No -- Mad Cow is caused by a prion, an infectious protein, similar to the agent of kuru (a disease that many human cannibals get). The Mad Cow prion probably has existed for thousands of years, but in general cows aren't cannibalistic, so it didn't spread much.
Of course you have no idea that "natural" plants are "bug-free" either -- which is where the analogy breaks down. There is a rather absurd meme floating around that says natural == good, and something that is "100% All-Natural" is wholesome. Makes me want to package up anthrax toxin and sell it to health food stores as "100% All Natural, Non-Genetically Modified Anthrax Extract"
Nah -- they need to preserve their intellectual property so they can make pointless remakes for the PS2 that have no saving graces except their name. Expect "Pac Man 2002", etc.
Scientists have hypotheses. This is not bad. They seek to prove, disprove or refine those hypotheses with evidence. The process is not based on faith. The process is based on observation.
Science just isn't that simple. The "Scientific Method" of sharply defined stages of hypothesis, testing, and theory that everyone learns in high school just isn't what scientists do in practice. If it were, science would be lot easier but much less interesting. To get a paper published, you have to convince the reader that your model is good, even if not much data supporting it is available. If your model was an obvious conclusion from the data, someone would have already published it.
There's nothing postmodern about it -- Hume was one of those Dead White European Males that the postmoderns hate.
Also, working scientists know very well that they are not in the business of searching for "Universal Truths", whatever they are. Scientists make theories, which they have faith in long before enough data is available to make them plausible to the the scientific community at large. The arguments at scientific meetings are quite heated because not everyone shares the faith in the theories being discussed.
I'm a scientist and not at all religious, but I can recognize that quite a lot of faith goes on in science, just like any other field. Even if science was nothing more than observation (and science is certainly far more than that), it is simple faith to assume that your senses give you an accurate picture of reality. The philosopher Hume (regarded as the father of modern atheism, btw) made that point in the 18th century.
If dominant and recessive genes really were so binary in nature (D | R = D, R | R = R, D | D = D, etc) then unless there was more imbreeding going on, all recessive genes would've eventually gone away and we would all be the same.
That is not correct. Even under such a simple model, recessive traits do not go away, at least in an effectively randomly breeding population. Look up "Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium" in any genetics textbook for a simple mathematical reason why this is so.
...saw the use for these things. In my opinion a pad of paper and a pencil cost much less, are faster to use, and are more reliable. Plus there's almost no chance of a pad of paper getting stolen. Unless you're going to do a lot of work on one of these and you are sure you will need it, don't get it!
That's pretty much what people said about personal computers in the 1980's...before they had one. Trust me, once you get a PDA you won't know how you survived without one.
Do you have so few books that you actually know everything you own? Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake? Do you never loan books to friends?
Great stuff? Ehh -- what's with the public and sociobiology anyway? The original "Sociobiology" was written in desperation by Wilson, as an attempt to rekindle interest in his sort of behaviorial research at the time when molecular biology was making traditional observational biology rather passe. Twenty-five years later, mainstream biology *is* molecular biology.
There are interesting questions to be sure in the genetics of behavior, but experiment, combined with molecular evolutionary studies, are the way they are being addressed today (for example, this paper), rather than by just-so stories. Look at all the recent sociobiology proponents -- Pinker, Wright, Dennet -- and you'll notice that they aren't biologists.
Why not? Are you against competition in the market? Would you rather all "alternative" platforms gave up hope and M$ took over 100% of the market?
No, but it is clear that most of the alternative platforms can't survive, and so spending energy on them can only hurt the chances of success of more viable alternatives like Linux. In fact, promoting such dead-on-arivial systems like BeOS and Amiga would be an excellent strategy for Microsoft. Divide and Conquer!
However, it is perfectly legal for Europeans to buy books published in the US via Amazon.com even if local publishers own the rights to print the same book in the purchaser's country. Therefore, it is clear that copyright law (which applies to books and movies equally) has nothing to do with the issue. Additionally, Australia and New Zealand (lands which respect international copyright law) have ruled that region-coding has no legal basis.
who wants to see Harrison Ford speaking Italian in Blade Runner.
People learning Italian, that's who! I would like to improve my German through DVDs, but Region 1 DVDs generally just contain English sound tracks, with French and Spanish subtitles. Sometimes French or Spanish sound tracks are included, but this isn't that common. And German tracks are never included, unless the film was originally in German
Indeed. People can make fun of Minsky and the other proponents of classical strong AI but they should remember that connectionists also made such claims. I have a book from the mid 1980's "Apprentices of Wonder:Inside the Neural Net Revolution" that made also sorts of silly predictions like intelligent cars that drive themselves (not as research projects, but commerically available) by 2001.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,"
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
One place.NET shines over Java is that you are not forced to do all your development in Java but instead can use the right tool for the job
But what if one of the right tools is Java? Forcing someone *not* use Java (as.NET does) is just as bad as forcing someone to always use it (which Java doesn't BTW -- long before MS "innovated".NET, Java had JNI)
Re:This is cool, but I have to wonder
on
LED Flashlights
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· Score: 2
However, am I the only person who thinks it is a little bizarre to test flashlights as a hobby? Somehow this behavior does not strike me as beneficial to the evolution of the species as a whole.
Well, after the metetor hits/nuclear war breaks out/other awful event happens, only those people who know flashlights well will survive and have offspring.
There are no such things as "Celtic elves" -- the word and concept of "elf" are Germanic in orgin and not at all Celtic. Perhaps some modern authors use the word "elf" to describe a type of creature from Celtic mythology, but that is analogous to calling those flying Chinese serpents "dragons"
Re:This isn't a troll, and not that rare an opinio
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
In English 'faerie tales', the faeries themselves generally aren't nice either, stealing babies and so forth. Tolkien certainly knew norse mythology -- the names of the dwarves in _The Hobbit_ -- Thorin, etc. are taken from the Eddas. But my point is what most people think of as an "elf" these days comes from LOTR -- good, lives in forests, doesn't get along with dwarves, etc.
Re:This isn't a troll, and not that rare an opinio
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
I believe strongly that if Tolkien had never lived, the main difference in fantasy literature would be no mentions of Tolkien in the reviews. There would still be stories about fireball-hurling wizards, sneaking goblins, vicious trolls, haughty elves, talking trees, and tough dwarves.
Well, for starters "elfs" (Tolkien coined the plural "elves", btw) before Tolkien were the cute tots that made toys for Santa. The whole modern fantasy idea of elves as tall pointy eared forest people started with Tolkien. Germanic myth at least had dwarves (snow white, Siegfried legend, etc), but they too were not those of modern fantasy. Wizards, goblins and trolls I agree are pretty generic.
There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men. Upon their shields they bore a strange device: a small white hand
But this is simply describing the Uruk-hai, which didn't exist in the time of _The Hobbit_. So either goblin is a synonym for orc in the eyes of Tolkien or _The Hobbit_ is simply not consistent with LOTR (also a possibility of course)
Slashdot Mirror
No -- Mad Cow is caused by a prion, an infectious protein, similar to the agent of kuru (a disease that many human cannibals get). The Mad Cow prion probably has existed for thousands of years, but in general cows aren't cannibalistic, so it didn't spread much.
Of course you have no idea that "natural" plants are "bug-free" either -- which is where the analogy breaks down. There is a rather absurd meme floating around that says natural == good, and something that is "100% All-Natural" is wholesome. Makes me want to package up anthrax toxin and sell it to health food stores as "100% All Natural, Non-Genetically Modified Anthrax Extract"
Nah -- they need to preserve their intellectual property so they can make pointless remakes for the PS2 that have no saving graces except their name. Expect "Pac Man 2002", etc.
Personally, I find the 0.3 series more stable, but this site allows later versions:
Complete Xine
I don't know how to get CSS working in Xine
See
CSS for Xine
I dunno. Xine and vlc are perfectly stable for me, although I use Debian and the packages are already compiled for it.
Scientists have hypotheses. This is not bad. They seek to prove, disprove or refine those hypotheses with evidence. The process is not based on faith. The process is based on observation.
Science just isn't that simple. The "Scientific Method" of sharply defined stages of hypothesis, testing, and theory that everyone learns in high school just isn't what scientists do in practice. If it were, science would be lot easier but much less interesting. To get a paper published, you have to convince the reader that your model is good, even if not much data supporting it is available. If your model was an obvious conclusion from the data, someone would have already published it.
There's nothing postmodern about it -- Hume was one of those Dead White European Males that the postmoderns hate.
Also, working scientists know very well that they are not in the business of searching for "Universal Truths", whatever they are. Scientists make theories, which they have faith in long before enough data is available to make them plausible to the the scientific community at large. The arguments at scientific meetings are quite heated because not everyone shares the faith in the theories being discussed.
I'm a scientist and not at all religious, but I can recognize that quite a lot of faith goes on in science, just like any other field. Even if science was nothing more than observation (and science is certainly far more than that), it is simple faith to assume that your senses give you an accurate picture of reality. The philosopher Hume (regarded as the father of modern atheism, btw) made that point in the 18th century.
If dominant and recessive genes really were so binary in nature (D | R = D, R | R = R, D | D = D, etc) then unless there was more imbreeding going on, all recessive genes would've eventually gone away and we would all be the same.
That is not correct. Even under such a simple model, recessive traits do not go away, at least in an effectively randomly breeding population. Look up "Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium" in any genetics textbook for a simple mathematical reason why this is so.
...saw the use for these things. In my opinion a pad of paper and a pencil cost much less, are faster to use, and are more reliable. Plus there's almost no chance of a pad of paper getting stolen. Unless you're going to do a lot of work on one of these and you are sure you will need it, don't get it!
That's pretty much what people said about personal computers in the 1980's...before they had one. Trust me, once you get a PDA you won't know how you survived without one.
Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?
Do you have so few books that you actually know everything you own? Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake? Do you never loan books to friends?
The more I have thought about it, the more I wondered if any 4 notes, if cleverly chosen, will sound musical if played at random.
Actually, the version of the DNA music program shown here first translates the sequence to amino acids, and so has 20 notes.
Great stuff? Ehh -- what's with the public and sociobiology anyway? The original "Sociobiology" was written in desperation by Wilson, as an attempt to rekindle interest in his sort of behaviorial research at the time when molecular biology was making traditional observational biology rather passe. Twenty-five years later, mainstream biology *is* molecular biology.
There are interesting questions to be sure in the genetics of behavior, but experiment, combined with molecular evolutionary studies, are the way they are being addressed today (for example, this paper), rather than by just-so stories. Look at all the recent sociobiology proponents -- Pinker, Wright, Dennet -- and you'll notice that they aren't biologists.
Why not? Are you against competition in the market? Would you rather all "alternative" platforms gave up hope and M$ took over 100% of the market?
No, but it is clear that most of the alternative platforms can't survive, and so spending energy on them can only hurt the chances of success of more viable alternatives like Linux. In fact, promoting such dead-on-arivial systems like BeOS and Amiga would be an excellent strategy for Microsoft. Divide and Conquer!
However, it is perfectly legal for Europeans to buy books published in the US via Amazon.com even if local publishers own the rights to print the same book in the purchaser's country. Therefore, it is clear that copyright law (which applies to books and movies equally) has nothing to do with the issue. Additionally, Australia and New Zealand (lands which respect international copyright law) have ruled that region-coding has no legal basis.
who wants to see Harrison Ford speaking Italian in Blade Runner.
People learning Italian, that's who! I would like to improve my German through DVDs, but Region 1 DVDs generally just contain English sound tracks, with French and Spanish subtitles. Sometimes French or Spanish sound tracks are included, but this isn't that common. And German tracks are never included, unless the film was originally in German
Indeed. People can make fun of Minsky and the other proponents of classical strong AI but they should remember that connectionists also made such claims. I have a book from the mid 1980's "Apprentices of Wonder:Inside the Neural Net Revolution" that made also sorts of silly predictions like intelligent cars that drive themselves (not as research projects, but commerically available) by 2001.
The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,"
I'm no fan of old-school AI, but Minsky has a point -- people use genetic algorithms and neural nets to "learn" from examples, but such pattern matching tells us *nothing* about how learning really happens. They are just generic black boxes that people throw at data in the hope that something useful comes out.
One place .NET shines over Java is that you are not forced to do all your development in Java but instead can use the right tool for the job
.NET does) is just as bad as forcing someone to always use it (which Java doesn't BTW -- long before MS "innovated" .NET, Java had JNI)
But what if one of the right tools is Java? Forcing someone *not* use Java (as
However, am I the only person who thinks it is a little bizarre to test flashlights as a hobby? Somehow this behavior does not strike me as beneficial to the evolution of the species as a whole.
Well, after the metetor hits/nuclear war breaks out/other awful event happens, only those people who know flashlights well will survive and have offspring.
There are no such things as "Celtic elves" -- the word and concept of "elf" are Germanic in orgin and not at all Celtic. Perhaps some modern authors use the word "elf" to describe a type of creature from Celtic mythology, but that is analogous to calling those flying Chinese serpents "dragons"
In English 'faerie tales', the faeries themselves generally aren't nice either, stealing babies and so forth. Tolkien certainly knew norse mythology -- the names of the dwarves in _The Hobbit_ -- Thorin, etc. are taken from the Eddas. But my point is what most people think of as an "elf" these days comes from LOTR -- good, lives in forests, doesn't get along with dwarves, etc.
I believe strongly that if Tolkien had never lived, the main difference in fantasy literature would be no mentions of Tolkien in the reviews. There would still be stories about fireball-hurling wizards, sneaking goblins, vicious trolls, haughty elves, talking trees, and tough dwarves.
Well, for starters "elfs" (Tolkien coined the plural "elves", btw) before Tolkien were the cute tots that made toys for Santa. The whole modern fantasy idea of elves as tall pointy eared forest people started with Tolkien. Germanic myth at least had dwarves (snow white, Siegfried legend, etc), but they too were not those of modern fantasy. Wizards, goblins and trolls I agree are pretty generic.
There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men. Upon their shields they bore a strange device: a small white hand
But this is simply describing the Uruk-hai, which didn't exist in the time of _The Hobbit_. So either goblin is a synonym for orc in the eyes of Tolkien or _The Hobbit_ is simply not consistent with LOTR (also a possibility of course)