To be fair, the summary is extremely harsh and implies the feature is primarily for advertising. The article gives an example of displaying a map depicting where all the action is happening during a TV show—a little like how the game Supreme Commander delegates additional resources to dedicated tasks (like a monitor just for a strategic view) rather than simply virtualising them all together as one big viewport.
I think what UCFFool was going for would translate into "what if you have insufficient after-the-fact interest to do another limited run at an affordable level?" This would be especially problematic with printing, where there are really deep bulk discounts.
I'm a firm believer in open source software and open source technologies. I can guarantee you that Light Table will be built on top of the technologies that are freely available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched. At some level, this is an experiment in how open source and business can mix - it will be educational for us all.
I'm pretty sure this is like when Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel's patents. It looks to me like agree with you that the TLD namespace is being polluted. If they get.lol, it'll prove the system is stupid, if not outright broken.
The argument I'm making is that mutation contrary to fitness is occurring, it's just that the stimulus is in the very likely (near?) future, not the present. Think of a plant that loses the ability to handle cold temperatures because it goes through a few centuries of warmth—the coldness is a predictable part of its environment, but because it got lucky and was out of it for a moment, the mutations were non-deleterious at the time. The warm climate was only a temporary part of its environment. The series of generations doesn't need to be extremely brief, but 'environment' needs to be redefined to be broader if there's evidence the organism has specialized genes for handling different conditions that would take more than one generation to observe. To my understanding, this sort of long-term epigenetic variability is typical of the tomato for factors like soil quality, sunlight quality, summer temperatures, and the duration and harshness of winter. It's not very hard to imagine a selection mechanism at work for needing to keep up with predictable (or at least common) changes in one's immediate environment that may prove deleterious to biological fitness.
Civilization isn't a long-term environment, either, and even if the musculature idea was a little far-fetched, I truly believe that the immune system is at risk of some degradation if our living conditions continue to become more sterile. Suppose we perfect air filtering, and can guarantee that no one breathes anything but pure air, with its familiar nitrogen/oxygen/water/carbon/argon/etc. ratios. (More cynically, imagine we destroy the atmosphere on Earth and have to wear oxygen tanks.) Ignoring disease, this would severely stunt the body's ability to cope with foreign matter in the lungs and bloodstream. The dependence on the absence of such irritants, however, would just be artificial; such a human would only be able to survive on that filtration system, and wouldn't be able to handle present-day Earth, or the atmosphere of another planet that happened to be non-toxic and had a decent amount of oxygen, much less Earth's own atmosphere if the people in this little musing cleaned it up to conditions that their ancestors (us) considered bearable.
So—just because you don't need it right now doesn't mean it isn't obvious you won't need it later. From the perspective of the entire history of the species, I would call the formation of such a dependence, primarily characterized by loss of gene function as it is, a form of devolution. The amount of information contained in the genome is being reduced and replaced with noise.
Unrelatedly, I'm not sure I agree with your point #2 very much. Ignoring epigentic annotations, the nucleotides themselves just appear to be filler (perhaps the fact that I was only talking about As, Cs, Gs, and Ts wasn't clear in my post.) They mutate too rapidly to be under selection. Perhaps the sequences are evolutionarily constrained so that hairpins can form for pairing up chromosomes during reproduction, but I distinctly recall a Nature paper from a few years ago making the case that the primary purpose of such sequences was large-scale chromatin remodelling, in that it gave enough slack so that every promoter could be oriented toward the outside of a loose sphere.
> Hello. My name is Eliza. How may I help you?
* know it all
> Ahh. Please continue...
* Why don't you ASK YOUR PEOPLE what they want you to do...
> Do you really believe I don't ASK my PEOPLE what they want me to do?
* and don't just open your fat mouth.
> Why are you concerned about my fat mouth?
I think Eliza may have you cornered on this one, AC.
(For the record, the recommendation originates from the NYC Health Department, and Bloomberg points out that you can still easily carry two smaller drinks.)
RTFS again. There was an ethically questionable engineer at Google who was responsible for collecting and retaining the unnecessary data. If memory serves, he wanted to do statistical analysis on the passwords he was collecting. Eventually, Google fessed up to it, even though they could have just covered it up and no one would ever have known. The only possible question is why his superiors took so long to deal with the problem once they knew about it, and my guess would be that they wanted to give him a chance to clean up his act before sacking him. He didn't, so they did.
In short, they're squeaky-clean on this issue, and any efforts to get it investigated further are unjustifiable.
I think you're missing some of the point, then. The story isn't just that scientific education doesn't appear to sway convictions, it's that scientific education also appears to make them more pronounced.
There are all kinds of subsets available, actually. You can get a microarray analysis done for a couple hundred dollars; that can screen for most hereditary diseases for which the mutations are known. You can even have full-exome sequencing done (all of the parts of DNA that we know turn into protein sequences), which will tell you your hair colour, but can't detect fragile X syndrome. And you can even ask to have only certain cherry-picked parts of your genome sequenced (in fact there are some parts we still can't sequence because they're so repetitive and meaningless)—but there's still a fixed cost overhead.
The thousand-dollar genome is mostly a benchmark, not necessarily something that will be medically applicable exactly as sold. And yes, these are only chemical costs, not the equipment; it's assumed in how the question is posed that any company that could offer such a service would very quickly recoup costs on volume alone.
Fortunately, it's not very likely, at least not in the US. Hiring discrimination is a sacred cow due to the civil rights movement, and genetic screening of employees has been illegal since 2003.
It's a non-standard use of the word, but actually I really have to disagree with you. Genes evolve to meet new demands in response to stimuli. The rate of directed evolution (and conservation) can be measured (and it has been) by comparing large data sets, yielding (for proteins) a ratio between synonymous and non-synonymous mutations. If anything can be considered biological devolution—besides certain Star Trek plots that actually require knowledge of information not stored in the genome (in fact, it would require time travel)—then surely it must be the random mutations inflicted upon genes that are no longer under any selection pressure; i.e. those that do not convey any evolutionary benefit.
Our genome is riddled with such material; only about 9% of the total mass of unique DNA carries information of any importance. Amongst that huge amount of nothingness are many pseudogenes (a broad term describing all sequences with proper starts and stops but aren't expressed) that correspond to functional genes in other, related species. Many animals, for example, have completely lost the ability to process certain foods simply because they didn't need them.
In the future we may very well lose a lot of capabilities to respond to pressure as a result of the absence of selection. I could see the human immune system and genes that support the musculature degrading substantially, for example, to the point that our distant descendants would be severely disadvantaged over athletes of today. This loss of capacity, when considered from the long perspective of the genome, is also a form of devolution, as the species no longer has the ability to respond to dangers as it once did; on a similarly larger scale we'd be less well-suited to handle our ever-changing world. Tens if not hundreds of millions of years of work could very go well the drain in a couple of thousand years of such stagnation.
Technically it's progress, but a cathedral is being demolished.
I think that the DNA duplication mechanism used by bacteria is too creative to be considered a producer of true clones. Evolution has fine-tuned binary fission in each species to have a very carefully-controlled mutation rate. The label 'clone' should be reserved for something where mutation isn't potentially advantageous, like stem cells dividing and differentiating into somatic tissue, or a starfish dividing in half.
I would like to know why this has been tagged as being about "Australia" and not my home country, "Autralia". Stupid Americans! I suppose you think Autria is the same country, too!
Slashdot Mirror
I bear no ill tidings toward the subtitles (although like any metadata for a show, they're distracting), I just don't like the show.
Regardless, I get the feeling they'd've been useful in the initial broadcasts too sometimes!
Presumably the same reason Lost had plot-explanation captions in some broadcasts—to facilitate sloppy storytelling and information overload.
To be fair, the summary is extremely harsh and implies the feature is primarily for advertising. The article gives an example of displaying a map depicting where all the action is happening during a TV show—a little like how the game Supreme Commander delegates additional resources to dedicated tasks (like a monitor just for a strategic view) rather than simply virtualising them all together as one big viewport.
There's a list of problems here, including several measurements that imply Earth has had approximately the same radius for a long time.
So what you're saying is... you didn't RTFA? (limp-wristed rimshot here)
I think what UCFFool was going for would translate into "what if you have insufficient after-the-fact interest to do another limited run at an affordable level?" This would be especially problematic with printing, where there are really deep bulk discounts.
Will it be open source?
I'm a firm believer in open source software and open source technologies. I can guarantee you that Light Table will be built on top of the technologies that are freely available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched. At some level, this is an experiment in how open source and business can mix - it will be educational for us all.
Pretty sure this calls for more tinfoil than that.
I think you'll find that's .xoxo
I'm pretty sure this is like when Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel's patents. It looks to me like agree with you that the TLD namespace is being polluted. If they get .lol, it'll prove the system is stupid, if not outright broken.
There aren't any samples in the "ASCII porn" article on Wikipedia, though.
The argument I'm making is that mutation contrary to fitness is occurring, it's just that the stimulus is in the very likely (near?) future, not the present. Think of a plant that loses the ability to handle cold temperatures because it goes through a few centuries of warmth—the coldness is a predictable part of its environment, but because it got lucky and was out of it for a moment, the mutations were non-deleterious at the time. The warm climate was only a temporary part of its environment. The series of generations doesn't need to be extremely brief, but 'environment' needs to be redefined to be broader if there's evidence the organism has specialized genes for handling different conditions that would take more than one generation to observe. To my understanding, this sort of long-term epigenetic variability is typical of the tomato for factors like soil quality, sunlight quality, summer temperatures, and the duration and harshness of winter. It's not very hard to imagine a selection mechanism at work for needing to keep up with predictable (or at least common) changes in one's immediate environment that may prove deleterious to biological fitness.
Civilization isn't a long-term environment, either, and even if the musculature idea was a little far-fetched, I truly believe that the immune system is at risk of some degradation if our living conditions continue to become more sterile. Suppose we perfect air filtering, and can guarantee that no one breathes anything but pure air, with its familiar nitrogen/oxygen/water/carbon/argon/etc. ratios. (More cynically, imagine we destroy the atmosphere on Earth and have to wear oxygen tanks.) Ignoring disease, this would severely stunt the body's ability to cope with foreign matter in the lungs and bloodstream. The dependence on the absence of such irritants, however, would just be artificial; such a human would only be able to survive on that filtration system, and wouldn't be able to handle present-day Earth, or the atmosphere of another planet that happened to be non-toxic and had a decent amount of oxygen, much less Earth's own atmosphere if the people in this little musing cleaned it up to conditions that their ancestors (us) considered bearable.
So—just because you don't need it right now doesn't mean it isn't obvious you won't need it later. From the perspective of the entire history of the species, I would call the formation of such a dependence, primarily characterized by loss of gene function as it is, a form of devolution. The amount of information contained in the genome is being reduced and replaced with noise.
Unrelatedly, I'm not sure I agree with your point #2 very much. Ignoring epigentic annotations, the nucleotides themselves just appear to be filler (perhaps the fact that I was only talking about As, Cs, Gs, and Ts wasn't clear in my post.) They mutate too rapidly to be under selection. Perhaps the sequences are evolutionarily constrained so that hairpins can form for pairing up chromosomes during reproduction, but I distinctly recall a Nature paper from a few years ago making the case that the primary purpose of such sequences was large-scale chromatin remodelling, in that it gave enough slack so that every promoter could be oriented toward the outside of a loose sphere.
No, no, no – just use a text browser, obviously...
Did it? Okay. I guess that's something.
Uh? They reported it when they could have hid it, with essentially no risk to themselves. Doesn't that count as a damn?
> Hello. My name is Eliza. How may I help you?
* know it all
> Ahh. Please continue...
* Why don't you ASK YOUR PEOPLE what they want you to do...
> Do you really believe I don't ASK my PEOPLE what they want me to do?
* and don't just open your fat mouth.
> Why are you concerned about my fat mouth?
I think Eliza may have you cornered on this one, AC.
(For the record, the recommendation originates from the NYC Health Department, and Bloomberg points out that you can still easily carry two smaller drinks.)
RTFS again. There was an ethically questionable engineer at Google who was responsible for collecting and retaining the unnecessary data. If memory serves, he wanted to do statistical analysis on the passwords he was collecting. Eventually, Google fessed up to it, even though they could have just covered it up and no one would ever have known. The only possible question is why his superiors took so long to deal with the problem once they knew about it, and my guess would be that they wanted to give him a chance to clean up his act before sacking him. He didn't, so they did.
In short, they're squeaky-clean on this issue, and any efforts to get it investigated further are unjustifiable.
I think you're missing some of the point, then. The story isn't just that scientific education doesn't appear to sway convictions, it's that scientific education also appears to make them more pronounced.
There are all kinds of subsets available, actually. You can get a microarray analysis done for a couple hundred dollars; that can screen for most hereditary diseases for which the mutations are known. You can even have full-exome sequencing done (all of the parts of DNA that we know turn into protein sequences), which will tell you your hair colour, but can't detect fragile X syndrome. And you can even ask to have only certain cherry-picked parts of your genome sequenced (in fact there are some parts we still can't sequence because they're so repetitive and meaningless)—but there's still a fixed cost overhead.
The thousand-dollar genome is mostly a benchmark, not necessarily something that will be medically applicable exactly as sold. And yes, these are only chemical costs, not the equipment; it's assumed in how the question is posed that any company that could offer such a service would very quickly recoup costs on volume alone.
Fortunately, it's not very likely, at least not in the US. Hiring discrimination is a sacred cow due to the civil rights movement, and genetic screening of employees has been illegal since 2003.
Some day I'm going to print stickers that say "Blame it on the epigenome" and hand them out at conferences.
It's a non-standard use of the word, but actually I really have to disagree with you. Genes evolve to meet new demands in response to stimuli. The rate of directed evolution (and conservation) can be measured (and it has been) by comparing large data sets, yielding (for proteins) a ratio between synonymous and non-synonymous mutations. If anything can be considered biological devolution—besides certain Star Trek plots that actually require knowledge of information not stored in the genome (in fact, it would require time travel)—then surely it must be the random mutations inflicted upon genes that are no longer under any selection pressure; i.e. those that do not convey any evolutionary benefit.
Our genome is riddled with such material; only about 9% of the total mass of unique DNA carries information of any importance. Amongst that huge amount of nothingness are many pseudogenes (a broad term describing all sequences with proper starts and stops but aren't expressed) that correspond to functional genes in other, related species. Many animals, for example, have completely lost the ability to process certain foods simply because they didn't need them.
In the future we may very well lose a lot of capabilities to respond to pressure as a result of the absence of selection. I could see the human immune system and genes that support the musculature degrading substantially, for example, to the point that our distant descendants would be severely disadvantaged over athletes of today. This loss of capacity, when considered from the long perspective of the genome, is also a form of devolution, as the species no longer has the ability to respond to dangers as it once did; on a similarly larger scale we'd be less well-suited to handle our ever-changing world. Tens if not hundreds of millions of years of work could very go well the drain in a couple of thousand years of such stagnation.
Technically it's progress, but a cathedral is being demolished.
I think that the DNA duplication mechanism used by bacteria is too creative to be considered a producer of true clones. Evolution has fine-tuned binary fission in each species to have a very carefully-controlled mutation rate. The label 'clone' should be reserved for something where mutation isn't potentially advantageous, like stem cells dividing and differentiating into somatic tissue, or a starfish dividing in half.
I would like to know why this has been tagged as being about "Australia" and not my home country, "Autralia". Stupid Americans! I suppose you think Autria is the same country, too!