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.