That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences.
I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.
I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.
If anything, this shows that biology and medicine are incomprehensibly more complex than computer science, and that their practitioners are true hackers!
Even here, we have surprises. Every modern x86 in use has thousands of errata pages in the specs.
Indeed, I am finishing up my dissertation applying electrical engineering theory to model cellular evolutionary biology predicated on digital signal processing theory to demonstrate natural selection progressively evolves adaptations with faster sampling rates of environmental radiation for greatest BIBO system stability.
You usually don't see connections between different things when you aren't actively looking for them, or when you haven't seen/thought those things to be related in the past. Since CPUs were designed by humans, your logical reasoning would usually work well when reverse engineering one, especially if you know the general ideas of how integrated circuits are constructed and what functional blocks a CPU is made of. Nature, on the other hand, has no logic. Your reasoning doesn't work with natural phenomena, and that's exactly what we're seeing in areas where experimentation and direct observation is hard, infeasible, or impossible.
Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point.
Yes they are. Consciousness is a result of an electric feedback loop, and aging is apparently a result of a chemical feedback loop but that wasn't proven completely yet (that's the feedback loop I'd very much like disrupted).
But again, that's not what I'm talking about. You're missing my point entirely. I'm talking about connections that aren't obvious so no one looks for them in the first place and performs no experiments to reveal them. Example: sleep-deprived fruit flies accumulate active oxygen in their gut[1] and eventually die because of it. Is this an obvious connection to look for? Hell no. And there are many more examples of such unexpected and perplexing connections in the inner workings of living things. Nature doesn't always choose the most optimal implementations either. Life is a fascinatingly complex Rube Goldberg machine.
Cut it out with the arrogance.
http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
Real life is extremely fuzzy and ill-defined. Almost everything mathematical is a model and models are almost by definition, simpler than the thing they model.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong within my lifetime and have someone come up with the Fundamental Laws of History, for example, fully defined from a mathematical point of view.
"The map is not the terrain" is my favourite way of getting that across.
And I’m in the process of writing a scientific work of human history in an evolutionary biological paradigm, justified by the linear time-invariant mechanics of dipole oscillations which are elemental to all natural phenomena.
Humans did not invent the human body, so it's not embarrassing to discover something new--it's exciting. That's the whole point of science. Medical researchers certainly know that they still have a ton to learn about the human body.
This one is a bit like not realizing the wheels are missing off your car. Right, it ought to have been damn obvious ages ago.
Humans did, but not you or me. What if they lied to us? What if we believed in those lies and never checked? ;-)
It’s not reassuring.
Most mental illnesses, but also physical ones like fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis have no definitive test.
Everything from time constraints to lack of knowledge to incompetence and or a combination of these is often found in most walks of life.
With medicine, we've a terribly complicated field, and like any profession, there is a range of competencies. I recall decades ago knowing a state director of health (the state's top doctor) and he said to me 'if you ever get really sick come to me and I'll put you in contact with the best advice available, as there are too many in this profession that I wouldn't give you a quarter for'.
As I said, this is a problem with all professions, finding the best advice available, can, at times, be a daunting experience.
I get that. What I find disturbing is that even when some doctors dedicate their lives to study anatomy, we still find a pair of salivary glands nobody has ever documented.
It's not a rare malformation. It's something that's more or less behind each and every human nose on Earth and has been there for thousands of years.
Especially right now when they’re under an even greater crunch due to the added pressures and constraints added by the pandemic.
I do seem to recall a very large cohort of programmers (LOCALE=en_us) finding themselves dumped through a rabbithole of wonder which turned the black-and-white scenery of the Land of ASCII to the kaliedoscopic technicolor of Unicode. We did, in fact, discover that there were extra bits on those characters that we had been pretending weren't there all along :)
Yes, even the memory business had its sleazy carpetbaggers.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_by_b...
This is why I invest to earn karma. So it can burn.
> how to find more "low-hanging fruit"
That we still have low hanging fruit (or fruit hiding behind our noses) after so many years of study is a bit concerning.
It's like discovering you can turn the lamp to remove it from the socket instead of keeping your hand still and hiring two people to rotate the ladder.
Haven't we sliced a couple humans to sub-millimetric resolution?
This report suggests that we do have 'streets' missing. Researchers are now delving into finely nuanced areas of research at a level the equivalent of the house before the preliminaries are resolved - before all streets are found. Bypassing prerequisites always has serious consequences, things go wrong, errors occur, time is wasted, work is duplicated by others, etc. Even patients may die.
I'd suggest that no one yet knows how this will impact research that's already been completed and which now has to be reinvestigated.
We know so startlingly little about how our own machines work in many ways.
(Anyway, some obsolete architectures actually did use nine-bit bytes.)
Following that reasoning, the mind isn't real either.