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> the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

Well, granted the article notes that there are different definitions of tool use, but consider ants: e.g., Tool use by the forest ant Aphaenogaster rudis: Ecology and task allocation (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u0176rl71k572870/).

This has all happened before and apparently will happen again:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/lr247770l2272741/

I recall these earthquakes were triggered by chemical weapon disposal, same plot though, dig a big deep hole and put liquid in.....
]

Hypotheses for what? The post 1941 warming? How about the same explanation as for the medieaval warm period? i.e. We have no Goddamn idea.

Just hope you don't get too many stem cells from them that survive in your body.

A few might lodge in your brain[1] (or your stomach "brain"[2] - which might change some of your dietary preferences[3]).

[1] If fetal stem cells can end up in their mother's brains, why not other transplanted stem cells?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725134.300-baby-comes-with-brain-repair-kit-for-mum.html

[2] See "Enteric Nervous System"
[3] See: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k51335l4k4676577/
That's somewhat anecdotal but I won't be surprised if your organs and other parts have some say on what you feel like eating (it'll be an evolutionary advantage if done "right").

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf

You must not have searched very hard. It's right on his website which you can find by Googling his name.

The problem with this specific study is that it doesn't contribute anything new. Tim Garrett basically states that the polution is related to the size of the economy. I would be surprised if that was news to the economists. Here is a link to the article http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf In the appendix he tries to relate economy to thermodynamics, but that part doesn't really contribute to the conclussion of the article. Furthermore the relations between mass transfer and money transfer is so vague that they are fairly useless.

The original paper is here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf , Linked from here http://www.met.utah.edu/tgarrett/Publications/index.html

The original paper is here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf Linked from here http://www.met.utah.edu/tgarrett/Publications/index.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf

Not really. Would it be impairing? I always heard that ants could navigate according to Earth's magnetic field too.

Effectively, having been asked why an incredibly unlikely event came about, you have responded "why not?". It's a non-answer, try again.

You've not given any reason to think it is incredibly unlikely apart from your belief. Try again :-)

Unfortunately the neo-darwinian hypothesis of evolution by natural selection of traits arising from random mutation CANNOT account for biology as we observe it.

Be careful of such sweeping statements, someone may ask you to demonstrate it is the case :-)

If you are simply pointing out we have gaps in our understanding then I agree. If you're claiming those gaps = god, then I guess Zeus causes lightning and Poseidon storms at sea.

Here's a start for soft tissue, whale evolution. I'm sure google could help as well :-)

Yes I'm a fan of CMI's website :)

You probably should be more skeptical of your sources. CMI (and other "creationist" organisations) tend to ignore evidence against their claims, over play the evidence which lends some support to their position, misrepresent research and quote mine, all seemingly driven by ideology and not a desire for understanding.

As a person is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of an integrated circuit, so an intelligent agent well beyond humans is our only seriously tenable explanation for the existence of even a single cell.

If you can find me the blueprints of the cell, describe the manufacturing process, show me the design steps, etc (all things we have for the IC), then perhaps you'd have a point. As it is, you are unable even to point to the "intelligent agent" responsible, let alone supply all of the other information. Your analogy fails :-)

I'll recant my whole setup if you can get a cell to arise from non-living components without human intervention. And pay you every cent in my bank account :)

Perhaps you need to read more scientific research into abiogenesis, as you don't seem to have an understanding of the current state.
This and this are pretty interesting to start with.

So again, what is your reasoning process for predicting a rational universe from a non-rational, non-intelligent, impersonal, naturalistic beginning?

To put it simply, what evidence we actually have indicates the universe appears to be open to investigation (through intersubjective empiricism), and as a result of that study there appears to be no rational intelligence behind it, or at least no decent evidence in it's favour.

Agreed, but lets not get ahead of ourselves ;)

I don't think we are. You seem to be arguing specifically for an interventionist deity. If that's the case, it would be nice to have the coherence and correspondence to reality of this being presented, else we should surely just ignore the concept? :-)

Statistically, the best heart surgeon is the one with them most computer game experience. See http://www.springerlink.com/content/a63nx82mbq2g37b4/

Surgery is just hand-eye coordination, so a specialist should be better.

But for a lot of problems, a good GP can be better than a specialist. Specialists will tend to over-diagnose and over-proscribe within their own field. If you see a psychologist, you'll get psycho-therapy. If you see a psychiatrist, you'll get happy pills. A good GP will recommend surgery, medication, lifestyle changes, or whatever else is most likely to work.

That said, a bad GP will give you a script of antibiotics, and tell you to come back if the symptoms persist.

(Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor, but I'm related to a GP).

Yep, the use of the Windows 7 math handwriting recognition in tablet mode integrated into Mathematica looks like it would be pretty useful. Has anybody used it and is able to comment on whether its performance is as good as the propaganda says?

An interesting sidenote

According to http://www.springerlink.com/content/u380751518251x56/

"Majoring in a scientific or technological discipline, earning good grades, persisting to degree completion, getting and staying married, and not having dependent children are all actions that substantially increase the likelihood of repayment and lower the likelihood of default."

You have to pay to get the full publication I guess, but that first part says what should be obvious: people with nerd degrees don't default.

The actual article is here.

I found this (PDF), doesn't mention current use, though.
about their history and actual use (paywall)
not recent...
I suggest you talk to your cardiologist. I can't quickly find any doc on this -- even through googling-- , but it may not be publicly available. From the few docs I can find, I think that they have been deemed safe for medical use but with the improvements of li-ion tech, possibly inductive charging, and other technologies, the use of rtg for pacemaker would look less attractive nowadays, not even considering the risks of accidental release of radioactive material (cremation...)...
So, ask your specialist, or his professors :-)

I agree completely, it's really cool regardless of the outcome. Some of this type of historical data has already been used: Records of bird migration in particular are useful because the date is known precisely and the record doesn't rely on a measurement, i.e., all you have to do is answer the questions does the bird in question migrate earlier or later than previously, and how much so? Some examples are the snow goose (pay link, sorry) from the Hudson Bay Company and other records. Here's a full article that shows that birds are migrating to and from the UK an average of 8 days earlier than 30 years ago.

Also, some evidence of hurricane patterns is from Spanish records of ships in the Caribbean from 1500 to 1600.

Bullshit. Show me one citation that says that natural fertilizers such as animal dung have any connection to acid rain. I dare you.

How about this?:

14 Million Tons of Pig Manure No Hogwash for the Dutch

The Washington Post, August 6, 1987, Edward Cody

The trouble with the Netherlands is pig manure, tons of it. Pig manure is overflowing storage vats. It is seeping into canals. It is polluting underground drinking water. It is even falling from the sky in acid rain. "Pig manure is very aggressive, you might say," remarked Theodore Bruins, a member of the six-man Manure Problem Steering Committee in the Netherlands' southern Brabant Province. The nation has 14.5 million human inhabitants in 16,484 square miles, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. It also has a pig for every person, giving it the world's most ...

Here, read a whole book about it, manure lover.

70 years ago the Rabbit plague was in full swing (until the Myxoma Virus was introduced in 1950's). Rabbits combined with overgrazing it amplified El Ninyos drying effect on Australia (Learning from history: land and pasture degradation episodes in Australiaâ(TM)s rangelands).

Today due to climate changes effects on the ocean currents, El Ninyo could quite possibly become permanent rather than a periodic event - which if happens, will freeze eastern Australia in a permanent drought conditions (and South America in permanent flooding conditions). A bit of drought in half of Australia and a few major floods in South America would be the very least of the worlds worries though... climate change screwing up the ocean current system is implicated in the Anoxic event which eventually led to the death of 90% of life on earth

>Climate change is a farce. im a sydneysider, this is the worst duststorm we've had in 70 years
No worries mate, the planet will be just fine. Nothing we can do to the planet short of complete nuclear Armageddon that Mother earth can't recover from in a few million years. Its not the planet we have to worry about... its our survival on it as a destructive, greedy, self serving species - and that's just a random sampling of our "elected" leaders

Hi, I think it's worth pointing out that this post is not really an accurate description of the original article. I don't say that genetically engineering animals that don't feel pain, "may be an acceptable alternative to factory farming." In fact, I'm pretty clear that given all of the problems associated with factory farming, the best solution would be to eliminate it altogether. My point is that *if* it does not seem likely that factory farming will be going away in the near future, then in the meantime we should reduce the amount of suffering it causes. Also, many of the points people are bringing up are discussed in the original Neuroethics article, which you can find here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/vrv4m6288w702123/fulltext.pdf . The people who are assuming I am making some kind of "stupid" mistake by equating suffering with pain or not being aware of the condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain would be well-served by reading the full article first. Surprisingly enough, the entire content of a 4500 word essay is not represented in this five sentence summary, or even in the two page summary from New Scientist. This is not to say that either summary was unfair, but just that before claiming "the author stupidly didn't think of X", you might want to read what the author actually said.

Similar studies have been done with Mourning Doves (free abstract) and they have the same effect.

The SINTEF-report can be found here:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/8v34n016j3648872/

and the base report for a successful attack is here:

http://sislab.no/redteam.pdf

I see no reason at all to have policies based on protocol. That's a static decision, and static policy decisions can be inaccurate for any particular connection, out of date or simply ignorant of new protocols, and can/will be largely decided by politics not practicality

So, you wouldn't mind having telesurgery on a connection that wasn't protocol aware?

Falcon

I oversimplified. There's many variants of AIS. I should have said "CAIS" (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), which is what most people think of when they refer to AIS (even though it's one of the less common form) -- that's where the person appears fully female. Yes, people with CAIS tend to be taller than average women, but they tend to have weaker bones and lack the skeletal muscle advantage of even the low-levels of androgens normally present in women (Sheffield-Moore, 2000). Also, those without CAIS but with Kennedy's Disease can have significant muscle mass loss (although more often then not they have a male presentation, so not applicable here).

So at sea level there's sound, at ten thousand feet there's sound, in space there's no sound. At what altitude does it suddenly cut off then, Einstein? 50 thousand feet? 15,027 metres and 23.20126 cm?

A. N. Volobuev and A. P. Tolstonogov published a paper in the Journal of Engineering Physics and Thermophysics in 2003 in which they calculate the minimum atmospheric pressure necessary to propagate sound. They wrote that on Earth the pressure drops below this threshold at about 95km above sea level.

Distinctive Features of the Propagation of Sound Waves in a Perfect Gas at Low Pressure

The new constant would actually be equal to pi/2, and at least one mathematician has suggested that we use a constant that looks like pi, but with a third leg (actually, it looks a bit like a cursive, uppercase "teh" in Russian: second line, fifth letter from the left).

I was fairly sure the OS running on the MONDEX smartcards was formally proven.

Can't be bothered to look it up in the MONDEX case, but usually only parts of the smart card operating systems are formally proven; it's too costly to cover the whole system. Often it can be (semi-)formally proven that certain security irrelevant parts do not affect the areas being evaluated. (There's a paper on the MONDEX certification for those interested.)

Also, from TFA:

Formal proofs for specific properties have been conducted for smaller kernels, but what we have done is a general, functional correctness proof, which has never before been achieved for real-world, high-performance software of this complexity or size.

Admittedly, smart card kernels can't be referred to as "smaller kernels" if what they have is 7500 lines.

Build a fly's brain that can control a real fly's functions and I might start to believe you.

would you settle for an eel?

YOUR SOURCE ? another than http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/tox_herb.htmmonsanto please ...

Very well:

Citation showing that Glyphosate breaks down. It may take a while, but it does *not* bioaccumulate. It also breaks down in water fairly rapidly.

Meanwhile, Atrazine is already banned in the EU and there are calls to ban it elsewhere, so that's a non-issue, IMHO.

In fact, of your cited source, Picloram is the only one that looks nasty for the environment. That said, there's little evidence it's harmful to humans. But I will concede your point on that particular chemical.

You take an oxy-acetylene torch, adjust it to a fuel-rich flame, and point it at a big piece of metal, then scrape off the stuff deposited on the metal and separate out the diamonds from the buckminsterfullerine from the soot. Here's a journal article and here's one of the many patents.

In 1978 is was suggested that a galactic density wave, rather than passage through the arms, was responsible for the 140 My events. This wave, with a period 1/2 that of galactic rotation, eminates from the galactic core. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k1t6v868227t7403/

The solar system doesn't just orbit the galaxy. It oscillates up and down through the galactic plane with a period of 88 +/- 5 My. This too has been suggested as being involved in extinctions, since the galactic plane is denser than the regions outside it.

I'm glad they got a better galactic map, and I'm sure it shows what they say. But the arms themselves aren't the only things hypothesized to be involved.

Yeah, nothing stands out as being obviously bad science here. The result is basically that on average, the right ear is slightly better at hearing things in a naturalistic setting. Only the first page of the article is available online, but the authors explain that this right-ear advantage has been fairly well-studied in the laboratory and they were attempting to confirm it in a less artificial environment.

Note that this advantage is apparently small, and may be only an average thing; could be that 60% of people hear better with their right ear, 40% of people with their left, I can't tell from the available information. The crap about "amenable parts of the brain" was most likely invented by journalists.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/123t3782704t876v/

You are drawing this conclusion, not from the article itself, but second hand, from a journalist, who may have talked to someone who has read the article. I might be able to discuss some of your concerns better, but the article costs $34. However, as someone with a passing knowledge of statistics, I can say your outright rejection of sample size is unscientific. A small sample size may be counteracted by very strong results, and without seeing the hypothesis tests the authors of the article doubtless performed, you cannot simply look at a sample and say 'that is too small' (unless it is absurdly small, eg, less than 20).

The free abstract also indicates that the investigation was performed in three phases, with the portion in the night club being used to confirm the results produced in a lab setting, although whether these results were double blind, I cannot say without having read the article.

This wireless charging/powering is by no means a new technique. My masters thesis included plenty of material and research on this topic, and I was referencing papers on wireless powering for implants as far back as the 70's. The class-E amplifier driving an inductive coil resonantly tuned with a receiving coil is the standard architecture used by decades.

I'm confused at the submitter's hailing 'resonant coupling' as a (seemingly) recent advance, as resonant coupling is simply what happens whenever a tuned transmitter and receiver antenna communicate. In communications devices, the tuning is broad so that the receiver takes in a wide range of frequencies which are filtered out down the line. In power transmission devices, the tuning is much more narrow, as only a single frequency (the power wave) is transmitted.

Ironically, [please tell me I've used that word correctly] what makes wireless powering and charging more feasible today than 20 years ago is not an improvement in the electromagnetic theory of wireless power. Rather, it is a combination of a reduction in the power requirements of the receiving device due to advances in low-power electronics, as well as an improvement in evolution-based software which can simulate and design better and better directed antennas--something which by-hand design has never been able to do. All in all, though, it's a nice demo but isn't much in the way of new and useful science.

Compare these to the 'new age' time-out techniques and the like which are based on adult psychology and are probably completely inappropriate for immature minds. Probably far more damaging, but we won't know for another couple of decades or so...

What really pans out best is being consistent in whatever parenting style (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, etc.) so time-outs are fine as long as they're actually enforced.
Anecdotal:
My mother managed to put me and my sib in a corner when we were 15, but she almost never used a belt on us when were kids. When I worked at a pre-school, time outs worked brilliantly at getting the rowdy kids sorted out.

citation:
  Inconsistent parenting: Is there evidence for a link with children's conduct problems?

I actually found a study that kind of supports your and the gp's claim: (though timeouts are common in authoritative parenting)
The relation of parenting style to adolescent school performance, but the reason the study gives for why authoritative has the highest correlation is that it's the most internally consistent.
and another, 'cause I'm feeling bored

But I wonder about the culture correlation-do families that tend to practice consistent authoritative discipline come from cultures where education is highly valued?

Check out A relational programming system with inferred representations.

SHA-256 and SHA-512, Whirlpool and Tiger are all pretty thoroughly-reviewed with no weaknesses uncovered

Tiger actually is vulnerable to a "pseudo-near-collision" ref. No, I have no idea what a "pseudo-near-collision" is, but Tiger's vulnerable to it.

My favorite hash is RadioGatun, but I also like Keccak. I would like Skein, except there is no published variant of it that uses 32-bit words (Whirlpool [1] and Tiger have the same problem).

[1] Yes, you could make a Whirlpool variant with a 128-bit or even 256-bit hash using AES as the compression function, but I prefer to stick to published crypto, since I don't know how to make a truncated differential.

There's so little difference between humans and, say, the chimp/pan that they are virtually the same species. We are the third chimpanzee. Like us, chimps seem to be happiest with close to ten hours of sleep per day.

The Primates journal is a good place to look for info.

The question then is why are the primates at the low end of the sleep budget? Your dietary thesis is interesting and represents one popular line of teleological reasoning for our waking budgets.

Getting back to the issue at hand, my thesis is that were it possible to simulate human consciousness, it may be necessary to simulate the sleeping as well as the waking state.

On the other hand one can observe the rate of brain tumors among train drivers. (In countries with fully electrified railways systems, of course).

You can, but the studies involve very few cases and are therefore very cautious in drawing conclusions: "For brain tumor (astrocytoma), the observed relative risk was close to one"; "95% CI: 1.2, 21.2". It looks like there is a small effect in this case, although it should be noted that the exposure to magnetism of the subjects in the second study there was over 100 times higher than exposure in the 200-metres-from-HT-power-line scenario the OP was talking about, which is I believe in the order of 100 times higher itself than mobile phone masts (a topic you hint at in your post).

Yes, there is some evidence that magnetic fields can have health effects, I'll admit it. But the evidence is overstated and the risks exagerated repeatedly by people like the original poster who seem to be spreading anti-electricity FUD for all I can see (probably not intentionally; few people have done the research and read the reports here).

A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.

Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.

Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.

Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?

Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.

Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?

To date, the only drugs that have been proven to induce schizophrenia in humans, and schizphrenia-like symptoms in lab animals, and to increase the symptoms of schizophrenia in people already afflicted with it are the NMDA receptor antagonists such as ketamine or PCP. These probably induce their chronic effects through an oxidative cascade. No similar mechanism has been presented, much less demonstrated, for any specific, putative effects of LSD on neural development.

Launchpad's Rosetta tool does something different, but workable. Software usually doesn't have complete sentences as much as words or phrases sprinkled about the UI. So what they do is gather up a bunch of pre-existing translation strings and suggest them to a human for approval for a new context.

What you're proposing is basically an intermediate language, similar to how you can compile Java, Ruby, Python, Scala and so on into JVM bytecode, and let the JVM translate into the platform's specific language. So when you say "Instead of having to know two languages, all that the crowd has to know is what the text actually means, which then allows them to disambiguate it for the program," what you really mean is "Instead of having to know two language, all that crowd has to know is some intermediate representation language and the target language." Not exactly a great improvement over just using English as a lingua franca (it must make frenchmen turn in their grave to see English labeled the french language).

-no one has quite figured out why life has the handedness it does

I recall a theory that it is due to the slight asymmetry in weak interaction, but I've forgotten the exact mechanism. This asymmetry exists basically everywhere in the universe, but as life is self-replicating, it can amplify the effect to a great extent. Here's the first reference found via quick googling:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0743577n4716u23j/

(I'm the AC that also responded to you). After doing some research into their claims, I came across this: impossible dinosaurs. Their claim is as follows:

"Most conventional theories assume that gravity throughout the universe has always been and will always be a constant property of matter. ... The Electric Universe offers a different point of view. Gravity is not a constant. It's a variable that depends on the plasma environment. So Earth in the Mesozoic Era may have had less gravity than it has today. Holden calculates that in order for the largest dinosaurs to function, gravity must have been at least 1/3 (and possibly as low as 1/4) what it is today."

It took a fair amount of effort to dig up the relevant papers regarding changes in the gravitational constant. (Short answer for the mathematically challenged: it hasn't changed). I'd also point out that if gravity was 1/3 to 1/4 of what it was today, the moon wouldn't have remained in orbit.

The original slashdot article had a post detailing what their predictions were. They were wrong.

Let's just call bad science when we see it. Plasma cosmology predicts few things. When it has tried to, it failed. Much like the yeti, flat earth, luminous aether and timecube, it probably won't go away any time soon. But it really should.

The problem is not that it is impossible, just that most current implementations are extremely slow. Song implemented ranged query over encrypted data on gMail and even with encryption accelerators the performance was low. Some more papers: http://www.springerlink.com/index/370086k273w1587t.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/rangequery-full.pdf http://www.springerlink.com/index/u2007h5706482j51.pdf There have also been some different multi-server database schemes that do the same thing, although, once again, due to performance and the cost of maintenance I do not know of any that have actually gone to market Hope those help. Hit me up if you want more info. -Nav

The problem is not that it is impossible, just that most current implementations are extremely slow. Song implemented ranged query over encrypted data on gMail and even with encryption accelerators the performance was low. Some more papers: http://www.springerlink.com/index/370086k273w1587t.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/rangequery-full.pdf http://www.springerlink.com/index/u2007h5706482j51.pdf There have also been some different multi-server database schemes that do the same thing, although, once again, due to performance and the cost of maintenance I do not know of any that have actually gone to market Hope those help. Hit me up if you want more info. -Nav

I realize that. But I thought that the opposition to oil rigs was most often due to the fact that they are ugly. If those who oppose the rigs limit their argument to just the pollution factor, then proponents of oil can argue that oil seeps from the earth naturally, as discussed below.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/bya6g7r7ceebanrl/

abstract below:
---------------
Recent global estimates of crude-oil seepage rates suggest that about 47% of crude oil currently entering the marine environment is from natural seeps, whereas 53% results from leaks and spills during the extraction, transportation, refining, storage, and utilization of petroleum. The amount of natural crude-oil seepage is currently estimated to be 600,000 metric tons per year, with a range of uncertainty of 200,000 to 2,000,000 metric tons per year. Thus, natural oil seeps may be the single most important source of oil that enters the ocean, exceeding each of the various sources of crude oil that enters the ocean through its exploitation by humankind.
-------------------

I've never witnessed one firsthand, but it seems as though the environment has always overcome oil spills (even the Exxon Valdeez spill) with remarkable vitality. I'm all for alternative energy, but I have a problem with the whole cap and trade system that is trying to be imposed. It's essentially going to be the largest new tax introduced in my lifetime.

"The dam might have just brought the event forward a year or two."

Or decades, or centuries. It's hard to be sure yet. As the article mentions, there is ample precedent for earthquakes being triggered by the weight of the water behind dams and increase in pore fluid pressure, both in seismically active and relatively inactive areas. If you want to find papers, look for the term "reservoir-induced seismicity". In the high activity case, yeah, maybe it didn't make much difference, because the area could have frequent earthquakes anyway, but in the latter case (less active area) it can make a big difference versus the natural earthquake pattern. Having major earthquakes where they didn't happen before (in human memory) is pretty inconvenient.

Because the earthquake did happen in a fairly seismically active part of China, people should be cautious about interpreting too much into its location near a dam. For an earthquake that big the stress must have built up over a long period of time -- far longer than the dam has been around. It couldn't have been the sole cause. It is still a legitimate question that deserves further study.

This paper [PDF] gives a good description of the physics and evidence behind the process with an example from the Montecello reservoir [PDF] in South Carolina.

This paper, which unfortunately requires a subscription to read, talks specifically about reservoir-induced seismicity in China, especially in regards to the Three Gorges Dam project. It dates from 1998.

"The dam might have just brought the event forward a year or two."

Or decades, or centuries. It's hard to be sure yet. As the article mentions, there is ample precedent for earthquakes being triggered by the weight of the water behind dams and increase in pore fluid pressure, both in seismically active and relatively inactive areas. If you want to find papers, look for the term "reservoir-induced seismicity". In the high activity case, yeah, maybe it didn't make much difference, because the area could have frequent earthquakes anyway, but in the latter case (less active area) it can make a big difference versus the natural earthquake pattern. Having major earthquakes where they didn't happen before (in human memory) is pretty inconvenient.

Because the earthquake did happen in a fairly seismically active part of China, people should be cautious about interpreting too much into its location near a dam. For an earthquake that big the stress must have built up over a long period of time -- far longer than the dam has been around. It couldn't have been the sole cause. It is still a legitimate question that deserves further study.

This paper [PDF] gives a good description of the physics and evidence behind the process with an example from the Montecello reservoir [PDF] in South Carolina.

This paper, which unfortunately requires a subscription to read, talks specifically about reservoir-induced seismicity in China, especially in regards to the Three Gorges Dam project. It dates from 1998.

what is the political implication of set theory? is this I found from google relevant?