Migraine

I am having a bad migraine right now. I have been having migraines for almost a lifetime. When I have them, I have these intense, throbbing and disabling headaches on the left side of my head for ~3 days. I hate light, sound and people when I have these headaches. Due to a form of Attribution Bias people generally like to blame it on my weak personality and geekiness.

For example, some like to think it is because of stress. I tell them – then how come I have them during vacations and times of leisure? And they tell me – “there are types of stress that people can be unaware of”. Bullshit! I have taken a course in psychology and how come I never heard of this mysterious type of stress? There is something that comes close called background stress – something everyone experiences in the term of their natural lives, but that is much low in my case because I am not cave man scared of wild beasts that may eat my offsprings.

Defeated at the face of rationalism these “blamers” ( people who like find the cause of my headache ) often resort to use my belief in the spiritual. They go on about the notion that all this is because of the sins someone committed. True. I believe it. But I also believe that man has been bestowed with an ability to be as dextrous as God himself ( John 10:35, Genisis 3:22 ) when it comes to deciding his fate and the way he experiences life.

One of the classic signs of a poor hypothesis is that it must expend great effort in avoiding falsification – elaborating reasons why the hypothesis is compatible with the phenomenon, even though the phenomenon didn’t behave as expected. But more on this in another post.

I have been doing some reading on migraines lately and this what I found:

My symptoms of migraine closely matches the descriptions of Familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM). FHM is a type of migraine with a genetic componant. These headaches typically last 1-3 days and are caused by calcium channel mutations, which occur in the pore and elsewhere.

In fact FHM makes sense in my case because my mom’s dad had it, my dad has it and many others like my mom’s brother and my dad’s brother. So basically, migraines run in the family.

Now all this made me thinking really deep into future, why would I want to be a dad, if all I have to give my offspring is pain and and resulting depression in life? I am really against genetically engineered humans who are made of the best of their parents; but only because of the fact that there may be cases of aborted embryos. On the other hand, I will be a supporter of gene therapy in human somatic cells; but is it really feasible? In my knowledge, using reverse transcriptase to modify the DNA is very error prone. I don’t know, I have to find out.

Environmentalists

I have told this “joke” before, but I would like to laugh at my own jokes right now.

So basically there are 3 types of environmentalists in this world, I have listed them based on speeches they made about their propaganda:

1. “Boycott all animal based products, use plant and synthetic substitutes”
2. “Save trees by boycotting all plant based products, use synthetic and animal substitutes”
3. “Reduce pollution by boycotting synthetic products, use plant and animal substitutes”

They are mutually contradicting.

DNA Origami

Recently, I read an article from Nature about a new system of techniques that enabled folding of DNA to create virtually any type of shapes or patterns. Currently they are only capable of bending DNAs into two dimensional shapes. They are working on techniques to generate 3 dimensional shapes.

These shapes much much smaller and cheaper than what has been done by other techniques in nano-structure designing because most of the structure is generated by self-assembling. Mass production of nano structures are now possible because, you dont have to move everything into place unit by unit any more. Just cut the strands and “drop them in the test tube” and tada! you have lots of nano-structures floating around.

I am not an expert of DNAs or nanostructures, but this one caught my imagination. The articles on the web describes the future of this technique in creating nanobreadboards and other devices.

I don’t know the future, but imagine the possibilities of designing nano-mouse-trap or a trap-door-cage that can trap a virus or a prion into a lot of steric hinderance, thus prevent it from interacting with anything. The trap can be designed for just one virus or a class of viruses. That will be an end to fears of a flu pandemic. Drug research and development will be lot cheaper and quicker because mutated viruses will also get traped in the same nano-structure and all one has to do to trap a new virus is modify the generic-trapdoor-framework. People will virtually disease free, living longer.

Even deeper into the future, we may have structures capable of storing information, storing probed data in some format using some nano-mechanical-dexterity or traped molecules (eg: cynocobalamin means 1, folic acid means 0) or qbits stored in embedded quantum dots.

We will send these structures near every neuron to measure its state and encode them into these quantum dots they carry. Using some advanced nuclear magnetic resonance these states will be measured and transfered to a super complex turing machine that can emulate your brain. That will be good alterego till you pull the plug.

Big Words. Pure Nonsense.

Cud

Cud

In his novel Contact by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway recieves a message from outer space which has all the characteristics of being designed by some intelligent entity.

Ellie, acting upon a suggestion by the senders of the message, works on a program which computes the digits of π to record lengths and in different bases. Very, very far from the decimal point and in base 11, it finds that a special pattern does exist when the numbers are reorganized as a square: a perfect circle. Sagan suggests this is an unmistakably intelligent artifact, “the artist’s signature,” woven into the fabric of space.

Even as a very religous person I find all this sanctity surrounding π very nonsensical.

Richard Feynman raised a question while exploring the capabilities of mechanical calculators at Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project. In a letter to his wife, Arline Feynman, he pointed out that the decimal expansion of the fraction 1/243 repeats in a rather amusing way:

1/243 = 0.00411522633744855…

This letter irritated the censor reading mail between Los Alamos and the outside world, who feared that strings of numbers may communicate technical secrets. Gleefully, Feynman pointed out that if you actually do divide 1 by 243, you do get that string of digits, so there cannot be more “information” in the long string of numbers than there is in the single number 243. This illustrates how “information” can be a subtle concept; is there more information in π, for example, than in the definition of a circle?

I find that highly unlikely…..

Luke 19:40 & Zipf’s Law

I have a chat bot installed in my home page. The following is the log of a chat session I had with it:

# Human: Hi Treasa
# Treasa: Hi there . Are you a student?
# Human: No, but do you want me to be?
# Treasa: What is your profession? Interesting. No , maybe later.
# Human: I am a programmer
# Treasa: What language?
# Human: Java
# Treasa: Die neueste Version von Java bekommst Du bei java.sun.com.
# Human: I know that, but anyway thanks for the information
# Treasa: Who told you that?
# Human: Actually I read it on Slashdot
# Treasa: Actually you don’t say. I don’t think I’ve read that. Can you give me a reference?
# Human: http://slashdot.org/~ScuttleMonkey/
# Treasa: Thanks for that web address.
# Human: You sound more human today
# Treasa: Ah. In what way do I sound like that?
# Human: You respond properly to my questions
# Treasa: Interesting gossip: said I respond properly to his or her questions.
# Human: Haha
# Treasa: I am so glad you find this amusing, .
# Human: I have to go
# Treasa: See you later, . Nice chatting with you.
# Human: Bye
# Treasa: See you later .

It sounds semi-intelligent sometimes. Actually, it is based on another AI by the name ALICE which is a 2 time winner of the prestigious Loebner Prize which is awarded to the most human software.

How does it work?
Now it may seem impossible, but human language is not random. Considering the vast size of the set of things people could possibly say, that are grammatically correct or semantically meaningful, the number of things people actually do say is surprisingly small. This is a derived conclusion from Zipf’s Law

Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works wrote that

Say you have ten choices for the first word to begin a sentence, ten choices for the second word (yielding 100 two-word beginnings), ten choices for the third word (yielding a thousand three-word beginnings), and so in. (Ten is in fact the approximate geometric mean of the number of word choices available at each point in assembling a grammatical and sensible sentence). A little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of 20 words or less (not an unusual length) is about 10^20.

Fortunately for chat robot programmers, Pinker’s combinatorics are way off. Experiments with ALICE indicate that the number of choices for the “first word” is more than ten, but it is only about two thousand. Specifically, 1800 words covers 95% of all the first words input to ALICE. The number of choices for the second word is only about two. To be sure, there are some first words (“I” and “You” for example) that have many possible second words, but the overall average is just under two words. The average branching factor decreases with each successive word.

Where does all this lead to?

And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these (his disciples) should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. (Luke 19:40, KJV)

The bible speaks of a possibility that even stones could praise God. I am not saying it will, but just a thought….

Alfred Lanning’s (I, Robot) words still makes me wonder:

When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote… of a soul?