Slashdot Mirror

You know that in the 70ies it was common knowledge that the cooling cycle was about to begin somewhere in the late 90ies,

"Common knowledge"? Maybe, by the public. But not among scientists.

These guys probably beg to differ :P

If you want something really flashy, you could install one of these high resolution walls for your video wall:

http://vis.ucsd.edu/~cglx/

disclaimer: I am affiliated with this group

The size constraint for cameras is the lens, not the sensor size. We already have small, handy point-and-shoots that match the resolution of DSLRs. But the image quality is generally poorer because the lenses are smaller (and not manufactured as exactingly). A camera on an iPod Nano will suck because the lens will be tiny and collect much less light than a 35mm lens.

One interesting development is origami lenses that use a flat array of angled mirrors to collect the same light as a comparable-diameter lens, but without the length, so you can have 35mm lenses of any focal length that are an eighth of an inch thick--your iPhone can then be as good as a DSLR for image quality.

Not sure where the 109 million tons of ammonia comes from... globally we use over a billion tons/yr of ammonia for fertilizer production.

Search for 109. That's the world total ammonia use in 2002. Looks like previous estimates were greatly exaggerated.

Plus we need the phosphates and potassium, eventually we'll need to recover those, as the mines will be depleted.

As phosphate prices rise, someone will find a solution. I don't know what it is yet. It might be method of farming that does not use phosphates. It might be a mining process. As for potassium, it makes up %1.1 percent of the salt in seawater. When we start large scale water desal, we'll get the potassium.

But we've also got to change inefficient consumption habits.

No we don't. That's exactly the point of the my post. My post was calculated using hydro. When you calculate that using solar, you get a tiny fraction of solar energy input, even when grotesquely inefficient methods of production are used. If that number went up ten, even a hundred times, in a solar world, nothing would happen. What will happen is that the market will sort it out. The price of meat will go up and people will stop eating it.

But in poorer countries? And what kind of political instability, and economic instability, will the global food shortages cause?

The shortages in those countries are caused not by high prices abroad, but by the difficulty of getting food to the people there. This is caused by dictators as well as the poor road ways (which is caused by a lack of economic freedom caused by dictators). If you want to solve these problems, you have to send a huge army of teachers and security guards. You have to pay for everyone in the whole country to go to school and college. Then the "food" crisis will be solved. But who would pay for that?

It's probably about time to mention the fact that the expansion Machine Access Code is in wide use, even if it is not the expansion you like.

Examples;

• UCSF ITFS: Wireless Networking and Security Standards: Legacy host based authorization systems utilizing the machine address code (MAC) may continue to be used until June 30th 2010
• Bluetooth essentials for programmers: 1.2.1: "Identical to the Machine Access Code (MAC) address for Ethernet"
• Source: Computer Crime Research Center, for another user's Ethernet address (known as a MAC or Machine Address Code)
• Book of the Dead, Patricia Daniels Cornwell; "Sandman's IP doesn't correspond to any MAC at the port. That's the Machine Address Code. Whatever computer the Sandman is using to send his e-mails, it doesn't seem to be one at the port,"
• Symantec.com, "When a host wants to join an IP Multicast group, it sends an Internet Group Multicast Protocol (IGMP) join message specifying its Machine Address Code (MAC) address and "
• Valparaiso University, Finding Windows System information, " 5. The Ethernet Address will be listed as the Physical Address. Machine Address Code (MAC)"
• PostgreSQL: A comprehensive guide, Korry Douglas, Susan Douglas; pg 106; "The acronym MAC stands for one of the following: Machine Address Code, Media Access Control, or Macaroni and Cheese"
• [1]
• Temple University, "Please note that you must first register the machine address code (MAC) of your laptop with Computer and Media Services before you can take advantage of this service. "
• Pharmacology Information Technology, "To register your computer, you'll need to know your computer's Machine Address Code (MAC) address, basically the serial number of your ethernet port."
• Chaminade Univeristy, "Examples of information which we receive, and may store, include (although are not necessarily limited to) the Internet protocol (IP) address used to communicate with us; the Machine Address Code (MAC) number of your computer"
• eHow: How to Find the Machine Address Code on a PowerMac

Here is work from the academic community exploring error rates, latencies and some other factors. It compares 11 NAND flash chips (both SLC and MLC) from 5 manufacturers: http://nvsl.ucsd.edu/ftest.html

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy.

Yet again, it's the "everyone else was ignoring" clause that I'm disagreeing with. Watts isn't the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn't the first person to examine stations in person, he's just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.

Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

Radtea made a similar argument, which I've already pointed out is ridiculous.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again.

You're not the first "graduate student of the philosophy of science" to say these things. And it's really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. is in physics, with a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper was part of my physics M.S. defense). It's only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth's time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize that you think that "I don't fucking know what I'm talking about" but I'm curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Again, you're not the first person to change the topic from "how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles" to something like "Is justified true belie

By performing controlled experiments, researchers have found that Carbon Dioxide Does Not Boost Forest Growth.

If carbon dioxide does not stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, how do you explain the rising concentration of the gas over the past 100 years?

This is 100% correct. The purpose of NIF is more or less to test nukes without testing nukes. The energy production bit is 90% greenwashing, 10% truth, because you can learn some useful physics (depending on what they release).

There are WAY better ways, cheaper too, to do research for laser-fusion energy production. One of these, the High-Average-Power Laser (HAPL) program, has been defunded by Congress and more or less disowned by the Dept. of Energy for the last 2 years, because they're owned by weapons interests and the institutional inertia of magnetic fusion.

HAPL differs in that it was cost-effective, had a roadmap to a demo power plant, and focused on things that are actually useful for energy production: repetition rates of 5+ Hz (NIF is hours), direct ignition designs and mass-production pellet fuel that don't require messy gold hohlraums, and KrF lasers instead of glass ones that produce deeper (more effective) UV light directly.

Look it up: http://www-ferp.ucsd.edu/HAPL/

Yes, I was somewhat involved, and more than a little sad that this cheap ($40M/yr) program got sidelined, though we haven't given up yet.

At least for the discovery. My wife is Dr. Russet McMillan, and I was spotting for her during that laser run. (Spotters are armed with kill switches and stand on the catwalk and watch for aircraft). She was extremely excited when she found it! Unfortunately on our next run, Sunday night, she couldn't hit it. I think our next laser run is 1am Thursday or Friday, we'll see what happens then.

A better source of information on this is the UCSD press release: http://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/news/releases/release_detail.php?release_id=296

I love to point out that Russet and the observatory was the final segment of the Mythbusters Lunar Landing episode.

Now I have to design a t-shirt that says "I helped to find the lost Lunokhod 1 lander and I had to make my own stupid t-shirt!" I wonder if Photoshop has a Cyrillic-looking English font.

Note, by the way, that LLR returns are always exactly 1 photon per shot, so this flash was no fainter than any other LLR return.

"The large aperture of the telescope in combination with the good atmospheric "seeing" at the site has launched us into the regime of recording multiple returned laser photons per pulse"
(http://www.physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/apollo.html)

Also, what you mean is what's detected from a return, not what actually returns - which is quite a bit more.

This means there are now six useable reflectors. See the list from the investigators.

As a sidenote: the earth has gone through numerous hot and cold periods; the CO2 levels rising can also be the *result* of a heating earth, instead of being the cause. The CO2 infrared absorption lines and it's presence in the atmosphere are both very small: it has just a very little real effect on heating up the air. CO2 will escape from water when the temperature rises though... We know temperatures are rising, so we can expect to see the level of CO2 rising too.

Not wanting to turn this into another climate change flamewar - but it's both a cause and a result; when it's something else doing driving the change (e.g. the sun), carbon dioxide increases as a result of the temperature increase and it amplifies the initial driving force through a positive feedback, when it's carbon dioxide doing the driving (as it appears to be at the moment), the temperature increase is the result itself.

There's a quick way to check whether the increase is coming from the oceans - photosynthesis has a slight preference for carbon-12 over the heavier carbon-13, so if fossil fuels are responsible for the rise, the carbon-13 ratio should be decreasing. If the oceans are temporarily overwhelming the biosphere, it should be increasing.

Guess which one it is.

Also, the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is lower than our emissions. Nature is busy trying to remove it from the atmosphere, let alone being a source itself.

I already posted this in the thread, but it's very relevant to your post. This paper describes a system for decoding keys based on images. In their testing, they were able to do it at 200 feet with a telephoto setup costing under $2000.

As a separate point, lock picking depends on the quality of the locks. While it may take 15 minutes to open a high security lock, most people tend to buy much cheaper locks (like Kwickset) which are much easier. It takes me less than 10 seconds to open the lock on my friend's apartment, and most of that time is spent inserting the tools.

Benjamin Laxton, Kai Wang, and Stefan Savage. Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding. ACM CCS 2008, Alexandria, VA, October 2008.

It's really quite a fun read. They have software that takes the picture, transforms the image, and decodes the key, turning it into a 5 digit number which you stick into a COTS keycutting machine to make your key. With their telephoto experiments, they tried to read keys at 100 feet. Out of 10 keys, they got 7 on the first try, 9 by the second try and all 10 by the third try. They then tested it from a roof, taking pictures of a keyring sitting on a table of a cafe across the street, 195 feet away, and decoded the key. The important thing is that once the software is written, anyone can use it. You can decode someone's key, and then go to a locksmith with the 5 digit code.

If KSM puts the KVM module on par with Xen in terms of performance then I think the writing is on the wall for Xen's demise.

No. Not at all. KSM saves memory but hurts performance. It shares memory across virtual machines to save memory.

Xen can't share memory across virtual machines, it's just not put together like that.

Actually, this exact feature is scheduled for the next release of Xen, plus a few other neat tricks such as sharing memory at sub-page granularity and transparently compressing pages which aren't used very often. See, e.g., here for more details.

(And, yes, it is kind of vapour ware at the moment, but it's slightly less vapourish than normal in the sense that actual honest-to-God working code does exist somewhere, even if it's not production-quality yet.)

Interestingly enough, I'm taking a class on that.

http://neurosciences.ucsd.edu/

Consider this result, and the data it references. A few rogue emails are just noise, not signal.

The result in the Nature letter, which I recall appearing in some other form a few years earlier, is the first information that made me go "oh shit" -- it's based on a long record of observations designed to minimize local effects, and it shows both CO2 increase, and evidence of warming. (And the whole crowd that's blathering on about water vapor and solar cycles and failure to measure X-rays and Mars and Jupiter -- sorry, that's been looked at, you guys are nuts and seriously in denial. Most of this shit can be checked with a few mouse clicks nowadays.)

Perhaps, but most imaging systems are already displaying in green monotone ;-)

Bioluminescence comes in colours from red to blue.

Falcon

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.html

Because those companies have money and make some indirect use of the technology. They'd probably sue Coke if they could find a networked vending machine.

Some coke machines are networked.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~bsy/coke.html

Who is the receiver? Me, or my ISP?

You are the receiver. Your ISP is a carrier. You elect to connect to private networks, who may charge subscription fees of you. For use of the ISP's network, those same private network owners may pay for their provisioned capacity.

...what happens if my ISP decides - of its own free will or because Disney/Government forced it to - to deny anonymous inbound traffic? I don't have any choice of ISPs where I live, and of course they too would be forced to obey such laws.

This is possible, sure. Just as, today, the same lobbying group could attempt to force the government to mandate that your ISP sniff your every packet to detect that you're pirating Steamboat Willie. However, bear in mind that the goal is to add an economic incentive to the ISP to fight restrictions. The ISP wants to sell services to as many private network providers as possible because they are being paid for the reserved capacity. When the copyright cartel meets the ISP lobby in Congress, there's at least a chance that things could improve. As it stands, the only ISP incentive to fight it is the cost of the monitoring equipment, and I'm sure the copyright cartel would be thrilled to provide it to them, along with their own custom software....

...the rest of us are not allowed to keep our own anonymous network, because anonymity is a threat to those in power by making monitoring people harder. Please cease researching growth hormones for Big Brother, it's huge enough already.

Either I have not explained things adequately or you have misunderstood. The goal is to enable disruptive, innovative network technologies which cannot currently be deployed because they might conflict with the existing technologies. (For a particularly disruptive example, look at Decongestion Control [PDF].) There's no desire to block existing technologies, and I'd fully expect the existing Internet to continue alongside the new networks. Retaining the existing Internet is a primary goal of the research thrust, and I'd reject as unworkable any new architecture that didn't enable it.

Really, the most undesirable thing about the model is that it enables a lot more nickel-and-diming from the ISPs and the network providers. You might pay a base fee for ISP connectivity, followed by an additional fee for access to the base Internet, then you pay a fee to connect to the SpamFreeEmailNetwork, and so forth ad nauseum. But at least you only need to pay for the services you use, and I could see package deals (analogous to cable channel bundles) becoming a selling point, too.

Oh, you think the printing press was cheap or easy to build and that it quickly became ubiqutious, all 600 years before the factory method of building? Again, I think you need to read and learn more. The world didn't get a printing press, and then the next year books were everywhere and easily copied.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/printech.html

Define hacked. My ROM based computer is pretty damned immune to being hacked, in the traditional definition of the word.

A recent paper reports on hacking a voting machine that could only execute out of ROM. Interesting paper. I hadn't read about the technique they used before--it's quite ingenious. Turns out, being ROM-based didn't make it unhackable at all.

Even more important: unlike trannies (no offense intended to any TG folk reading this), we intersexed people do not choose to be in the situation we are in.

C'mon don't call me a tranny and then innocently insist "no offense". I don't know about your suggestion that I actually wanted to be trans either. The only choice I had was transition or die. Years ago, I remember digging up info, trying to figure out why I am the way I am. Though I'm no longer curious about specifics, I'm sufficiently convinced there's a rational explanation for my disorder - you know, "neurologically intersexed", no offense.

Yeah, and all of the methods the GP posted are needlessly messy, dangerous, and destructive. Try this instead: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
Secure Erase uses ATA commands to tell the drive erase itself using the drive's own built in methods. Using the Secure Erase ATA command will erase parts of the drive that are normally missed by reformatting using the OS, and takes on the order of 20 minutes. Data on an ATA hard drive can be missed by the OS, ATA drives reallocate sectors due to damaged media and do so on the fly. If this happens and an all zero reformat is attempted, the old sectors are left behind, potentially with usable data left behind. The issue is that the ATA command set only exposes logical locations on the drive and not the direct physical addresses. Multiple pass erasing stresses the drive media a large amount, shortening the life of the drive itself. In any case, a secure erase will get the hidden data erased better anyway.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/27/2310234

and my comment to the first story: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1213805&cid=27741803

I'm guessing the inventor's statistics "In the office environment, 52% of respondents left their machines on for remote access, and 35% did so to support applications running in the background, of which e-mail and IM were most popular (47%)." are still true.

http://mesl.ucsd.edu/yuvraj/research/documents/Somniloquy-NSDI09-Yuvraj-Agarwal.pdf

I regularly read Dr. Vahdat's blog. I first got interested in it after reading his paper on Epidemic Routing which can be found in his list of publications here.

If you read his blog post you will see that he accomplishes his goal by creating a hierarchical tree of MAC addresses instead of a simple table. He also states that a large part of the proliferation of MAC addresses in these systems is due to virtual machines. Therefore everyone's nightmares of cabling hell are relatively moot.

Though I haven't contacted him yet, it seems that this solution would require reassigning new MAC addresses such that they can be organized hierarchically as we are accustomed to doing with IP addresses. If this is the case then it seems one would have two choices:

• Take great care not to use any MAC addresses that are already in use. One would probably need to purchase/register entire blocks of MAC addresses just as a manufacturer of network adapters must do. Or...
• Keep this entire network system separate from any other network system via IP routing and NAT so that the MAC addresses from one network never conflict with the MAC addresses of any other network.

Now, I am not an expert in the details of switches, routing, or NAT so I may have gotten some of the details wrong. But you get the idea.

I regularly read Dr. Vahdat's blog. I first got interested in it after reading his paper on Epidemic Routing which can be found in his list of publications here.

If you read his blog post you will see that he accomplishes his goal by creating a hierarchical tree of MAC addresses instead of a simple table. He also states that a large part of the proliferation of MAC addresses in these systems is due to virtual machines. Therefore everyone's nightmares of cabling hell are relatively moot.

Though I haven't contacted him yet, it seems that this solution would require reassigning new MAC addresses such that they can be organized hierarchically as we are accustomed to doing with IP addresses. If this is the case then it seems one would have two choices:

• Take great care not to use any MAC addresses that are already in use. One would probably need to purchase/register entire blocks of MAC addresses just as a manufacturer of network adapters must do. Or...
• Keep this entire network system separate from any other network system via IP routing and NAT so that the MAC addresses from one network never conflict with the MAC addresses of any other network.

Now, I am not an expert in the details of switches, routing, or NAT so I may have gotten some of the details wrong. But you get the idea.

One of many answers is that there are actually a lot of contests, and the concepts and technology used for them overlap. For example, for much lower payouts but higher probability of success, students can enter the UC San Diego data mining competition, among several others.

The concepts and technology needed to do well at these contests also overlap with non-contest applications, like finding employment or consulting work in data mining. Even if you don't win, a respectable result is a useful way of demonstrating that you understand the fundamental issues and how to make progress on them. Many companies aren't looking to hire researchers to push the state of the art in data-mining, so being the winning team (which usually involves some new research) isn't necessarily the only positive outcome; rather, many want to hire practitioners who can apply the current state of the art intelligently, which even a mid-range respectable result is good evidence of.

At the risk of being modded off-topic, I have some interesting information I'd like to contribute in regards to meat. There is increasing evidence that due to our specific evolutionary path, us humans have evolved such that eating other mammals is harmful to us. This is because we stopped producing certain sialic acids in the glycan layers of cells. Here is some more info.

Multiple changes in sialic acid biology during human evolution
http://cmm.ucsd.edu/varki/varkilab/B131.pdf

"Additionally, metabolic incorporation of Neu5Gc
from animal-derived materials occurs into biotherapeutic
molecules and cellular preparations - and into human
tissues from dietary sources, particularly red meat and milk
products. As humans also have varying and sometime high
levels of circulating anti-Neu5Gc antibodies, there are
implications for biotechnology products, and for some
human diseases associated with chronic inflammation."

"A third possibility is that
the ability of CMAH null individuals to generate anti-Neu5Gc
antibodies (see below) protected them from enveloped
viruses that originated from individuals with intact Neu5Gc
expression--as is postulated to occur with other glycan
variations associated with circulating antibodies [1, 40]."

"Another consequence of the loss of Neu5Gc is that it
became a foreign antigen. This is of potential significance
because of evidence that bound or free Neu5Gc from
extracellular fluids can get incorporated into human cells,
both in tissue culture [57, 58], and into the intact body (the
latter from dietary sources) [57], and because all humans
express varying levels of antibodies against glycans
terminating in Neu5Gc [57, 59, 60]."

"Taken together, all these data are consistent with the
hypothesis that human T cells are prone to hyper-reactivity,
perhaps explaining the human propensity for diseases
associated with excessive T cell responses, such as
rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and other autoimmune disor-
ders [94-96]."

"In this regard, a human volunteer study
confirmed that orally ingested Neu5Gc is indeed taken up
into the human body [57]. The limited survey of foods that
has been done so far indicates that the richest source of
Neu5Gc involves red meats (lamb, pork, and beef), with
bovine milk products containing significant amounts. Thus
we have hypothesized that the long-term dietary intake of
Neu5Gc with incorporation into endothelium and epitheli-
um could combine with the circulating anti-Neu5Gc anti-
bodies (see below), to stimulate chronic inflammation [10]."

"As noted above, earlier literature had
also reported more easily detectable anti-Neu5Gc anti-
bodies in patients with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, infec-
tious mononucleosis and other diseases."

"The major dietary sources of Neu5Gc appear to be foods of
mammalian origin, and major sites of accumulation
(endothelia of blood vessels and epithelial cells lining
hollow organs) [57], happen to also be the sites of diseases
that seem to preferentially occur in humans, i.e. large-vessel
occluding atherosclerosis and carcinomas of epithelial
origin."

"Interestingly, the
Cmah null mice also showed a definite human-like delay in
wound healing [108]."

BS

Absolutely. This "cure" is nonsense. The slashdot summary directly states "moderate amounts of the protein are found in the lining of normal intestines". It would be insane to increase the immune response for this protein. Over-active or inappropriate immune response is the cause of many many human diseases. See the following article:

Multiple changes in sialic acid biology during human evolution
http://cmm.ucsd.edu/varki/varkilab/B131.pdf

"Additionally, metabolic incorporation of Neu5Gc
from animal-derived materials occurs into biotherapeutic
molecules and cellular preparations - and into human
tissues from dietary sources, particularly red meat and milk
products. As humans also have varying and sometime high
levels of circulating anti-Neu5Gc antibodies, there are
implications for biotechnology products, and for some
human diseases associated with chronic inflammation."

"A third possibility is that
the ability of CMAH null individuals to generate anti-Neu5Gc
antibodies (see below) protected them from enveloped
viruses that originated from individuals with intact Neu5Gc
expression--as is postulated to occur with other glycan
variations associated with circulating antibodies [1, 40]."

"Another consequence of the loss of Neu5Gc is that it
became a foreign antigen. This is of potential significance
because of evidence that bound or free Neu5Gc from
extracellular fluids can get incorporated into human cells,
both in tissue culture [57, 58], and into the intact body (the
latter from dietary sources) [57], and because all humans
express varying levels of antibodies against glycans
terminating in Neu5Gc [57, 59, 60]."

"Taken together, all these data are consistent with the
hypothesis that human T cells are prone to hyper-reactivity,
perhaps explaining the human propensity for diseases
associated with excessive T cell responses, such as
rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and other autoimmune disor-
ders [94-96]."

"In this regard, a human volunteer study
confirmed that orally ingested Neu5Gc is indeed taken up
into the human body [57]. The limited survey of foods that
has been done so far indicates that the richest source of
Neu5Gc involves red meats (lamb, pork, and beef), with
bovine milk products containing significant amounts. Thus
we have hypothesized that the long-term dietary intake of
Neu5Gc with incorporation into endothelium and epitheli-
um could combine with the circulating anti-Neu5Gc anti-
bodies (see below), to stimulate chronic inflammation [10]."

"As noted above, earlier literature had
also reported more easily detectable anti-Neu5Gc anti-
bodies in patients with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, infec-
tious mononucleosis and other diseases."

"The major dietary sources of Neu5Gc appear to be foods of
mammalian origin, and major sites of accumulation
(endothelia of blood vessels and epithelial cells lining
hollow organs) [57], happen to also be the sites of diseases
that seem to preferentially occur in humans, i.e. large-vessel
occluding atherosclerosis and carcinomas of epithelial
origin."

"Interestingly, the
Cmah null mice also showed a definite human-like delay in
wound healing [108]."

BS

The Apollo LLR site has looked for Lunakhod 1, but without success so far. These LLR retroreflectors are arrays, and would work if a few corner cubes were cracked.

It's approximate position is of course known, but not well compared to the spot size. Searches can be made to go faster by defocusing the laser, thus making the spot larger, but that lowers the return (the larger spot has fewer photons per square meter). If the retroreflector isn't oriented towards Earth, that will cut down on the return, and it might not be possible to see it with a defocused laser. So, if LRO can see it, the Apollo LLR site will look for a return from the exact spot.

My prediction, FWIW, is that they will find it.

Here you can find a brief description of the Milky Way structure. In the time frame of 1 Gy our solar system makes probably four revolutions around the center of our galaxy. I try to make an example about what is the problem with the theory related with TFA. Suppose you live in New York City: get out from your home, look carefully to people around you, then get into the underground. Make four trips all around the city, and go back home. Are the very same people you met before still all around you ?!? Some of your neighbours for sure, others don't, somebody who previously was hidden is now in sight of you, and somebody else died or emigrated elsewhere. Now you are the solar system: what if one of your neighbours is like this one ? And what about dark matter (if ever exists) ? My point is that to prove or disprove the theories from Shaviv or Mellot we need something better than a piece of paper with a sketch of our galaxy, and a sign showing "you are here". I wonder if some further evidence can be inferred from geological data besides O16/O18 measurements. I am very curious about the outcome...

That method works, but for the day or more it took them to do that, using the Secure Erase ATA command on that drive would have been more secure and taken only an hour or two. The Secure Erase command is part of the ATA standard and present on every ATA drive larger than 15GB. The command "dd" cannot access and erase every sector as ATA drives do not allow access to certain sectors, like reallocated sectors. Even though SCSI drives do not have this limitation, I still wouldn't erase one with "dd", there are probably better open source tools. An even better and faster option for even more secure erasure on ATA drives, is to use the drive in encrypted mode. When done with the drive, toss the encryption key. This makes any data on the drive practically unusable. Reuse of the drive is still possible with a standard reformat after unlocking the drive.

More reading:
Hard Drive data erasure methods are described on page 27 of the PDF or page 19 as printed on the document:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf

Describes different methods of data sanitization on magnetic hard drives. Discusses hard drives exclusively, unlike the NIST paper above.
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf

Page from the author of the above paper with a DOS program that can send a Secure Erase ATA command to a drive, no source though:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

However, t13.org the website of the ATA standards body is here, and has the last drafts of standards available here (nearly as good as the actual standards, which cost money):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/MinutesDefault.aspx?DocumentType=4&DocumentStage=2

Start here though for the Secure Erase Command:
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2009/d2015r1a-ATAATAPI_Command_Set_-_2_ACS-2.pdf

That method works, but for the day or more it took them to do that, using the Secure Erase ATA command on that drive would have been more secure and taken only an hour or two. The Secure Erase command is part of the ATA standard and present on every ATA drive larger than 15GB. The command "dd" cannot access and erase every sector as ATA drives do not allow access to certain sectors, like reallocated sectors. Even though SCSI drives do not have this limitation, I still wouldn't erase one with "dd", there are probably better open source tools. An even better and faster option for even more secure erasure on ATA drives, is to use the drive in encrypted mode. When done with the drive, toss the encryption key. This makes any data on the drive practically unusable. Reuse of the drive is still possible with a standard reformat after unlocking the drive.

More reading:
Hard Drive data erasure methods are described on page 27 of the PDF or page 19 as printed on the document:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf

Describes different methods of data sanitization on magnetic hard drives. Discusses hard drives exclusively, unlike the NIST paper above.
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf

Page from the author of the above paper with a DOS program that can send a Secure Erase ATA command to a drive, no source though:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

However, t13.org the website of the ATA standards body is here, and has the last drafts of standards available here (nearly as good as the actual standards, which cost money):
http://www.t13.org/Documents/MinutesDefault.aspx?DocumentType=4&DocumentStage=2

Start here though for the Secure Erase Command:
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2009/d2015r1a-ATAATAPI_Command_Set_-_2_ACS-2.pdf

the lack of respect most Slashdotters have for other beliefs is disheartening.

The same can be applied to believers of religion. However while Slashdotters would let Religionists live as they want, Fundimentalists of various stripes whether Christian Talibans or Muslim Talibans would force people to live the way they say.

Falcon

In today's environment, there's plenty to go around. It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem. People call it the "evils of capitalism" and while greed is a big motivator, look at the pain it causes. They aren't kidding when they say money is the root of all evil.

Most war today is occurring in countries with very low levels of economic freedom. There are far greater evils from government control and over-regulation of economies than from the "free market" of capitalism. The science shows that free markets cause peace.

So greed for power of government over economies is the greed we should truly fear. Lack of economic freedom causes both poverty and war.

I got 2 pages into that PDF before I got fed up with the bullshit. The study you linked talks about DEMOCRACIES being peaceful with each other. It then waffles about how this is because of capitalism. The much simpler and easier to believe reason that democracies are largely more peaceful than dictatorships is because we don't have dictators. Likewise, you are talking about economic freedom. I think you will find that the people you speak of in warzones today have little POLITICAL freedom. I think you may find that political freedom is much more likely to lead to economic freedom than the other way around.

In today's environment, there's plenty to go around. It's not so much "haves and have nots" but "I have and you can't have" that's the problem. People call it the "evils of capitalism" and while greed is a big motivator, look at the pain it causes. They aren't kidding when they say money is the root of all evil.

Most war today is occurring in countries with very low levels of economic freedom. There are far greater evils from government control and over-regulation of economies than from the "free market" of capitalism. The science shows that free markets cause peace.

So greed for power of government over economies is the greed we should truly fear. Lack of economic freedom causes both poverty and war.

Dawkins' message and tone would positively mild compared to partisans like Rush Limbaugh

I completely agree, especially after reading quotations from the American Taliban.

"A boat mapping the sea floor would presumably be mapping at even intervals rather than what we see in the image. At the end of the survey area, I'd expect to see more of a curve or ellipsis rather than hard right angles. "

Not necessarily. For example, during Ocean Drilling Program and the earlier Deep Sea Drilling Program, ships would survey in patterns that coincided with where they planned to drill holes into the sea floor. Generally speaking this yields some kind of geometric pattern, but not necessarily evenly-spaced.

Here's an example of ship-track data in the central Atlantic.

Get a clue, people: the grid-like patterns here and all over the world are ship tracks, as are the ones that radiate from major ports.

Flaw in the sonar system? Not really. It's sort of the other way around.

The global dataset is derived from satellite radar topography of the sea surface, the classic example being the work of Smith and Sandwill (1997). Properly processed, the topography of the sea surface correlates well with the underlying bathymetry. It's a good dataset, and comprehensive, but it is based on a model relationship between the sea surface and the ocean depth. It isn't perfect. Thus, ship-based soundings are still used as "ground truth" and are integrated with the global satellite bathymetry. Inevitably, the readings are slightly different, and, unfortunately, there are only a few places in the world where ship bathymetry is dense enough to completely replace the satellite bathymetry (e.g., areas of swath bathymetry). When the two datasets are merged together and gridded you end up with this kind of artifact, with the sonar-derived values slightly different. Unless you filter carefully you will see lines wherever the ship drove. This is why if you look around you'll also see tracks mysteriously converge on such ports as Bermuda and Hawaii.

So, if there's a flaw, it's more likely in the satellite-derived bathymetry and the model used for it, although sometimes the ship bathymetry can be whacked out too.

More details at:

Smith and Sandwell 1997 summary

ETOPO1 topography/bathymetry -- I think this is the dataset Google Earth is now using

Global Topography

The first one has a figure with a plot of the ship tracks.

You'd have to be pretty unfamiliar with the way this sort of data is collected in order to suspect it had anything to do with Atlantis.

Flaw in the sonar system? Not really. It's sort of the other way around.

The global dataset is derived from satellite radar topography of the sea surface, the classic example being the work of Smith and Sandwill (1997). Properly processed, the topography of the sea surface correlates well with the underlying bathymetry. It's a good dataset, and comprehensive, but it is based on a model relationship between the sea surface and the ocean depth. It isn't perfect. Thus, ship-based soundings are still used as "ground truth" and are integrated with the global satellite bathymetry. Inevitably, the readings are slightly different, and, unfortunately, there are only a few places in the world where ship bathymetry is dense enough to completely replace the satellite bathymetry (e.g., areas of swath bathymetry). When the two datasets are merged together and gridded you end up with this kind of artifact, with the sonar-derived values slightly different. Unless you filter carefully you will see lines wherever the ship drove. This is why if you look around you'll also see tracks mysteriously converge on such ports as Bermuda and Hawaii.

So, if there's a flaw, it's more likely in the satellite-derived bathymetry and the model used for it, although sometimes the ship bathymetry can be whacked out too.

More details at:

Smith and Sandwell 1997 summary

ETOPO1 topography/bathymetry -- I think this is the dataset Google Earth is now using

Global Topography

The first one has a figure with a plot of the ship tracks.

You'd have to be pretty unfamiliar with the way this sort of data is collected in order to suspect it had anything to do with Atlantis.

What I mean by passive detection systems is anything like an optical camera which does not need to emit anything to see something. I am not sure what technologies could be used

Good idea.

http://extreme.ucsd.edu/Research/AcousticDaylight/AcousticDaylight.html

...a revolutionary underwater electronic imaging technique currently under development by a dozen Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) scientists is promising to shed new light into the ocean's murkiest depths.

The technique, known as the Acoustic Daylight Ocean Noise Imaging System (ADONIS), uses the ambient noise present in the ocean- created by everything from passing ships, breaking waves and popping of bubbles- to create images of objects in the water.

Google "Acoustic Daylight" for more.

At UCSD, we already have one of those things.

It commemorated Bush's catline reflexes 12 years before it happened. UCSD is very progressive.

http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/StuartCollection/Murray.htm

10,000 is just as arbitrary a figure as 1,000. If it went back 10,000 years, you'd insist on 20,000 years, or 100,000. You haven't looked at the models and worked out how many years of data we need to get decent figures out.

That's still off by at least an order of magnitude. The earth is something like 4.5 billion years old and ice age cycles are something like 100,000 years in duration.

I have a BIG problem with people saying "(hot|cold)est year on record" when accurate records just do not go very far back.

References:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/03_1.shtml

Secure Erase http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

Weird, not a single commenter knows that there is a secure erase function built into the drive controller of ALL hard disks. All that you need to do is activate it: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml