Slashdot Mirror

Pure ID (i.e without the superfluous Creationist baggage) is agnostic about the nature of the designer, other than it requires intelligence.

Michael Behe is a research biochemist. He's also an Evolutionist with some, to him, cogent questions.

So anyway, why did I use the word paranoid? It seems to me that with notable exceptions*, the Evolutionists I've come across when they're dealing with Creation/Evolution have been badly bitten by the antics of the rabid Creationists. The Evolutionist response to Intelligent Design seems to be disproportionate and often off topic - which looks to be somewhat paranoid about a rabid Creationist resurgence.

I'm not claiming anything for Intelligent Design. It should be dealt with as anything else in a civilized and rational public arena. I am bemoaning the BS from rabid Creationists and rabid Evolutionists alike.

BTW, not all religions do claim to be The One. For that matter, not all religious types are arrogant fools - but perhaps it's the noisy, arrogant fools who get more notice?

* I'd disagree with Steven Jay Gould's premiss in his "Rock of Ages" but it didn't come over as paranoid. Unlike, say, the ranty Dawkins.

I'm a fourth-year graduate student, and this book has been invaluable - I wish I had it doing undergraduate research! It starts with chapters on general orientation, "what to expect" kind of things, notebook-keeping and organization (and it's nothing like what you did for highschool labs), experimental design, presentations and communication, etc. Then, it dives into practical instructions for making buffers, sterile technique, cell culture (eukaryotic and bacterial), manipulation of DNA/RNA/protein, radiation, microscopy, etc. In all likelihood, the actual lab's expectations will be a little different, but if you've looked over this book you won't be caught flat-footed.

Beyond this particular book, I'll reiterate something that has been said above: your best resource (to start with) is the other people in the lab. You will spend an entire month badgering others with "where is" and "how do I" questions. Don't worry about it, that's just the way it works. One caveat, though: when someone takes the time to demonstrate a technique or the operation of a piece of equipment to you, do them the courtesy of taking copious notes so that you won't have to ask them again. This serves to back up your memory of the procedure, and it impresses upon the senior lab members that you are interested and appreciative of what they have to tell you.

It's fascinating that you believe that the bible adds nothing to scientific insight. Particularly when the bible itself states that the earth "hangs on nothing", that is to say, it floats in space. This was written during a time when all cultures believed something had to be holding it where it was .

If, however, you are only interested in real scientific facts done by real evolutionary scientists - I'd encourage you to check out Dr. Walt Brown's book "In the Beginning". The entire book is based on research done by scientists with an evolutionary viewpoint.

It's interesting that you mention organisms next to oceanic vents. Those are discussed in Dr. Walt Brown's book "In The Beginning". You should check it out. Buy.

He presents compelling explanations for nearly everything that science is struggling to understand - sedimentary layers on mountains, lack of dust on the moon, the origin of life. Throughout his book he relies on scientific studies performed by evolutionists. He does this to prevent anyone from claiming that his facts are contrived.

Just to set the record straight:

I am both a strong atheist and an ex-Christian. From everything I've read, I am compelled to say that Jesus probably did exist, but much of what is said about him is not true (not just the supernatural, but a lot of the events, too).

The reason that someone can dislike that which Jesus teaches (at least, according to the Bible) is plenty:

First of all, he forgives people's sins. This is an incredible concept, and one that I hadn't even considered until reading Christopher Hitchens' incredible book God is not Great (http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807). If you consider the incident with ``let the sinless throw the first stone'', you are advocating a society in which guilt is determined only by those who are not, themselves, guilty. That is ludicrous, particularly if Adam's original sin is taken into account.

Second, Jesus is advocating a quasi-communistic, merchant-less society. This is prevalent throughout all of his writings. ``Go sell all you have'', the incident in the Temple, etc. etc. Again, this is naive and ridiculous.

Third, Jesus is remarkably self-centred. He is saying that we must leave our families and follow him; if any of our friends or family says something against Jesus, we should leave him.

Fourth, Jesus has caused innumerable amounts of death and suffering. Perhaps he did this involuntarily, but it still happened.

There are many other reasons, but I am too tired to list them.

• pretty thoroughly debunks ID;
• at the same time, challenges scientists to be less dogmatic and more open in how they connect to the public;
• and is actually funny and fun to watch to boot

People in denial about nature, thinking that the concept of morals - a concept created by man, for the governing of the behaviour of man towards man - can be applied to animals, are sorely mistaken. Not that we shouldn't treat our animals right in life - heck, I think what takes place on CAFOs and egg factories is downright unconscionable. BUT YOU DON'T FIX THINGS BY REDUCING AND ABSTRACTING THEM. This can work for simple problems, or for a short time, but it will not work in the long run (neither for industrial food, or pretend food like MEATA (TM) ).

Farming over the centuries has provided innumerable benefits to our animals. Chickens, Cows, etc. actually benefit from being under our protection. They no longer have the natural defenses their progenitors once posessed. The image of the wild cow freed from its shackles of slavery is a myth, a fantasy. If we synthesized all of our meat, and freed our livestock, they would in short order go extinct. Reducing its suffering? Yes, I suppose not living implies not suffering. But once again, you don't solve these problems by getting further away from them - you reduce suffering by farming differently, not genetically engineering away anxiety, or making brainless test-tube ribeye.

Finally, this is completely unsustainable. By that I mean that doing this requires substantial energy input. Where is that energy going to come from? This is just a guess, but based off of previous data, I think it would bear out: petroleum. Love it, hate it, it's an amazing source of energy. One that won't be around forever. How do you grow sustainable meat? Well, that also requires substantial energy input - from the sun. I'm of course ignoring pesticides and fertilizers for the feed crops - they're unsustainable as well. However, you don't fix the problem BY ABSTRACTING IT EVEN FURTHER.

Okay, done ranting. If you want more information about this and other topics, might I redirect you to The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan, and Polyface Farms? Not the whole answer, but it's a good start. We aren't going to solve these problems by thinking about it from an industrial perspective. It's about time we start to think differently.

I think I've got a winning idea, thanks to this film. Hopefully those PETA folks won't ask too many questions. Then things might get... unpleasant.

Our molecular bio lab has this terrific book and it's exactly for folks like you: http://www.amazon.com/Bench-Laboratory-Navigator-Kathy-Barker/dp/0879695234

Will the Earth's Tail Fry Moon Visitors?

Is it a stretch to say I read:

Will the Earth's Soleil Moon Frye Visitors?

I mean her.

I'm not really seeing the problem with that. Personally, I think that if politicians and world leaders (I'm looking at you over there in the Whitehouse) could stop their idiocy and work together on a few things, we might find resources (not jut money) to do things like exploit^H^H^H^Hore the solar system a bit, perhaps go finding things like more room to live, more minerals, and perhaps some mysterious substance that helps us to manage global climate change.

The more that we all sit here on this rock arguing about stupid stuff, the longer the Borg has to get here before we are ready, god damnit!

Seriously, the more we learn about space, the solar system, universe etc. the more prepared we will be to better care for this little rock we call home. I do not believe that there is any one country that has the resources to do this alone. I believe it will take huge cooperative efforts to find the answers that humankind actually needs.

Right now we are starving people for the chance to make weak fuel out of corn. When you look at the facts of biofuel, it seems astoundingly stupid to do what we are doing as a group. I think that if we are going to find something that will help serve our energy needs we will have to keep exploring. Only through exploration do we find things that change life as we know it.

Sadly, if Vladimir Smith found out how to create a zero point module (go Stargate) next week, it would be kept a secret and not released to the public until some whistle-blower feels guilty on their deathbed. ZPMs and other such 'free energy' systems/devices and those that do not make anyone any money will be hidden from sight. A sad fact, and not to seem socialist but if we don't all try cooperation to solve some of the very urgent problems, Armageddon sans god is all that is left us. Nuclear energy might become safer with new discoveries lately, and I'm all for it. If you are not using it, safety and discoveries to make it safer are hardly on the radar of those who need to be inventing stuff like that. With nearly free electricity we can carry on with electric vehicles.

The space agencies around the globe really need to work together as has been shown, space tourism really isn't going to foot the bill for the kind of exploration that we need to be doing.

Solar and wind power are not THE answer to the energy needs of the human race and the planet Earth. We need to expand technologically beyond what we have so far. Look at Monsanto? GM foods and people are still starving around the globe. If we don't get some socialist ideas in action soon, we're headed for a scifi nightmare ending. Space exploration thus far has embodied all that is generally good in humankind: Exploration, advancement, betterment, working for the common good. Even if it was a space race for bragging rights or dominance of the domain, it was done in a way that has helped us all in one way or another. We need much more of it.

Yes, you can believe the book "The day after Roswell" http://www.amazon.com/Day-After-Roswell-Philip-Corso/dp/067101756Xif you like, but the way that space exploration has changed our lives is without comparison. I hope that this is one thing that we, as the human race, end up getting right.

Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Tells the entire story of Lorentz's discovery, in gory detail, down to the fact that he used a Royal McBee computer to do his original weather simulation, the same computer in the famous hacker "Story of Mel".

While many wondered about the ultimate durability of the XO-1, it's at least a full-fledged computer at a small price. Just the other day I was wondering if mainstream Internet retailers even had listing pages for OLPC's offerings, even if they couldn't sell it themselves. Doing a search on Amazon for OLPC brings up a page where you see some crappy toys that sell for $50 and look like a real computer, but with a tiny screen and very little capabilities. Have these companies convinced Amazon to bring them up automatically for OLPC searches? Isn't that illegal?

We've seen this problem with the PGP world. Geeks like working with everything themselves, but it's hard to convince non-geeks to use it, because they don't see the point. If encryption were really vital, it would be packaged for them to easily enable it, just like their online banking. Even with secure e-mail standards like Secure MIME, they are easy to use but are yet little known because companies don't actively pitch them to their customers.

I would beg my fellow geeks, at least, to rediscover some of the passion about encryption. As I posted a couple of days ago, a decade ago every geek had a PGP key and Schneier's Applied Cryptography was our favorite bedtime reading. Now, even geeks don't want to go through the minimal (to us) effort of working with crypto.

Linux+ guide to linux certification http://www.amazon.com/Linux%2B-Guide-Linux-Certification-Second/dp/0619216212/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208645101&sr=8-1 It worked very well and is extremely comprehensive. With some linux experience, you might have to jump around a bit in the beginning. Avoid the activities at the end of the chapters though, just use the included labsim software. The book is a little pricey and the labsim does not work in wine, but the book is very concise and readable and progresses in a logical order.

First off, you can't go wrong with Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition by Aeleen Frisch. Really, really excellent book.

But just as important as the specifics of Unix, I'd argue, is the general question of how to be a good sysadmin. ("Start by installing Linux" is my usual smart-ass answer, but I'll skip that for right now...) The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition, by Tom Limoncelli, Christine Hogan and Strata Chalup, is a truly excellent book about how to be a good sysadmin in the general case. I can't recommend it enough. (BTW, the link for the book comes from the authors' website, so I presume it throws them a few nickels if you buy it that way.)

Am I the only one who thinks Dilbert stopped being funny back in the 1990s? The last collection I enjoyed was Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy . Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags. And even though corporate culture in America may have changed to some extent, the Dilbert office seems the same early '90s environment that inspired him to turn the strip towards a parody of office life.

From the XBox 360 Manual

From the Amazon description of power cables

A decade ago, every geek had a PGP key, keysigning parties were a great way to spend a Friday night, and everyone was raving about Schneier's eggheaded but useful tome Applied Cryptography . Now when I ask otherwise normal geeks if they have a PGP key, they just look at me like I'm from Mars. I don't understand, PGP has gotten only easier to use, there's a great Firefox extension for it, but it has faded in popularity.

TFA also says the subscription bundles OneCare, which seperately costs $50 per year for up to 3 PCs. The typical Slashdot reader would probably find little or no value in OneCare, but novices might like it (especially the included phone/chat/email support).

So for most of us, we're comparing a small recurring subscription to a larger $120 purchase that doesn't expire (but newer versions cost another $120).

Commodore did that all the time. I'd recommend "On the Edge" (which details a lot of other semi-shady practices of the whole industry).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0973864907/ref=pd_bbs_olp_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208554130&sr=8-2

While the religious basis of the Barbary pirates' acts is contentious (as is Washington's supposed insistence that the U.S. is a specifically Christian nation), I'd highly recommend reading up about the Barbary Wars in London's Victory in Tripoli . Most Americans don't learn much about these skirmishes in school, since the usual course is just to skip from the American Revolution straight to the War of 1812 when covering wars. That's a pity, because the fight against the Barbary pirates was a big part of shaping the U.S. military into what it is today. It's not for nothing that the Marine's song references the shores of Tripoli (the Halls of Montezuma line is also a sadly forgotten episode).

In Eric Drexler's book "Nanosystems, he carefully analyzes questions like this regarding the possible failure modes of atomically-precise devices. The book goes through the math in detail. The short answer is that even with fairly pessimistic assumptions (e.g. that a single-atom defect created during manufacture or afterwards by cosmic rays or other radiation will completely destroy a particular functional sub-unit), you can still design highly robust devices.

The most obvious way is to build in some level of redundancy. Naively you can have dozens of redundant sub-units, and use things like "majority voting" to pull out the signal from the noise. In practice there are more elegant ways to do this (e.g. error correction). Many modern chips do indeed have some redundancies so that even with manufacturing defects, the chip still runs (perhaps with some reduction in functionality). Organizing the chip so that failsafe-checks occur during operation is certainly possible.

Again, check out the book for more details. The point is that these questions have been thought about and they are not insurmountable. The rate of defects generated from spurious environmental damage (e.g. cosmic rays) is low enough that it can be overcome with fairly straightforward engineering.

Evolution?

Don't plants need some form of air to survive? Not just rocks and bacteria? Don't see this working out.

In his trilogy beginning with Red Mars , Kim Stanley Robinson points out one of the difficulties of growing anything in a terraformed environment is the poverty of the soil. Even if you've got the right kind of rock, seeding it things such as earthworms (which are apparently vital to good crop growth) is so difficult that such soil can only be manufactured at incredibly slow speeds. It's not just air, rocks and bacteria that are necessary. It's the entire ecosystem present where the plants evolved on Earth.

I'm coming in on this discussion late, and I have a question. I know nothing about mySQL yet, and just a little about PHP. I do know HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript and JQuery, and am looking to learn more server-side stuff.

Amazon is supposed to be shipping me this book soon. What do these changes imply for me? If I learn mySQL now, will have to pay to use it? Would it be hard to switch over to some other flavor of SQL once I've got the basics down?

Would appreciate any advice you can offer. :)

If you let the balance of power fall too far to the state, it's grossly naive to think it wont lead to use of that power over you, your friends and your children.

Since DNA will first be collected from foreigners, whose stay in the country is dependent on the government's good graces, it's not hard to imagine a Gattaca style future where, if the government has your DNA on file and you might have some unpleasant genetic predisposition, your application for residency or citizenship suddenly falls though.

Very nice summary! I own the book and I must say that it's very nice and accessible.

The examples are practical and described quite well, even if ones math skills are not that great.

And the example in Python are almost looking pseudo-code like, even if one has little to no Python skills, the language is not a huge barrier.

5 stars out of 5!

The reviews at amazing are also quite quite good:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0596529325/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

23 ratings at this moment, 20x5 stars, 1x4 star, 1x3 star.

Jebus, if you have to read this book as a CS major to find out about the importance of 'where' then you're in deep deep deep trouble!

This shit gets modded insightful? I had long suspected that to get an insightful mod on this website all you had to do was follow the formula of: 1. bash a company that has earned Slashdot's 2 minutes of hate award (Intel here); 2. blather on for more than 4 words to give the illusion of thought; 3. Throw in some non sequitur numbers to look like you know math.

I don't have time to take apart every number in this stupid troll but, first of all: AMD does not use FSB's at all, and you have no idea what the "1.6Ghz" number you are quoting actually means... you are (ironically) trying to throw around frequency numbers to make the bigger number look better for AMD (wow sounds a lot like that "megahertz myth" everyone on Slashdot adores so much). Take a look at how badly the Phenom cache architecture works sometime, you'll see that core to core communications on those chips are only about 2% faster than when Intel chips have to use the FSB, and when Intel chips in dual core are using shared cache they communicate roughly 3 times faster than the best-case for the AMD chips. Hypertransport IS useful... but only for 4+ socket server systems where there are real advantages. On desktop machines & laptops the differences are negligible, and there can even be disadvantages when talking to a graphics card on a desktop machine (but I don't think the AMD powerpoints you were working off of mentioned that did it?)

  Second of all, you claim that if an Intel machine has to move a whopping 1 whole MEGAbyte of data a second around it somehow gets irreparably crippled to the point of not even being able to use a mouse or something. Lets actually run some numbers, even using your artificially low laptop ratings for the Intel FSB (desktops are much faster, and you are also failing to count the faster FSB used on Penryn laptops that are already on the market). Let's see here: 800 Mhz FSB * 8 bytes per clock (64 bit data bus) comes out to 6.4 Billion bytes per second. Your "massive" 1.2 Mbyte/sec transfer is therefore completely choking off... wait for it... about 0.02% of the bandwidth. OH NO MY COMPUTER IS GOING TO FREEZE IF ONLY 99.98% OF THE BANDWIDTH IS AVAILABLE!!

    Oh wow, you apparently can count processes and found out that your computer runs more than one program at a time? Guess what, I ran firefox (version 2 mind you not the nice & faster version 3) on a 2.4Ghz P4 just fine, and I could even run other programs at the same time! Now, I was using Linux of course, but you are either 1. lying, or 2. completel y incompetent when you say that somehow it is impossible to run more than one program "smoothly" on anything but an AMD system.

    Third (and this takes the fucking cake): You compare the intenionally low-power EEE PC from Asus that INTENTIONALLY uses very low power, very slow chips from Intel because it is targeting the ultra-mobile market, and then because this laptop, which is INTENTIONALLY designed to be slower & low power does not perform as well as a laptop that costs 3 times as much and comes with 4 times the RAM and has a massively more expensive and power hungry CPU and graphics processor in it. Yes you stupid fuck, I actually looked up the model number you posted. I'm sure you thought that you could put it right next to a mention of the EEE PC and think you could fool everyone into thinking the only difference was an Intel vs. an AMD chip. The only thing you've managed to prove is that there are AMD fanboys brainwashed enough to believe that because the EEE PC exists, it is physically impossible for anyone to use Intel chips in something that might run faster.

    That's all I have time for. You are either truly brainwashed, or are smart enough to know the Slashdot system to getting "insightful" mods when you are literally posting objectively proveable lies.

I would love to see the Fair Tax enacted and every other tax disappear. http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal-Boortz/dp/0061540463/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196436087&sr=8-4 Read. Learn. This goes for everyone.

The movie is real, or as accurate as any two hour movie can be. Her problem seems to be different than yours, though: her biggest problem was teaching the kids tolerance.

That kid doesn't want to be in jail. He has no concept of what jail is, he just knows what people around him have said. Don't let him push you around psychologically, you KNOW he's better off out in the real world, you KNOW education is going to help them, and you KNOW it's what they want, even if they don't. You gotta show it to them, let them know what they want and show them that it's REALLY POSSIBLE. You know this is true, too.

You might want to check out the Freedom Writers Teacher's Guide, it has some good tips, although it may not all be applicable to your situation.

The situation is hard, but it's not helpless. Keep going! There are those of us who are on your side, rooting for your success!!

In Larry Niven's old Known Space story "At the Core" (collected in Neutron Star , he conjectures that because the stars at the core are so close together, one supernova-ing could cause a chain reaction that would bring killing radiation to all reaches of the galaxy. What do astrophysicists today think of this possibility? All the hype now seems to be on black holes.

They might have had some (quickly rebutted) case in the analogue era, but with the digital era they are just outright cheating customers. You can get an HDMI cable for as low as 15 cents, but Monster continues to charge up towards $100 for theirs. Obviously with digital any cable is as good as another, because the system has error correction built into it and is not susceptible to distortion from nearby wiring.

Still, on Usenet I've seen people who, probably because they already "invested" thousands of dollars in Monster Cables, placed so much trust in the company that they brought out arcane arguments that, yes, Monster digital interconnects are better than anything else on the market. After all, can't you hear how "brighter" and "warmer" the sound is once you've blown money on the interconnects?

I think it's a turning point in every physicist's life when you realize you will never understand general relativity.

It suggests that, irrelevant of their personal experiences and lifestyle, knowledge of minor details of their genetic heritage gives major knowledge of their culture, traditions, customs and beliefs.

Well, yes, and no. I see "African American" or ANY similar term, "French", "Gypsy", "Arab," as a way to say that the people so described have a certain commonality of culture, tradition, custom or belief which sets them apart from others of ostensibly similar genetic heritage. AA's are to some identifiable extent different from other blacks. French people are to some extent different from other Europeans, Arabs different from other Middle Easterners. Not necessarily genetically, but culturally. Of course we accept that not all French eat baguettes, not all Arabs are Muslim, but even so, by and large, we can link a certain population through cultural affinity. If you move to France, your kids, despite their total lack of French racial heritage, will start adopting French customs. Barack Obama, e.g., despite his total lack of "African American" heritage (and I'm aware of the irony), attends an African American church and speaks in AA cadences. He has adopted an AA culture, not the Kenyan or mainstream American cultures of his parents.

Knowing your racial heritage does not tell me anything about you, and to assume that it does is simply ridiculous.

I think you're overstating your case. Advertisers make a living on the exact premise that knowing someone's racial heritage in the US and other places is likely to tell you a great deal about their cultural habits. I'm not enamored of his overall politics, but Thomas Sowell has written a highly regarded book on this very subject.

While I'm a big fan of McWhorter's books on linguistics, I find myself usually disagreeing with his opinions on race, which I do here as well. That is a nice find, however - a well thought-out counterargument.

The only problem is, you can't purchase OS X from a retailer, only license it.

There's a lot of loose talk here, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about buying legal copies of Mac OS X, not actually buying the source code from Apple or otherwise becoming the new copyright holder..

When you look at it that way, it makes sense. Lots of retailers sell boxes containing a OS X DVDROM. Pay your money, don't sign any contracts, and you walk out of the story owning a shrink-wrapped product. Pay cash, and neither Apple nor the retailer even knows who you are. After the transaction, there's no evidence or paperwork even suggesting that you (perhaps even anonymously) licensed anything, but you'll have a receipt showing that you bought something. No records pertaining to licenses are kept. No forms are required or explanations offered ("um, sire, you realize we don't really sell that, right?"), before you hit the cash register.

Online it's like that too, except without the anonymous aspect (it's hard to buy things online anonymously) but with even less interaction which would allow licensing. For example, Amazon.com sells Mac OS X and I know for a fact that they don't do any customer-licensing paperwork to broker agreements between Amazon customers and their suppliers (such as Apple). That would be incredibly intensive and delay shipping. Can you imagine ordering it online, and getting a form in the mail a few days later? There's no way Amazon could handle that sort of business model.

Purchasing OS X requires negotiating directly with Apple, and I don't think the price tag will be something most folks who post to these forums can afford.

Check out this page on Apple's own website. It has a section that links to resellers, and it also has a "Buy Now" link (those are Apple's words, not mine; they actually say "Buy" on their webpage, follow the link if you don't believe me).

The resellers link will take you to places where you can actually purchase (i.e. own) a copy of Mac OS X without any licensing. I've done business with one of the entities that they point to in my location, and am sure that the store in question sells rather than licenses.

But here's where it gets interesting: the "Buy Now" link goes to page where they actually do switch wording and mention licenses for the first time. The "add to cart" part of the page doesn't say anything about licenses, though (and yet, it seems implied since there is a mention of how many users will use the software; normally when you buy software, there's no limit to how many people are allowed to use the computer you install it on, so this shouldn't even be mentioned unless the customer is about to enter into some kind of agreement to keep other people off his own computer). After that, it gets even more inconsistent; if you add it to your cart and look in your cart, there's no hint that you're actually going to end up agreeing to a license rather than buying a product.

After that, if you click "check out" it wants me to create an account, so I wasn't able to check to see if they license rather than sell. It might be interesting, for someone who obtains their OS X directly from Apple, to take a careful look at exactly what they end up agreeing to, before getting the product. I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to actually license it; but I wouldn't count on their lawyers having actually crippled the website yet, either. Anyone wanna spend $129 to find out?

Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.

Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.

While Hawking has acheived fame for his popular science books, he has contributed immensely to the current state of physics thinking. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , co-authored with G.F.R Ellis (Cambridge University Press, 1973) is vastly influential.

I don't get this tendency for people to think that if someone produces popular science books, they must be an intellectual lightweight who can't make real contributions to the field.

...if the amazon reviews are accurate.

O'Reilly is great, but I do think you gotta be careful; a lot of their books can, at times, seem to be mostly printouts of man pages (and other freely available documentation), as this reviewer notes:


If you expect the quality of the author's other books from this book, you'll be disappointed. It just lists system calls and their descriptions that you can find from man pages without any serious examples. It doesn't provide any insight or thorough coverage you can find from other books such as Steven's book.


Richard Stevens was definitely "the man" when it came to writing books like this; I'd recommend them to anyone. Anyone who attempts to cover the same ground (even years later) has a tough act to follow.

I've bought a lot of computer books over the years, and for my money, none have been as well-written and valuable as Stevens'.

RIP, Richard.

There is no such thing as a 'color accurate display'. What you can do is calibrate your display with a color calibrator such as the Spyder3 which creates a color profile which is then used by your graphic card/Operating system to render accurate colors.

Project Orion was and is the only plan I've seen with a prayer of getting to a percentage of c and making it to Alpha Centauri within a lifetime. The usual irrational fears about radiation and nuclear weapons will probably prevent it, though. Space is full of enough radiation that it just doesn't matter in reality, and at least we'd get some use out of all of those expensive plutonium pits that cost so bloody much to make.

Bet it would get dusted off in a real hurry if we had an asteroid on a collision course.

  You know, George Dyson's book on Project Orion is a terrific resource on this, since Freeman Dyson, his dad, took a year to help the project:

http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/B000FUTQFU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208146708&sr=8-1

      I have this book and it has a number of details that are quite interesting. Recommended.

      Something quite surprising I found while just looking up this book today is apparently the History Channel is doing a show on Project Orion as part of "History Undercover".

      As for radioactive matter being scattered over the Earth's surface during a launch accident, isn't this more of an engineering problem to build containers that don't split open under X accelerations? This worry keeps coming up from the antinuke people and it never happens. Ye gods, the SNAP power supply on the LEM had them in a lather.

      Pound for pound nuclear fuel is a million times more powerful than any chemical fuel. I'm a little sick of the antinuke people tying our hands and forcing us into our current era of global warming. Thanks a lot.

      -- Dave

However, medically it is known that there is a conscience of sorts hardwired in the brain. I think it was 60 minutes or some thing with Diane Sawyer, where they showed this little boy who was missing it (was pretty scary)... tried to find, but couldn't.. although this may help.. http://www.amazon.com/Hardwired-Behavior-Neuroscience-Reveals-Morality/dp/0521860016
So if your brain is hardwired to tell you that killing is wrong, then the idea of free will, is a little less free.

There's also a lot of silicon up there for building solar satellites, but man, I've played Sim City, I know what trouble beaming power from space can be...

Jeffrey M. Schwartz in his book The Mind and the Brain discusses the concept of what he called "free wont" and how it could be observed by brain imaging.

Well, I wouldn't agree with Jack Thomson, but your analogy is not very good. Music and video games are fundamentally different in the ways that they effect the nervous system. While playing video games can be addictive due dopamine being released during the process[1], they do not have nearly the same subconscious effect that music does. Furthermore, it is much easier to distinguish between fantasy and the real world during a video game since the images are all artificial. When listening to music, you get to fill in your own script to the soundtrack with whatever is going on at the time (i.e. it is much more real).

This is a field of research that has gained a lot of attention in recent years, and a lot of good books have been done on the subject.

This is an up-and-comer:

http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Anticipation-Psychology-Expectation-Bradford/dp/0262582783/ref=pd_sim_b_title_4

There have been several studies done verifying that listening to complex, harmonious music (i.e. beethoven, bach, mozart, iron maiden, gnr etc.) sparks intelligence and creativity, while listening to someone talk over a one beat drum machine (e.g. Nelly, NAS) lowers intelligence and dulls creativity. Playing a musical instrument is even better for you. Just do a quick search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=music+makes+you+smart

As a matter of fact, Beethoven's 5th and 6th symphonies (opus 67 and 68 respectively) were written back to back and demonstrate the process of intelligence increase in musical form, with the crisis starting at the knocking of fate at the opening of opus 67 and traversing through the ex-stasis experience and ending in harmony in the pastoral symphony. The fact that listening to Beethoven dramatically increases intelligence has been proven time and again (http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Thinking-Principles-Creative-Problem/dp/0761506489).

People are creatures of habit and their personalities are shaped by the things that they do. You will become your rituals(see: wilson's 23rd law). Of course, your personal experience will be different from everyone else, but chances are that if you are listening to this on a constant basis it's going to have a deep, life-long effect on your personality.