Yeah, that's one of the reasons I moved to Debian. If all the people who are working on derivatives (Mepis, Ubuntu, Kanotix, DSL etc) put that effort back into Debian instead, we'd be getting much more per developer hour invested. Debian is not *that* hard to install, and if all the people working on easier-to-install sub distros were instead working on the Debian installer...
The relatively low cost of entry for would-be distro producers has definitely spread the talent pool pretty thin, with a lot of duplicated effort. If Microsoft can deal with their customers varying needs with a handful of distros, you'd think we could do the same with ten.
The glut of distros also fuels a distro-junky culture, where hobbyists spend hours and hours testing and tweaking different distros. Imagine what would happen if these people just picked one distro, got it running, and then started developing apps for it instead of posting screenshots of their desktop every day? But if we do that, I suppose we might as well imagine what would happen if all the brain-power devoted to baseball statistics were refocussed on electoral reform or cancer cures...
I'm getting tired of reading about how RMS is using GPLv3 to impose his ideals on everyone. He may well believe that all software should be free, but that is most definitely not what he's trying to accomplish with the GPL. If his main goal was to make all software Free Software he'd have to do it with legal challenges on the concept of intellectual property etc.
While he may be involved in that, GPL is different. GPL doesn't attempt to overturn the status quo, it provides an alternative to it. While RMS and Lessig et al. work on the long fight to get rational patent and copyright reforms enacted, GPL provides an immediate option for people that want to develop an alternative model. It gives you the opportunity to share your code without fear that someone else will benefit from it without sharing their improvements. If you prefer to write closed code, you can still do that; nothing in the GPL prevents you from writing your own code and releasing it under any other license.
The latest additions just address a few new issues. If you think DRM is fine, and you don't care if someone modifies your code to make it effectively unmodifiable via DRM hardware, then you can continue to use GPL2 or any other license. If, however, you think that's a bad thing, you'll be able to use GPL3 and protect your code. Currently, no other license addresses this issue. But still, there's nothing in the GPL, 2 or 3, that imposes itself upon anyone. You aren't forced to use the GPL, nor are you forced to use GPL programs.
The point of the public consultation is to bring as many people on-board as possible, so that those of us who agree with the system enforced by the GPL will have the widest possible selection of projects to use/contribute to. If people would stop arguing about how irrelevant the GPL is becoming and choose to either 1)participate to make it better or 2)bugger off and use another license, maybe this would all go a little smoother.
I can understand where you're coming from. If you have no experience installing a distro like Mepis or Ubuntu, haven't spent the ten minutes required to learn how to use Synaptic, and yet still feel compelled to comment on a topic you know nothing about, why wouldn't you resort to the old 'linux is too hard for joe-sixpack to install' line? You'd be joing hundreds, even thousands of others who have gone before you. Ignorance loves a crowd.
What I don't understand is how this bullshit gets modded +5 insightful.
So what? How many copies do you need to sell to get an Amazon rank of 500,000? How many for 1,000,000? I'm guessing that to qualify for a rank of one millionth you'd have to sell somewhere in the 0-1 copies range. So if two people bought your book in the last week you might 'spike' to 500,000th, then drop right back down until your next sale in 2020. Hardly a compelling argument to support the importance of the long tail.
Getting each state to use their electoral college votes to support the majority decision of all states does seem to undermine the whole system. But what puzzles me is why a state has to vote unanimously for one candidate. Why don't states divide their electoral college votes according to the proportion of their population that voted for a particular candidate?
If Florida has 10 votes (or whatever number) in the electoral college and the population splits down the middle, why don't they just give five votes to each candidate and be done with it? Round up in favour of the absolute winner to settle fractional votes. That way they still reflect the will of the people of the state they represent, but without skewing the results.
Seems pretty simple, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring an all-or-nothing opt-in. If the people of Florida wanted to use this system they wouldn't have to worry about what the other states do. On the other hand, if only Florida decided to use its votes to support the national majority they'd be pissing in the wind if all the other states kept to the status quo.
No shit! I've voted in every Canadian federal election since 1990, and damned if they didn't make me go back to school/work after I voted. Boy, do I feel stupid now!
The only problem with the license is that it's very hard to find it. Anything Warren wrote from scratch is released as "freely redistributable binary", or something to that effect. Which is to say, closed source. It's kind of creepy that this is so poorly documented. If there was a link from the main page at mepis.com that lead interested parties to a clear statement describing the code as proprietary, then much of the bad blood you mention would never have accumulated. And it would save those of us who still use Mepis from constantly having to clarify the issue.
All that is really necessary for scientific advancement is sufficient funding and strong government support. Freedom of speech is really a non-issue.
Not necessarily. Soviet crop science was headed by a crackpot named Lysenko from the 30s to the 50s. He developed an extensive system of crop breeding based on marxist ideals, completely rejecting the genetic advances that the rest of the world was taking advantage of. Not only did his abuse of power lead to massive food shortages in the Soviet Union, but any scientists who spoke out against him were subject to the sorts of abuse the Soviet state used for any other dissidents. In a freer society those scientists would not have died, and they could have helped save the lives of their countrymen through the application of real science.
You're reading too much into this. There is no hard and fast definition of amphibious. It just means they spend some time in the water and some time on land. There's no cut-off, you don't have to spend at least 45% of your life in the water to qualify or anything like that. So a duck is in this sense amphibious, as are all waterfowl.
That said, I don't think I've ever heard of any birds being referred to as amphibious before. It's an odd choice of words.
Evolutionary links are inferred from biological data. With living species this is done primarily with DNA, but for fossils you have to use morphological information. So the taxonomists would line up all the specimens they have and figure out morphological connections among them. You might find that one group of fossils all have a certain bone structure, so they get grouped together while another group with different bone structure is interpreted as being a different lineage. You might be lucky enough to find a specimen with an intermediate structure, linking the two groups. This is a very basic explanation - there are all kinds of variations for deciding which features to use to make your classification, what to do with features that produce conflicting results and how to interpret the differences, but you get the idea...
erm, if you're upset with something posted at the Panda's Thumb, perhaps that would be the most appropriate forum for your complaints. There's obviously some animosity between you and the PT people that is completely lost on those of us who haven't been to their site or your CEH.
Regarding the more substantive points in your post:
I don't think any reputable scientist would consider Fox News to be a reliable source for science journalism. If you have a problem with the way Fox reports on scientific work, that's quite a separate issue from the work itself
I question whether this discovery is best characterized as "the falsification of common notions about bird evolution". Rather, new evidence has arisen which requires a re-evaluation of some minor aspects of the theory.
You need to understand that for evolutionary biologists, evidence suggesting that webbed feet may have developed in a few million years rather than 10s of millions of years (or whatever, I don't know the timeline for bird evolution) is not the sort of thing that shakes the whole evolutionary theory. Similarly, while we don't understand the nature of fossilization and tissue preservation, or what exactly happened to kill off the dinosaurs, that doesn't mean evolution as a whole should be rejected. It seems entirely reasonable to me that these sorts of results lead to further investigation of bird evolution, the nature of tissue preservation etc. It does not seem reasonable to infer from evidence that bird evolution was faster than we thought that we need to invoke divine intervention as the only possible explanation.
So, they took the evidence and looked at it through the lense of their pre-determined conclusions got the answer they wanted to find? I seem to remember a lecture in a science 101 class that included strong, almost vehement admonition to never ever do exactly what they just did.
I'm just an evolutionary biologist, so you'll have to take this with a grain of salt, but that's bullshit. What they did was note that most species of birds near that occur near the base of the evolutionary tree are aquatic. That's it: they described a pattern. I suppose you could be right, maybe they have some vested interest in early birds being aquatic. I can't imagine what possible motivation you might have for fabricating such an esoteric claim, but you're the one who (anonymously) claims to know so much more than us biologists.
Of course, you could very easily and objectively test this yourself. Look up the latest evolutionary tree for birds, figure out which ones the ecology is known for, and label your tree accordingly. Then look at the tree, and see if the species near the base of the tree are mostly aquatic. If they are, then the guys in the article are ok. I don't think this is pressing enough that I'm going to rush out and do it myself. But you can be sure that there are more than enough fanatical ornithologists in the world to check these things out.
If you really can't find an "evolutionist" who knows more about the subject than you do, you are looking in the wrong places.
This isn't the missing link, it's a missing link. The fossil record is imperfect, and that makes every new fossil discovery a previously 'missing link' that connects a pair of things together in an evolutionary chain. This doesn't indicate a problem with Darwin's theory, just the tendency for journalists to sensationalize things in hopes that people will actually pay attention to less-than-earth-shattering discoveries. Unfortunately, scientists play the same game, as it helps give their work higher profile at the expense of distorting its actual value.
If anyone has told you that the "enigma of bird evolution" is already "solved" they would be wrong. The biggest problem with that statement is that there is no single enigma that needs solving. We know a lot about bird evolution, and this new discovery gives us a bit more information. But there is no single fact that awaits discovery that will allow us to say 'there, that's solved it, time to move on to cold fusion'. Most of the debate over evolution arises from this reduction of complex ideas to overly simple terms.
As a Canadian I am most certainly not an 'American', although I am a 'North American'. I've never had a conversation with another Canadian who would use the single word 'American' to describe themselves. In Canadian English it's an important distinction. 'North' modifies the 'American' part such that it can now include all of us from Mexico on up.
In common usage, the single word 'American' is almost never used. When we refer to citizens of the US, we generally refer to them as 'damn Americans', 'bloody Americans', or 'fucking Americans', depending on the context. Except when the Americans involved are spending money on Canadian products, in which case we would use 'Sir' or 'Ma'am'. I believe the Mexicans follow a similar scheme in spanish.
Spreadsheets are a great tool, but in a much more limited context that how they often are used. I see a lot of my colleagues in academia managing all of their data in spreadsheets, from data entry, error checking, and even a disturbing amount of actual analysis.
What I find works much better is to set up a simple relational database with data entry forms that limit your ability to make silly typos. Then I visually check over the data in a spreadsheet, to catch obvious errors, like mis-placed decimals. But I don't make any other changes to the data in the spreadsheet. For everything else, the data gets exported to R, where I do all non-trivial error-correction, calculation, and analysis.
This means that any changes I make, and all calculations and analysis, are stored in commented R scripts that I can review months later and still make sense of. This is a little harder than whipping up an Excel spreadsheet that does everything in one undocumented step. But I imagine in a big company you'd be able to build real simple GUIs for 90% of the users who just need to enter data or print out reports, and leave the messy in-between stuff to the IT folks.
Besides being proprietary, what exactly about Mac OS X is not "nearly as effectiv[e]" compared to these four Linux distributions?
In other words, besides not being FOSS, what makes Mac OS X a bad FOSS operating system?
yp.
Re:Here is why it is a big step
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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I really don't see a problem here. The majority of what you learn in installing and setting up a linux box is distro-independent. When you add to that the fact that 90% of the desktop oriented distros ship with one of two desktops, there's really very little to distinguish among them for the uninitiated. It's true that newbies may not understand the differences among all the available distros, but they don't need to. All you need to know is to look at the top five or ten distros at distrowatch, and start trying them out. The first one that installs and recognises your hardware is the best distro for you.
Eventually you'll learn how to run your first distro, and in the process learn enough to evaluate some of the others. There's nothing wrong with switching distros when your needs change. I mean, inevitably we all end up running Debian, but there's no need to rush people into it;)
And I'm not sure that the more limited number of *BSD systems offers any real solution to this 'problem' anyways. Consider the MSWindows user thinking of making the switch. If they are really put off by the number of linux distros, are they going to look at BSD as a simpler set of decisions to make, or does it just add one more decision they don't know enough to make?
Ah, shit, I was having trouble deciding which linux to use, and now you're telling me that first I need to decide between linux and this BSD thing?
The summary of the research is pretty slim, but if we assume the reporter got it right (dangerous, I know):
Of millions of initial mutations, 700 were useful
Of 700 useful mutations, one became dominant
The dominant mutation produced 5 derivatives
Two of the five derivatives survived until the end of the experiment
If they replicated this twice, with the same dominant mutation, and the same derivatives, and the same two successful derivatives, then I don't think we need to wait until they complete 1000 reps of an experiment that takes weeks or months to complete before we accept that they are on to something. The probability of that happening by chance even twice may be enough to make this a significant result. On the other hand, if they only got as far as the same dominant and then the results were only similar, then maybe we could quibble about how many reps they should do.
Looking back at the original article, it describes the work as preliminary, and doesn't mention a publication, so I suspect that the additional replications may already be in progress in any case.
And if they used a more realistic environment and got results that weren't so clear, then people would argue that they should have done something simpler where they could control all the variables. The answer is to use both approaches, but not necessarily in the same study.
There was an interesting paper on that touched on the same issues using a 'natural experiment'. They looked at a group of spiders that colonized the Hawaiian islands. Each island contains a collection of the same ecotypes of these spiders, but they all have different histories. If only one spider species colonized an island, evolution lead to it forming several different species to fill the basic ecotypes. If two or more spiders colonized the island, they divied up the ecotypes. So what you get was species 1 splitting into three species to match ecotypes A,B, and C on one island. On another island species 1 evolved to fill ecotype C, and other species 2 filled in A and B. And on another island species 2 had evolved to fill all three ecotypes.
In a nutshell, the evolutionary pattern was repeated over and over, with the same ecotypes arising from different ancestors. It didn't matter which species you started with, you always got the same product. This agrees with evolutionary theory, but I don't think you would expect such consistent results in an uncontrolled environment.
If you're interested in the details, it's Gillespie et al in Science 16 January 2004:Vol. 303. no. 5656, pp. 356 - 359
You're missing the point. They weren't trying to demonstrate evolution. They were trying to see how evolution actually played out, to examine the fine details. So yes, Darwin could have told you that the bacteria populations in the experiment would evolve in response to the changing environment. However, he wouldn't have had any idea about the details at a genetic or molecular level. It's interesting to see that the evolutionary pattern they produced was reproducable, even if they could have done more reps.
It's also important to note that just because evololutionary theory predicts a particular outcome, we shouldn't complacently accept the result as a law. We need to demonstrate the outcome experimentally. If our experiments confirm the theory, great. If they don't, we re-examine the theory and fix it (or find a new theory). That's how science works.
First: it is not "an economic subsidy". That suggests that the government is propping up an industry that is not economically viable. This is no the case - the price for a tag is ultimately set by the market, and the government does not need to supply any sort of subsidy. The only role of the government is to provide the oversight necessary to make sure that the hunts are conducted responsibly wrt to bear populations.
Second: the bears are not endangered by hunting. All else remaining the same, the hunt could continue indefinitely without causing the extinction of the species. All else does not remain the same, of course, and the melting of the polar icecap may well drive the bears to extinction. But how reasonable is it for us southerners to impose upon the Inuit to fix our mistakes: "Sorry, but we've fucked up the climate, and 20000 or so bears will likely die as a result, but since we're too lazy or stupid to correct the problem, you'll have to forego your annual hunt of a few dozen of those animals." Basically, that's saying that we want to be responsible for killing all the bears, not just most of them. Not very helpful.
I'm not sure the distinction between 'money making resource' and 'Inuit tradtions' is all that useful. The Inuit tradition includes hunting polar bears. Why is it ok for them to hunt and eat the bears, and use the skins to make their traditional clothes, but not ok for them to sell the tags and use the money to buy food and clothing? That's a little mean-spirited I think. First we forced them off the land into permanent settlements, tried our damnedest to beat their language and tradition out of them, supplied them with addictive substances of all kinds... now you want to turn around and tell them that to use their local resources they have to pretend that money doesn't exist? After all the crap has been dumped on them they should ignore any possible benefit from european cultures?
You do understand that these people live in the tundra, right? What do you suggest that they do instead? Agriculture? What's lichen selling for these days? IT? you want to set up a call centre where english is a second language and the only connection to the US is via radio-phone? Manufacturing? What could you possibly make and distribute at a competitive price when all raw materials have to be flown up in a bush plane, or sent annually on a freighter - and the finished product has to go back the same way. No, the only thing these people have is their natural resources, and aside from a few diamond mines, eco-tourism (including hunting and scientific research) are about the only way to make a buck.
I expect that the amount of money polar bear hunting brings to the Canadian economy is trivial. However, it is far from trivial for the native communities involved. And given all that the Canadian government has imposed on the Inuit, I think it's a good thing that they've allowed them to make their own decisions in at least this one aspect of managing their resources.
If I recall correctly, Scotland (could've been another north Atlantic country, my undergrad is a long ways back now) adopted a similar policy with respect to their salmon fishery, ie. limiting the number of tags available to locals to take advantage of the much greater return available by catering to rich overseas fishermen. Again, I think it's a responsible decision: given that an animal is going to die, is it better that it feeds a few people directly, or many people through the sale of a much sought-after tag?
Of course, not everyone agrees with this. That's why some Inuit communities don't sell any tags to outsiders.
Inuit communities are allowed a certain number of polar bear tags each season, based in part on the idea of sustainable yield (how sustainable I can't say). This is in recognition of the importance of the polar bear hunt in their traditional culture.
Each community decides how to allot their tags. Some places use all of the tags internally for subsistence hunting. Others sell a portion of them to big-game hunters, which brings a lot of money to the community. This is arguably a more efficient form of subsistence hunting: What's a better use of the resource, a) killing a bear and eating it or b)selling the chance to shoot a bear to a rich hunter and then spending the tens of thousands of dollars raised on feeding your community? Tags for outsiders are only available through the Inuit communities.
And yes, it's true that polar bears are dangerous, and anyone working in the arctic needs to carry a rifle in case of emergency encounters. Government research projects are extremely touchy about this (my wife's been up a few times) - spotting a bear anywhere near a camp results in the camp being moved rather than risk the death of a bear or a human. However, the suggestion by another poster that the hunt is necessary to keep communities safe is bullshit. Which is not to say nuisance bears won't get killed, but it certainly won't be part of the hunting tag system.
Yep, that's what my PhD is like. At least once a week the janitor comes in to empty the trashcan in my closet/lab, and I think to myself what a wonderful social environment I get to work in as a scientist!
No "mad" scientist
You obviously have never had a PhD supervisor.
Intense personal relationships... That's very strange for a movie scientist, who usually remains single to avoid confusing audiences who do not view scientists are normal human beings.
As opposed to real-life scientists, who remain single because of their total lack of socialization.
Problems with upper management
Of course, real-world scientists rarely stop fighting among themselves long enough to develop meaningful problems with outsiders.
Explain to me how this doesn't result in a complete duplication of Debian, only out of synch? We'll get Dapper Drake in June, the official stable Ubuntu for the next two years. Sometime in 2007 Etch will become the new stable Debian. Etch will be both stable and incrementally more 'edgy' than Dapper Drake... until the next Ubuntu 'stable' release, which becomes the new standard until the following Debian release...
It seems to me that if Ubuntu adopts a more Debian-style release cycle the differences between the two distros will diminish. What will make Ubuntu different enough to be a worthwhile alternative? The installation? You'd think that you could improve the installation of Debian for a fraction of the effort required to run an entire parallel distro.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I moved to Debian. If all the people who are working on derivatives (Mepis, Ubuntu, Kanotix, DSL etc) put that effort back into Debian instead, we'd be getting much more per developer hour invested. Debian is not *that* hard to install, and if all the people working on easier-to-install sub distros were instead working on the Debian installer...
The relatively low cost of entry for would-be distro producers has definitely spread the talent pool pretty thin, with a lot of duplicated effort. If Microsoft can deal with their customers varying needs with a handful of distros, you'd think we could do the same with ten.
The glut of distros also fuels a distro-junky culture, where hobbyists spend hours and hours testing and tweaking different distros. Imagine what would happen if these people just picked one distro, got it running, and then started developing apps for it instead of posting screenshots of their desktop every day? But if we do that, I suppose we might as well imagine what would happen if all the brain-power devoted to baseball statistics were refocussed on electoral reform or cancer cures...
yp.
I'm getting tired of reading about how RMS is using GPLv3 to impose his ideals on everyone. He may well believe that all software should be free, but that is most definitely not what he's trying to accomplish with the GPL. If his main goal was to make all software Free Software he'd have to do it with legal challenges on the concept of intellectual property etc.
While he may be involved in that, GPL is different. GPL doesn't attempt to overturn the status quo, it provides an alternative to it. While RMS and Lessig et al. work on the long fight to get rational patent and copyright reforms enacted, GPL provides an immediate option for people that want to develop an alternative model. It gives you the opportunity to share your code without fear that someone else will benefit from it without sharing their improvements. If you prefer to write closed code, you can still do that; nothing in the GPL prevents you from writing your own code and releasing it under any other license.
The latest additions just address a few new issues. If you think DRM is fine, and you don't care if someone modifies your code to make it effectively unmodifiable via DRM hardware, then you can continue to use GPL2 or any other license. If, however, you think that's a bad thing, you'll be able to use GPL3 and protect your code. Currently, no other license addresses this issue. But still, there's nothing in the GPL, 2 or 3, that imposes itself upon anyone. You aren't forced to use the GPL, nor are you forced to use GPL programs.
The point of the public consultation is to bring as many people on-board as possible, so that those of us who agree with the system enforced by the GPL will have the widest possible selection of projects to use/contribute to. If people would stop arguing about how irrelevant the GPL is becoming and choose to either 1)participate to make it better or 2)bugger off and use another license, maybe this would all go a little smoother.
yp.
I can understand where you're coming from. If you have no experience installing a distro like Mepis or Ubuntu, haven't spent the ten minutes required to learn how to use Synaptic, and yet still feel compelled to comment on a topic you know nothing about, why wouldn't you resort to the old 'linux is too hard for joe-sixpack to install' line? You'd be joing hundreds, even thousands of others who have gone before you. Ignorance loves a crowd.
What I don't understand is how this bullshit gets modded +5 insightful.
yp.
So what? How many copies do you need to sell to get an Amazon rank of 500,000? How many for 1,000,000? I'm guessing that to qualify for a rank of one millionth you'd have to sell somewhere in the 0-1 copies range. So if two people bought your book in the last week you might 'spike' to 500,000th, then drop right back down until your next sale in 2020. Hardly a compelling argument to support the importance of the long tail.
yp.
Getting each state to use their electoral college votes to support the majority decision of all states does seem to undermine the whole system. But what puzzles me is why a state has to vote unanimously for one candidate. Why don't states divide their electoral college votes according to the proportion of their population that voted for a particular candidate?
If Florida has 10 votes (or whatever number) in the electoral college and the population splits down the middle, why don't they just give five votes to each candidate and be done with it? Round up in favour of the absolute winner to settle fractional votes. That way they still reflect the will of the people of the state they represent, but without skewing the results.
Seems pretty simple, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring an all-or-nothing opt-in. If the people of Florida wanted to use this system they wouldn't have to worry about what the other states do. On the other hand, if only Florida decided to use its votes to support the national majority they'd be pissing in the wind if all the other states kept to the status quo.
my two cents.
yp.
No shit! I've voted in every Canadian federal election since 1990, and damned if they didn't make me go back to school/work after I voted. Boy, do I feel stupid now!
The only problem with the license is that it's very hard to find it. Anything Warren wrote from scratch is released as "freely redistributable binary", or something to that effect. Which is to say, closed source. It's kind of creepy that this is so poorly documented. If there was a link from the main page at mepis.com that lead interested parties to a clear statement describing the code as proprietary, then much of the bad blood you mention would never have accumulated. And it would save those of us who still use Mepis from constantly having to clarify the issue.
yp.
Not necessarily. Soviet crop science was headed by a crackpot named Lysenko from the 30s to the 50s. He developed an extensive system of crop breeding based on marxist ideals, completely rejecting the genetic advances that the rest of the world was taking advantage of. Not only did his abuse of power lead to massive food shortages in the Soviet Union, but any scientists who spoke out against him were subject to the sorts of abuse the Soviet state used for any other dissidents. In a freer society those scientists would not have died, and they could have helped save the lives of their countrymen through the application of real science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
yp.
You're reading too much into this. There is no hard and fast definition of amphibious. It just means they spend some time in the water and some time on land. There's no cut-off, you don't have to spend at least 45% of your life in the water to qualify or anything like that. So a duck is in this sense amphibious, as are all waterfowl.
That said, I don't think I've ever heard of any birds being referred to as amphibious before. It's an odd choice of words.
yp.
Evolutionary links are inferred from biological data. With living species this is done primarily with DNA, but for fossils you have to use morphological information. So the taxonomists would line up all the specimens they have and figure out morphological connections among them. You might find that one group of fossils all have a certain bone structure, so they get grouped together while another group with different bone structure is interpreted as being a different lineage. You might be lucky enough to find a specimen with an intermediate structure, linking the two groups. This is a very basic explanation - there are all kinds of variations for deciding which features to use to make your classification, what to do with features that produce conflicting results and how to interpret the differences, but you get the idea...
yp.
erm, if you're upset with something posted at the Panda's Thumb, perhaps that would be the most appropriate forum for your complaints. There's obviously some animosity between you and the PT people that is completely lost on those of us who haven't been to their site or your CEH.
Regarding the more substantive points in your post:
You need to understand that for evolutionary biologists, evidence suggesting that webbed feet may have developed in a few million years rather than 10s of millions of years (or whatever, I don't know the timeline for bird evolution) is not the sort of thing that shakes the whole evolutionary theory. Similarly, while we don't understand the nature of fossilization and tissue preservation, or what exactly happened to kill off the dinosaurs, that doesn't mean evolution as a whole should be rejected. It seems entirely reasonable to me that these sorts of results lead to further investigation of bird evolution, the nature of tissue preservation etc. It does not seem reasonable to infer from evidence that bird evolution was faster than we thought that we need to invoke divine intervention as the only possible explanation.
yp
I'm just an evolutionary biologist, so you'll have to take this with a grain of salt, but that's bullshit. What they did was note that most species of birds near that occur near the base of the evolutionary tree are aquatic. That's it: they described a pattern. I suppose you could be right, maybe they have some vested interest in early birds being aquatic. I can't imagine what possible motivation you might have for fabricating such an esoteric claim, but you're the one who (anonymously) claims to know so much more than us biologists.
Of course, you could very easily and objectively test this yourself. Look up the latest evolutionary tree for birds, figure out which ones the ecology is known for, and label your tree accordingly. Then look at the tree, and see if the species near the base of the tree are mostly aquatic. If they are, then the guys in the article are ok. I don't think this is pressing enough that I'm going to rush out and do it myself. But you can be sure that there are more than enough fanatical ornithologists in the world to check these things out.
If you really can't find an "evolutionist" who knows more about the subject than you do, you are looking in the wrong places.
yp.
This isn't the missing link, it's a missing link. The fossil record is imperfect, and that makes every new fossil discovery a previously 'missing link' that connects a pair of things together in an evolutionary chain. This doesn't indicate a problem with Darwin's theory, just the tendency for journalists to sensationalize things in hopes that people will actually pay attention to less-than-earth-shattering discoveries. Unfortunately, scientists play the same game, as it helps give their work higher profile at the expense of distorting its actual value.
If anyone has told you that the "enigma of bird evolution" is already "solved" they would be wrong. The biggest problem with that statement is that there is no single enigma that needs solving. We know a lot about bird evolution, and this new discovery gives us a bit more information. But there is no single fact that awaits discovery that will allow us to say 'there, that's solved it, time to move on to cold fusion'. Most of the debate over evolution arises from this reduction of complex ideas to overly simple terms.
yp.
As a Canadian I am most certainly not an 'American', although I am a 'North American'. I've never had a conversation with another Canadian who would use the single word 'American' to describe themselves. In Canadian English it's an important distinction. 'North' modifies the 'American' part such that it can now include all of us from Mexico on up.
In common usage, the single word 'American' is almost never used. When we refer to citizens of the US, we generally refer to them as 'damn Americans', 'bloody Americans', or 'fucking Americans', depending on the context. Except when the Americans involved are spending money on Canadian products, in which case we would use 'Sir' or 'Ma'am'. I believe the Mexicans follow a similar scheme in spanish.
yp.
Spreadsheets are a great tool, but in a much more limited context that how they often are used. I see a lot of my colleagues in academia managing all of their data in spreadsheets, from data entry, error checking, and even a disturbing amount of actual analysis.
What I find works much better is to set up a simple relational database with data entry forms that limit your ability to make silly typos. Then I visually check over the data in a spreadsheet, to catch obvious errors, like mis-placed decimals. But I don't make any other changes to the data in the spreadsheet. For everything else, the data gets exported to R, where I do all non-trivial error-correction, calculation, and analysis.
This means that any changes I make, and all calculations and analysis, are stored in commented R scripts that I can review months later and still make sense of. This is a little harder than whipping up an Excel spreadsheet that does everything in one undocumented step. But I imagine in a big company you'd be able to build real simple GUIs for 90% of the users who just need to enter data or print out reports, and leave the messy in-between stuff to the IT folks.
yp.
In other words, besides not being FOSS, what makes Mac OS X a bad FOSS operating system?
yp.
I really don't see a problem here. The majority of what you learn in installing and setting up a linux box is distro-independent. When you add to that the fact that 90% of the desktop oriented distros ship with one of two desktops, there's really very little to distinguish among them for the uninitiated. It's true that newbies may not understand the differences among all the available distros, but they don't need to. All you need to know is to look at the top five or ten distros at distrowatch, and start trying them out. The first one that installs and recognises your hardware is the best distro for you.
Eventually you'll learn how to run your first distro, and in the process learn enough to evaluate some of the others. There's nothing wrong with switching distros when your needs change. I mean, inevitably we all end up running Debian, but there's no need to rush people into it ;)
And I'm not sure that the more limited number of *BSD systems offers any real solution to this 'problem' anyways. Consider the MSWindows user thinking of making the switch. If they are really put off by the number of linux distros, are they going to look at BSD as a simpler set of decisions to make, or does it just add one more decision they don't know enough to make?
yp.
The summary of the research is pretty slim, but if we assume the reporter got it right (dangerous, I know):
If they replicated this twice, with the same dominant mutation, and the same derivatives, and the same two successful derivatives, then I don't think we need to wait until they complete 1000 reps of an experiment that takes weeks or months to complete before we accept that they are on to something. The probability of that happening by chance even twice may be enough to make this a significant result. On the other hand, if they only got as far as the same dominant and then the results were only similar, then maybe we could quibble about how many reps they should do.
Looking back at the original article, it describes the work as preliminary, and doesn't mention a publication, so I suspect that the additional replications may already be in progress in any case.
yp.
And if they used a more realistic environment and got results that weren't so clear, then people would argue that they should have done something simpler where they could control all the variables. The answer is to use both approaches, but not necessarily in the same study.
There was an interesting paper on that touched on the same issues using a 'natural experiment'. They looked at a group of spiders that colonized the Hawaiian islands. Each island contains a collection of the same ecotypes of these spiders, but they all have different histories. If only one spider species colonized an island, evolution lead to it forming several different species to fill the basic ecotypes. If two or more spiders colonized the island, they divied up the ecotypes. So what you get was species 1 splitting into three species to match ecotypes A,B, and C on one island. On another island species 1 evolved to fill ecotype C, and other species 2 filled in A and B. And on another island species 2 had evolved to fill all three ecotypes.
In a nutshell, the evolutionary pattern was repeated over and over, with the same ecotypes arising from different ancestors. It didn't matter which species you started with, you always got the same product. This agrees with evolutionary theory, but I don't think you would expect such consistent results in an uncontrolled environment.
If you're interested in the details, it's Gillespie et al in Science 16 January 2004:Vol. 303. no. 5656, pp. 356 - 359
yp.
You're missing the point. They weren't trying to demonstrate evolution. They were trying to see how evolution actually played out, to examine the fine details. So yes, Darwin could have told you that the bacteria populations in the experiment would evolve in response to the changing environment. However, he wouldn't have had any idea about the details at a genetic or molecular level. It's interesting to see that the evolutionary pattern they produced was reproducable, even if they could have done more reps.
It's also important to note that just because evololutionary theory predicts a particular outcome, we shouldn't complacently accept the result as a law. We need to demonstrate the outcome experimentally. If our experiments confirm the theory, great. If they don't, we re-examine the theory and fix it (or find a new theory). That's how science works.
yp.
First: it is not "an economic subsidy". That suggests that the government is propping up an industry that is not economically viable. This is no the case - the price for a tag is ultimately set by the market, and the government does not need to supply any sort of subsidy. The only role of the government is to provide the oversight necessary to make sure that the hunts are conducted responsibly wrt to bear populations.
Second: the bears are not endangered by hunting. All else remaining the same, the hunt could continue indefinitely without causing the extinction of the species. All else does not remain the same, of course, and the melting of the polar icecap may well drive the bears to extinction. But how reasonable is it for us southerners to impose upon the Inuit to fix our mistakes: "Sorry, but we've fucked up the climate, and 20000 or so bears will likely die as a result, but since we're too lazy or stupid to correct the problem, you'll have to forego your annual hunt of a few dozen of those animals." Basically, that's saying that we want to be responsible for killing all the bears, not just most of them. Not very helpful.
I'm not sure the distinction between 'money making resource' and 'Inuit tradtions' is all that useful. The Inuit tradition includes hunting polar bears. Why is it ok for them to hunt and eat the bears, and use the skins to make their traditional clothes, but not ok for them to sell the tags and use the money to buy food and clothing? That's a little mean-spirited I think. First we forced them off the land into permanent settlements, tried our damnedest to beat their language and tradition out of them, supplied them with addictive substances of all kinds... now you want to turn around and tell them that to use their local resources they have to pretend that money doesn't exist? After all the crap has been dumped on them they should ignore any possible benefit from european cultures?
You do understand that these people live in the tundra, right? What do you suggest that they do instead? Agriculture? What's lichen selling for these days? IT? you want to set up a call centre where english is a second language and the only connection to the US is via radio-phone? Manufacturing? What could you possibly make and distribute at a competitive price when all raw materials have to be flown up in a bush plane, or sent annually on a freighter - and the finished product has to go back the same way. No, the only thing these people have is their natural resources, and aside from a few diamond mines, eco-tourism (including hunting and scientific research) are about the only way to make a buck.
yp.
I expect that the amount of money polar bear hunting brings to the Canadian economy is trivial. However, it is far from trivial for the native communities involved. And given all that the Canadian government has imposed on the Inuit, I think it's a good thing that they've allowed them to make their own decisions in at least this one aspect of managing their resources.
If I recall correctly, Scotland (could've been another north Atlantic country, my undergrad is a long ways back now) adopted a similar policy with respect to their salmon fishery, ie. limiting the number of tags available to locals to take advantage of the much greater return available by catering to rich overseas fishermen. Again, I think it's a responsible decision: given that an animal is going to die, is it better that it feeds a few people directly, or many people through the sale of a much sought-after tag?
Of course, not everyone agrees with this. That's why some Inuit communities don't sell any tags to outsiders.
yp.
Some details for your consideration:
Inuit communities are allowed a certain number of polar bear tags each season, based in part on the idea of sustainable yield (how sustainable I can't say). This is in recognition of the importance of the polar bear hunt in their traditional culture.
Each community decides how to allot their tags. Some places use all of the tags internally for subsistence hunting. Others sell a portion of them to big-game hunters, which brings a lot of money to the community. This is arguably a more efficient form of subsistence hunting: What's a better use of the resource, a) killing a bear and eating it or b)selling the chance to shoot a bear to a rich hunter and then spending the tens of thousands of dollars raised on feeding your community? Tags for outsiders are only available through the Inuit communities.
And yes, it's true that polar bears are dangerous, and anyone working in the arctic needs to carry a rifle in case of emergency encounters. Government research projects are extremely touchy about this (my wife's been up a few times) - spotting a bear anywhere near a camp results in the camp being moved rather than risk the death of a bear or a human. However, the suggestion by another poster that the hunt is necessary to keep communities safe is bullshit. Which is not to say nuisance bears won't get killed, but it certainly won't be part of the hunting tag system.
yp.
Yep, that's what my PhD is like. At least once a week the janitor comes in to empty the trashcan in my closet/lab, and I think to myself what a wonderful social environment I get to work in as a scientist!
No "mad" scientistYou obviously have never had a PhD supervisor.
Intense personal relationships... That's very strange for a movie scientist, who usually remains single to avoid confusing audiences who do not view scientists are normal human beings.As opposed to real-life scientists, who remain single because of their total lack of socialization.
Problems with upper managementOf course, real-world scientists rarely stop fighting among themselves long enough to develop meaningful problems with outsiders.
yp.
Explain to me how this doesn't result in a complete duplication of Debian, only out of synch? We'll get Dapper Drake in June, the official stable Ubuntu for the next two years. Sometime in 2007 Etch will become the new stable Debian. Etch will be both stable and incrementally more 'edgy' than Dapper Drake... until the next Ubuntu 'stable' release, which becomes the new standard until the following Debian release...
It seems to me that if Ubuntu adopts a more Debian-style release cycle the differences between the two distros will diminish. What will make Ubuntu different enough to be a worthwhile alternative? The installation? You'd think that you could improve the installation of Debian for a fraction of the effort required to run an entire parallel distro.
yp.