The entire game was a giant demo for the Havok engine. It's a poster child for letting your technology drive game design, when it should be done the other way. Bad Valve. No cookie!
I'm curious what they spent four years on when they licensed the Havok engine only a year before release.
Of course UO and WOW will go out of style! Who wouldn't want the number of users of WOW with the famous stability of Ultima Online?
No, seriously. I think it would be neat to combine some genres. Sniper rifles make any game better -- especially golf.
And who wouldn't want to do Grand Turisimo Online while Turok Dinosaur Hunters are driving herds of wild brontosauruses across the I-5?
Could be very fun, but obviously if companies can't even keep their own games debugged (WOW has greatly declined in stablility, frame rate, and lag in the last year), I hold no hope they could keep an exponentially more complex game running at all.
A fight broke out between a British guy and a store clerk at Ralph's a little past midnight. All the Ralph's employees were beating on him, the British guy's friends came in... it wasn't pretty. Those of us customers who weren't involved in the fight were dailing 911, and all of us got put on hold when we called. After 15 minutes, one of us got in so I don't know how long we could have waited.
If my house had been burning down, I'd have been mighty upset at being placed on hold for 15.
Regardless of what you may have read in an article, selective infantcide is still very pervasive.
I know two girls who are only around today because the doctor misread the ultrasound and thought they were a boy. Let me tell you, this doesn't lead to good relations with your parents later in life.
And sure, it's illegal. Whatever. What the doctor does is smile if it's a boy, frown if it's a girl. Then without anything obvious at all being said, the parents spontaneously decide to abort or not.
Regardless of if you are for or against abortion, selective abortion is a heinous crime against humanity. The Chinese can easily think us uncivilized because we don't know Chinese manners (which are actually pretty hard to learn), but we can think they uncivilized because of practices like these and others. It drives some of my Chinese (living in China native Chinese) friends crazy when I say that China has a barbaric civilization. =)
My graduate advisor was Dr. Scott Baden, also in parallel computation, and for a year or two Dr. Baden and Berman shared a lab before expanding into two separate labs. I took all the graduate classes she offered. She's a real smart woman, and I think she was on to something.
Maybe not invent the theory of relativity every week, but at least trying to look at a new problem or a new solution to something once a month to keep your academic spirit of inquiry alive sounds like a good idea to me.
Re:Posession of a controlled substance
on
Cocaine Biosensor
·
· Score: 1
A friend of mine worked in a compounding lab where they handled large blocks of pure cocaine on a daily basis. Security on the place was pretty tight, so maybe a sensor like this would help prevent "slippage".
Hmm, looking back at what I just wrote, I guess it's not clear which side of the law he was working for. =)
(Yeah, it was a legit pharmaceutical compounding lab. Apparently there's a wide variety of drugs you can make out of cocaine.)
>>The two new ones are a simulator for pharmaceutical >>development and a new approach to solid state light sources
In, hmm, 1999 or so I worked for the Bionengineering Department at UCSD for a grant funded by Proctor and Gamble. The BIONOME project sort of went nowhere, really (you can find the hacked apart website still up at bionome.sdsc.edu. Or, wait. I guess it's down now. But there's something of a reference here: http://cgi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/General/CC/irg/cl earing/projectAbstract.pl?projid=955
But the point is, as soon as I finished the coding, a manager from P&G flew out, talked with the professor, myself, and the other people working on the project, and flew off with a floppy disk full of source code and a happy smile on his face.
Sure, the UCSD Bioengineering Department was #1 in the nation (maybe still is, I haven't checked recently), but everyone was doing this stuff seven years ago. Maybe he's done something a little different or better (evolutionarily new), but it's not a revolutionary concept at all. Big Pharma is all over computers, databases, and simulations these days. P&G and Johnson and Johnson both wanted to hire me, but P&G is in Ohio, and J&J wanted me to do database stuff, which isn't where my interests lie.
A graduate advisor I once had said that if you weren't coming up with one new idea a month, you shouldn't be in academia. That's a pretty fast pace, IMO, but I have come up with ideas nobody else has thought of, am working for a family business (because my mother thought of a business model nobody had done before), and my dad just sits around all day putting things together to try stuff completely new. He was working on free metropolitan WIFI nets years before you started hearing about them going up around the country, for example.
If you remove the slander, libel and half-truths from politics, you'd have a bunch of politicians standing on stage saying nothing. =)
It's an interesting idea, and it might strike the right level of balance for Free Speech. However, one should always be able to say they support a candidate or agree with his views. Currently even such speech is regulated or prohibited under the bill, which is what worries me the most. And I'm not talking ads bought on the air, even just posts such as these. Very worrisome.
Well, what the problem is, IIRC, is that if you publish a post on Slashdot bashing/supporting Bush, it can be construed as a soft ad, and it would be prohibited. That's what soft ads are -- you don't give anything directly to the party, you just run a TV ad or print an article on your own supporting an issue or candidate.
McCain Feingold restricts this, which is a very grim curtailing of free speech. Open political debate is a very central part of the American political system.
>>Yes, highly skilled in both anthropology and history there too
The other posted his speculation about why Irish people would have a much lower rate of mutation in their alcohol dehydrogenase genes, not me. I simply agreed with him that drinking weak alcohol was common in the middle ages.
>>See above for details. Pharmacology does not an accurate picture of history make.
Ain't talking about history. Read my original post. I posted a purely scientific reference (that Irish have low rates, asians have high), and you came back with a "laugh at the drunk paddies" post, and that I was making it up. Now that you've seen that I wasn't, I note you still haven't retracted that statement.
>>Sigh. Just out of interest, rather than the many points >> I could raise here, why don't I just ask how one can be >> "almost half Irish".
Grandfather was a genealogist. I'm 3/8th Irish. That's how someone can be almost half Irish. I apologize if "higher order fractions" are a bit hard for you to understand.
> Having been born and raised in Ireland, ethnically all >Irish, and being able to trace my roots back a thousand >years, I'm still calling bullshit on your argument.
Consdering that we've seen before that your "I live in Ireland so I would have heard of it" argument before was false, I don't hold much credence in his newer argument from ignorance.
>>Maybe agarwal should have studied the effects of extended alcohol consupmtion on people before wobbling >>to his incorrect conclusions then. Still, you do seem to have a lot of research to back you up there, its >> understandable if you swallowed it whole.
Ah, yes, Pubmed: the home of 20 years of total hogwash stored in one compleat archive. Right up there with the UC San Francisco Pharmacy School as the world's leading research center into ignorant and racist thought.
Or, wait, no.
"His incorrect conclusions"? You're an outstanding poster child for someone who is willing to disregard peer-reviewed research in order to continue believing ignorant thoughts. I'm honestly curious about how the mental process works in people like you. Just last week I was talking with a half-witted Indian Physicist who thought that Stalin was the greatest guy since sliced bread. He claimed that every fact ever about the atrocities of Stalin were lies. I.e., Ostrich-head syndrome. Is your sole counterclaim that you're Irish and have never heard of the study? I'm ethnically almost half Irish and have an Irish last name, but I'd never claim something isn't true just because I'd never heard of it. There's a huge corpus of knowledge in medicine. Nobody, not even doctors know all of it. Did you know that Selson Blue was used to treat tinea versicolor? It's a wide weird world.
Ah, hell, I'll answer your other post at the same time.
>Ah yes, the wikipedia, even more reliable sources of information. I can't be bothered to look up the >article now, but I recall reading one worthy had written up an article about how european men had >smaller willies than american men. Truly a rock of reliability. As for vitriol, sufficient unto the day, > the evil thereof.
So you demand research and references, but then admit to not even looking at them? How curious.
I would reference my European History textbook, but it doesn't have the advantage of being online like Wikipedia does. Find a reference to prove me wrong (and to give you a hint, "I've never heard of it" doesn't count) and I'll admit my mistake. However, I'll hold you to the same standard. Be a man and admit you were wrong.
>>I have learned a few things however, probably not what you think, though.
It's always fun Europeans learn a little bit about their own history from Americans.
>>But you've discovered the true secret to the emo-Sephiweenies who love the series: >>they can't play video games worth shit
You, sir, are a wise and noble person.
Sure, FFX-2 overdid the fan service -- instead of 10 minute long summon sequences in FFVII, we have magic girls with their clothes flying off and back on, but at least you could skip it after you watched it a few times -- and the voice acting was horrendous, but in terms of actual gameplay it is so much better than FFX that I get pissed off whenever I hear another "FFVII won the best game of all time award at gamefaqs.com!" or "FFX was voted the #1 game of all time by idiot RPGers!"
I really hate how video game reviewers almost always fall into the latter camp, making it hard to tell if a game is good or not. I avoided FFX-2 because it got terrible reviews, but picked up a used copy for 12 bucks at Gamestop -- and it was well worth it. Unlike FFX which I'm still kicking myself for paying full price for.
As I said in the GP, defining race is a terribly complex subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race), and since it's really a fuzzy classification problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set) we'll never have an answer that satisfies everyone. However, as I said, if simply using self-reported race is good enough to show such statistically meaningful differences that have such large impacts on science and medicine, then it is good enough for our purposes, and we can discard all of the competing and confusing notions for "race".
>>If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease)
They do have a lot of data. And it's a hot field right now. The field, in terms of the different impacts of drugs on race and other factors (to continue with the example I gave) is called pharmacogenetics.
Whites were shown to get more of a response from statins (or anti-cholesterol drugs) than African Americans. Older people were shown to have a greater response than younger. Women more than men. Non-smokers more than smokers. People with high blood pressure more than those with low. Slimmer people had a better response than fat people.
And yes, I'm using race and ancestry as being loosely equivalent to each other. Again, I'm trying to disregard these classically confounding problems because you can get tied up so much in trying to precisely define that which cannot be precisely defined (as I said, it's a fuzzy classification problem), that you will miss out on the practical benefits of it because you're too worried about being politically correct.
Go ahead and read the abstracts for them if you don't believe me.
Agarwal DP is the man. He started the field back in 1981 studying the different levels of mutated alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase levels by racial groups.
Will get you started. Yes databases of where genetic loci historically came from do exist, and are being expanded as we learn more.
What purpose does it serve? The most obvious is as an aid to diagnosis, much of which is sorting out the likely probabilities of symptoms from unlikely. Just because we all want to live in a colorblind society is no excuse to misdiagnose a black kid suffering from a sickle cell crisis because you want to give him the same diagnosis you'd give a white kid.
Secondly, an emerging field is to examine the effects of drugs on different genetic populations. Drugs can react differently in people depending on their genetic makeup. If you know that a rare mutation, one found mainly in Koreans, causes severe side effects with a certain drug, if you are Korean, you should probably not take the risk in taking the drug and use an alternative instead.
How do you know it's scientific? Statistics tells us what is scientific and what is not.
One in 12 (8.3%) African Americans (AA) is a carrier for sickle cell anemia (see the reference in my first post). Its percentage is much lower in whites (W) (let's say 0.1% to invent a number).
Let's say that the probability that someone has sickle cell anemia is P(S), and is perhaps 0.15% worldwide (again inventing numbers).
Thus, P(S) = 0.15%, but the conditional probabilities are P(S|AA) = 8.3% and P(S|W) = 0.1%
This numbers come from millions of samples. Are the differences statistically significant? Yes, unquestionably so. Therefore it is a scientifically valid statement to say that black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia than white people. With one swoop, we can discard confounding questions of what exactly is a "Race" -- which is probably never going to be answered in a such a manner as to satisfy everyone. But if self-reported race is enough to show a very statistically meaningful difference, then it is scientifically legitimite to report the difference and keep it in mind during diagnosis and treatment.
Again, it's simply wishful thinking that we are all identical geneticly. It's even on the surface an absurd claim, almost by definition.
As I said in my original post, it's also absurd to claim one person superior to another because he has higher or lower levels of melanin. But I find it very suspicious when people try to deny incontrovertable science for their own agendas.
I like being able to look at past reviews, since it gives me a feel for where the magazine is at. It's akin to the San Diego Union Tribune's movie reviewer. If he pans a movie, it's either really horrible (like he says) or really good. If he positively rates a movie, you shouldn't see it unless it's one of those gimme A ratings, like a Finding Nemo or whatnot.
FF1 was a great game. I wish it had a little more content, but damn, it was impressive for a NES title. FFVII was crap. Nonlinear, shoehorned, crap. I think the defining moment in FFVII was when you had gotten your little dune buggy (whose sole purpose was to cross a single river in the game) and you spy a new city. "Aha," I said, "I will defy the game's creators. Instead of entering the next town to buy the next set of weapons which are the same as my current set but a little bit better, I will simply drive past!"
And so I did drive past, into a featureless plain... and the dune buggy breaks down.
An invisible barrier then springs up prohibits passage until you enter the town.
Horrid game. It was like playing an interactive movie, wherein "interactive" means clicking tediously for 3 hours between scenese. I didn't die once in the game, except when doing optional encounters. Never powergamed my materia, never tried grinding, just played through start to finish in a bit under 40 hours, many of which was time the console was on but idle as I was snacking or talking to people.
FFX was just as bad, except it seemed to be have even longer and more tedious and less challenging. I made the mistake of grinding Iron Giants once for several hours to make a ring so I could always have protect and shield up. Waste of time. The game was even easier.
Key point on FFX: If you die in the final combat, the final boss casts raise on you. So you can't possibly lose. I don't think I ever had my party die on me in the entire game.
FFX-2 was a superior game in many aspects to FFX. The minimissions like Gunner's Gauntlet were superior to the horrendously tedious chocobo racing game in FFX, and provided nifty little rewards, like an item which let you penetrate enemy reflect spells. Instead of getting the airship at 95% of the way through the game in FFX, whose only point was to convey you to Sin, you start with it, and can do any of the missions in any order you want. You have something like 15 missions per chapter, 5 chapters in the game. About 2-3 of them per chapter are core storyline missions. The rest are optional. In chapter one, for only 5000 gil, you can get a No Encounters item which lets you bypass all the annoying random encounters in the game (if you're level 16, level 1 random encounters because you're walking to do some Sky Slots are nothing more than a pissant annoyance.) Take it off when you want to level. If you can stand the horrendous voice acting, it's a superior game to FFVII or FFX.
>>Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they >>belong to the same race. >>This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
If they can't interbreed they are considered different species (or sometimes subspecies).
>>Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color': >>sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
There is 'very little' difference between us and a hippopatomus (it's, what, 2%? IIRC). Therefore I will claim it is simply an illusion that we are different, and is solely socially constructed.
On the contrary. Instead of listening to wishful thinking of how life should be, and thus is, we are beholden to statistics for the truth.
If the conditional probability that a self-identified Jewish person shows a statistically significant difference in the likelyhood the person will have Tay-Sachs, then our concepts of race are not simply social constructions, and are NOT useless, but rather useful, especially when it comes to ourselves knowing what diseases we might be at risk for due to genetic variations and diseases common to our ancestors.
While there is a strong statistical correlation in America between being African-American and sickle cell anemia, with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error.
However if you start considering more of their genes, you can pretty accurately tell where their ancestors came from. Read the other posts inside this thread for more information.
And yet there is absolutely a statistically valid correlation between what people self-identify as their "Race" and significant genetic differences. I posted three. I'm Irish, I'm not planning on getting tested for Tay-Sachs. If I were Jewish (regardless of my sub-grouping), I'd get tested for it, just to be sure.
In the survey, 0% of Irish tested for the deficiency. Claiming that thus there are 0% of people in the entire nation of Ireland has it is a logical fallacy, and besides the point as well. All tests have statistical errors. Pointing this out doesn't mean that the survey is erroneous.
It was from a lecture at UC San Francisco, which is regarded as one of the top medical schools in the world. I doubt they were spouting off racist nonsense to get a dig in on the Irish. You're another example of how people can apply wishful thinking to real life (race is all an illusion -> there are no genetic differences between races), and end up wrong. Differences exist. Get over it. It's still no excuse for racism.
I'm Irish. My fiancee is Chinese. Guess which one of us turns bright red and vomits after one drink?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh lord, Half-Life 2.
The entire game was a giant demo for the Havok engine. It's a poster child for letting your technology drive game design, when it should be done the other way. Bad Valve. No cookie!
I'm curious what they spent four years on when they licensed the Havok engine only a year before release.
Of course UO and WOW will go out of style! Who wouldn't want the number of users of WOW with the famous stability of Ultima Online?
No, seriously. I think it would be neat to combine some genres. Sniper rifles make any game better -- especially golf.
And who wouldn't want to do Grand Turisimo Online while Turok Dinosaur Hunters are driving herds of wild brontosauruses across the I-5?
Could be very fun, but obviously if companies can't even keep their own games debugged (WOW has greatly declined in stablility, frame rate, and lag in the last year), I hold no hope they could keep an exponentially more complex game running at all.
A fight broke out between a British guy and a store clerk at Ralph's a little past midnight. All the Ralph's employees were beating on him, the British guy's friends came in... it wasn't pretty. Those of us customers who weren't involved in the fight were dailing 911, and all of us got put on hold when we called. After 15 minutes, one of us got in so I don't know how long we could have waited.
If my house had been burning down, I'd have been mighty upset at being placed on hold for 15.
Incorrect. Some theories are falsifiable, some are provable. It generally has to do with the class of question we're talking about.
Theory: At least dog has a green color. Provable, not falsifiable.
Theory: All dogs have a green color. Falsifiable, not provable.
It's a result of a wee bit too much positive materialism that we only consider theories "scientific" if they are falsifiable.
The correct answer is that scientific theories can be either, IMO.
Regardless of what you may have read in an article, selective infantcide is still very pervasive.
I know two girls who are only around today because the doctor misread the ultrasound and thought they were a boy. Let me tell you, this doesn't lead to good relations with your parents later in life.
And sure, it's illegal. Whatever. What the doctor does is smile if it's a boy, frown if it's a girl. Then without anything obvious at all being said, the parents spontaneously decide to abort or not.
Regardless of if you are for or against abortion, selective abortion is a heinous crime against humanity. The Chinese can easily think us uncivilized because we don't know Chinese manners (which are actually pretty hard to learn), but we can think they uncivilized because of practices like these and others. It drives some of my Chinese (living in China native Chinese) friends crazy when I say that China has a barbaric civilization. =)
Except some courts have found that the gold you earn in the game is a form of work, and subject to certain protections.
To paraphrase cookie monster, EULAs are a "sometimes contract".
The EU has even stronger protections for customers.
Well, the woman that said that became the head of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. So maybe there's something to it. =)
http://director.sdsc.edu/
My graduate advisor was Dr. Scott Baden, also in parallel computation, and for a year or two Dr. Baden and Berman shared a lab before expanding into two separate labs. I took all the graduate classes she offered. She's a real smart woman, and I think she was on to something.
Maybe not invent the theory of relativity every week, but at least trying to look at a new problem or a new solution to something once a month to keep your academic spirit of inquiry alive sounds like a good idea to me.
A friend of mine worked in a compounding lab where they handled large blocks of pure cocaine on a daily basis. Security on the place was pretty tight, so maybe a sensor like this would help prevent "slippage".
Hmm, looking back at what I just wrote, I guess it's not clear which side of the law he was working for. =)
(Yeah, it was a legit pharmaceutical compounding lab. Apparently there's a wide variety of drugs you can make out of cocaine.)
>>It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo.
From all the factual errors in the article, it's clear the reporter is obviously not going to be the guy that will invent #1002.
Galileo didn't invent the round earth concept. Copernicus died 21 years before Galileo was born.
>>The two new ones are a simulator for pharmaceutical
l earing/projectAbstract.pl?projid=955
>>development and a new approach to solid state light sources
In, hmm, 1999 or so I worked for the Bionengineering Department at UCSD for a grant funded by Proctor and Gamble. The BIONOME project sort of went nowhere, really (you can find the hacked apart website still up at bionome.sdsc.edu. Or, wait. I guess it's down now. But there's something of a reference here:
http://cgi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/General/CC/irg/c
But the point is, as soon as I finished the coding, a manager from P&G flew out, talked with the professor, myself, and the other people working on the project, and flew off with a floppy disk full of source code and a happy smile on his face.
Sure, the UCSD Bioengineering Department was #1 in the nation (maybe still is, I haven't checked recently), but everyone was doing this stuff seven years ago. Maybe he's done something a little different or better (evolutionarily new), but it's not a revolutionary concept at all. Big Pharma is all over computers, databases, and simulations these days. P&G and Johnson and Johnson both wanted to hire me, but P&G is in Ohio, and J&J wanted me to do database stuff, which isn't where my interests lie.
/shrug
A graduate advisor I once had said that if you weren't coming up with one new idea a month, you shouldn't be in academia. That's a pretty fast pace, IMO, but I have come up with ideas nobody else has thought of, am working for a family business (because my mother thought of a business model nobody had done before), and my dad just sits around all day putting things together to try stuff completely new. He was working on free metropolitan WIFI nets years before you started hearing about them going up around the country, for example.
If you remove the slander, libel and half-truths from politics, you'd have a bunch of politicians standing on stage saying nothing. =)
It's an interesting idea, and it might strike the right level of balance for Free Speech. However, one should always be able to say they support a candidate or agree with his views. Currently even such speech is regulated or prohibited under the bill, which is what worries me the most. And I'm not talking ads bought on the air, even just posts such as these. Very worrisome.
Well, what the problem is, IIRC, is that if you publish a post on Slashdot bashing/supporting Bush, it can be construed as a soft ad, and it would be prohibited. That's what soft ads are -- you don't give anything directly to the party, you just run a TV ad or print an article on your own supporting an issue or candidate.
McCain Feingold restricts this, which is a very grim curtailing of free speech. Open political debate is a very central part of the American political system.
>>Yes, highly skilled in both anthropology and history there too
The other posted his speculation about why Irish people would have a much lower rate of mutation in their alcohol dehydrogenase genes, not me. I simply agreed with him that drinking weak alcohol was common in the middle ages.
>>See above for details. Pharmacology does not an accurate picture of history make.
Ain't talking about history. Read my original post. I posted a purely scientific reference (that Irish have low rates, asians have high), and you came back with a "laugh at the drunk paddies" post, and that I was making it up. Now that you've seen that I wasn't, I note you still haven't retracted that statement.
>>Sigh. Just out of interest, rather than the many points
>> I could raise here, why don't I just ask how one can be
>> "almost half Irish".
Grandfather was a genealogist. I'm 3/8th Irish. That's how someone can be almost half Irish. I apologize if "higher order fractions" are a bit hard for you to understand.
> Having been born and raised in Ireland, ethnically all
>Irish, and being able to trace my roots back a thousand
>years, I'm still calling bullshit on your argument.
Consdering that we've seen before that your "I live in Ireland so I would have heard of it" argument before was false, I don't hold much credence in his newer argument from ignorance.
>>Maybe agarwal should have studied the effects of extended alcohol consupmtion on people before wobbling
>>to his incorrect conclusions then. Still, you do seem to have a lot of research to back you up there, its
>> understandable if you swallowed it whole.
Ah, yes, Pubmed: the home of 20 years of total hogwash stored in one compleat archive. Right up there with the UC San Francisco Pharmacy School as the world's leading research center into ignorant and racist thought.
Or, wait, no.
"His incorrect conclusions"? You're an outstanding poster child for someone who is willing to disregard peer-reviewed research in order to continue believing ignorant thoughts. I'm honestly curious about how the mental process works in people like you. Just last week I was talking with a half-witted Indian Physicist who thought that Stalin was the greatest guy since sliced bread. He claimed that every fact ever about the atrocities of Stalin were lies. I.e., Ostrich-head syndrome. Is your sole counterclaim that you're Irish and have never heard of the study? I'm ethnically almost half Irish and have an Irish last name, but I'd never claim something isn't true just because I'd never heard of it. There's a huge corpus of knowledge in medicine. Nobody, not even doctors know all of it. Did you know that Selson Blue was used to treat tinea versicolor? It's a wide weird world.
Ah, hell, I'll answer your other post at the same time.
>Ah yes, the wikipedia, even more reliable sources of information. I can't be bothered to look up the
>article now, but I recall reading one worthy had written up an article about how european men had
>smaller willies than american men. Truly a rock of reliability. As for vitriol, sufficient unto the day,
> the evil thereof.
So you demand research and references, but then admit to not even looking at them? How curious.
I would reference my European History textbook, but it doesn't have the advantage of being online like Wikipedia does. Find a reference to prove me wrong (and to give you a hint, "I've never heard of it" doesn't count) and I'll admit my mistake. However, I'll hold you to the same standard. Be a man and admit you were wrong.
>>I have learned a few things however, probably not what you think, though.
It's always fun Europeans learn a little bit about their own history from Americans.
>>But you've discovered the true secret to the emo-Sephiweenies who love the series:
>>they can't play video games worth shit
You, sir, are a wise and noble person.
Sure, FFX-2 overdid the fan service -- instead of 10 minute long summon sequences in FFVII, we have magic girls with their clothes flying off and back on, but at least you could skip it after you watched it a few times -- and the voice acting was horrendous, but in terms of actual gameplay it is so much better than FFX that I get pissed off whenever I hear another "FFVII won the best game of all time award at gamefaqs.com!" or "FFX was voted the #1 game of all time by idiot RPGers!"
I really hate how video game reviewers almost always fall into the latter camp, making it hard to tell if a game is good or not. I avoided FFX-2 because it got terrible reviews, but picked up a used copy for 12 bucks at Gamestop -- and it was well worth it. Unlike FFX which I'm still kicking myself for paying full price for.
As I said in the GP, defining race is a terribly complex subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race), and since it's really a fuzzy classification problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set) we'll never have an answer that satisfies everyone. However, as I said, if simply using self-reported race is good enough to show such statistically meaningful differences that have such large impacts on science and medicine, then it is good enough for our purposes, and we can discard all of the competing and confusing notions for "race".
= Search&db=pubmed&term=pharmacogenetics&tool=fuzzy& ot=pharmogenetics
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1651658 7&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
>>If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease)
They do have a lot of data. And it's a hot field right now. The field, in terms of the different impacts of drugs on race and other factors (to continue with the example I gave) is called pharmacogenetics.
PubMed lets you read the abstracts, so clicking here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Will give you 3567 articles on pharmacogenetics.
Just picking one at random:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Whites were shown to get more of a response from statins (or anti-cholesterol drugs) than African Americans. Older people were shown to have a greater response than younger. Women more than men. Non-smokers more than smokers. People with high blood pressure more than those with low. Slimmer people had a better response than fat people.
And yes, I'm using race and ancestry as being loosely equivalent to each other. Again, I'm trying to disregard these classically confounding problems because you can get tied up so much in trying to precisely define that which cannot be precisely defined (as I said, it's a fuzzy classification problem), that you will miss out on the practical benefits of it because you're too worried about being politically correct.
I did post a reliable source which you conveniently ignored:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer.
Neal Stephenson was by way of an interesting side note.
I did notice a significant drop off in the amount of vitriol in your posts though. Maybe you've actually learned something new? If so, I'm happy.
As I said, it was from notes at a lecture.
p ubmed&cmd=Display&dopt=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=7013 538
However, with a trivial amount of research I found 411 references on the subject:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=
Go ahead and read the abstracts for them if you don't believe me.
Agarwal DP is the man. He started the field back in 1981 studying the different levels of mutated alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase levels by racial groups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_counselingi a/DS00324/DSECTION=4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sickle-cell-anem
Will get you started. Yes databases of where genetic loci historically came from do exist, and are being expanded as we learn more.
What purpose does it serve? The most obvious is as an aid to diagnosis, much of which is sorting out the likely probabilities of symptoms from unlikely. Just because we all want to live in a colorblind society is no excuse to misdiagnose a black kid suffering from a sickle cell crisis because you want to give him the same diagnosis you'd give a white kid.
Secondly, an emerging field is to examine the effects of drugs on different genetic populations. Drugs can react differently in people depending on their genetic makeup. If you know that a rare mutation, one found mainly in Koreans, causes severe side effects with a certain drug, if you are Korean, you should probably not take the risk in taking the drug and use an alternative instead.
How do you know it's scientific? Statistics tells us what is scientific and what is not.
One in 12 (8.3%) African Americans (AA) is a carrier for sickle cell anemia (see the reference in my first post). Its percentage is much lower in whites (W) (let's say 0.1% to invent a number).
Let's say that the probability that someone has sickle cell anemia is P(S), and is perhaps 0.15% worldwide (again inventing numbers).
Thus, P(S) = 0.15%, but the conditional probabilities are P(S|AA) = 8.3% and P(S|W) = 0.1%
This numbers come from millions of samples. Are the differences statistically significant? Yes, unquestionably so. Therefore it is a scientifically valid statement to say that black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia than white people. With one swoop, we can discard confounding questions of what exactly is a "Race" -- which is probably never going to be answered in a such a manner as to satisfy everyone. But if self-reported race is enough to show a very statistically meaningful difference, then it is scientifically legitimite to report the difference and keep it in mind during diagnosis and treatment.
Again, it's simply wishful thinking that we are all identical geneticly. It's even on the surface an absurd claim, almost by definition.
As I said in my original post, it's also absurd to claim one person superior to another because he has higher or lower levels of melanin. But I find it very suspicious when people try to deny incontrovertable science for their own agendas.
I like being able to look at past reviews, since it gives me a feel for where the magazine is at. It's akin to the San Diego Union Tribune's movie reviewer. If he pans a movie, it's either really horrible (like he says) or really good. If he positively rates a movie, you shouldn't see it unless it's one of those gimme A ratings, like a Finding Nemo or whatnot.
FF1 was a great game. I wish it had a little more content, but damn, it was impressive for a NES title.
FFVII was crap. Nonlinear, shoehorned, crap. I think the defining moment in FFVII was when you had gotten your little dune buggy (whose sole purpose was to cross a single river in the game) and you spy a new city. "Aha," I said, "I will defy the game's creators. Instead of entering the next town to buy the next set of weapons which are the same as my current set but a little bit better, I will simply drive past!"
And so I did drive past, into a featureless plain... and the dune buggy breaks down.
An invisible barrier then springs up prohibits passage until you enter the town.
Horrid game. It was like playing an interactive movie, wherein "interactive" means clicking tediously for 3 hours between scenese. I didn't die once in the game, except when doing optional encounters. Never powergamed my materia, never tried grinding, just played through start to finish in a bit under 40 hours, many of which was time the console was on but idle as I was snacking or talking to people.
FFX was just as bad, except it seemed to be have even longer and more tedious and less challenging. I made the mistake of grinding Iron Giants once for several hours to make a ring so I could always have protect and shield up. Waste of time. The game was even easier.
Key point on FFX: If you die in the final combat, the final boss casts raise on you. So you can't possibly lose. I don't think I ever had my party die on me in the entire game.
FFX-2 was a superior game in many aspects to FFX. The minimissions like Gunner's Gauntlet were superior to the horrendously tedious chocobo racing game in FFX, and provided nifty little rewards, like an item which let you penetrate enemy reflect spells. Instead of getting the airship at 95% of the way through the game in FFX, whose only point was to convey you to Sin, you start with it, and can do any of the missions in any order you want. You have something like 15 missions per chapter, 5 chapters in the game. About 2-3 of them per chapter are core storyline missions. The rest are optional. In chapter one, for only 5000 gil, you can get a No Encounters item which lets you bypass all the annoying random encounters in the game (if you're level 16, level 1 random encounters because you're walking to do some Sky Slots are nothing more than a pissant annoyance.) Take it off when you want to level. If you can stand the horrendous voice acting, it's a superior game to FFVII or FFX.
>>>>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
>>Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they
>>belong to the same race.
>>This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
If they can't interbreed they are considered different species (or sometimes subspecies).
>>Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color':
>>sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
There is 'very little' difference between us and a hippopatomus (it's, what, 2%? IIRC). Therefore I will claim it is simply an illusion that we are different, and is solely socially constructed.
On the contrary. Instead of listening to wishful thinking of how life should be, and thus is, we are beholden to statistics for the truth.
If the conditional probability that a self-identified Jewish person shows a statistically significant difference in the likelyhood the person will have Tay-Sachs, then our concepts of race are not simply social constructions, and are NOT useless, but rather useful, especially when it comes to ourselves knowing what diseases we might be at risk for due to genetic variations and diseases common to our ancestors.
While there is a strong statistical correlation in America between being African-American and sickle cell anemia, with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error.
However if you start considering more of their genes, you can pretty accurately tell where their ancestors came from. Read the other posts inside this thread for more information.
And yet there is absolutely a statistically valid correlation between what people self-identify as their "Race" and significant genetic differences. I posted three. I'm Irish, I'm not planning on getting tested for Tay-Sachs. If I were Jewish (regardless of my sub-grouping), I'd get tested for it, just to be sure.
Someone else posted this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
In the survey, 0% of Irish tested for the deficiency. Claiming that thus there are 0% of people in the entire nation of Ireland has it is a logical fallacy, and besides the point as well. All tests have statistical errors. Pointing this out doesn't mean that the survey is erroneous.
It was from a lecture at UC San Francisco, which is regarded as one of the top medical schools in the world. I doubt they were spouting off racist nonsense to get a dig in on the Irish. You're another example of how people can apply wishful thinking to real life (race is all an illusion -> there are no genetic differences between races), and end up wrong. Differences exist. Get over it. It's still no excuse for racism.
I'm Irish. My fiancee is Chinese. Guess which one of us turns bright red and vomits after one drink?
(Hint: it's not the Irish man.)