Can a biologist fix a radio? What I learned while studying apoptosis (2002) [pdf]
cell.com
cell.com
It's really pretty universal.
As the article describes imagine having the list of radio components instead only instead of their topology (wiring diagram). The problem of figuring out how a radio works with this information, if youbknow little about their design, becomes quite similar with how figuring out how a biological system works.
The absence of a design diagram and our inability to measure components at the molecular level without disturbing the state of a system is the main reason bilogical systems are so challenging to understand.
It's interesting how you'll often, in culture and media, see computers described as cold and inhuman. Like, I get it, of course. But in a way, there's also something very human about working with them, because every part of the stack was designed, meticulously and painstakingly (or maybe haphazardly) by other humans. The analog EE might worry mainly about the laws of physics, sure, and as you said, the CS theorist might fiddle with pure mathematics. But it seems the majority of working software engineers, and even a good chunk of electronics designers, will spend their time dealing mainly with things designed by other people.
I get the impression it's not the same as like you said, the biologist that deals with the squishy, incomprehensible products of evolution, or the chemist and physicist that have to try to understand stuff like quantum mechanics. Those are the "cold" fields to me; ours is positively warm and cozy.
Of course at a high enough level, software development relies on judgments as well, and what architecture will be most maintainable or future-proof, when to go with which principle (DRY, YAGNI, KISS etc.), what approach to use etc. will be similarly squishy in a way.
Then at university I learned it all from the ground up, clearing many misconceptions. But my misconceptions also were helpful. When we learned about OpenMP, I remembered I had thought that "for" loops would run in parallel. And indeed it turns out it was possible to run them in parallel. Or I had misconceptions about pass-by-value and pass-by-reference but at least had a prepared mental framework for this when we formally learned about it.
Biologists arrived at the scene similarly, without manuals or foundational courses handed over by God. So it had to start with this "competent ignorance" at first. You don't quite know what you're doing but it works. And then you figure out the building blocks.
If you go deep enough into electronics, you'll run into physics again. The engineers working at the chip fabs (and chip design) work very hard to shield us mortals from the messy details - the idealized transistors and gates we work with in the digital world are a useful abstraction. (I hope never to need to learn about quantum tunneling!)
In the same way, if you go deep enough into software design (whether "user-facing" or for other developers, you'll run into the messy vagaries of humans and our wetbrains.
Whether you're dealing with the subcultural expectations of your audience for a drop-down vs radio-button, or writing a tutorial on how to use your library, or thinking about what features your fancy new programming language needs, we rely on the abstractions and rules-of-thumb that we've learned. But those rules come from deep places, using results from neurology, sociology, psychology, etc!
Everything is deep, in every direction and all the way down. :)
Often resulting in building things for 'customers' (internal or external or even ones self) which result in a complaint that you built the thing they asked for, not the thing they need.
There is occasional grateful acknowledgement that the only reason they now know what they need is because they got what they asked for, but usually its somehow your fault you got it wrong...
"Computer Science" as a term has always felt like a misnomer to me. Its a mash-up of building on whats already known (or assumed) and also exploration by trying things out. It lacks the rigor of the 'hard' sciences - hardly anyone writes mathematical proofs proving their computing is correct let alone optimal.
But I agree with you in general. Because you're continually 'building'/creating stuff with a reasonably quick feedback loop, rather than measuring/proving whether your idea is valid or not which can take up to or more than a whole career does make computing seem warm/cozy.
https://worrydream.com/refs/Cardelli_2005_-_Abstract_Machine...
Reading a bit farther (RNA is lists, DNA doubly-linked lists) is embarrassing. DNA is double stranded, which does not make a doubly-linked list. And somehow we fail to recognize the difference between template-driven molecules (DNA,RNA,proteins), which have a genetic history, and lipids and carbohydrates, which do not.
Modularity and simplicity do evolve naturally when selection pressures make those properties beneficial- and in such cases engineering is then possible, and engineering analogies make sense.
A few examples that come to mind: DNA, modular assembly line proteins, etc. In such cases there seems to have been a selection pressure for rapid reconfiguration, which favors composable modular systems where one small change can lead to a new functional system - often in a way that follows simple predictable rules. In some cases the systems are not messy at all- and rival the most carefully planned out human designed systems.
... assuming you don't believe in creationism or some branches of pre-astronautics (aliens used genetic engineering to create/modify a lot of life on earth). ;-)
oh and there were uncountable networks, at the same time, that were just lucky or not
Or a recap from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/can-neur...
I saw a wonderful recording of a talk the authors gave a few years ago (which I regrettably can't find now), and it was amongst the most eye-opening talks I've ever seen.
For example, they talk about destroying one transistor, observing that the thing can’t play Donkey-Kong anymore, and concluding that that is the DK transistor.
But computer chips are designed to have incredibly long chains of dependencies where each specific transistor does exactly the right thing, every time.
For neurons, it isn’t so specific, right? They all might fire, depending on the timing, and whether or not they are… I don’t know biology, charged or whatever. The whole system works under the assumption that many complements will mis-fire or be duds are any moment.
It seems (to me at least) more reasonable, to come to the conclusion that the DK neuron is really a DK neuron, if removing it causes an un-recoverable DK related failure… because the whole system is based around handling failures! It is somehow special that something can break it.
So we assume. And with some good reason, including both the studies done over the decades, and the fact that we've built systems based on this architecture that match this concept.
However, it is important to observe that this characteristic is still in the metaphorical spotlight. It is a thing that we can discover. If, in fact, there was One Blessed Neuron that contained the most vital aspect of some critical concept in someone's brain, we currently have zero capability to discover it, zero ability to characterize it, and effectively zero ability to manipulate that neuron directly in some experimental fashion once identified. Therefore, we should be fairly suspicious of the claim that we've eliminated this as even being a possibility.
I expect it is unlikely that there is a such thing as the One Blessed Neuron, even so, but there are a large number of other hypothetical organizations that could exist beyond "an amorphous neural net with nothing really located anywhere", and we have good evidence for that as well; the "regions" of the brain, the fact we can visibly see physically different organizations of neurons in certain regions and associate them with certain tasks. I would not even dream of trying to guarantee that there is no structure lying in between the gross differences we already know about and the hypothetical undifferentiated neural mass, the structures in those complexity voids between what we can currently see. We again have a lot of inductive reasons to believe that there is likely more structure there we do not even have a clue exists, on the grounds that every time we get a closer look at something for the first time ever, it is rarely only and exactly what we expected. It's such a notable outcome that it gets called out specifically when it happens, precisely because it's rare.
Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#Motor Over the decades people gradually uncovered more and more of the structure and ultimately recognized that the flagellum motor has components that correspond to engineered motors, with rotors, stators, energy sources, rings, bearings, etc. Amusingly, after all the effort, we recognized that the motor greatly resembles ATP synthase- one of the most core energy management proteins we have (which carries out a totally unrelated function).
I imagine that any rationally designed human engineering product could be understood by a biophysicist with no real technical knowledge beyond basic electrical and mechanical engineering.
See also "The Salvation of Doug", which gives an absolutely hilarious analogy between using scientific methods to understand biology, and reverse-engineering a car factory:
"""Emboldened by his successes, the next morning the geneticist tied the hands of an individual dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase in one hand and a laser pointer in the other (he was a vice president). That evening the geneticist, and Doug (although he would not openly admit it), anxiously waited to see the effect on the cars. They speculated that the effect might be so great as to prevent the production of the cars entirely. To their surprise, however, that afternoon the cars rolled off the assembly line with no discernible effect."""
What is this referring to? For most pieces inside the radio, the colors would be just superficial and not have any effect. There are some components (capacitors, resistors) where the colors have meaning, and changing them could lead to overcurrent and fires/damage or insufficient conduction and things not really working.
I'm finding it hard to imagine what parts the author is thinking of where changing the colors would have only attenuating effects, where it would take a trained ear to hear the distortion. In the set of all outcomes from changing just colors, most would be either "nothing happened" or "radio's operation is clearly messed up". The author's scenario seems like one of the less likely ones.
Can a biologist fix a radio? Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31697757 - June 2022 (21 comments)
Can a biologist fix a radio?–Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis (2002) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120457 - Jan 2022 (18 comments)
I would like an intro to Thermodynamics, but IDK where to start.
If a real biologist do it it will be like the evolution line approach which some thinks lead wu han lab created the covid funded by USA and approved by … That is debatable but the approach is not. Unless we can do evolve radio …
One must note bird seems to evolve use quantum mechanics to direct their migration. Hence that is not unthinkable.
The question is whether have radio communication has an evolution advantage. Ignore the issue of not science (as not refutable), that is the real question.