50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year | Hacker News Reader

50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year

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82 pointsmalvosenior34 comments

"40. The speed of U.S Internet broadband lags far behind other industrial nations, including Japan, Finland, South Korea, France and Canada."

We knew that last year, AT&T. I believe the government handed you some billions of dollars to do something about that years ago.

5. One mutated gene is the reason humans have language, and chimpanzees, our closest relative, do not. Overstated? Seems unlikely to be just one gene. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/282009

12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images. Really? Including what people are remembering? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/living/article...

RE 5: "Only one gene is involved in the important barrier." but "the gene, FOXP2, is not the only one involved in our ability to communicate linguistically but the specific gene in chimpanzees and humans act and appear much differently." I guess it's just one that is the difference.

That's testable. Splice the human gene in to the chimpanzee genome and see if the outcome is the talking chimpanzee. If not then there are more genes active.

Oh man, we should DO that!

It's a fascinating idea, especially what would their language (syntax) be like if they didn't have the concepts (semantics). Or would it turn out that they do have enough in the way of concepts, and have only lacked the language to express it? Or does syntax play a greater role in intelligence than we'd thought - not fully whorf-sapir, but perhaps there is some contribution, in the way that going from regular to context-free languages makes a difference? (personally, I think most of the power of our language comes from a huge vocabulary and combining it in regular ways; the CFG aspect doesn't seem so to be so profound in practice to me)

There's this weird thing though, we don't seem to have much in terms of 'intermediately intelligent' creatures. It seems to be an all-or-nothing thing, you can't be for instance smart enough to develop a 50,000 word vocabulary and write a thesis if you can not also speak, or at least have a speech center (no insult intended to deaf people).

It's hard to generalize from a single instance, but you may have something there. It is striking that both means of expressing large numbers of ideas - vocabulary and syntax - only occur in us. I would guess that they were driven by the same evolutionary pressures and benefits.

There was an article about a (potentially) intermediate "proto-syntax" language used by an animal. Even since your comment, I've been wracking my brains for what it was. I can't even recall what type of animal it was... ah, now that you prompt me to put it into words :), I can google "proto-syntax": http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091212144710.ht...

And just submitted (I seem to have come to it from reddit; it hadn't been submitted here yet): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036802

Whoa. That's scary.

You can read interesting things about FOXP2 gene here http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_evolution_of_lan...

That would be an even better article if it linked to the original research for those items.

Wouldn't that be a cool firefox plugin? Highlight text and click "Find Original Research." Opens a new tab/window and shows search result for key terms.

That would be very neat indeed, the problem would be to figure out what the 'original research' was in the midst of lots of fluff around it. Plenty of times articles will be 10% citations from the original but ranking higher in google because they don't link to the original stuff but do get linked themselves.

If you could crack that though it would be awesome.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...

How many of those would put you close enough to the original research that you wouldn't care to dig deeper?

Probably the easiest would be to work with a blacklist for 'popular' science publications and blogs, and a whitelist for places where original research would be published.

The 'elsevier' link would be the only one left from that page then, and that's the real deal.

This starts to look like it is a really nice weekend project.

Anybody have experience with writing browser plug ins ?

Greasemonkey script even maybe ?

Or use http://scholar.google.com/

But what's the fun in that? I was thinking about streamlining the process.

The original article does have links - not necessarily to the research itself, but still much better than this one.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/dec/27/na-50-things/news-me...

Much better link. Bolding has such a big impact in these types of lists.

Great find, maybe the submitter can change the link ?

Wasn't that hard - if you follow the http://www.tampatrib.com link at the bottom of the original article, it's staring you right in the face.

There are also similar articles back to 2005, which might be good to see whether the items that the Tribune picked turned out to be important or not.

Ah, yes, now I see it. Weird though how they actually had that information and then decided to leave it out of the article, that's a serious devaluation for no good reason at all.

I came expecting points addressing ATTs shortfalls in service, and how they plan on improving. That's not what I got, unfortunately.

15. The higher a patient's body-mass index, the less respect he or she gets from doctors.

I'm surprised to see this on the list, I would have thought this would have been established long ago. Anecdotally, I've talked with several docs who have commented on the frustration of trying to help people who clearly are not taking care of themselves (e.g 350 lb diabetics who won't lose weight, etc.)

Corollary might be "the spherical nurses in the cardiac unit are the ones most likely to lecture you on the importance of losing weight and a healthy diet".

I accompanied a close friend to the local hospital to get some tests done (EKG, etc). Virtually all the nurses were such that you couldn't any part of the chair they were sitting on except the back of the seat.

12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.

Does anyone else think we'll have the ability to "download" ourself into computers quite a while before we extend the life span of the human body beyond 250 years?

I think consciousness is tied to the hardware it is running on, so I'm not optimistic about that prospect... If you mean "copy ourselves" then I'd be more inclined to agree.

This is a neat list but skewed towards fun facts rather than substantial research. I would love to see a list of the biggest findings of the year, ranked in importance by scientists.

It's hard to judge the significance of findings until well after the fact. Science is a process, not just a series of papers.

A few here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/july-dec09/yeari...

That's exactly what I was looking for; thanks!

This one surprised me:

"Analysis of Greenland ice samples shows Europe froze solid in less than 12 months 12,800 years ago, partly due to a slowdown of the Gulf Stream. Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years."

Scared me a little too since I'm from Northern Europe...

Does anyone know where to find more information or the original research?

Their source:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427344.800-mini-ice-...

Some more details in the ESF press release:

"Geological evidence shows that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. This vast pulse, a greater volume than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined, diluted the North Atlantic conveyor belt and brought it to a halt."

http://www.esf.org/media-centre/press-releases/ext-single-ne...

And the background on "Big Freeze" mini ice-age:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

Thanks!

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