I saw a dead-cheap one at Wal-Mart not long ago that even an SD slot. I think it was around $60-80 Canadian, so that might even be in your price range after the conversion.
Wal-Mart, of course, but evil or not that's where the cheap prices are.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform.
No.
They found red, cell-like objects. They did some extraordinarily basic tests on them, some of which are so utterly simple-minded that they betray a total lack of understading about the characteristics of the kind of life they're trying to exclude as possibilities (see my upthread comment about the ethidium bromide test). There is **not one** test in there anywhere which positively excludes terrestrial life as a source for these cell-like objects.
Since their silly and uninformed experimental setup didn't make these things do what they had some vague notion that microbes should do, their conclusion was that theses might be extraterrestrial life forms.
That's such a colossal leap that it truly warrants the term "stupid".
The paper is so fundamentally flawed and uninformed that it really doesn't deserve a second look or any further discussion. If they can get a respected microbiologist to come in and do some kind of sensible work with them, it might be worth considering.
Personally I'd jump up and down making excited squealing noises if they had real evidence for extraterrestrial life. This paper misses the boat by such a wide margin as to be utterly laughable. They should stick to the physics, where I hope their science might be up to something better than high-school standards.
I've said this in other posts on this thread, but it bears repeating. Their methods are not kosher at all, and if anyone with any background in biological sciences, in particular with a background in the study of microorganisms, had been involved in the review process this paper would never have seen the light of day.
The authors clearly have no understanding of biology beyone "it has DNA in it and is carbon-based". Their methods, in particular their "study" of the DNA content, are laughably off-base and reveal a total lack of understanding of how to handle microorganisms which have a thick cell wall.
Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose! This is such an obvious damn thing to do that the only excuse for not doing it is (a) they don't know enough to try, or (b) they did and didn't like the results so they didn't mention them, which is probably more likely.
The whole paper is just embarassing. I haven't yet looked at the earlier preprints, but if this (ridiculous) version has been accepted I shudder to think what the others must have looked like.
I don't believe anyone with any background in biological sciences was involved anywhere in the review process. If they were and they recommended acceptance then they should be banished to teaching grade 1 science for the rest of their lives.
I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
I call shenanigans on their methodology. All they did was manually grind up the cells - once with a mortar and pestel, once with the same under liquid nitrogen. That **does not** ensure any breakage of many kinds of protist cells.
We do this kind of stuff in my lab. We frequently have to use a French Press with monstrously high pressures to get many single-celled eukaryotes to break open.
Hopefully this kind of thing will jog people to realize that "free markets" don't necessarily tend towards personal and political freedom. This is the difference between your methodology and the moral ground from which the boundaries of your actions spring.
Put capitalism and free markets in place in a totalitarian society and they work just as well, and will cheerfully help the local autocrat do whatever he wants. Put them in place in a society where a strong sense of personal libery exists, and the market will adapt to that.
Capitalism is just as happy to sell you Zyklon B as it is to sell you little American flags to wave around.
Youngsters should buy more CD's than us older folk, according to pre internet expectations. That used to be the case. Nowadays, young people don't buy CD's anymore, they download.
I wonder whether music is as fundamental a cultural force now as it was between the 50's and the 90's - but since I'm no longer young I have no way of knowing.
I am around a lot of people in their early 20's, and I don't see them identifying with music and bands to the extent that we did 20-odd years ago. Not that this is a bad thing, and not that they don't listen to music because they clearly do, but the impact of that one factor seems less now than it was back when there were arguably less avenues for common cultural experiences.
So beyond the effect mp3's I wonder if the cultural importance of pop music is on the downslope now.
I wish I had a mod point for you - I couldn't agree more. The great thing about mp3's is the degree to which I've had a chance to become familiar with music I would probably *never* had listened to otherwise.
One of my personal favourites these days is Renaissance sacred music - a lot of 15th century choral stuff (Victoria, Palestrina) is spooky beautiful if you're in the right frame of mind for it. I'm quite certain I would never looked twice at a CD of it had I not done an offhand download of it at one point.
I'm old enough to remember when the first microprocessor-based computers came out.
People said *precisely* the same thing about them.
If they make this thing they might just be surprised at the demand - a huge proportion of the population doesn't have $700+ to thow away on something like a computer.
Perhaps more unexpectedly, 51% of the 36 to 50s play games,
I'm in my early 40's and I've been gaming since I was twelve - that was when the first real electronic arcade games came out. I used to spend many an hour playing Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, etc etc and have know many people in my age group who did the same and have remained game players ever since.
Why would we stop doing what's fun just because of the calendar?
Personally I tend to think it's more of a bias in the age range of people doing games journalism that makes them find it surprising that we're gamers.
Actually I just don't have the time or the inclination to engage in extended debate on nonsense like this.
The Space Station, for one, pointlessly sucks up gigantic amounts of space science funding for no purpose whatsoever. You should like that one particularly, since cancelling it would involve keeping your eyes locked firmly on the ground.
An enormous list of worthless pork-barrel projects could be made with very little effort.
There's really not much point in debate however - if you can't understand the value of basic research I don't have anything much to say to you.
There are lots of pro uses for open source stuff - scientific, engineering, and so on.
However even most great OSS stuff, for instance OpenOffice (which I use) still struggles to catch up to MS on the most basic things that the home user does on a daily basis. They've invested many millions in usability research and it shows. Their stuff hangs together better and appears to work more seamlessly. Whether or not it actually does is irrelevant - it looks that way to Grandma.
There are exceptions of course - Firefox and Thunderbird can actually do the job for Auntie May better (by miles) than Outlook and Exploder.
I've been poking around too but no luck. I suppose they've put a heck of a lot of work in on this and don't want to see the whole thing torrented by a bunch of kids inside of five minutes. All the same it would be nice to archive the whole set - redundancy is still be best backup.
I console myself with the thought of how amazingly good the games will be when I retire and can start to enjoy things like that again.
Plus even if I can't afford to play it full time, I'll be damned if I'm not going to wander around in Oblivion just for the sake of enjoying whatever I can.
Real shame that the standard of living in Tibet has risen steadily from the subsistence level ever since the CCP took control, huh?
If I could trust a totalitarian government to do anything other than lie, maybe so. As it is they may as well be claiming that Tibetans are made of cheese for all the validity it has.
Anyway the song that "we're doing it all to raise the natives" has been the standard line of the conqueror all through history, and the natives always get the shaft in the end.
This is the thing I don't understand about "killing" the program -
What is the actual cost of downloading the data once in a while from the DSN?
In a worst-case scenario can't this be done for bare-bones prices (a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars)?
Cutting a multi-million dollar program would mean de-funding positions for PIs, postdocs, and whatnot, but couldn't the actual data still be gathered regardless?
I've never received any adequate response to this question.
The "hydrogen economy" is bunk because you need to make at least two extaenergy conversions (Form hydrogen and burn hydrogen), but does not address where the energy comes from to begin with.
There's gobs of the stuff sleeting down from the sun all the time, no?
Plus nuclear is pretty clean, antinuke paranoia aside.
...those that are 35-40 and up in age still view video games as entertainment for kids...
Excuse me? I think you're confused about video game history. I'm well past 40 and have been playing video games since I was about twelve years old. Myself, and plenty of people I know in our age group play and enjoy video games all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a dead-cheap one at Wal-Mart not long ago that even an SD slot. I think it was around $60-80 Canadian, so that might even be in your price range after the conversion.
Wal-Mart, of course, but evil or not that's where the cheap prices are.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform.
No.
They found red, cell-like objects. They did some extraordinarily basic tests on them, some of which are so utterly simple-minded that they betray a total lack of understading about the characteristics of the kind of life they're trying to exclude as possibilities (see my upthread comment about the ethidium bromide test). There is **not one** test in there anywhere which positively excludes terrestrial life as a source for these cell-like objects.
Since their silly and uninformed experimental setup didn't make these things do what they had some vague notion that microbes should do, their conclusion was that theses might be extraterrestrial life forms.
That's such a colossal leap that it truly warrants the term "stupid".
The paper is so fundamentally flawed and uninformed that it really doesn't deserve a second look or any further discussion. If they can get a respected microbiologist to come in and do some kind of sensible work with them, it might be worth considering.
Personally I'd jump up and down making excited squealing noises if they had real evidence for extraterrestrial life. This paper misses the boat by such a wide margin as to be utterly laughable. They should stick to the physics, where I hope their science might be up to something better than high-school standards.
Are you saying the Archaea don't have DNA, RNA, water, or carbon?
This will come as a great shock to the people I know who regularly exploit all of these things in their studies of them.
I've said this in other posts on this thread, but it bears repeating. Their methods are not kosher at all, and if anyone with any background in biological sciences, in particular with a background in the study of microorganisms, had been involved in the review process this paper would never have seen the light of day.
The authors clearly have no understanding of biology beyone "it has DNA in it and is carbon-based". Their methods, in particular their "study" of the DNA content, are laughably off-base and reveal a total lack of understanding of how to handle microorganisms which have a thick cell wall.
Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose! This is such an obvious damn thing to do that the only excuse for not doing it is (a) they don't know enough to try, or (b) they did and didn't like the results so they didn't mention them, which is probably more likely.
This is a stupid paper.
The whole paper is just embarassing. I haven't yet looked at the earlier preprints, but if this (ridiculous) version has been accepted I shudder to think what the others must have looked like.
I don't believe anyone with any background in biological sciences was involved anywhere in the review process. If they were and they recommended acceptance then they should be banished to teaching grade 1 science for the rest of their lives.
I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
I call shenanigans on their methodology. All they did was manually grind up the cells - once with a mortar and pestel, once with the same under liquid nitrogen. That **does not** ensure any breakage of many kinds of protist cells.
We do this kind of stuff in my lab. We frequently have to use a French Press with monstrously high pressures to get many single-celled eukaryotes to break open.
Looks like some kind of red algae to me.
Hopefully this kind of thing will jog people to realize that "free markets" don't necessarily tend towards personal and political freedom. This is the difference between your methodology and the moral ground from which the boundaries of your actions spring.
Put capitalism and free markets in place in a totalitarian society and they work just as well, and will cheerfully help the local autocrat do whatever he wants. Put them in place in a society where a strong sense of personal libery exists, and the market will adapt to that.
Capitalism is just as happy to sell you Zyklon B as it is to sell you little American flags to wave around.
I'd probably incline towards Palestrina myself - it's a "right mood" thing, but probably worth at least a listen.
Cheers.
Youngsters should buy more CD's than us older folk, according to pre internet expectations. That used to be the case. Nowadays, young people don't buy CD's anymore, they download.
I wonder whether music is as fundamental a cultural force now as it was between the 50's and the 90's - but since I'm no longer young I have no way of knowing.
I am around a lot of people in their early 20's, and I don't see them identifying with music and bands to the extent that we did 20-odd years ago. Not that this is a bad thing, and not that they don't listen to music because they clearly do, but the impact of that one factor seems less now than it was back when there were arguably less avenues for common cultural experiences.
So beyond the effect mp3's I wonder if the cultural importance of pop music is on the downslope now.
Anyone under 25 care to comment?
I wish I had a mod point for you - I couldn't agree more. The great thing about mp3's is the degree to which I've had a chance to become familiar with music I would probably *never* had listened to otherwise.
One of my personal favourites these days is Renaissance sacred music - a lot of 15th century choral stuff (Victoria, Palestrina) is spooky beautiful if you're in the right frame of mind for it. I'm quite certain I would never looked twice at a CD of it had I not done an offhand download of it at one point.
I'm old enough to remember when the first microprocessor-based computers came out.
People said *precisely* the same thing about them.
If they make this thing they might just be surprised at the demand - a huge proportion of the population doesn't have $700+ to thow away on something like a computer.
Everyone (well, a lot of people) will want one. They all come with Linux.
This is a potentially huge market that Windows would be at least temporarily shut out of.
Seems like there's a real opportunity for mainstream Linux inroads there...
Perhaps more unexpectedly, 51% of the 36 to 50s play games,
I'm in my early 40's and I've been gaming since I was twelve - that was when the first real electronic arcade games came out. I used to spend many an hour playing Space Invaders, Lunar Lander, etc etc and have know many people in my age group who did the same and have remained game players ever since.
Why would we stop doing what's fun just because of the calendar?
Personally I tend to think it's more of a bias in the age range of people doing games journalism that makes them find it surprising that we're gamers.
Actually I just don't have the time or the inclination to engage in extended debate on nonsense like this.
The Space Station, for one, pointlessly sucks up gigantic amounts of space science funding for no purpose whatsoever. You should like that one particularly, since cancelling it would involve keeping your eyes locked firmly on the ground.
An enormous list of worthless pork-barrel projects could be made with very little effort.
There's really not much point in debate however - if you can't understand the value of basic research I don't have anything much to say to you.
You can do that for a few million dollars? If that's true you really do deserve a grant.
I could trivially name fifty things which cost more than a space probe and contribute less.
There are lots of pro uses for open source stuff - scientific, engineering, and so on.
However even most great OSS stuff, for instance OpenOffice (which I use) still struggles to catch up to MS on the most basic things that the home user does on a daily basis. They've invested many millions in usability research and it shows. Their stuff hangs together better and appears to work more seamlessly. Whether or not it actually does is irrelevant - it looks that way to Grandma.
There are exceptions of course - Firefox and Thunderbird can actually do the job for Auntie May better (by miles) than Outlook and Exploder.
Some people for some unknown reason call the big box that houses the computer a modem.
That's only fair, since as we all know the monitor is actually called the "computer".
I've been poking around too but no luck. I suppose they've put a heck of a lot of work in on this and don't want to see the whole thing torrented by a bunch of kids inside of five minutes. All the same it would be nice to archive the whole set - redundancy is still be best backup.
Yup, it is a real problem.
I console myself with the thought of how amazingly good the games will be when I retire and can start to enjoy things like that again.
Plus even if I can't afford to play it full time, I'll be damned if I'm not going to wander around in Oblivion just for the sake of enjoying whatever I can.
Real shame that the standard of living in Tibet has risen steadily from the subsistence level ever since the CCP took control, huh?
If I could trust a totalitarian government to do anything other than lie, maybe so. As it is they may as well be claiming that Tibetans are made of cheese for all the validity it has.
Anyway the song that "we're doing it all to raise the natives" has been the standard line of the conqueror all through history, and the natives always get the shaft in the end.
This is the thing I don't understand about "killing" the program -
What is the actual cost of downloading the data once in a while from the DSN?
In a worst-case scenario can't this be done for bare-bones prices (a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars)?
Cutting a multi-million dollar program would mean de-funding positions for PIs, postdocs, and whatnot, but couldn't the actual data still be gathered regardless?
I've never received any adequate response to this question.
The "hydrogen economy" is bunk because you need to make at least two extaenergy conversions (Form hydrogen and burn hydrogen), but does not address where the energy comes from to begin with.
There's gobs of the stuff sleeting down from the sun all the time, no?
Plus nuclear is pretty clean, antinuke paranoia aside.
Excuse me? I think you're confused about video game history. I'm well past 40 and have been playing video games since I was about twelve years old. Myself, and plenty of people I know in our age group play and enjoy video games all the time.
40 neq 60, just FYI.
Was there any/much foam shedding prior to the removal of paint from the external tank?
Just wondering what the adhesive effects of all that white paint were.
I think I'm embarrassed just to be aware of this story.