KODA » Curiousity

Fascinating: Cancer cells that outlive their original hosts.

chromakode — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:29:28 +0000

Tonight I read an article off reddit by alluringly titled: Common Benign Dog Tumor May Actually Be Ancient, Immortal Dog Turned into Virus. After reading the article completely, I am stunned… what a concept, cancer cells mutating and propagating into a communicable disease of their own! The real clincher is that the article suggests that this “transmissible tumor” has distinctly different DNA from its host body, which is proposed to have originated from a single dog or wolf several centuries ago! Do check out this article, because it is truly fascinating. This is a concept in biology I had neither heard nor concieved of before.

However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species [...] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

HeLa are considered “immortal”: they do not die of old age and can divide an unlimited number of times as long as basic cell survival conditions are met (i.e. being maintained and sustained in a suitable environment). There are many strains of HeLa cells as they continue to evolve by being grown in cell cultures, but all HeLa cells are derived from the same tumour cells removed from Lacks. It has been estimated that the total mass of HeLa cells today far exceeds that of the rest of Henrietta Lacks’ body.

I find simply the ideas and implications of such a biological occurrance really startling. How would you like to be survived by the cancer cells that killed you? This is really food for thought, and while I don’t have much opinion about it at the moment, I’m sure many people could have a field day with all the idealogical, moral, and political ideas involved. Perhaps they already have. Yet, for now, I will simply share something new I learned about today.

The most evil python script you will likely ever encounter.

chromakode — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 05:29:09 +0000

A little while ago I told Whatah about a little obfuscated Python toy I had hatched together about a year before. Unfortunately, this hack was extremely version-dependent, so when I brought up the code (from the era of 2.3) to send to him, of course it did not work with Python 2.4. Well, I wanted it to work. So I got to tinkering again and this evening, with Whatah’s help, we have made this little critter much much more evil. Consider it a programming puzzle, a riddle written in Python. There shall be no hints, though if you are willing to run code before knowing fully what it does, you are a braver fiddler than I…

# Abandon all hope, ye who enter here _=lambda _, __:getattr(_.__dict__, "values")()[__];__=__builtins__;___ =['\'



Sight and Sound
chromakode — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 07:14:29 +0000
Have you ever watched a movie or an animation with the sound off, and felt like you could hear the movement? Kind of like your mind is assembling sounds for the motion? Have you ever been staring at some cheezy animated gifs and thought you could hear the visual rhythm? 
Have you ever stared at someone’s mouth in the distance and tried to read their lips? When doing so, did it feel like you could hear bits of what they were saying?
Perhaps our senses truly are not as separate as they would at first seem.



That which I cannot see
chromakode — Wed, 24 May 2006 06:46:23 +0000
Lately I’ve begun recognizing my assumption that everything I look at, everything I perceive, has a backside that I can’t see. A side that is hidden from me because of my current perspective. 
I see books on tables nearby, realize that the side facing down is completely hidden from my view. While in my mind I percieve things in this room as objects, and my mind can fill their forms in, what I am really viewing is a but 2D shadow of their existence. Just “the tip of the iceberg,” with far more of the surface hidden from my vantage point.
Yet, even as I move around and view the room from another angle, this backside is still there, and there is just as much unseen to me as there was before. And there always will be. It is like this backside of non-perception is dependent upon my very context of perception: I move, and it moves with me. The backside of things is a natural antithesis to the frontside that is accessible to my vision.
While this should seem a very simple and commonplace rule of existence, the more I think about it, the more I find it rather disturbing. If I am sitting still, looking at my world around me, and from my perspective canot determine if these objects really do have a backside, methaphorically, what other parts of my world are going unseen? Further, this aspect of concentrating upon the backside of things makes me uncomfortable. In my mind, I feel the temptation to view things as “inside-out,” to try and envision the backside while I am readily viewing the frontside. Isn’t it kind of futile to be placing my emphasis on the part that I accept to be impossible for me to see?
I can look at my laptop screen, percieve the fact that the screen has a backside that is currently facing away from me. I see it in my mind, the “Dell” logo circle and the silver finish. But this backside is one that from my current vantage point I cannot see. So why do I assume it exists? Now I test it, I reach out and touch the back of the screen, run my fingers across the surface. But internally my mind reels! Where is the connection between this sensation of what I am feeling, and this surface that I cannot see but know is there? Yet now that I am looking for a visual contact to what I am feeling, I am forced to realize that it simply is not there! I am touching something that currently does not exist in my perception.
Until now, as an artist and as an existing human, what I have concentrated upon is what is being seen, what is presented to the viewer, but never what is naturally obscured from them. For me, “seeing is believing:” if I can see something, I can reasonably accept its existence as being there. But now, when thinking about it, I challenge my vision; I doubt its importance and validity. I begin to feel like I am seeing without percieving: I am blind. Oh, how strange it is to contemplate that which I cannot see!