In a paper printed in a scientific journal, understanding the experimental protocol and seeing if their results are valid and support their conclusions is nontrivial. The ability to examine and determine the veracity of someone else's experiment, results, and conclusions increases with experience. While today I consider myself to be quite good at it I don't feel that I was truly qualified or able to do this until perhaps into my first or maybe even until my second year of graduate school. Additionally, my (and anybody else's) ability to do this decreases the further afield I get. I do protein structure and biochemistry. I start running into some difficulty reading a paper on genetics or organic chemistry. It sounds like (a guess) your training is at a bachelor's level in a field that is peripherally related to biochemistry and still more distantly to organic chemistry--the field in which Miller's article I think more appropriately belongs to. That said, perhaps you feel that you are able to make statements as strong as you have made and maybe you'd be one of those very rare people who does have such a broad grasp. More likely is that your view is affected by something outside of Miller's paper.
..broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?"
I think you should take a look at the article. The "carefully customised" device is incredibly simple, consisting of 2 flasks, a hot plate, an electrical sparker, a water condesor, and some glass tubing. That's it. It could be further simplified to remove the heater, as all this does is to make more vapor available in the 2nd flask containing the sparker--you could envision a simpler setup that is put into a window so sunlight evaporates the solution to make it more available to the spark chamber (closed loop, naturally, so no gas actually escapes the system). Actually since then the whole thing would run at a lower temperature you could omit the condensor and the little bend in the glass tubing (the "trap") leaving you with a flask on the bottom with your solution, connected by a single length of glass tubing to a second flask on top with the attached two bits of wire and battery, the whole thing sitting in the window. Sunlight hits the bottom flask, causing evaporation which rises up to the top flask, which sparks, condensate builds up in the top flask and over time falls back into the lower flask or sticks to the interconnecting glass tubing. Slowly you would use up your initial reagents leaving you with a complex mixture with among its components a collection of biologically relevant molecules. Total list of materials for the apparatus: 2 flasks, two feet or so of glass tubing, say a foot of copper wire, and a car battery--even simpler than the original. l'm fairly sure this would work similar to Miller's initial experiment, albeit much slower mainly due to the lower temperature. You should remember that his experiment produced an abundance of multiple different biologically relevant molecules in only a week. The point is: this experiment is incredibly simple, not "carefully customized". All that it was meant to show was that under conditions that at the time were thought to be similar to those on a prebiotic earth you could produce a host of biologically important compounds from even simpler compounds thought to be abundant using energy sources that would be available: heat, light, lightning. At this the experiment, one of many under a great variety of conditions--see his website for a starting point--succeeds at marvelously. Others have already answered your other complaints so it is pointless to repeat their statements here.
"Ecotopia" is a cityslicker's fantasy--probably from someone who has never been outside much. You really should get out of Portland sometime and meet the rest of the state, although from my experience "PDXers" typically think there is little in Oregon except Portland. Outside of the Portland metro area and Eugene (where I live) the state gets very conservative in a hurry. Most of these people are descended from those who came here in covered wagons to seek out a better life--farming, logging, fishing, mining, trapping, ranching--not ideology or environmentalism. They don't think like you. They don't have the same values as you. They don't vote like you (10 years of Republicans in the state legislature, after all). They don't like you either. Outside of Portland and to a lesser extent the Willamette valley, most people are fiercely independent and very conservative. They resent being told how, when, and where to do their jobs from what they often view as addled liberals in the cities who don't know how things really work. Chief among these cities is Portland, and they resent the degree of contol this one distant city has over thier lives and with whom they have nothing common. In the south this has gone to the extent that they want to break away and with a chunk of northern California form the new state of Jefferson. You can even see signs on I-5 welcoming you to Jefferson.
I can see how they want to get rid of the unsightliness of plastic bags blowing around everywhere, but this solution may be flawed. In a book I read on University of Arizona's famed garbology project (official website here), plastic has some advantages over paper. Easier to recycle, compresses better, and in a sanitary landfill, well, decomposition's bad. You'd prefer it to dessicate and sit there more or less inert and stable. The only landfill where there's much decomposition is going on is at Fresh Kills landfill in New York, conveniently located on the coast so it stays wet and the tides agitate the toxic sludge. However the problem facing South Africa looks like its going after is a litter problem, which maybe could be better fixed by building up the infrastructure to handle the garbage problem. While that may be a better, more permanent solution its also harder and more expensive to implement. Although it does remind me of one of Iraq's current problems, that being piles of trash that haven't been picked up in months and are still a low priority. Too bad it's also a recipe for a cholera epidemic.
Multiple techniques allow you to "see" atoms, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and x-ray crystallography. Electron microscopy generally is used for larger objects, at least in biochemical/biophysical applications as its resolution limit is somewhere around 1 nm, although recent innovations may have shrunk that somewhat. In comparison the diameter of a hydrogen atom is on the order of 0.1 nm. All three methods are highly indirect so the statement that you can't see atoms is still valid.
Well there's just one problem: all of our most current research points out that there really isn't a biological definition of race so it would be ~impossible to target. Hell we'd have about as good of odds targeting a virus towards knuckle-dragging white (or black or whoever) supremacists--although that might be money well spent.
Sounds similar to work being done by the Arnold group at Caltech. They've apparently (haven't read the article yet) made a NOT gate using directed evolution. They're more interested in developing and applying the directed evolution technique than in biological computers, it seems. Lab website's here. And the lab website's got their own articles available for free in.pdf form. Screw you, Elsevier!
" I believe the opposite. If societies acted as a group, probably very few stupid decisions would be made. But societies don't act as groups. The members of societies act as individuals."
Except when societies make those mistakes, they tend to be doozies. Take for instance communism or fascism. Both had their ringleaders, but really the people collectively brought it upon themselves and then suffered the consequences. Also you're forgetting the biggest problem with group-think: it inevitably descends down to the lowest common denominator.
1. Got a (reputable) source for anything in this Rusty-Shacklefordian post?
2. Got a reason for me to believe that even if true I should fear the study of genetics and/or genetic engineering? Especially since I and almost any other person studying biology uses genetic engineering of some kind as a tool at some stage in research?
3. Paragraphs! (less than sign)br(greater than sign) is your friend.
Seriously, if the point is an upgrade for cheap and the applications you want to run are similar to those in the review, why not just pop out the old "slow" 700 Mhz P3 and pop in a faster one? A 1.2 Ghz P3 goes for $99 on pricewatch which is going to be far cheaper than any other upgrade (providing your MB will take it of course). It seems that if the 2.2 Ghz Celeron was only about a third faster on the applications tested then a 1.2 Ghz P3 with its near doubling of the old P3's clock speed should be slightly faster than the Celeron, at least for these applications.
Of course I think shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a 1/3 performance boost in Quake is asinine, but then I also just retired my P120 after seven years of regular use.
"Some of the earlier problems with odour from acetic acid in the emissions were also solved. The fuel used is 95% bio-based ethanol from forestry by-products and, for some periods, wine-ethanol."
I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, but at some point Sweden was importing Spanish wine to fuel some of their buses. I dunno about the acetic acid smell though--yuck.
Re:I am not trolling, eat them don't waste them
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Easter Humor
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Yeah I gotta agree. I doubt that dumped bunnies get picked up as pets in good homes very often (although the author of the original post could probably tell us) so they suck up limited resources at the animal shelter. We meat eaters are always going to eat meat so something's gotta die, if the excess rabbits are offered up to a homeless shelter or for sale for meat, it's just fixing two problems simultaneously.
I think rabbit stew or rabbit rolled in flour with black pepper and just panfried is preferable. Just don't get roof rabbit by mistake--unless your name happens to be Alf.
Sorry, but AIDS simply isn't the most significant public health problem out there. Everything you said is more true of cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and trauma. Our efforts should be spent where they will do the most good."
Except that it isn't at all. The old get the lion's share of cancer, stroke, and heart disease, not the most productive age bracket in society which AIDS hits. Stroke and heart disease are often synonyms for old age--when my 97-year-old grandfather and survivor of multiple strokes eventually passes away hopefully a good number of years from now, when the obituary lists cause of death it could just as easily put in old age for either stroke or heart attack. An estimated 150 million have diabetes, most commonly middle aged persons, but only in a handful of small isolated populations does its penetration level ever become comparable to Zimbabwe's 1 in 3 adult AIDS cases. In these small populations current research has implicated drastic recent changes in diet and excercise to be the dominant factor in diabetes cases.
Let's get back to that 1 in 3 level of adult AIDS penetration in Zimbabwe. Go out to the mall or to the university or anywhere people 15-45 are found in numbers. Now imagine that 1 in 3 is carrying a disease that will kill them unless something else gets them first. Now multiply that out to cover an entire nation. Factor in the low education levels and social stigma of AIDS that help it spread to even higher levels. Imagine what it's like when you're a 8-year-old kid who's got a 1 in 3 chance of in the next 5 years of having your teacher die, your mom die, your dad die, aunts, uncles, cousins too. This isn't some "won't somebody think of the children" crapola either. These kids if they grow up at all will have lower education levels plus whatever value you get from parenting and family, plus a society in ruins--things that foster the continuing spread of AIDS.
Imagine it spreading to the nations next to you. Imagine that prevailing attitudes about AIDS have allowed people with HIV to donate blood, which is then mixed according to blood type with many others, contaminating 10's or 100's of units of blood--blood that is later used for transfusions, infecting the nation at large. This probably went on for years in China, where prevailing attitudes about medicine may be a culprit in the spread of SARS recently. It is an incontrovertible fact that AIDS is a contender for the next worldwide plauge. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and trauma are a pinprick even when combined in comparison to having 1/3 (and rising!) of your nation's workforce infected with something that will kill them. It'll be really interesting and I expect terrifying to see what happens to sub-Saharan Africa when it gets the coming population crash.
AIDS deserves heavy funding, and if you write a grant and have to worry that matter-of-fact descriptions like "sex workers" might be the factor in getting your grant rejected as opposed to its merits,that's just plain bullshit foisted upon the world by petty beaurocrats who are more interested in their myopic ideology than in fixing a major and growing problem.
Another excellent example of this is good old polymerase chain reaction (PCR, natch.). The old enzyme that made it sooo much easier to do (insert DNA manipulation of choice here) came out, according to the dimbulbs who give out Golden Fleece awards, "a $1 million study on algae [sic] in warm water." A second example near and dear to my heart is green fluorescent protein (GFP). This tool vital to modern molecular biology eventually fell out of a study on why jellyfish glow when you poke them.
"If you want funding for your AIDS research, you're going to have to convince the organization offering you the money that your research is more important than research that will help tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people over the long term."
Like AIDS, right? According to the United Nations, over the course of the last two decades 22 million have died because of AIDS. They currently estimate that there are another 34.1 million infected persons right now, the vast majority of them in developing nations. Most of those countries are extremely poor and have very limited educational opportunities both in general and to combat ignorance about STD's. Result: explosive growth and a plauge that is decimating their populations--in that most productive 15-45 age group. The World Health Organization presents an even less rosy picture, as can be found here. Wow. A 33% adult infection rate in Zimbabwe for a disease that has what, a 99.9% or better fatality rate? Not even Ebola's fatality rate is that good. Another figure that I found in my very brief web search was that in 2000 alone there were an estimated 5.3 million people newly infected--infection rates are continuing to climb.
Hmm...I followed that link on the 2nd page, and sure enough, you're correct. Never really thought about it that way--when you vaccinate against a virus, you use "killed" virus or artificially synthesized virus protein coat to provoke an immune response. The same approach could work for other things as well. For bacteria or a eukaryotic pathogen I imagine you'd pick something it expresses in quantity on the cell membrane or something it excretes; for antivenoms I think the case currently is different. Some are still made by injecting some poor critter with ever increasing doses of the toxin, making it produce antibodies against it. There's a somewhat newer approach where (insert favorite organism here) is transfected with DNA to produce human antibodies that are specific to only one portion of the venom; antiserum made this way is less likely to cause anaphylactic shock as it contains a only single type of human antibody. Developing a vaccine against toxins is intriguing, just take a nonfunctional part of one of the toxin proteins and use that to provoke an immune response, yes?
Not going to happen. Vaccines work against viruses; Alzheimers disease is thought to be caused by the formation and accumulation of amyloid plaques between neurons. The amyloid plaque itself is a great big gamish of improperly folded proteins. Alzheimer's patients can't properly dispose of them, or perhaps the systems that do dispose of them are overtaxed and the problem is in why they form in such size (I don't work on Alzheimer's--the 2nd one's just a guess). A couple other diseases have at some stage a buildup of misfolded proteins; Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) aka "Lou Gehrig's Disease" is one such example, multiple sclerosis is another.
Other than introducing competition into the marketplace we can't tell how important this is. Cancer patients as a result of their treatment have their white blood cell counts hit the floor and have been taking the drug Neupogen (as the company's website says). Neupogen (in my thankfully very limited second hand experience) works pretty well. A family member of mine taking the drug got a worried phonecall from the lab asking him if he was alright--his white blood cell count was something like 20x higher than a normal, healthy person. But to know how big of a deal HE2100 really is there would need to be a comparison of it to Neupogen, which the article and HollisEden's website don't offer.
The current record holder is a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert at nearly 11,700 years old. Well, technically the creosote bush only lives ~100 years but the current bushes are clones growing in a huge ring that are descended from the original plant, as the article says.
Viruses are pretty much inert until they dock with and infect a cell. What possible advantage would a "chemical dart" be to an inert particle? If viruses evolved to have a "chemical dart," what would it do with it? How could it evolve faster then "crude evolution," whatever that is? Looks like bad science fiction to me--although bacteria do some of this stuff, sorta. Bacteria can do something called quorum sensing where they detect chemical signals from other bacteria which can then regulate gene expression. Bacteria can also do some limited swapping of genes with other bacteria; neither is something a virus can do. Bacteria aren't taking over the world unless you mean what Gould said about it still being the age of bacteria. They're also not exactly what we'd call intelligent, either.
$150 average?!?!? What the hell were you taking? The most money I've ever had to spend on a textbook wouldn't have cleared $100 by much while the average I imagine would be round about $80. All the courses in my major or related I've kept, and as a grad student I've still got three of them on my shelf at work that I refer to often--and worth every cent of that $80 or so I spent on them. But your main point--college textbooks are expensive and sometimes unnecessary-is well taken. A lot of them aren't worth much as evidenced by the fact that I only continue to use 3-4 out of perhaps dozens. The other factor that we're all acquanted with is the fact that the student bookstore is total ripoff. For example, the student "discount" on WinXP (I know, I know....) cost $50 more than at newegg. Similarly textbooks are usually overpriced versus online competitors and selling your used textbooks can be problematic as the required texts change from year to year. However the alternative is to either hope the library's always got a copy of something similar on hand or share a copy with other students. From a TA's perspective, the students that tend to do the best are those that work together as a group and nothing would force that quite the way that textbook sharing would. My $0.02.
You claim "I have made no accusations of dishonesty on geologists..." but yet earlier you said: "What justification can there be for continuing to use a method known to be wrong? Aside from preserving the jobs and income of those whose livelihood depends on maintaining the intellectual status quo, none occurs to me - anybody out there got a less uncharitable idea? "--meaning geologists who work at radiometric dating are nothing more than charlatans and a clear personal attack. You then present me with a second source (Stansfield) and claim that it argues against the validity of K-Ar dating but this is done without defending your position on the first article. Since I have already shown that you misrepresented your first source why should I believe you when you present a second? Your other "examples" aren't even relevant to the validity of K-Ar dating techniques! I have better things to do than play along with your dishonest bait-and-switch arguing style especially since I am certain you don't read your own cited sources. You want to argue then defend your misinterpretation of Dalrymple or don't bother to respond at all.
"Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be?"
Interestingly three of Dalrymple's samples have lower levels of Ar40 relative to Ar36 than expected producing dates that are too young. You (our more likely your source--whichever) completely failed to mention this. Indeed a major point of the article was to investigate the range of Ar40/Ar36 ratios and to give us an idea of the error bars that a K-Ar date may give us. This renders your "point" about there being as much anomalous Ar in the Roccamonfina samples as there was in the Mt. St. Helens samples irrelevant (even if it were true): due to this and similar studies on rock types the initial deviation in Ar40/Ar36 ratios compared to the expected ratio from natural abundance is already factored in. What's more, again as the rock sample ages the importance of this initial Ar40/Ar36 ratio spread decreases. This simply cannot be made more obvious than in my previous message. We know the processes that bring about Ar40, we know the natural abundance of argon isotopes, and we know how samples might be contaminated (again on the order of that 1.4%!) and what evidence to look for for that contamination and naturally all of this is considered when applying a date to a sample; no omnipresent observer is required. Indeed it is nothing short of insulting to geologists to suggest that they wouldn't know to look for this--akin to telling a mechanic how to use a wrench. I suggest you critically examine your sources--it is obvious that you have been provided with faulty information and I suggest that you not accuse others of intellectual dishonesty until you can ascertain that your own sources are not themselves dishonest.
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In a paper printed in a scientific journal, understanding the experimental protocol and seeing if their results are valid and support their conclusions is nontrivial. The ability to examine and determine the veracity of someone else's experiment, results, and conclusions increases with experience. While today I consider myself to be quite good at it I don't feel that I was truly qualified or able to do this until perhaps into my first or maybe even until my second year of graduate school. Additionally, my (and anybody else's) ability to do this decreases the further afield I get. I do protein structure and biochemistry. I start running into some difficulty reading a paper on genetics or organic chemistry. It sounds like (a guess) your training is at a bachelor's level in a field that is peripherally related to biochemistry and still more distantly to organic chemistry--the field in which Miller's article I think more appropriately belongs to. That said, perhaps you feel that you are able to make statements as strong as you have made and maybe you'd be one of those very rare people who does have such a broad grasp. More likely is that your view is affected by something outside of Miller's paper.
..broke down as fast as they were made (in a carefully customised device, not in the wild), and were completely racemised at formation? Or that no evidence of a reducing atmosphere exists?"
I think you should take a look at the article. The "carefully customised" device is incredibly simple, consisting of 2 flasks, a hot plate, an electrical sparker, a water condesor, and some glass tubing. That's it. It could be further simplified to remove the heater, as all this does is to make more vapor available in the 2nd flask containing the sparker--you could envision a simpler setup that is put into a window so sunlight evaporates the solution to make it more available to the spark chamber (closed loop, naturally, so no gas actually escapes the system). Actually since then the whole thing would run at a lower temperature you could omit the condensor and the little bend in the glass tubing (the "trap") leaving you with a flask on the bottom with your solution, connected by a single length of glass tubing to a second flask on top with the attached two bits of wire and battery, the whole thing sitting in the window. Sunlight hits the bottom flask, causing evaporation which rises up to the top flask, which sparks, condensate builds up in the top flask and over time falls back into the lower flask or sticks to the interconnecting glass tubing. Slowly you would use up your initial reagents leaving you with a complex mixture with among its components a collection of biologically relevant molecules. Total list of materials for the apparatus: 2 flasks, two feet or so of glass tubing, say a foot of copper wire, and a car battery--even simpler than the original. l'm fairly sure this would work similar to Miller's initial experiment, albeit much slower mainly due to the lower temperature. You should remember that his experiment produced an abundance of multiple different biologically relevant molecules in only a week. The point is: this experiment is incredibly simple, not "carefully customized". All that it was meant to show was that under conditions that at the time were thought to be similar to those on a prebiotic earth you could produce a host of biologically important compounds from even simpler compounds thought to be abundant using energy sources that would be available: heat, light, lightning. At this the experiment, one of many under a great variety of conditions--see his website for a starting point--succeeds at marvelously. Others have already answered your other complaints so it is pointless to repeat their statements here.
Abacus is okay, but sliderules R|_|13Z D00D!
I think I just got dumber by typing that.
"Ecotopia" is a cityslicker's fantasy--probably from someone who has never been outside much. You really should get out of Portland sometime and meet the rest of the state, although from my experience "PDXers" typically think there is little in Oregon except Portland. Outside of the Portland metro area and Eugene (where I live) the state gets very conservative in a hurry. Most of these people are descended from those who came here in covered wagons to seek out a better life--farming, logging, fishing, mining, trapping, ranching--not ideology or environmentalism. They don't think like you. They don't have the same values as you. They don't vote like you (10 years of Republicans in the state legislature, after all). They don't like you either. Outside of Portland and to a lesser extent the Willamette valley, most people are fiercely independent and very conservative. They resent being told how, when, and where to do their jobs from what they often view as addled liberals in the cities who don't know how things really work. Chief among these cities is Portland, and they resent the degree of contol this one distant city has over thier lives and with whom they have nothing common. In the south this has gone to the extent that they want to break away and with a chunk of northern California form the new state of Jefferson. You can even see signs on I-5 welcoming you to Jefferson.
I can see how they want to get rid of the unsightliness of plastic bags blowing around everywhere, but this solution may be flawed. In a book I read on University of Arizona's famed garbology project (official website here), plastic has some advantages over paper. Easier to recycle, compresses better, and in a sanitary landfill, well, decomposition's bad. You'd prefer it to dessicate and sit there more or less inert and stable. The only landfill where there's much decomposition is going on is at Fresh Kills landfill in New York, conveniently located on the coast so it stays wet and the tides agitate the toxic sludge. However the problem facing South Africa looks like its going after is a litter problem, which maybe could be better fixed by building up the infrastructure to handle the garbage problem. While that may be a better, more permanent solution its also harder and more expensive to implement. Although it does remind me of one of Iraq's current problems, that being piles of trash that haven't been picked up in months and are still a low priority. Too bad it's also a recipe for a cholera epidemic.
Multiple techniques allow you to "see" atoms, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and x-ray crystallography. Electron microscopy generally is used for larger objects, at least in biochemical/biophysical applications as its resolution limit is somewhere around 1 nm, although recent innovations may have shrunk that somewhat. In comparison the diameter of a hydrogen atom is on the order of 0.1 nm. All three methods are highly indirect so the statement that you can't see atoms is still valid.
Well there's just one problem: all of our most current research points out that there really isn't a biological definition of race so it would be ~impossible to target. Hell we'd have about as good of odds targeting a virus towards knuckle-dragging white (or black or whoever) supremacists--although that might be money well spent.
As did "calculator."
Sounds similar to work being done by the Arnold group at Caltech. They've apparently (haven't read the article yet) made a NOT gate using directed evolution. They're more interested in developing and applying the directed evolution technique than in biological computers, it seems. Lab website's here. And the lab website's got their own articles available for free in .pdf form. Screw you, Elsevier!
" I believe the opposite. If societies acted as a group, probably very few stupid decisions would be made. But societies don't act as groups. The members of societies act as individuals."
Except when societies make those mistakes, they tend to be doozies. Take for instance communism or fascism. Both had their ringleaders, but really the people collectively brought it upon themselves and then suffered the consequences. Also you're forgetting the biggest problem with group-think: it inevitably descends down to the lowest common denominator.
1. Got a (reputable) source for anything in this Rusty-Shacklefordian post?
2. Got a reason for me to believe that even if true I should fear the study of genetics and/or genetic engineering? Especially since I and almost any other person studying biology uses genetic engineering of some kind as a tool at some stage in research?
3. Paragraphs! (less than sign)br(greater than sign) is your friend.
4. Man, I can't believe I read all that.
Seriously, if the point is an upgrade for cheap and the applications you want to run are similar to those in the review, why not just pop out the old "slow" 700 Mhz P3 and pop in a faster one? A 1.2 Ghz P3 goes for $99 on pricewatch which is going to be far cheaper than any other upgrade (providing your MB will take it of course). It seems that if the 2.2 Ghz Celeron was only about a third faster on the applications tested then a 1.2 Ghz P3 with its near doubling of the old P3's clock speed should be slightly faster than the Celeron, at least for these applications.
Of course I think shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a 1/3 performance boost in Quake is asinine, but then I also just retired my P120 after seven years of regular use.
Seriously.
"Some of the earlier problems with odour from acetic acid in the emissions were also solved. The fuel used is 95% bio-based ethanol from forestry by-products and, for some periods, wine-ethanol."
I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, but at some point Sweden was importing Spanish wine to fuel some of their buses. I dunno about the acetic acid smell though--yuck.
Yeah I gotta agree. I doubt that dumped bunnies get picked up as pets in good homes very often (although the author of the original post could probably tell us) so they suck up limited resources at the animal shelter. We meat eaters are always going to eat meat so something's gotta die, if the excess rabbits are offered up to a homeless shelter or for sale for meat, it's just fixing two problems simultaneously.
I think rabbit stew or rabbit rolled in flour with black pepper and just panfried is preferable. Just don't get roof rabbit by mistake--unless your name happens to be Alf.
Sorry, but AIDS simply isn't the most significant public health problem out there. Everything you said is more true of cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and trauma. Our efforts should be spent where they will do the most good."
Except that it isn't at all. The old get the lion's share of cancer, stroke, and heart disease, not the most productive age bracket in society which AIDS hits. Stroke and heart disease are often synonyms for old age--when my 97-year-old grandfather and survivor of multiple strokes eventually passes away hopefully a good number of years from now, when the obituary lists cause of death it could just as easily put in old age for either stroke or heart attack. An estimated 150 million have diabetes, most commonly middle aged persons, but only in a handful of small isolated populations does its penetration level ever become comparable to Zimbabwe's 1 in 3 adult AIDS cases. In these small populations current research has implicated drastic recent changes in diet and excercise to be the dominant factor in diabetes cases.
Let's get back to that 1 in 3 level of adult AIDS penetration in Zimbabwe. Go out to the mall or to the university or anywhere people 15-45 are found in numbers. Now imagine that 1 in 3 is carrying a disease that will kill them unless something else gets them first. Now multiply that out to cover an entire nation. Factor in the low education levels and social stigma of AIDS that help it spread to even higher levels. Imagine what it's like when you're a 8-year-old kid who's got a 1 in 3 chance of in the next 5 years of having your teacher die, your mom die, your dad die, aunts, uncles, cousins too. This isn't some "won't somebody think of the children" crapola either. These kids if they grow up at all will have lower education levels plus whatever value you get from parenting and family, plus a society in ruins--things that foster the continuing spread of AIDS.
Imagine it spreading to the nations next to you. Imagine that prevailing attitudes about AIDS have allowed people with HIV to donate blood, which is then mixed according to blood type with many others, contaminating 10's or 100's of units of blood--blood that is later used for transfusions, infecting the nation at large. This probably went on for years in China, where prevailing attitudes about medicine may be a culprit in the spread of SARS recently. It is an incontrovertible fact that AIDS is a contender for the next worldwide plauge. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and trauma are a pinprick even when combined in comparison to having 1/3 (and rising!) of your nation's workforce infected with something that will kill them. It'll be really interesting and I expect terrifying to see what happens to sub-Saharan Africa when it gets the coming population crash.
AIDS deserves heavy funding, and if you write a grant and have to worry that matter-of-fact descriptions like "sex workers" might be the factor in getting your grant rejected as opposed to its merits,that's just plain bullshit foisted upon the world by petty beaurocrats who are more interested in their myopic ideology than in fixing a major and growing problem.
Another excellent example of this is good old polymerase chain reaction (PCR, natch.). The old enzyme that made it sooo much easier to do (insert DNA manipulation of choice here) came out, according to the dimbulbs who give out Golden Fleece awards, "a $1 million study on algae [sic] in warm water." A second example near and dear to my heart is green fluorescent protein (GFP). This tool vital to modern molecular biology eventually fell out of a study on why jellyfish glow when you poke them.
"If you want funding for your AIDS research, you're going to have to convince the organization offering you the money that your research is more important than research that will help tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people over the long term."
Like AIDS, right? According to the United Nations, over the course of the last two decades 22 million have died because of AIDS. They currently estimate that there are another 34.1 million infected persons right now, the vast majority of them in developing nations. Most of those countries are extremely poor and have very limited educational opportunities both in general and to combat ignorance about STD's. Result: explosive growth and a plauge that is decimating their populations--in that most productive 15-45 age group. The World Health Organization presents an even less rosy picture, as can be found here. Wow. A 33% adult infection rate in Zimbabwe for a disease that has what, a 99.9% or better fatality rate? Not even Ebola's fatality rate is that good. Another figure that I found in my very brief web search was that in 2000 alone there were an estimated 5.3 million people newly infected--infection rates are continuing to climb.
Hmm...I followed that link on the 2nd page, and sure enough, you're correct. Never really thought about it that way--when you vaccinate against a virus, you use "killed" virus or artificially synthesized virus protein coat to provoke an immune response. The same approach could work for other things as well. For bacteria or a eukaryotic pathogen I imagine you'd pick something it expresses in quantity on the cell membrane or something it excretes; for antivenoms I think the case currently is different. Some are still made by injecting some poor critter with ever increasing doses of the toxin, making it produce antibodies against it. There's a somewhat newer approach where (insert favorite organism here) is transfected with DNA to produce human antibodies that are specific to only one portion of the venom; antiserum made this way is less likely to cause anaphylactic shock as it contains a only single type of human antibody. Developing a vaccine against toxins is intriguing, just take a nonfunctional part of one of the toxin proteins and use that to provoke an immune response, yes?
Not going to happen. Vaccines work against viruses; Alzheimers disease is thought to be caused by the formation and accumulation of amyloid plaques between neurons. The amyloid plaque itself is a great big gamish of improperly folded proteins. Alzheimer's patients can't properly dispose of them, or perhaps the systems that do dispose of them are overtaxed and the problem is in why they form in such size (I don't work on Alzheimer's--the 2nd one's just a guess). A couple other diseases have at some stage a buildup of misfolded proteins; Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) aka "Lou Gehrig's Disease" is one such example, multiple sclerosis is another.
Other than introducing competition into the marketplace we can't tell how important this is. Cancer patients as a result of their treatment have their white blood cell counts hit the floor and have been taking the drug Neupogen (as the company's website says). Neupogen (in my thankfully very limited second hand experience) works pretty well. A family member of mine taking the drug got a worried phonecall from the lab asking him if he was alright--his white blood cell count was something like 20x higher than a normal, healthy person. But to know how big of a deal HE2100 really is there would need to be a comparison of it to Neupogen, which the article and HollisEden's website don't offer.
The current record holder is a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert at nearly 11,700 years old. Well, technically the creosote bush only lives ~100 years but the current bushes are clones growing in a huge ring that are descended from the original plant, as the article says.
Viruses are pretty much inert until they dock with and infect a cell. What possible advantage would a "chemical dart" be to an inert particle? If viruses evolved to have a "chemical dart," what would it do with it? How could it evolve faster then "crude evolution," whatever that is? Looks like bad science fiction to me--although bacteria do some of this stuff, sorta. Bacteria can do something called quorum sensing where they detect chemical signals from other bacteria which can then regulate gene expression. Bacteria can also do some limited swapping of genes with other bacteria; neither is something a virus can do. Bacteria aren't taking over the world unless you mean what Gould said about it still being the age of bacteria. They're also not exactly what we'd call intelligent, either.
I've just been trolled, right? Oh well.
$150 average?!?!? What the hell were you taking? The most money I've ever had to spend on a textbook wouldn't have cleared $100 by much while the average I imagine would be round about $80. All the courses in my major or related I've kept, and as a grad student I've still got three of them on my shelf at work that I refer to often--and worth every cent of that $80 or so I spent on them. But your main point--college textbooks are expensive and sometimes unnecessary-is well taken. A lot of them aren't worth much as evidenced by the fact that I only continue to use 3-4 out of perhaps dozens. The other factor that we're all acquanted with is the fact that the student bookstore is total ripoff. For example, the student "discount" on WinXP (I know, I know....) cost $50 more than at newegg. Similarly textbooks are usually overpriced versus online competitors and selling your used textbooks can be problematic as the required texts change from year to year. However the alternative is to either hope the library's always got a copy of something similar on hand or share a copy with other students. From a TA's perspective, the students that tend to do the best are those that work together as a group and nothing would force that quite the way that textbook sharing would. My $0.02.
You claim "I have made no accusations of dishonesty on geologists..." but yet earlier you said: "What justification can there be for continuing to use a method known to be wrong? Aside from preserving the jobs and income of those whose livelihood depends on maintaining the intellectual status quo, none occurs to me - anybody out there got a less uncharitable idea? "--meaning geologists who work at radiometric dating are nothing more than charlatans and a clear personal attack. You then present me with a second source (Stansfield) and claim that it argues against the validity of K-Ar dating but this is done without defending your position on the first article. Since I have already shown that you misrepresented your first source why should I believe you when you present a second? Your other "examples" aren't even relevant to the validity of K-Ar dating techniques! I have better things to do than play along with your dishonest bait-and-switch arguing style especially since I am certain you don't read your own cited sources. You want to argue then defend your misinterpretation of Dalrymple or don't bother to respond at all.
"Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be?"
Interestingly three of Dalrymple's samples have lower levels of Ar40 relative to Ar36 than expected producing dates that are too young. You (our more likely your source--whichever) completely failed to mention this. Indeed a major point of the article was to investigate the range of Ar40/Ar36 ratios and to give us an idea of the error bars that a K-Ar date may give us. This renders your "point" about there being as much anomalous Ar in the Roccamonfina samples as there was in the Mt. St. Helens samples irrelevant (even if it were true): due to this and similar studies on rock types the initial deviation in Ar40/Ar36 ratios compared to the expected ratio from natural abundance is already factored in. What's more, again as the rock sample ages the importance of this initial Ar40/Ar36 ratio spread decreases. This simply cannot be made more obvious than in my previous message. We know the processes that bring about Ar40, we know the natural abundance of argon isotopes, and we know how samples might be contaminated (again on the order of that 1.4%!) and what evidence to look for for that contamination and naturally all of this is considered when applying a date to a sample; no omnipresent observer is required. Indeed it is nothing short of insulting to geologists to suggest that they wouldn't know to look for this--akin to telling a mechanic how to use a wrench. I suggest you critically examine your sources--it is obvious that you have been provided with faulty information and I suggest that you not accuse others of intellectual dishonesty until you can ascertain that your own sources are not themselves dishonest.