Isabella Chen > Recent Status Updates

Picked it up last night and it drew me in instantly. Gael is an interesting character and she reminds me of myself at her age at the start. It's nice to meet a young female character who is not bewildered by puberty and who acts (instead of only reacting).

Why do organisms die although all our cells are completely renewed every few years? For e.g. a clump of bacteria can persist as a clump forever. Mutations that have a positive effect early in life and a negative effect later in life get kept in the population.

Sumo wrestlers have a lot of fat but they are otherwise healthy. This is because their fat is stored subcutaneously and not around their organs as visceral fat. Excercise - jogging 20 km a week or 3 times high intensity training at least, causes the release of hormones that lead fat to be stored under the skin and not around the organs.

Fat produces is involved in wound healing and so releases a hormone that triggers an immune response. When there is too much fat, fat cells feel overcrowded and some die. Dead fat cells need to be cleared by the immune system and so fat releases this hormone. This hormone affects insulin sensitivity, leading to weight gain.

Body fat plays a role in wound healing and is important for bone density. Bone density is maintained in women via the ovaries and fat. After menopause, only fat produces estrogen, so it is important to have adequate fat. Fat and bone is created in the bone marrow from stem cells. In anorexics, who lack fat, the cells choose first to be fat, so anorexics have very weak bones.

Fat is so much more than 'fat', it's an organ in our endocrine system, with responsibilities regulating hormones and digestion. Fat produces Leptin, a way for fat to self reflectively know how much of itself there is in the body. Extreme obesity can be caused by producing defective leptin or by not being responsive to leptin (db/ob mouse). Fat stores stuff like cholesterol, so it doesn't end up in our blood and liver

In Westworld, the automas are given an inner voice, which is the trigger for their conciousness. This is has been proposed in philosophy for many decades now. However, there is a case of a monk who would have episodes where he lost the ability to process words yet was still able to communicate and make sense of his world and himself although he said during these episodes, it was more confusing than usual.

Communication requires signalling and receiving. Cephalophods have complex signalling but since their social lives are isolated, the processing of the signalling is likely not complex. Baboons have simple signalling (4 calls) but from these 4 calls they can make up a rich narrative of the troops dominance hirarchy.

When a cephalopod had half his brain removed, half of his skin stopped displaying colors and patters for awhile. However, that part of the skin soon regained the ability to color. It is speculated that there are neurons and color receptors in the skin themselves that allow the skin to 'think'.

Cephalopods have three layers to their skin responsible for creating colour. The top layer holds color sacs of yellow and red, with muscles to control and relax each sac. The second layer reflects the incoming light at different angles allowing for other colors not on the red-yellow spectrum. The third layer reflects light back as it is and is responsible for luminosity, providing a white backdrop for incoming light.

There are two routes from our eyes to our mind. One leads to a part that controls our movements, a primitive part shared with animals like frogs. This let us to respond to the world but doesn't give us inner understanding that we are seeing. The other path, damaged in the woman, leads to the part of brain that processes visual information in a way that categorizes them, giving us the awareness & experience of seeing

They also integrate what they see. An ex. is given of a woman with brain damage. She continued to receive visual stimuli but and was able to navigate around obstacles and put letters in a letterbox with the letterbox holes pitched at diff. angles, but she was unable to perceive the things around her as anything more than indistinct blobs.

Conscious beings have minds that can perceive the world in a constant way - e.g. although they see an object from a different angle, they still know it is the same object. Although they see a photograph of a person when they were younger, they still know it is the same person.

Conscious being do not only react but act. They produce actions based on an internal model of what they want the world around them to be. They also act to control what happens to them. They do not simply let things happen.

What was the first animal whoes life felt like something to it? How did subjective experience creep into being? Sentience comes before conciousness. How do we determine sentience?

Unlike mammals and insects whoes intelligence evolved from them being social creatures, Octopuses evolved intelligence because they are formidable predators and also because they have soft unprotected bodies and are not very fast swimmers.

Octopus intelligence is hard to quantify since experiments on animal behaviour are mostly designed for mammals. Octopus are picky eaters and the usual action-treat experiments aren't effective on them. We mostly infer their intelligence from anecdotal evidence.

Evolution has evolved minds twice over, once in mammals and once in the octopus. The octopus and us share a single common ancestor 600 million years ago and they among all the other animals in their phylum (they are in the mollusc category) have evolved subjective experience. Intelligence evolved due in an escalating arms race from an eden where simple creatures munched on a uniform nutritious mat on the sea floor.

Remember when you were a kid how lots of stories had a 'moral' this is one of those kinds of stories. Only the moral is very, very different. I think its about how one should use rationality to make decisions, but that it has to be used with kindness?

Author has thought deeply about each character's thinking style. Main characters all act in a rational way, although their inputs are different. Harry uses facts (actions to fulfil curiosity or need for fairness), Draco uses psychology in a broader social context (takes action to influence power players or large groups), Minerva uses psychology on a personal level (actions ensure well being of individual children)

The characters in this book are more rational than your average fantasy characters. If more characters approached problems like they do, we'd have more interesting stories since obstacles are caused not by human stupidity and ignorance but by genuine dilemmas. Not only dilemmas that demand some physical action but also psychological ones.

Wow, really surprised at the depth and insights of the Ellie character. I can related both to her and to Monsieur... is Emma Becker this insightful or am I reading into it too much?

The breakup is dragging on for Ellie - Monsieur hasn't contact her for a weeks and its an eternity to her. But when you're Monsieur's age, a few weeks can be both an eternity and nothing - time passes quicker with each year, does Ellie understand this?

A study has shown that people record and remember the same experience as similar brain patterns across different individuals. Monsieur is deeply relatable to me. I used to love difficult erotic French literature, I also dated a man 20 years older with an appreciation of such things, he was also in a mid-life crisis. He played me the same way (and I in return). The way Becker responds was close to how I responded.

Scathingly honest. Becker writes in the style of her mentors (Calaferte, Bataille...) and surpasses them. Her prose dips between dark moments and hilarity, and the meta-narrative is full of insight. It's difficult to prise apart whether it is the literature she loves drives her actions, or whether she would have done the same in the absence of such literature. The lines between fiction and reality are blurred...

Part 3 - still exciting and intriguing. Love the liberties he took with the Cradle's archi and the crow SMS system. Understand why some reviews complain about lack of dev. in the A+5000 society, compared to the dev. depth with the tech, the economics is a bit naive. Genetics slightly better but still lacking although some great insights like the Neoanders...

Almost done with part 2. No idea re complains about lack of character depth. You can create a great character in 500 words, Stepehnson has done a good job with Dinah at least and Ivy too. I read has last telegraph with dad scene a couple of times. So much with so little.

Took me ages to pick this up. Was fearing a long slog, but its shaping out to be a lot of fun. Descriptions of the tech are clear and easy to follow and I don't mind the info-dumping, which is strategically done. Every bit of tech is integral to the plot, love the super realistic world building - characters are not cardboard thin as other reviews claim, there are heartwarming moments and I identify with Dinah...

Not as good as Dart. Phedre's reasons for re-entering Naamah's Service are not strong enough, Melissande's pull for her could have been explored deeper, and one of the most complex characters, Nicola, has scant screen time. Phedre's boys are one dimensional, there's no Anafiel or Alcuin to add that depth. Lots more sex though which is great, probably even better written than the first. Still extremely gripping...

So far the most fascinating portions are the ones that concern doubt, not within the secular mind, but in the religious mind. Also, I knew that pagan rituals were adopted in Christian ones, but many Christian ideas, like God being an ultimate truth that one should strive for, are actually secular ones from Greek philosophy.