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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.
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.
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?
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.
Sorry but maybe I have missed something. Turkeys are prolific, we can already grow as many as we want to. The only limitation is what the market will bear. So how does making freaky genetically modified turkey change that.
Most poor people don't mind having "less". Not everyone is greedy and jealous. A lot of people would be quite happy just to have enough for survival.
apterous.org
Economics is not zero sum.
In every voluntary captilistic transaction, both parties are winners, the purchaser gets something he values more than the money he gave up, and the seller gets an amount of money he values more than the good he gave up to get it.
Win-Win. Everything isn't zero sum.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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."
The best part about genetic turkeys:
Did you catch that? I wonder if this research is applicable in humans too!
What's wrong, A-cup? Jealous?
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
Thankyou for highighting the real cause of world hunger. I thought I was going to have to write a post myself. Well I will expand on what you said anyway.
it has been shown time and time again that the cause of world hunger isnt the lack of production, but in fact the lack of distribution due to corruption, civil unrest and war, and high levels of subsidies in both the US and Europe that make it impossible for countries out side these areas to compete and hence develop their own agriculture.
Being forced to open their markets to subsidied produce from Europe and the US via pressure from the world bank, local farmers are thus unable to sell their own cash crops at a fair price. This has happened with nut growers, coffee, corn and many others. You thought the war on terror is expensive? The US will spend $180 Billion over 10 years from 2002.
Infact, GM products increase the likelyhood of starvation in the third world, because now the farmers are forced to buy expensive seed stocks and breeding animals from the owners of the GM patents (usually Monsanto) instead of being able to resow part of last year's crop, or if they try to continue in the traditional manner, they face competition in a heavily subsidies market. Farming only becomes ecconomically viable for "big agriculture".
More here
Socialism isn't "evil". It's just impractical with the human psyche. Most of us want to be "better" than the next guy. We want a better stereo, a better car, or a better house than the Joneses down the street. To get these things some are willing to work harder than others around us. When you introduce wealth redistribution, or socialism, it can, and usually does, take away the incentive to work hard. This stiffles production and innovation. And you will always get a few in power who will take a great deal more than the "equal" portion everyone else gets (Soviet Union, China, Cuba, N. Korea, by no means did/does the ruling party live like the populace). Socialism doesn't work because we are human, not because there are a few "evil" rich people. Ah well, an off topic rant for the holiday.
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.'"