It seems like the "Explore by Category" section needs some work too. Search for "Barack Obama" and the top two categories are "Iowa State Senators" and "Polish-American Politicians".
I, for one, welcome our new Polish-American Overlord from Iowa...
It's seems like just yesterday that my woefully neglected little blog was mocking Sheldon Jacobson of UIUC for "discovering" the same thing. My, how 18 months flies by...
In that blog post, I suggested some follow-up research:
We here at Duh!scoveries don't merely want to mock these studies - we long to contribute too. So, we're suggesting a follow-up study. Gasoline in cars and trucks isn't the only excess fuel being burned here - the same physics indicate that fat people themselves require more fuel (in the form of tasty fried foods and soft drinks filled with high-fructose corn syrup) to move their own excess weight. And now that more and more vehicles are being fueled with biodiesel from soybean oil and ethanol from corn, there is now a competition for those resources between the fat people needing cheap calories to be able to move their enormous bodies and the SUVs they need to buy in order to haul their enormous bodies to the local fried-food emporium.
All of which raises the question: what is the optimum number of huge biodiesel or ethanol SUVs? Build too many and fat people will start slimming down due to lack of caloric input diverted to biofuel production, which leads to fewer SUVs needed to haul their now-slender bodies, which allows those fuel stocks to be retargeted to food. A vicious cycle, so we need to figure out just how many Hummers are needed to keep Americans optimally fat (or, we suppose, fit).
It's hard for the camera companies to make any money (and pay for the cameras) if you have to give 100% to someone else. "All the time, our customers ask us, "How do you make money doing this?" The answer is simple: Volume. That's what we do."
Robert Heinlein had a nice little story along those lines called "They". Only a couple of pages long, but I remember it vividly even though I probably read it 25 years ago...
In sort of the same way that seemingly every British actor alive has at some point played a role in Doctor Who, Chris Pine's dad, the actor Robert Pine of "CHiPs" fame, has been on various incarnations of Star Trek. He was in the Star Trek:Voyager story "The Chute", and the Star Trek:Enterprise story "Fusion".
At least Chris won't have to sit in the head-bump and pointy ear attachment chair.
I've got a stupid little blog that digs a bit of good-natured fun at self-evident research results.
In a "recent" post, I included a link to a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not even posted to the blog - it's just a link.
Well, hot damn! I start getting hits from all over the world, especially Asia. And what are they for? You got it - they're lookin' for hunky body builder pictures! And the first one was a Google hit from Alborz in Khuzestan, Iran looking for pictures of weight lifters.
I actually have a (different) post on the blog that mentions a town in Iran by name (Masshad, Iran). How many Iranians stumbled on that post? Zero!
Looks like the Iranian government is right - their pervy little citizens just use Google to find hot pics of buff studs.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all, how else are we going to find that picture of Vanessa Hudgens... um, for "research"!
While the article focuses on the ability of these imprinted hydrogels to filter out viruses, or ingestible versions for blocking glucose in diabetics, a whole host of other uses come to mind.
For instance, why not use it to filter out cholesterol or arterial plaque? Go in to the clinic once a month and clean out the pipes. Or an ingestible version that binds with saturated or trans-fats? Granted, there's problems with having too much undigested crap (anal seepage, anyone?), but a lot of that is because current fat blockers use a shot-gun approach that knocks out good and bad fats. If you can just bind the trans or saturated fats and let the unsaturated ones in, that could be an amazing boost to the health of all Slashdotters - pepperoni pizza suddenly becomes a health food...
Actually, Cuba's economy has been propped up lately by an infusion of petrodollars from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has also been instrumental in raising Castro's profile lately. One of the reasons Chavez has become a powerful force in Latin American politics is that he has an enormous amount of money coming in from oil sales (Venezuela is the main oil power in the region) and is spreading that money around in good old fashioned money diplomacy.
Chavez, therefore, has a vested interest in making sure that the price of oil is not affected by either the promise or reality of alternate fuel sources. He is also pushing against a US/Brazilian alliance to increase Latin American use and production of cane-based ethanol - he does not want to see either country increase their influence in the region. Brazil's Lula da Silva is hardly a US puppet (he's a leftist), but he doesn't hide his dislike of Chavez and has had a fairly good working relationship with Bush. Plus, cane-based ethanol has been an incredible boon to Brazil, vastly reducing Brazil's need for oil. It's also 6-8 times more productive than corn-based ethanol - done correctly, it makes real economic and environmental sense (if used as just one of many ways to move to a post-oil energy economy).
Castro's editorial is just a followup on a conversation he and Chavez had on Chavez's talk show, "Alo Presidente". While it was billed as a "spontaneous" discussion, at several points Castro made references to talking points given to him by Chavez.
Castro may be many things, but he's not stupid - Chavez is the best thing that has happened to him in years. If he has to sell-out a declining industry (Cuban sugar cane) in order to do so, he will.
Actually, Chevrolet has shown (and has committed to build) just such a vehicle, the Chevy Volt.
It's the first plug-in hybrid car that I actually went "wow, that's exactly how it should be done". The basic idea is that for most commutes (60-80 miles), it simply runs off battery power. But it also has a backup generator (either a small, high-efficiency IC motor fueled with gas/ethanol/methanol/biobutanol or a small diesel motor) that kicks in when the battery runs low. The generator can be geared to run only at peak efficiency, as it is not directly driving the wheels and does need to trade torque for horsepower.
According to GM, even though this is a "concept" car, it is slated for production. The big issue right now is the batteries - they need batteries that can cycle 2000-3000 times without blowing up, losing capacity, or have poor low-temperature performance. "About three to five years" is the estimate - which sounds suspiciously weaselly to be sure, but, OTOH, that's about how far in advance the big car companies plan their new models out, and GM keeps talking the car up - their head of product development, Bob Lutz, said just a few weeks back that the plan is for production to start in 2010.
I'm all for the whole tree hugger view of global warming, but you've got to stop "rebutting" the "new data points to the possibility" of a warming trend on Mars with a RealClimate article that's a year and a half old.
This is the second time in a week I've seen that article claimed as the definitive response to claims made just this month - I like RealClimate, but they aren't clairvoyant...
According to that website you listed, the exchange rate in 1981 was $2.02 to the pound, and $2.33 in 1980. Maybe you could be a little more careful reading as well.
The highest in the 90s was $1.78, which isn't that far off from the "about 2:1" the GP recalled. The GBP has nearly always held more value than the US dollar - as recently as 1948, it was 4:1.
That the pound has managed to get back to a 2:1 ratio after a few decades of 1.5:1 or so is more a sign that the British/European economy has finally begun to regain the parity (or even dominance) that it historically has had than that the US is doing exceptionally badly - it's a reversion to the mean. One would expect a high-tech economic zone that has a higher population, a minimal defense budget and a few thousand years of infrastructure already built to be at the very least competitive in terms of economic output - the question is whether the European Social Model will be able to compete longer term with the productivity of the US model. It's an open question.
Members of the Falun Gong distribute the paper at the main entrances and exits of the train stations here in Chicago. I've picked up the occassional copy and tried to speak to the limited-English distributors. The articles are generally pretty poor - not just in command of the nuances of American English, but in the structure of mainstream journalism. But, once you get around that, it's a pretty interesting look into the worldview of the Falun movement.
Oh, and to say they're "anti-Communist" is quite the understatement - although I'd say they are more anti-Communist Party of China than collectivism as an idea.
Any Christian I talk to (including relatives) all believe not only in words written on pages thousands of years ago (written by dudes named John and Paul, which are very Jewish names, and also hand-picked by the Catholic church in later years)
They're, in my opinion, totally backwards and have nothing to do with modern living and have nothing to do with living a decent, educated, fair, and compassionate life.
Given a decent education, you might even realize that "John" and "Paul" are Anglicized versions of the Hebrew names Yohanan and Saul.
Don't necessarily disagree with the thrust of your commentary, but you appear to be as sadly lacking in the understanding of the religion you disparage as those religionists are of the secular, scientific world you prefer.
Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?
Most likely, it's cyclical. The USA goes through periods of heightened religiosity every 50-70 years or so. They are widely recognized by sociologists as "Great Awakenings". See here for a brief article on the current (fourth) one, and links to previous ones. The Third Great Awakening of the late 1800s was probably the one with the greatest impact, as many important American protestant denominations had their starts during that era. It also had its biggest impact at the opposite side of the political spectrum - for America, the Third Great Awakening provided the moral force for the Progressive movement. Child and woman labor laws, compulsory elementary education for all, prohibition of alcohol and a whole host of other progressive causes were largely the outgrowth of that religious revival.
Some of this is no doubt due to the separation clause in our Constitution, but probably not in the way you're envisioning. The separation clause, I think, gives both sides enough latitude to swing too far - when the religious frenzy gets to be too much for sensible folk, the pendulum gets pushed back hard the other way. When secular excess seems to go too far (big changes in sexual mores and capitalism run amok), people start streaming back into churches. An establishment church, where everyone is required to give at least lip service to the church, appears to have a societal calming, but enervating to faith, effect. No one gets too worked up about the church (it's at some level compulsory, after all), but its widespread reach allows its hierarchy to speak with some authority long before the "pendulum" starts moving too fast. You end up with societies formed of irreligious believers - which is a nice, cozy place to be.
The allele in question, the D version of microcephalin, was discovered by geneticist Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago. It appears to regulate the growth of fetal brain cells. If you have another allele of the gene, you end up with microcephaly, which in extreme cases causes death and in less severe cases ends up with smaller heads/brains (hence the name). If you've ever seen Howard Stern's show, the guy called "Beetlejuice" has microcephaly.
It's theorized that the D variant of microcephalin causes the fetal brain to organize slightly more rapidly and efficiently, leading to a bump in IQ. This variant seems to have appeared in either the Middle East or Europe about 37,000 years ago (hence, the newer theory about Neanderthal origin) and conferred such a genetic advantage that it has swiftly (in genetic terms) swept through the populations that had access to this allele.
70% of Europeans and East Asians now have variant D of microcephalin (not 70% of humans as was stated in the article). It is nearly non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa (many populations have none), but where there was any contact with Europeans or Asians, it has swiftly taken over (up to 25% of the population in just a few hundred years).
The standard measure of variation in human alleles is known as Wright's fixation index or FST. A value of between 5-10% should be considered "normal" within subpopulations. Higher than that, and the allele is being heavily selected for. The FST value for variant D of microcephalin is 48%, which is simply off the charts for a mutation (or introduced by cross-breeding with Neanderthals) that occurred within the last 37,000 years. This is one really important allele.
Lahn has also discovered a version of the ASPM gene that seems to have similar brain-boosting abilities that arose in Caucasian populations (Europe, the Middle East and India) about 6,000 years ago and is now found in 44% of that population. Another modified gene, found mostly in Ashkenazi Jews (Eastern European descent), also seems to significantly boost intelligence by modifying brain chemicals known as sphingolipids. It's quite a boost (27% of US Nobel prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who make up less than 3% of the US population), but its downside is severe as well (Tay-Sachs, Gaucher and Niemann-Pick diseases), indicating that the mutation is relatively recent and that the less favorable aspects of these alleles have not yet been selected out.
There are probably equivalent mutations in other populations that have boosted their intellect as well - they simply have yet to be discovered.
Most of this information is found in Nicholas Wade's excellent book Before the DawnRecovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, pp. 97-99, 193, 245-256 and 271.
In the scientific literature, look for:
Patrick D. Evans et. al., "Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans", Science 209:1717-1220 (2005)
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, "Ongoing Adaptive Evolution in ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens", Science 209:1720-1722 (2005)
I've only occassionally had a "too slow" experience with Yahoo! Mail. I do agree that when it gets slow, it sucks. But I use it as my primary email environment and out of the dozens of times a day I've used it over the past year, I'd say I had real speed issues maybe half a dozen times. I will occassionally get the "loading, loading" thing when scrolling thru my main inbox, but as 90% of my daily emailing tkaes place in the top three pages of emails, I don't see it very often.
On my primary account there, I pay the 20 bucks or so it takes to get rid of the ads for a year. That's not a biggie for me - $20/yr for accessible anywhere email with a slick GUI is fine by me. On my non-main accounts, the ads really don't bother me (again, I use Adblock Plus, so I'm really only seeing the text ads).
I also agree that there appears to be an occassional problem or delay with updating the folders when new mail arrives. This isn't an everyday occurence, but it's common enough that I notice it. I use the Yahoo! Companion for Mozilla plugin (I am a very minor code contributor to the project) and it handles my notifications, so it's not a big deal for me. I believe the Yahoo!-created toolbar does the same thing.
The title of this article should really be "Yahoo! Mail has a lot of ads", because that and the lack of "automatic" entry of addresses seems to be the only thing "reviewed".
Firstly, Yahoo! Mail Beta is a (slightly) reworked version of Oddpost, which was doing its AJAXy goodness years before Gmail existed. Yahoo! bought Oddpost about three months after Gmail appeared (April 1 vs. July 9, 2004), which may have been a competitive response to gmail, but probably was already in the works. Very early Gmail really only had a few "killer" features, the big one being lots of space (1 gig), which all the major webmail providers matched within a few months (Yahoo! initially went to 100M from 10M, and then quickly moved to 1G). Considering that most people couldn't get a gmail account for months or years, this wasn't exactly an existential threat.
Even the original Yahoo! Mail was a purchased product (Rocketmail by Four11), but it really was an innovation for the day (March 1997). The purchased Oddpost product was also a true innovation (it pretty much was the first major AJAX application that was widely deployed - and isn't AJAX the Slashdot Subject of the Year?).
Getting to the substance of the "review" - yes, the ads are a bit obnoxious on free Yahoo! accounts. But in order to get his vaunted 20% ratio, the reviewer had to come up with a very specific and somewhat narrow screen resolution (828x588 pixels). The Yahoo! Mail Folder Pane is a fixed size (200 pixels) and has four, two-line ads. The ad pane (which only exists on the free accounts) is 160 pixels. The center pane (tabs, mail folder, preview page) automatically resizes to take up the rest of the page. At my normal viewing size (1200x800), the ads take up about 14% of the space - and considering I use Adblock Plus, it's really just some blank space over on the right.
The Contact list stuff is even more silly. Yahoo! Mail will automatically add anyone you've ever sent mail to to your Contact list if you want, or ask for confirmation before doing so. Every email you read that came from someone you've never sent an email to has an "add to contacts" button next to the "From:" address (it's a little folder icon with a plus sign). What more exactly do you want? I, for one, don't want anyone who has ever sent an email to me to be a "contact" - that would clutter up my contacts. The GUI for handling contacts, adding them to lists, adding more information about them and the like is much slicker and better integrated than the equivalent Gmail version.
The "ad" for Yahoo! Calendar on the bottom isn't an ad at all - it's a single line that lists your next 3-4 calendar items. It's rather new (it only appeared about a week ago or so) and gives you a nice GUI for scanning upcoming calendar items and quickly adding a new one. Yahoo! was (rightly) being hammered for not upgrading its Calendar to the same AJAXy-goodness of the beta email, so again, what's the harm? Apparently, they need to add a "turn this off" button or right-click menu option to satisfy the reviewer. Sure, that'd be nice but it's not something I'm worrying about one week into the new functionality.
And that's the "review of the review". What the reviewer leaves out is all the really great features of Yahoo! Mail. It does just about everything the way a standalone mail client does - slick GUI, drag-and-drop, a multi-tabbed interface integrated into the client, message searching (results go into their own tab) and a whole bunch more. In my experience, the spam filter has been a lot better than gmail's.
I like both mail systems, but for average users, Yahoo!'s is a whole lot more natural and useful. I'd love to see message threading in Yahoo! and a slicker GUI in gmail.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the "Explore by Category" section needs some work too. Search for "Barack Obama" and the top two categories are "Iowa State Senators" and "Polish-American Politicians".
I, for one, welcome our new Polish-American Overlord from Iowa...
Tom Cruise and the scientologists?
Great band. They play Thursdays at Closet 51. No cover.
Were you describing aliens or Slashdot readers?
In that blog post, I suggested some follow-up research:
I guess it takes a while to get the grants...
Read the original, then steal all the best quotes and look like a genius...
All right people! Let's tear down Slashdot and replace it with that pink pony blog - we need to keep distracting Taco!
Robert Heinlein had a nice little story along those lines called "They". Only a couple of pages long, but I remember it vividly even though I probably read it 25 years ago...
They're The Veal of the Sea!
At least Chris won't have to sit in the head-bump and pointy ear attachment chair.
Carefully polishes Geek Badge...
Dual-layer Blu-Ray disc. 50GB/18hour = 2.77GB/hour. Same compression ratio as the 2 hours/DVD.
In a "recent" post, I included a link to a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not even posted to the blog - it's just a link.
Well, hot damn! I start getting hits from all over the world, especially Asia. And what are they for? You got it - they're lookin' for hunky body builder pictures! And the first one was a Google hit from Alborz in Khuzestan, Iran looking for pictures of weight lifters.
I actually have a (different) post on the blog that mentions a town in Iran by name (Masshad, Iran). How many Iranians stumbled on that post? Zero!
Looks like the Iranian government is right - their pervy little citizens just use Google to find hot pics of buff studs.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all, how else are we going to find that picture of Vanessa Hudgens... um, for "research"!
For instance, why not use it to filter out cholesterol or arterial plaque? Go in to the clinic once a month and clean out the pipes. Or an ingestible version that binds with saturated or trans-fats? Granted, there's problems with having too much undigested crap (anal seepage, anyone?), but a lot of that is because current fat blockers use a shot-gun approach that knocks out good and bad fats. If you can just bind the trans or saturated fats and let the unsaturated ones in, that could be an amazing boost to the health of all Slashdotters - pepperoni pizza suddenly becomes a health food...
Chavez, therefore, has a vested interest in making sure that the price of oil is not affected by either the promise or reality of alternate fuel sources. He is also pushing against a US/Brazilian alliance to increase Latin American use and production of cane-based ethanol - he does not want to see either country increase their influence in the region. Brazil's Lula da Silva is hardly a US puppet (he's a leftist), but he doesn't hide his dislike of Chavez and has had a fairly good working relationship with Bush. Plus, cane-based ethanol has been an incredible boon to Brazil, vastly reducing Brazil's need for oil. It's also 6-8 times more productive than corn-based ethanol - done correctly, it makes real economic and environmental sense (if used as just one of many ways to move to a post-oil energy economy). Castro's editorial is just a followup on a conversation he and Chavez had on Chavez's talk show, "Alo Presidente". While it was billed as a "spontaneous" discussion, at several points Castro made references to talking points given to him by Chavez.
Castro may be many things, but he's not stupid - Chavez is the best thing that has happened to him in years. If he has to sell-out a declining industry (Cuban sugar cane) in order to do so, he will.
It's the first plug-in hybrid car that I actually went "wow, that's exactly how it should be done". The basic idea is that for most commutes (60-80 miles), it simply runs off battery power. But it also has a backup generator (either a small, high-efficiency IC motor fueled with gas/ethanol/methanol/biobutanol or a small diesel motor) that kicks in when the battery runs low. The generator can be geared to run only at peak efficiency, as it is not directly driving the wheels and does need to trade torque for horsepower.
According to GM, even though this is a "concept" car, it is slated for production. The big issue right now is the batteries - they need batteries that can cycle 2000-3000 times without blowing up, losing capacity, or have poor low-temperature performance. "About three to five years" is the estimate - which sounds suspiciously weaselly to be sure, but, OTOH, that's about how far in advance the big car companies plan their new models out, and GM keeps talking the car up - their head of product development, Bob Lutz, said just a few weeks back that the plan is for production to start in 2010.
This is the second time in a week I've seen that article claimed as the definitive response to claims made just this month - I like RealClimate, but they aren't clairvoyant...
The highest in the 90s was $1.78, which isn't that far off from the "about 2:1" the GP recalled. The GBP has nearly always held more value than the US dollar - as recently as 1948, it was 4:1.
That the pound has managed to get back to a 2:1 ratio after a few decades of 1.5:1 or so is more a sign that the British/European economy has finally begun to regain the parity (or even dominance) that it historically has had than that the US is doing exceptionally badly - it's a reversion to the mean. One would expect a high-tech economic zone that has a higher population, a minimal defense budget and a few thousand years of infrastructure already built to be at the very least competitive in terms of economic output - the question is whether the European Social Model will be able to compete longer term with the productivity of the US model. It's an open question.
Members of the Falun Gong distribute the paper at the main entrances and exits of the train stations here in Chicago. I've picked up the occassional copy and tried to speak to the limited-English distributors. The articles are generally pretty poor - not just in command of the nuances of American English, but in the structure of mainstream journalism. But, once you get around that, it's a pretty interesting look into the worldview of the Falun movement.
Oh, and to say they're "anti-Communist" is quite the understatement - although I'd say they are more anti-Communist Party of China than collectivism as an idea.
23. Firefox is to Iceweasel as Thunderbird is to:
- Icedove
- LightningBug
- TranquilBat
- SoundOfOneHandClappingRaptor
- WhensThatNextVersionOfDebianBeingReleasedAnyway
I know, being Slashdot, "CowboyNeal" should have been one of the responses, but I just couldn't do it...Don't necessarily disagree with the thrust of your commentary, but you appear to be as sadly lacking in the understanding of the religion you disparage as those religionists are of the secular, scientific world you prefer.
Some of this is no doubt due to the separation clause in our Constitution, but probably not in the way you're envisioning. The separation clause, I think, gives both sides enough latitude to swing too far - when the religious frenzy gets to be too much for sensible folk, the pendulum gets pushed back hard the other way. When secular excess seems to go too far (big changes in sexual mores and capitalism run amok), people start streaming back into churches. An establishment church, where everyone is required to give at least lip service to the church, appears to have a societal calming, but enervating to faith, effect. No one gets too worked up about the church (it's at some level compulsory, after all), but its widespread reach allows its hierarchy to speak with some authority long before the "pendulum" starts moving too fast. You end up with societies formed of irreligious believers - which is a nice, cozy place to be.
The allele in question, the D version of microcephalin, was discovered by geneticist Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago. It appears to regulate the growth of fetal brain cells. If you have another allele of the gene, you end up with microcephaly, which in extreme cases causes death and in less severe cases ends up with smaller heads/brains (hence the name). If you've ever seen Howard Stern's show, the guy called "Beetlejuice" has microcephaly.
It's theorized that the D variant of microcephalin causes the fetal brain to organize slightly more rapidly and efficiently, leading to a bump in IQ. This variant seems to have appeared in either the Middle East or Europe about 37,000 years ago (hence, the newer theory about Neanderthal origin) and conferred such a genetic advantage that it has swiftly (in genetic terms) swept through the populations that had access to this allele.
70% of Europeans and East Asians now have variant D of microcephalin (not 70% of humans as was stated in the article). It is nearly non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa (many populations have none), but where there was any contact with Europeans or Asians, it has swiftly taken over (up to 25% of the population in just a few hundred years).
The standard measure of variation in human alleles is known as Wright's fixation index or FST. A value of between 5-10% should be considered "normal" within subpopulations. Higher than that, and the allele is being heavily selected for. The FST value for variant D of microcephalin is 48%, which is simply off the charts for a mutation (or introduced by cross-breeding with Neanderthals) that occurred within the last 37,000 years. This is one really important allele.
Lahn has also discovered a version of the ASPM gene that seems to have similar brain-boosting abilities that arose in Caucasian populations (Europe, the Middle East and India) about 6,000 years ago and is now found in 44% of that population. Another modified gene, found mostly in Ashkenazi Jews (Eastern European descent), also seems to significantly boost intelligence by modifying brain chemicals known as sphingolipids. It's quite a boost (27% of US Nobel prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who make up less than 3% of the US population), but its downside is severe as well (Tay-Sachs, Gaucher and Niemann-Pick diseases), indicating that the mutation is relatively recent and that the less favorable aspects of these alleles have not yet been selected out.
There are probably equivalent mutations in other populations that have boosted their intellect as well - they simply have yet to be discovered.
Most of this information is found in Nicholas Wade's excellent book Before the Dawn Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, pp. 97-99, 193, 245-256 and 271.
In the scientific literature, look for:
Patrick D. Evans et. al., "Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans", Science 209:1717-1220 (2005)
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, "Ongoing Adaptive Evolution in ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens", Science 209:1720-1722 (2005)
On my primary account there, I pay the 20 bucks or so it takes to get rid of the ads for a year. That's not a biggie for me - $20/yr for accessible anywhere email with a slick GUI is fine by me. On my non-main accounts, the ads really don't bother me (again, I use Adblock Plus, so I'm really only seeing the text ads).
I also agree that there appears to be an occassional problem or delay with updating the folders when new mail arrives. This isn't an everyday occurence, but it's common enough that I notice it. I use the Yahoo! Companion for Mozilla plugin (I am a very minor code contributor to the project) and it handles my notifications, so it's not a big deal for me. I believe the Yahoo!-created toolbar does the same thing.
Firstly, Yahoo! Mail Beta is a (slightly) reworked version of Oddpost, which was doing its AJAXy goodness years before Gmail existed. Yahoo! bought Oddpost about three months after Gmail appeared (April 1 vs. July 9, 2004), which may have been a competitive response to gmail, but probably was already in the works. Very early Gmail really only had a few "killer" features, the big one being lots of space (1 gig), which all the major webmail providers matched within a few months (Yahoo! initially went to 100M from 10M, and then quickly moved to 1G). Considering that most people couldn't get a gmail account for months or years, this wasn't exactly an existential threat.
Even the original Yahoo! Mail was a purchased product (Rocketmail by Four11), but it really was an innovation for the day (March 1997). The purchased Oddpost product was also a true innovation (it pretty much was the first major AJAX application that was widely deployed - and isn't AJAX the Slashdot Subject of the Year?).
Getting to the substance of the "review" - yes, the ads are a bit obnoxious on free Yahoo! accounts. But in order to get his vaunted 20% ratio, the reviewer had to come up with a very specific and somewhat narrow screen resolution (828x588 pixels). The Yahoo! Mail Folder Pane is a fixed size (200 pixels) and has four, two-line ads. The ad pane (which only exists on the free accounts) is 160 pixels. The center pane (tabs, mail folder, preview page) automatically resizes to take up the rest of the page. At my normal viewing size (1200x800), the ads take up about 14% of the space - and considering I use Adblock Plus, it's really just some blank space over on the right.
The Contact list stuff is even more silly. Yahoo! Mail will automatically add anyone you've ever sent mail to to your Contact list if you want, or ask for confirmation before doing so. Every email you read that came from someone you've never sent an email to has an "add to contacts" button next to the "From:" address (it's a little folder icon with a plus sign). What more exactly do you want? I, for one, don't want anyone who has ever sent an email to me to be a "contact" - that would clutter up my contacts. The GUI for handling contacts, adding them to lists, adding more information about them and the like is much slicker and better integrated than the equivalent Gmail version.
The "ad" for Yahoo! Calendar on the bottom isn't an ad at all - it's a single line that lists your next 3-4 calendar items. It's rather new (it only appeared about a week ago or so) and gives you a nice GUI for scanning upcoming calendar items and quickly adding a new one. Yahoo! was (rightly) being hammered for not upgrading its Calendar to the same AJAXy-goodness of the beta email, so again, what's the harm? Apparently, they need to add a "turn this off" button or right-click menu option to satisfy the reviewer. Sure, that'd be nice but it's not something I'm worrying about one week into the new functionality.
And that's the "review of the review". What the reviewer leaves out is all the really great features of Yahoo! Mail. It does just about everything the way a standalone mail client does - slick GUI, drag-and-drop, a multi-tabbed interface integrated into the client, message searching (results go into their own tab) and a whole bunch more. In my experience, the spam filter has been a lot better than gmail's.
I like both mail systems, but for average users, Yahoo!'s is a whole lot more natural and useful. I'd love to see message threading in Yahoo! and a slicker GUI in gmail.