A discovery from The University of Rochester is likely to make the whole fighting AIDS thing easier: We've been doing it wrong.
Viruses usually replicate by stealing a molecule from your cell, dNTP, and interfering with this process is the first means by which most anti-viral drugs work. AIDS, however, has taken to preying on immune cells that don't have this chemical. The university discovered that AIDS instead takes a similar molecule, rNTP, and works from there.
This could lead to whole new classes of AIDS fighting drugs, ones that do actual damage to the virus's metabolism. Not yet a cure, but AIDS is now officially on the run.
Curing viral disease tends to be more difficult. We have yet to develop any real cure for the common cold, a disease that we naturally recover from in a week or two. Part of the reason for this is that virus's aren't, in most senses of the word, alive. They are naked chunks of protein progammed to replicate endlessly, like some sort of zombie. And like zombies, they tend to keep going until totally destroyed.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Quadcopter Construction
A popular robot for fun is the Quadcopter, a robotic flying machine that has four helicopter-like rotors, and can do all sorts of aerial maneuvers by varying the speeds of its rotors. And some time ago, someone taught them to build building frameworks. Wait, what?
Discovery News reports that the University of Pennsylvania has developed Quadcopters that can manipulate plastic rods with a magnet on one end into the framework of pretty much any building. The metal end of one rod connects to the magnetic cube on the other, to form extremely solid building frames. Presumably one could finish it off with walls and floors that also attach to those magnets.
Already, people are imagining using these to throw up buildings in a hurry in places where it's impractical to take human construction workers. War zones. Mars. Antarctica. The quadcopters will cheerfully work in all of those places. And given a solar-powered charging station, they can work until they run out of parts. Admittedly, they sound like a swarm of angry bees from hell and being in the vicinity of them would be quite unpleasant, so I don't imagine them working urban construction anytime soon. (Especially because scaled up to the point where they'd make human-sized buildings, the noise would certainly rupture your eardrums.)
Discovery News reports that the University of Pennsylvania has developed Quadcopters that can manipulate plastic rods with a magnet on one end into the framework of pretty much any building. The metal end of one rod connects to the magnetic cube on the other, to form extremely solid building frames. Presumably one could finish it off with walls and floors that also attach to those magnets.
Already, people are imagining using these to throw up buildings in a hurry in places where it's impractical to take human construction workers. War zones. Mars. Antarctica. The quadcopters will cheerfully work in all of those places. And given a solar-powered charging station, they can work until they run out of parts. Admittedly, they sound like a swarm of angry bees from hell and being in the vicinity of them would be quite unpleasant, so I don't imagine them working urban construction anytime soon. (Especially because scaled up to the point where they'd make human-sized buildings, the noise would certainly rupture your eardrums.)
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo appears in the news a lot these days. He is the recipient of a Nobel peace prize, one that the Chinese government is hell-bent in preventing him from actually receiving. The Chinese government is really enraged about him, and to know why I'll have to explain more about his prize and how he got it.
In 1977, a group of Czech intellectuals irritated the then communist Czech government by producing a document called the Charter 77, which demanded human rights and democracy, and lambasted the Czech government for denying its promises in this regard. Though the Czech government lashed out, ultimately the demands outlined in Charter 77 were upheld after the fall of communism. Liu Xiaobo and a large number of other Chinese intellectuals were inspired by this document, and made a similar one called Charter 08 (as it was written in 2008).
This clearly annoyed the Chinese government, who not only was very irritated to be criticized like that, but also considers human rights to be a load of western bullshit that would derail Mao's vision of an equal society. Mr. Liu then went on to further annoy them:
The Chinese government was further enraged when Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel peace prize for the work on Charter 08, and its inability to lobby the Norwegian Government to influence the decision. (Members of the selection committee are chosen by the Norwegian parliament, but the government has no further input on selection and certainly enjoys nothing remotely similar to veto power.)
So that's why he's imprisoned, why the Chinese government is mad at Norway, and why shit will fly for years to come from all this. I argue that human rights, "Ren Quan" in Chinese, is an important part of Sun Yat Sen's "Minquan," or "people's power."
In 1977, a group of Czech intellectuals irritated the then communist Czech government by producing a document called the Charter 77, which demanded human rights and democracy, and lambasted the Czech government for denying its promises in this regard. Though the Czech government lashed out, ultimately the demands outlined in Charter 77 were upheld after the fall of communism. Liu Xiaobo and a large number of other Chinese intellectuals were inspired by this document, and made a similar one called Charter 08 (as it was written in 2008).
This clearly annoyed the Chinese government, who not only was very irritated to be criticized like that, but also considers human rights to be a load of western bullshit that would derail Mao's vision of an equal society. Mr. Liu then went on to further annoy them:
(It would take) 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would require 300 years as a colony for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.These kinds of views are generally seen as seditious, and I think if I expressed any similar beliefs (if I advocated that it would be a good thing if America were to be conquered by another country, say Germany or China), I think I would be loudly denounced as a treasonous bastard, though not arrested. The Chinese government, nationalistically insulted, arrested Mr. Liu on grounds of sedition.
The Chinese government was further enraged when Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel peace prize for the work on Charter 08, and its inability to lobby the Norwegian Government to influence the decision. (Members of the selection committee are chosen by the Norwegian parliament, but the government has no further input on selection and certainly enjoys nothing remotely similar to veto power.)
So that's why he's imprisoned, why the Chinese government is mad at Norway, and why shit will fly for years to come from all this. I argue that human rights, "Ren Quan" in Chinese, is an important part of Sun Yat Sen's "Minquan," or "people's power."
Friday, January 21, 2011
Brute Force Safecracking
If you wanted to get into a safe, but didn't know the combination, how would you crack it? The dumbest, but guarenteed to work, solution is to try every combination until one works. A human safecracker would get tired within a few hours of doing this, so Hack A Day reports someone automating this...with robots. The robot works faster than a human safecracker too.
The robot is a metal-and-plastic manipulator machine controlled by an embedded computer, and would fit in a backpack. If the thief is sneaky, and does this at a time when most people are asleep, and muffles the whirring noise made by the servos, he could sneak it into a bank at 2am in a backpack, muffle all noise in the area, let it grind away for 3 hours, grab the safe contents, grab the machine, and be gone by 6am. If he's stealthy enough, no one would even notice.
In some ways, I suppose this was inevitable. Cryptographic brute force is the only known way to solve NP based problems, and the only P based way to crack a safe would be to somehow figure out some pattern to the combination based on the manufacturer's serial number.
The robot is a metal-and-plastic manipulator machine controlled by an embedded computer, and would fit in a backpack. If the thief is sneaky, and does this at a time when most people are asleep, and muffles the whirring noise made by the servos, he could sneak it into a bank at 2am in a backpack, muffle all noise in the area, let it grind away for 3 hours, grab the safe contents, grab the machine, and be gone by 6am. If he's stealthy enough, no one would even notice.
In some ways, I suppose this was inevitable. Cryptographic brute force is the only known way to solve NP based problems, and the only P based way to crack a safe would be to somehow figure out some pattern to the combination based on the manufacturer's serial number.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Fruitfly Network
An interesting way of solving a wireless network problem was found today in fruit fly brains, reports Discovery News.
See, bug brains and wireless networks have a common problem. "Who's the leader?" To an individual brain cell or network node, it doesn't matter if it's the leader or not, so long as it definitely knows who's in charge. The bug solution has been applied to networks, for a saving of cpu power dedicated to routing.
In bug brains, neurons first see if there are any leaders near them. If so, they decline to become a leader -- someone's beaten them to it, why bother? If they don't find a leader, then this section of brain is leaderless, and they announce to their immediate neighbors that they are the leader. This tends to organize the leadership cells evenly through the fly's brain in a very efficient pattern.
To do this for wireless network, you only need two dedicated signals. One for "Any leaders around here?" One for "Yes, I am the leader." When a node turns on, it sends the first signal. If it doesn't hear the second one, then it puts out the second signal and sets itself to leadership mode. This isn't terribly difficult to set up even in hardware alone, so routers can route more efficiently....for cheap.
See, bug brains and wireless networks have a common problem. "Who's the leader?" To an individual brain cell or network node, it doesn't matter if it's the leader or not, so long as it definitely knows who's in charge. The bug solution has been applied to networks, for a saving of cpu power dedicated to routing.
In bug brains, neurons first see if there are any leaders near them. If so, they decline to become a leader -- someone's beaten them to it, why bother? If they don't find a leader, then this section of brain is leaderless, and they announce to their immediate neighbors that they are the leader. This tends to organize the leadership cells evenly through the fly's brain in a very efficient pattern.
To do this for wireless network, you only need two dedicated signals. One for "Any leaders around here?" One for "Yes, I am the leader." When a node turns on, it sends the first signal. If it doesn't hear the second one, then it puts out the second signal and sets itself to leadership mode. This isn't terribly difficult to set up even in hardware alone, so routers can route more efficiently....for cheap.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Mindreading
Neurology has advanced to the point where an EEG can now be used to answer yes or no questions, reports Discovery news. And this could be used for good or evil.
For good, it can be used to communicate with vegetative people. If they have enough brainpower left to understand you, you can put them in an EEG and ask questions. They're not conscious enough to answer you, but their brain activates in particular patterns when imagining answering the question, which we can now read. And this proves that people who have been unconscious for years can still recover: their brain still works.
For evil, I imagine that this may be used for coercive interviewing. The evil spy, government, or whoever, crams you into an EEG and starts answering questions of you. And you don't really have to answer him with words, your own brain will give you away. (Unless, of course, you've decided to rehearse your lies ahead of time.)
For good, it can be used to communicate with vegetative people. If they have enough brainpower left to understand you, you can put them in an EEG and ask questions. They're not conscious enough to answer you, but their brain activates in particular patterns when imagining answering the question, which we can now read. And this proves that people who have been unconscious for years can still recover: their brain still works.
For evil, I imagine that this may be used for coercive interviewing. The evil spy, government, or whoever, crams you into an EEG and starts answering questions of you. And you don't really have to answer him with words, your own brain will give you away. (Unless, of course, you've decided to rehearse your lies ahead of time.)
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
More on Emulating the Brain
Timothy Blee has a lot more to say about Robin Hanson's thesis of simulated people. Namely, Mr. Blee asserts that it is not possible.
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
