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Comment Re:in related news (Score 1) 77

Participation in fraud and selling stolen goods is hardly capitalism. ... Maybe you should look into the theory of capitalism a bit and this time read past the title and forward of the books.

Maybe you should look at how things work in the real world instead of believing what a bunch of philosophers tell you they think ought to happen. Hint: Karl Marx and Ayn Rand both developed economic theories that were entirely logical and self-consistent.

Comment Re:Creativity vs. Being a Crank (Score 2) 118

Yes. This is an important distinction. "They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Hoyle wasn't purely a crank, of course. He was a very good scientist, who had made major contributions to his field, but who just couldn't accept new ideas past a certain point, and thereby became a crank. This phenomenon isn't universal by any means, but it's sadly common.

Comment Re:Poster should consider going back to the clinic (Score 3, Informative) 64

The actual benefits from pharmacogenetic testing for Warfarin metabolism are swamped by all the other factors which affect Warfarin metabolism (eg diet and other meds).

The FDA disagrees, and so does the evidence. And there are a whole lot of areas where pharmacogenetics is starting to have an impact on treatment. In any case, pharmacogenetics is a subset of pharmacogenomics; for example, as I mentioned in another comment, the lab where I work is working on expression-based tests for prediction of altitude sickness and setting up drug trials.

Comment Re:Regulatory hurdles (Score 4, Insightful) 64

The clinical trials framework that's evolved over the decades isn't really equipped to deal with personalized medicine, but that's starting to change. Where I work, we're starting to understand the genomic basis of altitude sickness and putting together treatment trials on that basis. This is an area where the potential market is pretty large, of course, and for rare diseases that affect small numbers of people it's going to be harder, but if we can develop a generally accepted body of protocols for individualized trials then it should be possible to apply this to smaller groups as time goes by.

Comment Statistical analysis of craters (Score 4, Interesting) 135

I understand why they're getting a weak signal here on Earth, where most craters will have long since been erased by erosion and surface remodeling. But I'll bet we could get a much stronger signal from the Moon, particularly the far side. Do we have the ability to get dates for craters there from orbiting probes, or is that something we'd have to collect physical samples to do?

Submission + - "Genomic medicine, finally"

Daniel Dvorkin writes: When I first started studying bioinformatics almost fifteen years ago (!) what drew me to the field was the promise that we might soon be able to provide effective, personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases. There have been some successes along the way, like genetic tests for warfarin dosage, but for the most part our gains in understanding of basic biology haven't been matched by clinical advances. Now it looks like that is at long last about to change, and it's about time.

Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there.

Comment Re: i interpret it to mean (Score 4, Informative) 497

Theromes do exist but always with a defined set of starting axioms and therefore a theorome when applied to the physical world becomes a theory.

Theorems and theories are two different things. You're quite right, that proving a theorem requires a well-defined set of axioms; the natural world, unfortunately, doesn't provide us with such axioms*, which is why we have to use theories to describe it.

*Well, maybe. "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" argues that maybe there is some axiomatic Truth at the basis of reality. But if so, we have no idea what it is yet, and anyone who tells you they know is lying.

Comment Re:No, you don't (Score 2) 497

you'll frequently hear claims that the science is settled

No, you don't. Science is, by definition, always ready to accept a better theory. Nothing is settled. It's just that there are, at this moment, no better theories to explain observations.

Very true. You do, however, frequently hear claims along the lines of "Warmists say it's all 'settled science!' Stupid warmists, nothing is ever settled in science!" This article does an excellent job of addressing that particular straw man.

Comment Re:Settled (Score 0, Flamebait) 497

Claiming that a topic is "settled" is, typically, a tactic to shut a viewpoint down as no longer being a live option the community will consider in its collective deliberations.

And claiming that the other side is claiming "the topic is settled" is almost always a strawman.

One could argue that it's a thin veil over the military victor's (the North's) version of history.

Nice job of concealing your ideological looniness until the end of the post.

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