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A Mendelian gene is an all-or-nothing entity. When you were conceived, what you received from your father was not a substance, to be mixed with what you received from your mother as if mixing blue paint and red paint to make purple. If this were really how heredity worked (as people vaguely thought in Darwin's time)…
A few weeks before the debates, however, they are informed that it is the task of each to present the point of view of the opponent in a way that's satisfactory to the opponent - so the opponent will say, 'Yes, that's a fair presentation of my views.' In the joint written debate they explore their differences, but…
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. rhis is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. The alchemist and the magician in the Middle Ages thought, and the addict of comic strips is still encouraged to think, that nature must be mastered by a…
An estimated 181 654 (95% confidence interval: 148 548–214 761) children younger than 2 years of age were treated in emergency departments in the United States for injuries related to cribs, playpens, and bassinets during the 19-year study period. There was an average of 9561 cases per year or an average of 12.1…
No direct quote for this meme.
I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree, I think. And he says--"you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…
I was thinking about how the I Ching is composed of a total of 384 lines (6x64) Wouldn't it be nice if you could 'interlock' the hexagrams like a jigsaw puzzle? Have a look at the following code: THE CODE 0000001001000101010000110100110010110110001110101110011110111111 The 64 bit code above 'defines' the whole of the…
So everyone agrees these days: Hooray for pirates! Art and culture (or, more discouragingly, "content") should be free. Techno-utopians of the left and right envision a future in which everything ever made is accessible, at no cost, with a click of a button. Those who think "free" as in speech envision a new digital…
fucking magnets, how do they work? I don't want to talk to a scientist, ya'll MF lying and getting me pissed
No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia. Time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in…