The problem is that most true stories have holes in them as well. I have a pretty decent memory, but odds are that if you interrogated me about any event in my life that happened more than, oh, say, a week ago, I'd have forgotten some details -- and if I were under pressure (as implied by the word "interrogation") I'd probably make things up to fill in those details, and the things I'd make up wouldn't necessarily be consistent. This is particularly true of stressful events, of course, which is why eyewitness testimony in court, despite being the gold standard for most cases, is really quite unreliable.
I suppose the standard ignorant slashdot reply should be something like, "language changes, get used to it" or "if enough people do it, then it's OK".
Heh. I admit to mixed feelings on this issue -- languages do change over time, and we wouldn't have anywhere near the combination of simplicity and richness we do have in modern English if we'd held ourselves to arbitrary standards. OTOH (there you go) we need to have some standards in order to be able to communicate effectively, especially as our world grows more complex; Chaucer's English may be lovely, but you wouldn't want to write a scientific paper in it. In this particular case, it's a moral concern rather than one of linguistic purity. I've known a very few people in my life who genuinely deserved the title of "hero" -- I'd rather not see their achievements diminished by casual overuse of the word.
Actually, I'd argue that just being a competent firefighter or cop isn't enough to be considered a hero, and that the word is overused in reference to dangerous professions. And no, I've never been either one -- but I was a medic in Desert Storm, and worked as a civilian EMT in one of the nation's top trauma hospitals, so I do have some perspective on this. In the military, there is a very specific definition of heroism: putting yourself at great personal risk by going above and beyond the call of duty to accomplish the mission.
I think it's fair to apply this definition to dangerous civilian jobs as well. A firefighter who pulls someone out of a burning building, or a cop who busts an armed and dangerous criminal, isn't necessarily going above and beyond; he's doing his job. (OTOH, the specific circumstances may well involve going above and beyond, in which case this is heroism, and should be recognized as such.)
In the case of less dangerous jobs, such as medical research -- yeah, I'd certainly include Salk and the other pioneers of immunization (penicillin was Alexander Fleming, IIRC) especially since they did risk their lives by working with people infected with very dangerous diseases. But the average researcher working in a lab, no matter how competent, shouldn't be called hero unless he does something extraordinary to earn that title. Overuse of the word weakens its meaning, and dishonors those who actually deserve it.
too often scientists will ask themselves "can I do this", instead of "should I do this?"
In Hollywood, that's true. In the real world, most scientists are very concerned about the ethical implications of their work -- more so, in fact, than people in just about any other field.
In other news, this has happened every year since 1990 or thereabouts (definitely pre-Columbine).
Goes back further than that, actually -- I remember this kind of fuss when I was a teenage video-game geek in the early 80's. I was also a D&D geek and a bit of a metalhead, so I was getting it from all sides. Fortunately my parents were too smart to take the hysteria seriously, but some of my friends had really ferocious battles to fight.
I didn't realize that there were people who believed "sic" was an acronym. I've heard "i.e." explained as "in eexample" -- which may account for how often people use "i.e." when they really mean "e.g." -- but "spelling incorrect" is a new one. Human ignorance knows no bounds.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if any term is older than a century or so, it's very unlikely to be an acronym. Port outbound, starboard home? For unlawful carnal knowledge, or fornication under consent of the king? To insure promptness? No, no, no. Acronyms are almost entirely modern, and folk etymology is almost entirely wrong.
HTML? Isn't that a markup language, and not a programming language? How does HTML teach you any programming concepts?
Actually, HTML is a very good thing for people who have never done any programming in their lives to learn, because it does teach what I consider not only a "programming language concept," but the very idea of programming: giving the computer a series of instructions which produce an output noticeably different from the input. This is fundamentally different from the way most people use computers, in which output immediately follows input, and one is obviously a product of the other.
No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and no, learning it won't teach you any of the theoretical basis of programming. But it will teach you how to write something that can meaningfully be called "code," and let you see the results of your work... which was a revelation for me, and for many others. In my case, at least, cobbling together my first pointless, amateurish "this is my homepage hope you like it" Web page led, slowly but quite directly, to a programming career. And I don't think I'm unique in this.
Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?
Short answer: no.;)
Longer answer: first, protein structures are incredibly complex, and in fact it's often much easier to sequence a big protein than to determine its structure. The first can be done (these days) by any half-competent lab tech working with relatively cheap equipment; the second is one of the most demanding applications of the black art of crystallography -- if the protein is amenable to crystallization at all, which many aren't, and if crystallization doesn't change the protein's structure, which it often does. Other methods for determining protein structure exist, but most of them are really Not There Yet.
Second, the degree to which sequence determines structure is an open question. I mean, okay, in broad terms it does; there are only so many possible configurations for any given sequence. The problem is that the number of possible configurations for any protein of more than trivial size is really really big. There are many, many steps between "translation from RNA into polypeptide" and "finished protein" -- the simple fact is that in the cases of most proteins, not only do we not know their complete structures, we don't know how they get to the types of sub-structures we do know they have. It sounds to me like this IBM project is trying to puzzle out the first question, while AFAIK Folding@Home is more interested in the second.
Disclaimer: none of this is really my area of expertise; I'm a genomics guy. So it's quite possible that my answers are out-of-date or just plain wrong. If so, someone please tell me, because I'd like to know.
Isn't it theoretically possible to use a turbojet (or turbofan) to get up to (subsonic combustion) ramjet speed, and then use the ramjet to get up to scramjet speed? Not saying this would be the most practical way to do it, just noting that (I thought) it could be done.
The article only presents one side of the picture, albeit, the slashbot side.
Do you really think that The Economist, one of the most respected news magazines in the world, and one with a generally pro-corporate slant, is actually in the business of presenting "the slashbot side" of arguments?
A more reasonable interpretation, IMNSGDHO, is that when a source that is the very embodiment of suit-think agrees with the generally anti-corporate/. crowd that something is wrong with the way we're currently doing business, that's a pretty good sign that something is indeed wrong.
One way to prevent this, it seems to me, would be to require a very simple condition on any patent application: along with the paper application, you must present a working model. It seems to me that the USPTO used to require this, but then dropped the requirement -- anyone know the history?
Parent post would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Balanced budgets have been a core value of fiscal conservatives, mostly Republican, for decades. But then we had the Clinton surplus followed by the Bush deficit, and now the right-wingers insist that... wait for it... balanced budgets are a bad thing.
If you take that viewpoint, fine... substitute "growing the economy by leaving the money in the hands of the people who earn it" instead of "spending money on schools/healthcare/the environment/etc." The point is, that from both the liberal and libertarian viewpoints, this looks a lot like a boondoggle-in-the-making.
At least this sort of spending will have spin-offs that can be used by everyone else.
Maybe so. OTOH, it won't if either of two things happens: the tech stays classified and thus unavailable for civilian applications, or it's an unworkable mess that lags far behind what's available in the civilian market when it's finally complete. Considering who the major players are, I'd say both outcomes seem likely.
You know, I'd heard that there were people who still didn't understand the difference between intellectual property and physical property, but I'd never seen one in the wild before. Thanks for giving me a look at one of these beasties in its natural habitat.
My bad. How embarrassing. I should've crunched the numbers first.
I will note that if you go a million miles up, you get orbital velocities within the range of modern rifles... but then there are, to put it mildly, other issues to consider.
At low altitude (say, the 100 km that was the goal for the X Prize) that's not necessarily true -- you could have the velocity for n orbits, but lose enough to drag not to make n+1.
For an extreme example of this -- consider the fact that if you fired a bullet from a decent rifle a thousand miles up, it would go into orbit, but obviously bullets don't go into orbit here on the ground.
Rutan's accomplishment was impressive, but as has been pointed out in other discussions, it was essentially a high-flying airplane rather than a true spaceship, and doesn't scale well. Anyone who wins this prize will have built something much more directly applicable to real space travel.
Which isn't to say I don't want Rutan, or someone else whose approach is essentially aviation-based rather than big-boom-straight-up-based, to get it. When I was a kid, I spent endless hours reading my Dad's old 50's sci-fi collection, and somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that a real spaceship has a needle nose and delta wings...
[shrug] I was an 11B because I wanted to be. I knew some pretty dumb guys in the infantry, but also some really smart ones.
'Course, as soon as I could I re-upped as an Air Force medic, because I decided I really liked life's little luxuries such as taking hot showers and eating my meals off a plate. But those two years I spent as a grunt were valuable, and a lot of the REMFs I worked with in the AF could have benefited greatly from the experience. You don't really understand what the service is for until you've seen it from a foxhole, IMO.
Yes, I would, because you can bet that the Titanic II would be the most carefully engineered passenger ship in history.
I flew on 9/11/02. A lot of the people in the airport with me were chattering about how nervous they were. I was thinking that there has probably been no safer day in the entire history of aviation to fly.
Ever see those clips of astronauts constantly exercising? They need to do that keep up their muscles out of atophy. If muscles will atophy for an otherwise active astronaut, don't you think they'll get even worse for a hibernating astronaut?
Slowing down the metabolism slows everything down, including the process of muscle atrophy. You're right, of course, that there's a lot we don't understand about the process -- but if hibernation were the same as bed-rest, then animals that do hibernate would be too weak to move when they woke up. (And yes, being on strict bed-rest for a given period of time produces about the same degree of muscle atrophy and bone density loss as being in microgravity for the same period of time.) Odds are that hibernating astronauts would be in a lot better shape whent they got to Mars than they would be if they were awake the whole time.
A prime example of spin-off technology
on
Hibernating to Mars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Stories like this illustrate why people who say things like "why are we spending all this money on space when we have so many problems to solve here on Earth" need to rethink their arguments. Not only would true hibernation open up voyages to destinations much farther away than Mars, but being able to put humans into hibernation would have enormous medical implications -- imagine hibernating through surgery, or in the case of something incurable, being put into hibernation (thus, persumably, greatly slowing the process of the disease) until a cure is found. Also, the advances necessary to acheive this would lead to a much better understanding of human biology generally, with attendant medical advances we can't necessarily imagine at this point.
The usual counterargument to this is, "But if we spent the money studying ___ for its own sake, we would make the same discoveries, without the overhead of space flight!" This misses the point, IMO; we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't. Space exploration has provided the justification for some of the most important research the world has ever seen -- the reason "space-age technology" has fallen out of favor as an advertising slogan is because the stuff is now so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we no longer think about its origins -- and clearly continues to do so.
Re:Incumbents talk about their record
on
Don't Read My Lips
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· Score: 1
Because Kerry is, indeed, a mediocre Senator (I do wish he'd talk more about his one truly shining moment in the Senate, his one-man crusade to expose Iran-Contra -- but of course that would require a challenge to the sainted memory of Reagan) but Bush is a terrible President. Truly spectacular fuck-ups on Bush's part are a lot more relevant to the election than any of Kerry's mild accomplishments.
If someone robs your house, do you care that the cop who catches him is an asshole? No, because the other guy robbed your house!
I just wish Bin Laden had explicitly endorsed Ted Kennedy's fistpuppet instead of beating around the bush on the topic. It would be good therapy for the American public to have somebody to crush the juice out of, and Bin Laden himself is still, for a while, out of reach.
Bush's policies have been the best spur to al-Qaeda recruitment in the organization's history. Bin Laden wants Bush to win for the same reason that the Mafia wanted Prohibition to continue. Thanks to people like you, he may very well get his wish.
How does it feel to be giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, very true. And "hero" is quite susceptible to agendas, unfortunately.
The problem is that most true stories have holes in them as well. I have a pretty decent memory, but odds are that if you interrogated me about any event in my life that happened more than, oh, say, a week ago, I'd have forgotten some details -- and if I were under pressure (as implied by the word "interrogation") I'd probably make things up to fill in those details, and the things I'd make up wouldn't necessarily be consistent. This is particularly true of stressful events, of course, which is why eyewitness testimony in court, despite being the gold standard for most cases, is really quite unreliable.
I suppose the standard ignorant slashdot reply should be something like, "language changes, get used to it" or "if enough people do it, then it's OK".
Heh. I admit to mixed feelings on this issue -- languages do change over time, and we wouldn't have anywhere near the combination of simplicity and richness we do have in modern English if we'd held ourselves to arbitrary standards. OTOH (there you go) we need to have some standards in order to be able to communicate effectively, especially as our world grows more complex; Chaucer's English may be lovely, but you wouldn't want to write a scientific paper in it. In this particular case, it's a moral concern rather than one of linguistic purity. I've known a very few people in my life who genuinely deserved the title of "hero" -- I'd rather not see their achievements diminished by casual overuse of the word.
Actually, I'd argue that just being a competent firefighter or cop isn't enough to be considered a hero, and that the word is overused in reference to dangerous professions. And no, I've never been either one -- but I was a medic in Desert Storm, and worked as a civilian EMT in one of the nation's top trauma hospitals, so I do have some perspective on this. In the military, there is a very specific definition of heroism: putting yourself at great personal risk by going above and beyond the call of duty to accomplish the mission.
I think it's fair to apply this definition to dangerous civilian jobs as well. A firefighter who pulls someone out of a burning building, or a cop who busts an armed and dangerous criminal, isn't necessarily going above and beyond; he's doing his job. (OTOH, the specific circumstances may well involve going above and beyond, in which case this is heroism, and should be recognized as such.)
In the case of less dangerous jobs, such as medical research -- yeah, I'd certainly include Salk and the other pioneers of immunization (penicillin was Alexander Fleming, IIRC) especially since they did risk their lives by working with people infected with very dangerous diseases. But the average researcher working in a lab, no matter how competent, shouldn't be called hero unless he does something extraordinary to earn that title. Overuse of the word weakens its meaning, and dishonors those who actually deserve it.
too often scientists will ask themselves "can I do this", instead of "should I do this?"
In Hollywood, that's true. In the real world, most scientists are very concerned about the ethical implications of their work -- more so, in fact, than people in just about any other field.
In other news, this has happened every year since 1990 or thereabouts (definitely pre-Columbine).
Goes back further than that, actually -- I remember this kind of fuss when I was a teenage video-game geek in the early 80's. I was also a D&D geek and a bit of a metalhead, so I was getting it from all sides. Fortunately my parents were too smart to take the hysteria seriously, but some of my friends had really ferocious battles to fight.
I didn't realize that there were people who believed "sic" was an acronym. I've heard "i.e." explained as "in eexample" -- which may account for how often people use "i.e." when they really mean "e.g." -- but "spelling incorrect" is a new one. Human ignorance knows no bounds.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if any term is older than a century or so, it's very unlikely to be an acronym. Port outbound, starboard home? For unlawful carnal knowledge, or fornication under consent of the king? To insure promptness? No, no, no. Acronyms are almost entirely modern, and folk etymology is almost entirely wrong.
HTML? Isn't that a markup language, and not a programming language? How does HTML teach you any programming concepts?
... which was a revelation for me, and for many others. In my case, at least, cobbling together my first pointless, amateurish "this is my homepage hope you like it" Web page led, slowly but quite directly, to a programming career. And I don't think I'm unique in this.
Actually, HTML is a very good thing for people who have never done any programming in their lives to learn, because it does teach what I consider not only a "programming language concept," but the very idea of programming: giving the computer a series of instructions which produce an output noticeably different from the input. This is fundamentally different from the way most people use computers, in which output immediately follows input, and one is obviously a product of the other.
No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and no, learning it won't teach you any of the theoretical basis of programming. But it will teach you how to write something that can meaningfully be called "code," and let you see the results of your work
Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?
;)
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: first, protein structures are incredibly complex, and in fact it's often much easier to sequence a big protein than to determine its structure. The first can be done (these days) by any half-competent lab tech working with relatively cheap equipment; the second is one of the most demanding applications of the black art of crystallography -- if the protein is amenable to crystallization at all, which many aren't, and if crystallization doesn't change the protein's structure, which it often does. Other methods for determining protein structure exist, but most of them are really Not There Yet.
Second, the degree to which sequence determines structure is an open question. I mean, okay, in broad terms it does; there are only so many possible configurations for any given sequence. The problem is that the number of possible configurations for any protein of more than trivial size is really really big. There are many, many steps between "translation from RNA into polypeptide" and "finished protein" -- the simple fact is that in the cases of most proteins, not only do we not know their complete structures, we don't know how they get to the types of sub-structures we do know they have. It sounds to me like this IBM project is trying to puzzle out the first question, while AFAIK Folding@Home is more interested in the second.
Disclaimer: none of this is really my area of expertise; I'm a genomics guy. So it's quite possible that my answers are out-of-date or just plain wrong. If so, someone please tell me, because I'd like to know.
Isn't it theoretically possible to use a turbojet (or turbofan) to get up to (subsonic combustion) ramjet speed, and then use the ramjet to get up to scramjet speed? Not saying this would be the most practical way to do it, just noting that (I thought) it could be done.
The article only presents one side of the picture, albeit, the slashbot side.
/. crowd that something is wrong with the way we're currently doing business, that's a pretty good sign that something is indeed wrong.
Do you really think that The Economist, one of the most respected news magazines in the world, and one with a generally pro-corporate slant, is actually in the business of presenting "the slashbot side" of arguments?
A more reasonable interpretation, IMNSGDHO, is that when a source that is the very embodiment of suit-think agrees with the generally anti-corporate
One way to prevent this, it seems to me, would be to require a very simple condition on any patent application: along with the paper application, you must present a working model. It seems to me that the USPTO used to require this, but then dropped the requirement -- anyone know the history?
Parent post would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Balanced budgets have been a core value of fiscal conservatives, mostly Republican, for decades. But then we had the Clinton surplus followed by the Bush deficit, and now the right-wingers insist that ... wait for it ... balanced budgets are a bad thing.
Here, let me refresh your memory. Notice the very first item.
There are, BTW, economists who claim that budget deficits are good for the economy. History has proven them wrong, time and again.
How many social problems could be cured?
... substitute "growing the economy by leaving the money in the hands of the people who earn it" instead of "spending money on schools/healthcare/the environment/etc." The point is, that from both the liberal and libertarian viewpoints, this looks a lot like a boondoggle-in-the-making.
None.
If you take that viewpoint, fine
At least this sort of spending will have spin-offs that can be used by everyone else.
Maybe so. OTOH, it won't if either of two things happens: the tech stays classified and thus unavailable for civilian applications, or it's an unworkable mess that lags far behind what's available in the civilian market when it's finally complete. Considering who the major players are, I'd say both outcomes seem likely.
You know, I'd heard that there were people who still didn't understand the difference between intellectual property and physical property, but I'd never seen one in the wild before. Thanks for giving me a look at one of these beasties in its natural habitat.
My bad. How embarrassing. I should've crunched the numbers first.
... but then there are, to put it mildly, other issues to consider.
I will note that if you go a million miles up, you get orbital velocities within the range of modern rifles
At low altitude (say, the 100 km that was the goal for the X Prize) that's not necessarily true -- you could have the velocity for n orbits, but lose enough to drag not to make n+1.
For an extreme example of this -- consider the fact that if you fired a bullet from a decent rifle a thousand miles up, it would go into orbit, but obviously bullets don't go into orbit here on the ground.
Rutan's accomplishment was impressive, but as has been pointed out in other discussions, it was essentially a high-flying airplane rather than a true spaceship, and doesn't scale well. Anyone who wins this prize will have built something much more directly applicable to real space travel.
...
Which isn't to say I don't want Rutan, or someone else whose approach is essentially aviation-based rather than big-boom-straight-up-based, to get it. When I was a kid, I spent endless hours reading my Dad's old 50's sci-fi collection, and somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that a real spaceship has a needle nose and delta wings
[shrug] I was an 11B because I wanted to be. I knew some pretty dumb guys in the infantry, but also some really smart ones.
'Course, as soon as I could I re-upped as an Air Force medic, because I decided I really liked life's little luxuries such as taking hot showers and eating my meals off a plate. But those two years I spent as a grunt were valuable, and a lot of the REMFs I worked with in the AF could have benefited greatly from the experience. You don't really understand what the service is for until you've seen it from a foxhole, IMO.
Yes, I would, because you can bet that the Titanic II would be the most carefully engineered passenger ship in history.
I flew on 9/11/02. A lot of the people in the airport with me were chattering about how nervous they were. I was thinking that there has probably been no safer day in the entire history of aviation to fly.
Yeah, but they'd go nuts and start killing each other once they got far enough away from Earth for the ping times to slow down.
Ever see those clips of astronauts constantly exercising? They need to do that keep up their muscles out of atophy. If muscles will atophy for an otherwise active astronaut, don't you think they'll get even worse for a hibernating astronaut?
Slowing down the metabolism slows everything down, including the process of muscle atrophy. You're right, of course, that there's a lot we don't understand about the process -- but if hibernation were the same as bed-rest, then animals that do hibernate would be too weak to move when they woke up. (And yes, being on strict bed-rest for a given period of time produces about the same degree of muscle atrophy and bone density loss as being in microgravity for the same period of time.) Odds are that hibernating astronauts would be in a lot better shape whent they got to Mars than they would be if they were awake the whole time.
Stories like this illustrate why people who say things like "why are we spending all this money on space when we have so many problems to solve here on Earth" need to rethink their arguments. Not only would true hibernation open up voyages to destinations much farther away than Mars, but being able to put humans into hibernation would have enormous medical implications -- imagine hibernating through surgery, or in the case of something incurable, being put into hibernation (thus, persumably, greatly slowing the process of the disease) until a cure is found. Also, the advances necessary to acheive this would lead to a much better understanding of human biology generally, with attendant medical advances we can't necessarily imagine at this point.
The usual counterargument to this is, "But if we spent the money studying ___ for its own sake, we would make the same discoveries, without the overhead of space flight!" This misses the point, IMO; we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't. Space exploration has provided the justification for some of the most important research the world has ever seen -- the reason "space-age technology" has fallen out of favor as an advertising slogan is because the stuff is now so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we no longer think about its origins -- and clearly continues to do so.
Because Kerry is, indeed, a mediocre Senator (I do wish he'd talk more about his one truly shining moment in the Senate, his one-man crusade to expose Iran-Contra -- but of course that would require a challenge to the sainted memory of Reagan) but Bush is a terrible President. Truly spectacular fuck-ups on Bush's part are a lot more relevant to the election than any of Kerry's mild accomplishments.
If someone robs your house, do you care that the cop who catches him is an asshole? No, because the other guy robbed your house!
I just wish Bin Laden had explicitly endorsed Ted Kennedy's fistpuppet instead of beating around the bush on the topic. It would be good therapy for the American public to have somebody to crush the juice out of, and Bin Laden himself is still, for a while, out of reach.
Bush's policies have been the best spur to al-Qaeda recruitment in the organization's history. Bin Laden wants Bush to win for the same reason that the Mafia wanted Prohibition to continue. Thanks to people like you, he may very well get his wish.
How does it feel to be giving aid and comfort to the enemy?