Not even close for me.
I can do it at slow to moderate speeds. At fast speeds my left hand starts turning sideways and the rotation becomes closer to up/down. My coworker gave me a weird look as I attempted it, so thanks for that.
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Try doing it around your ears like indicating someone is crazy - easier.
@treco:
With regard to the lovely Bach piece you posted: As for the motor control aspect, Kelso does not mean to imply that the phase shift he found indicates a limiting condition on human movement capabilities. Given the flexibility and adaptability of the human motor-control system, it’s not surprising that, with practice, we (well, some of us) can develop the means to develop new attractors that allow for such complex movements. The challenge is to develop a theory accounting for the emergence of such complex movements.
The way I see it, science is fun! Not just FUNdamental. That car is sexy, but it’s also packed to the teeth with scientific advancements.
Metallurgy, tolerances, pressures all kinds of physics and chemistry beauties wrapped together to work in symphonic harmony with one another.
And the idea of using the A\C to cool the charged air coming out of the supercharger, genius! That’s something that will work on boosted and unboosted applications.
I am a drummer. It takes a long time to program your brain to work in complex patterns, in time, like that. And of course, The Professor is one of the best at it.
But of course, at some point, though his thresholds for out of phase controls are higher his hands will eventually hit his wall and his hands will move in phase.
The tricks to the complexity of movements on a drum kit is rudiments and bounce. Using rudiments and bounce you can get sounds that appear sonically to be very fast and complex and to a certain extant they are, but in the end are a combination of rudiments with precisely timed bounce that give it that illusion.
Nice resource. MIT introductory physics OpenCourseWare. This is just a 3.20 minute introduction.
@hugh_gilly, I thought of you, since you mentioned that you like math and physics. Now you can take physics at MIT. There are 36 lectures. 
I know you haven’t been to university yet, and I’m not sure what the numbering system is in the UK. Normally, this would be Physics 101 here, but at MIT all the buildings are numbered. The physics building is the 800 building, thus the name of the course, 8.01
(Danger! Another wall of text ahead).
So just to put a bow on the motor-control experiments I presented…
The Kelso work revealed that the behavior of two moving objects (hands, in his experiments) that shared no direct physical linkage nonetheless tightly constrained one another. Further, the way those movements changed was consistent with what is called a phase transition in the dynamical systems approach to natural phenomena. Note that in this usage, the word phase is a general term meaning ‘a particular state of coordination among parts’; it doesn’t mean in-phase or out-of-phase the way we’ve used it previously.
(For you dynamical-systems geeks, Kelso found other, converging evidence that what occurred was a phase transition. Specifically, the transitions displayed the properties of critical slowing down, critical fluctuations, and hysteresis.)
I can hear it now–Slow ya roll, EyeDentist. True, the participants’ hands weren’t linked directly in a physical sense, but they were intimately connected in an extremely important way, namely, in that they shared a common nervous system. Maybe all this fancy dynamical-systems mumbo-jumbo is illusory—a side effect of the way the human nervous system is set up.
This is where the startling results of the Schmidt et al experiments come into play. Recall that Schmidt had pairs of participants, each swinging a single leg while watching their partner swing his/hers. Thus, not only were the moving objects unattached in a physical sense, they were neurologically independent of one another as well. Indeed, the only linkage between the moving limbs was informational—that is, each participant watched their partner’s leg, and this visual information was the sole source of connection between the legs. And despite the lack of any sort of physical or neurological connection, the same sort of phase transition that occurred in the Kelso experiment was observed. Once again, human behavior—in this case, a form of cooperative social behavior—was found to adhere to the principles of dynamical systems theory.
(As an aside, there have been many, many other experiments that have confirmed and extended these findings.)
The implications of this for the study of human motor control are enormous. The trap that movement scientists have fallen into, again and again, is to include some sort of Executive Function in their theories of motor control. The executive function comes in many forms, but in essence it amounts to ascribing the coordination observed in the movement to some form of pre-existing coordination in the person’s head—usually a ‘motor program’ of some sort. Some philosophers of science refer to this sort of approach as ‘taking a loan on intelligence.’ In other words, the executive function is assumed, a priori, to possess at least some of the coordination that the movement scientist is trying to account for. But doing this undercuts the entire purpose of the scientist’s work. That is, explaining coordination is what we’re trying to do, and it is deeply unsatisfying to explain the coordinated movements of a person by appealing to the coordinated firings of a pre-existing neural program in their head.
The challenge facing the movement scientist is to explain coordination, but to do so without relying on or appealing to coordination as an explanatory mechanism. This is of a piece with the challenge I presented earlier regarding explaining rhythmic output without appealing to rhythmic input. (Speaking of which, can anyone think of a common mechanical household object–one that’s been around for centuries–that converts a continuous energy source into a discontinuous, rhythmic output?) Dynamical-systems theory—the study of the spontaneous emergence of order in highly complex systems–may be our ticket to doing so.
I’ll stop there, but will be happy to kick this around some more should anyone be interested.
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Reviving the thread.
I thought I’d put up a few things that I thought were really interesting.
This is a big deal. It’s been quoted sooo much.
I thought this was interesting. Rethinking the importance or universal application of the Stages of Grief. The theory may not apply. You may not experience this pattern. Many people grieve differently. Related to bereavement counseling, so I’ll tag you, @EmilyQ
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0030222817691870
Just fascinating.
And one just for fun!! AND because I love to bag on Gwyneth Paltrow and Tracy Anderson with their tiny weights.
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@Aragorn, I know you pictured this thread as a place to talk about research in depth, so I apologize for the sort drive by.
A couple of things that have been really interesting to me. This is a radio broadcast about neurological differences in men and women. I just found it fascinating. They talk about how the vast majority of medical research has been done on males so the estrus cycle doesn’t “mess up” the data.
They get into why this research is so important as we hope to move toward more individualize and personalized medicine. I often wonder about the recommendations for medications or supplements since I’m about half the size, and have a different hormone profile than the rest of you. I’m hopeful that we’re going to see both nutrition and medicine become much more specific to the individual.
They get into lots of new research about sex differences in neurology, and various mental health or psychological differences.
One hour. Let me know if any of you listen, and if you have any thoughts.
If you want to read a related article, Larry Cahill, one of the scientists talking on the radio program above, discusses some of the research here. Not political, but important, particularly as we move toward more discussion of sex and gender in society. He makes a nice case for why we should want to study and understand.
http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2014/Equal_≠_The_Same__Sex_Differences_in_the_Human_Brain/
Read it. If you read the Cahill piece, do yourself a favor and read the response to it (the link is at the end of his article). Speaking of which, an observation/question: Why were the authors of the response referred to as “women academicians”? That is, of what relevance is their gender?
Thank you. I just read the response, and Cahill’s response back. As to your question, I can only guess. Let me know if you listen to the radio discussion. I’m 30 minutes in. These seem like reasonable people talking science.
The part about gene expression and hormones is amazing. They have identified genes, that cycle in expression with the female hormone cycle. I believe that’s around minute marker 25, and it’s the guy from Stanford talking. WOW!
Maybe I should have said this before. I didn’t put this up so that we could start another contentious gender thread, or heaven forbid, call Raj over here to start talking gender and politics. If someone wants to do that, they can revive the gender thread.
Cahill talking about the first part of the discussion.
A bit related. @hugh_gilly, I thought of you. You may have seen this, or some of his longer lectures about autism before. He’s talking autism, but he gets a bit into evolutionary biology. Of course, we have so many more males affected by autism. Something that the researchers in the radio program linked talk about, the incidence of some of these conditions among men and women. For example, anxiety and depression are much more common in women.
edited.
From a friend of mine in bioengineering. This seems like BIG news, right?
We keep hearing about the importance of the gut microbiome, but I hadn’t heard about the possible link to a neurological condition like Parkinson’s. Wouldn’t that be remarkable to find that it’s related to other human conditions, things that we never thought would be related to the gut?
The BBC teaser for lay people like me.
The Cell article for all of you biological science people. Mouse study.
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Bump.
Terrifying. This is probably the next super predator. It won’t need to pick your locks, it can just slip under the door. Enjoy the creepy music and sound effects.
@SkyzykS, your little guy might like this. You’ll have to watch it first.
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Oh, and a followup to the sex and brain neurology radio program I found so interesting. This is one of the scientists interviewed there, and it covers some of what he talked about on that program.
Also, the Stanford arcticle below mentions a “70-article January/February 2017 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Research — the first-ever issue of any neuroscience journal devoted entirely to the influence of sex differences on nervous-system function.” I’m going to have to look at that when I’m on campus and have access to that.
Other big science news. Much more in @Aragorn or @anonym 's area of expertise. Raising ethical concerns about gene editing.
Paywall so please pardon long block of text -
For the first time in the U.S., researchers said they had edited viable human embryos to correct a disease-causing defect, avoiding problems that plagued previous efforts and stoking concerns that advances in the lab are outpacing public discussion about the ethics of gene editing.
Using the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9, the researchers said they successfully corrected a mutation that can cause a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM. The condition, affecting an estimated 1 in 500 people, is best known as a common cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes.
The collaboration, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Korea’s Institute for Basic Science, used embryos created from healthy egg donors and sperm donated by an adult male who has the gene mutation and a family history of HCM. The donors were recruited in Oregon, and the gene editing was done in the U.S., according to a spokesman for OHSU.
The embryos, created for research, weren’t implanted in a woman, according to the researchers, who reported their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The study results raise ethical questions because they involve changes to the human germ-line, the genes of sperm, eggs or embryos. Scientists and bioethicists have called for caution in editing the germ-line because such changes would not only alter the individual but also be passed to future generations.
Regulatory agencies have been willing to consider testing Crispr-Cas9 therapies that treat diseases in individuals. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is prohibited by law from using funds to accept applications for research using gene editing of the human germ-line.
A report published this year from an international ethics committee sponsored by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine concluded that germ-line editing might someday be permitted, with limits. Among the committee’s recommendations were that the technique be used to treat only serious conditions and only when other options aren’t available.
Once studies are published in the scientific literature, other groups try to replicate them. Some countries might permit the work eventually to move forward to clinical trials. A U.K. fertility regulatory authority granted permission to researchers editing human embryos with Crispr for research purposes. Chinese scientists have pushed ahead with Crispr research in human embryos.
Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and a member of the National Academy committee, said this new paper is “pushing hard on the international conversation.” An international summit on gene editing is scheduled for early 2018 in Shanghai or Beijing, he said.
There is disagreement among this study’s researchers about how quickly such research should move forward.
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, a corresponding author of the paper and a member of the international ethics committee, said the results are promising but “the research should stay in the lab where scientists can improve the technologies.”
Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a senior author of the paper from Oregon Health, said although more work needs to be done to replicate the results, his goal is to have clinical trials involving the transfer of embryos into the womb to produce pregnancy and the birth of healthy children.
He didn’t rule out the possibility of trials in other places such as the U.K.“We would like to do regulated clinical trials,” said Dr. Mitalipov. He worries U.S. prohibitions might lead to the technology’s use in “unregulated areas, which should not be happening.”
The Crispr system works by targeting a specific spot in DNA and cutting it. Healthy DNA can then be used to replace the faulty gene when the cell repairs the cut. The technology holds great promise for treating many diseases.
The technology has sparked a rush of investment into companies poised to take advantage of Crispr. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in for-profit startups founded by scientists whose academic institutions are now warring with each other over the patent.
Previous experiments have run into problems. Sometimes the Crispr system made cuts in unintended spots of the DNA, which can potentially introduce other health issues. Other concerns occur when only some of the embryo cells are repaired, called mosaicism.
By experimenting at an early stage, researchers in the Nature study avoided some of those issues and reported they corrected the mutation in 42 of 58 embryos, or 72.4%. They were able almost to eliminate mosaicism except in one embryo.
Some scientists caution it is still far too early to move out of the lab. “They got 72% of what they wanted, which is way better than what anyone has seen before but is not good enough,” said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at UC Davis School of Medicine. “You need to be close to perfect to really ever try this in an actual human reproductive context.”
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I’m going to put that on the big screen for him. He loves ocean documentaries. We’ve watched a ton of them on Netflix. An aside- these ones they make now are a whole other level than “The Under Sea World of Jaques Cousteau” that I was raised on.
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Oh, I’m glad. That’s wonderful. I have one like that. It was all nature shows and Animal Planet, all the time. Bookshelves of nature books. He’s branched out into lots of other things now, but it’s still hard to get him to read fiction.
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So no MSM subscriptions coming to the Puff households,
yuck yuck
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Reviving this thread for a very cool discovery.
A group has just made a huge breakthrough for chemists everywhere, and especially new drug design. They have partially solved the “mirror image” problem in chemistry, which is about 200 years old!! They’ve essentially made a “facial recognition” system for certain classes of molecules.
Chances are if you’re a chemist and work with organic compounds (carbon containing), you are very interested in creating super specific molecules. Drugs must be highly specific structured molecules in order to work well. If they aren’t, you get all kinds of nasty side-effects from random unwanted side reactions with other tissues.
This is a huge challenge, because you’re dealing with “soups” of different looking molecules all jumbled together in a test tube or lab. You don’t get to put a molecule on a scaffold by itself and work on it like a car manufacturer, even under the most controlled conditions. You have to find a way to coax only those molecules you want into doing something while leaving the rest.
This leads to a problem known as the “mirror image” problem (in layman’s terms). This problem arises because one of the primary ways we know of to make new molecules is to strip something off the starting molecule and create an electric charge on it, so it is “activated” to receive a new chemical building block that you want to put on the starting “lego block” later.
Almost all molecules used as starting building blocks for drugs have a specific geometry. Imagine a pyramid with a triangular base, ok? It has 4 points, and we make each point a different color. Now, each one of the 4 points on this pyramid represents a bundle of atoms. To make our drug we’re going to strip off one of the bundles–or more, but let’s keep it simple–and create an ion. Then we’ll introduce the new atom bundle that we want to add, and let the bond form to get a new pyramid with 1 new point on it. Sounds great so far…
EXCEPT that once you strip off that top pyramid point you’ve changed the geometry of the starting molecule from a “pyramid” to a flat triangle with 3 points. This means a new bundle can approach the target from above or below, and the bond it forms will point in a different direction depending on which side it came from! ONLY ONE OF THESE SIDES will work for making the drug though…the other one is an “evil twin”, the mirror image of what we want.
These evil twins can have any number of random effects–sometimes they’re inert and harmless except for taking up space. Sometimes they create random side reactions in the body, are highly toxic, or even negate the effectiveness of the “good twin’s” action.
This group of scientists developed a way to get a mini helper molecule to ID the side of the target we want to attack. It’s particularly ingenious because it doesn’t matter which side of our triangle the helper finds first (top or bottom)…it ALWAYS targets the correct one for us!
Classic reaction re-engineered through molecular face recognition (executive summary)
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The word chirality has appeared in my conscious awareness for some reason…
While organic chem was vastly harder than the preceding general chems, it was also far more interesting. I always enjoyed the 3D-nature of organic reactions.
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