My brother, who is red-green colorblind, alerted me to an interesting phenomenon: he, and apparently many other people, cannot tell whether specific fruit (particularly bananas) are ripe.
Yet no one has contrived a device to perform this function, as trivial as it would be to detect the color of the fruit!
It seems to me that the so-called “Gamma knife” therapy used primarily to treat brain tumors would also be effective as a method of fairly noninvasive radiofrequency ablation.
On the other hand, if cardiologists must probe around in there to discover the origin of an arrhythmia anyway, they may as well stick with the traditional method and avoid the radiation.
System = Method + Structure
Take a human, for example. The structure that supports the system is the body – the compiled version of the DNA source code. The methods, however, are things such as consciousness, experience, personality, thought, and emotion that run on top of the structure. You could duplicate the structure, but that won’t necessarily result in the same methods. Take identical twins, for example. They have mostly identical genetic data and thus mostly identical bodies, but they may not do the same things, think the same ways, or otherwise act like the same person.
There are two ways to create a system: Either the structure must be fully present before the methods can emerge or the structure and methods must codevelop (the latter is how evolution typically works). You can’t build the methods if the structure supporting them is nonexistent, just as you can’t construct a building from the top down.
Edit: Oddly enough, this appears to be a fundamental principle of the Jainist view of the universe. That means even more interesting discussion on the nature of systems, so I don’t mind!
In music and marketing, small incremental changes are best.
While eating at the local Wendy’s (basically the only source of food that is open past 2 PM in all of Templetown – words cannot describe how much I hate this city), I noticed two important things:
Expanding more on the Potentials, this should be a very intuitive, even downright obvious, idea. What makes it interesting is the particular framing of my thoughts: I realized that this could be used to derive a potential function (as in the amortized analysis technique) that serves as a “signature” of the changes physical objects undergo. I need to develop the idea further, but it’s something to talk about if I ever get around to writing “The Optimization of Systems”.
The early adopters set the trends once they have carved niches for themselves! They create them around their own skillsets. They don’t exist before then, and that explains how research fads come into being and why there are always one or two leaders at the very origin of a field! The very language of the field grows around these individuals!
Sorry if I got somewhat carried away with that insight. It just happens to support something I called the “initialism” principle, which I had largely discarded a while ago. That principle states that the present state of nearly everything is influenced by its origin. Please don’t mistake it for determinism; it makes no claim that the present state of things is exactly determined by the state of their origins.
Now that I’m thinking about interviews, I just realized a very interesting idea for an alternative: the bottom line is performance on the job, so that’s all we should really test.
Why not hire the candidate for a day and see how he/she does? That seems like the most pragmatic interview of all.
There is surprisingly little literature that treats an interview as a statistical test. I sense a research opportunity.
Natural selection tends to build things up by selecting only the most fit organisms.
We can reverse that very nicely by selecting the least fit. And whether or not my idea works, that’s probably how we’re going to beat cancer and other diseases that rely on natural selection to evade treatment.
I’m probably making some false assumptions here, but bear with me for a moment…
Malignant cells invade adjacent tissue.
Tissue may be normal or cancerous. Hopefully cancer cells can’t tell the difference.
Treatment is a natural selection process. Cells that survive the treatment proliferate and form treatment-resistant recurrences.
My idea is this: Examine a tumor for an area that is sensitive to chemotherapy or another treatment. Remove these cells (along with the rest of the tumor in a patient, but don’t use the rest), optionally genetically engineering them to curtail their ability to evolve, making them secrete some sort of treatment molecule (a telomerase antagonist would be a very good choice, IMO), or doing other things that may help treat the cancer. Grow these cells.
Now inject them back into the patient at the original tumor site.
Wait a little while and then blast the whole thing with whatever treatment those cells were vulnerable to.
The optimal hypothetical scenario is that the vulnerable tumor cells displace the original tumor, invading those cells just as they would invade normal tissue. The treatment then eradicates them, leaving the patient with virtually none of the vulnerable cells and substantially fewer resistant cells than they would otherwise have. Not a complete cure, but it should boost survival time significantly and may even boost cure rates due to elimination of micrometastases.
I’ll keep thinking. I’m still officially researching on the diagnostic side rather than the treatment side, but perhaps I have an audience (or at least someone to tell me why it won’t work) for these sorts of ideas now that I work with oncologists.
I was going to post here about how there should exist a line of coffee shops with the name “Espressivo”, but apparently Marriott has already implemented that idea in some of their hotels. “Con Brio” still seems open… “coffee with spirit!” could be the motto.