Since I seem to oscillate between looking at TEM images and doing confocal microscopy these days, allow me to chime in here.
Apart from resolution, there are two factors that make EM useful in a way that light microscopy techniques never will be. Namely, that they allow you to look at an entire specimen at once and at the same time see things you weren't looking for. The pretty color images confocal images are made by tagging particular structures in the cell with fluorescent molecules. This is done either with fluorochrome labeled antibodies or by expressing proteins fused to fluorescent proteins. Therefore, you have to know what you're looking for in order to make a picture of it. Furthermore due to the overlap in the emission spectra of the fluorescent tracers, you can generally only look at about 3 things simultaneously. So if you want to see all the structures in a cell at once or you're looking for something, like a virus, but don't know which one or don't have an antibody for it, EM is still the tool of choice.
The whole list is in one contiguous block of memory and iterating it means incrementing a pointer sizeof(int) bytes each iteration. Iterating a linked list on the other hand, means jumping around in memory following pointers for each iteration. Which is much slower and induces an enormous cache penalty.
This is basic stuff and just shows how futile using low-level languages is when people don't even understand why linked lists are slower than array lists...
It's a dark day on Slashdot when this is modded informative.
A linked list, like you say, is a bunch of objects in heap space containing pointers to one another. That's the whole bloody point. You give up random access and in return get O(1) head and tail insertion. A C# "list" as you describe it is a C++ std::vector or std::dequeue. Call vector::push_back() too many times and you get to reallocate and copy the whole pointer array. In return you get (maybe) faster transversal and random access capability. Comparing a C# List as you've described it to a C++ std::list is an apples to oranges comparison.
Note also, that C++ gives you both the apple and the orange depending on what you feel like eating.
This is correct. Most African nonhuman primate species have their own particular immunodeficiency virus. We call them SIVs, simian immunodeficiency viruses. Infections in these primate species are essentially asymptomatic. Phylogenetically, HIVs are descendants of a few SIVs implying multiple transmission events from nonhuman primates to humans. Humans are a non-adapted host for the virus and end up developing immunodeficiency. The same is true for Asian monkey species who have not co-evolved with SIV. Thus SIV-infected Asian monkeys are used as the model for HIV infection in humans.
Other viruses display similar behavior. The macaque equivalent to herpes simplex, for instance, causes fatal encephalitis in people but is typically completely asymptomatic in the monkeys.
Fortunately, we know from accidental infection of laboratory staff with SIV that the virus usually fails to replicate in people. In rare instances, the infected person becomes viremic but never developed immunodeficiency. Thus, the finding of an HIV of gorilla origin in a human is interesting but doesn't herald the arrival of some new super-virus pandemic.
Disclaimer: I am a veterinarian
Currently this sort of research is done on Plum Island (http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=19-40-00-00) which is conveniently separated from everything else by a nice long bridge. Very little of the disease work that goes on there has zoonotic potential, that is potential to infect humans, and those diseases that do would require transmission via arthropod vectors that hopefully don't live in New York. The worry with putting this kind of facility in Kansas is for diseases like foot and mouth disease (FMD), which cause epidemics in livestock but are harmless to people. Foot and mouth can be easily transmitted on objects and through aerosol. Outbreaks in FMD-free countries take months and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up before you can convince anyone to buy your exports again. I think the idea is that there aren't too many cows on Long Island but a hell of a lot more of them in Kansas.
The interesting thing about this finding is that the feathers in this dinosaur were associated with the ulna. In birds, most feather follicles are embedded in the skin. Only the flight feathers are attached to a bony structure. This is presumably because in birds, feathers form a major structural component of the wing itself. They need stiff shafts and a firm anchor to the skeletal system so as to maintain the form of the wing during flapping flight. The shape of a bat wing is maintained by a bat's modified finger bones and pterosaurs had some spine structures to support the wing membrane.
So why did this presumably non-flighted dinosaur require feathers with secure attachment to the bones of its forelimb?
...thousands successful cases of homeopathy use have been reported around the globe, and I am also talking about veterinary homeopathy (which dismisses many of the placebo arguments).
Speaking as a veterinarian, I can tell you that our profession has problems with homeopathy as well. The placebo effect is every bit as strong in the veterinary setting as it is in human medicine. If the owner believes in the efficacy of your prescription he can very easily bias himself into seeing improvement in the patient's signs. Placebo effect is observable with convention treatment as well. Prescribe a drug that takes a week to start working and get a delighted call back the next morning explaining how everything has gotten so much better. Or prescribe a drug for condition X and find out next recheck that unrelated condition Y was cured.
Yes, it certainly beats leaving the body at room temperature or baking in the hot, hot sun but still, if you open a bird after two days in the refrigerator there's plenty already plenty of autolysis going on. Brain and gastro-intestinal tract are particularly bad in this regard and both important places to look for lesions.
Unfortunately, it seems that Alex died on the 7th and his necropsy won't be conducted until the tomorrow, the 10th. The thing about avian tissues is that they tend to autolyze rather quickly. If he really died of aspergillosis and has fungal plaques all over the lungs, air sacs, and liver then the diagnosis is a no-brainer. On the other hand, if the diagnosis requires high quality histologic sections to make- well that might be harder with three-day-dead bird tissues.
Why would anyone wait three days for his personal veterinarian to return when there are boarded veterinary pathologists at Angell and Tufts in the state who could be called in over the weekend? Seems like with a bird this famous, it would have been worth the effort to do things right.
Particularly since the only effect discussed in the article linked from Slashdot seems to indicate that the vaccine produces in vitro neutralizing antibodies in a mouse model. As far as I know, neutralizing antibody titers don't have any ability to prevent or curb infection in vivo anyway. Seems a little early to be jumping to clinical trials.
If.net,.org, and.com only forced their users into using W3C validated xhtml/css and standard ecmascript I'd be a happy man. If they then subsequently broke the kneecaps of anyone writing a non-conformant user agent maybe web design wouldn't be the laborious, frustrating process that it is today. Sigh.
I'm sure at some point in time Jesus commanded Peter to go to the fridge and retrieve a beer. That doesn't make it some sort of religious law. When you quote the Bible you need to look at who's speaking, the audience the speaker is addressing, and the context in which the quote is being delivered. (It also really helps if you keep in mind the author of the particular scripture). When Jesus tells his disciples to do what he has "commanded" them is he really talking to me? Some of what he says would qualify as general advice and some of it will only make sense based on context. I'm sure if you examine the "general advice" section most of it will be good examples of "loving God" and "loving one's neighbor".
Absolutely right. It reminds me of something my dad used to talk about: how when he was growing up you could crack open a radio and look at the vacuum tubes in it, figure out how things worked and play with it, but these days all you see is a bunch of little black chips. Software is about the only thing left I can think of that I can open up, play with, and put back together again. You can kind of do that with a car or your house but you have to be willing to invest a lot of money in parts and God help you if you manage to break either one. A sad day indeed would be the day that our software was sequestered away on some server in a Sun or Microsoft basement, opaque and tamper proof.
It probably should be Columba as Columba is the genus to which Columba livia, the rock dove, or pigeon belongs. You know, like carrier pigeons and all?
Hey, you should seriously ask if you're actually interested. Someone might just take you up on that offer. Hell, I might if I lived in North Carolina...
I don't think people equate leaching and use in this context; at least I don't. When you LGPL software you're encouraging people to use it. You're making it available at no cost and opening up the source for everyone to see.
I would consider a leech to be an individual or organization who took your code, closed it, modified it, and sold it back to you. Personally I would find that irksome (as I imagine many people, 25 or otherwise, would) which is precisely why I enjoy the sort of "protection" afforded by the (L)GPL.
Why not the poor old LGPL? Everyone forgets about this little guy when the GPL vs BSD flamewars erupt. With LGPL you can make sure that no one leeches your code while allowing others to build commercial apps around it ands feed their children or whatever...
The unfortunate bit here is that Mono seems to be a subset of what's available on Windows with.NET. Practically speaking this means that I, the FOSS developer on Linux, create apps that run just great on Windows but none of those killer Windows apps are ever going to see the light of day on my Linux machine.
I really like the look of Mono and I agree that it has some wonderful technical merits (writing Gnome code in raw C is an exercise in masochism) but I think we ought to consider that it may ultimately end up impeding migration to Linux.
And yeah, I realize that free software is for everyone, Windows people included, but practically speaking MS marketshare needs a little erosion.
Is that right? I would think that if it was simply a matter of having the codec MPlayer would be able to play.wmv files properly. (Which is doesn't as half the time you only get the audio stream or nothing at all- at least on my Powerbook and Debian box).
I'm seeing a lot of posts today asking why anyone would go to the store and buy an XP without WMP installed or what benefit it poses to the consumer. I'd tend to agree with most of the posters that the benefit to the consumer is essentially none.
As I recall, however, the whole point of the RME edition was so that OEMs had greater flexibility in installing software on their Windows machines. This was supposed to foster competiton in the media player business since certain lines of computer would come with Real or maybe Quicktime or some other player.
The actual problem here is that media players are media specific since the file formats are all proprietary. You need Quicktime to view qti, Real to view rm, and WMP to view wmv files so unbundling WMP only screws the end user in that they've now lost default access to one kind of media. If the EU wanted to really foster competition they would mandate open standards on media file formats (I realize they can't do this- but hypothetically...) and make players compete on the basis of, well, being good _players_ and not by edging out the competition by creating proprietary de facto "standards" (.doc anyone?).
Slashdot Mirror
A 100mW laser will cheerfully blow holes in your retina before you even get the chance to blink. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#Class_II for details.
Since I seem to oscillate between looking at TEM images and doing confocal microscopy these days, allow me to chime in here.
Apart from resolution, there are two factors that make EM useful in a way that light microscopy techniques never will be. Namely, that they allow you to look at an entire specimen at once and at the same time see things you weren't looking for. The pretty color images confocal images are made by tagging particular structures in the cell with fluorescent molecules. This is done either with fluorochrome labeled antibodies or by expressing proteins fused to fluorescent proteins. Therefore, you have to know what you're looking for in order to make a picture of it. Furthermore due to the overlap in the emission spectra of the fluorescent tracers, you can generally only look at about 3 things simultaneously. So if you want to see all the structures in a cell at once or you're looking for something, like a virus, but don't know which one or don't have an antibody for it, EM is still the tool of choice.
The whole list is in one contiguous block of memory and iterating it means incrementing a pointer sizeof(int) bytes each iteration. Iterating a linked list on the other hand, means jumping around in memory following pointers for each iteration. Which is much slower and induces an enormous cache penalty.
This is basic stuff and just shows how futile using low-level languages is when people don't even understand why linked lists are slower than array lists...
It's a dark day on Slashdot when this is modded informative.
A linked list, like you say, is a bunch of objects in heap space containing pointers to one another. That's the whole bloody point. You give up random access and in return get O(1) head and tail insertion. A C# "list" as you describe it is a C++ std::vector or std::dequeue. Call vector::push_back() too many times and you get to reallocate and copy the whole pointer array. In return you get (maybe) faster transversal and random access capability. Comparing a C# List as you've described it to a C++ std::list is an apples to oranges comparison.
Note also, that C++ gives you both the apple and the orange depending on what you feel like eating.
This is correct. Most African nonhuman primate species have their own particular immunodeficiency virus. We call them SIVs, simian immunodeficiency viruses. Infections in these primate species are essentially asymptomatic. Phylogenetically, HIVs are descendants of a few SIVs implying multiple transmission events from nonhuman primates to humans. Humans are a non-adapted host for the virus and end up developing immunodeficiency. The same is true for Asian monkey species who have not co-evolved with SIV. Thus SIV-infected Asian monkeys are used as the model for HIV infection in humans.
Other viruses display similar behavior. The macaque equivalent to herpes simplex, for instance, causes fatal encephalitis in people but is typically completely asymptomatic in the monkeys.
Fortunately, we know from accidental infection of laboratory staff with SIV that the virus usually fails to replicate in people. In rare instances, the infected person becomes viremic but never developed immunodeficiency. Thus, the finding of an HIV of gorilla origin in a human is interesting but doesn't herald the arrival of some new super-virus pandemic.
Disclaimer: I am a veterinarian Currently this sort of research is done on Plum Island (http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=19-40-00-00) which is conveniently separated from everything else by a nice long bridge. Very little of the disease work that goes on there has zoonotic potential, that is potential to infect humans, and those diseases that do would require transmission via arthropod vectors that hopefully don't live in New York. The worry with putting this kind of facility in Kansas is for diseases like foot and mouth disease (FMD), which cause epidemics in livestock but are harmless to people. Foot and mouth can be easily transmitted on objects and through aerosol. Outbreaks in FMD-free countries take months and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up before you can convince anyone to buy your exports again. I think the idea is that there aren't too many cows on Long Island but a hell of a lot more of them in Kansas.
The interesting thing about this finding is that the feathers in this dinosaur were associated with the ulna. In birds, most feather follicles are embedded in the skin. Only the flight feathers are attached to a bony structure. This is presumably because in birds, feathers form a major structural component of the wing itself. They need stiff shafts and a firm anchor to the skeletal system so as to maintain the form of the wing during flapping flight. The shape of a bat wing is maintained by a bat's modified finger bones and pterosaurs had some spine structures to support the wing membrane.
So why did this presumably non-flighted dinosaur require feathers with secure attachment to the bones of its forelimb?
...thousands successful cases of homeopathy use have been reported around the globe, and I am also talking about veterinary homeopathy (which dismisses many of the placebo arguments).Speaking as a veterinarian, I can tell you that our profession has problems with homeopathy as well. The placebo effect is every bit as strong in the veterinary setting as it is in human medicine. If the owner believes in the efficacy of your prescription he can very easily bias himself into seeing improvement in the patient's signs. Placebo effect is observable with convention treatment as well. Prescribe a drug that takes a week to start working and get a delighted call back the next morning explaining how everything has gotten so much better. Or prescribe a drug for condition X and find out next recheck that unrelated condition Y was cured.
Yes, it certainly beats leaving the body at room temperature or baking in the hot, hot sun but still, if you open a bird after two days in the refrigerator there's plenty already plenty of autolysis going on. Brain and gastro-intestinal tract are particularly bad in this regard and both important places to look for lesions.
Unfortunately, it seems that Alex died on the 7th and his necropsy won't be conducted until the tomorrow, the 10th. The thing about avian tissues is that they tend to autolyze rather quickly. If he really died of aspergillosis and has fungal plaques all over the lungs, air sacs, and liver then the diagnosis is a no-brainer. On the other hand, if the diagnosis requires high quality histologic sections to make- well that might be harder with three-day-dead bird tissues.
Why would anyone wait three days for his personal veterinarian to return when there are boarded veterinary pathologists at Angell and Tufts in the state who could be called in over the weekend? Seems like with a bird this famous, it would have been worth the effort to do things right.
Particularly since the only effect discussed in the article linked from Slashdot seems to indicate that the vaccine produces in vitro neutralizing antibodies in a mouse model. As far as I know, neutralizing antibody titers don't have any ability to prevent or curb infection in vivo anyway. Seems a little early to be jumping to clinical trials.
If .net, .org, and .com only forced their users into using W3C validated xhtml/css and standard ecmascript I'd be a happy man. If they then subsequently broke the kneecaps of anyone writing a non-conformant user agent maybe web design wouldn't be the laborious, frustrating process that it is today. Sigh.
I'm sure at some point in time Jesus commanded Peter to go to the fridge and retrieve a beer. That doesn't make it some sort of religious law. When you quote the Bible you need to look at who's speaking, the audience the speaker is addressing, and the context in which the quote is being delivered. (It also really helps if you keep in mind the author of the particular scripture). When Jesus tells his disciples to do what he has "commanded" them is he really talking to me? Some of what he says would qualify as general advice and some of it will only make sense based on context. I'm sure if you examine the "general advice" section most of it will be good examples of "loving God" and "loving one's neighbor".
Absolutely right. It reminds me of something my dad used to talk about: how when he was growing up you could crack open a radio and look at the vacuum tubes in it, figure out how things worked and play with it, but these days all you see is a bunch of little black chips. Software is about the only thing left I can think of that I can open up, play with, and put back together again. You can kind of do that with a car or your house but you have to be willing to invest a lot of money in parts and God help you if you manage to break either one. A sad day indeed would be the day that our software was sequestered away on some server in a Sun or Microsoft basement, opaque and tamper proof.
It probably should be Columba as Columba is the genus to which Columba livia, the rock dove, or pigeon belongs. You know, like carrier pigeons and all?
Hey, you should seriously ask if you're actually interested. Someone might just take you up on that offer. Hell, I might if I lived in North Carolina...
I don't think people equate leaching and use in this context; at least I don't. When you LGPL software you're encouraging people to use it. You're making it available at no cost and opening up the source for everyone to see.
I would consider a leech to be an individual or organization who took your code, closed it, modified it, and sold it back to you. Personally I would find that irksome (as I imagine many people, 25 or otherwise, would) which is precisely why I enjoy the sort of "protection" afforded by the (L)GPL.
Why not the poor old LGPL? Everyone forgets about this little guy when the GPL vs BSD flamewars erupt. With LGPL you can make sure that no one leeches your code while allowing others to build commercial apps around it ands feed their children or whatever...
The unfortunate bit here is that Mono seems to be a subset of what's available on Windows with .NET. Practically speaking this means that I, the FOSS developer on Linux, create apps that run just great on Windows but none of those killer Windows apps are ever going to see the light of day on my Linux machine.
I really like the look of Mono and I agree that it has some wonderful technical merits (writing Gnome code in raw C is an exercise in masochism) but I think we ought to consider that it may ultimately end up impeding migration to Linux.
And yeah, I realize that free software is for everyone, Windows people included, but practically speaking MS marketshare needs a little erosion.
Is that right? I would think that if it was simply a matter of having the codec MPlayer would be able to play .wmv files properly. (Which is doesn't as half the time you only get the audio stream or nothing at all- at least on my Powerbook and Debian box).
I'm seeing a lot of posts today asking why anyone would go to the store and buy an XP without WMP installed or what benefit it poses to the consumer. I'd tend to agree with most of the posters that the benefit to the consumer is essentially none.
As I recall, however, the whole point of the RME edition was so that OEMs had greater flexibility in installing software on their Windows machines. This was supposed to foster competiton in the media player business since certain lines of computer would come with Real or maybe Quicktime or some other player.
The actual problem here is that media players are media specific since the file formats are all proprietary. You need Quicktime to view qti, Real to view rm, and WMP to view wmv files so unbundling WMP only screws the end user in that they've now lost default access to one kind of media. If the EU wanted to really foster competition they would mandate open standards on media file formats (I realize they can't do this- but hypothetically...) and make players compete on the basis of, well, being good _players_ and not by edging out the competition by creating proprietary de facto "standards" (.doc anyone?).