kichik’s blog

Medical science has developed amazing tools to examine the human body over the years. Petri dishes, incubators, and various types of cultures identify infections. Ultrasound, X-rays, CT, MRI, FMRI and PET use different kind of technologies to give doctors a better view and understanding of our inner working. In extreme cases, ever advancing surgery techniques provide hands on approach.

Most of us will only get to use these when seriously ill or seriously rich and paranoid. Despite all those mind-boggling technological innovations, when Joe sick-pack goes to the doctor he gets examined with a stethoscope, wooden stick, thermometer, analog sphygmomanometer and a whole lot of MD fingers. Verbal inquiring is another characteristic instrument doctors wield at medical proficient Joe sixth-pack, who is prone to lies of shame. It seems development of widespread diagnostic equipment available at doctors’ disposal has reached a stall a few decades ago. Funds keep flowing into research for ever more powerful drugs and fancier high-end diagnostic machines, promoting production of solve-all power tools or solutions for high profile diseases affecting only a fraction of the population. When all you have is a broad-spectrum antibiotic and ancient diagnostic equipment, everything looks like a superbug. Ironically, overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotic is a catalyst of superbug evolution. Other risks of antibiotics include side effects and an allergic reaction, yet antibiotic medicine is still one of the most powerful tools available at doctors’ disposal.

Absence of efficient analysis methods leads not only to over reliance on solve-all power tools, but also avoidance of the real issue at hand by both doctors and patients. Falling back to symptom treatment rather than going head to head with the real issue is the simpler choice, especially when facing rudimentary findings that can only be supplemented with extensive and cost-inefficient tests. Such a misinformed treatment could subject the patient to unnecessary side effects and hide the underlying illness by removing its symptoms, allowing it to stride on and mature, reducing chances of early discovery and treatment that can be sometimes save a life. It can also subject the patient to unnecessary dangerous operations where a simpler solution might exist.

It’s easy to blame doctors and the pharmaceutical industry for pushing drugs on unsuspecting patients, but both are just doing their jobs while trying to keep up with overwhelming crowds of sick, aching and impatient masses. Patients get no more than a few minutes each and are handled with archaic diagnostic equipment, forcing workarounds or guess work and hand-offs to busy specialists. It would seem our healers are doing the best they can under the circumstances, developing and distributing powerful drugs that work for most cases while favoring side effects over precise treatment in the name of cost efficiency and large scale medicine.

An analogy can be drawn to the computing world and specifically to debugging. Bug squashing consists of the same steps as illness treatment – discover symptoms, analyze, hypothesize, apply fix, rinse and repeat until symptoms disappear. Quality relevant analytic tools and deep understanding of the code make analysis easier and improve chances of spotting and fixing the bug faster; removing the need for quirky workarounds. Powerful and accessible tools like symbols, windbg, sysinternals, virtual machines, logs facilities, scriptable environments and automated test scenarios shed light over system internals and allow extensive yet concise overview of the issue, quick theory debunking, solutions for common issues, and easy verification of solutions. Imagine how powerful a vital signs logging facility would be at detecting anomalies, how much simpler analysis would be with body part isolation by virtualization, how less stressful it would be if every piece of the human body was marked with an appropriate name regardless of its current location, how enlightening it would be to view processes in a streamlined graph, and how relaxing it would be for the patient to know all is well on the spot instead of waiting for the test results.

Sci-fi inspired whole body scanner with shiny lasers able to detect the issue in a few seconds, fix it with a different color of laser and then make coffee will probably not be invented for a few more centuries, but there’s no need to get carried away. When debugging a system, human or digital, every little diagnostic tool should help. Cheap discrete heart monitor for rhythm irregularities detection, microbiological culture device with the ability to identify common infections with no need for a microscope, common antibodies detector, or a portable x-ray device would all reduce the burden and encourage better solutions overall.

Hopefully, the recent rise in biotechnological studies over the last few years will show its affect soon and shift focus from drugs to widespread diagnostics and narrow treatments.

I recently watched a trailer for the new 2012 movie. It seems like a pretty decent apocalyptic movie written and directed by the same guy behind two other similar movies – Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Famous actors, staggering visual effects and the genre-mandatory destruction of the White House by a ship are all included. It was enough to get me hooked, fully hoping for another immersing experience and the nightmares that will surely follow.

While the movie will probably be a blockbuster and deserves its credit, the concept behind it – an apocalypse occurring on December 21, 2012 predicted by the Mayan; is a misunderstanding at the very least. The Mayan, as any other respectable civilizations, had a calendar of their own to keep track of time. In particular interest is the long count – a cycle of approximately 5129 years. According to it, a day is called k’in. 20 k’ins are one winal. 18 winals are one tun. 20 tuns are one k’atun. 20 k’atuns are one b’ak’atun. Each b’ak’atun is 144,000 days, or approximately 394 years. A long count cycle consists of 13 b’ak’atuns, or 5129 years. Day zero, believed to be the creation day, is August 11, 3114 BC. Mayan math is base-20 and so date can be represented by five digits. In ye olde times that would be five groups of a bunch of stripes and dots listed from top to bottom. To make things more manageable for us modern people, a series of 5 modern numbers separated by dots is used. Today, for example, is 12.19.16.10.16. That is 12 b’ak’atuns, 19 k’atuns, 16 tuns, 10 winals and 16 k’ins or 5125 years since day zero.

Through various reasoning, certain academic scholars have concluded that at the end of each such cycle comes a grand and possibly cataclysmic event. Mayan scriptures make no direct reference to such an event and my personal belief is that interpretation of 13-b’ak’atun-ia party invitations have gone seriously awry; but an even simpler explanation exists.

Much like modern day engineers, Mayans had to carefully balance versatility and resources and perform a cost-benefit analysis. Understandably, they decided including the long count index in every date would be a waste of resources. Instead of carving six digits, accommodating for multiple long count cycles, they opted for ambiguity by implying the long count cycle. Imagine the vast amount of stone that would have gone to waste should every contract, ticket, advertisement, news paper and document of Mayan times had included another digit, just so it could be valid 5000 years into the future long after they and everything they knew was dead. That brilliant decision probably allowed the construction of another pyramid or two.

In fact, the Mayans are to be admired. When our modern day engineers faced the same challenge, they opted for a century time frame in favor of resources thus unleashing the infamous Y2K bug onto an unsuspecting world. It was believed date ambiguity would cause banks to fail, computers to crash and burn, zombies to overrun the streets and anniversaries to be forgotten thus eliminating any possibility of further human reproduction. Much of the same and more is being predicted for 2012 with the same reasoning. The apocalypse is looming at an arbitrary date due to green and efficient Mayan engineering. But despite widespread usage of technology and date abbreviation in our days, short of a few minor glitches, nothing occurred on January 1, 2000. Considering the 2012 bug concerns ancient technology no longer in use, the idea seems even more absurd.

Therefore, assuming you are not using Mayan computers, live in a mortgaged Mayan pyramid or somehow related to Indiana Jones; you’re welcome to join me for a Mayan themed end-of-the-world movie marathon on 0.0.0.0.1, or December 22, 2012.

Inspired by our dear friend Ilya, my friend Ron has engineered a little Python script to simulate Russian phone chats with a little help from Microsoft Sam. Ron has slaved over this task for a whole grueling 5 minutes. We proudly named our magnificent product RCS – Russian Conversation Synthesizer.

Not for the faint of heart…

import random
import win32com.client
 
speak = win32com.client.Dispatch('Sapi.SpVoice')
speak.Volume = 100
speak.Rate = 6
speak.Voice = speak.GetVoices('Name=Microsoft Sam').Item(0)
 
while True:
  speak.Speak(random.choice(["blat", "huui", "suukkaa"]))

This lovely script would typically generate an authentic conversation such as:

suukkaa blat blat huui blat suukkaa