Evolution is not a theory about the origin of life. It is not dependant on any specific hypothesis about the origin of life. For example (Hypothesis I) the hand of God could have placed the first primitive organism on the early earth. Alternatively (Hypothesis II) the first life on earth could have come from waste from the toilets of a visiting alien spaceship four and a half billion years ago.
Both these hypotheses are compatible with modern evolutionary theory and if either were true they would require no revision of the theory. They merely provide starting points for the evolutionary process.
However from the naturalist viewpoint of the evolutionary biologist the most probable explanation is that chemical evolution on the early earth lead to the formation of the first primitive organisms (Hypothesis III) providing the basis for biological evolution. Still I wouldn't rule out that we are the spawn of alien shit (Hypothesis II) even though I have my doubts about the hand of God (Hypothesis I).
Re:Millions of dollars? Years of research?
on
Kimchi in Space
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· Score: 1
Hey that gives me a great idea haggis and kimchi together. My two favorite dishes. I am of Scottish descent so maybe that's why I love haggis but I have no Korean links and I love kimchi too. Together they would be awesome, I just haven't thought of it before.
Make way for His Majesty the Haggis!
Mozilla = Mosaic Killer. The original codename for Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was public domain and Netscape Navigator was closed source until JWZ persuaded Netscape to open the code as a way of countering MSIE's burgeoning dominance. Irony eh?
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields.
Currently most of the bright minds in the US seem to be Chinese. They average literate Chinese person is typically better at maths than the average westerner because the higher level of abstraction required to learn written Chinese effectively prepares them for the abstract study of mathematics.
Yeah minority governments scare the shit out of the politicians. The Trudeau and Clark minority governments were better than any majority ones. It forces even a dangerous authoritarian bushite neocon like Harper to try to appear human, which he finds very painful.
he shows how journalism is typically left of center.
In the US "left of center" means somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. Hell they can't even spell centre right. You guys ought to get a real English-English spell checker.
I was on the jury for two trials back in England about 25 years ago. I was impressed by the seriousness and clarity of thought all the jurors brought to the cases. Maybe times have changed or the US is different or just that both of have only anecdotal examples, however I went away impressed by the jury system.
Here in Canada now they are slowly trying to work towards the abolition of the jury system by stealth and a thousand cuts. They are making less and less cases triable by jury and the percentage of cases tried by jury is continually falling.
Yes if Microsoft is prepared to to use this deliberate ploy to degrade the usability of Firefox on Hotmail, then it raises the question what is MS likely to do if they manage to acquire Yahoo.
This sort of behaviour could prove to be counter-productive for Microshaft (I normally disapprove of silly joke name calling of MS, but this is a case where they deserve that epithet). If I worked for Google, I would be carefully documenting this anti-competitive behaviour of MS in web services, in order to build up an anti-trust case against MS's takeover of Yahoo.
...they are designed to be read from a long distance. Gen2 is absolutely the wrong choice for this application. ISO 14443 (which is used by passports and credit cards) makes a hell of a lot more sense since that protocol is designed to be a close-range, contact smartcard replacement.
The want them to be long distance so they can monitor not only who goes in and out of specific buildings, but also who drives along specific sections of a highway. The intrusive state monitoring everything its so called citizens or serfs in reality do.
I have said it over and over again, let's fork Zimbra. Any [Zimbra] code we can lay our hands on should be forked...period...then we can debate what name we should call the product. I suggest "Zimbiya".
Yes and this is in Afghanistan run by the pro western government of that nice Mr. Karzai you the man, the one that wears the fashionable capes and has a brother heavily involved in the opium industry. Yes the opium industry that was brought back after the defeat of the Taleban.
So come on someone tell me what the war there is about, it certainly isn't about democracy and civil rights. It seems to me it's about oil pipelines and strategic control. Just carrying on the 19th Centuries "Great Game" on into the 21st. The US, British and Canadian hypocrisy disgusts me
I just looked back at this and discovered it had been moderated down as overated. I guess there actually must be some people out there that like U2. Poor suckers.
Why does this make them evil? Is is because they tell scientists to research the most profitable diseases?... How dare people try and make what others want instead of what you consider best for society.
It is evil because the big pharma corporations call themselves "ethical companies" to distinguish themselves from generic pharmaceutical companies, who are presumably "unethical" by bringing low cost generic drugs onto the market, to give people affordable alternatives. If they proclaim themselves to be "ethical" the should behave ethically and try to produce drugs that are urgently needed. Instead of searching for the next big lifestyle drug that reduces your long term chance of getting a disease by a few percent they should be developing drugs like new antibiotics where because of the spread of disease resistance there is the need for new defences. However since antibiotics are delivered for a course of treatment lasting a few weeks rather than for a lifetime with the "lifestyle" drugs they are less profitable.
As for "what others want instead of what you consider best for society", consider this - these companies receive special privileges from society that give them guaranteed monopolies for decades, called patents. In return society has a right to expect them to use those privileges ethically.
For the record, U2 has always sucked. Whiner music.
Yeah I'll second that. I have not, nor have I ever bought a U2 recording. But then I have not, nor have I ever downloaded so much as a single U2 track.
I buy CD's. [plug] I just got my wife to buy me for Xmas the "Someone to Drive You Home" album by the Long Blondes. I first found out about them by downloading a video of them Live in NY from Punkcast. I just had to download all their tracks I could find. That told me I had to buy their album complete with the cover art by their fabulous singer Kate Jackson [/plug]
The lesson is when I didn't download music I didn't buy CD's now I do download music I buy CD's. Not from CRIA/RIAA labels though.
PS I live in Canada and it's still legal to download music.
Gravitons have not been detected and there is no solid theory for them, but to be consisted with the rest of particle physics, they need to exist.
One of the results of string theory, that the proponents of string theory point out as one of its greatest successes, is the prediction of the existence of the graviton. They were not trying to derive the graviton from the theory, they found that the theory predicted an unexpected particle. When they looked at it closer they then realized that it had the expected properties of the graviton.
It died primarily, because we inconveniently for the RIAA/CRIA MPAA etc had an election called before it went to a vote ok the Senate slowed it down. This is something we can rely this year as we will almost certainly get an election this year and hopefully we will get rid of Harper and his crypto-Bushite hidden agenda. However we cant always rely on this there are enough Liberal MP's in the pay of the media conglomerate that we will face the same problem from them. I don't even trust the NDP on this one.
It's only if we as informed active citizens kick up enough fuss to our elected representatives, like we did when the Bill was first announced, which scared them enough to withdraw it for reconsideration. Which they did to pretend they are not the corrupt servants of the oligarchy, which they are, rather than the servants of their electorate, which they should be.
They are not saying saying that mutations are not random. If mutations were not random this would require major changes in either biology or physics. What they are saying is that selection, not random drift in the developmental changes they were studying in nematode worms is the determining factor.
What they concluded:
We propose that developmental evolution is primarily governed by selection and/or selection-independent constraints, not stochastic processes such as drift in unconstrained phenotypic space.
It is merely confirmation of the adaptationist program of modern evolutionary biology.
..the government they deserve. And as an outside (from the UK) it looks as if that is about to apply to America.
It isn't like any of this is surprising.
As a British expatriate, I want to ask did the British people deserve Bliar and NuLab. Britain has an uncorruptible voting system where the only choice you have is which of the corrupt to vote for.
It's the latter (with a more reasonable limit of 18 (and 16 for beer and wine)) over here in germany, and if parents hand their 10 year old a beer or wine, or even some hard stuff, that's not considered a problem.
Yes but modern Germany is a reasonably civilized country. Here we are talking about the U.S. the Land of the Unfree home of the Christian Taleban.
If God created the world. Then the scientific method is the way to find out how God's creation works. Therefore to reject the considered and soundly evaluated results of scientific research is to reject the work of God in creating the world.
Consequently creationists reject God and are apostates.
Actually I am an atheist (not a theist - someone who does not believe in a personal God) but it is fun to make the argument. It is also an approach mainstream Christians could take when dealing with the loony creationists.
I question whether we know that variables in quantum physics are truly random vs. pseudorandom, but I'm a bit rusty in that field. But ironically, if they are truly random, then that suggests a perfectly sound procedure for making a truly random number generator for a computer...
QM is stochastic truly random behaviour is predicted.
Yes, but if the universe is a simulation then any random number seeds would not be included in "every thing in the whole universe"
In practice, the output from many common PRNGs exhibit artifacts which cause them to fail statistical pattern detection tests. Consequently on test of the VR hypothesis is that a quantum random process is shown to be pseudorandom, VR would be supported. But then again it might take longer than the age of the universe to test this.
A much more lucid and convincing discussion of these ideas is presented by Max Tegmark in his paper "The Mathematical Universe" (preprint available here [arxiv.org]). In it, he discusses this idea of whether we could detect being inside a virtual reality and provides arguments for why there may be no meaningful difference between a "simulation of reality" and "reality itself". His overall argument, that the universe may be fundamentally mathematical, is quite interesting, and again he provides some means by which we could determine to what extent his arguments actually apply to our universe. Worth a read.
Yes, Tegmark's paper is essential reading. The VR hypothesis implies that the system that our VR resides could be another simulation at a higher level and so on. It then becomes "turtles all the way down". It is something we have had to consider since David Deutsch's reformulation of the Turing principle as:
There exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform
Nick Bostrom has also discussed the question of are we living in a computer simulation here:
Well of course George Orwell was a member of the Labour Party but then IngSoc was intended to be a warning of what Labour could become if it mixed in both Stalinism and American oligarchic capitalism. It was not intended as a prescription for it's future ideology. However Gordon Brown with his Ph.D. on the history of the Labour Party in Scotland together with his former colleague the inanely grinning Bliar clearly must have. What with Nu Lab instituting Nu Speek todays Britain looks evermore like the dystopia of 1984, more so than when I lived there in 1984 under the evil and despotic rule of the baby eating monster Maggie.
Big Brother is watching you ! Indeed he is with surveillance video cameras posted on virtually every street corner. Gordon B. seems more and more suited to his role as Big Brother than his dissimulating war criminal predecessor.
I hope the British people wake up and rise up, to hang the whole criminal gang by their intestines from the nearest street corner video camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Both these hypotheses are compatible with modern evolutionary theory and if either were true they would require no revision of the theory. They merely provide starting points for the evolutionary process.
However from the naturalist viewpoint of the evolutionary biologist the most probable explanation is that chemical evolution on the early earth lead to the formation of the first primitive organisms (Hypothesis III) providing the basis for biological evolution. Still I wouldn't rule out that we are the spawn of alien shit (Hypothesis II) even though I have my doubts about the hand of God (Hypothesis I).
Hey that gives me a great idea haggis and kimchi together. My two favorite dishes. I am of Scottish descent so maybe that's why I love haggis but I have no Korean links and I love kimchi too. Together they would be awesome, I just haven't thought of it before. Make way for His Majesty the Haggis!
Mozilla = Mosaic Killer. The original codename for Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was public domain and Netscape Navigator was closed source until JWZ persuaded Netscape to open the code as a way of countering MSIE's burgeoning dominance. Irony eh?
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields. Currently most of the bright minds in the US seem to be Chinese. They average literate Chinese person is typically better at maths than the average westerner because the higher level of abstraction required to learn written Chinese effectively prepares them for the abstract study of mathematics.
Yeah minority governments scare the shit out of the politicians. The Trudeau and Clark minority governments were better than any majority ones. It forces even a dangerous authoritarian bushite neocon like Harper to try to appear human, which he finds very painful.
In the US "left of center" means somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. Hell they can't even spell centre right. You guys ought to get a real English-English spell checker.
Here in Canada now they are slowly trying to work towards the abolition of the jury system by stealth and a thousand cuts. They are making less and less cases triable by jury and the percentage of cases tried by jury is continually falling.
This sort of behaviour could prove to be counter-productive for Microshaft (I normally disapprove of silly joke name calling of MS, but this is a case where they deserve that epithet). If I worked for Google, I would be carefully documenting this anti-competitive behaviour of MS in web services, in order to build up an anti-trust case against MS's takeover of Yahoo.
The want them to be long distance so they can monitor not only who goes in and out of specific buildings, but also who drives along specific sections of a highway. The intrusive state monitoring everything its so called citizens or serfs in reality do.
I prefer Zchange :)
So come on someone tell me what the war there is about, it certainly isn't about democracy and civil rights. It seems to me it's about oil pipelines and strategic control. Just carrying on the 19th Centuries "Great Game" on into the 21st. The US, British and Canadian hypocrisy disgusts me
I just looked back at this and discovered it had been moderated down as overated. I guess there actually must be some people out there that like U2. Poor suckers.
It is evil because the big pharma corporations call themselves "ethical companies" to distinguish themselves from generic pharmaceutical companies, who are presumably "unethical" by bringing low cost generic drugs onto the market, to give people affordable alternatives. If they proclaim themselves to be "ethical" the should behave ethically and try to produce drugs that are urgently needed. Instead of searching for the next big lifestyle drug that reduces your long term chance of getting a disease by a few percent they should be developing drugs like new antibiotics where because of the spread of disease resistance there is the need for new defences. However since antibiotics are delivered for a course of treatment lasting a few weeks rather than for a lifetime with the "lifestyle" drugs they are less profitable.
As for "what others want instead of what you consider best for society", consider this - these companies receive special privileges from society that give them guaranteed monopolies for decades, called patents. In return society has a right to expect them to use those privileges ethically.
Yeah I'll second that. I have not, nor have I ever bought a U2 recording. But then I have not, nor have I ever downloaded so much as a single U2 track.
I buy CD's. [plug] I just got my wife to buy me for Xmas the "Someone to Drive You Home" album by the Long Blondes. I first found out about them by downloading a video of them Live in NY from Punkcast. I just had to download all their tracks I could find. That told me I had to buy their album complete with the cover art by their fabulous singer Kate Jackson [/plug]
The lesson is when I didn't download music I didn't buy CD's now I do download music I buy CD's. Not from CRIA/RIAA labels though.
PS I live in Canada and it's still legal to download music.
One of the results of string theory, that the proponents of string theory point out as one of its greatest successes, is the prediction of the existence of the graviton. They were not trying to derive the graviton from the theory, they found that the theory predicted an unexpected particle. When they looked at it closer they then realized that it had the expected properties of the graviton.
It's only if we as informed active citizens kick up enough fuss to our elected representatives, like we did when the Bill was first announced, which scared them enough to withdraw it for reconsideration. Which they did to pretend they are not the corrupt servants of the oligarchy, which they are, rather than the servants of their electorate, which they should be.
They are not saying saying that mutations are not random. If mutations were not random this would require major changes in either biology or physics. What they are saying is that selection, not random drift in the developmental changes they were studying in nematode worms is the determining factor.
What they concluded:
It is merely confirmation of the adaptationist program of modern evolutionary biology.
I have Word 2 running under both DOSEMU and DOSBOX on my Linux system. It is a legal download from MS.
Aaargh! vi vi vi - The sign of the Beast. Sorry Offtopic.
As a British expatriate, I want to ask did the British people deserve Bliar and NuLab. Britain has an uncorruptible voting system where the only choice you have is which of the corrupt to vote for.
It's the latter (with a more reasonable limit of 18 (and 16 for beer and wine)) over here in germany, and if parents hand their 10 year old a beer or wine, or even some hard stuff, that's not considered a problem. Yes but modern Germany is a reasonably civilized country. Here we are talking about the U.S. the Land of the Unfree home of the Christian Taleban.
Consequently creationists reject God and are apostates.
Actually I am an atheist (not a theist - someone who does not believe in a personal God) but it is fun to make the argument. It is also an approach mainstream Christians could take when dealing with the loony creationists.
QM is stochastic truly random behaviour is predicted.
Yes, but if the universe is a simulation then any random number seeds would not be included in "every thing in the whole universe"
In practice, the output from many common PRNGs exhibit artifacts which cause them to fail statistical pattern detection tests. Consequently on test of the VR hypothesis is that a quantum random process is shown to be pseudorandom, VR would be supported. But then again it might take longer than the age of the universe to test this.
There exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform
Nick Bostrom has also discussed the question of are we living in a computer simulation here:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
and Sir Martin Rees has discussed the idea in a number of places so there is nothing really new in Whitworth's paper.
Big Brother is watching you ! Indeed he is with surveillance video cameras posted on virtually every street corner. Gordon B. seems more and more suited to his role as Big Brother than his dissimulating war criminal predecessor.
I hope the British people wake up and rise up, to hang the whole criminal gang by their intestines from the nearest street corner video camera.