I’ve been waiting for one of these stories for a long time — it was one of my constant fears when I smoked that I’d burn my backseat upholstery. Even when I didn’t throw my cigarette butts out the window, I always dropped the cherry out the window and every single time, I thought, what if the wind blows this into the back of my car where I can’t reach it. Still did it. That’s the amazing power of smoking. I can laugh about this guy because he wasn’t hurt — but he burnt up his cute little SUV just because he didn’t want to dirty his ashtray and stink up the car.
Archive for the ‘news’ Category
Butt stoked into flaming SUV
Thursday, February 17th, 2005Thirst for young blood
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005This headline is straight out of a sci-fi/horror film! Young Blood Makes Muscles Spry. It’s simultaneously funny and creepy.
Researchers at Stanford University have found that an infusion of young blood has significant benefits.
It’s about stems cells in old muscles being activated by blood from a younger host — so the environment those stem cells are in can affect their ability to be therapeutic. But what fodder for the imagination, too!
Loss of language
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005I read this today on Nature about the ability to understand math grammar versus the ability to understand language grammar. Aphasia is a disorder caused by damage to the temporal lobe or higher up in the frontal lobe — usually caused by a stroke or other brain injury — that impairs a person’s linguistic abilities. Words don’t make sense — people with this disorder sometimes can’t speak or read or write or understand what’s being said to them. But they seem to be able to do mathematical calculations with pen and paper. They understand the Arabic numeral 30 when they see it on paper, even though they don’t understand the word thirty when they hear it or see it.
Grammar is an innate ability for humans. Research has shown that spontaneous language development, without external influence, develops grammatical rules within a single generation. And while some of the same cognitive regions are used for both language and math grammars, it appears that our brain’s ability to understand math grammar (think about the rules of nested equations) isn’t dependent on the same regions as linguistic grammar is. Which is why people who can’t understand language in any form can still do math.
It’s an interesting exercise — trying to imagine what the world would be like without words. How do you understand other people? How do you make sense of your senses? The things you hear, see, smell and feel — how do you organize that data into coherent and meaningful sets? I was reading about alexithymia in Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. It’s the inability to express your emotions in words. People can’t explain what they’re feeling because they don’t understand what feelings are and don’t have the language to adequately describe them. Many people who suffer from it often go to the doctor because they think they’re ill or have some physical disorder when they feel upset, angry, or start crying. They can’t differentiate the physical sensations they feel when they feel intense emotions from physical pain.
Being able to talk about my emotions, to express myself in words, to appreciate the beauty of language when it’s used well — I can’t imagine living without these things. But I guess if the worst were to happen and I were to lose all of that — I’d still have math.
Broken heart syndrome
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005This is interesting. Emotional trauma can result in cardiomyopathy, aka broken-heart syndrome, and is physiologically similar to a heart attack.
It’s especially interesting to me right now because I’m reading Emotional Intelligence and Goleman writes at length about the various physiological effects of peoples’ negative emotions. He cites study after study on such topics as the effects of anger on the heart, optimism and pessimism and how one’s tendency to be one or the other is a better prognosticator of recovey (for example from cancer or a major medical procedure) than a person’s physical condition, and hope and its affects on recovey as well. And it seems like this should be common knowledge, but you can’t base medical or scientific treatments on ‘common knowledge’.
I picked this book up after reading The Gift of Fear in which Gavin de Becker recommends we listen to our intuitions. Because our brains and our bodies are primed to survive — whether we are cognitive or not of what our impulses are or how our intuition makes us feel, there’s probably a good reason for it. He also cites example after example, sometimes chilling and sometimes simply creepy, of cases he’s worked on in which peoples’ intuitions accurately warned them of impending danger.
De Becker cites Emotional Intelligence several times and the first section of EI is the most interesting to me because it essentially explains the mechanics of the brain and how it generates an intuitive sense (or a ‘gut feeling’ if you prefer). The most interesting tidbit from that section is this: signals from our sensory organs get sent to the thalamus which then sends them on to the neocortex of our brains which processes those signals into something we understand. But, there is a shorter, single synaptic neuronal pathway between the thalamus and the amygdala, a primitive center of emotions, which allows the amygdala to receive a smaller subset of the signals sent to the neocortex and allows it to immediately process and generate an emotional response (when significant) *before* we fully understand what it is we’re experiencing or seeing, or why we feel the way we do. A telling example cited in the book is about a young man who sees a woman standing at the edge of the water looking down with a distressed look on her face, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d jumped into the water to save a child who’d fallen in.
Our brains are endlessly interesting little things. So are our hearts. Today’s Nature, along with the article about cardiomyopathy, also has an article about the regenerative ability of certain heart cells and how this could potentially help patients with heart attacks.
RFIDs in passports
Friday, October 22nd, 2004Good god…the State Department is planning on putting RFIDs in passports. Note to self: must get valid passport before spring…
Predicting your fast food order
Wednesday, September 29th, 2004I love this! A bunch of CMU guys got together and formed a company called HyperActive Technologies (their crappy flash site doesn’t work in FireFox on the Mac) and they’ve created a product called HyperActive Bob that predicts fast food orders based on the cars driving into the lot. Bigger cars, more food and a tendency towards kids meals, chicken nuggets and french fries; smaller cars means more hamburgers. The initial trial was at a McDonald’s in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, but they’ve got them in 7 McDonald’s and a Burger King and a Taco Bell in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida now.
Advanced Interfaces, also of Pennsylvania, has a similar, but more advanced technology. It records images of people entering a restaurant and makes inferences based on gender and age. Women like salads, men like meat. You get the idea.
All this, of course, immediately makes me think about the privacy implications
of all these cameras on rooftops and doorways. My guess is that they’re not storing these recorded images indefinitely, just long enough to make the calculations and update cook orders. But what’s to say they won’t? Advanced Interfaces has a video mining service for customers to send in hours and hours of recorded video tape for analysis. So, hypothetically, you could be recorded on videotape entering your favorite retail shop or restaurant, and then that footage could get sent to AI. A human being isn’t watching all that video. A human might not ever see any of that video footage, but eventually widely available imaging technology could be sophisticated enough to be able to make out who you are. In any given geographical area, someone somewhere — human or computer, could piece together your entire daily, weekly, monthly schedule. It’s a hypothetical, but certainly not a far fetched one.
A part of me finds this creepy, and a part of me is fascinated by the marketing aspect of all this information. And how easily you can predict behavior and influence it.
Virtual brokers
Tuesday, September 28th, 2004Another interesting tidbit (no online article to link to)…a physicist and a mathematician at the University of Oxford designed a model that predicts the stock market. They equipped multitudes of intelligent agents with strategies that real life traders use to make decisions, then ran the model using historical stock market data, tweaked the agents so that predictions were more in line with the market’s actual behavior, and now they’re using it to predict the stock market and they claim it’s accurate to the minute! And the model can be used to mimic other multi-component systems like medicine, using cells as agents, or ecosystems. A friend of mine was working on something along these lines…I wonder if he’s still working on it and how he’s doing :)
I always thought that seemingly chaotic systems had predictability in them, but it still seems surreal that you can predict the stock market. Wouldn’t you be filthy rich?
Name recognition
Tuesday, September 28th, 2004I was reading the new New Scientist and saw a quote from this guy I went out on a date with months and months ago. He was a graduate student at Berkeley studying genetically modified maize. And it’s sort of cool to recognize someone’s name in a magazine you religiously read. Because even if he’s not a celebrity, he sort of becomes one at that moment. It made me think of this article I read months ago on scanning the brain to predict a person’s behavior in economic games. It was a long ass Newsweek article about how, for humans, the emotional and rational parts of their brain affect their decisions, and how primates appeared to be hard wired to act according to mathematically derived formulas of economy.
The monkeys used Berry Berry juice as their currency. And looking at a “celebrity” monkey was worth paying for:
Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual.
So it makes sense that humans do it, too — because we do things like pay to go to movies, buy magazines and cable tv to see celebrities, pay for expensive dinners with politicians. And “celebrity” is subjective. Your celebrities might be actors or politicians or scientists or writers or musicians or tech geeks. Whatever your thing is, there’s someone you consider a celebrity.
There’s been a lot of research in the last few months about predicting behavior. And there’s almost always a mention of what this means for marketing. Seems like in the end, we’re all paying to look like or live like a celebrity. Whoever that celebrity is.
The end of that long article makes some interesting notes about the differences in the decision making process in men and women. Which I think is funny because I was just thinking about this article the other day when I was going over how long it took me to come to my final decisions — even after I’d already made them.
Secure Flight, CAPPS II’s replacement, moving into test phase
Tuesday, September 28th, 2004The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) has issued a legal order to “compel” airlines to provide passenger data to test Secure Flight, its new passenger screening system. Lots of quotes from the privacy officers at TSA, including one from Lisa Dean, ex-EFF’er. But the TSA hasn’t been all that forthcoming with details, and what about the EU Data Protection Directive? How are they going to sort that out? The Practical Nomad has better, more in-depth blog entries about Secure Flight.
Joining the circus
Thursday, September 23rd, 2004That phrase has such romantic appeal, doesn’t it? A girl I knew used to live in a huge community warehouse in Oakland. At one of her parties, I got to meet a friend of hers who was going to the SF Circus Center. He was graceful and limber, and gave me an itch for the circus. Geek Love, read years ago, gave me an itch for the circus. So did Nights at the Circus beautifully give me an itch for the circus. Oh, and of course, HBO’s Carnivàle makes me yearn for the circus. Now, apparently, it’s fashionable to be into the circus. Trapeze for fitness is recently trendy. And apparently a good place to pick up on hot men with buff arms. I just want to fly through the air.
Urine sniffing dogs
Thursday, September 23rd, 2004Taking advantage of dogs’ innate desire to sniff at urine, scientists and trainers in the UK teamed up to form a cancer sniffing dog team. At a 41% success rate, they did pretty well. One sample was consistently identified by the dogs as coming from a cancerous bladder though it came from a donor without bladder cancer — a reexamination found a kidney tumor instead.
Carnivorous robots
Monday, September 20th, 2004I was just reading about EcoBot II, the fly eating robot. It’s got 8 microbial fuel cells that flies get sucked into. The chitin exoskeleton gets broken down into glucose, the bacteria break up the glucose and generate electrons to power EcoBot II with electricity. On a full stomach (8 flies — one in each fuel cell), it can go for 5 full days. But it takes 12 minutes to generate enough electricity for it to walk one 2cm step. That’s 5 steps and hour, 120 steps a day, 600 steps in 5 days. It’s probably not getting too far on a full stomach. But imagine if you could go for 5 days on a single meal..
The predecessor to EcoBot II was SlugBot, which hunted for slugs using its imaging systems. But its methane-based system took too long to power up. And EcoBot II draws its food to itself by reaking of sewage. Saves itself all that hunting and gathering time.
Dreamless
Tuesday, September 14th, 2004Dreamless woman feels fine. Dreams are fascinating. There is a load of research material on sleep, but not so much on dreams. How the brain functions is a fascinating subject of its own, but dreams have all sorts of nonscientific associations with them. There are prophetic, mythic, romantic notions about dreams. They’re scary; they’re sweet. I had two bad dreams last night. They both stemmed from what Ed says is my intense fear of rejection. Sometimes when I’m thinking really hard about someone, I dream about being rejected by that person. And they’re almost like nightmares.
Anonymous phone calls…for the stalker in all of us
Sunday, September 12th, 2004In other news…interesting company that launched a new service to anonymize phone calls by fucking with caller id, and three days later, the owner decides to try to sell it off because of threats by hackers. Star38 launch; Star38 calls it quits.
May be a great service for debt collectors, but imagine what it can do for stalkers. Want to terrorize your neighbor annonymously? Crank call that ex? Star38, baby.
Fruit sex
Sunday, September 12th, 2004This is so funny…Catholics upset about fruit sex labels.
Haribo macht kinder froh
und Erwachsne ebenso
I can even sing that little jingle if you ask nicely.
P not equal NP
Thursday, September 2nd, 2004This article was on slashdot today. Uninteresting little article about NP problems and how once we build our magic NP box, our current methods of encryption will be rendered useless. I particularly liked this statement: The Internet would be vulnerable to hackers and computer viruses. As though it currently isn’t vulnerable. Once we build a quantum computer or perhaps a cellular computer, it’ll be our magic NP box. No one can say when that’ll be, but I’m certain the day will come. The only interesting tidbit I garnered in that article is that Adleman is at USC.
What I don’t understand is why Garfinkel wrote the article (and spelled Adleman’s name wrong). Is this new information to him? He mentions last month’s Crypto conference, but did they have anything new to say about P vs NP problems? Probably not. And if they did, he doesn’t mention it.
And this makes me think how interesting it is to watch things go from rigorous scientific publications to mass media. How trendy some topics get. For a little while. Then you realize how long lived said topic is and the public loses interest again. Until the next cycle.
Experimenting on primates
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004I was reading this article in New Scientist (do I read anything else anymore? Those things come so fast in the mail…I’m halfway through one and the next one arrives) on research done with monkeys. And I’m an animal rights supporter. I don’t think animals should be mistreated, experimented on unnecessarily, tortured, maimed, hunted for sport, etc., etc. But I’m also a huge proponent of research and testing and making new discoveries. It isn’t even really a question — given the option of testing new drugs or procedures on animal or human subjects, no one is going to say, let’s test experimental drugs on humans. No one.
You should’ve seen this photo in the magazine. This sad, little monkey sitting in the corner. For a moment, I become really emotional about the animal imagining what it must undergo. But I completely anthropomorphize, too. Because that monkey isn’t necessarily sad. I project those emotions onto him. The editor chose that photo for that layout specifically for that effect. That isn’t to say that I don’t think monkeys and other animals don’t suffer some sort of trauma when they undergo tests and drug trials and various invasive and non-invasive procedures. I’m sure they do.
The quandry, I think, is balancing the needs of research against being as humane as possible. How do we ensure that we have enough resources to conduct all the research we need in order to progress in our scientific endeavors, and still treat animals humanely by decreasing stress, minimizing physical pain, and limiting use in trials. As a concrete example, we can talk about re-use of monkeys in research. Primates are currently in short supply. Often they are re-used in multiple experiments. From a humanitarian point of view, we want to limit the amount of suffering it undergoes by using it for one trial/one experiment, but from the same point of view, we want to limit the number of monkeys and apes being used for experiments. Where do we draw the line between those two? Do we experiment again and again with the same resource? Or bring in new resources? And at what point we bring in new resources? After one trial? Two, three? Four if they’re minor, two if the experiments are particularly harrowing?
Whatever the balance, it sounds like there should be something done to change the current situation — not only so that we can keep on conducting these trials, but also so that we can learn as much as possible out of the trials we do. There is a bad shortage of primates available and attainable for experimentation. AIDS research, for example, isn’t moving as fast it could. The Indian rhesus monkey is virtually unavailable, but critical in AIDS research because these Indian origin monkeys develop AIDS from SIV as humans do from HIV.
More data should be gathered on primates while in experimentation — history of the primate (what other trials, if any, has it been a part of? where did it come from?), gender, health, daily living arrangements (do they get exercise? have room to move around? live in a tiny cage?). These things are just as important when evaluating the data from experimentation — these can have an impact on that data, yet it’s not kept track of or published. If a monkey is stressed out from having been transported halfway around the world from a breeder to a lab, surely his immune system is suppressed, his biochemical balance is slightly altered — these things affect one’s reaction to a drug or ability to heal. It isn’t trivial. How can you ignore it?
Don’t forget your RFID
Monday, August 23rd, 2004I was reading an article in the hardcopy version of New Scientist (couldn’t find the article online to link to) about a new application of RFID — a watch that you could program with important items that you couldn’t leave the home or office without. You’d tag your keys, pager, cell phone, etc with small RFID stickers. The actual reader is too large to fit into a watch so you would have to install an RFID reader in the doorway of your house, or take advantage of RFID readers we already come in contact with out in the wild — like the card reader at work that lets you in the door. The readers would ping the tags, the watch would decode that data and buzz an alarm if you tried to leave your house without your house keys or tried to leave work without your pager.
Just imagine the wonderful uses of the forgetfulness watch — your wife could tag your wedding ring, the grocery list, your small child. Your boss could tag your laptop, the technical documents he wants you to read, the resumes you’re supposed to sift through, your pager, cellphone, and blackberry. Every time you’d tried to exit a building, your watch would go off in a beeping frenzy alerting everyone to the fact that yes, you are leaving some important piece of yourself behind. No, you cannot be trusted to take responsibility for your own things; yes, you are shirking some duty or another. You’d really be better off forgetting the damn watch.
I can’t wait to get an RFID reader. Imagine the fun things you’d find out about the people around you.
Score one for P2P
Friday, August 20th, 2004EFF scores a win for P2P. The Ninth Circuit declares that distributors of peer-to-peer software can’t be held liable for what their users do. Don’t forget to read Fred’s comments on the ruling.
Senator (not) on the no fly list
Friday, August 20th, 2004This is great evidence of the uselessness of these no fly lists: “One of the best-known U.S. senators” is misidentified as a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list. And this is just a current example — there are many other cases just like this.
It’s been almost 3 years and we still don’t know how people get on these lists and there isn’t a formal, systematic way to be removed from these lists or to find out how you even got on a list. Even when a passenger goes through the effort to clear his name, he finds himself back at square one the next time he flies. EPIC’s No-Fly page — with links to documents from the TSA and complaints from passengers. EPIC filed a suit against the TSA in Dec. 2002. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in April 2004. ACLU’s Why Federal Watch Lists Don’t Work page. The Practical Nomad blog (Edward Hasbrouck) has a fair bit of information on this subject, too.
