This is so easy to test that it's easy to disprove. If the baby cells "protected" the mother, then statistically mothers should live longer than childless woman. Since that's never been observed (and I'm sure someone has looked at the stats, it's such an easy study), this can't be true.
I suspect these so-called "scientists" who are proposing this aren't really all that high in the scientific food chain.
What a preposterous statement. Has it occurred to you that possibly, just maybe, the act of giving birth to a child is not statistically independent of a woman's lifespan?
Until recently, thanks to ultrasound testing, the use of Caesarian sections, induced labour, etc. childbirth was a major, major cause of death for women, and therefore we'd expect women who never had children to live longer on average. Globally, that's probably still the case; and it wouldn't surprise me to hear it's the case even in developed countries, since many women still die in childbirth even with modern medecine.
So the benefit to mothers described here may put a dent in these numbers, but it certainly isn't the only thing affecting longevity, and it's certainly naive to think the two lifespans (of mothers and non-mothers) should be the same.
If were as uncharitable as you, I might say that arguing that suggests that maybe you're not "really all that high in the scientific food chain.":)
What annoys me most about the reporting on this issue is that it is universally described in the past tense as a done deal: "political staffers changed articles and removed information".
I've seen little mention of what happened afterwards, i.e. that the changes were noticed, flagged as suspicious, and reverted. Or that some of these staffers repeatedly deleted information after it was repeatedly restored by other Wikipedians.
This must have happened in at least some cases, since a text deletion by a numeric IP address with a blank edit summary is one of the most suspicious things one can do in Wikipedia. Such changes are highly likely to be reverted just on general principle.
The fact that the consequences are not mentioned leaves the casual reader with the impression that the information was permanently purged, and therefore that Wikipedia is nothing more than the picked-over remains of truth after the propagandist vultures have flown away. This is far from being true.
Well, you're pretty confused when you're dragging out imaginary rationalizations for Bush's blatant confession to being merely a spokesmodel, when you oppose him so strongly. If you think Bush thinks that, and you're going to make up apologies for him, you might as well note that your proposed reason is jackass logic. Otherwise, you're the only one to blame for appearing to tacitly endorse it by articulating it unopposed.
Look, ceejayoz didn't say that Bush was correct, honest, or justified in any way, nor defend him in even the weakest way. He/she simply disagreed with your conclusion that this statement was an accidental confession.
The "jackass logic" that you describe makes perfect sense to me. I don't buy it -- I think it's a bullshit argument -- but I think it's an argument that a dick like Bush would make. And it's certainly more charitable to assume he meant this than to somehow conclude that he was baldly broadcasting to everyone that he's lobbing propaganda.
I invite you to perform some tai chi excercizes in the Washington Mall, then in Tianamen Square, and after the broken bones heal you can lecture us all on the moral equivalence of the American and Chinese governments.
I rather doubt you mean 'tai chi', considering these exercises has been practised in China continuously for hundreds of years, but rather Falun Gong.
Anyway, I agree with the point. I think the general problem in these types of debates is that there are two opposing viewpoints advanced, which for some reason are regarded as the only consistent viewpoints to hold, which are:
1) Country X (in this case, the United States) is the most free nation in the world. 2) All nations are equally 'free', with 'free' defined appropriately by the government.
Now, 2) is what is generally called moral equivalency. We shouldn't condemn it without thinking about why we're doing this. Its problems are that it is inconsistent and unreliable. Morality should be at least locally stable, but if we define it by the dictates of the ruling government, it can change in a heartbeat.
Yet 1) is objectionable too. I have very different opinions, as a non-American, on what 'freedom' is from many Americans. We would agree on most issues, e.g. free speech, democracy, innocence until guilt is proven, etc. Unlike many Americans, I would add no-cost access to (state-subsidized) health care as part of 'freedom', and would consider a society in which handguns are banned to be more free than one in which some equivalent of the Second Amendment holds.
So, there are different definitions of 'freedom' here. So is this moral equivalency? Can we allow our definitions of 'freedom' to differ and yet still condemn North Korea and Myanmar?
Sure. It's a Goldilocks thing. We have to be a bit loose about our freedoms (e.g. remove any stance on gun control from the definition of 'freedom') but not so loose as to let in totalitarianism. This can be done, and done defensibly.
The official message of many nuke-tenants is "nuke will solve the greenhouse-gas problem". This is pure BS, as a lab shows it right now. The lab name is 'France', where approximatively 80% of the electrical (grid power) is produced by nuclear plants. Guess what? France missed by far the Kyoto objectives of greenhouse gas (and among them CO2) reduction, and those objectives were not ambitious.
This is somewhat strange argument. Couldn't this also be taken as evidence that France didn't go far enough with conversion to nuclear power? One can't deny that, in itself, nuclear power generation generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal. So if they gone 100% nuclear, their emissions would have been less.
In any case, this is an odd argument. Whether or not nuclear energy will "solve" or "not solve" the carbon dioxide emissions problem, it will at least help to solve it. Burning coal never will.
As for the fact that CO2 is mostly generated by cars and trucks, well, so what? Drive electric cars and trucks or use alternatives, or choose not to do this and live with the consequences. But we can still work to reduce carbon emissions from power generation.
I think it is this style of argument, that "I'm only contributing 5% of what the other guy is, so it's not significant" which is really the problem here.
When I hear this style of argument, I'm reminded of Freeman Dyson's accounts of his work with nuclear-powered rockets (called "Project Plowshare"). He and his colleagues calculated that amount of radioactive waste their rockets contributed to the atmosphere each year was a small fixed percentage of what was being put there already by British/American/Russian/French/Chinese nuclear testing, so they should go ahead with their experiments, since it wasn't adding much.
Their calculation was and is correct. It's just that even that 5% was later calculated to be bad enough that it make these tests unjustifiable.
The issue with carbon emissions is the danger of climate change, not public health directly, but the principle is the same. Every little bit helps.
There's actually a framing calculator that has a much more useful square root function on it. It will return values that aren't decimal so it's easier to to use with a tape measure.
I was completely mystified about what this could possibly have meant, until I remembered that you guys don't use the metric system.:)
I guess converting from 11.764 feet to 11 feet and the appropriate number of inches would be a bitch. I'm just surprised they put the conversion into a special "square root" button and don't just have a general feet/inches decimal conversion tool.
Despite the whining from ESC researchers that only embryonic stem cells will do the magic, we've already heard several cases where non-embryonic stem cells have been used to work magic. Here we have another one. Why the continued push for ESC research? Here is a case where we don't have to destroy life in order to save life.
Well, do you really believe that stem-cell researchers would be courting controversy like this if it could be so easily avoided? Even if they don't accept the premise of the pro-lifers, it would still be easier for them to avoid controversy if they could.
I don't know this area particularly well, but I am sure that if the use of adult stem cells was in every way a replacement for the use of embryonic cells, then researchers would simply want to use those.
But they do want access to embryonic stem cells, which suggests to me that embryonic stem cells have some useful property that adult stems cells don't.
I am a VP at top 5 US bank, and I used to lead the team that develops our public website.
A VP at a top 5 U.S. bank, and (according to your user page) you're 28 years old and yet bother to post on Slashdot? I find this rather difficult to believe.
Also, keep in mind that in 1938 that the Nazi party and Hitler were fairly new, and were not yet seen as that bad. Germany's economy was just coming out of the sewer. In 1938, Hitler introduced the world to the Volkswagon Beetle, the most popular car in the world, and one that went without major redesign for many years. It was not until the end of 38 that Hitler started doing what he is known for today.
Yes, clearly in 1938 the Nuremberg Laws, the forced sterilization of Gypsies and the handicapped, the re-armament of the Rhineland, the outright assassination of political opponents, and the firebombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion all paled in the eyes of the world besides the amazing achievement of the Volkswagen Beetle.
Please, learn some goddamned history so you can make some more informed dumbass comments. The thirties in Europe was an armed camp, divided between Communism, Fascism, and everyone else forcefully suppressing either from taking over their country. He wasn't some fairytale poster boy who just randomly went bad; though I've never read it, I understand that the size of his ambition is evident in Mein Kampf, written long before 1938.
It does seem to be a sex linked one, that like baldness, manifests only in males.
"Sex-linked" refers to a gene on the X or Y chromosomes. In this case, since women can be carriers, it would have to be a gene on the X chromosome.
I would think if it were sex-linked they would have just said so, since then it wouldn't be any great mystery why it mostly affects men.
It's also worth noting that X-linked traits do *not* "only manifest" in males. They just manifest more often in males. If an X-linked gene occurs in the population with, say, 40% probability, then the chance of a baby boy expressing it is 0.40. On the other hand, the chance of a baby girl expressing it is 0.40 * 0.40 = 0.16, while the chance she gets it (and either expresses it or is a carrier) is 1-(1-0.40)*(1-0.40)=0.64.
For a gene occurring with small probability, the square of that probability is really small, so there are quite few colour-blind females. But they do exist, and any sons they have are guaranteed to be colour blind.
Mais, je pense que une capitulation propre devrait être fait en allemand. (Je me demande également combien de ceux qui se sont amusés par ton commentaire devraient le traduire avec Babelfish.)
Since we're integrating gadgets, we could place small solar panels on a hat and attach the hat to the glasses. The panels would charge the battery while providing additional sun protection, and it wouldn't look much dorkier than the Oakleys. (How could it?)
Perhaps you could add an layer of tinfoil for the paranoid, and to maximize energy use, mount a small propeller on the hat that would generate wind power when the person is in motion!
Really I don't know what to think because showing a nipple is like the apacolypse happening but when somebody expresses hate remarks against some people or says that they are a big supporter of gassing jews it's OK. Give me a fucking break.
Who was it who both agreed with the anti-Janet Jackson backlash and also promotes free speech for, among others, hate groups? I can think of mainstream groups who would support one of those two, but not both.
Are you maybe British, or from somewhere else in the Commonwealth? I believe Americans typically spell "enrolment" with two l's, and a Google search for each version supports this.
They're basically going to distribute a $100 machine to the poor. What do you want to bet that the poor will start selling them for: food, clothing, shelter, etc...
You can make the same argument about textbooks, bicycles and all sorts of things given to students by similar programs.
Since the goal is obviously to keep the things in the hands of students, the key will be to keep the black-market price low. A $100 laptop goes a hell of lot further towards this goal than a $1000 one.
These machines are going to be a HUGE flop and a complete waste of money - our money. No wonder there's such a huge anti-UN movement.
That's far from certain, and as for me, there are a hell of a lot of wastes of government money (on the local and national level) that concern me more than this stuff.
So I guess then you might not be particularly reassured to know that Negroponte's brother is the U.S. Director of National Intelligence?:)
Re:100,000 years humans did not walk in asia
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Sure, if you are looking for it, you might find it with "a bit of effort". But merely citing it as a source doesn't uncover any mistakes.
Then don't just cite it as a source. I didn't say that this level of confidence was easy to get: reading the edit history is a pain in the ass! I just said that when I use it, taking advantage of all its resources, this use does not often lead me astray.
As for the other point, I wrote:
No, you can't make unequivocal statements about the content, and information of a highly technical nature is hit and miss. But the degree of coverage more than makes up for this.
To that you wrote:
By that logic, a fictional encyclopaedia is better than a factual one, so long as it's larger. Doesn't fly. The whole purpose of an encyclopaedia is to convey facts. When it conveys incorrect information, its whole purpose is undermined. No amount of coverage can make up for that.
Ah, but you can make unequivocal claims about a fictional encyclopaedia: you can say it's fictional.
With Wikipedia you don't know, but the whole point, and the only reason I use it, is because by inspecting the page content, edit history, and talk pages, I can achieve a certain threshold of confidence about the accuracy of the information. I might still be wrong, but that's not usually the case.
I'm not suggesting one ought to generally use Wikipedia for everything. If I'm looking up Unicode characters, I'll look at the code charts on unicode.org; this is possible because a better resource exists. However, that's not always the case.
Finding truth in Wikipedia is a probabalistic algorithm. It's not going to be correct always. To be useful, it is only necessary that its falsehoods are rare.
Re:100,000 years humans did not walk in asia
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Only problem is, Huxley never had a sister named Roberta, and certainly didn't have a sister who died then. I'm not sure where the author came up with this.
First, there the question of how certain you can be that such a person never existed: babies who die within weeks or days of birth are often omitted from official histories.
However, I am inclined to agree with you that this information is probably false. It was introduced in this change here in October 2004 by an anonymous editor who provided no subject line. It's been left unchanged since, and even more egregiously, was propagated by some well-meaning translator into the Italian and Spanish versions, and probably others.
But, I would still stick to my claims. As I said, you can never make a completely unequivocal claim that what you got from Wikipedia is true: it's probabalistic, not deterministic. The idea is not to prove truth, but to argue that falsehood is rare.
The only time when misinformation is left unchanged for extended periods of time (by which I mean "several pages of edit history") is when it was so highly technical or specific that none of the intermediate reader/editors recognized it as wrong or felt comfortable with changing it.
In my experience, this has been rare so far. Of course, I can't fully trust my senses here -- this is something like dark matter in physics; by definition, it's what we don't notice -- so I may have passed by a lot of misinformation that I didn't see. My hypothesis that this sort of abuse is rare is based partly on the relative infrequency of false information when reading specific information I ''do'' know about, and partly on the guess that trolls just don't get much pleasure out of this sort of prank, because they don't get to see any evidence of people believing their lies.
As Wikipedia grows, the "reward" for successful trolling will grow too, so this sort of abuse will become more widespread. However, I suspect that Wikipedia is capable of evolving the right sort of trust weightings to combat it, which I why I don't feel this sort of abuse is a critical flaw.
Re:100,000 years humans did not walk in asia
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it's that "generally" that bothers me...
Fair enough. The thing is, you're always free to read the edit history yourself.
So the only danger is when someone introduces a change and it somehow survives long enough to have been buried several pages back in the edit history.
However, lots of entries in the edit history correspond to a lot of attention paid to the article, and attention paid means wrong information is reverted.
In my experience this phenomenon only occurs when the information changed was so highly technical or specific that none of the intermediate readers recognized it as wrong or felt comfortable with changing it. As a rule this combination -- an article with highly technical content but a huge edit history -- is quite rare.
Re:100,000 years humans did not walk in asia
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"Wikipedia pegs?!?!?" Wikipedia could be a kid in his pajamas sugared up on Fruit Loops and jujubes watching a Mummies Alive! marathon and logged on from his Mom's computer.
I don't understand how people, on Slashdot of all places, can't get past the anyone-can-edit-so-it's-all-crap argument about Wikipedia.
It's true that at any given time the content of any given Wikipedia page could be "omigod justin timberlake RULEZ", but you will notice that such changes last, usually, about 3-4 minutes. Discerning when this has and has not happened is what the "revision history" and "talk" pages are for.
Yes, there's nothing to stop stupid crap from being added, but I have yet to find a case where said crap does not reveal itself with a bit of effort. If I'm looking up information about human evolution, and find an article written by a kid in his pajamas, well, that will quickly become obvious to me from the writing. Similarly, if the article was not written by said kid, but said kid comes along and randomly changes "1,000,000 years ago" to "100,000 years ago" with no convincing argument in the edit summary, it will generally be noticed and reverted.
No, you can't make unequivocal statements about the content, and information of a highly technical nature is hit and miss. But the degree of coverage more than makes up for this. And in most cases, by combining the article content with judicious use of edit history, talk page discussions, and general critical judgment, I've found Wikipedia to be good enough as an information resource that it's usually the first place I look on the Internet.
Re:Birth of a Legend
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Almost every religion on this earth speaks of a flooding so big almost nothing survived - which should collide with the time a giant astroid hit the ocean somewhere around Cuba...
Um, you seem to be referring to the K-T extinction, which rendered approximately 50% of all genera extinct and is currently believed to have been caused by a meteorite impact in the Gulf of Mexico near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.
The thing is, that was 65 million years ago, at which time we -- and almost all other mammals -- were tiny furry insect-eaters trying our best not to get stepped on. So I hardly think we're going to find long-buried echoes of this event in our oral histories.
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This is so easy to test that it's easy to disprove. If the baby cells "protected" the mother, then statistically mothers should live longer than childless woman. Since that's never been observed (and I'm sure someone has looked at the stats, it's such an easy study), this can't be true.
:)
I suspect these so-called "scientists" who are proposing this aren't really all that high in the scientific food chain.
What a preposterous statement. Has it occurred to you that possibly, just maybe, the act of giving birth to a child is not statistically independent of a woman's lifespan?
Until recently, thanks to ultrasound testing, the use of Caesarian sections, induced labour, etc. childbirth was a major, major cause of death for women, and therefore we'd expect women who never had children to live longer on average. Globally, that's probably still the case; and it wouldn't surprise me to hear it's the case even in developed countries, since many women still die in childbirth even with modern medecine.
So the benefit to mothers described here may put a dent in these numbers, but it certainly isn't the only thing affecting longevity, and it's certainly naive to think the two lifespans (of mothers and non-mothers) should be the same.
If were as uncharitable as you, I might say that arguing that suggests that maybe you're not "really all that high in the scientific food chain."
What annoys me most about the reporting on this issue is that it is universally described in the past tense as a done deal: "political staffers changed articles and removed information".
I've seen little mention of what happened afterwards, i.e. that the changes were noticed, flagged as suspicious, and reverted. Or that some of these staffers repeatedly deleted information after it was repeatedly restored by other Wikipedians.
This must have happened in at least some cases, since a text deletion by a numeric IP address with a blank edit summary is one of the most suspicious things one can do in Wikipedia. Such changes are highly likely to be reverted just on general principle.
The fact that the consequences are not mentioned leaves the casual reader with the impression that the information was permanently purged, and therefore that Wikipedia is nothing more than the picked-over remains of truth after the propagandist vultures have flown away. This is far from being true.
Well, you're pretty confused when you're dragging out imaginary rationalizations for Bush's blatant confession to being merely a spokesmodel, when you oppose him so strongly. If you think Bush thinks that, and you're going to make up apologies for him, you might as well note that your proposed reason is jackass logic. Otherwise, you're the only one to blame for appearing to tacitly endorse it by articulating it unopposed.
Look, ceejayoz didn't say that Bush was correct, honest, or justified in any way, nor defend him in even the weakest way. He/she simply disagreed with your conclusion that this statement was an accidental confession.
The "jackass logic" that you describe makes perfect sense to me. I don't buy it -- I think it's a bullshit argument -- but I think it's an argument that a dick like Bush would make. And it's certainly more charitable to assume he meant this than to somehow conclude that he was baldly broadcasting to everyone that he's lobbing propaganda.
I invite you to perform some tai chi excercizes in the Washington Mall, then in Tianamen Square, and after the broken bones heal you can lecture us all on the moral equivalence of the American and Chinese governments.
I rather doubt you mean 'tai chi', considering these exercises has been practised in China continuously for hundreds of years, but rather Falun Gong.
Anyway, I agree with the point. I think the general problem in these types of debates is that there are two opposing viewpoints advanced, which for some reason are regarded as the only consistent viewpoints to hold, which are:
1) Country X (in this case, the United States) is the most free nation in the world.
2) All nations are equally 'free', with 'free' defined appropriately by the government.
Now, 2) is what is generally called moral equivalency. We shouldn't condemn it without thinking about why we're doing this. Its problems are that it is inconsistent and unreliable. Morality should be at least locally stable, but if we define it by the dictates of the ruling government, it can change in a heartbeat.
Yet 1) is objectionable too. I have very different opinions, as a non-American, on what 'freedom' is from many Americans. We would agree on most issues, e.g. free speech, democracy, innocence until guilt is proven, etc. Unlike many Americans, I would add no-cost access to (state-subsidized) health care as part of 'freedom', and would consider a society in which handguns are banned to be more free than one in which some equivalent of the Second Amendment holds.
So, there are different definitions of 'freedom' here. So is this moral equivalency? Can we allow our definitions of 'freedom' to differ and yet still condemn North Korea and Myanmar?
Sure. It's a Goldilocks thing. We have to be a bit loose about our freedoms (e.g. remove any stance on gun control from the definition of 'freedom') but not so loose as to let in totalitarianism. This can be done, and done defensibly.
The official message of many nuke-tenants is "nuke will solve the greenhouse-gas problem". This is pure BS, as a lab shows it right now. The lab name is 'France', where approximatively 80% of the electrical (grid power) is produced by nuclear plants.
Guess what? France missed by far the Kyoto objectives of greenhouse gas (and among them CO2) reduction, and those objectives were not ambitious.
This is somewhat strange argument. Couldn't this also be taken as evidence that France didn't go far enough with conversion to nuclear power? One can't deny that, in itself, nuclear power generation generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions than burning coal. So if they gone 100% nuclear, their emissions would have been less.
In any case, this is an odd argument. Whether or not nuclear energy will "solve" or "not solve" the carbon dioxide emissions problem, it will at least help to solve it. Burning coal never will.
As for the fact that CO2 is mostly generated by cars and trucks, well, so what? Drive electric cars and trucks or use alternatives, or choose not to do this and live with the consequences. But we can still work to reduce carbon emissions from power generation.
I think it is this style of argument, that "I'm only contributing 5% of what the other guy is, so it's not significant" which is really the problem here.
When I hear this style of argument, I'm reminded of Freeman Dyson's accounts of his work with nuclear-powered rockets (called "Project Plowshare"). He and his colleagues calculated that amount of radioactive waste their rockets contributed to the atmosphere each year was a small fixed percentage of what was being put there already by British/American/Russian/French/Chinese nuclear testing, so they should go ahead with their experiments, since it wasn't adding much.
Their calculation was and is correct. It's just that even that 5% was later calculated to be bad enough that it make these tests unjustifiable.
The issue with carbon emissions is the danger of climate change, not public health directly, but the principle is the same. Every little bit helps.
There's actually a framing calculator that has a much more useful square root function on it. It will return values that aren't decimal so it's easier to to use with a tape measure.
:)
I was completely mystified about what this could possibly have meant, until I remembered that you guys don't use the metric system.
I guess converting from 11.764 feet to 11 feet and the appropriate number of inches would be a bitch. I'm just surprised they put the conversion into a special "square root" button and don't just have a general feet/inches decimal conversion tool.
Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Seriously, does the author of the submission even know what deus ex machina means (not the literal Latin meaning, I mean how it's used)?
That's just...sad. That being said, I'm certain that I will now be modded down into oblivion. Goodbye cruel world. I hardly knew ye.
All I can say is that it might have been much worse. However one feels about "ebonics", it is at least a step up from Amos 'n Andy.
Despite the whining from ESC researchers that only embryonic stem cells will do the magic, we've already heard several cases where non-embryonic stem cells have been used to work magic. Here we have another one. Why the continued push for ESC research? Here is a case where we don't have to destroy life in order to save life.
Well, do you really believe that stem-cell researchers would be courting controversy like this if it could be so easily avoided? Even if they don't accept the premise of the pro-lifers, it would still be easier for them to avoid controversy if they could.
I don't know this area particularly well, but I am sure that if the use of adult stem cells was in every way a replacement for the use of embryonic cells, then researchers would simply want to use those.
But they do want access to embryonic stem cells, which suggests to me that embryonic stem cells have some useful property that adult stems cells don't.
I am a VP at top 5 US bank, and I used to lead the team that develops our public website.
A VP at a top 5 U.S. bank, and (according to your user page) you're 28 years old and yet bother to post on Slashdot? I find this rather difficult to believe.
Also, keep in mind that in 1938 that the Nazi party and Hitler were fairly new, and were not yet seen as that bad. Germany's economy was just coming out of the sewer. In 1938, Hitler introduced the world to the Volkswagon Beetle, the most popular car in the world, and one that went without major redesign for many years. It was not until the end of 38 that Hitler started doing what he is known for today.
Yes, clearly in 1938 the Nuremberg Laws, the forced sterilization of Gypsies and the handicapped, the re-armament of the Rhineland, the outright assassination of political opponents, and the firebombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion all paled in the eyes of the world besides the amazing achievement of the Volkswagen Beetle.
Please, learn some goddamned history so you can make some more informed dumbass comments. The thirties in Europe was an armed camp, divided between Communism, Fascism, and everyone else forcefully suppressing either from taking over their country. He wasn't some fairytale poster boy who just randomly went bad; though I've never read it, I understand that the size of his ambition is evident in Mein Kampf, written long before 1938.
How interesting, that my never-rated comment was overrated. Peut-être il y a un sentiment contre la langue française au Slashdot? Quelle surprise.
It does seem to be a sex linked one, that like baldness, manifests only in males.
"Sex-linked" refers to a gene on the X or Y chromosomes. In this case, since women can be carriers, it would have to be a gene on the X chromosome.
I would think if it were sex-linked they would have just said so, since then it wouldn't be any great mystery why it mostly affects men.
It's also worth noting that X-linked traits do *not* "only manifest" in males. They just manifest more often in males. If an X-linked gene occurs in the population with, say, 40% probability, then the chance of a baby boy expressing it is 0.40. On the other hand, the chance of a baby girl expressing it is 0.40 * 0.40 = 0.16, while the chance she gets it (and either expresses it or is a carrier) is 1-(1-0.40)*(1-0.40)=0.64.
For a gene occurring with small probability, the square of that probability is really small, so there are quite few colour-blind females. But they do exist, and any sons they have are guaranteed to be colour blind.
...accueillir nos nouveaux suzerains nazis.
Mais, je pense que une capitulation propre devrait être fait en allemand. (Je me demande également combien de ceux qui se sont amusés par ton commentaire devraient le traduire avec Babelfish.)
What's funny is the stuff he did is only coming into vogue in many circles - left untouched.
Erm, care to provide an example of something that was 'left untouched' until recently?
Since we're integrating gadgets, we could place small solar panels on a hat and attach the hat to the glasses. The panels would charge the battery while providing additional sun protection, and it wouldn't look much dorkier than the Oakleys. (How could it?)
Perhaps you could add an layer of tinfoil for the paranoid, and to maximize energy use, mount a small propeller on the hat that would generate wind power when the person is in motion!
Really I don't know what to think because showing a nipple is like the apacolypse happening but when somebody expresses hate remarks against some people or says that they are a big supporter of gassing jews it's OK. Give me a fucking break.
Who was it who both agreed with the anti-Janet Jackson backlash and also promotes free speech for, among others, hate groups? I can think of mainstream groups who would support one of those two, but not both.
Are you maybe British, or from somewhere else in the Commonwealth? I believe Americans typically spell "enrolment" with two l's, and a Google search for each version supports this.
They're basically going to distribute a $100 machine to the poor. What do you want to bet that the poor will start selling them for: food, clothing, shelter, etc...
You can make the same argument about textbooks, bicycles and all sorts of things given to students by similar programs.
Since the goal is obviously to keep the things in the hands of students, the key will be to keep the black-market price low. A $100 laptop goes a hell of lot further towards this goal than a $1000 one.
These machines are going to be a HUGE flop and a complete waste of money - our money. No wonder there's such a huge anti-UN movement.
That's far from certain, and as for me, there are a hell of a lot of wastes of government money (on the local and national level) that concern me more than this stuff.
...an RFID tag for my tinfoil hat?
:)
So I guess then you might not be particularly reassured to know that Negroponte's brother is the U.S. Director of National Intelligence?
Sure, if you are looking for it, you might find it with "a bit of effort". But merely citing it as a source doesn't uncover any mistakes.
Then don't just cite it as a source. I didn't say that this level of confidence was easy to get: reading the edit history is a pain in the ass! I just said that when I use it, taking advantage of all its resources, this use does not often lead me astray.
As for the other point, I wrote:
No, you can't make unequivocal statements about the content, and information of a highly technical nature is hit and miss. But the degree of coverage more than makes up for this.
To that you wrote:
By that logic, a fictional encyclopaedia is better than a factual one, so long as it's larger. Doesn't fly. The whole purpose of an encyclopaedia is to convey facts. When it conveys incorrect information, its whole purpose is undermined. No amount of coverage can make up for that.
Ah, but you can make unequivocal claims about a fictional encyclopaedia: you can say it's fictional.
With Wikipedia you don't know, but the whole point, and the only reason I use it, is because by inspecting the page content, edit history, and talk pages, I can achieve a certain threshold of confidence about the accuracy of the information. I might still be wrong, but that's not usually the case.
I'm not suggesting one ought to generally use Wikipedia for everything. If I'm looking up Unicode characters, I'll look at the code charts on unicode.org; this is possible because a better resource exists. However, that's not always the case.
Finding truth in Wikipedia is a probabalistic algorithm. It's not going to be correct always. To be useful, it is only necessary that its falsehoods are rare.
Only problem is, Huxley never had a sister named Roberta, and certainly didn't have a sister who died then. I'm not sure where the author came up with this.
First, there the question of how certain you can be that such a person never existed: babies who die within weeks or days of birth are often omitted from official histories.
However, I am inclined to agree with you that this information is probably false. It was introduced in this change here in October 2004 by an anonymous editor who provided no subject line. It's been left unchanged since, and even more egregiously, was propagated by some well-meaning translator into the Italian and Spanish versions, and probably others.
But, I would still stick to my claims. As I said, you can never make a completely unequivocal claim that what you got from Wikipedia is true: it's probabalistic, not deterministic. The idea is not to prove truth, but to argue that falsehood is rare.
The only time when misinformation is left unchanged for extended periods of time (by which I mean "several pages of edit history") is when it was so highly technical or specific that none of the intermediate reader/editors recognized it as wrong or felt comfortable with changing it.
In my experience, this has been rare so far. Of course, I can't fully trust my senses here -- this is something like dark matter in physics; by definition, it's what we don't notice -- so I may have passed by a lot of misinformation that I didn't see. My hypothesis that this sort of abuse is rare is based partly on the relative infrequency of false information when reading specific information I ''do'' know about, and partly on the guess that trolls just don't get much pleasure out of this sort of prank, because they don't get to see any evidence of people believing their lies.
As Wikipedia grows, the "reward" for successful trolling will grow too, so this sort of abuse will become more widespread. However, I suspect that Wikipedia is capable of evolving the right sort of trust weightings to combat it, which I why I don't feel this sort of abuse is a critical flaw.
it's that "generally" that bothers me...
Fair enough. The thing is, you're always free to read the edit history yourself.
So the only danger is when someone introduces a change and it somehow survives long enough to have been buried several pages back in the edit history.
However, lots of entries in the edit history correspond to a lot of attention paid to the article, and attention paid means wrong information is reverted.
In my experience this phenomenon only occurs when the information changed was so highly technical or specific that none of the intermediate readers recognized it as wrong or felt comfortable with changing it. As a rule this combination -- an article with highly technical content but a huge edit history -- is quite rare.
"Wikipedia pegs?!?!?" Wikipedia could be a kid in his pajamas sugared up on Fruit Loops and jujubes watching a Mummies Alive! marathon and logged on from his Mom's computer.
I don't understand how people, on Slashdot of all places, can't get past the anyone-can-edit-so-it's-all-crap argument about Wikipedia.
It's true that at any given time the content of any given Wikipedia page could be "omigod justin timberlake RULEZ", but you will notice that such changes last, usually, about 3-4 minutes. Discerning when this has and has not happened is what the "revision history" and "talk" pages are for.
Yes, there's nothing to stop stupid crap from being added, but I have yet to find a case where said crap does not reveal itself with a bit of effort. If I'm looking up information about human evolution, and find an article written by a kid in his pajamas, well, that will quickly become obvious to me from the writing. Similarly, if the article was not written by said kid, but said kid comes along and randomly changes "1,000,000 years ago" to "100,000 years ago" with no convincing argument in the edit summary, it will generally be noticed and reverted.
No, you can't make unequivocal statements about the content, and information of a highly technical nature is hit and miss. But the degree of coverage more than makes up for this. And in most cases, by combining the article content with judicious use of edit history, talk page discussions, and general critical judgment, I've found Wikipedia to be good enough as an information resource that it's usually the first place I look on the Internet.
Almost every religion on this earth speaks of a flooding so big almost nothing survived - which should collide with the time a giant astroid hit the ocean somewhere around Cuba...
Um, you seem to be referring to the K-T extinction, which rendered approximately 50% of all genera extinct and is currently believed to have been caused by a meteorite impact in the Gulf of Mexico near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.
The thing is, that was 65 million years ago, at which time we -- and almost all other mammals -- were tiny furry insect-eaters trying our best not to get stepped on. So I hardly think we're going to find long-buried echoes of this event in our oral histories.