Posts by Viviane

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Lets see 2^3billion is so big that we could say for practical reasons going through all those posibilities is impossible. We might not be able to do it ever. We might never find a way but I failed to see how without a doubt you can say there is no way period.

Because you are creating a version of Zeno's paradox. If you want to sample every human alive, by the time your sampling is done, there will be new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, and by the time that is done, you have new humans to sample, so you have to sample them, so on and so forth.

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Viviane usually programs are squishy(have bugs) because we don't have the same standards as other disiplines and we get away with it. Compare a bridge collapsing vs a program crashing. Some fields required very robous and bug free coding but those are few.

The intent of developing software is not to have bug-free software, that's impossible, it's to reach the highest known state of software quality.

Ah, I didn't know you were in the field. As it turns out, I have to eat my words, because your comment reminded me of what I'm working on at the moment, which is a complex network application. It's quite painful to diagnose problems when you can't use the debugger and have to deal with varying network conditions and issues that span multiple computer systems. It does often feel like I'm trying to get a grip on something slippery while tracking down problems. It's certainly not what I thought I was signing up for when I started learning programming!

Things are not as exact as people would imagine in the field of computing..... I remember in my early days we were working on some debugging and put in code to write extra logging ... which caused the issue to disappear. At least we figured out the extra code was causing a timing isse that the extra time it took to do the logging was "fixing". And then there was the time a DB developer tried to outsmart the thread scheduler ....

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Viviane you asked why draw the line where I did. It was a suggestion. The line was drawed becaused it fit the data and a pattern was found. Why use the definition of species when is flawed? You have horses and donkeys mating and some of the offsprings are not always sterile. If you take the definition of species that they can only mate with their own species and produce only that species then mathematically you could prove that a species could NEVER produce another species therefore prooving evolution doesn't exits. Since we know that is not the case the definition of species if flawed. Start with a wrong premise no wonder is impossible to find the first human(s).

Mating is only one way to make that distinction. There are multiple ways to define a species, none of them exact. You are proposing an arbitrary method based on an impossible data set to collect without showing why that data set would be the right one and not showing why it is better than the existing methods, all while ignoring the fact that there was no first human.

41

IF THERE WAS NO FIRST HUMAN.....

by DATA-DOG in

...and new species of "humans" have appeared gradually, do we have "x-men" amoung us??

so many people are willing to automatically discount abilities that cannot, as of yet, be explained by our current scientific knowledge.

is it too frightening to entertain the idea that there are new and possibly better "humans" in our ranks?

Viviane

If you can accept that over countless years, huge dinosaurs became birds, why is it so hard to accept the possibility that some humans have evolved unique abilities that we cannot explain yet?

One has evidence, the other has multiple tests debunking the claims.

41

IF THERE WAS NO FIRST HUMAN.....

by DATA-DOG in

...and new species of "humans" have appeared gradually, do we have "x-men" amoung us??

so many people are willing to automatically discount abilities that cannot, as of yet, be explained by our current scientific knowledge.

is it too frightening to entertain the idea that there are new and possibly better "humans" in our ranks?

Viviane

So many people are willing to automatically discount abilities that cannot, as of yet, be explained by our current scientific knowledge.

Abilities such as....?

8

Artificial Blood Is Patient-Ready

by cantleave in

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleno/39718/title/artificial-blood-is-patient-ready/.

a new source of blood could be just around the corner: red blood cells grown from fibroblasts that have been reprogrammed into mature red blood cells in the lab.

the blood, developed by researchers at the university of edinburgh and the scottish national blood transfusion service (snbts), would be type o negative, also known as universal donor blood, which currently comprises just 7 percent of the blood donor pool.. we have made red blood cells that are fit to go in a persons body, project leader marc turner, medical director at snbts, told forbes.

Viviane

This is absolutely amazing!

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Bohm, thanks for the update. I neither work in statistics (or a sub field) or in engineering or fluid dynamics!

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

It's why I gravitated toward computer science instead.

I actually work in the computer sciences, you would be amazed how squishy they can be sometimes also. With all of the logging, debbuing code, etc., it's very unlike life sciences in our abilty to determined what happened, that can be very easy (given the right expertise).

However, predicting the future in computing can be very difficult. By that I don't mean predicting what the next hot technology will be, I mean predicting resources consumed. Right now I am on a conference call working to determine the data growth patterns for a gigantic medical university for a solution design we are working on. Basically, it's predicting the future, be a prognosticator, making educated guesses, taking some hard data and trends and figuring how and when it will or might change. A LOT of assumptions are made and various models are developed until it "feels" right.

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Because there are some small differences in their genes that warrants one to be human and one non-human. The definition of species would need to be redefine where species with 99.99*% in common with other species they would be able to reproduce.

If they are that close that they can reproduce with absolutely no issues, why wouldn't te definition include the mate as well? IOW, why draw the line where you did?

266

There Was No First Human

by cofty in

this excellent 4 minute video will help to clear up a few common misunderstandings regarding evolution.. ....

Viviane

Science is usually more precise than that.

Hard sciences like some of the maths and physics are. Others working on large sets cannot be more precise. For instance, statistics is an incredibly useful tool, but it works within margins of error that would give a physicists or someone working in fluid dynamics a heart attack.

Not all sciences and not all branches of a specific science are that accurate or precise. Life sciences like biology, botany an archeology have notably large margins of error compared to other things. Just the way it is. As we develop better tools and learn more, that changes.