You think an incompetent president would be a good one?
I think another hilariously incompetent, dangerous lunatic of a US president would be good for the perception of America in the rest of the world. What happens within America itself is not much of a concern - their internal movement controls (TSA, inability to walk etc) are becoming effective at stopping Americans leaving their home country, so that's not much of a problem.
Margulis had the relatively rare pleasure of being proved right, in the teeth of pretty solid opposition, in her own life time. But she's also gone a bit OTT with the idea too, straining to wedge many other features of different taxons into other events of endosymbiosis, for which the evidence is much weaker. But she's definitely contributed more than the average room full of professors.
Is a Taser (loose sense) an AC source or a DC source? Considering how relatively easy it is to step up an AC voltage to high values (four off-the-shelf audio transformers would do the electrical work, but the windings might arc-over too easily), I'd bet that it's AC. Just possible that it'll be rectified, but I can't think of a good reason to do so.
... translates (in my book) into "Sales of any form of 'X' suffer, as people stay away in their droves, not wanting to get saddled with a SCSI HD-DVD writer for their Media-PC featuring the powerful 32-bit VL-bus extension to the Standard Architecture.
Oh, sorry, I've already forgotten what today's "X" was. Ah, a "Smart TV." Sounds... like a "why" to me. TV is for vegetating to ; if you want to interact, use a computer?
A suggestion that I don't think makes too much sense given that you'd expect them to be hardening their space vehicles against EM radiation since the Sun is rather good at making space is a rather hostile environment to EM sensitive equipment.
As I understand it, the failure appears to have been in the launcher's final stage, which was intended to move the satellite assembly from LEO to a Mars-intersecting orbit, then separate and fall back to Earth. So, the parts / software that failed had an expected lifetime in space of a few hours, not the 5+ years of the lander and sample-return mission.
I have no delusions that any company of substantial size has ANY respect for the IT team,
You're wrong. The attitude of contempt for the employees is not restricted to the IT department. It extends to all departments.
The critical thing is (IMHO) the point of "substantial size". When things are reasonable, and the Boss knows the cleaner and the cleaner knows the Boss, things are civilised. But as a company grows and you start to lose contact with everyone who works with you, then worsening behaviour becomes possible to the minions.
By the time that you need a human remains mangler ("Human Resources Manager"), it's probably time to leave and join a smaller company. Particularly if you're the Boss.
I've definitely read stuff by Nick Lane, and if I could access Amazon here, I'd be able to find if "Oxygen" is still on my wishlist, or if I'd actually read it. It's certainly been under consideration.
I have a suspicion that you've been misunderstanding something, but since I don't recall reading Lane's book, I think I'd better wait until I have read it.
Question (relevant) : are you familiar with Margulis' well-accepted theory of the origin of complex unicellular organisms by endosymbiosis between previously free-living organisms.
It's a quote from a recent contender for POTUS. She's so rock-breakingly stupid that she thinks North Korea is an ally of the United States. Or she's so rock-breakingly stupid that she's not really aware that there are two "Korea" countries, except as letters to be memorised on a briefing paper shoved under her nose by the puppet masters who pull her strings.
None of which, of course, invalidates her as a potential future POTUS. and in the long run, I think that such a person as "POTUS" would be a good thing.
"Triflic"... well, you've managed the uncommon by stumping me. That's one I've never heard of, at least by that name. [follows link] Trifluoromethanesulphonic acid. Ohh, sounds good already.
"dangerously exothermic."
Can you set that to music.... oh no, it's all right, I hear it's siren song.
Yes, on a scale of zero to "no"... well, it's not something I'd keep under the kitchen sink with children around. Or cats. Or most adults, to be honest. Me included.
1- Oxygen is used by some organisms now.
2- Time exists.
3- Either (molecular) oxygen has been used by organisms since the first moment of time, in which case there is a possible "dead heat" between two (or possibly more) individual organisms for the first one to have been carrying out a chemical reaction involving (molecular) oxygen. At which point you get into uninformative argumentation about how finely you can divide time, and the quality of your measurement. You can waste as much time on that debate as you like.
3a- OR, there was a time in the past when no organisms used molecular oxygen, and you can have a meaningful debate over which class of organism was the first to start using molecular oxygen.
To illuminate the choice in step 3, we have good evidence that the universe was formed without oxygen (atomic or molecular), so there was a time and a place where atomic oxygen first formed, and a time and place where molecular oxygen first formed. Equally (unless you're going to postulate that life has existed for the entire duration of the universe), there was a time and a place where life first originated. Since life and oxygen now co-exist in at least one part of the universe (/self : inhales) then there must have been a time and a place where life and (molecular) oxygen first came into contact, and also a time and place where life first started to make significant use of reactions involving molecular oxygen.
I think I've just given a solid reason for the first (molecular) oxygen-using organisms to have had a time and place of existence, using logic, not dogma.
Are you some sort of god-squaddie idiot? You have the stink of one.
It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water - with which it reacts explosively.
If you don't know what "hypergolic" means, you should. Well, you used "hydrogen-bonded" above in a reasonable place, so you probably know already.
Put your coffee down before following the link. Really.
I thought oxygen was pretty scarce until photosynthesis was used widely by plants and animals.
Photosynthesis was happening long long before plants or animals existed. A number of lines of bacteria (neither plant nor animal) had photosynthetic mechanisms, and one of these lines was co-opted by what became plants to provide them with a pre-packaged "black box" of energy and sugar production, given light and environmental CO2. Those bacteria raised the oxygen concentrations in the environment by some tens of thousands-fold, long before any plants or animals existed. Recently, plants came along, particularly on the surface of the land, and added a modest amount to the oxygen production of the surface. These days, plants are responsible for around a third to a half of oxygen production.
I understand it that and incorporating mitochondria pretty much required for multi-cellular organisms.
Mitochondria are essential parts of all (I think ; counter-examples welcome) eukaryotes. That's all plants, all animals, and around the same number of non-plant, non-animal other eukaryotes. Oh, and fungi too ; they're all eukaryotes, closely related to plants and animals, and more distantly related to all the rest of the eukaryotes. All obligately multicellular organisms are multicellular, though some non-eukaryotes can be opportunistically multicellular.
Or to put it in short - biology is a lot more varied than the broad brush that you may have had painted in school. Much, much more varied.
Shouldn't they be looking for the carbon dioxide eaters?
Well, if you want to find the first organisms that produced oxygen from carbon dioxide, then that might be a useful route to take. But if it turns out that the first oxygen producers did it by consuming something other than carbon dioxide, then you'd be answering the wrong question.
Indeed, if you'd read TFA, you'd realise that they were very specifically looking at molecular evidence for the origin of the ability to produce oxygen by digesting hydrogen peroxide in the environment. Which is... interesting.
It's interesting if it's true - I'm less than convinced, and I don't have access to the original paper to check it - because it suggests that some at least of the molecular tricks for handling one very toxic compound (oxygen) developed from techniques developed for handling one extremely toxic environmentally available compound (hydrogen peroxide). Developing a technique for turning an extremely toxic environmental pollutant into a merely very toxic environmental pollutant will have an energetic and evolutionary cost, but could give a net benefit to the organism. Then, as techniques develop to further detoxify that excreted pollutant, an energy source is found, in an organism that is "pre-adapted" to have appropriate biochemical tools to handle the nasty pollutant.
Hmmm, interesting.
But carbon dioxide fixation is not by any means the only way to produce oxygen.
I've never heard of a UK school (or county education authority, or national government within the UK) making typing training compulsory. Which, given the prevalence of keyboard work as an adjunct to both doing your day-job, and to interacting with government ("send us an email to..."), does strike me as being a bit lacking.
It struck my father as a bit lacking over 30 years ago too - probably because as his job had developed, he'd had to learn hunt-and-peck typing on manual typewriters, then electric typewriters, then on teletype terminals to control lab equipment, and by the time I was in secondary school, he could see computers themselves coming into work (if not into the office environment, yet). So he paid for me to have some typing lessons outside school.
I don't claim to be a touch-typist. But I do have a higher typing speed than most of my colleagues in the same cohort. Damned useful - I can spend more time thinking instead of concentrating on which keys to hit.
Cue the gen-X-Y-or-Z-ers saying that in six months time we're all going to be using voice interfaces. Bull. Shit. Keyboards are going to be around for a long, long time.
Cue the Dvorak-vs-Azerty-vs-Qwerty religious warriors to pause in their flogging of dead horses : not a shit is given about your religious war ; I'm perfectly capable of typing on a UK keyboard, a US keyboard, or a Russian keyboard or a Hebrew keyboard or an Arabic keyboard. (I do get pissed off though when an application changes the keyboard settings when it takes control, but doesn't release them when it releases control. Bastard trick.) Your religions are all wrong - the One-True-Religion for keyboarding is, of course, Pastafarianism. All hail the FSM, who has a noodly appendage for every keyboard in the world, as well as an appendage to touch all users (who wish to be touched).
I don't know about your country, but the UK has never - to the best of my knowledge - required typing to be taught.
The atmospheric CO2 would probably drop via other means if we stopped burning hydrocarbons.
And coal.
And we'd need to stop the large amounts of biomass currently in "suspended animation" in permafrost from decomposing into CO2 as well. (Or methane for that matter, which has a half-life for converting to CO2 of about 10 years.) That's a good few petatonnes. Or is it exatonnes - I forget.
Experience shows that yes, the decline will happen, and relatively rapidly. 100,000 years to 150,000 years, according to the most recent measurements I've seen for the duration of the last couple of examples. (I do, of course, use a geologist's meaning of "rapidly" ; in more common parlance the term "glacial", or "toenail-growing slowly" might be more appropriate. But I'm a geologist, so I'll use "rapidly.")
Some people might think that a technology that could take 90-odd thousand years off the duration of the greenhouse excursion would be a useful addition. But I think that I'll let your great-great-[(great-)^296]great-grandchildren worry about that one. What were our mutual ancestors doing that recently? I think they were just starting to get on with agriculture, but hadn't really started on pottery yet. Depends exactly where your ancestors were living.
I actually agree, but not for the same reasons as you.
Ribbon is actually a great step forward in terms of usability. I wasn't really heavy Office user but have used in from time to time.
I totally disagree. I used to be a pretty heavy, sophisticated user of the MS Office applications (along with actually doing my work ; Office is only a tool for producing reports and presenting results, not for doing anything important.) I'd get pretty pissed off with the details of the UI changing appreciably between versions, from 1990 (when we switched away from Word for DOS v5) all the way through to Office 2005. But I could get on with doing the report-writing and presentation producing which I needed to do within seconds of swapping from my work applications into an Office application.
Then the ribbon was introduced. No choice ; no way back ; no option. No instruction. Hell, this piece of shit even required you to take your fingers off the keyboard, clear desk space, and use the fucking mouse. What does it think it is? Paint?
You can't find anything. Your keyboard accelerators don't work, and even lead you off into holes that you can't get out of. It would sometimes take me thirty seconds to find how to get out of the fucking program and back to doing my work.
Office shit-canned. Portable OpenOffice.Org on a memory device : back to being productive.
The IT department tried forcing me to use MSOffice (still no training and absolutely no discussion) by restricting ability to run programs locally. But they couldn't handle the workload of other support calls. They had to give people the Admin keys in order to do their jobs. So they've given up the fight.
Yes, the Office Ribbon is a wonderful example of how an utterly fucked up user interface can destroy a program's user base.
It does bother me a bit that Nature (the journal, not the mom) is continuing to take a very politically polarized editorial stance. They're really egging on the creationists (pun intended, I guess).
What is political about taking the piss out of people who are afraid to face up to the inevitable reality of their death? And who (largely) live in a foreign country? Egging on Creationists to slaver and scream and soil themselves in their cages is just a permissible blood sport. It's on about the same level of "fun" as pulling the wings off flies, but does have the moral defence that they do, repeatedly, ask for it.
Nah, Nature Blog people - go for it! Put the stick in the bucket, rattle it, watch them come running!
YouTube is blocked at this location. And I fully understand the administrator's reasons for doing it and support him in this. Bandwidth isn't free - about $500/ day here for about 10 business-case users.
Its a hobby
It's not (for me) : it's a means to an end. I didn't know (until now) that there are many different techniques. That's it ; for me you've just killed the whole subject stone cold dead. I'll buy the boards ready populated, wire up headers where I need to so I can access appropriate points, and use what skills I do have to do the things I am interested in.
[Ham]
Not interested. Never have been, and unlikely ever to be. It's possible that it'll become a tool along the way to an end that I'm interested in (it was under consideration in the past). But I don't think that's terribly likely.
Otherwise, I'm paying an additional $20 a month for nothing.
You're thinking about things and analysing the situation to your benefit. You're not their target range of consumer, and are quite likely a terrorist bent on undermining the free market model that has taken such good care of your nations economy.
Well done. The black helicopter will be around to deliver your tickets to extraterritorial interrogation soon. Don't bother to pack.
Slashdot Mirror
I think another hilariously incompetent, dangerous lunatic of a US president would be good for the perception of America in the rest of the world. What happens within America itself is not much of a concern - their internal movement controls (TSA, inability to walk etc) are becoming effective at stopping Americans leaving their home country, so that's not much of a problem.
Margulis had the relatively rare pleasure of being proved right, in the teeth of pretty solid opposition, in her own life time. But she's also gone a bit OTT with the idea too, straining to wedge many other features of different taxons into other events of endosymbiosis, for which the evidence is much weaker. But she's definitely contributed more than the average room full of professors.
Stop tempting me!
You don't say?
Is a Taser (loose sense) an AC source or a DC source? Considering how relatively easy it is to step up an AC voltage to high values (four off-the-shelf audio transformers would do the electrical work, but the windings might arc-over too easily), I'd bet that it's AC. Just possible that it'll be rectified, but I can't think of a good reason to do so.
Oh, sorry, I've already forgotten what today's "X" was. Ah, a "Smart TV." Sounds ... like a "why" to me. TV is for vegetating to ; if you want to interact, use a computer?
As I understand it, the failure appears to have been in the launcher's final stage, which was intended to move the satellite assembly from LEO to a Mars-intersecting orbit, then separate and fall back to Earth. So, the parts / software that failed had an expected lifetime in space of a few hours, not the 5+ years of the lander and sample-return mission.
You're wrong. The attitude of contempt for the employees is not restricted to the IT department. It extends to all departments.
The critical thing is (IMHO) the point of "substantial size". When things are reasonable, and the Boss knows the cleaner and the cleaner knows the Boss, things are civilised. But as a company grows and you start to lose contact with everyone who works with you, then worsening behaviour becomes possible to the minions.
By the time that you need a human remains mangler ("Human Resources Manager"), it's probably time to leave and join a smaller company. Particularly if you're the Boss.
I have a suspicion that you've been misunderstanding something, but since I don't recall reading Lane's book, I think I'd better wait until I have read it.
Question (relevant) : are you familiar with Margulis' well-accepted theory of the origin of complex unicellular organisms by endosymbiosis between previously free-living organisms.
None of which, of course, invalidates her as a potential future POTUS. and in the long run, I think that such a person as "POTUS" would be a good thing.
"dangerously exothermic."
Can you set that to music .... oh no, it's all right, I hear it's siren song.
Yes, on a scale of zero to "no" ... well, it's not something I'd keep under the kitchen sink with children around. Or cats. Or most adults, to be honest. Me included.
1- Oxygen is used by some organisms now.
2- Time exists.
3- Either (molecular) oxygen has been used by organisms since the first moment of time, in which case there is a possible "dead heat" between two (or possibly more) individual organisms for the first one to have been carrying out a chemical reaction involving (molecular) oxygen. At which point you get into uninformative argumentation about how finely you can divide time, and the quality of your measurement. You can waste as much time on that debate as you like.
3a- OR, there was a time in the past when no organisms used molecular oxygen, and you can have a meaningful debate over which class of organism was the first to start using molecular oxygen.
To illuminate the choice in step 3, we have good evidence that the universe was formed without oxygen (atomic or molecular), so there was a time and a place where atomic oxygen first formed, and a time and place where molecular oxygen first formed. Equally (unless you're going to postulate that life has existed for the entire duration of the universe), there was a time and a place where life first originated. Since life and oxygen now co-exist in at least one part of the universe ( /self : inhales) then there must have been a time and a place where life and (molecular) oxygen first came into contact, and also a time and place where life first started to make significant use of reactions involving molecular oxygen.
I think I've just given a solid reason for the first (molecular) oxygen-using organisms to have had a time and place of existence, using logic, not dogma.
Are you some sort of god-squaddie idiot? You have the stink of one.
"OIL RIG" for me. Oxidation Is Loss ; Reduction Is Gain.
What is a Ger, and why would Leo have one? (partial answer : a Mongolian felt hut)
Specifically, IIRC, zirconium.
Meh.
This blog may give you a warm and cuddly feeling about good ol' fluorine : Sand Won't Save You This Time
For a taste :
If you don't know what "hypergolic" means, you should. Well, you used "hydrogen-bonded" above in a reasonable place, so you probably know already.
Put your coffee down before following the link.
Really.
Photosynthesis was happening long long before plants or animals existed. A number of lines of bacteria (neither plant nor animal) had photosynthetic mechanisms, and one of these lines was co-opted by what became plants to provide them with a pre-packaged "black box" of energy and sugar production, given light and environmental CO2. Those bacteria raised the oxygen concentrations in the environment by some tens of thousands-fold, long before any plants or animals existed. Recently, plants came along, particularly on the surface of the land, and added a modest amount to the oxygen production of the surface. These days, plants are responsible for around a third to a half of oxygen production.
Mitochondria are essential parts of all (I think ; counter-examples welcome) eukaryotes. That's all plants, all animals, and around the same number of non-plant, non-animal other eukaryotes. Oh, and fungi too ; they're all eukaryotes, closely related to plants and animals, and more distantly related to all the rest of the eukaryotes. All obligately multicellular organisms are multicellular, though some non-eukaryotes can be opportunistically multicellular.
Or to put it in short - biology is a lot more varied than the broad brush that you may have had painted in school. Much, much more varied.
Well, if you want to find the first organisms that produced oxygen from carbon dioxide, then that might be a useful route to take. But if it turns out that the first oxygen producers did it by consuming something other than carbon dioxide, then you'd be answering the wrong question.
Indeed, if you'd read TFA, you'd realise that they were very specifically looking at molecular evidence for the origin of the ability to produce oxygen by digesting hydrogen peroxide in the environment. Which is ... interesting.
It's interesting if it's true - I'm less than convinced, and I don't have access to the original paper to check it - because it suggests that some at least of the molecular tricks for handling one very toxic compound (oxygen) developed from techniques developed for handling one extremely toxic environmentally available compound (hydrogen peroxide). Developing a technique for turning an extremely toxic environmental pollutant into a merely very toxic environmental pollutant will have an energetic and evolutionary cost, but could give a net benefit to the organism. Then, as techniques develop to further detoxify that excreted pollutant, an energy source is found, in an organism that is "pre-adapted" to have appropriate biochemical tools to handle the nasty pollutant.
Hmmm, interesting.
But carbon dioxide fixation is not by any means the only way to produce oxygen.
That's an interesting piece of work.
I'm phoning Tehran, but it's siesta time. Call back in an hour.
I've never heard of a UK school (or county education authority, or national government within the UK) making typing training compulsory. Which, given the prevalence of keyboard work as an adjunct to both doing your day-job, and to interacting with government ("send us an email to ..."), does strike me as being a bit lacking.
It struck my father as a bit lacking over 30 years ago too - probably because as his job had developed, he'd had to learn hunt-and-peck typing on manual typewriters, then electric typewriters, then on teletype terminals to control lab equipment, and by the time I was in secondary school, he could see computers themselves coming into work (if not into the office environment, yet). So he paid for me to have some typing lessons outside school.
I don't claim to be a touch-typist. But I do have a higher typing speed than most of my colleagues in the same cohort. Damned useful - I can spend more time thinking instead of concentrating on which keys to hit.
Cue the gen-X-Y-or-Z-ers saying that in six months time we're all going to be using voice interfaces. Bull. Shit. Keyboards are going to be around for a long, long time.
Cue the Dvorak-vs-Azerty-vs-Qwerty religious warriors to pause in their flogging of dead horses : not a shit is given about your religious war ; I'm perfectly capable of typing on a UK keyboard, a US keyboard, or a Russian keyboard or a Hebrew keyboard or an Arabic keyboard.
(I do get pissed off though when an application changes the keyboard settings when it takes control, but doesn't release them when it releases control. Bastard trick.)
Your religions are all wrong - the One-True-Religion for keyboarding is, of course, Pastafarianism. All hail the FSM, who has a noodly appendage for every keyboard in the world, as well as an appendage to touch all users (who wish to be touched).
I don't know about your country, but the UK has never - to the best of my knowledge - required typing to be taught.
What is terminal velocity for an apple? A couple of hundred metres/second? You could probably do the experiments with a medium size housing block.
And coal.
And we'd need to stop the large amounts of biomass currently in "suspended animation" in permafrost from decomposing into CO2 as well. (Or methane for that matter, which has a half-life for converting to CO2 of about 10 years.) That's a good few petatonnes. Or is it exatonnes - I forget.
Experience shows that yes, the decline will happen, and relatively rapidly. 100,000 years to 150,000 years, according to the most recent measurements I've seen for the duration of the last couple of examples. (I do, of course, use a geologist's meaning of "rapidly" ; in more common parlance the term "glacial", or "toenail-growing slowly" might be more appropriate. But I'm a geologist, so I'll use "rapidly.")
Some people might think that a technology that could take 90-odd thousand years off the duration of the greenhouse excursion would be a useful addition. But I think that I'll let your great-great-[(great-)^296]great-grandchildren worry about that one. What were our mutual ancestors doing that recently? I think they were just starting to get on with agriculture, but hadn't really started on pottery yet. Depends exactly where your ancestors were living.
I actually agree, but not for the same reasons as you.
I totally disagree. I used to be a pretty heavy, sophisticated user of the MS Office applications (along with actually doing my work ; Office is only a tool for producing reports and presenting results, not for doing anything important.) I'd get pretty pissed off with the details of the UI changing appreciably between versions, from 1990 (when we switched away from Word for DOS v5) all the way through to Office 2005. But I could get on with doing the report-writing and presentation producing which I needed to do within seconds of swapping from my work applications into an Office application.
Then the ribbon was introduced. No choice ; no way back ; no option. No instruction. Hell, this piece of shit even required you to take your fingers off the keyboard, clear desk space, and use the fucking mouse. What does it think it is? Paint?
You can't find anything. Your keyboard accelerators don't work, and even lead you off into holes that you can't get out of. It would sometimes take me thirty seconds to find how to get out of the fucking program and back to doing my work.
Office shit-canned. Portable OpenOffice.Org on a memory device : back to being productive.
The IT department tried forcing me to use MSOffice (still no training and absolutely no discussion) by restricting ability to run programs locally. But they couldn't handle the workload of other support calls. They had to give people the Admin keys in order to do their jobs. So they've given up the fight.
Yes, the Office Ribbon is a wonderful example of how an utterly fucked up user interface can destroy a program's user base.
What is political about taking the piss out of people who are afraid to face up to the inevitable reality of their death? And who (largely) live in a foreign country? Egging on Creationists to slaver and scream and soil themselves in their cages is just a permissible blood sport. It's on about the same level of "fun" as pulling the wings off flies, but does have the moral defence that they do, repeatedly, ask for it.
Nah, Nature Blog people - go for it! Put the stick in the bucket, rattle it, watch them come running!
YouTube is blocked at this location. And I fully understand the administrator's reasons for doing it and support him in this. Bandwidth isn't free - about $500/ day here for about 10 business-case users.
It's not (for me) : it's a means to an end. I didn't know (until now) that there are many different techniques. That's it ; for me you've just killed the whole subject stone cold dead. I'll buy the boards ready populated, wire up headers where I need to so I can access appropriate points, and use what skills I do have to do the things I am interested in.
Not interested. Never have been, and unlikely ever to be. It's possible that it'll become a tool along the way to an end that I'm interested in (it was under consideration in the past). But I don't think that's terribly likely.
You're thinking about things and analysing the situation to your benefit. You're not their target range of consumer, and are quite likely a terrorist bent on undermining the free market model that has taken such good care of your nations economy.
Well done. The black helicopter will be around to deliver your tickets to extraterritorial interrogation soon. Don't bother to pack.