IANAN (I am not a neuroscientist) so I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that question. OOTPIWWIAN (one of the people I work with is a neuroscientist), though, so I'll ask him next time I get the chance. My main interest in the little wormies is immunological.
Your CS prof wasn't crazy, he was smart. I resisted using TeX for years, but once I finally gave in and learned it-- originally just intending to use it for math and CS papers, of course -- I realized that it really is the best thing for writing any kind of academic document. If you're writing a novel, sure, use a dedicated word processor. But if you're writing anything that involves citations and divisions into organized chunks, TeX is the way to go.
To some degree, this is a serious question, so I'll give it a serious answer: C. elegans serves as a useful model of development in multicellular animals (like us) because it's about the most primitive animal that still has basic systems like a nervous system, a digestive system, etc. It's also very tough (as this incident proves), reproduces quickly, and is easy to tinker with in the lab. IIRC, it was the first animal to have its genome completely sequenced.
It also shows the capacity for rudimentary learning, making it of great interest to neuroscientist, since it's a lot easier to study the ~300 neurons in a typical C. elegans than the rather larger number found in more compex organisms.
I think you're missing my point. If an early and effective response had contained it -- what we're trying to do with SARS right now -- people like the poster I was responding to would have been sitting there bitching about how everyone was overreacting, because they wouldn't have realized how serious the threat actually was.
Because we've decided that human life is more valuable than other kinds of life. You may disagree with that decision if you want, but it's pretty obviously one with which the vast majority of people agree. (And other species would probably make the same decision if they could.)
I wonder, would you so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining human populations if you or someone you love were dying from a preventable disease? I kind of doubt it.
Um... yeah. If you wait 'til 100,000 have died, that means millions have the disease. Odds are good that one of them is a co-worker, friend, or member of your family. Do you really want to get to that point?
The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives...
... and there would have been people like you sitting around bitching about how this flu thing was nothing compared to other risks (especially since WW1 was going on when the epidemic started) and what a waste of time it all was.
Two months ago, I posted some job ads (open position) to various forums, noting clearly that I did not want to work with recruiters or third parties. Then I started getting candidate applications responding to a post on flipdog.com (a Monster subsidiary). But I could not access this ad describing my own position unless I paid flipdog.com for the privilege.
Advice to job seekers: never, ever, ever deal with Monster.com or their subsidiaries. I have monster.com and flipdog.com in my spam filters.
And ugen replied:
And what other means of procuring a bread-winning position would You suggest from Your high-horse, Dr. Cowan?
Um... applying for jobs advertised in the local paper? Working with reputable job-search sites like Dice.com? Networking, which according to the studies I've seen is still how most positions are filled?
The point isn't that job-search sites are inherently a bad thing. The point is that job-search sites (or for that matter, any kind of sites) that sell your information to spammers are inherently evil. When you put your resume up on a site, you're not sending out an open invitation for people to send you e-mail about things you're not interested in. You're simply and solely announcing your availability for a job -- and you have the right to be as picky as you want to be in that announcement.
Of course, I suspect from ugen's response that his point is that he feels an irrational hostility toward people with Ph.D.'s. "Don't be thinkin' you're better'n us with all them books 'n' larnin'!"
Would-be totalitarian regimes pretty much always redefine "patriotism" as "doing whatever the government tells you to do and singing its praises" -- and its opposite, "treason," as "voicing any opinion contrary to the will of the government." Thus we have the USA-PATRIOT Act, and Fox News (AKA the US Government Ministry of Information) labeling protestors "traitors." This is the first step; the next n-2 steps are to be found in any book on the history of Germany, Russia, or China. Step n involves lots of barbed wire and mass graves.
No, we're not there yet, or I wouldn't be able to say what I'm saying. But in not so many years, we could be, and anyone who thinks I'm overreacting is desperately naive.
Ok then. Suppose a situation arose where it became possible to use the DCMA to sue the RIAA or MPAA ? The Slashdot crowd would go freakin' nuts. You can bet that all 'moral' and 'ethical' concerns would go flying out the window and the raving masses would slap the snot out of each other just to be the first in line to turn the law back on its creators.
Well, yeah. That's the best possible use for a bad law.
It doesn't happen very often, of course. The people who make the laws are rich, well-connected, and powerful -- IOW, exactly the sort of people who never, ever go to jail. The odds of Rosen, Valenti, and Hollings sharing a cell in Federal prison, as wonderful a fantasy as that might be, are just about the same as the odds of George W. Bush being impeached, then court-martialed, and sent to Leavenworth for the crime of desertion -- zero. (Actually, it was desertion during wartime, for which the maximum penalty is death, but IIRC the US hasn't executed anyone for desertion since WW2.) But hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
The other side to that coin, of course, is that just because something is not good (or even actively bad) it's not necessarily bad to use it to do good things. Particularly when the "good thing" is stopping someone else from doing something bad. (Whew!)
E.g., you may not believe guns are not good, or even believe that they're actively bad -- but unless you're a strong pacifist, you'd use a gun in self-defense, or to keep someone from harming someone else, if it were available to you. So it goes with the DMCA. The tool is there, and right now it looks like the most effective tool for the task; might as well use it.
To be fair, it's not just Ballmer who thinks this way. I remember having a discussion a while ago with a guy who was expressing dismay that "all the programming techniques everyone uses now are based on stuff that was done in the late Seventies." He seemed mortally offended that, given the way the computing world has changed in the last twenty-five years, we're not all using new! different! innovative! paradigm-breaking! data structures and algorithms to program our shiny new toys. The idea that maybe the late Seventies were when programming became essentially a mature art -- IMO the vast majority of innovations since then have been in applications, not underlying techniques -- seemed utterly foreign to him.
Oh, it'll happen soon enough. Someone will come along to tell us that global warming is a liberal commie tree-hugger myth. With luck, they'll also rant about how this study is an absurd waste of money that could better go to tax cuts for CEO's and bombing the shit out of little brown people.
It seems to me that both the Earth and Mars are far below the limit of possible atmospheric density for their size. Consider Venus: slightly smaller than Earth, but it has a much, much denser atmosphere. If that kind of stuff scales linearly (and I don't have any idea of it does; I'm just guessing) then Mars would have no trouble holding on to an atmosphere as dense as Earth's.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the Moon -- with its surface gravity of 1/6 g -- could hold on to an Earth-density atmosphere for something like 10,000 years. Wish I could remember more.
That's about the only excuse for Tomb Raider having any success in the theatres at all, IMO. It could have been a great flick, but it committed the cardinal sin for any action movie: it was boring. I'm not sure how Angelina Jolie in a skimpy costume kicking ass managed to be boring, but there it is...
... except there are plenty of men in biology. You may see biology as a "girly" subject, but I guarantee you male biologists don't.
Look, not only are fewer women starting CS programs, their dropout rates are higher than for men -- about the only academic track for which this is true. There is obviously a real problem here.
There will probably always be more female interior decorators than (straight) male, and more male mechanics than female. Fine. I buy that. But CS is, by its nature, pretty gender-neutral; it doesn't really fit into the stereotypes for either sex except the one that says, "Boys like computers and girls don't," which is a circular argument.
I've said this before, but part of the reason I don't buy that stereotype is because at both the school where I got my Bachelor's degree in math and the school where I'm currently studying for my Master's in CS, the math and CS programs have a mujch higher ratio of female to male students than most schools do -- about 50/50 in the first case, 40/60 in the second -- and the levels of satisfaction with, and completion of, the program seem to be about equal among students of both sexes.
Why is that? Well, I suspect that the main reason is that both schools are located on a commuter campus that caters largely to working adults. We're not talking about boys and girls here; we're talking about men and women. The average undergrad age is late twenties, and average grad student age is thirty or so; these are people who have moved past stupid stereotypes like "girls don't like computers" or (for both sexes) "smart isn't sexy."
Exactly. There is no security in obscurity or ignorance. The only way to know how dangerous something is -- and to learn how to deal with it if it is dangerous -- is to study it.
As for the "some experiments could destroy the earth" bit (really just a variant on There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know) IMO Rees is doing the typical crochety-old-scientist act. An awful lot of scientists who do brilliant work when they're younger seem to adopt an attitude of "Well, the search for knowledge was all well and good in my day, but you kids these days..." Regrettable, but I suppose it's part of human nature.
I can't think of a single area of research in which the benefits of aggressive experimentation and open reporting don't outweight the risks. Not a single one. Biotech, nanotech, high-energy physics... yes, the risks are real, but the potential rewards are so great that it would be criminal either for scientists to restrict themselves or laws and/or social pressure to lay restrictions on them.
The middle east is in a dark ages because the Mongols smashed its cities and centers of learning, and just when it was starting to get back on its feet, the Crusades finished the job. Yeah, that was a long time ago -- but it's hard to overestimate the effect of such massive destruction. Unfortunately, when civilization is wiped out, it's generally the really fanatical types who survive. Islam codified this change, but it didn't create it; Islam in the golden age and Islam now are essentially two completely different belief systems, and the Mongols and the Crusaders are why.
Oh, for God's sake, guys. It's a joke, a reference to the current Hollywood sci-fi vision of the future. I don't agree with more than about half of what he says in the article, but it's peppered with a number of amusing lines like that one, which kept me reading it. Get a sense of humor.
It's an accepted usage in both British and American English, though more common in the latter; collective entities can be referred to as either singular or plural. Sorry if you don't like it, but it's not incorrect.
The bad has been so thoroughly discussed by hysterical scaremongers that there's really no point. Even on Slashdot, where you'd expect a fairly scientifically (or at least technologically) literate audience, there are ten "don't these foolish scientists realize that There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know?!?!?" posts for every "wow, this is really cool" post.
It's amazing to me how people only discuss the upside of things like this without mentioning the bad that can come of it as well.
Reminds me of how American fundamentalist Christians like to talk about Christians as though they were a persecuted minority...
I have a better idea: let's stop using that silly phrase "play God" with respect to biotech. We've been "playing God" for thousands of years, ever since farmers first started selective breeding and hybridization of crops and livestock. Every tool of medical diagnosis and treatment in history, from traditional herbal remedies to antibiotics to MRI machines, has been "playing God," in that they interfere with the "natural" progression of disease and death. Indeed, all technology is "playing God" -- God didn't give us sharp teeth and claws, so we learned to chip spearheads out of flint; God didn't give us hooves, so we learned to ride horses and invented saddles; God didn't give us gills, so we built ships; et fucking cetera.
There will always be fanatics whose fear of divine wrath keeps them back in the muck and mire. That's their right, and their business. But when they stand in the way of progress that will immeasurable improve my life and the lives of my children... well, they'd better get the hell out the way.
Oh, for the love of God. Rush Limbaugh is a big Mac fan, but you didn't see me (a card-carrying member of the ACLU) getting ready to reformat the hard drive on my Mac when he started boosting them. Choose your computer on the basis of what works, not politics.
Zeitgeist, we can assume, overwhelmingly refelects desktops, not servers. The article's author doesn't make to too clear, but it sounds like he's (mostly) talking about servers.
I'm also, I have to say, doubtful that any browser-sniffing gives an accurate picture of what people out there are using, because so many people set Opera et al (on any OS) to report itself as IE for Windows. Personally I think that's a terrible idea -- if I find a site that refuses to work with my preferred setup (Mozilla on OS X) I figure, well, what the hell, I didn't really need to look at that site anyway -- but an awful lot of people do it.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAN (I am not a neuroscientist) so I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that question. OOTPIWWIAN (one of the people I work with is a neuroscientist), though, so I'll ask him next time I get the chance. My main interest in the little wormies is immunological.
Your CS prof wasn't crazy, he was smart. I resisted using TeX for years, but once I finally gave in and learned it-- originally just intending to use it for math and CS papers, of course -- I realized that it really is the best thing for writing any kind of academic document. If you're writing a novel, sure, use a dedicated word processor. But if you're writing anything that involves citations and divisions into organized chunks, TeX is the way to go.
To some degree, this is a serious question, so I'll give it a serious answer: C. elegans serves as a useful model of development in multicellular animals (like us) because it's about the most primitive animal that still has basic systems like a nervous system, a digestive system, etc. It's also very tough (as this incident proves), reproduces quickly, and is easy to tinker with in the lab. IIRC, it was the first animal to have its genome completely sequenced.
It also shows the capacity for rudimentary learning, making it of great interest to neuroscientist, since it's a lot easier to study the ~300 neurons in a typical C. elegans than the rather larger number found in more compex organisms.
I think you're missing my point. If an early and effective response had contained it -- what we're trying to do with SARS right now -- people like the poster I was responding to would have been sitting there bitching about how everyone was overreacting, because they wouldn't have realized how serious the threat actually was.
Because we've decided that human life is more valuable than other kinds of life. You may disagree with that decision if you want, but it's pretty obviously one with which the vast majority of people agree. (And other species would probably make the same decision if they could.)
I wonder, would you so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining human populations if you or someone you love were dying from a preventable disease? I kind of doubt it.
The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives
Um
The point isn't that job-search sites are inherently a bad thing. The point is that job-search sites (or for that matter, any kind of sites) that sell your information to spammers are inherently evil. When you put your resume up on a site, you're not sending out an open invitation for people to send you e-mail about things you're not interested in. You're simply and solely announcing your availability for a job -- and you have the right to be as picky as you want to be in that announcement.
Of course, I suspect from ugen's response that his point is that he feels an irrational hostility toward people with Ph.D.'s. "Don't be thinkin' you're better'n us with all them books 'n' larnin'!"
Would-be totalitarian regimes pretty much always redefine "patriotism" as "doing whatever the government tells you to do and singing its praises" -- and its opposite, "treason," as "voicing any opinion contrary to the will of the government." Thus we have the USA-PATRIOT Act, and Fox News (AKA the US Government Ministry of Information) labeling protestors "traitors." This is the first step; the next n-2 steps are to be found in any book on the history of Germany, Russia, or China. Step n involves lots of barbed wire and mass graves.
No, we're not there yet, or I wouldn't be able to say what I'm saying. But in not so many years, we could be, and anyone who thinks I'm overreacting is desperately naive.
It doesn't happen very often, of course. The people who make the laws are rich, well-connected, and powerful -- IOW, exactly the sort of people who never, ever go to jail. The odds of Rosen, Valenti, and Hollings sharing a cell in Federal prison, as wonderful a fantasy as that might be, are just about the same as the odds of George W. Bush being impeached, then court-martialed, and sent to Leavenworth for the crime of desertion -- zero. (Actually, it was desertion during wartime, for which the maximum penalty is death, but IIRC the US hasn't executed anyone for desertion since WW2.) But hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
The other side to that coin, of course, is that just because something is not good (or even actively bad) it's not necessarily bad to use it to do good things. Particularly when the "good thing" is stopping someone else from doing something bad. (Whew!)
E.g., you may not believe guns are not good, or even believe that they're actively bad -- but unless you're a strong pacifist, you'd use a gun in self-defense, or to keep someone from harming someone else, if it were available to you. So it goes with the DMCA. The tool is there, and right now it looks like the most effective tool for the task; might as well use it.
To be fair, it's not just Ballmer who thinks this way. I remember having a discussion a while ago with a guy who was expressing dismay that "all the programming techniques everyone uses now are based on stuff that was done in the late Seventies." He seemed mortally offended that, given the way the computing world has changed in the last twenty-five years, we're not all using new! different! innovative! paradigm-breaking! data structures and algorithms to program our shiny new toys. The idea that maybe the late Seventies were when programming became essentially a mature art -- IMO the vast majority of innovations since then have been in applications, not underlying techniques -- seemed utterly foreign to him.
Oh, it'll happen soon enough. Someone will come along to tell us that global warming is a liberal commie tree-hugger myth. With luck, they'll also rant about how this study is an absurd waste of money that could better go to tax cuts for CEO's and bombing the shit out of little brown people.
Come on, Slashdot righties! Don't disappoint me!
It seems to me that both the Earth and Mars are far below the limit of possible atmospheric density for their size. Consider Venus: slightly smaller than Earth, but it has a much, much denser atmosphere. If that kind of stuff scales linearly (and I don't have any idea of it does; I'm just guessing) then Mars would have no trouble holding on to an atmosphere as dense as Earth's.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the Moon -- with its surface gravity of 1/6 g -- could hold on to an Earth-density atmosphere for something like 10,000 years. Wish I could remember more.
That's about the only excuse for Tomb Raider having any success in the theatres at all, IMO. It could have been a great flick, but it committed the cardinal sin for any action movie: it was boring. I'm not sure how Angelina Jolie in a skimpy costume kicking ass managed to be boring, but there it is ...
... except there are plenty of men in biology. You may see biology as a "girly" subject, but I guarantee you male biologists don't.
Look, not only are fewer women starting CS programs, their dropout rates are higher than for men -- about the only academic track for which this is true. There is obviously a real problem here.
There will probably always be more female interior decorators than (straight) male, and more male mechanics than female. Fine. I buy that. But CS is, by its nature, pretty gender-neutral; it doesn't really fit into the stereotypes for either sex except the one that says, "Boys like computers and girls don't," which is a circular argument.
I've said this before, but part of the reason I don't buy that stereotype is because at both the school where I got my Bachelor's degree in math and the school where I'm currently studying for my Master's in CS, the math and CS programs have a mujch higher ratio of female to male students than most schools do -- about 50/50 in the first case, 40/60 in the second -- and the levels of satisfaction with, and completion of, the program seem to be about equal among students of both sexes.
Why is that? Well, I suspect that the main reason is that both schools are located on a commuter campus that caters largely to working adults. We're not talking about boys and girls here; we're talking about men and women. The average undergrad age is late twenties, and average grad student age is thirty or so; these are people who have moved past stupid stereotypes like "girls don't like computers" or (for both sexes) "smart isn't sexy."
Exactly. There is no security in obscurity or ignorance. The only way to know how dangerous something is -- and to learn how to deal with it if it is dangerous -- is to study it.
..." Regrettable, but I suppose it's part of human nature.
... yes, the risks are real, but the potential rewards are so great that it would be criminal either for scientists to restrict themselves or laws and/or social pressure to lay restrictions on them.
As for the "some experiments could destroy the earth" bit (really just a variant on There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know) IMO Rees is doing the typical crochety-old-scientist act. An awful lot of scientists who do brilliant work when they're younger seem to adopt an attitude of "Well, the search for knowledge was all well and good in my day, but you kids these days
I can't think of a single area of research in which the benefits of aggressive experimentation and open reporting don't outweight the risks. Not a single one. Biotech, nanotech, high-energy physics
The middle east is in a dark ages because the Mongols smashed its cities and centers of learning, and just when it was starting to get back on its feet, the Crusades finished the job. Yeah, that was a long time ago -- but it's hard to overestimate the effect of such massive destruction. Unfortunately, when civilization is wiped out, it's generally the really fanatical types who survive. Islam codified this change, but it didn't create it; Islam in the golden age and Islam now are essentially two completely different belief systems, and the Mongols and the Crusaders are why.
Oh, for God's sake, guys. It's a joke, a reference to the current Hollywood sci-fi vision of the future. I don't agree with more than about half of what he says in the article, but it's peppered with a number of amusing lines like that one, which kept me reading it. Get a sense of humor.
Oops. I meant, "in the former," of course. That was incorrect. ;)
It's an accepted usage in both British and American English, though more common in the latter; collective entities can be referred to as either singular or plural. Sorry if you don't like it, but it's not incorrect.
(It's "Ariane.")
There will always be fanatics whose fear of divine wrath keeps them back in the muck and mire. That's their right, and their business. But when they stand in the way of progress that will immeasurable improve my life and the lives of my children
Oh, for the love of God. Rush Limbaugh is a big Mac fan, but you didn't see me (a card-carrying member of the ACLU) getting ready to reformat the hard drive on my Mac when he started boosting them. Choose your computer on the basis of what works, not politics.
Zeitgeist, we can assume, overwhelmingly refelects desktops, not servers. The article's author doesn't make to too clear, but it sounds like he's (mostly) talking about servers.
I'm also, I have to say, doubtful that any browser-sniffing gives an accurate picture of what people out there are using, because so many people set Opera et al (on any OS) to report itself as IE for Windows. Personally I think that's a terrible idea -- if I find a site that refuses to work with my preferred setup (Mozilla on OS X) I figure, well, what the hell, I didn't really need to look at that site anyway -- but an awful lot of people do it.