25 OCT 2017 by ideonexus
A Sick Burn
Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulat...Folksonomies: insults
Folksonomies: insults
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notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Technology is Preserving Our Ghosts
Our technology is giving us progressively greater power to keep alive our ancestors' ghosts. First the invention of writing allowed us to preserve their words. Painting and photography allowed us to preserve their faces. The phonograph preserves their voices and the videotape recorder preserves their movement and gestures. But this is only the beginning. Soon we shall acquire the technology to preserve a permanent record of the sequence of bases in the DNA of their cells. This means that we s...
1 07 NOV 2014 by ideonexus
Borganism in Nature
he most common example used is the hives of social insects, where all individuals work for the common good with little regard for themselves. Although it has been argued that hives lack collective minds (Nicholls 1982) it should be noted that all such species communicate with chemical signals, and at least in the case of ants chemical trails can be seen as collective cognitive maps distributed in the environment (Chiavlo & Millonas 1995). There may exist degrees of borganisation, and they are...Folksonomies: collectivism transhumanism
Folksonomies: collectivism transhumanism
29 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Reality Teaches Us
At birth one may stand at the cross-roads for only a few lal. The adjustments are peremptory. The human mechanism must adjust itself to the new world. If it does,—then life. Sometimes it is necessary to "slap" it. That is "science" giving a first lesson in adjustment. An adequate supply of oxygen for the cells of the body is the first problem man faces when he comes into this world. Every pink pill is not a piece of candy. Science goes to the rescue and re-establishes adjustments. Man tires... 1 notes
notesWe start out trying to figure out the world, and science teaches us the lessons, but when we overbelieve--go beyond empirical evidence--we "may spoil the garden."
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Signaling Pathway
In a typical signaling pathway, proteins are continually being modified and demodified. Kinases and phosphatases work ceaselessly like ants in a nest, adding phosphate groups to proteins and removing them again. It seems a pointless exercise, especially when you consider that each cycle of addition and removal costs the cell one molecule of ATP—one unit of precious energy. Indeed, cyclic reactions of this kind were initially labeled “futile.” But the adjective is misleading. The additio...Folksonomies: neurology
Folksonomies: neurology
1 notes
notesThe underlying cyclical process of a synapse firing that turns it into a "tunable" device.
13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Two Kinds of Cell Growth
In 1838, Matthias Schleiden, a botanist, and Theodor Schwann, a physiologist, both working in Germany, had claimed that all living organisms were built out of fundamental building blocks called cells. Borrowing and extending this idea, Virchow set out to create a “cellular theory” of human biology, basing it on two fundamental tenets. First, that human bodies (like the bodies of all animals and plants) were made up of cells. Second, that cells only arose from other cells—omnis cellula e... 1 notes
notesHypertrophy and hyperplasia, cells either grow bigger or grow more numerous.
17 SEP 2013 by ideonexus
Neurons are Domesticated Cells
You really don't have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn't want to do. No, they're all slaves. If they're agents, they're slaves. They are prisoners. They have very clear job descriptions. They get fed every day. They don't have to worry about where the energy's coming from, and they're not ambitious. They just do what they're asked to do and do it brilliantly with only the slightest tint of comprehension. Y...
1 But they are also slightly feral. Neurons compete with one another, the brain works by neural pruning, natural selection. Cells that don't get used are allowed to die. Thus, neurons are motivated to survive, to have some independence.
31 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
The Difference in How the Public and Scientists Use "Theory"
The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence. Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), th...In common usage, it is the equivalent of an educated guess, in science, it is nearly synonymous with the facts it is built on.
21 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Cancer as a Microevolutionary Process
The body of an animal operates as a society or ecosystem whose individual members are cells, reproducing by cell division and organized into collaborative assemblies or tissues. In our earlier discussion of the maintenance of tissues (Chapter 22), our interests were similar to those of the
ecologist: cell births, deaths, habitats, territorial limitations, and the maintenance of population sizes. The one ecological topic conspicuously absent was that of natural selection: we said nothing of co... 1 notes
notesCancer evolves within us, growing by natural selection in rebellion against the environment of our body's ecosystem.
17 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Banks Knows What Caused His Cancer
As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. "Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" I think I pull a face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. "Cosmic ray," he says. "I won't brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an... 1 notes
notesClaims it was a "cosmic ray." A poetic notion.
