Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head • Hacker News Board

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#141

Post by boringg » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

nvrspyx wrote: post #133

boringg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Though, to be fair, I have met my share of arrogant medical practitioners.

I'm sure, but in the case of medical practitioners, that arrogance may be borne by confidence rather than ignorance. You certainly need to be confident in your abilities if you're going to take the responsibility of someone's health in your hands.

I don't disagree that they need to be confident in dealing with people's health. In the end arrogance born from confidence is still arrogance and I would argue (understandably unsubstantiated and difficult to quantify) that it is pervasive in the medical community.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#142

Post by achillesheels » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #119

rbanffy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

The thing with bytes, and everything else pertaining to computing, is that it's wholly invented by humans, so of course it's possible to obtain a complete enough mental image of things like CPUs given enough documentation. Human body, on the other hand, is literally alien technology because humans themselves didn't take any part in engineering it.

Actually, you’d be surprised how plausible it is to diagram the human electrophysiology using electromechanical circuit analogs. Everything in the body signals electrically, and biological matter being piezoelectric has been known (probably not popularly) since the late 60’s.

Indeed, I am finishing up my dissertation applying electrical engineering theory to model cellular evolutionary biology predicated on digital signal processing theory to demonstrate natural selection progressively evolves adaptations with faster sampling rates of environmental radiation for greatest BIBO system stability.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#143

Post by achillesheels » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #98

rbanffy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

Our field is vastly simpler than medicine. We're working on the edge of theory and practice is much, much, much messier. Cut it out with the arrogance. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Frankly speaking, how could you judge? I am coming from a biomedical engineering advanced education from a top 10 institution, mind you. And I can tell you the lack of mathematical completeness in medicine is very alarming. It is too pharmacologically driven without a fundamental appreciation of the electrical sciences being applied, well, anywhere in their disciplines.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#144

Post by bgribble » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #68

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #45

I find this weirdly amazing, as to this day I was reading some medical news and documentaries where it was said that entire human bodies were sliced by millimetre slices. So, somehow I always imagined that each part of body and tissue is 100% known and that only left is to find out what are inner workings on the nano-meter scale, deep molecular levels or genetic level. But in 2018 there was a similar news about Inter…

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

Funny you pick that as an example!

I do seem to recall a very large cohort of programmers (LOCALE=en_us) finding themselves dumped through a rabbithole of wonder which turned the black-and-white scenery of the Land of ASCII to the kaliedoscopic technicolor of Unicode. We did, in fact, discover that there were extra bits on those characters that we had been pretending weren't there all along :)

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#145

Post by edoloughlin » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #5

It seems almost unbelievable that in this day and age we could have missed something like this. In my opinion, it put modern medicine into perspective. I've suspected for some time that medicine is actually closer to the dark ages than we like to think it is, and this report seems like a good validation of that notion.

I've suspected for some time that medicine is actually closer to the dark ages than we like to think it is

Every now and then I see a comment that makes me think HN is closer to Facebook than we like to think it is.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#146

Post by hilbert42 » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #105

rbanffy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

Of course it would be embarrassing to discover a ninth bit; humans invented, created, and placed the other 8 bits, along with the entire computing infrastructure around them. Humans did not invent the human body, so it's not embarrassing to discover something new--it's exciting. That's the whole point of science. Medical researchers certainly know that they still have a ton to learn about the human body.

The point is that these days we're supposedly past finding 'large' physical chunks of the body—given a century's worth of diagnostics, x-rays, MRIs, etc.—and onto much more complicated matters such as how proteins are synthesized in human cells and how gut bacteria affects mental function and the like.

This one is a bit like not realizing the wheels are missing off your car. Right, it ought to have been damn obvious ages ago.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#147

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Thought this was an Onion headline for a second :P

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#148

Post by bzbarsky » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

valenciarose wrote: post #128

rbanffy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

You assume all bytes are eight bits, but that hasn’t always been the case. Machines with variable byte sizes were relatively common in the 70s and early 80s. This is why so many RFCs use the word octet instead of byte.

Even now there are hardware architectures with non-8-bit bytes, typically DSPs.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#149

Post by hilbert42 » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

valenciarose wrote: post #128

rbanffy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we still find new structures within our own bodies should be deeply troubling to anyone in the medical sciences. I for one would be deeply ashamed if I suddenly found that bytes had a ninth bit we never suspected was there in the first place.

You assume all bytes are eight bits, but that hasn’t always been the case. Machines with variable byte sizes were relatively common in the 70s and early 80s. This is why so many RFCs use the word octet instead of byte.

Yeah, and I also remember when real parity checking was replaced with a special pseudo parity-pretend chip on many SIM modules. It was so designed to especially fool motherboards into thinking that parity was actually enabled and working when it was not.

Yes, even the memory business had its sleazy carpetbaggers.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#150

Post by iguy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #135

iguy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seems weird about this is that the process for deciding that an approved drug is useful for a certain condition (not the one it was intended for) is really informal, it seems to rely on common knowledge circulating in the guild. For the initial approval, we have this very formal process, the FDA wants this kind of data from trials of this size to show this statistical level, etc. All very scientific-looking. But…

> I'm just a bit shocked how pre-modern our system for collecting this knowledge appears to be. I'm not an expert, but I imagine any more advanced system would be extremely problematic from a data protection point of view (think HIPAA etc.). In a study, patients sign multiple pages of legalese to allow the researchers to collect all the required data. You don't have that with regular patients in a GP's office.

Yes that's a hurdle. But even without that, it seems hard to design a good system. If most of the doctors treat the very sick cases (among those diagnosed with X) with drugs Y+Z currently rumoured to work, how do you disentangle the causes of their poor outcomes?

More generally, how do we know it isn't mostly garbage? That seems to be the consensus about most pre-20th-C medicine, and those guys weren't idiots, they were just trying things out and sharing ideas...