A curious thought! Here is the WSJ's bit on it. I'm somewhat skeptical that the process accused could produce ketone bodies to the same magnitude; keep in mind that ketosis occurs when the body starts burning fat because it's starving and/or exercising. Even with the minuscule amounts of water being consumed by lipolysis and the citric acid cycle, there's still a lot more water in a live human body than in a hunk of pork.
Well, for the most part, the thefts have only involved tiny fractions of pennies normally lost due to rounding errors, so usually they don't get caught...
Here is an overview of the core differences between the human and chimpanzee genomes. The human chromosomes are lined up across the horizontal axis, and the chimp chromosomes are lined up along the vertical axis. Upward diagonal lines indicate the same content, downward diagonal lines are inversion events, where chunks of DNA were flipped as the two species diverged from their common ancestor some six million years ago. When correcting for these inversions, 98.8% of all nucleotides are identical between humans and chimps, accounting for about 37 million changed bases, most of which are at the level of a single nucleotide.
Unfortunately we don't have enough sequenced pre-human genomes to construct a meticulous history at the level you're requesting. I can't say "base a on chromosome b flipped on Tuesday, March 32nd three hundred thousand years ago" because the only other genome we've fully sequenced so far is the Neanderthal one, which has about 99.7% identity or 9 million differences from the average modern-day human, and is only 38,000 years old; all we can do is make diff patches with the genomes we have. If you'd like to compare specific genes to see the differences between human and chimp genes for yourself, you can copy the accession numbers from here into the text box at the top of this form to see the chimp genes that most closely match a given human gene. Try NM_001282628.1 for an example; it only has three single-nucleotide differences in it. The gene it encodes, arylsulfatase E, is vital to bone development, and is well-conserved in all vertebrates, so it makes sense that the differences between the human and chimp copies are minor.
In fact, there's a good chance that they're silent mutations—a substantial fraction of nucleotide changes either don't affect the protein sequence at all (because of redundancies in the translation table) or make unimportant changes, like swapping two very similar amino acids (also because of redundancies.) The existence of a large number of silent mutations between two species is one of the most powerful arguments for a common origin—if life was created from scratch just recently, why the hell are there so many replication mistakes? The number of differences—on the order of millions of errors—requires hundreds of thousands of generations to produce.
For a more dramatic effect, try switching to the full database instead of just the chimpanzee. Looking down the list of hits for NM_001282628.1, you'll see that nearly every vertebrate we know of has a copy of this gene, and the nucleotide sequences are largely identical, but never quite the same. If there are exceptions, then it's most likely because they evolved the capacity to do the same task through a different approach following the loss of the gene.
Ah, okay. In biochemistry, "high-throughput" is specifically a euphemism for bioinformatics methods. Doing high throughput biochemistry already requires substantial literacy in programming and statistics, hence the confusion.
You're right, medical research often has really tragic quality control in it, particularly when it's conducted by MDs without much in the way of a stats background. A lot of the work you're thinking of is already being redone by network and systems biologists, although they're starting with smaller organisms that are easier to model. In the mean time, the low-quality low-throughput work at least gives us some sort of roadmap about what kind of relations we should expect to find. Fortunately it won't take as long since we have the protocols and a lot of automation technology.
As I understand it, the high rate of retractions in journals like Nature is due to the outright fabrication of data by glory-seekers, not the same swarms of bumbling idiots; they tend to employ rather good editors and reviewers who can weed out statistical misunderstandings.
I wouldn't be so sure this kind of pattern is something very pervasive in scientific advances still. The more dramatic a finding is, the more heavily it is scrutinized, and there are far, far more people now able to learn and verify any cutting-edge theory in any field, no matter how specialized. Today something like the N ray could never garner any support. Literally tens of thousands of researchers scrutinized the LHC results for the Higgs boson when it appeared, and science journalists pull headlines from respected, peer-reviewed journals, not directly from researchers.
I think graphics hardware capabilities are the bigger bottleneck here. Game assets are often produced at very high quality levels during design but need to be scaled down to actually fit on the playing machine.
Right mindset, wrong concern: why isn't God's code bug-free to begin with? If the dude's perfect, there should be no rogue processes. If he's testing a chosen people, then he's a sadist; why not just design them to be worthy? Not exactly good PR.
Modern agnosticism (at least in my understanding) is not quite what you're describing. What I'm saying is this: there may be something out there that initiated the creation of the universe, but it hasn't interfered since, so there's no way we can tell (without more information) how the world got this way. Mature agnosticism leaves no room for interfering agents or acceptance of anything described by any holy works; it's purely about saying we don't know where the universe came from; it could be a vast intelligence running a school experiment or it might simply originate from total nothingness.
You've got a lot of factual oversights and selective omissions here. I'm not a physicist, so I can't comment on the astronomy matters, but I do know about the rest. I have a feeling you're a troll and you don't actually believe any of this, but let's see if we can set the record straight at least a little.
The known mutations in the human genome divided by the mutation rate shows that humans were mutation free...6000 years ago and that all women on earth share the same mother.
The human genome is nothing but mutations, all 3.1 billion bases of it. We can compare the human genome to the Chimpanzee genome and meticulously reconstruct all of the differences and indeed the whole history of changes between the two. Mitochondrial Eve only affects a very small part of the human genome, the mitochondrion, which we also share with all other animals on the planet (as well as plants, fungi, and protists), and dates back to at least 140,000 years ago, not 6,000 years ago. I would be more than happy to devastate you with further discussions about evolutionary history.
Everything on earth still has Carbon-14 in it. Instead of explaining this as "background carbon", the Occam's Razor answer is that everything is less than 10,000 years old.
The background noise in radiocarbon dating is caused by nuclear testing, cosmic radiation, and spontaneous decay. This can be demonstrated under controlled conditions. Occam's Razor requires that all evidence be accounted for. (Do you propose we just pretend nuclear testing didn't happen, or that nuclei don't emit neutrons when they decay?) Keep in mind that C-14 is very rare, only accounting for a trillionth of all carbon on the planet. It's not as if there's a whole bunch of the stuff that came out of nowhere. It's stochastically normal for spontaneous decay to occur at that frequency. Even with the background levels, radiocarbon dating is useful up to about 60,000 years ago, six times longer than you suggest.
Every culture talks about dragons as if they are real, but we have mythologized them. Why? Creationists believe the simpler answer is that dinosaurs are dragons.
All dragon myths have been traced to regions that have crocodiles. Crocodiles are scary.
No intermediate forms, almost at all. Virtually every fossil is a modern-day creature as is.
Every culture talks about a flood, almost always one in which a guy often named something akin to "Noah" saves some combination of himself, his wife, his family and a bunch of animals with the help of his god. How do they all get this story when they didn't talk to each other.
But they did talk to each other; there were trade routes from Greece to Ireland in the 8th century BC. The legend of Noah is clearly derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Doesn't that mean you should worship the Sumerian pantheon?
So to me, the better question is why censor creationism? If it's so wrong, won't that be easily seen by everyone?
Creationism was rejected by mainstream Christianity precisely because it depends on heaps of factually inaccurate statements. Neither the Anglican Church nor the Catholic Church believes any of the bullshit you're spinning. It is dangerous precisely for the reasons outlined in the news article on which we're commenting: because it claims to offer cowards a better chance of avoiding Hel
Well, no, it's just an inconsistency in the Bible. I don't actually presume that a deity would care for much of anything at all.
That being said, I don't think you quite have your finger on Ares's heart; the Greeks recognized him as a bloodthirsty killing machine. The god of war isn't merely a metaphor for life's struggle, unless perhaps you're a Klingon. In the Roman empire this was downplayed, but only because they were so preoccupied with the idea of him as a protector; Roman farmers would call on him to rid their crops of blights.
Old-Testament Yahweh has a lot more in common with Zeus's habit of dispatching judgements from afar, or perhaps the even more self-centred attitudes of an older deity like the Titan Cronus. (Not to be confused with Chronos.)
The New Testament formulation of God is, quite simply, entirely different, and draws a lot of inspiration from things that had been attributed to Apollo and other largely benevolent gods, in tone if not in subject matter. (Zeitgeist technically deals with this, but the research and objectives of that documentary are so profoundly deficient I wouldn't wish it on anyone. So don't watch it. Just don't.) The Romans were gradually refining their concept of divinity and probably would have produced a weak form of monotheism on their own within a few centuries, centred around the cult of Apollo, if the Christians hadn't shown up. (I say "weak" both because few people cared and because the other deities would no doubt still have held some tokenary power.)
In order to compete, the Christians naturally had to produce a message that was more enlightened and loving than what the established theology could offer. The result is a totally different deity; a profoundly loving one. With all the dying for the sins and so forth. This is where the harmonizing comes from that I bring up. (Fun trivia: earlier versions of the New Testament described Jesus's childhood and revealed that he was a total jerk who abused his powers but then saw the error of his ways.)
That all being said, you're probably already moving past the Bible when you make statements like that, which is good, but it leaves me wondering why you'd bother with trying to understand a deity's motives anyway. If life's just a struggle, you don't need any divinity telling you that; that's just evolution in action. (And a rather turbulent subsection of it at that; there are plenty of people and organisms on this planet that are very much at peace.) At most you've described a situation that calls for a deistic universe, with no intervention on the part of a blind watchmaker.
If it's the afterlife you're worried about, may I point out that the concept of eternal damnation in Hell was invented in the middle ages as a way to scare heretics? It's vastly less credible an idea than the Bible itself. There are Anglican ministers who preach that it doesn't exist.
You'll get your point across a lot better if you can provide a specific citation instead of expecting a specific account, analysis, or conclusion to be dug up. I don't see anything exceptional in the way matters were handled.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here—I don't know the event particularly well, but a quick search suggests it was a major validation of Einstein's work. Are you trying to say that journalism plays too large a role in the communication to laypeople of received scientific opinion?
Hey, disorganized religion is a scam, too—it just doesn't pay anyone. You're still pulling wool over your own eyes and believing in things you have no justification for. Remember, agnosticism is the only empirically sound position.
Saying both groups are just trusting experts, however, is a bad reduction to make. It's also relevant to ask questions about what a follower believes they are following. A supporter of science believes that their ontology has been meticulously combed over and interrogated by clever, studious people to ensure consistency; a supporter of religion simply trusts that their sacred texts have been transmitted honestly by people told not to question what they receive. And there's no checksum in the New Testament!
I don't think parroting that is productive. The majority of creationists simply believe what their leaders tell them, and the ones who forge their own paths and invent doctrine (dinosaur fossils are what?!) do so because they are trapped by their cultural assumptions and (when you get down to it) an unhealthy preoccupation with avoiding oblivion. You, um, did RTFS, right?
Well, the fact that he couldn't make up his bloody mind at all in the Bible might have something to do with it—what with all the smiting and so forth. You'd think a perfect being would be a tad better at manufacturing and maintaining a harmonious world. (Maybe one without apple trees?)
Not necessarily; it just means that you're undergoing the same thing in the opposite direction; you like what's happening too much to let go; any strong emotion can probably cause dream-remembering. A particular dream may not actually contain very much content your brain's trying to forget, either; for example, if you have dreams that just consist of your daily routine with nothing unusual happening, then there's not much to change. That being said, though, it could be a sign that you're holding onto a hope you think is unrealistic. (Ironically, it seems possible that our dreams don't actually have much faith in our dreams.)
It has been speculated (by this fellow, before you start getting cranky and waving around questions about credibility) that the whole sleeping and dreaming process might actually be a maintenance procedure. A certain type of artificial neural network, called a restricted Boltzmann machine, undergoes a process where it back-calculates fake input data based on what it's seen (much like human dreams) and then uses that fake data as a guide to correct errors in its weights (i.e. to remove and correct false correlations.) If true or even approximately true, this would provide a much more coherent explanation than the idea of a wildly unreliable sub- or superconscious, and explain why people who don't sleep or dream at all experience hallucinations, neurosis, and other impairments consistent with bad neural net bookkeeping.
Under this proposal, the dreams we remember might actually be a bad thing, because it suggests they invoked something too powerful to sleep through. This could explain why nightmares recur: our brains are trying to forget, but we keep remembering them consciously. It's not a shut book, though, as I don't know how lucid dreaming would fit into the model. (Maybe the part you have control over is only very minor?)
Swearing is a really important part of one's life. It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing and without enjoying swearing... There used to be mad, silly, prissy people who used to say swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary—such utter nonsense. The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies and the kind of person who says swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary usually have a pretty poor vocabulary themselves... The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest or—is just a fucking lunatic... I haven't met anybody who's truly shocked at swearing, really, they're only shocked on behalf of other people. Well, you know, that's preposterous... or they say 'it's not necessary'. As if that should stop one doing it! It's not necessary to have coloured socks, it's not necessary for this cushion to be here, but is anyone going to write in and say 'I was shocked to see that cushion there, it really wasn't necessary'? No, things not being necessary is what makes life interesting—the little extras in life.
Well, for starters, it prevents this. As you can clearly see, only competition between companies trying to attract employees can improve living standards.
Slashdot Mirror
A curious thought! Here is the WSJ's bit on it. I'm somewhat skeptical that the process accused could produce ketone bodies to the same magnitude; keep in mind that ketosis occurs when the body starts burning fat because it's starving and/or exercising. Even with the minuscule amounts of water being consumed by lipolysis and the citric acid cycle, there's still a lot more water in a live human body than in a hunk of pork.
Well, for the most part, the thefts have only involved tiny fractions of pennies normally lost due to rounding errors, so usually they don't get caught...
Here is an overview of the core differences between the human and chimpanzee genomes. The human chromosomes are lined up across the horizontal axis, and the chimp chromosomes are lined up along the vertical axis. Upward diagonal lines indicate the same content, downward diagonal lines are inversion events, where chunks of DNA were flipped as the two species diverged from their common ancestor some six million years ago. When correcting for these inversions, 98.8% of all nucleotides are identical between humans and chimps, accounting for about 37 million changed bases, most of which are at the level of a single nucleotide.
Unfortunately we don't have enough sequenced pre-human genomes to construct a meticulous history at the level you're requesting. I can't say "base a on chromosome b flipped on Tuesday, March 32nd three hundred thousand years ago" because the only other genome we've fully sequenced so far is the Neanderthal one, which has about 99.7% identity or 9 million differences from the average modern-day human, and is only 38,000 years old; all we can do is make diff patches with the genomes we have. If you'd like to compare specific genes to see the differences between human and chimp genes for yourself, you can copy the accession numbers from here into the text box at the top of this form to see the chimp genes that most closely match a given human gene. Try NM_001282628.1 for an example; it only has three single-nucleotide differences in it. The gene it encodes, arylsulfatase E, is vital to bone development, and is well-conserved in all vertebrates, so it makes sense that the differences between the human and chimp copies are minor.
In fact, there's a good chance that they're silent mutations—a substantial fraction of nucleotide changes either don't affect the protein sequence at all (because of redundancies in the translation table) or make unimportant changes, like swapping two very similar amino acids (also because of redundancies.) The existence of a large number of silent mutations between two species is one of the most powerful arguments for a common origin—if life was created from scratch just recently, why the hell are there so many replication mistakes? The number of differences—on the order of millions of errors—requires hundreds of thousands of generations to produce.
For a more dramatic effect, try switching to the full database instead of just the chimpanzee. Looking down the list of hits for NM_001282628.1, you'll see that nearly every vertebrate we know of has a copy of this gene, and the nucleotide sequences are largely identical, but never quite the same. If there are exceptions, then it's most likely because they evolved the capacity to do the same task through a different approach following the loss of the gene.
Ah, okay. In biochemistry, "high-throughput" is specifically a euphemism for bioinformatics methods. Doing high throughput biochemistry already requires substantial literacy in programming and statistics, hence the confusion.
Okay... are you thinking of microarray experiments then? I thought we were talking about sloppy drug trials.
You're right, medical research often has really tragic quality control in it, particularly when it's conducted by MDs without much in the way of a stats background. A lot of the work you're thinking of is already being redone by network and systems biologists, although they're starting with smaller organisms that are easier to model. In the mean time, the low-quality low-throughput work at least gives us some sort of roadmap about what kind of relations we should expect to find. Fortunately it won't take as long since we have the protocols and a lot of automation technology.
As I understand it, the high rate of retractions in journals like Nature is due to the outright fabrication of data by glory-seekers, not the same swarms of bumbling idiots; they tend to employ rather good editors and reviewers who can weed out statistical misunderstandings.
I wouldn't be so sure this kind of pattern is something very pervasive in scientific advances still. The more dramatic a finding is, the more heavily it is scrutinized, and there are far, far more people now able to learn and verify any cutting-edge theory in any field, no matter how specialized. Today something like the N ray could never garner any support. Literally tens of thousands of researchers scrutinized the LHC results for the Higgs boson when it appeared, and science journalists pull headlines from respected, peer-reviewed journals, not directly from researchers.
I think graphics hardware capabilities are the bigger bottleneck here. Game assets are often produced at very high quality levels during design but need to be scaled down to actually fit on the playing machine.
Right mindset, wrong concern: why isn't God's code bug-free to begin with? If the dude's perfect, there should be no rogue processes. If he's testing a chosen people, then he's a sadist; why not just design them to be worthy? Not exactly good PR.
Modern agnosticism (at least in my understanding) is not quite what you're describing. What I'm saying is this: there may be something out there that initiated the creation of the universe, but it hasn't interfered since, so there's no way we can tell (without more information) how the world got this way. Mature agnosticism leaves no room for interfering agents or acceptance of anything described by any holy works; it's purely about saying we don't know where the universe came from; it could be a vast intelligence running a school experiment or it might simply originate from total nothingness.
You've got a lot of factual oversights and selective omissions here. I'm not a physicist, so I can't comment on the astronomy matters, but I do know about the rest. I have a feeling you're a troll and you don't actually believe any of this, but let's see if we can set the record straight at least a little.
The known mutations in the human genome divided by the mutation rate shows that humans were mutation free...6000 years ago and that all women on earth share the same mother.
The human genome is nothing but mutations, all 3.1 billion bases of it. We can compare the human genome to the Chimpanzee genome and meticulously reconstruct all of the differences and indeed the whole history of changes between the two. Mitochondrial Eve only affects a very small part of the human genome, the mitochondrion, which we also share with all other animals on the planet (as well as plants, fungi, and protists), and dates back to at least 140,000 years ago, not 6,000 years ago. I would be more than happy to devastate you with further discussions about evolutionary history.
Everything on earth still has Carbon-14 in it. Instead of explaining this as "background carbon", the Occam's Razor answer is that everything is less than 10,000 years old.
The background noise in radiocarbon dating is caused by nuclear testing, cosmic radiation, and spontaneous decay. This can be demonstrated under controlled conditions. Occam's Razor requires that all evidence be accounted for. (Do you propose we just pretend nuclear testing didn't happen, or that nuclei don't emit neutrons when they decay?) Keep in mind that C-14 is very rare, only accounting for a trillionth of all carbon on the planet. It's not as if there's a whole bunch of the stuff that came out of nowhere. It's stochastically normal for spontaneous decay to occur at that frequency. Even with the background levels, radiocarbon dating is useful up to about 60,000 years ago, six times longer than you suggest.
Every culture talks about dragons as if they are real, but we have mythologized them. Why? Creationists believe the simpler answer is that dinosaurs are dragons.
All dragon myths have been traced to regions that have crocodiles. Crocodiles are scary.
No intermediate forms, almost at all. Virtually every fossil is a modern-day creature as is.
This is just clear misinformation; there are relatively few living fossils. Almost all fossils are of extinct species—like the ground sloth, the Hallucigenia spiny worm, and seventeen thousand species of trilobite. Also, doesn't that conflict with your obsession with dinosaurs?
Every culture talks about a flood, almost always one in which a guy often named something akin to "Noah" saves some combination of himself, his wife, his family and a bunch of animals with the help of his god. How do they all get this story when they didn't talk to each other.
But they did talk to each other; there were trade routes from Greece to Ireland in the 8th century BC. The legend of Noah is clearly derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Doesn't that mean you should worship the Sumerian pantheon?
So to me, the better question is why censor creationism? If it's so wrong, won't that be easily seen by everyone?
Creationism was rejected by mainstream Christianity precisely because it depends on heaps of factually inaccurate statements. Neither the Anglican Church nor the Catholic Church believes any of the bullshit you're spinning. It is dangerous precisely for the reasons outlined in the news article on which we're commenting: because it claims to offer cowards a better chance of avoiding Hel
Well, no, it's just an inconsistency in the Bible. I don't actually presume that a deity would care for much of anything at all.
That being said, I don't think you quite have your finger on Ares's heart; the Greeks recognized him as a bloodthirsty killing machine. The god of war isn't merely a metaphor for life's struggle, unless perhaps you're a Klingon. In the Roman empire this was downplayed, but only because they were so preoccupied with the idea of him as a protector; Roman farmers would call on him to rid their crops of blights.
Old-Testament Yahweh has a lot more in common with Zeus's habit of dispatching judgements from afar, or perhaps the even more self-centred attitudes of an older deity like the Titan Cronus. (Not to be confused with Chronos.)
The New Testament formulation of God is, quite simply, entirely different, and draws a lot of inspiration from things that had been attributed to Apollo and other largely benevolent gods, in tone if not in subject matter. (Zeitgeist technically deals with this, but the research and objectives of that documentary are so profoundly deficient I wouldn't wish it on anyone. So don't watch it. Just don't.) The Romans were gradually refining their concept of divinity and probably would have produced a weak form of monotheism on their own within a few centuries, centred around the cult of Apollo, if the Christians hadn't shown up. (I say "weak" both because few people cared and because the other deities would no doubt still have held some tokenary power.)
In order to compete, the Christians naturally had to produce a message that was more enlightened and loving than what the established theology could offer. The result is a totally different deity; a profoundly loving one. With all the dying for the sins and so forth. This is where the harmonizing comes from that I bring up. (Fun trivia: earlier versions of the New Testament described Jesus's childhood and revealed that he was a total jerk who abused his powers but then saw the error of his ways.)
That all being said, you're probably already moving past the Bible when you make statements like that, which is good, but it leaves me wondering why you'd bother with trying to understand a deity's motives anyway. If life's just a struggle, you don't need any divinity telling you that; that's just evolution in action. (And a rather turbulent subsection of it at that; there are plenty of people and organisms on this planet that are very much at peace.) At most you've described a situation that calls for a deistic universe, with no intervention on the part of a blind watchmaker.
If it's the afterlife you're worried about, may I point out that the concept of eternal damnation in Hell was invented in the middle ages as a way to scare heretics? It's vastly less credible an idea than the Bible itself. There are Anglican ministers who preach that it doesn't exist.
You'll get your point across a lot better if you can provide a specific citation instead of expecting a specific account, analysis, or conclusion to be dug up. I don't see anything exceptional in the way matters were handled.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here—I don't know the event particularly well, but a quick search suggests it was a major validation of Einstein's work. Are you trying to say that journalism plays too large a role in the communication to laypeople of received scientific opinion?
Hey, disorganized religion is a scam, too—it just doesn't pay anyone. You're still pulling wool over your own eyes and believing in things you have no justification for. Remember, agnosticism is the only empirically sound position.
Saying both groups are just trusting experts, however, is a bad reduction to make. It's also relevant to ask questions about what a follower believes they are following. A supporter of science believes that their ontology has been meticulously combed over and interrogated by clever, studious people to ensure consistency; a supporter of religion simply trusts that their sacred texts have been transmitted honestly by people told not to question what they receive. And there's no checksum in the New Testament!
I don't think parroting that is productive. The majority of creationists simply believe what their leaders tell them, and the ones who forge their own paths and invent doctrine (dinosaur fossils are what?!) do so because they are trapped by their cultural assumptions and (when you get down to it) an unhealthy preoccupation with avoiding oblivion. You, um, did RTFS, right?
Well, the fact that he couldn't make up his bloody mind at all in the Bible might have something to do with it—what with all the smiting and so forth. You'd think a perfect being would be a tad better at manufacturing and maintaining a harmonious world. (Maybe one without apple trees?)
Not necessarily; it just means that you're undergoing the same thing in the opposite direction; you like what's happening too much to let go; any strong emotion can probably cause dream-remembering. A particular dream may not actually contain very much content your brain's trying to forget, either; for example, if you have dreams that just consist of your daily routine with nothing unusual happening, then there's not much to change. That being said, though, it could be a sign that you're holding onto a hope you think is unrealistic. (Ironically, it seems possible that our dreams don't actually have much faith in our dreams.)
It's not running away we're talking about here; it's more like letting go.
It has been speculated (by this fellow, before you start getting cranky and waving around questions about credibility) that the whole sleeping and dreaming process might actually be a maintenance procedure. A certain type of artificial neural network, called a restricted Boltzmann machine, undergoes a process where it back-calculates fake input data based on what it's seen (much like human dreams) and then uses that fake data as a guide to correct errors in its weights (i.e. to remove and correct false correlations.) If true or even approximately true, this would provide a much more coherent explanation than the idea of a wildly unreliable sub- or superconscious, and explain why people who don't sleep or dream at all experience hallucinations, neurosis, and other impairments consistent with bad neural net bookkeeping.
Under this proposal, the dreams we remember might actually be a bad thing, because it suggests they invoked something too powerful to sleep through. This could explain why nightmares recur: our brains are trying to forget, but we keep remembering them consciously. It's not a shut book, though, as I don't know how lucid dreaming would fit into the model. (Maybe the part you have control over is only very minor?)
They did; the two departing personnel were their last programmers.
After this? Three. They're kicking out the two other remaining people.
For whatever it's worth:
Swearing is a really important part of one's life. It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing and without enjoying swearing... There used to be mad, silly, prissy people who used to say swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary—such utter nonsense. The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies and the kind of person who says swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary usually have a pretty poor vocabulary themselves... The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest or—is just a fucking lunatic... I haven't met anybody who's truly shocked at swearing, really, they're only shocked on behalf of other people. Well, you know, that's preposterous... or they say 'it's not necessary'. As if that should stop one doing it! It's not necessary to have coloured socks, it's not necessary for this cushion to be here, but is anyone going to write in and say 'I was shocked to see that cushion there, it really wasn't necessary'? No, things not being necessary is what makes life interesting—the little extras in life.
– Stephen Fry.
Well, for starters, it prevents this. As you can clearly see, only competition between companies trying to attract employees can improve living standards.
You may want to read this, but I'd recommend waiting until your blood pressure goes down.