"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." Ambrose Bierce
(Thank you Civilization IV for that quote.)
Worse than that, it makes "being an amoral bastard who will do anything within the law to boost company profits" into a moral requirement. Even if none of the shareholders actually want the company to be amoral-bastard.
Not that I have any better alternatives at the moment.
Re:Why can't we do better? Are you fucking kidding
on
Volcano Futures
·
· Score: 1
You can't live a life without risk. Nor is the avoidance of risk worth any price (otherwise we'd drive a tank at 5km/hr while wearing a helmet and a flak jacket to go to the corner store for milk.) (And then not drink the milk for fear it was contaminated.) Ask all those people stuck in the wrong part of the world whether they'd take a flight if the chance of dying was 1 in 100,000 rather than the normal 1 in 9,000,000. I think you'd find most of them would accept it as a worthwhile risk.
Also, not flying is not a no-risk option. Pharmaceuticals are almost always shipped by air. Soon people will start dying as drug stockpiles run out.
"Have we erred too far on the side of caution" is NOT a "stupid f***ing question".
Connie Willis wrote a novel "Passage" about scientific investigation of NDEs. I rate it as the second best book by the best author I know. (Warning: Willis's books generally fall into the categories of 'comedy' or 'tragedy'. Which do you suppose a book about what you experience when you die is going to be?)
In Passage, the protagonists are following a two pronged strategy of interviewing patients who have had NDEs naturally, and simulating them in volunteers by using a drug, while the volunteer is in a brain scanner.
To say more would stray into spoiler territory, so just go out and buy the book and read it.
(For what it is worth, the book which beats "Passage" is "To Say Nothing Of The Dog", a time-travel Victorian farce.)
They can point to SCO and say 'Look what happened to the last company that tried to sue us on flimsy grounds in the hope we'd pay something to make them go away rather than fight it out in court.'
This mostly applies to IBM, who had options (early settlement or buying SCO) to avoid the case which Novell did not, and also more benefit to having SCO's head impaled on a spike on their battlements, as they're a bigger target to opportunistic lawsuits than Novell is.
The ultimate nightmare would have been if the Church of Scientology had bought SCO early on in the proceedings. The Maureen O'Gara 'unmasking' of PJ is nothing to what she'd have been subjected to if that had happened.
I enjoyed the John Hawks analysis, and I agree that a mitochondrial sequence from a single bone is much less data than I'd like before concluding the existence of a new species.
However, I don't agree with his main argument. Yes, the Neandertal population might have a 1 million year old divergence in their mitochondrial DNA, but that can't explain why the modern human/Neandertal divergence is only about half that. Under this hypothesis, the modern human diversity lies within the Neandertal.
For this to work, basically a Neandertal has to wander from Europe into Africa, *and* she must be a maternal-line ancestor of Mitochondrial Eve. (Alternatively modern humans evolve in Europe from Neandertals, migrate to Africa and die out in Europe, only to return later. Basically this is the same scenario except for the subspecies of the African immigrant.)
I was thinking in terms of more elaborate interactions where the bodies do multiple 'orbits' before one is eventually ejected, rather than a single pass. That is why all my instincts were going astray.
(My encounter with three body systems was in the context of binary+single star meet in a globular cluster. As I recall, if the binary is loosely bound, they tend to dance for a while before ejecting the lightest star. If the binary is tightly bound, it tends to get more tightly bound and eject the single star with greater energy. This is a source of 'heating' in globular clusters.)
"...it's much more likely that the more massive object gets ejected and the smaller captured."
How does this work? My memory from a few lectures 20 years ago is the opposite, but clearly you're more reliable than I am. I thought it was an equipartition of energy thing - interactions will tend to divide the energy evenly between the objects, which means the lightest is the most likely to acquire escape velocity. Is it that ejecting the lightest object doesn't usually take away enough energy to leave the other two bound?
If you're trying to drop Superearth into Neptune, then it has to both get very low angular momentum and at the same time high energy (else Triton would not be bound to Neptune). This seems a very narrow target to hit. If you're arguing relative probabilities (it is more likely that the more massive object gets ejected) then you need to establish that the unlikelihood of impact is outweighed by the gain in likelihood of losing the larger rather than smaller object.
It had not occurred to me that the disappearance of the third body could be a two stage process: ejected from Neptune orbit, then secondarily ejected from the solar system by Saturn or Jupiter. What are the odds that an object ejected from Neptune orbit will eventually be ejected from the solar system? My gut feeling is that the odds are pretty good, that falling into a resonance with one of the giant planets or being ejected are the only long term options. (Where 'long term' I'd guess to be thousands or millions of years, not billions.)
Whether absorbed or ejected, this interaction with Superearth would tend to increase Neptune's orbit's eccentricity. How does the expected increase in eccentricity compare to the current eccentricity of Neptune's orbit?
My counter hypothesis is that the third body was a pre-existing but now lost Neptunian moon. Now that I think on it, equally plausible is that Triton was this original moon (originally in a regular prograde orbit) and an outside object came in, formed a 3 body system for a while, and then was ejected.
Some may wonder what need there is for a third body at all - Triton wanders too close to Neptune, it gets captured, right?
The reason is conservation of energy: as Triton wanders near Neptune, it falls into Neptune's gravity well and accelerates, so it is going too fast to remain in orbit. Triton at infinity has more energy than Triton in orbit, so to get captured it has to lose energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.
With a few exceptions, three body interactions (e.g. Neptune, Superearth, Triton) are chaotic, and often end with one of the bodies being expelled and the remaining two left in orbit. The lightest body is the most likely to be expelled. This scenario has Superearth being expelled rather than Triton, which is somewhat unlikely but not impossible. (It is too long since I studied this for me to quantify 'most likely to be expelled'.)
It really doesn't seem to me that you need Superearth to explain Triton. The third body could very easily have been a normal Neptunian moon, which is now unobserved somewhere in the Oort cloud or expelled from the solar system entirely. (Could it be Pluto? This was thought of and rejected a long time ago.)
Disclaimer: All these comments are on the basis of reading the New Scientist summary, not the real paper.
I've thought a bit about what really good augmented reality could do.
Expensive at first, it is used by fighter pilots to give themselves 4 pi steradian field of view, unobstructed by bits of airplanes, with head-up-or-down-or-whichever-way-it-is-pointing display.
If the first application of a new technology is military, the second application will be pornography. You could order up a visible-only-to-you lap dancer to liven up that boring meeting at work.
When visiting the Parthenon, with the flick of a switch it transforms from ruins to a reconstruction of what it used to look like. Or why visit the Parthenon at all? Download the data and look at it while wandering around in a field.
Don't like your home decor? Just download a Regency England skin for your living room. Same old beat up sofa, but now it looks like a priceless antique.
People could broadcast avatar descriptions. If you have your AR set to accept avatars, you see that fat balding male programmer as a buxom bikini-clad feline-humanoid. There are clubs where you're not allowed in unless you have an avatar and have your AR set to see avatars.
Why be satisfied with the avatars other people choose for themselves? Give your credit card number to a dodgy website and you can download a program to make everyone else appear naked. Just try to ignore the online pharmacy ads which sometimes scroll across young women's breasts.
Contact lenses are clumsy: bionic implants are the way of the future. Wire that AR direct into your optic nerve!
Now that the AR system can't be removed, the Big Evil Government starts demanding overrides be installed. You never know where the Thought Police are, because your AR is programmed to not see them - they are invisible. (The word "fnord" will also be invisible, but will trigger stress hormones.)
That does seem to be what the article says, but it doesn't make sense to me. Why pay the huge premium for high speed rail lines and then use them for freight?
Interestingly, Wikipedia ("High-speed rail") says: In China there are two grades of high speed lines. Firstly slower lines that run at speeds of between 200 and 250 km/h (120 and 160 mph) and have freight as well as passenger trains. Secondly, [[High-speed rail in China|passenger dedicated high speed rail lines operate at top speeds above 300 km/h (190 mph).
So maybe they really do intend to run 200+km/hr freight trains. I suppose it would make sense for perishable goods (mostly fruit) which you'd otherwise have to airfreight. But I still don't see that transporting fresh fruit could justify the cost of this network.
I'm also puzzled as to the routes. They talk about a London to Beijing line, and a 'through Russia to Germany' as separate projects. A line which goes north of the Caspian would go through Russia and probably to Germany, so if they are separate, it sounds like London/Beijing is going south of the Caspian which means through Iran (political instability, hostility to England) and Turkey (mountains, earthquakes, and needing to cross the Bosphorus - although the web tells me this has already been bridged.)
I'm reading between the lines here, but this is an educated guess.
They want a large random sample of mitochondrial DNA, possibly with racial information attached to each sample. Then when they get DNA from a crime scene, they'll be able to answer questions such as "How common is this mitochondrial genotype?" and "What race was the person who left this DNA, and how certain can we be of the answer?"
Mitochondrial DNA is much easier to obtain, especially from degraded samples, than nuclear DNA, but it is not nearly so useful in identifying individuals. It looks to me like they're trying to research how much less useful it is.
While they deserve to be in big trouble over this and heads should roll, I don't think it is anything which would have been objectionable had they obtained permission first. It isn't as if it is "This is little baby Anne Onemus Coward's DNA, 23 years from now when she secretly puts up posters criticizing the President are put up we'll be able to identify her from DNA residues on them and know whose door to break down at 2 am."
I'm happy about the progress, but I have a few questions.
The feedstock ({corn cobs|sawdust|whatever}) will have to be transported from {the farm|the sawmill|wherever} where currently it just collects or is burned. The feedstock is bulky and if it has high moisture content it is heavy. They are talking about large facilities, so the transport distance will be appreciable. How much effect will this have on the energy efficiency budget?
There will be a distillation stage in production, which requires a heat source. Where will they get this heat? (Hopefully, by burning some fraction of the ethanol they've just produced, or some of the feedstock. If it turns out to be cheaper to burn natural gas for the distillation rather than ethanol which needs no transportation and is available in bulk at wholesale price, this will say something very bad about the economics of the production.) An additional thought: if wind energy really picks up, we'll have a situation where electricity prices for bulk consumers will be highly variable, depending on the wind. It would cost little to put electric heaters into the distillers, which you could then use only when electricity is cheap. You do, however, have to pay for a high capacity connection to the grid which you will only use intermittently.
There must be some waste from this process. What is the nature of this waste, and will it be difficult to dispose of safely?
I've heard people raise the concern that we're just going to swap running out of oil for running out of lithium. Can anyone knowledgeable comment on this?
In particular, what is the feasibility of extracting lithium from sea water?
I had a somewhat similar idea, but with more computer hardware.
We conceptually have a bunch of computers pretending to be the internet. Perhaps each computer might be represented by a single display showing a little island with postmen on it, and connected to other computers/islands by bridges. (We could put everything on one great big display, but I like the individual displays better.) In this system, we will attempt to send 'web pages' (a picture which gets broken down into jigsaw puzzle pieces) from servers to home computers. For arguments sake, there will be 6 web pages available.
A few are 'home computers' from which you can request web pages. The controls for these will be six buttons, one for each available web page. When a child pushes one of these buttons, a message travels from home computer to the ISP computer (mailman carries a letter to the bridge and shoves it across.) The letter is colour coded to match the server it is trying to reach. The ISP forwards it to a computer nearer the server, etc. When the server gets the message, they take a copy of their web page, break it into puzzle pieces, and start sending the bits back over bridges. Eventually, it assembles on the child's 'home computer' screen.
The final complication is that there are also 'failure' buttons: the kids can temporarily take out a bridge, or an island (something non-violent: the postmen take a tea break, or they can't pay attention to the mail because the sparklebunnies have escaped and need to be rounded up and recaged.) Then they get to see how the packets are rerouted and still make it to the destination.
Maybe there is a 'fail' button for each bridge and each computer, so kids can control exactly what failures happen, or maybe there is just a 'make three random things fail' button. If you allow full control over failures, some kids may upset other kids by preventing their web pages from ever arriving.
There will be more details I haven't described (indeed, by knowledge of networking is insufficient.) Packets need labels to show where they are going, bridges possibly need labels to say what other computers you can reach from them etc. Postmen need to keep copies of packets for resending until they get confirmation that the next island has received it. Lots of cute animations can be put in, for example packets falling off broken bridges and getting carried away by the flooding river.
You'd need a fair development budget for this one, with graphic design and user interface testing probably being bigger costs than the programming. However, as most of the cost is software, you can then try to sell it elsewhere.
Although I'd prefer it without, you can also put advertising in: the Google web page packets go through the AT&T ISP island etc.
For what it is worth, I place this idea in the public domain.
"Dr. Zuberbühler said he planned to play back recordings of given calls to the Campbell's monkeys and to test from their reactions whether he had correctly decoded their messaging system."
They haven't done that, and yet got published in PNAS? While I don't work in animal communication, I'd have thought that would be required for any claim of having decoded messages.
Or possibly they didn't get published in PNAS - I can't find anything resembling this on the PNAS web site (I have paid-for access.)
According to salon.com's 'Ask the Pilot' column, pilots are not exempt from screening. If all the groups you mention are in the same category, then they also are not exempt.
And here we see a completely anonymous GPS track starting at 47 Washington Ave, Charleston, California*, stopping for 30 minutes just outside "Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel" before continuing to parking space 15 at the Word Of God radio station. We have no idea what car it was.
(P.S. others have pointed that this scenario will not happen, because they delete the first and last.1 mile of the trip.) * All parts of this address except 'California' were made up by me. Any resemblance to the address of an actual patron of Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel are purely coincidental.
All the published studies looking for this introgression have been based on neanderthal mDNA.
There is this one (citation follows.) It is based purely on the pattern of variation within modern humans - it does not rely on ancient DNA. The Neandertal DNA project should conclusively confirm or refute the hypothesis that the gene came from Neandertals (although it may have come from H. erectus instead.) (There is one earlier similar paper from about 2002 I think, but I found it unconvincing and I can't be bothered finding it.)
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0606966103 Evans et al. "Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage" Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 103 18178 (2006)
Abstract
At the center of the debate on the emergence of modern humans and their spread throughout the globe is the question of whether archaic Homo lineages contributed to the modern human gene pool, and more importantly, whether such contributions impacted the evolutionary adaptation of our species. A major obstacle to answering this question is that low levels of admixture with archaic lineages are not expected to leave extensive traces in the modern human gene pool because of genetic drift. Loci that have undergone strong positive selection, however, offer a unique opportunity to identify low-level admixture with archaic lineages, provided that the introgressed archaic allele has risen to high frequency under positive selection. The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development and has experienced positive selection in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens. Within modern humans, a group of closely related haplotypes at this locus, known as haplogroup D, rose from a single copy 37,000 years ago and swept to exceptionally high frequency (70% worldwide today) because of positive selection. Here, we examine the origin of haplogroup D. By using the interhaplogroup divergence test, we show that haplogroup D likely originated from a lineage separated from modern humans 1.1 million years ago and introgressed into humans by 37,000 years ago. This finding supports the possibility of admixture between modern humans and archaic Homo populations (Neanderthals being one possibility). Furthermore, it buttresses the important notion that, through such adminture, our species has benefited evolutionarily by gaining new advantageous alleles. The interhaplogroup divergence test developed here may be broadly applicable to the detection of introgression at other loci in the human genome or in genomes of other species.
So in other words, the statement that they had sex is just his personal opinion?
Correct, as I read it. But notice in the interview he didn't make a big issue of this - The Times did.
Potentially he will be able to prove that some of us have a few Neandertal genes, in which case the issue will be settled. If no such genes can be found, there is still uncertainty - sex could have been rare or unproductive.
Wikipedia says "Electric vehicles can also use a direct motor-to-wheel configuration which increases the amount of available power. Having multiple motors connected directly to the wheels allows for each of the wheels to be used for both propulsion and as braking systems, thereby increasing traction. In some cases, the motor can be housed directly in the wheel, such as in the Whispering Wheel design, which lowers the vehicle's center of gravity and reduces the number of moving parts. When not fitted with an axle, differential, or transmission, electric vehicles have less drivetrain rotational inertia."
Slashdot Mirror
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." Ambrose Bierce
(Thank you Civilization IV for that quote.)
Worse than that, it makes "being an amoral bastard who will do anything within the law to boost company profits" into a moral requirement. Even if none of the shareholders actually want the company to be amoral-bastard.
Not that I have any better alternatives at the moment.
You can't live a life without risk. Nor is the avoidance of risk worth any price (otherwise we'd drive a tank at 5km/hr while wearing a helmet and a flak jacket to go to the corner store for milk.) (And then not drink the milk for fear it was contaminated.) Ask all those people stuck in the wrong part of the world whether they'd take a flight if the chance of dying was 1 in 100,000 rather than the normal 1 in 9,000,000. I think you'd find most of them would accept it as a worthwhile risk.
Also, not flying is not a no-risk option. Pharmaceuticals are almost always shipped by air. Soon people will start dying as drug stockpiles run out.
"Have we erred too far on the side of caution" is NOT a "stupid f***ing question".
Connie Willis wrote a novel "Passage" about scientific investigation of NDEs. I rate it as the second best book by the best author I know. (Warning: Willis's books generally fall into the categories of 'comedy' or 'tragedy'. Which do you suppose a book about what you experience when you die is going to be?)
In Passage, the protagonists are following a two pronged strategy of interviewing patients who have had NDEs naturally, and simulating them in volunteers by using a drug, while the volunteer is in a brain scanner.
To say more would stray into spoiler territory, so just go out and buy the book and read it.
(For what it is worth, the book which beats "Passage" is "To Say Nothing Of The Dog", a time-travel Victorian farce.)
They can point to SCO and say 'Look what happened to the last company that tried to sue us on flimsy grounds in the hope we'd pay something to make them go away rather than fight it out in court.'
This mostly applies to IBM, who had options (early settlement or buying SCO) to avoid the case which Novell did not, and also more benefit to having SCO's head impaled on a spike on their battlements, as they're a bigger target to opportunistic lawsuits than Novell is.
The ultimate nightmare would have been if the Church of Scientology had bought SCO early on in the proceedings. The Maureen O'Gara 'unmasking' of PJ is nothing to what she'd have been subjected to if that had happened.
I enjoyed the John Hawks analysis, and I agree that a mitochondrial sequence from a single bone is much less data than I'd like before concluding the existence of a new species.
However, I don't agree with his main argument. Yes, the Neandertal population might have a 1 million year old divergence in their mitochondrial DNA, but that can't explain why the modern human/Neandertal divergence is only about half that. Under this hypothesis, the modern human diversity lies within the Neandertal.
For this to work, basically a Neandertal has to wander from Europe into Africa, *and* she must be a maternal-line ancestor of Mitochondrial Eve. (Alternatively modern humans evolve in Europe from Neandertals, migrate to Africa and die out in Europe, only to return later. Basically this is the same scenario except for the subspecies of the African immigrant.)
Thanks - that all makes sense.
I was thinking in terms of more elaborate interactions where the bodies do multiple 'orbits' before one is eventually ejected, rather than a single pass. That is why all my instincts were going astray.
(My encounter with three body systems was in the context of binary+single star meet in a globular cluster. As I recall, if the binary is loosely bound, they tend to dance for a while before ejecting the lightest star. If the binary is tightly bound, it tends to get more tightly bound and eject the single star with greater energy. This is a source of 'heating' in globular clusters.)
"...it's much more likely that the more massive object gets ejected and the smaller captured."
How does this work? My memory from a few lectures 20 years ago is the opposite, but clearly you're more reliable than I am. I thought it was an equipartition of energy thing - interactions will tend to divide the energy evenly between the objects, which means the lightest is the most likely to acquire escape velocity. Is it that ejecting the lightest object doesn't usually take away enough energy to leave the other two bound?
If you're trying to drop Superearth into Neptune, then it has to both get very low angular momentum and at the same time high energy (else Triton would not be bound to Neptune). This seems a very narrow target to hit. If you're arguing relative probabilities (it is more likely that the more massive object gets ejected) then you need to establish that the unlikelihood of impact is outweighed by the gain in likelihood of losing the larger rather than smaller object.
It had not occurred to me that the disappearance of the third body could be a two stage process: ejected from Neptune orbit, then secondarily ejected from the solar system by Saturn or Jupiter. What are the odds that an object ejected from Neptune orbit will eventually be ejected from the solar system? My gut feeling is that the odds are pretty good, that falling into a resonance with one of the giant planets or being ejected are the only long term options. (Where 'long term' I'd guess to be thousands or millions of years, not billions.)
Whether absorbed or ejected, this interaction with Superearth would tend to increase Neptune's orbit's eccentricity. How does the expected increase in eccentricity compare to the current eccentricity of Neptune's orbit?
My counter hypothesis is that the third body was a pre-existing but now lost Neptunian moon. Now that I think on it, equally plausible is that Triton was this original moon (originally in a regular prograde orbit) and an outside object came in, formed a 3 body system for a while, and then was ejected.
Some may wonder what need there is for a third body at all - Triton wanders too close to Neptune, it gets captured, right?
The reason is conservation of energy: as Triton wanders near Neptune, it falls into Neptune's gravity well and accelerates, so it is going too fast to remain in orbit. Triton at infinity has more energy than Triton in orbit, so to get captured it has to lose energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.
With a few exceptions, three body interactions (e.g. Neptune, Superearth, Triton) are chaotic, and often end with one of the bodies being expelled and the remaining two left in orbit. The lightest body is the most likely to be expelled. This scenario has Superearth being expelled rather than Triton, which is somewhat unlikely but not impossible. (It is too long since I studied this for me to quantify 'most likely to be expelled'.)
It really doesn't seem to me that you need Superearth to explain Triton. The third body could very easily have been a normal Neptunian moon, which is now unobserved somewhere in the Oort cloud or expelled from the solar system entirely. (Could it be Pluto? This was thought of and rejected a long time ago.)
Disclaimer: All these comments are on the basis of reading the New Scientist summary, not the real paper.
I've thought a bit about what really good augmented reality could do.
Expensive at first, it is used by fighter pilots to give themselves 4 pi steradian field of view, unobstructed by bits of airplanes, with head-up-or-down-or-whichever-way-it-is-pointing display.
If the first application of a new technology is military, the second application will be pornography. You could order up a visible-only-to-you lap dancer to liven up that boring meeting at work.
When visiting the Parthenon, with the flick of a switch it transforms from ruins to a reconstruction of what it used to look like. Or why visit the Parthenon at all? Download the data and look at it while wandering around in a field.
Don't like your home decor? Just download a Regency England skin for your living room. Same old beat up sofa, but now it looks like a priceless antique.
People could broadcast avatar descriptions. If you have your AR set to accept avatars, you see that fat balding male programmer as a buxom bikini-clad feline-humanoid. There are clubs where you're not allowed in unless you have an avatar and have your AR set to see avatars.
Why be satisfied with the avatars other people choose for themselves? Give your credit card number to a dodgy website and you can download a program to make everyone else appear naked. Just try to ignore the online pharmacy ads which sometimes scroll across young women's breasts.
Contact lenses are clumsy: bionic implants are the way of the future. Wire that AR direct into your optic nerve!
Now that the AR system can't be removed, the Big Evil Government starts demanding overrides be installed. You never know where the Thought Police are, because your AR is programmed to not see them - they are invisible. (The word "fnord" will also be invisible, but will trigger stress hormones.)
That does seem to be what the article says, but it doesn't make sense to me. Why pay the huge premium for high speed rail lines and then use them for freight?
Interestingly, Wikipedia ("High-speed rail") says:
In China there are two grades of high speed lines. Firstly slower lines that run at speeds of between 200 and 250 km/h (120 and 160 mph) and have freight as well as passenger trains. Secondly, [[High-speed rail in China|passenger dedicated high speed rail lines operate at top speeds above 300 km/h (190 mph).
So maybe they really do intend to run 200+km/hr freight trains. I suppose it would make sense for perishable goods (mostly fruit) which you'd otherwise have to airfreight. But I still don't see that transporting fresh fruit could justify the cost of this network.
I'm also puzzled as to the routes. They talk about a London to Beijing line, and a 'through Russia to Germany' as separate projects. A line which goes north of the Caspian would go through Russia and probably to Germany, so if they are separate, it sounds like London/Beijing is going south of the Caspian which means through Iran (political instability, hostility to England) and Turkey (mountains, earthquakes, and needing to cross the Bosphorus - although the web tells me this has already been bridged.)
A very slight rewording:
'The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate,' anticipates Cisco's John Chambers.
Please sign me up.
(RTFA? All I need to read is the /. headline.)
I'm reading between the lines here, but this is an educated guess.
They want a large random sample of mitochondrial DNA, possibly with racial information attached to each sample. Then when they get DNA from a crime scene, they'll be able to answer questions such as "How common is this mitochondrial genotype?" and "What race was the person who left this DNA, and how certain can we be of the answer?"
Mitochondrial DNA is much easier to obtain, especially from degraded samples, than nuclear DNA, but it is not nearly so useful in identifying individuals. It looks to me like they're trying to research how much less useful it is.
While they deserve to be in big trouble over this and heads should roll, I don't think it is anything which would have been objectionable had they obtained permission first. It isn't as if it is "This is little baby Anne Onemus Coward's DNA, 23 years from now when she secretly puts up posters criticizing the President are put up we'll be able to identify her from DNA residues on them and know whose door to break down at 2 am."
I'm happy about the progress, but I have a few questions.
The feedstock ({corn cobs|sawdust|whatever}) will have to be transported from {the farm|the sawmill|wherever} where currently it just collects or is burned. The feedstock is bulky and if it has high moisture content it is heavy. They are talking about large facilities, so the transport distance will be appreciable. How much effect will this have on the energy efficiency budget?
There will be a distillation stage in production, which requires a heat source. Where will they get this heat? (Hopefully, by burning some fraction of the ethanol they've just produced, or some of the feedstock. If it turns out to be cheaper to burn natural gas for the distillation rather than ethanol which needs no transportation and is available in bulk at wholesale price, this will say something very bad about the economics of the production.) An additional thought: if wind energy really picks up, we'll have a situation where electricity prices for bulk consumers will be highly variable, depending on the wind. It would cost little to put electric heaters into the distillers, which you could then use only when electricity is cheap. You do, however, have to pay for a high capacity connection to the grid which you will only use intermittently.
There must be some waste from this process. What is the nature of this waste, and will it be difficult to dispose of safely?
I've heard people raise the concern that we're just going to swap running out of oil for running out of lithium. Can anyone knowledgeable comment on this?
In particular, what is the feasibility of extracting lithium from sea water?
Here's a little background info from Wikipedia: Lithium production,
Sea salt composition (which looks very pessimistic for sea water extraction.)
Besides, if you're willing to use heavy water (which is non-toxic), you can even use natural uranium in a reactor.
This goes against everything I've learnt about nuclear power. Please provide evidence that you can run a reactor on unenriched uranium.
which we can encode in 2042 bits, or 64 words (assuming 32 bit word size.)
(Adjust answer as needed to account for rotations, duplicate pixels etc etc.)
I had a somewhat similar idea, but with more computer hardware.
We conceptually have a bunch of computers pretending to be the internet. Perhaps each computer might be represented by a single display showing a little island with postmen on it, and connected to other computers/islands by bridges. (We could put everything on one great big display, but I like the individual displays better.) In this system, we will attempt to send 'web pages' (a picture which gets broken down into jigsaw puzzle pieces) from servers to home computers. For arguments sake, there will be 6 web pages available.
A few are 'home computers' from which you can request web pages. The controls for these will be six buttons, one for each available web page. When a child pushes one of these buttons, a message travels from home computer to the ISP computer (mailman carries a letter to the bridge and shoves it across.) The letter is colour coded to match the server it is trying to reach. The ISP forwards it to a computer nearer the server, etc. When the server gets the message, they take a copy of their web page, break it into puzzle pieces, and start sending the bits back over bridges. Eventually, it assembles on the child's 'home computer' screen.
The final complication is that there are also 'failure' buttons: the kids can temporarily take out a bridge, or an island (something non-violent: the postmen take a tea break, or they can't pay attention to the mail because the sparklebunnies have escaped and need to be rounded up and recaged.) Then they get to see how the packets are rerouted and still make it to the destination.
Maybe there is a 'fail' button for each bridge and each computer, so kids can control exactly what failures happen, or maybe there is just a 'make three random things fail' button. If you allow full control over failures, some kids may upset other kids by preventing their web pages from ever arriving.
There will be more details I haven't described (indeed, by knowledge of networking is insufficient.) Packets need labels to show where they are going, bridges possibly need labels to say what other computers you can reach from them etc. Postmen need to keep copies of packets for resending until they get confirmation that the next island has received it. Lots of cute animations can be put in, for example packets falling off broken bridges and getting carried away by the flooding river.
You'd need a fair development budget for this one, with graphic design and user interface testing probably being bigger costs than the programming. However, as most of the cost is software, you can then try to sell it elsewhere.
Although I'd prefer it without, you can also put advertising in: the Google web page packets go through the AT&T ISP island etc.
For what it is worth, I place this idea in the public domain.
"Dr. Zuberbühler said he planned to play back recordings of given calls to the Campbell's monkeys and to test from their reactions whether he had correctly decoded their messaging system."
They haven't done that, and yet got published in PNAS? While I don't work in animal communication, I'd have thought that would be required for any claim of having decoded messages.
Or possibly they didn't get published in PNAS - I can't find anything resembling this on the PNAS web site (I have paid-for access.)
According to salon.com's 'Ask the Pilot' column, pilots are not exempt from screening. If all the groups you mention are in the same category, then they also are not exempt.
And here we see a completely anonymous GPS track starting at 47 Washington Ave, Charleston, California*, stopping for 30 minutes just outside "Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel" before continuing to parking space 15 at the Word Of God radio station. We have no idea what car it was.
(P.S. others have pointed that this scenario will not happen, because they delete the first and last .1 mile of the trip.)
* All parts of this address except 'California' were made up by me. Any resemblance to the address of an actual patron of Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel are purely coincidental.
All the published studies looking for this introgression have been based on neanderthal mDNA.
There is this one (citation follows.) It is based purely on the pattern of variation within modern humans - it does not rely on ancient DNA. The Neandertal DNA project should conclusively confirm or refute the hypothesis that the gene came from Neandertals (although it may have come from H. erectus instead.) (There is one earlier similar paper from about 2002 I think, but I found it unconvincing and I can't be bothered finding it.)
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0606966103 Evans et al. "Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage" Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 103 18178 (2006)
Abstract
At the center of the debate on the emergence of modern humans and their spread throughout the globe is the question of whether archaic Homo lineages contributed to the modern human gene pool, and more importantly, whether such contributions impacted the evolutionary adaptation of our species. A major obstacle to answering this question is that low levels of admixture with archaic lineages are not expected to leave extensive traces in the modern human gene pool because of genetic drift. Loci that have undergone strong positive selection, however, offer a unique opportunity to identify low-level admixture with archaic lineages, provided that the introgressed archaic allele has risen to high frequency under positive selection. The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development and has experienced positive selection in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens. Within modern humans, a group of closely related haplotypes at this locus, known as haplogroup D, rose from a single copy 37,000 years ago and swept to exceptionally high frequency (70% worldwide today) because of positive selection. Here, we examine the origin of haplogroup D. By using the interhaplogroup divergence test, we show that haplogroup D likely originated from a lineage separated from modern humans 1.1 million years ago and introgressed into humans by 37,000 years ago. This finding supports the possibility of admixture between modern humans and archaic Homo populations (Neanderthals being one possibility). Furthermore, it buttresses the important notion that, through such adminture, our species has benefited evolutionarily by gaining new advantageous alleles. The interhaplogroup divergence test developed here may be broadly applicable to the detection of introgression at other loci in the human genome or in genomes of other species.
So in other words, the statement that they had sex is just his personal opinion?
Correct, as I read it. But notice in the interview he didn't make a big issue of this - The Times did.
Potentially he will be able to prove that some of us have a few Neandertal genes, in which case the issue will be settled. If no such genes can be found, there is still uncertainty - sex could have been rare or unproductive.
Wikipedia says "Electric vehicles can also use a direct motor-to-wheel configuration which increases the amount of available power. Having multiple motors connected directly to the wheels allows for each of the wheels to be used for both propulsion and as braking systems, thereby increasing traction. In some cases, the motor can be housed directly in the wheel, such as in the Whispering Wheel design, which lowers the vehicle's center of gravity and reduces the number of moving parts. When not fitted with an axle, differential, or transmission, electric vehicles have less drivetrain rotational inertia."