You should know that the University of Utah has a long history of academic excellence in computer science. People like John Warnock (founder of Adobe), David Evans and Ivan Sutherland (founders of Evans and Sutherland), Robert Barton (principal architect of all Burroughs computers), Tom Stockham (created digital recording among many other things), Alan Kay (GUI guy at Xerox PARC, developed Smalltalk and is a fellow at Apple), Chuck Seitz (pioneer in asynchronous circuits), Ronald Resch (pioneer in computer art), Alan Ashton (founder of WordPerfect), Tony Hearn (developed the oldest algebraic math package, REDUCE), Duane Call (designer of the FPS-120 supercomputer and vector calculation specialist), Henri Gouraud (developed the Gouraud shading methods so important for all your games), Elliott Organick (Founder of SIGSCE and author of many FORTRAN and CS textbooks), Buit Tuong-Phong (invented the Phong shading method), Ed Catmull (computer animation pioneer and co founder of Pixar), Jim Clark (founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Heatheon/WebMD), Henry Fuchs (founder of Pixel Planes and researchers in high performance graphics software), Martin Newell (object rendering and founder of Ashlar and co developed the Painter's algorithm for surface rendering), Frank Crow (famous for his anti-aliasing methods for edge smooting), Martin Griss (developed Portable Standard LISP), Suhas Patil (founder of CIRRUS Logic), James Blinn (Invented the first method for representing surface textures in graphical images. Scientist at JPL, where he worked on computer animation of the Voyager fly-bys), Jim Kajiya (Developed the frame buffer concept for storing and displaying single-raster images), Robert Johnson (Invented the magnetic ink printing technology used on virtually every check we write), Brian Barsky (Developed beta splines and methods to link computer graphics, geometric modeling, vision science, and optometry) and so on and so one are all graduates of our program.
So, just in case some of our students read this (its always weird when your students say "I saw your comment on Slashdot yesterday"), I should have mentioned that there are exceptions to the rule (obviously) like the developers who are developing some of our image processing code right now here at the Univ. of Utah Scientific Computing Institute and our collaborators at the UCSB Center for Bio-Image Informatics. These folks are doing amazing things as is the neuroscience grad student in our lab who routinely amazes me with his ability to code. But these folks are in these graduate programs and environments because they are interested in solving innovative and new problems and they enjoy a challenge. The vast majority of students who are learning to code are not interested in asking questions or doing hard things. Interestingly, a large number of students it seems coming into CS programs at the undergraduate level want to program games, but have no idea how much math and algorithm development goes on when one is crafting new material. It's easy to use someone else's engine or physics models, but coming up with your own is harder and requires some talent and dedication to learning your craft.
I have been thinking it is due to a few reasons. First off, it seems that math education is sorely lacking in many college students. We are waaaay off the mark here with lots of remedial work being necessary for entering college students and this is having a major effect on peoples ability to develop algorithms. The next major reason is lack of communication skills and writing skills. When I was a grade school kid learning BASIC, we had it drilled into our heads that we had to comment our code and explain exactly what it is that we were planning. This was done to help us learn how to think through a problem, but also to get us to help communicate what it is that we were trying to do with our code. Finally, it seems that many students have gotten lazy and are simply looking for an easy way out and not wanting to code line by line.
Put up a JE if you find a drop-in G4 that high, ok? My 1.42GHz is creaking badly under H.264. Actually, mine might be soldered in place.:( I might just try to overclock it to 1.58 and quit.
Will do, although Powerlogix appears to have a 2.0Ghz G4, it is apparently an overclocked 1.7...... Which may in fact work just fine.
Knowing you, I expect a couple pictures of this to show up.:-D Of course we have been busy moving freezers and tons of reagents and cell lines, so I was unable to get many pictures of this. Look for an update soon though....
Oh. Stop feeding the trolls.:)
Yeah, no doubt. Thanks for the feedback and reality check. You are absolutely right about that.
Beautiful use of statistics and just the sort of thing that the Flickr board of directors can take to their marketing meetings. Companies eat this stuff up as it is a real world reflection of specific markets using their products.
Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market and demonstrates that both Canon and Nikon did good when they went after a market that was primed to explode much like the 35mm market did in the late 70s and early 80s. Technology in both cases made it possible to build high quality cameras at affordable prices.
Of course this means good things for the consumer, but watch out for a new megapixel war much like what we saw with computers and the Mhz war. Of course just like the Mhz war, the MP war is going to be mostly hype as I've seen some damn fine images from 6 or 8 MP cameras that were far above the quality produced by some higher MP count cameras. The secret is going to be the size and quality of the individual imagers on the CCD, the quality of the image management chips (I tend to prefer Canon's DIGIC) and the quality of the lens.
Look, what call is there for being a confrontational ass here? Why the flames?
How ignorant is it to post on Slashdot, especially engaging in any sort of confrontational banter, using your name and having links to your blog in your profile?
How ignorant is it to engage in useless confrontational banter? What is your goal other than to feel better about yourself?
Where someone can easily google all sorts of the critical information you have sprawled all over the web in just minutes. While you can know nothing more than I exist, I can know everything about you. The person with a problem isn't the person posting AC, it's the person with their full name, address, phone number and place of employment in their sig. Wether you know it or not, that's what you have been doing every time you post on Slashdot.
I have news for you. It's pretty much impossible to remain completely anonymous on the web these days unless one takes extraordinary efforts. Furthermore, I always believed that if you have something to say, confrontational or not, you should stand up for yourself and take ownership of what you say. There is a reason that posting AC was titled anonymous coward. After all, its easy to spout off all that you want from the safety and convenience of your parents basement, spewing your vitriol around the planet for all to see and comforting yourself that you think you are smarter than the average bear.
Welcome to the internet. Please stow all personally identifiable information in public forums where it is likely you will draw unwanted attention to yourself. Keep your hands, feet, and self promoting blogs to yourself at all times.
Unless of course you are using the Internet and Slashdot to, you know..... communicate? It may surprise you to note that there are a number of social communities within Slashdot and there is lots of communication that occurs between and within those groups on these pages. In your selfishness, did you consider that I might have been addressing individuals in those subgroups?
Nobody cares that your blog is down. You're not that important. Get over yourself.
You won't mind if I reject advice from an anonymous coward, right? But for your information, I have received emails today asking about my server status from Slashdot users. Interestingly, the greatest number of hits on my blog occurred a couple of months ago and was 50,000 visits in a 24 hour period..... Usually I run about 2-300 hits/day so at least some folks want to know and those are the ones I care about.
Hrmmm. Well, seeing as how I just took delivery of a new quad 3.0Ghz Mac Pro, this dulls my bragging rights a bit. However, this bodes well for the CPU upgrade market. Companies like Sonnett, Newer, Powerlogix and OWC have had a tough time with the IBM/Freescale market because of poor performance among other critical reasons. The old 1.0 Ghz G4 I have at home as a media server is still an adequate system that currently holds a terabyte of storage space and I'd love to drop a good 2.0 Ghz or higher chip in it for a reasonable cost. There are some 1.8Ghz chips out there that may do the job just fine, but the market has been stuck at 1.8Ghz for quite some time.
And yes, my blog is down until we get a new transformer installed at my building...... Hopefully tomorrow by noon as they are installing a new one as we speak.
How long did it take you to figure that out Jewfro_Macabbi?
To my end user (of Amazon.com) knowledge, they have been doing this for at least a couple of years. Of course, the problem with the EULA is that the cookie is set as soon as you visit unless you explicitly disable cookies.
Of course being anonymous is getting harder and harder these days (especially if you are surfing from a place that is having packets sniffed by someone like the NSA. (for kicks do a traceroute (*NIX and OS X, tracert on Windows) on NSA.gov from where you are and look for the AT&T hub that is splitting the traffic (The AT&T hub for my traffic is tbr1013801.dvmco.ip.att.net). I know my packets are sniffed coming from an edu domain as well.......
One of the things that has consistently impressed me about Google is their willingness to look at old problems in new and innovative ways. Of course this is one of the hallmarks of a successful company, but it is not always successfully implemented. One example is their Google Earth application that made huge waves in certain agencies like NIMA. The interface made more than one NIMA/NRO/CIA analyst/project manager smack their forehead in stunned recognition of a superior way of layering and interacting with diverse types of data.
The other thing that really impresses me about the company is the flat egalitarian structure that at the same time allows for tremendous independent freedom while also making much of the management fairly transparent which does tremendous things for morale. I also respect the encouragement of discourse including criticism. Not many companies can tolerate that sort of structure because they are built upon protectionism of management structures and establishment of castes of a sort. It shows that Google is one of the few companies like Apple that are succeeding because of their inherent talent. Google knows this and I would encourage them to resist the pressure to devolve into management structures that are having negative effects on tech companies as diverse as SGI, HP, Dell and Microsoft.
As an aside, Google has shows a tremendously insightful ability to pick and choose product development talent at all levels over the years. I've been impressed by many of their hires. Whoever is heading up their HR dept. is talking actively with the Google special sauce R&D folks and they know their stuff.....
True, but these are small caliber vessels that do not change over time unless there is an angiogenic disease process. The larger caliber blood vessels and vascular choroid on the other side is capable of much higher flow rates that would cause problems if you had to have that vasculature in the way.
The human eye has a "design" error, in that the photosensitive layer is not in front, there are other cells above them.......
Actually, the mammalian (human) eye is optimized for the metabolic loads it requires. It turns out that there is no higher area of metabolism in your body than there is at the photoreceptor/retinal pigment epithelium interface. It is a highly oxidative environment and evolutionarily, you need the apposition of the photoreceptors up against a layer of cells that can deal with the shed outer segments and the metabolic loads induced by rod photoreceptors. The other advantage is that you can snuggle the photoreceptors up to these cells that have a direct connection (diffusion) to a vascular layer. If it were backwards, the blood vessels would get in the way of the image formation and cast shadows.
In mollusks, OTOH, the outer layer of cells is the photosensitive one. The eye is more sensitive to light, has no blind spot, and allows for more data processing in the retina itself. That may be one of the reasons why octopuses are so good at camouflage, their eyes are very sensitive.
Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish have fairly sophisticated retinas that is true and you are correct about their anatomy. However, they do not process the same metabolic loads that the mammalian retina does and thus do not require the same degree of buffering, care and feeding that mammalian photoreceptors do. You have to be careful about using "sensitive" to describe eyes as that descriptive is dependent upon lots of things. Typically in most retinas it has to do with the ability of the opsin to capture a photon and the cell the opsin is in to transduce that signal.
All this is one more argument for evolution and against the "intelligent design" theory.
Intelligent design (ID) really does not even factor into either argument. ID is a religiously/politically motivated belief, not a theory that can be tested.
The number of genes is not necessarily an indicator of sophistication. Also I should point out that as you allude to in your sarcasm, we humans are not the most sophisticated at all biological functions. For instance, the human eye is a much less sophisticated device than the eyes of other creatures such as birds, turtles and even many fish species who see in many more "channels" than we do with greater color discrimination (and they can often fix their retinas when damaged unlike us who suffer when AMD or retinal degenerative diseases hit us).
I predict that companies will start looking at these gene sequences for application in drug development and to investigate the application of these "novel genes" in DNA repair therapies, metabolism and other applications.
I am actually pretty interested in this species from a metabolomic perspective. Organisms that can tune their physiology have a lot to teach us about the ability of metabolic networks to respond to environmental challenge or optimize their function in response to stress/disease.
If this is indeed your perspective, there is nothing that this scientist (or others I suspect) could say to you except to suggest taking some classes in bioscience. ID does not count.....
I will tell you that people *do* have problems with #1 in that they do not believe even in selective pressure. As to what you believe about a "historical" theory about events happening over millions of years, I would encourage you to read about paleontology, geology, botany, molecular biology and genetics among a myriad of other sciences that help to support the theory of evolution.
Tell a 16 year old to stay in the bedroom? Well hey, don't throw me in the briar patch!
No, what this kid should be doing is community service. Work in a soup kitchen, pick up garbage by the side of the road, help out his common man by distributing clothes in an inner city, something like that. In addition, I'd like to see him have all private computer access restricted (can only use a computer in the presence of an adult until he demonstrates he can act like an adult) and to undergo some sort of therapy to deal with his anti-social mores as sending out emails saying "you will die in seven days" is pretty sick. This is not punishment per se, however. I see it more as societal rehabilitation.
Jeeeez, talk about flushing money down the drain.......:-)
Seriously though, there are some things whose design has absolutely been optimized to a point where it would take a revolution in technology to make any changes worth while. Think about things like the doorknob, or a book, or a toilet seat, which arguably has been around since Roman times. Now you might say that technology has allowed an evolution of sorts in each of these examples, and that is true (mass production for the doorknob, printing presses, computer fonts and the Macintosh for books, and polymers for toilet seats), but each of these items works fundamentally the same as they have for hundreds of years such that a person from a hundred years ago could still recognize and interface with the device.
Putting a computer on/in a toilet seat is...... *dare I say it?*....... asinine.
I've done a bit of IR with film and you are right, it is fun. Shooting digital is interesting because most manufacturers place IR filters over the CCDs. Sometimes you can pry them off if you wanna risk it to your digital SLR, but there are also models which are optimized for astrophotography that do not have the IR filters on them....
Thanks! You really do not have to know alot about racing to enjoy the atmosphere out there. I am an unabashed gearhead, but my friends are not and they are absolutely hooked on attending.
Yeah, this was their plan to do it incrementally. I got some great shots of the JCB team doing their thing during Speed Week here. The Dieselmax team was having some problems setting up the car for the salt and were gradually working their way up and had planned all along to really go for the record the week or so after Speed Week.
I found Keynote superior for the following reasons:
1) Ease of building presentations and embedding of graphics and movies. 2) Transitions (cross fades) for certain types of data allow for smooth flow of information allowing transparencies and overlays that facilitate interpretation. 3) Built in alignment guides for text and images so things are not jumping all over the place from slide to slide. 4) Cleaner interface and ease of exchange of data when building presentations with others. 5) Integration with iLife (iPhoto etc....) allowing the use of common (well managed) databases when building image files.
Yes, I *am* saying that I used a presentation software package, yet in using that package, I kept the "chartjunk" to a minimum, used graphics effectively where appropriate and used simple data and clear presentation to deliver the message.
This can be done with Powerpoint, Keynote and a variety of other packages. However, the problem with them is that people often use things like 3D graphs where inappropriate, fill up screens with lots of little text whereupon they say "don't read this, I just wanted to show......". Also the distracting use of transitions that flip and pop and such and cute little sounds that do nothing for the message except cloud it are common things that folks like Tufte and interestingly enough David Byrne have also commented on.
Ah the DOD culture of the Powerpoint. It's a scary thing. Everyone is gunning for the killer Powerpoint presentation that will get them some time with a flag. Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: Get a Mac and use Keynote. You will stand out with a polished presentation that is much more cinematic in appearance, yet useful in its ability to present data in a cleaner manner. And since most flags and their juniors in the Pentagon are using Windows, you will not be able to "give" them your Powerpoint where some junior officer will snake it from you. You will *have* to present it in person in front of the flag.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You should know that the University of Utah has a long history of academic excellence in computer science. People like John Warnock (founder of Adobe), David Evans and Ivan Sutherland (founders of Evans and Sutherland), Robert Barton (principal architect of all Burroughs computers), Tom Stockham (created digital recording among many other things), Alan Kay (GUI guy at Xerox PARC, developed Smalltalk and is a fellow at Apple), Chuck Seitz (pioneer in asynchronous circuits), Ronald Resch (pioneer in computer art), Alan Ashton (founder of WordPerfect), Tony Hearn (developed the oldest algebraic math package, REDUCE), Duane Call (designer of the FPS-120 supercomputer and vector calculation specialist), Henri Gouraud (developed the Gouraud shading methods so important for all your games), Elliott Organick (Founder of SIGSCE and author of many FORTRAN and CS textbooks), Buit Tuong-Phong (invented the Phong shading method), Ed Catmull (computer animation pioneer and co founder of Pixar), Jim Clark (founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Heatheon/WebMD), Henry Fuchs (founder of Pixel Planes and researchers in high performance graphics software), Martin Newell (object rendering and founder of Ashlar and co developed the Painter's algorithm for surface rendering), Frank Crow (famous for his anti-aliasing methods for edge smooting), Martin Griss (developed Portable Standard LISP), Suhas Patil (founder of CIRRUS Logic), James Blinn (Invented the first method for representing surface textures in graphical images. Scientist at JPL, where he worked on computer animation of the Voyager fly-bys), Jim Kajiya (Developed the frame buffer concept for storing and displaying single-raster images), Robert Johnson (Invented the magnetic ink printing technology used on virtually every check we write), Brian Barsky (Developed beta splines and methods to link computer graphics, geometric modeling, vision science, and optometry) and so on and so one are all graduates of our program.
So, just in case some of our students read this (its always weird when your students say "I saw your comment on Slashdot yesterday"), I should have mentioned that there are exceptions to the rule (obviously) like the developers who are developing some of our image processing code right now here at the Univ. of Utah Scientific Computing Institute and our collaborators at the UCSB Center for Bio-Image Informatics. These folks are doing amazing things as is the neuroscience grad student in our lab who routinely amazes me with his ability to code. But these folks are in these graduate programs and environments because they are interested in solving innovative and new problems and they enjoy a challenge. The vast majority of students who are learning to code are not interested in asking questions or doing hard things. Interestingly, a large number of students it seems coming into CS programs at the undergraduate level want to program games, but have no idea how much math and algorithm development goes on when one is crafting new material. It's easy to use someone else's engine or physics models, but coming up with your own is harder and requires some talent and dedication to learning your craft.
I have been thinking it is due to a few reasons. First off, it seems that math education is sorely lacking in many college students. We are waaaay off the mark here with lots of remedial work being necessary for entering college students and this is having a major effect on peoples ability to develop algorithms. The next major reason is lack of communication skills and writing skills. When I was a grade school kid learning BASIC, we had it drilled into our heads that we had to comment our code and explain exactly what it is that we were planning. This was done to help us learn how to think through a problem, but also to get us to help communicate what it is that we were trying to do with our code. Finally, it seems that many students have gotten lazy and are simply looking for an easy way out and not wanting to code line by line.
Advice taken. Thanks. :-)
Put up a JE if you find a drop-in G4 that high, ok? My 1.42GHz is creaking badly under H.264. :( I might just try to overclock it to 1.58 and quit.
:-D Of course we have been busy moving freezers and tons of reagents and cell lines, so I was unable to get many pictures of this. Look for an update soon though....
:)
Actually, mine might be soldered in place.
Will do, although Powerlogix appears to have a 2.0Ghz G4, it is apparently an overclocked 1.7...... Which may in fact work just fine.
Knowing you, I expect a couple pictures of this to show up.
Oh. Stop feeding the trolls.
Yeah, no doubt. Thanks for the feedback and reality check. You are absolutely right about that.
Beautiful use of statistics and just the sort of thing that the Flickr board of directors can take to their marketing meetings. Companies eat this stuff up as it is a real world reflection of specific markets using their products.
Interestingly, these statistics show that most of these cameras are solidly in the middle "pro-sumer" market and demonstrates that both Canon and Nikon did good when they went after a market that was primed to explode much like the 35mm market did in the late 70s and early 80s. Technology in both cases made it possible to build high quality cameras at affordable prices.
Of course this means good things for the consumer, but watch out for a new megapixel war much like what we saw with computers and the Mhz war. Of course just like the Mhz war, the MP war is going to be mostly hype as I've seen some damn fine images from 6 or 8 MP cameras that were far above the quality produced by some higher MP count cameras. The secret is going to be the size and quality of the individual imagers on the CCD, the quality of the image management chips (I tend to prefer Canon's DIGIC) and the quality of the lens.
Look, what call is there for being a confrontational ass here? Why the flames?
How ignorant is it to post on Slashdot, especially engaging in any sort of confrontational banter, using your name and having links to your blog in your profile?
How ignorant is it to engage in useless confrontational banter? What is your goal other than to feel better about yourself?
Where someone can easily google all sorts of the critical information you have sprawled all over the web in just minutes. While you can know nothing more than I exist, I can know everything about you. The person with a problem isn't the person posting AC, it's the person with their full name, address, phone number and place of employment in their sig. Wether you know it or not, that's what you have been doing every time you post on Slashdot.
I have news for you. It's pretty much impossible to remain completely anonymous on the web these days unless one takes extraordinary efforts. Furthermore, I always believed that if you have something to say, confrontational or not, you should stand up for yourself and take ownership of what you say. There is a reason that posting AC was titled anonymous coward . After all, its easy to spout off all that you want from the safety and convenience of your parents basement, spewing your vitriol around the planet for all to see and comforting yourself that you think you are smarter than the average bear.
Welcome to the internet. Please stow all personally identifiable information in public forums where it is likely you will draw unwanted attention to yourself. Keep your hands, feet, and self promoting blogs to yourself at all times.
Unless of course you are using the Internet and Slashdot to, you know..... communicate? It may surprise you to note that there are a number of social communities within Slashdot and there is lots of communication that occurs between and within those groups on these pages. In your selfishness, did you consider that I might have been addressing individuals in those subgroups?
Nobody cares that your blog is down. You're not that important. Get over yourself.
You won't mind if I reject advice from an anonymous coward, right? But for your information, I have received emails today asking about my server status from Slashdot users. Interestingly, the greatest number of hits on my blog occurred a couple of months ago and was 50,000 visits in a 24 hour period..... Usually I run about 2-300 hits/day so at least some folks want to know and those are the ones I care about.
Hrmmm. Well, seeing as how I just took delivery of a new quad 3.0Ghz Mac Pro, this dulls my bragging rights a bit. However, this bodes well for the CPU upgrade market. Companies like Sonnett, Newer, Powerlogix and OWC have had a tough time with the IBM/Freescale market because of poor performance among other critical reasons. The old 1.0 Ghz G4 I have at home as a media server is still an adequate system that currently holds a terabyte of storage space and I'd love to drop a good 2.0 Ghz or higher chip in it for a reasonable cost. There are some 1.8Ghz chips out there that may do the job just fine, but the market has been stuck at 1.8Ghz for quite some time.
And yes, my blog is down until we get a new transformer installed at my building...... Hopefully tomorrow by noon as they are installing a new one as we speak.
Actually, this is from a story that was broken some time ago and is commonly known about. See this article on Wired or this article on Slashdot.
How long did it take you to figure that out Jewfro_Macabbi?
To my end user (of Amazon.com) knowledge, they have been doing this for at least a couple of years. Of course, the problem with the EULA is that the cookie is set as soon as you visit unless you explicitly disable cookies.
Of course being anonymous is getting harder and harder these days (especially if you are surfing from a place that is having packets sniffed by someone like the NSA. (for kicks do a traceroute (*NIX and OS X, tracert on Windows) on NSA.gov from where you are and look for the AT&T hub that is splitting the traffic (The AT&T hub for my traffic is tbr1013801.dvmco.ip.att.net). I know my packets are sniffed coming from an edu domain as well.......
One of the things that has consistently impressed me about Google is their willingness to look at old problems in new and innovative ways. Of course this is one of the hallmarks of a successful company, but it is not always successfully implemented. One example is their Google Earth application that made huge waves in certain agencies like NIMA. The interface made more than one NIMA/NRO/CIA analyst/project manager smack their forehead in stunned recognition of a superior way of layering and interacting with diverse types of data.
The other thing that really impresses me about the company is the flat egalitarian structure that at the same time allows for tremendous independent freedom while also making much of the management fairly transparent which does tremendous things for morale. I also respect the encouragement of discourse including criticism. Not many companies can tolerate that sort of structure because they are built upon protectionism of management structures and establishment of castes of a sort. It shows that Google is one of the few companies like Apple that are succeeding because of their inherent talent. Google knows this and I would encourage them to resist the pressure to devolve into management structures that are having negative effects on tech companies as diverse as SGI, HP, Dell and Microsoft.
As an aside, Google has shows a tremendously insightful ability to pick and choose product development talent at all levels over the years. I've been impressed by many of their hires. Whoever is heading up their HR dept. is talking actively with the Google special sauce R&D folks and they know their stuff.....
True, but these are small caliber vessels that do not change over time unless there is an angiogenic disease process. The larger caliber blood vessels and vascular choroid on the other side is capable of much higher flow rates that would cause problems if you had to have that vasculature in the way.
The human eye has a "design" error, in that the photosensitive layer is not in front, there are other cells above them.......
Actually, the mammalian (human) eye is optimized for the metabolic loads it requires. It turns out that there is no higher area of metabolism in your body than there is at the photoreceptor/retinal pigment epithelium interface. It is a highly oxidative environment and evolutionarily, you need the apposition of the photoreceptors up against a layer of cells that can deal with the shed outer segments and the metabolic loads induced by rod photoreceptors. The other advantage is that you can snuggle the photoreceptors up to these cells that have a direct connection (diffusion) to a vascular layer. If it were backwards, the blood vessels would get in the way of the image formation and cast shadows.
In mollusks, OTOH, the outer layer of cells is the photosensitive one. The eye is more sensitive to light, has no blind spot, and allows for more data processing in the retina itself. That may be one of the reasons why octopuses are so good at camouflage, their eyes are very sensitive.
Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish have fairly sophisticated retinas that is true and you are correct about their anatomy. However, they do not process the same metabolic loads that the mammalian retina does and thus do not require the same degree of buffering, care and feeding that mammalian photoreceptors do. You have to be careful about using "sensitive" to describe eyes as that descriptive is dependent upon lots of things. Typically in most retinas it has to do with the ability of the opsin to capture a photon and the cell the opsin is in to transduce that signal.
All this is one more argument for evolution and against the "intelligent design" theory.
Intelligent design (ID) really does not even factor into either argument. ID is a religiously/politically motivated belief, not a theory that can be tested.
The number of genes is not necessarily an indicator of sophistication. Also I should point out that as you allude to in your sarcasm, we humans are not the most sophisticated at all biological functions. For instance, the human eye is a much less sophisticated device than the eyes of other creatures such as birds, turtles and even many fish species who see in many more "channels" than we do with greater color discrimination (and they can often fix their retinas when damaged unlike us who suffer when AMD or retinal degenerative diseases hit us).
I predict that companies will start looking at these gene sequences for application in drug development and to investigate the application of these "novel genes" in DNA repair therapies, metabolism and other applications.
I am actually pretty interested in this species from a metabolomic perspective. Organisms that can tune their physiology have a lot to teach us about the ability of metabolic networks to respond to environmental challenge or optimize their function in response to stress/disease.
If this is indeed your perspective, there is nothing that this scientist (or others I suspect) could say to you except to suggest taking some classes in bioscience. ID does not count.....
I will tell you that people *do* have problems with #1 in that they do not believe even in selective pressure. As to what you believe about a "historical" theory about events happening over millions of years, I would encourage you to read about paleontology, geology, botany, molecular biology and genetics among a myriad of other sciences that help to support the theory of evolution.
Tell a 16 year old to stay in the bedroom? Well hey, don't throw me in the briar patch!
No, what this kid should be doing is community service. Work in a soup kitchen, pick up garbage by the side of the road, help out his common man by distributing clothes in an inner city, something like that. In addition, I'd like to see him have all private computer access restricted (can only use a computer in the presence of an adult until he demonstrates he can act like an adult) and to undergo some sort of therapy to deal with his anti-social mores as sending out emails saying "you will die in seven days" is pretty sick. This is not punishment per se, however. I see it more as societal rehabilitation.
Jeeeez, talk about flushing money down the drain....... :-)
Seriously though, there are some things whose design has absolutely been optimized to a point where it would take a revolution in technology to make any changes worth while. Think about things like the doorknob, or a book, or a toilet seat, which arguably has been around since Roman times. Now you might say that technology has allowed an evolution of sorts in each of these examples, and that is true (mass production for the doorknob, printing presses, computer fonts and the Macintosh for books, and polymers for toilet seats), but each of these items works fundamentally the same as they have for hundreds of years such that a person from a hundred years ago could still recognize and interface with the device.
Putting a computer on/in a toilet seat is...... *dare I say it?*....... asinine.
I've done a bit of IR with film and you are right, it is fun. Shooting digital is interesting because most manufacturers place IR filters over the CCDs. Sometimes you can pry them off if you wanna risk it to your digital SLR, but there are also models which are optimized for astrophotography that do not have the IR filters on them....
Thanks! You really do not have to know alot about racing to enjoy the atmosphere out there. I am an unabashed gearhead, but my friends are not and they are absolutely hooked on attending.
Yeah, this was their plan to do it incrementally. I got some great shots of the JCB team doing their thing during Speed Week here. The Dieselmax team was having some problems setting up the car for the salt and were gradually working their way up and had planned all along to really go for the record the week or so after Speed Week.
Sure,
I found Keynote superior for the following reasons:
1) Ease of building presentations and embedding of graphics and movies.
2) Transitions (cross fades) for certain types of data allow for smooth flow of information allowing transparencies and overlays that facilitate interpretation.
3) Built in alignment guides for text and images so things are not jumping all over the place from slide to slide.
4) Cleaner interface and ease of exchange of data when building presentations with others.
5) Integration with iLife (iPhoto etc....) allowing the use of common (well managed) databases when building image files.
Yes, I *am* saying that I used a presentation software package, yet in using that package, I kept the "chartjunk" to a minimum, used graphics effectively where appropriate and used simple data and clear presentation to deliver the message.
This can be done with Powerpoint, Keynote and a variety of other packages. However, the problem with them is that people often use things like 3D graphs where inappropriate, fill up screens with lots of little text whereupon they say "don't read this, I just wanted to show......". Also the distracting use of transitions that flip and pop and such and cute little sounds that do nothing for the message except cloud it are common things that folks like Tufte and interestingly enough David Byrne have also commented on.
Ah the DOD culture of the Powerpoint. It's a scary thing. Everyone is gunning for the killer Powerpoint presentation that will get them some time with a flag. Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: Get a Mac and use Keynote. You will stand out with a polished presentation that is much more cinematic in appearance, yet useful in its ability to present data in a cleaner manner. And since most flags and their juniors in the Pentagon are using Windows, you will not be able to "give" them your Powerpoint where some junior officer will snake it from you. You will *have* to present it in person in front of the flag. :-)