The search for dark matter seems a bit like the search for the ether. Not that MOND is necessarily correct because it's the simplest solution, but that often seems to be the case. What's the current opinion on dark matter vs MOND?
Now I'm fairly sure all mice aren't born diabetic, so what did they do to the ones they studied to make them ill? This seems absent from the article. Or, if it's not known for this piece of research, how do they usually make mice diabetic?
I've always had a theory that one of the main purposes of sleep is to reduce energy useage. Humans can't hunt at night, or do pretty much anything of any use, so we might as well conserve energy. A similar logic applies to many other predators (owls are awake at night because so is their prey) and diurnal herbivores I can think of. Every animal has a reason to prefer being active either during the day or night, so they gain a huge advantage by conserving energy the rest of the time.
Of course, IANA biologist. Is this a plausible theory? I've never seen it written down.
Isn't it enough that something works right out of the box? Sure, I could buy an Apple/Mac and it would work, but I'd have to live without right-click.
I can't tell if that was sarcasm or not! I've been using right-click happily for ages, probably since OS X 10.0 came out, which is what 5/6 years ago? Not to mention the other 4 buttons I've got set up to control expose and the dashboard. In fact I wouldn't consider using a mac with less than 8 buttons on the mouse.
"...The [free range organic] birds had a much more pleasant and happy life" is an understatement. One of the most disturbing things about intensively-reared chicken is that it is killed while still technically an infant. The huge amount of growth hormones they are injected with causes them to reach near adult size before maturity. This is one reason why the ratio of organic cost : non-organic cost is so much higher for chicken than other meats.
In most cases, you are correct, and if I put your quote back in context of your comment, you are correct. However, there are still some circumstances where meat wins, such as on very steep hillsides, etc. where the animals are able to feed themselves through grazing on land unsuitable for growing grain.
I'm glad someone raised this - I was about to make the point myself. The world has far more pastoral land than arable land. There is also the small issue that COW ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT GRAINS! Cows are ruminants, designed to eat grass. Feeding them grains makes them sick and makes the quality of the meat worse, which renders the exercise at best pointless.
Off-topic bit follows:)
I'm not fond of the Atkins diet, despite eating a diet myself that often could pass as a valid Atkins (I don't specifically restrict my carbohydrate intake, but it often ends up low anyway as sugary/starchy foods don't agree with me). Atkins turns people into mindless carb-counters, with no concept of what or how much they should be eating, besides getting a single variable below a certain value. For an interesting look at the composition of a natural diet in line with my opinions above, look at this article on native Americans: Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans
Anyway.... Someday we will get another major pandemic, and yes our modern industrial livestock methods will contribute some to it. But they popped up before and will still pop up if we abandoned it. The question for debate is: are the potential savings from lowering the odds of a pandenic worth the certain loss of life from famine and all it's attendant problems that would result from losing the food production capacity gained from industrialization.
Industrialised food production is not the miracle it seems. I remember reading a good while ago about a country in Africa that suffered several years of running drought, and the only way for many people to survive was to revert to the diet of the local bushmen. The thirsty arable crops relied on more water than the environment could reliably supply, and when the rain stopped, people died. Those (few) still eating an indigenous diet were unaffected, because the plants and animals they ate were adapted to the local arid climate. I can't remember who the article described - I *think* it was the San, which would place this around Botswana.
Natural systems have cycles of hunger and plenty, but humans invented famine. We take too much from the land, and keep taking until it has been depleted completely. This low cost of this food is an illusion - the land eventually gets back what we took when we die of starvation.
Most dog breeds are already seriously dysfunctional. In humans, inbreeding is considered bad/disgusting/immoral. But an inbred dog is showhow elevated by its defective genes. It's amazing how ignorant people become when they are dazzled by things they think buy them status.
As a side note, has anyone considered that if someone is allergic to cats, they just shouldn't keep them??? I have a milk intolerance- so I don't drink milk! It's really simple! The cure is permanent and free! But you can't make money out of free cures, and as usual someone has found an alternative that involves spending huge sums of money on a partial improvement. The possibility that these cats will all die of some horrible genetic disease is pretty irrelevant to the breeders. They are, in any caes, just taking advantage of our obsessive desire to spend money to avoid the simple truth.
Well thank you for being the first person to post a sensible reply and not FETCH THE STAKE AND FIRE!!!:)
However, not all of our evolution is due to human genes. Some of those genes came from retroviruses and got stuck in the genome. Other genes confer a defensive capability against certain diseases, but require a normal 2nd copy otherwise they cause a disease
I wish I had more understanding of genetics than I do. Sickle cell anaemia is the only disease I can name that has a demonstrated beneficial side-effect (I suppose "disease" is the pessemistic name for it.)
Cystic Fibrosis may have evolved into the genepool in this fashion.
Unfortunately I don't have time to read the whole CF article right now. But I note it says that "the F508 mutation is estimated to be up to 52,000 years old", and then questions how it survived so long (~2000 generations?). The explanation I believe is often known as the "discordance theory", the idea that diseases associated with the "faulty" genes only manifest when the environment varies significantly than the one the gene evolved (mutated/was assimilated) in.
What people fail to see is that our modern diet is DRASTICALLY different from the one we evolved to eat. We fail to see this for the same reason the Egyptians thought that water was something that only flowed north: we've never seen anything different. What doctors call a "healthy" diet is, compared to a modern "unhealthy" diet, equivalent to water flowing NNNW instead of due N, whereas what I consider a healthy diet (primarily meat and veg, excluding a few suspect plants we eat much too often) is more like water flowing due E. Hence the futility of most research into disease which over-examines the effects of under-important factors.
If you want to see some startling examples of dietary treatments, find a copy of "Not All In The Mind" by Richard Mackarness. His main focus is mental illness, but most of the concepts can be extrapolated to any type of degenerative disease. If research this conclusive had been presented about anything BUT food, it would have spread the scientific world like wildfire. However, the situation we are in would be akin to research on lung cancer being carried out entirely by smokers, who have a personal (emotional) incentive to find it harmless.
This longevity takes us into the realm of where genetic mutations causing cancer have their biggest effects and also the things you mentioned, such as heart disease.
Just as an example, testicular cancer is most common in 15-30 year old males, ie during peak reproductive years. Did natural selection overlook this? There are many more diseases that are common even earlier, that kill before puberty. There is no sensible way that millions of years of human evolution could have left genes that cause these diseases in the pool, as for 99% of our time on this planet we have not had the drugs and surgery that (sometimes) extend sufferer's lives long enough to have children.
Umm, No that is completely and totally incorrect. However "We and our Pets" are the only ones DIAGNOSED and TREATED for any of these conditions. The wild animals that suffer from these problems all DIE and are EATEN by predators or scavengers.
Explain then, how the Innuit of Greenland lived for hundreds of generations free of heart disease eating essentially the same way as (for example) polar bears - almost nothing but the fatty bits of meat of animals they killed. Heart disease only appeared in their population when they encountered western refined foods made from flour and sugar. The same thing has been observed with native americans and australians too.
Why is it that some people will believe the MOST RIDICULOUS things without doing a single bit of research on their own or even applying any CRITICAL LOGIC ???
I've done two years of research on this subject. If you want to see some of the evidence yourself, visit the website of the Western A Price foundation.
As for critical logic, consider this: untreated childhood diabetes, leukaemia etc kill before puberty. These people would not be able to reproduce. Therefore, if these diseases were purely genetic, they would be selected out of the gene pool - but they have not been.
The longer we spend trying to find what is wrong with US, as opposed to what is wrong with the crap we eat, drink and breathe is the biggest killer of all. Somehow though, doctors are oblivious to the fact that the only animals that get cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc are us, and our domesticated pets (and livestock, etc). And so they don't find it unusual that the most sucessful primate in the world has more built-in flaws than a pre-alpha build of Windows. Hang on a second!!! Doesn't evolution select the MOST fit?
And it's worth bearing in mind that iatrogenic deaths (from misdiagnosis, drug side effects, etc) rival those of heart disease and cancer anyway. So even assuming that current lifestyle advice from doctors is NOT the cause of the health crisis we are in, what do we do? If this research highlights the genetic "faults" inherent in all of us, the pharmaceuticals will be in a race to create drugs or gene therapy to mask these alleged flaws. Again - hang on a second!!! If you get rats in your house, do you release rattlesnakes to eat them?
I once heard that increased cancer screening could actually increase deaths due to unnecessary surgery, or other treatments, on benign tumours. I used to think that was crazy. But just consider what could happen if you can walk into a doctor's surgery, put drop of blood on a probe and be told that you should consider a preventative [insert favourite body part here]-ectomy to remove the ticking timebomb inside you.
Postgres may have more features and better support of SQL standards like transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc, but these are things that improve data integrity, not performance.
Data integrity is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. Without data integrity your data is next to worthless! Even if your data is disposable, like a blog, inconsistent data can cause applications to fail. If it's not disposable, like financial data of some sort, data integrity should be your number one concern.
MySQL would have to be an order of magnitude faster than Postgres for me to even consider using it as a backend for an application (which it isn't, of course). Even the recently implemented integrity features are flawed. Maybe with 5.1 MySQL will ressemble a useable database server.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw Milgrom on telly a while back, talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dy namics
The search for dark matter seems a bit like the search for the ether. Not that MOND is necessarily correct because it's the simplest solution, but that often seems to be the case. What's the current opinion on dark matter vs MOND?
Now I'm fairly sure all mice aren't born diabetic, so what did they do to the ones they studied to make them ill? This seems absent from the article. Or, if it's not known for this piece of research, how do they usually make mice diabetic?
What's changed since this?: Taxi drivers' brains 'grow' on the job
I've always had a theory that one of the main purposes of sleep is to reduce energy useage. Humans can't hunt at night, or do pretty much anything of any use, so we might as well conserve energy. A similar logic applies to many other predators (owls are awake at night because so is their prey) and diurnal herbivores I can think of. Every animal has a reason to prefer being active either during the day or night, so they gain a huge advantage by conserving energy the rest of the time.
Of course, IANA biologist. Is this a plausible theory? I've never seen it written down.
"...The [free range organic] birds had a much more pleasant and happy life" is an understatement. One of the most disturbing things about intensively-reared chicken is that it is killed while still technically an infant. The huge amount of growth hormones they are injected with causes them to reach near adult size before maturity. This is one reason why the ratio of organic cost : non-organic cost is so much higher for chicken than other meats.
I'm glad someone raised this - I was about to make the point myself. The world has far more pastoral land than arable land. There is also the small issue that COW ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT GRAINS! Cows are ruminants, designed to eat grass. Feeding them grains makes them sick and makes the quality of the meat worse, which renders the exercise at best pointless.
Off-topic bit follows :)
I'm not fond of the Atkins diet, despite eating a diet myself that often could pass as a valid Atkins (I don't specifically restrict my carbohydrate intake, but it often ends up low anyway as sugary/starchy foods don't agree with me). Atkins turns people into mindless carb-counters, with no concept of what or how much they should be eating, besides getting a single variable below a certain value. For an interesting look at the composition of a natural diet in line with my opinions above, look at this article on native Americans: Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans
Industrialised food production is not the miracle it seems. I remember reading a good while ago about a country in Africa that suffered several years of running drought, and the only way for many people to survive was to revert to the diet of the local bushmen. The thirsty arable crops relied on more water than the environment could reliably supply, and when the rain stopped, people died. Those (few) still eating an indigenous diet were unaffected, because the plants and animals they ate were adapted to the local arid climate. I can't remember who the article described - I *think* it was the San, which would place this around Botswana.
Natural systems have cycles of hunger and plenty, but humans invented famine. We take too much from the land, and keep taking until it has been depleted completely. This low cost of this food is an illusion - the land eventually gets back what we took when we die of starvation.
Most dog breeds are already seriously dysfunctional. In humans, inbreeding is considered bad/disgusting/immoral. But an inbred dog is showhow elevated by its defective genes. It's amazing how ignorant people become when they are dazzled by things they think buy them status.
As a side note, has anyone considered that if someone is allergic to cats, they just shouldn't keep them??? I have a milk intolerance- so I don't drink milk! It's really simple! The cure is permanent and free! But you can't make money out of free cures, and as usual someone has found an alternative that involves spending huge sums of money on a partial improvement. The possibility that these cats will all die of some horrible genetic disease is pretty irrelevant to the breeders. They are, in any caes, just taking advantage of our obsessive desire to spend money to avoid the simple truth.
Well thank you for being the first person to post a sensible reply and not FETCH THE STAKE AND FIRE!!! :)
I wish I had more understanding of genetics than I do. Sickle cell anaemia is the only disease I can name that has a demonstrated beneficial side-effect (I suppose "disease" is the pessemistic name for it.)
Unfortunately I don't have time to read the whole CF article right now. But I note it says that "the F508 mutation is estimated to be up to 52,000 years old", and then questions how it survived so long (~2000 generations?). The explanation I believe is often known as the "discordance theory", the idea that diseases associated with the "faulty" genes only manifest when the environment varies significantly than the one the gene evolved (mutated/was assimilated) in.
What people fail to see is that our modern diet is DRASTICALLY different from the one we evolved to eat. We fail to see this for the same reason the Egyptians thought that water was something that only flowed north: we've never seen anything different. What doctors call a "healthy" diet is, compared to a modern "unhealthy" diet, equivalent to water flowing NNNW instead of due N, whereas what I consider a healthy diet (primarily meat and veg, excluding a few suspect plants we eat much too often) is more like water flowing due E. Hence the futility of most research into disease which over-examines the effects of under-important factors.
If you want to see some startling examples of dietary treatments, find a copy of "Not All In The Mind" by Richard Mackarness. His main focus is mental illness, but most of the concepts can be extrapolated to any type of degenerative disease. If research this conclusive had been presented about anything BUT food, it would have spread the scientific world like wildfire. However, the situation we are in would be akin to research on lung cancer being carried out entirely by smokers, who have a personal (emotional) incentive to find it harmless.
Just as an example, testicular cancer is most common in 15-30 year old males, ie during peak reproductive years. Did natural selection overlook this? There are many more diseases that are common even earlier, that kill before puberty. There is no sensible way that millions of years of human evolution could have left genes that cause these diseases in the pool, as for 99% of our time on this planet we have not had the drugs and surgery that (sometimes) extend sufferer's lives long enough to have children.
Explain then, how the Innuit of Greenland lived for hundreds of generations free of heart disease eating essentially the same way as (for example) polar bears - almost nothing but the fatty bits of meat of animals they killed. Heart disease only appeared in their population when they encountered western refined foods made from flour and sugar. The same thing has been observed with native americans and australians too.
I've done two years of research on this subject. If you want to see some of the evidence yourself, visit the website of the Western A Price foundation.
As for critical logic, consider this: untreated childhood diabetes, leukaemia etc kill before puberty. These people would not be able to reproduce. Therefore, if these diseases were purely genetic, they would be selected out of the gene pool - but they have not been.
The longer we spend trying to find what is wrong with US, as opposed to what is wrong with the crap we eat, drink and breathe is the biggest killer of all. Somehow though, doctors are oblivious to the fact that the only animals that get cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc are us, and our domesticated pets (and livestock, etc). And so they don't find it unusual that the most sucessful primate in the world has more built-in flaws than a pre-alpha build of Windows. Hang on a second!!! Doesn't evolution select the MOST fit?
And it's worth bearing in mind that iatrogenic deaths (from misdiagnosis, drug side effects, etc) rival those of heart disease and cancer anyway. So even assuming that current lifestyle advice from doctors is NOT the cause of the health crisis we are in, what do we do? If this research highlights the genetic "faults" inherent in all of us, the pharmaceuticals will be in a race to create drugs or gene therapy to mask these alleged flaws. Again - hang on a second!!! If you get rats in your house, do you release rattlesnakes to eat them?
I once heard that increased cancer screening could actually increase deaths due to unnecessary surgery, or other treatments, on benign tumours. I used to think that was crazy. But just consider what could happen if you can walk into a doctor's surgery, put drop of blood on a probe and be told that you should consider a preventative [insert favourite body part here]-ectomy to remove the ticking timebomb inside you.
Postgres may have more features and better support of SQL standards like transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc, but these are things that improve data integrity, not performance.
Data integrity is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. Without data integrity your data is next to worthless! Even if your data is disposable, like a blog, inconsistent data can cause applications to fail. If it's not disposable, like financial data of some sort, data integrity should be your number one concern.
MySQL would have to be an order of magnitude faster than Postgres for me to even consider using it as a backend for an application (which it isn't, of course). Even the recently implemented integrity features are flawed. Maybe with 5.1 MySQL will ressemble a useable database server.