Well, at the time there was a major debate about whether or not that would happen. A lot of proto-Earth's top scientist algae were certain that releasing so much oxygen would irreversibly alter the environment and seriously affect non-oxygen-respiring organisms, but there were many plants who maintained that the young planet had already seen worse, and yet life existed in the current day despite that. What the poor, innocent archaeans who bought into all of this didn't realise was that the smooth-talking photosynthesisers were more interested in the production and stockpile of carbohydrates than the well-being of the other clades, and had already convinced themselves that whether or not the planet could support infinite population and ecological growth was not their concern.
Conflict of interest: The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest and is clearly not trolling, nor taking a joke too far to farm karma.
Don't be absurd! Nothing sells better to a changing, increasingly diverse market than taking your old formula and pushing it to extremes that no one has asked for! It works for celebrities and reality television!
I'm afraid you've got bronze. Hognoxious and jginspace have the gold and silver, respectively. But don't worry, it's a very nice medal! With a swastika surrounded by the five Olympic rings, and everything! The National Spelling & Grammar Worker's Party has been honoured, and the cause of International Grammar Fascism advanced. We'll drive those dirty populist language reformers out of the Internet at any cost, and make them bleed red ink for disturbing our utopia of unambiguous syntax and inflection.
That's all well and good until someone needs to get contact info, mail, and apps in and out of a company-purchased phone. An iTunes account is necessary to operate an iOS device.
Realising you need the partnership is half the problem.:) Mathematicians and computer scientists didn't show up and say "Look, guys, you need to stop looking at this thing one gene at a time." The field was essentially founded as a result of Fred Sanger's early work with whole genomes, and he was a biochemist to the bone.
At any rate, the distinction doesn't matter; the point is that the problem of scaling up and looking at the big picture was resolved in the case of the biological sciences, and the view continues to get broader through approaches like environmental sequencing and metagenomics. The problem described in the article is exactly a case of an old-school, low-throughput mindset and insufficient concern for other variables. Reductionism can work very well when you don't accidentally leave things out! The trick lies in only reducing the system once you have good reason to believe that you've ruled out all the other possibilities.
Biology solved this problem of mindset a decade and a half ago, at least within its own issues, as bioinformatics started developing tools for high-level and high-throughput analysis. It did this on its own, transitioning over the course of many long decades prior from asking questions like "which mutation in which gene causes condition x?" to being able to display the status of all genes in all tissues at the same time with microarrays (a technology eerily similar to an old mainframe front panel, except in analogue form.) As long as people are interested in knowing the answers to a given question, we'll find those answers when we have the requisite knowledge and confidence to move forward.
A better complaint might be that science journalism has failed us, primarily because, like other forms of journalism, it has a profit motive and a desire to entertain.
I'm divided between wanting to point out that your examples were American, and that this is a Dutch case... and being too lazy^Hbusy to confirm that the same precedents exist in the Netherlands. Your choice!
Blerf. Yes, I did mean enemies. I didn't know about the Jimmy Carter story, but I've had some exposure to the psychology and the agendas of the people in the intelligence community. They're obsessed with getting the bad guy at any cost, and since their job security is not subject to the whims of election day, they have every incentive, and the right mindset, to undermine the efforts of someone who campaigns on the promise of eliminating them. The idea that Obama was sincere in his intent, but then compromised in order to avoid becoming another Carter administration, seems way more compelling than the kneejerk cynicism that Grishnakh was entertaining. Of course, we can never know for certain, but it certainly seems to follow the rest of Obama's policy approach.
Well, the scientific reason is as FunkyLich was sorta reaching for: if we can put together a cell from scratch, then we will be certain that we've accounted (and hopefully understood) all of the parts involved. The major reason, however, is commercially driven: if you can generate simple microbes abiotically, that opens the doors for a huge range of synthetic biology devices. And the associated profits.
Actually the challenge of deciding what is and isn't life is an ongoing mess; we haven't quite come to a universal agreement about some of the attributes. It's more of a definition issue than a chemistry one at this point, in fact! We've done a lot of experiments and discovered quite a few ways to kill a cell.:)
We're still some ways off! So far we've got the ability to throw a new membrane and a chromosome at a pre-existing cell; there's still a ton of stuff that goes on in between. We still don't know exactly how a lot of it works; there are lots of little protein structures in bacterial cytoplasm that will take a lot of diligent study to figure out. Some day, though. Some day.
(Also, is it just me, or is S nowhere near Y on any keyboard layout ever?)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. The purification of the English linguistic community, through the removal of degenerate elements, is a matter of utmost importance.
Some day, I swear, I will rewrite Mein Kampf so that it is about linguistic poverty.
Presumably, video games.
Any genocide has to start somewhere!
Well, at the time there was a major debate about whether or not that would happen. A lot of proto-Earth's top scientist algae were certain that releasing so much oxygen would irreversibly alter the environment and seriously affect non-oxygen-respiring organisms, but there were many plants who maintained that the young planet had already seen worse, and yet life existed in the current day despite that. What the poor, innocent archaeans who bought into all of this didn't realise was that the smooth-talking photosynthesisers were more interested in the production and stockpile of carbohydrates than the well-being of the other clades, and had already convinced themselves that whether or not the planet could support infinite population and ecological growth was not their concern.
Conflict of interest: The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest and is clearly not trolling, nor taking a joke too far to farm karma.
Don't be absurd! Nothing sells better to a changing, increasingly diverse market than taking your old formula and pushing it to extremes that no one has asked for! It works for celebrities and reality television!
I'm afraid you've got bronze. Hognoxious and jginspace have the gold and silver, respectively. But don't worry, it's a very nice medal! With a swastika surrounded by the five Olympic rings, and everything! The National Spelling & Grammar Worker's Party has been honoured, and the cause of International Grammar Fascism advanced. We'll drive those dirty populist language reformers out of the Internet at any cost, and make them bleed red ink for disturbing our utopia of unambiguous syntax and inflection.
That's all well and good until someone needs to get contact info, mail, and apps in and out of a company-purchased phone. An iTunes account is necessary to operate an iOS device.
Oh, but if only it were any other vendor...
Realising you need the partnership is half the problem. :) Mathematicians and computer scientists didn't show up and say "Look, guys, you need to stop looking at this thing one gene at a time." The field was essentially founded as a result of Fred Sanger's early work with whole genomes, and he was a biochemist to the bone.
At any rate, the distinction doesn't matter; the point is that the problem of scaling up and looking at the big picture was resolved in the case of the biological sciences, and the view continues to get broader through approaches like environmental sequencing and metagenomics. The problem described in the article is exactly a case of an old-school, low-throughput mindset and insufficient concern for other variables. Reductionism can work very well when you don't accidentally leave things out! The trick lies in only reducing the system once you have good reason to believe that you've ruled out all the other possibilities.
Biology solved this problem of mindset a decade and a half ago, at least within its own issues, as bioinformatics started developing tools for high-level and high-throughput analysis. It did this on its own, transitioning over the course of many long decades prior from asking questions like "which mutation in which gene causes condition x?" to being able to display the status of all genes in all tissues at the same time with microarrays (a technology eerily similar to an old mainframe front panel, except in analogue form.) As long as people are interested in knowing the answers to a given question, we'll find those answers when we have the requisite knowledge and confidence to move forward.
A better complaint might be that science journalism has failed us, primarily because, like other forms of journalism, it has a profit motive and a desire to entertain.
I'm divided between wanting to point out that your examples were American, and that this is a Dutch case... and being too lazy^Hbusy to confirm that the same precedents exist in the Netherlands. Your choice!
Well, it is when you're his age. The kid only has half hit dice!
Well, we tried that, but we ran out of Apple and Google stories to run during the interim.
Well... Mossad assassinated a holocaust denier this one time, but he was Polish.
FYI, Wikipedia says that The Pirate Bay was actually going to go through with it, but the deal fell through.
Blerf. Yes, I did mean enemies. I didn't know about the Jimmy Carter story, but I've had some exposure to the psychology and the agendas of the people in the intelligence community. They're obsessed with getting the bad guy at any cost, and since their job security is not subject to the whims of election day, they have every incentive, and the right mindset, to undermine the efforts of someone who campaigns on the promise of eliminating them. The idea that Obama was sincere in his intent, but then compromised in order to avoid becoming another Carter administration, seems way more compelling than the kneejerk cynicism that Grishnakh was entertaining. Of course, we can never know for certain, but it certainly seems to follow the rest of Obama's policy approach.
I can already feel my ability to make jokes succumbing to natural selection.
Did they come up with an excuse for why speciation stopped proceeding at such an incredible rate?
Of course it does! It's called try { ... } catch(err) { };.
That is the most staggeringly and phenomenally, mind-blowingly stupidest thing I have ever heard.
But you have given me inspiration for a new joke.
Q. Why haven't biologists evolved the ability to tell good jokes?
A. The ecological niche was already filled.
Well, the scientific reason is as FunkyLich was sorta reaching for: if we can put together a cell from scratch, then we will be certain that we've accounted (and hopefully understood) all of the parts involved. The major reason, however, is commercially driven: if you can generate simple microbes abiotically, that opens the doors for a huge range of synthetic biology devices. And the associated profits.
Dammit! I thought it was just AZERTY when I glanced at it. Curse you!
Actually the challenge of deciding what is and isn't life is an ongoing mess; we haven't quite come to a universal agreement about some of the attributes. It's more of a definition issue than a chemistry one at this point, in fact! We've done a lot of experiments and discovered quite a few ways to kill a cell. :)
Presumably it means that the prisoners are free to transfer to other cells and prisons if they can get accepted into them.
We're still some ways off! So far we've got the ability to throw a new membrane and a chromosome at a pre-existing cell; there's still a ton of stuff that goes on in between. We still don't know exactly how a lot of it works; there are lots of little protein structures in bacterial cytoplasm that will take a lot of diligent study to figure out. Some day, though. Some day.
(Also, is it just me, or is S nowhere near Y on any keyboard layout ever?)