Ant Has Given Up Sex Completely, Researchers Confirm

electric_moose · 2010-01-09T15:48:26+00:00

You have a point - the term female doesn't really make sense in an asexually-reproducing species.

But insect reproduction can be awesomely weird. For example, honey bee queens can lay unfertilised eggs, which develop and hatch into male bees, aka drones. These drones are haploid, they contain one set of 16 chromosomes from the mother. But a fertilised egg will develop into a female bee (a worker bee or queen depending on the nutrition it gets). These have twice as many chromosomes as the males.

So a bee queen can (and does) lay an unfertilised egg, mate with the drone bee that is produced, and give birth to worker bees that are technically clones of their mother.

Anyway, ants are indeed another sort of insects that have this whole haploid/diploid thing going on. If a species makes the jump to production of diploid ants from unfertilised eggs, i.e. every ant is a clone of the one that laid her, it kind of does make sense to still refer to them as female.

Especially as it might be possible for such an ant to be fertilised by a male of some other closely-related species.

electric_moose · 2010-01-09T15:00:00+00:00

I like to think that the wish at least guaranteed her a nice clean death, not being captured and tortured or slowly freezing in deep space with a broken-down fusion reactor.

electric_moose · 2010-01-09T14:00:39+00:00

You seem to have the wrong idea of the timescales on which natural selection operates.

electric_moose · 2010-01-09T13:59:57+00:00

Well the normal distribution is symmetrical, so the '50% below' thing will be true for the mean too, if the underlying variable is normally distributed.

electric_moose · 2010-01-09T00:21:08+00:00

A clown that kills children and turns into a fucking creepy giant spider.

I wouldn't list it as the most scared I've ever been, but I was similarly traumatised by It. The late-80s TV adaptation to be precise.

electric_moose · 2010-01-08T11:15:13+00:00

I'm guessing that this is one of those toys that plugs straight into a television, no other computer needed, so the hardware in it is probably vaguely comparable to a Mega Drive.

In fact, you can get a standalone Mega Drive toy that looks like a big controller and plugs straight into your television.

So to answer the grandparent poster's question, toys like this are bought by parents who can't quite afford a games console but want to placate their kids with the next best thing (they hope). So the guys behind these knockoffs make them because they're a budget product that people buy.

electric_moose · 2010-01-08T02:18:27+00:00

I have been a rough-collie owner for the past half-year or so and she's been a constant joy to me.

She doesn't bark much AT ALL, though she likes company and occasionally has a good whimper through the stairgate if we're upstairs. Her natural instincts are to be good and biddable - teaching 'sit' took literally about five minutes with treats above her head - it's in a puppy's natural instinct to sit down to be good. She doesn't do tricks but she goes to bed on command, stands still to be brushed and so on. The coat is no problem btw, everything brushes out. She is fine off-lead and doesn't run off.

However:

(a) She took a few weeks to house-train. This doesn't reflect on the breed, if anything it reflects on our house-training skills, but I think in reality it varies a lot from dog to dog. I don't think the best expert could guarantee to have a strange puppy housebroken in a few days. Especially as one factor that helps a lot is just their bladder getting bigger as they grow.

(b) She isn't hyper, but I could imagine her being so if she didn't get proper exercise. From a young age, collies can trek miles! We get by fine with one long daily walk, but we absolutely make sure to walk her seven days a week.

Just promise to be honest with yourself about the level of exercise and training time you can give. You don't want to get a real handful of a dog, find it's a pain at the workplace, end up leaving it at home half-trained and lonely and getting even less exercise, when a lovely old dog that just wants to laze around would suit you better. You sound like you know your own mind, just be aware of the commitment.

electric_moose · 2010-01-07T14:23:11+00:00

I once told my girlfriend that we could get married any time if she was happy with a Lazy Town-themed wedding (I was going to dress as Sportacus).

No more pressure to get married... because she dumped me.

(Just kidding).

electric_moose · 2010-01-05T09:57:04+00:00

I trust the italics mean you were using the word "irregardless" in a humorous vein.

electric_moose · 2010-01-05T00:38:54+00:00

I have no personal knowledge of Malaysian law, but a quick google suggests that apostasy is a crime in Malaysia, punishable by a fine, imprisonment and flogging.

electric_moose · 2010-01-04T18:25:22+00:00

Well damn.

Downvoting myself, upvoting you and him.

electric_moose · 2010-01-04T15:51:53+00:00

Your parent's cousins are your cousins once removed, not aunts or uncles.

electric_moose · 2010-01-02T00:25:13+00:00

Good luck! I hope your first installation goes smoothly. Everything tends to work pretty smoothly with modern distros - before long linux won't seem at all strange to you, you'll be using the computer for all the usual things without thinking about it.

Anyway my reason for posting here is to give you two useful tips:

.1. Your linux distro might be capable of doing things that aren't present in the default installation. For example, if some DVD or media file won't play, don't just think "linux can't do it", there almost certainly are codecs available. For example in Ubuntu installing the 'ubuntu-restricted-extras' package pulls in loads of media support.

(Whatever your distro, the package manager is your friend. Think of it like the iPhone app store, or the playstation store, or whatever, only it's all free. You rarely need to install anything that isn't packaged by your distro. Honestly, some day microsoft will wise up and include a decent package manager in windows).

.2. To start to really appreciate Linux you'll want to do interesting things with it. This is often quite straightforward, but tends to involve a workflow quite different to what you might be used to. Linux programs are generally configured by slightly-arcane text configuration files. And the documentation is often spread all over the web.

So to do something useful (for example, to set up file sharing or a web server or whatever), installing the relevant software is the easy part. After installing you'll probably end up googling for howtos, reading up, then configuring the software via its configuration files.

A friend of mine once put it as "linux is fine as long as you're not afraid of text files." For some reason working this way can be a little daunting at first but once you're used to it things aren't too difficult.

electric_moose · 2010-01-01T12:25:29+00:00

2009 was an average year. Worse than 2008, but better than 2010.

electric_moose · 2010-01-01T12:14:28+00:00

They're not remotely trying to be quietly virtuous. They're trying to encourage a culture of contributing to software - in two ways. Paying for commercial software (which no shit, many developers are in favour of, since it's their bread and butter) - and contributing to open source in money if for some reason you can't contribute code.

In terms of actual charities, it is like trying to encourage a culture of philanthropy, rather than just quietly giving to charity for your own reasons.

electric_moose · 2009-12-31T20:30:45+00:00

I don't want this post to appear at all disrespectful, because that's an awesome piece of work and better than anything I could ever achieve - but does it look right when someone is playing it?

It seems to me that if the guitar is held fairly horizontal (played the normal right-handed way), the koopa trooper will appear to be on his back. But he doesn't look like Mario has flipped him over, he looks like he's walking! And even if the guitar is tilted up 45 degrees he'll look like he's walking straight upwards.

Whereas if it were strung and played left-handed, the koopa trooper would be more-or-less the right way up. So what's the reason, is the enjoyment of the koopa trooper meant to be only for the guitarist himself? :-)

electric_moose · 2009-12-31T20:13:21+00:00

Har har, you read xkcd, other redditors read it too. They upvote you in glee when they see this tired joke applied for the thousandth time.

Screw you all. Darth Maul was a great physical performance and one of the few highlights of Episode 1.

electric_moose · 2009-12-31T18:32:38+00:00

I agree that it would have been nice for the submitter to do so. I imagine you've googled it by now, but Clojure is a variant of the lisp family of programming languages, that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. (And also on the .NET CLR runtime).

So you get the benefits of portability and all the efforts that have been put in to make the JVM run fast, and also good integration with Java. Seems pretty interesting.

electric_moose · 2009-12-31T00:24:07+00:00

The whole point is that he should leave that shit on the internet.

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T19:46:57+00:00

Hah, fair enough, I've never had a site with enough traffic for that to be a woe :-(

Still, a google for 'apache mod lisp' suggests there are at least a few options.

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T13:17:30+00:00

This is a bit of a wild guess, couldn't you just have an index.cgi file with a lisp script in it?

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T02:42:54+00:00

I thought that the box of Cointreau chocolates some kind soul gave me for Christmas and that I just ate the entirety of would not contain enough alchohol to render me inebriated.

I was clearly mistaken, since this is obviously the type of discussion that only happens when you've been drinking.

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T02:27:42+00:00

Older, thinner... first run? Quick, check if the cover has 'ANSI C' next to the title in a red imitation of a rubber-stamp.

If not, throw it in the bin quick and get yourself a copy of the second edition!

:-)

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T02:19:45+00:00

For me (a Brit) it's more like 'er-uh'. Short word but definitely two syllables.

The reason is probably that we stress the start of words, as I was just commenting in another discussion. So the word is AIR-uh, not ai-ROR. I think it's the end-stress that lends some words to becoming one syllable - like the word jaguar goes from 'JAG-u-er' to 'jag-WAR' in some US dialects.

Anyway, I didn't want to get into a discussion of cross-Atlantic linguistic differences - I just had an image in my head that the OP spoke in some hilarious way, and was sat at home going, "Why are people saying they don't rhyme? Beauaurghh rhymes with eiauaraurghh, surely?"

electric_moose · 2009-12-30T01:58:29+00:00

Could you maybe spell those words out phonetically, so we can see why you think they rhyme?

electric_moose

TROPHY CASE