Obiwan Kenobi - Slashdot User

The Incredible Shrinking Genome 113

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @10:32AM from the hey-it's-cold-alright dept.

Shipud writes "Mammalian genomes have been shrinking for about 65 million years, roughly since the dinosaur extinction. Why? And why were ancient mammalian genomes three times larger than they are today? A new article in Genome Biology and Evolution tries to explain this bizarre finding, and why the genomes of mammals (but not of other living groups) are still shrinking. 'Once [the dinosaurs] were gone, mammals started to radiate, fill those niches, and a whole new level of competition arose. The selective advantage of not having a genome encumbered by potentially damaging mobile DNA elements has probably become critical at this "be ye fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein" stage. In effect, the genomes of mammals has been shrinking by removing mobile DNA elements, just after the KT boundary. And according to the model presented in this study, this process is still ongoing: mammalian genomes are not at an equilibrium size. Unlike flies, mammals are still cleaning up.'"

Comment I'm Sorry, but Good Riddance (Score 1, Interesting) 233

by Obiwan Kenobi on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @02:47PM (#26346071) Attached to: Dr. Dobb's Journal Going Web-Only

"To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing."

This is another nostalgia-stuffed feel-good statement I see burrowed into our news stories from time to time as we shed the old and embrace the new. Me? I just don't give a damn. Let them die. I haven't purchased a magazine outside of an airport in this millennium and I don't know anyone else who has, either. There isn't one thing a magazine could tell me that I haven't read (and probably re-re-read) many times over.

Today we have our laptops, Kindles, RSS feeds, incredible PDAs, hell, my cell phone does more than first computer ever could, ten times over.

We don't need dead trees to get our information any longer. Call it the green economy shedding the skin of old media, call it putting the ole girl out to pasture, call it shooting an unneeded service in the face, whatever.

Just please don't give me this nostalgic wasn't-it-great-back-then crap about how you used to be so excited for the new issue to come in the mail. Rather, be excited about seeing your RSS feed updated. Shift your focus, enjoy your nostalgia, but put it into perspective.

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by a.d.venturer on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:46PM

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?

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