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Its actually more like 2.1 or 2.2 birth per female per lifetime - the total fertility rate.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/P/Populations.html

I am not stupid, I just work in another industry than university science.

I do not consider you, or your questioning of this theory to be stupid. My arguments are firm, but I do not intend them to be a personal attack.

Let's just leave it that you and I agree that the details are fuzzy and not well thought out, although we agree that the theory is in agreement with quite a lot of observed phenomena.

I do not agree that the details are fuzzy; I think that's part of what this argument is about. I believe that you are still not considering the slow pace of evolution.

Let's posit I accept your outline of speciation above. You say no unique mating ritual is necessary at the start (to establish?) a new species, but allow it may be necessary to sustain it.

Yes and no. I am saying that a unique ritual is not necessary at the start of a new species, but I do not mean to convey that it is necessary to sustain a species. Why would it be necessary? Why would 2 separate species of birds, in separate locations NEED to have different mating rituals? What difference would it make? How would not having a different ritual threaten that species? Of course, it makes sense that the rituals of each would eventually become different as their rituals change over time, but that doesn't mean they NEED to.

Genetically, this is a dodgy assumption because any species is most vulnerable when its numbers of individuals is small. No species is smaller that when it has only two members. It is counterintuitive to assume that a unique mating ritual is not necessary to establish a new species given that.

It is only counterintuitive if the new species forms in the same location as the old species. I believe your mention of separate bird songs was an attempt to show that separate rituals are necessary, but it just shows that separate groups develop different rituals. It says nothing about separate rituals being NECESSARY. An entire population changes together as genes (including surviving mutations) are bred back into the group - an entire population can slowly develop into a new species. It doesn't start with two individuals, it progresses with an entire population. The point here is, it isn't the emergence of a new species that has to cause separation. IT'S THE SEPARATION THAT CAN CAUSE SPECIATION! If the groups are already separate, why would separate rituals, etc. be necessary? Why, again, would a lack of separate rituals be dangerous for the new group if the groups don't compete at all?

The reason I and others are saying that your problems with evolution aren't problems at all isn't because we think evolution can explain or disprove them. It's because that's not what evolutionary theory says. In fact, evolutionary theory AGREES with what you're saying in regards to sudden change. A sudden change would not survive - a mutation too extreme will not propagate. It's the small but still compatible mutations that propagate, and with enough small mutations added up (and with physical separation), you will eventually have a new species.

Here's a quote taken from one page of many that provides good information on speciation;
"The formation of two or more species often (some workers think always!) requires geographical isolation of subpopulations of the species. Only then can natural selection or perhaps genetic drift produce distinctive gene pools."

some dumbass decided to print the entire mouse chromomome 22 sequence

Nice try. Mice only have 20 different chromosomes. Whose the dumbass now!

I kid. I kid.

Complaint to the SEC about the activities arising from the SCO lawsuits

"Your "beautiful creation" is, at it's core, nasty. Filled with pain, suffering, stupidity and pointlessness."

I couldn't agree more.

Evidence. The reason Evolution is "just a theory is because the concept has not been hammered out completely yet. It's constantly evolving with new evidence that is decovered. For example did you know there is a mathematical formula that can help you see how many mutations a speices is seperated from each other depending on certain mutations in genes. http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/M/Mutations.html Using Genomics you can infer with the data how many years ago for example different primate speicies had a common ancestor. Obviously this is not 100% certain but nothing in science is. But the body of evidence keeps growing for evolution. the evidence for ID has not.

Frankly, because it wouldn't be on demand if the bitrate was higher

I never said anything about "on demand". You brought it up, but it's a red herring.

Tivo is successful, but it's certainly not on-demand. Internet content delivery doesn't mean it will be on-demand; instead, it means viewing will be like Tivo, but with millions of "channels"- effectively, one per program per episode. It will be closer to on-demand than Tivo, because to record one specific episode you don't have to wait until some unspecified date in the future: virtually any content will be ready the day after you request it.

Similar genre with a similar palette and cinematography, BSG looks good full screen on an iBook and SD television

Exhibit a) TiVO. The resolution used by TivO leads to a data rate of 1 gigabyte/"hour", or about 380 kbps. Itunes video is 128 kbps, or 1/3rd as big. If 128 were good enough for typical TV viewers, then Tivo would use it, and achieve triple the storage time on the same hardware.

I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.

There's no reason for everyone to assume internet video delivery must be on-demand.

Exhibit b) Netflix. Delays of at least 48 hours.
Exhibit c) tv torrents. Delays of at least 4 hours, sometimes much more.

I think download time is a more important factor than resolution when it comes to TV 'on demand'.

Exhibit d) RCN Megamodem. I have seen them achieve download speeds adequate to stream two Tivo-quality videos simultaneously.

There are already consumers out there who can get big videos fast. If, as you claim, viewers would really need the shows to arrive in real-time, then they'd have the option to demand services like that.

I wouldn't download an hour of programming if it took more than an hour to download it... I'd just Tivo it instead.

You can't "TIVO" it, because it's not on TV. We're talking about programs that have already been canceled from the airwaves.

But from the constumer's viewpoint, TIVO and non-realtime downloading are the same. In both cases, you program the machine ahead of time for what shows you'd like, and then check it every evening to see what episodes it has collected by now.

People are treating this like there's a "smart gene". That's not at all the case. All they've done is identify a genetic defect which tends to lower the IQ of people who have this defect. They don't know the mechanism, and they still have a wide range, so it's probably one of many factors that is meaningless in isolation. Testing a particular living person for it wouldn't tell you anything useful about their intelligence.

So, what about potential people who do not yet have an intelligence that can be tested? Well, it turns out that IGF2R is a very, very special gene for other reasons. There are certain genes that are "imprinted" in sexual reproduction. You might wonder why, with all the mutations and screwups that nature seems to allow, we don't see female mammals occasionally giving birth to their own clones, from meiosis that doesn't go as planned. Well, inheriting two of the same chromosome is almost always fatal because of these imprinted genes. With imprinted genes, genes are expressed if and only if they come from one particular parent. IGF2 is expressed exclusively from the father. IGF2R is expressed exclusively from the mother. The upshot of this is that while you could use this to discriminate among egg donors, using it to discriminate among sperm donors would be useless. As the mechanism that causes the correllation is still unknown, and ova are in much shorter supply than sperm, people are unlikely to be terribly selective about it in ova. Given all the other things we can test for, it's unlikely people would make a sperm decision based on how smart the grandsons of their designer daughters would be. If we're assuming babies with pre-selected genetic makeup, the next generation could do the same, rendering the decision moot.

Read more: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/I/Imprinting.html

How do we know these are mutations? Well, it's actually quite simple: we have seen them arise from parents (or a single parent cell in the case of bacteria) who do NOT possess the mutation. In my second bacterial example in particular, where the bacteria are induced to undo a man-made mutation, we KNOW that every bacterium has a broken version of a gene, and the suspected mutagen's job is to mutate it back the way it was.

We also know the sequences of many mutated and non-mutated genes. We know what mutations are likely (based on extensive observation and experimentation), and sure enough, they can and do occur.

There are actually three varieties of commonly recognized mutations: nonsense, missense, and silent. In a silent mutation, there is no observable change. The gene sequence is modified slightly, but the modified section still codes for the same amino acid. In missense, the amino acid changes, but the protein produced still mostly works. In nonsense, the modified nucleotide changes a codon to a STOP codon, truncating the amino acid and greatly reducing its chances of functioning correctly.

Sickle Cell Anemia is a missense mutation -- according to this site, "the replacement of A by T at the 17th nucleotide of the gene for the beta chain of hemoglobin changes the codon GAG (for glutamic acid) to GTG (which encodes valine). Thus the 6th amino acid in the chain becomes valine instead of glutamic acid."

Yep, that's right, ONE replacement is the cause of this genetic disease, and replacements really ain't that rare. There are plenty of commonly-found mutagens in our environment that do that kind of thing, in addition to good old radiation from the sun. So yes, we know it's a mutation, we even know what KIND of mutation it is and what mutated, we can prove that it's possible, and we know that it is indeed likely that it has arisen in at least a few people whose parents did not carry the gene. Of course, it probably entered the human race very early on, given how simple a change it requires, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a mutation.

In college, I was on Shattered Kingdoms MUD which was very RP-enforced. My character was a bard, although the closest in-game class available was swashbuckler. Being an A student IRL, I wasn't able to spend a lot of time killing mobs. However my character ended up around 25th level before I left college, and I earned most of my experience and levels from roleplaying.

Now that was cool! I've never heard of another MUD letting people level from roleplaying bonus experience. Especially to the extent that I did.

I think I came across that more than twenty years ago. I think it was on a CME (Continuing Medical Education) show broadcast on a regular tv channel early one Sunday morning, but it may have been elsewhere. (I'm not a medical professional, but I kind of enjoy watching those kinds of shows.)

I figured a little searching on the Internet might find something. With a little searching, this is all I found:

From The "Flu" (written by a Dr. Kimball who's doctorate was in immunology, not medicine):

(The pandemic of 1957 probably made more people sick than the one of 1918. But the availability of antibiotics to treat the secondary infections, that are the usual cause of death, resulted in a much lower death rate.)

Also, in 1918 there were no vaccines available to stem the spread of the disease. In 1957, a vaccine was made available a few months after the disease was first identified in Asia.

For what it's worth, the 1918 virus was probably worse since the virus itself did seem to kill a good number of its victims quickly, but whether it was, in fact, more lethal in absolute terms it is not 100% clear.

It has been known for some time that transcription factors can help determine what other genes can be transcribed. For example, in maintaining circadian rhythms in fruitflies there is the PER and TIM (timeless genes). These bind to the gene promotors, creating a negative feedback system, such that both are inversely proportionate to each other, and are antiphase with CLK/CYC transcription factors:

(first link I found on the subject)
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/C/Circadian.html
http://www.scienceden.com/mbiology/research/circad ian

Gradually, men begin to disappear as old ones die and no new ones are born to replace them, until finally Earth is entirely populated by women.

Actually this could help save humans because as it is now the humans male is headed for extinction anyway... Generally what makes a human a male is the X chromosome. Most, not all (more explained later), humans have two sex chromosomes, either an X and a Y chromosome or two X chromosomes with females having two Xs. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome acts like a switch that controls male sexual differentiation. However the gene is decaying and will disappear.

The exceptions mentioned above are intersexuals commonly called Hermaphrodites. There are different types of intersexuals with different karyotypes. Some have the "normal" XX or XY but other may have XXY, XXXY, or XXXXY. Most intersexuals born with ambiguous genitalia go through Genital Plastic Surgery. However, no matter how they're medically treated and reared as children many don't fit into "normal" society and some may be considered "homosexual", gay or lesbian because they had their gender surgically altered, said ambiguous genitalia may include a larger than average clitoris or a smaller than average penis.

Who knows which persecuted people you claim to be. Funny that you think I should know based on some arbitrary number, 900 years. Are you Sudanese? Serbian? What other groups am I leaving out? Lets play 20 questions. Are you still being persecuted?

and it was you rednecks that said 'God created Einstein, not the other way round.' It was the antisemetism inherent in christians that led you to hate him and other thinkerslike him in the western world for revolutionizing our entire outlook on the universe, just like you denied Darwinian Theory (and still do).

I don't know what you're talking about here, who are the rednecks? I'll tell you who hates who today though, the Atheists hate Einstein for being the biggest skeptic of quantum mechanics, because it was their free ride to the primordial goo hypothesis being accepted as fact. I say to hell with the lot of you, you're just two bickering factions in a stupid argument. I can see you've got your bag of facts ot pull from all made up, skeptics are only of value if they're on your side.

Yes, sugar IS bad for you. That is because it has short-chain carbohydrates that are burned off as raw heat in the Krebs Tricarboxylic Acid cycle quickly and ineffieciently and less is converted to chemical energy required for muscles/bodily functions etc.

Oh is that why? See I was told that it was because it raises your insulin levels, and eventually the insulin levels stay higher and you store more fat, while complex carbohydrates are needed to keep insulin at balanced levels. I don't see how you leap from sugar being less efficient to it being unhealthy, even though we've been eating sucrose for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Oh, you want me to be impressed and just take your word for it, right? That's what others tend to do. See if you were SMART you would already know sugar is bad for you! Throw away all your sugary products! (that's what the headlines would say)

It's not hyperbole, it's a fact.

You know someone told me global warming was a fact the other day. It's fact! If you were smart you would KNOW THAT! Oh, and Jesus walked the earth, you should KNOW THAT TOO!

You're full of shit, if you divide the estimated number (even the outrageously high estimates) of people killed in Iraq since the Iraq war started, it comes nowhere close to the number of days we've been in Iraq * 1000. Oh you're taking a figure from the very first day of the war when we killed thousands of Iraqi army, right? Or the first day of an assault on Fallujah. You use so-called facts like a kid uses a big stick to beat other kids over the head.

So go ahead and be pessimistic about everything. The internet? Just a bunch of stupid fiber optic cables, worthless piles of junk. Space exploration? Just a bunch of stupid old men, they really want to blow up the world behind your back. World peace? An illusion inspired by stupid religious people like Ghandi, crap talk meant to strengthen the evil Muslims who plot to kill everybody. Freedom? Same thing. Hahaha, it's been fun.

• http://users.rcn.com/zap.dnai/
• http://jnaudin.free.fr/meg/meg.htm Looks scientific, doesn't it?
• http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com/Archives2002/Ne wEnergy.htm

It uses Verlet integration. It seemed adequate for the kinds of orbits involved in a tether, where the time span of interest is only a few hours. A trip to Mars will take months unless you go powered the whole way, which you probably can't afford to do (although a solar sail might help).

It would be best to come up with analytical solutions. If you never need to solve the 3-body problem these will be ellipses. A cheesy semi-solution to the 3-body problem could be piecewise-elliptical. Again, details are left as an exercise for the reader.

See: http://users.rcn.com/smith.ma.ultranet/athena4.htm l#5/

A positive diagnostic test should reliably identify an individual who would have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, not due to the job conditions, but rather due to the patient's own genetic predisposition. Such a patient might very well have been expected to develop a pressure palsy such as carpal tunnel syndrome even in a less physically demanding job. A claim on the part of such a patient that they ought to be compensated by the company for an injury that they were likely destined to sustain anyway would therefore be difficult to support.

On the other hand, the bit about testing the patients WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION would be considered UNETHICAL by most physicians (and all ethical physicians). The diagnosis of HNPP can be made WITHOUT genetic testing, and a positive genetic test raises issues of employability and insurability not only in the patient but also in their relatives. The patient and family members should not be exposed to risk of loss of employability and insurability without full disclosure of consequences of such genetic testing.

IN SHORT:

Use of this genetic test by a company to prove that they are not responsible for an employee's injuries is defensible, and is not a violation of the patient's rights.

Use of this genetic testing without permission of the individuals involved is deplorable, and is a violation of their rights.

It is not the genetic testing that is the issue, but rather the covert nature of that testing.

Gen X'er is actually a subset of Baby Bommer. There is no "between". The X'ers came right at the tail end of the boomers. The first boomers went into the workforce and got jobs, but filled up all the positions, and the X'ers are the ones that got there late, with no jobs left, went back to school until they were 30, smoked lots of pot, and avoided their parents telling them they were just slackers.

After Gen X is the "bust" years (late 70's), where comparatively few babies were born. That's where you are, most likely. We don't have as much competition, and there's lots of opportunity out there for us. After us come "Gen Y" or the "baby boom echo". That is the boomer's kids, born in the mid 80's, and around there (30 years after '55).

Read "boom, bust, and echo" - very interesting book.

Check this: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/B/BabyBoom75.gif

And this: book review

The issue to me, is that these lines are on public property, and in public airspace... Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines?

The problem is this requires lots of inital investment and with you being the new guy in town, getting customers away from the incombant is tough.

There's a company called RCN that did just that. Ran a separate fiber/coax network over areas that already had existing ones (Adelphia, Comcast, TW are the existing companies in their space). The company was in bankruptcy court a year or so ago, because they were unable to keep up on the debts they incurred from building the network (not enough customres had signed on to cover the costs). But they seem to be making process to getting out of it after some restructuring.

As one marketting manager of a broadband company told me recently, it's actually cheaper to buy an ISP than start a new one. This is why nobody is making their own infastructure.

The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life), but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)

What may come as a surprise is that most Creationists and IDists agree that there is speciation and adaptation. It's evident that animals adapt. What is more the crux of conflict is whether species can adapt to become an entirely new and different specie.

I see this from time to time and it's rediculously disengenonous. "We believe in speciation! But we don't believe in speciation." Species adapting to become a different species is what speciation is.

Every time I see this I cannot help but come to the conclusion that the "adaptation vs speciation" thing, or the "microevolution vs macroevolution" thing, or the "species adapt but do not evolve" thing, are nothing more or less than hand-waving away evidence. That is, anything that we have undeniable evidence of having observed occurring gets shifted into the "adaptation" or "microevolution" pile, anything that cannot be directly observed-- say, because it takes a couple thousand years to happen-- is shifted into the "macroevolution" or "becoming a different species" pile. Once this division has been made, everything in the "macroevolution" pile is denied to be true, even though it's the exact same process as the other pile, just on longer timescales.

The problem here, basically, is that there is technically no such thing as a "species". A species is a human construct, a pedagogical concept. There is no firm, reasonable, or real-world boundary between one species and the next; the difference between species is just a classification system, a subjective one created by humans. The creationist who accepts "adaptation" attempts to take these arbitrary, human-created boundaries between different groups of genomes and claim them to be immutable, uncrossable, "natural". But this doesn't really work, and it isn't scientific because "species" isn't rigorously defined enough to provide any good reason why evolutionary processes would suddenly cease to function at the species line, or even provide a reasonable explanation of exactly what it would mean were this true.

The "lightning zapped a glob of primordial ooze, thus forming the first proteins" idea is not only unnatural (life coming from non-life), but also unproven (why can't we reproduce this phenomena today?)

We can. It's been done many times. One of the students in my high school attempted a variant of the experiment and actually got it to work.

To say evolutionists have all the answers isn't true, is it?

To say anyone has all the answers is untrue. This is the entire problem. Science fundamentally recognizes that you cannot possibly ever have all the answers. Religion does not.

Those who promote creationism expect science to have all the answers, now. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. The idea of the scientific process is to come up with the best and most exhaustive possible rigorous explanation of natural phenomena which can be said to be consistent with all observable evidence. Given this, it's just plain silly to stand outside science and yell "if there's anything you haven't figured out an answer for yet, then it must have been the hand of God!".

I'm not sure how useful the term reptile still is, at least to scientists in determining common descent, since as I recall from grammer school it applied to all cold blooded vertebrates with eggs with shells. The class reptilia is composed of four orders, squmata (lizards & snakes), crocodilia (crocs & gators), Rhynchocephalia (tuataras) and turtles (testudines).

But these don't seem to be products of a single lineage other than being members of microphylum amniota. Back in the late paleozoic this group diverged into anapsids (turtles), diapsids (lizards and snakes, tuataras, as well as archosaurs, which includes crocadilians, dinosaurs and birds), and synapsids (mammal-like reptiles, which lead to mammals). In other words, the group repitiles is paraphyletic, that is, it contains the most recent common ancestor of the group but not all the descendants of the common ancestor.

Ow, my head hurts. Can I have a drink now?

I think the book should include some of the less popular spells. For example:

21: Badly Programmed Illusion
44: Charm Friends
84: Deny Reality
99: Differentiate Without Error
109: Drawmij's Instant Coffee (components: hot water and cup)
153: Get Life
178: Impress Plants
187: Irritate Self
205: Lightning Blot
220: Magic Missal
260: Nystul's Undetectible Aura
279: Power Word, Pun
292: Protection From Weevil
304: Remove Hand (yours)
326: Speak With Boring Monsters
348: Teleport With Lots Of Errors

I've seen a page with lots more... like "Summon Insect Swarm (range: 3"), but I can't find it offhand. I always thought it might be amusing to play a game with the voluntary restriction of only having access to the "unpopular" spells.

It varies a bit state by state, but yeah. If you're 20 and you have sex with a 16 year old it's generally statutory rape. Congratulations, you (figuratively) get "Child Molester" tatooed on your forehead for the rest of your life.

I recall there was some case about a ?16? year old with nude pictures of themselves... prosecuted for posession of kiddyporn.

Anh of course, urinating in public getting you tagged as a registered sex offender and having your name and address published by the police where ever you move.

Oh, we also enjoy witch hunts as a hobby. The kind where specialists come in and grill several hundred children. Grill them like terrorism suspects. Grill them until they suddenly realize that they've all been victims sex abuse. And kiddy porn pictures were taken of them. And satanic rituals, complete with animal and human sacrifices. And the kids report being subjected to all sorts of magical events. Except the physical examinations of the children show no signs of abuse. And none of the kiddy porn photographs can ever be found. And there's no evidence of animal or human sacrifices. And the abuse and satanic rituals being committed by a conspiracy of the entire day care center staff. And the sexual abuse and satanic rituals being committed in the middle of the day... with random people entering and leaving the building all the time... and no one ever witnessing anything... in a daycare center with multiple HUGE windows facing a public street. Case after case after case, almost identical. People convicted and later having convictions thrown out, and even those not convicted having their lives ruined. Read more here.

But don't worry, it's all OK. We just do it to Protect the Children.

-

Damn, hit "submit" instead of "preview". 'twas these people I was talking about. By the way, although most cancers aren't apparantly caused by stem cells (leukaemia aside), stem cells if left to reproduce too long in the lab often turn cancerous.

might some of these providers help?

http://www.rcn.com/business/index.php
http://www.abovenet.com/products/maps.html
http://work.comcast.net/smallbusiness.asp
http://www.level3.com/3385.html
http://www.cogentco.com/htdocs/map.php#

Everybody should make a copy of this document and e-mail it to enforcement@sec.gov. I bet if enough people complained, they would launch an investigation.

Complaint to the SEC

The human body is far, far, far from perfection. We've gone through some pretty radical changes in the last 5 million years, had our genetic diversity stripped to the bone by near-extinction genetic bottlenecks during glaciations and are generally a rather inbred bunch that survive only through a collection of ad-hock genetic hacks.

Case in point - as a result of the reconfigurations necessary to facilitate bipedalism, the vans deferens tube that links the testes to the urethra in human males is looped around the ureter. I doubt that this is in any way a 'perfect' configuration.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/S/Sexual_Reproduction.html

Our immune system has suffered from being a relatively low priority while we've been undergoing the various changes of the past 5 million years. Emu's, which have remained in much the same form (compared with humans) since they first grew feathers and lost their teeth 65+ million years ago, have been able to focus their evolution on developing their immune systems, and now have one of the most advanced immune systems of any terrestrial creature. Sharks have followed a similar path of changing little and reaching a certain plateau of perfection within their niche.

Perhaps in a few gigayears, when humans have, hopefully, collonised the stars and lived in a stable (if diverse on a local scale) environment, we'll see some approximation of perfection in the decendents of homo sapiens. I doubt it'll be a single brand of perfection though, but rather a perfection born of diversity, of organisms adapted to whatever challenges they come to face, from generalists to ultra-specialists. When adaptations approach fundamental limits of physics, it may be appropriate to call it perfection. Right now, we're less 'perfect' than cockroaches.

This will only be good for Linux if the SEC get off their arse and lay criminal charges.

Until the conspiracy between the US gov't and other world powers that prevents usage of zero point energy to give unlimited free energy for things like charging my cell phone, I won't be happy. That is, why use air when you can use "110 orders of magnitude greater than the radiant energy at the center of the Sun" to charge a battery?!

Unless, of course, it were cubium powered. Ignoring cubium indicts you evil!

In no particular order..

Perhaps it doesn't appeal to the stereotypical geek, but the vibrator. The pocket calculator as well as; The calculator/remote control/radio controlled/FM radio *wristwratch* (surely the pinnacle of minitiaturization!).

Of course, the bonefone: link. The transistor radio. The world receiver radio. The wind-up/clockwork radio/charger. The intimidating maglite flashlight. Glowsticks! Neither electonic, nor moving parts, but who can resist luminecence!

7" 33 1/3rpm vinyl gramophone records; or I can do you even better than that - 7" 33 1/3 rpm plastic gramophone records that were given away as inlays with MSX Magazine, that you'd dub on tape, and you'd "load" programs off of the tape using the regular "data cassette recorder".

CB (Citizen's Band, 27 "megacycle") radio. ZX80. C64. Nuff said. The lava lamp! Duh! The strap-on (wait for it) keyboard (keyboard guitar).

The hearing aid. The answering machine remote control/handheld DTMF tone dialer. Also; the blue box! The minox sub-miniature "spy" camera (as seen in james bond). The SLR Single Lens Reflex camera. Automatic tweezers (They don't work particularly well, but they have a gadget-esque movement)

The portable DVD player. Toys robots (remote controlled, especially; the robosapiens is a good stab at the concept). Magnesium firestarters. (I'm the firestarter!)

Personal Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (P-EPIRBs) RC cars, helicopters. E.g. The translator pen (scans text when you move across it, translates) The penman robotic plotter and of course the closely related concept of the Logo turtle..

The random movement printer (If and when it becomes widely available..) Lego mindstorms (programmable bricks..)

The most important hand-helds historically; the Smith&Wesson and the AK47.

Also, though not an autonomous device, nor mechanical, nominated for achievements in disrupting the global economy, I'd like to recognize bubblejet printer ink, for costing more than its weight in gold or oil.

Aerosol spray canisters; specifically,
every graffitti artist's friend: spraypaint and every gadget-minded geek's friend: deodorant (especially the miniature cans) and of course; aerosol cheese! Also, perhaps slightly more
palatable, mace pepper spray.

The electric toothbrush (with induction-loop-charging-circuit magic!)
Not the greatest gadget in history until you consider it's "dual use" nature, and the fact it's marketed so widely.

Sattellite TV. Not the most portable of gadgets, but come on! Windscreenwiper glasses. (Though more of a chindogu) The mac. The iMac for doing it twice. The aibo.

The "orgasmotron" (actually just a head massager, not at all naughty) Stylish pin clock. The keyghost hardware keystroke logger.

The digital camera. The digital photo frame.
The credit-card sized Anything, but in particular, the cre

RCN Increases Cable Modem Speed To 10 Mbps, Offers Fastest Residential Modem On The Market

I remember reading about another medical circumstance that also used the term Chimera. Apparently it's possible for two fraternal embryos in a pregnant woman to combine and become one organism, with two sets of genetics. Some beings composed this way stand out due to differing genetics manifesting different skin on the body; some don't stand out because certain organs or systems have a different genetic makeup than other systems, all internally. It's interesting, as these people have two DNA structures. When I first read Chimera in the context of the headline I wondered what this new thing had to do with the old use, but they appear to be exclusive of each other.

More here and here.

Right here in Boston, I have 10mbps cable (800k up), with no download cap. I don't know how much it costs individually, but bundled with an unlimited-local call line (the equivalent of Verizon's standard offer), it costs $67/month. Verizon used to charge $16 for that line, so the cable part costs about $51... a little less than £40, I'd say ;)

According to the friendly article, his life is not one big homage to "Star Wars," he says, and he has plenty of other interests, including classical music, modern dance, fine dining, dive bars, working out and reading about contemporary art.

Mutations are rare and usually sterile...

This is too simplistic a statement. Mutations as seen in the general population are rare. Other types of mutation (point mutation, indels etc.) are relatively frequent but there are mechanisms to mitigate these mutations. In fact it is estimated that approx. that every new human cell contains some 120 new mutations. But these mutations have little effect because of repeated DNA sections, junk DNA etc.etc.
Not all are sterile, of course. In fact, in just a short time, beneficial mutations can be seen.

There was an MCP Virgina and still is.

Master Control Program has been around since 1958, and was the first commercial high language OS (written in Algol, the great granddaddy of C).

http://users.rcn.com/hwbingham/security.htm

MCP was the OS that ran Burroughs' mainframes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation

And it STILL is out there on the ClearPath systems.

http://www.unisys.com/products/clearpath__servers/ clearpath__plus__mcp/operating__environment.htm

MCP lives, and it likely processed some of your financials or government data.

Of course it has - DNA is really good at duplicating itself.

I'm not sure why the CEO of SCO is not in that list

Snarl McSnide hasn't been crushed by the (ongoing?) SEC investigation. yet.

I suppose you think you're funny.

Still and all, the letter is quite compelling. I'm convinced that SCO is the devil.

http://users.rcn.com/srstites/jacuse/sec.complaint .v4.html

I was also stunned to learn how flexible decorators were in the previous version of python. It's refreshing to be see functions treated as objects... unless I'm mistaken about the concept.

...at least on the genetic level.
Since one of the x chromosomes in every female is "deactivated" and turned into a Barr body (to avoid aneuploidy) and which one is chosen is completely random, it can be said that all women contain two separate genetic makeups, resulting in a genetic mosaic: a chimera.

"There are over 1000 chemicals reported in a cup of coffee. Only 26 have been tested in animal cancer tests and more than half are rodent carcinogens; there are still a thousand chemicals left to test."

Ha ha. You said 'economic growth' in describing Philadelphia?
They didn't get cable until almost 1990 and they prevented RCN from laying wire so as to protect comcast, ultimately bankrupting RCN.

The democrats that run Philly are looking for kickbacks and concessions. That's all this is about. It has nothing to do with 'poor residents', despite the rhetoric.
If they could pick up trash, I would be a little more accomodating, but they suck.

Verizon just doesn't want to compete against the people who a.) write the laws and b.) underwrite their growth. There was an article about a neighborhood (Ruby Ranch) that 'rolled their own' ISP and it showed how the telecoms fought them tooth and nail.

There is no altruism here.

This already happens, in a form of twin birth where a pair of fraternal twins fuse into a single embryo. This can result in an "embedded twin", where one twin is partially absorbed into the body of the other. You get individuals with second faces on their shoulders, etc. But there is the happier case where the twins get mixed up at a very early stage in blastular development and develop normally from then on. This produces a chimeral individual whose cells are of two different genotypes.

This is extremely rare; a case was discovered in 2002 when a woman needed a kidney transplant. Tissue typing revealed her to be a tetragametic individual, having developed from four gametes instead of two. Half her cells were genotypically different from the other half. During development, this woman and her twin fused into one embryo, and appeared to the world after birth to be one person. There are probably more people like this out there. I seem to remember a story where another woman surprisingly failed a maternity test for her own son, and was found to be chimeral.

See here (or its Google cache to avoid slashdotting) for details.

And you are the reason the democrats weren't able to win. Calling the otherside stupid isn't the best way to sway their opinion.

Because it's not like anybody on the right-wing ever calls us stupid or cowards or anything like that. Oh wait....

Minor nitpick--humans actually have 46 chromosomes in most cells, in 23 pairs. Technically, a haploid number of 23 and a diploid chromosome number of 46. Most of the members of those pairs are quite similar to one another (in healthy individuals) but the sex chromosomes are quite different in males--the familiar X and Y chromosomes.

Some species, most often among plants, have a polyploid genome--their chromosomes are allocated in groups of three, four, or more. Potatoes, which you mentioned, are tetraploid; they have twelve groups of four similar chromosomes, giving a total chromosome number of 48 to which the parent alluded.

Oats are hexaploid, with a haploid number of 7 and a chromosome number of 42. (They may or may not be the answer to live, the Universe, and everything; research is ongoing.)

Sugarcane is octaploid: haploid number 10, chromosome number 80.

Polyploidy can arise spontaneously, when gametes (sex cells) are formed that contain a full diploid set of chromosomes, instead of the usual haploid set. Fertilization with a regular haploid gamete results in triploidy--these offspring are infertile, because they can't divide their genetic material evenly to produce new sex cells. Fertilization with another diploid gamete produces fertile, tetraploid offspring. (Later, rinse, and repeat for higher ploidy levels.) Here is a good site with more details on polyploidy in plants.

Another nifty phenomenon is the formation of polytene chromosomes. These show up in some species where certain cells undergo multiple rounds of DNA replication without cell division. This can create tens, hundreds, or even thousands of parallel strands of identical DNA. The canonical example is in the Drosophila (fruit fly) salivary gland, where the multiple copies of each gene in principle allow for much more rapid synthesis of important proteins. These polytene chromosomes are large enough to be easily stained and visualized with light microscopy--a task that is much more difficult in regular chromosomes.

Some bacteria actually do practice a form of sex: bacterial conjugation is quite common, even in the familiar Escherischia Coli. In addition, viruses provide a method of gene transfer for just about every species on the planet.
While it is true that the vast majority of bacterial reproduction happens by simple fission, let's not oversimplify.

Except if the tightly knit community is located in a geographical area that gets snow for four months of the year, at which point cycling to work/school every day gets to be at best inconvenient if not downright dangerous for a good time of the year.

Nah, it's not that bad. People in northern climes ride year round too. Good sites for ideas include icebike and bikewinter. Also I wrote up some suggestions on riding in winter.

Where I live in Michigan it's pretty easy as the streets usually get cleared early on all but a few of the worst days, so it's not really the ice and snow as just a matter of dressing right for the weather. (Main points: protect extremities, but don't dress *too* warm, since you'll warm up as you exercise.)

--Bruce Fields

Read this and learn:

Origin of HIV

Genome sequencing of different isolates of HIV-1 and HIV-2 shows that each is related to retroviruses that occur in primates in Africa. These are designated simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIV) although they do not cause immune deficiency (or any disease) in their natural host. However, on those occasions when a SIV accidentally infects a primate of a different species, it does cause disease in the new host. The human epidemic is one example.
HIV-1 is most closely related to a SIV found in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes)
HIV-2 is most closely related to a SIV that occurs in the sooty mangabey (Cercocebus atys).
Genome analysis also permits the construction of phylogenetic trees which reveal different clades of HIV just as such analysis reveals evolutionary relationship between species.

(emphasis mine)