Slashdot Mirror

While I suppose it is a little offtopic, I noticed in the first picture that the elevation of the south pole is greater than 9,000 feet. I never knew that, and it really highlights the crappy conditions that must exist there. Even at 10,000 feet your body does funny things adjusting to altitude (source).

But it does not generate complex structures

You never answer my question. You're a programmer, have you ever actually tried dabbling around with evolutionary algorithms? They are surprisingly easy to code. It's just the arbitrary plugable selection function that can range from dead simple to vast-simulated-environment.

If you're serious about doing some serious original work on evolution theory you really should have some first hand experience on what it does and doesn't do in action, obtain the direct first hand insight into how and why it does/doesn't do the things it does/doesn't do.

In the most simplistic sense you can establish generated complexity by sheer fact that even the most simplistic useful thing is more complex than than the pure random noise you started with. However that bare "existence proof" does not do justice to the truth. I have watched evolution start with the "initial usefulness" and build upon that, then build upon that, then build upon that, in a progressive chain I cannot describe as anything but increasing complexity.

in circuit design, evolutionary algorithms can [] not feed-back circuits.

I have not personally dabbled in any feed-back circuit designs, but with Google I located the book Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware chapter "Analog Circuit Evolution Based on FPTA-2" directly discussing successful evolution of a feedback circuit design.

Evolutionary algorithms are routinely applied to design active system processes critically dependent upon feedback loops. Evolution has absolutely no problem handling feedback signals. For example walking/running/balancing systems are entirely feedback based.

>Evolution can only traverse a sequence of selectable variations with reasonable mutation-count distance to reach each successive selectable variation.

Yes, that is precisely my point.

That may have been your point, but you are mistaken in thinking that evolution paths do not exist. For one thing we are not searching for a unique improvement step. There are generally a large number of potential improvement targets of which we need only hit any one, and a vastly larger number of non-negative mutation territory we can spread bridge across seeking improvement. And especially important is recombination, which is an extremely non-random form of mutation of extremely high search potential and which may introduce drastic change.

What I meant by predictability is that it has to lie at least close to the vicinity of function of its predecessors.

I would say biochemistry certainly satisfies that. Mutations and recombinations of biologically efficacious DNA are infinitely more likely to be useful than starting from scratch.

Universal Turing Machines

Biochemistry is certainly capable of Universal Turing behavior, however biology gets on just fine utilizing little or no biochemistry utilizing actual "universal" type behavior. There are some fancy biochemical cascades and feedback systems, but biochemistry generally does not sit around calculating an infinite series of primes.

However there is an area of genetic algorithms I haven't dabbled in yet - genetic programming. It does in fact directly evolve Turing-Complete interpreted executable code. Obviously you need to keep an instruction execution counter when you interpret arbitrary evolved code, to actively terminate any individual that would take too long to run (or run infinitely). Simple easy solution to the halting problem.

From Wikipedia:
"[Genetic Programming] is very computationally intensive and so in the 1990s it was mainly used to solve relatively simple problems. But more recently, thanks to improvements in GP technology and to the exponential growth in CPU power, GP produced many novel and outstanding results in areas such as quantum computing, electronic design, game playing, sorting, searching and many more. These results

Time to read the book again. It was the magnetic field which made it stand out, possibly maintained by current in a loop of superconductor.

There is a pretty good chance we would have found it by now.

Google and your local library are your friends.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p6g6k068809621q7/?p=50a188aa07894f5bbcd3dd468ad2bcc4&pi=4

I don't know which country you live in but the number of articles and books available, and specially their purpose, varies from country to country.

For those who want more meat, these look like places to start:

Pier Luigi Luisi, Francesca Ferri and Pasquale Stano Approaches to semi-synthetic minimal cells: a review
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y218jk71n1k407 85/

Giovanni Murtas Question 7: Construction of a Semi-Synthetic Minimal Cell: A Model for Early Living Cells
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9p404l8247968n 72/

For those who want more meat, these look like places to start:

Pier Luigi Luisi, Francesca Ferri and Pasquale Stano Approaches to semi-synthetic minimal cells: a review
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y218jk71n1k407 85/

Giovanni Murtas Question 7: Construction of a Semi-Synthetic Minimal Cell: A Model for Early Living Cells
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9p404l8247968n 72/

This isn't my area, but my Ph.D. is in applied and computational math, and I've spent a great deal of time solving first-order hyperbolic problems where characteristics cross. (In my context, level set methods where the zero contours can split and/or merge.)

For a hyperbolic problem like this, you'll want to be careful. Since the waves have variable propagation speeds, there's a possibility for shock formation. (characteristics can cross) Think of Burger's equation as a nice, tangible first-order analog. In such a case, it will be important to choose a numerical method that satisfies some kind of entropy condition to handle the shock. Similar things have been encountered in level set methods, where you solve an equation of the form ft + V |grad(f)| = 0, where V is the variable speed of an interface that's represented as the zero contour of f.

Since second-order wave equations are so important in physics, you may want to check out the Journal of Computational Physics. You should probably also try the Journal of Scientific Computing.

As for visualization, you'll probably want to check out the "industry standards" Matlab and Mathematica. You could plot the time evolution of level surfaces of your wave equation, for instance. As for other softare, I'd generally advise pulling together what you can find at netlib, although more cutting-edge stuff may require you to roll your own C/C++ or FORTRAN. But any of that stuff will be faster than running in Matlab or Mathematica, and it will take a whole lot less memory.

Best of luck, and have fun! :-) -- Paul

I know about the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper. I'm not sure he ever implemented it; he just implied he knew how to. It pays to be paranoid! In the paper UNIX Password Security - Ten Years Later the authors wrote "Over the past 10 years, improvements in hardware and software have increased the crypts/second/dollar ratio by five orders of magnitude." That was about 20 years ago, so if no-one has reported cracking ken's password in the meantime, I think the original UNIX password algorithm has stood up well.

Did I say that proved anything? It's an anecdote, maybe you've heard of them? I don't have to prove anything, I'm not a scientist and never claimed to be. However, there is a wonderful invention, the Internet. Maybe you've heard of it. When one encounters an anecdote, one can look up the underlying assumptions to see if they have any scientific validity. Now, as you are posting on said Internet, I must assume you know about it and are simply too lazy to look things up for yourself. Being a super nice guy, I will do so for you:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=416594
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0byj25luk2l8e6 f8/

Please let me know anytime you need help with this sort of thing, as I have absolutely nothing better to do than look up papers to back up my purely anecdotal postings on a nerd discussion site.

Look at that, I can be a sarcastic ass too! As if that surprises anyone here...

I never understood why life coming from outside is not widely accepted theory. There have been many proofs in the past. It is highly probable if compared to life evolving from a giant organic soup. The only problem was how, and now that also seems to be satisfactorily answered,

Dyson is right in that heretics are needed, and right that biomass needs to be considered in global climate models, but wrong in assuming that only meteorologists produce climate models. Have a look at (eg.) Fatih Evrendilek and Mohan K. Wali, Changing Global Climate: Historical Carbon and Nitrogen Budgets and Projected Responses of Ohios Cropland Ecosystems and the references.

I think parent is right and this article seems to confirm it. It also relates to this article that I read the other day. The article is called "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature", pretty good although some of the thing it says are very politically incorrect, it rings true. How it relates to this topic is that this article states that Polygamy favors women while monogamy favors man, since men seem to have a larger "fitness margin". So while few will be fit enough to mantain many women, that will in turn take away from the rest of the guys that are less fit, thus less attractive to women.

Here's a few. There are lots of studies on this, it's very well established science.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1047-7039(199308) 4%3A3%3C478%3ALDASAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r3n42410657816 43/
http://www.thomsoncustom.com/cj/cases/MOD018.pdf
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327825 mcs0701_7?cookieSet=1&journalCode=mcs

The page itself is pretty obviously not a high traffic news site; i almost mistook it for a genric squatter site. This is all goooogle turned up http://www.citeulike.org/article/1423027 (that's not a squatter page either). The link from TFA is pretty legit, http://www.springerlink.com/content/h0u280742k2530 6p/. Clearly a paper was written in some obscure Russian science journal and reprinted in english, and then this article surfaces out of the blue about said paper. There wouldn't be any quotes because the only source is the paper itself. Since the paper itself costs money to look at, and I don't know anything about the source journal, or how thorough its peer reviews are (not could I find anything out except from that one link from TFA), it's at least within the realm of possibility that the paper is exaggerated or even totally bogus. But jeez, look at all those names.

Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.

In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.

However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.

Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed?

"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".

This is how pop psychology, urban myths mix together. However, some of us may know differently: size matters and more importantly the width. While a Danish sample, it gives an insight. Thanks.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/wqw46755050017 61/?p=78e25fed12e247b2865ad85a359ecb45&pi=1

/if it doesn't work, sorry .....but at least the reference is there :)

Really? Then
why is technical
and industrial know-how
locked up in
pay-to-view websites
in the US?

anyone who wants to can go and read about finite element analysis; there's no secrets there.

Great. Now where are the directions for extracting stigmasterol from soybeans and using it to make corticosteroids?

Lai and Singh's work have not been surpressed: rather it has shown to be hard to replicate.

How can you possibly interpret the actions that have been taken surrounding Lai and Singh's work (see the article I linked) as anything other than surpression? And their work has been replicated: http://www.springerlink.com/content/21np1etlm5pj5u 5g/, in a simpler system even.

And there is another explanation (...) it is only the heat that gives the result.

If that were the case, why use multiple specific frequencies instead of just an un-tuned microwave source or Ohmic heating? Besides, there are strong indications that an unusual mechanism is at play. Lai and Singh have found that the DNA effects are reduced when using an iron chelate (removes iron from tissue) first. Maybe iron services as an intermediate or catalyst for free radical formation under EM excitation. It is not implausible because such heavy elements have a large spin-orbit coupling.

Also, there are several studies that indicate both maternal and paternal age effects the IQ of the child. They seem to indicate either physiological or social and psychological factors as the parent suggests. Maternal Age and Autism More Autism Studies Paternal Age

You are correct, The carnot efficiency comes about due to the phonons:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JAPIAU000084000002001109000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
http://www.evidenttech.com/applications/solar-cell -white-paper/solar-limitations.php
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8854u22418252 73/
http://www.evidenttech.com/applications/quantum-do t-solar-cells.php
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/29499/
(some of these require account to access :(

In practice only those photons that exactly match the bandgap are able to be converted with this efficiency, limiting Silicon cells to about 30%. Using multiple layers of decreasing bandgap can produce higher efficiencies (and hence the interest in higher bandgap materials such as those based on Gallium). This lower efficiency is called the Shockley-Queisser limit which increases with increasing illumination to about 40%:
http://www.pv.unsw.edu.au/Research/3gp.asp

Similarly, virtual photons corresponding to the 'flame temperature' or 'temperament' (derived from the Gibbs free energy) limit the maximum efficiency of the fuel cell to the carnot ratio:
http://www.benwiens.com/energy4.html#energy1.17

You can find the official recommended intake amounts

And you can find Vieth's explanation of why there is no RDA for Vitamin D here: Vitamin D insufficiency: no recommended dietary allowance exists for this nutrient

Another thing I found out is that you can't get an optimal amount of Vitamin D from supplements because it is all preformed vitamin D so your blood levels will track your intake, and nobody really knows exactly how much is best. When skin gets exposed to sunlight on the other hand, the vitamin D is stored and released appropriately to maintain the optimum concentration (assuming there's enough sunlight).....

Yes, we are still learning how much is best. No, we are not completely without informed opinions. It is generally accepted that serum 25OH-D status is the best indicator of Vitamin D status. There is an emerging consensus that you need to keep your serum levels above 70 or 80nmol/L to keep your skeleton from falling apart as you age.

Who said they were waiting to see that too much vitamin D causes some other serious illness? It causes "hypercalcemia", at least.

Please cite your cases. Or perhaps you meant to say "COULD cause hypercalcemia in some patients, but rarely in any who have not take INDUSTRIAL amounts of the substance". You may want to start by reviewing Vieth's seminal paper in which he systematically dismantles published accounts of Vitamin D poisoning.

If you were to consume a bottle of vitamin D supplements that would be lethal

Now you have passed along an utter untruth. You're probably unaware that it is not uncommon in Europe for doctors to use "stoss therapy" to assure Vitamin D status in particular patients. Stoss therapy consists of an annual injection of perhaps 150,000IU to 300,000IU -- much, much more than can be found in your local grocery store bottle of Vitamin D. I seem to recall a recent study in which infants (infants!) with rickets were given 600,000IU. I personally took an entire bottle (90,000IU) of Vitamin D3 the last time I started coming down with a cold (checks pulse -- yes, still completely alive!).

Can anyone make a useful comment about those sunlamp things, *please*?

If you elect to use sunlamps, buy from someone who can supply the relative known fraction of UVA/UVB (you want UVB for D production -- you don't really want the UVA that much). Sperti is a possibility. There is a flourescent bulb that really closely emulates the sun's UV frequency power ratios. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it's only being used in industrial hoods, not consumer sun lamps.

I just want some dam numbers!

Get the #1, most important number: go to your doctor and get a prescription for a test to measure your 25OH-vitamin D serum levels. Make sure the test technology is either Diasorin RIA, or high-performance liquid chromotography with tandem mass spectrometry (or just insist on going to Quest Diagnostics -- I *think* they now uniformly use the latter technology).

you are correct - my information was dated, I apologize.

Here is a link to an abstract on primary research for those who are feeling anti-pedia.

The minimum energy required to capture CO2 from the air at a partial pressure of 4×10^-4 atm and deliver it at one atmosphere is therefore about 20 kJ/mol or 1.6 GJ/tC (gigajoules per ton carbon). If we add the energy required for compressing the CO2 to the 100 atm pressure required for geological storage (assuming a 50% efficiency for converting primary energy to compressor work) the overall energy requirement for air capture with geologic sequestration is about 4 GJ/tC.

The 4 GJ/tC minimum may be compared to the carbon-specific energy content of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas have about 40, 50, and 70 GJ/tC respectively. Thus if the energy for air capture is provided by fossil fuels then the amount of carbon captured from the air can in principle be much larger than the carbon content of the fuel used to capture it. The fuel carbon can, of course, be captured as part of the process rather than being emitted to the air.

I cannot find a good web link, but I clearly recall reading about experiments conducted over 25 years ago (I think I read about it in Science magazine as a teen) where scientists severed the optic nerves of rats, near the location where the two nerve bundles cross just before entering the opposite sides of the brain. They then reconnected the nerves to the wrong eyes. After initially healing from the surgery, the rats were confused for a while, then fairly quickly adapted and within a short period of time (days to weeks) were acting as if nothing were wrong. A similar experiment was conducted on cats by actually inverting one of their eyeballs:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w4t82x8u734014 26/

A scientist named George Stratton, as the parent post (and I now see another post below) mentioned, conducted similar experiments on humans with inverting prism glasses, and had similar results. Here is another link to a description:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w9n3wk699uu5vc c6/
And an experiment with lateral offsets to vision, in children (probably related to how eyeglasses affect our brains and our hand-eye coordination):
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920(193303) 4%3A1%3C6%3AMLOCIH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

The brain is remarkable.

I cannot find a good web link, but I clearly recall reading about experiments conducted over 25 years ago (I think I read about it in Science magazine as a teen) where scientists severed the optic nerves of rats, near the location where the two nerve bundles cross just before entering the opposite sides of the brain. They then reconnected the nerves to the wrong eyes. After initially healing from the surgery, the rats were confused for a while, then fairly quickly adapted and within a short period of time (days to weeks) were acting as if nothing were wrong. A similar experiment was conducted on cats by actually inverting one of their eyeballs:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w4t82x8u734014 26/

A scientist named George Stratton, as the parent post (and I now see another post below) mentioned, conducted similar experiments on humans with inverting prism glasses, and had similar results. Here is another link to a description:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w9n3wk699uu5vc c6/
And an experiment with lateral offsets to vision, in children (probably related to how eyeglasses affect our brains and our hand-eye coordination):
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920(193303) 4%3A1%3C6%3AMLOCIH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

The brain is remarkable.

It has actually already been placed online, and can be read on SpringerLink with the appropriate access.

Better link to the paper directly:
https://www.springerlink.com/content/02648wu132m07 804/resource-secured/?target=fulltext.html

IAMB (I'm a molecular biologist) and I just read the paper online. Not a horrible study, but not terribly conclusive. Check the Acknowlegment:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/02648wu132m078 04/?p=9a49e2d215844a92a26a8eec3e8e4467&pi=0

"Acknowledgments We thank Anne-Laure Afchain for her help in statistical analyses, and the CRIIGEN scientific and administrative councils for expertise, and initiating judiciary actions by the former French minister of environment, Corinne Lepage, to obtain the data. We also thank Frederique Baudoin for secretarial assistance, and Dr. Brian John and Ian Panton for advising on the English revision of the manuscript. This work was supported by Greenpeace Germany who, in June 2005, won the Appeal Court action against Monsanto, who wanted to keep the data confidential. We acknowledge the French Ministry of Research and the member of Parliament François Grosdidier for a contract to study health assessments of GMOs, as well as the support of Carrefour Group, Quality, Responsibility and Risk Management."

Supported by Greenpeace...I love the organization, but there is a possible stigma of bias here. Like big tobacco funding studies scientists likely to do research that favors their cause....

The article says "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Technology", and as far as I can tell there's no such journal. Reuters probably made a mistake, and meant "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology".

At any rate, I couldn't find the study in question. It might not be published yet, so anyone who's really interested can check out this link in a couple weeks. Full text PDFs are available for current volumes.

Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology: http://www.springerlink.com/content/02648wu132m078 04/fulltext.html

I'm not an MD, but apparently emphysema is a little broader than we laymen think.

OK, this explanation may not be simple, but I'm putting it out here anyways because it includes factors that make an interesting story.

You need to read at least 1/2 way through that article to get to the interesting stuff, but it basically says that radio waves in the 250Hz range will misdirect the navigational function of bees. It talks about Russian bee studies and and the possibility of foul play by said Russians with mind control devices (250Hz also causes agitation in humans) and the like.

Though that explanation is satisfying to me I'm sure there are people out there that would instantly deem this a conspiracy theory and reject it out of hand. In order to thwart those attempts I'll include a second theory - 240Hz is a subharmonic of our 60Hz power system and as electrical consumption increases so do the electromagnetic fields produced by the system... i.e. we've reached the consumption point of overhead power transmission that generates enough EM to dislocate the bees.

If you'd like to keep bees you'll need a bigger Faraday cage.

We've know for the last 30 years, that were are emerging from a little ice age.

The temperature has changed ~1.2C in the last 200 years.

If you read the scholar.google.com papers, 1.1C is caused by increased solar activity. http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2n447034x15v0 87/

0.1C is attributed to atmospheric CO2.

Human activity is responsible for 50% of CO2, the other 50% is volcanic sources.

That makes human activity culpable for about 0.05C in two hundred years.

Of course this paper attributes global warming to cosmic forces http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TJK-471854M-3&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31 %2F2003&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c& _acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid= 10&md5=4df335c97179a6aebe85bacebd0679fe

We've reached the technological ability to see the change, and like Chicken Little run around declaring the "the sky is falling".

"Change, it's the only thing that stays the same" --Levar Burton.

... which is why I said to go read the widely-cited paper by Antoine Joux---published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2004---"Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions. Application to Cascaded Constructions". The email is just a summary for others who aren't interested enough to pay $95 for the proceedings of CRYPTO 2004.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u80t675421l380 48/

And unless I'm missing something, I can think of no obvious scientific reason to attribute Gulf War Syndrome with U-238. It smells very much like public paranoia and mis-information: Uranium 238 is depleted Uranium: it is not fissile, and it's half-life is near 5 billion years. It is rather abundant in bricks---which is why most building have a higher ambient radiation than the outdoors (even though the buildings shield some cosmic rays, they usually have enough Uranium in the bricks to compensate).

That the level of radiation is of absolutely no concern whatsoever, and calling it one of the 'most dangerous toys of all time' is spreading public mis-information.

If RF is supposedly targeting lipid bilayers, then any sort of RF-related brain damage/cancer risk should be magnified dozens of times ... Anybody ever heard anything about this?

Citation?

What about this article showing that subthermal 2.4GHz microwaves significantly accelerated the development of chemically-induced cancer?: http://www.springerlink.com/content/gl78h815206128 71/

Here's a processed version of a Lancet article stating some really scary things: http://www.2lolii.com/If%20Mobile%20Phones%20Were% 20a%20Type%20of%20Food.pdf. Apparently cellphones happen to resonate with important brain waves.

This is not directly relevant, but here's an article showing that olive oil degrades into more harmful compounds when microwaved than when conventionally heated. So, thermal effects certainly aren't the only effects that ought to concern us: http://www.springerlink.com/content/0yblxvnrnhmd8p 4e/

I'm definitely going to treat my cellphone and other devices with much greater respect after this! Too bad I work in a CS building all day, no real way to escape radiation for the better part of my life.

Citation?

What about this article showing that subthermal 2.4GHz microwaves significantly accelerated the development of chemically-induced cancer?: http://www.springerlink.com/content/gl78h815206128 71/

Here's a processed version of a Lancet article stating some really scary things: http://www.2lolii.com/If%20Mobile%20Phones%20Were% 20a%20Type%20of%20Food.pdf. Apparently cellphones happen to resonate with important brain waves.

This is not directly relevant, but here's an article showing that olive oil degrades into more harmful compounds when microwaved than when conventionally heated. So, thermal effects certainly aren't the only effects that ought to concern us: http://www.springerlink.com/content/0yblxvnrnhmd8p 4e/

I'm definitely going to treat my cellphone and other devices with much greater respect after this! Too bad I work in a CS building all day, no real way to escape radiation for the better part of my life.

This http://www.springerlink.com/content/p3rh75r4n38136 6w/ seem
to cast doubt on how broadly the Todd Rider conclusion is applicable.

This http://www.springerlink.com/content/p3rh75r4n38136 6w/ seem
to cast doubt on how broadly the Todd Rider conclusion is applicable.

Unbearable Phantom Pain A good-looking man who had lost both of his legs in Vietnam was brought to me in a wheelchair. No one had been able to help with the pain at the end of where his right foot had been. He vividly recalled the scene of stepping on a land mine and watching the bones and flesh of his right foot explode into pieces. The pain he now had was massive. The sensations were so similar to the original shock that he could never get relief from the traumatic memories. The relentless pain also led to terrible nightmares. His left foor wasn't as painful. It sometimes itched, but it was a mild discomfort compared with the area of his right foot.

As he sat there with his friend, he cried and said, "The pain is so excruciating, and the way it keeps me tied to my past is so bad, that I sometimes think of taking a gun to my head." I could see the energy still there in both of his absent legs, and I could feel it with my hands. I followed the energy along his absent legs to the end of where his feet had been. It was palpable. My hand began to hurt terribly. I asked him if my hand was in the area of the worst pain, and it was. The most painful areas were at the sides of his feet, which happens to be at the end of the bladder meridian. I said to him, "This may sound crazy to you, but I believe I can hold some points in midair hwere your feet were and help you."

I moved my hands to the ends of his legs, where his feet had been, and held the points on the bladder meridian. As the two men watched thses strange conjurings, it must have seemed to them that I was just holding air. But I was not! I felt and saw the meridian lines as strongly as if his legs were still there. At first it was painful for him to have me touch the area of his absent right foot. After a couple of minutes, he reported that not only was the foot being relieved of the pain, but another chronic pain in his back, just above his waist, was also lifting. Interestingly, that area is also goverened by the bladder meridian.

His kidney and liver meridians were also involved, and I held those points as well. ... By the time I had finished holding his liver points, he was pain free. I showed the friend, who lived with him, how to hold points and which points to hold. The man and his friend never returned, but on my invitation they called me about once a month. The friend told me that after the session, the manbegan to lift out of his deep depression. While the phantom pain would return every now and then, they knew how to deal with it.

-pg 31-32

• 6 GtC/year emitted per year
• 100 kilos per 10" balsam fir (50 years old; that's a bit slow
  of a turn-around for the market, but older trees absorb more carbon).
• 800 trees per acre

Hahaha that's silly - wtf are they going to do, run away? Next time I see a cow choke on a "toxic" blade of grass I'll believe that one.

Grass, no, but more sophisticated plants, yes.

Feel free to look it up

Similarly, douglas firs produce alleochemicals to warn other trees to increase production of anti-feedant chemicals, when they are under attack.

So unless you actually have any idea what you're talking about, STFU.

Why is your assertion that computers can't (or worse, can, but should not be allowed to) determine what is an accurate statement any less "creepily religious" than the google fetishists who think it's inevitable?

This is a fair question, and rather than overly defend a statement that I threw in on a bit of whimsy at the end, I'll go the short route and just say: Maybe it's just as creepy. But I want to underscore that this statement, which I said partly just to be provocative, is dancing around a true philosophical/religious issue (where in the context of this paragraph I'll define religion to be "the pursuit of the answer to unanswerable questions like whether there's a reason we're here at all, what happens after death, where did the Universe come from, and is there any point to existence if we're doomed to die soon (as individuals) or later (as a society, due to supernova, heat death of the universe, or whatever)" rather than as the dogmatic attempt to answer such questions by fiat, which is more how I was using religion in my provocative remark). I didn't mean to say that computers can't assess truth, I meant to ask the question: if computers are to do this for us, what are we retaining to ourselves? Because it follows not logically but pragmatically that a huge number of people are lazy, and once told that the computer can assess truth, they'll simply believe it rather than work hard to find their own truth. And also, if not today then in some tomorrow, there is a likely scenario where people are forced to ask: are we the dispensible ones or are machines, and where machines might be asking the same question, and where it might be an us/them choice. Some people believe machines will eventually replace us, and in a distant future where machines were actually smarter, that doesn't disturb me. What disturbs me is if computers displace us when they are not in fact yet smart nor wise nor even intelligent but have only misassessed that they are because an arbitrary probability calculation has been mistaken for Truth with a capital T.

As long as we are still asking questions about truth, I think we're on track. Google as an entity for asking questions of the world does not disturb me (well, not as much). Google as an entity for dispensing answers that require computation disturbs me more. Because I want "competition" and the ability to challenge. If Google can tell me who's lying, how much bigger a leap is it to tell me who I should vote for? Hey, why not just let it assess public policy and say what's good and what's not? I don't own the resources to challenge that. Nor do I know anyone who does. So I guess we'll just have to take it's word. So it starts to resemble a religion, a government, a prison in ways that are at least disturbing and where any rational person would say we should err on the side of asking questions and challenging assumptions, not simply assuming "this is fine" until it's too late.

yes, an algorithm *is* immune to lying. It's output may be inaccurate, but lying requires intent to decieve

So it's impossible to write an algorithm that requires, employs, benefits from, or otherwise involves lying? I remember seeing papers out of Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) on this issue decades ago and being fascinated by the issues of whether lying would optimize variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, for example. A quick web search for terms relating to this (heh--thanks Google!) turned up The Case of the Lying Postman: Decoys and Deception in Negotiation and Economic Implications of Agent Technology and E-Commerce as well as others. I haven't read these references myself, but I'm betting they'll support my