This has no syntax highlighting, no built in ftp client and no support for reg exp in the replace dialogue. Therefore, I'm not going to code in it. If you open a document in vi to do your find/replace, then vi is your text editor - whatever else you use is a feature-bloated form of/bin/less.
If I'm just using it to print up character sheets, pico or word pad suffices (although AbiWord is comfortably smaller, and probably more stable, than WordPad.)
So, given that I won't use it for either of the two types of documents that exist, why would I get it?:)
Seriously - if it doesn't have syntax-checking (as language specific plugins, of course), it isn't for nerds. Scripts that can deal with office documents are a very promising proposition, but not without reg exp - of course that plugin could include reg exp; the plugins have no documentation.
Mind you, I've never bought a harlequin novel, but I always assumed they went straight to paperback.
Now, most Sci Fi is sold in paperback, as well, but my belief is that it'll make more of an impact on the hardcover sales than romance novels, and I assume that these best seller lists will still be hardcover only.
Incidentally, I'm not hugely pleased by the emergence of the new, better marketing of music. I worry that accurate figures will drive the publishing industry to be (more) driven by marketing research. Does this mean that I think that culture-distributors should not have access to the information they need to make smart sales decisions? Well, they will only use that knowledge to do evil, so yes.
Of course, Garth Brooks contaminates the radio, and N'Sync has taken away my MTV. No-one forces you to read tripe, but if this sales data causes someone to decide that C-SPAN's book-TV is a commercially valuable resource... well, that'd be too bad.
Yes. I was gonna describe bootstrapping, and then decided to start by explaining cross validation, and then I cut out my explanation of bootstrapping because it was too complicated. I should've fixed my original sbuject (and some other things) but I didn't. Sorry, and good job calling me on it.
It's generally regarded as a Bayesian technique. Actually, there's far more to Bayesian statistics that bootstrapping, but it's the part I spend a lot of time working with. In fact, I suppose that bootstrapping isn't fundamentally a Bayesian process, but it is highly empirical so it appeals to the same "crowd" as more decidedly Bayesian techniques. By the by, "Bayesian" statistics are statistics that make heavy use of Bayes' Rule to incorporate prior knowledge not included in your measured data.
My background - you develop a program to predict something biological. Let us say, to pick a problem on the same order of difficulty as predicting the weather, that you're trying to predict the three dimensional confirmation that proteins assume, based on their sequence.
Now, okay, you have a bunch of known sequences, which other people (personally, I do both the data mining and some crystalography) have attached to known structures. So, what do you do?
Well, you could fiddle with your program until it predicts really well on those sequences, and announce that it was good. This is "Bad Science", as the parent-poster points out, since the criterion are arbitrary - you have a tendency to "discover" random noise in the data, and you have no way of validating your results.
So, second option. Instead, you split the data in half at random (actually into more than 2 pieces, but conceptually in half.) You take one half, and you make the model predict as well as you can on that data. Then, you VALIDATE ON THE OTHER HALF OF THE DATA. You *never* change the model on the basis of the second half of the data - that is arbitrary/bad/cheating. This is called "bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with compiler installation.
So, as far as most scientists (as opposed to mathematicians) are concerned, the important question is - does this work? In the biological sciences, I can say categorically, yes, this bootstrapping technique has a proven track record. It does work. Obviously, you can screw up (using non-representative data is a good start) but the technique, when properly applied, is sound.
So, I assume it would work for predicting the weather, as well. By work I mean - you would know how well your software predicted the weather. Bootstrapping is not a means of predicting the weather in and of itself, merely of honestly evaluating the effectiveness of a weather prediction mechanism you already have.
I think it was Greece that required all anarchists to register with the government (I find no evidence of such a law online, it may be apocryphal.) With Zen governance like that, you can do anything.
From an infrastructure standpoint, how would they tax downloaded information? There are a couple of ways- 1) The simplest way is to track the credit cards of everyone in the country. I have no idea what kind of credit cards Swedes even have (WTF is a "eurocard"? Is that real?) but I bet they use them for 95% of internet commerce. You could do the same thing with online checks, if europeans use those. You just make all the nations financial institutions report it to big brother whenever they transfer money out of the country. I bet Sweden does this already. This way you can enforce it entirely in-house. This would "catch" 95% of transactions. 2) Tax incoming data. Anytime you get more than X data over the course of some length of time, the government assumes it costs money. They tax you at some rate, unless a vendor turns in an electronic receipt for the purchase. Vendors that wanted to sell to europeans would have to play ball or their customers would get footed with crazy bills. "Maximum disruption, minimum benefit?" Yes, but I doubt the people in brussels care. This has the advantage of "catching" people who got their credit cards from the bank of antigua; a tiny sliver of the population who might otherwise escape. It would also tax filesharing.
Q: How are all these liquid assets held? Gold? Deposit accounts?
A: Mostly greenbacks, some gold and other precious metals. It's all held in a gargantuan bin, several city blocks on a side, with a giant dollar sign on the front. Bill likes to swim in it.
Q: The bin, I assume, is heavily secured.
A: Surprisingly, no. MS Security is quite porous, considering the massive resources available to it, and is often compromised by sub-literate ex-cons and bored underachieving teenagers (including, purportedly, Mr. Gates' own nephews.)
Q: Isn't he afraid it might be stolen?
A: Occasionally, as mentioned, thuggish dog-faced brutes will attempt to break into the bin. However, what Bill really worries about is that some practitioner of the dark arts might infiltrate his mansion and steal the first dime he ever earned - the magical powers of which are the only thing that keeps MS successful in spite of the low quality of their primary product.
I probably should have pointed that out at some point in my schpeal. I'm a molecular biologist, too.
Even if no energy dissipates, my thinking is that each "subsequent universe" must depend in no way on what the previous universe was like, in order for it to go on forever.
Otherwise, if some sort of characteristic is inherited from one cycle to the next, there will be a movement towards a maximum likelihood position, over the course of many cycles; since entropy is "really" a movement towards maximum likelihood, which is only disorder because disordered states are more likely than ordered ones - I view this is a form of entropy. It's very close in concept to a "maximum entropy" analysis from statistics, which is really what I'm thinking of.
Of course, if that "inherited characteristic", and I am being purposefully vague, can never interfere with the universe regenerating, it isn't a problem.
The point I am trying to make is that Entropy isn't really about order or disorder, that's what we observe, it is really about PROBABILITY. Whatever sort of system you have, if it is becoming more ordered, if it is becoming less, if it is undergoing two different sorts of totally different mathematical transformations at the same time, will move from whatever state it occupies to the state of maximum likelihood. In the universe that we observe on a day to day basis, the state of maximum likelihood is disordered; it has a maximal number of microstates available to it. EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE - even if the state of maximum likelihood conforms to some other property - there is still a tendency to move towards it!
Once it is reached, there is no tendency to leave it.
If the motion from a less likely state to a more likely state is what drives the repeated generation of big bangs - and it is what drives *everything else that we have ever observed* - eventually it will run down and new big bangs will no longer be generated.
The latest versions of the big bang theory, with the addition of dark energy or whatever, of an extra repulsive force, predict, basically, the entropic death of everything - the universe as we know it today, with hot stars and habitable planets and the like, exists for some finite period and then disperses forever.
There is certainly a desire - I feel it, myself - that the universe not be that way. It is far more pleasant to think that it will regenerate itself and that complex phenomena like life could re-emerge in some subsequent cycle. However, it is important, as scientists, that we not give in to wishful thinking of that sort.
While these branes are a cute idea in a number of respects - not just because a parallel plane full of dark matter is 100% cool old school science fiction - it strikes me that they answer "how can we match our observations to what we want to be true?" rather than "how can we match our explanations to what we observe?"
Which is not to say that it isn't an excellent theory - merely that there is extreme intellectual danger associated this sort of speculation.
Let me say also - Entropy is a thorough bitch. Whatever the laws of physics turn out to be, and whatever cycles they may allow, if subsequent phenomena depend in any way on previous phenomena (phenomena being the most general term I can manage), there will be a tendency for the whole shebang to degenerate, to move into a more likely state. It is possible that the most likely state for the whole universe involves repeated regeneration of galaxy-rich explosions like the one we all inhabit, but it is also possible that subsequent big bangs would be smaller and smaller in size, eventually dwindling below some critical threshold to generate stars and the like.
The murder rate, US and britain together, is on the order of 5 in 100,000 per year (US it was 6.8 in '97, according to CNN.) I assume that it's about the same in Russia. The odds of seeing 7 (definitely murders) over the course of 9 months out of a group of about 30,000 people are small, but not preposterously small. Given the portion of my prominent colleagues who are, to be blunt, old men, I'm suprised only two of them died of strokes during that period.
Also, if you keep subdividing the population into little pieces, eventually you're going to find a subsection (young black men of course, but besides that) who got killed disproportionately in any given period.
If you keep taking different colors of bullets, and shoot each color fifty times, you will eventually find a color of bullet that is more accurate; if you insist on a higher "degree of significance," it just means you have to check more colors (blue isn't more accurate, but turquoise is!) before you "find one."
This is not to say that I don't think that there's a conspiracy related to biological weapons, especially anthrax, in the United States. I believe that there is, and I believe that the fellow who fell off a bridge may very well have been bumped off. It is entirely a credible suggestion that the microbiologists who died under somewhat odd suggestions where targeted for assassination for some reason; such has happened in the past. Last year's death toll for molecular biologists *may* very well have been substantially enriched by CIA hitmen. Now, I don't think this is true, and you cannot conclude that it is true (or even likely) from the body count. The body count is not itself any cause for alarm.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I'm installing a metal detector for federal employees who come by the lab.:)
Is villanueva his family name? I have no idea how peruvian names work.
Anyway somebody, preferably here in new york (I could ask my boss, but I'm in the bio department, so it would go nowhere) should invite the man to come up here and give a talk. Does anyone at the school of public policy read slashdot? Also, somebody should give him an honorary doctorates ('though he already has one), and a medal.
Yow! Where can I get an informed legislator like Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez to represent me?
Masked Man #1: Good morning, Congressman. Dr. Nunez: Eh? Donde estoy? Quien es? Masked Man #1: Oh, Dammit. Does anyone here speak spanish? Masked Man #2: Give him a moment for the sedative to wear off. Dr. Nunez: Americans. You are here from the CIA, no doubt? This is a coup, heh? You people are amateurs, you know? I've seen - Masked Man #1: No, no, mr. congressman. We're with the US special congressional appropriation mission, and we'd like to swear you in as soon as possible. Dr. Nunez: Swear me where? Masked Man #2: Into the US congress. We're terribly short of capable legislators, so we've been apropriateing people from y'know, other counties. Where is Peru, anyway? Masked Man #1: East Africa, I think. Next to Georgia. Dr. Nunez: You sound like CIA to me. Masked Man #2: No, no. We're sorry to rush you like this, usually we give the new members a few days to recover from the tranq. dart, but you're chairing the house armed services committee, and we need you to get on the job quick before they appropriate any more money for missile defense. Masked Man #1: The people of the state of arizona are lucky to have you, sir.
The reason that we've spent all these billions of dollars to set up the internet, for people to communicate with people, is because we, and by we I mean the human race, really want to communicate with eachother.
My can of deodorant has no intrinsic desire to socialise with it's own kind. Whence, then, comes the impetus to enable it to do so?
If a consumer good is valuable enough to justify this kind of outlay (in a commercial setting) then it is expensive enough to have car-salesman types wander the floor pressuring people to buy it. Unless these built-in chips talk and engage in high pressure sales tactics (here's a cool one, "please, buy me, or I will be tortured horribly and dumped on the scrap heap!") I don't see the percentages.
As regards things that talk to things after you've bought them; there are merits of doing this with every consumer device that already has a computer chip built into it. However, this is far less of a revolution than when we put computer chips into our cars in the first place, but we weren't thinking about "revolutions" back then so it was just progress.
In order to qualify as a revolution, it has to substantively alter the way we, human beings, live. Internetwork protocol has done this, at least in my case. However, while communicating with city traffic control may vastly alter driving from your car's point of view, it'll make only a slight difference to you, the driver. It's a nice trick but hardly a revolution.
The revolution will come when people talk to machines directly, through TSA (today's sinister accronym, my favorite is DNI, or direct neural interface.)
The next struggle against the intervention-of-big-things-in-our-little-lives will come not when built in chips start monitering our shopping habits - b/c IF YOU DIDN'T BUY IT WITH A CREDIT CARD BIG BROTHER DOESN'T CARE - but when the government tries to restrict my right to have robotic claws, replace my eyes with digital cameras, etc.
Look, we all went to high school (at least for a little while, I'm sure) so we all know that the best experiments are the ones that end in an explosion. Unfortunately, most of the good experiments are generally regarded as chemistry, and not physics (an atificial distinction, I am aware.)
The very best experiment, however, which certainly satisfied at least the "changed worldview" requirement, took place in the nevada desert in 1945, and was carried out primarily by physicists. Now, two kids go to their science fair:
Cindy - I measured the speed of light by observing jupiter's moons! Kelly - I have first strike capability!
Who's going to win? I don't know how much enriched uranium you really need to make a nuclear bomb - all published figures are inflated - but they make lawn furniture out of it in the former soviet bloc, so I'm sure you can get some. After that you just need an enclosed container, an explosive, a little engineering knowhow and a healthy contempt for human life. With the plane tickets to and from eastern europe, I anticipate the whole deal costing less than $5,000 US for the fanatically inclined hobbyist. Admittedly, it costs more than a piece of cardboard with slits in it, but it's a lot more satisfying.
Brevity is the soul of wit, which makes me a clod. Sorry. I've actually got a degree in this, so here it goes:
H2 + O2 -> water + energy
everyone knows this, right? You burn hydrogen, it makes heat. So, conversely,
water + energy -> H2 + O2
this is splitting water; you can do this at home (not that I recommend this!) by taking the two leads from a power supply and dumping them at opposite ends of a glass of water. The bubbles you see (just before the explosion) are hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Now, when you run a reaction that goes
stuff -> other stuff + energy
the reaction makes the environment warm. Like a piece of wood burning.
Likewise, when you run a reaction that goes
stuff + energy -> other stuff
it makes the environment COLD. A simple home experiment you can do (in perfect safety) is to take a glass of water and then upend a container of salt into it. The glass of water will get cold, because:
NaCl (salt) + energy -> Na+ + Cl-
Now, the question is - why does Salt dissolve? The answer is: entropy. Entropy is one of the most difficult of all concepts to explain (especially when it results in organised phenomenon, such as life) but, basically, Entropy is the tendency of bigger aggragates (NaCl) to shatter into little pieces (Na+ and Cl-). There is a quantifiable relationship between the amount of entropy a reaction produces (the log of the number of pieces around) and the amount of heat (energy, in joules or calories) that a reaction must "liberate" into the environment in order to go (i.e. be "spontaneous"). A reaction that breaks things apart AND releases heat into the environment - like wood burning - will always go. A reaction that takes heat from the environment, and builds things up - such as a tree forming from water and air, bear with me - will never go; living things exist by coupling spontaneous reactions to non-spontaneous ones, the net reaction can be spontaneous even if one half of it would not be on it's own:
water + air + energy -> tree (non spontaneous) concentrated heat (from sunlight, incidentally) -> dissipated heat (spontaneous)
water + air + concentrated heat -> tree + less dissipated heat (spontaneous!)
See? We're allowed to continue existing.
So, for any given reaction, you COUNT the amount of entropy the reaction makes, and if that is BIGGER than the amount of heat the reaction takes up (as is the case when salt dissolves) the reaction goes.
Okay, now, if there isn't any hydrogen around (because all of it has filtered away) the amount of entropy you produce by liberating X hydrogen (it's a log, recall) is much, much greater than if there is already a lot of hydrogen around.
So, to go back into the kitchen, if there is already a lot of salt dissolved in the water, the reaction
NaCl + heat -> Na+ + Cl-
produces less entropy. Eventually, the entropy produced by the NaCl dissolving no longer outweights the heat required to break it into two pieces, and the salt stops dissolving. You can empty a second canister full of salt into your glass of water, and it will all filter to the bottom, the water will get no saltier.
A similar thing happens with heat. If you take your salt-water with salt on the bottom and put it onto the stove, more salt will dissolve - ignore this if it doesn't make sense: this is because the more heat there is the environment, the less entropy (disorder) the environment loses when it puts any given amount of heat into the system.
The famous mathematical expression of all this is:
Total Entropy Change = Heat "Liberated" / Temperature + Log (change in amount of stuff) (this is more commonly said dG = dH - TdS)
When I say Heat "Liberated", I mean heat which comes from the "system" (your glass of water) into the environment. If the glass of water makes the environment cold, this value is negative. 80% of PhDs can't keep the signs straight, so don't worry if something seems backwards. You're not alone.
So, doubling the amount of something always produces the same amount of entropy. If you have 60g of hydrogen, you need to make 60g more to produce (60,120) 1 "unit" of entropy. However, if you've got only 4g of hydrogen around to start with, making 60g more produces (4,8,16,32,64) 4 "units" of entropy.
So, in the reaction- CH4 + H2O + heat -> 3 H2 + CO2
Here we are breaking things into pieces (4 pieces on right, 2 pieces on left), so the reaction is driven forward by entropy. There are two things you can do to drive the reaction forward faster.
1) You can add more heat; if you add more heat, you will make more hydrogen.
2) At any given temperature, you can drive the reaction forward by taking hydrogen away - this is what they're doing in the article. As the reaction goes forward, the hydrogen bubbles off.
Another kitchen chemistry experiment. Put two pots of water on the stove, full of water. Cover one of them. The one that you don't cover will boil away and turn completely into steam, right? This is because there is no steam in the air immediately above the pot, so when a particular water molecule becomes steam, the entropy gain is huge. The covered pot, on the other hand, will not boil away entirely (of course, eventually it will but in the short term I mean,) instead, it will boil away until a certain concentration of steam is reached in the air in the pot, and then stop.
So, if you want to boil water away more efficiently, you set up a system to blow the steam out the window (or collect it somewhere that you want to keep it) so that the air in the kitchen doesn't get humid. That's what this group has done.
Congratulations, you now know thermodynamics. That's really it.
They've also added a catalyst that makes the reaction go faster, but I'll save my explanation of kinetics (the study of how FAST reactions "go", as opposed to weather or not they go at all) for another time.
Since you've read this far, you get to know the collective secret of the scientific community: we are so high right now. Snoop Dog ain't got nuthin' on us; reefer in hand 24/7. Do you think I could've written this long schpeal without beaking baked off my derear? Oh, man, have I got the munchies.
Yes, so I did. I support half-measures, but not counter-measures. EPIC fell for it to, for that matter, unless they were complacent in all this. EPIC just lost a great deal of my respect (only the EFF can be trusted? Everyone else is a fool or a corporate tool? Sad, sad world.)
Nevertheless, my overall point remained valid. if he *did* sponsor a good piece of legislation he would deserve credit for it. You can't make inroads towards productive dialogue with someone if, when they do something right (which many people think/thought that he had) all you do is shout louder about the things that they're doing which you don't like.
ET: Greetings, hu-mans. We contact you to usher you into the great community of sentient species! Human: We have d3crypt3d ur private k3v/s! \|/3 wi11 h4xxor u! ET: Stop that. It's an insult to the dignity of all thinking beings. Human: 1 4m s0 3|_33T! ET: I didn't wait 10,000 years for my answer to cross the icy depths of space so I could read your sophmoric babblings. Human: 1 r0xx0rd u! ET: Your puny intellect is no match for our massive weapons! Human: Br1|\|g it on! U \|/1|_|_ f34r/|\3!
Of course, I just assume that alien intelligence is like me. Maybe I'm just too closed-minded to envisage a form of consciousness that isn't driven into a homidical rage by leet-speak.
Seriously, while there are a great many ways besides SETI you can meet people and waste processor cycles together (I know - keep analysing the ripples in the surface of loch ness until you find the "messages" pixies are sending us from another dimension!) my colleagues at Oxford have managed to come up with something genuinely useful to do with your spare processor cycles.
Sen. Hollings (likewise his secret masters at Disney) may not be my favorite legislator, and he may sponsor a lot of bills which I do not like, but this is a good law. The things that Salon complains about the bill "legitimising" are already 100% legal, unfortunately. While the bill is too weak, I will say this: it is not true that weak provisions make stronger provisions unlikely by assuaging the fears of the sheep-like masses, instead, they shift the social pendulum to make stronger measures more feasible in the future. I support half-measures 100% - yes, this makes me a liberal.
Now that Sen. Hollings has sponsored a piece of good legislation - I'm not a lawyer but I trust EPIC to know totally fake privacy legislation when they see it - he deserves credit for doing the right thing, not continued vilification for the mistakes he's made in the past. Classifying him (or Disney, for that matter) as our Eternal Foe just because he (foolishly, ignorantly) sought to curtail our rights on one occasion is not the way to go. I, personally, know a lot of fine, upstanding people who work in the Movies (none actually at Disney, but hey, if Pat Robertson hate them that much they can't be all bad), some of whom even supported the CBDTPA, and lumping them in with Hitler as people with whom any dialogue is "appeasement" is neither productive nor justified.
"Opening the Xbox" is published by Prima Publishing. Among gamers, the Prima name is best known for publishing strategy guidebooks for a wide variety of console and computer titles. Prima guides are currently available for more than a dozen Xbox games, including Microsoft's popular shooter Halo and gridiron simulation NFL Fever 2002. Strategy guide publishers like Prima often depend heavily on the cooperation of game companies -- like Microsoft -- to release hint books that are information packed, timely and useful to gamers.
They also depend on mushbrained "journalists" giving them free advertising. That paragraph is worded like a prima press release, no one uses "information packed" in any other context.
Question - is Mr McCauley (who wrote the Salon article) a complete tool, or did he agree to include that exact phrasing in exchange for getting some sort of access? Have things gotten to the point where companies like Prima can dictate terms to the press? (He actually works for the Philadelphia Inquirer, not Salon.)
The launch comes at a time when the video game industry is at the beginning of a multi-year growth cycle...
So, someone said this to the journalist in an interview, so he turns around and prints it as fact. Not "so and so says that the industry is..." but, in the same ways ss he would say "the sky is blue" he prints whatever prognostications some industry insider cares to share as if they were physical truth.
Yes, I'm aware that the next statement starts many analysts predict... but that doesn't impact the first statement; in fact, it makes it stronger since it implies that the only disagreement is on the intensity of growth.
That's about the quality of journalism I expect from yahoo. Snarl.
No Book is required. Anyone who's seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail three times is standards compliant (they understand references to the film.) By complying to this standard, you are able to interact with anyone worthwhile. Since the rest of the human race cannot agree to watch the film more than once, interaction with them is impossible. You can't interact if people can't agree on a protocol!
Seriously, many books have been written on the subject of enabling human-human interaction. A number specifically target CS students. Reading them will slowly transform you into an MBA, killing you on the inside. IS THAT YOU WANT?
That said, you could construct a photosynthetic organism around haemoglobin (which does contain Iron) instead of chlorophyll, and it would be a totally different color.
What I meant to say was that Photosystem II is big and complicated; it contains 50 chlorophyll molecules. The properties of chlorophyll, that make it desirable as a primary light harvesting molecule, are heavily bound up in the properties of Photosystem II. The structure of photosystem II also changes the "color" of the Chlorophyll somewhat; but, of course, the robots would extract the chlorophyll into an organic solvent so that would not be an issue. Other photosystems here on Earth contain chromophores that are totally different in color - this is why red algae is red and brown algae is brown (instead of green.) All terrestrial plants happen to contain chlorophyll as well, but there's no reason to think that would be the case on Mars. In fact, there are two totally different classes of molecules that harvest energy from light here on earth (at least; I'm referring to the non-metal-ion carrying chemicals in our eyes and in the eyes of insects) which might form the basis for alien photosynthesis.
That's not flamebait, although he is mistaken. Immature, wrong press releases cost you funding. {JOKE}Science is not like IT, where famous screwups are more fundable than competent nobodies (anyone else remember that Dilbert episode?){/JOKE}
That said, I see no reason (I'm a biologist, not an astronomer) why alien cells would have chlorophyll. If they did find chlorophyll, it woul be a sign that we'd contaminated Mars with terrestrial cells.
Even if a Martian cell where photosynthetic, I would not expect it to express chlorophyll! Chlorophyll is long, big and complicated. An independently evolved protein, from an alien organism, would never look much like chlorphyll - the odds against such a coincidence are astronomical. Assuming the alien life had membranes, photosynthetic aliens MIGHT use a membrane-bound light-dependent electron pump like the ones found in chloroplasts and their bacterial cousins; however, since there are many, many classes of both light reactive molecules and of redox proteins (electron pumps) in terrestrial organisms, many of these proteins are not-at-all similar to one another, so even if an alien organism "worked the same" as a terrestrial chlorplast (chloroplasts are the cellular organelles in plants that harvest light) it'd have independently evolved proteins with similar functions, they wouldn't be chlorophyll, and they wouldn't be similar to chlorphyll in terms of sequence or overall shape. The odds are incredibly small! Even the twenty amino acids we use are a result of the original molecular evolution of terrestrial life; an alien organism might not have the same twenty (assuming that it had amino acids at all; we don't know enough to make a definitive conclusion, but nucleic acids and amino acids may be the only molecules in existence that could make a biological organism.)
All musings aside, the original poster was correct. Chlorophyll on Mars was a stupid thing to expect.
Slashdot Mirror
This has no syntax highlighting, no built in ftp client and no support for reg exp in the replace dialogue. Therefore, I'm not going to code in it. If you open a document in vi to do your find/replace, then vi is your text editor - whatever else you use is a feature-bloated form of /bin/less.
:)
If I'm just using it to print up character sheets, pico or word pad suffices (although AbiWord is comfortably smaller, and probably more stable, than WordPad.)
So, given that I won't use it for either of the two types of documents that exist, why would I get it?
Seriously - if it doesn't have syntax-checking (as language specific plugins, of course), it isn't for nerds. Scripts that can deal with office documents are a very promising proposition, but not without reg exp - of course that plugin could include reg exp; the plugins have no documentation.
In Hardcover?
Mind you, I've never bought a harlequin novel, but I always assumed they went straight to paperback.
Now, most Sci Fi is sold in paperback, as well, but my belief is that it'll make more of an impact on the hardcover sales than romance novels, and I assume that these best seller lists will still be hardcover only.
Incidentally, I'm not hugely pleased by the emergence of the new, better marketing of music. I worry that accurate figures will drive the publishing industry to be (more) driven by marketing research. Does this mean that I think that culture-distributors should not have access to the information they need to make smart sales decisions? Well, they will only use that knowledge to do evil, so yes.
Of course, Garth Brooks contaminates the radio, and N'Sync has taken away my MTV. No-one forces you to read tripe, but if this sales data causes someone to decide that C-SPAN's book-TV is a commercially valuable resource... well, that'd be too bad.
Yes. I was gonna describe bootstrapping, and then decided to start by explaining cross validation, and then I cut out my explanation of bootstrapping because it was too complicated. I should've fixed my original sbuject (and some other things) but I didn't. Sorry, and good job calling me on it.
It's generally regarded as a Bayesian technique. Actually, there's far more to Bayesian statistics that bootstrapping, but it's the part I spend a lot of time working with. In fact, I suppose that bootstrapping isn't fundamentally a Bayesian process, but it is highly empirical so it appeals to the same "crowd" as more decidedly Bayesian techniques. By the by, "Bayesian" statistics are statistics that make heavy use of Bayes' Rule to incorporate prior knowledge not included in your measured data.
My background - you develop a program to predict something biological. Let us say, to pick a problem on the same order of difficulty as predicting the weather, that you're trying to predict the three dimensional confirmation that proteins assume, based on their sequence.
Now, okay, you have a bunch of known sequences, which other people (personally, I do both the data mining and some crystalography) have attached to known structures. So, what do you do?
Well, you could fiddle with your program until it predicts really well on those sequences, and announce that it was good. This is "Bad Science", as the parent-poster points out, since the criterion are arbitrary - you have a tendency to "discover" random noise in the data, and you have no way of validating your results.
So, second option. Instead, you split the data in half at random (actually into more than 2 pieces, but conceptually in half.) You take one half, and you make the model predict as well as you can on that data. Then, you VALIDATE ON THE OTHER HALF OF THE DATA. You *never* change the model on the basis of the second half of the data - that is arbitrary/bad/cheating. This is called "bootstrapping". It has nothing to do with compiler installation.
So, as far as most scientists (as opposed to mathematicians) are concerned, the important question is - does this work? In the biological sciences, I can say categorically, yes, this bootstrapping technique has a proven track record. It does work. Obviously, you can screw up (using non-representative data is a good start) but the technique, when properly applied, is sound.
So, I assume it would work for predicting the weather, as well. By work I mean - you would know how well your software predicted the weather. Bootstrapping is not a means of predicting the weather in and of itself, merely of honestly evaluating the effectiveness of a weather prediction mechanism you already have.
Are they going to tax "sharing"?
I think it was Greece that required all anarchists to register with the government (I find no evidence of such a law online, it may be apocryphal.) With Zen governance like that, you can do anything.
From an infrastructure standpoint, how would they tax downloaded information? There are a couple of ways-
1) The simplest way is to track the credit cards of everyone in the country. I have no idea what kind of credit cards Swedes even have (WTF is a "eurocard"? Is that real?) but I bet they use them for 95% of internet commerce. You could do the same thing with online checks, if europeans use those. You just make all the nations financial institutions report it to big brother whenever they transfer money out of the country. I bet Sweden does this already. This way you can enforce it entirely in-house. This would "catch" 95% of transactions.
2) Tax incoming data. Anytime you get more than X data over the course of some length of time, the government assumes it costs money. They tax you at some rate, unless a vendor turns in an electronic receipt for the purchase. Vendors that wanted to sell to europeans would have to play ball or their customers would get footed with crazy bills. "Maximum disruption, minimum benefit?" Yes, but I doubt the people in brussels care. This has the advantage of "catching" people who got their credit cards from the bank of antigua; a tiny sliver of the population who might otherwise escape. It would also tax filesharing.
Q: How are all these liquid assets held? Gold? Deposit accounts?
A: Mostly greenbacks, some gold and other precious metals. It's all held in a gargantuan bin, several city blocks on a side, with a giant dollar sign on the front. Bill likes to swim in it.
Q: The bin, I assume, is heavily secured.
A: Surprisingly, no. MS Security is quite porous, considering the massive resources available to it, and is often compromised by sub-literate ex-cons and bored underachieving teenagers (including, purportedly, Mr. Gates' own nephews.)
Q: Isn't he afraid it might be stolen?
A: Occasionally, as mentioned, thuggish dog-faced brutes will attempt to break into the bin. However, what Bill really worries about is that some practitioner of the dark arts might infiltrate his mansion and steal the first dime he ever earned - the magical powers of which are the only thing that keeps MS successful in spite of the low quality of their primary product.
I probably should have pointed that out at some point in my schpeal. I'm a molecular biologist, too.
Even if no energy dissipates, my thinking is that each "subsequent universe" must depend in no way on what the previous universe was like, in order for it to go on forever.
Otherwise, if some sort of characteristic is inherited from one cycle to the next, there will be a movement towards a maximum likelihood position, over the course of many cycles; since entropy is "really" a movement towards maximum likelihood, which is only disorder because disordered states are more likely than ordered ones - I view this is a form of entropy. It's very close in concept to a "maximum entropy" analysis from statistics, which is really what I'm thinking of.
Of course, if that "inherited characteristic", and I am being purposefully vague, can never interfere with the universe regenerating, it isn't a problem.
The point I am trying to make is that Entropy isn't really about order or disorder, that's what we observe, it is really about PROBABILITY. Whatever sort of system you have, if it is becoming more ordered, if it is becoming less, if it is undergoing two different sorts of totally different mathematical transformations at the same time, will move from whatever state it occupies to the state of maximum likelihood. In the universe that we observe on a day to day basis, the state of maximum likelihood is disordered; it has a maximal number of microstates available to it. EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE - even if the state of maximum likelihood conforms to some other property - there is still a tendency to move towards it!
Once it is reached, there is no tendency to leave it.
If the motion from a less likely state to a more likely state is what drives the repeated generation of big bangs - and it is what drives *everything else that we have ever observed* - eventually it will run down and new big bangs will no longer be generated.
The latest versions of the big bang theory, with the addition of dark energy or whatever, of an extra repulsive force, predict, basically, the entropic death of everything - the universe as we know it today, with hot stars and habitable planets and the like, exists for some finite period and then disperses forever.
There is certainly a desire - I feel it, myself - that the universe not be that way. It is far more pleasant to think that it will regenerate itself and that complex phenomena like life could re-emerge in some subsequent cycle. However, it is important, as scientists, that we not give in to wishful thinking of that sort.
While these branes are a cute idea in a number of respects - not just because a parallel plane full of dark matter is 100% cool old school science fiction - it strikes me that they answer "how can we match our observations to what we want to be true?" rather than "how can we match our explanations to what we observe?"
Which is not to say that it isn't an excellent theory - merely that there is extreme intellectual danger associated this sort of speculation.
Let me say also - Entropy is a thorough bitch. Whatever the laws of physics turn out to be, and whatever cycles they may allow, if subsequent phenomena depend in any way on previous phenomena (phenomena being the most general term I can manage), there will be a tendency for the whole shebang to degenerate, to move into a more likely state. It is possible that the most likely state for the whole universe involves repeated regeneration of galaxy-rich explosions like the one we all inhabit, but it is also possible that subsequent big bangs would be smaller and smaller in size, eventually dwindling below some critical threshold to generate stars and the like.
Really.
:)
The murder rate, US and britain together, is on the order of 5 in 100,000 per year (US it was 6.8 in '97, according to CNN.) I assume that it's about the same in Russia. The odds of seeing 7 (definitely murders) over the course of 9 months out of a group of about 30,000 people are small, but not preposterously small. Given the portion of my prominent colleagues who are, to be blunt, old men, I'm suprised only two of them died of strokes during that period.
Also, if you keep subdividing the population into little pieces, eventually you're going to find a subsection (young black men of course, but besides that) who got killed disproportionately in any given period.
If you keep taking different colors of bullets, and shoot each color fifty times, you will eventually find a color of bullet that is more accurate; if you insist on a higher "degree of significance," it just means you have to check more colors (blue isn't more accurate, but turquoise is!) before you "find one."
This is not to say that I don't think that there's a conspiracy related to biological weapons, especially anthrax, in the United States. I believe that there is, and I believe that the fellow who fell off a bridge may very well have been bumped off. It is entirely a credible suggestion that the microbiologists who died under somewhat odd suggestions where targeted for assassination for some reason; such has happened in the past. Last year's death toll for molecular biologists *may* very well have been substantially enriched by CIA hitmen. Now, I don't think this is true, and you cannot conclude that it is true (or even likely) from the body count. The body count is not itself any cause for alarm.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I'm installing a metal detector for federal employees who come by the lab.
Dr. Nunez e-mail address is:
evillanueva@congreso.gob.pe
His peruvian congress page. (In Spanish) Or Translated by google.
Is villanueva his family name? I have no idea how peruvian names work.
Anyway somebody, preferably here in new york (I could ask my boss, but I'm in the bio department, so it would go nowhere) should invite the man to come up here and give a talk. Does anyone at the school of public policy read slashdot? Also, somebody should give him an honorary doctorates ('though he already has one), and a medal.
Yow! Where can I get an informed legislator like Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez to represent me?
Masked Man #1: Good morning, Congressman.
Dr. Nunez: Eh? Donde estoy? Quien es?
Masked Man #1: Oh, Dammit. Does anyone here speak spanish?
Masked Man #2: Give him a moment for the sedative to wear off.
Dr. Nunez: Americans. You are here from the CIA, no doubt? This is a coup, heh? You people are amateurs, you know? I've seen -
Masked Man #1: No, no, mr. congressman. We're with the US special congressional appropriation mission, and we'd like to swear you in as soon as possible.
Dr. Nunez: Swear me where?
Masked Man #2: Into the US congress. We're terribly short of capable legislators, so we've been apropriateing people from y'know, other counties. Where is Peru, anyway?
Masked Man #1: East Africa, I think. Next to Georgia.
Dr. Nunez: You sound like CIA to me.
Masked Man #2: No, no. We're sorry to rush you like this, usually we give the new members a few days to recover from the tranq. dart, but you're chairing the house armed services committee, and we need you to get on the job quick before they appropriate any more money for missile defense.
Masked Man #1: The people of the state of arizona are lucky to have you, sir.
The reason that we've spent all these billions of dollars to set up the internet, for people to communicate with people, is because we, and by we I mean the human race, really want to communicate with eachother.
My can of deodorant has no intrinsic desire to socialise with it's own kind. Whence, then, comes the impetus to enable it to do so?
If a consumer good is valuable enough to justify this kind of outlay (in a commercial setting) then it is expensive enough to have car-salesman types wander the floor pressuring people to buy it. Unless these built-in chips talk and engage in high pressure sales tactics (here's a cool one, "please, buy me, or I will be tortured horribly and dumped on the scrap heap!") I don't see the percentages.
As regards things that talk to things after you've bought them; there are merits of doing this with every consumer device that already has a computer chip built into it. However, this is far less of a revolution than when we put computer chips into our cars in the first place, but we weren't thinking about "revolutions" back then so it was just progress.
In order to qualify as a revolution, it has to substantively alter the way we, human beings, live. Internetwork protocol has done this, at least in my case. However, while communicating with city traffic control may vastly alter driving from your car's point of view, it'll make only a slight difference to you, the driver. It's a nice trick but hardly a revolution.
The revolution will come when people talk to machines directly, through TSA (today's sinister accronym, my favorite is DNI, or direct neural interface.)
The next struggle against the intervention-of-big-things-in-our-little-lives will come not when built in chips start monitering our shopping habits - b/c IF YOU DIDN'T BUY IT WITH A CREDIT CARD BIG BROTHER DOESN'T CARE - but when the government tries to restrict my right to have robotic claws, replace my eyes with digital cameras, etc.
Look, we all went to high school (at least for a little while, I'm sure) so we all know that the best experiments are the ones that end in an explosion. Unfortunately, most of the good experiments are generally regarded as chemistry, and not physics (an atificial distinction, I am aware.)
The very best experiment, however, which certainly satisfied at least the "changed worldview" requirement, took place in the nevada desert in 1945, and was carried out primarily by physicists. Now, two kids go to their science fair:
Cindy - I measured the speed of light by observing jupiter's moons!
Kelly - I have first strike capability!
Who's going to win? I don't know how much enriched uranium you really need to make a nuclear bomb - all published figures are inflated - but they make lawn furniture out of it in the former soviet bloc, so I'm sure you can get some. After that you just need an enclosed container, an explosive, a little engineering knowhow and a healthy contempt for human life. With the plane tickets to and from eastern europe, I anticipate the whole deal costing less than $5,000 US for the fanatically inclined hobbyist. Admittedly, it costs more than a piece of cardboard with slits in it, but it's a lot more satisfying.
Brevity is the soul of wit, which makes me a clod. Sorry. I've actually got a degree in this, so here it goes:
H2 + O2 -> water + energy
everyone knows this, right? You burn hydrogen, it makes heat. So, conversely,
water + energy -> H2 + O2
this is splitting water; you can do this at home (not that I recommend this!) by taking the two leads from a power supply and dumping them at opposite ends of a glass of water. The bubbles you see (just before the explosion) are hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Now, when you run a reaction that goes
stuff -> other stuff + energy
the reaction makes the environment warm. Like a piece of wood burning.
Likewise, when you run a reaction that goes
stuff + energy -> other stuff
it makes the environment COLD. A simple home experiment you can do (in perfect safety) is to take a glass of water and then upend a container of salt into it. The glass of water will get cold, because:
NaCl (salt) + energy -> Na+ + Cl-
Now, the question is - why does Salt dissolve? The answer is: entropy. Entropy is one of the most difficult of all concepts to explain (especially when it results in organised phenomenon, such as life) but, basically, Entropy is the tendency of bigger aggragates (NaCl) to shatter into little pieces (Na+ and Cl-). There is a quantifiable relationship between the amount of entropy a reaction produces (the log of the number of pieces around) and the amount of heat (energy, in joules or calories) that a reaction must "liberate" into the environment in order to go (i.e. be "spontaneous"). A reaction that breaks things apart AND releases heat into the environment - like wood burning - will always go. A reaction that takes heat from the environment, and builds things up - such as a tree forming from water and air, bear with me - will never go; living things exist by coupling spontaneous reactions to non-spontaneous ones, the net reaction can be spontaneous even if one half of it would not be on it's own:
water + air + energy -> tree (non spontaneous)
concentrated heat (from sunlight, incidentally) -> dissipated heat (spontaneous)
water + air + concentrated heat -> tree + less dissipated heat (spontaneous!)
See? We're allowed to continue existing.
So, for any given reaction, you COUNT the amount of entropy the reaction makes, and if that is BIGGER than the amount of heat the reaction takes up (as is the case when salt dissolves) the reaction goes.
Okay, now, if there isn't any hydrogen around (because all of it has filtered away) the amount of entropy you produce by liberating X hydrogen (it's a log, recall) is much, much greater than if there is already a lot of hydrogen around.
So, to go back into the kitchen, if there is already a lot of salt dissolved in the water, the reaction
NaCl + heat -> Na+ + Cl-
produces less entropy. Eventually, the entropy produced by the NaCl dissolving no longer outweights the heat required to break it into two pieces, and the salt stops dissolving. You can empty a second canister full of salt into your glass of water, and it will all filter to the bottom, the water will get no saltier.
A similar thing happens with heat. If you take your salt-water with salt on the bottom and put it onto the stove, more salt will dissolve - ignore this if it doesn't make sense: this is because the more heat there is the environment, the less entropy (disorder) the environment loses when it puts any given amount of heat into the system.
The famous mathematical expression of all this is:
Total Entropy Change = Heat "Liberated" / Temperature + Log (change in amount of stuff)
(this is more commonly said dG = dH - TdS)
When I say Heat "Liberated", I mean heat which comes from the "system" (your glass of water) into the environment. If the glass of water makes the environment cold, this value is negative. 80% of PhDs can't keep the signs straight, so don't worry if something seems backwards. You're not alone.
So, doubling the amount of something always produces the same amount of entropy. If you have 60g of hydrogen, you need to make 60g more to produce (60,120) 1 "unit" of entropy. However, if you've got only 4g of hydrogen around to start with, making 60g more produces (4,8,16,32,64) 4 "units" of entropy.
So, in the reaction-
CH4 + H2O + heat -> 3 H2 + CO2
Here we are breaking things into pieces (4 pieces on right, 2 pieces on left), so the reaction is driven forward by entropy. There are two things you can do to drive the reaction forward faster.
1) You can add more heat; if you add more heat, you will make more hydrogen.
2) At any given temperature, you can drive the reaction forward by taking hydrogen away - this is what they're doing in the article. As the reaction goes forward, the hydrogen bubbles off.
Another kitchen chemistry experiment. Put two pots of water on the stove, full of water. Cover one of them. The one that you don't cover will boil away and turn completely into steam, right? This is because there is no steam in the air immediately above the pot, so when a particular water molecule becomes steam, the entropy gain is huge. The covered pot, on the other hand, will not boil away entirely (of course, eventually it will but in the short term I mean,) instead, it will boil away until a certain concentration of steam is reached in the air in the pot, and then stop.
So, if you want to boil water away more efficiently, you set up a system to blow the steam out the window (or collect it somewhere that you want to keep it) so that the air in the kitchen doesn't get humid. That's what this group has done.
Congratulations, you now know thermodynamics. That's really it.
They've also added a catalyst that makes the reaction go faster, but I'll save my explanation of kinetics (the study of how FAST reactions "go", as opposed to weather or not they go at all) for another time.
Since you've read this far, you get to know the collective secret of the scientific community: we are so high right now. Snoop Dog ain't got nuthin' on us; reefer in hand 24/7. Do you think I could've written this long schpeal without beaking baked off my derear? Oh, man, have I got the munchies.
Yes, so I did. I support half-measures, but not counter-measures. EPIC fell for it to, for that matter, unless they were complacent in all this. EPIC just lost a great deal of my respect (only the EFF can be trusted? Everyone else is a fool or a corporate tool? Sad, sad world.)
Nevertheless, my overall point remained valid. if he *did* sponsor a good piece of legislation he would deserve credit for it. You can't make inroads towards productive dialogue with someone if, when they do something right (which many people think/thought that he had) all you do is shout louder about the things that they're doing which you don't like.
Sigh.
ET: Greetings, hu-mans. We contact you to usher you into the great community of sentient species! /|\3!
Human: We have d3crypt3d ur private k3v/s! \|/3 wi11 h4xxor u!
ET: Stop that. It's an insult to the dignity of all thinking beings.
Human: 1 4m s0 3|_33T!
ET: I didn't wait 10,000 years for my answer to cross the icy depths of space so I could read your sophmoric babblings.
Human: 1 r0xx0rd u!
ET: Your puny intellect is no match for our massive weapons!
Human: Br1|\|g it on! U \|/1|_|_ f34r
Of course, I just assume that alien intelligence is like me. Maybe I'm just too closed-minded to envisage a form of consciousness that isn't driven into a homidical rage by leet-speak.
Seriously, while there are a great many ways besides SETI you can meet people and waste processor cycles together (I know - keep analysing the ripples in the surface of loch ness until you find the "messages" pixies are sending us from another dimension!) my colleagues at Oxford have managed to come up with something genuinely useful to do with your spare processor cycles.
IANAL, but I had a similar idea and when I asked one of my relatives who is a lawyer he said-
1) Yes, you can.
2) You'd be sued anyway. Hope you have deep pockets.
Enjoy.
Sen. Hollings (likewise his secret masters at Disney) may not be my favorite legislator, and he may sponsor a lot of bills which I do not like, but this is a good law. The things that Salon complains about the bill "legitimising" are already 100% legal, unfortunately. While the bill is too weak, I will say this: it is not true that weak provisions make stronger provisions unlikely by assuaging the fears of the sheep-like masses, instead, they shift the social pendulum to make stronger measures more feasible in the future. I support half-measures 100% - yes, this makes me a liberal.
Now that Sen. Hollings has sponsored a piece of good legislation - I'm not a lawyer but I trust EPIC to know totally fake privacy legislation when they see it - he deserves credit for doing the right thing, not continued vilification for the mistakes he's made in the past. Classifying him (or Disney, for that matter) as our Eternal Foe just because he (foolishly, ignorantly) sought to curtail our rights on one occasion is not the way to go. I, personally, know a lot of fine, upstanding people who work in the Movies (none actually at Disney, but hey, if Pat Robertson hate them that much they can't be all bad), some of whom even supported the CBDTPA, and lumping them in with Hitler as people with whom any dialogue is "appeasement" is neither productive nor justified.
So, Kudos to the H-man. Keep it up.
"Opening the Xbox" is published by Prima Publishing. Among gamers, the Prima name is best known for publishing strategy guidebooks for a wide variety of console and computer titles. Prima guides are currently available for more than a dozen Xbox games, including Microsoft's popular shooter Halo and gridiron simulation NFL Fever 2002. Strategy guide publishers like Prima often depend heavily on the cooperation of game companies -- like Microsoft -- to release hint books that are information packed, timely and useful to gamers.
They also depend on mushbrained "journalists" giving them free advertising. That paragraph is worded like a prima press release, no one uses "information packed" in any other context.
Question - is Mr McCauley (who wrote the Salon article) a complete tool, or did he agree to include that exact phrasing in exchange for getting some sort of access? Have things gotten to the point where companies like Prima can dictate terms to the press? (He actually works for the Philadelphia Inquirer, not Salon.)
The launch comes at a time when the video game industry is at the beginning of a multi-year growth cycle...
So, someone said this to the journalist in an interview, so he turns around and prints it as fact. Not "so and so says that the industry is..." but, in the same ways ss he would say "the sky is blue" he prints whatever prognostications some industry insider cares to share as if they were physical truth.
Yes, I'm aware that the next statement starts many analysts predict... but that doesn't impact the first statement; in fact, it makes it stronger since it implies that the only disagreement is on the intensity of growth.
That's about the quality of journalism I expect from yahoo. Snarl.
No Book is required. Anyone who's seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail three times is standards compliant (they understand references to the film.) By complying to this standard, you are able to interact with anyone worthwhile. Since the rest of the human race cannot agree to watch the film more than once, interaction with them is impossible. You can't interact if people can't agree on a protocol!
Seriously, many books have been written on the subject of enabling human-human interaction. A number specifically target CS students. Reading them will slowly transform you into an MBA, killing you on the inside. IS THAT YOU WANT?
Chlorophyll contains Magnesium, not Iron.
That said, you could construct a photosynthetic organism around haemoglobin (which does contain Iron) instead of chlorophyll, and it would be a totally different color.
That's what I get for posting at 1 AM.
What I meant to say was that Photosystem II is big and complicated; it contains 50 chlorophyll molecules. The properties of chlorophyll, that make it desirable as a primary light harvesting molecule, are heavily bound up in the properties of Photosystem II. The structure of photosystem II also changes the "color" of the Chlorophyll somewhat; but, of course, the robots would extract the chlorophyll into an organic solvent so that would not be an issue. Other photosystems here on Earth contain chromophores that are totally different in color - this is why red algae is red and brown algae is brown (instead of green.) All terrestrial plants happen to contain chlorophyll as well, but there's no reason to think that would be the case on Mars. In fact, there are two totally different classes of molecules that harvest energy from light here on earth (at least; I'm referring to the non-metal-ion carrying chemicals in our eyes and in the eyes of insects) which might form the basis for alien photosynthesis.
That's not flamebait, although he is mistaken. Immature, wrong press releases cost you funding. {JOKE}Science is not like IT, where famous screwups are more fundable than competent nobodies (anyone else remember that Dilbert episode?){/JOKE}
That said, I see no reason (I'm a biologist, not an astronomer) why alien cells would have chlorophyll. If they did find chlorophyll, it woul be a sign that we'd contaminated Mars with terrestrial cells.
Even if a Martian cell where photosynthetic, I would not expect it to express chlorophyll! Chlorophyll is long, big and complicated. An independently evolved protein, from an alien organism, would never look much like chlorphyll - the odds against such a coincidence are astronomical. Assuming the alien life had membranes, photosynthetic aliens MIGHT use a membrane-bound light-dependent electron pump like the ones found in chloroplasts and their bacterial cousins; however, since there are many, many classes of both light reactive molecules and of redox proteins (electron pumps) in terrestrial organisms, many of these proteins are not-at-all similar to one another, so even if an alien organism "worked the same" as a terrestrial chlorplast (chloroplasts are the cellular organelles in plants that harvest light) it'd have independently evolved proteins with similar functions, they wouldn't be chlorophyll, and they wouldn't be similar to chlorphyll in terms of sequence or overall shape. The odds are incredibly small! Even the twenty amino acids we use are a result of the original molecular evolution of terrestrial life; an alien organism might not have the same twenty (assuming that it had amino acids at all; we don't know enough to make a definitive conclusion, but nucleic acids and amino acids may be the only molecules in existence that could make a biological organism.)
All musings aside, the original poster was correct. Chlorophyll on Mars was a stupid thing to expect.