RTFA FIRST- in reality they're looking at stuff only 13.2 billion light years away, not 14 billion- which would indicate light that was older than the universe itself at 13.7 billion years old
The actual horizon is 53 billion light years away, not 13.7. Consider a photon emitted very early, when the universe was still small, that reaches Earth today. During the first year of that photon's life, it would crossed only one light year of space on its trip to us- the first one.
13.7 billion years later, that first light year has expanded like a rubber sheet to have a disproportionate contribution to the 53 billion, compared to light years that the photon covered later on, just before reaching us. You can't just multiply the total elapsed time by c. You have to actually do an integral over time for the entire trip to get the 53 billion, where the integrand is the product of c by the "stretch factor" S(t) at that point on the trip: the factor by which the space that a photon was flying through at time t has expanded by now (as considered relative to a frame where the Earth is at rest). I don't know what this function would be, but I do know it's a function of time (or more specifically, time since the Big Bang in a frame at rest with respect to the microwave background radiation).
If S(t) were fixed at 1.0, you'd expect an integral of 13.7 billion light years. But it isn't fixed at 1.0; it is always greater than that and only approaches 1.0 at the end since light years at the end of the trip haven't had much time to expand. At the start of the trip S(t) could have been very high, depending on the age of the universe at the time.
"Asteroids" the video game takes place on a toroidal surface. You go in any one direction and eventually come back from the direction you were heading away from. The "torus", if considered as a 2D surface embedded in 3D space, can have its hole in the yz plane, the xz plane, or any plane really that contains the z axis, perpendicular to the screen. Within the 2D space defined by that donut surface, the orientation of the hole in the higher 3D space has no observable effect. Pac-Man, for its part, can be considered to have taken place on the surface of a cylindrical 2D surface embedded in a 3D space, not necessarily a toroidal one, since there was no magic tunnel connecting the top and bottom of the maze.
This is different: "an object that travels away from the Earth in a straight line will eventually return from the other side of the universe, having been rotated by 36 degrees in the process". So, it's just like Asteroids except the ship is pointing in a crooked direction when it reappears, off by some predictable angle. This would be a real problem for a game like Pac-Man, because of the way the controller works. Asteroids could accomodate the situation rather easily since left and right in that game control rotation instead of absolute direction, and applying continual thrust will keep the ship going straight even if it comes back with a cockeyed trajectory. Also, the maze and controller in Pac-Man, entirely based on NSEW directions, would present real headaches. Asteroids has no maze and the ship can point in any arbitrary direction, not just four.
The minimum radius of the soccer ball (according to this group) is 43 billion light years. The Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago, but the actual horizon is 53 billion light years and not 13.7 billion since the universe wasn't always this big and the first few light years covered by the earliest photons have expanded to have a large contribution to that 53 billion. This little detail would present a challenging user interface problem for Asteroids. Now that I think about it, that might be less lame than the original Asteroids.
From any vantage point the furthest radiation visible is the microwave background. Beyond that, the light would have had to have been emitted earlier, at a time when the universe was more opaque. (Charged particles had yet to combine and emit background-radiation to form neutral, transparent matter less efficient at scattering light.) Past the microwave background, we "see" the early universe along all lines of sight as a completely opaque, black sheet, which emits no light of its own, absorbs all light, and which lines the boundary of what is for us the observable universe. It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black. But these guys are saying that since 43 is less than 53, you can see the same patterns of microwave background radiation being emitted from various points in the sky, inside this opaque layer, in a pattern consistent with this dodecahedral symmetry. It's like God really does play dice, except he plays with those geeky 12-sided Dungeons and Dragons dice. Stuff like this has to make you wonder. Why 12? Who ordered that? What would have been wrong with a flat, spherical, tetrahedral, cubic, octahedral, or icosahedral universe? From a video game design perspective, a cubic symmetry would have been so much easier. In my humble opinion, God should have seriously considered creating a six-sided universe instead.
Even if you could reach the "edge", it's not like you would even notice anything, like a lot of these posts seem to be assuming. You wouldn't hit some sort of wall and go "splat". You'd just sort of relocate, rotate, and keep chomping away obliviously like Pac-Man does when he does his thing. We have no evidence that some anisotropy exists in the topology of the universe everywhere but here as if the universe really is centered on us and our galaxy, so that it changes somehow within a sphere that surrounds us. There's most l
So should we go go through your post and replace every instance of 'IE' with Firefox?
Go ahead. I can say most of the same stuff about FF. My point was people shouldn't be forced to use specific browser implementations, and they're going to get forced to anyway because it's cheaper for companies to code to implementations and not to standards.
I agree with the GP poster that it should make economic sense for them before they support Opera.
I use Mozilla.
As far as I'm concerned, with stories like this one, the real issue for me is: in five years time, am I going to be effectively forced to switch back to that POS browser IE, just because of idiot content providers like the Boston Globe who are turning the web into a Windows/IE-only playground, built on top of a foundation of Microsoft's browser bugs?
Now I have to be honest. Whether Opera users are inconvenienced is, on the one hand, not something that affects my sorry ass directly. Except, this has to be viewed as a battle within the context of a larger war for control of the future of the web. And when you look at it that way, there is no way that this little whiny story can be considered anything but ominous- not only for the handful of Opera users in the world, but for anyone who doesn't use IE on Windows and doesn't want to be forced.
Now I know, that it makes more economic sense for corporate sites not to support Opera, to only support IE, and reach the most browsers for the least amount of money. It probably makes them more competitive. That doesn't make it right. This often happens, that a corporation becomes competitive by engaging in some sort of undesirable behavior, which usually means they will do it. That's just because life sucks. We should still hope they don't do these things. In this case, there is a fairly compelling public interest in avoiding a situation where everyone is effectively forced to install Windows in order to access the web.
Well, the vast majority of them are funny, but the one that says 'the Republican Party will attempt to control science to meet political needs' deserves a prize.
Why?
Are you actually going to make someone Google around for a couple examples of this happening?
It's the all black costume that makes you look like an Invisible Pedestrian. None of the drivers will be able to see you- carry out clandestine missions at night in the middle of the road without getting spotted. I didn't see the Invisible Pedestrian Costume listed here so they must have liked it.
I don't see the Bag-O-Glass listed either. Another stimulating, wholesome toy.
United States Patent Application 732980759-32754321
Protein structure for biochemical enforcement of growth factor ink expiry dates
ABSTRACT
A protein structure and associated amino acid sequence providing a set of functions for remotely enforcing expiry dates of growth factor ink.
Inventors: MillionthMonkey
Serial No.: 053243653216 Series Code: 10 Filed: December 11, 2006
Claims
1. An architecture for a system comprising: a greedy ink manufacturer, an end user, an ink expiration date, a hardware device capable of spraying growth factor protein containing inks into desired tissue growth patterns, an application program interface to support same.
2. An architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein a biochemical timer is implemented with adjustable expiry date settings that may be set at time of manufacture, via expression of a sequence of amino acids (see Attachment A) generating a protein that processes an RNA strand at a fixed rate.
3. An architecture as recited in claim 2, wherein an RNA template molecule of predetermined length is used at time of manufacture to control a timer as recited in claim 2.
4. An architecture as recited in claim 3, wherein a biochemical clock is employed to trigger denaturation of growth factor proteins as recited in claim 1.
5. An architecture as recited in claim 4, wherein the application program interface comprises: a first group of services related to discovery of an impending ink expiry event, a second group of services related to displaying numerous dialog boxes to the end user [as outlined in claim 1] asking for money, and a third group of services related to remotely extracting payment from an end user [as outlined in claim 1].
6. An application program interface as recited in claim 5, wherein the first group of services comprises: first functions that enable ink manufacturer to specify an expiry date [as recited in claim 3] and implement enforcement of the expiry date by having a biochemical timer [as recited in claim 4] trigger denaturation of growth factors used in gene expression inks.
CONCLUSION
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claimed invention.
Aneuploidy (wrong chromosome copy number) is triggered during cell division and has something to do with damage to the kinetochore, a protein structure that sits on a centromere at the junction of the chromosome arms. This is the thing that attaches to a mitotic spindle and drags the chromosome along the spindle into its daughter cell. That mechanism can malfunction by either not transporting the chromosome, or by pulling it the wrong way, or gluing it to another chromosome, or falling apart, etc. Aneuploidy could result from any of these things. But exactly what happens when kinetochores break is not well understood yet.
Who said cancer was a chaotic system? Do very small changes in input parameters cause exponentially large deviations in output values? I doubt it. Cancer is probably difficult to simulate due to its complexity, not its chaoticness.
Cancer is complex because it is chaotic. There is a (poorly understood) mechanism cells use to ensure that each chromosome has the right copy number (usu. 2) and that no chromosome is missing a chunk. In a tumor, or even a precancerous growth, something has happened to break this mechanism. When cells in a tumor or precancerous growth divide, they don't copy their chromosomes correctly- they make way more mistakes than normal cells during mitosis. A cell division event might give one daughter cell a single copy of chromosome 5, while the other daughter cell gets three copies. Or, one daughter cell gets a chunk of a chromosome that is missing in the other daughter cell. As a result there is enormous genetic variability within a single tumor or precancerous growth- each one is a little version of evolution in action as individual cells within the tumor population compete for fitness. (Most genes still work if you only have one copy, or 3, but it's much better to have 2.)
Eventually one cell has zero copies of at least a part of a chromosome, and that's when the fun really starts. One of the arms of chromosome 3, for example, appears to confer certain "superpowers" on any cell that loses it, since there appear to be certain tumor suppressor genes on that chromosome. As chromosome parts are gradually lost in the tumor population, the various superpowers of cancer become evident: growth in absence of any growth signals, loss of contact inhibition (you keep dividing even when you run out of room), the ability to ignore suicide signals from attacking white blood cells, the ability to promote blood vessel growth into the tumor, the ability to metastasize, etc. If a cell loses the right chunk of the right chromosome it can quickly take over the entire tumor, and you have a population of cells that are all missing that chromosome chunk and are ready to start losing more random chunks. So as you see, "very small changes in input parameters cause exponentially large deviations in output values".
I could be wrong but I think what they are modeling here is the genetic variation within the tumor, as evident in the chromosomal copy number within each cell.
Apparently, more than half of all known compounds are organic
Practically all compounds are organic. You can connect carbons in an infinite number of ways. There are an infinite number of inorganic molecules too, but it's a much smaller infinity. Large inorganic molecules tend to break apart. Most atoms either want more electrons too much or don't know what to do with the ones they have, and the resulting instabilities build up over distance. You don't see many inorganic polymers- only a few, like polyphosphazenes and asbestos needles. Carbon is good at forming large covalent molecules, and its presence stabilizes large molecules with other elements.
People think organic chemistry is hard because they see all the compounds and freak. In fact organic is actually much easier than inorganic chem. The players are C, H, O, and N, plus phosphate (PO4---) if you're talking biochemistry. Phosphate aside, these are simple, well understood atoms. Being small, they are hard atoms with limited deformation in electrical fields (like from other nearby atoms). They display a small range of behaviors and form covalent bonds in a predictable way. We still sometimes learn new stuff about carbon, for example, like we did with buckyballs and nanotubes. But neither of these involved any fundamental carbon chemistry that we didn't already understand.
Carbon atoms get 4 bonds each, nitrogens 3, oxygens 2, hydrogens 1. You can connect them up in any way that satisfies those bond number requirements. But each bond should have a carbon on one end (preferably both ends) or you get unstable stuff. (Exceptions: N-H, O-H. You can get away with O=N, O-O, N-N, and N=N sometimes, but not too much, or the results are unpleasant.) Each of C, N, and O can form double bonds. Most double bonds are between C and either O or N. Especially in biochem, where carbon-carbon double bonds are not as common. Both C and N can form triple bonds, such as in nitriles (CN) or alkynes like acetylene (HCCH). Triple bonds are even rarer. (If you're bad you can use F, Cl, Br, or I to make CFCs and similar things. Halogens generally follow the same rules as H, except the bonds are more electron-poor than with H, and more stable. CFCs almost never appear in biochemistry.) Phosphate gets 3 bonds, but they can be anionic. When covalent, the bonds are usually with hydroxyls or other phosphates across shared bridge oxygens. In biochem P never appears outside its phosphate. When it does it gets 5 bonds. Many organophosphates used in industry and agriculture incorporate direct C-P bonds. The nerve agent Sarin for example has a P-CH3 bond as well as a P-F bond with fluorine. Phosphate can appear in organic and bioorganic polymers too, like DNA. In general addition of N or especially O to organic molecules makes them electron poor, and addition of H makes them electron rich. From least to most oxidized: C-OH, C=O, COOH. Heavily oxidized molecules tend to break apart.
Being mindful of the above restrictions, you can connect C, H, O, N, phosphate, etc. up like tinkertoys to form almost anything you can think of. Mostly stuff like tar and varnish. And that's basically what you learn in organic chemistry. Then they'll have you spend most of the semester memorizing hundreds of quirky little "recipe" type reactions with various bizarre reagents, so that you can eventually synthesize any organic structure in a lab that you want. Most of these little recipes were figured out in the 19th century.
Inorganic chemistry is less systematic. Consider something like Hg. We find out new stuff about Hg all the time. We don't understand its electronic structure very well. It has lots of excited states available to it, and it displays unexplained absorption lines that appear to be influenced by what's around. Its outer 6s valence electrons fly straight through the nucleus at relativistic speeds, raising their effective mass and shrinking their orbitals below the atom's surface. As a res
You do not have a right to bear arms in a high school. You do not have the right to congregate freely in school because you are expected to be in class and not blocking the halls. You are also not an adult when you are in school unless you are over 18 years of age.
And he wasn't in a high school, so all of this is irrelevant.
BONG HITS 4 JESUS isn't something that can be protected under the constitution because it isn't a political or ideolical belief.
Are you kidding? That's an extremely political thing to say.
You're thinking of polonium-218, with the radon. Its half life is 3 minutes. Polonium-210 is different. It's a popular radioisotope for 3 reasons:
1. Its half life is a convenient 120 days or something (not microseconds or decades). 2. It decays to lead 208 which is stable. 3. It is a pure alpha emitter (no beta or gamma) which makes it relatively safe to handle as long as you do not ingest it.
Polonium-218 has none of these properties.
They sell small amounts of polonium-210 in those little plastic red disks you find in high school chem labs. United Nuclear was selling them for like $69. You'd need to buy a lot of disks to kill a Russian spy.
Parent is a fraud: First you tell us to ride a bicicle while you have been driving until you could no more because of your condition. Big lover of the environment are you.
So?
Second, your wife has a prius and you babble some nonsense about driving 'a couple thousand miles a year'. For that mileage it would have been much wiser to buy a normal car. A Prius is more expensive than a normal car and you aren't paying it off.
I love it when a clueless AC gives me advice on how to run my life. I paid $13k in cash for a used 2001 Prius off Craigslist back when I had a license and a much longer commute, since as a big lover of the environment I didn't want to waste gas.
Red Delicious apples are disgusting. It's everyone's fault- the public buys them based on color, not sweetness, so the breeders and nurseries propagate the most mutant reddish varieties. They introduce a huge selective pressure for color and isolate the apple from any selective pressure for taste. You can't taste the apples at the store before you decide to buy them, and the breeders know it, so they act in their own short-term interests and breed beautiful red apples with no regard for taste. Over the long term people eventually learn to associate the red color with an apple that tastes like crap. At least it tastes bitter because it's full of antioxidants and good for you, but it's also bland.
A drop from 13711 miles in 2004 to 13657 miles in 2005. Wow, congratulations, guys.
Since earlier this year I can't drive anymore for medical reasons. So I have to ride a bike five miles to work. A commute like that keeps you constantly whipped into shape. I highly recommend it. (Not having a medical problem that forces you to do it, that is, but just doing it.)
We have one car. It's a Prius. My wife just drives it to Whole Foods and the vet. Maybe a couple thousand miles every year.
Perhaps we in the US need to wonder why we cannot provide this for them, it isn't like Wal*Mart should be expected to pay more for something they can get for cheaper.
Because of child labor laws. The stuff in your house is cheap because it was made by child labor and prison labor. Buying merchandise made with slave labor is unacceptable behavior, and it doesn't automatically become acceptable just by the stuff being cheap.
Why does Walmart import tons of cheap Chinese goods? Because customers want them.
There is nothing intrinsic about something being Chinese that makes me want it.
Walmart imports tons of Chinese goods because that's the country to where our manufacturing base has been transplanted by market forces for cheap labor. Customers do not buy Chinese goods because they are seeking them out. Even though I try to avoid Chinese stuff, most recently purchased stuff in my house was made in China because that's all they will sell you at the store. You almost can't buy anything else anymore.
Here's an eye-opener for you. Go to Google Suggest, which uses the popularity of various search terms to offer suggestions, and type "why is everything" into the box.
Slashdot Mirror
13.7 billion years later, that first light year has expanded like a rubber sheet to have a disproportionate contribution to the 53 billion, compared to light years that the photon covered later on, just before reaching us. You can't just multiply the total elapsed time by c. You have to actually do an integral over time for the entire trip to get the 53 billion, where the integrand is the product of c by the "stretch factor" S(t) at that point on the trip: the factor by which the space that a photon was flying through at time t has expanded by now (as considered relative to a frame where the Earth is at rest). I don't know what this function would be, but I do know it's a function of time (or more specifically, time since the Big Bang in a frame at rest with respect to the microwave background radiation).
If S(t) were fixed at 1.0, you'd expect an integral of 13.7 billion light years. But it isn't fixed at 1.0; it is always greater than that and only approaches 1.0 at the end since light years at the end of the trip haven't had much time to expand. At the start of the trip S(t) could have been very high, depending on the age of the universe at the time.
Well maybe you weren't downloading porn in 1991 but some of us were already busy gluing uuencoded ladies back together.
"Asteroids" the video game takes place on a toroidal surface. You go in any one direction and eventually come back from the direction you were heading away from. The "torus", if considered as a 2D surface embedded in 3D space, can have its hole in the yz plane, the xz plane, or any plane really that contains the z axis, perpendicular to the screen. Within the 2D space defined by that donut surface, the orientation of the hole in the higher 3D space has no observable effect. Pac-Man, for its part, can be considered to have taken place on the surface of a cylindrical 2D surface embedded in a 3D space, not necessarily a toroidal one, since there was no magic tunnel connecting the top and bottom of the maze.
This is different: "an object that travels away from the Earth in a straight line will eventually return from the other side of the universe, having been rotated by 36 degrees in the process". So, it's just like Asteroids except the ship is pointing in a crooked direction when it reappears, off by some predictable angle. This would be a real problem for a game like Pac-Man, because of the way the controller works. Asteroids could accomodate the situation rather easily since left and right in that game control rotation instead of absolute direction, and applying continual thrust will keep the ship going straight even if it comes back with a cockeyed trajectory. Also, the maze and controller in Pac-Man, entirely based on NSEW directions, would present real headaches. Asteroids has no maze and the ship can point in any arbitrary direction, not just four.
The minimum radius of the soccer ball (according to this group) is 43 billion light years. The Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago, but the actual horizon is 53 billion light years and not 13.7 billion since the universe wasn't always this big and the first few light years covered by the earliest photons have expanded to have a large contribution to that 53 billion. This little detail would present a challenging user interface problem for Asteroids. Now that I think about it, that might be less lame than the original Asteroids.
From any vantage point the furthest radiation visible is the microwave background. Beyond that, the light would have had to have been emitted earlier, at a time when the universe was more opaque. (Charged particles had yet to combine and emit background-radiation to form neutral, transparent matter less efficient at scattering light.) Past the microwave background, we "see" the early universe along all lines of sight as a completely opaque, black sheet, which emits no light of its own, absorbs all light, and which lines the boundary of what is for us the observable universe. It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black. But these guys are saying that since 43 is less than 53, you can see the same patterns of microwave background radiation being emitted from various points in the sky, inside this opaque layer, in a pattern consistent with this dodecahedral symmetry. It's like God really does play dice, except he plays with those geeky 12-sided Dungeons and Dragons dice. Stuff like this has to make you wonder. Why 12? Who ordered that? What would have been wrong with a flat, spherical, tetrahedral, cubic, octahedral, or icosahedral universe? From a video game design perspective, a cubic symmetry would have been so much easier. In my humble opinion, God should have seriously considered creating a six-sided universe instead.
Even if you could reach the "edge", it's not like you would even notice anything, like a lot of these posts seem to be assuming. You wouldn't hit some sort of wall and go "splat". You'd just sort of relocate, rotate, and keep chomping away obliviously like Pac-Man does when he does his thing. We have no evidence that some anisotropy exists in the topology of the universe everywhere but here as if the universe really is centered on us and our galaxy, so that it changes somehow within a sphere that surrounds us. There's most l
(de facto standards can be much more powerful than standards set by some arbitrary governing body)
That's pretty much what I thought I said. Although I felt that was a bad thing.
De facto standards defined by implementations not only tend to be more successful in the market, they also tend to suck.
So should we go go through your post and replace every instance of 'IE' with Firefox?
Go ahead. I can say most of the same stuff about FF. My point was people shouldn't be forced to use specific browser implementations, and they're going to get forced to anyway because it's cheaper for companies to code to implementations and not to standards.
I agree with the GP poster that it should make economic sense for them before they support Opera.
I use Mozilla.
As far as I'm concerned, with stories like this one, the real issue for me is: in five years time, am I going to be effectively forced to switch back to that POS browser IE, just because of idiot content providers like the Boston Globe who are turning the web into a Windows/IE-only playground, built on top of a foundation of Microsoft's browser bugs?
Now I have to be honest. Whether Opera users are inconvenienced is, on the one hand, not something that affects my sorry ass directly. Except, this has to be viewed as a battle within the context of a larger war for control of the future of the web. And when you look at it that way, there is no way that this little whiny story can be considered anything but ominous- not only for the handful of Opera users in the world, but for anyone who doesn't use IE on Windows and doesn't want to be forced.
Now I know, that it makes more economic sense for corporate sites not to support Opera, to only support IE, and reach the most browsers for the least amount of money. It probably makes them more competitive. That doesn't make it right. This often happens, that a corporation becomes competitive by engaging in some sort of undesirable behavior, which usually means they will do it. That's just because life sucks. We should still hope they don't do these things. In this case, there is a fairly compelling public interest in avoiding a situation where everyone is effectively forced to install Windows in order to access the web.
Well, the vast majority of them are funny, but the one that says 'the Republican Party will attempt to control science to meet political needs' deserves a prize.
Why?
Are you actually going to make someone Google around for a couple examples of this happening?
It's the all black costume that makes you look like an Invisible Pedestrian. None of the drivers will be able to see you- carry out clandestine missions at night in the middle of the road without getting spotted. I didn't see the Invisible Pedestrian Costume listed here so they must have liked it.
I don't see the Bag-O-Glass listed either. Another stimulating, wholesome toy.
United States Patent Application 732980759-32754321
Protein structure for biochemical enforcement of growth factor ink expiry dates
ABSTRACT
A protein structure and associated amino acid sequence providing a set of functions for remotely enforcing expiry dates of growth factor ink.
Inventors: MillionthMonkey
Serial No.: 053243653216
Series Code: 10
Filed: December 11, 2006
Claims
1. An architecture for a system comprising: a greedy ink manufacturer, an end user, an ink expiration date, a hardware device capable of spraying growth factor protein containing inks into desired tissue growth patterns, an application program interface to support same.
2. An architecture as recited in claim 1, wherein a biochemical timer is implemented with adjustable expiry date settings that may be set at time of manufacture, via expression of a sequence of amino acids (see Attachment A) generating a protein that processes an RNA strand at a fixed rate.
3. An architecture as recited in claim 2, wherein an RNA template molecule of predetermined length is used at time of manufacture to control a timer as recited in claim 2.
4. An architecture as recited in claim 3, wherein a biochemical clock is employed to trigger denaturation of growth factor proteins as recited in claim 1.
5. An architecture as recited in claim 4, wherein the application program interface comprises: a first group of services related to discovery of an impending ink expiry event, a second group of services related to displaying numerous dialog boxes to the end user [as outlined in claim 1] asking for money, and a third group of services related to remotely extracting payment from an end user [as outlined in claim 1].
6. An application program interface as recited in claim 5, wherein the first group of services comprises: first functions that enable ink manufacturer to specify an expiry date [as recited in claim 3] and implement enforcement of the expiry date by having a biochemical timer [as recited in claim 4] trigger denaturation of growth factors used in gene expression inks.
CONCLUSION
Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claimed invention.
And I'm off to the patent office! Later, suckas!
Bad form to reply to the moderators as an AC.
Aneuploidy (wrong chromosome copy number) is triggered during cell division and has something to do with damage to the kinetochore, a protein structure that sits on a centromere at the junction of the chromosome arms. This is the thing that attaches to a mitotic spindle and drags the chromosome along the spindle into its daughter cell. That mechanism can malfunction by either not transporting the chromosome, or by pulling it the wrong way, or gluing it to another chromosome, or falling apart, etc. Aneuploidy could result from any of these things. But exactly what happens when kinetochores break is not well understood yet.
Eventually one cell has zero copies of at least a part of a chromosome, and that's when the fun really starts. One of the arms of chromosome 3, for example, appears to confer certain "superpowers" on any cell that loses it, since there appear to be certain tumor suppressor genes on that chromosome. As chromosome parts are gradually lost in the tumor population, the various superpowers of cancer become evident: growth in absence of any growth signals, loss of contact inhibition (you keep dividing even when you run out of room), the ability to ignore suicide signals from attacking white blood cells, the ability to promote blood vessel growth into the tumor, the ability to metastasize, etc. If a cell loses the right chunk of the right chromosome it can quickly take over the entire tumor, and you have a population of cells that are all missing that chromosome chunk and are ready to start losing more random chunks. So as you see, "very small changes in input parameters cause exponentially large deviations in output values".
I could be wrong but I think what they are modeling here is the genetic variation within the tumor, as evident in the chromosomal copy number within each cell.
Practically all compounds are organic. You can connect carbons in an infinite number of ways. There are an infinite number of inorganic molecules too, but it's a much smaller infinity. Large inorganic molecules tend to break apart. Most atoms either want more electrons too much or don't know what to do with the ones they have, and the resulting instabilities build up over distance. You don't see many inorganic polymers- only a few, like polyphosphazenes and asbestos needles. Carbon is good at forming large covalent molecules, and its presence stabilizes large molecules with other elements.
People think organic chemistry is hard because they see all the compounds and freak. In fact organic is actually much easier than inorganic chem. The players are C, H, O, and N, plus phosphate (PO4---) if you're talking biochemistry. Phosphate aside, these are simple, well understood atoms. Being small, they are hard atoms with limited deformation in electrical fields (like from other nearby atoms). They display a small range of behaviors and form covalent bonds in a predictable way. We still sometimes learn new stuff about carbon, for example, like we did with buckyballs and nanotubes. But neither of these involved any fundamental carbon chemistry that we didn't already understand.
Carbon atoms get 4 bonds each, nitrogens 3, oxygens 2, hydrogens 1. You can connect them up in any way that satisfies those bond number requirements. But each bond should have a carbon on one end (preferably both ends) or you get unstable stuff. (Exceptions: N-H, O-H. You can get away with O=N, O-O, N-N, and N=N sometimes, but not too much, or the results are unpleasant.) Each of C, N, and O can form double bonds. Most double bonds are between C and either O or N. Especially in biochem, where carbon-carbon double bonds are not as common. Both C and N can form triple bonds, such as in nitriles (CN) or alkynes like acetylene (HCCH). Triple bonds are even rarer. (If you're bad you can use F, Cl, Br, or I to make CFCs and similar things. Halogens generally follow the same rules as H, except the bonds are more electron-poor than with H, and more stable. CFCs almost never appear in biochemistry.) Phosphate gets 3 bonds, but they can be anionic. When covalent, the bonds are usually with hydroxyls or other phosphates across shared bridge oxygens. In biochem P never appears outside its phosphate. When it does it gets 5 bonds. Many organophosphates used in industry and agriculture incorporate direct C-P bonds. The nerve agent Sarin for example has a P-CH3 bond as well as a P-F bond with fluorine. Phosphate can appear in organic and bioorganic polymers too, like DNA. In general addition of N or especially O to organic molecules makes them electron poor, and addition of H makes them electron rich. From least to most oxidized: C-OH, C=O, COOH. Heavily oxidized molecules tend to break apart.
Being mindful of the above restrictions, you can connect C, H, O, N, phosphate, etc. up like tinkertoys to form almost anything you can think of. Mostly stuff like tar and varnish. And that's basically what you learn in organic chemistry. Then they'll have you spend most of the semester memorizing hundreds of quirky little "recipe" type reactions with various bizarre reagents, so that you can eventually synthesize any organic structure in a lab that you want. Most of these little recipes were figured out in the 19th century.
Inorganic chemistry is less systematic. Consider something like Hg. We find out new stuff about Hg all the time. We don't understand its electronic structure very well. It has lots of excited states available to it, and it displays unexplained absorption lines that appear to be influenced by what's around. Its outer 6s valence electrons fly straight through the nucleus at relativistic speeds, raising their effective mass and shrinking their orbitals below the atom's surface. As a res
Are you kidding? That's an extremely political thing to say.
2. It decays to lead 208 which is stable.
Whoops, meant to say lead 206. I'm surprised none of you nitpickers caught that.
You're thinking of polonium-218, with the radon. Its half life is 3 minutes. Polonium-210 is different. It's a popular radioisotope for 3 reasons:
1. Its half life is a convenient 120 days or something (not microseconds or decades).
2. It decays to lead 208 which is stable.
3. It is a pure alpha emitter (no beta or gamma) which makes it relatively safe to handle as long as you do not ingest it.
Polonium-218 has none of these properties.
They sell small amounts of polonium-210 in those little plastic red disks you find in high school chem labs. United Nuclear was selling them for like $69. You'd need to buy a lot of disks to kill a Russian spy.
I just don't understand how spilling hot coffee on oneself is grounds for a lawsuit, but shredded fingers is not. Especially in America.
How is cutting yourself more someone else's fault than spilling coffee on yourself?
Parent is a fraud: First you tell us to ride a bicicle while you have been driving until you could no more because of your condition. Big lover of the environment are you.
So?
Second, your wife has a prius and you babble some nonsense about driving 'a couple thousand miles a year'. For that mileage it would have been much wiser to buy a normal car. A Prius is more expensive than a normal car and you aren't paying it off.
I love it when a clueless AC gives me advice on how to run my life. I paid $13k in cash for a used 2001 Prius off Craigslist back when I had a license and a much longer commute, since as a big lover of the environment I didn't want to waste gas.
Red Delicious apples are disgusting. It's everyone's fault- the public buys them based on color, not sweetness, so the breeders and nurseries propagate the most mutant reddish varieties. They introduce a huge selective pressure for color and isolate the apple from any selective pressure for taste. You can't taste the apples at the store before you decide to buy them, and the breeders know it, so they act in their own short-term interests and breed beautiful red apples with no regard for taste. Over the long term people eventually learn to associate the red color with an apple that tastes like crap. At least it tastes bitter because it's full of antioxidants and good for you, but it's also bland.
A drop from 13711 miles in 2004 to 13657 miles in 2005. Wow, congratulations, guys.
Since earlier this year I can't drive anymore for medical reasons. So I have to ride a bike five miles to work. A commute like that keeps you constantly whipped into shape. I highly recommend it. (Not having a medical problem that forces you to do it, that is, but just doing it.)
We have one car. It's a Prius. My wife just drives it to Whole Foods and the vet. Maybe a couple thousand miles every year.
Perhaps we in the US need to wonder why we cannot provide this for them, it isn't like Wal*Mart should be expected to pay more for something they can get for cheaper.
Because of child labor laws. The stuff in your house is cheap because it was made by child labor and prison labor. Buying merchandise made with slave labor is unacceptable behavior, and it doesn't automatically become acceptable just by the stuff being cheap.
Whether she was complicit in its burial, and is merely trying to take credit for its rediscovery, I have no idea.
Walmart imports tons of Chinese goods because that's the country to where our manufacturing base has been transplanted by market forces for cheap labor. Customers do not buy Chinese goods because they are seeking them out. Even though I try to avoid Chinese stuff, most recently purchased stuff in my house was made in China because that's all they will sell you at the store. You almost can't buy anything else anymore.
Here's an eye-opener for you. Go to Google Suggest, which uses the popularity of various search terms to offer suggestions, and type "why is everything" into the box.
I found my Razr after it was missing for three weeks. Somebody had buried it in the backyard.
There was not a scratch on it, and it worked just fine after a recharge.
This guy must be using one of the pink ones- those are sissy phones.