Slashdot Mirror
Science and Technology In Y2K
sandman935 writes "The editors at Scientific American have a wrap up of the important discoveries in the year 2000. It's a good read." It covers the gamut from the Golden Rice, Gecko's Toes, DNA Microarrays, and the new extra-solar system planets.
Beg your pardon? The man raised a perfectly valid point. If you can't refute it, say so, don't just resort to name-calling.
If you can refute it, on the other hand, feel free to send me an email. I'm willing to back my posts with my real identity.
Einstein? Darwin? Both of these believed in a God, or at least spoke about one. Both of them did work which can be used in arguing against creationism. Do you think that others should have been given their funding and projects?
You're making a mighty big leap.
The Golden rice was designed by a Swiss scientist to lower hunger rates in Africa.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
If the folks who created it get their way it should go a long way to reducing world hunger.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Imagine if G-d had said "In the begining was a mass of photons" to the Israelites, all that would have done is to confuse people who did not have the prior knowedge to understand it.
The cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
It is sequenced when the scientific papers are published.
The publication usually gives a summary of all the genes identified, with the details uploaded
to a NiH database.
For example, the thy cress (sp?) genome was published
a couple weeks ago, being the first higher plant
and largest so far.
You're reading too much into it. People can speak figuratively about God without having any mystic beliefs at all. Don't be too surprised or infer too much whenever you see scientists talk about things only known to God, God's algorithms, etc. Many people use God just as a literary device or character, in connection with just about any deep truth or optimization.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What I think I have noticed is that technology seems to be changing away from critical systems to more fluid, biological systems.
It's definitely happening, but I doubt it's a conscious effort to drive research in that direction. Evolution has been in force for billions of years, and we're at the stage where we're beginning to realise that if there's an easy way to do something, nature's probably found it. As we dig more and more into the nature of plants and animals, we find more and more nifty tricks that can be applied to other areas.
> This year we had a draught that lasted 8 months, followed by 4 months of continuous rain.
It looks like La Niña tripped a switch when she died: there was a sharp change of weather in lots of places in the USA that date almost to the day they annonced she was gone.
The question is, is it possible to pin the powerful El/La Niñ* events of the last couple of decades directly on global warming?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is it just me or is the thing about the study of the brain's mechanism for suppressing agressive responses to negative emotions a little scary? Don't get me wrong, i don't think there is anything wrong with brain research (or dna research or computer research or about any other research... It's what keeps our civilization going...), but the potential applications of this, espescially in the current fear-driven medication-crazy culture are really scary. Clockwork Orange, andybody?
They even mention screening people based on the activity of this neural pathway for their likelyhood to commit violent acts. This is really going to be a can o' worms...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Hm. I can blow a few holes in your theories pretty quickly (despite the fact that I'm a pretty WASPy Anglophile myself). Your English examples are all also countries with great expanses of navigable waters - long coastlines, with great harbors, and many inland rivers. (After all the Brits did have the world's best navy & merchant fleet for almost 200 years). Thus transporting food & redistributing capital, even with 18th century technology (ships & wagons), was pretty easy. Whereas most of the poorest African nations, are totally landlocked and drought-stricken to boot. I think the natural resources and historical factional conflicts of these nations are more relevant factors than the nationality of the imperialists who "discovered" them. As in most places worldwide, the national boundaries (drawn mostly by those imperialists) in Africa are pretty arbitrary, which also leads to conflict.
As far as your other examples go: I don't think there are too many starving Indonesians these days (though many are apparently still beaten with canes). Cambodia was fairly well off until the whole Pol Pot debacle, and they are coming back around now along with Vietnam & the rest of SE Asia. Liberia is coastal, but until the recent strife it was seen as pretty decent - plus it was formed by freed African-American slaves from the U.S. (former English colonies) so I don't think it fits in with your theory. Also, S. Africa & Zimbabwe have a strong Dutch (Afrikaans) & Portuguese influence; Egypt was variously inhabited by folks from Greece & the Roman Empire (remember Cleopatra?), as well as France; French also settled parts of the US (Louisiana) and Canada (Quebec). Not to mention the huge Spanish influence in North and especially Central and South America, the Philippines, etc.
Finally, you could say that in some of your examples, the countries involved only truly blossomed after getting fed up with the Brits and kicking them out (USA, India, etc.). Maybe that's what you meant by "rule themselves, and become proud, self sufficient countries"?
I do agree with your "lining pockets" comment though. That's one of the main reasons food and financial aid is not helping those who need it the most.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
You may be thinking of the high school girl that won the $100k Intel Science Talent Search. Read about it here.
Any know how many qbits are they are up to in a single machine now? Last I heard it was around 7 or so. The article here is a bit fuzzy on details but includes a link to qubit.org's intro. Some of the stuff I have read about this seems amazing, almost SciFi like. Applying this technology to cryptography and computing in general could really change things. The "photon takes two paths at once" thing still blows my mind. The world of the very small is a very strange world indeed. I find the idea of qbit based storage and parallel processing the most interesting. Some say quantum computing will never really work but if it does...just imagine where this stuff is going to take us. I can't wait!
-- soldack
The red one or the blue one? ;-)
>
> A man involved in one of the more purely secular and scientific research projects of human history, and he is a creationist?
Belief in God does not imply creationism.
Flip back to the theological discussion in the "Cosmos" thread, and you'll see a lot of stuff about what types of God(s) would be compatible with the practice of science.
Furthermore, just because science does not require the existence of God doesn't mean that it requires the nonexitence of God.
So no, I see no contradiction here.
Or as seen in a .sig somewhere on the net - "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."
As a previous reply (by Zachary Kessin) to this posting mentioned, Golden rice was developed to add nutrients not found in white rice into it. All of the white rice in the world equaly distributed would not solve many of the problems that quite a few third world countries fight, known as malnutrition.
When Europe had their spheres of influence within Asia they introduced a method of husking the wild rice so that it becomes easier to harvest. The new found ability to create white rice was widely accepted because it allowed for higher production, but what they didn't know is that it strips many of the essential nutrients that the brown rice that they used to produce had. The husk of the rice contains things like beta caratine, and more importantly IRON, which is transfered into the rice if it is not husked early to produce white rice.
Golden rice causes the iron and beta caratine to accumulate within the meat of the rice rather than only on the husk. This allows farmers in third worlds to continue to produce the high volumes of rice necessary to feed their country while at the same time it prevents people from dieing of rickets or other diseases caused by malnutrition. Sure, if they did not husk the rice and went back to eating brown rice then they would not have the problem, but many of these countries try to produce as much food as possible to prevent malnureshment.
We cannot just order these countries to stop producing white rice in favor of brown rice. Nor is it feasible to redistribute the wealth in an even way. At the same time I believe that allowing corperations to run without restriction is an equally bad decision. Pure communism and pure capitalism are nice utopias that don't work.
Saying that all genetic engineering of plants should be stopped because "evil" chemical corperations use it is like saying that all atomic physics research should be halted because the government has nuclear bombs. It is rediculous and uninformed. Sure people will miss-use the technology but it doesn't mean we should ban it.
More research should be done on genetic/chemical engineering but allowing people to die because you fear technology is negligent. Preventing society from progressing because people fear technology is maladaptive.
Halting progress due to ignorance is as bad as letting it run rampent for the same reason.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Scares the crap out of me.
I watch how heavily medicated our children are today, usually as the result of a school study and insistence, and I think about what the future holds for my children...
I was a tough child to raise, although as an adult I'm a fully functioning Helpful Member of Society... but if grade school was *then* like it is *now*, I would have been pumped SO full of medication that God only knows how my life would have gone.
Someday, we'll all be happily functioning busy bees who no longer have to react to emotions or question anything that makes us angry.
That's about as scary as it gets.
It's all about extremes. If it gets really warm, parts of the polar ice caps melt, circulate, and lower the temperature.
Global warming doesn't mean that it's always going to be warm, it means that we're going to see extreme weather. Something like days and days of ice storms in Texas...
I hear ya, I moved out of Oregon back to CT, and brought the rain with me, apparently.
Still, the cause of this warming is unknown. It is known that the Earth's temperature does not tend to stay contanstant, swinging into ice ages and slightly warmer ages. Showing that the Earth's temperature is changing has some uses, but knowing why would let us know if there is something we should do about it or if it is just a natural occurance we will have to weather.
-no broken link
If only someone could invent some machine which spews the cremated remains of dinosaurs into the air while shovelling my snow for me... :)
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
"Sometime early in the next century, the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within several decades, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike today's virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they tell us so. By 2019 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains." I like the first line of this because as we all know the next century begins on Sunday night but there are no good parties this year and I had to work last. :(
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Where from that quote did you get the idea that he is a creationist. Keep in mind belief in God != creationist. For example I believe in God but I am not by any means a creationist. A creationist thinks that the Earth is ~4000 years old was created at one time from nothing and has not changed and could not have changed since that time. Without going into alot of very long detail many people (like myself and I would suspect Francis although from the quote it is impossible to tell for sure)think that scripture tells us why we are here not how we got here. In their best forms both science and religion are searches for truth and are going to lead to the same place. It is true and sad that the best forms of religion in both theory and practice are very rare but they do exist. No irony here just a misunderstanding.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This the actual point I wanted to inronize :
The French media (I don't know about the others) usually seem to be quite confident until it becomes *damn* serious and then they will tell a little more provided the audience won't panick. the problem is that they are not smart enough to explain calmly how serious the problem is in a way that won't lose the audience's attention.
I remember the excellent film outbreak with Dustin Hoffmann and I guess such cases might happen on a daily basis.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is quite a funny thing to learn that the disease that was first announced as so frightening by French media and then supposed to have disappeared can now be cured. :-)
BTW, you'll also love to browse a bit further on this excellent web site.
Two thumbs up for the link, Slashdot
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
But maybe it should lead in a shift of money from bad dot com business plans to sciences in general
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
If you are scared by the trend of medicating for negative emotions perhapse this pill will make you feel better
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
It needs to be said. There is nothing in science today that precludes the existance of a or any god(s). Nor will anything in science ever confirm or deny the existance of god(s). Science explains how things work. They could work that way because they always worked that way, or they could work that way because that's how some divinity wrote the rules. Science cannot know which is true, it can only uncover and apply the rules.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Here is another related link to the Popular
Science Web site. It has their top ten science
stories for this year.
Has interesting stuff like -
Pig Organs for Human Transplants,
Water On Mars,
Sub Atomic Particals, etc.
usually as the result of a school study and insistence
It's insane to allow one's children to attend grade school if there is any way to avoid it. The playground teaches mindless conformity to the peer group. Students are taught to blindly obey the dictates of authority figures. Ridiculous concepts of collective responsibility (where students ignorant of the identity of an anonymous troublemaker suffer because of the acts and feigned ignorance of others) are emphasized. Drugs are used to sedate children who aren't sufficiently controlled by the threat of punishment.
So what is our society doing? We're proposing extending it down to age 3, so we can brainwash the children ever earlier and simultaneously make it easier to put their mothers to work so they can make and buy more consumer crap...
Some day, we'll figure out a system that produces, say, eight adult humans for every ten children sent into it, instead of the current system that produces two vicious wolves, seven compliant sheep, and one human for every ten children put into it.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
The problem here is that you have a view of the term "God" that drags in all the Judeo-Christio-Islamic baggage. But Zeus was a god-concept that was not a Creator, not omnipotent, not omnipresent, and not omniscient; none of those attributes are properly even implied by the term "God".
So this guy could merely believe in a God who just happens to know what DNA does and how it is sequenced. Creationism is not implied by his statement; you are inferring it based on your cultural assumptions.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
I'm not sure, but the 99% figure may actually be the percentage of our genome that does nothing at all. (Confirmation or refutation would be appreciated!)
As I recall, they made their announcement when "most" of the genome was sequenced - and they still don't know what 99% of it does.
Can someone confirm this?
In other words all the genes in the human body make up only about 3% of DNA. What the human gemome project did was identified where the genes were, not what the genes do. It's the first baby step to re-writing our own source code.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Although there are some good points in what you say I also have to disagree with some of it.
There will be a spike in "summer" temperate environments. This will bring about the melting of polar caps and the re-routing of standard ocean currents. Once there is enough moisture in the atmosphere, the temperatures will steadily decline
This is just one of the many theories. It is based on the principle that when there is more moisture in the atmosphere the albedo of the earth increases, therefore it reflects more of the Sun's radiation. Less radiation means lower temperatures. Lower temperatures lead you to snow precipitation that increase the Earth's albedo even more...
But... at the same time, as temperatures lower, less water is evaporated, so there are less clouds. Less clouds less albedo... less reflection, increases temperature...
And this is just one of the factors. There are many more considerations I don't even mention.
Although I am no denying the importance of the problem I believe that these alarmist predictions only diminish the credibility of less catastrophic, still serous and more scientific investigations.
Global warming does not mean that we'll be wearing shorts in January. What it does mean is that the seasons will be come more extreme and completely unpredictable.
Prediction is a matter of information. Weather might become extreme (another unproved theory), but the principles of its prediction will be the same. With the improvements in technology I can only predict better predictions.
The only way to bounce back is to shut the planet down and take about a 100 year rest from resource depletion, fossil fuel use, let the forrests re-grow, and all of the anti-global warming idoits out there to stop their "we aren't going to do any thing to the Earth's climate".
Nobody should deny there is warming effect going on. True, and some measures have to be taken. Again, extremists and alarmists only take credibility out of the real problem. Proposing solutions like this is a mistake. First, you are assuming that the global warmth is caused ONLY by those reasons... there are many other reasons. Do not forget that you are trying to evaluate a billions year process from a 10 year analysis. There has been global warmth periods in the past, there has been glacial ages in the past... so, keep your mind open, be ACCURATE in your studies and PROPORTIONATE in your solutions. Being alarmist and catastrophic will not help, and will make people take this issue less seriously.
Yeah, they've "mapped" the Human Genome and they don't know what most of it does, but by having the "road map" laid out people can know try to tackle various parts of it. Think of it this: there's a challenge to break this encyrpted string. A starting/ending point is established and then the string is broken into several parts and various people attempt to decypher it. Mapping the Human Genome runs parallel to this example. Since the mapping is complete people can now have an established "road map" in which to reference discoveries they've made about gene XX at location YY.
Project: To Take Over The World
Project: To Take Over The World
Plan: To Rule The World
Introns are actually bits of the code that are the portions of inactive genes whereas extrons are the active portions. Theoretically all living cells in your body have the exact... (ok to be PC) nearly exact DNA sequence. The difference is that the cells have different genes taht are active (extrons instead of introns). So to say that introns are rubbish is wrong. They are important.
Project: To Take Over The World
Project: To Take Over The World
Plan: To Rule The World
But now we seem to be getting more biological type systems! Neural nets and DNA computers and suchlike are appearing, and they seem to be very robust and non-critical. You can monkey around with them quite a lot without breaking them! Would I be right in thinking, and please bear in mind that I am an ignoramus, that such systems will become more common in the future, and may be a replacement for the design methodologies we use at the moment? When you consider that the most complex thing we know of, the Human Brain, is built with this design philosophy, we can see just how powerful it is, I think. Anyway, thank you for reading my ramblings! I really am getting addicted to this Slashdot lark - work is so boring :-)
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The