Perfect. You make my case for me. Key point here is that you also gained enough experience with the fairer sex to be capable of pulling off a more mature relationship... remember this was advice for geeks on how to "get girls", not "get a long-term relationship". Most geeks who have difficulty getting girls aren't ready for a serious relationship anyways and will have regrets later on if they do find someone early on... which would lead to an early divorce or infidelity or worse.
Sow your wild oats gentlemen, just like the parent post describes, then look around after a year or two and find yourself some quality women knowing that you have the experience and sophistication to charm the pants off her any time you want but not feeling the urgency to do so.
Also, many of those materialistic sluts he describes later turn out to be young professional women who just don't know any better... or are doing a little bit of their own wild oat sowing and have no interest in a long term anything.
Have you tried pulling out your wallet? A fat wad will get you more girls than anything else. Just don't ever spend it on them. Pull out a roll of hundreds or even just twenties at the bar when you're ready to pay your bill, credit cards don't impress anyone.. ask a hot girl nearby if she'd like a drink, making sure she sees your roll.. then tell the bartender to get her whatever she wants.. then walk away, let her pay for it. Go sit somewhere nearby and watch.. enjoy the show, laugh at her.. when she comes over to tell you you're an a-hole, laugh again and tell her to sit down.
Say this "You know, I didn't make a lot of money by buying strange girls drinks... come on over here, talk to me, get to know me a little better and maybe I'll buy the next one."
You might not get laid that night but you might get a number and you'll definitely get noticed by the rest of the girls.. stick with the attitude... never take a girl out to dinner unless you're already slept with her, no movies, no coffee dates...
If you get a number, call and ask if she's had dinner yet.. say you've already had yours 'but hey, how about a drink later?'... buy one drink, put some moves on her... hand on knee, go for a kiss, whatever.. if you get nothing back tell her you've got to work early but that she should give you a call, then leave. If you do get something back.. buy another drink for her and a beer for you.. then leave together back to your place, voila. If she asks about a bite to eat or anything else to delay.. tell her again, sorry.. I've got to work early... call me. Go home.
Simple. Money plus A-hole equals chicks.. they don't care how smart you are or if you're sweet or cute. They want to know if you can afford them and if you're confident enough to be an a-hole, nothing screams confidence like doing everything wrong and not caring. You don't care what she thinks cause there are twenty just like her at the bar down the street.
good luck hunting...
maybe you'll have the parent poster's problems with kids one day.
p.s. this whole thing only applies to getting girls, not keeping them... keeping them requires a balancing act between being an a-hole and being the best damn man she's ever met.. ie: caring about the important stuff and not giving a shit about little things.
Open Source and even Free as in Beer software is NOT socialism... the whole point is to develop commodities and then charge for service and administration.
The idea is free but the experience and knowledge to implement and or profit from that idea is not.
The only problem with your argument is that this is no longer held to be true. Work has been done and continues to be done on methods to revert adult stem cells to precursor stem cells that could be just as versatile...
There was never any debate over adult stem cells... there's still a debate over embryonic stem cells...
This news just gives more fuel for anti-embryonic stem cell groups to point at and say:
"Chalk up another victory for adult stem cell research... what is that now 79 to 0? Why are we studying embryonic stem cells?"
I tend to agree with that sentiment.. seems like the embryonic research is turning into a big waste of money... but then again it has about 10 years of work to catch up on so it may yet prove itself.
If I could I mod this +1 Informative.. alas, all I can do is say "touche"
s'okay, details wrong but it would have totally been stupid to refer to a japanese guy in a post about china... oh well, I thought is was kinda funny, so did someone else... nothing wrong with more laughter in the world.
Don't worry, as long as China has a lock on Tibet it's not a problem... I mean G.W.'s father did spew all over that Chinese consulate guy, I mean that's a bond that can't be broken... remember in junior high when your best friend beat you up or you stood up to him? Throwing up on someone is the same thing... total bonding...
Just to play Devil's advocate here....;-p and RANT:
IF someone believes in God and God's miracles, those miracles include science and discovery... only asshole pseudo-suretorepentontheirdeathbed-aethists think that God is a supernatural force that shows up like some D&D demigod/deity and conjures up some white healing magic to heal them.. it's not fantasy people it's the power of God, who created everything, including all the stuff modern scientists have REDISCOVERD over the last two hundred years, just in time to patent them apparently. Really science isn't so much the discovery process as it is the documentation process.. lots of what people have known for millenia is just now being acknowledged and documented but it gets hyped as some 'new' discovery for science, just cause they decided to write their observations down.
The family's prayers were answered by the application of knowledge not voodoo stupid.
You only have to look at the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus) to see that God loves knowledge but hates knowledge used for evil... the Jesuits even to this day require a double PhD, one in Theology and one in a discipline of their choosing. They've been around for a long time now.
Just because you've run in to a few ignorant Christians doesn't mean they're all ignorant... or deluded either, in fact they believe that you are the ones deluded by your own egos and self-righteousness, to think that you can possibly understand the universe in all it's complexity. Deconstruction can only take you so far gentlemen, it's the interrelationships between the various forms of energy that can provide you with the answers.. and you don't need an electron microscope or neutrino bombardment colliders to contemplate those interrelationships. Of course if you're amused by the experiments and feel compelled to write down your observations and get high from the ego trip of telling all the rest of us that you've 'made a new discovery' then by all means go ahead... just don't think it means a rats ass to the rest of us. Now if God decides to give you a Eureka moment and you figure out something to actually do with those observations, you know some sort of applied science then we'll congratulate you and give praise to God that he chose you to be the one to 'discover' it... and you'll die thinking you were the one that brought into existence some new thing, when we all know it was always there waiting for someone to find it.
""If you have to start up 20,000 dishes, you can't do it all at once or you'll bring down the grid," said Andraka. "But you can't stagger them 5 seconds apart either, or your last one won't even come on by the end of the day. We estimate that staggered startups will need to be limited to 5 or 10 milliseconds if we want all the dishes to go online in a reasonably short period."
These are the requirements.... if you use a battery store for the startup energy needed you can do it the way you describe. Pulling power from the grid is the problem with using a robust but sloppy system such as how the internet works..
what they are trying to avoid is the grid equivalent of a slashdot effect... which while inconvenient for internet users and server admins would obviously be a little more serious for a town or city nearby that suddenly is left with no power and hours if not days of repair work.
But they haven't demonstrated the viability of the staggered startup approach and the software is yet to be written... it's an obstacle in the way of a fully functioning system. The added cost would be small and possibly only a marginal difference over the cost of software development plus quality assurance testing and compliance qualification for use in a power station.
Real time software isn't cheap and this would have to control hardware to within milliseconds to avoid causing an escalation problem that could lead to a wide area blackout of all power, which given the fragile nature of our out-dated grid infrastructure could further escalate to multi-regional blackouts similar to what we saw happen in New York/North East.
Yeah, run on sentence... but poignant. The point is that this hardware driver software would need to be perfect... the battery type solution would only need to be 'good enough' as there is no single point of failure and even in the event of failure it would have no impact on the grid at all.
I was under the impression that the problem was the dishes would draw too much power all at once, within milliseconds which would overload the ability to provide power anywhere else, causing a blackout... the proposed solution being to stagger the startup times. It's not a bad solution but it seems overly complicated for the problem.
#1 reason... maybe I misread the article. I thought the problem was the draw on the system, not the load it would create by generating more power... that's a problem for any high output generator and as far as I know is a solved problem..
The problem i have with software for this situation is that it has to be JIT just in time and must work perfectly every time... most software applications just need to do things correctly on their own timeline.. they don't affect other systems.. notable exceptions being the software that runs Nuclear plants, Cars, etc. real time OS driven software... which works obviously... but this particular problem with the dishes could be solved without all that complication - from the available info that is.. playing armchair quarterback and all.
a hundred batteries with a backup and a service truck within 5 minutes drive time any day over a hundred pairs of wires that rely on super-excellent and totally bug-free centrally managed software.
Did you know that a standard AA battery can deliver 10 AMPs over a very short period of time? If all these things need is a few milliseconds of this amount of energy to kickstart.. I'm thinking one of the other posts that mentioned a capacitor might be just about right as long as it can hold it's charge over night. So a battery backup..
hmmm sometimes it is the most obvious things that escape our attentions... you're probably right about them considering it but it seems to me that relying on software and timing is never a good solution to something that could cause catastrophic results..
Essentially the big upside to using stored energy for startup rather than pulling from the grid is that if one of the 20,000 or 100,000 or even ten of these dishes doesn't start up on any given day, big whoop... send a crew out to swap a component or two, couple hours later they'll be back on line..
On the other hand if the software malfunctions even the tiniest bit you can have two possibilities... they draw too much at once for any amount of time - blackout or none of them start up and you lose however much time it takes to fix the bug in the software... so you have a single point of failure, the software.
Software is great for some things, especially things you have no physical access to... Mars Rovers for example... but if you can just send a few guys out to fix a problem on one or two dishes a day I think that a hardware solution is better suited.
"Since each dish draws about 10 amps from the power grid for a few milliseconds when it starts up in the morning, startup must be staggered if a large dish farm is to avoid causing a blackout."
Question:
Why not add a fuel cell or battery to each dish that would be charged as needed during operation for use as a starter?
This would enable each dish to start up under it's own power without affecting the grid at all... and for a very small price in terms of daily output.
How about being Theresa Heinz-Kerry's Husband? The money's great but still...
Re:Can we try something less controversial first?
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Einstein predicted nuclear fission.. people wanted to play with it for decades, then the technology 'matured' and it was used... devastatingly so in multiple situations.
I'm not an alarmist or anti-science or progress or anything else but this sort of science is a little close to home and it seems that a little prudence, a little extra foresight might just save us some serious headaches.
Re:Can we try something less controversial first?
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Blending Mice and Men
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· Score: 1
Bacteria actually use genetic material to communicate... much like how cells in multi-cellular organisms use RNA to signal protein production from one cell to another, bacteria use RNA to tell each other things as well. Typically an animal doesn't have receptor sites for these signals and the just get broken down by macrophagic activities via white blood cells, etc. but when you've physically manipulated genes in an animal to have bacterial DNA..??? you may be opening up a pandora's box of recombinant activity.
Here's some more info but with a different angle on what's happening:
In this study they found that bacteria were stealing genetic material from animals and then passing it around between bacterial species... whose to say it doesn't go both ways.
That applies to animals who are closely related already in genetic terms... how about spider/goats where genetic material from a spider is inserted into the goat and now the goat has receptor sites for spider viruses which are then able to mutate more effectively to fit their new environment and suddenly the goat species has a whole new problem that it is ill adapted for.
any thoughts?
Re:Can we try something less controversial first?
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Blending Mice and Men
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Apparently when they were doing those experiments (yes I read all about them thanks to Science Daily the best academic science publication aggregate service around)...
Apparently when they were doing those experiments they weren't focused on the cellular activities and completely focused on the cellular byproducts... cause I don't remember reading a damn thing about studies being done on whether spider parasites/viruses/bacteria were causing problems for goats as a result of that particular project, or whether those cells were migrating outside the intended regions...
Those other studies are so much more basic in nature they don't even compare... but in any case I do remember that the glow in the dark fish were outlawed in some areas because they were afraid that the genetic changes could migrate to new populations and cause broad damage to that family of fish via bacterially transported genetic mutation (cause bacteria can transport genetic material to new hosts).
What I know is that a few studies does not mean we even know 0.001% of what is happeing in the experiment! Ask those scientists if they understand why they are seeing the results they are seeing.... they'll tell you, they don't really know.. it's more like, okay if we do this and it does that, then if we do this other thing there is a good chance that we'll end up with what we want.
We don't know a damn thing about this stuff, hell we don't know how normal cellular processes really work.. we learn new stuff every damn day and half of it refutes earlier hypotheses from the month before, the year before and the decade before so don't give me this crap about how we learned all about animal/animal chimerics.
Let me clarify... let's start by redoing the study mentioned wherein they put quail brain tissue into chickens.. except instead of just observing the behavior lets go ahead and do in-depth studies of the results over the lifecycle of the bird, from embryo to death... and not just the brain.. let's look at the hormone glands and other organs.. then let's do it with several hundred chickens and monitor their group behavior to see if it also is influenced, their sexual behavior and dominance behavior and selection of mates and flocking patterns and finally let's go ahead and breed them through several generations to see what happens.
then let's do that again with as many types of animals as we need in order to come up with a complete understanding of what will happen when we insert homo sapien genetics into other animal species. Do it enough times and patterns will emerge that will be quite clear as to what will happen and what to expect. When we have those results decisions can be made based on real data, not just conjecture and ethical opinions.
Oh and I apologize for not being clear enough about what I was talking about..
Most people never did get it.. Pinky wasn't slow witted he was an idiot savant.. too wise to think he knew anything at all. There was one specific episode where Pinky modified one of Brain's inventions and that nearly allowed Brain to 'take over the world' but then he sabotaged it and the episode ended as usual..
Can we try something less controversial first?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
How about if they transplant animal stem cells into other animals first and see what happens.
I know there are more immediate 'benefits' to immediately going straight to human/animal but there would be plenty to learn by studying animal/animal chimera and we might just avoid making some serious mistakes in the process.
What's the rush all of a sudden? People have suffered from genetic disorders and trauma and disease in the past and will continue to in the future, regardless of how many discoveries we make... why do we need to find all the answers now?
The scientific community needs to learn a little patience and self-control and get their heads out of the pharmaceutical industry's ass and take a breath of fresh air.
The only way human/animal makes sense at this stage in our understanding of this area of science is that the Return on Investment is more immediate.
Is that good enough reason to jump into the deep end before we know how to swim?
If everyone could agree and not try to get the upper hand attempting to gain more power then yes, it would be a Good Thing. Unfortunately that's not how it is in the world today.
People seem to think that all the nations of the world have stopped competing with each other... it's simply not true. The general public is deluded, globally. The leadership in every country continues to scheme at how to gain more power, more resources, more influence. It's not just the US and if the US wants to compete they must make competitive decisions in international dealings.
A true free market on a global scale with one standard and one set of data and equality all around would be awesome... it's just not real yet.
I don't doubt the science I doubt the 'facts' as published regarding the true intentions of each group and what they are admitting to... there simply isn't any transparency in how the data is being acquired both on the environment and in the economic effects and additionally in how each nations policies are being implemented. Each nation is still holding back all of the data needed to establish a baseline reading on what is actually going on. Until there is complete transparency each nation has to assume that all other nations are only giving up the data that will benefit their own position.
I do agree that paper and bits are meaningless... it is the natural resources including labor that constitute wealth... all the rest is just the trade of debts and obligations back and forth covering both past trades of resources and future promises of resource trades. Yes standard of living is up there in the definition of wealth.. it is a reflection of the amount of resources available in day to day life. That's why the US is still the wealthiest nation in the world, day to day we have access to more resources per unit of work than any other nation.
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Perfect. You make my case for me. Key point here is that you also gained enough experience with the fairer sex to be capable of pulling off a more mature relationship... remember this was advice for geeks on how to "get girls", not "get a long-term relationship". Most geeks who have difficulty getting girls aren't ready for a serious relationship anyways and will have regrets later on if they do find someone early on... which would lead to an early divorce or infidelity or worse.
Sow your wild oats gentlemen, just like the parent post describes, then look around after a year or two and find yourself some quality women knowing that you have the experience and sophistication to charm the pants off her any time you want but not feeling the urgency to do so.
Also, many of those materialistic sluts he describes later turn out to be young professional women who just don't know any better... or are doing a little bit of their own wild oat sowing and have no interest in a long term anything.
Advice for geeks who want girls:
Have you tried pulling out your wallet? A fat wad will get you more girls than anything else. Just don't ever spend it on them. Pull out a roll of hundreds or even just twenties at the bar when you're ready to pay your bill, credit cards don't impress anyone.. ask a hot girl nearby if she'd like a drink, making sure she sees your roll.. then tell the bartender to get her whatever she wants.. then walk away, let her pay for it. Go sit somewhere nearby and watch.. enjoy the show, laugh at her.. when she comes over to tell you you're an a-hole, laugh again and tell her to sit down.
Say this "You know, I didn't make a lot of money by buying strange girls drinks... come on over here, talk to me, get to know me a little better and maybe I'll buy the next one."
You might not get laid that night but you might get a number and you'll definitely get noticed by the rest of the girls.. stick with the attitude... never take a girl out to dinner unless you're already slept with her, no movies, no coffee dates...
If you get a number, call and ask if she's had dinner yet.. say you've already had yours 'but hey, how about a drink later?'... buy one drink, put some moves on her... hand on knee, go for a kiss, whatever.. if you get nothing back tell her you've got to work early but that she should give you a call, then leave. If you do get something back.. buy another drink for her and a beer for you.. then leave together back to your place, voila. If she asks about a bite to eat or anything else to delay.. tell her again, sorry.. I've got to work early... call me. Go home.
Simple. Money plus A-hole equals chicks.. they don't care how smart you are or if you're sweet or cute. They want to know if you can afford them and if you're confident enough to be an a-hole, nothing screams confidence like doing everything wrong and not caring. You don't care what she thinks cause there are twenty just like her at the bar down the street.
good luck hunting...
maybe you'll have the parent poster's problems with kids one day.
p.s. this whole thing only applies to getting girls, not keeping them... keeping them requires a balancing act between being an a-hole and being the best damn man she's ever met.. ie: caring about the important stuff and not giving a shit about little things.
good response... I'll get back to you when I have time to put together one.. it will be difficult, you've made a good case and very succinctly.
Open Source and even Free as in Beer software is NOT socialism... the whole point is to develop commodities and then charge for service and administration.
The idea is free but the experience and knowledge to implement and or profit from that idea is not.
The only problem with your argument is that this is no longer held to be true. Work has been done and continues to be done on methods to revert adult stem cells to precursor stem cells that could be just as versatile...
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/08/0308
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/0403
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/0410
There was never any debate over adult stem cells... there's still a debate over embryonic stem cells...
This news just gives more fuel for anti-embryonic stem cell groups to point at and say:
"Chalk up another victory for adult stem cell research... what is that now 79 to 0? Why are we studying embryonic stem cells?"
I tend to agree with that sentiment.. seems like the embryonic research is turning into a big waste of money... but then again it has about 10 years of work to catch up on so it may yet prove itself.
SO you're saying that the MIT graduate students spent a good portion of their time developing a GIMMICK?
I guess it's possible but the conjecture would be more believable if the graduate students were from a school like UCLA or maybe Carnegie Mellon...
If I could I mod this +1 Informative.. alas, all I can do is say "touche"
s'okay, details wrong but it would have totally been stupid to refer to a japanese guy in a post about china... oh well, I thought is was kinda funny, so did someone else... nothing wrong with more laughter in the world.
Don't worry, as long as China has a lock on Tibet it's not a problem... I mean G.W.'s father did spew all over that Chinese consulate guy, I mean that's a bond that can't be broken... remember in junior high when your best friend beat you up or you stood up to him? Throwing up on someone is the same thing... total bonding...
Bam!
Just to play Devil's advocate here.... ;-p and RANT:
IF someone believes in God and God's miracles, those miracles include science and discovery... only asshole pseudo-suretorepentontheirdeathbed-aethists think that God is a supernatural force that shows up like some D&D demigod/deity and conjures up some white healing magic to heal them.. it's not fantasy people it's the power of God, who created everything, including all the stuff modern scientists have REDISCOVERD over the last two hundred years, just in time to patent them apparently. Really science isn't so much the discovery process as it is the documentation process.. lots of what people have known for millenia is just now being acknowledged and documented but it gets hyped as some 'new' discovery for science, just cause they decided to write their observations down.
The family's prayers were answered by the application of knowledge not voodoo stupid.
You only have to look at the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus) to see that God loves knowledge but hates knowledge used for evil... the Jesuits even to this day require a double PhD, one in Theology and one in a discipline of their choosing. They've been around for a long time now.
Just because you've run in to a few ignorant Christians doesn't mean they're all ignorant... or deluded either, in fact they believe that you are the ones deluded by your own egos and self-righteousness, to think that you can possibly understand the universe in all it's complexity. Deconstruction can only take you so far gentlemen, it's the interrelationships between the various forms of energy that can provide you with the answers.. and you don't need an electron microscope or neutrino bombardment colliders to contemplate those interrelationships. Of course if you're amused by the experiments and feel compelled to write down your observations and get high from the ego trip of telling all the rest of us that you've 'made a new discovery' then by all means go ahead... just don't think it means a rats ass to the rest of us. Now if God decides to give you a Eureka moment and you figure out something to actually do with those observations, you know some sort of applied science then we'll congratulate you and give praise to God that he chose you to be the one to 'discover' it... and you'll die thinking you were the one that brought into existence some new thing, when we all know it was always there waiting for someone to find it.
""If you have to start up 20,000 dishes, you can't do it all at once or you'll bring down the grid," said Andraka. "But you can't stagger them 5 seconds apart either, or your last one won't even come on by the end of the day. We estimate that staggered startups will need to be limited to 5 or 10 milliseconds if we want all the dishes to go online in a reasonably short period."
These are the requirements.... if you use a battery store for the startup energy needed you can do it the way you describe. Pulling power from the grid is the problem with using a robust but sloppy system such as how the internet works..
what they are trying to avoid is the grid equivalent of a slashdot effect... which while inconvenient for internet users and server admins would obviously be a little more serious for a town or city nearby that suddenly is left with no power and hours if not days of repair work.
But they haven't demonstrated the viability of the staggered startup approach and the software is yet to be written... it's an obstacle in the way of a fully functioning system. The added cost would be small and possibly only a marginal difference over the cost of software development plus quality assurance testing and compliance qualification for use in a power station.
Real time software isn't cheap and this would have to control hardware to within milliseconds to avoid causing an escalation problem that could lead to a wide area blackout of all power, which given the fragile nature of our out-dated grid infrastructure could further escalate to multi-regional blackouts similar to what we saw happen in New York/North East.
Yeah, run on sentence... but poignant. The point is that this hardware driver software would need to be perfect... the battery type solution would only need to be 'good enough' as there is no single point of failure and even in the event of failure it would have no impact on the grid at all.
I was under the impression that the problem was the dishes would draw too much power all at once, within milliseconds which would overload the ability to provide power anywhere else, causing a blackout... the proposed solution being to stagger the startup times. It's not a bad solution but it seems overly complicated for the problem.
#1 reason... maybe I misread the article. I thought the problem was the draw on the system, not the load it would create by generating more power... that's a problem for any high output generator and as far as I know is a solved problem..
The problem i have with software for this situation is that it has to be JIT just in time and must work perfectly every time... most software applications just need to do things correctly on their own timeline.. they don't affect other systems.. notable exceptions being the software that runs Nuclear plants, Cars, etc. real time OS driven software... which works obviously... but this particular problem with the dishes could be solved without all that complication - from the available info that is.. playing armchair quarterback and all.
a hundred batteries with a backup and a service truck within 5 minutes drive time any day over a hundred pairs of wires that rely on super-excellent and totally bug-free centrally managed software.
Did you know that a standard AA battery can deliver 10 AMPs over a very short period of time? If all these things need is a few milliseconds of this amount of energy to kickstart.. I'm thinking one of the other posts that mentioned a capacitor might be just about right as long as it can hold it's charge over night. So a battery backup..
hmmm sometimes it is the most obvious things that escape our attentions... you're probably right about them considering it but it seems to me that relying on software and timing is never a good solution to something that could cause catastrophic results..
Essentially the big upside to using stored energy for startup rather than pulling from the grid is that if one of the 20,000 or 100,000 or even ten of these dishes doesn't start up on any given day, big whoop... send a crew out to swap a component or two, couple hours later they'll be back on line..
On the other hand if the software malfunctions even the tiniest bit you can have two possibilities... they draw too much at once for any amount of time - blackout or none of them start up and you lose however much time it takes to fix the bug in the software... so you have a single point of failure, the software.
Software is great for some things, especially things you have no physical access to... Mars Rovers for example... but if you can just send a few guys out to fix a problem on one or two dishes a day I think that a hardware solution is better suited.
From the article:
"Since each dish draws about 10 amps from the power grid for a few milliseconds when it starts up in the morning, startup must be staggered if a large dish farm is to avoid causing a blackout."
Question:
Why not add a fuel cell or battery to each dish that would be charged as needed during operation for use as a starter?
This would enable each dish to start up under it's own power without affecting the grid at all... and for a very small price in terms of daily output.
Any reason why not?
How about being Theresa Heinz-Kerry's Husband? The money's great but still...
Einstein predicted nuclear fission.. people wanted to play with it for decades, then the technology 'matured' and it was used... devastatingly so in multiple situations.
I'm not an alarmist or anti-science or progress or anything else but this sort of science is a little close to home and it seems that a little prudence, a little extra foresight might just save us some serious headaches.
Bacteria actually use genetic material to communicate... much like how cells in multi-cellular organisms use RNA to signal protein production from one cell to another, bacteria use RNA to tell each other things as well. Typically an animal doesn't have receptor sites for these signals and the just get broken down by macrophagic activities via white blood cells, etc. but when you've physically manipulated genes in an animal to have bacterial DNA..??? you may be opening up a pandora's box of recombinant activity.
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Here's some more info but with a different angle on what's happening:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/05/0405
In this study they found that bacteria were stealing genetic material from animals and then passing it around between bacterial species... whose to say it doesn't go both ways.
That applies to animals who are closely related already in genetic terms... how about spider/goats where genetic material from a spider is inserted into the goat and now the goat has receptor sites for spider viruses which are then able to mutate more effectively to fit their new environment and suddenly the goat species has a whole new problem that it is ill adapted for.
any thoughts?
Apparently when they were doing those experiments (yes I read all about them thanks to Science Daily the best academic science publication aggregate service around)...
Apparently when they were doing those experiments they weren't focused on the cellular activities and completely focused on the cellular byproducts... cause I don't remember reading a damn thing about studies being done on whether spider parasites/viruses/bacteria were causing problems for goats as a result of that particular project, or whether those cells were migrating outside the intended regions...
Those other studies are so much more basic in nature they don't even compare... but in any case I do remember that the glow in the dark fish were outlawed in some areas because they were afraid that the genetic changes could migrate to new populations and cause broad damage to that family of fish via bacterially transported genetic mutation (cause bacteria can transport genetic material to new hosts).
What I know is that a few studies does not mean we even know 0.001% of what is happeing in the experiment! Ask those scientists if they understand why they are seeing the results they are seeing.... they'll tell you, they don't really know.. it's more like, okay if we do this and it does that, then if we do this other thing there is a good chance that we'll end up with what we want.
We don't know a damn thing about this stuff, hell we don't know how normal cellular processes really work.. we learn new stuff every damn day and half of it refutes earlier hypotheses from the month before, the year before and the decade before so don't give me this crap about how we learned all about animal/animal chimerics.
Let me clarify... let's start by redoing the study mentioned wherein they put quail brain tissue into chickens.. except instead of just observing the behavior lets go ahead and do in-depth studies of the results over the lifecycle of the bird, from embryo to death... and not just the brain.. let's look at the hormone glands and other organs.. then let's do it with several hundred chickens and monitor their group behavior to see if it also is influenced, their sexual behavior and dominance behavior and selection of mates and flocking patterns and finally let's go ahead and breed them through several generations to see what happens.
then let's do that again with as many types of animals as we need in order to come up with a complete understanding of what will happen when we insert homo sapien genetics into other animal species. Do it enough times and patterns will emerge that will be quite clear as to what will happen and what to expect. When we have those results decisions can be made based on real data, not just conjecture and ethical opinions.
Oh and I apologize for not being clear enough about what I was talking about..
Most people never did get it.. Pinky wasn't slow witted he was an idiot savant.. too wise to think he knew anything at all. There was one specific episode where Pinky modified one of Brain's inventions and that nearly allowed Brain to 'take over the world' but then he sabotaged it and the episode ended as usual..
How about if they transplant animal stem cells into other animals first and see what happens.
I know there are more immediate 'benefits' to immediately going straight to human/animal but there would be plenty to learn by studying animal/animal chimera and we might just avoid making some serious mistakes in the process.
What's the rush all of a sudden? People have suffered from genetic disorders and trauma and disease in the past and will continue to in the future, regardless of how many discoveries we make... why do we need to find all the answers now?
The scientific community needs to learn a little patience and self-control and get their heads out of the pharmaceutical industry's ass and take a breath of fresh air.
The only way human/animal makes sense at this stage in our understanding of this area of science is that the Return on Investment is more immediate.
Is that good enough reason to jump into the deep end before we know how to swim?
If everyone could agree and not try to get the upper hand attempting to gain more power then yes, it would be a Good Thing. Unfortunately that's not how it is in the world today.
People seem to think that all the nations of the world have stopped competing with each other... it's simply not true. The general public is deluded, globally. The leadership in every country continues to scheme at how to gain more power, more resources, more influence. It's not just the US and if the US wants to compete they must make competitive decisions in international dealings.
A true free market on a global scale with one standard and one set of data and equality all around would be awesome... it's just not real yet.
I don't doubt the science I doubt the 'facts' as published regarding the true intentions of each group and what they are admitting to... there simply isn't any transparency in how the data is being acquired both on the environment and in the economic effects and additionally in how each nations policies are being implemented. Each nation is still holding back all of the data needed to establish a baseline reading on what is actually going on. Until there is complete transparency each nation has to assume that all other nations are only giving up the data that will benefit their own position.
I do agree that paper and bits are meaningless... it is the natural resources including labor that constitute wealth... all the rest is just the trade of debts and obligations back and forth covering both past trades of resources and future promises of resource trades. Yes standard of living is up there in the definition of wealth.. it is a reflection of the amount of resources available in day to day life. That's why the US is still the wealthiest nation in the world, day to day we have access to more resources per unit of work than any other nation.
Totally right, it is fair:
"Superficially true or appealing; specious: Don't trust his fair promises."