DI water (or any water) does not break down into hydronium and hydroxide ions with storage, it is in an equilibrium where a certain percentage of the water is in ionic form at any given time. For example, the definition of pH is the negative base 10 log of the hydronium ion concentration. DI water can be stored for a long time.
Part of the reason that I think the original author mentioned Crick as the closest to Einstein is precisely because he made several major contributions to biology, not just the DNA structure. I don't remember them all, but I think he was the first to postulate tRNAs, for example (it was called "the adaptor hypothesis", IIRC).
There are several different ways to test for HIV. The one you're describing tests for antibodies to the virus, and it has a high false-positive rate. PCR-based tests that test for the viral RNA itself are more difficult to perform and require much more equipment. Those tests can also quantify the concentration of viruses in the blood, rather than give a positive/negative result.
Re:What about the research benefits?
on
Faster DNA Testing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One of the big ones, if the device is small/portable/cheap, will be portable HIV testing for the third world. That will be a night and day difference. For research in labs that are already well-funded and stocked with equipment, it might speed things up a little, but I don't see anything obvious where it would be a huge change.
You just say so many things that are factually incorrect, I'm not willing to go through and correct them any more. Feel free to have the last word. But please, don't try to play this "I design pharmaceuticals" game with me, when you so obviously have not had even advanced undergraduate training in virology or molecular biology.
You've shown nothing to support that a mouse neuraminidase has an active site even close to that of the overly hyped mutated bird flu neuraminidase. It's likely that bird neuraminidases and human neuraminidases differ significantly.
The neuraminidase that tamiflu and relenza inhibit is a VIRAL neuraminidase, not a neuraminidase from the host.
Funny. No mention of a bird strain anywhere. ... Mouse adapted, huh? Can we get some human adapted bird strains so that this is actually relevent?
You quoted random sentences from the abstract, but you apparently missed the first two, which describe the viruses used in the paper:
"In 1997, an H5N1 avian influenza A/Hong Kong/156/97 virus transmitted directly to humans and killed six of the 18 people infected. In 1999, another avian A/Hong/1074/99 (H9N2) virus caused influenza in two children."
The current hype is about the possibility of a bird strain adapting to humans.
No, the current hype is about the possibility that a bird strain that has already adapted to humans, killing six people in 1997, will adapt to efficient human-to-human transfer. Once again, this has already happened, in 1918, and 50-100 million people died.
I think your confusion stems from the fact that the abstract (if you read it) used the word "avian" instead of the word "bird." Let me assure you, they are the same thing.
Does it? Did you see anywhere in that article the mechanism of action of Tamiflu? Even if Tamiflu is effective against the virus, it's effective against a mouse strain of the virus. There's no indication that the inhibited viral enzyme is the same in the mouse strain and the human strain.
Did you even read the abstract? Because if you did, you would see that even the abstract lists the mechanism of tamiflu, as well as the viruses used, which include a human H5N1 virus and both human and mouse-adapted H9N2. They also demonstrate effectiveness of tamiflu against the viruses in MDCK cells, which are from dogs, as well as direct biochemical inhibition of neuraminidase. When the bird flu comes, I'm sure no one will force a dose of tamiflu on you. By all means, please follow your instincts and free up a dose for someone else.
To clarify, Galen did a study of soldiers who had sustained a bunch of different brain injuries and what happened to them afterwards. What I'm saying is that the fact that physical modification or damage to the brain directly modified behavior, thought, and every aspect of what we might call their humanity is evidence that humanity itself is a property of the physical brain, not some immaterial soul floating off in the ether.
I agree that it isn't necessarily a good measure of clinical outcomes, but it does demonstrate that Tamiflu is effective against the virus itself, irrespective of what organism it's replicating in. Also, the difference between humans and mice is smaller than the difference between mice and birds.
You're suggesting that the further we go, the more we realize what we don't understand. There might be cases in which that is true, but I would argue that those cases are in the minority. There are MANY things that you take for granted that are more or less fully understood today, and people 2000 years ago didn't understand them. For example, atoms exist. You can't see them, since they're smaller than the wavelength of visible light, but they can be observed, manipulated, etc. Bacteria (which are invisible to the naked eye) can cause disease. Try explaining that to the authors of the Bible, who didn't know about microorganisms. Time travels slower at the top of a mountain than at sea level. If Einstein hadn't figured that out, GPS wouldn't work. How about electricity? What could be more mysterious than that, yet it's fully understood by people in our society, and our entire society runs on it. All I'm saying is that science does allow us to really understand things, and not just some moronic operational level, but on a deep philosophical level.
Also, as far as evolution goes, the ID people mainly want to defeat it because they believe it destroys the fundamental underpinning of morality. That might even be true, but if that's the case, they need to change the basis of their morality because no matter how much they want to stick their heads in the sand, evolution is a fact. The reason I support evolution is because it is the fundamental conceptual basis of all of modern biology. Telling a biologist that evolution is false is like telling a physicist that calculus is false. It's silly and counterproductive.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I should clarify that I don't mean to imply that intelligence isn't real, just that it isn't real the same way a baseball is real. It's not a physical object, it's a property of a certain system that happens to be the brain. Other systems could have that property too, and that wouldn't require any deities to step in. My problem with the ID debate is that the entire concept presupposes a mystical origin of intelligence. I'm saying that the origin of intelligence, even in the human brain, is not mystical, so the real hole in the ID argument is the assumption that supposed fingerprints of intelligence are necessarily evidence of some sort of human-like deity, not evidence that the dynamics of evolutionary processes can display "intelligent" behavior.
The problem I have with this entire ID vs. evolution thing, speaking as a computational neuroscientist and a biologist, is that the entire framing of the argument is arrogant and flawed because it presupposes a definition of "intelligence" that is invalid at the level of basic neuroscience. Nobody can define intelligence adequately, but it's obviously something that (basically by definition) is a property of the human brain. The human brain is a dynamical system with a huge number of degrees of freedom and strong nonlinearities, but that's it. There isn't any magic, and there aren't any souls (and yes, I would argue that there IS scientific evidence against the existence of souls, and there has been since Galen's groundbreaking work in ~200 AD), there's just swirling masses of atoms inside peoples' heads. If you accept that "intelligence" is simply a property of the dynamics of a certain nonlinear system (e.g. the brain), then there's nothing to prevent other complex systems from displaying "intelligent" behavior. Like evolution, for example.
What bothers me the most is not that ID is fundamentally religious, but that it's based on a fundamentally anthropomorphic definition of "intelligence" that is impossible to define, and even proponents of evolution fall into supporting this false dichotomy. Instead of saying "No, evolution is not intelligent!" they should be pointing out that intelligence itself is not intelligent. There's atoms, they move around, and that's it. If there's even a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise, please point it out, because I've never seen it, and I've been looking for a long time.
there is no Pandemic. It too is a fiction. Bird Flu is indegenous to the Americas. It in no way fits the profile of a "Pandemic." It is too lethal to be a viable pathogen. It kills itself off.
That logic is simply ridiculous, with the high population densities of cities and the speed and frequency with which people travel. You're seriously suggesting that a human-transmissible bird flu wouldn't be a "viable pathogen" because it would kill everyone in Taiwan too quickly to spread? Even if that were true, which is isn't, wouldn't you expect the Taiwanese to be concerned about that?
The idea that a human-transmissible bird flu would be dangerous has already been demonstrated by the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 20-50 million people. The 1918 virus was recently reconstructed, and it was found to be very similar to the bird flu viruses that are around in Asia today. The actual scientific paper, available here states:
"Until now, the exceptional virulence of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus has been a question of historical curiosity. Herein, we demonstrate the successful reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus in order to understand more fully the virulence of this virus and possibly of other human influenza pandemic viruses. Because the emergence of another pandemic virus is considered likely, if not inevitable (25), characterization of the 1918 virus may enable us to recognize the potential threat posed by new influenza virus strains, and it will shed light on the prophylactic and therapeutic countermeasures that will be needed to control pandemic viruses."
Tamiflu, assuming Bird Flu were to mutate into a dangerous flu "Pandemic", would be of no value. The disease kills in about 9 days. It is symptomatic only 2 of those days. By the time a person knew they were getting sick, getting a prescription would not save them. Its value is probably null anyway as it appears it is ineffective against the disease. Its only value would be prophalaxis and that is questionable.
A scientific paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the H5N1 virus is here.
A paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the 1918 flu virus (which is similar to the virus we fear will emerge) is here.
First, as I mentioned in another post, the increases in funding are barely above the level of inflation. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Bush administration isn't in direct control of those budgets. They can't cut funding as much as they would like to, but they've tried. Thankfully, congress is a little more sane. If you're actually interested in looking at this more in depth, here's an interesting link. The thing that kills me is that NASA, the only big "science" branch of the government that IS a waste of money, is going to see their funding increase, but only for manned space exploration, which has little scientific value.
They show a decrease in funding FOR ONE YEAR. The funding increased every other year, and it has increased beyond just the level of inflation, so I am trying to understand how you feel Bush has really decreased funding overall? The implication that was being proven wrong by those statistics is that the Bush administration doesn't support science funding.
First, the rate of inflation in scientific research costs is significantly higher than the rate of inflation in consumer goods or whatever. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I remember hearing 7-8% per year quoted for biological research. I don't know what it is for NSF-funded research, but it's also high, so even though it looks like NSF funding had been increasing dramatically during that period, it hasn't.
Second, a lot of money for basic science research was reallocated to homeland security-related projects still administered by the NSF, so effectively the decrease in funding was much larger than what the total numbers indicate.
Did the government invent/popularize computers? Nope, that honor goes to many companies.
It's hard to pinpoint when computers were invented, but I thought it was basically for military applications in WWII, including code-breaking and the Manhattan project, which were obviously both driven by huge government spending. And contrary to what you say, the development of TCP/IP was directly funded by the government.
What would have happened if the taxpayers held onto that money, and invested it in companies? Is it possible we would have something even better than today's internet network?
I would argue that we wouldn't have anything at all. Industry and academia work on different problems, and the early development of most worthwhile technologies goes through a long, tedious stage where they're not remotely profitable, and therefore of little interest to industry. It's not a question of whether industry is better or academia is better--both are important, and they play complementary roles. The work done in federally-funded research labs today will be the basis of industry research tomorrow, so it is a worthwhile investment for a country to make.
What I meant is that the NSF budget figures were posted to show that the Bush administration supports science, but the numbers show a decrease in funding.
Whether or not spending government money to support scientific research is a separate argument, but I would argue that it's ironic that you would imply that it is not, typing your message into a "computer" hooked up to the "internet"...
In legal terms, it's not a ban. In PRACTICAL terms, it is a ban. If all the equipment in a lab was bought with federal funds (which is the way most labs in the US are), how can you do any ES cell research? Build a new lab from scratch, not using any federal funds? In practical terms, how is that possible? Fortunately, some of the states (which traditionally have nothing to do with biomedical research funding) are stepping in and rectifying the idiocy of the federal government.
The reason they don't spread is 1: human cells don't fly, and 2: tissue incompatibility. If you took tumor cells out of someone who was a matched tissue donor for someone else, then injected the cells into the second person, that second person would have cancer. Clinically speaking, this has happened as an accidental byproduct of organ donation, and the second person's cancer has the same drug resistance characteristics as that of the first person.
Interestingly, in dogs, there is an extremely common sexually transmitted disease that has infected something like 50% of the dogs on earth (their immune system can get rid of it, though). This infection is actually an infection with cancer cells from some dog that died decades ago, except its cells evolved into a sort of canine amoeba.
The only difference between the page of an open book and a mirror is that a mirror preserves the spatial structure of the reflected light. However, a book's page preserves the temporal structure of the incoming light, so they just use a light source where the spatial and temporal patterns are correlated, then read out the temporal information and use that to reconstruct the spatial information. It's a neat trick, but it's absolutely routine in microscopy. Microscopes that operate on this exact principle have been available commercially for years.
To add on to this, confocal and two-photon laser scanning microscopy work exactly the same way, with photons. Really, I don't this as anything more than another implementation of a scanning imaging approach. I didn't read the paper, but it sounds like maybe they extended it to using arbitrary images instead of a simple scanning beam, but that's just a change of basis (in the linear algebra sense).
I think this post is one of the more insightful things I've read on/., ever. To extrapolate from this (I'm speaking as a computational neuroscientist, not as a biologist), I would tack on the idea that the fundamental problem is that both evolutionists and IDists are tacitly anthropomorphizing intelligence. I mean, what is "intelligence" exactly? The only definition I'm aware of is some vague property that the human brain possesses. Or rather, a property of the dynamics instantiated by ionic currents in the human brain. The human brain, the only object in the known universe that everyone can agree displays "intelligence," is a nonlinear dynamical system. It's made of atoms, like anything else, and it follows the rules of physics, like anything else, although it contains some interesting nonlinearities. Anyway, when people use the word "intelligence," they're implying there's some mastermind "God"-like organism behind the scenes, but if intelligence itself is defined in a dynamical systems sense (or in some information theoretic description of dynamical systems, which is what I understand Kolmogorov complexity to be, though I need to learn more about those things), it makes sense that evolution on earth could easily instantiate dynamics that one could consider "intelligent." Because even "intelligence" is not intelligent.
Maybe we're having a problem with semantics. When I refer to lower primates, I'm referring to lower primates that are those primates in existance today, but not as advanced as man( in the zoological sense of the word). Like man, they have former ancestors from which they have evolved. But these former ancestors are no more a lower primate(zoological) than our human ancestors are human.
I agree, there was a misunderstanding, and I agree with what you're saying. However, I would argue that it is valid to call our last common ancestor with a chimpanzee a primate, despite the fact that it's extinct. If it existed today, zoologists would call it a primate, so I think it's a valid thing to say. For example, I'm pretty sure Homo erectus is considered a primate, despite the fact that it's extinct.
The probability that you describe with the oxygen atoms in the room is based on Heisenberg's (sp?) uncertainty principle which I related to in a different post.
Actually, the oxygen molecule thing has nothing to do with the HUP, as far as I know. It has more to do with thermodynamics. Basically, as I understand it, there's a finite probability that warm water will spontaneously turn into boiling water with ice cubes in it, it's just that the probability is so ridiculously low that in practice, we can talk about "laws" of thermodynamics as if they weren't probabilistic. Of course, I'm not a physicist, so I could obviously be wrong about that, but that's what I remember from college physics.
Even with all of the uncertainties that scientists must deal with, they refer to things as facts, but in reality, they know they aren't. Just look at how physics and chemistry have changed their theories (not facts) over the last 100 years.
I'm a scientist, and I would modify what you're saying a little. I would say that we refer to things as "facts," but it's not that we "know they aren't" facts. It's that we know that the fact that they're facts is never demonstrated in an absolute sense, which is a very different thing. For example, I'd argue that the roundness of the earth is a fact. It's impossible to ever demonstrate absolutely that we're correct about the fact that the earth is round, but at some point you have to just sweep that under the rug and accept it. Science is full of times that people can prove something to the 99.9% level, and after that they just accept that it's correct.
Also, there are qualitatively different types of scientific "facts," and I think talking changes in mathematical models in physics and chemistry is a bit of a false analogy. For example, I can say "I ate a banana for breakfast yesterday," and that's a fact, not a theory. If someone says "here is a set of equations that can quantitatively explain the movement of matter exactly," that's a qualitatively different kind of statement. That's the kind of thing that becomes a "theory" with sufficient experimental support. Whether or not I ate a banana for breakfast yesterday is a factual question, and experimental resolution of the issue yields a factual answer. So basically what I'm saying is that the question "Is evolution real?" is a factual question, and the answer is either yes or no. If we can demonstrate that the answer is yes to the 99.999% level, it's simple sophistry to argue that there's a finite probability that we're wrong.
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DI water (or any water) does not break down into hydronium and hydroxide ions with storage, it is in an equilibrium where a certain percentage of the water is in ionic form at any given time. For example, the definition of pH is the negative base 10 log of the hydronium ion concentration. DI water can be stored for a long time.
Part of the reason that I think the original author mentioned Crick as the closest to Einstein is precisely because he made several major contributions to biology, not just the DNA structure. I don't remember them all, but I think he was the first to postulate tRNAs, for example (it was called "the adaptor hypothesis", IIRC).
There are several different ways to test for HIV. The one you're describing tests for antibodies to the virus, and it has a high false-positive rate. PCR-based tests that test for the viral RNA itself are more difficult to perform and require much more equipment. Those tests can also quantify the concentration of viruses in the blood, rather than give a positive/negative result.
One of the big ones, if the device is small/portable/cheap, will be portable HIV testing for the third world. That will be a night and day difference. For research in labs that are already well-funded and stocked with equipment, it might speed things up a little, but I don't see anything obvious where it would be a huge change.
In case you hadn't noticed, Americans are becoming less and less intelligent as the years go by.
It's because less intelligent people tend to reproduce more. So it's evolution at work!
You just say so many things that are factually incorrect, I'm not willing to go through and correct them any more. Feel free to have the last word. But please, don't try to play this "I design pharmaceuticals" game with me, when you so obviously have not had even advanced undergraduate training in virology or molecular biology.
You've shown nothing to support that a mouse neuraminidase has an active site even close to that of the overly hyped mutated bird flu neuraminidase. It's likely that bird neuraminidases and human neuraminidases differ significantly.
The neuraminidase that tamiflu and relenza inhibit is a VIRAL neuraminidase, not a neuraminidase from the host.
Funny. No mention of a bird strain anywhere.
...
Mouse adapted, huh? Can we get some human adapted bird strains so that this is actually relevent?
You quoted random sentences from the abstract, but you apparently missed the first two, which describe the viruses used in the paper:
"In 1997, an H5N1 avian influenza A/Hong Kong/156/97 virus transmitted directly to humans and killed six of the 18 people infected. In 1999, another avian A/Hong/1074/99 (H9N2) virus caused influenza in two children."
The current hype is about the possibility of a bird strain adapting to humans.
No, the current hype is about the possibility that a bird strain that has already adapted to humans, killing six people in 1997, will adapt to efficient human-to-human transfer. Once again, this has already happened, in 1918, and 50-100 million people died.
I think your confusion stems from the fact that the abstract (if you read it) used the word "avian" instead of the word "bird." Let me assure you, they are the same thing.
Does it? Did you see anywhere in that article the mechanism of action of Tamiflu? Even if Tamiflu is effective against the virus, it's effective against a mouse strain of the virus. There's no indication that the inhibited viral enzyme is the same in the mouse strain and the human strain.
Did you even read the abstract? Because if you did, you would see that even the abstract lists the mechanism of tamiflu, as well as the viruses used, which include a human H5N1 virus and both human and mouse-adapted H9N2. They also demonstrate effectiveness of tamiflu against the viruses in MDCK cells, which are from dogs, as well as direct biochemical inhibition of neuraminidase. When the bird flu comes, I'm sure no one will force a dose of tamiflu on you. By all means, please follow your instincts and free up a dose for someone else.
To clarify, Galen did a study of soldiers who had sustained a bunch of different brain injuries and what happened to them afterwards. What I'm saying is that the fact that physical modification or damage to the brain directly modified behavior, thought, and every aspect of what we might call their humanity is evidence that humanity itself is a property of the physical brain, not some immaterial soul floating off in the ether.
I agree that it isn't necessarily a good measure of clinical outcomes, but it does demonstrate that Tamiflu is effective against the virus itself, irrespective of what organism it's replicating in. Also, the difference between humans and mice is smaller than the difference between mice and birds.
You're suggesting that the further we go, the more we realize what we don't understand. There might be cases in which that is true, but I would argue that those cases are in the minority. There are MANY things that you take for granted that are more or less fully understood today, and people 2000 years ago didn't understand them. For example, atoms exist. You can't see them, since they're smaller than the wavelength of visible light, but they can be observed, manipulated, etc. Bacteria (which are invisible to the naked eye) can cause disease. Try explaining that to the authors of the Bible, who didn't know about microorganisms. Time travels slower at the top of a mountain than at sea level. If Einstein hadn't figured that out, GPS wouldn't work. How about electricity? What could be more mysterious than that, yet it's fully understood by people in our society, and our entire society runs on it. All I'm saying is that science does allow us to really understand things, and not just some moronic operational level, but on a deep philosophical level.
Also, as far as evolution goes, the ID people mainly want to defeat it because they believe it destroys the fundamental underpinning of morality. That might even be true, but if that's the case, they need to change the basis of their morality because no matter how much they want to stick their heads in the sand, evolution is a fact. The reason I support evolution is because it is the fundamental conceptual basis of all of modern biology. Telling a biologist that evolution is false is like telling a physicist that calculus is false. It's silly and counterproductive.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I should clarify that I don't mean to imply that intelligence isn't real, just that it isn't real the same way a baseball is real. It's not a physical object, it's a property of a certain system that happens to be the brain. Other systems could have that property too, and that wouldn't require any deities to step in. My problem with the ID debate is that the entire concept presupposes a mystical origin of intelligence. I'm saying that the origin of intelligence, even in the human brain, is not mystical, so the real hole in the ID argument is the assumption that supposed fingerprints of intelligence are necessarily evidence of some sort of human-like deity, not evidence that the dynamics of evolutionary processes can display "intelligent" behavior.
The problem I have with this entire ID vs. evolution thing, speaking as a computational neuroscientist and a biologist, is that the entire framing of the argument is arrogant and flawed because it presupposes a definition of "intelligence" that is invalid at the level of basic neuroscience. Nobody can define intelligence adequately, but it's obviously something that (basically by definition) is a property of the human brain. The human brain is a dynamical system with a huge number of degrees of freedom and strong nonlinearities, but that's it. There isn't any magic, and there aren't any souls (and yes, I would argue that there IS scientific evidence against the existence of souls, and there has been since Galen's groundbreaking work in ~200 AD), there's just swirling masses of atoms inside peoples' heads. If you accept that "intelligence" is simply a property of the dynamics of a certain nonlinear system (e.g. the brain), then there's nothing to prevent other complex systems from displaying "intelligent" behavior. Like evolution, for example.
What bothers me the most is not that ID is fundamentally religious, but that it's based on a fundamentally anthropomorphic definition of "intelligence" that is impossible to define, and even proponents of evolution fall into supporting this false dichotomy. Instead of saying "No, evolution is not intelligent!" they should be pointing out that intelligence itself is not intelligent. There's atoms, they move around, and that's it. If there's even a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise, please point it out, because I've never seen it, and I've been looking for a long time.
there is no Pandemic. It too is a fiction. Bird Flu is indegenous to the Americas. It in no way fits the profile of a "Pandemic." It is too lethal to be a viable pathogen. It kills itself off.
.
That logic is simply ridiculous, with the high population densities of cities and the speed and frequency with which people travel. You're seriously suggesting that a human-transmissible bird flu wouldn't be a "viable pathogen" because it would kill everyone in Taiwan too quickly to spread? Even if that were true, which is isn't, wouldn't you expect the Taiwanese to be concerned about that?
The idea that a human-transmissible bird flu would be dangerous has already been demonstrated by the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 20-50 million people. The 1918 virus was recently reconstructed, and it was found to be very similar to the bird flu viruses that are around in Asia today. The actual scientific paper, available here states:
"Until now, the exceptional virulence of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus has been a question of historical curiosity. Herein, we demonstrate the successful reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus in order to understand more fully the virulence of this virus and possibly of other human influenza pandemic viruses. Because the emergence of another pandemic virus is considered likely, if not inevitable (25), characterization of the 1918 virus may enable us to recognize the potential threat posed by new influenza virus strains, and it will shed light on the prophylactic and therapeutic countermeasures that will be needed to control pandemic viruses."
Tamiflu, assuming Bird Flu were to mutate into a dangerous flu "Pandemic", would be of no value. The disease kills in about 9 days. It is symptomatic only 2 of those days. By the time a person knew they were getting sick, getting a prescription would not save them. Its value is probably null anyway as it appears it is ineffective against the disease. Its only value would be prophalaxis and that is questionable.
A scientific paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the H5N1 virus is here
A paper demonstrating Tamiflu's effectiveness against the 1918 flu virus (which is similar to the virus we fear will emerge) is here.
First, as I mentioned in another post, the increases in funding are barely above the level of inflation. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Bush administration isn't in direct control of those budgets. They can't cut funding as much as they would like to, but they've tried. Thankfully, congress is a little more sane. If you're actually interested in looking at this more in depth, here's an interesting link. The thing that kills me is that NASA, the only big "science" branch of the government that IS a waste of money, is going to see their funding increase, but only for manned space exploration, which has little scientific value.
They show a decrease in funding FOR ONE YEAR. The funding increased every other year, and it has increased beyond just the level of inflation, so I am trying to understand how you feel Bush has really decreased funding overall? The implication that was being proven wrong by those statistics is that the Bush administration doesn't support science funding.
First, the rate of inflation in scientific research costs is significantly higher than the rate of inflation in consumer goods or whatever. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I remember hearing 7-8% per year quoted for biological research. I don't know what it is for NSF-funded research, but it's also high, so even though it looks like NSF funding had been increasing dramatically during that period, it hasn't.
Second, a lot of money for basic science research was reallocated to homeland security-related projects still administered by the NSF, so effectively the decrease in funding was much larger than what the total numbers indicate.
Did the government invent/popularize computers? Nope, that honor goes to many companies.
It's hard to pinpoint when computers were invented, but I thought it was basically for military applications in WWII, including code-breaking and the Manhattan project, which were obviously both driven by huge government spending. And contrary to what you say, the development of TCP/IP was directly funded by the government.
What would have happened if the taxpayers held onto that money, and invested it in companies? Is it possible we would have something even better than today's internet network?
I would argue that we wouldn't have anything at all. Industry and academia work on different problems, and the early development of most worthwhile technologies goes through a long, tedious stage where they're not remotely profitable, and therefore of little interest to industry. It's not a question of whether industry is better or academia is better--both are important, and they play complementary roles. The work done in federally-funded research labs today will be the basis of industry research tomorrow, so it is a worthwhile investment for a country to make.
What I meant is that the NSF budget figures were posted to show that the Bush administration supports science, but the numbers show a decrease in funding.
Whether or not spending government money to support scientific research is a separate argument, but I would argue that it's ironic that you would imply that it is not, typing your message into a "computer" hooked up to the "internet"...
Are you intending to point out that the NSF budget actually decreased this year for the first time since 1998?
In legal terms, it's not a ban. In PRACTICAL terms, it is a ban. If all the equipment in a lab was bought with federal funds (which is the way most labs in the US are), how can you do any ES cell research? Build a new lab from scratch, not using any federal funds? In practical terms, how is that possible? Fortunately, some of the states (which traditionally have nothing to do with biomedical research funding) are stepping in and rectifying the idiocy of the federal government.
The reason they don't spread is 1: human cells don't fly, and 2: tissue incompatibility. If you took tumor cells out of someone who was a matched tissue donor for someone else, then injected the cells into the second person, that second person would have cancer. Clinically speaking, this has happened as an accidental byproduct of organ donation, and the second person's cancer has the same drug resistance characteristics as that of the first person.
Interestingly, in dogs, there is an extremely common sexually transmitted disease that has infected something like 50% of the dogs on earth (their immune system can get rid of it, though). This infection is actually an infection with cancer cells from some dog that died decades ago, except its cells evolved into a sort of canine amoeba.
The only difference between the page of an open book and a mirror is that a mirror preserves the spatial structure of the reflected light. However, a book's page preserves the temporal structure of the incoming light, so they just use a light source where the spatial and temporal patterns are correlated, then read out the temporal information and use that to reconstruct the spatial information. It's a neat trick, but it's absolutely routine in microscopy. Microscopes that operate on this exact principle have been available commercially for years.
To add on to this, confocal and two-photon laser scanning microscopy work exactly the same way, with photons. Really, I don't this as anything more than another implementation of a scanning imaging approach. I didn't read the paper, but it sounds like maybe they extended it to using arbitrary images instead of a simple scanning beam, but that's just a change of basis (in the linear algebra sense).
I think this post is one of the more insightful things I've read on /., ever. To extrapolate from this (I'm speaking as a computational neuroscientist, not as a biologist), I would tack on the idea that the fundamental problem is that both evolutionists and IDists are tacitly anthropomorphizing intelligence. I mean, what is "intelligence" exactly? The only definition I'm aware of is some vague property that the human brain possesses. Or rather, a property of the dynamics instantiated by ionic currents in the human brain. The human brain, the only object in the known universe that everyone can agree displays "intelligence," is a nonlinear dynamical system. It's made of atoms, like anything else, and it follows the rules of physics, like anything else, although it contains some interesting nonlinearities. Anyway, when people use the word "intelligence," they're implying there's some mastermind "God"-like organism behind the scenes, but if intelligence itself is defined in a dynamical systems sense (or in some information theoretic description of dynamical systems, which is what I understand Kolmogorov complexity to be, though I need to learn more about those things), it makes sense that evolution on earth could easily instantiate dynamics that one could consider "intelligent." Because even "intelligence" is not intelligent.
Maybe we're having a problem with semantics. When I refer to lower primates, I'm referring to lower primates that are those primates in existance today, but not as advanced as man( in the zoological sense of the word). Like man, they have former ancestors from which they have evolved. But these former ancestors are no more a lower primate(zoological) than our human ancestors are human.
I agree, there was a misunderstanding, and I agree with what you're saying. However, I would argue that it is valid to call our last common ancestor with a chimpanzee a primate, despite the fact that it's extinct. If it existed today, zoologists would call it a primate, so I think it's a valid thing to say. For example, I'm pretty sure Homo erectus is considered a primate, despite the fact that it's extinct.
The probability that you describe with the oxygen atoms in the room is based on Heisenberg's (sp?) uncertainty principle which I related to in a different post.
Actually, the oxygen molecule thing has nothing to do with the HUP, as far as I know. It has more to do with thermodynamics. Basically, as I understand it, there's a finite probability that warm water will spontaneously turn into boiling water with ice cubes in it, it's just that the probability is so ridiculously low that in practice, we can talk about "laws" of thermodynamics as if they weren't probabilistic. Of course, I'm not a physicist, so I could obviously be wrong about that, but that's what I remember from college physics.
Even with all of the uncertainties that scientists must deal with, they refer to things as facts, but in reality, they know they aren't. Just look at how physics and chemistry have changed their theories (not facts) over the last 100 years.
I'm a scientist, and I would modify what you're saying a little. I would say that we refer to things as "facts," but it's not that we "know they aren't" facts. It's that we know that the fact that they're facts is never demonstrated in an absolute sense, which is a very different thing. For example, I'd argue that the roundness of the earth is a fact. It's impossible to ever demonstrate absolutely that we're correct about the fact that the earth is round, but at some point you have to just sweep that under the rug and accept it. Science is full of times that people can prove something to the 99.9% level, and after that they just accept that it's correct.
Also, there are qualitatively different types of scientific "facts," and I think talking changes in mathematical models in physics and chemistry is a bit of a false analogy. For example, I can say "I ate a banana for breakfast yesterday," and that's a fact, not a theory. If someone says "here is a set of equations that can quantitatively explain the movement of matter exactly," that's a qualitatively different kind of statement. That's the kind of thing that becomes a "theory" with sufficient experimental support. Whether or not I ate a banana for breakfast yesterday is a factual question, and experimental resolution of the issue yields a factual answer. So basically what I'm saying is that the question "Is evolution real?" is a factual question, and the answer is either yes or no. If we can demonstrate that the answer is yes to the 99.999% level, it's simple sophistry to argue that there's a finite probability that we're wrong.