Goldmine Bug DNA May Be Key to Alien Life

"The fact that the community contains only one species stands one of the basic tenets of microbial ecology on its head," says Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in Chivian's DNA analysis but whose team made the initial discovery that there were microbes living in this particular fissure two years ago.

Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson says the discovery is so important he will at once begin to mention it in his lectures on biodiversity.

Community of one

A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. It means the ecosystem's only species must extract everything it needs from an otherwise dead environment.

"Virtually all other known ecosystems on Earth that don't use sunlight directly do use some product of photosynthesis," says Pilcher.

Deep-sea vent communities, for instance, are too far down to directly use sunlight but they do use oxygen dissolved in seawater, and that oxygen is produced by photosynthesising plankton at the surface.

Chivian's analysis shows that D. audaxviator gets its energy from the radioactive decay of uranium in the surrounding rocks. It has genes to extract carbon from dissolved carbon dioxide and other genes to fix nitrogen, which comes from the surrounding rocks. Both carbon and nitrogen are essential building blocks for life as we know it, and are used in the building blocks of proteins, amino acids. D. audaxviator has genes to produce all the amino acids it needs.\

ABC News: Goldmine Bug DNA May Be Key to Alien Life

A look at the modified cash basis Accounting

Modified cash basis financial statements use a combination of cash basis and accrual basis financial reporting. These financial statements report all accounts from cash transactions and from all other sufficiently supported modifications that were adopted. Reviewed or auditied modified cash basis financial reports should include the same items required of GAAP financial statements. Distinction among modified cash basis, cash basis, tax basis and accrual basis accounting is made.

A look at the modified cash basis. (Accounting)

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Science News Rating The Rankings

The single best school in the country is Penn State. Then again, maybe it’s Princeton. Or perhaps Johns Hopkins, or Harvard, or Notre Dame …

Each of these schools could legitimately claim to be on top, according to a mathematical analysis, posted recently on ArXiv.org, of the data U.S. News & World Report uses to generate its influential and controversial rankings of American undergraduate institutions. It all depends, the researchers say, on what your priorities are.

The magazine uses seven key factors in its ratings, including things like percentage of alumni who donate, acceptance rates for admission, and spending per student. Lior Pachter of the University of California, Berkeley and Peter Huggins of Carnegie Mellon University reasoned that all these factors are probably relevant to the quality of a university, but one student might value a university with a low student-faculty ratio, for example, while another might care more about research funding. Was there a way to analyze the data, they wondered, that wouldn’t rely on an arbitrary selection of priorities?

Techniques they’d developed for a completely different problem — aligning gene sequences to understand evolutionary changes — could be adapted to do just that, they realized. Biologists commonly analyze the differences between the DNA of two closely related creatures in order to understand how they evolved. To do that, researchers first have to decide how to line the two gene sequences up, identifying the segments that are identical and the places where DNA has have mutated or moved around or been deleted. But this alignment requires some guesswork: How likely, for example, it is that a gene will have mutated, and how likely is it that it simply will have been deleted? Biologists have little basis for deciding that, Pachter says, just as U.S. News has little basis for deciding how important one of its factors is for a particular person.

Science News / Rating The Rankings

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HotForWords.com : Who is Marina - HotForWords?

Who is HotForWords? Her name is Marina Orlova, she’s 27 and she’s a philologist! Now you might be asking what the heck is a philologist? Well, it’s someone who studies linguistics and etymology.. and in Marina’s case.. she has applied her Philology degrees to specializing in word origins.

Marina has two degrees - Teaching of Russian Language and World Literature Specializing in Philology and the Teaching of English Language Specializing in Philology from State University of Nizhni Novgorod Region in Russian Federation, graduated 2002 and taught English to high school students for 2 years.

Marina burst in on the scene in mid 2007 launching her YouTube channel HotForWords, where she takes requests from YouTube viewers for words to discuss, and she releases 5-7 videos each week discussing the origins of these words, in a fun and playful manner!

Marina is the #1 Guru on YouTube, she’s consistently the most watched channel on ALL of YouTube as well - just ahead of Universal Music Group and the NBA, her videos are seen over five million times each week (She is currently at 117,522,384 video views on YouTube alone and counting!), she hosts a bi-weekly radio show on Maxim Radio on Sirius Satellite Radio, she’s currently writing a book on how to use etymology in everyday life - yet nobody really knows much about Marina, other than what her channel states - that she is from “The Capital of the Republic of Lexicon” and her hometown is “Etymologia”

HotForWords : Who is Marina - HotForWords?

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Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops

But here's the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery--wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

Bank robber hires decoys on Craigslist, fools cops | The Social - CNET News

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Form W-8BEN given at time of opening a bank account

If you are on H-1B, you are a resident alien for tax purposes. Fill form W-9 instead. I think this is for interest income, which needs to be reported. And taxed! I think they will send a 1099-MISC at the end of the year.

W-8BEN

W-8BEN is to declare you are exempt from US taxes.

Rentier capitalism and current financial crisis

Savings, pension plans, etc have flowed into the hands of rentier capitalists: hedge funds, venture capitalists backed by major financial firms, etc. The whole world economy is, to a great extent, controlled by rentier capitalists.

These rentier capitalists just destruct themselves, a hypothesis that Jan Toporowski has defended in his book "The end of finance. Capital Market inflation, financial derivatives, and pension fund capitalism".

Jan's hypotheses are interesting to those who think that financial economy is going to solve all the world's problems.

Web server on a business card

This mini web server is slightly smaller than a business card. There are a lot of tiny one-board servers out there, but this is probably the smallest you can etch and solder at home. Unlike many embedded web servers, files are stored on a PC-readable SD card, not in a difficult-to-write EEPROM.

How-To: Web server on a business card (Part 2) - Hack a Day

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reply to email spam

You heard the joke at a social dinner some 5 years ago. Was that the last one you were invited to before others found you to be insensitive and ignorant ? A simple e mail to the sender would have been enough without displaying to 's friends and colleagues that she has made one significant mistake in her life and that was imagining than there was honour in us all. Please don't trouble to reply as your opinions do not concern me.

can I transfer H-1 with just receipt number?

Lawyer says NO!

We need a copy of approval notice (I-797). If you hear otherwise from some other lawyer, let me know.

Google Transit NJ NYC

Google transit - NYC, NJ. Lovely!

The Secret Life of a (Very) Social Wasp : Discovery News

Female paper wasps can't perform an "air kiss," hug or shake hands, but like humans, they look each other over and remember individuals for at least a week after first meeting them. They then base subsequent encounters on these first impressions.

Scientists previously thought only humans and other big-brained creatures could remember social encounters over long periods of time, with insects possessing more fleeting memories. Since the paper wasp brain is less than a millionth the size of our brains, some assumptions about social cognition now appear wrong.

The Secret Life of a (Very) Social Wasp : Discovery News

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Three Men in a Boat (by Jerome K. Jerome)

With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

“Well, what’s the matter with you?”

I said:

“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.”

Three Men in a Boat (by Jerome K. Jerome)

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Eleven reasons America is the new top socialist economy - MarketWatch

Welcome to the conservative's worst nightmare: The law of unintended consequences. Why? Nobody wants to admit it, folks, but the conservatives' grand ideology is backfiring, actually turning the world's greatest capitalistic democracy into the world's newest socialist economy.

A little history: The core principles of conservative economic ideology are grounded in Nobel economist Milton Friedman's 1962 classic "Capitalism and Freedom." Too late to stop President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, those principles became the battle cries energizing conservatives since Reagan: Unrestricted free markets, free enterprise and free trade; deregulation, privatization and globalization; trickle-down economics and trickle-up wealth to an elite plutocracy destined to rule the new American capitalist utopia.

So what happened? Are you guys nuts? Hey, I'm talking to all you blind Beltway politicians (in both parties) ... plus the Old Boys Club running Wall Street (into the ground) ... plus all you fat-cat CEOs (with megamillion parachutes) ... and all your buddies scamming everybody else to get on the Forbes 400. You are proof of Lord Acton's warning: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

It's backfiring! You folks turned our America from a great capitalistic democracy into a meddling socialist economy. Still you don't get it. You're acting like teen addicts tripping on an overdose of "greed-is-good" testosterone while your caricature of conservative economics would at best make a one-line joke on Jay Leno.

Here are 11 reasons your manipulations are sabotaging the great principles of leaders like Friedman and Reagan:

Eleven reasons America is the new top socialist economy - MarketWatch

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Make Immigration Work for Working Immigrants

In addition to the reduced waiting times for green cards from H.R. 5882, Congress can take other steps. It can fix the labor certification process for skilled immigrants under which the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) requires companies to engage in expensive and time-consuming advertisements to show no qualified Americans are available for certain jobs. Neither the law nor the original DOL regulations required such advertisements. Yet DOL is using its questionable authority to, among other things, audit thousands of green card cases from the nation’s largest immigration law firm, Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy. The Fragomen firm has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging DOL has exceeded its authority. Congressional oversight is warranted.

Cesar Conda :: Townhall.com :: Make Immigration Work for Working Immigrants

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Labor audit frustrates companies

Some of the nation's biggest companies are expected to face delays in securing green cards for some foreign workers due to a Labor Department audit that has sparked anger in legal and business circles.

The Labor Department announced this month that it was auditing labor applications filed by immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP of New York, which the department alleged had improperly advised some clients seeking permanent resident status, or green cards, for foreign workers.

People familiar with the firm said it has about 3,000 green-card applications pending on behalf of companies, including International Business Machines Corp., General Electric Co. and Bank of America Corp.

The audit is expected to delay those applications, the department said. GE said it has 70 applications subject to the audit.

"Our actions on behalf of our clients have at all times been lawful and proper," said Austin Fragomen Jr., the firm's chairman.

Gregory Jacob, the Labor Department's solicitor, said the department routinely audits applications for green cards "to ensure the integrity of the program." The audits typically delay the applications by no more than eight months, he said. The department hasn't indicated that Fragomen's clients engaged in wrongdoing.

Daily Herald | Labor audit frustrates companies

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why 'Indian philosophy' is adhoc?

What does "philosophy" refer to in our common parlance? Production of theoretical knowledge, of course. Whatever theoretical knowledge Indian traditions produced, in a way, is subordinated to the experiential knowledge. Heuristics, generalizations, tricks, etc, are descriptive. Focussing on arguments concerning the former, without telling what they are after (in this case, experiential knowledge) is just unproductive: that is,their hypothesis that Indian traditions are set of philosophies have not explained any thing at all; or explained only the set of the facts they have chosen to explain in the first place (and therefore, adhoc).

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenInHisBlindness/message/4378

Scott Adams Blog: My Views on the Dilbert Survey of Economists

As a general rule, I find this argument to be a good approach on a lot of issues. However, I have to disagree with you on this issue because I think there are fundamental reasons why it's impossible for us to copy the health care systems that "work" elsewhere. I'm going to assume that you are talking about the socialized systems that exist in Europe in my argument below.

Having just lived for a year in England, I had a chance to learn a bit about how the NHS (the UK National Health Services) system works. Everyone receives cheap and reasonable health care through the NHS, but the system is always short on funds and looking for good ways to cut costs. Medical care is inherently expensive and even the more socialist governments can't throw unlimited amounts of money at it. Since the NHS is legally required to pay for any approved medical treatment that a doctor deems necessary, they stand to lose a lot of money whenever a brand new and expensive drug/treatment is invented. Thus, they've identified a convenient loophole to the problem: don't approve any medical treatment as "safe" until the patent runs out and a generic brand is available. The consequence for Europeans is that they may not have access to the latest/greatest new medical treatments and are always a few years behind, but they still get good cheap health care that's guaranteed.

The problem, though, is that their system depends entirely on the US. The pharmaceutical industry in Europe is basically dead because there is no longer a market to sell new products. There's plenty of good basic research still done at universities, but no new drugs ever come out of universities directly. University researchers are concerned with scientific research, not fulfilling legal requirements for getting drugs approved and making a profit. There are still big European drug companies out there that invent new drugs all the time, but their entire business models are based on the profits they expect to earn selling new drugs to Americans overseas. Overall, the medical industry worldwide continues to invent new drugs/medical devices and improve our overall lifespan and standard of living, but only because Americans are willing to pay for it.

By now you probably know where I'm going with this. The only way we can successfully copy the European system is if we could find some large external market that's willing to keep paying the huge costs for new, patented drugs. We are that large external market for Europe and no other large market exists. If we copy their system, all these drug companies (both American and European) are either going to go bankrupt or they're going to just manufacture drugs they've already invented. This means nor more medical advances, no new medical technologies, and the same health care available to us when we're 30 as when we're 80. It's not worth it.

Scott Adams Blog: My Views on the Dilbert Survey of Economists 09/17/2008

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Subprime Crisis

You need to inform yourself. First of all, the housing bubble was primarily fueled by errors on Wall Street, not Washington. The explosive growth of the mortgage-backed security industry created an environment that gave people lots of incentive to do really stupid things, like loan people money without requiring them to invest significantly in what they were purchasing or demonstrate that they had the money to pay back the loan. Secondly, here [businessweek.com] is just one of many available articles explaining that the really big hit has come from borrowers with good credit ratings and sufficient cash flow who simply do not wish to continue to pay the mortgage on a house that is no longer worth nearly what they paid for it. It turns out that you can default on your mortgage and all they can take is your house, not your other assets (who knew?).


Anyway, it's certainly not "authoritative," but here [google.com] is a funny and true cartoon that does a pretty fair job of explaining how the screwed up incentives turned normal people in financial fuck-up machines.

Slashdot | Trading the Markets With FOSS Software?

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Court detains preacher with 86 wives

A Nigerian Muslim court Monday detained an 84-year-old Islamic preacher with 86 wives after he failed to heed a call by local leaders to divorce all but four of them.

The authorities in central Niger state charged Mohammed Bello with "insulting religious creed" and "unlawful marriages" after local chiefs and Muslim leaders gave him until September 7 to comply with Islamic sharia law, which allows a man to have no more than four wives at a time.

The preacher, who lives with his wives and some 170 children in the town of Bida, pleaded not guilty to the charges at an Upper Sharia Court in the state capital Minna.

Court detains preacher with 86 wives | Oddly Enough | Reuters

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