Chinas economy is growing without having to steal oil
Americas economy is falling even after stealing oil.
To be fair, we didn't steal it nearly as cost-effectively as we could have, and the economic failings weren't directly related to religion, a lack of scientists in government, OR the stealing of oil.
So how would YOU take a billion people out of poverty?
Not having a 12 step plan to create a billion jobs doesn't disqualify one from criticizing human rights abuses.
Institute minimum wages you say? Say goodbye to companies who will setup their factories elsewhere.
I don't hear anyone saying "If China would just raise minimum wages, everything would work out PERFECTLY!!!" Hell, I think even morons on cable news would propose a more nuanced plan than that.
The fact is, when there are a billion people waiting in line for a job, wages will be low.
Citation needed. What's the critical mass of population at which you are doomed to have low wages?
Compare this to the current US government: tax cuts for the richest, bailouts for the big banks (TARP and the Feds ~0% interest rates), subsidies for the oil companies. This comes all out of the pocket of its taxpayers, to further enrich the richest.
I think there's a false dichotomy going on here. The US being screwed up does not make the Chinese good.
Yeah, those guys are slaves, with their no regulations and income tax rate half of ours.
Indeed. The regulations they often lack are for the workers' protection. And you have to have your head buried pretty deep in conservative propaganda to equate income taxes with slavery on any level. Actual slaves don't earn -any- income.
Political scientists study politics, they don't BECOME politicians. It's the same as in biology: biologists don't become rats, they study them. Lawyers are far more likely than political science majors to become politicians.
So instead of signing up for a subscription to HBGO, I could sign up for cable AND HBO just to watch it online? Uh, thanks, but that's not better unless I'm missing something... I think I'll stick to signing up for -nothing- and just watch it streaming until they offer it on DVD.
Ugh, I don't want to see what such a corporate-happy supreme court will do with that.
[Read in a Scalia voice]: "As the corporation made the product, and as the corporation is a person and the consumer is not a person, the corporation retains the rights to the game and the money. Selling a used game is essentially triple theft: it deprives the corporation of it's rightful copy of Fable VI, it deprives the money paid to the person selling the game that should be going to the corporation, and it deprives the money the consumer would have paid to the corporation for the new game. What? I counted that last one twice? Whatever.
Furthermore, the defendant admits his dog watched him play Fable VI. That's another theft."
Did you e-mail your representatives and/or give money to EFF? Or some other relevant public interest group? Because I haven't yet either, and there are 3 reasons:
1. Laziness
2. I'm telling myself I will do it soon
3. It's a bit of a depressing situation. I'm guessing my personal opinions on the subject are outweighed by ten dollars from the MPAA. That might be optimistic. Thousands of us need to give counter money AND bother our reps before we have a glimmer of hope of opposing them, and by the time we do, they may well have all but written a fucking amendment to the constitution saying copyright infringement carries the death penalty. ACTA or whatever it's called these days is going to plague us long after the movie executives are dust.
I'd support a fine (not felony convictions, that's absurd) if entertainment executives faced felony convictions for not making their content available at a reasonable price to the public.
Put it on Hulu. I'll watch ads. Put it on netflix, I pay for that. I'm not signing up for HBGO just to watch game of thrones.
I don't know how you'd prove that statement, but if you can find me a review article saying "As agreed upon at the last nutritionists meeting, we present more evidence here that coffee bad." Otherwise, it seems to me that I could come up with one nutrition researcher saying coffee is good for you, or at least not bad, for any given 10 year time period.
I -am- a researcher (though not in nutrition) and thus could be guilty of being overly optimistic, but I do not see researchers of any field eagerly lining up to prove someone else's theory that coffee = bad, I see them eagerly lining up to tear down anything any other researcher says to say "Ha! Everyone else is wrong!" and get more grants.
Be careful. Last time I pointed out how bad this was, a bunch of Sony Fanbois downmodded me.
Fanboys will find you no matter what. If all other fanboys fail to get you, there's going to be a PC fanboy who mods you down for discussing console gaming.
Sometime in the last 10 years they finally gave up on the idea that coffee is bad for us.
That's not really how research works, even in nutrition. You get a result, you publish it if you have reason to think it's real. Researchers don't get together and decide they're going to publish results saying coffee good or coffee bad. For one thing, researchers LOVE to overturn previous models and results. You don't get attention or much funding for "We did a study and it showed exactly what everyone expected it would show." For another, conclusions should come from results and not vice versa. Some researchers have enough integrity to discard their theories and hypotheses when results disagree with what they think. Others just realize that if they get a result that proves them wrong, someone else will eventually, and it's better to prove yourself wrong first than someone else do it later.
The researchers here are undoubtedly not drawing any broad conclusions like "coffee is good for you," they're just saying it might prevent some forms of cancer. Any overarching conclusions like that are made by people who want the TL:DR version. Realistically, any chemical you put into your body that doesn't kill you right away is going to have good AND bad effects, and it's up to doctors and you yourself to weigh whether it's an overall good thing or bad thing. Coffee probably encourages other forms of cancer while preventing some forms and waking you up. No one has given up on the idea that coffee has some of those negative effects, just as no one was convinced coffee was entirely bad for you.
It is surprising to those of us who think of coffee as "caffeine vehicle" first and foremost, followed closely by "good tasting" and "break from work." When I heard "coffee does good things" I was thinking "Caffeine does good things," not "phytoestrogens are undoubtedly what's doing the good thing in coffee!"
Not logical exactly, but yeah, the decaf part was a surprise to me. If for no other reason than "What type of horrible person would even think to test decaf."
I've worked with C. elegans before. It gets worse.
They have males and hermaphrodites. The males can fertilize the hermaphrodites, but the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves as well. This is gross, and as a guy, kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential.
In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them.
Holy water does not kill C. elegans. It just makes them sparkle.
Certain mutations cause the worms to be born without neurons. They survive, they're just "uncoordinated." Neurotoxin wouldn't be able to stop them either.
Certain other mutations cause the "bag of worms" phenotype. Remember how I said the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves? If the worm can fertilize the eggs but not lay them... the embryos will eat their way out. It's like Aliens.
If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans.
Lastly, scientists have recently discovered that at night, the worms crawl into our eyes and control us like puppets, erasing nearly all evidence of it before dawn.
We can be sure that at least one of the following is true:
-No one at the USPTO has ever used iphoto
-No one at the USPTO has any understanding of his or her job
I'd hesitate to say it's vital to me as a biologist, but I'd certainly buy a used one out of my own pocket if I didn't have a free one provided. My laptop's monitor is 1388x768. Not optimal for reading papers on the screen, and it gets slightly more annoying if I have to keep switching windows to take notes from the paper. The maximize to half a screen feature is better than nothing, but gets a bit cramped if there's a large figure. If it weren't for the extra monitor, I'd just print out every slightly interesting paper. I suspect that's less energy efficient than the second monitor, and there's also toner costs. So, in my specific case, TFA's point of "higher energy costs" is a wash.
It's also helpful for showing data to other people in the lab, they don't have to all crowd around my laptop screen.
Need? Well, no. I have done science writing with a marker and a paper towel. I'm guessing real developers could make due with a blackberry screen while walking barefoot in the snow if they NEEDED to.
Rather than the social stigma, female students, and student body appropriately handle this idiot, law enforcement decided to step in.
I think you're overly optimistic about high school, 17 year olds, and people in general if you think his peers or the female students would ostracize him for this.
(which is not to say the law SHOULD involve itself in this, I just think it's a no win situation.)
pc gamers helped make these companies huge, and now we're treated like we dont matter
If it's any consolation, it's nothing personal. If they thought they could make more money by screwing over the console users and playing nice to PC users, they'd do that.
For that matter, if they could make more money making the game and then not selling it to anyone, maybe playing it in a window and letting gamers of all types press their faces against the glass but never touch a machine running it, they'd do that gleefully.
Successful is probably not the word I should have used. "Fitness" is the more common term than success, at least in my experience (probably since success has different connotations.)
Fitness is a measure of reproductive success. Those individuals who leave the largest number of mature offspring are the fittest. This can be achieved in several ways:
Survival or mortality selection
Mating success or sexual selection
Family size or fecundity selection
From an evolutionary standpoint, rats are most certainly more fit than we are: they reproduce far more often, have far more offspring.
Wrong. Invertebrate model organisms are how most discoveries about the mammalian brain started off and continue to be how we discover the basics. On the most obvious level, THIS IS A NEURON. Same type of cell your brain is made up of.
As far as one individual meganeuron in your head, maybe not. I think the histologists of the past would have realized if there were giant neurons similar to this. In the 1800's, they were using advanced staining techniques to show the shape of cells, I think if one neuron were synapsing with that many neurons, it would have shown up with golgi staining back then, or with the brainbow mouse more recently.
The concept of bottlenecking information when sparsity is necessary: that probably IS a valuable lesson for human brains. It probably isn't a single cell, but the concept is still possible with a smaller number of cells.
Anyway, as a general rule, it's idiotic to write off any valid scientific findings as "not interesting" just because they don't immediately beat you over the head with the relevance.
What happens if this single neuron fails/is damaged?
I'd hazard a guess: that it sucks for the individual locust, but evolution doesn't serve the individual locust, it serves the species. The species with a simpler designed system, with that single point of failure, maybe it gets individuals that mature faster and breed faster than one with redundancies, and thus is the design that wins.
Simplicity, not complexity, is the direction evolution usually favors. We, as an unsuccessful, complex dead end of evolution (from an evolution standpoint) tend to think of complexity as the better of the two directions in evolution, but we're vastly outnumbered by species that are simpler than us. Good for us as individuals, but our numbers take -much- longer to grow. We have two eyes, and that's good for us, but if there had been a branch of cavemen with one eye, but they only took 8 months of development instead of 9, we might have been cyclopses.
(I am not an evolutionary biologist, so this might be completely outdated theory by now)
And counterpoint: yes, it is. Citation: I laughed at it many times. QED, XKCD is funny.
References to pop culture don't make you funny.
To get semi serious for a minute: Have you read more than one strip? Because I can't think of any off the top of my head that simply boil down to references to POP culture. There were a few that boiled down to mere references to Enders Game, but not pop culture.
Being funny makes you funny.
I can't argue with circular logic, I guess you're right. By extension, XKCD is not funny because it's not funny.
Slashdot Mirror
At least with a dollar, I can pay my taxes and not be imprisoned.
You only pay a DOLLAR in taxes? What are you, a corporation?
Chinas economy is growing without having to steal oil Americas economy is falling even after stealing oil.
To be fair, we didn't steal it nearly as cost-effectively as we could have, and the economic failings weren't directly related to religion, a lack of scientists in government, OR the stealing of oil.
So how would YOU take a billion people out of poverty?
Not having a 12 step plan to create a billion jobs doesn't disqualify one from criticizing human rights abuses.
Institute minimum wages you say? Say goodbye to companies who will setup their factories elsewhere.
I don't hear anyone saying "If China would just raise minimum wages, everything would work out PERFECTLY!!!" Hell, I think even morons on cable news would propose a more nuanced plan than that.
The fact is, when there are a billion people waiting in line for a job, wages will be low.
Citation needed. What's the critical mass of population at which you are doomed to have low wages?
Compare this to the current US government: tax cuts for the richest, bailouts for the big banks (TARP and the Feds ~0% interest rates), subsidies for the oil companies. This comes all out of the pocket of its taxpayers, to further enrich the richest.
I think there's a false dichotomy going on here. The US being screwed up does not make the Chinese good.
Yeah, those guys are slaves, with their no regulations and income tax rate half of ours.
Indeed. The regulations they often lack are for the workers' protection. And you have to have your head buried pretty deep in conservative propaganda to equate income taxes with slavery on any level. Actual slaves don't earn -any- income.
Political scientists study politics, they don't BECOME politicians. It's the same as in biology: biologists don't become rats, they study them. Lawyers are far more likely than political science majors to become politicians.
So instead of signing up for a subscription to HBGO, I could sign up for cable AND HBO just to watch it online? Uh, thanks, but that's not better unless I'm missing something... I think I'll stick to signing up for -nothing- and just watch it streaming until they offer it on DVD.
Ugh, I don't want to see what such a corporate-happy supreme court will do with that.
[Read in a Scalia voice]: "As the corporation made the product, and as the corporation is a person and the consumer is not a person, the corporation retains the rights to the game and the money. Selling a used game is essentially triple theft: it deprives the corporation of it's rightful copy of Fable VI, it deprives the money paid to the person selling the game that should be going to the corporation, and it deprives the money the consumer would have paid to the corporation for the new game. What? I counted that last one twice? Whatever.
Furthermore, the defendant admits his dog watched him play Fable VI. That's another theft."
Did you e-mail your representatives and/or give money to EFF? Or some other relevant public interest group? Because I haven't yet either, and there are 3 reasons:
1. Laziness
2. I'm telling myself I will do it soon
3. It's a bit of a depressing situation. I'm guessing my personal opinions on the subject are outweighed by ten dollars from the MPAA. That might be optimistic. Thousands of us need to give counter money AND bother our reps before we have a glimmer of hope of opposing them, and by the time we do, they may well have all but written a fucking amendment to the constitution saying copyright infringement carries the death penalty. ACTA or whatever it's called these days is going to plague us long after the movie executives are dust.
I'd support a fine (not felony convictions, that's absurd) if entertainment executives faced felony convictions for not making their content available at a reasonable price to the public.
Put it on Hulu. I'll watch ads. Put it on netflix, I pay for that. I'm not signing up for HBGO just to watch game of thrones.
I don't know how you'd prove that statement, but if you can find me a review article saying "As agreed upon at the last nutritionists meeting, we present more evidence here that coffee bad." Otherwise, it seems to me that I could come up with one nutrition researcher saying coffee is good for you, or at least not bad, for any given 10 year time period.
I -am- a researcher (though not in nutrition) and thus could be guilty of being overly optimistic, but I do not see researchers of any field eagerly lining up to prove someone else's theory that coffee = bad, I see them eagerly lining up to tear down anything any other researcher says to say "Ha! Everyone else is wrong!" and get more grants.
Be careful. Last time I pointed out how bad this was, a bunch of Sony Fanbois downmodded me.
Fanboys will find you no matter what. If all other fanboys fail to get you, there's going to be a PC fanboy who mods you down for discussing console gaming.
Sometime in the last 10 years they finally gave up on the idea that coffee is bad for us.
That's not really how research works, even in nutrition. You get a result, you publish it if you have reason to think it's real. Researchers don't get together and decide they're going to publish results saying coffee good or coffee bad. For one thing, researchers LOVE to overturn previous models and results. You don't get attention or much funding for "We did a study and it showed exactly what everyone expected it would show." For another, conclusions should come from results and not vice versa. Some researchers have enough integrity to discard their theories and hypotheses when results disagree with what they think. Others just realize that if they get a result that proves them wrong, someone else will eventually, and it's better to prove yourself wrong first than someone else do it later.
The researchers here are undoubtedly not drawing any broad conclusions like "coffee is good for you," they're just saying it might prevent some forms of cancer. Any overarching conclusions like that are made by people who want the TL:DR version. Realistically, any chemical you put into your body that doesn't kill you right away is going to have good AND bad effects, and it's up to doctors and you yourself to weigh whether it's an overall good thing or bad thing. Coffee probably encourages other forms of cancer while preventing some forms and waking you up. No one has given up on the idea that coffee has some of those negative effects, just as no one was convinced coffee was entirely bad for you.
Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.
But there was a report a while ago that said that caffeine might protect against Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
So from a disease prevention standpoint, you're still stupid if you buy decaf.
In the 90's, I asked for AOL.
What I got was... compuserve.
I think I've almost forgiven my parents.
It is surprising to those of us who think of coffee as "caffeine vehicle" first and foremost, followed closely by "good tasting" and "break from work." When I heard "coffee does good things" I was thinking "Caffeine does good things," not "phytoestrogens are undoubtedly what's doing the good thing in coffee!"
Not logical exactly, but yeah, the decaf part was a surprise to me. If for no other reason than "What type of horrible person would even think to test decaf."
I've worked with C. elegans before. It gets worse.
They have males and hermaphrodites. The males can fertilize the hermaphrodites, but the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves as well. This is gross, and as a guy, kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential.
In lab, the worms eat lawns of e.coli. They'll eat up all the bacteria on a petrie dish in a week. If you leave a plate of worms on ecoli and come back a month later, you'll see the worms have made balls of themselves, but are still alive. Worm biologists call that "dauer," and one was trying to explain something about it to me, but all I got out of it was the terrifying fact that even starvation can't kill them.
Holy water does not kill C. elegans. It just makes them sparkle.
Certain mutations cause the worms to be born without neurons. They survive, they're just "uncoordinated." Neurotoxin wouldn't be able to stop them either.
Certain other mutations cause the "bag of worms" phenotype. Remember how I said the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves? If the worm can fertilize the eggs but not lay them... the embryos will eat their way out. It's like Aliens.
If you want a plate of worms all at the same age, you just soak them in bleach. One stage of development is evidently resistant. To bleach. Bleach even kills ebola. Not C. elegans.
Lastly, scientists have recently discovered that at night, the worms crawl into our eyes and control us like puppets, erasing nearly all evidence of it before dawn.
We can be sure that at least one of the following is true:
-No one at the USPTO has ever used iphoto
-No one at the USPTO has any understanding of his or her job
I'd hesitate to say it's vital to me as a biologist, but I'd certainly buy a used one out of my own pocket if I didn't have a free one provided. My laptop's monitor is 1388x768. Not optimal for reading papers on the screen, and it gets slightly more annoying if I have to keep switching windows to take notes from the paper. The maximize to half a screen feature is better than nothing, but gets a bit cramped if there's a large figure. If it weren't for the extra monitor, I'd just print out every slightly interesting paper. I suspect that's less energy efficient than the second monitor, and there's also toner costs. So, in my specific case, TFA's point of "higher energy costs" is a wash.
It's also helpful for showing data to other people in the lab, they don't have to all crowd around my laptop screen.
Need? Well, no. I have done science writing with a marker and a paper towel. I'm guessing real developers could make due with a blackberry screen while walking barefoot in the snow if they NEEDED to.
Rather than the social stigma, female students, and student body appropriately handle this idiot, law enforcement decided to step in.
I think you're overly optimistic about high school, 17 year olds, and people in general if you think his peers or the female students would ostracize him for this.
(which is not to say the law SHOULD involve itself in this, I just think it's a no win situation.)
pc gamers helped make these companies huge, and now we're treated like we dont matter
If it's any consolation, it's nothing personal. If they thought they could make more money by screwing over the console users and playing nice to PC users, they'd do that.
For that matter, if they could make more money making the game and then not selling it to anyone, maybe playing it in a window and letting gamers of all types press their faces against the glass but never touch a machine running it, they'd do that gleefully.
What does "successful" mean, though?
Successful is probably not the word I should have used. "Fitness" is the more common term than success, at least in my experience (probably since success has different connotations.)
And this page concisely defines it:
Fitness is a measure of reproductive success. Those individuals who leave the largest number of mature offspring are the fittest. This can be achieved in several ways: Survival or mortality selection Mating success or sexual selection Family size or fecundity selection
From an evolutionary standpoint, rats are most certainly more fit than we are: they reproduce far more often, have far more offspring.
The most successful life form on the planet is a fly
Pretty sure that title would go to bacteria, who outnumber flies by orders of magnitude, much as flies outnumber us by orders of magnitude.
Wrong. Invertebrate model organisms are how most discoveries about the mammalian brain started off and continue to be how we discover the basics. On the most obvious level, THIS IS A NEURON. Same type of cell your brain is made up of.
As far as one individual meganeuron in your head, maybe not. I think the histologists of the past would have realized if there were giant neurons similar to this. In the 1800's, they were using advanced staining techniques to show the shape of cells, I think if one neuron were synapsing with that many neurons, it would have shown up with golgi staining back then, or with the brainbow mouse more recently.
The concept of bottlenecking information when sparsity is necessary: that probably IS a valuable lesson for human brains. It probably isn't a single cell, but the concept is still possible with a smaller number of cells.
Anyway, as a general rule, it's idiotic to write off any valid scientific findings as "not interesting" just because they don't immediately beat you over the head with the relevance.
What happens if this single neuron fails/is damaged?
I'd hazard a guess: that it sucks for the individual locust, but evolution doesn't serve the individual locust, it serves the species. The species with a simpler designed system, with that single point of failure, maybe it gets individuals that mature faster and breed faster than one with redundancies, and thus is the design that wins.
Simplicity, not complexity, is the direction evolution usually favors. We, as an unsuccessful, complex dead end of evolution (from an evolution standpoint) tend to think of complexity as the better of the two directions in evolution, but we're vastly outnumbered by species that are simpler than us. Good for us as individuals, but our numbers take -much- longer to grow. We have two eyes, and that's good for us, but if there had been a branch of cavemen with one eye, but they only took 8 months of development instead of 9, we might have been cyclopses.
(I am not an evolutionary biologist, so this might be completely outdated theory by now)
XKCD isn't funny, either.
citation needed.
And counterpoint: yes, it is. Citation: I laughed at it many times. QED, XKCD is funny.
References to pop culture don't make you funny.
To get semi serious for a minute: Have you read more than one strip? Because I can't think of any off the top of my head that simply boil down to references to POP culture. There were a few that boiled down to mere references to Enders Game, but not pop culture.
Being funny makes you funny.
I can't argue with circular logic, I guess you're right. By extension, XKCD is not funny because it's not funny.