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Of course, there is yet another reason. Business documents vary wildly, from leaflets to brochures to memos to spreadsheets to banners. A note about a dead coworker will be printed in a different way from a note about a new baby in the family of another coworker. A "Lost Cat" ad will be different from both of them. In Word you can set up your style in just a couple of minutes because you are in control of all the elements of a style. In LaTeX you are a hostage of a few styles, all alike :-) and there is no chance for a mere user to whip up a new one on a whim.

This is very different from "physics exam papers" - those papers couldn't care less about the presentation because the content is all that matters. A business document is sometimes all about presentation. For example, three neighboring pizza outlets can compete on attractive photos and text; their product is more or less the same.

Even the most fanatical adherents of LaTeX admit that at some small level of document complexity MS Word and other WYSIWYG packages outperform LaTeX. Guess what, most business documents are under that threshold. Nobody at the office can afford to work ten years on his document and produce 100,000 pages, and 10,000 illustrations, and 50,000 bibliography references. Most documents are under twenty pages, because this gives the writer the agility in publishing his knowledge. Memos, notes, agendas, plans, schedules are often shorter than a couple of pages. This places the majority of office documents under the threshold. But if I need to generate a 1000-page datasheet for an Intel chipset ... I am sure Intel already has a process in place to handle that, because they do publish those datasheets.

Of course, there is yet another reason. Business documents vary wildly, from leaflets to brochures to memos to spreadsheets to banners. A note about a dead coworker will be printed in a different way from a note about a new baby in the family of another coworker. A "Lost Cat" ad will be different from both of them. In Word you can set up your style in just a couple of minutes because you are in control of all the elements of a style. In LaTeX you are a hostage of a few styles, all alike :-) and there is no chance for a mere user to whip up a new one on a whim.

This is very different from "physics exam papers" - those papers couldn't care less about the presentation because the content is all that matters. A business document is sometimes all about presentation. For example, three neighboring pizza outlets can compete on attractive photos and text; their product is more or less the same.

Even the most fanatical adherents of LaTeX admit that at some small level of document complexity MS Word and other WYSIWYG packages outperform LaTeX. Guess what, most business documents are under that threshold. Nobody at the office can afford to work ten years on his document and produce 100,000 pages, and 10,000 illustrations, and 50,000 bibliography references. Most documents are under twenty pages, because this gives the writer the agility in publishing his knowledge. Memos, notes, agendas, plans, schedules are often shorter than a couple of pages. This places the majority of office documents under the threshold. But if I need to generate a 1000-page datasheet for an Intel chipset ... I am sure Intel already has a process in place to handle that, because they do publish those datasheets.

Wow, thanks for the extreme FUD. May I spoil it a little with some bona fide facts? Just two, if it's alright with you:

1) You don't need to get involved with the mildly difficult TeX syntax; you can just use lyx (free in both senses) or Scientific Word (free in neither).

2) Elsevier do accept LaTeX submissions, or at least PDF printouts, for all their journals, because they even have pages *on their own website* dedicated specifically to LaTeX, at http://www.elsevier.com/latex. Other publishers (including Springer!) who accept LaTeX submissions can be found here: http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html#tex-latex_publishers

I won't bother to discuss the irrelevance of the ubiquity of Microsoft Word that you mention nor that -- gosh! -- Word allows for templating and referencing, which as you well know LaTeX can handle much more gracefully.

You write pompously without the requisite backing of facts which would make it acceptable. No-one will deny that LaTeX has a steeper learning curve than Microsoft Word, at least initially, but your whole post reeks of trollness with its misrepresentation of the facts.

well there are numerous examples of scientifically minded people vilifying the religious point of view in the other replies to the original article right in this thread---examples where the argument is based completely on non-scientific reasoning. Like the ones that proclaim that religion and god are a thing of the past. :-b

That is not a new argument. It has been stated numerous times in one form or another ever since the reformation (i.e., once church and state started to separate from each other). Probably sooner. I get the feeling that Richard Dawkins has sometimes been guilty of the same in contemporary circles, but I can't really find a good example of that, so maybe I am mistaken there.

For my comments on the ID proponents:

Michael Behe is the sort who seems completely sincere but when you pick apart his arguments that so-called "irreducible complexity" has already been observed in known biological systems he talks in logical circles and doesn't seem to realize that he's implicitly assuming that the system is irreducibly complex as one of the premises of his argument for why it is irreducibly complex.

Background: to ID theorists, the existence of an irreducibly complex biological system is the holy grail that proves the designer. Because irreducibly complex means, essentially by definition, that the system could not have evolved to its current state. It had to have started in that state (they say), and this in turn proves the existence of the designer. Logically this is absurd because anything you don't sufficiently understand can be proclaimed irreducibly complex because there is no precise notion of what determines something to be biologically irreducible. They are essentially looking for the "prime numbers" of the biological world and think they can prove that complex biological systems that actually already serve specific functions ARE these "prime numbers". One classic example that they have given in the past is the bacterium's flagellum. I have no idea if any of them still believes that the bacterium's flagellum is irreducibly complex but they did at one point.

William Dembski is the far more insidious sort in my opinion. His attempt to build a mathematical framework for irreducible complexity is utter poppy-cock. This is going to sound harsh, but in my opinion, the man seem to be either insane, or systematically disingenuous. I'm hard pressed to believe that one could use so much obscure mathematical jargon and not secretly realize that one's logic is completely without premise. Reading his works leaves the distinct impression that he knows he is talking out of his arse, and is using the convoluted jargon and terminology in an intentional effort to confuse the reader into thinking that he's proven something that he hasn't. It seems to me that it is either that, or he actually has no idea what the heck the terminology he is using actually means. The man builds entire theses on mathematical terminology that he invented, but which he never clearly defines. To any mathematically rigorous thinker, this is the immediate red flag. If nothing else, one thing that is always true about mathematics is that mathematical reasoning always begins with precision in the definition of terms. But that is not his starting point. Instead, he defines vaguely, and then takes advantage of the vagueness in his terms to enable himself to adjust the implied definition of the terms (implied from the context in which he uses them) to suit the paragraph at hand. It's all hand waving nonsense because the definition he uses on one page is incompatible with the definition he uses for the same term in some other page. He then proclaims at the end that he has proven something momentous. But the premise of it all is this imprecisely defined terminology. His notion of "complex specified information" is a specific example of this, in my opinion. Others have disected it better than I: http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/dembski /specified.complexity.html

Science has shown us over the years that the minority of our population that has left handed DNA are just as good as the rest of us. Despite this the scientific establishment has continued to discriminate against them.
We have to stop discriminating based on the twists of our DNA.

:P

The DNA in the fist picture is LEFT handed instead of right. That's WRONG!
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/LeftHanded.DNA.h tml

Henry Morris is not the best source of information on probabilities of harmful mutations. The probability of a mutation being harmful is overstated, and to have five happen at the same time in a generation in functionally related genes is highly unlikely.

Mutations that are seriously harmful can prevent child bacteria from dividing or living, or in humans, can prevent sperm from surviving, eggs from surviving, sperm and eggs from fusing, zygotes from being implanted, can cause miscarriages, or can lead to unattractive people who give potential mates the creeps.

Despite all the 'dice rolling' that natural selection and gene crossover in meiosis do, natural selection is the opposite process. It cuts down on the number of variations that are not so good or appropriate for the conditions.

Even Behe, admittedly ID's "powerhouse", had to back off from such statistical arguments on day 12 of the Dover case.

Dembski is one of the creationists who likes to play the numbers game, but plays loosely with information theory.

Creationism is what is easier to understand, and isn't science at all. ID is less understandable, because it attempts to dress itself up as science.

Actually, most people I've seen on the pro-ID side here are either actually thinking of creationism, perhaps in part because Intelligent Design is less well-defined (?) ("there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence" is not the best definition of a whole field), or the oft-repeated and oft-debunked carried-over-from-creationism jabs against evolutionary theory.

Intelligent design does not specify the intelligent designer, though almost to a fault, its proponents are unequivocal that it's God, but try to pretend it's not when making their sales pitches (whether winking across the table at the school boards or not).

The definitions are different

The old one "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us" implies that everything that we observer around us has a natural explanation

in theory, the qdots ar more stable (less photobleaching) a recognized problem with std labels, and they have narrower emission spectra, so multiplexing is easier (eg std labels like fluorescein and rhodamine have wide emission spectra that overlap)(altho the lanthanide chelates have 10 nm fwhm)

potentially, you can tune the excitation and emission spectra to match your laser lines, so if someone develops a real cheap stable diode laser, you can tune the dot to that line

All in all, I think quantum dots are way overhyped. They are sticky, hard to passivate, and they blink.

...but nowadays given enough polygons, clear textures, and good processing power we already can run an almost full virtual reality with all the tricks up a graphics card's sleeves (or registers). Like higher order surfaces, vertex programs, and such stuff...it blows one's mind IMO.

I think, speed aside, we won't see much improvement anymore, now or in the future (except, perhaps, for true 3D displays--in space, like the DNA strand in the Athens 2004 opening ceremony, as opposed to flattened like a TV/monitor).

Personally, when I count words in LaTeX I avoid the .dvi step. I use either the simple untex or the prettier hevea to go from LaTeX to plain text. This avoids the problem of page numbers and references, though it has some other issues.

The short of it is that atoms spin on an axis, and if you put atoms in a strong magnetic field, their spin axes will mostly line up. Adding a strong RF pulse will "tip" them in one direction (like tipping a spinning top) and they will precess while going back to alignment with the field. This precession can be picked up as a seperate RF emission, and the nature of the emission from each atom will be affected by what atoms are around it. It's the same concept as NMR, just that medical MRI looks for the specific signature of water, finding differences in tissue density.

I think this is it: http://www.mudlib.org/~rassilon/p2c/