Treeleaf - Slashdot User

Comment Re:By "caught", you mean "killed", right? (Score 1) 661

by Treeleaf on Saturday June 16, 2007 @02:44PM (#19534029) Attached to: Weapon Found in Whale Dated From the 1800s

[snip]

But all traditions are to be respected equally without judgment, no matter how barbaric, asinine, or destructive they are. Who are you to say that foot binding or genital mutilation or brain eating is wrong, if my God told my ancestors to do it, or they've just been doing it forever, because once-upon-a-time it was necessary or beneficial?

[/snip]
Some things can't be justified just because it is or was trandition. I agree, some things that we now consider wrong were out of necessity; but some "traditions" were just because some idiot found it to be the right thing to do or because (s)he had some personal gain from it. If we all were living in the Ancient Inca empire, we would probably not consider human sacrifice as evil. But have we not evolved ? Would you still sacrifice humans just because it was tradition?

Bill Gates' Management Style 362

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday May 06, 2007 @11:31AM from the behold-the-glorious-borg-icon dept.

replicant108 wrote in to give us Tom Evslin's fascinating account of working for Microsoft in the early 90s. "So you're in there presenting your product plan to billg, steveb, and mikemap. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he's rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you're saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don't know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn't looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on. At some point in your presentation billg will say "that's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can't really let it faze you. Moreover, you can't afford to look fazed; remember: he's a bully."

Single Gene Gives Mice Three-Color Vision 184

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 24, 2007 @03:53PM from the colors-you-can't-see dept.

maynard writes "A study in the peer-reviewed journal Science shows that mice transgenetically altered with a single human gene are then able to see in full tri-color vision. Mice without this alteration are normally colorblind. The scientists speculate that mammalian brains even from animals that have never evolved color vision are flexible enough to interpret new color-sense information with just the simple addition of new photoreceptors. Such a result is also indicated by a dominant X chromosome mutation that allows for quad-color vision in some women." A sidebar in the article includes a nice illustration of what two-color vs. three-color mice might perceive.

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