This will undoubtedly induce all sorts of railing about both the government and climate, but this step was actually recommended by the National Academies of Science, and I'm happy that it's being seriously considered. The NAS issued in a report that, distilled down, says that we're already paying for climate science, but the info generated by that work isn't reaching the people who need it most, like the ones that have to manage water supplies in the desert southwest. When those people do find the research, it's typically not structured in a way that's especially useful to them. (For a more elaborate summary of the report, see here - full disclosure, i wrote that).
So, this is largely an attempt to take information we're already producing (the government has paid for climate research for a long time through NOAA and the NSF) and make it useful.
Wow, way to get a bunch of stuff wrong. I was especially struck by this: "we actually see all varieties of viruses, monera, protista, fungi, plants, invertibrates and vertebrates show up in the fossil record all at the same time"
Could you explain how to find a fossil of a virus?
And, incidentally, none of those things appeared in the fossil record at the same time. I see that getting your facts straight is optional.
You know, you might want to consider reading the review that this story's based on, since it came up there:
"An entire section of the book is devoted to Discovery Fellow Michael Behe's contention that complex, multiprotein systems cannot evolve, a concept called "irreducible complexity." Again, PubMed reveals no significant presence of this concept in the scientific literature. There are 18 papers, only three of which address it directly; all of them conclude that "irreducibly complex" systems can evolve. Indeed, scientists have proposed at least three mechanisms by which irreducibly complex systems can evolve, any one of which would invalidate Behe's contention that they can't. EE mentions only one of these, and again concludes that nobody really knows what's going on."
I realize that asking someone to read the linked piece is a bit much, especially given that it's more than a page long, but it might be a good idea to do so before you stick your foot in your mouth. Reading Behe's cross examination at Dover would also be useful.
Well, what i was trying to say is that no drug company pursues anything without knowing the molecules it targets, the role they play in the cell, etc. It's doubtful that the FDA would approve the testing of a drug if all the company came up with is "we dump it on cells, and it does X, but we have no idea why."
You're absolutely correct that this sort of knowledge isn't often that deep - we know what serotonin reuptake inhibitors do on the biochemical level, but what that means for the brain is pretty hazy. But there's still a large gap between this sort of shallow knowledge and the "well, it came out of a datamining session" level of understanding.
Whoever wrote the summary of the story on Ars had a bad day. The figure in Joules is right, but it came when the energy hit the surface of the existing star, not whatever remnant remains of the core.
"Largely settled matters" turned out to be a point we could have put more time into when writing this, as i see a lot of people here misinterpreting it.
Many experiments have looked into the existence of structures in water. All the evidence indicates that they are small, and last on the order of picoseconds. Because of that body of data, science can operate as if the lack of stable structures in water were a settled matter.
Now, there's nothing wrong with gathering data to unsettle that matter; science often progresses that way. Find flaws in the initial experiments, find a new method for measuring structures, etc. You'd probably have a hard time getting the work funded in the first place, but the data will eventually win out.
Homeopaths are not unsettling the matter - they're ignoring it completely. Without bothering to gather evidence to show that large, stable structures exist in water, homeopaths assume they exist simply because they need them to exist. In that sense, they are ignoring a settled issue, based on a large body of evidence. .
Hopefully, that explanation is a bit more clear, and someone will find it hidden here among the comments...
The press release this story is based on is absolutely terrible, in that it's using a definition of "functional" that i can only describe as bizarre. The discovery in question is that much more of the genome is copied into RNA than we'd realized. According to the story, that makes it "functional."
In reality, it only shifts the issue: we now have tons of RNA with no apparent function. That RNA is in the exact same situation that junk DNA was - in essence, we now have a junk RNA question. If that RNA turns out to be nothing more than a byproduct of the RNA copying mechanism, then it truly will be junk. If it is junk, what does that mean for the underlying DNA? Is it magically not junk, despite producing nothing of use?
Until we know whether these RNAs perform some function, the talk of "no junk DNA" is little more than overinterpretation and hype.
Actually, my understanding was that astronomers are suggesting that this may be the first observed case of a type of supernova called pair-instability. The actual prediction of pair-instability supernovae was made decades ago - it's more that observations are catching up with predictions.
So, you seem to have gotten this exactly backwards.
As a bit of reading should also make clear, the reason that observations of this type of supernova are rare is that the conditions that favored the formation of stars capable of exploding this way have become rare as the universe has aged. They are expected to be far more common in the early universe, and it's hoped that the next generation of space telescope will be capable of viewing them (as it will see further, and thus earlier, into the universe).
Did you see the electric universe team? One retired professor of engineering. One guy who claims "university training" in astronomy. A "physicist" who dropped out of grad school because "the lack of curiosity and the frequent hostility toward this challenge to mainstream science convinced Thornhill to pursue an independent path outside academia." The rest appear to be comparative mythologists.
This is the crew that's calling modern astronomers crippled by ignorance? Excuse me while i die laughing...
Your response depends on the assumption that changes in the frequency of genes within a larger population is not an example of evolution. Population genetics, as a field, would like to disagree. Evolution does not presuppose a specific source of useful variations. In most cases, they do occur without the benefits of horizontal gene transfer, and their origin involves one type of evolutionary study. But the spread of favorable variations is also an evolutionary process, and one that does not assume anything about their origins.
It's ironic that in light of the recent analysis of the use of the term "evolution" covered here on slashdot that the summary would suggest that the bacteria will "develop a resistance to these drugs." Resistance to the drugs will will evolve, if we're to use the proper term for the process.
As the original article in that earlier discussion noted, if we'd use the appropriate term when discussing these issues, it's more likely that people will realize that understanding evolution is essential to understand this and a variety of other public health issues, such as emerging diseases, cancer, etc. And maybe, just maybe, science classes would be a touch more likely to teach science without winding up in the court system.
One google search brings us: "Morano works under Senator James Inhofe, majority chairman of the committee."
Inhofe is the senator who called human influence on climate one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated, and used his former chairmanship to throw all sorts of unsubstantiated claims into the limelight. I would assume that his staff have just as much credibility.
I marked you troll not because your logic was faulty, but because your post was nothing more than toying with semantics in an attempt to generate a response. Creationism may fit the common definition of theory, in that it is a hunch that some find appealing. In no way is it functionally equivalent to a scientific theory, such as evolution. Creationism has sought to advance itself primarily via the political arena, and therefore fits the common definition of ideology. Evolution, in contrast, only fits the formal definition of ideology, in that it is an organized structure of concepts.
By freely mixing common and formal definitions in your statements and failing to note what the differences are, you've essentially written something devoid of content.
You do realize that the kernel and its driver kit are open sourced, and the developer tools and SDK for driver development are a free download (with registration)? What sort of embracing are you looking for?
"Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot, he knows his molecular biology, and he raises some valid points. " Clearly, you haven't read his cross examination during the dover trial ( check here: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/intelligen tdesigncase/dovertrialtranscripts.htm). He may know his molecular biology, but he seems to have a few issues with reality in general.
This is another example of the mistaken belief of many that evolution addresses the origin of life. It does not. It explains the diversity of life, not its origin.
Read Daniel for the whole revived Roman Empire piece that corresponds to the EU today. Which part of the Roman Empire corresponds to Norway? How about Ireland?
The irony to your post is that one of the things they didn't borrow from any version of Unix is their driver model. IOKit, which uses embedded C++ to bring inheritance to driver coding, is unique to the Darwin kernel.
It's fine if you're willing to accept being charged for a repackaging of your own work as part of a commercial product. You're more than welcome to allow that, but i'm not, and Creative Commons has a license (non-commercial attribution) that fits my tastes nicely.
I'm assuming the intruction set for the cell processor is a superset of the existing PowerPC processors
That's funny - i'd assumed that something with such low power consumption was only implementing a subset of the instructions of something like the 970. A lot of the stuff i've seen about the Cell seems to confirm this.
That's not to say that OS-X can't be ported, but it's going to be more work than you would think. GCC will almost certainly appear on Cell and that's what Apple uses. But to speed the ObjC runtime, Apple's implemented a bunch of it in machine code. Also, they've done a lot of their graphic system using Altivec, which may not directly translate to the Cell's vector instructions. Performance would suffer badly if Altivec wasn't used.
I'd expect that Darwin would port fairly easily, though, which might make for a good start and increase Apple's temptation to port the whole thing.
before we entered the current ice-age (we're in an interglacial at the moment, technically still an ice age).
I"m sorry, i've got to call you on this one. For much of its recent history, the earth's been in repeated warming/cooling cycles. If you mean to include all recent glacial and interglacial periods as "technically still an ice age", then to get to a pre-glacial period, i'm pretty sure you have to go back to before the emergence of homo erectus, much less modern humans.
There are ways to square the Atlantis myth with established past events - this just isn't one of them.
I think NeXT never made it out of the 3.x series in terms of BSD capabilities. Apple was certainly way behind BSD when they first released OS-X (but damn, they caught up fast), and i think it took to 10.2 to get up to speed with the 4.x series.
I can't remember what BSD came for free as part of Mach - it may be NeXT was really lazy about this and never updated the BSD from the Mach default.
Yeah, Power5. Not very affordable, but very much next generation. And i'd bet money there's a Power6, but wouldn't place such a bet on Itanic III. Or should that be Itanic !!!?
Re:Core Data = good idea, weak storage
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Basically, that capacity's not there because Apple doesn't guarantee that any of the databases that work with these things are going to be installed on a user's system or network - they want to make sure it works for users of a desktop OS. Adding SQLite to a system is damn light weight and doesn't create much in the way of security concerns. The same can't be said of the major SQL databases. Apple's right not to add them as part of the general distribution.
That said, adding that capacity to Server would rock. My guess is that they're just getting things to work in relatively simple situations first before moving on to something like you're suggesting. Adding plugins to Cocoa software is laughably easy - I expect to see extensibility a plugin SDK for CoreData somewhere around 10.4.3 or so...
Slashdot Mirror
This will undoubtedly induce all sorts of railing about both the government and climate, but this step was actually recommended by the National Academies of Science, and I'm happy that it's being seriously considered. The NAS issued in a report that, distilled down, says that we're already paying for climate science, but the info generated by that work isn't reaching the people who need it most, like the ones that have to manage water supplies in the desert southwest. When those people do find the research, it's typically not structured in a way that's especially useful to them. (For a more elaborate summary of the report, see here - full disclosure, i wrote that).
So, this is largely an attempt to take information we're already producing (the government has paid for climate research for a long time through NOAA and the NSF) and make it useful.
Wow, way to get a bunch of stuff wrong. I was especially struck by this:
"we actually see all varieties of viruses, monera, protista, fungi, plants, invertibrates and vertebrates show up in the fossil record all at the same time"
Could you explain how to find a fossil of a virus?
And, incidentally, none of those things appeared in the fossil record at the same time. I see that getting your facts straight is optional.
You know, you might want to consider reading the review that this story's based on, since it came up there:
"An entire section of the book is devoted to Discovery Fellow Michael Behe's contention that complex, multiprotein systems cannot evolve, a concept called "irreducible complexity." Again, PubMed reveals no significant presence of this concept in the scientific literature. There are 18 papers, only three of which address it directly; all of them conclude that "irreducibly complex" systems can evolve. Indeed, scientists have proposed at least three mechanisms by which irreducibly complex systems can evolve, any one of which would invalidate Behe's contention that they can't. EE mentions only one of these, and again concludes that nobody really knows what's going on."
I realize that asking someone to read the linked piece is a bit much, especially given that it's more than a page long, but it might be a good idea to do so before you stick your foot in your mouth. Reading Behe's cross examination at Dover would also be useful.
Well, what i was trying to say is that no drug company pursues anything without knowing the molecules it targets, the role they play in the cell, etc. It's doubtful that the FDA would approve the testing of a drug if all the company came up with is "we dump it on cells, and it does X, but we have no idea why."
You're absolutely correct that this sort of knowledge isn't often that deep - we know what serotonin reuptake inhibitors do on the biochemical level, but what that means for the brain is pretty hazy. But there's still a large gap between this sort of shallow knowledge and the "well, it came out of a datamining session" level of understanding.
Whoever wrote the summary of the story on Ars had a bad day. The figure in Joules is right, but it came when the energy hit the surface of the existing star, not whatever remnant remains of the core.
"Largely settled matters" turned out to be a point we could have put more time into when writing this, as i see a lot of people here misinterpreting it.
Many experiments have looked into the existence of structures in water. All the evidence indicates that they are small, and last on the order of picoseconds. Because of that body of data, science can operate as if the lack of stable structures in water were a settled matter.
Now, there's nothing wrong with gathering data to unsettle that matter; science often progresses that way. Find flaws in the initial experiments, find a new method for measuring structures, etc. You'd probably have a hard time getting the work funded in the first place, but the data will eventually win out.
Homeopaths are not unsettling the matter - they're ignoring it completely. Without bothering to gather evidence to show that large, stable structures exist in water, homeopaths assume they exist simply because they need them to exist. In that sense, they are ignoring a settled issue, based on a large body of evidence. .
Hopefully, that explanation is a bit more clear, and someone will find it hidden here among the comments...
The press release this story is based on is absolutely terrible, in that it's using a definition of "functional" that i can only describe as bizarre. The discovery in question is that much more of the genome is copied into RNA than we'd realized. According to the story, that makes it "functional."
In reality, it only shifts the issue: we now have tons of RNA with no apparent function. That RNA is in the exact same situation that junk DNA was - in essence, we now have a junk RNA question. If that RNA turns out to be nothing more than a byproduct of the RNA copying mechanism, then it truly will be junk. If it is junk, what does that mean for the underlying DNA? Is it magically not junk, despite producing nothing of use?
Until we know whether these RNAs perform some function, the talk of "no junk DNA" is little more than overinterpretation and hype.
Actually, my understanding was that astronomers are suggesting that this may be the first observed case of a type of supernova called pair-instability. The actual prediction of pair-instability supernovae was made decades ago - it's more that observations are catching up with predictions.
So, you seem to have gotten this exactly backwards.
As a bit of reading should also make clear, the reason that observations of this type of supernova are rare is that the conditions that favored the formation of stars capable of exploding this way have become rare as the universe has aged. They are expected to be far more common in the early universe, and it's hoped that the next generation of space telescope will be capable of viewing them (as it will see further, and thus earlier, into the universe).
Did you see the electric universe team? One retired professor of engineering. One guy who claims "university training" in astronomy. A "physicist" who dropped out of grad school because "the lack of curiosity and the frequent hostility toward this challenge to mainstream science convinced Thornhill to pursue an independent path outside academia." The rest appear to be comparative mythologists.
This is the crew that's calling modern astronomers crippled by ignorance? Excuse me while i die laughing...
Your response depends on the assumption that changes in the frequency of genes within a larger population is not an example of evolution. Population genetics, as a field, would like to disagree. Evolution does not presuppose a specific source of useful variations. In most cases, they do occur without the benefits of horizontal gene transfer, and their origin involves one type of evolutionary study. But the spread of favorable variations is also an evolutionary process, and one that does not assume anything about their origins.
It's ironic that in light of the recent analysis of the use of the term "evolution" covered here on slashdot that the summary would suggest that the bacteria will "develop a resistance to these drugs." Resistance to the drugs will will evolve, if we're to use the proper term for the process.
As the original article in that earlier discussion noted, if we'd use the appropriate term when discussing these issues, it's more likely that people will realize that understanding evolution is essential to understand this and a variety of other public health issues, such as emerging diseases, cancer, etc. And maybe, just maybe, science classes would be a touch more likely to teach science without winding up in the court system.
One google search brings us:
"Morano works under Senator James Inhofe, majority chairman of the committee."
Inhofe is the senator who called human influence on climate one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated, and used his former chairmanship to throw all sorts of unsubstantiated claims into the limelight. I would assume that his staff have just as much credibility.
I marked you troll not because your logic was faulty, but because your post was nothing more than toying with semantics in an attempt to generate a response.
Creationism may fit the common definition of theory, in that it is a hunch that some find appealing. In no way is it functionally equivalent to a scientific theory, such as evolution.
Creationism has sought to advance itself primarily via the political arena, and therefore fits the common definition of ideology. Evolution, in contrast, only fits the formal definition of ideology, in that it is an organized structure of concepts.
By freely mixing common and formal definitions in your statements and failing to note what the differences are, you've essentially written something devoid of content.
You do realize that the kernel and its driver kit are open sourced, and the developer tools and SDK for driver development are a free download (with registration)? What sort of embracing are you looking for?
"Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot, he knows his molecular biology, and he raises some valid points. "n tdesigncase/dovertrialtranscripts.htm). He may know his molecular biology, but he seems to have a few issues with reality in general.
Clearly, you haven't read his cross examination during the dover trial ( check here: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/intellige
This is another example of the mistaken belief of many that evolution addresses the origin of life. It does not. It explains the diversity of life, not its origin.
Read Daniel for the whole revived Roman Empire piece that corresponds to the EU today.
Which part of the Roman Empire corresponds to Norway? How about Ireland?
The irony to your post is that one of the things they didn't borrow from any version of Unix is their driver model. IOKit, which uses embedded C++ to bring inheritance to driver coding, is unique to the Darwin kernel.
It's fine if you're willing to accept being charged for a repackaging of your own work as part of a commercial product. You're more than welcome to allow that, but i'm not, and Creative Commons has a license (non-commercial attribution) that fits my tastes nicely.
I'm assuming the intruction set for the cell processor is a superset of the existing PowerPC processors
That's funny - i'd assumed that something with such low power consumption was only implementing a subset of the instructions of something like the 970. A lot of the stuff i've seen about the Cell seems to confirm this.
That's not to say that OS-X can't be ported, but it's going to be more work than you would think. GCC will almost certainly appear on Cell and that's what Apple uses. But to speed the ObjC runtime, Apple's implemented a bunch of it in machine code. Also, they've done a lot of their graphic system using Altivec, which may not directly translate to the Cell's vector instructions. Performance would suffer badly if Altivec wasn't used.
I'd expect that Darwin would port fairly easily, though, which might make for a good start and increase Apple's temptation to port the whole thing.
JT
before we entered the current ice-age (we're in an interglacial at the moment, technically still an ice age).
I"m sorry, i've got to call you on this one. For much of its recent history, the earth's been in repeated warming/cooling cycles. If you mean to include all recent glacial and interglacial periods as "technically still an ice age", then to get to a pre-glacial period, i'm pretty sure you have to go back to before the emergence of homo erectus, much less modern humans.
There are ways to square the Atlantis myth with established past events - this just isn't one of them.
JT
I think NeXT never made it out of the 3.x series in terms of BSD capabilities. Apple was certainly way behind BSD when they first released OS-X (but damn, they caught up fast), and i think it took to 10.2 to get up to speed with the 4.x series.
I can't remember what BSD came for free as part of Mach - it may be NeXT was really lazy about this and never updated the BSD from the Mach default.
JT
Yeah, Power5. Not very affordable, but very much next generation. And i'd bet money there's a Power6, but wouldn't place such a bet on Itanic III. Or should that be Itanic !!!?
Basically, that capacity's not there because Apple doesn't guarantee that any of the databases that work with these things are going to be installed on a user's system or network - they want to make sure it works for users of a desktop OS. Adding SQLite to a system is damn light weight and doesn't create much in the way of security concerns. The same can't be said of the major SQL databases. Apple's right not to add them as part of the general distribution.
That said, adding that capacity to Server would rock. My guess is that they're just getting things to work in relatively simple situations first before moving on to something like you're suggesting. Adding plugins to Cocoa software is laughably easy - I expect to see extensibility a plugin SDK for CoreData somewhere around 10.4.3 or so...
JT
'cause Tab is really helpful in Photoshop....