Didn't I read an article a couple of weeks (months?) ago that said the exact oposite. Something to the effect that video games boosted cognitive skills and what not. I do believe I read it here though I can't find it in the archives.
I'm sure this has been pointed out a dozen times already, but the omision of this point in the article is so glaring that I have to mention it. Movies contain a massive amount of information. Songs do not. Just storing a movie on a hard drive in Divx format takes up 600Mb. You try to download a 600Mb file from a person limiting their upload to 10kbps. Don't plan on using the file for a little over 17 hrs. An mp3 averages 5Mb. On the same 10kbps connection you'd only have to wait 8 1/2 minutes. Also an album is broken up into tracks. Each track is an individual song enjoyable on it's own. Try downloading one chapter off of a DVD... wow this is great, it's the 12th scene in the movie, it's really the only one I wanted off of that DVD anyway. Not going to happen.
How about just stamping out your own DVD's. To copy a CD, all you have to do is have a CD-R and the right software. It's cheap, it's easy, and it takes minutes. DVD copying hardware is still pretty expensive. Do you know anyone with a DVD-R drive (Universities and corporations don't count)? Chances are most of you don't. That's because it is prohibitively expensive and basicly unavailable. That's also why you hear about the government busting DVD copying rings and seizing their DVD burning hardware... because it's unusual for anyone to have it. When's the last time you heard of an arrest where they broke up a CD copying ring and seized their CD-R stuff.
The long and the short of it is that the reason the motion picture industry isn't taking a hit from the internet while the recording industry is, is because they have fundamentally different products. Movies don't lend themselves to electronic distribution at current internet speeds while songs do. It's not some malicious need to pirate songs, or the challange of it or what not as stated in that assanine article.
"has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands"
Perhaps I jumped the gun here, however, this does seem to intimate an actual new evolutionary trait not just a physical acclimation to a new environment.
As for the vertibrae thing, you are correct. I could instead, have used the fact that the elephant is the only animal to have four knees facing the front. If we assumed that a pre-elephant's knees were like every other four legged animal on earths, then we could make the same argument: how could bending your knees completely rework your skeletal structure?
This really is a good helping of drivel. If there's one thing I've learned by reading articles about technical or scientific topics in mainstream media it's that you can't really trust it, not because the subject matter is suspect, but rather because the journalist who wrote the story is not very well informed about the science or technology upon which they are reporting.
This is a good example of what I mean. The type of "evolution" or "mutation" described in this article falls under the umbrella of Lamarckian evolution, not Darwinian. Larmarck was a french scientist who theorised that a physical change exhibited in an organism as a response to its environment would be reflected in it's offspring as an inheritable trait. The classic example is the evolution of the long neck of the giraffe. The anscestors of giraffes had short necks but, according to Lamarck, over their lifetimes, they stretched their necks trying to reach for ever higher branches, these longer necks were then passed on to their children. Over the generations their necks reached their current length.
The Darwinian way of looking at this is that every generation or so a pre-giraffe was born with the mutation carrying the genes for a longer neck. This longer neck conferred upon it's owner an advantage (more available food) and so it had more offspring than shorter necked pre-giraffes. Slowly this mutation outbread the shorter neck gene and so the population as a whole had longer necks. This process eventually results in our modern giraffe.
Lamarcks theory while on the surface somewhat resonable failed in several respects. How, under Lamarckian evolution, could the giraffe add vertibrae to its neck? Simply stretching the neck, while having a physical effect on the structure of ligaments, muscles, and to a limited extent bones, does not create whole new vertibrae to be passed on to a creatures offspring. Lamarck would have us beleive that any physical change in the individual would manifest itself in the offspring. If Lamarck's theories were true we would see the offspring of people who had nose jobs growing up with noses similar to their parents post surgery faces, not noses dictated by the genetics that created their parents original nose.
Scientific exploration, while vindicating (in the eyes of most) the theories of Darwin, has completely failed to find any supporting evidence for the theories of Lamarck. This story describes a learned behavior, not an evolved adaptation to the modern human genome. If these "new" humans with their "new thumbs" had children who were raised in an environment without cell phones, game controllers, etc. they would not manifest this behavior.
What the hell? Shouldn't this be Microsofts problem? Isn't it their software that lets these self propogating worms survive in the first place? It's like wanting to put a 3 million percent tax on gasoline because the car companies would rather put out 7 mile to the gallon SUV's instead of fuel efficient vehicles. It's not the companies fault for being irresponsible, it's the consumer. I'm an engineer and I need my internet access and email privileges to do my job. Have you ever had to do a freakin' parts search in those stupid catalogs? Not to mention that email is how I communicate with a lot of people on the outside world: vendors, customers, etc.. Wasn't there just a story about the 101 dumbest business moves of the last year? Was this crap on it?
Does anyone besides me remember that news story from a few weeks ago stating that large therapod dinosaurs similar to Tyrannosaurus Rex did run fast. The proof being fossil footprints showing the same dinosaur both walking and running. Kind of a smoking gun on the whole therapods run fast thing don't you think?
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Didn't I read an article a couple of weeks (months?) ago that said the exact oposite. Something to the effect that video games boosted cognitive skills and what not. I do believe I read it here though I can't find it in the archives.
I'm sure this has been pointed out a dozen times already, but the omision of this point in the article is so glaring that I have to mention it. Movies contain a massive amount of information. Songs do not. Just storing a movie on a hard drive in Divx format takes up 600Mb. You try to download a 600Mb file from a person limiting their upload to 10kbps. Don't plan on using the file for a little over 17 hrs. An mp3 averages 5Mb. On the same 10kbps connection you'd only have to wait 8 1/2 minutes. Also an album is broken up into tracks. Each track is an individual song enjoyable on it's own. Try downloading one chapter off of a DVD... wow this is great, it's the 12th scene in the movie, it's really the only one I wanted off of that DVD anyway. Not going to happen.
How about just stamping out your own DVD's. To copy a CD, all you have to do is have a CD-R and the right software. It's cheap, it's easy, and it takes minutes. DVD copying hardware is still pretty expensive. Do you know anyone with a DVD-R drive (Universities and corporations don't count)? Chances are most of you don't. That's because it is prohibitively expensive and basicly unavailable. That's also why you hear about the government busting DVD copying rings and seizing their DVD burning hardware... because it's unusual for anyone to have it. When's the last time you heard of an arrest where they broke up a CD copying ring and seized their CD-R stuff.
The long and the short of it is that the reason the motion picture industry isn't taking a hit from the internet while the recording industry is, is because they have fundamentally different products. Movies don't lend themselves to electronic distribution at current internet speeds while songs do. It's not some malicious need to pirate songs, or the challange of it or what not as stated in that assanine article.
"has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands"
Perhaps I jumped the gun here, however, this does seem to intimate an actual new evolutionary trait not just a physical acclimation to a new environment.
As for the vertibrae thing, you are correct. I could instead, have used the fact that the elephant is the only animal to have four knees facing the front. If we assumed that a pre-elephant's knees were like every other four legged animal on earths, then we could make the same argument: how could bending your knees completely rework your skeletal structure?
This really is a good helping of drivel. If there's one thing I've learned by reading articles about technical or scientific topics in mainstream media it's that you can't really trust it, not because the subject matter is suspect, but rather because the journalist who wrote the story is not very well informed about the science or technology upon which they are reporting.
This is a good example of what I mean. The type of "evolution" or "mutation" described in this article falls under the umbrella of Lamarckian evolution, not Darwinian. Larmarck was a french scientist who theorised that a physical change exhibited in an organism as a response to its environment would be reflected in it's offspring as an inheritable trait. The classic example is the evolution of the long neck of the giraffe. The anscestors of giraffes had short necks but, according to Lamarck, over their lifetimes, they stretched their necks trying to reach for ever higher branches, these longer necks were then passed on to their children. Over the generations their necks reached their current length.
The Darwinian way of looking at this is that every generation or so a pre-giraffe was born with the mutation carrying the genes for a longer neck. This longer neck conferred upon it's owner an advantage (more available food) and so it had more offspring than shorter necked pre-giraffes. Slowly this mutation outbread the shorter neck gene and so the population as a whole had longer necks. This process eventually results in our modern giraffe.
Lamarcks theory while on the surface somewhat resonable failed in several respects. How, under Lamarckian evolution, could the giraffe add vertibrae to its neck? Simply stretching the neck, while having a physical effect on the structure of ligaments, muscles, and to a limited extent bones, does not create whole new vertibrae to be passed on to a creatures offspring. Lamarck would have us beleive that any physical change in the individual would manifest itself in the offspring. If Lamarck's theories were true we would see the offspring of people who had nose jobs growing up with noses similar to their parents post surgery faces, not noses dictated by the genetics that created their parents original nose.
Scientific exploration, while vindicating (in the eyes of most) the theories of Darwin, has completely failed to find any supporting evidence for the theories of Lamarck. This story describes a learned behavior, not an evolved adaptation to the modern human genome. If these "new" humans with their "new thumbs" had children who were raised in an environment without cell phones, game controllers, etc. they would not manifest this behavior.
What the hell? Shouldn't this be Microsofts problem? Isn't it their software that lets these self propogating worms survive in the first place? It's like wanting to put a 3 million percent tax on gasoline because the car companies would rather put out 7 mile to the gallon SUV's instead of fuel efficient vehicles. It's not the companies fault for being irresponsible, it's the consumer. I'm an engineer and I need my internet access and email privileges to do my job. Have you ever had to do a freakin' parts search in those stupid catalogs? Not to mention that email is how I communicate with a lot of people on the outside world: vendors, customers, etc.. Wasn't there just a story about the 101 dumbest business moves of the last year? Was this crap on it?
Does anyone besides me remember that news story from a few weeks ago stating that large therapod dinosaurs similar to Tyrannosaurus Rex did run fast. The proof being fossil footprints showing the same dinosaur both walking and running. Kind of a smoking gun on the whole therapods run fast thing don't you think?