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The diet you refer to doesn't offer many suggestions about which foods to eat (focusing mostly on total calories), but I urge you do avoid the USDA pyramid you may have learned about in school.

The current USDA pyramid is flawed and promotes many unhealthy habits. Like much of the field of "nutrition", the pyramid isn't based on scientific facts, but rather conjecture and speculation.

Some of the main flaws with the current pyramid are the recommended amounts of complex carbohydrates per day, the dubious inclusion of potato as a vegetable, and the absence of "good" fats from the pyramid.

There was a very nice article with real scientific/medial data behind it in Scientific American a few months ago. Take a look before heading into that new diet.

There is also a nice picture of the proposed new pyramid. For those using Lynx, the base contains whole grain foods and plant oils. The next tiers contain vegetables and fruit, with the emphasis on vegetables. The middle tiers consist of nuts, legumes, fish, poultry and eggs and dairy. At the top, under "use sparingly" are red meat and the hacker diet, white rice/white bread/potatoes/pasta and sweets.

Good luck. I hope you can keep the pounds off.

The diet you refer to doesn't offer many suggestions about which foods to eat (focusing mostly on total calories), but I urge you do avoid the USDA pyramid you may have learned about in school.

The current USDA pyramid is flawed and promotes many unhealthy habits. Like much of the field of "nutrition", the pyramid isn't based on scientific facts, but rather conjecture and speculation.

Some of the main flaws with the current pyramid are the recommended amounts of complex carbohydrates per day, the dubious inclusion of potato as a vegetable, and the absence of "good" fats from the pyramid.

There was a very nice article with real scientific/medial data behind it in Scientific American a few months ago. Take a look before heading into that new diet.

There is also a nice picture of the proposed new pyramid. For those using Lynx, the base contains whole grain foods and plant oils. The next tiers contain vegetables and fruit, with the emphasis on vegetables. The middle tiers consist of nuts, legumes, fish, poultry and eggs and dairy. At the top, under "use sparingly" are red meat and the hacker diet, white rice/white bread/potatoes/pasta and sweets.

Good luck. I hope you can keep the pounds off.

And for a bit of extra karma-whoring, here's a direct link to the sidebar with the pretty pictures they used.

I don't necessarily claim to understand his art, but I found fascinating a recent Scientific American article (sorry only first paragraphs available) where they did a mathematical analysis of various magnifications of Pollock's paintings and found that they were 1.6 to 1.9 fractals. This is almost exactly the same as found in many places in nature like tree branches. Discover also has a somewhat interesting article on the topic. Also, there was a recent movie about his life that I've heard is pretty well done.

As seen in this Scientific American article (among too many others) the cost per megabyte measured in dollars per megabye back in the early 1990s. which seems to be where SSDs are right about now. Presuming a similar price performance curve for the forseeable future, these things should be available and affordable in the mass market in the next decade or so.

We then reach the point where conventional storage is able to be completely absurd. We currently have over 100 times the capacity we had available about ten years ago for about the same price. Let's face it, it is hard to figure out what you would use a forty terabyte drive for, but I'm sure an OS and an animation based office suite will be developed by somebody that will make a valient stab at it.

so by that time SSDs will be far more affordable as well, and there will be a shift to this technology because of the cost. Note that a similar technology is seen in PDAs. Right now PDA's have the capacity and power of the old 486 machines. Imagine when they have the capacity of the current generation of desktops.

Desk Top machines will have a similar boost in power, but may go to SSD technology, simply because of the performance boost. and most people are not editing movies, etc at home.

One use of the incredible space that comes to mind is the software used to do the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings. Imagine when this will become a desktop product. You could then create a movie usually methods similar to making a midi file. Events specified invoking effects generated by the computer, printed to video.

under optimal conditions, spin coherence in a semiconductor could last hundreds of nanoseconds at low temperatures

Or, in other words, even if someone figures out how to inject spin currents from a ferromagnetic metal into a semiconductor (real unlikely, IMHO), then they aren't going to be stable without being spin currents from a ferromagnetic metal into a semiconductor.

Note that this is only for single-walled nanotubes...here's an article about it...

Universes can differ not just in location, cosmological properties or quantum state but also in the laws of physics.

why does scientific american use the netscape logo for its favicon???

Please, don't confuse the ability to lose weight with being healthy. You could starve yourself and lose weight, but not be healthy. Read this article from Scientific American. Read other scientific articles on health. If you follow some crazy diet just to lose weight, you may face bigger health problems down the road.

> Its that simple really... Forget all the diets, just burn more then you eat.. you loose weight...

To belabor the increasingly obvious: yep. To a first approximation the cure for "industrial disease" is to 'consume' less energy by eating and 'consume' more energy by exercise. (The second-order approximation spells out some preferences about which items you cut back on, such as sugars, refined starches, saturated fats, and carcigens. But the exercise itself will help with blood sugar and lipoprotein ratios, regardless of diet.)

There was a really nice article suggesting a revised food pyramid in the January 2003 issue of Scientific American, and interestingly the base of the new pyramid was "exercise".

• The first type of "parallel universe" is just another part of this universe. Because the universe appears to be infinitely large, any configuration of matter - be it Earth, our galaxy, or our entire currently-observable universe - must be duplicated somewhere out there. Back-of-the-envelope statistics math is used to figure out how far away (hint: really, really far).
  
  In principle, these other "universes" can interact with our own, but in practice they're far enough away that it doesn't matter. Physical laws are likely similar.
  
  Re. an infinite universe, the article states that a finite universe would leave artifacts in the cosmic microwave background that weren't seen.
  
  
• The second type of parallel universe is other post-inflationary regions in the still-infationary space that holds our own universe. These universes would have different physical laws, and possibly different numbers of uncurled/macroscopic dimensions, some or all of which are set by symmetry breaking as the expanding universe cools.
  
  These parallel universes are utterly unreachable, as the space between them a) exists in a different coordinate system that puts it in our past from our point of view, and b) is expanding exponentially quickly, dragging other universes away from ours at mind-boggling speed.
  
  
• The third type of parallel universe scenario is the familiar "multiple histories" interpretation of quantum mechanics - the idea that all possible outcomes to any event occur, in their own universes.
  
  As far as I understand it, interaction between these universes wouldn't be possible without violating some of the ground rules involved (the history tree could be thought of as a state transition diagram for all possible states of a closed system; if it's closed, it can't interact with anything else).
  
  
• The fourth type of parallel universe discussed is, as far as I can tell, imaginary universes. The idea is to consider an arbitrary mathematical description of an object a spacetime diagram, and to consider the result of interpretation of this diagram to be a universe.
  
  If you call this a "real" universe, then Everquest and the reality hosting the United Federation of Planets are also real universes. It depends on your point of view (and what you mean by "real" in this context).
  

Taking the multiverse theory at face value, therefore, means accepting that virtual worlds are more numerous than "real" ones.

Even is this were a reason to be concerned (even if it's true, what are you going to do about it?), what the hell does this have to do with the multiverse theory? How is this virtual world conundrum dependent on it? Can't we start the whole virtual world chain of deception right here on Earth, without anybody else's assistance anyway? Why do we have to believe in the multiverse theory in order for the idea of this reality being virtual to be true?

The rest of his argument is a bit much for a Saturday afternoon, anyway. There is an article in Scientific American that talks about this very topic. There are many theories about the multiverse, and only some assume different basic laws. One of them allows for different constants , but occuring with the same laws (i.e., everything works exactly the same, except, oh, I don't know, the weak nuclear force is 2% weaker).

Ah, it's nice out, I quit the rant now. But this shouldn't have gotten past the NyC editors, much less Slashdot's. His argument is since we can't confirm it by seeing it, it's pointless. Heh, most of physics today falls into that realm.

Scientific American might disagree with you... "Although Americans with good health insurance coverage may get the best medical treatment in the world, the health of the average American, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality, is below the average of other major industrial countries."

Most of the waste from conventional fission plants is spent fuel and its byproducts ...

Some of the first fission plants in the US are now being decomissioned. You don't just leave it sitting there for the next several centuries; you break it down and reuse the land. Tons of radioactive material besides "spent fuel and byproducts" needs to be properly contained and stored for varying periods of time, ranging from years to generations: concrete (low level), pipe and other innards (highly radioactive), contaminated soil, machinery ... No power plant lasts for ever or is even meant to, and fusion plants will be no exception. And they will have plenty of similar stuff to be contained stored.

Check out this article. (Sorry, it was in last month's issue, so the whole article isn't available.)

"We didn't know that Rosalind Franklin had in late February turned in the B form because she was leaving King's College. We didn't know her then. I still didn't know about it when I wrote The Double Helix (1968)."

"We're very famous because DNA is very famous. If Rosalind had talked to Francis [Crick] starting in 1951, shared her data with him, she would have solved that structure. And then she would have been the famous one."

"We didn't know that Rosalind Franklin had in late February turned in the B form because she was leaving King's College. We didn't know her then. I still didn't know about it when I wrote The Double Helix (1968)."

"We're very famous because DNA is very famous. If Rosalind had talked to Francis [Crick] starting in 1951, shared her data with him, she would have solved that structure. And then she would have been the famous one."

My favorite quote from The Double Helix, by James Wastson was regarding Rosalyn Franklin.

"...that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

Article about Rosalyn, a female scientist who made contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA but because she was a woman her contributions were largly ignored.

And no, her research was not stolen, it was shown to Watson who than took those ideas to hypothesize a structure.

We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London.

Here's a brief NPR review of a recent biography of Rosalind Franklin and a more extensive review in Scientific American which details the theft of data by Watson/Crick/Wilkins.

Teaser available at their website.

Yeah, that's basically it. The geometry of the gear teeth is what screws things up. The thermal motion in the pawl and gear allows the gear to jiggle. It only takes a tiny jiggle in the pawl and gear assembly to go the wrong way by one tooth, but it requires a larger jiggle to go the right way. So when the pawl clicks back into place the wheel is likely to have shifted the wrong way. And as the ratchet reengages, it pushes the vanes and they dump heat back into the gas. These effects, plus the effects anticipated in the original design (where everything works "correctly") ensure that the motion is random.

People have argued that the ratchet/pawl motor will work if the motor is tiny enough. A version was made out of benzene rings in 1997 and they found that it jiggles randomly.

Still, it's probably the coolest perpetual motion machine anyone has come up with.

Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.

Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.

Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.

But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.

Seems to me that text to speech would be a good problem for darwinian competitive algorithms. You can take a book on tape, feed the text as input, and have the computer have different algorithms compete by judging them against the human speaker.

Many iterations later, you probably can get a computer sounding just like a person. And since it has had a whole book to practice over, it should be pretty general.

For those of you with an interest in the subject of aging, you may wish to check out some of Scientific American's articles on the subject from the last year:

The Truth About Human Aging

The Serious Search for an Anti-Aging Pill

GMD

For those of you with an interest in the subject of aging, you may wish to check out some of Scientific American's articles on the subject from the last year:

The Truth About Human Aging

The Serious Search for an Anti-Aging Pill

GMD

Since I've seen no mention of methane hydrates yet, I'll bring it up. Methane hydrate is a compound somewhat similar to natural gas that is found trapped in ice crystals on the ocean floor. We don't know how to extract it economically yet, but according to the this article there are about 400 million trillion cubic feet of this stuff worldwide. Replace "Hydorgen Economy" with "Methane Gas Economy" and you've now got a resource that you can mine. Check out google for more info on methane hydrates.

I would recommend either Discover magazine or Scientific American. Discover has good science reporting in easy simple terms (when compared to Scientific American) but still gets slightly fluffy ocasionally. Scientific American, my favorite magazine, always has some exciting science stories which offer plenty of detail and manage to avoid going over or under my head (your milage, and head, may vary).

I noticed this in several books I read about complexity some years back --- they all featured the same cast of characters, with the same spin on how they labored alone in obscurity to develop their ideas. After a while, I felt like I was reading the work of a Hollywood PR consultant who specializes in branding the "scientific persona". In contrast, economist W. Brian Arthur's own account of his research focused on how he got inspiration for his ideas from working with Russian mathematicians.

I do think it's possible to weave a compelling narrative out of scientific ideas, it's just harder.

My first inductee into the science journalism "Hall of Shame" would have to be The Double Helix by James Watson, which I enjoyed immensely the first time I read it (shortly after high school) and horrified me the second time I read it (shortly after grad school). Not only is The Double Helix an abominable exercise is self-aggrandizement, Watson proudly recounts their underhanded attempts to gain access to another researcher's work without her knowledge or consent, and of course, without giving her credit later, even though it involved an outright lie in a letter to Nature.

Here's a review of a biography Rosalind Franklin, THe Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox in Scientific American.

I think you mean this. (Talks about how generators are kept in phase with stuff coming from different areas, for those people (especially moderators) who don't RT(F)A)

Electronic paper is one of those things that alawys seems to be just round the corner, but it really does seem to be nearing a useful state now.

Electronic paper, IMO, would be the ideal solution: you have the stuff in an electronic format, and "print" out whichever bit you're currently interested in onto a (say) 64-page electronic paper booklet which is entirely reusable. You get all the advantages of the electronic format (greppable, updateable, cheap and light) as well as most of those of the dead-tree format (read it on the toilet, doesn't occupy screen area).

As far as I can see the only dead-tree advantages you'd lose would be annotation (though touch-sensitive film might solve this) and, of course, the impressive bookshelf factor.

According to this review of her biography she was the woman who produced the x-ray data that most strongly supported the DNA structure but was not properly acknowledged for her contributions.

That reveiw further goes on to say that... According to Watson's best-selling 1968 account of the great race, The Double Helix, Franklin was not even a contender, much less a major contributor. He painted her as a mere assistant to Wilkins who "had to go or be put in her place" because she had the audacity to think she might be able to work on DNA on her own. Worse yet, she "did not emphasize her feminine qualities," lamented Watson, who refers to her only as "Rosy." "The thought could not be avoided," he concluded, "that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

Sounds like Watson was *quite* the ladies man =)

In this column, you'll find my comments on both the "Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes" article, published by National Geographic News and "New DNA Computer Functions sans Fuel" story provided by Scientific American. But more importantly, you'll find the real *meat*, the abstract of the research conducted by the scientists of the Weitzmann Institute of Science. It is published in today's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I don't think that's what he didn't understand.

I think he hadn't seen Scientific American, or any of the other coverage.

I saw a presentation by Intel last year in which it pointed out that modern CPU's emit more heat per area than molten lava, and they expect that within a few years they will emit more heat per area than the sun.

Hrmm...I was going to buy a space heater, but I guess I'll just wait for the P5's to come out instead.

All kidding aside, I suspect that we're running into some physical barriers with respect to clock synchronized computing. Seems to me that we really need a paradigm shift such as asynchronous computing to take us to the next level.

Probably not. It's likely responsible for heat in the mantle though. This Scientific American article gives more detail.

The core is hot because... it hasn't cooled down yet. The earth is a very poor conductor of heat, so it takes a very long time for the heat at the core to radiate out to space. I remember doing the math as an excerise to show that the 4Gy age of the earth was not great enough to account for a significant radiative transfer of heat from the core---which is why volcanos and such have to get their energy from somewhere else. Friction and fission being the most likely candidates.

As to safety, well, let us rather look at cost effectiveness, for total lifetime cost. Against the value of the energy produced, set the cost of:

• Building the reactor
• Fueling the reactor
• Running the reactor
• Maintaining the reactor
• Assuring 'other people' that you are not making bombs
• Disposing of the waste
• Decommisioning the reactor when its done with

The last three items are not usually significant with 'conventional' energy sources. Or rather, it's not nearly as expensive to render acceptable the output of an oil-fired generator as it is radioactive isotopes with ky half-lives.

So, which is cheaper? Note, I don't know. There is so much mis- and dis-information on both sides it's tough to decide.

does the patent office even check if the submissals actually exist/work whatever as claimed?

or do they just pay 10,000 monkeys to read through it then rubber stamp it?

ahh; sorry to be a dork, but this is the article on Scientific American about this stuff. Very good read.

The Environmental Cost of Silicon Chips - posted by Cowboy Neal citing a Scientific American article

The collection of distances from the array of pixels provides a 3-D map of the area scanned. Moreover, this device can survey its surroundings more than 50 times every second. Like the pattern projector, the infrared light stays close to the surface. The sensor's view can get blocked if a user hits two keys at once that are exactly in line from the sensor. That happens rarely. But if it does, the keyboard's software makes the shift key "sticky," so even if it gets blocked by a finger on the E, the keyboard will interpret it as the two keys hit together.

Robots.net and Scientifinc American have some discussion on the differences between the Roomba and the Electrolux Trilobite, which has been selling in Europe from since last summer.

Living with a Trilo roaming our household, its sonar crackling now and then, when it looks for a power-up at its dock, is much like having a pet :)

J

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

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

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

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

on the other hand - I have to wonder, while interesting how does this article fit in slashdot?

In brief:

Forests: The FAO data series is the only long run series available.

Fisheries

Lomborg's deceptive "doubling" is based on the fact that fishing operations now rely heavily on landing species that were considered "trash" in the 1970s, and on landing juveniles because the full-sized fish are now increasingly scarce.

So you admit that Lomborg is right and fishery catches have actually doubled? Does it matter that fish eating habbits have changed or been forced to change? As for landing juvenilles, that's just evolution in action.

Biodiversity: The largest tropical study of the correlation between rainforest and the extinction of species was carried out in Puerto Rico by Ariel Lugo of the United States Department of Agriculture. He found that the primary forest had been reduced by 99 percent over a period of 400 years. 'Only' seven out of 60 species of birds had become extinct although the island today is home to 97 species of birds.

Global Warming: Are you sure Lomborg's position is a straw man? He never says that the Kyoto accord is a 100 year treaty but merely quotes the IPCC numbers and says that if the Kyoto accord is implemented in full, the IPCC projections will only be delayed by 6 years.

Water: Quite right that the plant has not yet been built -- there's no pressing need for it! Throughout history, humans have demonstrated a lot of intelligence and ingenuity. I have absolutely no doubts that when a large scale desalination plant is required, my guess is that the prices will be close to what Lomborg predicts (higher than what Lomborg predicts, but much, much lower than current rates).

Two points before I end this:

1. Lomborg does not claim to be a scientist. He has merely placed an alternative interpretation on existing data.

2. This quote from one of his critics Stephen Schneider:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand,
we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this
context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some
broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to
offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This
'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right
balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both." (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45-48, Oct. 1989,
see also American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996, http://cyclotron.aps.org/apsnews/0896/11592.html).

Lomberg has responded, in initial brief, to the fraud charges. And, according to Glenn Reynolds, most of the panel's complaints seem to be directed at Lomberg's response to the initial SciAm critique (PDF).

The sheer complexity of this issue makes soapboxing inappropriate. I'm an early poster, but it's already begun. Please try to refrain from making fools of yourselves.

fossil trail has a huge hole in it

The hole has been getting smaller. You'll have to buy the magazine to read the full article, but the gist of the story is that scientists have found 7 million year old remains that are show evidence of belonging to an upright walking hominid. There have also been many other finds in the last decades that shore up the details of the fossil record which are all discussed in the article.

Don't call this slavery. There is real slavery still go around in the world. This isn't it. You might not like, but it is not slavery.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0005F 83 9-CC90-1CC6-B4A8809EC588EEDF

Er, I don't think anyone eats 90% meat/cheese -- well, not for long, anyways ("what's that funny pain in my chest?"). :)

Personally, I think you can have a very healthy diet that includes *some* meat/etc. Just keep everything in moderation. I think there's little difference between that and *no* meat, health-wise. Vegitarianism could even be worse, if you don't do it right. Meat is a convenient source of some good stuff, and you have to really know what you're doing (or live in a well-evolved, largely-vegetarian culter, e.g. India) to get enough non-meat sources of these components.

The real problem that a lot of Americans have is just too many calories overall -- well, too much of *everything*, actually. But an under-appreciated danger is that of having too carbohydrates. They translate into the same bad (and some good) fats in your body as meat will give you, if you don't exercise it off promptly. And that's where some misguided vegetarians could go wrong, I think. I mean, if someone goes to McDonald's and just gets french fries and a soda, and thinks they're being healthy because they're avoiding meat, they're sadly mistaken!

This relates somewhat to a recent Scientific American article , about how the absolute "no fat" emphasis has been misguided. Here's a zoom-up on what the authors feel is a better design for the Food Pyramid.

Personally, I lost nearly 20lbs (low 170's --> mid 150's) about 1.5 yrs ago, over a period of 6 months. This wasn't by doing anything drastic with my diet, I just stopped eating so *damn* much! Probably due to being laid off from my company, where we had free dinners every night, and where I went out to lunch with buddies every day. Now if I could just get out of my computer chair and *exercise*...

Er, I don't think anyone eats 90% meat/cheese -- well, not for long, anyways ("what's that funny pain in my chest?"). :)

Personally, I think you can have a very healthy diet that includes *some* meat/etc. Just keep everything in moderation. I think there's little difference between that and *no* meat, health-wise. Vegitarianism could even be worse, if you don't do it right. Meat is a convenient source of some good stuff, and you have to really know what you're doing (or live in a well-evolved, largely-vegetarian culter, e.g. India) to get enough non-meat sources of these components.

The real problem that a lot of Americans have is just too many calories overall -- well, too much of *everything*, actually. But an under-appreciated danger is that of having too carbohydrates. They translate into the same bad (and some good) fats in your body as meat will give you, if you don't exercise it off promptly. And that's where some misguided vegetarians could go wrong, I think. I mean, if someone goes to McDonald's and just gets french fries and a soda, and thinks they're being healthy because they're avoiding meat, they're sadly mistaken!

This relates somewhat to a recent Scientific American article , about how the absolute "no fat" emphasis has been misguided. Here's a zoom-up on what the authors feel is a better design for the Food Pyramid.

Personally, I lost nearly 20lbs (low 170's --> mid 150's) about 1.5 yrs ago, over a period of 6 months. This wasn't by doing anything drastic with my diet, I just stopped eating so *damn* much! Probably due to being laid off from my company, where we had free dinners every night, and where I went out to lunch with buddies every day. Now if I could just get out of my computer chair and *exercise*...

With this inexpensive computer it might dramatically drive down the prices of web access and give India's lower class a much needed edge over the surrounding countries. After all, for a computer that costs $99 and monthly access for $5, it seems like a no-brainer for the thousands of informationally-unaware people there.

the first human clone has probably already been walking around for a while

And you base this on what? Your abundant lack of knowledge about cloning technology and basic biology?

The first adult mammal cloned was Dolly the sheep. She has some rather serious defects as a result of that cloning, such as rapid aging. It took 277 attempts to produce a viable clone.

A cow was cloned in 1998 without the aging problems, and it took a "mere" 104 attempts.

China cloned their first cow in October of this year. Brazil attempted to clone a cow and wound up with a bull instead.

Cloning isn't easy. It's not like you can just go to the corner drug store and buy a clone'o'matic. It requires a great deal of lab resources, time, and lots of money.

And while you may very well find scientists who would try to clone a human, you also have to find 50-100 women willing to be implanted with a cloned embryo, given that 90%+ of them will miscarry (the human body is pretty good at detecting and aborting non-viable fetuses -- and I apologize right now to anyone who has had to deal with a miscarraige in their family, I know they are deeply traumatizing). This immediately increases the number of potential leaks.

Right now is about the earliest it would have been possible to clone a human... after all, no matter what you try to do, it's going to take 9 months from implantation until birth.

It has nothing to do with fear, at least not for me. I think the ethics are questionable at best, primarily due to the large number of failures in current cloning methods. For the record, I'm pro-choice, but that doesn't mean that I would want dozens of women subjected to the trauma of a miscarraige (or worse), or that I think playing with human life this way is a good thing.