# your choice of how your desktop environment looks
themes?
Themes are a pathetic substitute for being able to totally switch desktop environments and/or window managers. My environment looks and acts nothing at all like Windows, and I prefer it that way. I've heard of alternate GUIs for Windows, but since Windows ties you down to using a GUI for nearly everything, I can't imagine that you'd ever have enough flexibility. (Control panels are for pussies.)
# a powerful command prompt for expert users
cygwin?
This is an add-on layer, not an integral part of the OS. Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones? (And yes, I do these things all the time.)
As for Soviet smallpox being bio-engineered... that could be a problem in theory, but given the track record of Soviet technology, it's probably not as great as it's cracked up to be.
I'm sure they tested it on political prisoners before loading it into warheads.
Also, in a lot of the Tcl scripts he added in a bunch of "good practice" verbosity which he didn't afford to, say, Perl
Interesting - I hadn't noticed this. Personally, I ALWAYS code Perl with 'use strict', because I've had so many bad experiences with larger scripts that were undecipherable and/or had nasty bugs due to variable mispellings. I avoid using shortcuts whenever possible.
I think these comparisons are largely bullshit anyway. Many of these programming languages have their own tics or methodologies that appeal to subsets of people. Quite a few people I've talked to (and quite a few posters here, from past experience) are annoyed by Python's syntactical indentation. Since I think everyone should be indenting their code perfectly and consistently anyway, even C or Perl, I love this feature. On the other hand, Python is too slow for some of the simple tasks I need done.
I don't think you can apply these comparisons broadly either; the code I write in scripting languages includes everything from cleaning up files and batch scripts, to text parsing, sequence alignment, and protein structure calculations. Since at least half of the code I write will never be seen or used by anyone else, I use whatever I think will get the job done fastest AND be the most fun to code in. And if I ever make someone maintain my AWK code, I'll fully expect to be thrown off the roof.
Doctors use MRI machines all the time. How many of them can explain how they work? Not many.
How many pre-meds have you known? If you'd met enough, you wouldn't find it so shocking that most doctors wouldn't understand an MRI machine.
Most biologists who use NMR (which is what MRI is called when we don't have to worry about anti-nuclear freaks), however, do understand very well how it works, even if they don't know enough to build their own $4,000,000 spectrometer.
Also, if you are creating bioinformatics tools on Federal funding
Not damn often enough, I'm afraid.
I just spent the past week writing code to parse PDB files. This format has been around for ages, and is so inadequate.
Less inadequate than you think. The problem with biological databases is not the formats, it's the inconsistency of information. Obtaining information about a specific human gene will usually require using multiple databases, each of which use multiple IDs, and each of which returns multiple overlapping bits of data. With the PDB, the real difficulty is figuring out what all that data means once you've parsed it, and figuring out how to compare it with other proteins.
The proposal to use XML instead won't solve anything, it'll just add overhead. The column-based formatting is easy to handle, and more importantly anyone can scan the file by eye and pick out interesting info (I do this all the time). Anyone familiar with the PDB format should be able to write a parser for it in a few hours. However, since the PDB has never enforced standards on its submitters and the submitters tend to not give a fuck (structural biologists can be a prickly bunch), the data may still be incomprehensible, and there are so many exceptions that just figuring out the actual protein sequence may require eight steps. Good luck figuring out what the "insertion code" means.
There is a growing and dangerous tendency to overengineer things, which often seems more like a ploy to keep bioinformaticists busy rather than a serious attempt to improve communications. This is why I've switched to experimental work.
I'm sure it'll be great if the teenage coffehouse gets busted by the RIAA or MPAA for sharing 30 gigs of the latest hits. Or if it crashes under the weight of all that porn - although I suppose there's very little you can do to stop that.
If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel.
Yes, he claims that Linus and his supporters were claiming that Linus authored 32,000 lines of code that made a working kernel in a year as a first-year CS student. I read this and thought, wow, maybe Brown has a point. That's a pretty complex app.
So I downloaded some older kernels. I decided to look back earlier than 1.0. 0.01 is available from kernel.org, and is dated from the fall of 1991. With headers and everything, 'wc' reports that the entire thing is less than 7500 lines. (That includes blank lines, comments, lines with a single brace, etc.)
By the time you get to 0.95, released six months later, the kernel has grown to just under 9000 lines. The memory allocation routines are not even by Linux, but contributed by Theodore T'so at MIT.
By July of '92, four months after 0.95, the 0.96c kernel has around 11,500 lines. Linux already has mailing lists and alt.os.linux, and a growing user community testing the code.
Version 1.0 is not released until the spring of 1994, by which point the project was two and a half years old, and had 80 contributors listed. It is indeed around 32,000 lines, and is clearly not all Linus' work. It had also undergone extensive testing by a very skilled community.
Linus' original kernel seems like a very reasonable project for an undergrad, and someone pointed out that it was pretty raw at the beginning. I wrote a large code library this spring, and although it's packed with comments it's about 6000 lines. And I'm a biologist, not a CS student. Looking at kernel 0.01, I think I could write this if I wanted to, once I learned some basic OS design. (Guiding it from an undergrad project into an industry-leading product, on the other hand, I could not do, and therein lies Linus' real brilliance.)
The complete history of kernel releases is publically available on the web, and it's easy to verify that a) the original kernel was both small and incomplete, b) the initial growth of the kernel was slow, c) version 1.0 was neither written in a year nor did it pretend to be written solely by Linus. In other words, Brown is ignorant and/or flat-out lying, and can't even get the facts in his rebuttal correct. He's not doing much to dispell the impression that this is a paid disinformation campaign with little factual basis.
Of course nobody likes nuclear energy. Nuclear's some scary shit even if you don't mess it up, and messing it up is what humanity does.
I love nuclear energy, and I think Sterling is full of shit. To be perfectly honest, I love my first-world, technologically sophisticated existence, and my research depends on having shitloads of electricity available. But I'm also from the Left Coast, and since we still have some natural resources left unpillaged I'd like them to stay that way. So I'm a pro-capitalism, pro-industrial-society environmentalist. It's really not much of a contradiction; I support sustainable development. And I think it'd be great if the rest of the world could have the same happen.
Over here we have it a little easier because of hydroelectric power, which I think is generally the best source we've found so far (although also the most immediately destructive to the environment). Most of the world doesn't have this luxury, and such projects are anathema to environmentalists and can be a huge pain in the ass in general (Three Gorges Dam).
Sterling's objections seemed pretty incoherent to me. The first is that nuclear power is unsafe, which has become a religious rather than scientific argument at this point. (My own impression is that Three Mile Island is one of the most overblown "disasters" in history, and Chernobyl was due to Soviet incompetence. But I'm sure there are plenty of hysterical leftists who will claim otherwise.) The second is that nuclear power == nuclear bombs; or at least that's what I got from his invocation of Hiroshima. This isn't really worth debating; we'll have to worry about nuclear bombs anyway. The third is that we're not doing enough about climate change, and adding a new energy source will make things much worse.
I have no objection to making fossil fuels obsolete; I wouldn't mind seeing a reduction in cars either. (I don't own one; I walk to the grocery store and work, and use public transportation or carpool.) I'm sure as hell NOT going to give up living in the 21st century, though. The claim that nuclear power is a "necessary evil" makes it sound like something we should get rid of ASAP, and Sterling says something similar. This only works if you believe in some dream world where we all grow our own organic vegetables and soybeans, bicycle to work at sunlit offices, and don't need any industrial goods. (That includes medicines, although some leftist environmentalists sound like they're actually endorsing shorter lifespans and global die-offs.)
I get the impression that Sterling would rather see us reverting to candles and typewriters than embracing nuclear power. I guess at least we'd be spared his ridiculous Internet rants.
But a lot of them are sick of the BS, totally-divorced-from-reality, criticism that they hear from people outside of the US.
THANK YOU. I've been trying to say this for years. What's worse is that I've known foreigners living in the US who are just as strident and ignorant in their criticisms. They're also huge consumers of US culture, technology, and education, which makes me suspect more than a little bit of hypocritical nationalism at work.
The thing that really galls me is the condescending attitude most assume when I try to argue with them. They immediately decide that I must be another ignorant American and that it's their duty to educate me about the world. Most of the time this consists of regurgitating random facts that I already read about in American media, many of which are of dubious veracity. If you read nothing but The Guardian and Noam Chomsky, you're just as ill-informed as some Texan listening to Rush and watching Fox News.
They'd rather subsist under a tyrant then die under a freedom fighter.
I used to work with a number of Chinese scientists who'd come to the US for grad school. Some of them clearly intended to stay here as long as possible, but others were more nationalistic. I asked one student (who had pictures of Zhou Enlai and the aftermath of the Naking massacre on his desk) why obviously intelligent people like him continued to put up with the Communists. He said it was because the situation in China kept improving: they now have some form of capitalism, better technology, continuing superpower status, and so on. And as you suggest, as long as you follow the rules you'll do pretty well. He said that if things got worse, they might be more inclined to want a change of government, but right now nobody wanted to rock the boat. I guess if your parents lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, modern China must seem pretty terrific.
I've heard similar claims made about the US, although they're usually made by people who think we're not communist enough.
I'll add a specific example, from last summer. A brief snippet reported on the political opposition to the Patriot Act, and focused exclusively on liberal groups such as the ACLU. Anyone who wasn't more informed would have assumed that the only people fighting the act were left-wing agitators. This is absolutely not true. Some Republicans (including Grover Norquist, who is if nothing else consistent) are remembering that their party is supposed to stand for limited government. And bear in mind that a Republican was responsible for ripping out some of the more nauseating provisions of the act in the first place. I can't prove why Fox didn't see it necessary to mention any of this, but if it's not bias it's certainly shitty reporting.
I agree, but conservatives have long held up the NY Times op-ed page as evidence of liberal bias, and hammered the paper for every single piece of partisanship displayed by Dowd and Krugman. If we apply the same standards as the Media Research Council, we certainly can blame Fox as well.
The real issue here is not whether organizations may be judged by the political leanings of their paid commentators; it's whether they're responsible for the distortions and lies spread by same.
Up to now there is no conclusive evidence which mechanism triggers cell death in the brain.
Okay, I guess I'm partly extrapolating from other diseases. Isn't Alzheimer's due to buildup of amyloids, and are there other neuorodegenerative disorders that have a similar cause?
Re:Difference Between Nanobacteria and Prions?
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Nanobacteria Discovered?
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· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC, when they encounter a normal protein, they're able to twist it into a copy of themselves.
That's the right idea, although it's really best described in terms of the statistical mechanics of protein folding. If you have a protein locked in a conformation that exposes a large hydrophobic patch, the tendency will be for that protein to bind other proteins with hydrophobic patches. A misfolded prion protein will propagate itself by stabilizing misfolded conformations of other proteins (probably the same protein, actually, or something related), which otherwise might be transitory.
Eventually the host body is damaged from having a significant amount of their normal protein turned into prions, and dies.
I think it's actually the buildup of prionic aggregates that causes tissue damage; I don't think it affects very many distinct proteins in the cell. It's not a systemic thing; most prion diseases afflict neurons.
My recollection may be a bit off; I saw the guy who discovered them (Stanley Prusiner) give a talk last fall but this is a bit different from what I normally study.
High-impact journals select for, well, high impact, not for better quality. And there is plenty of junk science in Nature, Science, Cell, and other such journals.
Yeah, an impact factor of 30 doesn't mean all that much if half of those citing articles are essentially saying "bullshit." I suspect the retraction rate is much higher on average for these journals than for the good second-tier journals like JMB.
Interestingly, the major article by a sceptic was submitted to PNAS, track II (for those who don't know, track II means it gets published without review, since PNAS is a bit of an "old boys club")
Wrong. Track II means it goes through the normal review process like any other paper. This is a fairly recent addition on the part of PNAS; it used to only allow communications from members.
As a side note, I've noticed that the quality of Track I and III papers varies widely. There's some excellent stuff published that way, and it's never quite clear why it went through that route rather than a more "prestigious" one. I've seen some garbage articles in PNAS as well, but you can't judge an article by its method of acceptance, only by evaluating the evidence yourself.
And, as someone else pointed out, the really prestigious journals publish garbage all the time. The papers that get into a journal like Science are sometimes huge breakthroughs, sometimes they're smaller breakthroughs that just got lucky and appealed to the editor on that particular day, and sometimes they're not much of anything but they present such an interesting or provocative model that they're published anyway. I saw one recent research article that looked like it must have been really difficult to complete but the results really weren't that exciting or useful, but the paper had one spectacular figure extrapolating from their results and that was probably what got it accepted.
Re:Difference Between Nanobacteria and Prions?
on
Nanobacteria Discovered?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think these nanobacteria are just smaller than bacteria (and larger than viruses), not actually smaller than prions, which still hold the title as the smallest.
Prions are organic infectious agents, but they're not "life" under any standard, and they're also nothing more than corrupted versions of proteins already in the cell. Their replication is a trick of physical chemistry, not a true reproductive process, not even comparable to a virus's hijacking of the cell's machinery. Prions are really more like oncogenic proteins, except with transmissibility.
Viruses are actually more complicated that "strands of protein and RNA"; some have relatively large genomes (~40 proteins) and a fairly intricate structure. Bacteriophages in particular have a wicked-looking protein casing. They're still not life, though, as they don't reproduce on their own and don't metabolize energy. (I think they're also one of the great mysteries of evolution, as well.)
I can't believe there are two of you here having the same delusional fantesy. Theaters full of women climaxing all around you? And you actually believe this happened?
Dude, chill the fuck out. You're taking this too seriously, and you've obviously never watched the movie with a group of college- or high-school-age women. Even during the previews, when Orlando Bloom's name flashed breifly in the teaser for "Pirates of the Caribbean", they shrieked. And I'm joking about the climax part (WHAT DID YOU THINK?), but I'm not the first one to make this comparison. (One chick wrote online that "when Legolas jumped onto the horse, I swear I got pregnant.")
(And, for the record, this is more a nightmare than a fantasy. There's nothing better to remind you of your own failings as a man than listening to a bunch of women your age go ape over some movie star. Although I'd say that my experiences with Hugh Grant in this respect have been much more humbling. Emotionally castrating, actually.)
I'm a former Seattle resident. We managed to ignore the espresso trend for years while regular patrons of Starbucks; my parents have always been coffee lovers (and frequently consumers of mass amounts of the stuff). When we finally noticed espresso (early 90s) my mom initially though it was some yuppie fad that would go the way of fondue. Then one day a coworker convinced her to try a latte.
I think it was '96 or so that we bought her the pump-driven espresso maker for her birthday. About a year later, I started drinking two straight shots of espresso every morning before school. My brother manages to "borrow" money from mom for "mocha runs" to Starbucks every few days; I had to beg her for new clothes when I was his age. A college classmate from Seattle (but going to school on the East Coast) estimated that she spent $500 on Starbucks lattes in one semester.
- hokey physical comedy and stupid gags, like C3PO in both movies. In retrospect, the special edition of ANH fortells this, with the Jawa being thrown around by some huge lizardlike steed, or Han stepping on Jabba's tail.
- Ridiculous foreshadowing that attempts to tie every single plot thread or character from the original movies into the prequels. Tatooine figures so prominently in the prequels that you'd think the Empire would have been interested in the planet before the droids landed there in ANH. They should have just left the droids out entirely; they had character in the originals, and here they're just cartoonish plot devices. Any bets on whether and how Han Solo will show up in EPIII?
- Overexplanations in general, not just the midichlorians. I don't give a shit whether the stormtroopers are all clones. What made them so scary in the originals was the fact that they've been dehumanized by sticking them behind all that armor. It's actually a lot more frightening if you don't know their origin; they're robot-like, but not robots.
- Which brings me to: all those friggin' robots. Battle droids aren't scary or evil. Stormtroopers are evil, massive Star Destroyers are evil, TIE fighters are evil. The only evil parts of I and II were Darth Maul, Count Dooku, and the Fetts. The Empire had this whole aesthetic style to it that just screamed "heartless planet-crushers and destroyers of hope"; the Trade Federation has crappy faux-Oriental accents and CGI bots.
It's possible I'm mistaken on the Vinn Diesel bit, but the commercials make me sick so I've never watched on of the movies:)
(It's 'Vin', not Vinn, by the way.)
He's very good in Saving Private Ryan, but he's just a supporting character who dies relatively early. Pitch Black is excellent, as B-grade sci-fi movies go, and Diesel is perfect for the part. I definitely recommend the film to all geeks; it's derivative but also well done and genuinely scary at times. The Fast and the Furious is pretty fun if you ignore Paul Walker.
What makes Diesel good in all of these movies is that none of the parts really stretch his acting skills. It's the same reason Ahnuld is so very good on occasion: when a director has the sense to give him the part he was born to play. (Terminator being the classic example.) When a role is mostly macho swagger, what's required isn't really acting but the ability to project charisma from the screen. Diesel is terrific at that. It's just not much to build a career on; Ahnuld was lucky. (It remains to be seen whether he'll be as limited as a governor; I hope not, since I'm a UC student.)
I agree on the elephant scene in ROTK. I loved the rest of the movie, but that seemed like something added in to make the chicks happy. The horse-mounting scene in TTT was much better, partly because it happened so quickly that you didn't have time to think twice about how obviously fake it was. (And I thought the audience response to it was better; I swear half the women in the theater climaxed.)
Actually, that's an interesting point. But ignoring the expanded lore for a moment (I don't really know much of it), the cave on Dagobah is one of those troubling little things that the movie never explains. It probably just started out as a plot device to have Luke face his own dark side, but the Count dying there would make lots of sense. I'd sort of assumed that something like this must have happened; Yoda seems unwilling to talk much about the cave in the movie, like there's some unpleasant memory associated with it.
. ..we had GrokLaw for Watergate, Rodney King, Clinton, and OJ, the world would be a much better place.
I'm not sure how any of these compare. SCO is claiming something that can be largely refuted based on information that's already publically available, albeit in disperse form, across many versions, and fairly large in size. In all of the other cases except King's, the events in question occured relatively in secret. More like if SCO just sued IBM over AIX (but then the Linux community wouldn't give a shit, so what'd be the point of this whole community discovery process?)
You seem to be making the point that a distributed, non-profit, internet based investigation system would be useful more generally for all sorts of civil and criminal cases, but there are almost no cases where there's such a wealth of evidence already available. And keep in mind that our various three-letter agencies are trying to do something similar to uncover terrorist plots, and Slashdotters generally hate some of the methods (i.e. Carnivore, encryption laws) they've applied.
If all of us were doing this collectively out in the open, the potential for invasion of privacy wouldn't be any less and might actually be greater. Take a look at the Powerbook scam article for an example of this; the guy got what he deserved, but isn't it frightening how much the anti-scammers were able to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Themes are a pathetic substitute for being able to totally switch desktop environments and/or window managers. My environment looks and acts nothing at all like Windows, and I prefer it that way. I've heard of alternate GUIs for Windows, but since Windows ties you down to using a GUI for nearly everything, I can't imagine that you'd ever have enough flexibility. (Control panels are for pussies.)
cygwin?
This is an add-on layer, not an integral part of the OS. Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones? (And yes, I do these things all the time.)
As for Soviet smallpox being bio-engineered... that could be a problem in theory, but given the track record of Soviet technology, it's probably not as great as it's cracked up to be.
I'm sure they tested it on political prisoners before loading it into warheads.
Also, in a lot of the Tcl scripts he added in a bunch of "good practice" verbosity which he didn't afford to, say, Perl
Interesting - I hadn't noticed this. Personally, I ALWAYS code Perl with 'use strict', because I've had so many bad experiences with larger scripts that were undecipherable and/or had nasty bugs due to variable mispellings. I avoid using shortcuts whenever possible.
I think these comparisons are largely bullshit anyway. Many of these programming languages have their own tics or methodologies that appeal to subsets of people. Quite a few people I've talked to (and quite a few posters here, from past experience) are annoyed by Python's syntactical indentation. Since I think everyone should be indenting their code perfectly and consistently anyway, even C or Perl, I love this feature. On the other hand, Python is too slow for some of the simple tasks I need done.
I don't think you can apply these comparisons broadly either; the code I write in scripting languages includes everything from cleaning up files and batch scripts, to text parsing, sequence alignment, and protein structure calculations. Since at least half of the code I write will never be seen or used by anyone else, I use whatever I think will get the job done fastest AND be the most fun to code in. And if I ever make someone maintain my AWK code, I'll fully expect to be thrown off the roof.
Doctors use MRI machines all the time. How many of them can explain how they work? Not many.
How many pre-meds have you known? If you'd met enough, you wouldn't find it so shocking that most doctors wouldn't understand an MRI machine.
Most biologists who use NMR (which is what MRI is called when we don't have to worry about anti-nuclear freaks), however, do understand very well how it works, even if they don't know enough to build their own $4,000,000 spectrometer.
Also, if you are creating bioinformatics tools on Federal funding
Not damn often enough, I'm afraid.
I just spent the past week writing code to parse PDB files. This format has been around for ages, and is so inadequate.
Less inadequate than you think. The problem with biological databases is not the formats, it's the inconsistency of information. Obtaining information about a specific human gene will usually require using multiple databases, each of which use multiple IDs, and each of which returns multiple overlapping bits of data. With the PDB, the real difficulty is figuring out what all that data means once you've parsed it, and figuring out how to compare it with other proteins.
The proposal to use XML instead won't solve anything, it'll just add overhead. The column-based formatting is easy to handle, and more importantly anyone can scan the file by eye and pick out interesting info (I do this all the time). Anyone familiar with the PDB format should be able to write a parser for it in a few hours. However, since the PDB has never enforced standards on its submitters and the submitters tend to not give a fuck (structural biologists can be a prickly bunch), the data may still be incomprehensible, and there are so many exceptions that just figuring out the actual protein sequence may require eight steps. Good luck figuring out what the "insertion code" means.
There is a growing and dangerous tendency to overengineer things, which often seems more like a ploy to keep bioinformaticists busy rather than a serious attempt to improve communications. This is why I've switched to experimental work.
Why not let them push the rules?
I'm sure it'll be great if the teenage coffehouse gets busted by the RIAA or MPAA for sharing 30 gigs of the latest hits. Or if it crashes under the weight of all that porn - although I suppose there's very little you can do to stop that.
If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel.
Yes, he claims that Linus and his supporters were claiming that Linus authored 32,000 lines of code that made a working kernel in a year as a first-year CS student. I read this and thought, wow, maybe Brown has a point. That's a pretty complex app.
So I downloaded some older kernels. I decided to look back earlier than 1.0. 0.01 is available from kernel.org, and is dated from the fall of 1991. With headers and everything, 'wc' reports that the entire thing is less than 7500 lines. (That includes blank lines, comments, lines with a single brace, etc.)
By the time you get to 0.95, released six months later, the kernel has grown to just under 9000 lines. The memory allocation routines are not even by Linux, but contributed by Theodore T'so at MIT.
By July of '92, four months after 0.95, the 0.96c kernel has around 11,500 lines. Linux already has mailing lists and alt.os.linux, and a growing user community testing the code.
Version 1.0 is not released until the spring of 1994, by which point the project was two and a half years old, and had 80 contributors listed. It is indeed around 32,000 lines, and is clearly not all Linus' work. It had also undergone extensive testing by a very skilled community.
Linus' original kernel seems like a very reasonable project for an undergrad, and someone pointed out that it was pretty raw at the beginning. I wrote a large code library this spring, and although it's packed with comments it's about 6000 lines. And I'm a biologist, not a CS student. Looking at kernel 0.01, I think I could write this if I wanted to, once I learned some basic OS design. (Guiding it from an undergrad project into an industry-leading product, on the other hand, I could not do, and therein lies Linus' real brilliance.)
The complete history of kernel releases is publically available on the web, and it's easy to verify that a) the original kernel was both small and incomplete, b) the initial growth of the kernel was slow, c) version 1.0 was neither written in a year nor did it pretend to be written solely by Linus. In other words, Brown is ignorant and/or flat-out lying, and can't even get the facts in his rebuttal correct. He's not doing much to dispell the impression that this is a paid disinformation campaign with little factual basis.
Of course nobody likes nuclear energy. Nuclear's some scary shit even if you don't mess it up, and messing it up is what humanity does.
I love nuclear energy, and I think Sterling is full of shit. To be perfectly honest, I love my first-world, technologically sophisticated existence, and my research depends on having shitloads of electricity available. But I'm also from the Left Coast, and since we still have some natural resources left unpillaged I'd like them to stay that way. So I'm a pro-capitalism, pro-industrial-society environmentalist. It's really not much of a contradiction; I support sustainable development. And I think it'd be great if the rest of the world could have the same happen.
Over here we have it a little easier because of hydroelectric power, which I think is generally the best source we've found so far (although also the most immediately destructive to the environment). Most of the world doesn't have this luxury, and such projects are anathema to environmentalists and can be a huge pain in the ass in general (Three Gorges Dam).
Sterling's objections seemed pretty incoherent to me. The first is that nuclear power is unsafe, which has become a religious rather than scientific argument at this point. (My own impression is that Three Mile Island is one of the most overblown "disasters" in history, and Chernobyl was due to Soviet incompetence. But I'm sure there are plenty of hysterical leftists who will claim otherwise.) The second is that nuclear power == nuclear bombs; or at least that's what I got from his invocation of Hiroshima. This isn't really worth debating; we'll have to worry about nuclear bombs anyway. The third is that we're not doing enough about climate change, and adding a new energy source will make things much worse.
I have no objection to making fossil fuels obsolete; I wouldn't mind seeing a reduction in cars either. (I don't own one; I walk to the grocery store and work, and use public transportation or carpool.) I'm sure as hell NOT going to give up living in the 21st century, though. The claim that nuclear power is a "necessary evil" makes it sound like something we should get rid of ASAP, and Sterling says something similar. This only works if you believe in some dream world where we all grow our own organic vegetables and soybeans, bicycle to work at sunlit offices, and don't need any industrial goods. (That includes medicines, although some leftist environmentalists sound like they're actually endorsing shorter lifespans and global die-offs.)
I get the impression that Sterling would rather see us reverting to candles and typewriters than embracing nuclear power. I guess at least we'd be spared his ridiculous Internet rants.
But a lot of them are sick of the BS, totally-divorced-from-reality, criticism that they hear from people outside of the US.
THANK YOU. I've been trying to say this for years. What's worse is that I've known foreigners living in the US who are just as strident and ignorant in their criticisms. They're also huge consumers of US culture, technology, and education, which makes me suspect more than a little bit of hypocritical nationalism at work.
The thing that really galls me is the condescending attitude most assume when I try to argue with them. They immediately decide that I must be another ignorant American and that it's their duty to educate me about the world. Most of the time this consists of regurgitating random facts that I already read about in American media, many of which are of dubious veracity. If you read nothing but The Guardian and Noam Chomsky, you're just as ill-informed as some Texan listening to Rush and watching Fox News.
They'd rather subsist under a tyrant then die under a freedom fighter.
I used to work with a number of Chinese scientists who'd come to the US for grad school. Some of them clearly intended to stay here as long as possible, but others were more nationalistic. I asked one student (who had pictures of Zhou Enlai and the aftermath of the Naking massacre on his desk) why obviously intelligent people like him continued to put up with the Communists. He said it was because the situation in China kept improving: they now have some form of capitalism, better technology, continuing superpower status, and so on. And as you suggest, as long as you follow the rules you'll do pretty well. He said that if things got worse, they might be more inclined to want a change of government, but right now nobody wanted to rock the boat. I guess if your parents lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, modern China must seem pretty terrific.
I've heard similar claims made about the US, although they're usually made by people who think we're not communist enough.
And a close Sarlac pit.
Those of us in northern California have also been known to refer to it as "Los Angeles".
Dude, seriously, I saw this image in the story and thought the exact same thing.
I'll add a specific example, from last summer. A brief snippet reported on the political opposition to the Patriot Act, and focused exclusively on liberal groups such as the ACLU. Anyone who wasn't more informed would have assumed that the only people fighting the act were left-wing agitators. This is absolutely not true. Some Republicans (including Grover Norquist, who is if nothing else consistent) are remembering that their party is supposed to stand for limited government. And bear in mind that a Republican was responsible for ripping out some of the more nauseating provisions of the act in the first place. I can't prove why Fox didn't see it necessary to mention any of this, but if it's not bias it's certainly shitty reporting.
It's comparable an Op-Ed piece in a newspaper.
I agree, but conservatives have long held up the NY Times op-ed page as evidence of liberal bias, and hammered the paper for every single piece of partisanship displayed by Dowd and Krugman. If we apply the same standards as the Media Research Council, we certainly can blame Fox as well.
The real issue here is not whether organizations may be judged by the political leanings of their paid commentators; it's whether they're responsible for the distortions and lies spread by same.
Up to now there is no conclusive evidence which mechanism triggers cell death in the brain.
Okay, I guess I'm partly extrapolating from other diseases. Isn't Alzheimer's due to buildup of amyloids, and are there other neuorodegenerative disorders that have a similar cause?
IIRC, when they encounter a normal protein, they're able to twist it into a copy of themselves.
That's the right idea, although it's really best described in terms of the statistical mechanics of protein folding. If you have a protein locked in a conformation that exposes a large hydrophobic patch, the tendency will be for that protein to bind other proteins with hydrophobic patches. A misfolded prion protein will propagate itself by stabilizing misfolded conformations of other proteins (probably the same protein, actually, or something related), which otherwise might be transitory.
Eventually the host body is damaged from having a significant amount of their normal protein turned into prions, and dies.
I think it's actually the buildup of prionic aggregates that causes tissue damage; I don't think it affects very many distinct proteins in the cell. It's not a systemic thing; most prion diseases afflict neurons.
My recollection may be a bit off; I saw the guy who discovered them (Stanley Prusiner) give a talk last fall but this is a bit different from what I normally study.
High-impact journals select for, well, high impact, not for better quality. And there is plenty of junk science in Nature, Science, Cell, and other such journals.
Yeah, an impact factor of 30 doesn't mean all that much if half of those citing articles are essentially saying "bullshit." I suspect the retraction rate is much higher on average for these journals than for the good second-tier journals like JMB.
Interestingly, the major article by a sceptic was submitted to PNAS, track II (for those who don't know, track II means it gets published without review, since PNAS is a bit of an "old boys club")
Wrong. Track II means it goes through the normal review process like any other paper. This is a fairly recent addition on the part of PNAS; it used to only allow communications from members.
As a side note, I've noticed that the quality of Track I and III papers varies widely. There's some excellent stuff published that way, and it's never quite clear why it went through that route rather than a more "prestigious" one. I've seen some garbage articles in PNAS as well, but you can't judge an article by its method of acceptance, only by evaluating the evidence yourself.
And, as someone else pointed out, the really prestigious journals publish garbage all the time. The papers that get into a journal like Science are sometimes huge breakthroughs, sometimes they're smaller breakthroughs that just got lucky and appealed to the editor on that particular day, and sometimes they're not much of anything but they present such an interesting or provocative model that they're published anyway. I saw one recent research article that looked like it must have been really difficult to complete but the results really weren't that exciting or useful, but the paper had one spectacular figure extrapolating from their results and that was probably what got it accepted.
I think these nanobacteria are just smaller than bacteria (and larger than viruses), not actually smaller than prions, which still hold the title as the smallest.
Prions are organic infectious agents, but they're not "life" under any standard, and they're also nothing more than corrupted versions of proteins already in the cell. Their replication is a trick of physical chemistry, not a true reproductive process, not even comparable to a virus's hijacking of the cell's machinery. Prions are really more like oncogenic proteins, except with transmissibility.
Viruses are actually more complicated that "strands of protein and RNA"; some have relatively large genomes (~40 proteins) and a fairly intricate structure. Bacteriophages in particular have a wicked-looking protein casing. They're still not life, though, as they don't reproduce on their own and don't metabolize energy. (I think they're also one of the great mysteries of evolution, as well.)
I can't believe there are two of you here having the same delusional fantesy. Theaters full of women climaxing all around you? And you actually believe this happened?
Dude, chill the fuck out. You're taking this too seriously, and you've obviously never watched the movie with a group of college- or high-school-age women. Even during the previews, when Orlando Bloom's name flashed breifly in the teaser for "Pirates of the Caribbean", they shrieked. And I'm joking about the climax part (WHAT DID YOU THINK?), but I'm not the first one to make this comparison. (One chick wrote online that "when Legolas jumped onto the horse, I swear I got pregnant.")
(And, for the record, this is more a nightmare than a fantasy. There's nothing better to remind you of your own failings as a man than listening to a bunch of women your age go ape over some movie star. Although I'd say that my experiences with Hugh Grant in this respect have been much more humbling. Emotionally castrating, actually.)
I'm a former Seattle resident. We managed to ignore the espresso trend for years while regular patrons of Starbucks; my parents have always been coffee lovers (and frequently consumers of mass amounts of the stuff). When we finally noticed espresso (early 90s) my mom initially though it was some yuppie fad that would go the way of fondue. Then one day a coworker convinced her to try a latte.
I think it was '96 or so that we bought her the pump-driven espresso maker for her birthday. About a year later, I started drinking two straight shots of espresso every morning before school. My brother manages to "borrow" money from mom for "mocha runs" to Starbucks every few days; I had to beg her for new clothes when I was his age. A college classmate from Seattle (but going to school on the East Coast) estimated that she spent $500 on Starbucks lattes in one semester.
It's not just an addiction, it's a way of life.
You left out:
- hokey physical comedy and stupid gags, like C3PO in both movies. In retrospect, the special edition of ANH fortells this, with the Jawa being thrown around by some huge lizardlike steed, or Han stepping on Jabba's tail.
- Ridiculous foreshadowing that attempts to tie every single plot thread or character from the original movies into the prequels. Tatooine figures so prominently in the prequels that you'd think the Empire would have been interested in the planet before the droids landed there in ANH. They should have just left the droids out entirely; they had character in the originals, and here they're just cartoonish plot devices. Any bets on whether and how Han Solo will show up in EPIII?
- Overexplanations in general, not just the midichlorians. I don't give a shit whether the stormtroopers are all clones. What made them so scary in the originals was the fact that they've been dehumanized by sticking them behind all that armor. It's actually a lot more frightening if you don't know their origin; they're robot-like, but not robots.
- Which brings me to: all those friggin' robots. Battle droids aren't scary or evil. Stormtroopers are evil, massive Star Destroyers are evil, TIE fighters are evil. The only evil parts of I and II were Darth Maul, Count Dooku, and the Fetts. The Empire had this whole aesthetic style to it that just screamed "heartless planet-crushers and destroyers of hope"; the Trade Federation has crappy faux-Oriental accents and CGI bots.
It's possible I'm mistaken on the Vinn Diesel bit, but the commercials make me sick so I've never watched on of the movies :)
(It's 'Vin', not Vinn, by the way.)
He's very good in Saving Private Ryan, but he's just a supporting character who dies relatively early. Pitch Black is excellent, as B-grade sci-fi movies go, and Diesel is perfect for the part. I definitely recommend the film to all geeks; it's derivative but also well done and genuinely scary at times. The Fast and the Furious is pretty fun if you ignore Paul Walker.
What makes Diesel good in all of these movies is that none of the parts really stretch his acting skills. It's the same reason Ahnuld is so very good on occasion: when a director has the sense to give him the part he was born to play. (Terminator being the classic example.) When a role is mostly macho swagger, what's required isn't really acting but the ability to project charisma from the screen. Diesel is terrific at that. It's just not much to build a career on; Ahnuld was lucky. (It remains to be seen whether he'll be as limited as a governor; I hope not, since I'm a UC student.)
I agree on the elephant scene in ROTK. I loved the rest of the movie, but that seemed like something added in to make the chicks happy. The horse-mounting scene in TTT was much better, partly because it happened so quickly that you didn't have time to think twice about how obviously fake it was. (And I thought the audience response to it was better; I swear half the women in the theater climaxed.)
Actually, that's an interesting point. But ignoring the expanded lore for a moment (I don't really know much of it), the cave on Dagobah is one of those troubling little things that the movie never explains. It probably just started out as a plot device to have Luke face his own dark side, but the Count dying there would make lots of sense. I'd sort of assumed that something like this must have happened; Yoda seems unwilling to talk much about the cave in the movie, like there's some unpleasant memory associated with it.
. . .we had GrokLaw for Watergate, Rodney King, Clinton, and OJ, the world would be a much better place.
I'm not sure how any of these compare. SCO is claiming something that can be largely refuted based on information that's already publically available, albeit in disperse form, across many versions, and fairly large in size. In all of the other cases except King's, the events in question occured relatively in secret. More like if SCO just sued IBM over AIX (but then the Linux community wouldn't give a shit, so what'd be the point of this whole community discovery process?)
You seem to be making the point that a distributed, non-profit, internet based investigation system would be useful more generally for all sorts of civil and criminal cases, but there are almost no cases where there's such a wealth of evidence already available. And keep in mind that our various three-letter agencies are trying to do something similar to uncover terrorist plots, and Slashdotters generally hate some of the methods (i.e. Carnivore, encryption laws) they've applied.
If all of us were doing this collectively out in the open, the potential for invasion of privacy wouldn't be any less and might actually be greater. Take a look at the Powerbook scam article for an example of this; the guy got what he deserved, but isn't it frightening how much the anti-scammers were able to do?