Open source is open source, no matter what platform.... If you write something open souce, you know what, thats good enough for me.
Well, yes and no. One important issue that seems obscured by this way of framing the issue is the practical reason for wanting "open source": If you want reliable software, you need access to the source for all the software. Not just the app you're running, but all its libraries. And the system calls that it makes. And, ultimately, the hardware diagrams for the processor.
If you reframe it as a "software quality" issue, it becomes clearer. As a programmer, I often point out that, on a closed platform like Windows, I can't guarantee the behavior of any of my code. The reason is simple: My code needs to call lower-level libraries to do its job. If I can't access the code to those lower levels, I can't really know exactly what they do. Since my understanding of the lower levels is incomplete, there could be surprises in special cases that will make my code misbehave.
We saw an extreme case of this some years back, with the Pentium floating-point bug. In this case, the bug went all the way down to the hardware, where incorrect values were returned for a small number of inputs. Without access to code and circuit diagrams, you can't discover such things by any method short of exhaustive testing, which could take centuries.
Of course, making everything "open" is of somewhat theoretical value to most users. But it is of value. The "many eyes" argument explains why: By making the details visible, it is at least theoretically possible to do an exhaustive analysis; with a lot of people looking at the stuff, you greatly increase the chances that someone will spot problems or devise tests that expose problems.
But if anything under your code is closed, you don't even have the theoretical possibility of discovering problems until they bite you. Since your code is dependent on those lower levels, you can't make any guarantees about your code's behavior.
Security people have been saying something similar for years. If you want real security, you don't run anything unless you have the source. And you compiled it yourself, so you know that the binary corresponds to the source. And you compiled the compiler yourself (using a compiler from a different source), so you have confidence that the compiler doesn't contain backdoor code like Brian Kernigan described in his famous paper. And your hardware guys studied the processor's diagrams to look for possible gotchas (or designed-in bugs) in the machine language.
Unless all this stuff is open and available, you are utterly at the mercy of the lower-level stuff that you're calling.
In particular, since MS Windows isn't open for inspection, no software running on it can be reliable or secure. We have no way of knowing what tricks may be lurking down there in the OS or system libraries.
Reptiles and birds, for instance, are closely related having only seperated (relatively) recently, while the group that eventually formed the true mammals and monotremes seperated out much earlier. And then we all seperated from the fish long, long ago.
So you reject outright the entire concept of cladistics?
That's your right, of course. But it does rather put you outside the main branch of evolutionary biology these days. (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That;-) After a few decades of discussion, the cladists have won overwhelmingly.
According to the cladistics terminology, we didn't separate from the fish; we are [a branch of the] fish. Granted, we're funny-looking fish, since we're adapted to breathing air and living on land. Our fins are heavily modified to arms and legs, and our scales are skinny hairs. But if you look at the tree that includes all the things we call "fish", mammals are a part of that tree, so we're fish, too.
If you don't agree, then your definition of "fish" isn't a clade, so it's a bogus classification. It's ok as a term in common English, but it's not a biologically meaningful classification term.
So how much money in scientific research grants is out there working to disprove evolution?
Two answers:
1. Lots
2. Not enough.
In a sense, most of the digging at paleontological sites, plus the laborious extraction and study of fossils, is done with the goal of finding evidence for or against various hypotheses. Granted, these are mostly about details. But this is because the general evolutionary history of the Earth has been quite well filled out. There's no longer any room for doubt about the general outline, so you have to concentrate on the finer aspects of it all.
Thus, one of Darwin's conjectures was that birds had a lot of similarities to dinosaurs, and there was a good chance that birds are modern dinosaurs. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize well. When he was alive, only a few Archaeopteryx fossils had been found, and scientists just said "That's interesting, but you need better evidence than that." And so things stood for a century.
Then, back in the 70's, a gang led by John Ostrom decided to attack the puzzle again. By some luck, China had stopped sending their intellectuals to re-education camps, and field research was again permitted. In the rocks of Liaoning, some very fine siltstones and limestones were found that contained fossils of several more primitive birds and some of their non-flying relatives. Some of those birdlike non-flying dinosaurs had feather-like coverings, as Ostrom predicted. The evidence built up, and now birds are officially classified as a suborder of the dinosaurs.
The evidence could just as well have shown that birds weren't dinosaurs at all. They could have been crocodilians, as some biologists argued. They could have been a completely separate order. The details still aren't complete, but it is clear now that birds are theropod dinosaurs. This idea was falsifiable, as were the other classifications. The others were debunked, and the theropod hypothesis was supported by the evidence.
But there's still a lot of work being done (and funded;-). Just when did the theropods split off from the other dinosaurs? We don't really know, and some recent theropod fossils in South America have pushed the split back by several million years. Maybe the theropods are really a separate order, more closely related to mammals or reptiles than to the other dinosauria. Maybe Deinonychus was a closer relative to us than to Stegosaurus. That's a wild surmise, but it hasn't been disproved, so some biologists push it as a "devil's advocate" argument.
Anyway, there is funding for this research, though few paleontologists get rich from their life work. If we really want to know about such things, we should find ways of sending more money their way. That's more likely to answer the questions than any debate with religious folks.
And really, how credible are they? They claim to have this private communication channel to the Intelligent Designer who set it all up. But they can't even tell us where to find the relevant fossils. Why don't they just ask the Designer? He must know, and He talks to them, but they aren't telling where the bodies are buried. Doesn't this failure sorta discredit them?
As Richard Dawkins says, half an eye is indeed better than no eye at all.
There's some interesting recent news on this front. Google for "brittle-star eye" and read a few of the articles. Anyone interested in evolutionary puzzles should know about this research.
It seems that we've found a new eye that's in the early stages of evolution. It's a compound eye in a class of critters (starfish) that otherwise don't have eyes, though many do have patches of light-sensitive cells that can't form an image.
But a small group of brittle stars have recently (past million years or so) modified their silica-based armor so that it includes tiny compound lenses that focus light on a cluster of light-sensitive cells. The brittle stars have patches of these lenses, and they have been shown to form images. The resolution isn't great. They probably can't even resolve things 1 degree apart. So the sun and moon are each less than one pixel. But it's a good start, and in a few million more years, their descendents will probably have much better eyes, several per arm.
To date there's little evidence as to how, precisely, speciation happens.
If you change the wording slightly, you can get something that is generally understood among biologists: There's much evidence that speciation doesn't happen precisely at some instance in time; rather it's a gradual process with a messy transition. A speciation event can be long by human standards, though fast by geological standards ("punctuated equilibrium").
We have lots of examples. Thus, cattle breeders recently produced a fertile cross between domestic cattle and the American bison ("beefalo"). Previous crosses had been sterile, and they were considered separate species. Now they're considered a speciation event that's nearly but not quite complete.
The familiar "mule", i.e. a horse x donkey cross, sometimes produces fertile mules. They're very rare, and their offspring are usually sterile. So this is another speciation event that's almost complete.
The domestic dog can interbreed with grey wolves and jackals, but those wolves and jackals can't interbreed. Well, they can, of course, but the offspring aren't fertile ("mules"). This is considered a 3-way species split happening right now, but not complete. 3-way splits are probably rare, but we seem to have one living in our homes.
And on and on. There are many cases where what were thought to be two species turn out to be somewhat interfertile. They almost always turn out to be very differently adapted, and the hybrids are usually not very successful in either of the parents' habitats. The conclusion is obvious: We're seeing a speciation event.... we have lost one link evolutionary scientists thought was squarely in the chain... the neanderthal.
Actually, that's still deserving of a great deal of skepticism. The evidence one way or the other just isn't very convincing. Proving or disproving actual descent is very difficult, and there's a good chance that the fossil record doesn't contain the needed information to disprove Neanderthal ancestry in modern Europeans. It might contain evidence supporting such ancestry, but that hasn't been found either. The fossils of apparent hybrids aren't convincing; they could have been "mules", they could be our ancestors, or their descendents could have died out. Our only DNA evidence is fragmentary mtDNA, and all we can conclude from that is that there's probably no purely maternal line leading from Neanderthals to modern humans. After 30,000 years, that's not too convincing.
All this should be called "conjecture", not "theory".
Something that keeps getting missed in the ID discussion is that scientists generally have no qualms about saying "We don't know." That's a very respectable scientific position (usually expressed as "Further research is needed"), and is one of the best counterpoints to the ID proposal.
Based on this score, why does ID get argued as if it's an entirely equal theory to evolution?
It doesn't, really. ID is often asserted, but that's different from an argument. What passes for argument in ID circles is talking about all the loose ends in evolutionary theory. That's pretty easy, because biologists do the same, and anyone can listen in to pick up the discussion points. But you never hear a scientific defense of ID, because you really can't express it in scientific language.
(You can talk about ID in engineering terms. I've gotten involved in a few such discussions. Engineer types can have a lot of fun with it. Consider what you can conclude about the Cosmic Designer by examining His handiwork. That Designer was one weird dude. Eventually the ID guys realize they're not being taken seriously, get very annoyed with what those geeks call "humor", and leave.;-)
But there really isn't anything resembling an argument (in the scientific sense) for/against ID. There's really nothing to be said about it except "I believe" or "It's not testable", and that's not an argument.
Myself, I like to ask ID supporters if they've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Usually they haven't, so I tell them with a straight face they it gives strong support to their theory, and they really should read it.
it was a press release, and therefore intended for the layman...
You mean for the American layman.
Most of the rest of the world wouldn't even know how to convert those funny American degrees to real degrees.
Using American-only units in online articles basically just shows your contempt for readers in the rest of the world, which mostly uses standard units. Granted, there are all sorts of quaint local units in use around the world. But most other people have the courtesy to not use them in an international setting.
One part of the explanation that I've run across is that over a significant temperature range (0-40 C) a 10-degree rise in temperature roughly triples the power output of a muscle fiber for a given consumption of fuel (ATP). So there's a tradeoff at work: If you can warm your muscles, you get a lot more power out of them. But it takes fuel to keep them warm.
Some animals handle this by warming their muscles just before using them. Moths and bees are examples: They "power down" their flight muscles when they're at rest. Before taking off, they shiver their flight muscles, working them in opposing pairs to convert fuel to heat. Some of the larger insects can't fly when their flight muscles are cold.
Other animals maintain a high body temperature. As an example of the tradeoff here, I've seen the observation that salamanders and mice are fairly similar in their lifestyles, but mice need roughly 10 times as much food as salamanders. This can be worthwhile, though. During cold times, salamanders go dormant. Sometimes a wastful, hot-blooded mouse comes along and eats a chilled salamander, because the salamander doesn't have the power to run away. Actually, it's more often voles, which are more carnivorous than mice, and they also eat lizards and snakes in the winter. But you get the idea. This is an example where the efficient approach isn't always the one that survives.
Anyway, fish have a special problem here: Water steals heat about 100,000 times faster than air. Gills can't be kept warm; they have to be at water temperature. You need fast blood exchange between gills and body. This seriously limits how warm your body can be.
But the power advantage is still there, and various kinds of fish have evolved a solution, at least 10 times in different families. Google for "rete mirabile" and "countercurrent exchange" to read all about it. In most "warm-blooded" fish, the gills are thermally isolated from the body, and blood to/from the gills goes through a heat exchange organ that transfers heat in outgoing blood to incoming blood. Still, heat loss in water is a difficult problem, and even the largest fish can't maintain a body temperature as high as ours.
Ducks and geese have a similar organ in the legs, to minimize heat loss through their feet in cold water. They also have a shunt that bypasses the exchanger and sends warm blood to the feet. This is because in flight, large birds have a serious problem with overheating. But a goose in flight can use its feet as cooling fins, allowing it to fly faster and at higher air temperatures.
Anyway, countercurrent heat/gas exchangers are well understood by engineers. It also seems that Ma Nature understands them, too, in some sense. She keeps "inventing" them in needy species and families.
(Actually, it's surprising that the ID people haven't glommed onto this one, especially considering the cute name that biologists have given the exchange organs. Maybe they are such poor engineers that they don't understand countercurrent exchangers. Or maybe even they can see how easy it should be for such a thing to evolve.;-)
Just because two pairs of animals are the same distance from each other in a taxonomic classificiation does not mean they are the same distance from each other in terms of relation.
Well, actually, it does mean that; this follows directly from how taxonomic classificiations are defined.
Of course, sometimes the classifications are wrong and don't match the actual relations. This has been found a lot lately, as DNA analyses are done. Then something gets reclassified to match its actual relations to other known species/families/orders/etc.
Eventually we might get it all right, and the official classification will exactly match the tree of relations. But I wouldn't hold my breath; it's gonna be a few more years.
Of course, in cladistic terminology mammals are a branch of the fish, so dogs - and humans - are indeed fish. But then, in that system, dolphins and whales are also fish.
The more you know about it, the more complicated it looks...
Engineers don't get any more say than anybody else what the problem or constraints should be.
No, but very often they can say a lot more about what the constraints are.
Thus, an engineer is expected to be familiar with the speed of light and consider it an inviolable speed limit. They are also likely to understand things like tensile strength of materials, and restrict themselves to structures that will withstand the expected stresses. Politicians, community action groups, and the like are not so constrained.
But if you don't care whether your "solutions" actually work, you don't need an engineer.
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is outstanding. It's even formatted perfectly: he gives you the "news summary" for about 10 minutes.... You just can't beat it.
Sure I can. A common rule of thumb is that most people can read 5-6 times faster than they speak. So in 2 minutes with news.google.com, you can scan just as many summaries. Or in 10 minutes you can scan 5-6 times as many summaries.
Then you can click on the "all N related >>" links that goes with the interesting-looking stories, and look through the list for a number of sites that are likely to report the story from different points of view. This way, you get much more varied information on a story than what's presented by your TV news sources, no matter where in the world you live.
And you run across lots of stories that never appear on any of your local TV channels. Or when a story finally breaks because it can't be ignored any more, you think "Huh? I read about that months ago. Why is it news now?"
Of course, if you read/., google's Sci/Tech is usually out of date. Right now, the top story there is "Two new moons discovered around Pluto". Yup, yesterday's/. news. This is probably true for most technical topics, though, since google uses some news-ranking algorithm, and it takes time for a story's significance to bubble it up to the top of their list.
Wait, let's look at the ranges for the muscle temps: 68-86 F. Seems a bit of an odd range, doesn't it?... But converting to Celsius, we find the temperature range is 20-30 C. Aha!
There's a long tradition behind this. My favorite example is the "normal" human body temperature, which here in the US is always given as 98.6 degrees. Why that ".6"? Does it mean that if your temperature is 98.7F you have a fever?
Actually, temperature in humans routinely varies by a degree or two without any harm. A temperature of 98.2F or 99.1F is not at all outside the normal range. Where the 98.6 comes from is that it's a translation of 37C, ignoring the "plus or minus a degree or so" qualification that should go with it.
But I saw an even funnier one just a few months ago. In a story about the melting of the permafrost in much of the arctic, I saw a mention of a rise of 5 degrees Celsius in one area. The writer then translated this for Americans into a rise of 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Anyone who doesn't understand how they made this mistake should stop reading a "news for nerds" site.;-)
The "Daily Show" isn't commenting on the news everyone finds annoying...the crime reports....they are poking fun at authority....something that the regular news cann't do in such a polarized country...they'd offend too many...
Well, if that's true, then how did The Daily Show come to be so successful, and recognized as one of the few informative news shows (no matter how often they deny being a news show)?
Maybe the news media should learn from their success. Instead of what they're doing now, maybe they should learn to poke fun at the authorities when those authorities deserve a bit of poking.
For example, if they would juxtapose a statement of some official with a contrary statement by the same official some time earlier, it would qualify as news, informative, and funny all at the same time.
But I suppose their "sponsors" wouldn't much like it.
[T]he vast majority of people who watch the evening news are in their 50s or older.
Funny, my wife and I, both "50 or older", cancelled our cable service last year, after getting DSL service via speakeasy. Among our arguments were that 15 minutes with news.google.com gave you more actual news than an entire evening of TV news, no matter the channel.
And for news analysis, TV can't even touch the quality or the sheer volume (and sometimes the insanity) of the zillions of blogs.
I wonder if we maybe need a "TV is dying" meme, to go with "BSD is dying" and the others.
I would remind you of Stephen Hawking's rejoinder to that famous quip by Einstein:
God not only plays dice with the universe; he throws them where they can't be seen.
This is quite germane to the topic at hand: The blackberries' BES server is proprietary software on top of a proprietary MS system. Lots of dice being thrown there every second, and you have no way of seeing a lot of them. The behavior probably isn't random, but as a mere user, that's the sort of behavior that you will see. And it could be doing all sorts of extra things with your messages, with no way for you to find out what's happening.
If the BBC has concerns about who sees the contents of their messages, they are utter fools for basing it on such software.
Funny thing is that they talk about solving their security problems by moving to a PocketPC system.
In 2002, the BBC banned any of its staff from using devices not based on a Microsoft operating system.. So they enforce use of MS to reduce risk? Errr...
Earlier this year a fellow in our local linux/unix users group told a funny story of how MS Word docs had just been banned in email where he worked.
It seems a VP had sent around a message that naturally everyone wanted to read, and it was a Word doc. The recipients on unix-like systems often didn't have anything that could decode it, and a lot of them just fed the message to the strings(1) command to extract the ascii text. To their amusement, they read not just his intended message, but a list of the salaries of most of the top people in the company.
As you might imagine, lots of those top people got rather upset over this. Investigation showed that the Word doc was a revision (of a revision...) of an earlier doc, and it contained lots of "deleted" text. The unix strings command doesn't understand Word's binary markup, so it didn't know to ignore stuff marked as deleted.
It probably didn't help that the MS experts' reaction was pretty much "Well, of course; didn't you know that text is deleted by just marking it as deleted?" The VPs didn't know any such thing, but they learned that day.
There was probably some discussion of banning "hacking" tools like the unix strings command (or unix itself), but that wasn't really feasible. So they faced the facts, and quite sensibly banned Word docs. That ban is probably ignored routinely by most of their employees, including the VPs, if it's like most organizations.
Anyway, I've noticed that nobody seems to be picking up on the obvious conclusion: You shouldn't be sending email in proprietary formats. You have no idea what's in them. If you have any concerns at all about secrecy anywhere in your organization, you'd be a fool to send email in any form other than plain text (and you'd encrypt that). Otherwise, you should assume that not only your intended message, but pieces of any other file that's ever been in your computer might well be included in what you send.
And if the email is bounced off a server machine, you should assume that bugs like this will occur, mixing your message with other messages or sending it (accidentally or otherwise) to recipients that you don't know about. If you don't understand this, you are simply clueless about how it all works.
Had WMDs/would get them as soon as allowed. Again, a distinction without a difference.
You actually believe it is okay to invade a country because of what you believe that their leader will do in the future?
Hey, that's an example of the Bush people learning from their mistakes. They had tried all sorts of justifications for a war, but their opponents kept proving that they were lies. Finally, they found a justification that can't be disproved. Nobody has yet disproved their claim that Saddam would have developed WMDs. And nobody ever will.
This should be considered a stoke of genius. After all, no matter how saintly you have been all your life, how could you ever prove that you'd never do anything wrong in the future?
This was the perfect justification for war, at least for the large number of Americans dumb enough to fall for it. Of course, people in the rest of the world understood it quite well, too. It is a perfect justification for attacking anyone at any time, regardless of their past behavior.
This goes a long way to explain the lack of, uh, cooperation that the US has gotten from all them furriners out there. (But we understand that they're all irrelevant anyway.)
I believe one of the founding principles of your society is that all men should be equal in the eyes of the law.
Well, if you read the US Constitution, you'll find that it approves of slavery. It does this indirectly, true, by giving a slave 3/5 of the vote of a free man. This clearly acknowledged the existence (and legality) of slavery, which wasn't abolished for another 80 years.
But you got the "all men should be equal" part right. The US Constitution gave no rights to women. That took more than a century, and another constitutional ammendment. When the US was formed, a wife wasn't legally even as well off as a slave; a slave owner had legal obligations to a slave that didn't apply to a wife.
This latter point has been mentioned by historians writing about Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's slave who was half-sister to his wife. When he was made ambassidor to France, she accompanied him to Paris. At the time any slave on French soil could claim sanctuary and become a free French citizen. She didn't do this. A conventional explanation is that, at the time, in both France and the US a female slave was better off legally than a wife or even a free, unmarried woman.
You really think that the Democrats are much more incorruptible than the Republicans,...?
A few months ago, Doonesbury had a good explanation of the difference. One of the characters (I don't recall which) remarked that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. Another character replied that when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong.
I keep getting reminded of this when I read quotes from the current administration.
The point is, though, that the seal is used to indicate official documents, etc.
It's especially ridiculous if we're forbidden to see images of the seal. How are we to know that a claimed seal is authentic?
Perhaps the Onion should follow Jon Stewart's practice, and start reminding people at every opportunity that they're comedians doing satire, not a real news service. Jon has got a lot of mileage out of his constant reminders to oh-so-serious critics that he'd a professional comedian. This shuts people up very quickly. If the folks in the White House take them seriously, the Onion folks should probably do similarly, and mention "comedy" and "satire" in every other sentence.
Then maybe Bush's people would get the idea that they're making fools of themselves.
Alternatively, perhaps the Onion should display two seals, one clearly labelled "This is the real Presidential Seal" and "This is our parody of the Presidential Seal". They could claim that, like wikipedia, they are doing this as an educational service, for the benefit of people who can't tell the real thing from the parody.
Maybe they could replace the eagle with a cute baby seal.
Me, I'm still trying to figure out how burning jet fuel can melt steel.
Heh. According to the New York firemen, that's not really what happened. According to their analysis, most of that jet fuel escaped from the WTC towers and formed the fireballs you see in some of the photos. On the way through, it started an office fire of the sort that the fire department people had been warning about for years. They had considered the place a firetrap, because their calculations were that an office fire that got out of control would have destroyed a WTC tower exactly as happened. So, according to their explanation, the jets were merely the "match" that started a fire that would likely have happened eventually by accident or arson. What melted the steel was the burning of the office furniture, paper, etc., and this didn't require jet fuel.
The New York firemen have been pushing for stricter fire-safety laws for decades. They've been trying to use the WTC attack as a way to get such laws. They don't seem to have had any great succcess, though.
You can read a lot on the topic by googling for "World Trade Center firetrap". There have been a good number of published articles on the topic.
I am sure that stuff like this went on all the time before 9/11.
Indeed; this was why the FBI was originally created, some 80 years ago. Google for "FBI Palmer Act" to read about it. The FBI has also doubled as a legal investigative entity, but that was something of a post-facto addition. Their original reason for being was primarily political, and "terrorism" (aka "anarchism" and "communism" at the time) was the excuse.
Of course, in 1920 this wasn't especially new. You might also look up "Alien and Sedition Act" for a 1798 precedent for the Palmer and Patriot Acts.
People don't seem to know much history around here...
...yet those drugs don't exist on the market for the sole reason there's not enough profit to be made.
A rational person would need evidence for this that goes beyond whatever anecdotal hogwash your ex-wife happened to feed you.
Heh. Yeah; it would be nice to get our hands on some actual numbers on this topic.
Something I've been noticing for a few years is interviews with (usually pseudonymous) drug-company reps who were explaining why the number of companies manufacturing vaccines has been dropping in recent years.
Very often, they state baldly that this is because vaccines aren't profitable enough. One I recall gave an actual number: He remarked that last year (that was probably 2003), world-wide sales of vaccines amounted to US$6 billion. He said that this might sound like a lot of money, but that's for all vaccines combined, and there are single pharmaceuticals whose sales are much larger than this.
The conventional explanation of what's going on is: A vaccine is typically a one-shot (or maybe two) treatment. Then the patient is cured, and there's no followup sale. OTOH, a drug that doesn't cure a disease, but merely reduces it to a chronic condition, results in ongoing sales. This is much more profitable, so that's where pharma companies prefer to invest.
It used to be that this was claimed by critics, as a calumny against the pharma industry. "They find it more profitable to keep us sick than to cure us." But now, company reps openly use this as what a profit-making company should do.
It would be interesting to read some hard figures on the subject. It would also be interesting to find drug-company reps who could talk about this openly, not as an "unnamed source". But that may not happen soon; the morality of the situation is probably obvious to even the most money-grubbing managers.
In any case, people are making this sort of argument openly. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you might run across them. I wouldn't be surprised to see this argument advanced here, since we do hear from a lot of free-market advocates here on/.
When someone picks beautiful colors, the photo becomes partly art.
The implication is that people wouldn't be interested in straight science.
True, but scientific photos are often colorized or frequency-shifted for valid scientific reasons. The human eye and the brain behind it are very good as spotting complex patterns in visual data. So mapping data into a 2-D image in the human visual range can be a fast way to spot the interesting features (that may then be analyzed in more detail by software).
Thus, the most informative weather-satellite pictures are usually the "false color" images that map infrared into our visual spectrum. A true-color picture just looks like grey cloud, but the frequency-shifted IR images can impart a lot of information very quickly.
Similarly, Saturn is mostly just an off-white spheroid to our eyes, due to high-altitude haze. But in other frequencies, the planet is as complex as Jupiter. So IR and UV photos are routinely shifted to make images that can be understood visually.
In the last week, we've seen some interesting new IR images of the Andromeda galaxy. Combined with earlier UV images (linked to by that page), we can easily see features that don't show up in visual-range images. Together, the infrared, visual, and ultraviolet images are much more interesting and informative than any one alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source is open source, no matter what platform. ... If you write something open souce, you know what, thats good enough for me.
Well, yes and no. One important issue that seems obscured by this way of framing the issue is the practical reason for wanting "open source": If you want reliable software, you need access to the source for all the software. Not just the app you're running, but all its libraries. And the system calls that it makes. And, ultimately, the hardware diagrams for the processor.
If you reframe it as a "software quality" issue, it becomes clearer. As a programmer, I often point out that, on a closed platform like Windows, I can't guarantee the behavior of any of my code. The reason is simple: My code needs to call lower-level libraries to do its job. If I can't access the code to those lower levels, I can't really know exactly what they do. Since my understanding of the lower levels is incomplete, there could be surprises in special cases that will make my code misbehave.
We saw an extreme case of this some years back, with the Pentium floating-point bug. In this case, the bug went all the way down to the hardware, where incorrect values were returned for a small number of inputs. Without access to code and circuit diagrams, you can't discover such things by any method short of exhaustive testing, which could take centuries.
Of course, making everything "open" is of somewhat theoretical value to most users. But it is of value. The "many eyes" argument explains why: By making the details visible, it is at least theoretically possible to do an exhaustive analysis; with a lot of people looking at the stuff, you greatly increase the chances that someone will spot problems or devise tests that expose problems.
But if anything under your code is closed, you don't even have the theoretical possibility of discovering problems until they bite you. Since your code is dependent on those lower levels, you can't make any guarantees about your code's behavior.
Security people have been saying something similar for years. If you want real security, you don't run anything unless you have the source. And you compiled it yourself, so you know that the binary corresponds to the source. And you compiled the compiler yourself (using a compiler from a different source), so you have confidence that the compiler doesn't contain backdoor code like Brian Kernigan described in his famous paper. And your hardware guys studied the processor's diagrams to look for possible gotchas (or designed-in bugs) in the machine language.
Unless all this stuff is open and available, you are utterly at the mercy of the lower-level stuff that you're calling.
In particular, since MS Windows isn't open for inspection, no software running on it can be reliable or secure. We have no way of knowing what tricks may be lurking down there in the OS or system libraries.
Reptiles and birds, for instance, are closely related having only seperated (relatively) recently, while the group that eventually formed the true mammals and monotremes seperated out much earlier. And then we all seperated from the fish long, long ago.
;-) After a few decades of discussion, the cladists have won overwhelmingly.
So you reject outright the entire concept of cladistics?
That's your right, of course. But it does rather put you outside the main branch of evolutionary biology these days. (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
According to the cladistics terminology, we didn't separate from the fish; we are [a branch of the] fish. Granted, we're funny-looking fish, since we're adapted to breathing air and living on land. Our fins are heavily modified to arms and legs, and our scales are skinny hairs. But if you look at the tree that includes all the things we call "fish", mammals are a part of that tree, so we're fish, too.
If you don't agree, then your definition of "fish" isn't a clade, so it's a bogus classification. It's ok as a term in common English, but it's not a biologically meaningful classification term.
So how much money in scientific research grants is out there working to disprove evolution?
;-). Just when did the theropods split off from the other dinosaurs? We don't really know, and some recent theropod fossils in South America have pushed the split back by several million years. Maybe the theropods are really a separate order, more closely related to mammals or reptiles than to the other dinosauria. Maybe Deinonychus was a closer relative to us than to Stegosaurus. That's a wild surmise, but it hasn't been disproved, so some biologists push it as a "devil's advocate" argument.
Two answers:
1. Lots
2. Not enough.
In a sense, most of the digging at paleontological sites, plus the laborious extraction and study of fossils, is done with the goal of finding evidence for or against various hypotheses. Granted, these are mostly about details. But this is because the general evolutionary history of the Earth has been quite well filled out. There's no longer any room for doubt about the general outline, so you have to concentrate on the finer aspects of it all.
Thus, one of Darwin's conjectures was that birds had a lot of similarities to dinosaurs, and there was a good chance that birds are modern dinosaurs. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize well. When he was alive, only a few Archaeopteryx fossils had been found, and scientists just said "That's interesting, but you need better evidence than that." And so things stood for a century.
Then, back in the 70's, a gang led by John Ostrom decided to attack the puzzle again. By some luck, China had stopped sending their intellectuals to re-education camps, and field research was again permitted. In the rocks of Liaoning, some very fine siltstones and limestones were found that contained fossils of several more primitive birds and some of their non-flying relatives. Some of those birdlike non-flying dinosaurs had feather-like coverings, as Ostrom predicted. The evidence built up, and now birds are officially classified as a suborder of the dinosaurs.
The evidence could just as well have shown that birds weren't dinosaurs at all. They could have been crocodilians, as some biologists argued. They could have been a completely separate order. The details still aren't complete, but it is clear now that birds are theropod dinosaurs. This idea was falsifiable, as were the other classifications. The others were debunked, and the theropod hypothesis was supported by the evidence.
But there's still a lot of work being done (and funded
Anyway, there is funding for this research, though few paleontologists get rich from their life work. If we really want to know about such things, we should find ways of sending more money their way. That's more likely to answer the questions than any debate with religious folks.
And really, how credible are they? They claim to have this private communication channel to the Intelligent Designer who set it all up. But they can't even tell us where to find the relevant fossils. Why don't they just ask the Designer? He must know, and He talks to them, but they aren't telling where the bodies are buried. Doesn't this failure sorta discredit them?
As Richard Dawkins says, half an eye is indeed better than no eye at all.
There's some interesting recent news on this front. Google for "brittle-star eye" and read a few of the articles. Anyone interested in evolutionary puzzles should know about this research.
It seems that we've found a new eye that's in the early stages of evolution. It's a compound eye in a class of critters (starfish) that otherwise don't have eyes, though many do have patches of light-sensitive cells that can't form an image.
But a small group of brittle stars have recently (past million years or so) modified their silica-based armor so that it includes tiny compound lenses that focus light on a cluster of light-sensitive cells. The brittle stars have patches of these lenses, and they have been shown to form images. The resolution isn't great. They probably can't even resolve things 1 degree apart. So the sun and moon are each less than one pixel. But it's a good start, and in a few million more years, their descendents will probably have much better eyes, several per arm.
To date there's little evidence as to how, precisely, speciation happens.
... we have lost one link evolutionary scientists thought was squarely in the chain... the neanderthal.
If you change the wording slightly, you can get something that is generally understood among biologists: There's much evidence that speciation doesn't happen precisely at some instance in time; rather it's a gradual process with a messy transition. A speciation event can be long by human standards, though fast by geological standards ("punctuated equilibrium").
We have lots of examples. Thus, cattle breeders recently produced a fertile cross between domestic cattle and the American bison ("beefalo"). Previous crosses had been sterile, and they were considered separate species. Now they're considered a speciation event that's nearly but not quite complete.
The familiar "mule", i.e. a horse x donkey cross, sometimes produces fertile mules. They're very rare, and their offspring are usually sterile. So this is another speciation event that's almost complete.
The domestic dog can interbreed with grey wolves and jackals, but those wolves and jackals can't interbreed. Well, they can, of course, but the offspring aren't fertile ("mules"). This is considered a 3-way species split happening right now, but not complete. 3-way splits are probably rare, but we seem to have one living in our homes.
And on and on. There are many cases where what were thought to be two species turn out to be somewhat interfertile. They almost always turn out to be very differently adapted, and the hybrids are usually not very successful in either of the parents' habitats. The conclusion is obvious: We're seeing a speciation event.
Actually, that's still deserving of a great deal of skepticism. The evidence one way or the other just isn't very convincing. Proving or disproving actual descent is very difficult, and there's a good chance that the fossil record doesn't contain the needed information to disprove Neanderthal ancestry in modern Europeans. It might contain evidence supporting such ancestry, but that hasn't been found either. The fossils of apparent hybrids aren't convincing; they could have been "mules", they could be our ancestors, or their descendents could have died out. Our only DNA evidence is fragmentary mtDNA, and all we can conclude from that is that there's probably no purely maternal line leading from Neanderthals to modern humans. After 30,000 years, that's not too convincing.
All this should be called "conjecture", not "theory".
Something that keeps getting missed in the ID discussion is that scientists generally have no qualms about saying "We don't know." That's a very respectable scientific position (usually expressed as "Further research is needed"), and is one of the best counterpoints to the ID proposal.
Based on this score, why does ID get argued as if it's an entirely equal theory to evolution?
;-)
It doesn't, really. ID is often asserted, but that's different from an argument. What passes for argument in ID circles is talking about all the loose ends in evolutionary theory. That's pretty easy, because biologists do the same, and anyone can listen in to pick up the discussion points. But you never hear a scientific defense of ID, because you really can't express it in scientific language.
(You can talk about ID in engineering terms. I've gotten involved in a few such discussions. Engineer types can have a lot of fun with it. Consider what you can conclude about the Cosmic Designer by examining His handiwork. That Designer was one weird dude. Eventually the ID guys realize they're not being taken seriously, get very annoyed with what those geeks call "humor", and leave.
But there really isn't anything resembling an argument (in the scientific sense) for/against ID. There's really nothing to be said about it except "I believe" or "It's not testable", and that's not an argument.
Myself, I like to ask ID supporters if they've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Usually they haven't, so I tell them with a straight face they it gives strong support to their theory, and they really should read it.
it was a press release, and therefore intended for the layman...
You mean for the American layman.
Most of the rest of the world wouldn't even know how to convert those funny American degrees to real degrees.
Using American-only units in online articles basically just shows your contempt for readers in the rest of the world, which mostly uses standard units. Granted, there are all sorts of quaint local units in use around the world. But most other people have the courtesy to not use them in an international setting.
This subject isn't exactly new to biologists.
;-)
One part of the explanation that I've run across is that over a significant temperature range (0-40 C) a 10-degree rise in temperature roughly triples the power output of a muscle fiber for a given consumption of fuel (ATP). So there's a tradeoff at work: If you can warm your muscles, you get a lot more power out of them. But it takes fuel to keep them warm.
Some animals handle this by warming their muscles just before using them. Moths and bees are examples: They "power down" their flight muscles when they're at rest. Before taking off, they shiver their flight muscles, working them in opposing pairs to convert fuel to heat. Some of the larger insects can't fly when their flight muscles are cold.
Other animals maintain a high body temperature. As an example of the tradeoff here, I've seen the observation that salamanders and mice are fairly similar in their lifestyles, but mice need roughly 10 times as much food as salamanders. This can be worthwhile, though. During cold times, salamanders go dormant. Sometimes a wastful, hot-blooded mouse comes along and eats a chilled salamander, because the salamander doesn't have the power to run away. Actually, it's more often voles, which are more carnivorous than mice, and they also eat lizards and snakes in the winter. But you get the idea. This is an example where the efficient approach isn't always the one that survives.
Anyway, fish have a special problem here: Water steals heat about 100,000 times faster than air. Gills can't be kept warm; they have to be at water temperature. You need fast blood exchange between gills and body. This seriously limits how warm your body can be.
But the power advantage is still there, and various kinds of fish have evolved a solution, at least 10 times in different families. Google for "rete mirabile" and "countercurrent exchange" to read all about it. In most "warm-blooded" fish, the gills are thermally isolated from the body, and blood to/from the gills goes through a heat exchange organ that transfers heat in outgoing blood to incoming blood. Still, heat loss in water is a difficult problem, and even the largest fish can't maintain a body temperature as high as ours.
Ducks and geese have a similar organ in the legs, to minimize heat loss through their feet in cold water. They also have a shunt that bypasses the exchanger and sends warm blood to the feet. This is because in flight, large birds have a serious problem with overheating. But a goose in flight can use its feet as cooling fins, allowing it to fly faster and at higher air temperatures.
Anyway, countercurrent heat/gas exchangers are well understood by engineers. It also seems that Ma Nature understands them, too, in some sense. She keeps "inventing" them in needy species and families.
(Actually, it's surprising that the ID people haven't glommed onto this one, especially considering the cute name that biologists have given the exchange organs. Maybe they are such poor engineers that they don't understand countercurrent exchangers. Or maybe even they can see how easy it should be for such a thing to evolve.
Just because two pairs of animals are the same distance from each other in a taxonomic classificiation does not mean they are the same distance from each other in terms of relation.
Well, actually, it does mean that; this follows directly from how taxonomic classificiations are defined.
Of course, sometimes the classifications are wrong and don't match the actual relations. This has been found a lot lately, as DNA analyses are done. Then something gets reclassified to match its actual relations to other known species/families/orders/etc.
Eventually we might get it all right, and the official classification will exactly match the tree of relations. But I wouldn't hold my breath; it's gonna be a few more years.
So dogs are fish?
...
Though I have seen dogfish, which are sharks.
Of course, in cladistic terminology mammals are a branch of the fish, so dogs - and humans - are indeed fish. But then, in that system, dolphins and whales are also fish.
The more you know about it, the more complicated it looks
Engineers don't get any more say than anybody else what the problem or constraints should be.
No, but very often they can say a lot more about what the constraints are.
Thus, an engineer is expected to be familiar with the speed of light and consider it an inviolable speed limit. They are also likely to understand things like tensile strength of materials, and restrict themselves to structures that will withstand the expected stresses. Politicians, community action groups, and the like are not so constrained.
But if you don't care whether your "solutions" actually work, you don't need an engineer.
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is outstanding. It's even formatted perfectly: he gives you the "news summary" for about 10 minutes. ... You just can't beat it.
/., google's Sci/Tech is usually out of date. Right now, the top story there is "Two new moons discovered around Pluto". Yup, yesterday's /. news. This is probably true for most technical topics, though, since google uses some news-ranking algorithm, and it takes time for a story's significance to bubble it up to the top of their list.
Sure I can. A common rule of thumb is that most people can read 5-6 times faster than they speak. So in 2 minutes with news.google.com, you can scan just as many summaries. Or in 10 minutes you can scan 5-6 times as many summaries.
Then you can click on the "all N related >>" links that goes with the interesting-looking stories, and look through the list for a number of sites that are likely to report the story from different points of view. This way, you get much more varied information on a story than what's presented by your TV news sources, no matter where in the world you live.
And you run across lots of stories that never appear on any of your local TV channels. Or when a story finally breaks because it can't be ignored any more, you think "Huh? I read about that months ago. Why is it news now?"
Of course, if you read
Wait, let's look at the ranges for the muscle temps: 68-86 F. Seems a bit of an odd range, doesn't it? ... But converting to Celsius, we find the temperature range is 20-30 C. Aha!
;-)
There's a long tradition behind this. My favorite example is the "normal" human body temperature, which here in the US is always given as 98.6 degrees. Why that ".6"? Does it mean that if your temperature is 98.7F you have a fever?
Actually, temperature in humans routinely varies by a degree or two without any harm. A temperature of 98.2F or 99.1F is not at all outside the normal range. Where the 98.6 comes from is that it's a translation of 37C, ignoring the "plus or minus a degree or so" qualification that should go with it.
But I saw an even funnier one just a few months ago. In a story about the melting of the permafrost in much of the arctic, I saw a mention of a rise of 5 degrees Celsius in one area. The writer then translated this for Americans into a rise of 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Anyone who doesn't understand how they made this mistake should stop reading a "news for nerds" site.
The "Daily Show" isn't commenting on the news everyone finds annoying...the crime reports....they are poking fun at authority....something that the regular news cann't do in such a polarized country...they'd offend too many...
Well, if that's true, then how did The Daily Show come to be so successful, and recognized as one of the few informative news shows (no matter how often they deny being a news show)?
Maybe the news media should learn from their success. Instead of what they're doing now, maybe they should learn to poke fun at the authorities when those authorities deserve a bit of poking.
For example, if they would juxtapose a statement of some official with a contrary statement by the same official some time earlier, it would qualify as news, informative, and funny all at the same time.
But I suppose their "sponsors" wouldn't much like it.
[T]he vast majority of people who watch the evening news are in their 50s or older.
Funny, my wife and I, both "50 or older", cancelled our cable service last year, after getting DSL service via speakeasy. Among our arguments were that 15 minutes with news.google.com gave you more actual news than an entire evening of TV news, no matter the channel.
And for news analysis, TV can't even touch the quality or the sheer volume (and sometimes the insanity) of the zillions of blogs.
I wonder if we maybe need a "TV is dying" meme, to go with "BSD is dying" and the others.
"God does not play dice with the universe."
...
I would remind you of Stephen Hawking's rejoinder to that famous quip by Einstein:
God not only plays dice with the universe; he throws them where they can't be seen.
This is quite germane to the topic at hand: The blackberries' BES server is proprietary software on top of a proprietary MS system. Lots of dice being thrown there every second, and you have no way of seeing a lot of them. The behavior probably isn't random, but as a mere user, that's the sort of behavior that you will see. And it could be doing all sorts of extra things with your messages, with no way for you to find out what's happening.
If the BBC has concerns about who sees the contents of their messages, they are utter fools for basing it on such software.
Funny thing is that they talk about solving their security problems by moving to a PocketPC system.
Utterly clueless
In 2002, the BBC banned any of its staff from using devices not based on a Microsoft operating system.. So they enforce use of MS to reduce risk? Errr...
...) of an earlier doc, and it contained lots of "deleted" text. The unix strings command doesn't understand Word's binary markup, so it didn't know to ignore stuff marked as deleted.
Earlier this year a fellow in our local linux/unix users group told a funny story of how MS Word docs had just been banned in email where he worked.
It seems a VP had sent around a message that naturally everyone wanted to read, and it was a Word doc. The recipients on unix-like systems often didn't have anything that could decode it, and a lot of them just fed the message to the strings(1) command to extract the ascii text. To their amusement, they read not just his intended message, but a list of the salaries of most of the top people in the company.
As you might imagine, lots of those top people got rather upset over this. Investigation showed that the Word doc was a revision (of a revision
It probably didn't help that the MS experts' reaction was pretty much "Well, of course; didn't you know that text is deleted by just marking it as deleted?" The VPs didn't know any such thing, but they learned that day.
There was probably some discussion of banning "hacking" tools like the unix strings command (or unix itself), but that wasn't really feasible. So they faced the facts, and quite sensibly banned Word docs. That ban is probably ignored routinely by most of their employees, including the VPs, if it's like most organizations.
Anyway, I've noticed that nobody seems to be picking up on the obvious conclusion: You shouldn't be sending email in proprietary formats. You have no idea what's in them. If you have any concerns at all about secrecy anywhere in your organization, you'd be a fool to send email in any form other than plain text (and you'd encrypt that). Otherwise, you should assume that not only your intended message, but pieces of any other file that's ever been in your computer might well be included in what you send.
And if the email is bounced off a server machine, you should assume that bugs like this will occur, mixing your message with other messages or sending it (accidentally or otherwise) to recipients that you don't know about. If you don't understand this, you are simply clueless about how it all works.
Hey, that's an example of the Bush people learning from their mistakes. They had tried all sorts of justifications for a war, but their opponents kept proving that they were lies. Finally, they found a justification that can't be disproved. Nobody has yet disproved their claim that Saddam would have developed WMDs. And nobody ever will.
This should be considered a stoke of genius. After all, no matter how saintly you have been all your life, how could you ever prove that you'd never do anything wrong in the future?
This was the perfect justification for war, at least for the large number of Americans dumb enough to fall for it. Of course, people in the rest of the world understood it quite well, too. It is a perfect justification for attacking anyone at any time, regardless of their past behavior.
This goes a long way to explain the lack of, uh, cooperation that the US has gotten from all them furriners out there. (But we understand that they're all irrelevant anyway.)
I believe one of the founding principles of your society is that all men should be equal in the eyes of the law.
Well, if you read the US Constitution, you'll find that it approves of slavery. It does this indirectly, true, by giving a slave 3/5 of the vote of a free man. This clearly acknowledged the existence (and legality) of slavery, which wasn't abolished for another 80 years.
But you got the "all men should be equal" part right. The US Constitution gave no rights to women. That took more than a century, and another constitutional ammendment. When the US was formed, a wife wasn't legally even as well off as a slave; a slave owner had legal obligations to a slave that didn't apply to a wife.
This latter point has been mentioned by historians writing about Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's slave who was half-sister to his wife. When he was made ambassidor to France, she accompanied him to Paris. At the time any slave on French soil could claim sanctuary and become a free French citizen. She didn't do this. A conventional explanation is that, at the time, in both France and the US a female slave was better off legally than a wife or even a free, unmarried woman.
You really think that the Democrats are much more incorruptible than the Republicans, ...?
A few months ago, Doonesbury had a good explanation of the difference. One of the characters (I don't recall which) remarked that the Democrats and Republicans are equally corrupt. Another character replied that when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong.
I keep getting reminded of this when I read quotes from the current administration.
The point is, though, that the seal is used to indicate official documents, etc.
It's especially ridiculous if we're forbidden to see images of the seal. How are we to know that a claimed seal is authentic?
Perhaps the Onion should follow Jon Stewart's practice, and start reminding people at every opportunity that they're comedians doing satire, not a real news service. Jon has got a lot of mileage out of his constant reminders to oh-so-serious critics that he'd a professional comedian. This shuts people up very quickly. If the folks in the White House take them seriously, the Onion folks should probably do similarly, and mention "comedy" and "satire" in every other sentence.
Then maybe Bush's people would get the idea that they're making fools of themselves.
Alternatively, perhaps the Onion should display two seals, one clearly labelled "This is the real Presidential Seal" and "This is our parody of the Presidential Seal". They could claim that, like wikipedia, they are doing this as an educational service, for the benefit of people who can't tell the real thing from the parody.
Maybe they could replace the eagle with a cute baby seal.
Me, I'm still trying to figure out how burning jet fuel can melt steel.
Heh. According to the New York firemen, that's not really what happened. According to their analysis, most of that jet fuel escaped from the WTC towers and formed the fireballs you see in some of the photos. On the way through, it started an office fire of the sort that the fire department people had been warning about for years. They had considered the place a firetrap, because their calculations were that an office fire that got out of control would have destroyed a WTC tower exactly as happened. So, according to their explanation, the jets were merely the "match" that started a fire that would likely have happened eventually by accident or arson. What melted the steel was the burning of the office furniture, paper, etc., and this didn't require jet fuel.
The New York firemen have been pushing for stricter fire-safety laws for decades. They've been trying to use the WTC attack as a way to get such laws. They don't seem to have had any great succcess, though.
You can read a lot on the topic by googling for "World Trade Center firetrap". There have been a good number of published articles on the topic.
I am sure that stuff like this went on all the time before 9/11.
...
Indeed; this was why the FBI was originally created, some 80 years ago. Google for "FBI Palmer Act" to read about it. The FBI has also doubled as a legal investigative entity, but that was something of a post-facto addition. Their original reason for being was primarily political, and "terrorism" (aka "anarchism" and "communism" at the time) was the excuse.
Of course, in 1920 this wasn't especially new. You might also look up "Alien and Sedition Act" for a 1798 precedent for the Palmer and Patriot Acts.
People don't seem to know much history around here
...yet those drugs don't exist on the market for the sole reason there's not enough profit to be made.
/.
A rational person would need evidence for this that goes beyond whatever anecdotal hogwash your ex-wife happened to feed you.
Heh. Yeah; it would be nice to get our hands on some actual numbers on this topic.
Something I've been noticing for a few years is interviews with (usually pseudonymous) drug-company reps who were explaining why the number of companies manufacturing vaccines has been dropping in recent years.
Very often, they state baldly that this is because vaccines aren't profitable enough. One I recall gave an actual number: He remarked that last year (that was probably 2003), world-wide sales of vaccines amounted to US$6 billion. He said that this might sound like a lot of money, but that's for all vaccines combined, and there are single pharmaceuticals whose sales are much larger than this.
The conventional explanation of what's going on is: A vaccine is typically a one-shot (or maybe two) treatment. Then the patient is cured, and there's no followup sale. OTOH, a drug that doesn't cure a disease, but merely reduces it to a chronic condition, results in ongoing sales. This is much more profitable, so that's where pharma companies prefer to invest.
It used to be that this was claimed by critics, as a calumny against the pharma industry. "They find it more profitable to keep us sick than to cure us." But now, company reps openly use this as what a profit-making company should do.
It would be interesting to read some hard figures on the subject. It would also be interesting to find drug-company reps who could talk about this openly, not as an "unnamed source". But that may not happen soon; the morality of the situation is probably obvious to even the most money-grubbing managers.
In any case, people are making this sort of argument openly. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you might run across them. I wouldn't be surprised to see this argument advanced here, since we do hear from a lot of free-market advocates here on
When someone picks beautiful colors, the photo becomes partly art.
The implication is that people wouldn't be interested in straight science.
True, but scientific photos are often colorized or frequency-shifted for valid scientific reasons. The human eye and the brain behind it are very good as spotting complex patterns in visual data. So mapping data into a 2-D image in the human visual range can be a fast way to spot the interesting features (that may then be analyzed in more detail by software).
Thus, the most informative weather-satellite pictures are usually the "false color" images that map infrared into our visual spectrum. A true-color picture just looks like grey cloud, but the frequency-shifted IR images can impart a lot of information very quickly.
Similarly, Saturn is mostly just an off-white spheroid to our eyes, due to high-altitude haze. But in other frequencies, the planet is as complex as Jupiter. So IR and UV photos are routinely shifted to make images that can be understood visually.
In the last week, we've seen some interesting new IR images of the Andromeda galaxy. Combined with earlier UV images (linked to by that page), we can easily see features that don't show up in visual-range images. Together, the infrared, visual, and ultraviolet images are much more interesting and informative than any one alone.