we don't need no education

fuck yeah, 11 year-old kid! tell texas and the tyranny of standardized testing to take their curriculum-wasting mind-numbing creativity-stifling exam and shove it! free thinkers unite! or, er, um, disperse! and um, multiply! or something.

have i become less meta?

i used to be smart and depressed. i think now i'm ignorant and blissful. is the trade-off worthwhile? i don't know, that's what this experiment is all about, i guess. i haven't been keeping up with the running thing lately, too much focus on lab and girls and sushi and tv shows and downloading music legally from apple itunes music store. but i'm doing bay to breakers in may, so i better get back into running. especially since it's like 20 degrees warmer in the mornings than when i started back in november. but my motivation then was much more out of a desperate need for mental stability than any real desire to be in shape, so now that i'm doing well i'm not that driven.

a professor who used to be at mit gave lectures in my neuroscience class this week and it reminded me how much i love the abstraction barrier.

zaphod?

second heads are real.

daily show

daily show shouts out to bloggers. all i gotta say is, why hasn't someone already grabbed colberkilledapanda.com?

daily geekout

global consciousness project may be predicting world events.

autism is not a crutch! this synesthete solves math problems by visualizing numbers as shapes and colors, and is inventing a new language where sounds shared by words will reflect underlying semantic relationships between words. a good friend of mine has been saying for some time that if i'm going to study neuroscience, i need to figure out what it is about autistics that makes them the way they are, and instead of figuring out how to "fix" them, figure out what it is that we can learn from them. in general, i think nonconventionally-wired brains may be our only salvation in this rats nest of normally-wired morons.

oh, and, for those of you who don't know about lentivirus, it's a form of HIV virus that molecular biologists have altered so that it cannot replicate or create any of the proteins that cause AIDS. instead of inserting HIV genes into the host cell's genome, lentivirus can infect a cell and insert whatever gene it is programmed to insert by scientists in the lab. so it has been used to overexpress and to knockdown expression of certain proteins in order to determine their functions in cells, roles in the development of organisms, etc. but it has been speculated that at some point we may actually be able to use lentivirus built to combat other diseases. so you would get infected with a bioengineered HIV virus in order to kill cancer, or some other debilitating or life-threatening disease. this strikes me as profound. because, on the surface, it appears that AIDS is a horrible thing that has caused and continues to cause many people to suffer. but what if it was given to us for a greater good? what if our experience with AIDS and our understanding of viruses and our engineering of lentivirus actually cures thousands of other diseases in the next few hundred years? it makes me have faith that all hardships are endured by humanity for a reason. it's hard now, but the learning process will makes things better in the future. here are two articles about lentivirus fighting cancer (1), (2), and then a scary article about how HIV is actually still adapting despite our efforts to control it with drugs.

the political power of faces

so i've read that our internal template for "beauty" is a weighted average of all of the faces that we've come across. i've also read that symmetry in faces is preferred, since evolutionarily we don't want mates with defective bodies because we don't want progeny with defective bodies.

and of course it makes sense that we vote for candidates with "views" most similar to our own. but with faces most similar to our own? wtf?

morph your face with a politico's and you're likely to be persuaded by him

especially read the first comment...now that's fucked up. all bush would have to do to get me to vote for him in ten years is make custom-designed ads that only get sent to my television, where his face is morphed with mine, and then do that to every american. hmm. maybe the comcast on-demand paradigm where content is individually piped to the home is a totalitarian plant!

meta-intelligent design

alright.

first read this nytimes editorial rationalizing intelligent design. apparently this guy behe came to talk at UCSF and was booed off stage. here is a website with a few links debunking some of his arguments. but let's not stop there. that would be that one-sided and closed-minded. let's get all meta on this guy's ass and everyone elses, too. let's seriously think this through. i'll state my assumptions and biases right now, upfront:

1) i think that there are very simple rules that, when iterated over and over again, are capable of producing the maximum degree of complexity that has been observed in even the most complex of biological systems.

2) i think that we have not yet elucidated exactly what those rules are. to state that darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of all biological systems is simply stating the obvious: we have not yet fully explored the mathematics of nonlinear systems enough to understand how complex properties in the world can emerge from the iterative application of simple rules, and we have not yet built the experimental tools we need to uncover the mechanisms that guided the evolution of many complex biological systems.

3) i think that our perception of the world is fallible, so just because mt. rushmore looks designed and we feel it is designed does not mean that when we encounter complexity on scales we still know very little about, such as on the level of molecular motors in cells, if we feel it is designed, that means it is designed.

okay. now i will build on those assumptions and suggest that proponents of intelligent design are right, but looking in the wrong place and attempting to discredit a field of study that they should, in fact, be promoting as consistent with their own theory.

i think that, more amazing and complex than a molecular motor or mt. rushmore, is the fact that a designer does not have to be invoked in order to explain their emergence from an unsupervised iterative process based on a finite set of simple rules. so if there's a place to look for an intelligent designer, it is not in the actual emergence of any of these seemingly engineered systems, but rather in the universe that pre-dated their emergence. when did these rules get set, and how did the initial conditions get set such that the iterative process would produce something so architecturally magnifiscent that we would be sitting here now staring at it and wondering how it could not be designed? if anyone wants to invoke a designer, they shouldn't be invoking one to explain how this, the most beautifully complex process ever, engineered life, but rather they should be invoking one to explain how a world was created that would make engineering unnecessary.

God is efficient. why would He create a system that required explicitly thinking about each machine and putting the right pieces in place one at a time when He could create a system that allowed Him to go take a vacation and let it organize itself?

such a silly controversy. both sides are incomplete, but right. stop arguing over who knows more about a world that we know nothing about and just keep looking for evidence of how the world works in the most unbiased way we can, despite our innate predispositions to do everything in the most biased way possible.

haha.

stuck in 2005, er 1985, er 1966

sometimes i do things just to able to feel like i am a part of the culture of the blogosphere so that when my grandkids ask me what 2005 was like i can say it pretty much was based on finding links, following links, and sending links to people as a means of learning about the world, experiencing the world, and sharing the world with each other and getting to know each other. this site has these stupid multiple choice tests that create "blogthings" that categorize you. this is the 2004 hit song that i would be if i were one:

1985 by Bowling for Soup

"Where's the mini-skirt made of snakeskin? And who's the other guy that's singing in Van Halen? When did reality become T.V.? What ever happened to sitcoms, game shows?" You took the bitter with the sweet in 2004 - and kept laughing.

What 2004 Hit Song Are You?

then i went ahead and bought the song on itunes music store. haha.

and here's what year i would live in:

You Belong in 1966

1966 If you scored... 1950 - 1959: You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in! 1960 - 1969: You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too. 1970 - 1979: Bold and brash, you take life by the horns. Whether you're partying or protesting, you give it your all! 1980 - 1989: Wild, over the top, and just a little bit cheesy. You're colorful at night - and successful during the day. 1990 - 1999: With you anything goes! You're grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It's all good!

What Year Do You Belong In?

even though this just cost me $1.00 and an hour that some would consider superfluous and wasted, i love the fucking internet, and living in 2005.