Centauri's Thoughts

We started eons ago as separate beings with separate thoughts, completely isolated.

Through the advent of language, we got better at communicating with each other, but this was still a long ways from truly understanding anothers thoughts. We are a sea of of islands, each completely distinct in thoughts.

As time went on, we got better at communicating with each other. Not only in spoken word, but with the written word as well. Writing also allowed people to speak across time, for once something was written, it could be read at any time, whether that was ten minutes later, or ten years, or ten centuries!

In the past ten years, our level of communications has gone up yet another level. Our written word is not just a daily newspaper or a letter. We went from e-mail, to web pages, to blogs, to chat, twitter and IM.

Communication now is almost instantaneous amongst so many of us, and the connectedness of us is starting to resemble the kind of connection in a large brain. Each of us has many contacts, and each of those contacts has many more, and not all of them overlap. the concept of a “meme” spreading over the global community is somewhat like a “thought” becoming known to the whole.

The concept of the Borg in StarTrek: The Next Generation was a bunch of beings tied together at the thought level. We are working our way towards this, although we have a long ways to go. for one thing, we dont (as of yet) have a chip implant to be always connected to the centralized system (thats coming!). There is also the question of being able to turn it off (the Borg didnt have this choice).

The way we can currently get legions of computers to work together on a problem (via the SETI distributed method, or parallel processors) could prove very interesting when this is applied to human minds. Imagine if solving a problem suitable for human could be sent to 100 or a 1,000 minds to each ponder and resolve all or a part of it, together.

IF we dont blow ourselves up, I feel this last point will not be a question of if – but when

A microbe that has caused trouble in human stomachs for around 60,000 years may also play a role in preventing children from developing asthma and other allergies.

A longtime resident of the human stomach, H. pylori went largely undetected until Australian scientists discovered it in 1979 and went on to show that it can cause stomach ulcers. Further work has linked it to stomach cancer. It’s now treated with antibiotics whenever detected [Science News]. But researchers say that when they studied health records of over 7,000 kids between the ages of 3 and 13, they found that children with H. pylori in their stomachs were less than half as likely to develop asthma. Those children were also less likely to suffer from eczema and hay fever.

Growing up with childhood asthma myself, I can relate to this:

Blaser says the study doesn’t prove that the bacterium itself is preventing asthma, and says they could serve as a marker for something else that happens in children’s developing bodies. “One explanation for this phenomenon has been termed the ‘hygiene hypothesis,’ which considers that humans are more prone to allergic disorders because of a lifestyle that may be too ‘clean’,” Blaser’s team wrote. The idea is the immune system doesn’t have enough work to do early in life, so it becomes hyper-responsive to inappropriate triggers, such as dust, instead [Reuters].

The full article is here: here.

In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did.

So they have pinpointed the area which allows for mimmicking behavior.

Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons."


Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.


"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."

See the whole story here

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (AP) -- Bank of America Corp. is rolling out a new security system aimed at thwarting efforts by online crooks to access its customers' accounts.


Passwords will no longer be enough.


With SiteKey, bank customers pick three challenge questions -- things only the customer would know, such as the year and model of the customer's first car -- and provide them with the traditional password to log on.


Customers can also verify they are indeed at Bank of America's Web site by clicking on a SiteKey button. If they fail to see a secret image and phrase they had chosen earlier, they could be at a fake Web site and the target of a "phishing" scam.


Until we have full biometrics this will be better security than just a password. I can see people forgetting which challenge questions go with which site though, ultimately causing more headaches if they get locked out after the 3rd or 5th try, because they pick the right challenge question.


The full story is here

The past week or so I have been delving into DNA and genetics, how cells and enzymes
work, ribosomes, and other such details. A very good intro into cells is here.

Discovery channel also ran a multi-part series called "how to make a human" discussing DNA. What
I got from each is interesting, but there seems to be a bit of a conflict, and that is what I wish to think through.


In Cells, we learn that the encoding in DNA is there to replicate and build certain shapes of folded proteins. These special shapes match the shapes of very specific molecules, and are designed to make or break specific molecular bonds. The final word from the cell article is that all DNA does is code for enzymes. This does not explain non-enzym

e material, like cell walls. They do reference that cells are molecular machines, so if enzymes can create all sorts of molecules, then this concept would still work.


One of the things shown during the Discovery series, was a family that had a genetic defect that made the fingers stop growing after the first joint, even though the palm of the hand was perfectly formed. It was traced down to a single code mistake along a chain in one chromosome. This would imply that somewhere in the genes and DNA, not only is there the instructions for building the day to day molecule builders that make maltose breakers, and hemoglobin molecules, but something which directs the entire stem cell to full growth as well. There must be instructions which direct the zygote and stem cells to differentiate to form brain tissue, (and to become the complex thing that a whole brain is), and for the entire body to develop literally from head to toe, (including toes). In retrospect, it could not be any other way, or the whole embryonic development cycle is all magic anyway.


The other thing brought up in the Discovery series, is personality and tenancies in DNA. This brings up interesting possibilities from quite a few angles. We believe that personality, aggressive or passive behavior, and other such things, are generally set by genetics, but specific to each person according to development through life and responses to the environment. These tendencies can be in a few categories. First, there are the types of behaviors coming from imbalance of certain brain chemicals. Just as a lactose intolerant person does not have the ability to produce the enzyme lactase, we know that certain types of brain chemicals may be in abundance or short supply, causing the neural activity to be modified. Manic-depressive and bi-polar fits into this category. There are probably many others as well. Some may be combinations of brain chemicals, not just one. There might be something in
the genetic coding which alters how receptor sites themselves work, not just what fits at a receptor site.


Some background into the brain itself can be found here.

Of course, All of this is extremely interesting to me as I work on Robotics and attempt to mimic the human system a bit.