Nothing in my post made any judgements about the virtues (or lack thereof) of Obamacare; I was simply citing what all of the polls have shown. Do you simply label anyone who contradicts you as a "radical leftist"?
He probably shouldn't have antagonized the Republicans from the start. He might have done more horse trading and made more sacrifices elsewhere: the budget, gay rights, financial regulation, whatever.
As far as the budget was concerned, he was in a rough spot with the economy - it was just spectacularly bad timing for dealing with budget problems. I'm not convinced that changing his mind on financial regulation or gay rights would have done any good, since the steps he took in those directions were fundamentally so small. And from what I can remember, the repeal of DADT was the first major policy change on gay rights and that came well after the Obamacare passage.
Where he could have become active is scale back the abuses of the Bush era, the NSA, and all the other things he promised to do but has failed to.
God, I wish - this was the main reason I voted for him in 2008 and he has been a spectacular disappointment on these issues, which is why I stayed home in 2012. But, again in partial defense, even his good-faith efforts were blindly opposed by the GOP, which went out of its way to prevent him from closing down Guantanamo. (Admittedly with some Democratic support, and may those legislators rot in hell.)
Health care reform could have waited a little longer.
Unlikely, since he probably would have lost Congress in 2010 regardless of what else happened. Either the right wing was going to accuse him of being a radical socialist, or they (and everyone else) were going to blame him for not doing more to improve the economy.
Probably a Republican president would have been better for passing this; in fact, if Romney had become president, we probably would have gotten reasonable health care reform, because he could have passed something better and more consistent with bipartisan support.
It's a nice fantasy, except both Romney and the Republicans have moved so far to the right that anything they passed was likely to be even more favorable to the insurance companies and even less effective at bringing insurance to the people who don't have it. What exactly is their plan to reduce costs? Malpractice tort reform? Screwing over the trial lawyers, while it might be a worthy goal on general principle, would barely put a dent in the price of insurance. And people with pre-existing conditions are simply fucked.
At least half the fucking country wants to see Obamacare go
Yes, and half of those want it replaced with a far more progressive plan, e.g. national single-payer insurance. Far less than half of the country supports the Republican position that Obamacare is a radical leftist policy that must be destroyed at all costs.
Obama decides to declare martial law and arrest the GOP
This also has no basis in reality whatsoever. If you want to convince people that Obamacare is a bad idea, you'll have a much easier time if you don't sound like you just escaped from a mental institution.
Even more than the fiscal unreliability, the big problem with government funding is that it makes science a political football, with brain-dead demagogues getting to decide what is and isn't studied according to their religion.
The structural problems go even deeper than that. The demagogues don't actually directly interfere that often, although it's especially annoying when they do. The bigger problems are a) the supply-and-demand problem created by poor and/or inconsistent government policy, and b) the uncertainty created by crises like the shutdown and the sequester. Naturally, neither of these problems is unique to government service! People working for companies have the same problems all the time, and I can't imagine that being stalked by MBAs much more fun than worrying about Congress. But most scientists in the public sector have made an implicit trade: we accept lower salaries in exchange for decent benefits, decent job security, and the freedom to study what excites us without worrying about "how do I bring this to market within 18 months?" Most of us spent our 20s in school just to qualify for these jobs - which is not quite as bad as it sounds (we get a small stipend at least, and flexible hours), but most academics postpone having children until relatively late, and we get to watch our more financially motivated peers make vastly more money, often with less formal education. The base starting salary for an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow is $40,000; that is by definition someone with a PhD, usually around 30 years old. There are some truly mediocre postdocs out there, but many brilliant ones - and if they want an academic career, they basically have no choice but to spend several years in such a position. Meanwhile, their friends with real jobs are probably making at least twice as much.
On top of this, the success rate for grants has dropped precipitously, and the sequester has made it even worse. The biomedical research sector grew with NIH funding, and now that funding is contracting, there are more people competing for less money. So even the long-term job security isn't very good any more.
I'm relatively lucky; I managed to only spend a little more than a year as a postdoc before getting a more permanent position, and the research group I work for is well-funded, non-controversial, and very successful in our field. But I still make tends of thousands less than my grad school friends who work in industry. And it's far from certain that we'll continue to get funding. More importantly, a large fraction of the people who control the purse strings think I'm a lazy, useless welfare queen, and want to close down the department I work for and send our jobs to China. Or, barring that, they're happy to do that temporarily just out of spite because they think the Heritage Foundation's healthcare plan is a socialist takeover. So, after spending most of my adult life working overtime (unpaid, of course) while assuring myself that the implicit bargain was worth it, leaving academia is not a hard decision for me to make. Fuck this, if you want to treat me like shit and continually threaten me with unemployment, you'd better fucking pay me for it. None of the public (certainly none of Congress) understands what I do anyway, so why should I care whether or not I'm contributing to human health and knowledge?
he chose to ram through his health care reform without bipartisan support
In partial defense, what was he supposed to do? The Democrats basically took the plan created by the Heritage Foundation and enacted by Mitt Romney in MA, because they thought that was the most progressive reform that could win any Republican support. (And contrary to what progressives might think, it was probably the most that could rely on support from the more conservative Democrats.) The Republicans said no anyway. So should Obama have simply scrapped the whole idea of health care reform?
I agree that the new bill is a huge mess, but the Republicans have offered nothing that would both reduce overall costs and make insurance more accessible (and affordable) to the people who don't already have it. And if they think that Heritage's plan is some radical leftist abomination that sends us down the road to serfdom, just imagine how they would have reacted if the Democrats tried to pass a national single-payer insurance plan.
Hasn't the benchmarks already placed it above pretty much any computer in the tasks it can do within its full size?
My understanding was that the benchmarks - at least the one that was quoted as showing a "3600x speedup" - weren't even comparing the same thing: the D-Wave computer was running the quantum adiabatic annealing method, which is the only way it can be programmed, while the conventional CPU was running an exact solver. The latter is expected to be vastly less efficient (but more precise). When a group of computer scientists came up with an annealing method to solve the same problem on a conventional CPU, they ended up with something just as fast as the D-Wave system.
If you have to do the whole thing from scratch then Fortran is the fastest platform. I can't say I've meet anyone who enjoyed Fortran but it's wicked fast.
True, but the only place where this *really* matters is programming for repetitive calculations on massively parallel supercomputers. For anything else, there is a tradeoff between program speed and developer speed, and ultimately it's cheaper to buy more computers than hire more programmers.
Sure, if you don't care about having your code be maintained or extended by anyone under age 30, don't plan on doing any custom visualization beyond GNUplot, and don't care if you ever find employment outside of academia.
This is certainly the way of the future, not just for gene sequencing but many other quantitative sciences, although a complete answer would be Python and C++, because numpy/scipy can't do everything and Python is still very slow for number-crunching. It's best to start with just Python, but eventually some C++ knowledge will be helpful. (Or just plain C, but I can't see any good reason to inflict that on myself or anyone else.)
But the committee better figure something out because this kind of problem is going to be the norm, not the exception. The age of one or two scientists making such an outsized contribution to standout from the rest of their (or other) research groups is over.
I certainly agree with that, and there are many other instances where three was at least one too few - Doug Prasher comes to mind, and also the prize for ribosome structure where they easily could have picked out a half-dozen people whose contributions were essential. (On the other hand, I can also think of another case where I'm really glad they didn't "spread the wealth" around to someone who didn't deserve it.)
Leaving racist rant aside, scientific Nobel pizes are serious, non-scientific prizes (peace, literature or even economy) are not in the same level of credibility, by any means.
They're not even awarded by the same organization or process. At least in the case of the Peace prize, anyway - that institution is in Norway, whereas the science Nobels are in Sweden. It's all coming from the same source in the end, but even in the cases where the science prizes were controversial (usually because someone got left out, or someone didn't deserve the award) there's been no evidence of political motivations, unlike the Peace prize.
Or in other words, big pharma would be more than happy to cure HIV because it's just not that profitable compared with other chronic diseases and there's little predictability about how much they could make in the future.
Not only that, it's fantastic PR. The company that produces a vaccine that ends the HIV pandemic will be bragging about it for the next several decades, and rightly so. (Same goes for cancer, the common cold, etc.) They will be guaranteed profits, because foundations like Gates, NGOs like the WHO and UN, and some governments will hand them buckets of cash to inoculate their populations. Of course it will also take many years to truly eradicate a disease which already infects huge numbers of adults, guaranteeing a long-term revenue stream. It's just such a no-brainer that any pharma CEO who suppresses a cure to keep selling medications which will be off-patent in a few years anyway should be locked up for defrauding shareholders.
They can vaccinate you with some poorly tested crap as well, then cash-in on the medication needed to cure the "side effects". Alzheimer's, cancers... and restless leg syndrome.
I'm sorry, I must be behind on the medical literature. What vaccines have been proven to cause Alzheimer's or cancer?
since as a scientist you spend a significant portion of your day rolling around naked on piles of money
No, depending on whom you ask, I'm actually much too busy either fabricating data to support totalitarian socialist government policies, or developing new poisons for the pharmaceutical industry to exploit at public expense. Besides, we already blew most of our grant money on booze and gambling at a "conference" in Vegas last year.
But on a site that is supposed to cater to educated people (nerds per the masthead), why not use a more technical description instead of one you might find in USA Today or some other media directed to a 6th grade education? Even the word target is much more accurate than recognize.
The term "recognize" is used all the time in the technical literature when discussing how proteins bind to, well, pretty much anything - DNA, small molecules, or other proteins. In fact, the abstract for the actual Nature article uses the phrase "molecular recognition". You may find this unacceptably colloquial, but it's common usage in the field at this point.
This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
True. But this is hardly new either. Hoover spied on MLK and anyone else he deemed "subversive", which included vanilla liberal activists (not Communist sympathizers) and generally anyone who opposed the whims of Hoover himself. Nixon wanted him to go after Democratic campaign donors, and also use the IRS to investigate their finances. (Note that unlike the current IRS "scandal", Nixon was actually caught on tape wishing for this.) He also had his thugs break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, in the hope that they could find material to discredit the leaker of the Pentagon Papers.
Of course it's terrifying to think about what would happen if we ended up with another president like Nixon. I'll be hiding under the bed for the rest of Sunday, thanks.
Anyways, feel free to tell me why the US is so awesome, I kinda need it...
It's flawed like any other country. People tend to focus on the bad news because a) it was the unquestioned superpower for nearly two decades and everyone loves a good fall-from-power story, b) they have a poor understanding of history, and/or were blissfully ignorant of reality when younger, so they subconsciously inflate current problems, and c) some people derive a twisted satisfaction from being prophets of doom. For everything you mention, if you look back a few decades you will find much worse examples. Crime peaked in the 1980s/early 1990s and has been in decline ever since. The spy agencies used to be far more aggressive in violating our rights - the big thing that's changed recently is that they have more technology at their disposal than ever before. As far as human rights violations and war crimes are concerned, well, they're small potatoes compared to the Jim Crow era or the Vietnam war. Not that we can't do better, but progress is incremental.
If you really want a perspective on how much it could suck, I recommend the book "Nixonland" - in many ways we're living in paradise compared to the hell that America once seemed destined for. Also recommended: "Postwar", which is actually about Europe, but also shows how an entire continent devastated by war - and at various points threatened by violent social unrest - ended up becoming a reasonably prosperous and pleasant place to live. I find books like these make me far less pessimistic about the future.
I've lived in the Bay Area for the last ten years, and there are few places I'd rather live. Despite being a native-born WASP-ish American, I still feel out of place here, just like every other corner of the earth; I'm not nearly attractive or stylish or sociable enough. But it's one of the few places I've been in where people don't give me crap for it, because this place is stuffed full of people far weirder than me, with a huge variety of backgrounds. The science and technology sectors here are equal to anywhere else in the world, as you're certainly aware. There is a small core of rabid left-wing activists who generally make pests of themselves, but otherwise everyone minds their own business most of the time. It is just as socially liberal as you may have heard, but not nearly as left-wing economically as its reputation suggests. You'll find relatively high support for progressive income taxes and public services, but we like our iGadgets and pricey apartments too. I have never heard anyone in the area ask a question like "what church do you attend?" (More common: "who's your weed connection?")
The best thing is that you can move here from anywhere in the world, and as long as you have something in common with at least a handful of people, you'll find a way to fit in, and in a generation, your children will be Americans in every sense. There aren't many countries about which you can say this. (Canada and England are major exceptions.)
My only big complaints about the area: first, the insane violence in places like Oakland and Richmond - it is easy to avoid most of the time but absolutely horrific to read about and vastly out of proportion to any lingering economic/racial injustice. Second, the large number of truly helpless homeless around. I'm not talking about the aggressive (mostly younger) and relatively sane bums who flock to SF - and are widely despised by most people who live here - but the schizophrenics and just plain miserable older folk for whom there is no good solution except to try to keep them clothed and fed and out of trouble.
"America for Americans." It's not racist at all! Ever think that maybe that prosperity was a result of theft and maybe it needs to be spread around instead of kept among white people?
I didn't really detect any nativism in the GP post. I personally favor open borders, both for scientists and avocado pickers, as long as they obey a few basic rules (i.e. work hard, don't hurt anyone, contribute to the general welfare, etc.). If someone in China or India thinks he or she can do my job better or cheaper, they're welcome to try. But I also think the claims of a shortage are self-serving bullshit by a clique of plutocrats who would happily fuck their fellow citizens for a new private jet. The only shortage is of people willing to do first-world work for developing-world salaries. Pointing this out isn't picking on the poor would-be immigrants who only want the same opportunities I have - it's merely the product of frustration at seeing the rich and powerful game the system yet again, and do so by lying through their teeth. If we're going to open our doors to foreign technology workers, it shouldn't be because some technology or pharma executive wrote an editorial in the WSJ.
Unless by "this country" you mean Switzerland, I fail to see the relevance of your rant.
The LHC is an international collaboration - there are significant numbers of scientists in the US contributing to the design and analysis, including grad students.
So when country X goes to the moon and mines the helium, are they going to come back and distribute it to all of the world's inhabitants or does it just belong to country X? I'm curious, because before mining the moon began, it would seem that we would need to know who owns the moon? Does it belong to the first one who gets there? Does it belong equally to all people? Or will it belong to some mining company?
I have no idea, but I think it's ultimately just an academic exercise. If a single country is able to immediately leap from initial mining operations on the moon to total dominance of the entire surface before anyone else can even start, that implies such an advanced level of technology that the rest of the world would be grovelling at their feet anyway.
Not that I agree with him or even RTFA, but consider it from the point of view that The Sphinx used to have a nose. Copper is pretty useful and valuable right now. Why don't we melt down The Statue of Liberty to recover the raw resources? It's just a giant chunk of metal.
As someone else pointed out, those are genuine historical artifacts, products of human ingenuity rather than natural processes. If you start from the argument that even enormous hunks of rock have rights above the welfare of humanity, you're pretty much ruling out any technological development or use of natural resources.
What exactly is wrong with the proposition that mining Helium-3 on the moon is evil
Seriously? How about the fact that it privileges an inanimate, lifeless celestial body over the development and happiness of the human race? Most environmental concerns focus on the danger (and immorality) of fucking up biospheres, but the moon has never supported life, and never will (unless we alter it even more radically).
Slashdot Mirror
it sounds like you've put yourself in a shitty situation and prefer to blame others for it rather than accepting responsibility.
Bonus: I only had to look one page back in his comment history to find this gem:
"That's because you're a poor person, who will always be poor, thanks to your poor person mentality."
So, when other people are poor, it's because they're lazy and stupid; when he's poor, it's because the evil leftist government is oppressing him.
your radical leftist viewpoint
Nothing in my post made any judgements about the virtues (or lack thereof) of Obamacare; I was simply citing what all of the polls have shown. Do you simply label anyone who contradicts you as a "radical leftist"?
He probably shouldn't have antagonized the Republicans from the start. He might have done more horse trading and made more sacrifices elsewhere: the budget, gay rights, financial regulation, whatever.
As far as the budget was concerned, he was in a rough spot with the economy - it was just spectacularly bad timing for dealing with budget problems. I'm not convinced that changing his mind on financial regulation or gay rights would have done any good, since the steps he took in those directions were fundamentally so small. And from what I can remember, the repeal of DADT was the first major policy change on gay rights and that came well after the Obamacare passage.
Where he could have become active is scale back the abuses of the Bush era, the NSA, and all the other things he promised to do but has failed to.
God, I wish - this was the main reason I voted for him in 2008 and he has been a spectacular disappointment on these issues, which is why I stayed home in 2012. But, again in partial defense, even his good-faith efforts were blindly opposed by the GOP, which went out of its way to prevent him from closing down Guantanamo. (Admittedly with some Democratic support, and may those legislators rot in hell.)
Health care reform could have waited a little longer.
Unlikely, since he probably would have lost Congress in 2010 regardless of what else happened. Either the right wing was going to accuse him of being a radical socialist, or they (and everyone else) were going to blame him for not doing more to improve the economy.
Probably a Republican president would have been better for passing this; in fact, if Romney had become president, we probably would have gotten reasonable health care reform, because he could have passed something better and more consistent with bipartisan support.
It's a nice fantasy, except both Romney and the Republicans have moved so far to the right that anything they passed was likely to be even more favorable to the insurance companies and even less effective at bringing insurance to the people who don't have it. What exactly is their plan to reduce costs? Malpractice tort reform? Screwing over the trial lawyers, while it might be a worthy goal on general principle, would barely put a dent in the price of insurance. And people with pre-existing conditions are simply fucked.
At least half the fucking country wants to see Obamacare go
Yes, and half of those want it replaced with a far more progressive plan, e.g. national single-payer insurance. Far less than half of the country supports the Republican position that Obamacare is a radical leftist policy that must be destroyed at all costs.
Obama decides to declare martial law and arrest the GOP
This also has no basis in reality whatsoever. If you want to convince people that Obamacare is a bad idea, you'll have a much easier time if you don't sound like you just escaped from a mental institution.
Even more than the fiscal unreliability, the big problem with government funding is that it makes science a political football, with brain-dead demagogues getting to decide what is and isn't studied according to their religion.
The structural problems go even deeper than that. The demagogues don't actually directly interfere that often, although it's especially annoying when they do. The bigger problems are a) the supply-and-demand problem created by poor and/or inconsistent government policy, and b) the uncertainty created by crises like the shutdown and the sequester. Naturally, neither of these problems is unique to government service! People working for companies have the same problems all the time, and I can't imagine that being stalked by MBAs much more fun than worrying about Congress. But most scientists in the public sector have made an implicit trade: we accept lower salaries in exchange for decent benefits, decent job security, and the freedom to study what excites us without worrying about "how do I bring this to market within 18 months?" Most of us spent our 20s in school just to qualify for these jobs - which is not quite as bad as it sounds (we get a small stipend at least, and flexible hours), but most academics postpone having children until relatively late, and we get to watch our more financially motivated peers make vastly more money, often with less formal education. The base starting salary for an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow is $40,000; that is by definition someone with a PhD, usually around 30 years old. There are some truly mediocre postdocs out there, but many brilliant ones - and if they want an academic career, they basically have no choice but to spend several years in such a position. Meanwhile, their friends with real jobs are probably making at least twice as much.
On top of this, the success rate for grants has dropped precipitously, and the sequester has made it even worse. The biomedical research sector grew with NIH funding, and now that funding is contracting, there are more people competing for less money. So even the long-term job security isn't very good any more.
I'm relatively lucky; I managed to only spend a little more than a year as a postdoc before getting a more permanent position, and the research group I work for is well-funded, non-controversial, and very successful in our field. But I still make tends of thousands less than my grad school friends who work in industry. And it's far from certain that we'll continue to get funding. More importantly, a large fraction of the people who control the purse strings think I'm a lazy, useless welfare queen, and want to close down the department I work for and send our jobs to China. Or, barring that, they're happy to do that temporarily just out of spite because they think the Heritage Foundation's healthcare plan is a socialist takeover. So, after spending most of my adult life working overtime (unpaid, of course) while assuring myself that the implicit bargain was worth it, leaving academia is not a hard decision for me to make. Fuck this, if you want to treat me like shit and continually threaten me with unemployment, you'd better fucking pay me for it. None of the public (certainly none of Congress) understands what I do anyway, so why should I care whether or not I'm contributing to human health and knowledge?
he chose to ram through his health care reform without bipartisan support
In partial defense, what was he supposed to do? The Democrats basically took the plan created by the Heritage Foundation and enacted by Mitt Romney in MA, because they thought that was the most progressive reform that could win any Republican support. (And contrary to what progressives might think, it was probably the most that could rely on support from the more conservative Democrats.) The Republicans said no anyway. So should Obama have simply scrapped the whole idea of health care reform?
I agree that the new bill is a huge mess, but the Republicans have offered nothing that would both reduce overall costs and make insurance more accessible (and affordable) to the people who don't already have it. And if they think that Heritage's plan is some radical leftist abomination that sends us down the road to serfdom, just imagine how they would have reacted if the Democrats tried to pass a national single-payer insurance plan.
Hasn't the benchmarks already placed it above pretty much any computer in the tasks it can do within its full size?
My understanding was that the benchmarks - at least the one that was quoted as showing a "3600x speedup" - weren't even comparing the same thing: the D-Wave computer was running the quantum adiabatic annealing method, which is the only way it can be programmed, while the conventional CPU was running an exact solver. The latter is expected to be vastly less efficient (but more precise). When a group of computer scientists came up with an annealing method to solve the same problem on a conventional CPU, they ended up with something just as fast as the D-Wave system.
If you have to do the whole thing from scratch then Fortran is the fastest platform. I can't say I've meet anyone who enjoyed Fortran but it's wicked fast.
True, but the only place where this *really* matters is programming for repetitive calculations on massively parallel supercomputers. For anything else, there is a tradeoff between program speed and developer speed, and ultimately it's cheaper to buy more computers than hire more programmers.
Sure, if you don't care about having your code be maintained or extended by anyone under age 30, don't plan on doing any custom visualization beyond GNUplot, and don't care if you ever find employment outside of academia.
the whole industry uses mostly python
This is certainly the way of the future, not just for gene sequencing but many other quantitative sciences, although a complete answer would be Python and C++, because numpy/scipy can't do everything and Python is still very slow for number-crunching. It's best to start with just Python, but eventually some C++ knowledge will be helpful. (Or just plain C, but I can't see any good reason to inflict that on myself or anyone else.)
But the committee better figure something out because this kind of problem is going to be the norm, not the exception. The age of one or two scientists making such an outsized contribution to standout from the rest of their (or other) research groups is over.
I certainly agree with that, and there are many other instances where three was at least one too few - Doug Prasher comes to mind, and also the prize for ribosome structure where they easily could have picked out a half-dozen people whose contributions were essential. (On the other hand, I can also think of another case where I'm really glad they didn't "spread the wealth" around to someone who didn't deserve it.)
Leaving racist rant aside, scientific Nobel pizes are serious, non-scientific prizes (peace, literature or even economy) are not in the same level of credibility, by any means.
They're not even awarded by the same organization or process. At least in the case of the Peace prize, anyway - that institution is in Norway, whereas the science Nobels are in Sweden. It's all coming from the same source in the end, but even in the cases where the science prizes were controversial (usually because someone got left out, or someone didn't deserve the award) there's been no evidence of political motivations, unlike the Peace prize.
White countries have simply become the dumping ground for the world's Third World trash, and anybody objecting to it is automatically branded racist.
Speaking as a native-born (white) American citizen, I'll happily trade one of you for a dozen third-worlders chosen at random.
Or in other words, big pharma would be more than happy to cure HIV because it's just not that profitable compared with other chronic diseases and there's little predictability about how much they could make in the future.
Not only that, it's fantastic PR. The company that produces a vaccine that ends the HIV pandemic will be bragging about it for the next several decades, and rightly so. (Same goes for cancer, the common cold, etc.) They will be guaranteed profits, because foundations like Gates, NGOs like the WHO and UN, and some governments will hand them buckets of cash to inoculate their populations. Of course it will also take many years to truly eradicate a disease which already infects huge numbers of adults, guaranteeing a long-term revenue stream. It's just such a no-brainer that any pharma CEO who suppresses a cure to keep selling medications which will be off-patent in a few years anyway should be locked up for defrauding shareholders.
They can vaccinate you with some poorly tested crap as well, then cash-in on the medication needed to cure the "side effects". Alzheimer's, cancers ... and restless leg syndrome.
I'm sorry, I must be behind on the medical literature. What vaccines have been proven to cause Alzheimer's or cancer?
since as a scientist you spend a significant portion of your day rolling around naked on piles of money
No, depending on whom you ask, I'm actually much too busy either fabricating data to support totalitarian socialist government policies, or developing new poisons for the pharmaceutical industry to exploit at public expense. Besides, we already blew most of our grant money on booze and gambling at a "conference" in Vegas last year.
But on a site that is supposed to cater to educated people (nerds per the masthead), why not use a more technical description instead of one you might find in USA Today or some other media directed to a 6th grade education? Even the word target is much more accurate than recognize.
The term "recognize" is used all the time in the technical literature when discussing how proteins bind to, well, pretty much anything - DNA, small molecules, or other proteins. In fact, the abstract for the actual Nature article uses the phrase "molecular recognition". You may find this unacceptably colloquial, but it's common usage in the field at this point.
(Yes, I am a biochemist.)
This runs the risk of such information being used against them if it beomes politically expedient for those in power- now, *or in the future*, and for whoever is in power- like them or not.
True. But this is hardly new either. Hoover spied on MLK and anyone else he deemed "subversive", which included vanilla liberal activists (not Communist sympathizers) and generally anyone who opposed the whims of Hoover himself. Nixon wanted him to go after Democratic campaign donors, and also use the IRS to investigate their finances. (Note that unlike the current IRS "scandal", Nixon was actually caught on tape wishing for this.) He also had his thugs break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, in the hope that they could find material to discredit the leaker of the Pentagon Papers.
Of course it's terrifying to think about what would happen if we ended up with another president like Nixon. I'll be hiding under the bed for the rest of Sunday, thanks.
Anyways, feel free to tell me why the US is so awesome, I kinda need it...
It's flawed like any other country. People tend to focus on the bad news because a) it was the unquestioned superpower for nearly two decades and everyone loves a good fall-from-power story, b) they have a poor understanding of history, and/or were blissfully ignorant of reality when younger, so they subconsciously inflate current problems, and c) some people derive a twisted satisfaction from being prophets of doom. For everything you mention, if you look back a few decades you will find much worse examples. Crime peaked in the 1980s/early 1990s and has been in decline ever since. The spy agencies used to be far more aggressive in violating our rights - the big thing that's changed recently is that they have more technology at their disposal than ever before. As far as human rights violations and war crimes are concerned, well, they're small potatoes compared to the Jim Crow era or the Vietnam war. Not that we can't do better, but progress is incremental.
If you really want a perspective on how much it could suck, I recommend the book "Nixonland" - in many ways we're living in paradise compared to the hell that America once seemed destined for. Also recommended: "Postwar", which is actually about Europe, but also shows how an entire continent devastated by war - and at various points threatened by violent social unrest - ended up becoming a reasonably prosperous and pleasant place to live. I find books like these make me far less pessimistic about the future.
I've lived in the Bay Area for the last ten years, and there are few places I'd rather live. Despite being a native-born WASP-ish American, I still feel out of place here, just like every other corner of the earth; I'm not nearly attractive or stylish or sociable enough. But it's one of the few places I've been in where people don't give me crap for it, because this place is stuffed full of people far weirder than me, with a huge variety of backgrounds. The science and technology sectors here are equal to anywhere else in the world, as you're certainly aware. There is a small core of rabid left-wing activists who generally make pests of themselves, but otherwise everyone minds their own business most of the time. It is just as socially liberal as you may have heard, but not nearly as left-wing economically as its reputation suggests. You'll find relatively high support for progressive income taxes and public services, but we like our iGadgets and pricey apartments too. I have never heard anyone in the area ask a question like "what church do you attend?" (More common: "who's your weed connection?")
The best thing is that you can move here from anywhere in the world, and as long as you have something in common with at least a handful of people, you'll find a way to fit in, and in a generation, your children will be Americans in every sense. There aren't many countries about which you can say this. (Canada and England are major exceptions.)
My only big complaints about the area: first, the insane violence in places like Oakland and Richmond - it is easy to avoid most of the time but absolutely horrific to read about and vastly out of proportion to any lingering economic/racial injustice. Second, the large number of truly helpless homeless around. I'm not talking about the aggressive (mostly younger) and relatively sane bums who flock to SF - and are widely despised by most people who live here - but the schizophrenics and just plain miserable older folk for whom there is no good solution except to try to keep them clothed and fed and out of trouble.
"America for Americans." It's not racist at all! Ever think that maybe that prosperity was a result of theft and maybe it needs to be spread around instead of kept among white people?
I didn't really detect any nativism in the GP post. I personally favor open borders, both for scientists and avocado pickers, as long as they obey a few basic rules (i.e. work hard, don't hurt anyone, contribute to the general welfare, etc.). If someone in China or India thinks he or she can do my job better or cheaper, they're welcome to try. But I also think the claims of a shortage are self-serving bullshit by a clique of plutocrats who would happily fuck their fellow citizens for a new private jet. The only shortage is of people willing to do first-world work for developing-world salaries. Pointing this out isn't picking on the poor would-be immigrants who only want the same opportunities I have - it's merely the product of frustration at seeing the rich and powerful game the system yet again, and do so by lying through their teeth. If we're going to open our doors to foreign technology workers, it shouldn't be because some technology or pharma executive wrote an editorial in the WSJ.
Unless by "this country" you mean Switzerland, I fail to see the relevance of your rant.
The LHC is an international collaboration - there are significant numbers of scientists in the US contributing to the design and analysis, including grad students.
I think you need to re-read my comment again more closely - that's exactly what I said.
So when country X goes to the moon and mines the helium, are they going to come back and distribute it to all of the world's inhabitants or does it just belong to country X? I'm curious, because before mining the moon began, it would seem that we would need to know who owns the moon? Does it belong to the first one who gets there? Does it belong equally to all people? Or will it belong to some mining company?
I have no idea, but I think it's ultimately just an academic exercise. If a single country is able to immediately leap from initial mining operations on the moon to total dominance of the entire surface before anyone else can even start, that implies such an advanced level of technology that the rest of the world would be grovelling at their feet anyway.
Not that I agree with him or even RTFA, but consider it from the point of view that The Sphinx used to have a nose.
Copper is pretty useful and valuable right now. Why don't we melt down The Statue of Liberty to recover the raw resources? It's just a giant chunk of metal.
As someone else pointed out, those are genuine historical artifacts, products of human ingenuity rather than natural processes. If you start from the argument that even enormous hunks of rock have rights above the welfare of humanity, you're pretty much ruling out any technological development or use of natural resources.
What exactly is wrong with the proposition that mining Helium-3 on the moon is evil
Seriously? How about the fact that it privileges an inanimate, lifeless celestial body over the development and happiness of the human race? Most environmental concerns focus on the danger (and immorality) of fucking up biospheres, but the moon has never supported life, and never will (unless we alter it even more radically).