09.04.10
Posted in General, Ideas at 10:14 am by Michael
The reason why additional taxes get shuffled onto the rich has little to do with who “needs” the money most. The real reason: there is an 80/20 distribution of wealth but not of votes. Therefore it is politically much safer to anger the highest-earning 20% than the bottom 80% in our winner-take-all elections.
This inequity can be solved by simply allowing people to choose how their tax dollars are spent. No taxation without representation, right? Well it follows that those who are taxed more should be better represented…
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09.03.10
Posted in Biology, Ideas, Sociology at 3:26 pm by Michael
While it is true that humanity is killing off species at an alarming rate, I don’t think this trend will continue indefinitely. The previous mass extinctions were driven (or at least initiated) for the most part by external events to the ecosystem, with reductions in the sustaining energy of the ecosystem and other consequences lasting for millions of years.
The rate at which we destroy ecosystems, on the other hand, is kept in check by our own population. Unless we pass some dire tipping point and cause the destruction to spiral out of our control, we will eventually hit a population limit, beyond which the planet can’t sustain us. It’s possible that we have already passed this limit; in that case, much like the current recession was caused because people borrowed money that didn’t actually exist and corrected by a return to the amount of real money left in the economy, the human population will be forced to decline, either through some sort of saturated-ecology problem (hunger is a big one; war could also be considered a limiting factor when resources become scarce) or simply through lower birth rates. Either way, the current mass extinction will not be as dire as the previous ones because, even at a faster rate of extinction, it will last for a much shorter period of time.
If I’m wrong and Earth becomes an ecumenopolis, it would instead bode well for humanity’s continuous expansion to other planets and we would nevertheless have the room to save what species remained extant.
…Barring a runaway process which takes matters entirely out of our hands. Watch those greenhouse gases!
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08.23.10
Posted in Biology, Ideas at 12:04 am by Michael
One of the all-cause mortality reductions of vitamin D may stem from the fact that it is synthesized from a cholesterol precursor, thus removing it from the bloodstream. Supplementing would not have this benefit.
This hypothesis is testable by following a group of sunlight-synthesized vitamin D patients and comparing them against a group which receives less sunlight exposure and supplements the difference.
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08.22.10
Posted in Ideas, Psychology at 11:49 pm by Michael
There are two types of traits which people refer to as “intelligence”, and two regions of the brain with their storage infrastructure: there’s the ability to draw new insights from disparate data, mediated by inductive long-term retrieval (hippocampus) and there’s the ability to draw formal and rapid mathematical/logical conclusions from existing theorems, mediated by working memory (anterior cingulate cortex).
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08.15.10
Posted in Biology, Ideas at 11:29 pm by Michael
One treatment which would probably be fairly effective to counteract an infection with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium which causes symptoms by secreting a toxin (such as pathogenic E. Coli which releases a Shiga toxin) is to induce an immune response (via immunoglobulin) against the toxin rather than the bacterium for the duration of the traditional symptomatic period. This should alleviate the symptoms as long as treatment is followed, and when the treatment ends the underlying infection will have been fought off by the immune system. Thus patients would be technically infected (and infectious) but would not exhibit symptoms caused by the toxin.
Here’s a study which demonstrates that it is possible to induce an immune response against the Shiga toxin in mice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC321607/
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08.10.10
Posted in Biology, Ideas at 9:29 pm by Michael
I’ve been thinking of ways to produce long-term localized immunosuppression recently in order to help people with autoimmune diseases. What I’ve dreamed up this time is a device similar to a radioactive “seed” used for prostate cancer, but delivering an inhibitor of cellular signaling (take your pick of interleukins) in direct response to a high concentration of inflammatory cytokines. By carefully controlling the dose in response to environmental conditions, it should be possible to produce a strong localized immunosuppressive response without too much of the drug entering systemic circulation.
Corticosteroids aren’t an option – one challenge is to find something that can be used long-term with few side effects.
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07.26.10
Posted in Programming at 2:04 am by Michael
The traditionally held restrictions of malloc()-allocated objects are “no constructor calls” and “no destructor calls”. However, there is an additional restriction: no virtual functions or polymorphism. If you wish to implement polymorphism on the Arduino and plan to use dynamic memory, you must declare operators new and delete (in terms of malloc() and free()) before you can use polymorphism. Once declared, these operators acquire the “magic” they are known for.
Attempting to call a virtual function on a malloc()-allocated object on the Arduino will not crash in an obvious way. It will merely return a bogus result which appears to come from some random spot in memory (maybe where the function points).
Of course, if you’re developing for a normal platform and not a microcontroller, just use the native new and delete and be done with it.
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07.21.10
Posted in Ideas, Programming at 10:03 pm by Michael
Images have texture. Sentences have texture too. Use the keyblock approach to dynamically build n-grams. ‘Nuff said.
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Posted in Ideas at 12:11 am by Michael
It is possible to define a mapping between the bits in a digital key and the shape of a physical key. Further, it is possible to physically etch a digital key onto a physical one below the resolution at which said data could be easily copied. Consequently, it is possible to design an intelligent lock which possesses a public key and which generates a cryptographic challenge, which is then decrypted using the private (physical) key. A key which could physically open the lock but which does not possess the appropriate private key could trigger an alarm.
Certainly digital keys exist, but this key would require no power source. The lock, on the other hand, would require both power and enough logic to implement the PKI approach of choice. Nevertheless, this strikes me as a practical approach for car or office locks.
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06.11.10
Posted in Ideas, Sociology at 9:03 pm by Michael
Videos and music become popular because people like to minimize their risk of wasting time listening to or watching something unenjoyable. Actually, I suspect something similar lies at the heart of popularity in any context.
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