At the time, the french title was "l'homme qui vallait 3 miliars", but now, it would only be slighly more than 4 million euros, basicaly only slightly more than the TCO of a regular soldier or policeman.
So they manage to build a pair of molecules that can be sucessfully copied when put in a DNA helix, that's something worth publishing in a biochemistery journal, but I don't see how those new molecules could be interpreted by the cell to build new man-designed proteins. Wouldn't it be easier to use man-designed regular DNA sequences that the cell know how to interpret?
Proprioception Deficit Disorder is a disease where people lose the ability to "feel" their body. People suffering from this rare disease can't do things that seems natural to us without a lot of focus.
Well, in the first case, you're a proud american learning to protect his family, and in the second, you're a terrorist training on a murder simulator. Oops, I thought you were asking about moral differences, my bad.
But your paper airplaines don't encounter strong temperature gradients or supersonic shock waves. In such conditions, even having the sun illuminate one side of the plane and not the other one could significantly alter the trajectory of the plane, and I believe is what makes the experiment interesting: will the real course match the planned one?
While I agree your point might be true in 1% of the cases, the whole purpose of training and procedure is to be able to know what to do in some situations where most of the untrained people would panick and make mistakes or where the right choice can be counter-intuitive. Your firefigher/snake example only shows lack of training and knowlegde of procedure for that particular situation, maybe he thought that the ER team would need it to chose the right antidote.
Of course, even the better trained people will eventually make mistakes and you can't train all firefighters or EMT-B (or whoever) to the level needed to optimally handle any situation they might get into, so yes, they sometimes need to stop for a second and think of what to do, but even in that case, the best tool they have to chose the right action is their experience of similar situations (and that includes training and theorical knowledge).
"It will be effectively impossible for anyone to debunk the research if it is genuinely good, because that's how science works."
No, that's how it should work.
Gathering funding and peer approbation is a vital and time consuming part of research, unless you want to perform your research in your garage living on welfare.
I have a real story for you. In the XIXth century, Marcelin Berthelot created the bases of industrial organic chemistery, as a consequence, he became rather rich and very respected in the academic field. Too bad he didn't believe in the emerging theories of thermodynamics because he hused a lot of his influence to prevent many french students who explored this new branch from getting their PhD. We'll never know how many of those would have been great scientists, but they ended up teaching in high school not because their work wasn't genuinely good, but simply because of an old arrogant man and politics.
This story was told to me by Berthelot's grandson, who BTW, also teaches in high school.
"pro-gay marraige: I would split what we call "marriage" it into civil and religious components - for everyone. A civil-union for the legal/tax/estate stuff, and marriage for the religious stuff - if your religion supports you. Everyone, gay or straight gets one, the other or both. "
In France, we have the PACS (PActe Civil de Solidarite), the legal marriage (both performed at the town hall) and the optional religious marriage (performed at any place you like, it has no legal value anyway). The PACS allows the couple to be legally treated just like a married couple for a lot of things (adoption is a notable and sensitive exception), but can be easily broken and doesn't necessarily imply sex (people of the same sex and even siblings can form PACS for the sole purpose of mutual legal protection in case one would die). Anyway, because of the easy breakup, many people who could perform a regular marriage sign a PACS instead (they form the majority of the PACS couples) and many people who want to marry anyway sign one too when they engage to benefit of the mutual protection. So it was initially created mostly for gay couples, but many more people benefit from it and very few people are against it because it is not a real "gay marriage".
"pro-flag burning: Seriously, what's the argument here? You can buy US flag underwear. People die protecting our rights, including free-expression. You don't like someone buring a flag, too bad - move to N Korea - bet you can't burn a flag there. I argue that the US is great *because* we can burn our flag. "
That's something I always wondered. Why are most the people vocal about not burning a flag the descendants of people who fought a war against it or people who used to burn crosses? Am I mistaking or do these people place their religion a least at the same priority as their country?
And I wonder how would you feel, as an educated Muslim, if a science-bashing and socially retrograd taliban preacher was to make a speach in your university without anyone being allowed to contradict him?
Mr Ratzinger shows everyday that he oppose scientific and social progress anytime he can, in Itally, he has an almost unlimited access to media and has an agressive influence over the elected government. He also gave a lot of power to extremists groups such as the Opus Dei, that JP II had more or less managed to refrain. He is not just a scholar (and not the scientific kind), he his the wrong person at the right place that gives all the Roman Catholic Church a bad name.
Maybe he uses a logic similar of the one expressed by Pascal, who basically says that people should believe because it could bring them a potential personnal gain. Personally, if a god do actually exists and rewards hypocrisy over integrity, then bugger off, he doesn't deserve to be MY god! Otherwise, I don't know and I don't care.
I know someone who works for a large medical delivery service, his job is to deliver drugs to several pharmacies twice a day, mostly in dense urban area. His boss has a program that defines the expected delivery time by taking the theorical maximal speed of the route, not even taking into account the normal trafic slowing elements such as stops and red lights. The driver's only way to avoid doing too much unpaid overtime (and be blamed for deliverling later than the planned hour) is to speed anytime they can. Conclusion: lots of them cause accidents and it costs the compagny a fortune.
You're too optimistic. No matter how hard you set the threshold, you'll always find people willing to ruin their health just to keep a shitty job. Plus, bad product is always caused by bad employees, never by bad management.
From experience, I'd say the only employee feedback that the HR directors understand well is waiting for them in the parking lot with a mask and a baseball bat, preferably with dozen of coworkers so you benefit from the emulation.
Given the HR practices in some places I've worked, I'd say that anyone who is not in the red will be tagged "lazy bastard, find any reason to fire him ASAP". And I'm dead serious, leaving the building to do some sport during lunchbreak was almost on par with being drunk on the job and I've seen someone being fired for showing up at 9H15 instead of 9H00 (the fact that he worked 4H of unpaid overtime the night before to cope with a last minute issue was obviously not on the same ground as the 1/4H he stole from the corp).
Everytime I was into an out of office "bonding activities", it was organised by management and ultimately revolved around office politics. You definitely can't enjoy meeting your coworkers outside work when your main concious though is to not going postal on those weasels.
No kidding, fresh out of school, I applied for one of those specialized 5+ years jobs. 3 days after mailing my (very short) resume, I was called to meet the project leader, who had only 5 min to run the interview. The wole interview was more or less: Him- It's an embedded driver coding job for mobiles phones. Do you know C? Me- Yes, also C++. Him- We don't use C++, assembly? Me- introduction course, on 68000. Him- We're using ARM. Do you know real time? Me- No. Him- GSM? Me- No.
The next day, he called me to begin the next monday for more money than I was expecting and I worked for him for 3 years and over 20 project deadlines. Overall, it's been a wonderfull first experience.
Thinking of it, there could be a working protection from antimatter: if the cloud is ionized, an containment magnetic field could keep those nasty particules away in the same way it keeps the superhot gas far from the hull of a fusion reactor. But if there are anti-neutron or anti-H2 in the gas, you're toast.
Well, there is doublt, and common sense. I could shoot you in the head and tell the judge that your death is not related in any way and that he should let me go. Antimatter does not spontaneously form inside regular matter galaxies be magic, you need extremely high energy to produce matter-antimatter pairs and particular conditions to separate them before they recombine. The binary system with a black hole that shares the same geometry is simply almost infinitely more plausible source than the void beside.
The existence of such a cloud can only be explained by the massive creation of antimatter (there is most likely also the same amount of regular matter produced but it is probably cast the other way by an electric or magnetic field) that eventualy cleaned a portion of space of all regular matter. Puting any kind of matter into that cloud will result in particule-corresponding antiparticlue reaction into very high energy photon (gamma radiation). If an hypothetical spaceship entered the cloud, I don't know if it will be changed into pure energy almost instantly or not (the violent reaction at the surface of the hull will probably push back the antimatter cloud, and you need the same mass of antimatter to totally disintegrate the introduced matter) but it will be like putting it into a fusion reactor so the crew would die very fast anyway.
I don't know i it is done that way, but you could define the north and south sides of a galaxy (or any rotating object) by looking in which way it rotates around its axe.
It's more expensive because you have to pay those people to count the votes. It's slower because you have to give those people time to count the votes."
Well, of course, if you live in a corporate owned country. In my country, the process is free and rather fast (over 90% done within 2H) because the poll is done on a sunday (sothat people have more facility to go voting) and about 5% of the voters of each bureau volunteer (like in taking pride in being a part of a democratic process, not like being a greedy mercenary) to participate in the count (the count is performed by tables of 4 randomly-paired persons checking each other + other persons walking between the tables, so the risk of unnoticed wrongdoing is very slim)
Slashdot Mirror
At the time, the french title was "l'homme qui vallait 3 miliars", but now, it would only be slighly more than 4 million euros, basicaly only slightly more than the TCO of a regular soldier or policeman.
So they manage to build a pair of molecules that can be sucessfully copied when put in a DNA helix, that's something worth publishing in a biochemistery journal, but I don't see how those new molecules could be interpreted by the cell to build new man-designed proteins. Wouldn't it be easier to use man-designed regular DNA sequences that the cell know how to interpret?
"BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?"
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=678
Proprioception Deficit Disorder is a disease where people lose the ability to "feel" their body. People suffering from this rare disease can't do things that seems natural to us without a lot of focus.
Well, in the first case, you're a proud american learning to protect his family, and in the second, you're a terrorist training on a murder simulator. Oops, I thought you were asking about moral differences, my bad.
I don't need any of those gadgets to ignore other people (although I own some of them), all you need is to be an insensitive clod.
But your paper airplaines don't encounter strong temperature gradients or supersonic shock waves. In such conditions, even having the sun illuminate one side of the plane and not the other one could significantly alter the trajectory of the plane, and I believe is what makes the experiment interesting: will the real course match the planned one?
While I agree your point might be true in 1% of the cases, the whole purpose of training and procedure is to be able to know what to do in some situations where most of the untrained people would panick and make mistakes or where the right choice can be counter-intuitive.
Your firefigher/snake example only shows lack of training and knowlegde of procedure for that particular situation, maybe he thought that the ER team would need it to chose the right antidote.
Of course, even the better trained people will eventually make mistakes and you can't train all firefighters or EMT-B (or whoever) to the level needed to optimally handle any situation they might get into, so yes, they sometimes need to stop for a second and think of what to do, but even in that case, the best tool they have to chose the right action is their experience of similar situations (and that includes training and theorical knowledge).
"It will be effectively impossible for anyone to debunk the research if it is genuinely good, because that's how science works."
No, that's how it should work.
Gathering funding and peer approbation is a vital and time consuming part of research, unless you want to perform your research in your garage living on welfare.
I have a real story for you. In the XIXth century, Marcelin Berthelot created the bases of industrial organic chemistery, as a consequence, he became rather rich and very respected in the academic field. Too bad he didn't believe in the emerging theories of thermodynamics because he hused a lot of his influence to prevent many french students who explored this new branch from getting their PhD. We'll never know how many of those would have been great scientists, but they ended up teaching in high school not because their work wasn't genuinely good, but simply because of an old arrogant man and politics.
This story was told to me by Berthelot's grandson, who BTW, also teaches in high school.
"pro-gay marraige: I would split what we call "marriage" it into civil and religious components - for everyone. A civil-union for the legal/tax/estate stuff, and marriage for the religious stuff - if your religion supports you. Everyone, gay or straight gets one, the other or both. "
In France, we have the PACS (PActe Civil de Solidarite), the legal marriage (both performed at the town hall) and the optional religious marriage (performed at any place you like, it has no legal value anyway). The PACS allows the couple to be legally treated just like a married couple for a lot of things (adoption is a notable and sensitive exception), but can be easily broken and doesn't necessarily imply sex (people of the same sex and even siblings can form PACS for the sole purpose of mutual legal protection in case one would die). Anyway, because of the easy breakup, many people who could perform a regular marriage sign a PACS instead (they form the majority of the PACS couples) and many people who want to marry anyway sign one too when they engage to benefit of the mutual protection.
So it was initially created mostly for gay couples, but many more people benefit from it and very few people are against it because it is not a real "gay marriage".
"pro-flag burning: Seriously, what's the argument here? You can buy US flag underwear. People die protecting our rights, including free-expression. You don't like someone buring a flag, too bad - move to N Korea - bet you can't burn a flag there. I argue that the US is great *because* we can burn our flag. "
That's something I always wondered. Why are most the people vocal about not burning a flag the descendants of people who fought a war against it or people who used to burn crosses? Am I mistaking or do these people place their religion a least at the same priority as their country?
And I wonder how would you feel, as an educated Muslim, if a science-bashing and socially retrograd taliban preacher was to make a speach in your university without anyone being allowed to contradict him?
Mr Ratzinger shows everyday that he oppose scientific and social progress anytime he can, in Itally, he has an almost unlimited access to media and has an agressive influence over the elected government. He also gave a lot of power to extremists groups such as the Opus Dei, that JP II had more or less managed to refrain. He is not just a scholar (and not the scientific kind), he his the wrong person at the right place that gives all the Roman Catholic Church a bad name.
Maybe he uses a logic similar of the one expressed by Pascal, who basically says that people should believe because it could bring them a potential personnal gain.
Personally, if a god do actually exists and rewards hypocrisy over integrity, then bugger off, he doesn't deserve to be MY god! Otherwise, I don't know and I don't care.
I know someone who works for a large medical delivery service, his job is to deliver drugs to several pharmacies twice a day, mostly in dense urban area. His boss has a program that defines the expected delivery time by taking the theorical maximal speed of the route, not even taking into account the normal trafic slowing elements such as stops and red lights. The driver's only way to avoid doing too much unpaid overtime (and be blamed for deliverling later than the planned hour) is to speed anytime they can. Conclusion: lots of them cause accidents and it costs the compagny a fortune.
You're too optimistic. No matter how hard you set the threshold, you'll always find people willing to ruin their health just to keep a shitty job. Plus, bad product is always caused by bad employees, never by bad management.
From experience, I'd say the only employee feedback that the HR directors understand well is waiting for them in the parking lot with a mask and a baseball bat, preferably with dozen of coworkers so you benefit from the emulation.
Given the HR practices in some places I've worked, I'd say that anyone who is not in the red will be tagged "lazy bastard, find any reason to fire him ASAP". And I'm dead serious, leaving the building to do some sport during lunchbreak was almost on par with being drunk on the job and I've seen someone being fired for showing up at 9H15 instead of 9H00 (the fact that he worked 4H of unpaid overtime the night before to cope with a last minute issue was obviously not on the same ground as the 1/4H he stole from the corp).
That's why the UK government leaked all those sensitive data about half of their subjects a few mounthes ago.
"Being smart considered embarrassing to those who aren't."
Well, that one is so obvious it's got to be wrong.
Everytime I was into an out of office "bonding activities", it was organised by management and ultimately revolved around office politics. You definitely can't enjoy meeting your coworkers outside work when your main concious though is to not going postal on those weasels.
Pictures of Pinto are OK, but Wes Craven owns the pictures of former Pinto owners.
No kidding, fresh out of school, I applied for one of those specialized 5+ years jobs. 3 days after mailing my (very short) resume, I was called to meet the project leader, who had only 5 min to run the interview. The wole interview was more or less:
Him- It's an embedded driver coding job for mobiles phones. Do you know C?
Me- Yes, also C++.
Him- We don't use C++, assembly?
Me- introduction course, on 68000.
Him- We're using ARM. Do you know real time?
Me- No.
Him- GSM?
Me- No.
The next day, he called me to begin the next monday for more money than I was expecting and I worked for him for 3 years and over 20 project deadlines. Overall, it's been a wonderfull first experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineutron
Thinking of it, there could be a working protection from antimatter: if the cloud is ionized, an containment magnetic field could keep those nasty particules away in the same way it keeps the superhot gas far from the hull of a fusion reactor. But if there are anti-neutron or anti-H2 in the gas, you're toast.
Well, there is doublt, and common sense. I could shoot you in the head and tell the judge that your death is not related in any way and that he should let me go.
Antimatter does not spontaneously form inside regular matter galaxies be magic, you need extremely high energy to produce matter-antimatter pairs and particular conditions to separate them before they recombine. The binary system with a black hole that shares the same geometry is simply almost infinitely more plausible source than the void beside.
No (it's way too far way) and yes.
The existence of such a cloud can only be explained by the massive creation of antimatter (there is most likely also the same amount of regular matter produced but it is probably cast the other way by an electric or magnetic field) that eventualy cleaned a portion of space of all regular matter. Puting any kind of matter into that cloud will result in particule-corresponding antiparticlue reaction into very high energy photon (gamma radiation). If an hypothetical spaceship entered the cloud, I don't know if it will be changed into pure energy almost instantly or not (the violent reaction at the surface of the hull will probably push back the antimatter cloud, and you need the same mass of antimatter to totally disintegrate the introduced matter) but it will be like putting it into a fusion reactor so the crew would die very fast anyway.
I don't know i it is done that way, but you could define the north and south sides of a galaxy (or any rotating object) by looking in which way it rotates around its axe.
"The downside:
It's more expensive because you have to pay those people to count the votes.
It's slower because you have to give those people time to count the votes."
Well, of course, if you live in a corporate owned country. In my country, the process is free and rather fast (over 90% done within 2H) because the poll is done on a sunday (sothat people have more facility to go voting) and about 5% of the voters of each bureau volunteer (like in taking pride in being a part of a democratic process, not like being a greedy mercenary) to participate in the count (the count is performed by tables of 4 randomly-paired persons checking each other + other persons walking between the tables, so the risk of unnoticed wrongdoing is very slim)