This is pretty offtopic, but in response to your comment about the "beautiful" Aqua, I have to disagree. The great part about X interfaces is that most of them enable you to make it look pretty well exactly the way you want. Granted, out of the box, Aqua's better looking than the default Gnome UI. But do you really think the non-flush dock is attractive? I did for a while, but now, I just think it's shitty design. It doesn't go all the way to the edges, and it's hideous! Window Maker and other OpenStep-type themes are waay better looking!!
And isn't it correct that one of the defining pieces of information on a black hole (from an astronomical viewpoint) is that they emit gamma radiation? Does this fall into the field we're discussing, or spontaneous matter creation?
Well, it's been a few years since I left the lab, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't there already machinery in place which at development and later extends the telomeres with C repeats?
I can see me smearing on a gel of that sort of stuff and having a big milkshake every week..
But now we're getting silly. You're right, there's alot of barriers. The interesting thing with cloning is that we're realising some things we thought were important, like the telomere issue, aren't quite so important. And some issues maybe are. Bloated fat mice, anyone?
Well, Ebola is certainly not one of the smarter ones. HIV is infinitely smarter, because not only does it target certain cells, it's a slow developer, thus being able to spread much further.
What makes it smart is more its method of transport than anything else: being a retrovirus, it has a nasty 'cloaking' mechanism of encapsulating itself within its host's cell membrane, thus making itself appear 'local'.
What makes a virus smart isn't how good it is at killing cells, but how good it is at reproducing. Turning on a viral promoter for programmed cell death will just kill, kill, kill. It's not going to spread very far now, is it?
Well, it's a possible way to keep killing all the cells harbouring nasties before they spread, and of killing of malignant tumours. If nothing else kills you, cancer will - it's basically cells malfunctioning, so it's a product of age. If you can control a great extent of illnesses with it, which you could if the targeting was perfected, you've got the cure to all disease.
All you've gotta do then is convince all the good cells to keep reproducing. Though the AIF probably controls the Hayflick number, so you can probably beat that too.
You're only half wrong. You can't kill the cells directly. But if you can quickly kill the cells which are harbouring the virus quickly, then you can stop it reproducing.
Cells have this clever way of grabbing parts of the viral capsids you've described and displaying them on the cell membrane, their surface. So what you do is program a virus with your AIF, then culture that virus within your patient's cells. if it's the right kind of virus (bear with me here, I'm skipping two years of college biology to explain this quickly) you get a virus which is encapsulated in your own cell membrane, and will be accepted by other cells.
Now, in a method as-yet not determined, you get the virus to target cells with the viral fragments on the surface. The custom made virus then infects these cells, and quickly exterminates them, thus your virus won't keep spreading.
Please bear in mind that this is really science fiction - but there are biological entities which perform all of the above. Give protein function and viral vectors fifty years and I would expect this to be a valid reality.
Absolutely agreed. The arguments that most CS or even "it" grads give is based on the concept of "applied science." This is a loose description of Engineering in most people's language. Unfortunately, I remain doubtful of this. Engineers operate in a world with rules, but not all of those rules are understood. The rules of an operating environment such as a language or even defined hardware are pretty nailed down.
Don't consider this flamebait, but there's little more "applied science" in programming one language for one or two platforms than there is in baking a cake. There's a bunch of rules and a relatively defined environment. The reason I bring up a domestic activity like cooking is that the "scientific method", or "check and test" is equally well argued in making something new of any sort. I think the phrase "scientific" needs a slightly better meaning than simply a method whereby you don't accept that donig somethign one way is necessarily the best way.
It is is, if voice it puts out, it puts out, it is it is not, the SCE. Generally, making the Linux of enviroment for software development and passing, the GPL kernel using therefore the é it is, when releasing, you wrapped, becoming matter of concern, hurting, it does, don't you think?. Voice just it puts out how, with Internet the proudest thing. The which pulled out this speech á it is, it started learning political power, well. Originally, there was a knowledge, however probably will be. Saying the night it is made, also Soichiro Honda emphasizing the importance of the party in the book, it increased history.
What has it got to do with energy?? Nothing! It's got to do with the after-effects of radiation that lasts for several million years (or thousands if we're lucky) and the destruction of our ability to receive sunlight on earth!
And if the entire explosion was in one place, it might not be so bad. If it's distributed over a hemisphere, which it ould be, it's far worse! The wind can't blow it away when there's nowhere for it to go.
Justify that. Why do we lack the ability? Ending your comment with a one-liner doesn't make you smart, it makes us think your argument is probably too weak to type.
Cloning has got kinda confused with Stem Cell Research lately. The point of stem cells should be that they can take any one of your cells and create a totipotent cell capable of turning into anything. The really cool part is, you don't have to do a full-organism clone to make them. You can in fact 'seed' a cartiligenous 'sculpture' of your organ with stem cells and grow a healthy new organ in it.
It's damn good technology, but probably won't help you. You're suffering from an endogenous retroviral superantigen reflex syndrome. Ok, all the words made sense, but I made up the biggest term I could think of. Anyhow, what you're after is probably far more dependent on the Genome projects, cause you'll probably find that, with your very own new organ, your immune system would just move in and kill the Pancreatic Beta cells anyhow. Bummer.
Once again, you're committing the cardinal sin of implying direction in evolution. WE ARE NEITHER BETTER NOR WORSE, WE ARE MERELY DIFFERENT.
Our backs probably were fine, yes. But that was more than likely when we didn't have heads bobbing around on top of them and hips below them. We are the way we are because of our ancestry.
This is put forward very simply in Fick's Law, which states "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny." This means, if you look at the life history of an organism, you can see a great deal of their eveolutionary ancestry reflected in their form. If you look at a week-old embryo, it had gills. If you look a bit later it looks a hell of alot like a lizard. Later, you can't tell the difference between a human and a pig. A chimp and a human, a human and a bonobo. You know how you looked at embryos when you were in High School and figured it was interesting how they all looked pretty similar? That's because older organisms are typically less specialised and have less complex structures. We came from those, and alot of our genes are similar or modified versions. So first, we look like them.
We were not born six thousand years ago with blonde hair and blue eyes throwing the discus to please the gods. We crawled our way out of the muck and the slime! We are forever in a race with the pathogens that prey on nothing because they are mindless and soulless. And little by little, we also become them. See New Scientists' story on endogenous Retroviruses.
There is no "better" or "worse", simply fitter, less fit, and luck.
Oh sure, I can easily see the next lot of set-top boxes running mailer daemons, but there's two problems:
Where does the namespace come from? I'm willing to bet we once again end up with the IP6 model and go geographic. This means, you end up with a street address as a domain name. No biggie, it'll probably happen once the judges make sure no domain names are ever recycled again anyway. And of course, doing this requires one hell of a dns server heirarchy. You'd probably find it'd have to be the same dumb heirarchy again.
Genetic Engineering: Because 2 billion years of evolution obviously got it wrong.
Again, someone's misunderstanding of evolution shows through. It's a hundred-year old concept, you'd think educated people would have a clue by now.
Evolution has no will. Evolution is non-directional and has no end goal. The thing which let us get all this way is not that we were the best evolved in any way, but that we were the most adaptive. Evolution can't get anything wrong because it can't get anything right.
As popular as it has become for physicists and the like - scientists with no biological training - to speculate on the meaning of life. realise that it is precisely true that Evolution is not God. It is a cast die.
Genetic engineering is precisely mimicking a process already present in nature - the transfer of genetic material by gene vectors. It's a tool of adaptation, and means that we are, again, adapting to situations without being locked into a particular skein of evolution.
To put it simply: If evolution supposedly got everything right, why do so many people have bad backs, and wisdom teeth problems? Because that's part of the toolset that got us here. Not what is perfect for the job right now. We've luckily learned how to build our own toolkit and that's going to be the greatest advantage of all.
Ideology is teriffic. If you know where your next meal is coming from.
There's also a widespread belief in the homeopathic and naturopath communities that shark cartilidge is good for cancer, sharks never having been found to get cancer.
I say erroneous because they can and do get cancer. We really need to stop believing that merely because something is bigger and stronger than us, that it has some kind of mystical powers. For Christ's sake, please stop chopping off tiger penises! Dam superstition has done a great deal to harm this planet.
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This is pretty offtopic, but in response to your comment about the "beautiful" Aqua, I have to disagree. The great part about X interfaces is that most of them enable you to make it look pretty well exactly the way you want. Granted, out of the box, Aqua's better looking than the default Gnome UI. But do you really think the non-flush dock is attractive? I did for a while, but now, I just think it's shitty design. It doesn't go all the way to the edges, and it's hideous! Window Maker and other OpenStep-type themes are waay better looking!!
And isn't it correct that one of the defining pieces of information on a black hole (from an astronomical viewpoint) is that they emit gamma radiation? Does this fall into the field we're discussing, or spontaneous matter creation?
Well, it's been a few years since I left the lab, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't there already machinery in place which at development and later extends the telomeres with C repeats?
I can see me smearing on a gel of that sort of stuff and having a big milkshake every week..
But now we're getting silly. You're right, there's alot of barriers. The interesting thing with cloning is that we're realising some things we thought were important, like the telomere issue, aren't quite so important. And some issues maybe are. Bloated fat mice, anyone?
Well, Ebola is certainly not one of the smarter ones. HIV is infinitely smarter, because not only does it target certain cells, it's a slow developer, thus being able to spread much further.
What makes it smart is more its method of transport than anything else: being a retrovirus, it has a nasty 'cloaking' mechanism of encapsulating itself within its host's cell membrane, thus making itself appear 'local'.
What makes a virus smart isn't how good it is at killing cells, but how good it is at reproducing. Turning on a viral promoter for programmed cell death will just kill, kill, kill. It's not going to spread very far now, is it?
You mean like clicking on "start" to shut you computer down???
Yeah, it's not unix, but it's not a big deal to trash your disk, man. It even kinda makes sense. Sheesh.
Well, it's a possible way to keep killing all the cells harbouring nasties before they spread, and of killing of malignant tumours. If nothing else kills you, cancer will - it's basically cells malfunctioning, so it's a product of age. If you can control a great extent of illnesses with it, which you could if the targeting was perfected, you've got the cure to all disease.
All you've gotta do then is convince all the good cells to keep reproducing. Though the AIF probably controls the Hayflick number, so you can probably beat that too.
Sounds alot like a recipe for immortality to me.
You're only half wrong. You can't kill the cells directly. But if you can quickly kill the cells which are harbouring the virus quickly, then you can stop it reproducing.
Cells have this clever way of grabbing parts of the viral capsids you've described and displaying them on the cell membrane, their surface. So what you do is program a virus with your AIF, then culture that virus within your patient's cells. if it's the right kind of virus (bear with me here, I'm skipping two years of college biology to explain this quickly) you get a virus which is encapsulated in your own cell membrane, and will be accepted by other cells.
Now, in a method as-yet not determined, you get the virus to target cells with the viral fragments on the surface. The custom made virus then infects these cells, and quickly exterminates them, thus your virus won't keep spreading.
Please bear in mind that this is really science fiction - but there are biological entities which perform all of the above. Give protein function and viral vectors fifty years and I would expect this to be a valid reality.
*Sigh.* It does not, it kills them.
Uh, viruses use the cellular machinery of the host to reproduce.
Dead cell = no more viruses. This would have to be the dumbest virus ever.
Absolutely agreed. The arguments that most CS or even "it" grads give is based on the concept of "applied science." This is a loose description of Engineering in most people's language. Unfortunately, I remain doubtful of this. Engineers operate in a world with rules, but not all of those rules are understood. The rules of an operating environment such as a language or even defined hardware are pretty nailed down.
Don't consider this flamebait, but there's little more "applied science" in programming one language for one or two platforms than there is in baking a cake. There's a bunch of rules and a relatively defined environment. The reason I bring up a domestic activity like cooking is that the "scientific method", or "check and test" is equally well argued in making something new of any sort. I think the phrase "scientific" needs a slightly better meaning than simply a method whereby you don't accept that donig somethign one way is necessarily the best way.
Dude, that's a fucked up sig!
Deep Blue did beat him, as I recall. But it was best of three and he wasted it in the next two games.
I don't actually know if Deeper Blue ever played him.
Course I could be wrong..
It is is, if voice it puts out, it puts out, it is it is not, the SCE. Generally, making the Linux of enviroment for software development and passing, the GPL kernel using therefore the é it is, when releasing, you wrapped, becoming matter of concern, hurting, it does, don't you think?. Voice just it puts out how, with Internet the proudest thing. The which pulled out this speech á it is, it started learning political power, well. Originally, there was a knowledge, however probably will be. Saying the night it is made, also Soichiro Honda emphasizing the importance of the party in the book, it increased history.
You're kidding, right?
Well what about those of us that would like a cheap alternative to an SGI workstation to develop 3d on? Sounds like a killer machine for it to me!
Maya's out too, though right? And what else do you need? Well, except for a second mortgage..
Thassit.
Yes, um, New Zealand thanks you:) It's nice to know we're so well thought of, but please don't make out like we've got no imaginations.
Anyhow, the email I saw was that we were all to list ourselves as "Seekers of Punani."
Here's the point: Yes, you're right. But if we're reduced to extraordinary bacteria, I don't think argyments like this well have meant much to them.
What has it got to do with energy?? Nothing! It's got to do with the after-effects of radiation that lasts for several million years (or thousands if we're lucky) and the destruction of our ability to receive sunlight on earth!
And if the entire explosion was in one place, it might not be so bad. If it's distributed over a hemisphere, which it ould be, it's far worse! The wind can't blow it away when there's nowhere for it to go.
Justify that. Why do we lack the ability? Ending your comment with a one-liner doesn't make you smart, it makes us think your argument is probably too weak to type.
Cloning has got kinda confused with Stem Cell Research lately. The point of stem cells should be that they can take any one of your cells and create a totipotent cell capable of turning into anything. The really cool part is, you don't have to do a full-organism clone to make them. You can in fact 'seed' a cartiligenous 'sculpture' of your organ with stem cells and grow a healthy new organ in it.
It's damn good technology, but probably won't help you. You're suffering from an endogenous retroviral superantigen reflex syndrome. Ok, all the words made sense, but I made up the biggest term I could think of. Anyhow, what you're after is probably far more dependent on the Genome projects, cause you'll probably find that, with your very own new organ, your immune system would just move in and kill the Pancreatic Beta cells anyhow. Bummer.
Once again, you're committing the cardinal sin of implying direction in evolution. WE ARE NEITHER BETTER NOR WORSE, WE ARE MERELY DIFFERENT.
Our backs probably were fine, yes. But that was more than likely when we didn't have heads bobbing around on top of them and hips below them. We are the way we are because of our ancestry.
This is put forward very simply in Fick's Law, which states "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny." This means, if you look at the life history of an organism, you can see a great deal of their eveolutionary ancestry reflected in their form. If you look at a week-old embryo, it had gills. If you look a bit later it looks a hell of alot like a lizard. Later, you can't tell the difference between a human and a pig. A chimp and a human, a human and a bonobo. You know how you looked at embryos when you were in High School and figured it was interesting how they all looked pretty similar? That's because older organisms are typically less specialised and have less complex structures. We came from those, and alot of our genes are similar or modified versions. So first, we look like them.
We were not born six thousand years ago with blonde hair and blue eyes throwing the discus to please the gods. We crawled our way out of the muck and the slime! We are forever in a race with the pathogens that prey on nothing because they are mindless and soulless. And little by little, we also become them. See New Scientists' story on endogenous Retroviruses.
There is no "better" or "worse", simply fitter, less fit, and luck.
Oh sure, I can easily see the next lot of set-top boxes running mailer daemons, but there's two problems:
Again, someone's misunderstanding of evolution shows through. It's a hundred-year old concept, you'd think educated people would have a clue by now.
Evolution has no will. Evolution is non-directional and has no end goal. The thing which let us get all this way is not that we were the best evolved in any way, but that we were the most adaptive. Evolution can't get anything wrong because it can't get anything right.
As popular as it has become for physicists and the like - scientists with no biological training - to speculate on the meaning of life. realise that it is precisely true that Evolution is not God. It is a cast die.
Genetic engineering is precisely mimicking a process already present in nature - the transfer of genetic material by gene vectors. It's a tool of adaptation, and means that we are, again, adapting to situations without being locked into a particular skein of evolution.
To put it simply: If evolution supposedly got everything right, why do so many people have bad backs, and wisdom teeth problems? Because that's part of the toolset that got us here. Not what is perfect for the job right now. We've luckily learned how to build our own toolkit and that's going to be the greatest advantage of all.
Ideology is teriffic. If you know where your next meal is coming from.
There's also a widespread belief in the homeopathic and naturopath communities that shark cartilidge is good for cancer, sharks never having been found to get cancer.
I say erroneous because they can and do get cancer. We really need to stop believing that merely because something is bigger and stronger than us, that it has some kind of mystical powers. For Christ's sake, please stop chopping off tiger penises! Dam superstition has done a great deal to harm this planet.