Filed under: Alzheimer's, Blade Runner, Connections, General Musings, Health, movies, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, Survival, Writing stuff
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been very busy getting ready for our trip to Patagonia, including some long hours to wrap up work for clients before I leave.
But I took some time out for a follow-up visit to my doctor. A good thing that I did.
* * * * * * *
As I sat waiting in the exam room for my doctor to come in, I looked around. All the usual stuff. But high up on top of a cabinet, only barely visible from where I sat on the exam table, was a wooden box. Some light-colored wood, perhaps pine or a light oak. It was a bit battered, but in decent shape, about the size of loaf of bread. Not one of those long loafs of sandwich bread – a short loaf, of something like rye or pumpernickel.
One the end of the box bore a large seal, the sort of thing which was popular in the late 19th century. Big outer ring, inner motif of a six-pointed star, cross-hatched on half of each star arm to indicate motion or something. Center of the star had three initials: JBL. Around the ring was more information: “TYRELLS HYGIENIC INST. NEW YORK CITY U.S.A. PATENT JANUARY, 1894 AUGUST, 1897 JUNE 1903.” Outside the ring, one in each upper corner, and one below in the center were three words: “JOY. BEAUTY. LIFE.”
You can get some idea of what this looked like from this image. So far, I have been unable to find an image online of the box I saw.
* * * * * * *
I’d gone in first part of the week to have blood drawn, for tests my doctor wanted to run. I still have the bruise where the aide who drew the blood went a bit too deep and punctured the back of my vein.
My doctor looked over the lab results, looked up at me. “Not too bad. LDL is a bit high, so is your HDL, which helps. Fasting blood sugar also a bit high, but not bad. I think we should give both of those a chance to settle out some more, as you continue to get diet and exercise back completely under your control. The rest all looks pretty good – liver & kidney function, et cetera. Nothing to be too worried about.”
She handed over the sheaf of papers to me. “But I want to do something more about your blood pressure. It is still dangerously high, though you seem to have made some real progress with the beta blocker.”
Yeah, I had – I’d been testing it. And it was down 50 points systolic, 20 points diastolic. About halfway to where it should be.
“Would you be willing to try something else? Another drug?”
Echo of the first conversation we had on the topic. “What did you have in mind?”
“Calcium channel blocker,” she said. “We could still increase the dosage of the beta blocker you’re taking, because you’re on the low end of that. But I would like to see how your system responds to this additional drug, also at a minimal dosage. Then we can tweak dosage levels, if we need to.”
Another good call. “Sure, let’s try it.”
* * * * * * *
My doctor returned with my prescriptions. “Do you have any other questions?”
I pointed at the box up on top of the cabinet. “What’s the story behind that?”
Caught off-guard, she looked at the box, confused.
“I mean, what was in there? Is there a particular reason you have it?”
“No, not really. Nothing’s in there. I just came across it at an antique shop some years ago.” She looked at me. “Why?”
“There was an author in the 60s & 70s who wrote a lot of stuff I like. Philip K. Dick. He had a lot of health issues, and I can imagine him sitting in a room not unlike this one, looking at some variation of a box like that.” I got down off the exam table. “One of his most important books was made into the movie Blade Runner in the early 1980s. In that movie one of the major characters goes by the name Tyrell, and he has a connection to . . . um, the medical industry. I just thought it an interesting coincidence.”
“Oh.” She was completely lost. I’ve worked with doctors enough to know that they do not like this feeling. “Well, we’ll see you after your trip, check out how the new meds are working, OK?”
“Sure.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, N. Am. Welsh Choir, Patagonia, Promotion, Publishing, Travel, Writing stuff
Well, this is post #500. Figuring that posts average about 500 words (that’s a guess, but I bet that it is pretty close), this blog has generated about 250,000 words – about twice the number of words in Communion of Dreams. Of course, even at that it has still been a whole lot less work overall than it was to write and revise the novel. And it has been a good venue for me to promote the book, as well as to explore a number of things happening in my life.
A bit about that first point: CoD has now had just shy of 12,000 downloads, and I would once again like to thank all those who have helped to spread the word. Given that this has been done entirely word-of-mouth, that’s very gratifying. In the coming weeks (once we’re back from vacation and things settle down) my wife will be taking over the job of promoting the book – I just haven’t had the emotional energy for the long slog it takes to try and go through round after round of submissions and follow-up. She’ll be a bit more removed from the thing, but still has a great desire to see it succeed. And she may decide to explore some non-conventional options for publishing and may do some guest posts here to solicit ideas and support.
In a week we’ll be going on vacation – I’ll set up the blog to automatically post some items, so those who like to stop by will find fresh content on a regular basis – but I will not be posting from Patagonia. Look forward to getting some travelogues from our trip later, though! Things might also be a bit light in terms of posting here over the next week, because I still have a lot to wrap up before we leave.
And speaking of such, I need to get busy . . .
Jim Downey
(Seriously – this guy is brilliant on several levels. When he shuttered his blog in January ’07, it was depressing as all hell. Catching his stuff at various other locations now and then was enough to keep hope alive. Rejoice! It is the Second Coming of Bérubé !!!)
Jim Downey
Just some quick numbers.
We’re now over 11,600 downloads of Communion of Dreams. Since the beginning of the year that’s over 5,000 downloads, almost 500 downloads of the audio version of the book. This blog has had over 26,000 views (and my filters have caught over 15,000 spam comments – sheesh!). This is post 480 – I’ll have to think of something special for 500, I suppose.
Thanks to one and all who have helped to make these numbers a reality, who have shared my writings with others, who appreciate my sometimes offbeat sense of humor and odd take on the world.
Jim Downey
We were watching some of the first season episodes of The West Wing last night, and in this episode the White House Press Secretary comments that a news story is already “on the Internet” and will be in the newspapers the next day.
I turned to my wife and made note of this, how it shows the evolution of our language in just 8 years. Because the usual word choice today to say the same thing would likely be that a news story is already “online” – it would be understood that meant on the Internet.
Just thought I’d share that.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
A couple of quick items . . .
We’re now over 11,400 downloads of Communion of Dreams – that’s about 400 in the last month.
Sometime overnight we passed 25,000 hits to this blog. I mentioned a few months back that Welcome to the Hobbit House was far and away the most popular post I’ve written. It still is, by a factor of 10x. It seems to pop up fairly high when people search for “hobbit”, “hobbit house” and variations thereof. Not my most thought-provoking or literary post, but there you go.
Oh, yeah, this is post 461. Given my usual rate of posting, I should cross 500 sometime in October. I’ll try to make note of it. Since my posts tend to average 400 – 500 words, that means we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 words, or half again the number of words in Communion. But while I do try and put a little thought into most of the things I post here, that is nothing like the amount of work required to write a book-length work of fiction.
So, thanks to one and all who stop by here (particularly those who comment), and who have downloaded Communion and told friends/forums about the book. Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll have a small bit of news about the novel (no, I have not been contacted by a publisher or anything).
Maybe more later today.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Pharyngula, Politics, PZ Myers, Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism, Violence, Writing stuff
[This post contains mild spoilers about Communion of Dreams.]
I’ve had some people say that the Edenists I created for Communion of Dreams are just absurdly overblown – that I have unfairly mischaracterized both fundamentalist religion and radical environmentalists. I don’t usually argue with people who say things like this – my goal is not to convince everyone that my book of speculative fiction is right in all of its particulars. I just hope that they will continue to pay attention to the world around them, and see what is happening.
Like this item, via PZ Myers:
Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?
* * *
Clearly then, “evolutionists should not be allowed to roam free in the land.” All that remains for us to discuss is “What should be done with evolutionists?” For the purposes of this essay, I will ignore the minor issue of Western-style jurisprudence and merely mention possible solutions to the “evolutionism problem,” leaving the legal details to others:
- Labor camps. Their fellow believers were high on these. But, my position would be that most of them have lived their lives at, or near the public trough. So, after their own beliefs, their life should continue only as long as they can support themselves in the camps.
- Require them to wear placards around their neck, or perhaps large medallions which prominently announce “Warning:Evolutionist! Mentally Incompetent – Potentially Dangerous.” I consider this option too dangerous.
- Since evolutionists are liars and most do not really believe evolution we could employ truth serum or water-boarding to obtain confessions of evolution rejection. But, thisshould, at most, result in parole, because, like Muslims, evolutionist religion permits them to lie if there is any benefit to them.
- An Evolutionist Colony in Antarctica could be a promising option. Of course inspections would be required to prevent too much progress. They might invent gunpowder.
- A colony on Mars would prevent gunpowder from harming anyone but their own kind, in the unlikely event they turned out to be intelligent enough to invent it.
That’s an excerpt from the close of the piece, after the author has gone through some effort to define who ‘evolutionists’ are (he seems to mix up socialism, communism, Nazism, and support for slavery. No, really, he says that ‘evolutionists’ are all of these things.) Feel free to read the entire piece.
Now, as one commentor over at Pharyngula said, “that’s some weapons-grade crazy.”
My intent here isn’t to get into a discussion on this particular fellow’s pathology. It is simply to point out that this stuff is out there, and in my experience is fairly widespread. He’s just down the road from me about 100 miles, and growing up and living in the Midwest I have met plenty of his type. There are a lot of people who would take such an eliminationist approach to all their perceived enemies. Unfortunately, as we have also seen with the Earth Liberation Movement, there are also those who claim to be radical environmentalists who are willing to take violent action. Melding two such groups was an easy step in my mind.
Don’t misunderstand me – I am not claiming that all religious adherents are violent extremists. Nor are all environmentalists. Hardly. But these groups are out there. They are not a figment of my imagination. And if we forget that, or ignore them, we may find ourselves in a world akin to Communion of Dreams (or someplace worse.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Feedback, Guns, Health, Migraine, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction, Sleep, Society, Writing stuff
As I have noted, I have been fairly busy of late. And in looking back over the last couple of months, I can see a real change in both my energy level and my ability to focus – it’s no longer the case that I want to nap most of the time. Yeah, I am still going through a detox process, still finding my way back to something akin to normalcy – but there has been a decided improvement. Fewer migraines. More energy. A willingness to take on some additional obligations.
So I had to debate a long time when I was recently contacted by a site wanting to expand their scope and impact. These folks. They were wanting me to do a column every two weeks, more-or-less related to Science Fiction (giving me a lot of latitude to define the scope of the column as I saw fit). They have a lot of good ideas, and seem to have a pretty good handle on where they want to go in the future. And the invitation was a real compliment to me – not only did they say nice things about my writing, but they have a good energy and attitude which is appealing.
But I declined the invitation. Why? Well, to a certain extent it’s like Bradbury says: “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
I may come to regret this decision. It could possibly have helped my writing career, at least in terms of landing a conventional publishing contract. And I know from writing my newspaper column that the discipline can do good things for me – forcing me to address a specific topic rather than the more general musings I post here and at UTI. But I really do have a lot on my plate right now, and they are all things I want to do well, rather than just get done. Blogging here (which is really quite important to me). Participating at UTI. Crafting this book about being a care provider. Getting the ballistics project website up and running. All the book conservation work waiting for me. Eventually getting to work on St. Cybi’s Well again. And enjoying life. There’s been precious little of that these last few years.
So, I declined. But if you perhaps would be interested in the gig, they have contact info on their homepage.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Connections, Expert systems, General Musings, Health, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Synesthesia, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
[This post contains mild spoilers about Communion of Dreams.]
One of the difficulties facing computer engineers/scientists with developing expert systems and true Artificial Intelligence is the paradigm they use. Simply, working from structures analogous to the human brain, there has been a tendency to isolate functions and have them work independently. Even in modern computer science such things as adaptive neural networks are understood to analogous to biological neural networks in the brain, which serve a specific function:
Biological neural networks are made up of real biological neurons that are connected or functionally-related in the peripheral nervous system or the central nervous system. In the field of neuroscience, they are often identified as groups of neurons that perform a specific physiological function in laboratory analysis.
But what if the neuroscience on which these theories are based has been wrong?
Here’s the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a “higher cognitive” producer, like the brain’s superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.
The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.
* * *
Researchers trained monkeys to locate a light flashed on a screen. When the light was very bright, they easily found it; when it was dim, it took a long time. But if a dim light made a brief sound, the monkeys found it in no time – too quickly, in fact, than can be explained by the old theories.
Recordings from 49 neurons responsible for the earliest stages of visual processing, researchers found activation that mirrored the behavior. That is, when the sound was played, the neurons reacted as if there had been a stronger light, at a speed that can only be explained by a direct connection between the ear and eye brain regions, said researcher Ye Wang of the University of Texas in Houston.
The implication is that there is a great deal more flexibility – or ‘plasticity’ – in the structure of the brain than had been previously understood.
Well, yeah. Just consider how someone who has been blind since birth will have heightened awareness of other senses. Some have argued that this is simply a matter of such a person learning to make the greatest use of the senses they have. But others have suspected that they actually learn to use those structures in the brain normally associated with visual processing to boost the ability to process other sensory data. And that’s what the above research shows.
OK, two things. One, this is why I have speculated in Communion of Dreams that synesthesia is more than just the confusion of sensory input – it is using our existing senses to construct not a simple linear view of the world, but a matrix in three dimensions (with the five senses on each axis of such a ‘cube’ structure). In other words, synesthesia is more akin to a meta-cognitive function. That is why (as I mentioned a few days ago) the use of accelerator drugs in the novel allows users to take a step-up in cognition and creativity, though at the cost of burning up the brain’s available store of neurotransmitters.
And two, this is also why I created the ‘tholin gel’ found on Titan to be a superior material as the basis of computers, and even specify that the threshold limit for a gel burr in such use is about the size of the human brain. Why? Well, because such a superconducting superfluid would not function as a simple neural network – rather, the entire burr of gel would function as a single structure, with enormous flexibility and plasticity. In other words, much more like the way the human brain functions as is now coming to be understood.
So, perhaps in letting go of the inaccurate model for the way the brain works, we’ll take a big step closer to creating true artificial intelligence. Like in my book. It pays to be flexible, in our theories, in our thinking, and in how we see the world.
Jim Downey
Hat tip to ML for the news link.
Filed under: Genetic Testing, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Synesthesia, Titan, Writing stuff
I’ve written previously about the emergence of consciousness and the role that the biochemical stew in our heads plays in awareness and cognition. But let’s get a little more basic in our analysis. Let’s consider fire. No, not the slow fire of chemical reactions in our bodies, but actual burning of wood, and the role that it may have played in the development of human intelligence.
* * * * * * *
The Greek myth of Prometheus bringing the holy fire of Zeus to mankind, and thereby enabling civilization, has usually been understood as being an explanation of the role which technology plays in human development. After all, fire allows humans to control our environment, from living in colder climates to clearing land for farming to metallurgy. And, of course, to cook food, making a wider range of nutrients available.
But what if fire made human thought itself possible?
Cooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart
After two tremendous growth spurts — one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability — the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy.
It consumes huge amounts of calories, is rather temperamental and, when harnessed just right, exhibits incredible prowess. The brain’s roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man’s invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.
OK, that article is a little light on actual information. So I went to check the research paper. It’s a bit thick, but the basic idea was to study the rise of human cognition via two methods:
In this study, we attempted to identify molecular mechanisms involved in the evolution of human-specific cognitive abilities by combining biological data from two research directions: evolutionary and medical. Firstly, we identify the molecular changes that took place on the human evolutionary lineage, presumably due to positive selection. Secondly, we consider molecular changes observed in schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder believed to affect such human cognitive functions as the capacity for complex social relations and language [6–12]. Combining the two datasets, we test the following prediction: if a cognitive disorder, such as schizophrenia, affects recently evolved biological processes underlying human-specific cognitive abilities, we anticipate finding a significant overlap between the recent evolutionary and the pathological changes. Furthermore, if such significant overlap is observed, the overlapping biological processes may provide insights into molecular changes important for the evolution and maintenance of human-specific cognitive abilities.
Got that? First, you determine the differences due to evolution (specifically as seen in DNA/mRNA divergence between us and chimpanzees), then you see where the brains of people who have schizophrenia are different from ‘normal’ brains. That can give you some indications of how cognition works, since schizophrenia is known to primarily impact cognition.
What did the researchers find?
In order to select human-specific evolutionary changes, we used the published list of 22 biological processes showing evidence of positive selection in terms of their mRNA expression levels in brain during recent human evolution [13]. Next, we tested whether expression of genes contained in these functional categories is altered in schizophrenia to a greater extent than expected by chance. To do this, we ranked 16,815 genes expressed in brain in order of probability of differential expression in schizophrenia, using data from a meta-analysis of 105 individuals profiled on 4 different microarray platforms in 6 independent studies [14]. We found that 6 of the 22 positively selected biological processes are significantly enriched in genes differentially expressed in schizophrenia (Wilcoxon rank sum test, p < 0.03, false discovery rate (FDR) = 11%), while only 0.7 would be expected to show such an enrichment by chance (Figure 1; Table S2 in Additional data file 1; Materials and methods). Strikingly, all six of these biological processes are related to energy metabolism. This is highly unexpected, given that there were only 7 biological processes containing genes involved in energy metabolism among the 22 positively selected categories (Figure 1; Table S2 in Additional data file 1). The mRNA expression changes observed in schizophrenia appear to be distributed approximately equally in respect to the direction of change, pointing towards a general dysregulation of these processes in the disease rather than a coordinated change (Table S3 in Additional data file 1).
Simply put: it’s metabolism. The brain eats up a lot of energy, about 20% of all the energy you take in as food. That’s a lot – for chimps the number is about 13%, and for other vertebrates it runs 2 – 8%. The conclusion:
In this study we find a disproportionately large overlap between processes that have changed during human evolution and biological processes affected in schizophrenia. Genes relating to energy metabolism are particularly implicated for both the evolution and maintenance of human-specific cognitive abilities.
Using 1H NMR spectroscopy, we find evidence that metabolites significantly altered in schizophrenia have changed more on the human lineage than those that are unaltered. Furthermore, genes related to the significantly altered metabolites show greater sequence and mRNA expression divergence between humans and chimpanzees, as well as indications of positive selection in humans, compared to genes related to the unaltered metabolites.
Taken together, these findings indicate that changes in human brain metabolism may have been an important step in the evolution of human cognitive abilities. Our results are consistent with the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution [11,37].
When did this take place? From the LiveScience article first cited:
The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic “Iron Chefs;” the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.
In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.
* * * * * * *
In Communion of Dreams, I posit the use of “auggies” – drugs designed to maximize the utilization of neurotransmitters in the brain. When combined with increased sensory information thanks to technology, an artificial kind of synesthesia occures, allowing for insights (artistic, cognitive) otherwise beyond human ability. But it is a cheat – you ‘burn up’ the available neurotransmitters quickly, accelerating brain function, but are left then less capable for a period of days after as the body replenishes. This is by and large a metabolic function – the same way an athlete can burn up energy stored in muscles in one brief period, but then needs time to recover.
I wrote this with an instinctive understanding of the mechanism involved – we’ve all experienced something akin to this phenomenon of pushing ourselves mentally for a short period, being tired and less able to think clearly afterwards. It’s a bit surprising to find that it may have literally been the same mechanism which lead to the rise of human intelligence to begin with.
And as for the alien artifact on Titan, which causes a similar phenomenon? Just coincidence that Prometheus was one of the Titans in Greek mythology.
No, really – just coincidence.
Jim Downey
*and yes, I realize that this isn’t quite what The Doors meant.
Communion Of Dreams 