KODA

Tonight I read an article off reddit by alluringly titled: Common Benign Dog Tumor May Actually Be Ancient, Immortal Dog Turned into Virus. After reading the article completely, I am stunned… what a concept, cancer cells mutating and propagating into a communicable disease of their own! The real clincher is that the article suggests that this “transmissible tumor” has distinctly different DNA from its host body, which is proposed to have originated from a single dog or wolf several centuries ago! Do check out this article, because it is truly fascinating. This is a concept in biology I had neither heard nor concieved of before.

However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species [...] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

A little while ago I told Whatah about a little obfuscated Python toy I had hatched together about a year before. Unfortunately, this hack was extremely version-dependent, so when I brought up the code (from the era of 2.3) to send to him, of course it did not work with Python 2.4. Well, I wanted it to work. So I got to tinkering again and this evening, with Whatah’s help, we have made this little critter much much more evil. Consider it a programming puzzle, a riddle written in Python. There shall be no hints, though if you are willing to run code before knowing fully what it does, you are a braver fiddler than I…

# Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
_=lambda _, __:getattr(_.__dict__, "values")()[__];__=__builtins__;___ =['\'<BZh91AY&SY', 'e3', '93', 'd9', 'e6', '00', '00', '12', '9f', '80pe', '00', '08', '08@@\\n.g', 'dc', 'a0 ', '00P', 'a0', '00h', '00', '00j', "9bS&\\'", 'a9', 'a7', 'a9', '906SH-f', 'c1', 'f6', '8cS', '12', 'a9', 'ad', 'c1', '08', 'ee_', '0b', 'd9d', 'c1', '17', 'd7', '93', 'bc', '9e', 'ceI', 'c0', '1a', '87guj', '0cc', 'aadF', '18', 'ec', '89', '12', 'fc]', 'c9', '14', 'e1BC', '8eOg', '983\''];_one = _(_(__, 92), 46);_1=lambda ___:_(__, 96)(___);_2=lambda ___: _one('', ___);_3=lambda ___:_(__, 112)(_(__, 0111+2), ___);_4=(98, 122, 50);_24=_1(_2(_3(_4)));_6=lambda __:_(_24, 4)(__);exec _6(eval(_one(r'\x', ___))[1:-1:1])

Have you ever watched a movie or an animation with the sound off, and felt like you could hear the movement? Kind of like your mind is assembling sounds for the motion? Have you ever been staring at some cheezy animated gifs and thought you could hear the visual rhythm?

Have you ever stared at someone’s mouth in the distance and tried to read their lips? When doing so, did it feel like you could hear bits of what they were saying?

Perhaps our senses truly are not as separate as they would at first seem.

Lately I’ve begun recognizing my assumption that everything I look at, everything I perceive, has a backside that I can’t see. A side that is hidden from me because of my current perspective.

I see books on tables nearby, realize that the side facing down is completely hidden from my view. While in my mind I percieve things in this room as objects, and my mind can fill their forms in, what I am really viewing is a but 2D shadow of their existence. Just “the tip of the iceberg,” with far more of the surface hidden from my vantage point.

Yet, even as I move around and view the room from another angle, this backside is still there, and there is just as much unseen to me as there was before. And there always will be. It is like this backside of non-perception is dependent upon my very context of perception: I move, and it moves with me. The backside of things is a natural antithesis to the frontside that is accessible to my vision.