Well, to be fair, they have moved into beta-beta releases (or 'pre' releases) so what features currently exist or not is always tricky. Personally, I just go to the special:recentchanges page of minecraftwiki to see the latest. Or jeb/notch's twitter feed. Or yogscast. What? What? I'm not addicted! That's nonsense!

Well you're absolutely right that the important thing is what it can do, not what it is called :) I'm not sure how the connectivity of a CA-like computer affects its function. The brain, for example is connected both locally (to nearby neurons) and globally (long-distance axons). I'm no neuroscientist, however, so I don't know how dense the network is.

Apologies, I thought that you were claiming the opposite - that you can make parallel computers serial. I suppose that replicators in CAs are serial, but I assume that you can also use them in parallel. I wonder what the different states of the molecule are.

So isn't that just a highly connected CA? What about a CA where each cell is connected to all the rest - it might behave very differently to a more grid-like CA, but it still counts as one.

The image in that link looks like a non-parallel computer in a CA. So, yes, you can throw away the advantages of parallelism if you like; what's your point? They are claiming that their setup could be parallel, not that it must be.

So the hypothesis would be : "organisms cannot traverse these gaps"?

Well, I would generally agree. You could maybe test if you could 'reduce' protein-protein interaction networks (or gene networks) by graph edit operations. There was a talk about that today at work, and it seems like you can replace subgraphs in a network with smaller subgraphs and still have the same logical result. If you can generate a series of functional networks that increase in complexity through time, then that's proof against ID

Then again, this kind of research is simply called "genetics" or bioinformatics...

His theory was the Big Bang. Appropriately enough, he was a priest.

wiki link for the truly lazy

With optional typing. So, more like groovy.

Did your 'retarded' peers know how to spell the plural of monkey?

This is the _real_ culprit! Beware of this site - it's horribly addictive :)

More seriously, yes ; totally agree. If you are going to 'cure' cancer (or its equivalent) at 25, you don't need to graduate at 15. Perhaps only pure mathematicians do their greatest work when they are young (like Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Évariste Galois) and even then, there are notable exceptions (Carl Friedrich Gauss or Leonhard Euler) who produce work throughout their lives.

I think many people would look awkward in front of the press, unless they are already quite outgoing, or used to it. However, yes school is useful for more than just learning

Can't he learn to drink his own piss indoors, comfortably surrounded by books?

John von Neumann? Although I'm not sure whether his life history will satisfy the homeschoolers in this thread:

So, normal 'restrictive' school, plus tutors.

Well, I don't mean to be too flippant, but he is 13. He can quite literally grow up. He's a child prodigy, not a victim of a Disney-movie style body swap freaky friday kind of thing.

I've been having fun recently reading the wikipedia talk pages on disputed topics. One of these was about whether parapsychology should be a subclass of psychology or fruitloopery. Sorry, that last word should have been "fringe science".

However, I kind of take the point that the study of nonsense like ghosts can still be scientific, in a way. Well, for a while at least. Certainly a subject like cryptozoology that at least gets some results is surely a science.

(oh, and you could tone down the language just a little - I mean, I don't mind swearing, but fucking hell!)

Speaking as a molecular biologist? Wot.

If you were a zoologist - perhaps even a cryptozoologist - this might make sense. Yes it is very doubtful that some human (-like?) species is still alive - but then again, there was Homo floresiensis which may have been alive as little as 12,000 years ago. It's not impossible that some tiny population has hung on in the very large wild areas of Siberia.

Poured into cross-cap cups?