One of Doug Adams's "other" books, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has an interesting take on mathematics and life. The main character proposes that our artistic side is actually a mathematical genius that can see the formulas that underly all of life. He uses the analogy of catching a ball. A flying ball follows physical laws, and it's trajectory is no simple matter to calculate. Initial speed, airflow resistence, effects of gravity, wind, etc all affect its flight. The calculations required to determine this are difficult, but it can be done. Interestingly, a person who has difficulty figuring out the value of 3x5x2 can instantly do the calculus involved to know exactly where to put his hand to intercept that ball flying through the air.
He goes on to say that this same part of our brain "instinctively" sees the patterns and mathematics in all things from how a tree grows, to how we fall in love, to how sofas get stuck in stairwells.
That's all paraphrase, and from memory; Adams said it MUCH better.
When caught in the heat of the moment, people lose their ability to think clearly. If you go forward 5-10 years, the anger, disappointment, or whatever is gone, and you can look at it logically.
To put in my 2 cents, the reason most people's marriages fail is because the foundation is wrong: They get married for the wrong reasons, or they think that they understand what it means to devote your life to another person. That's just opinion, of course.
For fun, throw corporations funding and directing the respectable, civilized scientific research, into your mix, and then watch as we laugh, as we burn, in an all-consuming sub-atomic fire that rends our space-time continuum asunder!:D
Nahhh...There's no money in quantum physics. More likely create some super mutant virus as a result of gene therapy research. THAT is what will kill us all.
An answer that answers nothing and only poses new, rather hard questions is not a very good answer.
Without delving into the rest of the quagmire of this thread, I have to say something here...
You are correct that the "aliens" explanation provides no answers, yet raises questions. No argument there. But on a philosophical note...Answers to questions that raise more (and harder) questions are the best ones. It happens to me all the time. Whenever I do an experiment and get a good answer, 10 more great questions pop up in its place, as a direct result of the question. Generally, it goes along the lines of
"Why did X happen?" (do the experiment)
"Because of Y and Z."
"OK, what caused Y? What caused Z?"
and so forth...
Whats needed is sophisticated enough nanobots that will be able to not only perform the construction of the DNA, but to "spell check" it by running up and down its length continually, comparing it against the desired pattern.
These exsist, in the form of enzymes. These organisms would have their genome checked in the same manner as you and I; cellular repair enzymes would monitor for problems. They would start with microbes, simple bacteria. Ther would be maintained like a multicellular organism,. though; large errors would trigger a death response.
There are "spell checkers" of a sort. Each gene would be assembled individually and checked. Most errors in the coding sequence would result in glaring problems with the resultant enzyme. The big problem would be in the regulatory regions; all permutations would have to be checked individually and together.
I would imagine starting with a normal organism similar to what you want; you would then knockout genes and resupply them with engineered ones as you went along. This is a common technology, people have been doing it for years to test function of genes.
I wish I had more time to go on, but I have a timer going off in a few seconds...I gotta go
Re:Meteor strikes not that uncommon
on
Meteor Over Midwest
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Interesting, but not terribly new. The idea that the increased breathing rate of asthmatics is the cause and not an effect of their symptoms has been around for a while.
It has been alternatively proven and disproven at least 3 times that I know of over the past 60 years or so. This theory has the same problem as every other theory/model/whatever describing asthma: asthma is not a homogeneous disease. It isn't even a single disease. Hell, some people don't even like calling it a disease at all. There are several mechanistiaclly distinct syndromes that all present as asthma. This theory possibly addresses one, and can therefore be proven or disproven depending solely on what subpopulation of asthmatics you survey.
This is not a guy you should use to tout this theory, though. His papers have many errors, are poorly documented, and some of his extrapolations of well known pocesses are actually kind of funny. To his credit, though; he does tell patients not to discontinue their current treatments.
The article was fairly scarce on details, but there are thermostable enzymes. We use some that are perfectly fine after sitting at 90+ degrees (C) for hours. These are from bugs that live in hot areas (geothermal vents), and therefore need thermostable enzymes. The most common example is the Taq polymerase used in PCR.
There are other enzymes that tolerate boiling, and other extreme conditions. They are inactive in the severe condition, but have such a stable tertiary structure that they snap right back when put into the proper environment again. Mammalian RNAses are notorious for this.
From the article, however, the restriction of the enzymes to these pockets may help. For those that don't know, enzymes have a structure like a ribbon (or several ribbons) that fold back on themselevs in a particular way. By thermodynamics, as you add heat, you add entropy and the ribbon moves around too much to stay in its functional orientation.
Keeping the enzyme in a small, restrictive pocket may restrict its random motion enough to help keep the ribbon from unfolding, allowing the enzyme to function at a higher temperature than it normally would.
Someone who writes code pertaining to the flight of a missle would probably have to have a pretty in-depth knowledge of aerodynamics. You have to know what to tell the missle to do under certain circumstances. Also, they would have to have at least a little military strategy knowledge; they need to anticipate what may be required of the missle.
Someone who writes code to model weather systems should know something about those weather systems. Otherwise, how do they know how to model it?
I don't know about other scientific arenas, but in mine (biochemistry) people who write software that helps us (modeling, DNA sequence analysis, etc) typically know quite a bit about the subject area covered by their software.
Not to say that the parent is an expert, but who do you think makes the computer model? Anybody who writes software that models global climate, IMHO, qualifies as a geek. Perhaps, even and uber-geek.
Who cares if I've never directly paid them a penny? I've never directly paid NBC a penny, but they still cater to my needs (in a watered-down way). If they start showing stuff that people don't like, people don't watch it. If Google starts filtering stuff out by local government decree, some people who use it as a source of info will walk away as well.
I would never argue that they don't have the right to do this, or filtering in such a way is morally wrong for them. Google is a company and can do whatever the hell it wants as far as censorship is concerned.
We should, however, be aware of their actions. If they are pushing a product (unbiased information searches) that product should be deliverd. If they don't, we, as users, should know about it so we can stop treating it as such.
Of course they have the right to do this, it's just that we, as users, should know about it. I am also not saying that Google is somehow obligated to tell us how it all works. I would prefer that they do so, but AFAIK, there is no law requiring that.
You're going to have a tough time finding any real scientific study as strongly worded as you may wish. To a scientist, "strongly suggests" is about as close to an unequivical (sp) statement as you can get.
To get you started, though:
Nutr Rev 2002 Aug;60(8):261-4 (review article on the impact of antibiotic use in animals on humans)
J Am Diet Assoc 2002 Jun;102(6):768 (article on how to communicate the issue to patients, written to Dieticians)
J Environ Health 2002 May;64(9):66, 62 (WHO data summary)
And lastly...
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 99, Issue 9, 5752-5754, April 30, 2002
If you only read one, read the last one; it's a great outline of the debate. It presents the issue as formally unresolved (as any good paper this early on the debate should), and presents a good case.
The issues you introduced are true...especially in the case of TB; it's a six month treatment program, and people genrally feel better within a month or so, and they quit taking their pills. The blanket application of ABs to patients for no good reason is an issue that hospitals have been trying to tackle for years (at least since 1995, I wasn't even in the clinical side, but I still got the memos about curbing the use of broad spectrum AB's).
However, if you go through those articles, you will see that over half of all manufactured antibiotics in the US are used as on livestock, mostly as prophylactics. It is certainly not the only factor, but it is certainly a factor. At the very least, it increases ABR strains of zoonotics (Salmonella, E. coli, etc.
This HAD to happen. I just got Slack 9 up and running with my core software, then they go and do this. I JUST got the last tidbits installed last night!
To quote you.... "not to be flippant, but"... try and find an old house in a non-settled area. That breeze you use for ventillation has diesel fumes, etc in it if you live anywhere near a city. The guy can't live in areas with any level of pollution, ruling out all cities, US or otherwise.
Also, BTW, "toxic" here is a relative term. Toxicity is the level at which a certain potentially harmful thing begins to have negative effects. Every person has a different tolerance to a given substance based on a host of factors (genetics, prior exposure to that and related substances, current/prior disease states, current/prior injuries, etc); what is toxic to you may have no effect on me.
This guy (and people like him) have a decreased tolerance to a large number of substances for some unknown reason. So, although you may have lived in your house for decades with no ill effects, the case will likely be different for him.
This condition really intrigues me...it makes me wonder what could happen to make someone sensitive like this. There has to be a phsyiological/biochemical reason for it.
one day there will be no oil to produce plastics, not enough wood to produce paper
No more oil to make plastics, no doubt. But as for wood, there is a greater acreage of forest cover (in the US) than there was 300 years ago; lumber companies love to plant trees, it's a very cheap factory. What we have lost is old growth forest, not total ammount of forest. Trees are a renwable resource in every sense of the term; It is unlikely that we will run out of them due to their overuse.
As for the "former former former," these guys are experts in their field, and obviously have strong convictions regarding the environment. The main point is that these are the same people that advocated recycling 20 years ago. They have now reversed their opinion, and that is significant. If we listened to them then, why not listen now?
Reference to a fact that is little known to people outside of TN & TX (grew up in the former, spent many recent years in the latter).
In the Texas war if independence, TN supplied a huge number of soldiers to help TX win. In fact, some of TX's most celebrated historical figures are from TN. It's part of the reason TN is called the Volunteer state, and why the football team is called the Vols (Volunteers).
BTW, I do realize that most people don't know that because most people really don't care...
I broke down crying after about the 300th question during the install
Thank God...I thought it was just me being a wuss. I did wade through it, though, and I did like Debian (kinda) once I got it set up.
I've been trying distros out for my primary desktop machine (so far, Debian, Slack, and I'm about to try SuSE). I'm no total newb, but I've never used Linux on my primary machine before. This thread has been quite useful...I started out gung-ho for trying the new Slack, but now based on the posts I've seen so far, I'm leaning towards Gentoo.
Hussein provided a list of weapons he currently possesed (I think this was 1993...could be wrong on the exact year). He provided a list of chemical and biological stockpiles, along with reports on the progress of his nuclear program. This was not conjecture by intelligence communities, Hussein declared what he had. He was told to disarm, and that he was to provide evidence that he did disarm.
Contrary to what you say, it is possible to prove this. For instance, destroy the weapons in the presence of 3rd party inspectors (sound familiar?). Instead of allowing the inspectors to do that he dragged his feet for several years, destroying only a small portion of the weapons, then kicked the inspectors out of the country. He now says the weapons are gone, but will provide no evidence of that. What he did was extremely suspicious, and there is evidence now that he is hiding something. It all kind of adds up....
Slashdot Mirror
He goes on to say that this same part of our brain "instinctively" sees the patterns and mathematics in all things from how a tree grows, to how we fall in love, to how sofas get stuck in stairwells.
That's all paraphrase, and from memory; Adams said it MUCH better.
When caught in the heat of the moment, people lose their ability to think clearly. If you go forward 5-10 years, the anger, disappointment, or whatever is gone, and you can look at it logically.
To put in my 2 cents, the reason most people's marriages fail is because the foundation is wrong: They get married for the wrong reasons, or they think that they understand what it means to devote your life to another person. That's just opinion, of course.
If you don't do it by tommorrow, I will...
Nahhh...There's no money in quantum physics. More likely create some super mutant virus as a result of gene therapy research. THAT is what will kill us all.
This was easy to read...
by 2Lazy2Register () on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002 @ 06:22AM
Without delving into the rest of the quagmire of this thread, I have to say something here...
You are correct that the "aliens" explanation provides no answers, yet raises questions. No argument there. But on a philosophical note...Answers to questions that raise more (and harder) questions are the best ones. It happens to me all the time. Whenever I do an experiment and get a good answer, 10 more great questions pop up in its place, as a direct result of the question. Generally, it goes along the lines of "Why did X happen?" (do the experiment) "Because of Y and Z." "OK, what caused Y? What caused Z?" and so forth...
Another one down! Next, please!
Is everybody ready for the internet cleaning day?
C'mon, though really...it was funny the first time. Humorous the second, but come ON....Are you going for a record or something?
Actually, hell...it's probably a reference to something mentioned in the RFC(j)...I just haven't taken the time to read it yet.
These exsist, in the form of enzymes. These organisms would have their genome checked in the same manner as you and I; cellular repair enzymes would monitor for problems. They would start with microbes, simple bacteria. Ther would be maintained like a multicellular organism,. though; large errors would trigger a death response.
There are "spell checkers" of a sort. Each gene would be assembled individually and checked. Most errors in the coding sequence would result in glaring problems with the resultant enzyme. The big problem would be in the regulatory regions; all permutations would have to be checked individually and together.
I would imagine starting with a normal organism similar to what you want; you would then knockout genes and resupply them with engineered ones as you went along. This is a common technology, people have been doing it for years to test function of genes.
I wish I had more time to go on, but I have a timer going off in a few seconds...I gotta go
Injuries were light.
Great book...I read Forever War in college, years before I read Starship Troopers. I really enjoyed the perspective.
It has been alternatively proven and disproven at least 3 times that I know of over the past 60 years or so. This theory has the same problem as every other theory/model/whatever describing asthma: asthma is not a homogeneous disease. It isn't even a single disease. Hell, some people don't even like calling it a disease at all. There are several mechanistiaclly distinct syndromes that all present as asthma. This theory possibly addresses one, and can therefore be proven or disproven depending solely on what subpopulation of asthmatics you survey.
This is not a guy you should use to tout this theory, though. His papers have many errors, are poorly documented, and some of his extrapolations of well known pocesses are actually kind of funny. To his credit, though; he does tell patients not to discontinue their current treatments.
There are other enzymes that tolerate boiling, and other extreme conditions. They are inactive in the severe condition, but have such a stable tertiary structure that they snap right back when put into the proper environment again. Mammalian RNAses are notorious for this.
From the article, however, the restriction of the enzymes to these pockets may help. For those that don't know, enzymes have a structure like a ribbon (or several ribbons) that fold back on themselevs in a particular way. By thermodynamics, as you add heat, you add entropy and the ribbon moves around too much to stay in its functional orientation.
Keeping the enzyme in a small, restrictive pocket may restrict its random motion enough to help keep the ribbon from unfolding, allowing the enzyme to function at a higher temperature than it normally would.
OK, sure, there's a chance it might be OK, just like there's a chance Farscape could be picked up by another network....
but great?...No friggin' way.
Someone who writes code to model weather systems should know something about those weather systems. Otherwise, how do they know how to model it?
I don't know about other scientific arenas, but in mine (biochemistry) people who write software that helps us (modeling, DNA sequence analysis, etc) typically know quite a bit about the subject area covered by their software.
Not to say that the parent is an expert, but who do you think makes the computer model? Anybody who writes software that models global climate, IMHO, qualifies as a geek. Perhaps, even and uber-geek.
I would never argue that they don't have the right to do this, or filtering in such a way is morally wrong for them. Google is a company and can do whatever the hell it wants as far as censorship is concerned.
We should, however, be aware of their actions. If they are pushing a product (unbiased information searches) that product should be deliverd. If they don't, we, as users, should know about it so we can stop treating it as such.
Of course they have the right to do this, it's just that we, as users, should know about it. I am also not saying that Google is somehow obligated to tell us how it all works. I would prefer that they do so, but AFAIK, there is no law requiring that.
To get you started, though:
Nutr Rev 2002 Aug;60(8):261-4 (review article on the impact of antibiotic use in animals on humans)
J Am Diet Assoc 2002 Jun;102(6):768 (article on how to communicate the issue to patients, written to Dieticians)
J Environ Health 2002 May;64(9):66, 62 (WHO data summary)
And lastly...
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 99, Issue 9, 5752-5754, April 30, 2002 If you only read one, read the last one; it's a great outline of the debate. It presents the issue as formally unresolved (as any good paper this early on the debate should), and presents a good case.
The issues you introduced are true...especially in the case of TB; it's a six month treatment program, and people genrally feel better within a month or so, and they quit taking their pills. The blanket application of ABs to patients for no good reason is an issue that hospitals have been trying to tackle for years (at least since 1995, I wasn't even in the clinical side, but I still got the memos about curbing the use of broad spectrum AB's).
However, if you go through those articles, you will see that over half of all manufactured antibiotics in the US are used as on livestock, mostly as prophylactics. It is certainly not the only factor, but it is certainly a factor. At the very least, it increases ABR strains of zoonotics (Salmonella, E. coli, etc.
Bastards.
Also, BTW, "toxic" here is a relative term. Toxicity is the level at which a certain potentially harmful thing begins to have negative effects. Every person has a different tolerance to a given substance based on a host of factors (genetics, prior exposure to that and related substances, current/prior disease states, current/prior injuries, etc); what is toxic to you may have no effect on me.
This guy (and people like him) have a decreased tolerance to a large number of substances for some unknown reason. So, although you may have lived in your house for decades with no ill effects, the case will likely be different for him.
This condition really intrigues me...it makes me wonder what could happen to make someone sensitive like this. There has to be a phsyiological/biochemical reason for it.
No more oil to make plastics, no doubt. But as for wood, there is a greater acreage of forest cover (in the US) than there was 300 years ago; lumber companies love to plant trees, it's a very cheap factory. What we have lost is old growth forest, not total ammount of forest. Trees are a renwable resource in every sense of the term; It is unlikely that we will run out of them due to their overuse.
As for the "former former former," these guys are experts in their field, and obviously have strong convictions regarding the environment. The main point is that these are the same people that advocated recycling 20 years ago. They have now reversed their opinion, and that is significant. If we listened to them then, why not listen now?
In the Texas war if independence, TN supplied a huge number of soldiers to help TX win. In fact, some of TX's most celebrated historical figures are from TN. It's part of the reason TN is called the Volunteer state, and why the football team is called the Vols (Volunteers).
BTW, I do realize that most people don't know that because most people really don't care...
You should have seen people when I showed up for the first day in my orange baseball cap with "UT" on the front. Not a good way to start college....
Thank God...I thought it was just me being a wuss. I did wade through it, though, and I did like Debian (kinda) once I got it set up.
I've been trying distros out for my primary desktop machine (so far, Debian, Slack, and I'm about to try SuSE). I'm no total newb, but I've never used Linux on my primary machine before. This thread has been quite useful...I started out gung-ho for trying the new Slack, but now based on the posts I've seen so far, I'm leaning towards Gentoo.
Contrary to what you say, it is possible to prove this. For instance, destroy the weapons in the presence of 3rd party inspectors (sound familiar?). Instead of allowing the inspectors to do that he dragged his feet for several years, destroying only a small portion of the weapons, then kicked the inspectors out of the country. He now says the weapons are gone, but will provide no evidence of that. What he did was extremely suspicious, and there is evidence now that he is hiding something. It all kind of adds up....