AIs Are Beating Experts at Old, Relevant, Real-World Problems

When I was a molecular biology undergrad in the mid 90s, the Big Question in biochemistry was protein folding - how to predict the 3D structure of a protein from its primary (linear) sequence of amino acids. Solving this problem would provide a massive boon to many fields, not least of which is drug development. But it's a hard problem: a factoid cited to impress this upon people is that if proteins folded by passing through every possible configuration randomly until they found its working (not usually lowest energy) conformation, the process would take longer than the lifespan of the universe so far. Obviously this isn't what's happening. And yet, the promise of number-crunching power being used to finally solve this always seemed just a few years away - many people, in retrospect comically, thought the problem would be solved by the close of the century.

The problem is still not solved, but scientists have made incremental progress, and now, the closest thing to a quantum leap forward. Every two years there is a contest where scientists competitively try to solve a structure, then get together and see who got closest. Mohammed Al Quraishi is a computational biologist at Harvard who writes about the 2019 meeting, and who the winner was: an AI named Alpha Fold.

This is exciting because computational biology may really be about to start paying dividends. It's scary because it's one more place where AI is starting to automate our jobs, even Harvard professors. Al Quraishi makes many interesting observations in his post, among them, that a technology company showed up and ate the protein chemists' lunch, and the reaction was muted; we're all becoming numb to this sort of thing. He tries to wake us up by asking how academic computer scientists would react if at a conference, a pharmaceutical company's scientists had showed up and beaten them at their own game.

I had previously made the informal argument that AIs would naturally exceed human performance on games, as games are clearly defined processes with discrete rules and entities, exactly the sort of thing that computers are good at. The difficulty comes when machines must interact between the information-overloaded not-fully-understood messy real world, which is why (again, I informally argue) computers are great at parsing text, and even writing text in the style of sports journalism or certain authors - but at bottom, these are all just very complicated echo chambers, with no meaning or subjective experience associated with the words and sentences. And indeed, the language manipulation has come first, but that doesn't mean encoding external experience in language is impossible. I had maybe subconsciously thought that something like protein folding, a perfect example of a messy real-world process, would be beyond the capabilities of machines at least for many years, but this theory has now been clearly falsified.

For The Over-Optimistic

Brief online debate between David Brin and Aubrey de Grey here. Brin points out that the low-hanging fruit for life-extension have already been picked, and that any life extension on the order of decades (not to mention indefinite extension) will require "thorough" intracellular nanotechnology. Agreed. There is always a component in every make of car that fails first, and even if you keep replacing components, eventually you'll be putting new parts in every day. This is why people don't keep repairing their cars indefinitely! What's more, a car is not a person. Your transmission is not you. Your brain is you. And we don't know how to replace that practically, and we still don't understand consciousness and self even at a basic philosophical level.

Living a long time is emphatically a worthy goal but we will not have this technology in the next few centuries.

Consuming Random Elements and Werewolves

I'm kind of jealous of the first half of the twentieth century. It was a time when you could just feed frogs rubidium and write down what happened. I once argued that based on its rarity, ruthenium was actually a better currency standard than gold; gold is (or was) a standard by historical accident of having a high redox potential, therefore being the only metal found in nature in its non-oxidized form, plus monkeys like shiny things. Okay, forget the common isotopes of elements; what happens when you start feeding, so heavy water to living things? Not much, actually. No eye lasers, no phasing through walls, you don't even turn into a werewolf. It doesn't even taste any different (according to Harold Urey)


Nope. Not even close.

So what do you have to do to poison yourself with heavy water? To show the initial effects, you'd have to drink about a quarter of your water weight. Those initial effects in mammals are sterility - D2O in high enough concentrations is toxic to rapidly dividing cells, just like radiation or free-radical generating chemical species; this is a result of the altered kinetics when free protons begin to be replaced with slightly-more-than-twice as massive deterium nuclei. Consequently as the concentration increases, the damage begins to effect other high-turnover tissues next, like the GI tract and after that, presumably the central nervous system. Mammals given only heavy water die after a week. It turns out a disgruntled employee at a Canadian nuclear power plant spiked the office water cooler with D2O back in 1990, but it wasn't enough to replace any significant water weight as mentioned above, and no one was injured.

One interesting (but simplistic) idea was that in slowing the reaction kinetics of an organism's biochemistry, you could slow the organism's aging. And indeed it was shown that Drosophila given D2O did live longer. No telling what's going on to their gametes or nervous systems, or what would go on in a longer-lived more neurologically complex organism!

The question of why our ancestors made some very basic chemical commitments (nerves based on sodium, potassium and calcium flux, for example) is interesting but ultimately not useful, very likely having to do with the happenstance of what was available and soluble at the Earth's wet crust. Lithium is similar enough to sodium that it can fool certain sodium channels in the central nervous system and decrease the rate or amplitude of mood swings in bipolar people, but that's a coincidence.

By the way, the werewolf formulas are pretty disappointing. There was one where you can use a mixture of nightshade and children's blood and smear it on your skin during a full moon but it didn't work. Maybe you can't use your own blood like I did (but I was ten, so it should count.) Another way is to drink water out of a wolf paw print in the Harz Mountains in Germany. I'll have to import the wolves since they're not extirpated in Germany.

Vaccines and Vitamins

This is cross-posted to my atheist blog, The Lucky Atheist.

From the NY Times:

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

That's from a NY Times article a friend sent me and asked for my opinion about. First, you should probably weight the findings of a peer-reviewed study much more heavily than the opinion of a fourth year medical student; read the article and follow up the individual studies if you're curious. It's also worth pointing out this nice summary is written by Paul Offitt, the pediatrician who co-invented the rotavirus vaccine and wrote "Autism's False Prophets" (for his efforts he receives frequent death threats from anti-vaxxers).

All that said, the findings are not so surprising. Why is that people think an animal which existed where nutrients, predation, and infectious disease were always limiting, is then freed from those constraints, and is suddenly immortal and perfect? If a car is designed to last for 100,000 miles, and you take really good care of it (more than the engineers expected) you might get 200,000 miles before a major breakdown, but you won't get a million. Less metaphorically: megadoses of fat-soluble vitamins are already known to be bad, so consuming anything in dramatically different quantities than nature has accounted for is at best, not going to do anything. In any event I'm betting the effect sizes are still pretty small. It's much more likely air pollution or a bad gene will get you than too many supplements. But more supplements won't make you live forever.

For anyone who has any protective feelings for the supplement industry and harbors any suspicions that the big bad doctors and pharmaceutical companies are attacking a poor little defenseless business - the supplement industry is a $32 BILLION dollar industry, complete with lobbyists. They're maximizing profits, period, like everyone else.

To expand on this: to my transhumanist comrades in the rationalist movement, I say your desire for long life and/or immortality is a worthy goal! But there's no hack for it, any more than using a certain kind of motor oil will make your Ford get to a billion miles. Probably not coincidentally, I find it's often programmers who don't understand the limitations of non-symbolic moving parts, unlike those in software, but very like those in cars or organs. To that end the impulse to become code via the still complete-science-fiction of uploading is understandable, though it makes some pretty big assumptions about the nature of consciousness that I don't think people are ready to literally bet their lives on.

If anyone is aware of backlash against these studies and this article I would be very interested to read it; please post in comments.

American Gerontological Society Meeting in San Diego, Right Now Nov 15-18

For the Transhumanists and others interested in aging. Here is the information. Leonard Hayflick is there.

(Little did I know until I read his Wiki bio that he discovered Mycoplasma pneumoniae, i.e. the pathogen that causes walking pneumonia. Cool.)

Everything You Believe, It's Just Because You're Afraid of Dying

Here's a piece that's a bit Freudian in the broad sense of explaining grand sweeps of human action and belief in terms of obscure dark fears: specifically, that all our worldviews and cultures are attempts at achieving immortality. On the whole the article is a little silly, but it does make an interesting point: that the cognitive foibles that afflict humans do not spare atheists (true enough). In the context of discussing immortality, this immediately makes one think of cryopreservation, which I've written about before. And the question there is: are cryopreservationists usually non-religious? The few serious (i.e. pre-paid) ones I know are in fact atheists.

ROBOTS MADE OF DNA KILL CANCER!!!!! OMG!!!!

Like OMG! DNA Robots!

The title above (and image) is what the press release title would have you believe. The reality is still pretty cool - the lab created structures composed of DNA and engineered to move in the presence of certain compounds, so that the structures opened when they contacted leukemia cells; then they can deliver therapeutic chemicals to kill those cells.

This is a good innovation that has potential but right now it's barely proof of concept, because "killing cancer cells" does not at all equate to "curing cancer". (That particular inequality is why we have drug development professionals.) The problem here is not in a lab that's doing cutting edge work, it's in (presumably) the university's press office, and the outlets that distribute their breathless releases. The press has to learn to stop swallowing releases undigested, whether they're from Harvard or much more entertaining ones that explain the whole universe - or we have to learn to stop wasting our time on those particular press outlets.

I Warned You, Cryonicists

...that you would wake up in a hellish, incomprehensible dystopia. (Actually it's not that bad, I just asked why they would wait until after they're dead, if they believe their own claims about future medical technology.)

Well it turns out I was too optimistic, because you cryonicists will be waking up next to Larry King. Orwell's 1984 will seem idyllic in comparison.

Organ Legging

Over forty years ago, Larry Niven predicted that organ transplantation and harvesting would become a problem. From the good summary of his concept of organlegging of Niven's use of the concept of organ-legging at Wikipedia:

On Earth, the problem led to a repressive society almost unrecognizable by today's standards. Since the average citizens wished to extend their lives, the world government sought to increase the supply by using condemned criminals to supply the organ banks. When this failed to meet the demand, citizens would vote for the death penalty for more and more trivial crimes. First violent crimes, then theft, tax evasion, false advertising, and even traffic violations became punishable by the organ banks. This failed to solve the problem, as once the death penalty was passed for a crime, people stopped committing it. This resulted in nearly every crime meriting the death penalty. Further attempts to alleviate the problem by declaring certain groups of cryogenically frozen people to be dead in law (the so-called "Freezer Bills") and harvesting their organs also proved to be unsuccessful. The freezer vaults represented a finite supply and therefore were eventually exhausted.[1]

Then you read things like this Al Jazeera story (via Boingboing), and you wonder why Larry Niven isn't more of a household name:

A young woman, posing as a migrant worker from Hebei province, calls a man who has advertised on the website, identified as Mr He.

"I need money," she says over the phone. "Do you want a woman's kidney?"

Mr He asks her age. Twenty-five, she replies.

"Of course we want your kidney."

Mr He tells the woman to travel to Xuzhou city, Jiangsu province, where somebody will be waiting when her train pulls into the station. She'll be given a physical examination and, if she's found to be in good health, Mr He will find a suitable transplant candidate. He says he'll pay RMB 320,000 (50,000 dollars) - a dubious offer, since most kidneys in China sell for around RMB 100,000 (15,000 dollars) - and promises to transfer the money before surgery.

In China, around 1.5 million people require organ transplants, but just 10,000 receive them each year. The vast majority of organs in China still come from condemned prisoners, but new government regulations have reduced the number of organs available for transplant. Meanwhile, few Chinese agree to donate their organs upon death, widening the gap between supply and demand.

I concede that there's a libertarian/free trade argument to be made here, more often applied to egg donation, which is essentially: "You can sell things you own, right, and if your kidney isn't yours, then whose is it? And there are people dying for want of kidneys (and other organs)." The problem is that not everyone knows what their kidneys really do, or what the consequences of giving one away might be - and the organ dealers aren't going to go out of their way to educate sellers.

So, before my fellow techno-libertarians tell me I'm a paternalistic sell-out, either convince me that what's happening in China, and what happened to Hu Jie and thousands like him, is morally optimal, or alternatively that it's only not morally optimal because it's currently a black market. Look at your own positions too - are you ready to legalize all drugs, not to mention do away with all prescription control? That is a far, far less fraught issue than this. And some are ready for that; congratulations, you're consistent. If on the other hand you are not ready for such changes, then you're certainly not ready for legal organ markets.

[1] I left the part about freezer vaults in for my cryopreservation friends. (You should also see the next Darren Aronofsky movie, with George Clooney.)

Iced, Iced Baby

Baby born after 20 years frozen as embryo. (More descriptive, but less fun than the post title I chose.)

1) There are probably not enough of these cases to get statistical power and there is the major potential confounder of the freeze-thaw itself. However if technology allows this to become more common, and the Flynn effect is still occurring, we'll start to have twins born decades or centuries apart to help us find out why.

2) Derek Parfit would have something to say to people who are hesitant to let their frozen embryos get implanted. Your genes are locked in a test tube, never able to experience happiness? Or raised by someone else and on net happy more than suffering, 20 years from now? If there's no chance you're going to use them, then #2 is a no brainer, if you think causing a hypothetical person to miss out on hypothetical happiness is immoral.


A frozen baby from the future. As it turns out, Flynn was only half-right: not just IQ rises over time, but also average birthweight, here up to 35 tons.

Why Do Cryonicists Wait to Be Frozen Until After They're Dead?

Per Wikipedia, the first person to be frozen for revival in a future age was James Bedford in 1967, who died from cancer. An outsider with an earnest interest in understanding cryogenics might ask two questions. The first is whether there's anybody in storage now who could be helped with any of the medical advances made in the previous 43 years; we might be the gleaming future civilization Bedford was hoping for. And it's almost certain that Bedford's cancer, whatever kind it was, is more treatable today than it was in 1967. But there's a bigger challenge than the disease that Bedford had, which is that he's dead. To put it bluntly, "he shoulda got it looked at sooner." That is, he should have gone to the cryo-doctor earlier. Why do cryonicists wait until they actually die?

I am not a cryonicist, but presumably the motivation of people who are is that they want to be revived at such time that their disease can be treated or cured, and in such a way that they, their selves, are intact, so that they can enjoy being alive again. (Otherwise, what's the point?) This being the case, waiting until you're actually dead seems to introduce unnecessary challenges to your would-be future healers. For this, we return to Professor Bedford.

Even if tomorrow someone finds a way to thaw people out without damaging them, we still couldn't help Bedford, even though we could treat less advanced forms of his cancer. Because he died. His self is gone, because his heart stopped, the oxygen that kept his brain organized as James Bedford stopped coming, and that delicate organization broke down. The information is gone. "Yes," objectors might say, "but in the future, they might be able to fix that." Even assuming that they could, it would be just like watching Rebel Without a Cause and reassembling a car from random parts you find in junkyards, and saying, "This - this specific car was the car James Dean drove in that movie." Without even getting into the philosophical debate of continuity of self, the point is if that's what you're going to do, you don't need James Dean's car, just the blueprints and pictures of it, and you don't need James Bedford's body, just the information about it. "But," the objectors might say, "we don't have a way of recording brain structure yet, so the best thing to do is keep his body." No dice. He died and his brain organization was irretrievably damaged. That was the whole problem in the first place. It's gone. Yes, there might be amazing science in the future that we have no way of imagining today, but today, there's no more reason to think that you could recover Bedford's intact brain structure than there is to think if I gave you a bag of dice, you could tell how the last thousand rolls came up.


Above: not you anymore. Not anybody. Credit Concurring Opinions.

I assume that cryonicists have heard these kinds of arguments before and remain unpersuaded that being frozen after you die renders the whole project pointless; they would seem to believe that this is just a limitation of current technology and imagination. Fine; for the sake of discussion let's move past that. But can there be any question that being frozen while you're still living would make it much easier for your future doctors to help you? Imagine that Bedford had been frozen six months before his death, with his cancer in a then-terminal state, and today someone discovers a way to thaw out tissue (frozen in the method Bedford was) without damaging it. Bedford's descendants (or whoever, no offense, cares about him at this point - more on that later) could send his records to a 2010 oncologist who would say "Oh, he just had XYZ cancer, and that's relatively easy to fix now. Thaw him out and I'll treat him." Done!

My knowledge of cryonicists' positions is very superficial, and I assume that the community has answers for these questions (though I haven't heard them.) But I'm very curious whether most cryonicists have plans to be frozen before their natural deaths, and if not, why not. If you really believe that in the future, you will be able to be awakened and treated for a disease that is now incurable, why make it harder on your future doctors? If you really believe that life will be much better then, why wait? Assuming you're fortunate enough (from the Buddhist standpoint anyway) of having a protracted and predictable decline from some progressive disease (as opposed to a massive MI that takes your right now, this minute), why not bid farewell to your family a few months before your otherwise inevitable demise?

Imagine: you have a tearful farewell party. Your family takes you to the facility and gathers around you, and the medical staff places the IVs. You get drowsy as the anesthesiologist injects the initial push of midazolam. Your thoughts relax and scatter, your eyes close, and then re-open. A strangely uniformed attendant is leaning over you speaking to someone you can't see with an odd accent: "Can you believe this guy was 'dying' from melanoma? Sheesh." The attendant says to take two pills and call her in the morning, then she compliments you: "You're smart. All these other people in your facility were frozen after they were dead. Pointless." Again, it seems that if cryonicists really believe their best bet is to be frozen to await a future cure, missing a few days or weeks with misguided non-cryonicist loved ones now in exchange for a much better chance of the future revival they want would seem to be a no-brainer - and at worst, all you're doing is a very expensive form of euthanasia. The argument has odd parallels to theists who hold forth on the virtues of the afterlife. If they're so hot to get to heaven and pick up their harp or their houris, why aren't they more eager to leave this life right now? Why wait? You might say, because euthanasia is illegal in most of the U.S., and freezing a not-yet-almost-terminal person would probably be considered murder; healthcare practitioners wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. That's probably true, and maybe this legal reality is the admittedly unfortunate reason for post-mortem cryopreservation.

In addition to the very basic question of "why wait until you die", there are also operational problems that present themselves. Again I apologize to cryonicists that have thought them through (and would be thrilled to see your comments here!) Have you ever been to a cemetery where a lot of your ancestors are buried? There's one in the Appalachians in Western Pennsylvania that has a whole boatload of mine. And when I walk among the graves, I see my last name on a bunch of the stones and I feel vaguely guilty that here are the remains of people to whom I owe my existence, yet I have no idea what most of them even looked like. Imagine your own great-great-grandfather is on ice, and we have the technology to revive him, and finally a discovery is made that could cure his disease. There are problems, aren't there?

1) Almost no one has any idea what their ancestors died from going back more than three generations. The only time most people care at all about their ancestors' health is when we go to a new doctor and fill out those lists of conditions that run in the family (i.e. insofar as it directly affects our own current health.) Consequently, if a cryonicist expects to be revived, that means s/he also expects that somebody is going to be scouring Pubmed for the next ???? years on his/her behalf. If they expect it to be their great great grand-children, they're in for a shock. Those people are strangers.

2) If your great great grandchildren can't be bothered to check Pubmed on your behalf, then who's paying the power bill to keep you frozen? This raises further questions of the business model of these foundations. Sure, someone might set aside a massive endowment that generates enough interest to keep the freezers running. In 2200, when no one knows you existed, who's going to care enough to fight if they want to shut it down and use the funds for something else? If my family had been dutifully paying to keep my great great grandfather frozen and when my father died the responsibility passed to me, I'm sorry to say that old Jacob would have been in trouble, Civil War hero though he was. Keep in mind that the cost is indefinite! For all they know, there will never be a cure for what you had. It reminds you of the old cliche of lightbulbs guaranteed by the company to work for a century. At those time frames, considering other kinds of events become important. So who guarantees the company?

3) What the hell are you going to do in 2200 once you're healthy that anyone could conceivably want to pay you for? Many Americans are already paying to keep their aging parents in nursing homes. How about adding on top of that expense a recently thawed great great grandparent that you never even met and who you know ahead of time will require expensive cutting-edge medical treatment? Even if you were smart and put money in the bank to generate compound interest, you better hold your breath when you wake up and hope that in two centuries the government never seized it. As it is today in the U.S., bank accounts idle for seven years can be seized by the government. So now we need either your descendants who never met you managing your money (and not spending it), or special laws protecting cryonicists' bank accounts. If there are enough of them, will this not start to distort economies? (By the way, this is the best argument against vampires. Their compound interest would do exactly that. Only if all vampires are financial idiots does this argument not work.)


EVEN IF PEOPLE THINK CRYONICS IS SILLY, WHY DO THEY RESIST?

The recent NYT article largely focused on the culture surrounding cryonics and the resistance that some have shown to the whole idea. Though I'm making arguments against it here, if other people who want to do this, it's their money; let them! But it seems that the strongest reactions come from within families. There were two main objections. The first is money, which is a real concern. I could understand objections if the objecting partner doesn't want to spend hard-earned cash on something that s/he thinks is silly. If a person could somehow get funded or do it for free, there can be no debate. This leads to the more interesting, though less valid emotional argument: spouses feel that they're being abandoned or separated. This is ironic because if they think cryonics is a crock, all that's happening is the person's remains are being interred in a separate place. Putting yourself in the objector's place doesn't really shed any light on it. If your husband or wife came home one day and said they wanted to do this, why would you care that in the year 2200 s/he would wake up, visit your barely-legible eroded grave marker, and run off with a dashing Buck Rogers or Aeon Flux-type? Roughly even odds that your partner will outlive you anyway, and in your absence, I would hope that you want him/her to be happy, so if they re-marry to a good person once you're pushing up daisies, good for them, whether it's one year after you're dead, or two hundred. You understandably might not want them spending your money on silly stuff while you're still alive, but that's a different objection.

Perhaps most relevant to my future career as a physician, I may eventually be confronted with individuals who ask me about cryopreservation. My thoughts on the matter are in this blog post, and I would tell them the same thing: that I thought they were wasting their money on an elaborate form of euthanasia, and that they shouldn't make medical decisions based on what might eventually be true. But the decision is theirs. Unless technology and law that affect these objections change dramatically over the 25-30 years of my career, I wouldn't participate in cryogenics-related procedures, although I would give patients a referral if they asked.


WHY I WON'T BE CRYOGENICALLY PRESERVED

My main concern with such a decision for myself is that it would financially burden the people I love based on a long bet. I also don't want to sacrifice a single moment of experience of my loved ones and this world for a bet that magic doctors can wake me up in the future, so doing it before I die is out too.

As for the chance that it might work - others have objected (and this occurs to me too) that the world in which you're awakened might very well be an unpleasant one, that it might even be so bad that remaining dead is preferable. I would be very surprised if the world I awakened in centuries hence was not very unpleasant to me in some ways, if only because it's so different that it's hard to get used to. Robin Hanson has discounted this as an irrational fear of a future dystopia, but there's a distinction to be made. While I like the world I live in currently, and it's not dystopian to me and many (most?) of the people living in it, it would certainly be confusing and unpleasant to many people from earlier times. If you don't grow up in an environment, adapting to it at an old age is difficult.

For example: people seem perfectly happy in the Netherlands, and it's okay to visit, but I've lived in California for the past 11 years, and if I woke up on a planet where the whole world was the Netherlands (densely urbanized, rotten weather) I'd be drowning myself in a canal after about two weeks. Is the Netherlands an Orwellian nightmare? Not by any stretch! The difference is in the people, not in the place. What's the difference between me and Dutch people? They grew up there! If you think your grandmother has trouble with the internet, try your great great grandfather. He might have trouble just getting past slavery having been outlawed and women voting, never mind driving a car. So if people who have been continuously participating in society since the 1930s have trouble adapting to 2010, try waking up in 2200. Even if you're surrounded by sympathetic well-intentioned people, or their future equivalents, and even if you agree that the culture of 2200 is some kind of sensible straight-line improvement from ours today, things will be hard for you. Don't overestimate your ability to adapt. I argued previously that just because a social arrangement seems strange and creepy to us now, to other generations growing up in the future it might not - this was in regard to corporate individuals. Because I personally can't imagine this is no reason that I should forbid it for future generations who might find personal corporatization useful and palatable. That's why even if I had a chance at free cryopreservation, I would still say no.

Reading back over this long post, I hate sounding like a naysayer. Every one of us should be all for ways to increase quality of life and the ability of those lives to contribute to each other. Cryonicists believe that that they have found one way to do just that. If you're a cryonicist, to the extent that you're neither breaking my leg nor picking my pocket, yours is a choice for you to make and I truly wish you well. If you're brushing the digital dust off this post centuries from now laughing at my narrow-mindedness, good for you.