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Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
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Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#62[flagged]
The sweet smell of dying journalism..
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#63EDITED: She can also smell Alzheimer's, even before a person is about to develop it. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1107030/dementia...
But her sensitivity to smell means she is unable to enter the cleaning products aisle in supermarkets. To most people, the plastic packaging has no odour; to Joy, it is so intense she starts to retch. Is that even remotely true that people can't smell that aisle? I don't think I have an extraordinary sense of smell and I think of the smell of that aisle as "rank" or something like that.
It's interesting that she's not becoming de-sensitized to all the smells. I think we all have the capability to discriminate between many colors, smells, sounds, etc, but most people normally would de-sensitize and filter out the noise over time.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a riff on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — a bug that changes behaviour when you try to observe it, typically the sort of bug that you can’t reproduce under debug conditions. Often they’re race conditions or other timing-sensitive bugs, and the debugger changes timings enough that the bug doesn’t trigger.
I fondly remember a bug that only appeared when print statements were removed. The i/o of the system out was just long enough for some buffer to clear, making the app work. That was very annoying.
This is a very common one with concurrent code. I've seen many cases where something works most of the time until a log statement is removed.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if "science" generally suffers the same plight that is discussed in The Mythical Man Month. I suspect it does.
So, you think science one big problem that we’re trying to solve? Personally, I’d say it’s more like millions of smaller problems.
It's not clear that doubling the research funding from the NIH results in twice as much qualitative output. That's all I mean.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is a heisenbug?
It’s a riff on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — a bug that changes behaviour when you try to observe it, typically the sort of bug that you can’t reproduce under debug conditions. Often they’re race conditions or other timing-sensitive bugs, and the debugger changes timings enough that the bug doesn’t trigger.
> It’s a riff on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — a bug that changes behaviour when you try to observe it...
As an aside, the Heisenbug is erroneously named because the phenomenon being described is actually the observer effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) ). The uncertainty principle refers to something entirely different.
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#67First epilepsy (dogs), now Parkinson's. Leads me (retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist) to wonder if ALL pathology has an olfactory component that, with sufficient sensitivity of instrumentation, can be detected. Perhaps we won't require a "Star Trek"-type imaging device: just stand still and let the mass spectrometer do its thing.
Years ago I saw a case study go by. Despite negative tests, an elderly wife was sure something was wrong with her husband. He turned out to have a lung abscess. I no longer recall details, but the hypothesis was she could smell the rot on his breath in bed.
Would you find that with a low dose CT scan?
Re: Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell
#68EDITED: She can also smell Alzheimer's, even before a person is about to develop it. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1107030/dementia...
But her sensitivity to smell means she is unable to enter the cleaning products aisle in supermarkets. To most people, the plastic packaging has no odour; to Joy, it is so intense she starts to retch. Is that even remotely true that people can't smell that aisle? I don't think I have an extraordinary sense of smell and I think of the smell of that aisle as "rank" or something like that.
I always sort of hold my breath and hurry past everything in that aisle.