Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But never fear now we can get the same misleading data at much greater expense using RNAseq!
And why bother growing things when you can just model everything using the annotated genome? (My PhD project involves, shock, horror, culture-based data. This....confuses some people.)
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to 3410,
Isn’t it the case that we can judge the efficiency or inefficiency only if we know what the goal is, which we don’t?
Ahahah, you’ve hit the point: there is no (forward-looking) goal. Evolution can only adapt organisms to deal with the environment as it was for their parents, by permitting the parents best adapted to the current environment to have the most offspring. It can do SFA about what the environment will be like in the future.
But, nevertheless, its solutions for those past/present problems can still be efficient/inefficient depending on the constraints it has to work around: c.f. the human pelvis, which has reached its widest possible width, allowing for the most-developed babies (evolutionary adaptive for our ancestors *and* us), but is still small enough that some women will (if surgery is not available) die in childbirth. It also impacts the mechanical efficiency of women’s gaits. That’s inefficient. But it’s what we got.
I love it when folks say “look that gene is expressed there it MUST be doing something impotant” whereas it usually turns out to be doing nothing, there was just no reason to turn it off. Like saying “the light is on there must be someone in the room”.
Let's hear it for validation by protein expression and/or other phenotypic evidence! (Oh, microarrays, you mislead us so. And yet we keep coming back to you.)
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I know vocal atheists who are certain that science will disprove <deity>. That’s faith, no more, no less. They don’t like it when I point that out, either.
That's like asking science to disprove Carl Sagan's invisible dragon in your garage. The invocation of faith inherently denies the acceptance of proof/disproof, making the argument irrelevant.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Efficiency means almost nothing, evolution is amazing but it is far from efficient.
Sometimes it seems that evolution selects for the most inefficient solutions. (Which isn't true, of course...they're just, like democracy, the worst solution except for everything else.)
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Rachel Prosser,
I'll take Phantom of the Opera any day. I grew up loving musicals, and still pretty much know the West End Cast album of Phantom word for word. I also recall loving " I've never been to me" as a 12 year old, love the operatic quality of Bohemian Rhapsody, and love Abba - although I don't actually play it.
I managed to go see Phantom on Broadway last month, and not only am I not sorry, I'd go see it again.
(Then again, I always looked forward to the Christmas music when I worked summer retail jobs, which is probably a sign of....uniqueness.)
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I’d also argue that the stereotypes of bisexuals are damaging in and of themselves. We’re promiscuous, heartless, self-absorbed exhibitionists lacking in empathy and compassion. We’re sluts. We’re “over-sexed” – a phrase deliciously packed with social conditioning. We are, in short, the women of least value. If you’re the kind of man with jealousy issues who needs to control his partner, it’s not just men you have to keep away from your bisexual missus, it’s everyone. Seriously, the slag could be getting it on with anyone at all. Imagine the strain that places on your average rat-bastard.
I think it boils down to a stereotype of bisexuals as fundamentally untrustworthy, which is a basically unforgiveable sin in relationships - of any sort. It's worse than a mere perception of promiscuity. It's possibly the most destructive sexual stereotype there is.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I think the idea that middle class white women *in particular* are subject to unfair bias is itself a bit prejudiced.
As a middle class white woman, I inferred that more as a complaint about the jury being largely comprised of members of *any* one subgroup of society. But you have a point.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Andre,
They were overwhelmingly middle class white women that I left on the panel, some of whom had already told us that Tame Iti scared them etc. One of the jurors asked to be excluded because she was convinced he was guilty by how he looked. She was refused her request to leave and heard the case. Another guy asked to be excluded because he thought the whole exercise was a waste of taxpayer money and resources and he was excluded. How does that work? I’m glad they did the right thing…
I have to admit some admiration that the woman was able to recognise her own prejudice and decide it precluded her from being able to do her job as a juror properly. Shame the people she asked didn't see it that way.
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Hard News: Reputation and remuneration, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Can Wellington have some, too?
I'm guessing they wouldn't play so well with the trolley bus lines.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But I had hoped the police would have had a better idea of what was going on and a more appropriate response than behaving as if they were in a hollywood movie. To compound their (over)reaction with shear incompetence is just downright disappointing.
I guess the police - as much as any of us - are susceptible to the lure of Doing Something Important. It's the same instinct that helps convince people to respond to emails from Nigerian princes - the idea that this is it, this is that big thing that's been waiting to happen. But unlike things that are too good to be true, we are not encouraged to evaluate things that are too bad to be true (or at least too bad to be very likely.)