This is a once-in-a-lifetime mind-boggling tale of “Unity in Diversity”

Carl Zimmer has a mind-boggling post up on the Discover Magazine blog titled “The Human Lake”, talking about a unique “organ” that doesn’t show up in human anatomy diagrams - “The Microbiome”, an insanely vast collection of microbes that exist inside our body doing things that you couldn’t even have imagined yet have taken for granted so far.

Some excerpts from the post, on the Microbiome - the organ you can’t see:

Our collection of microbes–the microbiome–is like an extra organ of the human body. And while an organ like the heart has only one function, the microbiome has many.

When food comes into the gut, for example, microbes break some of them down using enzymes we lack. Sometimes the microbes and our own cells have an intimate volley, in which bacteria break down a molecule part way, our cells break it down some more, the bacteria break it down even more, and then finally we get something to eat.

Another thing that the microbiome does is manage the immune system. Certain species of resident bacteria, like Bacteroides fragilis, produce proteins that tamp down inflammation. When scientists rear mice that don’t have any germs at all, they have a very difficult time developing a normal immune system. The microbiome has to tutor the immune system in how to do its job properly. It also acts like an immune system of its own, fighting off invading microbes, and helping to heal wounds.

While the microbiome may be an important organ, it’s a peculiar one. It’s not one solid hunk of flesh. It’s an ecosystem, made up of thousands of interacting species.

The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species—somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.

On the mind-boggling levels of diversity:

Here’s a microbial Venn diagram shows the diversity in three mouths. All told, they harbor 818 species, but only 387 were shared by all three, the rest were missing from some people and present in others.

Microbes that live on the surface of the skin can get lots of oxygen, but they also bear the brunt of sun, wind, and cold. Microbes in the intestines have next to no oxygen, but they have a much more stable habitat. Microbes have carved up the human body into far finer niches. The bugs on your fingers are different from the ones on your elbow. The two sides of a single tooth have a different diversity of microbes.

On the unbelievable levels of interdependence between vastly different species of microbes:

Such is the case for one microbe called Synergistetes that lives in the mouth. On its own up in a Petri dish (the top red dish to the right), it struggles to grow. But if you add a streak of Parvimonas micra, it can take off. It’s not clear what P. micra is doing for Synergistetes but it’s doing something really important. There are links like this between the hundreds of species in every mouth.

On how incredible an impact these teensy little things have on our bodies:

scientists have found, obese mice have a different microbial ecosystem than regular mice. And if you take the stool from one of these obese mice and transplant it into a mouse that has been raised germ-free, the recipient mouse will gain more weight than recipients of normal gut microbes. The microbes themselves are altering how obese mice are processing energy.

This is the ultimate example of unity in diversity. Amazing how so many things, so vastly different, can all just come together and work simply because the participants don’t have the concept of “the individual” built in. All the troubles we humans face today is a side-effect of “the individual”. I however, am positive there will come a time in our future when we’ll stop being “individuals” and become a single whole - a superorganism - The One Mind. On that day, our race will have evolved to the next level.

Actually, everything comes from just one thing

I was just reading this supremely interesting post on how all of nature, animals, plants, microbes, dinosaurs, birds etc are simply scaled up versions of a ‘master creature’, a ‘template’. The whole article is mighty interesting but here’s a relevant snippet:

What did we learn from scaling in biology? We not only learned the network theory, but we learned that despite the fact that the whale lives in the ocean, the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant a truck, and we walk on two feet and the mouse scurries around, at some 85, 90 percent level, we’re all scaled versions of one another.

There’s kind of one mammal, and every other mammal, no matter what size it is and where it existed, is actually some well-defined mathematically scaled version of that one master mammal, so to speak. And that is kind of amazing.

In other words, the size of a mammal, or any organism for that matter, can tell you how long it should live, how many children it should have, how oxygen diffuses across its lungs, what is the length of the ninth branch of its circulatory system, how its blood is flowing, how quickly it will grow, et cetera.

via

But I believe this pattern goes beyond just earth and like I told my friend @praveenvasudev a year ago, everything in our universe, from planets & stars & molten lava to the beating human heart comes from a single master source, a single ‘template’. That ‘thing’, I have no idea how it looks, how it works, and what the hell it is, but while explaining it to Praveen I used the analogy of a flag waving in the wind, where the material of the flag is the ‘master source’ and each wrinkle on the flag is an object of nature - a thin, long wrinkle on this ‘master source’ might be the fan that is rotating above your head while a short, fat one could be the sound of a car horn. Each ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’ gives rise to every phenomena and being that exists in our universe. 

As I was raised conforming to Hindu traditions, early on in my teens I came across this concept that ‘Everything came from nothing’. At that time, I was like yeah that’s BS. But now I see what they were talking about. It’s easy: imagine a flat, plain piece of cloth that is hanging on a clothes line. While it’s fluttering in the wind there’s lots of wrinkles on the cloth, but when the wind stops, the wrinkles die out and the cloth becomes flat again - no wrinkles. Empty! Nothing! Do you see it? It can be thought of as - all the wrinkles on that cloth came from nothing! Nothing is a ‘state’, not a ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ does not mean that the cloth has never existed.

Everything came from nothing - ‘wrinkled’ state came from the ‘nothing’ state.

While I use cloth as an anology, even flat vs crumpled paper works. Here it is…

Everything came from nothing. This is what the old Hindu smartasses were talking about - the ‘state’. And they also lend credence to my ‘master source’ theory - you can’t talk about ‘state’ without there being a common object that generates these ‘states’, and this common object that generates the ‘states’ is nothing but the ‘master source’. Like the paper above that exists both in the ‘Nothing’ state and in the ‘Crumpled’ state, the ‘master source’ has always existed. But there was a time when the ‘master source’ had no wrinkles which the Hindu ancients called ‘Nothing’ and today the ‘master source’ has lots of ‘wrinkles’ which is everything that we have in the universe - the ancients call this ‘Everything’.

Everything comes from nothing. A bit misleading since it’s not immediately obvious that both ‘everything’ and ‘nothing are ‘states’. Which is why I prefer the title of this post - everything comes from just one thing - the ‘master source’.

It’s an amazing thought - that all this incomprehensible complexity that we in nature are just different manifestations of a single ‘master source’. Imagine this, it could even be possible that I, a particular ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’ could morph/change into another ‘wrinkle’, let’s say a beam of pure light, if I could have control over this ‘master source’. Lots of questions remain - what is the ‘master source’ made of? Who/what made/controls this ‘master source’ and why? Will the universe end when the ‘wrinkles’ stop forming? What is beyond this ‘master source’? It’s impossible to see the earth rotating without going outside of earth and into space, so to see the ‘wrinkles’ form, move and die off, can I, a ‘wrinkle’ on this ‘master source’, ever see the ‘master source’ from outside of it?

To know answers to these questions, there has to be more than just ‘thought experiments’. The ancients stated the truth but could never prove it. Someday I hope to do just that - to get off my internet armchair and show that actually, everything comes from just one thing.

When someone stumbles onto the same idea you had years ago…

Just saw hashify.me and realized it was basically the same service I built and been using since over a year ago. I call it ‘Wysp’ and it’s a simple notepad which stores the entire document in the URL. If you use Chrome, you can even use the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature in Chrome to enter your notebook data even before hitting the site like in this shot…

That’s a nifty use of the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature even if I do say so myself. Once you hit enter/return, the ‘Wysp’ loads up with what you had typed and you see this…

Wysp comes with a bunch of features I needed, like a clean design, auto-save, word and char counts etc. But the best feature is the one that I saw today in hashify.me - storing the entire document in the URL itself. So the text you see there can all be got back from its URL: http://dffrnt.com/snippets/snippet.html#What%20I%20type%20here%20will%20show%20up%20in%20my%20notebook.&fs-36px&fc-rgb(51, 51, 51)&sp-0

I’m storing extra style and font information also in the URL, so technically anyone, anywhere can get back all the data from the URL just by parsing it. But storing data in a URL has lots of other benefits:

• Compression: You can use bit.ly or other URL shorteners to compress the URL, and since all the data is in the URL, this means the data is compressed. Hashify.me uses this, kudos to them. But the one downside is that this system doesn’t scale very well. The more people use the service, the longer the bit.ly URL gets and the less efficient the compression becomes. You could switch to a different service or build one yourself from the ground up to account for this shortcoming… just seems a bit messy to me.
• You can store your data client-side: Want to save the document? No need for a ‘save’ button, simply click the ‘bookmark’ button. Since the ‘bookmark’ button saves the URL and since all your data is in the URL itself, bookmarking = saving the data. I’ve been doing this for over a year now…
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  Bookmarks are saved back to the cloud if you use a bookmarking service, I’m using Google Bookmarks which comes by default with Google Chrome and I can also search for my documents from the default bookmark manager. I can even search for the content ‘inside’ my Wysp documents as the bookmark manager searches both the bookmark title and the URL for the search keywords. Handy.
• Versioning: Since the document is now a URL, and since ‘Wysp’ auto-saves, you can step backward and forward through every edit made to the document by simply using the back and forward button in the browser. I think this is simply the most useful feature of ‘Wysp’ - I just use it all the time while writing drafts and switch between edits to see how things are shaping up.

So, why didn’t I tell people about it? I did have a few beta testers but even after a year of using it I still don’t see a way to monetize it.
So, why am I posting about it now? Because hashify.me is public, and thus there is no sense in keeping my efforts to myself anymore - Wysp’s only plus point was that it was unique, but now that hashify.me is out, that plus point is negated and I am now free to talk about it.

The other thing why I’m writing this down is that it has happened many times before - someone else stumbles upon a idea and that becomes popular, but I had had the same idea over a year before but never posted it publicly. Like, my idea for ‘Single Input Logins’ that I posted about 2 years ago here went popular when someone else stumbled on the same idea just a few months back. Today’s hashify.me was the fifth such instance I know of, when someone has made popular an idea I had had first. 

The first time I saw someone had built a business out of my idea was in 2007 when Modu brought to market my 2005 idea for a modular cellphone. I was shattered then, but over time I’ve learnt the lesson that ideas are 0.002BTC-a-dozen and that the true value of an idea is exposed only when brought to the market in a scalable and profitable way.

But… since I don’t have much else to talk about on this blog (besides Apple and Science), the next time someone stumbles on one of the 1,816 (and growing) ideas that I have stored away in one of my wysps, you can expect to see a post on that here, along with whatever efforts I had been making to bring that idea to market. It pisses me off when people claim ideas as their own while offering no proof, as well as making no effort to realizing their ideas prior - I’ll be damned if I made that mistake myself.

Or maybe I’ll just post my ideas on here anyway even if no one stumbles on to it, like how I did with Gyrotasking.

What a revolution looks like

Absolutely amazing.

To start the original PC revolution and follow that up with the digital music, smartphone and tablet revolutions, Apple is truly the greatest company mankind has ever known.

And to get to see this ‘phenomenon’ unfold right in front of us… we are all the luckiest bastards ever.

[Graph from the inimitable asymco]

Gyrotasking

Gyrotasking is an idea I had last year for a better way to switch between apps running on your iPhone. The current way to switch apps is to double-tap the home button, bring up the multitasking bar, scroll through and search the ‘icon soup’ for the icon of the app you want to switch to, and then click on the icon.

But it doesn’t have to be this tedious if we make use of the gyroscope that every iPhone 4 (and above) ships with. This is the base for my idea - Gyrotasking.

Gyrotasking lets you switch apps by simply pressing the home button and then moving/rotating the iPhone physically around you and depending on how much your arm/iPhone rotates around you, the apps start switching in sequence.

Here’s an interactive flash widget I made to demo the idea - simply press and hold the home button in the demo below with your mouse and move your mouse left/right to switch between open apps. It’s one, simple fluid motion to switch between apps instead of the present “double-tap, scroll through and search for app icon you want to switch to, then tap on that icon” flow.

I did this file sometime about the middle of last year and Apple has since updated the switching transitions so if you see that the switching animation in my flash demo doesn’t look exactly the way it does on your iPhone, this is why. The file is also a bit too wide but I don’t have the time to edit it back down to a more compact res.

While doing this on an iPhone mockup on your desktop using a mouse is clumsy, you can get a real world feel for it very easily. Simply hold up your iPhone, press and hold the home button and swing your iPhone left and right slowly while imagining the apps switching, like in the demo above - ain’t that sweet?

Grab a chair, as the buttons are here to tell their story

One of the things about closely following software UI changes is that, over time, they can give you hints about the thinking and planning that goes behind-the-scenes. As a UI enthusiast, I’ve been doing this for a long time and when I saw the latest Mac OS X Lion screenshots, it got me thinking and here is my theory…

The graphic says it all - as OS X gains market share and continues to want to gain market share, its target is now set squarely on the mainstream audience and as you can see from the graphic, OS X progress is now tracking the same paths Windows is - “great for none but good enough for everyone”. 

For someone who first started up Photoshop 8 years ago, to complete that tutorial on “How to make Mac OS X style Aqua-esque pill buttons”, OS X Lion is a huge letdown.

The buttons have told us their story, a story about great fame and fortune. But when the story ends, only sadness lingers in its wake.

It’s time desktops caught up with smartphone innovations, starting with ‘Editable selections’

If you look at the iPhone above (image via taptaptap)**, you’ll see a now familiar sight - a blob of selected text. But what I want to focus on, is something so subtle that we take it for granted, but is in fact highly useful and interesting - the edit handles at the ends of the selection. 

We’ve been selecting stuff on our desktop machines for decades now, but after using my iPhone and getting used to the edit handles that iOS provides for selections, I’m amazed why no one has ever thought of bringing this highly useful feature to the desktop. Think of all those times when you had to cancel a selection and start over again. Now imagine if you had the ability to edit your selections all along - saves clicks, time and you from frustration.

Apple is already working to carry over iOS innovations ‘Back to the Mac’ with the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. I just wish there was a way to add my ‘Editable selections’ feature request to the innovations they’ve already added in like Launchpad, Folders, Full-screen apps, and Auto-save.

If only Steve read this blog.

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** An easier way to select an entire paragraph is to simply do a two-fingered swipe down gesture, over the paragraph you want to select. Tapping four times is insane. 

A star half a million times the mass of our sun was torn apart by a black hole. Let’s put that in perspective.

I just finished reading this piece that absolutely blew my mind by the scale of the events that happened. As an exercise, I made an attempt to visualize just how large a scale we are talking about here…

Each dot is the Sun and all the dots put together form the mass of the star that was torn apart by the black hole… dayum, that’s one hell of a black hole right there.

But the mind-blowing action doesn’t stop there. They measured the brightness of this star as it was getting torn apart peaking at 4 trillion times brighter than the Sun, but even then it’s not even a blip in the cosmic radar…

Holy shit.