Posts by Grikath

really not that much...

Nothing in the trick-cycling is said about watching a clip/movie in its entirety or at least during its ...conclusion. So there will be a lot of flicking through clips before a ..correct match is made.

A quick check ( For Science, of course.. ) on the site of one of the main providers, using the "most popular" feature, I've found that you need at least a couple of tries to find something..stimulating.., given the sheer vastness of the range in tastes that becomes apparent immedeately when observing the .. menu..

So 200 views can rather rapidly translate to "once a month" , which I find a rather low estimate given the subject at hand, and the rather well-known ways of our Willies. YMMV though.

Re: So what's the chance...

about 1, I guesstimate, given that "most of Britain" lies well above sea level, and even the EcoHippies' worst case scenarios don't have the sea level rising that much.

Re: "This is fantastic news ... FOR SCIENCE!!!"

Hmmm... some napkin calculations tell me that the difference in mass between the orbiter and the comet would be in the region of several times 1*10^9 even if the comet manages to shed an insane amount of mass during this flyby.

Somehow I don't think the comet's trajectory would be significantly altered if the orbiter is crashed into it, unless the boffins at ESA figure out a way to get it upt to an appreciable fraction of c.

Re: Confusing

Germany at large? yes, very liberal, especially compared to the UK/US. German Official Chairwarmers? Not so much.

Re: Contradiction? @ chemist

It would work that way if you consider the graphene not as a sheet of carbon, but two layers of hydrogen stabilised by a lattice of carbon + electron soup ( extremely simplified, of course).

To migrate to the silicon any copper atom would have to react with the H of the graphene first.. and there it stops, really. Given the purity of the environment, only direct synthesis would be possible, and while the gods of Quantum could pull a fast one and provide the energy, the local temperature would ensure any CuH formed would revert near-immedeately. ( reverse reaction "happens readily" at 20 K, let alone 20 C...)

Then there is the issue of inserting into/breaking the benzene-ring lattice itself. And the Si-facing layer of H in the sheet ( with even more ...impressive... energies in play..). Let's just say the odds are stacked against it.

Re: Correct your correction

well the galaxies obviously aren't dead, so would be quite prolific... ;)

Re: Confusion in paragraphs 4 and 5

"Is it so unusual to find that vertebrates share a DNA similarity with invertebrates eg a fruit fly?"

The proper scientific answer to that would be: "Funny you should ask that..." followed by a three-hour lecture.

the TLDL version is: Vertebrates aren't supposed to be able to switch germ cell fate independent of gender. That particular switch is thought to be buried too deep within the gender instruction set to be messed with (at least not without Horrible Effects.. ). ymmv depending on exactly how gender is determined in a species, though. XY ( like with mammals ) is by far not the only method, and some mechanisms leave room for shenanigans.

Gender-wise, fish are morphologically very similar between the sexes, with very little differentiation between the sexes' gonads, other than the type of germ cells they produce, so it's not impossibe per sé. Just very surprising, especially the viable de-coupling between gender-morphology and gamete production.

Re: Sabotage your own product?

Wouldn't kill it off. Most peeps would still buy the thing for non-nookie applications if it adds sufficient value.

But, yes... The biggest internet industry in the US (ironically..) will find a way onto it. one way or the other..

Re: Oh so?

They did.. briefly... before going "b00m!". Bombs land on target. Intent is everything: V2 landed ( albeit very, very briefly.), Philae crashed.

Re: Jebus!

Not dissing voyager.. I still have the projector slide set of Jupiter I got in my Youf. But the mechanics of the flyby's of the Voyagers was such that they'd *never* get near Pluto, so most of us assumed we'd never see whatever was out there in our lifetime, because no-one would be mad enough to send out a probe off into that direction. We'd missed our chance..

Even theze foggy images are already 1000% percent more than I , and with me a lot of amateur astronomers, ever expected to see.. And I can fill my slide tray with the final pics of the Nine.. :)

"who could evidently sit through Fawlty Towers: The Germans without cracking a smile "

That's not difficult, as Cleese isn't nearly as funny as he thinks he is.

Re: Energy Efficiency @ dr. Mouse

but the places you mention will mostly never fall below the traffic treshold mentioned in the article.

Call me silly, but other than proof-of-concept this idea is, as the headline says, BONKERS.

Re: Acrylamide toxicity is nothing new

I once attended an Environmentalist lecture where the speaker was ranting about the Dangers of polycyclic aromatics in the environment. He was rather... exreme in his views, and quite boring to boot.

At the post-lecture chinwagging, he was still raging on a bit so we made him a nice cup of Earl Grey.

I'm pretty sure that up to this day he still has not figured out why we were trying to control our grins so much.

Re: Geotagging hack

I have a feeling that they checked one way or another.

22h is a pretty long time between spotting the pic and delivering the presents, especially in a theatre where your potential targets like to move around regularly, and are not beyond misdirection by, for instance, bragging next to something they can use for some instapropaganda about the Evil of the Infidels like , say, a hospital or school, or...

Religious fanatics, may be nasty, insane, unscrupulous, merciless, or any combination, but "stupid" is generally only reserved for the cannon fodder.

Re: Some Female Lizards in the Wild @ John H Woods

Must have been *quite* a while then.. between recombination and paternal and maternal masking at meiosis alone , you get the advantage of having a backup in case mutation ends you up with something undesireable, and a *much* higher expression of , potentially beneficial, mutations in the phenotype. It's all about rigging the numbers to be able to fill the existing habitat as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

I do like the flame-bait in the article though. But if even single-celled eukaryotes see reason to produce gametes on occasion, and even bacteria see fit to merge and do some DNA hussling if circumstances allow, I think I can safely say that "males" are pretty much indispensible in the whole process.

Re: There's a simple way to explain it to them... @ Charles 9

"They'll add, "If that were true, you can do it with physical keys, too. Why aren't we seeing a rash of break-ins into high-security sites courtesy of copied keys, hmm?" "

Well, Real Life comes to aid there, since most of the physical breaking and entering in "secure" sites revolves around getting access to the physical keys to the place, either through theft, copying, coercion, or simply the "inside job".

Only an idiot would.... oh wait... we're talking about U.S. politicians, right?

Re: Easy Peasy...

Nice sentiments, but us dutchies don't work that way. The Terror Card doesn't fly over here, there's no such thing as "aiding and abetting" in our laws, and stichting BREIN has about the same status as an ambulance chaser or patent troll at best.

The way things stand now over here is that while it is technically illegal to dowload "pirated" copyrighted content, the whole mess is officially considered Unenforcable. This means that unless you're actively distributing for profit, the authorities won't bother, at all. (If you do want to try and turn a profit on someone others' wares you have another problem.. we're a country based on Trade.. that's sacrosanct.. We have a different set of laws for that one, where the "with intent to profit" is the working ingredient.. )

When it comes to the Pirate Bay, who are only just "pointing the way to ...", there is nothing in Dutch law that forbids them to do that. On the contrary, making a profit of Knowing Where To Get Stuff is a time-honoured Dutch form of enterprise and as such protected in Dutch law and custom. Criminalising the Pirate Bay on that would have severe repercussions for several trade and service sectors here, so that's a political no-no.

Even worse, what BREIN wants amounts to censorship. This is an extremely sensitive subject in this country, given that our whole existence and success is based on the fact that we have none. You will have people up in arms if you even try, as it's felt to be on par with ( or even worse than) capital punishment, and cases where it's applied are rare.

On its own, our government can issue a law that would indeed make things like the Pirate Bay illegal, and even block it. Technically speaking. The original injunction has already cost some parties seats in parliament as they failed to address the censorship issue immedeately, or even defended the injunction. It's actually only fuelled the anti-Brussels sentiments over here.

BREIN is tickling the bear while pulling the tigers' tail here, and our Advocaat-Generaal knows this. The checking-back-with-the EU-court is simply a delaying tactic to avoid middens hitting windmills. Which will happen eventually, since BREIN is like a rabid terrier. It won't quit until it's taken down the back and shot.

Re: Been there, done that...

"the swarm of middle-aged men with cameras. They were scarily aggressive and swamped any poor girl who so much as took her top off."

Those are pretty much universal, and can generally be spotted in the wild on any event where Cleavage (or more) is to be expected. Dunno about the UK, but over here in Holland they're known as Fapparazzi.

Re: How many sources? @Grikath @yet another AC

a quick google tells you the story from the horses' mouth:

"The obvious question, though, was how soft, pliable tissue could survive for millions of years. In a new study published today (Nov. 26) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Schweitzer thinks she has the answer: Iron.

Iron lady

Iron is an element present in abundance in the body, particularly in the blood, where it is part of the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Iron is also highly reactive with other molecules, so the body keeps it locked up tight, bound to molecules that prevent it from wreaking havoc on the tissues.

After death, though, iron is let free from its cage. It forms minuscule iron nanoparticles and also generates free radicals, which are highly reactive molecules thought to be involved in aging.

"The free radicals cause proteins and cell membranes to tie in knots," Schweitzer said. "They basically act like formaldehyde."

Formaldehyde, of course, preserves tissue. It works by linking up, or cross-linking, the amino acids that make up proteins, which makes those proteins more resistant to decay.

Schweitzer and her colleagues found that dinosaur soft tissue is closely associated with iron nanoparticles in both the T. rex and another soft-tissue specimen from Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a type of duck-billed dinosaur. They then tested the iron-as-preservative idea using modern ostrich blood vessels. They soaked one group of blood vessels in iron-rich liquid made of red blood cells and another group in water. The blood vessels left in water turned into a disgusting mess within days. The blood vessels soaked in red blood cells remain recognizable after sitting at room temperature for two years."

See? Nothing miraculous about it, the blood vessel experiment pretty much speaks for itself. The bone marrow is simply metal-tanned in situ. With the bone as a container ( note that the original bone was fossilised intact.) the marrow inside would have been pretty much sterile upon death so could actually be preserved in this way. Even a hairline crack would have ruined the process though, so you'd have a hell of a time finding another specimen.

As for the specific substances you mention: she did not find hemoglobin but heme, the active compound in hemoglobin. There's a reason that stuff is safely packed up in globins in your body, y'know... Collagen doesn't surprise me at all, since that's terribly hardy stuff. In fact.. stone/iron age clothing finds that were stitched with spun tendon filaments still hold their stitches up to this day. tanned in a sealed container? who knows how long that stuff can last. Actin and tubulin.. oh you mean muscle components. They're part of the inner workings of every cell, and also really, really resistant to anything but proteases. Which degrade much faster than actin or tubulin, so any amount released upon cell death would have had no chance to eat it all, and with no bacterial action the stuff would stay there, even if the cells themselves are gone. Osteocalcin, same thing. An extremely hardy protein that needs to be specifically degraded in the body to be disposed of at all. DNA? Yes, in fragments, which is as it should be. DNA is extremely stable, and the only reason it's so damned hard to find is that bacteria love a free lunch, as the components take a lot of energy to make. DNA itself, especially repeat sequences, is extremely stable. So stable, in fact that it self-mutates to the most stable form possible if given half the chance. If left undisturbed it does indeed have a half-time measured in millennia. Wouldn't trust the code on it for one bit though.

As far as C14 dating is concerned: As far as I can find out there have been no attemtps to use any C14 dating methods on the samples the good doctor acquired. I would love it if she does an attempt on the samples she did get, and do so as publicly and peer-reviewed as possible though. the result might surprise us, but I have 5-sigma confidence that they won't be able to find any C14 beyond background. It would at least cut off another avenue of waffling for the Apologeticists.

Re: According to Eyeo, AdBlock Plus is used on 50 million devices

nah the admen will insure that obscure driver will only be deployable by an installer that will silently co-install "helpful" tools with convoluted routes to the mandatory opt-out menus..

or that can only be downloaded by first dowloading their dowload client which...etc...

No need for ads there.

Re: @PeterGriffin @AC

"6 years old is not old enough for sex education, and is why your entire argument disappears up its own bum."

Oh boy.. are you wrong..

Re: too cold, no life

I doubt we'd be able to any time soon. Conditions there would be similar to earth's Deep Ocean, with probably a much higher salinity. You'd need a hell of a pressure container to bring any stuff that evolved there back up alive and well.

Re: Could they block it?

well.. in theory they could, if they had chosen the proprietary driver/interface route for the thing. How long it would last before that was cracked is another matter, of course..

In the end the adult industry will adopt it, or make Stuff for it, if there's $$ in it for them. The niche market is pretty much low-turnover high-profit, so no doubt we'll see reports of something in that direction within a year after the set is available.

Re: more like stuck? @ brandon

I very much doubt that the surface of the comet is water ice.. The comet is practically black..

I was thinking more about an unholy mixture of methane, ammonia, carbon mono/dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, and possibly assorted complex carbohydrates/sulfur compounds thrown in. Makes for a very sticky mess when half-melted, and at seriously lower temperatures than pure water would even budge.

Re: Warm blooded? @Arnaut

If you mean the 2002 paper by James D. Rose as quoted by wikipedia and other sources, his conclusion is the same as mine: Pain, being a psychological phenomenon, needs a psyche to be experienced. And there is no physical evidence whatshowever that fish have actual intelligence, let alone a psyche.

As far as the engineering goes, I could have used terms like "physically and behaviourally optimised for their niche within the phase space", but as a biologist I tend to appreciate the beasties in the wild as well as on my plate, and "beautifully engineered" is just as applicable, especially since "life" engineers itself against the environment it finds itself in. No need for god-bothering there, as you try to imply.

Re: 'Ere - he says he's not dead!

"If your body stopped being able to produce new cells, you wouldn't die instantly, but you wouldn't be alive very long either."

It's called adulthood, so roughly between 40 and 60 years on average for humans.

Re: Non-Americans can sort themselves out. Sorry. @Hollerith

Ummmm yeah.. right..

Are you mayhaps referring to the San Andreas fault? Y'know.. the one near ,for starters, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley?

Re: "so far caused by human error and inattention"

afaik the cars only use satnav to determine their global position and what they can expect road-wise. They augment that info with what they actually "see" ( hence the almost military-grade sensor/camara package on them.) If A doesn't fit B the driver is urged to grab the wheel and do things himself, so that's at least one of the more obvious "safety" measures.

Given that this whole thing is watched like a hawk by just about everyone having remotely to do with transportation and legislation, I pretty much doubt that the several teratonnes of data that's been collected about those cars can easily be fudged or tut-tutted, especially those fenderbenders. On the contrary, given the way I'm told US insurance works, one of those cars is the last things you want to hit, given that you can't just write of the dent and be done with it, as most people do. Even ignoring all the (utterly non-google) other camera-type things possibly aimed at you at the time, your little scrape has just been Borged, and you cannot avoid Insurance Interference if only just because Google insuror will want to know what happened there...

While technically possible, it's simply too risky and ultimately counterproductive to fudge the data on accidents when it comes to this project, by Google of any of the other hopefuls. There's simply too much riding on it, and even with my paranoïdar deployed I , at least, can't see how any of the companies involved could get away with it for long, if at all.

But I'll one-up my previous challenge: Having successfully circumnavigated the Arc de Triomphe and the vagaries of Parisian coureurs, we shift the scene to Italy. Let's be fair there and do it classic Top Gear: The challenge is to pass through Rome , including the Colosseum **, followed by a leisurely drive to Napoli, and a pass through the city centre there, ending at an appropriate pub with a functioning car, and a maximum of 5 human interventions.

** locals may know better...testing grounds.. But that's one route I prefer never to have to do again..

Re: We don't vote for parties...

or from the article: "In one sense, no. We get the government we vote for."

Because you don't. Locally maybe, but on a national level the local-representative election system the UK uses will heavily skew the seat distribution on even minor differences in voting totals. Because the local winner takes all, and only needs a marginal victory to take that victory, the system ensures that a "majority" national government representation will always be an actual minority by votes.

Because the difference needs only be so small locally, it's also very hard to accurately poll for or model outcome, unless you have limited (bi-partisan) options and/or a very conservative voter base that's not likely to switch, because you cannot use national totals to predict the outcome for a single constituency. Which as far as I can tell happened here more than pollsters getting Wrong Answers. They simply applied the data wrong.

The system in place in the UK works fine for a bi- or tripartisan setup, but this election was typical for having five major players, each with their own major issues and programs. And that's where things went wrong, because anyone who's done any system analysis can see the the "dilution" of votes would mean that massive amounts of voters would basically get shafted, as their representations in votes would never stand a chance of being materialised in the house of commons.

The worst hit, and potentially the most dangerous artefact of this, is UKIP, who did get a fair share of the vote, but lost out in the dance-of-chairs. Like them or not, it is terribly dangerous to ignore a set of sentiments that, by votes and by distribution, is a serious nationwide affair that now has no representation in government, and as such no release valve. Even if UKIP does not survive this, the sentiments will not disappear and it will bite peeps in the back the next few years.

Re: seagulls

There's a solid reason why, but if even the hardiest scavengers refuse to dine on seagull unless a matter of life and dead..... Well you get the picture...