BTW, you’ll be happy to know I just shame-corrected someone who used ‘maths’ instead of ‘math’.
I didn’t know that “maths” was incorrect!
Huh, turns out both are fine and it’s just another regional quirk. I wonder why I thought maths was categorically incorrect.
It’s even funnier, given the meme you posted earlier, because ‘maths’ is definitely the traditional Queen’s English choice, and ‘math’ is strongly associated with Americans.
Also, like many places where American English and British English differ, maths-vs.-maths is a story of we Americans preserving the older form while the rest of the world invents weird new words, at least as far as Google Ngram Viewer can be trusted.
From what I have read this is true of many words. The British messed it up. Just like that war. Redcoats and all that. :)
Huh, well this is different
Now it’s only a matter of time before monkey vision is directly streamed on the Internet.
It isn’t already?
An episode of Black Mirror waiting to happen.
This is something I’ve been following for a couple months now and is starting to get some widespread attention:
Basically, you take some white blood cells (called ‘T-cells’) from a patient’s body, modify their genes using a fragment of the HIV virus (!) to make them cancer-killing machines, and then re-insert them into the patient’s body. The T-cells then multiply and attack the cancer in a way that the un-altered T-cells would not.
The “early-days” results against leukemia patients have been astonishing, with an 83% remission rate (and with 66% remaining cancer-free).
The down-side is that the therapy is necessarily bespoke. It’s never going to be a pill you can stock in a pharmacy. And although the $ half-million per-person price tag will surely come down, it’ll probably never be a cheap process.
One of the crazy things about parts of genomics/genetics is the price scaling. The cost to sequence the whole human genome back in the late 90’s was ~ 2.7 billion dollars. We can sequence a person’s whole genome in a day now for about $1,000. We routinely run this level of sequencing in the lab as “no big deal.”
I’m pretty sure as gene therapy gets safer (more accurate CRISPER-like technology) and we have a better survey of exactly what changes are effective given someone’s genetic background, this will move from a specialized lab process to something that can be cranked out by well trained lab techs and software. I’m not sure how long that’ll take, but “never” is a really long time.
Some labs (like the one I’m in) are always thinking about how to scale our studies/analysis, and most of our tech dev work takes processes that cost thousands of dollars per and get it to a few dollars by inventing new technology/analysis to get around the bottlenecks.
Obligatory data:
Yeah, using “never” when talking about a technical hurdle is a rookie mistake that I should have known better than do. “It will be a while before the cost of this comes down to the point where it’s available to the masses” is probably more accurate.
AI Obama
[quote]
The researchers were careful to not generate videos where they put words in Obama’s mouth that he did not at some other time utter himself. However, such fake videos are “likely possible soon,” says study lead author Supasorn Suwajanakorn, a computer scientist at the University of Washington.[/quote]
Still a better president than He Who Will Not Be Named.
I’ve estimated that the lifetime costs of my son’s leukemia treatments and subsequent bone marrow transplant will be in the $2.5 million+ range.
Holy crap! That certainly adds a new perspective.
I for one am ready for our Raven overlords.
He described to me how one experiment took an eerie turn: One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock/box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it.
Sorry, Raven. Nevermore.
We have laser weapons.