It takes a lot of effort sequence DNA and odds are the university hadn't actually sequenced the entirety of the DNA that was provided, but just the relevant chromosomes. Likewise, depending upon when the sequencing was done their might be errors or incomplete blocks in the sequences that modern equipment could correct for.
Inflation in part depends upon where you are and speaking purely from the stand point of the United States, the national average was -0.4% for FY2009; however, for FY2010 we are already sitting at 2.35% so any nominal raises have already been overtaken by inflation [Source].
However, the survey was done by the Israeli Army which has a mandatory service period for all non-Arab Israeli citizens, as such, the survey is likely a good cross section of the general demographics of the country.
That's why I'm making reference to the compelling cases as opposed to NDEs in general. For situations where there isn't a loss of brain activity, there are quite a few different reasons for an NDE or NDE-like experience to occur. The interesting ones are the ones were there is a recorded lack of brain activity.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the grandparent says that the compelling NDEs happen during periods of no electrical activity in the brain because most of the NDE research out there says that a period of no electrical activity in the brain occurred during the event. Now as you point out in a roundabout way, we have no way of knowing if the event occurred during that period or not; however, some NDEs also have out of body experiences (OBE) where the individual may report events that occurred during the flat line period. I'd have to dig around a bit to find journal articles and a Google search is going poorly research material filter to the top, but there are peer reviewed articles out there.
If you are really interested in the subject though, you would be remiss to also look into death bed visions (they occurred more before modern palliative care, but still interesting reading since they were very common) and reincarnation ("20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation" is a book that gets mentioned a lot) has some evidence available as well. Now what the explanation for these phenomena is still undecided, but they can make for some interesting reading and discussion.
Religion actually added a pretty interesting dynamic to the game play in Civilization IV, so I'm actually in the group of people that is disappointed to see it go. It gave another route to victory beyond the military or technological routes.
However, I would argue that well written code should also be accompanied by enough well written comments that you should be able to scan the comments to isolate the code that you want to read in-depth. Granted, most code in existence doesn't have the be best comments, but ideally that should be the case.
1. Why are anyone's images being stored anywhere in the first place
This might be some sort of legal or other technically, as the images would be stored in volatile memory on the scanner and the computer that is displaying them.
As far as I can tell, that's why it's listed in a lot of games that originate in Japan. More often than just it seems to be there just to give you a quick idea of the characters personality than anything else.
To be honest, I'm still not convinced that all physical systems can be modeled on a Turing Machine. At this point my understanding of quantum mechanics (mostly via my limited understanding of quantum computing) is that things can get to be a bit under predictable at that level. Granted quantum computers can be simulated on traditional computers, but the field is still so new that I'm not sure we even know enough to know how much we don't know.
I'm burning mod points saying this, but yes, computers are deterministic. As long as you know what the inputs to the system are, you can describe exactly what it will do and break it down to the exact sequence of steps that it will take. In fact, any computing device that we have right now (excluding quantum computers, to an extent) can be fully described using a Turing Machine which is a fully deterministic device.
Why is that though? You want to talk about out dated social mores, the concept that the man is expected to ask the woman out on the date seems to be up there on the list of ones that shouldn't be around any more.
There are a great deal of many people posting here would be positively furious if their code was fixed/rewritten by a female who was a better programmer than them.
Actually, I disagree, I think the vast majority of people would be furious if their code was fixed and/or rewritten by a better programmer than then. Regardless of what your gender is, you have to be aware of observer bias when looking at social interactions, most developers I've met tend to be possessive of their work and don't like it when someone else critiques it, even more so when it is completely scraped in favor of something better.
I didn't know karma-whoring could be so powerful. Weee! 100.000 points! I must be *great!* (My mom loves me...)
This looks a bit like a troll, but I'll bite. The person on Stack Overflow with over 100,000 reputation is Jon Skeet who also happens to write technical books which is part of the reason he has so much reputation on the site. There are a lot of questions on Stack Overflow relating to C# that were answered by Jon Skeet which is where all of those reputation points came from.
Since my original comment seems to be jumping around all over the place in terms of the moderation, I feel the need to clarify my point a bit since people have been missing it. I never meant that herbs are some "magical" substance that is going to cure all of your woes, I was just pointing out to the grandparent (admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek) that some things such as herbal remedies shouldn't automatically be lumped in with "alternative medicine."
Read though the reactions that people have on Slashdot when people mention anything in the realm of alternative medicine and you will note that a lot of people out right dismiss what is being discussed. However, the problem with that is you also run the risk of dismissing something, simply due to association. In the case of herbs, specifically herbalism, from the modern standpoint falls into two realms: the accepted scientific study of herbs to determine if there is a therapeutic effect that can be isolated and the more traditional methods that tend to fall distinctly into the realm psudo-science.
Part of the reason that they herbs shouldn't be out right dismissed, though, is because there may still be plants out there that have therapeutic effects that we are not aware of. Since we can't take a sample of every plant in existence and test to see what it may or may not do since you have to know what to target. Thus, sometimes talking to local "folk healers," more so in remote parts of the world, will sometimes point you in the direction of a plant that is worth investigating.
A good deal of early pharmaceutical research involved going out and finding what "folk medicines" there were and then examining the associated herbs to see if there actually was a therapeutic effect, and if so, what was causing it. I'm not sure how common that still, but it did happen at one point in the past.
I will also be one of the first ones to admit that there is a lot of "noise" when it comes to discussions about alternative medicine, even more so when you consider some of the things that work (e.g. acupuncture) fall under the same heading. However, there are a lot of people (even more so in the scientific community) that will dismiss anything that they think falls into alternative medicine without doing even some basic research to see what the status of something might be.
I hate to be the one to point it out but, isn't that a straw man?
It should be a straw man as I'm not really trying to argue on behalf of everything in the alternative medicine bucket based upon herbalism. Based upon the context of the GP's statement, it appeared that he was lumping them in the same bucket as alternative medicine as a junk science and just wanted to point out that it really wasn't a fair statement.
As for your query in regards to herbs being used to cure cancer, Paclitaxel was derived from Pacific Yew (Taxus brevifolia) and is used in the treatment of various forms of cancer.
What do you define useful as though? The point that I was trying to make in my original comment is that sometimes the bar to launch a formal investigation is placed so high (sometime due to association with "alternative medicine") that we may be overlooking something that does in fact work, but under a mechanism that we don't understand yet. There is always going to be an issue with trying to separate useful information from anecdotal evidence, but we also can't outright dismiss it simply because of the source.
The problem with that experiment is that massage is known to have some therapeutic benefits, so depending upon what the back problem is, a good massage may treat the problem. In a way, your suggestion reveals one of the problems of researching some forms of therapy, namely that there isn't really a good way to do a controlled experiment since there is no way to have a proper control.
However, the obvious question then becomes the following: at what point should anecdotal evidence be considered enough to actually warrant a controlled invigilation? Granted you can't investigate every single claim out there, but at some point someone should conduct a formal investigation.
Actually, over the course of history herbs have been proven time and time again to have a therapeutic effect and can also be an effective treatment of illness (e.g. Cinchona bark) so you need to be careful about how you dismiss herbs as they don't always belong under the heading of "alternative medicine."
If it is a programming type position, I would likely ask then the check list of questions offered by the Joel Test and make sure they have really good reasons for any negative responses. Also, based upon my own experiences, I would add one more question to that list, "What is the background of the person that will be my supervisor?" For a position that involves you writing a lot of code, having someone that is not familiar with the process as your supervisor is definitely a negative.
The 40 hours of entertainment depends heavily upon what type of games you like though. Some of the FPS games are fairly short (10 - 15 hours) and the multiplayer is what makes or breaks them. One with good multiplayer will likely get several hundred hours of play time where as one with bad multiplayer may not even get much more than one or two matches.
That's such a loaded statement I think I'll just step around it and hope it doesn't detonate...
While I will agree that I could have phrased that much better (suggestions anyone?) I think the spirit came though in that not all men think that women should be "young, supple, well-rounded, etc." Also, this whole subject tends to be a two way street in that woman also have a mental image of what the "ideal" man should look like, the big difference tends to be that most men don't care as much about their personal body image.
I suppose shouting "dyke!" in a crowded internet forum would be bad form?
Also, I didn't mean the meeting other people comment in a negative way and it doesn't help that my phrasing was horrible as well as that should have been "...and need to go somewhere else to meet different people?" Thus, I apologize for any offense I might have caused. What I was trying to get at was if you don't like the men you are meeting, perhaps you are trying to meet them at the wrong type of places? I've had problems meeting women before in the past, turns out that I wasn't going to meet the type of women that I wanted where I was going, change of venue and things are going a little bit better.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes a lot of effort sequence DNA and odds are the university hadn't actually sequenced the entirety of the DNA that was provided, but just the relevant chromosomes. Likewise, depending upon when the sequencing was done their might be errors or incomplete blocks in the sequences that modern equipment could correct for.
Inflation in part depends upon where you are and speaking purely from the stand point of the United States, the national average was -0.4% for FY2009; however, for FY2010 we are already sitting at 2.35% so any nominal raises have already been overtaken by inflation [Source].
However, the survey was done by the Israeli Army which has a mandatory service period for all non-Arab Israeli citizens, as such, the survey is likely a good cross section of the general demographics of the country.
That's why I'm making reference to the compelling cases as opposed to NDEs in general. For situations where there isn't a loss of brain activity, there are quite a few different reasons for an NDE or NDE-like experience to occur. The interesting ones are the ones were there is a recorded lack of brain activity.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the grandparent says that the compelling NDEs happen during periods of no electrical activity in the brain because most of the NDE research out there says that a period of no electrical activity in the brain occurred during the event. Now as you point out in a roundabout way, we have no way of knowing if the event occurred during that period or not; however, some NDEs also have out of body experiences (OBE) where the individual may report events that occurred during the flat line period. I'd have to dig around a bit to find journal articles and a Google search is going poorly research material filter to the top, but there are peer reviewed articles out there.
If you are really interested in the subject though, you would be remiss to also look into death bed visions (they occurred more before modern palliative care, but still interesting reading since they were very common) and reincarnation ("20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation" is a book that gets mentioned a lot) has some evidence available as well. Now what the explanation for these phenomena is still undecided, but they can make for some interesting reading and discussion.
Religion actually added a pretty interesting dynamic to the game play in Civilization IV, so I'm actually in the group of people that is disappointed to see it go. It gave another route to victory beyond the military or technological routes.
However, I would argue that well written code should also be accompanied by enough well written comments that you should be able to scan the comments to isolate the code that you want to read in-depth. Granted, most code in existence doesn't have the be best comments, but ideally that should be the case.
1. Why are anyone's images being stored anywhere in the first place
This might be some sort of legal or other technically, as the images would be stored in volatile memory on the scanner and the computer that is displaying them.
As far as I can tell, that's why it's listed in a lot of games that originate in Japan. More often than just it seems to be there just to give you a quick idea of the characters personality than anything else.
To be honest, I'm still not convinced that all physical systems can be modeled on a Turing Machine. At this point my understanding of quantum mechanics (mostly via my limited understanding of quantum computing) is that things can get to be a bit under predictable at that level. Granted quantum computers can be simulated on traditional computers, but the field is still so new that I'm not sure we even know enough to know how much we don't know.
I'm burning mod points saying this, but yes, computers are deterministic. As long as you know what the inputs to the system are, you can describe exactly what it will do and break it down to the exact sequence of steps that it will take. In fact, any computing device that we have right now (excluding quantum computers, to an extent) can be fully described using a Turing Machine which is a fully deterministic device.
Why is that though? You want to talk about out dated social mores, the concept that the man is expected to ask the woman out on the date seems to be up there on the list of ones that shouldn't be around any more.
There are a great deal of many people posting here would be positively furious if their code was fixed/rewritten by a female who was a better programmer than them.
Actually, I disagree, I think the vast majority of people would be furious if their code was fixed and/or rewritten by a better programmer than then. Regardless of what your gender is, you have to be aware of observer bias when looking at social interactions, most developers I've met tend to be possessive of their work and don't like it when someone else critiques it, even more so when it is completely scraped in favor of something better.
Actually, it is the lazy programmers way of writing "manual" as in "Go read the manual."
I didn't know karma-whoring could be so powerful. Weee! 100.000 points! I must be *great!* (My mom loves me...)
This looks a bit like a troll, but I'll bite. The person on Stack Overflow with over 100,000 reputation is Jon Skeet who also happens to write technical books which is part of the reason he has so much reputation on the site. There are a lot of questions on Stack Overflow relating to C# that were answered by Jon Skeet which is where all of those reputation points came from.
Since my original comment seems to be jumping around all over the place in terms of the moderation, I feel the need to clarify my point a bit since people have been missing it. I never meant that herbs are some "magical" substance that is going to cure all of your woes, I was just pointing out to the grandparent (admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek) that some things such as herbal remedies shouldn't automatically be lumped in with "alternative medicine."
Read though the reactions that people have on Slashdot when people mention anything in the realm of alternative medicine and you will note that a lot of people out right dismiss what is being discussed. However, the problem with that is you also run the risk of dismissing something, simply due to association. In the case of herbs, specifically herbalism, from the modern standpoint falls into two realms: the accepted scientific study of herbs to determine if there is a therapeutic effect that can be isolated and the more traditional methods that tend to fall distinctly into the realm psudo-science.
Part of the reason that they herbs shouldn't be out right dismissed, though, is because there may still be plants out there that have therapeutic effects that we are not aware of. Since we can't take a sample of every plant in existence and test to see what it may or may not do since you have to know what to target. Thus, sometimes talking to local "folk healers," more so in remote parts of the world, will sometimes point you in the direction of a plant that is worth investigating.
A good deal of early pharmaceutical research involved going out and finding what "folk medicines" there were and then examining the associated herbs to see if there actually was a therapeutic effect, and if so, what was causing it. I'm not sure how common that still, but it did happen at one point in the past.
I will also be one of the first ones to admit that there is a lot of "noise" when it comes to discussions about alternative medicine, even more so when you consider some of the things that work (e.g. acupuncture) fall under the same heading. However, there are a lot of people (even more so in the scientific community) that will dismiss anything that they think falls into alternative medicine without doing even some basic research to see what the status of something might be.
I hate to be the one to point it out but, isn't that a straw man?
It should be a straw man as I'm not really trying to argue on behalf of everything in the alternative medicine bucket based upon herbalism. Based upon the context of the GP's statement, it appeared that he was lumping them in the same bucket as alternative medicine as a junk science and just wanted to point out that it really wasn't a fair statement.
As for your query in regards to herbs being used to cure cancer, Paclitaxel was derived from Pacific Yew (Taxus brevifolia) and is used in the treatment of various forms of cancer.
Useful anecdotal evidence...
What do you define useful as though? The point that I was trying to make in my original comment is that sometimes the bar to launch a formal investigation is placed so high (sometime due to association with "alternative medicine") that we may be overlooking something that does in fact work, but under a mechanism that we don't understand yet. There is always going to be an issue with trying to separate useful information from anecdotal evidence, but we also can't outright dismiss it simply because of the source.
The problem with that experiment is that massage is known to have some therapeutic benefits, so depending upon what the back problem is, a good massage may treat the problem. In a way, your suggestion reveals one of the problems of researching some forms of therapy, namely that there isn't really a good way to do a controlled experiment since there is no way to have a proper control.
However, the obvious question then becomes the following: at what point should anecdotal evidence be considered enough to actually warrant a controlled invigilation? Granted you can't investigate every single claim out there, but at some point someone should conduct a formal investigation.
Actually, over the course of history herbs have been proven time and time again to have a therapeutic effect and can also be an effective treatment of illness (e.g. Cinchona bark) so you need to be careful about how you dismiss herbs as they don't always belong under the heading of "alternative medicine."
If it is a programming type position, I would likely ask then the check list of questions offered by the Joel Test and make sure they have really good reasons for any negative responses. Also, based upon my own experiences, I would add one more question to that list, "What is the background of the person that will be my supervisor?" For a position that involves you writing a lot of code, having someone that is not familiar with the process as your supervisor is definitely a negative.
The 40 hours of entertainment depends heavily upon what type of games you like though. Some of the FPS games are fairly short (10 - 15 hours) and the multiplayer is what makes or breaks them. One with good multiplayer will likely get several hundred hours of play time where as one with bad multiplayer may not even get much more than one or two matches.
That's such a loaded statement I think I'll just step around it and hope it doesn't detonate...
While I will agree that I could have phrased that much better (suggestions anyone?) I think the spirit came though in that not all men think that women should be "young, supple, well-rounded, etc." Also, this whole subject tends to be a two way street in that woman also have a mental image of what the "ideal" man should look like, the big difference tends to be that most men don't care as much about their personal body image.
I suppose shouting "dyke!" in a crowded internet forum would be bad form?
Also, I didn't mean the meeting other people comment in a negative way and it doesn't help that my phrasing was horrible as well as that should have been "...and need to go somewhere else to meet different people?" Thus, I apologize for any offense I might have caused. What I was trying to get at was if you don't like the men you are meeting, perhaps you are trying to meet them at the wrong type of places? I've had problems meeting women before in the past, turns out that I wasn't going to meet the type of women that I wanted where I was going, change of venue and things are going a little bit better.