Most biologists are just relieved when we hear the word "evolution" used without "intelligent design" or "superpowers" being used in the same sentence.
we killed off our fanbase when we starting whining about napster
I think they killed their fanbase when they continued playing music after the early 90s and their fans graduated from high school. I listened to plenty of shitty music in high school, most of those bands had the decency to crawl off and die a quiet death rather than keep playing to remind me how bad their music always was.
You would be better off genetically engineering a better eye and attempting to implant that instead.
Because that is far more simple than designing an artificial eye that is better than a normal eye.
Anyway I think you misunderstand him. While it may be true that the optic nerve will bottleneck anything you send through, it's easy to imagine ways of still getting an improvement over the normal eye: night vision, infrared, UV, longer distance, microscope vision. None of those things would improve resolution but assuming they did the duty of normal eyes but also did those things, that would be "better" than a human eye. I for one would like to get a fake eye that could see an expanded spectrum, even if it were such that I had to switch between normal spectrum and, say, UV light because of optic nerve bottlenecking.
I wish the scientists would provide a picture that represents what the person can see so we can see for ourselves just how much of a breakthrough it is.
I would guess that they did, but the BBC thought they were boring so they're not on that page.
So now when terrorists look at a map they can more easily identify potential targets because they are blurry.
Assuming the terrorists have some powers of deduction. I've never met one, but it seems to me if you're committing a terrorist act, there's at least a few major problems with your head, logic being one of them. 9/11: fundamentalists kill a bunch of innocent people, 9/12: the number of people who look favorably on Islam reaches a new low in America. Realizing that blurred out buildings are vulnerable places might be a little advanced for those idiots.
Current disparities do not in and of themselves justify adding new ones!
Which is why I was in no way suggesting that they do. I WAS saying that "should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?" is a ridiculous question: we already have.
Some of us would like to ethical issues throughly examined prior to any attempt at significant abuses, instead of waiting until after the fact.
Right, I thought that's what we were doing right now. Are you suggesting we go beyond that and stop research (which, again, has not produced any applications yet) just because we're not all on the same page that it might unintentionally create a bad situation? When it could help numerous diseases like autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, ALS, depression et al, and could significantly improve our understanding of brain function? I'm arguing that vague worries about class disparity based off a wired article do not constitute a major ethical question justifying putting this valuable research on hold.
What I am saying is that it is no where close to 'neuroengineering'.
Yeah, that was pretty tangential to your point. On your point, I guess it just goes to show that everyone likes to use buzzwords to describe their research to people who will never fully understand it. I'm guilty of that too. It's a disservice, but people generally don't have the background knowledge required for any research project. If you try to bring them up to speed, even quickly, they'll nod along like they follow, but their eyes glaze over. I suspect it's the deep-rooted human tendancy to want to not appear ignorant of anything, even if it's something no one could reasonably expect someone outside of the field to know.
I really don't know what else to do. Either give people the short, not very accurate soundbite that will stick with them, or the more accurate version that won't stick. I try to balance, but sometimes I don't even bother.
I don't know why the vortigaunts in question don't just zap the portugese computers and make them work. They do wonders for pretty much anything else. I mean, I don't know anything about computers besides how to play half life 2 and even -I- know that much.
Pfft, like anyone's going to miss that obvious sarcasm. And if someone did, there would only be one post, everyone else who missed it would realize that one is enough.
Every human (who lives long enough) will go through puberty. Not every human will be able to afford 'enhancements.' So, should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?... don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
Given that we already have disparities among many lines, healthcare being one of them, I think we have sufficently covered it here just now.
These are not superman enhancements, it's still at the question asking phase. We're not using this to make people or even rats smarter. And I have to think even if we do manage that, how would that be different than what we have now? You can't tell me that a refugee in a 3rd world country is on equal footing in almost any respect to your average CEO here. If he has a machine rigged into his head to cure his depression instantly, that won't change things significantly. Heck, if we make him smarter, he might see the problems with such inequity and may change things for the better. Unlikely, but the bottom line is that this is far from real right now and wouldn't seem to be a unique problem anyway.
Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.
Although the electrode has long been the preferred tool for controlling neuronal electrical activity, this method of stimulation has a number of shortcomings, including mechanical damage inflicted on the target tissue, limited spatial resolution with extracellular electrodes, and a limited population of activated neurons (typically one cell) when using intracellular electrodes. An alternative way to stimulate neurons is to use light as a source of energy.
In other words, the old way damages the cells and could produce artifacts, and the new way additionally allows for better understanding of the circuitry. And that's not all...
From the abstract:
Photostimulation also could evoke synaptic transmission between neurons, and, by scanning with a small laser light spot, we were able to map the spatial distribution of synaptic circuits connecting neurons within living cerebral cortex. We conclude that ChR2 is a genetically based photostimulation technology that permits analysis of neural circuits with high spatial and temporal resolution in transgenic mammals.
Better resolution as well I guess.
You really can't judge research by blurby articles published in non-scientific journals, (which kind of seems to be what you're doing, maybe not). They don't seem to be doing this with the goal of "making the mouse run in circles," that was just what the journalist got out of it and thought would be interesting to his readers. In fact, they may have explained the full relevance of their work to the writer, who didn't understand any of it and instead wrote about what he did understand: mice with freaking lasers in their heads.
Note that having skimmed the paper and working in a somewhat related field, I'm not entirely clear on what's going on with this researcher. Then again, I didn't try to write an article about it...
He said his mom is a nurse. Seriously, how much "innate knowledge" do you have to have to know that a sore throat is not an emergency?
No, I was the one who had a nurse mother, who told me to go to the emergency room. I had a day off, no appointment, and the sore throat had been going on for 2 weeks. I was starting to think it was something else. I didn't rush to the ER after a day of sore throat, I knew what they would say to that, it was only after it persisted that I thought I should make sure. My mother, who lived in a different state and couldn't examine it herself, suggested I go across the street to the ER and be sure immediately it was just a sore throat that lasted unusually long rather than something else and potentially miss more work. So it was not clear that the sore throat was only a sore throat at the time, at least to me, I thought that 2 weeks was too long for it to be just that. For all I knew, it could have been strep throat.
Yes, I could have found a free clinic, that obviously would have been cheaper, but my mother, who works at a free clinic, suggested that the wait would have been very long if they even were seeing people without appointments. I didn't know where any were, and walking across the street seemed preferable. After all, I had insurance.
As far as "driving the cost up for everyone," no, I paid for it.
As far as wasting time, it took 5 minutes, don't know how long he spent on paperwork, but it wasn't like I tied him up for hours, and had it been something more serious and I had ignored it until it became an actual emergency, that would have wasted more of their time.
I wouldn't have done it had I known 1. that it was just a viral sore throat, which can last up to 2 weeks 2. that it would be that expensive even with insurance 3. if I could have gotten in that day at a free clinic
Of course I didn't know any of those 3 things. Could I have found the second and third ones? Yes, but again, I was sick, and a nurse was telling me what to do, second guessing that didn't occour to me.
Seriously, it's not that obvious, which is why people make these mistakes, not sure why you're making a federal case out of it, or why you're acting as if we willfully threw a wrench into the system.
Dr Steinhauser, whose other projects have included monitoring the erosion of his wedding ring, said: "The question of the nature of navel fluff seems to concern more people than one would think at first glance.
Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco has liberal EX-Mormons
Fixed that for you. Or rather, made a cheap joke out of that for you since you are probably right.
Does it have something to do with one of their favorite search terms, referenced here
http://xkcd.com/522/
They want to see men kissing, but they don't want to see ads targeted to people who search for men kissing?
You mean if I want to post something, I not only have to RTFA that I'm posting, I ALSO have to read a BOOK on the subject?!?
Again...I weep for humanity...
I was starting to weep too over several things in your post, until you said that you are a blond guy. Then it all made sense.
Most biologists are just relieved when we hear the word "evolution" used without "intelligent design" or "superpowers" being used in the same sentence.
we killed off our fanbase when we starting whining about napster
I think they killed their fanbase when they continued playing music after the early 90s and their fans graduated from high school. I listened to plenty of shitty music in high school, most of those bands had the decency to crawl off and die a quiet death rather than keep playing to remind me how bad their music always was.
No, Because terrorism is already against the laws.
Woosh, although maybe that was a bit too subtle for an issue where ridiculous ideas are rarely jokes, so that may have been on me.
For the record, any law regulating "looking at a map" is a ridiculous one.
You would be better off genetically engineering a better eye and attempting to implant that instead.
Because that is far more simple than designing an artificial eye that is better than a normal eye.
Anyway I think you misunderstand him. While it may be true that the optic nerve will bottleneck anything you send through, it's easy to imagine ways of still getting an improvement over the normal eye: night vision, infrared, UV, longer distance, microscope vision. None of those things would improve resolution but assuming they did the duty of normal eyes but also did those things, that would be "better" than a human eye. I for one would like to get a fake eye that could see an expanded spectrum, even if it were such that I had to switch between normal spectrum and, say, UV light because of optic nerve bottlenecking.
I wish the scientists would provide a picture that represents what the person can see so we can see for ourselves just how much of a breakthrough it is.
I would guess that they did, but the BBC thought they were boring so they're not on that page.
Clearly the best use of this will be toilet paper for wombats, not for writing on.
So now when terrorists look at a map they can more easily identify potential targets because they are blurry.
Assuming the terrorists have some powers of deduction. I've never met one, but it seems to me if you're committing a terrorist act, there's at least a few major problems with your head, logic being one of them. 9/11: fundamentalists kill a bunch of innocent people, 9/12: the number of people who look favorably on Islam reaches a new low in America. Realizing that blurred out buildings are vulnerable places might be a little advanced for those idiots.
Occasionally I hear people supporting States rights. Clearly these people don't live in California.
If we just blurred all maps, the terrorists couldn't even find their targets!
We're thinking along the wrong lines. Why not just outlaw looking at maps with the intent to commit terrorism?
No, my dream is always that the zombies are about to catch me, when I realize I'm naked and then start falling. Then I wake up.
Current disparities do not in and of themselves justify adding new ones!
Which is why I was in no way suggesting that they do. I WAS saying that "should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?" is a ridiculous question: we already have.
Some of us would like to ethical issues throughly examined prior to any attempt at significant abuses, instead of waiting until after the fact.
Right, I thought that's what we were doing right now. Are you suggesting we go beyond that and stop research (which, again, has not produced any applications yet) just because we're not all on the same page that it might unintentionally create a bad situation? When it could help numerous diseases like autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, ALS, depression et al, and could significantly improve our understanding of brain function? I'm arguing that vague worries about class disparity based off a wired article do not constitute a major ethical question justifying putting this valuable research on hold.
I'm tired of the smell of curry.
Then you, sir, are tired of life.
There's nothing special about the foreigners. We can make more.
You can't make more Foreigner, AND THEY ARE TOTALLY SPECIAL!
You're as cold as ice if you don't think so! Man, these head games you are playing really make me hot blooded...
Fortunately, they are still alive, well, touring, and rocking, so we don't need to make more.
What I am saying is that it is no where close to 'neuroengineering'.
Yeah, that was pretty tangential to your point. On your point, I guess it just goes to show that everyone likes to use buzzwords to describe their research to people who will never fully understand it. I'm guilty of that too. It's a disservice, but people generally don't have the background knowledge required for any research project. If you try to bring them up to speed, even quickly, they'll nod along like they follow, but their eyes glaze over. I suspect it's the deep-rooted human tendancy to want to not appear ignorant of anything, even if it's something no one could reasonably expect someone outside of the field to know.
I really don't know what else to do. Either give people the short, not very accurate soundbite that will stick with them, or the more accurate version that won't stick. I try to balance, but sometimes I don't even bother.
I don't know why the vortigaunts in question don't just zap the portugese computers and make them work. They do wonders for pretty much anything else. I mean, I don't know anything about computers besides how to play half life 2 and even -I- know that much.
There is an *allowed* number??
That number MIGHT be zero... And monkeys MIGHT fly out my butt right now. ...
Probably just a coincidence that they actually did.
Pfft, like anyone's going to miss that obvious sarcasm. And if someone did, there would only be one post, everyone else who missed it would realize that one is enough.
Every human (who lives long enough) will go through puberty. Not every human will be able to afford 'enhancements.' So, should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?... don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
Given that we already have disparities among many lines, healthcare being one of them, I think we have sufficently covered it here just now.
These are not superman enhancements, it's still at the question asking phase. We're not using this to make people or even rats smarter. And I have to think even if we do manage that, how would that be different than what we have now? You can't tell me that a refugee in a 3rd world country is on equal footing in almost any respect to your average CEO here. If he has a machine rigged into his head to cure his depression instantly, that won't change things significantly. Heck, if we make him smarter, he might see the problems with such inequity and may change things for the better. Unlikely, but the bottom line is that this is far from real right now and wouldn't seem to be a unique problem anyway.
Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.
A quick pubmed search led me to this article, which Boyden was an author on http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17483470
From the intro:
In other words, the old way damages the cells and could produce artifacts, and the new way additionally allows for better understanding of the circuitry. And that's not all...
From the abstract:
Better resolution as well I guess.
You really can't judge research by blurby articles published in non-scientific journals, (which kind of seems to be what you're doing, maybe not). They don't seem to be doing this with the goal of "making the mouse run in circles," that was just what the journalist got out of it and thought would be interesting to his readers. In fact, they may have explained the full relevance of their work to the writer, who didn't understand any of it and instead wrote about what he did understand: mice with freaking lasers in their heads.
Note that having skimmed the paper and working in a somewhat related field, I'm not entirely clear on what's going on with this researcher. Then again, I didn't try to write an article about it...
He said his mom is a nurse. Seriously, how much "innate knowledge" do you have to have to know that a sore throat is not an emergency?
No, I was the one who had a nurse mother, who told me to go to the emergency room. I had a day off, no appointment, and the sore throat had been going on for 2 weeks. I was starting to think it was something else. I didn't rush to the ER after a day of sore throat, I knew what they would say to that, it was only after it persisted that I thought I should make sure. My mother, who lived in a different state and couldn't examine it herself, suggested I go across the street to the ER and be sure immediately it was just a sore throat that lasted unusually long rather than something else and potentially miss more work. So it was not clear that the sore throat was only a sore throat at the time, at least to me, I thought that 2 weeks was too long for it to be just that. For all I knew, it could have been strep throat.
Yes, I could have found a free clinic, that obviously would have been cheaper, but my mother, who works at a free clinic, suggested that the wait would have been very long if they even were seeing people without appointments. I didn't know where any were, and walking across the street seemed preferable. After all, I had insurance.
As far as "driving the cost up for everyone," no, I paid for it.
As far as wasting time, it took 5 minutes, don't know how long he spent on paperwork, but it wasn't like I tied him up for hours, and had it been something more serious and I had ignored it until it became an actual emergency, that would have wasted more of their time.
I wouldn't have done it had I known
1. that it was just a viral sore throat, which can last up to 2 weeks
2. that it would be that expensive even with insurance
3. if I could have gotten in that day at a free clinic
Of course I didn't know any of those 3 things. Could I have found the second and third ones? Yes, but again, I was sick, and a nurse was telling me what to do, second guessing that didn't occour to me.
Seriously, it's not that obvious, which is why people make these mistakes, not sure why you're making a federal case out of it, or why you're acting as if we willfully threw a wrench into the system.
I don't blame you for not RTFA