Posts by MondoMan 612 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2007
The mining will be so slow that you will never win the "race" to the next successful hash. Since it's a first-past-the-post system, you get nothing, as each time just dividing the work among your army of very slow bitzombies will take more time than others use to actually complete their solution with their compact high-power miners and win the round.
Sanger's work impacted modern molecular biology from the 1950s through the end of the 20th century and beyond. Unlike most modern researchers who work on quite specialized topics, Sanger's main contributions came in allowing us to read out the sequences of both proteins and DNA, two of the main groups of molecules in our cells. Essentially, DNA is the "book" of life; its sequence contains the instructions for making the various proteins which form most of the cell's form and function. To be clear, protein and DNA are different substances; neither is a component of the other.
Before the mid-20th century, scientists only knew bulk information about proteins and DNA; it's analogous to cutting a book up into its constituent letters, then measuring the percentage of A's, B's, C's and so on. Clearly, this doesn't provide much insight into a book's meaning.
Similarly, protein and DNA information content (and resulting functionality) depends on the *linear order* of a limited choice of subcomponents. For proteins, there are 20 common amino acids strung together to form mammalian proteins, some as short as 5 or 10 amino acids, some containing hundreds; for DNA, there are 4 nucleotide bases strung together, with about 3 billion making up the complete genome (that is, all the genetic information in a cell).
Sanger's first Nobel Prize was for developing methods to sequence proteins; his second was for developing a method to sequence DNA. It is this latter advance which has transformed molecular biology and been a key enabler for modern genetic engineering, genomics, etc. He gave us the ability to "read" DNA and proteins; combined with the ability to "write" new DNA and proteins developed in the '80s and '90s, we have now moved from a solely descriptive era of biology to one that includes substantial modification and de novo construction as well -- biology is becoming engineering.
Er, bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria) have been well-studied over the past century, and have become essential tools in modern molecular biology. Phage lambda in particular has been heavily engineered for all kinds of genetic engineering uses, and a number of phages had their genomes sequenced by the very early DNA sequencing techniques in the 1970s, since they had small (short) genomes, were easy to grow in quantity, and their DNA was easy to purify.
As you likely know, there's been a bit of a performance plateau in graphics cards over the past few years, at least on the AMD side, with new cards populating similar performance levels to the earlier cards, although at lower prices. For example, the HD5970 is still an upper-tier card almost 4 years after its release, while the over-2-year-old HD6990 matches the performance of the current R9 280X (which uses a year-old GPU).
It'd be nice to know what suffices for a 1080p screen, and what you'd need to run a 3-monitor wide setup instead.
Looking forward to your class, GD!
(That's a Watchmen smiley, son)
M & D126 FTW!
Interestingly, in the US, it's the poor who are most likely to be obese. Calories are so cheaply available due to industrial-scale food production that activists must now go through ever more intricate contortions and phrasings to pump up their numbers and make it seem as though people in the US still suffer from food shortages that are not secondary to other issues such as mental illness.
Fasting has become a trendy new health activity here, whether for successive half-days or for part of a week.
Lars is right. What the story on this article doesn't report is that local climate varies widely throughout the Arctic because of all the water/land interactions (lots of islands, changing currents, floating ice packs, and so forth). Thus, data from a single location (on Baffin Island in this case) doesn't mean much for a spot 100 or 1000 miles away in the Arctic that has a different local climate. Even the authors' assumption that the climate at their dig sites on Baffin Island and at their ice core sites on Greenland 500-1000 miles away is comparable enough to "line them up" is quite questionable.
It's the equivalent of looking at the outside thermometer in Chicago in order to determine if you need to turn on your air conditioning at home in Washington, D.C.
I found this comment of Icahn's especially funny: " irrational undervaluation as dramatic as this is often a short term anomaly." That is, Apple's low share price won't last long, so get buybacking!
Of course, if Apple's price is about to go up on its own, why would you consider paying out Apple's cash to do so?
The fatal flaw in this study is that the viruses sequenced were not random samples from a population, so we can't conclude anything about the population of all HSV1 viruses. Not just that, but 7/31 viruses (about 25% of those analyzed) were collected from eye tissue in Seattle, WA, while about half (15/31) were from unknown tissues in Kenya. Thus, the vast majority of samples analyzed here are either from Seattle eyes or from somewhere in Kenyans. Not quite the robust geographical coverage the abstract and news coverage imply, is it?
Here's one simple alternative explanation for the data: the Kenyan samples represent most of the HSV1 viruses in the wild in non-eye tissues, while the Seattle virus grouping indicates a previously-unsuspected alternate sequence clade of HSV1 that provides a selective advantage for virus growth in eye tissue.
Normally, overclocking involves boosting voltage, not just cooling. This leads to increased electromigration, which won't be affected by cooling, and is a major cause of failure under overclocking conditions. I wonder if they're manipulating that aspect at all.
IIRC, the last small populations of mammoths in these island "refugia" were not only small in numbers, but smaller or "dwarf" in physical stature. Their smaller size would have helped in reducing feed requirements, and would have helped with the warmer climate as well. Being big helps reduce percentage heat loss as long as you are roughly spherical (like a mammoth), so being smaller helps you handle warmer temps, when you *want* to lose excess internal heat.
Unfortunately, being smaller also makes you easier to kill by normal-sized human hunters...
Seems to me that 20th century Kodak, while generally well-run, was made possible by the obscene margins it made on emulsions/photographic paper/etc, combined with the marketing that made it a near-monopoly in the US and many other countries.
I don't see any way that manufacturing razors (digital cameras) where the blades are essentially free (reusable flash storage) could have resulted in anywhere near similar profit margins. It would have been nice to still have a much-shrunken Kodak around for the Rochester tourist industry, but there's no way it could have produced the profits that sustained so many (and Rochester!) during the 20th century.
And to remember how I cursed at the incompetent executives every time I read an article recounting Kodak's flailing attempts over the past 20 years. I still remember trying (and failing!) to convince a good friend NOT to use one of Kodak's stock price drops in the '90s as a buying opportunity for his and his wife's retirement investment account...
At least Eastman Chemical is still around and doing fine, last I heard.
I used to work down the street from Polaroid's Cambridge, MA, headquarters and jog by its Art Deco riverfront building during the '90s. Another Kodak-like story, but one that developed (!) in a shorter time :)
Here's an unintentionally ironic news story dating from peak-Polaroid times: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-03-16/business/8601200293_1_instant-cameras-instant-imaging-polaroid-stock
The MetOffice's few-month "predictions" have been so lacking in accuracy that you would think they would be pounding on IBM's door begging to be allowed to buy this technology. After all, it can supposedly accurately predict weather conditions in a small location (that's even harder than doing it for a big region) a month in advance!
My guess is that both the MetOffice and IBM realize this is just sales droid fluff, and since they would only be ripping off the Chinese if their statement turned out not to be true there's no skin off Britain's nose.
We haven't had that in the USA in a loooong time. He'll get released after the jail + house arrest (presumably with about 50% time off for good behavior), but the unpayable fine will ensure that he never again votes, serves on a jury, and so forth. In most states of the US, you lose such civil rights once you are a convicted felon, and can petition the state to have your rights reinstated only once you satisfy your punishment (serve your time, any community service, and fully pay any fines).
Wow, Dra, are you always this overdramatic? Sure, America has made (and continues to make!) plenty of mistakes. I think most of us would agree that the Iraq war was one of those.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. America does a lot of good in the world (for example, ever wonder why that same G. W. Bush is beloved in Africa? Worth a few seconds of your Google-foo).
If you're not happy with America's leadership, get your country to step up and offer something better!
A big "Sveiks!" shout-out to all you Latvians visiting the Reg carrion-pit!
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