I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.
...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.
It did, much to my disappointment. All mentions of other methods of teaching are those that have been imported. There was something about Prince Charles visiting in 1988, but it was only for the sake of analogy, and the British schooling system is rather lackluster. In fact the vignette seemed rather pointlessly antagonistic, but perhaps there was context somewhere between what the chapter itself described and the events of April 19, 1775 that I missed.
The sheer lengths of his tract and interview are impressive, and I am compelled by the numerous footnotes. Clearly, this is a work of profound augustness.
I do have a key objection, though, and perhaps you can lay it to rest—he doesn't seem to be in touch with modern practices in other countries; or at least I haven't noticed any mention of them in my cursory glances. Did you notice any?
That's pretty scary. I'm pretty sure we covered all of those in grade one, and it just so happens I was in grade one in 1995. The Ontario curriculum was a bit tougher, it seems.
Then again, asking an eleven-year-old to read and understand Thoreau or Shakespeare sounds like a classic Victorian misunderstanding of childhood development. Piaget may not be perfect (or up to date, for that matter), but educators believed some truly absurd things before then. Carroll was certainly a good pick, and a lot more accessible.
And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.
To be honest, I think perhaps the name comes across as a self-conscious conservative title, i.e. something you get called so often you adopted it as a moniker to pre-empt the insult. (Which, I guess, is the point.) But, hey, we all have lousy days. And weeks. And months. And years... I'm a little too young to be a life coach, but have you considered buying a really expensive car? That seems to be the standard solution to this kind of problem.
As for cells, the largest single-celled organism I know of off the top of my head is an ostrich or dinosaur egg (which doesn't really count since it's not fully alive for long, and generally holds something else), followed by the Mermaid's wineglass, a ridiculously large alga (up to 10 cm or about 4 inches.) There may be larger. In general, large single-cell organisms are unpopular because they provide a single point of failure and can't specialize, meaning they have to do everything at once, which gets cluttered. It's a little like running a mainframe with no service contract.
I think the most exciting thing about the Michigan Militia is the faint implication that Ontario might invade at any moment. It is sad that their website does not mention this. Oh, what could have been.
Your supposed counter-examples are all cases that do not violate the original co-evolution constraint. You claimed that an unfamiliar, non-adaptive bacterium would have a superior ability to evade the human immune system, when all medical evidence suggests that viruses are only able to keep ahead of the race by mimicking human antigens and mutating extremely rapidly. You claimed that a plasmid could "easily" be acquired by an ancient bacterium, even though analogous systems show that such extreme isolation can cause changes as dramatic as alterations in the genetic code. These ancient bacteria are disadvantaged in every imaginable way when compared against modern species, and to such an extreme degree that the point is meaningless to argue. It is comparable to discussing flying pigs.
Do you actually know anything about evolutionary genomics or is your entire life oriented around dismissing others to make yourself feel better, as your post history suggests? You've dodged every single one of my posts, done no work to "establish" anything, and brought up irrelevant examples. I don't think you should have gotten yourself into this conversation.
I dug up the Rahme et al. paper on P. aeruginosa, and it would be better to describe the strains with double-virulence as hosts of two pathogens; indeed, most strains of P. aeruginosa only attack one kingdom or the other. The gene gacA is required for attacking plants, and plays no role in attacking mammals. Most of the genes that are shared between the two mechanisms are simply involved in the export of extracellular products. The same can be said of Aspergillus spp.; the major group of animal toxins produced by them, the aflatoxins, do not harm plants.
This leads to an idea that may not sit comfortably with you, but I think is honest: bacteria that actively participate in horizontal gene transfer (through plasmids, phages, or any other mechanism) are not, themselves, diseases, but merely hosts. It would be more accurate, if perhaps not always medically pragmatic, to say that the genes responsible are the actual pathogens. Two pathogenic plasmids that occupy the same cell but target different hosts are no different from two pathogenic plasmids that occupy different cells which are both abundant in the environment. If such a plasmid got into an ancient bacterium and were functional, it would be best-described as a new strain of an old problem.
That all being said, I do not believe modern plasmids would be compatible with bacteria that have been isolated for 1.5 billion years. It is unlikely that they would have retained compatible promoter sequences over that interval. As we see in obligate parasites that are constrained to consistent and resource-rich niches, the rate of evolution is greatly enhanced, as fewer genes are necessary for survival.
I strongly believe it is wrong to assume that a completely alien surface would go undetected by the immune system; if it were, the most successful human viruses would have strange and randomly-generated exteriors, and would not bother with mimicking and pilfering human surface elements. If an ancient bacterium did have a good surface for evading the immune system, it would probably be because it is extremely barren. As many Archaeans have protein cell walls and can form biofilms, the entire tree of life is heavily laden with crowded exteriors, and hence we have no reason to believe that an extremely barren exterior would be likely for anything after the Bacteria–Archaea split.
Just remember—most of those people are victims in some sense, whether it be of a bad childhood that impeded education or an ideology that actively seeks to deny them a sense of worldliness as a method of control. No matter how mean-spirited or loud-mouthed they may get, "sadly" is indeed the right adverb for the situation.
It sure does! And there's nothing wrong with that unless people can't separate fact from fiction. Which they can't, because they haven't been taught what's real.
It is erroneous to assume that humankind will succumb to natural selection. Self destruction, maybe, but there is nothing on this planet that can select against us—short of, y'know, extreme environmental pressures. The human mind is, as far as this planet knows, the final card to play in the evolutionary race. Evolution for us is cultural now; something we can change at any time, in response to detailed analyses of a situation. That's miles better than waiting for reproduction to stumble onto the right combination by accident.
Ah, yes, because bacteriophages regularly harass mammals. Excuse me while I stare at you. It's very bold of you to make that kind of accusation with my comment history.
For a virus to transit between hosts, it needs regular access to both a stable host and a target host. It must be able to adapt to the surface receptors on the target host, it must exploit the cellular machinery in a manner that the target host does not innately defend against, and it must be able to do so without completely losing relevance in its original reproductive environment. It must also avoid presenting any antigens that would be easily be picked up by the target.
In practice, this means that vertebrates are isolated from the rest of the evolutionary tree. The number of spontaneous inventions necessary to jump from, say, an amoeba to a dog, is prohibitive. This is not to say the distance is completely insurmountable, but it is rather like randomly carving the correct key for a door in one attempt. The majority of well-studied viruses only affect an extremely limited host range, such as one species; rabies is considered exceptional for its ability to affect a large number of mammals. Most likely, viruses either co-evolved with the rest of the tree, since we can see the development of the immune system by following it.
Complex parasites like protozoans are about on par in terms of their hosts' physiology to survive. They require more nutrients, which means a long period of interaction, and hence a long interval of evasion. There are over two hundred Plasmodium species that target different higher animals, but like human Malaria, their core metabolic cycle depends on harvesting haemoglobin, which makes them irrelevant to non-vertebrates.
Pathogenic bacteria are a little different: most are natural body flora that have developed toxicity to the host. These can be very non-specific in the environments they dwell in; some bacteria, like Baccilus thuringiensis, can survive in a huge range of environments, have a spore form to protect against unfavourable conditions, and emit defensive toxins as needed. Bt is so successful that whole cells have been spread over crops as an insecticide, and its primary toxin has been spliced into corn by Monsanto to accomplish the same effect.
The trick here, however, is that there is once more a limitation on how far the toxin itself can be useful, and this constrains host-jumping much like viral evolution. Constant exposure to the new environment is required, and hardened species typically have closed genomes not receptive to horizontal gene transfer. As a result, vertebrate pests keep with vertebrates, insect pests keep with insects, and plant pests keep with plants (and so on for every other phylum and kingdom.) The amount of energy necessary to jump between hosts over such long distances, combined with the abundance of already-extant pathogens at the target, creates an energetically unfavourable challenge. It is more likely that a strain would lose its pathogenicity to one species and then develop an entirely separate pathogenicity, in which case they should probably be regarded as two separate diseases.
This leaves diseases that are almost completely non-specific: detritovores. It would probably be best to say they can't jump between kingdoms, as their entire metabolic system is oriented toward processing either animal, plant, fungal, or bacterial food, which generally corresponds to the available nutrients found in the host.
So, there you go: the very real, very diverse biochemical basis for the limits on how far pathogens can jump.
The question was never whether or not it was a joke, but how conscious the author was of the implications of the statement, and whether or not the joke reflected a genuine anxiety. During the cold war, there was plenty of black humour about nuclear attacks, but few people, if any, discounted the dangers of it.
However, you do get a gold star for correctly guessing my nationality.
I'm all ears if you actually want to have a conversation. Here, I'll start:
Saying homosexuality is "immoral" is an attack on homosexuality, and saying Islam is "a barmy doctrine" is an attack on Islam. These are not "exactly the same thing," and they deserve different responses. Unless Steyn was selective quoting things to make his stance look weaker? Neither GALHA nor Iqbal restrained their words to strictly objective observations; GALHA in particular could have avoided flak by citing Iqbal's statements and underlining that they are intolerant. That doesn't require any ad hominem attacks, much less accusations that all of Islam is "barmy" (i.e. crazy.)
So what, exactly, do you think you're talking about?
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I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.
Oh, how I wish it were.
Can you believe these animals survived? Who knows what they'll try next, maybe a dog or chimp! One day, humans might even be able to go into space!
...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.
Biology is more of a day job. Computer history is one of my hobbies. That being said, though, biology does involve a lot of Java and XML.
It's lived a vibrant, fruitful life.
Well now it'll live another one! Like the sporocarp of a fungus growing on a bag of rotting garbage.
Truly, there can be no greater evil than COBOL and enterprise Java in the same bucket, united by an unholy sludge of XML.
It did, much to my disappointment. All mentions of other methods of teaching are those that have been imported. There was something about Prince Charles visiting in 1988, but it was only for the sake of analogy, and the British schooling system is rather lackluster. In fact the vignette seemed rather pointlessly antagonistic, but perhaps there was context somewhere between what the chapter itself described and the events of April 19, 1775 that I missed.
And a helicopter! Surely that is equivalent somehow. Surely.
The sheer lengths of his tract and interview are impressive, and I am compelled by the numerous footnotes. Clearly, this is a work of profound augustness.
I do have a key objection, though, and perhaps you can lay it to rest—he doesn't seem to be in touch with modern practices in other countries; or at least I haven't noticed any mention of them in my cursory glances. Did you notice any?
I see you are skilled in the art of dad humour. It suits you, I think. To be honest.
That's pretty scary. I'm pretty sure we covered all of those in grade one, and it just so happens I was in grade one in 1995. The Ontario curriculum was a bit tougher, it seems.
Then again, asking an eleven-year-old to read and understand Thoreau or Shakespeare sounds like a classic Victorian misunderstanding of childhood development. Piaget may not be perfect (or up to date, for that matter), but educators believed some truly absurd things before then. Carroll was certainly a good pick, and a lot more accessible.
And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.
To be honest, I think perhaps the name comes across as a self-conscious conservative title, i.e. something you get called so often you adopted it as a moniker to pre-empt the insult. (Which, I guess, is the point.) But, hey, we all have lousy days. And weeks. And months. And years... I'm a little too young to be a life coach, but have you considered buying a really expensive car? That seems to be the standard solution to this kind of problem.
As for cells, the largest single-celled organism I know of off the top of my head is an ostrich or dinosaur egg (which doesn't really count since it's not fully alive for long, and generally holds something else), followed by the Mermaid's wineglass, a ridiculously large alga (up to 10 cm or about 4 inches.) There may be larger. In general, large single-cell organisms are unpopular because they provide a single point of failure and can't specialize, meaning they have to do everything at once, which gets cluttered. It's a little like running a mainframe with no service contract.
I think the most exciting thing about the Michigan Militia is the faint implication that Ontario might invade at any moment. It is sad that their website does not mention this. Oh, what could have been.
That one is a little less impressive, but kudos for investing the time and energy. It's creative in its own way.
Indeed there is! From now on, all citizens will be required to wear extremely delicate balloons tied to their ears.
I am genuinely impressed by that comeback.
Ooh, ooh! Now do one about a famous historical figure!
Your supposed counter-examples are all cases that do not violate the original co-evolution constraint. You claimed that an unfamiliar, non-adaptive bacterium would have a superior ability to evade the human immune system, when all medical evidence suggests that viruses are only able to keep ahead of the race by mimicking human antigens and mutating extremely rapidly. You claimed that a plasmid could "easily" be acquired by an ancient bacterium, even though analogous systems show that such extreme isolation can cause changes as dramatic as alterations in the genetic code. These ancient bacteria are disadvantaged in every imaginable way when compared against modern species, and to such an extreme degree that the point is meaningless to argue. It is comparable to discussing flying pigs.
Do you actually know anything about evolutionary genomics or is your entire life oriented around dismissing others to make yourself feel better, as your post history suggests? You've dodged every single one of my posts, done no work to "establish" anything, and brought up irrelevant examples. I don't think you should have gotten yourself into this conversation.
I dug up the Rahme et al. paper on P. aeruginosa, and it would be better to describe the strains with double-virulence as hosts of two pathogens; indeed, most strains of P. aeruginosa only attack one kingdom or the other. The gene gacA is required for attacking plants, and plays no role in attacking mammals. Most of the genes that are shared between the two mechanisms are simply involved in the export of extracellular products. The same can be said of Aspergillus spp.; the major group of animal toxins produced by them, the aflatoxins, do not harm plants.
This leads to an idea that may not sit comfortably with you, but I think is honest: bacteria that actively participate in horizontal gene transfer (through plasmids, phages, or any other mechanism) are not, themselves, diseases, but merely hosts. It would be more accurate, if perhaps not always medically pragmatic, to say that the genes responsible are the actual pathogens. Two pathogenic plasmids that occupy the same cell but target different hosts are no different from two pathogenic plasmids that occupy different cells which are both abundant in the environment. If such a plasmid got into an ancient bacterium and were functional, it would be best-described as a new strain of an old problem.
That all being said, I do not believe modern plasmids would be compatible with bacteria that have been isolated for 1.5 billion years. It is unlikely that they would have retained compatible promoter sequences over that interval. As we see in obligate parasites that are constrained to consistent and resource-rich niches, the rate of evolution is greatly enhanced, as fewer genes are necessary for survival.
I strongly believe it is wrong to assume that a completely alien surface would go undetected by the immune system; if it were, the most successful human viruses would have strange and randomly-generated exteriors, and would not bother with mimicking and pilfering human surface elements. If an ancient bacterium did have a good surface for evading the immune system, it would probably be because it is extremely barren. As many Archaeans have protein cell walls and can form biofilms, the entire tree of life is heavily laden with crowded exteriors, and hence we have no reason to believe that an extremely barren exterior would be likely for anything after the Bacteria–Archaea split.
Just remember—most of those people are victims in some sense, whether it be of a bad childhood that impeded education or an ideology that actively seeks to deny them a sense of worldliness as a method of control. No matter how mean-spirited or loud-mouthed they may get, "sadly" is indeed the right adverb for the situation.
By all means, feel free to demonstrate of an example where a plant toxin emitted by a bacterium suddenly starts affecting an animal or vice versa.
It sure does! And there's nothing wrong with that unless people can't separate fact from fiction. Which they can't, because they haven't been taught what's real.
It is erroneous to assume that humankind will succumb to natural selection. Self destruction, maybe, but there is nothing on this planet that can select against us—short of, y'know, extreme environmental pressures. The human mind is, as far as this planet knows, the final card to play in the evolutionary race. Evolution for us is cultural now; something we can change at any time, in response to detailed analyses of a situation. That's miles better than waiting for reproduction to stumble onto the right combination by accident.
Ah, yes, because bacteriophages regularly harass mammals. Excuse me while I stare at you. It's very bold of you to make that kind of accusation with my comment history.
For a virus to transit between hosts, it needs regular access to both a stable host and a target host. It must be able to adapt to the surface receptors on the target host, it must exploit the cellular machinery in a manner that the target host does not innately defend against, and it must be able to do so without completely losing relevance in its original reproductive environment. It must also avoid presenting any antigens that would be easily be picked up by the target.
In practice, this means that vertebrates are isolated from the rest of the evolutionary tree. The number of spontaneous inventions necessary to jump from, say, an amoeba to a dog, is prohibitive. This is not to say the distance is completely insurmountable, but it is rather like randomly carving the correct key for a door in one attempt. The majority of well-studied viruses only affect an extremely limited host range, such as one species; rabies is considered exceptional for its ability to affect a large number of mammals. Most likely, viruses either co-evolved with the rest of the tree, since we can see the development of the immune system by following it.
Complex parasites like protozoans are about on par in terms of their hosts' physiology to survive. They require more nutrients, which means a long period of interaction, and hence a long interval of evasion. There are over two hundred Plasmodium species that target different higher animals, but like human Malaria, their core metabolic cycle depends on harvesting haemoglobin, which makes them irrelevant to non-vertebrates.
Pathogenic bacteria are a little different: most are natural body flora that have developed toxicity to the host. These can be very non-specific in the environments they dwell in; some bacteria, like Baccilus thuringiensis, can survive in a huge range of environments, have a spore form to protect against unfavourable conditions, and emit defensive toxins as needed. Bt is so successful that whole cells have been spread over crops as an insecticide, and its primary toxin has been spliced into corn by Monsanto to accomplish the same effect.
The trick here, however, is that there is once more a limitation on how far the toxin itself can be useful, and this constrains host-jumping much like viral evolution. Constant exposure to the new environment is required, and hardened species typically have closed genomes not receptive to horizontal gene transfer. As a result, vertebrate pests keep with vertebrates, insect pests keep with insects, and plant pests keep with plants (and so on for every other phylum and kingdom.) The amount of energy necessary to jump between hosts over such long distances, combined with the abundance of already-extant pathogens at the target, creates an energetically unfavourable challenge. It is more likely that a strain would lose its pathogenicity to one species and then develop an entirely separate pathogenicity, in which case they should probably be regarded as two separate diseases.
This leaves diseases that are almost completely non-specific: detritovores. It would probably be best to say they can't jump between kingdoms, as their entire metabolic system is oriented toward processing either animal, plant, fungal, or bacterial food, which generally corresponds to the available nutrients found in the host.
So, there you go: the very real, very diverse biochemical basis for the limits on how far pathogens can jump.
The question was never whether or not it was a joke, but how conscious the author was of the implications of the statement, and whether or not the joke reflected a genuine anxiety. During the cold war, there was plenty of black humour about nuclear attacks, but few people, if any, discounted the dangers of it.
However, you do get a gold star for correctly guessing my nationality.
I'm all ears if you actually want to have a conversation. Here, I'll start:
Saying homosexuality is "immoral" is an attack on homosexuality, and saying Islam is "a barmy doctrine" is an attack on Islam. These are not "exactly the same thing," and they deserve different responses. Unless Steyn was selective quoting things to make his stance look weaker? Neither GALHA nor Iqbal restrained their words to strictly objective observations; GALHA in particular could have avoided flak by citing Iqbal's statements and underlining that they are intolerant. That doesn't require any ad hominem attacks, much less accusations that all of Islam is "barmy" (i.e. crazy.)
So what, exactly, do you think you're talking about?