jballanc

18 ms·

151.
by jballanc 9y ago
Unfortunately I don't have the time to look into this specific approach, and I've been away from nanoparticle biology for about 5 years now, but... In almost all cases where nanoparticles have shown promise to treat various condit
152.
by jballanc 9y ago
The entire world minus the United States of America and Syria is on board with climate change. What's your point, again?
153.
by jballanc 9y ago
Two main reasons: * Genetic drift vs fixation. As bacteria reproduce and die, the relative frequency of genes tends to remain fixed in the absence of selection. In layman's terms: if 0.0000001% of bacteria in a population have antibiot
154.
by jballanc 9y ago
This article, like much of the debate about antibiotic resistance, is fatally flawed by its anthropocentric viewpoint. The thing to understand about antibiotic resistance is that we humans are but foot soldiers in a global war that has been
155.
by jballanc 9y ago
Personally, when conducting technical interviews, I try to keep the interviewee right at the limits of their knowledge and ability. It's sort of like standing blindfolded in a room and walking in different directions until you hit a wa
156.
by jballanc 9y ago
Items from a sorted list can be retrieved by a binary search in O(log(n)) time, so a database index is merely a list, sorted by the column being indexed, that points back at the original record for each entry. Simple, right? So simple, in f
157.
by jballanc 9y ago
Well, New Jersey is still the only state to have a programming language named for it (SML/NJ, in case you were curious)...
158.
by jballanc 9y ago
It's in keeping with their "Tick-Tock" naming since Snow Leopard: Leopard (Tick) -> SnowLeopard (Tock) Lion -> Mountain Lion Mavericks -> ...(uuhhh...whoops?) Yosemite -> El Capitan Sierra -> High Sierra
159.
by jballanc 9y ago
Designed correctly, there is potentially a whole spectrum between "complete success, desired orbit" and "fire-y ball of death". As other commenters here have pointed out, one of the Space Shuttle's fatal flaws is th
160.
by jballanc 9y ago
My understanding is that more than direct exposure to radioactive materials in fly ash, the real risk is Radon. As Thorium and Uranium decay they will produce Radon, which can accumulate especially in low-lying areas with poor ventilation (
161.
by jballanc 9y ago
Definitely adding that to my reading list. My understanding is that the Ottoman strategy for controlling the Mediterranean was to go the "long way 'round" and control as much of the surrounding ports, as opposed to the Knight
162.
by jballanc 9y ago
Suleyman was not only a great military mind, but an extremely astute politician as well. One thing the article fails to mention is that Suleyman didn't just let the people of Rhodes "go free" after their defeat, the Knights H
163.
by jballanc 9y ago
Well, there's the other interpretation: Such a government jobs program! I mean, in many cases most of that "huge expense" is going to be salary for the people that manufacture and then dispose of these arms. Of course, that p
164.
by jballanc 9y ago
I think the jury's still out on whether or not this is actually different from the past extinctions. Yes, there was an asteroid impact around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, but every year there's some new paper or some new b
165.
by jballanc 9y ago
The planet isn't dying. The planet is just a ball of rock running loops around the gravity well of the closest star. We are, however, in the midst of the sixth great extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holoce
166.
by jballanc 9y ago
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Personally, I have two: Comcast and AT&T. Comcast has been a nightmare recently, with almost weekly outages and frequent periods of severely degraded bandwidth. AT&T (even their supposed &qu
167.
by jballanc 9y ago
They can now, but couldn't for a loooong time. The damage is done, and everyone now just expects lower prices for iOS apps without realizing that they are (subconsciously, perhaps) pricing in the "it might suck" insurance whe
168.
by jballanc 9y ago
I'd argue it's not just the lack of paid upgrades, but also the inability to do trials and/or (easy) refunds. I think the absolute glut of "free with almost all functionality as in-app purchases" style apps speaks t
169.
by jballanc 10y ago
JetBlue from San Jose is often just as convenient, and the only cost is an extra hour or so on the train.
170.
by jballanc 10y ago
I can't begin to explain why, but almost every American airline has been a worse experience for me than almost every non-American airline. I fly regularly on Turkish, for example, and their service is amazing! If ever I have to fly
171.
by jballanc 10y ago
Pros and Cons depend largely on what you're hoping to use your DB for and how you intend to deploy/administer it. Feature-wise, Postgres has a break-neck speed of new feature adoption compared to MySQL. That could be a Pro or a Co
172.
by jballanc 10y ago
There are elements of the Clojure design philosophy that are likely to keep it in the realm of "hosted language" for some time to come. That said, with the advent of self-hosted ClojureScript, there is no reason that you need be t
173.
by jballanc 10y ago
I've witnessed it in the post-seminar lab visits. It bears little resemblance to the "whiteboard interview" from the developer world, but if you're visiting with a faculty member after you present your work, they may ask
174.
by jballanc 10y ago
It's been almost a decade since I worked in an organic synthesis lab, but when I did we stuck with chalk, instead of the more "modern" whiteboards. There's not much an accidental organic solvent spill will do to slate an
175.
by jballanc 10y ago
Same here. I wonder when we stop calling these "regular expressions" and start calling them "parsing expressions"?
176.
by jballanc 10y ago
That is an excellent question! I should start by saying that we don't know, for sure, that pre-cellular replicons don't still exist. They may, and we may just not have figured out the right place to look for them. That said, g
177.
by jballanc 10y ago
Archaea and Eubacteria have different Ribosomes. In the world of biology, if DNA is the source code then ribosomes are the compiler. In other words, while both families use DNA to store information and RNA to translate it, all the rest of t
178.
by jballanc 10y ago
The terms you want to look up are "allopatric speciation" and "sympatric speciation". In short, events can occur that segment population, and from that point forward you have two species. Given enough time, these two wil
179.
by jballanc 10y ago
For commercial service I agree with you heartily. For AF1...I don't know. I'd be inclined to take a seat myself, but I can understand not, for a number of reasons. For example, even if landing is a tad rough, from the sounds of it
180.
by jballanc 10y ago
I was in the same camp as you until the results from the Bullet Cluster were published ( https://arstechnica.com/science/2006/08/5058/ ). Essentially, for the first time astronomers were able to observe

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