I am not arguing for its mandated use, only for its continued existence, as neither you nor any other pro-metrication person I've run across has made a convincing argument why nobody should be allowed to use these units for trade if they so choose.
I can sympathize with that argument, but that's entirely separate from what we've been discussing so far. What you've been saying is that the existing US system is efficient, internally consistent, elegant, etc., and I'm simply arguing that it is not. It is an obsolete, nonsensical, inferior system. Right now I'm simply arguing that the metric system is superior in that it is more consistent, more elegant, more powerful, simpler, and easier to use. It is also superior, BTW, in that there are many metric/SI units that have no british system counterparts. What is the british/US/imperial analog of volts, for example? What about chemical concentration (molarity)? Half the calculations I do on a daily basis can't be done in the US system.
To address your point directly, you're making it sound like it's some sort of personal freedom issue, that people "should be allowed to use these units for trade if they so choose," but I don't agree with that. First, people can't just make up their own units and use those. A grocery store can't sell apples using a pound that's smaller than the neighboring grocery store--the system of units defines a standard, and it's enforced by the law. If that store were caught using nonstandard pounds, there would be some sort of penalty. So I absolutely believe that a society has the right to dictate what units of measurement are used by its members when it comes to trade (which is different than what units you use to measure your own height at home). As to whether or not we "should" upgrade to the metric system, I'm not arguing that it's a moral imperative, simply that it's a good idea. It will be inconvenient in the beginning, but it will make everything easier in the long run. I won't bore you with the specifics of those arguments, since I'm sure you're familiar with them, but I do think that when society determines that it's sufficiently in our interests to switch, then that alone is argument enough for why it can and should be enforced by law (for purposes of trade).
You're conflating "metric" with SI. SI is metric, but not all metric is SI.
No, I'm not. There's a difference between things that are "metric," like the cm, but not SI, and things like mm Hg or the gallon, which aren't "metric" by any meaningful definition. The centimeter, angstrom, etc. are simply derived units based on scaling by powers of ten.
If you are a strict adherent to SI, then yes. But no country on the planet (with the possible exception of France itself) is a strict adherent to SI. I've already experienced the headache of working on a Japanese tractor with Japanese tires with the only pressure listed on the sidewall being "kg/cm^2."
I'm not a strict adherent to SI, and neither is anyone else, including France. But there's a difference between using measuring length in centimeters and measuring pressure in kg/cm^2, which is simply incorrect. In fact, the only reason I can imagine why someone would make that mistake would be because they were converting from pounds/inch^2, and the person mistakenly thinking that "pounds" in that context referred to pounds of mass rather than pounds of force.
Considering the definition of the pound in the US is 453,592,370 micgrograms (which makes sense, since it was determined by comparing a pound artifact with a kilogram artifact on a beam balance), it is a unit of mass, not force. The slug is a substitution for the pound in order to create a coherent system of measure (i. e. avoids a dimensionless constant in F=ma), and is never actually used outside of first semester physics textbooks.
I didn't realize the pound had been redefined as a unit of mass...interesting. Truthfully, I've never seen pounds, slugs, poundals, or any other non-metric units given more than a brief mention in any physics textbook, first-semester or otherwise. However, the very fact that the pound-mass vs. pound-force ambiguity exists is a strike against the system.
The same can be said of SI prefixes. Why use them instead of solely using scientific notation?
The point is, you can do it either way, and the systems are quickly convertible. Those are options, not needless complexity. I know that 3 x 10^-3 L is 3 mL. What is 3 x 10^-3 gallons in teaspoons?
I've never seen a gas station in the US sell in units other than decimal gallons, and I know of no gas station penalized by any state standards authority for not selling gasoline in gallonts/quarts/pints/etc.
You're arguing my point for me. The pseudo-base two system you're insisting is so elegant and wonderful is so useless in real life that modern implementations of british units have been metric-ized. As in decimal gallons, mils (thousandths of an inch), or your milliteaspoon.
How many milimeters of mercury are in a pascal? What about in kilograms of force per square meter?
I have no idea--mm Hg are not any more metric than pounds per square inch. Also, I'm sure you probably knew this, but kg are units of mass, not force. The newton is the SI unit of force, and 1 Pa is defined as 1 N/m^2. Pounds correspond to newtons, while slugs correspond to kilograms.
"A few seconds?" I could tell you there are 768 teaspoons in a US gallon in less time.
Yes, and I can tell you there are 1000 mL in 1 L pretty quickly too. A calculation that would actually be analogous would be for you to tell me how many cubic 1/2^n-ths of an inch there are in a femtogallon (where n is an integer). Besides, shouldn't there be 512 teaspoons in a US gallon if we're going by powers of two? I guess there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon, unless you're in Australia, where there are four, or unless you're in an industry that defines the teaspoon as 5 mL...
The bushel (and units derived from it) is used solely in agriculture (and that particular unit is hardly used even then), much like the metric (but non-SI) dyne being used only in specialized fields, or the widespread use of the ambiguous term "ton" to refer to a megagram or the non-SI units "milimeter of mercury" or "milibar" to measure pressure.
BTW, I think the bushel is still pretty widely used in agriculture. I grew up in a farm town, and I heard people using them all the time.
What kind of options are those? It just sounds like a lot of needless complexity to me.
I could point to units, but what exactly is preventing you from using centiteaspoons or militeaspoons?
Now you're mixing systems. The metric system is based on the idea of deriving smaller units by scaling base units by powers of ten, while the british/US system does it by using pre-set fractions. Maybe there are 144 antspoons in a teaspoon or something. But the entire concept of milliteaspoons is something you just made up by using metric prefixes with british units.
The liter is deprecated. BIPM would rather you and your doctors use cubic linear measure. Please figure out the proper prefix to use with "cubic meters."
The fact that liters, centimeters, angstroms, etc. aren't official SI is kind of irrelevant. It still comes down to factor of ten conversions. A femtoliter is a cubic micrometer, and it only took me a few seconds to figure that out in my head just now. Even if that weren't true, the combination of prefixes and scientific notation provides a framework for doing this that doesn't exist with teaspoons, drams, fluid ounces, or whatever.
If the series "1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256..." doesn't mean anything to you, you don't belong on Slashdot. They're powers of 2. If your job has anything to do with computers beyond using a word processor, I suggest a new field.
It's not that I don't understand powers of two, it's that I use base ten, like everyone else. You're even writing them in base ten.
1 gal = 4 qt = 8 pt = 16 cup = 128 fl oz = 256 tbsp
Yes, and 1 L = 1000 mL. In the Imperial case, you have at least seven units with nonsystematic names spanning less than three orders of magnitude (I'm including teaspoons). What does that add? And how do you measure volumes smaller than a teaspoon anyway? Fractions of a teaspoon? What's the volume of a red blood cell in teaspoons? When I get the results of my blood test, they're in femtoliters, and I don't know the conversion. BTW, according to wikipedia, a gallon is 160 fluid ounces, and was equal to either 277.420 in^3 in 1963, or 277.41943 in^3 in 1985. I guess that's different from the US liquid gallon, which in turn is different from the US dry gallon.
However, different units are more appropriate for measuring different things, so don't try to tell me that I can't use Imperial units where it makes sense.
The thing is, you're not measuring different things, you're measuring the same thing over different scales. One of the fundamental insights that makes the metric system superior to the british system is the idea that there should be only one base unit to measure something. For example, you could say that gallons is a good unit for measuring the capacity of a bathtub, but teaspoons is a good unit for measuring the capacity of a teacup. But in both cases, you're measuring the same thing, liquid volume--why does it make sense to use two different units to do it? Of course, you can convert between the different units--I think a teaspoon is 1/384th of a gallon. But does that really make any sense? Likewise, you might argue that thousandths of an inch are good for precision machining, while miles are good for measuring driving distances (and nautical miles are good for measuring boating distances). Does that really make more sense than using millimeters and kilometers?
A US gallon is made up of:
4 quarts
8 pints
16 cups
128 fluid ounces
256 tablespoons
If you can't see the pattern and do that kind of math in your head, you don't belong on Slashdot.
I'm sorry, but that's totally bizarre and nonsensical. If I want 1.9 gallons, then I'm supposed to measure one gallon, three quarts, one pint, three fluid ounces, and 0.4 tablespoons? Please don't be so condescending as to suggest that figuring something like that out in one's head is utterly trivial. The idea of having more than one base unit for liquid volume is absolute and total nonsense. There are enough interesting and challenging things in the world for us to think about. Struggling with an obsolete and overly complex system of measurement shouldn't be one of them.
Whatever accurately supports commerce is really all that matters. And the Imperial system works in the US.
Your argument assumes that Americans only want to buy and sell products within the US. This isn't true today, and it's becoming less and less true with time. I want to be able to buy products from different countries, and if I were a business, I'd want to be able to sell overseas. One reason to switch to metric is that it's simply better--you're arguing that this isn't significant enough to warrant a change, and you might be right. But another reason to switch to metric is that everyone else has already switched, and to me this is a more compelling reason. Metric is the worldwide standard, and it costs us time and money to keep using something that doesn't conform to this standard. The EU has a rule that they will not import products that are labeled in non-metric units, and I think it was supposed to go into effect in 1999. The US successfully petitioned them to get this postponed to 2009, but once that goes into effect, it simply will not make sense for manufacturers to have to package their products two different ways for the American vs. world markets.
I agree with and respect what you're saying. However, I would argue that only a minority of scientifically-minded people are really like that. The flip side of what you're saying is that religion itself is fine, but when religious teaching runs up against facts of the natural world (as determined by scientific evidence), such as evolution or the age of the earth, religious people also need to be able to accept that some of the things written in their books is not literally correct.
I agree with you completely, but to be fair, there are a lot of technical reasons why it's much easier to make a vaccine against one or a few strains of HPV than HIV or the other diseases you mention, which aren't caused by viruses. Also, I don't think it's the job of pharmaceutical companies to do long-term thinking. That what government funding and university research labs are for. There are plenty of short-term things that aren't being adequately researched, like new classes of antibiotics. It's definitely true that pharmaceutical companies aren't always looking out for the common good, but at least they do something good once in a while, unlike a lot of other industries (tobacco, military weapons, etc.)
I think you're missing the point of how science works. Even though most scientists are wrong most of the time about brand new ideas they come up with, the correct ideas win out over the incorrect ones over time. The arguments between different scientific ideas, each purporting to be correct, is a feature, not a bug. Scientists as individuals can be incorrect or even dishonest, but over time "science" gets the right answer.
I think your anger is a little misplaced. The HPV vaccine is an example of the pharmaceutical industry doing a good thing. You can complain they're just doing it for money, but many, many people will benefit in a very important way. If only more money went toward development of important things like vaccines for important pathogens instead of treatments for baldness, impotence, wrinkles, etc. the world would be a much better place.
Obviously you're right, technically, that the HPV vaccine is not a vaccine against cancer, but against the virus that causes the majority of that type of cancer. However, getting the vaccine is not the same as not smoking because smokers make a conscious choice to do something they know is bad for them. People who get infected with HPV do not consciously choose to become infected. Also, it is not true that there are other factors that cause the same cancers as cigarettes and HPV in significant numbers. There can be different types of cancers of the same organs (such as asbestos inhalation, which causes a different type of lung cancer), but that's not the same thing.
According to the article, they injected capsaicin to kill the neurons, not block them. Capsaicin acts primarily through the "capsaicin receptor," which is most likely a heteromultimer of TRPV1 and another TRP channel subunit, though TRPV1 alone forms homotetramers that are capsaicin-responsive. Activating TRPV1 alone will kill the cells, essentially by excitotoxicity (depolarization + calcium influx). I'm not sure if you're referring to the k-opioid receptor, but I don't think the capsaicin is acting through that pathway here. Of course, I didn't read the actual cell paper, so maybe there's more to the story than that.
There's a difference between starvation and being malnourished. For every person who doesn't get enough calories, there are many more people who have vitamin or protein deficiency because they can only afford to eat one food all the time (rice or noodles, for example). The African kids you see on TV with the skinny arms and bulging bellies are actually suffering from Kwashiorkor. I don't know what the 800M number reflects, but I just thought I should point out you might both be right.
This is the same idea as two-photon microscopy, a relatively common technique in biological sciences. Basically, the advantage is that it gives you very good resolution in the z dimension (not just x and y). This allows you to image deep into biological tissue, or apparently, into multiple layers of an optical disc. It's not exactly a new idea, and the technology is mature. The question is whether or not it can be made affordable--a low-end titanium-sapphire laser costs around $130,000, and they have to be physically large enough to accommodate several meters (IIRC) of optical path length. The development of laser diodes with high enough intensity to do two-photon excitation will probably be the limiting factor in bringing this to market, not the dye chemistry.
If you won't be rational, then there's nothing more to talk about. Deny whatever you like--decreased science funding, evolution, or the round earth theory. Take your pick.
Okay, I never accused you of being a liar. I would argue that using unadjusted dollars is less honest, since adjusted dollars is what matters, and it's the standard way of comparing amounts of money over time.
However, even if that weren't true, the NSF web site says that their budget did decrease by $105 million (unadjusted dollars) between FY 04 and FY 05:
What you're doing is pointless debate about details of how budgets are calculated. No one denies that the amount of science getting funded has decreased over recent years, and that's the point. Accusing other people of pernicious lies based on technicalities of the claims is missing the point completely.
I absolutely agree with the basic sentiment of what you're saying, but the NSF funds primarily non-biological research, such as physics, chemistry, etc. The NIH funds biomedical research, and its budget it much larger, over $20 billion IIRC.
You have to look at dollars adjusted for inflation. Unfortunately, the rate of inflation for costs of scientific research is high--much higher than the rate of inflation for consumer goods, and the rate of NSF budget increase is significantly lower than that. As a result, fewer grants can be funded. It also places these funding agencies in an awkward position, since they give out grants that are supposed to last for several years, but they don't know what their budget is going to be next year. The reality of the current situation is that it is much tougher to get funded than it was just a few years ago--part of this is because the budgets have decreased (in adjusted dollars), and part of it is because there are more people applying for the grants.
I don't remember exactly where I read this, but there was some study at the NIH or NSF or one of those agencies, and they found that the reason that US science is falling behind is simply because other countries are catching up. Basically, the US has dominated science in recent years not because it was so great, but because the amount of money spent in other countries was inadequate, and as a result, the best and brightest all flocked here. Now, other countries are starting to increase their science funding, and they're catching up. So according to the people who should know best, US science is fine, and the shift is really a result in what's been happening in other countries. As a US-born scientist, some small part of me wants to see us retain the lead, but for the most part I'm just glad that science is benefiting from this.
To clarify, it's not the NSF that is slashing budgets, it's the President and congress that have been slashing the NSF budget, forcing them to make tough decisions. I'm sure the NSF would like nothing more than to fund more research.
In general, I agree with you, but when it comes to science, specifically, I think the OP is correct. US science is the best in the world because we have the most grant money, so all the best scientists across the world are fighting to come here. This creates the highest concentration of scientific talent, which leads to a good intellectual environment. If you walk around the labs of any elite research institution, Americans are always less than half of the people you'll see. So it's not just about education and anti-intellectualism, since most of the top "US scientists" weren't born or educated in the US anyway.
But it's not a product announcement, it's a piece of research science. From the abstract, the model does make useful and testable predictions, providing an unexpected mechanism by which tumor invasiveness (the most important clinical aspect of a tumor) can emerge. It doesn't bother me that people sit around and snipe at serious scientists making useful contributions to the world, but it does bother me that other people mod them up.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not arguing for its mandated use, only for its continued existence, as neither you nor any other pro-metrication person I've run across has made a convincing argument why nobody should be allowed to use these units for trade if they so choose.
I can sympathize with that argument, but that's entirely separate from what we've been discussing so far. What you've been saying is that the existing US system is efficient, internally consistent, elegant, etc., and I'm simply arguing that it is not. It is an obsolete, nonsensical, inferior system. Right now I'm simply arguing that the metric system is superior in that it is more consistent, more elegant, more powerful, simpler, and easier to use. It is also superior, BTW, in that there are many metric/SI units that have no british system counterparts. What is the british/US/imperial analog of volts, for example? What about chemical concentration (molarity)? Half the calculations I do on a daily basis can't be done in the US system.
To address your point directly, you're making it sound like it's some sort of personal freedom issue, that people "should be allowed to use these units for trade if they so choose," but I don't agree with that. First, people can't just make up their own units and use those. A grocery store can't sell apples using a pound that's smaller than the neighboring grocery store--the system of units defines a standard, and it's enforced by the law. If that store were caught using nonstandard pounds, there would be some sort of penalty. So I absolutely believe that a society has the right to dictate what units of measurement are used by its members when it comes to trade (which is different than what units you use to measure your own height at home). As to whether or not we "should" upgrade to the metric system, I'm not arguing that it's a moral imperative, simply that it's a good idea. It will be inconvenient in the beginning, but it will make everything easier in the long run. I won't bore you with the specifics of those arguments, since I'm sure you're familiar with them, but I do think that when society determines that it's sufficiently in our interests to switch, then that alone is argument enough for why it can and should be enforced by law (for purposes of trade).
You're conflating "metric" with SI. SI is metric, but not all metric is SI.
No, I'm not. There's a difference between things that are "metric," like the cm, but not SI, and things like mm Hg or the gallon, which aren't "metric" by any meaningful definition. The centimeter, angstrom, etc. are simply derived units based on scaling by powers of ten.
If you are a strict adherent to SI, then yes. But no country on the planet (with the possible exception of France itself) is a strict adherent to SI. I've already experienced the headache of working on a Japanese tractor with Japanese tires with the only pressure listed on the sidewall being "kg/cm^2."
I'm not a strict adherent to SI, and neither is anyone else, including France. But there's a difference between using measuring length in centimeters and measuring pressure in kg/cm^2, which is simply incorrect. In fact, the only reason I can imagine why someone would make that mistake would be because they were converting from pounds/inch^2, and the person mistakenly thinking that "pounds" in that context referred to pounds of mass rather than pounds of force.
Considering the definition of the pound in the US is 453,592,370 micgrograms (which makes sense, since it was determined by comparing a pound artifact with a kilogram artifact on a beam balance), it is a unit of mass, not force. The slug is a substitution for the pound in order to create a coherent system of measure (i. e. avoids a dimensionless constant in F=ma), and is never actually used outside of first semester physics textbooks.
I didn't realize the pound had been redefined as a unit of mass...interesting. Truthfully, I've never seen pounds, slugs, poundals, or any other non-metric units given more than a brief mention in any physics textbook, first-semester or otherwise. However, the very fact that the pound-mass vs. pound-force ambiguity exists is a strike against the system.
The same can be said of SI prefixes. Why use them instead of solely using scientific notation?
The point is, you can do it either way, and the systems are quickly convertible. Those are options, not needless complexity. I know that 3 x 10^-3 L is 3 mL. What is 3 x 10^-3 gallons in teaspoons?
I've never seen a gas station in the US sell in units other than decimal gallons, and I know of no gas station penalized by any state standards authority for not selling gasoline in gallonts/quarts/pints/etc.
You're arguing my point for me. The pseudo-base two system you're insisting is so elegant and wonderful is so useless in real life that modern implementations of british units have been metric-ized. As in decimal gallons, mils (thousandths of an inch), or your milliteaspoon.
How many milimeters of mercury are in a pascal? What about in kilograms of force per square meter?
I have no idea--mm Hg are not any more metric than pounds per square inch. Also, I'm sure you probably knew this, but kg are units of mass, not force. The newton is the SI unit of force, and 1 Pa is defined as 1 N/m^2. Pounds correspond to newtons, while slugs correspond to kilograms.
"A few seconds?" I could tell you there are 768 teaspoons in a US gallon in less time.
Yes, and I can tell you there are 1000 mL in 1 L pretty quickly too. A calculation that would actually be analogous would be for you to tell me how many cubic 1/2^n-ths of an inch there are in a femtogallon (where n is an integer). Besides, shouldn't there be 512 teaspoons in a US gallon if we're going by powers of two? I guess there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon, unless you're in Australia, where there are four, or unless you're in an industry that defines the teaspoon as 5 mL...
The bushel (and units derived from it) is used solely in agriculture (and that particular unit is hardly used even then), much like the metric (but non-SI) dyne being used only in specialized fields, or the widespread use of the ambiguous term "ton" to refer to a megagram or the non-SI units "milimeter of mercury" or "milibar" to measure pressure.
BTW, I think the bushel is still pretty widely used in agriculture. I grew up in a farm town, and I heard people using them all the time.
Options.
What kind of options are those? It just sounds like a lot of needless complexity to me.
I could point to units, but what exactly is preventing you from using centiteaspoons or militeaspoons?
Now you're mixing systems. The metric system is based on the idea of deriving smaller units by scaling base units by powers of ten, while the british/US system does it by using pre-set fractions. Maybe there are 144 antspoons in a teaspoon or something. But the entire concept of milliteaspoons is something you just made up by using metric prefixes with british units.
The liter is deprecated. BIPM would rather you and your doctors use cubic linear measure. Please figure out the proper prefix to use with "cubic meters."
The fact that liters, centimeters, angstroms, etc. aren't official SI is kind of irrelevant. It still comes down to factor of ten conversions. A femtoliter is a cubic micrometer, and it only took me a few seconds to figure that out in my head just now. Even if that weren't true, the combination of prefixes and scientific notation provides a framework for doing this that doesn't exist with teaspoons, drams, fluid ounces, or whatever.
If the series "1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256..." doesn't mean anything to you, you don't belong on Slashdot. They're powers of 2. If your job has anything to do with computers beyond using a word processor, I suggest a new field.
It's not that I don't understand powers of two, it's that I use base ten, like everyone else. You're even writing them in base ten.
1 gal = 4 qt = 8 pt = 16 cup = 128 fl oz = 256 tbsp
Yes, and 1 L = 1000 mL. In the Imperial case, you have at least seven units with nonsystematic names spanning less than three orders of magnitude (I'm including teaspoons). What does that add? And how do you measure volumes smaller than a teaspoon anyway? Fractions of a teaspoon? What's the volume of a red blood cell in teaspoons? When I get the results of my blood test, they're in femtoliters, and I don't know the conversion. BTW, according to wikipedia, a gallon is 160 fluid ounces, and was equal to either 277.420 in^3 in 1963, or 277.41943 in^3 in 1985. I guess that's different from the US liquid gallon, which in turn is different from the US dry gallon.
However, different units are more appropriate for measuring different things, so don't try to tell me that I can't use Imperial units where it makes sense.
The thing is, you're not measuring different things, you're measuring the same thing over different scales. One of the fundamental insights that makes the metric system superior to the british system is the idea that there should be only one base unit to measure something. For example, you could say that gallons is a good unit for measuring the capacity of a bathtub, but teaspoons is a good unit for measuring the capacity of a teacup. But in both cases, you're measuring the same thing, liquid volume--why does it make sense to use two different units to do it? Of course, you can convert between the different units--I think a teaspoon is 1/384th of a gallon. But does that really make any sense? Likewise, you might argue that thousandths of an inch are good for precision machining, while miles are good for measuring driving distances (and nautical miles are good for measuring boating distances). Does that really make more sense than using millimeters and kilometers?
A US gallon is made up of:
4 quarts
8 pints
16 cups
128 fluid ounces
256 tablespoons
If you can't see the pattern and do that kind of math in your head, you don't belong on Slashdot.
I'm sorry, but that's totally bizarre and nonsensical. If I want 1.9 gallons, then I'm supposed to measure one gallon, three quarts, one pint, three fluid ounces, and 0.4 tablespoons? Please don't be so condescending as to suggest that figuring something like that out in one's head is utterly trivial. The idea of having more than one base unit for liquid volume is absolute and total nonsense. There are enough interesting and challenging things in the world for us to think about. Struggling with an obsolete and overly complex system of measurement shouldn't be one of them.
Whatever accurately supports commerce is really all that matters. And the Imperial system works in the US.
Your argument assumes that Americans only want to buy and sell products within the US. This isn't true today, and it's becoming less and less true with time. I want to be able to buy products from different countries, and if I were a business, I'd want to be able to sell overseas. One reason to switch to metric is that it's simply better--you're arguing that this isn't significant enough to warrant a change, and you might be right. But another reason to switch to metric is that everyone else has already switched, and to me this is a more compelling reason. Metric is the worldwide standard, and it costs us time and money to keep using something that doesn't conform to this standard. The EU has a rule that they will not import products that are labeled in non-metric units, and I think it was supposed to go into effect in 1999. The US successfully petitioned them to get this postponed to 2009, but once that goes into effect, it simply will not make sense for manufacturers to have to package their products two different ways for the American vs. world markets.
I agree with and respect what you're saying. However, I would argue that only a minority of scientifically-minded people are really like that. The flip side of what you're saying is that religion itself is fine, but when religious teaching runs up against facts of the natural world (as determined by scientific evidence), such as evolution or the age of the earth, religious people also need to be able to accept that some of the things written in their books is not literally correct.
I agree with you completely, but to be fair, there are a lot of technical reasons why it's much easier to make a vaccine against one or a few strains of HPV than HIV or the other diseases you mention, which aren't caused by viruses. Also, I don't think it's the job of pharmaceutical companies to do long-term thinking. That what government funding and university research labs are for. There are plenty of short-term things that aren't being adequately researched, like new classes of antibiotics. It's definitely true that pharmaceutical companies aren't always looking out for the common good, but at least they do something good once in a while, unlike a lot of other industries (tobacco, military weapons, etc.)
I think you're missing the point of how science works. Even though most scientists are wrong most of the time about brand new ideas they come up with, the correct ideas win out over the incorrect ones over time. The arguments between different scientific ideas, each purporting to be correct, is a feature, not a bug. Scientists as individuals can be incorrect or even dishonest, but over time "science" gets the right answer.
I think your anger is a little misplaced. The HPV vaccine is an example of the pharmaceutical industry doing a good thing. You can complain they're just doing it for money, but many, many people will benefit in a very important way. If only more money went toward development of important things like vaccines for important pathogens instead of treatments for baldness, impotence, wrinkles, etc. the world would be a much better place.
Obviously you're right, technically, that the HPV vaccine is not a vaccine against cancer, but against the virus that causes the majority of that type of cancer. However, getting the vaccine is not the same as not smoking because smokers make a conscious choice to do something they know is bad for them. People who get infected with HPV do not consciously choose to become infected. Also, it is not true that there are other factors that cause the same cancers as cigarettes and HPV in significant numbers. There can be different types of cancers of the same organs (such as asbestos inhalation, which causes a different type of lung cancer), but that's not the same thing.
According to the article, they injected capsaicin to kill the neurons, not block them. Capsaicin acts primarily through the "capsaicin receptor," which is most likely a heteromultimer of TRPV1 and another TRP channel subunit, though TRPV1 alone forms homotetramers that are capsaicin-responsive. Activating TRPV1 alone will kill the cells, essentially by excitotoxicity (depolarization + calcium influx). I'm not sure if you're referring to the k-opioid receptor, but I don't think the capsaicin is acting through that pathway here. Of course, I didn't read the actual cell paper, so maybe there's more to the story than that.
There's a difference between starvation and being malnourished. For every person who doesn't get enough calories, there are many more people who have vitamin or protein deficiency because they can only afford to eat one food all the time (rice or noodles, for example). The African kids you see on TV with the skinny arms and bulging bellies are actually suffering from Kwashiorkor. I don't know what the 800M number reflects, but I just thought I should point out you might both be right.
This is the same idea as two-photon microscopy, a relatively common technique in biological sciences. Basically, the advantage is that it gives you very good resolution in the z dimension (not just x and y). This allows you to image deep into biological tissue, or apparently, into multiple layers of an optical disc. It's not exactly a new idea, and the technology is mature. The question is whether or not it can be made affordable--a low-end titanium-sapphire laser costs around $130,000, and they have to be physically large enough to accommodate several meters (IIRC) of optical path length. The development of laser diodes with high enough intensity to do two-photon excitation will probably be the limiting factor in bringing this to market, not the dye chemistry.
I deny it.
If you won't be rational, then there's nothing more to talk about. Deny whatever you like--decreased science funding, evolution, or the round earth theory. Take your pick.
It's a deception intended to mislead.
c u04_1123.jsp
Okay, I never accused you of being a liar. I would argue that using unadjusted dollars is less honest, since adjusted dollars is what matters, and it's the standard way of comparing amounts of money over time.
However, even if that weren't true, the NSF web site says that their budget did decrease by $105 million (unadjusted dollars) between FY 04 and FY 05:
http://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/108/highlights/
What you're doing is pointless debate about details of how budgets are calculated. No one denies that the amount of science getting funded has decreased over recent years, and that's the point. Accusing other people of pernicious lies based on technicalities of the claims is missing the point completely.
I absolutely agree with the basic sentiment of what you're saying, but the NSF funds primarily non-biological research, such as physics, chemistry, etc. The NIH funds biomedical research, and its budget it much larger, over $20 billion IIRC.
You have to look at dollars adjusted for inflation. Unfortunately, the rate of inflation for costs of scientific research is high--much higher than the rate of inflation for consumer goods, and the rate of NSF budget increase is significantly lower than that. As a result, fewer grants can be funded. It also places these funding agencies in an awkward position, since they give out grants that are supposed to last for several years, but they don't know what their budget is going to be next year. The reality of the current situation is that it is much tougher to get funded than it was just a few years ago--part of this is because the budgets have decreased (in adjusted dollars), and part of it is because there are more people applying for the grants.
I don't remember exactly where I read this, but there was some study at the NIH or NSF or one of those agencies, and they found that the reason that US science is falling behind is simply because other countries are catching up. Basically, the US has dominated science in recent years not because it was so great, but because the amount of money spent in other countries was inadequate, and as a result, the best and brightest all flocked here. Now, other countries are starting to increase their science funding, and they're catching up. So according to the people who should know best, US science is fine, and the shift is really a result in what's been happening in other countries. As a US-born scientist, some small part of me wants to see us retain the lead, but for the most part I'm just glad that science is benefiting from this.
But the NSF is constantly slashing budgets
To clarify, it's not the NSF that is slashing budgets, it's the President and congress that have been slashing the NSF budget, forcing them to make tough decisions. I'm sure the NSF would like nothing more than to fund more research.
In general, I agree with you, but when it comes to science, specifically, I think the OP is correct. US science is the best in the world because we have the most grant money, so all the best scientists across the world are fighting to come here. This creates the highest concentration of scientific talent, which leads to a good intellectual environment. If you walk around the labs of any elite research institution, Americans are always less than half of the people you'll see. So it's not just about education and anti-intellectualism, since most of the top "US scientists" weren't born or educated in the US anyway.
But it's not a product announcement, it's a piece of research science. From the abstract, the model does make useful and testable predictions, providing an unexpected mechanism by which tumor invasiveness (the most important clinical aspect of a tumor) can emerge. It doesn't bother me that people sit around and snipe at serious scientists making useful contributions to the world, but it does bother me that other people mod them up.