Slashdot Mirror

Thanks for posting the link to that article. This article is so awesome, and anyone even casually conversant with Number Theory wil certainly benefit from reading it. As well as those who love Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Unlikely connections between prime numbers and quantum physics

Here's Craig Venter's take on it: http://seedmagazine.com/stateofscience/sos_feature_venter_p1.html

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/prime_numbers_get_hitched/

This slightly fluffy piece suggests mathematicians might need to turn to the physicists at least once :)

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

You're assuming that the longterm survival of the species is a strong motivator for the average person. [...] What matters is our immediate happiness. [...] I increasingly suspect that an intelligent race would more likely not go into space. Interesting possibilities I've heard speculated are that it would ultimately commit mass suicide, feeling existence is pointless, or withdraw into a virtual reality world on its own planet [...]

Geoffrey Miller's take on Fermi's Paradox:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels... ever so good.

Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens
Geoffrey Miller

It's a necessary building block that has, now, been demonstrated. After that, everything else is of secondary importance (but I do think that demonstrating VASMIR will be cool.)

In no small part because a Coal fired plant can spew a tremendous amount of general gunk into the air for "free" if they paid the "true cost" of the pollution they generate, perhaps the equation would be different?

I agree, and that's without including the subsidies coal gets. However in a market where businesses have to carry their own weight and don't pass external costs to others geothermal, solar, wind and other power sources would be more competitive. According to this, "Cost Comparison for Nuclear vs. Coal", nuclear compares favorably with coal. The $/Mw-hr cost for coal is 29.1 vs nuclear's 30.0. But as Benjamin Sovacool says they are both Faustian bargains. He says "By far the cheapest, cleanest, and quickest strategy to meet America's growing demand for electricity is energy efficiency and demand-side management."

It's even more fuzzy... But my point remains..

As does my point, nuclear power is expensive and more isn't needed.

Falcon

Of course not! Why would anyone turn down a subsidy offered? That doesn't change the fact, however, that A Nuclear Power plant and produce energy cheaper than coal

Citation needed. On the other hand, I'll provide some:

"Nick d'Arbeloff, president of the New England Clean Energy Council, views nuclear plants as costly. "Nuclear power plants are massively expensive and they are massively subsidized."
"By far the cheapest, cleanest, and quickest strategy to meet America's growing demand for electricity is energy efficiency and demand-side management."
"For Cheap Clean Energy, Go Geothermal, Study Says".
"Coal is America's most abundant and cheapest fossil fuel but, as Scott Pelley reports, burning it happens to be the biggest contributor to global warming."

Wiki has a table of the cost of various energy sources at Levelised energy cost. Of more than 10 sources listed of cost per megawatt coal is cheapest while 4 others are potentially cheaper than nuclear. One of those potentially cheaper is wind.

with a virtually nonexistent environmental footprint

Try to tell that to indigenous people's from who's land uranium is mined. Ask the Sioux or Navajo in the US. Ask the Algonquin First Nation in Canada. Or the aboriginals in Australia such as the Adnyamathanha community.

Now I picked on Australia, Canada, and the Unites States because they should have among the strictest environmental laws. Imagine what happens in countries without strong environmental laws.

AND with equal reliability (which, of all of the renewables I've ever heard of, none can accomplish all three).

Check into conservation which is listed as being cheaper and geothermal which is also listed as being cheaper by at least one of the links above and is good for baseload power.

Subsidies will be taken by the Nuclear Industry as long as they are offered

Nuclear power asks and is addicted to subsides. Without them Wall Street will not pay for nuclear power plants to be built. At least solar and wind would be built without subsidies. Think NanoSolar asked for or was given subsidies? Not that I know of, instead billionaire founders of Google invested in NanoSolar. Even if they did though, economically subsidies are supposed to be only temporary aid, however coal and nuclear power get subsidized year after year after year. There is nothing temporary about the subsidies they get.

One, the new "Cap and Trade" laws will make Coal Power (which is already more expensive to operate than Nuclear, even though the initial plant construction costs *might* be cheaper)

As referenced above coal is cheapest and even with cap and trade or carbon capture and storage it's still cheaper than nuclear power. Now if you have a link to data that disputes that provide it.

Despite all the rosy pictures and cheery outlook for renewables, *only* Nuclear Energy is a drop in replacement for Coal Fired Energy.

No matter how many tymes you repeat a lie* it doesn't magically make i

This sounds identical to the Blue Brain project. This article is a great intro to the project and I hope some competition will help the race wrap up sooner!

This article here: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/how_we_evolve_1.php argues the EXACT opposite and is much more convincing too!

It does work the other way around.

For anyone doubting our ability to model a brain in computer hardware, I very much encourage you to read this.

In an article in SEED magazine, Geoffrey Miller suggests that technological civilizations lose ambition toward real achievement once they start playing computer games.

Cripes, I known fellers like that.

That is not a prediction for the future.

The natural selection baloney in this case is just an INTERPRETATION of the genetic data.

It shows that the writer of the genetic code also knows a lot about engineering and design in physics and chemistry.

Check out Seed Magazine's Cribsheets. They take a bit longer than 2 minutes to read but they've covered String Theory and other topics pretty well...

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/04/cribsheet_9_string_theory.php

Isn't that like asking a physicist about cellular mitosis?

I would expect a physicist to understand mitosis enough to be able to object if some ignorant polictal hack tried to say that the theory of cell division is just a conspiracy by the opposition. Richard Feynman, IIRC, did some graduate level work in biology, and could probably have given a fair layman's explanation of mitosis.

I would expect the surgeon general to be scientifically literate, and be able to explain that the Earth moves around the Sun, that burning hydrogen creates water, that objects of different masses fall with the same accleration (disregarding air resistance), and that the biosphere is warming and it seems that human activity is at least partly responsible.

The current candidate is criticized because he called homosexual intercourse unhealthy and unnatural. Excuse me, but are there any reproductive structures in the anus?

Excuse me, but are there any reproductive structures in the mouth?

Leave cunniligus and fellatio out of it, what are you doing kissing?

If it's "unnnatural", how do you explain ass-fucking homosexual sheep? Did somebody sit them down and make them watch Brokeback Mountain and turn them gay?

(Oh, and you do realize that many heterosexual people enjoy anal sex, right?)

I guess it's only natural that they would have podcasts

Congratulations, jackass: you just gave the largest industrial manufacturers in the world every reason to spend billions to convince everyone that global warming doesn't exist. Think the anti-intellectual movement is bad now? Wait until GM's "Chicken Little" series of advertisements encourages SUV owners to run over anyone carrying a book.

Un-frickin'-believable. If you thought major corporations were bad before, see what happens when you give them an enormous financial incentive to be even worse.

You know what's really bad? It would be cheaper long term for the manufacturers to spend 1-2 billion improving the average understanding of science in the US. I read http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/putting_h is_money_where_his_ma.php article today about a Math Billionaire that is trying to get Math People that have BS or Masters in Math actually teaching math and paid alot doing it. He was trying for 1.6 Billion for Federal money trying to expand his program nation wide. What if our really cool leading edge companies required their best R&D people to teach one year or one class at their local highschool? Would it increase interest in science? Hopefully.

From the SEPTEMBER 2006 issue of Seed:

At a time when the Earth's climate is at the top of practically every nation's agenda, it might seem perplexing that there's a $100 million, fully completed climate-sensing satellite stored in a warehouse in Maryland.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was supposed to be delivered five years ago to the L1 Lagrangian point—a gravity-neutral parking spot between the Earth and the sun that affords a continuous, sunlit view of the planet. From here, DSCOVR would measure the planet's energy balance and reflectivity, known as albedo, which is critical data for calibrating climate change models and monitoring the ozone layer. Yet the mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite is sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Could the decision to kill DSCOVR have anything to do with the politics of climate science? For years, Republicans have claimed the need for more data before acting to curb global warming. A letter President Bush wrote to four Republican senators in March 2001 (after DSCOVR's endorsement by a National Academy of Sciences review panel) referred to "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." More recently, in a 2005 briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asserted that "there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the science of climate change." Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, "It is as if the administration prefers to continue to hide behind lack of definitive data as an excuse for lack of action and leadership."

According to Dr. Jonah Colman, who does climate modeling at Los Alamos National Laboratory, "the availability of DSCOVR for inter-comparison between other measurements" would reconcile discrepancies in data from low-Earth orbit satellites. "Albedo is incredibly important," he added. "It can change quickly, and we currently do not have a direct method for measuring it. DSCOVR would have given us that." Project leader Dr. Francisco P.J. Valero, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, describes the mission as "an urgent necessity." Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is even more blunt about the importance of DSCOVR's data: "Not knowing may kill us."

If we're interested in understanding how climate changes and how to predict what's going to happen next, DSCOVR would appear to be a crucial undertaking. So what happened? The loss of the Columbia shuttle certainly didn't help, but the real coffin nail seems to have been partisan politics.

Back in 1998, Al Gore championed a probe that would broadcast real-time images of Earth to the Internet at the relatively cheap cost of $20 million. Dubbed Triana (after the sailor on Columbus' voyage who first spotted the New World), Gore hoped the probe would foster greater awareness of the fragility of the planet; the idea, he admitted publicly, had come to him in a dream.

After a peer review process, the mission was upgraded to allow the spacecraft to continuously monitor the energy budget of the entire planet—the first one ever with this capability—making it a much more credible mission. The name was later changed from Triana to DSCOVR, likely in the hope of jettisoning the Gore-dream baggage.

Republicans didn't buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, calling it the "Goresat," a "multimillion-dollar screen saver." Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader, quipped, "This idea supposedly came from a dream.

From the SEPTEMBER 2006 issue of Seed:

At a time when the Earth's climate is at the top of practically every nation's agenda, it might seem perplexing that there's a $100 million, fully completed climate-sensing satellite stored in a warehouse in Maryland.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was supposed to be delivered five years ago to the L1 Lagrangian point—a gravity-neutral parking spot between the Earth and the sun that affords a continuous, sunlit view of the planet. From here, DSCOVR would measure the planet's energy balance and reflectivity, known as albedo, which is critical data for calibrating climate change models and monitoring the ozone layer. Yet the mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite is sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Could the decision to kill DSCOVR have anything to do with the politics of climate science? For years, Republicans have claimed the need for more data before acting to curb global warming. A letter President Bush wrote to four Republican senators in March 2001 (after DSCOVR's endorsement by a National Academy of Sciences review panel) referred to "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." More recently, in a 2005 briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asserted that "there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the science of climate change." Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, "It is as if the administration prefers to continue to hide behind lack of definitive data as an excuse for lack of action and leadership."

According to Dr. Jonah Colman, who does climate modeling at Los Alamos National Laboratory, "the availability of DSCOVR for inter-comparison between other measurements" would reconcile discrepancies in data from low-Earth orbit satellites. "Albedo is incredibly important," he added. "It can change quickly, and we currently do not have a direct method for measuring it. DSCOVR would have given us that." Project leader Dr. Francisco P.J. Valero, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, describes the mission as "an urgent necessity." Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is even more blunt about the importance of DSCOVR's data: "Not knowing may kill us."

If we're interested in understanding how climate changes and how to predict what's going to happen next, DSCOVR would appear to be a crucial undertaking. So what happened? The loss of the Columbia shuttle certainly didn't help, but the real coffin nail seems to have been partisan politics.

Back in 1998, Al Gore championed a probe that would broadcast real-time images of Earth to the Internet at the relatively cheap cost of $20 million. Dubbed Triana (after the sailor on Columbus' voyage who first spotted the New World), Gore hoped the probe would foster greater awareness of the fragility of the planet; the idea, he admitted publicly, had come to him in a dream.

After a peer review process, the mission was upgraded to allow the spacecraft to continuously monitor the energy budget of the entire planet—the first one ever with this capability—making it a much more credible mission. The name was later changed from Triana to DSCOVR, likely in the hope of jettisoning the Gore-dream baggage.

Republicans didn't buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, calling it the "Goresat," a "multimillion-dollar screen saver." Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader, quipped, "This idea supposedly came from a dream.

Math is cool, but goddamn, the way it's taught is awful and jackasses like this reviewer and the joker who wrote the book he's reviewing are a prime reason why.

http://www.seedmagazine.com/

I like Seed and Scienceblogs myself.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the [Fermi] Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain's ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels...ever so good.

Would you refer to your wife as "the woman whose pussy I pump?" "The bitch that sucks my cock?" If so you need to lay off the porn, dude. Not sure where you picked up all that gay stuff, but you've obviously given it some thought or been hitting the gay porn. Usually people leave verbose descriptions of the actual physical methods of their lovemaking out of whatever pronoun reference they use.

The thing is, you don't get to decide what word other people use to describe their relationships. They do. You opinion matter none. If you'd like them to respect your own chosen term and not vomit profanities all over you each time you mention your relationships, then you need to provide others the same courtesy. The only thing that can cause that kind of response is fear. What are you afraid of Mr. Anonymous? Afraid some guy will try and suck your cock or afraid you'll like it?

Oh and by the way Mr. I-feel-so-strongly-about-this-that-i-will-remain-a n-anonymous-coward, Homosexual sex is natural and normal., not to mention fun. Not everybody does it, but ... well you sound like you could use some.

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

maybe china just wants to regain some credibility in science / technology matters by having their standard adopted. http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/05/scientifi c_copy_cats.php

Speaking of which, I found this interesting:

Incompetent Design

Something tells me this is how the creationists will handle this:

When confronted with something that works and is complex:
"See, proof of Intelligent Design!"

When confronted with something obviously "designed" badly:
"We can't comprehend the will of 'the designer.'" ...or: "It's because of the (insert group they hate) are angering 'the designer!'" (usually for desasters, plagues, cancer, birth defects, etc...)

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/11/the_other _id.php

Seed Magazine is attempting to bridge popular culture and and science. I've read a few isssues of the magazine, and the righting is a bit too edgey for my taste (like the recent article on João Maguiejo and the theory of Variable Speed Light. I'm gonna buy another issue or two to continue to evaluate it. I guess that means it's good enough, so far, to keep me buying it.