Incoming links: Cancer
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) part 5 "Murder or suicide" mentions that apoptosis has two main functions:
- prevent cancer
- but it is also an important part of body development, e.g. fingers are separated because cells between them kill themselves. Otherwise we would have webbed feet like ducks. There is also a lot of apoptosis during the development of the brain. This has been observed notably in C. elegans see also: Section "C. elegans cell lineage".
A cool thought about cancer expressed at Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) is that cancer it is the direct product of natural selection gone wrong!
Cancer cells are obviously selected against anti-cancer mechanism, which when they manage to evade, they reproduce uncontrollably, gaining more and more momentum.
Ciro Santilli's energy throughout the day varies as follows:
- morning: highest
- 11AM: peak exercise performance
- after lunch: brain death. Possibly due to Ciro's partial Spanish descent?
- late afternoon and evening: can do some stuff
Ciro has low tolerance to sleep deprivation which makes him very irritable, and low ability to sleep if there is any light. It must have to do with those damned ganglion cell photoreceptors. On the other hand, Ciro Santilli's wife can sleep without any problems with some morning light! It is definitely genetic. Ciro conjectures that people from very Northern parts of the world must have a gene that allows them to sleep even if there is some light, while more equatorial people don't. Maybe: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33049062/
Ciro has mild olfactory synesthesia for star anise (八角, bajiao), which is widely used in Chinese cuisine and makes Ciro think uncontrollably of the color blue. Ciro does not have any other known synesthesias. He is also prone to nerd sniping form time to time.
Ciro is a reptilian-like being with cold hands and feet and low blood pressure. For this reason he believes that he will die of cancer or some respiratory problem. If the Chinese government doesn't get him first that is. This also partly explains why Ciro is not a big fan of swimming.
Besides Chinese food, Ciro really likes eating fruits and roasted nuts, maybe partly because he was born in Brazil, and partly because of monkey nature, see his Chinese name. At home he is known as "水果大王" (the big king of the fruits). Ciro is also a sucker for yoghurt (natural without added sugars and full fat, fat-tree yoghurt is terrible, often eaten with fruits). Ciro's "favorite drink" could be tonic water with freshly squeezed lemon. Tied with fresh fruit juices. Chocolate-wise, although not a huge fanatic, a Lindt dark chocolate with whole hazelnut pieces bar will do the job.
Ciro does not like receiving or giving gifts on expected social situations like birthdays or Christmas. Ciro believes that every day is equally precious, and can be a day to give, be it through awesome open source software contributions, or if you find something that your friend will like
Ciro has some respiratory allergies. When he was around 5, he had relatively serious asthma crisis which scared his parents to death. Throughout his life, he appears to be allergic at an intermediate level to: mold or dust mites (or whatever it is that old books/pillows have), cats (itching on touch), hay fever (in May in the UK, likely grass pollen). But even outside of hayfever season, Ciro's nose is constantly either running in the cold, or often partially blocked while sleeping throughout the year. Ciro believes however that this also gives him higher resistance to viral infections, since it has been many many years since he had a cold/flu, and when everyone in the office is going down with it, he's just fine. Ciro wonders if his active immune system will actually kill off cancers early, which he ranks as his most likely causes of death, along with respiratory and gastro-intestinal problems. Ciro has low blood pressure and cannot get fat, so cardio vascular problems seem much less likely.
Ciro is generally democrat due to his high compassion level. He believes that politics is highly genetically determined, and that just like you enter a room full of people and immediately like some and dislike others, the same goes for politics. People just vote for whoever they want to see more of because their way of speaking makes them feel good. There is not rationality involved in it at all.
Ciro self diagnoses a slight graphomania in the early 2020's. This is largely what led him to create OurBigBook.com, and contribute to Stack Overflow. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz also suffers from the condition however, so maybe good can also come out of it:
If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.
When Ciro was quite young, maybe around 7-10, when he got very angry or sad for some stupid reason (bullying perhaps? Ciro forgot), he would have a psychosomatic manifestation: his spine would become visibly curved sideways (scoliosis). While writing this paragraph, Ciro Googled it, and found e.g. medium.com/@michaelrosen_94192/the-root-cause-of-scoliosis-5c461002b634 that describes:so it is a somewhat well known thing! Incredible. Can you imagine the level of the passions that lead to such physical deformations? But of course, it was all for nothing.
The Root Cause of Idiopathic ScoliosisIt is proposed that Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is a condition created by emotional stress. Evidence is presented that unresolved emotional stress can cause unbalanced tensions in the fascia and growing muscles that gradually deform the spinal column.
Ciro Santilli supports full legalization of all drugs, because he feels that it would be better overall for the world to have cheaper drugs and more drug addicts, but way, way less organized crime.
These should be extremely controlled of course, with extremely high taxes that puts their price just below the current illegal market, and a complete ban on any positive advertising.
Ciro believes that maybe the government could even go as far as giving free drugs to drug addicts so they don't have to rob to get a fix.
This is notably considering that drug-led organized crime completely dominates and corrupts the politics of many production and trafficking zones, which are already generally poor fucked up places to start with:Ciro's experiences in Brazil such as mentioned at São Remo, the favela next to USP, although much less extreme than the above, also come to mind.
Drug traffic corrupts everything. It prevents development of honest people. It is a cancer, which we have failed time and time a gain to cure. The only cure is to accept the other less insidious of addiction.
Bibliography:
- How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) gives a good sense of the relentlessness of the drug war, and how it affects people who are already poor the most
Died of cancer at age 53. Ciro Santilli just can't help but speculate that it is linked to radioactivity exposure.
GitHub account: github.com/hplgit
It should be mentioned that when you start Googling for PDE stuff, you will reach Han's writings a lot under his GitHub Pages: hplgit.github.io/, and he is one of the main authors of the FEniCS Project.
Unfortunately he died of cancer in 2016, shame, he seemed like a good educator.
He also published to GitHub pages with his own crazy markdown-like multi-output markup language: github.com/hplgit/doconce.
Rest in peace, Hans.
From episode "Mortynight Run"
Look at this. You beat cancer, and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Booooh.