Viraj's Weblog

I attended a talk by these guys. This is a rather amazing service. It lets anyone be a money lender in a safe way (or a borrower). Set your own interest rates, diversify to many borrowers, etc. I predict this will be big and may even be a threat to banks.

Here are some pics of our Santa Cruz offsite.

Here's an interesting article about synthetic meat. Will vegetarians die off?

Ever wonder how the rabies virus achieves its evolutionary goals? What's the point of making the host crazy and rabid? Here's an excerpt from Carl Sagan's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

Of course, predators need not be bigger than their prey. Disease microbes can be formidable predators - not only attacking and eventually killing the organisms that bear them, but also taking over their hosts, changing their behavior to spread the disease microorganisms to other hosts. One of the most striking examples is the rabies virus. On being injected into the bloodstream of a placid, people-loving dog, they head straight for the limbic system of the dog's brain, where the control buttons for rage reside. There, they set about converting the poor animal into a marauding, snarling, vicious predator that now bites the hand that feeds it. Rabid animals are afraid of no one. At the same time, other rabies viruses are dispatched to inactivate the nerves for swallowing, to put the saliva-manufacturing machinery into overdrive, and to invade the saliva in huge numbers. The dog is furious, although it has no idea why. A pawn of the viruses within it, it's helpless to resist the impulse to attack. If the attack is successful, the viruses in the dog's saliva enter the bloodstream of the victim through the lesion or laceration, and then set about taking over this new host. This process continues.

The rabies virus is a brilliant scenarist. It knows its victims, and how to pull their strings. It circumvents their defenses - infiltrating, outflanking, accomplishing a coup d'etat within beings so much larger, you might have thought them invulnerable.

It's rather amazing that the rabies virus evolved in such a way to see this big picture.

Good article on the topic.

This movie reminded me of the various street acrobatics videos out there. It had some really cool stunts, which I always get a kick out of watching. I had heard this movie came from the producers of Ong-bak, which pretty much blew me away with its martial arts style and stunts. They are different from the Jackie Chan type of stunts, as well as the wire-pulled anti-gravity flying martial arts so prevalent in movies these days. I really don't get why people get a kick out of that. Those seem happy and PG-rated to me. When it comes to martial arts, I'm more interested in real fighting with no strings attached. The street and ghetto-style building hopping of B13 gives a true gritty feel to the stunts and seem almost R-rated.

The violence and drugs in the movie also contributes to that. In general I found the story entertaining and cinematography very stylish. The storyline is interesting, that the ghettos have been walled off and a neutron bomb just happened to get inside the complex. Reminds me of another wall in the middle east, and perhaps the director is hinting at that.

Speaking of flying martial arts, I saw the trailer for the new Jet Li movie Fearless which looked cool. I still like the Crouching Tiger types of movies because they are so beautifully done, even if everyone is flying.

I saw the movie 'The Proposition' which was a cold, dark, and raw movie ultimately about blood ties and human nature. The movie actually made me think about evolution. In the movie, an important character is the flies. It's wierd, they are in almost every scene. They are shown buzzing around the filthy people of the land. But the real kicker is the flies are buzzing around the upper class people as well, with their nice houses, proper hygiene, and clean living areas. Both the bums and the rich are swatting the flies off of their face and neck.

I felt a point was trying to be made here. That no matter how much we try to hide our animal nature, we are still animals. Our divisions of class are only superficial. Inside we are all the same. The movie has alot of graphic violence, and this also helps to convey this point. But the flies are what really stuck with me.

When people think about evolution, they usually think "survival of the fittest" and "humans descended from apes." But I think we miss the real point, and that is the concept of ancestry. The fact that we are ALL related by a common ancestry. That the terrorist is your brother.

Think about that for one moment. What would make you kill your family? Would you not want to resolve conflicts with those you love instead of resorting to violence? What makes it easier to pull the trigger on a person outside of our supposed family than on our own mother? Evolution says that the person you hate, despise, the murderer, is actually your brother, sister, mother, and father. Why do we not treat people that way?

Think of how different the world would be if you considered every other human being your family. Would you not treat them differently?

I think there are alot of people that say they believe in evolution but really are ignorant to its concepts. You may say you believe in evolution, but you are wrong. I will say that if you advocate violence, war, or anything that causes death or suffering to other human beings, and you believe a murderer should be treated any differently than your closest family member, then you don't believe in evolution. I think we have alot of atheists out there that only accept evolution halfway. In other words, hypocrites.

It's because we cannot grasp the concept of an extended family including every human being on earth. Or can we? Is there any possibility of realizing that the homeless man in the gutter is deserving of the love you give to your mother or wife? This is the real question and I feel the true dilemma of humanity. As long as the answer is no, there will be war, and the continuous cycle of violence that has plagued us since the beginning of time, back before we were even human.

Is it possible to think that humans can rise above this cycle? To consider every living being as our next of kin? That the blood we spill by bullets are from wounds in our own body?

A beautiful passage from Jane Goodall's Reason for Hope:

I shall conclude this chapter with a symbolic story. It is about an American, Rick Swope, a zoo visitor who rescued an adult male chimpanzee from drowning in the moat around his enclosure. And this despite the dire warning of a keeper and the threats of other adult male chimpanzees of the group. When asked what had made him risk his life he answered: "I looked into his eyes. It was like looking into the eyes of man. And the message was: Won't anybody help me?"

That is the look that I've seen in the eyes of chimpanzees tied up in the African markets, from under the frills of the circus chimp, from behind the steel bars of the laboratory prisons. It's a look I've seen in the eyes of other suffering animals. And in the eyes of little children from Burundi who saw their parents slaughtered in the ethnic violence. In the eyes of the street children, and those that are caught up in the violence of our inner cities. Indeed, that appeal is all around us. Albert Schweitzer wrote: "A man who possesses a veneration of life will not simply say his prayers. He will throw himself into the battle to preserve life, if for no other reason than that he is himself an extension of life around him."

I truly believe that more and more people are seeing the appeal in the eyes around them, feeling it in their hearts, and throwing themselves into the battle. Herein lies the real hope for our future; we are moving toward the ultimate destiny of our species - a state of compassion and love. Yes, I do have hope. I do believe we can look forward to a world in which our great-grandchildren and their children after them can live in peace. A world in which there will still be trees and chimpanzees swinging through them, and blue sky and birds singing, and the drumbeats of indigenous peoples reminding us powerfully of our link to Mother Earth and the Great Spirit - the God we worship. But as I've stated repeatedly, we don't have much time. The planet's resources are running out. And so if we truly care about the future of our planet we must stop leaving it to "them" out there to solve all the problems. It is up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it's up to you and me.

I saw "An Inconvenient Truth" this weekend and felt this passage conveys alot of what the movie conveys. I strongly urge you to see it and make an effort to really change things.

Our lives are filled with constant battles against entropy. Entropy is randomness, disorder, chaos. Everything in your body is struggling to keep order. Down to the cell, it's purpose is to maintain structure. Throughout the day we are battling bacteria and infectious agents that aim to destroy that order without even realizing it. Our body tries to clean out any toxic substances we eat, and when our skin is cut there is a rush to restore order to the damaged area. When our bones break, what begins is a process to decrease entropy in the system and restore order.

When your body dies, all of its defenses are gone. It can no longer fight off organisms that would love to eat us. That's when the body decays. When you see an animal corpse rotting, you are seeing the defense system shut down. The pile of mass gravitates towards more entropy, to an equilibrium with the environment. That order in the body now must disseminate. What was order now becomes disorder. It's as if during life you are literally holding yourself together, and in death you can no longer hold yourself up.

It takes alot of energy to keep order, or reduce entropy. That's the food we eat, the fuel that powers our defense system.

It seems natural to think of disease as a form of entropy introduced into our system. Whether it be a virus or a cancer, that attack on our system destroys the order in our body bit by bit. Cancer is ultimately destroying the 'order' of our DNA. If our immune system is strong enough, we are able to restore order. If not, we die. We may throughout the day get cancerous cells and not even know it, because our immune system is smart enough to recognize such cancerous cells as damaged and rid them quickly before spreading.

As we age we become less able to keep the order in our system, and the entropy out. Our skin wrinkles, our bones weaken, we become more suceptible to diseases that we could fight off when we were younger.

It's really amazing just how much our body is doing constantly to keep us from literally falling to pieces.

But our body fights disease at the cellular level. Diseases aren't fought with the big picture in mind. Take AIDS for example. Here is a disease whose symptoms are literally a death from within. The immune system cannot fight the simple infections that any normal person could fight. The AIDS patient ends up constantly battling random diseases. The body doesn't know this. It sees one problem, say pneumonia, and fights that specifically, regardless of whether it was caused by AIDS or not. There is no 'big picture'. The body doesn't realize that its own immune system is what is damaged, and struggles to fight the symptoms.

If only the system itself could learn about the big picture. Sort of the body having an 'aha!' moment and being able to redirect its defenses to the true cause of AIDS, the virus that hides in cells going undetected. To learn how to make this detection. Obviously, doctors can take blood samples and 'detect' HIV. That's an outside 'brain' looking at a drop of blood and seeing a problem. How can we teach the body to do that? How can the body look at its own drop of blood and change its strategies?

I feel that the brain plays an integral part in fighting disease. If there is anything that can coordinate our defense system, that can know the 'big picture' and attack the right targets, it is the brain. I think we may underestimate the role the brain may play in fighting disease. There are cases of patients healing faster through laughter and a happy mood. Our mood can actually affect our recovery time from surgeries. Would the opposite be true as well? Would a depressed person heal slower or be more susceptible to disease? I don't think it is a far stretch.

Awhile ago I stated that brain damage might possibly be similar to the process of building muscles. But in the sense that relaxation is recuperation for muscles, what would be recuperation from 'brain-building'? Sleep of course.

During a normal day, the brain is slightly damaged by the body's metabolism, and by free radicals. When one is asleep, the brain engages a repair center which slowly mends the tiny injuries, restoring the brain to its full potential. During the deepest phase of sleep, called REM, it is believed that the repair center itself is repaired. But the longer that sleep is prevented, the more damage one's brain accrues, and the more sleep one will require to repair it. Too much damage, and it becomes irreparable.
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The brain also uses sleep as a time to sort, process, and catalog all of the information it has absorbed throughout the waking period, which is why memory is adversely effected by lack of sleep. Creativity also suffers because the brain builds creative associations from memories while slumbering. As if that weren't enough, the immune system will be weakened by insufficient sleep.