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Comment Re:Didn't we already know this? (Score 1) 160

I have an idea here; closer examinations have shown that the intestines actually contain brain tissue or at least brain-like tissue. Such tissues have also been found in other organs, but particularly in the intestines. Other studies have also found that drugs such as SSRI and tranquilizers also affect the intestines, even to such a degree that treatments of some cases of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) with such medications have been successful. So the 'function' of this 'brain tissue' in the intestines appears to be quite essential.

The digestion process ought to be very complicated and delicate so it is no surprise that a more 'intelligent' form of tissue is needed to control it carefully. We don't know exactly how this tissue works and how it interacts with the gut bacteria. Some small changes in this brain tissue's configuration could probably make or break the prosperity of healthy gut bacteria.

So perhaps the connection between autism and the gut problems may be due to a general disorder of the neural system that also affects the intestinal "brain tissue". Interestingly, also people who suffer migraine (which is also another form of neural disorder) also tend to suffer from digestive disorders in connection to a migraine outbreak.

It would also be interesting to find out whether there is a link between autism and other organs' "brain tissue". E.g. the heart has brain tissue in it so perhaps there is also a link between neurological heart disorders (such as arrhythmia; both the lethal as well as the benign variants...) and disorders such as autism.

Comment Re:the point of diminishing returns? (Score 1) 91

I'm not arguing against 4K resolution per se. Personally, I would really like to have 4K, 8K resolution or even higher. For tasks such as word processing (or any task that involves working with text or letters) and getting desktop estate it is the more the merrier that applies, at least for now at the screen resolutions that are available for current desktop or laptop PCs. I totally agree with what Linus Torvalds said about this a while ago.

For FPS gaming on the other hand, I agree that 4K is overkill, at least with the polygon capability of current gen GPUs. I think that when dealing with photo, a resolution beyond 1080p (and perhaps 720p) is probably not very beneficial to the experience of immersion. But then again, I have yet to see a truly highly-detailed video-clip at 4K, perhaps that would be a mind-blowing experience. When looking at IMAX in theatres it is indeed a more capturing experience than regular 35mm footage. But the experience will be greater when it comes from say outdoor shots with a nice view and a lot of details from say trees and foliage than from camera shots taken inside a room with much less details.

I find the "Uncanny Valley analogy" to be very inappropriate here because firstly "uncanny valley" applies to human-like robots vs humans which is a very different story, some aspects of why this is different is discussed e.g. here, and secondly, the higher resolution makes the fps games look less realistic than at lower resolution. The high resolution reveals how "empty" the artificial world really is, something that could be concealed behind a blur or a coarse matrix of pixels which is now floating up to the surface.

Comment Re:the point of diminishing returns? (Score 1) 91

But is using such a high resolution really necessary? I've looked into those 4K BF4 video clips and to be honest, it looks pretty terrible. I could barely see the city and the buildings in the game level, it looked more like a bunch of squary boxes with textures painted on top of them. When using a lower resolution I could more easily suspend my disbelief, the coarseness of the pixels makes the primitive polygons look less, ... boxy. Perhaps GPU hardware a few orders of magnitude faster is required so that there are enough hardware resources to render the extra detail needed to make 4K rendered 3D environments in real-time look fairly realistic again.

Comment Re:the point of diminishing returns? (Score 1) 91

Not to mention all of the different research projects taken by students. I myself have indulged in more complex computer simulations using software such as Matlab. Simulations that took a few days of computing to complete on each run. If I had better hardware I would definitely use even more advanced models and conduct more simulations. So, there you have a forth reason :)

Comment Re:Why the obsession with faking a physical camera (Score 1) 87

While I agree to some extent to what you are saying, I believe that sometimes it is desired to deliver that cinematic experience. Also directors can eliminate lens flares and motion blurs during shootings with the right set of lightings and aperture times but they don't. The reason for that is that they want to emphasize that something is extremely bright or is moving extremely fast. All this is part of cinematic storytelling. Something modern digital cameras such as the over-hyped Red(tm) cameras are lacking considerably compared to traditional film cameras that have been tweaked for over half a century.

Comment Re:C strings strike again! (Score 1) 156

TheRaven64: A few years ago you wrote this:

Possible, but nowhere near as easy. I've read most of volume 3A of Intel's architecture reference while doing background reading for my Xen book, but the complete architecture reference is well over 3,000 pages. The GPU reference - if you can get it - is a similar length, and that's before you get to the OS. The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System is 720 pages. It's a good book, but it skips over a lot of details. The copy of the X11 protocol reference that I read was several hundred pages, and it's a few revisions old. The OpenGL reference was a similar length. But now you can do 2D and 3D graphics and, once you've read the C spec (not so bad, only a couple of hundred pages) and spent some time familiarising yourself with your C compiler and standard library you can draw things.

To get the level of understanding that the original poster is talking about, on a modern computer, means reading and remembering around 10,000 pages of reference books, and gaining familiarity with the source code that they mention. And that's just going to give you one CPU architecture and the core bits of the OS.

as a reply to a guy who basically said that a modern PC is essentially no more than a faster C64 with more memory and expandability options...

Now, my question to you is; what would you say about the ARM platform and Arduino? Would you say that e.g. a Raspberry Pi system is as simple to program as a C64 or Amiga?

Comment Re:Global warming is politics, not science. (Score 1) 339

You have to understand that also science and research is heavily influenced by politics. Research is simply spent only on things people want to find out about. If a politician wants to find research that supports the political views his party represents he will only fund such research and not research that refutes his views. Also scientists want and need money for their research. In fact, they need the money to keep their jobs and do what they like to do; research. This seriously tends to make research heavily biased and just because a person wears a lab coat and has a PhD degree it doesn't mean you can trust him and what he says. There is a famous quote from the Ghostbusters movie:

"Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say. "

The same goes with research and so called experts. There is another example of how research can get biased by politics: In Scandinavian regions a feministic political agenda is pushing through and influencing people in various ways. There is also a strong influence of anti-racism (some people refer to this ideology as anti-white) and multiculturalism in the politics of western Europe.

Under these political views the sexes are both perfectly equal and actually born the same. The book "Men Areähg from Mars, Women Are from Venus" by John Gray is almost as taboo as "Mein Kampf" in a Jewish community and e.g. research that would indicate that some ethnic groups would have a higher (or lower) IQ level than other is highly unethical and banned in these countries. Also scientifically trying to find evidence that would support that there would be some physiological differences between homosexuals (and other HBT people) and normal heterosexual people is a definite no-no.

I recommend watching the following Norwegian documentary Hjernevask (Brainwash):

Brainwash (1/7) - The Gender Equality Paradox

It is the first of a 7 part documentary that explores the concepts of what I mentioned above. The subjects themselves are not as interesting as how the research institutions in Norway are totally blinded by the political ideologies they are trying to uphold. It shows how you can conduct research into something over years and years and yet be totally blind to the truth. Norway is far from the only country with these problems and I seriously believe that a lot of this "environmental research" suffers from these issues as well.

Comment Re:I know how to do this (Score 1) 440

Yep, I have eaten both breads, this sounds like a stupid question. The bread needs to be fresh when frozen and the defrosted bread needs to be consumed immediately after defrosted. Also if you let the frozen bread sit to long in the microwave it goes dry and stiff so you need to experiment for a while until you find the proper time. Some oil or butter may help preventing it from going dry/stiff in the microwave. I'm not really sure why I'm explaining all this as this is naught but common sense.

Comment Re:Can we shoot Sandforce first? (Score 1) 76

So even an Intel SSD drive with the SandForce controller shoud be avoided?

Lately, the Samsung drives have become very popular but there is one caveat to them as well; they don't have a unique WWN like normal hard drives have. This drawback leads to problems using several SSDs on the same controller; the system cannot tell them apart. It's like a router or a switch cannot tell two computers apart because their NICs use the same MACs. Unlike NICs you cannot change the WWN of a Samsung drive.

Comment Re:Damn... (Score 1) 602

I think the reason why Asperger's Syndrome is classified as a disease or a disorder is because that a lot people with this disorder have problems with social interactions just like a person with dyslexia or even myopia have a problem with reading. Some people even have problems with taking care of themselves so the spectrum may vary. So whenever there is a problem there is a desire to find a solution to this problem.

Ultimately I don't think this classification is intended to judge or put any sort of moral value on this medical condition but to understand what's going on and to find ways to help these people better cope with their surroundings and the surroundings to better cope with them. After all there are quite a few successful people out there diagnosed with this condition such as Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Daryl Hannah, Alfred Hitchcock, ... the list is long.

Comment Re:Alternative: XFCE (Score 1) 152

My pet peeve with all of those window managers is that they don't scale well on high resolution displays, especially xfce. I know Linus Torvalds have written a critical post about this awhile ago in connection with Apple's retina displays on their macbooks. But even on a low-resolution 1080p display, fonts and the user interface don't scale well.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 102

Nowhere did I state that it should be free. If you remove the "F" from the FOSS you are mentioning then you are talking my language. While I'm a proponent of FOSS I don't think all open source software necessarily should be free. If people are concerned about this openness then perhaps some kind of encryption or other ways to obfuscate the source code that would make it understandable only to the compiler would be in place. However, in the end I don't think people would want to obfuscate the code before distribution. After all, even binaries can be reverse engineered and cracked so going open source shouldn't be that big of a deal.

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