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Your cells won't work anymore either.

The DNA/RNA is often used to make proteins. Different code = different or no protein.

See: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/dna/transcribe/

I've just realised what you're saying - that it's different layers of cells in the retina to detect different wavelengths. Can you point to any diagram of how you think it works, as I was under the impressions that we have different cone cells in the retina which are sensitive to red, blue or green i.e. different cones in the same "layer" not different layers.

Here's a couple of helpful diagrams: http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-i-foundations/simple-anatomy-of-the-retina/

If I were designing an eye and I found that the retina cells were prone to overheating from ordinary daylight (which they aren't), then I'd be more likely to stick some kind of filter into the cornea rather than turning all the retinal cells back to front and then introducing wiring complexities and extra muscles to fudge it so that it works.

I was hoping for the story of Mel, a real programmer.

On the article, it's fantastic. It puts me in mind of First & Third almost FORTH and the recent Fixing E.T. hack.

But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms. And we are absolutely correct to do so. 100 deaths per year in a country of 300 million is negligable.

Although mass shootings get all the headlines, controlling access to firearms will save a whole lot more than 100 lives per year. Most of the savings will come from reduced accidental deaths and suicides.

There is a widespread belief that having a gun in the house makes you safer: this is not true.

In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides. source

(other sources along those lines)

There is also a widespread belief a person who dies from suicide would have done so no matter what method: this also is not true. Most suicide attempts are impulsive acts, and most are unsuccessful. An impulse act with pills or slit wrists is unlikely to succeed: it takes time, the person may have second thoughts, and usually recovers through medical and psychological treatment. A suicide attempt by a gun is much, much more likely to succeed. If that suicidal person did not have ready access to a gun, and had to resort to a different method, the changes are good that most (i.e., more than 50%) of those people would still be with us today.

You can also do it in minutes with common household items: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/extraction/howto/

Extraction's not the problem. Sequencing is not actually a problem, either (~$150k gets you an ION Torrent Proton that will come close to sequencing a person in a few hours). Data analysis is currently the hardest and costliest part of sequencing. Of course, that's getting better, too.

Don't get me wrong, incremental process improvements such as this are important, they're just not groundbreaking anymore.

-Chris

Perhaps telomere shortening in the cells of the hypothalamus mediates the control of the aging process? Then again, all the genetic research studies could have had it wrong!

Nope: http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/112608-2.html

I thought this one to be interesting:
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.08_17.53.16_flake_1_cam_0.png

(Freudian photography by a researcher hoping for a new grant to rain down on them?)

All of these images are low res and out of focus.

Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png

All of these images are low res and out of focus.

Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png

All of these images are low res and out of focus.

Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png

All of these images are low res and out of focus.

Photographing falling snowflakes is probably pretty tricky, but some of them are just awful.
eg.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.01.27_06.25.55.5_flake_17839_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.02.18_22.43.52_flake_1406_cam_2.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.09_06.14.16_flake_107_cam_0.png
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2013.02.22_16.06.08.425688_flake_16605_cam_1.png

I wish we had these snowflakes here: http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/Gallery/2012.11.08_17.53.16_flake_1_cam_0.png
I'd be rich!

Previous Story: "Show me the money"

This story: "Here's the snowflakes! And the money."

Just in case this page gets updated and the penny gets bumped off, hopefully the direct link to the beautiful high-speed photo of a falling penny will persist in the records and the annals of time forever.

That article directly contradicts a Utah study that showed that cell phone users drive more slowly and change lanes less. Both of these behaviors should decrease accidents, but they violate the accepted dogma that "cell phones cause accidents", so they're ignored. In fact, the researchers concluded that driving slower and changing lanes less was actually bad, which shows that they wanted to demonstrate something that followed the dogma (probably because it's easier to get funding if you come to the "correct" conclusions).

Agreed, but such things make them relevant. It's called keeping their job security. It's like an old-school ASM programmer back in the 80s using every little tidbit they can to make a program so hard to maintain that when they retire you ought to just rewrite the program from scratch (since both hardware and software upgrades are inevitable). For an example, see the story of Mel.

Mod parent +interesting.

I nominate this story is (almost) destined to become a classic as Mel the programmer is:
  http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

You've touched upon something that I think separates the novice "code monkeys" from the experienced developers. The experienced realize we (sometimes) write crap code and aren't afraid to learn how to do our job better. The novices *think* they are some hot-shot programmer but don't realize how much they have yet to learn. ;-)

I guess the holy trinity never changes:
  "You can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick two."

Although there are those that say scope is the 4th dimension; othere say in practicality there is only time vs features.

Interesting References:
* http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/10/engineering-managers-lament.html
* http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help/the-project-triangle-HA010351692.aspx

This is just my point. While I understand that science and engineering has to start somewhere, they have made promises to this woman and done surgery to her, potentially increasing risks for other problems where I would argue there is no hope of "seeing" anything coherent.

Yes, we can do remarkable things with even an 8x8 pixel array, but this approach has no promise of even delivering that to this woman. The electrode cuff on the optic nerve simply stimulates too many neurons that are not coherent and those neurons project to far too many areas of cortex. A retinal implant that appropriately targets cell populations would be more appropriate as would genetic engineering of targeted opsins to other cell classes.

As for implants directly in the cortex, I might argue that this has a better chance of stimulating phosphenes that could be interpreted as vision. I've participated in some of that early work http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/08/bionic-implants/ and while I believe there are other approaches that will be more effective, that work still has some promise (particularly for motor interfaces).

The person in the passenger seat can actually be more of a distraction than someone on the phone, so what will we do, limit vehicles to not have any passenger seats?

This claim certainly seems plausible, but somebody actually did the research on this and found the opposite is true:
University of Utah press release on the study

Second that. "Child friendly" in this case means "cheap enough that if he breaks it it won't be a big deal." I had a cheap plastic "kids" microscope when I was a kid from Fischer price or something like that. It was less useful than a magnifying glass. I used it as a toy gun mostly. That didn't deter me from it: I'm a cell biologist today, but I would have loved a real microscope.

This dissecting microscope looks pretty cool.

I woudn't rule out compound scopes though. If he's interested in paramecia and bacteria, microbes, he's interested in plenty of things that are going to be visible with a compound microscope. A drop of pond water, you can generally see more with the compound scope than you can with the dissecting scope.

Also, somewhat unrelated, show him this virtual microscope and Nikon small world galleries.

Picking corn to use as an example to complain about genetic alterations, now there's an irony. Do you know how many mutations and genetic alterations are in modern corn varieties (and that's completely ignoring genetic engineering), let alone all the transposons hopping around in there? If I've got, for example, a Country Gentleman sweet corn, a Golden Bantam sweet corn, a Blue Jade sweet corn, and a Ruby Queen sweet corn, just by looking at them you can tell they are obviously genetically different. Is only one corn? By your logic, we shouldn't call anything corn anymore. And why should only changes made by genetic engineering count and not everything else I listed?

Do you know what you get when you add a gene to corn? Corn. It is still corn. It isn't a new species, just a new variety.

I do no think you comprehend the difference in scale between the molecular level and anything remotely recognizable or interesting to us. If your basic water molecule is 275 pm, and anything complex enough to be recognizable as "wood" would be something like 0.1 mm, you'd need something like 3 million building blocks. In addition, you're asking for many more degrees of freedom for position/angle of your basic building blocks as well as interactions between a much greater number of blocks. Here is something that could give you a better sense of how small things are:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Even if all of this were possible to simulate on our dinky little home computers, the time and effort it would take to actually build anything interesting would be far too much for almost every body.

Seminar semantics

The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states

Actually, it's debatable whether SCOTUS is a common law court. Everything in the federal court system below SCOTUS is certainly common law, with the wide lattitude and power that those judges have. But SCOTUS is somewhat different. Scalia argues that the court is not really common law in practice, as when a case comes before the US high court, the only standard is "does this contradict our written Constitution?". If it does, even if it has a basis in common law, then the justices are supposed to toss it. SCOTUS judges are more or less supposed to be umpires, calling "balls and strikes" on legislation (unless the issue is one of the few original jurisdiction issues that SCOTUS has). So SCOTUS, it could be argued, is itself a kind of hybrid court, drawing on common law traditions, but ultimately ruling in a civil law manner. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. Roe v. Wade, for instance, was very much a common law kind of ruling, as the majority literally found the right to abortion within another right to privacy that itself isn't explicity written in the Constitution. This is one of the arguments that the "living constitution" advocates make... judges should be able to make law from the bench to "suit the times". But this was clearly not the intent of the founders, as they made a mechanism to change the constitution... the amendment process... and intentionally made it so that it was hard to change the Constitution. Why do so if you wanted judges to change it on their own authority?

Nothing?

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20
http://www.darwinawards.com/science/forensic_analysis.html
that didn't take me long to find.

And the most damning, from a university:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/gel/forensics/

Is DNA evidence alone enough to acquit or convict?

It is easier to exclude a suspect than to convict someone based on a DNA match. The FBI estimates that one-third of initial rape suspects are excluded because DNA samples failed to match.

Forensic DNA is just one of many types of evidence. It is important to examine other clues such as motive, weapon, or additional evidence linking a suspect to the crime scene. The more evidence collected, the less likely it is that samples from a particular suspect were planted, either on purpose or by accident, at the crime scene.

So assuming that taking someone's DNA is going to match later? And not acknowledging that people could be mis-identified?

Either everyone on the planet is in your "DNA bank" or it's simply not going to be accurate. Guess how realistic that is?
"look a DNA match! this guy's guilty, let's go arrest him" (because he's the only person in the database). You know that will happen.

Isn't weight proportional to cube of height?

That would be the Ponderal Index, which assumes mass is proportional to the cube of height, and has some use in pediatrics. However, non-infant humans don't scale like spheres. Unfortunately, they also don't scale such that mass is proportional to the square of height, which the BMI assumes. A statistical fit to height and weight data for the US yields an exponent of about 2.6 for those aged 2 to 19 years. Note that this exponent slightly underestimates weight for persons shorter than 40" or taller than 65", and slightly overestimates it for those of height from 45" to 60". Apparently, medical underwriters don't rely just on BMI, but assume the Ponderal index has at least as much significance in assessing health risks from weight.

Handsfree phones should be required; anything else should be prohibited.

Hands-free doesn't help: http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/062206-1.html http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=cellphone

There are other studies to point to. Point is, it's not the distraction of the hands that's the really big problem, it's the distraction of the brain.

Maybe you mis-copied, but that second link is to a study from 1991. Hands-free cellphone devices hadn't really taken off yet, unless you count the classic image of someone with a phone duct-taped to their head. If you missed the 1991 date at the top of the study, one giveaway is right there in the second paragraph (emphasis mine):

What CB radios were to the '70s, cellular phones were to the '80s. From early 1984, when the first complete systems became operational, the number of cellular phone users has grown to over two million. By the mid-'90s, when cellular service will be available throughout most population centers in the United States, the number of subscribers is expected to grow to between ten and twenty million.

The first link is to a study from 2006. I got my first hands-free Bluetooth headset in 2007, and it was bit balky to use. My wife's new Fiat comes standard with a voice-activated cellphone interface, so there are no fiddly buttons to mess with. Technology has progressed a bit.

I'd really like to see a more recent study that looks at hands-free cellphone use and explicitly lays out variables such as 1) how much button-fiddling is required, 2) how much the driver has to look away from the road to operate the hands-free unit, 3) how much the driver has to look away from the road to operate the phone itself, and 4) a description of any instructions given to the driver during the test (to weed out the Mythbusters scenario described further up the page, where the drivers apparently prioritized conversing over driving).

Gadgets (especially cellphones) are a menace. Plenty of studies show that drivers who drive while using cellphones are impaired to a similar extent as legally-intoxicated drunk drivers.

See this and this and this.

Gadgets (especially cellphones) are a menace. Plenty of studies show that drivers who drive while using cellphones are impaired to a similar extent as legally-intoxicated drunk drivers.

See this and this and this.

If you're using a hands-free device, you're just basically having a conversation with someone who isn't actually in the car. It's not going to be any more inherently distracting than having a conversation with somebody who is in the car. So if hands-free phones are a problem... So is talking to a passenger.

It most definitely is more distracting than having a conversation with someone in the car: 2008 study.

Handsfree phones should be required; anything else should be prohibited.

Hands-free doesn't help:
http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/062206-1.html
http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=cellphone

There are other studies to point to. Point is, it's not the distraction of the hands that's the really big problem, it's the distraction of the brain.

Anonymous Coward is correct. Regardless of this particular incident, there at least two good reasons why it is bad for people to use their phones while driving: Phone use while driving slows down traffic, and drivers using their phones are more likely to be in an accident.

My read is that the drama of this incident gave the NTSB the opportunity to make a recommendation that would otherwise risk political repercussions from the 10,000-text-message-per-month set.

I used to say that and carried a P&S with me wherever I went... Until the iPhone 4 came along. I've been really, really happy with the iPhone 4 camera never before posting images to Jonesblog from anything other than a dedicated camera until then.

A fading light shot is here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/10/evening-light/

and an indoor shot of the inside of an instrument is here:
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/12/gravity-probe-b/

To get me back in the point and shoot camera buying club, the camera companies are going to start to have to do something exciting again, like Olympus and Fuji are now doing with the larger sensor sizes.

I used to say that and carried a P&S with me wherever I went... Until the iPhone 4 came along. I've been really, really happy with the iPhone 4 camera never before posting images to Jonesblog from anything other than a dedicated camera until then.

A fading light shot is here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/10/evening-light/

and an indoor shot of the inside of an instrument is here:
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/12/gravity-probe-b/

To get me back in the point and shoot camera buying club, the camera companies are going to start to have to do something exciting again, like Olympus and Fuji are now doing with the larger sensor sizes.

A good cell phone camera... honestly. The best camera you can learn with is one that you will always have on your person. The latest cell phone cameras can make some really beautiful images: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/06/time-and-space/

When you are ready to go beyond framing and composition, then step up to a basic SLR like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D40.

Magnetohydrodynamics has been around for quite a while and has long been one of the holy grails of submarine propulsion with prototypes existing now for years. During my last visit to a Los Angeles class submarine, this was a hot topic. Movement of ferrofluids is a natural extension of this concept with applications in everything from medical imaging to cooling of large and small objects. Its pretty exciting, though I am surprised that this is the *first* implementation of this.

And then the performance of the code I'd written (pretty straightforwardly) was abysmal.

Well, it's true that Guile has horrible performance, even compared to other Scheme implementations'; but then, JavaScript had pretty horrible performance until Google and Mozilla started putting serious effort into speeding it up.

That is using Guile 1.8.x; Guile 2.0 features a brand new VM that performs much better (IIRC, beating Chicken in some cases).

It became annoying, however, because Scheme lacks convenient ways of creating local variable declarations without nesting the whole thing into a let form.

Most languages lack convenient ways to create local variable declarations without nesting the whole thing in a code block. In fact, JavaScript lacks a convenient way to create local variable declarations without using an anonymous function.

Another issue was the complete lack of a useful standard library. No hash maps, no sorting function. Even the most basic string functions were lacking. If I'm not mistaken, the Scheme spec doesn't even specify a way to get the numerical code for a character...

Well, we're talking about Guile here, which has sort functions and regexp string manipulation.

And then the performance of the code I'd written (pretty straightforwardly) was abysmal.

Well, it's true that Guile has horrible performance, even compared to other Scheme implementations'; but then, JavaScript had pretty horrible performance until Google and Mozilla started putting serious effort into speeding it up.

No, they don't. http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/HFES2004-000597-1.pdf The risks are increased, but no where near as much as using a cell phone.

Why not design a connectomics informed system that mimics the neural retina and visual system? Something that takes the results of research like this and uses true biologically informed computing to do what neural systems are good at and silicon based systems are not so good at? After all, what they are looking at is a system that works like a retina works (more like a video camera and not a still camera), so why not go to the biology which is really good at comparing like streams of information and making like or not like decisions.

More traditional background on retinal design and research can be found here.

Why not design a connectomics informed system that mimics the neural retina and visual system? Something that takes the results of research like this and uses true biologically informed computing to do what neural systems are good at and silicon based systems are not so good at? After all, what they are looking at is a system that works like a retina works (more like a video camera and not a still camera), so why not go to the biology which is really good at comparing like streams of information and making like or not like decisions.

More traditional background on retinal design and research can be found here.

The technique is called "point set surfaces" or "surface splatting". It builds the world out of ellipses of various sizes which, with sufficiently dense placement, recreate the surface. The advantage is that there is no connectivity information to maintain: You can remove and add splats at any time and in any place. This enables pervasive and smooth level-of-detail rendering. Rendering individual splats is easy and quick as well. The downside is that you have to modify a huge amount of geometry information when anything in the scene changes and there is no hierarchy, or you have to maintain connectivity if there is a hierarchy to save you from modifying all splats individually. On the other hand, polygonal scenes are often static too because maintaining the their data structures in a moving scene is difficult as well.

Seriously though, the Internet is actually where just about everybody goes in academia to stay on top of the latest research and most areas of focus have their own resources like PubMed for biomedical research.

Also, a good way to make sure you keep up with the absolute torrent of work out there (slowing due to budget cuts) is by keeping a blog generated around the area of science interest you have. Webvision http://webvision.med.utah.edu/ is such an effort to keep up with the latest and greatest in vision research. While this one is tuned to be slightly more accessible to the general public, it has not been uncommon for other lay individuals to rapidly become "experts" in their fields through their blogs. This high school kid, Sawyer has established a blog http://www.talkingspaceonline.com/ that already has him winning awards and getting international accolades from folks like Xeni Jardin and Miles O'Brien.

I was at the landing and got another angle here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/07/final-sts-135-landing/

For this project, we have multiple multi-terabyte (5-18 terabyte) datasets that need backup. We have online and offline strategies and the offline strategy is simply multiple, redundant copies on hard drives stored in static proof containers onsite and off site.

Hard drives are *very* cheap all things considered, are easy to store, take up very little physical space and if things go badly, restoring from them is faster than just about any other method. For datasets in the GB range, its a no-brainer to go with hard disks.

Conceptually, its a little like focus stacking http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/03/focus-stacking/ only with a compound lens that does all the exposures at once. More examples of focus stacking here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/tag/focus-stacking/

Conceptually, its a little like focus stacking http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/03/focus-stacking/ only with a compound lens that does all the exposures at once. More examples of focus stacking here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/tag/focus-stacking/

Mel is turning over in his grave.

Yeah, perhaps this video might be more interesting to those too lazy, busy or arrogant to read the full argument:

Pi is (still) wrong

And more on the 'movement': Pi is wrong

I am sure that if somebody had showed me this back in high school a LOT of things would've been a lot simpler and clearer ... GP can dismiss it all he wants, but I'll be teaching my children about this.

The one in the summary is fine, but the original (better) article is here:
http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=032411-5
It talks more in depth about how they actually did the imaging. It's actually quite interesting.