Next time you have a problem with assertions people make about the UN, try rebutting their assertions instead of trying to label them "neocons" and implying that they are only asserting their views as part of a conspiracy with an agenda of building the First American Reich.
Chill out, I didn't say you were a neocon. I said that smearing the UN was currently a tactic that the neocons are using.
Hey, maybe you have some other reason for joining in the chorus. Wasn't very clear from your post, but...
[the UN] wasn't created to be "the World's Government"
Heaven forbid. I mean, it was created to keep peace and all, and
specifically to be able to deploy armed forces (which the League
of Nations wasn't), and to have divisions for things like public
health and education; and it has an assembly with representatives of the world's governments in it; but
heaven forbid it might actually be called governmental itself.
I mean, that might offend the libertarians. (aiieeeee!! another ad hominem!!!!!!)
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
True. If by funny you mean the sort of joke that makes
you want to throw up... and let's not forget that the CIA under Reagan was the primary organizing force behind the Afghan mujahedin, including certain terrorists of recent renown.
The denigration of the UN, so mindlessly echoed by many on here, is a neocon tactic designed to set up the
New American Century. Just look at the smearing of the IAEA (and subsequent total failure of the US to do any better). It's sad when people are so ignorant of history that they forget why the UN was created in the first place, or how Germany and Japan undermined the League of Nations as a critical part of their imperial manouevres in the 30's.
People need to take a minute to think about the agenda
behind this constant rubbishing of the UN.
Is Empire really what Americans want?
Possibly not, but there's no way of knowing: see e.g.
Mike Scheuer,
former head of CIA's bin Laden unit, who points out that
the underlying reasons for Arab terrorism or the implications of America's continued imperial expansion are simply not part of
the political dialogue in America right now.
As for bureaucracy, I've worked in many US govt labs and the idea that America is somehow less bureaucratic is another of those jokes that makes you want to hurl. People, turn off your TV, it's lying to you...
We used to program games in Basic, on BBC Micros! First game I ever wrote was a donkey kong clone, and a poor one at that - about 1500 lines of code, max.
You were lucky! We had to program in 6502 machine code, using a non-relocatable assembler, in under 32K, and save onto tape!
(Although, this was peanuts compared to the trials faced by Jeremy Smith and Peter Irvin, programmers of the best ever BBC game, Exile...)
It's OK to try change doctors when you're not very sick and when you try to find a nice doctor who you like to have him as the one who you usually refer first to.
BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors.
From what I understand (a mutual friend knows Pat and told me his story, independent of/.) many of the doctors Pat consulted simply refused to acknowledge that he was capable of diagnosing his own Actinomyces infection. I even saw a physician on slashdot
criticising him for self-diagnosis, and comparing a self-diagnosing patient to a "newbie blindly editing his/her registry".
If someone starts panicking, switching doctors rapidly and self-diagnosing at random, then I agree it's bad news. But when someone who is intelligent and scientifically-minded attempts to seek out information on their own health, and is rebutted by the medical establishment, then I consider it sadly indicative of the way knowledge is compartmentalised in our society, and the professional airs that some doctors affect.
I'm a molecular biologist, and (fairly or not) we routinely jibe at medics. It's perhaps a generalisation, but my experience is that physicians often simply don't want to know about new science. "Genetics? Molecules? Biotechnology? Pah. Bedside manner is the key, sonny, oh and my years of training, which rule out any possibility that you could know something I don't..."
As I understand it, the moment Pat found a doctor who was able to take suggestions as well as offer them, he stuck with that doctor. This, I think, is the bottom-line lesson here: find a doctor who listens as well as talks, who's prepared to admit that you might have a brain as well as a bunch of symptoms, and hang on to that doctor for dear life.
Oh, and get a bloody health service in this country.
NB: I'm also a fiction author, and in the fiction world, you should never ever ever pay a publisher to publish your work. EVER. But academic publishing has always worked by different rules.
The different rules in this case are because academic publications are peer-reviewed, whereas other publications (excepting Slashdot posts) ain't.
3) Morality. All but the strongest pacificts would agree...
What a great example of consensus morality.
Here's a stunning thought: what if
more people (and video games companies) did what they thought was right, rather than
what most other people thought was right?
I don't see that being a 'historical event' is much of a mitigating factor. So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it
Again with the "most people" morality. What are you, afraid of being disliked?
Personally I think
America's Army is one of the scariest
developments on the market and was unshocked (perhaps even intrigued) when
Under Ash presented an alternate viewpoint
(not that I support that viewpoint, me being a loony extreme pacifist and all that).
As for games like Hitman and GTA, the actions of the character
are clearly immoral: that's the whole vicarious fun of it.
You really have to shed this tepid Puritan morality and recognize that art can and does depict dark stuff.
Mod me flamebait, but I'd bet hard money that a 9/11 game is not long in coming.
Again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, but I am interested in why, for example, a $15 million grant couldn't go towards building a really fast supercomputer - ala Virginia Tech - hire a couple of scientists, a few talented programmers and systems engineers
The problem is that hiring the scientists and programmers is
typically much harder than
building a fast machine. Software is the bottleneck, not hardware.
Dumb question from a bio neophyte, but wouldnt you already know the structure if you knew the sequence, since you would have an example of the protein, and the sequence supposedly more or less determines the structure?
No, going from sequence to structure is a big problem;
see e.g. the
CASP competition.
The fundamental difficulty is that protein folding involves
many complex interactions between amino acid side chains and solvent molecules, getting you into a world of nightmarish quantum chemistry where energy landscapes are rugged and rules are made to be broken.
In general there are two ways to approach structure prediction. The most reliable is
homology modeling
where you basically find a similar protein sequence (i.e. a close evolutionary relative) whose structure is known.
Current protein database searches
generally rely on probabilistic models borrowed from
natural language processing and speech recognition,
primarily
hidden Markov models.
Essentially, these models address the evolutionary process (which describes how different proteins are related),
rather than the folding process (which describes how individual proteins fold).
If there aren't any similar proteins with known structure,
you're into the domain
of novel fold prediction, the second (harder) way to predict structure.
The current best novel fold prediction methods begin by
breaking the protein sequence into lots of tiny fragments
(think words), then doing homology modeling on these
fragments... e.g. the ROSETTA program from David Baker's group.
Simulating the full folding kinetics, as folding@home does, is even harder, and involves wading knee-deep into all that nightmarish quantum chemistry (or approximating it).
Here you are interested in not only the final folded structure
of the protein, but also its intermediate structures (hence the
applicability of this approach to study of misfolding diseases, such as those involving prions).
Thank you DeepStream for pointing out the difference between folding@home and this ROSETTA-related project... teach me to respond without rtfa...
For those of you who don't know Stanford's project, called Folding@Home, uses computer cycles to observe and find out more about how proteins fold.
Now how is this really different from IBM's project?
A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.
Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing,
it is less useful than it appears.
In my research area
(computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.
Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g.
simulations of prion aggregation
(mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these
cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example
is
building cheap clusters out of console hardware
which I reckon I first heard in 1996!).
And every other month someone offers me supercomputer
time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work
in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as
MCMC,
are better suited to this treatment than others.
Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other
scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving,
which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs
from being used for the eminently futile task of
looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)
Slashdot Mirror
Please turn over your logs to confirm that you did, in fact, keep it to yourself.
Chill out, I didn't say you were a neocon. I said that smearing the UN was currently a tactic that the neocons are using. Hey, maybe you have some other reason for joining in the chorus. Wasn't very clear from your post, but...
[the UN] wasn't created to be "the World's Government"
Heaven forbid. I mean, it was created to keep peace and all, and specifically to be able to deploy armed forces (which the League of Nations wasn't), and to have divisions for things like public health and education; and it has an assembly with representatives of the world's governments in it; but heaven forbid it might actually be called governmental itself.
I mean, that might offend the libertarians. (aiieeeee!! another ad hominem!!!!!!)
True. If by funny you mean the sort of joke that makes you want to throw up... and let's not forget that the CIA under Reagan was the primary organizing force behind the Afghan mujahedin, including certain terrorists of recent renown.
The denigration of the UN, so mindlessly echoed by many on here, is a neocon tactic designed to set up the New American Century. Just look at the smearing of the IAEA (and subsequent total failure of the US to do any better). It's sad when people are so ignorant of history that they forget why the UN was created in the first place, or how Germany and Japan undermined the League of Nations as a critical part of their imperial manouevres in the 30's.
People need to take a minute to think about the agenda behind this constant rubbishing of the UN. Is Empire really what Americans want? Possibly not, but there's no way of knowing: see e.g. Mike Scheuer, former head of CIA's bin Laden unit, who points out that the underlying reasons for Arab terrorism or the implications of America's continued imperial expansion are simply not part of the political dialogue in America right now.
As for bureaucracy, I've worked in many US govt labs and the idea that America is somehow less bureaucratic is another of those jokes that makes you want to hurl. People, turn off your TV, it's lying to you...
You were lucky! We had to program in 6502 machine code, using a non-relocatable assembler, in under 32K, and save onto tape!
(Although, this was peanuts compared to the trials faced by Jeremy Smith and Peter Irvin, programmers of the best ever BBC game, Exile...)
(I don't want to know about punchcards....)
BUT when someone health is compromised HE SHOULDN'T keep switching doctors.
From what I understand (a mutual friend knows Pat and told me his story, independent of /.) many of the doctors Pat consulted simply refused to acknowledge that he was capable of diagnosing his own Actinomyces infection. I even saw a physician on slashdot
criticising him for self-diagnosis, and comparing a self-diagnosing patient to a "newbie blindly editing his/her registry".
If someone starts panicking, switching doctors rapidly and self-diagnosing at random, then I agree it's bad news. But when someone who is intelligent and scientifically-minded attempts to seek out information on their own health, and is rebutted by the medical establishment, then I consider it sadly indicative of the way knowledge is compartmentalised in our society, and the professional airs that some doctors affect.
I'm a molecular biologist, and (fairly or not) we routinely jibe at medics. It's perhaps a generalisation, but my experience is that physicians often simply don't want to know about new science. "Genetics? Molecules? Biotechnology? Pah. Bedside manner is the key, sonny, oh and my years of training, which rule out any possibility that you could know something I don't..."
As I understand it, the moment Pat found a doctor who was able to take suggestions as well as offer them, he stuck with that doctor. This, I think, is the bottom-line lesson here: find a doctor who listens as well as talks, who's prepared to admit that you might have a brain as well as a bunch of symptoms, and hang on to that doctor for dear life.
Oh, and get a bloody health service in this country.
NB: I'm also a fiction author, and in the fiction world, you should never ever ever pay a publisher to publish your work. EVER. But academic publishing has always worked by different rules.
The different rules in this case are because academic publications are peer-reviewed, whereas other publications (excepting Slashdot posts) ain't.
You mis-spelled if. HTH
What a great example of consensus morality. Here's a stunning thought: what if more people (and video games companies) did what they thought was right, rather than what most other people thought was right?
I don't see that being a 'historical event' is much of a mitigating factor. So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it
Again with the "most people" morality. What are you, afraid of being disliked?
Personally I think America's Army is one of the scariest developments on the market and was unshocked (perhaps even intrigued) when Under Ash presented an alternate viewpoint (not that I support that viewpoint, me being a loony extreme pacifist and all that).
As for games like Hitman and GTA, the actions of the character are clearly immoral: that's the whole vicarious fun of it. You really have to shed this tepid Puritan morality and recognize that art can and does depict dark stuff. Mod me flamebait, but I'd bet hard money that a 9/11 game is not long in coming.
The problem is that hiring the scientists and programmers is typically much harder than building a fast machine. Software is the bottleneck, not hardware.
Sign yourself up, d00d.... order the Federal Five now! (NSFW)
No, going from sequence to structure is a big problem; see e.g. the CASP competition. The fundamental difficulty is that protein folding involves many complex interactions between amino acid side chains and solvent molecules, getting you into a world of nightmarish quantum chemistry where energy landscapes are rugged and rules are made to be broken.
In general there are two ways to approach structure prediction. The most reliable is homology modeling where you basically find a similar protein sequence (i.e. a close evolutionary relative) whose structure is known. Current protein database searches generally rely on probabilistic models borrowed from natural language processing and speech recognition, primarily hidden Markov models. Essentially, these models address the evolutionary process (which describes how different proteins are related), rather than the folding process (which describes how individual proteins fold).
If there aren't any similar proteins with known structure, you're into the domain of novel fold prediction, the second (harder) way to predict structure. The current best novel fold prediction methods begin by breaking the protein sequence into lots of tiny fragments (think words), then doing homology modeling on these fragments... e.g. the ROSETTA program from David Baker's group.
Simulating the full folding kinetics, as folding@home does, is even harder, and involves wading knee-deep into all that nightmarish quantum chemistry (or approximating it). Here you are interested in not only the final folded structure of the protein, but also its intermediate structures (hence the applicability of this approach to study of misfolding diseases, such as those involving prions).
Thank you DeepStream for pointing out the difference between folding@home and this ROSETTA-related project... teach me to respond without rtfa...
Now how is this really different from IBM's project?
A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.
Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.
Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example is building cheap clusters out of console hardware which I reckon I first heard in 1996!). And every other month someone offers me supercomputer time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as MCMC, are better suited to this treatment than others.
Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving, which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs from being used for the eminently futile task of looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)