I so wish I had mod points and that you could go higher.
This point has been missed by 90% of the posters here on slashdot. The article was well-reasoned and balanced. The response here has been almost exclusively "But we need those controls! Bad, stupid users!"
Of course, an awful lot of them haven't actually read the article...
Talk about serendipity! I checked out the entry in Wikipedia on "Quantum Mechanics" just today, and went looking for a place that I could mention just how bad it was, and how little time I had (as a grad student in physics) to correct the numerous mistakes, unclear comments, examples of bad grammar, and so forth, that plagued the article.
The issue isn't so much that it is wrong (although it seems to be vandalized fairly regularly), but that several people who apparently got their notion of what quantum mechanics is from popular publications have repeatedly "corrected" the article on points which were, in fact, originally correct. An example of this is the usual discussion of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, which is frankly complex enough that it either deserves an article of its own or a mention in a related article such as "The EPR Paradox" or "Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics", but whose treatment in the Quantum Mechanics article is almost completely superficial (for instance, it conflates "Quantum Mechanics" with "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics"). Frankly, it shouldn't be in the article at all; the article should link to the appropriate specific articles, and this should discuss the issue.
Another example is the statement that quantum mechanics is important on the scale of the atom or in macroscopic quantum systems. This is so ignorant it's not even funny. Quantum mechanics provides the best-known basis for all microscopic systems, yes, but in statistical mechanics this often spills over into macroscopic systems. Examples of this spill-over including such every-day things as electrical conduction in room-temperature metals, with special emphasis on the nature of semiconductors in use in every computer used to view the article. It is also necessary to explain why it is impossible to walk through walls (electrical repulsion between electrons is part of it, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle provides a large part as well).
I just know some fans of Wikipedia are going to ask why I didn't go in and fix all these problems if I saw them. The simple answer is: I don't have time. I have a job. I've just scratched the surface of what's wrong with this article, and fixing it would be time-consuming. I'm much better off writing up my research results and sending them to a peer-reviewed journal with my name on it than trying to keep an article on Wikipedia from sliding into mediocrity, especially when I, personally, have much better written, more precise, references that cover more material. Yes, they cost (much more) money. You get what you pay for.
I'm just going to say that this article, combined with the original topic, convince me to not use Wikipedia for anything, not even to satisfy casual curiosity. For that, I *might* use the links given in the end of each article, but that's about it. I just don't know how much folklore I'm absorbing even in established articles.
I'm familiar with at least two, personally: Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. I'm sure there are more.
Both religions use the traditional Protestant Bible (in terms of books included, not in terms of translation) and believe them, well, religiously. They interpret some parts rather differently from mainstream Christianity, (and from each other as well, of course.)
I believe he is saying that all official recounts that actually obeyed the state laws when it came to voting procedure had Bush as the winner, which is true AFAIK, although the margin got smaller.
As for every recount, if we include unofficial recounts, well frankly it's too close to call. Some show Bush winning, some show Gore winning. This depends mostly on how you count.
The GP had a very good point. There are clearly recounts which have shown Bush winning, so his label of "Liar" is appropriate. If the GGP isn't a liar, he is *badly* biased in his sources, and probably unreliable about his other facts.
I'd like to say I agree with your assessment. Religion and innovation aren't as strongly correlated as people like to claim. I suspect this comes from something of an "us versus them" mentality which, while it makes the world a simple place, is just plain false.
I'd also like to add that, from my perspective, having moved from Utah to Maryland during my lifetime, is rather different from the average slashdotter. What I see happening, historically, is
Religion, especially some form of Protestant Christianity, is firmly embedded in the American lifestyle. This results in several aspects of public behavior and policy being rather different than now.
With time, especially after WWII, and as science progresses and becomes more important, the philosophy behind science become more important parts of society.
With this change in philosophy comes a change in religion. Some people start seriously evangelizing the new world-view and have a more receptive audience than before.
This new world-view also requires a rethinking of the old ideas, and so many things held dear by earlier generations are dropped or changed in the new world-view.
These ideas take solid hold in the cities, among the younger generations. Now that we are something like twenty-forty years into this, many people in these areas have no idea it was ever different and think their interpretation is the only real one.
In the more remote regions, or where the new ideas were received more skeptically or only partially(for whatever reason), the ideas still enter, but more slowly and with resistance. (New technology, on the other hand, usually is accepted everywhere in the states, stem cell research being a notable exception.)
Some people from the cities/other places where the ideas have been almost fully accepted see the outer regions attempts to resist the ideas and think it must be some new movement that is in danger of overthrowing their world-view.
The exact opposite is the truth. Modern liberal ideals are making serious headway everywhere (and an awful lot of science, not remotely the same thing, was never actually opposed anywhere). The issues that seem to cause so much concern to slashdot are minor setbacks for the most part. The Kansas debacle (and debacle it was) is a good example; the story is almost never told to the finish. From wikipedia:
"On August 1, 2006, 4 of the 6 conservative Republicans who approved the Critical Analysis of Evolution classroom standards lost their seats in a primary election. The moderate Republican and Democats gaining seats vowed to overturn the 2005 school science standards and adopt those recommended by a State Board Science Hearing Committee that were rejected by the previous board. [26]"
In short, the elements opposing evolution *lost* in Kansas, in the long run, by *vote*. They were a *minority* who cheated to get into office. Many other so-called problems are like this: single people or small groups are singled out as the "real" representative, when the public is actually doing what we want.
Of course, even this is a simplification. But my main point is that hearing people on the winning side complain that the other side hasn't given in yet is a major pet peeve of mine on Slashdot. As I see it, most don't realize that the resistance isn't a counter-insurgence; it's simply a continuation of a battle that has been won where you are, but hasn't been won everywhere.
How does it relate to the parent of your original post? I did read the thread, and I didn't understand. The parent of your original post was complaining about being stereo-typed by being from a particular state, and how *his* parent post was making that flagrantly clear. He was, in essence, complaining about discrimination, as I understand him.
I didn't see how your post related to this tangent, although it clearly related to the over-all thread.
The discussion page is a life-saver. If you think "Hmm, this seems a bit NPOV." you can go see whether the discussion agrees or not.
The discussion on the Roswell UFO Incident is a case in point. If you read the discussion page, it quickly becomes obvious that a UFO believer has been paying inhuman amounts of attention to the editing and sucesfully been stopping the skeptical viewpoint from becoming dominant.
I sure wish I had mod points, because the parent deserves to be modded up.
Here's a hint: America didn't invent racism, or a lot of other bad things that it's done. However, it (and the west in general) has succesully supressed a lot of the bad things that used to be universal. It's ironic that we then turn around and say "Look at the evil early Americans!" The culture they left us has allowed us to grow beyond them, but the important fact is that they allowed us to grow and were growing themselves.
***Well... and if not, that was just a child, one more, one less who cares.***
Can you provide any sources for this statement? Every description I've ever seen of losing a child, even in the bad old days, was usually pretty painful. You probably have to exempt the usual psychopaths.
If we consider the basic principle "Only kill people who are guilty of a terrible crime," I'm not sure where the moral contradiction is.
As far as I can tell, the usual pro-choice stance is "Don't kill people," with a different definition of "people". I can tell you that conservatives who see this principle stated, but don't understand that people is being defined differently (e.g. fetuses aren't people) think someone who supports abortion but it against the death penalty is being hypocritical. How can they be against the death penalty (death for guilty people) but for abortion (death for innocent people to satisfy the parents lust? Yes, that's how its seen. Don't argue with me about it; I can understand why it's seen differently.)
I really, really wish people wouldn't invent hypocrisy where it doesn't exist. The differences are in the definition of "people," and the honest debaters don't throw out manufactured misunderstandings.
If I understood the book correctly (and I'm not sure I do) what Lewis says is that the things created aren't real. Thus you can imagine a house, but it won't actually keep the rain out. You can imagine food, but it won't fill you. The things you can create in Hell are, at their bottom, imaginary. (This in contrast to Heaven, which is, by definition, Real. And also imposible for humans to change; it must just be accepted or rejected.)
Also, it must be said that the nature of the people in Hell doesn't necessarily reflect the behavior of all people, even in Lewis' view of the world.
I'm pretty sure that birds use multiple cues to know which direction to go. Do they notice, for instance, where the sun rises and sets? Do they remember landmarks from year to year? Is it instictive for them to head north/south, or is there a little switch in their brain that says "Learn which direction is which and then follow it?"
Basically, I think a little redundancy and plasticity in their brains could solve this problem without much biological innovation.
In one sense, yes. You are discussing the so-called closing velocity of two moving items. There is nothing wrong with this value being greater than the speed of light, and no contradiction of relativity.
However, it is impossible to find a reference frame in which something physical is moving at this closing velocity. This isn't just because the beamns are moving at the speed of light. If we have two massive objects coming in at 3/4 the speed of light each, the closing velocity would be 1 1/2c. But if we try to change into the reference frame of either object, thanks to relativity the observerd closing velocity (or the velocity of the other object) will be 24/25 c.
The long and short of it is that it is easy to construct a quantity that is greater than the speed of light, and which is real. However, nothing physical actually moves at this speed.
***I was always wondering, what about commercials in the US ? ( no trolling, genuine question )***
They're pretty much held to the same standard as the video games. Significantly higher, in fact, because children can see them so easily. It's one of the big culture gaps across the Atlantic, but its pretty much consistent.
Most American's that I know who care about that sort of thing are typically completely shocked when they go to Europe.
***(and even then, nothing is done to erotise the situation, if you walk naked, nobody even look at you or say something)***
By American standards, walking around naked where a person of the opposite sex is likely to see *is* erotic (within single-sex groups, it typically isn't). That is also fairly consistent across the cultures, AFAIK. And if you were to walk around naked in public (male or female), somebody in the states would definitely say something. In fact, they'd probably call the police.
****Wait, the Islamic conquests of Europe pretty much ended with the Battle of Tours [wikipedia.org] in 732.***
True. What you said is true and completely misleading. The simple fact is that the crusades were not directly caused by Islamic conquests of Europe. Some indirect side effects, such as orders of knights devoted to driving muslims out of the Iberian peninsual probably helped, and that is the sort of delayed reaction that would take 350 years to build up. But we are looking more for direct causes here.
From Wikipedia:
"The immediate cause of the First Crusade was Alexius I's appeal to Pope Urban II for mercenaries to help him resist Muslim advances into territory of the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire had been defeated, and this defeat led to the loss of all but the coastlands of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Although the East-West Schism was brewing between the Catholic Western church and the Greek Orthodox Eastern church, Alexius I expected some help from a fellow Christian. However, the response was much larger, and less helpful, than Alexius I desired, as the Pope called for a large invasion force to not merely defend the Byzantine Empire but also retake Jerusalem."
Thus it was not Islamic advances in Europe that directly caused the crusades; it was Islamic advances against the Byzantine empire (which is not in what is currently considered Europe). Which is still an instance of Islam extending its empire. I'm not sure if that qualifies as Jihad, though. To be completely frank, it sounds like exactly what Europe was trying to do, for instance, when it tried to reclaim the Iberian peninsula, except in reverse.
Well, I rather think that if you want to keep something absolutely private, don't use the service.
As others have pointed out before, the same applies to email, or just about any other activity online. And I think that that was the real jist of the grandparent post. Only put things on that the whole world could read; there are plenty of those and the service is useful.
We notice it. It's a lot of what fuels the "Discrimination is still real" talk that floats around, and at some level, they're probably right.
Part of the problem is that nobody knows exactly what to do about it. We have been trying things (I think that's a large part of what Affirmative Action is about) but change happens slowly no matter what.
I must also add that what you saw was a snap-shot of race dynamics in the states. What you can't see is how different this is from fifty years ago when the seperation was even more pronounces and firmly established in law and custom.
Guess what? Google watch is the #1 search result, followed by mostly articles about Google's slogan and often whether they've kept it up or not.
All this seems to be completely appropriate. It's not hard to find bad stuff about Google, using Google, although it is very hard to take Google Watch's claims about Google manipulating page-rank seriously after this little exercise.
I would like to point out
1) that it's not just BYU working on this. The person whose results are actually cited in the study is actually Dr. Derya Unutmaz, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
2) it's being supported by Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is based in Denver. It's probably a long shot, and the company knows it. But it's real research the way it's normally done in this field.
3) it's not the professors hyping the results so much as it is the journalists. As usual. All those saying there's a long way to go are right, and the researchers who did the work would whole-heartedly agree.
4) BYU has and continues to produce research that is published in peer reviewed journals. Just because part of it was done at BYU doesn't make it wrong; BYU has done many things that are actually right. Saying or implying anything different is simply religious bigotry.
5) Oh, and many of you would be surprised to visit the Biology department at BYU. They believe in evolution there. When I went home for Christmas my sister bad-mouthed creationism because, after taking botany at BYU, she knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. (Stories about individual Mormons, even prominent ones, who might have disagreed will be promptly ignored. I probably have seen, heard, and read more of it than you have.)
'Ceragenin' results in no hits. However, 'Ceragenins' does. They all seem to be referring back to essentially the same article. But it is getting some attention.
As icing on the cake, it is also really easy to search for the company that seems to have been sponsoring the research (Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Inc.) As far as I can tell, they're a legit company that recently changed their name after a merger, with a history on Wall Street, etc.
Really, I'm starting to think that Google spoils us. There are lots of things that are so obscure, even Google can't find them until this kind of publicity occurs. Finding useful information on, say, cutting-edge specialized physics (say, the statistics of correlations functions between scattering matrix elements of a classically chaotic cavity), is essentially impossible on Google, even using Google Scholar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be with the fantastically large number of different organic compounds that can be created.
Slashdot Mirror
I so wish I had mod points and that you could go higher.
This point has been missed by 90% of the posters here on slashdot. The article was well-reasoned and balanced. The response here has been almost exclusively "But we need those controls! Bad, stupid users!"
Of course, an awful lot of them haven't actually read the article...
The issue isn't so much that it is wrong (although it seems to be vandalized fairly regularly), but that several people who apparently got their notion of what quantum mechanics is from popular publications have repeatedly "corrected" the article on points which were, in fact, originally correct. An example of this is the usual discussion of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, which is frankly complex enough that it either deserves an article of its own or a mention in a related article such as "The EPR Paradox" or "Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics", but whose treatment in the Quantum Mechanics article is almost completely superficial (for instance, it conflates "Quantum Mechanics" with "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics"). Frankly, it shouldn't be in the article at all; the article should link to the appropriate specific articles, and this should discuss the issue.
Another example is the statement that quantum mechanics is important on the scale of the atom or in macroscopic quantum systems. This is so ignorant it's not even funny. Quantum mechanics provides the best-known basis for all microscopic systems, yes, but in statistical mechanics this often spills over into macroscopic systems. Examples of this spill-over including such every-day things as electrical conduction in room-temperature metals, with special emphasis on the nature of semiconductors in use in every computer used to view the article. It is also necessary to explain why it is impossible to walk through walls (electrical repulsion between electrons is part of it, but the Pauli Exclusion Principle provides a large part as well).
I just know some fans of Wikipedia are going to ask why I didn't go in and fix all these problems if I saw them. The simple answer is: I don't have time. I have a job. I've just scratched the surface of what's wrong with this article, and fixing it would be time-consuming. I'm much better off writing up my research results and sending them to a peer-reviewed journal with my name on it than trying to keep an article on Wikipedia from sliding into mediocrity, especially when I, personally, have much better written, more precise, references that cover more material. Yes, they cost (much more) money. You get what you pay for.
I'm just going to say that this article, combined with the original topic, convince me to not use Wikipedia for anything, not even to satisfy casual curiosity. For that, I *might* use the links given in the end of each article, but that's about it. I just don't know how much folklore I'm absorbing even in established articles.
Both religions use the traditional Protestant Bible (in terms of books included, not in terms of translation) and believe them, well, religiously. They interpret some parts rather differently from mainstream Christianity, (and from each other as well, of course.)
As for every recount, if we include unofficial recounts, well frankly it's too close to call. Some show Bush winning, some show Gore winning. This depends mostly on how you count.
The GP had a very good point. There are clearly recounts which have shown Bush winning, so his label of "Liar" is appropriate. If the GGP isn't a liar, he is *badly* biased in his sources, and probably unreliable about his other facts.
I'd also like to add that, from my perspective, having moved from Utah to Maryland during my lifetime, is rather different from the average slashdotter. What I see happening, historically, is
"On August 1, 2006, 4 of the 6 conservative Republicans who approved the Critical Analysis of Evolution classroom standards lost their seats in a primary election. The moderate Republican and Democats gaining seats vowed to overturn the 2005 school science standards and adopt those recommended by a State Board Science Hearing Committee that were rejected by the previous board. [26]"
In short, the elements opposing evolution *lost* in Kansas, in the long run, by *vote*. They were a *minority* who cheated to get into office. Many other so-called problems are like this: single people or small groups are singled out as the "real" representative, when the public is actually doing what we want.
Of course, even this is a simplification. But my main point is that hearing people on the winning side complain that the other side hasn't given in yet is a major pet peeve of mine on Slashdot. As I see it, most don't realize that the resistance isn't a counter-insurgence; it's simply a continuation of a battle that has been won where you are, but hasn't been won everywhere.
My scroll wheel is both scrollable and clickable. I click it to close tabs all the time...
I didn't see how your post related to this tangent, although it clearly related to the over-all thread.
I'm trying to figure out what your comment has to do with the point being made by the Grandparent post?
The discussion page is a life-saver. If you think "Hmm, this seems a bit NPOV." you can go see whether the discussion agrees or not. The discussion on the Roswell UFO Incident is a case in point. If you read the discussion page, it quickly becomes obvious that a UFO believer has been paying inhuman amounts of attention to the editing and sucesfully been stopping the skeptical viewpoint from becoming dominant.
Of course, the really funny people are the ones who believe it when they say it.
Here's a hint: America didn't invent racism, or a lot of other bad things that it's done. However, it (and the west in general) has succesully supressed a lot of the bad things that used to be universal. It's ironic that we then turn around and say "Look at the evil early Americans!" The culture they left us has allowed us to grow beyond them, but the important fact is that they allowed us to grow and were growing themselves.
***Well... and if not, that was just a child, one more, one less who cares.***
Can you provide any sources for this statement? Every description I've ever seen of losing a child, even in the bad old days, was usually pretty painful. You probably have to exempt the usual psychopaths.
If we consider the basic principle "Only kill people who are guilty of a terrible crime," I'm not sure where the moral contradiction is.
As far as I can tell, the usual pro-choice stance is "Don't kill people," with a different definition of "people". I can tell you that conservatives who see this principle stated, but don't understand that people is being defined differently (e.g. fetuses aren't people) think someone who supports abortion but it against the death penalty is being hypocritical. How can they be against the death penalty (death for guilty people) but for abortion (death for innocent people to satisfy the parents lust? Yes, that's how its seen. Don't argue with me about it; I can understand why it's seen differently.)
I really, really wish people wouldn't invent hypocrisy where it doesn't exist. The differences are in the definition of "people," and the honest debaters don't throw out manufactured misunderstandings.
Just a minor comment on this:
If I understood the book correctly (and I'm not sure I do) what Lewis says is that the things created aren't real. Thus you can imagine a house, but it won't actually keep the rain out. You can imagine food, but it won't fill you. The things you can create in Hell are, at their bottom, imaginary. (This in contrast to Heaven, which is, by definition, Real. And also imposible for humans to change; it must just be accepted or rejected.)
Also, it must be said that the nature of the people in Hell doesn't necessarily reflect the behavior of all people, even in Lewis' view of the world.
I'm pretty sure that birds use multiple cues to know which direction to go. Do they notice, for instance, where the sun rises and sets? Do they remember landmarks from year to year? Is it instictive for them to head north/south, or is there a little switch in their brain that says "Learn which direction is which and then follow it?"
Basically, I think a little redundancy and plasticity in their brains could solve this problem without much biological innovation.
In one sense, yes. You are discussing the so-called closing velocity of two moving items. There is nothing wrong with this value being greater than the speed of light, and no contradiction of relativity.
However, it is impossible to find a reference frame in which something physical is moving at this closing velocity. This isn't just because the beamns are moving at the speed of light. If we have two massive objects coming in at 3/4 the speed of light each, the closing velocity would be 1 1/2c. But if we try to change into the reference frame of either object, thanks to relativity the observerd closing velocity (or the velocity of the other object) will be 24/25 c.
The long and short of it is that it is easy to construct a quantity that is greater than the speed of light, and which is real. However, nothing physical actually moves at this speed.
***I was always wondering, what about commercials in the US ? ( no trolling, genuine question )***
They're pretty much held to the same standard as the video games. Significantly higher, in fact, because children can see them so easily. It's one of the big culture gaps across the Atlantic, but its pretty much consistent.
Most American's that I know who care about that sort of thing are typically completely shocked when they go to Europe.
***(and even then, nothing is done to erotise the situation, if you walk naked, nobody even look at you or say something)***
By American standards, walking around naked where a person of the opposite sex is likely to see *is* erotic (within single-sex groups, it typically isn't). That is also fairly consistent across the cultures, AFAIK. And if you were to walk around naked in public (male or female), somebody in the states would definitely say something. In fact, they'd probably call the police.
Why? Dunno. That's a question for another time.
Thanks for the reply. Is it just me, or do simplistic versions of history do more harm than good?
****Wait, the Islamic conquests of Europe pretty much ended with the Battle of Tours [wikipedia.org] in 732.***
True. What you said is true and completely misleading. The simple fact is that the crusades were not directly caused by Islamic conquests of Europe. Some indirect side effects, such as orders of knights devoted to driving muslims out of the Iberian peninsual probably helped, and that is the sort of delayed reaction that would take 350 years to build up. But we are looking more for direct causes here.
From Wikipedia:
"The immediate cause of the First Crusade was Alexius I's appeal to Pope Urban II for mercenaries to help him resist Muslim advances into territory of the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire had been defeated, and this defeat led to the loss of all but the coastlands of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Although the East-West Schism was brewing between the Catholic Western church and the Greek Orthodox Eastern church, Alexius I expected some help from a fellow Christian. However, the response was much larger, and less helpful, than Alexius I desired, as the Pope called for a large invasion force to not merely defend the Byzantine Empire but also retake Jerusalem."
Thus it was not Islamic advances in Europe that directly caused the crusades; it was Islamic advances against the Byzantine empire (which is not in what is currently considered Europe). Which is still an instance of Islam extending its empire. I'm not sure if that qualifies as Jihad, though. To be completely frank, it sounds like exactly what Europe was trying to do, for instance, when it tried to reclaim the Iberian peninsula, except in reverse.
Well, I rather think that if you want to keep something absolutely private, don't use the service.
As others have pointed out before, the same applies to email, or just about any other activity online. And I think that that was the real jist of the grandparent post. Only put things on that the whole world could read; there are plenty of those and the service is useful.
"greater personal freedom and more economic restrictions (particularly income redistribution, but there are others)"
???
Small business owners probably see those two stated goals as completely incompatible, especially the income redistribution.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
We notice it. It's a lot of what fuels the "Discrimination is still real" talk that floats around, and at some level, they're probably right.
Part of the problem is that nobody knows exactly what to do about it. We have been trying things (I think that's a large part of what Affirmative Action is about) but change happens slowly no matter what.
I must also add that what you saw was a snap-shot of race dynamics in the states. What you can't see is how different this is from fifty years ago when the seperation was even more pronounces and firmly established in law and custom.
Guess what? Google watch is the #1 search result, followed by mostly articles about Google's slogan and often whether they've kept it up or not.
All this seems to be completely appropriate. It's not hard to find bad stuff about Google, using Google, although it is very hard to take Google Watch's claims about Google manipulating page-rank seriously after this little exercise.
I would like to point out 1) that it's not just BYU working on this. The person whose results are actually cited in the study is actually Dr. Derya Unutmaz, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. 2) it's being supported by Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is based in Denver. It's probably a long shot, and the company knows it. But it's real research the way it's normally done in this field. 3) it's not the professors hyping the results so much as it is the journalists. As usual. All those saying there's a long way to go are right, and the researchers who did the work would whole-heartedly agree. 4) BYU has and continues to produce research that is published in peer reviewed journals. Just because part of it was done at BYU doesn't make it wrong; BYU has done many things that are actually right. Saying or implying anything different is simply religious bigotry. 5) Oh, and many of you would be surprised to visit the Biology department at BYU. They believe in evolution there. When I went home for Christmas my sister bad-mouthed creationism because, after taking botany at BYU, she knew they didn't have a leg to stand on. (Stories about individual Mormons, even prominent ones, who might have disagreed will be promptly ignored. I probably have seen, heard, and read more of it than you have.)
'Ceragenin' results in no hits. However, 'Ceragenins' does. They all seem to be referring back to essentially the same article. But it is getting some attention. As icing on the cake, it is also really easy to search for the company that seems to have been sponsoring the research (Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals Inc.) As far as I can tell, they're a legit company that recently changed their name after a merger, with a history on Wall Street, etc. Really, I'm starting to think that Google spoils us. There are lots of things that are so obscure, even Google can't find them until this kind of publicity occurs. Finding useful information on, say, cutting-edge specialized physics (say, the statistics of correlations functions between scattering matrix elements of a classically chaotic cavity), is essentially impossible on Google, even using Google Scholar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be with the fantastically large number of different organic compounds that can be created.