> I, for one, am gonna put them behind bars where they belong.
The sooner the better!
BTW, regarding this ridiculously appropriate acronym, it's hard to imagine that they weren't aware of what it almost spells. That leads me to suspect that it was intentional... sorta like Orwellian newspeak.
Neither of TFAs said whether or not they expect to get back in service in time for the crew exchange in November. From the SFgate piece, it sounds like they're planning to go ahead, but one has to wonder if that's realistic.
Reminds me of a cartoon I saw back in the 70's about the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous. It showed the two spacecraft, each with a "word-balloon", under the caption, "Checklist."
The Apollo word-balloon was filled with technical-sounding gibberish like, "Primary backup thrust inverters... Check! Docking-ring framulator extenders... Check!"
The Soyuz word-balloon said, "Anvil... Da! Hammer... Da!"
Yes, Erlich jumped the gun, but that doesn't mean his thesis was wrong. He just didn't anticipate the mitigating factors that arose after he wrote his book. The bottom line is, our "standard" assumption of perpetual growth is simply incompatible with the constraints of a finite planet. And we can't keep relying on the "magic" of technology to continue pulling our collective ass out of the frying pan forever.
Spend an hour of your time on this video presentation by Dr. Bartlett. No doubt the early parts will seem "old hat" to a/.er, but stick with it and it may surprise you.
Ditto. I just have a feeling... similar to how I feel about recent advances in solar cell tech (etc)... We keep hearing about all these great innovations in the last few years, but so far none of them have translated into a "revolutionary" advance. I'd like to see something that actually gets "out of the lab" and into widespread use someday. Keeping fingers crossed...
Hm... I don't see how I've misunderstood the ID folks. In my mind, they are among the "fence-sitters" I mentioned. You have described it in much more detail than my short post, but I don't think we disagree on the basics.
Ultimately I think it's a generational thing. The younger folks tend to be more open to evolution, just as they are more open to equal rights for gays. The main difference between these two issues is that young people tend to personally know more gays than their parents and grandparents, whereas "awareness" of evolution is more dependent on education which, sadly, has been declining in recent years.
Thanks for the link. (Yes, it is much better.) I suspect that we're going to see an exponential increase in the number of genomes that get sequenced. Sorta like exosolar planets... just a few at first, then more and more.
But I'd say you're a bit optimistic in thinking this will convince the hardcore evolution skeptics. Yes, it will chip away at the fence-sitters, but that "debate" will unfortunately be with us for a good while yet.
I'm also curious why they hardly mention a word about virtual reality. Seems to me like an OBVIOUS application for this device. Put it together with a Kinect sensor and you'd have a pretty kick-ass setup.
I'd be surprised if they didn't have at least some optical adjustment. Most cameras have had adjustable viewfinders for a long time.
From TFA: "It seems unlikely that most people — or even technology enthusiasts — will want to buy a product that involves sitting alone and wearing a little helmet."
You identify the problem while simultaneously glossing it over... Yes, plants give us the simple sugars we need for our nutrition, but they devote a majority of their photosynthetic efforts toward complex sugar-polymers bound by lignins (ie: cellulose) which we are unable to digest. Cows, termites, and some other critters are able to digest this stuff with the help of their gut flora, but thus far we have not been able to efficiently mimic this process to produce fuel at an industrial scale.
> they are also needed for feeding the Humanity itself
The point is, we humans don't use this stuff anyway, so it would be handy if we could figure out a way to convert it into fuel. Also, there are plenty of crops, such as switchgrass or hemp, that can be grown on land that is currently not practical for "food" crops like corn or beans. Thus, we could expand our harvest of sunlight for fuel without reducing our output of food calories.
We gotta hook up these panda-poo bugs with those newspaper eating bugs from a few hours ago... once they mate and reproduce, we'll solve all the world's problems and live happily ever after in a global utopia.
Seriously, I'm all in favor of this research, I just wish we could get this tech out of the lab an into the local gas station sometime before the next millennium.
I just watched this @Google talk yesterday, which finds wide variation in the way people think about various tasks. It doesn't contradict the findings of this MIT team, it just shows how variable and "plastic" these functions can be. One example that comes to mind is students from one country (France, IIRC) showed a lot of activation in the hearing areas of the brain when doing simple arithmetic tasks. They said this was because they learned arithmetic through rote repetition of tables, and thus used those aural regions when doing the tasks. (They also said they preferred doing math problems in a quiet environment to avoid distraction.)
IANA neuro-scientist, I just enjoy learning about this stuff. For any other armchair brain enthusiasts out there, you might also enjoy this lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
Jeebus! You had a 40MB hard drive in 1992?!?! I remember spending about $300 for an 8MB "Bigfoot" in the mid-90's... that computer must have cost you the price of a new car at the time.
Thanks for the link. (And thanks to Lars for posting it.)
I started using Linux in 1995, and have been using it almost exclusively since about 1999. But I never knew so much "deep background" about the early days.
Congrats and thanks to all who have contributed over the years! Many happy returns.
Define leech. A leech's safety is not dependent on the host. Even if the host dies, the leech can simply find a new host.
I don't publish info on FB that doesn't already exist in the phone book. I'm not in a position to worry much about photos. I've restricted my privacy settings to "friends only" for most things (not friends of friends).
The only thing I'm worried about is the "Truth Game," which allows my "friends" to answer questions about me. I never "opted-in" to this system, but my "friends" are still allowed to comment on me without my permission. I reckon my "friends" aren't saying anything catastrophic, but I'd rather not participate at all. But thus far I have not found any way to opt-out. This is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the safety of Facebook.
I use Facebook daily, but I only have minimal ID info in my profile. I don't play any FB games or take any FB quizzes... basically anything that wants to access my personal info is routinely blocked. I treat FB more like a blog, I post links to some things I'm reading, and occasionally "like" or comment on friends' posts.
That's what tweaks my suspicion... we've been blasting "nuclear" materials with lasers for decades, and I've never heard of this effect before. If this is something new -- an "over-unity" power source -- it ought to merit a Pons-and-Fleischmann-style press conference.
Also, what happens to the Thorium as it is "used" in this process? Does it degrade to Lead? How is this supposed to work?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If this tech actually works it could be the biggest revolution in energy since the discovery of oil. My only question is, does it actually work? From TFA:
> when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat
IANAnuke: So what is going on here? Is this a well known phenomenon? Is it really possible to get more energy out than you put in via the laser? If so, how come nobody ever noticed this before? If this is for real, it's huge... which is why I have my doubts.:-/
Slashdot Mirror
> I, for one, am gonna put them behind bars where they belong.
The sooner the better!
BTW, regarding this ridiculously appropriate acronym, it's hard to imagine that they weren't aware of what it almost spells. That leads me to suspect that it was intentional... sorta like Orwellian newspeak.
Neither of TFAs said whether or not they expect to get back in service in time for the crew exchange in November. From the SFgate piece, it sounds like they're planning to go ahead, but one has to wonder if that's realistic.
Reminds me of a cartoon I saw back in the 70's about the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous. It showed the two spacecraft, each with a "word-balloon", under the caption, "Checklist."
The Apollo word-balloon was filled with technical-sounding gibberish like, "Primary backup thrust inverters... Check! Docking-ring framulator extenders... Check!"
The Soyuz word-balloon said, "Anvil... Da! Hammer... Da!"
I wish I'd saved that one. ;-)
A friend of mine had a great idea for and airship: glass-bottom swimming pool!
Yes, Erlich jumped the gun, but that doesn't mean his thesis was wrong. He just didn't anticipate the mitigating factors that arose after he wrote his book. The bottom line is, our "standard" assumption of perpetual growth is simply incompatible with the constraints of a finite planet. And we can't keep relying on the "magic" of technology to continue pulling our collective ass out of the frying pan forever.
Spend an hour of your time on this video presentation by Dr. Bartlett. No doubt the early parts will seem "old hat" to a /.er, but stick with it and it may surprise you.
Ditto. I just have a feeling... similar to how I feel about recent advances in solar cell tech (etc)... We keep hearing about all these great innovations in the last few years, but so far none of them have translated into a "revolutionary" advance. I'd like to see something that actually gets "out of the lab" and into widespread use someday. Keeping fingers crossed...
Hm... I don't see how I've misunderstood the ID folks. In my mind, they are among the "fence-sitters" I mentioned. You have described it in much more detail than my short post, but I don't think we disagree on the basics.
Ultimately I think it's a generational thing. The younger folks tend to be more open to evolution, just as they are more open to equal rights for gays. The main difference between these two issues is that young people tend to personally know more gays than their parents and grandparents, whereas "awareness" of evolution is more dependent on education which, sadly, has been declining in recent years.
Thanks for the link. (Yes, it is much better.) I suspect that we're going to see an exponential increase in the number of genomes that get sequenced. Sorta like exosolar planets... just a few at first, then more and more.
But I'd say you're a bit optimistic in thinking this will convince the hardcore evolution skeptics. Yes, it will chip away at the fence-sitters, but that "debate" will unfortunately be with us for a good while yet.
I'm also curious why they hardly mention a word about virtual reality. Seems to me like an OBVIOUS application for this device. Put it together with a Kinect sensor and you'd have a pretty kick-ass setup.
I'd be surprised if they didn't have at least some optical adjustment. Most cameras have had adjustable viewfinders for a long time.
From TFA: "It seems unlikely that most people — or even technology enthusiasts — will want to buy a product that involves sitting alone and wearing a little helmet."
Apparently they don't know very many /. readers.
Remember the Tunguska event?
> "Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across."
Depending on where it hit, a 10m wide object could easily wipe out tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people.
You identify the problem while simultaneously glossing it over... Yes, plants give us the simple sugars we need for our nutrition, but they devote a majority of their photosynthetic efforts toward complex sugar-polymers bound by lignins (ie: cellulose) which we are unable to digest. Cows, termites, and some other critters are able to digest this stuff with the help of their gut flora, but thus far we have not been able to efficiently mimic this process to produce fuel at an industrial scale.
> they are also needed for feeding the Humanity itself
The point is, we humans don't use this stuff anyway, so it would be handy if we could figure out a way to convert it into fuel. Also, there are plenty of crops, such as switchgrass or hemp, that can be grown on land that is currently not practical for "food" crops like corn or beans. Thus, we could expand our harvest of sunlight for fuel without reducing our output of food calories.
Sorry, that link was wrong, it should have been: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/2324243/Making-Fuel-With-Newspapers-and-Bacteria
We gotta hook up these panda-poo bugs with those newspaper eating bugs from a few hours ago... once they mate and reproduce, we'll solve all the world's problems and live happily ever after in a global utopia.
Seriously, I'm all in favor of this research, I just wish we could get this tech out of the lab an into the local gas station sometime before the next millennium.
I just watched this @Google talk yesterday, which finds wide variation in the way people think about various tasks. It doesn't contradict the findings of this MIT team, it just shows how variable and "plastic" these functions can be. One example that comes to mind is students from one country (France, IIRC) showed a lot of activation in the hearing areas of the brain when doing simple arithmetic tasks. They said this was because they learned arithmetic through rote repetition of tables, and thus used those aural regions when doing the tasks. (They also said they preferred doing math problems in a quiet environment to avoid distraction.)
IANA neuro-scientist, I just enjoy learning about this stuff. For any other armchair brain enthusiasts out there, you might also enjoy this lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
Yeah, now that you mention it, that must have been an 8GB drive. Never mind. ;-)
Jeebus! You had a 40MB hard drive in 1992?!?! I remember spending about $300 for an 8MB "Bigfoot" in the mid-90's... that computer must have cost you the price of a new car at the time.
Thanks for the link. (And thanks to Lars for posting it.)
I started using Linux in 1995, and have been using it almost exclusively since about 1999. But I never knew so much "deep background" about the early days.
Congrats and thanks to all who have contributed over the years! Many happy returns.
No, that's mid-summer. The word midsummer refers specifically to the solstice.
I was wondering that too... There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your string theory, Horatio.
Bashar al Assad is thanking Allah that there's no oil under his country.
Define leech. A leech's safety is not dependent on the host. Even if the host dies, the leech can simply find a new host.
I don't publish info on FB that doesn't already exist in the phone book. I'm not in a position to worry much about photos. I've restricted my privacy settings to "friends only" for most things (not friends of friends).
The only thing I'm worried about is the "Truth Game," which allows my "friends" to answer questions about me. I never "opted-in" to this system, but my "friends" are still allowed to comment on me without my permission. I reckon my "friends" aren't saying anything catastrophic, but I'd rather not participate at all. But thus far I have not found any way to opt-out. This is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the safety of Facebook.
I use Facebook daily, but I only have minimal ID info in my profile. I don't play any FB games or take any FB quizzes... basically anything that wants to access my personal info is routinely blocked. I treat FB more like a blog, I post links to some things I'm reading, and occasionally "like" or comment on friends' posts.
How "safe" (or un-) am I if I follow these rules?
That's what tweaks my suspicion... we've been blasting "nuclear" materials with lasers for decades, and I've never heard of this effect before. If this is something new -- an "over-unity" power source -- it ought to merit a Pons-and-Fleischmann-style press conference.
Also, what happens to the Thorium as it is "used" in this process? Does it degrade to Lead? How is this supposed to work?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If this tech actually works it could be the biggest revolution in energy since the discovery of oil. My only question is, does it actually work? From TFA:
> when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat
IANAnuke: So what is going on here? Is this a well known phenomenon? Is it really possible to get more energy out than you put in via the laser? If so, how come nobody ever noticed this before? If this is for real, it's huge... which is why I have my doubts. :-/