Actually, one of the main uses of genetic engineering so far is to make plants produce poison. Or were you under the impression
that herbicides and pesticides were not poisonous?
Get a grip, man. Yes, herbicides and pesticides are poisons, but only to herbs and pests. Ever taken an antibiotic? Something like penicillin? Quite deadly to the staph. aurreus, or what ever bactirium was bothering you. I'm sure if they had a voice, these eucaryotes would scream Poison!, yet you ingest this poison voluntarily. Why? You are not a eucayote, nor are you an herb or a pest (YMMV).
Yes, there are serious concerns about geneticaly modified crops, and you even raise a couple of relevent points in your post. However, your opening paragraph paints you as an ignorant individual whose complaints are not to be taken seriously. This may or not be true, but either way
you hurt the cause.
Pick your battles. Know what it is you are fighting for.
Oh yeah, nothing's worse than those damn noisy Intel chips.
One needs to consider the intel chip and the fan together, as a system. Neither one, alone, is going to get much processing done for very long.
Of course, it is possible to move away from the atx form factor motherboard for x86 chips, towards a design which is more ammenable to keeping the die cool without a fan, but, until we do: yes, the chip (system) generates too much noise.
--
When your computer is louder than your refrigerator, you know you are in trouble.
This is all true if any putative health impact is caused by bulk heating of brain tissue. In other words, you have just effectively argued that if cell phone usage causes damage to brain, the mechanism is not bulk heating. This much seems obvious.
Biology, however, is often very subtle. It is possible that the RF energy from a cell phone could be interacting with brain in some more localized manner.
The normal way to answer a question such as: "does cell phone usage increase the risk for brain cancer?" is to run a study to check if people who use cell phones have a higher incedence than those who do not. If they dont, then there is probably no problem. If they do have more cancer, then one has (maybe) found a correlation between cell phone usage and cancer, but one can say nothing about causality ; maybe there are other differences which cause cell phone users to get more cancer than non-users.
Only after one was fairly certain that a causal relationship existed would one begin to test possible mechanisms. Of course, bulk heating would not be a likely mechanism, for the reasons you have pointed out.
The point is: Although what you say is true, it does not speak to the issue of whether or not cell phone usage can lead to cancer. It is non sequitor .
Personaly, I doubt that there is any health risk from cell phone usage, but I can not prove this.
It's also well known that sleep deprivation decreases life expectancy. Remember the DJ in 1959 who spent 200 hours on the air without any sleep. Then they found he was permanently brain damaged. He had increased brain activity all right but he was a vegetable. Ever since then when a radio station wanted to pull a stunt like that they had the DJ taking intermittant naps.
Do not forget that it is not possible to prove causality from one antecdotal data point.
Someone who could stay awake for 200 hours was probably not typical to begin with.
Of course you're right... I mean come on, anybody who has been sleep-deprived for a substantial period of time can testify that there is no worse feeling.
True story: I've been through officer training for a certain Army...
It is also interesting that that the 35 hours the subjects were kept awake is the typical length of a shift for a medical resident. Sleep deprevation has long been a part of medical training, although the reasons why are unclear. New York recently passed a law prohibiting it, though I have heard mixed reviews regarding its enforcement.
...To look any farther, you literally need tens of thousands of people to participate in a controlled, double blinded trial to get statistically significant data...
This is incorrect.
And I am off topic, so I will not go into much detail, but the basic point is that the benifits of increasing sample size are only O(root(N)). It is never necessary to sample "tens of thousands" of subjects to obtain statisticaly significant data.
It is unfortunate that this level of missunderstanding of stastics is so common in the US.
People see numbers, they think they mean something. Bah.
The New Scientist article is baffling because it seems to have things backwards. Our livers (in the unhappy event anyone is foolish enough to consume methanol - not ethanol) in fact convert methanol into formaldehyde and formic acid, not the other way round.
You are essentialy correct with regard to the action of alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver.
I know the article waves its hands and says, oh, the process is reversible. Maybe...
Nothing handwavy about it. Remember that enzymes are catalysts. They do not alter the energetics of a reaction, only the kinetics. ALL catalysts (enzymes) Increase the rate of reaction equaly in both directions. This is fundamental to the way the universe works. If you ever took a basic chemistry class, think back to something called Le Chatlier's Principle. As long as you keep the concentration of methanol low in the reaction vessel, there is no problem having the reaction proceed in a "backward" direction. Many, many,many reactions in the cells of your own body use the same enzymes to proceed in both directions, depending upon the imediate need. An obvious example comes to mind: carbonic anhydrase in red blood cells, which, in most tissue, catylizes the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into carbonic acid, and then in lung catylizes the reverse reaction of carboic acid into carbon dioxide and water. Nothing hand wavy about it. Another example involves most of the enzymes involved in glycolosis ("forward") and gluconeogenisis ("backward"). And so on and so on.
let's see - AM Radio... gives us - talk radio and spanish stations over really bad mono audio.
AM Radio also allows people who are not in line of sight of an FM transmitter to receive radio. Think of the worker who put the lettuce in your salad tonite; it may be his only contact with the world outside of the salinas valley. (think NPR--only in Spanish)
Be careful what you choose to trivialize.
PS yes, I know the issue is carrier frequency, not modulation scheme.
The notion of people reforming in prison is nice, but it just doesn't happen. Yes, you see the occasional article about it,which is exactly the point: it's so rare that it's newsworthy when it happens.
Recidivism is high, however, I have not seen a definitive model of causality WRT this. IMHO, there are probably structural reasons for the failure of the prison system to reform inmates. Perhaps the total cost to society would be reduced if somebody would take a serious look at this.
Prison renders criminals incapable of committing crimes for some period, and it punishes them. The criminals that do go straight usually do so because, in a moment of lucid thought, they realize that if they don't commit any more crimes, they don't have to go back! This is obvious to most of us, but a revelation to a large portion of the population in question.
I thought that there were four "R's" which guide the design of correctional institutions:
Restraint: Prevent them from comitting crimes while locked up.
Restitution: Pay for any physical or psychic harm which resulted from the crime.
Retribution (Retaliation): This covers the belief that someone who has done wrong should be punnished.
Rehabilitation: A person should come out of prison not wanting, nor needing to commit more crimes. This serves the incarcerated individual as well as society as a whole.
The "R" with the greatest potential for reducing costs for the average citizen is the one which you discount: Rehabilitation. If we could get at, understand, and change the reasons for so many people returning to prison, we would dramatically reduce the cost of criminal justice, as well as save a few souls.
Pretty ballsy move. I expect some beancounters at the university must be just a weeeee bit choked right now.
Yes and no.
No, nobody is choked right now. Any patent would belong to the University, not to the researchers. The decision to not patent was made by the university. Hell, IIRC, the very first paper I signed when I matriculated as an undergrad at UCB assigned all rights to any intelectual property I developed, while at the University, back to the school. And that was a long time ago.
Yes, It is an insightful move by the University not to patent this.
Gosh, if machines keep getting faster, maybe we can reincarnate the old Symbolics machines, where everything including the operating system, is written in Lisp. It's just a bit hard on your TCP retries when the garbage collector fires up.:-)
Yeah! And if they really get fast enough, we can write whe whole system in perl:-) Just think of it! A perl compiler writen in perl!
A profession is not about a degree requirement or an apprenticeship. Initiation into a profession requires one to take an oath. There is a big difference.
There are only a handfull of true professions. Examples include: Clergy, Soldier, Doctor, Lawyer.
Engineering is, in this strict sense, not a profession.
Consider: Clergy, Soldier, Doctor, Lawyer -- You break the code and you are out of the profession. Period. (if you are caught:)
This is not at all the case for an Engineer.
There is, of course, an ethical obligation attached to being an Engineer; however, neither this nor any requirements for licensure makes Engineering a profession in the same sense as the examples cited.
Perhaps things would be better if Engineering was a profession, but, for now, it is not.
We need people with a good overview of the field to make informed comment and separate the wheat from the chaff in areas such as biotech, which is outside of the sphere of competence of many inorganic materials-based nanotech experts.
I am uncertain if an inorganic materials-based nanotech expert refers to an expert on nanotechnology that does not involve carbon compounds, or if she is a life force based on germanium.;-)
This is not much of a story, except that patents in the biotech industry are at least as insane as they are in the software world.
They synthesised and separated DNA double helixes and then attached the single strands to building materials, such as gold spheres. Then, in solution, the DNA strands found their partners and bound together the components they carried.
Gold spheres are routinely attached to biomolecules. (quite a useful techniqu in electron microscopy) DNA oligonucleotides are routinely synthesized comercialy. PCR is as basic to biotech as photolithography is to Silicon technology. There is nothing new here.
They believe the selectivity provided by the DNA pairing will allow complex objects to be assembled. They even speculate such objects could multiply themselves by bio-chemical methods and might be able to optimise their operation through "artificial" evolution.
This is just absurdity; pandering to the x-files crowd. Thank God these are not the people who will be dealing with the Y2K issues.
Also, I'm going WAY out on a limb but hey... why not?
Not really as far out as you may think.
I read a story not too long ago from the BBC newssite about how early bacteria were found to have existed even as far back as the molten stage of earth's history. Could life have formed so fast that it existed so early OR did it get seeded here from somewhere else? These bacteria live in the cooling lava fields close to the vent and at the mid-atlantic rift deep below the sea in environments close to what you'd expect in hell. You know how hardy bacteria can be when they're in a less than savory environment - right? They form cysts and get real hardy! Scientists have found bacteria deep in the earth's crust and so high in the atmosphere that it could nearly be called space... is there some kind of bacterial life that can exist in the void of space? I wouldn't be surprised.
The idea of panspermia is that life on earth was seeded from bacteria carried to earth on meteorites. This is part of the reason scientists are so excited about searching for life on Mars. Once you have a bacterium, the rest, evolutionarily speaking, is easy, creating that first protist, however, seems to be very tricky.
Part of the problem is that life seems to have appeared on the Earth very quickly. Too quickly. Perhaps on Mars, or somewhere else, there was more time.
Evolution hasNothing to say regarding the origins of life. In fact, creating that first bacterium in the short time available on Earth seems so improbable that scientists such as Francis Crick feel that pamspermia makes more sense.
Of course this is exaggerated. Any properly designed appliance will have thermal fuses and stuff not subject to computer control. Just don't get complacent and assume that computer controlled sensors and controls can replace these.
There is at least one well known case where software controlls were used in place of mechanical interlocks, and the result was several deaths. Check out this link .
I actualy took the course at Berkeley which the book was written for (CS150). Good class, I was EE, so the material was useful as an introduction to logic design. A year or two of more advanced academic work might put you in a possition to understand some of the issues people working at AMD and INTEL deal with. However, this is a book about Logic Design not Digital Design. Two very different worlds.
Hmm, reminds me of Dirac delta functions and other such oddities which are not mathematicaly *nice.* I think that there is a whole branch of quasi-mathematics dealing with these monsters. I think that they chose the name *generalized functions.*
I am in no way endorsing the decision in Kansas, and I beleive that New Mexico did the right thing. However, it is naive to think that biologists today have all the answers. Survival of the fittest is a good model, and much can be explained by it, but it is mistaken to believe that Evolution has anything to say about the ORIGINS of Life on Earth. Stanley Miller's experiment proved nothing, and most people in the biology community realize this. Think about diamonds created from peanut-butter in a lab. It is doable, but it has nothing to do with the way natural diamonds were made. Similarly, it is routine these days to order custom made oligonucleotides, which are easily made, yet their method of manufacture has as little to do with the origins of life as Miller's manufacture of amino acids, yet naive people cling RELIGOUSLY to millers results.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a grip, man. Yes, herbicides and pesticides are poisons, but only to herbs and pests. Ever taken an antibiotic? Something like penicillin? Quite deadly to the staph. aurreus, or what ever bactirium was bothering you. I'm sure if they had a voice, these eucaryotes would scream Poison!, yet you ingest this poison voluntarily. Why? You are not a eucayote, nor are you an herb or a pest (YMMV).
Yes, there are serious concerns about geneticaly modified crops, and you even raise a couple of relevent points in your post. However, your opening paragraph paints you as an ignorant individual whose complaints are not to be taken seriously. This may or not be true, but either way you hurt the cause.
Pick your battles. Know what it is you are fighting for.
One needs to consider the intel chip and the fan together, as a system. Neither one, alone, is going to get much processing done for very long.
Of course, it is possible to move away from the atx form factor motherboard for x86 chips, towards a design which is more ammenable to keeping the die cool without a fan, but, until we do: yes, the chip (system) generates too much noise.
--
When your computer is louder than your refrigerator, you know you are in trouble.
If you have a Win 2000 server or know someone that does, just get the patch. Simple as that.
Yep. And much as I hate to say it, the security bulletin on the Microsoft site is well written and honest.
This is all true if any putative health impact is caused by bulk heating of brain tissue. In other words, you have just effectively argued that if cell phone usage causes damage to brain, the mechanism is not bulk heating. This much seems obvious.
Biology, however, is often very subtle. It is possible that the RF energy from a cell phone could be interacting with brain in some more localized manner.
The normal way to answer a question such as: "does cell phone usage increase the risk for brain cancer?" is to run a study to check if people who use cell phones have a higher incedence than those who do not. If they dont, then there is probably no problem. If they do have more cancer, then one has (maybe) found a correlation between cell phone usage and cancer, but one can say nothing about causality ; maybe there are other differences which cause cell phone users to get more cancer than non-users.
Only after one was fairly certain that a causal relationship existed would one begin to test possible mechanisms. Of course, bulk heating would not be a likely mechanism, for the reasons you have pointed out.
The point is: Although what you say is true, it does not speak to the issue of whether or not cell phone usage can lead to cancer. It is non sequitor .
Personaly, I doubt that there is any health risk from cell phone usage, but I can not prove this.
You are right on with number 1:
1.Eat less, exercise.
Following this simple advice will change your life! However, I know that it is very hard to do.
--
paxil
Maybe I am just being pedantic here, but I think this illustrates some of the ignorance regarding biology, and science in general, in the god old USA.
The Human genome has not been around for millions of years, the genome of c. elegens or drosophila, yes, perhaps.
Again, being pedantic, the chemical nature of DNA was not even elucidated until 1953, or 47 years ago, not "most of a century."
Do not forget that it is not possible to prove causality from one antecdotal data point.
Someone who could stay awake for 200 hours was probably not typical to begin with.
It is also interesting that that the 35 hours the subjects were kept awake is the typical length of a shift for a medical resident. Sleep deprevation has long been a part of medical training, although the reasons why are unclear. New York recently passed a law prohibiting it, though I have heard mixed reviews regarding its enforcement.
This is incorrect.
And I am off topic, so I will not go into much detail, but the basic point is that the benifits of increasing sample size are only O(root(N)). It is never necessary to sample "tens of thousands" of subjects to obtain statisticaly significant data.
It is unfortunate that this level of missunderstanding of stastics is so common in the US.
People see numbers, they think they mean something. Bah.
Actualy, there is evidence that MDMA causes brain damage.
Serious damage, too.
In parts of your brain which you really want.
Try a quick medline search for "mdma AND neurotoxic."
Plenty of evidence there.
Be careful with X, it can do some very nasty things to your brain with moderate exposure.
AM Radio also allows people who are not in line of sight of an FM transmitter to receive radio. Think of the worker who put the lettuce in your salad tonite; it may be his only contact with the world outside of the salinas valley. (think NPR--only in Spanish)
Be careful what you choose to trivialize.
PS yes, I know the issue is carrier frequency, not modulation scheme.
Restraint: Prevent them from comitting crimes while locked up.
Restitution: Pay for any physical or psychic harm which resulted from the crime.
Retribution (Retaliation): This covers the belief that someone who has done wrong should be punnished.
Rehabilitation: A person should come out of prison not wanting, nor needing to commit more crimes. This serves the incarcerated individual as well as society as a whole.
The "R" with the greatest potential for reducing costs for the average citizen is the one which you discount: Rehabilitation. If we could get at, understand, and change the reasons for so many people returning to prison, we would dramatically reduce the cost of criminal justice, as well as save a few souls.
No, nobody is choked right now. Any patent would belong to the University, not to the researchers. The decision to not patent was made by the university. Hell, IIRC, the very first paper I signed when I matriculated as an undergrad at UCB assigned all rights to any intelectual property I developed, while at the University, back to the school. And that was a long time ago.
Yes, It is an insightful move by the University not to patent this.
Go Bears!
A profession is not about a degree requirement or an apprenticeship. Initiation into a profession requires one to take an oath. There is a big difference.
There are only a handfull of true professions. Examples include: Clergy, Soldier, Doctor, Lawyer.
Engineering is, in this strict sense, not a profession.
Consider: Clergy, Soldier, Doctor, Lawyer -- You break the code and you are out of the profession. Period. (if you are caught :)
This is not at all the case for an Engineer.
There is, of course, an ethical obligation attached to being an Engineer; however, neither this nor any requirements for licensure makes Engineering a profession in the same sense as the examples cited.
Perhaps things would be better if Engineering was a profession, but, for now, it is not.
help me.
The idea of panspermia is that life on earth was seeded from bacteria carried to earth on meteorites. This is part of the reason scientists are so excited about searching for life on Mars. Once you have a bacterium, the rest, evolutionarily speaking, is easy, creating that first protist, however, seems to be very tricky.
Part of the problem is that life seems to have appeared on the Earth very quickly. Too quickly. Perhaps on Mars, or somewhere else, there was more time.
Evolution hasNothing to say regarding the origins of life. In fact, creating that first bacterium in the short time available on Earth seems so improbable that scientists such as Francis Crick feel that pamspermia makes more sense.
Excellent book!
I am amazed that the full text is available.
I actualy took the course at Berkeley which the book was written for (CS150). Good class, I was EE, so the material was useful as an introduction to logic design. A year or two of more advanced academic work might put you in a possition to understand some of the issues people working at AMD and INTEL deal with. However, this is a book about Logic Design not Digital Design. Two very different worlds.
Didn't MS try to launch an emasculated, ineffectual, and anoying flavor of this technology around 1995???
Hmm, reminds me of Dirac delta functions and other such oddities which are not mathematicaly *nice.* I think that there is a whole branch of quasi-mathematics dealing with these monsters. I think that they chose the name *generalized functions.*
I am in no way endorsing the decision in Kansas, and I beleive that New Mexico did the right thing. However, it is naive to think that biologists today have all the answers. Survival of the fittest is a good model, and much can be explained by it, but it is mistaken to believe that Evolution has anything to say about the ORIGINS of Life on Earth. Stanley Miller's experiment proved nothing, and most people in the biology community realize this. Think about diamonds created from peanut-butter in a lab. It is doable, but it has nothing to do with the way natural diamonds were made. Similarly, it is routine these days to order custom made oligonucleotides, which are easily made, yet their method of manufacture has as little to do with the origins of life as Miller's manufacture of amino acids, yet naive people cling RELIGOUSLY to millers results.