Gee, Think.

Continuing my reading of “Elliot Wave Principle” by Frost and Prechter I have come across this page. It demonstartes a few of the myraid examples where the golden ratio, 1.618, is apparent in nature. The premise of the wave theory is summed up as “the stock market obeys thegolden ratio just as every natural growing form does.” From seahorses, to huricanes, to pinecones, to our DNA. There are example of all sizes that exhibit frequent 1.618 proportions.
This is truly an amazing phenomenon that I think many people would enjoy thinking about. It’s astounding that there is something so basic that unites so many vaired forms of our world.

Microbiology certainly isn’t my field. I did like chemistry in high school, and I do like science in general. I also enjoy philosophy, especially with a few friends. What if questions are some of my favorites. Tonite I was talking with an accomplished scholar of microbiology about vaccinations, antibiotics, disease & prevention.

I was in a bit of a philosophical mood tonite. It was a night of science philosophy and thought experiments. I thought of a new term, macrobiology. I would bet that this has been thought of before, but it is a new thought for me. The concept is like macroeconomics is to microeconomics.

It started with some kind of simple question whose answer led to another question. An hour or so went by and these were some of the mysteries I was wondering about:
What is the biology of an entire population? What do we find if we look at the patterns in the antibodies and bacteria found in individuals in a community and compare them?
How do these bacteria spread between individuals?
Is it possible for bacteria cohabiting an organism to interact and mutate into something new?
Instead of asking how antibiotics will affect the inner ecosystem of an individual, ask how antibiotics administered over 10, 15, or 20 years could affect our biology. Could this bread new diseases? What happens if a large percentage of a population becomes treated with antibiotics in terms of the kinds and frequency of bacteria. Could an untreated minority be subjected to super germs breed through natural selection in the individuals who were treated with antibiotics?
Could living longer create the conditions for new diseases or bacteria to develop, mutate, or evolve?
I got some answers to these questions, but some still linger in my mind. I really wonder how these organisms interact between individuals, and how the condition of a person’s immune system can affect their community members. Is it possible that while antibiotics are good for the individual in the immediate moment they could produce undesirable effects in the long term? Could a person heavily treated with antibiotics serve as a treat to society? Hmmm. I definitely have a lot to learn about this subject.

You can help find a cure for aids by running some software on your computer. This is a site of a wonderful collaborative computing project. People all over the world are helping to find a cure by running a program that completes individual “work units” for the research project. The software downloads a workunit, analyzes it, and then sends the results back to the research center. This method of computer teamwork makes many problems solvable that would have taken too long to solve with a single supercomputer.

Folding @ Home is a collaborative (distributed) computing project to find a cure for various diseases including Alzheimer’s, Cancer, Huntington’s, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Parkinson’s. The project is based on simulations of protein folding. Proteins are long but microscopic chains of nucleotides that fold in many ways to create function structures within our bodies. There are some diseases that develop based on the way these proteins fold. Scientists are using computer models to analyze the way that a protein folds. The goal is to find cure’s for the diseases mentioned above. Who knows if they’ll actually get it, but I run the program on my computers because I’ve got to hope that it’s helping something worthwhile. I mean, a cure for cancer??? alzheimer’s?? I’m willing to contribute my computer’s extra time to that!

optimism
Originally uploaded by _rebekka.

I have just about finished my Learning Classifier System writing in the CLIPS (http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html) programming language. It has been a really fun experience. Tedious at times, yes, but definitely satisfying to know that’s I’ve implemented the first basic steps of machine learning. Today I’m going to be commenting the code extensively, and providing a small report on my work.

I plan to make the system available somewhere on the internet, but I’m not sure where yet. My own webserver will be moving shortly, so it’s time to find some new space.

Artificial Intelligence has been the most interesting technology as of late for science fiction. A lot of people I know are worried about the EVENTUALITY of sentient computers. They are also worried about computers ability to learn new and unpredictable rules about their environment.

I would worry about such things, but I think that’s like worrying about the tides of the ocean. I see it as a certainty that Artificial Intelligence research and development will progress. Who knows how it will affect our daily lives, but I think it will in the next 10 years for certain. I’ll be writing more on this topic to elaborate on why I think this way.

‘Parallax Inferno’
Originally uploaded by patisfaction.

New device from Magellan navigation that includes both top down and 3d mode when users approach turns. price 1100 USD$. Man! I still see such a market here. Something that I want to do with a little company I call…. “Masterminds Unlimited” We had an idea to bring navigation to cell phones, PDAs, and devices already in the hands of many people. However, our idea is mostly an idea. We have an amatuer implementation of the idea at www.mastermindsunlimited.net. That will be live for about 3 more days before the server comes down. Anyway, our goal was to bring the first person perspective to navigation using digital imagery taken by actual people. Turns out that surveying isn’t that costly. Our product would have gotten to the hands of the directionally impaired for WAY under $1100.

I love engadget’s rss feed. I can’t help it. It’s like a daily snapshot of the state of the art. There’s so much going on now in hardware development. Everyday I see news of 5-6 groundbreaking new technologies. Advances in networking, data storage, communication means, and other categories. I get this huge feeling of optimism thinking of the possibilities. With all this new technology… what won’t we be able to do?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Artificial Intelligence this week as I’m working on my last bit of course work before I head down to New Jersey. I’m building a learning classifier system that learns to recommend wines on a really basic level. It will learn that red wine goes with red meat and that white wine goes with poultry. This is supervised learning based on a answer key and probabilistic mutation of rules.