Tag: science

Magnets on the brain.

The FDA just gave the go ahead for doctors to use magnets to tickle your brain cells when you’re depressed. Apparently someone out there has been messing with something they call transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The idea is to take magnets and use them to stimulate parts of the brain responsible for things like mood regulation. There have been studies that showed that this was effective for a lot of people suffering from clinical depression and, of course, there are no side effects. The downside to these studies is that the placebo groups didn’t get a very convincing dose of fake therapy. Obviously, if you’re comparing two groups and neither of them can be used a control then your results aren’t going to be all that acceptable. It’s interesting anyway. It makes you wonder how long it will be until we no longer have to be sad, ever. It also makes you wonder if that’s really a good thing. Check it out:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn14998-magnetic-brain-therapy-gets-us-green-light.html

This is why I’m smarter than you.

I don’t think that I could say that with a straight face in real life. I know I’m not stupid, but I’ll often argue against the things I think I know if I can’t find someone to do it for me. I’m pretty much in a constant state of questioning whether I’m right or not on any number of points so I couldn’t possibly be arrogant enough to tell anyone that I’m smarter than them…. unless someone out there thinks that’s a completely inaccurate portrait of me.

Anyway, I found this article today:

http://www.physorg.com/news142185056.html

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

I think this study is pretty much a load of crap personally. First of all, I know you don’t need millions of people to make a psychological study statistically significant but forty people? Also, the musicians had higher IQ as a whole? Doesn’t that mean that they picked people who had higher IQs for the musicians side of the experiment? These people failed the chicken vs the egg test. And the last thing I’ll point out, although not the last thing that could be pointed out, is that I’ve met a hell of a lot of really stupid musicians. Maybe classical musicians from this one particular school tend to be smart, but that’s certainly not the whole from my experience.

<Insert closing paragraph that creatively wraps things up here.>

LHC spin off?

That thing I was talking about the other day, the Large Hadron Collider, may have its own spin-off technology. The amount of information created and collected by this machine is up in the petrabyte level (millions of gigabytes). There was no way for the project to use the internet as a backbone for moving all this information between the 55,000 servers they’re using so they developed a new, completely fiber optic system. This network is about 10,000 times faster than current broadband connections. That, from the viewpoint of computing today, is essentially an unlimited amount of bandwidth. What this means is that cloud computing, along with a complete disregard for bandwidth limitations when developing new technologies, could be on the horizon.

The idea behind cloud computing, if I understand it right, is that your computer would be a gateway instead of the workhorse behind your computer use. Your computer’s power would not be limited by what pieces of hardware you have in front of you. Instead, most things would be saved on various computer on the grid and you would just be accessing it all from your computer. You would also be using the processing power from all these other computers. That’s the big thing. Whatever processing power all the other computers on the network aren’t currently using could be picked up and used by your computer. So, all those people who have brand new laptops that they use purely for browsing the web, yeah that won’t be a waste of computing power. The power users who may be playing high end games, running graphic design programs, editing movies, etc, will not have to worry about running out of power. If you build a 3D object in a CAD program that’s really complicated, it might take 3 seconds to render it instead of 5 weeks.

If you think about it, this might also lead to even more independent media being produced on the same level as commercial media without those independent people needing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. Do you know why Pixar movies look way better than the 3D videos you’ll find on YouTube? Because they have the processing power to render them. Imagine if anyone who wanted to could create their own Pixar movie without even having to consider the hardware limitations. Neat stuff.

I’ve been reading the Hunchback of Notre Dame. There’s a chapter in that about how the printing press destroyed buildings. What Mr. Hugo was referring to was the art of architecture. He makes the argument, which may or may not be correct, that before the printing press the most widespread form of the common person’s expression was architecture. People could fancy up their homes and it would be seen by every person that walked by. It was much more expensive for them to write a book and have it copied by hand and only the nobility really had access to those books afterwards because they were so expensive. With the printing press, that suddenly flipped. Writing books was a much cheaper way to express yourself and your ideas could be picked up by more people than those who just happen to walk by your house. The internet has done the same thing to every other form of media. Movies, music, graphic arts, fine arts, are all instantly cheaper to create and easier to spread. The ability to shape our culture is being placed in the hands of the people like never before and things like this grid system can only progress that pattern. I don’t know about the rest of you but that gets me excited.

You can read a bit about the technology here:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/09/06/they-say-my-machine-threatens-the-world-91466-21685078/

BTW, just to tie some political spin into this. John McCain doesn’t even use the internet. How can you trust a guy who hasn’t even used the internet yet to be able to react to how these new technologies are changing our world?

The end of the world… again.

On Wednesday, September 10th, CERN will be turning on their Large Hadron Collider and possibly create a black hole that sucks up our entire planet from the inside.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/08/particlephysics.physics

If we don’t get sucked into a black hole, this collider is expected to bring us a giant leap closer to developing a “theory of everything”. Sooo, the risk is erasing all human life along with any evidence that we ever existed at all and the reward could be as significant as finding God. Fun stuff, eh?

The risk of a black hole is supposed to be ridiculously miniscule. It’s supposed to be as likely as watching a pen fall through a solid table. There are some 8,000 physicists working on this thing so we can only assume that all of those optimistic opinions are correct. Afterall, we’ve had this situation before. When the first atoms were split in a little room in Chicago, the scientists working on that project didn’t know whether they would ignite the atmosphere or not. No worries, right? I guess you have to ask yourself though, if the chance of ending all life is .000001%, is that still too high?

The problem is, if this is our last two days in existence, we should all probably live it up, right? I mean, there are plenty of things that I can think of doing and saying to people that I would never, ever do if I thought I had to live with them for the rest of my life. Come to think of it, shouldn’t we just live that way anyway though? Do you live your life as if there’s only a couple days left? For all we know nuclear war could break out tomorrow or we could be wiped out by some act of God. Personally, I still feel reluctant. Pride and embarrassment are possibly the worst features of the human psyche.

The world probably won’t end in two days and you probably won’t have to tell all the people you know that you love them or do all the things that you were too embarrassed to do before. You won’t have to admit your undying love to your secret crush and you won’t have to spill your darkest secret to your family. You won’t have to decide which religion is right all the sudden or ask for forgiveness before you bite the big one. You can go on living your life exactly like you’ve been doing if you want. At the end of the day, even if the world isn’t going to end, is it really worth living that way?

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