PhDP

Weak compiler or not, it's one of the fastest language in town. And it's pretty new, v.1 was only released in 2007. So I guess my question is if D is a language with a bright future. Python, JAVA, OCaml, C#; they're all great languages, and to be honest, I would rather use a language than JAVA or Python. But for some people (scientists, mathematicians, and probably game programmers), the speed of execution is a huge issue. So it would be great if we had a modern language based on C/C++, with the ability of C/C++ to do low-level programming, but that would also allows automatic memory management and solve the basic issues with C/C++. This is what D is trying to achieve, and I hope it does, but I have no idea if it will. I don't know much about game programming, but for huge projects they must certainly do most of the programming in C++.

ohhh I thought it was in January, I'll have to wait longer because of you To be fair, so far it's the best season, IMO, so I'm sure it's worth the wait.

He promised us gold, but all we got was pyrite...

CDarwin, The notion that culture is somewhat different from the other forces in nature is, IMO, completely wrong. Predators are also unpredictable, their density fluctuate, sometime wildly, and they evolve. Also, the funny thing with quantitative genetics is that you don't need to know anything about the genes or about the influences from the environment. Information is obtained by studying relatives, twins, ... We get it; you like to dance. But the fact is, I'm sure quantitative genetics could be used to study dancing, we could try to see, well, if heredity affects the type of dance preferred, the average number of time someone dance in a year, et cetera... Sometime the conclusion will be that heredity has very little effect, but we never know until we try. I'm not specialized in quantitative genetics, but it's pretty impressive, it can solve problems from agriculture to paleontology. It's really a shame that so few social scientists know about it.

It was not revealed yet, you'll have to wait for the second part if the 4th season.

Paranoia, I think your definition of "liberty" is too narrow. Presenting this issue as a question of "rights" and "liberties" in such a simplistic way just doesn't work, you have to ignore the rights and the liberties of other people. Your example show this very well; if "blacks" can now enjoy a similar level of freedom as everyone else, it's [in part] because discrimination based on race is illegal. So yes, if you adopt an extremely narrow definition of rights and liberties, this case is really about removing some rights from the doctors. But of course, discrimination based on race, or gender, or sexual orientations; it does affect the life and freedom of others. So the real question here is; are we going to allow the doctors, who choose their job and specialization BTW, to follow their conscience and ignores the rights of homosexuals, or are we going to protect the rights of homosexuals and ignore the rights of doctors to follow their conscience. It's certainly not about protecting rights and liberties, it's about what kind of rights and liberties we're going to protect in this situation. Exactly.

? What it says is that doctors can't discriminate based on sexual orientations. Her "feelings" are not more important because she's a lesbian, and I have no idea how you reached this conclusion, she jusgt has the right to have the same treatment as anyone else.

I also felt his answers were much better, they were nuanced. Yet, Bush has repeatably shown that a war against nuances could pay off, McCain's answers were short, direct, and simple.

If you're looking for something free; Public Library of Science

CDarwin, Earth shattering ? No, not really. But it's important to remember that heritability is often very high even for things we tend to attribute to cultural influences. I guess most people would think their environment had a much stronger influence on their political philosophy than their genes, but it's not that clear. At the very least, heritability for political affiliations is high enough that we can't ignore it. Also, some personality traits are strongly related to political affiliations, "openness" is the perfect example. And I think you missed my point We're talking about nurture v. nature, so the question is; how much variation can be explained by genes, how much can be explained by the environment. It's the basis of quantitative genetics, one of the foundation of modern evolutionary biology; heritability. If you can quantify phenotypic variations, then you can use quantitative genetics to estimate the % of this variation which is caused by genes. You talk about dancing, I think we can put a % on this. Why not ? We could study variations in style between cultures (heritability is probably 0 in this case), variations within a culture, for example how often will someone dance, what kind of dances, et cetera... I cannot really understand why you think we can't put a % on this, especially if you believe in evolution. When you talk about culture or interpretations, in the eye of quantitative genetics it's the same thing as any other variation in the environment, it's no different than the temperature of water or the density of a predator.

I lost a lot of respect for McCain. Is it me, or Bush lead America into troubles because he was stubborn, because of his good vs evil view of the world, because of his ridiculously aggressive foreign policies ? And McCain is playing the same cards, that's dangerous, and in a certain way it's surprising. The approval rating for Bush is low, yet it seems that no lesson was learned and Americans are still going to fall for the exact same thing; - Democrats are complex, hesitant, weak. - Republicans are tough and reliable when it comes to security. They know where the bad guys are, and they're going for the jugular.

Who cares about non-religious Americans ? Non-religious American is not an oxymoron, but it's pretty damn close. How many atheists in the U.S.; 5, 10 % ? For a rich, industrialized country it's ridiculously low. And few of them were going to vote for McCain anyway. Strategically speaking, it's very smart for Obama to talk a lot about religion, and for so many reasons... (1) He's considered unpatriotic. But of course, you can't be unpatriotic if you're a good christian... (2) Many still think he's a muslim, or has some sort of relationship with Islam. (3) Christian conservatives care, a lot, about the personal life of their candidate. Obama never divorced, and he's not making stupid jokes about women. And, most importantly; (4) The new generation of evangelists is running away from the "abortions & gay marriage are the only two important issues in the world" philosophy, or at least, many of them. They are increasingly interested in poverty and the environment, so there is probably a real opportunity for democrats here. Also, I wonder if they're going to talk about evolution. Because, as we all know, presidential elections are the perfect place to discuss scientific theories. I think they broadcast it on CNN. Do I get something for saving your soul ?

I'm eager to hear the opinion of experts... so, what do you think about D (the programming language) ? It's potentially as fast as C, with an option to use a garbage collector, yet for some reason it's not really popular yet.

Alford, John R., Carolyn L. Funk, John R. Hibbing. 2005. Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2): 1‐15. Of course, it was not very well received by social scientists.

Sure we can, it's called heritability; the ratio of the genetic variance of a phenotype to the total phenotypic variance of that phenotype. We can estimate heritability from the simplest behaviors (interest in alcohol) to the more complex ones (political affiliations).

gable can go see an optician if he's concerned, but it's definitively not an eye trouble, it sounds much bigger than it really is. Which is probably why he never even thought of asking his optician before.

gable, I always see tons of little bright dots. Always. Everywhere. They seem to move, to dance around. It doesn't disturb my vision at all, and I saw them for as long as I can remember. It's a little hard to describe because it sounds really annoying, but in truth I can barely notice except when I think about it, and even in this case it doesn't hinder my vision in any way. You'll find many crazy interpretations, I was once told I was able to see 'energy', the New Age kind of energy. In truth, it's just a simple entoptic phenomena; something happening within the eye.

It depends. Some universities will accept you directly in the PhD program (example: McGill, Princeton...), some require a M.Sc, and finally, some will only accept you directly at the Ph.D if you have an exceptional background (GPA > 3.7, things like that...). You have to look the websites of the universities you want to apply to. All B.Sc are similar, but graduate programs are often very different.

- I was always among the 2-3 tallest in my classes when I was young. - My height was average/slightly above average when I was a teenager. - I'm pretty tall now (a little less than 190cm). From my experience, height makes a huge difference, and I'm curious to know why. Why men feel so bad about being small ? I doubt it has anything to do with fighting abilities, after all, many tall people are ectomorphs... It might have something to do with development, or it might simply be some sort of primitive behavior with no adaptive value for modern humans.

Laurence Morgan posted a small criticism of the show (+ the video); http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/08/genius-of-charles-darwin.html

CharonY, Yea, of course, the current view outside the field of evolutionary genetics is ridiculously biased toward selectionist hypotheses. Despite the fact that scientists (i.e; Derek A. Roff, H. Allen Orr, Michael Lynch, Arlin Stoltzfus, ...) have built models to detect phenotypic evolution when selection is absent. But I also think that molecular population genetics is too often dominated by obsolete neutral models. Matthew Hahn (Indiana U.) recently wrote in Evolution; And I agree 100% with him. pionner, Again, my answer is; quantitative genetics. It has methods to evaluate the proportion of variations caused by heredity, and the proportion caused by the environment (see; heritability). So it is possible to see if an increase in the average height is caused by evolution (natural selection, drift,, ...) or by the environment. It might be difficult to do so in the fossil record, but in this case we have molecular genetics, which is a powerful tool to detect natural selection events in the past.

CharonY; it's probably this article; http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/21 About his theories; it combines many controversial ideas, I would have to read more about this to form an educated opinion. And anyway, I think classical Darwinism is already dead If you're interested, Larry Moran posted a review of Koonin's biological big bang on his blog; http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/10/eugene-koonin-and-biological-big-bang.html

It's possible, some graduate programs are quite flexible, but they will likely ask you to take a few undergrad courses. It also depends on your first B.Sc, if you have a baccalaureate in sociology with a GPA below 3.2, you're not likely to be accepted (even in sociology, in fact). If you had the equivalent of a minor in chemistry with a very good GPA (in the 3.5+ range), I'm sure you could be accepted in some universities. But again, it depends on the programs, some are very rigid. I hope you'll find a way, science require a lot of work but it's truly rewarding.

...but seriously, intellectual skills seem to be barely considered in elections. Ideological proximity is great, but if the guy is an idiot (but I guess people are biased toward thinking that if someone is close to them in terms of ideology, they must be smart)...

...and that's where you're wrong, not everything is an adaptation, it could be a maladaptive behavior, it could be a byproduct, it could be neutral.