Coffee is supposed to be brewed HOT. It is supposed to be served HOT. You spill HOT SHIT on you, and you GET BURNT.
It's also "supposed" to be served in a sturdy ceramic cup with an open top that allows rapid evaporative cooling (which is why the coffee needs to be that hot in the first place). Failing that, a sturdy cardboard cup would at least be reasonable.
What is obviously not reasonable is a cheap styrofoam cup that gets soft when it is exposed to that level of heat, although this may not be obvious to the customer when it is stabilized by a rigid plastic top firmly in place. Remove that top (to add sugar or cream (which are provided separately so that the customer has to remove the top), and the cup is prone to catastrophic collapse from even slight pressure on the sides. And obviously unsafe to serve to customers in cars, who clearly are not going to have a table to catch most of the spill (this was hardly the first burn they'd had, just the worst).
So yes, serve the coffee HOT if you want--but spend the money to give the customer a reasonably safe cup. If you are going to compromise by using a cup that can't take the heat, you have to compromise on the temperature as well to maintain safety.
Frankly, This is an illustration of why our process of developing medications is ridiculous. This may not work (though I resent that "wontwork" tag) but frankly there are at least 3 very promising treatments for Alzheimer's Disease in early trials. There are a lot more than 3. But think about the problems. Alzheimer's Disease develops slowly, so it takes years to tell if a treatment is working. And while this notion looks pretty benign (I'd lay money that it won't work, but it's worth trying), that is not the case in general. One of the most promising treatment ideas was an antibody against Alzheimer plaque protein. And when tried, it actually seemed to be working. Unfortunately, it also caused fatal encephalitis
...and attempts to make the writer look smarter by using fancy words that the writer doesn't even know the meaning of (you cannot have an eliolated CPU).
Maybe you should spend a bit more time with a dictionary before presuming to nitpick. "Etiolated" is not that fancy a word--it's hardly the first time I've seen it used in its broader meaning of "feeble."
Even if one only knew about the specific horticultural meaning, it would be a pretty good metaphor.
The good news seems to be that the old adaptors will work for charging the machine when it is idle, even if they aren't really suitable for charging it in use. That's useful for people who already have one of the old ones. I imagine somebody will come out with an adaptor at some point.
Seems like this sort of analysis depends heavily on different companies being exactly "in sync" in terms of their accounting. When AT&T says that it "ended" 2007 with 2M customers, does that really mean "as of Dec 31"? Or is there a little lag in AT&T's accounting? Are the 4M phones all shipped, or does that include orders and phones in transit? How about phones in transit to overseas? Are there any phones being shipped to other countries in anticipation of product launch?
His "to clarify, add detail" rule could be applied to his comment on the photo browser. He says they should be grey not white, and only one pixel wide, but gives no reason why.
He probably thought it was obvious. So do I. Smaller borders mean the thumbnails can be larger and clearer. There is no real need for a wide border, since different pictures usually look different enough that the borders are obvious, and the eye will extend the grid where they aren't.
First of all, if you fit thousands of data points into a single graph, it's going to need a damn big piece of paper before I'm capable of distinguishing them, combined with a ruler and a set square if I want to get the value for a specific data point.
The value of a graph is not to read off the value of a single data point; for that you use a table. The advantage of a graph is that you can take in trends with a glance.
Second, why would I want this level of detail on a phone app? Personally, I find the iPhone's red light / green light view combined with percentage points useful - it jumps out at you when e.g. the market crashes as it did recently.
Tufte is not suggesting using these mini-plots as a substitute for the current price and percent change, or as a substitute for a large plot of a single stock, but as a supplement. They fit into the space currently used to display stocks. The advantage is they provide context--how does the magnitude of the recent move compare to moves in the recent past.
He criticises the iPhone browswer for having 10% of the screen used for buttons, but in his own designs he comments "about 90% of the image is substance". Clearly he's happy with that 10% sacrifice when it's his own work. And if you look at the designs, you'll note that in each case there is a navigation bar of some form at the top or bottom of the page. What a hypocrite.
He's hardly a hypocrite to argue that maximizing ( the part of the screen that is used for substance is a good thing. He's actually praising the iPhone, saying that it is very good, but could do slightly better. He certainly isn't arguing that 10% is inherently either good or bad--if he could think of a way of reducing the 10% in his own designs, he would clearly want to do so.
But I do need those functions in the browser, and I need them large enough to easily hit with my finger.
And how does making them transparent, as he suggested, interfere with either of these?
Commenting that the button bar should at least be transparent strikes me as just one of those condescending little compromises some people like to make when they know they won't convince the other side of "the right answer".
It sounds to me that it is the kind of compromise people make when they can't think of a better answer--because, as you pointed out, those commands are important ones that might be needed at any time. My personal opinion is that they should start out opaque and fade to transparent after a few seconds.
It would be bad interface design to have application buttons hovering over hyperlinks, making it distinctly ambiguous what would happen when you touched that bottom 10% of the screen.
Apple has already managed to deal with this ambiguity where a touch may be intended to scroll or access a hyperlink. And how often do you have to access a hyperlink at the very, very bottom of a page, anyway? Compared to how often you use the forward and back buttons, is it such a big deal to scroll up a bit more to hit the hyperlink? Which you have to do with the current opaque buttons, anyway.
Part of the reason that people BUY the iPhone is that it's simple and stylish, rather than the existing information heavy devices like Pocket PC phones. In particular, look at his example about the Weather- Apple's widget is small and sleek. It shows you the vital information, and it does it in strong fonts and bold styling. It's clear, and it's easy.
Part of the reason I bought it (and one that has been promoted in Apple's ads) is that the browser does not display a "simplified" version of the Internet as do most cell phones--it shows standard web pages with all of their detail and complexity.
It is understandable that Apple was in a hurry, and simply implemented Dashboard widgets on the iPhone, but an iPhone is not the Dashboard, and iPhone apps can handle more information.
Although to be fair, if your stock market widget is going to start pulling down 14,000 datapoints and assembling them into a graph, or your weather widget is going to start displaying complex radar images, then it's quite likely that retrieval times are going to be substantively worse. The key word that you're ignoring is "relevant". I doubt many people will find all 14,000 datapoints of relevance when looking up a stock price on their iPhone. They're probably only interested in a general sense of the trend. Kind of like asking how old someone is and getting a reply accurate to the number of days, it's not clear that more information is always more clarity, despite what Mr Tufte says -- at least for me.
This is true but easily dealt with by prioritizing retrieval. First display the most important info (current stock prices, today's forecast) then fill in the additional information that some people will be wanting.
I agree with Tufte that the buttons at the bottom of the screen in Safari take up too much real estate, and I like his solution, having them transparent. They could fade after a minute or two, with a tap at the bottom of the screen bringing them back to full intensity.
I also agree that the iPhone can't afford to leave the address bar at the top of the screen like a PC browser, and that Apple made a good choice in having it scroll off with the page. But it does highlight a problem: With very long pages (many blogs for example), it can take a very long time to scroll to the bottom of the page, and a long time to scroll back up to the address bar. Of course, you can use the forward and back arrows at the bottom, or the pages button to call up a new browser page, but that's kind of awkward.
I'm hoping Apple will bring the 3-finger swipe of the AirBook to the iPhone. 3-Finger swipe down to jump to the bottom of a page, 3-Finger swipe up to jump to the top and the address bar. Right and left swipes could do forward and back, and make the fading of the bottom buttons less of an issue.
The human eye can resolve 1200 dpi from 10 inches.. the iPhone is at merely 160.... why do decent laser printers start at 1200 dpi?
Because it is a selling point even though most people can only barely see the difference over 300 dpi. That was the resolution of the first laser printers, and most people thought they looked as good as typeset. And that was for black and white printers with no way of controlling dot intensity. With a screen that can produce halftones for antialiasing, it is hard to see much improvement above 150 dpi.
In the video, Tufte has to bust out his Sparklines (the infographics that look like lightning bolts that he mentions in the section on stocks.) He claims these have thousands of pieces of information in them but the reality is that they're merely zig-zags. As the inventor of the sparkline, Tufte thinks they're the be-all and end-all of I.D.
They are mini graphs, and I'd find them highly useful. I get annoyed having to go through and touch each stock to see how it has been doing. Sparklines would give me the flavor for all stocks at once.
I found it hilarious when Tufte showed how he would redesign the Weather program to show more information. He said something on the order of, the only bad information design is that which leaves out important information. Sorry, holmes, I don't need to see a time lapse of cloud patterns. The Apple weather design is elegant and succinct, yours is crowded, ugly and excessive.
I don't agree. Apple's weather app does not provide a real weather report. A pretty snow icon is nice, but is that 2 inches or 2 feet?--that just might affect my plans for the day. Does the rain icon mean showers or torrential downpours? Is it calm or gale-force winds? Tufte's design provides an actual weather forecast. The radar image is less useful, but still nice. Especially for those who don't life in the center of big cities, it can give a better idea of what to expect where you are. And a glance at the radar often gives you information about how severe the weather is, how widespread, and how fast it is moving that can be hard to glean from a text report. But the image should load last, because often I don't need it, in which case I don't want to wait for it to load just to read today's forecast.
Hopefully, if Apple doesn't step up a 3rd party developer will, once Apple releases the iPhone SDK.
Nothing is set in stone; there have already been major upgrades. So Tufte's suggestions (which are excellent) may well be implemented at some time in the future--if not by Apple, then by a third party developer.
Night is when tape backups run. It is when I sync my home computer to my office computer. And when it is not doing other things, my office computer participates in distributed computing projects to donate time to other scientific word.
I am close to agreeing with you, but with a slightly different paradigm (sorry about the PHB word, but I feel it best expresses the concept.) I do not think that a mechanism exists for increasing the likelihood of mutations in a certain region of DNA. What does exist are mechanisms to prevent mutations and to repair damage done to segments of DNA. Assuming that natural selection works on the level of the gene, it would logically follow that protection and repair mechanisms would be themselves adapted to specialize on regions of DNA which are the most likely to cause problems when mutations arise. Those regions which allow for stepwise evolution would therefore not be protected with the same intensity as those regions in which mutations would be fatal.
I think that you could have positive or negative control of mutation frequency, but my bet would be a combination of both. However, it would be tricky to evolve non-protection of regions required for stepwise evolution, because in most cases, past history is no predictor of future performance--i.e. there is no way for evolution to anticipate what mutations will be required to adapt to a change in the environment. Another possibility is a general relaxation of fidelity of replication/repair when an organism is under stress. This is the sort of thing that could happen "automatically" as proofreading is an energy-requiring process.
In your post, however, I did notice one fairly important misunderstanding of the mechanisms for evolution. Your statement that if (a mutation)is favorable, why was it not retained in... ignores the temporal aspect of evolution, in that the environment changes. Evolution selects for traits (and therefore gene sequences which allow for expressions of those traits) based on the suitability of the environment that the organism lives in. What might be favorable in one place spatially or temporally might be harmful to the organisms success under different circumstances.
Correct. This is my point. What is the selective pressure for an organism to "remember" (in the form of increased rate of mutagenesis) those loci where mutation has been beneficial in an environment that no longer obtains? If the same circumstances recur frequently, there would be selective pressure favoring organisms prone to mutations in the specific regions required to adapt to those particular circumstances. But this is a crude, highly inefficient mechanism that really only makes sense for microorganisms with tight constraints on genome size. For organisms with more genomic storage space, there would be a strong selective advantage to organisms that duplicated the sequence in question and retained both copies--initially under leaky control, subsequently evolving regulatory mechanisms to activate the appropriate genes or splice variants when circumstances demand.
Evolution does not even need to rely on external environmental change to stimulate genetic change, as certain gene combinations may have a synergistic (again, sorry for the PHB term) effect in which one is really not that beneficial unless the other exists. In other circumstances, a potentially deleterious mutation can give some benefit such as being a heterozygous carrier for sickle cell anemia giving increased resistance to malaria.
However, in the absence of environmental change, the population will eventually approach some "satisfized" local optimum or cycle, from which it will escape only as a low probability event, unless there is external perturbation from the environment--e.g. a parasite such as malaria.
It would appear at first that Apple's ultra thin and light missed its target market; after all, the main market for ultra thin and lights has traditionally been mobile road warriors. However, the lack of a swappable battery and of a wired LAN port (my company, and most I have been to, as well as many hotels I have stayed at, don't even have a wireless network option) make clear that mobile road warriors aren't the target market.
Free wireless is my top requirement when selecting a hotel. I have not had any difficulty satisfying it, even with moderately priced hotels. Of course, one can always carry a USB adaptor, but who wants to be tied down to a desk in a hotel room?
I don't think that weight is necessarily even _that_ significant a factor here. Steve Jobs made clear if I recall correctly that he was willing to increase weight to decrease thickness. Thickness has no particular use other than sex appeal
A thin laptop is more likely to fit in a briefcase with other stuff. And a light one is considerably more pleasant to lug around.
Any company that installs firmware on a system in an unknown state "unintentionally" are morons.
Or perhaps they just trust their customers not to be morons? After all, what would you call somebody who installs an update on a modified phone in defiance of a prominent warning IN ALL CAPS that the update will damage modified phones? And then complains about it when that happens?
The word "proof" has more than one meaning. In mathematics and logic, it is used to refer to derivation from postulates--although because for most mathematical/logical systems it is not generally possible to prove that the system itself is without contradiction, even that is somewhat less than absolute.
In science, "proof" is used more to mean "test," as in the sense of "proving ground." So a theory is continuously being proved, but it is never shown to be absolutely true.
It all makes sense to me. It's a reasonable question to ask: Does evolution evolve? Certainly it ought to. Those organisms whose DNA better tweaks the likelihood of mutations in useful ways would tend to be better evolvers. If it happens to be a trait of DNA that some regions have more "mutational flexibility" than others, eventually these regions would tend to be arranged to favor useful mutations. And if enough of these regions exist it could form a sophisticated predictive system. Now imagine DNA in which "concerted mutations" benefit the organism, but only in certain reinforcing or complimentary arrangements. Then when certain mutations prove beneficial, those others that compliment them will begin to emerge too.
It is certainly possible to imagine that evolution could select some regions of DNA to be more mutable than others. Something similar happens in the development of the immune system. But it is hard to imagine that evolution could promote favorable mutations over unfavorable ones, because the only way it has of recognizing a favorable mutation is to try it, and if it is favorable, why was it not retained in the genome, or at least in the population?
One can imagine that a bias toward certain mutations that have been advantageous in the past could be "programmed in" as a way of compressing the genome (I wrote a paper with this speculation back in the '70's), but it is hard to imagine this being of value in large-genome organisms like us, who apparently carry around considerably more DNA than they actually use, and we have a pretty sophisticated compression system in the form of alternative splicing.
While we may think odd damage to DNA won't cause any problems, I don't believe we know with any certainty it won't.
"Odd damage" to DNA happens all of the time in normal reproduction--it's called "mutation." So if there are weird mutations to cow DNA that can cause disease in humans (of which there is zero evidence) we are eating them already. The reason two cows are not genetically identical, even though at some point in the past they had a common ancestor, is due to "odd damage to DNA."
IMO, the parent comment is just the sort of response you'd expect from a computer science crowd trying to comment on biological systems. Cloning a cow is not the same as cloning a partition on a hard disk.
Speaking as a biologist, accuracy is far more important in cloning a partition on a hard disk. Errors creep into biological organisms, cloned or not, on a regular basis, but biology is far more fault-tolerant than computer software. This extends to our digestive systems, which are unlikely to care about subtle differences that might or might not arise through cloning--they deals all the time with the enormously greater differences that arise through normal processes of mutation and reproduction.
Not to worry. Most "chemicals" in the body are actually made from a few basic components--fats, sugars, amino acids--and our digestive system is pretty good at breaking things down into those common components, so the animal to animal differences are not as great as you imagine. Moreover, there is no way the variability between different cows even comes close to the differences between cows and birds, or birds and fish, or any meat and vegetables. So even if all of the cattle we ate were genetically identical, it would make a negligible difference in the diversity of "chemicals" in our diet.
As a scientist, I see people all the time toting those skinny little Sony subnotebooks. They are people who travel a lot to give talks, don't care to lug around a heavy notebook computer, and prefer to have their presentations on their own laptop where they can be confident that everything will work as intended.
Optical disks are already going the way of the floppy. These days I rarely see an optical disk other than for software installations, and for occasional use the AirBook can "share" another computer's drive. Most people cary information around on USB flashdrives.
I expect that the flashdrive model will become popular as prices on flash memory drop, but there are certainly people who can afford it if it provides advantages of speed or battery life.
Yeah, actually, I am presenting that. SPEECH doesn't develop at two months either -- what kind of moron are you? Are you suggesting that symptoms of autism should manifest before the capacity to exhibit those symptoms has?
No, I'm simply pointing out that major symptoms of autism frequently develop a bit after the time that children receive their MMR booster, and this is really the only basis for blaming vaccinations for autism. But in fact, autism tends to develop around that time even in kids who don't get the vaccination.
Needless to say, the fact that autism symptoms generally do not become evident after earlier vaccinations cannot be offered in favor of the autism hypothesis.
On the other hand, the brain's development is certainly ongoing at that time, and if mercury in vaccines is interfering with that development [you do know that mercury prevents neural tubulin from maintaining its structure, right?] such that the connections to allow proper sensory integration just don't happen, then the subsequent ability to demonstrate the abilities required of those connections would never manifest.
Yes, mercury is a neurotoxin. But the symptoms of mercury neurotoxicity do not resemble autism. And the experience of multiple countries showing that elimination of mercury from vaccines does not affect the incidence of autism clearly eliminates mercury as a causative factor.
You didn't even read the Rolling Stone article, did you?
Yes, nor was this the first time I've seen it. I thought that it was pretty stupid and dishonest when it was published, but to bring it up now, when the evidence against the mercury hypothesis is much stronger, is amazingly stupid.
No, your links DO NOT refute the article in Rolling Stone.
The do. They link to the full transcript (large pdf) of the conference, which proves that the Rolling Stone article is not merely wrong, but dishonest.
The simple fact is that the CDC had already DETERMINED that there was a link between mercury in vaccines and the rise (RISE -- how many "genetic disorders" ever have a rise in their rates of appearance?) of autism.
This is a lie, as documented here and in the meeting transcript. The CDC has determined no such thing. And in fact, it is unclear whether there is in fact a rise in the rate of autism, as there is evidence that much, perhaps all, of the increase is due to changes in diagnosis, such that many children who would previously be diagnosed as "retarded" are now being diagnosed as autistic. But even if the rise is real, that is not evidence for mercury, or vaccination, being a cause. Genetic disorders can be triggered by an environmental cause; for example, brain damage resulting from the genetic disorder PKU is triggered by a ubiquitous amino acid present in many foods, as well as artificial sweeteners, which is harmless to children without the defect. So even if there is an environmental trigger for autism, it doesn't have to be a neurotoxin--it could be a normal foodstuff, or a virus that is harmless to people without the defect.
Does Mercury cause autism in children? Hmmm... If you wanted to study whether or not something caused cancer, what would you do? Maybe... subject the cells to the substance in question and see whether or not any of them turn cancerous?
I've done lots of cell culture, and I can tell you that this is doubtless the single most unreliable method of determining whether
These are researchers looking to make a huge splash, and their premise is faulty. While it is possible that the removal of the thimerosal is making no change, it is impossible at this point to reach that conclusion. We would need to have a stable rate for autism in the general population before this sort of statistical analysis is adequate.
You can certainly exclude the hypothesis that most (or as some claim, all) autism is actually "misdiagnosed mercury poisoning." More broadly, you can conclude that any hypothetical effect of thimerosol is negligible compared to other factors, such as changes in diagnostic criteria for autism or "diagnostic substitution".
Slashdot Mirror
It's also "supposed" to be served in a sturdy ceramic cup with an open top that allows rapid evaporative cooling (which is why the coffee needs to be that hot in the first place). Failing that, a sturdy cardboard cup would at least be reasonable.
What is obviously not reasonable is a cheap styrofoam cup that gets soft when it is exposed to that level of heat, although this may not be obvious to the customer when it is stabilized by a rigid plastic top firmly in place. Remove that top (to add sugar or cream (which are provided separately so that the customer has to remove the top), and the cup is prone to catastrophic collapse from even slight pressure on the sides. And obviously unsafe to serve to customers in cars, who clearly are not going to have a table to catch most of the spill (this was hardly the first burn they'd had, just the worst).
So yes, serve the coffee HOT if you want--but spend the money to give the customer a reasonably safe cup. If you are going to compromise by using a cup that can't take the heat, you have to compromise on the temperature as well to maintain safety.
Maybe you should spend a bit more time with a dictionary before presuming to nitpick. "Etiolated" is not that fancy a word--it's hardly the first time I've seen it used in its broader meaning of "feeble."
Even if one only knew about the specific horticultural meaning, it would be a pretty good metaphor.
You are seriously comparing a 1.1 GHz single core to a 1.6 GHz dual core? That's not even close to the same class of computing power.
Meanwhile, people are quibbling that the MBA is slightly slower than other Mac dual core laptops...
The good news seems to be that the old adaptors will work for charging the machine when it is idle, even if they aren't really suitable for charging it in use. That's useful for people who already have one of the old ones. I imagine somebody will come out with an adaptor at some point.
Seems like this sort of analysis depends heavily on different companies being exactly "in sync" in terms of their accounting. When AT&T says that it "ended" 2007 with 2M customers, does that really mean "as of Dec 31"? Or is there a little lag in AT&T's accounting? Are the 4M phones all shipped, or does that include orders and phones in transit? How about phones in transit to overseas? Are there any phones being shipped to other countries in anticipation of product launch?
He probably thought it was obvious. So do I. Smaller borders mean the thumbnails can be larger and clearer. There is no real need for a wide border, since different pictures usually look different enough that the borders are obvious, and the eye will extend the grid where they aren't.
The value of a graph is not to read off the value of a single data point; for that you use a table. The advantage of a graph is that you can take in trends with a glance.
Tufte is not suggesting using these mini-plots as a substitute for the current price and percent change, or as a substitute for a large plot of a single stock, but as a supplement. They fit into the space currently used to display stocks. The advantage is they provide context--how does the magnitude of the recent move compare to moves in the recent past.
He's hardly a hypocrite to argue that maximizing ( the part of the screen that is used for substance is a good thing. He's actually praising the iPhone, saying that it is very good, but could do slightly better. He certainly isn't arguing that 10% is inherently either good or bad--if he could think of a way of reducing the 10% in his own designs, he would clearly want to do so.
And how does making them transparent, as he suggested, interfere with either of these?
It sounds to me that it is the kind of compromise people make when they can't think of a better answer--because, as you pointed out, those commands are important ones that might be needed at any time. My personal opinion is that they should start out opaque and fade to transparent after a few seconds.
Apple has already managed to deal with this ambiguity where a touch may be intended to scroll or access a hyperlink. And how often do you have to access a hyperlink at the very, very bottom of a page, anyway? Compared to how often you use the forward and back buttons, is it such a big deal to scroll up a bit more to hit the hyperlink? Which you have to do with the current opaque buttons, anyway.
Part of the reason I bought it (and one that has been promoted in Apple's ads) is that the browser does not display a "simplified" version of the Internet as do most cell phones--it shows standard web pages with all of their detail and complexity.
It is understandable that Apple was in a hurry, and simply implemented Dashboard widgets on the iPhone, but an iPhone is not the Dashboard, and iPhone apps can handle more information.
This is true but easily dealt with by prioritizing retrieval. First display the most important info (current stock prices, today's forecast) then fill in the additional information that some people will be wanting.
I agree with Tufte that the buttons at the bottom of the screen in Safari take up too much real estate, and I like his solution, having them transparent. They could fade after a minute or two, with a tap at the bottom of the screen bringing them back to full intensity.
I also agree that the iPhone can't afford to leave the address bar at the top of the screen like a PC browser, and that Apple made a good choice in having it scroll off with the page. But it does highlight a problem: With very long pages (many blogs for example), it can take a very long time to scroll to the bottom of the page, and a long time to scroll back up to the address bar. Of course, you can use the forward and back arrows at the bottom, or the pages button to call up a new browser page, but that's kind of awkward.
I'm hoping Apple will bring the 3-finger swipe of the AirBook to the iPhone. 3-Finger swipe down to jump to the bottom of a page, 3-Finger swipe up to jump to the top and the address bar. Right and left swipes could do forward and back, and make the fading of the bottom buttons less of an issue.
Because it is a selling point even though most people can only barely see the difference over 300 dpi. That was the resolution of the first laser printers, and most people thought they looked as good as typeset. And that was for black and white printers with no way of controlling dot intensity. With a screen that can produce halftones for antialiasing, it is hard to see much improvement above 150 dpi.
They are mini graphs, and I'd find them highly useful. I get annoyed having to go through and touch each stock to see how it has been doing. Sparklines would give me the flavor for all stocks at once.
I don't agree. Apple's weather app does not provide a real weather report. A pretty snow icon is nice, but is that 2 inches or 2 feet?--that just might affect my plans for the day. Does the rain icon mean showers or torrential downpours? Is it calm or gale-force winds? Tufte's design provides an actual weather forecast. The radar image is less useful, but still nice. Especially for those who don't life in the center of big cities, it can give a better idea of what to expect where you are. And a glance at the radar often gives you information about how severe the weather is, how widespread, and how fast it is moving that can be hard to glean from a text report. But the image should load last, because often I don't need it, in which case I don't want to wait for it to load just to read today's forecast.
Hopefully, if Apple doesn't step up a 3rd party developer will, once Apple releases the iPhone SDK.
Nothing is set in stone; there have already been major upgrades. So Tufte's suggestions (which are excellent) may well be implemented at some time in the future--if not by Apple, then by a third party developer.
Night is when tape backups run. It is when I sync my home computer to my office computer. And when it is not doing other things, my office computer participates in distributed computing projects to donate time to other scientific word.
I think that you could have positive or negative control of mutation frequency, but my bet would be a combination of both. However, it would be tricky to evolve non-protection of regions required for stepwise evolution, because in most cases, past history is no predictor of future performance--i.e. there is no way for evolution to anticipate what mutations will be required to adapt to a change in the environment. Another possibility is a general relaxation of fidelity of replication/repair when an organism is under stress. This is the sort of thing that could happen "automatically" as proofreading is an energy-requiring process.
Correct. This is my point. What is the selective pressure for an organism to "remember" (in the form of increased rate of mutagenesis) those loci where mutation has been beneficial in an environment that no longer obtains? If the same circumstances recur frequently, there would be selective pressure favoring organisms prone to mutations in the specific regions required to adapt to those particular circumstances. But this is a crude, highly inefficient mechanism that really only makes sense for microorganisms with tight constraints on genome size. For organisms with more genomic storage space, there would be a strong selective advantage to organisms that duplicated the sequence in question and retained both copies--initially under leaky control, subsequently evolving regulatory mechanisms to activate the appropriate genes or splice variants when circumstances demand.
However, in the absence of environmental change, the population will eventually approach some "satisfized" local optimum or cycle, from which it will escape only as a low probability event, unless there is external perturbation from the environment--e.g. a parasite such as malaria.
Free wireless is my top requirement when selecting a hotel. I have not had any difficulty satisfying it, even with moderately priced hotels. Of course, one can always carry a USB adaptor, but who wants to be tied down to a desk in a hotel room?
A thin laptop is more likely to fit in a briefcase with other stuff. And a light one is considerably more pleasant to lug around.
Or perhaps they just trust their customers not to be morons? After all, what would you call somebody who installs an update on a modified phone in defiance of a prominent warning IN ALL CAPS that the update will damage modified phones? And then complains about it when that happens?
The word "proof" has more than one meaning. In mathematics and logic, it is used to refer to derivation from postulates--although because for most mathematical/logical systems it is not generally possible to prove that the system itself is without contradiction, even that is somewhat less than absolute.
In science, "proof" is used more to mean "test," as in the sense of "proving ground." So a theory is continuously being proved, but it is never shown to be absolutely true.
It is certainly possible to imagine that evolution could select some regions of DNA to be more mutable than others. Something similar happens in the development of the immune system. But it is hard to imagine that evolution could promote favorable mutations over unfavorable ones, because the only way it has of recognizing a favorable mutation is to try it, and if it is favorable, why was it not retained in the genome, or at least in the population?
One can imagine that a bias toward certain mutations that have been advantageous in the past could be "programmed in" as a way of compressing the genome (I wrote a paper with this speculation back in the '70's), but it is hard to imagine this being of value in large-genome organisms like us, who apparently carry around considerably more DNA than they actually use, and we have a pretty sophisticated compression system in the form of alternative splicing.
"Odd damage" to DNA happens all of the time in normal reproduction--it's called "mutation." So if there are weird mutations to cow DNA that can cause disease in humans (of which there is zero evidence) we are eating them already. The reason two cows are not genetically identical, even though at some point in the past they had a common ancestor, is due to "odd damage to DNA."
Speaking as a biologist, accuracy is far more important in cloning a partition on a hard disk. Errors creep into biological organisms, cloned or not, on a regular basis, but biology is far more fault-tolerant than computer software. This extends to our digestive systems, which are unlikely to care about subtle differences that might or might not arise through cloning--they deals all the time with the enormously greater differences that arise through normal processes of mutation and reproduction.
Not to worry. Most "chemicals" in the body are actually made from a few basic components--fats, sugars, amino acids--and our digestive system is pretty good at breaking things down into those common components, so the animal to animal differences are not as great as you imagine. Moreover, there is no way the variability between different cows even comes close to the differences between cows and birds, or birds and fish, or any meat and vegetables. So even if all of the cattle we ate were genetically identical, it would make a negligible difference in the diversity of "chemicals" in our diet.
As a scientist, I see people all the time toting those skinny little Sony subnotebooks. They are people who travel a lot to give talks, don't care to lug around a heavy notebook computer, and prefer to have their presentations on their own laptop where they can be confident that everything will work as intended.
Optical disks are already going the way of the floppy. These days I rarely see an optical disk other than for software installations, and for occasional use the AirBook can "share" another computer's drive. Most people cary information around on USB flashdrives.
I expect that the flashdrive model will become popular as prices on flash memory drop, but there are certainly people who can afford it if it provides advantages of speed or battery life.
No, I'm simply pointing out that major symptoms of autism frequently develop a bit after the time that children receive their MMR booster, and this is really the only basis for blaming vaccinations for autism. But in fact, autism tends to develop around that time even in kids who don't get the vaccination.
Needless to say, the fact that autism symptoms generally do not become evident after earlier vaccinations cannot be offered in favor of the autism hypothesis.
Yes, mercury is a neurotoxin. But the symptoms of mercury neurotoxicity do not resemble autism. And the experience of multiple countries showing that elimination of mercury from vaccines does not affect the incidence of autism clearly eliminates mercury as a causative factor.
Yes, nor was this the first time I've seen it. I thought that it was pretty stupid and dishonest when it was published, but to bring it up now, when the evidence against the mercury hypothesis is much stronger, is amazingly stupid.
The do. They link to the full transcript (large pdf) of the conference, which proves that the Rolling Stone article is not merely wrong, but dishonest.
This is a lie, as documented here and in the meeting transcript. The CDC has determined no such thing. And in fact, it is unclear whether there is in fact a rise in the rate of autism, as there is evidence that much, perhaps all, of the increase is due to changes in diagnosis, such that many children who would previously be diagnosed as "retarded" are now being diagnosed as autistic. But even if the rise is real, that is not evidence for mercury, or vaccination, being a cause. Genetic disorders can be triggered by an environmental cause; for example, brain damage resulting from the genetic disorder PKU is triggered by a ubiquitous amino acid present in many foods, as well as artificial sweeteners, which is harmless to children without the defect. So even if there is an environmental trigger for autism, it doesn't have to be a neurotoxin--it could be a normal foodstuff, or a virus that is harmless to people without the defect.
I've done lots of cell culture, and I can tell you that this is doubtless the single most unreliable method of determining whether
You can certainly exclude the hypothesis that most (or as some claim, all) autism is actually "misdiagnosed mercury poisoning." More broadly, you can conclude that any hypothetical effect of thimerosol is negligible compared to other factors, such as changes in diagnostic criteria for autism or "diagnostic substitution".