>When you design a web site for a particular resolution you're
>guaranteed that it will display undesirably on more than 50% of >your visitors' screens.
It's standard procedure to design the site for lowest common resolution and then test it at higher resolutions. You have to shoot for _some_ resolution and if you use 800x600 right now it will also satisfy 1024x768, and that will make 90%+ of the world happy.
Right now about 50% of the world is cruising at 800x600, 40% are at 1024x768, and 10% are "other" (like 640x480 and 1280x1024).
When I first started doing web sites the target was 640x480. Today it is 800x600 because hardly anybody uses 640x480 anymore. A few years from now it will be 1024x768, if 800x600 falls below 10% of installations. Win XP installs at 800x600 by default and that caused the shift in the base level layout. I wonder what the default install of Vista will be?
and use the $40,000 to fund two post docs from the paleontology department. They will go and investigate the fossil bed that yielded the recent limbed fish found in Canada. More digging needs to be done.
Those social studies people will just waste the money on semantic nonsense anyway.
Damn you. I was about to post this one. I've never got a mod 3 before and you stole it from me. A curse on your head.
Bill is doing what any wise business person does: he is investigating the competition. He will also get the opportunity to run his own studies to tell customers why Windows is better than Linux.
On a totally different subject, can anybody tell me why I get port scanned on 6588 and 3382 when I make a post to slashdot? It happens every time.
> It doesn't appear that US citizens even care about global warming
Why is everybody always bashing USA? The whole world is making this mess and all the efforts to do something about it have been superficial. The Kyoto Treaty doesn't go far enough to actually make a dent in the problem. Bush just adds to the comedy of errors by saying "What problem?".
> No they aren't responsible for giving the public morals, but they
> are responsible for helping focus research and (for this government
> especially) controlling the information that flows to the public.
The government should tell people to RTFJ (Read The Freaking Journals).
Americans, especially, avoid reading and trying to understand scientific topics because they believe it is too nerdy and they might loose their sex appeal. Having the government force people to read Science and Nature will educate the people as to what is going on around them and also, as a side benefit, decrease the population growth rate.
> a bunch of eggheads doing good research without the talent to communicate it.
It was communicated 12 years ago and tracking the progression of the warming has been in all the scientific journals on a monthly basis ever since. Every month there is new data to support it and new computer models to predict it based on the new data. In the scientific community the hoopla was over a long time ago, and now it is time to watch it happen and practice some modeling. What more can be said?
The other mutations that stick are the ones that "do no evil". These are neutral
mutations, like the non-optimal eye of mammals that you mention. It is a bizarre, nonoptimal design, but we get by with it well enough so it stays.
The world of biochemistry and their metabolic pathways is full of even more bizarre examples of nonsensical "design". In some pathways there are many degrees of freedom for mutations to happen and yet still end up with the same end product, so you see random and nonsensical changes. Other pathways are less free so they persist over hundreds of millions of years (like in histone production).
Evolution is not a pretty process and things end up resembling Rube Goldberg contraptions.
A great book on "missing links" is "Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution"
by Barbara Stahl, ISBN 0-486-64850-8, Dover Books
It is a bit dated now, having last been updated in 1985 (that I know of). It tracks through Chordata from the Burgess to hominids and points out all the areas that need some work done.
Although this is a scientific book, both paleontologists and creationists would find this book a lot of fun. =-}
This is news to me. I didn't realize the size and extent of these early terrestrial arthropods. I earlier made a post that stated there was nothing for early tetrapods to eat because insects came into the picture 50 million years later. If you look at the mouth on the fossil fish you will see it is for gulping down some large prey, so maybe it was chasing these large arthropods along the shoreline.
Maybe the fish is not gulping down large prey, but rather has a large mouth to increase its prey catching chances on small, fast prey (e.g., a frog).
Notice that proper insects are not discovered until about 320 mya; long after the first amphibian fossils are found.
Another good reason for the fish to develop legs is to migrate between ponds. This would enable it to find new habitats and also to avoid getting stuck in a pond that was drying out, similar to what lung fish do today.
>The pathway from gills to lungs needs to be fleshed out more,
That has already been determined long ago. The swim bladder of fish was the precursor to lungs. You can still see this in the lung fish and other fish.
>>2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?
> Well, putting the loaded word "decide" aside, the obvious > answer is that land represented a huge unexploited ecological niche, > with tons of food and no predators.
But there is nothing for this creature to eat on land! Take a look at these timelines :
There are land plants at 375 mya, but no insects. The fossils that were found were of meat eaters (probably large prey; look at the mouth). There are vascular plants on land, but no large prey. If there were large insects on land at that time it might be likely they were pursuing those as food, but insects don't come along for another 50 million years.
It seems more likely that the evolution of limbs for land animals was driven by the need for freshwater fish to easily move about from pond to pond. Later on they started to prey on eachother when they had adapted to life on land.
> Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's
>one of those terms often bandied about by creationists,
Get used to it. The term is a permanent part of common language. A tip to handling creationists is to ignore them. They are not part of the scientific process and are just jeering from the peanut gallery.
Paleontologist use the term "missing link" only when they are pretty excited by a find. It's a vulgar buzz word that the common Joe can understand.
If you feel forced to change terminology because of what creationists say, then you are letting them control you. The creationists are not worth even listening to. I've never met a creationist who has done any in-depth study of paleontology, biology, or geology. Why even consider their opinion?
Science marches on, with or without support of the belief of the masses.
You are right that this is a nice find based on predictions. Another great thing is that it wasn't found in Mongolia. All the recent great finds have been coming from there and it's nice to see a new hot spot to investigate.
I can't find the actual survey online. I found some other articles by people with the same frustration. I want to see how the questions were framed.
I have done embedded design for more than 20 years. I have been subjected to many goofy surveys than were written by marketing suits who were clueless about how to ask proper questions. The typical survey says "Will you be doing an embedded design in the next 6 months? Y/N" and then it gives some kernels to choose from. The category of "hand rolled" is always the winner (~50%). This is because most embedded designs are quite small (8 and 16 bit) and buying a canned kernel is too much bother. Linux is not an option on these little processors (gross overkill and no MMU protection anyway).
The survey should ask "Will you be doing a 32 bit embedded design and if so, what will you use as a kernel?" If the design does not require TCP/IP networking, I still would seriously consider hand rolled as an option. When you make the kernel yourself you are not dependant on the support of the kernel provider.
I've never done an embedded Linux design, but I sure would like to. My only concern would be the complexity of dealing with the GPL (I ain't no lawyer). I'm accustom to hiding the source to prevent knock-off designs. In government research designs I willingly release the full design, but in commercial design it sets off alarm bells in my mind. I'm not sure what the reaction of a customer/employer would be if I told them I was going to release their code to the internet. I'll have to figure that part out.
> This article doesn't tell you how the fossils are dated.
It was dated with Argon decay. Go read the real press release by the
original author at http://www.stoneageinstitute.org/. Press releases by the popular press are often only mangled versions written by some liberal arts major and often contain errors.
>Radiocarbon dating only works up to about 50,000 years.
Other atoms has longer decay times, giving the ability to date rock up to billions of years.
> As the result, the meaning of that skull can be seen to be entirely fabricated.
Interesting interpretation by you.
> But how are geological layers dated? By the fossils that are found in them! This is circular reasoning!
Yes, your reasoning is very roundish.
Another method they are using to date this fossil is by the chemical composition. It was buried in volcanic ash and each volcanic eruption has a unique chemical signature. By matching the chemicals in the fossil to the eruption they can use other methods to match the eruption to a date.
It sounds like the fossil might have been a "float", meaning that it was eroded out of it's original bedding and washed downhill. Unfortunately that would mess up the context a bit. Still, a nice find and with some more detective work they can narrow down the date (hopefully).
This news was just a press release from the group that is studying the fossils and a full blown paper with more details should come out later.
Modern humans's alone changed a lot over the span of 100,000's of thousands of years and are NOT stable over the span of 2 million years.
The _average_ duration of a species is 2 million years. That's a statistical fact, not open for dispute. The standard deviation is quite high (> 1 million years?, don't recall exactly). Species come and go based on fluctuations in the environment and their ability to adapt to the changes. Just like nobody can predict the weather, the future success of a species is indeterminate (but averages 2 million years).
When you say "modern humans" I assume you mean our species. We haven't changed much in 250K years. Some populations are shorter, some taller, and interesting shades of skin color have popped up recently, but we are pretty much the same as we started out a quarter million years ago. The differences between the current populations may seem great to us because we notice the slightest differences in eachother. DNA studies show that we have all recently radiated from Africa within the last 60K years and that is when the small changes started to appear. A good, modern book on the DNA subject is "The Seven Daughters of Eve" by the geneticist Bryan Sykes.
In our early history we lived with two other species, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. Did we evolve from the erectus line or the neanderthalensis? Both species predate our own. Wouldn't it be interesting to know who we should call daddy? =-}
Sequences of animal records on that island show the change in a much shorter time span.
You mention the rapid evolution of animals that become trapped on an island.Yep,that's true. Darwin wrote extensively about the island effect. Rapid speciation is common in populations that become isolated from their main populations and have the stress of adaptation to the new environment applied to them. They either have to adapt to the new conditions or die. It creates a rapid speciation event. As long as the species is fit enough for the new environment it will more than likely live on for a couple million years without much change in form.
It's amazing that a post like this could get a score
of "Insightful". Isn't there one called "Totally Misguided"?
"Evolution was a slow, gradual change that happens over time. We just happen to dig up random fossils and see dramatic changes from the previous, older species.We forget that there were sometimes 10,000's or 100,000's of years in between the two species."
Most species are stable over an average of 2 million years. A sequence of fossils found at 10K or 100K intervals wouldn't show much change.
Very often a new derived species is found in the same sequence and seems to have popped out of nowhere. The two species coexist in the same geographical location.
"There isn't one "link" between two species."
Technically, they are called transitional forms. Yes, some have been found, but the normal mode of speciation seems to be so rapid that it is very rare to catch it in the act.
"A situation where one day a parent gives birth to a dramatically different, more advanced offspring that is more evolved then the parents doesn't happen."
You are wrong. Spontaneous, beneficial mutations can and do happen, but they don't seem to be a common method of species formation.
-------------- Back to Our Main Story... -----
The fossil is of interest because Homo erectus seems like it should be our ancestor, but the jump from them to us seems too far in one speciation event. This fossil that was found might be an unknown subspecies of erectus that is closer to our species and thus help prove or disprove our descent from the erectus line.
According to mitochondrial DNA studies, Homo sapien is about 250K years old. This fossil is not only a very complete skull, but it also _might_ date from the time of the creation of our species. It is exciting in two ways.
It's about time somebody patented fixed point notation. I wish I had thought of it.
Has anybody patented floating point yet? "A method of representing numbers using a dot operator to signify numbers less than one"? How much does a patent cost?
Slashdot Mirror
>guaranteed that it will display undesirably on more than 50% of
>your visitors' screens.
It's standard procedure to design the site for lowest common resolution and then test it at higher resolutions. You have to shoot for _some_ resolution and if you use 800x600 right now it will also satisfy 1024x768, and that will make 90%+ of the world happy.
Right now about 50% of the world is cruising at 800x600, 40% are at 1024x768, and 10% are "other" (like 640x480 and 1280x1024).
When I first started doing web sites the target was 640x480. Today it is 800x600 because hardly anybody uses 640x480 anymore. A few years from now it will be 1024x768, if 800x600 falls below 10% of installations. Win XP installs at 800x600 by default and that caused the shift in the base level layout. I wonder what the default install of Vista will be?
Those social studies people will just waste the money on semantic nonsense anyway.
Damn you. I was about to post this one. I've never got a mod 3 before and you stole it from me. A curse on your head.
Bill is doing what any wise business person does: he is investigating the competition. He will also get the opportunity to run his own studies to tell customers why Windows is better than Linux.
On a totally different subject, can anybody tell me why I get port scanned on 6588 and 3382 when I make a post to slashdot? It happens every time.
Why is everybody always bashing USA? The whole world is making this mess and all the efforts to do something about it have been superficial. The Kyoto Treaty doesn't go far enough to actually make a dent in the problem. Bush just adds to the comedy of errors by saying "What problem?".
> are responsible for helping focus research and (for this government
> especially) controlling the information that flows to the public.
The government should tell people to RTFJ (Read The Freaking Journals).
Americans, especially, avoid reading and trying to understand scientific topics because they believe it is too nerdy and they might loose their sex appeal. Having the government force people to read Science and Nature will educate the people as to what is going on around them and also, as a side benefit, decrease the population growth rate.
It was communicated 12 years ago and tracking the progression of the warming has been in all the scientific journals on a monthly basis ever since. Every month there is new data to support it and new computer models to predict it based on the new data. In the scientific community the hoopla was over a long time ago, and now it is time to watch it happen and practice some modeling. What more can be said?
Now it is just a political football.
It's a degenerate subspecies of unix.
The world of biochemistry and their metabolic pathways is full of even more bizarre examples of nonsensical "design". In some pathways there are many degrees of freedom for mutations to happen and yet still end up with the same end product, so you see random and nonsensical changes. Other pathways are less free so they persist over hundreds of millions of years (like in histone production).
Evolution is not a pretty process and things end up resembling Rube Goldberg contraptions.
"Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution"
by Barbara Stahl, ISBN 0-486-64850-8, Dover Books
It is a bit dated now, having last been updated in 1985 (that I know of). It tracks through Chordata from the Burgess to hominids and points out all the areas that need some work done.
Although this is a scientific book, both paleontologists and creationists would find this book a lot of fun. =-}
This is news to me. I didn't realize the size and extent of these early terrestrial arthropods. I earlier made a post that stated there was nothing for early tetrapods to eat because insects came into the picture 50 million years later. If you look at the mouth on the fossil fish you will see it is for gulping down some large prey, so maybe it was chasing these large arthropods along the shoreline.
Maybe the fish is not gulping down large prey, but rather has a large mouth to increase its prey catching chances on small, fast prey (e.g., a frog).
See these time lines from fossil discoveries so far...s /timelines.html
http://www.intergate.com/~tmaier/fossils/timeline
Notice that proper insects are not discovered until about 320 mya; long after the first amphibian fossils are found.
Another good reason for the fish to develop legs is to migrate between ponds. This would enable it to find new habitats and also to avoid getting stuck in a pond that was drying out, similar to what lung fish do today.
That has already been determined long ago. The swim bladder of fish was the precursor to lungs. You can still see this in the lung fish and other fish.
> Well, putting the loaded word "decide" aside, the obvious
> answer is that land represented a huge unexploited ecological niche,
> with tons of food and no predators.
But there is nothing for this creature to eat on land! Take a look at these timelines :
http://www.intergate.com/~tmaier/fossils/timelines /timelines.html
There are land plants at 375 mya, but no insects. The fossils that were found were of meat eaters (probably large prey; look at the mouth). There are vascular plants on land, but no large prey. If there were large insects on land at that time it might be likely they were pursuing those as food, but insects don't come along for another 50 million years.
It seems more likely that the evolution of limbs for land animals was driven by the need for freshwater fish to easily move about from pond to pond. Later on they started to prey on eachother when they had adapted to life on land.
>one of those terms often bandied about by creationists,
Get used to it. The term is a permanent part of common language. A tip to handling creationists is to ignore them. They are not part of the scientific process and are just jeering from the peanut gallery.
Paleontologist use the term "missing link" only when they are pretty excited by a find. It's a vulgar buzz word that the common Joe can understand.
If you feel forced to change terminology because of what creationists say, then you are letting them control you. The creationists are not worth even listening to. I've never met a creationist who has done any in-depth study of paleontology, biology, or geology. Why even consider their opinion?
Science marches on, with or without support of the belief of the masses.
You are right that this is a nice find based on predictions. Another great thing is that it wasn't found in Mongolia. All the recent great finds have been coming from there and it's nice to see a new hot spot to investigate.
I have done embedded design for more than 20 years. I have been subjected to many goofy surveys than were written by marketing suits who were clueless about how to ask proper questions. The typical survey says "Will you be doing an embedded design in the next 6 months? Y/N" and then it gives some kernels to choose from. The category of "hand rolled" is always the winner (~50%). This is because most embedded designs are quite small (8 and 16 bit) and buying a canned kernel is too much bother. Linux is not an option on these little processors (gross overkill and no MMU protection anyway).
The survey should ask "Will you be doing a 32 bit embedded design and if so, what will you use as a kernel?" If the design does not require TCP/IP networking, I still would seriously consider hand rolled as an option. When you make the kernel yourself you are not dependant on the support of the kernel provider.
I've never done an embedded Linux design, but I sure would like to. My only concern would be the complexity of dealing with the GPL (I ain't no lawyer). I'm accustom to hiding the source to prevent knock-off designs. In government research designs I willingly release the full design, but in commercial design it sets off alarm bells in my mind. I'm not sure what the reaction of a customer/employer would be if I told them I was going to release their code to the internet. I'll have to figure that part out.
It was dated with Argon decay. Go read the real press release by the original author at http://www.stoneageinstitute.org/. Press releases by the popular press are often only mangled versions written by some liberal arts major and often contain errors.
>Radiocarbon dating only works up to about 50,000 years.
Other atoms has longer decay times, giving the ability to date rock up to billions of years.
> As the result, the meaning of that skull can be seen to be entirely fabricated.
Interesting interpretation by you.
> But how are geological layers dated? By the fossils that are found in them! This is circular reasoning!
Yes, your reasoning is very roundish.
Another method they are using to date this fossil is by the chemical composition. It was buried in volcanic ash and each volcanic eruption has a unique chemical signature. By matching the chemicals in the fossil to the eruption they can use other methods to match the eruption to a date.
It sounds like the fossil might have been a "float", meaning that it was eroded out of it's original bedding and washed downhill. Unfortunately that would mess up the context a bit. Still, a nice find and with some more detective work they can narrow down the date (hopefully).
This news was just a press release from the group that is studying the fossils and a full blown paper with more details should come out later.
The _average_ duration of a species is 2 million years. That's a statistical fact, not open for dispute. The standard deviation is quite high (> 1 million years?, don't recall exactly). Species come and go based on fluctuations in the environment and their ability to adapt to the changes. Just like nobody can predict the weather, the future success of a species is indeterminate (but averages 2 million years).
When you say "modern humans" I assume you mean our species. We haven't changed much in 250K years. Some populations are shorter, some taller, and interesting shades of skin color have popped up recently, but we are pretty much the same as we started out a quarter million years ago. The differences between the current populations may seem great to us because we notice the slightest differences in eachother. DNA studies show that we have all recently radiated from Africa within the last 60K years and that is when the small changes started to appear. A good, modern book on the DNA subject is "The Seven Daughters of Eve" by the geneticist Bryan Sykes.
In our early history we lived with two other species, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. Did we evolve from the erectus line or the neanderthalensis? Both species predate our own. Wouldn't it be interesting to know who we should call daddy? =-}
Sequences of animal records on that island show the change in a much shorter time span.
You mention the rapid evolution of animals that become trapped on an island.Yep,that's true. Darwin wrote extensively about the island effect. Rapid speciation is common in populations that become isolated from their main populations and have the stress of adaptation to the new environment applied to them. They either have to adapt to the new conditions or die. It creates a rapid speciation event. As long as the species is fit enough for the new environment it will more than likely live on for a couple million years without much change in form.
"Evolution was a slow, gradual change that happens over time. We just happen to dig up random fossils and see dramatic changes from the previous, older species.We forget that there were sometimes 10,000's or 100,000's of years in between the two species."
Most species are stable over an average of 2 million years. A sequence of fossils found at 10K or 100K intervals wouldn't show much change. Very often a new derived species is found in the same sequence and seems to have popped out of nowhere. The two species coexist in the same geographical location.
"There isn't one "link" between two species."
Technically, they are called transitional forms. Yes, some have been found, but the normal mode of speciation seems to be so rapid that it is very rare to catch it in the act.
"A situation where one day a parent gives birth to a dramatically different, more advanced offspring that is more evolved then the parents doesn't happen."
You are wrong. Spontaneous, beneficial mutations can and do happen, but they don't seem to be a common method of species formation.
-------------- Back to Our Main Story... -----
The fossil is of interest because Homo erectus seems like it should be our ancestor, but the jump from them to us seems too far in one speciation event. This fossil that was found might be an unknown subspecies of erectus that is closer to our species and thus help prove or disprove our descent from the erectus line.
According to mitochondrial DNA studies, Homo sapien is about 250K years old. This fossil is not only a very complete skull, but it also _might_ date from the time of the creation of our species. It is exciting in two ways.
So, are you excited now?
Has anybody patented floating point yet? "A method of representing numbers using a dot operator to signify numbers less than one"? How much does a patent cost?
Eager to join the action...