Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time...

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:18:27 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:14:08 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 19:30:57 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

They do just this, but in the form of a population code.
While no single neuron\'s output is all that precise or complex, the
average over a few thousand neurons doing the same thing is quite
precise, and robust against loss of many neurons.

There is also a lot of phase coding (phase relative to such as the
alpha or theta rhythms). There may also be random codes and
cross-correlation processing. It\'s very complex. Details still being
worked out.


So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

Fast but not complex. Typical speeds are about 100 meters per second
(one third of sound in air), so that\'s 20 ms for 2 meters.


A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

It does not work that way at all. There are books.


Things being in books doesn\'t make them right.

True. The point is that it is pretty complicated and so I cannot
explain it here. Nor do the books all agree - they document this or
that researcher\'s theory of what\'s going on, and the case for that
view, precisely so others can critique it.


Nobody knows how a brain works.

Yes and no. There are many areas that are fairly well understood, and
others that are complete mysteries. So far...

Joe Gwinn

If a picture of a goat or a hammer or the Golden Gate Bridge pops up
on your screen you\'d recognize and name it in under a second. If you
read 300 wpm, you are processing 5 words a second, maybe 30 letters
per second. If a word is misspelled or the bridge is assembled wrong,
you\'ll note that instantly. Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Nobody has a clue. Extraordinary performance suggests extraordinary
mechanisms.

The history of biology is concensus among experts that things are
impossible, punctuated by rebels proving otherwise.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 15/10/22 15:51, Jan Panteltje wrote:
> Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time

One of the founders is a personal friend. What do you want to ask him?

Smart bloke, is Andy. His dad was a professor of mathematics too.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 13:40:15 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:18:27 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:14:08 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 19:30:57 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

They do just this, but in the form of a population code.
While no single neuron\'s output is all that precise or complex, the
average over a few thousand neurons doing the same thing is quite
precise, and robust against loss of many neurons.

There is also a lot of phase coding (phase relative to such as the
alpha or theta rhythms). There may also be random codes and
cross-correlation processing. It\'s very complex. Details still being
worked out.


So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

Fast but not complex. Typical speeds are about 100 meters per second
(one third of sound in air), so that\'s 20 ms for 2 meters.


A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

It does not work that way at all. There are books.


Things being in books doesn\'t make them right.

True. The point is that it is pretty complicated and so I cannot
explain it here. Nor do the books all agree - they document this or
that researcher\'s theory of what\'s going on, and the case for that
view, precisely so others can critique it.


Nobody knows how a brain works.

Yes and no. There are many areas that are fairly well understood, and
others that are complete mysteries. So far...

Joe Gwinn

If a picture of a goat or a hammer or the Golden Gate Bridge pops up
on your screen you\'d recognize and name it in under a second.

Yes.

If you
read 300 wpm, you are processing 5 words a second, maybe 30 letters
per second. If a word is misspelled or the bridge is assembled wrong,
you\'ll note that instantly.

We don\'t usually process things a letter (or phoneme) at a time - too
slow. We seem to recognize big chunks at a time. This, after may
years learning how to read better and better. Associative memory is
the key to speed here.

Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Turns out that memories are stored everywhere, and very poorly
understood mechanism binds all this into a perceptual whole.

Access is fast because memory is associative. For the general
mechanism, go back to my various postings on Sparse Distributed
Memory.

Ref: \"Kanerva on \"Computing with 10,000-Bit Words\"\", SED, July 2021.

The core problem is that nobody has come up with a good non0biological
way to implement a sufficiently large associative memory.

Emulation using ordinary computers is good only for playing with the
theory, but not for real-world use.

Someone will solve the problem.

Nobody has a clue. Extraordinary performance suggests extraordinary
mechanisms.

Well there are certainly clues, but this is definitely an emerging
field.

The history of biology is concensus among experts that things are
impossible, punctuated by rebels proving otherwise.

True enough. But it\'s hard to tell which ones are correct in advance.

Joe Gwinn

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:38:07 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 13:40:15 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:18:27 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:14:08 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 19:30:57 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

They do just this, but in the form of a population code.
While no single neuron\'s output is all that precise or complex, the
average over a few thousand neurons doing the same thing is quite
precise, and robust against loss of many neurons.

There is also a lot of phase coding (phase relative to such as the
alpha or theta rhythms). There may also be random codes and
cross-correlation processing. It\'s very complex. Details still being
worked out.


So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

Fast but not complex. Typical speeds are about 100 meters per second
(one third of sound in air), so that\'s 20 ms for 2 meters.


A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

It does not work that way at all. There are books.


Things being in books doesn\'t make them right.

True. The point is that it is pretty complicated and so I cannot
explain it here. Nor do the books all agree - they document this or
that researcher\'s theory of what\'s going on, and the case for that
view, precisely so others can critique it.


Nobody knows how a brain works.

Yes and no. There are many areas that are fairly well understood, and
others that are complete mysteries. So far...

Joe Gwinn

If a picture of a goat or a hammer or the Golden Gate Bridge pops up
on your screen you\'d recognize and name it in under a second.

Yes.

If you
read 300 wpm, you are processing 5 words a second, maybe 30 letters
per second. If a word is misspelled or the bridge is assembled wrong,
you\'ll note that instantly.

We don\'t usually process things a letter (or phoneme) at a time - too
slow. We seem to recognize big chunks at a time. This, after may
years learning how to read better and better. Associative memory is
the key to speed here.

Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Turns out that memories are stored everywhere, and very poorly
understood mechanism binds all this into a perceptual whole.

Access is fast because memory is associative.

That\'s just a word. It suggests nothing about how it works.

For the general
mechanism, go back to my various postings on Sparse Distributed
Memory.

Ref: \"Kanerva on \"Computing with 10,000-Bit Words\"\", SED, July 2021.

The core problem is that nobody has come up with a good non0biological
way to implement a sufficiently large associative memory.

Emulation using ordinary computers is good only for playing with the
theory, but not for real-world use.

Someone will solve the problem.

Some things may never be explained.

Nobody has a clue. Extraordinary performance suggests extraordinary
mechanisms.

Well there are certainly clues, but this is definitely an emerging
field.


The history of biology is concensus among experts that things are
impossible, punctuated by rebels proving otherwise.

True enough. But it\'s hard to tell which ones are correct in advance.

But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:

But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.

Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 14:57:25 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:38:07 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 13:40:15 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:18:27 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:14:08 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 19:30:57 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

They do just this, but in the form of a population code.
While no single neuron\'s output is all that precise or complex, the
average over a few thousand neurons doing the same thing is quite
precise, and robust against loss of many neurons.

There is also a lot of phase coding (phase relative to such as the
alpha or theta rhythms). There may also be random codes and
cross-correlation processing. It\'s very complex. Details still being
worked out.


So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

Fast but not complex. Typical speeds are about 100 meters per second
(one third of sound in air), so that\'s 20 ms for 2 meters.


A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

It does not work that way at all. There are books.


Things being in books doesn\'t make them right.

True. The point is that it is pretty complicated and so I cannot
explain it here. Nor do the books all agree - they document this or
that researcher\'s theory of what\'s going on, and the case for that
view, precisely so others can critique it.


Nobody knows how a brain works.

Yes and no. There are many areas that are fairly well understood, and
others that are complete mysteries. So far...

Joe Gwinn

If a picture of a goat or a hammer or the Golden Gate Bridge pops up
on your screen you\'d recognize and name it in under a second.

Yes.

If you
read 300 wpm, you are processing 5 words a second, maybe 30 letters
per second. If a word is misspelled or the bridge is assembled wrong,
you\'ll note that instantly.

We don\'t usually process things a letter (or phoneme) at a time - too
slow. We seem to recognize big chunks at a time. This, after may
years learning how to read better and better. Associative memory is
the key to speed here.

Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Turns out that memories are stored everywhere, and very poorly
understood mechanism binds all this into a perceptual whole.

Access is fast because memory is associative.

That\'s just a word. It suggests nothing about how it works.

It\'s true that \"associative\" describes only what is accomplished, not
how to build the thing.

In this case, we do know how biology does this, but cannot figure out
a way to do the same well enough to build robots that can do the same
fast and well enough to matter in the real world.

For the general
mechanism, go back to my various postings on Sparse Distributed
Memory.

Ref: \"Kanerva on \"Computing with 10,000-Bit Words\"\", SED, July 2021.

The core problem is that nobody has come up with a good non0biological
way to implement a sufficiently large associative memory.

Emulation using ordinary computers is good only for playing with the
theory, but not for real-world use.

Someone will solve the problem.

Some things may never be explained.

True enough, but the issue here is far simpler: We know how it is
done in biology, but not how to do it non-biologically.

Nobody has a clue. Extraordinary performance suggests extraordinary
mechanisms.

Well there are certainly clues, but this is definitely an emerging
field.


The history of biology is concensus among experts that things are
impossible, punctuated by rebels proving otherwise.

True enough. But it\'s hard to tell which ones are correct in advance.

But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.

Yep, true in all fields.


>Rotating biological structures are my favorite.

Yes, and not just in cilia.

See SED thread \"DNA animation\" specifically 18 May 2019.

Also the movies on the manufacture of ATP fro ADP.


Joe Gwinn

 

[Fred Bloggs]

On Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 12:43:13 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:20:17 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
bloggs.fred...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 1:07:18 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:03:26 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
bloggs.fred...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 10:44:55 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6
I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong..

A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

Of course few-cell critters have complex behaviors and can learn, and
they don\'t have neurons. But they don\'t have to send data very far and
don\'t have to fill out tax forms.

Doesn\'t work that way.

\"Synaptic transmission is the process at synapses by which a chemical signal (a transmitter) is released from one neuron and diffuses to other neurons or target cells where it generates a signal which excites, inhibits or modulates cellular activity.\"

\"By means of synaptic transmission, an electrical signal in one neuron passes from the terminal of its axon into another cell and starts in that cell an impulse having characteristics different from its own (Palay and Chan-Palay, 1976).\"

So you see it\'s way, way more than anything having to day with \"information\" bundles.
I was talking about long runs, toe to brain, data sent some distance
within a single nerve fiber. Prop delays of the gross electrical pulse
are roughly 50 m/s, maybe 40 milliseconds toe to brain.

1976 was a long time ago, and still nobody knows how our nervous
system works.

Part of my retina thing made me think of how extraordinary our optical
processing is. Images from two eyes (especially mine) are scaled
differently, distorted, twisted, constantly changing, and some brain
centers manipulate them in space and time and align the images, then
extract an extraordinary amount of data in milliseconds. Two fuzzy
images can be processed in to one good one.

In summary:
:
An understanding of synaptic transmission is the key to understanding the basic operation of the nervous system at a cellular level.
But nobody understands it.


Without transmission, there is no direct communication between cells?here would be only individual isolated cells. The whole point of the nervous system is to control and coordinate body function and enable the body to respond to, and act on, the environment. Synaptic transmission is the key process in the integrative action of the nervous system.
:
This is the classic example of getting zillions of component cellular entities to act as a coordinated whole.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/synaptic-transmission


Yikes, 1906 theory! Claude Shannon wasn\'t born yet!

Chemical diffusion sounds slow if you want to win at tennis.

I had a friend who was a pretty good tennis player. Good play is all
about english, ball spin. He could read the spin on a ball by looking
at the seams as it crossed the net coming at him, and adjust his
return strategy... in a fraction of a second.

Just saw one crazy statistic that there is 500 km of nerve fiber in the brain- about the distance to the moon. There\'s the moon again- do we have a correlation between this moon-fiber distance and mood-sanity changes with the moon?

That should be 500,000 km of nerve fiber in the brain.

I\'m trying to connect a clock to eight NC7SV74 Tiny flipflops. If I
lump them together the capacitance slows the driver down too much. If
I distribute their capacitance along a transmission line, the edge
hits the last one too late.

Don\'t they have zero delay PLLs for stuff like that? If it\'s a pulsed CK then you need something else. McKeown (sp?) probably has something in his circuits collection.
https://ipo.llnl.gov/technologies/instruments-sensors-and-electronics/micropower-impulse-radar-mir

I\'m out of time, connecting eight flops at the speed of light.

Imagine connecting 86 billion neurons with chemical things that
propagate at about 50 meters per second.

 

[Ricky]

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 11:20:21 PM UTC-4, Fred Bloggs wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 1:07:18 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:03:26 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
bloggs.fred...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 10:44:55 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6
I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

Of course few-cell critters have complex behaviors and can learn, and
they don\'t have neurons. But they don\'t have to send data very far and
don\'t have to fill out tax forms.

Doesn\'t work that way.

\"Synaptic transmission is the process at synapses by which a chemical signal (a transmitter) is released from one neuron and diffuses to other neurons or target cells where it generates a signal which excites, inhibits or modulates cellular activity.\"

\"By means of synaptic transmission, an electrical signal in one neuron passes from the terminal of its axon into another cell and starts in that cell an impulse having characteristics different from its own (Palay and Chan-Palay, 1976).\"

So you see it\'s way, way more than anything having to day with \"information\" bundles.
I was talking about long runs, toe to brain, data sent some distance
within a single nerve fiber. Prop delays of the gross electrical pulse
are roughly 50 m/s, maybe 40 milliseconds toe to brain.

1976 was a long time ago, and still nobody knows how our nervous
system works.

Part of my retina thing made me think of how extraordinary our optical
processing is. Images from two eyes (especially mine) are scaled
differently, distorted, twisted, constantly changing, and some brain
centers manipulate them in space and time and align the images, then
extract an extraordinary amount of data in milliseconds. Two fuzzy
images can be processed in to one good one.

In summary:
:
An understanding of synaptic transmission is the key to understanding the basic operation of the nervous system at a cellular level.
But nobody understands it.


Without transmission, there is no direct communication between cells葉here would be only individual isolated cells. The whole point of the nervous system is to control and coordinate body function and enable the body to respond to, and act on, the environment. Synaptic transmission is the key process in the integrative action of the nervous system.
:
This is the classic example of getting zillions of component cellular entities to act as a coordinated whole.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/synaptic-transmission


Yikes, 1906 theory! Claude Shannon wasn\'t born yet!

Chemical diffusion sounds slow if you want to win at tennis.

I had a friend who was a pretty good tennis player. Good play is all
about english, ball spin. He could read the spin on a ball by looking
at the seams as it crossed the net coming at him, and adjust his
return strategy... in a fraction of a second.
Just saw one crazy statistic that there is 500 km of nerve fiber in the brain- about the distance to the moon. There\'s the moon again- do we have a correlation between this moon-fiber distance and mood-sanity changes with the moon?

Should we assume you mean 500,000 km? Or do you mean a moon that is much closer to the earth, like one of the many artificial satellites?

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman

Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:43:57 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
<bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 12:43:13 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 20:20:17 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
bloggs.fred...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 1:07:18 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:03:26 -0700 (PDT), Fred Bloggs
bloggs.fred...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 10:44:55 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6
I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

A nerve fiber probably transmits multiple message bundles between each
occasional electrochemical refresh pulse. The messages might propagate
about the speed of sound, or even faster. The data bundles might in
fact be frequent and tiny, sent far more often than the gross
electrical refresh impulses. The packets and the refresh could be
fully asynchronous, and data packets cruise right through the slowly
moving refresh pulses.

Of course few-cell critters have complex behaviors and can learn, and
they don\'t have neurons. But they don\'t have to send data very far and
don\'t have to fill out tax forms.

Doesn\'t work that way.

\"Synaptic transmission is the process at synapses by which a chemical signal (a transmitter) is released from one neuron and diffuses to other neurons or target cells where it generates a signal which excites, inhibits or modulates cellular activity.\"

\"By means of synaptic transmission, an electrical signal in one neuron passes from the terminal of its axon into another cell and starts in that cell an impulse having characteristics different from its own (Palay and Chan-Palay, 1976).\"

So you see it\'s way, way more than anything having to day with \"information\" bundles.
I was talking about long runs, toe to brain, data sent some distance
within a single nerve fiber. Prop delays of the gross electrical pulse
are roughly 50 m/s, maybe 40 milliseconds toe to brain.

1976 was a long time ago, and still nobody knows how our nervous
system works.

Part of my retina thing made me think of how extraordinary our optical
processing is. Images from two eyes (especially mine) are scaled
differently, distorted, twisted, constantly changing, and some brain
centers manipulate them in space and time and align the images, then
extract an extraordinary amount of data in milliseconds. Two fuzzy
images can be processed in to one good one.

In summary:
:
An understanding of synaptic transmission is the key to understanding the basic operation of the nervous system at a cellular level.
But nobody understands it.


Without transmission, there is no direct communication between cells?here would be only individual isolated cells. The whole point of the nervous system is to control and coordinate body function and enable the body to respond to, and act on, the environment. Synaptic transmission is the key process in the integrative action of the nervous system.
:
This is the classic example of getting zillions of component cellular entities to act as a coordinated whole.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/synaptic-transmission


Yikes, 1906 theory! Claude Shannon wasn\'t born yet!

Chemical diffusion sounds slow if you want to win at tennis.

I had a friend who was a pretty good tennis player. Good play is all
about english, ball spin. He could read the spin on a ball by looking
at the seams as it crossed the net coming at him, and adjust his
return strategy... in a fraction of a second.

Just saw one crazy statistic that there is 500 km of nerve fiber in the brain- about the distance to the moon. There\'s the moon again- do we have a correlation between this moon-fiber distance and mood-sanity changes with the moon?

That should be 500,000 km of nerve fiber in the brain.

I\'m trying to connect a clock to eight NC7SV74 Tiny flipflops. If I
lump them together the capacitance slows the driver down too much. If
I distribute their capacitance along a transmission line, the edge
hits the last one too late.

Don\'t they have zero delay PLLs for stuff like that?

It\'s a burst clock that starts when we get a customer trigger. Some
time after it starts it\'s phase locked to an XO.

I think I\'ll buffer the comparator output, that generates the clock,
with a BUF602 and drive all eight flops brute force in a tight cluster
without terminations.

BUF602 has a 1.4 ohm output impedance and a 350 ps rise time. It can
output 350 mA peak.

 

[bitrex]

On 10/16/2022 1:39 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 11:22:21 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
m9ulkh53e7hs41uqenuh89dga4hg64hksr@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 17:24:37 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 10:13:34 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
dcqlkh9o0c33hn1prkagga6h5tjch0utea@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 15:05:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
tsflkh1805insfkc4iiorl6v4i3blf6rj5@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii
%2
FS
0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

Look up neural nets software
A neuron is simulated by a connection with \'weights\' to other neurons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network





So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

The distances from eye and ear to to the related brain areas are not very big,
Our reaction time is measured in milli seconds...

And sound localization uses ear-to-ear time differences resolved to
nanoseconds.

Well, you are aware that a _nano_ second (10E-9) stands for 1 GHz? (I hope) ;-)

I knew that!

Most audio frequencies are in the max few kHz range...

Yes, but localization seems to involve nanosecond resolution, at least
in bats.

Imagine wings flapping, hearts beating, air turbulance, and
maintaining ns resolution - or even us resolution - between two ears.
With meters per second prop delays and millisecond logic elements.

Bats use sound just a bit above what we can hear, from 9 kHz (we can hear) to about 200 kHz.
you can buy a \'bat detector\' that mixes it down to audible range so you can hear the bats.
The reflected delay from an external object is a very specific pattern that is easily
told apart from \'internal\' noise.
Would not surprise me a bit if bats also used radar like frequency sweeps, never
really listened to bats myself, but did a lot of ultrasonic experiments at about 40 kHz.
Not any bats around here, else I would have tested that

My unscientific experiments as a kid throwing gravel up in the air like
\"chaff\" into the path of hungry bats that came out of the woods near my
home at night, is that bats are easily fooled by the \"chaff\" at least
transiently, but quickly realize their mistake and break off long before
the gravel comes back down.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:11:11 -0400) it happened bitrex
<user@example.net> wrote in <zB43L.439637$SAT4.70534@fx13.iad>:

On 10/16/2022 1:39 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 11:22:21 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
m9ulkh53e7hs41uqenuh89dga4hg64hksr@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 17:24:37 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 10:13:34 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
dcqlkh9o0c33hn1prkagga6h5tjch0utea@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 15:05:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 15 Oct 2022 07:44:43 -0700) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
tsflkh1805insfkc4iiorl6v4i3blf6rj5@4ax.com>:

On Sat, 15 Oct 2022 04:51:28 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221012132528.htm
is actually about adaptation... and what we are...


https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii
%2
FS
0896627322008066%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0896-6273%2822%2900806-6


I was just thinking about neurons and signal processing. I had some
recent retina damage and an amazing repair, so it\'s on my mind.

My thought is that the electrical impulses that can be easily measured
in nerve cells can\'t convey much information. They are slow and gross
and their prop delays will be erratic so they can\'t use some sort of
time-of-pulse encoding to send information.

Look up neural nets software
A neuron is simulated by a connection with \'weights\' to other neurons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network





So a nerve pulse from your toe to your brain is probably a fast-moving
complex packet of information, a traveling bundle of chemicals. I
suspect that the gross electrical pulse actually follows the data
packet, slowly, sort of a refresh/reset to prepare the channel for the
next data packet. The info packet would travel much faster,
practically has to since you can localize sounds and play ping-pong.

The distances from eye and ear to to the related brain areas are not very big,
Our reaction time is measured in milli seconds...

And sound localization uses ear-to-ear time differences resolved to
nanoseconds.

Well, you are aware that a _nano_ second (10E-9) stands for 1 GHz? (I hope) ;-)

I knew that!

Most audio frequencies are in the max few kHz range...

Yes, but localization seems to involve nanosecond resolution, at least
in bats.

Imagine wings flapping, hearts beating, air turbulance, and
maintaining ns resolution - or even us resolution - between two ears.
With meters per second prop delays and millisecond logic elements.

Bats use sound just a bit above what we can hear, from 9 kHz (we can hear) to about 200 kHz.
you can buy a \'bat detector\' that mixes it down to audible range so you can hear the bats.
The reflected delay from an external object is a very specific pattern that is easily
told apart from \'internal\' noise.
Would not surprise me a bit if bats also used radar like frequency sweeps, never
really listened to bats myself, but did a lot of ultrasonic experiments at about 40 kHz.
Not any bats around here, else I would have tested that


My unscientific experiments as a kid throwing gravel up in the air like
\"chaff\" into the path of hungry bats that came out of the woods near my
home at night, is that bats are easily fooled by the \"chaff\" at least
transiently, but quickly realize their mistake and break off long before
the gravel comes back down.

Nothing like real experiments, I like it!

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

On 2022-10-17 02:05, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman


Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

On the microscopic level, there is no need to get blood vessels,
nerves and structural tissues across. I imagine that that was why
macroscopic rotating biological structures where declared impossible.
On the microscopic and molecular levels, no such limitations exist.

The statement was taken out of context.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 2:57:36 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:38:07 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joeg...@comcast.net
wrote:

We don\'t usually process things a letter (or phoneme) at a time - too
slow. We seem to recognize big chunks at a time. This, after may
years learning how to read better and better. Associative memory is
the key to speed here.

Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Turns out that memories are stored everywhere, and very poorly
understood mechanism binds all this into a perceptual whole.

Access is fast because memory is associative.

That\'s just a word. It suggests nothing about how it works.

Fair enough, the \'how it works\' is correlation. There\'s an overlap integral
inside a LOT of physics, and that same kind of thing can
do much of image processing.

There was a moving-parts gizmo that projected lines and curves onto a
negative, and noted all the locations and curvatures where there were peaks; it
analyzed bubble-chamber and spark-chamber tracks of particles at an accelerator,
in the days when film was the available technology.

It worked, because only the curves correlated with the particle track
gave high light transmission. The most god-awful array of function generators
and an oscilloscope display, and mirrors, and... voila, analyzed data!

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:05:28 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman


Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

The key here is the unspoken assumption that if we cannot see a path,
there can be no path.

And a spoken but untrue assumption is that useless mutations are
quickly deleted, and so cannot evolve. There is lots of random
redundancy in genomes, so previously useless variation may one day
become slightly advantageous, and it\'s off to the races.

Rinse and repeat. A million years is many many generations, so the
advantage can be quite tiny, and still it evolves.

A classic large-scale example is when a chromosome (or a part thereof)
is accidentally duplicated, so now the critter has two genes for the
same thing. Before, that gene was constrained to continue to serve
the original function. After, one of the pair can remain the same
while the other evolves independently. This pattern has been seen
many times.

Joe Gwinn

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 01:14:03 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 2:57:36 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:38:07 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joeg...@comcast.net
wrote:

We don\'t usually process things a letter (or phoneme) at a time - too
slow. We seem to recognize big chunks at a time. This, after may
years learning how to read better and better. Associative memory is
the key to speed here.

Where are images and words stored, and how
can you access so many so fast?

Turns out that memories are stored everywhere, and very poorly
understood mechanism binds all this into a perceptual whole.

Access is fast because memory is associative.

That\'s just a word. It suggests nothing about how it works.

Fair enough, the \'how it works\' is correlation. There\'s an overlap integral
inside a LOT of physics, and that same kind of thing can
do much of image processing.

There was a moving-parts gizmo that projected lines and curves onto a
negative, and noted all the locations and curvatures where there were peaks; it
analyzed bubble-chamber and spark-chamber tracks of particles at an accelerator,
in the days when film was the available technology.

It worked, because only the curves correlated with the particle track
gave high light transmission. The most god-awful array of function generators
and an oscilloscope display, and mirrors, and... voila, analyzed data!

Our brains do intense 3d shifting and rotation and zooming and
distortion of the data from our retinas and then search for
correlations, for aligned stereo vision and for image recognition.
With motion tracking, in milliseconds. Pretty cool chemical computer.

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

On 2022-10-17 21:27, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:05:28 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman


Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

The key here is the unspoken assumption that if we cannot see a path,
there can be no path.

And a spoken but untrue assumption is that useless mutations are
quickly deleted, and so cannot evolve. There is lots of random
redundancy in genomes, so previously useless variation may one day
become slightly advantageous, and it\'s off to the races.

Rinse and repeat. A million years is many many generations, so the
advantage can be quite tiny, and still it evolves.

A classic large-scale example is when a chromosome (or a part thereof)
is accidentally duplicated, so now the critter has two genes for the
same thing. Before, that gene was constrained to continue to serve
the original function. After, one of the pair can remain the same
while the other evolves independently. This pattern has been seen
many times.

Joe Gwinn

Beside the point. We were talking about rotating biological structures.
Can we have beasts with freely rotating wheels or propellers? Sounds
like a fun idea to use in a science fiction novel.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 23:04:01 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-17 21:27, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:05:28 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman


Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

The key here is the unspoken assumption that if we cannot see a path,
there can be no path.

And a spoken but untrue assumption is that useless mutations are
quickly deleted, and so cannot evolve. There is lots of random
redundancy in genomes, so previously useless variation may one day
become slightly advantageous, and it\'s off to the races.

Rinse and repeat. A million years is many many generations, so the
advantage can be quite tiny, and still it evolves.

A classic large-scale example is when a chromosome (or a part thereof)
is accidentally duplicated, so now the critter has two genes for the
same thing. Before, that gene was constrained to continue to serve
the original function. After, one of the pair can remain the same
while the other evolves independently. This pattern has been seen
many times.

Joe Gwinn


Beside the point. We were talking about rotating biological structures.
Can we have beasts with freely rotating wheels or propellers? Sounds
like a fun idea to use in a science fiction novel.

Ciliated bacteria are just such a critter.

I actually recall such a ScFi story, from the 1970s, but don\'t recall
title or author.

But more or less the same rotary mechanism is seen in mammalian cells
as well, as shown in the various videos.

Joe Gwinn

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:27:30 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:05:28 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:


But the experts weren\'t shy about declaring things impossible.
Rotating biological structures are my favorite.


Example please? Or are you talking of unicellular things with
cilia? That would be cheating.

Jeroen Belleman


Cilia was a classic case. Experts said that rotation was an optical
illusion. Some kid glued down a cilia and saw the entire bacteria
rotating.

The DNA splitter helicase rotates about 10,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8gH404a3Gg

some molecular motors go over 100,000 RPM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyd4CfYfVCA

The key here is the unspoken assumption that if we cannot see a path,
there can be no path.

And a spoken but untrue assumption is that useless mutations are
quickly deleted, and so cannot evolve. There is lots of random
redundancy in genomes, so previously useless variation may one day
become slightly advantageous, and it\'s off to the races.

And junk DNA. We don\'t understand it so it must be useless.

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at 2:48:28 PM UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:27:30 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joeg...@comcast.net> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2022 17:05:28 -0700, John Larkin <jla...@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote:
On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:17:06 +0200, Jeroen Belleman <jer...@nospam.please> wrote:
On 2022-10-16 23:57, John Larkin wrote:

The key here is the unspoken assumption that if we cannot see a path, there can be no path.

And a spoken but untrue assumption is that useless mutations are
quickly deleted, and so cannot evolve. There is lots of random
redundancy in genomes, so previously useless variation may one day
become slightly advantageous, and it\'s off to the races.

And junk DNA. We don\'t understand it so it must be useless.

That might have been true a long time ago. The current understanding is that a lot of it is information about gene regulation. Different genes are active to different extents in different cells (nerve cells versus muscle cells and so on) at different times, and the rules about when they are active is believed to be encoded in the \"junk DNA\" which is to say stretches of DNA that don\'t encode the structure of some protein or other. We seem to have about 20,000 genes that encode the structure of about 100,000 proteins, which is to say about 80,000 proteins are edited versions of the 20,000 encoded in the identifiable genes.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney