Well, when I'm drunk I'm still in control enough to not kill someone or give away secrets. In fact, being drunk doesn't mitigate any crime in our legal system, and that's rational. Why then would anyone have the right to assume that I can get drunk and follow the law but can't be trusted to keep secrets?
It's the same reason why employers can't bar you from drinking after you are employed and are privy to their secrets: being drunk doesn't make you spill your beans. There's no reason to assume that because someone does get drunk, he or she is going to be a liability and should not be hired.
You keep saying "what is public is public" and variations as it's own justification. That's getting back to a should vs is argument. I'm not saying an employer WON'T use public drunkeness as a reason to not hire you, I'm saying its a stupid reason not to hire you.
Suppose someone is going for a job at a bank. If the weekend before that person just happens to be a bar doing shots all night and makes an ass of themselves and the bank manager just happens to be at that bar that night. Do you think that the bank manager should ignore that?
Yes. If the interviewee is not hung over, and did not do anything like give away bank secrets or badmouth former employees while drunk, then it has no bearing on his potential as an employee. The only way your personal life should matter to an employer is if it affects your job performance.
Anyway, the two are not the same. It's drastically different between happening to observe something firsthand and observing something from a google search. Its one thing to not get drunk at a bar when your boss is there. It's harder to ensure no one is going to snap a picture of you. Furthermore, if your boss is at the bar, he'll know what is actually going on. If you're sober and someone happens to take a picture that say makes it look like you're in a wet T shirt contest when you're not, that's not somethign a picture on facebook is going to clarify.
Man, it took that guy 3 years to figure out how to braid his hair? I guess it might take some people that long to grow their hair out long enough, but it's still pretty easy! 2nd graders know how to do it with play-do!
You know what would be WAY more cost effective? Paying a high-priced marketing agency to convince people that people who use computers are terrorists, and it's patriotic to watch TV instead.
It's also telling that it seems to be the guys who made the "classic games" in the 80s that are praising remakes of their games and saying things like
I think more than half of the games you see today with huge budgets and such a ârealisticâ(TM) focus will be either stale or forgotten in 20 years...On the other hand, the masterpieces of the 80â(TM)s will definitely be enjoyed far into the future. The reason for this is simple â" many of these classic titles have unique and fascinating mechanics that canâ(TM)t be diminished by the advancement of technology.
Yes, just like how those earliest black and white silent movies, with simple concepts like going to the moon on a zepplin, are still being remade wheras more modern movies like "Jurrasic Park," with huge budgets and "realism" are forgotten in a week.
In honesty, Galaga and Pacman I find quite boring. It's ludicrous to imply that high budgets and production values prevent good concepts from seeing the market, only an arrogant old man out of touch with current videogames would suggest that. There are plenty of good simple mechanics that also utilize more modern machinery and higher quality graphics, just as there are movies that are good movies and also have decent special effects. It's a mistake to see that many of the high-budget films made are crap, and look at a filtered library of "classics" distilled from the last 50 years of film and suggest that you can't make a good high budget movie.
The media has really evolved since the 80s as well. The story in pac man is what? Fruit good ghosts bad? If there is a story, it was told in the game packaging, not through the game itself. I would suggest that games are still evolving, the basic mechanisms of gameplay and storytelling are being fleshed out, and those 80s stars are actually dinosaurs who can't recognize that the type of videogames they made are largely obsolete.
I'm reading a lot of "this is how the world works, deal with it" comments. It's odd because that doesn't have much to do with the issue at hand. The issue is SHOULD it be this way. Saying stuff like "poor judgment will effect your life" is off topic and also asinine. Of course it will. Doesn't mean employers have a good reason to stick their noses up applicant's asses.
Why does every manager not screen all applicants? Takes 5 minutes.
For one thing, some managers who think for themselves instead of following the herd might realize that someone binge drinking in college or using drugs recreationally doesn't mean they are going to be a bad worker. Bad PR for the company also seems a bit ridiculous to me. If I'm working in a cubicle for X bank or Y law firm, a picture of me doing body shots on spring break is not going to disgrace the company. In fact, if pictures surfaced of me setting a puppy on fire, I would be doubtful that the company I work for is going to get any real negative exposure. Depends on the job, but we're not talking specifically about spokesperson positions.
Badmouthing former bosses I could see as a legitimate red flag, but not enough to preclude further consideration if the complaints were reasonable.
80% of hiring managers using logic instead of superstition does sound unlikely though...
I personally think it's easy to send things into the sun because I've never had to do it before and it always works great for superman. Also because I rarely figure out the calculus and physics behind wild "what if" scenarios. What's the fun in that?
It's jerks like you who make foreign policy boring by saying stuff like "Yes we could invade Iraq, but then what would we do about the insurgency, building democracy blah blah blah I hate america." Let us build the ever loving nuclear reactor on the moon then chuck it into the sun when we're done with it! Next you're probably going to whine about how tax dollars might better be spent on education or some crap like that!
In my defense, I did mean for that line to be a joke, I was going to write "Yes? Well good..." but couldn't think of anything else before I went off on a tangent. Then I was going to go back and fix it, but then I got high. Oooh oooh.
In my defense, people use that reasoning all the time with anything biology related.
You appear to be thinking specifically of oxidative phosphorylation in advanced eukaryotic cells which arose from the proliferation of oxygen in the atmosphere by prokaryotic cells and the symbiotic engulfing of smaller specialised prokaryotic cells (ie mitochondria, chloroplasts) by larger prokaryotic cells. This is the most efficient way to produce ATP, but certainly not the only way, and definitely not going to happen in a very primitive cell. Rather, you'd be looking at good old reliable fermentation.
You're right, but my point was that even in the tailored and protected environment of your bloodstream, which services mostly your own cells, you don't just find free energy, your cells/symbiotes have to digest it. These artificial cells the guy made likely only have the ability to incorporate already digested raw materials, there is little chance for them to survive in any non-artificial environment you can think of because you don't find nutrients just lying around. Kind of like a baby surrounded by packaged formula. There are nutrients arond, but since it can't open the formula, it would starve on it's own.
You should go on. Bone structure I'd like to know more about. Histology to me is the study of tissues, which are not present or observeable in dinosaurs. You have impressions of their skeletons, that's all.
Growth rates I would also like to know how that means they were warm blooded. A google search shows several pages that assert that they have a growth rate that is inconsistent with cold bloodedness, but no explanation as to why. How many large cold-blooded reptiles are there today? Alligators and crocs are the only ones I can think of. It's not hard to imagine that in the ice age, the genes enabling rapid growth in poikilotherms was extremely deleterious, and as a result today there are no cold-blooded reptiles with fast growth. That could be the reason we don't see any fast growing reptiles today. Same with speed and agility. And I have to point out that there are many lizards that are extremely fast. Crocodiles are lethargic only until they see something they want to eat.
I can't see how rates of evolution would be specific to endothermic organisms. An environment in which cold-blooded large reptiles were particularly fit for would by consequence produce a lot of reproductive sucesses and thereby a lot of evolution. Maybe I should rather say that evolutionary sucess comes from fitness to the environment, not body type. Our environment is not well suited to cold blooded reptiles, consequently we would today see slow rates of evolution for them. It would be a mistake to take those rates and say that it would mean that under different conditions, cold blooded reptiles could not have evolved faster.
Similarities with birds, parental care, bone isotype composition, and insulation you're going to have to explain further.
All the arguments sound like they're based on looking at current reptiles, adapted to current conditions, and trying to say they couldn't do what dinosaurs did because they're not doing it now. Conditions are different now than they were in their era, changing the rules of the game, and furthermore we know that the extinction event selected against the very features that allowed the dinosaurs to proliferate, today's cold-bloods reflect that and consequently do not have the features that the dinosaurs had. All around it's faulty comparison.
That's strong evidence? I would say that's evidence that appears to challenge the hypothesis, but I think it's quite a leap to say that suggests they were warm blooded.
All organisms self replicate. Just because something is lab-made doesn't mean it would magically not be subject to evolutionary forces.
Having not been made by natural evolutionary forces, it's unlikely they would be fit to survive in any natural environment. These things have not been instilled with any defenses against things looking to eat them including bacteria. Didn't read the article, but I would guess they aren't capable of digesting molecules, they probably have to be presented with ready to go "nutrients" to replicate, move or do anything. You don't find that anywhere in the real world, in fact, as I recall you don't even find that in your bloodstream. ATP is what your molecules use for power, but you only get that once your cells import glucose and your mitochondria turn it into ATP.
In other words, they have absolutely no way to eat anything they would need to survive.
In evolutionary biology, a major cause of extinction, at least in theory, is called "changing rules." If you're an organism doing well, you're highly adapted to your environment and proliferate. Think of the dinosaurs, they ruled the earth, bigger was better. Mammals were barely hanging on for dear life, small, furry, warm blooded, nocturnal didn't make sense at the time. If the rules suddenly change though through environmental shift, you might not be fit for the new environment. The asteroid hits, an ice age happens, and suddenly cold-blooded huge lizards can't cut it and massively go extinct. The only reason reptiles remain today is that there was significant variation in that clade that allowed some of them to survive in the new game.
These artificial bugs are barely managing to survive in an environment tailored to them, they can't replicate on their own. They also appear to have no variation. If they get out of their environment, they have no chance of survival. It's precisely because they're subject to evolutionary forces that they have no chance.
Do von neumann machines have to be made out of inorganic materials? If not, I think these qualify, although green goo might be more precise.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet.
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Microscopic black holes would evaporate in a very small amount of time due to Hawking radiation..
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
By the way, every biology article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?" An article showing that artificial DNA self-associates was tagged that. No chance of killer viruses from that, yet it got the tag. Here we have a scientific study with some people actually claiming it will end the earth. They may be idiots, but people who worry about DNA strands creating vampires like in I am legend are just as idiotic. What gives?
I personally say it's only because no movies have yet taken the idea of LHC and mangled it into nonsense to use as a plot device the way they've used killer artificial viruses. And that's probably only because "complete oblitheration of the world" is a pretty boring plot.
HaeMaker phrased that oddly. The mechanic isn't afraid his job is disappearing because of hybrids, he's losing his job because of numerous sexual harassment lawsuits. Nothing to do with hybrids, he just hates them.
The whole point of Marth's paper is that there has been too much focus on genes and proteins as the origins of disease, and that the research into lipids and glycans that has been conducted hasn't been integrated well enough into the genetic research.
A large part of that is due not to researchers prefering genes and proteins over the others, but limitations in our tools for probing them. There is quite a bit of research into lipids membranes, but the field is having trouble agreeing on some of the very basic mechanisms due to technical limitations. It's much harder to replicate lipids than it is to do so for DNA or proteins. DNA sequences you can have as much as you want by tomorrow using bacteria or PCR. Proteins you can get a cell type of your choice to express it and then harvest it (this becomes more difficult with certain proteins like transmembrane ones and becomes much more difficult with protein complexes). Those come out very pure and have been exhaustively troubleshot. Lipid purification methods are less developed.
I'm no expert in that, but it seems like a vicious cycle of no one purifies lipids because there hasn't been much work done to come up with a cheap and fast way of purifying lipids because no one purifies lipids. If anyone knows of a way to purify lipids for as cheap as you can DNA, let me know.
Furthermore, you can manipulate DNA or proteins much easier than you can lipids. A professor was telling me once that there were only two people in the world who knew how to effectively modify lipids to do spin-spin labeling (I think that's a way of determining the orientation of two mollecules) and to buy purified modified lipids was outrageously expensive. In proteins on the other hand, it's my understanding that any grad student could make and purify protiens for spin-spin.
And lipid biologists are having trouble with the very basics of their field as a consequence of limited tools. Lipid rafts are potentially one of the most important functions of lipids in the bilayer, but it's quite controversial as to whether they exist or not. I personally am not convinced that they do. The evidence in support seems to all be artificial examples of where they could get certain lipids to self-associate, but real-life examples have as far as I know either not been sufficiently proven or have been disproven.
I don't mean to demean lipid biologists, that work is far above my head and it is definitely an area that is far, far underdeveloped compared to the genes and protein research that I do. My hat is off to them.
Basically, we're focused on genes and proteins because you work with what you can. When the tools for lipid studies catch up to DNA and protein, you can expect lipids to catch up.
On a completely unrelated note, I've made an illustration with 5 essential parts of all buildings: nails, screws, wood, cement, and support beams. These 5 building blocks provide the structural basis for the architectural choreography that constitutes the entire structure of a building. These construction components may now hold the keys to uncovering the origins of many grievous architectural problems that continue to evade understanding.
Grr... pick at my phrasing will you? You see what I meant right? We consider ourselves the pinacle of evolution only because we have a different set of standards. Evolutionary success is better measured in reproductive successes. We're losing to other mammals in that reguard, mammals as a whole are the losing team when compared to things like insects.
And I neglected to mention that this whole multicellular thing is by evolutionary standards a massive failure. Bacteria are by far the dominant mode of life on this planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, when I'm drunk I'm still in control enough to not kill someone or give away secrets. In fact, being drunk doesn't mitigate any crime in our legal system, and that's rational. Why then would anyone have the right to assume that I can get drunk and follow the law but can't be trusted to keep secrets?
It's the same reason why employers can't bar you from drinking after you are employed and are privy to their secrets: being drunk doesn't make you spill your beans. There's no reason to assume that because someone does get drunk, he or she is going to be a liability and should not be hired.
You keep saying "what is public is public" and variations as it's own justification. That's getting back to a should vs is argument. I'm not saying an employer WON'T use public drunkeness as a reason to not hire you, I'm saying its a stupid reason not to hire you.
Suppose someone is going for a job at a bank. If the weekend before that person just happens to be a bar doing shots all night and makes an ass of themselves and the bank manager just happens to be at that bar that night. Do you think that the bank manager should ignore that?
Yes. If the interviewee is not hung over, and did not do anything like give away bank secrets or badmouth former employees while drunk, then it has no bearing on his potential as an employee. The only way your personal life should matter to an employer is if it affects your job performance.
Anyway, the two are not the same. It's drastically different between happening to observe something firsthand and observing something from a google search. Its one thing to not get drunk at a bar when your boss is there. It's harder to ensure no one is going to snap a picture of you. Furthermore, if your boss is at the bar, he'll know what is actually going on. If you're sober and someone happens to take a picture that say makes it look like you're in a wet T shirt contest when you're not, that's not somethign a picture on facebook is going to clarify.
Man, it took that guy 3 years to figure out how to braid his hair? I guess it might take some people that long to grow their hair out long enough, but it's still pretty easy! 2nd graders know how to do it with play-do!
You know what would be WAY more cost effective? Paying a high-priced marketing agency to convince people that people who use computers are terrorists, and it's patriotic to watch TV instead.
I would like to see him combine lightning with his "lightsaber" though.
It's also telling that it seems to be the guys who made the "classic games" in the 80s that are praising remakes of their games and saying things like
I think more than half of the games you see today with huge budgets and such a ârealisticâ(TM) focus will be either stale or forgotten in 20 years...On the other hand, the masterpieces of the 80â(TM)s will definitely be enjoyed far into the future. The reason for this is simple â" many of these classic titles have unique and fascinating mechanics that canâ(TM)t be diminished by the advancement of technology.
Yes, just like how those earliest black and white silent movies, with simple concepts like going to the moon on a zepplin, are still being remade wheras more modern movies like "Jurrasic Park," with huge budgets and "realism" are forgotten in a week.
In honesty, Galaga and Pacman I find quite boring. It's ludicrous to imply that high budgets and production values prevent good concepts from seeing the market, only an arrogant old man out of touch with current videogames would suggest that. There are plenty of good simple mechanics that also utilize more modern machinery and higher quality graphics, just as there are movies that are good movies and also have decent special effects. It's a mistake to see that many of the high-budget films made are crap, and look at a filtered library of "classics" distilled from the last 50 years of film and suggest that you can't make a good high budget movie.
The media has really evolved since the 80s as well. The story in pac man is what? Fruit good ghosts bad? If there is a story, it was told in the game packaging, not through the game itself. I would suggest that games are still evolving, the basic mechanisms of gameplay and storytelling are being fleshed out, and those 80s stars are actually dinosaurs who can't recognize that the type of videogames they made are largely obsolete.
I'm reading a lot of "this is how the world works, deal with it" comments. It's odd because that doesn't have much to do with the issue at hand. The issue is SHOULD it be this way. Saying stuff like "poor judgment will effect your life" is off topic and also asinine. Of course it will. Doesn't mean employers have a good reason to stick their noses up applicant's asses.
What would you expect if you admitted you're a drunken dope user on Facebook? An award for honesty?
What I WOULDN'T expect is for a potential employer to read that as "I don't work hard," or "I am a drunken dope user while on company time."
I guess I was optimistically expecting they could seperate personal life from work life the way I do.
People are dumbassess. And they think it is cool to show their friends what a dumbass they are.
Hence which is why I will NEVER sign up for myspace or facebook.
So... you won't sign up for facebook because you are a person and therefore are a dumbass?
(Yes, I do know I took that out of context. It was for comedic purposes only.)
Why does every manager not screen all applicants? Takes 5 minutes.
For one thing, some managers who think for themselves instead of following the herd might realize that someone binge drinking in college or using drugs recreationally doesn't mean they are going to be a bad worker. Bad PR for the company also seems a bit ridiculous to me. If I'm working in a cubicle for X bank or Y law firm, a picture of me doing body shots on spring break is not going to disgrace the company. In fact, if pictures surfaced of me setting a puppy on fire, I would be doubtful that the company I work for is going to get any real negative exposure. Depends on the job, but we're not talking specifically about spokesperson positions.
Badmouthing former bosses I could see as a legitimate red flag, but not enough to preclude further consideration if the complaints were reasonable.
80% of hiring managers using logic instead of superstition does sound unlikely though...
I personally think it's easy to send things into the sun because I've never had to do it before and it always works great for superman. Also because I rarely figure out the calculus and physics behind wild "what if" scenarios. What's the fun in that?
It's jerks like you who make foreign policy boring by saying stuff like "Yes we could invade Iraq, but then what would we do about the insurgency, building democracy blah blah blah I hate america." Let us build the ever loving nuclear reactor on the moon then chuck it into the sun when we're done with it! Next you're probably going to whine about how tax dollars might better be spent on education or some crap like that!
Everyone already knows my personal preferences in pornography and has my DNA sequence for the same reasons.
Maybe it was the manager who found out the programmers were sleeping with his wife?
In my defense, I did mean for that line to be a joke, I was going to write "Yes? Well good..." but couldn't think of anything else before I went off on a tangent. Then I was going to go back and fix it, but then I got high. Oooh oooh.
In my defense, people use that reasoning all the time with anything biology related.
You appear to be thinking specifically of oxidative phosphorylation in advanced eukaryotic cells which arose from the proliferation of oxygen in the atmosphere by prokaryotic cells and the symbiotic engulfing of smaller specialised prokaryotic cells (ie mitochondria, chloroplasts) by larger prokaryotic cells. This is the most efficient way to produce ATP, but certainly not the only way, and definitely not going to happen in a very primitive cell. Rather, you'd be looking at good old reliable fermentation.
You're right, but my point was that even in the tailored and protected environment of your bloodstream, which services mostly your own cells, you don't just find free energy, your cells/symbiotes have to digest it. These artificial cells the guy made likely only have the ability to incorporate already digested raw materials, there is little chance for them to survive in any non-artificial environment you can think of because you don't find nutrients just lying around. Kind of like a baby surrounded by packaged formula. There are nutrients arond, but since it can't open the formula, it would starve on it's own.
You should go on. Bone structure I'd like to know more about. Histology to me is the study of tissues, which are not present or observeable in dinosaurs. You have impressions of their skeletons, that's all.
Growth rates I would also like to know how that means they were warm blooded. A google search shows several pages that assert that they have a growth rate that is inconsistent with cold bloodedness, but no explanation as to why. How many large cold-blooded reptiles are there today? Alligators and crocs are the only ones I can think of. It's not hard to imagine that in the ice age, the genes enabling rapid growth in poikilotherms was extremely deleterious, and as a result today there are no cold-blooded reptiles with fast growth. That could be the reason we don't see any fast growing reptiles today. Same with speed and agility. And I have to point out that there are many lizards that are extremely fast. Crocodiles are lethargic only until they see something they want to eat.
I can't see how rates of evolution would be specific to endothermic organisms. An environment in which cold-blooded large reptiles were particularly fit for would by consequence produce a lot of reproductive sucesses and thereby a lot of evolution. Maybe I should rather say that evolutionary sucess comes from fitness to the environment, not body type. Our environment is not well suited to cold blooded reptiles, consequently we would today see slow rates of evolution for them. It would be a mistake to take those rates and say that it would mean that under different conditions, cold blooded reptiles could not have evolved faster.
Similarities with birds, parental care, bone isotype composition, and insulation you're going to have to explain further.
All the arguments sound like they're based on looking at current reptiles, adapted to current conditions, and trying to say they couldn't do what dinosaurs did because they're not doing it now. Conditions are different now than they were in their era, changing the rules of the game, and furthermore we know that the extinction event selected against the very features that allowed the dinosaurs to proliferate, today's cold-bloods reflect that and consequently do not have the features that the dinosaurs had. All around it's faulty comparison.
That's strong evidence? I would say that's evidence that appears to challenge the hypothesis, but I think it's quite a leap to say that suggests they were warm blooded.
All organisms self replicate. Just because something is lab-made doesn't mean it would magically not be subject to evolutionary forces.
Having not been made by natural evolutionary forces, it's unlikely they would be fit to survive in any natural environment. These things have not been instilled with any defenses against things looking to eat them including bacteria. Didn't read the article, but I would guess they aren't capable of digesting molecules, they probably have to be presented with ready to go "nutrients" to replicate, move or do anything. You don't find that anywhere in the real world, in fact, as I recall you don't even find that in your bloodstream. ATP is what your molecules use for power, but you only get that once your cells import glucose and your mitochondria turn it into ATP.
In other words, they have absolutely no way to eat anything they would need to survive.
In evolutionary biology, a major cause of extinction, at least in theory, is called "changing rules." If you're an organism doing well, you're highly adapted to your environment and proliferate. Think of the dinosaurs, they ruled the earth, bigger was better. Mammals were barely hanging on for dear life, small, furry, warm blooded, nocturnal didn't make sense at the time. If the rules suddenly change though through environmental shift, you might not be fit for the new environment. The asteroid hits, an ice age happens, and suddenly cold-blooded huge lizards can't cut it and massively go extinct. The only reason reptiles remain today is that there was significant variation in that clade that allowed some of them to survive in the new game.
These artificial bugs are barely managing to survive in an environment tailored to them, they can't replicate on their own. They also appear to have no variation. If they get out of their environment, they have no chance of survival. It's precisely because they're subject to evolutionary forces that they have no chance.
Do von neumann machines have to be made out of inorganic materials? If not, I think these qualify, although green goo might be more precise.
Microscopic black holes would evaporate in a very small amount of time due to Hawking radiation..
Are you willing to gamble the existence of the universe on that untested hypothesis? Yes?
By the way, every biology article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?" An article showing that artificial DNA self-associates was tagged that. No chance of killer viruses from that, yet it got the tag. Here we have a scientific study with some people actually claiming it will end the earth. They may be idiots, but people who worry about DNA strands creating vampires like in I am legend are just as idiotic. What gives?
I personally say it's only because no movies have yet taken the idea of LHC and mangled it into nonsense to use as a plot device the way they've used killer artificial viruses. And that's probably only because "complete oblitheration of the world" is a pretty boring plot.
HaeMaker phrased that oddly. The mechanic isn't afraid his job is disappearing because of hybrids, he's losing his job because of numerous sexual harassment lawsuits. Nothing to do with hybrids, he just hates them.
Because it doesn't give you enough time during the day to sufficiently explain yourself on /.?
The whole point of Marth's paper is that there has been too much focus on genes and proteins as the origins of disease, and that the research into lipids and glycans that has been conducted hasn't been integrated well enough into the genetic research.
A large part of that is due not to researchers prefering genes and proteins over the others, but limitations in our tools for probing them. There is quite a bit of research into lipids membranes, but the field is having trouble agreeing on some of the very basic mechanisms due to technical limitations. It's much harder to replicate lipids than it is to do so for DNA or proteins. DNA sequences you can have as much as you want by tomorrow using bacteria or PCR. Proteins you can get a cell type of your choice to express it and then harvest it (this becomes more difficult with certain proteins like transmembrane ones and becomes much more difficult with protein complexes). Those come out very pure and have been exhaustively troubleshot. Lipid purification methods are less developed.
I'm no expert in that, but it seems like a vicious cycle of no one purifies lipids because there hasn't been much work done to come up with a cheap and fast way of purifying lipids because no one purifies lipids. If anyone knows of a way to purify lipids for as cheap as you can DNA, let me know.
Furthermore, you can manipulate DNA or proteins much easier than you can lipids. A professor was telling me once that there were only two people in the world who knew how to effectively modify lipids to do spin-spin labeling (I think that's a way of determining the orientation of two mollecules) and to buy purified modified lipids was outrageously expensive. In proteins on the other hand, it's my understanding that any grad student could make and purify protiens for spin-spin.
And lipid biologists are having trouble with the very basics of their field as a consequence of limited tools. Lipid rafts are potentially one of the most important functions of lipids in the bilayer, but it's quite controversial as to whether they exist or not. I personally am not convinced that they do. The evidence in support seems to all be artificial examples of where they could get certain lipids to self-associate, but real-life examples have as far as I know either not been sufficiently proven or have been disproven.
I don't mean to demean lipid biologists, that work is far above my head and it is definitely an area that is far, far underdeveloped compared to the genes and protein research that I do. My hat is off to them.
Basically, we're focused on genes and proteins because you work with what you can. When the tools for lipid studies catch up to DNA and protein, you can expect lipids to catch up.
Nonsense.
On a completely unrelated note, I've made an illustration with 5 essential parts of all buildings: nails, screws, wood, cement, and support beams. These 5 building blocks provide the structural basis for the architectural choreography that constitutes the entire structure of a building. These construction components may now hold the keys to uncovering the origins of many grievous architectural problems that continue to evade understanding.
Grr... pick at my phrasing will you? You see what I meant right? We consider ourselves the pinacle of evolution only because we have a different set of standards. Evolutionary success is better measured in reproductive successes. We're losing to other mammals in that reguard, mammals as a whole are the losing team when compared to things like insects.
And I neglected to mention that this whole multicellular thing is by evolutionary standards a massive failure. Bacteria are by far the dominant mode of life on this planet.