[HN Gopher] Neurotechnology numbers worth knowing (2022)
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Neurotechnology numbers worth knowing (2022)
Author : Jun8
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-08-25 03:40 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (milan.cvitkovic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (milan.cvitkovic.net)
| danwills wrote:
| I don't know why but I just love being able to read all of this
| fascinating information in such a compact form, just amazing!
| Heading back over to read the rest now!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > fascinating information
|
| ...you don't find it uncomfortable or distressing to be
| confronted with the dry facts and hard-limits of the 1.5Kg
| squishy-pink prison we're all trapped-inside and all condemned
| to die inside?
| Terr_ wrote:
| > "Not at all," said the medtech. "Think of all the work he
| represents on somebody's part. Nine months of pregnancy,
| childbirth, two years of diapering, and that's just the
| beginning. Tens of thousands of meals, thousands of bedtime
| stories, years of school. Dozens of teachers. And all that
| military training, too. A lot of people went into making
| him." She smoothed a strand of the corpse's hair into place.
| "That head held the universe, once."
|
| -- _Aftermaths_ by Lois McMaster Bujold
| danwills wrote:
| Quite the opposite for me it kinda just makes it seem even
| more amazing that it exists and works at all and how much
| humans have worked out about it!
|
| There's some interesting regenerative medicine avenues
| (Michael Levin's stuff, planarian worms don't die from old
| age) that I have some hope might eventually slightly reduce
| the 'condemned to die' side of the picture for humans also.
| gary_0 wrote:
| It's so delicate, too. Drop the squishy pink thing and its
| ancillary support-meat on a random part of Earth and most
| likely it drowns in an ocean, freezes on a mountainside,
| dries out in a desert, or starves in a wasteland.
|
| That's leaving aside the other 99.99999999% of the universe
| where it chokes on vacuum or is blasted by radiation.
|
| And even in a perfect habitat with an ideal genotype and
| phenotype, its functional lifetime is a mere century
| bookended by billions of years of nonexistence.
|
| So yeah.
|
| I try not to think about all that.
| protomolecule wrote:
| >the other 99.99999999% of the universe
|
| You are off by so many orders of magnitude.
| cen4 wrote:
| And many of those numbers aren't static. They change.
|
| The Theory of Bounded Rationality emerged as a reaction to
| growing awareness within the chimp troupe, of the numerous
| limitations of that chimp brain. Its a useful tool when
| coping with complex ever changing reality.
| layer8 wrote:
| How does it make any difference about being trapped and
| dying?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >...you don't find it uncomfortable or
|
| Well, you have heard it: Ignorance is bliss. That's how the
| masses survive.
| agumonkey wrote:
| In case someone is as confused as I was, a french is a gauge unit
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_catheter_scale
|
| It's also a good joke opportunity, but for the link above it's
| not a joke.
| dominicq wrote:
| This is awesome. Even though many think it unpopular, I've always
| found that a certain measure of rote learning is beneficial, if
| not straight up necessary.
|
| > Having them memorized and at your fingertips is great for
| sanity checking ideas.
|
| This is essentially the reason. There are certain idea pathways
| you simply cannot traverse if you constantly need to check
| specific values. And I think that it might be possible that your
| subconscious simply won't "give" you an idea until you have
| specific facts memorized.
|
| Just think how much more difficult your life would be if you had
| no concept of a kilometer/mile, and constantly needed to do the
| math to check how far something is in... meters/yards, or
| something.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's like knowing how much clock speed, RAM and storage is on a
| typical computer.
| epgui wrote:
| Yep. 12 years studying biochem and health science makes that
| very clear.
|
| Knowing and understanding are intimately tied, and it's
| questionable whether one can meaningfully understand anything
| without first knowing things.
| fredgrott wrote:
| hmm, you know there is this big book of all chemicals....no one
| in the science communities with any professional sense and skills
| recommends rote remember such lists....
|
| For example, is it better to remember by rote all the amino acids
| or is it better to reason which is which be the quantum mechanics
| involved in the different bonding groups?
|
| Most in biochemistry go with the 2nd option....and succeed.
| egnehots wrote:
| I would be interested in a computer science only version.
|
| A quick search didn't bring up an already existing one :(
| Sajarin wrote:
| Isn't the computer science version Peter Novig's, "Latency
| Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" table?
|
| https://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers
|
| Edit: This version is also quite nice -
| https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375
| teraflop wrote:
| One classic set of numbers is Jeff Dean's "latency numbers
| every programmer should know", as quoted in a bunch of places
| including: https://highscalability.com/google-pro-tip-use-back-
| of-the-e...
|
| (EDIT: apparently Dean got this table from Peter Norvig as
| another commenter mentioned.)
|
| The disk numbers are a bit outdated now because of the
| overwhelming shift from spinning hard disks to SSDs, but most
| of the others have held up surprisingly well AFAIK. For
| instance, neither CPU L1 caches nor the speed of light have
| gotten dramatically faster in the last couple decades.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math
| dragon96 wrote:
| Next up: Numbers every math person should know
| tsurba wrote:
| >Tennis court size is in feet
|
| Lol.
| p0nce wrote:
| I found this book very helpful to understand most cellular
| process, and viruses, with an intuition of how things works at
| these scales: https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-
| Goodsell/dp/03...
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm not getting why these are significant because it's spelling
| out what it seems the tip of the ice berg numbers, and there are
| a lot more missing, and even if you spell them all out, it's too
| general to be useful. However it is interesting
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Suggestions from someone who hasn't used sub mm units in decades
| and is therefore out of practice: since the first section is
| supposed to orient us, remove the French =3mm bullet point, you
| never mention French again as far as I can see, so it's just
| trivia. Instead, try to link the first 2 points - maybe express
| human hair in nm instead of um, so that we can then visualize an
| angstrom (something most people don't know about) in terms of
| human hair (something most folks do know). Don't make us convert
| nm and um our heads.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| > A cage of 5 mice costs ~$1k upfront and ~$5k/yr recurring You
| can get mice a lot cheaper than that, I'm not sure what kind of
| mice he's referring to but the prices depend on the vendor and
| mouse type.
|
| Where I work it's about $2 a day to house a cage of 5 mice. It's
| about $30 a mouse if you get C57BL/6NJ's from Jackson:
| https://www.jax.org/strain/005304
|
| So more like $150 for 5 mice and $800 to house for a year.
|
| Another good one to know if the size of antibodies (10-12 nm).
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