Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Rules for companies
Many companies train their employees and then tell them the rules about safety, work and other work related things but very few inculcate the values that are important to the company. LEGO is one interesting company that set very clear values on what it expects its employees to do and believe about its products: Limited…
-
Head mounted displays
Many displays serve as just just reflections of what the computer projects. However, it would be cool to have a display that see’s what you are looking at and then augments the display. Such Virtual Reality (VR)displays are just being created and though all the attention has been given to Google glass, there are several…
-
Mobile happiness
It is very difficult to judge when a person is happy. The current way of estimating is to take a survey. However, surveys are prone to failure and they are not very exciting for the surveyors. The people surveyed make a best guess of questions, based on recall. One of the toughest surveys is to…
-
Carpenter known world wide
Ole Kirk Christiansen, was a carpenter who founded LEGO toys. His story is very inspiring and amazing to see how one carpenter in one country takes it forward to create a great worldwide company. The motivating story is told to every LEGO employee but from the beginning to success was no easy road. Ole’s wife…
-
Neglected diseases definition?
See the link below for a disease that has affected about 100 people in the US since 1960. It is contracted by swimming in a few lakes which have sediment that can stir up amoeba. This amoeba called Naegleria Fowlerie and can infect the neurons through the nasal cavity. Eating their way through neurons from…
-
From today’s news article on Homeostasis and diseases to a comment about robotics.
It has always been argued that breakdown in homeostasis is the real cause of disease. This point is amply illustrated by the recent PNAS article that correlated the miniscule amounts of copper in the mice diet with A-beta clearance and would have an implication for Alzheimer’s disease. In this case, the presence of copper affected…
-
Only the best is good enough
There are several ways to look at development: The Lego way used to be that the best is good enough in the book “Brick by Brick” with the assumption being that the product has to be perfect before it is made available to the general public. However, the second line of thought is that the…
-
New Cancer targets
Targets for cancer therapy initially were very specific cell division targets. Nowadays, the targets have become very cancer specific, for e.g. targeting the BCR-ABL to target Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. However, a scientist in Australia has come up with a target that is very unlikely – tropomyosin. Tropomyosin is a protein that along with actin is…
-
Regeneron – how do they make a drug for less ?
Fortune highlighted Regeneron for its ability to do drug discovery for much less. To quote from their article here are the costs for drug development by some of the Big Pharma: Merck : $5.5 Billion per drug Pfizer: $7.8 Billion Sanofi: $10 Billion Average for other Pharma: $4.3 Billion Regeneron: $0.75 Billion There may be…
-
Cancer Therapy with Cellular automata
Cellular automata are more of a computer based concept wherein a “cell” that is created in virtual screen dependent on the neighbors. Its creation or destruction is dependent on the type of neighbors. This leads to interesting displays, dynamic scenario’s, that are always dynamic since the neighbor’s affect their other neighbors and the effect continues…
Got any book recommendations?