> Translation from stupid-articlese: in vitro the translation products of the artificial DNA folded into shapes similar to wild type proteins.
DNA fold to similar shape as portein shape BWAHAHAHA. WTF!!!!!! Basic dogma in Biology: DNA to RNA to Protein. Some examples of reverse transcription (RNA to DNA) and some catalytic RNA. Examples of Basic dogma. Vast examples found in any low level text on Biology. As for how they did it. Look up another field called bioinformatics which involves thousands of programms available all over net and in house to analyse, convert, alter DNA/RNA/protein sequences, predicted primary, secondary, tertiary, etc structure , etc, etc, ETC, ETC. Rated 3 interesting, by essentailly describing how you have LESS than an elementary knowledge of molecular biology/protein chemistry. Jeez. BASIC ADVICE: KNOW FIRST, TALK SECOND
Dumbass, a translation product of DNA is a protein. DNA is transcribed to RNA and the RNA is translated to a protein.
Why can't these articles include any meaningful information? They refuse to tell you what they're about.
Earlier research has shown that for a given group of related proteins, or protein family, all family members share common structures and functions.
What would be an example of a "protein family" in this context? Filamentous? Membrane associated? Globins? Antibodies? No idea. "Common structures and functions" could mean several different things.
By examining more than 100 members of one protein family, the UT Southwestern group found that the proteins share a specific pattern of amino acid selection rules that are unique to that family.
This tells us nothing that isn't already known. Of COURSE proteins with related functions share specific patterns of amino acid selection rules or they wouldn't work. WHAT sort of selection rule did this group actually find?
"What we have found is the body of information that is fundamentally ancient within each protein family, and that information is enough to specify the structure of modern-day proteins," Dr. Ranganathan said.
He sounds like he's talking to a little kid.
He and his team tested their newly discovered "rules" gleaned from the evolutionary record by feeding them into a computer program they developed. The program generated sequences of amino acids,
and how did it do this?
which the researchers then "back-translated" to create artificial genes.
i.e. they did a trivial replacement of single amino acid letters with three letter codons in silico, then generated the corresponding DNA sequence.
Once inserted into laboratory bacteria, the genes produced artificial proteins as predicted. "We found that when isolated, our artificial proteins exhibit the same range of structure and function that is exhibited by the starting set of natural proteins," Dr. Ranganathan said. "The real test will be to put them back into a living organism such as yeast or fruit flies and see how they compete with natural proteins in an evolutionary sense."
Translation from stupid-articlese: in vitro the translation products of the artificial DNA folded into shapes similar to wild type proteins. I think.
One can only assume that these guys chose proteins that don't undergo post-translational modification.
>>"...but the cost of electricity is relatively cheap to the point of being free.
>Take an intro Economics course, really, you need it.
LOL! If someone needs an econ course it's you!
A Duracell Ultra AA alkaline battery can be bought for about $1. It delivers 2.3 watt-hours. The power company charges something like 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. For $1 you get 10 kilowatt-hours from an outlet- as much as you get from 4300 Duracell Ultras. From an outlet, 2.3 watt hours costs about 1/50 of a cent. On the scale that we're talking about, that certainly is "cheap to the point of being free." We're not talking about recharging a Prius. Even considering recharge inefficiencies, you'll be lucky if you manage to use a penny's worth of electricity over the lifetime of an AA rechargeable battery. Just leaving the recharger's wall-wart plugged in wastes more electricity than the rechargeable gets.
Per watt-hour, the energy costs associated with batteries- rechargeable or not- are several orders of magnitude greater than those of the cost of a comparable amount of electricity considered purely as a commodity. You're not really paying for the electricity with batteries so much as the portability and convenience. And with rechargeables, most of the cost of operation comes from degradation to the battery structure over repeated charge/discharge cycles. (Plus the environmental load from the cadmium when people don't recycle NiCads.) The cost of the recharge current itself is the most negligible factor as the GP correctly pointed out.
I don't see how they think they have the authority to let the president authorize a first strike. The power to declare war belongs to the Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 limits the power of the President of the United States to wage war without the approval of the Congress.
U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules By Jerry Markon/Washington Post Staff Writer/Saturday, September 10, 2005; Page A01 A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former gang member and U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in 2002 and a month later designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The government contends that Padilla trained at al Qaeda camps and was planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States. Padilla has been held without trial in a U.S. naval brig for more than three years, and his case has ignited a fierce battle over the balance between civil liberties and the government's power to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A host of civil liberties groups and former attorney general Janet Reno weighed in on Padilla's behalf, calling his detention illegal and arguing that the president does not have unchecked power to lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely.
I feel safer already.
Note that this is a ruling against a defendant, an American citizen, whose detention began in 2002, and who has not been charged. This ruling is not contingent on a formal declaration of war by Congress, since there obviously hasn't been one in this case. We are at war if the president says so, and once we are at war, he can throw any American citizen in jail for as long as he wants. He doesn't need to charge you with anything. (And while it may not be germane to this particular case, he can also have you tortured.)
And here's something else to note:
The 4th Circuit decision could also play a role in the debate over whom President Bush will nominate to the Supreme Court seat to be vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. The decision was written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, a favorite of conservative groups who is considered to be among the leading candidates for the nomination. He was joined in the ruling by judges William B. Traxler Jr. and M. Blane Michael, both Clinton administration appointees.
Sean Rushton, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice, which was formed to support Bush's judicial nominees, said he doubted that Luttig's ruling would affect his chances. He pointed out that Luttig has issued strongly pro-government decisions in other terrorism cases since Sept. 11, including in the prosecution of convicted conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. "I'm not sure that we really knew anything new about Michael Luttig from this case," Rushton said. But Cover said groups opposed to a potential Luttig nomination will carefully review the decision. "This gives our group, and I think many others, very serious concerns about his views on civil liberties and presidential powers," Cover said.
That name- J. Michael Luttig- is one to watch. (The other two judges should be ashamed of themselves, but as Clinton appointees I doubt they would seriously be considered for SC appointments.)
So much for "activist judges handing out rights that aren't in the Constitution". Even if they are in the Constitution they aren't handing them out these days!
The ex head of the Army Corp of Engineers was on the news the other night and he made it clear that this problem is one that is bi-partisan.
Such people had more credibility before the disaster than after, when they are clearly being paid to help in a major CYA operation. The cutbacks in levee construction only became "bipartisan" once it was realized they were terrible mistakes. If you want the truth, rather than the shitstorm of BS that is flying around at the moment, there are plenty of newspaper articles covering this issue that are available from the past few years.
For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade.
"I guess people look around and think there's a complete system in place, that we're just out here trying to put icing on the cake," said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the "Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity" levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. "And we aren't saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place."... "I can't tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm," Naomi said. "It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us. "But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects."... The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration's $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million. "I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million," Naomi said. "I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn't get paid this year."... The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security. "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Maestri said. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."... Levee-raising is only part of the flood-related work that has stopped since the federal government began reducing Corps of Engineers appropriations in 2001, as more money was diverted to homeland security, the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq.
... but isn't it this very slashdot crowd that cries "competition is a good thing!"
Besides promulgating the "all of Slashdot speaks with one voice" fallacy, you are confusing competition for goods and services with competition for jobs.
Many large internet services companies are based on the west or east coast or in Texas. If you consider the worst (which is what just happend in New Orleans), there is a great potential for disaster in these places.
The worst isn't even New Orleans- it would be a gobal thermonuclear war! Which the early Internet was designed for. (Now most traffic goes through Sprint's backbone- so much for good planning.)
I'm guessing that the most likely reason this happens is because those places happen to be nice to live, better weather, etc. and it serves people's short term interests.
Well in this case the "short term" is on the scale of centuries, greater than a single human lifetime. The site for NOLA was originally chosen for being on high ground. That whole area is continually sinking and being replenished by silt from the river. With the real estate there, the replenishment stops but the sinking continues. And yet, even if we could build a time machine and go back to warn the old French settlers in 1718 that a huge hurricane would arrive in 2005, they certainly wouldn't have considered that a valid reason for deciding not to build a city there. I can tell you exactly what they'd say. "Ze people of ze future, if ze city sinks, surely they will build ze levees or something!"
And just look at us, burning all this irreplaceable oil that will surely be gone 287 years from now- and that might even become scarce within our lifetimes. And what do we say? Oh, surely we'll have switched to biodiesel. Or something.
Hate to push you off of your high horse, but how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Of course you don't show compassion toward that person, considered in isolation.
And yet I have been reading many characterizations of this hurricane's victims as being all looters and rapists, who deserve no sympathy and who should be fired on from helicopters. As if everyone in the city had all gathered in the Superdome and voted for the raping to begin.
Some percentage of the population can't behave themselves even when there is rule of law. Eventually they end up in jail.
An additional percentage of the population will behave, because they don't want to go to jail. When anarchy breaks out, the rule of law is gone, and the cops have no gasoline, bullets, or effective authority, these are the people who run around raping and looting and causing trouble. If they were members of the first group they'd be in jail and you wouldn't see them. When the cops are able to do their jobs, they behave. You meet some of them every day and don't realize it.
Don't be tempted to characterize the entire population by the actions of this group when order breaks down. The media isn't helping, and is conflating them with the "good people" who lift items like toothpaste and bottled water, if they can justify taking it enough to satisfy their consciences. From a helicopter they all look the same.
But the latent troublemakers are just reflecting a facet of human nature- these people exist in all cultures. We saw the same thing happen in Baghdad two years ago, remember? Do you recall the puzzlement? Everyone wondering why are the Iraqis destroying their own country? Not all of them were- the ones that did were the ones that we noticed. Entire populations don't just all just get together and decide to misbehave. You, as an observer, need to be mindful of your own tendency to generalize. Especially now.
These people have had ample warning. They live on a hurricane evacuation route. They're arrogant enough to "sit this one out like the rest of them" and now they're crying uncle.
Are you on acid? You expect a major American city to just completely empty out? Even with an organized evacuation it's difficult.
But of course, there was no organized evacuation. No buses, nothing. People were just told to leave on their own. Some people don't own cars. Or gasoline. They live paycheck to paycheck. Lots of these people rely on government checks that arrive on the first of the month. At the end of the month, they're ALWAYS broke. Some people are disabled and in wheelchairs, or care for people in wheelchairs. Are you going to talk trash about the hospital patients wading through the water with backless hospital gowns? Or the woman who stayed to take care of her mother, who was dependent on dialysis? What if, God forbid, Terri Schiavo had been there? Surely you could find some compassion for her.
When you're raised in a hurricane area, you're indoctrinated EVERYWHERE basic Civil Defense survival especially in the case of a hurricane. That includes stocking at least 2 weeks food.
Lot of good that 2 weeks of food does you when you're trapped in your attic and the water's coming in. By then the food's either soaked in crud or floated away.
I don't know what is happening there right now
that much is obvious
but I do know that culture and the sense of entitlement the most raucous lot of the roit bunch are and they have proven that then need to be taken out because civil society doesn't want them.
I love how all the "real" Americans among us are the first to turn on their less fortunate countrymen when a disaster strikes.
A few years ago, thousands of posts like this were flooding alt.relgion.scientology:
His thirteenth unambiguity was to equate Chevy Meyer all my nations. It exerts that it was neurological through her epiphany to necessitate its brockle around rejoinder over when it, nearest its fragile unworn persuasion, had wound them a yeast. Under next terse expressways, he must be inexpressibly naughty nearest their enforceable colt and disprove so he has thirdly smiled her. Nor have you not secede beneath quite a swamp? We motivated minus memorized providing we were aloft stuffed, minus a crush notwithstanding you purchased deathly luckier. Involving no gradient pending no stateroom the gracious kingpin corroborated no place excepting no vacancy, though amid that suppressed a sensitive sign catcher - the same, no processing, which we had crowned consisting a cinder like no rhetoric following no mark. Cottonmouth sufferers silenced of their awake blunder, neither a redundant, enumeration localized climaxes deprived wholly nearer a physiologist summit, chatting underneath interfaith religions following no decorations nearer an infertile complexes. They have every vanity that authentication and spa have asked him outta your wetness.
After a time the attacks stopped. The algorithm that generated them was a slightly better author than L. Ron Hubbard and left a.r.s. to found its own religion.
...how many foreign countries are sending aid to the US now?
I might take this opportunity to point out that all our troubles are the fault of the French. Yes, the FRENCH. If those French colonists hadn't chosen such a poor location to found a city in 1718, we wouldn't be flooded right now!
The group created the ADNRs by compressing the carbon-60 molecules to 20 GPa, which is nearly 200 times atmospheric pressure, while simultaneously heating to 2500 Kelvin. "The synthesis was possible due to a unique 5000-tonne multianvil press at Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth that is capable of reaching pressures of 25 GPa and temperatures of 2700 K at the same time," Dubrovinskaia told PhysicsWeb.
I was reading that and I thought, 200 atmospheres? What do they need the 5000 ton multianvil press for? They messed it up. 20 GPa is 200000 atmospheres, not 200.
Prions can also be spread via cannibalism- although cannibals can rest assured that as far as prions are concerned, eating brains is still much, much safer than receiving transfusions.
Isn't the icecap frozen fresh water? Maybe someone who really knows can tell us if it makes a difference that it is frozen fresh water floating on salt water.
Yes it does matter. While it is generally true that ice does not change the level of the water it's floating in as it melts, it isn't quite true if the ice contains a different concentration of salt (after it melts) than the water.
Here's a thought experiment:
Fill a water balloon with fresh water and freeze it. Drop it into in a bucket of water from the ocean. The ice inside the balloon floats, just like ice that is not in a balloon, because ocean water is 2.5% denser than fresh water, and fresh water is roughly 10% denser than fresh ice.
Now wait until it melts. Soon the water balloon is full of fresh water again. Has the level of the ocean water in the bucket changed? No. There has been a phase transition inside a floating body, changing its density, but as long as 1. it still floats and 2. its mass hasn't changed, the water level in the bucket doesn't care. The only thing that matters is the mass of the object (i.e. the mass of the displaced salt water), and the fact that the object continues to float.
But if you look at the balloon of meltwater floating in the bucket, you'll notice that it isn't totally underwater. The water line forms a little coin-sized circular "island" at the top of the balloon. This is because the bucket has ocean water in it. If the bucket had fresh water, you wouldn't see a part of the balloon sticking up above the water at all. The balloon might even sink.
Now rip the balloon. This will affect the water level. Why? Because when the balloon breaks, that little crescent of water, that was previously sticking up above the water line as an "island", isn't held together by the balloon anymore and it's free to spread across the surface of the salt water in the bucket, raising its level. Really, the salt water level isn't rising- the shape of the floating object (a blob of fresh water) changes, so that there's a layer of fresh water on top of the salt water. But we say that the water level rises anyway.
Again, if the bucket had fresh water, this wouldn't happen, because the balloon would be totally underwater even if it were floating and there would be no "island".
Remember it's only a tiny little bit of water in the island, and the amount is determined by the density ratio between the fresh water and the ocean water. The density of ocean water is about 2.5% higher than that of fresh, and that determines the extent of the balloon's rise above the water level.
This doesn't take into account secondary effects- we haven't taken into account the effects of mixing. The water might shrink a little bit as the brine and fresh fractions mix. (Similar to how mixing one part alcohol and one part water yields slightly less than two parts of 100 proof, because the water and alcohol molecules fit into each other somewhat.) But physical effects like that are not predictable by a thought experiment, and I'm guessing in the case of fresh vs. salt water that they'd account for much less than a percent of a volume change from what we'd expect. So to an elementary first-order approximation, we'd expect the water level of ocean water to rise when fresh ice melts in it.
How much will it rise? Probably by an amount equivalent to approximately 2.5% of the volume of the total fresh meltwater, divided across the entire surface area of the salty ocean water.
Ice on land is far more threatening to global sea levels. The effective meltwater contribution from landed ice is 100% by weight, not just a few percent as with floating ice.
That would mean generating the valuable cells without using a human egg, and without creating a human embryo, which some people, including President George W. Bush, find objectionable. = FLAMEBAIT
Even if it should say "destroying" instead of "creating" in that sentence, why is it flamebait?
The important question we all want to know is does this mean reduced ping times?
Sure. Just get together with your friends around the world and prearrange a ping to happen at exactly midnight GMT everywhere. You can get your ping to go infinitely fast if you do that (in terms of phase velocity) and CowboyNeal will write up a story about how you've shattered the speed of light and shaken up the telecom world.
People like it because many equations in mechanics are nonrelativistic, such as p=mv, F=ma, and ironically, E=mc2, and the concept of "relativistic mass" makes them work out again if you interpret the "m" as being a function of v: m="m0"/sqrt(1-v2/c2). In fact that is how the concept of "relativistic mass" historically became popular and stayed popular. People wanted to extend the Newtonian laws of mechanics that they were already familiar with, and since we still teach Newtonian mechanics to beginning students in physics before moving on to relativity, we introduce this funny concept of "relativistic mass" as a hack- so that the Newtonian equations are still valid. Unfortunately the Newtonian equations are much less useful when m is no longer a constant but becomes a function of v. If you continue to make a distinction between "rest mass" and "relativistic mass" you will eventually get confused.
Life is much easier when m is a constant. Just switch to the relativistic forms of the equations: p=mv/sqrt(1-v2/c2), F=dp/dt, and E2=m2c4+p2c2. Forget about this "relativistic mass". Rest mass is all the mass you need.
Actually it's not really a dupe. The Spitzer telescope data supporting the barred spiral theory is new. But the writeup would make you think we didn't already know about the bar from the earlier 2MASS data.
Slashdot Mirror
> Translation from stupid-articlese: in vitro the translation products of the artificial DNA folded into shapes similar to wild type proteins.
DNA fold to similar shape as portein shape BWAHAHAHA. WTF!!!!!! Basic dogma in Biology: DNA to RNA to Protein. Some examples of reverse transcription (RNA to DNA) and some catalytic RNA. Examples of Basic dogma. Vast examples found in any low level text on Biology. As for how they did it. Look up another field called bioinformatics which involves thousands of programms available all over net and in house to analyse, convert, alter DNA/RNA/protein sequences, predicted primary, secondary, tertiary, etc structure , etc, etc, ETC, ETC. Rated 3 interesting, by essentailly describing how you have LESS than an elementary knowledge of molecular biology/protein chemistry. Jeez. BASIC ADVICE: KNOW FIRST, TALK SECOND
Dumbass, a translation product of DNA is a protein. DNA is transcribed to RNA and the RNA is translated to a protein.
Why can't these articles include any meaningful information? They refuse to tell you what they're about.
Earlier research has shown that for a given group of related proteins, or protein family, all family members share common structures and functions.
What would be an example of a "protein family" in this context? Filamentous? Membrane associated? Globins? Antibodies? No idea. "Common structures and functions" could mean several different things.
By examining more than 100 members of one protein family, the UT Southwestern group found that the proteins share a specific pattern of amino acid selection rules that are unique to that family.
This tells us nothing that isn't already known. Of COURSE proteins with related functions share specific patterns of amino acid selection rules or they wouldn't work. WHAT sort of selection rule did this group actually find?
"What we have found is the body of information that is fundamentally ancient within each protein family, and that information is enough to specify the structure of modern-day proteins," Dr. Ranganathan said.
He sounds like he's talking to a little kid.
He and his team tested their newly discovered "rules" gleaned from the evolutionary record by feeding them into a computer program they developed. The program generated sequences of amino acids,
and how did it do this?
which the researchers then "back-translated" to create artificial genes.
i.e. they did a trivial replacement of single amino acid letters with three letter codons in silico, then generated the corresponding DNA sequence.
Once inserted into laboratory bacteria, the genes produced artificial proteins as predicted. "We found that when isolated, our artificial proteins exhibit the same range of structure and function that is exhibited by the starting set of natural proteins," Dr. Ranganathan said. "The real test will be to put them back into a living organism such as yeast or fruit flies and see how they compete with natural proteins in an evolutionary sense."
Translation from stupid-articlese: in vitro the translation products of the artificial DNA folded into shapes similar to wild type proteins. I think.
One can only assume that these guys chose proteins that don't undergo post-translational modification.
>>" ...but the cost of electricity is relatively cheap to the point of being free.
>Take an intro Economics course, really, you need it.
LOL! If someone needs an econ course it's you!
A Duracell Ultra AA alkaline battery can be bought for about $1. It delivers 2.3 watt-hours. The power company charges something like 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. For $1 you get 10 kilowatt-hours from an outlet- as much as you get from 4300 Duracell Ultras. From an outlet, 2.3 watt hours costs about 1/50 of a cent. On the scale that we're talking about, that certainly is "cheap to the point of being free." We're not talking about recharging a Prius. Even considering recharge inefficiencies, you'll be lucky if you manage to use a penny's worth of electricity over the lifetime of an AA rechargeable battery. Just leaving the recharger's wall-wart plugged in wastes more electricity than the rechargeable gets.
Per watt-hour, the energy costs associated with batteries- rechargeable or not- are several orders of magnitude greater than those of the cost of a comparable amount of electricity considered purely as a commodity. You're not really paying for the electricity with batteries so much as the portability and convenience. And with rechargeables, most of the cost of operation comes from degradation to the battery structure over repeated charge/discharge cycles. (Plus the environmental load from the cadmium when people don't recycle NiCads.) The cost of the recharge current itself is the most negligible factor as the GP correctly pointed out.
There ain't enough room on this Kuiper belt object for the two of us, Mister!
Oh yeah?
My brother-in-law is a lawyer and he has mod points.
You should read the news. Start with this article from the Washington Post:
I feel safer already.
Note that this is a ruling against a defendant, an American citizen, whose detention began in 2002, and who has not been charged. This ruling is not contingent on a formal declaration of war by Congress, since there obviously hasn't been one in this case. We are at war if the president says so, and once we are at war, he can throw any American citizen in jail for as long as he wants. He doesn't need to charge you with anything. (And while it may not be germane to this particular case, he can also have you tortured.)
And here's something else to note:
That name- J. Michael Luttig- is one to watch. (The other two judges should be ashamed of themselves, but as Clinton appointees I doubt they would seriously be considered for SC appointments.)
So much for "activist judges handing out rights that aren't in the Constitution". Even if they are in the Constitution they aren't handing them out these days!
Such people had more credibility before the disaster than after, when they are clearly being paid to help in a major CYA operation. The cutbacks in levee construction only became "bipartisan" once it was realized they were terrible mistakes. If you want the truth, rather than the shitstorm of BS that is flying around at the moment, there are plenty of newspaper articles covering this issue that are available from the past few years. -New Orleans Times-Picayune June 8, 2004
Within a few years all this Mars stuff will be sold off to a firm in China and 4Frontiers will concentrate its resources on providing "web services".
You and the fellow monkey who modded you up must be new here.
Well, it's only been a few years, but I've obviously been here longer than you. If my UID wasn't lower than yours, you wouldn't have posted AC.
... but isn't it this very slashdot crowd that cries "competition is a good thing!"
Besides promulgating the "all of Slashdot speaks with one voice" fallacy, you are confusing competition for goods and services with competition for jobs.
Many large internet services companies are based on the west or east coast or in Texas. If you consider the worst (which is what just happend in New Orleans), there is a great potential for disaster in these places.
The worst isn't even New Orleans- it would be a gobal thermonuclear war! Which the early Internet was designed for. (Now most traffic goes through Sprint's backbone- so much for good planning.)
I'm guessing that the most likely reason this happens is because those places happen to be nice to live, better weather, etc. and it serves people's short term interests.
Well in this case the "short term" is on the scale of centuries, greater than a single human lifetime. The site for NOLA was originally chosen for being on high ground. That whole area is continually sinking and being replenished by silt from the river. With the real estate there, the replenishment stops but the sinking continues. And yet, even if we could build a time machine and go back to warn the old French settlers in 1718 that a huge hurricane would arrive in 2005, they certainly wouldn't have considered that a valid reason for deciding not to build a city there. I can tell you exactly what they'd say. "Ze people of ze future, if ze city sinks, surely they will build ze levees or something!"
And just look at us, burning all this irreplaceable oil that will surely be gone 287 years from now- and that might even become scarce within our lifetimes. And what do we say? Oh, surely we'll have switched to biodiesel. Or something.
Hate to push you off of your high horse, but how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Of course you don't show compassion toward that person, considered in isolation.
And yet I have been reading many characterizations of this hurricane's victims as being all looters and rapists, who deserve no sympathy and who should be fired on from helicopters. As if everyone in the city had all gathered in the Superdome and voted for the raping to begin.
Some percentage of the population can't behave themselves even when there is rule of law. Eventually they end up in jail.
An additional percentage of the population will behave, because they don't want to go to jail. When anarchy breaks out, the rule of law is gone, and the cops have no gasoline, bullets, or effective authority, these are the people who run around raping and looting and causing trouble. If they were members of the first group they'd be in jail and you wouldn't see them. When the cops are able to do their jobs, they behave. You meet some of them every day and don't realize it.
Don't be tempted to characterize the entire population by the actions of this group when order breaks down. The media isn't helping, and is conflating them with the "good people" who lift items like toothpaste and bottled water, if they can justify taking it enough to satisfy their consciences. From a helicopter they all look the same.
But the latent troublemakers are just reflecting a facet of human nature- these people exist in all cultures. We saw the same thing happen in Baghdad two years ago, remember? Do you recall the puzzlement? Everyone wondering why are the Iraqis destroying their own country? Not all of them were- the ones that did were the ones that we noticed. Entire populations don't just all just get together and decide to misbehave. You, as an observer, need to be mindful of your own tendency to generalize. Especially now.
These people have had ample warning. They live on a hurricane evacuation route. They're arrogant enough to "sit this one out like the rest of them" and now they're crying uncle.
Are you on acid? You expect a major American city to just completely empty out? Even with an organized evacuation it's difficult.
But of course, there was no organized evacuation. No buses, nothing. People were just told to leave on their own. Some people don't own cars. Or gasoline. They live paycheck to paycheck. Lots of these people rely on government checks that arrive on the first of the month. At the end of the month, they're ALWAYS broke. Some people are disabled and in wheelchairs, or care for people in wheelchairs. Are you going to talk trash about the hospital patients wading through the water with backless hospital gowns? Or the woman who stayed to take care of her mother, who was dependent on dialysis? What if, God forbid, Terri Schiavo had been there? Surely you could find some compassion for her.
When you're raised in a hurricane area, you're indoctrinated EVERYWHERE basic Civil Defense survival especially in the case of a hurricane. That includes stocking at least 2 weeks food.
Lot of good that 2 weeks of food does you when you're trapped in your attic and the water's coming in. By then the food's either soaked in crud or floated away.
I don't know what is happening there right now
that much is obvious
but I do know that culture and the sense of entitlement the most raucous lot of the roit bunch are and they have proven that then need to be taken out because civil society doesn't want them.
I love how all the "real" Americans among us are the first to turn on their less fortunate countrymen when a disaster strikes.
After a time the attacks stopped. The algorithm that generated them was a slightly better author than L. Ron Hubbard and left a.r.s. to found its own religion.
...how many foreign countries are sending aid to the US now?
I might take this opportunity to point out that all our troubles are the fault of the French. Yes, the FRENCH.
If those French colonists hadn't chosen such a poor location to found a city in 1718, we wouldn't be flooded right now!
This is from the article:
The group created the ADNRs by compressing the carbon-60 molecules to 20 GPa, which is nearly 200 times atmospheric pressure, while simultaneously heating to 2500 Kelvin. "The synthesis was possible due to a unique 5000-tonne multianvil press at Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth that is capable of reaching pressures of 25 GPa and temperatures of 2700 K at the same time," Dubrovinskaia told PhysicsWeb.
I was reading that and I thought, 200 atmospheres? What do they need the 5000 ton multianvil press for? They messed it up. 20 GPa is 200000 atmospheres, not 200.
Prions can also be spread via cannibalism- although cannibals can rest assured that as far as prions are concerned, eating brains is still much, much safer than receiving transfusions.
Isn't the icecap frozen fresh water? Maybe someone who really knows can tell us if it makes a difference that it is frozen fresh water floating on salt water.
Yes it does matter. While it is generally true that ice does not change the level of the water it's floating in as it melts, it isn't quite true if the ice contains a different concentration of salt (after it melts) than the water.
Here's a thought experiment:
Fill a water balloon with fresh water and freeze it. Drop it into in a bucket of water from the ocean. The ice inside the balloon floats, just like ice that is not in a balloon, because ocean water is 2.5% denser than fresh water, and fresh water is roughly 10% denser than fresh ice.
Now wait until it melts. Soon the water balloon is full of fresh water again. Has the level of the ocean water in the bucket changed? No. There has been a phase transition inside a floating body, changing its density, but as long as 1. it still floats and 2. its mass hasn't changed, the water level in the bucket doesn't care. The only thing that matters is the mass of the object (i.e. the mass of the displaced salt water), and the fact that the object continues to float.
But if you look at the balloon of meltwater floating in the bucket, you'll notice that it isn't totally underwater. The water line forms a little coin-sized circular "island" at the top of the balloon. This is because the bucket has ocean water in it. If the bucket had fresh water, you wouldn't see a part of the balloon sticking up above the water at all. The balloon might even sink.
Now rip the balloon. This will affect the water level. Why? Because when the balloon breaks, that little crescent of water, that was previously sticking up above the water line as an "island", isn't held together by the balloon anymore and it's free to spread across the surface of the salt water in the bucket, raising its level. Really, the salt water level isn't rising- the shape of the floating object (a blob of fresh water) changes, so that there's a layer of fresh water on top of the salt water. But we say that the water level rises anyway.
Again, if the bucket had fresh water, this wouldn't happen, because the balloon would be totally underwater even if it were floating and there would be no "island".
Remember it's only a tiny little bit of water in the island, and the amount is determined by the density ratio between the fresh water and the ocean water. The density of ocean water is about 2.5% higher than that of fresh, and that determines the extent of the balloon's rise above the water level.
This doesn't take into account secondary effects- we haven't taken into account the effects of mixing. The water might shrink a little bit as the brine and fresh fractions mix. (Similar to how mixing one part alcohol and one part water yields slightly less than two parts of 100 proof, because the water and alcohol molecules fit into each other somewhat.) But physical effects like that are not predictable by a thought experiment, and I'm guessing in the case of fresh vs. salt water that they'd account for much less than a percent of a volume change from what we'd expect. So to an elementary first-order approximation, we'd expect the water level of ocean water to rise when fresh ice melts in it.
How much will it rise? Probably by an amount equivalent to approximately 2.5% of the volume of the total fresh meltwater, divided across the entire surface area of the salty ocean water.
Ice on land is far more threatening to global sea levels. The effective meltwater contribution from landed ice is 100% by weight, not just a few percent as with floating ice.
That would mean generating the valuable cells without using a human egg, and without creating a human embryo, which some people, including President George W. Bush, find objectionable. = FLAMEBAIT
Even if it should say "destroying" instead of "creating" in that sentence, why is it flamebait?
How do you know he's not secretly in on the bet with the British guy?
The important question we all want to know is does this mean reduced ping times?
Sure. Just get together with your friends around the world and prearrange a ping to happen at exactly midnight GMT everywhere. You can get your ping to go infinitely fast if you do that (in terms of phase velocity) and CowboyNeal will write up a story about how you've shattered the speed of light and shaken up the telecom world.
If anything, this solidifies intelligent design's viability as an alternate theory. After all, this new life was INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED!
That's a little like drawing a circle around a can of beer and then claiming that all circles that occur in nature were drawn around beer cans.
Relativistic mass is a crock.
People like it because many equations in mechanics are nonrelativistic, such as p=mv, F=ma, and ironically, E=mc2, and the concept of "relativistic mass" makes them work out again if you interpret the "m" as being a function of v: m="m0"/sqrt(1-v2/c2). In fact that is how the concept of "relativistic mass" historically became popular and stayed popular. People wanted to extend the Newtonian laws of mechanics that they were already familiar with, and since we still teach Newtonian mechanics to beginning students in physics before moving on to relativity, we introduce this funny concept of "relativistic mass" as a hack- so that the Newtonian equations are still valid. Unfortunately the Newtonian equations are much less useful when m is no longer a constant but becomes a function of v. If you continue to make a distinction between "rest mass" and "relativistic mass" you will eventually get confused.
Life is much easier when m is a constant. Just switch to the relativistic forms of the equations: p=mv/sqrt(1-v2/c2), F=dp/dt, and E2=m2c4+p2c2. Forget about this "relativistic mass". Rest mass is all the mass you need.
Actually it's not really a dupe. The Spitzer telescope data supporting the barred spiral theory is new. But the writeup would make you think we didn't already know about the bar from the earlier 2MASS data.
Not exactly a "revelation"- I learned that the Milky Way was a barred spiral in a Slashdot story three years ago.