Hmm... you apparantly did not read the article. you said:
And has he never seen one of those little devices that has a little spinner on a needle in an evacuated piece of glass?
while the article clearly states:
It seems that the failure to apply the thermodynamic limitations to radiation physics has shown up in many experiments involving radiation pressure. Thus
Crookes' radiometer has invariably rotated in the opposite sense to the expected one. The black side of the paddles invariably recedes from the light, and many explanations have been offered, but not including that which would seem the most obvious: the absence of radiation pressure on the bright side.
Not to say that his arguments are correct (I don't know), but your appeal to the authority of the Crooke's radiometer is clearly something the author has considered.
Gasses in a biological system are all bound to something - example - Oxygen is bound to hemoglobin or myoglobin, if it isn't it causes serious problems.
No.
How do you suppose the O2 makes it way to the hemoglobin?
Well, I'll tell you: the oxygen diffuses through the cell membranes of the alveoli, disolves in the liquid component of the blood, diffuses through the cell membrane of the Red Blood Cells, and binds to the hemoglobin.
Of course, the oxygen bound to hemoglobin is in equilibrium with the oxygen disolved in the RBC's cytoplasim, which is in equilibrium with the oxygen disolved in the liquid component of blood. (I am simplifying, but you get the idea.)
It may be biology, but it isn't black magic how this stuff works, the laws of physical chemistry must still be obeyed, there has to be an equilibrium between the phases.
This aspect of blood is pretty well understood too: there is 0.03ml oxygen per liter of blood per mm Hg partial pressure of oxygen, or about 2.9ml oxygen disolved per litre of arterial blood, and 1.2ml of disolved oxygen per litre of venous blood. Breathing 100 percent oxygen will, of course, increase these numbers.
An interesting but not completely obvious effect of Viagra is that it may protect some endangered species.
Consider that for thousands of years people have tried crazy things like tiger penis soup as an aphrodesiac.
Now that we have Viagra, which really does work to restore male potency, there is less demand for the traditional, endangerd-species-based cures for impotence.
Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.
It is somewhat surprising how well translation of poems or other word play works, and even more surprising is how wildly differant translations can convey the same feel, and somehow capture the feel of the original work.
Of course, it isn't too hard to screw it up completely either.
it sounds like this article is describing a cut in the aorta farther away from the heart than you're thinking. that would cause significantly less bleeding, and since imaging of such a location would be a secondary consideration, a complication in that area could go unnoticed for some time.
Not quite right. The Aorta at the level of the kidneys is still a huge vessel. Consider that ALL of the blood flowing to the lower half of the body is passing through the aorta at this level, where it is a little bigger than your thumb, and about 2 liters of blood per minute are flowing through it.
The kidneys are only a couple of inches away from the aorta (the left one is closer because of the asymetry of the body) probably because they need a huge supply of blood to function properly (kind of like how the oil filter in your car needs a huge supply of oil to work correctly.)
Anyways, keeping an eye on the aorta would be a part of any surgery to remove a kidney, thats just the way surgery works: you make a point to identify all the important structures and make sure you are not accidentaly cutting them or whatever.
I have never seen the DaVinci system, but my guess is that the error was probably due to some oversight in the protocol because the procedure is so new, something like the back end of a tool bumping into the aorta out of camara range after the surgeon thought it was safely out of harms way.
Although it didn't get wide usage, Emacs used to have (still has?) a "mouse gestures" add-on that allows you to map any unique mouse gesture to a key-sequence (which Emacs can then map to pretty much any command -- including user defined ones). Always meant to try it out, but never got around to it. Wonder if it's still around?
You are thinking of strokes-mode, which is alive and well in emacs 21
But why is the marketing of drugs such a factor? Do people really pressure their doctors to prescribe Celebrex rather than taking ibuprofen?
They sure do!
I don't understand it either, but patients often demand drugs which they have seen advertised. Mostly patients assume newer=better despite what you tell them (e.g., the truth).
I could hold a 1 volt 300000 amp power supply's leads all day and not be hurt. The reason is Ohms law.
Although what you say is mostly correct from a practical point of view, try not to forget that "ohms law" is an idealization and only applies to a small class of conductors. What G. S. Ohm noticed more than a hundred years ago what the in metalic conductors at a constant temperature the ratio of electric field to current density was approximately a constant, known as the resistivity. (note that this is a microscopic statement.) Working from this assumtion that rho=E/J, and assuming an isotropic, ohmic conductor, one easily arrives at the more familliar version of ohms law: R=V/I. Now this is a very usefull result, but please remember that it was drived only after making multiple assumptions regarding the nature of the conducting material and has noting to say with regard to what is going on at a smaller scale.
Anyways, just be carefull you don't read too much into "ohms law".
A tunnel diode is not a bad example of something you can hold in your hand which is most deffinately not ohmic and exhibits some interesting behavior because of this.
Electrochemical systems (such as collections of cells in a human body) are another good example of decidedly non-ohmic systems. Pick up a physical chemistry book if you want to learn more.
The take home point is: Yes, you could probably hold on to a 1v supply with no problem, but the effects of electricity on the body are not as simple as you make them seem.
And, No, I am not one of those people who think cell phones or power lines are harmfull:)
Honestly, even during the 7.2 Loma Praeta quake we had when I was in Junior High, I got up, stood in the doorway, went "Woo hoo!" and then sat down again and continued playing Curse of the Azure Bonds on my 286.
On a more personal level, the "good" bacteria in your innards don't provide nutrients (that I know of, being an ignorant techie, not a scientist)...
Actually, the comensual bacteria in our guts do produce most of the vitamin-K (no, not the club drug!) for most mamals. As you know, vitamin-K is a necessary co-factor for the enzymes which produce the gamma-hydroxy glutamate necessary for the synthesis of several of the enzymes involved in the blood clotting cascade.
Sometimes infants guts do not get colonized with the correct bacteria right away and they develop problems with defficiencies of vitamin-K.
Also, gnotobiotic animals (those grown in a sterile laboratory to be free of the normal bacterial flora) are not quite normal in other ways.
So, now you know of one nutrient the bacteria make!:)
30% could reverse a linked list by pointer flipping.
I am not much of a programmer these days, but back when I was earning my BS in EECS at UCB, we were tought that a node in a linked list knew where it was pointing, but had no idea who was pointing at it. The trivial implementaion went something like: typedef struct node { struct node *rest; void *data; };
I mean, sure, one can cdr down a list all day long, but reverse it? WTF? You must be thinking about some sort of doubley linked list?
20% could contrast linked lists to other related data structures (stacks, queues, heaps, dlls, etc.)
Oh... Nevermind... you think a "dll" is a data structure.
I am fairly certian that the optic nerve (cranial nerve III) is, outside of the dura and therefore is a nerve.
Close again... The retina is probably most accurately described as part of the brain. A strong argument for this description comes from looking at how the eye develops embryologicaly. Also, there are four layers of neurons in the retina, just as there are four layers of neurons in areas of brain cortex which are phylogenicaly old. (hence the term neocortex for cerebral cortex, which has six layers of neurons and is a recent evolutionary design.) The cell bodies of the neurons making up the optic nerve are in layer four of the retina and synapse with neurons in the thalamus, another phylogenicaly old brain structure. So, it is "brain all the way down."
So, should we call cranial nerve II (you wrote III, but you meant to say II) a "nerve?" or should we call it a "tract?"
Glad you asked. The real distinction is between central nervous system and periphrial nervous system. PNS neurons tend to heal, while CNS nerves do not. It is believed that this has much to do with the differences among the cells which provide support for the CNS vs PNS. For example, the myelin in PNS is provided by schwan cells, while the myelin in the CNS is provided by oligodendricytes, and there are many other differences in the "support staff" between CNS and PNS.
So, you ask, is CN II really a nerve or is it a tract? Well, if you look at it closely, it is realy part of the brain, and therfore properly called a tract, but the convention is to call it a nerve until it reaches the optic chiasma, then call it a nerve. But whatever you call it, it is very differant than the sort of nerve which gets cut when one, say, puts their hand through an old glass door.
Perhaps you are unaware of the many studies which demonstrate that there is a large genetic component to addiction?
Yes, we are all ultimately the masters of our own destiny, and we must take responsability for our actions, but I find your "pull your self up by your own bootstraps" proselytizing somewhat quaint, at best.
Well, a widely used, and fairly good, operational definition of addiction is something like: continuing a behaviour in spite of consequences.
The very important issue here is consequences.
For example, someone may smoke cigarettes every day, and feel very uncomfortable if they can not smoke for some reason. This person is dependent on cigarettes, but as long as they are able to go to work, form meaningfull relationships with other humans, not commit crimes in order to smoke, and otherwise not have their monkey f-up their life, they are not addicted. Doesn't matter if they can stop or not, as long as the rest of their life is working.
Likewise, if someone plays EQ all the time, but the rest of their life is working, then they are not addicted; even if they find it hard to stop playing. They are dependent, but not necessarily addicted.
And yes, a person can become addicted to almost anything: games, alcohol, drugs, shopping, even sex or slashdot.
No matter how enjoyable the activity, if it is disturbing other areas of your life, and despite that you can not stop, then you are an addict.
All the "power users" who think CLIs are more efficient because it seems like it takes less time would do well to try making some objective speed measurements with a stopwatch. It might come as a surprise that GUIs are actually faster, even though it seems like they are slower
Perhaps this is true, perhaps not. In any case, might I also sugest that the "bean counters with stopwatches" ponder Alan j. Perlis' excelent preface to the first edition of SICP, published in 1985, which begins:
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun...
And ends:
...What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
Somehow I recall some sort of case where the two sides wanted to settle, but....
But the lawyers saw that they were going to make so much money that they threatened to sue their clients if they did settle in advance to minimise the costs.
Sir, you are either trolling or ignorant. I scincerly hope it is the former.
Any lawyer engaging in the sort of activity you descibe above would have his license snatched so quickly it would make his metaphorical head spin!
If your comment was, indeed, the result of ignorance, perhaps it would be to your advantage to refer, in the future, to "lawyers," as "attorneys." It is closer to the nature of the profession: serving as an advocate.
Bush was struggling with some political issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetuses.
Embreos, not "fetuses," and certainly not "aborted." Huge difference. No one was talking about trying to create cell lines from aborted fetuses (as a matter of fact, it is not even technicaly possible to do so at this time).
However, It is possible to get a stem cell line going from an embryo created in vitro.
Think "test tube baby" here. IVF is not at all uncommon these days, and the technique has been around long enough, and has been successfull enough, that it is not unlikely that some/. posters were conceived in vitro. Of course, their parents may be keeping it a secret. (no joke, I am speaking seriously)
Now, the "Nuts and Bolts"
When one does an IVF, one first harvests ova (eggs) from the mother. This is hard. Next, one harvests sperm from the father. This is easy. Next, one combines the eggs and the sperm in hope of creating some embryoes. This is sort of hard. Finally, one implants a couple of the embryoes in the Mother, and hopes one of them likes it there and starts to grow. This is easy, but not too successfull. So, considering the easy and hard parts of this process, what one does is make a bunch of embryoes, freeze most of them, implant a couple, and hope for the best.
When this works, there are often a bunch of embryoes left in a vat of liquid N2 at the fertillity center.
Most people who do this sort of work are not comfortable with throwing these out, so there are thousands of frozen embryoes around the country. Some are pretty old.
Now, the question is: what do we do with these embryoes? Do we discard them? do we use them to perform research, such as creating stem cell lines? Do we keep them frozen indeffinately?
Did we cross some line by creating them in the first place?
This is a format used by medical imaging systems, which includes such interesting information as the name, sex, and age of the patient, how the image was obtained, the size and format of the image, etc. etc.
It is pretty easy to extract the raw pixel data, if that is what you want to do.
You are both right and wrong with your post, and your enthusiasm for learning is encouraging.
You're correct: The protein folding ploblem is is hard, in the worst (best?) sense of the word. That is to say, NO, there have been no interesting advances in the field; All that has been done so far, more or less, is to throw some processor cycles at the problem. There have some good results from this aproach, but no new insights or understanding of the problem.
This would be a good project for an interested and motivated student looking for a trip to Stockholm.
With an understanding of protein folding, we could rapidly discard the current: "piss on the porch, see if the cat licks it up," era of biotech, and actually do some engineering. Proteins are, to put it mildly, amazing: they are nanomachines that work, sometines with such elegance that when you see what is really going on it is enough to take your breath away as you try to yell Holly Sh*t and wonder if you are living your life right.
Designing proteins to functional specifications would be highly interesting, i.e., one of the simplest scenarios: "Uh, how about we have it arange the glucose carbons in a cubic crystal latice and let the O and H diffuse out as water?"
Today, we can pretty much string together any arbitrarilly long sequence of amino acids we want, but they are just so much fried egg until the folding problem is solved. When, and if, that day comes, our world is going to change in surprising ways. The implications reach far beyond medicine and agriculture.
You're a bit wrong: DNA folding is not, by itself, a barrier to our understanding of the genome. Actually, we have a pretty good understanding of how the whole transcription translation thing works, with a pretty solid understanding of splicing, targeting, etc., even some understanding of promoters, enhancers, and so on, we just don't know, for the most part, what the hell the products of this process (proteins) are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
you said:
while the article clearly states:
Not to say that his arguments are correct (I don't know), but your appeal to the authority of the Crooke's radiometer is clearly something the author has considered.
No.
How do you suppose the O2 makes it way to the hemoglobin?
Well, I'll tell you:
the oxygen diffuses through the cell membranes of the alveoli, disolves in the liquid component of the blood, diffuses through the cell membrane of the Red Blood Cells, and binds to the hemoglobin.
Of course, the oxygen bound to hemoglobin is in equilibrium with the oxygen disolved in the RBC's cytoplasim, which is in equilibrium with the oxygen disolved in the liquid component of blood. (I am simplifying, but you get the idea.)
It may be biology, but it isn't black magic how this stuff works, the laws of physical chemistry must still be obeyed, there has to be an equilibrium between the phases.
This aspect of blood is pretty well understood too:
there is 0.03ml oxygen per liter of blood per mm Hg partial pressure of oxygen, or about 2.9ml oxygen disolved per litre of arterial blood, and 1.2ml of disolved oxygen per litre of venous blood. Breathing 100 percent oxygen will, of course, increase these numbers.
An interesting but not completely obvious effect of Viagra is that it may protect some endangered species.
Consider that for thousands of years people have tried crazy things like tiger penis soup as an aphrodesiac.
Now that we have Viagra, which really does work to restore male potency, there is less demand for the traditional, endangerd-species-based cures for impotence.
Translation is an interesting problem.
Douglas Hofstadter , of Goedel Escher Bach fame, wrote an entire book about the nuances of translation, using many, many translations of an obscure one stanza poem to illustrate his theme.
It is somewhat surprising how well translation of poems or other word play works, and even more surprising is how wildly differant translations can convey the same feel, and somehow capture the feel of the original work.
Of course, it isn't too hard to screw it up completely either.
Not quite right. The Aorta at the level of the kidneys is still a huge vessel. Consider that ALL of the blood flowing to the lower half of the body is passing through the aorta at this level, where it is a little bigger than your thumb, and about 2 liters of blood per minute are flowing through it.
The kidneys are only a couple of inches away from the aorta (the left one is closer because of the asymetry of the body) probably because they need a huge supply of blood to function properly (kind of like how the oil filter in your car needs a huge supply of oil to work correctly.)
Anyways, keeping an eye on the aorta would be a part of any surgery to remove a kidney, thats just the way surgery works: you make a point to identify all the important structures and make sure you are not accidentaly cutting them or whatever.
I have never seen the DaVinci system, but my guess is that the error was probably due to some oversight in the protocol because the procedure is so new, something like the back end of a tool bumping into the aorta out of camara range after the surgeon thought it was safely out of harms way.
You are thinking of
strokes-mode, which is alive and well in emacs 21
M-X strokes-mode
They sure do!
I don't understand it either, but patients often demand drugs which they have seen advertised. Mostly patients assume newer=better despite what you tell them (e.g., the truth).
No. Think again, it is much more complicated than that.
PS: Edison is not the orginator of the amplified vacum tube but the light blub. A man by the name of Forester about 100 years ago did it.
Dont you mean Lee DeForest?
I could hold a 1 volt 300000 amp power supply's leads all day and not be hurt. The reason is Ohms law.
:)
Although what you say is mostly correct from a practical point of view, try not to forget that "ohms law" is an idealization and only applies to a small class of conductors. What G. S. Ohm noticed more than a hundred years ago what the in metalic conductors at a constant temperature the ratio of electric field to current density was approximately a constant, known as the resistivity. (note that this is a microscopic statement.) Working from this assumtion that rho=E/J, and assuming an isotropic, ohmic conductor, one easily arrives at the more familliar version of ohms law: R=V/I. Now this is a very usefull result, but please remember that it was drived only after making multiple assumptions regarding the nature of the conducting material and has noting to say with regard to what is going on at a smaller scale.
Anyways, just be carefull you don't read too much into "ohms law".
A tunnel diode is not a bad example of something you can hold in your hand which is most deffinately not ohmic and exhibits some interesting behavior because of this.
Electrochemical systems (such as collections of cells in a human body) are another good example of decidedly non-ohmic systems. Pick up a physical chemistry book if you want to learn more.
The take home point is: Yes, you could probably hold on to a 1v supply with no problem, but the effects of electricity on the body are not as simple as you make them seem.
And, No, I am not one of those people who think cell phones or power lines are harmfull
Honestly, even during the 7.2 Loma Praeta quake we had when I was in Junior High, I got up, stood in the doorway, went "Woo hoo!" and then sat down again and continued playing Curse of the Azure Bonds on my 286.
Good times...
Asshole.
You don't know much? do you?
(don't know about tru64.)
You can get a $99.00 Non-Comercial license for Tru64 from Compaq. You can get a three or four year old Alpha for about the same.
I am not much of a programmer these days, but back when I was earning my BS in EECS at UCB, we were tought that a node in a linked list knew where it was pointing, but had no idea who was pointing at it. The trivial implementaion went something like: typedef struct node { struct node *rest; void *data; };
I mean, sure, one can cdr down a list all day long, but reverse it? WTF? You must be thinking about some sort of doubley linked list?
Oh... Nevermind... you think a "dll" is a data structure.
Who do you do hiring for again?
Yep, reminds me of that silly comic strip with the
cat (or tiger, whatever). What was that called?
Alvin and something, I think.... What a bunch of
Oh yeah, I remember now, it was called "Calvin and Hobbes."
Pretty funny strip. But, or course, I'm sure there was nothing else there but "entertainment."
What a silly name, though! Can't imagine why he chose that.
Anyways, that'll be the day: when a cartoon has something to do with philosopy. Yeah, right.
Nater said:
Factoring primes is not a difficult problem... the fastest known solution is already O(n)[...]
I find this hard to believe. Factoring can now be done in O(n)?
I am not a mathematician, but I do have access to a library. I would enjoy reading any papers you have found supporting this assertion.
Would you be willing to provide one citation?
Thanks!
or in academic journals.
Did you miss the citation at the bottom of the New Scientist article? or do you just believe that PR folks make the world go round? or something else?
Close again... The retina is probably most accurately described as part of the brain. A strong argument for this description comes from looking at how the eye develops embryologicaly. Also, there are four layers of neurons in the retina, just as there are four layers of neurons in areas of brain cortex which are phylogenicaly old. (hence the term neocortex for cerebral cortex, which has six layers of neurons and is a recent evolutionary design.) The cell bodies of the neurons making up the optic nerve are in layer four of the retina and synapse with neurons in the thalamus, another phylogenicaly old brain structure. So, it is "brain all the way down."
So, should we call cranial nerve II (you wrote III, but you meant to say II) a "nerve?" or should we call it a "tract?"
Glad you asked. The real distinction is between central nervous system and periphrial nervous system. PNS neurons tend to heal, while CNS nerves do not. It is believed that this has much to do with the differences among the cells which provide support for the CNS vs PNS. For example, the myelin in PNS is provided by schwan cells, while the myelin in the CNS is provided by oligodendricytes, and there are many other differences in the "support staff" between CNS and PNS.
So, you ask, is CN II really a nerve or is it a tract? Well, if you look at it closely, it is realy part of the brain, and therfore properly called a tract, but the convention is to call it a nerve until it reaches the optic chiasma, then call it a nerve. But whatever you call it, it is very differant than the sort of nerve which gets cut when one, say, puts their hand through an old glass door.
Perhaps you are unaware of the many studies which demonstrate that there is a large genetic component to addiction?
Yes, we are all ultimately the masters of our own destiny, and we must take responsability for our actions, but I find your "pull your self up by your own bootstraps" proselytizing somewhat quaint, at best.
Well, a widely used, and fairly good, operational definition of addiction is something like: continuing a behaviour in spite of consequences .
The very important issue here is consequences.
For example, someone may smoke cigarettes every day, and feel very uncomfortable if they can not smoke for some reason. This person is dependent on cigarettes, but as long as they are able to go to work, form meaningfull relationships with other humans, not commit crimes in order to smoke, and otherwise not have their monkey f-up their life, they are not addicted. Doesn't matter if they can stop or not, as long as the rest of their life is working.
Likewise, if someone plays EQ all the time, but the rest of their life is working, then they are not addicted; even if they find it hard to stop playing. They are dependent, but not necessarily addicted.
And yes, a person can become addicted to almost anything: games, alcohol, drugs, shopping, even sex or slashdot.
No matter how enjoyable the activity, if it is disturbing other areas of your life, and despite that you can not stop, then you are an addict.
Perhaps this is true, perhaps not. In any case, might I also sugest that the "bean counters with stopwatches" ponder Alan j. Perlis' excelent preface to the first edition of SICP, published in 1985, which begins:
And ends:
--
Sir, you are either trolling or ignorant. I scincerly hope it is the former.
Any lawyer engaging in the sort of activity you descibe above would have his license snatched so quickly it would make his metaphorical head spin!
If your comment was, indeed, the result of ignorance, perhaps it would be to your advantage to refer, in the future, to "lawyers," as "attorneys." It is closer to the nature of the profession: serving as an advocate.
Not that I have any great love of lawyers...
Embreos, not "fetuses," and certainly not "aborted." Huge difference. No one was talking about trying to create cell lines from aborted fetuses (as a matter of fact, it is not even technicaly possible to do so at this time).
However, It is possible to get a stem cell line going from an embryo created in vitro.
Think "test tube baby" here. IVF is not at all uncommon these days, and the technique has been around long enough, and has been successfull enough, that it is not unlikely that some
Now, the "Nuts and Bolts"
When one does an IVF, one first harvests ova (eggs) from the mother. This is hard. Next, one harvests sperm from the father. This is easy. Next, one combines the eggs and the sperm in hope of creating some embryoes. This is sort of hard. Finally, one implants a couple of the embryoes in the Mother, and hopes one of them likes it there and starts to grow. This is easy, but not too successfull. So, considering the easy and hard parts of this process, what one does is make a bunch of embryoes, freeze most of them, implant a couple, and hope for the best.
When this works, there are often a bunch of embryoes left in a vat of liquid N2 at the fertillity center.
Most people who do this sort of work are not comfortable with throwing these out, so there are thousands of frozen embryoes around the country. Some are pretty old.
Now, the question is: what do we do with these embryoes? Do we discard them? do we use them to perform research, such as creating stem cell lines? Do we keep them frozen indeffinately?
Did we cross some line by creating them in the first place?
It is a DICOM 3.0 image.
This is a format used by medical imaging systems, which includes such interesting information as the name, sex, and age of the patient, how the image was obtained, the size and format of the image, etc. etc.
It is pretty easy to extract the raw pixel data, if that is what you want to do.
You are both right and wrong with your post, and your enthusiasm for learning is encouraging.
You're correct: The protein folding ploblem is is hard, in the worst (best?) sense of the word. That is to say, NO, there have been no interesting advances in the field; All that has been done so far, more or less, is to throw some processor cycles at the problem. There have some good results from this aproach, but no new insights or understanding of the problem.
This would be a good project for an interested and motivated student looking for a trip to Stockholm.
With an understanding of protein folding, we could rapidly discard the current: "piss on the porch, see if the cat licks it up," era of biotech, and actually do some engineering. Proteins are, to put it mildly, amazing: they are nanomachines that work, sometines with such elegance that when you see what is really going on it is enough to take your breath away as you try to yell Holly Sh*t and wonder if you are living your life right.
Designing proteins to functional specifications would be highly interesting, i.e., one of the simplest scenarios: "Uh, how about we have it arange the glucose carbons in a cubic crystal latice and let the O and H diffuse out as water?"
Today, we can pretty much string together any arbitrarilly long sequence of amino acids we want, but they are just so much fried egg until the folding problem is solved. When, and if, that day comes, our world is going to change in surprising ways. The implications reach far beyond medicine and agriculture.
You're a bit wrong: DNA folding is not, by itself, a barrier to our understanding of the genome. Actually, we have a pretty good understanding of how the whole transcription translation thing works, with a pretty solid understanding of splicing, targeting, etc., even some understanding of promoters, enhancers, and so on, we just don't know, for the most part, what the hell the products of this process (proteins) are doing.