Slashdot. news for natural philosophy aficionados. News of Import. A British Naturalist has just come up with with a new theory that explains the origin of species. A review in the _Times_ tells all.
Two hours later... Is Paley's "Watchmaker" theory through? The Times of London discuss a new book by Charles Darwin...
I did a postdoc with a guy who wrote a book called "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications". Anyway, Chaitin finds out that this book is going to be published and calls my boss, whining that he's not going to call it "An Introduction to Chaitin-Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" -- Chaitin just doesn't get the idea that you have to come up with something *first* to get it named after you.
Quite the contrary -- besides the whole feud with Linus, even earlier he quarreled with Stallman. It seems that Andrew, being at a Dutch institution called (in English) "Free University", had created a compiler kit called "The Free University Compiler Toolkit", and Stallman was intrigued and assumed that Tannenbaum was a kindred spirit and suggested a collaboration (this was in the 1980's, when the GNU project was first taking form). Tannenbaum in no uncertain terms told Stallman that "the university is free, but certainly not my software", and tried to dissuade Stallman from continuing his quixotic quest to create GNU.
Anyway, the point isn't to criticize Andrew, but to show that his current support is all the more useful because he's *not* a traditional fan of free software.
What, then, does someone have to do to gain your permission to talk about socialism or pacifism?
For starters, in the case of socialism a degree in economics and in the case of pacifism a degree in international relations. Of course, given this, I'd still take the opinions of a student fresh out of school with a grain of salt -- experienced economists and diplomats would be more convincing.
I'd rather hear Einstein's (and to a lesser degree Joy's) "babblings" than J. Random Blowhard on Slashdot.
And some no doubt would prefer to hear Brad Pitt's or Madonna's. It all depends on what type of celebrity you prefer.
It's amazing to read an article about someone like Bill Joy, a truly creative thinker and someone who accomplished a lot
He accomplished a lot in *programming*, nothing else. See, that's the problem. Once someone gets famous for doing X, they think they can speak authoritatively on all subjects. But they can't -- they can just babble, just as Einstein did about socialism and pacifism, and Bill Joy is doing about science. While we can all hold opinions on everything, and even babble about them on Usenet and Slashdot (or indeed on blogs, the most self-indulgent waste of time possible), it would be considerably more productive if people limited their interactions with journalists to the subjects they have actually been educated in.
Actually, from your description, it sounds like GenBank is *exactly* the same thing as your "virtual observatories". GenBank doesn't just include the results of data analysis (that is, predicted genes), but the raw sequence data as well. For example, a genome sequence in GenBank isn't just a list of genes, it's a string of millions of A's, T's, G's, and C's that can downloaded and analyzed by your favorite in-house method as well. It's perfectly normal for researchers to discover new genes in existing GenBank records. Just like in astronomy, it's a lot easier to generate data in molecular biology than it is to analyze it well.
Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you.
Because I want to know and experience more than I can reasonably expect to do in a single lifetime. I have one doctorate already; I would like to have dozens. I have studied several human languages; I would like to study more. I have lived in several countries; I would like to live in more.
Even within my field of microbiology, there is only so much that one person can do in a normal lifetime, and so people end up specializing rather than tackling any problem that strikes their interest. That's a shame, although it's understandable given the short life span of a human.
If on the other hand, to you time is just something to kill by watching reality TV, then maybe you wouldn't see the need.
Not to mention that practically every biology paper involving a molecular sequence includes a search against GenBank, a database of all publicly available sequences started in 1982. Database-based science is nothing new in biology, but we don't call it "virtual sequence hybridization" or some such thing, although database searches have replaced a lot of experimental approaches to sequence similarity measures.
Not to mention that the quote assumes that Washington, D.C. is "far away". I happen to live there, so that assumption fails for me. In addition, it's only about three hours away by train or car (and about 45 min by plane) from NYC, which is the most populated city in the USA.
I'd be more worried about the password for this [...]
Don't be. I'm a microbiologist and personally I think all this noise about bioweapons is a lot of nonsense. None of it has been shown to work in practice, while nuclear weapons have, and are a hell of a lot simpler, and thus scarier.
Alibek would just have been one of the numerous unemployable ex-Soviet scientists if he hadn't exaggerated the technology of a country that had little to no biological infrastructure (thanks to Trofim Lysenko, who managed to get nearly every competent Soviet biologist killed off from 1930-1960)
However, there's no question that all this hysteria has pumped money into microbiology -- the institute where I work has gotten quite deeply into anthrax research, despite B. anthracis basically being boring B. subtilis with a bad attitute.
I'm really not trying to criticize here, but what words are at *all* complex in those sentences?
Trains anyone?
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"public transportation" DOESN'T produce, package, or deliver your food to the stores and restaurants you frequent. Nor does it in the US-or any place else. The goods you all buy at the stores, from clothes to Cds to various hardware to..whatever--inevitably is reflected cost wise with the price of petroleum-and it's availability.
Not public transit as such, but yes, most places other than North America still use trains a great deal to move goods. You just don't see very many huge semis on the highways in Europe like you do in the US and Canada. And trains just are a hell of lot more efficient at moving stuff -- it's just that the absurdly cheap gas in NA screws up the economics here.
It was a Newton. Jobs killed the Newton division shortly after he came back to Apple, partly due to poor sales (although they were picking up), and partly because the Newton division had close ties to former Apple CEO Scully (the guy who forced out Jobs the first time).
I've read the pdf and I still don't quite get it all. What did the professor in Indiana have to do with anything? Was his site merely hacked, or was he in cahoots with the scammer?
It's amazing how many drivers almost hit me when I'm riding around on my bicycle
On the other hand, as a pedestrian (when I'm not taking public transit), it's amazing how many bicyclists on sidewalks act rather similar to us as you describe cars acting to you...
Forget this nonsense about "November" -- why do Europeans not realize that the greatest achievement of their culture is not the overrated metric system, but the glorious revolutionary calendar? Now go outside and enjoy the beautiful Floreal day!
If an old guy in the sky just uses natural laws, there isn't much point to worship the lazy old guy is there? But the bible is full of exceptions -- the sun stops in the sky, PI suddenly equals 3 and not 3.1415... funny that none of these things happen when rational people can actually check, no?
The question "is there a god?" is exactly analogous to "is there a Santa Claus?" Given that the positive evidence is exactly zero, science certainly can answer to the negative.
But really, if one wants to believe in the supernatural, why not believe the mythology of superior people like the Greeks and not the the inane ramblings of smelly shepherds?
There's a wide-held misconception that science and religion are so conflicting with one another that you cannot believe in both areas of life.
It's not a misconception. Either the universe is ruled by natural laws or by invisible old guy(s) in the sky. No two ways about it. And despite centuries of persecution of sciencists by religion, its religion, rather than science that now wants a truce -- quite understandably, considering that (at least in the West), science has religion up against the ropes and is preparing a knockout punch...
Yes, that sort of thing is annoying for self-learners. But many textbooks for instance have the answers for the odd numbered problems in the back, which means lazy professors can still use the even numbered ones for homework and the students can still check themselves using the odd numbered ones.
Why, for the sake of God's Green Earth, can anybody claim a patent on something that has grown in the ground, DISCOVERED (not invented), and not researched.
Discovery and invention are just two words for the same thing -- it's just that engineers like to say they "invented" something while scientists like to say "discover". And discovery *is* research.
It's one thing to be against patents in general but it's just hypocritical to say that engineers should be able to patent their work but scientists not.
Horizontal gene transfer is a completely natural phenomenon, which is actually one of the forces behind evolution at a molecular level, While it is certainly possible that an introduced gene could be horizontally transfered, there is no reason to assume it would happen more often than with any other gene in general.
Saying, as the article you linked to says, that horizontal gene transfer of GM genes has been detected is a bit like saying people who eat carrots have been known to have strokes -- true, but deliberately misleading. But that's intentional -- The "Institute of Science in Society" isn't a real research institute, nor is the article, cleverly disguised as a real scientific publication (with references, even!) , a genuine peer reviewed piece of science.
This is just plain silly -- loose vs. well attached genes? How in the world did such nonsense get modded up? I have a doctorate in microbiology focussing on molecular evolution and it just irritates me how people are willing to believe any sort of pseudo-scientific notion if it agrees with their political agenda. Maybe you read something about it in a Greenpeace pamphlet, but that's not a good place to learn facts about science, any more than a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet.
Perhaps, just maybe, you are recalling a half understood description of transposons, which are genes that can change position in the genome but even so, 1) transposons are found in nature -- Barbara McClintock got her Nobel for finding them in corn decades ago 2) only some GM techniques use transposons. So an attack on transposons, if indeed I'm not reading more into your notion of "loose genes" than is merited, makes no sense.
It could just be that the man believes that you ought to pay for what you use for entertainment, if the creator of that entertainment wants payment.
Yes, remember that Adams is a man who sells content for a living -- you may think his model is flawed, and Creative Commons, etc. is the wave of the future, but there's no reason to assume that it's United Media's opinion rather than just Adams'
Slashdot Mirror
Nah it's 1859 he's talking about --
Slashdot. news for natural philosophy aficionados. News of Import.
A British Naturalist has just come up with with a new theory that explains the origin of species. A review in the _Times_ tells all.
Two hours later...
Is Paley's "Watchmaker" theory through? The Times of London discuss a new book by Charles Darwin...
I did a postdoc with a guy who wrote a book called "An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications". Anyway, Chaitin finds out that this book is going to be published and calls my boss, whining that he's not going to call it "An Introduction to Chaitin-Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications" -- Chaitin just doesn't get the idea that you have to come up with something *first* to get it named after you.
Quite the contrary -- besides the whole feud with Linus, even earlier he quarreled with Stallman. It seems that Andrew, being at a Dutch institution called (in English) "Free University", had created a compiler kit called "The Free University Compiler Toolkit", and Stallman was intrigued and assumed that Tannenbaum was a kindred spirit and suggested a collaboration (this was in the 1980's, when the GNU project was first taking form). Tannenbaum in no uncertain terms told Stallman that "the university is free, but certainly not my software", and tried to dissuade Stallman from continuing his quixotic quest to create GNU.
Anyway, the point isn't to criticize Andrew, but to show that his current support is all the more useful because he's *not* a traditional fan of free software.
What, then, does someone have to do to gain your permission to talk about socialism or pacifism?
For starters, in the case of socialism a degree in economics and in the case of pacifism a degree in international relations. Of course, given this, I'd still take the opinions of a student fresh out of school with a grain of salt -- experienced economists and diplomats would be more convincing.
I'd rather hear Einstein's (and to a lesser degree Joy's) "babblings" than J. Random Blowhard on Slashdot.
And some no doubt would prefer to hear Brad Pitt's or Madonna's. It all depends on what type of celebrity you prefer.
It's amazing to read an article about someone like Bill Joy, a truly creative thinker and someone who accomplished a lot
He accomplished a lot in *programming*, nothing else. See, that's the problem. Once someone gets famous for doing X, they think they can speak authoritatively on all subjects. But they can't -- they can just babble, just as Einstein did about socialism and pacifism, and Bill Joy is doing about science. While we can all hold opinions on everything, and even babble about them on Usenet and Slashdot (or indeed on blogs, the most self-indulgent waste of time possible), it would be considerably more productive if people limited their interactions with journalists to the subjects they have actually been educated in.
Actually, from your description, it sounds like GenBank is *exactly* the same thing as your "virtual observatories". GenBank doesn't just include the results of data analysis (that is, predicted genes), but the raw sequence data as well. For example, a genome sequence in GenBank isn't just a list of genes, it's a string of millions of A's, T's, G's, and C's that can downloaded and analyzed by your favorite in-house method as well. It's perfectly normal for researchers to discover new genes in existing GenBank records. Just like in astronomy, it's a lot easier to generate data in molecular biology than it is to analyze it well.
Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you.
Because I want to know and experience more than I can reasonably expect to do in a single lifetime. I have one doctorate already; I would like to have dozens. I have studied several human languages; I would like to study more. I have lived in several countries; I would like to live in more.
Even within my field of microbiology, there is only so much that one person can do in a normal lifetime, and so people end up specializing rather than tackling any problem that strikes their interest. That's a shame, although it's understandable given the short life span of a human.
If on the other hand, to you time is just something to kill by watching reality TV, then maybe you wouldn't see the need.
Not to mention that practically every biology paper involving a molecular sequence includes a search against GenBank, a database of all publicly available sequences started in 1982. Database-based science is nothing new in biology, but we don't call it "virtual sequence hybridization" or some such thing, although database searches have replaced a lot of experimental approaches to sequence similarity measures.
Not to mention that the quote assumes that Washington, D.C. is "far away". I happen to live there, so that assumption fails for me. In addition, it's only about three hours away by train or car (and about 45 min by plane) from NYC, which is the most populated city in the USA.
I'd be more worried about the password for this [...]
Don't be. I'm a microbiologist and personally I think all this noise about bioweapons is a lot of nonsense. None of it has been shown to work in practice, while nuclear weapons have, and are a hell of a lot simpler, and thus scarier.
Alibek would just have been one of the numerous unemployable ex-Soviet scientists if he hadn't exaggerated the technology of a country that had little to no biological infrastructure (thanks to Trofim Lysenko, who managed to get nearly every competent Soviet biologist killed off from 1930-1960)
However, there's no question that all this hysteria has pumped money into microbiology -- the institute where I work has gotten quite deeply into anthrax research, despite B. anthracis basically being boring B. subtilis with a bad attitute.
I'm really not trying to criticize here, but what words are at *all* complex in those sentences?
"public transportation" DOESN'T produce, package, or deliver your food to the stores and restaurants you frequent. Nor does it in the US-or any place else. The goods you all buy at the stores, from clothes to Cds to various hardware to..whatever--inevitably is reflected cost wise with the price of petroleum-and it's availability.
Not public transit as such, but yes, most places other than North America still use trains a great deal to move goods. You just don't see very many huge semis on the highways in Europe like you do in the US and Canada. And trains just are a hell of lot more efficient at moving stuff -- it's just that the absurdly cheap gas in NA screws up the economics here.
It was a Newton. Jobs killed the Newton division shortly after he came back to Apple, partly due to poor sales (although they were picking up), and partly because the Newton division had close ties to former Apple CEO Scully (the guy who forced out Jobs the first time).
I've read the pdf and I still don't quite get it all. What did the professor in Indiana have to do with anything? Was his site merely hacked, or was he in cahoots with the scammer?
It's amazing how many drivers almost hit me when I'm riding around on my bicycle
On the other hand, as a pedestrian (when I'm not taking public transit), it's amazing how many bicyclists on sidewalks act rather similar to us as you describe cars acting to you...
And this year's Universala Kongreso will be held in Beijing, so green is still appropriate...
Forget this nonsense about "November" -- why do Europeans not realize that the greatest achievement of their culture is not the overrated metric system, but the glorious revolutionary calendar? Now go outside and enjoy the beautiful Floreal day!
If an old guy in the sky just uses natural laws, there isn't much point to worship the lazy old guy is there? But the bible is full of exceptions -- the sun stops in the sky, PI suddenly equals 3 and not 3.1415... funny that none of these things happen when rational people can actually check, no?
The question "is there a god?" is exactly analogous to "is there a Santa Claus?" Given that the positive evidence is exactly zero, science certainly can answer to the negative.
But really, if one wants to believe in the supernatural, why not believe the mythology of superior people like the Greeks and not the the inane ramblings of smelly shepherds?
There's a wide-held misconception that science and religion are so conflicting with one another that you cannot believe in both areas of life.
It's not a misconception. Either the universe is ruled by natural laws or by invisible old guy(s) in the sky. No two ways about it. And despite centuries of persecution of sciencists by religion, its religion, rather than science that now wants a truce -- quite understandably, considering that (at least in the West), science has religion up against the ropes and is preparing a knockout punch...
The Vatican doesn't exactly like its own philosophizing about ETs. They certainly weren't amused by former Dominican monk Giordano Bruno...
Yes, that sort of thing is annoying for self-learners. But many textbooks for instance have the answers for the odd numbered problems in the back, which means lazy professors can still use the even numbered ones for homework and the students can still check themselves using the odd numbered ones.
Why, for the sake of God's Green Earth, can anybody claim a patent on something that has grown in the ground, DISCOVERED (not invented), and not researched.
Discovery and invention are just two words for the same thing -- it's just that engineers like to say they "invented" something while scientists like to say "discover". And discovery *is* research.
It's one thing to be against patents in general but it's just hypocritical to say that engineers should be able to patent their work but scientists not.
Horizontal gene transfer is a completely natural phenomenon, which is actually one of the forces behind evolution at a molecular level, While it is certainly possible that an introduced gene could be horizontally transfered, there is no reason to assume it would happen more often than with any other gene in general.
Saying, as the article you linked to says, that horizontal gene transfer of GM genes has been detected is a bit like saying people who eat carrots have been known to have strokes -- true, but deliberately misleading. But that's intentional -- The "Institute of Science in Society" isn't a real research institute, nor is the article, cleverly disguised as a real scientific publication (with references, even!) , a genuine peer reviewed piece of science.
This is just plain silly -- loose vs. well attached genes? How in the world did such nonsense get modded up? I have a doctorate in microbiology focussing on molecular evolution and it just irritates me how people are willing to believe any sort of pseudo-scientific notion if it agrees with their political agenda. Maybe you read something about it in a Greenpeace pamphlet, but that's not a good place to learn facts about science, any more than a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet.
Perhaps, just maybe, you are recalling a half understood description of transposons, which are genes that can change position in the genome but even so, 1) transposons are found in nature -- Barbara McClintock got her Nobel for finding them in corn decades ago 2) only some GM techniques use transposons. So an attack on transposons, if indeed I'm not reading more into your notion of "loose genes" than is merited, makes no sense.
It could just be that the man believes that you ought to pay for what you use for entertainment, if the creator of that entertainment wants payment.
Yes, remember that Adams is a man who sells content for a living -- you may think his model is flawed, and Creative Commons, etc. is the wave of the future, but there's no reason to assume that it's United Media's opinion rather than just Adams'