You may very well be right, in which case I weep for my country.

Apologies for the weird formatting characters, which didn't show up in the preview. Slashdot, Slashdot ...

By that logic, it is impossible for anything posted in a newsgroup to be spam, since seeing it requires you to read that newsgroup. Which is a pretty silly interpretation, given the history involved.

You're not the only person here who "was on the Internet when the term was invented," you know.

Currently modded to +5.

Censorship is bad! NSA is evil! Facebook is for sheeple! Microsoft sucks! Apple sucks! Google sucks! Go Edward Snowden! Ooooh, I'm a rebel! Dancing on the edge!

We've had so many wacko right-wing conspiracy trolls on /. lately, it's nice to see a wacko left-wing conspiracy troll instead. Refreshing, you know?

Long week at work.

Thanks, that helps clear things up.

I was just trying to make a joke, but it's an interesting question: are cells Turing machines? (To the degree anything in the real world can be called a Turing machine; if you know where to get a computer with infinite memory, please send me the manufacturer's URL.) They have the potential to be, else we couldn't build biological computers--which AFAICT are just lab curiosities for now, but may someday do real work--but it seems to me they don't really act like them in their day-to-day functions. Then again, neither do our computers, a lot of the time ...

The more time I spend modeling gene regulation, the more skeptical I am of any attempt to draw any equivalence between computers and living organisms, or even parts of organisms, except in the very broad sense that we and our machines both process information. The collection of branching stochastic feedback loops necessary to carry out the processes of life, at every level from transcription to tissue function, is like nothing any sane engineer would ever try to build.

It's like when you send your old server to the junkyard to be parted out ... ahhh, crap.

Have you actually read your own posts in this thread?

Huh. It's like you're having an argument with someone who made a post vaguely similar to mine. Well, have fun with that.

What do you mean by "fractally wrong"?

True, but I'd argue that "mere" speed is pretty important. There are only so many hours in the day. A particular problem with modern science--bad enough in Einstein's day, worse now--is that there's a whole lot you have to learn before you can hope to make meaningful new contributions to any field. To refer back to an earlier famous scientist, standing on the shoulders of giants is great, but a lot of times you reach the shoulder of the giant only to realize that you're staring at the feet of the next giant. The climb will take you a long time even if you're very smart; if you're not, it may well take more than a lifetime to complete. Having just finished a PhD that took [mumble mumble] more years to complete than I expected at the outset, I'm acutely aware of this problem ...

Hardly. No one really knows at the outset if they've got what it takes, and everyone who wants to do so should certainly give it a try. Even if they don't reach the top, they'll learn a lot along the way. But not everyone will reach the top, just as (mixing metaphors a bit) a whole lot of people who set out to climb the world's highest mountains don't succeed, and often die trying.

In that sense, sure--anyone can, and everyone should. But that's not the same thing as "doing science" the way Einstein did, making major discoveries that change the way we look at the world. Hell, it's not even the same thing as publishing a few highly cited articles, which is a fair accomplishment for any working scientist to aim for.

The problem is that "average" in common usage usually refers to the mean, except when it doesn't. Which is why statisticians avoid the word as much as possible. ;) It was the use of "Statistically speaking ..." that caught my eye; practically every time someone starts out that way, they're going to say something that needs calling out. (Other examples include "I'm opposed to censorship, but ..." and "I'll probably get modded down for this ...")

So, you've studied the distribution of corpus callosum size enough to be sure the median is equal to the mean?