You need a PhD these days and probably a few years as a low paying post-doc for the better computer science departments. No job security for the first couple of years until tenure. A lot less pay than in the corporate world too. The politics can get pretty bad and the reason for that is that you are constantly being assessed by your peers - ie. in slashdot terms, karma whoring becomes a way of life.
There of course many advantages to being in academia for creative people who want to be right on the edge pursuing ideas that noone else has explored. Also things are probably more relaxed at smaller institutions where teaching is more important than research. However, I think if you are looking for a safe cushy job - you should look elsewhere rather than wasting your time and effort acquiring degrees.
You mean the ones that stayed awake through Attack of the Clones and Matrix Revolutions...?
Depends on your attention span and what floats your boat. Seven Samurai kept my attention throughout the 3.5 hours but your mileage may differ...
Sounds like you read some film critic's choices and picked the wrong ones. Critics have different criteria for choosing a film than you might - such as historical importance (or rather, what they learned in film studies) and your criticisms are right on for those films. Personally, I don't much like the films you mentioned either but it's silly to condemn an entire genre because of a small sample. If you only saw a few critic's choices for colour films you might also think they sucked. It all depends on what you are looking for i.e. if you want an action film, try Seven Samurai, a mystery - Rashomon, a romantic comedy - His girl Friday, a hard-boiled detective- Maltese Falcon or Big Sleep, slapstick - 3 Stooges.
Now it could be that my choices are just based on nostalgia (same way that Saved by the Bell is funny to a certain generation) but I find it hard to believe that people have changed so much in such a short time that certain themes don't still resonate even if the technological wrappings are different.
There are many grad students and post-docs who will tell you of their years spent making a mouse knockout of the gene they are studying and it having no obvious effect (or being an uninformative embryonic lethal...).
Mammals have very good redundancy in their genomes and the effects of a knockout can be very subtle. It could be for example, that the knockout of that desert region could affect the stability of the genome which could manifest itself in higher mutation rates or lower fertility. That would be sufficient for it to be selected and maintained but would not be obvious from observing just a few individuals.
Not to say that sports journalists are very good - as a group they rank with politcal commentators. However, they don't do the "balance" thing because there is more or less a right answer at the end of the season - which every reader and sportscaster understands. So the guy who says that the Dolphins are a better team than the Patriots get ignored or laughed at because everyone can see their won-loss records
In science, as in sports, everyone can look at the raw data - but because of the complexity of modern science, only a few are able to interpret it. There's the problem - if you don't understand the bases of the expert opinions - how are you to evaluate them? It would be like trying to understand football articles without knowing the game. The easiest thing to do for the lazy journalist is to go into CYA mode and quote fans of both teams and conclude that the Dolphins may be as good as the Patriots.
But even if one is unable to completely fathom the game, a good journalist would be still able to follow and assess the logic of the arguments (i.e. win-loss record analyses) and the credentials of opinion giver (i.e. Phil Simms versus Dennis Miller for example) though this will still fail when the conclusions depend on the details (as they often do...). This is the level of science reporting which one finds in the Economist or sometimes, the Wall Street Journal. But here the readers have a monetary stake in the accuracy of the reporting and if the Dolphins losing to the Patriots costs them money - they stop reading the journal
So until people understand science as well as sports (very unlikely), or learn how to reason and evaluate reasoning (very unlikely) or get burnt by bad information (very likely) and learn from their mistakes (much less likely) we will continue to have bad science journalism as the norm.
Normal primary cell cultures i.e. ones that would be made from real tissue can only divide so many times before they stop. Some contend that this is due to innate limitations in normal cells - others say it just reflects the way cells are grown in culture - no matter - cancer cells and some pre-cancerous cells have the property of being "immortalized" in that they can be cultured indefinitely.
The article says that the cells were of the immortal variety which mean that they were likely derived from tumors or other abnormal cells (like teratomas which I believe is the source of 3T3 cells..) - so no humans or mice were injured in the process (well maybe the first mouse...).
You have hit the nail on the head. Everything GM does is "natural" in the sense that it does occur in nature. The difference is that things can be done several orders of magnitude faster.
Is this speed which changes can be made potentially dangerous - possibly - which is why the P1-P4 system was instituted back in the 70's to set standards for recombinant research. I think that most scientists agree that it is very very unlikely but being scientists will also (weasily - but truthfully) admit that it's only been 30 years since we've been using these accelerated methods so one can't be 100% sure.
The public concern, has however provided impetus for marker assisted breeding. Here, gene sequencing and bioinformatics provides potential gene targets and DNA markers which can be manipulated by traditional techniques if desired. It does eliminate most of the bigger concerns about cross-species (or cross-kingdom) gene transfer which do occur in nature btw - just much much more slowly. Of course, this also negates many of the benefits of the technology. Sorta of using a GPS in a horse and buggy but if that's what people want that's OK too as long as they are made aware of the pros and cons of going more slowly...
In Aristotle's Politics he describes 3 different forms of government - rule by one, rule by a few and rule by many. His view was that in the best scenario (an enlightened ruler), rule by one was the best but it was also the worst when a despot was in control. Rule by the few had fewer extremes and rule of the many was the golden medium. It was the worst form even when run well but was the best of a bad lot when executed poorly. Sorta sounds like the idea of checks and balances doesn't it?
Funny enough - it was the bad form of rule by many that Aristotle called a democracy...
From the wording in the article, the patent is not a narrow one just for transformation of CHO cells by CaPO4 precipitation using methotextrate selection but for any protein expression from cotransformation of any eukaryotic cell. IANAL and if it is just for the CHO system in question then my objections (but not surprise) are greatly reduced.
Anyway, this really is not the place for this thread - since none of this is relevant to the olfactory work that won him the prize.
I had no idea that something that friggin' obvious had made so much money. It is akin to being able to collect royalties every time someone sorts a list because you were the first one to implement a bubble sort in COBOL - and of course file it with the patent office.
As I understand the purpose is to distinguish between legal and illegal ivory. Legal ivory is from government "harvests" in South Africa for example so the location the elephants came from is important.
I guess it could also work with one of the other poster's idea of allowing limited tourist-hunting. Sad that it seems impossible just to ban ivory completely..
I would have no problem with a straight out declaration that stem research is evil because it encourages abortions and then let people decide what to do with it. Then it is a moral issue.
However when these lobbyists couch their arguments with assertions that the research is not useful or that the restrictions will not hamper the experiments then it is a matter that should concern scientists. It is one thing to ignore scientists (and perfectly understandable) but it is another matter to mis-speak their work and co-opt their voices to support a hidden agenda.
The example that struck me was the decision to axe Elizabeth Blackburn from the Bioethics council so that they could get a "consensus" from a "scientific" advisory body that was consistent with the anti-abortionists position on stem cell research. Of course, she was the only real scientist on the entire panel...
I have never ever played one that could beat my sister and I've been looking for decades. I don't claim to a great poker player and I don't expect something world class like Chess, Backgammon or Scrabble programs but just something that plays decently like some of the Bridge programs nowadays. With poker mathematics being better understood these days one would think there would be something out there that plays at this level. BTW this isn't meant as a troll - I really would love to have a decent program to practice against and if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it if they'd share it...
You are of course correct I think I did read it (js7a's comment) properly the first time but my mind automatically coerced it into something sensible...
My apologies to the poster if this was meant as a troll (in which case it seems successful) or a joke but just in case it really is ignorance...
The idea behind global warming is that greenhouse gases such as CO2 make it more difficult to radiate heat back into space acting sort of like - well a greenhouse. The amount of heat that is produced by manmade processes is entirely negligible relative to how much the earth receives from the sun and radiates back. So by subsitituting wind energy for fossil fuel burning we reduce the CO2 produced and lessen the greenhouse effect, reducing global warming...
What we have here is something that you see a lot of from freshly minted English and Journalism majors who have a preconceived view that popular (inferior) genres such as SF/fantasy/comic books are not true literature and have never recovered from the fact that Tolkien is more revered by readers than Nabokov. If you read the article - there is a clear slant from the writer which is not really supported by the experts she so selectively quotes, paraphrases and ignores. While Sawyer is telling her that science fiction is not about the future, she goes on in the next breath to say that the mainstream literary works by authors like Atwood, whom she respects, co-opt science fiction techniques failing to realize that they are science fiction. To her science fiction is the narrow hardcore predictive pulp that Sawyer and others admit might be dying out. But to equate that with the whole genre dying is as absurd as saying that poetry is dead because people no longer read limericks...
Sadly, you see this type of shoddy research in pages other than weekend filler where the writers have clear biases and agendas (ironically, often unknown and unintentional) which they selectively pursue rather than trying to understand and communicate what they are being told - (science and technology articles are the best examples - and the weekend technology section in the Globe is particularly bad). Good thing for blogs and/. which are replacing traditional print media as sources of informed commentary. At least now you get a lot of different biases and agendas to choose...
I never claimed that no research was done at the pharmaceuticals - they do have huge compound libraries - but it is all very applied not to say that it is trivial - it is just not my cup of tea. I also do not doubt that many drugs come out this work. I have no doubt however that this is an extremely small percentage of the overall "research" costs that the companies like to quote.
My point was that to claim that no drug development is done with public funding is misleading and mendacious - because while it is true that little research is directly aimed at developing drugs, the knowledge that does come out of NIH funded projects is the underpinning of novel drug discoveries. That's what we write in our grants anyways. However, if it really is mostly undirected testing of random compounds and modifications of existing working compounds then I take it all back.
as wrong as the idea that NIH-funded research does all (or even much) of the work of drug development
No they just do the basic research that results in the drug leads. The companies then do the expensive but scientifically easy trials and rake in all the money (and now it seems, the credit as well).
And since when is an industry spokesman considered a reliable source of information..?
A typical resolution image coming off of a digital camera only prints at maybe 2 or 3 inches across at the resolution a typical (inkjet) printer operates.
Not true, because inkjet "resolutions" are really dot densities and not resolution (resolution would be how many distinct dots can you print per inch.) That's why laser printers with nominally "lower resolution" output crisper text. Also the dot density is for a single colour - complex hues such as skin tones have to be simulated by digital halftoning (essentially multiple dots forming larger colour pixels) techniques which reduce the effective resolution several fold depending on the colour being simulated and the accuracy desired. That's why continous tone printers such as dye subs with nominally "lower resolution" can give much sharper colour prints.
Software would have a major effect on the quality of colour prints from inkjets but that would mostly be from how the halftoning was done rather than the interpolation per se...
You have it backwards...
on
Why We Fall Apart
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually sex evolved because of one inherent problem in mitosis - accumulated errors. Any individual cell that relies on duplicating its genome each generation also duplicates mutations which eventually accumulate. The odds of another spontaneous mutation correcting the error is virtually nil. However, the odds of two cells having exactly the same errors is also very low. Thus cells that are able to cut and paste from each others genome (have sex) are able to repair themselves and have a selective advantage over those that don't.
This, not diversity (as many people think) is the driving force for origin of sexual reproduction. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith explains this in much more detail in his book "The evolution of sex" which can be googled for synopses.
To get back on topic, he also has published quite a few good papers on the evolutionary basis of ageing which can be summed up as follows. Even the most fit organism will eventually die by some unlucky event such as being hit by lightning or eaten by a lion. If you can increase your fitness in the short term even at the price of shortening your life you can do better overall. For example suppose that large breasts, while causing back problems later in life also increase the odds of finding a mate. If the odds of being eaten by a lion make it unlikely that any female will live past 40 then it becomes advantageous to have big breasts even if it shortens your potential lifespan.
Of course none of this tells us how to lengthen our lives or anything about the mechanism of ageing but it does tell us how it was selected for.
We just installed another 32 dual 2.7 GHz Xeons in racks with 200 gig drives with the cost of approximately 1 K per processor which is roughly what these clusters are going for. In terms of sheer number crunching - it ain't gonna cut it. 1.5 GFLOPs per processor as opposed to 5 GFLOPs per processor. This is probably an optimistic figure - given that the Efficeon translates from X86 code to it's own native code before execution and the translation performance is likely variable with real world apps and probably hard to optimize code for. There is also the issue of reliability - what happens when one of the chips goes down?
However, the fact that most applications can take advantage of the processors with no tweaking, the low power consumption (no computer room necessary...) and the high interprocessor bandwidth might make it appealing to casual users with memory intensive applications and $100K kicking around...
But that's just my point - you should do much more than talk to the neurosurgeon. His word is not good enough since he might only know personally of the case history of a few hundred patients - and may have performed the procedures only a few times in his career. I am willing to wager that he's done little post-operative follow up and probably has never looked at the original studies critically. I am not saying that he's a bad guy or stupid but clinicians are trained to treat patients, not how to evaluate the treatments.
That being said - there may be some justification in cases of extreme epilepsy. However, the fact that not so long ago, these therapies were used in a more widespread manner with the same assurances that they were worth it based on the same data should make one think twice. The point is that you shouldn't believe me or the brain surgeon but look it up yourself. Now that the internet has made the primary data so much more easily available there is no reason not to check up on these pronouncements - trouble is - so few people do...
The sheer subjectiveness of both the classification and evaluation methods in a non-double blind study put this on the level of a pub debate rather than science. Note that the "research" has not been completed and has not been reviewed and published by a journal. Not that the pseudo-science matters, it is obvious that the reason the story was picked up was to stir up the old right versus left debate (as evidenced in the posts here)
However, I fear that the fact that so many people just assumed the science is true because it was convenient to believe, reflects the recent and scary trend of promoting or supressing "scientific facts" depending on how they fit into one's belief system. The classic example was Lysenko in the Soviet Union who demolished Soviet genetics due to the promotion of "nurture" type Lamarckian inheritance in concordance with communist beliefs. Harmless enough, until millions die from crop failures - at least in some small part due to choosing the wrong strains of wheat. Simularly, while red vs blue brains may be fun to believe - remember that electroshock, lobotomies, split-brain "therapies" still exist largely because of an uncritical public. Or to paraphrase Douglas Adams - it's OK to think that white is black - until a car hits you at a zebra crossing..
The trouble with this train of thought is that the science that you are talking about is very very far removed from basic physics. Even at the chemistry level, none of the equations are useful beyond very basic cases. For example in molecular dynamics simulations of proteins - the answers are nearly always wrong because of problems in the force fields. These problems are not due to any lack of understanding of the underlying physical equations but the lack of computable approximations in a complex environment.
When you start going up the ladder of complexity, more or these details become less and less important. Whether DNA is a B form double helix is not ever really used by most biochemists - only the fact that there are two complementary strands and that replication is semi-conservative is of use. Not to say that there won't be some unforseen spin-off of finding another weak force but to think that AIDS research hangs on this is misleading.
The part about the drug companies wasting their money is true and I would have no objection to them spending it on the collider. Actually I don't even have objections to spending limited public resources on it because I believe that it is important to know about these things - but that is for the public to decide.
Slashdot Mirror
Re Academics
You need a PhD these days and probably a few years as a low paying post-doc for the better computer science departments. No job security for the first couple of years until tenure. A lot less pay than in the corporate world too. The politics can get pretty bad and the reason for that is that you are constantly being assessed by your peers - ie. in slashdot terms, karma whoring becomes a way of life.
There of course many advantages to being in academia for creative people who want to be right on the edge pursuing ideas that noone else has explored. Also things are probably more relaxed at smaller institutions where teaching is more important than research. However, I think if you are looking for a safe cushy job - you should look elsewhere rather than wasting your time and effort acquiring degrees.
You mean the ones that stayed awake through Attack of the Clones and Matrix Revolutions...? Depends on your attention span and what floats your boat. Seven Samurai kept my attention throughout the 3.5 hours but your mileage may differ...
Sounds like you read some film critic's choices and picked the wrong ones. Critics have different criteria for choosing a film than you might - such as historical importance (or rather, what they learned in film studies) and your criticisms are right on for those films. Personally, I don't much like the films you mentioned either but it's silly to condemn an entire genre because of a small sample. If you only saw a few critic's choices for colour films you might also think they sucked. It all depends on what you are looking for i.e. if you want an action film, try Seven Samurai, a mystery - Rashomon, a romantic comedy - His girl Friday, a hard-boiled detective- Maltese Falcon or Big Sleep, slapstick - 3 Stooges.
Now it could be that my choices are just based on nostalgia (same way that Saved by the Bell is funny to a certain generation) but I find it hard to believe that people have changed so much in such a short time that certain themes don't still resonate even if the technological wrappings are different.
There are many grad students and post-docs who will tell you of their years spent making a mouse knockout of the gene they are studying and it having no obvious effect (or being an uninformative embryonic lethal...).
Mammals have very good redundancy in their genomes and the effects of a knockout can be very subtle. It could be for example, that the knockout of that desert region could affect the stability of the genome which could manifest itself in higher mutation rates or lower fertility. That would be sufficient for it to be selected and maintained but would not be obvious from observing just a few individuals.
Not to say that sports journalists are very good - as a group they rank with politcal commentators. However, they don't do the "balance" thing because there is more or less a right answer at the end of the season - which every reader and sportscaster understands. So the guy who says that the Dolphins are a better team than the Patriots get ignored or laughed at because everyone can see their won-loss records
In science, as in sports, everyone can look at the raw data - but because of the complexity of modern science, only a few are able to interpret it. There's the problem - if you don't understand the bases of the expert opinions - how are you to evaluate them? It would be like trying to understand football articles without knowing the game. The easiest thing to do for the lazy journalist is to go into CYA mode and quote fans of both teams and conclude that the Dolphins may be as good as the Patriots.
But even if one is unable to completely fathom the game, a good journalist would be still able to follow and assess the logic of the arguments (i.e. win-loss record analyses) and the credentials of opinion giver (i.e. Phil Simms versus Dennis Miller for example) though this will still fail when the conclusions depend on the details (as they often do...). This is the level of science reporting which one finds in the Economist or sometimes, the Wall Street Journal. But here the readers have a monetary stake in the accuracy of the reporting and if the Dolphins losing to the Patriots costs them money - they stop reading the journal
So until people understand science as well as sports (very unlikely), or learn how to reason and evaluate reasoning (very unlikely) or get burnt by bad information (very likely) and learn from their mistakes (much less likely) we will continue to have bad science journalism as the norm.
Normal primary cell cultures i.e. ones that would be made from real tissue can only divide so many times before they stop. Some contend that this is due to innate limitations in normal cells - others say it just reflects the way cells are grown in culture - no matter - cancer cells and some pre-cancerous cells have the property of being "immortalized" in that they can be cultured indefinitely.
The article says that the cells were of the immortal variety which mean that they were likely derived from tumors or other abnormal cells (like teratomas which I believe is the source of 3T3 cells..) - so no humans or mice were injured in the process (well maybe the first mouse...).
You have hit the nail on the head. Everything GM does is "natural" in the sense that it does occur in nature. The difference is that things can be done several orders of magnitude faster.
Is this speed which changes can be made potentially dangerous - possibly - which is why the P1-P4 system was instituted back in the 70's to set standards for recombinant research. I think that most scientists agree that it is very very unlikely but being scientists will also (weasily - but truthfully) admit that it's only been 30 years since we've been using these accelerated methods so one can't be 100% sure.
The public concern, has however provided impetus for marker assisted breeding. Here, gene sequencing and bioinformatics provides potential gene targets and DNA markers which can be manipulated by traditional techniques if desired. It does eliminate most of the bigger concerns about cross-species (or cross-kingdom) gene transfer which do occur in nature btw - just much much more slowly. Of course, this also negates many of the benefits of the technology. Sorta of using a GPS in a horse and buggy but if that's what people want that's OK too as long as they are made aware of the pros and cons of going more slowly...
Even the Greeks thought their own system sucked
Not quite true...
In Aristotle's Politics he describes 3 different forms of government - rule by one, rule by a few and rule by many. His view was that in the best scenario (an enlightened ruler), rule by one was the best but it was also the worst when a despot was in control. Rule by the few had fewer extremes and rule of the many was the golden medium. It was the worst form even when run well but was the best of a bad lot when executed poorly. Sorta sounds like the idea of checks and balances doesn't it?
Funny enough - it was the bad form of rule by many that Aristotle called a democracy...
From the wording in the article, the patent is not a narrow one just for transformation of CHO cells by CaPO4 precipitation using methotextrate selection but for any protein expression from cotransformation of any eukaryotic cell. IANAL and if it is just for the CHO system in question then my objections (but not surprise) are greatly reduced.
Anyway, this really is not the place for this thread - since none of this is relevant to the olfactory work that won him the prize.
I had no idea that something that friggin' obvious had made so much money. It is akin to being able to collect royalties every time someone sorts a list because you were the first one to implement a bubble sort in COBOL - and of course file it with the patent office.
But then again why should I be surprised...
As I understand the purpose is to distinguish between legal and illegal ivory. Legal ivory is from government "harvests" in South Africa for example so the location the elephants came from is important.
I guess it could also work with one of the other poster's idea of allowing limited tourist-hunting. Sad that it seems impossible just to ban ivory completely..
I would have no problem with a straight out declaration that stem research is evil because it encourages abortions and then let people decide what to do with it. Then it is a moral issue.
However when these lobbyists couch their arguments with assertions that the research is not useful or that the restrictions will not hamper the experiments then it is a matter that should concern scientists. It is one thing to ignore scientists (and perfectly understandable) but it is another matter to mis-speak their work and co-opt their voices to support a hidden agenda.
The example that struck me was the decision to axe Elizabeth Blackburn from the Bioethics council so that they could get a "consensus" from a "scientific" advisory body that was consistent with the anti-abortionists position on stem cell research. Of course, she was the only real scientist on the entire panel...
I have never ever played one that could beat my sister and I've been looking for decades. I don't claim to a great poker player and I don't expect something world class like Chess, Backgammon or Scrabble programs but just something that plays decently like some of the Bridge programs nowadays. With poker mathematics being better understood these days one would think there would be something out there that plays at this level. BTW this isn't meant as a troll - I really would love to have a decent program to practice against and if anyone has a link I'd appreciate it if they'd share it...
You are of course correct I think I did read it (js7a's comment) properly the first time but my mind automatically coerced it into something sensible...
My apologies to the poster if this was meant as a troll (in which case it seems successful) or a joke but just in case it really is ignorance...
The idea behind global warming is that greenhouse gases such as CO2 make it more difficult to radiate heat back into space acting sort of like - well a greenhouse. The amount of heat that is produced by manmade processes is entirely negligible relative to how much the earth receives from the sun and radiates back. So by subsitituting wind energy for fossil fuel burning we reduce the CO2 produced and lessen the greenhouse effect, reducing global warming...
What we have here is something that you see a lot of from freshly minted English and Journalism majors who have a preconceived view that popular (inferior) genres such as SF/fantasy/comic books are not true literature and have never recovered from the fact that Tolkien is more revered by readers than Nabokov. If you read the article - there is a clear slant from the writer which is not really supported by the experts she so selectively quotes, paraphrases and ignores. While Sawyer is telling her that science fiction is not about the future, she goes on in the next breath to say that the mainstream literary works by authors like Atwood, whom she respects, co-opt science fiction techniques failing to realize that they are science fiction. To her science fiction is the narrow hardcore predictive pulp that Sawyer and others admit might be dying out. But to equate that with the whole genre dying is as absurd as saying that poetry is dead because people no longer read limericks...
/. which are replacing traditional print media as sources of informed commentary. At least now you get a lot of different biases and agendas to choose...
Sadly, you see this type of shoddy research in pages other than weekend filler where the writers have clear biases and agendas (ironically, often unknown and unintentional) which they selectively pursue rather than trying to understand and communicate what they are being told - (science and technology articles are the best examples - and the weekend technology section in the Globe is particularly bad). Good thing for blogs and
I never claimed that no research was done at the pharmaceuticals - they do have huge compound libraries - but it is all very applied not to say that it is trivial - it is just not my cup of tea. I also do not doubt that many drugs come out this work. I have no doubt however that this is an extremely small percentage of the overall "research" costs that the companies like to quote.
My point was that to claim that no drug development is done with public funding is misleading and mendacious - because while it is true that little research is directly aimed at developing drugs, the knowledge that does come out of NIH funded projects is the underpinning of novel drug discoveries. That's what we write in our grants anyways. However, if it really is mostly undirected testing of random compounds and modifications of existing working compounds then I take it all back.
as wrong as the idea that NIH-funded research does all (or even much) of the work of drug development
No they just do the basic research that results in the drug leads. The companies then do the expensive but scientifically easy trials and rake in all the money (and now it seems, the credit as well).
And since when is an industry spokesman considered a reliable source of information..?
A typical resolution image coming off of a digital camera only prints at maybe 2 or 3 inches across at the resolution a typical (inkjet) printer operates.
Not true, because inkjet "resolutions" are really dot densities and not resolution (resolution would be how many distinct dots can you print per inch.) That's why laser printers with nominally "lower resolution" output crisper text. Also the dot density is for a single colour - complex hues such as skin tones have to be simulated by digital halftoning (essentially multiple dots forming larger colour pixels) techniques which reduce the effective resolution several fold depending on the colour being simulated and the accuracy desired. That's why continous tone printers such as dye subs with nominally "lower resolution" can give much sharper colour prints.
Software would have a major effect on the quality of colour prints from inkjets but that would mostly be from how the halftoning was done rather than the interpolation per se...
Actually sex evolved because of one inherent problem in mitosis - accumulated errors. Any individual cell that relies on duplicating its genome each generation also duplicates mutations which eventually accumulate. The odds of another spontaneous mutation correcting the error is virtually nil. However, the odds of two cells having exactly the same errors is also very low. Thus cells that are able to cut and paste from each others genome (have sex) are able to repair themselves and have a selective advantage over those that don't.
This, not diversity (as many people think) is the driving force for origin of sexual reproduction. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith explains this in much more detail in his book "The evolution of sex" which can be googled for synopses.
To get back on topic, he also has published quite a few good papers on the evolutionary basis of ageing which can be summed up as follows. Even the most fit organism will eventually die by some unlucky event such as being hit by lightning or eaten by a lion. If you can increase your fitness in the short term even at the price of shortening your life you can do better overall. For example suppose that large breasts, while causing back problems later in life also increase the odds of finding a mate. If the odds of being eaten by a lion make it unlikely that any female will live past 40 then it becomes advantageous to have big breasts even if it shortens your potential lifespan.
Of course none of this tells us how to lengthen our lives or anything about the mechanism of ageing but it does tell us how it was selected for.
We just installed another 32 dual 2.7 GHz Xeons in racks with 200 gig drives with the cost of approximately 1 K per processor which is roughly what these clusters are going for. In terms of sheer number crunching - it ain't gonna cut it. 1.5 GFLOPs per processor as opposed to 5 GFLOPs per processor. This is probably an optimistic figure - given that the Efficeon translates from X86 code to it's own native code before execution and the translation performance is likely variable with real world apps and probably hard to optimize code for. There is also the issue of reliability - what happens when one of the chips goes down?
However, the fact that most applications can take advantage of the processors with no tweaking, the low power consumption (no computer room necessary...) and the high interprocessor bandwidth might make it appealing to casual users with memory intensive applications and $100K kicking around...
But that's just my point - you should do much more than talk to the neurosurgeon. His word is not good enough since he might only know personally of the case history of a few hundred patients - and may have performed the procedures only a few times in his career. I am willing to wager that he's done little post-operative follow up and probably has never looked at the original studies critically. I am not saying that he's a bad guy or stupid but clinicians are trained to treat patients, not how to evaluate the treatments.
That being said - there may be some justification in cases of extreme epilepsy. However, the fact that not so long ago, these therapies were used in a more widespread manner with the same assurances that they were worth it based on the same data should make one think twice. The point is that you shouldn't believe me or the brain surgeon but look it up yourself. Now that the internet has made the primary data so much more easily available there is no reason not to check up on these pronouncements - trouble is - so few people do...
The sheer subjectiveness of both the classification and evaluation methods in a non-double blind study put this on the level of a pub debate rather than science. Note that the "research" has not been completed and has not been reviewed and published by a journal. Not that the pseudo-science matters, it is obvious that the reason the story was picked up was to stir up the old right versus left debate (as evidenced in the posts here)
However, I fear that the fact that so many people just assumed the science is true because it was convenient to believe, reflects the recent and scary trend of promoting or supressing "scientific facts" depending on how they fit into one's belief system. The classic example was Lysenko in the Soviet Union who demolished Soviet genetics due to the promotion of "nurture" type Lamarckian inheritance in concordance with communist beliefs. Harmless enough, until millions die from crop failures - at least in some small part due to choosing the wrong strains of wheat. Simularly, while red vs blue brains may be fun to believe - remember that electroshock, lobotomies, split-brain "therapies" still exist largely because of an uncritical public. Or to paraphrase Douglas Adams - it's OK to think that white is black - until a car hits you at a zebra crossing..
The trouble with this train of thought is that the science that you are talking about is very very far removed from basic physics. Even at the chemistry level, none of the equations are useful beyond very basic cases. For example in molecular dynamics simulations of proteins - the answers are nearly always wrong because of problems in the force fields. These problems are not due to any lack of understanding of the underlying physical equations but the lack of computable approximations in a complex environment.
When you start going up the ladder of complexity, more or these details become less and less important. Whether DNA is a B form double helix is not ever really used by most biochemists - only the fact that there are two complementary strands and that replication is semi-conservative is of use. Not to say that there won't be some unforseen spin-off of finding another weak force but to think that AIDS research hangs on this is misleading.
The part about the drug companies wasting their money is true and I would have no objection to them spending it on the collider. Actually I don't even have objections to spending limited public resources on it because I believe that it is important to know about these things - but that is for the public to decide.