The ironic thing about that, of course, is that the Chinese remember Nixon quite fondly; he broke through to China with his '72 visit, a pretty amazing feat soon overshadowed by the famous scandal.
...I wonder if China is going to end up as the next stand-in for the old Soviet union. Espionage, nuke stand-offs and a race to the moon are already in the wings.
It's an interesting foray into the supernatural, taking lots of cues from mythologies around the world, and creates its own mythological panorama and pantheon of demigods and strange creatures.
The stories mostly focus on Dream, one of the seven Endless whose domains are the life, death, sleep, trials and emotions of mankind. Dream is the one who feels his responsibilities most deeply, and much of the series revolves around his interaction with mankind, and with his somewhat dysfunctional siblings.
It has spawned off a few series from parts of the mythos it has constructed. There's the Books of Magic, the Books of Faerie, and one of my favorites, Lucifer.
Most of the modern reprints (I'm gathering they're reprints) have some interesting introductions at the beginning by all sorts of famous (in the comic/SF/fantasy arena) folks.
You likely don't have to order them online - even most "regular" bookstores are starting to set up small graphic novels areas, and I haven't seen one of these yet without a Sandman or ten, and used bookstores often have a few.
They're a much different style from the superhero comics, however. It's a lot of myth, mystery and drama, but not much in the way of action. Definitely find out if it's to your tastes before ordering any.
Other comics, like The Invisibles are very interesting, with lots of action, but absolute noodle-benders, and will have you wondering what on earth (or planet of your choice, for that matter) they were smoking.
From some of my readings (New Scientist, IIRC), humans have an area for reading that is specialized on the left hand side that makes it more amenable for reading. The mirror brain area on the right hand side has kept its function from primates. In primates, both sides have the same function.
So what is the function of this magical area?
Experiments have determined that it seems to be used to recognize various kinds of shapes without regard to its three-dimensional orientation. There are a limited number of shapes it can discern, which might indicate that the shapes involved in human reading and writing are bound by certain limitations.
I don't imagine the trouble is in the area itself, given its function, and the fact that young children frequently have 'dyslexic' effects as they learn to read and write (hence the archetypal backwards S and N of children's crayon masterpieces). Spoons and cats don't vary in function by orientation, but b, d, p and q certainly do... so I imagine there's something in post-processing (likely also on the left side) that can learn and handle orientation-specific symbols.
I saw an interesting videotape showing 'normal' folks what it would be like to live with dyslexia. They took all the d's, p's, b's and q's, mixed them up, shuffled the vertical spacing inside words and changes where the spaces were. You could make out what the text was with a little effort, but it drove home the point that if you have to take the time to "decode" something instead of being able to merely "read" it, it's much harder to remember the content.
One interesting comment a dyslexic coworker mentioned to me was that wearing glasses that slowed down reading actually helped. I don't know the theory behind why it works, but good results bear investigation.
> It's cheaper to litigate than actually produce a product
We need a new word to describe this - litigate sounds so 'legitimate'.
I nominate "illitigate".
That sounds appropriately illegitimate. That, and it contains the word 'ill', too, which describes both the proper reaction to said company's actions, as well as doing double duty to describe said company's mental state:)
Answer to question # 42: Trojan is to horse as SCO is to company
Actually, Mike, such a mechanism was proposed by George Lewis LeSage in 1784. The theory keeps on getting shot down, then revitalised in periodic cycles. There are those who have derived Newton's equations from this sort of paradigm, and there are those who have indicated that if gravitons (assuming such a particle is involved) go at the speed of light, there might be problems with orbits.
Side thought: I think I got my don't-close-the-door-on-them attitude to these various theories from being a good debugger. If reality is anything close to the way debugging operates, the same symptom can have multiple causes, but any instance really has one cause...
...and it's hardly ever what any of your initial guesses were, regardless of how sensible they seemed.;)
Let's keep adding terms to the equations
on
Dark Energy Confirmed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Now we've been decelerating...then accelerating?
This is the thing that has been driving me absolutely crazy vis-a-vis the Big Bang theory, is that the practitioners seem to operate under the maxim:
"Keep adding terms until the data fits"
That's not the way science is supposed to work.
We've had a fair share of juggling of terms, including:
"Big Crunch" - gravity will let the universe collapse again
"Flat Universe" - universe will expand forever, but keep slowing down
"Inflationary Universe" - universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a tiny moment (addressing the age and isotropy problems)
Not sure what to call this... "Second wind universe" - universe slows its acceleration before dark energy becomes the reigning cause of repulsion
The Hubble telescope observations are getting awfully close to the predicted age of the universe. I wonder what age-of-the-universe estimate this new theory will predict; something more than 13.7 billion years?
The missing mass in the form of dark matter is, by all accounts, supposed to be mass that attracts; the inflationary universe theory depends on it for flatness. This might be another move 'around' the problem.
The Big Bang theory fell from grace for me over a period of fifteen years. While I don't subscribe to the notions of Velan, I'm curious, yet ambivalent about Alfven's plasma cosmology, there are a number of viable cosmological theories that don't have age, mass or exotic physics problems. It seems we closed the book on alternatives too soon, and are constantly interpreting data so it fits with theory, instead of breaking the back of theory on data.
Proving mathematically that you can never hit a wall must be tempered with observations of a hole in the wall and drunk in front of said wall on his back at a frat party:)
I don't share the same completely dim view of Biotech as you - at least in the sense of the time scale involved. It does seem to take the occasional brave leap forward by a company to "embarrass" some others into making a leap, other times there just happens to be profit in finding something more effective, more 'humane', with less side effects.
A combination of such things helped us progress forward in antidepressants, from monoamine oxidase inhibitors through tricyclics to SSRIs that can be prescribed by almost any practitioner (the book "The Synaptic Self" by Joseph Ledoux has a pretty good history on the subject)
That said, there always seems to be a cycle of 15-20 years from seeing something in a research paper/science magazine to seeing them come to fruition for the sake of humans, some of which I'm sure is related to IP issues, which are tougher to fault in medicine; there's more expense involved, and no direct equivalent of an open source movement:)
New-grown organs will make their way out of the lab slowly, but surely. Techniques with simple tissues, like skin,are already available. More complex multi-tissued organs that have to approximate embryonic growth patterns, kidneys for example, have had some success in animals, including pigs, but the age of the cells used for growth are really important at the moment.
There are two endeavors that will really help out the cause: telomerase research, which is one of the means to 'immortalize' cells - just read of some interesting advances in New Scientist where they've managed to immortalize a human muscle cell line with a hijacked retrovirus. This isn't a good option for most tissues, because it can make benign tumor growths keep growing, so they're trying the same experiment with adenoviruses instead for a 'one shot' version of the same effect.
The other is the nascent science of unravelling histone tails and their meanings. Histones are the spools around which DNA is wrapped. The histone 'tails' appear to determine what parts of the DNA get read/ignored/transcribed at any one time, and is one means outside of the DNA to control protein synthesis. Cracking this code could help us understand what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how histone tails might indicate whether a cell is a neuron, or a liver cell or what have you. It could also indicate why we've had some trouble with cloning (the DNA doesn't change, but the histone code does). Organ growing is akin to cloning on a limited basis, and often requires identical, less specialized or stem cell versions of the tissue you wish to generate.
One interesting fallout of organs grown this way - applied often enough until the technology gets cheap, and you have an interesting alternative to getting meat from animals.
That wouldn't be utopia, mind you. If there's a 'cheaper, more humane way' to get meat, we could lose some farm species. Not to mention that the 'vat meat' might be too uniform, get infected, and would constantly have to be screened for tumors:)
Whatever Bioware's been doing on the Linux client, despite a long turnaround, it works just great.
The only problems I ran into were updating NVidia's drivers (with which you need "nvidia" in your XConfig-4 file, as well as uncommenting/adding Load "glx" to get the OpenGL extensions working properly), and setting it to 24 bpp as a color depth (the NWN client gives a very unhelpful single line "Error" if you do not - discovered the solution in the forums in five minutes, but still...)
Past that, it worked, and was pretty easy to set up, to boot. Did the "./fixinstall" as per their instructions, and "./nwn" brought up the game.
I works indentically to the original - save for the cutscenes (no Bink video port yet), not a single crash on my machine, and snappy. The file access is a little bit faster as well (compared to FAT32), which I can hardly complain about:)
Reduces my excuses for firing up Win98 to do some gaming with:)
I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.
The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society
Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques underway.
I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).
I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?
For an instructive comparison, take a look at the recent DirecTV fiasco and the class action suit going on in relation to it.
I'm sure there are loads of actual pirates getting swept up in that 'sting', but a number of dolphins are getting caught up in the tuna net.
The thing that I found interesting (especially in light of the use of words in this forum such as extortion, barratry and racketeering) was that they've settled on extortion as the grounds for the suit.
If the circumstances are similar here, you'd have to be served a threat by SCO and pay the money to be a plaintiff in a class action suit. They'd be fair targets then, but of course the dire projections of SCO's demise (likely true if their company's inflated skin is as thin as it seems to be) makes a class action suit moot... right at the point where we'd have muscle as end users.
Of course, most of us don't have a clue about how one would go about sitting down, making the calls, making the case, etc. I think we need an FAQ from someone wise in the way of the courts:)
There's plenty of precedent for class action suits against copyright offenders, but I don't think any kernel contributor wants their life turned upside-down, no matter how noble the cause. Would they be able just to be 'named plaintiffs' in a suit that's pretty hard to attach hard damages to?
Parasites exert a lot of pressure
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 1
Disease and parasites can drive populations in bad directions solely for the infection resistance that mutations causing cells to present different markers and the like can bring.
It's always a trite example, but the bad recessive disorder sickle-cell anemia confers resistance to the malaria parasite if you have inherited only one copy of the gene, but deformed blood cells that aren't as efficient if you get two copies.
Some have said it's the same sort of story with Tay-Sachs and tuberculosis, but the jury's still out on whether there's been enough time for the mutation to become that prevalent - I'm sure there will be a few re-estimations of just how fast some mutations occur and spread in future, though, so it remains within the realm of possibility.
You have to wonder what, if anything, the Black Plague might have done to us.
Well, they're begging the question somewhat, but it seems true that globular clusters metal deficient. Jupiter's atmosphere is 82% hydrogen, 14% helium and only a trace of heavier elements. Who knows what goes on at the core, but that would seem to indicate that planets don't need rock to form.
That said, if we found some moons around it somehow at some point in the future, there would be a lot of questions that need answering.
Is it worrying anyone else, though, how thoroughly we're cutting in to the upper estimate of the age of the universe according to Big Bang Theory? Prior guesses on the age of the universe in BBT were in the 9-12 billion range.
Invoking tweaks on inflation theory and 'anti-gravity' via the cosmological constant, the upper limit has been moved up to 15 billion years. Now here we are with a planet... a close planet (all things considered, 7200 light years isn't that far away on a grand scale:), that's 13 billion years old plus star and cluster formation time, and some of the other observations from the furthest visible reaches coming back from ye olde Hubble... how much further can we cut into this without jeopardizing the 15 billion year estimate?
I don't think the aliens would take it kindly if we sent Marklar to try to teach them about Marklar and save their Marklars from Marklar, if we can't even get Marklars here to follow the same Marklar.
There's nothing saying they won't use Java for this project, mind you. Their WebSphere product runs on Linux and is certainly Linux-capable, and their own IBM Developer Kits for Linux feature Java 2 front and center.
Java may be a bit bearish on the UI side, but it's not too shabby for number-crunching with a decent JIT compiler.
I'd personally just love to find out what they're coding it in - they have a lot of options. They may decide to pitch some elegance for performance in the core number-crunching; financial systems make 3D Studio Max look lazy:)
Regardless of development language, I'm glad to see them deploy on Linux; it's a welcome change from all the corporate worried whispering, and it sure thumbs its nose in a hearty way at Darl-ing's visit to frighten Japanese manufacturers away from Linux.
Masaka desu!
If you can read Japanese, you can find out from IBM Japan, "Why Linux?", or heck, it might be a good time to see if they have any jobs available:)
At lot can show through a dust cloud at the right wavelengths, and you don't even have to go as far as radio astronomy to get some good detail of what's going on behind the scenes.
ESO (European Southern Observatory) shows the dark cloud Barnard 68 as it appears in various visible and infrared wavelengths here. It's quite striking how transparent the cloud becomes in the near-infrared.
It's called a grand mal seizure. Well, even that is likely less than 100%;)
I had always thought the origin of the 10% myth was a misquote on 10% "at a time" - thanks for some more of the origins regarding it.
It's pretty unlikely that there's masses of unused neurons hanging around. Neurons are kept alive by having connections - past their initial growing stages, they die by apoptosis voluntarily. This is not a bad thing - one condition, synaesthesia, arises from neurons connecting auditory and visual parts of the brain not dying off.
Most of the 'information' in neurons comes from the connections; on the order of 10,000 in and 10,000 out - the stained cell micrographs you see in textbooks do the real picture no justice. Thoughts are akin to a travelling contour amplitude modulation map (sorry, everyone, your brain operate in AM, not FM:) - the 'contour map' can suffer some degradation of detail from dying neurons or forgetfulness before losing meaning.
Walter J Freeman's book "How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind" is full of interesting information. Someone should help him make a next edition in English (instead of merely using purportedly English words as "limit cycles" and "zero-point attractors") to widen the audience for the fascinating discoveries in the book.
Slashdot Mirror
The ironic thing about that, of course, is that the Chinese remember Nixon quite fondly; he broke through to China with his '72 visit, a pretty amazing feat soon overshadowed by the famous scandal.
...I wonder if China is going to end up as the next stand-in for the old Soviet union. Espionage, nuke stand-offs and a race to the moon are already in the wings.
It's an interesting foray into the supernatural, taking lots of cues from mythologies around the world, and creates its own mythological panorama and pantheon of demigods and strange creatures.
The stories mostly focus on Dream, one of the seven Endless whose domains are the life, death, sleep, trials and emotions of mankind. Dream is the one who feels his responsibilities most deeply, and much of the series revolves around his interaction with mankind, and with his somewhat dysfunctional siblings.
It has spawned off a few series from parts of the mythos it has constructed. There's the Books of Magic, the Books of Faerie, and one of my favorites, Lucifer.
Most of the modern reprints (I'm gathering they're reprints) have some interesting introductions at the beginning by all sorts of famous (in the comic/SF/fantasy arena) folks.
You likely don't have to order them online - even most "regular" bookstores are starting to set up small graphic novels areas, and I haven't seen one of these yet without a Sandman or ten, and used bookstores often have a few.
They're a much different style from the superhero comics, however. It's a lot of myth, mystery and drama, but not much in the way of action. Definitely find out if it's to your tastes before ordering any.
Other comics, like The Invisibles are very interesting, with lots of action, but absolute noodle-benders, and will have you wondering what on earth (or planet of your choice, for that matter) they were smoking.
From some of my readings (New Scientist, IIRC), humans have an area for reading that is specialized on the left hand side that makes it more amenable for reading. The mirror brain area on the right hand side has kept its function from primates. In primates, both sides have the same function.
So what is the function of this magical area?
Experiments have determined that it seems to be used to recognize various kinds of shapes without regard to its three-dimensional orientation. There are a limited number of shapes it can discern, which might indicate that the shapes involved in human reading and writing are bound by certain limitations.
I don't imagine the trouble is in the area itself, given its function, and the fact that young children frequently have 'dyslexic' effects as they learn to read and write (hence the archetypal backwards S and N of children's crayon masterpieces). Spoons and cats don't vary in function by orientation, but b, d, p and q certainly do... so I imagine there's something in post-processing (likely also on the left side) that can learn and handle orientation-specific symbols.
I saw an interesting videotape showing 'normal' folks what it would be like to live with dyslexia. They took all the d's, p's, b's and q's, mixed them up, shuffled the vertical spacing inside words and changes where the spaces were. You could make out what the text was with a little effort, but it drove home the point that if you have to take the time to "decode" something instead of being able to merely "read" it, it's much harder to remember the content.
One interesting comment a dyslexic coworker mentioned to me was that wearing glasses that slowed down reading actually helped. I don't know the theory behind why it works, but good results bear investigation.
> It's cheaper to litigate than actually produce a product
We need a new word to describe this - litigate sounds so 'legitimate'.
I nominate "illitigate".
That sounds appropriately illegitimate. That, and it contains the word 'ill', too, which describes both the proper reaction to said company's actions, as well as doing double duty to describe said company's mental state :)
Answer to question # 42: Trojan is to horse as SCO is to company
Actually, Mike, such a mechanism was proposed by George Lewis LeSage in 1784. The theory keeps on getting shot down, then revitalised in periodic cycles. There are those who have derived Newton's equations from this sort of paradigm, and there are those who have indicated that if gravitons (assuming such a particle is involved) go at the speed of light, there might be problems with orbits.
I prefer to wait and see on the subject. I'm just waiting for the book Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation to arrive for yet more "light reading" :)
Side thought: I think I got my don't-close-the-door-on-them attitude to these various theories from being a good debugger. If reality is anything close to the way debugging operates, the same symptom can have multiple causes, but any instance really has one cause...
...and it's hardly ever what any of your initial guesses were, regardless of how sensible they seemed. ;)
Now we've been decelerating...then accelerating?
This is the thing that has been driving me absolutely crazy vis-a-vis the Big Bang theory, is that the practitioners seem to operate under the maxim:
"Keep adding terms until the data fits"
That's not the way science is supposed to work.
We've had a fair share of juggling of terms, including:
- "Big Crunch" - gravity will let the universe collapse again
- "Flat Universe" - universe will expand forever, but keep slowing down
- "Inflationary Universe" - universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a tiny moment (addressing the age and isotropy problems)
- Not sure what to call this... "Second wind universe" - universe slows its acceleration before dark energy becomes the reigning cause of repulsion
I sincerely doubt it will end there - the Missing Mass problem and the Age of the Universe problem will push the equations incrementally.The Hubble telescope observations are getting awfully close to the predicted age of the universe. I wonder what age-of-the-universe estimate this new theory will predict; something more than 13.7 billion years?
The missing mass in the form of dark matter is, by all accounts, supposed to be mass that attracts; the inflationary universe theory depends on it for flatness. This might be another move 'around' the problem.
The Big Bang theory fell from grace for me over a period of fifteen years. While I don't subscribe to the notions of Velan, I'm curious, yet ambivalent about Alfven's plasma cosmology, there are a number of viable cosmological theories that don't have age, mass or exotic physics problems. It seems we closed the book on alternatives too soon, and are constantly interpreting data so it fits with theory, instead of breaking the back of theory on data.
Proving mathematically that you can never hit a wall must be tempered with observations of a hole in the wall and drunk in front of said wall on his back at a frat party :)
I don't share the same completely dim view of Biotech as you - at least in the sense of the time scale involved. It does seem to take the occasional brave leap forward by a company to "embarrass" some others into making a leap, other times there just happens to be profit in finding something more effective, more 'humane', with less side effects.
A combination of such things helped us progress forward in antidepressants, from monoamine oxidase inhibitors through tricyclics to SSRIs that can be prescribed by almost any practitioner (the book "The Synaptic Self" by Joseph Ledoux has a pretty good history on the subject)
That said, there always seems to be a cycle of 15-20 years from seeing something in a research paper/science magazine to seeing them come to fruition for the sake of humans, some of which I'm sure is related to IP issues, which are tougher to fault in medicine; there's more expense involved, and no direct equivalent of an open source movement :)
New-grown organs will make their way out of the lab slowly, but surely. Techniques with simple tissues, like skin,are already available. More complex multi-tissued organs that have to approximate embryonic growth patterns, kidneys for example, have had some success in animals, including pigs, but the age of the cells used for growth are really important at the moment.
There are two endeavors that will really help out the cause: telomerase research, which is one of the means to 'immortalize' cells - just read of some interesting advances in New Scientist where they've managed to immortalize a human muscle cell line with a hijacked retrovirus. This isn't a good option for most tissues, because it can make benign tumor growths keep growing, so they're trying the same experiment with adenoviruses instead for a 'one shot' version of the same effect.
The other is the nascent science of unravelling histone tails and their meanings. Histones are the spools around which DNA is wrapped. The histone 'tails' appear to determine what parts of the DNA get read/ignored/transcribed at any one time, and is one means outside of the DNA to control protein synthesis. Cracking this code could help us understand what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how histone tails might indicate whether a cell is a neuron, or a liver cell or what have you. It could also indicate why we've had some trouble with cloning (the DNA doesn't change, but the histone code does). Organ growing is akin to cloning on a limited basis, and often requires identical, less specialized or stem cell versions of the tissue you wish to generate.
One interesting fallout of organs grown this way - applied often enough until the technology gets cheap, and you have an interesting alternative to getting meat from animals.
That wouldn't be utopia, mind you. If there's a 'cheaper, more humane way' to get meat, we could lose some farm species. Not to mention that the 'vat meat' might be too uniform, get infected, and would constantly have to be screened for tumors :)
Something to think about :)
Whatever Bioware's been doing on the Linux client, despite a long turnaround, it works just great.
The only problems I ran into were updating NVidia's drivers (with which you need "nvidia" in your XConfig-4 file, as well as uncommenting/adding Load "glx" to get the OpenGL extensions working properly), and setting it to 24 bpp as a color depth (the NWN client gives a very unhelpful single line "Error" if you do not - discovered the solution in the forums in five minutes, but still...)
Past that, it worked, and was pretty easy to set up, to boot. Did the "./fixinstall" as per their instructions, and "./nwn" brought up the game.
I works indentically to the original - save for the cutscenes (no Bink video port yet), not a single crash on my machine, and snappy. The file access is a little bit faster as well (compared to FAT32), which I can hardly complain about :)
Reduces my excuses for firing up Win98 to do some gaming with :)
I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.
The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society
Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques underway.
I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).
I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?
For an instructive comparison, take a look at the recent DirecTV fiasco and the class action suit going on in relation to it.
I'm sure there are loads of actual pirates getting swept up in that 'sting', but a number of dolphins are getting caught up in the tuna net.
The thing that I found interesting (especially in light of the use of words in this forum such as extortion, barratry and racketeering) was that they've settled on extortion as the grounds for the suit.
If the circumstances are similar here, you'd have to be served a threat by SCO and pay the money to be a plaintiff in a class action suit. They'd be fair targets then, but of course the dire projections of SCO's demise (likely true if their company's inflated skin is as thin as it seems to be) makes a class action suit moot... right at the point where we'd have muscle as end users.
Of course, most of us don't have a clue about how one would go about sitting down, making the calls, making the case, etc. I think we need an FAQ from someone wise in the way of the courts :)
There's plenty of precedent for class action suits against copyright offenders, but I don't think any kernel contributor wants their life turned upside-down, no matter how noble the cause. Would they be able just to be 'named plaintiffs' in a suit that's pretty hard to attach hard damages to?
Disease and parasites can drive populations in bad directions solely for the infection resistance that mutations causing cells to present different markers and the like can bring.
It's always a trite example, but the bad recessive disorder sickle-cell anemia confers resistance to the malaria parasite if you have inherited only one copy of the gene, but deformed blood cells that aren't as efficient if you get two copies.
Some have said it's the same sort of story with Tay-Sachs and tuberculosis, but the jury's still out on whether there's been enough time for the mutation to become that prevalent - I'm sure there will be a few re-estimations of just how fast some mutations occur and spread in future, though, so it remains within the realm of possibility.
You have to wonder what, if anything, the Black Plague might have done to us.
Or computers, for that matter :)
Well, they're begging the question somewhat, but it seems true that globular clusters metal deficient. Jupiter's atmosphere is 82% hydrogen, 14% helium and only a trace of heavier elements. Who knows what goes on at the core, but that would seem to indicate that planets don't need rock to form.
That said, if we found some moons around it somehow at some point in the future, there would be a lot of questions that need answering.
Is it worrying anyone else, though, how thoroughly we're cutting in to the upper estimate of the age of the universe according to Big Bang Theory? Prior guesses on the age of the universe in BBT were in the 9-12 billion range.
Invoking tweaks on inflation theory and 'anti-gravity' via the cosmological constant, the upper limit has been moved up to 15 billion years. Now here we are with a planet... a close planet (all things considered, 7200 light years isn't that far away on a grand scale :), that's 13 billion years old plus star and cluster formation time, and some of the other observations from the furthest visible reaches coming back from ye olde Hubble... how much further can we cut into this without jeopardizing the 15 billion year estimate?
Something to consider...
I haven't seen folks point this out, but...
I don't think the aliens would take it kindly if we sent Marklar to try to teach them about Marklar and save their Marklars from Marklar, if we can't even get Marklars here to follow the same Marklar.
They might get offended :)
- NimbleThere's nothing saying they won't use Java for this project, mind you. Their WebSphere product runs on Linux and is certainly Linux-capable, and their own IBM Developer Kits for Linux feature Java 2 front and center.
Java may be a bit bearish on the UI side, but it's not too shabby for number-crunching with a decent JIT compiler.
I'd personally just love to find out what they're coding it in - they have a lot of options. They may decide to pitch some elegance for performance in the core number-crunching; financial systems make 3D Studio Max look lazy :)
Regardless of development language, I'm glad to see them deploy on Linux; it's a welcome change from all the corporate worried whispering, and it sure thumbs its nose in a hearty way at Darl-ing's visit to frighten Japanese manufacturers away from Linux.
Masaka desu!
If you can read Japanese, you can find out from IBM Japan, "Why Linux?", or heck, it might be a good time to see if they have any jobs available :)
At lot can show through a dust cloud at the right wavelengths, and you don't even have to go as far as radio astronomy to get some good detail of what's going on behind the scenes.
ESO (European Southern Observatory) shows the dark cloud Barnard 68 as it appears in various visible and infrared wavelengths here. It's quite striking how transparent the cloud becomes in the near-infrared.
It's called a grand mal seizure. Well, even that is likely less than 100% ;)
I had always thought the origin of the 10% myth was a misquote on 10% "at a time" - thanks for some more of the origins regarding it.
It's pretty unlikely that there's masses of unused neurons hanging around. Neurons are kept alive by having connections - past their initial growing stages, they die by apoptosis voluntarily. This is not a bad thing - one condition, synaesthesia, arises from neurons connecting auditory and visual parts of the brain not dying off.
Most of the 'information' in neurons comes from the connections; on the order of 10,000 in and 10,000 out - the stained cell micrographs you see in textbooks do the real picture no justice. Thoughts are akin to a travelling contour amplitude modulation map (sorry, everyone, your brain operate in AM, not FM :) - the 'contour map' can suffer some degradation of detail from dying neurons or forgetfulness before losing meaning.
Walter J Freeman's book "How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind" is full of interesting information. Someone should help him make a next edition in English (instead of merely using purportedly English words as "limit cycles" and "zero-point attractors") to widen the audience for the fascinating discoveries in the book.