I'd have moderated if this wasn't anonymous; instead, I shall clarify:
American manufacturing is incredibly productive. Why? Automation. We can crank out expensive, precision goods with tight tolerances and great yields. Problem is, robotic assembly lines don't lead to huge employee headcounts. I'm not sure what happens when automation makes people so productive that the design team hands their blueprints off to a fully automated factory, but I suspect that the result is something that could be described as "structural unemployment" or "cascading economic collapse".
Maybe I misread it, but different threads of this discussion have suggested both. I thought I was replying to "Ditch the $1 denomination", not just the paper bills.
I'd be happy enough to switch to dollar coins, I guess, but there goes my commitment to having the lightest and thinnest wallet possible.
Private sector work offers similar conditions plus some flexibility. It's often much easier to shop around for employers if your current one is deteriorating, but there's not exactly a huge number of public sector employers who need your particular obscure skillset. People who can jump ship will, people who only know how to operate a water treatment plant will have to retrain to something more marketable before they jump ship.
Technically the "randomly diverging" is also evolution, but the parent is for the most part spot-on and I'm too tired to write this sort of thing at 4:44 AM. Instead, please enjoy the benefits of my karma; had I mod points, you'd have gotten an "insightful" from me.
Actually, I am a biologist.
Mods, please do me a favor and add some "insightful"?
That's okay. In about a generation, everyone will be cyborgs anyway. Seriously, Intel plans on shipping 14 nanometer chips in 2013; 5 nanometer processes are under development already, and at that point we can start seriously thinking about using the 5nm process to make machines to make utility fog.
Your natural body is just a device for building a brain and a pair of gonads, at that point, and selective pressures only work on it in this scenario are those that render cyborg-you sterile, destroy your brain before it can be transplanted into a cyberbody, or make you better able to talk a partner into raising a family with you.
I don't patronize strip clubs often, but I've had restaurant service where $5 is completely unjustified. Granted, it's frequently on a $6 sandwich, but I don't make a habit of tipping 80%. No, it's the $50 sushi platter where I have to pour my own water because the wait staff couldn't be arsed.
Problem also solved when hunters start sucking down hydrogen fluoride from burning lithium batteries and their bones melt.
What? Should have thought about that when you started shooting holes in a ten-pound battery with the same energy density as TNT.
Potentially also solved when the activists switch to a gas-powered model that's a little sturdier, it gets shot down, and either goes down in flames or just sprinkles burning fuel all over everything under it, either way burning down the shooting range. Of course, lithium-ion batteries burn rather like solid-fuel rocket motors, so
I don't know, but I'd think twice before shooting down any aircraft, even one of those little AirHogs things. Even if someone's deliberately using them specifically as target drones, anything with a decent power-to-weight ratio can probably set - at minimum - dry grass on fire.
It's worth noting that most flu shots are made with milk proteins, and people who are allergic to milk (distinct from "lactose intolerance") are just boned. Same with egg allergy - they're used to mass produce vaccines. But if most of the population is immune, there's nobody to give the allergic people the disease in the first place - we say they're protected by "herd immunity" as tactless as that term may be. And we're okay putting that into substantially everyone, risks and all. This way, we get to exchange a large risk for a small risk and, if it turns out the risk of the gene vaccine is smaller than the protein vaccine, I have no idea why we shouldn't be putting it in people.
I'm guessing that on this basis they've annointed this new thing as having the potential "lifelong" protection from the flu. As for how this would be significantly different than just giving someone a regular flu shot with all the known HA subtypes, I don't see it. Seems like a bit of hype to me compared to what other folks are working on (e.g., specific artificial antibodies that target all HA subtypes).
It's got the potential to be a self-boosting vaccine; normally without periodic "reminders" the body tends to not make memory T cells for a given pathogen - but the epitope continues to be produced for as long as they can keep the plasmid stable. There's another approach, but it might seem a little squicky. Failing that, Wikipedia has a good breakdown on the what and why. A potential stronger immune response is one benefit, a persistent effect is another, and unlike some vaccines, a DNA vaccine can't ever give you the disease it's trying to prevent. It also looks like they can be mass produced without chicken eggs in the same method as any other DNA snippet - Polymerase chain reaction, making mass production staggeringly efficient. Also, it looks like they may be able to vaccinate against MS, which is kinda fucking magic.
But yes - if they vaccinated against all known subtypes of hemaglutinin, the vast majority of influenza wouldn't effect humanity. If we vaccinated against the ones not known to infect humans, we're likely to prevent zoonosis and a new strain jumping to human hosts and causing another 1918. And since these never wear off, you're likely to never catch the flu again until your bloodstream is so full of nanotech that the concept of "disease" becomes an antiquity.
I'm told working with RNA's a bitch and a half; while bleach will clean up (sterilize) any stray bacterial cells, a lab handling RNA has to be washed down with an eye-wateringly expensive RNAse cleaner to prevent any stray molecules from contaminating your sample and being amplified into the billions of copies by your next round of PCR. While you probably won't get a 1:1 copy of the foreign RNA, you'll ruin any hope of making a specifically selective test, or getting clean data from your next step. Good shotgun sequencers should be able to isolate the foreign sequence and output two strong signals instead of one, but my university didn't have one at the time; "sequencer" was a grad student's job description, not a piece of equipment. (That's changed recently)
In biological systems, DNA is usually more robust. Chemical or enzymatic attack? DNA is tougher. Funnily enough, RNA is more resistant to UV, so you can't use that to sterilize a lab bench without enough of a dose that it starts damaging plastic, too. RNA may be easier to melt, or "unzip" too, but it's still a pain in the ass to get every last bit of it.
If you mean storing a high-quality sample and guaranteeing it'll be intact, that may be rather dicey - but the curious can check out a forum post I found on it. Also, I recall something about if RNA has -OH groups and is unstable in alkaline environments, it could be autocatalytic; this wasn't a problem when I was studying to be a gene jock - we stuck to working with DNA.
Why bother making fetuses when we can just make the parts? Unless you want all the other stuff you can't transplant to sell at a fast food restaurant, I can think of no good reason for it.
I suppose altering the child's DNA might fix that problem, but even then, you start getting to the point where humans don't even, for that matter, actually even have to resemble their parents except superficially.
The term for that is either "transhuman" or "posthuman" depending on whether the changes are continuing, on a population level. If you buy into that concept of "what is a species" (a surprisingly thorny issue).
Antivenom is just a refined solution of antibodies in plasma; I see no reason why we can't produce them in ton lots using recombinant technology, while covering most of the pathogens we need to worry about - while simultaneously using recombinant-production human plasma proteins. Heck, that's what monoclonal antibody therapies are, we're just talking about a longer-lasting course of treatment with a few hundred different strains. Once we're producing them for use in combating infectious disease, their prophylactic use in uterine environment replicators has a marginal cost approaching zero.
Apple menu, system preferences, displays, and switch from "best for built in display" to "scaled". Now you get to crank the effective resolution up to panel-native, but everything's bleeding tiny like that. But hey, if that makes you productive, go for it.
Nothing nonstandard about the RAM. As for a "standard hard disk", screw that, I'm loving the SSD.
Except for the part where it's soldered on. If they only sold it in the configuration with "As much RAM as the chipset can address", I'd not care about soldered on memory. Alas, that decision complicates my decision to buy an rMBP; I have to save an extra $200 to buy this up front. I also have to save an extra $500 or $1000 to fully upgrade the storage up front; nobody else is making the proprietary modules in similar capacities and speeds. I think I can get a 1-terabyte SSD in the standard 2.5" form factor. (Okay, yes, the OCZ Octane comes in 2.5" SATA3, but it's a bit more expensive than the early reports indicated.) And while it's expensive now, in a couple years when I can either buy a new laptop or upgrade the old one, they'll be relatively cheap. (cheaper?)
I despair of anyone making the three or four current flavors (form factors) of Macbook SSD a couple years after they launch.
And this is speaking as an Apple fan. I'm a little worried I'm going to go from "Apple fan" to "Not a computer person" soon.
I'm having flashbacks to linear flash and the Newton. I remember being blown away when I discovered execute-in-place architectures, and frankly I'd like to see them come back.
This will be primarily used by those who can not conceive and those who cannot carry to term. That would be a huge intervention in the evolutionary process, as those are the people we DON'T want to reproduce.
Their warranty service seems particularly good to me; it seems like a solid enough product to warrant warrantee-ing (not technically a word yet). I prefer the AG-7 Apollo pen, but the bullet pen is a nice pocket pen - I just keep losing them. Seriously - phone them up, unless they've gotten a lot worse in the last year, they'll help you out.
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I'd have moderated if this wasn't anonymous; instead, I shall clarify:
American manufacturing is incredibly productive. Why? Automation. We can crank out expensive, precision goods with tight tolerances and great yields. Problem is, robotic assembly lines don't lead to huge employee headcounts. I'm not sure what happens when automation makes people so productive that the design team hands their blueprints off to a fully automated factory, but I suspect that the result is something that could be described as "structural unemployment" or "cascading economic collapse".
Maybe I misread it, but different threads of this discussion have suggested both. I thought I was replying to "Ditch the $1 denomination", not just the paper bills.
I'd be happy enough to switch to dollar coins, I guess, but there goes my commitment to having the lightest and thinnest wallet possible.
Private sector work offers similar conditions plus some flexibility. It's often much easier to shop around for employers if your current one is deteriorating, but there's not exactly a huge number of public sector employers who need your particular obscure skillset. People who can jump ship will, people who only know how to operate a water treatment plant will have to retrain to something more marketable before they jump ship.
And if our smallest currency denomination is a five-dollar coin?
We'll also immediately be left wanting for public servants, who won't work for crap pay, no job security, and no retirement either.
Technically the "randomly diverging" is also evolution, but the parent is for the most part spot-on and I'm too tired to write this sort of thing at 4:44 AM. Instead, please enjoy the benefits of my karma; had I mod points, you'd have gotten an "insightful" from me.
Actually, I am a biologist.
Mods, please do me a favor and add some "insightful"?
I beg to differ.
;)
And if enough people here like it, they might reprint that shirt.
That's okay. In about a generation, everyone will be cyborgs anyway. Seriously, Intel plans on shipping 14 nanometer chips in 2013; 5 nanometer processes are under development already, and at that point we can start seriously thinking about using the 5nm process to make machines to make utility fog.
Your natural body is just a device for building a brain and a pair of gonads, at that point, and selective pressures only work on it in this scenario are those that render cyborg-you sterile, destroy your brain before it can be transplanted into a cyberbody, or make you better able to talk a partner into raising a family with you.
Evolution at the neutral rate is still evolution.
On the other hand, it looks like we may have seriously lowballed our estimates of the neutral rate of evolution.
I don't patronize strip clubs often, but I've had restaurant service where $5 is completely unjustified. Granted, it's frequently on a $6 sandwich, but I don't make a habit of tipping 80%. No, it's the $50 sushi platter where I have to pour my own water because the wait staff couldn't be arsed.
Problem also solved when hunters start sucking down hydrogen fluoride from burning lithium batteries and their bones melt.
What? Should have thought about that when you started shooting holes in a ten-pound battery with the same energy density as TNT.
Potentially also solved when the activists switch to a gas-powered model that's a little sturdier, it gets shot down, and either goes down in flames or just sprinkles burning fuel all over everything under it, either way burning down the shooting range. Of course, lithium-ion batteries burn rather like solid-fuel rocket motors, so
I don't know, but I'd think twice before shooting down any aircraft, even one of those little AirHogs things. Even if someone's deliberately using them specifically as target drones, anything with a decent power-to-weight ratio can probably set - at minimum - dry grass on fire.
I'm referring to the ability to vaccinate against MS at all as the FM there. Gene vaccines are neat, but don't rise to that level of awesome just yet.
It's worth noting that most flu shots are made with milk proteins, and people who are allergic to milk (distinct from "lactose intolerance") are just boned. Same with egg allergy - they're used to mass produce vaccines. But if most of the population is immune, there's nobody to give the allergic people the disease in the first place - we say they're protected by "herd immunity" as tactless as that term may be. And we're okay putting that into substantially everyone, risks and all. This way, we get to exchange a large risk for a small risk and, if it turns out the risk of the gene vaccine is smaller than the protein vaccine, I have no idea why we shouldn't be putting it in people.
It's got the potential to be a self-boosting vaccine; normally without periodic "reminders" the body tends to not make memory T cells for a given pathogen - but the epitope continues to be produced for as long as they can keep the plasmid stable. There's another approach, but it might seem a little squicky. Failing that, Wikipedia has a good breakdown on the what and why. A potential stronger immune response is one benefit, a persistent effect is another, and unlike some vaccines, a DNA vaccine can't ever give you the disease it's trying to prevent. It also looks like they can be mass produced without chicken eggs in the same method as any other DNA snippet - Polymerase chain reaction, making mass production staggeringly efficient. Also, it looks like they may be able to vaccinate against MS, which is kinda fucking magic.
But yes - if they vaccinated against all known subtypes of hemaglutinin, the vast majority of influenza wouldn't effect humanity. If we vaccinated against the ones not known to infect humans, we're likely to prevent zoonosis and a new strain jumping to human hosts and causing another 1918. And since these never wear off, you're likely to never catch the flu again until your bloodstream is so full of nanotech that the concept of "disease" becomes an antiquity.
I'm told working with RNA's a bitch and a half; while bleach will clean up (sterilize) any stray bacterial cells, a lab handling RNA has to be washed down with an eye-wateringly expensive RNAse cleaner to prevent any stray molecules from contaminating your sample and being amplified into the billions of copies by your next round of PCR. While you probably won't get a 1:1 copy of the foreign RNA, you'll ruin any hope of making a specifically selective test, or getting clean data from your next step. Good shotgun sequencers should be able to isolate the foreign sequence and output two strong signals instead of one, but my university didn't have one at the time; "sequencer" was a grad student's job description, not a piece of equipment. (That's changed recently)
In biological systems, DNA is usually more robust. Chemical or enzymatic attack? DNA is tougher. Funnily enough, RNA is more resistant to UV, so you can't use that to sterilize a lab bench without enough of a dose that it starts damaging plastic, too. RNA may be easier to melt, or "unzip" too, but it's still a pain in the ass to get every last bit of it.
If you mean storing a high-quality sample and guaranteeing it'll be intact, that may be rather dicey - but the curious can check out a forum post I found on it. Also, I recall something about if RNA has -OH groups and is unstable in alkaline environments, it could be autocatalytic; this wasn't a problem when I was studying to be a gene jock - we stuck to working with DNA.
Why bother making fetuses when we can just make the parts? Unless you want all the other stuff you can't transplant to sell at a fast food restaurant, I can think of no good reason for it.
Seriously, we can already just make the parts.
The term for that is either "transhuman" or "posthuman" depending on whether the changes are continuing, on a population level. If you buy into that concept of "what is a species" (a surprisingly thorny issue).
Antivenom is just a refined solution of antibodies in plasma; I see no reason why we can't produce them in ton lots using recombinant technology, while covering most of the pathogens we need to worry about - while simultaneously using recombinant-production human plasma proteins. Heck, that's what monoclonal antibody therapies are, we're just talking about a longer-lasting course of treatment with a few hundred different strains. Once we're producing them for use in combating infectious disease, their prophylactic use in uterine environment replicators has a marginal cost approaching zero.
Actually, there's a slider for that.
Apple menu, system preferences, displays, and switch from "best for built in display" to "scaled". Now you get to crank the effective resolution up to panel-native, but everything's bleeding tiny like that. But hey, if that makes you productive, go for it.
Except for the part where it's soldered on. If they only sold it in the configuration with "As much RAM as the chipset can address", I'd not care about soldered on memory. Alas, that decision complicates my decision to buy an rMBP; I have to save an extra $200 to buy this up front. I also have to save an extra $500 or $1000 to fully upgrade the storage up front; nobody else is making the proprietary modules in similar capacities and speeds. I think I can get a 1-terabyte SSD in the standard 2.5" form factor. (Okay, yes, the OCZ Octane comes in 2.5" SATA3, but it's a bit more expensive than the early reports indicated.) And while it's expensive now, in a couple years when I can either buy a new laptop or upgrade the old one, they'll be relatively cheap. (cheaper?)
I despair of anyone making the three or four current flavors (form factors) of Macbook SSD a couple years after they launch.
And this is speaking as an Apple fan. I'm a little worried I'm going to go from "Apple fan" to "Not a computer person" soon.
I don't know about you, but I've never had to eat a meal while I'm sleeping.
I'm having flashbacks to linear flash and the Newton. I remember being blown away when I discovered execute-in-place architectures, and frankly I'd like to see them come back.
What, cyborgs?
Electrical stimulation, mostly, if I read the article correctly.
Their warranty service seems particularly good to me; it seems like a solid enough product to warrant warrantee-ing (not technically a word yet). I prefer the AG-7 Apollo pen, but the bullet pen is a nice pocket pen - I just keep losing them. Seriously - phone them up, unless they've gotten a lot worse in the last year, they'll help you out.