Updatathon

I'm not exactly feeling well right now, but I'm not feeling too sick either. Now it feels like there's just a few inches of fog between me and reality, not several feet. I'm still slow and clumsy ... and my darned headache just came back after staying away for the last several hours.

Anyway, although I don't seem able to focus on anything that requires real concentration, I don't seem to be as stupid as I was earlier, so I've been catching up on my newsgroup/blog/news site reading and as a result there's a passel or two of posts I'll probably be making in the next hour, if I don't suddenly discover a need to sleep.

I'll try to merge posts on similar topics, but no promises.

Medical News.

There's a surprising amount of Medical news just from the last week that I think should be mentioned:

1. Scientists at John Hopkins and U. of Minnesota have discovered part of the mechanism behind alzheimer's memory loss. They've managed to show that it isn't the plaques and tangles and associated neuron loss that causes the problem, but an amyloid-beta protein that shows up earlier in the disease.
2. Dr. Moshe Szyf of McGill university is doing fascinating research in the field of Epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science of the activation and deactivation of genes, and it seems we still have much to learn on this subject. There is now mounting evidence that it IS possible to inherit a genetic memory of what one's forefather's did, as some of the genes that get activated in one's body make it more likely that a child will be born with those same genes activated.
3. Natural eidetic memory is extremely rare; so rare that scientists have only recently had an example to work on: "AJ" can remember everything that has happened in her life, in excruciating detail. The scientists have dubbed this "hyperthymestic syndrome".
4. Leave it to the Japanese to discover that menstrual blood is a surprisingly good source of stem cells.
5. In what is being described as a "nanotech breakthrough" scientists have discovered that they can restore limited vision to blind rats who've had their optic nerves severed by injecting a peptide solution that self-assembles into a neural scaffold that enhances natural neuron regrowth.
6. It seems that recent results indicate that asthma has a completely different cause than has usually been assumed.

Programming Update.

Here's a few nifty and/or useful and/or stupid computer-related things I came across in the reading. Specific categorization is left as an exercise for the reader:

1. Here's an interesting UTF-8 stress test to see how your renderer deals with malformed code points. At first glance, Firefox seems to do pretty well.
2. It seems that among many other design failures, no one thought about RFID viruses when designing them.
3. Someone has created a scrolling LED bra. I'm sure it has 1001 uses.
4. The Linux Kernel Configuration Archive is intended to tell you enough about obscure kernel parameters so you know whether to turn them on or not. I wish I had known about this before.
5. Here's a cute website that shows the path your email took to get to you, plotted on a Google map.

My brain is starting to fade, so I guess I'll post the rest tomorrow.

Adverts.

(Stolen from dashing)

Here's a new and interesting form of advertising, if it doesn't cause you a heart attack.

And I suppose the same could be said of the next image as well. (NWS!)

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Edit: BTW, what is it about the Russians? Whenever I am bored and spend time just looking at random LJ images, the vast majority of interesting ones are accompanied by Cyrillic writing. I almost never see French, or Italian, or Chinese. Heck, English is a distant second when it comes to blogs with interesting pictures. I wonder if that says more about LJ's demographics, or more about me.

Awake, and still sick.

My wake/sleep cycle is all screwed up (which isn't surprising considering that I sleep as much as I can when I'm sick -- whenever the sickness lets me).

I just woke up today. I seem to be about as sick as ever, although today I woke up with an aching hip as well. I don't know if that's the disease, or old age, or some combination thereof. Starting a few years ago, I sometimes wake up with aching hip joints if I haven't kept my legs warm enough during the night. Last night I slept under 3 comforters, a duvet and an electric blanket, so I'm not sure how my leg could have gotten cold (it felt toasty warm when I woke up), but I had the electric blanket turned off for the first time in a week because I was too warm when I went to bed.

I am fully prepared to get well, any time now. Okay?

Mortality Stats.

Does anyone know where I could get raw mortality rate figures for North America (Canada and/or the US) for the last 50 years or more? I need them broken down by age (and gender, if possible). I went to look at Stats Canada, but I could only find the number up to 1975. That's not very useful for my purposes.

I pay taxes to get this info collected, so I certainly don't want to pay any money in order to see the results...

Christian Moral Philosophy.

I just want to start out here by saying I'm not trying to insult or upset anyone or to start a flame war. Its just that a question occurred to me when taking my shower today, and I thought I might seek some enlightenment from my f-list.

I was brought up in a moral system that I suppose I could characterize as liberal and secular. It has many principals but one of them is that people are generally only to be considered culpable for their own actions. You can only be culpable of inaction in certain narrow circumstances where you have accepted responsibility, or there is some sort of implied social responsibility. In no circumstances are you to be held culpable for an inability to act.

You can not, for example, be held accountable for genocide just because you were born German, and Germans participated in the Holocaust. Unless you participated, the fact that you are German has no bearing. In similar ways, my Magyar and Viking roots have no moral taint to them, regardless of what attrocities my ancestors may have gotten up to.

Now, this seems to be a fairly common moral principal, and up till now I had simply assumed that it held in Christian morality as well. Today it occurred to me that this directly flies in the face of the whole concept of Original Sin by which (as I understand it) everyone is assumed to be damned because of what Adam did in the distant past. So, I can think of several possibilies, and I wonder which of the following are true:

1. Christain moral philosophy does <b>not</b> accept that you are blameless for the actions of your ancestors. Modern day Germans should all be punished for the Holocaust and most whites should be held accountable for slavery.
2. Christians believe as I do. The Original Sin is some sort of metaphor and has nothing to do with systems of moral philosophy.
   
3. God is allowed to act in a fashion that is immoral for people, without it being immoral. Thus God is allowed to declare that a moral taint be visited upon all the descendants of Adam, but no man could be allowed to make such a declaration. Thus God is considered moral only because They are God, and not because of any other particular attributes of behaviour.
4. Christians disagree completely on this topic and its a huge moral quagmire.
5. Something else that I haven't considered.

So, any answers?

Patriot Act Game.

Play the Patriot Act Game. See if you can be the last one to lose all your civil liberties. You can read more about it here.