Chemotherapy harms cancer cells as well as normal cells. Chemotherapy is designed to be more harmful to cancer cells than to normal cells, but the damage to normal cells can be brutal.
New studies suggest that fasting prior to receiving chemotherapy may reduce the number of normal cells harmed by the treatment. Fasting may put normal cells in a defensive mode that increases their resistance to chemical attack.
Computer chips can use significantly less energy if they don’t have to be correct all the time. That’s the idea behind PCMOS — probabilistic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology. Here’s an excerpt from Technology Review’s article on PCMOS.
[Inventor Krishna] Palem’s idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip—specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits, such as the 3 in the number 21,693. The resulting decrease in signal-to-noise ratio means those circuits would occasionally arrive at the wrong answer, but engineers can calculate the probability of getting the right answer for any specific voltage. “Relaxing the probability of correctness even a little bit can produce significant savings in energy,” Palem says.
In applications such as video processing, a small probability of error would not make a noticeable difference. It would an interesting exercise to separate those parts of a system that require accuracy and those that tolerate error. For example, a cell phone might use high-accuracy chips for dialing phone numbers but low-accuracy chips for controlling the display in order to extend battery life.
Bjarne Stroustrup made a comment in an interview about functional programming. He said advocates of functional programming have been in charge of computer science departments for 30 years now, and yet functional programming has hardly been used outside academia. Maybe it’s because it’s not practical, at least in its purest form.
I’ve heard other people say that functional programming is the way to go, but most programmers aren’t smart enough to work that way and its too hard for the ones who are smart enough to go against the herd. But there are too many brilliant maverick programmers out there to make such a condescending explanation plausible. Stroustrup’s explanation makes more sense.
Let me quickly address some objections.
I fully expect there will be more functional programming in the future, but it will be part of a multi-paradigm approach. On the continuum between pure imperative programming and pure functional programming, development will move toward the functional end, but not all the way. A multi-paradigm approach could be a jumbled mess, but it doesn’t have to be. One could clearly delineate which parts of a code base are purely functional (say, because they need to run concurrently) and which are not (say, for efficiency). The problem of how to mix functional and procedural programming styles well seems interesting and tractable.
[Stroustrup’s remark came from an OnSoftware podcast. I’ve listed to several of his podcasts with OnSoftware lately but I don’t remember which one contained his comment about functional programming.]
When I took my first probability course, it seemed like there were an infinite number of approximation theorems to learn, all mysterious. Looking back, there were probably only two or three, and they don’t need to be mysterious.
For example, under the right circumstances you can approximate a Binomial(n, p) well with a Normal(np, np(1-p)). While the relationship between the parameters in these two distributions is obvious to the initiated, it’s not at all obvious to a beginner. It seems much clearer to say that a Binomial can be approximated by a Normal with the same mean and variance. After all, a distribution that doesn’t get the mean and variance correct doesn’t sound like a very promising approximation.
Taking it a step further, a good teacher could guide a class to discover this approximation themselves. This would take more time than simply stating the result and working an example or two, but the difference in understanding would be immense. And if you’re not going to take the time to aim for understanding, what’s the point in covering approximation theorems at all? They’re not used that often for computation anymore. In my opinion, the only reason to go over them is the insight they provide.
The Code Wizard blog posted some anecdotal evidence of attention span varying as a function of nationality.
The author looked through the visitor statistics on his blog and observed that Americans spend less time per page than visitors from other countries. Visitors from Canada, Australia, and England spend far more time per page and click more links while they’re there. I’m not aware of anything in the content of the blog that would be intrinsically more interesting to folks outside the US.
The American Journal of Physics has an article in the June issue about the physics of dropping Mentos into Diet Coke. The spectacular result depends on physical characteristics of the Mentos, not their chemical composition. Here’s an explanation from the 60-Second Science podcast.