I think these animals deserve special rights. There's no question they're intelligent and I get the sense that most of the higher primates are self-aware, though I'm not a specialist in this area at all, so I can't say for sure.
As someone who works in a lab that designs drugs for cancer research, I'm kind of torn on the whole animal testing thing. Now, for our group specifically, we never do animal testing. We do mostly in vitro work. But when things go beyond our lab, assuming the drugs appear promising, animal testing eventually arises. My hope is that primates are the absolute final step in the drug testing and that it's gone through at least a few other lower life forms and been shown to be safe before it goes into the primates. I don't really know for sure. But this is the question I ask myself in the end: "Do I want them testing this drug on a primate or do I want them testing this drug on my mother?" And that pretty much answers the question for me. It's a harsh reality, but if a few (and yeah, I know it's more than a few) primates are sacrificed to save thousands of lives, I accept that. I'm not happy about it. I'd love to see us arrive at the point where we can model this stuff accurately enough to not need animals, but at this point, we do need them. Our knowledge is simply too incomplete at this point.
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions. What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased..." feature.
I agree, that definitely drives people to see the book. What sells the book, in my opinion (assuming it has a decent sized market and a lot don't), is the customer reviews. I read the customer reviews and if the book is crap, it comes out in the reviews.
The parent poster id mostly correct. However, not all single celled organism reproduce "clonally" or, asexually. Some do, some don't, some do both. It's true that more genetic diversity comes by combining the genetic material of two different haploid cells (sperm and ovum), but some diversity as the parent poster pointed out, mutations are a source of diversity. Most mutations are harmful, but when you have a population of, hell, I don't even know what the numbers are for and individual species of rotifers, but it's subtantially higher than the human population by anywhere from a factor of tens of thousands to billions or more, but the point is, their numbers are so extremely high, that you're bound to have a large number of beneficial mutations and these are enough to provide the necessary diversity and change.
Just to give you an idea of how many rotifers there are, go pick up some dried lawn clippings from your back yard, throw them in a glass of water (let it sit over night before adding the grass so the chlorine can evaporate). Then a couple days later, take a look in a microscope. You'll probably find thousands of rotifers in your glass of water. Of course, this assumes that, like me, you're a biology geek and you have a microscope.
Personally, I think rotifers are amazingly cool to watch. I've spent many an hour watching them feed and, being completely transparent, digest, and then excrete material. Because some remain relatively stationary, they're much easier to view than say a paramecium which zips around (though you can get viscous additives to slow them down).
First of all, don't get me wrong: I use Firefox as my primary browser and I love it. I use IE for a couple of sites because I have to, but I hate it. But there's one glitchy thing in Firefox that I think goes beyond firefox and could have a pretty big impact on a desktop environment based on Mozilla.
The glitch is that, in my case, I have a good number of bookmarks. My bookmarks.html file is 560K. I know that sounds a bit excessive, but I have a single folder that has about 150 booksmarks, each to a specific page of data that I sometimes need access to and since each page has an MD5 checksum in hex as part of the page name, using a bookmark keyword isn't very feasible...
Okay, but anyway, I digress. The issue is that when I hit the bookmarks menu item, there's a 30-40 sec pause the first time while it parses the HTML. Now, if this kind of thing is regularly used for data management by a Mozilla based desktop, then you can expect equally slow responses. So this is one small thing that needs to get fixed before they need to be doing a desktop based system. I want my desktop responsive. And frankly, I'd kinda like my Bookmark button to be responsive, but I'll live with it.
he main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
I disagree. This was the case 30-50 years ago. People in the U.S., at least, had plenty of food and while maybe there was more obesity than previously, there was absolutely NOTHING like the rampant obesity going on now. 20 years ago, when I was in high school, obesity was pretty uncommon in my high school. Today, the kids that go to that same high school probably weigh, on average, 10-20lbs more than the kids of my generation. That's not a change in food availability. That's a change in what people are eating.
I keep hearing all this stuff about obesity being genetic. People having a genetic tendency towards obesity, blah blah blah... I'll be the first to admit, some people are more prone to it than others. But all these studies are ridiculous. Why are people getting fat? Because they're drinking 32 and 64oz sodas once or more a day. They're getting double-quarter pounders super-sized. I mean, Christ, this isn't rocket science.
Obesity is a problem that's really become epidemic in the past 30 years. That didn't happen by evolution and genetics. That happened when fast food places started super-sizing meals, soda companies stopped using sugar and started using high fructose corn syrup, and people stopped having family meals.
Growing up, I ate A LOT. I should have probably been fat, but despite the huge portions I ate, I ate well. My mother made dinner every night growing up. My weight peaked at about 195lb (88kg for you metric folks). I'm 5'10" (177cm). I was eating a lot crap at the time, including more soda than I should have. Fast food is now something I do maybe once every month or two and I've cut out sodas (even diet) and don't eat processed foods. I don't eat piles of vegetables, but I do eat them. I still eat a lot, but my weight is now 145lb (66kg).
I don't exercise a lot. I probably walk a couple miles a day now out of necessity to get to the places I need to go, but the weight started dropping when I fixed the way I ate. This isn't some diet I read in a book. I just avoid processed foods, particularly manufactured sugars and fats. I still get plenty of sugar (in the form of starches from breads and pasta) and fat (animal and dairy) in my diet. It's just natural stuff instead of man-made stuff. I'm not saying that'll fix everyone, but there's no question in my mind that obesity is the result of the crap we've been eating and drinking for the past 30 years because if you look at how this stuff has all evolved, it goes hand-in-hand with both the sudden rise in obesity and diabetes int his country.
Dude, this sucks. A year and a half ago you guys said that cannabinoids induce brain growth and man, I've really been putting that theory to the test. But now you want me to exercise? I can't do both dude. And given a choice... I think I'll stick with the old news...
There's something to the article. During the.com boom, everyone and their mother was writing custom software. But a lot of niches have been filled with relatively mature and stable products now. Not everyone wants to spend the money for custom software. Not to mention, I think during the.com era, a lot of people began to grasp the expense of custom development, the hard way.
There will always be areas where software development is needed. There will always be new areas and old areas that need something new. Everything evolves. But the need for programmers will definitely be finite.
There will continue to be academic programmers to do research, there will continue to be people working in open source to provide competing products, and there will continue to be corporate innovators out there that will find new niches to fill. The numbers just aren't going to be quite what they were in the past. So is Computer Science dead? Absolutely not. Like the market, it's just need of a correction in numbers...
I guess what's unclear is what kinds of molecules they're trying to match. I work part-time in a university lab doing drug research. We synthesize variants of existing molecules and test them for efficacy in various diseases, though we do mostly work on cancer-related drugs. Some of the molecules we work with are very large and very complex. But finding what else is out there isn't genereally that difficult. Molecules are divided into a number of families and families of molecules are generally pretty similar to each other in shape. Searching by family name or for molecular sub-parts, generally works pretty well, I've found.
But there's a lot more to the chemistry than just the shape of the molecule. When it comes to drugs, you're often looking for something that will bind with a given protein and while shape plays a part in that, the functional groups on the molecule are major drivers in whether or not the molecule will actually do its work.
They don't really give enough specifics in the article to know how valuable this really is.
It was just a few years ago that a fairly sizable asteroid passed between the Earth and the Moon and we didn't even notice it until it passed by because it came from the direction of the sun. We need at least several years notice on these things if we want to avoid a direct hit at some point. There's no argument to be made against paying for the survey. We know big rocks hit the Earth. It's happened plenty of times in the past. It will eventually happen again. And it's one of those things that doesn't really cost that much compared to the GDP.
That said, it's to the benefit of the entire planet and the entire planet should pitch in to help pay for it. Someone said, "So what? There's nothing we can do about it." Actually, given a few years notice, there's a lot we can do about it. An asteroid 5-10 years from hitting doesn't need much of a push to get it completely out of our way. It's when it's only a few months away that we're just completely screwed. But if there were an imminent threat of collision a few years out, I guarantee you, we'd figure out a way to move it. The world would definitely come up with the resources to figure out a solution.
Belief in God is a fairly complex concept. Genes encode proteins. Not complex thoughts. There are very basic survival instincts that can be conferred genetically, but even something as simple as not crawling off the side of a cliff is a learned behavior that doesn't happen for a while after we're born and that's a hell of a lot more important for survival.
There's simply no way genes can be responsible for encoding thoughts as complex as belief in a higher being. It's simply an artifact of being reflective beings that have the ability to think about things beyond our immediate surroundings. There's a comfort that comes with believing in a God or some other higher power. It gives us the ability to relinquish control and responsibility for everything, which is something we generally need. We need to feel like things have a purpose and having a God or higher power helps to provide that. But it's not genetic.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..... Oh man, let me wipe away these tears. This is just too funny. I don't even know where to begin... Let's see, Apple has had what, 25 years to beat MS? And they've never held more than a small percentage of the desktop market. Nothing has really changed except now there's Linux, which frankly, has a better chance than Apple. Apple dug themselves into a hole on the desktop a long time ago and they've never managed to dig out of it.
They're selling fewer machines, but making more money per machine. Well duh. That's exactly what they've done for the past 25 years. And now suddenly it's some magical advantage? Sorry, don't think so...
Man, I thought the FDA was more responsible than this. This is such a ridiculously stupid idea. They're basically saying the current health of the cattle outweighs the health of people. This is so incredibly shortsighted. It's precisely this stuff that got us to the point of having antibiotic resistant bacteria. Everyone in the scientific community, particularly the medical community, knows this. How the FDA can be so irresponsible, is beyond me.
I agree with this parent post. It's pretty silly to assume that "if space faring civilizations exist, they should have colonized the ENTIRE galaxy by now." What about evolution time? Time to develop technology? Time to establish colonies? etc etc etc.
Actually, the Fermi Paradox takes all that into consideration. The time to colonize the galaxy, once a species has become space faring is minuscule in comparison to evolution. The paradox is based on the idea that the space faring civilization will colonize the galaxy before other species have a chance to evolve and the probability of two space faring civilizations existing at the same time is incredibly low.
If another civilization were to have started colonizing the galaxy, it's unlikely it would have been in the time periods you point out, 10,000, 20,000 years ago. It's more likely they would have begun tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, and yes, that is enough time to colonize the entire galaxy.
The Earth is believed to be about 4.6 billion years old. Life emerged in the first few hundred million years, probably around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life sprung up around 1 billion years ago. Mammals have been around for about 200 million years. Homosapiens started out, probably around 200 million years ago. Now, let's say that instead of taking 3 billion years to go from single cell to multi-cell, it only took 2.5 billion years. That's a 500 million year head start. And there's no reason to think that's impossible. It's believed that the evolution of multi-cell was likely a fluke and not necessarily a forgone conclusion, largely because it took so long to show up. So that "fluke" could have probably happened any time after single-celled life began (well, any time after the first few hundred million years of it, at least).
Also, intelligence isn't necessarily a forgone conclusion of evolution. Dinosaurs had a lot more time to evolve than we have and they never developed our kind of intelligence. So let's say an animal in the dinosaur period had developed intelligence. That was over 65 million years ago. Plenty of time to colonize the galaxy.
The time to colonize the galaxy would, with only modest technological advancement from where we are now, would probably be a few million years. A very thin line on the timeline of evolution.
Why not just send the uploaded consciousness and genomes of the astronauts and, if need be, grow the bodies when you get there. The starship would very tiny and far less expensive to accelerate to a good fraction of light speed.
Actually, this is a much more reasonable possibility. I don't know about the uploading the consciousness part. We'll have to see how far we get in development of consciousness uploads, but what about this:
Instead of creating one huge ship, why not create a bunch of much smaller ones. Inside would be some sort of fairly good sized landing craft (if it's not the ship itself) along with some probes.
When a ship arrives at a potential planet, it would go into orbit, launch a probe, which would then take soil and air samples and determine if the planet was or wasn't hostile to human life. If the planet is no good, the ship heads off to another possible location.
When it finds a planet that meets its specifications, either it lands or sends down the landing craft. All automated, of course. The landing craft contains frozen embryos and chambers capable of bringing the embryos to birth. It could hopefully raise a number of embryos simultaneously. Say at least 5-10. And it could continue doing this every 9 months or so for a number of years, until you have enough people born to have a viable genetic pool.
Also aboard the craft would be robots capable of raising the first generations. They'd be able to take care of them and teach them until they're in their mid to late teens. During the first 9 month period, the robots could busy themselves with setting up some basic equipment: Greenhouses for food, solar panels for power, small habitations.
This wouldn't require a huge deal of advancement in technology to reach the point where we could do this. I mean, not compared to what's required to send out the proposed style colony and give it what it needs to survive 700 years. In the case of these "embryo ship" I propose, the size of the ships and the amount of their cargo would be far lower. Travel time shouldn't be an issue. There will be little need for anything until the ship arrives to where it's going. This first generation would clearly have an odd upbringing to be sure and I'm sure that there would be people to protest that it's not moral, because the embryos have no choice, but it might be a good way to ensure the species survives.
We could easily send them along with enough information that they could get a fully technological civilization up and running in a matter of few generations. After a couple hundred years, they could then build and send off their own ships to colonize other planets. And so on and so on. We could colonize the entire galaxy in fairly short order (in cosmological terms).
Why not wait a while? In the past 100 years, there have been more technological breakthroughs than it pretty much all of human history before that. Isn't it likely that in the next 100 years we'll find a way to get us that far in a lot less than 700 years? I mean, even if we knocked it down to only 100 years, we'd have people there 500 years faster. Hell, they'd probably be stopping off at the "ark" to pick people up and take them the rest of the way.
As well as we might be able to determine if planets have atmospheres, lands and oceans in the next few decades, we don't know that they'll be habitable. What if we get there and there's something wrong with the soil that makes planting food impossible? The ark's survivors won't ever be able to live beyond the means of what they can grow on the ark. In the end, we need a way to get people there fast enough that if the first choice turns out to not be habitable for some reason, they can go somewhere else. I dunno about you, but after 700 years of traveling, if I was in the generation arriving to find a planet I couldn't live on, I'd probably be seriously bummed!
I'm all for moving us out to interstellar distances, but I don't think we really need to do it today. On top of which, with the rate that technology is advancing, by the time such a stupendous project were completed, we'd probably have already come up with a way to cut the trip in half.
Geez, you guys need to relax. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm not even saying it's got even a.001% chance of happening. But to be so brazen as to say we absolutely KNOW what won't happen in something like this is simply arrogance. You're right... All the science currently points to the idea that it won't happen and it very likely won't. But to say that it absolutely won't is just stupid.
Okay, maybe I missed some major shift over at Wikipedia but a little over a year ago, Slashdot reported that Nature magazine's comparison of a sample of 42 Wikipedia and Britannica articles found on average, Wikipedia had 4 errors per article while Britannica had 3, but on average, Wikipedia articles had 2.6 times as much content.
So, from that point of view, I hardly see Wikipedia as a failing endeavor. There have been other studies that show Wikipedia to generally be quite accurate. There are exceptions, particularly in controversial topics which has been covered here a number of times, and maybe that needs to be fixed, but "Is Wikipedia Failing?" What is this? Fox News?
First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Fourth of all, all of this is theoretical so far since we haven't done it. Maybe our models are all wrong and this will in fact create a black hole capable of consuming everything around it and eventually the Earth and solar system. Probably not, but you can't really rule anything out completely.
Clearly you went straight to the naked pictures and skipped the second sentence of the article you link that points out that the plural of "woman" is "women" and not "Womans". Not that the post would have been funny if you could spell.
So far, to get Avian Flu a person needs to eat or have contact with infected birds. Once it goes airborne, though, you will see Avian Flu killing a lot more people than the regular flu does.
This is somewhat correct. It has not become an airborne contagion yet, but it won't necessarily become one either. That's just a roll of the dice. It requires a mutation to become airborne. Furthermore, you're assuming that the airborne version will be deadly. It probably would be pretty deadly (though likely, and very hopefully, less deadly than the non-airborne counterpart), but could possibly become even less deadly than regular flu. It all depends on how the mutations happen.
I don't mean to imply it's not a huge threat. It is. Even if the airborne version turns out to be half as lethal as the non-airborne version, we're still looking at anywhere from tens of millions to over a hundred million dead.
The fact is, H5N1 is kind of a blessing in disguise, because it's getting us prepared for a flu pandemic which we were previously completely unprepared for. Flu pandemics aren't a matter of "if". They're a matter of "when". There were 3 in the last century alone, so even if H5N1 doesn't go airborne, another will, eventually, and the better prepared we are, the better off everyone is.
I wasn't really surprised to see Tallinn, Estonia on the list. I went to Tallinn back in '97. Now, personally, I don't care for the friggin' cold places like that (Estonia is within swimming distance of Finland, if you happen to be a seal). Back in '97, and keep in mind, this was only 6 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia was kicking our butts in cell phone technology. What is wrong with the U.S. that this little former Soviet republic in such a short time just started beating our pants off technologically. Granted, they got a lot of help from Finland (their languages are very similar and there's some history between the two). Good for them for improving their lot in life significantly. Too bad people in the U.S. aren't very concerned about improving their own lot in life. If they were, maybe they'd elect a president who was concerned with their lot in life as well.
Slamming customers isn't acceptable in any other profession; doctors don't call their patients "meatbags" -- at least, not publicly.
About 15 years ago, I was jogging daily. I started having a pain in my ankle, not from an accident or anything, it just slowly started, so I stopped running, but the pain was getting worse every day, so I went to see the doctor. I get into his office, tell him the story and his response is, "Do I really need to tell you what you did to your ankle?"
That's more or less the kind of stuff this author is talking about. It happens in every profession. The fun part of the story is this: He says, "You've sprained your ankle, walk it off." Two days later I was using a crutch and the following day, two crutches. I go to see a podiatrist, tell her what happened and tell her about the first doctor. She says, "This other doctor, did he take x-rays?" "No." I reply. "I see. Did he have x-ray vision?", she asked. After x-rays, it was clear that I had torn a ligament in my ankle and was tearing a second one by walking on it.
But anyway, the point is simply it happens in every profession. It's probably a bit more exaggerated in IT, but the reasons for it, I think, are pretty obvious. First of all, many people in IT are geeks and got started early. They've always known more than others about IT stuff and they have a tendency to carry the same attitude of superiority in that area onto adulthood with them. Many probably weren't athletes or the "cool kids" in their schools and therefore have the feeling that their superiority in IT and the need for their skills is, as young adults, their time has finally come to "get even", so to speak.
Comparing this to a doctor is simply apples and oranges. To be a doctor, you need to get pretty damn good grades all through college, pass the MCAT, and then do 4 years of med school and 3-7 years of residency, depending on the specialty. Medical schools tend to look for a certain degree of maturity in candidates and if they don't have it coming in, they tend to get it as they go through. It's a completely different world than what "normal" people go through and thus, it's going to tend to produce much more mature people.
As for other fields, people tend to enter at a much lower level and tend to need maturity to move up. IT is just different. They'll take just about anyone with the skills. IT people do gain experience at their jobs, but they tend to move up faster, or they move out. Maturity usually has less to do with advancement than skill, unlike other jobs where maturity is often integral to advancement. Maturity in IT gets you into management which is where a lot of geeks don't want to go.
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I think these animals deserve special rights. There's no question they're intelligent and I get the sense that most of the higher primates are self-aware, though I'm not a specialist in this area at all, so I can't say for sure.
As someone who works in a lab that designs drugs for cancer research, I'm kind of torn on the whole animal testing thing. Now, for our group specifically, we never do animal testing. We do mostly in vitro work. But when things go beyond our lab, assuming the drugs appear promising, animal testing eventually arises. My hope is that primates are the absolute final step in the drug testing and that it's gone through at least a few other lower life forms and been shown to be safe before it goes into the primates. I don't really know for sure. But this is the question I ask myself in the end: "Do I want them testing this drug on a primate or do I want them testing this drug on my mother?" And that pretty much answers the question for me. It's a harsh reality, but if a few (and yeah, I know it's more than a few) primates are sacrificed to save thousands of lives, I accept that. I'm not happy about it. I'd love to see us arrive at the point where we can model this stuff accurately enough to not need animals, but at this point, we do need them. Our knowledge is simply too incomplete at this point.
If I were an author (or a musician, or someone selling anything else on Amazon), I wouldn't care too much about the Amazon rankings. I have been shopping at Amazon since it opened, and have never bothered looking at any of the "Top Ranked" for suggestions. What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased ..." feature.
I agree, that definitely drives people to see the book. What sells the book, in my opinion (assuming it has a decent sized market and a lot don't), is the customer reviews. I read the customer reviews and if the book is crap, it comes out in the reviews.
The parent poster id mostly correct. However, not all single celled organism reproduce "clonally" or, asexually. Some do, some don't, some do both. It's true that more genetic diversity comes by combining the genetic material of two different haploid cells (sperm and ovum), but some diversity as the parent poster pointed out, mutations are a source of diversity. Most mutations are harmful, but when you have a population of, hell, I don't even know what the numbers are for and individual species of rotifers, but it's subtantially higher than the human population by anywhere from a factor of tens of thousands to billions or more, but the point is, their numbers are so extremely high, that you're bound to have a large number of beneficial mutations and these are enough to provide the necessary diversity and change.
Just to give you an idea of how many rotifers there are, go pick up some dried lawn clippings from your back yard, throw them in a glass of water (let it sit over night before adding the grass so the chlorine can evaporate). Then a couple days later, take a look in a microscope. You'll probably find thousands of rotifers in your glass of water. Of course, this assumes that, like me, you're a biology geek and you have a microscope.
Personally, I think rotifers are amazingly cool to watch. I've spent many an hour watching them feed and, being completely transparent, digest, and then excrete material. Because some remain relatively stationary, they're much easier to view than say a paramecium which zips around (though you can get viscous additives to slow them down).
First of all, don't get me wrong: I use Firefox as my primary browser and I love it. I use IE for a couple of sites because I have to, but I hate it. But there's one glitchy thing in Firefox that I think goes beyond firefox and could have a pretty big impact on a desktop environment based on Mozilla.
The glitch is that, in my case, I have a good number of bookmarks. My bookmarks.html file is 560K. I know that sounds a bit excessive, but I have a single folder that has about 150 booksmarks, each to a specific page of data that I sometimes need access to and since each page has an MD5 checksum in hex as part of the page name, using a bookmark keyword isn't very feasible...
Okay, but anyway, I digress. The issue is that when I hit the bookmarks menu item, there's a 30-40 sec pause the first time while it parses the HTML. Now, if this kind of thing is regularly used for data management by a Mozilla based desktop, then you can expect equally slow responses. So this is one small thing that needs to get fixed before they need to be doing a desktop based system. I want my desktop responsive. And frankly, I'd kinda like my Bookmark button to be responsive, but I'll live with it.
he main culprit is evolution. We've got millions of years of evolution in our genes telling us to eat high-calorie, high-sugar, high-fat foods, eat as much as we can of them, and eat them now, because winter is coming and there won't be any food to eat. Combine this with a society that, unprecedented in human history, has such an abundance of food that virtually everyone can overeat if they want to, and you've got an obesity problem.
I disagree. This was the case 30-50 years ago. People in the U.S., at least, had plenty of food and while maybe there was more obesity than previously, there was absolutely NOTHING like the rampant obesity going on now. 20 years ago, when I was in high school, obesity was pretty uncommon in my high school. Today, the kids that go to that same high school probably weigh, on average, 10-20lbs more than the kids of my generation. That's not a change in food availability. That's a change in what people are eating.
I keep hearing all this stuff about obesity being genetic. People having a genetic tendency towards obesity, blah blah blah... I'll be the first to admit, some people are more prone to it than others. But all these studies are ridiculous. Why are people getting fat? Because they're drinking 32 and 64oz sodas once or more a day. They're getting double-quarter pounders super-sized. I mean, Christ, this isn't rocket science.
Obesity is a problem that's really become epidemic in the past 30 years. That didn't happen by evolution and genetics. That happened when fast food places started super-sizing meals, soda companies stopped using sugar and started using high fructose corn syrup, and people stopped having family meals.
Growing up, I ate A LOT. I should have probably been fat, but despite the huge portions I ate, I ate well. My mother made dinner every night growing up. My weight peaked at about 195lb (88kg for you metric folks). I'm 5'10" (177cm). I was eating a lot crap at the time, including more soda than I should have. Fast food is now something I do maybe once every month or two and I've cut out sodas (even diet) and don't eat processed foods. I don't eat piles of vegetables, but I do eat them. I still eat a lot, but my weight is now 145lb (66kg).
I don't exercise a lot. I probably walk a couple miles a day now out of necessity to get to the places I need to go, but the weight started dropping when I fixed the way I ate. This isn't some diet I read in a book. I just avoid processed foods, particularly manufactured sugars and fats. I still get plenty of sugar (in the form of starches from breads and pasta) and fat (animal and dairy) in my diet. It's just natural stuff instead of man-made stuff. I'm not saying that'll fix everyone, but there's no question in my mind that obesity is the result of the crap we've been eating and drinking for the past 30 years because if you look at how this stuff has all evolved, it goes hand-in-hand with both the sudden rise in obesity and diabetes int his country.
Dude, this sucks. A year and a half ago you guys said that cannabinoids induce brain growth and man, I've really been putting that theory to the test. But now you want me to exercise? I can't do both dude. And given a choice... I think I'll stick with the old news...
There's something to the article. During the .com boom, everyone and their mother was writing custom software. But a lot of niches have been filled with relatively mature and stable products now. Not everyone wants to spend the money for custom software. Not to mention, I think during the .com era, a lot of people began to grasp the expense of custom development, the hard way.
There will always be areas where software development is needed. There will always be new areas and old areas that need something new. Everything evolves. But the need for programmers will definitely be finite.
There will continue to be academic programmers to do research, there will continue to be people working in open source to provide competing products, and there will continue to be corporate innovators out there that will find new niches to fill. The numbers just aren't going to be quite what they were in the past. So is Computer Science dead? Absolutely not. Like the market, it's just need of a correction in numbers...
I know it's real. I've actually seen it in action. An unfortunate side-effect is that my cat suddenly died... and didn't.
I guess what's unclear is what kinds of molecules they're trying to match. I work part-time in a university lab doing drug research. We synthesize variants of existing molecules and test them for efficacy in various diseases, though we do mostly work on cancer-related drugs. Some of the molecules we work with are very large and very complex. But finding what else is out there isn't genereally that difficult. Molecules are divided into a number of families and families of molecules are generally pretty similar to each other in shape. Searching by family name or for molecular sub-parts, generally works pretty well, I've found.
But there's a lot more to the chemistry than just the shape of the molecule. When it comes to drugs, you're often looking for something that will bind with a given protein and while shape plays a part in that, the functional groups on the molecule are major drivers in whether or not the molecule will actually do its work.
They don't really give enough specifics in the article to know how valuable this really is.
It was just a few years ago that a fairly sizable asteroid passed between the Earth and the Moon and we didn't even notice it until it passed by because it came from the direction of the sun. We need at least several years notice on these things if we want to avoid a direct hit at some point. There's no argument to be made against paying for the survey. We know big rocks hit the Earth. It's happened plenty of times in the past. It will eventually happen again. And it's one of those things that doesn't really cost that much compared to the GDP.
That said, it's to the benefit of the entire planet and the entire planet should pitch in to help pay for it. Someone said, "So what? There's nothing we can do about it." Actually, given a few years notice, there's a lot we can do about it. An asteroid 5-10 years from hitting doesn't need much of a push to get it completely out of our way. It's when it's only a few months away that we're just completely screwed. But if there were an imminent threat of collision a few years out, I guarantee you, we'd figure out a way to move it. The world would definitely come up with the resources to figure out a solution.
Belief in God is a fairly complex concept. Genes encode proteins. Not complex thoughts. There are very basic survival instincts that can be conferred genetically, but even something as simple as not crawling off the side of a cliff is a learned behavior that doesn't happen for a while after we're born and that's a hell of a lot more important for survival.
There's simply no way genes can be responsible for encoding thoughts as complex as belief in a higher being. It's simply an artifact of being reflective beings that have the ability to think about things beyond our immediate surroundings. There's a comfort that comes with believing in a God or some other higher power. It gives us the ability to relinquish control and responsibility for everything, which is something we generally need. We need to feel like things have a purpose and having a God or higher power helps to provide that. But it's not genetic.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..... Oh man, let me wipe away these tears. This is just too funny. I don't even know where to begin... Let's see, Apple has had what, 25 years to beat MS? And they've never held more than a small percentage of the desktop market. Nothing has really changed except now there's Linux, which frankly, has a better chance than Apple. Apple dug themselves into a hole on the desktop a long time ago and they've never managed to dig out of it.
They're selling fewer machines, but making more money per machine. Well duh. That's exactly what they've done for the past 25 years. And now suddenly it's some magical advantage? Sorry, don't think so...
Man, I thought the FDA was more responsible than this. This is such a ridiculously stupid idea. They're basically saying the current health of the cattle outweighs the health of people. This is so incredibly shortsighted. It's precisely this stuff that got us to the point of having antibiotic resistant bacteria. Everyone in the scientific community, particularly the medical community, knows this. How the FDA can be so irresponsible, is beyond me.
Woops, meant 200 thousand years ago, not 200 million years ago, for humans. My bad.
I agree with this parent post. It's pretty silly to assume that "if space faring civilizations exist, they should have colonized the ENTIRE galaxy by now." What about evolution time? Time to develop technology? Time to establish colonies? etc etc etc.
Actually, the Fermi Paradox takes all that into consideration. The time to colonize the galaxy, once a species has become space faring is minuscule in comparison to evolution. The paradox is based on the idea that the space faring civilization will colonize the galaxy before other species have a chance to evolve and the probability of two space faring civilizations existing at the same time is incredibly low.
If another civilization were to have started colonizing the galaxy, it's unlikely it would have been in the time periods you point out, 10,000, 20,000 years ago. It's more likely they would have begun tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, and yes, that is enough time to colonize the entire galaxy.
The Earth is believed to be about 4.6 billion years old. Life emerged in the first few hundred million years, probably around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life sprung up around 1 billion years ago. Mammals have been around for about 200 million years. Homosapiens started out, probably around 200 million years ago. Now, let's say that instead of taking 3 billion years to go from single cell to multi-cell, it only took 2.5 billion years. That's a 500 million year head start. And there's no reason to think that's impossible. It's believed that the evolution of multi-cell was likely a fluke and not necessarily a forgone conclusion, largely because it took so long to show up. So that "fluke" could have probably happened any time after single-celled life began (well, any time after the first few hundred million years of it, at least).
Also, intelligence isn't necessarily a forgone conclusion of evolution. Dinosaurs had a lot more time to evolve than we have and they never developed our kind of intelligence. So let's say an animal in the dinosaur period had developed intelligence. That was over 65 million years ago. Plenty of time to colonize the galaxy.
The time to colonize the galaxy would, with only modest technological advancement from where we are now, would probably be a few million years. A very thin line on the timeline of evolution.
Why not just send the uploaded consciousness and genomes of the astronauts and, if need be, grow the bodies when you get there. The starship would very tiny and far less expensive to accelerate to a good fraction of light speed.
Actually, this is a much more reasonable possibility. I don't know about the uploading the consciousness part. We'll have to see how far we get in development of consciousness uploads, but what about this:
Instead of creating one huge ship, why not create a bunch of much smaller ones. Inside would be some sort of fairly good sized landing craft (if it's not the ship itself) along with some probes.
When a ship arrives at a potential planet, it would go into orbit, launch a probe, which would then take soil and air samples and determine if the planet was or wasn't hostile to human life. If the planet is no good, the ship heads off to another possible location.
When it finds a planet that meets its specifications, either it lands or sends down the landing craft. All automated, of course. The landing craft contains frozen embryos and chambers capable of bringing the embryos to birth. It could hopefully raise a number of embryos simultaneously. Say at least 5-10. And it could continue doing this every 9 months or so for a number of years, until you have enough people born to have a viable genetic pool.
Also aboard the craft would be robots capable of raising the first generations. They'd be able to take care of them and teach them until they're in their mid to late teens. During the first 9 month period, the robots could busy themselves with setting up some basic equipment: Greenhouses for food, solar panels for power, small habitations.
This wouldn't require a huge deal of advancement in technology to reach the point where we could do this. I mean, not compared to what's required to send out the proposed style colony and give it what it needs to survive 700 years. In the case of these "embryo ship" I propose, the size of the ships and the amount of their cargo would be far lower. Travel time shouldn't be an issue. There will be little need for anything until the ship arrives to where it's going. This first generation would clearly have an odd upbringing to be sure and I'm sure that there would be people to protest that it's not moral, because the embryos have no choice, but it might be a good way to ensure the species survives.
We could easily send them along with enough information that they could get a fully technological civilization up and running in a matter of few generations. After a couple hundred years, they could then build and send off their own ships to colonize other planets. And so on and so on. We could colonize the entire galaxy in fairly short order (in cosmological terms).
Why not wait a while? In the past 100 years, there have been more technological breakthroughs than it pretty much all of human history before that. Isn't it likely that in the next 100 years we'll find a way to get us that far in a lot less than 700 years? I mean, even if we knocked it down to only 100 years, we'd have people there 500 years faster. Hell, they'd probably be stopping off at the "ark" to pick people up and take them the rest of the way.
As well as we might be able to determine if planets have atmospheres, lands and oceans in the next few decades, we don't know that they'll be habitable. What if we get there and there's something wrong with the soil that makes planting food impossible? The ark's survivors won't ever be able to live beyond the means of what they can grow on the ark. In the end, we need a way to get people there fast enough that if the first choice turns out to not be habitable for some reason, they can go somewhere else. I dunno about you, but after 700 years of traveling, if I was in the generation arriving to find a planet I couldn't live on, I'd probably be seriously bummed!
I'm all for moving us out to interstellar distances, but I don't think we really need to do it today. On top of which, with the rate that technology is advancing, by the time such a stupendous project were completed, we'd probably have already come up with a way to cut the trip in half.
Geez, you guys need to relax. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm not even saying it's got even a .001% chance of happening. But to be so brazen as to say we absolutely KNOW what won't happen in something like this is simply arrogance. You're right... All the science currently points to the idea that it won't happen and it very likely won't. But to say that it absolutely won't is just stupid.
Okay, maybe I missed some major shift over at Wikipedia but a little over a year ago, Slashdot reported that Nature magazine's comparison of a sample of 42 Wikipedia and Britannica articles found on average, Wikipedia had 4 errors per article while Britannica had 3, but on average, Wikipedia articles had 2.6 times as much content.
So, from that point of view, I hardly see Wikipedia as a failing endeavor. There have been other studies that show Wikipedia to generally be quite accurate. There are exceptions, particularly in controversial topics which has been covered here a number of times, and maybe that needs to be fixed, but "Is Wikipedia Failing?" What is this? Fox News?
First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Fourth of all, all of this is theoretical so far since we haven't done it. Maybe our models are all wrong and this will in fact create a black hole capable of consuming everything around it and eventually the Earth and solar system. Probably not, but you can't really rule anything out completely.
Any of you 3 Womans on slashdot wanna give away some genetic research?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman
Clearly you went straight to the naked pictures and skipped the second sentence of the article you link that points out that the plural of "woman" is "women" and not "Womans". Not that the post would have been funny if you could spell.
So far, to get Avian Flu a person needs to eat or have contact with infected birds. Once it goes airborne, though, you will see Avian Flu killing a lot more people than the regular flu does.
This is somewhat correct. It has not become an airborne contagion yet, but it won't necessarily become one either. That's just a roll of the dice. It requires a mutation to become airborne. Furthermore, you're assuming that the airborne version will be deadly. It probably would be pretty deadly (though likely, and very hopefully, less deadly than the non-airborne counterpart), but could possibly become even less deadly than regular flu. It all depends on how the mutations happen.
I don't mean to imply it's not a huge threat. It is. Even if the airborne version turns out to be half as lethal as the non-airborne version, we're still looking at anywhere from tens of millions to over a hundred million dead.
The fact is, H5N1 is kind of a blessing in disguise, because it's getting us prepared for a flu pandemic which we were previously completely unprepared for. Flu pandemics aren't a matter of "if". They're a matter of "when". There were 3 in the last century alone, so even if H5N1 doesn't go airborne, another will, eventually, and the better prepared we are, the better off everyone is.
I wasn't really surprised to see Tallinn, Estonia on the list. I went to Tallinn back in '97. Now, personally, I don't care for the friggin' cold places like that (Estonia is within swimming distance of Finland, if you happen to be a seal). Back in '97, and keep in mind, this was only 6 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia was kicking our butts in cell phone technology. What is wrong with the U.S. that this little former Soviet republic in such a short time just started beating our pants off technologically. Granted, they got a lot of help from Finland (their languages are very similar and there's some history between the two). Good for them for improving their lot in life significantly. Too bad people in the U.S. aren't very concerned about improving their own lot in life. If they were, maybe they'd elect a president who was concerned with their lot in life as well.
Slamming customers isn't acceptable in any other profession; doctors don't call their patients "meatbags" -- at least, not publicly.
About 15 years ago, I was jogging daily. I started having a pain in my ankle, not from an accident or anything, it just slowly started, so I stopped running, but the pain was getting worse every day, so I went to see the doctor. I get into his office, tell him the story and his response is, "Do I really need to tell you what you did to your ankle?"
That's more or less the kind of stuff this author is talking about. It happens in every profession. The fun part of the story is this: He says, "You've sprained your ankle, walk it off." Two days later I was using a crutch and the following day, two crutches. I go to see a podiatrist, tell her what happened and tell her about the first doctor. She says, "This other doctor, did he take x-rays?" "No." I reply. "I see. Did he have x-ray vision?", she asked. After x-rays, it was clear that I had torn a ligament in my ankle and was tearing a second one by walking on it.
But anyway, the point is simply it happens in every profession. It's probably a bit more exaggerated in IT, but the reasons for it, I think, are pretty obvious. First of all, many people in IT are geeks and got started early. They've always known more than others about IT stuff and they have a tendency to carry the same attitude of superiority in that area onto adulthood with them. Many probably weren't athletes or the "cool kids" in their schools and therefore have the feeling that their superiority in IT and the need for their skills is, as young adults, their time has finally come to "get even", so to speak.
Comparing this to a doctor is simply apples and oranges. To be a doctor, you need to get pretty damn good grades all through college, pass the MCAT, and then do 4 years of med school and 3-7 years of residency, depending on the specialty. Medical schools tend to look for a certain degree of maturity in candidates and if they don't have it coming in, they tend to get it as they go through. It's a completely different world than what "normal" people go through and thus, it's going to tend to produce much more mature people.
As for other fields, people tend to enter at a much lower level and tend to need maturity to move up. IT is just different. They'll take just about anyone with the skills. IT people do gain experience at their jobs, but they tend to move up faster, or they move out. Maturity usually has less to do with advancement than skill, unlike other jobs where maturity is often integral to advancement. Maturity in IT gets you into management which is where a lot of geeks don't want to go.