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

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#171

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:02 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.

> humans invented, created, and placed the other 8 bits,

Humans did, but not you or me. What if they lied to us? What if we believed in those lies and never checked? ;-)

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#172

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #168

DoreenMichele wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a hard question to answer is "Where does the gut end and the contents of the gut begin?" Stomach acid is contents of the gut but also part of the digestive tract. An even more thorny issue: the microbiome, which is a hot topic in research. And that's a complication the head lacks.

Going up a meta-level, for different types of research/analysis, its also important to ask "when is it important to look at gut/contents of gut as separate" and "when should we use a systems understanding". My personal opinion is that modern medicine doesn't really like to think about the systems, because it's easier to look at something in isolation. Sometimes this is helpful - simply the problem space and you can s…

In tribal cultures, "medicine men" are both doctors and spiritual leaders. Historically in the Western world, doctors were some of the best educated people in town and some of the wisest people in town and everybody knew each other in a small town. The doctor made house calls with his little black bag.

Now doctors mostly don't make house calls because we use so much tech for diagnostics that you can't carry it with you. Star Trek's Dr. McCoy and his tricorder was modeled on the "little black bag" pattern of medicine and it married the idea of tech to that model and he could diagnose anything with the super advanced gadget in his hand while going to where the patient was. This is not how it has gone in real life.

In the process of making house calls, a doctor casually picked up a lot of information by observation that didn't require him to ask questions. He saw how clean your house was. He saw if you lived alone or with family. Etc.

Medicine has moved to a place where we treat people like specimens in a petri dish and as if their physical health is a separate question from the rest of their life. The reality is these are deeply intertwined and cannot be neatly separated.

The systems we need to be looking at are not just systems within the body but how the systems those bodies exist within impact the human body. And we aren't even really thinking in that direction yet.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#173

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

LocalH wrote: post #165

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.

Why would it be troubling that there is more to learn? There is always more to learn. If you were under the misconception that we knew everything about the human body, then I’m glad you’re now enlightened

It's troubling to discover something that's been there for thousands of years, right behind our noses.

Haven't we sliced a couple humans to sub-millimetric resolution?

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#174

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:06 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.

I remember that. A 36 bit computer makes no sense until you realize people used octal a lot back then. And grouped switches in 3's instead of 4's.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#175

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

jlg23 wrote: post #132

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.

> 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. http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_by_b...

It HAD to be Lisp... :-)

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#176

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #146

snowwrestler wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's more like suddenly realizing there is a spare tire under the carpet in the trunk. Or that 5 is indeed divisible by 2, even though everyone said it wasn't and doctors never bothered to check.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#177

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #162

52-6F-62 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... and hearing some of those being related to the gut. I’ve been diagnosed with a condition this year without real, solid evidence for cause. Seeing some of the brightest doctors try and write off health matters to alcoholism in non-alcoholics was concerning. After even cursory, high-level reading of what those terms mean elf me to believe it’s the favoured diagnosis when they’re unsure of the diagnosis and hesi…

That sucks. The thing to understand is that the vast majority of doctors don't have the mindset of scientists or even engineers. They're more like plumbers who have to triage/fix 400 houses a day.

> They're more like plumbers

I get that. What I find disturbing is that even when some doctors dedicate their lives to study anatomy, we still find a pair of salivary glands nobody has ever documented.

It's not a rare malformation. It's something that's more or less behind each and every human nose on Earth and has been there for thousands of years.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#178

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

starkd wrote: post #122

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.

Nobody really knows how computers work.

That's more true than false.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#179

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:20 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.

Are you sure the CPU you are using now actually has the same number of registers that the ISA documentation says?

Even here, we have surprises. Every modern x86 in use has thousands of errata pages in the specs.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#180

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

JabavuAdams wrote: post #158

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.

There's something to the parent comment, even though it's getting downvoted to oblivion. I'm a computer engineer turned biophysicist, so I've hit up against the "holy shit biology is so much more complicated than I could have imagined" realization. That said, should medical researchers be looking at their processes, incentives, etc. to figure out why such things have been missed, and how to find more "low-hanging fru…

> even though it's getting downvoted to oblivion.

This is why I invest to earn karma. So it can burn.

> how to find more "low-hanging fruit"

That we still have low hanging fruit (or fruit hiding behind our noses) after so many years of study is a bit concerning.

It's like discovering you can turn the lamp to remove it from the socket instead of keeping your hand still and hiring two people to rotate the ladder.