You've heard about a pedestrian who you don't even know had an accident and determine its too unsafe.
Meanwhile I personally know multiple people who died, mangled in a car after an accident. I know multiple people who have survived but were in bad accidents where at least one person was injured. I know multiple people who were pedestrians and cyclists who were properly using the streets and were hit by cars requiring hospital visits, and indirectly know of several people who have died being legally in the right cycling on the streets.
You're way more likely to be seriously harmed or killed even just being around a car than you are riding a train or subway.
And Gene wrote the assembly tools that did shotgun assembly of the human genome for Celera when most folks (except Jim Kent who wrote the _other_ assembler (used by the public sequencing effort (NIH,Broad,UCSC, etc…)) said it couldn’t be done. IMO, he and Jim Kent deserve a Nobel prize for these efforts.
True. Celera had a large TruCluster, machines with 8 (16?) processors, 64GB and inter-node cluster networking for a truly shared filesystem. Shotgun at the time required very large memory many-CPU high throughput IO machines (although 64GB isn't really a large memory machine now) while Kent's approach worked fine on clusters but IIRC was tuned for the specific type of scaffold sequencing done by the public project.
From the original celera paper, an endnote describing what was pretty impressive hardware for the time:
Celera’s computing environment is based on Compaq Computer Corporation’s Alpha system technology running the Tru64 Unix operating system. Celera uses these Alphas as Data Servers and as nodes in a Virtual Compute Farm, all of which are
connected to a fully switched network operating at Fast Ethernet speed (for the VCF) and gigabit Ethernet speed (for data servers). Load balancing and
scheduling software manages the submission and execution of jobs, based on central processing unit (CPU) speed, memory requirements, and priority.
The Virtual Compute Farm is composed of 440 Alpha CPUs, which includes model EV6 running at a clock speed of 400 MHz and EV67 running at 667 MHz. Available memory on these systems ranges from 2 GB to 8 GB. The VCF is used to manage trace file processing, and annotation. Genome assembly was performed on a GS 160 running 16 EV67s (667MHz) and 64 GB of memory, and 10 ES40s running 4 EV6s (500 MHz) and 32 GB of memory. A total of 100 terabytes of physical disk storage was included in a Storage Area Network that was available to systems across the environment. To ensure high availability, file and database servers were configured as 4-node Alpha TruClusters, so that services would fail over in the event of hardware or software failure. Data availability was further enhanced by
using hardware- and software-based disk mirroring (RAID-0), disk striping (RAID-1), and disk striping with parity (RAID-5).
What's more, this isn't history. Code from the Celera assembler lives on in a lineage of assembly methods (Canu, HiCanu, Verkko) which have ultimately _completely automated the process of complete genome assembly_
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-01662-6. The fact that this assembly approach remained relevant until practical resolution of the assembly problem is a testament to its solid theoretical foundation (the string graph) which relates read length, error rate, and information theoretic limits of genome assembly https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bti1114.
Meanwhile, there's a pretty sizeable percentage of the educational world that has inextricably tied education to religion. How about getting religion out of higher (and lower) education?
> Surely religion is just a specific form of activism.
Even if this were true (a couple billion people would probably beg to differ), the First Amendment specifically protects the free exercise of religion. So any law that attempted to prevent religious-affiliated organizations from operating a university or school would be clearly unconstitutional.
Fair enough. One's belief in creation myths, higher powers/beings, afterlives, etc... is not, per se, activism, but once you start gathering people on a regular basis to bring about societal/behavioral change (ya know, commandments, morals, laws based on religious ideas/notions/opinions, etc...), much less proselytizing, then, yeah, it's pretty much the definition (or at least the poster child) of activism.
Lovely tangent; it seems you don't have any ideas about how this could be accomplished in a way that is consistent with the First Amendment (which was the entirety of my original comment)?
What are you talking about? The whole article implies that they're gonna decouple activism from teaching. Just apply the same playbook to religion? Oh what's that? It can't be done? Ah, I see. Maybe that was the meta-point behind my whole rant after all. You wanna have religious schools? Fine. You want (non-religous) activist schools? I guess that's fine too. But the notion that we're gonna get rid of "activism" and not touch religion in teaching/education/academia strikes me as absurd.
You're absolutely right that people can claim shelter under the First Amendment by calling their beliefs a religion. Sometimes the courts will go along with their claims, other times they won't. But that doesn't change what @slyrus is complaining about, which is that people with sincerely held religious beliefs are allowed to run educational institutions.
No, once again you've misunderstood or mischaracterized what I'm getting it. Folks can hold their beliefs with whatever sincerity they choose, but when they mix those beliefs with teaching, it becomes a pernicious form of activism. So if people are gonna try to decouple activism from teaching, they better include religious activities, doctrines, and proselytizing in said activism. That's all. Or, to put it another way, if you're gonna allow religious activities to get mixed up with teaching, be prepared for other forms of activism to be mixed in as well. To put activism grounded in supernatural beliefs/prophets/sacred texts on privileged ground above other forms of activism makes little sense to me.
> No, once again you've misunderstood or mischaracterized what I'm getting it.
Actually, I'm replying to someone else, not you.
> To put activism grounded in supernatural beliefs/prophets/sacred texts on privileged ground above other forms of activism makes little sense to me.
I can see that! But the Founders felt differently, and they're the ones who wrote the Bill of Rights that, for the most part, still reigns supreme. Unless you've got a workaround that I'm not thinking of (IAAL, FWIW), there's not much point dwelling on the question of whether religion is a type of activism. As I said above: even if it is, it's constitutionally protected.
That, general tone, some familiar names amongst authors of a few of the pieces. Then I decided to check the masthead / about sections.
When I first saw this turn up in the HN "new" queue (the story hit the 2nd chance queue after failing to gain traction the first time 'round), I thought it might be some new-age woo group. Took a bit of chewing to realise who was behind the curtain.
I took it two semesters ago with Hilfinger and sadly didn’t have any Microvax in it. You might be thinking of 61C, which deals more with computer architecture.
A dead assembly language sounds like a Hilfinger thing. Taking 61B with him was an experience. He started by asking us to look to our left and to our right. He told us that one of us would not make it to the end of the class, with pride in his voice. He was right about that.
In his defense he would also work very long hours answering emails from students. The night before projects were due he would hang out in his office all night in case people had questions. He'd return submitted code to you with detailed comments about how to write clean, readable code. More so than data structures I learned how to write readable code in that class.
