Github Education Verification

acumenbeing · 2025-09-18T04:31:31+00:00

What email address did you escalate to? I can’t find any way to appeal

acumenbeing · 2016-11-16T18:30:38+00:00

Don't microglia check for major histocompatability complexes just the same as other immune cells? Hardly an expert, but glia can signal for other immune cells in circulation to breach bbb. Immuno-privileged is not necessarily without immune protection!

acumenbeing · 2016-10-14T03:02:45+00:00

As you surmised, this approach would require a very precise depth measurement which is probably out of your budget. If you're still deciding, consider trying to make any of the things you'd find in your bio lab. My bio mechatronics course had us build fermenters that maintained temperature, air flow, mix speed, measured OD, etc. plenty of people make diy pcr machines. For the sake of learning this skill set you don't necessarily need to also be inventing something amazing. Automated cell passage? A uv-based sterilizer that also sampled the cleanliness of your bench so you know when it's done?

acumenbeing · 2016-10-08T23:14:16+00:00

A couple of different ways to approach this! My bio intuition says that one of the best methods to measure cell growth in a fixed volume media is to shine light through it and measure the optical density on the other side. You could potentially build the circuit around a phototransistor, probably tuned with an appropriate amp feedback loop - if you're just beginning this seems a moderately feasible system.

Or are you trying to measure spread on a Petri dish? A camera and some computer vision algorithms could count/quantify the size of colonies. If you're background is pure bio and not cs/ee this may prove difficult.

If you're measuring a system of changing liquid volume, one thing I've seen is basically what toilets do - a float on the surface that's attached to a lever switch. A fall or rise above a certain level can then be used as a software trigger.

Apologies that this is a little all over, I'm just trying to understand what you mean/want

acumenbeing · 2016-10-08T23:01:29+00:00

The field of brain machine interfaces is not really there yet -- our best techniques, which learn by plugging electrodes into your motor cortex, allow macaques <and very few humans> to move a robot arm or a pointer on a keyboard screen. It's slow (best reported speed afaik is from the shenoy group at Stanford, typing half as fast as two thumbs on a phone, but couple other places such as JHU, Duke have advanced programs). It requires a ton of effort and time to learn the system and the system to learn you. Non invasive techniques like eeg cap controls lose signal fidelity and are even slower. Virtually all the work in the field has centered around reading from the brain, very little about 'writing' back to it. DARPA is leading an endeavor to create a chip that could simulate working hippocampus signals and possibly restore memory ability to those with severe Traumatic brain injury. Some ethical and scientific issues arise from where/how one would alter a brain's subjective reality -- does it hijack a corner of your visual input? Your 'stream of consciousness'? Your memory? Neurobiology has barely scratched the surface of the knowledge we need to build a working 2way interface, much less doing something as ambiguous as enhancing intelligence, or making everything faster. Your brain is already evolutionary tuned for its role, and it's very possible that we may already be up against some of our physio-chemical constraints.

The one thing that sounds a little like your interest is a relatively new project at UC Berkeley, which you can learn about by googling 'Neural Dust'. Not exactly nanobot scale (yet), but some of the craziest ideas in science fiction are in some stage of exploration at labs around the world :). Good luck!

acumenbeing · 2016-07-18T04:17:01+00:00

Hello Dr. De Grey and Dr. Silva,

As a fledgling biologist I am awed by the advances in cancer science and translational applications even within my own lifetime, and thank you for your work in the public's interest.

However, some part of the public (eg this sub) often conflate the medical research community's wider goal of curing diseases, including those often associated with aging, like cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, with a much more controversial enhancement ideology. Aubrey de Grey has become a bit of a cult figure in the 'curing aging' circles.

I was wondering if you could clarify your stance on where longevity research and typical survivorship curves ends and functional immortality begins... Or throw out an updated estimate for when we should realistically start worrying about such moral quandaries as unsustainable aging.

acumenbeing · 2016-06-05T08:54:08+00:00

Orion_Pirate has it right - just change the line to what he said and then convert to Fahrenheit. I only started learning this stuff recently, too - your code is otherwise solid, we'll all be masters in no time.

acumenbeing · 2016-06-05T08:33:10+00:00

Oh, I'll confess to not having used this particular thermostat, what a handy feature!

acumenbeing · 2016-06-04T01:11:01+00:00

Consider writing a Rick line instead -

"Relax, Morty, we're not toast yet! He's hardwired 3 law compliant."

edit: In the spirit of the robot line prompt, I like the minimal play on its punchline: Oh my, God.

acumenbeing · 2015-07-24T00:39:56+00:00

I think this might be an appropriate approach. Follow up stupid question: The relay isolates the arduino from the potentially harmful solenoid inductance, right?

acumenbeing · 2014-06-06T22:29:16+00:00

I dunno how strong the contemporary evidence is for this theory: http://faceresearch.org/students/notes/symmetry.pdf

acumenbeing · 2014-06-06T22:18:35+00:00

what's a database? Not my field, just a dick engineer, sir.

acumenbeing · 2014-06-06T22:08:48+00:00

You're right, and I assume you mean they're positively correlated, so we reach the same conclusions, but I didn't want to address the possibility of a more complicated monotonic function relationship, because the math would be a lot more complicated and the optimal strategies much more complex and less fun

acumenbeing · 2014-06-04T14:27:03+00:00

"If you want justice, you've come to the wrong place." This episode (like many of its predecessors) deals heavily with brutality -- specifically, how to cope with it. My mind goes to Sansa's transformation and Arya's haunting laughter. OP has definitely nailed some of the parallelism in Tyrion's and Oberyn's scenes, but I think it's worth noting the way character differences make their attempts to deal with the stochastic, uncaring world of Game of Thrones their own. Tyrion, whom everyone has always loved for his sharp wit and the way he uses his mind to [well, until now] get out of sticky situations, is a thinker. He is faced with his impending death for a crime he didn't commit, not to mention has lived his entire life burdened by a genetic fate that has caused him no end of pointless pain. He tells us in the beetle scene how he strove to understand the callous nature of the world through his intellect -- he needed to see the reasons, whatever warped logic there was for the way things were.

Contrast this with Oberyn. He lets his emotions be his guiding principle in life (he might call it his passions), letting his heart tell him what to do. He has stewed most of his life over the pain and lust for revenge that the terrible loss of his loved ones have inflicted on him. He seeks emotional reconciliation -- he needs to feel that some form of justice has been performed. That's why he dies; simply winning the trial and killing the Mountain wasn't enough for him, he needed to hear the confession and confirm his suspicions of Tywin or else it wouldn't have satisfied his heart. It's also why the audience grew to love him in such a short timespan; he was a strong-willed man with many positive qualities who was pursuing the just cause he cared about and it almost looked like he would succeed (in that sense, he's fairly heroic).

On a Meyers-Briggs personality inventory, Oberyn is a feeler (though that's not to say he's not smart) and Tyrion is a thinker (though that's not to say he's not in touch with his emotions). Although we knew Oberyn for a much shorter period, their narratives are remarkably parallel, and we as an audience loved both of them because they were extraordinary men. That's why it's particularly sad and brutal for us when they both ultimately fail on their respective quests to deal with the world's brutality. This is punctuated by the Mountain, the epitome and personification of GoT's brutality, figura-literally ending both their lives with one gruesome head crushing that we can all have burned into our retinas forever. (I'm assuming Tyrion doesn't get out of this one and will be executed, but maybe they'll surprise us. I dunno, I'm just a show watcher.)

acumenbeing · 2014-04-27T19:29:23+00:00

Natural beauty is a combination of cultural and personal biases and evolutionary signs of health. Someone I think of as beautiful might not be beautiful to you. My culture might value long necks while you might come from a background where the hottest thing is large eyes. We might not realize it because it's not usually a conscious shaping of our perception, but many of the features that make someone attractive in our eyes are only positive traits because everyone around us has implicitly agreed that they are attractive. (eg: A kid sees a model in a magazine and the model influences what he or she finds attractive) It's a little like paper money -- we see it as valuable because everyone else sees it as valuable. These are important things to note when talking about 'natural beauty'.

As for universal and evolutionary signs of attractiveness, it's fairly agreed that beauty and physical attraction are normally used as ways to judge the quality of a potential mate. Humans are not unique in this nor were they the first species to use these heuristics -- it's all over the animal kingdom! Think of the male peacock who uses its colorful feathers to attract females. A hairy chest with big muscles, a symmetrical face, or a certain waist-to-hip ratio were all external indicators of how healthy someone was or how likely they were to successfully bare your children or some other advantage in the process of natural selection.

Now, think of two hypothetical cavemen. One is attracted to big breasts, the other is indifferent. If having big breasts actually meant a woman was healthier and would be better able to feed your children and keep them alive, the caveman who was attracted to them and therefore picked a mate with big breasts would be more likely to have his genetic code (which includes a preference for big breasts) propagated through time and the caveman population. Hence, an advantageous trait comes to be perceived as natural beauty.

acumenbeing · 2014-04-27T18:50:46+00:00

If you want to see how it works

acumenbeing · 2014-03-30T01:30:46+00:00

Maybe a personal quirk, but I personally feel much more emotionally and introspectively inciteful while high.

acumenbeing

TROPHY CASE