Welp. Sorry, Cocos2d, as much fun as you were, I'm moving on.
WWDC kicked off yesterday, and aside from the drool-worthy massive overhaul of the iOS operating system, another thing stood out to me. Apple now has a 2d game development framework! So, I'm pretty much going to drop using Cocos2d and begin using Sprite Kit. It looks like it will be much easier to use, and it will probably be faster/more efficient owing to under-the-hood optimizations. Apple is very good at that sort of thing. I also like that they chose an API implementation similar to Cocos2d, for multiple reasons. Familiarity, clarity, and effectiveness.There are definitely going to be people who claim it is a Cocos2d ripoff, completely forgetting that there were game engines with similar implementations before Cocos2d, but eh, whatever. People get so caught up in things that they forget that there is nearly /always/ prior art.Anyhow, I have no idea what I am going to make with it, but since it is part of the iOS frameworks, it means I can screw with it at work a bit :DAside from that, aggravation at work. When one puts up a flag saying 'if we do this, things will be more difficult down the line', and then, down the line, everyone starts panicking, one tends to get annoyed. It was an issue that I'd brought up not once, not twice, but three times before. Each time it was said that it wasn't a problem, yet lo and behold here we are, and its a problem.angryfaecz D:< D:< D:<Other things are more interesting. I've always been a science buff, and I've been following several things as of late. One of my favorites is that bioengineering is taking off far faster than I thought it would. So what is some cool experimental stuff that shows promising results? Recently, some serious advances in stuff related to detecting and treating Alzheimers, a couple new tenative types of anti-biotics that act on completely new mechanisms (they attack different mechanisms that are incredibly difficult if not impossible for the bacteria to adapt to), advances in viral medicines, oh so many new methods to make stems cells from adult cells. Stuff like that.The biggest stuff as of recent are really cool.1) Tissue engineering has succeeded in the first bioneutral artificial blood vessel, which is massively important. Blood vessels are usually harvested from other parts of the body (usually the leg) but this can be dangerous, and obviously it means you lose a blood vessel elsewhere. So this is cool.Thy used the same technique as some earlier cool stuff where they took a heart* (either cow or pig) stripped it of all the genetic material and cells leaving the collagen scaffolding, and then repopulated it with different (human, I believe) cells. Lo and behold, a the cells differentiated, and bam new organ! Obviously this is like pre-alpha, so it'll be a while before this can be used for organ transplant, and it might never be because…2) Bioprinting. Woo! Exactly what it says on the tin. Printing out organs or organ replacements. They've recently implanted a bioprinted trachea into someone. They've also been able to bioprint small portions of a liver that appeared to function perfectly fine. Bioprinting still has its issues, mostly in that they can't print blood vessels yet**, and blood vessels are quite necessary for tissue to stay alive. However, given the rapidity at which bioprinting is advancing, it oughtn't be too long. In tandem with the above item, this could save many, many lives.3) Teeth. Somehow, this seems to have not been noticed, but there are now not one, but two methods by which one can regrow teeth in-situ. Both experimental, obviously, but totally awesome. One of the methods uses ultrasound,and the other of course uses stem cells. When this hits dentistry and becomes available, I am getting a new full set of teeth.4) Hair, they've figured out how to undo gray hair, and give people back their natural hair colors. Cool.Medical science is very exciting. Remember, it wasn't so long ago that cessation of heartbeat was considered legal death. How barbaric. Now we at least have brain death as the standard, and even now that is beginning to be shown to not be true. Interesting…*swishes tail*Leave comments or face my wrath!* or kidney, I can't remember. Quite possibly both.** different from the above thing
From my experience, medical science is a complete fucking mess, thousands of people running experiments they are asked to perform without any understanding whatsoever, taking directions established by funding agencies or corporations or recent fads in science and technology, vast majority of their results being totally useless to anyone, future researchers and patients included. The funding source tortures the researcher and the researches tortures the rat and and there is pain and pain and neither the funding source nor the researcher nor the rat understand their place in the machine.
Of course, the press and the Internet then get to pick a couple of cool things and market them as advancements for the future.@Cesque - agreed. It is a total mess. Also, I'm usually pretty skeptical about stuff as well, but I try to do my due diligence in researching if something is true or not. If we (specifically America but you can replace that with whatever fits) annually dumped into science even a 10th of what we spend on military, holy shit, we could do so many things. I think another issue is that when people see news about an experimental success, they expect a 100% functioning result, rather than a proof-of-concept.
Also on my search, the first result I get is this. That has some samples of the work they're doing in bioprinting, both in terms of printing living tissue which was my intended meaning, but also printing tissue-compatible items.The third result, however, is exactly the one I was talking about when I mentioned the liver.The explainthefuture site is really sketchy though - no disagreement from me.Edit: Oh, and here's the heart thing, although I can't find the actual article I wanted. I wouldn't normally use Dailymail as a source, but I've seen it before and that article is decently accurate. And here's the same thing, applied to rat kidneys.because of the ethical issue with embryonic stem cells, i work with cells from the subventricular cortex of the brain from 4 day old rat pups
The ethical issue is quickly becoming a non-concern, considering how rapidly we're figuring out how to turn other cells into stem cells. Which is awesome, because stem cells are damn useful.
I'm not sure how many of you know what stem cells actually are, but I'm guessing at least a few of you do. For those of you that don't, they are pretty amazing. They are cells that have yet to differentiate and thus have the possibility to become anything; they are merely waiting for direction for which of the thousands of different kinds of cells they are to become. My last semester of college I took Histology which is the study of all of the specific cells in the body and I mean down to the specifics. I could still probably tell you how many of the body's cells work and I barely got a C. The information that is known is astounding but the more we discover the more we find that needs to be understood. It is not a problem but just how science works.
Anyway to my point, don't be too hard on scientists for what they don't know yet, instead look at what they DO know. What you will find is astounding. Like did you know there are two different cell in you bones the are either building or dissolving your bones. Depending on hormone signaling these cells control the amounts of calcium and phosphate ions in your blood. Past a certain age the osteoclasts (dissolvers) tend to be more active than the osteoblasts (bone builders) and thus bones are more brittle in old age. I find that fascinating.@Cesque - I think you've hit it on the nail squarely. To get from A to Z, you have to go through all the letters in between (although sometimes you get to skip a few), and we're still near the beginning of the alphabet. People need to appreciate advances for what they are - steps in the right direction. Also, very much agreed with the lack of links to the original source. Highly irritating when trying to validate a news article.
I'd argue that we hit a glass ceiling with machine translation owing to resource constraints rather than funding - language is a difficult and potentially unbounded problem, and in the 50's we had nowhere near the CPU power to do it. However, it is entirely apt here. @Seleney - 64digits is made up of fairly intelligent people. I'd wager that a decent portion of the community here knows what they are. And bones are pretty cool, aren't they?