Everybody gets hung up on "life" as if it's something so fundamental, but really it's by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics (ability to reproduce, etc, etc).
Do you consider a virus to be alive? It's a borderline case, but some people at least would say yes.
The Polio virus has already been synthesized from scratch from raw chemicals - feed chemicals into a machine and get a virus out the other end. No need to sprinkle any magic "life" pixie dust on it.
I think it would be more correct to say it's an artificially _modified_ chromosome rather than created.
In terms of the design that's true - he cut bits out rather than designed new bits (that will come next).
But in terms of building it, it seems it's accurate to say he created it, and certainly that it's artificial. The article says he built the DNA "from laboratory chemicals" which I assume means it was synthesized (not the first to do it - the polio virus has already been synthesized from raw chemicals) rather than the result of gene splicing.
You can say that, but then to be consistent you'd have to be willing to also describe "intelligent design" regarding new species as nothing but the same dumb evolutionary "algorithm" running on different hardware.
Except that of course in nature you don't need to simulate a thing - DNA/competition/etc really exist, so there is no simulation algorithm and hence no algorithm writer. Oh, well.
Fair enough, but since there has ever been a single exception observed the difference is rather moot!
There's never been a single molecule of neurotransmitter, or anything else, that's stepped out of line and obeyed some mysterious dualistic force rather than the laws of nature that we have painstakingly discovered.
The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow.
If it's considered ambitious for a tiny country like Japan to be doing this, then it's downright mind boggling that Verizon is doing this in the US - systematically digging up half of America to install fiber to the home. Doing it pretty damn fast too.
Ok... since when is mind-body dualism incompatible with any known physical law?
Ever since man discovered that the physical world is 100% controlled by the laws of nature. The neuronal activity in your brain and everything that your brain and rest of your body does is caused by the laws of physics, not by little green aliens living in an invisible 5th dimension that don't contrubute (dualism) to those laws.
One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it.
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
It's stupid, but not because it's a non-question, it's stupid because it's a stupid question.
The brain doesn't have a Wake-on-LAN function - it is always on.
The question is like asking does the weather stop when the sun goes down, or will there still be ripples in the whirlpool if I stop throwing stones into it.
The resting brain is not silent, but exhibits organized fluctuations in neuronal activity even in the absence of tasks or stimuli. This intrinsic brain activity persists during task performance and contributes to variability in evoked brain responses. What is unknown is if this intrinsic activity also contributes to variability in behavior.
In follow-up research these scientists will investigate if there is any correlation between the loud humming noise cars make when they move and the wheels rotating.
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What's been the biggest joy of the whole Slashdot experience, and what's been the biggest suckage?
Sadly subtlties like the typical 10-1 (or more) productivity ratios between entry-level fucks and experienced people noticed by anyone actually at all involved in the software industry don't enter into the equation.
Then they wonder why their outsourced projects have such piss-poor productivity and would have been cheaper to do at home. Or, at least they wonder this after a few yars of having been BS'd about how great the outsourcing is working by corporate ass-kissers too weak to tell them the truth.
Or as the expression used to go (when overloaded with work and someone asks you to do something else on top of it all)... "why don't I just stick a brush up my arse and sweep the floor at the same time?".
At least that was a standard retort in England back in the 80's.
The pattern matchine step can be real simple - in practice the only place where you might want to allow non-words is as a prefix or suffix allowed by your naming convention, so you can just have a table of the ones that you will allow - can just put this in a text file and suck it into awk.
You could also enhance it with an exceptions file of identifiers that would otherwise fail but that you are explicitly going to allow.
Updates done via Apple iTunes (makes sense since it's also an iPod and iPod updates are done that way). I'd not be suprised if they start selling ring tones etc via the iTunes store also.
Err... you do realize that the Dalai Lama is currently planning his own succession? Nothing mystical going on here. The "reincarnation mechanism" consists of the DL's succession instructions being carried out after he dies, whereupon the newly tapped DL announces hihself as the reincarnation of the old one.
The Chinese ban on unauthorized reincarnation is so that the next DL is by definition a criminal (since he has to claim to have been reincarnated) to prevent him from travelling inside Tibet.
So presumably we can predict that the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated outside of Tibet (to Tibetan parents, perhaps) and live his life in "exile" for fear of arrest.
Maybe the real change here is opening the door to harass buddhists for supporting someone (next D.L.) they are defining as a criminal.
"I'm sure that later (maybe within our lifetime) we'll be able to design out own life forms completely from scratch".
I meant "of course the first wetware implementation of artificial life will use nature's building blocks" as a matter fact not of necessity. Craig Venter's "minimal life form" artificial DNA should be upon us in months and will of course be "executed" by inserting it into a living organism per this type of genome transplant technology. However superficial you regard this line of research, it is still by definition artifical life. Call it "partly artifical" if you want to be pedantic.
The first wetware implementations of artificial life will of course be using nature's building blocks, but you have to start somewhere. What this work provides is an "test environment" for running the artifical DNA that Venter et al are designing.
I'm sure that later (maybe within our lifetime) we'll be able to design out own life forms completely from scratch, but rather ironically intelligent design really is the hard way to do it. Nature used the dumb brute force algorithm (cf Deep Blue playing chess) of running a gazillion experiments in parallel and doing so for hundreds of millions of years... we don't yet have the capability of exploring the search space so thoroughly, but a local exploration from a known good point (i.e. artificial DNA) is a different matter.
Bear in mind that this self-validating conclusion comes from Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe who is intimately tied to the theory of panspermia. Let's wait for science to do it's thing and see if everyone else agrees with his conclusions and math (yeah, right)...
Gotta say that last time I checked the water is liquid right here on planet earth also.
Sadly that's not true, because if you live in a State with a Republican majority then voting Democrat (or vise versa) won't make any difference. ALL of your state's electoral college votes will go the way of the majority.
With the current voting system in the US all you could do to make your vote count (or minimally not be re-cast against your wishes by the electoral college) is not to live in a state where the majority politics is different than your own. Best case would be to move to one of the few swing states where your vote actually can effect the outcome of the election. How sad.
Maybe one day the US will trust it's voters to allow them to vote directly. Yeah, right.
The point is that short term weather forcasting (will it rain on Tuesday = where will my grain of rice be in the bathtub) is an entirely different matter than long term (will it be hotter in 10 years time = will my bathwater be cooler in 10 years) forecasting.
Short term forecsting is inaccurate because the weather is a chaotic system.
Long term "big picture" forcasting is fundamentally a different matter since you're not trying to predict "where will we be on the attractor" (short term forcast) but rather "what will be the bounds of the attractor" (big picture), which is a solvable problem.
You're assuming that colonizing another (suitable) solar system is something that will likly be achievd by any suitably intelligent species, but it may well be that none has ever done it, nor ever will. Or maybe 1 in a million planetary life forms ever achieve it, and so far none within the lifetime of our galaxy have.
Given the size of our galaxy (100,000 light years diameter), if there have only ever been 4500 space-faring species spread across the galaxy, and even if they were all prolifically sending out probes, the chances of any ever having even been aware of our solar system (1 out of 200,000,000,000 to chose to explore) is essentially zero.
No-one thinks that the earliest form of life involved DNA (or anything like it). The simplest form of cellular metabolism would basically have been a self-replicating chemical soup that "consumed" chemicals in the environment in order to create more of it's own chemical constituents. This type of self-sustaining chemical microenvironments likely occured all over the place - before they ever became separated from the rest of the environment by any cell-like container.
The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty) bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).
The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism) "reproduces" by splitting into two.
Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather than being part of it per se.
These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe".
Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals) would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to break your bubble...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm
Everybody gets hung up on "life" as if it's something so fundamental, but really it's by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics (ability to reproduce, etc, etc).
Do you consider a virus to be alive? It's a borderline case, but some people at least would say yes.
The Polio virus has already been synthesized from scratch from raw chemicals - feed chemicals into a machine and get a virus out the other end. No need to sprinkle any magic "life" pixie dust on it.
I think it would be more correct to say it's an artificially _modified_ chromosome rather than created.
In terms of the design that's true - he cut bits out rather than designed new bits (that will come next).
But in terms of building it, it seems it's accurate to say he created it, and certainly that it's artificial. The article says he built the DNA "from laboratory chemicals" which I assume means it was synthesized (not the first to do it - the polio virus has already been synthesized from raw chemicals) rather than the result of gene splicing.
You can say that, but then to be consistent you'd have to be willing to also describe "intelligent design" regarding new species as nothing but the same dumb evolutionary "algorithm" running on different hardware.
Except that of course in nature you don't need to simulate a thing - DNA/competition/etc really exist, so there is no simulation algorithm and hence no algorithm writer. Oh, well.
Fair enough, but since there has ever been a single exception observed the difference is rather moot!
There's never been a single molecule of neurotransmitter, or anything else, that's stepped out of line and obeyed some mysterious dualistic force rather than the laws of nature that we have painstakingly discovered.
The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow.
If it's considered ambitious for a tiny country like Japan to be doing this, then it's downright mind boggling that Verizon is doing this in the US - systematically digging up half of America to install fiber to the home. Doing it pretty damn fast too.
Ok... since when is mind-body dualism incompatible with any known physical law?
Ever since man discovered that the physical world is 100% controlled by the laws of nature. The neuronal activity in your brain and everything that your brain and rest of your body does is caused by the laws of physics, not by little green aliens living in an invisible 5th dimension that don't contrubute (dualism) to those laws.
One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it.
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
It's stupid, but not because it's a non-question, it's stupid because it's a stupid question.
The brain doesn't have a Wake-on-LAN function - it is always on.
The question is like asking does the weather stop when the sun goes down, or will there still be ripples in the whirlpool if I stop throwing stones into it.
No - slashdot is still running off a homebrew computer in Taco's Mom's basement. They will never sell out.
The resting brain is not silent, but exhibits organized fluctuations in neuronal activity even in the absence of tasks or stimuli. This intrinsic brain activity persists during task performance and contributes to variability in evoked brain responses. What is unknown is if this intrinsic activity also contributes to variability in behavior.
In follow-up research these scientists will investigate if there is any correlation between the loud humming noise cars make when they move and the wheels rotating.
What's been the biggest joy of the whole Slashdot experience, and what's been the biggest suckage?
Here's the formaula that the geniuses at IBM / etc are using for outsourcing jobs:
if ((body-temperature-A == body-temperature-B) && (salary-A salary-B)) {
outsource(B, A);
}
Sadly subtlties like the typical 10-1 (or more) productivity ratios between entry-level fucks and experienced people noticed by anyone actually at all involved in the software industry don't enter into the equation.
Then they wonder why their outsourced projects have such piss-poor productivity and would have been cheaper to do at home. Or, at least they wonder this after a few yars of having been BS'd about how great the outsourcing is working by corporate ass-kissers too weak to tell them the truth.
Or as the expression used to go (when overloaded with work and someone asks you to do something else on top of it all)... "why don't I just stick a brush up my arse and sweep the floor at the same time?".
At least that was a standard retort in England back in the 80's.
Just a brief follow-up:
The pattern matchine step can be real simple - in practice the only place where you might want to allow non-words is as a prefix or suffix allowed by your naming convention, so you can just have a table of the ones that you will allow - can just put this in a text file and suck it into awk.
You could also enhance it with an exceptions file of identifiers that would otherwise fail but that you are explicitly going to allow.
Agreed - should be a simple awk script.
1) Generate (line number, identifier) pairs to pass to spell checker function
2) Split identifiers into words based on chamgeOfCase or embedded_underscores [("chamge"), ("of"), ("case")]
3) Do word lookup in standard dictionary first then private jargon/etc dictionary [("chamge", fail), ("of", pass), ("case", pass)]
4) Use simple pattern matching to score results (e.g. [("m", fail), {(, pass}] -> OK
5) Report errors in terms of source line (then use sed/whatever to fix them)
If you can't implement this in a day then switch career.
Updates done via Apple iTunes (makes sense since it's also an iPod and iPod updates are done that way). I'd not be suprised if they start selling ring tones etc via the iTunes store also.
Err... you do realize that the Dalai Lama is currently planning his own succession? Nothing mystical going on here. The "reincarnation mechanism" consists of the DL's succession instructions being carried out after he dies, whereupon the newly tapped DL announces hihself as the reincarnation of the old one.
The Chinese ban on unauthorized reincarnation is so that the next DL is by definition a criminal (since he has to claim to have been reincarnated) to prevent him from travelling inside Tibet.
So presumably we can predict that the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated outside of Tibet (to Tibetan parents, perhaps) and live his life in "exile" for fear of arrest.
Maybe the real change here is opening the door to harass buddhists for supporting someone (next D.L.) they are defining as a criminal.
Sigh.
"I'm sure that later (maybe within our lifetime) we'll be able to design out own life forms completely from scratch".
I meant "of course the first wetware implementation of artificial life will use nature's building blocks" as a matter fact not of necessity. Craig Venter's "minimal life form" artificial DNA should be upon us in months and will of course be "executed" by inserting it into a living organism per this type of genome transplant technology. However superficial you regard this line of research, it is still by definition artifical life. Call it "partly artifical" if you want to be pedantic.
The first wetware implementations of artificial life will of course be using nature's building blocks, but you have to start somewhere. What this work provides is an "test environment" for running the artifical DNA that Venter et al are designing.
... we don't yet have the capability of exploring the search space so thoroughly, but a local exploration from a known good point (i.e. artificial DNA) is a different matter.
I'm sure that later (maybe within our lifetime) we'll be able to design out own life forms completely from scratch, but rather ironically intelligent design really is the hard way to do it. Nature used the dumb brute force algorithm (cf Deep Blue playing chess) of running a gazillion experiments in parallel and doing so for hundreds of millions of years
Bear in mind that this self-validating conclusion comes from Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe who is intimately tied to the theory of panspermia. Let's wait for science to do it's thing and see if everyone else agrees with his conclusions and math (yeah, right)...
Gotta say that last time I checked the water is liquid right here on planet earth also.
Sadly that's not true, because if you live in a State with a Republican majority then voting Democrat (or vise versa) won't make any difference. ALL of your state's electoral college votes will go the way of the majority.
With the current voting system in the US all you could do to make your vote count (or minimally not be re-cast against your wishes by the electoral college) is not to live in a state where the majority politics is different than your own. Best case would be to move to one of the few swing states where your vote actually can effect the outcome of the election. How sad.
Maybe one day the US will trust it's voters to allow them to vote directly. Yeah, right.
The point is that short term weather forcasting (will it rain on Tuesday = where will my grain of rice be in the bathtub) is an entirely different matter than long term (will it be hotter in 10 years time = will my bathwater be cooler in 10 years) forecasting.
Short term forecsting is inaccurate because the weather is a chaotic system.
Long term "big picture" forcasting is fundamentally a different matter since you're not trying to predict "where will we be on the attractor" (short term forcast) but rather "what will be the bounds of the attractor" (big picture), which is a solvable problem.
You're assuming that colonizing another (suitable) solar system is something that will likly be achievd by any suitably intelligent species, but it may well be that none has ever done it, nor ever will. Or maybe 1 in a million planetary life forms ever achieve it, and so far none within the lifetime of our galaxy have.
Given the size of our galaxy (100,000 light years diameter), if there have only ever been 4500 space-faring species spread across the galaxy, and even if they were all prolifically sending out probes, the chances of any ever having even been aware of our solar system (1 out of 200,000,000,000 to chose to explore) is essentially zero.
No-one thinks that the earliest form of life involved DNA (or anything like it). The simplest form of cellular metabolism would basically have been a self-replicating chemical soup that "consumed" chemicals in the environment in order to create more of it's own chemical constituents. This type of self-sustaining chemical microenvironments likely occured all over the place - before they ever became separated from the rest of the environment by any cell-like container.
The earliest cell-like containers may well have been simply lipid (fatty) bubbles that presented a semi-permiable membrane that let certain chemicals thru. These types of lipid bubble could easily have formed naturally (think froth at the edge of the ocean), maybe even based on products of these chemical reactions. There's no need for the earliest "cells" to have been created/encoded by the chemicals they contained as they are today (DNA).
The earliest forms of replication also need not have been self-encoded - they would almost certainly have been due to physical processes - e.g. if you whipped up (sea-shore wave action) a bunch of large fatty bubbles, you'd get a lot of smaller fatty bubbles which would then "grow" via their semi-permiable enclosure letting in the external chemical components that "fed" the chemical reactions. Similar to how an amoeba )modern single cellular organism) "reproduces" by splitting into two.
Highly complex chemicals like DNA or RNA may have have originated as simple chemical catalysts that sped up the reaction process - i.e. guided it rather than being part of it per se.
These types of extremely simple pre-cellular origins are far from being low probabiliy events - they are alomost inevitably going to occur given a rich enouch chemical environment and suitable phyiscal conditions (water, wave action = stirring, lightening, sunlight, etc). If you're interested in the beginning of life at this extrememly early stage, try reading Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe".
Even at this early stage, evolution would necessarily have occured. Among multiple such self-sustaining reactions, those that were best adapted to the environment (those parts of it they relied upon, e.g. available chemicals) would necessarily have left more "descendents" than others that were competing for the same raw ingredients (food supply). With these types of lipid membrance cell, new chemicals in the environemnt that were not part of the chain reactions occuring in the "population" would often have been introduced, and occasionally would have modified those reactions and their products. This source of variation would then have been fodder for natural selection (the winners swamping the losers out of the environment), and so it goes...