We classify viruses in the same way we classify living organisms, but there's still a lot of debate about whether or not they're alive. I could come up with a half-baked underslept computer analogy, but just going to Wikipedia would probably be more useful.
Regarding #2: a truly reliable and perfect form of biological reproduction is asymptotically impossible due to thermodynamics (this is mentioned in the article.) Assuming 'nearly perfect' = 'perfect', I meant 'approximate' to refer to complex mechanics like sexual reproduction, where the traits of multiple parents are mixed, and random evolution is enhanced.
Regarding #3: It means the organisms produced by mutation must be sufficiently different for natural selection to act upon them. A photocopy machine operating repeatedly in the absence of humans will produce imperfect copies, but no one cares.
I've got lots of good ones too if you need one. Unfortunately I can only give you a car analogy if you assume automobile manufacturers are random processes. (insert your own punchline here)
Perfect replication + deliberate error mechanisms = evolution. Evolution has a tolerance rate; too many mutations too quickly and your evolutionary magic turns into lethal dysfunction. The rate of evolution for E. coli, for example, is a few orders of magnitude smaller than 1/(the number of nucleotides), which means that most of the time the offspring are a perfect match. Relatedly, humans manifest a substantial number of new point mutations when the gametes are formed, but have a much lower rate when producing somatic cells through mitosis. It's replication with a very small p-value. The article discusses the thermodynamic inevitability of mutation, if you're genuinely interested.
I think you overestimated the scope of my complaint! I used to make maps for Doom, I collect and restore vintage computers, and I'm a few months away from a bachelor's degree in bioinformatics (in fact, a lecture is going to start in ten minutes.) I was criticizing people for playing games that are particularly cruel to the fingers and wrists because they require rapidly hitting the 'punch' and 'kick' buttons. That's all.:)
On my planet, 'replicating' involves producing identical offspring (or nearly so.) If your method of reproduction involves a continual reduction in mass, we may need to rethink how the dictionary works.
In all seriousness, though, the definition of 'life' taught to young scientists doesn't proscribe any particular construction materials; hence this article (or at least this summary) is deceptive. The requirements are:
1. Homeostasis. It must make a detectable effort to maintain the conditions of its internals, and to adjust to changes in its environment.
2. Reproduction. It must be capable of creating copies of itself (or approximate copies of itself.)
3. Evolution. Its offspring must be able to adapt to changes in the environment through to natural selection.
That being said, there are circumstances in which some of these are suspended, like ancient trees and soldier ants that can't reproduce but are most definitely alive. The maintenance of an internal environment (homeostasis) is considered the most important, and the primary reason scientists have hesitated to consider transposons and viruses to be alive, even though they can reproduce and evolve.
Outside of these guiding principles, though, biologists really have no problem with the Enterprise running into plasma filament creatures, or Doctor Chaotica's henchmen duking it out with photonic life forms (although physicists might.) We're very good at pointing out flaws with some of these ideas (like "silicon is extremely bad at supporting life when compared with carbon") but that doesn't mean chemical evolution will never find a way to do it anyway.
This is the sort of thing that makes me stare at fighting game players in utter incredulity. How and why would anyone ever put up with such ridiculously tiresome finger movements for so long? It's probably healthier to get into an actual fistfight!
Oxygen is the most aggressively electronegative element after Fluorine. (I think that Neon might be even more aggressive if you could ionize it usefully.) I had a colourful mnemonic for this in second-year organic chemistry that revolved around bitches and gimps, but the take-home message is that Chlorine robs Nitrogen, and Oxygen wipes out everything but good ol' Fluorine. For related reasons, fluorine becomes a source of face-melting death in hydrogen-bonded form.
Toooooooo laaaaaaaaaaaaate. Soon we will all live within our own socially-bounded thought bubbles, and the Internet's power to connect people will just be an abstraction layer on top of the physical world. Say goodbye to having your culture, values, and beliefs challenged. Advertising has spoken, and advertising hates having to pander to multiple audiences at the same time.
This. This right here... will never happen in the United States. How would you get the law passed? Every lobbyist on the planet would shovel money at their playthings as fast as possible to ensure it didn't. Except perhaps the underdogs, who have less money anyway. You're going to have to found a new country or have a violent revolution, and then get this particular piece of sound advice directly in the founding document.
From the time I was seven years old, I was captivated by blandness. When asked what kind of ice cream I wanted, the answer was always "Vanilla, please."
My favourite toy was an old sock that belonged to my grandfather. It was the most dull, lifeless white sock you had ever seen. I called it "Blandy". When I turned 13 my parents let me paint my room any colour I wanted. I picked a decidedly neutral beige paint. I didn't want any excitement in my room, just a calming dullness. My whole room was like that: beige walls, beige lampshades, beige bedding. The only contrast was when I would place Blandy on my pillow. My room was the ultimate in dull. Sitting in it was almost like floating in a sensory deprivation tank. Except you could see that glorious beige everywhere.
What are your memories of your first computer?
I bought my first computer when I was fifteen. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80. The silver-grey painted chassis caused too much excitement in my otherwise dull bedroom so I spray painted it beige. The cassette tape's door was a shiny bit of transparent plastic, far too eye catching. I used some 120 grit sandpaper to take off the glossiness. You couldn't read the tape labels through it after that, but I didn't care. It was a small price to pay in my quest for supreme dullness.
What modern technology do you wish you had growing up and why?
I've learned that technology on its own isn't what really matters. What's important is how dull it is. How you can get someone to spend their hard earned money on something then look at it and wonder "Why did I buy that?" To me, making items that has people doing just that, even before they receive their order confirmation, is the greatest thing ever.
Companies that go for excitement and innovation are certain to die. They have no future. Why, if it were up to me, I'd sell whatever company it was and give the money back to the shareholders. Printed on dull, beige cheques.
I'm pretty sure that's why Americans (and us Canadians) call them tires: because their primary purpose is to wear out, and wear out the poor souls who have to change them constantly.
Well, the next time you design a nuclear power plant, you can make sure to do away with all of the radiation shielding that the facilities included that blocked the robot's radio. Then, maybe, your friends at the JPL will be able to help you. RTFA!:)
Yes, yes, and yes. To be fair, these are comparatively cheap and fast runs, but the numbers are still ridiculous, I agree. Hopefully third-generation sequencing technologies (not counting Pacific Bio's implausible promises of "3.1 billion flying pigs in 30 seconds flat!") will do better at pandering to us poor underfunded evolutionary biologists.
Incidentally, ABI claims you can do de novo with SOLiD systems (which have read lengths of only ~20 bp!) but they say you need to get about 300x coverage just for a bacterial genome. That's not a lot of saved money when you work out all the numbers. It looks like we've nearly found a state function for dollars-per-high-quality-nucleotide.
...countering this stunning and exciting revelation is BGI's stunning and exciting reputation for producing stunningly and excitingly low-quality raw data from said stunning and exciting second-generation sequencing machines. This is a little like the biology equivalent of being told that your least-favourite Slashdot editor (please pick just one) has just gotten a brain implant so he can spam the front page with dupes, typo-ridden summaries, and fallacy-laden opinion pieces ten times an hour.
Simple. The patent claims are "making at least one inference", "estimating", "determining an importance", "resolving conflicts"... and so on. Those are not methods. I don't see any equations or anything of the sort. This isn't as specific as the traditional kind of patent (e.g. the proverbial shoe heel) that relies upon a concrete description of what is being protected.
The last time I spoke to an IP lawyer for my university's technology transfer office, he made the following point: when you patent something, you're giving up the secrecy of your method so that it can be put under legal protection. What Microsoft has done is attempted to prevent people from combining GPS instruments with crime statistics. They haven't exposed how they actually do what they're doing, or planning on doing; only the obvious consequences of what's necessary from the original idea, that any programmer could work through in a few minutes. That's not how patents are supposed to work.
Or a man of the night. Or several men of the night who are all too happy to see you.
Also, they're patenting the idea of the algorithm "that say don't go this way... etc." Not an actual algorithm. No methods were harmed during the making of this filing. I would call that worse. Here's the patent so you can wince for yourself.
Actually, it says in the article that sufficient shielding more than doubled the weight of one Japanese robot used at Fukushima. Also, the normal wireless remote control was useless inside of the reactor buildings and had to be replaced with a cable that eventually snapped. Robots that have to properly accommodate these two requirements do require some specialized engineering, it would appear.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I tried to express that, but the lecturer was rather loud and I ended up... well.
We classify viruses in the same way we classify living organisms, but there's still a lot of debate about whether or not they're alive. I could come up with a half-baked underslept computer analogy, but just going to Wikipedia would probably be more useful.
Regarding #2: a truly reliable and perfect form of biological reproduction is asymptotically impossible due to thermodynamics (this is mentioned in the article.) Assuming 'nearly perfect' = 'perfect', I meant 'approximate' to refer to complex mechanics like sexual reproduction, where the traits of multiple parents are mixed, and random evolution is enhanced.
Regarding #3: It means the organisms produced by mutation must be sufficiently different for natural selection to act upon them. A photocopy machine operating repeatedly in the absence of humans will produce imperfect copies, but no one cares.
I've got lots of good ones too if you need one. Unfortunately I can only give you a car analogy if you assume automobile manufacturers are random processes. (insert your own punchline here)
Perfect replication + deliberate error mechanisms = evolution. Evolution has a tolerance rate; too many mutations too quickly and your evolutionary magic turns into lethal dysfunction. The rate of evolution for E. coli, for example, is a few orders of magnitude smaller than 1/(the number of nucleotides), which means that most of the time the offspring are a perfect match. Relatedly, humans manifest a substantial number of new point mutations when the gametes are formed, but have a much lower rate when producing somatic cells through mitosis. It's replication with a very small p-value. The article discusses the thermodynamic inevitability of mutation, if you're genuinely interested.
I think you overestimated the scope of my complaint! I used to make maps for Doom, I collect and restore vintage computers, and I'm a few months away from a bachelor's degree in bioinformatics (in fact, a lecture is going to start in ten minutes.) I was criticizing people for playing games that are particularly cruel to the fingers and wrists because they require rapidly hitting the 'punch' and 'kick' buttons. That's all. :)
On my planet, 'replicating' involves producing identical offspring (or nearly so.) If your method of reproduction involves a continual reduction in mass, we may need to rethink how the dictionary works.
In all seriousness, though, the definition of 'life' taught to young scientists doesn't proscribe any particular construction materials; hence this article (or at least this summary) is deceptive. The requirements are:
1. Homeostasis. It must make a detectable effort to maintain the conditions of its internals, and to adjust to changes in its environment.
2. Reproduction. It must be capable of creating copies of itself (or approximate copies of itself.)
3. Evolution. Its offspring must be able to adapt to changes in the environment through to natural selection.
That being said, there are circumstances in which some of these are suspended, like ancient trees and soldier ants that can't reproduce but are most definitely alive. The maintenance of an internal environment (homeostasis) is considered the most important, and the primary reason scientists have hesitated to consider transposons and viruses to be alive, even though they can reproduce and evolve.
Outside of these guiding principles, though, biologists really have no problem with the Enterprise running into plasma filament creatures, or Doctor Chaotica's henchmen duking it out with photonic life forms (although physicists might.) We're very good at pointing out flaws with some of these ideas (like "silicon is extremely bad at supporting life when compared with carbon") but that doesn't mean chemical evolution will never find a way to do it anyway.
Yes, but bone can heal (at least, most bone, by mass.) Arthritis is a one-way street. Also, you're less inclined to do it again.
This is the sort of thing that makes me stare at fighting game players in utter incredulity. How and why would anyone ever put up with such ridiculously tiresome finger movements for so long? It's probably healthier to get into an actual fistfight!
Oxygen is the most aggressively electronegative element after Fluorine. (I think that Neon might be even more aggressive if you could ionize it usefully.) I had a colourful mnemonic for this in second-year organic chemistry that revolved around bitches and gimps, but the take-home message is that Chlorine robs Nitrogen, and Oxygen wipes out everything but good ol' Fluorine. For related reasons, fluorine becomes a source of face-melting death in hydrogen-bonded form.
There are some comments that just naturally belong in the hall of fame. :)
Toooooooo laaaaaaaaaaaaate. Soon we will all live within our own socially-bounded thought bubbles, and the Internet's power to connect people will just be an abstraction layer on top of the physical world. Say goodbye to having your culture, values, and beliefs challenged. Advertising has spoken, and advertising hates having to pander to multiple audiences at the same time.
Neo: Mr. Wizard. Get me the hell out of here.
This. This right here... will never happen in the United States. How would you get the law passed? Every lobbyist on the planet would shovel money at their playthings as fast as possible to ensure it didn't. Except perhaps the underdogs, who have less money anyway. You're going to have to found a new country or have a violent revolution, and then get this particular piece of sound advice directly in the founding document.
MICHAEL DELL
CEO and founder of Dell
From the time I was seven years old, I was captivated by blandness. When asked what kind of ice cream I wanted, the answer was always "Vanilla, please."
My favourite toy was an old sock that belonged to my grandfather. It was the most dull, lifeless white sock you had ever seen. I called it "Blandy". When I turned 13 my parents let me paint my room any colour I wanted. I picked a decidedly neutral beige paint. I didn't want any excitement in my room, just a calming dullness. My whole room was like that: beige walls, beige lampshades, beige bedding. The only contrast was when I would place Blandy on my pillow. My room was the ultimate in dull. Sitting in it was almost like floating in a sensory deprivation tank. Except you could see that glorious beige everywhere.
What are your memories of your first computer?
I bought my first computer when I was fifteen. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80. The silver-grey painted chassis caused too much excitement in my otherwise dull bedroom so I spray painted it beige. The cassette tape's door was a shiny bit of transparent plastic, far too eye catching. I used some 120 grit sandpaper to take off the glossiness. You couldn't read the tape labels through it after that, but I didn't care. It was a small price to pay in my quest for supreme dullness.
What modern technology do you wish you had growing up and why?
I've learned that technology on its own isn't what really matters. What's important is how dull it is. How you can get someone to spend their hard earned money on something then look at it and wonder "Why did I buy that?" To me, making items that has people doing just that, even before they receive their order confirmation, is the greatest thing ever.
Companies that go for excitement and innovation are certain to die. They have no future. Why, if it were up to me, I'd sell whatever company it was and give the money back to the shareholders. Printed on dull, beige cheques.
I'm pretty sure that's why Americans (and us Canadians) call them tires: because their primary purpose is to wear out, and wear out the poor souls who have to change them constantly.
Well, the next time you design a nuclear power plant, you can make sure to do away with all of the radiation shielding that the facilities included that blocked the robot's radio. Then, maybe, your friends at the JPL will be able to help you. RTFA! :)
Yes, yes, and yes. To be fair, these are comparatively cheap and fast runs, but the numbers are still ridiculous, I agree. Hopefully third-generation sequencing technologies (not counting Pacific Bio's implausible promises of "3.1 billion flying pigs in 30 seconds flat!") will do better at pandering to us poor underfunded evolutionary biologists.
Incidentally, ABI claims you can do de novo with SOLiD systems (which have read lengths of only ~20 bp!) but they say you need to get about 300x coverage just for a bacterial genome. That's not a lot of saved money when you work out all the numbers. It looks like we've nearly found a state function for dollars-per-high-quality-nucleotide.
...countering this stunning and exciting revelation is BGI's stunning and exciting reputation for producing stunningly and excitingly low-quality raw data from said stunning and exciting second-generation sequencing machines. This is a little like the biology equivalent of being told that your least-favourite Slashdot editor (please pick just one) has just gotten a brain implant so he can spam the front page with dupes, typo-ridden summaries, and fallacy-laden opinion pieces ten times an hour.
Yeah, Wired, what gives?
(Hint: the summary is a direct quote from the enterprise-y TFA.)
Simple. The patent claims are "making at least one inference", "estimating", "determining an importance", "resolving conflicts"... and so on. Those are not methods. I don't see any equations or anything of the sort. This isn't as specific as the traditional kind of patent (e.g. the proverbial shoe heel) that relies upon a concrete description of what is being protected.
The last time I spoke to an IP lawyer for my university's technology transfer office, he made the following point: when you patent something, you're giving up the secrecy of your method so that it can be put under legal protection. What Microsoft has done is attempted to prevent people from combining GPS instruments with crime statistics. They haven't exposed how they actually do what they're doing, or planning on doing; only the obvious consequences of what's necessary from the original idea, that any programmer could work through in a few minutes. That's not how patents are supposed to work.
Read the patent. I linked to it. Their "method" consists of specifying junk like the wireless spectrum used. It's as wrong as it sounds.
Or a man of the night. Or several men of the night who are all too happy to see you.
Also, they're patenting the idea of the algorithm "that say don't go this way... etc." Not an actual algorithm. No methods were harmed during the making of this filing. I would call that worse. Here's the patent so you can wince for yourself.
RTFS: "neighborhoods that exceed a certain threshold of violent crime statistics."
Actually, it says in the article that sufficient shielding more than doubled the weight of one Japanese robot used at Fukushima. Also, the normal wireless remote control was useless inside of the reactor buildings and had to be replaced with a cable that eventually snapped. Robots that have to properly accommodate these two requirements do require some specialized engineering, it would appear.