The best kittens, technology, and video games blog in the world.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

The new Coca Cola Chicken

Spyk Enjoying A Drink by mary cabbie from flickr (CC-NC-ND)When I started cooking, I had absolutely no idea what I'm going to prepare. I just looked around the kitchen for things that seemed to fit. It's hard to explain what exactly was in my mind when I selected the ingredients, but they seemed to be somehow right. The result tasted great !

  • 500g chicken breast, in small pieces (about 2-3cm cubes, like for Chinese cuisine)
  • 480ml (1 bottle) "hot" ketchup
  • 500ml (2 cups) Coca Cola or Pepsi
  • 3 medium tangerines (250g), in pieces
  • 3 tablespoons (50ml) honey
  • 2 tablespoons (30ml) Garam Masala
  • half teaspoon (2g) monosodium glutamate
Mix everything in a pot and cover with aluminium foil. Put the pot in a hot oven for about 60 minutes. Serve with rice.

That's the recipe. Now on my intuitions.

Aluminium foil or some other cover is important. Ketchup is thick, so the sauce is medium thick before the baking, and if baked without cover, water would evaporate very quickly, and the sauce would be very thick. As sugar does not evaporate with the water, it would also become too sweet. It's definitely uncenessary to add extra thickeners like starch.

To make the dish less sweet, lower amount of ketchup and coke to about 350ml (1.5 cup). I think it might be a good idea to start with these lower values, and go up only if you want something more. It's too sweet to be eaten without something like rice.

Any fruit can be added, as long as its taste is not too strong, as it shouldn't dominate the dish. Some vegetables like tomatoes and onions would do as well. Adding either honey or jam would do - I think version without fruit would be better with a lot of jam (like 150ml or 2/3 cup), version with fruit would be better with a bit of honey (like 50ml or 3 tablespoons). It's probably better to use a single-fruit jam.

Then of course we need some "generic" spicing. Depending on how you feel, curry, or some other Indian cuisine spice mix (like garam masala) would be right. You can try your own mixes, with spices like ginger and garlic. Adding either chili or significant amount of soy sauce would probably require modifying other parts of the recipe. It should be at least a bit spicy.

The dish is going to be pretty mild. I used "hot" ketchup, because for some reason in stuff they sell in Europe, label "extra hot" means "hot", "hot" means "mild", and "mild" means "no taste at all". I've heard that in some countries they actually got it right, in which case you can use normal ketchup.

I didn't add salt (even to rice) or anything salty, as I don't like salty food much. If you feel otherwise, a bit of salt or soy sauce should be compatible with the recipe, but not too much.

The ingredients have fairly strong taste, but they blend and become milder with cooking, so don't worry.

For more extreme version of Coca Cola Chicken, take a look at this Youtube movie:

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Modern drug design for dummies

Bunny by Charles DH Crosbie from flickr (CC-NC-ND)
Designing new drugs is an important part of medical science that people know very little about, and about which there are many misconceptions. It would take way too long to tell the full story, so here's an abridged version. Details and variations are skipped, but it should give you a good big picture view.

First rule of designing new drugs - don't. It's extremely expensive. Exact figures are difficult to get, but they're in hundreds of millions euro. Finding a promising molecule is expensive, and running all tests imposed by health authorities like FDA even more so. So most research is actually into improving existing drugs, mixing them and so on - it's faster, cheaper, and the authorities require a lot less testing.

Even when scientists actually work on new drugs, they tend to work on ones similar to existing drugs - either similar molecules, or different molecules working in similar way.

Why drugs ?



Why is medicine so much into drugs as opposed to other kinds of therapy ? The main reason is price - drugs are extremely cheap, and need no specialized medical personel to apply, especially orally taken drugs. Year's worth of drugs is typically much cheaper than a single surgical procedure or a week at a hospital. That doesn't mean drugs are cheap. Patent protection for drugs is just a few years, and when it's over the competition immediately enters the market with identical generic equivalents causing the prices to plummet, so the full costs of research must be recuperated very quickly, by heavily overpricing new drugs. Add to that costs of huge marketing campaigns without which adoption would be too slow, and you have the answer for high drug prices. That and the fact that neither the patient nor the doctor (who decide which drugs to use) pay for the drugs - most of the price is typically covered by either state healthcare system or private insurance. So there is usually little incentive for taking cheaper but less efficient older drug, situation rarely found in other fields of economy.

Drugs are also popular because they can handle so many different health issues, and pretty much any doctor can prescribe them. Most other therapies can handle very narrow range of conditions and require highly-specialized personel.

The target



In the ancient past (like 50 years ago) people discovered drugs mostly accidentally. They knew they worked, but had really little idea how. In modern drug design the "how" question is asked before the search for drugs even starts. Most commonly we want to affect some molecular process associated with the disease. Most commonly we want to block one of the enzymes, with minimal effects on everything else.

For example to treat HIV infection, we want to block reverse transcriptase (enzyme which copies viral genome to cell genome), or protease (enzyme used to assemble new viruses). To fight inflamation, we want to block cyclooxygenase enzymes. Against depression - we block serotonin reuptake by neurons. In most diseases there are at least a few promising molecular targets. How do we even know where to start ? That's what the basic medical research is for ! By studying how diseases work, we are later able to target their vulnerable aspects. Unlike drug design itself, this research is more often than not publically funded.

Selected target must then be verified. If you think HIV needs reverse transcriptase to be infectious, genetically engineer HIV without reverse transcriptase and check if it really worked.

Some diseases have many targets to choose from. Bacterial infections are particularly easy. Because bacteria are complex cells very far evolutionary from humans, it is extremely simple to find vital enzymes in them that don't have counterparts in humans and block them. That's why antibiotics were so successful (the main problem here is not harming the mitochondria, which were originally symbiotic bacteria, and still share many enzymes with their free-living cousins). Viruses are far more difficult, because they simply reuse host's cellular machinery, and have only a few enzymes of their own. Even more difficult are cancer cells, which are genetically almost identical to normal cells.

How to block the target ?



So we selected a target and convinced ourselves that it will work. What now ? Most commonly the target is a protein enzyme, which has one or more active sites - parts where the reaction occurs. Usually we want to design a drug that will bind to one of them so tightly as to disrupt all normal functionality (competitive inhibition). A common alternative is binding somewhere else that disrupts enzyme shape and makes it inactive (noncompetitive inhibition). Enzymes can be disrupted in two ways - either we destroy the enzyme chemically (irreversible inhibition, like acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin), or simply bind very tightly without causing any chemical changes (reversible inhibition, like ibuprofen). Reversible inhibition is more popular, as it is less likely to produce side effects, and they're usually equally efficient.

It is usually trivial to find sequence of aminoacids forming the enzyme by simply looking at the genome. The harder part is finding 3D structure of the enzyme. This problem (protein folding) considered too expensive to compute now, but projects like Folding@home begin to change it. Not everybody is optimistic about it, but perhaps in 10-20 years folding will be routinely performed in silico (on a computer). For now experimental methods are typically used, the most popular of which are X-ray crystalography and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. 3D structures are published in public databases like the famous Protein Data Bank.

Unfortunately proteins take many different forms, and it's difficult to guess which one is the biologically active form. It's most difficult for transmembrane proteins - a very large and important group of proteins that live in cellular membranes. We don't know how to get accurate 3D structure while they're in the membrane, and taking them out changes their structure completely. This is one of the hottest areas of drug design research.

When we have an accurate 3D structure, we need to find active sites. There are many methods. If 3D structures were taken of protein together with some known inhibitor drug (very common case - more often than not we design better drugs for old targets), we simply need to take a look where the drug is. We can guess active site by finding aminoacids that are most "conserved". Enzymes are almost never unique - humans, mice, rats, and so on have typically similar but not identical enzymes. Changes in the active site are very rare (the enzyme wouldn't normally work any more, causing disease or death), while changes in other sites are pretty common. If conserved aminoacids are all in one place, that's most likely our active site. We can also use geometric methods (active sites tend to look like small "cavities") or a computer simulation.

What does a good drug look like ?



Before going any further, we should consider a question what do we want to develop. A drug should definitely be able to treat some disease, but that's only part of the story. It must be cheap to manufacture, reasonably stable for storage, and fit many other criteria, but the main issues are: Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity:

  • Absorption - Drugs that can be administered orally are strongly preferred, other methods like injection (insulin before introduction of insulin pumps) or inhalation (like anti-flu drug zanamivir) are used only when oral use would be impossible. In case of oral drugs, it is extremely important for them to be well absorbed from digestive tract, other routes are more tolerant. Drugs must also be able to pass through the cellular membrane from blood to cells, and in case of drugs affecting the central nervous system, to pass the blood-brain barrier. One example is neurotransmitter serotonin, which cannot pass the blood-brain barrier. Instead either its precursor 5-HTP is taken, or drugs like SSRI that increase effects of existing serotonin.
  • Distribution - Drugs are commonly needed in some parts of the body. They also tend to be distributed inequally in various organs and tissues. It is important for significant portion of the drug to reach the intended site. If the drug isn't distributed well, it lowers efficiency and increases side effects. It is probably most crucial in case of cancer, as anti-cancer drugs tend to have severe side effects.
  • Metabolism - the body doesn't let foreign substances to move around freely - it uses a wide range of methods to break them down. If drugs are metabolized too easily, efficiency will be low. It would be even worse if products of such metabolism were harmful. A good example is methanol, which isn't overly harmful itself, but alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme breaks it to extremely dangerous formic acid and formaldehyde. Sometimes we actually want the drug to be metabolized, as the product is active, not the original drug (which is usually called prodrug). Prodrugs are most commonly used for easier absorption.
  • Excretion - drugs would be very dangerous if they could freely accumulate in the body, and keep affecting it long after administration of the drug ceased. Most drugs are either excreted by urine (partially metabolized, partially unchanged) or broken down into simple molecules like carbon dioxide and water.
  • Toxicity - drugs do have side effects, and it is not going to change. More drugs than not may cause nausea, dizziness, headaches, and an ocasional allergic reaction, and many important drugs are significantly worse than that. If possible, side effects in new drugs should be less severe, but they won't rule out drug approval if they are offset by increased efficiency, different range of applicability, or at least are significantly different. A good example is antibiotic vancomycin, which has more severe side effects than most other antibiotics. But many bacteria are resistant to other antibiotics, so vancomycin is very useful in spite of the side effects. It isn't necessarily more efficient - as more benign antibiotics were more commonly used, the bacteria had higher chances of developing resistance to them. So paradoxically, vancomycin is more useful because of more severe side effects. Another example is rofecoxib (Vioxx) (a selective COX-2 inhibitor), which causes fewer disturbances in the gastrointestinal tract than traditional non-steroidal anti-inflamatory drugs like naproxen (non-selective COX inhibitors), while increasing cardiovascular risk. Depending on the patient, either of them may be preferable.


List of all aspects taken into account is very long. The short story - the new drug should be drug-like, that is similar to successful drugs.

The famous Lipinski's Rule of Five states that typical orally administered drug has:
  • no more than 5 hydrogen bond donors (like OH and NH groups),
  • no more than 10 hydrogen bond acceptors (like N and O atoms in rings),
  • molecular weight under 500,
  • partition coefficient (relative solubility in octanol and water, it estimates how hydrophobic the molecule is) log P under 5.


One drug that is far away from this description is insulin, with molecular weight of 5808. And indeed, it is impossible to administer it orally and the only known way to synthesize it is to use genetically modified organisms.

Getting a Hit



So we have a 3D structure of a verified target, know where to bind, and know the intended result. What to do next ? There are a few ways, but by far the most popular is docking. Simply take a database of let's say - 100 million molecules, and run a computer simulation to see how strongly each of them binds to the target. This is pretty easy - atoms and groups of some kinds attract when they are close to each other, while other kinds repel. Just sum all such interactions to get a rough estimate of binding free energy. This isn't particularly accurate, but it's very fast - and we simply want to go down from 100 million molecules to a small number like a few hundreds. First the fastest and crudest methods are used to rule out the obviously bad matches. Then increasingly more accurate and increasingly slower methods are applied until we get a reasonable number of hits.

Unfortunately, nobody really believes in docking. All results are verified in vitro. Due to sheer number of experiments that need to be performed, automated facilities are used. This is the so called High-throughput screening, and a major fully automated laboratory can test as many as 100 000 compounds a day. Molecules that bind best are our "hits".

Hit to Lead



Not all hits will become drugs, a still fairly large number of "hits" must be reduced to a small (like 5) number of leads. Many experiments are performed in silico and in vitro (from simple chemical assays to cell cultures). Is the molecule absorbed well by cellular membranes ? Is it stable ? Is it soluble in water ? Is it non-toxic ? Can we easily synthesize it ? Is it selective enough (doesn't significantly affect other enzymes) ? Isn't it metabolized too rapidly ? Finally, is it free of other companies' patents ? Probably none of the hits fits all the criteria, so they're modified until they do reasonably well.

A very diverse set of tests is applied, but basically we want to develop drugs that are "drug-like", or similar to successful drugs (using rules like Lipinski's Rule of Five). But we don't want "drug-like" leads. What we're looking for are "lead-like" leads, or similar to successful leads. Turning a lead into a drug candidate usually makes it bigger, more complex, and more hydrophobic, so we're interested in leads that are smaller, simpler, and less hydrophobic than good drugs.

Lead optimization



By now we have a few promising molecules. It's still not the time for human testing. First, we want to optimize the leads. For each lead, a vast number of similar molecules is synthesized and tested, and the most successful ones become drug candidates. The testing is again in silico and in vitro. Usually modification is addition of some chemical group or replacement of one group by another, so the drug candidates tend to be bigger and more complex than leads.

It is important to develop cheap and efficient methods of drug synthesis at this point, as previously only miligram quantities were required, and large-scale testing will require kilogram quantities.

Animal testing



After many experiments with computers, test tubes, and cell cultures, we hopefully have a few promising drug candidates. However, no regulatory authority is going to let us proceeding directly to human testing. Safety and efficiency of drugs must be tested on animals first. This is a very annoying part, because it's very expensive, and the results are only weakly correlated to results on humans. The most common test animals are mice (about 80%), rats (about 20%), and all others including other rodents, primates, rabbits, dogs, etc. together make up less than 2%.

Rodents are reasonably cheap, but very different from humans, so sometimes rodents with some human genes are used. Other animals are even more expensive, so they're used mostly when the rodents won't do. For example there is no way to infect mice with HIV, so primates need to be used to test HIV drugs.

In drug development less expensive methods are always preferred to more expensive ones. So whenever possible, human testing is replaced by animal testing, animal testing by cell cultures, cell cultures by simple chemical assays, and assays by computations. By Moore's law, computers get 100x more powerful every 10 years. In vitro testing becomes more automated and cheaper very rapidly too, and more complex experiments with cell cultures start to become automated too. As they get cheaper, they can handle more complex and more realistic setups, and be more accurate. But there is no way to automate animal testing, to make it cheaper, to significantly increase throughput, or to make it significantly more accurate (human-mouse hybrids would probably do, but that would be a public relations disaster). So in my opinion animal testing is going to greadually become less and less relevant, and at some not so distant point in the future to disappear completely.

Related to increasing automation is the fail early doctrine. Early phases of drug development are relatively cheap, while late phases like human testing are very expensive. So if the drug doesn't show much promise, experimentation should be terminated as early as possible. Many drugs that would eventually work are rejected this way, but it's cheaper overall.

In many countries (EU, USA) but not all (Japan) animal experimentation requires a licence or even a government approval of every single experiment.

Human testing - Phase I



You're probably wondering when do we start testing whether the drug works on humans. It's not this point yet. We need to apply to a regulatory authorities for permission to start human testing, but it's only going to be safety testing, the so called Phase I clinical trials.

Safety testing verifies that the drug has no unexpected adverse effects on a small group (like 30, exact numbers vary a lot depending on the condition so don't care much about them) of healthy individuals. Most drugs are expected to have some side effects, but they should all be documented. If an unexpected side effect is found, even a relatively insignificant one, the regulator is likely to require further testing at some earlier stage before proceeding any further.

In addition to safety, pharmacokinetics (what happens with the drug in the body, how is it absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and eliminated) and pharmacodynamics (what desired and undesired effects the drug has in the body) of the drug at different dosages are evaluated.

At this point companies typically apply for patents. In most countries (including EU) only the "first to file" a patent application can get the patent, and in the few that follow the "first to invent" rule (like USA), it would take a long and costly lawsuit to recover the patent if someone else filed first. So companies don't want to wait too long. On the other hand, the patent only lasts 20 years (previously 17 years), so filling too early means shorter monopoly. Because clinical trials tests and waiting for all approvals take many years, especially if there were some problems, the actual patent monopoly is often just a few years.

Human testing - Phase II



Hopefully everything went well, and we can finally test how well the drug works. This requires another approval from the authorities. Phase II clinical trials measure drug efficiency on a limited number (like 200) of actual patients in highly controlled conditions. This point, very late in drug development, is the first time where efficiency is evaluated under realistic conditions, and unfortunately many drugs fail here, and such late failures are very expensive.

The tested drug is supposed to be more efficient than all existing drugs, have less severe side effects, be more widely applicable, and so on. The rules are not exactly fair - if a more efficient drug is registered first, a less efficient one will be rejected. But if a less efficient drug is registered first, and a more efficient one is found later, the former won't be pulled from the market. The most extreme example is probably acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) which has so many side effects that it would never pass the drug registration process today, or at best end up as a prescription drug for a very limited range of conditions. Most authorities are far on the paranoid side - accepting a drug that has to be pulled later is a political disaster, while rejecting or delaying a perfectly fine drug doesn't cost them a dime. Procedures are usually more lenient for the most deadly diseases like cancer and AIDS, and for rarely occuring diseases (so called "orphan diseases").

Human testing - Phase III



If Phase II went well, the authorities may approve proceeding to Phase III clinical trials - that is wider randomized testing of the drug, on hundreds or even thousands of patients. At this point we have preliminary evidence that the drug is safe and efficient, and the wider trials will provide information on interactions with other drugs or conditions, less common side effects, and give a final confirmation that the drug is indeed safer and more efficient.

After Phase III is completed, the company which developed the drug applies for registration. It would be extremely costly and painful to fail here, fortunately it doesn't happen that often.

Success !



As I said, the first rule of designing new drugs is don't. So when the new drug gets to the market, the research team doesn't get back to designing another drug - very often even more intense research on the newly developed drug starts, sometimes even before the Phase III is over. Extending it to more conditions, improving bioavailability, work on similar molecules, combinations with other drugs, such research can be extremely profitable as it carries much lower risk, nobody was there before, and as it is freshly patented, everything containing the new drug is covered.

It would mean a guaranteed stream of money if not for two issues. First, the patent doesn't last that long, and a few years probably already passed since filling (around Phase I clinical trials usually).

The other issue is the competition. Usually all simple modifications of the molecule are covered by the patent, but the target is not covered by patents (the big pharma tried to cover these too, but courts tend to throw them out). For most targets it's not exactly difficult to find alternative drugs.

A great example are inhibitors of cGMP specific phosphodiesterase type 5 enzyme. The first one sildenafil (Viagra) was patented in 1996 and approved by FDA on March 27, 1998. Depending on the country, the patents will expire somewhere around 2011–2013. Based on patent laws alone, that would be a 15-year monopoly over a huge market. However FDA approved two different erectile dysfunction drugs targetting the same enzyme soon - vardenafil (Levitra) on August 19, 2003, and tadalafil (Cialis) on November 21, 2003. That's just 5 years and a few months.

So before even the drug is registered, a huge marketing campaign is started to ensure its speedy adoption. This adds even more to the overall cost, but without it the very valuable monopoly time would be lost. After generic drugs or other competition enters, the prices can stay high for some more time due to brand recognition and plain inertia, but the profits fall quite fast, so you better hurry.

That's about what you need to start designing new drugs. At least if your rich uncle dies leaving you a few hundred million euro. ;-)

The Pharmaceutical Industry


Unless you're interested in political issues like this one, simply ignore this section.

No discussion of drug development would be complete without at least a mention of the pharmaceutical industry.

During the first few years, the drug is heavily "overpriced" compared to the cost (this is intended as a statement of fact, not a moral judgment). Commonly, the price would fall by over 90% if free competition was allowed. A good example was introduction of generic antiretrovival drugs in India in 2000, which caused the prices to fall from $778 a month to $33 a month (96% decrease) in 2003, what also raised number of people living with HIV receiving anti-retrovival therapy from 22% to 44%, and a huge decrease in number of HIV-related deaths, but the main point is how "overpriced" the drugs are. This only compares prices against marginal costs, that is manufacturing, and basic operational costs, and doesn't include things like research.

We can also compare against total costs, including manufacturing, research, development, marketing, sales, CEO compensation, oportunity cost of capital, and everything else. In 2004 top ten big pharmaceutical companies had $305 billion in revenue, $64 billion in net income, and just $43 billion in research and development spending. Average net income at 21% of revenue is far above almost any other industry, including big oil. More typical values are around 5%.

If some industry has very high profits, normally capital would flow to it from less profitable industries, with loads of new companies joining, competition lowering prices, until average profits are back to the industry standard range. Getting exact numbers requires a bit more work than just pulling them from a chart on Wikipedia, but pharmaceuticals undeniably make a very profitable industry, it's the case for quite some time, and industries can stay very profitable for a long time only due to high barriers to entry. In this case - mostly government-issued drug patents.

Actually the taxpayers fund all medical research - basic research in the academia, and drug development by having government healthcare systems pay any company which successfully developed new drugs. After all, virtually nowhere patients pay directly for new drugs - it's always either public healthcare or private insurance. This is great, because the taxpayers only pay for successful developments, not for the failures.

How much does it cost ? Let's make a simple model - let's say the big pharma loses all patent and other protections, stops doing any research and development at all, their profits are brought to industry average, that is 5% over costs (and let's check 10% too), and all savings go to publically funded research (which already does most of the basic medical research). If $305 billion was revenue, $64 billion net income, and $43 billion R&D, the non-R&D costs are $198 billion, plus 5% net income that's $208 billion. Alternatively with 10% net income it'd be $220 billion. That leaves the tax payers with extra $85 billion to $97 billion to fund drug development. So unless the big pharma is 97% to 125% more efficient than the academia in drug development, taxpayers would benefit from the switch. Universities aren't particularly well-regarded on their abilities of bringing results of the research to the market, so their R&D would probably be less efficient, but would the difference be that high ? The largest part of the expenses is after all clinical testing required by the regulatory authorities.

This back of an envelope computation is far too unrealistic for any serious use, however a bad model is far better than the hand-waving approach commonly used to discuss the big pharma or pretty much any other subject in politics or economy. But it seems the taxpayers should consider subsidies to partially cover clinical trials of publically developed patent-free drugs. This avoids financing most of the failures (the drug got to the clinical trials, so it's not a total flop), encourages practice that leads to successful designs, and it's probably cheaper than paying for the patented drug later.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Baka Y2K6

Sunny / 001 by !ºrobodot from flickr (CC-NC-ND)
It had been two years since my last anime convent. The one I visited last week, BAKA (Very Attractive Anime Convent) Y2K6, was an attempt at resurecting the famous BAKA series, last of which took place two years ago. Many people, especially those who organized BAKA in the past, objected to using such name for a convent that was pretty sure not to achieve the level of earlier BAKA convents. They were mostly right, it didn't really live up to the name. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun.

First, I don't remember anything nearly as disorganized. The draft program and even the opening hour weren't put on the website until a day before the convent. Everyone got copy of the planned program at entry, but it was completely useless - lists of anime weren't there, room numbers were wrong, and half of the things either didn't take place or took place at different time in a different room. The most up-to-date list of events was hanged near the entrance, but it wasn't very accurate either.

I'm not compaining for no reason - because of the mess I missed half of the Hentai Night, and a panel on Lolita Complex ! Hentai Night was completely unannounced, and Lolita Complex panel took place a day before it was supposed to.

As far as attractions are concerned, some really cool anime were shown. I like Death Note and Code Geass most, both of which started airing in Japanese in October 2006. It's scary how fast fansubbers can be. Other anime I liked were REC, The Third - Aoi Hitomi no Shōjo, Arashi no Yoru Ni, and .hack//Roots.

I'm not sure what to think about Dead Leaves, It had no plot, it looked absolutely horrible, and the humor was really crude (Chinko Drill). And somehow it was really enjoyable to watch.

There was obviously a DDR room. Unfortunately it was closed for the night, and very crowded during the day, so it wasn't much fun. The best part about it was a new (and not yet released) mix containing songs like School Rumble intro. Really great.

Console room was too crowded, so I didn't even care. There were two LARPs (whatever). People were playing go everywhere. There were some panels (more about it later). Corridors were taken by people selling things like yaoi dōjinshi and Hard Gay stickers, or doing things like body painting and free hugs. Mostly because of the name, the convent was simply flooded with people. And that's important, as convents are mostly social activities.

That's pretty much what the convent was about. I want to write a bit more on two panels I attended - a "Seppuku tutorial" and "Why people hate Japan ?" panel.

Japanese swords

"Seppuku tutorial" was pretty funny, and pretty scary. The funny part was of course seppuku tutorial itself. The scary part was the following discussion, and some of the participants. To my astonishment, many people actually believe in magical properties of Japanese swords. Stuff like them being made by billions of folds over 45 years, being able to cut through everything like butter, and of course being million times better than any other sword ever made.

This is of course pure crap. The real story is more or less like this. Japanese had much less iron than Europe, so it was expensive. It was also of dreadful quality. So they had to spent much more time on each one of them, and as iron was expensive, it didn't make much difference.

The simplest way of making an iron sword, one used by Roman "gladius" sword and other ancient people is taking soft wrought iron (which has low carbon content), and increasing carbon content on the surface to make it hard enough to hold sharp edge. It is fast, cheap, and if iron has few impurities good enough for most uses.

The slightly more advanced technique is pattern welding, where the sword is repetitively carburized and then folded. This increases carbon content of the sword, making it harder but not brittle. This famous "Japanese" technique was actually widely used by Romans for their "spartha" sword, ancient Barbarians, and pretty much everyone in Medieval Europe.

Number of folds was typically 8-10. The process had to be tightly controlled - alloys of iron has multiple stable and metastable allotropic phases, like martensite and pearlite. Content of carbon and other alloying elements, and speed of cooling determine hardness and brittleness of the end result. Obviously, the process is bound by limits of chemistry - no amount of magic is able to create sword much better than one made of modern high-quality steel.

Leaving modern steel aside, about two thousand years ago Indians discovered a much more advanced technique. It was also used in the Middle East, and their famous "Damascene swords" were considered hugely superior to anything Europe could offer. That's right - the "mythical" Japanese technique of "pattern welding" (used in Europe) was no match for something known 2000 years ago.

Of course there's no need to use European examples to dispel myths of Japanese swordmaking technology. Japanese history provides plenty of examples. The first time Japanese fought foreign army was during Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281. Japanese armies were beaten throughout, and their swords couldn't even handle Mongol leather armors. Against chain mail and plate armour commonly used in Europe they would be pretty much useless. Japan was only saved by ill-preparedness of the invasion - using hastly acquired river boats instead of high sea ships, which weren't able to withstand the typhoon, and internal problems within the Yuán China following death of Kublai Khan which made further attempts impossible.

Apparently early 1300s were the high time of sword making. It is believed that pattern welding was reinvented in Japan during that era. Civil wars of the Muromachi period (1336-1573) are pretty much the only time where good Japanese swords were used in actual battle. Except for a minor Korean anti-pirate expedition in 1419, we cannot tell anything about efficiency of armies using Japanese sword in that period against different tactics.

Firearms were introduced in Japan by Portuguese in 1542. They were increasingly used in Japanese civil wars, and by 1575 battle of Nagashino, in which winners used European-style tactics and firearms, hardly anything commonly associated with "samurai" fighting style (swordfighting, horseback archery) was left.

When Japan invaded Korea in 1592-1598, the dominant weapons were already matchlock muskets, arquebuses, cannons, grenades, and mortars, in addition to more traditional bows. There was very little sword fighting or any other close combat. It was even more true in later wars.

In the following Edo period (1603-1867), it is commonly believed that quality of swords deteriorated. The "new style swords" (新刀) from that time were considered vastly inferior to "old style swords" (古刀), and the old knowledge was never restored. It is very likely considering limitations on military technology put by the shogunate.

It is during this peaceful time that samurai caste really developed. The most famous samurai text Go Rin No Sho was written around 1645. Cult of the sword principally dates to that era, where samurai were no longer fighting, and sword making technologies were long forgotten.

A few words are in order on sword shape. Unlike European swords since antiquity, Japanese swords were designed for use against unarmored or lightly-armored opponents. They would be useless against much more heavily armed soldiers in Europe. Against armour, stabbing is far more effective than cutting, and katana is a primarity cutting weapon. As iron was expensive in Japan, few people could afford heavy armour, and such weapons could be pretty effective.

So to sum it up - Japanese swords really sucked, there were better swords pretty much everywhere, and Japanese katana-wielding samurais would be totally crushed by a much smaller European force with European swords and a decent armour. Any European force, Roman, barbarian, medieval, heck even Greek phalanx would most likely do. Most armies from Asia would likewise crush Japanese army (see Mongol invasion, which consisted of Chinese and Korean soldiers mostly). Stories of Japanese sword-making magic are no more than myths, popularized during Edo period when there was hardly any fighting, and that mostly with firearms. Believing such myths is as lame as believing in feng shui

Why people hate Japan ?

The premise of this panel was - "People in Asia (Chinese, Koreans, Russians and so on) hate the Japanese, because the Japanese committed terrible crimes against them and instead of apologizing, they falsify their history, glorify the war criminals etc.".

There's certainly some point in that. Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社) glorifies 12 convinced (and 2 accused who died before the trial) war criminals, denies that Nanking Massacre took place and portrays Japan as a defender of Asia against Western threat.

The shrine was visited by many officials, including Japanese prime ministers Miki Takeo (三木 武夫), Fukuda Takeo (福田 赳夫), Ōhira Masayoshi (大平 正芳), Suzuki Zenkō (鈴木 善幸), Nakasone Yasuhiro (中曽根 康弘), Miyazawa Ki'ichi (宮澤 喜一), Hashimoto Ryūtarō (橋本 龍太郎), and Koizumi Jun'ichirō (小泉 純一郎). Can you imagine Angela Merkel visiting a SS musuem that denies Holocaust ever happened and claims Nazis were actually defending European civilization against Bolshevik threat ?

This would be clearly absurd. And while they actually have a point that Europeans and other Asians committed many atrocities in Asia, and trials after WW2 were conducted with total disregard of any rules, it doesn't change the basic facts that war crimes were committed by the Japanese army, Japanese nationalists are totally fucked up people by not admiting it, and Japanese public should be ashamed of not reacting when their prime ministers associate themselves with such fuckups as those who run Yasukuni Shrine.

It also seems that most people in Japan are unaware of scale of war crimes committed by the Japanese Army.

I completely disagree with the premise. Sure Germans are treating their history much more responsibly than Japanese. But Japanese aren't exception here, Germans are ! Pretty much every nation glorifies its past war criminals, denies or minimizes them, and definitely refuses to apologize.

Just a set of random examples. Relations between Poland and Ukraine. During WW2, Polish (AK) and Ukrainian (UPA) guerilla murdered each others' civilians. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died. But ask any nationalist - they're going to remember crimes of the other side only, not of their side. Fortunately, the denial is mostly over for the general public. Or how about massacres of Jews committed during WW2 like one in Jedwabne ? A lot of Polish will absolutely reject the very idea that Polish people could have done that. Surely, it must have been Nazi Germans, right ? They also deny responsibility for crimes by Communist government of Poland, as it was controlled by "the Russians". In common mentality, the Polish were always victims, and even the idea that some of them cooperated with the occupants, let alone did anything wrong on their own.

Or moving somewhere else. Christopher Columbus is widely glorified in spite of all his crimes. He personally introduced slavery to America and started genocide of Indians, which between 1492 and 1508 killed three million people (according to Las Casas). After report by Francisco de Bobadilla, he was arrested for attrocities committed as "Governor of the Indies" 1493-1500. So Columbus' guilt shouldn't be exactly news to anyone. It was widely known 500 years ago, so why the heck is he still regarded as a great hero instead of genocidal madman that he was ?

Or take Iraq. American invasion is responsible for about 650,000 deaths. What does Bush do ? Completely disregards reality and claims that maybe some 30 thousand people died. That's great. How about Angela Merkel claiming 300 thousand victims of Nazi death camps ? Whatever the number, is anybody preparing a tribunal for Bush's war crimes ? Last time I checked, waging war of aggression is a crime according to the international law and USA accepted this by supporting Nuremberg Trials.

And there's of course Russian government, which still glorifies the Red Army, which invaded Central Europe together with the Nazis. Lenin's Mausoleum is still open and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century". Nobody could top that one.

Almost every nation failed to confront a lot of evilness it is guilty of, whether against other nations, or its own people.

In spite of all past crimes and denial, most countries aren't hated the way Japan is in East Asia. Few people care about things that took place such a long time ago, and even recent events are mostly ignored. Like - most people in the world hate Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest of neocon war criminals, but it rarely turns into hatred of all Americans.

I think the real reason of anti-Japanese feelings is different. Governments of People's Republic of China, South Korea and other countries in the region, try to incite anti-Japanese sentiment to shift public attention away from domestic problems. It's just like with Muhammad cartoons. Not a single rioter in the Middle East even read Jyllands-Posten. Muslims do make pictures of Muhammad (usually not cartoons). But it was so convenient for Middle Eastern governments and radical immams to direct people against Danish cartoonists. And it happened again after famous remark by Pope Benedict XVI. How many Muslims listened to that lecture ?

Now, it's perfectly understandable that some people feel seriously pissed off when Koizumi visits Yasukuni Shrine, Danish newspapers print Muhammad cartoons, or pope quotes Byzantine emperors who didn't like islam much. But don't people have more serious problems ? There are wars all over the world (whether your country is invaded or invader). Very often poverty, crime, and corruption are widespread, and democracy and human rights are lacking. Are cartoons and some lame shrine really that important ?

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's because of governments of People's Republic of China, South Korea and other countries in the region, that anti-Japanese sentiment is so widespread, even to the point of ourbursts of violence. Sure, Koizumi is a jackass for visiting Yasukuni Shrine, but this is simply irrelevant. Move on.

Friday, November 03, 2006

magic/help for Ruby

First steps by fofurasfelinas from flickr (CC-NC-ND) Help is a weakness of almost all programming languages. Ruby help really sucks too. For example let's try to get help on sync method of an opened File:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> f = File.open("/dev/null")
=> #<File:/dev/null>
irb(main):002:0> help f.sync
------------------------------------------------ REXML::Functions::false
     REXML::Functions::false( )
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     UNTESTED
=> nil
irb(main):003:0> help 'f.sync'
Bad argument: f.sync
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> help File.sync
NoMethodError: undefined method `sync' for File:Class
        from (irb):4
irb(main):005:0> help 'File.sync'
Nothing known about File.sync
=> nil
irb(main):006:0> help 'File#sync'
Nothing known about File#sync
=> nil
irb(main):007:0> help 'sync'
More than one method matched your request. You can refine
your search by asking for information on one of:

     IO#sync, IO#fsync, IO#sync=, Zlib::GzipFile#sync,
     Zlib::GzipFile#sync=, Zlib::Inflate#sync,
     Zlib::Inflate#sync_point?, Mutex#synchronize,
     MonitorMixin#mon_synchronize, MonitorMixin#synchronize,
     StringIO#sync, StringIO#fsync, StringIO#sync=
=> nil
irb(main):008:0> eat flaming death
(irb):8: warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version
NameError: undefined local variable or method `death' for main:Object
        from (irb):8
irb(main):009:0> ^D
$ firefox http://www.google.com/
Of course nobody would actually do that. Everyone either visits Google the first thing, or talks with objects using reflection. The help system is just way too weak. It's not that the help isn't there, Ruby has plenty of documentation. It's just too hard to find. Compare Ruby:

help "Array#reverse"
---------------------------------------------------------- Array#reverse
     array.reverse -> an_array
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Returns a new array containing _self_'s elements in reverse order.

        [ "a", "b", "c" ].reverse   #=> ["c", "b", "a"]
        [ 1 ].reverse               #=> [1]
with Python:

>>> help([].reverse)
Help on built-in function reverse:

reverse(...)
    L.reverse() -- reverse *IN PLACE*
So Ruby has more documentation, but it's more difficult to access it. At least it was till today morning. Because right now, Ruby totally dominates ! If you pass class, class name, or class instance, you get documentation on the class:
irb(main):001:0> help "Array"
irb(main):002:0> help Array
irb(main):003:0> help { Array }
irb(main):004:0> help { ["a", "b", "c"] }
----------------------------------------------------------- Class: Array
     Arrays are ordered, integer-indexed collections of any object.
     Array indexing starts at 0, as in C or Java. A negative index is
     assumed to be relative to the end of the array---that is, an index
     of -1 indicates the last element of the array, -2 is the next to
     last element in the array, and so on.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Includes:
---------
     Enumerable(all?, any?, collect, detect, each_cons, each_slice,
     each_with_index, entries, enum_cons, enum_slice, enum_with_index,
     find, find_all, grep, include?, inject, map, max, member?, min,
     partition, reject, select, sort, sort_by, to_a, to_set, zip)


Class methods:
--------------
     [], new


Instance methods:
-----------------
     &, *, +, -, <<, <=>, ==, [], []=, abbrev, assoc, at, clear,
     collect, collect!, compact, compact!, concat, dclone, delete,
     delete_at, delete_if, each, each_index, empty?, eql?, fetch, fill,
     first, flatten, flatten!, frozen?, hash, include?, index, indexes,
     indices, initialize_copy, insert, inspect, join, last, length, map,
     map!, nitems, pack, pop, pretty_print, pretty_print_cycle, push,
     rassoc, reject, reject!, replace, reverse, reverse!, reverse_each,
     rindex, select, shift, size, slice, slice!, sort, sort!, to_a,
     to_ary, to_s, transpose, uniq, uniq!, unshift, values_at, zip, |
If you call a method inside the block, you get documentation on it. It won't really be called, because magic/help plugs into debugging hooks (set_trace_func). So you can safely ask for help on start_global_thermonuclear_warfare.
irb(main):005:0> help { 2 + 2 }
--------------------------------------------------------------- Fixnum#+
     fix + numeric   =>  numeric_result
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Performs addition: the class of the resulting object depends on the
     class of +numeric+ and on the magnitude of the result.
It doesn't matter whether it's in the class, or one of its ancestors, or an included module. You can also pass Method or UnboundMethod object, or method name. It all does the right thing.
irb(main):006:0> f = File.open("/dev/null")
=> #<File:/dev/null>
irb(main):007:0> help { f.sync }
irb(main):008:0> help "File#sync"
irb(main):009:0> help f.method(:sync)
irb(main):010:0> help File.instance_method(:sync)
---------------------------------------------------------------- IO#sync
     ios.sync    => true or false
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Returns the current ``sync mode'' of _ios_. When sync mode is true,
     all output is immediately flushed to the underlying operating
     system and is not buffered by Ruby internally. See also +IO#fsync+.

        f = File.new("testfile")
        f.sync   #=> false
magic/help tries to guess whether you meant class or instance method. So help "Dir.[]" gives you documentation for class method of Dir, while help "Array.[]" gives you documentation for instance method of Array. Using magic/help requires almost no effort. Simply copy magic_help.rb to some visible place, and add require 'magic_help' to your ~/.irbrc. Works with either 1.8 or 1.9. I haven't converted it to a gem yet. For now go to magic/help website and get a tarball or a zip file. Documentation is minimal, as it was just finished. Unit test coverage is naturally 100%.