What's your objection to the statement? Big brains are a huge metabolic investment, and a frog doesn't make said investment because it's got a completely different set of adaptations. One of them is insano fecundity. This isn't a real controversial idea.
If you consider the useless irrelevance on canvas to be what our "art" is, then yeah, the monkey's right up there with Jackson Pollock. But what about, say, Blade Runner? Or the Philadelphia Philharmonic? Or Cowboy Bebop, Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? "Art" ain't just what gets painted.
I'm working with class Ophiuroidea right now- brittlestars. The genus name is "ophiactidae", so if I ever discover a new species? I'm naming it "snap", so that textbooks will have to type O. snap for hundreds of years into the future.
But it's not that virii do nothing, it's that they have no action when in the circumstances under which cells have their action. You're right that, in the absence of a replication and transcription system to hijack, a virus will sit in a tube doing nothing. But that's because that is its particular form of metabolism. If you take a sporulated bacterium, say Anthrax (which I choose as an example because it's especially good at sitting there doing nothing for decades at a time) , and put it somewhere in the absence of the materials which it is specialized to act on, it will do nothing- it will stay sporulated and not move, replicate, metabolize, communicate, or anything. Does this mean it's not alive? No, it means that it's not specialized to deal with the resources with which you've presented it.
A virus won't act if you put it in a buffer solution with glucose and amino acids. And a cell won't act if you put it in another cell (it'll get digested). Just like how a computer program written for a Mac won't run if you try to run it on a PC- it doesn't mean it's not a computer program, it just means that you've got it in an environment to which it is not adapted.
That said, the real argument is that cells are just enormously more complex than virii. It's just basically an enzyme with DNA.
This is actually really neat, and completely feasible. It's already known that certain parasites modify behaviors in their hosts in order to ensure their own survival- Toxoplasma gondii [wikipedia], for instance, is a protozoan known to cause mice to not be scared of cats, because it lives and grows in mice, but reproduces in cats. So it gets its mice eaten by cats. The same parasite, when found in humans, is correlated with "clumsiness"- a higher incidence of stupid accidents, car crashes, even schizophrenia. And there are a lot of people expected to have it.
In the same way, we know that you can make a rat obese by altering its genetics- it's called the Zucker rat. If you block leptin receptors altogether (leptin is a hormone released by adipose, "fat", tissue) then you can promote feelings of starvation. And if a virus wants to make sure it'll have a nice, long lifetime with little risk-taking and lots of sitting on the part of its host, if it can make its host morbidly fat then it's a good gambit (at least, as long as it's doing so in a culture in which obesity is a feasible survival model for the host, i.e. our culture).
You're looking at a virus, here, that rather than promoting risky, stupid behavior, is promoting low-risk behavior in order to keep its host fat and stable. In a different, less McDonalds-saturated culture, this might even be a benificial symbiosis to the human host. The only weird part about it is that people who are fatter usually have stronger immune systems than those who are very skinny. So that's kind of weird.
I know that a lot of slashdotters like to feel that our mentality is unrelated to our biochemistry, but the simple fact is that it isn't. There's no reason not to believe that this story is true. That said, these people still aren't gaining any weight that they didn't eat themselves, so their problem remains a disorder of not-putting-down-the-damn-fork, regardless of virus.
Actually, from a game theory perspective, if you concede a point it gives you the opportunity to change the rules of the game from zero-sum to non-zero-sum. The rules of a given argument aren't set in stone, so if you say "Wow, you're right on that point, so I concede that. Now you think about this thing- are you sure you want to keep arguing it?
The other person now has a chance to assent to the new rules, or not. If they choose to, then you have a meaningful and beneficial discussion instead of a wordfight. If they choose not to, all you've done was admit the truth of a true idea, and you have therefore lost nothing.
But you should probably be careful not to do this while in front of lots of other people, because if they're a politician then their power is based on all the other people that voted for them, and the voicing of those people's stupid ideas. Demagogue types can't change the rules in this way because too much is at risk, and that's why now that we have highly publicized debate between parties, the people are just modelling their behaviors after the zero-sum behaviors of the politicians (who are playing an unavoidably zero-sum game).
You're seriously proposing that "GTK", "GIMP", and all these other nonreferential names I've been reading in this thread are equally as intuitive, and as easily recognized by neophytes, as "Internet Explorer", "Windows Media Player", "Microsoft Word" and "Paint"?
Yea you're right, post-computer-familiarity, you'll know the weird Linux names. But that's redundant, because that's exactly what's meant by "computer familiarity".
Whereas everybody, computer literate or no, understands "Internet Explorer", "Notepad", "Media Player", because these things reference pre-existing familiarity. Hence "User Friendly". They cut out the need for another level of training and familiarity- hence, they're more efficient.
It's not that tech is developed by trial and error (at least, not since the good ol' days of hydrogen-filled zeppelins), but that tech is developed as a result of a demand for it. Advancements and developments come, not out of some intellectually-altruistic Drive To Acheive, but out of a need to solve a particular problem- from fish hooks, to nuclear missiles, tech is made as a response to a problem.
Look on extreme cost of shuttle parts, reliablity and longevity of these.. Look at tons of inefficient fuel used. Look at that laughable "orbital stations" where they most of the time spend by monitoring hundreds of their unreliable parts, they are only surviving there and under extreme conditions.
You're right. And it remains crappy so long as there is no market or demand for space exploration. Nobody's going to go around solving those problems unless there is, say, a billionaire funding the project and paying them to do so. And in the short term this will get people up there and looking around. Eventually we'll find something of value out there, that market will explode, and that technology will grow in the way that you're talking about. But until there's a market in it, any directional R&D needs an artificial infusion of cash to get this project done.
It's just like the Wright Brothers. Flight tech was shit, but they piddled around with it anyway, and now that the tech got rolling look at what we have today- the streamlined, high efficiency planes, perfectly suited to mass production and use (as opposed to our space ones) that we have today.
As a non-computer specialist who is basically computer literate and comfortable with the really basic programming tutelage I got in high school, but in no way a programmer, is Unix useful for me?
Is there any "How to use Unix if you don't want to type a lot of code and basically want windows without the bugs" option?
There's such a thing called NK Cells[wiki], the function of whom is to go around killing cells of the host that have been a: infected by retroviruses but are still alive, as in hepatitis, or b: are cancerous. Basically harmful living host cells.
So under normal circumstances the body fights off cancerous cells on its own. But that response would be correlated to the strength of the immune system. So it's totally possible that kids showing more symptoms of colds actually have weaker immune systems, so as a result they aren't fighting their own cancer cells at full strength. Correlation rather than cause.
Also, somebody made a comment about cancer being associated with socioeconomic status, as well. One of the things that would prevent NK cells from working normally would be immunosuppression, and one of the first known immunosuppressants was Cortisone. Cortisone functions parallel to Adrenaline, which is to say in times of stress, the immune system is suppressed.
So that could be a correlation between socioeconomic status and stress- immunosuppression as a result of stress hormones released, which prioritize the whole body's metabolism towards immediate survival, rather than long term goals like immunity and reproduction (which it also suppresses).
I might be wrong on this, but I was under the impression that the precancerous cells that HPV causes are the virus' way of reproducing- they're not a side effect, but rather they're the direct effect.
Is HPV generaly a lytic or a lysogenic virus? Because if it's lysogenic then it would seem more advantageous for it to be being produced by cancer cells, as an adaptation to keep its producing cells around.
Actually they're already well caught up to the crusades, with their own actions in the crusades.
And besides, they tried HARD to catch up with the holocaust, three times if you'll recall. Fortunately for the Jews Israel beat em back every time, and now they're trying it piecemeal.
The whole debate about the ethics or morality of the media promoting imagery of sexy women is the question of whether women should be encouraged to pursue a particular version of beauty simply because it pleases men.
Well only if they want to attract any of them. They're free to give up the pursuit of physical attractiveness at any given time, but they'll have to accept the being-single that comes with it.
Funny, they have that in common with guys, don't they?
Right, that's why I'm dating the really hot, young psychology major with the crush on me that is getting everything for free, rather than the chem major with bad teeth who grew up poor and is paying her own way through college.
OH WAIT. I'M DATING THE CHEM MAJOR.
You're just completely wrong, here. Women are judged on what they do just as much as men, and men are judged just as much on their appearance (or would you have believed Jack Black playing the lead in American Psycho?). If the standards are different, so be it, but it's shallow, insulting and wrong to guys to suggest that physical attractiveness doesn't matter if you're a guy, and it's the only thing that matters if you're a girl.
It's a little technical, but here's a rundown for the biochemically inclined: M6P/IGF2R introduction.
Turns out it's a cancer suppressor, too- a growth suppressor all around. It was suppressed it in early (animal) clones, and so the fetuses/feti grew too big in the womb and aborted. At least, according to the guy who wrote that rundown.
It causes LOS, "Large Offspring Syndrome" when deactivated, because of stuff detailed in that article there. Unfortunately we can't say whether this form of the protein mentioned in the article is more or less active, because the article doesn't specify. Does anyone know?
Also, they should do a correlation between the same set of subjects, and see if it also shows correlation of body size. To check the use of IGF2R as a growth suppressor.
It's a variation of 20 IQ points. Iq tests are normed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. That means that this difference signifies greater than one standard deviation of difference: even in a "small" sample (and precisely how much do you want for them to compare IQs over 160, and do gene arrays on them all?) that's freaking enormously significant.
So now the Siegenthaler article, previously an admirably libelous piece, is now singing castrato and sounding like a press release from 1984.
"He's a hero and saved a suicidal guy! He worked for civil rights. Oh what a great guy. Controversy, and criticism, is for bitches."
Also, if the MGS series is to be believed, in Japan they have lengthy, idiomatic philosophy discussions over the radio while deep in hostile territory.
AND THAT'S WHY THEY LOST THE WAR.
Anyone remember when MGS 2: Solid Snake came out?
In it, the "X" button meant "cancel" and the "O" button meant "select", in a reverse of the normal, expected way.
At my local Gamestop, hundreds of copies of the game were sent back as "Defective" because "I can't go forward in the menu, it just goes back," even though it said, right there on the screen, "X: cancel, O: select".
Now somebody's suing microsoft for the "Defect" in the XBox 360 which he wouldn't be experiencing if he'd read the freakin manual.
Retards.
It's saying that you can use a small amount of starter energy to set off a reaction that yields higher amounts of energy. Using energy siphoned from a single tornado to start up other tornadoes is no more a violation of conservation of energy than is a nuclear chain reaction, in which the energy from one fission event is sufficient to set off multiple fission events.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your objection to the statement? Big brains are a huge metabolic investment, and a frog doesn't make said investment because it's got a completely different set of adaptations. One of them is insano fecundity. This isn't a real controversial idea.
If you consider the useless irrelevance on canvas to be what our "art" is, then yeah, the monkey's right up there with Jackson Pollock. But what about, say, Blade Runner? Or the Philadelphia Philharmonic? Or Cowboy Bebop, Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?
"Art" ain't just what gets painted.
I'm working with class Ophiuroidea right now- brittlestars. The genus name is "ophiactidae", so if I ever discover a new species? I'm naming it "snap", so that textbooks will have to type O. snap for hundreds of years into the future.
But it's not that virii do nothing, it's that they have no action when in the circumstances under which cells have their action. You're right that, in the absence of a replication and transcription system to hijack, a virus will sit in a tube doing nothing. But that's because that is its particular form of metabolism. If you take a sporulated bacterium, say Anthrax (which I choose as an example because it's especially good at sitting there doing nothing for decades at a time) , and put it somewhere in the absence of the materials which it is specialized to act on, it will do nothing- it will stay sporulated and not move, replicate, metabolize, communicate, or anything. Does this mean it's not alive? No, it means that it's not specialized to deal with the resources with which you've presented it.
A virus won't act if you put it in a buffer solution with glucose and amino acids. And a cell won't act if you put it in another cell (it'll get digested). Just like how a computer program written for a Mac won't run if you try to run it on a PC- it doesn't mean it's not a computer program, it just means that you've got it in an environment to which it is not adapted.
That said, the real argument is that cells are just enormously more complex than virii. It's just basically an enzyme with DNA.
I don't know about anybody else, but I didn't see it because it was a cowboy love story.
I mean seriously, I see absolutely no prospects of anyone getting shot off a horse, here.
If ethics fall by the wayside, don't you think consumers will respond by progressively rejecting Google as a search engine?
What if they're tapping less phone lines, but more of the important ones?
Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to wonder, or discuss, who's getting wiretapped, because the government was actually following the law?
This is actually really neat, and completely feasible. It's already known that certain parasites modify behaviors in their hosts in order to ensure their own survival- Toxoplasma gondii [wikipedia], for instance, is a protozoan known to cause mice to not be scared of cats, because it lives and grows in mice, but reproduces in cats. So it gets its mice eaten by cats. The same parasite, when found in humans, is correlated with "clumsiness"- a higher incidence of stupid accidents, car crashes, even schizophrenia. And there are a lot of people expected to have it.
In the same way, we know that you can make a rat obese by altering its genetics- it's called the Zucker rat. If you block leptin receptors altogether (leptin is a hormone released by adipose, "fat", tissue) then you can promote feelings of starvation. And if a virus wants to make sure it'll have a nice, long lifetime with little risk-taking and lots of sitting on the part of its host, if it can make its host morbidly fat then it's a good gambit (at least, as long as it's doing so in a culture in which obesity is a feasible survival model for the host, i.e. our culture).
You're looking at a virus, here, that rather than promoting risky, stupid behavior, is promoting low-risk behavior in order to keep its host fat and stable. In a different, less McDonalds-saturated culture, this might even be a benificial symbiosis to the human host. The only weird part about it is that people who are fatter usually have stronger immune systems than those who are very skinny. So that's kind of weird.
I know that a lot of slashdotters like to feel that our mentality is unrelated to our biochemistry, but the simple fact is that it isn't. There's no reason not to believe that this story is true. That said, these people still aren't gaining any weight that they didn't eat themselves, so their problem remains a disorder of not-putting-down-the-damn-fork, regardless of virus.
Actually, from a game theory perspective, if you concede a point it gives you the opportunity to change the rules of the game from zero-sum to non-zero-sum. The rules of a given argument aren't set in stone, so if you say "Wow, you're right on that point, so I concede that. Now you think about this thing- are you sure you want to keep arguing it?
The other person now has a chance to assent to the new rules, or not. If they choose to, then you have a meaningful and beneficial discussion instead of a wordfight. If they choose not to, all you've done was admit the truth of a true idea, and you have therefore lost nothing.
But you should probably be careful not to do this while in front of lots of other people, because if they're a politician then their power is based on all the other people that voted for them, and the voicing of those people's stupid ideas. Demagogue types can't change the rules in this way because too much is at risk, and that's why now that we have highly publicized debate between parties, the people are just modelling their behaviors after the zero-sum behaviors of the politicians (who are playing an unavoidably zero-sum game).
You're seriously proposing that "GTK", "GIMP", and all these other nonreferential names I've been reading in this thread are equally as intuitive, and as easily recognized by neophytes, as "Internet Explorer", "Windows Media Player", "Microsoft Word" and "Paint"?
Yea you're right, post-computer-familiarity, you'll know the weird Linux names. But that's redundant, because that's exactly what's meant by "computer familiarity".
Whereas everybody, computer literate or no, understands "Internet Explorer", "Notepad", "Media Player", because these things reference pre-existing familiarity. Hence "User Friendly". They cut out the need for another level of training and familiarity- hence, they're more efficient.
It's not that tech is developed by trial and error (at least, not since the good ol' days of hydrogen-filled zeppelins), but that tech is developed as a result of a demand for it. Advancements and developments come, not out of some intellectually-altruistic Drive To Acheive, but out of a need to solve a particular problem- from fish hooks, to nuclear missiles, tech is made as a response to a problem.
Look on extreme cost of shuttle parts, reliablity and longevity of these.. Look at tons of inefficient fuel used. Look at that laughable "orbital stations" where they most of the time spend by monitoring hundreds of their unreliable parts, they are only surviving there and under extreme conditions.
You're right. And it remains crappy so long as there is no market or demand for space exploration. Nobody's going to go around solving those problems unless there is, say, a billionaire funding the project and paying them to do so. And in the short term this will get people up there and looking around. Eventually we'll find something of value out there, that market will explode, and that technology will grow in the way that you're talking about. But until there's a market in it, any directional R&D needs an artificial infusion of cash to get this project done.
It's just like the Wright Brothers. Flight tech was shit, but they piddled around with it anyway, and now that the tech got rolling look at what we have today- the streamlined, high efficiency planes, perfectly suited to mass production and use (as opposed to our space ones) that we have today.
As a non-computer specialist who is basically computer literate and comfortable with the really basic programming tutelage I got in high school, but in no way a programmer, is Unix useful for me?
Is there any "How to use Unix if you don't want to type a lot of code and basically want windows without the bugs" option?
Also, do they have firefox for it?
There's such a thing called NK Cells[wiki], the function of whom is to go around killing cells of the host that have been a: infected by retroviruses but are still alive, as in hepatitis, or b: are cancerous. Basically harmful living host cells.
So under normal circumstances the body fights off cancerous cells on its own. But that response would be correlated to the strength of the immune system. So it's totally possible that kids showing more symptoms of colds actually have weaker immune systems, so as a result they aren't fighting their own cancer cells at full strength. Correlation rather than cause.
Also, somebody made a comment about cancer being associated with socioeconomic status, as well. One of the things that would prevent NK cells from working normally would be immunosuppression, and one of the first known immunosuppressants was Cortisone. Cortisone functions parallel to Adrenaline, which is to say in times of stress, the immune system is suppressed.
So that could be a correlation between socioeconomic status and stress- immunosuppression as a result of stress hormones released, which prioritize the whole body's metabolism towards immediate survival, rather than long term goals like immunity and reproduction (which it also suppresses).
I might be wrong on this, but I was under the impression that the precancerous cells that HPV causes are the virus' way of reproducing- they're not a side effect, but rather they're the direct effect.
Is HPV generaly a lytic or a lysogenic virus? Because if it's lysogenic then it would seem more advantageous for it to be being produced by cancer cells, as an adaptation to keep its producing cells around.
Actually they're already well caught up to the crusades, with their own actions in the crusades.
And besides, they tried HARD to catch up with the holocaust, three times if you'll recall. Fortunately for the Jews Israel beat em back every time, and now they're trying it piecemeal.
The whole debate about the ethics or morality of the media promoting imagery of sexy women is the question of whether women should be encouraged to pursue a particular version of beauty simply because it pleases men.
Well only if they want to attract any of them. They're free to give up the pursuit of physical attractiveness at any given time, but they'll have to accept the being-single that comes with it.
Funny, they have that in common with guys, don't they?
Right, that's why I'm dating the really hot, young psychology major with the crush on me that is getting everything for free, rather than the chem major with bad teeth who grew up poor and is paying her own way through college.
OH WAIT. I'M DATING THE CHEM MAJOR.
You're just completely wrong, here. Women are judged on what they do just as much as men, and men are judged just as much on their appearance (or would you have believed Jack Black playing the lead in American Psycho?). If the standards are different, so be it, but it's shallow, insulting and wrong to guys to suggest that physical attractiveness doesn't matter if you're a guy, and it's the only thing that matters if you're a girl.
People hunt bears in cell phone range?
Damn, I thought they were kidding with those commercials. "Can you hear me now?"
It's a little technical, but here's a rundown for the biochemically inclined: M6P/IGF2R introduction.
Turns out it's a cancer suppressor, too- a growth suppressor all around. It was suppressed it in early (animal) clones, and so the fetuses/feti grew too big in the womb and aborted. At least, according to the guy who wrote that rundown.
It causes LOS, "Large Offspring Syndrome" when deactivated, because of stuff detailed in that article there. Unfortunately we can't say whether this form of the protein mentioned in the article is more or less active, because the article doesn't specify. Does anyone know?
Also, they should do a correlation between the same set of subjects, and see if it also shows correlation of body size. To check the use of IGF2R as a growth suppressor.
It's a variation of 20 IQ points. Iq tests are normed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. That means that this difference signifies greater than one standard deviation of difference: even in a "small" sample (and precisely how much do you want for them to compare IQs over 160, and do gene arrays on them all?) that's freaking enormously significant.
So now the Siegenthaler article, previously an admirably libelous piece, is now singing castrato and sounding like a press release from 1984.
"He's a hero and saved a suicidal guy! He worked for civil rights. Oh what a great guy. Controversy, and criticism, is for bitches."
Also, if the MGS series is to be believed, in Japan they have lengthy, idiomatic philosophy discussions over the radio while deep in hostile territory.
AND THAT'S WHY THEY LOST THE WAR.
Anyone remember when MGS 2: Solid Snake came out?
In it, the "X" button meant "cancel" and the "O" button meant "select", in a reverse of the normal, expected way.
At my local Gamestop, hundreds of copies of the game were sent back as "Defective" because "I can't go forward in the menu, it just goes back," even though it said, right there on the screen, "X: cancel, O: select".
Now somebody's suing microsoft for the "Defect" in the XBox 360 which he wouldn't be experiencing if he'd read the freakin manual.
Retards.
It's saying that you can use a small amount of starter energy to set off a reaction that yields higher amounts of energy. Using energy siphoned from a single tornado to start up other tornadoes is no more a violation of conservation of energy than is a nuclear chain reaction, in which the energy from one fission event is sufficient to set off multiple fission events.