fiddled filter design

Example?

Not exactly. We now know enough not to bother trying to start from scratch, but people are fooling around putting extra amino acids into the genetic code and getting organisms that survive.

That implies a fairly high level of understanding.

Darwin had an excellent idea. It has taken a while to flesh it out.

That particular "mathematical concept" kicks electrons out of photocathodes. It's got a definite physical reality.

Quantum mechanical tunnelling doesn't happen all that often, but there's a lot of universe out there.

It's a very long way from full.

Except that there isn't any ocean.

Not this particular batch. There's been a degree Celcius of global warming the last century, and no corresponding orbital change.

CO2 levels go up from about 180 ppm during ice ages to 270ppm during interg lacials, which accounts for about half the temperature rise, with the loss of high albedo ice cover on the more northern parts of the northern hemisph ere accounting for most of the rest. Orbital changes are big enough - just- to trigger the switch between the two states, but that doesn't make them t he cause.

In fact the current sequence of ice ages and interglacials only started 2.6 millions years ago, and it won't take all that much continental drift to s top it again.

The earth got by for hundred of millions of years seeing the same orbital c hanges and not having ice ages - you have to have the continents in the rig ht places for it to drive an ice age/interglacial switch.

It will take a while.

The current CO2 level - 405 ppm - is higher than it has been for some 20 mi llions years, and nicely explains the current warming.

More CO2 and more warming would be a very bad idea.

Q.E.D.

No more to be said.

Which is why they have cured malaria, cancer, and ageing.

And according to himself, most were failures of various sorts.

OK, you don't design electronics either. Why post to s.e.d?

Glad we agree,

but but this is s.e.d

now you're getting really optimistic. Just killfile his stupid, pointless & endless arguments. He's not about to get cured.

NT

They are slowly getting there with malaria. We have already eliminated and completely sequenced smallpox.

Cancer is a huge number of different diseases caused by environmental factors and genetic predisposition or mutation. Ageing is almost certainly inevitable otherwise the world would fill up too quickly. Average lifespan has increased considerably during the past century.

Whilst we may not yet have a complete understanding of living cells a great deal more is understood about it than you seem to think.

I suspect that certain researcher groups are not all that far away from being able to genetically engineer a minimal life form ab initio now. They have come on a long way recently as sequencing has become mainstream and tools like CRISPr make editing the genome precisely all too easy. It is still a lot of tedious trial and error to figure out what each idividual component does but they are closing in on a minimal working genome solution for self replicating cellular life.

At the moment they still need the bare scaffold of a pre-existing cell membrane to put their new genetic blueprint inside.

What point are you trying to make?

That we don't understand everything? Well duh. But that doesn't mean we understand nothing!

Or might your point be similar to us not having (practical) fusion reactors, nor understanding dark matter/energy, nor being able to predict everything that happens in turbulent flow?

Not any more.

I'm here to listen and learn. How about you?

I like to talk about electronics and sometimes peripherial issues. A few people here are skilled and helpful and help me think.

I also like to compare styles, like schematics and PCB layouts and simulations and packaging, but hardly anyone is willing to post their work. Most people are either paranoid or NDA'd.

I did find my best senior engineer in this NG, imported him here from Houston. And I met Phil, Joerg, Speff, George, Jeroen, and some other cool people here, and drunk beer with some of them. I knew James Arthur already; he always skis in short pants.

A religionist can confront a scientist with a claim that 'your theory is wrong'.

The scientist then waits a few seconds to hear the observation that led to this breakthrough (because a hole in an accepted theory IS a breakthrough, an opening to new vistas of knowledge and understandiing).

The religionist voices some dogma or ancient-text prescription supporting his statement. The scientist frowns, and walks away.

An ape, watching this exchange, sees one male accosting another, and the scientist losing.

A fashion reporter notes the colorful necktie of the religionist, and the spiffy white lab coat with wide, functional lapels.

A watching religionist sees a triumph of [Marduk/Baal/Apollo]'s temple over a lesser mortal institution.

A scientist watching the exchange doesn't see it that way, at all. Don't waste time over prestige/attitude/mood-based descriptions of scientific exchanges.

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He means that they flatter him enough to let him feel comfortable. He doesn 't like being corrected - it makes him feel inadequate - so he doesn't lear n anything like as much as he should.

James Arthur is morally challenged. He thinks it's okay to take money from the Koch brothers to sell their brand of political nonsense, though - to be fair - he's intellectually challenged enough that he may not realise that their political message is self-interested nonsense. Presumably he's willin g to flatter John Larkin enough to blind John Larkin's unimpressive moral s ensibilities.

One case I witnessed was one particle physicist brutalizing another during a presentation; it looked normal in that crowd to me. Another case was gross public humiliation of a helpless grad student by the dean of the physics department. For being either wrong, or just not smart enough.

The dean's wife was the dean of the Chemistry department at the same university. Freshman Chemistry was used as a wholesale washout course, to get rid of about 30% of the kids first semister.

People can't help being as smart as they were born. Nor should they think being born smart somehow makes them superior. People should be kind by default.

It looks reminiscent of the PCBs you see inside early 1980s Lexicon "mainframe" digital echo / reverb units for recording studios; a four or six rack unit enclosure with many memory chips and array logics on a number of cards into a backplane.

Pretty sure they did each reverb "algorithm" DSP a similar way with state machines in programmable logic, general purpose microprocessors weren't yet fast enough to do it in real time

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University teachers - as opposed to university researchers who teach as wel l a do research - do tend to be peevish. The nastier ones I ran into as an undergraduate and a graduate student weren't highly regarded by their colle agues because they didn't publish much (and what they did publish didn't ma ke it into higher ranked journals) and took out their resentment on the stu dents.

In an industrial environment, being nasty to your colleagues doesn't pay of f. They will be unhelpful in response, and you can't get stuff done. Being unkind to your students isn't as immediately expensive.

They failed too many of the pop tests? Or they didn't show up for the pract ical classes? Getting rid of 30% of the people enrolled by half-way through the year should have required fairly draconian testing.

Why not? Being born pretty or well-coordinated makes them socially or athle tically superior. Being born smart makes them academically superior.

Not if it allows half-wits to go around thinking that they know what they a re talking about. Other half-wits might take them seriously.

Some people are rather too inclined to believe that they don't get things w rong - about anthropogenic global warming for example - and need to be disc ouraged from propagating dangerous nonsense.

Martin Brown wrote

I have long been aware of the work by Venter , and here some notes from my understanding:

Sticking modified or synthetic DNA into a living cell is not creating life. It is no different for organ transplants, or making a horse or donkey go a specific way.

Life, and I am not religious, I have seen people die, and you could see that something 'field' leave an go back, leaving a dead body behind. There is a song: Where you go when you die, you go to the spirit in the sky.

Something like that,

I see it the other way around, the 'spirit in the sky' leaves the creature, leaving a dead body behind.

What is this? I have wondered many times, IMO we live in a cross field of past and future, I have seen things from the future (that came true later) and it makes me conclude that what we are just sees part of all that is, but everything is already known. From logic you can then perhaps conclude if every thing is already known, then what is our part?

We are, again in my view, the puppet, and the hand that plays us, is the infinite one. It is the puppet master. Its (His?) script is already known. We jump and play and that is it,. Things unfold that way. IMO you cannot turn it around and say 'hey puppet master now I will jump', well you can and maybe by some coincidence you may jump,,, But anyways, we are nowhere near to understanding what that something is, and that something is a - , or maybe the ONLY common element in all religions, In more religious terms, you cannot command God, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever have you in other religions. Maybe if it is meant to be we will understand that spirit better, maybe not. I'd love to understand it, but it is already a gift to be able to see it at times.

So creating life? probably no. ? Connecting something to it ? To that spirit? ?? And they have been working at it since the sixties according to that wikipedia link,, bit like break even fusion .. But nice work it is.

As you become able to measure ever more accurately then it requires an ever more precise theory to match. Science always works by stepwise refinement until someone comes along with an experiment that breaks the current accepted paradigm in some more spectacular way.

When the first binary pulsar was found having a super precise external clock at great distance allowed an error lurking in the VSOP perturbation series for the position of Jupiter to be determined when experimental observations of the light path delay did not match "theory". It turned out that there was a bug in the automatic generation of FORTRAN code continuation cards when the number of them exceeded 9.

Until you have the means to do the test you cannot know if the theory is correct or the experiment has found something new.

Newtonian dynamics and special relativity will both predict the motion of projectiles and billiard balls to well beyond the limits of any experimental verification. Any new more complete theory invariably contains older theories as a weak field limiting case. You will do a lot of extra work using relativity for dynamics with v At best Occam's Razor saves time by prioritizing the testing of a list

The purpose of Occam's razor is to avoid adding unnecessary complexity just for the sake of it. Theorists often want to add extra symmetry for aethetic reasons - sometimes it is justified and leads to useful insights and discoveries. Dirac's idea of positrons for instance.

Put simply a model requiring just three parameters to fit *all* the observations is generally preferable to one which requires as many free parameters as there are measurements all other htings being equal. Too many people are inclined to overfit their data with over optimistic ideas about the noise level.

Scientists are human too.

You probably didn't understand the nature of the probably very basic error the hapless student had made. I have known some very cutting comments from the sharper tongued researchers of my acquaintance. Defending a thesis or hypothesis is adversarial in nature. You have to be able to back up what you are claiming with evidence.

Steady State vs Big Bang was personalised by Hoyle and Ryle in Cambridge eventually leading to the loser going into self imposed exile. Ryle was proved right but in part for the wrong reasons since some of the excess of faint radio galaxies they found were actually sidelobe artefacts. Penzias and Wilsons 1964 detection of the microwave background was the final nail in the coffin for Steady State.

That may be a kindness to the ones unsuited to be working in a chemical laboratory environment. Teaching laboratory science is expensive so you only want to have the students that are actually going to make it.

My final year theoretical physics course was well known as a complete bastard and the first week had a very hard exam at the end of it intended to put off anyone who wouldn't make the grade. It eased off a bit after that but the finals paper was still extremely tough.

It is kinder to let them know that they are not suited to their chosen course of study earlier when they can still change subject rather than later.