Thursday, Sept 27, 2012
1. DELAY: WHATS NEW WAS AGAIN DELAYED BY SERVER PROBLEMS.
OT says theyve solved it this time. Sure. Here's updates on some problems
that never go away.
To form my own opinion about this unpleasant piece of trash, written and
produced by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian Copt on parole for fraud,
I first had to sit through it. Im not a film critic but I don't think
Nakoula is expecting an Academy Award. Salman Rushdie, the brilliant
author of Satanic Verses, he is not, although there is a fatwa on both of
them. To parade their moral outrage, a mob of mindless Muslims murdered
four Americans, including the Ambassador Chris Stevens, who of course had
nothing to do with the film. So who expects religion to make sense? God
speaks only to prophets. The rest of us are supposed to take their word for
it.
By 2001, sequencing of the human genome found a surprisingly small number
of genes, but lots of non-coding "junk" DNA. However, the old idea of the
genome as a string of genes interspersed with unimportant non-coding DNA is
no longer tenable. The ENCODE consortium revealed this month that much of
the so-called "junk DNA" is also copied into RNA with additional but still
largely unknown functions. This is a huge change. Genes apparently are not
even be the best unit of inheritance.
But they don't kill. In last week's Nature, Sharon Weinberger (author of
Imaginary Weapons), wrote that "despite 50 years of research on high-power
microwaves, the military has yet to produce a usable weapon." As WN has
pointed out repeatedly, microwave photons can't create mutant strands of
DNA.
A panel of "experts" convened by the National Research Council two years
ago has concluded that the United States missile-defense strategy is
flawed. Strategy? Of course its flawed, it's nonexistent. Ballistic
missiles are cold and stupid. Theyre visible only during a too-brief
launch window, and can't be fooled. The only effective strategy would be to
improve international relations, but that's somebody else's job. Good
luck.
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