Actually, that's pretty good. Generally speaking, a "1 healthy animal per 1000 modified embryos" success rate was normal, and that resulted in chimeric fusions, the splotchy nature of the incorporation of the exogenous DNA. Some parts of the animal would express the genes for the green fluorescent protein, others wouldn't. If they really got a line of pigs that express the gene in 100% of their cells, then that's a big step forward, not so much to have pigs that flueoresce, but in that they developed techniques that allow for ubiquitous expression of the inserted genes.
Why is this important? If you are engineering pigs to express human cell recognitions factors (so you can use that pig's liver for human transplants, for example), then you want to be sure that ALL of the liver cells are expressing them, otherwise the liver cells that don't will trigger rejection by the organ recipient. Link the GFP gene to the recognition factor gene, and you can tell just by looking.
I've given lots of public speeches, and I've been in a number of plays, and it completely depends on the audience and the intention of what you are trying to do as to wether you should work from an outline or a script.
If you are simply trying to convey information, then working from an outline is fine, since you can move sentences and phrases around and still deliver the same content.
If you are trying to elicit a specific emotional response, then you *must* script it out, down to the length of the pause between phrases and when to nod your head. In theatre, a ton of time is spent on "blocking"... establishing where to stand when saying one line, when to move to another mark for the next line, wether the emotional impact of the line is better if delivered facing stage right vs. house right, etc. All of this stage business will either enhance or detract from the emotional impact of your lines.
You simply cannot effectively manipulate the emotional response of your audience by going out there are winging it. Jobs isn't trying to simply introduce a new product - any marketroid could do that. He's trying make people fall out of their chairs with excitement at sight of the new product. A standing ovation in the room is what builds excitement, word of mouth, brand loyalty and market impact. A round of polite applause heralds a product with no lasting impact.
The spaceport, to be located some 25 miles south of the town of Truth or Consequences, will be constructed 90 percent underground, with just the runway and supporting structures above ground.
Some people might think that they are going to all of the trouble and expense of digging out tunnels and pits to construct living quarters, maintenance, etc. is for energy efficiency or something.
The real reason is more unsavory.
If you are announcing your intention to build a conventional (above ground) 60,000 square foot multi-building compound, it will be obvious to everyone if you only build the first 5000 square foot building, and leave the rest for when you actually turn a profit. If it's "90 percent underground", then you can just dig out for that first little structure, put a few 5' side tunnels on and install locked doors in front of the dirt. Who can tell the difference? If you slap labels like "Authorized Personnel Only" or "Hazardous Area - Do Not Enter", then you don't have to open the doors for the reporters who come to tour the "spaceport".
What this means is that they can put up a few sheds and bunkers above ground, build one showcase underground structure to show the reporters and passengers (who come in one or two at a time). Have a few bulldozers and dumptrucks drive around for awhile "building" the rest, then call it a spaceport. That might give them enough time to do a few flights to get the money coming in, then they can actually build the rest of it (probably above ground, with a cover story about how the original underground plans were too expensive). If the project tanks, they walk away without having sunk a lot of money in the thing.
Hell, I don't even need to RTFM - I could have told them certain jeans reduce IQ in males. Those low rise hip-huggers are the biggest culprit, although the kind with strategic rips that allow little flashes of blue panties also have a noticable negative impact on male cognitive ability.
I'm just surprised the resultant decline in IQ was only 20 points.
To survive and thrive on the Internet, newspapers should remake themselves to include proximal space for readership commentary, moderation systems to rein in the flamethrowers/idiots/newbies while fostering meaningful dialog, real-time vox populi fact checking, national news and general interest stuff on the front page, local news and special interest stuff on dedicated subpages that people can access directly.
what does the cost it took to make a movie have to do with how good or artistic it was?
Part of the cost of making a movie is marketing. Even if a film is mediocre, an aggressive marketing campaign can bring people in - examples of this are How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Pearl Harbor, Independence Day, and other manufactured "blockbusters". The problem is that you have to spend a lot of money to make a little more, so your ROI takes a hit, and you can't keep the public interested in a mediocre movie without breaking the bank on marketing.
A film that is very good (entertaining, artistic, informative, titillating, whatever criteria of "good" you want to use) will bring people in via word of mouth and good reviews, both of which cost essentially nothing, and which keep films profitably running in the theaters for many weeks longer than the typical mediocre blockbuster. Blair Witch Project, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and other low budget films are examples of this.
A film with a high ROI indicates a lot of interest in the moviegoing public without a huge, expensive marketing campaign. Granted, people are interested in lots of not-very-uplifting stuff like strange sex (Deep Throat), the politics of rage (Fahrenheit 9/11), blood and gore (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and cross-dressing bisexual alien mad scientists (Rocky Horror Picture Show), so ROI is not necessarily an indicator of a film with socially redeeming qualities, but its a pretty good benchmark of a film that gave the public what they wanted.
ROI is always tricky to calculate. You could argue that this figure doesn't include infrastructure costs, even amortized ones. Disney was only able to make SW&SD because they had previously spent a bunch of money in assembling a team of animators in a first-class animation shop. These costs were borne by the animated shorts (Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etc.), but are not assigned to the feature films. Every subsequent feature film Disney made benefited from the institutional knowledge and production infrastructure, which isn't easy to reflect in ROI.
Still, the re-release stuff is legitimate. They re-released Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, and Jaws, and people went to see them again. If they re-released How the Grinch Stole Christmas, would there be any significant additional revenue? If you make something of lasting value, it will give a better ROI than if you make a flash in the pan.
The list linked in the parent post gives the budget for TBWP as "0", presumeably since the budgets are given in millions of dollars. I was surprised to see this not on the tope 20 ROI but didn't have time to check further. I *am* at work, after all....
A lot of the films which grossed big bucks were also very expensive to make. A better scale is return on investment. The top 20 films, based on (box office)/(budget) are:
Film ROI-Dom ROI-World Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 185 185 The Rocky Horror Picture Show 134 134 Rocky 117 117 American Graffiti 115 115 Gone With the Wind 66 130 My Big Fat Greek Wedding 48 71 Star Wars 42 73 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 37 37 Grease 30 63 The Sting 27 27 Porky's 26 26 Platoon 23 26 The Godfather 22 22 Jaws 22 39 Fahrenheit 9/11 20 37 Look Who's Talking 18 37 The Exorcist 17 30 The Empire Strikes Back 16 30 The Passion of the Christ 15 24 Good Will Hunting 14 23
Snow White made it's budget back a whopping 185 times over, domestically and internationally. This is far and away better than any other film in history.
"genius" vs. "very, very smart"
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I once read one of Turing's colleagues describing him as a genius. According to this account (uncited because I can't remember where I read it, despite my own 168 IQ), there were a lot of very, very smart people working at Bletchley Park, but Turing was the only genius. He said the difference was that when you are very, very smart and see someone else who is very, very smart do something very, very smart, you think, "Oh, well, right, I would have come up with that eventually." When you see a genius do something that is an act of genius, you realize that you could have worked on it for the next 20 years and not come up with that. Geniuses, he said, are very inspring and very annoying.
Most people who are very, very smart are usually the smartest person in the room at any given time. It's only under special circumstances that a collection of very, very smart people are brought together, and it's even rarer for there to be a true genius among them.
Evolution cannot be true as it contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Using the same logic as you have used here, it is impossible to separate gold from sand simply by swirling them in a pan full of water, because this would be an increase in the orderliness of the mixture of gold+sand. The mistake that you are making in applying this argument is that you are not looking at the whole system. For every bit of the world that becomes more orderly, a bunch more becomes more disorderly - a lot of chemical energy gets turned into heat in the process of panning for gold.
However, the theory of Evolution has the basic principle that everything is getting more organized and more complex.
A lot of people make this mistake. Only the *organisms* are getting more complex and sophisticated... on the other side of the energy ledger is all of the food they eat and energy they expend. Of all the billions of terawatts the sun has shined down onto the earth over the last 4.5 billion years, some dinky proportion was captured and stored as chemical energy, which was then liberated and used by the metabolism of some organism to do something productive, creating heat in the process.
The organisms are only one small part of the sunlight-into-heat progression. When you consider the whole system, there's no violation of any thermodynamics. Most people who use this argument are operating from an incomplete understanding of thermodynamics, evolution or both.
Because GUBA is trying to make a splash as being the first to offer porn for the iPod. Apple doesn't sell porn videos in the iTunes store, so GUBA wants to meet the demand. In a reasonably clever marketing move, though, rather than sell them by the video, they'll sell all-you-can-eat access for $15/month, counting on the desire for continuous novelty on the part of porn consumers to keep them coming back. There's a boatload of porn in the Usenet archives, and you will never run out of new stuff to watch.
Also, a lot of the stuff posted on Usenet is fairly small files, and the big stuff (movies, etc.) is broken up into bite-sized chunks, perfect for downloading to an iPod.
I mean to say that this system is so convoluted, it looks like it wasn't designed *at all*. It looks like it accreted, with each new/changed/updated feature tacked onto the existing structure with a hodge-podge of inefficient methodologies, recyling bits and pieces from here and there. If conditions favored individuals with adaptation X, then those individuals came to predominate, even though the way they accomplished adaptation X is really poorly done and inefficient. For some adaptations, the individuals who do it more efficiently come to predominate, but where the metabolic cost of inefficiency doesn't impose a burden, the inefficiencies accumulate.
I suppose one could say that if it looks like it was put together by a lunatic, then it could be the product of irrational design, or that we just don't fully comprehend the subtlety and hidden elegance of the design. That's an argument that can never be refuted.
Not at all a well-designed, efficient and elegant system, it looks instead like the genetics is the most convoluted Rube Goldberg style mess you could imagine. To make a gene work you first express the DNA as mRNA, then edit the mRNA to remove to bits you didn't want in the first place, then reassmeble the parts you did. Except that some of that "non-coding" mRNA is used for spacing the "coding" mRNA.
To turn a gene off, you don't just turn it off... you turn another gene on that makes a piece of interfering RNA that binds to some of the mRNA from the first gene. The second gene is controlled in the same way, maybe as a positive feedback from the first gene maybe as a negative feedback, maybe under the control of some other gene, which may or may not have the same promoter region. Layers on top of layers on top of layers of interlocking control systems.....
Little bits and pieces of RNA, recycled and reused, adapted from their former functions to serve some new function, forming a hugely complex interlocking mess that somehow functions. This is like a typewriter constructed from a couple of staplers, a telephone and a box of paperclips.
So, since inefficient, cumbersome and inelegant spaghetti code-type machinery is at the heart of every mammalian cell, that pretty much drives a stake in the heart of any thought that this was a product of rational design, right?
I can appreciate the difficulty in dealing with deadlines and a screaming boss, but if you aren't getting the tools you need to do your job, then that's a problem for everyone, not just you. If you were using a utility knife on a daily basis, you would expect to have to spend some money to get the blades replaced periodically, right? A laser printer needs new toner cartidges periodically, right? So why do you continue to do a job using the same mental tools, year in year out, and expect to stay competitive with everyone else who is upgrading and/or replacing their mental tools on a regular basis?
I don't advocate taking two weeks off to go read the journals, once a year. I advocate investing a couple of hours at least every month, prefereably every week, for this "required tool maintenance". Going to the conferences isn't a *replacement* for reading the literature... it's a *supplement*. If you go and see absolutely nothing new, nothing you can use, then, great, you're happily fixed at the cutting edge. When budgets are tight, we don't go to every meeting every year; we send one of our group and have him/her report back to us what's new. I'm not shilling for IEEE, but getting together with professionals in your field that you don't usually see, in the context of a trade show/conference is almost always an educational experience.
Maybe I didn't understand the comparison of your solution vs. the PhDs. Are you saying that his 10 lines was a scant and inadequate solution compared to your 3 pages, or it was just that much more elegant?
Wound Healing in Mice: In the process of carrying out an autoimmunity experiment, the Heber-Katz research team noted that in the MRL strain of mice, punched ear holes used for long term identification rapidly closed without any sign of scarring. Besides lack of scarring when the ear hole closed, a blastema formed and new hair follicles and cartilage grew back, processes not generally seen in adult mammals though thought to be part of a regenerative process seen in amphibians. The laboratory has been actively pursuing the identification of genes involved in this trait along with the mechanisms that allow this healing to take place. They found that the matrix metalloproteinases are upregulated early after wounding and just prior to blastema formation and that the molecule Pref-1 is upregulated late after wounding and just as the blastema is beginning to redifferentiate into mature cells. These studies have led the research team to examine multiple tissues that show the unusual regenerative capacity seen in this mouse.
As my old high-school physics teacher used to say, the Princes of Serendip paid that lab a visit. Luck got the ball rolling, but hard work made it into something with potential. It took an observant, inquiring mind to note that the ear holes were closing, and to choose to investigate it further. Fortune favors the prepared mind, especially in science.
Each mini-satellite should come standard with a de-orbiting mechanism, like a small gas cannister or an azide pellet. When the lifespan is up, de-orbit the satellite to avoid adding to the space junk problem.
Even in the journals that I regularly read (every issue, every year), I only read a relative handful of papers, germaine to my research. When my research topics evolve, I might go back and read different papers in the same issue. Maybe there are some scientists out there who read every paper in every issue of journal in their field, but they must read a hell of a lot faster than I do. I rely on Current Contents, automated lit searches, and other computer-based tools to sift through the flood of info. I also rely on my colleagues - they know what research I do, and I know what research they do. If I see something that might interest them, I forward it to them, and vice versa.
there is no good way to stay abreast of current interesting developments
I would respectfully point out that that's why the annual scientific conferences are useful. The research presented in the talks and the posters precedes that presented in the papers and book chapters, giving you a feel for what the latest interesting problems are. If all of a sudden there are three times as many posters on Probelm X at the 2005 conference than there were at the 2004, then that should tip you off that something is up. If they are all coming out of one institution, that should tell you something, too. I know IEEE and other engineering societies hold annual meetings; are they not as useful as, say, ASM?
Once or twice a year I have the luxury of spending a week or two in an engineering library for the express purpose of finding out new and interesting things in my field.
This means that you are necessarily reading the journals at least a month, perhaps as much as a year after they come out. I don't mean to flame, but I suggest that this is not a very good strategy for staying current. By the time something is published in a journal, a lot of people will have known about it for a year or more, right down to the experimental details.
As to how to tell good work from bad work, that's what collective and individual professional judgement is for. If the profession is divided, and your individual level of expertise in that particular area is inadequate to make a good judgement, that's when you ask a few of your colleagues, "So, did you see that presentation on Problem X from Dr. Smith at Big State University? It looks like he was directly contradicting Dr. Jones from Small Private University. What do you think?" If none of you can tell who's probably right, then you either wait for more data or go generate the data to decide the issue.
I was thinking more along the lines of the flash of UV you get from a plasma arc just before the electrodes vaporize. It certainly cools down through the visible into IR pretty quickly, but in this case, you've got about 15 pounds of server slag to cool, so it might take a few minutes to go from blue-white through yellow and orange.
I sort of regard Slashdot not as a trigger for a WMD, but as a standalone WMD all by itself.
Having your webserver shine briefly in the ultraviolet range before slumping in a heap of molten slag because you got linked on the front page of Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Four out of 265 is a pretty low rate.
Actually, that's pretty good. Generally speaking, a "1 healthy animal per 1000 modified embryos" success rate was normal, and that resulted in chimeric fusions, the splotchy nature of the incorporation of the exogenous DNA. Some parts of the animal would express the genes for the green fluorescent protein, others wouldn't. If they really got a line of pigs that express the gene in 100% of their cells, then that's a big step forward, not so much to have pigs that flueoresce, but in that they developed techniques that allow for ubiquitous expression of the inserted genes.
Why is this important? If you are engineering pigs to express human cell recognitions factors (so you can use that pig's liver for human transplants, for example), then you want to be sure that ALL of the liver cells are expressing them, otherwise the liver cells that don't will trigger rejection by the organ recipient. Link the GFP gene to the recognition factor gene, and you can tell just by looking.
I've given lots of public speeches, and I've been in a number of plays, and it completely depends on the audience and the intention of what you are trying to do as to wether you should work from an outline or a script.
If you are simply trying to convey information, then working from an outline is fine, since you can move sentences and phrases around and still deliver the same content.
If you are trying to elicit a specific emotional response, then you *must* script it out, down to the length of the pause between phrases and when to nod your head. In theatre, a ton of time is spent on "blocking"... establishing where to stand when saying one line, when to move to another mark for the next line, wether the emotional impact of the line is better if delivered facing stage right vs. house right, etc. All of this stage business will either enhance or detract from the emotional impact of your lines.
You simply cannot effectively manipulate the emotional response of your audience by going out there are winging it. Jobs isn't trying to simply introduce a new product - any marketroid could do that. He's trying make people fall out of their chairs with excitement at sight of the new product. A standing ovation in the room is what builds excitement, word of mouth, brand loyalty and market impact. A round of polite applause heralds a product with no lasting impact.
Isn't that what keyboard remapping is for?
if people would take more personal responsibility when posting, blogging, etc. ... said the Anonymous Coward.
The spaceport, to be located some 25 miles south of the town of Truth or Consequences, will be constructed 90 percent underground, with just the runway and supporting structures above ground.
Some people might think that they are going to all of the trouble and expense of digging out tunnels and pits to construct living quarters, maintenance, etc. is for energy efficiency or something.
The real reason is more unsavory.
If you are announcing your intention to build a conventional (above ground) 60,000 square foot multi-building compound, it will be obvious to everyone if you only build the first 5000 square foot building, and leave the rest for when you actually turn a profit. If it's "90 percent underground", then you can just dig out for that first little structure, put a few 5' side tunnels on and install locked doors in front of the dirt. Who can tell the difference? If you slap labels like "Authorized Personnel Only" or "Hazardous Area - Do Not Enter", then you don't have to open the doors for the reporters who come to tour the "spaceport".
What this means is that they can put up a few sheds and bunkers above ground, build one showcase underground structure to show the reporters and passengers (who come in one or two at a time). Have a few bulldozers and dumptrucks drive around for awhile "building" the rest, then call it a spaceport. That might give them enough time to do a few flights to get the money coming in, then they can actually build the rest of it (probably above ground, with a cover story about how the original underground plans were too expensive). If the project tanks, they walk away without having sunk a lot of money in the thing.
If you can't see it, it isn't there.
Hell, I don't even need to RTFM - I could have told them certain jeans reduce IQ in males. Those low rise hip-huggers are the biggest culprit, although the kind with strategic rips that allow little flashes of blue panties also have a noticable negative impact on male cognitive ability.
I'm just surprised the resultant decline in IQ was only 20 points.
Dear print media,
To survive and thrive on the Internet, newspapers should remake themselves to include proximal space for readership commentary, moderation systems to rein in the flamethrowers/idiots/newbies while fostering meaningful dialog, real-time vox populi fact checking, national news and general interest stuff on the front page, local news and special interest stuff on dedicated subpages that people can access directly.
In other words, be like Slashdot.
Sincerely,
Roblimo
what does the cost it took to make a movie have to do with how good or artistic it was?
Part of the cost of making a movie is marketing. Even if a film is mediocre, an aggressive marketing campaign can bring people in - examples of this are How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Pearl Harbor, Independence Day, and other manufactured "blockbusters". The problem is that you have to spend a lot of money to make a little more, so your ROI takes a hit, and you can't keep the public interested in a mediocre movie without breaking the bank on marketing.
A film that is very good (entertaining, artistic, informative, titillating, whatever criteria of "good" you want to use) will bring people in via word of mouth and good reviews, both of which cost essentially nothing, and which keep films profitably running in the theaters for many weeks longer than the typical mediocre blockbuster. Blair Witch Project, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and other low budget films are examples of this.
A film with a high ROI indicates a lot of interest in the moviegoing public without a huge, expensive marketing campaign. Granted, people are interested in lots of not-very-uplifting stuff like strange sex (Deep Throat), the politics of rage (Fahrenheit 9/11), blood and gore (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and cross-dressing bisexual alien mad scientists (Rocky Horror Picture Show), so ROI is not necessarily an indicator of a film with socially redeeming qualities, but its a pretty good benchmark of a film that gave the public what they wanted.
ROI is always tricky to calculate. You could argue that this figure doesn't include infrastructure costs, even amortized ones. Disney was only able to make SW&SD because they had previously spent a bunch of money in assembling a team of animators in a first-class animation shop. These costs were borne by the animated shorts (Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etc.), but are not assigned to the feature films. Every subsequent feature film Disney made benefited from the institutional knowledge and production infrastructure, which isn't easy to reflect in ROI.
Still, the re-release stuff is legitimate. They re-released Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, and Jaws, and people went to see them again. If they re-released How the Grinch Stole Christmas, would there be any significant additional revenue? If you make something of lasting value, it will give a better ROI than if you make a flash in the pan.
The list linked in the parent post gives the budget for TBWP as "0", presumeably since the budgets are given in millions of dollars. I was surprised to see this not on the tope 20 ROI but didn't have time to check further. I *am* at work, after all....
A lot of the films which grossed big bucks were also very expensive to make. A better scale is return on investment. The top 20 films, based on (box office)/(budget) are:
Film ROI-Dom ROI-World
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 185 185
The Rocky Horror Picture Show 134 134
Rocky 117 117
American Graffiti 115 115
Gone With the Wind 66 130
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 48 71
Star Wars 42 73
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 37 37
Grease 30 63
The Sting 27 27
Porky's 26 26
Platoon 23 26
The Godfather 22 22
Jaws 22 39
Fahrenheit 9/11 20 37
Look Who's Talking 18 37
The Exorcist 17 30
The Empire Strikes Back 16 30
The Passion of the Christ 15 24
Good Will Hunting 14 23
Snow White made it's budget back a whopping 185 times over, domestically and internationally. This is far and away better than any other film in history.
I once read one of Turing's colleagues describing him as a genius. According to this account (uncited because I can't remember where I read it, despite my own 168 IQ), there were a lot of very, very smart people working at Bletchley Park, but Turing was the only genius. He said the difference was that when you are very, very smart and see someone else who is very, very smart do something very, very smart, you think, "Oh, well, right, I would have come up with that eventually." When you see a genius do something that is an act of genius, you realize that you could have worked on it for the next 20 years and not come up with that. Geniuses, he said, are very inspring and very annoying.
Most people who are very, very smart are usually the smartest person in the room at any given time. It's only under special circumstances that a collection of very, very smart people are brought together, and it's even rarer for there to be a true genius among them.
Evolution cannot be true as it contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Using the same logic as you have used here, it is impossible to separate gold from sand simply by swirling them in a pan full of water, because this would be an increase in the orderliness of the mixture of gold+sand. The mistake that you are making in applying this argument is that you are not looking at the whole system. For every bit of the world that becomes more orderly, a bunch more becomes more disorderly - a lot of chemical energy gets turned into heat in the process of panning for gold.
However, the theory of Evolution has the basic principle that everything is getting more organized and more complex.
A lot of people make this mistake. Only the *organisms* are getting more complex and sophisticated... on the other side of the energy ledger is all of the food they eat and energy they expend. Of all the billions of terawatts the sun has shined down onto the earth over the last 4.5 billion years, some dinky proportion was captured and stored as chemical energy, which was then liberated and used by the metabolism of some organism to do something productive, creating heat in the process.
The organisms are only one small part of the sunlight-into-heat progression. When you consider the whole system, there's no violation of any thermodynamics. Most people who use this argument are operating from an incomplete understanding of thermodynamics, evolution or both.
Because GUBA is trying to make a splash as being the first to offer porn for the iPod. Apple doesn't sell porn videos in the iTunes store, so GUBA wants to meet the demand. In a reasonably clever marketing move, though, rather than sell them by the video, they'll sell all-you-can-eat access for $15/month, counting on the desire for continuous novelty on the part of porn consumers to keep them coming back. There's a boatload of porn in the Usenet archives, and you will never run out of new stuff to watch.
Also, a lot of the stuff posted on Usenet is fairly small files, and the big stuff (movies, etc.) is broken up into bite-sized chunks, perfect for downloading to an iPod.
I can only give you that info if you file a Guidance Request Invoice Packet (Expanded), form 229-A, in triplicate.
No GRIPE, no info. That's been policy since last November. You should know that.
Oh, and don't use the old version of the GRIPE 229-A, use the new version. Ask your secretary which is which... I don't have time to tell you.
From the last page of TFA:
With a few additions, like a hard drive and optical drive, a computer like this one could easily be a great work computer.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement....
I mean to say that this system is so convoluted, it looks like it wasn't designed *at all*. It looks like it accreted, with each new/changed/updated feature tacked onto the existing structure with a hodge-podge of inefficient methodologies, recyling bits and pieces from here and there. If conditions favored individuals with adaptation X, then those individuals came to predominate, even though the way they accomplished adaptation X is really poorly done and inefficient. For some adaptations, the individuals who do it more efficiently come to predominate, but where the metabolic cost of inefficiency doesn't impose a burden, the inefficiencies accumulate.
I suppose one could say that if it looks like it was put together by a lunatic, then it could be the product of irrational design, or that we just don't fully comprehend the subtlety and hidden elegance of the design. That's an argument that can never be refuted.
Not at all a well-designed, efficient and elegant system, it looks instead like the genetics is the most convoluted Rube Goldberg style mess you could imagine. To make a gene work you first express the DNA as mRNA, then edit the mRNA to remove to bits you didn't want in the first place, then reassmeble the parts you did. Except that some of that "non-coding" mRNA is used for spacing the "coding" mRNA.
To turn a gene off, you don't just turn it off... you turn another gene on that makes a piece of interfering RNA that binds to some of the mRNA from the first gene. The second gene is controlled in the same way, maybe as a positive feedback from the first gene maybe as a negative feedback, maybe under the control of some other gene, which may or may not have the same promoter region. Layers on top of layers on top of layers of interlocking control systems.....
Little bits and pieces of RNA, recycled and reused, adapted from their former functions to serve some new function, forming a hugely complex interlocking mess that somehow functions. This is like a typewriter constructed from a couple of staplers, a telephone and a box of paperclips.
So, since inefficient, cumbersome and inelegant spaghetti code-type machinery is at the heart of every mammalian cell, that pretty much drives a stake in the heart of any thought that this was a product of rational design, right?
I can appreciate the difficulty in dealing with deadlines and a screaming boss, but if you aren't getting the tools you need to do your job, then that's a problem for everyone, not just you. If you were using a utility knife on a daily basis, you would expect to have to spend some money to get the blades replaced periodically, right? A laser printer needs new toner cartidges periodically, right? So why do you continue to do a job using the same mental tools, year in year out, and expect to stay competitive with everyone else who is upgrading and/or replacing their mental tools on a regular basis?
I don't advocate taking two weeks off to go read the journals, once a year. I advocate investing a couple of hours at least every month, prefereably every week, for this "required tool maintenance". Going to the conferences isn't a *replacement* for reading the literature... it's a *supplement*. If you go and see absolutely nothing new, nothing you can use, then, great, you're happily fixed at the cutting edge. When budgets are tight, we don't go to every meeting every year; we send one of our group and have him/her report back to us what's new. I'm not shilling for IEEE, but getting together with professionals in your field that you don't usually see, in the context of a trade show/conference is almost always an educational experience.
Maybe I didn't understand the comparison of your solution vs. the PhDs. Are you saying that his 10 lines was a scant and inadequate solution compared to your 3 pages, or it was just that much more elegant?
As my old high-school physics teacher used to say, the Princes of Serendip paid that lab a visit. Luck got the ball rolling, but hard work made it into something with potential. It took an observant, inquiring mind to note that the ear holes were closing, and to choose to investigate it further. Fortune favors the prepared mind, especially in science.
Each mini-satellite should come standard with a de-orbiting mechanism, like a small gas cannister or an azide pellet. When the lifespan is up, de-orbit the satellite to avoid adding to the space junk problem.
Even in the journals that I regularly read (every issue, every year), I only read a relative handful of papers, germaine to my research. When my research topics evolve, I might go back and read different papers in the same issue. Maybe there are some scientists out there who read every paper in every issue of journal in their field, but they must read a hell of a lot faster than I do. I rely on Current Contents, automated lit searches, and other computer-based tools to sift through the flood of info. I also rely on my colleagues - they know what research I do, and I know what research they do. If I see something that might interest them, I forward it to them, and vice versa.
there is no good way to stay abreast of current interesting developments
I would respectfully point out that that's why the annual scientific conferences are useful. The research presented in the talks and the posters precedes that presented in the papers and book chapters, giving you a feel for what the latest interesting problems are. If all of a sudden there are three times as many posters on Probelm X at the 2005 conference than there were at the 2004, then that should tip you off that something is up. If they are all coming out of one institution, that should tell you something, too. I know IEEE and other engineering societies hold annual meetings; are they not as useful as, say, ASM?
Once or twice a year I have the luxury of spending a week or two in an engineering library for the express purpose of finding out new and interesting things in my field.
This means that you are necessarily reading the journals at least a month, perhaps as much as a year after they come out. I don't mean to flame, but I suggest that this is not a very good strategy for staying current. By the time something is published in a journal, a lot of people will have known about it for a year or more, right down to the experimental details.
As to how to tell good work from bad work, that's what collective and individual professional judgement is for. If the profession is divided, and your individual level of expertise in that particular area is inadequate to make a good judgement, that's when you ask a few of your colleagues, "So, did you see that presentation on Problem X from Dr. Smith at Big State University? It looks like he was directly contradicting Dr. Jones from Small Private University. What do you think?" If none of you can tell who's probably right, then you either wait for more data or go generate the data to decide the issue.
You just made that sh*t up, didn't you?
I was thinking more along the lines of the flash of UV you get from a plasma arc just before the electrodes vaporize. It certainly cools down through the visible into IR pretty quickly, but in this case, you've got about 15 pounds of server slag to cool, so it might take a few minutes to go from blue-white through yellow and orange.
I sort of regard Slashdot not as a trigger for a WMD, but as a standalone WMD all by itself.
Having your webserver shine briefly in the ultraviolet range before slumping in a heap of molten slag because you got linked on the front page of Slashdot.