A single quarter is more valuable than one million bills if you’re looking for change for the parking meter.
Currency is valuable only in proportion to its usefulness
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Category Archives: Ideas
Are somatiform disorders really psychiatric rather than neurological in origin?
Upon examining several “psychosomatic” conditions, noting their hypothesized causes, observable signs (and lack thereof), and suffering through some of them myself over the years from time to time (as someone prone to somatization disorder but self-aware enough to recognize it for what it is), I’ve come to the conclusion that these disorders are largely neurological rather than psychiatric in origin. That’s not to say that stress or other psychiatric factors can’t provoke these diseases; they very often do. However, the predisposition to these conditions appears to be largely innate, with lower pain thresholds and increased visceral sensitivity prevalent in a number of conditions, as well as objectively observed differences in the levels and balance of neurotransmitters (particularly serotonin). And then there’s the resistance of somatization to psychiatric treatment (probably exaggerated; one study found that CBT worked well), suggesting a neurally-grounded cause.
All this is to say that we should be paying more attention to the neurological basis for these diseases. I haven’t run across any good fMRI studies of patients with somatiform disorders, both at rest and when suffering from the disorder. It’d be an interesting direction to explore.
Traffic is an n-delay machine.
Each car behind copies the speed of the car in front. The n is (roughly) the number of cars in the lane. This may explain why traffic persists after the event that generated it has ceased.
Handwriting Variance and Piano Variance
I have rather poor handwriting. More than the interestingly poor mean is a surprising amount of variance in the quality of my writing. I have also (subjectively) noticed a similar quality in my piano performances, whereby I’ll play a piece perfectly one moment and completely screw it up (due to a lack of dexterity moreso than a lack of mental facility with the piece) another. Perhaps this is the case with everyone, but I haven’t noticed it in others (maybe they don’t notice it in me either?)
Anyway, I’m pondering whether the two phenomena are related.
Religion is a beneficial evolutionary trait due to hidden rationality.
Many of the world’s religions, particularly the earlier ones, tend to have certain curious traditions which at one point made life possible. Failure to adhere to these traditions typically invited harm of a material rather than spiritual nature, supposedly brought upon by a deity in response to the transgression, but well within the purview of science now. For example, meat must be soaked and salted to be considered Kosher. The concept of a pathogen was unknown then, but it was probably observed that people who prepared their meat in that manner tended not to get as many foodborne illnesses, as the salt acted as an antiseptic. Thus the precaution became ingrained and the illness became a matter of divine retribution.
In this manner, religion has a beneficial effect and would be a supported trait through our evolution.
Relations between diseases
It’s important to observe commonalities in presentation, symptoms, causes, or treatment responses of various diseases, as these may suggest a common etiology. For instance, trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches both present with extreme pain, short frequent attacks separated by periods of remission, and autonomic symptoms (such as lacrimation and Horner’s syndrome). These diseases should be compared and effective treatments for one studied on the other.
Making the immune system forget?
The most severe autoimmune diseases seem to result from an inappropriate immunological memory response against self tissue. Is there some way to make the immune system forget? Selective, specific immunomodulation seems like it could be promising for a very wide range of diseases, cancer, MS, and SLE among them.
I think I just found the branch of medicine I want to study.
Do Cats Dream?
Partition two areas. Allow cats to sleep in either, but wake the cats who sleep in one of the areas midway through sleep. Also partition the cats into two groups: a group that is woken during REM sleep and a group that is woken during non-REM sleep.
As time passes, observe avoidance behaviors. If the cats woken during REM sleep more readily avoid the area in which they are awoken, then it is likely that not only are the cats dreaming, but that these dreams serve a training function.
Programming by Intent via Automatic Search and Function Binding
There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.
Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:
The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.
But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?
This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.
Baroque, Rococo, and Reformation
All of human history is a battle between simplicity and complexity. It is reflected in our culture, our science, our philosophy, our governments, our conflicts, and our actions.
We constantly build large, intricate, complex systems, only to later knock them down and return to basics.