Hit In the Gut

Hit In the Gut

    The past few days found me somewhat at the mercy of a stomach bug, one that leaves you with cramps and little energy, much less a desire to eat or drink anything.  It's a 24-hour bug, my wife told me; but at the end of 24-hours, it was still painful to turn over in bed (in which I lay most of the day), my stomach now feeling like the shifting blob of a lava lamp, with accompanying pain as it rumbled into its new position.  Why don't they use this sort of thing on the battlefields, I wondered?  In 48 hours, enemy troops would gladly surrender or offer no resistance, no loss of life, full recovery, no wasted bullets or destroyed homes?  At the time I was sick, even the act of reading or watching something on the tellie was abhorrent, ghastly even.  Sleep, and perhaps a warm stomach massage...wait, cancel the latter.  Too painful.  But at the end of 30 hours, my stomach still hurt but my head was now clear; sleep was coming back to its normal trajectory and guess what, I could read!

    First thing that caught my eye (okay, among the first things anyway) was an article in Bloomberg Businessweek by Max Chafkin and Ian King, all on how Intel makes a chip.  No big deal, you say, seen it before on those "how it's made" shows.  But this is the new chip, the one that requires a factory to be built just for making this particular chip and a factory that costs $8.5 billion (in fact, Intel has 2 such factories for this chip), a chip that takes about 3 months to complete and one that is already looked at by Intel as ready to be replaced by the next chip being designed (just to keep up with the demand for more in less space).  It's the E5, and what got my attention (probably because what my stomach thing was was indeed some sort of flu virus, a virus being smaller than a bacteria) is that as the article noted, if a human red blood cell is 7000 nanometers across, a virus is around 70 times smaller at 100 nm; Intel's new chips work on a scale almost 10x smaller than that at 14nm (and the new generation chip in planning will work at the 5 nm scale).  Here's their "simple" explanation for why this all matters: A transistor is a switch.  But instead of requiring a finger to turn it on or off, it uses small electrical pulses—3 billion per second in the case of a powerful computer.  What can you do with a switch?  Well, you can use it to store exactly one bit of information.  On or off, yes or no, 0 or 1—these are examples of data that can be conveyed in a single bit, which is, believe it or not, a technical term. (There are 8 bits in a byte, 8 billion in a gigabyte.)  The earliest computers stored bits in punch cards—hole or no hole?—but that was limiting, because if you want to do anything cool, you need a lot of bits. For instance, if you want your computer to store the words “God, this stuff is complicated,” it would need 8 bits for every letter, or 240 transistors.  Another thing you can do with a switch is math.  String seven switches together in just the right order, and you can add two small numbers; string 29,000 of them, and you have the chip that powered the original IBM PC in 1981; pack 7.2 billion on an E5, and you can predict global weather patterns, sequence a human genome, and identify oil and gas deposits under the ocean floor.  To make the new chips that are now in the next planning stages, the wave of light currently used on the E5 is too large, so the hunt is on for ultraviolet-light printing which has a much smaller light spectrum. 

    Not exactly stuff to wake up to with a groggy head, but I found it quite fascinating.  So I jumped ahead to what else was out there?  Ultrasonic X-rays?  Imagine biting down on just one mouthpiece and having not only a more accurate reading of your teeth but having it all done without the use of radiation and producing a 3-dimensional view of all of your teeth and gums?  Done (pending FDA approval).  Clothes made of metal, silicon and insulating fibers that can emit electrical signals, detect explosives and communicate with communication devices and computers?  Done (already 30 universites and 50 companies are working on the textiles).  But then this article appears, that despite pouring millions of dollars into finding a non-addictive pain reliever, pharmaceutical companies are stymied, so they're turning to...chili peppers.  Such common remedies as lidocaine and capsaicin are more thoroughly studied, already in wide use, and could hold hidden benefits not yet discovered.  Technology be damned...back to nature.

    Luckily, choosing what article was more interesting or what pain reliever I would take would be all due to my own free willand be that of my own choosing consciously or not...or would it?  In The Atlantic Monthly writer Steven Cave argued that there's no such thing: The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect.  This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species.  Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary.  But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions.  So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance...Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture.  Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics?  Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment?  Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor.  Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something...In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will.  Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment.  But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.  Hmm, no repercussions on or because of our actions or decisions...is that what I had said in an earlier post?

    Then along comes Martha Beck, life coach (don't laugh, there are currently over 50,000 "life coaches" throughout the world, each making a very comfortable living) and here to coach others about, well, how to have a life (duh!).  But for Beck, the appeal is like listening to your grandmother.  As she tells Bloomberg Businessweek (yes, it was time to catch up on my past issues) and author Taffy Brodesser-Akner (to expand and reveal my ignorance of today's world, this is the first person I've heard of with the first name of Taffy): What could I possibly be doing to help these people?  I mean, everything I was saying was so obvious...we're in the afterlife.  This is the afterlife of my 20-year-old self, and your 20-year-old self.  We are living after that life, and that person is gone.  As author Brodesser-Akner wrote: In the conference room of an oceanside hotel in Pismo Beach, Calif., Martha Beck stands on stage, nearing the end of an effusive 90-minute keynote speech for the semiannual Meet and Greet of the (mostly) women enrolled in her life coach training program, when she stops abruptly. “Integrity check!” she says...She’d been telling the 80 or so trainees a story about her diagnosis many years ago of fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition.   She’d been an avid runner before the diagnosis; she’s started running again, even though exercising is often painful for people with fibromyalgia.  Her point was that we shouldn’t always believe in our limitations, no matter how expert the source who presents them or how concrete they may seem.  Also, maybe we don’t need quite so many rules!   She reminded everyone that so much of what we know is told to us with great authority, and we accept it.  Part of Beck’s credo—part of any trained sociologist’s credo—is to understand that most rules put in place for our lives are a social construct, so it’s our constant job to ask, “Wait, is that presumption that I have true?  What proof do I have that it’s true?  How did I come to believe this, and does it serve me to continue believing it?”

    Phew,  after all of that reading and more, my stomach felt more sore than ever...and my head as well.  Perhaps it wasn't a bug, maybe just a desire to both read and to rest, my mind fighting within itself.  And maybe that wasn't a bad thing, but rather just "one of those things."  Maybe it was free will, or lack thereof...but I still wasn't hungry.  Which ironically led me to read about farming...now there's an interesting subject with changes afoot.