5 ms·
> It's a balloon flapping madly in a hurricane, tethered to an intoxicated panicked mouse clinging to a rope Welp, my desk is now covered in coffee. Thanks fo
by Balgair 9y ago
> It's a balloon flapping madly in a hurricane, tethered to an intoxicated panicked mouse clinging to a rope
Welp, my desk is now covered in coffee. Thanks for that one, I'll be stealing it ;)
It may be better to think of a cell as more of a liquid crystal than anything else, considering the densities. The synapse of neurons is incredibly dense with structures and scaffolding proteins. Even most grad students still think that the ER is a soma kinda thingy, but it goes all the way up the dendrite to just kiss the synaptic buton. The ER is really more of a cell inside a cell, or rather the cell membrane is just a latex bodysuit for the ER.
It's always amazing to me when I heard guys like Elon and Kurzweil talking about MMIs and how you are never gonna actually die, you'll just upload your brain, somehow. Like, they really have no idea how clueless we are in biology. Eric Schmidt goes to parties in West LA about living forever. It's crazy. We are decades away from even a cursory understanding of 1 cubic mm of brain tissue, with all the neurons, astrocytes, glia, mesenchymal cells, etc. Like, we just found out that the immune system is in your brain too, like 3 years ago. I actually think Elon has better odds of putting 0.6 of a Saturn V on Mars and not having it explode before we have a MMI.
- abecedarius 9y agoWhat do you mean by MMI?
- mncharity 9y ago> desk :) > liquid crystal [...] cell membrane is just a latex bodysuit for the ER Has anyone seen an attempt to collect or catalog such analogies? "One way to think about <concept>, is <one-liner or short story>." Maybe something like http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ , but for analogical conceptual understanding, instead of rough quantitative understanding. My very fuzzy recollection is bionumbers grew out of one grad student thinking "I don't have a quantitative feel for my area", and starting to collect numbers. Could we do that for stories? > upload your brain [...] crazy Well, there's https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ (clueless physicist meets unfamiliar field). But also... part of what makes science work, is fear of being embarrassed by getting it wrong in front of the community of one's peers. And to avoid that, extensively sanity checking with local peers. Trying to think clearly without those, using literature and smarts, but disconnected from the field(s), is hard. And bonus hard points for multidisciplinary questions.