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Well, the thing is that we don't need Nitrogen in the air to survive. The only reason Nitrogen is used in the space program is because pure oxygen in the air is an incredible hazard (as shown in the Apollo I catastrophy.)

Even then, the amount of neutral gas like Nitrogen needed to prevent oxidation disasters is far less then the amount of oxygen needed to survive.

(compounds like ATP) + O2 = Energy + (waste byproducts)

There is no N2 in that equation.

Just hoping to clarify a few things. Yes we will need to bring something or produce some other gas so the air isn't as combustible as pure oxygen, but the only thing we really need to breathe is oxygen.

Some helpful webpages:
ATP AND BIOLOGICAL ENERGY
The Apollo 1 Tragedy

I think it's an INCREDIBLE assumption to say that 'they can not only drink, but breathe when they get to Mars'. The text (from the article itself) 'The same design of instrument was used on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft that discovered ice in the shadowed regions of the Moon's poles in 1998' seems to show why this is a bad assumption. We can't just go trouncing around on our own moon without space-suits 'just because we found water-based ice'.

My $.01

"Now, if I may digress momentarily from the mainstream of this evening's symposium, I'd like to sing a song which is completely pointless, but is something which I picked up during my career as a scientist. This may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances. It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a possibly recognizable tune. "

The elements

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

No no no.

As far as gasses go, photosynthesis takes 6 waters, and 6 CO2s and liberates 6 O2's. There is no crisis.

Check this link. MM
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Don't worry about oxygen. As others have pointed out, we have been engaging in "destroying" oxygen for many many years already, and there is still plenty of it. This is true for a reason:

Plants liberate O2 during photosynthesis.

In fact, the single biggest and most important biological and geological change in Earth's history was probably when plants first began to spew oxygen which, at the time, must have been HIGHLY TOXIC to most life forms. Prior to that time, almost everything on Earth was in an (electrochemically) reduced state. Over some geological period of time, everything converted to an oxidized state. Most organisms must have become extinct or relegated to marginal environments when this happened.

However, eventually a new class of organisms arose which was able to take advantage of the new, oxygenated environment with the use of aerobic respiration. The rest, as they say, is history.

MM
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Good design doesn't necessarily mean using only the newest browsers and proprietary technologies. Far from it, I have a friend who develops the page for a local college, and the page is a fairly clean, tight layout that quickly connects the user to the main areas of the site (the one problem is the menu, which was designed by a committee, but last I hear he was fighting to trim it to a reasonable size). All that, and it's not ugly. No scrolling, and the info is right there. The interesting thing in all of this, however, is that he claims that the page works at least decently even with "beta versions of lynx", as he puts it- in short, it was designed with other browsers in mind. (I've been trying to find a browser where the page doesn't work, but so far no success. Any ideas?). Cross-browser compatibility doesn't require multiple versions of the same page, or a stripped down ugly site- just a little thought.

besides with the speed advantages shared memory brings to multiprocessing a quad xenon would probably outpreform this.. deffinately a quad proc ultrasparc but those are pricey even used...


First, I'm guessing you meant quad-Xeon and not quad-Xenon, cause why would you want to have 4 instances of Xenon text editor running on your desktop, or 4 atoms of the element Xenon.

Second, there is the misnomer that Ultra-sparc boxen are rediculously expensive. It's just not true. The place where I work recently purchased a new shared solaris server - quad-proc Ultra2 4x300mhz w/ 1 Gig of ram and 2x18 gig scsi drives. It only set us back about $1500. That is NOT MUCH in the world of shared website hosting. Plus, it compiles things a lot faster than, say, our P4-1.5 Ghz, despite the 300 Mhz advantage.
High end hardware is doable, and most people don't need much, especially considering that a Sparc IPC (25-ish mhz w/ 24 megs of ram) runnig solaris 7 can host 200 web pages easily, and handle 3 million hits a month. Web serving is *not* difficult, and it doesn't take a lot of power, just a proc that can switch between processes quickly and efficiently. It's poorly-written CGI that takes power.

~z

• Lisp
• Forth, and this other Forth one and this one. mmm forth, every good programmer should learn this beauty.
• x86 Assembly pretty boring stuff
• Pascal, well not my favorite either
• Cobol (this list while compile in cobol).
• Fortan. They say it still outcranks C in some areas if you can believe it. (I don't)

Really? I have never heard this one. Got a reference?

Straigth from the horse's mouth: James Watson, The Double Helix : A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

Been a long time since I've read it, but I remember it was a close race between Pauling and his team at Caltech (IIRC). BTW, Watson and Crick relied on Rosalind Franklin's excellent x-ray crystallography work for their discovery - without her, the nobel prize would have probably gone to Pauling.

Raymond

(p.s. see also this page)

This will probably become flamebait...oh well.

The first time I heard the 'bull' you are referring to it was coming from a pigs mouth, Rush Limbaugh. It's been seven years, but it still amazes me people take an entertainers words as scientific fact.

I'm not saying I know the truth of the matter. I'm not a scientist in that field nor am I on a political committee dealing with the subject. I honestly don't have any facts. What I do know is this: world leaders are concerned enough to host global meetings about the greenhouse effect. That's enough for me...

My only concern is the lobbying by third world countries and corporations. I don't want what happened to Easter Island to happen to the rest of the Earth. I don't want greed and shortsightedness to get in the way of pure science.

PS. I live in Houston, #1 in US smog. My eyes are burning this morning.

You will get a very strong founders effect from a sample this small, of course... meaning that any problems in the genotype will be magnified and exaggerated. But if there aren't any lethal recessives, you could establish a breeding population, albeit one with persistent problems such as vulnerability to disease.

(For more on the cheetah, see this natural history and this genetics discussion)

Yeah, I've been affected by this stuff too. My school (www.mc.maricopa.edu) decided to shut down THE ENTIRE NETWORK from Noon (our time) today until Jan 2. Huh?

No e-mail, no Netscape roaming access, no web pages, no FTP, no Telnet.

Do they really want me to get drunk and party? Cuz that's the only thing left. =)


Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

This reminds me of when the Police (the band, not the blueshirts) put out a song called "Ah Doo Doo Doo, Ah Da Da Da" specifically because they thought it would be funny to hear a bunch of the boss jocks try to say it and still sound cool. It will take a lot longer to get popular simply because a lot of alpha geeks out there wouldn't be caught dead talking about their code in terms of kibis & bits.

Another problem I have with this system is that it is still tied to the base10 numbering system, setting the markers around every three tens place. Admittedly, this is the way we think about them currently, but let's apply a little Sapir Whorf, eh?