Todd Hoff

"Psilocybin may be useful in treating anxiety, addiction, and depression, and in studying the neurobiology of mystical experience. CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN DOYLE On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick Mettes, a fifty-four-year-old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death. His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive. The article, headlined “HALLUCINOGENS HAVE DOCTORS TUNING IN AGAIN,” mentioned clinical trials at several universities, including N.Y.U., in which psilocybin—the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms—was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and “existential distress.” One of the researchers was quoted as saying that, under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” Patrick had never taken a psychedelic drug, but he immediately wanted to volunteer. Lisa was against the idea. “I didn’t want there to be an easy way out,” she recently told me. “I wanted him to fight.”" - Todd Hoff

I suggest the Jetsons flying car sound. - MoTO Boychick Devil

How about sled dogs? - John (bird whisperer)

Coconuts. - bentley

"Roughly 70% of the surface is covered by water.  It only makes sense to try to inhabit some of that area, especially with the world’s population expecting to reach 9.6 billion by the year 2050.  A Japanese architecture company has released its design for what will be the world’s first underwater city.  They hope to start building this project within the next 20 years." - Todd Hoff

I hope it also has hyperdrive - Todd Hoff

"We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!" - Eivind

That's zero rain. Zero. In what is typically our wettest month. - Todd Hoff

I hope she does some torch songs someday, love the depth of her voice. - Todd Hoff

"“We can reduce compulsive sucrose-seeking but not affect their normal feeding,” said Nieh. “This is important because for treating compulsive eating behavior, we only want to stop the unhealthy parts of eating and keep normal eating intact.” “There is a clear application to feeding disorders and perhaps drug abuse and gambling because it may be a common pathway that activates these kinds of behaviors,” said Phillips." - Todd Hoff

and another from Joseph Campbell "When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness." - Greg GuitarBuster

"The new London arcade of home-made coin operated machines built by enthusiasts – opens February 11th 2015 (twinned with ‘The Under The Pier Show’ seaside arcade) Tim Hunkin’s new arcade of slot machines, including some old favourites from CMT’s Covent Garden days -The Frisker, Test Your Nerve and The Chiropodist. Novelty Automation is a mix of humour and engineering. It’s a new home for Tim Hunkin’s arcade machines, with some guest machines made by kindred spirits. 1a Princeton St, London WC1R 4AX" - Todd Hoff

I'm going to have to see these when we go over. Way to strange to pass up. - Todd Hoff

"The University of Michigan Library, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and ProQuest have made public more than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from 1473-1700 — the first 200 years of the printed book. Full text access. Multiple format downloads, including ePUB. Or just download the entire corpus. The texts represent a significant portion of the estimated total output of English-language work published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The release via Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication marks the completion of the first phase in the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). An anticipated 40,000 additional texts are planned for release into the public domain by the end of the decade." - Todd Hoff

"This new map allows scientists to determine the age of large swaths of Greenland's ice, extending ice core data for a better picture of the ice sheet's history. "This new, huge data volume records how the ice sheet evolved and how it's flowing today," said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics and the study's lead author." - Todd Hoff

"The three of us work for companies on this technological frontier, building devices that take advantage of developments in low-power implantable sensors and embedded signal processing. In this article we’ll describe three devices that respond to the flux of biology within the body. Because these devices rely on data related to the processes they influence, we call them “closed-loop” systems, but you could also call them the next step in a bionic model of medicine. In this new paradigm, engineered systems composed of chips, wires, and batteries can replace or supplement biological systems that malfunction." - Todd Hoff

"he stimulation of so-called brown fat—the energy-burning kind—is thought to be a potential therapeutic target for obesity. In a study published in Cell Metabolism this month (January 6), researchers gave volunteers an already-approved drug, which, as it turned out, appeared to stimulate metabolism and the activity of brown fat. The drug, mirabegron, acts as an agonist of β3-adrenergic receptors and is given to patients who experience overactive bladder. “Brown adipose tissue, or brown fat, produces β3-adrenergic receptor at levels higher than nearly every other organ in the body. We showed that a one-time dose of the drug mirabegron stimulates human brown adipose tissue so that it consumes glucose and burns calories,” study coauthor Aaron Cypess of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases said in a statement. The researchers estimated that at the 200 milligram dose used in the study, men taking mirabegron could lose around five kilograms (11 pounds) in the first year, and 10 kilograms (22 pounds) after three years of treatment. “Though promising, the actual amount of weight loss would likely be less, since 200 kcal/day was the peak energy expenditure and not sustained throughout the day,” the authors wrote in their paper. Still, the researchers added that they are encouraged their findings might “accelerate the development of pharmacological strategies designed to increase energy expenditure and treat obesity and metabolic disease.”" - Todd Hoff

Seems like a reasonable investment. - Todd Hoff

It would be, if the right people were using it - the article points out that a lot of the people prescribed aspirin don't actually meet the criteria for it to be useful. The real-life numbers are probably higher for "not prevented" than they were for the carefully selected trial. - Jennifer Dittrich

"Researchers at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT have developed a new search engine that outperforms current ones, and helps people to do searches more efficiently. The SciNet search engine is different because it changes internet searches into recognition tasks, by showing keywords related to the user’s search in topic radar. People using SciNet can get relevant and diverse search results faster, especially when they do not know exactly what they are looking for or how to formulate a query to find it. Once initially queried, SciNet displays a range of keywords and topics in a topic radar. With the help of the directions on the radar, the engine displays how these topics are related to each other. The relevance of each keyword is displayed as its distance from the centre point of the radar – those more closely related are nearer to the centre, and those less relevant are farther away. The search engine also offers alternatives that are connected with the topic, but which the user might not have thought of querying. By moving words around the topic radar, users specify what information is most useful for them." - Todd Hoff

I'll keep an open mind, but the picture's not encouraging--I've seen loads of information-visualization systems like this in the past (some as library catalog user interfaces), and found them pretty consistently confusing for most tasks. I guess it depends on your favored mental models and the nature of the data. - walt crawford

<threadjack>Whatever happened to the revolutionary result visualization systems front-ending library catalogs? I've forgotten the names, but there were a couple that were highly touted.</threadjack> - walt crawford

Jealous! - Jenny H.

"Yes chaps, well done. You made a breakthrough discovery of the absolute bleeding obvious. You mean, insulin makes you fat? Well who’d a thunk? Well, lots and lots of people actually. At which point, let me introduce you to the Pima Indians of North America. This race has an almost unbelievably high rate of type II diabetes. It is greater than 50%. Perhaps more. Are they obese, yes? Of course. However, of greater interest is that Pima Indians, long before they become obese and/or diabetic, produce far, far, more insulin than any other race [2]:" - Todd Hoff

"But what if you could have a home that was so energy efficient that it generated enough energy every day to not only power your home and keep it warm, but allow you own and operate an electric car without ever paying for electricity ever again? It sounds too good to be true, but one recently-erected house in Norway can do just that. No energy bills. Ever." - Todd Hoff

I've been following 'green building' for a long time. I'd love to build as sustainably as possible, but I just don't know if it will happen. I can't stand compressed tire earthships. I follow several sustainable building groups on FB and you also run across a lot of crazy people there too. - Greg GuitarBuster

"Insects don’t seem to count for much.  They bite, buzz around, and wreck picnics. They don’t trigger moral sensibilities in the way higher order animals might.  In fact for some, insects generate downright moral revulsion, yet these small presences are closer to our lives than we care to consider. And though they might be unsettling, they can provide a muse for deep reflection in an environmentally compromised world. We discuss the philosophical necessity to contemplate the lives of small instinctual animals." - Todd Hoff

"http://youtu.be/BEG-ly9tQGk" - Todd Hoff

I too have dreamed of using perl to save the universe :-) - Todd Hoff

"So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table." - Todd Hoff

Brain chemistry is well covered in various publications, the wonderment is the protective value of social relations. Happy rats didn't fall prey to drugs. In a reductionist sense everything is chemistry or physics, but that's not the insight here. - Todd Hoff

"Eighty people hold the same amount of wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people, according to an analysis just released from Oxfam. The report from the global anti-poverty organization finds that since 2009, the wealth of those 80 richest has doubled in nominal terms — while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population has fallen." - Todd Hoff

Quite a few species organize as groups from herds of sheep and goats to prides of lions. - Greg GuitarBuster

"A space-time tunnel could exist in the middle of the Milky Way and we could travel through it, say scientists" - Todd Hoff

but it's not connected to other galaxies - miki - zuck suca

Watch out, I hear most of those chocolate planets are really made of laxatives. Tricky aliens. - Todd Hoff

"Thoman’s art seamlessly incorporates 3D printing in a manner that connects the dualities of the natural and technological worlds. In fact. duality is a central theme in all of her work. Of her earlier 3D modeled work, Thoman explains to 3DPrint.com: “In the Venus Series, I engage the idea of duality by creating diptychs that juxtapose panels that are digitally created with other panels that are traditional oil paintings. The electronically created panels are a more intellectual process while I use an intuitive mark-making process on the oil painted panels. It is an exciting investigation into new ways to approach the idea of dualities in all things.”" - Todd Hoff

"But we should not underestimate our tendencies to rely on confidence, our own and others’, as a cue for what information deserves the most attention (independent of the validity of that information). One of the most insidious side effects of group decision making is that people believe in wrong group decisions more than they believe in incorrect individual decisions. The social proof resulting from cascades and (conformity more generally) amplifies everyone’s trust in the incorrect outcome. And inputs into the decision process from highly confident or dominant personalities have more impact and increase the esteem accorded to those individuals, regardless of the quality of their contributions." - Todd Hoff

"Designed by Estonian artist and sculptor Mati Karmin, this furniture collection rises to the challenge of recycling and reusing Russian sea mine shells. The deserted Soviet submarine base in Estonian town of Paldiski experienced lots of empty naval mines shells that seemed unsightly prior to the designer turned them into distinctive furniture that reminds from the Soviet period." - Todd Hoff

Wow! - DS