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Thanksgiving Bits
An anonymous reader writes "Whatis.com has a holiday themed tech quiz, Thanksgiving: Do you speak Geek?. Bit stuffing, anyone?" And reader Punboy writes with some hope of building a better turkey: "Apparently the biotech guys are at it again, this time with our poultry! They're mapping the turkey genome in hopes of providing better breeding techniques, and remove the 'guesswork'." And while food is on your mind, here's a story about the challenges of feeding a hungry planet.
Sounds interesting.. But if we need to feed the poor we should shell out from our exess stock :(
Welcome our new genetically engineered turkey overlords!
You're over a month late -- Thanksgiving was observed on October 11, 2004.
I, for one, hope that they go the tomato route when engineering the super turkeys. It's my dream to find giant perfectly formed turkeys that can last forever on the shelves and look amazing on the table but taste... aw who cares just look at it.
What is this thanksgiving of which you speak.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Although mapping the entire Turkey Genome is something new, they have been manipulating Turkey's genetically for years now. For Instance, the Turkey's that are "pardoned" by the President of the United States never survive for more than a couple of weeks because their genetic structure has been altered so heavily for the purpose of providing more Turkey Meat.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
And what is up with this huge fascination with the 'all-white-meat' bird?
Gag me with a spoon! Everybody knows that the dark meat is tastier. Who cares if it's got more fat in it -- fat is flavour, after all.
Sheesh. If i -wanted- all-white-meat, I'd eat caucasian.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Look into it.
Hey, I am one of the first 10 to post. Good work german ... :P
I'm glad that after wasting most of the article talking about how we need to find better ways of growing crops in order to feed all the hungry people out there, the BBC article does make an off-hand mention towards the end that there is enough food to feed everyone, it's just a matter of distribution due to politics.
Puts the rest of the article in a totally different light. What would feed the most people soonest would be to topple a bunch of idiot dicators and stablize some chaotic countries, no bio-engineered crops required. Once those countries are stablized, they can grow their own food, reducing the problem even further.
There's really no point in giving drough-resistant super crops to a dirt poor family in a war ravaged land, especially when they'll probably have to flee before the crops even sprout.
It's so frustrating to see reporters still stuck on an old problem that's mostly irrelevant today. I fully expect them to wish that movies would have some way of determining, or rating them, so you'd know which ones were safe to take your kids to. If only there was a way to send mail to someone on the other side of the planet without having to wait months for it to arrive. If only someone other than Intel made CPUs. Imagine if there was an operating system, based on Unix but free to use however you wanted?
We don't Celebrate Thanksgiving im European you insenstive clod!
These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.
The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes
Is it just me or is it just some writer under a deadline attempting poorly to write something related to Thanksgiving? I mean, table? That's not something I'd associate Thanksgiving with. And "binary digits"? WTF?
read the bunni comic
Sequencing is only the first small step required in such lofty goals as improving a turkey's meat quality or introducing disease resistance. The actual tough part (which the article does not mention) is identifying the genes that code for the protein, or more likely proteins, that are involved in producing a desirable trait. If it were as simple as sequencing an animals genome, a task which an automated sequencer and computer can almost do by themselves, then we would already be well on the way to curing all of the genetic diseases that currently plague the human race. I can tell you that this is a goal we are far from accomplishing for humans, let alone turkeys. And remember this is the genetic sequence from only one or two turkeys and hardly represents the diversity of all turkeys on the face of the planet, an issue that also arises in discussion of the human genome project. The genetic sequencing of all these organisms we hear of in the media, while extremely useful for researchers (myself included), is not the holy grail for our understanding of how biology actually works.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
Maybe someday we'll have real turkipedes.
Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October.. this is a bit late isn't it?
What we call "Turkeys" http://www.peta.org/feat/turk2004/ ain't got it real great. At least worth thinking about once a year?
There is enough food for everyone. The problem is not the size of the turkey.
The problem is that as long as you subsidize farmers to make too many turkeys and then dump them on the international markets, third world farmers won't be able to compete with these prices.
You'll just end up with a bunch of farmers making too much food, a good portion of it being wasted, and a good portion of earth's population not being able to compete with them.
It's called protectionism and it's what's preventing the world from being fed properly.
And replace the word turkey in what I said with wheat and corn.
--- Worst tagline ever.
At a rate of 25,000 people dying a day from starvation any new advance that will help feed people is well worth considering. but this would be after shooting those retard corrupt heads of states who while living in high style don't give a damn if their people starve or not.
Makes me sleeeeeppyyy...
What about countries that simply can't provide food based on whatever reason? Isn't it stupid or even arrogant of people to assume that they can live everywhere, even places that food simply can't grow in sustainable amounts? To me, it seems somewhat absurd to expect people to bail you out when you can't provide the bare necessities yourself in any set of circumstances. Perhaps a move to another region would be the wiser move.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
There's too much food, and therefore people are starving.
Look, farmers don't need to sell their food on the international market to not go hungry. THEY PRODUCE FOOD
Surplus production is a very good thing. It means that people will be able to pick and choose what they want to eat in good years, and won't starve in bad years. Every once in a while (a century or a few), a Really Bad Year happens, you only get a fraction of your usual crop worldwide, and if you're only producing enough food in a normal year, much of your population starves. Waste is security.
The truth is that widespread hunger doesn't happen these days in countries with a stable government and a relatively free market. You look at poor countries, and you're looking for some singular global cause of oppression, and really, there are just a lot of little local oppressors who actually cause the messes individual countries are in with their desperate violence and insecure brutality.
I want to sniff some ASS-PANTIES!!!!!!11
To me, it seems somewhat absurd to expect people to bail you out when you can't provide the bare necessities yourself in any set of circumstances. Perhaps a move to another region would be the wiser move. "If they're poor, why don't they just get credit cards"
Reminds me a delightful (and dark) book from 1952 called "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. The main character ends up working at an offshore turkey breast factory where they grow a giant turkey breast tumour from cancerous turkey issue.
They just carve off hunks as it grows.
The texture is lacking the grain of real turkey breast, but lots of people seem to like ground turkey, or turkey loaf, or turkey hotdogs.
There is a mention of it in the Wikipedia article on vat grown meat.
Turkeys can kill anyone they want! Turkeys cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These cocks are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this turkey who was about being eaten at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the turkey killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a turkey totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.
Your head a splode
No, it won't. It didn't any of the other times that idiots like you have cried wolf either. If we'd listened to you it was impossible to feed even one billion people, and the telephone was a luxury for the rich because of the huge number of people needed to staff it.
"destroying topsoil at 10 or sometimes 100s of times faster than nature creates it"
This statistic is meaningless on its own. It seems to have been calculated specifically to sound scary, while being totally useless. "Spacebats increased 40 times faster after Anonymous Cowards began writing meaningless nonsense on Slashdot".
Example:
Assume topsoil is created over period of 1 million years prior to outset of civilisation. Farmers begin somehow "destroying" it in a way which decreases topsoil by 1% of this starting quantity every thousand years. After 100 000 years all the topsoil would be exhausted if this process were allowed to continue. So we're destroying it 10 times faster than nature creates it. Just like the rant above...
Except that this assumes our current civilisation and technology continues to exist exactly as-is for 100 000 years. So far it's been changing so quickly that our ancestor's lives are almost unrecognisable to us. So the premise is hopelessly flawed.
If you have solid research to present, go present it to someone who cares and can make a proper case for you. If you just have more stories about the sky falling go tell Chicken Little instead of bothering us.
I for one, hope that they go the tomato route when engineering the super turkeys. It's my dream to find giant perfectly formed turkeys that can last forever on the shelves and look amazing on the table but taste... aw who cares just look at it.
--
you insensitive clod, my father was a super turkey that was killed by a gang of giant perfectly formed turkeys. And my mother was a tomato, killed by a super villain team consisting of a shelve and table.And being half tomato, we prefer the politicly correct term; love apples.
now get your act together or ill bring the smack down on ya
Please explain - I'm trying to reduce my grocery bills!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
When you take a the predator that has been eating top predators all their lives and turn it into a food source the resulting toxic buildup woud only produce remarkable offspring.
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
So if we all started eating tigers, we'd gain psychic powers?
Interesting point? But the top predator is human beings. And Soylant Green is human beans.
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
1. In a spreadsheet or a database, this is a data structure used to organize information. (Hint: Its Thanksgiving namesake might feature a cornucopia centerpiece.)
What is it?
Their Answer: Table
My Answer: A linked hash map with external buckets
The market? Good grief, try the country side! Wild turkeys have moved into central / northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and are moving around in flocks of 10-30 birds! This has happened in just the last 10 years or so. They are likely to become a nuisance fairly soon.
All we have to do is care. There's enough food going to waste on this planet that no one need go hungry if we would only spend the money necessary to get the food to them.
Of course, that would cost money, and god knows we can't spend money on anything unless it lets someone make more money. There's no money in housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, or any of that touchy-feely humanitarian hippie shit...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Enclosed is your formal invitation to start celebrating Thanksgiving in Europe. Please recall that we in the U.S. have accepted European invitations to celebrate your holidays (e.g. October Fest, Christmas) and feel obligated to extend our holidays to you. The U.K. might be particularly interested in 4/7 since it reduced the King's areas of responsibility and allowed him to focus his goodwill on the Irish. In order to allow you to enjoy Thanksgiving, the U.S. offers to increase the supply of turkeys. We offer (Condoleezza) Rice, (Donald) Rumsfeld, etc. as our initial offering of turkeys.
I find it a bit funny that they have confused bit stuffing with bit padding.
For those who don't know, bit stuffing is when you add bits to a packet so you know there are no control codes by accident in the fields. For example, your standard HDLC packet begins and ends with 0111110, so to make sure this doesn't appear again before the end of the packet,a 0 is inserted after every five consecutive ones.
Bit padding is when you add bits at the end of a field to make sure it becomes a standard size.
was this thing called "Chicken Little"? Because I remember reading a short story with a giant hunk of meat called chicken little, and I've been trying for the life of me to recall the author/title.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
I just can't wait until the day that turkeys are advertised by feature set.
*85% water volume
*grain-fed taste
*128 MB RAM
*rfid molecular chains (for your protection)
*featherless
"If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat."
Virtually every country in the world has enough crop land to grow enough food to feed itself and the ones that do not generally have sufficient wealth to afford to import food if it can't grow enough to feed itself.
Poorer countries either have enough tax revenues based upon resources available to provide assistance to the poor, and international relief organizations can assist those in countries where there is extreme poverty so that there in no real reason for anyone to go hungry.
Okay, that's the ideal situation. The real problem is not the capacity to feed anyone hungry, it's the mismanagement of resources, military and government interference in aid programs, corruption, waste and government political interference. Here are a few examples.
- Marxist land-planning schemes which obviously will not work, the result being famine.
- Draconian government controls on farming making it uneconomical to grow food.
- Failure of governments to provide adequate infrastructure to allow farmers to send crops to market.
- Refusal of governments to allow private organizations to develop infrastructure where the government cannot or will not.
- Starve the populations in some areas through planned famines for political power.
- "Punish" areas that are supportive of rebel groups by starving the public.
- Denying aid organizations access to the hungry on the specious grounds that feeding starving people aids the cause rebel groups or those who oppose the particular government of that country
- Allowing surplus food sold into government price support systems to go to waste instead of allowing it to be donated to international aid organizations because of fears if surplus food is donated it may end up back in the market and depress prices further
- Rebel organizations and black marketers stealing relief supplies and selling them.
- Government officials demanding bribes and kickbacks to allow donations of food to the hungry by international aid organizations.
- Governments refusing to allow international aid organizations to make food available to the hungry because it would look bad.
. These and other reasons are why many countries (mostly in Africa) have masses of starving people dying of hunger (approximately 27,000 people each day), not because of any resource shortages or inability to feed people.Back in the 1980s, the economist Dr. Thomas Sowell stated in his newspaper column that it is possible to place the entire world population - 6,000,000,000 people - at a density per square mile equal to or less than most American cities, in single-family homes, in an area the size of the state of Texas.* Given that to be the case, it becomes clear that the world has the capacity to feed itself given the small amount of land actually needed to house the entire population. It is mismanagement, politics and corruption that causes famine, not lack of resources or capacity.
Paul Robinson
* I personally have done the math myself and verified Dr. Sowell's conclusion to be correct. For those that wish to check, the size of Texas is about 250,000 square miles, there are 640 acres per square mile, and the population density of Manhattan is 148 persons per acre, for all of New York City it's 52, Chicago is 62, and Los Angeles is 51.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
After consulting Google and all the other than Whatis dictionaries, it does appear that "bit padding" is frequently used to mean the addition of bits to make sure some transmission or storage unit is a standard or set size. And that "bit stuffing" is used more often to mean the insertion of control information in a bit sequence. So I've revised our definition of "bit stuffing" somewhat and added a new one for "bit padding." (I'm not convinced that padding is always at the end of a sequence.) Thanks for your comment and please let me know if you'd like to be listed as a "suggestor" on these two definitions. These will be live on the site tomorrow via our "New additions/changes" page if you can take the time to review them (or send me a note directly). Thanks again for contributing! Lowell Thing, Consulting Editor, Whatis.com