The apoptotic path involved in capsaicin killing of cancer cells - its been previously shown
to induce suicides in other kinds of cancer cells as well - is not the only road to cell death that
hot chili takes us down.
One of the more memorable factoids from a neurobiology course I took years back was that
the long-term desenzitation that one experiences from enjoying a capsaicin-rich diet is due
to cell death in the taste buds. Short term adaptation does occur via another mechanism,
but tastbud necrosis is important in the long term. This also explains why you feel
the impact of the tex mex spice much more after not having had any for a few months - you have regrown the
previously killed taste buds!
The tast bud death is however a necrotic effect - cell killing, via a vanilloid receptor - rather
than suicide. See e g Caterina MJ et al, Nature 1997.
There is a real nice, stripped clean and naturally free linux distro for firewalls/routers
called bifrost. The latest few versions use 2.4-kernels, but they keep a nice annotated back-log of their old distros since 1997. The distro has a fairly clever system for dealing with mobile users (called nomad).
It lacks a "click-and-go" wui by design, due to the risk of unneccesary security breaches - in my translation from the swedish pages - Correct filterrules are preferentially constructed "offline", and transfered by scp. For those who want clickability and colors, we recommend Xemacs for suitable coziness. Imho, thats the way to go (although I zealously use emacs instead).
The guys
who maintain bifrost/nomad spend a lot of time on fairly advanced network performance testing with different hardware/driver combinations, so you maight want to consider their hardware recommendations as well. For the machines they put together for the Swedish university network, they go with flash-drives for safe (and fast) storage.
If you are curios about the name of the distro, the following helps:
The name Bifrost comes from the nordic mythology, where Bifrost is the bridge between Midgård (The Earth) and Asgård (the home of gods) and is called The Rainbow by humans. It's so strong that it will not be destroyed until Ragnarök - the end of the world. Bifrost is guarded by Heimdall and the red color one can see in it, is a flaming fire that prevents the giants to climb up to Asgård.
Well, for us nontele commuters who haven't as of yet come areound to hacking apmd this comes in handy. What would be really nifty, though, is a [insert favourite passtime here] during kernel loading and while the system consumes its due time in loading all those demons I just couldn't live without..:-)
You are right in the sense that to create the sequence, data from several individuals are used, but no more than 5-10 are actually required. Look up a tutorial on shotgun fragment assembly if you are curious to know more! Larger samplesizes can be effectively handled by just looking for differences between the individuals and the "concensus" sequence for that species - somewhat like what encoding a movie does, storing only differences from the last frame. Have look at for instance hgvbase to see all human sequence variations we know so far.
You are correct that the human genome is "only about" 3 giga basepairs of sequence, but to only store that would be rather egocentric. There are as of Dec 3 2001 some 14396883064 bp in the GenBank, and the amount of sequence information still grows roughly in a exponential manner.
Now, this will not hit the TB line anytime soon. The trouble starts if you are involved in genome sequencing. Then you need to store the raw data for all that sequence. Each some 450 bp of sequence is reconstructed from about 5 - 10 different fairly high reslution gel images (in the ballpark of 150 kBi per image). Also, recall that even short stretches of the sequence can be accompanied with a lot of annotating information, such as names and functions of genes, regualtory elements or pointers to articles explaining the experimental evidence for such. This mutiplies the storage requirement with quite a factor - nothing a neat little linux box with a huge RAID-array cannot handle though. Thats how we handle the sequencing data from Trypanosoma cruzi, by the way.
Actually, to some extent that seems to be what Stanley Williams suggests. Has anyone got an idea about how these tiny guys are supposed to actually interact?
Dr Heaths homepage suggests at attempts to construct "molecular based memories and molecular-based communications networks". Sounds slightly peculiar, but interesting enough in the light of what they claim to have accomplished so far!
..which is actually one of several very interesting points in the "Copenhagen" play. How come the otherwise so exceedingly brilliant Heisenberg - not to mention his staff of excellent german researchers - was not able to solve an equation that any physics undergraduate could do today? Was he persuaded by Bohr to stall the german bomb programme? Had he lost his edge, and come to his old tutor for guidance on this and other problems? Or was he, as the NYT article argues, carrying out his duties as a german citizen on an espionage or deterrence mission?
If you happen on the chance to see a performance of "Copenhage" my advice would be to take it, regardless if the current state of information would skew the carefully crafted balance between Niels Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg.
Imho what one would want is rather a stable general purpouse device with easy plug-in capability; not unlike the general purpouse pcs that sit on your desk or in your lap.
The problem with many "converged" devices is that they come in a brittle, non-upgradable form. For stability, simplicity is required - combinatorics sort of dictates that at a very fudamental level. But you would certainly not want to carry a whole army of little devices, each with its own battery, display, network-if, speaker etc. etc.
I suppose I'm not the only one, but I always get a bit excited when someone claims a certain subject has reached its theoretical limit of knowledge. Reaing Murphy and Kuhn, one almost has to agree that a change of paradigm is imminent..
Knowledge being unlimited is probably something that the guys that wrote the article at hand might argue against. The theoretical limit of knowledge could of course be estimated using the same approach as for the 1 kg laptop. You only need to find a rouch esimate for the mass and volume of this and any closely-interacting parallell universa - and voila!
The idea of black hole computing is obviously heavy, but the requirements on a heat sink capable of handling the matter-energy conversion of one kg are staggering.
Overklocking might of course not be strictly necessary, considering the effects of general relativity.
Staggering might be descriptive of the investment costs for setting up a new singularity for each calculation, given the obvius difficulty of interactivity once a Schwartschild-barrier is in place.
One must though admire the article authors, not only on their interesting essay, but also on behalf of the courage involved in imagining the prescence of a dissapearing black hole in ones lap.
Yep, this feels like a rather intermediary solution to the computer-waste problem. We are going to end up with a lot of toxic paperweights, but on the other hand, there will be less old toxic webservers. Perhaps they could form-press it into utility objects so that they are of some kind of use when exported to a thirld-world dumpsite.
Now, if only it wouldn't be so easy to carry off when left unattended on your desk..
For music, this is intuitive, but one sort of wonders whether this goes for movies as well?
How about e-texts? No doubt, an increased interest for the medias as such may be generated, but not for the instances of media being shared.
Where does that put us on copyright-protection - allowing free music sharing, simply on the grounds of increasing revenue, but not sharing of other kinds of media? Sort of tough, principially speaking..
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more memorable factoids from a neurobiology course I took years back was that the long-term desenzitation that one experiences from enjoying a capsaicin-rich diet is due to cell death in the taste buds. Short term adaptation does occur via another mechanism, but tastbud necrosis is important in the long term. This also explains why you feel the impact of the tex mex spice much more after not having had any for a few months - you have regrown the previously killed taste buds!
The tast bud death is however a necrotic effect - cell killing, via a vanilloid receptor - rather than suicide. See e g Caterina MJ et al, Nature 1997.
There is a real nice, stripped clean and naturally free linux distro for firewalls/routers called bifrost. The latest few versions use 2.4-kernels, but they keep a nice annotated back-log of their old distros since 1997. The distro has a fairly clever system for dealing with mobile users (called nomad). It lacks a "click-and-go" wui by design, due to the risk of unneccesary security breaches - in my translation from the swedish pages - Correct filterrules are preferentially constructed "offline", and transfered by scp. For those who want clickability and colors, we recommend Xemacs for suitable coziness. Imho, thats the way to go (although I zealously use emacs instead).
The guys who maintain bifrost/nomad spend a lot of time on fairly advanced network performance testing with different hardware/driver combinations, so you maight want to consider their hardware recommendations as well. For the machines they put together for the Swedish university network, they go with flash-drives for safe (and fast) storage.
If you are curios about the name of the distro, the following helps:
The name Bifrost comes from the nordic mythology, where Bifrost is the bridge between Midgård (The Earth) and Asgård (the home of gods) and is called The Rainbow by humans. It's so strong that it will not be destroyed until Ragnarök - the end of the world. Bifrost is guarded by Heimdall and the red color one can see in it, is a flaming fire that prevents the giants to climb up to Asgård.
Well, for us nontele commuters who haven't as of yet come areound to hacking apmd this comes in handy. What would be really nifty, though, is a [insert favourite passtime here] during kernel loading and while the system consumes its due time in loading all those demons I just couldn't live without.. :-)
You are right in the sense that to create the sequence, data from several individuals are used, but no more than 5-10 are actually required. Look up a tutorial on shotgun fragment assembly if you are curious to know more! Larger samplesizes can be effectively handled by just looking for differences between the individuals and the "concensus" sequence for that species - somewhat like what encoding a movie does, storing only differences from the last frame. Have look at for instance hgvbase to see all human sequence variations we know so far.
You are correct that the human genome is "only about" 3 giga basepairs of sequence, but to only store that would be rather egocentric. There are as of Dec 3 2001 some 14396883064 bp in the GenBank, and the amount of sequence information still grows roughly in a exponential manner.
Now, this will not hit the TB line anytime soon. The trouble starts if you are involved in genome sequencing. Then you need to store the raw data for all that sequence. Each some 450 bp of sequence is reconstructed from about 5 - 10 different fairly high reslution gel images (in the ballpark of 150 kBi per image). Also, recall that even short stretches of the sequence can be accompanied with a lot of annotating information, such as names and functions of genes, regualtory elements or pointers to articles explaining the experimental evidence for such. This mutiplies the storage requirement with quite a factor - nothing a neat little linux box with a huge RAID-array cannot handle though. Thats how we handle the sequencing data from Trypanosoma cruzi, by the way.
Actually, to some extent that seems to be what Stanley Williams suggests. Has anyone got an idea about how these tiny guys are supposed to actually interact?
Dr Heaths homepage suggests at attempts to construct "molecular based memories and molecular-based communications networks". Sounds slightly peculiar, but interesting enough in the light of what they claim to have accomplished so far!
Reunite Gondwanaland!
..which is actually one of several very interesting points in the "Copenhagen" play. How come the otherwise so exceedingly brilliant Heisenberg - not to mention his staff of excellent german researchers - was not able to solve an equation that any physics undergraduate could do today? Was he persuaded by Bohr to stall the german bomb programme? Had he lost his edge, and come to his old tutor for guidance on this and other problems? Or was he, as the NYT article argues, carrying out his duties as a german citizen on an espionage or deterrence mission?
If you happen on the chance to see a performance of "Copenhage" my advice would be to take it, regardless if the current state of information would skew the carefully crafted balance between Niels Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg.
Imho what one would want is rather a stable general purpouse device with easy plug-in capability; not unlike the general purpouse pcs that sit on your desk or in your lap.
The problem with many "converged" devices is that they come in a brittle, non-upgradable form. For stability, simplicity is required - combinatorics sort of dictates that at a very fudamental level. But you would certainly not want to carry a whole army of little devices, each with its own battery, display, network-if, speaker etc. etc.
I suppose I'm not the only one, but I always get a bit excited when someone claims a certain subject has reached its theoretical limit of knowledge. Reaing Murphy and Kuhn, one almost has to agree that a change of paradigm is imminent..
Knowledge being unlimited is probably something that the guys that wrote the article at hand might argue against. The theoretical limit of knowledge could of course be estimated using the same approach as for the 1 kg laptop. You only need to find a rouch esimate for the mass and volume of this and any closely-interacting parallell universa - and voila!
The idea of black hole computing is obviously heavy, but the requirements on a heat sink capable of handling the matter-energy conversion of one kg are staggering.
Overklocking might of course not be strictly necessary, considering the effects of general relativity.
Staggering might be descriptive of the investment costs for setting up a new singularity for each calculation, given the obvius difficulty of interactivity once a Schwartschild-barrier is in place.
One must though admire the article authors, not only on their interesting essay, but also on behalf of the courage involved in imagining the prescence of a dissapearing black hole in ones lap.
Yep, this feels like a rather intermediary solution to the computer-waste problem. We are going to end up with a lot of toxic paperweights, but on the other hand, there will be less old toxic webservers. Perhaps they could form-press it into utility objects so that they are of some kind of use when exported to a thirld-world dumpsite.
Now, if only it wouldn't be so easy to carry off when left unattended on your desk..
For music, this is intuitive, but one sort of wonders whether this goes for movies as well? How about e-texts? No doubt, an increased interest for the medias as such may be generated, but not for the instances of media being shared. Where does that put us on copyright-protection - allowing free music sharing, simply on the grounds of increasing revenue, but not sharing of other kinds of media? Sort of tough, principially speaking..