henryaj's shared items

Check out this awesome infographic from the KoldCast TV blog. A little heteronormative but edutaining nonetheless.

The difference between a child who laughs off skinned knees and one who cries at the smallest pinch could be in their DNA. Subtle changes to a certain gene seem to determine how sensitive people are to pain, according to new research.

In the past 5 years, researchers have discovered that three rare but serious pain disorders are caused by mutations in a gene called SCN9A. In nerve cells that relay painful sensations in the body's tissues to the central nervous system, SCN9A encodes instructions for sodium channels that help the cells fire. In two of the disorders, people carry faulty versions of the gene and suffer crippling pain because their sodium channels open too easily or can't close. In the third disorder, which leaves patients unable to feel pain at all, SCN9A produces a protein that can't function.

"We wondered if more common, apparently harmless [changes] in the gene might give rise to an altered degree of pain threshold," says Geoffrey Woods, a medical geneticist at Cambridge University in the U.K., who discovered the genetic reason for this third disorder.

DSU Notes:

1. The referendum in 2009 in which students opted to retain DSU's affiliation to the National Union of Students (NUS).
2. That, in February 2010, Durham Union Society proposed to hold a debate on multiculturalism, in which students and invited guests would have had the opportunity to debate against BNP representatives.
3. A letter sent by the NUS Black Students' Officer and NUS LGBT Officer to DSU, DUS and the University in which they said:

   "The debating society should cancel this event and offer apologies for the offence that it has caused. [...] Should you fail to listen to our advice you will have a colossal demonstration on your hands. The National Union of Students, Unite Against Fascism, and other anti-fascist organisations are already mobilising nationally and organising coach loads of students to demonstrate at your university on Friday evening. This will no doubt bring with it a lot of negative media attention and if any students are hurt in and around this event responsibility will lie with you."

4. That, in response to the threats of protest, Durham Union Society was forced to cancel the event.

DSU Resolves:

To end its affiliation to the National Union of Students.

Is the happy life characterized by shallow, happy-go-lucky moments and trivial small talk, or by reflection and profound social encounters? Both notions—the happy ignoramus and the fulfilled deep thinker—exist, but little is known about which interaction style is actually associated with greater happiness.

Together, the present findings demonstrate that the happy life is social rather than solitary, and conversationally deep rather than superficial. What makes these findings especially compelling is the lack of method overlap between the well-being measures (self- and informant reports) and the interaction measures (direct observation). Also, the replication of findings across measures of well-being and across weekday and weekend behavior is encouraging.

So the movie’s thesis is that to be happy, we must self-deceive and embrace incorrect but inspiring far-view ideals, such love, friendship, altruism, laughter, art, and fiction.  This thesis affirms a core ideal we seem desperate to believe: that common far ideals have little practical function.  For example, we want to think that our loves of fiction or laughter are “true” loves, and do little to achieve base and personal purposes.

In fact of course our far ideals evolved to serve concrete, practical, and largely personal functions.  A world without lies would still contain art, laughter, fiction, etc. – we’d just be more honest about the functions they serve.  But that is a truth we dare not tell; we’d actually rather believe that most of our other cherished ideals are lies.

And if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life form, such as of some vertebrate‐like creature, we would have to conclude that the probability is very great that the bulk of the Great Filter is ahead of us. Such a discovery would be a crushing blow. It would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover.

First observation: just like the people who told me in 1990 that exponential growth in supercomputer power couldn’t continue for another decade, the people who told me this in 2000 were again completely wrong. Ha ha, told you so! So let me make another prediction: for the next decade this pattern will once again roughly hold, taking us to about 10^18 FLOPS by 2020.

Second observation: I’ve always been a bit sceptical of Kurzweil’s claim that computer power growth was double exponential, but I’m now thinking that there is some evidence for this having spent some time putting together data for this graph and attempting to compensate for changes in measurement etc. in the data. That said, I think it’s unlikely to remain double exponential much longer.

Third observation: it looks like we’re heading towards 10^20 FLOPS before 2030, even if things slow down a bit from 2020 onwards. That’s just plain nuts. Let me try to explain just how nuts: 10^20 is about the number of neurons in all human brains combined. It is also about the estimated number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That’s a truly insane number of calculations in 1 second.

Most of the primary causes of human mortality and decline are strongly correlated with age and free-radical processes, including heart disease, stroke, Type II diabetes, many cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, and inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. Successful intervention into the ageing process could consequently prevent or forestall all of these.

Using bagel bits soaked in the supplement to ensure consistent and accurate dosing, the formula maintained youthful levels of locomotor activity into old age whereas old mice that were not given the supplement showed a 50 per cent loss in daily movement, a similar dramatic loss in the activity of the cellular furnaces that make our energy, and declines in brain signaling chemicals relevant to locomotion. This builds on the team's findings that the supplement extends longevity, prevents cognitive declines, and protects mice from radiation.

Ingredients consists of items that were purchased in local stores selling vitamin and health supplements for people, including vitamins B1, C, D, E, acetylsalicylic acid, beta carotene, folic acid, garlic, ginger root, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, green tea extract, magnesium, melatonin, potassium, cod liver oil, and flax seed oil. Multiple ingredients were combined based on their ability to offset five mechanisms involved in ageing.

Think of other common forms of suffering and most of the time, you will see no evidence that it improves people at the time of suffering or afterwards and quite a lot that it makes them worse. Soldiers return from the horrors of the front line broken men and women. Someone goes into what becomes a terrible, traumatic relationship open to love and leaves it suspicious, more misanthropic and full of self-loathing. In areas of socio-economic suffering there is more crime and more violence. You'll need to point to a lot of examples where the suffering has a good effect to balance out the innumerable cases where it clearly doesn't.

Why then do so many persist with the idea that suffering is good for us? The religious need to, of course. If suffering is not, on balance, a good thing, then there can be no benevolent creator in charge of this show. But even without a theological motivation, the thought of so much suffering without redemption can be almost intolerable. Believing it has a point can be the only way to make life bearable.