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Simultaneously, the dinosaurs decided to develop hollow bones, a totally different lung system, flight muscles, brain modifications, dietary modifications, new digestive and excretory systems, new behavioral instincts, flight feathers, and everything else that goes along with aeronautical engineering. Just how that happened is somehow glossed over.

What is most incredible is how all the lazy news sources parrot this story uncritically, with literally no one asking the hard questions about how flight could evolve with all of these complex subsystems working together. If they present any controversy at all, it is only about which evolutionary tall tale is better than the others.

Examples: "Scientific" American, Nature, EurekAlot, New Scientist, ABC, etc.

It seems as if only creationists have the guts to pull the curtains from the wizards of awes and call a dumb story dumb. Want to add your entry to this storytelling contest? Send it in to Science and see if it passes peer review. They don't seem to be too particular these days, as long as you toe the Darwin Party line. You might even get NSF money and 15 minutes of fame. Try this science project: drop lizards out of trees and measure their flapping rates. Just be sure you take good lab notes and draw pretty graphs so that it looks scientific. Videos also make good supplementary material. Just don't show the blood on the ground and proves how absurd this all really is.

Here's another part of the problem:

Incremental upgrading is part of the drive that keeps the marketing-PR-coup of Moore's Law running.

I just finished a book chapter entitled "The Leapfrog Effect" that details some of the ways in which developing nations HAVE to run their technology into the ground before upgrading. They can't afford to make the incremental steps. In fact, as it turns out, neither can the so-called "developed world" - they just hide many of the true costs.

Upgrade when you have to, not just because you are bored and there's a new game out that needs incrementally better hardware.

STF

"The Leapfrog Effect" is a chapter in: Managing Globally with Information Technology (Sherif Kamel, ed). IDEA Group Publishing (in press)

This stuff is in the process of being patented

The abstract of the paper (Reversible Data Hiding) is: "We present a novel reversible (lossless) data hiding (embedding) technique, which enables the exact recovery of the original host signal upon extraction of the embedded information. A generalization of the well-known LSB (least significant bit) modification is proposed as the data embedding method, which introduces additional operating points on the capacity-distortion curve. Lossless recovery of the original is achieved by compressing portions of the signal that are susceptible to embedding distortion, and transmitting these compressed descriptions as a part of the embedded payload. A prediction-based conditional entropy coder which utilizes static portions of the host as side-information improves the compression efficiency, and thus the lossless data embedding capacity"

In case anyone is interested.

this is an interesting article that may be relevant to the discussion at hand..
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-08/uog -rst080102.php

to quote:
Scientists in the past decade have discovered that remnants of ancient germ line infections called human endogenous retroviruses make up a substantial part of the human genome. Once thought to be merely "junk" DNA and inactive, many of these elements, in fact, perform functions in human cells.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-07/acs -tvm072902.php

Where do those spaces come from? [The one between 'acs' and '-tvm'. I didn't put it there]

According to this which states that it's not signifigantly better than a placebo operation...

The problem with the opposite sex is they aren't yet aware of this study which shows semen intake makes girls happier. Finally the proof we've all been waiting for.

These things implode in bright light!

See
Carbon nanotubes ignite when exposed to flash.
Makes my plans for a superstrong nanotube fiber superhero suit go up in smoke. Literally!

They've already got a monkey doing this. Couple of implants in its brain lets it control a cursor.

EurekaAlert

They've also got one controlling a robotic arm.

bbc article

Human tests are only a few years away.

If they could find a way to send feedback to the brain it could feel like any other part of your body.

Actually. this professor had disclosed this idea of his one year back! Look at this. I dont know how Slashdot didnt perform a search on this before posting!

For a comparion of magnetic pole shift vs other theories of polar and crusty disturbance, check out this page which picks apart the psuedo science of it all. There are a lot of wacko theories on what pole shift means, and a lot of it is based on lack of evidence and mis-conceptions.

It is intereting to note that, the earth's core is rotating faster than the surface crust to begin with.

There is this concern: The magnetic field acts as a shield against solar particles, etc. No field = no shield. Weak field = weak shield. This could be an issue with solar flares. Some folks are concerned that the field may be in the process of failing

Also, if the poles were to flip suddenly, many creatures that navigate magnetically could be affected. A full magnetic reversal could cause massive ecological problems across the whole of the Earth. If this took place slowly enough, each generation of creatures would learn to navigate with its' current situation.

For a comparion of magnetic pole shift vs other theories of polar and crusty disturbance, check out this page which picks apart the psuedo science of it all. There are a lot of wacko theories on what pole shift means, and a lot of it is based on lack of evidence and mis-conceptions.

It is intereting to note that, the earth's core is rotating faster than the surface crust to begin with.

There is this concern: The magnetic field acts as a shield against solar particles, etc. No field = no shield. Weak field = weak shield. This could be an issue with solar flares. Some folks are concerned that the field may be in the process of failing

Also, if the poles were to flip suddenly, many creatures that navigate magnetically could be affected. A full magnetic reversal could cause massive ecological problems across the whole of the Earth. If this took place slowly enough, each generation of creatures would learn to navigate with its' current situation.

Amen to that!

Whenever we relinquish a technology because we feel we're ethically "above that sort of thing", we run the risk that the technology will be picked up by people with WAY less moral scruples. Relinquishment pushes technology into the hands of the unethical, the very thing we'd hope to avoid by relinquishing in the first place.

There's then this tricky problem: how do we keep a strong technical lead in an ethically problematical area of technology? Historically we've done it with black ops. Maybe that's what would work here. Then again, there have recently been advances that may make Bush's unfortunate decision moot: it is now possible to extract a stem cell from an adult human that is fully capable of differentiating into any cell type.

So now, maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. If the Chinese make huge gains using fetal stem cells, but we can do all the same stuff with stem cells from adults, then their putative technological lead becomes a tempest in a teapot.

If there are any real factual arguments against GM foods, by all means present them.

What about the recent unexpected contamination of natural Mexican corn by genetically modified corn? If you're not familiar with this, here's the scoop: the Mexican equivalent of the US Department of Agriculture tested some corn-seed in Oaxaca and found that it had between a 3-60% rate of transgenetic contamination from species of corn that had not been imported into Mexico.

from:
UC Berkeley
Reuters
Nature, Vol. 413, September 27, 2001

My real factual argument against GM foods follows.

One: until a GM food product has existed for a number of years it is impossible to be 100% certain what effects it might have. (Think about drugs the FDA approved as good...thalidomide for one).

Two: apparently, based on the links mentioned above, it is impossible to control the dissemination of GM foods -- even the Monsanto Terminator gene isn't going to stop corn pollen.

Thus: we can't be what effects a GM food might have on the environment.

Ergo: this is a good argument for the strict control of GM foods.

And I might add, you probably don't trust Microsoft with Passport. Why would you trust Monsanto with GM foods?

This was presented at the

International Conference on Quantum Information
June 10-13, 2001 at the University of Rochester campus in Rochester, New York.

1. +3 troll, after some "funny" mods: "According to this upcoming news release". And 'this' has in large letters at the top: "Public release date: 27-Jul-2001". [witty connection.]
2. +3 informative: "Viking Soil Data Points to Life on Mars?" Slashdot editors are always sensationalisizing. This isn't news. So some quack re-analyzes the data once all the scientists have died. Big whoop. Nothing to see here, move right along folks.
3. +5 funny: With a witty reply to above bemoaning the fact that we can't agree on an international American spelling and denouncing the the British spelling of sensationalisizing...
4. +3 informative'The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.' witty statement about the author not being too old unfortunatley to confuse us with ancient Latin pluralizations of data. "The data were?" come on.
5. +3 troll: Conspiracy theory. "'The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.'" "Died." How convenient. <rant&gt....
6. +4 funny. First one to spot the fact that the sentence reads "a University of Southern California has re-analyzed the data from the 1976 Viking Mars lander's soil experiments". Quick! Did anyone catch the license plate? Those sneaky university of southern californias...always advancing these crackpot theories.
   
7. +5 funny. First one to get to the title of the news article: "heh. did anyone notice the title 'USC neuroscientist finds signature of life on Mars in decades-old data.' Yeah. Neuroscientist. "Yes, Bones, but. Is the life. Form. Intelligent."...spock interrupts "Actually, the brain-waves do exhibit circadian rhythms."
8. Right about here we gett some Anne'y long troll posts about whether we can truly, once we've discovered intelligent life on other planets (look for the phrase "I don't know about these circadian rhythms, but if they mean intelligent life...". Note that "Anne" hasn't read the article), then we need to re-evaluate our speciesist attitudes. How can we torture animals based solely on the fact that we're human and they're not, if there's intelligent life on other planets that might one day enslave us just as badly. Rant about vivisection. Rant turns into planet of the apes scenario. Gets mod'd out of oblivion by the time you've finished reading to the bottom.
9. +4 redundant. (After 5 informatives) First one to get to "San Diego, July 29, 2001" after pointing out (again) "Public release date: 27-Jul-2001".
10. First posts come streaming in from people who've read the articles. Phew!

Anthropology in the News has links to a lot more news stories on these findings. The BBC story is very short, but noteworthy for including a little bit of information on the dating methods used in the Australian case.

Anthropology in the News updates a lot and doesn't keep stuff on its front page for very long, so for the sake of Slashdot's archives, I'm copying the links here.

• New Evidence in Extinction Whodunnit BBC (6/7/01)
• Humans Linked to Animal Extinction New York Times (6/7/01)
• Humans Linked to Animal Extinction Yahoo (6/7/01)
• Human Hunters Spelled Doom for Ice Age Behemoths Yahoo (6/7/01)
• Humans Blamed for Ancient Extinctions MSNBC (6/7/01)
• Planet Was Too Small for Man and Beasts, Study Finds Dallas Morning News (6/8/01)
• Humans Hunted Mammals to Extinction in North America Eureka Alert (6/7/01)

All that the results prove is that these simulations agree with the expectations of those running them (I can't use the word "scientists" here). There's an indication that they are not simulating the real world.

And other things keep getting discovered, like the cirrus iris effect where local heating causes cooling.

Quantum entangled photons.

Wait, let me get this straight. On the frontpage of /., there is a story about a bug and its bug. A wasp that can't get its groove on because because of bacteria. Ok. Great.

Where is the frontpage mention of the instant orgasmatron that is being researched for women that can't have an orgasm??

...

BZZZZZTT!

Rami
--

You might want to check out Eurekalert .

Eurekalert is a general research press-release service. It's searchable though, so you should be able to find what you want fairly easily. Cognitive issues are of some special interest to me too, and I've been fairly pleased with it as an information source.

You might want to check out Eurekalert .

Eurekalert is a general research press-release service. It's searchable though, so you should be able to find what you want fairly easily. Cognitive issues are of some special interest to me too, and I've been fairly pleased with it as an information source.

Well, if a change in Earth's tilt triggered the change then fixing it will be an Earth-shaking project. If Himalayan erosion cooled Earth, the fix might be as simple as sealing the mountains in plastic.

Wide acceptance of low-emissions vehicles is almost completely dependent on the existence of a, for lack of a better word, refueling infrastructure. People don't want to have to drive across town to the one electric recharge station (or hydrogen station, or whatever) when they could drive their combustion car 2 blocks. And they dont' want to run out of whatever fuel they're using out in the middle or nowhere, or in a bad neighborhood, etc.

Wide acceptance of low-emissions vehicles is almost completely dependent on the existence of a, for lack of a better word, refueling infrastructure. People don't want to have to drive across town to the one electric recharge station (or hydrogen station, or whatever) when they could drive their combustion car 2 blocks. And they dont' want to run out of whatever fuel they're using out in the middle or nowhere, or in a bad neighborhood, etc.

-schussat

> I want to become filthy-rich from a program
> that I will design and sell, with no-source, and on
> whatever OS i choose.

Forget about it. Microsoft will squash you like a bug.

> If I create a killer app for linux, "the
> public domain" owns it, not me.

You don't say? Well, I guess that means I can put a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux on an ftp site somewhere, because according to my expert lawyer (you) it has now entered the public domain. Won't Cowpland be pissed? Tough luck, Cowpland!

> the US was built on capitalism, and the only
> thing open-source will do is destroy it.

Capitalism sucks, and I think it would be just great if open-source software would somehow magically wipe capitalism out or at least club it down a bit, but of course that's not going to happen.

> Read up on your history kids, and pay close
> attention to china and russia.

If you had read your history, focusing particularly on the nineteenth century when capitalism developed, you'd never have posted such nonsense. But do pay attention to Russia, especially now that they have traded in their sinister old postwar gangster socialism for an even worse gangster capitalism.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Au contraire Mon capitan! (pardon me =)
Pattern recognition has already reached a significant level of compexity but, what is not public at this moment is an integrated personality. A Machine Intelligence might even exist today, if it does you definately don't know about it and neither do I. To know of such a thing would very logically be a death warrent or at least permanent house arrest.
I think therefore I am. The prefrontal cortex is one of Gödel's islands of consistancy, reverse-engineering of that structure is well under way on many fronts: here, here, here and too many other places to mention. Gaming AI doesn't have a trillionish dollar distributed budget behind it simply because games don't generate that kind of revenue. Besides this hardware is woefully inadequate, a few very fast processor versus my billions of slow ones. I simply have more chances to stumble across something.
Hmm. So a compressed dictionary is the key to creating a true intelligence? Well! Step right over to those fine folks at Cyc who have been doing just that! To bad the darn thing is a lot more brittle than you or I. Although I really like the semantics they're developing - someday it could make good baby food for the real thing. I've spent many sleepless nights researching this field and the only thing I've learned is that there are a whole lot of distractions. The proof of that lies in the fact that HAL didn't come online on schedule.

The Night Angel

Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

here and here.
_________________________

here and here.
_________________________

Some of the interesting stuff happening at Rice involves getting the buckytubes to behave as either metals or semiconductors, depending on the tiling pattern of hexagons. To build circuits with this, you'd need to be able to join tubes of different tiling patterns. This was an active area of research two or three years ago, I haven't heard more since. At the same conference, I heard that it was pretty easy (from a chemist's pov) to "functionalize" buckytubes, i.e. stick little molecules on there that did useful things. Probably that would be useful in joining tubes with different tiling patterns.

(Note to Rob: I submitted this same story to /. yesterday afternoon, with links and proper attribution to NECRI and Nature, but I guess accuracy doesn't count as much as timing.)

Hypernova are approximately 100 times more powerful than supernova. This still gives a fudge factor of approximately 55 times. So it's equivalent to a supernova at a distance of about 750 light years. A supernova at this distance would be harmful, but again not a complete killer. It still wouldn't be healthy but nothing like a close up view of a supernova. Now if a hypernova went off within ~1000 light years, we would be completely screwed.

Of course if the hypernova are a factor of 10,000 times as energetic as a supernova we would be cooked. Though since it probably won't happen in the next millenium or so gives us plenty of time to advance and prevent this kind of thing from wiping us out.