The deeper you look, the more obnoxious this gets: try checking the "topics" menu at the top. Off to the right in a corner are the topics people actually care about, but front-and-centre we have the horrible Business Intelligence, Cloud, TV, and Data Center categories that no one cares about. (Okay, so TV turns out a bit of content that's worthwhile sometimes, but it's more usually just nigh-shameless promotional content. Despite all the other pointless and petty blogifications, this off-to-the-side ghettoization of the site's actual content really feels like the biggest subversion of the site's community spirit.
Actually it looks okay in Lynx for the most part. It doesn't even truncate the summaries in standard mode, which is the most obnoxious thing when using a graphical browser. (Guess that requires Javascript.)
I've got no experience whatsoever with the Star Wars universe beyond the movies (to be honest, it's just not my thing), but the Star Trek novel situation is similar, with one exception: authors almost never collaborate on a setting. Unless two books are by the same author, the only thing you can rely on the two having in common is the show and movies; they're really just published fanfics. You might think this is a good idea, but it (presumably) limits the re-use of creative inventions, and definitely mostly just serves to enable crazy shit. Shatner wrote a series (or more accurately, had a series ghostwritten for him) in which the Borg resurrect Kirk for no reason, who proceeds to be virtually omnipotent for the rest of the series. The disasters far outshine the gems... which mostly serves to make me wonder why serial authors aren't beaten with cluesticks about Mary Sues and overpowered bullshit when they sign on.
The way they describe their conceptual representation system (they give the example "king - man + woman = queen") makes it pretty clear that figurative language is completely out of the question.
I actually agree with your perspective on those matters as well, and was mostly just trying to be flippant. Certainly they're key to the tone of what makes Firefl—I mean, Star Wars—what it is.
However, the prequels committed much worse crimes than merely not being Star Wars-y, as Plinkett thoroughly demonstrates, and that's a much more important consideration. If the prequel trilogy had been made with a competent and coherent artistic vision, it wouldn't have caused such a nostalgia-hugging cringe response. I bet these same people would now be accepting Star Wars as a bigger universe than just the operatic romp encoded in episodes IV–VI. The Expanded Universe covers a ton of subject matter (admittedly, I haven't read any), not just gritty frontiersing, and yet it's still been successful as a book series. This is despite having Spooky Space Mitochondria and Senate debates for decades. Perhaps most surprisingly, Midi-chlorians have been Star Wars canon since 1977, before The Empire Strikes Back was even written.
That's not to say it wasn't good sense on Lucas's part to keep such exposition out of the actual films (especially the embarrassingly bad names—seriously? Darth Plagueis? You couldn't even remove the "e" so it would look like you were at least trying? Thank god he didn't get a shout-out or we'd never stop laughing), but they're not really barriers to competent or captivating cinema on their own. These other elements could most certainly have been put together into good pictures that could mesh naturally with the original trilogy, and they'd still feel like meaningful parts of the Star Wars world, despite the different tone, as demonstrated by the contrast between Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.
For what it's worth, the Star Trek films were never that clued into the style of the shows themselves anyway, with the exception of The Motion Picture. They were cash cows; a chance to give the audience high-quality action scenes with characters who they knew were already established as morally upright and sophisticated. The difference in style is not entirely a bad thing—early drafts of The Wrath of Khan ended like this:
As Enterprise approached the planet, its engines were badly damaged, and Spock sacrificed his life to get them back online in time for Kirk to fight the Reliant off. Later, Khan and Kirk would fight a psychic battle in a variety of exotic locations, using quarterstaffs, whips, and swords. Khan, who had acquired impressive mental powers during his isolation, eventually won, but Kirk survived because he understood that the weapons were only illusory. The film ended with a pitched space battle in orbit around the planet, in which Kirk defeated his enemy with his superior tactics. (source)
But, then again, the people making the original Star Trek films weren't always in touch of the tone of what they were working with. The dune buggy scene in Nemesis was Patrick Stewart's idea. (Although, for what it's worth, the Nemesis director had never seen a single episode of TNG, either, and thought Geordi was supposed to be an alien.)
Perhaps most remarkably, Into Darkness is not even the first weird amalgam of The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country in the Star Trek film catalogue; that honour belongs to Nemesis.
There are plenty of objective measures by which a film can be judged, as can any story. Innovation is a key aspect in which films are judged, although in contrast to this we also have adherence to a form. Star Wars is almost a genre-defining space opera, doing for cinema what series like Flash Gordon failed to accomplish years earlier. The science fiction of the 80s and 90s owes a huge amount to its commercial success, and its release prompted the production and sequels of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, amongst other franchises. Star Wars showed that science fiction could have popular appeal without being a B-movie, a process that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forbidden Planet were only partially successful in instigating due to their relatively cerebral tone.
...and as a fan of Dresden Codak, I somewhat have to disagree with the AC on the points about the plot; the vast majority of epic literary works have multiple threads in the same fashion, often with significant diversions from the main plot. This is a key element of pacing, and can be found in everything from Tolstoy to Tarantino. Diaz has a particular fondness for expressionism and symbolism that make such realist diversions incompatible with his storytelling style, but the recent prevalence of this in literature is a largely postmodern revival of a rather old idea. Such a creative choice can barely be called a subjective criterion, much less an objective one.
...and on that note, DC isn't very rigorous about world-building, either. In neither series is it all that important; Star Wars is a drama about emotions, and Dark Science and Hob (Dresden Codak's largest comics, for those following along at home) both focus on metaphysical and personal questions; the world's beauty is merely a backdrop for characters, played in a different regard.
1. The setting must be gritty. Star Wars needs to happen in the "frontier," and city settings and government intrigue are an anathema. (Apparently no one's ever set foot on the Death Star or Cloud City.)
2. Technology must be old. Shiny things are right out. (Again, apparently neither the Death Star nor Cloud City exist.)
3. The Force must remain mysterious. Ooh, mystery.
4. Cute things are bad. Gungans are right out. As is Anakin Skywalker. (Ewoks are okay though?)
...Basically, it's a load of nostalgia and action-flick obsession, and the letter's authors will be perfectly fine if the new Star Wars movies are indistinguishable from JJ Abrams's cookie-cutter take on Star Trek. Importantly, the authors completely failed to touch on any of the prequel trilogy's technical flaws—y'know, the incoherent plot, the stilted dialogue, the terrible directing, the miserable editing, the textbook cinematography. For anyone actually interested in understanding what's wrong with the prequel films, watch the Plinkett reviews of the three movies; there's some remarkable footage buried in there of the exact moment when George Lucas realized he had produced a heap of garbage called Episode I.
The -phobia suffix has been used to demarcate prejudices since long, long before the DSM was even conceived of. "Gallophobia" (fear/hate of the Gallic people, i.e. the French) dates back to 1840 at the latest. You are mistaken to presume it necessarily implies a disorder, or any sort of academic authority.
Aside: face is actually a very translatable concept that most educated Westerners understand easily; it mostly seems to be cultural anthropologists who are convinced that it's hard to understand the consequences of being embarrassed in front of important people to one's social status. (Maybe they don't remember giving their thesis defences?)
Joce640k really hit the nail on the head. Not only does this problem exist in the English-speaking world as well, we developed a whole class of drugs just to deal with difficult patients. It really seems like a failure on the Chinese doctors' parts to not do the same.
That all being said, don't discount factory farming. In every country, people drench their animals and their animal feed in common antibiotics, which is why so many of them are useless now. This is, perhaps, the least awful part about some antibiotics being really expensive; it protects them from being abused like this.
This is the phenomenon the researchers are exploiting. Not every antibiotic resistance comes from a neatly-packed, horizontally-transferable gene; often, the bacterium is instead evolving alternatives to perform common tasks like the binding of ribosome cofactors. The most transferable antibiotic resistance genes are often enzymes that degrades the antibiotic. These can be overwhelmed; just hit the bacteria with several drugs at the same time. HGT of new-and-improved constitutive genes certainly still happens, but it's much less common, and may not be compatible across species. (As an extreme example, we only recently started finding cases where the ribosomal 16S gene was transferred, and both instances were within the same genus.)
So... there are definitely some strains, like MRSA, that have evolved to be ruthless killing machines, and these are particularly dangerous because their DNA can be taken up by other bacteria, but at present they represent a small percentage of all potential hospital-borne pathogens. They kill a lot (MRSA is believed to be the fourth largest cause of death in the US and kills over a hundred thousand people a year), but because the resistance comes from all of these key constitutive genes that have co-evolved, they mostly stay put. This is why a lot of research now focuses on preventing biofilm formation.
They probably couldn't count to 7 and figured no one would notice; I bet no one would know about any of this if they'd waited 2 or 3 more milliseconds. The less of a lead time, the less time others have to react, and the less time your assets spend locked up waiting.
I have an easier idea—why not just get rid of first posts? Most of the trouble stems from those. The rule would be simple; if a news article has zero comments on it, no one is allowed to post until it has more.
No, I don't, because I'm vaguely familiar with the cultural history of the Middle East and I'm fairly confident that aside from the region's general resource scarcity, the majority of administrative errors that led to its current volatile state have occurred in the last century or two.
And, it seems, at some level one risks evolution as a theory becoming unfalsifiable, if the notion of gradualism is discarded and -literally any- biological transition is regarded as plausible within a single "generation".
Here are some of the dramatic kinds of mutations that we know can happen:
1. DNA can sometimes be absorbed from external sources. A small portion of the human genome comes from bacteria that have been in contact with the body for a long time, and bacteria have mechanisms for acquiring DNA from the environment. Viruses also count.
2. Chromosomes and genes can rearrange or duplicate. With whole chromosomes, this causes severe problems like truncated chromosomes (rare, usually fatal), trisomy (extra copies e.g. Down syndrome), or ring chromosomes (very rare, not quite as fatal.) If you're lucky, the duplication or deletion will only be a small part, which makes it possible for genes to be cut-and-pasted together, although this is a very slow process.
3. Transposons are a weird kind of parasite that consists solely of a single gene. Through various methods, they cut themselves out and re-insert themselves elsewhere in the genome, often randomly. This can cause problems sometimes. The human body suppresses them because they're dangerous, but weirdly there's a large group of them that become hyper-active in the brain. It's possible they're doing something that helps give us our intelligence. This is another way in which genes can get cut-and-pasted together.
Collectively, #2 and #3 comprise what appear to be controlled evolution mechanisms. The DNA replication process could be much more reliable, and the transposon suppression could be much more effective, but they aren't. We think it's because life likes to gamble; there's a chance these kinds of controlled mutations will be beneficial. Further support for this comes from the fact that protein-making genes often have self-contained components that are easier to splice together, called domains.
4. Many kinds of bacteria have something called the SOS response, where they actually start making very low-quality replacement DNA when experiencing extreme chromosome damage. The replacement is very noisy and many have random chunks in it. Usually by the time the SOS response is triggered, the cell is extremely damaged and has no hope of postponing death, but in the tiny chance that it makes a useful or accurate repair (a chance which isn't quite as tiny when you're considering a huge colony of trillions of bacterial cells and only a small destroyed region) it can save itself. It's believed that this is the primary mechanism through which antibiotic resistances evolve so quickly.
5. By a similar concept, a large part of our active immune system works by (completely) randomly cutting up parts of its own chromosomes. This isn't passed on to our children, but it definitely happens to the DNA itself and is arguably a kind of directed evolution. The idea is that the gripping parts on the antibodies have to cover a large number of possible shapes (of things to attack), so each cell that makes them has a long list of protein domains that can contribute to the gripping surface of the antibody. This list is then randomly cut apart and sewn back together several times, and if the antibody it produces becomes useful (i.e. it hits a target), then the cell which created it is told to reproduce. More B cells producing the same antibody then makes it easier to kill matching pathogens.
(And for completeness's sake, the other, less dramatic kinds of mutations are single-base deletions, single-base duplications, and single-base point mutations. Deletions and insertions of all kinds are usually caused by slippage by the replication proteins due to similar content, like a confused scribe with no short-term memory, and changes are usually caused by chemicals and radiation.)
I've kept an iPod touch 2G and 4G around for a while—and I can say with some confidence that every single release of iOS has come with a palpable performance penalty. That's how Apple decides when to stop releasing iOS for a given device; the performance gets unacceptably awful.
I was being sarcastic—but you bring up an interesting and very recent popular misconception.
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew all use gendered pronouns to refer to inanimate objects, so until English and German speakers started misinterpreting the Bible in the modern era, it was understood that God was more or less genderless. Even the English pronoun system used to bemore ambivalent.
Taking up a little less of a naive perspective, one of the major interpretations of the Book of Revelation is that it was written in response to (or anticipation of) the persecution of Christians by Caligula and several subsequent Roman emperors. 616 and 666 in alphabetic numerals both equate to "Nero", depending on the language used. Given this very specific purpose, I would argue that it should be excluded (or at least dealt with separately) from the main corpus when playing character judge, much like Leviticus is excluded when picking out personal hygiene habits.
Slashdot Mirror
The deeper you look, the more obnoxious this gets: try checking the "topics" menu at the top. Off to the right in a corner are the topics people actually care about, but front-and-centre we have the horrible Business Intelligence, Cloud, TV, and Data Center categories that no one cares about. (Okay, so TV turns out a bit of content that's worthwhile sometimes, but it's more usually just nigh-shameless promotional content. Despite all the other pointless and petty blogifications, this off-to-the-side ghettoization of the site's actual content really feels like the biggest subversion of the site's community spirit.
Actually it looks okay in Lynx for the most part. It doesn't even truncate the summaries in standard mode, which is the most obnoxious thing when using a graphical browser. (Guess that requires Javascript.)
For some bizarre reason, https: on the link redirects to the current home page.
Who wants to start making tongue-in-cheek remarks about the current layout instead of the new one?
I've got no experience whatsoever with the Star Wars universe beyond the movies (to be honest, it's just not my thing), but the Star Trek novel situation is similar, with one exception: authors almost never collaborate on a setting. Unless two books are by the same author, the only thing you can rely on the two having in common is the show and movies; they're really just published fanfics. You might think this is a good idea, but it (presumably) limits the re-use of creative inventions, and definitely mostly just serves to enable crazy shit. Shatner wrote a series (or more accurately, had a series ghostwritten for him) in which the Borg resurrect Kirk for no reason, who proceeds to be virtually omnipotent for the rest of the series. The disasters far outshine the gems... which mostly serves to make me wonder why serial authors aren't beaten with cluesticks about Mary Sues and overpowered bullshit when they sign on.
The way they describe their conceptual representation system (they give the example "king - man + woman = queen") makes it pretty clear that figurative language is completely out of the question.
I actually agree with your perspective on those matters as well, and was mostly just trying to be flippant. Certainly they're key to the tone of what makes Firefl—I mean, Star Wars—what it is.
However, the prequels committed much worse crimes than merely not being Star Wars-y, as Plinkett thoroughly demonstrates, and that's a much more important consideration. If the prequel trilogy had been made with a competent and coherent artistic vision, it wouldn't have caused such a nostalgia-hugging cringe response. I bet these same people would now be accepting Star Wars as a bigger universe than just the operatic romp encoded in episodes IV–VI. The Expanded Universe covers a ton of subject matter (admittedly, I haven't read any), not just gritty frontiersing, and yet it's still been successful as a book series. This is despite having Spooky Space Mitochondria and Senate debates for decades. Perhaps most surprisingly, Midi-chlorians have been Star Wars canon since 1977, before The Empire Strikes Back was even written.
That's not to say it wasn't good sense on Lucas's part to keep such exposition out of the actual films (especially the embarrassingly bad names—seriously? Darth Plagueis? You couldn't even remove the "e" so it would look like you were at least trying? Thank god he didn't get a shout-out or we'd never stop laughing), but they're not really barriers to competent or captivating cinema on their own. These other elements could most certainly have been put together into good pictures that could mesh naturally with the original trilogy, and they'd still feel like meaningful parts of the Star Wars world, despite the different tone, as demonstrated by the contrast between Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.
If it helps any, perhaps now is an opportune time to point out that River had psychic abilities. Fairly mysterious ones, at that.
As Enterprise approached the planet, its engines were badly damaged, and Spock sacrificed his life to get them back online in time for Kirk to fight the Reliant off. Later, Khan and Kirk would fight a psychic battle in a variety of exotic locations, using quarterstaffs, whips, and swords. Khan, who had acquired impressive mental powers during his isolation, eventually won, but Kirk survived because he understood that the weapons were only illusory. The film ended with a pitched space battle in orbit around the planet, in which Kirk defeated his enemy with his superior tactics. (source)
But, then again, the people making the original Star Trek films weren't always in touch of the tone of what they were working with. The dune buggy scene in Nemesis was Patrick Stewart's idea. (Although, for what it's worth, the Nemesis director had never seen a single episode of TNG, either, and thought Geordi was supposed to be an alien.)
Perhaps most remarkably, Into Darkness is not even the first weird amalgam of The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country in the Star Trek film catalogue; that honour belongs to Nemesis .
There are plenty of objective measures by which a film can be judged, as can any story. Innovation is a key aspect in which films are judged, although in contrast to this we also have adherence to a form. Star Wars is almost a genre-defining space opera, doing for cinema what series like Flash Gordon failed to accomplish years earlier. The science fiction of the 80s and 90s owes a huge amount to its commercial success, and its release prompted the production and sequels of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, amongst other franchises. Star Wars showed that science fiction could have popular appeal without being a B-movie, a process that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forbidden Planet were only partially successful in instigating due to their relatively cerebral tone.
...and as a fan of Dresden Codak, I somewhat have to disagree with the AC on the points about the plot; the vast majority of epic literary works have multiple threads in the same fashion, often with significant diversions from the main plot. This is a key element of pacing, and can be found in everything from Tolstoy to Tarantino. Diaz has a particular fondness for expressionism and symbolism that make such realist diversions incompatible with his storytelling style, but the recent prevalence of this in literature is a largely postmodern revival of a rather old idea. Such a creative choice can barely be called a subjective criterion, much less an objective one.
...and on that note, DC isn't very rigorous about world-building, either. In neither series is it all that important; Star Wars is a drama about emotions, and Dark Science and Hob (Dresden Codak's largest comics, for those following along at home) both focus on metaphysical and personal questions; the world's beauty is merely a backdrop for characters, played in a different regard.
You mean this decent writing? Please, tell me more.
1. The setting must be gritty. Star Wars needs to happen in the "frontier," and city settings and government intrigue are an anathema. (Apparently no one's ever set foot on the Death Star or Cloud City.)
2. Technology must be old. Shiny things are right out. (Again, apparently neither the Death Star nor Cloud City exist.)
3. The Force must remain mysterious. Ooh, mystery.
4. Cute things are bad. Gungans are right out. As is Anakin Skywalker. (Ewoks are okay though?)
...Basically, it's a load of nostalgia and action-flick obsession, and the letter's authors will be perfectly fine if the new Star Wars movies are indistinguishable from JJ Abrams's cookie-cutter take on Star Trek. Importantly, the authors completely failed to touch on any of the prequel trilogy's technical flaws—y'know, the incoherent plot, the stilted dialogue, the terrible directing, the miserable editing, the textbook cinematography. For anyone actually interested in understanding what's wrong with the prequel films, watch the Plinkett reviews of the three movies; there's some remarkable footage buried in there of the exact moment when George Lucas realized he had produced a heap of garbage called Episode I.
Incidentally, real life caught up—fortunately there's not much worth translating with such a low-bandwidth form of communication.
The -phobia suffix has been used to demarcate prejudices since long, long before the DSM was even conceived of. "Gallophobia" (fear/hate of the Gallic people, i.e. the French) dates back to 1840 at the latest. You are mistaken to presume it necessarily implies a disorder, or any sort of academic authority.
Aside: face is actually a very translatable concept that most educated Westerners understand easily; it mostly seems to be cultural anthropologists who are convinced that it's hard to understand the consequences of being embarrassed in front of important people to one's social status. (Maybe they don't remember giving their thesis defences?)
Joce640k really hit the nail on the head. Not only does this problem exist in the English-speaking world as well, we developed a whole class of drugs just to deal with difficult patients. It really seems like a failure on the Chinese doctors' parts to not do the same.
That all being said, don't discount factory farming. In every country, people drench their animals and their animal feed in common antibiotics, which is why so many of them are useless now. This is, perhaps, the least awful part about some antibiotics being really expensive; it protects them from being abused like this.
Fortunately, it's even messier than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS_response
This is the phenomenon the researchers are exploiting. Not every antibiotic resistance comes from a neatly-packed, horizontally-transferable gene; often, the bacterium is instead evolving alternatives to perform common tasks like the binding of ribosome cofactors. The most transferable antibiotic resistance genes are often enzymes that degrades the antibiotic. These can be overwhelmed; just hit the bacteria with several drugs at the same time. HGT of new-and-improved constitutive genes certainly still happens, but it's much less common, and may not be compatible across species. (As an extreme example, we only recently started finding cases where the ribosomal 16S gene was transferred, and both instances were within the same genus.)
So... there are definitely some strains, like MRSA, that have evolved to be ruthless killing machines, and these are particularly dangerous because their DNA can be taken up by other bacteria, but at present they represent a small percentage of all potential hospital-borne pathogens. They kill a lot (MRSA is believed to be the fourth largest cause of death in the US and kills over a hundred thousand people a year), but because the resistance comes from all of these key constitutive genes that have co-evolved, they mostly stay put. This is why a lot of research now focuses on preventing biofilm formation.
They probably couldn't count to 7 and figured no one would notice; I bet no one would know about any of this if they'd waited 2 or 3 more milliseconds. The less of a lead time, the less time others have to react, and the less time your assets spend locked up waiting.
I have an easier idea—why not just get rid of first posts? Most of the trouble stems from those. The rule would be simple; if a news article has zero comments on it, no one is allowed to post until it has more.
No, I don't, because I'm vaguely familiar with the cultural history of the Middle East and I'm fairly confident that aside from the region's general resource scarcity, the majority of administrative errors that led to its current volatile state have occurred in the last century or two.
Huh. Interesting. I've been keeping my iPT 4G on iOS 5 because I assumed 6 would be dog-slow like all the others; maybe I should upgrade it.
And, it seems, at some level one risks evolution as a theory becoming unfalsifiable, if the notion of gradualism is discarded and -literally any- biological transition is regarded as plausible within a single "generation".
Here are some of the dramatic kinds of mutations that we know can happen:
1. DNA can sometimes be absorbed from external sources. A small portion of the human genome comes from bacteria that have been in contact with the body for a long time, and bacteria have mechanisms for acquiring DNA from the environment. Viruses also count.
2. Chromosomes and genes can rearrange or duplicate. With whole chromosomes, this causes severe problems like truncated chromosomes (rare, usually fatal), trisomy (extra copies e.g. Down syndrome), or ring chromosomes (very rare, not quite as fatal.) If you're lucky, the duplication or deletion will only be a small part, which makes it possible for genes to be cut-and-pasted together, although this is a very slow process.
3. Transposons are a weird kind of parasite that consists solely of a single gene. Through various methods, they cut themselves out and re-insert themselves elsewhere in the genome, often randomly. This can cause problems sometimes. The human body suppresses them because they're dangerous, but weirdly there's a large group of them that become hyper-active in the brain. It's possible they're doing something that helps give us our intelligence. This is another way in which genes can get cut-and-pasted together.
Collectively, #2 and #3 comprise what appear to be controlled evolution mechanisms. The DNA replication process could be much more reliable, and the transposon suppression could be much more effective, but they aren't. We think it's because life likes to gamble; there's a chance these kinds of controlled mutations will be beneficial. Further support for this comes from the fact that protein-making genes often have self-contained components that are easier to splice together, called domains.
4. Many kinds of bacteria have something called the SOS response, where they actually start making very low-quality replacement DNA when experiencing extreme chromosome damage. The replacement is very noisy and many have random chunks in it. Usually by the time the SOS response is triggered, the cell is extremely damaged and has no hope of postponing death, but in the tiny chance that it makes a useful or accurate repair (a chance which isn't quite as tiny when you're considering a huge colony of trillions of bacterial cells and only a small destroyed region) it can save itself. It's believed that this is the primary mechanism through which antibiotic resistances evolve so quickly.
5. By a similar concept, a large part of our active immune system works by (completely) randomly cutting up parts of its own chromosomes. This isn't passed on to our children, but it definitely happens to the DNA itself and is arguably a kind of directed evolution. The idea is that the gripping parts on the antibodies have to cover a large number of possible shapes (of things to attack), so each cell that makes them has a long list of protein domains that can contribute to the gripping surface of the antibody. This list is then randomly cut apart and sewn back together several times, and if the antibody it produces becomes useful (i.e. it hits a target), then the cell which created it is told to reproduce. More B cells producing the same antibody then makes it easier to kill matching pathogens.
(And for completeness's sake, the other, less dramatic kinds of mutations are single-base deletions, single-base duplications, and single-base point mutations. Deletions and insertions of all kinds are usually caused by slippage by the replication proteins due to similar content, like a confused scribe with no short-term memory, and changes are usually caused by chemicals and radiation.)
It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
I've kept an iPod touch 2G and 4G around for a while—and I can say with some confidence that every single release of iOS has come with a palpable performance penalty. That's how Apple decides when to stop releasing iOS for a given device; the performance gets unacceptably awful.
I was being sarcastic—but you bring up an interesting and very recent popular misconception.
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew all use gendered pronouns to refer to inanimate objects, so until English and German speakers started misinterpreting the Bible in the modern era, it was understood that God was more or less genderless. Even the English pronoun system used to be more ambivalent.
Taking up a little less of a naive perspective, one of the major interpretations of the Book of Revelation is that it was written in response to (or anticipation of) the persecution of Christians by Caligula and several subsequent Roman emperors. 616 and 666 in alphabetic numerals both equate to "Nero", depending on the language used. Given this very specific purpose, I would argue that it should be excluded (or at least dealt with separately) from the main corpus when playing character judge, much like Leviticus is excluded when picking out personal hygiene habits.