It was so bad that Nintendo called the console an "Entertainment System" and marketed a Robot with it to keep people from thinking of it as Another Video Game Console(TM).
Yeah.. What was up with that robot?
As a robot-crazed geek kid, I was hugely impressed by the Nintendo robot in their TV ads back in the 80's. I never owned one though, and never met anyone who did. Did anyone here have one? Was there more than one game for it? And how much fun was it? Or, as my adult mind tells me.. how badly did it suck?
Well, obviously Google will now be paying teachers to have future generations of school children memorize and recite by heart the complete list of contributing programmers!
We cannot allow the names of these brave souls who laboured so hard for several months to be lost in the sands of time. Their memory shall be passed on from generation to generation for time immortal.
How do we know SCO won't turn around and claim that the code in MySQL is tainted??? This is EXACTLY what they did to IBM.
Well one reason would be that SCO doesn't have any database software of their own.
What you should really be worried about then is GCC and the Linux kernel, which SCO has contributed to as well.
Re:how about we STOP pushing our culture, mkay?
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 2, Insightful
they're playing rock music, which is perhaps the single most pervasive and identifiable aspect of american culture.
Bullshit. You're living in the past.
Saying that rock music is uniquely American is like saying that theatre is uniquely Greek. Just because it originated in the US doesn't make it American forever. Outside the US, rock music hasn't been regarded as a American phenomenon since the 50's. The "British Invasion" killed any pretenses of that.
Rammstein is a particularily bad example, since they have none of those original American (Read: blues, country, Elvis) elements in them, as well. Their main source of influence was Laibach, who in turn had Kraftwerk as a main source of influence.
Kraftwerk owes absolutely nothing to Rock music, and Rammstein very little.
The Swedish Data Inspection Board gave the APB a green-light to collect IP adresses.
It's not quite a big deal, since the anti-pirate folks already can do that legally in a number of countries (such as the US) which don't have strict data-protection laws.
And the ISPs are not only doing the right thing but probably the only legal thing, since it'd quite likely violate the very same data-protection laws if they gave information about their customers to a private third party without permission from either the government or their customers.
The "Anti-Pirate Bureau" isn't a government agency after all. And while the USA seems to have happily handed over law-enforcement to the copyright holders, Europe has not. So far.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
Red Hat is getting OOo to play with the GNU compiler for java (gcj). They shipped OOo using gcj with Fedora Core 4, and according to the blog of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.
Keep your arguments straight! First you're saying Qt is shit because they require copyright assignment. Although so does the FSF on certain projects.
So now you're saying that it's 'ethically dubious' for free software programmers to contribute code to a project if there's a properitary version of it? That'd make it 'ethically dubious' to contribute anything to a BSD-licensed project then.
That's an incredibly narrow-minded ethic you've got there. Not even RMS would agree with that.
BTW, you'll get that same response from projects like GCC too. They require copyright assignment on all code, and they won't look at a (non-trivial) patch either.
If "[s]omething that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" then why are we only allowed to judge one encyclopedia--Wikipedia--on that basis?
Nobody said that though.
You then proceed to complain that EB doesn't have articles on some of your favorite subjects. Well, that's too bad. But EB doesn't have articles on other marginal things either. And free software is indeed a marginal (but growing) phenomenon. Nobody said EB was better at current affairs anyway.
So that leaves the "open source" article. I haven't read it since I don't have an EB subscription, but I do agree the use of 'public domain' there seems ill-advised but OTOH, let's remember that this is not a legal document, and it'd be equally ill-advised to infer that the strict legal sense was intended.
(There is, IMO, a geek tendency to be anal-retentive about terms and not distinguish between common and specific usage. Like the logician who answers "Yes." to the question "Are you coming along, or staying here?")
Which brings me to the next problematic criticism of these encyclopedias: drawing conclusions by weighing too small a sample.
Agreed. So why do you waste your time pointing out single articles in EB as a counter-criticism, then?
And you don't really adress the criticism raised. The criterion "something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" sounds highly reasonable to me.
People got to a reference work to find information. They can't know beforehand if that information is going to be any good or not and you can't expect them to determine the quality themselves. If they knew the subject, they wouldn't be needing to look it up in the first place.
This does invalidate the pro-Wikipedia argument raised in the article. ("if it's broken, you can fix it."). The reader can't be expected to know the article is 'broken' without first consulting other sources of information. And if you need to go elsewhere for information, what's the point of going to Wikipedia in the first place?
I don't see why you don't view this critique as having any backing?
So, how is the user supposed to know if the information is any good? Quality. If I look something up in E.B., I know that I can expect a certain level of quality. It won't be perfect, needless to say, but I know that if it's there it will conform to a certain level of quality. And I do feel that the weakest entry in the E.B. and other traditional encyclopedias are far stronger than the weakest in Wikipedia. It's my general impression. And I edit Wikipedia regularily and have loved reading encyclopedias since I was a kid, so its hardly based on a few single entries.
The criticisms raised against Wikipedia in the article are general problems, in my experience and not confined merely to the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda articles. As the article and others in this thread have pointed out, Wikipedia is prone to 'factoid glut'. Contributors are want to include information like "X liked to wear blue hats." and will add that information without any regard for whether its warranted within the scope of the article, or whether it can be worked into the existing text.
Knowing what not to include is just as important as what to include. Anyone having done any amount of journalistic or academic writing knows that, but Wikipedia suffers dearly in this respect. Contributors want their contribution in and since there is no single authority deciding over scope, argument on this matter tends to default to be inclusive.
But MySQL AB does not have to join hands with the company that (with msft's help) is dedicated to destroying F/OSS. Do you remember Scox's CEO writing the US congress and declaring that the GPL was unconstitutional?
SCO payed MySQL to support and maintain an SCO port of their software. If SCO is paying to have F/OSS software developed, then that is not destroying F/OSS.
Yes, their letter to those congressman was anti-F/OSS. But MySQL had nothing to do with that.
On the other hand, SCO has in-house developers maintaining the SCO port of GCC, code which contributed back to main and assigned to the FSF. So, by the same rationale, the Free Software Foundation itself has 'joined hands' with this company destroying F/OSS.
1) Use monopoly power to crush and stifle any competition 2) PROFIT!! 3) Pay off government to drop anti-trust charges 4) Pay off former competitors to drop anti-trust charges 5) EVEN MORE PROFIT!!
While I haven't been a subscriber since circa 1993, they certainly had plenty of ads when I read them. Mostly a few pages in the front and in the back, like on the inside covers and between the table of contents and the first article.
They were thankfully completely missing from the actual content pages, so I guess that makes them relatively ad-free.
Seen the article on consciousness? Especially the "physical approaches" section?
Not only is it full of fringe (read:loony) theories such as "quantum consciousness", but the view of the scientific majority isn't even represented. Namely, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the networks of cells in the brain.
(But don't take my word, see "Consciousness, reduction, and emergence - Some remarks" by Murray Gell-Mann, or Max Tegmark's debunking of the entire quantum consciousness thing. Both these guys are fairly prominent physicists.)
-- but to me chenistry is about general principles of chemical reactions, just like physics is about general principles of matter and energy.
Well, that's your problem then.. it's a narrow view. By that rationale, you would have very very few Nobel prize winners in either Physics or Chemistry.
E.g. this year's Physics prize doesn't teach us anything new about the "general principles". It's all explainable in terms of Quantum Mechanics and Maxwell's equations. That doesn't mean it's not physics.
Of course, things like proteins certainly need to obey physical and chemical laws, but discoveries of how proteins work, as in last year's chemistry nobel, while certainly of great importance, don't really tell us any new basic facts about chemistry itself.
Neither does this prize. All of chemistry is explainable within the framework of quantum mechanics. It's like complaining that the Physics prize isn't teaching us anything new about QM (or newtonian mechanics for that matter).
Besides which, that's bull. Catalysis is catalysis and it pertains to perhaps the most central part of chemistry there is, namely "How do chemical reactions occur". Why would it be less interesting to chemistry just because an enzyme is doing the catalysis?
In fact, it's just the other way around! Enzyme catalysis is an area which is vastly more complex and vastly less understood than traditional catalysts. Not to mention there is significant cross-over between the areas of metalloorganic catalysts (such as this prize) and enzyme catalysis. Try googling for "biomimetic catalyst".
Ironic, isn't it, that so many Nobel winners are Americans?
Surely you're joking?
The USA has about 200 (give or take) laureates (counted as ones at US universities). And a population of 295 million. 0.67 per million.
Switzerland: 28 and 7.5 million population : 3.7 per million. Sweden: 29 and 9 million. 3.2 per million. Norway: 11 and 4.5 million. 2.4 per million. Austria: 21 and 8 million. 2.6 per million. Denmark: 13 and 5.5 million. 2.3 per million. Germany: 89 and 82 million 1.1 per million. Netherlands: 16 and 16. One in a million. France: 49 and 60 million. 0.8 per million. Belgium: 8 and 10.5 million. 0.76 per million. Italy: 19 and 58 million. 0.3 per million. Japan: 12 and 127 million. 0.1 per million.
Call it bias or whatever you want. But the US certainly isn't overrepresented. All figures from doing a simple laureate-search, so they're all approximate, and refer to country of residence, not birth.
What the heck does it matter who it goes to? It's the discovery that counts, not the academic background of the person who made it.
Or don't you consider biochem to be part of chemistry? Because that's a pretty narrow-minded view of chemistry, especially considering how it's the area where the biggest things are happening.
Ah, yeah, you got me there. It's true. Although, on the other hand, the pronounciation is also somewhat irregular. - like how most prounounce "kex" with a hard 'k', but some (Göteborgare) prounounce it with a soft one.
But I guess it's one of the deficiencies of Swedish spelling that you can't mark hard vs. soft vowels, and thus there's no way to distinguish "kör" (choir) and "kör" (driving). Another one is the lack of information about intonation (accents or such) and no way to distingush "banan" (banana) and "banan" (the track).
You're countering an exaggerated and wrong post with a just as exaggerated opposite.
English is just as phonetic as all those others -- mainly because its spellings and pronunciations are derived from all those others.
That's the point. Different languages have different proununciations and spellings. And they have different amount of consistency between spelling and pronunciation. Is that hard to understand?
Russian is an excellent example of a language where spelling and pronunciation are very consistent. This is due to the the Russian-cyrillic alphabet being constructed specifically for the russian language. So common russian phonemes such as "zh" and "tch" have their own letters - and those letters represent that sound and only that sound. Moreover, since foreign words need to be translitterated into cyrillic, they do so with the letters closest to the way they prounounce it. E.g. the English name "Johnny" becomes "Dzhonni". It would be inconsistent to write it as "Johnny" because the russian "j" sound is not the same as the English one.
English, on the other hand, and as you point out yourself, loves to borrow words from foreign languages and keep the spelling. They don't keep the pronunciation though. No language does that. You prounounce the word with the closest approximation with the phonemes of your own language. (I.e. what a foreign accent is).
you need to treat each word with the rules of the language it came from for it to make sense.
English doesn't do that though. For instance, the word "queue" or "cue" are prounounced like the letter "q". They are not prounounced "keuh" (which would be an english approximation of the french prounciation). By comparison the same word was borrowed into Swedish, the spelling changed to "kö". The pronounciation is much closer to the original.
The grandparent poster is wrong in saying english is the only inconsistent language here. All languages have inconsistency. But English is certainly widely known as one of the least, if not the least consistent of all. This is reflected in how easily foreigners and english-speakers themselves pick up the proununcation of new words. It's also reflected in how many spelling errors people make on average.
Now, give me a someone learning Swedish and show them the word "kö" and someone learning English and show them the word "queue". Which one do you think will get the proununcation correct? I'd wager quite a lot on the former.
Well, for one, a complexs molecule can be more than simple carbon chains, as one "tool" said so in a post below this one.
Okay! So what you're saying is that: "big, complex molecules can be made of other things than just carbon chains"? Well that's not news to anyone who knows about silicone rubber, for instance.
So who are these people you speak of saying otherwise? Who are you debating on this?
BTW, you shouldn't use the term "complex molecule". In chemistry a "complex" is something different than a molecule.
The Second law semantically conradicts itself. If energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred/transformed thru heat (which is how we measure all things energy-wise, by wattage) then the entire universe, as far as we can tell, is a perpetual motion machine
No. The universe as a whole isn't gaining or losing any energy. It would only be a perpetual motion machine if it was gaining energy.
How about learning some science before criticizing it?
Therefore, to expect the life on another planet may be complex-molecule-based instead of simple-carbon-based is feasible.
"Complex-molecule-based" versus "simple-carbon-based" ?? Did you make up those terms yourself? Could you please define them? And perhaps elaborate on how this is supposed to follow from the statement "acetylene is organic"?
Because the statement "acetylene is organic" doesn't mean anything in particular. It's saying that the acetylene molecule has a carbon-carbon bond in it.
But the other people saying 'no' are (as far as I can tell thru HISTORY) full of horse-hockey.
Who is saying 'no' to what?
Tell me exactly what in the world you know about organic compounds on another planet that will/will not produce life, please?
Since this is the first semi-intelligible statement in your post, I'll try and answer it:
1) Most scientists believe that life in all its forms, terrestrial or otherwise, follows the laws of chemistry. All life we know of appears to do so. In the same way that we also believe that all the universe follows the same laws of physics. We have no reason to believe otherwise. (and the chemistry follows from the physics, anyway.)
2) We know that certain conditions are required to sustain life regardless of its form. For instance, life requires energy. This follows from the laws of thermodynamics being one of those things believed to be universal in 1).
3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.
Yes, it's flamebait/trollbait. How about you editors/moderators tell me your experience on Titan, [..]
No, it's just moronic. How about you tell me about all those atoms you've seen yourself? Still believe they exist though, don't you?
Let the organic/biological scientists determine this, not the uneducated populace.
David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".
Even I don't dare step into this conversation, except as far as I have made my agrument.
What if there is a big rock that serves as a catalyst for this conversion of acetylene and hydrogen to methane.
Actually, it's not a 'what if'. Platinum powder will catalyze that reaction just fine. Well, at least as far as ethane. (not sure about the final step: ethane + H2 --> 2 methane)
Would we think of that as a life form?
Last I checked, nobody was saying platinum was alive.:) Seriously though, "catalyzing a chemical reaction" is a terrible definition of 'life'.
Or would we require reproduction?
That's getting better. But what about, say, a virus? They can reproduce, but not on their own. The simplest ones are basically just a strand of DNA or RNA sitting around waiting for some cell to pick them up and reproduce them.
Most biologists I've talked to don't consider viruses as 'life' though. It needs to be self-reproduction to some extent. But that'll never be clear cut, since you then have to define how much the environment is allowed to 'help'.
Well, duh. But the point wasn't "bacteria can't easily make stuff which isn't a protein", the point was "bacteria can't easily be engineered to make stuff which isn't a protein".
Those antibiotics-producing bacteria weren't engineered to produce antibiotics. (Although they are typically engineered to produce more antibiotics than in the wild, but enhancing function is pretty far from creating it.)
Now where's the bacteria that will make substances like xanax or other drugs, so it can make the entire market cheaper and more affordable to those who need it but don't have insurance, and "naturally" at that? (Naturally as in not needing a buttload of power from a processing plant for the drug and wasting energy uselessly)
Um.. news flash: Drugs have been made that way for years.
But first: This works for proteins such as insulin. Most drugs are not proteins, however.
And for those who are, there is nothing about it which necessarily makes it cheaper or less power-consuming. Bacteria need food. Bacteria need to be kept warm. And most importantly, you've got to seperate and purify your drug from the bacteria and growth substrate and whatnot.
Of course, for proteins you've got no choice. It's practically impossible to synthesize proteins using conventional chemistry. And it's very very difficult (and likely uneconomical) to use bacteria to produce other organic compounds. So these things are complimentary to eachother, really.
The researchers believe they may have found a set of statistical rules for determining the tertiary ('overall') structure of proteins from the sequence.
(Although the summary reads otherwise, creating a 'new' protein with an arbitrary amino acid sequence isn't new at all though. )
If this pans out, it is of course significant towards the goal of engineering 'new' proteins one day. But there is still a lot to be covered. Even if the relationship between sequence and structure were simple and known (and it isn't, yet), you still have the issue of relating structure to function.
Which isn't known. And of course, even knowing the structure and function of a single protein doesn't mean you know what it's going to do in a complicated environment such as a cell, where there are thousands of things to interact with.
It's a step forward, nonetheless. But if someone thinks this means we're going to be tricking-out living organisms with new custom-engineered proteins anytime soon, you'll be disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
It was so bad that Nintendo called the console an "Entertainment System" and marketed a Robot with it to keep people from thinking of it as Another Video Game Console(TM).
Yeah.. What was up with that robot?
As a robot-crazed geek kid, I was hugely impressed by the Nintendo robot in their TV ads back in the 80's. I never owned one though, and never met anyone who did. Did anyone here have one? Was there more than one game for it? And how much fun was it? Or, as my adult mind tells me.. how badly did it suck?
How are these programmers immortalized?
Well, obviously Google will now be paying teachers to have future generations of school children memorize and recite by heart the complete list of contributing programmers!
We cannot allow the names of these brave souls who laboured so hard for several months to be lost in the sands of time. Their memory shall be passed on from generation to generation for time immortal.
How do we know SCO won't turn around and claim that the code in MySQL is tainted??? This is EXACTLY what they did to IBM.
Well one reason would be that SCO doesn't have any database software of their own.
What you should really be worried about then is GCC and the Linux kernel, which SCO has contributed to as well.
they're playing rock music, which is perhaps the single most pervasive and identifiable aspect of american culture.
Bullshit. You're living in the past.
Saying that rock music is uniquely American is like saying that theatre is uniquely Greek. Just because it originated in the US doesn't make it American forever. Outside the US, rock music hasn't been regarded as a American phenomenon since the 50's. The "British Invasion" killed any pretenses of that.
Rammstein is a particularily bad example, since they have none of those original American (Read: blues, country, Elvis) elements in them, as well. Their main source of influence was Laibach, who in turn had Kraftwerk as a main source of influence.
Kraftwerk owes absolutely nothing to Rock music, and Rammstein very little.
The Swedish Data Inspection Board gave the APB a green-light to collect IP adresses.
It's not quite a big deal, since the anti-pirate folks already can do that legally in a number of countries (such as the US) which don't have strict data-protection laws.
And the ISPs are not only doing the right thing but probably the only legal thing, since it'd quite likely violate the very same data-protection laws if they gave information about their customers to a private third party without permission from either the government or their customers.
The "Anti-Pirate Bureau" isn't a government agency after all. And while the USA seems to have happily handed over law-enforcement to the copyright holders, Europe has not. So far.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
Red Hat is getting OOo to play with the GNU compiler for java (gcj). They shipped OOo using gcj with Fedora Core 4, and according to the blog of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.
Keep your arguments straight! First you're saying Qt is shit because they require copyright assignment. Although so does the FSF on certain projects.
So now you're saying that it's 'ethically dubious' for free software programmers to contribute code to a project if there's a properitary version of it? That'd make it 'ethically dubious' to contribute anything to a BSD-licensed project then.
That's an incredibly narrow-minded ethic you've got there. Not even RMS would agree with that.
It's not an open source project.
BTW, you'll get that same response from projects like GCC too. They require copyright assignment on all code, and they won't look at a (non-trivial) patch either.
And they have the same reasons.
If "[s]omething that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" then why are we only allowed to judge one encyclopedia--Wikipedia--on that basis?
Nobody said that though.
You then proceed to complain that EB doesn't have articles on some of your favorite subjects. Well, that's too bad. But EB doesn't have articles on other marginal things either. And free software is indeed a marginal (but growing) phenomenon. Nobody said EB was better at current affairs anyway.
So that leaves the "open source" article. I haven't read it since I don't have an EB subscription, but I do agree the use of 'public domain' there seems ill-advised but OTOH, let's remember that this is not a legal document, and it'd be equally ill-advised to infer that the strict legal sense was intended.
(There is, IMO, a geek tendency to be anal-retentive about terms and not distinguish between common and specific usage. Like the logician who answers "Yes." to the question "Are you coming along, or staying here?")
Which brings me to the next problematic criticism of these encyclopedias: drawing conclusions by weighing too small a sample.
Agreed. So why do you waste your time pointing out single articles in EB as a counter-criticism, then?
And you don't really adress the criticism raised. The criterion "something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" sounds highly reasonable to me.
People got to a reference work to find information. They can't know beforehand if that information is going to be any good or not and you can't expect them to determine the quality themselves. If they knew the subject, they wouldn't be needing to look it up in the first place.
This does invalidate the pro-Wikipedia argument raised in the article. ("if it's broken, you can fix it."). The reader can't be expected to know the article is 'broken' without first consulting other sources of information. And if you need to go elsewhere for information, what's the point of going to Wikipedia in the first place?
I don't see why you don't view this critique as having any backing?
So, how is the user supposed to know if the information is any good? Quality. If I look something up in E.B., I know that I can expect a certain level of quality. It won't be perfect, needless to say, but I know that if it's there it will conform to a certain level of quality. And I do feel that the weakest entry in the E.B. and other traditional encyclopedias are far stronger than the weakest in Wikipedia. It's my general impression. And I edit Wikipedia regularily and have loved reading encyclopedias since I was a kid, so its hardly based on a few single entries.
The criticisms raised against Wikipedia in the article are general problems, in my experience and not confined merely to the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda articles. As the article and others in this thread have pointed out, Wikipedia is prone to 'factoid glut'. Contributors are want to include information like "X liked to wear blue hats." and will add that information without any regard for whether its warranted within the scope of the article, or whether it can be worked into the existing text.
Knowing what not to include is just as important as what to include. Anyone having done any amount of journalistic or academic writing knows that, but Wikipedia suffers dearly in this respect. Contributors want their contribution in and since there is no single authority deciding over scope, argument on this matter tends to default to be inclusive.
But MySQL AB does not have to join hands with the company that (with msft's help) is dedicated to destroying F/OSS. Do you remember Scox's CEO writing the US congress and declaring that the GPL was unconstitutional?
SCO payed MySQL to support and maintain an SCO port of their software. If SCO is paying to have F/OSS software developed, then that is not destroying F/OSS.
Yes, their letter to those congressman was anti-F/OSS. But MySQL had nothing to do with that.
On the other hand, SCO has in-house developers maintaining the SCO port of GCC, code which contributed back to main and assigned to the FSF. So, by the same rationale, the Free Software Foundation itself has 'joined hands' with this company destroying F/OSS.
1) Use monopoly power to crush and stifle any competition
2) PROFIT!!
3) Pay off government to drop anti-trust charges
4) Pay off former competitors to drop anti-trust charges
5) EVEN MORE PROFIT!!
Nothing quite like the "free market"..
Is it only me here seeing a more-than-slight resemblence between this and this?
While I haven't been a subscriber since circa 1993, they certainly had plenty of ads when I read them. Mostly a few pages in the front and in the back, like on the inside covers and between the table of contents and the first article.
They were thankfully completely missing from the actual content pages, so I guess that makes them relatively ad-free.
Seen the article on consciousness? Especially the "physical approaches" section?
Not only is it full of fringe (read:loony) theories such as "quantum consciousness", but the view of the scientific majority isn't even represented. Namely, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the networks of cells in the brain.
(But don't take my word, see "Consciousness, reduction, and emergence - Some remarks" by Murray Gell-Mann, or Max Tegmark's debunking of the entire quantum consciousness thing. Both these guys are fairly prominent physicists.)
-- but to me chenistry is about general principles of chemical reactions, just like physics is about general principles of matter and energy.
Well, that's your problem then.. it's a narrow view. By that rationale, you would have very very few Nobel prize winners in either Physics or Chemistry.
E.g. this year's Physics prize doesn't teach us anything new about the "general principles". It's all explainable in terms of Quantum Mechanics and Maxwell's equations. That doesn't mean it's not physics.
Of course, things like proteins certainly need to obey physical and chemical laws, but discoveries of how proteins work, as in last year's chemistry nobel, while certainly of great importance, don't really tell us any new basic facts about chemistry itself.
Neither does this prize. All of chemistry is explainable within the framework of quantum mechanics. It's like complaining that the Physics prize isn't teaching us anything new about QM (or newtonian mechanics for that matter).
Besides which, that's bull. Catalysis is catalysis and it pertains to perhaps the most central part of chemistry there is, namely "How do chemical reactions occur". Why would it be less interesting to chemistry just because an enzyme is doing the catalysis?
In fact, it's just the other way around! Enzyme catalysis is an area which is vastly more complex and vastly less understood than traditional catalysts. Not to mention there is significant cross-over between the areas of metalloorganic catalysts (such as this prize) and enzyme catalysis. Try googling for "biomimetic catalyst".
Ironic, isn't it, that so many Nobel winners are Americans?
Surely you're joking?
The USA has about 200 (give or take) laureates (counted as ones at US universities). And a population of 295 million. 0.67 per million.
Switzerland: 28 and 7.5 million population : 3.7 per million.
Sweden: 29 and 9 million. 3.2 per million.
Norway: 11 and 4.5 million. 2.4 per million.
Austria: 21 and 8 million. 2.6 per million.
Denmark: 13 and 5.5 million. 2.3 per million.
Germany: 89 and 82 million 1.1 per million.
Netherlands: 16 and 16. One in a million.
France: 49 and 60 million. 0.8 per million.
Belgium: 8 and 10.5 million. 0.76 per million.
Italy: 19 and 58 million. 0.3 per million.
Japan: 12 and 127 million. 0.1 per million.
Call it bias or whatever you want. But the US certainly isn't overrepresented.
All figures from doing a simple laureate-search, so they're all approximate, and refer to country of residence, not birth.
What the heck does it matter who it goes to? It's the discovery that counts, not the academic background of the person who made it.
Or don't you consider biochem to be part of chemistry? Because that's a pretty narrow-minded view of chemistry, especially considering how it's the area where the biggest things are happening.
Ah, yeah, you got me there. It's true. Although, on the other hand, the pronounciation is also somewhat irregular. - like how most prounounce "kex" with a hard 'k', but some (Göteborgare) prounounce it with a soft one.
But I guess it's one of the deficiencies of Swedish spelling that you can't mark hard vs. soft vowels, and thus there's no way to distinguish "kör" (choir) and "kör" (driving). Another one is the lack of information about intonation (accents or such) and no way to distingush "banan" (banana) and "banan" (the track).
You're countering an exaggerated and wrong post with a just as exaggerated opposite.
English is just as phonetic as all those others -- mainly because its spellings and pronunciations are derived from all those others.
That's the point. Different languages have different proununciations and spellings. And they have different amount of consistency between spelling and pronunciation. Is that hard to understand?
Russian is an excellent example of a language where spelling and pronunciation are very consistent. This is due to the the Russian-cyrillic alphabet being constructed specifically for the russian language. So common russian phonemes such as "zh" and "tch" have their own letters - and those letters represent that sound and only that sound. Moreover, since foreign words need to be translitterated into cyrillic, they do so with the letters closest to the way they prounounce it. E.g. the English name "Johnny" becomes "Dzhonni". It would be inconsistent to write it as "Johnny" because the russian "j" sound is not the same as the English one.
English, on the other hand, and as you point out yourself, loves to borrow words from foreign languages and keep the spelling. They don't keep the pronunciation though. No language does that. You prounounce the word with the closest approximation with the phonemes of your own language. (I.e. what a foreign accent is).
you need to treat each word with the rules of the language it came from for it to make sense.
English doesn't do that though. For instance, the word "queue" or "cue" are prounounced like the letter "q". They are not prounounced "keuh" (which would be an english approximation of the french prounciation). By comparison the same word was borrowed into Swedish, the spelling changed to "kö". The pronounciation is much closer to the original.
The grandparent poster is wrong in saying english is the only inconsistent language here. All languages have inconsistency. But English is certainly widely known as one of the least, if not the least consistent of all. This is reflected in how easily foreigners and english-speakers themselves pick up the proununcation of new words. It's also reflected in how many spelling errors people make on average.
Now, give me a someone learning Swedish and show them the word "kö" and someone learning English and show them the word "queue". Which one do you think will get the proununcation correct? I'd wager quite a lot on the former.
Well, for one, a complexs molecule can be more than simple carbon chains, as one "tool" said so in a post below this one.
Okay! So what you're saying is that: "big, complex molecules can be made of other things than just carbon chains"? Well that's not news to anyone who knows about silicone rubber, for instance.
So who are these people you speak of saying otherwise? Who are you debating on this?
BTW, you shouldn't use the term "complex molecule". In chemistry a "complex" is something different than a molecule.
The Second law semantically conradicts itself. If energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred/transformed thru heat (which is how we measure all things energy-wise, by wattage) then the entire universe, as far as we can tell, is a perpetual motion machine
No. The universe as a whole isn't gaining or losing any energy. It would only be a perpetual motion machine if it was gaining energy.
How about learning some science before criticizing it?
Therefore, to expect the life on another planet may be complex-molecule-based instead of simple-carbon-based is feasible.
"Complex-molecule-based" versus "simple-carbon-based" ?? Did you make up those terms yourself? Could you please define them? And perhaps elaborate on how this is supposed to follow from the statement "acetylene is organic"?
Because the statement "acetylene is organic" doesn't mean anything in particular. It's saying that the acetylene molecule has a carbon-carbon bond in it.
But the other people saying 'no' are (as far as I can tell thru HISTORY) full of horse-hockey.
Who is saying 'no' to what?
Tell me exactly what in the world you know about organic compounds on another planet that will/will not produce life, please?
Since this is the first semi-intelligible statement in your post, I'll try and answer it:
1) Most scientists believe that life in all its forms, terrestrial or otherwise, follows the laws of chemistry. All life we know of appears to do so.
In the same way that we also believe that all the universe follows the same laws of physics. We have no reason to believe otherwise. (and the chemistry follows from the physics, anyway.)
2) We know that certain conditions are required to sustain life regardless of its form. For instance, life requires energy. This follows from the laws of thermodynamics being one of those things believed to be universal in 1).
3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.
Yes, it's flamebait/trollbait. How about you editors/moderators tell me your experience on Titan, [..]
No, it's just moronic. How about you tell me about all those atoms you've seen yourself? Still believe they exist though, don't you?
Let the organic/biological scientists determine this, not the uneducated populace.
David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".
Even I don't dare step into this conversation, except as far as I have made my agrument.
You didn't really make one.
What if there is a big rock that serves as a catalyst for this conversion of acetylene and hydrogen to methane.
:)
Actually, it's not a 'what if'. Platinum powder will catalyze that reaction just fine. Well, at least as far as ethane. (not sure about the final step: ethane + H2 --> 2 methane)
Would we think of that as a life form?
Last I checked, nobody was saying platinum was alive.
Seriously though, "catalyzing a chemical reaction" is a terrible definition of 'life'.
Or would we require reproduction?
That's getting better. But what about, say, a virus? They can reproduce, but not on their own. The simplest ones are basically just a strand of DNA or RNA sitting around waiting for some cell to pick them up and reproduce them.
Most biologists I've talked to don't consider viruses as 'life' though. It needs to be self-reproduction to some extent. But that'll never be clear cut, since you then have to define how much the environment is allowed to 'help'.
Well, duh. But the point wasn't "bacteria can't easily make stuff which isn't a protein", the point was "bacteria can't easily be engineered to make stuff which isn't a protein".
Those antibiotics-producing bacteria weren't engineered to produce antibiotics.
(Although they are typically engineered to produce more antibiotics than in the wild, but enhancing function is pretty far from creating it.)
Now where's the bacteria that will make substances like xanax or other drugs, so it can make the entire market cheaper and more affordable to those who need it but don't have insurance, and "naturally" at that? (Naturally as in not needing a buttload of power from a processing plant for the drug and wasting energy uselessly)
Um.. news flash: Drugs have been made that way for years.
But first: This works for proteins such as insulin. Most drugs are not proteins, however.
And for those who are, there is nothing about it which necessarily makes it cheaper or less power-consuming. Bacteria need food. Bacteria need to be kept warm. And most importantly, you've got to seperate and purify your drug from the bacteria and growth substrate and whatnot.
Of course, for proteins you've got no choice. It's practically impossible to synthesize proteins using conventional chemistry. And it's very very difficult (and likely uneconomical) to use bacteria to produce other organic compounds. So these things are complimentary to eachother, really.
The researchers believe they may have found a set of statistical rules for determining the tertiary ('overall') structure of proteins from the sequence.
(Although the summary reads otherwise, creating a 'new' protein with an arbitrary amino acid sequence isn't new at all though. )
If this pans out, it is of course significant towards the goal of engineering 'new' proteins one day. But there is still a lot to be covered. Even if the relationship between sequence and structure were simple and known (and it isn't, yet), you still have the issue of relating structure to function.
Which isn't known. And of course, even knowing the structure and function of a single protein doesn't mean you know what it's going to do in a complicated environment such as a cell, where there are thousands of things to interact with.
It's a step forward, nonetheless. But if someone thinks this means we're going to be tricking-out living organisms with new custom-engineered proteins anytime soon, you'll be disappointed.