Genesis tells that God created the heavens, the earth, and life.
So what? The Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster tells me we were all created by his noodly appendage. The only thing the bible has over http://www.venganza.org/ is that it's been around a bit longer. Length of tradition of course proves nothing. Hinduism has been around considerably longer than Judaism yet you are choosing to believe the newcomer.
Science, and evolution, rest on proof in the fossil and genetic records. The bible has no such proof behind it and so for the purposes of this discussion should be thrown on the junk heap along with all other 'sacred' texts.
But Scotland has it's own quite distinct legal system, separate education and health systems, and a lot of other domestic peculiarities. True we're the same country as far as foreign policy is concerned, but in practical everyday terms Holyrood now has more impact than Westminster.
Put in this way, in the last election the only campaign issues that were of any relevance to Scotland were the EC and Iraq. Everything else that Blair and Howard chuntered on about has been devolved to Holyrood.
Also I think, and I'm not alone in seeing this, the amount of anti-English whinging that goes on has markedly decreased since 1999. We now whinge about the boy Jack and his cronies instead, although Holyrood as an institution has been widely succesful and polls reliably return vast and increasing majorities against it's abolition. As a consequence support for full independance has dropped through the floor.
That's because of the peculiar makeup of the British state. There's approximatly 5 million of us Scots, a similar number of Welsh, and the rest - 50 million odd - are English. Because representation is approximatly proportional the British parliament is hence 85% or so English.
Furthermore the legal systems are split into England and Wales - which have the same legal system because Edward I conquered Wales in the 13th Century, and Scotland, which is separate because the act of union between Scotland and England didn't take place util 1707 and was on paper at least a merger of equals (haha).
Until we got our own Parliament back in 1999 Scottish legislation was voted on in the British Parliament, so that 85% English majority got to determine Scottish domestic legislation. This did lead to a certain amount of tension;-). The reverse, that out fraction of Scottish MPs got to vote on English affairs, was thus completely overshadowed by the greater injustice (unless you were Tam Dayell of course).
Since 1999 the English do however seem to have noticed us and there is some clamour to do something about Scots voting on English matters. However because and English Parliament would represent 85% of the British Parliament setting a separate body up would be costly and create a second power centre with almost as much legitimacy as the British Parliament. Needless to say this isn't a viable political solution, so what's most likely to happen is that eventually Scots MPs won't vote on English matters and there will be a defacto English parliament comprised of a subset of the British one. Labour isn't keen on this as it disproportionatly returns Scottish MPs, and it's contortions to justify the status quo are truly a wonder to behold, but it's one of those things that isn't going to go away and the 'no vote' solution is so plausably fair that it's pretty likely to happen eventually.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you. However since it's become apparent that a) life was present on earth very very early in it's history - microfossils have been found 3.5Ga old, and b) Mars use to have a thick atmosphere, lots of water and probably moved out of it's Hadean phase at an earlier date, then I think the possibility that life started on Mars and then seeding Earth has to be taken seriously.
There's been no crossover of an air-transmissible virus or anything remotely similar to the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 and odds are far against it happening. Just as with "terrorism", the various governments are promoting concern about the "bird flu" merely to scare the populace into submission on security issues and to maintain political control.
If only that were true. In fact by comparison with H1N1 (recovered from 1918 victims) it appears that H5N1 is about 30 mutations off a human pandemic form. Usual scientific caveats apply, but the suprise to many virologists, frankly, is that we've not already had the pandemic.
It is of course quite possible that H5N1 burns itself out in birds without the necessary mutations occuring, but that is far from certain and in fact probably quite unlikely. One of the more interesting observations amout H1N1 1918 is that is seems to have broken out in several geographicaly disperate countries almost simultaniously, which implies it had mutated by random genetic drift in birds to be human-transmissible then jumped species, so it was probably around in birds quite a long time before randomly acquiring the necessary mutations. H5N1 isn't quite as widespread yet, but it will be within a year.
At a guess then H5N1 may be globably pandemic in birds for several years before we get a human pandemic. If we're lucky that is. Kepp your fingers crossed.
Alternately, if you still think there is a credible concern for the H5N1 virus to mutate to a human communicable form, then I'd suggest taking care of the AIDS epidemic first. AIDS is incurable, and I'm sure you're worried about that virus mutating into a form transmissible by contact, sneezing, or become airborne.
AIDS is an entirerly different virus family to influenza, and as such there is no expectation of a form transmissible by contact - there's probably something deep in the viral structure that means it cannot survive outside the body in an infectious form.
OTOH we know, by comparison with H1N1, that H5N1 is about 30 mutations off being human transmissible at a sufficiently high degree to form a pandemic. This is a perfectly credible threat - it's not certain to happen, but every time a human gets infected the odds increase. Actually the suprise is that we've not already had the pandemic.
No, you miss the point. I've been coding for 20 years and like you in my time I've coded in many different languages on many different platforms - Macs, Windows, various 'nixs, Linux, IBM 390, with Assembler, C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Lisp, Prolog, Java, Perl, PHP, VB, VBA, COBOL using DB2, CICS, SQLServer, ADABAS, Natural, Access, COM, OpenGL and so on and so on. And I still code for 10 hours a day at least - it's what I do and I love doing it.
However, that is over a 20 year period. I take the impression, and I may be wrong, that you are suggesting that your nacescent coder needs to go out and gain mass exposure across a wide breadth of technologies such as you mention in a relatively short timescale. I disagree that's a good idea. Of course limiting yourself to one environment would be foolish in extremis, but I simply doubt it's possible to be really good in more than a few 'programming worlds' (to borrow from Joel Spolsky) at the same time, so a better approach would be to concentrate first on learning a couple of these in depth - for example C# on.NET and LAMP - then when the opportunity arises move on to pick up another and so keep expanding experience. However each is going to take a couple of years to really master - although an experienced coder can be productive in a new environment in much less time of course.
By the time you've mastered half a dozen then you can count yourself as a real programmer, although I doubt it's possible to keep up to speed in more than three or four at the same time.
To code at a competent level you have to be holding a lot of information at your fingertips, which means constant practice. For instance I'd count myself as currently good with Delphi, VBA, SQL Server and PHP in a Windows environment just because these are the systems I make my living with and am constantly coding. I could also get back up to speed with Java, C++ and Perl reasonably fast. Everything else beyond that is now really just background knowledge and 'experience'.
I once worked in a lab where a colleague - a young fit microbiologist in her mid 20's - had aquired a low level Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Most of the time it was fine as her immune system kept it well in check, however every time she got a cold she got an ear infection as the bug was hidding out in one of her Eustachian tubes. She eventually had to have the tube irrigated with antibiotics to get rid of it.
We used to grow a lot of various Pseudomonas species for comparative protein sequencing, and the culture rooms, in particular the one for vat growing, were plastered with warnings about aeruginosa and aerosols. Little green packets of death is a phrase that I've remembered about the bug ever since.
It originated in China and spread via the middle east. Arrived in Europe by ship to Venice, so certainly covered the whole of the old world. The Wikipedia article on it is very good - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_death.
Except... although it was probably bubonic plague there's enough oddities that it could have been something else. An Ebola-like virus has been suggested. There are other unidentified pandemics in medieaval and classical history - the English sweating sickness - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
One of the aims of COBOL was so managers could read, understand and amend programs. That's why it has such a verbose pseudo-english syntax.
Anyone remember ADABAS's NATURAL language? Guess what that was claimed to do:-)
Back in the late 80's when I first started out as a coder a company took a lot of ad space in the computer press to advertise 'the last one', which was a 'programming system' that was so powerful but easy to use that managers would develop there own systems and programmers would all be out of a job in a couple of years. Needless to say it sunk without trace.
SQL itself was originally marketed as being something managers could use. Heck I even went on an introductory course in the late 80's where there were managers and programmers present. Utter disaster of course.
Anyone who's been any form of computer consultant must have come across the user-developed Access database application. Usually a codeword for an unmaintainable nightmare waiting for a rewrite.
None of the above is not to say that users can't extend systems. If I'm putting a Access/SQL system into an office I usually like to put in a 'Expert User' Access system so a technically minded clerk can play around with (read only) sql and generate their own reports - a day or two's basic Access course can really boost productivity and keep simple maintenance requests out of my hair. However one has to be *very* careful to set up the sandbox correctly. I suppose this is what the article could mean by user programming, but if so it's (a) nothing new and (b) more akin to changing your own oil on a car - useful but hardly qualifies you as a car mechanic.
Oracle have overinflated revenues and profits based on crap software, and they've been doing it for years.
Oh dear, looks like we have a MySQL weenie here. Oracle my well be pumping their revenue stream for every dollar they can get, and like IBM their salesmen used to be notorious for turning up for meetings without a price list (it's depends Sir:-). But crap software? Hardly. Oracle plummeled MySQL into the dust in quality before MySQL even existed. Oracle has had transactions and atomicity since version 6 in the early 1990s, a full and elegent procedural SQL language since around that time, SQL that supports concepts such as subselects and everything else needed so a dba could support a mission-critical company database and sleep easy at night.
Oh, and did I mention the support? When I was a dba I knew I could ring support up, at any time of the day or night, and I would get an answer to a question and a fix/work-around for any problem. Truly impressive.
MySQL has it's place and it's useful for many things - although generally as a database it's still pretty crap. Postgres is much much better and is now a serious alternative to Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. But to dismiss Oracle as crap frankly just says in large flashing letters that you've never used a real database for a serious application.
There's a theory that just like solar systems, galaxies have a 'habital zone' around the core - too far in and the stars formed before there was enough heavy metals to support life. If so it would be a nice explanation as to why we havn't seen any signs of intelligent life out there yet.
Incidently I life would manage to get by with scarer metals. There's a group of molluscs with vanadium-based blood, which is a couple of orders of magnitude rarer in the crust than iron.
And given that the large (million-year) scale of climate change is extremly poorly understood, there is no reason to believe that the current interglacial is not the end of the ice-age that has dominated Earth's climate for the last million years or so.
Not that poorly undestood. We have ice ages because the continent of antartica if sitting squarly over the south pole and there's no other land masses in the southern ocean. This reduces the global circulation of heat between the equator and the pole, the pole ices over and reflects more heat back into space, and the whole system cools down. There's a similar, but lesser, effect in at the north pole because the artic ocean is relatively isolated from the rest of the worlds oceans.
Consequently the conditions for ice ages will persist until the continents drift away from their current positions, which may take a while.
give both the UN and Non-Aligned Movement influence
Err, yeah right.
So, given the choice between a great deal of scientific evidence and opinion for global warming, which incidently includes BP, one of the world's largest energy companies, and a global conspiracy so the "UN and and Non-Aligned Movement" can increase their influence you're going with the global conspiracy theory?
Must admit this is the first time I've heard of the Non-Aligned Movement being cited in these fantasies. Kind of odd really given that according to Wikipedia the Non-Aligned Movement includes the Gulf States, Venezuala and Nigeria - indeed actually the whole of OPEC.
Perhaps you'd care to explain what motivation OPEC countries would have in supporting a global warming conspiracy?
"Thus I postulate that our political entities of the U.N. and individual country's governments of the world are NOT the ones to be issuing the demands on people for change"
That's what I'm saying. I'd be highly suprised if alien life used precisely the same biochemistry, however I'd be equally suprised if it didn't use nucleic acids, amino/acid/proteins, sugars/polycarbohydrates and lipids. These grouping are too useful and easily available for them not to be used.
We can even reasonably be a bit more precise about it. With proteins of the 20 amino acids in prime use a good dozen of them could be expected to turn up in an alien biochemistry just because they're the simplest that do the job. With the carbohydrates many are also a dead certainty - glucose, fructose etc. and polymers like chitin are certain to be just as useful to alien biochemistry as they are to ours. On the lipid front, wll lipids are lipids and our biochemistry uses just about everyone going anyway so there's certain to be major overlap.
Nucleic acids are more interesting though. I'd lay a bet on RNA just because the ribonucelic acids tend to form easily in prebiotic conditions. DNA is more suspect, particularly as life here can get along without it just fine. Nevertheless it's the next simplest step up from RNA so may be favoured against other varients. Of course which nucelic acids are actually used is open to chance, although it's noticable that the ones we have are among the simplest.
Beyond these broad categories though indeed it gets more speculative. Even so, some assumptions seem probable. For example if there is RNA/DNA then a triplet genetic code is likely, because as has been observed, a doublet code doesn't give you enough combinations to work with (but there is evidence that our early genetic code was doublet and we evolved the triplet later) whereas a quad code would be inefficient needing 33% extra DNA to code and more error prone.
Other things that might also be expected to turn up. For example porphorins (the building block of haem, chlorophyll and many other useful molecules).
Unfortunatly I guess we'll never know, unless we strike lucky on Mars or Europa.
"Any biochemists out there feel free to disagree and/or expound."
I'll take that one. In a liquid water environment it's difficult to see how you'd end up with a biochemistry that wasn't nucleic acid, protein, carbohydrate and fatty acid based. By observation life on earth seems to have explored just about every type of possible molecular structure that carbon/hydrogen/oxygen + other minor elements can produce and if there were some other useful biological molecule then it's difficult to imagine why it's not been 'discovered' and exploited already. That's not to say that the details won't differ - I'd have thought it virtual certain that a mix of different nucleic acids and amino acids would be used in different combinations with a different genetics etc etc, but I'd expect life to be grossly similar on similar planets, just differing radically in the details.
Outside that I'm very unconvinced by non-water or carbon based life. Silicon just doesn't form complex enough molecules so that's out. The next best bet seems to me to me ammonia based.
That's a good point and it's difficult to know how that could be managed. However the problem is that H5N1 first came up on the radar as a potentially serious threat back in 1997 in Hong Kong, and although the HK authorities handled it well there, it was obvious that the virus didn't originate in HK and so hadn't been eliminated. Nevertheless it was then almost completely ignored by any form of Government anywhere.
When in 2002/3 when it surfaced again seriously in Vietnam it was again almost completely ignored outside the WHO and Vietnam itself. That continued with the situation deteriorating even when it became apparent that the virus was endemic in wildfowl populations and so was virtually certain, eventually, to break out of SE Asia and spread worldwide. Although I no longer work in the field I'm a microbiologist myself by training so I tend to follow these kinds of news items and I myself found it incredible that the situation seemed to be given such low priority internationally. It was also pretty easy to see that at the time an awful lot of scientists who were aware of the problem seemed to be picking up their own personal stockpiles of Tamiflu - particularly after the SARS outbreak when it became apparent how quickly a virus could spread under moden conditions (SARS was interesting itself as it was quite obvious early on that it would be controlled eventually - the lack of transmission by an infected passenger on an international flight pretty much confirmed that).
At least now there's a lot of hopeful signs around about potential vaccines - the work on which would not have been done without the profile being raised. And we have increased awareness about looking out for sick birds and human infection, and money available for WHO, CDC etc to send teams to third world countries which should reduce the opportunity for transmission. In Vietnam the situation is now under control with all of the country's fowl stocks vaccinated against the virus, so it can be beaten. More could be done of course - and should be - but without the certain amount of scare-mongering that was done I don't think we'd even be this far.
Scariest thing of course is that the scare-mongering isn't even necessarily untrue. Experiments on the reconstructed 1918 virus in mice showed it ripped through lung tissue an order of magnitude faster than any other flu virus previously examined. And although there's good reasons to expect that the lethality of a human-transmissible H5N1 will be much lowerer than that seen at the moment, there is no law that says that has to be true.
Odd thing is that for myself I now find myself in the strange position whereas before it became media news I was more concerned about it than everyone I knew, whereas now I find that I'm reassuring people that it's perfectly ok for us to have booked a holiday this summer in a country which has had H5N1 reported and we'll be at far, far more risk of a salmonella infection that from avian flu.
Frankly that's an idiotic argument. Fortunatly our medical science has now advanced to the point we can see potential threats coming. Avian Influenza is a case in point - if it does mutate to pass from human to human then it's very likely to be a rerun of 1918 (the viruses are remarkably similar) and kill 5% of the population. The 1918 epidemic killed more people that WWI.
Ebola is less of an immediate threat, but there are some signs that it, or something related, could mutate to an airborne or aerosol form. On the scale of risk the probability is low, but there's some convincing arguments that some past plagues - even the Black Death - were hemorregic fevers.
It therefore makes sense that we take some preventative measures against potential threats now. Personally I'm very glad that the WHO hyped up Avian Flu because at least governments have started to take some precautions, pump money into vaccine development etc. If we are luckly and the virus doesn't mutate for another year or two then there's a good chance that the death rate from an epidemic could be substantially cut. Reducing the number of cases of Avian Flu in humans by culling birds and inducing fear in the populations where it occurs all helps by reducing the chances the virus has to mutate.
Of course in some cases the percieved threat will never have been real, and in others preventative actions will stall a major disaster so the sceptics will argue there was no major threat in the first place. Whatever, in both human and economic terms the cost of a small amount of hype and preparatory action now will pay off many, many times over.
Right, so you're quite happy to run the risk of an airborne Ebola strain because you'd rather save a relatively small amount of money?
Ebola outbreaks currently burn themselves out pretty fast because they are (a) horrific and very deadly, so really motivate the population to take action and (b) only transmitted by blood contact. However there have been some indications of a monkey strain that can transmit either airborne or aerosol.
Add to that there's a good argument that the Black Death was not bubonic plague but a hemorragic fever. It's a long way from proven but there are some persuasive lines of evidence - lack of DNA from plague bacteria in the corpses of Black Death victims for example, the spread of the Black Death in Iceland despite the fact that the vector - black rats - was absent.
Apart from the non-trivil consideration that having an vaccine for Ebola will save lives in future outbreaks, having the expertese in filiovirus haemoregic fever vaccines would be of considerable help if the situation ever became more serious.
There's been quite a few studies showing that the more 'intelligent' you are, or at least the more you excercise your brain, the less likely you are to be diagnosed with Alzheimers in the first place.
One I particularly liked was of a Convent where before admission the nuns had to submit an essay on why the wanted to join. The essays were all kept. By comparing the essays of those who later died of Alzheimers with those who didn't it was show there was a stong negative correlation with increasing complexity in sentence structure and breadth of vocabularly with diagnosis of Alzheimers.
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So what? The Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster tells me we were all created by his noodly appendage. The only thing the bible has over http://www.venganza.org/ is that it's been around a bit longer. Length of tradition of course proves nothing. Hinduism has been around considerably longer than Judaism yet you are choosing to believe the newcomer.
Science, and evolution, rest on proof in the fossil and genetic records. The bible has no such proof behind it and so for the purposes of this discussion should be thrown on the junk heap along with all other 'sacred' texts.
But Scotland has it's own quite distinct legal system, separate education and health systems, and a lot of other domestic peculiarities. True we're the same country as far as foreign policy is concerned, but in practical everyday terms Holyrood now has more impact than Westminster.
Put in this way, in the last election the only campaign issues that were of any relevance to Scotland were the EC and Iraq. Everything else that Blair and Howard chuntered on about has been devolved to Holyrood.
Also I think, and I'm not alone in seeing this, the amount of anti-English whinging that goes on has markedly decreased since 1999. We now whinge about the boy Jack and his cronies instead, although Holyrood as an institution has been widely succesful and polls reliably return vast and increasing majorities against it's abolition. As a consequence support for full independance has dropped through the floor.
That's because of the peculiar makeup of the British state. There's approximatly 5 million of us Scots, a similar number of Welsh, and the rest - 50 million odd - are English. Because representation is approximatly proportional the British parliament is hence 85% or so English.
;-). The reverse, that out fraction of Scottish MPs got to vote on English affairs, was thus completely overshadowed by the greater injustice (unless you were Tam Dayell of course).
Furthermore the legal systems are split into England and Wales - which have the same legal system because Edward I conquered Wales in the 13th Century, and Scotland, which is separate because the act of union between Scotland and England didn't take place util 1707 and was on paper at least a merger of equals (haha).
Until we got our own Parliament back in 1999 Scottish legislation was voted on in the British Parliament, so that 85% English majority got to determine Scottish domestic legislation. This did lead to a certain amount of tension
Since 1999 the English do however seem to have noticed us and there is some clamour to do something about Scots voting on English matters. However because and English Parliament would represent 85% of the British Parliament setting a separate body up would be costly and create a second power centre with almost as much legitimacy as the British Parliament. Needless to say this isn't a viable political solution, so what's most likely to happen is that eventually Scots MPs won't vote on English matters and there will be a defacto English parliament comprised of a subset of the British one. Labour isn't keen on this as it disproportionatly returns Scottish MPs, and it's contortions to justify the status quo are truly a wonder to behold, but it's one of those things that isn't going to go away and the 'no vote' solution is so plausably fair that it's pretty likely to happen eventually.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you. However since it's become apparent that a) life was present on earth very very early in it's history - microfossils have been found 3.5Ga old, and b) Mars use to have a thick atmosphere, lots of water and probably moved out of it's Hadean phase at an earlier date, then I think the possibility that life started on Mars and then seeding Earth has to be taken seriously.
If only that were true. In fact by comparison with H1N1 (recovered from 1918 victims) it appears that H5N1 is about 30 mutations off a human pandemic form. Usual scientific caveats apply, but the suprise to many virologists, frankly, is that we've not already had the pandemic.
It is of course quite possible that H5N1 burns itself out in birds without the necessary mutations occuring, but that is far from certain and in fact probably quite unlikely. One of the more interesting observations amout H1N1 1918 is that is seems to have broken out in several geographicaly disperate countries almost simultaniously, which implies it had mutated by random genetic drift in birds to be human-transmissible then jumped species, so it was probably around in birds quite a long time before randomly acquiring the necessary mutations. H5N1 isn't quite as widespread yet, but it will be within a year.
At a guess then H5N1 may be globably pandemic in birds for several years before we get a human pandemic. If we're lucky that is. Kepp your fingers crossed.
Alternately, if you still think there is a credible concern for the H5N1 virus to mutate to a human communicable form, then I'd suggest taking care of the AIDS epidemic first. AIDS is incurable, and I'm sure you're worried about that virus mutating into a form transmissible by contact, sneezing, or become airborne.
AIDS is an entirerly different virus family to influenza, and as such there is no expectation of a form transmissible by contact - there's probably something deep in the viral structure that means it cannot survive outside the body in an infectious form.
OTOH we know, by comparison with H1N1, that H5N1 is about 30 mutations off being human transmissible at a sufficiently high degree to form a pandemic. This is a perfectly credible threat - it's not certain to happen, but every time a human gets infected the odds increase. Actually the suprise is that we've not already had the pandemic.
Err, that's just what they did. Obviously reading is a challenge for you as just a few paragraphs in they say
"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."
Obviously no need for divine relevation there then.
As for the thermometer, well duh, obviousky they're measuring the temperature (i.e. energy) of radiation.
Read this, one of Joel's better efforts
s ton.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmer
No, you miss the point. I've been coding for 20 years and like you in my time I've coded in many different languages on many different platforms - Macs, Windows, various 'nixs, Linux, IBM 390, with Assembler, C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Lisp, Prolog, Java, Perl, PHP, VB, VBA, COBOL using DB2, CICS, SQLServer, ADABAS, Natural, Access, COM, OpenGL and so on and so on. And I still code for 10 hours a day at least - it's what I do and I love doing it.
.NET and LAMP - then when the opportunity arises move on to pick up another and so keep expanding experience. However each is going to take a couple of years to really master - although an experienced coder can be productive in a new environment in much less time of course.
However, that is over a 20 year period. I take the impression, and I may be wrong, that you are suggesting that your nacescent coder needs to go out and gain mass exposure across a wide breadth of technologies such as you mention in a relatively short timescale. I disagree that's a good idea. Of course limiting yourself to one environment would be foolish in extremis, but I simply doubt it's possible to be really good in more than a few 'programming worlds' (to borrow from Joel Spolsky) at the same time, so a better approach would be to concentrate first on learning a couple of these in depth - for example C# on
By the time you've mastered half a dozen then you can count yourself as a real programmer, although I doubt it's possible to keep up to speed in more than three or four at the same time.
To code at a competent level you have to be holding a lot of information at your fingertips, which means constant practice. For instance I'd count myself as currently good with Delphi, VBA, SQL Server and PHP in a Windows environment just because these are the systems I make my living with and am constantly coding. I could also get back up to speed with Java, C++ and Perl reasonably fast. Everything else beyond that is now really just background knowledge and 'experience'.
And while you're doing all this you are making a living precisely how?
We used to grow a lot of various Pseudomonas species for comparative protein sequencing, and the culture rooms, in particular the one for vat growing, were plastered with warnings about aeruginosa and aerosols. Little green packets of death is a phrase that I've remembered about the bug ever since.
It originated in China and spread via the middle east. Arrived in Europe by ship to Venice, so certainly covered the whole of the old world. The Wikipedia article on it is very good - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_death.
Except... although it was probably bubonic plague there's enough oddities that it could have been something else. An Ebola-like virus has been suggested. There are other unidentified pandemics in medieaval and classical history - the English sweating sickness - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
So, the old Chestnut comes around again.
:-)
One of the aims of COBOL was so managers could read, understand and amend programs. That's why it has such a verbose pseudo-english syntax.
Anyone remember ADABAS's NATURAL language? Guess what that was claimed to do
Back in the late 80's when I first started out as a coder a company took a lot of ad space in the computer press to advertise 'the last one', which was a 'programming system' that was so powerful but easy to use that managers would develop there own systems and programmers would all be out of a job in a couple of years. Needless to say it sunk without trace.
SQL itself was originally marketed as being something managers could use. Heck I even went on an introductory course in the late 80's where there were managers and programmers present. Utter disaster of course.
Anyone who's been any form of computer consultant must have come across the user-developed Access database application. Usually a codeword for an unmaintainable nightmare waiting for a rewrite.
None of the above is not to say that users can't extend systems. If I'm putting a Access/SQL system into an office I usually like to put in a 'Expert User' Access system so a technically minded clerk can play around with (read only) sql and generate their own reports - a day or two's basic Access course can really boost productivity and keep simple maintenance requests out of my hair. However one has to be *very* careful to set up the sandbox correctly. I suppose this is what the article could mean by user programming, but if so it's (a) nothing new and (b) more akin to changing your own oil on a car - useful but hardly qualifies you as a car mechanic.
Oracle have overinflated revenues and profits based on crap software, and they've been doing it for years.
:-). But crap software? Hardly. Oracle plummeled MySQL into the dust in quality before MySQL even existed. Oracle has had transactions and atomicity since version 6 in the early 1990s, a full and elegent procedural SQL language since around that time, SQL that supports concepts such as subselects and everything else needed so a dba could support a mission-critical company database and sleep easy at night.
Oh dear, looks like we have a MySQL weenie here. Oracle my well be pumping their revenue stream for every dollar they can get, and like IBM their salesmen used to be notorious for turning up for meetings without a price list (it's depends Sir
Oh, and did I mention the support? When I was a dba I knew I could ring support up, at any time of the day or night, and I would get an answer to a question and a fix/work-around for any problem. Truly impressive.
MySQL has it's place and it's useful for many things - although generally as a database it's still pretty crap. Postgres is much much better and is now a serious alternative to Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. But to dismiss Oracle as crap frankly just says in large flashing letters that you've never used a real database for a serious application.
There's a theory that just like solar systems, galaxies have a 'habital zone' around the core - too far in and the stars formed before there was enough heavy metals to support life. If so it would be a nice explanation as to why we havn't seen any signs of intelligent life out there yet.
Incidently I life would manage to get by with scarer metals. There's a group of molluscs with vanadium-based blood, which is a couple of orders of magnitude rarer in the crust than iron.
And given that the large (million-year) scale of climate change is extremly poorly understood, there is no reason to believe that the current interglacial is not the end of the ice-age that has dominated Earth's climate for the last million years or so.
Not that poorly undestood. We have ice ages because the continent of antartica if sitting squarly over the south pole and there's no other land masses in the southern ocean. This reduces the global circulation of heat between the equator and the pole, the pole ices over and reflects more heat back into space, and the whole system cools down. There's a similar, but lesser, effect in at the north pole because the artic ocean is relatively isolated from the rest of the worlds oceans.
Consequently the conditions for ice ages will persist until the continents drift away from their current positions, which may take a while.
give both the UN and Non-Aligned Movement influence
Err, yeah right.
So, given the choice between a great deal of scientific evidence and opinion for global warming, which incidently includes BP, one of the world's largest energy companies, and a global conspiracy so the "UN and and Non-Aligned Movement" can increase their influence you're going with the global conspiracy theory?
Must admit this is the first time I've heard of the Non-Aligned Movement being cited in these fantasies. Kind of odd really given that according to Wikipedia the Non-Aligned Movement includes the Gulf States, Venezuala and Nigeria - indeed actually the whole of OPEC.
Perhaps you'd care to explain what motivation OPEC countries would have in supporting a global warming conspiracy?
Ah right, so what we're dealing with here is not Global Warming, but the New World Order and a surfeit of Black Helicopters
Let's put it nice and simply, the changes being seen at present are different in degree to any previous change that can be measured or inferred.
That's what I'm saying. I'd be highly suprised if alien life used precisely the same biochemistry, however I'd be equally suprised if it didn't use nucleic acids, amino/acid/proteins, sugars/polycarbohydrates and lipids. These grouping are too useful and easily available for them not to be used.
We can even reasonably be a bit more precise about it. With proteins of the 20 amino acids in prime use a good dozen of them could be expected to turn up in an alien biochemistry just because they're the simplest that do the job. With the carbohydrates many are also a dead certainty - glucose, fructose etc. and polymers like chitin are certain to be just as useful to alien biochemistry as they are to ours. On the lipid front, wll lipids are lipids and our biochemistry uses just about everyone going anyway so there's certain to be major overlap.
Nucleic acids are more interesting though. I'd lay a bet on RNA just because the ribonucelic acids tend to form easily in prebiotic conditions. DNA is more suspect, particularly as life here can get along without it just fine. Nevertheless it's the next simplest step up from RNA so may be favoured against other varients. Of course which nucelic acids are actually used is open to chance, although it's noticable that the ones we have are among the simplest.
Beyond these broad categories though indeed it gets more speculative. Even so, some assumptions seem probable. For example if there is RNA/DNA then a triplet genetic code is likely, because as has been observed, a doublet code doesn't give you enough combinations to work with (but there is evidence that our early genetic code was doublet and we evolved the triplet later) whereas a quad code would be inefficient needing 33% extra DNA to code and more error prone.
Other things that might also be expected to turn up. For example porphorins (the building block of haem, chlorophyll and many other useful molecules).
Unfortunatly I guess we'll never know, unless we strike lucky on Mars or Europa.
"Any biochemists out there feel free to disagree and/or expound."
I'll take that one. In a liquid water environment it's difficult to see how you'd end up with a biochemistry that wasn't nucleic acid, protein, carbohydrate and fatty acid based. By observation life on earth seems to have explored just about every type of possible molecular structure that carbon/hydrogen/oxygen + other minor elements can produce and if there were some other useful biological molecule then it's difficult to imagine why it's not been 'discovered' and exploited already. That's not to say that the details won't differ - I'd have thought it virtual certain that a mix of different nucleic acids and amino acids would be used in different combinations with a different genetics etc etc, but I'd expect life to be grossly similar on similar planets, just differing radically in the details.
Outside that I'm very unconvinced by non-water or carbon based life. Silicon just doesn't form complex enough molecules so that's out. The next best bet seems to me to me ammonia based.
That's a good point and it's difficult to know how that could be managed. However the problem is that H5N1 first came up on the radar as a potentially serious threat back in 1997 in Hong Kong, and although the HK authorities handled it well there, it was obvious that the virus didn't originate in HK and so hadn't been eliminated. Nevertheless it was then almost completely ignored by any form of Government anywhere.
When in 2002/3 when it surfaced again seriously in Vietnam it was again almost completely ignored outside the WHO and Vietnam itself. That continued with the situation deteriorating even when it became apparent that the virus was endemic in wildfowl populations and so was virtually certain, eventually, to break out of SE Asia and spread worldwide. Although I no longer work in the field I'm a microbiologist myself by training so I tend to follow these kinds of news items and I myself found it incredible that the situation seemed to be given such low priority internationally. It was also pretty easy to see that at the time an awful lot of scientists who were aware of the problem seemed to be picking up their own personal stockpiles of Tamiflu - particularly after the SARS outbreak when it became apparent how quickly a virus could spread under moden conditions (SARS was interesting itself as it was quite obvious early on that it would be controlled eventually - the lack of transmission by an infected passenger on an international flight pretty much confirmed that).
At least now there's a lot of hopeful signs around about potential vaccines - the work on which would not have been done without the profile being raised. And we have increased awareness about looking out for sick birds and human infection, and money available for WHO, CDC etc to send teams to third world countries which should reduce the opportunity for transmission. In Vietnam the situation is now under control with all of the country's fowl stocks vaccinated against the virus, so it can be beaten. More could be done of course - and should be - but without the certain amount of scare-mongering that was done I don't think we'd even be this far.
Scariest thing of course is that the scare-mongering isn't even necessarily untrue. Experiments on the reconstructed 1918 virus in mice showed it ripped through lung tissue an order of magnitude faster than any other flu virus previously examined. And although there's good reasons to expect that the lethality of a human-transmissible H5N1 will be much lowerer than that seen at the moment, there is no law that says that has to be true.
Odd thing is that for myself I now find myself in the strange position whereas before it became media news I was more concerned about it than everyone I knew, whereas now I find that I'm reassuring people that it's perfectly ok for us to have booked a holiday this summer in a country which has had H5N1 reported and we'll be at far, far more risk of a salmonella infection that from avian flu.
Frankly that's an idiotic argument. Fortunatly our medical science has now advanced to the point we can see potential threats coming. Avian Influenza is a case in point - if it does mutate to pass from human to human then it's very likely to be a rerun of 1918 (the viruses are remarkably similar) and kill 5% of the population. The 1918 epidemic killed more people that WWI.
Ebola is less of an immediate threat, but there are some signs that it, or something related, could mutate to an airborne or aerosol form. On the scale of risk the probability is low, but there's some convincing arguments that some past plagues - even the Black Death - were hemorregic fevers.
It therefore makes sense that we take some preventative measures against potential threats now. Personally I'm very glad that the WHO hyped up Avian Flu because at least governments have started to take some precautions, pump money into vaccine development etc. If we are luckly and the virus doesn't mutate for another year or two then there's a good chance that the death rate from an epidemic could be substantially cut. Reducing the number of cases of Avian Flu in humans by culling birds and inducing fear in the populations where it occurs all helps by reducing the chances the virus has to mutate.
Of course in some cases the percieved threat will never have been real, and in others preventative actions will stall a major disaster so the sceptics will argue there was no major threat in the first place. Whatever, in both human and economic terms the cost of a small amount of hype and preparatory action now will pay off many, many times over.
Right, so you're quite happy to run the risk of an airborne Ebola strain because you'd rather save a relatively small amount of money?
Ebola outbreaks currently burn themselves out pretty fast because they are (a) horrific and very deadly, so really motivate the population to take action and (b) only transmitted by blood contact. However there have been some indications of a monkey strain that can transmit either airborne or aerosol.
Add to that there's a good argument that the Black Death was not bubonic plague but a hemorragic fever. It's a long way from proven but there are some persuasive lines of evidence - lack of DNA from plague bacteria in the corpses of Black Death victims for example, the spread of the Black Death in Iceland despite the fact that the vector - black rats - was absent.
Apart from the non-trivil consideration that having an vaccine for Ebola will save lives in future outbreaks, having the expertese in filiovirus haemoregic fever vaccines would be of considerable help if the situation ever became more serious.
There's been quite a few studies showing that the more 'intelligent' you are, or at least the more you excercise your brain, the less likely you are to be diagnosed with Alzheimers in the first place.
One I particularly liked was of a Convent where before admission the nuns had to submit an essay on why the wanted to join. The essays were all kept. By comparing the essays of those who later died of Alzheimers with those who didn't it was show there was a stong negative correlation with increasing complexity in sentence structure and breadth of vocabularly with diagnosis of Alzheimers.