Right so the real question (in the terms of this metaphor) is how did that compiler get coded without a compiler? The chicken/egg problem is that if DNA codes the machinery that allows DNA to code any machinery then how did that process actually occur naturally. It is one thing to use existing machinery to create modified proteins using synthesized DNA (this occurs constantly in biology) but it is another to "create life." This is one of the important questions in this field. These scientists will almost certainly be sucessful in coopting E. coli cellular machinery to create a "synthetic" organism but it is hardly completely original in an evolutionary sense. This is not to be taken as an attack on the science because this will no doubt yield good results if successful, but is it truly "synthesizing life?"
This is something that is really, truly interesting. I am curious as to what they will consider a "human crafted" organism. I work in a virology lab and in the field there are often "frankenstein" viruses that are created to preform certain tasks. I know many people do not consider viruses to be living, but you are getting pretty darn close. Also, the viruses that are created (actually quite often) are usually combinations of parts of DNA sequence from a variety of viruses. Literally just last week I created an engineered virus that will insert the DNA that codes the protein USP18 into human cell cultures (huh-7.5 cells... modified human hepatoma 7 cells). The goal is actually to support or detract from the conclusion of the linked paper. The virus in question is basically a highly modified form of HIV. It has certain elements that are exactly the same as HIV but there are large portions (the parts that make it really pathogenic) that are removed and other things are added (promoters and insertions sites to allow the USP18 -or whatever- to be inserted).
The long and short of it is. These "life forms" are significantly different from their naturally occuring cousins. They are this way by nature of human engineering. This argument can also be extended to bacteria that have been highly modified. There are laboratory strains of almost every bacteria that we know of that are significantly different from wild type bacteria. I am curious as to where they will draw the line. From the article is appears that they are paring down mycoplasma to the barest bones.
The other question is, once you have the DNA how do you kickstart the process. They appear to be inserting it into and E. coli with the nucleus removed. This means that the cellular machinery of the E. coli will be used to translate the DNA into protein and eventually a new synthetic cell. Does this mean that it is human created if we use naturally occuring cellular machinery?
I don't mean to detract from the research in any way because it is highly interesting and will tell us a lot about how life works on the most basic level, BUT there are a lot of questions out there and I hope that people keep them in mind as we see this field develop over the next several years.
Well that is all a question of environment. We get lyophilized primers (~15-25bp) sent to us at room temperature all the time. In fact, we incubate long strands of DNA at temperatures of 95C all the time. We even do the same with long strands of RNA (the 10,000 bp RNA genome of Hepatitic C Virus). Brian Sykes at Oxford even made a big splash by exctracting 9,000+ year old mitochondrial DNA from the "Cheddar Man," not to mention other famous historical figures.
Making a blanket statement like "DNA is a delicate molecule" or "this will never be useful" is not necessarily correct. It is more correct to say "DNA can be delicate in the wrong conditions" and "this does not have applications, yet." Now, will we overcome the cost of synthesizing DNA? Perhaps. The cost of DNA synthesizing oligonucletides (15-20bp) has dropped dramatically in the last few years. Now will this be useful in making nano-toaster ovens or other more "industrial" tech? Probably not, but neither article really proposes anything like that. Also DNA is a lot less expensive than certain chemicals that are used in trace amounts in all sorts of tech and industrial applications. The field really seems to be wide open.
Ned Seeman's work is slightly different but along the exact same lines. Also, of course he has been doing it for years! A lot of people have been working on this for years. The scientific community is all for competition. Simply because Dr. Seeman has been working on this doesn't somehow invalidate this study. People have also been working on broadband over powerlines for several years. Is that now "old non news?"
YOU probably can't build a whole person from your DNA. Highly advanced scientists in the field of cloning may be able to. YOU probably need a girlfriend first.
So I deal with hand surgeons on a very regular basis (and these are top of the line international teaching surgeons to boot) and the concencus I get from them is that the act of typing itself is not necessarily what is causing the inflammation on the nerve. For example:
Take your hands and hold them out in front of you with your elbows touching your ribcage and forearms extended directly out, parallel to the floor, palms down and also parallel to the floor.
Now move your your hands together so your thumbs touch.
Now move your hands (thumbs still touching) toward your chest.
If you did all of that correctly you would see how the angle of your wrists becomes and less natural. Now imagine typing with your standard (or worse.. laptop) keyoard close to your chest. The unnatural angle does not bode well for your wrist.
Basically 75% (rough number) of people that come into these docs complaining of chronic wrist pain don't even need splints. They are advised to get a trackball (much easier on the wrists), type with the keyboard farther away, and have the top of the monitor at eye level, and sometimes to get an ergonomic keyboard. Most people report that their symptoms are gone within 2-4 weeks if they keep up their new setup. I know a lot of/.'ers are pretty down on things like ergonomic keyboards and consider them little more than overpriced gimmicks but the truth is they are a far cry less expensive than carpal tunnel surgery and relatively effective.
As a microbiologist I can also tell you that pretty much any disease/disorder/etc. is influenced by things like genetics, age, weight, hormone levels, etc. etc. Saying that carpal tunnel isn't affected by poor body angle and repetetive motions (like typing) is like saying that skin cancer isn't caused by bathing yourself in UV radiation all day and that it is only attributable to genetics, and body type. The other problem with this report (which we also have not seen yet) is that it is a correlation study in the negative. They are saying that they cannot find a correlation so therefore it must not exist. That is even worse that the positive correlation studies where two trends coincide so they conclude causation. My view is that typing does aggravate carpal tunnel but so does genetics that make you susceptible to inflammation.
Well I never really considered little yellow cloth stars or number tattoos "good" or "evil" in and of themselves... but you know while we are at it lets brand everyone's social security number on their arm... you know so you can't lie to women at bars about being Leonardo DiCaprio.
Well duh... the only problem that people fail to realize effectively is that we are at a serious disadvatage (not so much in the cyber realm) but in the actual espionage realm. China is free to sponsor students to come to the US (and they do regularly). Chinese embassies hold yearly meetings and invite the sponsored students to the embassies and they don't talk about the weather. This is actually fairly commmon in academic fields (even in my field of microbiology). It barely even rates as espionage in most cases because the data will get published in public journals. Now you try running that with a white guy in China who doesn't speak any Chinese language well. Its not going to be easy. Whereas you see someone in science here who is Chinese with good to poor English speaking skill you don't think twice. So in a certain sense it is a ONE WAY street. They are mining a lot of useful intelligence from us and all we can do is supply it.
I am actually really suprised that there is no way to edit the RSS for an entry in the iTMS podcast directory. I ran into this problem through a far less worriesome way. When I initially started my indie rock podcast the setup was less than optimal so after two shows my friend who runs the tech side of our website re-worked the entire site (much for the better) but that meant that my podcast listing in the iTMS was broken. After some emails to Apple I have found that there is no way to effectively take care of this. I cannot edit the broken XML so my only recourse is to delete and relist or recreate a folder that no longer exists in order to host an RSS file that redirects people to my new RSS but all the subscribers would remain pointed to the wrong RSS feed. Luckily I don't have anyone subscribed that way because it was my first two shows. One would think that apple would have thought of this and I could just log in under the account I posted it as in order change the RSS feed...
...As a former college DJ and current podcaster I can say that radio is in need of a bit of a shakeup. The rules that govern radio are so bizarre and Clear Channel/Emmis/etc. has such a strangle on what we hear that radio has become little more than a mouthpiece for the RIAA. Look at the recent settlements for payola. The big labels pay DJ's to play what they want to sell effectively making most "music" just a big commercial for whatever "hot new album" Sony wants to sell. This means that ad supported music radio is really just one big ad.
It also means that corporate radio isn't playing what you want to hear, and they certainly aren't going to play anything that is truly alternative. So the fact that companies and people are doing everything they can to get their music in some other way, including paying more for it, is not really surprising.
Hopefully if corporate focus shifts away from radio then there will be more room for what (IMHO) radio should be for and that is local programming, independent music, giving listeners some choice in hearing new and interesting music, instead of the same angsty teen rock song sliced 10 different ways by 5 different bands or the exact same backbeat and harmony repackaged as a different song by 12 poptart starlettes.
That the government can offer a better service for free... with the kind of service I have gotten out of US telco's I can see why they can't sell their product. No one complains that we don't have private roads. Maybe internet service needs to be free. It is certainly becoming necessary to normal cultural development. So what happens is the government provides basic access and if you want faster then you pay. That will certainly put pressure on the market to fix the current state of insanity that is US internet services.
The truth is that even stupid non-l33t folks can just put a screwdriver across the solenoid contacts. Do you think that car mechanics are all gifted hackers? Hell no... go for the simple mechanical workarounds.
well I guess I should have said that it marks the gradual and very nautural hearing loss that makes all of this possible.... as we get older the finer 'hairs' in our inner ears that detect high pitched frequencies wear out first. This is why teens hear sounds many oldsters dont.
This is EXACTLY what I pulled in my undergraduate 'Modern Electronics' class. When we used small speakers I could adjust the frequency to a positively epilepsy inducing sound (especially if you ran the speakers on square wave functions with slight frequency scanning) that caused most of my classmates considerable discomfort but my professor (a fan of loud and live rock shows) could hear nothing. The best part is that he was proud that he was "immune" even though it indicates the beginnings of hearing loss.
I have been a happy (and donating) user of Last FM formerly Audioscrobbler. They do a really good job of matching up music tastes and their radio program is good. They also have a plugin that allows you to submit what you play from most major audio players so you can track what you listen to and compare with others. They have full tagging capabilities and extensive forums as well as music 'groups' of like minded appreciators. I have been very impressed and I admit I haven't played with Pandora much but it doesn't seem too much better/different.
this really seems to be a PR plant by iDefense (they seem to be spending a little marketing cash to get us worried about keyloggers)
Other planted articles that are startlingly similar:
The actual verisign press release with a cute graph
PC World with a seemingly verbatim copy of the press release
Again from Tech News World
And C|Net's news.com.com even copies the fun and [extreme sarcasm]ever so statistically meaningful[/extreme sarcasm] graph
It is nice to note that VerisSign's Nasdaq abbreviation appears in all of these articles within the first sentence. So I wouldn't be too worried because its not surprising that VeriSign wants us to fear keyloggers.
This seems in the same vein as the ICANN/Root Servers debate. Who controls things like this in an ever more connected world. My view is if it isn't broken why mess with it?
From the article it seems like the leap second is annoying but the leap hour is too much and not frequent enough. If it really that much trouble to keep resetting high precision clocks then why not compromise at leap 10 seconds or some other standard.
I wonder if I'm alone in just wishing that consoles looked like stereo components and fit in my rack without scary balancing acts and lopsided aesthetics. A Gamecube, PS2, and X-Box can not be stacked nicely.
I bet that this is actually a calulated move. This way their product is not just some anonymous unit in a rack of stereo equipment. This way it is sitting out by itself in its own area in many cases where visitors etc. look at it and see exactly what you have. My guess is that it is pure and simple advertising. When you think about it very few game consoles have been 'stackable' and almost all of them have a distinctive shape and pattern.
As a molecular biologist I am curious what part of my science actually supports intelligent design?
The problem is that intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE. Science is the logical analysis of observed data. Itelligent Design accepts that it is not possible to describe the emergence of species. At the point where you state that it is impossible to analyze things based on observable evidence you stop being science. If for no other reason that intelligent design is not science I think it should be left out of science classes.
There is an enourmous difference between pointing out the holes in a theory and abandoning the scientific process. That is what they appear to be doing here.
"Oh there are still things we don't know about evolution"
"That means that science can't describe what we see."
"I see... so lets abandon the scientific process because it hasn't really ever definitively described anything"
"Exactly like the 'theory of gravitation' which we also can't prove."
"Well lets still teach evolution but then teach 'crazy' along with it."
Personally, I hope that having to pay $117,000 whenever they fuck up will make school officials a bit more conservative in their exercise of authority.
Probably not... I mean its 'our' (if you are in that school district) tax dollars that just payed them and schools still need the same amount of money to run (only now add $117,000). I am however, in FULL support of this decision. The same is true of the recent myspace "terror threat." For those that don't know some kids put up some text on their myspace pages talking about bringing guns to school and killing everyone. So the next day only 400 out of more than a thousand students came to class. The kids were charged (very rightly) with a couple felonies. The problem is that all the parents and administrators are all charged up and ready to go after myspace somehow claiming it was their fault... somehow for allowing people to post whatever they want on the webpage they provide. I know... baffling.
It just seems IMHO that the operating system itself shouldn't allow spyware. Will "Defender" also block commercially bundled "spyware?" Will it allow any old "official" spyware free reign on your system? I feel like this is a lose/lose for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Right so the real question (in the terms of this metaphor) is how did that compiler get coded without a compiler? The chicken/egg problem is that if DNA codes the machinery that allows DNA to code any machinery then how did that process actually occur naturally. It is one thing to use existing machinery to create modified proteins using synthesized DNA (this occurs constantly in biology) but it is another to "create life." This is one of the important questions in this field. These scientists will almost certainly be sucessful in coopting E. coli cellular machinery to create a "synthetic" organism but it is hardly completely original in an evolutionary sense. This is not to be taken as an attack on the science because this will no doubt yield good results if successful, but is it truly "synthesizing life?"
The long and short of it is. These "life forms" are significantly different from their naturally occuring cousins. They are this way by nature of human engineering. This argument can also be extended to bacteria that have been highly modified. There are laboratory strains of almost every bacteria that we know of that are significantly different from wild type bacteria. I am curious as to where they will draw the line. From the article is appears that they are paring down mycoplasma to the barest bones.
The other question is, once you have the DNA how do you kickstart the process. They appear to be inserting it into and E. coli with the nucleus removed. This means that the cellular machinery of the E. coli will be used to translate the DNA into protein and eventually a new synthetic cell. Does this mean that it is human created if we use naturally occuring cellular machinery?
I don't mean to detract from the research in any way because it is highly interesting and will tell us a lot about how life works on the most basic level, BUT there are a lot of questions out there and I hope that people keep them in mind as we see this field develop over the next several years.
Making a blanket statement like "DNA is a delicate molecule" or "this will never be useful" is not necessarily correct. It is more correct to say "DNA can be delicate in the wrong conditions" and "this does not have applications, yet." Now, will we overcome the cost of synthesizing DNA? Perhaps. The cost of DNA synthesizing oligonucletides (15-20bp) has dropped dramatically in the last few years. Now will this be useful in making nano-toaster ovens or other more "industrial" tech? Probably not, but neither article really proposes anything like that. Also DNA is a lot less expensive than certain chemicals that are used in trace amounts in all sorts of tech and industrial applications. The field really seems to be wide open.
Ned Seeman's work is slightly different but along the exact same lines. Also, of course he has been doing it for years! A lot of people have been working on this for years. The scientific community is all for competition. Simply because Dr. Seeman has been working on this doesn't somehow invalidate this study. People have also been working on broadband over powerlines for several years. Is that now "old non news?"
YOU probably can't build a whole person from your DNA. Highly advanced scientists in the field of cloning may be able to. YOU probably need a girlfriend first.
If you did all of that correctly you would see how the angle of your wrists becomes and less natural. Now imagine typing with your standard (or worse.. laptop) keyoard close to your chest. The unnatural angle does not bode well for your wrist.
Basically 75% (rough number) of people that come into these docs complaining of chronic wrist pain don't even need splints. They are advised to get a trackball (much easier on the wrists), type with the keyboard farther away, and have the top of the monitor at eye level, and sometimes to get an ergonomic keyboard. Most people report that their symptoms are gone within 2-4 weeks if they keep up their new setup. I know a lot of /.'ers are pretty down on things like ergonomic keyboards and consider them little more than overpriced gimmicks but the truth is they are a far cry less expensive than carpal tunnel surgery and relatively effective.
As a microbiologist I can also tell you that pretty much any disease/disorder/etc. is influenced by things like genetics, age, weight, hormone levels, etc. etc. Saying that carpal tunnel isn't affected by poor body angle and repetetive motions (like typing) is like saying that skin cancer isn't caused by bathing yourself in UV radiation all day and that it is only attributable to genetics, and body type. The other problem with this report (which we also have not seen yet) is that it is a correlation study in the negative. They are saying that they cannot find a correlation so therefore it must not exist. That is even worse that the positive correlation studies where two trends coincide so they conclude causation. My view is that typing does aggravate carpal tunnel but so does genetics that make you susceptible to inflammation.
Well I never really considered little yellow cloth stars or number tattoos "good" or "evil" in and of themselves... but you know while we are at it lets brand everyone's social security number on their arm... you know so you can't lie to women at bars about being Leonardo DiCaprio.
Well duh... the only problem that people fail to realize effectively is that we are at a serious disadvatage (not so much in the cyber realm) but in the actual espionage realm. China is free to sponsor students to come to the US (and they do regularly). Chinese embassies hold yearly meetings and invite the sponsored students to the embassies and they don't talk about the weather. This is actually fairly commmon in academic fields (even in my field of microbiology). It barely even rates as espionage in most cases because the data will get published in public journals. Now you try running that with a white guy in China who doesn't speak any Chinese language well. Its not going to be easy. Whereas you see someone in science here who is Chinese with good to poor English speaking skill you don't think twice. So in a certain sense it is a ONE WAY street. They are mining a lot of useful intelligence from us and all we can do is supply it.
I am actually really suprised that there is no way to edit the RSS for an entry in the iTMS podcast directory. I ran into this problem through a far less worriesome way. When I initially started my indie rock podcast the setup was less than optimal so after two shows my friend who runs the tech side of our website re-worked the entire site (much for the better) but that meant that my podcast listing in the iTMS was broken. After some emails to Apple I have found that there is no way to effectively take care of this. I cannot edit the broken XML so my only recourse is to delete and relist or recreate a folder that no longer exists in order to host an RSS file that redirects people to my new RSS but all the subscribers would remain pointed to the wrong RSS feed. Luckily I don't have anyone subscribed that way because it was my first two shows. One would think that apple would have thought of this and I could just log in under the account I posted it as in order change the RSS feed...
It also means that corporate radio isn't playing what you want to hear, and they certainly aren't going to play anything that is truly alternative. So the fact that companies and people are doing everything they can to get their music in some other way, including paying more for it, is not really surprising.
Hopefully if corporate focus shifts away from radio then there will be more room for what (IMHO) radio should be for and that is local programming, independent music, giving listeners some choice in hearing new and interesting music, instead of the same angsty teen rock song sliced 10 different ways by 5 different bands or the exact same backbeat and harmony repackaged as a different song by 12 poptart starlettes.
That the government can offer a better service for free... with the kind of service I have gotten out of US telco's I can see why they can't sell their product. No one complains that we don't have private roads. Maybe internet service needs to be free. It is certainly becoming necessary to normal cultural development. So what happens is the government provides basic access and if you want faster then you pay. That will certainly put pressure on the market to fix the current state of insanity that is US internet services.
The truth is that even stupid non-l33t folks can just put a screwdriver across the solenoid contacts. Do you think that car mechanics are all gifted hackers? Hell no... go for the simple mechanical workarounds.
well I guess I should have said that it marks the gradual and very nautural hearing loss that makes all of this possible.... as we get older the finer 'hairs' in our inner ears that detect high pitched frequencies wear out first. This is why teens hear sounds many oldsters dont.
This is EXACTLY what I pulled in my undergraduate 'Modern Electronics' class. When we used small speakers I could adjust the frequency to a positively epilepsy inducing sound (especially if you ran the speakers on square wave functions with slight frequency scanning) that caused most of my classmates considerable discomfort but my professor (a fan of loud and live rock shows) could hear nothing. The best part is that he was proud that he was "immune" even though it indicates the beginnings of hearing loss.
I have been a happy (and donating) user of Last FM formerly Audioscrobbler. They do a really good job of matching up music tastes and their radio program is good. They also have a plugin that allows you to submit what you play from most major audio players so you can track what you listen to and compare with others. They have full tagging capabilities and extensive forums as well as music 'groups' of like minded appreciators. I have been very impressed and I admit I haven't played with Pandora much but it doesn't seem too much better/different.
Other planted articles that are startlingly similar:
The actual verisign press release with a cute graph
PC World with a seemingly verbatim copy of the press release
Again from Tech News World
And C|Net's news.com.com even copies the fun and [extreme sarcasm]ever so statistically meaningful[/extreme sarcasm] graph
It is nice to note that VerisSign's Nasdaq abbreviation appears in all of these articles within the first sentence. So I wouldn't be too worried because its not surprising that VeriSign wants us to fear keyloggers.
GOVERNMENT WHAT!
Actually I can think of a couple years in middle school that I might have liked to skip... can we skip those?
This seems in the same vein as the ICANN/Root Servers debate. Who controls things like this in an ever more connected world. My view is if it isn't broken why mess with it?
From the article it seems like the leap second is annoying but the leap hour is too much and not frequent enough. If it really that much trouble to keep resetting high precision clocks then why not compromise at leap 10 seconds or some other standard.
I bet that this is actually a calulated move. This way their product is not just some anonymous unit in a rack of stereo equipment. This way it is sitting out by itself in its own area in many cases where visitors etc. look at it and see exactly what you have. My guess is that it is pure and simple advertising. When you think about it very few game consoles have been 'stackable' and almost all of them have a distinctive shape and pattern.
As a molecular biologist I am curious what part of my science actually supports intelligent design?
The problem is that intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE. Science is the logical analysis of observed data. Itelligent Design accepts that it is not possible to describe the emergence of species. At the point where you state that it is impossible to analyze things based on observable evidence you stop being science. If for no other reason that intelligent design is not science I think it should be left out of science classes.
There is an enourmous difference between pointing out the holes in a theory and abandoning the scientific process. That is what they appear to be doing here.
"Oh there are still things we don't know about evolution"
"That means that science can't describe what we see."
"I see... so lets abandon the scientific process because it hasn't really ever definitively described anything"
"Exactly like the 'theory of gravitation' which we also can't prove."
"Well lets still teach evolution but then teach 'crazy' along with it."
"Sounds good to me."
"Agreed!"
Probably not... I mean its 'our' (if you are in that school district) tax dollars that just payed them and schools still need the same amount of money to run (only now add $117,000). I am however, in FULL support of this decision. The same is true of the recent myspace "terror threat." For those that don't know some kids put up some text on their myspace pages talking about bringing guns to school and killing everyone. So the next day only 400 out of more than a thousand students came to class. The kids were charged (very rightly) with a couple felonies. The problem is that all the parents and administrators are all charged up and ready to go after myspace somehow claiming it was their fault... somehow for allowing people to post whatever they want on the webpage they provide. I know... baffling.
It just seems IMHO that the operating system itself shouldn't allow spyware. Will "Defender" also block commercially bundled "spyware?" Will it allow any old "official" spyware free reign on your system? I feel like this is a lose/lose for them.
Now I know what to do with my stockpile of Hot Coffee modded GTAs. There is nothing that hospitalized children need more than that.
...it is a publicity stunt I don't mind. We could use more publicity stunts like this.