Indeed. And we have lots of examples in the modern world where such mixed symbioses are visible. We're part of a lot of them. Consider that many of our domesticated species are far more "successful" than their wild relatives, but their price for teaming up with the world's top predator (us) is that we eat most of them. We let enough of them survive and reproduce that, biologically speaking, it's worth the price.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it does turn out that our mitochondria started off as both food and parasites for the amoeba-like critters that eventually "domesticated" them and converted them into internal organs. This seems also seems possible for chloroplasts, who could have started as parasites on the larger cells, then eventually adapted to the "you give me minerals and water and hold me up to the sun and I'll give you sugars" role, and had no good reason to ever leave their hosts again.

But it's possible that we'll never be able to fully sort out how these adaptations happened. There's no natural law saying that they had to leave the evidence behind.

Good point and I amend my statement to include, "Do NOT use the Big Dig model as your reference or as your influence. Also, don't be cheap, pay for proper studies, vet them, and use good engineers who have done this work before."

As for rail? I can now drive down to Portland and hop a train to Boston to catch a Bruins game. It is, by no means, high speed though. The Big Dig was a horrific project and, yeah, I suppose you may be right in that that's what government projects will result in. We *can* do better though.

California had subways. Their inclusion will be no more catastrophic than without when the big one hits so that is a moot point. Seriously, they had them. I don't recall if it was the automobile companies or the oil companies that bought them and closed them (watched a documentary on it once but it was quite a while ago) but they had them then. That and we've gotten pretty good at making things withstand quite a bit of abuse. They have subways in Japan which is more tectonically active than California. So, yes, put in subways but be smart about it and don't be cheap.

It might be pointed out that plants' chloroplasts and our mitochondria are now well-understood to have originated as "ingested" bacteria that, rather than being broken down and digested, ended up first as internal symbionts, and were over time transformed into the cells' internal organs. What these slugs are doing is somewhat similar to this, though on a somewhat smaller scale. The slugs apparently only nab a few chromosomes from the algae, and transfer them into their own digestive-system cells.

But the "first" in the article is a bit different from this: They describe it as the first-known such transfer between two multi-cellular species. Our mitochondria seem to have originated in a single-cell ancestor similar to an amoeba, which incorporated an entire living bacterium as an internal resident. Similarly, plant chloroplasts are believed to have originated as photosynthetic bacteria that were incorporated whole into early algae. In both of these cases, there has been gene transfer from the internal bacteria into the eukaryotic cell's nucleus, leaving the mitochondria and chloroplasts with mostly just the genes needed to do their job, and unable to survive outside their host cell.

But the slugs took a different route, of separating out the photosynthesis genes from their food's cells, moving the DNA into the slugs' cells, and digesting the rest of the algal cells as food.

It could be interesting to stick around and see how this works out. Eventually, they might be able to incorporate the photosynthetic mechanism into their own genome, so that when a slug cell divides, it'll get copies of of these genes and won't have to steal them from algae. Plants never never did this, because they maintained their chloroplasts' ability to divide within the plant cell (with a bit of help from the host cell). The slug's approach might turn out better than the plants'. Or maybe it won't. Or maybe it'll just be two different approaches to photosynthesis that both work well enough.

But we might not know about this for a few more millennia ...

In my experience, this is because "employers" in this context means the people who are either doing the hiring process, or are the top management. That is, they are people who have no concept of what a programming language is. So they make the obvious connection based on the terminology: It's like a (written, probably) human language. This means that it's so complex, inconsistent, and full of special cases that it takes years for anyone to become fluent.

I've experimented in a few interviews, and tried to get across what learning a programming language is really like. One of the example I like to bring up is my introduction to C. I borrowed a colleague's "C bible", took it home for the weekend, and read through it. On Monday morning, I sat down at a terminal at work and tried writing a few programs. One of my self-assigned programs was a functional sort routine, which I had running and correctly sorting some available multi-Mbyte datasets by noon. After lunch, I coded up another half dozen sort routines, wrote an inteface routine that took pointers to a data set and a sort function and churned out the results. I tested all the sort routines on all several dozen available datasets, and printed out the sort speed for each routine on each dataset. (The results of this surprised a lot of people, who knew the usual estimated speeds of sorts on random data, but of course none of our datasets were anywhere close to random. Some were really upset when the winner on several of our - very non-random - datasets was the bubble sort. ;-)

Inevitably, though, the interviewers decided that I was lying. Nobody could learn a language that fast, y'know. They were clearly puzzled about why I would even try to pass off such a blatant lie, when anyone would know it couldn't be possible. My colleagues in the DP department weren't surprised, of course; they'd all done similar things to learn other languages. Sorting is a well-defined subject with lots of well-defined algorithms that they could mostly code up in a few hours, and C is a logical, well-defined language that was (almost;-) completely described in a rather small book. But the HR and manager types that did the hiring all judged the difficulty by imagining how long it would take them to learn to explain a sort algorithm fluently in a strange human language, and by that misunderstanding, I had to be lying, because nobody can learn a language that well in only a weekend.

(Actually, I've only tried this sort of thing after I've already decided I don't want the job. Making them thing you're lying during the interview isn't really a good idea if you want a job. ;-)

Anyway, if you understand this, you understand why employers might not want to hire someone who doesn't know a language. They're thinking of examples like opening a sales organization in Pakistan or Thailand, and what would happen if they hired people who weren't fluent in the local languages to run the sales campaigns. The computer folks' use of the term "language" makes them think that hiring a programmer who doesn't know language X to write software in language X will be that sort of disaster, and they can't wait the years it'd take to develop the sort of fluency they need. There's nothing you can do to teach them about their serious lack of understanding. If you try, you'll just be labelled a liar, so don't bother trying to educate them.

You do know that we have invented machines that dig tunnels at various depths, yes? That is just one solution. That one can be done with little bother to the traffic above even. It CAN be done but will take time and cost money. Those are two things the little people and the politicians hate.

Pretty much the same here though I don't rent DVDs as I have yet to find anyone renting the material I want to watch. I pretty much only watch educational material and usually in the form of documentaries. The Red Box machine thingy didn't appear to have a single educational DVD in it. It was the same at the (now long closed) rental stores in the area. I do watch, I tend to binge watch, some television that's entertaining but I normally just stick to something that's going to make me a little more in touch with the world around me. I like science and history documentaries best so I frequent YouTube and Netflix. I can't deal with the ads - even with a paid account - from Hulu so I don't give them money any more. I did for two months as I recall and found it worthless.

No, it would appear that Foss's software is non-f/oss.

It must have been before recorded history. We have documented examples of such behavior for as long as we have documents.

Well, duh, they did it to verify that the people did give the "expected" answer most of the time. There are lots of scientific studies showing that something the "everyone knows" isn't actually true, so such beliefs are often worth actually testing. In this case, a number for what fraction of the people haven't a clue about DNA is interesting and potentially useful. It does put a lot of other such surveys in an "interesting" light.

Well, they apparently spent some time in meetings of an international organization discussing the definition of "planet", when they could have been doing actual scientific work. ;-)

Of course, sometimes terminology is important scientifically, and it's worthwhile spending time to get it right. But they were mocked by other actual astronomers pointing out that any term that includes both Mercury and Jupiter but not some objects with intermediate properties must be an absolutely worthless term for any scientific purposes. So, at least during the time they spent in such discussions of the definition of "planet", they weren't functioning as scientists. But they were pretending that the terminology involved had scientific value, so it probably did qualify for the term "pseudo-science", in at least one of its common meanings.

Neither has Earth; there's a rather large, bright rock visible in our sky about half the time. ;-)

Seriously, though, it's probably just a matter of time before a rock bigger than Earth is discovered out in the Kuiper belt and/or the Oort Cloud, and chances are pretty slim that its orbit will be "cleared" of rubble. This will either put an end to the current (somewhat bogus) definition of "planet", or it will cause the debate over what's a planet and what's not to bumble on indefinitely.

The most likely result will be that astronomers will eventually reject the term "planet" entirely. Sorta like how, a few centuries back, they rejected the older term "astrology", due to all its baggage and mis-use by pseudo-scientists and charlatans.

In any case, the big rocks in the sky don't really care how we classify them. They just go about their orbiting, occasionally bashing into each other (and occasionally us) at widely-spaced intervals.

Actually, it's quite common for local weather data to play fast-and-loose with the concept of "average" in ways that produce such anomalous results.

Thus, it's common to record the "average" temperature for a day by averaging the high and low temperature. It should be fairly obvious how this can produce days that are mostly below (or above) average, like when a front moves through and produces a peak high or low that's very different from most of the day. Similarly, I've seen the "average" monthly highs and lows calculated by taking four numbers (the min/max of the daily highs/lows) and doing similarly misleading averaging.

Actually, meteorologists typically record such things on an hourly basis, and do averaging across all of them. You still run into questions like whether the results are means or medians. But it's not unusual for the politically inclined to ignore such data (which is often only available by grovelling through the databases), using an "average" of only a small set of highs and lows.

Yes, these should average out over the long run. But we've seen so much "cherry picking" in this subject area that one should be skeptical of all the data until you've verified that the writers aren't trying to pull a fast one to support their religious/political/economic theories.

You must speak a rather restrictive dialect of English. In my native dialect (US West Coast), the phrase "everywhere around here" is quite normal, and you can figure out its meaning by inserting "that's" in the right place. The first quote above used the two halves of the phrase in a common way, and speakers of such dialects will automatically carry the "around here" over to the second sentence.

So what dialect do you speak, for which this isn't true. Online linguists studying English dialects are curious ...