Amit's Thoughts

From Amit’s Thoughts

Bladder control #

I know there are lots of advanced technologies being developed for treating disease, but the same technologies could be used for non-disease applications. I wrote a little about this a few years ago. So I want to propose something that I think a lot of people would like:

Extra bladders

There are people working on 3d printed organs. Wouldn't it be cool to get a 3d printed bladder? Would you like to super-size that?

Even better, wouldn't it be cool if your supplemental bladder automatically ran tests on your urine, like these Japanese toilets do? The toilets developed in 2004 can measure glucose levels but I'm sure there are other tests that will be practical too. Plus, if it's done in your 3d printed bladder, it can be transmitted to your smartphone in real time over low energy bluetooth, like a Fitbit.

I'd want one. Wouldn't you?

Labels: future, speculation

Genetically engineered gut bacteria #

We're starting to learn how important gut bacteria are. Antibiotics can mess up the ecosystem in your gut. We have probiotics to try to restore the natural ecosystem.

(photo from worldworldworld on flickr)

This is assuming that natural is good. But the natural gut bacteria are evolved to match our natural diet. Most of us don't eat a natural diet.

I want unnatural gut bacteria.

We know cells can do amazing things. The cells in our body can turn fat and sugar into energy. Bacterial cells can do a far great variety of things, such as turning algae into oil, collecting gold atoms into gold veins, generate light, and process heavy metals. So let's design our own gut bacteria! I want to implant gut bacteria that turn chocolate cake into vitamins. I want gut bacteria to turn potato chips into omega 3.

Most people are drawn towards unhealthy food. We keep telling them to stop eating it, and eat healthy food instead. What if we could instead turn all unhealthy food into healthy food? (Also see my previous post on this subject.) I think that's a world-changing technology waiting to happen.

Update: [2024-03-22] Over ten years after I posted this, I see Monch Monch and Zya look interesting. They aren't gut bacteria but they do go into the gut to turn chocolate cake into fiber. Update [2025-04-14] Jason C points out that proteins require nitrogen, and carbs don't have any. So there could be some limitations to which molecules can be turned into which other molecules. Fiber may be a better output than protein. [2025-12-07] Someone has developed a genetically engineered gut bacteria to reduce kidney stones.

Labels: future, health, speculation

Emacs: highlight active buffer #

Long ago, I used XEmacs, and its buffer-local faces to highlight the active window and modeline. When I switched to Emacs, I was sad to see that it didn't have buffer-local and window-local faces. It does have a separate face for active and inactive modelines though.

Today I learned that Emacs 23 has a buffer-local face remapping feature. I'm using this to highlight the active buffer (not window):

Labels: emacs

Mayan Calendars #

There are at least three Mayan calendars. I was listening to the How Stuff Works: Mayan Calendar podcast, and learned that the Mayan calendars are not as strange as I expected them to be. Let’s first look at how our years are structured:

When the last component overflows (from 9 to 0), we carry one and increment the decade. When the decade overflows we increment the century. This is how base 10 numbers work.

Now let’s look at how dates are structured:

When the last component (day) overflows from 31 to 1, we carry one and increment the month. When the month overflows from Dec to Jan, we increment the year. This is very similar to how base 10 numbers work, except that each component has its own rules for when it overflows, and months don’t all have the same number of days.

How are weekdays numbered? We can say both the day of week and the day of month, and increment both each day:

The Mayan Tzolk’in calendar works like this. Both components are incremented each time. One component has 20 days and the other has 13 days, and they line up every 260 days.

The Mayan Haab calendar is more conventional, lasting 365 days. There are 18 months each with 20 days, giving 360 days, plus an extra 5 days to make it fill a year. They didn’t handle leap years.

The Mayan Long Count calendar is the one people are worked up over. There are five (or maybe nine) “digits”, each base 20 except one that’s base 18 to match the months of the Haab calendar. However the Long Count calendar doesn’t include the extra 5 days, so it doesn’t stay lined up with Haab.

What’s the big deal about 21 Dec 2012? It’s 13.0.0.0.0, at least under the most common translation of our calendar to the Mayan calendar. It’s sort of like how people celebrated the year 2 0 0 0. It’s nice to celebrate a bunch of zeros. Some interpretations say that it doesn’t go to 13.0.0.0.0 but resets back to 0.0.0.0.0, but it’s not universally agreed upon, and some say that there are four more places in the calendar system, so it’d be 0.0.0.0.13.0.0.0.0, resetting only after 63 million years.

In any case, the thing I find strangest about the Mayan calendar systems is that there are so many of them, somewhat incompatible with each other. In addition to the three I described above, there’s a 9 day cycle, a lunar cycle, a Venus cycle, and a few others. See the Wikipedia page for a reasonable overview. If you use Emacs, the Mayan calendar is included, and you can use M-: (calendar-mayan-date-string) to get back a string like "Long count = 12.19.19.17.15; tzolkin = 12 Men; haab = 18 Mac".

Appendix: 13.0.0.0.0 dates

There are different translations between Mayan dates and our dates. A lot of this has to be reconstructed because Christians burned the Mayan books. I translated the Wikipedia list of date translations into a list of dates for 13.0.0.0.0:

Emacs: Helm for finding files #

When using Emacs I’m often switching buffers or opening files, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to make those operations more pleasant.

A while ago I tried Anything.el. Anything is like Quicksilver for Emacs. It’s powerful but I found it confusing to set up. Emacs-Fu had a blog post about configuring anything.el, and I used that for my setup.

For the most part, I use it instead of find-file:

Labels: emacs