It appears that HD-DVD may have just had the last nail in the coffin as Toshiba have decided to cease producing new HD-DVD players or marketing them:
Toshiba is refusing to give any refunds or sweeteners to HD DVD player buyers who were burned by the death of the format, saying they still have “inherent value”.
Overnight, the company said in a statement it had reviewed its overall HD DVD strategy and decided it would no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players.
Of course, the first line there is also important. Toshiba isn’t required to give refunds or incentives to anyone who bought HD-DVD initially and quite frankly, I always figured it would be a horrible idea to back either format until a clear winner was emerging. This is a good move for Toshiba in the end anyway, they were getting hammered all over as various movie studios had dropped them and adoption of blu-ray playes was getting ahead of HD-DVD in key markets like Europe. Of course, I find it curious that they claim their players will have “inherent value”, given that the decision makes them worthless bricks almost and anyone with one will almost certainly have to upgrade to Blu-ray in order to continue with a high definition movie option. Perhaps they mean you can use the thing as a paper weight? Or perhaps hollow it out and make a particularly festive hat out of it, which could be considered rather arty as well (tech art?). Alternatively, you could always use it as a fancy kitty litter box among other things.
I’m sure all these uses will make the $100 plus dollars many of these players cost seem completely worth-while.
With Florida deciding if they should adopt good science standards or insert nonsense from the usual suspects, I think a quick reminder of my previous “turtles all the way down” essay is in order. Despite the age of this and that it’s a fairly common anti-ID argument, I’ve never really seen it adequately refuted. One particular argument (well cop-out really) is that aliens that could design us don’t need to be complicated themselves and could have evolved elsewhere. Of course, when asked what these aliens could look like, what ID predicts the environment they evolved in should be and what methods they could have used (being ’simpler’ than us, who must have been designed you see) usually results in the crickets chirping. I still stand by that ID is nothing more than creationism redressed to make it more palatable to being inserted into American classrooms after creationisms heavy defeats in key court cases in the early and late 1980s. Ultimately, any ID proponent that wants to argue space aliens has to somewhere demonstrate where these space aliens may have come from and why they were able to evolve by natural means, but life on earth could not (again, another question that is merely greeted with the sound of crickets). In any event, this repost is for you Florida <3
Turtles all the way down.
Around the net I’ve seen this expression come up called ‘turtles all the way down’, usually referenced to intelligent design. The term comes from a story, of unknown source as it seems to come up often from different people, where essentially a famous lecturer was giving a talk on astronomy. After he was finished a little old lady came down and told him he had it all wrong.
“The world is really on the back of a giant tortoise” the woman said to which the scientist asked, in an attempt to stump her most likely, “Well then, what is the tortoise standing on?” To this the lady triumphantly replied “You’re very clever young man, but it’s of no use – it’s turtles all the way down”.
In many respects this is the problem that intelligent design faces when it proposes a ‘designer’ is natural. For example, when we take Dembski mathematics, fancy as they are and apply it to the designer we find, unsurprisingly, that the designer must himself be designed. If we do the same thing again, we find that each designer in turn requires another designer. Eventually, we have an infinite regress of designers, each one designing the previous one; turtles all the way down in other words.
This news article in Nature, entitled, HIV can ‘never be cured’ caught my interest pretty much immediately as it describes some interesting new research on the HIV virus and for its unusually pessimistic title. For one thing, it’s true that HIV is a very tricky virus to get rid of because it attacks the immune system that a vaccine and the host needs to actually destroy the virus to begin with. Additionally, as if things weren’t bad enough, HIV is pretty crafty and likes to hide in a wide variety of places such as inside T-cells (the generals of the immune system for a rough comparison), follicular dendritic cells (which store antigens for restimulating memory T-cells) and apparently even the gut (1). Being able to infect the gut causes a few problems, one of which is that the current top of the line anti-retroviral drugs don’t seem to be able to destroy this gut reservoir of HIV. This leads to a continual re-infection of the rest of the body from the HIV population in the guts lymphoid (immune) tissue.
While a serious problem, I don’t view this as making HIV ‘incurable’ by any stretch, just it makes things considerably more complicated. It should mean rather than being a result that makes us more pessimistic, instead it should be taken as a result that bolsters our understanding of how HIV causes an infection and better design a vaccine/new drug regimen. For example, armed with this knowledge a potential vaccine may have aspects that help target mucosal immunity and could [theoretically] inspire the gastrointestinal part of the immune system to help destroy the virus: or even prevent the early reservoir from being able to form abrogating an infection. Likewise, current anti-retroviral treatments could have new drugs or altered existing drugs that can target the virus in the gut lymphoid tissue, helping to further prevent reinfection with the virus.
It should be conceded that HIV being able to form a relatively protected reservoir in the gut does make life a whole lot more difficult, I don’t think it’s a result that warrants undue pessimism by any stretch. Knowing something you didn’t know before and couldn’t account for, doesn’t make HIV any more ‘incurable’ than it was before, instead it should be taken as a new way of thinking and attacking the problem at hand. Statements like declaring it ‘incurable’ are not going to help anyone anytime soon.
1) Chun, T.-W. et al. J. Infect. Dis. doi:10.1086/527324 (2007).
The series American Dad, depicting a dysfunctional CIA agent and his equally dysfunctional family wasn’t really that good a show at first considering the pedigree of the guys who made it (Family Guy), but I must admit it’s getting better every season. I don’t think anything will quite top this bit in a while:
Edit: Curses, it has been removed! You win this time youtube, you win this time, but your victory shall be short lived >: (
From what I understand of Herceptin, I can’t quite understand why we don’t fund a full (one year) course of the drug. Neither can a group of women with breast cancer, who are taking New Zealands drug funding agency Pharmac to court to find out and have had a small win:
Eight breast cancer survivors have won the right to see “commercially sensitive” documents on the first day of their high court appeal against Pharmac.
They are challenging Pharmac’s decision not to fund a full course of Herceptin treatment for New Zealand women diagnosed with her-2 positive breast cancer.
The government currently funds the treatment for nine weeks, with doctors advising women to continue privately funding the drug if they can afford it.
I hope they do win. Herceptin has a good record (again, from what I know of it anyway) and should be funded for the amount of time it takes to be effective.
[This is a repost from my previous blog that's semi-relevant to another topic I'm going to bring up in the near future on this blog. It's also a cheap way of getting postcount++ while I don't have the time to make a totally new post. Enjoy!]
Cannibalism is one of those practices that, at least as far as humans go isn’t very high on the list of things that are socially acceptable. One of the numerous problems with cannibalistic practices is the transmission of diseases, after all what infects dinner is just as easily going to infect the cannibal. It should be reasonable common sense as a result not to feed a farmed animal the remains of their fellow animals. This would greatly aid the spread of an infectious microorganism through a herd and possibly even rapidly increase virulence (which is often directly correlated to the ease of transmission).
The case example of why this practice shouldn’t be performed, with any animal, is the dramatic outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Britain. BSE was found to be spread by an infectious protein called a prion, which is predominantly found in the brain and spinal matter of the remains of cattle. Worse, these parts were frequently fed back to other cattle as a supplement to their feed, providing an easy method of transmission for the infectious prions. The worst part of the entire discovery was not just that other cattle could be infected in this manner, but the potential spread of the disease between beef from infected cattle and humans. This led to the culling and suffering of a large number of animals and an overall ban on British beef that lasted a considerable time.
Dr. Simmons, who is the man best known for his hideously terrible arguments he put forward against PZ Myers in their recent debate, is apparently doing a Black Knight. He accuses PZ Myers of a variety of things, such as not paying attention to the points he raised, bearing in mind that Dr. Simmons never raised any points that were actually valid or not easily contradicted. Simmons opined:
Before the recent KKMS (MN radio) debate, Dr. P.Z. Myers blogged on Pharyngula that he would decimate me. Within minutes of the shows conclusion, he blogged that he accomplished his goal, never conceding a single point from an hour long show. It is worth ones while to read his blogs and those that follow as they readily speak to the character of these folks, much moreso than I could ever do. Richard Dawkins was also quick to compliment the professor and add to the feeding frenzy. Again, no concessions. They had their hearing aids turned off before the show even started.
Of course, we should point out at this point that even diehard ID supporters believed that Dr. Simmons came off looking completely clueless and indeed got ‘decimated’ by Dr. Myers. When even your own side believes you performed horribly and not just those opposed to your viewpoint, that probably means you did a terrible job: not that your opponent didn’t listen. Dr. Simmons goes through with another howler about the current state of understanding about whale evolution:
Could it be the five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals that represent intermediate species between land animals and the quadrillion-cell whale with unexplained tons of blubber, communication skills that span thousands of miles, a windpipe separate from the esophagus (unheard of in land animals), segmental decompression, a heart the size of a Volkswagon, ability to dive thousands of meters deep or eat a krill diet?
Starting off with a factual inaccuracy is not a good way of making a point, clearly demonstrating that Dr. Simmons has never actually bothered to look into whale fossils at all or he would be familiar with many larger transitionals like Basilosaurus, which is around 15 meters in length. If he was trying to demonstrate he learned absolutely nothing from his debate with PZ Myers, he has certainly gone out of his way to prove that. He then adds the standard creationist fallacy of an argument from improbability/argument from incredularity, which is basically him stating that “I cannot see how this evolved, therefore God/Design/whatever”. This isn’t even an argument really and he continues it onto his developmental argument, which again boils down into “I can’t see how you developed, therefore God!!! I R IRREFUTABLE!!” etc. I’m sorry, but that’s not even an argument at all.
I think that the criticism Dr. Simmons suffered from his own side, the hammering he got on air from an opponent that actually knew what they were talking about and the subsequent bizarre post have caused him to lose some of his grip on reality.
Edit: It’s worth noting that Dr. Simmons in his whale rant never actually finishes whatever he was trying to say. He never refutes that there are actually early transitionals in the whale fossil line, he just brings up the point and then goes into a rant about how complex modern whales are (while simultaneously forgetting to address the original mentioning of transitional fossils, fossils he claims don’t exist at all).
A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to go and have a wander around a stream near a friends house. After poking at various insects and other creepy crawlies, it occurred to me to have a look in the water and see if I could find anything a bit different than the usual insects I find. It just so happens that I found this fellow (click images for full sized picture..theoretically anyway):
This fellow is a freshwater crayfish, one of two species in New Zealand Paranephrops zealandicus, or more commonly known as the Southern Koura. The other species, rather boringly enough, is simply called the Northern Koura (Paranephrops planifrons) and is rather similar to the Southern Koura, but is often of a smaller size. Moving some rocks around revealed something moving about in the water and closer inspection revealed several Koura wandering about. Catching them was a little tricky, as they are extremely fast and stirring up sediments makes life much harder, but in the end I succeeded (for SCIENCE!). Once ready for his photoshoot this guy* was rather happy for the most part to sit up for the camera and have his photograph taken, but there was one rather dramatc incident towards the late afternoon.
There is a further update on the discussion the other day about Casey Luskin using the research blogging icon inappropriately on the official research blogging news site here.
I talked privately with science ethicist Janet Stemwedel, and she agrees that the blurring of the distinction between what’s supported by the article itself and what constitutes the blogger’s personal opinion is problematic. In this case, when Luskin refers to “the evidence,” what evidence could he be referring to, if not the evidence supposedly offered in Orgel’s article? Yet Orgel does not present any evidence that “the complexity of life requires an intelligent cause.” The blog post itself should make it clear that this final assertion is Casey’s alone, not Orgel’s. We shouldn’t have to wait for Luskin’s assertion that this was only his personal opinion, especially when he still hasn’t modified his original post to make that clear.
