The gene study only suggests that we all have common ancestors from a small group (perhaps only few thousand) which was pretty geneticaly homogennous and lived maybe 70 000 years ago.
There are many possible scenarios: one possibility is that tribes originating from an isolated small group of individuals got lucky for some random reason, while the other prehistoric people did not make it to the current gene pool. But it does not necesserily follow that everybody other must have died at once, exactly around that time. Maybe the other prehistoric people were living happily along for millenia, just thinking that hunting with the handaxe is a good idea and did-not want to have anything to do with those imbred short-sighted teet-seeking inovators with narrow shoulders and concave rib-cage. But the lactose tolerancy incidentaly infered immunity against bad infection outbreak caused by canibalism, which in turn was a result of sudden unability to hunt because of the hand-axe repeated strain injury.
"Swans and typhoid - it all comes from the same place. I collect church collapses recreationaly. Have you heard about the last one - in Sicily? Just marvellous: imagine, the facade felt on sixty two celebrating grandmothers during a special mass. If he is up there, he loves it, Clarice"
(Now this is definitely not a citation from St. Augustine)
That's true, but you have to give the Holywood guys some carma for showing a technical stuff instead of some dopey stereotype.
Btw., have you recognized the animals in the Saruman's evil army of Orcs in "Two Towers"? These were wooly mamoths (instead of Oliphants in the book) and their actual temporaries, giant hyenas (instead of Wargs, which the orcs were riding in the book). Jackson let in CG-generated real (but scary) recently extinct giant animals. He did not have to do this - and it was a nifty improvement!
These giant hyenas were probably worse than the giant saber-toothed tigers and it is now believed that until their extinction, they effectively held off the population of America through Bering straight land bridge. And now you can see them in one picture with Frodo!
What I realy liked in the article was the film-crew: they actualy cared to replicate the real instrument for their movie - down to a minute details like lab inventory sticker on the back of the instrument. I wish they would do this more often - most of the time Holywood people display a completely cockeyed imagination of how the labs should look like (and how experimental scientists behave there) - probably by watching too many B-movies about mad scientists! I have never seen a chemistry lab in movie that would even remotely looked like a lab. The dumb stereotypes must be offensive to non-scientist people too, I think.
And it would be realy cheap to rent a lab at some univeristy - I bet some students would be delighted in taking cameo roles - and even staging some impressive-looking accident!
The radioactive cookies story is a little bit stupid: Alphas emitors are not *that* harmless in hands.
Plutonium parts ("the pit") of the core of nuclear bomb as well as the depleted uranium-tipped ammunition is always electroplated with a thin layer of another metal (nickel, for example) to prevent people from getting "radiation burns" on the skin of their hands when handling these alpha emiting materials.
I have not heard of caffeine doing this, but I know of a case of a bipolar patient who was misdiagnosed as depression case. When the SSRI antipresants (like Prozac) did not work too well so his therapist (who turned out to have had just a psychology undergrad degree) got a bright idea to try some short-acting + strongly stimulating medication, which brightened the depressions rightaway - and got his occasional hypomania into full-blown uncontroled manic delusion episodes!
Check the Venus fact sheet - namely the surface temperature, pressure and the composition of the Venus atmosphere - and you will find reasons why their best time of the probe functioning (before disintegrating) was approx one hour. If you do not like their camera optics and mounting, please volunteer to take better pictures by yourself.
BULL-looney: Caffeine has no optical isomers (=enantiomers) = is non-chiral: caffeine is a flat molecule (has plane of symmetry).
For a molecule (or any shape, for that matter) to be chiral = to form lefty and righty shape - like left and right shoe - it must not have any of following symmetries: 1) center of symmetry 2) plane of symmetry 3) any higher rotation-reflexion axis.
"Guaranine" is in fact impure caffein:
http://www.rain-tree.com/guarana.htm
The claim of BAWLS manufacturer about "natural guarana caffein is 2.5 more potent" is a promotional nonsense. It turns out that guarana seeds just contain about twice coffeine than coffee beans. But the stuff is identical.
Coffeine addiction: not too bad or hard to kick, but severaly affected individuals can have blood pressure effects, which can cause withdrawal headaches. I have a friend and she has breast-pain (she had some kind of cystic problem there) as a coffeine reaction. And there is the tolerance - you have to escalate the dose to get your fix.
Coffeine is pretty safe even in large doses: if you don't mind messing your sleep cycle and being sometimes unproductive, exhausted and depressed as a result.
You probably know about the Google censorship
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Church of Scientology recently threatened Google in court and got a judge to issue temporary cease-and-desist order to make Google to eliminate the objectionable (=critical) sites from its search engine, because displaying materials to which COS owns copyright. Google was scared and took the links down temporarily, then restored most of them (which did not display the copyrighted secrets - just provided links to them) and as a bonus Google published a court document containing a complete list of COS-objectionable sites with their explanation.
Very bad on eyestrain is a bright monitor in darkened room. Try to lit your cubicle wall behind and around the monitor evenly, with a lightbulb lamp.
Part of the eyestrain problem is also the blinking of the monitor, unfortunately this is hard problem to fix. I wonder if there is a defice, like a fluorescent screen with afterglow - which would even-out the blinking. (The downside would be that you would not be able to scroll fast - or it would produce "tails")
I heard of a story about a worker who got into an MRS head scan. He started screaming and they pulled him out but it was too late - a steel splinter that was embeded in one of his eyes from a work-related injury and got undetected for years started moving around in the >15 Gauss magnetic field.
A lot of tumor cells use signaling pathways which are activated normaly only in embryogenesis - turning the cell signaling off is a new promising way to treat cancer without the typical debilitating chemotherapy side-effects. The ability to switch this master stem-cell gene off could be useful in this respect.
Editors hate manuscripts - the longer the worse: it takes extraordinary measures to convince them to read anything.
1.Write an decent first page. Must have some highly quotable, short paragraphs. Have a cliffhanger right at the end of the page. 2.Print 10 000+ copies of the first page. 3.Get a single engine prop plane (preferrably a crop-duster). Fly over a major city and dump your leaflets all over. (N.Y. is best - N.Y.Times have nationvide circulation but you will have to watch out for wind blowing towards Hudson river and seashore.) 4. As you are getting arrested, mention the troubles with editors ignoring your novel as the reason for doing it. 5. Give plenty of interviews. Save some copies of your sample first page to hand out to the journalists. Avoid any references about devout muslim pilots.
Hobit started as a children's book - a charming adventure story - and Tolkien is trying to make the characters funny and likable.
LOTR is dead serious and sometimes takes itself too seriously and goes didactic about duty, honor, destiny etc. But its story is much stronger than of Hobit and it is a wonderful eskape ito a different world. While hobit is fun, you cannot burry yourself in it so completely after age of 12.
No, I was not trying to suggest any particular official material - anything that you get from ETS is good (the more the better). My days with GRE are over for couple years now.
[Given that I am Czech, never had English in school, have a quite bad case of dyslexia - troubles with spelling even in Czech - and I got even in the *vocabulary/text analysis* part of the general test a score above 50% percentille supports the argument about the possibility of preparing for GRE from the old tests.]
GRE - All tests and especialy the general portion of it: Buy the published test stuff from ETS. Get as much of their original materials which were given in previous years as possible.
Contrary to what they want us to believe, the best way to prepare for the GRE test is doing the tests repeatedly. The authors are probably the same over years, and the format, material and type of question is mostly a re-hash of the previous tests.
Having practiced the test in full lenght 3-5 times will greatly improve your speed and confidence at the actual test. You need to stick above the average procentile - which is not that hard if you compete against people that did not practice the actual test. A lot of people lose on scores not because the lack of knowledge, but because of the unfamiliarity with the test, nervousness and lack of time. The test authors have this "earnest" way in wording their multiple-choice answers: they often give the answer away just by the way they write them. You can see through them after few practice runs.
WHADAYA MEAN "Spell Czech"? Czech spelling of word nuclear is *nuklear*
Spellcheck option in Slashdot would be wellcome addition - alphabet started as a phonetic business and even now there are some languages that like to keep it that way (...Czech, for exaple).
AND I am getting tired of jokes like "Bounced Czechs" [Especialy when the bounced people turn out top be Gypsies]
rats are very inteligent and it is difficult to kill them all - they learn from mistakes. So the rat poison is usualy slow-acting. They use most often on rat Coumatox (coumidine derivative - similar to those that hart patients use as a blood thinner). It causes slow and painless internal bleeding and is cumulative.
Fluoroacetate works quite fast, it blocks the metabolism (by mimicking acetate - gets transformed into fluorocitrate which blocks the citrate cyclus) and is most toxic on animals with fast metabolic rate - birds and carnivores. I am not sure if Kiwi birds are immune to it.
One of the things that Pt-Ir absorbs very easily is hydrogen. We do not know if the casting of the cylinder in 1889 was not done under reducing conditions.
The other possible strongly-absorbing substances are thiols [R-S-H compounds]. These are frequent stinky volatiles of biogenic origin. Maybe this silversmith had a flatulence problem or liked hard-boiled eggs on his sandwich.
Maybe they should make the new standart from isotopicly pure, mildly radioactive material with very long decay halftime. By measuring the produced radiation, they would be able to tell how much material they have.
[Be careful with these standards - it takes only 7.5 kg sphere of Pu239...]
Here is an old czech folk song (it actually rhymes in original)
"We used to have a grandpa and he was getting pretty old. One day in July - early morning - he went into the cellar - to get a pitchfork for haymaking. But he never made it back, it looks like that he has vanished for good.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole in the cellar. It eats everything it finds and it has no restraint. Grandma, please don't go there for coal - or it will eat you too - and police will never ever find you!"
Scientists came from far away - and from near too, grandma is nervous and beats us all, the kids. She is all alone there to do the cleaning and taking care of kitchen - while grandpa sits in the cellar and is infinitely heavy.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole...
Don't worry grandma, please don't despair, my wife is making the lunch. Her food is usualy quite terrible and I am gonna use it to feed the black hole. So I fed the leftovers from lunch to the black hole and it threw up everything including the grandpa. Then I took the chaisaw and cut the hole into pieces. And so the man won again over mysterious forces.
Slashdot Mirror
The gene study only suggests that we all have common ancestors from a small group (perhaps only few thousand) which was pretty geneticaly homogennous and lived maybe 70 000 years ago.
There are many possible scenarios: one possibility is that tribes originating from an isolated small group of individuals got lucky for some random reason, while the other prehistoric people did not make it to the current gene pool. But it does not necesserily follow that everybody other must have died at once, exactly around that time. Maybe the other prehistoric people were living happily along for millenia, just thinking that hunting with the handaxe is a good idea and did-not want to have anything to do with those imbred short-sighted teet-seeking inovators with narrow shoulders and concave rib-cage. But the lactose tolerancy incidentaly infered immunity against bad infection outbreak caused by canibalism, which in turn was a result of sudden unability to hunt because of the hand-axe repeated strain injury.
"Swans and typhoid - it all comes from the same place. I collect church collapses recreationaly. Have you heard about the last one - in Sicily? Just marvellous: imagine, the facade felt on sixty two celebrating grandmothers during a special mass. If he is up there, he loves it, Clarice"
(Now this is definitely not a citation from St. Augustine)
That's true, but you have to give the Holywood guys some carma for showing a technical stuff instead of some dopey stereotype.
Btw., have you recognized the animals in the Saruman's evil army of Orcs in "Two Towers"? These were wooly mamoths (instead of Oliphants in the book) and their actual temporaries, giant hyenas (instead of Wargs, which the orcs were riding in the book). Jackson let in CG-generated real (but scary) recently extinct giant animals. He did not have to do this - and it was a nifty improvement!
These giant hyenas were probably worse than the giant saber-toothed tigers and it is now believed that until their extinction, they effectively held off the population of America through Bering straight land bridge. And now you can see them in one picture with Frodo!
Yeah, recently they also produced transgenetic tobbaco with firefly genes which glows in the dark when sprayed with a chemical called "luciferin".
/ bi oplant.htm
http://www.gla.ac.uk/ibls/US/L1/l12002/plantwat
We will have more of these nasty tobbaco hybrids soon - pack-hunting around, biting their victims and even infecting them with rabbies.
What I realy liked in the article was the film-crew: they actualy cared to replicate the real instrument for their movie - down to a minute details like lab inventory sticker on the back of the instrument. I wish they would do this more often - most of the time Holywood people display a completely cockeyed imagination of how the labs should look like (and how experimental scientists behave there) - probably by watching too many B-movies about mad scientists! I have never seen a chemistry lab in movie that would even remotely looked like a lab. The dumb stereotypes must be offensive to non-scientist people too, I think.
And it would be realy cheap to rent a lab at some univeristy - I bet some students would be delighted in taking cameo roles - and even staging some impressive-looking accident!
The radioactive cookies story is a little bit stupid: Alphas emitors are not *that* harmless in hands.
Plutonium parts ("the pit") of the core of nuclear bomb as well as the depleted uranium-tipped ammunition is always electroplated with a thin layer of another metal (nickel, for example) to prevent people from getting "radiation burns" on the skin of their hands when handling these alpha emiting materials.
I have not heard of caffeine doing this, but I know of a case of a bipolar patient who was misdiagnosed as depression case. When the SSRI antipresants (like Prozac) did not work too well so his therapist (who turned out to have had just a psychology undergrad degree) got a bright idea to try some short-acting + strongly stimulating medication, which brightened the depressions rightaway - and got his occasional hypomania into full-blown uncontroled manic delusion episodes!
Check the Venus fact sheet - namely the surface temperature, pressure and the composition of the Venus atmosphere - and you will find reasons why their best time of the probe functioning (before disintegrating) was approx one hour. If you do not like their camera optics and mounting, please volunteer to take better pictures by yourself.
I will remember this, but I have to write it down.
BULL-looney: Caffeine has no optical isomers (=enantiomers) = is non-chiral: caffeine is a flat molecule (has plane of symmetry).
For a molecule (or any shape, for that matter) to be chiral = to form lefty and righty shape - like left and right shoe - it must not have any of following symmetries: 1) center of symmetry 2) plane of symmetry 3) any higher rotation-reflexion axis.
"Guaranine" is in fact impure caffein:
http://www.rain-tree.com/guarana.htm
The claim of BAWLS manufacturer about "natural guarana caffein is 2.5 more potent" is a promotional nonsense. It turns out that guarana seeds just contain about twice coffeine than coffee beans. But the stuff is identical.
Coffeine addiction: not too bad or hard to kick, but severaly affected individuals can have blood pressure effects, which can cause withdrawal headaches. I have a friend and she has breast-pain (she had some kind of cystic problem there) as a coffeine reaction. And there is the tolerance - you have to escalate the dose to get your fix.
Coffeine is pretty safe even in large doses: if you don't mind messing your sleep cycle and being sometimes unproductive, exhausted and depressed as a result.
Church of Scientology recently threatened Google in court and got a judge to issue temporary cease-and-desist order to make Google to eliminate the objectionable (=critical) sites from its search engine, because displaying materials to which COS owns copyright. Google was scared and took the links down temporarily, then restored most of them (which did not display the copyrighted secrets - just provided links to them) and as a bonus Google published a court document containing a complete list of COS-objectionable sites with their explanation.
Very bad on eyestrain is a bright monitor in darkened room. Try to lit your cubicle wall behind and around the monitor evenly, with a lightbulb lamp.
Part of the eyestrain problem is also the blinking of the monitor, unfortunately this is hard problem to fix. I wonder if there is a defice, like a fluorescent screen with afterglow - which would even-out the blinking. (The downside would be that you would not be able to scroll fast - or it would produce "tails")
I heard of a story about a worker who got into an MRS head scan. He started screaming and they pulled him out but it was too late - a steel splinter that was embeded in one of his eyes from a work-related injury and got undetected for years started moving around in the >15 Gauss magnetic field.
[Scrambled eyes, anyone?]
A lot of tumor cells use signaling pathways which are activated normaly only in embryogenesis - turning the cell signaling off is a new promising way to treat cancer without the typical debilitating chemotherapy side-effects. The ability to switch this master stem-cell gene off could be useful in this respect.
Editors hate manuscripts - the longer the worse: it takes extraordinary measures to convince them to read anything.
1.Write an decent first page. Must have some highly quotable, short paragraphs. Have a cliffhanger right at the end of the page.
2.Print 10 000+ copies of the first page.
3.Get a single engine prop plane (preferrably a crop-duster). Fly over a major city and dump your leaflets all over. (N.Y. is best - N.Y.Times have nationvide circulation but you will have to watch out for wind blowing towards Hudson river and seashore.)
4. As you are getting arrested, mention the troubles with editors ignoring your novel as the reason for doing it.
5. Give plenty of interviews. Save some copies of your sample first page to hand out to the journalists. Avoid any references about devout muslim pilots.
Hobit started as a children's book - a charming adventure story - and Tolkien is trying to make the characters funny and likable.
LOTR is dead serious and sometimes takes itself too seriously and goes didactic about duty, honor, destiny etc. But its story is much stronger than of Hobit and it is a wonderful eskape ito a different world. While hobit is fun, you cannot burry yourself in it so completely after age of 12.
No, I was not trying to suggest any particular official material - anything that you get from ETS is good (the more the better). My days with GRE are over for couple years now.
[Given that I am Czech, never had English in school, have a quite bad case of dyslexia - troubles with spelling even in Czech - and I got even in the *vocabulary/text analysis* part of the general test a score above 50% percentille supports the argument about the possibility of preparing for GRE from the old tests.]
GRE - All tests and especialy the general portion of it: Buy the published test stuff from ETS. Get as much of their original materials which were given in previous years as possible.
Contrary to what they want us to believe, the best way to prepare for the GRE test is doing the tests repeatedly. The authors are probably the same over years, and the format, material and type of question is mostly a re-hash of the previous tests.
Having practiced the test in full lenght 3-5 times will greatly improve your speed and confidence at the actual test. You need to stick above the average procentile - which is not that hard if you compete against people that did not practice the actual test. A lot of people lose on scores not because the lack of knowledge, but because of the unfamiliarity with the test, nervousness and lack of time. The test authors have this "earnest" way in wording their multiple-choice answers: they often give the answer away just by the way they write them. You can see through them after few practice runs.
WHADAYA MEAN "Spell Czech"? Czech spelling of word nuclear is *nuklear*
Spellcheck option in Slashdot would be wellcome addition - alphabet started as a phonetic business and even now there are some languages that like to keep it that way (...Czech, for exaple).
AND I am getting tired of jokes like "Bounced Czechs" [Especialy when the bounced people turn out top be Gypsies]
rats are very inteligent and it is difficult to kill them all - they learn from mistakes. So the rat poison is usualy slow-acting. They use most often on rat Coumatox (coumidine derivative - similar to those that hart patients use as a blood thinner). It causes slow and painless internal bleeding and is cumulative.
Fluoroacetate works quite fast, it blocks the metabolism (by mimicking acetate - gets transformed into fluorocitrate which blocks the citrate cyclus) and is most toxic on animals with fast metabolic rate - birds and carnivores. I am not sure if Kiwi birds are immune to it.
No, they interviewed Mr. Russell. He is a former pro and owns the best mud-'ressling ring there.
The real asteroid will have sign on the back: HOW IS MY SPEED? CALL 1-800-EXTINCT
[i have stolen this one]
One of the things that Pt-Ir absorbs very easily is hydrogen. We do not know if the casting of the cylinder in 1889 was not done under reducing conditions.
The other possible strongly-absorbing substances are thiols [R-S-H compounds]. These are frequent stinky volatiles of biogenic origin. Maybe this silversmith had a flatulence problem or liked hard-boiled eggs on his sandwich.
Maybe they should make the new standart from isotopicly pure, mildly radioactive material with very long decay halftime. By measuring the produced radiation, they would be able to tell how much material they have.
[Be careful with these standards - it takes only 7.5 kg sphere of Pu239...]
Here is an old czech folk song (it actually rhymes in original)
"We used to have a grandpa and he was getting pretty old. One day in July - early morning -
he went into the cellar - to get a pitchfork
for haymaking. But he never made it back, it looks like that he has vanished for good.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole in the cellar.
It eats everything it finds and it has no restraint. Grandma, please don't go there for coal - or it will eat you too - and police will never ever find you!"
Scientists came from far away - and from near too, grandma is nervous and beats us all, the kids. She is all alone there to do the cleaning and taking care of kitchen - while grandpa sits in the cellar and is infinitely heavy.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole...
Don't worry grandma, please don't despair, my wife is making the lunch. Her food is usualy quite terrible and I am gonna use it to feed the black hole. So I fed the leftovers from lunch to the black hole and it threw up everything including the grandpa. Then I took the chaisaw and cut the hole into pieces. And so the man won again over mysterious forces.
...Some people have all the fun.