> I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.
If anything, this shows that biology and medicine are incomprehensibly more complex than computer science, and that their practitioners are true hackers!
The thing with bytes, and everything else pertaining to computing, is that it's wholly invented by humans, so of course it's possible to obtain a complete enough mental image of things like CPUs given enough documentation. Human body, on the other hand, is literally alien technology because humans themselves didn't take any part in engineering it.
Actually, you’d be surprised how plausible it is to diagram the human electrophysiology using electromechanical circuit analogs. Everything in the body signals electrically, and biological matter being piezoelectric has been known (probably not popularly) since the late 60’s.
Indeed, I am finishing up my dissertation applying electrical engineering theory to model cellular evolutionary biology predicated on digital signal processing theory to demonstrate natural selection progressively evolves adaptations with faster sampling rates of environmental radiation for greatest BIBO system stability.
It's not that. Yes it's all electrical and chemical and electrochemical and so on. The problem is not with finding a good visual/logical representation.
You usually don't see connections between different things when you aren't actively looking for them, or when you haven't seen/thought those things to be related in the past. Since CPUs were designed by humans, your logical reasoning would usually work well when reverse engineering one, especially if you know the general ideas of how integrated circuits are constructed and what functional blocks a CPU is made of. Nature, on the other hand, has no logic. Your reasoning doesn't work with natural phenomena, and that's exactly what we're seeing in areas where experimentation and direct observation is hard, infeasible, or impossible.
As a matter of fact, Nature does have logic. It’s motion is principally geometrical and affords us the ability to recursively structure electrical signals harmonically, eg feedback amplification.
Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point.
> Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point.
Yes they are. Consciousness is a result of an electric feedback loop, and aging is apparently a result of a chemical feedback loop but that wasn't proven completely yet (that's the feedback loop I'd very much like disrupted).
But again, that's not what I'm talking about. You're missing my point entirely. I'm talking about connections that aren't obvious so no one looks for them in the first place and performs no experiments to reveal them. Example: sleep-deprived fruit flies accumulate active oxygen in their gut[1] and eventually die because of it. Is this an obvious connection to look for? Hell no. And there are many more examples of such unexpected and perplexing connections in the inner workings of living things. Nature doesn't always choose the most optimal implementations either. Life is a fascinatingly complex Rube Goldberg machine.
I see what you are saying. Sorry for missing the point. Of course I have to agree that what you describe is the enterprise of scientific discovery altogether! My point on that end is all these “mysteries” in the biological domain are easier to spot with the proper framework. Right now the biological sciences do not emphasize any mathematically rigorous understanding of electricity which is keeping their blinders on. It is intuitive to understand the oxidation reactions, per your example, dielectrically, but the researchers certainly lack the cohesive understanding.
Frankly speaking, how could you judge? I am coming from a biomedical engineering advanced education from a top 10 institution, mind you. And I can tell you the lack of mathematical completeness in medicine is very alarming. It is too pharmacologically driven without a fundamental appreciation of the electrical sciences being applied, well, anywhere in their disciplines.
Well, almost every field that's "lacking mathematical completeness" is generally more complex than those that are not lacking it.
Real life is extremely fuzzy and ill-defined. Almost everything mathematical is a model and models are almost by definition, simpler than the thing they model.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong within my lifetime and have someone come up with the Fundamental Laws of History, for example, fully defined from a mathematical point of view.
I would claim that the mathematical models of the electrical engineering sciences which permit frequency domain convolutions empirically demonstrate “real life” is fuzzy because our sensible perceptions are bandlimited, and not because of Nature herself. We arrive at approximations because things are always in motion!
And I’m in the process of writing a scientific work of human history in an evolutionary biological paradigm, justified by the linear time-invariant mechanics of dipole oscillations which are elemental to all natural phenomena.
Even if Nature were perfectly defined, which it might well be, I'd venture to say, without any proof, of course, that its mathematical definition could still be beyond our current or even future power of comprehension.
Fortunately, it’s mathematical definition, were we to equate a science of Nature with a science of motion, is not. Euler’s Formula characterizes all universal phenomena in time. The important judgment to make is in understanding our observation is an effect of our brain processing, with everything reducible to discrete units of simple harmonic motion, ie quanta, in time.
I'm sure, but in the case of medical practitioners, that arrogance may be borne by confidence rather than ignorance. You certainly need to be confident in your abilities if you're going to take the responsibility of someone's health in your hands.
I don't disagree that they need to be confident in dealing with people's health. In the end arrogance born from confidence is still arrogance and I would argue (understandably unsubstantiated and difficult to quantify) that it is pervasive in the medical community.
Of course it would be embarrassing to discover a ninth bit; humans invented, created, and placed the other 8 bits, along with the entire computing infrastructure around them.
Humans did not invent the human body, so it's not embarrassing to discover something new--it's exciting. That's the whole point of science. Medical researchers certainly know that they still have a ton to learn about the human body.
The point is that these days we're supposedly past finding 'large' physical chunks of the body—given a century's worth of diagnostics, x-rays, MRIs, etc.—and onto much more complicated matters such as how proteins are synthesized in human cells and how gut bacteria affects mental function and the like.
This one is a bit like not realizing the wheels are missing off your car. Right, it ought to have been damn obvious ages ago.
It's more like suddenly realizing there is a spare tire under the carpet in the trunk. Or that 5 is indeed divisible by 2, even though everyone said it wasn't and doctors never bothered to check.
Yeah... and hearing some of those being related to the gut. I’ve been diagnosed with a condition this year without real, solid evidence for cause. Seeing some of the brightest doctors try and write off health matters to alcoholism in non-alcoholics was concerning. After even cursory, high-level reading of what those terms mean elf me to believe it’s the favoured diagnosis when they’re unsure of the diagnosis and hesitate at all costs to give the label “idiopathic” if possible because then it really means “we don’t know”.
There are a number of "bucket" diagnoses that you can get thrown into once other things are ruled out, because there simply is no way to test to confirm that is what they are.
Most mental illnesses, but also physical ones like fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis have no definitive test.
The concerning factor for me re: alcoholic diagnosis is that there is typically a baseline for minimum consumption that has been tested and "proven". And that even said baseline isn't necessarily adhered to, and that bucket is used in preference over more accurate, but less resolute, buckets (like idiopathy).
I've been reasonably critical of medicos and medical science in posts to this article, but in all fairness I think this sort of thing happens in almost all professions.
Everything from time constraints to lack of knowledge to incompetence and or a combination of these is often found in most walks of life.
With medicine, we've a terribly complicated field, and like any profession, there is a range of competencies. I recall decades ago knowing a state director of health (the state's top doctor) and he said to me 'if you ever get really sick come to me and I'll put you in contact with the best advice available, as there are too many in this profession that I wouldn't give you a quarter for'.
As I said, this is a problem with all professions, finding the best advice available, can, at times, be a daunting experience.
That sucks. The thing to understand is that the vast majority of doctors don't have the mindset of scientists or even engineers. They're more like plumbers who have to triage/fix 400 houses a day.
I get that. What I find disturbing is that even when some doctors dedicate their lives to study anatomy, we still find a pair of salivary glands nobody has ever documented.
It's not a rare malformation. It's something that's more or less behind each and every human nose on Earth and has been there for thousands of years.
I do seem to recall a very large cohort of programmers (LOCALE=en_us) finding themselves dumped through a rabbithole of wonder which turned the black-and-white scenery of the Land of ASCII to the kaliedoscopic technicolor of Unicode. We did, in fact, discover that there were extra bits on those characters that we had been pretending weren't there all along :)
You assume all bytes are eight bits, but that hasn’t always been the case. Machines with variable byte sizes were relatively common in the 70s and early 80s. This is why so many RFCs use the word octet instead of byte.
Yeah, and I also remember when real parity checking was replaced with a special pseudo parity-pretend chip on many SIM modules. It was so designed to especially fool motherboards into thinking that parity was actually enabled and working when it was not.
Yes, even the memory business had its sleazy carpetbaggers.
There's something to the parent comment, even though it's getting downvoted to oblivion. I'm a computer engineer turned biophysicist, so I've hit up against the "holy shit biology is so much more complicated than I could have imagined" realization. That said, should medical researchers be looking at their processes, incentives, etc. to figure out why such things have been missed, and how to find more "low-hanging fruit"
This is why I invest to earn karma. So it can burn.
> how to find more "low-hanging fruit"
That we still have low hanging fruit (or fruit hiding behind our noses) after so many years of study is a bit concerning.
It's like discovering you can turn the lamp to remove it from the socket instead of keeping your hand still and hiring two people to rotate the ladder.
Why would it be troubling that there is more to learn? There is always more to learn. If you were under the misconception that we knew everything about the human body, then I’m glad you’re now enlightened
It's about expectations. We obviously will never know everything about anything. Some things seem easier to discover than others. This seems like something easy to discover that has long since gone undiscovered.
In this case it's a little like finding someone's house in a town you've never been in before. You expect the town's map to be accurate and to have all relevant streets listed - not having some of them missing.
This report suggests that we do have 'streets' missing. Researchers are now delving into finely nuanced areas of research at a level the equivalent of the house before the preliminaries are resolved - before all streets are found. Bypassing prerequisites always has serious consequences, things go wrong, errors occur, time is wasted, work is duplicated by others, etc. Even patients may die.
I'd suggest that no one yet knows how this will impact research that's already been completed and which now has to be reinvestigated.
Bytes aren't real. Bodies are, and also have people living in them a lot of the time. It shouldn't come as a surprise or a concern, I think, that the imaginary and trivially simple thing is much easier to comprehend than the category of real and vastly complex things.
(Anyway, some obsolete architectures actually did use nine-bit bytes.)
