Posts by MondoMan 612 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2007
Sprint already controls 51.7% of Clearwire; this bid is for the remaining stock in Clearwire. Because of US security laws, Sprint has to treat the minority shareholders "fairly"; hence the non-Sprint Clearwire board members running the show and other requirements for the bids and procedures.
Then you're calling the whole "global surface temperature" methodology into question. You're saying that El Nino essentially reduces the transfer of heat to the ocean deeps, which are not included in the global surface temperature measurements. If that's true, then it would seem that looking at global surface temps alone is meaningless, as varying (and unknown!) amounts of energy are removed from the surface every year.
If that's not an own goal, I'm not sure what is.
Let's say NNN is right, and remove 1998; there's still a plateau. From the graph, I'd estimate that removing 1998 shifts the "plateau" forward about 4 years, so we've currently got about 10 years and running of the "plateau":
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/compress:1
However, removing data without a very good a priori reason is dangerous, as it often brings in selection bias. I'd be interested in knowing what NNN's specific criteria are for designating 1998 (in part? all?) as an outlier, whether any other years in the temp record qualify (whether "hot" or "cold"), and what exactly the "cause" of 1998's value is claimed to be. I had thought that the climate system was so complex that even things like whether clouds are net positive or negative feedbacks was unknown, but I'm always up for learning something new.
js, it's indeed *over*estimating. We've done a pretty good job of reducing human-caused particulates and aerosols (e.g. sulphur dioxide, soot, etc -- good "London Fog" stuff) over the past 50 years, so although the P&As masked/counteracted a portion of the greenhouse warming during that period, going forward we expect there to be less of them, offsetting less of the "underlying" warming.
However, the modelers can only tune their models to past temps, not future ones, so if they model their P&As as doing too much cooling (the *over*estimating), the warming effects in the model also end up being boosted to restore the balance so the sum of cooling and warming adds up to the correct historical measured temperatures. Then, once the cooling P&As are cleaned out of the atmosphere in the 21st century, the (boosted) underlying warming mechanisms are all that's left in the model, and the modeled temps skyrocket.
A warming Mars would actually be Good Thing, as it's rather nippy there as is. It will be easier to sell Virgin's and SpaceX's one-way tickets to Mars if it warms up a bit. Once we do that, people will be living there, so it'll matter to them *and* Weather Channel and Weatherbug.
Paris, since she seems to like everything "hot".
What cracks me up is that even the IPCC admits they have no idea how much temps will rise for a doubling of CO2 concentrations (versus the 280 ppm in pre-industrial times); it might be 1C, it might be 2C, it might be 3C, it might be something else; this paper picks their own value, notwithstanding the existence of observations.
Recent scientific attempts to use real observational data (instead of the computer models (ab)used in papers like this one) to narrow the possibilities indicate a value around 1.7C for a doubling of CO2 (to 560 ppm, expected perhaps around the end of the 21st century). That's about 3 degrees Fahrenheit for the Americans here. We've already experienced part of that temperature rise, since we're already at 391 ppm -- the best guess is that we've experienced 1/3 to 1/2 of the temperature rise already, leaving maybe 1.2C (or 2F) of temperature rise for the next 80 - 90 years. Doesn't seem so scary when you put it like that, does it?
Perhaps because the original paper is behind a paywall, the stories describing it have wandered off the proper path into the quicksand.
The underlying question is, can we propose a plausible way (evolutionarily and genomically) to go from your extremities being fins to your extremities being rather more physically substantial (the stump-like "autopods"). This paper suggests that the answer is "yes."
The authors of the paper hypothesize that all you have to do is to crank up the amount of the product of the genes near the 5' end of the hoxd gene complex (a set of hoxd genes lined up in a row on the chromosomal DNA) and Bob's no longer a flounder, but rather your stumpy uncle. Essentially, hox genes are expressed at different levels in different regions of the developing embryo, and act as part of a code that directs each such region what type of structure to form. The authors think that boosting amounts of one of the 5'hoxd genes, hoxd13, throughout the developing extremity will make each subpart "think" it is closer to the fish's body, and to thus form a more robust structure than it would normally do. In particular, the cells in the very thin "finfold" region at the end of the fin instead will form a more thick and robust structure like that normally found further up the center of the fin. Thus, a fin becomes an "autopod" merely by boosting the level of a single gene product!
To test this, the authors try boosting hoxd13 levels by injecting a mouse version of the gene into the fish embryos; they see that those embryos with the gene do in fact form autopods instead of fins. (We assume that they did proper controls to show that hoxd13 levels increased compared to normal embryos, and that increased gene product levels caused the change, and not just the fact of using a mouse version of the gene rather than a zebrafish version) OK, so boosting a 5'hoxd gene DOES cause changes that look like extremities becoming autopods instead of fins.
Now, how might one boost 5'hoxd gene levels in a straightforward evolutionarily-plausible way (mouse-gene-injecting biologists having been rather thin on the ground hundreds of millions of years ago when autopods came into being)? The authors propose that genetic elements (DNA sequences) called "enhancers" might be the answer.
As their name suggests, enhancers boost the expression of nearby genes, and conveniently, tend to be much shorter than and much more robust to changes in their DNA sequence and location than are actual protein coding genes. Thus, it is plausible that a "new" enhancer might have been created by mutations near the 5' end of the ancestral tetrapod hoxd gene complex, or perhaps more likely, that a copy of an enhancer sequence from elsewhere in the genome (with some minor DNA changes to allow it to be controlled separately from its original) might have been spliced into the DNA 5' of the hoxd gene complex.
To test the plausibility of this enhancer hypothesis, it seems that the authors inserted an enhancer DNA sequence called "CsC", normally found 5' of the hoxd gene complex in tetrapods (but not fish), into zebrafish embryos. They found that it promotes nearby gene expression similarly in the zebrafish embryo fin regions and in its "normal" mouse limb environment.
Thus, the authors propose that fish fins evolved into stumpy autopods (later to become the slender limbs of fashion week runway models around the world) simply by the addition of novel enhancer DNA sequences in the region 5' of the Hoxd gene complex.
Paris, since her expression was certainly enhanced quite nicely.
Doug, fracking DOES massively increase reserves of gas (and less massively for oil IIRC), because those gas deposits were previously thought not to be produceable, and now they are produceable quite cheaply. This has happened already in areas in the US where it has been used, and should similarly happen in other areas of the US and world when fracking is used there. The fact that a given fuel isn't renewable over human timescales doesn't really matter in practice if new supplies are accessed that will last for many decades or even hundreds of years at current consumption rates.
V - certainly all the infrastructure costs for transport, refining and so forth are directly added to the retail costs of the fuels.
As for global stability costs, it's just as valid to charge it to food, trade, or health care as to charge it to fossil fuels. In any case, since the US pays the lion's share, it's really the US subsidizing the rest of the world, so all those future carbon tax revenues are belong to us!
Natural gas is quite clean, so doesn't cause any significant health problems. Also remember that the benefit to plant growth of increased CO2 starts immediately, while climate consequences take a long time to appear. Thus, on a multi-decadal timescale, fossil fuels benefit world-wide agriculture, and deserve a credit for that if we're going to try to analyze net externalities.
Good points, thanks! My general objection was that the article seems to assume arguably possible price drops for the modes (wind and solar) it is arguing for, but not for those (gas/oil/coal) it does not favor. Fair is fair, especially since it seems that at least some of the benefit from wind is assumed to come from having it replace some gas use; if gas prices are lower than assumed, that savings is also reduced. Again because of the paywall, I don't know what level of gas prices were assumed in the article. I'm sure you would agree that whether they chose 2005 prices, 2010 prices, or some other value would make a big difference in the analysis.
Frum, the Reg article mentions that one of the study's assumptions is that the capital cost of both wind and solar will drop by 50% by 2030. That sure seems like "renewables will drop greatly in price".
Sadly, the article is behind a paywall; not being able to read the article, here are a few other likely problems with the study:
1) Does it also assume natural gas prices will drop by 50% by 2030? This is certainly likely due to the fracking revolution, but I would guess the study authors didn't include that assumption.
2) It's plausible to claim that distributing wind generation over a large geographical area will even out the peaks and troughs of the availability of wind-generated electricity, but we now have some years of real-world data from actual windfarms. Did they use the real-world wind-generation data (which seems to indicate much less even availability than predicted), or just simulate it from a single value?
3) What is the dollar value of the assumed credit for avoiding air pollution and how does that compare to the predicted dollar cost of the wind/solar power? If the credit were small, that would strengthen the study's conclusions; since the authors find it necessary to include it while excluding most other externalities, its magnitude is likely large compared to the actual cost of the electricity, thus weakening the study's robustness.
In many jurisdictions, the police department allows its officers to work private security jobs while they are off-duty (hence, no change in "normal" police coverage). The companies hiring these officers have to pay more than they would to non-sworn security guards, but the officers have more legal powers than do ordinary private security guards.
As any (sales tax free shopping) ful kno, Nashua and its wealth of malls and outlet stores are in the state of New Hampshire, not in Taxachusetts. Of course, politicians in Mass. have delusions of grandeur, so maybe they did really think Nashua was a part of their state. My bet is that they were just pulling one over on Iain Thomson.
Perhaps there's no *need* for genome sequence to be in one place, or to be kept indefinitely, but certainly the tradition and expectation in the medical community is that everything be included as part of an individual's medical records. Genome sequence would surely become a part of that.
TRT is right that DNA sequencing and IQ are only loosely correlated (you can get just about anyone to run a DNA sequencing machine these days :) ), but the actual DNA sequence would be well-correlated with IQ, if only we knew which parts (genes) to look at. Twin studies, where IQ was tested for identical twins (genetically identical) and fraternal twins (only genetically as related as siblings), have been run and indicate that about half the variation in IQ is due to genes, leaving about half for environment.
Poster TRT above was in fact correct in his/her statement that:
> most males are missing a huge chunk of DNA making them more prone to genetic disease anyway...
Even though we inherit two copies of almost every gene (one from father and one from mother, except in specialized cases), almost always a single properly-functioning copy is enough for normal development and life. Thus, even if one of your gene copies is defective, the other copy is likely OK and acts as a backup, providing enough normal function to avoid having fly antennae (or other movie-style "mutations").
The X and Y chromosomes are one of the special cases, with females having the usual two copies of the chromosome, one from father and one from mother (X and X), but males having only one copy of the X and in place of the other copy a smaller chromosome called Y. Although Y does contain some dozens of male-specific genes, it is missing something like 90% of the genes on the X (many, many more than the few male-specific genes gained on the Y). Thus, for the hundreds of genes on the bulk of the X chromosome without corresponding "backup" copies on the Y, any gene defect will become evident, rather than being masked by the proper function of a "backup" copy. Classic not-extremely-fatal examples of this include the famous hemophilia gene passed to many of Queen Victoria's descendents, and most color blindness. Fatal examples include X-linked SCID, a severe immunodeficiency caused by a single defective gene for an immune-system receptor building block.
Bottom line: human males are missing "backup" copies of about 3.4% of their genes because of having only a single X chromosome instead of the two copies that females have. This is likely to be the underlying reason that human males have average lifespans about 10% shorter than human females, once death due to pregnancy/childbirth complications is prevented.
Better analogy:
View 1: "Benchtop cold fusion is real."
View 2: "It's all a plot by an international cabal of chemists and physicists to get research grants, backed up by governments so they can raise taxes pretending it's all about "clean energy" and "moving away from dependence on fossil fuels".
In that case, the "balanced" presentation of both views did a better service for the population than would have either view alone. Of course, the "correct" view turned out to be something like "Benchtop cold fusion is almost certainly just an artifact of wishful thinking and cherry-picking of data by sloppy chemists and physicists who naturally enough in the difficult funding climate, are individually desperate for grants and the personal prestige they would reap if their results were true."
I was thinking that the traditional computer operation was also linear in time complexity, as you're just adding a constant time black box check in going from N checks to N+1 checks. Of course, I'm also not entirely sure of what I'm talking about here, so I appreciate your bringing the famed worldwide Anonymous organization to bear on the issue :)
On page 2, under 'Constant vs. balanced", I'm puzzled by the description of the Deutsch and Jozsa method. Surely, adding an additional digit to the input and output qubits is the moral equivalent of running the single-digit test an additional time. Thus, using the quantum method does not reduce the overall time/expense of the operation, but simply shifts the time/expense from the computation to the I/O part of the whole operation.
Read the article.
1) The authors find opsin genes in placozoans, and thus infer that the first opsin gene appeared *before* jellyfish, in a common ancestor of jellyfish and placozoans. (Placozoans are among the simplest possible multi-cellular animals, being a flattened pouch of exterior epithelial cells surrounding an internal sheet of stellate cells.) However, it's unclear whether *vision* arose in that ancestor, because it's unclear whether or not that gene made a protein that was sensitive to light in its final form.
2) Previously, the opsin genes in Bilateria (animals with left/right symmetry, like us and fish, rather than radial symmetry like jellyfish) were grouped into 3 types. The authors extend this grouping by showing that the opsin genes from Cnidaria and Ctenophora (jellyfish and related animals) also fit into these 3 types. Thus, the authors infer that the first animal with a full set of 3 types of opsin genes was a common ancestor of all of the Cnidaria, Ctenophora, and Bilateria (and so, pre-jellyfish). The assumption is that by the time of the 3 opsin genes, these genes made light-sensitive proteins and so were involved in vision of some sort.
It's not clear whether the authors fit the placozoan opsin genes into the 3 types above.
What the report actually said was that of the minority of respondents (40-something percent) who thought the world's innovation center would move away from Silicon Valley in the future, more than 40 percent thought it would move to China (or something like 20 percent overall).
Not that these sorts of reports are worth reading...
Roton was one of the coolest ideas of the '90s private spaceship boom (during the dot com bubble). I think the company was called the Rotary Rocket Company. IIRC, the Roton design had two big rotary features: 1) Giant rotor containing combustion chambers and nozzles at base of rocket, using centrifugal force instead of turbopumps to feed propellants to combustion chambers and 2) for the descent phase, rotors with small rockets at the tips that would extend from the nose and bring the capsule in for a vertical, controlled helicopter-style landing.
Physics simplified for us non-physicists often gets a bit confused in the process, and that's what seems to have happened here. Apparently, there are *two* distinct Heisenbergian relations that have been conflated (starting in paragraph two of the article):
#1 is the famous Uncertainty Principle, which states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be simultaneously known, and specifies that limit. This has been proven true and experimentally confirmed to be so. This relation is not based on measurements disturbing a particle, and has nothing to do with the Rozema paper.
#2 is called the "observer effect" and involves a lower limit to the degree of disturbance of a particle by a "measurement" of that particle. It is often confused with #1, especially by non-physicists.
The confusion is not surprising, as Heisenberg himself originally approached relation #1 by thinking about measurements affecting particles' properties. In fact, for a very specialized case, he found that (measured position precision)(momentum distubance) <= 1/2 Planck's constant (that is, he found that Relation #2 = Relation #1 for one special case).
Many assume that Heisenberg's relation #1 is generally correct for relation #2. Not only has this not been proven, it has been shown that relation #2 usually does NOT equal relation #1. In particular, the Ozawa (2003) paper proposed a more involved formula as the correct limit for relation #2. Drawing on the ideas of the Lund (2010) paper as to how to test Ozawa's formula, the current Rozema paper reports experimental results verifying that:
a) Heisenberg's formula for the #2 limit is wrong and
b) Ozawa's formula for the #2 limit seems to be correct and
c) Ozawa's relation #2 limit is (at least often) less than that from Heisenberg's formula (couldn't access article behind its paywall, so I'm inferring this from secondary sources)
Why we care: quantum cryptosystems that assume higher natural uncertainty (from Heisenberg's incorrect formula) than actually exists (Ozawa's correct limit for relation #2) may miss evidence of tampering that increases uncertainty above Ozawa's limit but keeps it below the level of Heisenberg's formula).
Useful sources used for the above:
Wikipedia's entry on "Uncertainty principle" (surprisingly unbad)
The Lund(2010) article which inspired the recent work (http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/9/093011/)
This could have been an interesting and informative article, but some key errors crept in early on:
1) "Noncoding DNA" does NOT mean "not *associated with* encoding protein strings"; rather it means "not encoding protein strings". As an analogy, only the characters in this article that make up the article's words would be the "coding" characters, while the title, formatting, HTML tags, ads and so forth would be "noncoding" characters, even though many of them are in fact "associated with" the article's text.
The results of this major study have not changed our estimates of the proportion of the genome that is non-coding, as the coding part remains a small fraction of the total. Rather, the study has attempted to assign some function to much of the non-coding part that previously had no known function assigned. Again, pushing our genome-as-Reg-article analogy, the study has identified some characters as parts of the title, others as formatting characters, others as indicating where ads should be placed, others as ad content, others as the first characters of every line, and more. Clearly, the initial functions in this list are potentially quite interesting to would-be genome/Reg-article decoders. The later functions I listed, such as those involved with serving ads, are indeed "functions", but unlikely to be significant for the function of the article. Finally, there are likely to be chunks of characters without any function for the article -- perhaps a bit of someone's debugging core dump that was accidentally pasted in, or old, now irrelevant, comments. The last is what everyone would agree on as true "junk" DNA; many would also argue that the genomic analogs of ads and their functional elements also belong in the evolutionary "junk" bin (in DNA, these include sequences such as integrated retroviruses, transposons, and so forth). A controversial aspect of the recent study is that it also includes many physical features of the DNA as potential functional regions; although in a limited number of cases, these have been associated with some clear function, it's unclear whether the association holds in general. In our analogy, this would correspond to sites such as the first characters of every line. These account for much of the difference between the 20% and 80% numbers.
2) Nobody (other than the article's author) suggested that "functional" "...means that even being replicated counts as a 'function'". Since essentially 100% of the DNA in the cell gets replicated when the cell divides, that would unhelpfully define 100% of the DNA as "functional" just because it exists! At least one knowledgeable commenter did tweet that the 80% number "...includes definitions of 'activity' barely more interesting than 'replicated'..." and it's that definition of "interesting" that causes all the controversy.
3) Scientists should not decide what results to publish based on whether Intelligent Designists (or even so-called climate denialists) will find succor in their results. What is, is; if someone finds that to be compatible only with creationism, that's the person's own issue, not that of society. Along those lines, I'd caution readers that the mere fact of even 100% of the genome having some function would not be evidence one way or the other in that specific controversy.
Not quite sure what "simulated conditions" would be, or how they would differ from actual conditions. The fact that nobody else does this anymore points out that this has not been cutting-edge science for some decades, if ever. It's already possible to induce as many mutations as one wants on Earth (even more than one per seed on average), and to choose among methods that cause big changes (e.g. deletions/inversions) or small changes (e.g. single-base changes); the reason for this weak Chinese PR plant is most likely to try to drum up domestic support for the country's space program.
Now, if mutated sees produced Tang, that would be worth reading about!
As mentioned, this disease is not so much contagious in the traditional sense, as contagious in the "Aliens" sense. Because the Devils were once nearly wiped out, they are apparently so inbred (much much more than dogs) that a bit of tissue from one that is implanted in another will not be recognized as foreign by the immune system of the recipient. The disease tumors grow on the face; since the Devils fight one another for dominance using their mouths and teeth, it's common for an unaffected Devil to get a piece of a rival's tumor tissue into an open wound on its face. In other species, this would be quickly killed off by the immune system. In the Devils, it's assumed to be part of the animal's own normal tissue, and so can grow unchecked until, like the Alien's offspring, it kills its host (though without all the abdominal tissue volcano dramatics).
Sadly, the paper isn't worth reporting on except as the photo ensures that our "...morbid and vulgar curiosity is slaked, and slaked with a baleful beverage."*
"Immortal" tumors have been known for over 50 years (see for example the interesting book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" about HeLa cells), and the "immortal" nature of the terrible DFT disease cells has likewise been known for many years. The existence and importance for continued cell division of telomere-maintaining enzymes was discovered in the 1980s. Thus, this paper merely confirms, as expected, that the immortal DFTD cells have their telomere-maintenance enzymes turned on to a level that allows them to divide indefinitely. Any useful connection to human disease treatment is extremely unlikely.
The photo does bring home the sad sprint toward extinction of a fellow furry creature, no matter its ill temperament.
*(quote from "The Stowe-Byron Controversy: A Complete Resume of all that has been written and said upon the Subject, Reprinted from ..."; retrieved 9/3/12 at http://books.google.com/books?id=XI5SAAAAcAAJ&dq=morbid+interest+slaked&source=gbs_navlinks_s; worth a look as quite a breathless example of 19th century celebrity scandal-mongering)
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