As a CS person about to switch into Biology I found the reviewed book interesting. Even if you have a good handle on Perl and Biology you will find certain elements in the book intruguing.
On a personal experience side note, Perl does seem to handle genetics problems with quite a bit of ease. The ease seems to stem from Perl's obfuscation. (it also seems to confuse my Biology profs quite a bit since my answers are legitimate answers on the exams)
Typically cancer can be short lived (compared to human life). Cancerous cells multiply very quiclkly but they don't use up all their telomeres and many work in ways to "infect" surrounding cells. Consider this. The average cell divides 60 times. This allows for a heck of a lot of cells and means that cancer can just go away with time if all they did was multiply.
Instead cancerous tends to cause short term problems, over time it can be treated by just keeping the person alive.
Other forms of cancer target other cells. Cancer is afterall, a mutation so they can mutate quickly. Mutations occur very often in the human body but almost all result in a lethal mutation that can't live. Thus just lenghtening telomeres won't necessarily be a bad thing. Once they are put into the body or they convert to another form they will start to loose those telomeres.
Also, telomeres only help stabilize nuclear material division (division of chromosomes and making copies) so it has very little to do with cell death. Rather, cell death is controlled by the chromosomes themselves.
I look forward to what they will use the stem cells for I'm pretty sure that in 40 years I will need my heart or stomach patched up.
I'm really not a fan of AOL (ever since they bought out Quack.com) but there's a lot of pros and a lot of cons to Red Hat being bought.
First the Pros:
hmm...can't think of anything =)
no, just kidding.
Ok, there could possibly be a lot more money towards the development and production of an even more user friendly linu> to non techies. It also means a greater spread and porting of more tools that could possibly maybe make it out to other dists (that's a statement not a question)
It's nice to have large companies push OS's, everybody knows that. Yes, AOL will push linux like mad(by association).
Now the bad points, I don't want to restate what other people are saying, but I really don't want Red Hat to go down the drain. Among geeks AOL carries an evil stench that permeates your desktop causing you to burn it just to remove any trace of it. Also, AOL could modify to the point where they just branch Linux off and develop it on their own and then charge lots of cash. Yes it violates the licences but they have money to buy the licences out.
In conclusion, it's good and bad but it seems to be more bad than anything else.
The amount of detail that the animators put into Wallace and Gromit is incredible. You can watch the video repeatedly and find something new. Like the news papers always fortell what the future may contain.
A particularly advanced example of this is the news paper in "A Grand Day Out". If you read it you'll find out about Feathers McGraw who is in The Wrong Trousers which was completed a few years later.
Also, in "A Close Shave" you can see Feathers Was Here written on the Jail cell that Gromit is in. It does seem that Feathers is perhaps one of the most exciting characters that was created.
Consider that it's a bowling ball but from the two blank little eyes you can tell it's evil and it doesn't even have eyebrows but when it rubs the flippers together you can sense it like the evil from Sauron.
Just a small other point, the hole in the eyes of the characters are so that the animators can put a needle in and move the direction that the eyes look.
Hope this has been interesting, informative, insightful and funny;)
They can own patents to methods and procedures and techniques in it. Just like genes, you can't own the actual gene but you can patent specific portions that you disocvered (patenting how they work and techniques with it)
Thing is that they're probably not looking for the center of the Earth. The Earth, moon or any object upon which there is a changing gravitational field is not static.
In other words, the center of the Earth is constantly shifting from one point to another. All non-gaseous planets are continously evolving (like Io, you know, one of Jupiters moons). Thus getting an exact measurement from the centers is wrong the millisecond that you get it.
What this study is more useful for is doing these measurements over time and finding out some sort of gravitational pattern.
It's like an MRI scan for the Earth but we've got a very large scanner and we've moved the emitters to the Earth and are using the Moon to bounce. Potentially we could determine how the shape of the earth changes by measuring the distance to the moon (since we know how fast it recedes).
So the data obtained from this experiment has many many uses (not just those that are listed here).
Not exactly sure what you mean by "since it will take time to bounce signals back and forth".
We know that the moon recedes at 1 nanometer per second. Since they're trying to determine nearest millimeter they don't care about how much it's receding or even if it is. As far as they're concerned, it doesn't move farther away in a day or even a few months.
Also, it takes just over 2 seconds for light to get there and back so we're looking at a 2 nanometer change in the whole time. Also, this nanometer movement will change as the moon gets farther away.
Thus they don't have to worry about movement (tis less than the 5% error range they're "allowed")
This is an amazingly good point. When you post it on the page you are inviting people to write abusive emails.
There will most likely be an email that may threaten bodily harm upon the minister. This is a threat that can be convicted in a court of law.
If I'm not mistaken, then Belgium has laws that can convict somebody of that crime in abstensia, even if they never set foot in the country.
Thus if traced and convicted that person could be deported to Belgium to face jail time.
Could Slashdot moderators please at least trim the article so that the email address only appears when people read the news story in full (so that you don't actually censor)
This is not an occasion for an advancement of linux, it's a great oppurtunity for those who don't have access to computers to get that access. Perhaps those who feel they need more (or specific uses) can switch to an OS that better suits them.
MS Windows is a great OS for exactly these people. When all that most people want to do is surf the web and read their email or write documents/improve their computer skills it makes sense to get an OS that is supported the world over and can be fixed easily.
to be a marine biologist:
The CTO at a company where I worked (and still do once in a while) was a marine biologist. Like the article said: you get to do what you want. You get the expertise and learn more about the creatures living in the ocean, but if you're bright, you can be the CTO for a successful business.
Congratulations on the code. Hope that you continue on your quest. I know that there's many comments already posted about how the it's not much of an achievement.
Nevertheless, a quarter million lines is more code than the trollers above have ever written.
Hopefully the software will provide for a better base for us.
Thank you
that could be true, but we write custom GUI's not a general purpose. I write for myself rather than for the general population. That would require quite a bit of research.
Linux can and will be used on the desktop. There's a fundamental reason to use Linux: It's very flexible. It's much easier to write a GUI for Linux through X than for other OS's. I use Linux primarily as a desktop OS. Sure I've got half a dozen servers, but the power of Linux combined with Windows and OS X suits me just fine. Develop code on Linux, adapt for Windows, and make pretty things on a Mac.
but that's the point...it isn't meant for us. We can pretty much say that the whole Universe isn't meant for us. Even most of Earth isn't meant for us. Once the people with the money realize that we have to move then we're going to go. Even if we have to live in tin cans in space, we will. Eventually though, over thousands and thousands of years, we could make mars habitable. Then hopefully we'll start getting into the Foundation series.
In a related to that story to that...the man who made Bic was Mr. Bich. He was a french man and they named the product Bic. Real story, not making it up: full story
Huge significance. All the talk of global warmings and temperature snaps means humans are more likely to start heading towards space soon. In any eventuality, we're going to head out to the rest of the Universe soon (next 100 to 200 years at the latest) and need to find viable new homes.
Having Mars available will give us a boost in terms of learning how to teraform and how to populate new planets. It's also an untouched resource in terms of natural resources and learning experiences.
I for one want us to last for a very long time and being stuck one planet is not the way to do it. Thus populating mars is the next logical step.
Of course (now the rant portion is over), we need water. Water would allow us to irrigate and grow the food that is native to us. Everything on our planet needs water to survive (as in everything we need) and it makes sense that we would live on a planet with water.
There is an organization called MERLOT. It's more of an online system where professors from Canada and the US submit links to sites with learning tools and programs.
Anybody can submit links but each link is graded by professors from Universities and Colleges that pay a fee (a really big fee). This system ensures that only the good tools get online. It takes a minimum of 3 stars out of 5 to be linked. This encourages improvements (rejections get feedback) in tools to become easier to use and more educational.
It's FREE (no registration at all) to and layed out into easy to navigate catagories (Arts, Biology, Math, Physics, etc...)
I think they were going with a combination of cool and style. They are after all a news/money making magazine as opposed to a research or scientific magazine.
But the motor powered scooter is a hydrogen powered scooter. It's an advancement of putting fuel cells in smaller areas. This is very important when you want a car to actually go far without running out of gas. It can also be beneficial to put one of these cells (must be small) in something like an artificial heart. It'll last longer and that's pretty important.
I agree they could've trimmed the surfboard off their list, but it's really really sweet and light. It's like that article on slashdot about the fridge in a server box. It's just something neat.
By the time we run out of hydrogen and water on earth we'll be harvesting hydrogen from dead stars.
Quick explanation, only the core of the star has fusion, it doesn't cycle the hydrogen from most of the star into the core. So when a star dies it's about 10% helium and 90% hydrogen. This means that the outer layers of the hydrogen drift off into space making dead stars ideal refueling ports.
This is of course all hypothetical but wouldn't it be a very nice way to travel? Just fuel up your fuel cells by "flying" through a cloud of gas.
Yeah, it's listed on Time as well. Apparently the details that were leaked made a lot of people nervous and some major investors pulled out.
Another thing was the book deal that Dean Kamen made with Steve Kemper (Harvard Business School). Kemper leaked what could have been details; in the book proposal and that caused Dean to become very quiet about the whole matter.
In fact we still don't know what project Ginger could be. I could very well be something like Ginger from the Civilisation Earth series (by Harry Turtledove, a continuation of the World War series). to time
Slashdot Mirror
As a CS person about to switch into Biology I found the reviewed book interesting. Even if you have a good handle on Perl and Biology you will find certain elements in the book intruguing.
On a personal experience side note, Perl does seem to handle genetics problems with quite a bit of ease. The ease seems to stem from Perl's obfuscation. (it also seems to confuse my Biology profs quite a bit since my answers are legitimate answers on the exams)
cancer does not necessarily do that.
Typically cancer can be short lived (compared to human life). Cancerous cells multiply very quiclkly but they don't use up all their telomeres and many work in ways to "infect" surrounding cells. Consider this. The average cell divides 60 times. This allows for a heck of a lot of cells and means that cancer can just go away with time if all they did was multiply.
Instead cancerous tends to cause short term problems, over time it can be treated by just keeping the person alive.
Other forms of cancer target other cells. Cancer is afterall, a mutation so they can mutate quickly. Mutations occur very often in the human body but almost all result in a lethal mutation that can't live. Thus just lenghtening telomeres won't necessarily be a bad thing. Once they are put into the body or they convert to another form they will start to loose those telomeres.
Also, telomeres only help stabilize nuclear material division (division of chromosomes and making copies) so it has very little to do with cell death. Rather, cell death is controlled by the chromosomes themselves.
I look forward to what they will use the stem cells for I'm pretty sure that in 40 years I will need my heart or stomach patched up.
I'm really not a fan of AOL (ever since they bought out Quack.com) but there's a lot of pros and a lot of cons to Red Hat being bought.
First the Pros:
hmm...can't think of anything =)
no, just kidding.
Ok, there could possibly be a lot more money towards the development and production of an even more user friendly linu> to non techies. It also means a greater spread and porting of more tools that could possibly maybe make it out to other dists (that's a statement not a question)
It's nice to have large companies push OS's, everybody knows that. Yes, AOL will push linux like mad(by association).
Now the bad points, I don't want to restate what other people are saying, but I really don't want Red Hat to go down the drain. Among geeks AOL carries an evil stench that permeates your desktop causing you to burn it just to remove any trace of it. Also, AOL could modify to the point where they just branch Linux off and develop it on their own and then charge lots of cash. Yes it violates the licences but they have money to buy the licences out.
In conclusion, it's good and bad but it seems to be more bad than anything else.
The amount of detail that the animators put into Wallace and Gromit is incredible. You can watch the video repeatedly and find something new. Like the news papers always fortell what the future may contain.
;)
A particularly advanced example of this is the news paper in "A Grand Day Out". If you read it you'll find out about Feathers McGraw who is in The Wrong Trousers which was completed a few years later.
Also, in "A Close Shave" you can see Feathers Was Here written on the Jail cell that Gromit is in. It does seem that Feathers is perhaps one of the most exciting characters that was created.
Consider that it's a bowling ball but from the two blank little eyes you can tell it's evil and it doesn't even have eyebrows but when it rubs the flippers together you can sense it like the evil from Sauron.
Just a small other point, the hole in the eyes of the characters are so that the animators can put a needle in and move the direction that the eyes look.
Hope this has been interesting, informative, insightful and funny
Remember how MS made their own Java VM and modified the language to suit themselves?
Perhaps they're aiming for MS OpenGL (MS OpenJelly, lube up and aim for penetration)
(please don't troll me)
They can own patents to methods and procedures and techniques in it. Just like genes, you can't own the actual gene but you can patent specific portions that you disocvered (patenting how they work and techniques with it)
I know that directx has improved greatly over the years making it much nicer and easier to use. Does anybody know if they're porting it to Linux?
WINE supports it, but are they going to modify so that it can be used like glut and opengl in X apps?
Thing is that they're probably not looking for the center of the Earth. The Earth, moon or any object upon which there is a changing gravitational field is not static.
In other words, the center of the Earth is constantly shifting from one point to another. All non-gaseous planets are continously evolving (like Io, you know, one of Jupiters moons). Thus getting an exact measurement from the centers is wrong the millisecond that you get it.
What this study is more useful for is doing these measurements over time and finding out some sort of gravitational pattern.
It's like an MRI scan for the Earth but we've got a very large scanner and we've moved the emitters to the Earth and are using the Moon to bounce. Potentially we could determine how the shape of the earth changes by measuring the distance to the moon (since we know how fast it recedes).
So the data obtained from this experiment has many many uses (not just those that are listed here).
Not exactly sure what you mean by "since it will take time to bounce signals back and forth".
We know that the moon recedes at 1 nanometer per second. Since they're trying to determine nearest millimeter they don't care about how much it's receding or even if it is. As far as they're concerned, it doesn't move farther away in a day or even a few months.
Also, it takes just over 2 seconds for light to get there and back so we're looking at a 2 nanometer change in the whole time. Also, this nanometer movement will change as the moon gets farther away.
Thus they don't have to worry about movement (tis less than the 5% error range they're "allowed")
hope that's kinda helpful
This is an amazingly good point. When you post it on the page you are inviting people to write abusive emails.
There will most likely be an email that may threaten bodily harm upon the minister. This is a threat that can be convicted in a court of law.
If I'm not mistaken, then Belgium has laws that can convict somebody of that crime in abstensia, even if they never set foot in the country.
Thus if traced and convicted that person could be deported to Belgium to face jail time.
Could Slashdot moderators please at least trim the article so that the email address only appears when people read the news story in full (so that you don't actually censor)
This is not an occasion for an advancement of linux, it's a great oppurtunity for those who don't have access to computers to get that access. Perhaps those who feel they need more (or specific uses) can switch to an OS that better suits them.
MS Windows is a great OS for exactly these people. When all that most people want to do is surf the web and read their email or write documents/improve their computer skills it makes sense to get an OS that is supported the world over and can be fixed easily.
This isn't about us, it's about the world.
to be a marine biologist:
The CTO at a company where I worked (and still do once in a while) was a marine biologist. Like the article said: you get to do what you want. You get the expertise and learn more about the creatures living in the ocean, but if you're bright, you can be the CTO for a successful business.
Congratulations on the code. Hope that you continue on your quest. I know that there's many comments already posted about how the it's not much of an achievement.
Nevertheless, a quarter million lines is more code than the trollers above have ever written.
Hopefully the software will provide for a better base for us.
Thank you
that could be true, but we write custom GUI's not a general purpose. I write for myself rather than for the general population. That would require quite a bit of research.
Linux can and will be used on the desktop. There's a fundamental reason to use Linux: It's very flexible. It's much easier to write a GUI for Linux through X than for other OS's. I use Linux primarily as a desktop OS. Sure I've got half a dozen servers, but the power of Linux combined with Windows and OS X suits me just fine. Develop code on Linux, adapt for Windows, and make pretty things on a Mac.
but that's the point...it isn't meant for us. We can pretty much say that the whole Universe isn't meant for us. Even most of Earth isn't meant for us. Once the people with the money realize that we have to move then we're going to go. Even if we have to live in tin cans in space, we will. Eventually though, over thousands and thousands of years, we could make mars habitable. Then hopefully we'll start getting into the Foundation series.
Yeah, sometimes it does, but that's because the story might contain points that yours doesn't, or that it got to them first.
After all, it is a queue.
In a related to that story to that...the man who made Bic was Mr. Bich. He was a french man and they named the product Bic. Real story, not making it up: full story
Huge significance. All the talk of global warmings and temperature snaps means humans are more likely to start heading towards space soon. In any eventuality, we're going to head out to the rest of the Universe soon (next 100 to 200 years at the latest) and need to find viable new homes.
Having Mars available will give us a boost in terms of learning how to teraform and how to populate new planets. It's also an untouched resource in terms of natural resources and learning experiences.
I for one want us to last for a very long time and being stuck one planet is not the way to do it. Thus populating mars is the next logical step.
Of course (now the rant portion is over), we need water. Water would allow us to irrigate and grow the food that is native to us. Everything on our planet needs water to survive (as in everything we need) and it makes sense that we would live on a planet with water.
There is an organization called MERLOT. It's more of an online system where professors from Canada and the US submit links to sites with learning tools and programs.
Anybody can submit links but each link is graded by professors from Universities and Colleges that pay a fee (a really big fee). This system ensures that only the good tools get online. It takes a minimum of 3 stars out of 5 to be linked. This encourages improvements (rejections get feedback) in tools to become easier to use and more educational.
It's FREE (no registration at all) to and layed out into easy to navigate catagories (Arts, Biology, Math, Physics, etc...)
I think they were going with a combination of cool and style. They are after all a news/money making magazine as opposed to a research or scientific magazine.
But the motor powered scooter is a hydrogen powered scooter. It's an advancement of putting fuel cells in smaller areas. This is very important when you want a car to actually go far without running out of gas. It can also be beneficial to put one of these cells (must be small) in something like an artificial heart. It'll last longer and that's pretty important.
I agree they could've trimmed the surfboard off their list, but it's really really sweet and light. It's like that article on slashdot about the fridge in a server box. It's just something neat.
By the time we run out of hydrogen and water on earth we'll be harvesting hydrogen from dead stars.
Quick explanation, only the core of the star has fusion, it doesn't cycle the hydrogen from most of the star into the core. So when a star dies it's about 10% helium and 90% hydrogen. This means that the outer layers of the hydrogen drift off into space making dead stars ideal refueling ports.
This is of course all hypothetical but wouldn't it be a very nice way to travel? Just fuel up your fuel cells by "flying" through a cloud of gas.
The fuel cell lasts 43 miles or so. I'm assuming flat surface. They say that it's twice as far as the previous bikes.
Yeah, it's listed on Time as well. Apparently the details that were leaked made a lot of people nervous and some major investors pulled out.
Another thing was the book deal that Dean Kamen made with Steve Kemper (Harvard Business School). Kemper leaked what could have been details; in the book proposal and that caused Dean to become very quiet about the whole matter.
In fact we still don't know what project Ginger could be. I could very well be something like Ginger from the Civilisation Earth series (by Harry Turtledove, a continuation of the World War series). to time
How long will it be before commercialism invades this new internet as well?
Not allowing it will make it much more controlled and perhaps not as free as most would prefer the internet to be.
There are many issues that need to be looked into and the biggest is perhaps: when will I get this hooked up to my room?
Can anybody else think of other issues or what exactly the funders are looking for in return?
Tushar
Quack