Oh boy.

Joke_Choke · 2012-05-24T20:13:32.296814+00:00

And if you click through, one of the matches is even from this subreddit, though it got no attention.

fastparticles · 2012-05-24T20:06:22.585748+00:00

If we're going to argue from definitions, then it seems like transgenic plants should be safer than traditional hybrids, because they involve shooting in a single gene, possibly targeted to a safe place, rather than just mixing an edible strain with a probably toxic one (most wild plants are not good to eat) to see what happens.

fastparticles · 2012-05-24T20:04:14.077588+00:00

I seem to recall a survey that found a huge number of Americans believe that only GMOs, and not "natural" foods, contain DNA. Does anyone know the source?

At any rate, that's what we're up against. I think kids learn about this stuff in high school now, but that probably wasn't true when most voters went to high school.

fastparticles · 2012-05-24T20:01:18.453164+00:00

You could just say "climate research". Though they might still ask your "opinion".

fastparticles · 2012-05-24T19:42:36.018122+00:00

<sigh> Fine, I'll open the can of worms.

"Race is a social construct."

What I think this was originally supposed to mean: There are cultures associated with ethnic groups, and most of what they involve is not genetically heritable. Barack Obama is a member of the African-American culture even though neither of his parents was. (sounds reasonable)

What many people, including some tenured academics outside biology, think it means: People from different ethnic groups have no genetic differences between them. (you'd have to be a tenured academic to believe this)

As a corollary, I used to hear "there's more variation within races than between them" (Lewontin's Fallacy - maybe not strictly false the way he phrased it scientifically, but certainly all the social implications come from misunderstandings of genomics and of variance) more often than I do now, maybe because population genetics has continued to ignore it and make progress, or maybe because Lewontin has continued to fade into obscurity.

So the biggest problem here is that "race" is not a technical term with a precise meaning, and very well could refer to culture rather than genome - I don't think many Departments of Hispanic Studies have DNA sequencers (even though they should! because the populations of the Americas have some really interesting genetics going on! /shoutout), in which case this is a tautology, not a revelation. Sometimes geneticists will still refer to European vs. African vs. East Asian populations in broad generalizations, but of course we know there are plenty of populations living in the continuum between them.

Anyway, yes, of course there are measurable genetic differences among populations that have been reproductively isolated for many generations, and in fact they mirror archaeological evidence for the migration and divergence histories of those populations. Just for fun, here are some examples:

this tree is totally out of date and uses terms that (in translation) are not very politically correct, and certainly aren't technical (anymore), but you can generally see what's going on
this is a nice map of human migration history based on mitochondrial DNA
the famous figure in this blog post represents how medium-resolution genetic profiles of Europeans cluster, unsupervised, and it turns out that genetics just happens to line up very nicely with geography
I don't know of a really good figure for it, but the genetic diversity of a population decreases with how far it is from central Africa - or, rather, how many historical migrations it's been through since its ancestors left Africa, because each migration is a genetic bottleneck that takes only a subset of the original population's diversity, even if the migrant population expands to the same size

tl;dr I have no idea what a "race" is but people from different parts of the world have predictable genetic differences

EDIT, probably not the last one: typo

fastparticles · 2012-05-24T19:13:02.500197+00:00

I thought Jung was the archetypal psychologist.

allotriophagy · 2012-05-24T18:09:59.427630+00:00

Or just go to /r/gaybears (NSFW - gay bears)

allotriophagy · 2012-05-24T18:05:24.730062+00:00

Oh, okay, so you're saying it's more like if the punchline had been "to make a long story short, I've been eating fried chicken for like eighteen months now and washing it down with watermelon and grape juice" because those are "black behaviors". Except I had no idea chest-shaving was supposed to be a "gay behavior", much less that it could turn you gay. I might have associated it with Jersey Shore, but not Queer as Folk. Have I been out of high school too long to know what the latest gay stereotypes are?

Trying to apply formal logic to humor is nonsensical.

I don't think I used any syllogisms here, but humor just isn't funny when it relies unironically on wrong information. That's why the Daily Show has better fact-checkers than most TV news - Jon Stewart doesn't want the jokes to land with a thud because someone says "actually, so-and-so isn't the president, she's the prime minister".

EDIT: or for a more appropriate comparison, I'll use your example: what if it had been a joke where a guy tries dressing in women's panties because they're comfortable and winds up sucking cock within a month? Would that also be funny in the same way? Cause I still wouldn't "get it" but it seems like the same joke, the way you describe it.

I dunno, it seems like this joke is more about straight ~~men's~~teenage boys' insecurity about their straightness (which causes them to nervously make fun of deviance in others) than anything about actual gay people.

NightOwl-1988 · 2012-05-24T17:35:58.320865+00:00

Hmmmm. I only really put samples into the queue and got the data back as colorspace reads; someone else ran the machine and the pipeline. I know the satay plots are you how diagnose bad runs, and most of mine were bad.

But yeah, once you get a csfastq file, just plug it into BWA, tell it you're using colorspace, and what comes out will be pretty standard.

NightOwl-1988 · 2012-05-24T17:28:29.109604+00:00

My lab was the first in the world to get a SOLiD. Probably also the first in the world to stop using it, but certainly not the last. I wouldn't waste too much time learning it because no one's using it anymore.

Do all your informatics in colorspace, then once the reads are mapped, they behave the same way.

I have no clue what the difference is between single read and paired-end reads

And actually SOLiD has something different called mate pairs, which you can do on HiSeq if you homebrew it but Illumina hasn't made a kit that works.

allotriophagy · 2012-05-24T17:21:27.039757+00:00

I think Margaret Cho is funny.

So I guess it's not that I don't find homosexuality funny, it's that I don't really associate homosexuality with men whose lifestyles I don't approve of, therefore the humor is lost on me. It makes just as much sense as if the punchline had been that shaving your chest hair turns you into a geologist.

Clayburn · 2012-05-24T17:10:47.693020+00:00

Have you ever read a history book?

Cavaliers? Roundheads? Lancasters? Yorks? Richard III? Henry VI?

Clayburn · 2012-05-24T17:09:13.528260+00:00

Considering the effective population size is 10,000...

Clayburn · 2012-05-24T17:08:00.553332+00:00

One of the most common questions in /r/AskScience (at least in my field) is "if the human species were going to be completely wiped out, how many people would you need to keep alive to avoid losing genetic diversity?" Of course, in the fourth or fifth iteration of that, someone pointed out that you could just freeze everyone else's sperm and then it's not an issue.

One thing worth pointing out is that different populations have different amounts of genetic diversity, depending on how many historical migration bottlenecks they've been through. So if you really wanted to preserve human diversity, you wouldn't select randomly; you'd select mostly southern African hunter-gatherers and then a few miscellaneous non-Africans for good measure.

Clayburn · 2012-05-24T17:02:46.811904+00:00

And then we're already down to 3 billion!

pcman2000 · 2012-05-24T16:57:20.432210+00:00

But that's not the Apple Way. You're using a right mouse button!

RoboStormo · 2012-05-24T16:34:22.517898+00:00

Yeah, fine, I'll save you the trouble: here's the Dies Irae. You know that's what you were going to look for anyway. Tuba Mirum immediately follows. What the hell is the brass instrument at 20:04? (aside from a tuba mirum)

They should have borrowed Solti's baseball bat for the bass drum. EDIT: Incidentally, his recording is worth a listen even if you're not into LOUD NOISES; it has Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Martti Talvela, and Luciano Fucking Pavarotti.

pcman2000 · 2012-05-24T16:26:46.860181+00:00

I am not Mac-savvy, but couldn't you just put VLC on your "dock" and drag the files into it?

pcman2000 · 2012-05-24T16:21:13.347729+00:00

Because Apple doesn't typically have them and Apple is pretty. Gotta keep up with the Joneses.

beanieb · 2012-05-24T16:19:59.498789+00:00

Probably helps to go to a lot of conferences and meet the people who did the research; once you tie it in with personalities, it's easier to keep track of it (even though maybe that makes it harder to be objective).

theOptimusPrimeRib · 2012-05-24T16:16:23.803118+00:00

I don't know enough of Bach to draw an overall comparison, but I'm thinking especially of things like the violin sonatas/partitas and cello suites, which every string player learns as a student (violists get a little bit of both in transposition) and it's even been disputed whether Bach wrote some of the cello stuff; these pieces continued to be lost even during the Bach revival of the 19th century. I'm not sure how often The Art of Fugue is played now, but we don't even know if Bach himself played it, since it seems to have been a composition exercise (though it happens to be playable on a harpsichord, and not really anything else from that era, so that's our best guess). Even the now-revered cantatas were often throwaway pieces written to be performed just once. And nearly none of Bach's work was actually published during his lifetime.

Seelenkuchen · 2012-05-24T16:00:19.392799+00:00

Yeah, multiplying your available actions doesn't really make it easier to find the right one. What a good game it was, though, and I honestly did manage to beat it without any hints... eventually.

Vaethin · 2012-05-24T15:59:02.482179+00:00

but I know for a fact, that the theologians at my university have a history of being very bible critical, so I think they are gonna have some good points at least.

I doubt the theologians were invited and I doubt they would go if they were. Usually these talks are just feel-good motivational things, sometimes with just enough veneer of argumentation that you can convince yourself there was logic, if you want to.

Who's the speaker? If it's a local, anything could happen, but it's more likely to be someone who just goes around giving this same talk over and over for a surprisingly good living.

theOptimusPrimeRib · 2012-05-24T15:55:59.384014+00:00

For a lot of Bach's compositions that are most frequently performed now, there's no evidence they were ever performed in his lifetime.

allotriophagy · 2012-05-24T15:48:44.831128+00:00

Hmmm, I guess I could see how this would be amusing if you thought homosexuality was funny.

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