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Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

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Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#181

Post by grishka »

rbanffy wrote: post #179
grishka wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I know because I read about register renaming a while ago :)

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#182

Post by noir_lord »

oblio wrote: post #157
achillesheels wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, almost every field that's "lacking mathematical completeness" is generally more complex than those that are not lacking it. Real life is extremely fuzzy and ill-defined. Almost everything mathematical is a model and models are almost by definition, simpler than the thing they model. I'd be glad to be proven wrong within my lifetime and have someone come up with the Fundamental Laws of History, for example, full…

> Almost everything mathematical is a model and models are almost by definition, simpler than the thing they model.

"The map is not the terrain" is my favourite way of getting that across.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#184

Post by tuatoru »

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…

From Wikipedia: "The total fluid volume of the interstitium during health is about 20% of body weight".

Wow. How could we possibly have missed this? Medical researchers must tend non-quantitative.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#185

Post by julianlam »

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…

(2013) https://www.livescience.com/40981-new-ligament-found-in-huma...

A new ligament discovered next to the ACL

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#186

Post by christkv »

m463 wrote: post #69
garbagetime wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the following. Here's the spectrum of medical knowledge: ----------------------------------------- Here's where we were in the dark ages: --|-------------------------------------- Here's where we are now: -------|--------------------------------- Here's where people like to think we are: ------------------|---------------------- In this scenario it seems like what you're saying and what your parent said are b…

I'm reminded of the scene in Mad Men where Roger says something to the effect of "I did everything they said for my ulcer, I drank the buttermilk. and now I have a coronary!" Also, in the book "The King of Hearts" which describes the history of open heart surgery, the first open heart surgeries were done by sewing the circulatory system of two people together (usually mother and child). that was in the recent past.

You might find the book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine interesting. Crazy to think that the training to become a surgeon led to a lot of people dying from cutting into infected cadavers during training.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#187

Post by [deleted] »

rbanffy wrote: post #177
JabavuAdams wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#189

Post by achillesheels »

oblio wrote: post #169
achillesheels wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would claim that the mathematical models of the electrical engineering sciences which permit frequency domain convolutions empirically demonstrate “real life” is fuzzy because our sensible perceptions are bandlimited, and not because of Nature herself. We arrive at approximations because things are always in motion! And I’m in the process of writing a scientific work of human history in an evolutionary biological p…

Even if Nature were perfectly defined, which it might well be, I'd venture to say, without any proof, of course, that its mathematical definition could still be beyond our current or even future power of comprehension.

Fortunately, it’s mathematical definition, were we to equate a science of Nature with a science of motion, is not. Euler’s Formula characterizes all universal phenomena in time. The important judgment to make is in understanding our observation is an effect of our brain processing, with everything reducible to discrete units of simple harmonic motion, ie quanta, in time.

Re: Researchers discover new salivary glands in the human head

#190

Post by fwip »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #116
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.

> medicine is actually closer to the dark ages than we like to think it is I'm not sure it's entirely on point, but ever since my mother was almost murdered by medical malpractice, and then learning about exactly how bad (frequent and severe) medical malpractice is, it's extremely hard for me to not see it this way. Somewhere close to 300,000 people die a year from medical malpractice, give or take ~50k! Even adjusti…

This common factoid isn't actually true. The real number is almost certainly less than 10,000 people even with a generous definition, and probably closer to a few hundred annually.

Further reading: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-really-t...

Takeaway:

> (1) [Adverse Effects of Medical Treatment] are not uncommon; (2) the vast majority of AEMTs that occur in patients who die aren’t the primary cause of death; (3) only a relatively small fraction of AEMTs are due to misadventure or medical error; and (4) population-adjusted AEMT rates have been slowly decreasing

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