But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Didn't the OP say the motivation behind the research was to protect against extinction? The means may be perceived as cruel and horrible, but if it preserves an species that would otherwise be lost, the end is not. In any case, the motivations for doing GE on humans are different than the ones they mention here. It's not like we're very close to extinction...
After reading that, and seeing conceptual pictures of how these "landings" occur, I think that what makes Mars "hard" is our solutions to landing problems, and maybe even transportation. I don't know what we could do about transportation, but the landings are obviously way to [sic] stressful for delicate equipment.
Consider the following:
These probes are traveling to Mars at (least) 19,300 km/hr.
It needs to travel that fast to get out
of Earth's gravitational field and orbit.
The only economically feasible way to
slow down a craft going that speed is aerobraking.
You need to be in a planet's atmosphere to
aerobrake.
Mars' atmosphere is (at most) a few hundred
kilometers thick.
Anything going that fast isn't going to have a long time to slow down.
Thus the problem is unavoidable-- you must go
from 19,300 km/hr to 0 km/hr in a matter of minutes. If you can think of a method to do that that's
less "stressful" than NASA's, we're all eager to
hear it.
TRUE: C is a programming language
TRUE: Linux is a kernel
FALSE: Perl is easy to read and has a great syntax
TRUE: Saying Perl is hard to read is not flamebait
FALSE: Perl is the only language one can obfuscate
TRUE: Perl can be written clearly
TRUE: Saying "Saying Perl is hard to read is not flamebait" is ironic
Re:Can we use languages not by lunatics?
on
Perl 5.8.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah! He's a Christian, and therefore a lunatic.
Clearly Perl's not worth anything because of that.
Oh, but he's not only one! Isn't Donald Knuth a
Christian? Everybody, take your copies of ``The Art of Computer Programming'' and burn them. Knuth's clearly a nut job!
But let's not stop there! Augustine, Martin Luther, Johann Sebastian Bach, Soren Kirkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Moore, Dietrich Bonhoffer, John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, J.R.R. Tolkien... all obviously insane. I don't know why we keep printing their works.
I suppose it's easier to blame someone else than to admit your movie is crap.
Ladies and gentlemen of the press... Thank you for coming.
As you may know, LCTR:TCOL (catchy
name, don't you know think?) didn't perform
as well as expected its first weekend. We producers were confused at first, but then we realized the film
is a big steaming pile of monkey shit, and have only ourselves to blame. Questions?
What's next is.... well it *won't* be video games blamed for teenage pregnancy... I think.
Well, there probably *is* a statistical relationship between sexual experience and video game use-- though I suspect the correlation
coefficient has a big honkin' minus sign in
front of it.
... but for every dumb shitty employee working at a retail place that you look down on, there are three more who are just there until they get done with school and can afford to direct all their time to a better career who are most likely as intelligent (if not moreso) than you.
I'm sorry, this really bothers me.
Your post
is much better than many of the others in the
thread, but there's still an inherent assumption-- those that are "intelligent" or "skilled" will eventually get educations and professional jobs
while those that are not will not. That somehow,
given enough time, the world will sort itself
out, with the talented naturally settling into
the white-collar class, and the not-so-talented remaining behind to clean the talented's bathrooms.
Listen. The world is not a meritocracy.
It bears repeating. The world is not a meritocracy.
I suspect most/.ers are anchored safely in the cocoon of the educated, professional, middle-class world. I'd be much
surprised if the vast majority of us aren't
college-educated (or will be, at some point).
We are part of a geek culture that prides itself on
the fact that good work (or good code) will be
rewarded while not-so-good work will be criticized or ignored. But don't fool yourself
into thinking that the real world is anything like
that!
Every day, talented, gifted, smart people are forced to give up education plans for reasons that have nothing to do with their intelligence. Maybe a parent or spouse got sick, and there wasn't enough insurance to cover the bills. Maybe there was a car crash, with long, drawn-out lawsuits. Maybe they had the misfortune to be born poor. Maybe they got pregnant or went bankrupt or went through any one of a thousand other life-changing events. (And
let's not even consider the situation if they
happen not to be white...)
Maybe at the end of all of that, they're a grown adult, with a family, trying to make ends meet working full-time at Blockbuster or Wal-Mart. Does that make them any less intelligent, or skilled?
There are many many reasons why real people (excluding arrogant college students like yourself) might end up in the working class
rather than behind a white-collar desk. Opportunity, resources and money have just as much an effect as intelligence. If we end up
calling a person in that situation to be just
a "dumb shitty employee", we should be ashamed of ourselves!
Why they aren't using.NET is a
FAQ.
The current (CVS) parrot not only runs assembled bytecode, but also will parse, optimize (to a certain degree) and
execute Parrot assembly directly.
Two real pages for what Perl 6 is really about
on
State of the Onion 7
·
· Score: 2, Informative
MS bites. I think we pretty much agree on that. But to take MS-bashing to the point where we revel in images of the chairman of the company being graphically dismembered, we've crossed a line somewhere.
That's really naive - it's just marketing. Their foundation is just an other Microsoft way of forcing others into Windows. It's pretty clever for it's tax deductable so it's much cheeper then ordinary marketing. That is you taxparyer contribute and help the Gates foundation to brainwash thous poor kids.
No it's not worth respect.
I'm all for a little cynicism, but isn't there such a thing as too much? Bill Gates' foundation has given away 5.5 billion dollars.
That's nearly 10% of the total assets of his company ($67 billion), and a much bigger share of his own personal net worth. And more than half of it was given away for global health improvement. How exactly does that brainwash people into using Windows? The people who are getting that money aren't concerned with what's on their desktop-- they're worried about dying of AIDS or tuberculosis!
Listen, I realize that his personal giving does provide good publicity for Microsoft, and some of the things that company does makes me want to dry-heave, e.g. donating "free" software to the countries thinking about switching to open source alternatives. But to say that the man doesn't deserve any respect even after giving several billion dollars to charity-- causes that help the millions of people that are dying in third world countries-- well, that's just cold. I'm hoping that that your message's just flamebait, but if you're really that cynical, I feel bad for you.
But their conventional wisdom still considers it useless, whatever they call it (introns, apparently).
I really don't think that modern geneticists consider introns useless. It has been pretty well established that they play important biological roles, as other people have pointed out here.
What might tempt a person to consider introns useless is the fact that they don't fit into what is called the central dogma of molecular biology-- DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA which is then translated into protein. Introns are DNA segments that don't follow that rule. Yet in higher organisms, they are required for the whole process to take place.
So they may appear useless in a simple model, and if that's what you mean by "conventional wisdom", you may be right. But trust me when I say that the understanding of modern-day molecular geneticists of introns and exons follows a much more complicated model.
Frankly, the mapping between biological constructs (DNA, RNA, proteins) and computer science constructs (source, objects, virtual machines) is not a simple 1:1. All of those molecules fill different roles in different contexts. For example, RNA can act as "code", as an "executable", and as a "virtual machine" that "runs" other RNA code, depending on what sequence it has and in what place it is made.
The computer science analogies are actually quite good for describing isolated biological processes, but don't take it too far, because most biological systems as a whole usually too complicated to be explained precisely in those terms.
Not to mention the roles that introns play in generating splice variants (alternative ways of assembling exons in an RNA transcript or protein) or in protein folding. That explanation sounds a little too vague and overgeneralized to me (and I am a biophysicist).
But hey, the math's way over my head, and it involves chaos theory, so it must be right, right?
(Of course, that's a popular science article, not a formal report, so we should cut them a little slack for that.)
Maybe a programming analogy for the introns (non-genetic DNA) is that they are subroutines. The exons (genes) use different subroutine calls, resulting in different executables (people).
A better analogy is that the exons are the source files and the introns are the makefiles. The introns don't contribute any actual "code" to the gene products (proteins, RNA) produced, they just provide instructions for their construction and assembly.
> > Removal of this "junk-DNA", however, has proven to be lethal. > > Does this scare the shit out of anyone else?
Look at it this way. Damn near *anything* you do to DNA (either exon or intron) is lethal to the cell in which it is found-- but it's okay because adult organisms have trillions and trillions of copies of the same DNA blueprint (one per cell). If I modify or mutate the DNA in a cell in my body, the chances are fair to good that that cell will just die. Think of it as a massively parallel RAID cluster of DNA.
True, there is a chance that I'll modify the part of the DNA's instructions in such a way that that particular cell will start growing uncontrollably, but there's a name for that: cancer.
So maybe the better question to ask is: does cancer scare the shit out of you?
What the press release is skimming over is the fact that COX-2 and COX-3 are very similar. It was originally discovered as a *variant* of COX-2 that specifically responded to the same inhibitor (which are used in biochemistry as a marker for a particular enzyme) but had slightly different chemical properties (it binds acetominophen as well). See this paper from the same lab in 1999.
So the logic is more like this:
1. We know that NSAIDs block COX-1 and COX-2, and this blockage is responsible for their analgesic activies.
2. Acetominophen blocks a variant of COX-2 (called COX-3) in much the same way that other NSAIDs block that class of enzymes.
3. Since COX-2 and COX-3 are chemically similar (possibly variants of the same gene), we presume they have similar functions.
Therefore, acetominophen acts as an analgesic because it blocks COX-3. It's not absolute proof (and undoubtedly they shall research it further!) but it is in fact very likely. In any case, this most recent study is only saying that COX-3 is found in human hearts and brains-- they're mainly trying to prove that the variant they discovered previously is actually found in vivo.
How do you:
Insert a bibliography?
Do statistical analysis in Calc?
Write a plugin?
Get help? (Every time I try to pull up the
Help dialog I get the headers of all the
topics but no actual information).
These are probably due to my own ignorance, so I apologize in advance-- but the lack of documentation in particular has made it difficult
for me personally to use.
So even if MS Office has some unique features today, it likely won't for long.
I agree! Hence the parenthetical "yet" in the prior post. I think that OpenOffice will be very competitive in the not-so-distant future. I'm merely pointing out that there are a few hurdles they still have to leap, that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Didn't the OP say the motivation behind the research was to protect against extinction? The means may be perceived as cruel and horrible, but if it preserves an species that would otherwise be lost, the end is not. In any case, the motivations for doing GE on humans are different than the ones they mention here. It's not like we're very close to extinction...
(Though I suspect that depends who you ask).
Is it just me, or is anyone else worried that YOU'RE WINNER going to become this year's ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US?
Consider the following:
Thus the problem is unavoidable-- you must go from 19,300 km/hr to 0 km/hr in a matter of minutes. If you can think of a method to do that that's less "stressful" than NASA's, we're all eager to hear it.
Just promise me there won't be an International Talk-like-a-Warchalker Day...
One improvised drum solo and you take down the whole LAN...
TRUE: C is a programming language
TRUE: Linux is a kernel
FALSE: Perl is easy to read and has a great syntax
TRUE: Saying Perl is hard to read is not flamebait
FALSE: Perl is the only language one can obfuscate
TRUE: Perl can be written clearly
TRUE: Saying "Saying Perl is hard to read is not flamebait" is ironic
Yeah! He's a Christian, and therefore a lunatic. Clearly Perl's not worth anything because of that. Oh, but he's not only one! Isn't Donald Knuth a Christian? Everybody, take your copies of ``The Art of Computer Programming'' and burn them. Knuth's clearly a nut job!
But let's not stop there! Augustine, Martin Luther, Johann Sebastian Bach, Soren Kirkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Moore, Dietrich Bonhoffer, John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, J.R.R. Tolkien... all obviously insane. I don't know why we keep printing their works.
(Stupid troll. Made me flame.)
I suppose it's easier to blame someone else than to admit your movie is crap.
Ladies and gentlemen of the press... Thank you for coming. As you may know, LCTR:TCOL (catchy name, don't you know think?) didn't perform as well as expected its first weekend. We producers were confused at first, but then we realized the film is a big steaming pile of monkey shit, and have only ourselves to blame. Questions?
What's next is.... well it *won't* be video games blamed for teenage pregnancy... I think.
Well, there probably *is* a statistical relationship between sexual experience and video game use-- though I suspect the correlation coefficient has a big honkin' minus sign in front of it.
Well, Columbia wasn't the only Space Shuttle you Yanks have, was it?!?!
Yes, but given the fact they've tended to, well, explode, we're a little reluctant to send another right now.
I'm sorry, this really bothers me.
Your post is much better than many of the others in the thread, but there's still an inherent assumption-- those that are "intelligent" or "skilled" will eventually get educations and professional jobs while those that are not will not. That somehow, given enough time, the world will sort itself out, with the talented naturally settling into the white-collar class, and the not-so-talented remaining behind to clean the talented's bathrooms.
Listen. The world is not a meritocracy.
It bears repeating. The world is not a meritocracy.
I suspect most /.ers are anchored safely in the cocoon of the educated, professional, middle-class world. I'd be much
surprised if the vast majority of us aren't
college-educated (or will be, at some point).
We are part of a geek culture that prides itself on
the fact that good work (or good code) will be
rewarded while not-so-good work will be criticized or ignored. But don't fool yourself
into thinking that the real world is anything like
that!
Every day, talented, gifted, smart people are forced to give up education plans for reasons that have nothing to do with their intelligence. Maybe a parent or spouse got sick, and there wasn't enough insurance to cover the bills. Maybe there was a car crash, with long, drawn-out lawsuits. Maybe they had the misfortune to be born poor. Maybe they got pregnant or went bankrupt or went through any one of a thousand other life-changing events. (And let's not even consider the situation if they happen not to be white...) Maybe at the end of all of that, they're a grown adult, with a family, trying to make ends meet working full-time at Blockbuster or Wal-Mart. Does that make them any less intelligent, or skilled?
There are many many reasons why real people (excluding arrogant college students like yourself) might end up in the working class rather than behind a white-collar desk. Opportunity, resources and money have just as much an effect as intelligence. If we end up calling a person in that situation to be just a "dumb shitty employee", we should be ashamed of ourselves!
Why they aren't using .NET is a
FAQ.
The current (CVS) parrot not only runs assembled bytecode, but also will parse, optimize (to a certain degree) and
execute Parrot assembly directly.
Try here or here.
Just trust that there are many talented people working on Perl 6.
(Please pardon the pedantry. Pet peeve.)
Well said.
MS bites. I think we pretty much agree on that. But to take MS-bashing to the point where we revel in images of the chairman of the company being graphically dismembered, we've crossed a line somewhere.
That's really naive - it's just marketing. Their foundation is just an other Microsoft way of forcing others into Windows. It's pretty clever for it's tax deductable so it's much cheeper then ordinary marketing. That is you taxparyer contribute and help the Gates foundation to brainwash thous poor kids.
No it's not worth respect.
I'm all for a little cynicism, but isn't there such a thing as too much? Bill Gates' foundation has given away 5.5 billion dollars. That's nearly 10% of the total assets of his company ($67 billion), and a much bigger share of his own personal net worth. And more than half of it was given away for global health improvement. How exactly does that brainwash people into using Windows? The people who are getting that money aren't concerned with what's on their desktop-- they're worried about dying of AIDS or tuberculosis!
Listen, I realize that his personal giving does provide good publicity for Microsoft, and some of the things that company does makes me want to dry-heave, e.g. donating "free" software to the countries thinking about switching to open source alternatives. But to say that the man doesn't deserve any respect even after giving several billion dollars to charity-- causes that help the millions of people that are dying in third world countries-- well, that's just cold. I'm hoping that that your message's just flamebait, but if you're really that cynical, I feel bad for you.
I really don't think that modern geneticists consider introns useless. It has been pretty well established that they play important biological roles, as other people have pointed out here.
What might tempt a person to consider introns useless is the fact that they don't fit into what is called the central dogma of molecular biology-- DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA which is then translated into protein. Introns are DNA segments that don't follow that rule. Yet in higher organisms, they are required for the whole process to take place.
So they may appear useless in a simple model, and if that's what you mean by "conventional wisdom", you may be right. But trust me when I say that the understanding of modern-day molecular geneticists of introns and exons follows a much more complicated model.
Geneticists don't call it junk DNA. Journalists who write science articles for laypeople call it junk DNA. There's a difference.
The computer science analogies are actually quite good for describing isolated biological processes, but don't take it too far, because most biological systems as a whole usually too complicated to be explained precisely in those terms.
Not to mention the roles that introns play in generating splice variants (alternative ways of assembling exons in an RNA transcript or protein) or in protein folding. That explanation sounds a little too vague and overgeneralized to me (and I am a biophysicist).
But hey, the math's way over my head, and it involves chaos theory, so it must be right, right?
(Of course, that's a popular science article, not a formal report, so we should cut them a little slack for that.)
Maybe a programming analogy for the introns (non-genetic DNA) is that they are subroutines. The exons (genes) use different subroutine calls, resulting in different executables (people).
A better analogy is that the exons are the source files and the introns are the makefiles. The introns don't contribute any actual "code" to the gene products (proteins, RNA) produced, they just provide instructions for their construction and assembly.
> > Removal of this "junk-DNA", however, has proven to be lethal.
>
> Does this scare the shit out of anyone else?
Look at it this way. Damn near *anything* you do to DNA (either exon or intron) is lethal to the cell in which it is found-- but it's okay because adult organisms have trillions and trillions of copies of the same DNA blueprint (one per cell). If I modify or mutate the DNA in a cell in my body, the chances are fair to good that that cell will just die. Think of it as a massively parallel RAID cluster of DNA.
True, there is a chance that I'll modify the part of the DNA's instructions in such a way that that particular cell will start growing uncontrollably, but there's a name for that: cancer.
So maybe the better question to ask is: does cancer scare the shit out of you?
What the press release is skimming over is the fact that COX-2 and COX-3 are very similar. It was originally discovered as a *variant* of COX-2 that specifically responded to the same inhibitor (which are used in biochemistry as a marker for a particular enzyme) but had slightly different chemical properties (it binds acetominophen as well). See this paper from the same lab in 1999. So the logic is more like this:
1. We know that NSAIDs block COX-1 and COX-2, and this blockage is responsible for their analgesic activies.
2. Acetominophen blocks a variant of COX-2 (called COX-3) in much the same way that other NSAIDs block that class of enzymes.
3. Since COX-2 and COX-3 are chemically similar (possibly variants of the same gene), we presume they have similar functions.
Therefore, acetominophen acts as an analgesic because it blocks COX-3. It's not absolute proof (and undoubtedly they shall research it further!) but it is in fact very likely. In any case, this most recent study is only saying that COX-3 is found in human hearts and brains-- they're mainly trying to prove that the variant they discovered previously is actually found in vivo.
How do you:
Insert a bibliography?
Do statistical analysis in Calc?
Write a plugin?
Get help? (Every time I try to pull up the Help dialog I get the headers of all the topics but no actual information).
These are probably due to my own ignorance, so I apologize in advance-- but the lack of documentation in particular has made it difficult for me personally to use.
So even if MS Office has some unique features today, it likely won't for long.
I agree! Hence the parenthetical "yet" in the prior post. I think that OpenOffice will be very competitive in the not-so-distant future. I'm merely pointing out that there are a few hurdles they still have to leap, that's all.
Because he wanted to make corrections to it! If I just wanted him to read the text of it I would have printed it out.