Re:Life fills a space defined by its environment
on
Did Sea Life Arise Twice?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Despite the BBC article's title and the slashdot summary, this story is not about whether *life* evolved twice---it's about whether *animals* evolved twice.
The issue here is that they have discovered relatively complex sponge-like organisms before a catastrophic event (snowball earth). This means either that 1) snowball earth wasn't that bad, didn't kill them off, and more complex animals (including us) might have evolved from them or 2) it killed them off, and animals evolved a second time once it was over.
I think 1 and 2 are consistent, it's just the numbering in the document isn't the order of events.
How I read it, it's basically:
1) Plaintiff, don't worry, you'll get access to the drive by March 21
2-3) Defendent, don't worry, here's how we'll do it---first, you get to delete your private files
IANAL, but that's how I read it. The summary's a bit confusing, and seems to suggest that #1 in the document has to occur before #2, which really doesn't make sense, as the GP points out.
It's basically kerning pairs, but instead of just a few pairs, it's generalized to maintain the area between all combinations of letters:
The Law of Optical Volumes states that the area between any two letters in a word must be of equal measure throughout the word, and remain consistent throughout the body of text. So why 'Volumes', not 'Areas'?
If Scott were more of a geometry wonk, he'd have dubbed it the Law of Optical Areas rather than volumes, but that doesn't sound as imposing. Why stop there? A Law of Optical Hyperspace would be even better...
Good point, and probably true of humans in the recent past (1000's years), but the evolutionary changes we're really talking about occur on much longer time scales (10's to 100's of thousands of years)
I think, though, that since it's not at all easy to predict the complexity of the genome by the appearance of the organism e.g. plants have more genes than humans, that what this really means is that what we judge as important (by appearance) doesn't predict genetic complexity/evolvedness.
I think that's because nature has used the best genetic toolkit available to it to produce whichever animals are best suited to reproduce.
i.e. if it has a sophisticated genetic toolkit available for whatever reason (past evolutionary pressures) and the best organism for a particular environment is very simple, then the highly evolved genetic toolkit will be used to build a simple animal.
Except the article says the opposite:
Bakewell, Zhang and a colleague found that substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes.
...
Chance events could also explain why the scientists found more gene variants that were either neutral and had no functional impact or negative changes that are involved in diseases. I.e. chimps have more gene variants (i.e. genes that might be useful for future selection), humans have less. They postulate that the smaller gene pool for humans might be because of periods in human evolution when the population size became very small.
I work in a closely related field, and it's very hard even for those who work on evolutionary biology to hold in our minds the idea that things don't evolve towards greater complexity (with human beings at the pinacle), they evolve towards whatever works.
Often people giving scientific talks about some detailed aspect of evolutionary biology slip into terms like 'primative' and correct themselves with 'simple'. I think part of this is because we tend to organize organisms by appearance, and before the genomic era this was the only thing we had to go on. We now know that many of the organisms that seem simple have the same or greater gene complexity as ourselves.
To clarify, it's not the electron itself that traverses the chlorophyll molecule(s), but the energy of the electron (somewhat analogous to kinetic energy transfer in Newton's Cradle). See also (Resonance Energy Transfer )
True. I always thought part of the reason cell phones were banned (at least in the beginning) was so people would have to use the airphones (and pay the exorbitant fees).
I suspect the original reason may well have been that, but I think it must have shifted as time went on (airphones are much rarer now than they were). Article has a good point about crowd control. I've seen some pretty irate people on buses when the person next to them is talking loudly on their cell phone (I think it's responded to as an invasion of personal space), and can imagine that combining that with a crowd of people squashed together for hours would be pretty inflammatory.
So I since I own the copyright to this post, I should be free of restrictions against pretexting?
"They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting."
From www.copyright.gov Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
It's not clear to me that they ever had a case for charging Universities or Non-profit groups, so it's odd that they mention that they have "started waiving the fees"
IANAL, but doesn't the Patent Research Exemption specifically mean that research does *not* require a license. Even companies can work on research and clinical trials and they don't need a licence as long as they don't begin commercial manufacture of the product within the patent term?
I'd love to use openoffice, but for me the killer is lack of full Endnote support.
In much academia at the moment, unless you're in Math/Physics and use LaTeX, Endnote is pretty much essential. [There's a clunky workaround using rich-text export to get it to work somewhat with openoffice, but the 'Cite While You Write' feature that works with MS Word is the real key to Endnote. And yes, there are alternative bibliographies (including built-in) but it's no use if you have to share a database with people who are using Endnote with word.]
You can argue that people should use the alternatives, but the fact is they won't. Endnote is the de-facto standard and for openoffice to be welcomed for paper writing, it needs either Endnote integration or an open-source alternative bibliography that is both compatible with existing Endnote databases and offers the same 'Cite While You Write' functionality.
It's a pity, because I know a lot of people in academia who be very happy to switch to openoffice if they could.
The idea is that you can eliminate blur caused by camera movement by taking many short exposures (high noise because of the short exposure), then align and average them together to eliminate the noise. This will work, but the downside is that it does require computationally intensive image alignment (to remove the camera movement that would have caused the blur in the first place) But that could be done offline.
dd-wrt will do this.
It has a basic web server that normally serves the interface page, but can also be set to serve your own web pages for external requests. It runs on a bunch of hardware, linksys, buffalo etc---but if you want to run a web server make sure you have enough storage space, or add an sd card though that requires a bit of hacking.
This is the whole idea behind the Public Library of Science which has really taken off in the last couple of years. It's peer reviewed, high quality research, and gives free online access to everyone.
"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."
Does anyone know, is that 29 million cut for the EPSRC higher because they get more money in the first place, or are they specifically cutting back more on Engineering?
It seems slower to respond than gmail, but I think the outlook-like layout is more functional (amazingly, both gmail and yahoo are *still* missing simple things like the ability to select multiple emails to forward to someone). I think Gmail's organisation by conversation is much better though, and Yahoo's connection is still over http, unlike gmail's https encryption.
May be part of an airbag ripped off during impact. The airbags were designed with a number of layers, the outer layers were expected to be torn up a lot when it hit the rocky surface at speed.
It seem far more plausible, in my *opinion*, that the function of the attack on SCO is to gain the sympathy of linux users. Many systems administrators are Linux users who administer anti-virus software, and therefore are in a position or eradicate the virus. Gaining the sympathy of these people by attacking SCO would therefore likely *help* the virus survive, and promote its sucess as a SPAM relay.
I used LaTeX for my 150 page Master's thesis, and I'm a big fan---but that was back when I was in a Physics department. Now I'm in Biology and no-one here would know where to begin with LaTeX. Outside of Physics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering etc., LaTeX isn't the standard, it's MSWord.
LaTeX isn't aimed to be a competitor to Word---it's got a much too steep learning curve for most people. OpenOffice could replace Word, and we would certainly move to OpenOffice, but the lack of good bibliography software keeps us (and probably a lot of other academics) from switching.
Lack of a fully-functional bibliographic system (to compete with Endnote) prevents universities (at least Research labs) switching from Microsoft to the opensource Openoffice. (and since Endnote doesn't work run under linux, and Crossover office doesn't fully support Endnote, we're locked into Microsoft Word on Microsoft Windows.)
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the BBC article's title and the slashdot summary, this story is not about whether *life* evolved twice---it's about whether *animals* evolved twice. The issue here is that they have discovered relatively complex sponge-like organisms before a catastrophic event (snowball earth). This means either that 1) snowball earth wasn't that bad, didn't kill them off, and more complex animals (including us) might have evolved from them or 2) it killed them off, and animals evolved a second time once it was over.
I think 1 and 2 are consistent, it's just the numbering in the document isn't the order of events.
How I read it, it's basically:
1) Plaintiff, don't worry, you'll get access to the drive by March 21
2-3) Defendent, don't worry, here's how we'll do it---first, you get to delete your private files
IANAL, but that's how I read it. The summary's a bit confusing, and seems to suggest that #1 in the document has to occur before #2, which really doesn't make sense, as the GP points out.
Also, I just realized '9:00 am the next day' was two days ago, so...what happened?
Good point, and probably true of humans in the recent past (1000's years), but the evolutionary changes we're really talking about occur on much longer time scales (10's to 100's of thousands of years)
I think, though, that since it's not at all easy to predict the complexity of the genome by the appearance of the organism e.g. plants have more genes than humans, that what this really means is that what we judge as important (by appearance) doesn't predict genetic complexity/evolvedness. I think that's because nature has used the best genetic toolkit available to it to produce whichever animals are best suited to reproduce.
i.e. if it has a sophisticated genetic toolkit available for whatever reason (past evolutionary pressures) and the best organism for a particular environment is very simple, then the highly evolved genetic toolkit will be used to build a simple animal.
...
Chance events could also explain why the scientists found more gene variants that were either neutral and had no functional impact or negative changes that are involved in diseases. I.e. chimps have more gene variants (i.e. genes that might be useful for future selection), humans have less. They postulate that the smaller gene pool for humans might be because of periods in human evolution when the population size became very small.
What's wrong is that it isn't a progression, it's a branching tree.
I.e. it's not that man's ancestor was an ape, it's that apes and man have a common ancestor that was neither ape nor man.
I work in a closely related field, and it's very hard even for those who work on evolutionary biology to hold in our minds the idea that things don't evolve towards greater complexity (with human beings at the pinacle), they evolve towards whatever works.
Often people giving scientific talks about some detailed aspect of evolutionary biology slip into terms like 'primative' and correct themselves with 'simple'. I think part of this is because we tend to organize organisms by appearance, and before the genomic era this was the only thing we had to go on. We now know that many of the organisms that seem simple have the same or greater gene complexity as ourselves.
Sometimes I think Evolution needs a better iconic image than the ape to man progression
To clarify, it's not the electron itself that traverses the chlorophyll molecule(s), but the energy of the electron (somewhat analogous to kinetic energy transfer in Newton's Cradle). See also (Resonance Energy Transfer )
True. I always thought part of the reason cell phones were banned (at least in the beginning) was so people would have to use the airphones (and pay the exorbitant fees).
I suspect the original reason may well have been that, but I think it must have shifted as time went on (airphones are much rarer now than they were). Article has a good point about crowd control. I've seen some pretty irate people on buses when the person next to them is talking loudly on their cell phone (I think it's responded to as an invasion of personal space), and can imagine that combining that with a crowd of people squashed together for hours would be pretty inflammatory.
So I since I own the copyright to this post, I should be free of restrictions against pretexting?
"They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting."
From www.copyright.gov Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
It's not clear to me that they ever had a case for charging Universities or Non-profit groups, so it's odd that they mention that they have "started waiving the fees"
IANAL, but doesn't the Patent Research Exemption specifically mean that research does *not* require a license. Even companies can work on research and clinical trials and they don't need a licence as long as they don't begin commercial manufacture of the product within the patent term?
I'd love to use openoffice, but for me the killer is lack of full Endnote support.
In much academia at the moment, unless you're in Math/Physics and use LaTeX, Endnote is pretty much essential. [There's a clunky workaround using rich-text export to get it to work somewhat with openoffice, but the 'Cite While You Write' feature that works with MS Word is the real key to Endnote. And yes, there are alternative bibliographies (including built-in) but it's no use if you have to share a database with people who are using Endnote with word.]
You can argue that people should use the alternatives, but the fact is they won't. Endnote is the de-facto standard and for openoffice to be welcomed for paper writing, it needs either Endnote integration or an open-source alternative bibliography that is both compatible with existing Endnote databases and offers the same 'Cite While You Write' functionality.
It's a pity, because I know a lot of people in academia who be very happy to switch to openoffice if they could.
I think you missed the GP's point
The idea is that you can eliminate blur caused by camera movement by taking many short exposures (high noise because of the short exposure), then align and average them together to eliminate the noise. This will work, but the downside is that it does require computationally intensive image alignment (to remove the camera movement that would have caused the blur in the first place) But that could be done offline.
dd-wrt will do this. It has a basic web server that normally serves the interface page, but can also be set to serve your own web pages for external requests. It runs on a bunch of hardware, linksys, buffalo etc---but if you want to run a web server make sure you have enough storage space, or add an sd card though that requires a bit of hacking.
...PloS
This is the whole idea behind the Public Library of Science which has really taken off in the last couple of years. It's peer reviewed, high quality research, and gives free online access to everyone.
"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."
Does anyone know, is that 29 million cut for the EPSRC higher because they get more money in the first place, or are they specifically cutting back more on Engineering?
Or perhaps just having a CS degree doesn't actually make you qualified for every one of those 100,000 jobs?
Link to try it out: http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/
n00b should too!
Nah. n00b hasn't been around long enough...
It's gone now---probably blown away.
It seem far more plausible, in my *opinion*, that the function of the attack on SCO is to gain the sympathy of linux users. Many systems administrators are Linux users who administer anti-virus software, and therefore are in a position or eradicate the virus. Gaining the sympathy of these people by attacking SCO would therefore likely *help* the virus survive, and promote its sucess as a SPAM relay.
LaTeX isn't aimed to be a competitor to Word---it's got a much too steep learning curve for most people. OpenOffice could replace Word, and we would certainly move to OpenOffice, but the lack of good bibliography software keeps us (and probably a lot of other academics) from switching.
The Openoffice bibliography project still isn't working well enough to replace Endnote, but it's getting there...