Neurotechnology numbers worth knowing (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Neurotechnology numbers worth knowing (2022)

milan.cvitkovic.net

160 pointsJun826 comments

This is awesome. Even though many think it unpopular, I've always found that a certain measure of rote learning is beneficial, if not straight up necessary.

> Having them memorized and at your fingertips is great for sanity checking ideas.

This is essentially the reason. There are certain idea pathways you simply cannot traverse if you constantly need to check specific values. And I think that it might be possible that your subconscious simply won't "give" you an idea until you have specific facts memorized.

Just think how much more difficult your life would be if you had no concept of a kilometer/mile, and constantly needed to do the math to check how far something is in... meters/yards, or something.

It's like knowing how much clock speed, RAM and storage is on a typical computer.

Yep. 12 years studying biochem and health science makes that very clear.

Knowing and understanding are intimately tied, and it’s questionable whether one can meaningfully understand anything without first knowing things.

In case someone is as confused as I was, a french is a gauge unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_catheter_scale

It's also a good joke opportunity, but for the link above it's not a joke.

> A cage of 5 mice costs ~$1k upfront and ~$5k/yr recurring You can get mice a lot cheaper than that, I'm not sure what kind of mice he's referring to but the prices depend on the vendor and mouse type.

Where I work it's about $2 a day to house a cage of 5 mice. It's about $30 a mouse if you get C57BL/6NJ's from Jackson: https://www.jax.org/strain/005304

So more like $150 for 5 mice and $800 to house for a year.

Another good one to know if the size of antibodies (10-12 nm).

I don't know why but I just love being able to read all of this fascinating information in such a compact form, just amazing! Heading back over to read the rest now!

> fascinating information

...you don't find it uncomfortable or distressing to be confronted with the dry facts and hard-limits of the 1.5Kg squishy-pink prison we're all trapped-inside and all condemned to die inside?

> “Not at all,” said the medtech. “Think of all the work he represents on somebody’s part. Nine months of pregnancy, childbirth, two years of diapering, and that’s just the beginning. Tens of thousands of meals, thousands of bedtime stories, years of school. Dozens of teachers. And all that military training, too. A lot of people went into making him.” She smoothed a strand of the corpse’s hair into place. “That head held the universe, once.”

-- Aftermaths by Lois McMaster Bujold

Quite the opposite for me it kinda just makes it seem even more amazing that it exists and works at all and how much humans have worked out about it!

There's some interesting regenerative medicine avenues (Michael Levin's stuff, planarian worms don't die from old age) that I have some hope might eventually slightly reduce the 'condemned to die' side of the picture for humans also.

It's so delicate, too. Drop the squishy pink thing and its ancillary support-meat on a random part of Earth and most likely it drowns in an ocean, freezes on a mountainside, dries out in a desert, or starves in a wasteland.

That's leaving aside the other 99.99999999% of the universe where it chokes on vacuum or is blasted by radiation.

And even in a perfect habitat with an ideal genotype and phenotype, its functional lifetime is a mere century bookended by billions of years of nonexistence.

So yeah.

I try not to think about all that.

>the other 99.99999999% of the universe

You are off by so many orders of magnitude.

And many of those numbers aren't static. They change.

The Theory of Bounded Rationality emerged as a reaction to growing awareness within the chimp troupe, of the numerous limitations of that chimp brain. Its a useful tool when coping with complex ever changing reality.

How does it make any difference about being trapped and dying?

>...you don't find it uncomfortable or

Well, you have heard it: Ignorance is bliss. That's how the masses survive.

Suggestions from someone who hasn't used sub mm units in decades and is therefore out of practice: since the first section is supposed to orient us, remove the French =3mm bullet point, you never mention French again as far as I can see, so it's just trivia. Instead, try to link the first 2 points - maybe express human hair in nm instead of um, so that we can then visualize an angstrom (something most people don't know about) in terms of human hair (something most folks do know). Don't make us convert nm and um our heads.

Yeah, that hit me too, felt like a missed opportunity to not link those units.

The whole thing feels like it's almost telling a story

I found this book very helpful to understand most cellular process, and viruses, with an intuition of how things works at these scales: https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/03...

Next up: Numbers every math person should know

I’m not getting why these are significant because it’s spelling out what it seems the tip of the ice berg numbers, and there are a lot more missing, and even if you spell them all out, it’s too general to be useful. However it is interesting

Fascinating. I wish more people would post more quick lists and tables like this from their areas. So much information in a single document. I am a big fan of CRC books of reference tables.

hmm, you know there is this big book of all chemicals....no one in the science communities with any professional sense and skills recommends rote remember such lists....

For example, is it better to remember by rote all the amino acids or is it better to reason which is which be the quantum mechanics involved in the different bonding groups?

Most in biochemistry go with the 2nd option....and succeed.

I would be interested in a computer science only version.

A quick search didn't bring up an already existing one :(

Isn't the computer science version Peter Novig's, "Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" table?

https://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

Edit: This version is also quite nice - https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

One classic set of numbers is Jeff Dean's "latency numbers every programmer should know", as quoted in a bunch of places including: https://highscalability.com/google-pro-tip-use-back-of-the-e...

(EDIT: apparently Dean got this table from Peter Norvig as another commenter mentioned.)

The disk numbers are a bit outdated now because of the overwhelming shift from spinning hard disks to SSDs, but most of the others have held up surprisingly well AFAIK. For instance, neither CPU L1 caches nor the speed of light have gotten dramatically faster in the last couple decades.

https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math

>Tennis court size is in feet

Lol.

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