As for "deathplane"...I'm not even sure I should touch that one. I'll just say that deathplanes like it are the very reason east coasters aren't speaking German and west coasters Japanese.
The V-22 Osprey is a deathplane not because it is useful for killing foes, but rather because it tends to kill the pilot instead. The only way this piece of garbage would have helped in WWII is if it by accident crash landed on top of german or japanese soldiers.
Re:US Version - completed in 1967
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 1
Yes indeed! I grew up in Wisconsin and it seemed that every other year in grade school we had a field trip to The Domes.
Project Eden seems to be the same thing but on an even grander scale.
his has been said repeatedly. and it's always been proven wrong; just reading ANKOS is reassuring that there is plenty of open pastures ahead for the lone inventor. to be sure, though, the US "gubment" is sure working hard to make it come true.
I hope you realize that Steve Wolfram didn't do all that stuff in ANKOS alone -- as vain as Wolfram is, he still felt the need to list dozens of collaborators at the beginning of the book -- not to mention the well known falling out between Wolfram and Matthew Cook, who was reponsible for almost all of the work on rule 110, the most interesting discovery in ANKOS.
Specificially of the Methanosarcina? If so, then yes, this has direct implications to your health:-) Otherwise, it more interesting from the standpoint of evolution as Methanosarcina is an archaeon (a member of the Kingdom Archaea, a group of prokaryotes that appear to be more closely related to you and me than to the superficially more similar bacteria).
However, the very related nature of the Archaea to the the eukaryotes like us suggests that it is not completely unlikely that pyrrolysine will be found to occur in small amounts in human proteins. The 21st amino acid, selenocysteine, occurs in only a handful of known human proteins but is extremely important where it occurs.
It's been an exciting few weeks for those of us interested in the Archaea. A few weeks ago, the smallest genome of a known free living organism, whjich happened to be an archaeon, was sequenced, and now this.
Mr Wolfram, I loved your book but I do have a question. Did you like the new Star Wars episode 2? Was that Yoda fight not really cool?
Wolfram: Yes, rule 589, which I[*] developed several years ago predicted that Yoda would do that. Some say that Lucas is predictable, but really he is no more predictable than anything else in the universe.
[*] Well, actually Matthew Cook, really, but if he threatens to give a lecture on 589, like he did on 110, I'll sue him again!
Ernst Mayr is no position to attack Gould seeing how Mayr himself likes to attack (with much more heat than light) molecular evolutionists like Carl Woese. I think the problem is that paleontologists like Gould, zoologists like Dawkins, Smith, and Mayr, and molecular evolutionists like Woese talk three different languages and there is a tendency to assume that all the "important" stuff happens at one's own level of study. A true understanding of evolution must consider all levels of information.
That annoyed me too. On the other hand, everyone seems to have a different opinion as to what the main problems in bioinformatics are. According to the O'Reilly books, bioinformatics is just writing Perl scripts to parse BLAST output...
Come to think of it... the great majority of 'bioinformaticians' I've met at conferences were CS grads. I must have been tricked into attending those fake bioinformatics conferences...
Well, I did a postdoc in a CS department (my doctorate was in microbiology), and there do seem to be a number of bioinformatics conferences that seem a little *too* much CS and not enough biology -- RECOMB is the classic example -- hardly ever is a practical problem discussed -- simply proving that some simplified bioinformatics problem is NP-hard doesn't cut it as bioinformatics IMHO.
But at the more useful bioinformatics conferences like ISMB and PSB you'll find a good mix of people approaching bioinformatics from both directions. And sometimes it is hard to tell who is who -- most people would imagine that Hidden Markov Model guru Sean Eddy is a computer scientist, but his background is actually in experimental genetics.
Oddly enough, not a one of them calls themselves a "bioinformatician", preferring the more vague "computational biologist".
Well, "computational biologist" has the advantage of being analogous to "computational chemist", a career with a good 30 year history to date. Additionally, some think that "bioinformatics" sounds too applied seeing how "informatics" is often used to describe the practical aspects of computing, such as networks and databases.
Well, we are indeed extremely cool. That can't be argued:-)
;) that aside... How benficial are these results? Who's to say it won't change in 5 years? What makes these hot, amount of money you can make?
As people have already said, I do expect that eventually the field will be flooded now that there are actual degree programs in it. Today most of the people in bioinformatics are either biologists that have always been computer geeks (such as myself, programming Apple ]['s starting in sixth grade, but getting a doctorate in microbiology) or computer scientists who have managed to read enough biology papers to understand the subject (such as my boss).
Basically, bioinformaticians are needed because molecular biology has entered the era of large scale experiments generating gigabytes of information. The traditional way of analyzing results by hand just doesn't work anymore -- it's a similar problem to what other fields of study such as radio astronomy have been facing for some years now. The difference is that biological information is more applicable to both the human quality of life and commercial gain than astronomy and so there going to be much more data to be analyzed.
No. Perhaps he's happy the way he is. Perhaps ALS is what has defined him as he is today... would you risk losing him? Perhaps, without ALS, he'd be flipping burgers.
Now you're just being silly. First of all, Hawkings was already a famous scientist long before the symptoms of ALS began to appear, Second, he isn't "happy the way he is" -- if you read about him, you'll find that he considered suicide when he first realized he had ALS, and in fact many people with ALS do kill themselves. Thirdly, there is no evidence that people with ALS are more intelligent than normal in general.
Indeed, at the end of gattaca, there are some pointed examples about how altering genes to cure certain diseases/ailments/whatever (not for talents!) could quite possibly have altered the future (in a negative way):
A short sequence which shows some famous people who may had not been born if science had decrypted the human DNA sooner: Abraham Lincoln (Marfan Syndrome) Emily Dickinson (Manic Depression) Vincent van Gogh (Epilepsy) Albert Einstein (Dyslexia) John F. Kennedy (Addison's Disease) Rita Hayworth (Alzheimer's Disease) Ray Charles (Primary Glaucoma) Stephen Hawking (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Asthma) The last sentence is: "Of course, the other birth that may never have taken place is your own"
Aborting fetuses with genetic diseases is one thing, using gene therapy to cure them is something else. Sure, we would have lost out if Stephen Hawking was aborted, but it would be much better for Stephen if his mutation causing ALS had been corrected, don't you agree?
Anyway, the point is that there are some serious moral, philisophical and political issues... and none of them should be taken lightly.
Personally, I think the only use of "bioethics" is to employ "bioethicists". Whenever a new technology is out, people are scared of it. Eventually, when the technology is commonplace, people can't even understand what all the fuss was all about. Look at computer-phobia before the 1980's, for instance. Just let things take their natural course and in time people won't fear biotech either.
Furthermore, I would guess by your standards, that Mary W. Shelley's Frankenstein would not be considered the classic that it is.
I hated it -- it is the original technophobic book that spawned all others.
I didn't care for Gattaca, but as I'm a molecular biologist, it seemed to me about as plausible as "The Net" or "Hackers". Nobody in the field seriously believes that there exist individual genes for different talents, so the whole central idea of the film -- that hard work can overcome lack of a custom genetic background is just fighting against a straw-man argument that nobody holds.
By what measure are they enlightened capitalists?!?
Being enlightened is a *political* measurement. Being capitalistic is entirely independent. According to your list at that right-wing thinktank, the second most economically free country in the world is the dictatorship of Singapore, certainly not politically free.
Well, China, although ruled by a group that *calls* itself communist, has been pretty capitalistic for the past ten years or so. The Chinese communists saw what happened to the Soviet Union and is willing to make whatever changes needed to make sure that they don't get thrown out of power too.
A mouse with one human gene to produce cheap insulin might be quite acceptable to the public. Frankly a goat that makes spider silk in its milk seems more twisted. But granting an application for a human with one mouse gene would be patently ridiculous. pun intended
Exactly. What people don't want is a "Bladerunner" world of patented quasi-people. But really, I don't see how mice with a few human genes or even as the article's "humouse" has -- a few human cells -- could be objectionable to anyone, except perhaps to the religious right.
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2
wonder why the RIAA isn't sending street teams out to every bar in the country (think of the thousands, nay 10s of thousands of bands, every weekend, playing in bars all over this great land of ours not paying royalties) with bands, or a stack of CDs.
Well, probably because most professionals pay up. Talk to some professional musicians and DJs -- you'll find that they take royalities seriously.
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Performance allows one to play (using the traditional term here) any song at any time without owing anyone.
No. Even local bands playing in bars have to pay royalties if they perform covers of other bands' songs.
Modern art seems to be a collection of people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" I disagree that this is really art. Art is a transcendant statement about the human condition.
Well, that's *your* definition of art, but I (and most rationalists) don't believe that any sort of "transcendant statement" about anything is possible.
The most famous picture in Western art is the Mona Lisa, which most now accept is a feminized self-portrait of da Vinci himself. All it tells us is poor Lenny da Vinci had odd hangups.
Yes, and schools got along for centuries with teaching pupils nothing except reading, writing, and arithmetic. That was fine when only a few people were literate and mere literacy was enough to ensure a high-paying job.
So, as I have a doctorate in microbiology, I now have a legitimate excuse for indulging in paranoid fantasies?
But seriously, the conspiracy angle has a bit of flaw -- while the former Biopreparat (Soviet biological warware program) scientist Valdimir Pasechnik is dead, Kanatjan Alibekov (or Ken Alibek as he likes to call himself these days) who was nearly at the top of the Biopreparat hierarchy, is still very much alive -- wouldn't he be the obvious target of any conspiracy? Or, wait, he would be, but that would be too obvious. Anyway, gotta go, someone's knocking on my door (which is a bit odd, as none of my friends get up this early on weekends...)
Peruvians are busy trying to feed themselves and the government is busy trying the crush the Shining Path. My house probably contains more computing power than that entire country.
Have you been to Peru? Granted, it does have more poverty than the US, Canada, and Western Europe, but it isn't nearly as bad off as many third world nations. And it isn't the computerless wasteland you seem to think -- in the cities you'll find offices with LANs and computers not too different from those in the US.
Huh? There's never any fees though and you can have as many accounts as you want. Your statement is like saying you effectively pay for "free" Linux when you buy an x86 machine.
No -- the point is the very real costs of maintaining the ftp servers are paid by Apple out of its income. Transparent ftp connectivity is already part of KDE, the problem is that there can be no centralized server without *somebody* paying for it.
Before making such bold claims, you should probably check out man perl, and the plethora of man pages which are listed therein.
Believe me, I am quite aware of the Perl man pages -- I even learned Perl from them in 1992 and I still use Perl (and its man pages and perldoc) today. But to really know Perl you have to read the Camel book. And Wall and Schwartz haven't made that free yet. The Ruby version is free, however.
Slashdot Mirror
28MB is enough for the trip once. During the return trip you'll have to listen to the same mp3s
Seems to me that if you simply use the standard 128 kpbs encoding, 128 megs is enough for more than 2 hours of music...
As for "deathplane"...I'm not even sure I should touch that one. I'll just say that deathplanes like it are the very reason east coasters aren't speaking German and west coasters Japanese.
The V-22 Osprey is a deathplane not because it is useful for killing foes, but rather because it tends to kill the pilot instead. The only way this piece of garbage would have helped in WWII is if it by accident crash landed on top of german or japanese soldiers.
Yes indeed! I grew up in Wisconsin and it seemed that every other year in grade school we had a field trip to The Domes.
Project Eden seems to be the same thing but on an even grander scale.
his has been said repeatedly. and it's always been proven wrong; just reading ANKOS is reassuring that there is plenty of open pastures ahead for the lone inventor. to be sure, though, the US "gubment" is sure working hard to make it come true.
I hope you realize that Steve Wolfram didn't do all that stuff in ANKOS alone -- as vain as Wolfram is, he still felt the need to list dozens of collaborators at the beginning of the book -- not to mention the well known falling out between Wolfram and Matthew Cook, who was reponsible for almost all of the work on rule 110, the most interesting discovery in ANKOS.
Specificially of the Methanosarcina? If so, then yes, this has direct implications to your health :-) Otherwise, it more interesting from the standpoint of evolution as Methanosarcina is an archaeon (a member of the Kingdom Archaea, a group of prokaryotes that appear to be more closely related to you and me than to the superficially more similar bacteria).
However, the very related nature of the Archaea to the the eukaryotes like us suggests that it is not completely unlikely that pyrrolysine will be found to occur in small amounts in human proteins. The 21st amino acid, selenocysteine, occurs in only a handful of known human proteins but is extremely important where it occurs.
It's been an exciting few weeks for those of us interested in the Archaea. A few weeks ago, the smallest genome of a known free living organism, whjich happened to be an archaeon, was sequenced, and now this.
Mr Wolfram, I loved your book but I do have a question. Did you like the new Star Wars episode 2? Was that Yoda fight not really cool?
Wolfram: Yes, rule 589, which I[*] developed several years ago predicted that Yoda would do that. Some say that Lucas is predictable, but really he is no more predictable than anything else in the universe.
[*] Well, actually Matthew Cook, really, but if he threatens to give a lecture on 589, like he did on 110, I'll sue him again!
Ernst Mayr is no position to attack Gould seeing how Mayr himself likes to attack (with much more heat than light) molecular evolutionists like Carl Woese. I think the problem is that paleontologists like Gould, zoologists like Dawkins, Smith, and Mayr, and molecular evolutionists like Woese talk three different languages and there is a tendency to assume that all the "important" stuff happens at one's own level of study. A true understanding of evolution must consider all levels of information.
Things I was unaware of until the article's author enlightened me:
- Bioinformatics == Computational Pharmacokinetics
That annoyed me too. On the other hand, everyone seems to have a different opinion as to what the main problems in bioinformatics are. According to the O'Reilly books, bioinformatics is just writing Perl scripts to parse BLAST output...
Come to think of it... the great majority of 'bioinformaticians' I've met at conferences were CS grads. I must have been tricked into attending those fake bioinformatics conferences...
Well, I did a postdoc in a CS department (my doctorate was in microbiology), and there do seem to be a number of bioinformatics conferences that seem a little *too* much CS and not enough biology -- RECOMB is the classic example -- hardly ever is a practical problem discussed -- simply proving that some simplified bioinformatics problem is NP-hard doesn't cut it as bioinformatics IMHO.
But at the more useful bioinformatics conferences like ISMB and PSB you'll find a good mix of people approaching bioinformatics from both directions. And sometimes it is hard to tell who is who -- most people would imagine that Hidden Markov Model guru Sean Eddy is a computer scientist, but his background is actually in experimental genetics.
Oddly enough, not a one of them calls themselves a "bioinformatician", preferring the more vague "computational biologist".
Well, "computational biologist" has the advantage of being analogous to "computational chemist", a career with a good 30 year history to date. Additionally, some think that "bioinformatics" sounds too applied seeing how "informatics" is often used to describe the practical aspects of computing, such as networks and databases.
Bioinformatician, that is one COOL name.
:-)
Well, we are indeed extremely cool. That can't be argued
;) that aside...
How benficial are these results? Who's to say it won't change in 5 years? What makes these hot, amount of money you can make?
As people have already said, I do expect that eventually the field will be flooded now that there are actual degree programs in it. Today most of the people in bioinformatics are either biologists that have always been computer geeks (such as myself, programming Apple ]['s starting in sixth grade, but getting a doctorate in microbiology) or computer scientists who have managed to read enough biology papers to understand the subject (such as my boss).
Basically, bioinformaticians are needed because molecular biology has entered the era of large scale experiments generating gigabytes of information. The traditional way of analyzing results by hand just doesn't work anymore -- it's a similar problem to what other fields of study such as radio astronomy have been facing for some years now. The difference is that biological information is more applicable to both the human quality of life and commercial gain than astronomy and so there going to be much more data to be analyzed.
No. Perhaps he's happy the way he is. Perhaps ALS is what has defined him as he is today... would you risk losing him? Perhaps, without ALS, he'd be flipping burgers.
Now you're just being silly. First of all, Hawkings was already a famous scientist long before the symptoms of ALS began to appear, Second, he isn't "happy the way he is" -- if you read about him, you'll find that he considered suicide when he first realized he had ALS, and in fact many people with ALS do kill themselves. Thirdly, there is no evidence that people with ALS are more intelligent than normal in general.
Indeed, at the end of gattaca, there are some pointed examples about how altering genes to cure certain diseases/ailments/whatever (not for talents!) could quite possibly have altered the future (in a negative way):
A short sequence which shows some famous people who may had not been born if science had decrypted the human DNA sooner: Abraham Lincoln (Marfan Syndrome) Emily Dickinson (Manic Depression) Vincent van Gogh (Epilepsy) Albert Einstein (Dyslexia) John F. Kennedy (Addison's Disease) Rita Hayworth (Alzheimer's Disease) Ray Charles (Primary Glaucoma) Stephen Hawking (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Asthma) The last sentence is: "Of course, the other birth that may never have taken place is your own"
Aborting fetuses with genetic diseases is one thing, using gene therapy to cure them is something else. Sure, we would have lost out if Stephen Hawking was aborted, but it would be much better for Stephen if his mutation causing ALS had been corrected, don't you agree?
Anyway, the point is that there are some serious moral, philisophical and political issues... and none of them should be taken lightly.
Personally, I think the only use of "bioethics" is to employ "bioethicists". Whenever a new technology is out, people are scared of it. Eventually, when the technology is commonplace, people can't even understand what all the fuss was all about. Look at computer-phobia before the 1980's, for instance. Just let things take their natural course and in time people won't fear biotech either.
Furthermore, I would guess by your standards, that Mary W. Shelley's Frankenstein would not be considered the classic that it is.
I hated it -- it is the original technophobic book that spawned all others.
I didn't care for Gattaca, but as I'm a molecular biologist, it seemed to me about as plausible as "The Net" or "Hackers". Nobody in the field seriously believes that there exist individual genes for different talents, so the whole central idea of the film -- that hard work can overcome lack of a custom genetic background is just fighting against a straw-man argument that nobody holds.
By what measure are they enlightened capitalists?!?
Being enlightened is a *political* measurement. Being capitalistic is entirely independent. According to your list at that right-wing thinktank, the second most economically free country in the world is the dictatorship of Singapore, certainly not politically free.
Well, China, although ruled by a group that *calls* itself communist, has been pretty capitalistic for the past ten years or so. The Chinese communists saw what happened to the Soviet Union and is willing to make whatever changes needed to make sure that they don't get thrown out of power too.
A mouse with one human gene to produce cheap insulin might be quite acceptable to the public. Frankly a goat that makes spider silk in its milk seems more twisted. But granting an application for a human with one mouse gene would be patently ridiculous. pun intended
Exactly. What people don't want is a "Bladerunner" world of patented quasi-people. But really, I don't see how mice with a few human genes or even as the article's "humouse" has -- a few human cells -- could be objectionable to anyone, except perhaps to the religious right.
wonder why the RIAA isn't sending street teams out to every bar in the country (think of the thousands, nay 10s of thousands of bands, every weekend, playing in bars all over this great land of ours not paying royalties) with bands, or a stack of CDs.
Well, probably because most professionals pay up. Talk to some professional musicians and DJs -- you'll find that they take royalities seriously.
Performance allows one to play (using the traditional term here) any song at any time without owing anyone.
No. Even local bands playing in bars have to pay royalties if they perform covers of other bands' songs.
Modern art seems to be a collection of people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" I disagree that this is really art. Art is a transcendant statement about the human condition.
Well, that's *your* definition of art, but I (and most rationalists) don't believe that any sort of "transcendant statement" about anything is possible.
The most famous picture in Western art is the Mona Lisa, which most now accept is a feminized self-portrait of da Vinci himself. All it tells us is poor Lenny da Vinci had odd hangups.
People love books in dead tree format for the most part. You don't really want to curl up with a cup of coffee and a nice monitor.
Why the hell not? Isn't that what we all do while working?
Yes, and schools got along for centuries with teaching pupils nothing except reading, writing, and arithmetic. That was fine when only a few people were literate and mere literacy was enough to ensure a high-paying job.
So, as I have a doctorate in microbiology, I now have a legitimate excuse for indulging in paranoid fantasies?
But seriously, the conspiracy angle has a bit of flaw -- while the former Biopreparat (Soviet biological warware program) scientist Valdimir Pasechnik is dead, Kanatjan Alibekov (or Ken Alibek as he likes to call himself these days) who was nearly at the top of the Biopreparat hierarchy, is still very much alive -- wouldn't he be the obvious target of any conspiracy? Or, wait, he would be, but that would be too obvious. Anyway, gotta go, someone's knocking on my door (which is a bit odd, as none of my friends get up this early on weekends...)
Peruvians are busy trying to feed themselves and the government is busy trying the crush the Shining Path. My house probably contains more computing power than that entire country.
Have you been to Peru? Granted, it does have more poverty than the US, Canada, and Western Europe, but it isn't nearly as bad off as many third world nations. And it isn't the computerless wasteland you seem to think -- in the cities you'll find offices with LANs and computers not too different from those in the US.
Huh? There's never any fees though and you can have as many accounts as you want. Your statement is like saying you effectively pay for "free" Linux when you buy an x86 machine.
No -- the point is the very real costs of maintaining the ftp servers are paid by Apple out of its income. Transparent ftp connectivity is already part of KDE, the problem is that there can be no centralized server without *somebody* paying for it.
Before making such bold claims, you should probably check out man perl, and the plethora of man pages which are listed therein.
Believe me, I am quite aware of the Perl man pages -- I even learned Perl from them in 1992 and I still use Perl (and its man pages and perldoc) today. But to really know Perl you have to read the Camel book. And Wall and Schwartz haven't made that free yet. The Ruby version is free, however.