Something of a chess novice, I watched this game on ESPN2 yesterday, and I was very confused that Kasparov offered Deep Junior a draw immediately after his rook sacrifice. ESPN's analyst thought, and I agreed, that Kasparov was in a relatively strong position. However Kasparov spent 15 minutes debating that sacrifice. Did he see something nobody else saw? Does anybody here know why he offered a draw, why Deep Junior rejected the offer, and why they agreed to draw a couple of moves later?
Well actually... Bollywood produces more movies than the American film industry does. (See this link.) Indian movies have substantial audiences in the UK, the Middle East, Africa, East Asia and (randomly) Greece. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Indian films are crud. There's hope though... gems like Lagaan (Go see it. Really.)
Well I'm glad I got an intelligent reply. I do not have a problem with *undirected* research. I have a major problem with *unfocussed* research. Let me give you an example. I've done research on the proteins involved in the development of fruit-flies - how do they make a wing where they need a wing, and so forth. This is pretty much "blue sky" research. However, as a by-product, people in that lab found an efficient, easy way to screen potential drugs for colon cancer. That's a great, immediate pay-off. Perhaps more importantly, solving the fruit flies development will provide valuable insight into the development of other more complex organisms.
I've also done some research I'm not so proud of - on the parental effects of recombination in fruit flies. Basically, the more sex a female fruit fly has, the greater the probability of certain kinds of mutations in her offspring. This is presumably due to proteins in the male's semen. All well and good. Except - this system is *unique* to fruit flies. In every other organism we've studied, the system of recombination is drastically different. Although everyone involved in this research project was very nice and very well-meaning, I cannot help but think that it was something of a waste of time and resources.
As you may have gathered, I know a bit about fruit flies and other weird and wonderful creatures. However, thanks for your reply and your spirited defence of pure science.
Carbohydrates are technically all compounds with the formula Cx H2y Oy; they have hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio, plus carbon ("hydrates of carbon", get it?).
Glucose and formaldehyde are both technically carbohydrates, but calling formaldehyde a carbohydrate is a bit like calling a tomato a fruit. Scientifically, a tomato is a fruit, but in the real world it's a vegetable. Similiarly, carbohydrate normally refers to carbohydrate compounds with at least 4-5 carbon atoms. This includes pentoses (ribose, found in RNA), hexoses (glucose, fructose etc.) all the way up to starch and cellulose, which are polymers of hexoses.
I disagree with the author's basic assumption: that the purpose of science is to find a higher truth, for its own sake, and that benefits to humanity are merely tangential spinoffs. I think science's purpose should be to create things that will improve the human condition, especially in fields of inquiry such as biology, where the results of scientific research can have almost immediate, tangible results on people.
I understand the arguments for more or less undirected research, that electricity or quantum physics or [insert science here] would never have been discovered without it. I disagree. Directed research would, I feel, have lead us to all of our modern breakthroughs anyway. It frustrates me, as a student, to see scientists waste time, money and effort on questions that are fundamentally not that important. It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
The interviewee talks about companies being forced/sued to be accessible, in the real world and on the web. Does anybody know what laws govern this? What is Section 508, or the WAI?
I'm not sure that there ought to be laws mandating accessibility to disabled people. I mean, that's really upto the business or individuals concerned.
\I"ron*y\, n.[L. ironia, Gr. ? dissimulation, fr. ? a dissembler in speech, fr. ? to speak; perh. akin to E. word: cf. F. ironie.] 1. Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist.
2. A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the literal sense of the words.
tconnors(UID #91126) posted a link to the original paper, the last time this was posted on/.
Not to karma whore or anything:), but this is a fascinating paper. They talk about how Strange Quark Nuggets contain strange, up and down quarks, which makes them stable enough to exist without condensing into protons and neutrons. It also talks about how SQNs are dark matter candidates - so these paired seismic events may be proof of this form of dark matter.
This seems like an amazing amount of work - they went through nearly 10 million seismic event records, from 1981 to 1993.
Well... I don't think that the morphology of the human body is in any way a fractal system.
However, in 1997, West, Brown and Enquist (Science 276:122-126) showed that vertebrate circulatory systems are space-filling fractal networks and this in turn could explain the scaling relations between mass and metabolic rates etc. If BMR scaled with volume, we would expect 1/3 exponential scaling; however, since BMR scales with a "four-dimensional" fractal network, BMR = a*M^(3/4).
The West et al paper is mathematically somewhat involved - there is a good summary by Williams (Science 276:34).
The paper you talk about (Cello, Paul and Wimmer, Science 297: 1016-1018) describes the de novo synthesis of Poliovirus. The authors used polymerases in a cell-free system to translate synthetic cDNA derived from the entire polio genome. The synthetic virus did not differ significantly from the wild-type phenotype (i.e., it was not a "1000 times less potent"). Admittedly, the polymerases used were ultimately of biological origin; however there was no force vital that hindered the synthetic poliovirus. Article specifically states that vitalism was shattered, and that poliovirus is "a chemical with a life cycle". Quo vadis, neovitalism?
And the rest of your troll goes downhill from there. "Life begets life" dates back to the mid-19th century, and is an empirical observation that countered hypotheses like maggots spontaneously arising from rotting meat.
Morphogenesis is a genuine scientific concept, but there is nothing mysterious about it. These "patterns" you speak of, they sound strangely like "genes", don't they? Hmm.
I could find no reference to Penrose and a quantum description of human consciousness. This sounds bogus to me, but even if he did seriously make that claim, human consciousness is in no way a prerequisite for life. A bacterium or an earthworm has no human consciousness.
And finally emergism. Certainly, in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole can replicate, while the parts cannot. Living organisms are emergent systems, but there is nothing mysterious about emergent systems per se.
The relation of life to matter is indeed an old philosophical problem. My own religion (Hinduism) has some very interesting perspectives on the divisions between mind, matter and spirit. However this has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I am not personally qualified to talk about AI and whether are not it is feasible. However, judging from the rest of your post, I doubt your competence in that field of human endeavor as well.
You don't need water to buff it! Although some militaries teach soldiers to use water, you can get a good shine by just buffing it dry, with wax-based polish.
I agree that was a crappily put together headline. I thought *genes* had made the jump from corn to soy.
Genes sometimes do make interspecies jumps: at least in the lab, bacteria can transduce genes from one species to another. A bacterial plasmid (small circular piece of DNA) integrated into a host genome can excise a small part of the host's genome, replicate, and reintegrate into another host's genome, even if the second host is of a different species. Plasmid integration is fairly common in plants, and integration of the T-plasmid from B. thuringiensis is the basis for most pest-resistant crops.
Transposons could also potentially transduce genetic materials between species.
You know, I was thinking about this earlier... I think it would be cool to have a spin-off about a *Klingon* ship on it's adventures through space. The characters would not be as one-dimensional as, say, Voyager, and they could do some interesting things with Klingon history, ethics etc. Also, a whole lot more fighting and no stupid Prime Directive;)
Vatican/HP To Put Library Online Slashdot - 4 minutes ago... 4567222). I thought for a fleeting moment that The Vatican had acquired HP. I would've liked to have seen the org chart for that one......
All those people worrying about asphyxiating on carbon monoxide...
CO binds very tightly to metallic ligands such as copper. The Carbon atom has an unbound lone pair of electrons, that are donated to the metal's d-electron shell. Additionally the CO molecule creates a pi-back-bonding system with the metal center, making the complex even more stable.
Upshot: the CO is not going to spontaneously leak off the chip into your atmosphere. In any case, I doubt that such logic circuits would contain sufficient carbon monoxide to pose a health threat.
(Interesting side note: CO asphyxiates you by binding very tightly to the iron in hemoglobin in your blood, much more tightly than oxygen can. IIRC, however, CO will preferentially bind to copper over Fe.)
Long range, imaginative plans... A next generation telescope at L2, shielded from the Earth's EM output by the moon... This is really exciting. Good luck NASA. I hope we get this done eventually, regardless of how much it winds up costing.
Slashdot Mirror
Something of a chess novice, I watched this game on ESPN2 yesterday, and I was very confused that Kasparov offered Deep Junior a draw immediately after his rook sacrifice. ESPN's analyst thought, and I agreed, that Kasparov was in a relatively strong position. However Kasparov spent 15 minutes debating that sacrifice. Did he see something nobody else saw? Does anybody here know why he offered a draw, why Deep Junior rejected the offer, and why they agreed to draw a couple of moves later?
Honestly, I can't see this satisfying anyone's caloric needs.
Sigh... this patch isn't trying to deliver calories. It's trying to deliver micronutrients - vitamins and minerals. Just RTFA.
That's not potatoid... It's PEOPLE! Pringles(tm) is PEOPLE!!!!
mmm... sour cream...
Well actually... Bollywood produces more movies than the American film industry does. (See this link.) Indian movies have substantial audiences in the UK, the Middle East, Africa, East Asia and (randomly) Greece. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Indian films are crud. There's hope though... gems like Lagaan (Go see it. Really.)
Well I'm glad I got an intelligent reply.
I do not have a problem with *undirected* research. I have a major problem with *unfocussed* research. Let me give you an example. I've done research on the proteins involved in the development of fruit-flies - how do they make a wing where they need a wing, and so forth. This is pretty much "blue sky" research. However, as a by-product, people in that lab found an efficient, easy way to screen potential drugs for colon cancer. That's a great, immediate pay-off. Perhaps more importantly, solving the fruit flies development will provide valuable insight into the development of other more complex organisms.
I've also done some research I'm not so proud of - on the parental effects of recombination in fruit flies. Basically, the more sex a female fruit fly has, the greater the probability of certain kinds of mutations in her offspring. This is presumably due to proteins in the male's semen. All well and good. Except - this system is *unique* to fruit flies. In every other organism we've studied, the system of recombination is drastically different. Although everyone involved in this research project was very nice and very well-meaning, I cannot help but think that it was something of a waste of time and resources.
As you may have gathered, I know a bit about fruit flies and other weird and wonderful creatures. However, thanks for your reply and your spirited defence of pure science.
Carbohydrates are technically all compounds with the formula Cx H2y Oy; they have hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio, plus carbon ("hydrates of carbon", get it?).
Glucose and formaldehyde are both technically carbohydrates, but calling formaldehyde a carbohydrate is a bit like calling a tomato a fruit. Scientifically, a tomato is a fruit, but in the real world it's a vegetable. Similiarly, carbohydrate normally refers to carbohydrate compounds with at least 4-5 carbon atoms. This includes pentoses (ribose, found in RNA), hexoses (glucose, fructose etc.) all the way up to starch and cellulose, which are polymers of hexoses.
HTH
I disagree with the author's basic assumption: that the purpose of science is to find a higher truth, for its own sake, and that benefits to humanity are merely tangential spinoffs. I think science's purpose should be to create things that will improve the human condition, especially in fields of inquiry such as biology, where the results of scientific research can have almost immediate, tangible results on people.
I understand the arguments for more or less undirected research, that electricity or quantum physics or [insert science here] would never have been discovered without it. I disagree. Directed research would, I feel, have lead us to all of our modern breakthroughs anyway. It frustrates me, as a student, to see scientists waste time, money and effort on questions that are fundamentally not that important. It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
The interviewee talks about companies being forced/sued to be accessible, in the real world and on the web. Does anybody know what laws govern this? What is Section 508, or the WAI?
I'm not sure that there ought to be laws mandating accessibility to disabled people. I mean, that's really upto the business or individuals concerned.
Radio-iodine is used to treat thyroid cancer. Not saying this is definitely not BS, but it could be legit. HTH
It's "Y'all", not "Ya'll"
;-)
Damn white boys
This is beautiful. Slashdot's two greatest pr0nographers are flaming each other about philosophy. Doesn't get any better than that.
Webster's:"irony"
\I"ron*y\, n.[L. ironia, Gr. ? dissimulation, fr. ? a dissembler in speech, fr. ? to speak; perh. akin to E. word: cf. F. ironie.] 1. Dissimulation; ignorance feigned for the purpose of confounding or provoking an antagonist.
2. A sort of humor, ridicule, or light sarcasm, which adopts a mode of speech the meaning of which is contrary to the literal sense of the words.
heh.
"Sometimes people go too far in being a fan of a great movie or of a great book."
Case in point:
"After seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, you have probably fantasized about living in a Hobbit Hole and lazing about in the shade."
Um... not sure how to break this to you, but NO I HAVEN'T.
*shakes head*
Too far gone, this one is.
tconnors(UID #91126) posted a link to the original paper, the last time this was posted on /.
:), but this is a fascinating paper. They talk about how Strange Quark Nuggets contain strange, up and down quarks, which makes them stable enough to exist without condensing into protons and neutrons. It also talks about how SQNs are dark matter candidates - so these paired seismic events may be proof of this form of dark matter.
Not to karma whore or anything
This seems like an amazing amount of work - they went through nearly 10 million seismic event records, from 1981 to 1993.
Well... I don't think that the morphology of the human body is in any way a fractal system.
However, in 1997, West, Brown and Enquist (Science 276:122-126) showed that vertebrate circulatory systems are space-filling fractal networks and this in turn could explain the scaling relations between mass and metabolic rates etc. If BMR scaled with volume, we would expect 1/3 exponential scaling; however, since BMR scales with a "four-dimensional" fractal network, BMR = a*M^(3/4).
The West et al paper is mathematically somewhat involved - there is a good summary by Williams (Science 276:34).
The paper you talk about (Cello, Paul and Wimmer, Science 297: 1016-1018) describes the de novo synthesis of Poliovirus. The authors used polymerases in a cell-free system to translate synthetic cDNA derived from the entire polio genome. The synthetic virus did not differ significantly from the wild-type phenotype (i.e., it was not a "1000 times less potent"). Admittedly, the polymerases used were ultimately of biological origin; however there was no force vital that hindered the synthetic poliovirus. Article specifically states that vitalism was shattered, and that poliovirus is "a chemical with a life cycle". Quo vadis, neovitalism?
And the rest of your troll goes downhill from there. "Life begets life" dates back to the mid-19th century, and is an empirical observation that countered hypotheses like maggots spontaneously arising from rotting meat.
Morphogenesis is a genuine scientific concept, but there is nothing mysterious about it. These "patterns" you speak of, they sound strangely like "genes", don't they? Hmm.
I could find no reference to Penrose and a quantum description of human consciousness. This sounds bogus to me, but even if he did seriously make that claim, human consciousness is in no way a prerequisite for life. A bacterium or an earthworm has no human consciousness.
And finally emergism. Certainly, in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole can replicate, while the parts cannot. Living organisms are emergent systems, but there is nothing mysterious about emergent systems per se.
The relation of life to matter is indeed an old philosophical problem. My own religion (Hinduism) has some very interesting perspectives on the divisions between mind, matter and spirit. However this has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I am not personally qualified to talk about AI and whether are not it is feasible. However, judging from the rest of your post, I doubt your competence in that field of human endeavor as well.
You'd just have to run around naked in the rain...
So take a shower, is that what you're saying? Dammit that doesn't help at all.
Accursed lameness filter.
You don't need water to buff it! Although some militaries teach soldiers to use water, you can get a good shine by just buffing it dry, with wax-based polish.
I agree that was a crappily put together headline. I thought *genes* had made the jump from corn to soy.
Genes sometimes do make interspecies jumps: at least in the lab, bacteria can transduce genes from one species to another. A bacterial plasmid (small circular piece of DNA) integrated into a host genome can excise a small part of the host's genome, replicate, and reintegrate into another host's genome, even if the second host is of a different species. Plasmid integration is fairly common in plants, and integration of the T-plasmid from B. thuringiensis is the basis for most pest-resistant crops.
Transposons could also potentially transduce genetic materials between species.
You know, I was thinking about this earlier... I think it would be cool to have a spin-off about a *Klingon* ship on it's adventures through space. The characters would not be as one-dimensional as, say, Voyager, and they could do some interesting things with Klingon history, ethics etc. Also, a whole lot more fighting and no stupid Prime Directive ;)
I would pick up both. But maybe that's just me.
Wait. I have a 400 MHz Celeron - NOOOO!!!! My computer's worthless... as it was when I bought it, 3+ years ago.
The news.google.com results:
... 4567222). I thought for a fleeting moment that The Vatican had acquired ...
...blargle...
Vatican/HP To Put Library Online
Slashdot - 4 minutes ago
HP. I would've liked to have seen the org chart for that one...
[snip]
All those people worrying about asphyxiating on carbon monoxide...
CO binds very tightly to metallic ligands such as copper. The Carbon atom has an unbound lone pair of electrons, that are donated to the metal's d-electron shell. Additionally the CO molecule creates a pi-back-bonding system with the metal center, making the complex even more stable.
Upshot: the CO is not going to spontaneously leak off the chip into your atmosphere. In any case, I doubt that such logic circuits would contain sufficient carbon monoxide to pose a health threat.
(Interesting side note: CO asphyxiates you by binding very tightly to the iron in hemoglobin in your blood, much more tightly than oxygen can. IIRC, however, CO will preferentially bind to copper over Fe.)
*What* has been solved? EP-what?...
NOOO!!!!
Why have I never heard of this? I must be getting dumber!
Now I'm sure all these uber-geeks are laughing at me.
Must sit still. Must...find...something...cogent...to...say...
Long range, imaginative plans... A next generation telescope at L2, shielded from the Earth's EM output by the moon... This is really exciting. Good luck NASA. I hope we get this done eventually, regardless of how much it winds up costing.