I think you are mostly right. The problem isn't one of material cost, but the cost of knowledge and time. It takes time and effort to learn how to cook healthful meals and how to eat properly. Preparing a meal from scratch also takes a lot of time, much more than throwing something in the microwave oven. It's a lot easier in the short term to just buy food that's already prepared for you. This also explains a large part of the obesity epidemic. Once you take into account the long-term benefits of eating well, then there is no doubt that you save money when you avoid junk food, but it's difficult for many people to plan ahead.
Well, in the US right now it's more often than not "sorry, you're too poor." A national health system that encourages people to pick up preventative care is win-win for everyone (except the richest of the rich). Emergency rooms aren't a solution.
I'm one of the co-authors of the paper. Indeed, we were aware of what Adleman had done, and were partly inspired by his idea. However, his method required much more manual labor to do the computing, whereas once we have assembled our genetic sequences, we let the bacteria do the thinking.
The color changes were used to identify those bacteria which found a solution. Ideally other selective markers would also work, such as antibiotic resistance. The big issue is that our system can yield false positives, so depending on your setup some manual checking is required.
The Guardian article is rather misleading and inaccurate. We never had the intention of replacing your desktop PC, nor do we claim that our 3-node implementation is faster than a computer (in fact, someone spending 10 minutes or less can figure out a 3-node problem). I'm more excited about the proof-of-concept: we can encode a mathematical problem by using a molecule, hand it to a living organism, and get a correct output. The work was also done by undergraduate students in under a year. We presented our work at iGEM 2007, for those interested.
Yeah maybe the more interesting brain to start modeling would be for Caenohrabditis elegans, a nematode (roundworm). I could try to write out all the cool reasons myself, but it's easier to quote wikipedia:
The developmental fate of every single somatic cell (959 in the adult hermaphrodite; 1031 in the adult male) has been mapped out. These patterns of cell lineage are largely invariant between individuals, in contrast to mammals where cell development from the embryo is more largely dependent on cellular cues. In both sexes, a large number of additional cells (131 in the hermaphrodite, most of which would otherwise become neurons), are eliminated by programmed cell death (apoptosis).
In addition, C. elegans is one of the simplest organisms with a nervous system. In the hermaphrodite, this comprises 302 neurons whose pattern of connectivity has been completely mapped out, and shown to be a small-world network.[7] Research has explored the neural mechanisms responsible for several of the more interesting behaviors shown by C. elegans, including chemotaxis, thermotaxis, mechanotransduction, and male mating behavior.
Exactly. It's sad to say, but most people are too stupid to save up for the right things. They'd rather buy that new HD television now than worry about their broken leg five years from now. A public health care system increases preventative care (which is cheaper and more effective) and is a way to force people to save for emergencies, rather than going to the emergency room. So if you're smart enough to know how to manage your health, just be glad not as many of your tax dollars will be going to idiots in the ER anymore.
I'd much rather have the choice of health care plan (as Obama intends) and pay less overall.
[sarcasm]Yes, heaven forbid the United States catch up with the rest of the developed world and get a system that works better while costing less.[/sarcasm] Passport security and health systems have nothing to do with each other, please let you brain do the thinking, not your mouth or your gut.
That's highly unlikely. There are basic reasons why we age, which boil down to the laws of physics and our relationship with energy. A good read (albeit highly technical) can be found here, where ageing is put in a cellular context. One of the ideas: our cells age, and yet they give rise to young structures (babies are born very young, but their parents are not young). This process allows us to be "immortal" by spawning off copies. Bacteria make exact copies, we make mixed copies.
"Natural selection and immortality" http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18720024
I also hold the phone to my left ear despite being right-handed, but for a different reason: my right ear is deaf! I've often wondered if I perceive language and sound differently than others (besides the obvious lack of stereo). Perhaps doing a study with half-deaf people could give some interesting results.
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionize our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What these researchers haven't realized is that first we need to learn about superconductors (Conquer 4) and Pre-sentient Algorithms (Discover 5) to learn Fusion Power. But yeah, it'll be a pretty big deal once we get it.
To quote:
"It will happen, and it will happen in our lifetimes. Fusion Power isn't just the future. Fusion Power is now.
It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
Re-read it. It says that the only thing that doesn't change in the 21st century is that things change. Arguably, things always change, in which case the phrase is vapid.
At the same time, the rate at which things change is accelerating. Compare life in Europe, circa 1000 with 1100. Then compare life in Europe 1900 and 2000 - the differences are much greater!
Haiku / BeOS. It's one of the few operating systems out there that is markedly different. And you can even test it in Virtualbox as a virtualized machine.
Actually, you raise an interesting point: humans are animals, and any reproduction between non-identical entities would create a hybrid. Sounds like the birth rate in Louisiana is going to decrease a tad if this law is passed and enforced...
I think you forgot to specify that the bus had 0 passengers before those twelve people entered it. Otherwise, there could simply have been a passenger sitting there beforehand.
The big issue (at least in the United States) is with the teachers' unions. Due to union regulations, most salaries are dependent on time spent teaching, and not important criteria such as competence or subject matter. Good teachers should be paid more than bad ones, to promote incentives, and people who teach tougher subjects should be paid more than those who teach easier subjects. i.e. if there are fewer people qualified to teach math than English, math teachers should fetch higher salaries. Good luck with that, though!
As an anecdote in relation to yours, I got the chicken pox when I was very young (2 years old), which is likely the cause of me also losing nearly all my hearing in one ear. It's hard to describe to others how inconvenient it is to be partially deaf, but the thought of inflicting a lifelong handicap on somebody because of this Luddite assumption that vaccines give autism is terrible. Trust the scientists who have done the experiments and collected the statistics - vaccine your kids!
A very simple answer is that RNA degrades *extremely* rapidly. Injecting RNA could feasibly give a short change in phenotype, but it is hard to imagine that RNA would be able to encode something as long-lasting as memory.
Wow - you criticize Obama for not providing the details, but when you remark that he has lengthy PDFs you don't want to bother to read. Either you've already made up your mind and are just rationalizing your opinion, or you don't really care enough about the topic to do your research.
At least you admit to having bias, but then I fail to see anything meaningful at all in what you wrote. At the very least, you should said that you don't have enough information to make a sound judgment on the topic, which is fine. Unfortunately, the norm is that people don't want to admit that, and would rather just make up some reasons for their opinions rather than admit they don't know.
Ok, I'm going to take your nitpick one further. We did evolve from apes, because we *are* apes! Just look it up in any reputable source. Yes, we share common ancestors with other apes, just as we share common ancestors with all living beings. And we are evolved from apes too.
Besides the fact that most societies value the life of their people (generally speaking), you can also think of this from an economic standpoint: these astronauts have a lot of experience and very specific knowledge, and are also physically fit etc. A lot has been invested in them, and they're worth a lot. So risking your crew that way can cost a lot of money.
And then, of course, people have a lot of pride in the space program, and losing people in space gives a big blow to the average Joe's perception of its value. If we spend billions of dollars to blow people up, it's not going to sell so well to the public.
In the end, to me it's all irrelevant, because I don't see the immediate need to send any people in space. Let's use robots - they don't require life support, they don't have to return, and they don't carry all the emotional baggage.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like i4i went for the "tooth for a tooth" strategy. Microsoft should have been suspicious all along :-)
I think you are mostly right. The problem isn't one of material cost, but the cost of knowledge and time. It takes time and effort to learn how to cook healthful meals and how to eat properly. Preparing a meal from scratch also takes a lot of time, much more than throwing something in the microwave oven. It's a lot easier in the short term to just buy food that's already prepared for you. This also explains a large part of the obesity epidemic. Once you take into account the long-term benefits of eating well, then there is no doubt that you save money when you avoid junk food, but it's difficult for many people to plan ahead.
Well, in the US right now it's more often than not "sorry, you're too poor." A national health system that encourages people to pick up preventative care is win-win for everyone (except the richest of the rich). Emergency rooms aren't a solution.
I'm one of the co-authors of the paper. Indeed, we were aware of what Adleman had done, and were partly inspired by his idea. However, his method required much more manual labor to do the computing, whereas once we have assembled our genetic sequences, we let the bacteria do the thinking.
The color changes were used to identify those bacteria which found a solution. Ideally other selective markers would also work, such as antibiotic resistance. The big issue is that our system can yield false positives, so depending on your setup some manual checking is required.
The Guardian article is rather misleading and inaccurate. We never had the intention of replacing your desktop PC, nor do we claim that our 3-node implementation is faster than a computer (in fact, someone spending 10 minutes or less can figure out a 3-node problem). I'm more excited about the proof-of-concept: we can encode a mathematical problem by using a molecule, hand it to a living organism, and get a correct output. The work was also done by undergraduate students in under a year. We presented our work at iGEM 2007, for those interested.
Cheers,
Andrew Martens
Yeah maybe the more interesting brain to start modeling would be for Caenohrabditis elegans, a nematode (roundworm). I could try to write out all the cool reasons myself, but it's easier to quote wikipedia:
Exactly. It's sad to say, but most people are too stupid to save up for the right things. They'd rather buy that new HD television now than worry about their broken leg five years from now. A public health care system increases preventative care (which is cheaper and more effective) and is a way to force people to save for emergencies, rather than going to the emergency room. So if you're smart enough to know how to manage your health, just be glad not as many of your tax dollars will be going to idiots in the ER anymore.
I'd much rather have the choice of health care plan (as Obama intends) and pay less overall.
[sarcasm]Yes, heaven forbid the United States catch up with the rest of the developed world and get a system that works better while costing less.[/sarcasm] Passport security and health systems have nothing to do with each other, please let you brain do the thinking, not your mouth or your gut.
Yes, but with my Google Calendar being in Beta status (up until now) I wouldn't have been able to trust it!
That's highly unlikely. There are basic reasons why we age, which boil down to the laws of physics and our relationship with energy. A good read (albeit highly technical) can be found here, where ageing is put in a cellular context. One of the ideas: our cells age, and yet they give rise to young structures (babies are born very young, but their parents are not young). This process allows us to be "immortal" by spawning off copies. Bacteria make exact copies, we make mixed copies. "Natural selection and immortality" http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18720024
I also hold the phone to my left ear despite being right-handed, but for a different reason: my right ear is deaf! I've often wondered if I perceive language and sound differently than others (besides the obvious lack of stereo). Perhaps doing a study with half-deaf people could give some interesting results.
It's time to launch a full-scale, nucleotide-based, pun-ishing ATTAC!!
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionize our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What these researchers haven't realized is that first we need to learn about superconductors (Conquer 4) and Pre-sentient Algorithms (Discover 5) to learn Fusion Power. But yeah, it'll be a pretty big deal once we get it.
To quote:
"It will happen, and it will happen in our lifetimes. Fusion Power isn't just the future. Fusion Power is now.
-- T. M. Morgan-Reilly, Morgan Metagenics"
It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
Re-read it. It says that the only thing that doesn't change in the 21st century is that things change. Arguably, things always change, in which case the phrase is vapid. At the same time, the rate at which things change is accelerating. Compare life in Europe, circa 1000 with 1100. Then compare life in Europe 1900 and 2000 - the differences are much greater!
A good song to listen to about this: One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21 by the Flaming Lips. An excerpt:
'Cause it's hard to say what's real
When you love the way you feel
Is it wrong to think it's love?
When it tries the way it does
Of course, the song approaches the subject from the artistic / emotional side of things... and has to be taken in context with the whole album.
Haiku / BeOS. It's one of the few operating systems out there that is markedly different. And you can even test it in Virtualbox as a virtualized machine.
Actually, you raise an interesting point: humans are animals, and any reproduction between non-identical entities would create a hybrid. Sounds like the birth rate in Louisiana is going to decrease a tad if this law is passed and enforced...
I think you forgot to specify that the bus had 0 passengers before those twelve people entered it. Otherwise, there could simply have been a passenger sitting there beforehand.
And stay away from any living cells! (think about it...)
The big issue (at least in the United States) is with the teachers' unions. Due to union regulations, most salaries are dependent on time spent teaching, and not important criteria such as competence or subject matter. Good teachers should be paid more than bad ones, to promote incentives, and people who teach tougher subjects should be paid more than those who teach easier subjects. i.e. if there are fewer people qualified to teach math than English, math teachers should fetch higher salaries. Good luck with that, though!
As an anecdote in relation to yours, I got the chicken pox when I was very young (2 years old), which is likely the cause of me also losing nearly all my hearing in one ear. It's hard to describe to others how inconvenient it is to be partially deaf, but the thought of inflicting a lifelong handicap on somebody because of this Luddite assumption that vaccines give autism is terrible. Trust the scientists who have done the experiments and collected the statistics - vaccine your kids!
A very simple answer is that RNA degrades *extremely* rapidly. Injecting RNA could feasibly give a short change in phenotype, but it is hard to imagine that RNA would be able to encode something as long-lasting as memory.
Wow - you criticize Obama for not providing the details, but when you remark that he has lengthy PDFs you don't want to bother to read. Either you've already made up your mind and are just rationalizing your opinion, or you don't really care enough about the topic to do your research.
At least you admit to having bias, but then I fail to see anything meaningful at all in what you wrote. At the very least, you should said that you don't have enough information to make a sound judgment on the topic, which is fine. Unfortunately, the norm is that people don't want to admit that, and would rather just make up some reasons for their opinions rather than admit they don't know.
Ok, I'm going to take your nitpick one further. We did evolve from apes, because we *are* apes! Just look it up in any reputable source. Yes, we share common ancestors with other apes, just as we share common ancestors with all living beings. And we are evolved from apes too.
The bigger question: why does this matter? Quit leaving me in the dark!
Besides the fact that most societies value the life of their people (generally speaking), you can also think of this from an economic standpoint: these astronauts have a lot of experience and very specific knowledge, and are also physically fit etc. A lot has been invested in them, and they're worth a lot. So risking your crew that way can cost a lot of money.
And then, of course, people have a lot of pride in the space program, and losing people in space gives a big blow to the average Joe's perception of its value. If we spend billions of dollars to blow people up, it's not going to sell so well to the public.
In the end, to me it's all irrelevant, because I don't see the immediate need to send any people in space. Let's use robots - they don't require life support, they don't have to return, and they don't carry all the emotional baggage.