Ah, but you're mistaken; there were popular-but-terrible books in every era. You just don't know about them because they're so awful no one bothered to preserve them, hence the moniker "penny dreadfuls." Twilight will not be remembered; perhaps the only trash of this period that will is Fifty Shades of Grey, and even then only because it broke sales records. There are still good writers around today, they're just not so respected or well-known because of the current bloatedness of presentism and popular culture. (Stick around, though; that last part might change as we millennials get sufficiently picky.)
It dates back to the PDP-10 days and the ASR-33. The "ALT MODE" key was located about where tab is now, so they were the same in ITS, the operating system under which the first Emacs versions were developed.
Overanalysis is inevitable (you'd be absolutely appalled at how many analyses have been written of Shakespearean characters) but not really pertinent to h4rr4r's complaints.
Going slightly off-topic, don't even bother with Rowling; we already have plenty of examples of earlier 20th Century literature being mangled. You'd be amazed at how many people have interpreted Lord of the Rings as anti-industrial despite Tolkien's explicit pleas.
The colon's right: dashes aren't real punctuation marks. Any time you see a dash, it's either a comma or a colon that's been drawn out into a breathing mark. Colons were once employed widely whenever a statement explained the previous one.
I think a "whoosh" may be in order. At the time such questionable applications were quite commonplace, as the rules hadn't quite settled in. If you keep going back, then by the Middle Ages you will discover that entire paragraphs are concatenated out of wildly independent clauses using rather stilted-looking conjunctions and puncti. I was hamming it up a little for the sake of theatre. Perhaps I should berate you for such a rare and archaic use of a colon?
Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813. The majority of its style is simply what was commonplace at the time amongst the literate elite; indeed, most English-language writing held echoes of the same manner of elocution until the later half of the twentieth century when it had become strictly a formal mode of communication and literature was reinvented to be more casual. The style reflects the content of the subject matter.
I would highly recommend working your way up to understanding a thing or two about literature before trying to pass such sweeping judgements on it. Literary studies, and indeed most of the Humanities, are concerned with history; to try and pull them apart or to focus only on the present is to completely fail to understand and ignore most of the greatest books ever written. It really does not look good to make such brazen statements.
Snowden knows a lot more than he's told the general public. I'm pretty sure when they say they're afraid he'll tell them everything else, that's their genuine worry. Remember Setec Astronomy.
There's no need to guess. It's been demonstrated that a build-up of bad bacteria is responsible for difficult-to-conotrol weight gain in a significant portion of the US population. It's almost certain that this is only a problem now because of changing food conditions. One specific type of bacteria emit a toxin that causes the intestine to take up excess nutrients; it's that simple. Normally the human immune system prevents this bacterium from colonizing the gut. While a bad circadian cycle (i.e. no sunlight) can contribute to such issues, they're negligible next to Bacteroidetes infections. There's even a cure, consisting of a very specific crash diet that replaces all intestinal flora. Antibiotics have, unfortunately, made the situation worse.
No, I mean sea urchin reproduction is similar to the bacterial reproduction strategy. Both involve high numbers with a small chance of survival. The Red Queen challenge is more generic; any organism that is not currently being driven to extinction, no matter how numerous or scarce, is handling itself sufficiently.
The trick is that bacteria reproduce quickly—it's akin to a business strategy of a small company spinning off half its staff and assets every time it passes a certain size threshold. Inevitably there's never enough work for all these little companies, so most go bankrupt, but by pure statistics the most aggressive survive. Without a doubt this business model would satiate short-term profiteers, but I wouldn't say they're winning the game of life, per se; we live long for the same reason businesses (try to) do: it's less wasteful and more stable.
Planetary Annihilation is the technical and spiritual successor to both SC and TA. SC2 was made by Square Enix (oh god why, I can hear you say), but strangely the original designer of both TA and SC, Chris Taylor, claimed responsibility (or at least support) for its deviations from the core formula (most notably unit upgrades and noncontinuous resource gathering.) The goal was to simplify; the result was to alienate the only audience the brand had ever drawn; the lesson was for the next game—Planetary Annihilation, which to my knowledge doesn't include Chris Taylor but does have some GPG staff behind it—to return to TA's core qualities.
Our awareness of environmental triggering of epigenetic phenomena is actually quite older. Agriculture is full of examples of Lamarckian traits, such as resistance to drought or cold; plants switch on these attributes over successive generations as a form of memory, no DNA mutations required; it's all chromatin re-modelling. You're certainly right that it took us a while to accept that nearly everything in the Central Dogma has at least one counterexample.
A little note: obesity is actually an immune disorder and has nothing to do with epigenetics. You can read a pretty good explanation here. I think the real cause of the epidemic is unsanitary factory farming practices.
Also, the term "mRNA" is not generally used to refer to RNA molecules that hang around and perform other functions, even though they're all transcripts. The "messenger" moniker implies it's destined to be turned into a protein at a ribosome.
There's nothing wrong here; it's just a simple misunderstanding by the journalist. We've known about X-linked for as long we've known about sex chromosomes, which inherently implies that the X chromosome has responsibilities beyond determining sex.
Believe it or not, however, there are actually advantages to the Y chromosome being so minimal. Men are nature's beta testers: sometimes mutations in the X chromosome have significant benefits, and as these traits aren't balanced out by a second allele, they become more pronounced and hence are easier to detect during sexual and natural selection. This is (probably) why men display a greater variance in height, strength, and analytical skill. Similarly, by always suffering from a disease, and hence by not getting laid, men protect the rest of the tribe from the disorders they end up with. (Admittedly not great when you're actually in the middle of things, but sexual dimorphism and reproduction are both full of cruelties.)
It's not a trait that lasts very long; every successive daughter has a 50% chance of passing it on afterwards, after all, so at most you'd expect such a mutation to only be around for three or four generations.
However, such diseases are probably the reason why women make up 51% of the population. In the stereotypical portrayal of hunter-gather societies, certainly it is desirable to have slightly more women than men; the traditional division of responsibilities leaves the women with more consistent work. Contrariwise it would seem that an agrarian society would benefit more from a surplus of men to work fields, but there are relatively few adaptations in our genomes that are agriculture-oriented. (Cavities, for example, are a symptom of eating grains.)
Well, we upgraded to include a dynamic self-modifying portion, but there are some bugs; the basic self/non-self discrimination regularizer has a high tendency to cause wars over stupid things like whohasthebetterfacialhair. Unfortunately, the wide range of other regularizers—emotions, convictions, self-preservation, altruism, and the rest—aren't enough to completely repress this sort of thing. On the plus side they're now inventing new ones.
(In all seriousness, I think comparing the human species to an ensemble of classifiers is perhaps the most profound and interesting analogy ever made. The passing of genetic algorithms out of vogue in ML research reflects our own development of an advanced nervous system as an adaptable survival mechanism; culture, then, is the mass of concepts and rules we can integrate into our personal collections of weights to tune our nets to do specific things.)
Not a chance. The computing mapping is almost 1:1, and I simply don't know enough about cars to come up with a plausible explanation for the second half. Not everything in biology can be fit into a car analogy. Computers are somewhat easier.
Correction; I've done a bit more research and I'm now inclined to count beaver behaviour as more instinctual and less learned. They don't appear to have the mental capacity for many of their activities to be much more. Still, without more research I don't think I can say for certain either way.
Grey area. No one said it had to be a matter of absolutes. Most people would say that it depends on how an animal learns how to change its environment; if knowledge has to be passed down from parent to child, then it's part of culture and is hence synthetic; if it's instinctual and requires no learning whatsoever then it's definitively not a craft and hence not artificed. I'm pretty sure beaver dams are artificial by that definition, it's just that we humans have been incredibly shitty about recognizing the accomplishments of other species.
The Y chromosome used to just be a variant of the X chromosome, with only a few genes different; they were the same size. Over time, careless maintenance staff decided the backups were redundant and stopped keeping them. Thus something like 5% of men have one or more factory defects—most commonly colour-deficient vision, which some backward engineer decided was a feature, not a bug, and went to great lengths to distribute bad copies to other users.
On the plus side, we recently found out that the genome actually does have some documentation—well, more like debugger symbols—so it's getting easier to figure out where the important binaries are located. Unfortunately in the process we also discovered that what appeared to be severe filesystem fragmentation is actually rotational performance optimization, and most of the rest of the disk is actually a messy broth of shell scripts, not merely unallocated space as we assumed.
The sad thing is that even if we did redesign everything, it would probably be way worse than the existing codebase, particularly since we only have a tiny portion of the actual spec, which you can imagine was never exactly written down.
No, it's just bad science journalism. The X chromosome is, for the most part, just another part of the genome; it contains all sorts of random junk, like blood clotting factors and parts of the receptors in our eyes that let us see colour. Any disease you've ever heard of that's "X-linked" or more common in men than women is either affected or effected, directly or indirectly, by the X chromosome. It is of no significance or note whatsoever that it contains stuff that's only activated in the male body.
If you want something weird and sex-linked to rant insanely about, however, there's always the mystery of digit ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you're mistaken; there were popular-but-terrible books in every era. You just don't know about them because they're so awful no one bothered to preserve them, hence the moniker "penny dreadfuls." Twilight will not be remembered; perhaps the only trash of this period that will is Fifty Shades of Grey, and even then only because it broke sales records. There are still good writers around today, they're just not so respected or well-known because of the current bloatedness of presentism and popular culture. (Stick around, though; that last part might change as we millennials get sufficiently picky.)
It dates back to the PDP-10 days and the ASR-33. The "ALT MODE" key was located about where tab is now, so they were the same in ITS, the operating system under which the first Emacs versions were developed.
Overanalysis is inevitable (you'd be absolutely appalled at how many analyses have been written of Shakespearean characters) but not really pertinent to h4rr4r's complaints.
Going slightly off-topic, don't even bother with Rowling; we already have plenty of examples of earlier 20th Century literature being mangled. You'd be amazed at how many people have interpreted Lord of the Rings as anti-industrial despite Tolkien's explicit pleas.
I take it you're not exactly friends, then.
The colon's right: dashes aren't real punctuation marks. Any time you see a dash, it's either a comma or a colon that's been drawn out into a breathing mark. Colons were once employed widely whenever a statement explained the previous one.
I think a "whoosh" may be in order. At the time such questionable applications were quite commonplace, as the rules hadn't quite settled in. If you keep going back, then by the Middle Ages you will discover that entire paragraphs are concatenated out of wildly independent clauses using rather stilted-looking conjunctions and puncti. I was hamming it up a little for the sake of theatre. Perhaps I should berate you for such a rare and archaic use of a colon?
Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813. The majority of its style is simply what was commonplace at the time amongst the literate elite; indeed, most English-language writing held echoes of the same manner of elocution until the later half of the twentieth century when it had become strictly a formal mode of communication and literature was reinvented to be more casual. The style reflects the content of the subject matter.
I would highly recommend working your way up to understanding a thing or two about literature before trying to pass such sweeping judgements on it. Literary studies, and indeed most of the Humanities, are concerned with history; to try and pull them apart or to focus only on the present is to completely fail to understand and ignore most of the greatest books ever written. It really does not look good to make such brazen statements.
I think the Slashdot Treasury is already full of stale copypasta and mangled attempts at Yakov Smirnoff jokes, but the thought is appreciated.
Snowden knows a lot more than he's told the general public. I'm pretty sure when they say they're afraid he'll tell them everything else, that's their genuine worry. Remember Setec Astronomy.
You need a finally { fallOffCliff(); } block.
There's no need to guess. It's been demonstrated that a build-up of bad bacteria is responsible for difficult-to-conotrol weight gain in a significant portion of the US population. It's almost certain that this is only a problem now because of changing food conditions. One specific type of bacteria emit a toxin that causes the intestine to take up excess nutrients; it's that simple. Normally the human immune system prevents this bacterium from colonizing the gut. While a bad circadian cycle (i.e. no sunlight) can contribute to such issues, they're negligible next to Bacteroidetes infections. There's even a cure, consisting of a very specific crash diet that replaces all intestinal flora. Antibiotics have, unfortunately, made the situation worse.
No, I mean sea urchin reproduction is similar to the bacterial reproduction strategy. Both involve high numbers with a small chance of survival. The Red Queen challenge is more generic; any organism that is not currently being driven to extinction, no matter how numerous or scarce, is handling itself sufficiently.
Hey, it's not that much of a one-upping in this case—your sea urchin analogy from yesterday was basically the same idea.
The trick is that bacteria reproduce quickly—it's akin to a business strategy of a small company spinning off half its staff and assets every time it passes a certain size threshold. Inevitably there's never enough work for all these little companies, so most go bankrupt, but by pure statistics the most aggressive survive. Without a doubt this business model would satiate short-term profiteers, but I wouldn't say they're winning the game of life, per se; we live long for the same reason businesses (try to) do: it's less wasteful and more stable.
Planetary Annihilation is the technical and spiritual successor to both SC and TA. SC2 was made by Square Enix (oh god why, I can hear you say), but strangely the original designer of both TA and SC, Chris Taylor, claimed responsibility (or at least support) for its deviations from the core formula (most notably unit upgrades and noncontinuous resource gathering.) The goal was to simplify; the result was to alienate the only audience the brand had ever drawn; the lesson was for the next game—Planetary Annihilation, which to my knowledge doesn't include Chris Taylor but does have some GPG staff behind it—to return to TA's core qualities.
Our awareness of environmental triggering of epigenetic phenomena is actually quite older. Agriculture is full of examples of Lamarckian traits, such as resistance to drought or cold; plants switch on these attributes over successive generations as a form of memory, no DNA mutations required; it's all chromatin re-modelling. You're certainly right that it took us a while to accept that nearly everything in the Central Dogma has at least one counterexample.
A little note: obesity is actually an immune disorder and has nothing to do with epigenetics. You can read a pretty good explanation here. I think the real cause of the epidemic is unsanitary factory farming practices.
Also, the term "mRNA" is not generally used to refer to RNA molecules that hang around and perform other functions, even though they're all transcripts. The "messenger" moniker implies it's destined to be turned into a protein at a ribosome.
There's nothing wrong here; it's just a simple misunderstanding by the journalist. We've known about X-linked for as long we've known about sex chromosomes, which inherently implies that the X chromosome has responsibilities beyond determining sex.
Believe it or not, however, there are actually advantages to the Y chromosome being so minimal. Men are nature's beta testers: sometimes mutations in the X chromosome have significant benefits, and as these traits aren't balanced out by a second allele, they become more pronounced and hence are easier to detect during sexual and natural selection. This is (probably) why men display a greater variance in height, strength, and analytical skill. Similarly, by always suffering from a disease, and hence by not getting laid, men protect the rest of the tribe from the disorders they end up with. (Admittedly not great when you're actually in the middle of things, but sexual dimorphism and reproduction are both full of cruelties.)
It's not a trait that lasts very long; every successive daughter has a 50% chance of passing it on afterwards, after all, so at most you'd expect such a mutation to only be around for three or four generations.
However, such diseases are probably the reason why women make up 51% of the population. In the stereotypical portrayal of hunter-gather societies, certainly it is desirable to have slightly more women than men; the traditional division of responsibilities leaves the women with more consistent work. Contrariwise it would seem that an agrarian society would benefit more from a surplus of men to work fields, but there are relatively few adaptations in our genomes that are agriculture-oriented. (Cavities, for example, are a symptom of eating grains.)
Well, we upgraded to include a dynamic self-modifying portion, but there are some bugs; the basic self/non-self discrimination regularizer has a high tendency to cause wars over stupid things like who has the better facial hair. Unfortunately, the wide range of other regularizers—emotions, convictions, self-preservation, altruism, and the rest—aren't enough to completely repress this sort of thing. On the plus side they're now inventing new ones.
(In all seriousness, I think comparing the human species to an ensemble of classifiers is perhaps the most profound and interesting analogy ever made. The passing of genetic algorithms out of vogue in ML research reflects our own development of an advanced nervous system as an adaptable survival mechanism; culture, then, is the mass of concepts and rules we can integrate into our personal collections of weights to tune our nets to do specific things.)
Not a chance. The computing mapping is almost 1:1, and I simply don't know enough about cars to come up with a plausible explanation for the second half. Not everything in biology can be fit into a car analogy. Computers are somewhat easier.
Correction; I've done a bit more research and I'm now inclined to count beaver behaviour as more instinctual and less learned. They don't appear to have the mental capacity for many of their activities to be much more. Still, without more research I don't think I can say for certain either way.
Grey area. No one said it had to be a matter of absolutes. Most people would say that it depends on how an animal learns how to change its environment; if knowledge has to be passed down from parent to child, then it's part of culture and is hence synthetic; if it's instinctual and requires no learning whatsoever then it's definitively not a craft and hence not artificed. I'm pretty sure beaver dams are artificial by that definition, it's just that we humans have been incredibly shitty about recognizing the accomplishments of other species.
The Y chromosome used to just be a variant of the X chromosome, with only a few genes different; they were the same size. Over time, careless maintenance staff decided the backups were redundant and stopped keeping them. Thus something like 5% of men have one or more factory defects—most commonly colour-deficient vision, which some backward engineer decided was a feature , not a bug, and went to great lengths to distribute bad copies to other users.
On the plus side, we recently found out that the genome actually does have some documentation—well, more like debugger symbols—so it's getting easier to figure out where the important binaries are located. Unfortunately in the process we also discovered that what appeared to be severe filesystem fragmentation is actually rotational performance optimization, and most of the rest of the disk is actually a messy broth of shell scripts, not merely unallocated space as we assumed.
The sad thing is that even if we did redesign everything, it would probably be way worse than the existing codebase, particularly since we only have a tiny portion of the actual spec, which you can imagine was never exactly written down.
No, it's just bad science journalism. The X chromosome is, for the most part, just another part of the genome; it contains all sorts of random junk, like blood clotting factors and parts of the receptors in our eyes that let us see colour. Any disease you've ever heard of that's "X-linked" or more common in men than women is either affected or effected, directly or indirectly, by the X chromosome. It is of no significance or note whatsoever that it contains stuff that's only activated in the male body.
If you want something weird and sex-linked to rant insanely about, however, there's always the mystery of digit ratio.
Your analysis seems... controversial.