A species of bacteria is not named a superbug because it will kill the whole world. A superbug is a species of bacteria that has resistance against multiple antibiotics, thus making it very hard to kill. A superbug might be completely harmless. Having said that, it might pass on those genes of antibiotics resistance to other, more dangerous species of bacteria through plasmids, so that might become a problem.
> However, this doesn't really explain why someone should finish their course of antibiotics. If a resistant bacterium already exists, then continuing the antibiotic will continue killing its competition. It only makes sense if the immune system finishes off the resistant bacteria.
That bacterium will not have 100% immunity to the antibioticum. It will just be less sensitive to it. By completing your course it is very likely you kill all the bacteria, even those few who have a partial resistance to it. (Compare: holding your breath. If I put a thousand people into an environment without oxygen for 5 minutes, only some will survive. If I put them there for an hour, all of them will be dead, even those who can hold there breath for a very long time.) By not completing the course, you allow the partially-resistant bacteria to live, and become the ancestors of a whole new generation of partially-resistant bacteria. When you use the antibioticum again in the future, or infect someone else with your bacteria who then uses the same antibioticum, again you kill most of the partially resistant bacteria - but some even more resistant bacteria survive.
Rome wasn't build in one day, and if you don't complete your course of antibiotics once, it is extremely unliky that you will be the creator of a new strain of super-resistant bacteria. Instead you'll create a strain of somewhat-resistant bacteria. That strain is likely, but not guaranteed, to follow you into your grave and end there. A single offence won't be the end of the world, but the effects stack.
Sure there is. Take 1 bacterium. Wait till the next gereration, now you have 2 bacteria. They should be as equivalent as you can get. Now, put one of them in a freezer, and the other one in an environment that is suboptimal for this particular species, but good enough to survive. Wait a hundred years (= many generations -> evolution likely to occur). Now put one of the unfrozen bacteria and the frozen bacterium into an environment just like the unfrozen ones have been for 100 years. After a week, count how many bacteria are present of both 'species'. Repeat this experiment very often (I'd do them in parallel and wait less than a 100 years). If the unfrozen bacterium reproduces slower than the frozen bacterium in most instances of the experiment, this could serve as proof that "the fittest individuals within a species survive with higher frequency in the next generation" is not true.
What the experiment shows is that, given time, incentive, and a closed environment, bacteria will evolve. Since evolution isn't a determenistic process, repeating the experiment is extremely unlikely to yield the exact same results, thus making it impossible for someone to repeat the experiment and produce the same results. But the experiment did produce results, those being that the bacteria evolved. And if you were to repeat the experiment, you'd also see the bacteria evolve, probably in a different way than the ones in the experiment, but it'd be evolution alright. Here comes a bad analogy. Imagine evolution being the theory that throwing a standard 6-sided die will always produce an integer in the range [1,6]. The experiment to test this theory would be 12 scientists throwing dice for 20 years and writing down the result of each throw on a really long piece of paper. The result would be that all of the numbers were integers in the range [1,6]. Note that the results do not prove the theory, but they do strongly suggest that it is true. What you seem to be suggesting is that these results cannot be used to support the theory that throwing a standard 6-sided die will always produce an integer in the range [1,6], because repeating the experiment would almost certainly not be able to produce the same results. You, sir, are confused about the goal of the experiment.
If the other hammer allows you to hammer 1.1 times faster than the current hammer once you are familiar with it, and it takes a month to become familiar with that hammer (assuming you cannot do anything useful during that month), then you start getting returns on that investment withing a year. Assuming you will be hammering for a significant part of your life, you'd be an idiot not to learn the better hammer.
You can factor large numbers, but it is very, very hard. For a 1024-bits number it will take a LONG time (you'll be long dead before you get the result, and the rest of mankind will probably be dead too.). Using a quantum computer would speed things up since they can factor large numbers more easily using a different algorithm.
> DNA was essentially a binary system since A always pairs with T and C with G
DNA is a double helix, so we have 2 pieces that match, like this:
Piece 1 : T C C A T G T G T Piece 2 : A G G T A C A C A
There is a distinction between A and T and between C and G, so if the above were a useful bit of DNA, only one of the pieces would contain useful code, the other one simply being the complement. IIRC the complement piece doesn't do anything useful but it comes in handy when the cell decides to copy its DNA. Anyway so while the base pairs always come in pairs (as the name suggests), the members of such a pair are not the same. Reusing the example above, this:
Piece 1 : T C C A T G T G T Piece 2 : A G G T A C A C A
is not the same as this:
Piece 1 : T G G A T G A G T Piece 2 : A C C T A C T C A
However, YMMV: if memory serves well a combination of 3 'letters' codes for a certain amino-acid, and some aminoacids can be encoded in several ways, so two different 3-letter fragments of DNA might mean the same thing (nature didn't make this very easy).
If you're really interested I suggest you visit wikipedia, they appear to have quite lengthy articles about this stuff.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this before, but where did you get the crazy idea that DNA is somehow 'worlds ahead' of us since it uses a way of storing information that can, with a little imagination, be seen as a base four system. The way you store your data has NOTHING to do with the data itself. If I were to post this message in both binary and hex, would the latter be more advanced that the former? I'm sure we can build a computer that stores data in base 8 by the end of this year. But there is no point in doing so at all.
I do not disagree with you on the whole 'the brain is pretty complex compared to a computer chip'-thing, but comparing DNA to binary makes no sense at all.
Germany declared war on the U.S., not the other way round, because Germany and Japan were allies and there was a war between the U.S. and Japan (the pearl harbor thing).
> Why did we start killing Hitler and the Nazis?
Because they declared war on you.
> Were they a threat to us?
YES. See above.
> Your reasoning seems to suggest that we should have let Hitler take over all of Europe because he didn't attack America directly.
He would have, unless the soviets defeated the germans (they *might* have, but the odds weren't good).
Indeed. I wonder why we hear this "We're the Americans we're so cool and friendly because we helped out in WOII"-thing all the time. Like you say, it was pretty obvious that Hitler was a threat to the U.S.. In addition, the U.S. was attacked by the Japanese, who, as we all know, were one of the three members of the Tripartite Pact (Italy and Germany being the others). When the U.S. declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy responded by declaring war on the U.S..
While it's great that the U.S. helped out in WOII, GP is being inaccurate when saying "So, in saying that you are saying that we shouldn't have gone after Hitler?", suggesting that the U.S. took initiative and did for altruistic reasons. Truth is, Germany declared war on the U.S., not the other way round (once again I want to point out that this did not make their assistence less welcome).
You mean fainting goats. Fainting goats freeze for about 5-10 seconds when you scare them. Since goats were cheaper than sheep, people who had many sheep would get a few fainting goats. Then, when the herd was attacked by predators, the sheep would easily get away faster than the goats (which would simply fall down, remember, I dont't need to outrun the lion, I just need to outrun _you_), so the predators would eat the goat and leave the sheep.
Is there any chance you've seen this on QI, the source of all useless knowledge?:)
Are you seriously suggesting one should, at any particular time, work only on solving the problem that happens, at that particular time, to be the biggest, ignoring all other problems until it is solved? You do realise that this approach is optimal only in a world where each problem takes the same amount of time to be solved, and problems don't get worse while you ignore them?
You can probably easily do that with an existing open-source bootloader. However if they copy your HD they will/might notice and it would look highly suspicious...
To put it in Monopoly terms: Go straight to Gitmo do not pass Go you do not receive $200.
> PErhaps self awareness existed on the particle level before the 3d universe big banged itself into existence. Perhaps the existence of the 3d universe was a result of self awareness of the 2d.
So what you are saying is that particles are self-aware, but (in your other post) you also say that not all mammals are self-aware. Rocks are not self-aware either, so they don't exist. But what are the mammals and rocks made of? Maybe particles could only be self-aware before the universe came into existance?
You mention a 2d universe. Is there any evidence that supports the existence of such a thing? And if so, where did that come from? The 1d universe 'self-awared' the 2d universe in existence? Turtles all the way down? (0d universe? -1d universe?)
> And since you believe all new age philosophy to be crap, you are probably a closed minded athiest so why does it matter how I came up with my opinion?
Maybe you found The Genuine Truth(c). It would be close-minded to dismiss you without examing your ideas, and I feel I might understand them better if you were to share with me the revalation that led to your philosophy.
> But if you want me to make it simple, nothing exists outside of our minds.
Now you're contradicting yourself. I thought the universe observed itself, so it doesn't need us to keep going, right?
> You only think that stuff exists but you have no way to actually prove anything exists prior to perception.
Just curious, if I am hallucinating, then I perceive things, right? But they don't exist. So even if I perceive something I cannot know that it exists, since I could be hallucinating. And it's not limited to hallucination. An illusionist can make people see impossible things, this doesn't make those things real.
> And if you somehow do believe the universe can exist independent on the observer then the burden is on you to prove something can exist without being observed by anything in the universe.
If you believe that the universe is observing itself (and therefore anything inside) then how is it possible for me to show you that something cannot exist without being observed by anything? To proof that I'd have to have place an object somewhere where no-one can perceive it, and then retrieve it at a later point. Since you believe the universe will observe it, I can only perform this experiment by moving something OUTSIDE the universe, which is impossible.
I've heard about the quantum mechanics stuff but is there reason to believe that conciousness is required instead of mere observation?
Explain this: if the universe cannot exist without self-awareness, and there was a time when the universe did not exist, then how did the universe came to be? One cannot be aware of oneself if one does not yet exist.
Your philosophy sounds an aweful lot like that new-age crap, but let's assume you came up with this yourself. How did you come to this philosophy of yours?
I never said such a thing, I merely (implicitly) pointed out that there there is, to my knowledge, no scientific theory that suggests that genetic code was written by some entity, instead it suggests that it is a (rather impressive) case of self-modifying code. Where (R/D)NA 1.0 came from is still unclear, but given the way science has advanced the last hundred years, it would seem reasonable to assume we'll find it out at some point in the future (and it will probably be an explanation that does not involve a supernatural being, just like the ones we have for the lightning, disease, etc.).
Now if we assume that there was no writer involved in the creation of (R/D)NA, then we can conclude that (R/D)NA was not written at all. However, many religions involve some kind of creator(s). Someone believing in such a religion might believe that (R/D)NA was 'written' by such a creator. Any argument in favor of the existance of such a writer based primarily on such a religion would not be a valid argument for anyone who is not a member of that specific religion, and therefore should not be used on slashdot, where people of many different religions (and many without any religion) are present.
Long story short: I fail to see how you conclude form my former post that religion offends me, it does not. And we're being horribly off-topic.
I guess they could be, depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of computer. It seems quite obvious this the definition used in the question, though. But assuming we somehow agree that DNA is code, you'd still need a religion to refer to it as 'written' instead of 'generated'.
Slashdot Mirror
A species of bacteria is not named a superbug because it will kill the whole world. A superbug is a species of bacteria that has resistance against multiple antibiotics, thus making it very hard to kill. A superbug might be completely harmless. Having said that, it might pass on those genes of antibiotics resistance to other, more dangerous species of bacteria through plasmids, so that might become a problem.
> However, this doesn't really explain why someone should finish their course of antibiotics. If a resistant bacterium already exists, then continuing the antibiotic will continue killing its competition. It only makes sense if the immune system finishes off the resistant bacteria.
That bacterium will not have 100% immunity to the antibioticum. It will just be less sensitive to it. By completing your course it is very likely you kill all the bacteria, even those few who have a partial resistance to it. (Compare: holding your breath. If I put a thousand people into an environment without oxygen for 5 minutes, only some will survive. If I put them there for an hour, all of them will be dead, even those who can hold there breath for a very long time.)
By not completing the course, you allow the partially-resistant bacteria to live, and become the ancestors of a whole new generation of partially-resistant bacteria.
When you use the antibioticum again in the future, or infect someone else with your bacteria who then uses the same antibioticum, again you kill most of the partially resistant bacteria - but some even more resistant bacteria survive.
Rome wasn't build in one day, and if you don't complete your course of antibiotics once, it is extremely unliky that you will be the creator of a new strain of super-resistant bacteria. Instead you'll create a strain of somewhat-resistant bacteria. That strain is likely, but not guaranteed, to follow you into your grave and end there. A single offence won't be the end of the world, but the effects stack.
Sure there is. Take 1 bacterium. Wait till the next gereration, now you have 2 bacteria. They should be as equivalent as you can get. Now, put one of them in a freezer, and the other one in an environment that is suboptimal for this particular species, but good enough to survive. Wait a hundred years (= many generations -> evolution likely to occur). Now put one of the unfrozen bacteria and the frozen bacterium into an environment just like the unfrozen ones have been for 100 years. After a week, count how many bacteria are present of both 'species'.
Repeat this experiment very often (I'd do them in parallel and wait less than a 100 years). If the unfrozen bacterium reproduces slower than the frozen bacterium in most instances of the experiment, this could serve as proof that "the fittest individuals within a species survive with higher frequency in the next generation" is not true.
What the experiment shows is that, given time, incentive, and a closed environment, bacteria will evolve. Since evolution isn't a determenistic process, repeating the experiment is extremely unlikely to yield the exact same results, thus making it impossible for someone to repeat the experiment and produce the same results.
But the experiment did produce results, those being that the bacteria evolved. And if you were to repeat the experiment, you'd also see the bacteria evolve, probably in a different way than the ones in the experiment, but it'd be evolution alright.
Here comes a bad analogy.
Imagine evolution being the theory that throwing a standard 6-sided die will always produce an integer in the range [1,6]. The experiment to test this theory would be 12 scientists throwing dice for 20 years and writing down the result of each throw on a really long piece of paper.
The result would be that all of the numbers were integers in the range [1,6]. Note that the results do not prove the theory, but they do strongly suggest that it is true. What you seem to be suggesting is that these results cannot be used to support the theory that throwing a standard 6-sided die will always produce an integer in the range [1,6], because repeating the experiment would almost certainly not be able to produce the same results.
You, sir, are confused about the goal of the experiment.
If the other hammer allows you to hammer 1.1 times faster than the current hammer once you are familiar with it, and it takes a month to become familiar with that hammer (assuming you cannot do anything useful during that month), then you start getting returns on that investment withing a year. Assuming you will be hammering for a significant part of your life, you'd be an idiot not to learn the better hammer.
Known plaintext makes RSA much easier to crack? I didn't know, source please?
Hmmn, it seems the above is incorrect. I cite wikipedia:
"RSA claims that 1024-bit keys are likely to become crackable some time between 2006 and 2010 and that 2048-bit keys are sufficient until 2030."
You can factor large numbers, but it is very, very hard. For a 1024-bits number it will take a LONG time (you'll be long dead before you get the result, and the rest of mankind will probably be dead too.). Using a quantum computer would speed things up since they can factor large numbers more easily using a different algorithm.
IANAG (I am not a geneticist)
> DNA was essentially a binary system since A always pairs with T and C with G
DNA is a double helix, so we have 2 pieces that match, like this:
Piece 1 : T C C A T G T G T
Piece 2 : A G G T A C A C A
There is a distinction between A and T and between C and G, so if the above were a useful bit of DNA, only one of the pieces would contain useful code, the other one simply being the complement. IIRC the complement piece doesn't do anything useful but it comes in handy when the cell decides to copy its DNA.
Anyway so while the base pairs always come in pairs (as the name suggests), the members of such a pair are not the same. Reusing the example above, this:
Piece 1 : T C C A T G T G T
Piece 2 : A G G T A C A C A
is not the same as this:
Piece 1 : T G G A T G A G T
Piece 2 : A C C T A C T C A
However, YMMV: if memory serves well a combination of 3 'letters' codes for a certain amino-acid, and some aminoacids can be encoded in several ways, so two different 3-letter fragments of DNA might mean the same thing (nature didn't make this very easy).
If you're really interested I suggest you visit wikipedia, they appear to have quite lengthy articles about this stuff.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned this before, but where did you get the crazy idea that DNA is somehow 'worlds ahead' of us since it uses a way of storing information that can, with a little imagination, be seen as a base four system. The way you store your data has NOTHING to do with the data itself. If I were to post this message in both binary and hex, would the latter be more advanced that the former? I'm sure we can build a computer that stores data in base 8 by the end of this year. But there is no point in doing so at all.
I do not disagree with you on the whole 'the brain is pretty complex compared to a computer chip'-thing, but comparing DNA to binary makes no sense at all.
Germany declared war on the U.S., not the other way round, because Germany and Japan were allies and there was a war between the U.S. and Japan (the pearl harbor thing).
> Why did we start killing Hitler and the Nazis?
Because they declared war on you.
> Were they a threat to us?
YES. See above.
> Your reasoning seems to suggest that we should have let Hitler take over all of Europe because he didn't attack America directly.
He would have, unless the soviets defeated the germans (they *might* have, but the odds weren't good).
Indeed. I wonder why we hear this "We're the Americans we're so cool and friendly because we helped out in WOII"-thing all the time. Like you say, it was pretty obvious that Hitler was a threat to the U.S.. In addition, the U.S. was attacked by the Japanese, who, as we all know, were one of the three members of the Tripartite Pact (Italy and Germany being the others). When the U.S. declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy responded by declaring war on the U.S..
While it's great that the U.S. helped out in WOII, GP is being inaccurate when saying "So, in saying that you are saying that we shouldn't have gone after Hitler?", suggesting that the U.S. took initiative and did for altruistic reasons. Truth is, Germany declared war on the U.S., not the other way round (once again I want to point out that this did not make their assistence less welcome).
You mean fainting goats. Fainting goats freeze for about 5-10 seconds when you scare them. Since goats were cheaper than sheep, people who had many sheep would get a few fainting goats. Then, when the herd was attacked by predators, the sheep would easily get away faster than the goats (which would simply fall down, remember, I dont't need to outrun the lion, I just need to outrun _you_), so the predators would eat the goat and leave the sheep.
:)
Is there any chance you've seen this on QI, the source of all useless knowledge?
Which killed more AIDS or Communism?
Are you seriously suggesting one should, at any particular time, work only on solving the problem that happens, at that particular time, to be the biggest, ignoring all other problems until it is solved? You do realise that this approach is optimal only in a world where each problem takes the same amount of time to be solved, and problems don't get worse while you ignore them?
> do they give you notice when your going to be let go? No. Depending on where you live 'they' might well be required by law to give you notice.
Assembler is a pair of shoes.
You can probably easily do that with an existing open-source bootloader. However if they copy your HD they will/might notice and it would look highly suspicious...
To put it in Monopoly terms: Go straight to Gitmo do not pass Go you do not receive $200.
> PErhaps self awareness existed on the particle level before the 3d universe big banged itself into existence. Perhaps the existence of the 3d universe was a result of self awareness of the 2d.
So what you are saying is that particles are self-aware, but (in your other post) you also say that not all mammals are self-aware. Rocks are not self-aware either, so they don't exist. But what are the mammals and rocks made of? Maybe particles could only be self-aware before the universe came into existance? You mention a 2d universe. Is there any evidence that supports the existence of such a thing? And if so, where did that come from? The 1d universe 'self-awared' the 2d universe in existence? Turtles all the way down? (0d universe? -1d universe?)
> And since you believe all new age philosophy to be crap, you are probably a closed minded athiest so why does it matter how I came up with my opinion?
Maybe you found The Genuine Truth(c). It would be close-minded to dismiss you without examing your ideas, and I feel I might understand them better if you were to share with me the revalation that led to your philosophy.
> But if you want me to make it simple, nothing exists outside of our minds.
Now you're contradicting yourself. I thought the universe observed itself, so it doesn't need us to keep going, right?
> You only think that stuff exists but you have no way to actually prove anything exists prior to perception.
Just curious, if I am hallucinating, then I perceive things, right? But they don't exist. So even if I perceive something I cannot know that it exists, since I could be hallucinating. And it's not limited to hallucination. An illusionist can make people see impossible things, this doesn't make those things real.
> And if you somehow do believe the universe can exist independent on the observer then the burden is on you to prove something can exist without being observed by anything in the universe.
If you believe that the universe is observing itself (and therefore anything inside) then how is it possible for me to show you that something cannot exist without being observed by anything? To proof that I'd have to have place an object somewhere where no-one can perceive it, and then retrieve it at a later point. Since you believe the universe will observe it, I can only perform this experiment by moving something OUTSIDE the universe, which is impossible.
I've heard about the quantum mechanics stuff but is there reason to believe that conciousness is required instead of mere observation?
Explain this: if the universe cannot exist without self-awareness, and there was a time when the universe did not exist, then how did the universe came to be? One cannot be aware of oneself if one does not yet exist. Your philosophy sounds an aweful lot like that new-age crap, but let's assume you came up with this yourself. How did you come to this philosophy of yours?
If I remember correctly, he got a satalite named after him in some James Bond movie. I don't see how that is a problem? :P
'This is a strange game. The only way to win is not to play' ?
I never said such a thing, I merely (implicitly) pointed out that there there is, to my knowledge, no scientific theory that suggests that genetic code was written by some entity, instead it suggests that it is a (rather impressive) case of self-modifying code. Where (R/D)NA 1.0 came from is still unclear, but given the way science has advanced the last hundred years, it would seem reasonable to assume we'll find it out at some point in the future (and it will probably be an explanation that does not involve a supernatural being, just like the ones we have for the lightning, disease, etc.). Now if we assume that there was no writer involved in the creation of (R/D)NA, then we can conclude that (R/D)NA was not written at all. However, many religions involve some kind of creator(s). Someone believing in such a religion might believe that (R/D)NA was 'written' by such a creator. Any argument in favor of the existance of such a writer based primarily on such a religion would not be a valid argument for anyone who is not a member of that specific religion, and therefore should not be used on slashdot, where people of many different religions (and many without any religion) are present.
Long story short: I fail to see how you conclude form my former post that religion offends me, it does not. And we're being horribly off-topic.
I guess they could be, depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of computer. It seems quite obvious this the definition used in the question, though. But assuming we somehow agree that DNA is code, you'd still need a religion to refer to it as 'written' instead of 'generated'.