A better option for the near future
on
Store Your Own Juice
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It becomes much more economic if you already have the batteries sitting around for other purposes - i.e. in your hybrid car. Plug your car into the mains when you're at home, and let the computer decide when to charge and discharge the batteries. (This isn't an original idea - it is from a recent Scientific American article.)
I'm a regular visitor to Silent PC Review (SPCR) where they talk about CPU heatsinks at great length. Only one of the ones in this article (Thermaltake Sonic Tower) do I ever recall seeing mention of at SPCR. The noise levels they're talking about (~45 dBA) are just way over the top from my point of view - I'd be reluctant to consider anything over about 25 dBA, which is about 50-100 times quieter.
If you're a mad overclocker who plays FPS games with sound through your stereo system with volume on 11, this is a useful review. If you want quiet, go to SPCR.
I use a Scythe Ninja passive (fanless) heatsink. Until about 10 days ago, I had a nearly inaudible, single fan system. (I upgraded my video card to be able to play Oblivion, and I'm waiting a few months for it to fail before I void warantee by replacing the active heatsink it came with.)
In all honesty, take a look at "child geniuses" that prospered early on. We hear every once in a while about a kid that starts college at the age of 8, or 10; and that's the last time we hear about them.
I think these kids generally end up as significant mathematicians or musicians. If you were a mathematician, you'd still be hearing about them (but likely ignorant of when they attended college.)
Your comment reminds me of an anecdote about the physicist J. J. Thompson. One of his classmates from school had grown up to be a successful industrialist - rich, possibly knighted. He gave a speach about his success. Part of it went something like this: "When I was young and at school, there was a boy called Johnny Thompson who was very good at school work. All the teachers would say 'why can't you be more like him?' But look where I am now, and who's heard of little Johnny Thompson?"
My source for the anecdote doesn't record the response, but it could have been something like "That would be Professor Sir Johnny Thompson, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society."
I really don't understand why the 2002 Solaris movie was made (or, at least, why it was made with such a big budget). It is an arthouse movie with a Hollywood budget. While I appreciate it, I can't see how they ever thought they'd make their money back on this one.
Here's some box office data from IMDB. While it isn't too easy to interpret, it looks to me like it grossed well under its production cost (perhaps about 1/2 to 2/3.) The return to the movie makers will be a fraction of that.
Much more than cocaine
on
Cocaine Biosensor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It has the potential to measure concentrations of thereputic/analgesic drugs too. Imagine an needle with appropriate probes inside which constantly monitor the blood concentration of drugs. Wires lead to an IV control which then administers the drugs at precisely the rate required.
This is, of course, a very hypothetical future - it might not work out this well.
I just did a web search. This list was published in 2003. As such, it clearly is deliberately drawing parallels - looking for common threads between current USA politics and historical facist regimes. This looks like an academically informed partisan political argument, rather than an impartial assesment.
I'd be happier if it had been published in (say) 1975, so that it was predictive rather than reactive.
(For the record, I agree with the author's point of view, however.)
I haven't read the real paper (as opposed to the linked pop-sci article) so I really don't know how good their data is, in particular how strong the argument for homology rather than convergent evolution is. (Nor would I be very confident at interpreting their argument - I've used BLAST before, but only at the nucleotide level, on ncRNAs. I'm not so familiar with proteins. I'm also not very familiar with viruses.)
They may well be right, but I bet there will be many who contest the "proof" that Luca had viruses.
Host switching could come from a combination of viruses: a eukaryotic virus accidentally incorporates a bacterial virus. I then starts infecting bacteria, and loses the eukaryotic genes, but keeps the old membrane.
I had been thinking that detectable homology from pre-LUCA was unlikely in a virus, but I'm more used to RNA viruses that DNA ones, and we do have many proteins in bacteria/eukaryia with homology from pre-LUCA. Do DNA viruses have similar rates of evolution in key proteins to cellular life?
The article seems to be stretching too far beyond the facts in many places. In particular:
Moreover, certain signature Mimi genes, such as those that code for the production of the soccer-ball shape of its capsid (an outer protein coat common to all viruses), have been conserved in viruses that infect organisms from all three of the domains, particularly in eukaryotes. The implications of that finding are truly radical: that Mimi, or a Mimi-like ancestor, emerged prior to the three other domains and played a key role in inventing the very cells of which humans and all complex cellular life-forms are made.
I can think of three alternative explanations: convergent evolution (it is such a good protein design that multiple viruses have developed it independently), horizontal gene transfer (e.g. a virally infected amoeba eats a virally infected bacterium. Virus particles are released which contain DNA from both of the original viruses) or host switching (e.g. a bacterium virus "learns" to infect amoebae.) Host switching is problematic, because the domains use slightly different genetic codes.
How can they call genes "signature Mimi genes" and also claim they are in many other viruses? This is contradictory.
You can't create a signature for a binary without reading and manipulating the contents of the binary - so a signature is a derivative work of the binary. The binary is of course derivative of the source. The source is under the GPL. So, if you release the signature, you must release the "source" of that signature, i.e. the private key.
Under this theory, you can't release the signature for a binary of GPLed code without releasing the private key, even under GPLv2.
BadCorp has - they released a version of the kernel which can only be run with Alan's signature. They can only do so if they supply Alan's private key. Note that Alan is under no obligation to provide his key - only BadCorp is. So, unless Alan cooperates with them, they are up the creek.
But what if BadCorp don't distribute the software? They just say "Alan signed kernels are freely downloadable, here's some places you can get them."
How can GPLv3 possibly disallow the machine rejecting unsigned code? The bare machine likely has no GPL code in it, so the manufacturer is not bound by it.
Scenario A: Alan signs a Linux binary with his private key "A". He makes available public key "a". Many Linux installations are set to refuse to run binarys which are not signed to match one of the public keys they have in their "trusted keys" file, which typically include Alan's key "a". I can run a modified binary as follows: Create my own key pair "C" and "c". Add public key "c" to my trusted keys file. Modify, compile the program, sign the binary with "C". The program now runs.
Scenario B: BadCorp's box has DRM-like hardware which refuses to run any code not signed by BadCorp's private key B. They use a modified, signed copy of Linux as the OS. They make available the source of their modifications (which are pretty much specific to their hardware) but nobody else can modify the kernel running on a BadCorp box because they don't have key B.
I think scenario B is what the GPL v3 language is trying to forbid, and scenario A is why GPL v3 doesn't require Alan's private key to be released. However, I'm not sure what happens in
Scenario C: BadCorp produce a box which won't run unsigned code, and which only they can add keys to the trusted keys file. DastardlyCorp produce modified GPL programs for the BadCorp box, sign the binaries with key "D" and pay BadCorp to add key "d" to the trusted keys file. DastardlyCorp won't release key "D" - "It's our private key. Get BadCorp to add your key to the box if you want to modify stuff. It is their fault, not ours, that you can't run on their box." BadCorp says "Only if you pay us money. We aren't bound by the the GPL - we don't release any GPLed software." (And BadCorp and DastardlyCorp just happen to be owned by the same people.)
Scenario D: As above, but BadCorp unilaterally add Alan's key "a" to the trusted keys list. Now Alan can recompile for the BadCorp box, but other people can't - but Alan did not want this situation to be.
How can the license force DastardlyCorp to release their key in scenario C, but not force Alan to release in scenario D?
Disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, I have not followed this controversy closely. Better informed comment is invited.
The word "helped" is misused by idiots, instead of the correct "holpen". Just because there are thousands of idiots repeating the incorrect usage does not make it correct.
"Helped" is wrong, no amount of hand waving will suddenly make it right.
. . .
I have sympathy for your argument, but in language, correctness is defined by usage, not vice-versa.
And if you had 10 oz of gold in Jan 1980, you had $8500 worth, but now you'd have only $5500 (that's about $2300 in 1980 dollars)- and for most of the intervening time, it was about $3700 worth.
(Wikipedia article, to make a vague claim at relevancy to the topic.)
Putting it another way: $10000 in Jan 1980 was 11.7 oz of gold. Inflation adjusted, that 1980 $10000 is $23700 now, and is 43 oz of gold.
Yes, I picked the all-time high price for gold as my base. But it has still been a generally poor investment ever since. The price of gold in non-adjusted dollars hasn't changed much in 25 years - it has pretty much oscillated in the $300-$450/oz range.
Who, exactly, appointed you the sole authoritative spokesperson to represent the entire community of "evolutionary scientists?"
The same person who appointed you to represent humanity. It's good to know we have a mutual friend.
You are correct that studying a bath tub would be rather trivial.
I'm sorry for the poor choice of analogy.
... you were meant to extrapolate the analogy to something that is not easily observed...
I tried to do so, but, alas, I failed.
As analogy has failed, please read some textbooks or web pages which I'm sure you'll find links to in other comments, and you'll find out how science works, and the overwelming wealth of evidence for evolution. E.g. the high level of agreement between phlogenies based on physical charactoristics and phlogenies based on DNA sequencing.
Cool. I hadn't realized the DOS box was new - I'd assumed it had been there for some time. But now that I think of it, there wouldn't have been much need for computer control prior to MOA using the telescope.
The first thing we do is the calculation you refer to. We discuss how plausible the constancy of rate hypothesis is. (In this case, we note that the tap (faucet, to you) is capable of delivering more or less water.) Then we discuss how the inferred filling time relates to our other knowledge (does it imply the bath was half full before the house was built?) That is the first paper. It presents an interesting observation, and the most obvious interpretation, with suitable caveats.
In the second paper, we try to infer subtle effects of the constant-rate hypothesis (CR). We observe material deposited on the side of the bath at water level, and conclude that under CR, we should see these deposits uniformly continued at deeper levels. We start applying for grants to do a bath-dive expedition to observe them, but don't get funding.
In the third paper, different group calculates that, had the rate been much higher in the past, we should observe water droplets splashed on the wall. This being easily accessible, they have looked for them and found them.
The fourth through tenth papers are analyses of how fast the water flow needed to be to spash that high, how long it was high flow to explain the frequency, and how old the drops are. It takes a while before the theorists agree on the correct mathematical treatment. The question of whether the quantity of water added by dripping is significant is still within the margin of error.
Now there is sufficient interest, we finally get the grant to do the bath dive. We observe no deposits below the current level, and conclude the dripping phase has been at most a few days. The Fast Fill theory of the bath enters the textbooks.
10 years later, the principle authors of the first and third papers share the Nobel prize in Domestic Hydrology.
I am an evolutionary scientist. We don't follow your straw-man portrayal of how science works.
Slashdot Mirror
It becomes much more economic if you already have the batteries sitting around for other purposes - i.e. in your hybrid car. Plug your car into the mains when you're at home, and let the computer decide when to charge and discharge the batteries. (This isn't an original idea - it is from a recent Scientific American article.)
I'm a regular visitor to Silent PC Review (SPCR) where they talk about CPU heatsinks at great length. Only one of the ones in this article (Thermaltake Sonic Tower) do I ever recall seeing mention of at SPCR. The noise levels they're talking about (~45 dBA) are just way over the top from my point of view - I'd be reluctant to consider anything over about 25 dBA, which is about 50-100 times quieter.
If you're a mad overclocker who plays FPS games with sound through your stereo system with volume on 11, this is a useful review. If you want quiet, go to SPCR.
I use a Scythe Ninja passive (fanless) heatsink. Until about 10 days ago, I had a nearly inaudible, single fan system. (I upgraded my video card to be able to play Oblivion, and I'm waiting a few months for it to fail before I void warantee by replacing the active heatsink it came with.)
In all honesty, take a look at "child geniuses" that prospered early on. We hear every once in a while about a kid that starts college at the age of 8, or 10; and that's the last time we hear about them.
I think these kids generally end up as significant mathematicians or musicians. If you were a mathematician, you'd still be hearing about them (but likely ignorant of when they attended college.)
Your comment reminds me of an anecdote about the physicist J. J. Thompson. One of his classmates from school had grown up to be a successful industrialist - rich, possibly knighted. He gave a speach about his success. Part of it went something like this: "When I was young and at school, there was a boy called Johnny Thompson who was very good at school work. All the teachers would say 'why can't you be more like him?' But look where I am now, and who's heard of little Johnny Thompson?"
My source for the anecdote doesn't record the response, but it could have been something like "That would be Professor Sir Johnny Thompson, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society."
The article summary seems fine. The title is wrong.
I concur. I'm an ex-astronomer doing bioinformatics. Finding genomes and getting them in some unified format can be a right pain.
Blaming Google for biopiracy is like blaming ship builders for real piracy, or map makers for wars.
Just from looking at the numbers, I'm pretty sure that $14 million is cumulative, not per-week. I.e. *total* US box office take was about $15 million.
I really don't understand why the 2002 Solaris movie was made (or, at least, why it was made with such a big budget). It is an arthouse movie with a Hollywood budget. While I appreciate it, I can't see how they ever thought they'd make their money back on this one.
Here's some box office data from IMDB. While it isn't too easy to interpret, it looks to me like it grossed well under its production cost (perhaps about 1/2 to 2/3.) The return to the movie makers will be a fraction of that.
It has the potential to measure concentrations of thereputic/analgesic drugs too. Imagine an needle with appropriate probes inside which constantly monitor the blood concentration of drugs. Wires lead to an IV control which then administers the drugs at precisely the rate required.
This is, of course, a very hypothetical future - it might not work out this well.
I just did a web search. This list was published in 2003. As such, it clearly is deliberately drawing parallels - looking for common threads between current USA politics and historical facist regimes. This looks like an academically informed partisan political argument, rather than an impartial assesment.
I'd be happier if it had been published in (say) 1975, so that it was predictive rather than reactive.
(For the record, I agree with the author's point of view, however.)
Life imitates The Onion: New, Delicious Species Discovered
I haven't read the real paper (as opposed to the linked pop-sci article) so I really don't know how good their data is, in particular how strong the argument for homology rather than convergent evolution is. (Nor would I be very confident at interpreting their argument - I've used BLAST before, but only at the nucleotide level, on ncRNAs. I'm not so familiar with proteins. I'm also not very familiar with viruses.)
They may well be right, but I bet there will be many who contest the "proof" that Luca had viruses.
Host switching could come from a combination of viruses: a eukaryotic virus accidentally incorporates a bacterial virus. I then starts infecting bacteria, and loses the eukaryotic genes, but keeps the old membrane.
I had been thinking that detectable homology from pre-LUCA was unlikely in a virus, but I'm more used to RNA viruses that DNA ones, and we do have many proteins in bacteria/eukaryia with homology from pre-LUCA. Do DNA viruses have similar rates of evolution in key proteins to cellular life?
The article seems to be stretching too far beyond the facts in many places. In particular:
Moreover, certain signature Mimi genes, such as those that code for the production of the soccer-ball shape of its capsid (an outer protein coat common to all viruses), have been conserved in viruses that infect organisms from all three of the domains, particularly in eukaryotes. The implications of that finding are truly radical: that Mimi, or a Mimi-like ancestor, emerged prior to the three other domains and played a key role in inventing the very cells of which humans and all complex cellular life-forms are made.
I can think of three alternative explanations: convergent evolution (it is such a good protein design that multiple viruses have developed it independently), horizontal gene transfer (e.g. a virally infected amoeba eats a virally infected bacterium. Virus particles are released which contain DNA from both of the original viruses) or host switching (e.g. a bacterium virus "learns" to infect amoebae.) Host switching is problematic, because the domains use slightly different genetic codes.
How can they call genes "signature Mimi genes" and also claim they are in many other viruses? This is contradictory.
Three days with no real sleep, only catnaps, then he has to land an airplane.
Does he get to take amphetamines during this time? Or are US drug laws too strict to allow this (given that he started in Florida.)
I've thought of another interesting twist.
You can't create a signature for a binary without reading and manipulating the contents of the binary - so a signature is a derivative work of the binary. The binary is of course derivative of the source. The source is under the GPL. So, if you release the signature, you must release the "source" of that signature, i.e. the private key.
Under this theory, you can't release the signature for a binary of GPLed code without releasing the private key, even under GPLv2.
I am still not a lawyer.
BadCorp has - they released a version of the kernel which can only be run with Alan's signature. They can only do so if they supply Alan's private key. Note that Alan is under no obligation to provide his key - only BadCorp is. So, unless Alan cooperates with them, they are up the creek.
But what if BadCorp don't distribute the software? They just say "Alan signed kernels are freely downloadable, here's some places you can get them."
How can GPLv3 possibly disallow the machine rejecting unsigned code? The bare machine likely has no GPL code in it, so the manufacturer is not bound by it.
Scenario A:
Alan signs a Linux binary with his private key "A". He makes available public key "a". Many Linux installations are set to refuse to run binarys which are not signed to match one of the public keys they have in their "trusted keys" file, which typically include Alan's key "a". I can run a modified binary as follows: Create my own key pair "C" and "c". Add public key "c" to my trusted keys file. Modify, compile the program, sign the binary with "C". The program now runs.
Scenario B:
BadCorp's box has DRM-like hardware which refuses to run any code not signed by BadCorp's private key B. They use a modified, signed copy of Linux as the OS. They make available the source of their modifications (which are pretty much specific to their hardware) but nobody else can modify the kernel running on a BadCorp box because they don't have key B.
I think scenario B is what the GPL v3 language is trying to forbid, and scenario A is why GPL v3 doesn't require Alan's private key to be released. However, I'm not sure what happens in
Scenario C:
BadCorp produce a box which won't run unsigned code, and which only they can add keys to the trusted keys file. DastardlyCorp produce modified GPL programs for the BadCorp box, sign the binaries with key "D" and pay BadCorp to add key "d" to the trusted keys file. DastardlyCorp won't release key "D" - "It's our private key. Get BadCorp to add your key to the box if you want to modify stuff. It is their fault, not ours, that you can't run on their box." BadCorp says "Only if you pay us money. We aren't bound by the the GPL - we don't release any GPLed software." (And BadCorp and DastardlyCorp just happen to be owned by the same people.)
Scenario D:
As above, but BadCorp unilaterally add Alan's key "a" to the trusted keys list. Now Alan can recompile for the BadCorp box, but other people can't - but Alan did not want this situation to be.
How can the license force DastardlyCorp to release their key in scenario C, but not force Alan to release in scenario D?
Disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, I have not followed this controversy closely. Better informed comment is invited.
And 500 years ago:
The word "helped" is misused by idiots, instead of the correct "holpen". Just because there are thousands of idiots repeating the incorrect usage does not make it correct.
"Helped" is wrong, no amount of hand waving will suddenly make it right.
.
.
.
I have sympathy for your argument, but in language, correctness is defined by usage, not vice-versa.
I took about a 30% pay cut to move from programming to science. I'm happy with that choice.
Apparently there is a term for this: "downshifters".
Its not the fluoride in the water supply you should be worrying about, its the dihydrogen monoxide. DHMO kills millions every year.
And if you had 10 oz of gold in Jan 1980, you had $8500 worth, but now you'd have only $5500 (that's about $2300 in 1980 dollars)- and for most of the intervening time, it was about $3700 worth.
(Wikipedia article, to make a vague claim at relevancy to the topic.)
Putting it another way: $10000 in Jan 1980 was 11.7 oz of gold. Inflation adjusted, that 1980 $10000 is $23700 now, and is 43 oz of gold.
Yes, I picked the all-time high price for gold as my base. But it has still been a generally poor investment ever since. The price of gold in non-adjusted dollars hasn't changed much in 25 years - it has pretty much oscillated in the $300-$450/oz range.
Oh, Please.
... you were meant to extrapolate the analogy to something that is not easily observed ...
You're welcome.
Who, exactly, appointed you the sole authoritative spokesperson to represent the entire community of "evolutionary scientists?"
The same person who appointed you to represent humanity. It's good to know we have a mutual friend.
You are correct that studying a bath tub would be rather trivial.
I'm sorry for the poor choice of analogy.
I tried to do so, but, alas, I failed.
As analogy has failed, please read some textbooks or web pages which I'm sure you'll find links to in other comments, and you'll find out how science works, and the overwelming wealth of evidence for evolution. E.g. the high level of agreement between phlogenies based on physical charactoristics and phlogenies based on DNA sequencing.
Thanks. We have something in common, then. Unfortunately, the demographics of /. being what they are, it isn't likely to do me much good.
Cool. I hadn't realized the DOS box was new - I'd assumed it had been there for some time. But now that I think of it, there wouldn't have been much need for computer control prior to MOA using the telescope.
The first thing we do is the calculation you refer to. We discuss how plausible the constancy of rate hypothesis is. (In this case, we note that the tap (faucet, to you) is capable of delivering more or less water.) Then we discuss how the inferred filling time relates to our other knowledge (does it imply the bath was half full before the house was built?) That is the first paper. It presents an interesting observation, and the most obvious interpretation, with suitable caveats.
In the second paper, we try to infer subtle effects of the constant-rate hypothesis (CR). We observe material deposited on the side of the bath at water level, and conclude that under CR, we should see these deposits uniformly continued at deeper levels. We start applying for grants to do a bath-dive expedition to observe them, but don't get funding.
In the third paper, different group calculates that, had the rate been much higher in the past, we should observe water droplets splashed on the wall. This being easily accessible, they have looked for them and found them.
The fourth through tenth papers are analyses of how fast the water flow needed to be to spash that high, how long it was high flow to explain the frequency, and how old the drops are. It takes a while before the theorists agree on the correct mathematical treatment. The question of whether the quantity of water added by dripping is significant is still within the margin of error.
Now there is sufficient interest, we finally get the grant to do the bath dive. We observe no deposits below the current level, and conclude the dripping phase has been at most a few days. The Fast Fill theory of the bath enters the textbooks.
10 years later, the principle authors of the first and third papers share the Nobel prize in Domestic Hydrology.
I am an evolutionary scientist. We don't follow your straw-man portrayal of how science works.