Slashdot Mirror

Nick Bostrom asks whether we live in a computer simulation (18 November, p 38). What would that run on, then? The class of programming languages called functional languages - and their close relative Lisp - often make use of a technique called "lazy evaluation": they defer computing a result until it is actually needed.

Perhaps the developers of our simulation are using such a functional language, and the wave-particle duality is visible evidence of their choice of development tools.

Michael Hamilton

New Science Disagreed

I support the theory of the universe as a DFA. If you knew the governing rules of the universe as well as every quantum state of every particle in the universe, you could calculate both the past and the future with perfect accuracy. But that's a little like saying if you had a pinch of fairy dust and a happy thought, you could fly to Neverland.

Apparently the locals don't share your enthusiasm for UK science commitment:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19626356.100-science-cuts-may-harm-uks-international-reputation.html

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200

Yes you can make it from atmospheric carbon.
Why not just use hydrogen? Well for transportation hydrocarbons have some real advantages over hydrogen. They can be liquid at normal temperatures and have a much higher energy density than hydrogen. You extract the hydrogen from water and the carbon from the CO2 in the air.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420884.400-escape-from-mars.html
Shows how you can do it on Mars but hydrogen is hydrogen and co2 is co2.

Sure the point about the difference between a rat and human brain is valid, but I suspect that most people underestimate the complexity of the brain in general. Here's a picture of a tiny mouse brain that shows some hints about the internal physical structure. mouse brain image and an article about how that image was made.

Sure the point about the difference between a rat and human brain is valid, but I suspect that most people underestimate the complexity of the brain in general. Here's a picture of a tiny mouse brain that shows some hints about the internal physical structure. mouse brain image and an article about how that image was made.

Dude, there's no shortage of energy and I say that as a fully paid up peak oil convert.

We're surrounded by energy. Once natural oil production starts to slide (and I can believe that'll happen in 0-5 years, if not before) we can and probably will replace it with coal-to-liquids technology, which is crap for global warming but does solve the problem of powering our food trucks.

It's an open question what will happen after that. Our investment in petroleum based propulsion is gigantic. It's lockin on a far bigger scale than Windows ever was. Even relatively minor changes like ethanol have problems with things like pipeline incompatability. Bigger changes like going to all-electric cars are thrown around without thinking through the costs.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised at all if in 2108 we're still using cars powered by petroleum. Not petroleum that we suck out of the ground with hi-tech straws of course. That'll probably end in the next 50 years. Probably, either petroleum manufactured from biomass or extracted directly from the air and water (CO from the air, H from electrolysis, CO + H == syngas, input to the fischer-trope process). Petrol is amazingly energy dense, easy to transport and we have very hundreds of millions (billions?) of vehicles deployed that use it already ..... carbon-neutral renewable petroleum? What's not to like?

And they're two and a half years behind Philip Ball's "Critical Mass" which won the Aventis Prize for science books that year. Of course, CM dealt with a lot more than traffic jams - but they were in there. (In fact, from the new story's summary, it sounds like the researchers may have read it.)

If we really want to explore the stars, we must focus on high-risk projects that bust the fundamental notions of science. One such project is the hyperdrive. Burkhardt Heim developed a unique (almost incomprehensible) field of physics. If he is right, then we can build a space ship to visit the space alien peering at us.

Note that one deduction from Heim's work is a formula for calculating the mass of fundamental particles. The formula has been subjected to review by esteemed physicists and is 100% accurate. Could the hyperdrive be another valid consequence of Heim's work? The possibilities are quite tantalizing.

"To boldly go where no one has gone before ..."

Its not a format war, its a new format. But it *will* be a format war if any of the large firms thinks there is any money in it.

Remember "DataPlay"? A small format optical disk (with an elaborate and complicated DRM system btw) in the early 2000s - they had a new and innovative format. They even got the record companies on their side until the big players (in this case Philips) looked at them, saw they had a business model and crushed them to develop small-form factor optical (SFFO). Of course, SFFO vanished as soon as cheap flash memory was available (low power, no moving part) but the point remains. A single isolated firm will be destroyed by a large multinational as soon as they prove they have a business case. And I bet my metaphorical hat that any array of patents will not affect that outcome in any way.

More information on Dataplay/SFFO available on net, here one's link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2930-tiny-optical-disc-could-store-five-movies.html

Besides, I've seen a number of multi terrabyte, multi layered optical systems paraded over the last few years - I label this vapor ware until I see it on the shelves. And even then I would not trust my data to it until its been proven in the corporate world.

This one they didn't notice until after it nearly missed earth.

So to answer your question: Yes, it's very possible!

A new weapon of intergalactic war has been found. A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbour, a new study reveals.

Galaxies have been known to ram into each other, but this is the first known example of attack by particle beam.

The New Scientist recently posted a list of craziest experiments, one of them being what was the minimum needed to turn on a male turkey.

It turned out a mummified head on a stick did the trick.

Though our courting rituals may be more complex (or at least appear to be to us), we're nothing more than another type of animal convinced of our own superiority. That doesn't mean we cant' fool our brains into wanting or enjoying something that doesn't contribute to the survivability of the race.

We'll find our own mummified head-on-a-stick soon enough.

This article says it's 84 AU out, which is a little more than 11.6 light-hours.

I refer you to the line in the article that states:

"... if the monolayers are made from immortalised cell lines, the biobattery should live as long as the host."

If the biobattery will live as long as the host does, then that sounds fairly permanent.

Going through the list of disasters, I'm left wondering where the Indonesian mud volcano is.

Considering its permanently displaced 11,000 people, over 10KM squared. I'd say thats a far larger disaster then for example, a bridge collapsing in the states, or a plane killing 300.

It's killed 200 people, and was probably caused by the gas drilling company cutting corners on its drilling.

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11025-indonesian-mud-volcano-caused-by-gas-drilling.html

I'd personally have that at #1 or #2, i also question having global warming as the #1 man made disaster, since i don't consider it being a disaster yet. The worst that comes to my mind is hurricane Katrina, and even then, there is no decisive link to the two.

There's further confirmation this week for EU Theory based upon the termination shock that Voyager 2 is observing. Although it might not have been explicitly predicted by any theorist, observations of the termination "shock" are not looking at all that "shock-full". Within conventional theories, the termination of the heliosphere is a bowshock, where our own solar wind supposedly violently slaps up against cosmic rays from the sheath.

What scientists found instead is the following, from http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13029#comForm:

"But the shock did not look the way it was expected to. Instead of seeing a very abrupt drop, the spacecraft saw a gradual slowing of the solar wind ahead of each crossing, followed by a relatively small drop at the termination shock itself."

The fact will surely slip into nothingness in a day or two due to the popularity of the belief that the heliosphere can be modeled with fluids-style equations, but it's critical that people like yourself observe the lack of understanding associated with the largest object in our solar system, the heliospheric sheet. If we can't even explain either this or the mechanism that continues to accelerate the solar wind even as it passes the planets, then we're failing to understand the driving force behind the largest structure in our own neighborhood. That we would still express great confidence in our understanding of foreign star systems when we cannot even understand our own home system is not very scientific.

"We see lots of mice [and voles] there, they look normal, they have babies, everything looks fine," says Ron Chesser, a population geneticist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina, who is investigating Chernobyl's wildlife. "But these are the most contaminated animals I've seen anywhere. They're living on radioactive materials. How are they managing to survive?"

To help answer that question, Chesser, Robert Baker from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and Ron Van Den Bussche at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater have analysed the sequence of a gene in voles and mice living in the shadow of Chernobyl's doomed reactor. The gene, which codes for an energy-producing protein called cytochrome b, is located in the cell's mitochondria rather than the nucleus. Under normal circumstances it changes at the steady rate of one mutation in every million letters of genetic code per generation. The rate supplies biologists with a handy evolutionary ruler - the greater the number of differences in their cytochrome b genes, the more distantly related are two animals or two species.

The researchers were astonished to find that the cytochrome b genes of two different species of Chernobyl vole were riddled with new mutations - one new mutation for every 10 000 letters of DNA code. Voles of the same species living in uncontaminated areas 30 kilometres away did not share this rapid rate of mutation. "We're seeing more diversity in the mitochondrial DNA between two individual Chernobyl voles than we see between two different species, such as mice and rats, which parted company about 15 million years ago," Chesser says.

- How are we 'maxxed out' on hydro?? I guess I'm thinking in terms of Canada too.

Transporting electricity long distances isn't cheap, so more hydro in parts of Canada isn't an ideal solution. Also, much of the US is in a drought stage (which may be status-quo and we mis-interpreted good years as typical) so it's looking like we've over-maxxed out hydro. Also, hydro can have some pretty harmful side effects too.

- Why did she skip from hydro to fossil fuels and nuclear? What happened to wind, solar hot water heat, energy conservation - increased energy efficiency, etc? I know that in my Canadian home town... they are close to approving the largest wind project in Canada for my county- the first one in the county. Proof that we are far from 'maxxed out' on wind for example.

Similar to hydro, wind power has a significant problem of being geographically sensitive, as you have to use in a high wind area. It also has consistency issues (as does solar) and isn't cheap initially, particularly in land area cost. Obviously most of Canada has an advantage here compared to more densely populated areas.

- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.

Certainly, and I don't think most advocates for nuclear power would disagree, but that misses the point. Currently the majority of our power (power grid + transportation) comes from burning coal, oil and gas, with millions of tons of harmful emissions. If we reduce our fossil fuel use (which we need to do) then something has to take it's place, and currently nuclear power is the only thing that can generate the power needed 24/7 and at most geographic locations.

- What REALLY is the solution to nuclear waste? Isn't it kind of a joke to assume that any human government or corporation will be around and responsible enough to babysit these waste storage locations for 50 or a hundred thousand years? That's THOUSANDS of generations of humans!!! Puh-lease!

Integral Fast Reactors. As been stated elsewhere in this thread, allow the reprocessing of fuel (typical reactors used in the US use ~1% of available energy, IFR 99%+) and the volume of waste would be greatly diminished. (There are other reactor types that solve this problem, IFR looks to me, as an interested non-professional, like the best solution.) What makes nuclear waste dangerous is what makes it still usable as a power source, so if we get most of the energy out then we have ~200 year waste in a smaller quantity (small enough to even store on-site), not the many tons 100k year waste.

- It seems to me that it's kind of a give-up to say nuclear is the 'only' solution.

I definitely agree. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, bio(waste|diesel), ethanol, clean coal, etc., all have their place (and a more significant one than they do currently), and intelligent reduction of resource usage is very much needed. However, nuclear power alone is usable most everywhere (no need for highly specific geographies like wind paths, coastlines, geothermal vents, etc.,) is highly available (24/7 power,) has manageable emissions, and is doable now with today's technology. The safety issue is largely settled, as TMI would illustrate from the fact that there were no deaths as a result and the long history of successful safe operations elsewhere (France, US navy,

I wonder whether if could be used to make a lighter bear proof suit... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1637-bearproof-suit-to-be-put-to-the-test.html

We've observed 30,000 generations of fruit flies and have yet to have one mutation that has added information to the genome.

Well, not exactly.... And here's an example of a transition adding information you can partially test on your own body:

Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)

It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.

See a useful illustration of this here.

There have been studies that have shown the rise in autism directly linked to the rise in the use of mercury in vaccines in 3rd world countries.

You sure about that? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7461.html

This is not the first time they've found soft dinosaur tissue in the Dakotas. Maybe the submitter was confusing this with an earlier soft tissue find in South Dakota.

Yeah. Sure. "The people is dumb".

Let's see...

> The 4,000 deaths of cleanup workers at Chernobyl is completely unexcusable.

This estimation was touted by the IAEA, which runs in order to disseminate nuclear powerplants, and by the OMS (censored by the IAEA for all nuclear-related matters).

Moreover the IAEA announced "4,000 deaths, grand total, definitive and scientific (United Nations) estimation" in September 2005 (it wasn't definitive, nor sci, nor UN) before discreetling backing up in April 2006 ("9000, stated only for a subset of the Soviet population and for solid cancers"). Here is an overview and an article.

> 800 deaths are objectively fewer than the 105,000 reported in Wikipedia.

On WP (en and fr) there are too many pro-nuke agit-propers, eager to relay disinformation and censor facts.

> 4,000 deaths are objectively fewer than "the six-figure death counts that opponents of nuclear power once cited".

The most famous report published by the opponents (titled TORCH) was published AFTER IAEA's report.

The IAEA estimation ("4000 ...") is mainly based upon scientific material from E. Cardis (who served as the scientific secretary for the study which leaded to the report), and they properly credited her. Know what? As soon as the ''4000 deaths'' thesis was published she declared that 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths is "the right order of magnitude". See New Scientists and Nature. Her most recent study leads to "By 2065, models predict that about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400 72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000 59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident and that about 16,000 deaths (95% UI 6,700 - 38,000) from these cancers may occur).". Abstract: no less than 6,700, approx 16,000, maybe up to 38,000 ... remember that the main "opponents" report (TORCH) authors estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 may die. Therefore the 'total mortality' estimation published by the very expert committed by the IAEA are more on the same ballpark of published by scientific "opponents" than IAEA's.

The IAEA's "4,000 total" is ridiculous. Quoting it, as you did, is at best naive.

> don't see people debating the accuracy of the numbers they use
> Grow up

Yeah. Sure. Good advice, chief. Thanx! Here is my hint: avoid propagating lies. The ongoing propaganda campaign "eat nuke! good for health! yummy!" is already well funded, they don't need any help.

As a extra bit of information on the figure of 8 kite flying:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12610-computers-learn-to-fly-kites-for-renewable-energy.html

They suggest 10 times the power by performing the figure of 8's which they have trained computers to do.... seems like a good match if the cables can handle that.

"Soft drinks sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup are up to 10 times richer in harmful carbonyl compounds, such as methylglyoxal, than a diet soft drink control. Carbonyl compound are elevated in people with diabetes and are blamed for causing diabetic complications such as foot ulcers and eye and nerve damage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

Soda Warning? New Study Supports Link Between Diabetes, High-fructose Corn Syrup
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532433/

Diabetes fears over corn syrup in soda. New Scientist (04 September 2007)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19526192.800-diabetes-fears-over-corn-syrup-in-soda.html

Theresa Waldron Sugary Sodas High in Diabetes-Linked Compound
http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.asp?docID=607536

Bantle, John P.; Susan K. Raatz, William Thomas and Angeliki Georgopoulos (November 2000). "Effects of dietary fructose on plasma lipids in healthy subjects". American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72 (5): 1128-1134.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/72/5/1128

Whey Protein and Fructose, an Unhealthy Combination. Enerex Botanicals. Retrieved on 2007-1-17.
http://www.enerex.ca/articles/whey_protein_and_fructose.htm

Jurgens, Hella; et al. (2005). "Consuming Fructose-sweetened Beverages Increases Body Adiposity in Mice". Obesity Res 13: 1146-1156.
http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/7/1146

Faeh D, Minehira K, Schwarz JM, Periasamy R, Park S, Tappy L (July 2005). "Effect of fructose overfeeding and fish oil administration on hepatic de novo lipogenesis and insulin sensitivity in healthy men". DIABETES 54 (7):1907-1913. PMID 15983189
http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/full/54/7/1907

No, it's because we can measure (right here on Earth, using cheap equipment -- an example experiment is here, others can be constructed with bits of styrofoam and plastic sheets, or latex balloons and latex-paint-covered ceilings) the ratio of the gravitational force to the electro-magnetic force. The ratio is HUGE (1:4.17e42). Since the Earth-Moon, Earth-Sun and Halley's Comet-Sun orbits have been closely approximated by classical Newtonian gravitation for centuries, this means that any contribution of electrical charge to these orbits is going to be tiny.

The problem with your logic is that you rule out an important, viable alternative within your assumptions. You do not consider the possibility that there is a unification of electromagnetism and gravity -- the idea that gravity and mass itself may be related. As you know, mass is a trait of matter. Wallace Thornhill specifically states:

[B]y the addition or subtraction of charge from a celestial body, the mass of that body is altered. To conserve energy the result is a proportional change in orbital radius. The problem for your correspondent is to realize that the masses in Newton's gravitational theory are electrical variables. And comets do not conform to classical Newtonian gravitation, exhibiting anomalous non-Newtonian accelerations that have been explained away principally as due to cometary jets.

Before you outright dismiss the suggestion, I would actually add to this further the following NewScientist article (from http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2814). The emphasis is my own:

Their work is based on theories such as string theory that try to unify all the forces, including electromagnetism and gravity, by invoking the existence of several extra spatial dimensions.

In a paper submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravity and presented at a meeting of the European Astronomical Society in Porto, Portugal, the researchers calculated the values they would expect G to have at different locations around the world. They say it should be greater where the Earth's magnetic field is stronger, with the highest measurements at the north and south magnetic poles.

The values of G measured so far seem to fit with that idea. But the researchers say the best way to test their theory would be to take accurate measurements of G at locations such as the magnetic poles and particular longitudes on the equator, and then check those values against the predictions.

Studies of the Sun also support the theory. To make mathematical models of the star's interior tally with experimental data, physicists have to use a lower value of G than is traditionally agreed. Mbelek says his calculations predict that electromagnetism would not boost gravity as much at higher temperatures, so you would expect G to be lower inside the Sun.

Exotic physics

But other researchers are not convinced. Clifford Will, a gravity theorist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, believes improvements in terrestrial experiments will eventually do away with the need for explanations that rely on such exotic physics.

"In many ways it's a scandal that we don't have an agreed value for G, but if you look at the experiments, the values have been converging," he says. "In five years or so, we'll have an agreed value."

But Mbelek does not think so. Although the precision of individual measurements is improving, he says, the values are not converging.

Keep in mind that the voltages we're talking about here are qui

Hi there, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I missed your reply. As for sources, here is a news story from last year: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-01-10-algae-powerplants_x.htm

If you have access to New Scientist: http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19225725.600-biofuel-made-from-power-plant-cosub2sub.html

Or companies to keep an eye on: http://www.greenfuelonline.com/index.html and http://www.greenshift.com/

-Rick

Is it another sign of the decline -faith-based, pseudo-science- under the rule of Caligula Bush?

New Scientist is a major source of global warming agitprop, so the answer is apparently "yes".

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Google has failed me this morning. I remember reading in New Scientist (whose anti-drug propaganda I ranted about a couple of years ago) that they did a study of baby boomers; the generation that started smoking ganja in their youth and are now geezers. They were trying to prove, as all these government studies from all the world's governments do, that pot is bad for you. The object of the study was to look at cancer rates in potheads vs non-potheads. They were certain that reefer causes cancer because there are carcinogens in it.

What they found instead was that (IIRC) potsmokers who did not smoke tobacco had a 10% lower incidence of all cancers than nonsmokers. More striking, however, was the difference between cigarette smokers who also smoked hemp and buttheads who only smoked butts. The cancer incidence of those who smoked both marijuana and tobacco was half the number of those who only smoked cigarettes.

So your study is done, the results are that cannibis prevents cancer.

As I said, a google search for "marijuana boomer study" yielded only one hit (he he he said), to a site I'd never heard of. So I searched New Scientist and found some other interesting tidbits:
Cannabis compound reduces skin allergies in mice
Cannabis compound slows lung cancer in mice
Cannabis extract shrinks brain tumours
Cannabis can help MS sufferers
Cannabis can protect the brain from damage from stroke

So we have a substance that is non-addictive (habit forming but not addictive), non-lethal, fights cancer, helps MS sufferers, is the best anti-nausea agent known, stimulates appetite, yet it is illegal. So why is it illegal?

Because it makes you lazy and forgetful, and what's worse for our corporate overlords, makes you think. You can forget about any substance that makes you think ever being legalized; thinking is the VERY last thing your government (wherever you may live) wants you to to do.

Yes, I'm a geezer. No, I wasn't in the study. Yes, I've smoked dope.

-mcgrew

Dibs on patenting the wheel.
--

You are too late..

However, in that case, an Australian lawyer was able to sneak the wheel patent through a fast-track application system. The US patent went through the full application procedure.

Refrence;
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178.html

So... who bent the brush? ;)

Could this also lead to a method of sending signals (sight, sound etc) to the brain?
Blind people "seeing", the deaf "hearing"... TFA was a bit light, I thought that the brain cells would "move away" from electrodes ( this article is about neural "extension cords" to overcome the problem, the other way I have heard about was "The Berlin Brain Interface" a YouTube clip of it in action.

Only North Korea had been a signatory of the NPT. Had other nuclear powers followed the US example in halting reprocessing, the NPT might have been strengthened and greater pressure brought on non-signatories. As it it, there is a percieved lack of commitment among nuclear powers to implement portions of the NPT as written. This situation is so dire now that only complete denuclearization, including ending civilian use of nucelar power, will suffice to end the risk of nuclear war. The risk to US and global security at this point is too great to continue. Over a billion people around the world would die as a consequence of a war between India and Pakistan: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn12728. The history of nuclear power is a history of proliferation and it is now completely clear that it cannot be used responsibly.

This finding was originally reported by Graham Rawlinson while doing his PhD at Nottingham University in 1976!

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16221887.600

See also this cached page which also has an interesting discussion of the effect in other languages; it works in French and Spanish, but not in Finnish or Hebrew. Interestingly, I could recognise the language of most of the scrambled samples, and even read much of the French and Spanish without difficulty, and I'm by no means fluent in either.

Funny that many people mistake mythology with factual history... you also think that x-files are documentary, aren't you?

Your comment is classical pseudoscience tactic: find some problem with actual theories and claim "so my completely ludicrous idiotic shambling on acid must be right!!!!oneone".

And for rest of universe, I would like to present Velikovsky in all ot his (in)famous glory...

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

http://skepdic.com/velikov.html

"report the arrival of Venus into our solar system as a comet-like body within the past 10,000 years"

No. Venus was to be expelled from Jupiter. And remind me, what comets have anything in common with Venus? Mass? Temperature? Looks? Materials? Orbital parameters?

I read this in new scientist years ago:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422141.000-now-you-see-it---.html

Youngsters these days...know-it-alls...youth is indeed wasted on the young! :-)

Here's one of a myriad of examples of significant differences between human, mouse and monkey brains.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n9/full/nn0901-860.html

It is indeed correct to call 'bullshit', when extrapolating ANYTHING from one species to another without evidence! BASIC SCIENCE!!!!

Consider something far, far less complex than neurons, neural nets, etc., i.e. blood across species:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood
Yours is red (iron base) in the arteries...in some species, it is blue (copper base)! (And Spock may have been a genetic mutant leading to Sulphemoglobinemia!) :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfhemoglobinemia
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg16121747.600-the-last-word.html

And then of course, there is nearly colourless penguin blood! ;-)
http://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/gallery.php?Asset=Magellan%20Penguin%20blood&Group=&Category=Blood%20Cells&Section=Introduction

So, to say that ANYTHING is similiar across species without evidence (i.e. SCIENCE!), is bullshit.

". They need to take a step back and rigorously investigate the possibility that gravity waves are not very, very fast "

Do you mean to say "not very, very fast" or just "very, very fast"?
grammar matters, and when I have to say that, you've done something not very very good.

If you actually saying that they are 'very, very fast" then thats been done.
Gravity moves at the speed of light, just like radio.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3232.html

Maybe you should choose to read actual science instead of those fucking non-science based speculation? Dear lord, what do you read, Metaresearch.com? haha..sorry, that was mean to imply you were that stupid.

...is the title of a book I have seen reviewed a few times recently and is due out shortly. As the title suggests, the author explores the possibilities of love and physical relationships with robots. There is also a discussion over at New Scientist magazine about the book.

All sorts of issues come to mind. If androids are self-aware, it would be wrong to use them as sex slaves. If we make androids find humans physically attractive, that would be a very artificial thing to program in. How much worse would it be to go further and make an android artificially attracted to a particular individual?

If there is an eventual robot revolution, I suppose it would be much easier on the eye if it was an army of sexy fembots rather than terminators.

In the last year I've lost a lot of weight. Over 165 pounds of fat gone with more to go. During my study of weight loss I recall reading that the difference in body fat between men and women could actually explain the observed mortality rates. I haven't seen an actual study of it so I have to defer judgment, but it was said that having extra body fat increased the chances of surviving through the worst of some diseases. The quote in the summary is worded to indicate that people didn't necessarily have a lower incidence of these diseases, they just had less chance of dying as a result. (I'd check the article but it wants a login)

And in response to the poster mentioning that sedentary overweight people are likely to stay home and therefore less likely to die in a serious accident. Keep in mind, in addition to the greater likelihood of an accident happening in the home, people who are obese have dramatically increased chances of serious injury or death in car accidents compared to those of normal body mass.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2093.html