Yeah, seriously. Slashdot has lost it. Duplicates rue the day! -- It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy. I moderate therefore I rule!
The journal to which Sokal submitted his paper was not peer-reviewed, in the scientific sense. It was a "debate and opinion" publication aimed at encouraging exchange of new, possibly provocative ideas.
A famous scientist comes and tell them "look, I have written a paper about connections between science and your field of activity". They read the paper, they don't like it, but they think "hey, he's a big honcho, so this must be genuine and after all maybe we just don't understand everything - let's publish it, after all we're here to foster communication between different people". Then they find out it was a hoax, the sole purpose of which was to ridicule them by imposing upon them irrelevant standards to which they never adhered in th first place.
Imagine you head a physics magazine - not a scientific journal, a magazine. A well-known historian submits an article about history of science. You don't really know what he's talking about, and some of the things he mentions seem really strange (what, Newton was gay ?) but you think, "hey, the guy is a respectable historian, so he must know things that we don't, right ?" So you publish his paper. Two months later the historian comes and says "mwahaha my paper was a hoax, littered with falsehoods and incorrect information, and you published it ! You are th3 suck ! PwN3d y4 !!"
Slashdotter n.: a person who sincerely believes that a robot that can produce blocks of amorphous material is a "first step" towards a self-replicating machine, or that building an elevator to climb an average-size building on a campus is a "first step" towards a space elevator.
And yes... Terrorism was a concern in how they designed it. But... they still made it.
The Channel Tunnel connects two pieces of land that are separated by a ridiculously small, shallow strait. The Dover cliffs are clearly visible from France all year long, and when you fly over it, you can see France and England almost touching each other. The difficulty in building the Tunnel was the digging part.
A space elevator requires a single cable / tape that must be a thousand times as long as the Channel Tunnel, at the very least. Oh, and it must hold in geosynchronous orbit.
The Channel Tunnel was a remarkable achievement in terms of engineering, but there was no major scientific breakthrough involved. We already had the science and the technology to do it. It was just a matter a finding the money. The space elevator is quite a different matter. We don't have the technology, and there is no reason to believe that we will have a workable plan for building a space elevator within the foreseeable future.
It is an undisputed fact that the Soviets and Eastern Europeans were superior to the West in mathematics and abstract theoretical physics. The Soviet school built around Kolmogorov is the prominent example of this superiority.
The fact is easy to explain: mathematics and theoretical physics don't cost much. All you need is a pencil and a sheet of paper. So the Soviets diverted most of their resources to these domains, simply because they could not afford the experimental apparatus necessary for chemistry, physics or molecular biology.
Now, whether or not this distinction still holds in today's Putinian Russia is another matter entirely...
Just for the fun of it, would he gain much by using parabolic mirrors that would concentrate solar rays even more ?
Of course you must be able to find a lot of cheap parabolic mirrors of the right curvature (ideally they would have slightly different curvatures, being at different distances from the target focal point, but hey that would still be better than flat mirrors).
But still, I wonder how much power he could get from this.
AFP is big all over the world. There are 3 real global news agencies, AP, AFP and Reuters (in no particular order).
Hell, they're even "big" in the US ! Look at Yahoo's top stories, check out the sources (upper right corner). Guess who comes third, right behind AP and Reuters ?
In other parts of the world (say, the Arab world or western Africa), AFP happens to dominate. It has more to do with politics and language than anything else, but still, they're not just big in France.
How many shortwave programs does AFP broadcast? And in what languages? Let's see, the answer would be none and none. Hell, the Beeb broadcasts in multiple languages.
Wow. Congratulations, you just discovered that a news agency is not the same as a media corporation (Hint: how many AP / Reuters programs are syndicated on public radio in the United States ? How many shortwave programs do AP and Reuters broadcast ?)
If you want French media, you should look at TV5 (French-language international television) or Radio-France Internationale (radio services in 19 languages).
This site is just mind-boggling. This guy not only digged the meaning, etymology and mnemonics for thousands of characters, but he managed to put it on the web in a user-friendly way. I don't know what I find most admirable - the scholarly erudition or the technical "Do-The-Right-Thing" insight.
As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer.
*sigh* You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron. Because, guess what - real world event don't happen on the web. They happen in the real world (duh!) And you need to have real-world journalists to report on them (double-duh!) They are the primary news source; any website that does not directly employ journalists is, at best, a secondary news source.
The AFP is composed of a few hundred journalists scattered all over the world, who write articles and take pictures on real-world events. The AFP is a major "primary news source". Web-based publications are dependent on AFP and other journalists to produce the content that appears on your screen, even though you don't seem to be aware of this basic fact. Apparently in your world news stories and photographs self-assemble spontaneously from random electronic noise.
Journalists and photographers, believe it or not, need to pay the bills too. So agencies such as AFP sell their stories to publishers (web or paper based), usually in a non-exclusive manner, without redistribution rights. This allows them to pay their journalists, who produce all the hot juicy content that titillates your ocular globes.
I'll make a very simple summary of the case for you:
- Google aggregates articles (and photographs) from public websites, with their permission.
- AFP licenses photographs to websites, without redistribution rights: The websites not allowed to redistribute the picture.
- However, Google harvests AFP-made pictures from websites and happily displays them on GoogleNews.
Until recently it was unclear how exactly Sun could differentiate themselves from the competition, seeing how they moved away from hardware and big iron, with the risk of becoming "just another vendor". But now it seems thay have a pretty neat business model to take on:
The power and flexibility of open source, with the reliability and dependability of a large, experienced company.
Note that here "reliability and dependability" does not only apply to the products themselves, but also to the relationship with your customers: when you do business with Sun, you know they won't pull the carpet under your feet the morning after (RedHat Linux -> RHEL comes to mind).
Punctuated equilibrium is an alternate theory invoked to explain gaps (no, they are not a creationist myth) in the evolutionary records
The theory of punctated equilibria was invented by paleontologists. The "short periods of fast evolution" they refer to often span hundreds of thousands of years. This is "short" when you're a paleontologist, but is perfectly compatible with "smooth" neo-Darwinian evolution by genetic mutations and recombination - it's just occuring faster due to new environmental / ecological conditions. By the way, the guys behind this theory (essentially Nils Eldredge and the late S. J. Gould) never missed an opportunity to stress that they were bona fide Darwinists.
What causes periods of fast evolution ? Of course you can invoke asteroids or volcanoes, but it turns out that evolution itself is naturally unstable. Because most species depend on other species in some way, when a species evolves a new adaptive feature, this has consequences for all other species that depend on this one, possibly leading to a cascade of evolutionary changes in those species.
Per Bak and his colleagues came up with an insanely simple model of co-evolution between many species: organise a set of variables along a circle. Initialise them with random values. At any time step, change the lowest value to another, random value (evolution of a species) and do the same with its two neighbours (consequences over "dependent" species). Rinse, repeat.
This model happens to exhibit punctuated equilibria and avalanches of evolutionary adaptations, with a neat power-law distribution in the size of these avalanches (the number of species that are affected by evolutionary change in one species).
This also offers an explanation for mass extinctions. Sure, asteroids or volcanoes can trigger the process, but the most likely culprit overall is simply the instability of ecosystems.
You mean, like Linux "stole" the Unix idea (must... resist... mentioning... SCO...) ?
Paterson re-implemented (from scratch) an API clone of CP/M, throwing in his own ideas for design and implementation. Not to mention that Kildall took a lot of his "ideas" from DEC's VMS for PDP-10.
Call that "stealing" if you want, but then be consistent with yourself, and support software patents. Oh, and sue the FreeDOS project too !
Wake up and look at who's putting the money behind the efforts you're idealistically supporting.
RTFA. In this case, it's local governments who actually give (some) money to non-profit organisations to offer free WiFi access to communities.
WiFi is cheap and easy to set up. A NPO can't lay optic fiber because it's too hard and expensive, but they can set up WiFi access points. All they need is a little support and, most importantly, the right to do it.
How on earth does this benefit the big bad ugly corporate monopolies ?
But by giving these people freedom of speech you are giving them the rope to hang themselves with.
No, you're giving them the opportunity to attract large numbers of poorly educated people whom they will brainwash into submission before unleashing them on the jews/niggers/infidels/rest of the world. The same problem occurs with religious fanatics (self-appointed moslem "leaders", mostly).
And Germany (and France) know this because they've been here before. The US haven't. Yet. It's quite possible that the huge size of the US prevents these people from actually taking over large segments of the population, limiting them to semi-isolated action. Not so in Europe. Again, Europeans have seen first hand that it is perfectly possible for fanatics of the most insane kind to take control of large, developed, civilised nations. In the words of Paul Valery, "We, civilisations, know henceforth that we are mortals".
There is such a thing as extremism, both in religions and politics. Leaving extremists alone until they actually commit violent acts is like letting a forest fire spread until it starts burning houses. Hell, even the English (who once refused to expel Algerian terrorists to France, citing human rights concern) have started to realise that political or religious insanity is no less dangerous than clinical insanity, and even much worse, because it is contagious.
Feel free to flame me down and to tell me how nazism or religious fanaticism (not even the brain-dead "you invade me so I kill you so you'll have to invade me even more" kind, but the "die, infidels, die" kind) are just another political opinion.
It is true that French scientists - who happen to have a civil servant status - are often required to produce reports in French. I don't know where you got the idea that they are forbidden from publishing anything in English.
Another example: a few years ago, out of a sudden, the french government decreed that the word e-mail is to be forbidden and replaced with made-up "courriel".
Yeah, Heaven forbid that people speaking a different language try to create new words for new things instead of just adopting English ones !
BTW, the word "courriel" was coined by the Quebecois.
Seriously, if you want a nice review of the topic of scientific consensus, here's a bit from a speech given by Michael Crichton
Wow ! Similarly if you want a review of the consensus on Evolution, check out Answers in Genesis. And if you want to know more about the consensus on AIDS prevention, birth control, etc., just ask the Catholic Church !
Michael Crichton does not believe in significant man-made global warning. He's on the minority side. So of course he will use his writing skills defend minorities against the big bad "consensus".
He goes on to explain that many important scientific discoveries have been in direct conflict with the consensus.
And have been accepted instantaneously if they were backed by evidence, at least after from Newton onwards. See Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Bohr for details.
Crichton is a MD and a writer, I do not doubt his level of education, but he's not a scientist.
Yeah, sure, that's why they poured litres of ketchup in the streets and renamed it "Freedom Tomato Paste". Oh wait... </pointless controversy>
As a side note, the one thing that we deeply dislike about Americans is precisely this stubborn refusal to give a fsck about the consequences that their actions have over the rest of the world.
Arguments of "Americans are selfish and stupid" are not likely to pursuade.
How do you expect people to react to a discourse that can be summarised as this: "We're the US, so we'll keep churning out CO2 because it will make us richer and most of the short term consequences will affect other countries anyway" ?
It's no different than the GPL -- also free as in speech, but not necessarily free as in beer.
Indeed. You could imagine a business model where company X offers an "enhanced Wikipedia experience": they take (or fork) the wikipedia content, host it on their servers and offer massive bandwidth, advanced search capacities, etc. and charge a small amount for using it. Maybe it would fly, maybe not.
However that's clearly not what Google is doing, which brings us back to question 1: publicity aside, what exactly do they have in mind ?
Why so ? The advantage of sex is increased adaptivity and variability. A sexual population will adapt and change more quickly.
But the selective environment of a given individual is no only defined by external factors such as climate, etc.: it is also defined by the characteristics of other organisms it lives with. E.g. as Darwin himself said, competition is more severe within a given species than between different species, for the simple reason that member of a same species compete for the same resources.
So, by increasing rate of change in sexual lineages, sex also increases rate of change in the environmental conditions of other organisms - and thus increases their need for adaptivity ! In this perspective, sex would be a self-reinforcing process.
So the question would not be so much "why sex", but "why asexual reproduction". How come bacteria overwhelmingly use asexual reproduction ? A possible answer is that they don't: genetic exchange occurs frequently between bacteria, and always has (with the interesting consequence that the tree of life has no single root: check out Carl Woese's notion of "darwinian threshold").
All of these programs are in C. So far, the only successful examples of code evolution that we know of are based on functional programming (i.e. Lisp).
A major advantage of Lisp-like languages is that the program is actually a tree of functions. When you mutate a program, or cross it with another (i.e. swap branches between trees), you still obtain something meaningful / compilable. When you cross together two random pieces of imperative code, most of the time, you end up getting something meaningless.
Artificial evolution needs three things: an environment, primitives which are reasonably well suited to this envronment, and a reasonably efficient way to combine them together.
Check out John Koza's "Genetic Programming" books.
Tierra shows the main problems of patforms based on self-replicating code:
1- Organisms based on machine code are just too brittle. Any given mutation will most likely have catastrophic consequences over the resulting organism - much more so than in biological creatures.
2- To overcome this, you have to put a lot of a priori knowledge into the system. Tierra creatures did not evolve self-replication: they are actually endowed with a self-replicating process which is provided to them by the programmer.
Brittleness + a priori knowledge = severe limitation on any interesting evolution that might occur.
At the beginning of the Tierra project, interesting results were reported: the system had evolved "ecosystems", "parasites" (which exploited other organisms' replicating systems to replicate themselves) and even "hyper parasites" (which turned the parasites against themselves). Unfortunately it has since been shown that these creatures could be obtained with just two mutations in the original genome (Ref.).
Since then, perhaps unsurprisingly, no significant new result has been reported in Tierra.
Evolution of code works well in less ambitious settings, when the reproductive function is an external process (i.e. a computer program selects and duplicates the best creatures). Genetic algorithms and genetic programming work fine.
If the advantage of sexual reproduction is so great, why did giardia give it up?
Standard answer: because giardia lived in an ecological niche that was stable enough over millenia, so that the advantage of sex (quick recombination, bringing adaptivity and creativity to the species) was not large enough in this particular case to compensate the obvious cost (with sex, you need two or more to make one, so the genetic material of a given sexual individual will be propagated half as fast as that of an asexual individual)
Sex must have some sort of advantage, for the simple reason that 90+% of all eukaryotic lifeforms are sexual.
Genetic exchange is really useful. Suppose it takes N different mutations to be "well adapted" to a given environment (whatever this may mean), but that each of these N mutations, taken individually, only brings a very minor advantage. It would take a momnumental piece of luck (probability of mutation ^ N) to obtain all of these mutations with just random mutations. If an individual evolves one of these "good" mutations, it cannot communicate it to others, and so to obtain the desirable feature each lineage would need to evolve all of these features one by one, which may take a lot of time. With sex, thanks to genetic recombination, all you need is to have several lineages, each evolving one particular mutation (which is much easier) and sexual recombination will allow these good mutations to propagate until they all get mixed up into one individual.
Again, if your environment is rich and stable enough, the added adaptivity does not bring a significant advantage. In this case, once a given lineage reverts to asexual reproduction, they quickly take over the whole population, and their lack of adaptivity is not a problem - until the environment changes again.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, seriously. Slashdot has lost it. Duplicates rue the day!
--
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
The journal to which Sokal submitted his paper was not peer-reviewed, in the scientific sense. It was a "debate and opinion" publication aimed at encouraging exchange of new, possibly provocative ideas.
A famous scientist comes and tell them "look, I have written a paper about connections between science and your field of activity". They read the paper, they don't like it, but they think "hey, he's a big honcho, so this must be genuine and after all maybe we just don't understand everything - let's publish it, after all we're here to foster communication between different people". Then they find out it was a hoax, the sole purpose of which was to ridicule them by imposing upon them irrelevant standards to which they never adhered in th first place.
Imagine you head a physics magazine - not a scientific journal, a magazine. A well-known historian submits an article about history of science. You don't really know what he's talking about, and some of the things he mentions seem really strange (what, Newton was gay ?) but you think, "hey, the guy is a respectable historian, so he must know things that we don't, right ?" So you publish his paper. Two months later the historian comes and says "mwahaha my paper was a hoax, littered with falsehoods and incorrect information, and you published it ! You are th3 suck ! PwN3d y4 !!"
Thomas-
Slashdotter n.: a person who sincerely believes that a robot that can produce blocks of amorphous material is a "first step" towards a self-replicating machine, or that building an elevator to climb an average-size building on a campus is a "first step" towards a space elevator.
Thomas-
And yes... Terrorism was a concern in how they designed it. But... they still made it.
The Channel Tunnel connects two pieces of land that are separated by a ridiculously small, shallow strait. The Dover cliffs are clearly visible from France all year long, and when you fly over it, you can see France and England almost touching each other. The difficulty in building the Tunnel was the digging part.
A space elevator requires a single cable / tape that must be a thousand times as long as the Channel Tunnel, at the very least. Oh, and it must hold in geosynchronous orbit.
The Channel Tunnel was a remarkable achievement in terms of engineering, but there was no major scientific breakthrough involved. We already had the science and the technology to do it. It was just a matter a finding the money. The space elevator is quite a different matter. We don't have the technology, and there is no reason to believe that we will have a workable plan for building a space elevator within the foreseeable future.
Thomas -
It is an undisputed fact that the Soviets and Eastern Europeans were superior to the West in mathematics and abstract theoretical physics. The Soviet school built around Kolmogorov is the prominent example of this superiority.
The fact is easy to explain: mathematics and theoretical physics don't cost much. All you need is a pencil and a sheet of paper. So the Soviets diverted most of their resources to these domains, simply because they could not afford the experimental apparatus necessary for chemistry, physics or molecular biology.
Now, whether or not this distinction still holds in today's Putinian Russia is another matter entirely...
Thomas-
Just for the fun of it, would he gain much by using parabolic mirrors that would concentrate solar rays even more ?
Of course you must be able to find a lot of cheap parabolic mirrors of the right curvature (ideally they would have slightly different curvatures, being at different distances from the target focal point, but hey that would still be better than flat mirrors).
But still, I wonder how much power he could get from this.
Thomas-
AFP is big in France.
AFP is big all over the world. There are 3 real global news agencies, AP, AFP and Reuters (in no particular order).
Hell, they're even "big" in the US ! Look at Yahoo's top stories, check out the sources (upper right corner). Guess who comes third, right behind AP and Reuters ?
In other parts of the world (say, the Arab world or western Africa), AFP happens to dominate. It has more to do with politics and language than anything else, but still, they're not just big in France.
How many shortwave programs does AFP broadcast? And in what languages? Let's see, the answer would be none and none. Hell, the Beeb broadcasts in multiple languages.
Wow. Congratulations, you just discovered that a news agency is not the same as a media corporation (Hint: how many AP / Reuters programs are syndicated on public radio in the United States ? How many shortwave programs do AP and Reuters broadcast ?)
If you want French media, you should look at TV5 (French-language international television) or Radio-France Internationale (radio services in 19 languages).
Thomas-
What ? No mention of zhongwen.com ?
This site is just mind-boggling. This guy not only digged the meaning, etymology and mnemonics for thousands of characters, but he managed to put it on the web in a user-friendly way. I don't know what I find most admirable - the scholarly erudition or the technical "Do-The-Right-Thing" insight.
Thomas-
Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition.
Obviously we need filter from OO format to OO format. I wonder if there will be any copyright issues though....
Thomas-
As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer.
*sigh* You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron. Because, guess what - real world event don't happen on the web. They happen in the real world (duh!) And you need to have real-world journalists to report on them (double-duh!) They are the primary news source; any website that does not directly employ journalists is, at best, a secondary news source.
The AFP is composed of a few hundred journalists scattered all over the world, who write articles and take pictures on real-world events. The AFP is a major "primary news source". Web-based publications are dependent on AFP and other journalists to produce the content that appears on your screen, even though you don't seem to be aware of this basic fact. Apparently in your world news stories and photographs self-assemble spontaneously from random electronic noise.
Journalists and photographers, believe it or not, need to pay the bills too. So agencies such as AFP sell their stories to publishers (web or paper based), usually in a non-exclusive manner, without redistribution rights. This allows them to pay their journalists, who produce all the hot juicy content that titillates your ocular globes.
I'll make a very simple summary of the case for you:
- Google aggregates articles (and photographs) from public websites, with their permission.
- AFP licenses photographs to websites, without redistribution rights: The websites not allowed to redistribute the picture.
- However, Google harvests AFP-made pictures from websites and happily displays them on GoogleNews.
- AFP says to Google: "Stop that, please"
- Google ignores them
- AFP sues
Got it ?
Thomas-
Until recently it was unclear how exactly Sun could differentiate themselves from the competition, seeing how they moved away from hardware and big iron, with the risk of becoming "just another vendor". But now it seems thay have a pretty neat business model to take on:
The power and flexibility of open source, with the reliability and dependability of a large, experienced company.
Note that here "reliability and dependability" does not only apply to the products themselves, but also to the relationship with your customers: when you do business with Sun, you know they won't pull the carpet under your feet the morning after (RedHat Linux -> RHEL comes to mind).
Thomas-
Sounds like Kazaa's lawyers might be telling them to prepare for the worst..
"You know, it's not that painful if you really bend over as much as you can, and spread your knees apart... Oh, and be sure to use lots of lube too !"
Thomas-
Punctuated equilibrium is an alternate theory invoked to explain gaps (no, they are not a creationist myth) in the evolutionary records
The theory of punctated equilibria was invented by paleontologists. The "short periods of fast evolution" they refer to often span hundreds of thousands of years. This is "short" when you're a paleontologist, but is perfectly compatible with "smooth" neo-Darwinian evolution by genetic mutations and recombination - it's just occuring faster due to new environmental / ecological conditions. By the way, the guys behind this theory (essentially Nils Eldredge and the late S. J. Gould) never missed an opportunity to stress that they were bona fide Darwinists.
What causes periods of fast evolution ? Of course you can invoke asteroids or volcanoes, but it turns out that evolution itself is naturally unstable. Because most species depend on other species in some way, when a species evolves a new adaptive feature, this has consequences for all other species that depend on this one, possibly leading to a cascade of evolutionary changes in those species.
Per Bak and his colleagues came up with an insanely simple model of co-evolution between many species: organise a set of variables along a circle. Initialise them with random values. At any time step, change the lowest value to another, random value (evolution of a species) and do the same with its two neighbours (consequences over "dependent" species). Rinse, repeat.
This model happens to exhibit punctuated equilibria and avalanches of evolutionary adaptations, with a neat power-law distribution in the size of these avalanches (the number of species that are affected by evolutionary change in one species).
This also offers an explanation for mass extinctions. Sure, asteroids or volcanoes can trigger the process, but the most likely culprit overall is simply the instability of ecosystems.
Thomas-
He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86)
You mean, like Linux "stole" the Unix idea (must... resist... mentioning... SCO...) ?
Paterson re-implemented (from scratch) an API clone of CP/M, throwing in his own ideas for design and implementation. Not to mention that Kildall took a lot of his "ideas" from DEC's VMS for PDP-10.
Call that "stealing" if you want, but then be consistent with yourself, and support software patents. Oh, and sue the FreeDOS project too !
Thomas-
Considering only people with enough money to buy a computer really benifet, it isn't fair to use everyones taxes.
Considering only people with enough money to buy a car can use roads, it isn't fair to use everyones taxes to build them.
Thomas-
Wake up and look at who's putting the money behind the efforts you're idealistically supporting.
RTFA. In this case, it's local governments who actually give (some) money to non-profit organisations to offer free WiFi access to communities.
WiFi is cheap and easy to set up. A NPO can't lay optic fiber because it's too hard and expensive, but they can set up WiFi access points. All they need is a little support and, most importantly, the right to do it.
How on earth does this benefit the big bad ugly corporate monopolies ?
Thomas-
But by giving these people freedom of speech you are giving them the rope to hang themselves with.
No, you're giving them the opportunity to attract large numbers of poorly educated people whom they will brainwash into submission before unleashing them on the jews/niggers/infidels/rest of the world. The same problem occurs with religious fanatics (self-appointed moslem "leaders", mostly).
And Germany (and France) know this because they've been here before. The US haven't. Yet. It's quite possible that the huge size of the US prevents these people from actually taking over large segments of the population, limiting them to semi-isolated action. Not so in Europe. Again, Europeans have seen first hand that it is perfectly possible for fanatics of the most insane kind to take control of large, developed, civilised nations. In the words of Paul Valery, "We, civilisations, know henceforth that we are mortals".
There is such a thing as extremism, both in religions and politics. Leaving extremists alone until they actually commit violent acts is like letting a forest fire spread until it starts burning houses. Hell, even the English (who once refused to expel Algerian terrorists to France, citing human rights concern) have started to realise that political or religious insanity is no less dangerous than clinical insanity, and even much worse, because it is contagious.
Feel free to flame me down and to tell me how nazism or religious fanaticism (not even the brain-dead "you invade me so I kill you so you'll have to invade me even more" kind, but the "die, infidels, die" kind) are just another political opinion.
Thomas-
French scientists are not allowed to write publications in any language other than French
I beg your pardon ??
It is true that French scientists - who happen to have a civil servant status - are often required to produce reports in French. I don't know where you got the idea that they are forbidden from publishing anything in English.
Another example: a few years ago, out of a sudden, the french government decreed that the word e-mail is to be forbidden and replaced with made-up "courriel".
Yeah, Heaven forbid that people speaking a different language try to create new words for new things instead of just adopting English ones !
BTW, the word "courriel" was coined by the Quebecois.
Thomas-
Seriously, if you want a nice review of the topic of scientific consensus, here's a bit from a speech given by Michael Crichton
Wow ! Similarly if you want a review of the consensus on Evolution, check out Answers in Genesis. And if you want to know more about the consensus on AIDS prevention, birth control, etc., just ask the Catholic Church !
Michael Crichton does not believe in significant man-made global warning. He's on the minority side. So of course he will use his writing skills defend minorities against the big bad "consensus".
He goes on to explain that many important scientific discoveries have been in direct conflict with the consensus.
And have been accepted instantaneously if they were backed by evidence, at least after from Newton onwards. See Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Bohr for details.
Crichton is a MD and a writer, I do not doubt his level of education, but he's not a scientist.
Thomas-
The air and water seem pretty good. Weather seems normal.
WTF ?
Europeans dislike us, some HATE us
Yeah, sure, that's why they poured litres of ketchup in the streets and renamed it "Freedom Tomato Paste". Oh wait... </pointless controversy>
As a side note, the one thing that we deeply dislike about Americans is precisely this stubborn refusal to give a fsck about the consequences that their actions have over the rest of the world.
Arguments of "Americans are selfish and stupid" are not likely to pursuade.
How do you expect people to react to a discourse that can be summarised as this: "We're the US, so we'll keep churning out CO2 because it will make us richer and most of the short term consequences will affect other countries anyway" ?
Thomas-
It's no different than the GPL -- also free as in speech, but not necessarily free as in beer.
Indeed. You could imagine a business model where company X offers an "enhanced Wikipedia experience": they take (or fork) the wikipedia content, host it on their servers and offer massive bandwidth, advanced search capacities, etc. and charge a small amount for using it. Maybe it would fly, maybe not.
However that's clearly not what Google is doing, which brings us back to question 1: publicity aside, what exactly do they have in mind ?
Thomas-
But this benefit is only in the *long term*.
Why so ? The advantage of sex is increased adaptivity and variability. A sexual population will adapt and change more quickly.
But the selective environment of a given individual is no only defined by external factors such as climate, etc.: it is also defined by the characteristics of other organisms it lives with. E.g. as Darwin himself said, competition is more severe within a given species than between different species, for the simple reason that member of a same species compete for the same resources.
So, by increasing rate of change in sexual lineages, sex also increases rate of change in the environmental conditions of other organisms - and thus increases their need for adaptivity ! In this perspective, sex would be a self-reinforcing process.
So the question would not be so much "why sex", but "why asexual reproduction". How come bacteria overwhelmingly use asexual reproduction ? A possible answer is that they don't: genetic exchange occurs frequently between bacteria, and always has (with the interesting consequence that the tree of life has no single root: check out Carl Woese's notion of "darwinian threshold").
Thomas-
All of these programs are in C. So far, the only successful examples of code evolution that we know of are based on functional programming (i.e. Lisp).
A major advantage of Lisp-like languages is that the program is actually a tree of functions. When you mutate a program, or cross it with another (i.e. swap branches between trees), you still obtain something meaningful / compilable. When you cross together two random pieces of imperative code, most of the time, you end up getting something meaningless.
Artificial evolution needs three things: an environment, primitives which are reasonably well suited to this envronment, and a reasonably efficient way to combine them together.
Check out John Koza's "Genetic Programming" books.
Thomas-
Tierra shows the main problems of patforms based on self-replicating code:
1- Organisms based on machine code are just too brittle. Any given mutation will most likely have catastrophic consequences over the resulting organism - much more so than in biological creatures.
2- To overcome this, you have to put a lot of a priori knowledge into the system. Tierra creatures did not evolve self-replication: they are actually endowed with a self-replicating process which is provided to them by the programmer.
Brittleness + a priori knowledge = severe limitation on any interesting evolution that might occur.
At the beginning of the Tierra project, interesting results were reported: the system had evolved "ecosystems", "parasites" (which exploited other organisms' replicating systems to replicate themselves) and even "hyper parasites" (which turned the parasites against themselves). Unfortunately it has since been shown that these creatures could be obtained with just two mutations in the original genome (Ref.).
Since then, perhaps unsurprisingly, no significant new result has been reported in Tierra.
Evolution of code works well in less ambitious settings, when the reproductive function is an external process (i.e. a computer program selects and duplicates the best creatures). Genetic algorithms and genetic programming work fine.
Thomas
If the advantage of sexual reproduction is so great, why did giardia give it up?
Standard answer: because giardia lived in an ecological niche that was stable enough over millenia, so that the advantage of sex (quick recombination, bringing adaptivity and creativity to the species) was not large enough in this particular case to compensate the obvious cost (with sex, you need two or more to make one, so the genetic material of a given sexual individual will be propagated half as fast as that of an asexual individual)
Sex must have some sort of advantage, for the simple reason that 90+% of all eukaryotic lifeforms are sexual.
Genetic exchange is really useful. Suppose it takes N different mutations to be "well adapted" to a given environment (whatever this may mean), but that each of these N mutations, taken individually, only brings a very minor advantage. It would take a momnumental piece of luck (probability of mutation ^ N) to obtain all of these mutations with just random mutations. If an individual evolves one of these "good" mutations, it cannot communicate it to others, and so to obtain the desirable feature each lineage would need to evolve all of these features one by one, which may take a lot of time. With sex, thanks to genetic recombination, all you need is to have several lineages, each evolving one particular mutation (which is much easier) and sexual recombination will allow these good mutations to propagate until they all get mixed up into one individual.
Again, if your environment is rich and stable enough, the added adaptivity does not bring a significant advantage. In this case, once a given lineage reverts to asexual reproduction, they quickly take over the whole population, and their lack of adaptivity is not a problem - until the environment changes again.
Thomas-