It's the story line... it's a terrific adventure story, a ripping yarn, really keeps the pages turning.
And besides well-plotted use of technology (which Clarke is supremely good at, of course), it's got a very rich and interesting set of well-plotted characters (not always his strength).
Cancer and evolution have traditionally been considered separately by different scientists with different interests using different methods. You could graduate from medical school, you could follow that with a Ph.D. in cell biology or molecular genetics, you could become a respected oncologist or a well-funded cancer researcher, without ever having read Darwin. You could do it, in fact, without having studied much evolutionary biology at all. Many cell and molecular biologists tended even to scorn evolutionary biology as a “merely descriptive” enterprise, lacking the rigor, quantifiability, and explanatory power of their disciplines. There were exceptions to this disconnect, cancer scientists who even during the early days thought in evolutionary terms, but those scientists had little influence.
In recent decades, however, the situation has changed, as molecular genetics and evolutionary biology have converged on some shared questions. One signal act of synthesis occurred in 1976 when a leukemia researcher named Peter Nowell published a theoretical paper in Science titled “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations.” Nowell proposed what was then a novel idea: that the biological events occurring when cells progress from normal to pre-cancerous to cancerous represent a form of evolution by natural selection. As with the evolution of species, he suggested, the evolution of malignant tumors requires two conditions: genetic diversity among the individuals of a population and competition among those individuals for limited resources. Genetic diversity within one mass of pre-cancerous cells comes from mutations—copying errors and other forms of change—that yield variants as the cells reproduce. That is, in the very act of replicating themselves (sometimes inaccurately), the cells diversify into a population encompassing some small genetic differences between one cell and another. Each variant cell then replicates itself true to type, constituting a clonal lineage (a lineage of accurate copies), until the next mutation creates a new variant. The fittest variants survive and proliferate. By this means, the genetic character of the cell population gradually changes, and with such change comes adaptation, a better fit to environmental circumstances. What constitutes “the fittest” among clonal lineages within a pre-cancerous growth? Those that can reproduce fastest. Those that can resist chemotherapy. Those that can metastasize and therefore escape the surgeon’s knife.
Nowell’s hypothesis about tumor evolution became widely known and accepted within certain circles of cancer research. (Among other researchers, it wasn’t adamantly disputed but merely ignored.) Those circles have more recently produced a lot of rich theorizing, and a smaller amount of empirical work, supporting Nowell and carrying his idea forward. A culmination of sorts occurred in 2000, when the cancer geneticist Robert Weinberg, discoverer of the first human oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene, published a concise paper titled “The Hallmarks of Cancer.” Weinberg and his coauthor, Doug las Hanahan, described six “acquired capabilities,” such as endless self-replication, the ignoring of antigrowth signals, the invasion of neighboring tissues, and the refusal to die, that collectively characterize cancer cells. How are those capabilities acquired? By mutations and other genetic changes, giving cells with one such trait or another competitive advantage over normal cells. Hanahan and Weinberg added that “tumor development proceeds via a process formally analogous to Darwinian evolution.” With this cautious phrasing, they gave authoritative endorsement to the idea that Peter Nowell had proposed: Cancers, like species, evolve.
Another approach that... a friend of mine uses: take the junk mail and stuff it in the corner mailbox on his/her way to work.
If people like my friend all stuffed their unwanted junk mail in public mailboxes, the carriers would slow down and complain, their supervisors would get concerned, which would cause worries for the supervisors' bosses, and so on up the chain, until whoever runs USPS (I forget -- God? Ayn Rand?) finally stopped the madness.
The U.S. Postal Service delivers my paper waste recycling material twice a week, in the form of "Coupons" and "Specials" and so forth.
I made strenuous efforts to remove myself from the distribution list. Found the advertising agency's phone number, in the very fine print; called repeatedly; got no reply.
Postal regulations provide a mechanism for "take me off your list, stop sending this junk!"... but only when the junk mail is addressed to a particular household. In this case, the junk mail isn't addressed to a particular household -- instead, the junk is bulk-distributed to every household in the neighborhood.
I went to my local post office and spoke with the clerk, who was sympathetic, but said, essentially: "I can't stop sending you this junk mail -- the advertisers pay the Postal Service too much money."
Same with bloatware. Yes, it sucks. Yes, we hate it. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. And yes -- PC manufacturers will keep on loading machines with bloatware precisely because there is so much money to be made.
Perhaps the guy holding the cube is the replacement for the tower.
Say the reception is not so good on a rainy day. With a tower, there's nothing you can do, the tower is bolted to the ground.
But the guy holding the cube, you can tell him "Turn a little bit more to the right... sorry, I meant my right, not your right... okay, that's better."
"[A] doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargaining group (i.e., has not recognized a union). Under this legal doctrine:
“any hiring is presumed to be "at will"; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all," and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work."
I recall that event, yes. I was actually thinking of Jihadists killing their own -- internal enforcement of the party line, keep the weak-willed from straying -- but your case is another good example.
The assumption is that suicide bombers are used to "inflict maximum casualties," which is probably true in most cases.
On the other hand, I suppose that suicide bombers might also be used as assassins, to kill one (or several) specific targets, under the guise of mass-murder terrorism.
"The Dungeon Master doesn't tell players what to do, he's asks them what they are going to do, and the DM just tells them the consequences."
Not so. The Dungeon Master -- in my experience, anyway -- must take an active role as lead storyteller in the collective storytelling of D&D (or other role playing game).
The D.M. should appear to be impartial, aloof, merely telling players the consequences... while gently maneuvering the players in order to keep the game running smoothly.
Ford will know who is who, where they are, where they are going, what kind of mileage they get, and how loud the driver yelled when he spilled hot coffee on his lap while attempting to punch in a cell phone number while attempting to negotiate a high-speed lane change.
Multiply this by all the other car companies, post the results as a Facebook app, and brother, you've got yourself some valuable data.
Not all that new, really. Singapore implemented government tracking of every single vehicle, oh, at least a decade ago.
"He was just replacing one set of sperm with another."
No: he was seeding the female stock of conquered races with superior Mongol sperm.
Okay, okay -- the sperm may or may not have been superior, I don't know. But I think it's a safe bet that the Mongols believed themselves -- and their seed -- be superior. After all:
(a) They were the freaking Mongols;
(b) Everyone (well, every male, anyway) believes that he is better than everyone else. (As it turns out, there is exactly one male who is actually better than everyone else... me.)
Slashdot Mirror
A blind man with a bomb is far from helpless.
Goddamn right, Daylight Savings Time is bad for me.
It fucks with my sleep cycle -- messes it up for a week or more -- every six months, like fucking clockwork.
Repeal it, stop it, get rid of it forever.
It's the story line ... it's a terrific adventure story, a ripping yarn, really keeps the pages turning.
And besides well-plotted use of technology (which Clarke is supremely good at, of course), it's got a very rich and interesting set of well-plotted characters (not always his strength).
Thanks for boiling down the article to its essential shortcomings.
I don't have the math to make sense of all this, but I can tell from your analysis that you know what you're talking about.
Thanks for mentioning Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961).
I must have read that novel half a dozen times, back in the seventies (my teen years), and got more out of it every time.
I'll bet it still holds up today (with some allowance for post-1961 discoveries about the moon, naturally).
"For some reason a lot of people on Slashdot think", etc.
It's probably not "some" reason -- but rather a very specific reason, which you are kind enough not to spell out in all its embarrassing glory.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/0081988
Excerpt:
Cancer and evolution have traditionally been considered separately by different scientists with different interests using different methods. You could graduate from medical school, you could follow that with a Ph.D. in cell biology or molecular genetics, you could become a respected oncologist or a well-funded cancer researcher, without ever having read Darwin. You could do it, in fact, without having studied much evolutionary biology at all. Many cell and molecular biologists tended even to scorn evolutionary biology as a “merely descriptive” enterprise, lacking the rigor, quantifiability, and explanatory power of their disciplines. There were exceptions to this disconnect, cancer scientists who even during the early days thought in evolutionary terms, but those scientists had little influence.
In recent decades, however, the situation has changed, as molecular genetics and evolutionary biology have converged on some shared questions. One signal act of synthesis occurred in 1976 when a leukemia researcher named Peter Nowell published a theoretical paper in Science titled “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations.” Nowell proposed what was then a novel idea: that the biological events occurring when cells progress from normal to pre-cancerous to cancerous represent a form of evolution by natural selection. As with the evolution of species, he suggested, the evolution of malignant tumors requires two conditions: genetic diversity among the individuals of a population and competition among those individuals for limited resources. Genetic diversity within one mass of pre-cancerous cells comes from mutations—copying errors and other forms of change—that yield variants as the cells reproduce. That is, in the very act of replicating themselves (sometimes inaccurately), the cells diversify into a population encompassing some small genetic differences between one cell and another. Each variant cell then replicates itself true to type, constituting a clonal lineage (a lineage of accurate copies), until the next mutation creates a new variant. The fittest variants survive and proliferate. By this means, the genetic character of the cell population gradually changes, and with such change comes adaptation, a better fit to environmental circumstances. What constitutes “the fittest” among clonal lineages within a pre-cancerous growth? Those that can reproduce fastest. Those that can resist chemotherapy. Those that can metastasize and therefore escape the surgeon’s knife.
Nowell’s hypothesis about tumor evolution became widely known and accepted within certain circles of cancer research. (Among other researchers, it wasn’t adamantly disputed but merely ignored.) Those circles have more recently produced a lot of rich theorizing, and a smaller amount of empirical work, supporting Nowell and carrying his idea forward. A culmination of sorts occurred in 2000, when the cancer geneticist Robert Weinberg, discoverer of the first human oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene, published a concise paper titled “The Hallmarks of Cancer.” Weinberg and his coauthor, Doug las Hanahan, described six “acquired capabilities,” such as endless self-replication, the ignoring of antigrowth signals, the invasion of neighboring tissues, and the refusal to die, that collectively characterize cancer cells. How are those capabilities acquired? By mutations and other genetic changes, giving cells with one such trait or another competitive advantage over normal cells. Hanahan and Weinberg added that “tumor development proceeds via a process formally analogous to Darwinian evolution.” With this cautious phrasing, they gave authoritative endorsement to the idea that Peter Nowell had proposed: Cancers, like species, evolve.
Another approach that ... a friend of mine uses: take the junk mail and stuff it in the corner mailbox on his/her way to work.
If people like my friend all stuffed their unwanted junk mail in public mailboxes, the carriers would slow down and complain, their supervisors would get concerned, which would cause worries for the supervisors' bosses, and so on up the chain, until whoever runs USPS (I forget -- God? Ayn Rand?) finally stopped the madness.
"Don't hire ... definitely don't ... chances are that all the press you'll get will be about the crazy stunt and no one will remember a thing ..."
I detect jealousy.
Go ahead: do hire ... definitely do ... chances are that all the press you'll get will be about the crazy stunt ... which is fine. So go ahead and do it.
That let the cat out of the bag!
The U.S. Postal Service delivers my paper waste recycling material twice a week, in the form of "Coupons" and "Specials" and so forth.
I made strenuous efforts to remove myself from the distribution list. Found the advertising agency's phone number, in the very fine print; called repeatedly; got no reply.
Postal regulations provide a mechanism for "take me off your list, stop sending this junk!" ... but only when the junk mail is addressed to a particular household. In this case, the junk mail isn't addressed to a particular household -- instead, the junk is bulk-distributed to every household in the neighborhood.
I went to my local post office and spoke with the clerk, who was sympathetic, but said, essentially: "I can't stop sending you this junk mail -- the advertisers pay the Postal Service too much money."
Same with bloatware. Yes, it sucks. Yes, we hate it. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. And yes -- PC manufacturers will keep on loading machines with bloatware precisely because there is so much money to be made.
Good one! Made me laugh.
Perhaps the guy holding the cube is the replacement for the tower.
Say the reception is not so good on a rainy day. With a tower, there's nothing you can do, the tower is bolted to the ground.
But the guy holding the cube, you can tell him "Turn a little bit more to the right ... sorry, I meant my right, not your right ... okay, that's better."
At-will employment:
"[A] doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargaining group (i.e., has not recognized a union). Under this legal doctrine:
“any hiring is presumed to be "at will"; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all," and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work."
"Showing results for suppress dissent. Search instead for safeguard democracy."
Does anyone actually use Stonehenge for its intended purposes?
I've taken your implicit criticism to heart, and reworked my manifesto accordingly:
"The crisis was the result of [human action] man's inhumanity to man and [inaction] good men doing nothing, thus ensuring the triumph of evil."
I recall that event, yes. I was actually thinking of Jihadists killing their own -- internal enforcement of the party line, keep the weak-willed from straying -- but your case is another good example.
The assumption is that suicide bombers are used to "inflict maximum casualties," which is probably true in most cases.
On the other hand, I suppose that suicide bombers might also be used as assassins, to kill one (or several) specific targets, under the guise of mass-murder terrorism.
"Italics mine", as they say.
"'The crisis was the result of [human action] criminal behavior and [inaction] failure of law enforcement to do anything about it."
"The Dungeon Master doesn't tell players what to do, he's asks them what they are going to do, and the DM just tells them the consequences."
Not so. The Dungeon Master -- in my experience, anyway -- must take an active role as lead storyteller in the collective storytelling of D&D (or other role playing game).
The D.M. should appear to be impartial, aloof, merely telling players the consequences ... while gently maneuvering the players in order to keep the game running smoothly.
Ford will know who is who, where they are, where they are going, what kind of mileage they get, and how loud the driver yelled when he spilled hot coffee on his lap while attempting to punch in a cell phone number while attempting to negotiate a high-speed lane change.
Multiply this by all the other car companies, post the results as a Facebook app, and brother, you've got yourself some valuable data.
Not all that new, really. Singapore implemented government tracking of every single vehicle, oh, at least a decade ago.
"He was just replacing one set of sperm with another."
No: he was seeding the female stock of conquered races with superior Mongol sperm.
Okay, okay -- the sperm may or may not have been superior, I don't know. But I think it's a safe bet that the Mongols believed themselves -- and their seed -- be superior. After all:
(a) They were the freaking Mongols;
(b) Everyone (well, every male, anyway) believes that he is better than everyone else. (As it turns out, there is exactly one male who is actually better than everyone else ... me.)
Not having an apoplectic stroke when I find out that Skype is fucking with my Firefox -- now that's a ramification I can live with.