I imagine they can do it in the time they say. I also imagine the results are very simple, like looking at one STR sequence and counting how many lengths of it are in the person's genome in a process similar to qPCR, less RFLP/southern, as parent seems to think. Despite what TFA might imply, I don't think there's endonuclease digestion involved. I may be wrong, and they could have a really, really fast breifcase thermocycler making this work. Maybe, doubt it.
1. get cells = blood and semen. yum. In fact, I'd infer this kit is probably a "semen-only" deal in practice, which makes isolating the DNA that much easier, since semen is largely DNA.
2. isolate DNA. Do it yourself, kids! (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/extraction/) 2-5 minutes with a kit.
3. PCR. Here's where things get interesting. What are their primers? I think they're using 5-10 nucleotide STR sequences that are already conjugated to a fluorescent dye. Since STRs for human identification use are just, according to wikipedia, 4-5 STRs (10-50 nucleotides) long, each cycle can probably be as short as 30 seconds. With ramping the temperatures we can call that 1 minute per cycle. How many cycles do we need? 10 cycles gives us 2^10 copies of the original STR, that's (biologist math)1000 copies(/biologist math). Add 2 minutes for our hot-start polymerase, and that's 12 minutes for PCR. Whoo! It well may be less, i.e. shorter elongation, fewer cycles. This is where they're claiming to save time, so who knows.
4. electrophoresis. Undoubtedly capillary, you can see it in the photo (at least I can), and since we're looking at stuff that's only 75 nucleotides max, can be done very quickly. I don't really know capillary gel electrophoresis, but it apparently kicks the shit out of slab gel electrophoresis: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=330505. We'll call that 10 minutes, lol. Could be a bit more? Balances with the PCR.
5. Of course, we added a 10-100 nucleotide standard conjugated to a different fluorescent species from the primers (i.e. the primers glow green and the standard glows red), so we can use our shitty little built-in 2-wavelength spectrophotometer to see where our unknown sample's bands are.
And now we have our data! And that only took... 25 minutes! Of course, this isn't a full-blown RFLP, like parent seems to assume. But just for doing a quick-and-dirty count of STRs, this could work. That's how I'd do it. Maybe I just invented a competing type of kit, lol. In any event, looking at the picture, I get the feeling their pipettes are crap.
Note this doesn't show how many repeats of a given legth the accused has, so the asshole could have 3 5-repeat ones and 2 4-repeat, and the machine would show that as being the same as a person with 1 of each. Also, they may use more fluorescent dyes to look at more STR sequences without too much difficulty. But in general, the samples will be unclean at best, total crap more often than they'll like to admit, and, in the end, only good as a blood-type-and-then-some test. How juries will react to this, I don't know.
To get even farther from parent, the real threat to your privacy is coming from gene chips, the next generation of sequencing technology. This kit is comparatively rudamentary, and obviously expensive. Yet more overhyped crap, whee!
Yeah, the arguments in TFA were dumb, but the overall point was right. Ubuntu gives me a crappy little "share a folder" dialogue, then, when it doesn't work, I have to crawl the net to find out how to edit the samba config file. There's no 'ramp' leading from simple, "easy to use" (but non-functional) GUI tools to the steps needed for a tech-inclined non-CS-major to get the thing working. Ubuntu gives a half-functional, efforless setup for Grandma on top of the only-accessible-to-hardcore-geeks core of Linux. As someone in the middle, I can't get simple functionality out of it.
Even the online guides and forum comments jump from stupid-newbie to CS-major levels, leaving me stumped.
I'm a lay user of Ubuntu and I can't get that shit to work. It's five minutes before I'm editing config files and trying to copy files - except I can't, because I don't have permission, leving Ubuntu unusable. I managed to share my drive, but my P2P program mysteriously stopped working after an update.
After a lot of digging, I found out the many directories it's spread across, but I have no idea what to do, even with the forums' advice ("install java in a new directory and point the program there"... OK, I'll "point" it, ponce, WTF?). And even if I did, I couldn't, since the super-secure OS won't let me modify them. And since I'm a simple end user, I'm left doing chown -R 777 whenever I need to tinker (which is often). Hella secure!
Part of it is that the online guides expect things are going to go well. They don't tell you what to do when the inevitable happens and packages don't install right or the system settings GUI doesn't actually modify system settings.
Linux for humans, my ass. Did they even have a human try to use it? Just watch your non-geek cousin try to use the OS for a half day. You'll see a dozen stupid little things that can be changed or explained to make it usable. Instead it seems they're running off some asperger-y ideal of "usability" that holds specific points (e.g. no hand editing config files) above the overall experience that Linux can offer at this stage of it's development.
This root/non-root thing is the same. Why can't I modify my system files when I need to, using the GUI? Why can't I enter a password, instead of just being told I don't have permission? It's so stupid. I - I can't even go on. Fuck this shit, I'll find a PowerMac G4 to hold my storage.
Dude, hate is their culture. Get rid of the hate, and they'd be empty shells. Which would be an improvement, sure. I'm just saying... kinda a poor culture some folks got in this country.
Nobody likes Uncle Scam up in their crotch. But what drives Libertarianism's bizarre economic ideas?
Jost et al (2003) blew up this idea: people choose an ideology to make themselves feel good. So let's talk about Libertarianism as motivated social cognition!
Libertarainism means wallowing in how "smart" you are. You don't need the government to help you, you're smart! You don't need the government to tell you what to put in your body, you're smart! Oh, those pathetic souls voting republicrat, they don't understand. But you do, you're smart!
That's all fine, fine. Who the fuck likes the nanny state, who wants to reward irresponsibility? But then libertarianism turns stupid: radical deregulation, even scrapping the minimum wage, ending all public services that aren't gun-centric, etc.
No, it's stupid. I'm not going to explain it: I cited Jost et al (2003) so I could get to the heart of libertarianism: fuck-you-ism.
The frothing Objectivist side of libertarianism is chock full of nerd rage. It is pure misanthropy. Overweight coders with testosterone poisoning. People with high IQs and the social skills of a busted levee, cursing the shitty world that dragged them into a miserable, lonely existence. An empty life of shame and hatred motivates the economic side of libertarianism and its bizarre ideas of "self reliance" and the "night watchman state," codewords for social-Darwinism and a Banana Republic.
I'm not saying all libertarians are misanthropes. Some just give lip service to the economic side, while piling on the caveats. Some are non-ideological people reasonably sick of the two-party system. But let's not kid ourselves about the dark core of libertarian ideology. Every ideology has its dark core. But libertarianism seems to have a black hole at its center, a hole of loneliness and hate, and that makes me sad.
But I believe that with faith and effort, even the most awkward person can craft a satisfying, flesh-space social life. First, admit your pain. Then realize the universe is full to the brim, and you're swimming in it. Then take that power, that relief, and keep trying different things. Again and again. It'll hurt like a bitch, but eventually you'll get there! If you don't feel the universe to be like I described, try meditating, exercising, joining a spiritual community, etc.
That may sound stupid, but it's the wisdom of the ages. You'll feel so much better once you get to the other side of your pain! Good luck.
Well, we're seeing widespread increase in the amount of material that's classified. Considering it is a "Military-Industrial Complex," you've gotta figure that there's a bigass amount of CYA (that's cover yo' ass) planned into classification policy nowadays... Need to fight this problem throughout government.
A malicious vendor (or a well-placed malicious employee of a vendor lacking sufficient internal controls and external supervision) places a small piece of code in its DREs' video BIOS, such that it will be invoked regularly during ordinary machine operation. This "malware loader" polls a communications device (such as a WiFi or WiMax port, broadband-over-powerline (BPL) port, IrDA port, Ethernet port, proprietary radio receiver, etc.) within the DRE for a signal to begin cheating. The vendor or malicious employee arranges to broadcast this signal during elections in which it/she wishes to cheat.
How can you be so wrong? Open source would completely prevent this!
The feds (who I have no love for, as a leftie who knows what they and the CIA have done to the left over the years - see the CIA's soon-to-be-declassified "family jewels,") are just offering to give university folks a briefing on what a spy looks like. That's OK. Everyone knows universities are hotbeds of espionage. That's not terrorism, not warfare, just trying to steal secrets, pass on information, primarily technical. I fear spies less than muggers and burglars, and I hate the hyper-paranoid national security types. But this is just a list ways you can tell who ISN'T a spy: doesn't have a bunch of money, isn't jetting off every other weekend, isn't hanging around with creepy people of the type who composed this list. It's good information, and people who don't think that espionage happens are silly. It's not a big deal, except in certain cases, and not worth getting worked up about in either direction - making this list or criticizing this list. I just appreciate the paranoid spooks telling me what a spy looks like - they probably know, so it's good information. As for "restricting freedom," this doesn't sound like any sort of policy that's going to be enacted. It's just an informational briefing the feds are offering! Lighten up!
Let's get something clear - even the Cato's support the existence of the national security apparatus which has illegally and consistently pushed this country to the right, as these documents will show. So let's cut the glibbertarian BS: giving people health care isn't going to increase the power of Homeland Security, and destroying the Department of Education isn't going to get the CIA to stop fucking up lefties. But that you want to deny people health care and destroy public education in this country, THAT is a poduct of government intervention.
You ask, but doesn't that show how evil government intervention is and so we should oppose those social programs?
Go back to the top of the comment, genius.
I don't use strawmen. The fact is that most of these "logical" policies "libertarians" promote are originally formulated by think tanks funded by the rich, for the rich, in the interest of creating more inequality by supporting greed and dressing it up as reason. To use your social security example: we can change SS to just go to those that need it, but the electorate has a history of coming to loathe poor people who get government help and destroying programs that aren't universally applied. E.g. welfare, affirmative action. You'd add social security to their ranks with your policies, and set it up for destruction. See what I'm getting at? So you can muck around in your particular logic, your justifications for tax cuts, etc, but YOU'D BE HAPPIER IF YOU JUST SUPPORTED THE WELFARE STATE - because anytime you start trying to grasp you money so tightly that you justify your greed as altruism, you're going against your better nature. It's why you're angry and scared. Find the love, damnit! LOVE! It'll give you something your earnings can't buy.
Behavioral neuroscience has been putting out some interesting findings (look at any issue of Scientific American Mind), even if they are easily distorted and used as excuses for crappy behavior. That includes, IMHO, conservatives who are looking to neuro to justify their worldview - selfishness, selfishness, selfishness. But reality cuts in many ways, and at the end of the day science is going to reflect the whole of human nature expressed across all society's stripes. So while there is plenty of work supporting the reality of selfish, cowardly and lazy citizen that conservatism presupposes, the other side of human nature is becoming equally represented, in research like TFA talks about.
On an even happier note, game theory continues to undercut the "rational economic actor" that underlies the precious free-marketeering so many slashdotters jerk their knees to... All in all, it looks like, while behavioral neuro is going to spawn a thousand shitty covers of Time Magazine ("Are You Hard-Wired to Hate Mexicans?") at the end of the day, a lot of bull is going to get cut, and people will be brought down to earth, de-ideologized. That's good.
Small correction: an intercalating molecule slips between the aromatic bases that are "stacked" in the center of the DNA helix, not the grooves of the helix. Intercalating mutagens are usually aromatic molecules because they like to stack like this.
Just because it isn't the first of its kind doesn't mean it's not special. Computer modelling gives a whole new level of detail on development processes - it's like moving from a light microscope to an electron microscope. It can allow us to vibrantly integrate large amounts of data and move from reductive to synthetic biology. In this case, it has allowed the researches to see the timing of the chemical signals cells send each other to cause them to develop. This information is going to be crucial for getting stem cells into useful treatments for disease. I don't see how you can say that this is nothing special.
Another example of this sort of research can be found at www.computableplant.org, which has a lot of stuff on arabidopsis.
Has anyone seen Neon Genesis Evangelion? That's how BSG should end. NGE went into a very philosophical and trippy space, it continued the characters but dissolved the narrative, and BSG definately has the potential to pull something like that off. So in this scheme finding Earth would be a sort of apocalyptic, reality-shattering event, and one or two of the characters would be left on a black stage working through their philosophical backstory, they talk, one walks off into blackness and another comes, they talk, one walks off into the blackness and another comes, they talk, and so on, and the ideas and meaning build and build. It would work, it would be fitting, they should do it.
It would also make the "I'm a cylon, you're a cylon" bullshit comprehensible.
Quite the victory for navel-gazing morons of the web. A recording industry lobbying group worse then a bunch of war profiteers? Are people really that selfish and stupid nowadays? Gaah! *head explodes*
It's not just/. material, it was at the top of the Financial Times' site. That means there's something important about it. But all I'm getting are a bunch of neoliberal/.ers running apologetics for big capital. Bleh. Does anyone really know what's going on around here?
I'm mostly surprised they're still testing surface proteins. You'd think they'd have taken every bit of what HIV presents to the body, cloned it, and tested it as a vaccine. 25 years of work and they are just now testing this protein? WTF?!
You're wrong. It's not the analysis, the methodology is flawed. The more runs you do the less pronounced the effects of "streaks of luck" on the final data. But the more runs you do, the more whatever lingering bias in your methods will come out. So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch. That effect will come out when you have huge sample sizes, but random effects will disappear. That's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
Still, I'm sad to see them go. A little openmimndedness can make the world much more fun. I mean, they were named after a fruit!
Like right wing radio is going anywhere. That's some typical right-wing reality twisting.
Here's the deal. There are huge numbers of issues that are outside normal "left-wing" discussion that simply can't get covered because of government-corporate lock-ins. Think landmines, and other such awful things that might actually inspire a debate about something more substantive than buttsecks.
Just because CNN is pro-buttsecks doesn't give any balance in a meaninful manner - if people would check out things like projectcensored.org or prwatch.org they'd move past the silly "truth must be in the middle" thinking. There is a bias in the media that goes beyond right or left - it is institutional.
So I say it's typical for a rightwinger to play the aggreived card, call the media "leftist," and then demand that we don't let real alternative ideas be put forward on OUR spectrum, even as the media consolidates and consolidates. Ask some questions!
Not. Racialism back around and before WWII, or Lysenkoism in the USSR.
Moreover, there's a difference between data having political implications, and data that's manipulated for political ends. It's the difference between being a citizen-scientist and being a partisan hack.
You're shifting the context. The Constitution wasn't made to govern under the British, it was made to govern as part of a federal system. So your argument (the reinterpretation of the second amendment to apply to members of militias doesn't make sense because who'd want only British militias having guns) is flawed, since the Constitution is talking about militias within a federal system.
So my understanding, like yours, is that the second amendment is designed to allow states and individuals (not under direct government authority like the nat. guard) to have guns for the purpose of forming militias that can take on the more centralized parts of the government if they become tyrannical. But the words "well regulated" are still in the amendment. You're saying that restricting the ability of gangbangers and yahoos to pack heat outside of any defense organization is unconstitutional, but that is certainly more debatable than your "test" indicates, since the Constitution and these DC lawyers are talking about a People's militia, and you're talking about a British one.
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I imagine they can do it in the time they say. I also imagine the results are very simple, like looking at one STR sequence and counting how many lengths of it are in the person's genome in a process similar to qPCR, less RFLP/southern, as parent seems to think. Despite what TFA might imply, I don't think there's endonuclease digestion involved. I may be wrong, and they could have a really, really fast breifcase thermocycler making this work. Maybe, doubt it.
I'm not any kind of STR expert, but from cribbing Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_tandem_repeat, here's my impression of what's going on with this kit:
1. get cells = blood and semen. yum. In fact, I'd infer this kit is probably a "semen-only" deal in practice, which makes isolating the DNA that much easier, since semen is largely DNA.
2. isolate DNA. Do it yourself, kids! (http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/extraction/) 2-5 minutes with a kit.
3. PCR. Here's where things get interesting. What are their primers? I think they're using 5-10 nucleotide STR sequences that are already conjugated to a fluorescent dye. Since STRs for human identification use are just, according to wikipedia, 4-5 STRs (10-50 nucleotides) long, each cycle can probably be as short as 30 seconds. With ramping the temperatures we can call that 1 minute per cycle. How many cycles do we need? 10 cycles gives us 2^10 copies of the original STR, that's (biologist math)1000 copies(/biologist math). Add 2 minutes for our hot-start polymerase, and that's 12 minutes for PCR. Whoo! It well may be less, i.e. shorter elongation, fewer cycles. This is where they're claiming to save time, so who knows.
4. electrophoresis. Undoubtedly capillary, you can see it in the photo (at least I can), and since we're looking at stuff that's only 75 nucleotides max, can be done very quickly. I don't really know capillary gel electrophoresis, but it apparently kicks the shit out of slab gel electrophoresis: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=330505. We'll call that 10 minutes, lol. Could be a bit more? Balances with the PCR.
5. Of course, we added a 10-100 nucleotide standard conjugated to a different fluorescent species from the primers (i.e. the primers glow green and the standard glows red), so we can use our shitty little built-in 2-wavelength spectrophotometer to see where our unknown sample's bands are.
And now we have our data! And that only took... 25 minutes! Of course, this isn't a full-blown RFLP, like parent seems to assume. But just for doing a quick-and-dirty count of STRs, this could work. That's how I'd do it. Maybe I just invented a competing type of kit, lol. In any event, looking at the picture, I get the feeling their pipettes are crap.
Note this doesn't show how many repeats of a given legth the accused has, so the asshole could have 3 5-repeat ones and 2 4-repeat, and the machine would show that as being the same as a person with 1 of each. Also, they may use more fluorescent dyes to look at more STR sequences without too much difficulty. But in general, the samples will be unclean at best, total crap more often than they'll like to admit, and, in the end, only good as a blood-type-and-then-some test. How juries will react to this, I don't know.
To get even farther from parent, the real threat to your privacy is coming from gene chips, the next generation of sequencing technology. This kit is comparatively rudamentary, and obviously expensive. Yet more overhyped crap, whee!
Yeah, the arguments in TFA were dumb, but the overall point was right. Ubuntu gives me a crappy little "share a folder" dialogue, then, when it doesn't work, I have to crawl the net to find out how to edit the samba config file. There's no 'ramp' leading from simple, "easy to use" (but non-functional) GUI tools to the steps needed for a tech-inclined non-CS-major to get the thing working. Ubuntu gives a half-functional, efforless setup for Grandma on top of the only-accessible-to-hardcore-geeks core of Linux. As someone in the middle, I can't get simple functionality out of it.
Even the online guides and forum comments jump from stupid-newbie to CS-major levels, leaving me stumped.
It doesn't matter.
I'm a lay user of Ubuntu and I can't get that shit to work. It's five minutes before I'm editing config files and trying to copy files - except I can't, because I don't have permission, leving Ubuntu unusable. I managed to share my drive, but my P2P program mysteriously stopped working after an update.
After a lot of digging, I found out the many directories it's spread across, but I have no idea what to do, even with the forums' advice ("install java in a new directory and point the program there"... OK, I'll "point" it, ponce, WTF?). And even if I did, I couldn't, since the super-secure OS won't let me modify them. And since I'm a simple end user, I'm left doing chown -R 777 whenever I need to tinker (which is often). Hella secure!
Part of it is that the online guides expect things are going to go well. They don't tell you what to do when the inevitable happens and packages don't install right or the system settings GUI doesn't actually modify system settings.
Linux for humans, my ass. Did they even have a human try to use it? Just watch your non-geek cousin try to use the OS for a half day. You'll see a dozen stupid little things that can be changed or explained to make it usable. Instead it seems they're running off some asperger-y ideal of "usability" that holds specific points (e.g. no hand editing config files) above the overall experience that Linux can offer at this stage of it's development.
This root/non-root thing is the same. Why can't I modify my system files when I need to, using the GUI? Why can't I enter a password, instead of just being told I don't have permission? It's so stupid. I - I can't even go on. Fuck this shit, I'll find a PowerMac G4 to hold my storage.
Dude, hate is their culture. Get rid of the hate, and they'd be empty shells. Which would be an improvement, sure. I'm just saying... kinda a poor culture some folks got in this country.
Nobody likes Uncle Scam up in their crotch. But what drives Libertarianism's bizarre economic ideas?
Jost et al (2003) blew up this idea: people choose an ideology to make themselves feel good. So let's talk about Libertarianism as motivated social cognition!
Libertarainism means wallowing in how "smart" you are. You don't need the government to help you, you're smart! You don't need the government to tell you what to put in your body, you're smart! Oh, those pathetic souls voting republicrat, they don't understand. But you do, you're smart!
That's all fine, fine. Who the fuck likes the nanny state, who wants to reward irresponsibility? But then libertarianism turns stupid: radical deregulation, even scrapping the minimum wage, ending all public services that aren't gun-centric, etc.
No, it's stupid. I'm not going to explain it: I cited Jost et al (2003) so I could get to the heart of libertarianism: fuck-you-ism.
The frothing Objectivist side of libertarianism is chock full of nerd rage. It is pure misanthropy. Overweight coders with testosterone poisoning. People with high IQs and the social skills of a busted levee, cursing the shitty world that dragged them into a miserable, lonely existence. An empty life of shame and hatred motivates the economic side of libertarianism and its bizarre ideas of "self reliance" and the "night watchman state," codewords for social-Darwinism and a Banana Republic.
I'm not saying all libertarians are misanthropes. Some just give lip service to the economic side, while piling on the caveats. Some are non-ideological people reasonably sick of the two-party system. But let's not kid ourselves about the dark core of libertarian ideology. Every ideology has its dark core. But libertarianism seems to have a black hole at its center, a hole of loneliness and hate, and that makes me sad.
But I believe that with faith and effort, even the most awkward person can craft a satisfying, flesh-space social life. First, admit your pain. Then realize the universe is full to the brim, and you're swimming in it. Then take that power, that relief, and keep trying different things. Again and again. It'll hurt like a bitch, but eventually you'll get there! If you don't feel the universe to be like I described, try meditating, exercising, joining a spiritual community, etc.
That may sound stupid, but it's the wisdom of the ages. You'll feel so much better once you get to the other side of your pain! Good luck.
Well, we're seeing widespread increase in the amount of material that's classified. Considering it is a "Military-Industrial Complex," you've gotta figure that there's a bigass amount of CYA (that's cover yo' ass) planned into classification policy nowadays... Need to fight this problem throughout government.
Haha, conservative paranoia, mod parent up!
"damn libral medya makin noise bout nukular waste spills - bs just tryin sabatage th troops arrr"
you "smell an ulterior motive"? seriously?
I agree that the dems are acting like a bunch of wimps...
As they oberved in "The Wire," politicians will always let you down.
But!
Check out The Daily Howler for a taste of what keeps the dems in line.
We need to change the discourse in this country if we want the dems to be able to do anything real without getting tarred and feathered.
More than a haircut: He actually knows what's going on and what to do!
The feds (who I have no love for, as a leftie who knows what they and the CIA have done to the left over the years - see the CIA's soon-to-be-declassified "family jewels,") are just offering to give university folks a briefing on what a spy looks like. That's OK. Everyone knows universities are hotbeds of espionage. That's not terrorism, not warfare, just trying to steal secrets, pass on information, primarily technical. I fear spies less than muggers and burglars, and I hate the hyper-paranoid national security types. But this is just a list ways you can tell who ISN'T a spy: doesn't have a bunch of money, isn't jetting off every other weekend, isn't hanging around with creepy people of the type who composed this list. It's good information, and people who don't think that espionage happens are silly. It's not a big deal, except in certain cases, and not worth getting worked up about in either direction - making this list or criticizing this list. I just appreciate the paranoid spooks telling me what a spy looks like - they probably know, so it's good information. As for "restricting freedom," this doesn't sound like any sort of policy that's going to be enacted. It's just an informational briefing the feds are offering! Lighten up!
Let's get something clear - even the Cato's support the existence of the national security apparatus which has illegally and consistently pushed this country to the right, as these documents will show. So let's cut the glibbertarian BS: giving people health care isn't going to increase the power of Homeland Security, and destroying the Department of Education isn't going to get the CIA to stop fucking up lefties. But that you want to deny people health care and destroy public education in this country, THAT is a poduct of government intervention. You ask, but doesn't that show how evil government intervention is and so we should oppose those social programs? Go back to the top of the comment, genius.
I don't use strawmen. The fact is that most of these "logical" policies "libertarians" promote are originally formulated by think tanks funded by the rich, for the rich, in the interest of creating more inequality by supporting greed and dressing it up as reason. To use your social security example: we can change SS to just go to those that need it, but the electorate has a history of coming to loathe poor people who get government help and destroying programs that aren't universally applied. E.g. welfare, affirmative action. You'd add social security to their ranks with your policies, and set it up for destruction. See what I'm getting at? So you can muck around in your particular logic, your justifications for tax cuts, etc, but YOU'D BE HAPPIER IF YOU JUST SUPPORTED THE WELFARE STATE - because anytime you start trying to grasp you money so tightly that you justify your greed as altruism, you're going against your better nature. It's why you're angry and scared. Find the love, damnit! LOVE! It'll give you something your earnings can't buy.
Behavioral neuroscience has been putting out some interesting findings (look at any issue of Scientific American Mind), even if they are easily distorted and used as excuses for crappy behavior. That includes, IMHO, conservatives who are looking to neuro to justify their worldview - selfishness, selfishness, selfishness. But reality cuts in many ways, and at the end of the day science is going to reflect the whole of human nature expressed across all society's stripes. So while there is plenty of work supporting the reality of selfish, cowardly and lazy citizen that conservatism presupposes, the other side of human nature is becoming equally represented, in research like TFA talks about.
On an even happier note, game theory continues to undercut the "rational economic actor" that underlies the precious free-marketeering so many slashdotters jerk their knees to... All in all, it looks like, while behavioral neuro is going to spawn a thousand shitty covers of Time Magazine ("Are You Hard-Wired to Hate Mexicans?") at the end of the day, a lot of bull is going to get cut, and people will be brought down to earth, de-ideologized. That's good.
Small correction: an intercalating molecule slips between the aromatic bases that are "stacked" in the center of the DNA helix, not the grooves of the helix. Intercalating mutagens are usually aromatic molecules because they like to stack like this.
Just because it isn't the first of its kind doesn't mean it's not special. Computer modelling gives a whole new level of detail on development processes - it's like moving from a light microscope to an electron microscope. It can allow us to vibrantly integrate large amounts of data and move from reductive to synthetic biology. In this case, it has allowed the researches to see the timing of the chemical signals cells send each other to cause them to develop. This information is going to be crucial for getting stem cells into useful treatments for disease. I don't see how you can say that this is nothing special.
Another example of this sort of research can be found at www.computableplant.org, which has a lot of stuff on arabidopsis.
Has anyone seen Neon Genesis Evangelion? That's how BSG should end. NGE went into a very philosophical and trippy space, it continued the characters but dissolved the narrative, and BSG definately has the potential to pull something like that off. So in this scheme finding Earth would be a sort of apocalyptic, reality-shattering event, and one or two of the characters would be left on a black stage working through their philosophical backstory, they talk, one walks off into blackness and another comes, they talk, one walks off into the blackness and another comes, they talk, and so on, and the ideas and meaning build and build. It would work, it would be fitting, they should do it.
It would also make the "I'm a cylon, you're a cylon" bullshit comprehensible.
Quite the victory for navel-gazing morons of the web. A recording industry lobbying group worse then a bunch of war profiteers? Are people really that selfish and stupid nowadays? Gaah! *head explodes*
It's not just /. material, it was at the top of the Financial Times' site. That means there's something important about it. But all I'm getting are a bunch of neoliberal /.ers running apologetics for big capital. Bleh. Does anyone really know what's going on around here?
I'm mostly surprised they're still testing surface proteins. You'd think they'd have taken every bit of what HIV presents to the body, cloned it, and tested it as a vaccine. 25 years of work and they are just now testing this protein? WTF?!
You're wrong. It's not the analysis, the methodology is flawed. The more runs you do the less pronounced the effects of "streaks of luck" on the final data. But the more runs you do, the more whatever lingering bias in your methods will come out. So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch. That effect will come out when you have huge sample sizes, but random effects will disappear. That's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
Still, I'm sad to see them go. A little openmimndedness can make the world much more fun. I mean, they were named after a fruit!
Like right wing radio is going anywhere. That's some typical right-wing reality twisting.
Here's the deal. There are huge numbers of issues that are outside normal "left-wing" discussion that simply can't get covered because of government-corporate lock-ins. Think landmines, and other such awful things that might actually inspire a debate about something more substantive than buttsecks.
Just because CNN is pro-buttsecks doesn't give any balance in a meaninful manner - if people would check out things like projectcensored.org or prwatch.org they'd move past the silly "truth must be in the middle" thinking. There is a bias in the media that goes beyond right or left - it is institutional.
So I say it's typical for a rightwinger to play the aggreived card, call the media "leftist," and then demand that we don't let real alternative ideas be put forward on OUR spectrum, even as the media consolidates and consolidates. Ask some questions!
RTFA
Not. Racialism back around and before WWII, or Lysenkoism in the USSR. Moreover, there's a difference between data having political implications, and data that's manipulated for political ends. It's the difference between being a citizen-scientist and being a partisan hack.
You're shifting the context. The Constitution wasn't made to govern under the British, it was made to govern as part of a federal system. So your argument (the reinterpretation of the second amendment to apply to members of militias doesn't make sense because who'd want only British militias having guns) is flawed, since the Constitution is talking about militias within a federal system.
So my understanding, like yours, is that the second amendment is designed to allow states and individuals (not under direct government authority like the nat. guard) to have guns for the purpose of forming militias that can take on the more centralized parts of the government if they become tyrannical. But the words "well regulated" are still in the amendment. You're saying that restricting the ability of gangbangers and yahoos to pack heat outside of any defense organization is unconstitutional, but that is certainly more debatable than your "test" indicates, since the Constitution and these DC lawyers are talking about a People's militia, and you're talking about a British one.