Bird Flu is not some kind of crazy new flu. It is regular flu. It happens to be a strain that is particularly virulent but not so great at spreading from human to human. It is the same virus that causes regular flu but has a chromosomal arrangement that is just not so great for birds or people. That is what makes influenza so versatile and adaptable. It has a rearrangeable chromosome.
I like the part about actual distinctions being reduced to mere epithets but you lose me when that becomes a distinctly American thing.
Also:
American's will tolerate outright evilness on the part of the avowed anti-communist & anti-socialist capitalist businessmen and lobbyists.
So will Europeans. So will Canadians. Also remember that there were plenty of Americans that were perfectly content to tolerate outright evilness on the part of avowed communists & socialists, lest we forget how great Josef Stalin and Pol Pot were.
The problem is that this goes beyond partisan politics. I agree that digg seems to skew left rather than right but that is not really the point is it?
The point is that the very ability to "bury spam" is inherently abusable. It is a simple tyranny of the majority. When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse you end up censoring otherwise popular content. There is no button for "this is not spam" or "this is not lame" in digg. Say something that is mildly unpopular and it can easily be buried.
The problem is that the "bury" criteria are opaque. It is possible (even likely) that a small group is able to bury stories according to their personal agenda which is anathema to a site like digg. I consider this to be as much a problem as spamming stories to the front page. As is the system digg uses is self defeating... it assumes all users opinions are worthwhile whereas slashdot makes you work for your opinion to really means something. There is an "activation energy" to influence stories and comments.
I have found the rapid proliferation of this story across the web really funny. This same lab and this same device have been featured several times on PhysOrg but the moment the word "tricorder" is thrown out there it gets instant net popularity!
My buddy who works in the lab responds and is available to answer questions on his website. The one that has been killing me is the "why does it have to be so big" question. For the love of G-D they condensed a gigantic mass spec into the size of a PC case. These things can weigh hundreds of pounds and now they are even working no an 11 lb version.
This is just getting out of hand. What we need to do is replace Latin characters in DNS with numbers. That way there will international unity through the language of math. Every DNS entry will be a number that points to current IP addresses. I don't know why this hasn't already been implemented. It completely solves "the problem."
Its kind of true and kind of fiction. Cells are often "programmed" with a certain number of divisions and various signals ranging from infection to touching up against other cells signal cells to die and not divide. However, there are plenty of cells that go right on merrily dividing right up to the moment of death. Your liver for instance. It is true that a lot of your cells get a lot less efficient at division as you get older which is one of the reasons for aging. So it is a bit of a mixture of fact and fiction.
It is pretty incredible but they also do this with your personal passwords and others' passwords. Try it! It must be a new safety feature. You can IM your passwords and they just don't go through. It also works with Yahoo email!!!!!!11111one2
This might be it
and better yet THE WHOLE LIST! (This pretty much encapsulates modern politics, copyright law, the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, John Kerry, George Bush, Al Gore, Newsweek, The New York Times, NY Post, and on and on)
And this guy has opened himself to criminal charges for taking pictures of people without their consent.
This is probably not true. In the US at least it is legal to take pictures of anything that can easily be seen from a public place (the tube definitely counts). I can't imagine that it is much different in the UK. There is no need to ask people for their permission.
While it is probably impolite to do the "block-quote-most-of-another-article" approach. This isn't academia we are talking about. Most blogs are like diaries or conversation NOT scientific journals or historical biographies. The important thing would be to tell the difference between a new content, factual blog and a crappy plagarism blog (probably not hard). As far as I can tell this is basically a non-issue.
Even there Hollywood really shows how little they know about science. If you go to the VLA (Very Large Array... the place with all the radio dishes) they actually have a big poster with Jodie Foster sitting on the hood of her car with the headphones on. The caption starts with "While we do not listen to cosmic signals on headphones..." which really makes you think how ridiculous it is to assume that signals collected by a large radio telescope could just be 'listened to' from a laptop with headphones.
You are thinking, quite rightly, of something else. I am almost certain that they do not mean rickets in the article, which is probably the source of the confusion. They probably mean infection with rickettsiae. It turns out that my lab neighbor is in fact one of the small handful of researchers worldwide who study the rickettsiae family of bacteria. They are obligate intercellular bacteria that are the causative agents of typhus, scrub typhus, and rocky mountain spotted fever ("old timey" diseases"). Since they live only inside human cells they are hard to treat and even harder to study, one of the reasons for the comeback.
First CSS now meta tagging and community bookmarks. Whats next!? Will I wake up coffee in hand only to find/. all AJAXed out with satellite imagery and SlashSpace personal pages with photosharing!?? I feel like I am really riding Web 2.0 into the future.
The point is that it is targeted not just large. I feel like people who take the time to delve into/. tend not to be the same kind of people that just spew moronic crap on Digg and the like. The best part about/. is the community that keeps it as good as it is. If you go to a/. tagged bookmark site you have a better idea of what you are going to get.
Seriously they are blatantly publishing all kinds of gene information that our tax money has paid for. I mean what if the Canadians got their hands on all this precious data.
More seriously there are some from a non-geek perspective (it's good to get out a bit):
Dreadful Snake Radio (RSS
A middle aged former musician turned corporate guy. He mixes his love of folk/blues in with his world travels. It is a little "what I did today" but what he does daily is amazing. Everything from podcasting while doing a 5k with his son, while biking in Beijing, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, to Church (state sponsored) in Beijing on Christmas.
Earth & Sky (RSS)
A great public radio science show. It is not always just new science, it is a lot of explanations that you have probably always been curious about. And it is the best way to stay up to date on cool science events (eclipses, meteor showers, that kind of thing)
The plague was largely in Europe, but that was primarily a function of where the population density was at the time. Since plague was spread mostly by infected fleas on rats there needed to be some dense population centers with poor sanitation. Plague is now actually mostly not in developed countries like Europe. There are still a few thousand cases of plague a year in the US. Most cases are in India and Africa now.
Survivors of plague are resistant, but that is not confered to offspring.
Slashdot Mirror
Bird Flu is not some kind of crazy new flu. It is regular flu. It happens to be a strain that is particularly virulent but not so great at spreading from human to human. It is the same virus that causes regular flu but has a chromosomal arrangement that is just not so great for birds or people. That is what makes influenza so versatile and adaptable. It has a rearrangeable chromosome.
no no no OS choice = religion
The point is that the very ability to "bury spam" is inherently abusable. It is a simple tyranny of the majority. When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse you end up censoring otherwise popular content. There is no button for "this is not spam" or "this is not lame" in digg. Say something that is mildly unpopular and it can easily be buried.
The problem is that the "bury" criteria are opaque. It is possible (even likely) that a small group is able to bury stories according to their personal agenda which is anathema to a site like digg. I consider this to be as much a problem as spamming stories to the front page. As is the system digg uses is self defeating... it assumes all users opinions are worthwhile whereas slashdot makes you work for your opinion to really means something. There is an "activation energy" to influence stories and comments.
Exactly right... in the lab a lot of the funding already comes from DHS and DARPA
I have found the rapid proliferation of this story across the web really funny. This same lab and this same device have been featured several times on PhysOrg but the moment the word "tricorder" is thrown out there it gets instant net popularity!
My buddy who works in the lab responds and is available to answer questions on his website. The one that has been killing me is the "why does it have to be so big" question. For the love of G-D they condensed a gigantic mass spec into the size of a PC case. These things can weigh hundreds of pounds and now they are even working no an 11 lb version.
Everyone knows you can't trust a Canadian... you just can't. Thanks MPAAfia!
Is it based in France per chance?
So what band were you in and what did you play on what label? I will see if I can get you some of it.
This is just getting out of hand. What we need to do is replace Latin characters in DNS with numbers. That way there will international unity through the language of math. Every DNS entry will be a number that points to current IP addresses. I don't know why this hasn't already been implemented. It completely solves "the problem."
Its kind of true and kind of fiction. Cells are often "programmed" with a certain number of divisions and various signals ranging from infection to touching up against other cells signal cells to die and not divide. However, there are plenty of cells that go right on merrily dividing right up to the moment of death. Your liver for instance. It is true that a lot of your cells get a lot less efficient at division as you get older which is one of the reasons for aging. So it is a bit of a mixture of fact and fiction.
It is pretty incredible but they also do this with your personal passwords and others' passwords. Try it! It must be a new safety feature. You can IM your passwords and they just don't go through. It also works with Yahoo email!!!!!!11111one2
This might be it and better yet THE WHOLE LIST! (This pretty much encapsulates modern politics, copyright law, the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, John Kerry, George Bush, Al Gore, Newsweek, The New York Times, NY Post, and on and on)
Knowing them kind of gives you an edge.
Ads!? Popups!?
My question is this:
Why the hell are there so many people on Slashdot that haven't heard of the incredible fruits of OSS?
And this guy has opened himself to criminal charges for taking pictures of people without their consent.
This is probably not true. In the US at least it is legal to take pictures of anything that can easily be seen from a public place (the tube definitely counts). I can't imagine that it is much different in the UK. There is no need to ask people for their permission.
While it is probably impolite to do the "block-quote-most-of-another-article" approach. This isn't academia we are talking about. Most blogs are like diaries or conversation NOT scientific journals or historical biographies. The important thing would be to tell the difference between a new content, factual blog and a crappy plagarism blog (probably not hard). As far as I can tell this is basically a non-issue.
Even there Hollywood really shows how little they know about science. If you go to the VLA (Very Large Array... the place with all the radio dishes) they actually have a big poster with Jodie Foster sitting on the hood of her car with the headphones on. The caption starts with "While we do not listen to cosmic signals on headphones..." which really makes you think how ridiculous it is to assume that signals collected by a large radio telescope could just be 'listened to' from a laptop with headphones.
You are thinking, quite rightly, of something else. I am almost certain that they do not mean rickets in the article, which is probably the source of the confusion. They probably mean infection with rickettsiae. It turns out that my lab neighbor is in fact one of the small handful of researchers worldwide who study the rickettsiae family of bacteria. They are obligate intercellular bacteria that are the causative agents of typhus, scrub typhus, and rocky mountain spotted fever ("old timey" diseases"). Since they live only inside human cells they are hard to treat and even harder to study, one of the reasons for the comeback.
First CSS now meta tagging and community bookmarks. Whats next!? Will I wake up coffee in hand only to find /. all AJAXed out with satellite imagery and SlashSpace personal pages with photosharing!?? I feel like I am really riding Web 2.0 into the future.
The point is that it is targeted not just large. I feel like people who take the time to delve into /. tend not to be the same kind of people that just spew moronic crap on Digg and the like. The best part about /. is the community that keeps it as good as it is. If you go to a /. tagged bookmark site you have a better idea of what you are going to get.
Seriously they are blatantly publishing all kinds of gene information that our tax money has paid for. I mean what if the Canadians got their hands on all this precious data.
Obviously the best out there for new music is The Indie Sermons of the Rt. Rev Fischer (RSS).
I might be biased because its mine.More seriously there are some from a non-geek perspective (it's good to get out a bit):
Dreadful Snake Radio (RSS
A middle aged former musician turned corporate guy. He mixes his love of folk/blues in with his world travels. It is a little "what I did today" but what he does daily is amazing. Everything from podcasting while doing a 5k with his son, while biking in Beijing, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, to Church (state sponsored) in Beijing on Christmas.
Rocket Boom
Just great. (actually a video cast)
Earth & Sky (RSS)
A great public radio science show. It is not always just new science, it is a lot of explanations that you have probably always been curious about. And it is the best way to stay up to date on cool science events (eclipses, meteor showers, that kind of thing)
...an n=1 for a good statistical correlation. This is statistically meaningless you cannot establish a trend with one sample.
...if the little Mac Mini melts from a good /.'ing?
The plague was largely in Europe, but that was primarily a function of where the population density was at the time. Since plague was spread mostly by infected fleas on rats there needed to be some dense population centers with poor sanitation. Plague is now actually mostly not in developed countries like Europe. There are still a few thousand cases of plague a year in the US. Most cases are in India and Africa now. Survivors of plague are resistant, but that is not confered to offspring.