10.1M views · Mar 7, 2008 · 0:29 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2013–2021
A very short microscope clip of a neutrophil chasing a Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, originally from David Rogers at Vanderbilt University. It is a widely reposted piece of immune-system footage.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN shares it as striking classic footage of the immune system at work, sometimes as an analogy for attack and pursuit.
“You can sense the frantic desperation of the bacterium as it tries to get away from something monstrous”HN comment, 2021
“You can sense the frantic desperation of the bacterium as it tries to get away from something monstrous”
Classic footage of a white blood cell chasing a bacterium.
Makes me think of the classic video of a white blood cell chasing a bacterium. You can sense the frantic desperation of the bacterium as it tries to get away from something monstrous that will inevitably swallow it whole. this video
Animation of immune cell attacking invader, used as analogy.
This is because HIV is a brilliantly designed virus (of course it evolved, it's not designed. I don't know a better way to say this though). It's a third-generation retrovirus, meaning it defeats internal cell safeguards in a very clever way, meaning that if one cell of a few types comes into contact with ~10 virus particles, you effectively have AIDS. For the flu we're talking hundreds of cells needing to be in contact with thousands of virus particles. It evades being a target for vaccination by using internal body networks to transmit itself as opposed to the blood. The immune system inside our bodies has a sort of chemical protocol for one cell to exchange data with another. One cell approaches another, presents a specific molecule, and the cells link, exchange something (we don't know what, or why, or how for that matter), and the HIV virus slips along. This means HIV looks at the immune system from behind all the detection mechanisms. You can look at immune cells as a mine : they have lots of traps on the outside. Trigger one of them and a massive army of huge, very angry, and very dangerous cells will overwhelm whatever triggered it ( this video ), and a large part of things nearby that didn't trigger it too, usually. So where does HIV hide ? Simple : on the inside of the mine, transmitting itself to other mines when through the mechanic that comes by to repair the mine and doublecheck things every now and then. There's other virii doing this, however they don't generally
Cited loosely in a discussion of natural intelligence.
In my opinion, it's not. Natural intelligence is another way of saying that dynamics and interactions of millions of neurons in our brain is too complicated for us to understand. Our brain is just a complex machine, and the complexity at the level of its individual components is based on very fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. In that sense, you bring up an excellent question. I don't think there exists any unique "natural intelligence" which Hofstadter in the linked article is referring to. Watson is only different from "natural intelligence" in terms of complexity. Conway's Game of Life can perhaps be used as an analogy here. The uninitiated is likely to assume a very complex source code upon observing setups like 'spaceships' and 'glider guns'. However, it all is based on some very simple rules which can be easily implemented by a high school computer science student. I'd to extrapolate this logic towards the concept of 'life' itself. I feel that what we call life is just collective of natural processes too complicated for us to comprehend completely. Scientific research has allowed us to understand biological processes to some extend, but not enough to us to deduce the state of a living entity at t+1 by observing the state at t=0. The common assumption is that there is some independent/supernatural force (consciousness) which allows the living entity to 'chose' the new state at t+1 (free will). Watson appears to be "intelligently" making a chess move, but as Hofst
