Well, I suppose. In the same way that an amputation is a benefit against gangrene.
PDFs bork almost all of the advantages of ereaders. You can't choose your own typeface, size, kerning, or leading. You can't reflow as desired. You are locked into whatever "page size" the original author decided for you. For anything other than printing onto standard paper sizes, PDFs are a loss.
Fetal stem cells, on the other hand, are as close to pristine genetic condition as is possible.
I guess I forgot to add to my earlier comment that many people assume that embryonic and youthful cells are "pristine" and so devoid of problems. The relative prevalence of blastocytic tumours and leukemias within embryos, newborns, and children argues otherwise.
Fetal stem cells, on the other hand, are as close to pristine genetic condition as is possible.
That's true, but foetal cells are still subjected to a lot of in utero imprinting and differential methylation. And of course, the original egg cell still receives a random assortment of differentially functional maternal mitochondrial organelles.
You probably know that a great deal of in vivo processing is expended to sequester and effectively immobilise and constrain the expression of stem cells and germ cells within the developing foetus. To repeat my earlier argument, removing those cells from that milieu and subjecting them to stresses very far removed from any environmental inputs previously determined for which genetic and epigenetic responses have been encoded by natural selection creates a situation in which any developmental predictions or risk/benefit calculations are problematic. I think that is why a lot more science and research and planning is anticipated before going ahead with large-scale human therapeutic interventions using these cells.
Up until the closing decades of the 20th century medicine basically just went for it, and while this produced a lot of good results, there were also a few very bad outcomes. Modern medicine is more evidence-based. For many large-scale interventions, this can be slower to deploy but over the past couple of decades we have already seen this approach overturn some decades-old beliefs and accepted practices. Some therapies that seemed to make perfect sense upon first glance and analysis have been proven to be either a wash or even to increase mortality. Had these therapies been subjected to longer experimental and analyses stages, their drawbacks might have been caught sooner.
It's going to take longer than a month for *any* putative stem cell treatment to show results. Human cells simply cannot divide that quickly. So the "ticking time bomb" argument is a little fanciful. Further, the cardinal example given here, diabetes, will not kill you quickly as long as you manage it with meds. Properly controlled, diabetes (either Type 1, Type 2, or gestational/MODY) is a serious disease, but an eminently treatable disease.
Take one of your own well-behaved, tightly regulated stem cell out of its milieu, subject it to various biochemical stresses, and then re-introduce it to your body. You may just have transformed it into an unregulated, tumour-producing cell. Or accelerated it along a transformational path that could take a long time to become apparent.
I'd say that precaution is warranted dealing with something like this. Especially when you have a very long-lived animal like a human, with decades of time during which manipulated stem cells could transform malignantly, versus the limited lifespan of most animal models.
A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.
Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.
Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.
Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?
Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.
Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?
Generic web searches mainly suck for finding anything comprehensive in printed/journalistic/academic/legal content. They are okay for 1st year/freshman initial searches and fact finding, but for anything serious, there's a reason why deep databases like LexisNexis and WestLaw exist.
There are no standard dosing regimens for LSD. In the US it is a S1 controlled substance with no recognised medical benefit. There is no way YttriumOxide could substantiate this claim and it is obviously a personal opinion that cannot be verified by any objective measure. LSD, Still With Us After All These Years is an old (mid-1990s) but quite well researched book that examines in some depth, using primary sources and research, the consequences of varying amounts of LSD ingestion and the symptoms of LSD intoxication in terms of dose-response, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics.
By contrast, soundguy made a very specific claim about the etiology of the mental illness of a large portion of the in patient mental health population. That is a claim that can and should either be backed up by objective data, or admitted as also personal opinion or speculation.
Giving Them Drugs, Taking Their Lives Away?
on
Cosmetic Neurology
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are tens of thousands of people in mental hospitals because of the permanent psychological damage [LSD] can cause in certain individuals, most notably those who already walk the fine line between creative genius and insanity.
Please supply any reference to substantiate this claim.
The man who made the Internet accessible to millions of people worldwide thinks ReplayTV and Replay Network Service will fundamentally change how people watch and interact with television. "Replay could do for television what Netscape did for the Internet," Andreessen said.
ReplayTV was the DVR to own during the analog era. It offered built-in autoconfiguring ethernet, automatic user-oblivious commercial skip (using detection heuristics similar to those now employed by MythTV) and the ability to exchange show recordings over the internet. The last two features were potentially massively disruptive to the TV/movie industry and landed the ReplayTV people in court. The protracted legal battles drained the company's finances and attention, and in the end they consented to remove the coolest features from their newer units. By then Tivo, which always played well the media conglomerates, had taken most of the market by offering units with significantly less disruptive potential.
Ballard's writing for me was always the epitome of supremely ironic indifferent technophilia and, as such, a template for our hyper-connected present. Considering he first realised his vision during the 1960s, this makes him even more of a legend. The Drought or The Crystal World are just fucking classics. So many Sf writers, and even "non" writers like Cormac McCarthy with The Road, are just excavating the upper layers of mine shafts that Ballard plunged into decades ago.
Interesting that your "faults" relate to interfacing with third-party devices. And as for "Blood Feud"? Interesting idea and I wish I had the energy for something like intense, but having used Apple since the 1970s, and having owned and worked on everything from the original compact Mac on, that would be a little difficult to maintain. I've no feud with Apple, just with Apple Polishers.
I'm currently halfway through medical school and this axiom is being beaten into us repeatedly. It's not like academic medicine is in denial. Thanks to the influence of post-modernism and self-reflexivity, modern medical education is perfectly comfortable with telling its students, over and over, that only around 50% of what is taught today will turn out to be "correct" in 20 years or so, and half of it will turn out to be incorrect, and that there is of course no easy way today to tell which is which.
Some people take this to heart and will remain lifelong learners open to new evidence and the retirement of discredited approaches. Others will simply freeze in amber what they learn in their first few years and overly rely on this body of gradually discredited knowledge for the rest of their lifetime. In this regard, doctors as a population are very similar to a lot of other professionals. The proportions of those willing to update their knowledge versus those unwilling may vary between some professions, but humans and human emotions remain the same.
I had dealings with the.IE crowd back in the early-mid-90s trying to set up some domains. At the time it was being run by a small cabal of jumped-up sysadmins-turned-pointy-haired-bosses hidden away in University College Dublin (one of the larger public universities in Ireland). They blocked basically every application for any domain name that was any way lucrative, exciting, or with a potential to make a profit, and took an amazing amount of time to actually get anything done. I am unsurprised but a little dismayed to see that the descendant of that dismal sinkhole apparently still possesses much of the same bureaucratic DNA.
"Once, the fringe anarchists used to think the UN was some kind of quasi-fascist world government. Back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when strong government was in fashion because the whole planetary civilization was suffering from future shock, because it was approaching a Singularity. After that passed, though--well, there weren't a lot of viable authoritarian governments left, and the more rigid they were, the less well they could deal with the aftereffects of losing nine-tenths of their populations overnight. Oh, and the cornucopiae: it can't be pleasant to run a central bank and wake up one morning to discover ninety percent of your taxpayers are gone and the rest think money is obsolete."
"But the UN is a government--"
"No it isn't," Martin insisted. "It's a talking shop. Started out as a treaty organization, turned into a bureaucracy, then an escrow agent for various transnational trade and standards agreements. After the Singularity, it was taken over by the Internet engineering task force. It's not the government of Earth; it's just the only remaining relic of Earth's governments that your people can recognize. The bit that does the common-good jobs that everyone needs to subscribe to. World-wide vaccination programs, trade agreements with extrasolar governments, insurer of last resort for major disasters, that sort of thing. The point is, for the most part, the UN doesn't actually do anything; it doesn't have a foreign policy, it's just a head on a stick for your politicians to rant about. Sometimes somebody or another uses the UN as a front when they need to do something credible-looking, but trying to get a consensus vote out of the Security Council is like herding cats."
Last year I used WMWiFiRouter to share out my 3G Sprint connection through my HTC Titan. It became an access point and several 2G Iphones were able to connect to it over WiFi and use it to browse and download at around 750 Kbps. The newer WMWiFiRouter also enables Bluetooth redistribution so, as long as the Iphone can use BT for a network connection, I don't see why this isn't possible.
Slashdot Mirror
A PDF Reader is a benefit?
Well, I suppose. In the same way that an amputation is a benefit against gangrene.
PDFs bork almost all of the advantages of ereaders. You can't choose your own typeface, size, kerning, or leading. You can't reflow as desired. You are locked into whatever "page size" the original author decided for you. For anything other than printing onto standard paper sizes, PDFs are a loss.
Fetal stem cells, on the other hand, are as close to pristine genetic condition as is possible.
I guess I forgot to add to my earlier comment that many people assume that embryonic and youthful cells are "pristine" and so devoid of problems. The relative prevalence of blastocytic tumours and leukemias within embryos, newborns, and children argues otherwise.
Fetal stem cells, on the other hand, are as close to pristine genetic condition as is possible.
That's true, but foetal cells are still subjected to a lot of in utero imprinting and differential methylation. And of course, the original egg cell still receives a random assortment of differentially functional maternal mitochondrial organelles.
You probably know that a great deal of in vivo processing is expended to sequester and effectively immobilise and constrain the expression of stem cells and germ cells within the developing foetus. To repeat my earlier argument, removing those cells from that milieu and subjecting them to stresses very far removed from any environmental inputs previously determined for which genetic and epigenetic responses have been encoded by natural selection creates a situation in which any developmental predictions or risk/benefit calculations are problematic. I think that is why a lot more science and research and planning is anticipated before going ahead with large-scale human therapeutic interventions using these cells.
Up until the closing decades of the 20th century medicine basically just went for it, and while this produced a lot of good results, there were also a few very bad outcomes. Modern medicine is more evidence-based. For many large-scale interventions, this can be slower to deploy but over the past couple of decades we have already seen this approach overturn some decades-old beliefs and accepted practices. Some therapies that seemed to make perfect sense upon first glance and analysis have been proven to be either a wash or even to increase mortality. Had these therapies been subjected to longer experimental and analyses stages, their drawbacks might have been caught sooner.
It's going to take longer than a month for *any* putative stem cell treatment to show results. Human cells simply cannot divide that quickly. So the "ticking time bomb" argument is a little fanciful. Further, the cardinal example given here, diabetes, will not kill you quickly as long as you manage it with meds. Properly controlled, diabetes (either Type 1, Type 2, or gestational/MODY) is a serious disease, but an eminently treatable disease.
Take one of your own well-behaved, tightly regulated stem cell out of its milieu, subject it to various biochemical stresses, and then re-introduce it to your body. You may just have transformed it into an unregulated, tumour-producing cell. Or accelerated it along a transformational path that could take a long time to become apparent.
I'd say that precaution is warranted dealing with something like this. Especially when you have a very long-lived animal like a human, with decades of time during which manipulated stem cells could transform malignantly, versus the limited lifespan of most animal models.
A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.
Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.
Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.
Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?
Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.
Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?
To date, the only drugs that have been proven to induce schizophrenia in humans, and schizphrenia-like symptoms in lab animals, and to increase the symptoms of schizophrenia in people already afflicted with it are the NMDA receptor antagonists such as ketamine or PCP. These probably induce their chronic effects through an oxidative cascade. No similar mechanism has been presented, much less demonstrated, for any specific, putative effects of LSD on neural development.
If ALL publications were archived online to allow for searching through the web it would make comparative research so much easier.
This exists. It's called LexisNexis.
Generic web searches mainly suck for finding anything comprehensive in printed/journalistic/academic/legal content. They are okay for 1st year/freshman initial searches and fact finding, but for anything serious, there's a reason why deep databases like LexisNexis and WestLaw exist.
I've been 'into computing' since a '286/20 was described as 'lightning fast'. I've never, ever spent more than 100 dollars on a video card.
Intel 80286 released in 1982. Value of 1982 $100 in today's cash: $220.28.
There are no standard dosing regimens for LSD. In the US it is a S1 controlled substance with no recognised medical benefit. There is no way YttriumOxide could substantiate this claim and it is obviously a personal opinion that cannot be verified by any objective measure. LSD, Still With Us After All These Years is an old (mid-1990s) but quite well researched book that examines in some depth, using primary sources and research, the consequences of varying amounts of LSD ingestion and the symptoms of LSD intoxication in terms of dose-response, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics.
By contrast, soundguy made a very specific claim about the etiology of the mental illness of a large portion of the in patient mental health population. That is a claim that can and should either be backed up by objective data, or admitted as also personal opinion or speculation.
As a matter of fact, yes. How about you?
There are tens of thousands of people in mental hospitals because of the permanent psychological damage [LSD] can cause in certain individuals, most notably those who already walk the fine line between creative genius and insanity.
Please supply any reference to substantiate this claim.
Ironically, the Economist misses an important piece of the puzzle. It writes:
The 1999 CES awarded the "Best of Show" video category to ReplayTV, with Tivo as the runner up.
ReplayTV was the DVR to own during the analog era. It offered built-in autoconfiguring ethernet, automatic user-oblivious commercial skip (using detection heuristics similar to those now employed by MythTV) and the ability to exchange show recordings over the internet. The last two features were potentially massively disruptive to the TV/movie industry and landed the ReplayTV people in court. The protracted legal battles drained the company's finances and attention, and in the end they consented to remove the coolest features from their newer units. By then Tivo, which always played well the media conglomerates, had taken most of the market by offering units with significantly less disruptive potential.
<blink>This Comment Is Still Under Construction</blink>
(yes, even after 15 years)
And this is a spinning GIF logo. Your browser is just too tasteful to display it.
Ballard's writing for me was always the epitome of supremely ironic indifferent technophilia and, as such, a template for our hyper-connected present. Considering he first realised his vision during the 1960s, this makes him even more of a legend. The Drought or The Crystal World are just fucking classics. So many Sf writers, and even "non" writers like Cormac McCarthy with The Road, are just excavating the upper layers of mine shafts that Ballard plunged into decades ago.
Interesting that your "faults" relate to interfacing with third-party devices. And as for "Blood Feud"? Interesting idea and I wish I had the energy for something like intense, but having used Apple since the 1970s, and having owned and worked on everything from the original compact Mac on, that would be a little difficult to maintain. I've no feud with Apple, just with Apple Polishers.
I do not fault them for it.
Have you ever actually faulted Apple for anything?
Continuous, long-term use of Ketamine will result in a loss of the phenotype of a particular subset of your GABAergic inhibitory interneurons. This has a good chance of increasing your risk of progression along the schizophreniform axis. Is that really something you want?
I'm currently halfway through medical school and this axiom is being beaten into us repeatedly. It's not like academic medicine is in denial. Thanks to the influence of post-modernism and self-reflexivity, modern medical education is perfectly comfortable with telling its students, over and over, that only around 50% of what is taught today will turn out to be "correct" in 20 years or so, and half of it will turn out to be incorrect, and that there is of course no easy way today to tell which is which.
Some people take this to heart and will remain lifelong learners open to new evidence and the retirement of discredited approaches. Others will simply freeze in amber what they learn in their first few years and overly rely on this body of gradually discredited knowledge for the rest of their lifetime. In this regard, doctors as a population are very similar to a lot of other professionals. The proportions of those willing to update their knowledge versus those unwilling may vary between some professions, but humans and human emotions remain the same.
Basically they saw what a mess of what .com became (cybersquatting, typo urls) and made it hard to do this.
Ah yes. .COM. It'll never catch on.
I had dealings with the .IE crowd back in the early-mid-90s trying to set up some domains. At the time it was being run by a small cabal of jumped-up sysadmins-turned-pointy-haired-bosses hidden away in University College Dublin (one of the larger public universities in Ireland). They blocked basically every application for any domain name that was any way lucrative, exciting, or with a potential to make a profit, and took an amazing amount of time to actually get anything done. I am unsurprised but a little dismayed to see that the descendant of that dismal sinkhole apparently still possesses much of the same bureaucratic DNA.
Copyright infringement IS NOT a criminal offense. It is a civil infraction
in the US, that hasn't been true for over a decade and copyright infringement can be prosecuted on a Federal level.
Until that's won and we all are one homogeneous mass with no cultural identities, I guess we have nationalism and more or less continuous wars.
Senator Jay Billington Bulworth agrees:
I like the Stross version of the post-Singularity UN in the 24th century:
Apparently, some things never change.
Last year I used WMWiFiRouter to share out my 3G Sprint connection through my HTC Titan. It became an access point and several 2G Iphones were able to connect to it over WiFi and use it to browse and download at around 750 Kbps. The newer WMWiFiRouter also enables Bluetooth redistribution so, as long as the Iphone can use BT for a network connection, I don't see why this isn't possible.