A flexible diet usually means the organism is oriented toward rapid reproduction and is not all that good at surviving. Our innate immune system is great at dealing with that kind of pest.
Well, they can attack, but I don't want to give anyone nightmares. Cryptosporidium is unnerving enough as it is, and that's a well-developed metazoan.
And granted, there are bacteria that secrete toxins as a defence mechanism, but the chance of an extreme reaction is fairly small for something that has never had to defend itself against animals. The kinds of random compounds you see excreted by exotic isolated bacteria may be irritants, but they're nonspecific and don't cause all that much damage. The more specific the target, the more dangerous it can be. (Consider, for example, Brevetoxin.) Unless, y'know, it can secrete a superacid or something, which would be very strange.
That's a good way to get through high school, but by the time you hit your twenties, you should be viciously digging through Wikipedia on a daily basis. At least, that's what we do nowadays. I guess that wasn't so practical back before the invention of the encyclopedia.
...and I'm guessing you know the glass thing is false and those windows are actually thicker at the bottom because the glass was spun on a wheel. Centrifugal force caused the outer edge to get thicker. You can occasionally find the work of less thoughtful glaziers where the windows were installed upside-down. And it was a mediaeval cathedral, not just an old house!
As Lynnwood points out, most, if not all, GM crop modifications are simply more direct ways of achieving what we've already been doing for thousands of years through plant domestication: resistance to damp, drought, heat, cold, pests, and pesticides. The biggest danger is that these improvements will transfer into weeds, nullifying the utility of herbicides. Few if any crop modifications are a threat to human health.
The real issues are about various kinds of monopolies: these modifications are patented and hence not freely available, and if a single strain of (for example) wheat is used everywhere on the planet, then the whole food supply can be wiped out by one disease. The danger is hence not in the modified thing itself, but what humans do with it.
This is a perfect example of how severely the public has been misinformed.
Those quotes are not "exactly the same thing," and Mark Steyn does not appear to be a very balanced commentator. Did you actually want to try a hand at a more serious debate or are we just sharing quotes from grumpy Torontonians?
The only argument I have against this is that it's in Northern Ontario, which is like Minnesota, only hillier, and far, far too boring for a south-pacific jet-setter like the Great Dead One.
No, no, that was last week's script. They couldn't make the monster look unconvincing enough, so now we're going with the robot invasion/mind control subplot.
I am glad—and relieved—to hear that. Just one small thing:
If people want to be educated, they can educate themselves. If they want to be stupid, they have that right too.
Many people have not been given the choice either way, because they have been subjected to stupid people so thoroughly that what glimpses of the truth they hear are incomprehensible or immediately discounted. Many young people with creationist parents are in this boat; it's only by chance that they're given an opportunity to think differently. (And this obviously applies to other subjects, too, like the entire population of North Korea. They may doubt, but they have no way of knowing better.)
Like it or not, you do have a responsibility to make sure your audience can distinguish a joke from the truth when you make it, otherwise you risk misinforming them. And as many replies to my first post in this thread show, many people here can't.
By definition, a parasite is something that has co-evolved with its host. Occasionally you do get species-jumping, but there are limits in how far this can go before the target is just too alien for the invader to adapt to. It takes a lot of exposure and a long time for evolution to enact any drastic changes.
Simple, self-sufficient organisms like bacteria are a little more successful in exploring new environments, but their tendency to do harm is generally accidental, and requires a certain degree of metabolic compatibility. If you eat a handful of dirt, for example, you'll get an upset stomach for a while as the new bacteria produce byproducts that are incompatible with the rest of your intestinal flora, and then you'll get diarrhoea as your body takes steps to eliminate the threat. Evading detection, or breaking the immune system (like HIV) requires a lot of specialized, highly-directed effort. All cells are covered in glycoproteins that act as friend-or-foe markers; that's how antibodies work.
Above all else, the organisms in such an ancient pool have no incentive to attack anything else. With such limited resources and such a small space they're probably used to growing very slowly to prevent overpopulation. They may even have been destroyed by accident when they were exposed to the air.
It's a fine line to walk, certainly, and that's hard to squeeze adequately into a Slashdot post. I agree with your views. Brave New World is a title that has had an immense impact on the world, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, and these were very important resources in preventing the world from becoming unhinged at critical moments in the twentieth century. A good book can be a powerful tool—although, be wary, as books can present garbage and convoluted logic and still be just as accepted. (Annoyed glares go to War and Peace and She Who Must Not Be Named.)
My complaint is really about the influence of trash on popular culture. The Andromeda Strain, to pick a random title from a vast genre, presents a completely implausible story, but has contributed to the long-running idea that nature is out to kill us. Carl Sagan was similarly upset about the repetitiousness of fictional portrayals of aliens as hostile, if you'll recall.
As for the radium situation: I've done a bit of reading on this, and it's worth noting that the Radium Corporation actively tried to suppress information about the dangers of its products. The result was a lot of regulation, which has generally been successful in protecting health. Caution, in this case, was prevalent.
I somewhat suspect, though, that all important/successful dystopian novels have concentrated on ethical issues: people hurting each other or the environment. Fear of the world beyond us has, so far, been comparatively unproductive.
I was aware of that, and I feel my point stands: essentially, it would be cruel to hire someone based on a portfolio of work that emphasizes skills the job doesn't require. It's important to recognize how much of a demo is trickery, and that those abilities won't necessarily transfer to a typical real-world job. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a "break" for sceners to work on demos, as you say.)
There could have been a lifeform back then that had the lethality of the plague and the transmissible abilities of the worst flus.
This is an oxymoron for most pathogens. Highly lethal diseases kill too quickly to be transmitted. Certain parasites like Malaria are capable of delaying their impact, but that is only possible because they have spent a long time co-evolving to kill mammals.
Life back then was very different to what we have now. What we could find down here could rewrite history, if anything lives.
Our evolutional timescale could be off by millions of years, we simply do not know yet. Only by digging more to find such underground structures may we ever know for sure.
Without a doubt this is a very important find, but it won't be so world-shattering that the layperson would be affected by it. We have a fairly good idea of what life was like prior to this point in time because of fossil records.
All something would need is a way to attack some very base mechanism that evolution cannot defend against and it is sorted.
Humans already have this. It's called stomach acid, but it doesn't work that well. (If for some reason the organisms we find in the pool use acid-base chemistry as a defence mechanism, that will be worth noting.) Evolution has found ways to defend against ice crystals, a complete vacuum, severe radiation, and temperatures hot enough to boil water. There's nothing it can't defend against. That's why organisms generally work by attacking weaknesses in each other; they yield better results and they're more easy to mutate spontaneously. In order to get past the passive immune system, you have to be at least a little prepared for how mammals work.
There could be multiple lifeforms down there that have been evolving beside each other all that time and fighting for what little resources are there.
And they would evolve in a trajectory completely different from anything we've ever known, totally dependent on the high methane concentrations and hence helpless in our nearly methaneless atmosphere.
Evolution has surprised us before. It will certainly do it again and again. That bag of tricks is larger than a city.
Evolution's surprises never make for good movie plots. The most horrible things that can happen to humans have been happening to them for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.
Oh, sure, it can interact with us. It can interact with us just like tree pollen does: it can bounce off, it can get washed away in a pool of mucus, it can get embedded in earwax, it can get clobbered by a macrophage and digested in a lysosome... those are all forms of interaction!
1.5 billion years ago is 1.5 billion years behind in an arms race—an arms race that is comprised entirely of exploiting vulnerabilities in a hardened enemy. This organism is not used to human physiological conditions. It is not used to the human immune system. Hell, it may even pre-date the concept of complex multicellular life. The idea that the systems could be compatible is, statistically, laughable. It is less than a rounding error.
Biology is not a horror movie, and it is not a computer. Fiction has lied to you.
Personally, I'm a fan of panspermia, but the fossil record goes back so far that what arrived on Earth would necessarily have to be extremely simple; possibly just a handful of nucleic acids (or analogous) with no envelope. Such organisms would be ridiculously delicate, and most likely destroyed instantly by RNases if they were exposed to the modern atmosphere on Earth.
Yes. Yes it is. It was another planet at the time; plants hadn't even arrived on land yet. I feel conversations like this go to underscore just how little understanding of biology is actually common knowledge. Every parasite you've ever heard of has co-evolved with humans or some other similar animal for millions of years. The truth is, human body is great at dealing with unexpected environmental problems. If it isn't evolved to harm us directly, then the worst it can do is trigger a pollen allergy, or act like some other nuisance pollutant.
And if it weren't for that binary name, I never would've known at all.:)
I'll switch to calling it LibreOffice exclusively just for you if it makes you feel better. I do have a few... vague suggestions for things that could be done to promote LO's image, but most of them depend on understanding why Apache has bothered holding onto its fork instead of giving it back to the LO community, which is something I'm not privy to. I'm pretty sure that most people (who are aware of the distinction) see the existence of AOO as senseless and confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
A flexible diet usually means the organism is oriented toward rapid reproduction and is not all that good at surviving. Our innate immune system is great at dealing with that kind of pest.
Well, they can attack, but I don't want to give anyone nightmares. Cryptosporidium is unnerving enough as it is, and that's a well-developed metazoan.
And granted, there are bacteria that secrete toxins as a defence mechanism, but the chance of an extreme reaction is fairly small for something that has never had to defend itself against animals. The kinds of random compounds you see excreted by exotic isolated bacteria may be irritants, but they're nonspecific and don't cause all that much damage. The more specific the target, the more dangerous it can be. (Consider, for example, Brevetoxin.) Unless, y'know, it can secrete a superacid or something, which would be very strange.
Granted, yes.
That's a good way to get through high school, but by the time you hit your twenties, you should be viciously digging through Wikipedia on a daily basis. At least, that's what we do nowadays. I guess that wasn't so practical back before the invention of the encyclopedia.
...and I'm guessing you know the glass thing is false and those windows are actually thicker at the bottom because the glass was spun on a wheel. Centrifugal force caused the outer edge to get thicker. You can occasionally find the work of less thoughtful glaziers where the windows were installed upside-down. And it was a mediaeval cathedral, not just an old house!
Curious. What is IBM using it for that requires the code be kept under non-copyleft terms?
As Lynnwood points out, most, if not all, GM crop modifications are simply more direct ways of achieving what we've already been doing for thousands of years through plant domestication: resistance to damp, drought, heat, cold, pests, and pesticides. The biggest danger is that these improvements will transfer into weeds, nullifying the utility of herbicides. Few if any crop modifications are a threat to human health.
The real issues are about various kinds of monopolies: these modifications are patented and hence not freely available, and if a single strain of (for example) wheat is used everywhere on the planet, then the whole food supply can be wiped out by one disease. The danger is hence not in the modified thing itself, but what humans do with it.
This is a perfect example of how severely the public has been misinformed.
Those quotes are not "exactly the same thing," and Mark Steyn does not appear to be a very balanced commentator. Did you actually want to try a hand at a more serious debate or are we just sharing quotes from grumpy Torontonians?
The only argument I have against this is that it's in Northern Ontario, which is like Minnesota, only hillier, and far, far too boring for a south-pacific jet-setter like the Great Dead One.
No, no, that was last week's script. They couldn't make the monster look unconvincing enough, so now we're going with the robot invasion/mind control subplot.
I am glad—and relieved—to hear that. Just one small thing:
If people want to be educated, they can educate themselves. If they want to be stupid, they have that right too.
Many people have not been given the choice either way, because they have been subjected to stupid people so thoroughly that what glimpses of the truth they hear are incomprehensible or immediately discounted. Many young people with creationist parents are in this boat; it's only by chance that they're given an opportunity to think differently. (And this obviously applies to other subjects, too, like the entire population of North Korea. They may doubt, but they have no way of knowing better.)
Like it or not, you do have a responsibility to make sure your audience can distinguish a joke from the truth when you make it, otherwise you risk misinforming them. And as many replies to my first post in this thread show, many people here can't.
There wouldn't be; it was just for the sake of illustration.
Admittedly, the Old Ones are a slightly more credible threat.
By definition, a parasite is something that has co-evolved with its host. Occasionally you do get species-jumping, but there are limits in how far this can go before the target is just too alien for the invader to adapt to. It takes a lot of exposure and a long time for evolution to enact any drastic changes.
Simple, self-sufficient organisms like bacteria are a little more successful in exploring new environments, but their tendency to do harm is generally accidental, and requires a certain degree of metabolic compatibility. If you eat a handful of dirt, for example, you'll get an upset stomach for a while as the new bacteria produce byproducts that are incompatible with the rest of your intestinal flora, and then you'll get diarrhoea as your body takes steps to eliminate the threat. Evading detection, or breaking the immune system (like HIV) requires a lot of specialized, highly-directed effort. All cells are covered in glycoproteins that act as friend-or-foe markers; that's how antibodies work.
Above all else, the organisms in such an ancient pool have no incentive to attack anything else. With such limited resources and such a small space they're probably used to growing very slowly to prevent overpopulation. They may even have been destroyed by accident when they were exposed to the air.
It's a fine line to walk, certainly, and that's hard to squeeze adequately into a Slashdot post. I agree with your views. Brave New World is a title that has had an immense impact on the world, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, and these were very important resources in preventing the world from becoming unhinged at critical moments in the twentieth century. A good book can be a powerful tool—although, be wary, as books can present garbage and convoluted logic and still be just as accepted. (Annoyed glares go to War and Peace and She Who Must Not Be Named.)
My complaint is really about the influence of trash on popular culture. The Andromeda Strain, to pick a random title from a vast genre, presents a completely implausible story, but has contributed to the long-running idea that nature is out to kill us. Carl Sagan was similarly upset about the repetitiousness of fictional portrayals of aliens as hostile, if you'll recall.
As for the radium situation: I've done a bit of reading on this, and it's worth noting that the Radium Corporation actively tried to suppress information about the dangers of its products. The result was a lot of regulation, which has generally been successful in protecting health. Caution, in this case, was prevalent.
I somewhat suspect, though, that all important/successful dystopian novels have concentrated on ethical issues: people hurting each other or the environment. Fear of the world beyond us has, so far, been comparatively unproductive.
I was aware of that, and I feel my point stands: essentially, it would be cruel to hire someone based on a portfolio of work that emphasizes skills the job doesn't require. It's important to recognize how much of a demo is trickery, and that those abilities won't necessarily transfer to a typical real-world job. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a "break" for sceners to work on demos, as you say.)
Yeah, sneezing on someone can get you thirty years in prison in the US.
There could have been a lifeform back then that had the lethality of the plague and the transmissible abilities of the worst flus.
This is an oxymoron for most pathogens. Highly lethal diseases kill too quickly to be transmitted. Certain parasites like Malaria are capable of delaying their impact, but that is only possible because they have spent a long time co-evolving to kill mammals.
Life back then was very different to what we have now. What we could find down here could rewrite history, if anything lives.
Our evolutional timescale could be off by millions of years, we simply do not know yet. Only by digging more to find such underground structures may we ever know for sure.
Without a doubt this is a very important find, but it won't be so world-shattering that the layperson would be affected by it. We have a fairly good idea of what life was like prior to this point in time because of fossil records.
All something would need is a way to attack some very base mechanism that evolution cannot defend against and it is sorted.
Humans already have this. It's called stomach acid, but it doesn't work that well. (If for some reason the organisms we find in the pool use acid-base chemistry as a defence mechanism, that will be worth noting.) Evolution has found ways to defend against ice crystals, a complete vacuum, severe radiation, and temperatures hot enough to boil water. There's nothing it can't defend against. That's why organisms generally work by attacking weaknesses in each other; they yield better results and they're more easy to mutate spontaneously. In order to get past the passive immune system, you have to be at least a little prepared for how mammals work.
There could be multiple lifeforms down there that have been evolving beside each other all that time and fighting for what little resources are there.
And they would evolve in a trajectory completely different from anything we've ever known, totally dependent on the high methane concentrations and hence helpless in our nearly methaneless atmosphere.
Evolution has surprised us before. It will certainly do it again and again. That bag of tricks is larger than a city.
Evolution's surprises never make for good movie plots. The most horrible things that can happen to humans have been happening to them for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.
That's still co-evolution, just with a bit of a gap. "Things" is a nice, vague word. The tree of life still puts limits on how far pathogens can jump.
Oh, sure, it can interact with us. It can interact with us just like tree pollen does: it can bounce off, it can get washed away in a pool of mucus, it can get embedded in earwax, it can get clobbered by a macrophage and digested in a lysosome... those are all forms of interaction!
1.5 billion years ago is 1.5 billion years behind in an arms race—an arms race that is comprised entirely of exploiting vulnerabilities in a hardened enemy. This organism is not used to human physiological conditions. It is not used to the human immune system. Hell, it may even pre-date the concept of complex multicellular life. The idea that the systems could be compatible is, statistically, laughable. It is less than a rounding error.
Biology is not a horror movie, and it is not a computer. Fiction has lied to you.
Personally, I'm a fan of panspermia, but the fossil record goes back so far that what arrived on Earth would necessarily have to be extremely simple; possibly just a handful of nucleic acids (or analogous) with no envelope. Such organisms would be ridiculously delicate, and most likely destroyed instantly by RNases if they were exposed to the modern atmosphere on Earth.
Yes. Yes it is. It was another planet at the time; plants hadn't even arrived on land yet. I feel conversations like this go to underscore just how little understanding of biology is actually common knowledge. Every parasite you've ever heard of has co-evolved with humans or some other similar animal for millions of years. The truth is, human body is great at dealing with unexpected environmental problems. If it isn't evolved to harm us directly, then the worst it can do is trigger a pollen allergy, or act like some other nuisance pollutant.
Is it really so hard to think that a divine being would be lazy enough to re-use code? Fnord.
And if it weren't for that binary name, I never would've known at all. :)
I'll switch to calling it LibreOffice exclusively just for you if it makes you feel better. I do have a few... vague suggestions for things that could be done to promote LO's image, but most of them depend on understanding why Apache has bothered holding onto its fork instead of giving it back to the LO community, which is something I'm not privy to. I'm pretty sure that most people (who are aware of the distinction) see the existence of AOO as senseless and confusing.
It really is. Organisms in a stagnant environment adapt to that niche and then... do nothing. We had this exact argument on the Vostok article.
That only happens in Hollywood.
Seriously, how else do you think they'd select Academy Award winners?
See bitchy rebuttal here.