Yeah, I submitted this story Friday evening GMT, just after it hit The Register. My guess is Slashdot was checking their legal responsibilites (and cta) etc... being a good 'Merkin site, and all that...
And yeah, I'm a bit peeved I didn't get the credit...
If they can make this work, then it sounds great - I'd be concerned about the risk to the ship's own electronics, though, as much as to its' cargo. Computerised navigation systems, and the like, and ship-wide systems whose wiring well run very near, or even along the inside of the hull... Neat idea, and one that may well send the internationnal rope-manufacturing industry into decline - after all, who else needs four inch diameter hemp ropes in this day and age...?
I'm aware of a few of my messages not reaching their destinations, but that's the important ones where I follow up with a call a few hours later saying 'So? Did you get my text? -are- we on for tonight?' I'd guess more trivial ones than that actually disappear.
*shrug* I'd not consign anything that important to SMS anyway, and it annoys me more when SMSs take five or six hours to get through, which seems to happen all the time...
... Wouldn't a moderate number of 'Western' countries (North America, the EU, and a few others who might want to tag along) banning the sending of unsolicited mail and the marketing of tools and lists with which to do it make a serious impact on the amount of spam recieved? Sure, a certain amount of it comes from abroad, but quite a lot is domestic, too, and quite a few countries in these areas are prepared to pay for it who might not be if it were banned.
There needs to be a mechanism for the governments to pick up the excess cost of people recieving spam, rather than Jo Punter paying for it in a few extra pennies every time he dials up to check his mail...
Notwithstanding the privacy issues involved, which have been discussed by other people -
I'd have thought that if you could get a representative group of people of sufficient size, and allow for intrinsic skew in the data, then watching what they do online - what their ecommerce browse to conversion rates are, whether they're shopping at all, whether they're looking at holidays, cars, that kind of thing - could well provide a very good short-term predictor of where the economy is going next.
You could find out, for instance, that people were planning to buy new cars or go on a long-haul holiday weeks or months before that was converted to Real Money in the retailers' pockets, and upwards of three months before the quarterly reports from the companies themselves start to reflect the changes in the economic climate.
Sounds to me like this could be a really interesting toy to use as an adjunct to playing the markets:)
Yes, I noticed this thinko in the moment I posted;) I wondered how long it would take for someone to spot it... A bit longer than I thought, as it happens...
Adaptations of Asterix have been bad enough, especially those dreadful live-action ones with Depardieu...
I grew up on French comics, which I guess is some excuse, but... You just -can't- live action adapt Tintin. It'll be awful! Or at least, if they have to, in the name of all that is Holy -please- adapt them as cartoons...
Aaah, yes. Photographic evidence of our ability to pollute and degrade the environment even of places we don't live... Maybe the images will end up as art posters on every third student's wall...
From what I understand of fractals-in-nature, aren't fractal patterns pretty ubiquitous in non-random non-identical data? If so, this isn't a great surprise - we know intron material is non-random non-identical. Should it really surprise us that much that if we throw sufficient computing resources at it it yields fractal-like information?
What worries me more is that if this patent is granted, a lot of effects which are a feature of things we already know about intron DNA, and relate to its interaction with histone protein, particularly, will end up being swallowed up by the patent, when in fact it's just to do with the physical and chemical properties of the DNA.
And here's why... A few things in that article set alarm bells ringing in my head:
The notion that at least certain parts of junk DNA might have a purpose appears to be picking up steam. Many scientists, for example, now refer to those areas with a far less derogatory term: introns.
They've been introns for ever and ever. I don't know what the author of the article Hal Plotkin's biological credentials are, but they're not looking great... 'Junk DNA' is almost universally a Pop-Sci term.
(...)Other researchers have begun looking at similar questions, with most focusing on intron strands located near genes whose functions are better understood.
Yes, intron patterns are used as markers in genetic testing, because a particular pattern is associated in space with a particular version of a disease-gene, and because intron repeats are easier to recognise in standard gene profiling techniques. There's no magic, and no one is suggesting the intron pattern itself is significant.
Pellionisz has chosen the unorthodox route of making his initial disclosures online on his own Web site. He picked that strategy, he says, because it is the fastest way he can document his claims and find scientific collaborators and investors. Most mainstream scientists usually blanch at such approaches, preferring more traditionally credible methods, such as publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals.
This is pretty bad. Intentionally avoiding peer-review is, um, well, not great for his credibility, shall we say? The article also spends an awful lot of time jumping up and down about just *how* good this man's credentials are. C'mon folks, methinks the lady doth protest too much...
Fractals are a way that nature organizes matter. Fractal patterns can be found in anything that has a non-smooth surface. (...) If junk DNA really is junk, some of it is certainly organized in a pretty peculiar pattern, one that looks amazingly like a fractal.
So if it's a generalised effect of non-smooth data, why is it so surprising that it's present in intron DNA? After all, the way DNA replicating machinery works in cells, it's much more prone to accidentally copying bits of self-similar code - it's more likely to get stuck to itself in the wrong place, and similar effects.
Just as knowing the radius of a circle lets one create that circle, understanding the more complicated fractal-based formula that nature uses to turn inanimate matter into a heart might -- in theory, at least -- help us learn how to grow a living heart, or simpler structures, such as disease-fighting antibodies.
We already understand how antibodies are put together, and have a pretty good idea how cells assemble themselves into organs! We don't need fractal dark magic to explain the protein synthesis in antibody production, it's just protein, and protein is coded directly by gene exons.
Hopefully that gives a flavour of the problems with this, anwyay. There are dozens bore things I could quote and argue, but I can't be bothered.
I saw this trailer in the cinema last night, as it happens, and boy, do the effects look good on a big screen...
But isn't it about time the Next Gen crew went off into quiet retirement and someone else got a shot at a Trek movie? At least this one looks darker and more interesting than some of the recent output...
The 'solution' from MS in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-065 recommends that you remove MS from the list of Trusted Publishers."
Am I the only one who finds this uproariously funny...?
Micro$oft wants us not to trust it. Not that this will be a problem in many cases, but... Maybe if we applied this more generally the world would be a nicer and safer place?
Are you thinking of staph or strep? Streptococci are routinely present in the throats of healthy individuals. Some strains of staph are skin commensals, that is to say they live on the skin without causing any problems under normal conditions. Staph are a common sauce of post-operative infections, and are the culprit in MRSA, or Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, the antibiotic resistant hospital 'superbug' now seen throughout the world. They are frequently carried into hospitals by patients and visitors.
Yes, it's quite possible that smaller incisions and a greater separation between the patient and the surgeons / nurses would reduce the chance of post-op infections, not just Staph, but of all kinds.
A slightly different problem occurrs to me, though: In the UK recently in the light of nvCJD there've been moves to make surgical implements which are used in high-risk procedures (in this case those on lymphatic tissues) strictly single use. Even including things like cauterising irons. It seems likely that this is going to be an increasing trend as we get progressively more paranoid about this kind of thing... so, how much of this robot is disposable? What does that do to the cost-balance and to the quality of the parts being used (in the case of the cauterising irons the rule has been repealed as cheaply imported 'disposable' irons were killing patients)?
I assume all the parts that actually go inside the patients are fully sterilisable at the very least, but this does add extra wear to the parts and increase the risk of a mechanical failure...
I think you probably mean egregious, but that's a minor complaint...
Genetic engineering nearly always involves just insertion or deletion of a gene. It's not as if genomes are strictly fixed length, we don't have to swap bits of it for other bits. Problems that occurr with unexpected outcomes are usually because the gene that gets inserted ends up crashing into the middle of something else and disabling it / having some unexpected effect, but on the whole these are things that can be spotted long before the organism goes to production.
I'm very split over this end of biotech. On the one hand, using gen-tech plants (and possibly animals) to produce drugs and vaccines is one of the most exciting and potentially revolutionary applications of genetic engineering technology. It's much more efficient to produce big organic molecules in suitable organic systems than it is in test tubes... It seems to me to be a much more worthy application of the technology than using it to increase profit margins and control farmers behaviour.
On the other hand, producing biologically active compounds - which, one would hope, drugs and vaccines are - raises the stakes on control of seeds and pollen, and the need for safety assurance,sky high.
So what do we do? Cover acres with air-conditionned glass-houses? Give up on the huge potential benefits just in case something goes wrong? Can we trust the biotech companies given how snuggly in bed they seem to be with most of the governments of the Western world...?
That's interesting, what I've read about this particular research (the vibrating floor stuff, mostly in New Scientist) suggested treshold effects were going on, but if as you say the reaction is trainable, tben yes,that does suggest a different mechanism. Hrm. I'll have to go and read the real paper now. *grin*.
I was speaking to someone in a pub (yes, I know...) who asserted that it was possible to balance an infinite length series of flexibly connected rods on a vibrating object if only you could calculate exactly the vibration required, which we can't. It'd be very cool though, imagine the towers of balancing pencils...
Erm.... I don't know where you learnt your sensory neurophysiology...
Light hitting the back of the eye causes (in the roughest possible terms) a change in electrical potential in the light sensitive cells, which is transmitted down neurons in the optic nerve (as electrical pulses) into the visual cortex of the brain, where it's interpreted in exceptionally clever ways we don't really understand. No vibrations to be seen, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I submitted this story Friday evening GMT, just after it hit The Register. My guess is Slashdot was checking their legal responsibilites (and cta) etc... being a good 'Merkin site, and all that...
And yeah, I'm a bit peeved I didn't get the credit...
...Ropes don't last forever.
Seriously, in the U.S. we just recently had a paralytic dockworkers' strike.
Paralytic? Really? They all went off and got so trashed they couldn't come into work? Kewl! Where do I sign up...?
If they can make this work, then it sounds great - I'd be concerned about the risk to the ship's own electronics, though, as much as to its' cargo. Computerised navigation systems, and the like, and ship-wide systems whose wiring well run very near, or even along the inside of the hull... Neat idea, and one that may well send the internationnal rope-manufacturing industry into decline - after all, who else needs four inch diameter hemp ropes in this day and age...?
I'm aware of a few of my messages not reaching their destinations, but that's the important ones where I follow up with a call a few hours later saying 'So? Did you get my text? -are- we on for tonight?' I'd guess more trivial ones than that actually disappear.
*shrug* I'd not consign anything that important to SMS anyway, and it annoys me more when SMSs take five or six hours to get through, which seems to happen all the time...
... Wouldn't a moderate number of 'Western' countries (North America, the EU, and a few others who might want to tag along) banning the sending of unsolicited mail and the marketing of tools and lists with which to do it make a serious impact on the amount of spam recieved? Sure, a certain amount of it comes from abroad, but quite a lot is domestic, too, and quite a few countries in these areas are prepared to pay for it who might not be if it were banned.
There needs to be a mechanism for the governments to pick up the excess cost of people recieving spam, rather than Jo Punter paying for it in a few extra pennies every time he dials up to check his mail...
Notwithstanding the privacy issues involved, which have been discussed by other people -
:)
I'd have thought that if you could get a representative group of people of sufficient size, and allow for intrinsic skew in the data, then watching what they do online - what their ecommerce browse to conversion rates are, whether they're shopping at all, whether they're looking at holidays, cars, that kind of thing - could well provide a very good short-term predictor of where the economy is going next.
You could find out, for instance, that people were planning to buy new cars or go on a long-haul holiday weeks or months before that was converted to Real Money in the retailers' pockets, and upwards of three months before the quarterly reports from the companies themselves start to reflect the changes in the economic climate.
Sounds to me like this could be a really interesting toy to use as an adjunct to playing the markets
Yes, yes. I've acknowledged this thinko already, if you care to give a glance to the other replies...
Yes, I noticed this thinko in the moment I posted ;) I wondered how long it would take for someone to spot it... A bit longer than I thought, as it happens...
TinTin is a french cartoon that has been published for years.
;)
I think you'll find Belgian was the nationality you were looking for
You can't! No! They're sacred, damn it!
... Please...?
Adaptations of Asterix have been bad enough, especially those dreadful live-action ones with Depardieu...
I grew up on French comics, which I guess is some excuse, but... You just -can't- live action adapt Tintin. It'll be awful! Or at least, if they have to, in the name of all that is Holy -please- adapt them as cartoons...
Aaah, yes. Photographic evidence of our ability to pollute and degrade the environment even of places we don't live... Maybe the images will end up as art posters on every third student's wall...
... or, isn't this just the Apple G4 Cube done two years belatedly and considerably less prettily by the PC world...
From what I understand of fractals-in-nature, aren't fractal patterns pretty ubiquitous in non-random non-identical data? If so, this isn't a great surprise - we know intron material is non-random non-identical. Should it really surprise us that much that if we throw sufficient computing resources at it it yields fractal-like information?
What worries me more is that if this patent is granted, a lot of effects which are a feature of things we already know about intron DNA, and relate to its interaction with histone protein, particularly, will end up being swallowed up by the patent, when in fact it's just to do with the physical and chemical properties of the DNA.
And here's why... A few things in that article set alarm bells ringing in my head:
The notion that at least certain parts of junk DNA might have a purpose appears to be picking up steam. Many scientists, for example, now refer to those areas with a far less derogatory term: introns.
They've been introns for ever and ever. I don't know what the author of the article Hal Plotkin's biological credentials are, but they're not looking great... 'Junk DNA' is almost universally a Pop-Sci term.
(...)Other researchers have begun looking at similar questions, with most focusing on intron strands located near genes whose functions are better understood.
Yes, intron patterns are used as markers in genetic testing, because a particular pattern is associated in space with a particular version of a disease-gene, and because intron repeats are easier to recognise in standard gene profiling techniques. There's no magic, and no one is suggesting the intron pattern itself is significant.
Pellionisz has chosen the unorthodox route of making his initial disclosures online on his own Web site. He picked that strategy, he says, because it is the fastest way he can document his claims and find scientific collaborators and investors. Most mainstream scientists usually blanch at such approaches, preferring more traditionally credible methods, such as publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals.
This is pretty bad. Intentionally avoiding peer-review is, um, well, not great for his credibility, shall we say? The article also spends an awful lot of time jumping up and down about just *how* good this man's credentials are. C'mon folks, methinks the lady doth protest too much...
Fractals are a way that nature organizes matter. Fractal patterns can be found in anything that has a non-smooth surface. (...) If junk DNA really is junk, some of it is certainly organized in a pretty peculiar pattern, one that looks amazingly like a fractal.
So if it's a generalised effect of non-smooth data, why is it so surprising that it's present in intron DNA? After all, the way DNA replicating machinery works in cells, it's much more prone to accidentally copying bits of self-similar code - it's more likely to get stuck to itself in the wrong place, and similar effects.
Just as knowing the radius of a circle lets one create that circle, understanding the more complicated fractal-based formula that nature uses to turn inanimate matter into a heart might -- in theory, at least -- help us learn how to grow a living heart, or simpler structures, such as disease-fighting antibodies.
We already understand how antibodies are put together, and have a pretty good idea how cells assemble themselves into organs! We don't need fractal dark magic to explain the protein synthesis in antibody production, it's just protein, and protein is coded directly by gene exons.
Hopefully that gives a flavour of the problems with this, anwyay. There are dozens bore things I could quote and argue, but I can't be bothered.
I saw this trailer in the cinema last night, as it happens, and boy, do the effects look good on a big screen...
But isn't it about time the Next Gen crew went off into quiet retirement and someone else got a shot at a Trek movie? At least this one looks darker and more interesting than some of the recent output...
The 'solution' from MS in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-065 recommends that you remove MS from the list of Trusted Publishers."
Am I the only one who finds this uproariously funny...?
Micro$oft wants us not to trust it. Not that this will be a problem in many cases, but... Maybe if we applied this more generally the world would be a nicer and safer place?
Are you thinking of staph or strep? Streptococci are routinely present in the throats of healthy individuals. Some strains of staph are skin commensals, that is to say they live on the skin without causing any problems under normal conditions. Staph are a common sauce of post-operative infections, and are the culprit in MRSA, or Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, the antibiotic resistant hospital 'superbug' now seen throughout the world. They are frequently carried into hospitals by patients and visitors.
Yes, it's quite possible that smaller incisions and a greater separation between the patient and the surgeons / nurses would reduce the chance of post-op infections, not just Staph, but of all kinds.
A slightly different problem occurrs to me, though:
In the UK recently in the light of nvCJD there've been moves to make surgical implements which are used in high-risk procedures (in this case those on lymphatic tissues) strictly single use. Even including things like cauterising irons. It seems likely that this is going to be an increasing trend as we get progressively more paranoid about this kind of thing... so, how much of this robot is disposable? What does that do to the cost-balance and to the quality of the parts being used (in the case of the cauterising irons the rule has been repealed as cheaply imported 'disposable' irons were killing patients)?
I assume all the parts that actually go inside the patients are fully sterilisable at the very least, but this does add extra wear to the parts and increase the risk of a mechanical failure...
This could result in an aggregious mistake
I think you probably mean egregious, but that's a minor complaint...
Genetic engineering nearly always involves just insertion or deletion of a gene. It's not as if genomes are strictly fixed length, we don't have to swap bits of it for other bits. Problems that occurr with unexpected outcomes are usually because the gene that gets inserted ends up crashing into the middle of something else and disabling it / having some unexpected effect, but on the whole these are things that can be spotted long before the organism goes to production.
I'm very split over this end of biotech. On the one hand, using gen-tech plants (and possibly animals) to produce drugs and vaccines is one of the most exciting and potentially revolutionary applications of genetic engineering technology. It's much more efficient to produce big organic molecules in suitable organic systems than it is in test tubes... It seems to me to be a much more worthy application of the technology than using it to increase profit margins and control farmers behaviour.
On the other hand, producing biologically active compounds - which, one would hope, drugs and vaccines are - raises the stakes on control of seeds and pollen, and the need for safety assurance,sky high.
So what do we do? Cover acres with air-conditionned glass-houses? Give up on the huge potential benefits just in case something goes wrong? Can we trust the biotech companies given how snuggly in bed they seem to be with most of the governments of the Western world...?
Isn't that usually known as rain...?
That's interesting, what I've read about this particular research (the vibrating floor stuff, mostly in New Scientist) suggested treshold effects were going on, but if as you say the reaction is trainable, tben yes,that does suggest a different mechanism. Hrm. I'll have to go and read the real paper now. *grin*.
Coo! Yes, that is what I meant :)
I was speaking to someone in a pub (yes, I know...) who asserted that it was possible to balance an infinite length series of flexibly connected rods on a vibrating object if only you could calculate exactly the vibration required, which we can't. It'd be very cool though, imagine the towers of balancing pencils...
Erm.... I don't know where you learnt your sensory neurophysiology...
Light hitting the back of the eye causes (in the roughest possible terms) a change in electrical potential in the light sensitive cells, which is transmitted down neurons in the optic nerve (as electrical pulses) into the visual cortex of the brain, where it's interpreted in exceptionally clever ways we don't really understand. No vibrations to be seen, though.