Readit Newseig commented on Feynman vs. Computer entropicthoughts.com/feyn... · Posted by u/cgdl
What is the advantage of this Monte Carlo approach over a typical numerical integration method (like Runge-Kutta)?
eig commented on 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long conwaylife.com/forums/vie... · Posted by u/nooks
Is there a visualization of the glider in the thread? Would love to see how it evolves with one dimension being time.
eig commented on High speed X-ray video: jumping beans, wind-up toys and more youtube.com/watch?v=xdpDd... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
I got nervous watching him put his hand in front of the machine.
You don't want to subject yourself needlessly to ionizing radiation. A little here and there is probably okay at small doses and for valid reasons, but it all adds up over a lifetime.
He didn't mention how much X-ray radiation this puts out in the first half or so of the video. I worry it's more than a medical photograph as it's continuous high sample rate video, but I'm not an expert. Would be curious to know.
Also curious about the shielding and leaking.
Don't damage your DNA if you don't have to. This is a cool, semi-educational video. I don't think I'd take the same risk though.
Be rest assured Ben’s previous job was in the medial imaging industry. While he worked on MRI machines rather than ionizing radiation, I think he’s very well aware of the dangers of X rays and has many projects dealing with ionizing radiation. There’s a lot of bad safety science YouTubers, Ben isn’t one of them :)
Funny thing: it’s actually rare to get radiation damage to human hands and feet since there’s not too much growing tissue there!
eig commented on Why formalize mathematics – more than catching errors rkirov.github.io/posts/wh... · Posted by u/birdculture
I’m not a mathematician, so could someone explain the difference in usage between Lean and Coq?
On a surface level my understanding is that both are computer augmented ways to formalize mathematics. Why use one over the other? Why was Lean developed when Coq already existed?
eig commented on IRonCub: A Humanoid Robot Designed to Fly Like Iron Man spectrum.ieee.org/ironcub... · Posted by u/rbanffy
I really feel like people need to stop trying to make these sorts of robots look so "human-like". The effect of a mouthless bald doll head strapped on top of an iron man robot isn't exactly comforting, to me anyway. It starts to hit the uncanny valley a bit
Presumably they want to eventually put a human inside it, in which case having a humanoid robot to work off of wouldn't change the aero calculations and designs too much. The article talks about specific design considerations to avoid the exhaust gases.
eig commented on Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis astro.org/news-and-public... · Posted by u/geox
> It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Are you confusing osteoarthritis with rheumatoid arthritis? I didn't think the pain of osteoarthritis had anything to do with the immune response. You've literally got bone rubbing against bone. It's not going to feel good.
Both OA and RA involve some inflammation (-itis means inflammation). RA is more T cell driven inflammation (and clinically visible) while OA is more macrophage driven. Mechanical wearing still makes the joint unhappy at the cellular level- you just don’t see it big and red as a symptom like in RA.
eig commented on Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis astro.org/news-and-public... · Posted by u/geox
Glad to see this! We need better treatments for OA short of a joint replacement.
I'm not too surprised that this treatment works. It's essentially like localized steroids to just the joint- killing off the immune cells causing inflammation.
Good features is that it's localized (so no systemic immunosuppression) and the risk of cancer is low since you rarely get radiation-induced cancer in joints because there's not enough dividing cells. Unfortunately heading to radiotherapy is a logistical challenge, but there are enough people suffering from OA that would happily do this to get relief.
Ostensibly, it is in what you left out of your question? If you can buy the assets, specifically, you can not buy the liabilities.
Obviously, getting some people off of obligation lists is one of them. There could be others?
Is it not illegal in the US to break up a company to isolate liabilities?
I'm not too impressed with this article since it doesn't really give a definition for computing, just picks a few similarities between what we see as computing (in the practical sense) and what cells do.
It's a shame because there *has* been a lot of deep work done on what kind of computer life is. People often use the Chomsky Hierarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy) to define the different types of computer vs automata. Importantly, a classical Turing machine is Type-0 on the Chomsky Hierarchy. Depending on what parts you include from a biological system, you could argue it's anywhere from Type-0 to Type-4.
Interestingly, the PhD thesis of well-known geneticist Aviv Regev was to show that certain combinations of enzymes with chemical concentration states are enough to emulate pi-calculus, and therefore are Turing machines! https://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb01/regev....