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[You refuse to give credit] Because she's a woman. Bow, fuckers.

Well, she's a woman now.

At the time, though, she was Chris Peterson, not Christine.[1] [2]

[You refuse to give credit] Because she's a woman. Bow, fuckers.

Well, she's a woman now.

At the time, though, she was Chris Peterson, not Christine.[1] [2]

but I do consider myself an empiricist

I did you the courtesy of reading your whole reply. I am also an empiricist. That's why I don't believe the hype about global warming, most of which is promoted by environmentalists and activist scientists ("we need to bring more attention to the field") through the use of models that are demonstrably wrong. There are too many eyebrow raising graphs knocking around for me to believe the current climate is outside of the range of natural variation. I mean let's face it, if a climate scientist told me 1908 - 1940 was natural variation but that 1979 - 2000 was Human-CO2 induced, I would stifle a chuckle or three.

What amuses me so much is why you and others like you can't see this.

Funny thing, if you look at temperature averages over a longer period, it doesn't exist at all.

Perhaps you should look at the long term. The silly chart you keep posting over and over goes all the way back to 1970. Let's take it back a bit more so we can see what climate change actually looks like on a graph. Now who's bullshit just got blown out of the water?

http://www.imm.org/
http://www.foresight.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/

Once we have a fully functioning nanotechnology, we'll change their minds about it by literally changing their minds.

Don't worry, that's just a scary-ass joke.

Yeah, the possibilities are a bit scary to people who think the technology will be used that way, rather than having defensive nanotechnology open-sourced. BTW, the term "Open Source" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source was originated by Christine Peterson of the Foresight institute http://foresight.org/ which is a big proponent of nanotechnology.

-- Terry

Feedback effects of are not "assumed," but are based upon established physical properties of CO2 and water, such as the effect of temperature on CO2 solubility and evaporation of water.

Then tell me this, how would you discern between something acting as a feedback, and something acting as a forcing. Be specific.

There is a correlation between temperature and CO2; the question is why. For this question of causality, there is no null hypothesis, because the null hypothesis has already been excluded.

Yes, there *is* a correlation between temperature and CO2, and the historical record clearly shows CO2 changing *after* temperature. It is a novel assumption that suddenly, this behavior has changed, and as for causality, until you get a time machine, causes have to come before effects :)

The null hypothesis of no statistical relationship between temperature and CO2 is excluded.

Be careful here, you're moving the goalposts - the null hypothesis is that there is no *causal* relationship *from* CO2 *to* global average temperature. The novel proposition you claim is that there is in fact a *causal* relationship. This must be held to strict scrutiny.

-but you are hardly equipped to criticize the quality of those hindcasts unless you can offer a model that does a better job.

One does not need a competing model to demonstrate problems with an existing one. While it may be *nice* to have a new and improved model, it is not necessary to show the problems with existing models.

What you're proposing here is cargo cult science, with the demand that unless I can create a better model than the coconut radio transmitters and the bamboo landing fields, that I have no right to insist that you're barking up the wrong tree.

As for cargo cult science, here are a few more references for you to learn from:

http://misunderstoodfinance.blogspot.com/2010/01/would-feynman-disprove-global-warming.html

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3607

"if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."

The record says otherwise, unless you limit your timeframe to, say, 800 years or so...

It has been trending warmer for roughly 6,000 years

Nice charts.

30 year periods? WTF, that's just weather. I want to know what's been going on for a least a few thousand before we get too worked up. Pretty charts some one posted earlier in the thread are here. So can it over come the natural variability over a few thousand years?

The recent warming (over the past four decades) is at a much faster rate than the warming since the last ice age, by orders of magnitude. It's not the warming that's the problem. It's the rate of warming that's the problem.

Really? Because the historical record says otherwise. The "rise" now is equal to what happened in the MWP, to past inter-ice-age periods, and on the REALLY long term, we're experiencing general cooling.

The period you select is very important. Over the very long term, we're slowly cooling...

I, too, would like to find a place where the editors edit. Maybe even research a little. And where they don't comment in the stories. Where non-stories don't get posted. I mean - this is /. You would think that an editor could pick up the phone and actually call the subject of a story on rare occasion and maybe get a little insight into what is really going on.

Oh, and a site that doesn't end up slashdotting the subject without warning.

I use
* http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/ for nano tech news
* http://www.macrumors.com/ for mac news

I would like to find outlets for
* Programmer related news (in addition to http://thedailywtf.com/ :-)
* Hardware related news
* Tech/Social new

To be fair, I think /. has done a pretty good job of covering tech and the recent middle-east events. It's just the other 95% that's pretty much crap.

Here's some basic homework for anti-deniers so that they understand what they are arguing against:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553

Apparently they are arguing against people who think you can extrapolate global temperature to 0.5 degree from a single ice core located in Greenland.

Here's some basic homework for anti-deniers so that they understand what they are arguing against:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8
(watch the very end about hot body radiation if nothing else)

I'm a denier who believes in global warming and I'm GLAD. We can cope with warm. It's the coming cold period thats going to kill us all: (http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553)

Sam

Yes, we should calibrate our models on historic data; of course, that historic data is also quite problematic to look at when you want to discuss the radical heating we're seeing...

Yes, let's look at some historical data. As with any modeling problem, the selection of the data is much more critical than the actual model used. Wonder why models only concern themselves with the last 100 or so years? See graphs 2-7 of that link.

Without starting a giant flame war (too late?), could someone please explain the following data from two ice-core samples:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-icecore-2475.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-icecore-2453.html

This data is referenced in the following article, which claims global warming cannot be man-made:
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553

I would love for someone to explain either; why the data is wrong, or how it could be misconstrued.

Please please please, no name calling. I'm uninterested in shouting matches, and am only after logical argument.

What's more, this looks like a candidate for the Feynman Grand Prize. Not too shabby.

See this excellent essay against Mars and in favor of exploring the asteroids, Phobos, Deimos, or Earth's moon by NSS Board of Governors member and former L5 board adviser Eric Drexler, Space Development: The Case Against Mars

This recent NewScientist article overviews a recent report from the NSS co-authored by Buzz Aldrin with a similar conclusion, Astronaut-authored report says NASA needs new direction

Since we've been dreaming of medical Nanorobots since Rachel Welsh got my (grand)dad hot in Fantastic Voyage. The above robot is hardly the first, nor likely the robot to get into common use. This a by now a small industry on Medical Nanorobots and on how to control or use them, for instance this this paper on Medical Nano Robot Control from my Nanotech Feed @ Feed Distiller.

I guess they didn't have the foresight to use a real host.

I'll be here all night folks try the steak.

• A united world
• Extendable brain
• Artifical intelligence (ethical strong AI)
• Nanotechnology (especially assembler/disassembler)
• Neural interface
• In situ hackable mediated reality
• Thought communication
• Ability to fly
• Teleportation
• Our Wish-IT® (patent applied)(Wish Innovation Technologies) manufacturing model up and running which enables customer driven innovation, to make everyone's wish come through (hint to investors).

• A united world
• Extendable brain
• Artifical intelligence (ethical strong AI)
• Nanotechnology (especially assembler/disassembler)
• Neural interface
• In situ hackable mediated reality
• Thought communication
• Ability to fly
• Teleportation
• Our Wish-IT® (patent applied)(Wish Innovation Technologies) manufacturing model up and running which enables customer driven innovation, to make everyone's wish come through (hint to investors).

• A united world
• Extendable brain
• Artifical intelligence (ethical strong AI)
• Nanotechnology (especially assembler/disassembler)
• Neural interface
• In situ hackable mediated reality
• Thought communication
• Ability to fly
• Teleportation
• Our Wish-IT® (patent applied)(Wish Innovation Technologies) manufacturing model up and running which enables customer driven innovation, to make everyone's wish come through (hint to investors).

• MacArthur Fellowship ($500,000)
• Feynman Grand Prize ($250,000)
• Rolex Award ($100,000)

We don't want to succumb to bogosity.

Wow, I would love to see a reference on that. You're saying that it takes *800 million* cpu cycles to simulate one second worth of one neuron's activities? (Assuming a dual core 4 ghz processor).

Of course, if Moore's law holds...
a factor of 10 billion takes about (lemme see, 10^10 =~ 2^33, implies 33 * 1.5 years) 50 years. Yeah, that's a while, but not outside our lifetime, to get a household computer with the processing power of the human brain.

The references I've seen state that the power for the human brain will be available in a household computer between 10 and 30 years from now. (Search for human brain at http://www.foresight.org/updates/Update36/Update36 .4.html for estimates from Moravec & Kurzweil.)

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

He's coined terms you and I take for granted (Open Source?)....

I believe that was actually Christine Peterson, though ESR was at the summit.

OSS certainly would have had a much more up-hill fight without a little moderation by the likes of ESR....

In my mind, ESR stopped any pretense of showing moderation in 1999. See Communist China adopts Linux? and Surprised By Wealth. Uncoincidentally, he stopped speaking for me that same year.

I'm surprised that no one mentioned the Space Pier as a more feasible alternative.
http://discuss.foresight.org/~josh/tower/tower.htm l

>> This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.

That's very true. I'll stick with the definitions given by the founder of the field (ie. Drexler), as it's less subject to commercial and political manipulation. Much of the defining material is freely available online, for anyone who wants their information from the horse's mouth.

First of all there's the online version of Eric Drexler's extremely seminal Engines of Creation. It's a fantastic read, even after all these years.

(The online version of EoC used to be maintained at the Foresight Institute, but it's now kept by Drexler himself above. His whole site is a great resource of course, so clear out the tail of the URL and have a look around.)

Then there's the online version of the popular Unbounding the Future, an easily readable and slightly updated introduction to nanotechnology for everyone, although somehow I find it lacks the charm of Engines of Creation.

But nothing beats his textbook Nanosystems though. This book is a 150% must-have for anyone with a strong interest in nanotechnology, because even if you cannot follow the detailed science and mathematics, the diagrams and tables alone justify the cost.

Unfortunately the online version of Nanosystems is still at a very early stage, and is not really useful except as an online table of contents. Buy the textbook, you won't regret it.

>> This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.

That's very true. I'll stick with the definitions given by the founder of the field (ie. Drexler), as it's less subject to commercial and political manipulation. Much of the defining material is freely available online, for anyone who wants their information from the horse's mouth.

First of all there's the online version of Eric Drexler's extremely seminal Engines of Creation. It's a fantastic read, even after all these years.

(The online version of EoC used to be maintained at the Foresight Institute, but it's now kept by Drexler himself above. His whole site is a great resource of course, so clear out the tail of the URL and have a look around.)

Then there's the online version of the popular Unbounding the Future, an easily readable and slightly updated introduction to nanotechnology for everyone, although somehow I find it lacks the charm of Engines of Creation.

But nothing beats his textbook Nanosystems though. This book is a 150% must-have for anyone with a strong interest in nanotechnology, because even if you cannot follow the detailed science and mathematics, the diagrams and tables alone justify the cost.

Unfortunately the online version of Nanosystems is still at a very early stage, and is not really useful except as an online table of contents. Buy the textbook, you won't regret it.

This is a great all-around introduction to real "nanotech", it's the entire book online, for free.

http://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/index.htm l

[...] where can anyone expect to be in 50 years?

We should achieve full-blown nanotechnology in 10 years or so; 30 on the outside. Nothing short of a full-scale nuclear war will prevent us from acheiving this. Nations may attempt to ban it, but they will fall behind and be made less relevant to science.

It is difficult to predict the future after the Singularity happens, which achieving nanotechnology will bring us basically to (having the Foresight Institute's two achievements required for the Feynman Grand Prize (a computing device and a robot arm) will allow us to quickly develop the ability to reproduce and improve upon the human brain; one way to Singularity is to create an ultraintelligent machine, which is capable of designing better machines, ad nauseum).

My answer, when asked where I will be in 50 years, is generally "around some distant star, setting up a Dyson sphere."

Which brings me to my political answer. Although I have in the past called myself a libertarian, I am currently a socialist libertarian. Since we will soon achieve a technology that will make everyone as gods, I feel that our utmost concern is to prevent people from dying. I would be happy to pay additional taxes out of my salary if I knew they went towards freezing (properly) those who were currently too sick to continue functioning.

Once we've achieved nanotechnology it'll be trivial to develop the ability to bring them back, full memories intact.

I love my grandparents, and the thought of losing them forever simply because they were born a few years too early is heartbreaking.

Here the concept of intellectual property is tainted with visions of patent trolls "inventing" such gems as the double click and the hyperlink, however there is room for true innovation in the biotech industry. It is still a very young science and once the obvious patents are dealt with (eg "The use of carbon to create reeally small robots") serious headway can be made. Imagine the possibilities of nanorobots to treatvascular disease, physical trauma, and biological aging. (Links shamelessly ripped from the wikipedia article.) Would such innovation seem possible without the protection patents give to the investors in such high-risk (not to mention expensive) endeavors?

1. Doug Lenat 's AI program EURISKO (search for "tournament", middle of page) computed that a fleet of small, nimble craft would quickly decimate any other type of fleet:
   

   Lenat and EURISKO entered the 1981 national Traveller TCS tournament with a strange-looking fleet. The other contestants laughed at it, then lost to it. The Lenat/EURISKO fleet won every round, emerging as the national champion. As Lenat notes, "This win is made more significant by the fact that no one connected with the program had ever played this game before the tournament, or seen it played, and there were no practice rounds."
   
   In 1982 the competition sponsors changed the rules. Lenat and EURISKO entered a very different fleet. Other contestants again laughed at it, then lost. Lenat and EURISKO again won the national championship.
   
   In 1983 the competition sponsors told Lenat that if he entered and won again, the competition would be canceled. Lenat bowed out.
   

   
   
2. In Millennium Challenge 2002, a $250 million war game

   Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, former president of the Marine Corps University, was asked to command the "enemy" forces. In the first days of that mock battle, he used unconventional methods, including a preemptive attack that featured air-, sea-, and ground-launched cruise missiles to sink 16 American ships. After the American forces decided to refloat the ships and restart the game, Van Riper stepped aside from his role, contending that the rest of the game was scripted for American victory.

   
   

   So once again our military is preparing for past wars.

Your opinion is yours. but it sounds awfully like the 19th century opponents of trains. "ooh the human body cannot sustain speeds in excess of 20 mph, it's just unnatural". Railway travel (general) "I see what will be the effect of it; that it will set the whole world a-gadding. Twenty miles an hour, sir! - Why, you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweetheart. Grave plodding citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments will be at an end. It will encourage flightiness of intellect. Veracious people will turn into the most immeasurable liars. All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notions of distance. -- Only a hundred miles off!--Tut, nonsense, I'll step across, madam, and bring your fan'...And then, sir, there will be barrels of port, cargoes of flour, chaldrons of coal, and even lead and whiskey, and such like sober things that have always been used to slow travelling -- whisking away like a sky rocket. It will upset all the gravity of the nation...Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harm-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straight forward, regular Dutch Canal - three miles an hour for expresses, and two rod jog-trot journeys -- with a yoke of oxen for heavy loads. I go for beasts of burden. It is more formative and scriptural, and suits a moral and religious people better. -- None of your hop skip and jump whimsies for me." Source: From the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana, July 24, 1830, as quoted by Seymour Dunbar in A History of Travel in America, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915, Vol. III. p. 938. http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.htm l Just keep your horse then...

Organic life is a proof-by-example that molecular nanotechnology is possible, so your statement is trivially incorrect (and, curiously, contracts your immediately preceding paragraph). It's generally considered courteous to have some knowledge of a subject before you try to comment on it. I recommend reading Engines of Creation or picking up a copy of Nanosystems at your local bookstore. Thanks.

Foresight Nanotech Institutes mission is to ensure the beneficial implementation of nanotechnology.

to educate society about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology.

The mission of CRN is to raise awareness of the issues presented by nanotechnology: the benefits and dangers, and the possibilities for responsible use.

I know you were kidding, but let me just point out that the "grey goo by accident" concept is outdated and not very probable. In fact, its "inventor", Eric Drexler, wrote a paper why his earlier warnings in Engines of Creation will not apply. Basically, the argument is that in nanofactories, the assemblers are not floating freely, but are tied up in rigid and designed patterns to make assembly most efficient. Because such a fixed design is more efficient then self-organising floating assemblers, there is no economic incentive to do floating assemblers and thus no danger of grea goo by accident. Intent might be another story of course.

Hasn't the Foresight Institute been doing this for many years?

http://www.foresight.org/

Interesting article though. I dig reading about nanotech, its the coolest sci-fi-ish tech thats just around teh corner somewhere.

http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Abstrac ts/Donoabst.html

In practice, an ignition temperature of 400M K is needed to compensate for lost energy

The term has, over the last years, become something of a catch-all phrase for all things below 100 nm, also including fairly ordinary chemistry, unfortunately. Originally, the term was invented by Norio Taniguchi, but broadly popularized by Eric Drexler with the famous book "Engines of Creation" (available for free as in beer at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html). "Engines" was over the top in some respects and often criticized, but even ardent opponents of Drexler's vision of nanotech like the recently deceased Richard Smalley admit they have been brought into nanotechnology by this very book. Back in the days of "Engines", nanotechnology was strictly confined to the not yet developed "mass-manufacturing of devices to atomic precision and specification".

Note that Drexler himself has presumably ceded the term to its current usage and has called Intel's 90nm chips "nanotechnology", although it bears no resemblence whatsoever to Engines-style nanotech. He prefers "zetatech" (mega, tera, peta, exa, zeta) nowadays because of the quantity of atoms involved, but I think it's rarely used. Molecular Manufacturing is the preferred term for what used to be Nanotechnology. Let's see how many more rearguard action Nanotechnology has yet to fight before it becomes reality at last.

They are now shifting their focus from a member-centric model to an ad supported model. If you don't think that will work out for them then you'd better sell all of your Google and Microsoft stock because that is exactly their plans for the future too.

I think it will work. I think it's really amazing cool that it will work, also, because it validates some people's foresight of the future: that money will increasingly become obsolete (not all at once).

Once we achieve nanotechnology, we'll be able to create any good from dirt and sunlight. Services are a slightly different story; we'd be able to create robots to perform the services, so no human would need to work.

In a pre-nanotech society (but one rapidly approaching nanotech), it makes sense that as much as possible, goods and services would be available to humans at no cost, and the companies would make their money via advertising. This is, largely, one company giving another company pieces of paper in order for both companies to continue to provide something for free to citizens.

So what I'm getting at is, enjoy the free stuff because there will be even more of it in the future!

The idea of an electronically connected web of hyper-linked documents for academic review was dicussed by Kevin Drexler in the Engines of Creation (a really good book about NanoTech published almost 20 years ago.) I'm not suggesting that it was his idea, in fact I suggest we accept the concept of "independent origination", i.e. that multiple people can have the same idea independent of each other. In order to promote "independent origination" among all the people, let's listen before we judge, and postpone judgement until required by other forces.

In any case it will not be obsolete humans which go colonizing any stars. It will be complex nanosystems which support either uploaded "natural" intelligences or artificial intelligences or a combination of the two. Ultimately the entire framework that humans tend to view life from is flawed at the levels Matrioshka Brains operate at. Rather than replicate starting almost from scratch (using gametes), advanced civilizations are more likely to divide in half (as cells do). The problem is that due to the large amount of information advanced civilizations will have at their disposal they cannot easily transmit that quantity of information across large interstellar distances. Thus replication will only take place when developed star systems happen to orbit (or be navigated) to within close proximity of undeveloped star systems. Under normal circumstances this is a very slow development process. It is possible however that from time to time that the civilizations of a galaxy might choose to use the "seed" distribution (plant) approach to development, in which case it seems likely that the galaxy would "go dark" much more quickly. That may be the case for the galaxy associated with the "naked" black hole.

There can be no paradise on earth as long as the nastier bits of our evolutionary psychology are still holding us back. Egomaniacal, power-hungry, sociopaths (many of whom are now CEOs and politicians) may have been genetically successful in the past, but with increasing technological power, that mindset becomes a liability for net-positive happiness in the world. It's a good thing, then, that a biological solution, and a non-biological solution, will emerge parallel to the growing threat of exponentially more powerful tech in the hands of mostly static primate brains.