Forget the 98% figure. It honestly doesn't mean anything at all. The tests are very accurate, but their results are meaningless. They amount to comparing two strings of binary written with a language and compiler that were lost 3 billion years ago, for a computer we don't understand. Measuring how every base pair matches up to every other base pair is useless. There are pieces of DNA that are far more important than others, like the ones that turn other genes on and off, or the ones that code for important enzymes.
The figure for how many identical base pairs we share doesn't mean much because we don't understand most of what the DNA is doing. A switch controlling production of an important chimp hormone could be switched off in humans, turning off the thousands of base pairs involved in creating that hormone. Read by this type of analysis, however, that system would read as only 1% different, rather than 100% different, because the base pairs stay on the chromosome even though they don't do anything.
Also, chimps don't even have the same number of chromosomes we do, so comparing the DNA strands in their 48 chromosomes to those in our 46 is to ignore significant changes in the overall organization of genes.
So please, stop asking for clarification on the percentage, because it just doesn't matter. All it tells us is that we are closely related, but not how close, or in what way.
Forget the 98% figure. It honestly doesn't mean anything at all. The tests are very accurate, but their results are meaningless. They amount to comparing two strings of binary written with a language and compiler that were lost 3 billion years ago, for a computer we don't understand. Measuring how every base pair matches up to every other base pair is useless. There are pieces of DNA that are far more important than others, like the ones that turn other genes on and off, or the ones that code for important enzymes.
The figure for how many identical base pairs we share doesn't mean much because we don't understand most of what the DNA is doing. A switch controlling production of an important chimp hormone could be switched off in humans, turning off the thousands of base pairs involved in creating that hormone. Read by this type of analysis, however, that system would read as only 1% different, rather than 100% different, because the base pairs stay on the chromosome even though they don't do anything.
Also, chimps don't even have the same number of chromosomes we do, so comparing the DNA strands in their 48 chromosomes to those in our 46 is to ignore significant changes in the overall organization of genes.
So please, stop asking for clarification on the percentage, because it just doesn't matter. All it tells us is that we are closely related, but not how close. or in what way.
What I don't understand about this thread is why so many people are bitching and complaining about a new feature, provided for free, which wasn't listed anywhere on their box/license agreement.
How can so many people be so whiny and selfish? Valve repeatedly said the only multiplayer they were releasing with HL2 was CS:S. Now you've got another form of online play, completely free! So the first thing you do is get on Slashdot and bitch about it? Do you somehow retroactively feel you were entitled to this free update, and should have received better?
How can you call a frozen ball of 200 cells with less differentiation than a flatworm a human being? Every vertebrate starts out just like we do. This same "embryo" (still a blastocyst) could be aborted naturally in a miscarriage without the mother ever noticing anything but a late period.
This life is no more "human" than any other vertebrate embryo, because not only is it only human in the sense that its DNA is, but being frozen in a lab, it does not even have the potential to become human, as an aborted fetus would.
Re:Can we try something less controversial first?
on
Blending Mice and Men
·
· Score: 1
Seems you need to do more research before you post your idle speculations online. And reveal your ignorance.
Scientists have been making animal/animal chimeras for quite some time. Perhaps you've read about the spider/goat chimera that secrets spider silk in its mammary glands? Going even farther out, have you heard of the bacteria/fish chimeras that glow in the dark? (no, not the ones with colonies of bacteria in them, the ones with bacterial DNA) Maybe the controversial bacteria/rabbit chimera that fluoresces under ultraviolet light? (And was defended as art?
Get with the picture man, animal/animal was back in the '90s
Being relatively fresh out of high school and privy to what modern (purchased by a wealthy school and published within the last 5 years, thank god) biology textbooks -not the kind found in the Bible Belt- are saying about chimeras, I can tell you this:
Chimeric individuals are no longer thought to be exceedingly rare. Estimates vary wildly, but the fact remains that most women (who are much more likely to be chimeras) just don't ever go in for DNA and tissue sampling. Ever. In their entire lives. So while the confirmed cases of chimerism are extremely rare, no one knows how many are out there. Indeed, no one really needs to care, because most chimeras live their lives without ever noticing anything unusual about themselves, and they are otherwise completely normal.
Well, it just doesn't work like that. These are human brain cells in mice. They will act like human brain cells in a human embryo, trying to connect up with the rest of the nervous system and figure out what the hell they're supposed to be doing.
They will most likely end up operating the mouse in a way reminiscent of the way a mouse brain does. Whether it will have an internal monologue or not... well... who the hell knows?
Wow, someone seriously referring to "Green Mother Gaia" and extra-sensory perception, making a plea for racial harmony, and including an obscure Star Trek reference all in one post.
You sir, are the ultimate new-ager. I salute you.
BTW, i have some harmonic native american crystals on eBAY if you're interested.
This creature you speak of sounds like a crossbreed between very closely related species. These are not at all uncommon. I refer you to mules/hinnies. An animal that is basically 100% bovine IS going to wander aimlessly all day. This is normal.
"I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells..." woah woah. Stop there. Yes, you can imagine that. Have fun with your excellent imagination. But the assertions you make based on your totally random subjective imagining, how can anyone take that seriously?
REAL chimeric humans, the kind who start out as twins and fuse as embryos, NEVER EVER know about it until they get weird results on unrelated DNA tests. So based on FACTS that have been proven in studies, we can surmise that perhaps other chimeras wouldn't notice either.
Now this is totally open to disproof, but its better than imagining something and going from there.
Oh, and by the way, the structures you mention as unnatural are indeed found elsewhere in nature, in the species of their respective original owners, they are just moved over to another organism.
Re:Better than a Volcano
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 1
Many science labs now get their anyhdrous ethanol mixed with a small amount of gasoline. Not too attractive. But then, 190 proof vodka isn't really either.
Actually, a million rabid fanboys tear up these poor game reviewers no matter what score they give them. Head over to last Friday's Penny Arcade to see Tycho give a thorough description.
If they had given Halo 2 an 8, Halo 2 fanboys would be up in arms about what is undoubtedly a great game getting an undeservedly low score.
If they give it a 9, idiots like you post their weird ideas about how the rating system should be related to grades in academia and, having never played the game, conclude that 9 is too high.
From those screenshots it looks like somebody finally went and made a decent game with the Freelancer engine. I'm pretty sure they used a different one, but it looks similar.
*sigh* Freelancer was so disappointing. Look, we have an absolutely enormous world for you to play in, and, erm, no roleplaying elements... and the combat is point-and-click... and most of the world is empty space... and only three ships viable for high-level use... but hey it sure looks pretty
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-12 -06&res=l
Normally I'm all for multilateralism, but this guy has a point. The U.S. gives out so much money that other nations start to take it for granted, and actually get real pissed off when the money stops, for any reason. I think that's a bit stupid and dumb. I mean, the U.S. won't be the richest nation in the world for that long, why should we be giving money to 3rd world nations that have long histories of poor government, embezzlement, and absolutely zero population control?
Ah yes, the time honored tactic of challenging the results of the "experts", just because you don't trust them. You have no idea how they acheived their results, why they were there, or who put them there, but you don't trust them because they told you something you don't like.
Wake up buddy. Cold fusion experts were wrong, phlogisten experts were wrong, medical experts have been wrong, but even if you delete this report from every article its ever been published in, there are still hundreds more estimates all over journals, the headlines of newspapers and magazines, and the internet, claiming similar figures.
When do you cross the line from suspicion of experts to denial of reality?
Okay, I agree that they were, in many ways, better than the Nationalists.
But coming to the conclusion that, since they were better than the nationalists, they've "done alright" is a bit much. They did kill thousands and imprison many times that in the last 50 years, not to mention the horrible stifling of intellectualism and various other "isms" during the Cultural Revolution and earlier "Hundred Flowers" campaign.
In fact, the "Hundred Flowers" is enough to make you shudder at its sheer unmitigated evil, evil intentions, evil beginnings, and evil end.
Ok, what part of "invasion" do you not understand. I said that if you're worrid about invasions, you should get a map and check out the Pacific. I said nothing about ICBMs. Way to change the subject.
If you're really crazy enough to think the Chinese leadership wants us all dead and is willing to fire nukes at us to achieve that, maybe you should look at China's revenue from exporting goods to the U.S.
If you use English in Tian An Men, nobody will care.
If you're American and you use Mandarin anyway, nobody will bother you.
If you're Chinese shouting in front of the Statue of Liberty, you might get hassled.
Of course, if you use Mandarin in front of the Statue of Liberty, nobody will care.
Finally, if you're Chinese, shouting this in Mandarin at Tian An Men, nobody will care, as long as you aren't too close to any police. And they might not care either. This is because in Chinese logic, one man shouting one thing one time isn't important.
There's actually a large intellectual community that thinks that China wouldn't work as a democracy. It would certainly face the largest problems with voting that any democracy ever has, just because of the sheer scale.
Many Chinese are actually quite upset that the Western press shows them in such a bad light. Most Chinese people either don't care about Tibet, or believe that it's such a small issue compared to others that the westerners should stop complaining about it.
I've also been to China, almost for a month, and life there isn't much different. Aside from the language barrier. My Mandarin wasn't very good when I was there a couple years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Please God let the yellow panda of Azerbaijan be a real character. I would buy the game even though I can't play online.
Forget the 98% figure. It honestly doesn't mean anything at all. The tests are very accurate, but their results are meaningless. They amount to comparing two strings of binary written with a language and compiler that were lost 3 billion years ago, for a computer we don't understand. Measuring how every base pair matches up to every other base pair is useless. There are pieces of DNA that are far more important than others, like the ones that turn other genes on and off, or the ones that code for important enzymes.
The figure for how many identical base pairs we share doesn't mean much because we don't understand most of what the DNA is doing. A switch controlling production of an important chimp hormone could be switched off in humans, turning off the thousands of base pairs involved in creating that hormone. Read by this type of analysis, however, that system would read as only 1% different, rather than 100% different, because the base pairs stay on the chromosome even though they don't do anything.
Also, chimps don't even have the same number of chromosomes we do, so comparing the DNA strands in their 48 chromosomes to those in our 46 is to ignore significant changes in the overall organization of genes.
So please, stop asking for clarification on the percentage, because it just doesn't matter. All it tells us is that we are closely related, but not how close, or in what way.
Forget the 98% figure. It honestly doesn't mean anything at all. The tests are very accurate, but their results are meaningless. They amount to comparing two strings of binary written with a language and compiler that were lost 3 billion years ago, for a computer we don't understand. Measuring how every base pair matches up to every other base pair is useless. There are pieces of DNA that are far more important than others, like the ones that turn other genes on and off, or the ones that code for important enzymes.
The figure for how many identical base pairs we share doesn't mean much because we don't understand most of what the DNA is doing. A switch controlling production of an important chimp hormone could be switched off in humans, turning off the thousands of base pairs involved in creating that hormone. Read by this type of analysis, however, that system would read as only 1% different, rather than 100% different, because the base pairs stay on the chromosome even though they don't do anything.
Also, chimps don't even have the same number of chromosomes we do, so comparing the DNA strands in their 48 chromosomes to those in our 46 is to ignore significant changes in the overall organization of genes.
So please, stop asking for clarification on the percentage, because it just doesn't matter. All it tells us is that we are closely related, but not how close. or in what way.
What I don't understand about this thread is why so many people are bitching and complaining about a new feature, provided for free, which wasn't listed anywhere on their box/license agreement.
How can so many people be so whiny and selfish? Valve repeatedly said the only multiplayer they were releasing with HL2 was CS:S. Now you've got another form of online play, completely free! So the first thing you do is get on Slashdot and bitch about it? Do you somehow retroactively feel you were entitled to this free update, and should have received better?
I know, welcome to the intarweb.
How can you call a frozen ball of 200 cells with less differentiation than a flatworm a human being? Every vertebrate starts out just like we do. This same "embryo" (still a blastocyst) could be aborted naturally in a miscarriage without the mother ever noticing anything but a late period.
This life is no more "human" than any other vertebrate embryo, because not only is it only human in the sense that its DNA is, but being frozen in a lab, it does not even have the potential to become human, as an aborted fetus would.
Any modern gaming rig can run Doom 3 at 100 fps... please post the video settings next time, so we can be duly impressed.
*slaps Camel Pilot with a wet fish* sigh...
Seems you need to do more research before you post your idle speculations online. And reveal your ignorance.
Scientists have been making animal/animal chimeras for quite some time. Perhaps you've read about the spider/goat chimera that secrets spider silk in its mammary glands?
Going even farther out, have you heard of the bacteria/fish chimeras that glow in the dark? (no, not the ones with colonies of bacteria in them, the ones with bacterial DNA)
Maybe the controversial bacteria/rabbit chimera that fluoresces under ultraviolet light? (And was defended as art?
Get with the picture man, animal/animal was back in the '90s
Being relatively fresh out of high school and privy to what modern (purchased by a wealthy school and published within the last 5 years, thank god) biology textbooks -not the kind found in the Bible Belt- are saying about chimeras, I can tell you this:
Chimeric individuals are no longer thought to be exceedingly rare. Estimates vary wildly, but the fact remains that most women (who are much more likely to be chimeras) just don't ever go in for DNA and tissue sampling. Ever. In their entire lives. So while the confirmed cases of chimerism are extremely rare, no one knows how many are out there. Indeed, no one really needs to care, because most chimeras live their lives without ever noticing anything unusual about themselves, and they are otherwise completely normal.
Well, it just doesn't work like that. These are human brain cells in mice. They will act like human brain cells in a human embryo, trying to connect up with the rest of the nervous system and figure out what the hell they're supposed to be doing.
They will most likely end up operating the mouse in a way reminiscent of the way a mouse brain does. Whether it will have an internal monologue or not... well... who the hell knows?
Wow, someone seriously referring to "Green Mother Gaia" and extra-sensory perception, making a plea for racial harmony, and including an obscure Star Trek reference all in one post.
You sir, are the ultimate new-ager. I salute you.
BTW, i have some harmonic native american crystals on eBAY if you're interested.
This creature you speak of sounds like a crossbreed between very closely related species. These are not at all uncommon. I refer you to mules/hinnies. An animal that is basically 100% bovine IS going to wander aimlessly all day. This is normal.
"I can only imagine what a mouse with human brain cells..." woah woah. Stop there. Yes, you can imagine that. Have fun with your excellent imagination. But the assertions you make based on your totally random subjective imagining, how can anyone take that seriously?
REAL chimeric humans, the kind who start out as twins and fuse as embryos, NEVER EVER know about it until they get weird results on unrelated DNA tests. So based on FACTS that have been proven in studies, we can surmise that perhaps other chimeras wouldn't notice either.
Now this is totally open to disproof, but its better than imagining something and going from there.
Oh, and by the way, the structures you mention as unnatural are indeed found elsewhere in nature, in the species of their respective original owners, they are just moved over to another organism.
Many science labs now get their anyhdrous ethanol mixed with a small amount of gasoline. Not too attractive. But then, 190 proof vodka isn't really either.
Scifi First Person Shooter - Modern Action Game oh, and, Won't destroy your console - will destroy your console
So... you don't like fps games. Great. And you are discussing this game... why?
Actually, a million rabid fanboys tear up these poor game reviewers no matter what score they give them. Head over to last Friday's Penny Arcade to see Tycho give a thorough description.
If they had given Halo 2 an 8, Halo 2 fanboys would be up in arms about what is undoubtedly a great game getting an undeservedly low score.
If they give it a 9, idiots like you post their weird ideas about how the rating system should be related to grades in academia and, having never played the game, conclude that 9 is too high.
Not that I know of. But that's the whole point isn't it?
From those screenshots it looks like somebody finally went and made a decent game with the Freelancer engine. I'm pretty sure they used a different one, but it looks similar.2 -06&res=l
*sigh* Freelancer was so disappointing. Look, we have an absolutely enormous world for you to play in, and, erm, no roleplaying elements... and the combat is point-and-click... and most of the world is empty space... and only three ships viable for high-level use... but hey it sure looks pretty http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-1
Normally I'm all for multilateralism, but this guy has a point. The U.S. gives out so much money that other nations start to take it for granted, and actually get real pissed off when the money stops, for any reason. I think that's a bit stupid and dumb. I mean, the U.S. won't be the richest nation in the world for that long, why should we be giving money to 3rd world nations that have long histories of poor government, embezzlement, and absolutely zero population control?
Ah yes, the time honored tactic of challenging the results of the "experts", just because you don't trust them. You have no idea how they acheived their results, why they were there, or who put them there, but you don't trust them because they told you something you don't like.
Wake up buddy. Cold fusion experts were wrong, phlogisten experts were wrong, medical experts have been wrong, but even if you delete this report from every article its ever been published in, there are still hundreds more estimates all over journals, the headlines of newspapers and magazines, and the internet, claiming similar figures.
When do you cross the line from suspicion of experts to denial of reality?
Okay, I agree that they were, in many ways, better than the Nationalists.
But coming to the conclusion that, since they were better than the nationalists, they've "done alright" is a bit much. They did kill thousands and imprison many times that in the last 50 years, not to mention the horrible stifling of intellectualism and various other "isms" during the Cultural Revolution and earlier "Hundred Flowers" campaign.
In fact, the "Hundred Flowers" is enough to make you shudder at its sheer unmitigated evil, evil intentions, evil beginnings, and evil end.
Ok, what part of "invasion" do you not understand. I said that if you're worrid about invasions, you should get a map and check out the Pacific. I said nothing about ICBMs. Way to change the subject. If you're really crazy enough to think the Chinese leadership wants us all dead and is willing to fire nukes at us to achieve that, maybe you should look at China's revenue from exporting goods to the U.S.
Sorry, I did that wrong. It should read:
"Ni yao qu mai yi ben zhong wen zi dian."
Don't people know how to acquire information for themselves anymore?
If you use English in Tian An Men, nobody will care.
If you're American and you use Mandarin anyway, nobody will bother you.
If you're Chinese shouting in front of the Statue of Liberty, you might get hassled.
Of course, if you use Mandarin in front of the Statue of Liberty, nobody will care.
Finally, if you're Chinese, shouting this in Mandarin at Tian An Men, nobody will care, as long as you aren't too close to any police. And they might not care either. This is because in Chinese logic, one man shouting one thing one time isn't important.
There's actually a large intellectual community that thinks that China wouldn't work as a democracy. It would certainly face the largest problems with voting that any democracy ever has, just because of the sheer scale.
Many Chinese are actually quite upset that the Western press shows them in such a bad light. Most Chinese people either don't care about Tibet, or believe that it's such a small issue compared to others that the westerners should stop complaining about it.
I've also been to China, almost for a month, and life there isn't much different. Aside from the language barrier. My Mandarin wasn't very good when I was there a couple years ago.