This study studied continuous flow pumps (which, have been used as assist-devices rather than heart replacements) and noticed a few problems:
Continuous flow pumps seem to favor stasis of blood distal to atherosclerotic lesions, which in turn favors thrombogenesis. So let's say you have carotid stenosis because of all those McDonald's hamburgers you've been eating. Unless they do a carotid endarterectomy on you, continuous flow will cause blood to pool distal to the blockages, which will generate blood clots, which will get propelled into your brain, likely causing multiple massive strokes.
If you happen to have an arteriovenous malformation in your GI tract (which, while not common, is not rare either), they noticed that with continuous flow pumps, you would tend to bleed more, for reasons not yet ascertained.
Continuous flow is not as good as pulsatile flow when it comes to compensating for increases in systemic vascular resistance such as, for example, when you decide to stand up, when you get dehydrated, or when your adrenals decide to dump epinephrine into your bloodstream. Flow drops precipitously, and is guaranteed to cause ischemia or infarction in target organs. Raise your blood pressure and you might just stroke out or cause your kidney to fail.
Of course, this is just one study, and most of the subjects had other pathologies besides just heart failure. It would be interesting to see what happens in trauma patients who are otherwise healthy. But I think these particular findings would be relevant even if you were replacing the heart rather than just assisting it.
Ironically, because the root cause of Type 2 is insulin resistance in target tissues (and relative, but not absolute, insulin deficiency), increasing the number of beta-cells won't necessarily cure this disease. In contrast, in Type 1, the cause seems to be the autoimmune destruction of beta-cells (resulting in absolute insulin deficiency.) If caught early, and if you can figure out how to modulate the immune system (which has already been tried, and which alone does not seem to modify the course of the disease), then perhaps exenatide could be used to repopulate the pancreas.
Still, even in Type 2, another treatment would be useful. Incidentally, metformin doesn't cause weight gain either, but exenatide would be useful if metformin fails or is not tolerable by the patient.
You know, given enough time and money, this can work, but, as someone else has pointed out, don't think that the treatment will be some magic pill that you can take, some nanomachine that you can just set, inject, and forget. While the laws of thermodynamics don't automatically make living forever impossible, you still have to pay attention to them.
Entropy will win in the end. The most you can do is delay the inevitable.
Most likely, living forever will require some very intensive regimen. Maybe less intensive as the centuries go by, but surely for the first subjects, it will be a serious pain in the ass. Injections (or their futuristic equivalent--transdermal sprays, nanofine needles, I don't know) every day, pills three times a day, trips to the doctor, trips to the pharmacy. You'll have to change your lifestyle, because I'm sure that at least the first few generations of these treatments will only be optimized for people who are still relatively healthy. So it is unlikely that, at least for the first few hundred years, you'll be able to eat as many Big Macs as you would like. And maybe they might disqualify you if you do something to yourself that causes damage. Either metabolically, by eating nothing but trans-saturated fats, or traumatically, like falling off of a cliff while rock-climbing.
And I bet you that bad things will happen if you happen to slack off on any of these things. Or that you physically, chemically, and biologically won't be able to continue once you reach a certain threshold of non-compliance to the regimen.
Not to mention that this will certainly cost a shitload of money. There will be very few immortals in the first few centuries, and the ironic thing is that they'll probably be disinclined to reproduce. (Assuming that this process doesn't render you sterile anyway.)
And if Western civilization gets set back somehow, a la the European Middle Ages, then you can kiss your immortality goodbye, because clearly something this intensive will require the infrastructure of a fully functioning civilization.
So, is it possible? Certainly. Is it probable? I'm a little less sure about that.
You can still always get killed in a car crash or by a bullet in the head. And it'll certainly take even longer to develop methods of reversing death than it will to develop methods of extending life.
And then, even if you can somehow keep from getting killed traumatically, and we somehow keep civilization from getting set back the way that human history so far demonstrates that it cyclically does, you still have to worry about that killer asteroid that has our name written on it. And if we get off the planet, there's the sun exploding. If we get to another star, the Milky Way will get sucked into the black hole at the galactic center. And then eventually, there's the heat death of the expanding universe.
Speaking as a pedantic biologist, I don't think you can objectively call it brain damage. Presumably, our shorter attention spans are the result of our homeostatic processes trying to cope with the continual bombardment of information. This will clearly cause changes to the brain. I wouldn't be surprised if you could directly correlate subtle findings on PET scan or fMRI to the slight variations in the duration of someone's attention span. I don't think we can evaluate whether these changes are in fact "damage," i.e., with negative adaptive (selective) consequences, or are in fact, positive adaptations until, as they say, more real data comes in. (Yes, I know this sounds very Lamarckian, but, you know, he was right when it comes to molecular biology as opposed to evolution of species.)
That said, I do think there is some value in listening to albums in track sequence. Like other posters have pointed out, presumably the artists put the tracks in that order for a reason (although, more likely, a marketroid put the tracks in that order, but I digress) and since the emotional effects that a lot of posters have been alluding to are cumulative, you're clearly missing out if you always listen randomly. I mean, if there were no value to listening to songs in a particular sequence, what would the point of creating playlists be?
While I agree, most classification schemes and the subsequent reclassification of various objects may seem extraordinarily trivial and silly, I think it happens because of the way human brains work.
In many respects, people think in categories. Apparently, short-term memory can only manage a certain number of objects at a time, making it necessary to chunk concepts into mentally digestible pieces--hence taxonomies, and categories containing fewer than 10 objects.
Also, our pattern recognition capabilities are fine-tuned for determining whether things fit in a particular category or not. Pattern-recognition is the only way the human brain can make predictions about things it has never seen (or heard, tasted, smelled, or touched) before. The neural networks in our brains will almost automatically assign certain properties to various unknown objects and events if they match enough criteria to fit into a certain archetypal category.
And because of how integral categories are to how the brain works, reclassifications of things have profound effects on our societal weltanschauung.
For example, Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect once and for all exploded the idea that categories such as waves and particles even exist. They are both, and this forever changed the way that the West has looked at the world. It has definitively changed the way we try and predict unknowns.
On the social side of things, the move from an empirically based biological taxonomy to one based on genetic-relatedness has destroyed the Victorian idea of a great chain of being. We find that, instead of being, evolutionarily-speaking, superior to monkeys (in the sense that we are "higher," "more evolved" organisms), we are in fact merely branches off the same tree.
The recognition of the importance of genetic-relatedness has allowed us to perform useful experiments on rats and monkeys that are completely applicable to humans. Without this kind of reclassification, it is doubtful that we would have made the genetic and pharmaceutical advances that we have.
And the destruction of the great chain of being has also led us to a more egalitarian society. Now that the idea of genetic-relatedness is in the fore, it becomes harder to justify racial segregation on the basis of supposed evolutionary superiority. Genetics has shown us that, truly, humanity is one race, descended from the same mother, regardless of our skin color.
In many ways, classification schemes is at the heart of thinking like a human.
Will XP Reloaded feature a new, more standards-compliant, less vulnerable (to spyware, worms, and pop-ups) version of IE? Because if they aren't planning to release the next IE before Longhorn, and if XP Reloaded will delay the release of Longhorn, Microsoft will have just driven another nail into IE's coffin, setting us up for a Gecko and/or KHTML-dependent web. (Maybe Netscape will win the browser war after all?)
So are you saying that Billy Gates is going back to the Source? (And is going to meet the Architect?) But instead of saving Trinity (and fixing the god-awful mess otherwise known as Windows), he's going to screw us all, only to start the upgrade cycle all over again.... Bastard.
On a complete OT tangent, do you think those guys who released the Source of WinNT4 and Win2000 had to (1) destroy the power plant supplying all of Redmond, WA (2) disable the emergency generator by hacking into the server via the SSH1 CRC-32 exploit and (3) enter through a software backdoor using the Keymaker and narrowly avoided getting jacked by the Agent Smith worm and (4) do they fly a cool hovercraft that they call "the Nebuchadnezzar"?
While I agree that the examples you cited are good examples of the kind of tripe that Hollywood churns out, I think it is possible to come out wit h a movie that doesn't compromise the book too much. A faithful rendition is simply impossible given the great differences between the two media. But I think you can come decently close. Like "The Lord of the Rings," for example. Obviously, there are a lot of liberties taken with the book, usually to its detriment, but, the fact of the matter is that LotR actually became a decent, watchable movie that didn't make me want to throw up too much. I think to ask more than that is unrealistic. Not to say that you're wrong about the studios more likely screwing up tHHGttG though.
While I appreciate your point of view regarding hip-hop, I just think it's too restrictive to only regard "classic" hip-hop highly. I mean, who do you think the intellectual descendants of Gil Scott-Heron and the stylistic descendants of De La and Digable Planets are if not artists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, the Roots, etc. True, the one's I've listed are popular in the sense that people outside of hip-hop may have heard of them, but I don't think that necessarily disqualifies them from being "real." Even artists like 2pac and Kanye West, who, while guilty of catering to the lowest common denominator, deserve props for being true to their roots and talking about the Struggle, considering they are sons of Black Panthers.
Cultural elitism in the context of hip-hop is a little ridiculous. To quote Mos himself:
"Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us" ....
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We are Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
Maybe not racism, then. How about cultural elitism? Why are you automatically excluding particular individuals who you automatically pigeon-hole into a particular genre, as if they somehow represent and embody the genre? Where is it written that a hip-hop artist can't be a good actor? And since when are actors chosen on the basis of what they do in real life? It's not like Harrison Ford was ever pigeon-holed to play a carpenter in any of his movies.
And what exactly do you mean by underground hip-hop? Do you even listen to hip-hop? Do you have any friends who are hip-hop artists (obviously, not necessarily signed by a record label or anything like that)? While granted, Mos Def is more recognizable than many other talented underground artists, are you seriously spitting out the line that since an artist is popular, he must have sold out? Have you even listened to the lyrics on his last album "Black on Both Sides"? He isn't exactly pandering to the white suburbanites, nor is he glorifying the essentialized violence and materialism that defines commercial hip-hop. Seriously, when's the last time you saw Mos Def make a rap video? When's the last time you even heard him played on the radio? Frankly, I think you're just dissin' on hip-hop, and whether it's a racial thing or a cultural thing doesn't matter. But, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance and stupidity, I suppose.
On the other hand, you're probably right about the studios gutting the book. Such is life.
Before you criticize, it might be worthwhile to know what you're talking about. I can't believe you just equated Mos Def with Nelly. That's a lot like equating the Beatles with N'sync.
In case you cared, Mos Def, unlike many self-styled "MCs," is a real artist, a poet who started off in spoken word venues like the Brooklyn Moon. Unlike the commercialized hip-hop spewed by Clear Channel radio stations targeted at white suburbanites to reinforce their stereotypes of people of color, Mos Def actually has a positive message for the urban counterculture, rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle of people of color everywhere to attain equality.
I have a feeling that Mos Def and Douglas Adams would have had a lot to talk about. After all tHHGttG saga talks a lot about the disgusting excesses of capitalism and the rampant insanity of corporate culture (see Magrathea and the collapse of the Galactic Stock Market, the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, Hotblack Desiato being dead for "tax purposes," the awesome satire in the sequence involving the Golgafrinchans, and the fact that the enemy in the final book is an evil corporation), the way the powers-that-be and the media manipulate the masses (remember, anyone you actually meet is the product of a deranged imagination, the fact that most everything is "somebody else's problem" makes it possible to create a good stealth device, and there's the irony when the tourism industry's campaign in Ursa Minor Beta backfires when they state that "when you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta, you are tired of life," and then there's the message in front of tHHttG which advises "Don't Panic!") and then there's the whole idea of revisionist history and the desecration of ancient sites all in the name of progress and profit (as in the story of the Cathedral of Chalesm, the poet who was bought out by the pen company and who had to plagiarize his own work in order to get them written, and more obviously the destruction of Earth in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass), the pointless destruction wrought by war (see the Silastic Armor fiends of Striterax, and the Krikkiters after them, and then those guys who fought wars just because they saw strange things in the sky, and ended up killing mostly the peaceful forest people in the middle), the evil of racism (again, the Krikkiters) and the fact that the people who want to have power shouldn't be allowed to have power (wonderfully lampooned by the description of the guy who actually runs the universe)
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a big 1st amendment advocate, so there should be no reason to ban GTA--like another poster noted, disallowing children's access to this stuff is the parents' responsibility, not the legislators. But, on the other hand, I am a believer in evidence-based medicine, too, and I know various studies (all the way back to the '80's) show a statistically significant correlation between exposure to game violence and violent behavior. This was, I believe, usually done in children, so there may be no applicability to adults.
I haven't read the actual studies, although I have read some of the abstracts, but as a medical student, I find that it seems to be the consensus among most pediatricians that game violence does in fact provoke real violence and we are taught to counsel parents to minimize exposure to game and movie violence. So, whether it is true or not, I am inclined to believe the cause/effect linkage is real. So I'm not sure the mainstream press is necessarily clueless. But it is still no reason to ban such games.
The latest copyright laws in the U.S. don't even require you to register a copyright. Works are copyrighted upon creation. You don't even have to put a copyright notice on the work to have it copyrighted.
This "news" is unnecessarily alarmist. Acinetobacter baumannii usually doesn't cause infection in healthy individuals. Notice that they did this study in the intensive care unit, where they've known for a while that patients get this sort of infection. The patients might have open wounds or burns. Their immune systems tend to be shot to hell, from, for example, chemotherapy, HIV, some other illness, or just from the high levels of cortisol in their blood because of stress from, e.g., the extreme amounts of pain and/or respiratory distress they are in.
From Harrison's Princples of Internal Medicine 15th edition, 2001:
Acitenobacter is highly prevalent in the environment. It is found in most water and soil samples and has a wide habitat. Acitenobacter has been cultured from the moist skin of healthy humans; increased colonization of the skin and the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts occurs in individuals in long-term-care facilities and hospitals. Reservoirs for acquisition in these settings include health care personnel, medical equipment, food, and the surrounding environment. Infections in healthy people in the community are unusual, but a few reports of pneumonia have been published. The overwhelming majority of infections are acquired in the hospital and long-term-care facilities.... Acinetobacter species account for 1 to 3% of hospital-acquired infections and affect primarily immunocompromised hosts and patients with comorbid disease. ICUs are a prominent site of Acitenobacter infections.
Didn't Teller lead the crusade to strip Oppenheimer of his security credentials by insinuating that Oppenheimer was a pinko commie for opposing nuclear proliferation? And that this effectively destroyed Oppenheimer's career?
Well, the analogy does work. While to say Macs are vaccinated against Windows viruses is wrong, Macs are immune to Windows viruses the same way humans are immune to canine immunodeficiency virus. No receptors means no infection. Pure biology.
The thing is, while Windows is the predominant desktop OS, UNIX and UNIX-like systems have run the Internet since the beginning (and MacOS X is a UNIX-like system) and there have been few comparably massive exploits in UNIX's 30+ year history. So I think it is possible to build a secure but popular OS.
While security by obscurity really isn't security, you can capitalize on the fact that many users don't know about/don't care about things like RPC and closing open ports and sharing files over a LAN and what not. How? By not enabling these sort of things that make a computer insecure by default. You really shouldn't have to be root to "click a button and send pictures to your friends," and a Trojaned screensaver shouldn't have the capability of wiping your entire hard drive, OS and all. MacOS X doesn't even allow you to login as root, without some command-line tweaking, which would mean that you knew what you were doing. And it's not like your computer is cripppled out of the box without a root account. You can do all those user activities you mention without once having to run as root.
And while "individual appliances that do only 1 particular job" is extreme, it's actually not a bad way to summarize how *nix works: a tool should do one thing, and do it well. Except for, I guess emacs, most *nix tools adhere to this. There's really no good reason why an e-mail client or a word processor should be able to run executables, as root, no less.
There really isn't anything magical about information per se. Anything pleasurable is addictive in theory since the reward circuit in the brain is a positive feedback system. Obviously, there are addictions to substances, but also look at addictions to gambling, to sex, to eating. A "hit" of information likewise probably activates the reward circuit, flooding parts of the brain with dopamine. So, while there isn't any hard data in the article, the idea certainly follows current thinking about addiction and frontal lobe (dys)function.
Fact is, you probably don't need to consult a cardiologist every time you order an EKG. The average competent physician should be able to pick up major problems. A lot of the time, you have cardiologists read strips just for liability purposes. But no one in their right mind would trust a machine as the final arbiter of a clinical encounter.
When I did my ER rotation, the attending physicians taught me that if the EKG reads something as normal, there's a good chance it's probably normal, expecially if you have no clinical suspicion of an abnormality (this last phrase is key!) It's only when it reads something as abnormal that you definitely can't trust it.
(And, plenty of times, especially because of being rushed or just simple incompetence, the leads will be placed suboptimally, or the patient will refuse to co-operate, causing a less than ideal tracing on which the machine will choke on and read as wildly abnormal, but the doc may actually still be able to read.)
But, you have to realize, no one ever orders an EKG alone in order to evaluate whether or not someone is OK and can go home. You still have to take a history and do a physical, at the very least. And in what circumstances are EKGs usually ordered? When the patient is having acute chest pain.
There are plenty of non-cardiac, possibly catastrophic reasons for acute chest pain: pulmonary embolism, esophageal rupture, pneumothorax, aortic dissection, cardiac tamponade, etc., etc. Chances are, you'll get a normal EKG in all of these, and in the cases where you might get abnormal EKG, the machine might not even catch it, much less make a diagnosis.
So it seems pretty unlikely that you can automate the process at all on the basis of a normal EKG or even normal monitor readings. That's why you need nurses to check patients every hour in the ICU even with all those monitors and even though the patients are all in plain sight. If machines still can't do OCR that well, how the hell can we expect them to recognize patterns of clinical presentation?
Well, I know an Internal Medicine/Pediatrics resident who has done this very thing, turning a bunch of recorded lectures on multifarious medical topics into mp3s. Although he does admit it's more of a rationalization for why he bought his iPod than something really practical. Still, just imagine, you could have a recorded lecture talk you through how to insert a venous catheter into someone's neck, or even how to manage a cardiac arrest. (Chest pain radiating to your left shoulder? Hold on, let me get my iPod)
(and other nitpicks on human anatomy and physiology)
(Minor point: contrary to what the article states, the neonate actually has more synapses than an older child. Extensive pruning of synapses occurs as the baby matures. The pruning is what makes the synapses useful. Otherwise the brain would simply remain a chaotic tangle of fibers sending random electrical impulses to each other-- pathophysiologically similar to a generalized seizure disorder.)
Is it the diaphragm or the heart that kills you?
What probably happens when the avatar dies is that the person probably stops breathing first. The heart and the gut can continue to function without any input from the brain, but the diaphragm cannot. Once you stop breathing, you have about 6-8 minutes before your blood starts desaturing with regards to oxygen, beyond which the dearth of oxygen starts to irreversibly damage your heart and brain. This might explain why Neo starts fibrillating--this doesn't happen to healthy normal people just because they are experiencing an anxiety attack, but it does happen if you start running out of oxygen.
It could very well be that the Matrix actually sends a signal to directly paralyze the diaphragm.
An easy way to get around this is to put the real person on a ventilator. Though maybe the rebels just don't have a ventilator, or even someone with the ability to intubate people.
Alternatively, what can happen is that the Matrix sends a signal that disrupts the sympathetic nervous system, sending the body into neurogenic shock, and eventually causing the heart to fail, but this would take a longer time to kill someone.
What this can't explain, however, is why people die if they get abruptly disconnected from the Matrix. Provided that you aren't paralyzed, the natural drive to breathe should kick in.
Whether or not you can do two things at once depends on how scarce the resources are. The pharmaceutical companies say that they are in fact strapped for resources, which is one reason why medication is so expensive. There are only so many pharmaceutical companies out there, and every drug they create has to be a winner, lest they hemorrhage enough money to kill their company. (This is related to the long and involved process it takes to get a drug approved by the FDA, bribery non-withstanding.) So in a sense, pharmaceutical R&D is close to a zero-sum game. Research one thing, and your company probably won't have time or money to research another. But this is all hearsay. I don't know, maybe you're right about legislators, though. Maybe they can argue about cel phone standards at the same time they argue about what kind of humanitarian aid to send to Iraq. (I can see it now, a draft of a bill for a post-Iraqi cel phone standard, with a humanitarian aid package tacked on.)
Now we come to even more hairsplitting: As for SARS, the likely etiology is a coronavirus, but even then, some scientists are skeptical that there really is a single agent. It depends on who you believe, but most textbooks say that most colds whose etiologies are known are caused by rhinoviruses. A smaller, though significant, percentage are indeed caused by coronaviruses. But if I had to bet money, I would guess that the putative cure for the common cold would be targeted against rhinoviruses.
That's probably a really bad analogy you got there. Otherwise, it completely feeds into what the parent post is saying--the U.S. is only in it for the money, not unlike some pharmaceutical companies.
No one ever died from a cold, but a cure for the common cold would be far more lucrative than a cure for cancer by the sheer fact that people get colds more often than they get cancer. But if you're actually interested in saving people's lives, we really should pursue the cure for cancer instead of the cure for the common cold. In the same vein, I think making sure people get food and water is a hell of a lot more important than determining what their cel phone standard is going to be.
In summary, I don't think dead people or people dying of starvation and thirst really need cel phones. And I don't think people with terminal cancer will feel all that much better even if you manage to stop their nose from running.
"Weakening the race"? While we will never be able to conclusively prove the assertions of anthropologists and evolutionists, some would say that the very thing that allowed us to speciate is precisely our dependence on a large infrastructure. Even when we were proto-monkeys swinging in trees, we were already significantly dependent on a social structure and hierarchy. Homo sapiens has never done very well on their own. There are too many species (even now, despite our attempts to eradicate them) that are physically stronger and faster and naturally better adapted to their environment than we are, and without the "large infrastructure," we would've been extinct long ago.
And as to the role of beauty in evolution, what it really illustrates is the evolutionary arms race between the cheaters and cheater-detectors (to steal the paradigm from Richard Dawkins, and from game theory in general.) There is a certain threshold where it would be more energetically economic to simply pretend your genes are good. So early in evolution, maybe there really was a 1:1 correspondence between a pretty face and good genes. Thereby, a mechanism would evolve for potential mates to use a pretty face as criteria. But when that energy threshold is reached where it costs less to just code for a pretty face than to actually ensure that one's genes are good (thereby destroying the connection between a pretty face and good genes) a new mechanism would likely evolve for potential mates to detect this mismatch. The cheaters would continue to find ways not only to pretend they have good genes but also to pretend that they are not faking it, and the cheater-detectors would continue to find ways to tell otherwise. The face might actually really evolved this way (in the same way that peacocks evolved ridiculously flamboyant plumage and humans evolved a purely hydrostatic, non-bony penis) and I think this is all discussed in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but I could be wrong.
Old age != failure of DNA replication/cell divisio
on
Speeding up Evolution
·
· Score: 1
While, yes, people do die because of DNA damage (e.g., radiation poisoning), for the most part, death from old age is because of structural wear and tear. Cardiac myofibrils do not regenerate effectively, and while the brain can generate new neurons in certain parts of the brain, for the most part, most neurons are really irreplaceable. Cartilage breaks down, the macrostructure of bones (which DNA knows nothing about) degrade with time. All cells develop inclusion bodies, which are waste products of cellular metabolism that accumulate within the cell and eventually cause cells to die, even if their replication machinery is intact. And even with all your replication machinery intact, DNA polymerase still makes a number of statistically significant errors, and the repair mechanisms also have a finite failure rate. (Hence, cancer.) In the end, entropy will triumph.
So what we need to do to achieve longevity if not immortality is not as simple as expressing telomerase in every cell, or preventing apoptosis. We have to somehow get the body to repair things that it currently doesn't know how to repair, like brains and hearts. This is much more than just convincing stem cells to restart replication. We have to somehow figure out feedback systems so that the growth is controlled. This first means that we have to understand how the body works in molecular detail. And as of now, what we understand, as wonderful as it is, is hugely dwarved by what we don't understand, and it doesn't help that there isn't much of an incentive for pure research.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, this is just one study, and most of the subjects had other pathologies besides just heart failure. It would be interesting to see what happens in trauma patients who are otherwise healthy. But I think these particular findings would be relevant even if you were replacing the heart rather than just assisting it.
Still, even in Type 2, another treatment would be useful. Incidentally, metformin doesn't cause weight gain either, but exenatide would be useful if metformin fails or is not tolerable by the patient.
Entropy will win in the end. The most you can do is delay the inevitable.
Most likely, living forever will require some very intensive regimen. Maybe less intensive as the centuries go by, but surely for the first subjects, it will be a serious pain in the ass. Injections (or their futuristic equivalent--transdermal sprays, nanofine needles, I don't know) every day, pills three times a day, trips to the doctor, trips to the pharmacy. You'll have to change your lifestyle, because I'm sure that at least the first few generations of these treatments will only be optimized for people who are still relatively healthy. So it is unlikely that, at least for the first few hundred years, you'll be able to eat as many Big Macs as you would like. And maybe they might disqualify you if you do something to yourself that causes damage. Either metabolically, by eating nothing but trans-saturated fats, or traumatically, like falling off of a cliff while rock-climbing.
And I bet you that bad things will happen if you happen to slack off on any of these things. Or that you physically, chemically, and biologically won't be able to continue once you reach a certain threshold of non-compliance to the regimen.
Not to mention that this will certainly cost a shitload of money. There will be very few immortals in the first few centuries, and the ironic thing is that they'll probably be disinclined to reproduce. (Assuming that this process doesn't render you sterile anyway.)
And if Western civilization gets set back somehow, a la the European Middle Ages, then you can kiss your immortality goodbye, because clearly something this intensive will require the infrastructure of a fully functioning civilization.
So, is it possible? Certainly. Is it probable? I'm a little less sure about that.
You can still always get killed in a car crash or by a bullet in the head. And it'll certainly take even longer to develop methods of reversing death than it will to develop methods of extending life.
And then, even if you can somehow keep from getting killed traumatically, and we somehow keep civilization from getting set back the way that human history so far demonstrates that it cyclically does, you still have to worry about that killer asteroid that has our name written on it. And if we get off the planet, there's the sun exploding. If we get to another star, the Milky Way will get sucked into the black hole at the galactic center. And then eventually, there's the heat death of the expanding universe.
Forever is a long time.
That said, I do think there is some value in listening to albums in track sequence. Like other posters have pointed out, presumably the artists put the tracks in that order for a reason (although, more likely, a marketroid put the tracks in that order, but I digress) and since the emotional effects that a lot of posters have been alluding to are cumulative, you're clearly missing out if you always listen randomly. I mean, if there were no value to listening to songs in a particular sequence, what would the point of creating playlists be?
In many respects, people think in categories. Apparently, short-term memory can only manage a certain number of objects at a time, making it necessary to chunk concepts into mentally digestible pieces--hence taxonomies, and categories containing fewer than 10 objects.
Also, our pattern recognition capabilities are fine-tuned for determining whether things fit in a particular category or not. Pattern-recognition is the only way the human brain can make predictions about things it has never seen (or heard, tasted, smelled, or touched) before. The neural networks in our brains will almost automatically assign certain properties to various unknown objects and events if they match enough criteria to fit into a certain archetypal category.
And because of how integral categories are to how the brain works, reclassifications of things have profound effects on our societal weltanschauung.
For example, Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect once and for all exploded the idea that categories such as waves and particles even exist. They are both, and this forever changed the way that the West has looked at the world. It has definitively changed the way we try and predict unknowns.
On the social side of things, the move from an empirically based biological taxonomy to one based on genetic-relatedness has destroyed the Victorian idea of a great chain of being. We find that, instead of being, evolutionarily-speaking, superior to monkeys (in the sense that we are "higher," "more evolved" organisms), we are in fact merely branches off the same tree.
The recognition of the importance of genetic-relatedness has allowed us to perform useful experiments on rats and monkeys that are completely applicable to humans. Without this kind of reclassification, it is doubtful that we would have made the genetic and pharmaceutical advances that we have.
And the destruction of the great chain of being has also led us to a more egalitarian society. Now that the idea of genetic-relatedness is in the fore, it becomes harder to justify racial segregation on the basis of supposed evolutionary superiority. Genetics has shown us that, truly, humanity is one race, descended from the same mother, regardless of our skin color.
In many ways, classification schemes is at the heart of thinking like a human.
Will XP Reloaded feature a new, more standards-compliant, less vulnerable (to spyware, worms, and pop-ups) version of IE? Because if they aren't planning to release the next IE before Longhorn, and if XP Reloaded will delay the release of Longhorn, Microsoft will have just driven another nail into IE's coffin, setting us up for a Gecko and/or KHTML-dependent web. (Maybe Netscape will win the browser war after all?)
On a complete OT tangent, do you think those guys who released the Source of WinNT4 and Win2000 had to (1) destroy the power plant supplying all of Redmond, WA (2) disable the emergency generator by hacking into the server via the SSH1 CRC-32 exploit and (3) enter through a software backdoor using the Keymaker and narrowly avoided getting jacked by the Agent Smith worm and (4) do they fly a cool hovercraft that they call "the Nebuchadnezzar"?
I admit. I'm being ridiculous.
While I agree that the examples you cited are good examples of the kind of tripe that Hollywood churns out, I think it is possible to come out wit h a movie that doesn't compromise the book too much. A faithful rendition is simply impossible given the great differences between the two media. But I think you can come decently close. Like "The Lord of the Rings," for example. Obviously, there are a lot of liberties taken with the book, usually to its detriment, but, the fact of the matter is that LotR actually became a decent, watchable movie that didn't make me want to throw up too much. I think to ask more than that is unrealistic. Not to say that you're wrong about the studios more likely screwing up tHHGttG though.
Cultural elitism in the context of hip-hop is a little ridiculous. To quote Mos himself:
And what exactly do you mean by underground hip-hop? Do you even listen to hip-hop? Do you have any friends who are hip-hop artists (obviously, not necessarily signed by a record label or anything like that)? While granted, Mos Def is more recognizable than many other talented underground artists, are you seriously spitting out the line that since an artist is popular, he must have sold out? Have you even listened to the lyrics on his last album "Black on Both Sides"? He isn't exactly pandering to the white suburbanites, nor is he glorifying the essentialized violence and materialism that defines commercial hip-hop. Seriously, when's the last time you saw Mos Def make a rap video? When's the last time you even heard him played on the radio? Frankly, I think you're just dissin' on hip-hop, and whether it's a racial thing or a cultural thing doesn't matter. But, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance and stupidity, I suppose.
On the other hand, you're probably right about the studios gutting the book. Such is life.
Before you criticize, it might be worthwhile to know what you're talking about. I can't believe you just equated Mos Def with Nelly. That's a lot like equating the Beatles with N'sync.
In case you cared, Mos Def, unlike many self-styled "MCs," is a real artist, a poet who started off in spoken word venues like the Brooklyn Moon. Unlike the commercialized hip-hop spewed by Clear Channel radio stations targeted at white suburbanites to reinforce their stereotypes of people of color, Mos Def actually has a positive message for the urban counterculture, rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle of people of color everywhere to attain equality.
I have a feeling that Mos Def and Douglas Adams would have had a lot to talk about. After all tHHGttG saga talks a lot about the disgusting excesses of capitalism and the rampant insanity of corporate culture (see Magrathea and the collapse of the Galactic Stock Market, the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, Hotblack Desiato being dead for "tax purposes," the awesome satire in the sequence involving the Golgafrinchans, and the fact that the enemy in the final book is an evil corporation), the way the powers-that-be and the media manipulate the masses (remember, anyone you actually meet is the product of a deranged imagination, the fact that most everything is "somebody else's problem" makes it possible to create a good stealth device, and there's the irony when the tourism industry's campaign in Ursa Minor Beta backfires when they state that "when you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta, you are tired of life," and then there's the message in front of tHHttG which advises "Don't Panic!") and then there's the whole idea of revisionist history and the desecration of ancient sites all in the name of progress and profit (as in the story of the Cathedral of Chalesm, the poet who was bought out by the pen company and who had to plagiarize his own work in order to get them written, and more obviously the destruction of Earth in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass), the pointless destruction wrought by war (see the Silastic Armor fiends of Striterax, and the Krikkiters after them, and then those guys who fought wars just because they saw strange things in the sky, and ended up killing mostly the peaceful forest people in the middle), the evil of racism (again, the Krikkiters) and the fact that the people who want to have power shouldn't be allowed to have power (wonderfully lampooned by the description of the guy who actually runs the universe)
I think Mos Def would make a great Ford Prefect.
I haven't read the actual studies, although I have read some of the abstracts, but as a medical student, I find that it seems to be the consensus among most pediatricians that game violence does in fact provoke real violence and we are taught to counsel parents to minimize exposure to game and movie violence. So, whether it is true or not, I am inclined to believe the cause/effect linkage is real. So I'm not sure the mainstream press is necessarily clueless. But it is still no reason to ban such games.
The latest copyright laws in the U.S. don't even require you to register a copyright. Works are copyrighted upon creation. You don't even have to put a copyright notice on the work to have it copyrighted.
From Harrison's Princples of Internal Medicine 15th edition, 2001:
(bold is my emphasis added)Didn't Teller lead the crusade to strip Oppenheimer of his security credentials by insinuating that Oppenheimer was a pinko commie for opposing nuclear proliferation? And that this effectively destroyed Oppenheimer's career?
Well, the analogy does work. While to say Macs are vaccinated against Windows viruses is wrong, Macs are immune to Windows viruses the same way humans are immune to canine immunodeficiency virus. No receptors means no infection. Pure biology. The thing is, while Windows is the predominant desktop OS, UNIX and UNIX-like systems have run the Internet since the beginning (and MacOS X is a UNIX-like system) and there have been few comparably massive exploits in UNIX's 30+ year history. So I think it is possible to build a secure but popular OS.
While security by obscurity really isn't security, you can capitalize on the fact that many users don't know about/don't care about things like RPC and closing open ports and sharing files over a LAN and what not. How? By not enabling these sort of things that make a computer insecure by default. You really shouldn't have to be root to "click a button and send pictures to your friends," and a Trojaned screensaver shouldn't have the capability of wiping your entire hard drive, OS and all. MacOS X doesn't even allow you to login as root, without some command-line tweaking, which would mean that you knew what you were doing. And it's not like your computer is cripppled out of the box without a root account. You can do all those user activities you mention without once having to run as root.
And while "individual appliances that do only 1 particular job" is extreme, it's actually not a bad way to summarize how *nix works: a tool should do one thing, and do it well. Except for, I guess emacs, most *nix tools adhere to this. There's really no good reason why an e-mail client or a word processor should be able to run executables, as root, no less.
There really isn't anything magical about information per se. Anything pleasurable is addictive in theory since the reward circuit in the brain is a positive feedback system. Obviously, there are addictions to substances, but also look at addictions to gambling, to sex, to eating. A "hit" of information likewise probably activates the reward circuit, flooding parts of the brain with dopamine. So, while there isn't any hard data in the article, the idea certainly follows current thinking about addiction and frontal lobe (dys)function.
When I did my ER rotation, the attending physicians taught me that if the EKG reads something as normal, there's a good chance it's probably normal, expecially if you have no clinical suspicion of an abnormality (this last phrase is key!) It's only when it reads something as abnormal that you definitely can't trust it. (And, plenty of times, especially because of being rushed or just simple incompetence, the leads will be placed suboptimally, or the patient will refuse to co-operate, causing a less than ideal tracing on which the machine will choke on and read as wildly abnormal, but the doc may actually still be able to read.)
But, you have to realize, no one ever orders an EKG alone in order to evaluate whether or not someone is OK and can go home. You still have to take a history and do a physical, at the very least. And in what circumstances are EKGs usually ordered? When the patient is having acute chest pain.
There are plenty of non-cardiac, possibly catastrophic reasons for acute chest pain: pulmonary embolism, esophageal rupture, pneumothorax, aortic dissection, cardiac tamponade, etc., etc. Chances are, you'll get a normal EKG in all of these, and in the cases where you might get abnormal EKG, the machine might not even catch it, much less make a diagnosis.
So it seems pretty unlikely that you can automate the process at all on the basis of a normal EKG or even normal monitor readings. That's why you need nurses to check patients every hour in the ICU even with all those monitors and even though the patients are all in plain sight. If machines still can't do OCR that well, how the hell can we expect them to recognize patterns of clinical presentation?
Well, I know an Internal Medicine/Pediatrics resident who has done this very thing, turning a bunch of recorded lectures on multifarious medical topics into mp3s. Although he does admit it's more of a rationalization for why he bought his iPod than something really practical. Still, just imagine, you could have a recorded lecture talk you through how to insert a venous catheter into someone's neck, or even how to manage a cardiac arrest. (Chest pain radiating to your left shoulder? Hold on, let me get my iPod)
(Minor point: contrary to what the article states, the neonate actually has more synapses than an older child. Extensive pruning of synapses occurs as the baby matures. The pruning is what makes the synapses useful. Otherwise the brain would simply remain a chaotic tangle of fibers sending random electrical impulses to each other-- pathophysiologically similar to a generalized seizure disorder.)
Is it the diaphragm or the heart that kills you?
What probably happens when the avatar dies is that the person probably stops breathing first. The heart and the gut can continue to function without any input from the brain, but the diaphragm cannot. Once you stop breathing, you have about 6-8 minutes before your blood starts desaturing with regards to oxygen, beyond which the dearth of oxygen starts to irreversibly damage your heart and brain. This might explain why Neo starts fibrillating--this doesn't happen to healthy normal people just because they are experiencing an anxiety attack, but it does happen if you start running out of oxygen.
It could very well be that the Matrix actually sends a signal to directly paralyze the diaphragm.
An easy way to get around this is to put the real person on a ventilator. Though maybe the rebels just don't have a ventilator, or even someone with the ability to intubate people.
Alternatively, what can happen is that the Matrix sends a signal that disrupts the sympathetic nervous system, sending the body into neurogenic shock, and eventually causing the heart to fail, but this would take a longer time to kill someone.
What this can't explain, however, is why people die if they get abruptly disconnected from the Matrix. Provided that you aren't paralyzed, the natural drive to breathe should kick in.
Whether or not you can do two things at once depends on how scarce the resources are. The pharmaceutical companies say that they are in fact strapped for resources, which is one reason why medication is so expensive. There are only so many pharmaceutical companies out there, and every drug they create has to be a winner, lest they hemorrhage enough money to kill their company. (This is related to the long and involved process it takes to get a drug approved by the FDA, bribery non-withstanding.) So in a sense, pharmaceutical R&D is close to a zero-sum game. Research one thing, and your company probably won't have time or money to research another. But this is all hearsay. I don't know, maybe you're right about legislators, though. Maybe they can argue about cel phone standards at the same time they argue about what kind of humanitarian aid to send to Iraq. (I can see it now, a draft of a bill for a post-Iraqi cel phone standard, with a humanitarian aid package tacked on.)
Now we come to even more hairsplitting: As for SARS, the likely etiology is a coronavirus, but even then, some scientists are skeptical that there really is a single agent. It depends on who you believe, but most textbooks say that most colds whose etiologies are known are caused by rhinoviruses. A smaller, though significant, percentage are indeed caused by coronaviruses. But if I had to bet money, I would guess that the putative cure for the common cold would be targeted against rhinoviruses.
No one ever died from a cold, but a cure for the common cold would be far more lucrative than a cure for cancer by the sheer fact that people get colds more often than they get cancer. But if you're actually interested in saving people's lives, we really should pursue the cure for cancer instead of the cure for the common cold. In the same vein, I think making sure people get food and water is a hell of a lot more important than determining what their cel phone standard is going to be.
In summary, I don't think dead people or people dying of starvation and thirst really need cel phones. And I don't think people with terminal cancer will feel all that much better even if you manage to stop their nose from running.
And as to the role of beauty in evolution, what it really illustrates is the evolutionary arms race between the cheaters and cheater-detectors (to steal the paradigm from Richard Dawkins, and from game theory in general.) There is a certain threshold where it would be more energetically economic to simply pretend your genes are good. So early in evolution, maybe there really was a 1:1 correspondence between a pretty face and good genes. Thereby, a mechanism would evolve for potential mates to use a pretty face as criteria. But when that energy threshold is reached where it costs less to just code for a pretty face than to actually ensure that one's genes are good (thereby destroying the connection between a pretty face and good genes) a new mechanism would likely evolve for potential mates to detect this mismatch. The cheaters would continue to find ways not only to pretend they have good genes but also to pretend that they are not faking it, and the cheater-detectors would continue to find ways to tell otherwise. The face might actually really evolved this way (in the same way that peacocks evolved ridiculously flamboyant plumage and humans evolved a purely hydrostatic, non-bony penis) and I think this is all discussed in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but I could be wrong.
So what we need to do to achieve longevity if not immortality is not as simple as expressing telomerase in every cell, or preventing apoptosis. We have to somehow get the body to repair things that it currently doesn't know how to repair, like brains and hearts. This is much more than just convincing stem cells to restart replication. We have to somehow figure out feedback systems so that the growth is controlled. This first means that we have to understand how the body works in molecular detail. And as of now, what we understand, as wonderful as it is, is hugely dwarved by what we don't understand, and it doesn't help that there isn't much of an incentive for pure research.