I don't think you realize how printed encyclopedias are written. Basically, they contact someone in a field and they can write basically anything they want and it goes in. Gary Olsen, who was my doctoral advisor, was contacted to write the World Book entry on Archaeabacteria. Now, he knows his stuff, and is honest, so it's a good article. But what if he didn't and wasn't? Certainly I've read just plain wrong things in printed encyclopedias
AFAIK, most open source software comes with the GNU configure script.
Well, your mileage must vary. I rarely come across "configure" except in genuine GNU packages like Emacs. But I'm mostly interested in scientific packages written not by programmers but by scientists who may have not the best software engineering skills and simply use Makefiles
Re:Why IT is annoying
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why don't you install the stuff you need in $HOME?
I do. But sometimes it's not so simple as just editing one line in the Makefile. Lots of software expect themselves to be in/usr or/usr/local.
Plus, there's the annoying limitation that our home directories are only allowed to be 400 megs. (Because they back up the home directories and don't want to back up too much, I suppose)
The problem is IT people can interfere with my work, but what I do doesn't affect them. For example, I'm a scientist. I know Linux inside and out and have been using it at home and elsewhere for over ten years. Yet, I don't have root access to my *own* Linux PC at work, which is behind the firewall. So whenever I need something installed, I need to ask IT, wait weeks, explain what's needed ten times to different IT people, and my productivity is hindered. As far as I'm concerned, IT is more or less useless, as I could do their job in addition to mine. And of course they know that -- that's why they don't give root access to us scientists.
There's a store there that sells various incidentals plus souvenirs (I haven't been there, but I've known two fellow microbiologists who have). McMurdo isn't just a couple of huts like you see in movies -- it's basically a small town of scientists.
Re:Ultima Underworld and other games...
on
Game with God
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Most religions, minus the people, are neither good nor bad.
Yeah, but that's about as meaningful as the NRA's "Guns don't kill people; people do". Just like guns make killing people easier than with a knife, religion makes hating the foreign unbeliever easier than if you just had to hate them for speaking funny.
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"? I would understand if they always wrote "ei", but I see too many instances of "wierd" for that to be true. Odd...
Yes. My landlord (in DC) is named Bernstein, but he always pronounces his name as if it were spelled Bernstien. Makes me want to give him a German textbook so he can learn how his name is supposed to be said.
conservatives believe in freedom too, freedoms is just defined differently...the right to own property and do what you want with it, the right to start a business,
To be rights, wouldn't everyone have to have equal access to these things? That is poor people as well as rich would have to have equal ability to buy property and start businesses. That's maybe a noble goal, but is rather socialistic, which is pretty amusing for "conservative rights".
About as meaningful as false-color images
on
Saturn Hailstorm
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you read the article, you'll find out that this isn't recorded by a microphone inside the spacecraft or anything like that, but is only a representation of impact data. That is, if someone wanted to make the impacts sound like bells, or cow moos or dog barks, those would be equally as valid representations as the "hail" sounding impacts.
Can be, yes. But are they? And do the people checking them over actually have the knowledge to do so properly? At least with Britannica I can be fairly confident that the article was written by an expert in the field. With Wikipedia it may well have been written by some guy with spare time on his hands, enthusiasm, but not much knowledge. Or worse, it may have been written by an expert and then "corrected" by Jo Schmo.
As someone with a doctorate dealing with genomic evolution in microorganisms, I have to say that at least the scientific articles in Wikipedia seem to be reasonably balanced and competently written -- and reasonably up-to-date as well.
Quite often in commercial encyclopedias the articles are quite biased and out-of-date because they are written by a single, well known old guy in the appropriate field, and as Max Planck said, a new idea in science doesn't generally win by converting its opponents -- rather the old opponents die and the new scientific generation is comfortable with the new idea from the start...
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
Yes, you *can* define evolution that way (to be precise, one group of biologists, the population geneticists, do define evolution that way). However, that's an entirely different statement than saying that's the *only* valid definition of evolution, which seems to be what you're implying.
As a molecular evolutionist, I find alleles to be too high level -- I deal with the evolution of sequences themselves. And a zoologist would probably claim that alleles are too low level as zoologists mostly deal in phenotypes.
Minister of Propaganda? Thats an interesting title.
Technically, *any* spread of information favorable to a cause is propaganda. Most corporations for example, have propaganda divisions, but just call them "Public Relations". The idea that propaganda must be false is a misconception.
Your perception is mostly incorrect, being colored by the media. Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower benefit from the haze of history
Let's see -- TR started the Forest Service and many national parks -- no Republican since has ever been so environmentally conscious. Your beloved Reagan said "If you've seen one Redwood, you've seen them all.".
Eisenhower, despite being a career soldier, was intelligent enough to realize the danger of the military industrial complex. Reagan just gave bottom-feeding scum corps like Lockheed and Northrop everything they asked for.
and left-wingers are still very angry that Reagan's policies ended the cold war and saved the U.S. economy.
Communism collapsed of its own accord, helped by the struggles of people behind the iron curtain, which the US never helped despite their desperate pleads (We also screwed over the Czechs and Hungarians by not lifting a finger when they rebelled in the 50's and '60s) Read up on East Germany's "Swords to Ploughshares" movement, for example. Without those protests, the Berlin Wall wouldn't have fell.
We've been debating in MN for almost a decade on how to fund the building of a new baseball stadium for the Twins (remember contraction?), which is estimated to cost $438 million. The debate isn't even to fund the whole cost, only part of it.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million,
Well, a train is infinitely* more useful than a stadium, so why complain? Transportation is part of the government's business, after all, while entertainment isn't. The idea of "creating jobs" never held much water because the jobs at a stadium, such as hot-dog vendor, aren't exactly great.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million, although it was only estimated to cost $444 million. For those unfamiliar with Minnesota, we've got some of the best highway infrastructure in the country and we're about as spread out as a metropolitan area can be, so trains aren't exactly an efficient solution to traffic congestion, especially when the train only travels 12 miles.
Yeah, but do you really think anyone's going to be driving cars in 25 years? Individual transport is already a pretty irresponsible use of oil and it is only going to get more so as oil becomes scarcer and scarcer and more and more wars are needed to secure oil fields in the hands of friendly governments. Sounds like MN is actually thinking about the future for a change. Good for them.
Apart from SF movies, books and tv shows, can anyone suggest other technology predicted by video/computer games that we might actually see in the near future?
Arkanoid. In fact, I bet that metallic balls falling on modern spacecraft would bounce even using today's technology
I really can't believe the ethics of the pharmaceutical compnaies out there. They patent drugs as if they own them. Wrong. They might have developed a method of production which they *may* be able to say was a wholly new idea (doubtful). However, even if the chemical did not exist in nature, who can you patent a chemical
Then guess what? You won't have have any new drugs available. It's easy to say that "industry and industrial researchers are evil; academic researchers are pure and good", but it just isn't that simple.
I like academic research -- I'm back in the public sector after three years at a pharmaceutical company, but really, the projects are quite different. Academic research can never produce a new drug -- at best it can provide insights that can help design a new drug. It takes millions and millions of dollars to design and test a new drug. Without patents, the high prices of drugs, and all the things that people hate about the pharmaceutical industry, where is all this development money supposed to come from?
It did happen. Sometime ago a 50 years old chemical weapon was discovered in a rural village in China and serveral people died because it was activated somehow.
But that's totally different -- I can believe that a chemical weapon can last 50 years -- believing that vegetative cells of a bacterium can last 50 years is something else. Anthrax can survive because it can form spores. Plague can't.
There are outbreaks at the sites of the former labs(I'm not saying they are responsible for country wide outbreaks), that would tend to make me believe that the lab is at least partially responsible.
But what is the claimed mechanism? Are the Chinese running those labs today or something? The agent of plague isn't a virus or a spore-forming bacillus like anthrax -- it's a normal enteric bacterium and thus needs to be maintained in culture to survive. An abandoned plague lab would contain nothing infectious.
Re:At least they didn't load them with bio-weapons
on
Japanese Balloon Battle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It was quite an engineering marvel, even if the results were sickening(to this day, parts of rural China will still periodically get outbreaks of the plague because of these weapons labs),
Yes, China and India still have plague outbreaks from time to time. But it's absurd to blame that on Japanese weapons of 50 years ago rather than the more obvious lack of sufficient sanitation in rural areas.
Paul Allen doesn't get it. Museums have exhibits of objects made on a visual medium, like paintings and sculptures. How exactly is a museum setting appropriate for a music collection for Jimmy Hendrix? who wants to see a twenty feet high pile of electric guitars, all of which look pretty much like the other, but they just so happen to have been owned at some point in time by oldie band X?
It sounds like your definition of a "museum" has to be an art museum. Personally, I find art museums dull -- after I've seen one or two paintings, I want to leave -- they just get repetitive. Oh look a landscape! And another one! And another one!
To me, the more interesting type of museum is the "historical artifact" type of museum -- to see in person Thomas Jefferson's desk or Galileo's telescope (and even his preserved finger! Really! I'm not making that up! Those wacky Italians!) really puts me in touch with history. While I agree that Jimmy Hendrix or Yoda may not be in the same league as Jefferson or Galileo, to devoted fans I they might seem so.
I'm curious. What app is there on Windows (and not on Macs) that really needs emulating? My impression was that people ran Windows emulators on Macs for the same reason they do on Linux -- for the gee-whiz, look I'm emulating another system -- not to do anything serious.
Dialect kind of bills itself as a BASIC-like RAD language, but *do not* be scared away by that. It is a lot more like Python than Dialect in its syntax..
Oh, man, a language that is more like Python than itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you realize how printed encyclopedias are written. Basically, they contact someone in a field and they can write basically anything they want and it goes in. Gary Olsen, who was my doctoral advisor, was contacted to write the World Book entry on Archaeabacteria. Now, he knows his stuff, and is honest, so it's a good article. But what if he didn't and wasn't? Certainly I've read just plain wrong things in printed encyclopedias
AFAIK, most open source software comes with the GNU configure script.
Well, your mileage must vary. I rarely come across "configure" except in genuine GNU packages like Emacs. But I'm mostly interested in scientific packages written not by programmers but by scientists who may have not the best software engineering skills and simply use Makefiles
Why don't you install the stuff you need in $HOME?
/usr or /usr/local.
I do. But sometimes it's not so simple as just editing one line in the Makefile. Lots of software expect themselves to be in
Plus, there's the annoying limitation that our home directories are only allowed to be 400 megs. (Because they back up the home directories and don't want to back up too much, I suppose)
The problem is IT people can interfere with my work, but what I do doesn't affect them. For example, I'm a scientist. I know Linux inside and out and have been using it at home and elsewhere for over ten years. Yet, I don't have root access to my *own* Linux PC at work, which is behind the firewall. So whenever I need something installed, I need to ask IT, wait weeks, explain what's needed ten times to different IT people, and my productivity is hindered. As far as I'm concerned, IT is more or less useless, as I could do their job in addition to mine. And of course they know that -- that's why they don't give root access to us scientists.
(I mean, what do you need cash for there?)
There's a store there that sells various incidentals plus souvenirs (I haven't been there, but I've known two fellow microbiologists who have). McMurdo isn't just a couple of huts like you see in movies -- it's basically a small town of scientists.
Most religions, minus the people, are neither good nor bad.
Yeah, but that's about as meaningful as the NRA's "Guns don't kill people; people do". Just like guns make killing people easier than with a knife, religion makes hating the foreign unbeliever easier than if you just had to hate them for speaking funny.
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"? I would understand if they always wrote "ei", but I see too many instances of "wierd" for that to be true. Odd...
Yes. My landlord (in DC) is named Bernstein, but he always pronounces his name as if it were spelled Bernstien. Makes me want to give him a German textbook so he can learn how his name is supposed to be said.
conservatives believe in freedom too, freedoms is just defined differently...the right to own property and do what you want with it, the right to start a business,
To be rights, wouldn't everyone have to have equal access to these things? That is poor people as well as rich would have to have equal ability to buy property and start businesses. That's maybe a noble goal, but is rather socialistic, which is pretty amusing for "conservative rights".
If you read the article, you'll find out that this isn't recorded by a microphone inside the spacecraft or anything like that, but is only a representation of impact data. That is, if someone wanted to make the impacts sound like bells, or cow moos or dog barks, those would be equally as valid representations as the "hail" sounding impacts.
Can be, yes. But are they? And do the people checking them over actually have the knowledge to do so properly? At least with Britannica I can be fairly confident that the article was written by an expert in the field. With Wikipedia it may well have been written by some guy with spare time on his hands, enthusiasm, but not much knowledge. Or worse, it may have been written by an expert and then "corrected" by Jo Schmo.
As someone with a doctorate dealing with genomic evolution in microorganisms, I have to say that at least the scientific articles in Wikipedia seem to be reasonably balanced and competently written -- and reasonably up-to-date as well.
Quite often in commercial encyclopedias the articles are quite biased and out-of-date because they are written by a single, well known old guy in the appropriate field, and as Max Planck said, a new idea in science doesn't generally win by converting its opponents -- rather the old opponents die and the new scientific generation is comfortable with the new idea from the start...
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
Yes, you *can* define evolution that way (to be precise, one group of biologists, the population geneticists, do define evolution that way). However, that's an entirely different statement than saying that's the *only* valid definition of evolution, which seems to be what you're implying.
As a molecular evolutionist, I find alleles to be too high level -- I deal with the evolution of sequences themselves. And a zoologist would probably claim that alleles are too low level as zoologists mostly deal in phenotypes.
Minister of Propaganda? Thats an interesting title.
Technically, *any* spread of information favorable to a cause is propaganda. Most corporations for example, have propaganda divisions, but just call them "Public Relations". The idea that propaganda must be false is a misconception.
Your perception is mostly incorrect, being colored by the media. Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower benefit from the haze of history
Let's see -- TR started the Forest Service and many national parks -- no Republican since has ever been so environmentally conscious. Your beloved Reagan said "If you've seen one Redwood, you've seen them all.".
Eisenhower, despite being a career soldier, was intelligent enough to realize the danger of the military industrial complex. Reagan just gave bottom-feeding scum corps like Lockheed and Northrop everything they asked for.
and left-wingers are still very angry that Reagan's policies ended the cold war and saved the U.S. economy.
Communism collapsed of its own accord, helped by the struggles of people behind the iron curtain, which the US never helped despite their desperate pleads (We also screwed over the Czechs and Hungarians by not lifting a finger when they rebelled in the 50's and '60s) Read up on East Germany's "Swords to Ploughshares" movement, for example. Without those protests, the Berlin Wall wouldn't have fell.
We've been debating in MN for almost a decade on how to fund the building of a new baseball stadium for the Twins (remember contraction?), which is estimated to cost $438 million. The debate isn't even to fund the whole cost, only part of it.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million,
Well, a train is infinitely* more useful than a stadium, so why complain? Transportation is part of the government's business, after all, while entertainment isn't. The idea of "creating jobs" never held much water because the jobs at a stadium, such as hot-dog vendor, aren't exactly great.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million, although it was only estimated to cost $444 million. For those unfamiliar with Minnesota, we've got some of the best highway infrastructure in the country and we're about as spread out as a metropolitan area can be, so trains aren't exactly an efficient solution to traffic congestion, especially when the train only travels 12 miles.
Yeah, but do you really think anyone's going to be driving cars in 25 years? Individual transport is already a pretty irresponsible use of oil and it is only going to get more so as oil becomes scarcer and scarcer and more and more wars are needed to secure oil fields in the hands of friendly governments. Sounds like MN is actually thinking about the future for a change. Good for them.
"Pac-Man is still as compelling today as it was 30 or 40 years ago"
Considering that Pac-Man only came out 24 years ago, this statement is pretty amusing.
Apart from SF movies, books and tv shows, can anyone suggest other technology predicted by video/computer games that we might actually see in the near future?
Arkanoid. In fact, I bet that metallic balls falling on modern spacecraft would bounce even using today's technology
I really can't believe the ethics of the pharmaceutical compnaies out there. They patent drugs as if they own them. Wrong. They might have developed a method of production which they *may* be able to say was a wholly new idea (doubtful). However, even if the chemical did not exist in nature, who can you patent a chemical
Then guess what? You won't have have any new drugs available.
It's easy to say that "industry and industrial researchers are evil; academic researchers are pure and good", but it just isn't that simple.
I like academic research -- I'm back in the public sector after three years at a pharmaceutical company, but really, the projects are quite different. Academic research can never produce a new drug -- at best it can provide insights that can help design a new drug. It takes millions and millions of dollars to design and test a new drug. Without patents, the high prices of drugs, and all the things that people hate about the pharmaceutical industry, where is all this development money supposed to come from?
It did happen. Sometime ago a 50 years old chemical weapon was discovered in a rural village in China and serveral people died because it was activated somehow.
But that's totally different -- I can believe that a chemical weapon can last 50 years -- believing that vegetative cells of a bacterium can last 50 years is something else. Anthrax can survive because it can form spores. Plague can't.
There are outbreaks at the sites of the former labs(I'm not saying they are responsible for country wide outbreaks), that would tend to make me believe that the lab is at least partially responsible.
But what is the claimed mechanism? Are the Chinese running those labs today or something? The agent of plague isn't a virus or a spore-forming bacillus like anthrax -- it's a normal enteric bacterium and thus needs to be maintained in culture to survive. An abandoned plague lab would contain nothing infectious.
It was quite an engineering marvel, even if the results were sickening(to this day, parts of rural China will still periodically get outbreaks of the plague because of these weapons labs),
Yes, China and India still have plague outbreaks from time to time. But it's absurd to blame that on Japanese weapons of 50 years ago rather than the more obvious lack of sufficient sanitation in rural areas.
Paul Allen doesn't get it. Museums have exhibits of objects made on a visual medium, like paintings and sculptures. How exactly is a museum setting appropriate for a music collection for Jimmy Hendrix? who wants to see a twenty feet high pile of electric guitars, all of which look pretty much like the other, but they just so happen to have been owned at some point in time by oldie band X?
It sounds like your definition of a "museum" has to be an art museum. Personally, I find art museums dull -- after I've seen one or two paintings, I want to leave -- they just get repetitive. Oh look a landscape! And another one! And another one!
To me, the more interesting type of museum is the "historical artifact" type of museum -- to see in person Thomas Jefferson's desk or Galileo's telescope (and even his preserved finger! Really! I'm not making that up! Those wacky Italians!) really puts me in touch with history. While I agree that Jimmy Hendrix or Yoda may not be in the same league as Jefferson or Galileo, to devoted fans I they might seem so.
After seeing those... I'm disappointed to say the least.
Why? What were you expecting? It looks more interesting than the overrated Spy Museum we have here in DC...
I'm curious. What app is there on Windows (and not on Macs) that really needs emulating? My impression was that people ran Windows emulators on Macs for the same reason they do on Linux -- for the gee-whiz, look I'm emulating another system -- not to do anything serious.
No. Blimps don't have a rigid structure.
Dialect kind of bills itself as a BASIC-like RAD language, but *do not* be scared away by that. It is a lot more like Python than Dialect in its syntax..
Oh, man, a language that is more like Python than itself.