Regardless of that, how exactly would intel be optimize my code?
A CPU contains multiple sub-devices that carry out functions like arithmetic logic, floating point logic, memory address decoding, instruction decoding etc. In many CISC processors (or CISC descended like current Intel x86 chips) a microcode language that controls the sub-devices is embedded in the processor. As the instructions from a program are decoded, each "machine code" instruction will be turned into a sequence of microcode instructions. The CPU may execute the microcode instructions out of their natural order to improve efficiency. For example, moving an arithmetic operation between two memory fetches. This is what I was meant by "Intel optimziing your code". See this article for more information.
My point was that even programming in machine language is still at least one layer of abstraction above what is happening on the CPU.
Now, I know all the Buzz word slashdot people will disagree with me, but Object Oriented programing adds a layer of abstraction, taking away pointers adds another layer of abstraction and then adding in a garbage collection adds another layer of abstration. And also having Sun hide all those pointers behing an extrememly gross hierachy of classes that always seem to hand-off work to another class has its penalties.
Ooooh! Those evil layers of abstraction! I suppose you've figured out some way to write directly to microcode because, after all, you understand how to optimize your program better then Intel does. Doubtless you drop your own memory manager into all your applications, since lord knows what the OS will do when you call alloc or free.
Looking at the bug list for any substantial application will demonstrate that even very talented programmers cannot write software using C and C++ without buffer overruns, heap corruption, and memory leaks. Sometimes the requirements dictate that's what we have to live with, but sometimes it is sheer masochism or machismo. Every hour you spend chasing down dangling pointers is an hour you can't spend improving the algorithms you are implementing.
3) Mutations occur but almost always bring harm and NEVER add new information to a genetic chain. New information is required for one species to change or evolve into another and this does not occur in observable nature anywhere. Infact, DNA which was discovered after the evolution theory is a huge slap in the face to evolution and a dramatic proof of intelligent design.
I hardly know where to begin.
First, there is rather a lot of evidence that most point mutations are neutral. This is because a the genetic code is redundant. For example both CCC and CCA code for the amino acid proline. Markedly beneficial mutations are rare but not so rare that they are not produced in the laboratory every day. How about a mutation that extends the life of mice? Second, speciation has frequently been observed in the wild. In fact one of the papers cited in the parent article in Science was on the speciation process in European blackcaps. Are you actually familiar with information theory? A lot of ID proponents seem to toss it around without actually understanding it. Let me offer you this quote from The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (Illini Books edition, 1963 pg 8)
The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information.
What you are calling "new information" is from the point of view of communication theory a loss of information because it represents the failure of DNA replication to produce a perfect copy of the original message. Information theory offers no opinion whether this loss of information will bring good or ill to the organism.
Most of the important algorithms in bioinformatics and computational biology are implicitly based on evolutionary ideas. Some in fact use explicit models of DNA evolution. These are algorithms are being used with considerable success to find genes and regulatory elements in our genome. Why don't the ID advocates come up with their own algorithms and gene finding software. We'll pit them head to head and see who's better at finding genes.
Now, I'm not a physicist, but might a Faraday Cage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) built with an appropriately sized mesh do the job? Just as a microwave lets some radiation out (we can see the burrito cooking inside) while keeping the harmful radiation in (we don't get toasted by the microwaves), couldn't this be used to do the reverse, that is, allow communication in while shielding the robot from radiation?
I realize that these cages must be in a specific shape to work correctly, but if the core components at least, can be shielded, this go a long way towards solving our problems.
It isn't the shape of the Faraday cages that's special. It's the size of the mesh. The mesh has to be significantly smaller then the wavelength of the radiation you are trying to keep out. Microwaves have a wavelength of 1-300mm. The wave-length of gamma rays is less then 0.00000000001mm. That's much smaller then the distance between atoms in a typical solid, so the idea of a mesh becomes kind of absurd.
I doubt that the problem with shielding is communications. After all you could put the shielding on the side facing the radiation, and leave the side towards the crew open. Gamma radiation doesn't go around corners. Or, as others have suggested, you could just run a cable to the robot. I think the actual problem is weight. Lead is heavy. You might be able to pile a ton of lead around the cpus and memroy, and just crank up the horsepower of the motors. However, by their very purpose you can't put the sensors behind lead sheilds, since all they would see then would be the lead shield. Not very helpful.
Our judicial system is fucked if they don't bring charges against Mr. Chase for slandering Mr. Siegenthaler.
Do you understand that there is a difference between civil law and criminal law? For the most part libel is not a crime, but is instead covered by civil law. The only person who could bring this to court is Mr. Siegenthaler and he would have to prove (by the preponderance of the evidence) that he had suffered damages from the libel. Mr. Siegenthaler has said that he has no interest in pursuing a libel case.
There are a few states that do have criminal libel laws but they have rarely been invoked, and when they have they have often been struck down by higher courts.
So, another question, how do you know how much C-14 you started off with? From my understanding it would work something like this: at year x (which is however many years ago) sample contains y amount of C-14 since we know the rate at which C-14 decomposes (or whatever the correct term is for radioactive material' half-life), we can then extrapolate the date x from the amount now in the sample today. But, how do we know what y was?
In the atmosphere C-14 is created by cosmic rays hitting N-14. The balance between new C-14 being created by cosmic rays and existing C-14 decaying away keeps the ratio of C-14 to C-12 nearly constant in the atmosphere. Once the carbon gets buried in the ground it is shielded from cosmic rays so no new C-14 is created and the existing atoms begin deaying away. You don't need to know what y was, you just need to compare the ratio C-14 to C-12 in the atmosphere to the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the sample.
The obvious question to follow that one is "How do we know the atomospheric ratio of C-14 to C-12 has remained constant?". In fact it has not! But by comparing C-14 dating to other dating methods the C-14 date can be calibrated. Lots of different methods have been used to calibrate the dates produced by C-14 measurements: historicial records, tree rings, strata in ice cores, and sedimentation in lakes, to mention a few.
In this case strata in ice cores are particularly significant. If you actually read the news article that is the subject of this thread, they don't even mention C-14 dating. Even in Antarctica the rate at which snow accumulates depends on the season, and the passage of the seasons leaves distinct strata in the ice. The strata in the ice can be counted just like tree rings to measure the age of a sample. These strata also make your comet disater hypotheses very unlikely, since you wouldn't expect a single large disaster to leave fine strata like these.
Your questions are good, but you have to bear in mind that the science stories you read in the newspaper are the tip of the iceberg. It's a bit like reading "Between 1939 and 1945 a general war was fought in Europe between the Allies and the Axis. The Allies won." True and informative as it is, the full story is a lot more complex. Very few articles in scientific journals claim to disucss anything as grand or definitive as 'Human Activity Responsible for Global Warming' Most are more along the lines of: 'Devensian glacigenic sedimentation and landscape evolution in the Cardigan area of southwest Wales'. These are guaranteed to put any non-specialist to sleep, but they make up the body of critical supporting evidence for the big science stories that reach the papers. If you really want to read the web of evidence that supports things like C-14 data you should make your way to a university library and start chewing through the actual scientific journals.
Thanks, I think that makes it even funnier. How come he did not know that Unix was far more evolved and stress tested than his cobbled together OS, that evolved from CPM, an 8 bit operating system. Unix evolved on main frames.
Actually UNIX evolved on the mini-computer platforms: first the PDP and then the VAX. The mainframe folks despised UNIX as an upstart, and the UNIX folks despised the PC as a "toy" computer. Both camps had good reasons for their opinions, but in the end they were missing great opportunities.
Back in 1982-1986 when Microsoft and a few other vendors were selling UNIX flavors for microprocessors, they did not sell well. You have to bear in mind that the UNIX of that day was not the UNIX of today. There was no formal system of open source software, and AT&T got a big cut of every sale, so it was very expensive. UNIX was buggier back then then so "kernel panics" (analogous to the Windows BSOD) were not uncommon. Most installations had to have an expensive service contract or had to hire their own admin who at least knew shell programming, and preferably knew enough 'C' to decode core dumps.
It is my opinion that although the UNIX OS was unquestionably superior, the UNIX end-user application model of the time was hopeless. Most of the big UNIX software shops wrote multi-user applications for display on serial terminals. They sold those applications for $10k/per seat/per year, knowing they could only sell a few thousand copies. It was Apple, IBM, and Microsoft's (and many others) insight that very few businesses would spend $25,000 and hire an admin to give their employees vi and troff, but millions of business's would spend $5000 to give their employees Wordperfect and 1-2-3. If the OS was so limited that the only debugging tool was the Big Red Switch, so much the better!
Umm, perhaps this was before your time, or perhaps you're just going for the wry comment, but back in the day Microsoft had it's own version of UNIX: XENIX. They originally sold it on the Tandy and later ported it to the 386. They gradually sold their UNIX business off to *shudder* SCO. In fact I believe at one point AT&T had to by the rights to sell UNIX on the Intel x86 architecture back from Microsoft. Whatever Bill Gates' many sins, not knowing UNIX is not one of them.
One final question, and this is more a question than a challenge.. if there's more carbon dioxide now than there used to be, and carbon dating works by checking how much carbon there is in something, then wouldn't anything from awhile back seem o be from a really really *long* while back, simply by virtue of the fact that it *started off* with less carbon, and so therefore now has less?
Carbon dating works by measuring the ratio of the number of C-14 atoms to the number of C-12 atom. Carbon 12 is a stable isotope, but Carbon-14 is radioactive, decaying into nitrogen. The amount of C-12 doesn't change over time, so that can be used as your yardstick for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
You say "often" or "usually".. in other words, these are not normal occurrences. They are not sustainable. If they were, we would have packs of lion/tiger hybrids running around the jungles. As far as dogs and wolves are concerned, I know that dog/wolf hybrids are, in fact, quite common, but dogs and wolves are so similar anyway that it might mean just that they are incorrectly identified as different species rather than breeds of the same species.
First off, let's point out that what you are saying now is quite different from your initial statement. You said point blank that fertile hybrids, never, ever happened. Please have the good grace to admit you were wrong on that point. Doesn't it give you cause to wonder what other elementary facts from biology you are wrong about? Dogs (canis familiaris) and wolves (canis lupus) have been recognized as different species since Carlus Linneus began assigning Latin names to living things. You are trying to change the definition of a species to fit your preconceptions, which preconceptions as I've pointed out are wrong. Evolution does not predict the existence of fish-bird hybrids, but rather predicts that the relative inter-fertility of two species depends on the amount of time they have been undergoing independent evolution. This prediciton can then be tested against the fossil record or in the laboratory, with fruit files and abalone.
Evolution makes no assumption to the existence or non-existence of God.
Then they look at all the different species over time, mostly based on fossils and radiation dating. Then they use their imaginations to fill in the rest of the details. You don't see anything problematic with this approach?
No, because that is not where they stop, it is just the starting point. They then use that starting point to make predictions about details they have yet to observe, testing their initial picture.
Were you aware that computational biologists use simple mathematical models of evolution to improve the accuracy of their gene finding software? When will the creationists or ID advocates come forward with a mathematical model of their own for gene structure so that we can test the two models?
All in all I have no problem with women or men. I don't like men that act like women any more than I like a woman that acts like a man. I have noticed in my behavior and that of many other males, that we are being less like men, and that is simply unnatural.
Maybe you haven't read much history, but this "unnatural" argument has been given in all ages and all places by the folks who were on top the social order to justify keeping their place, and by those who were on the bottom of the heap to justify rebelling. Marxists call it the force of history. The founders of the US called it natural rights. Read Dickens and Jane Austen and you'll hear plenty of characters from the landed gentry talking about how "unnatural" it is for all the locals to be giving up their positions as servants and becoming merchants and tradesman. Read Plato's "Republic" to learn why some men are "naturally" slaves. Oddly enough they all disagree violently on what is "natural".
Hell, if there was a leopard capable of speech 50,000 years ago I'm sure it could have given you a long harangue about how "unnatural" it was for these naked monkeys to be fighting back with stone knives when attacked. "Oh yes, I'm sure they are very clever, but look at the physical differences between us! We are fast and strong and have claws and teeth like razors. I mean being clever is all very good, but it isn't a leopard-ly virtue is it? Clearly the natural role of these monkeys is to be our dinner!"
Has it occurred to you that what you call "natural" and "unnatural might be just the inarticulate expression of your own experience in life? Have you seen much of the world? Might it be a bit pre-mature for you to declare what is "natural" and what is "unnatural"?
Females are prettier than males in humans
So you think that Kathy Bates is without doubt prettier then Orlando Bloom?
While there may indeed be gender based difference in attitudes, skills, and proclivities, they are in the end statistical differences, and there is huge individual variation. Why would it make any more sense to enforce gender average behavior then to enforce gender average clothing sizes? "You have a 30 inch inseam? That's unnatural! Eveyone knows that the average inseem for a man is 36 inches."
However, what I fail to understand is how people who are supposed biologists can put so much credence in a theory that flies in the face of other established "facts." It is a fact that two different species, when mated, cannot produce reproductible offspring.
A wise man once said "It is not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, but what you know that's not so." Your statement is the sort of broad-brush, general picture that is given to grade school kids by teachers who don't actually know much about the subject. I really think if you'll reflect about what you already know about familiar animals you'll see that your statement is false.
Consider: horses, donkeys, lions, tigers, wolves, and dog are all different species, but the results of mating pairs of them are highly variable. Crossing a lion with a dog, or a dog with a horse won't even produce a fertilized egg. Crossing a horse with a donkey can produce viable offspring, but they are (almost) always sterile. A lion can mate with a tiger to produce a liger or a tigon and the male is always sterile, but the females are often fertile. Dogs can mate with wolves, and both the male and female offspring are usually fertile.
Those are just the big mammals that are familiar even to city dwellers. Things get even more subtle with abalone, sea urchins, worms and insects.
Odds are, if the state is paying for it, they can't afford a laptop
It isn't just a matter of scholarships or financial aid. Tuition usually doesn't cover the full costs of a college education. If you are attending a state school and paying the in-state tuition rate, you are being subsidised by the tax-payers. There is also the issue that admission to college and classroom seats are limited resources, so if you are spending the classtime just dicking around, those resources would be better allocated to someone who is actually going to make use of them.
Re:it would change the pharmaceutical industry
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I contend that if a large US pharmaceutical company is given the choice of getting $10 million once off profit for discovering a cure or 5 million a year for a treatment for symptoms they will take the $5 mil per year
You can contend all you want. I asked for 3 examples of this. You provided 1 example. Can't you come up with two more examples? I don't mean to be a pain in the butt, I'm just looking for evidence that this is stuff you know, as opposed to stuff you believe.
Re:it would change the pharmaceutical industry
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where are these companies like Glaxo Smith Klin or even Daimler Chrysler
If it is a moral imperitive for Daimler Chrysler to be involved in drug research why isn't it a moral imperitive for you to be involved in drug research (assuming you are not)?
Why is a 25 year old company celebrating advances in vaccines it did 100 years ago?
Gee, maybe because last year was the 100 year anniversary of the first industrial production of vaccines? People get sentimental about round numbers.
Things get odd when you start looking at different research units inside multi-nationals and how they are funded.
I am probably almost as prepared to believe evil things about giant corporations as you are, but I didn't ask about that. I asked you for three examples of disease cures being researched outside of the US, but not in the US. You got a hit with the role of H. Pylori in stomach ulcers, but now you're back to making sinister implications without supporting arguments. Can you come up with two more concrete examples?
Re:Why I refuse to even worry about this
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For me, this is another "don't worry, be happy" case, as there is only a very small probability for a danger to a big number of people. Remember the Y2K bug, remember Sadams WMD, remember SARS, remember the mad cow disease? (bonus question: which doesn't fit?) None of these things ever caused real trouble to a major part of the world's population, but on all occasions, people got scared real easy.
I sympathise, because the media (and the public) do love a scary story. However, people sometimes do not respond to sweet reason. The Y2K bug, mad cow, and SARS did not become global problems because folks in key positions took them very seriously and took steps to address the problem. They did so because their technicians and boffins started telling them scary stories about what might happen. Unfortunately the scare stories linger in the media long after their genuine usefulness has disappeared.
As an example of what happens when people don't get appropriately scared, consider the levees in New Orleans. The hydrology wonks have been telling the people of Lousiana for well nigh on a century about the risks of flooding, but for some reason it was never taken as seriously as it needed to be.
Consider the parable of the man who jumped from the top of a tall building. As he pass the 10th floor he shouted out to the horrified onlookers "So far so good!"
Re:it would change the pharmaceutical industry
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How about the budget for Viagra marketing budget being more than the entire R&D budget of the company that makes nearly all of the existing flu vaccines.
But both of those are American companies (Pfizer and Chiron) so it doesn't speak to your claim that American companies are more venal then companies in other countries. This example is nonetheless troubling to me. It certainly seems like a misallocation of resources. However, I think it is not a problem of just the pharmaceutical industry, but of market economies in general: the luxuries of life for folks with money will be serviced before the life or death needs of folks without money. But is Pfizer anymore culpable then the rest of us? The world spends billions on friggin ring tones for their celluar phones! Aren't those folks just as shallow as Pfizer? I also must confess that I have not devoted my own career to seeking cures for terrible diseases. If I am not obligated to do so, why is Pfizer?
Then there is the stomach ulcer research in the US that brought out billions of dollars every year in anti-acids while a few guys doing real research fond the culprit and that wiped billions off the ulcer business.
It wasn't like other countries were pouring money into this research either though. It was a couple of lone wolf Australian academics, who were bucking scientific dogma not corporate censorship. I'd also note that H pylori only accounts for 40-60% of stomach ulcers. The other 60%-40% still depend on the palliative drugs.
Check the drugs that are given in the 3rd world where the doctors may have one chance to immunize a kid for everything for their entire life. Most of those drugs aren't made by the US drug industry even though it spends many times more than every one else
This is a little vauge isn't it? The immediate question that springs to my mind is whether the research for the drugs was done in the US, but the manufacturing is done elsewhere. In most cases the manufacturing costs of drugs are trivial compared to the research costs, and wasn't it the research we were talking about anyway?
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
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MRSA
Like the parent poster I think you are confusing resistance with virulence. As far as I know, an untreated staph infection in a wound was just as likely to kill you in 1910 as it is today. However, in 1910, all staph infections were untreated because they had no effective antibiotics. In 1950 treating staph infections was a piece of cake because they largely responded to antibiotics. In 2005 treating staph infections can be tricky because of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, but at worst we're no worse off then we were in 1910.
Contrast that with the influenza virus. Until recently we've had no drug that attacked the flu virus, but the virus's natural genetic variability all by itself generated strains who's virulence ranged from giving you a bad weekend to killing you in 48 hours.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
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In the first place, people like me don't get the flu as I already said, moron.
So what magical property is it that people like you posses that keeps you from getting the flu? It couldn't just be luck could it?
Are you seriously suggesting that evolution works everywhere *but* in the realm of colds and flus and that they don't become more harmful and vicious over time to compensate for the medicinal walls they hit this year?
Here you betray a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of resistance and evolution. You are conflating virulence and resistance, but they are independent traits. Some bacteria have indeed become resistant to antibiotics, but that doesn't mean they are any more virulent. It has just put us back on the same footing with them we had 70 years ago. Sure enough, a random mutation may result in radical changes in virulence, but those mutations are not selected for or against by vaccinations, antibiotics, anti-virals, or soap and water.
Think about it: can you name any disease that has become more harmful and vicious over time due to "medicinal walls"?
I hate people who get flu shots every year as if the flu is personally targetting THEM and they're 90 years old and can't fight it off or something.
Of course then there are those of us who spend a lot of time working around 90 year olds, and don't want to infect them during that period when we've been infected but are asymptomatic.
Re:The 1957 influenza epidemic
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The influenza virus in the 1957 influenza epidemic may have actually been considerably worse than that in the 1918 epidemic.
This doesn't jibe with the little I know about the 1918 epidemic. The 1957 epidemic was more typical of flu epidemics in that it mostly killed the very young and the very old. The 1918 epidemic killed a lot of young adults in otherwise good health, in some cases in a matter of hours. Do you have some evidence behind your statement or is it just your opinion? I highly recommend The Great Influenza by John Barry for background on the 1918 pandemic.
Re:it would change the pharmaceutical industry
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This is in sharp contrast to the pharmaceutical research done in other countries that are more interested in finding real cures.
OK, I'll bite. How about providing three examples of pharamaceutical research into cures being done in other countries for which there is no equivalent effort in the US?
Am I the only one, having a somewhat strong immune system, that is not in the least bit worried about a pandemic?
Oddly enough the 1918 flu was especially hard on those with mature, fully functional, immune systems. The age of fatalities from most epidemics takes the form of a "bathtub" curve, killing the very young and the very old. However, many of the fatalities in the 1918 epidemic were young adults who died in in a matter of days or even hours, despite having previously been in good health. It's thought that the flu virus triggered a massive over-reaction of their immune systems called a cytokine storm. In the process of trying to kill virus infected cells, the victims' immune systems ended up killing so much of their lung tissue that they died. For a history and analysys of the 1918 pandemic I highly recommend the book The Great Influenza by John M. Barry.
To continue the cheery news, the current strain of bird flu also seems to be able to induce this kind of immune over-reaction.
Unless your technological work has something to do with religion or evolution, I can't see where this decision makes a friggin' difference to a technological company.
But there are a lot of bio-tech companies that do have "something to do with evolution"! Many of the central algorithms in bioinformatics are based on statistical models of evolution. These algorithms are used to search for genes and regulatory sites in the human genome and the genome of other species, an activity which is of considerable importance to medicine. Does Intelligent Design or creationism provide me with alternative models that I can use to do my gene finding?
Bill has continually sold shares into the stock market floating millions and millions of shares into the marketplace that buyers have to absorb.
To first order, a company's stock price is the market's judgment of the expected total return of the company over its lifetime. While the total number of shares outstanding is critical to the price of a stock, who actually holds the shares is not that important except insofar as it determines who has control over the company. If Bill Gates were minting new shares, you'd have room to complain, but he's not. If he were moving his money from Microsoft stock to other investments, other investors might take that as evidence that the stock is overvalued, but he's not doing that either.
Which they do at a relatively cheap price, and the stock has not moved during one of the largest bull runs in Nasdaq history, while company sales and profits have been increasing at a fantastic rate.
Probably because those fantasic sales and profits were already figured into the stock price when it doubled several times back in the 90s. The stock price won't change until the outlook for Microsoft's profits change.
Essentially continually depressing the stock price by dumping by the millions of shares, by the billions of dollars he is taking everyone ELSES money and deciding what to do with it. What makes him more qualified to do with the money than ME? Keep his voting shares, give him a big raise, or even a huge freakin' bonus that he can spend however he likes, but keep your freakin' hands out of my pocket.
Of course using this logic, no one should ever sell anything, because it depresses the price for the folks who have yet to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
A CPU contains multiple sub-devices that carry out functions like arithmetic logic, floating point logic, memory address decoding, instruction decoding etc. In many CISC processors (or CISC descended like current Intel x86 chips) a microcode language that controls the sub-devices is embedded in the processor. As the instructions from a program are decoded, each "machine code" instruction will be turned into a sequence of microcode instructions. The CPU may execute the microcode instructions out of their natural order to improve efficiency. For example, moving an arithmetic operation between two memory fetches. This is what I was meant by "Intel optimziing your code". See this article for more information.
My point was that even programming in machine language is still at least one layer of abstraction above what is happening on the CPU.
Ooooh! Those evil layers of abstraction! I suppose you've figured out some way to write directly to microcode because, after all, you understand how to optimize your program better then Intel does. Doubtless you drop your own memory manager into all your applications, since lord knows what the OS will do when you call alloc or free.
Looking at the bug list for any substantial application will demonstrate that even very talented programmers cannot write software using C and C++ without buffer overruns, heap corruption, and memory leaks. Sometimes the requirements dictate that's what we have to live with, but sometimes it is sheer masochism or machismo. Every hour you spend chasing down dangling pointers is an hour you can't spend improving the algorithms you are implementing.
I hardly know where to begin.
First, there is rather a lot of evidence that most point mutations are neutral. This is because a the genetic code is redundant. For example both CCC and CCA code for the amino acid proline. Markedly beneficial mutations are rare but not so rare that they are not produced in the laboratory every day. How about a mutation that extends the life of mice? Second, speciation has frequently been observed in the wild. In fact one of the papers cited in the parent article in Science was on the speciation process in European blackcaps. Are you actually familiar with information theory? A lot of ID proponents seem to toss it around without actually understanding it. Let me offer you this quote from The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (Illini Books edition, 1963 pg 8)
What you are calling "new information" is from the point of view of communication theory a loss of information because it represents the failure of DNA replication to produce a perfect copy of the original message. Information theory offers no opinion whether this loss of information will bring good or ill to the organism.
Most of the important algorithms in bioinformatics and computational biology are implicitly based on evolutionary ideas. Some in fact use explicit models of DNA evolution. These are algorithms are being used with considerable success to find genes and regulatory elements in our genome. Why don't the ID advocates come up with their own algorithms and gene finding software. We'll pit them head to head and see who's better at finding genes.
It isn't the shape of the Faraday cages that's special. It's the size of the mesh. The mesh has to be significantly smaller then the wavelength of the radiation you are trying to keep out. Microwaves have a wavelength of 1-300mm. The wave-length of gamma rays is less then 0.00000000001mm. That's much smaller then the distance between atoms in a typical solid, so the idea of a mesh becomes kind of absurd.
I doubt that the problem with shielding is communications. After all you could put the shielding on the side facing the radiation, and leave the side towards the crew open. Gamma radiation doesn't go around corners. Or, as others have suggested, you could just run a cable to the robot. I think the actual problem is weight. Lead is heavy. You might be able to pile a ton of lead around the cpus and memroy, and just crank up the horsepower of the motors. However, by their very purpose you can't put the sensors behind lead sheilds, since all they would see then would be the lead shield. Not very helpful.
Do you understand that there is a difference between civil law and criminal law? For the most part libel is not a crime, but is instead covered by civil law. The only person who could bring this to court is Mr. Siegenthaler and he would have to prove (by the preponderance of the evidence) that he had suffered damages from the libel. Mr. Siegenthaler has said that he has no interest in pursuing a libel case.
There are a few states that do have criminal libel laws but they have rarely been invoked, and when they have they have often been struck down by higher courts.
In the atmosphere C-14 is created by cosmic rays hitting N-14. The balance between new C-14 being created by cosmic rays and existing C-14 decaying away keeps the ratio of C-14 to C-12 nearly constant in the atmosphere. Once the carbon gets buried in the ground it is shielded from cosmic rays so no new C-14 is created and the existing atoms begin deaying away. You don't need to know what y was, you just need to compare the ratio C-14 to C-12 in the atmosphere to the ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the sample.
The obvious question to follow that one is "How do we know the atomospheric ratio of C-14 to C-12 has remained constant?". In fact it has not! But by comparing C-14 dating to other dating methods the C-14 date can be calibrated. Lots of different methods have been used to calibrate the dates produced by C-14 measurements: historicial records, tree rings, strata in ice cores, and sedimentation in lakes, to mention a few.
In this case strata in ice cores are particularly significant. If you actually read the news article that is the subject of this thread, they don't even mention C-14 dating. Even in Antarctica the rate at which snow accumulates depends on the season, and the passage of the seasons leaves distinct strata in the ice. The strata in the ice can be counted just like tree rings to measure the age of a sample. These strata also make your comet disater hypotheses very unlikely, since you wouldn't expect a single large disaster to leave fine strata like these.
Your questions are good, but you have to bear in mind that the science stories you read in the newspaper are the tip of the iceberg. It's a bit like reading "Between 1939 and 1945 a general war was fought in Europe between the Allies and the Axis. The Allies won." True and informative as it is, the full story is a lot more complex. Very few articles in scientific journals claim to disucss anything as grand or definitive as 'Human Activity Responsible for Global Warming' Most are more along the lines of: 'Devensian glacigenic sedimentation and landscape evolution in the Cardigan area of southwest Wales'. These are guaranteed to put any non-specialist to sleep, but they make up the body of critical supporting evidence for the big science stories that reach the papers. If you really want to read the web of evidence that supports things like C-14 data you should make your way to a university library and start chewing through the actual scientific journals.
Actually UNIX evolved on the mini-computer platforms: first the PDP and then the VAX. The mainframe folks despised UNIX as an upstart, and the UNIX folks despised the PC as a "toy" computer. Both camps had good reasons for their opinions, but in the end they were missing great opportunities.
Back in 1982-1986 when Microsoft and a few other vendors were selling UNIX flavors for microprocessors, they did not sell well. You have to bear in mind that the UNIX of that day was not the UNIX of today. There was no formal system of open source software, and AT&T got a big cut of every sale, so it was very expensive. UNIX was buggier back then then so "kernel panics" (analogous to the Windows BSOD) were not uncommon. Most installations had to have an expensive service contract or had to hire their own admin who at least knew shell programming, and preferably knew enough 'C' to decode core dumps.
It is my opinion that although the UNIX OS was unquestionably superior, the UNIX end-user application model of the time was hopeless. Most of the big UNIX software shops wrote multi-user applications for display on serial terminals. They sold those applications for $10k/per seat/per year, knowing they could only sell a few thousand copies. It was Apple, IBM, and Microsoft's (and many others) insight that very few businesses would spend $25,000 and hire an admin to give their employees vi and troff, but millions of business's would spend $5000 to give their employees Wordperfect and 1-2-3. If the OS was so limited that the only debugging tool was the Big Red Switch, so much the better!
Umm, perhaps this was before your time, or perhaps you're just going for the wry comment, but back in the day Microsoft had it's own version of UNIX: XENIX. They originally sold it on the Tandy and later ported it to the 386. They gradually sold their UNIX business off to *shudder* SCO. In fact I believe at one point AT&T had to by the rights to sell UNIX on the Intel x86 architecture back from Microsoft. Whatever Bill Gates' many sins, not knowing UNIX is not one of them.
Carbon dating works by measuring the ratio of the number of C-14 atoms to the number of C-12 atom. Carbon 12 is a stable isotope, but Carbon-14 is radioactive, decaying into nitrogen. The amount of C-12 doesn't change over time, so that can be used as your yardstick for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
First off, let's point out that what you are saying now is quite different from your initial statement. You said point blank that fertile hybrids, never, ever happened. Please have the good grace to admit you were wrong on that point. Doesn't it give you cause to wonder what other elementary facts from biology you are wrong about? Dogs (canis familiaris) and wolves (canis lupus) have been recognized as different species since Carlus Linneus began assigning Latin names to living things. You are trying to change the definition of a species to fit your preconceptions, which preconceptions as I've pointed out are wrong. Evolution does not predict the existence of fish-bird hybrids, but rather predicts that the relative inter-fertility of two species depends on the amount of time they have been undergoing independent evolution. This prediciton can then be tested against the fossil record or in the laboratory, with fruit files and abalone.
Evolution makes no assumption to the existence or non-existence of God.
No, because that is not where they stop, it is just the starting point. They then use that starting point to make predictions about details they have yet to observe, testing their initial picture.
Were you aware that computational biologists use simple mathematical models of evolution to improve the accuracy of their gene finding software? When will the creationists or ID advocates come forward with a mathematical model of their own for gene structure so that we can test the two models?
Maybe you haven't read much history, but this "unnatural" argument has been given in all ages and all places by the folks who were on top the social order to justify keeping their place, and by those who were on the bottom of the heap to justify rebelling. Marxists call it the force of history. The founders of the US called it natural rights. Read Dickens and Jane Austen and you'll hear plenty of characters from the landed gentry talking about how "unnatural" it is for all the locals to be giving up their positions as servants and becoming merchants and tradesman. Read Plato's "Republic" to learn why some men are "naturally" slaves. Oddly enough they all disagree violently on what is "natural".
Hell, if there was a leopard capable of speech 50,000 years ago I'm sure it could have given you a long harangue about how "unnatural" it was for these naked monkeys to be fighting back with stone knives when attacked. "Oh yes, I'm sure they are very clever, but look at the physical differences between us! We are fast and strong and have claws and teeth like razors. I mean being clever is all very good, but it isn't a leopard-ly virtue is it? Clearly the natural role of these monkeys is to be our dinner!"
Has it occurred to you that what you call "natural" and "unnatural might be just the inarticulate expression of your own experience in life? Have you seen much of the world? Might it be a bit pre-mature for you to declare what is "natural" and what is "unnatural"?
So you think that Kathy Bates is without doubt prettier then Orlando Bloom?
While there may indeed be gender based difference in attitudes, skills, and proclivities, they are in the end statistical differences, and there is huge individual variation. Why would it make any more sense to enforce gender average behavior then to enforce gender average clothing sizes? "You have a 30 inch inseam? That's unnatural! Eveyone knows that the average inseem for a man is 36 inches."
A wise man once said "It is not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, but what you know that's not so." Your statement is the sort of broad-brush, general picture that is given to grade school kids by teachers who don't actually know much about the subject. I really think if you'll reflect about what you already know about familiar animals you'll see that your statement is false.
Consider: horses, donkeys, lions, tigers, wolves, and dog are all different species, but the results of mating pairs of them are highly variable. Crossing a lion with a dog, or a dog with a horse won't even produce a fertilized egg. Crossing a horse with a donkey can produce viable offspring, but they are (almost) always sterile. A lion can mate with a tiger to produce a liger or a tigon and the male is always sterile, but the females are often fertile. Dogs can mate with wolves, and both the male and female offspring are usually fertile.
Those are just the big mammals that are familiar even to city dwellers. Things get even more subtle with abalone, sea urchins, worms and insects.
It isn't just a matter of scholarships or financial aid. Tuition usually doesn't cover the full costs of a college education. If you are attending a state school and paying the in-state tuition rate, you are being subsidised by the tax-payers. There is also the issue that admission to college and classroom seats are limited resources, so if you are spending the classtime just dicking around, those resources would be better allocated to someone who is actually going to make use of them.
You can contend all you want. I asked for 3 examples of this. You provided 1 example. Can't you come up with two more examples? I don't mean to be a pain in the butt, I'm just looking for evidence that this is stuff you know, as opposed to stuff you believe.
Gee, maybe because last year was the 100 year anniversary of the first industrial production of vaccines? People get sentimental about round numbers.
Did you look at the product pipeline on the Chrion web site?
I am probably almost as prepared to believe evil things about giant corporations as you are, but I didn't ask about that. I asked you for three examples of disease cures being researched outside of the US, but not in the US. You got a hit with the role of H. Pylori in stomach ulcers, but now you're back to making sinister implications without supporting arguments. Can you come up with two more concrete examples?
I sympathise, because the media (and the public) do love a scary story. However, people sometimes do not respond to sweet reason. The Y2K bug, mad cow, and SARS did not become global problems because folks in key positions took them very seriously and took steps to address the problem. They did so because their technicians and boffins started telling them scary stories about what might happen. Unfortunately the scare stories linger in the media long after their genuine usefulness has disappeared.
As an example of what happens when people don't get appropriately scared, consider the levees in New Orleans. The hydrology wonks have been telling the people of Lousiana for well nigh on a century about the risks of flooding, but for some reason it was never taken as seriously as it needed to be.
Consider the parable of the man who jumped from the top of a tall building. As he pass the 10th floor he shouted out to the horrified onlookers "So far so good!"
It wasn't like other countries were pouring money into this research either though. It was a couple of lone wolf Australian academics, who were bucking scientific dogma not corporate censorship. I'd also note that H pylori only accounts for 40-60% of stomach ulcers. The other 60%-40% still depend on the palliative drugs.
This is a little vauge isn't it? The immediate question that springs to my mind is whether the research for the drugs was done in the US, but the manufacturing is done elsewhere. In most cases the manufacturing costs of drugs are trivial compared to the research costs, and wasn't it the research we were talking about anyway?
Like the parent poster I think you are confusing resistance with virulence. As far as I know, an untreated staph infection in a wound was just as likely to kill you in 1910 as it is today. However, in 1910, all staph infections were untreated because they had no effective antibiotics. In 1950 treating staph infections was a piece of cake because they largely responded to antibiotics. In 2005 treating staph infections can be tricky because of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, but at worst we're no worse off then we were in 1910.
Contrast that with the influenza virus. Until recently we've had no drug that attacked the flu virus, but the virus's natural genetic variability all by itself generated strains who's virulence ranged from giving you a bad weekend to killing you in 48 hours.
So what magical property is it that people like you posses that keeps you from getting the flu? It couldn't just be luck could it?
Here you betray a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of resistance and evolution. You are conflating virulence and resistance, but they are independent traits. Some bacteria have indeed become resistant to antibiotics, but that doesn't mean they are any more virulent. It has just put us back on the same footing with them we had 70 years ago. Sure enough, a random mutation may result in radical changes in virulence, but those mutations are not selected for or against by vaccinations, antibiotics, anti-virals, or soap and water.
Think about it: can you name any disease that has become more harmful and vicious over time due to "medicinal walls"?
Of course then there are those of us who spend a lot of time working around 90 year olds, and don't want to infect them during that period when we've been infected but are asymptomatic.
This doesn't jibe with the little I know about the 1918 epidemic. The 1957 epidemic was more typical of flu epidemics in that it mostly killed the very young and the very old. The 1918 epidemic killed a lot of young adults in otherwise good health, in some cases in a matter of hours. Do you have some evidence behind your statement or is it just your opinion? I highly recommend The Great Influenza by John Barry for background on the 1918 pandemic.
OK, I'll bite. How about providing three examples of pharamaceutical research into cures being done in other countries for which there is no equivalent effort in the US?
Oddly enough the 1918 flu was especially hard on those with mature, fully functional, immune systems. The age of fatalities from most epidemics takes the form of a "bathtub" curve, killing the very young and the very old. However, many of the fatalities in the 1918 epidemic were young adults who died in in a matter of days or even hours, despite having previously been in good health. It's thought that the flu virus triggered a massive over-reaction of their immune systems called a cytokine storm. In the process of trying to kill virus infected cells, the victims' immune systems ended up killing so much of their lung tissue that they died. For a history and analysys of the 1918 pandemic I highly recommend the book The Great Influenza by John M. Barry.
To continue the cheery news, the current strain of bird flu also seems to be able to induce this kind of immune over-reaction.
But there are a lot of bio-tech companies that do have "something to do with evolution"! Many of the central algorithms in bioinformatics are based on statistical models of evolution. These algorithms are used to search for genes and regulatory sites in the human genome and the genome of other species, an activity which is of considerable importance to medicine. Does Intelligent Design or creationism provide me with alternative models that I can use to do my gene finding?
To first order, a company's stock price is the market's judgment of the expected total return of the company over its lifetime. While the total number of shares outstanding is critical to the price of a stock, who actually holds the shares is not that important except insofar as it determines who has control over the company. If Bill Gates were minting new shares, you'd have room to complain, but he's not. If he were moving his money from Microsoft stock to other investments, other investors might take that as evidence that the stock is overvalued, but he's not doing that either.
Probably because those fantasic sales and profits were already figured into the stock price when it doubled several times back in the 90s. The stock price won't change until the outlook for Microsoft's profits change.
Of course using this logic, no one should ever sell anything, because it depresses the price for the folks who have yet to sell.