The truth is this: the Great Hall in the Justice Deparment building (where the statues reside) was built in the 30's for department events (such as press conferences) and ceremonies. For decades Attorney-Generals have given press conferences in the Great Hall, in front of the formal entrance, with the statues "Spirit of Justice" (the one with the boob) and "Majesty of Law" directly visible behind them. That is, until the very socially conservative John Ashcroft is Attorney General, who orders "Spirit of Justice" covered.
John Ashcroft, the guy who lost an election to a freakin' dead guy and who is so terrified of boobs that he covers a statue of of a semi-nude woman representing justice so he won't have to appear with it? He's the evil mastermind? It's Dick Cheney and we all know it, although I have to admit when I picture Dick as a lightsaber-weilding Sith I only see Chris Farley in "Beverly Hills Ninja." Except in stead of fat and goofy Dick would be fat and as evil as that movie was bad.
"Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective."
Speaking as a grad student, after 5-7 years of 60+ hour work weeks and dealing with all the crap that grad school entails while making next to nothing you're both "used" and "expended."
Oh I know most people don't want to eat nutria. I live in Oregon and nutria were imported here too. They live in similar places, albeit with much less pollution. I think you can go out and pop one with a.22 or something anytime you want, but its very rare you here about them being eaten. Even my former roommate who's eaten a lot of weird, weird meat (cougar, beaver, muskrat, moose, caribou--went drinking one night and made him list everything. The fish list alone topped over 200 species. He's a freak.) didn't get around to trying one before he moved to California. But we also have a program for roadkills--you smack a deer or elk or something, you call highway patrol and they come out and pick it up. If salvageable it gets butchered and is fed to prisoners. That wouldn't work for nutria unless you managed to get a large number of them together and had a nutria stampede over a cliff or something equally improbable. I'd pay to see it, though.
Seriously--if you have to kill them anyway, why waste all that meat? Besides there's plenty of carnivores like me who'd be interested in trying them out for no other reason than culinary curiosity. Other places have taken similar steps: Lousiana has a problem with damage done by nutria (think sorta like a muskrat) that was once prized as a furbearer but now is regarded as an invasive species and as a nuisance. The solution provided by the website: "The Coastwide Nutria Control Program, paired with the promotion of nutria meat as a high-protein, low-fat food source, is the main hope for Louisiana's coast." Yum.
I wish I could grab this idiot or whoever's responsible for this crap and hit them square on the noggin with a 2x4. Did someone mention to the idiot in charge that our equipment currently in use is largely based off 1970's technology? So the Chinese are using similar equipment to what we had in the 60's--that makes them 10 years behind, not 20! They're moving forward too, while we're stationary. Watch for the Chinese to announce in 2020 that they are not interested in working with NASA due to our primitive space technology.
"A miracle in which the volume of water on earth was increased 5 fold for a cosmic millisecond (40 days) and then returned to normal would allow it."
So...you want science, which by definition is limited to the study of natural events, to investigate...something supernatural and therefore outside the realm of science? How very peculiar. Of course the Star Trek reference makes it clear you're just trolling. One of the best I've seen in a long time, too.
They didn't think about it anywhere near long enough. From the webpage: "The descendants of each of these different kinds, apart from humans, would today mostly be represented by a larger grouping than what is called a species." So except for us humans, kind=larger group than species, but for humans, kind=species.
"those species descended from a particular original kind would be grouped today within what modern taxonomists (biologists who classify living things) call a genus (plural genera). Okay, so kind=genus, except for us humans...except when kind=family: "In fact, not only are there known crosses between so-called species, but there are many instances of trans-generic matings, so the 'kind' may in some cases be as high as the family."
Of course it gets better when dealing with "disease germs," as AiG calls them: "Another problem often raised by atheists and theistic evolutionists is 'how did disease germs survive the flood?' This is a leading question--it presumes that germs were as specialized and infectious as they are now, so all the Ark's inhabitants must have been infected with every disease on earth. But germs were probably more robust in the past, and have only fairly recently lost the ability to survive in different hosts or independently of a host. In fact, even now many germs can survive in insect vectors or corpses, or in the dried or frozen state, or be carried by a host without causing disease. Finally, loss of resistance to disease is consistent with the general degeneration of life since the Fall." Really, one could probably apply their label of "kind" to anything up to and including Kingdoms when dealing with eubacteria and archaea. Actually, why not lump the two kindoms together? No reason not to under the "definition!"
So there we have it: In one webpage one creationist group defines "kind" as a species, genus, family, and with respect to single-celled organisms the term "kind" might be applied to groups larger than kindoms! No rationale was provided in any of the distinctions. For example, the extant species within the genus Equus vary in chromosome number from 44-66, but are the same "kind!" Humans and the great apes are different "kinds," but humans have 23 pairs, and great apes have 24, but our chromosome number 2 looks exactly like two fused great ape chromosomes and even has the remains of an extra centromere and two telomeres in the middle! Worse for the creationists is that humans and bonobos share 98% DNA sequence identity, far greater than within the horse "kind!" Clearly no one can take this "definition" of "kind" seriously, just like everything else comming out of the creationist camp.
Polyethylene glycol's pretty good on one hand: it's dirt cheap, comes in a variety of weights (we have on the shelf in lab average molecular weight PEGs from 200 to 20,000 daltons) and as has been mentioned above is nontoxic. What's bad about PEG is that it degrades fairly easily--it should be stored in the dark and kept cold, at least if you're going to use it as a reagent. This makes me wonder about the shelf life of the armor, although PEG degredation might not be the limiting factor; physical wear and tear might be.
So can Bob Urosevich and other executives in-the-know at Diebold be charged with voter fraud for knowingly releasing faulty voting machines? Or is this one of those deals where the corporation is responsible and since you can't send it to prison, you slap a fine on it?
...is going to be important in there somewhere. The United States is harshly anti-intellectual--people can be openly proclaim total ignorance in the most basic of basics of science and math and there is no negative social stigma. It starts at a young age: ask a kid what they think a scientist is like and you get a pretty negative charicature of someone you don't want to be like. It continues on to adulthood too. I remember some drug commercial a while back where the actor said "I don't care how many scientific studies say X, I want to know what my doctor takes." and that's pretty typical. Nobody likes "eggheads telling them what to do." You need to include good role models of scientists and mathematicians. Not just what s/he did, but who they were and what they were like. Like Richard Feynman: you read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and it's like the guy's a crazy brilliant beatnik physicist who hung out in clubs, did paintings of naked women, and loved to freak out psychologists. Or at least a more rolemodelish Rosalynd Franklin, breaking down barriers to women in science in the 50's. If you make mathematicians and scientists more human then people will be more willing to look upon them if not positively then at least not automatically negatively.
"OTH, do we really want anyone creating their very own designer drugs/poisons/catylists/etc?"
Sure we do. New drugs come from somewhere. Some are found using rational design, or are based on an initial hit from rational design. I'm working on a project right now to try and inhibit an enzyme that appears to be critical for establishment of a long-term infection of a certain major pathogen. One way of doing that is by taking the structure of the enzyme and trying to model in a whole series of compounds to find ones that appear to bind well to the active site. Another would be to attempt to solve the enzyme:inhibitor structure by x-ray crystallography, but crystallization's not always straightforward. Often the two methods are used in tandem.
"Maybe someone could explain whether or not it's possible to take a model and actually make a few grams of it."
Once you've got a model compound that you're interested in trying out in the real world, you're going to have to figure out how to obtain it. Various chemical and pharmaceutical companies (sigma, fisher, roche, or with all the consolidations lately is it sigmafisherrocheetc?) have hundreds of thousands (or more) compounds available for sale. Or you might be unlucky and have to make it. In that case, someone might have synthesized the compound for a completely different purpose already, in which case you might use a program such as Scifinder Scholar to search the organic chemistry literature to see if it's already been made. This program's not something that everybody has, my entire university's license only allows one person from the whole university to be logged on at a given time. If it's there, you're in luck and you "just" have to follow their materials and methods. Of course, it still could be a bitch. I've got a very bright undergrad working on synthesizing a compound for me that I found this way. In three months he's managed to get a trace amount that's highly impure--and this is with him working in an organic chemistry prof's lab with all the equipment and support necessary. If you're unlucky and it hasn't been synthesized or isn't in the literature, then you've got to figure the synthesis out yourself--which considering what the organic chemists have already made will likely require a hell of a lot of experience and expertise in chemistry to pull off--not just somebody out there in a basement lab. A basement lab might be just fine for synthesizing a number of previously known poisons or drugs, of course.
Too bad about VMD, it looks pretty slick. I haven't tried Cn3D but I asked around the structural biology labs here at U. Oregon and it seems nobody uses it much. If it's for something besides model building people here tend to use Deep View, although a couple use Xtalview or O for everything.
IANAE (I am not an entomologist) but I can think of a few ways that you might get resistence. The first being that these sonicators are going to be operated by people, who naturally are somewhat lazy--the devices will tend to be placed and used where they are the easiest for the operator to put them. Mosquitos already have some small ability to differentiate between a good and a bad place to put eggs; this might be a further refinement. Mosquitos that tend to put larvae in places inaccessible to humans will have an edge in survival and make more of themselves, increasing the freqency of their "inaccessible egg dumpin' gene" in the population.
The second way is that mosquito larvae don't spend all their time on the water surface. I used to feed mosquito larvae to my fish occasionally, and the larvae could dive and bury themselves in the gravel. One could imagine an increased propensity to dive being an advantage, as this might be further from the sonicator and they would get less energy transmitted to their air bladders.
A third possibility is a structural change in the air bladder itself. There may be an uncommon allele currently in the population or there might arise a novel mutation affecting the size of the air bladder such that wouldn't resonate (and then explode) at the frequencies (currently) in use by the sonicator. Perhaps a mutation in segmentation of the insect resulting in two air bladders that would compete for resources in the larval body resulting in two ~functional but smaller air bladders--provided that air bladders are affected by segmentation regulation.
Mutations in segmentation genes do occur from time to time and are not necessarily all that catastrophic; I knew a kid in high school with an extra vertebra and this I'd guess was a mutation involved with regulation of segmentation.
Okay, it's a pretty cool idea and it goes one step further than what my friends and I (grad students in biology or chemistry) have done on our own by putting useful biochemistry tools on a CD for when we travel. But Rasmol?! It's antiquidated and was replaced by Protein Explorer, a Rasmol derivative, three or four years ago. If you want a free, compact, powerful, and reasonably easy-to-use program that can be run on linux/mac/windows for viewing macromolecular structures then you use Deep View Swiss-PdbViewer. It can do a lot of what the molecular visualization programs we actually use to build protein structures (eg O, Xtalview) can do, plus you can use it to generate good-quality images by using POV-Ray.
My roommate and I have thrown several parties for friends of ours who finally got their PhD's. There's more concentrated drunken nerdliness at these things than probably is legal, and at several of them the pot game (from the Simpsons) happens. Two grad students or newly-minted PhD's grab pots from our kitchen and bash heads. So far only one real injury: a cracked but not broken nose (the pots escape undamaged). So if the thicker skull of H. erectus was due to ritualized violence does that mean that the street preacher who came to campus last month was right when he called us a bunch of degenerates?
But it is a bit different. Four years ago I was working on a project peripherally related to getting rid of landmines. There are strains of bacteria found on old World War 2 mutitions factories where bacteria have evolved the ability to take various explosive compounds such as trinitrotoluene (TNT) and metabolize them. The idea at the time was to elucidate the pathway that allowed these bacteria to do the chemistry, and engineer an organism (almost certainly bacteria) to express the pathway plus green fluorescent protein (GFP). You spray it over a minefield and you get bacteria with the ability to metabolize TNT or other explosive compounds colonizing the area around the mine and begin degrading the TNT that slowly leaks from it. The vicinity around the mine turns green from the expression of GFP (or another member of the GFP family; color of different members nearly spans the visible spectrum) making the mine visible. After the explosive material is exhausted the introduced engineered bacteria give way to the native bacteria, as the selective pressure keeping the TNT-eaters present is gone. It looks like this plant-based product is closer to practical application, however.
Also there have been a number of plants, some engineered and some not, that have been used in various bioremediation projects. That said, this IMHO is the most elegant one I know of.
The android isn't named after "I Love Lucy," it's named after Lucy, a 40% complete hominid skeleton a bit older than 3 million years found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Ethiopia in 1974.
Lucy, as the above link mentions, was named becuase the paleontologists were listening to the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over again and eventually someone called skeleton Lucy.
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" apparently was named after the title of a painting by Julian Lennon, the then-4-year-old son of John Lennon, not LSD.
If you don't believe John Lennon's explanations, then the most popular position was that it was named after the hallucinogenic drug LSD. LSD is the abbreviation for Lyserg-saure-diathylamid, or to us English speakers lysergic acid N,N-diethylamide. First synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, the "interesting" properties were discovered by the same in 1943.
I wish I could find it, but sometime recently one of the business rags had an article in it where it was found that you could replace the CEO with anyone off the street at random. The stock price would briefly dip, but would quickly rebound as though nothing had happened.
As for making sure the chief executive doesn't get (Nobody EVER earns $5 million a year and a $40 million golden parachute) an excessive amount, there are options: 1. Pass a law saying the federal and state governments cannot do business with any corporation where the CEO recieves more than Xtimes what the average or median employee earns in a year, whichever is lower. 2. Graduate the tax system more--make it less worthwhile for the company to give out huge paychecks as the CEO will recieve less and less of each dollar spent on their salary package as the amount gets higher and higher. 3. We have minimum wage laws, we can impose a maximum wage law. I like the idea of 1 and 2, but 3 I don't care for. While it is bad for our republic to have such wealth and power in the hands of so few and the concomitantly huge gap between the rich and the poor, it just seems wrong to say nobody can get paid $x million a year. But until we have campaign finance reform it's a moot point since no laws will be passed seeking to limit excessive executive pay, since they donate money to election campaigns and money plays a critical role in politics.
Most famous google result? Now while I really don't care for the man or the policies of his administration a search engine that can be manipulated into giving these bogus results is not what we really want. Good luck to these new efforts.
Re:It is Good Bill Nye is Still Doing Science
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Bill Nye's Marsdial
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I'm not so sure it't punishment per say, but how the scientific "culture" works. Society at large may look at professors and think that their primary job is teaching but very few professors view it this way. Science is highly competitive and extremely time consuming and there often doesn't seem to be time enough to do other things. Some professors in the sciences look at just teaching as punishment since it takes time away from research; assignment of a heavy teaching load is a way to get rid of a tenured professor if you don't want them around. With that point of view towards something that is actually a part of the job of a professor, it's no small wonder that there is some stigma against writing books for the mass audience and going on TV etc. If you're writing a book and going on TV you have to take valuable time away from doing research and keeping up on your constantly-changing field, and since research is the primary function of a professor it's almost like you're not doing your job if you're writing books and whatever. What might be worse for the book-writing TV-appearing professor is that your collegues may end up seeing more of your dumbed-down mass-audience work than your actual research. The natural tendency would be to associate you with the dumbed-down stuff and then unconsciously wonder exactly how much you really know about the subject. Which gets us to Carl Sagan not getting into the Academy and other such problems.
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. Humphreys decides for no real reason to assume:
1. The universe is ~6000 years old.
2. The planets and sun were initially created out of water.
3. Some portion* of those water molecules had their dipoles aligned causing the initial magnetic field.
4. At some point, God transmuted the water into whatever complex mix of elements/compounds that sun or planet now has.
5. God left the inital magnetic field due to those water molecules intact after transmuting them.
6. The field decays exponentially** as those water molecules come out of alignment (even though those same water molecules are no longer there).
*Humphreys gets to decide exactly what fraction of water molecules were aligned in the beginning, without any possible idea of what it was other than that value when plugged into his equations produces the known current magnetic field of that body. He assumes/back calculates values of 25% for all the planets save Jupiter, which to quote Humphreys "So it looks as if God pulled out nearly all the organ stops when He orchestrated Jupiter. Not only did He create a larger mass of water, but He lined up more than 90 percent of the water's hydrogen nuclei." No reasoning for this is given!
**Now one of the many problems with Humphreys' idea is that there is only one check on his exponential decay times: the Earth. There have been measurements of the Earth's magnetic moments for about 150 years, using different methods with different sources of noise and systematic error. Humphreys makes yet another assumption that these data are taken at face value and for no real reason other than his need for an exponential fit applies an exponential fit, despite the fact that two straight lines probably fit the data much better as there is drop off from 1835-1935, but is essentially constant afterwards. It gets worse. An important parameter in Humpreys' calculations for determining the current magnetic moment is the decay time T, or the time it takes for the field to (exponentially) decrease to 36.8 percent of any given value...but "D2cay[sic] times are deduced front created and present moments." So in addition to the above assumptions (including exponential decay) we have circular reasoning! Besides, Humphreys has nothing to say about his wide range of "decay times," which range from less than 360 years to greater than 41,000 years. He also doesn't show how his magnetic moment at the moment of creation (Mc) is related to the current magnetic field.
Humphreys took the known value of the Earth and Saturn, and guessed that Neptune and Uranus would be somewhere in the middle...which gives a couple orders of magnitude to be "right" in. Nothing got burned across any plate, the best you can give him is he got a cow pie to stick to the broadside of a barn. If you want to believe in miracles that's your business, but you can't call your belief in Humphreys' theory of magnetic fields by divine intervention science.
Humphreys' (this is the correct spelling) "theory" has a couple of odd bits in it. The biggest is a requirement that God created everything initially out of water with a fraction* of the molecules aligning their magnetic moments, with the resulting field decaying exponentially as these water molecules come out of alignment after the moment of creation. Of course, all this water would also magically transform into other compounds at some later date as we are all well aware of the fact that the Sun and Earth are not composed entirely of water, but the magic gets trickier still by leaving the exponentially decaying magnetic field due to those water molecules intact after the magical transmutation event. *The actual fraction of initially aligned water molecules itself is important, as it of course cannot be computed independently. The faction just kind of floats and can be modified at will by Humphreys to make a magnetic field fit with whatever strength he so chooses. As such, Humphreys' ability to "compute" the strength of various magnetic fields is meaningless. talkorigins has the details.
So why concentrated sulfuric acid I wonder. Would a concentrated solution of a different strong acid work as well? If it's just acidity to get increased solubility, why not a superacid like HF-SbF5? Any organic chemistists out there?
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is this: the Great Hall in the Justice Deparment building (where the statues reside) was built in the 30's for department events (such as press conferences) and ceremonies. For decades Attorney-Generals have given press conferences in the Great Hall, in front of the formal entrance, with the statues "Spirit of Justice" (the one with the boob) and "Majesty of Law" directly visible behind them. That is, until the very socially conservative John Ashcroft is Attorney General, who orders "Spirit of Justice" covered.
John Ashcroft, the guy who lost an election to a freakin' dead guy and who is so terrified of boobs that he covers a statue of of a semi-nude woman representing justice so he won't have to appear with it? He's the evil mastermind? It's Dick Cheney and we all know it, although I have to admit when I picture Dick as a lightsaber-weilding Sith I only see Chris Farley in "Beverly Hills Ninja." Except in stead of fat and goofy Dick would be fat and as evil as that movie was bad.
"Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective."
Speaking as a grad student, after 5-7 years of 60+ hour work weeks and dealing with all the crap that grad school entails while making next to nothing you're both "used" and "expended."
Oh I know most people don't want to eat nutria. I live in Oregon and nutria were imported here too. They live in similar places, albeit with much less pollution. I think you can go out and pop one with a .22 or something anytime you want, but its very rare you here about them being eaten. Even my former roommate who's eaten a lot of weird, weird meat (cougar, beaver, muskrat, moose, caribou--went drinking one night and made him list everything. The fish list alone topped over 200 species. He's a freak.) didn't get around to trying one before he moved to California. But we also have a program for roadkills--you smack a deer or elk or something, you call highway patrol and they come out and pick it up. If salvageable it gets butchered and is fed to prisoners. That wouldn't work for nutria unless you managed to get a large number of them together and had a nutria stampede over a cliff or something equally improbable. I'd pay to see it, though.
Seriously--if you have to kill them anyway, why waste all that meat? Besides there's plenty of carnivores like me who'd be interested in trying them out for no other reason than culinary curiosity. Other places have taken similar steps: Lousiana has a problem with damage done by nutria (think sorta like a muskrat) that was once prized as a furbearer but now is regarded as an invasive species and as a nuisance. The solution provided by the website: "The Coastwide Nutria Control Program, paired with the promotion of nutria meat as a high-protein, low-fat food source, is the main hope for Louisiana's coast." Yum.
I wish I could grab this idiot or whoever's responsible for this crap and hit them square on the noggin with a 2x4. Did someone mention to the idiot in charge that our equipment currently in use is largely based off 1970's technology? So the Chinese are using similar equipment to what we had in the 60's--that makes them 10 years behind, not 20! They're moving forward too, while we're stationary. Watch for the Chinese to announce in 2020 that they are not interested in working with NASA due to our primitive space technology.
"A miracle in which the volume of water on earth was increased 5 fold for a cosmic millisecond (40 days) and then returned to normal would allow it."
So...you want science, which by definition is limited to the study of natural events, to investigate...something supernatural and therefore outside the realm of science? How very peculiar. Of course the Star Trek reference makes it clear you're just trolling. One of the best I've seen in a long time, too.
They didn't think about it anywhere near long enough. From the webpage: "The descendants of each of these different kinds, apart from humans, would today mostly be represented by a larger grouping than what is called a species." So except for us humans, kind=larger group than species, but for humans, kind=species.
"those species descended from a particular original kind would be grouped today within what modern taxonomists (biologists who classify living things) call a genus (plural genera). Okay, so kind=genus, except for us humans...except when kind=family: "In fact, not only are there known crosses between so-called species, but there are many instances of trans-generic matings, so the 'kind' may in some cases be as high as the family."
Of course it gets better when dealing with "disease germs," as AiG calls them: "Another problem often raised by atheists and theistic evolutionists is 'how did disease germs survive the flood?' This is a leading question--it presumes that germs were as specialized and infectious as they are now, so all the Ark's inhabitants must have been infected with every disease on earth. But germs were probably more robust in the past, and have only fairly recently lost the ability to survive in different hosts or independently of a host. In fact, even now many germs can survive in insect vectors or corpses, or in the dried or frozen state, or be carried by a host without causing disease. Finally, loss of resistance to disease is consistent with the general degeneration of life since the Fall." Really, one could probably apply their label of "kind" to anything up to and including Kingdoms when dealing with eubacteria and archaea. Actually, why not lump the two kindoms together? No reason not to under the "definition!"
So there we have it: In one webpage one creationist group defines "kind" as a species, genus, family, and with respect to single-celled organisms the term "kind" might be applied to groups larger than kindoms! No rationale was provided in any of the distinctions. For example, the extant species within the genus Equus vary in chromosome number from 44-66, but are the same "kind!" Humans and the great apes are different "kinds," but humans have 23 pairs, and great apes have 24, but our chromosome number 2 looks exactly like two fused great ape chromosomes and even has the remains of an extra centromere and two telomeres in the middle! Worse for the creationists is that humans and bonobos share 98% DNA sequence identity, far greater than within the horse "kind!" Clearly no one can take this "definition" of "kind" seriously, just like everything else comming out of the creationist camp.
Polyethylene glycol's pretty good on one hand: it's dirt cheap, comes in a variety of weights (we have on the shelf in lab average molecular weight PEGs from 200 to 20,000 daltons) and as has been mentioned above is nontoxic. What's bad about PEG is that it degrades fairly easily--it should be stored in the dark and kept cold, at least if you're going to use it as a reagent. This makes me wonder about the shelf life of the armor, although PEG degredation might not be the limiting factor; physical wear and tear might be.
So can Bob Urosevich and other executives in-the-know at Diebold be charged with voter fraud for knowingly releasing faulty voting machines? Or is this one of those deals where the corporation is responsible and since you can't send it to prison, you slap a fine on it?
...is going to be important in there somewhere. The United States is harshly anti-intellectual--people can be openly proclaim total ignorance in the most basic of basics of science and math and there is no negative social stigma. It starts at a young age: ask a kid what they think a scientist is like and you get a pretty negative charicature of someone you don't want to be like. It continues on to adulthood too. I remember some drug commercial a while back where the actor said "I don't care how many scientific studies say X, I want to know what my doctor takes." and that's pretty typical. Nobody likes "eggheads telling them what to do." You need to include good role models of scientists and mathematicians. Not just what s/he did, but who they were and what they were like. Like Richard Feynman: you read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and it's like the guy's a crazy brilliant beatnik physicist who hung out in clubs, did paintings of naked women, and loved to freak out psychologists. Or at least a more rolemodelish Rosalynd Franklin, breaking down barriers to women in science in the 50's. If you make mathematicians and scientists more human then people will be more willing to look upon them if not positively then at least not automatically negatively.
"OTH, do we really want anyone creating their very own designer drugs/poisons/catylists/etc?"
Sure we do. New drugs come from somewhere. Some are found using rational design, or are based on an initial hit from rational design. I'm working on a project right now to try and inhibit an enzyme that appears to be critical for establishment of a long-term infection of a certain major pathogen. One way of doing that is by taking the structure of the enzyme and trying to model in a whole series of compounds to find ones that appear to bind well to the active site. Another would be to attempt to solve the enzyme:inhibitor structure by x-ray crystallography, but crystallization's not always straightforward. Often the two methods are used in tandem.
"Maybe someone could explain whether or not it's possible to take a model and actually make a few grams of it."
Once you've got a model compound that you're interested in trying out in the real world, you're going to have to figure out how to obtain it. Various chemical and pharmaceutical companies (sigma, fisher, roche, or with all the consolidations lately is it sigmafisherrocheetc?) have hundreds of thousands (or more) compounds available for sale. Or you might be unlucky and have to make it. In that case, someone might have synthesized the compound for a completely different purpose already, in which case you might use a program such as Scifinder Scholar to search the organic chemistry literature to see if it's already been made. This program's not something that everybody has, my entire university's license only allows one person from the whole university to be logged on at a given time. If it's there, you're in luck and you "just" have to follow their materials and methods. Of course, it still could be a bitch. I've got a very bright undergrad working on synthesizing a compound for me that I found this way. In three months he's managed to get a trace amount that's highly impure--and this is with him working in an organic chemistry prof's lab with all the equipment and support necessary. If you're unlucky and it hasn't been synthesized or isn't in the literature, then you've got to figure the synthesis out yourself--which considering what the organic chemists have already made will likely require a hell of a lot of experience and expertise in chemistry to pull off--not just somebody out there in a basement lab. A basement lab might be just fine for synthesizing a number of previously known poisons or drugs, of course.
Too bad about VMD, it looks pretty slick. I haven't tried Cn3D but I asked around the structural biology labs here at U. Oregon and it seems nobody uses it much. If it's for something besides model building people here tend to use Deep View, although a couple use Xtalview or O for everything.
IANAE (I am not an entomologist) but I can think of a few ways that you might get resistence. The first being that these sonicators are going to be operated by people, who naturally are somewhat lazy--the devices will tend to be placed and used where they are the easiest for the operator to put them. Mosquitos already have some small ability to differentiate between a good and a bad place to put eggs; this might be a further refinement. Mosquitos that tend to put larvae in places inaccessible to humans will have an edge in survival and make more of themselves, increasing the freqency of their "inaccessible egg dumpin' gene" in the population.
The second way is that mosquito larvae don't spend all their time on the water surface. I used to feed mosquito larvae to my fish occasionally, and the larvae could dive and bury themselves in the gravel. One could imagine an increased propensity to dive being an advantage, as this might be further from the sonicator and they would get less energy transmitted to their air bladders.
A third possibility is a structural change in the air bladder itself. There may be an uncommon allele currently in the population or there might arise a novel mutation affecting the size of the air bladder such that wouldn't resonate (and then explode) at the frequencies (currently) in use by the sonicator. Perhaps a mutation in segmentation of the insect resulting in two air bladders that would compete for resources in the larval body resulting in two ~functional but smaller air bladders--provided that air bladders are affected by segmentation regulation.
Mutations in segmentation genes do occur from time to time and are not necessarily all that catastrophic; I knew a kid in high school with an extra vertebra and this I'd guess was a mutation involved with regulation of segmentation.
Okay, it's a pretty cool idea and it goes one step further than what my friends and I (grad students in biology or chemistry) have done on our own by putting useful biochemistry tools on a CD for when we travel. But Rasmol?! It's antiquidated and was replaced by Protein Explorer, a Rasmol derivative, three or four years ago. If you want a free, compact, powerful, and reasonably easy-to-use program that can be run on linux/mac/windows for viewing macromolecular structures then you use Deep View
Swiss-PdbViewer. It can do a lot of what the molecular visualization programs we actually use to build protein structures (eg O, Xtalview) can do, plus you can use it to generate good-quality images by using POV-Ray.
My roommate and I have thrown several parties for friends of ours who finally got their PhD's. There's more concentrated drunken nerdliness at these things than probably is legal, and at several of them the pot game (from the Simpsons) happens. Two grad students or newly-minted PhD's grab pots from our kitchen and bash heads. So far only one real injury: a cracked but not broken nose (the pots escape undamaged). So if the thicker skull of H. erectus was due to ritualized violence does that mean that the street preacher who came to campus last month was right when he called us a bunch of degenerates?
But it is a bit different. Four years ago I was working on a project peripherally related to getting rid of landmines. There are strains of bacteria found on old World War 2 mutitions factories where bacteria have evolved the ability to take various explosive compounds such as trinitrotoluene (TNT) and metabolize them. The idea at the time was to elucidate the pathway that allowed these bacteria to do the chemistry, and engineer an organism (almost certainly bacteria) to express the pathway plus green fluorescent protein (GFP). You spray it over a minefield and you get bacteria with the ability to metabolize TNT or other explosive compounds colonizing the area around the mine and begin degrading the TNT that slowly leaks from it. The vicinity around the mine turns green from the expression of GFP (or another member of the GFP family; color of different members nearly spans the visible spectrum) making the mine visible. After the explosive material is exhausted the introduced engineered bacteria give way to the native bacteria, as the selective pressure keeping the TNT-eaters present is gone. It looks like this plant-based product is closer to practical application, however.
Also there have been a number of plants, some engineered and some not, that have been used in various bioremediation projects. That said, this IMHO is the most elegant one I know of.
The android isn't named after "I Love Lucy," it's named after Lucy, a 40% complete hominid skeleton a bit older than 3 million years found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Ethiopia in 1974.
Lucy, as the above link mentions, was named becuase the paleontologists were listening to the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over again and eventually someone called skeleton Lucy.
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" apparently was named after the title of a painting by Julian Lennon, the then-4-year-old son of John Lennon, not LSD.
If you don't believe John Lennon's explanations, then the most popular position was that it was named after the hallucinogenic drug LSD. LSD is the abbreviation for Lyserg-saure-diathylamid, or to us English speakers lysergic acid N,N-diethylamide. First synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, the "interesting" properties were discovered by the same in 1943.
the Martian Operation to Restore Equality, Opportunity, and Institute Liberty?
I wish I could find it, but sometime recently one of the business rags had an article in it where it was found that you could replace the CEO with anyone off the street at random. The stock price would briefly dip, but would quickly rebound as though nothing had happened.
As for making sure the chief executive doesn't get (Nobody EVER earns $5 million a year and a $40 million golden parachute) an excessive amount, there are options: 1. Pass a law saying the federal and state governments cannot do business with any corporation where the CEO recieves more than Xtimes what the average or median employee earns in a year, whichever is lower. 2. Graduate the tax system more--make it less worthwhile for the company to give out huge paychecks as the CEO will recieve less and less of each dollar spent on their salary package as the amount gets higher and higher. 3. We have minimum wage laws, we can impose a maximum wage law. I like the idea of 1 and 2, but 3 I don't care for. While it is bad for our republic to have such wealth and power in the hands of so few and the concomitantly huge gap between the rich and the poor, it just seems wrong to say nobody can get paid $x million a year. But until we have campaign finance reform it's a moot point since no laws will be passed seeking to limit excessive executive pay, since they donate money to election campaigns and money plays a critical role in politics.
Most famous google result? Now while I really don't care for the man or the policies of his administration a search engine that can be manipulated into giving these bogus results is not what we really want. Good luck to these new efforts.
I'm not so sure it't punishment per say, but how the scientific "culture" works. Society at large may look at professors and think that their primary job is teaching but very few professors view it this way. Science is highly competitive and extremely time consuming and there often doesn't seem to be time enough to do other things. Some professors in the sciences look at just teaching as punishment since it takes time away from research; assignment of a heavy teaching load is a way to get rid of a tenured professor if you don't want them around. With that point of view towards something that is actually a part of the job of a professor, it's no small wonder that there is some stigma against writing books for the mass audience and going on TV etc. If you're writing a book and going on TV you have to take valuable time away from doing research and keeping up on your constantly-changing field, and since research is the primary function of a professor it's almost like you're not doing your job if you're writing books and whatever. What might be worse for the book-writing TV-appearing professor is that your collegues may end up seeing more of your dumbed-down mass-audience work than your actual research. The natural tendency would be to associate you with the dumbed-down stuff and then unconsciously wonder exactly how much you really know about the subject. Which gets us to Carl Sagan not getting into the Academy and other such problems.
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. Humphreys decides for no real reason to assume:
1. The universe is ~6000 years old.
2. The planets and sun were initially created out of water.
3. Some portion* of those water molecules had their dipoles aligned causing the initial magnetic field.
4. At some point, God transmuted the water into whatever complex mix of elements/compounds that sun or planet now has.
5. God left the inital magnetic field due to those water molecules intact after transmuting them.
6. The field decays exponentially** as those water molecules come out of alignment (even though those same water molecules are no longer there).
*Humphreys gets to decide exactly what fraction of water molecules were aligned in the beginning, without any possible idea of what it was other than that value when plugged into his equations produces the known current magnetic field of that body. He assumes/back calculates values of 25% for all the planets save Jupiter, which to quote Humphreys "So it looks as if God pulled out nearly all the organ stops when He orchestrated Jupiter. Not only did He create a larger mass of water, but He lined up more than 90 percent of the water's hydrogen nuclei." No reasoning for this is given!
**Now one of the many problems with Humphreys' idea is that there is only one check on his exponential decay times: the Earth. There have been measurements of the Earth's magnetic moments for about 150 years, using different methods with different sources of noise and systematic error. Humphreys makes yet another assumption that these data are taken at face value and for no real reason other than his need for an exponential fit applies an exponential fit, despite the fact that two straight lines probably fit the data much better as there is drop off from 1835-1935, but is essentially constant afterwards. It gets worse. An important parameter in Humpreys' calculations for determining the current magnetic moment is the decay time T, or the time it takes for the field to (exponentially) decrease to 36.8 percent of any given value...but "D2cay[sic] times are deduced front created and present moments." So in addition to the above assumptions (including exponential decay) we have circular reasoning! Besides, Humphreys has nothing to say about his wide range of "decay times," which range from less than 360 years to greater than 41,000 years. He also doesn't show how his magnetic moment at the moment of creation (Mc) is related to the current magnetic field.
Humphreys took the known value of the Earth and Saturn, and guessed that Neptune and Uranus would be somewhere in the middle...which gives a couple orders of magnitude to be "right" in. Nothing got burned across any plate, the best you can give him is he got a cow pie to stick to the broadside of a barn. If you want to believe in miracles that's your business, but you can't call your belief in Humphreys' theory of magnetic fields by divine intervention science.
Humphreys' (this is the correct spelling) "theory" has a couple of odd bits in it. The biggest is a requirement that God created everything initially out of water with a fraction* of the molecules aligning their magnetic moments, with the resulting field decaying exponentially as these water molecules come out of alignment after the moment of creation. Of course, all this water would also magically transform into other compounds at some later date as we are all well aware of the fact that the Sun and Earth are not composed entirely of water, but the magic gets trickier still by leaving the exponentially decaying magnetic field due to those water molecules intact after the magical transmutation event. *The actual fraction of initially aligned water molecules itself is important, as it of course cannot be computed independently. The faction just kind of floats and can be modified at will by Humphreys to make a magnetic field fit with whatever strength he so chooses. As such, Humphreys' ability to "compute" the strength of various magnetic fields is meaningless. talkorigins has the details.
So why concentrated sulfuric acid I wonder. Would a concentrated solution of a different strong acid work as well? If it's just acidity to get increased solubility, why not a superacid like HF-SbF5? Any organic chemistists out there?