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While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe.

My main area of surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today, as revealed in the interview below:

RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of Minnesota
JC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

I have come to learn that these past carbon dioxide concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

I have also seen a great rejection of the global warming panic in the scientific community (it is unlikely that "big oil" funds have "bribed" so many faculty members of such prestigous universities):

Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming... If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.

And I have also seen a growing political backlash against scientifically-unfounded runaway global warming panic:

Politicians who build campaigns around "alarmist" global warming claims are themselves becoming quite alarmed because of growing skepticism, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said.

When I see interviews such as

No, you are right, the GP is just an idiot and seems to have no clue what theology actually is. Here is the course list from Harvard divinity school. Politics, sociology, history, philosophy, current events--it's all there. No one posting to this thread has actually stated their case from what separates theology apart from all the other humanities as making it especially worthless, and that's telling. I'd argue that it's in fact especially worthwhile. Certainly no other force shaped the course of human events than religion over the last 2000 years. Only until comparatively recently was it that religion stopped being the final arbiter of literally aspect of day to day existence, from sexual mores to music to styles of dress to economics.

Please check out http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anonymous/2007/02/26/ the-rumors-of-our-demise/ for The Tor Project's official response to this paper.

Shava Nerad
executive director
The Tor Project

The Harvard Gazette article is original, I think, rather than just being a regurgitation of Reuters and/or New Scientist.

The core claim seems to be that the ancient Moslems discovered a set of patterns that interlocked in a very practical way.

Now let's go to Wikipedia. Scroll down and look at the how-to pictures, and note the references to the Golden Mean. I don't see anything there that couldn't have been discovered by the Greeks or their successors.

Finally, let's go to common sense. I don't know the history of how Penrose discovered these tilings, but two main avenues come to mind:

1. Dumb luck/trial and error/general geometric insight.
2. Symmetry groups (the analysis of rotational symmetries via the abstract algebra concept of "groups", something any computer science graduate is somewhat familiar with).

Well, if it's #1, then of course somebody ancient could have done it too. And if it's #2 -- well, a lot of ruler/compass constructions were done by the ancients, long before Galois proved they were better analyzed via group theory.

So yes -- it's easy to imagine, given the evidence, that somebody figured this out 500-1,000 years ago. True, it's almost impossible to imagine that they understood it in the same way that Penrose did -- but there's a whole lot of physical evidence that, at some level, they understood it just fine.

Google scholar gives some good starting points. A couple quick results:

DC Geary, SJ Saults, F Liu, MK Hoard, Sex differences in spatial cognition, computational fluency, and arithmetical reasoning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2000.

This paper:

ES Spelke, Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review. American Psychologist, 2005.

criticizes studies that conclude any general disparity in skills, and argues that gender disparity seen in such fields does not have a biological basis (or that any biological influence is trivially small), but even it acknowledges that there are several differences in how and how efficiently males/females process certain tasks on a very fine scale. The argument is that these differences generally cancel each other out when you look at aptitude for mathematics as a whole.

Only because the squirrels are too slick to get caught.

Not true: A new approach to rodent performance evaluation.

There have been some recent discoveries of some "super-Earth" planets, e.g. GJ 876d and a planet found through gravitational microlensing, that have masses several times that of Earth. In the core-accretion scenario for planet formation, it's hard to stop runaway gas accretion once it gets going, suggesting that such low-mass planets are rocky and not gaseous. Perhaps they're the remnant cores of former gas giants that have lost their gaseous envelopes via some process that occurred after formation.

There have been some recent discoveries of some "super-Earth" planets, e.g. GJ 876d and a planet found through gravitational microlensing, that have masses several times that of Earth. In the core-accretion scenario for planet formation, it's hard to stop runaway gas accretion once it gets going, suggesting that such low-mass planets are rocky and not gaseous. Perhaps they're the remnant cores of former gas giants that have lost their gaseous envelopes via some process that occurred after formation.

Some of what you've said is contradicted by:
http://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/unpublished/fermi. htm
which is based upon the recollections of Herb York, who was present when Fermi posed the quesion over a regular lunch at Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to the source above.

Can you supply sources?

frank.harvard.edu is an interesting site, BTW. I like the image sequence of Frank (Drake) meeting frank (server) at:
http://frank.harvard.edu/frank/

Some of what you've said is contradicted by:
http://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/unpublished/fermi. htm
which is based upon the recollections of Herb York, who was present when Fermi posed the quesion over a regular lunch at Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to the source above.

Can you supply sources?

frank.harvard.edu is an interesting site, BTW. I like the image sequence of Frank (Drake) meeting frank (server) at:
http://frank.harvard.edu/frank/

reference and here and here's a picture of the spare lander that was never launched the boom on it is the meteorology sensor

This makes it likely that some genes will become more prevalent in one environment (ex.: where malaria is widespread) and less in other environments.

So even if ESP is possible and some people have that ability, this ability could come with its own set of problems making it less likely to be passed on from one generation to the other.

Seems like they have a spider looking for names of artists or properties they represent auto-DMCAing Youtube on any dictionary search matches. Apparently Viacom has an artist named Leon Redbone. Anyway, they chose poorly in this case, as the video poster is a former Berkman Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

John Palfrey, the director of the Berkman Center, weighs in with several relevant blog posts.

Looks like Viacom has succeeded in bringing attention from legal academic circles to the DMCA takedown process. This will probably be a good thing in the long run, it will just air out more problems with the DMCA and clarify the need for more protections from malicious use of this tool.

Apparently Viacom owns the rights to a few people eating dinner as well.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2007/02/02/the-vi acom-international-copyright-dmca-debacle-about-yo utube-videos-should-we-counter-sue/

It looks like Viacom automated their DMCA complaints, and included several videos in their DMCA notifications that they clearly don't hold the copyright to. One of the affected users also writes a Harvard law blog, and posted about it.

The Holocene climatic optimum was a period of warming in which the global climate became 0.5-2C warmer than today. However, the warming was probably not uniform across the world. It began roughly 9,000 years ago and ended about 5,000 years ago, when the earliest human civilizations in Asia and Africa were flourishing. This period of warmth ended with a cooler period with minor glaciation, which continued until about 2,000 years ago. At that time, the climate was not unlike today's, but there was a slightly warmer period from the 10th-14th centuries known as the Medieval Warm Period. This was followed by the Little Ice Age, from the 13th or 14th century to the mid 19th century, which was a period of significant cooling, though not as severe as previous periods during the Holocene.

Wikipedia

It got even warmer than that in places:

Combination of these newly calculated water ages and previously reported noble gas temperatures reveals new aspects of late Pleistocene and Holocene climate in southwestern Texas, in particular, an abrupt late Holocene temperature increase previously unidentified through 14C dating. Temperature increased by up to 3.4 C in the first half of the last millennium and by 1.5 C between 5.6 and 3.7 kyrs BP.

Abstract from "Noble Gas Thermometry and Hydrologic Ages: Evidence for Late Holocene Warming in Southwest Texas"

And other recent research is finding that sunspots were largely responsible for the Holocene warming:

Glacier fluctuations of the last 10,000 years have been reconstructed in Garibaldi Provincial Park in the southern Coast Mountains, British Columbia, from historical documents, dendrochronologic and lichenometric dating of moraines, and radiocarbon dating of fossil wood in glacier forefields. Six major periods of glacier advance are recognized: 7700-7300, 6400-5100, 4300, 4100-2900, 1600-1100 14C years BP, and the last millennium. Evidence for each of these six periods was found in the forefield of Sphinx Glacier, the only glacier in western North America with so complete a record. Evidence for each period, except the 4300 14C years BP event, was found at two or more sites, showing the regional significance of the advances. The data demonstrate that the LittleIce Age in Garibaldi Park began as early as AD 1000. The earliest maximum was achieved in the 12th century, followed by recession until sometime in the 14th century. Several glaciers advanced into forests in the 14th century, culminating with the construction of moraines in the late 17th, early 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Helm Glacier provides a near complete record of fluctuations since the 14th century. Glaciers receded between the 1930s and 1960s at average annual rates of about 30 m. Between the 1960s and 1980s,glaciers advanced up to 300 m, but since then they have receded at annual rates of 5-10 m. Ice cover has decreased by about 240 km since the Little Ice Age maximum, with most of this loss occurring after the 1920s. Some small glaciers in the park have already vanished, and more are likely to disappear if the current trend continues. The record from Garibaldi Park is broadly synchronous with records of glaciers throughout the world, suggesting a global forcing mechanism. Hemispheric temperature change can explain glacier behaviour during the last millennium. The Garibaldi record shows a relation to reconstructed Holocene sunspot activity, suggesting that changes in solar activity probably play an important role in global climate change.

I followed your link... I thought you meant this http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/04/01/16/1451 207.shtml

Yeah, I mean Harvard and MIT have never contributed anything to phys... oh, never mind.

The most plausible work I've seen on the subject is based on Durda & Kring's recent work on giant impacts and heat of re-entry. Based on the size of the Chixculub (sp?) impact crater, they concluded that the heat of re-entering rock on ballistic trajectories would have heated almost the entire atmosphere to incandescence. This is global warming of a sort, I suppose.

I've seen talks by archaeobiologists who assert that the dinosaurs were simply broiled by the heat coming from the atmosphere. That theory nicely explains why small, burrowing creatures suddenly took off and why the seas weren't as strongly affected by the land: anything small enough to hide in a burrow, or agile enough to swim deep underwater for a few days survived (at least in numbers large enough to propagate); everything else was cooked. It is also consistent with the fossil record, which shows huge amounts of charcoal cinders near the K-T boundary wherever you look, and a drastic change in the types of pollen present.

Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist, I'm only an astrophysicist.

He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it. And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.

The question this women is asking is more like, "Given that there are no inherent disparities in aptitude between men and women, why aren't as many women appearing in engineering positions?"

Actually they made a 0.02% error (0.2mm in 1m). See also the obligatory wikipedia link.

Given the time, it was not so bad a result, although it could have been better because the lawmakers used provisional estimations from the measuring expedition because they were in a hurry for a result. Some things never change.

Google is the new AskSlashdot. Nasa has a web site that will show you graphically as well as give you more detailed ephemeral data:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

Harvard also has raw data.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/ 2006P1_1.html

Here in Oxford, UK, the comet will be above the horizon from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. tomorrow (15th January), which means there is a very, very slim chance of seeing it right on the horizon at sunset.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/co rporate_governance/MediaMentions/WSJ_01.11.06.pdf

The hedge fund managers are paying themselves huge fortunes when they take over a company and replace the CEO with themselves.

1973 Peter Kirstein at University College London (UCL) established the first transatlantic packet network link - Rutherford Laboratory IBM 360/195 in the UK linked through UCL and satellite link from Norway to ARPAnet. In November the RL machine is the most powerful on the ARPAnet

the total legal justification (from the US viewpoint) for running the network services between Arpanet and the UK networks between 1973 and 1988 was the need to test these developments with real traffic

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976ucle.rept.....K

Except the oceans are currently a massive CO2 sink, not a net CO2 source.

Two decades of ocean CO2 sink and variability (abstract)
The Acid Ocean - the Other Problem with CO2 Emission
Direct observation of the oceanic CO2 increase revisited

...what fundamental principle would you have to violate...?

Incompressibility of a material is mediated by the electromagnetic force arising from the charges inside and between the atoms comprising a material. As such there is a fundamental limit to the magnitude of the incompressibility. You can always push those electrons closer together (until they disappear on you, creating a shower of new particles).

Sound waves are ultimately constituted by moving particles, and according to relativity it is not possible for a particle (or even information!) to move faster than c=299792458 m/s (not to be confused with "the speed of light" which is only equal to c in vacuo). This is unless those particles are (hypothetical) tachyons, in which case they can never move slower than c (but even then, they cannot transmit information faster than c.)

Even inside a neutron star, the Pauli exclusion principle is insufficient to prevent the neutrons from compressing and collapsing into a black hole.

Good thesis on how to keep the net neutral.

http://afs.eecs.harvard.edu/~goodell/blossom/

You don't even need to RTFA to know it's beyond most of our equipment. The /. summary says "7th to 9th magnitude", so you know you probably can't see them. The stellar magnitude scale goes brighter the lower the number, and it's logarithmic. The sun is about -26, the moon -12, and Saturn is about a 1. Theoretically, in a very dark rural area, you should be able to see 7th magnitude items with a modest aperture (say 4 - 6 inches.) But it becomes logarithmically more difficult at higher magnitudes like 8 and 9, so those of us in any suburban setting already know that we won't see anything. The only saving grace to the article is the suggestion that the software will notice the strikes, even though the astonomer won't.

Magnitude descriptions
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/icq/MagScale.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

In 1859 a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was observed by Richard Carrington
a British Astronomer. Aurora was observed in Havana and transcontinental telegraph
lines burst into flames...

If one of a similar intensity were to hit us today, it would might
burn out electrical systems hemisphere wide. Our power grids and
transistor based control system could fail.

I would be curious if someone with a statistics background could give
some rough estimate as to the frequency of a CME hitting earth, based upon
the fact that the last such an event (which would severly disrupt our civilization)
happened only 147 years ago.

http://csem.engin.umich.edu/muri/MURIreport2003.pd f

http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv= table&multiple=1&range=1&directget=1&application=s m04&database=%2Fdata%2Fepubs%2Fwais%2Findexes%2Fsm 04%2Fsm04&maxhits=200&=%22SH51B%22

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AdSpR..38..232S

The publishing industry also realizes it does not have the balls nor lobbyists to enforce these whims on the world. They cannot change legal deposit. They cannot close down the Library of Congress. They cannot kill Gutenburg.org. They cannot stop Google and Harvard and Amazon and Yahoo from scanning books. And yes Virginia, they do get a special stipend from Library purchases, and annual fees for copying provisions. (At least in Canada. Dunno what you Yanks do except allow school teachers to show commercial videos in classrooms. Scandalous!!)

The issue with these slippery slope "where's my money?" arguments is they never know whom to blame. Is it Xerox for letting me photocopy? Is it HP for letting me scan? Is it the security guard for not tasering me as I approach the photocopier? Is it the bus driver for taking me downtown to commit a felony? Is it the library for buying a book I never heard of, which made me decide to go out and buy the entire series to read over and over and over again? "You only paid once, that's not fair!"

Four hundred years ago the publishers complained because it was too hard to sell obscure books, and now they complain because there are so many obscure books people aren't buying enough of theirs. Libraries are the only customer that actually want one of everything, and they actually enable citizens to purchase more for themselves. Libraries grow the economy across the board. If all knowledge or literature had to be purchased before it was read... well where would all these starving authors go to get their ideas? You've hit the big time when every city in the country promises to make your words available for 50 years, not when someone pays $5 for a PDF with a click-wrap agreement.

Information wants to be free. If you want to make money and become famous, stick to paperback thrillers. Just don't complain when some less successful author sues you for having read their ideas too.

I can't figure out "calcium from animal-based sources is a myth", given that everyone involved in osteoporosis seems seems to support dairy. Is it simply about animal protein? Animal protein certainly appears to be worse than plant protein. However, that study was only done with women and not men, and unfortunately the article doesn't go into detail about the diets or vitamins. For example vitamin A is higher in plants than animals, and lower levels are associated with fractures in women; men however are not affected. Also, it seems that high levels of calcium intake is worse than moderate levels. A Harvard synthesis (which I'm using now) about milk and calcium acknowledges that animal protein is associated with lower levels of bone formation, but still concludes that dairy is a good source of calcium. (1) The USDA also lists dairy products as being generally better sources of calcium than plant products (by my estimation: the list is very long). Lastly, some plant sources may be detrimental to overall calcium absorption.

1. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calciu m.html (Damn, what's with Slashdot screwing up links?)

How many times have you heard the word "innovation" from a microsoftie?
(uncountable)

How much money does it spend on research?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/204 2218
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/120606-micro soft-research.html

How many times has it innovated?

http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/opinions/msinnova te.html
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.sh tml
http://www.mcmillan.cx/innovation.html

This last dude gave up, Last updated 27 June 1999. Basically, it came down to a list of all accepted innovation nominations compared to two accepted: Microsoft Bob (doubtful but accepted) and the fucking talking paper clip. Which is basically Bob redone as a more annoying Help file.

all I did was a google search for "microsoft innovate" without quotes, and I came up with ZERO microsoft sites, and a whole bunch which put "innovate" into the quotes it deserves.

Worthless software company. The only things they did right are SQL server (derived from Sybase, and even though it was apparently recoded it shares similar syntax), which actually has a decent track record on security issues, and of course Visual Studio (IMO until the .NET crapfest, but even that is well done, just a personal preference, except that they are trying to win against Java using an interpreted framework, but Visual Basic was completely reengineered and basically thrown away?) (but it uses a third party C/C++ library from Dinkumware, don't think they came up with any of that themselves) (oh and they didn't make the compiler either, they made it worse). But without microsoft we wouldn't need either of these. I believe they don't suck because they were made by developers, for developers.

Dinkumware info, apparently there is a license dispute so that MS can't package the updates in a visual studio service pack, so Dinkumware tells which lines to edit and how:
http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html

std::string causes corruption. Sorry we can't fix it, upgrade to .NET or buy a C++ library:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813810
"When you build applications in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 that use the supplied Standard Template Library (STL), memory corruption may occur, or your computer may stop responding. "

Origins of MSC compiler
http://www.nimh.org/microsoft/
"`This is just a historical note about the C compiler microsoft sells. In the late 80's I was developing C programs under DOS using the Lattice C compiler. One day I got a letter from Lattice saying they were out of the C compiler business, I should contact microsoft for support. I found out that microsoft bought the compiler and exclusive rights to sell it from Lattice. "

O man I just pissed myself off again rehashing all that ineptitude.

The point about long-term secrecy is interesting, however, it can be cheaply addressed with classical cryptography, in a provably secure way (NOT depending on any computational assumptions like RSA).

http://athome.harvard.edu/dh/hvs.html

You still need more assumptions than with QC, which is why I don't exactly buy this approach, but if you really need long-term security, you might consider this scheme.

As for QC, it is expensive, point-to-point only, and makes sense only if you are worried about somebody breaking RSA or a similar problem. But the worst thing about QC is that we have no practical experience with it. QC may be theoretically unbreakable, but what about all the accompanying software and the normal communication channels that are necessary for QC to work, and standard attacks against those channels? QC is not only quantum transmission, but the whole suite of accompanying (classical) protocols, whose implementation might be seriously broken. We don't know. Why should anyone spend large amounts of money on something that may be, and in the current implementation probably is, broken and not secure at all?

Not so much potable as not seawater. To generate hydrogen in the amounts needed to power transportation you are going to have some serious issues with chlorine and insoluable percipitates.

I remember when the first computers with DVD-ROM's started showing up, the computers generally had about 200-400MB hard drives. So a single 600MB CD disk held more than everything on your entire hard drive.

Now a standard computer might come with a 160 or 250GB hard drive, and where are disks? Only at about 8 GB for DL DVD's. Instead of fitting one or two hard drives of info on a single disc, now you fit 20 or more discs onto a single hard drive.

Yeah, I know Blue Ray and HD-DVD will be in computers soon, but they don't come close to reversing the trend. Soon we'll have 25-50 GB/disc, and by that time probably at least 500GB-1TB standard hard drives. And then it'll be a long time with frequent hard drive upgrades and no bigger discs again. Blue Ray and HDDVD may be bigger, but at the rate they're getting bigger, discs are still falling farther and farther behind.

I hope there will be some revolutionary increase like holographic storage discs, but I'm not holding my breath, because I remember reading articles about how we'd have terabyte holographic storage devices in a few years going back as far as NASA in 1993 and 4D around 1997. Holographic storage seems to be one of those technologies like fusion that are always a few years off.

At least holographic storage is always five years away, while fusion is always 20 years away. At least that sounds more promising.

Harvard seems to offer only one course that would cover SQL and RDBMS. It's Comp Sci 165, "Information Management," and seems to be relatively theoretical in the sense that banging out SQL isn't the real focus. To wit,

Covers the fundamental concepts of database and information management. Data models: relational, object-oriented, and other; implementation techniques of database management systems, such as indexing structures, concurrency control, recovery, and query processing; management of unstructured data; terabyte-scale databases.

Upon reading the syllabus I see that two class sessions (of about 40) cover SQL specifically.

While I can't find the official list of requirements to complete the Comp Sci major there, I did spot a form that seemed to indicate that 165 is optional.

So as far as I can tell, it seems that you can complete a bachelor's in Comp Sci from Harvard without taking a database class at all. And the one and only undergraduate class on databases seems to be heavy on the sort of knowledge you'd need to implement your own server software--not so much on ordinary business applications that run on SQL.

I haven't given you an example of an Ivy that has no SQL or RDBMS on its curriculum at all. But I think I've illustrated a prestigious Comp Sci program that one could graduate from without much everyday practical knowledge of SQL.

My own background, I majored in pure mathematics at a near-Ivy while dabbling on Comp Sci. The Comp Sci major didn't exist until I was near graduation already, but ISTR that the CS program of the time didn't include SQL. Then again, it was the 1980s and industry was still pretty heavily into ISAM on mainframes. We had an "Exotic Programming Languages Study Group" that was going to do COBOL one semester--because to us, that was considered exotic. Comp Sci was Pascal and B-trees, combinatorial theory, computational complexity, stuff like that. Pretty darned theoretical if what you wanted was a programming job, but still quite useful.

Wikipedia article on the Murchison meteorite. The entry mentions the idea that "a small amount of chiral amino acids [on meteorites] may explain the evolution of right-handedness of sugars."

Also, here is an abstract of an article on extraterrestrial chirality w.r.t. the Murchison and Murray meteorites.

You're slandering one of the greatest philanthropists of our generation with an outright lie.

It's not slandering when it's truth:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/

Apple made operating systems for non-x86 hardware.

Today I would gladly accept that this is no longer true. That doesn't change that it was true.

The abstract also mentions "In the presence of the colloidal PVA-Pt as a catalyst and triethanolamine (TEOA) as a sacrificial electron donor, the photosensitized reduction of water to H2 takes place." This basically means that electron fro TEOA is being used to reduce water to hydrogen. This chemical (TEOA) is oxidized and has to be replenished to maintain the H2 production rate. I am not disparaging their results (they are valuable, otherwise it would not be published in such a reputed journal), but trying to put things in perspective. Compare this to the reports of water splitting using titanium dioxide and other ceramics ( http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006ApPhL..89p3106P, http://edu.chem.tue.nl/6KM11/files/Project%20repor ts%202003%202004/Photocatalytic%20water%20splittin g.pdf ) where water is split to yield hydrogen and oxygen without the need for any "sacrificial electron donor".

All your post makes tons of sense. Well, almost all. This paart is not real:

[India] don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status

Actualy they have.

Those who want to be superpowers have aircraft carriers. India has some and is building more. Se:

India as a superpower:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_as_an_emerging_ superpower

Indian Navy carriers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_carrier#Indi an_Navy

List of Indian carriers:
http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/india.htm

India begins construction of aircraft carrier
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-04/1 2/content_433517.htm

"Moscow and New Delhi today signed a $1.6 billion deal finalizing India's purchase of a refurbished Russian aircraft carrier, fighter jets, and helicopters. Observers say it's a sweet agreement for both sides, allowing Russia to bolster its sagging arms industry and India its regional strategic capacity. "
http://www.defense-aerospace.com/cgi-bin/client/mo dele.pl?prod=32130&session=dae.23771315.1164583691 .RWojC8Oa9dUAAHETeZY&modele=jdc_1

Grand Delusions: The Psychology of Aircraft Carriers
http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/1068/

India's Military, from CIA's factbook:
https://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in. html#Military

Peace!

Already discussed in postings, but worth repeating: By definition, the blacker a material is, the more photons it absorbs. Ultra-black materials are particularly useful if you are making photosensitive materials (e.g. cameras) or any sort of photo collector (e.g. PV cells).

While I understand the frustration at the idiot comments that have been posted so far, I think you are way off base in regards to the scientific research and education that goes on in the US. If you were too lazy to read the article before responding, the summary even states that the US has supplied funding for this project.

While it is amazing that Mexico has built a new LMT, I feel obligated to remind you of the multiple telescopes the US operates such as Gemini, KECK, NASA IRTF, CSO, SMA, NRAO. These are but a few off the top of my head.

Leslie Valiant---he invented the PAC (probably approximate correct) model of machine learning back in 1984, if you'll recall---postulates an interesting model:
Memorization and association on a realistic neural model, Neural Computation, 17:3 (2005) 527-555.

this is only the US ruling, you can go google for other nations rulings, I believe also they have some problems at least in japan and korea (perhaps, don't recall)

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/

In the US the case still isn't over yet either, there is at least one more state going after them, Iowa, and the head cheeses have to travel and go testify in person

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/20 03342909_webmssuit03.html

And if you say tenesgrity, or porosity again ...

tensegrity

tensegrity

CC.

Yes, Hedy Lamarr also deserves to be mentioned because she was the actress who invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio technology. During WWII, with the help of Peter Antheil, she worked on using a frequency-hopping radio to create a jam resistant control system for "guided" torpedoes.

Before that, as a teenager, she made headlines and shocked Europe by doing few nude scenes in the Czech film, "Ecstasy". She later married a merchant who was selling munitions to Germany. She did learn some about technology from him, but he was a very controlling person who watched her all the time. During an evening party she drugged her maid and escaped to London. She then signed a contract with MGM and became a movie star who starred opposite leading men such as Charles Boyer, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Victor Mature.

She met George Antheil at a Hollywood party and the next day they discussed what they could do to stop Hitler. With his knowledge of player pianos, they worked together to develop a guidance system for torpedoes that could not easily be jammed. She also helped raise money for war bonds by selling kisses for $50,000 per smack. After their patent expired in the 1950's Sylvania "re-discovered" frequency-hopping and called it spread-spectrum. Today many pagers, cellphones and other devices use spread-spectrum technology. If I am not mistaken, it is also used in 802.11b/g wireless networking for computers. Here are a couple of links about her:

The Inventor of Frequency Hopping, a web technology

The birth of spread spectrum

Everyone is pointing out the silly choices and the huge number of worthy candidates not on the list. But I think the most poignant line is the bit about Rosalind Franklin where it says something about DNA and X-ray crystallography (and I've lost the quote because I closed the page and now it's slashdotted - d'oh) and then says in brackets "don't ask". This is supposed to be about geeks ffs, and asking is the first thing geeks do. This just shows that cnet is about the geek as a passing trend, and has nothing to do with intellectualism.

Oh, and I vote for Lisa Randall :)

Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power.