thoughts

Cells

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century-is-about-to-change-medicine-forever-2015-2 a rather long but interesting article about the DNA editing tool CRISPR.  This tool was not created, rather it was found.  Microbes (or whatever they are called) have been using this to defend against invasion for a long time.  The way the article makes it out to be that there exists a war at the micro scale being waged constantly.  The combatants aren’t dumb either.  They have a memory, they have tools, they communicate, they learn!  It is truly amazing.  What kind of mechanisms do they have to cooperate?  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22999189 discusses this and this article talks about how cancer cells cooperate and even have free riders.  In order combat the cancer they change the code of the dna to make it so that there are more free riders so the tumor dies.  Cellular organization is very elegant.

This is interesting.  In the future this could be a way to hack a MAS that may be built on similar principles.  The fact is that we try to avoid freeriders but if the system is flooded with them the system will decay.

 

AI conspiracy

I know this sounds all conspiracy theory like, but it seems possible that people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have recently made comments about the potential threat of an artificial intelligence take over, were only doing it so that there would be more articles written about AI and how its highly unlikely given current state of the art.  I mean there has been so much press about this issue lately that I don’t think that as many people would have even known about the true current state of AI.  So, the conspiracy is that Bill and Elon really know how unlikely it is to happen any time soon and they know how hard getting all of the news outlets to talk about AI and the current research.  So, they made the outrageous claims to get attention to an area that needs it.  Which other than making them look bad I think it was useful.

Datamining Forums

Would be interesting to compare writing styles, format etc of users on forums.  Would be interesting if we could identify users with multiple accounts.  Also, would be interesting to look at the change in style over time per person to see if it was hacked or something out of the ordinary.  Plot emotions over time.  Would be interesting to see who has the emotional sway (can cause others to become emotional etc.) over the forum or post etc.  I wonder how much there is in this area.  I would imagine it would be a lot since we have had forums for a long time and I think this is something that Facebook has (or should be) been doing.

Robins and cryptochrome

I was sitting in my chair and I saw a robin out the window and I wondered whether it could see me (as in how far can robin’s see).  I of course googled it.  But, I got sidetracked and found a Discovery article explaining that robins can see the earth’s EM field.  According to the article the effect is due to the right eye, left half of the brain and a molecule called cryptochrome (best name for such a molecule, in my opinion).  The article discusses an experiment that shows that the birds can’t orient correctly if their vision in the right is obscured.  Of course this didn’t answer my original question, but it is much cooler.

This reminds me of Gary from Alphas (“respect the badge!”).

Comparison Continued

I took a look at the R source code for the tukey test (HSD test) from the agricolae library http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/agricolae/index.html.  The interesting thing is that they purposefully call round:

round(1-ptukey(abs(dif[k])*sqrt(2)/sdtdif,ntr,DFerror),6)

Also, they assume lm or aov.  So, we know that they don’t like big numbers. However, the nice thing is that the R file shows how to use the ptukey function!  Which is where I was a bit iffy.  So, I think I could get away with writing it in R and just instead of requiring lm or aov I just want the data then I can perform the requisite calculations.

I think I’ve convinced myself that I’ll trust mathematica and I’ll deal with how long it takes to get the data.  I don’t like how ineffiecient it is, but I can sacrifice time if it means that I get accurate results.  I don’t think that I’m qualified or have the time to create such a library.  It is interesting though that we don’t have many papers on knowing how many significicant digits are necessary for accurate tests.  Or that the R libraries don’t report the errors in their calculations.  This must be why people use Mathematica or Matlab because we trust them to do it right to enough sig figs that it doesn’t matter the error because it is insignificant.

So, I just need a nice desktop.

New computer, is it worth it?

OR I could just ask for a computer with more ram then I could just use slow mathematica or R or whatever and not care.  Of course it might not be that slow for R since its not that slow it just takes lots of ram.  Which makes sense since it is very memory inefficient.  That would be so much easier.  But it would cost probably 2k for a computer like that.  Crazy that if only they had coded the tests better I could get results instantly!

Then I can also have the nice pretty graphs that Mathematica has too.  Then I don’t have the headache of ensuring that the tests are correct etc.  That would be terrifying if I coded the tests wrong and I reported incorrect results.  So, probably best to just get a new computer…  I think he said he has money to buy machines.

Touchscreen for touchpads

Would be neat to have a color touch screen that acted as the touchpad for a laptop.  It could make gestures easier, allow you to maybe see your clipboard, show your password here instead of on your monitor (less easy for someone to observe this way).  I’m sure there would be a lot of superficial and gimmicky things you could do.

 

Man vs Machine

Some people (not me) believe that we are the result of random chemical interactions.  I wonder what the probability is that they assign to us existing.  Because it has to be less than the probability of machine men existing.  The existence of such machines would fit more into the notion of evolving randomly by fitness since they would be more durable and require less variety of resources.  The number of micro organisms and organs and what not that must work together in order for humans to work compared to what a machine man would need, most likely would astound us.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/ really neat slider app that puts the size of a cell into perspective.

On a side note I found this neat PopSci article, http://www.popsci.com/have-we-found-alien-life, haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.

Just a note, I’ve been sick for that past few days, most likely the flu.  Thats probably why I’ve been writing such odd posts…  Oh well.

Thoughts on Humor

I wonder if humor is universal?  If all languages have a form of humor.  I know some languages only have rudimentary term for quantity or numbers.  So, do they have humor?

Humor doesn’t seem like something that would need to be present in a language.  Programming languages certainly don’t.  However, you can’t have a conversation in a programming language that wouldn’t be funny.

So, I think that humor may be universal in humans.  Although what is funny in one language is probably not funny in another.  Although probably the experience of laughing is universally humanly possible.

At the end of page 43 of Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly  they state that chimpanzees are even known to laugh, specifically when playing and general horsing around.  However, the book then proceeds to cite that humor developed in humans to relieve emotional trauma or stress.  Actually none of the references claim that humor developed out of joy (which I find rather humorous).  And then afterwords was used as a mechanism to relieve stress.

That book also notes studies on the brain that identified regions that are responsible for understanding and producing humor.  Which is very interesting.  We actually have a section of the brain dedicated to humor.  We were built to communicate in ways that bring joy and laughter to others.  Or as those at the end of page 43 would have you believe to reduce each others stress.  I’m not saying they are wrong that humor does have that effect, I’m just claiming its not the basis for humor’s development.

Well this post certainly was longer than I originally thought it was going to be.  It was just a random thought I had.  Turned out to be rather interesting.  I wonder what humor will look like between AIs.  If it was up to those at the end of 43 they probably wouldn’t have humor since they don’t experience stress/trauma :).