Hacker News Reader

Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with the core part of what you're saying. There is a difference between the physical medium information is stored in, and the pattern of the medium that is storing the information.

To make this difference clearer, look at a typical cd or dvd. An equivalent article would talk about which chemicals and combination of lasers at certain optical frequencies are used to etch patterns into the surface of the cd/dvd.

An article on encoding would detail how the pattern of microscopic bumps on a cd/dvd represents binary data formats.

View on HN

the pattern of microscopic bumps on neurons are dendritic spines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendritic_spine. these have glutamate receptors.

Glutamate is the primary excitatory transmitter in the brain. The Glutamate synpase has two receptors: AMPA and NMDA. These act as an AND gate for learning and are both activated by glutamate.

When glutamate binds to the AMPA receptor, it opens a channel that lets in sodium (Na+). If enough enters fast enough, Mg+2 is reppelled from blockading the NMDA receptor allowing Ca+2 ions to enter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitatory_postsynaptic_potenti...

When Ca+2 enters the cells through NMDA, it triggers a ton of internal metabolic changes. in the neuron in order to do make it more sensitive and conditioned to the connections from stimulating neurons such as producing more AMPA receptors at that location for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_learning

We don't know all of the internal metabolic changes that allow the cell to do such things, and this article is about one of them.

Brief neurosci101 to put the article in perspective.

This is a common problem with Science Daily. They basically copy and paste press releases from universities with all the bullshit hype intact. Every article has the same format: Scientists discover mind-blowing new theory that will blow your mind and cure cancer, AIDS, and global warming!!!!

Further to this point.

I have a few friends in different fields of research and in the biotech field. I sent them a link from sciencedaily, after thanking me for the link. They politely informed me that sciencedaily is not a worth while publication and therefore deem the information from it not so exciting / important.

You could say they are being snobbish maybe even elitist. But as mentioned in the comments, this is not the first time a post to there has had words like "misleading" etc.

What if we had a peer review, prestigious website where you could submit your articles for publishing in the IT world?

Equally, does "snobbishness" exist already in peer review sites for the IT world already?

If anything I would expect two crowds to form, the larger of which being an "anti-snob" crowd that says, "If it wasn't on a developer's personal blog, it isn't worth reading!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com