บทความแนะนำ (อีกแล้ว): "ดื่มน้ำวันละ 8-10 แก้วเพื่อสุขภาพและประชาธิปไตย (ที่ไม่ดีแบบฝรั่ง)"

โดยคุณทวิช จิตรสมบูรณ์ครับ บทความเต็มอยู่ที่นี่

มีคนบอกผมมานานแล้วว่าคนควรจะดื่มน้ำเยอะๆ วันละ 8-10 แก้วต่อวัน ซึ่งผมก็สงสัยมาตลอดว่ามันจริงเหรอ เพราะมันน่าจะขึ้นกับขนาดร่างกาย และสภาพอากาศร้อนเย็นแห้งชื้นด้วย ดังนั้นผมจึงไม่ได้สนใจนัก ดื่มนำ้ไปเรื่อยๆเมื่อหิวหรืออยากดื่ม

คุณทวิชก็สงสัยเหมือนผมแต่ลงมือทำอะไรให้คนอื่นๆฉุกคิดหรือถกเถียงในเรื่องนี้ ไม่ใช่แต่เชื่อตามๆกันไป โดยไม่หยุดถามว่าคนที่มาบอกรู้ได้อย่างไรว่าจริง นอกจากนี้ผมชอบอ่านส่วนความคิดเห็นของผู้อ่านด้วยครับ

ผมลองค้นหาใน Google ดูว่ามีหลักฐานอะไรไหมว่าดื่มน้ำวันละ 8 แก้วดีต่อสุขภาพหรือไม่ปรากฎว่าไม่มีหลักฐานหนักแน่นยืนยันว่าดีหรือไม่ดีนะครับ ผมเดาว่าเรื่องอย่างนี้อย่าทำสุดโต่งน่าจะเข้าท่าที่สุด ไม่ดื่มน้อยหรือมากเกินไปกว่าที่ร่างกายต้องการ อย่างน้อยวิธีนี้ก็ทำให้สิ่งมีชีวิตอยู่รอดมาเป็นล้านๆปีแล้ว

Applied Evolution

Although human have been directing evolution in other organisms for thousands of years (such as breeding dogs, fruits without seeds, high-yield rice, etc.,) I'm still very impressed to hear that researchers are evolving bacteria to produce more electricity in fuel cells.

Here is the excerpt (MFC = Microbial Fuel Cell = a kind of fuel cell to generate electricity):

"In order to produce electricity, it is imperative that MFC's bacteria conduct electrons to the cathode. The researchers at UMass Amherst realized that there has never been any natural selective pressure that would enhance electronic conduction in bacteria, so they used directed evolution to produce highly conducting bacteria.

G. sulfurreducens bacteria were cultured on a graphite electrode under a 400 mV applied bias. The goal was to force the bacteria to adapt to conditions inside the MFC with the hope that they would evolve greater functionality in the process. Several colonies were isolated after five months in the MFC environment and re-cultured under normal conditions. When placed in an MFC cell, the specially cultured bacteria grew much more rapidly—current saturated after 50 hours as opposed to 400 hours—and they provided twice the current density of normally cultured bacteria."

Very Interesting Organisms

From what I know about biology, I'm pretty sure that we are descendants of a unicellular organism that ate ancestors of mitochondria. Our ancestors got to use super high power generated by mitochondria's oxygen-base metabolism, so they could move better, hunt better, evade predators better, and in time mutated into us and all living things that have mitochondria in their cells. (By the way, all mitochondria in you come from your mother; your father's sperm was too small to carry any mitochondrion. When my kids misbehave, I would turn to my wife and tell her "Titus/Tatia/Tanya got your mitochondria.")

I just read an interesting account of something analogous to what our unicellular ancestors might have done: a carnivorous cell hunts other things until it eats a particular type of unicellular plants; it then turns into a photosynthesizing organism and stops hunting. When it reproduces (by binary fission), one offspring becomes a hunter, the other becomes a plant.

An excerpt:

Two researchers have shown a striking example of endosymbiosis forming now: in 2005 Noriko Okamoto an Isao Inouye reported on a unicellular organism called Hatena. Hatena (”enigma” in Japanese) leads a curious life cycle. Hatena is a single-cell organism, swimming around in the water, using a little feeding apparatus to eat cells and organic material smaller than itself. At some point, it would feed on another unicellular algae, the Nephroselmis. Once Hatena swallows Nephroselmis, it does not digest it. Rather, Nephrosolmis makes itself comfortable home inside Hatena. The alga starts growing inside Hatena: it grows to about 10 times its original size, filling up most of Hatena. The alga also seems to lose most of its own organelles, except for the chloroplast. The chloroplast actually grows bigger.

Hatena changes too as a result. Before ingesting the alga, it has a rather complex “mouth”, or feeding apparatus. After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears only to be replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye, that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obviously stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.

Spare 10 Minutes And Understand Evolution

If you have ever wondered that, if evolution is real, why don't apes change into human, or you have thought evolution is too improbable to work, you should see this excellent video clip: (Click here or watch below):

วันเกิด ชาร์ลส์ ดาร์วิน

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Linus On Evolution

Linus Torvalds, the Linux kernel creator, in responding to a complaint why the kernel has evolved via "sheer luck", has this interesting view about engineering complex things. An Excerpt in italic:

"...You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what - it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car.

It's you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. "sheer luck".

Well, sheer luck, AND:

- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")..."

The same process probably underlies the relative success of capitalism. Of course, capitalism might be too successful and hastens our species' extinction.

The 2007 Darwin Awards

The Darwing Awards are named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution; the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.

The 2007 Darwin Awards, as determined by the visitors' votes, are presented here.

If you enjoy the Darwin Awards, you might also enjoy this excellent movie, Idiocracy. You can see the first 3 minutes here.

I Also Am A Fortune Teller (หมอดูฟันธง)*

I predict that Robert Axelrod will win a Nobel Prize for this work.

Well, he should anyway.

Now before you doubt my ability as a fortune teller, my Nobel prediction is currently 100% correct! In the late 1980's/early 1990's, I told my friends that Ahmed Zewail would surely win a Nobel prize in the future after listening to his talk about femtochemistry.

Well, one data point is probably a fluke anyway.

If you have not read "The Evolution of Cooperation", you should really take a look.

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*Of course, fortune tellers seem to know the future by doing these:

1. Predict dramatic things.
2. Predict often.
3. Ignore wrong predictions.
4. Focus exclusively on correct predictions.
5. Master cold reading.

The correct question we should ask ourselves is "Does the fortune teller performs better than chance?" not "Does the fortune teller predicts anything correctly?" I'm quite sure that all fortune tellers are fraud. However, if any of them is real, there are many Nobel prizes awaiting those who can deduce the nature of time from those real fortune teller's performance.

Superstition Is Not Limited To Human!

In 1948, there was an experiment by B.F. Skinner that showed that pigeons appeared to exhibit superstitious behaviors.


Full paper is here.


I think the result might be applicable to why human perform rituals, pray, bribe karma wheel, buy lotteries, etc. I also wonder whether animals have their religious thoughts too.


I like to collect these animal examples because, based on what we learn from animal and human behaviors, I believe that biology created human morals and religions through evolution of societal units and it's up to the us, not supernatural mechanisms, to make sure that bad deeds got punished and good deeds got rewarded. I don't believe that human require special treatment from nature in terms of mechanisms that shaped us.


A few books that shaped my thinking about this matter:

• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
• Peacemaking among Primates
• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
• Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
• Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
• The Evolution of Cooperation

In the last book, bacteria show cooperative behaviors that might be examples of what we would call moral behaviors. That book, along with The Blind Watchmaker started my education in evolution.

Evidences For Life's Common Ancestors & The Tree Of Life

A good friend of mine asked me what evidences I have for my belief in the idea that all living things on earth have common ancestors. This is an excellent question since it's very important to base our judgement about reality on good evidences, or we can easily be led astray by our commonsense, biases, and other extremely appealing ideas that don't match reality.*

My specific belief is this: All living things on Earth descend from one or small number of groups of ancestors. (I would like to say one group, but I'm open to the possibility that there are unknown life forms that have independent ancestors, distinct from our group.)

For this particular belief, a very good summary of evidences can be be found here (29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent.)

Also, a very informative depiction of known life on Earth can be found at the Tree of Life Web Project. Make sure that you read this page about the interpretation of the image.

An implication of the belief is that I am a (mostly distant) relative of bacteria, mushrooms, blue-green algae, jasmine rice, earth worms, monitor lizards, cows, starfish, mangoes, octopuses, fire ants, bees, dogs, monkeys, gorillas, parrots, sharks, triceratops, T-Rexes, the slaves that built the pyramids, Ghenghis Khan, and you, the reader.

Another implication that if there are extra-terrestrial beings (which I really hope there are, although I don't have any evidence for that yet) it's very unlikely for them to look very similar to us. Even if we and ET have the same common ancestors, that ancestors must have come to earth billions of years ago and will have enough time to evolve into us and myriads forms of animals and plants. Similarly, the ET would descend from the common ancestors over the similarly long time period. So, Captain Kirk in Star Trek should not be able to mate with those ET chicks if he is not really, really into inter-planetary bestiality. (Same reasoning applies to Superman and Lois Lane.**)

Yet another implication is that human is not the apex of evolution. There will be other lifeforms in the billions of years ahead if we don't destroy all life first. We are the first Earth lifeform that can destroy all life on Earth using our technology, but we are not necessarily the best lifeform. To think that we are the peak of all possible lifeforms is just extremely arrogant.

Finally, my body is made of atoms from things (living/dead, never-alive) from the past. Therefore, I also believe that when I die, some atoms that used to be me will be recycled into other living things in the future but the atoms won't carry any of my memory there, since my memory is not stored in specific atoms, but in the patterns of how atoms are arranged. This is supported by the fact that, atoms inside my bodies are very likely to have been in bodies of people of the past, yet I don't share their memory. Conversely, with very high probability, atoms that are in my body now weren't the same atoms that were in my body when I was a child, yet I still remember many things from my childhood. This gives me a hope that, in principle, human can preserve identity/memory by capturing the memory patterns and upload them to more permanent substrate and become relatively immortal.

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* The great Richard Feynman summed it up (in this book) thus: "... there are many reasons why you might not understand [an explanation of a scientific theory] ... Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it. A little screen comes down and you don't listen anymore. I'm going to describe to you how Nature is - and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it. It's a problem that [scientists] have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. [A scientific theory] describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is - absurd.

I'm going to have fun telling you about this absurdity, because I find it delightful. Please don't turn yourself off because you can't believe Nature is so strange. Just hear me all out, and I hope you'll be as delighted as I am when we're through."


**Larry Niven wrote a very funny essay called "Man of Steel,Woman of Kleenex" on the problems involved when Superman and Lois Lane try to mate.

Two Ways To Combat Ignorance Promulgated By Religious Fundamentalists

Lately, religious fundamentalists of all types are trying to force schools in many countries to either stop teaching evolution as an explanation of how life and species were formed, or to spend equal time teaching nonsense that is amply contradicted by evidences.

Here are two ways to combat such vile attempts:

1. A rational way: Explain the frequently misunderstood aspects of evolution, and,
2. A sublime way: Convert the infidels to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If you are interested in evolution, you can start here.

The book that changed my view of how the world came to be is The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. I read it when I was 19 and I'm so glad I did. Dawkins wrote in the book: "I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence."

You can learn more about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster here (Wikipedia), here (Uncyclopedia), and here (the official website.)

ถ้าจะพยายามเข้าใจช่วงเวลานานๆ...

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One More Step Toward My Cyborg Future!

This IBM's report indicates that their scientists used the 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer to simulate 8 million neurons of mouse brain with 6,300 synapses per neuron at 1/10 the real-time speed.

Human brain has about 100,000 million neurons, so there is a factor of 12,500 in the number of neurons to go, and a factor of 10 for the simulation speed. Let's say we need 1,000,000 times more computing power to simulate the human brain in real time, that will take only 20 doublings in processing power to achieve. Therefore, a supercomputer in 20-30 years might be able to simulate a human brain!

Further understanding of how the states of the brain are stored in neuron configurations, and how to read the state of a living human and upload the state to the simulator would be the limiting steps in our ability to backup our brain states.

Hopefully, in the next few decades, nanotech + biotech will allow us to either repair our biological body or build a more durable artificial body for our backup brain states.

I think if I can live another 40-50 years, I will be able to upload and backup myself repeatedly to live for a really long time.

I might as well dream a little bit more. I might even download my brain to a diplodocus body with Titus in an allosaurus body and we can really walk with the dinosaurs. Maybe I can live for a while in a plesiosaur body to reduce my fear of the ocean. :-)

A Reason To Live "Forever"*

I found an interesting article about what important ideas scientists want to tell us. Sir Martin Rees said this:

"I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead — for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that exist then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Our concern with Earth's future is, understandably, focused upon the next 100 years at most — the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. But awareness of this longer time horizon, and the immense potential that human actions this century could foreclose, offers an extra motive for proper stewardship of this planet."

I hope scientists will learn about our biology and information processing fast enough to significantly extend our lives. Although I want to believe otherwise, all evidences so far tell me that I only have one life to live, so I better live a good, long one before this consciousness ceases to exist at my death. There is so much to explore and learn, so much potential in directly evolving our body and mind, and so little time to do it. But hey, if we succeed, maybe we will become something like Q!

Another two quotes that I think more people should know about are:

"I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant." -- Richard Dawkins

"Science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it. The myth that science gets rid of mysteries, started by the Romantic poets, was well nailed by Albert Einstein —whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling, and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets.

Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world's stock of awe." -- Matt Ridley
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*"Forever" because it's not really forever as in infinite years, just a few centuries to a few billion years :-)