New Achievements I Unlocked (In Real Life – The Xbox 360 Game)

Fortunately, I didn’t get this one:

… although there were a couple of close calls…

(Oh, and Darci wants me to clarify – I didn’t REALLY drive through the night – Darci did most of the night driving on Saturday night, although we did it in shifts. She handles lack of sleep so much better than I do. Although of course, if she had a blog she could clarify it there :))

Naive Questions vs. Stupid Questions

This one’s a quickie.

There are stupid questions – you know, things that with a tiny bit of work, you could get the answer to yourself. (The origin, no doubt, of the site Let Me Google That For You). Or questions such as… if I stick a fork in this light socket, will I get electrocuted? (Answer: yes).

No-one wants to look stupid. In fact, people will take great pains to avoid looking stupid. This is a really bad idea though – because it can get in the way of real progress. There are plenty of questions which could be answered twice as fast if you just let your ego go, and spoke up instead. This is the basis of putting together an egoless team – something practiced at Surreal, and at X-Ray Kid; the idea is to reduce that barrier, by encouraging people to talk and ask questions. If you get stuck? Go talk to someone! People get stuck all the time – there’s no excuse for sitting there and being stuck when you could fix the problem in five minutes instead of three days by going and talking to a peer – no matter how silly or stupid it makes you feel.

In fact, you’ll feel less stupid when you realize that you could have spent hours on it, and instead you found out the answer much quicker.

Now, there’s another kind of question which is very similar to the “stupid” question, but subtly different.

That’s the naive question.

Naive questions are great. You should ask them all the time. A lot of people get stuck thinking about the nitty-gritty details of a problem. While a naive question looks silly at first (and a good percentage of the time they are silly in reality), about 1 in 5 times, that question will make people stop, and suddenly reassess their assumptions.

It’s like a laser-guided can-opener that lets you jump straight into the middle of a problem. Worst case? Your assumptions get overturned. Best case? All of a sudden you’ve laid bare a fundamental issue.

It’s hard to figure out which is which – a stupid question or a naive question – so err on the side of asking anyway. It’s worth it, and allows you to perform miracles.

(In short, naive questions challenge assumptions and allow you to build models of systems. Do it often, do it early).

The Fastest Repair in the West...

Recently, my fiancee accidentally dropped her phone in the toilet, so it was time to get a new one. I picked up an AT&T Tilt. (Note: I'm not an ass; she preferred it to the iPhone - this was a conscious choice).

Roll forward a month, and we're at the Puyallup Fair, and the screen cracked. Well, it didn't actually crack per se, but the transistors certainly did, causing it to leak a puddle of pixels in the middle of the screen.

It looked like this, only more personally annoying

Argh. Not covered under warranty, and I didn't get phone insurance (which I'm seriously thinking of getting now).

I did a little searching, and I came across Matt. He builds eCommerce sites, and in order to prove to his clients that - no, seriously - he's good at it, he built a site for himself, and started a business on the side repairing AT&T Tilt (and other devices) screens.

He lives local, so instead of shipping the phone to him, I went and met him at the Tully's in Wallingford this morning. Shook hands, gave him the phone, went to get my latte.

My latte took about 5 minutes to arrive. While I waited there patiently, and got the hazelnut syrup added which was conspicuously missing, I heard this pinging sound of a phone booting up.

I walked over to him with my now flavored coffee. He was done.

I'm flabbergasted. He officially has the fastest hands in the West. One phone, fixed, good as new, for $85 - which is much cheaper than sending it in for an official repair, and if you live in Seattle, much much faster than shipping it anywhere. And frankly, the experience of seeing someone do that repair job that fast was worth the price of admission. (Ok, so I'm a big fat geek... you were expecting someone else?)

Contact him here: http://www.jetcitydevices.com

[edit: updated to new URL for Matt’s company]

Cytomegalovirus and Hypertension – Another Piece of the Herpesviridae Puzzle

Article Navigation: Previous article in this series

So I heard about this on the BBC World Service today:

“Based on a series of studies in mice, they said cytomegalovirus or CMV -- a herpes virus that affects some 60 to 99 percent of adults globally -- appears to increase inflammation in blood vessels, causing high blood pressure.

And when combined with a fatty diet, CMV may also cause hardening of the arteries, a major risk factor for heart attacks, strokes, and kidney disease, they said.” - (Reuters)

Which is AWESOME! And comes 17 years after this study in people:

Herpesvirus antibodies and vascular complications in essential hypertension.

Antibodies against herpes simplex virus (HSV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV) were examined in sera from 132 patients with essential hypertension and 54 normotensive healthy subjects of the same age and sex. Prevalences of HSV and CMV antibodies (titre greater than or equal to 4) were equal in patients and controls. A HSV antibody tire greater than or equal to 64 was found in 39.5% (17/53) of patients with WHO stage III hypertension, in 26.2% (22/85) of patients with stage I-II hypertension, and in only 9.4% (5/54) of normotensive subjects (p less than 0.0005). The HSV antibodies were mainly of type 1. No association between CMV antibodies and vascular complications could be demonstrated.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6297261

Which is great news – now we know that CMV AND HSV cause hypertension. Which should be no surprise – because other studies show connections between HSV and atherosclerosis/arteriosclerosis. And that’s in studies from 1982. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=442386

So let’s look at the mechanism behind this.

We know that herpesviridae require arginine to replicate.

We also know that they scavage lysine (because the replication mechanism mistakes lysine for arginine).

This paper: http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/95/2/311 – shows that arginine is required for NO pathway synthesis. Like most smooth tissue, arteries and veins require NO (nitric oxide) to relax.

Arterial and venous tissue is endothelial tissue, a specialized form of epithelial tissue.

Where does CMV like to hang out, and HSV like to replicate?

Yep, that’s right – epithelial tissue.

HSV, by the way, is known to promote blood clots too – as this paper shows:  http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/95/2/311.

Ultimately, what we seem to be seeing here is that the herpesviridae strip-mine the arterial wall for arginine and lysine. Inflammation is promoted. Coagulation occurs. Adding arginine will help a little; but long term, the arginine is required for the viral replication to occur.

And this, by the way, is a repeating cycle. TNF-alpha is released by the body to signal that it is under attack in that area (by macrophages). The virus sees this as a signal to go from dormancy (latent infection, which in the case of HSV, the primary site is nerve tissue; whereas in CMV, it’s epithelial tissue, and epithelial tissue and endothelial tissue are very closely related), to full on replication. (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u6u8735318u7lw42).

Which scavenges more arginine. And causes more replication.

It’d be pretty simple at this point to come to the conclusion that a large preponderance of heart disease is caused by herpesviridae. Now, there’s other causes too – fungal infection, and bacterial infection – but I’d say that the most common cause are these viruses, which nearly everyone has.

(You’ve heard of the French Paradox, right? That drinking red wine, rich in resveratrol, reduces your risk of heart disease? Resveratrol inhibits herpes virus replication at a very early stage in its reproductive cycle. It also has other benefits – mainly by allowing sirtuins to spend more time switching off erroneously expressed genes, and less time fixing up damage, but that’s secondary to the heart disease issue).

So, going back to part 1 of this series, I stated that herpesviridae can cause the following:

• Alzheimer's Disease
• Type-II Diabetes
• High Cholesterol, including high HDL and high triglyceride levels
• Heart disease, including atherosclerosis (aka arteriosclerosis)
• Cancer of the gallbladder (cholangiocarcinoma)
• Colon cancer
• Crohn's disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Arthritis
• Osteoporosis
• Multiple myeloma
• Glioblastoma multiforme
• Bipolar disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Hodkin's Disease
• Lymphoma
• Breast Cancer
• Kaposi's Sarcoma

We can now add Hypertension to this list.

The common factor to all of these? Well, there’s actually two. We’re talking about diseases of epithelial tissue, and nerve tissue.

For example, take osteoporosis. Herpesviridae (specifically in this study, HSV-1), upregulates expression of Interleukin-6. Osteoblast and osteoclast differentiation are regulated by IL-6. Osteoclasts are also very similar in nature to epithelial cells.

A similar line of argument applies to arthritis.

Ultimately, we need more virion assay testing. Take tissue samples. Test for viruses. We have the technology. We should be able to generate lots of evidence FAST for the involvement of herpesviriade in these diseases.

We also need to start taking medical histories that include people who are in close contact with you. I’ll try to write about that next – it’s all about histocompatibility complexes, and how especially one spouse may have one disease, and the other spouse may have another, but it’s all the same root cause.

Note to the Internet: Videos aren’t THAT cool

A quick note to the Internet, especially those out there who run tech information sites. (Channel 9? Asp.net? I’m looking at YOU guys).

Videos are compelling. They get your face out there. You get a modicum of celebrity. People hear your voice. Heck, you can even show your family.

Please, keep it to YouTube.

I’ll watch videos on the internet when I want to waste a few minutes looking at a drunken squirrel, or check out Zero Punctuation. When I want information – a science based interview, or a good tutorial on how to use, say, Dynamic Data Entities in ASP.NET – believe it or not, I actually want text.

Why do I want text?

• I can read really fast. I can skim even faster. When I’m looking for tech information, I’m looking for a couple of very specific bits and pieces.
• It’s searchable on Google or Live Search. And you know what? I know ALL the keywords I need to know to get the search result in the first couple of links usually.
• I can cut & paste it into OneNote if I really need to.
• I can read it on my mobile phone if necessary.
• I don’t have to shut out the world and put on my headphones.
• I don’t want to look like I’m wasting time surfing the net at work (which I look like when I’m looking for tech info usually anyway). Watching a video? It’s the same problem squared.
• Returning to point 1 – reading really fast – I don’t want to waste 15 minutes to an hour watching something that I could get through in less than 3 minutes.

If you put your information in video-only format, you’re actually just stroking your ego. If it’s technical information and it’s NOT a Photoshop tutorial, or a very SPECIFIC demonstration of new features in, say, Windows 7 - then please, don’t do it. Don’t. Just don’t. Stop it. I don’t want to hear your voice. I don’t want to watch you mug for the camera. I just want the information I came for. Give me a break.

What’s worse is when what I’m watching is someone’s cursor wandering around Visual Studio for 15 minutes. DON’T DO IT. IT’S BORING.

Pointless ego stroking: hey look! It’s code! In a video! You can even hear them type! 

Video is great for some things. It’s my preferred medium for stories. I love it for comedy. Just please, give information in the most suitable form. And for 90% of people in a hurry, just trying to get their day-to-day done, that form is text.

(And Powerpoint mavens? I’m watching you… don’t get too complacent)