Despite the fact that they do speak English, the Germans still dub non-German movies to German. It's one -- albeit small -- reason why I don't go the movies that often.
You're so right... that is my main reason for downloading movies. I can't stand the crappy german dubs anymore. Every now and then, if I really want to see something on the big screen, I drive about 100 kilometers to the next cinema that shows english originals without dub. Regarding the english phrases, especially in commercials, I saw a poll some weeks ago which showed that most of the customers didn't even understand what the phrases really ment... WebEasy, indeed.
Completely right. I would even go so far to say that the nineties showed quite an improvement in overall musical quality, compared to the musical nightmare of the eighties... Besides - I seriously doubt anyone could have downloaded *all* the good music that's out there - if anybody has, please contact me - I'll take my 4 TB raid server to your place to get me a mirror... and I doubt that storage space would suffice.
>>I don't particularly like the original Star Trek
>Let me guess....you use emacs, right?
And there, at first unnoticed in a somewhat offtopic thread on/., it happened. The combination of two flamebaits, the Star-Trek-TOS-vs.-later-series and vi-vs.-emacs debates. Little did the original posters know about what they unleashed, a critical flame-mass triggering the worlds first thermonuclear flamewar. Centuries did it take for historians to recover the way of events from mostly degraded hard disks. Up to now it is heavily debated in the scientific community, whether "frist ps0t!" had anything to do with this, and what kind of deities the mighty "vi" and the world-shattering "emacs" represented...
Unfortunately, I don't know of any decent review on the subject. But I can give you some publications regarding the role of quantum effects on protein interaction and structure:
This should be a good starting point. I can't give you anything regarding membrane environments. As I am working with systems where NMR spectroscopic dynamics data have to be available, I don't get in touch with membrane proteins too much.
I'll talk to my friend, and find out when she plans to publish. If it's soon, I'll post a link to the abstract when it comes out.
This would be appreciated. I'm working in the field of molecular dynamics myself. The link you gave in your previous post referred to the group working on the NAMD molecular dynamics package. As far as I know accurate folding modelling on the level of free molecular dynamics has never been successfully done up to now. Would be a great accomplishment if your friend succeeded at this. Regarding the role of quantum mechanics in folding, there are certainly influences of QM phenomena on structure, dynamics and activity. QM interactions extend farther than the electron shell of single atoms, and govern for example the distribution of bond angles throughout a molecule - one of the major degrees of freedom of a polypeptide chain. This has of course implications for folding and interaction. The actual extent is unclear, though.
But if your take a CMV promoter, put it in front of GFP, and slap into HEK293, what happens?
Ok - but this is really simple. On this level one might design some dangerous concepts - say, by transferring enterotoxin genes or other pathogenicity factors to formerly harmless bacteria. This might cause some problems, but it's far from the easy design of some "superbug" posing a serious threat. If you wanted to design something that is utmost pathogenic, evades the immune system and is resistant to all known antibiotics while being spread rapidly through the air, this "modular approach" won't take you too far. You have to take into account the interactions between the single modules, which is vastly more complicated.
Making an oligo is simple - designing the sequence so that this oligo carries the information you want and ultimately leads to a certain phenotype if cloned and expressed is quite difficult. Depending on the phenotype you want to create, I'd say it may be more difficult than making weapons grade plutonium in many cases. It requires less sophisticated technology, but vastly greater knowledge in many cases.
Two comments on that:
1) Folding predictions sometimes can work - but these are mostly on the basis of sequence homologies - so no real ab initio methods, as the grandparent stated. Even in the case of homology based modelling the accuracy is rather low.
2) We may actually know most of the rules governing biological systems, at least at atomic/molecular resolution. The problem is not only, as you correctly said, that we are dealing with many-body systems. An additional problem is the scale on which the proteins operate. Let us take electrostatics for a simple example. While we know the basic physics of electrostatic interaction, application of these knowledge on modelling electrostatic interactions in proteins suffers two problems. First, we have large problems modelling the dielectricum between two charges in the protein. Second, and perhaps most important, we are dealing with systems on a scale on which quantum mechanics are important - but the systems are far too large for analytical solutions of their wavefunctions. So all modelling tasks, if they involve folding or simple modelling of protein dynamics or interactions, are necessarily a crude approximation at the moment.
democratized molecular manufacturing "printers" would mean the end of conflict based on trade of once-scarce resources.
Err, no... molecular manufacturing "printers" would mean the introduction of artificial scarcity by means of insane lawmaking - DMCA, anyone? Oh, sorry. You said "democratized"... Well in this case, I guess, putting an end to that "Democracy" thing would be rather high on the corporate agenda. Conflict based on trade of scarce resources is the holy, all curing capitalism, after all... So you're talking communism here - and we can't let that happen, can we?
Sorry for the cynical mode.... Should get some sleep.
While I'm not a fuel cell expert, I'm baffed how a fuel cell can run on methanol. Unless it isn't really a fuel cell (a device that produces electric current directly from the H2 + O2 -> H2O process similar to batteries) but rather is one of those micro-turbine units that is just burning the methanol to spin a turbine and an alternator.
Fuel cells can, in principle, run on any redox reaction, that is, any reaction based on the transfer of electrons. So the methanol oxidation is fully capable of driving a fuel cell.
The redox pair in this case would be:
anode: CH3OH + H2O => CO2 + 6H+ + 6e-
cathode: 3/2 O2 + 6 H+ + 6e- => 3 H2O
sum: CH3OH + 3/2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O
Anode and cathode half cells would be separated by a membrane, the protons travel through this membrane, while the electrons are transferred through the external circuit, generating a usable current.
privacy = terrorist...
Perl: Can't modify constant item in scalar assignment at test line 1, near "terrorist;"
This is the most insightful commentary on the whole matter I have seen on/. up to now...
So, demonstrating that our aesthetic perception is intricately linked to mathematical beauty somehow diminishes the value of art? I don't think so.
I think Huffman himself gave the best comment to this: "I don't claim to be an artist. I'm not even sure how to define art," he said. "But I find it natural that the elegant mathematical theorems associated with paper surfaces should lead to visual elegance as well."
It's more a question of speed than of height - with the current design, Spaceship One won't be capable of reaching orbital speeds, which far exceed Mach 3.
So you're saying that the methods we use to do evolution on computers isn't good. I agree. That's why we need more research.
More research won't alleviate the fact that the evaluation of the fitness function is the critical point of every genetic/evolutionary optimization strategy. The fitness function has to be calculated for every individual in the population once in every generation. If this function is rather complex, it soon becomes the single most important factor determining the calculation cost of the algorithm. While in many cases genetic algorithms can be a very efficient method to sample a large phase space, there are other cases where the evaluation of the fitness function is simply to costly in terms of computation time. GAs can be very efficient, but they will never be a general solution for every optimization problem.
I feel.... being drawn into the future... far... very far... wait a moment... i'm getting something, a huge event... that could be it.... naah, sorry... just the violent end of the human race, the machines are taking over... BUT WAIT!! they continue the developement... I'm drawn farther down the timeline... it's very distant now, very weak... there! another disturbance!... no, sorry, just the sun going nova... still farther into the future... again there is something... wait... it's faint, very faint... ahh, no, that appeared to be the heat death of the universe... and still no Duke Nukem Forever Sorry, I have to disapoint you, transdimensional sooth-saying is not my metier. You'll have to ask someone else. That's 150 bucks, please.
Obscure??? Mouse on Mars? Olivia Tremor Control?? GYBE??? Obscure???? Man, where the hell do you live? Especially Mouse on Mars is one of the most innovative electronic bands. I don't see where any of the bands mentioned above is "obscure" or even "pretentious". Try listening!
As far as I know, some geologist from Japan is working on exactly this concept. Didn't he predict a smaller quake in Japan this spring? (Sorry, no time to google myself...)
I agree with you that modern reactors are quite safe - especially the subcritical concept, that has to be constantly powered by a spallation source sounds very promising. But the most dangerous kind of critical failure, be it a "meltdown" or something else, is the one not anticipated.
While we are able to handle fission reactors, we should strongly refrain from overconfidence. Despite all advances in safety measures, nuclear technology is inherently dangerous and should be handled as such. Not with panic, not with overconfidence, but with due care.
Take one old parabolic satellite antenna, remove the receiver. Coat the internal surface of the parabolic dish with reflective tape. Polish. Carry it UPSIDE DOWN until you intend to use it. The focal area of these things is incredibly small. We got about 1.5 kW per square centimeter in the focal point (by rough calculation). Additionally you can use the receiver mount to hold things you want to go up in flames in a rather spectacular way.
And... don't look into mirror with remaining eye...
Well, when civilization is confined to some well defined focal points, mass destruction is quite easy. More distributed societies are more difficult to disrupt und to utterly destroy.
Mods?? Funny?? This could work... Ever seen the strangeness NMR spectroscopists use linear algebra for? On this background I can't help to find this idea quite... interesting.
I'm not really current with the Alzheimer's literature. Generally speaking, amyloid diseases come in different flavours. On the one hand, there are systemic amyloidoses, such as Amyloidosis A, where the amyloid per se is not toxic, but causes damage due to its sheer mass. In extrem cases there are deposits of kilograms of misfolded protein which cause damage by the space the take up and the pressure they exert on organs. On the other hand, there are specific amyloidoses, in particular, the neurodegenerative amyloidoses. As far as I know, there is no common cause for the actual pathogenic features known. In case of Alzheimers there seems to be some evidence for actual cytotoxicity of A(beta) fibrils, but, as far as I know, it is not conclusive. In case of prion diseases, and for example, in case of Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, the identity of the pathogenic species is quite unclear. There is some evidence pointing to a role of prefibrilar oligomeric aggregates as the actual species causing cell death, but the overall role of such aggregates is still unclear.
Slashdot Mirror
You're so right... that is my main reason for downloading movies. I can't stand the crappy german dubs anymore. Every now and then, if I really want to see something on the big screen, I drive about 100 kilometers to the next cinema that shows english originals without dub.
Regarding the english phrases, especially in commercials, I saw a poll some weeks ago which showed that most of the customers didn't even understand what the phrases really ment... WebEasy, indeed.
Completely right. I would even go so far to say that the nineties showed quite an improvement in overall musical quality, compared to the musical nightmare of the eighties... Besides - I seriously doubt anyone could have downloaded *all* the good music that's out there - if anybody has, please contact me - I'll take my 4 TB raid server to your place to get me a mirror... and I doubt that storage space would suffice.
>Let me guess....you use emacs, right?
And there, at first unnoticed in a somewhat offtopic thread on /., it happened. The combination of two flamebaits, the Star-Trek-TOS-vs.-later-series and vi-vs.-emacs debates. Little did the original posters know about what they unleashed, a critical flame-mass triggering the worlds first thermonuclear flamewar. Centuries did it take for historians to recover the way of events from mostly degraded hard disks. Up to now it is heavily debated in the scientific community, whether "frist ps0t!" had anything to do with this, and what kind of deities the mighty "vi" and the world-shattering "emacs" represented...
This should be a good starting point. I can't give you anything regarding membrane environments. As I am working with systems where NMR spectroscopic dynamics data have to be available, I don't get in touch with membrane proteins too much.
This would be appreciated. I'm working in the field of molecular dynamics myself. The link you gave in your previous post referred to the group working on the NAMD molecular dynamics package. As far as I know accurate folding modelling on the level of free molecular dynamics has never been successfully done up to now. Would be a great accomplishment if your friend succeeded at this.
Regarding the role of quantum mechanics in folding, there are certainly influences of QM phenomena on structure, dynamics and activity. QM interactions extend farther than the electron shell of single atoms, and govern for example the distribution of bond angles throughout a molecule - one of the major degrees of freedom of a polypeptide chain. This has of course implications for folding and interaction. The actual extent is unclear, though.
Ok - but this is really simple. On this level one might design some dangerous concepts - say, by transferring enterotoxin genes or other pathogenicity factors to formerly harmless bacteria. This might cause some problems, but it's far from the easy design of some "superbug" posing a serious threat. If you wanted to design something that is utmost pathogenic, evades the immune system and is resistant to all known antibiotics while being spread rapidly through the air, this "modular approach" won't take you too far. You have to take into account the interactions between the single modules, which is vastly more complicated.
Making an oligo is simple - designing the sequence so that this oligo carries the information you want and ultimately leads to a certain phenotype if cloned and expressed is quite difficult. Depending on the phenotype you want to create, I'd say it may be more difficult than making weapons grade plutonium in many cases. It requires less sophisticated technology, but vastly greater knowledge in many cases.
Two comments on that:
1) Folding predictions sometimes can work - but these are mostly on the basis of sequence homologies - so no real ab initio methods, as the grandparent stated. Even in the case of homology based modelling the accuracy is rather low.
2) We may actually know most of the rules governing biological systems, at least at atomic/molecular resolution. The problem is not only, as you correctly said, that we are dealing with many-body systems. An additional problem is the scale on which the proteins operate. Let us take electrostatics for a simple example. While we know the basic physics of electrostatic interaction, application of these knowledge on modelling electrostatic interactions in proteins suffers two problems. First, we have large problems modelling the dielectricum between two charges in the protein. Second, and perhaps most important, we are dealing with systems on a scale on which quantum mechanics are important - but the systems are far too large for analytical solutions of their wavefunctions.
So all modelling tasks, if they involve folding or simple modelling of protein dynamics or interactions, are necessarily a crude approximation at the moment.
RFID tags are passive, meaning they only emit radiation when probed by a scanner. So, no interference with the plane electronics.
Err, no... molecular manufacturing "printers" would mean the introduction of artificial scarcity by means of insane lawmaking - DMCA, anyone?
Oh, sorry. You said "democratized"... Well in this case, I guess, putting an end to that "Democracy" thing would be rather high on the corporate agenda. Conflict based on trade of scarce resources is the holy, all curing capitalism, after all... So you're talking communism here - and we can't let that happen, can we?
Sorry for the cynical mode.... Should get some sleep.
Fuel cells can, in principle, run on any redox reaction, that is, any reaction based on the transfer of electrons. So the methanol oxidation is fully capable of driving a fuel cell.
The redox pair in this case would be:
anode: CH3OH + H2O => CO2 + 6H+ + 6e-
cathode: 3/2 O2 + 6 H+ + 6e- => 3 H2O
sum: CH3OH + 3/2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O
Anode and cathode half cells would be separated by a membrane, the protons travel through this membrane, while the electrons are transferred through the external circuit, generating a usable current.
privacy = terrorist ...
Perl: Can't modify constant item in scalar assignment at test line 1, near "terrorist;" /. up to now...
This is the most insightful commentary on the whole matter I have seen on
I think Huffman himself gave the best comment to this:
"I don't claim to be an artist. I'm not even sure how to define art," he said. "But I find it natural that the elegant mathematical theorems associated with paper surfaces should lead to visual elegance as well."
It's more a question of speed than of height - with the current design, Spaceship One won't be capable of reaching orbital speeds, which far exceed Mach 3.
More research won't alleviate the fact that the evaluation of the fitness function is the critical point of every genetic/evolutionary optimization strategy. The fitness function has to be calculated for every individual in the population once in every generation. If this function is rather complex, it soon becomes the single most important factor determining the calculation cost of the algorithm.
While in many cases genetic algorithms can be a very efficient method to sample a large phase space, there are other cases where the evaluation of the fitness function is simply to costly in terms of computation time. GAs can be very efficient, but they will never be a general solution for every optimization problem.
I feel.... being drawn into the future... far... very far...
wait a moment... i'm getting something, a huge event...
that could be it....
naah, sorry... just the violent end of the human race, the machines are taking over...
BUT WAIT!! they continue the developement...
I'm drawn farther down the timeline... it's very distant now, very weak...
there! another disturbance!... no, sorry, just the sun going nova...
still farther into the future... again there is something...
wait...
it's faint, very faint...
ahh, no, that appeared to be the heat death of the universe...
and still no Duke Nukem Forever
Sorry, I have to disapoint you, transdimensional sooth-saying is not my metier. You'll have to ask someone else. That's 150 bucks, please.
Obscure??? Mouse on Mars? Olivia Tremor Control?? GYBE??? Obscure???? Man, where the hell do you live? Especially Mouse on Mars is one of the most innovative electronic bands. I don't see where any of the bands mentioned above is "obscure" or even "pretentious". Try listening!
As far as I know, some geologist from Japan is working on exactly this concept. Didn't he predict a smaller quake in Japan this spring? (Sorry, no time to google myself...)
While we are able to handle fission reactors, we should strongly refrain from overconfidence. Despite all advances in safety measures, nuclear technology is inherently dangerous and should be handled as such. Not with panic, not with overconfidence, but with due care.
Hah! Now I also know how to reach you on the phone...
And... don't look into mirror with remaining eye...
Well, when civilization is confined to some well defined focal points, mass destruction is quite easy. More distributed societies are more difficult to disrupt und to utterly destroy.
Mods?? Funny?? This could work...
Ever seen the strangeness NMR spectroscopists use linear algebra for? On this background I can't help to find this idea quite... interesting.
I'm not really current with the Alzheimer's literature. Generally speaking, amyloid diseases come in different flavours. On the one hand, there are systemic amyloidoses, such as Amyloidosis A, where the amyloid per se is not toxic, but causes damage due to its sheer mass. In extrem cases there are deposits of kilograms of misfolded protein which cause damage by the space the take up and the pressure they exert on organs.
On the other hand, there are specific amyloidoses, in particular, the neurodegenerative amyloidoses. As far as I know, there is no common cause for the actual pathogenic features known. In case of Alzheimers there seems to be some evidence for actual cytotoxicity of A(beta) fibrils, but, as far as I know, it is not conclusive. In case of prion diseases, and for example, in case of Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, the identity of the pathogenic species is quite unclear. There is some evidence pointing to a role of prefibrilar oligomeric aggregates as the actual species causing cell death, but the overall role of such aggregates is still unclear.
The creepy thing is, one never knows if these options might actually exist...