Cultured cells can grow virus just as easily as in vivo cells. Even easier, since they don't have the benefit of a thymus or bone marrow. That's why we learned how to culture cells in the first place.
Forget about creationism for a minute. Have you considered that there might be a good reason for kids not to study evolutionary biology? Old-school field studies are dying. The days of people like Darwin & Audobon (or even WD Hamilton) are over, the world is too small now. Funding is easier to find for molecular biology, and other fields that can be easily conscripted by pharmaceutical companies - and these are companies where you can start working with a MS in Chemical Engineering. Plus, as much as I hate to say it, there may not be much left for evolutionary biologists left to find. Ever since we reached a definition of inclusive fitness, I've thought that the details of the mechanisms involved don't really matter in day-to-day life.
I used a Netgear ME101 Ethernet bridge, purchased from justdeals.com for $25. Plug one end of an ethernet cable into your computer, the other end into the bridge, and you're ready to go. I even cobbled together a cable that powers it off the +5v from my USB port, so I can use it on a laptop. It's big and unwieldly, but gets the job done if you have to use Linux.
I've often wondered if some people literally can't understand concepts that are presented in written form. I've noticed that some of my friends will laugh at a joke on TV, but they could stare at the EXACT SAME JOKE in print for an hour and never get it. It's probably kind of a cop-out to blame television for this (was there any more literacy before the rise of television?), although the thought has crossed my mind.
Slashdot pedants take note: illiteracy doesn't just manifest itself in grammar mistakes and misplaced apostrophes. It also is responsible for nonexistent words like "virii" and overly verbose language like the updates on Penny Arcade. Read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", it'll change your life.
This is crazy...I just had my car stored, because I don't drive enough to bother keeping up the insurance. And last night, in fact, it occurred to me that Pay-as-you-drive might be easier and more efficient, but it would require some kind of monitoring in the car. I finally decided I wouldn't spring for it, because it's too much like having your parents check the odometer after you take the family minivan out on a date. But for someone who didn't mind the lack of privacy, it would be a great deal.
I can see why they would stress the infectious nature of these bacteria -- I actually just walked out of my bathroom and noticed the telltale pink colonies of Pseudomonas growing on the shower curtain. They also form around the drain in the sink, under the rim of the toilet and anywhere it stays damp most of the time. They haven't caused any health problems yet, but maybe this article will give me the initiative to clean it.
When I was a kid, my parents had a DOS-based computer with an early version of Quicken and a text editor that they used to write letters. Now they have a newer computer that runs Windows XP, but they still prefer to use the older programs.
If I was to teach someone Linux, I would definitely teach the command line first. When there are just a few programs you use, it's easier to memorize their commands or keyboard shortcuts than it is to hunt through a menu each time. E.G., if all you want to do is play Pac-Man, you can either a) Hunt through the menus to launch gRustibus, wait for it to load, scroll through the gamelist until you find the right version of Pac-Man, and double-click the name, or b) type "xmame pacman" at the command promt.
Now if someone would come out with an MP3 player that fit in your car stereo slot, and cost less than $300, I'd buy it in a minute. I listen to most of my music in the car, but carrying around a bunch of CDs is more trouble than it's worth. It doesn't seem like it would be that much more expensive to make, but who knows.
Probably everybody and his brother will mention this, but software bloat is a big reason for slow "Fast" machines. Even something like a word processor can be bloated if you put in all kinds of dynamic spellchecking, OLE, libraries to support 100 different kinds of documents, and so on. When I get a new, fast, box, I use the opportunity to run all kinds of new, fast software, which makes the machine seem slower by comparison. Not that I'm going to abandon spiffy new software, but I realize that there is going to be a speed tradeoff.
That's about 2.5 hours of internet access per day, plus 2 hours of tv and 1.5 hours of listening to the radio. So either these kids are spending 6 hours a day (after school no less) sitting in front of various electronic babysitters or they've learned how to multi-task.
Okay, so somebody beat me to the goatse idea...I can't say that I'm surprised...but I can't help thinking that this picture is more in the spirit of the slashdot forums.
For some reason, the only game that really scared me (and still continues to) is the original Doom 2. The first time I played it I used headphones for a more "immersive" experience, but I ended up freaking out and looking behind me every time I heard a monster. After I quit playing, I had broken out in a cold sweat, and my friends told me I had kept trying to peer into the monitor to see around corners. This is all incredibly embarrassing in retrospect, but the weird thing is that no other game has ever done that to me. Even today, nothing compares to the creepy feeling you get when you hear muttering behind a wall and know there's an Arch-Vile nearby.
The most interesting thing about this announcement is that this guy has been able to use evolution to improve his circuits. I don't expect molecular computers to surpass electronic computers, at least right away -- although they could theoretically perform faster than electronic computers in the short term, any advantage is offset by the time needed to convert the information to human-readable form (by finding and correctly reading the DNA sequence). As the article says, it's better to take advantage of the fact that you can "work with" bacteria. But if DNA computers could repair and upgrade themselves, they would have an advantage that electronics currently does not have. Electronics already is under intense artifical selection, and it can reproduce itself after a fashion, but unlike copper and aluminum, DNA computers can be randomly mutated, and the close homology between computers ensures that some of those mutations will be beneficial.
Perhaps it would be nice to move away from wild, unfounded speculation and Sci-fi references to discuss how these things are used in the real world. Last summer I worked at a research station where we set up a network of these things to remotely monitor ground-nesting birds in their burrows. Privacy of the birds aside, these are great tools for scientific observation in sensitive areas -- observer effect is minimized, cost is minimized, and you can monitor many different locations constantly, without having to check them again every day. If you're wondering what the limitations of these systems are, powering them is a big one. The motes run on battery power, so the size of the battery puts a restriction on both the size of the mote and the amount of time it can run before it needs to be replaced (and the site needs to be disturbed). And size is important too, as they are not yet quite small or cheap enough to throw one in every locker room (despite what you may have heard).
Ignoring the multitude of people who are jumping on the bandwagon to say this isn't an interesting topic, I beg to differ. I think this issue is fascinating because, by and large, the people who will be doing the genetic modification will not be the people who are receiving it. Unless you are undergoing gene therapy to cure a disease, your genetic modification will be performed by your parents or guardians for their own benefit, essentially without your permission. In a lot of cases, it can be argued that this benefit is what the child would have wanted anyway (would you deny someone with a genetic disease the right to see their children live and prosper?), but it can never be possible to know for sure because the effects won't become obvious until the child is full-grown. Considering that modifying the human genome is a bit like tweaking a million-line program without knowing the language, I think people need to be cautious about what rights they accord to parents and which to children. Social discrimination can be just as bad as physical harm caused by GM, and there's no need to make GM humans suffer for the "sins of the father".
On the subject of writing "Fuck" in comic books...
on
Ask Warren Ellis
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Warren, I used to read comic books, like most kids, before I was a teenager. But after I got older, I looked back and realized that it was embarrassingly juvenile. Most comics were basically male power fantasies with gratuitous violence and pretentious dialogue (e.g., "although that regrettable ontogenetic experience may have dissuaded you from answering, Logan..."). And that still hasn't changed. You have "adult" comics which add gratuitous sex and profanity to the gratuitous violence; webcomics and 'zines that replace the pretentious dialogue with pretentious avant-garde layout; and "socially conscious" comics that are essentially the same male power fantasies with politically incorrect villains.
The overall perception of comics is of an industry that just hasn't grown up, and comic book enthusiasts are seen as adults who can't let go of their childhood. This is especially true in the case of hentai and furry porn, where adult themes are combined with "childish" cartoon artwork. But although I have seen writing that does fit this description, I have also seen examples of competent, mature writing, and I know that comic books can be as effective a form of art as any other.
I want to know what you, having worked in the mainstream comics industry, have to say about this. If you know of comics out there that are truly great -- not amateur, pretentious, or immature -- I would like to know what they are. I gave up on comics years ago, but I have hopes that one will come along that will change my mind.
Maybe I've just had bad experiences, but whenever I've heard statements like this before, they turned out to be just as true for both sexes after the proper testing. I know that when I switched from one desktop to virtual desktops, I had an easier time navigating, and the same thing happened when switching from one monitor to two monitors. And later in the article, they mention how women "need" smoother frame rates to keep from getting disoriented. It sounds to me like the women just hadn't gotten used to the computers yet. I bet when they do the control experiments, men will get even better when they have a widescreen monitor and smooth framerate, and then they find out that the guys spent all their time playing Counterstrike on laggy servers, with 15-inch monitors. Oh, incidentally, I'm astounded that more people haven't pointed out the irony of a Microsoft-funded study suggesting that all female computer users buy high-end graphics cards, and monitors which are fully two times larger than their current ones! Maybe their next study will suggest that women buy intellimice since they have trouble double-clicking.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot really like video games (me included!), so it's easy for us to have disdain for something that looks at them in a negative light. But if video games really do cause violence, then we need to overlook our feelings for a moment and take the subject seriously. I for one can sympathize, because right after I showed my little brother how to play Commander Keen, he started running around on a rampage of pogo-stick-and-ray-gun related violence. I finally had to take his neural stunner away from him because he was causing so much trouble. I'm not even going to mention what happened after he got addicted to Gauntlet and then got his hands on a magical flask of liquid. It took me hours to clean the mess up.
When I was on an island research station last summer, I was astounded to walk out of the building one morning and see waves crashing against the base of a lighthouse, 20 miles away on the edge of the horizon. Something about the air had magnified the distant object so that I could see it with the naked eye. Ever since then I've wondered if it was possible to make an extremely powerful telescope by using gas. It's easy to get magnification by changing eyepieces, but the hard part is getting a nice wide primary lens/mirror to collect light and keep the image from getting blurry. A gas lens would solve that problem by using a huge bubble of heated air -- if you could get it to hold its shape well enough. This isn't exactly the same thing, since it uses radio refraction through charged particles rather than light refraction through air, but I'd like to imagine that it's a start.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why does anybody give this article any credibility whatsoever? If you look at the slashdot article, they act like this is a legitimate company with a realistic goal. But what kind of company puts animated GIFs of a "space elevator" on their home page and supports their idea with citations from science fiction novels? They tell us this has been considered by NASA. But so has the Podkletnov effect, which supposedly miraculously shields objects from earth's gravity. Either NASA isn't given enough funding to do background checks, or they're checking out every crackpot who comes along in hopes of finding gold. I'm betting this is a hoax, but if it isn't, this guy has about as much chance of constructing his space elevator as Imari Stevenson has of designing a Final Fantasy sequel. A word to the wise.
One of the posters brings up an interesting point. Although meaningful data has more information than pure noise, it also has less than a blank signal. When you download pictures, regardless of the "meaning" they have to you, their compression can vary a considerable amount. And you've probably heard the statistic that the english language is 50 percent redundant. That figure may vary a bit too, but the point is that english's meaning to us is independent of its information content. And the probability that an image of a life form with more information will also have more "meaning" is probably just as uncertain.
This kind of reminds me of Super 3d Noah's Ark for the Super Nintendo. On that game, you had to have an existing SNES game (I think any one would do) and plug it into the top of the Super 3d Noah's Ark cartridge, sort of like the Game Genie. I imagine this had something to do with the fact that S3DNA was the only unlicensed SNES game, so it needed another game connected to make use of its licensed hardware. You could look at Agent Under Fire as the licensed game which is needed to run the unlicensed program, Linux.
Farscape is an OK show (at least better than the awful Sliders, where I once saw a guy run backward into a wall to simulate falling off a building). But a "petition" to get it back on the air is a little much. Sheesh, who cares if there's no good reason to cancel it, the creators have the right to cancel it if they want to. I think eventually people will have to realize that the show is not getting cancelled "just to make them mad", and more importantly, nobody in Hollywood cares about a bunch of nerds and their idiotic "petition campaign". The only reason people even care about this is because:
1. Chiana is hot and has a dominating personality, i.e. nerd dream date. I think someone in this thread mentioned that he liked Farscape because "Chiana was totally hot". Uh-huh.
2. Crichton is portrayed as being smart AND good looking, not a hacker in a greasy t-shirt and coke-bottle glasses.
Stroking the egos of the sci-fi community is not a good reason to keep a show on the air. I'll probably get flamed to a crisp for going against established Slashdot dogma, but somebody has to point out that the obvious.
I'll tell you one thing, the world doesn't deserve a browser as good as Opera. I had the pleasure of using a computer that had Windows installed the other day, and the new Opera 7 is simply amazing. Not only can you do anything by using exclusively the mouse (or the keyboard), but the small screen rendering works perfectly. And I thought that was just going to be a crap marketing feature that mutilated the page. It's got integrated e-mail with spam filtering and PIM features, button themes for skins, and renders stuff that Internet Explorer chokes on. And that was just what I found in one night. I know I sound like a corporate shill, but it's not advertising if they didn't pay you for it. This is one thing I would GLADLY pay for if it came out on Linux (and think it was a small price to pay, too). If I browsed the web a lot, I think I might consider booting into windows just to browse, for this reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Cultured cells can grow virus just as easily as in vivo cells. Even easier, since they don't have the benefit of a thymus or bone marrow. That's why we learned how to culture cells in the first place.
Forget about creationism for a minute. Have you considered that there might be a good reason for kids not to study evolutionary biology? Old-school field studies are dying. The days of people like Darwin & Audobon (or even WD Hamilton) are over, the world is too small now. Funding is easier to find for molecular biology, and other fields that can be easily conscripted by pharmaceutical companies - and these are companies where you can start working with a MS in Chemical Engineering. Plus, as much as I hate to say it, there may not be much left for evolutionary biologists left to find. Ever since we reached a definition of inclusive fitness, I've thought that the details of the mechanisms involved don't really matter in day-to-day life.
I used a Netgear ME101 Ethernet bridge, purchased from justdeals.com for $25. Plug one end of an ethernet cable into your computer, the other end into the bridge, and you're ready to go. I even cobbled together a cable that powers it off the +5v from my USB port, so I can use it on a laptop. It's big and unwieldly, but gets the job done if you have to use Linux.
I've often wondered if some people literally can't understand concepts that are presented in written form. I've noticed that some of my friends will laugh at a joke on TV, but they could stare at the EXACT SAME JOKE in print for an hour and never get it. It's probably kind of a cop-out to blame television for this (was there any more literacy before the rise of television?), although the thought has crossed my mind.
Slashdot pedants take note: illiteracy doesn't just manifest itself in grammar mistakes and misplaced apostrophes. It also is responsible for nonexistent words like "virii" and overly verbose language like the updates on Penny Arcade. Read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", it'll change your life.
the Unix businesses couldn't agree on software development standards
Oh, and Linux can?
This is crazy...I just had my car stored, because I don't drive enough to bother keeping up the insurance. And last night, in fact, it occurred to me that Pay-as-you-drive might be easier and more efficient, but it would require some kind of monitoring in the car. I finally decided I wouldn't spring for it, because it's too much like having your parents check the odometer after you take the family minivan out on a date. But for someone who didn't mind the lack of privacy, it would be a great deal.
I can see why they would stress the infectious nature of these bacteria -- I actually just walked out of my bathroom and noticed the telltale pink colonies of Pseudomonas growing on the shower curtain. They also form around the drain in the sink, under the rim of the toilet and anywhere it stays damp most of the time. They haven't caused any health problems yet, but maybe this article will give me the initiative to clean it.
If I was to teach someone Linux, I would definitely teach the command line first. When there are just a few programs you use, it's easier to memorize their commands or keyboard shortcuts than it is to hunt through a menu each time. E.G., if all you want to do is play Pac-Man, you can either a) Hunt through the menus to launch gRustibus, wait for it to load, scroll through the gamelist until you find the right version of Pac-Man, and double-click the name, or b) type "xmame pacman" at the command promt.
Now if someone would come out with an MP3 player that fit in your car stereo slot, and cost less than $300, I'd buy it in a minute. I listen to most of my music in the car, but carrying around a bunch of CDs is more trouble than it's worth. It doesn't seem like it would be that much more expensive to make, but who knows.
Probably everybody and his brother will mention this, but software bloat is a big reason for slow "Fast" machines. Even something like a word processor can be bloated if you put in all kinds of dynamic spellchecking, OLE, libraries to support 100 different kinds of documents, and so on. When I get a new, fast, box, I use the opportunity to run all kinds of new, fast software, which makes the machine seem slower by comparison. Not that I'm going to abandon spiffy new software, but I realize that there is going to be a speed tradeoff.
That's about 2.5 hours of internet access per day, plus 2 hours of tv and 1.5 hours of listening to the radio. So either these kids are spending 6 hours a day (after school no less) sitting in front of various electronic babysitters or they've learned how to multi-task.
Okay, so somebody beat me to the goatse idea...I can't say that I'm surprised...but I can't help thinking that this picture is more in the spirit of the slashdot forums.
For some reason, the only game that really scared me (and still continues to) is the original Doom 2. The first time I played it I used headphones for a more "immersive" experience, but I ended up freaking out and looking behind me every time I heard a monster. After I quit playing, I had broken out in a cold sweat, and my friends told me I had kept trying to peer into the monitor to see around corners. This is all incredibly embarrassing in retrospect, but the weird thing is that no other game has ever done that to me. Even today, nothing compares to the creepy feeling you get when you hear muttering behind a wall and know there's an Arch-Vile nearby.
The most interesting thing about this announcement is that this guy has been able to use evolution to improve his circuits. I don't expect molecular computers to surpass electronic computers, at least right away -- although they could theoretically perform faster than electronic computers in the short term, any advantage is offset by the time needed to convert the information to human-readable form (by finding and correctly reading the DNA sequence). As the article says, it's better to take advantage of the fact that you can "work with" bacteria. But if DNA computers could repair and upgrade themselves, they would have an advantage that electronics currently does not have. Electronics already is under intense artifical selection, and it can reproduce itself after a fashion, but unlike copper and aluminum, DNA computers can be randomly mutated, and the close homology between computers ensures that some of those mutations will be beneficial.
Perhaps it would be nice to move away from wild, unfounded speculation and Sci-fi references to discuss how these things are used in the real world. Last summer I worked at a research station where we set up a network of these things to remotely monitor ground-nesting birds in their burrows. Privacy of the birds aside, these are great tools for scientific observation in sensitive areas -- observer effect is minimized, cost is minimized, and you can monitor many different locations constantly, without having to check them again every day. If you're wondering what the limitations of these systems are, powering them is a big one. The motes run on battery power, so the size of the battery puts a restriction on both the size of the mote and the amount of time it can run before it needs to be replaced (and the site needs to be disturbed). And size is important too, as they are not yet quite small or cheap enough to throw one in every locker room (despite what you may have heard).
Ignoring the multitude of people who are jumping on the bandwagon to say this isn't an interesting topic, I beg to differ. I think this issue is fascinating because, by and large, the people who will be doing the genetic modification will not be the people who are receiving it. Unless you are undergoing gene therapy to cure a disease, your genetic modification will be performed by your parents or guardians for their own benefit, essentially without your permission. In a lot of cases, it can be argued that this benefit is what the child would have wanted anyway (would you deny someone with a genetic disease the right to see their children live and prosper?), but it can never be possible to know for sure because the effects won't become obvious until the child is full-grown. Considering that modifying the human genome is a bit like tweaking a million-line program without knowing the language, I think people need to be cautious about what rights they accord to parents and which to children. Social discrimination can be just as bad as physical harm caused by GM, and there's no need to make GM humans suffer for the "sins of the father".
The overall perception of comics is of an industry that just hasn't grown up, and comic book enthusiasts are seen as adults who can't let go of their childhood. This is especially true in the case of hentai and furry porn, where adult themes are combined with "childish" cartoon artwork. But although I have seen writing that does fit this description, I have also seen examples of competent, mature writing, and I know that comic books can be as effective a form of art as any other.
I want to know what you, having worked in the mainstream comics industry, have to say about this. If you know of comics out there that are truly great -- not amateur, pretentious, or immature -- I would like to know what they are. I gave up on comics years ago, but I have hopes that one will come along that will change my mind.
Maybe I've just had bad experiences, but whenever I've heard statements like this before, they turned out to be just as true for both sexes after the proper testing. I know that when I switched from one desktop to virtual desktops, I had an easier time navigating, and the same thing happened when switching from one monitor to two monitors. And later in the article, they mention how women "need" smoother frame rates to keep from getting disoriented. It sounds to me like the women just hadn't gotten used to the computers yet. I bet when they do the control experiments, men will get even better when they have a widescreen monitor and smooth framerate, and then they find out that the guys spent all their time playing Counterstrike on laggy servers, with 15-inch monitors. Oh, incidentally, I'm astounded that more people haven't pointed out the irony of a Microsoft-funded study suggesting that all female computer users buy high-end graphics cards, and monitors which are fully two times larger than their current ones! Maybe their next study will suggest that women buy intellimice since they have trouble double-clicking.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot really like video games (me included!), so it's easy for us to have disdain for something that looks at them in a negative light. But if video games really do cause violence, then we need to overlook our feelings for a moment and take the subject seriously. I for one can sympathize, because right after I showed my little brother how to play Commander Keen, he started running around on a rampage of pogo-stick-and-ray-gun related violence. I finally had to take his neural stunner away from him because he was causing so much trouble. I'm not even going to mention what happened after he got addicted to Gauntlet and then got his hands on a magical flask of liquid. It took me hours to clean the mess up.
When I was on an island research station last summer, I was astounded to walk out of the building one morning and see waves crashing against the base of a lighthouse, 20 miles away on the edge of the horizon. Something about the air had magnified the distant object so that I could see it with the naked eye. Ever since then I've wondered if it was possible to make an extremely powerful telescope by using gas. It's easy to get magnification by changing eyepieces, but the hard part is getting a nice wide primary lens/mirror to collect light and keep the image from getting blurry. A gas lens would solve that problem by using a huge bubble of heated air -- if you could get it to hold its shape well enough. This isn't exactly the same thing, since it uses radio refraction through charged particles rather than light refraction through air, but I'd like to imagine that it's a start.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why does anybody give this article any credibility whatsoever? If you look at the slashdot article, they act like this is a legitimate company with a realistic goal. But what kind of company puts animated GIFs of a "space elevator" on their home page and supports their idea with citations from science fiction novels? They tell us this has been considered by NASA. But so has the Podkletnov effect, which supposedly miraculously shields objects from earth's gravity. Either NASA isn't given enough funding to do background checks, or they're checking out every crackpot who comes along in hopes of finding gold. I'm betting this is a hoax, but if it isn't, this guy has about as much chance of constructing his space elevator as Imari Stevenson has of designing a Final Fantasy sequel. A word to the wise.
One of the posters brings up an interesting point. Although meaningful data has more information than pure noise, it also has less than a blank signal. When you download pictures, regardless of the "meaning" they have to you, their compression can vary a considerable amount. And you've probably heard the statistic that the english language is 50 percent redundant. That figure may vary a bit too, but the point is that english's meaning to us is independent of its information content. And the probability that an image of a life form with more information will also have more "meaning" is probably just as uncertain.
This kind of reminds me of Super 3d Noah's Ark for the Super Nintendo. On that game, you had to have an existing SNES game (I think any one would do) and plug it into the top of the Super 3d Noah's Ark cartridge, sort of like the Game Genie. I imagine this had something to do with the fact that S3DNA was the only unlicensed SNES game, so it needed another game connected to make use of its licensed hardware. You could look at Agent Under Fire as the licensed game which is needed to run the unlicensed program, Linux.
1. Chiana is hot and has a dominating personality, i.e. nerd dream date. I think someone in this thread mentioned that he liked Farscape because "Chiana was totally hot". Uh-huh.
2. Crichton is portrayed as being smart AND good looking, not a hacker in a greasy t-shirt and coke-bottle glasses.
Stroking the egos of the sci-fi community is not a good reason to keep a show on the air. I'll probably get flamed to a crisp for going against established Slashdot dogma, but somebody has to point out that the obvious.
I'll tell you one thing, the world doesn't deserve a browser as good as Opera. I had the pleasure of using a computer that had Windows installed the other day, and the new Opera 7 is simply amazing. Not only can you do anything by using exclusively the mouse (or the keyboard), but the small screen rendering works perfectly. And I thought that was just going to be a crap marketing feature that mutilated the page. It's got integrated e-mail with spam filtering and PIM features, button themes for skins, and renders stuff that Internet Explorer chokes on. And that was just what I found in one night. I know I sound like a corporate shill, but it's not advertising if they didn't pay you for it. This is one thing I would GLADLY pay for if it came out on Linux (and think it was a small price to pay, too). If I browsed the web a lot, I think I might consider booting into windows just to browse, for this reason.