CharonY

I swear a lot and throw abuses at him. If he really annoys me, I put a cloth over the mirror and ignore him for the rest of the day.

Absolutely. As I mentioned, there is a fair chunk of research that tries to re-create aspects of animal physiology. For the vast majority it is done out of necessity. In addition to tox testing there are also other aspects where animals are sacrificed, e.g. to isolate antibodies or extract primary cell lines. One could argue that this not different to regular livestock use, though.

.... no.

This is one the things which make me dubious about claims of personalized medicine. In an actual medical setting you need rather easy decision making systems based on simple diagnostics (relatively speaking). However, the promise of more data also means that data analyses and subsequent diagnostics is going to be complicated. In bio, this is still a very ongoing and often unresolved problem. For practical medical approaches it will be even worse.

Also in that context I would like to add that incompetent use or blatant misuse of statistics and general data analysis (as the example provided above... eliminating outliers, anyone?) is leading to a huge amount of wasted time and effort. Often coupled with the attempt of post-mortem statistics (i.e. calling in the statistician after the fact). Often, biology students are badly underprepared in statistical analysis. But the worst I have seen are certainly in the medical field (sadly). There have been many (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to change curricula accordingly. But hopefully with a new generation of faculty it will be easier to implement in the future. Hopefully.

I kind of disagree. There are schools out there with a high reputation in ecological sciences. In this context wildlife bio is actually quite relevant. It will depend on the area, though. I suppose finding a job in a very urbanized country/state will be hard, but in areas which much higher agricultural/resource based economy things are different. Also according to e.g Hesa (Higher Education Statistics Agency) biology students had very good employment statistics. For example, 2009/10 (there are newer statistics available here), the employment rate for full-time first degrees in bio is 91.1%, which is higher than for comp science or engineering (84.7 and 87.7, respectively). And that despite the huge number of graduates (which is a bit of a problem in biology, as it usually has more graduates and hence, more competition than other natural sciences). It should be noted that these figures do not distinguish whether graduates are working in their respective fields. Nonetheless, in comparison it does not seem that it is anywhere near its way out. Also I think what swansont said: is a major point in this context. As such, I do not see any field really declining at all.

Well, if you use such unwieldy beasts then by all means, bellow on BTW, have you heard about the sony 50 MP 44x33 mm (medium format-ish) sensor? The new medium frame crop promises to be relatively cheap (below 10k).

Well, I have used bellows before for macro shoots, but quite frankly, I have not heard of anyone (outside medium format shooters) still using it for architecture. Tilt shifts are much more common for perspective control as they are much more convenient and are easier to focus with.

This is just silly. So many areas hit -22 F and lower and people still have to do choires outside. Sure, frostbite is an issue but suffocation? Trying to argue that point based on an anecdote is really, well, silly.

I am not certain as I usually aim to get pics that are similar to what the human eye may see. One can get a bit of color in by boosting vibrance and saturation. Though even then this pic looks vastly oversaturated and they may have done more to it.

There is little that you can do in terms of colour, the moon is pretty monochromatic as it is. But if you want it to have a brownish hue, shoot during moonrise to get a nice tint. However, getting contrast and resolution right is usually the important bit. To get more of the craters a moon lit from the side (i.e. not a full moon) will provide more depth. Also minimize camera vibrations with a good tripod (weigh down if there is wind), locking the mirror (to avoid slap) or use a mirrorless and use shutter release cable or timer. And of course use a good lens.

Considering that this discussion tends to repeat itself I would like to add this paper. Here, a finer analysis was done to differentiate between climate papers and articles specifically addressing agw. Here, the paper found a rejection rate based on abstracts of about 1.9% (given potential error rates, this is quite remarkable). Note that rejecting global warming can be a different subset than rejecting AGW (as the latter may allow for global warming).

I do not see much use for a tutorial-like thread as there are gazillions of tutorial websites/books/seminars out there. Also considering that there are not many photography enthusiasts here, I would think Q&A type discussions (e.g. moon photography) or similar would be best suited here.

Always shoot manual, metering does not work well under extreme conditions (unless you use live view to set it properly, in that case aperture mode is useful). Set your focus to infinite assuming it is well-calibrated. I generally stop down the aperture to the sweet spot of the lens (i.e. where you have maximum sharpness), The moon is quite bright so you can stop down quite a bit. Assuming you got a tripod you can further set iso (for digital) to base to minimize noise. After that it is a matter for finding the right exposure. Again, avoid overexposure. If you go aperture mode you may have choose the metering wisely (i.e. straight on the moon) and still adjust exposure manually. Often times you need to go faster than 1/60 at base iso to avoid overexposure. And again, do not autofocus. That often goes wrong, too. Back to bellows, there may be some uses for perspective control in specific architectural photos (though less in cityscapes) but I assume in many cases a tilt-shift is more useful (and common, to my knowledge) than bellows. The latter is eminently useful for macros, though.

If you do not know precisely on the plate, do not expose yourself to it.

AFAIK bellows are primarily used in macro photography as it would affect the focal plane but not the overall alignment. Maybe I am misunderstanding something, though. For a regular cityscape (without tilt shift or anything) a good tripod with adjustable head (e.g. ballhead or gimbal) with built in water levels are useful. Of course, in digital photography you can use live view to adjust the alignment of your camera before you snap.

Extrapolation of few examples again. First of all if it was something general, it would apply to all social animals. Here, you only manage to pick a handful to support your assertions. It is not better than using anecdotes to translate that to other species. And even in that limited sample male lions are known to form cooperative alliance and are not follow a strictly hierarchical alpha male model (though of course there are also many cases without co-ops). Again, this is based on limited knowledge of diversity of hierarchical behavior in nature that you try to apply to a other species (i.e. humans). The point is that social behavior in many animals are highly complex and obviously, I would expect it also to be the case in humans (unless you think the social behavior of humans is much simpler than in other primates). You have to understand that hierarchies are often less stringent than in many animals as folklore will tell you. And sometimes even researchers get it wrong (wolves being prominent examples). Using that shaky knowledge to extrapolate it to other situations and species is really not appropriate. Another example of extrapolation used here is that of hormones. Do they influence behavior? Almost certainly. But blanket statement that there is a difference because hormones is an intellectual shortcut that does not try to understand whether and what differences they may actually result in. For example, does the actual level of any hormone influence behavior in a given way, or does the change from the baseline play a role. Finally, linking a complex behavior to a single source is tricky even for simple organisms (usually there is quite an interplay of factors). Trying that to rather complex animals is also rather bold.

For the use of strobes, you would need a situation where the strobe is much stronger than any other light source. You would generally not shoot in bulb mode, but instead trigger normally and set the shutter to the highest flash sync speed (usually between 1/160-1/1320, though there is also the option of using high speed sync, which relies on the flash). The reason here is that by having the fastest shutter speed you reduce ambient light further. Then you would take a pic normally but only the time exposed by the strobe would be visible. For many high-speed situations you will want to trigger the camera using something that links it to what you want to image, instead of relying on your reflexes. For that you can couple an external trigger e.g. with a laser detector (that triggers when the object passes through a defined area) or use an acoustic trigger for loud things (say, exploding balloons).

And again extrapolation of ignorance rears its ugly head. Alpha as term is used in specific contexts (and sometimes wrongly) and it is well known that they can be either female or male and in some species there are alpha male as well females (i.e. in cases where there is separate rankings in either sex. In both, females and males their roles have been extensively studied in a variety of species. This includes the studies of de Waal on rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, for example. Then there are species which are dominated by females (such as hyena) in which the lowest ranking female outranks the highest ranking male (technically the alpha male). Essentially a faulty appeal to nature based on ignorance.

I am not sure which you are referring to. However, fungi, or more precisely, their fruiting body, just looks like a singular organism. However they actually basically grow as hyphae which is a somewhat organized cell colony that can regrown and proliferate somewhat independent from the rest of the structure. At this point it becomes tricky to argue whether it is fair or a matter of semantics to call it immortal as the overall structure does not exhibit senescence, whereas each individual parts have been thoroughly replaced. This is basically the case for all organisms which are on the edge between uni and multi-cellularism, where the individual elements still often exhibit partial autonomy.

Well there is a difference between high-speed photography and videography. Freezing motion can be done either by high shutter speed or utilizing the speed of strobe flash. Shutter speeds of modern cameras are usually between 2000-8000th of a second. Flash guns can be about 1/620000. In set ups where you can precisely trigger your camera these are roughly the speed limitations you are dealing with. And in research settings you would be better of using specialized equipment rather than a camera. Often times you need to track an event which means more than single frame. CCDs and CMOS that do not use mechanical shutters can take pictures at rates of 400k fps or higher, which makes them much more suitable for these types of tasks. However, if you need only a single frame when you want to freeze motion of say of wildlife things are a bit easier. There is lens selection, body speed and burst rate (as you may want to take a lot of pictures and hope you get a perfect one) to be taken into consideration. Usually this is the realm of specialized sports cameras. For example, even the high-end Canon and Nikon full-frame such as the Canon 5D MkIII or Nikon D800 only go to 6fps. The older Nikon D4 however, is their sports line and goes up to 11 fps. As you can see, again the case of specialized equipment. It is somewhat interesting to see that some new technologies (e.g. removing the mirror) has apparent benefits for the burst rate. For example the high-end Olympus mirrorless (which roughly costs 1/5 or 1/4 of the D4) has a burst rate of 10 fps, although it is not really marketed towards sports photography. One newcomer, the Sony A6000 mirrorless with is quite moderate in price (~600$) even goes up to 11fps (though not with continuous tracking), which is quite astonishing if you look at the size of that little thing. And I realized that I am a geek.

There are cell lines that can divide indefinitely. However it is often not clear whether an individual has the same capability. I.e. after a few generations it is possible that the population is taken over by the daughter cells and the original ones may have been lost. That is probably a common problem in determining biological immortality. There may be mechanisms and traits (e.g. continuous regeneration/replication) that would suggest immortality, but if you track an individual there is a good chance that it still dies. It is then not clear whether it was just due to whatever unknown mechanism or really a mechanism of senescence.

Well, I know what you mean. However, other species are also doing that, if unknowingly.

The most successful organisms are, with little doubt, prokaryotes. They use us to feed them, spreading them around and even in death they utilize us. Bastards.

That's brilliant! Aaand there goes my productivity.