As a side-note, the Bible might have the first description of genetic engineering, when Jacob selectively crossbred sheep to achieve a desired phenotype. Good thing to know, when people are on about how genetic engineering is against God's Will.
The article reinforces my contention that at some point, Zeno's paradox will no longer apply as an argument against evolution.
1. There aren't an infinite number of ancestors. We're "only" 160,000 generations away from what they're talking about. If we could find all 160,000 ancestors along a line, we'd have a complete record of a speciation event, by anyone's criteria. Obviously we can't, but:
2. There isn't such a thing as a clearly defined species. There's tremendous variance within a species -- think Chihuahua and Great Dane -- and there are groups of separate species which have variable interbreeding success: ring species.
From these two ideas, we can conclude that at some point, variation within a species and sufficient fossil history will give us a continuum from one "species" to another, within which there is enough variation at any point to allow interbreeding, but at the end points, there are clearly two different species. At that point, macroevolution has happened and is conclusively demonstrated. We might never find this point for humans, given the sparsity of the fossil record, but ring species are already living proof of speciation.
I think the first person I met online, then in person, was in 1985. (BBS, obviously...) I haven't ever had a *bad* experience, but I'm a big guy. All your rules -- meet in a public place, have a way out, make sure someone knows where you are and for how long -- are really good pieces of advice, and to bring this back to the general topic, ones that young kids from MySpace should know and obey. I guess part of my original point was that I don't think they WILL because they underestimate the dangers just as much as their parents are overestimating the dangers. It's easy to emotionally seduce someone online, where by 'seduce' I mean 'get the person to do something out of character'.
Everyone I've met online has been interesting, smart, fun to be around -- but, wow, have there been some straaaaaange people, people living in basements filled with garbage and wild animals that crept in and now live there, to name one. Yow.
Yeah, creepy screen name is like signpost #1.
You got a proper alternator and a shoddy one. Right. Okay. How about this test. LOOK AT THE BOX!
If one comes with the logo of your car brand and the other comes in a plastic bag with chinese instructions. Easy choice.
I'm guessing you didn't read about the entire corporate structure faking being NEC that was producing material in perfectly authentic (looking) boxes with the NEC label, instructions, and warranty information, being sold in major stores as NEC equipment.
>What is a good question is if anti-lock brakes, stabilization systems and the like make people drive faster, with less distance to those in front of them and in general with less safety margins.
Yes, it does.
'"When you feel safe, you can be passive," Rapaille says of the fundamental appeal of the S.U.V.'
Hey! man! there's some really cool bands on myspace, like, uh, sister mary reload and uh uh okay I agree with you.
And yeah, your experience seems to be similar to mine, tho' I will say I would've enjoyed *talking* to any of the people I've met online, I just wouldn't've dated them if I hadn't already gotten interested in them from all the online communication.
Well, see, the thing is, that's more or less what happened. My great-grandmother, aka 'Nana', was seriously messed up. Not crazy, because I think she knew what she was doing, but she was mean, manipulative, alcoholic, and full of rage, and when she picked up a gun and started shooting out windows in the homes of people she hated, as happened occasionally, she got locked up. Since she'd divorced my great-granddad after trying to shoot him, that meant that her kids didn't really have a home whenever she was incarcerated, so they got evicted and lived wherever they could. I don't think they ever lived in a lake, seeing as Colorado's pretty dry, but they did live in orphanages, alleys, and wooden boxes.
You may be right, and I agree with most of what you're saying. I suspect part of it might be that I have a highly-developed sensitivity for creepyvibe in person, and not so much online, but it's completely possible that other people might be better at detecting problem behavior or even just borderline behavior online. Default is to assume other people act like I do, and that's often not true. Maybe this is one of those times. I wish other people would reply, to give a broader experience base.
>I contend that meeting people online first then meeting them in real life is far safer than meeting them in real life first--profiles and conversation (both online and on the phone) will give clues to the nature and personality of the person you're meeting--all of which you don't have the luxury of if you just meet them in real life first.
And I respectfully but strongly disagree. I can recognize someone with Down's Syndrome from 500 feet away. I can recognize a crazy homeless guy from 200 feet. I can often recognize a scary, manipulative control freak within about thirty seconds of starting a conversation. But, and here I speak from long experience, when I start talking to someone interesting online, and don't get any cues whatsoever beyond what they're willing to give me -- and someone who is reasonably intelligent and has been online for a while rapidly figures out how to say what works -- I can easily come to the conclusion that someone is really amazingly cool and fun to talk to, and after a couple weeks of that, and maybe some phone calls, the first f2f meeting is like getting together with a reasonably close friend and those same blinders that make you not kill your children when they're acting up, and not run screaming out of the house when you see your girlfriend wearing a mudpack, do exactly the same thing and keep you from critically assessing the situation. I've gotten seriously involved with six or seven women online and every one of them was a really cool, smart, interesting person that I enjoyed being around, and most of them I still consider friends, but not one of them would I have gotten romantically involved with if I'd met them first because they were and are just different. But, because I didn't get the 'different' vibe at first, by the time I could/should have I wasn't paying attention to it anymore. And, like I said, every one of them was a wonderful, really cool person. How much harder, for a child, when the other person in question is a manipulative, intelligent adult who has evil -- or even just natural but completely socially unacceptable -- urges?
I don't think people are devolving. I think kids -- and, let's face it, society at large -- are poor at causality. As Bruce Schneier said in "Beyond Fear", we underestimate the danger of things we know, and overestimate the danger of things we don't know. So, the clueless parents and congresscreatures are scared of MySpace, and the kids who are used to it don't treat it carefully enough. If you're a homely 13-year-old and post pictures of your jammie parties for your friends, and then suddenly you hit puberty and aren't so homely anymore, are you likely to change your behavior? Why would you? Are you likely to have a clue about why people suddenly start treating you differently? This has been happening forEVER. My grandmother remembers working at a restaurant 2 miles from her house, when she was 12 (yeah, a while ago, and she lied about her age because her family was living in a hole in the ground, basically) so she'd just walk through the railyards to get to work. Then she went, rather rapidly, from 'girl' to 'woman' and suddenly she was getting chased by hobos and hassled by railroad cops, and it was probably ten years later that she finally figured out why she'd had to start riding the bus, why suddenly everyone had gotten weird.
Here's an analogy. Think of the people who sit at the x-ray machines looking for bombs in luggage. If they go 10,000 bags without seeing a bomb, they're quite likely to not notice a bomb in the 10,001th bag. Same thing with kids online, only with them it's probably more like 100 before their attention to hinky behavior has completely disappeared.
I think it's really cool that they said "we want high-temperature biologicals: where can we get them?" and went and found them in temperature-resistant animals. It's obvious, in hindsight, but it's a great idea.
When Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction for amplifying DNA to detectable levels -- which is more or less responsible for the viability of genetic engineering as a discipline -- the original system was extremely expensive because it used enzymes that got cooked in the high-temperature portion of the cycle. So they went to Yellowstone and found similar enzymes from creatures that lived in geyser pools, which dealt very well with those high temperatures, and that made PCR a viable research tool. So the idea was already there, but -- camels. Dude. I don't think I would ever have made that particular leap.
By the way, the reason they didn't just go back to Yellowstone is because while mammals and birds produce lots of antibodies, other animals either don't at all or don't in a manner that's well understood. (Or at least that's what they were teaching when I took immunochemistry.) Plants and bacteria don't produce them at all. Since an antibody is both incredibly specific and incredibly avid for a given chemical, you can stick their butts to a substrate and their front ends will stick out just waiting to attach to their chosen molecule -- much like a leech, if you've ever seen how they work when they're in water.
Of course it applies only to him. The *moment* a liberal democrat gets into a position where there's even the possibility of using this framework, the very same people who currently support it will pass lots of incredibly strong laws against it. They're not interested in anything but their own power base and maximizing it at all costs, even -- or perhaps especially -- when those costs are borne by the American public.
Hm. So on the one hand you have people with no job security, working 12 hour days, and having their bosses yell at them if they don't produce code or fix machines fast enough, and on the other you have "60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50."
And you see a *problem* with this? Unionization is getting them all that, and you're against it? Why? I'd love to have that job description.
My cockatoo learned what 'NO!' meant and started using it on me when he was angry with what I was doing.
He also had conversations. They were rote, but when I came home I would say "Hello {bird's name}" and he'd say "Hello {my name}" and I'd say "How are you?" and he'd say "Fine." Now, that's just memorization, but the funny part is that if I DIDN'T follow the conversation as outlined, he'd be all grumpy with me the rest of the day.
I was also impressed that he could pick (sometimes, if given a couple of hours) combination locks.
Not anywhere near as impressive as your birds, but still: pretty funny.
Here's a brilliant article by the equally brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, discussing the original six degrees research, the social connector aspects of it, and how they apply to social interaction in general. I don't know that he introduced the idea but he sure did do a good intro and summary.
Okay, let's go with that. Taste some sugar from honey. Taste some sugar from the sugar bowl. They both taste sweet, don't they? Guess what? The sugar from the sugar bowl is a polymer. *just* *exactly* *like* starch. It converts from its polymer form, one glucose and one fructose stuck together, into the monomers and *then* isomerizes from fructose into glucose, in a millisecond in your mouth. That's *exactly* the same thing that starch does, but because it's a big polymer rather than a small one, it takes seconds, or maybe even minutes, to do *exactly* the same thing. That's how sugars work. The only difference between sucrose, table sugar, and starch, and cellulose, is which branch is linked to which other branch, and how many of them are hooked together. Animals lack the enzyme to break cellulosic bonds, but have them to break starch bonds. The reason fruit tastes sweeter when it's ripe is because the starch breaks down into simple sugars, *just* *exactly* *like* it does in your mouth and stomach.
If you put sugars and starches in a high-temp furnace, they both turn into carbon dioxide and water. If you put sugars and starches in an animal, they both turn into carbon dioxide and water. It's how all animal life works. No hard-to-remove gunk anywhere, either, as long as there's plenty of oxygen and the temperature is high enough to break the carbon-carbon bonds.
I woulda bet on the 'everyone else' corner until you said Prez Bush, and I think he's pretty clearly in the Jack Thompson corner, and unfortunately, as a result, that's probably a better gamble. Bah humbug.
What? They're both carbohydrates with practically the same chemical formula and practically the same chemical energy, meaning if I burned them in a calorimeter they'd show basically the same numbers. If I burnt them both in a high-temperature incinerator you couldn't tell the difference. Starch and cellulose are just different ways of storing sugars, and as far as the body is concerned, sugars are just the way you store acetyl (two-carbon-with-benefits) groups. They're all just different exchange media for low energy storage for rapid energy recovery.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya mean like /dev/random?
/dev/random > sendmail?
So what they're saying is that any time anyone's using any computer they should be cat
That should help encourage bandwidth upgrades in the UK.
As a side-note, the Bible might have the first description of genetic engineering, when Jacob selectively crossbred sheep to achieve a desired phenotype. Good thing to know, when people are on about how genetic engineering is against God's Will.
1. There aren't an infinite number of ancestors. We're "only" 160,000 generations away from what they're talking about. If we could find all 160,000 ancestors along a line, we'd have a complete record of a speciation event, by anyone's criteria. Obviously we can't, but:
2. There isn't such a thing as a clearly defined species. There's tremendous variance within a species -- think Chihuahua and Great Dane -- and there are groups of separate species which have variable interbreeding success: ring species.
From these two ideas, we can conclude that at some point, variation within a species and sufficient fossil history will give us a continuum from one "species" to another, within which there is enough variation at any point to allow interbreeding, but at the end points, there are clearly two different species. At that point, macroevolution has happened and is conclusively demonstrated. We might never find this point for humans, given the sparsity of the fossil record, but ring species are already living proof of speciation.
If you go to their house and they offer to show you "a couple of" baby movies, for God's sake say "NO."
I know you're joking, but wireless control of control surfaces could prevent accidents where debris from turbine failures cut flight controls and it could even help with the infamous 737 hydraulic control reversal problems that might be related to several major crashes.
I think the first person I met online, then in person, was in 1985. (BBS, obviously...) I haven't ever had a *bad* experience, but I'm a big guy. All your rules -- meet in a public place, have a way out, make sure someone knows where you are and for how long -- are really good pieces of advice, and to bring this back to the general topic, ones that young kids from MySpace should know and obey. I guess part of my original point was that I don't think they WILL because they underestimate the dangers just as much as their parents are overestimating the dangers. It's easy to emotionally seduce someone online, where by 'seduce' I mean 'get the person to do something out of character'.
Everyone I've met online has been interesting, smart, fun to be around -- but, wow, have there been some straaaaaange people, people living in basements filled with garbage and wild animals that crept in and now live there, to name one. Yow.
Yeah, creepy screen name is like signpost #1.
If one comes with the logo of your car brand and the other comes in a plastic bag with chinese instructions. Easy choice.
I'm guessing you didn't read about the entire corporate structure faking being NEC that was producing material in perfectly authentic (looking) boxes with the NEC label, instructions, and warranty information, being sold in major stores as NEC equipment.
Yes, it does.
'"When you feel safe, you can be passive," Rapaille says of the fundamental appeal of the S.U.V.'
And yeah, your experience seems to be similar to mine, tho' I will say I would've enjoyed *talking* to any of the people I've met online, I just wouldn't've dated them if I hadn't already gotten interested in them from all the online communication.
Well, see, the thing is, that's more or less what happened. My great-grandmother, aka 'Nana', was seriously messed up. Not crazy, because I think she knew what she was doing, but she was mean, manipulative, alcoholic, and full of rage, and when she picked up a gun and started shooting out windows in the homes of people she hated, as happened occasionally, she got locked up. Since she'd divorced my great-granddad after trying to shoot him, that meant that her kids didn't really have a home whenever she was incarcerated, so they got evicted and lived wherever they could. I don't think they ever lived in a lake, seeing as Colorado's pretty dry, but they did live in orphanages, alleys, and wooden boxes.
You may be right, and I agree with most of what you're saying. I suspect part of it might be that I have a highly-developed sensitivity for creepyvibe in person, and not so much online, but it's completely possible that other people might be better at detecting problem behavior or even just borderline behavior online. Default is to assume other people act like I do, and that's often not true. Maybe this is one of those times. I wish other people would reply, to give a broader experience base.
And I respectfully but strongly disagree. I can recognize someone with Down's Syndrome from 500 feet away. I can recognize a crazy homeless guy from 200 feet. I can often recognize a scary, manipulative control freak within about thirty seconds of starting a conversation. But, and here I speak from long experience, when I start talking to someone interesting online, and don't get any cues whatsoever beyond what they're willing to give me -- and someone who is reasonably intelligent and has been online for a while rapidly figures out how to say what works -- I can easily come to the conclusion that someone is really amazingly cool and fun to talk to, and after a couple weeks of that, and maybe some phone calls, the first f2f meeting is like getting together with a reasonably close friend and those same blinders that make you not kill your children when they're acting up, and not run screaming out of the house when you see your girlfriend wearing a mudpack, do exactly the same thing and keep you from critically assessing the situation. I've gotten seriously involved with six or seven women online and every one of them was a really cool, smart, interesting person that I enjoyed being around, and most of them I still consider friends, but not one of them would I have gotten romantically involved with if I'd met them first because they were and are just different. But, because I didn't get the 'different' vibe at first, by the time I could/should have I wasn't paying attention to it anymore. And, like I said, every one of them was a wonderful, really cool person. How much harder, for a child, when the other person in question is a manipulative, intelligent adult who has evil -- or even just natural but completely socially unacceptable -- urges?
Here's an analogy. Think of the people who sit at the x-ray machines looking for bombs in luggage. If they go 10,000 bags without seeing a bomb, they're quite likely to not notice a bomb in the 10,001th bag. Same thing with kids online, only with them it's probably more like 100 before their attention to hinky behavior has completely disappeared.
When Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction for amplifying DNA to detectable levels -- which is more or less responsible for the viability of genetic engineering as a discipline -- the original system was extremely expensive because it used enzymes that got cooked in the high-temperature portion of the cycle. So they went to Yellowstone and found similar enzymes from creatures that lived in geyser pools, which dealt very well with those high temperatures, and that made PCR a viable research tool. So the idea was already there, but -- camels. Dude. I don't think I would ever have made that particular leap.
By the way, the reason they didn't just go back to Yellowstone is because while mammals and birds produce lots of antibodies, other animals either don't at all or don't in a manner that's well understood. (Or at least that's what they were teaching when I took immunochemistry.) Plants and bacteria don't produce them at all. Since an antibody is both incredibly specific and incredibly avid for a given chemical, you can stick their butts to a substrate and their front ends will stick out just waiting to attach to their chosen molecule -- much like a leech, if you've ever seen how they work when they're in water.
Of course it applies only to him. The *moment* a liberal democrat gets into a position where there's even the possibility of using this framework, the very same people who currently support it will pass lots of incredibly strong laws against it. They're not interested in anything but their own power base and maximizing it at all costs, even -- or perhaps especially -- when those costs are borne by the American public.
Good post.
If Bill Hicks were alive today, he'd be screaming at the top of his lungs.
The NSA would be recording every word he said.
Hm. So on the one hand you have people with no job security, working 12 hour days, and having their bosses yell at them if they don't produce code or fix machines fast enough, and on the other you have "60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50."
And you see a *problem* with this? Unionization is getting them all that, and you're against it? Why? I'd love to have that job description.
Heh. You're more subtle than most. nice .sig, too.
Having nothing to say, never stopped anyone from saying it at excruciating length on MySpace. Or, for that matter, on slashdot.
My cockatoo learned what 'NO!' meant and started using it on me when he was angry with what I was doing.
He also had conversations. They were rote, but when I came home I would say "Hello {bird's name}" and he'd say "Hello {my name}" and I'd say "How are you?" and he'd say "Fine." Now, that's just memorization, but the funny part is that if I DIDN'T follow the conversation as outlined, he'd be all grumpy with me the rest of the day.
I was also impressed that he could pick (sometimes, if given a couple of hours) combination locks.
Not anywhere near as impressive as your birds, but still: pretty funny.
Here's a brilliant article by the equally brilliant Malcolm Gladwell, discussing the original six degrees research, the social connector aspects of it, and how they apply to social interaction in general. I don't know that he introduced the idea but he sure did do a good intro and summary.
I was gonna say "and the bartender says, 'What is this, a joke?'" but yours is much funnier.
Okay, let's go with that. Taste some sugar from honey. Taste some sugar from the sugar bowl. They both taste sweet, don't they? Guess what? The sugar from the sugar bowl is a polymer. *just* *exactly* *like* starch. It converts from its polymer form, one glucose and one fructose stuck together, into the monomers and *then* isomerizes from fructose into glucose, in a millisecond in your mouth. That's *exactly* the same thing that starch does, but because it's a big polymer rather than a small one, it takes seconds, or maybe even minutes, to do *exactly* the same thing. That's how sugars work. The only difference between sucrose, table sugar, and starch, and cellulose, is which branch is linked to which other branch, and how many of them are hooked together. Animals lack the enzyme to break cellulosic bonds, but have them to break starch bonds. The reason fruit tastes sweeter when it's ripe is because the starch breaks down into simple sugars, *just* *exactly* *like* it does in your mouth and stomach.
If you put sugars and starches in a high-temp furnace, they both turn into carbon dioxide and water. If you put sugars and starches in an animal, they both turn into carbon dioxide and water. It's how all animal life works. No hard-to-remove gunk anywhere, either, as long as there's plenty of oxygen and the temperature is high enough to break the carbon-carbon bonds.
I woulda bet on the 'everyone else' corner until you said Prez Bush, and I think he's pretty clearly in the Jack Thompson corner, and unfortunately, as a result, that's probably a better gamble. Bah humbug.
What? They're both carbohydrates with practically the same chemical formula and practically the same chemical energy, meaning if I burned them in a calorimeter they'd show basically the same numbers. If I burnt them both in a high-temperature incinerator you couldn't tell the difference. Starch and cellulose are just different ways of storing sugars, and as far as the body is concerned, sugars are just the way you store acetyl (two-carbon-with-benefits) groups. They're all just different exchange media for low energy storage for rapid energy recovery.