mablap

"Mozart without sound of music notation."

Edit: Wow a lot of bs going on in the comments. First of all, there's an immense number of ways a DNA strand can degrade, and only one of them splits the strand in two. The relative importance of all these pathways depend on the environment of the DNA, which obviously changes for each and every fossil you have. The global kinetics of "DNA degradation" are supposedly first-order, which implies constant half-life.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724

Harper being so pro-monarchy, insisting on the War of 1812 as being a national foundational myth, trying to assert soverignty in the North seem to be a realization of this identity problem. Also take the current celebrations for the federation's 150th anniversary: the branding completely skips the fact that there were people in the region calling themselves Canadiens for roughly 200 years prior...

Add to that the recent underwhelming documentary on the country's history done by the CBC and the current Premier's own belief that the country has no core identity (being "post-national").

All in all I believe there's a good chance that Canada as you and I know it today will not be around to celebrate another 100 years.

The way Trump has acted towards Canada, talking about NAFTA etc, made me think of someone who has an eye for the territories up north...

In real life, you have to make choices. Some choices preclude certain futures while enabling others. Sometimes you can make a sacrifice now in order to "win" later. Etc.

I am not saying that memorizing complex mating patterns for example can be directly transposed to real life decision making. Rather, realizing these exist, and appropriating the patterns of thought that make such analyses possible is what is beneficial.

You are right that we aren't "built to exhaustively analyze game trees", but this is precisely what makes learning chess a good thing: you get to train your mind to do that. Transposing that skill in real life is, I believe, beneficial.

http://wiki.c2.com/?ChessIsLife

I might be wrong though. Someone shoot that argument down if you have to ;)

    There's a reasonable argument that we're fairly clueless
    about how most natural systems actually work.

What type of cancers are you talking about? What subtype? What population are we talking about? What subpopulation? What is the difference between an early diagnostic and prevention? Are CTs and MRIs the right tool for the job? Who is most at risk? How often do you screen your target population? How do you make sure they actually come and do the exams? How do you measure success? Are you ready to deal with the outcomes of the diagnosis?

These are just basic questions really. Some people devote their entire life to these hard topics. The radio host sounded like an "expert" with "great ideas" to an equally clueless audience when really he just has no idea.

Most people have no clue about anything going on around them except for what pays the bills (and even then). I was listening to some random radio host telling how "stupid" doctors and healthcare administrators are, that we should be concentrating our efforts on "prevention" rather than fitting a brand new hip onto a 96 year old person. He then went on to cite cancer patients in particular: we should not cure cancer, we should prevent it. His recommendation? "Preventative" MRI and SCANs for everybody over 30, because these would help "detect cancer" earlier.

I don't have to explain to you how clueless that man is/was. But there you have it. The general population is clueless about everything and people speak out of their asses all the time. So in a sense, you were right, but it's the other way around: the problem is politics and human nature, not science.

However, since there are so many applicants, schools have no choice but to cut all below a certain GPA. This has an effect on the pool of applicants and the schools are trying to mitigate that.

This story has been posted a handful of times now. See link for other discussions ^.

I don't understand the logic of people who hold the arguments you bring forth. It's as if because you're not "elite" (whatever that means) now, you will never be.

Yoshua Bengio's dream (if I may) is to make Montreal a global hotspot of AI research. That's all. Now you (and others) can bash it all you want, blame the local population, blame the language, blame the education system - whatever.

To me, the fact that some people are reacting the way you are is actually confirmation that things are doing well - quite contrary to your frankly misguided assumption that I have a defeatist opinion of the city and the province in general.