Well, I was told to learn vi because... it's everywhere.

And, as I have said, while far from being a vim master, I really believe learning 20+ commands is enough to make you very productive under vim.

I have tried and tried and tried to ''get'' emacs, but I always give up after learning 5 or 6 Ctrl+something commands. Maybe I'll just give up one day and use vile, but vim is enough for my needs right now.

As the joke goes, "vi a veggie peeler knife, vim is a finely-honed, precision surgeon knife and emacs is a light saber. Most of the time, I cook, but, once in a while I need to fight hordes of battle droids."...

Here is my problem in the vim-vs-emacs debate:

Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use. Emacs is usually an extra package. Therefore, vim is installed, while emacs is not.

Once you have mastered the basic commands of vi, and its mode dichotomy (edit/command) you can edit text in a very efficient manner. Not to mention the goodies of vim, such as "vim -d" or "vim -x". I am so used to vim that, these days, I find myself hitting the Escape key under Word or Firefox. And I still have a lot to learn!

Emacs, on the other hand, is a complex, jumbled mess, a crazy carpal-inducing kitchen sink of a program that requires you to master its twisted logic before you can actually benefit from all the lispy goodness hiding inside. In the meantime, if you master, let's say, about 20 commands under vim, you undertand that its power is in its own logic, so to speak. Vim is complex, but it seems to me much more predictable and logically organized than Emacs.

These days it's mostly vim, Python, shell, Perl.

When I really have to do something ''serious'' in Python, I use the free version of PyCharm, with the vim plugin, of course.

Otherwise, it's nothing but straight vim all day, every day. If not vim, thel elvis. if not elvis, then straight vi or nvi.

Absolutely. I've worked both with pure biologists and physicians (and biologists in a medical context) and they have dramatically different outlooks and mindsets. Many, many biologists are deeply interested in understanding what is going on, while physicians and medical-focused biologists are much more interested in finding stuff that works to solve this problem.

The divide is very similar to that between pure and applied physicists, although for some reason we don't talk about "applied biologists" (perhaps we should.) Pure physicists are simply trying to find answers to questions; applied physicists are trying to find solutions to problems. The same is true in biology.

Brain size and IQ are not particularly correlated, and I've seen at least some research suggesting that people with high IQs or more education are actually more efficient at using their brains, to the extent that there is some thinning of the grey matter in such individuals in their late teens or early 20's.

Thinking does take more energy than not, but this isn't a big effect compared to brain size: http://www.scientificamerican....

And evolutionary biologists will ask, "What is the evolutionary advantage of intelligence?"

What we think of as "intelligence"--the specifically human abilities to build complex machines and to use anything to represent anything else and to create unbounded chains of logical inference--is almost certainly an epiphenomenon of having a brain big enough to engage in the kind of complex social and cultural behaviour that developed due to sexual selection in our evolutionary history.

The human brain is like the peacock's tail: men with big brains were more likely to get laid, probably because we could be more entertaining and interesting to women with big brains. Once the process started it ran away with itself, until both men and women ended up with these enormous brains that happen to be able to think deep thoughts.

Evolution does this kind of thing, like flight-feathers evolving from modified scales that were selected for thermal rather than aerodynamic properties.

Many genetic diseases are the result of optimizations for other things (anemia is related to malaria resistance, there is some problematic gene in a Jewish sub-population that is related to plague resistance, etc.)

Evolution is continuously running an extremely complex multi-dimensional optimization problem with a time-varying objective function. Local minima abound, and it's easy for organisms to get trapped in them.

Furthermore, kin selection and possibly group selection play a role in human evolution, which makes the whole thing even more complex and non-linear. So looking at specific genes and saying, "That doesn't make sense!" as if there was some obligation for the universe to "make sense" to our naive pre-scientific intuition is fairly silly.

The human genome is a Rube Goldberg apparatus that manages to make hundreds of thousands of products out of 40,000 strongly interacting templates plus a bunch of ridiculously inefficient secondary control mechanisms like micro-RNAs (which in some typically degrade already-transcribed mRNA). Pointing to one step as if it can be considered in isolation from everything else is not a good move.

Loss of vitamin C manufacture could well have to do with the development of some other pathway that was more important at the time, and may well continue to be more important today. The only way to really find out is to either a) understand the genetic trade-offs in detail or b) ask some volunteer to have their vitamin C production turned back on by a technique like this. Personally, I'd recommend the former.

Given how weird humans are developmentally, some things like this may be important when we're young and not so much when we're older, so in the fullness of time we may find we can turn on vitamin C production only after people mature, for example. The possible range of futures, given how little we know now, is large.

In the meantime, we have plenty of people with genetic diseases that we know the cure will not significantly disrupt their cellular machinery, because we have lots of examples of people without those diseases who are just fine.

The photons were in the visible, but the e+/e- pair exists "off the mass shell", which is an obscure way of saying that the normal conservation laws don't apply. There is an uncertainty relation that goes dE*dt >~ h/2Pi, which is to say: you can violate the law of conservation of energy by any amount so long as you do it for a short enough time. That's what's happening here.

That said, this whole thing is pure speculation, and somewhat problematic speculation at that. If you take the first neutrino detection seriously, the real question becomes not the difference between the first neutrinos and the light, but why the one neutrino detector has such a different arrival time. Conventional wisdom is that it is an instrumental artifact, and that's a pretty good bet.

If it is not--and this slowing-down-light is real--then we need even more new physics to explain why the Mont Blanc neutrino detector saw such different arrival time from three other detectors: Kamiokande II, Baskan and IMB, all of which detected events that are consistent in time of arrival.

Their energy sensitivities are not that different, and there's no very obvious explanation of why some neutrinos would happen to make it out earlier than others, particularly when segregated by detection technology.

The memo cites case law to justify the suppression of 4th and 5th amendment rights. For example:

and:

So if I'm reading this correctly, 4th amendment rights don't apply if the government deems that its interests outweigh yours, and 5th amendment rights don't apply if the the government deems that its interests outweigh yours or the government asserts that it would be excessively burdensome to give you due process.

The only reasonable interpretation of this is that the government of the United States has become exactly what the Framers feared: an utterly autocratic organization that asserts its own interests over and above the interests of citizens who may come into conflict with it.

Physicists have a funny way of talking about theoretical entities, particularly these days when theory almost always leads experiment. We have years or decades to talk about theoretical entities, and that leads to a strange nomenclature.

"The Higgs" is actually a class of particles. In the "bare" electro-weak theory none of the particles have masses. The only way to give them mass is to break one of the internal symmetries of the theory, and one "natural" way of doing that was invented by Peter Higgs and others in the form of a massive scalar field that takes on a non-zero vacuum expectation value as energy decreases (this is the famous "Mexican hat" potential.)

Suppose we arrived on Earth from Mars and were observing the inhabitants, and we wondered how emergency vehicles would get through busy traffic. One of our number--call it Sggih--theorizes that humans, being visually-oriented, might use a flashing light to warn motorists of an emergency vehicle. Others might elaborate on this and suggest that both a flashing light and a loud noise would be use. All of these types of local warning mechanisms might go under the name of Sggih, with the original one being the "minimal Sggih mechanism" and the other ones going under different names.

In the meantime, there are those who think that humans are telepathic, or use radios, or some other non-local signalling mechanism.

Then one day in the course of observation a Martian--and let's say Martians are deaf, the air being so thin there--sees an emergency vehicle with a flashing light on top zipping through traffic. Horray! The Sggih mechanism is correct! At least probably... it may be that wasn't an emergency vehicle but some kind of advertising stunt. And if it is the Sggih, which one is it? Further research is required to determine if humans use the minimal Sggih mechanism or one of the more complex elaborations...

This work is in the vein of that further research, and the outcome strongly suggests that of the various theoretical possibilities, nature is actually using the minimal Higgs and that is what has been seen, rather than some unexpected but similar exotic particle.

All of this is good news for those of us who are unenthused by supersymmetry and other more-or-less exotic extensions to the Standard Model.

Yeah, and don't forget that "loud pipes save lives" around typical inattentive drivers. This thing is silent but deadly.

The interesting thing about math is that it is a language that reveals underlying isomorophisms, like the one described in TFA. This feature is one of the things that leads to naive people thinking that the math somehow "precedes" the things it describes.

But we see similar isomorphisms in all languages. Consider the "ballad" form of poem. It occurs in incredibly diverse contexts, but the underlying structure is always the same, which means you can sing "Amazing Grace" to the tune of the theme from "Gilligan's Island". So claiming that "pi" shows up in a variety of contexts doesn't prove anything except that it reflects those parts of the universe we find it interesting as humans to describe.

Furthermore, mathematical descriptions include extraneous bits. Wave equations have both advanced and retarded solutions, for example. If the math truly "preceded" the reality you'd expect that this would never happen, or that there would be some mathematical (rather than empirical) principle that let us get rid of the parts that don't describe reality.

The role of mathematics in biology is an, err, evolving one. The possibility of a law-like mathematical description underlying biological and evolutionary processes is at least worth speculating about: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

From TFA: "Second, suramin is a poor drug choice for chronic use because of potentially toxic side effects that can occur with prolonged treatment."

And from the Wikipedia page on the drug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suramin#Adverse_reactions):

So while this is an important piece of work that identifies purine metabolism as a critical set of pathways related to ASD, it should be viewed primarily as a starting point for a more precisely targeted drug that will have the same effect on the pathways that matter without also messing up the ones that cause the side-effects.