This is rather interesting because a couple of weeks ago I was discussing with some friends how Brenner got cheated out of a Nobel for his work in discovering apoptosis -- so finally he gets one. I guess he just had to live long enough for the idea to become trendy.
No -- It is more that Lindows (even if they stop directly hyping the non-existant Windows compatability) still has a misleading name and is likely to confuse the naive consumer. When these consumers find that their Windows programs don't work, they are likely to assume that it (and Linux in general) is garbage.
I have done research in the private and public sectors (see my homepage for my publications), and I think that both sectors are valuable, but it is simply nonsense to say that drugs come out of the public sector. Please give a list of drugs that according to you came out the public sector.
The public sector does basic research, and the private sector does use this information to create products by applied research, sometimes generating more basic research as well. No university lab has the funding to conduct the sort of research and clinical trials required to bring a drug to market -- it is simple economics.
Forget the Nintendo -- what about the Speccy?
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 2
Those who have been around the gaming scene for a while may be interested in the fact that the folks behind Rare were also the same people behind Ultimate (Play the Game), a popular game development house in the early to mid 1980's.
Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do not understand it
Typical Feynmannian arrogance. His fellow physicist, C.P. Snow, recognized that there are in fact "two cultures" in modern society, and that natural scientists tend to be as ignorant of the humanities as scholars in the humanities are about the natural sciences.
Exactly. I sometimes buy textbooks in various academic fields and go through them just for fun. It's a geeky hobby, granted, but no geekier than playing video games, and sometimes the knowledge gained is even useful. Having lectures and assignments on-line is great because it will make my hobby learning easier.
It isn't just "free as in beer" -- they encourage reuse -- from the FAQ.
We do hope that faculty at colleges and universities around the world will use these materials to develop new curricula and specific courses, and that individual learners will draw upon the MIT OCW materials for self-study or supplementary use.
Maybe OS-X will help change this. If you're going to write something for BSD, you might as well port it to linux.
As a Linux and occasional Mac user, I think that this would be neat if possible, but really, most of the work in porting a typical app is in the user interface, which would be completely different between Linux and OS X.
So maybe Linux users are willing to pay for their apps. Big deal. So are Mac users, and we all know many ports that platform has.
I'm no rabid mac fan, although I use them occasionally, and despite what non-mac people may think the answer to your question is "a hell of a lot more than you think; certainly way more than for Linux". For example, the article in question was whining about the lack of a Dreamweaver port for Linux. There is, of course, a Macintosh version of Dreamweaver.
Nah, _Infinity_ was just the standard -- guy meets girl, girl gets sick, girl dies, boo hoo hoo story that Hollywood has done over and over again ever since "Love Story". The fact that the guy in Infinity was a great physicist was pretty irrelevant -- he could have just as easily been a shoe salesman so far as the plot was concerned. Yes, I know it was factually based on the death of Feynman's first wife -- but that doesn't make the melodrama any less banal.
Look at the screenshot of the power settings in Windows. The reason it looks like that is because the computer that Apple happened to use for the screen shot did not have the "turn off disk", "standby", and "hibernate" features and as such those things were missing from the screenshot. Had those things been there, then the screenshot would have looked full. Just a little misleading
Well, why didn't the size of the dialog shrink if those features weren't there? That's Apple's point.
There, its all there, nothing else has to be said you can go on to a different article now.
Why do think that an article dealing with a book about evolution needs to start a flame war at all? Articles dealing with books about physics don't start flame wars -- people interested in physics discuss the book and people ignorant of physics ignore the article. Why can't that be the case for evolution?
I realize that a thrill for everyone '80s related is quite now quite common (look at the MAME craze), but really, getting excited about the DDR? What, do these fans drive Trabants and Wartburgs while singing Die Partei hat immer Recht?
Not all new math follows the trend from theory to practice. Quite a lot goes the other way. Consider Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. He created it to help reduce static on phone lines, but it turns out to have deep theoretical implications in many fields.
Did you read the article? The author *knows* that not all the domains were registered with the intent of business. "Iloveclaire.com", etc. was obviously registered by some geek who had a crush on some girl named Claire -- and clearly it didn't work out -- it is funny and pathetic at the same time.
By an odd coincidence, I've just read Hidden Order last week (I seem to have gotten onto a complexity/artificial life kick lately, unfortunately about 7 years late...is the party over?).
Anyway, I rather liked the book, although it is hard to say who the audience is supposed to be. It is too technical to be a good book for the general public, and yet isn't full of proofs to satisify the propeller-heads. And yet, I think it was better than reading the papers, at least for me, because I could focus on the main ideas rather than the details.
Incidentally, all of the above is based on my recollection of the C=64 world. Other platforms may have had different limitations, but I recall ACS and Gamemaker as both being C=64 only
I think Bass is native american fish. (Correct me if I am wrong and replace Bass with more american fish if you like:)
There are indeed native bass in North America.
What about "Bass" label on music CDs as a symbol of its free distribution?
An interesting idea. One thing that is either positive or negative according your point of view is that bass are carnivores while carp are vegetarians.
Many of you may have heard about the problems that the (Asian) northern snakehead fish are causing in Maryland. What you may not know is that carp are also non-native to North America, but were introduced from the Old World in the 19th century. Therefore, I am glad that there is going to be carp free music labels. There are many native fish species that deserve to be supported instead.
Re:Review is confusing
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 3, Funny
But you're right, they both have monoliths
Wouldn't that be multiliths if there is more than one?
Well, you'd need more than a centrifuge -- you'd need things like 2D liquid chromotography and million-dollar tandem mass spectrometers. While we don't look at obese vs. skinny people, comparing the proteomes (set of proteins present in a given tissue) of diseased vs. normal people is what the company I work for does, in the hope that new drug targets can be found. The problem is that people vary for lots of reasons that are irrelevant to the matter at hand, as do even samples from the same person. Statistics on large numbers of samples can help of course, but it is far from trivial to get lots of samples. In general, with modern techniques, a fairly substational chunk of tissue is needed, which generally means the "leftovers" from a surgical procedure, not a simple scraping of the mouth lining or a blood sample.
What's worse is that while many stores don't take $50's, the ATMs (at least TD Bank's) still give them out if you take more than $100 (which in Canadian dollars isn't that much) out.
Yes, I read it. (although long, it really isn't that hard of a book -- Wolfram, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, often uses more words than he needs, and besides that the book is double spaced and full of pictures).
The real problem is that his key Principle of Computational Equivilence is simply asserted. Wolfram believes that nothing in the universe (including quantum computers!) can really be more powerful than his CA's. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but I'm certainly not convinced.
Here is not the full Nature article, but the "News and Views" summary. As Nature is read by all sorts of scientists from physicists to molecular biologists, each major scientific article is accompanied by a summary by someone in the field explaining what the hell the article is about
Tropical agriculture: The value of bees to the coffee harvest
The self-pollinating African shrub Coffea arabica, a pillar of tropical agriculture, was considered to gain nothing from insect pollinators1, 2. But I show here that naturalized, non-native honeybees can augment pollination and boost crop yields by over 50%. These findings, together with world coffee-harvest statistics and results from field studies of organically shade-grown coffee, indicate that coffee plants would benefit from being grown in habitats that are suitable for sustaining valuable pollinators.
African honeybees colonized western Panama in 1985, where they naturalized. By 1997 they had become major pollinators of coffee growing near forests at 1,500 m above sea level2. Yields of C. arabica may therefore be higher near forest, which provides a good pollinator habitat2. In a study of 50 2-year-old plants in Panama in 2001, I observed that flowers were visited not only by native pollinators, but also by the naturalized honeybees.
Ripe berries resulting from open pollination of coffee flowers were heavier than those on control branches that had been bagged with fine-mesh material (from which pollinators were excluded), and were more abundant per flower (49% increase; P 0.01, paired t-test). The open-pollinated fruit was, on average, 7% heavier, whereas a 25% increase in mass was recorded when African honeybees had exclusively dominated the flowers2. This suggests that the contributions to final berry weight and total yield1, 2 may differ for non-native honeybees and other, natural pollinators; however, bees consistently controlled over 36% of the total production.
Do bees control coffee harvests on a larger scale? Long-term data indicate that they do, although the results require detailed analysis. Almost 11 million hectares of coffee were harvested in 2001 (ref. 3). Cultivated areas of coffee in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon and Indonesia have increased two- to fivefold in the past 41 years, although yields have decreased by 20-50%. El Salvador and Haiti, like other countries with intensive land usage and little natural habitat, show similar trends (Table 1)3. Pollinator loss is implicated in this decline, as sustained and aggressive cultivation may harm pollinators by removing their habitat.
A substantial increase in Latin American coffee yield partly coincided with the establishment of African honeybees in those countries2, 4, although there was no such change in the Old World, where honeybees originated (Table 1). This comparison underlines a possible cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of social bees and coffee yield.
Further comparison of yields from the Caribbean islands with those from Mexico and Central America suggests that social bee colonies, which exploit blooming coffee intensely, have two important effects. Such colonies, whether native or introduced, are virtually absent on Caribbean islands. On the mainland, African honeybees may replace native pollinators (primarily stingless, social bees) without affecting yields (paired t-test)2-4 but they reduce the variation in yield, as indicated by the coefficient of variance (c.v., ratio of the standard deviation to the mean).
The c.v. magnitude for the islands had been the lowest in the region by a factor of two and has been stable for 41 years (P = 0.27, paired t-test). But after African bees arrived in Central America and Mexico, it dropped for those areas (P = 0.02, paired t-test), eventually reaching a value that is 23% less than for Caribbean islands. Moreover, the coffee yield of the islands has remained only half that of Central America and Mexico3, indicating an absence of pollination and outcrossing benefits from bees2. The low c.v. in yield in Haiti, for example (Table 1), may be derived from low variance in self-pollination and scarce pollinators.
Recent saturation of the neotropics with feral honeybees, which compete with other flower visitors4, has caused intensive exploitation of coffee and other flowering plants and has promoted pollination stability. However, although the island of New Guinea has no honeybees, its yields remain high (Table 1), partly because its native solitary bees pollinate the obligately outcrossing coffee plant Coffea canephora there1, 3. C. canephora is grown in tropical lowlands and extensively in the Old World, but it is also wind-pollinated1.
Declining yields can be offset by expanded cultivation or by increasing planting density, but such remedies are unstable (Table 1). Although shade conditions significantly improve the flavour of commercial coffee5, 6, coffee monocultures often lead to the removal of shade trees. The trend towards cultivating 'sun coffee' at high densities to boost yield5, 6 will eliminate sites for bee nesting and mask the erosion of pollinator populations, which is shown here to affect yield by 36%. Optimization of coffee harvests and agricultural flexibility in tropical countries in the long term will depend on a consideration of pollinator sustainability and habitat.
DAVID W. ROUBIK
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Unit 0948, APO AA 34002-0948, USA e-mail: roubikd@tivoli.si.edu ------------------
Slashdot Mirror
This is rather interesting because a couple of weeks ago I was discussing with some friends how Brenner got cheated out of a Nobel for his work in discovering apoptosis -- so finally he gets one. I guess he just had to live long enough for the idea to become trendy.
No -- It is more that Lindows (even if they stop directly hyping the non-existant Windows compatability) still has a misleading name and is likely to confuse the naive consumer. When these consumers find that their Windows programs don't work, they are likely to assume that it (and Linux in general) is garbage.
I have done research in the private and public sectors (see my homepage for my publications), and I think that both sectors are valuable, but it is simply nonsense to say that drugs come out of the public sector. Please give a list of drugs that according to you came out the public sector.
The public sector does basic research, and the private sector does use this information to create products by applied research, sometimes generating more basic research as well. No university lab has the funding to conduct the sort of research and clinical trials required to bring a drug to market -- it is simple economics.
Those who have been around the gaming scene for a while may be interested in the fact that the folks behind Rare were also the same people behind Ultimate (Play the Game), a popular game development house in the early to mid 1980's.
Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do
not understand it
Typical Feynmannian arrogance. His fellow physicist, C.P. Snow, recognized that there are in fact "two cultures" in modern society, and that natural scientists tend to be as ignorant of the humanities as scholars in the humanities are about the natural sciences.
Exactly. I sometimes buy textbooks in various academic fields and go through them just for fun. It's a geeky hobby, granted, but no geekier than playing video games, and sometimes the knowledge gained is even useful. Having lectures and assignments on-line is great because it will make my hobby learning easier.
It isn't just "free as in beer" -- they encourage reuse -- from the FAQ.
We do hope that faculty at colleges and universities around the world will use these materials to develop new curricula and specific courses, and that individual learners will draw upon the MIT OCW materials for self-study or supplementary use.
Maybe OS-X will help change this. If you're going to write something for BSD, you might as well port it to linux.
As a Linux and occasional Mac user, I think that this would be neat if possible, but really, most of the work in porting a typical app is in the user interface, which would be completely different between Linux and OS X.
So maybe Linux users are willing to pay for their apps. Big deal. So are Mac users, and we all know many ports that platform has.
I'm no rabid mac fan, although I use them occasionally, and despite what non-mac people may think the answer to your question is "a hell of a lot more than you think; certainly way more than for Linux". For example, the article in question was whining about the lack of a Dreamweaver port for Linux. There is, of course, a Macintosh version of Dreamweaver.
Nah, _Infinity_ was just the standard -- guy meets girl, girl gets sick, girl dies, boo hoo hoo story that Hollywood has done over and over again ever since "Love Story". The fact that the guy in Infinity was a great physicist was pretty irrelevant -- he could have just as easily been a shoe salesman so far as the plot was concerned. Yes, I know it was factually based on the death of Feynman's first wife -- but that doesn't make the melodrama any less banal.
Look at the screenshot of the power settings in Windows. The reason it looks like that is because the computer that Apple happened to use for the screen shot did not have the "turn off disk", "standby", and "hibernate" features and as such those things were missing from the screenshot. Had those things been there, then the screenshot would have looked full. Just a little misleading
Well, why didn't the size of the dialog shrink if those features weren't there? That's Apple's point.
There, its all there, nothing else has to be said you can go on to a different article now.
Why do think that an article dealing with a book about evolution needs to start a flame war at all? Articles dealing with books about physics don't start flame wars -- people interested in physics discuss the book and people ignorant of physics ignore the article. Why can't that be the case for evolution?
I realize that a thrill for everyone '80s related is quite now quite common (look at the MAME craze), but really, getting excited about the DDR? What, do these fans drive Trabants and Wartburgs while singing Die Partei hat immer Recht?
Not all new math follows the trend from theory to practice. Quite a lot goes the other way. Consider Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. He created it to help reduce static on phone lines, but it turns out to have deep theoretical implications in many fields.
Did you read the article? The author *knows* that not all the domains were registered with the intent of business. "Iloveclaire.com", etc. was obviously registered by some geek who had a crush on some girl named Claire -- and clearly it didn't work out -- it is funny and pathetic at the same time.
By an odd coincidence, I've just read Hidden Order last week (I seem to have gotten onto a complexity/artificial life kick lately, unfortunately about 7 years late...is the party over?).
Anyway, I rather liked the book, although it is hard to say who the audience is supposed to be. It is too technical to be a good book for the general public, and yet isn't full of proofs to satisify the propeller-heads. And yet, I think it was better than reading the papers, at least for me, because I could focus on the main ideas rather than the details.
Incidentally, all of the above is based on my recollection of the C=64 world. Other platforms may have had different limitations, but I recall ACS and Gamemaker as both being C=64 only
Naw, the Apple ][ had them both too.
I think Bass is native american fish. (Correct me if I am wrong and replace Bass with more american fish if you like :)
There are indeed native bass in North America.
What about "Bass" label on music CDs as a symbol of its free distribution?
An interesting idea. One thing that is either positive or negative according your point of view is that bass are carnivores while carp are vegetarians.
Many of you may have heard about the problems that the (Asian) northern snakehead fish are causing in Maryland. What you may not know is that carp are also non-native to North America, but were introduced from the Old World in the 19th century. Therefore, I am glad that there is going to be carp free music labels. There are many native fish species that deserve to be supported instead.
But you're right, they both have monoliths
Wouldn't that be multiliths if there is more than one?
Well, you'd need more than a centrifuge -- you'd need things like 2D liquid chromotography and million-dollar tandem mass spectrometers. While we don't look at obese vs. skinny people, comparing the proteomes (set of proteins present in a given tissue) of diseased vs. normal people is what the company I work for does, in the hope that new drug targets can be found. The problem is that people vary for lots of reasons that are irrelevant to the matter at hand, as do even samples from the same person. Statistics on large numbers of samples can help of course, but it is far from trivial to get lots of samples. In general, with modern techniques, a fairly substational chunk of tissue is needed, which generally means the "leftovers" from a surgical procedure, not a simple scraping of the mouth lining or a blood sample.
Whose going to manage these benefits? Will eBay have a new department for assisting their people with benefit claims?
No -- like in any job in the US with a group health plan, you deal with the insurance company providing the coverage and not your employer.
What's worse is that while many stores don't take $50's, the ATMs (at least TD Bank's) still give them out if you take more than $100 (which in Canadian dollars isn't that much) out.
Yes, I read it. (although long, it really isn't that hard of a book -- Wolfram, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, often uses more words than he needs, and besides that the book is double spaced and full of pictures).
The real problem is that his key Principle of Computational Equivilence is simply asserted. Wolfram believes that nothing in the universe (including quantum computers!) can really be more powerful than his CA's. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but I'm certainly not convinced.
Here is not the full Nature article, but the "News and Views" summary. As Nature is read by all sorts of scientists from physicists to molecular biologists, each major scientific article is accompanied by a summary by someone in the field explaining what the hell the article is about
Tropical agriculture: The value of bees to the coffee harvest
The self-pollinating African shrub Coffea arabica, a pillar of tropical agriculture, was considered to gain nothing from insect pollinators1, 2. But I show here that naturalized, non-native honeybees can augment pollination and boost crop yields by over 50%. These findings, together with world coffee-harvest statistics and results from field studies of organically shade-grown coffee, indicate that coffee plants would benefit from being grown in habitats that are suitable for sustaining valuable pollinators.
African honeybees colonized western Panama in 1985, where they naturalized. By 1997 they had become major pollinators of coffee growing near forests at 1,500 m above sea level2. Yields of C. arabica may therefore be higher near forest, which provides a good pollinator habitat2. In a study of 50 2-year-old plants in Panama in 2001, I observed that flowers were visited not only by native pollinators, but also by the naturalized honeybees.
Ripe berries resulting from open pollination of coffee flowers were heavier than those on control branches that had been bagged with fine-mesh material (from which pollinators were excluded), and were more abundant per flower (49% increase; P 0.01, paired t-test). The open-pollinated fruit was, on average, 7% heavier, whereas a 25% increase in mass was recorded when African honeybees had exclusively dominated the flowers2. This suggests that the contributions to final berry weight and total yield1, 2 may differ for non-native honeybees and other, natural pollinators; however, bees consistently controlled over 36% of the total production.
Do bees control coffee harvests on a larger scale? Long-term data indicate that they do, although the results require detailed analysis. Almost 11 million hectares of coffee were harvested in 2001 (ref. 3). Cultivated areas of coffee in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon and Indonesia have increased two- to fivefold in the past 41 years, although yields have decreased by 20-50%. El Salvador and Haiti, like other countries with intensive land usage and little natural habitat, show similar trends (Table 1)3. Pollinator loss is implicated in this decline, as sustained and aggressive cultivation may harm pollinators by removing their habitat.
A substantial increase in Latin American coffee yield partly coincided with the establishment of African honeybees in those countries2, 4, although there was no such change in the Old World, where honeybees originated (Table 1). This comparison underlines a possible cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of social bees and coffee yield.
Further comparison of yields from the Caribbean islands with those from Mexico and Central America suggests that social bee colonies, which exploit blooming coffee intensely, have two important effects. Such colonies, whether native or introduced, are virtually absent on Caribbean islands. On the mainland, African honeybees may replace native pollinators (primarily stingless, social bees) without affecting yields (paired t-test)2-4 but they reduce the variation in yield, as indicated by the coefficient of variance (c.v., ratio of the standard deviation to the mean).
The c.v. magnitude for the islands had been the lowest in the region by a factor of two and has been stable for 41 years (P = 0.27, paired t-test). But after African bees arrived in Central America and Mexico, it dropped for those areas (P = 0.02, paired t-test), eventually reaching a value that is 23% less than for Caribbean islands. Moreover, the coffee yield of the islands has remained only half that of Central America and Mexico3, indicating an absence of pollination and outcrossing benefits from bees2. The low c.v. in yield in Haiti, for example (Table 1), may be derived from low variance in self-pollination and scarce pollinators.
Recent saturation of the neotropics with feral honeybees, which compete with other flower visitors4, has caused intensive exploitation of coffee and other flowering plants and has promoted pollination stability. However, although the island of New Guinea has no honeybees, its yields remain high (Table 1), partly because its native solitary bees pollinate the obligately outcrossing coffee plant Coffea canephora there1, 3. C. canephora is grown in tropical lowlands and extensively in the Old World, but it is also wind-pollinated1.
Declining yields can be offset by expanded cultivation or by increasing planting density, but such remedies are unstable (Table 1). Although shade conditions significantly improve the flavour of commercial coffee5, 6, coffee monocultures often lead to the removal of shade trees. The trend towards cultivating 'sun coffee' at high densities to boost yield5, 6 will eliminate sites for bee nesting and mask the erosion of pollinator populations, which is shown here to affect yield by 36%. Optimization of coffee harvests and agricultural flexibility in tropical countries in the long term will depend on a consideration of pollinator sustainability and habitat.
DAVID W. ROUBIK
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Unit 0948, APO AA 34002-0948, USA
e-mail: roubikd@tivoli.si.edu
------------------