grey413

Nope. Phylogenetic families are based on the degree of shared ancestry, not the presence or absence of any given trait.

I mean, don't get me wrong, you CAN develop phylogenetic trees based on traits. That's how Linnaeus and all subsequent taxonomists did it before they could just look directly at DNA. But it takes a lot of traits, and has been preempted by DNA based methods anyway.

Genomes are used as a reference point for all sorts of genetic analysis. It's comparable to having the source code to a binary. Plant breeding in particular benefits from having better analytical tools on hand, since it's such a critical field with such a gargantuan and diverse pool of organisms to study.

US political and military protection.

Everything else aside, there was absolutely no way that this was going to work. Injecting plasmids under your skin and expecting it to change your genes is like pouring nitrous oxide on your steering wheel and expecting your car to go faster.

Even if by some miracle all of the exposed cells had decided to incorporate these random, bacteria-looking rings of DNA from the interstitial fluid into their nuclei, IT WAS INJECTED INTO THE ADIPOSE TISSUE OF HIS SKIN. ADIPOSE TISSUE DOES NOT MAKE ANTIBODIES.

I'm baffled how anyone with an ounce of expertise thought this would do anything.

Dogs are kind of a weird case, from an animal population standpoint. On one hand, there are a ton of 'purebred' populations that undergo very specific selection and which are fairly genetically isolated from the rest of the species. These are your fighting dogs, your hunting dogs, your ratters, your herders, your companions, etc etc. On the other, there's this huge pool of castoffs and mutts, which aren't really undergoing any concerted deliberate selection at all. However, the castoffs from the specific breed dogs are constantly being shunted into the general population.

So to answer your question in that context: Yes, it would be more than possible to take a population of dangerous fighting dogs and use them as the base stock for a pet breed, provided that the breeding program was well designed. However, the general mutt population will always have fighting dog traits mixed into it so long as there are fighting breeds around.

Culling non-desirable stock is an important tool in any breeding program. The essence of evolution is replacement, after all.

That's actually already an area of active study.

See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1534580708...

In terms of pure impactful science I'd say 1920-1960 or so. Quantum mechanics and everything it led to (modern chemistry, in particular) is the big one, but there was also relativity, the modern evolutionary synthesis, huge advances in statistics, the math of computing, and so much more.

It's been addressed elsewhere in the thread, but the problem is not statistical false positives, but rather technically "true" positives (for what the test measures) that do not correlate to an actual disease. More data points do not help.

That's not how public figures work. Influential public figures are influential largely because they are credible. Credibility requires history. Anonymity precludes history.

Take Jeff for example. Jeff has a history. Jeff is a credible game developer with an impressive development history. He's a known factor in the creative community. He's got credibility out the wazoo. As such, we give his words extra weight because of that. In an alternate universe where this article was written by internet-man-of-mystery Bleff Blogel, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because he would have no history to back up his points. It just wouldn't have the same impact.

Even if you're not invested in reddit's fate (I'm a fairweather user myself), this whole debacle has been a fascinating example of how to screw up community management, and how that in turn ruins public relations. Good community management is all about managing expectations and cultivating your userbase so that they'll support you during rough patches. Likewise, good public relations is all about controlling and influencing the narrative. Reddit-the-company, has apparently failed on both fronts. First, they shut out their core of dedicated, free volunteers, giving them literally no reason to be loyal to the company. As a direct result, reddit lost out on one of their best tools for managing the narrative. So when Reddit co. undermined their most prominent, productive volunteers by firing their staff liaison with no warning, it's no damned wonder that the moderators turned on their "bosses". Result? Instant PR nightmare, with next to zero available leverage for controlling it.

The whole thing is a failure of management, pure and simple. Reddit's board should be looking for blood.

The business may be evaporating, but the service is going to continue. It turns out that getting documents and packages to any given citizen is really, really important for the function of governance.

In many ways, stripping the post office of their monopoly had the opposite of the intended effect, because it removed the pretenses that let people pretend that it was somehow magically different and special compared to other essential government services just because it sold stuff.

So, an average of approximately $65 per taxpayer per year. I'm personally ok with that.

Nope! Cosmic radiation causes much higher energy collisions in our atmosphere every microsecond of every day. Even if those collisions form black holes, our continued existence as non-singularities is evidence enough that they're not an issue.

I would venture to guess that those organizations feel that the pains of working with a prototype is worth the payoff of shaping the final product (not to mention the immediate advantages of rust's already stable safety features).

Thanks, that was a genuinely interesting analysis

Keep your heavy runtime code and invocations behind "if __name__ == '__main__'" blocks. Alternately, if you're using a framework keep your runtime code constrained to the appropriate entry class/function. Outside of those blocks, your modules should be mostly constants, functions, and classes.

Evolutionary geneticists don't trace individual lineages that far out, nor would they need to. The hypothesis under question is that the porcine/proto-hominind cross provided a variety of important, wide-acting traits that all humans share. That means that every human has them, and that every chimpanzee doesn't have them. That would show up in a comparative genomic assay.

The champion of the theory attributes the lack of genomic similarity to repeated back-crossing to one of the parent populations. To put it in other words, the droplet of initial hybridization got diluted in the larger gene pool, but the novel genes (and thus traits) remained and underwent selection.

That being said, diluted gene contribution is not the same thing as no gene contribution. To even begin accepting such a theory I would require direct genetic evidence showing considerable horizontal gene transfer between porcine and hominid lines.

Goat and sheep lineages diverged approximately five to eight million years ago[1]. For reference, human and gorilla lines diverged roughly six to eight million years ago[2].

Also, different breeds of dogs are considered the same species (and likewise with cats).

[1] http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/89/44/91/PDF/hal-008...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics#Div...

Actually, the period between the development of woody plants and the development of wood-eating fungi was approximately 60 million years, and is known as the carboniferous because of all of the carbon that got sequestered.

Also, the key chemical wasn't cellulose, but rather lignin. Lignin is an astoundingly complex polymer* that plants use as "concrete" to create their woody cells. As far as I know, white rot fungi is the only group that can break it down.

*seriously, look at that thing: http://cse.ksu.edu/REU/S11/emd4y8/breakdown.html. That's a big goddamn molecule.

The huge majority of any fungi tends to be in the ground or within it's host.

Plus the entire problem is quite likely that the wood/leaf eating fungi are radiation sensitive, so...

To the best of my understanding, graphite in reactors serves the purpose of moderating nuclear chain reactions. The radioactive materials in the forest are almost certainly not dense enough to undergo a chain reaction, so adding a moderator would be pointless. The issue isn't the environmental radiation (like you might worry about standing next to an exposed nuclear core), it's the prospect that radioactive materials might be absorbed by people (like you might worry about if a nuclear core was on fire in the same city as you). Spreading moderators around would do nothing to help about bioaccumulation.

That was really concise and well written. I particularly appreciated the clean warnings and subtle grips about the confusing pats of the syntax.

Four reasons, all dating back to when I started using VC.

1) The GUIs were better, especially on windows. I think that gap has closed some in the last few years, but I think hg still has an edge.

2) Bitbucket offered free private repos and was hg only when they started out

3) The command line semantics were less imposing

4) I happened to find some really good introductory literature for hg.

I was a very, very green developer at the time so all of these points mattered a lot.

The logic is that fewer moving parts means a lower failure rate. It amounts to paying a premium for longer-lived drives. How much you value that is a matter of taste and means.

Academia in general sticks surprisingly close to the guild model. You have professors as masters, postdocs as journeymen, grad students as apprentices, and undergraduates as initiates.

If I had to venture to guess, the project most likely started with 0.x notation because the first few releases didn't have major planned features such as the declarative ORM. After that there were never any truly backwards incompatible versions to merit a full number increment.

Really, it's a credit to just how much Mike got right on the first go.

I find it highly unlikely that vat meat would totally replace livestock. For starters, a large portion of the world doesn't have refrigeration or reliable transport infrastructure, let alone industrial labs. Even in developed areas, you have to take into account the large existing demand for pasture raised meat.

Vat meat simply has externalities associated with it – civil infrastructure, educational overhead, perception issues, etc – that make it so that it can't compete with traditional livestock models in many areas.

Realistically, vat meat competes with factory farming, and not a whole lot else. Which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic all on it's own.

That's rather harsh, don't you think? All models have their limits and scopes, but that doesn't preclude them being useful in their own right. For instance, Newtonian physics simply can't cope with molecular-scale events, but it still gets used every day for the cases where quantum or relativistic effects don't matter. Likewise, phylogenetic classification is still a hugely useful tool within biology. The fact that it has assumptions and limitations merely defines it, rather than diminishing from it.