Want to see a human brain sliced open? Wired magazine has the gory photos as well as an in-depth profile of Paul Allen’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, an ambitious scientific undertaking that’s attempting to map thousands of genes that make up the human brain.

"I first got interested in the brain through computers," Allen tells Wired. "There’s a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they’ve all fallen short. Here’s this incredible computer, a really astonishing piece of engineering, and we have no idea how it works."

Wired’s Jonah Lehrer writes that there’s some irony in Allen efforts to fund "an exhaustive atlas of our neural hardware":

For decades, many cognitive scientists insisted that the physical brain was largely irrelevant to the study of the mind. It didn’t matter whether the human operating system was running on a real cortex or a set of silicon microchips—the software was everything.

Given Allen’s background—this was the man who helped develop MS-DOS 1.0, after all—he might have been expected to ally with the software crowd in the belief that the 1s and 0s were more important than the anatomical details. Instead, Allen decided that our operating system could run only on one very particular kind of computer. "There are so many intricacies to our brain that won’t be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole," he says. "All these different details don’t operate in isolation. But how do they work together to create such a powerful machine?"

A good read.

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and Microsoft: No more unauthorized sneak peeks at Windows games  

Microsoft’s Games for Windows team plans to roll out new piracy protections aimed at preventing people from playing copies of games that leak out prior to their release, Ars Technica reports today from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "The bits are encrypted, and there is a one-time activation that checks to see if the game has been released or not, and we’ll send out a decrypt code so the game can be played," Microsoft’s Drew Johnston tells Ars.

A new book, "Burning the Ships," details the evolution of Microsoft’s approach to patents — a timely topic given the company’s TomTom litigation. The authors are Marshall Phelps, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for intellectual property policy and strategy, and journalist David Kline. I’m reading it now. CNet’s Ina Fried has extracted tidbits on Microsoft’s negotiations with Toshiba and Novell.

A new post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into detail — lots of it — on the touch-related features planned for the upcoming operating system.

Microsoft is working with the open-source Eclipse Foundation but doesn’t plan to become a member, according to this InfoWorld report. On the broader subject of Microsoft’s relationship with the open-source community, also see this post by Matt Asay on his CNet blog.

BackWeb Technologies has sued Microsoft for patent infringement, targeting the Redmond company’s Automatic Update technology.

And finally, Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Watch offers up a funny list of suggested gifts for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer upon his 53rd birthday.

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and Public officials defend stimulus money for ‘Bridge to Microsoft’  

Redmond’s 36th Street Bridge, better known as the "Bridge to Microsoft," is a "wonderful project" that benefits much more than the software giant, write the city’s mayor and the head of the Puget Sound Regional Council in a Seattle Times guest column.

The plan "reduces congestion and greenhouse-gas emissions, helps our region meet growth and housing obligations, and addresses the needs of hundreds of employers within a major regional job center," say Redmond’s John Marchione and the PSRC’s Bob Drewel — responding to critics who assert that the project doesn’t deserve federal stimulus money.

"Simply put, without this bridge, Redmond cannot — repeat, cannot — accommodate the employment and housing the city is expected to absorb for the benefit of our region and our state," they write.

Bloomberg News reported March 13 that local planners designated $11 million of the region’s federal stimulus money for the project. Microsoft is paying about half of the total $36.5 million project cost.

Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told the news service at the time that federal funding was inappropriate, considering that Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates "could finance this out of pocket change."

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Reports: Video distribution startup GridNetworks selling out  

Has Seattle video distribution startup GridNetworks been sold? That’s the word from The Seattle Times and BusinessofVideo.com, which reported this week that

Citing unnamed sources, BusinessofVideo reports that the buyer is a New York-based desktop video company. That would rule out a couple possible big-name suitors. Comcast, which purchased Seattle video startup thePlatform in June 2006, and Cisco, the networking powerhouse, sunk cash into GridNetworks. It raised a $9.5 million venture round in October 2007, with total funding in the company at the time under $20 million.

NewTeeVee — also citing unnamed sources — reports that there won’t be much of a return on the capital invested.

Led by former Internap CEO Tony Naughtin, GridNetworks has developed a peer-to-peer system to deliver HD-quality TV and movies at a lower cost than rivals. Competitors include Akamai and Limelight Networks.

The startup was founded by Jeff Payne, a former RealNetworks who told me in 2006 that the cost of delivering a 1.2-gigabyte movie through the system was only 25 to 50 cents. That price point, he said, could change the online video business.

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