An alien attack is a really unlikely scenario. Aliens aren't going to deal with the incredibly non-trivial problem of interstellar travel and then decide to go wack the primitive humans. And if they do decide to do that, they are likely to be so far advanced from us that it won't make much of a difference, since humans will be wiped so quickly that Google will be irrelevant. However, the alien scenario does two things that are good: First, a lot of the worst-case scenarios are things which one won't think of in advance. By using scenarios like the alien scenario they help cover a lot of reactions to unanticipated very bad scenarios that no one has even come up with. Second, this sort of thing helps make security wargaming fun. The fact is that a lot of standard wargaming and largescale simulations can be frightfully dull. Using something like aliens helps get people actually involved and potentially have fun with the situation, which will mean they will pay more attention and put more effort in.
Well, he isn't being too much of a hypocrite. Rick Perry earlier said he was against embryonic stem cell research http://www.chron.com/news/article/Perry-speaks-out-against-abortion-stem-cell-1498123.php So instead he's using his own stem cells in a poorly studied and as yet not very well understood process. He could have been a real hypocrite and done something with embryonic stem cells. But nope, he's pushed for the screwing over of science and medicine and he's going to stick with it. Of course, there's the secondary problem that even reliable, well-studied adult stem cell research is based to a large extent on information we got from studying embryonic stem cells. So even if this does work he will be benefiting from the research he despises. So I guess there is a small bit of hypocrisy but it isn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
TFA notes that this work was done by Martin Brasier's team and that Brasier has generally been a strong critic of a lot of the claims about early fossilized life. That may be strong evidence that this claim should be taken seriously. However, there have been times before where scientists have criticized claims coming from other groups even as they've made nearly identical claims. It looks like Brasier et al. have done much more careful chemical work than some of the other early life claims which makes this look promising but this probably won't be completely clear until a bit more work by other groups is done. It is also important to note that it is extremely unlikely that we are finding the very first life. Most likely, life had to be pretty common already in order for it to have a decent chance to leave fossils. This means that one can tentatively guess that life arose at least a few million years before when these fossils were formed.
We keep pushing farther and farther back in time when life arose on Earth. This is important since it helps us figure out just how likely life is to arise in general. The argument goes that if life is easy to start then we should expect to see life arise soon after heavy bombardment of Earth begins. And that's what we do seem to be seeing. This suggests that life may be plentiful. There's a substantial very recent argument against this line of reasoning by David Spiegel and Edwin Turner http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-astrophysicists-logic-downplay-probability-extraterrestrial.html. Spiegel and Turner argued that if it generally takes a lot of time to get intelligent life to develop then intelligent life will have an observer bias since it will only arise on the planets where life started very early. This means that seeing life early on in our history might be something which we should expect even if life arises really rarely.
Hindsight here is wrong. That's a typo. My point was that Mars is generally closer than Jupiter but that it is easier to get ejecta to Mars than Earth. That's what is counterintuitive. Even when Mars and Earth are opposite each other they are only about 15-20 light minutes apart. When Earth and Jupiter are near each other they are still farther away than that.
Two feet per a century is one of the more conservative estimates http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/slrmaps_probability.html. Even one foot by 2050 could be potentially devastating. 3 feet in a hundred years (which is not at an extreme estimate) will be economically devastating. Areas like Tuvalu are already running into problems.
What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.
Actually, many of the suicide bombers don't have crippling poverty. They are more likely to be literate and have college degrees than the general populations from which they spring. One fact that might be particularly interesting to Slashdot is that there's a disproportionate number of terrorists who are engineers. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html and http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers. There's an associated idea known as the Salem Hypothesis which is the observation that in the US, anti-evolution proponents with advanced degrees are disproportionately engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis). Engineers in the United States are also more politically conservative and religious than scientists. There's something weird going on here. But regardless, attributing "crippling poverty" as a major part of why people engage in suicide bombing seems to be off.
Ugh, should pay more attention to preview. Last part got cut off from bad URL link. Mean to say:
Well this is interesting. The fact that it is easier for our ejecta to get to a moon of Jupiter than Mars when Mars is much further away is counterintuitive and cool. But, this means that even if we find life on Europa, unless that life's basic biochemistry is radically different from that on Earth, we won't be getting any useful data about how difficult it is for life to start. The Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation [wikipedia.org] and variants thereof try to get an estimate for how common intelligence life should be. Most of the non-biological parameters (e.g. rate of star formation, how common planets are in star systems) we've been able to pin down estimates for a lot better than we used to (thanks in a large part to the modern ability to detect exoplanets and especially the massive amount of data we've got from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft) [wikipedia.org] although we still don't have a very good idea of exactly how common Earth-like planets are and the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Finder. This strongly suggests that investingating Euorpa won't get a good estimate for this probability. However, it also suggests that Drake's assumption that the chance for life to arise on each planet or moon is independent underestimates the chance for life to arise.
Well this is interesting. The fact that it is easier for our ejecta to get to a moon of Jupiter than Mars when Mars is much further away is counterintuitive and cool. But, this means that even if we find life on Europa, unless that life's basic biochemistry is radically different from that on Earth, we won't be getting any useful data about how difficult it is for life to start. The Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation and variants thereof try to get an estimate for how common intelligence life should be. Most of the non-biological parameters (e.g. rate of star formation, how common planets are in star systems) we've been able to pin down estimates for a lot better than we used to (thanks in a large part to the modern ability to detect exoplanets and especially the massive amount of data we've got from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft) although we still don't have a very good idea of exactly how common Earth-like planets are and the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled underestimates the chance for life to arise.
The real threat from sea level rise is zero. It would take a long, long time for all of that ice to melt; generations most likely. People will just naturally move inland as the water level rises. It's not like you're going to wake up in your seventh floor apartment one morning and find out that your balcony would now make a good dock.
There's a lot wrong with this. It doesn't require a full melt for the sea level to rise a few feet. Even a two or three foot rise could have devastating consequences. My parents have a small house in a small town in New England. There house is on a hill and so is pretty safe. But many of the other houses in the area are only a few feet above the high-tide line. If the sea level went up 2 or 3 feet, then when the sea gets really high during storms there would be real damage. Furthermore, some buildings have foundations that go down far which would then lead to problems with the foundations. It doesn't take water up to your balcony window to make the building have problems, that will happen well before that. What do you think will happen to a building with a basement that is partially below the water table? And relocating people takes a massive amount of economic resources and destroys national heritage ("Yes, children, much of where Paul Revere road through you've never heard of. It has been uninhabitable for 30 years." Do you want to have to tell kids that?) And New England isn't the only area that will have problems. New York City right now to keep the subways functioning on dry days pumps out around 13 million gallons of water. http://www.nysun.com/new-york/inside-the-mtas-fight-against-subway-flooding/35672/ And that's just the subways, that's not counting all the other pumps in NYC. Do you realize how much worse that will be from just a 1 or 2 foot increase in water level? Then add to this list a lot of cities in Florida. And that's just the more obviously impacted areas of the US.
And even this ignores the problem in less well-off countries. For example, many people live on small islands in the South Pacific. Consider Tuvalu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu which is not at all well off, and is so small that there's no part of it higher than about 15 feet above sea level. If sea level increases by 2 feet, then most of the island will become inhabitable. That's it. An entire country gone. They lack the money and area to relocate if the worst happens. And not surprisingly, they are a bit pissed off that our failure means that they might have to move. And they aren't the only example. There are literally hundreds of small islands in the Pacific which will suffer from sea level rise. And this isn't the only part of the world that will have trouble. Many South American countries have a lot of people on the coasts.
Then there's also all the secondary environmental problems. Many areas which are now fresh water will become much more saline. Fresh water fish will have problems. Water supplies currently used for drinking water will need to add all sorts of expensive desalinization equipment. Environmentally stressed areas like the Florida Everglades will run into even more problems.
So yeah, there's a serious threat here. And it doesn't require water going that high up. Only a few feet can have devastating economic, environmental and social consequences.
There's no question that there are genetic differences. And some of those differences probably do have to do with intelligence. But it seems clear that this isn't what is happening in this situation. The study in question corrected for education background and prior work/studies. That means that researchers who on paper look the same and have accomplished the same amount scientifically and yet are treated differently based on their race.
That's about... oh... 20 minutes using NSA equipment
In order for this sort of thing to be cracked quickly one would need either ridiculously fast computers even by the standards of something like the NSA. It is more plausible that the NSA is aware of improved algorithms that would allow much faster key recovery. In that case, this improvement is likely irrelevant. It is more likely that they will be able to break things due to implementational problems such rather than direct key retreivable. So I'd be more concerned about side-channel attacks and the like. Also, obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/.
I don't have much experience with different e-readers. Just noting that from my personal experience with the Kindle's default handling of PDFs it isn't very good for scientific papers. Diagrams especially don't come out well, and occasionally stuff isn't rendered correctly (although that issue has become nearly non-existent with the new Kindles and the upgrades. I don't know what they did but presumably improved stuff somewhere). I have friends who have had good experiences with the iPad, and for diagrams it is quite nice. You can easily rotate them or zoom in or out using a very intuitive interface.
Over time, there have been more and more ways of getting computers to our scientific work for us. There's been success with this sort of thing for a long time. For example, in math the mid 1990s the Robbins conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_algebra was proven using essentially an automated theorem proving system. Similarly, Simon Colton has done work with computer systems that can notice patterns and make novel mathematical definitions and conjectures without human input ahref=http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.htmlrel=url2html-7891http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.html>. There's been work in other fields as well such as in automated experiment systems in biochemistry http://www.aejournal.net/content/2/1/1.
One interesting thing about TFA is that it is suggesting that powerful enough systems might be able purely through simulation to predict what new compounds are worth investigating. In principle, this could lead eventually to self-improving systems where a system designs better and better algorithms and hardware for itself which it uses to then design even better ones and so on. This sort of Singularity scenario generally seems implausible to me but it is one of the more plausible Singularity scenarios and articles like this make me wonder if it should be taken seriously. Obviously, there are serious limits on that sort of thing, since one runs into the laws of physics and the laws of mathematics eventually. You can't improve algorithms beyond a certain point (you start running into P!=NP sort of issues). And you can't improve physical efficiency beyond the laws of physics. In essence, even if I can look through a search space a 1000 times as fast, that doesn't mean I will find a solution that is a 1000 times as good. But with access to both software and hardware improvements, substantial improvement may be possible.
Of course, at the current stage this is highly limited. The simulations in question in their current forms can at best target specific molecules that look promising. They are very far from actually predicting the exact behavior. Indeed, my old college roomate is a physicist who works on computational physics and related issues, and one thing he and a few others have been working on for a long time is trying to derive accurate behavior for water from quantum mechanical principles. This is still not doable beyond a rough approximation. The computations are simply too difficult. And as TFA notes, figuring out how to synthesize new compounds can still take years. So this is a really interesting result, but it isn't something that is likely to see immediate impact. Still very cool though.
A lot of neat synthesized compounds have been found in nature after they've been made by people. A very similar example is how last year using very similar methods buckyballs (big carbon molecules with 60 carbon atoms in the shape of soccer balls) have been found in space http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/07/carbon_buckyballs_found_in_spa.html. Buckyballs have also been found on Earth in craters from meteorites and they are believed to have been made in the impact. Since buckyballs are large enough to contain very small molecules, there's been work trying to take these buckyballs and trying to extract atoms which were inadvertently trapped during the C60 formation. http://cnx.org/content/m14355/latest/ There's hope that this technique can help us learn about atmospheric issues from long ago as well as learn about isotope ratios and the like.
Unfortunately, Spitzer will not be operating forever. Indeed Spitzer has already run out of liquid helium, making most of its sensitive instruments inoperable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope. Spitzer will likely have very little functionality by 2020. There's some slight good news in that Spitzer is in a heliocentric rather than geocentric orbit, so it won't need to be deorbited (often we need to deorbit satellites so that they don't contribute more space junk or engage in uncontrolled deorbits and hit something back on Earth). So Spitzer can keep working until the very end of its instruments.
The really bad news is that there's a lot of effort to cancel the James Webb Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope which will replace a lot of what Spitzer does and some of what Hubble does. Without Webb, when Spitzer goes, the US will have essentially no major space based telescope capacity. We will have let all that capacity be in the hands of Europe, Japan and China. Just as the center of particle physics moved to Europe when the LHC was built their and the SSC was canceled, so two the center of astrophysics may move to Europe. We are engaging in a slow steady decline. Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized the problem very well- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_F3pw5F_Pc- We have stopped dreaming. The American dream is ending. We might yet stop it, but right now it looks like the US is going the way of all failed empires, falling slowly into stagnation.
Anyone interested in this issue should read the NIAC report http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf which discusses the issues in detail and the technical problems. Space elevators would make space travel much cheaper. But the technical issues are immense. The NIAC report carefully outlines the major issues and how they might be handled. We would need to make extremely high quality carbon nanotubes at an immense scale. We also would need to put into space a structure orders of magnitude larger than anything we've put in space. Indeed, a space elevator would be one of the largest physical structures ever made by humans. And the engineering hurdles, such as the problems of wind in the lower atmosphere, are massive. But there's nothing about the idea that is physically impossible. The primary issues are issues of scale. And the issues are being worked on. Right now, there's a lot of work on making carbon nanotubes of high quality in a large scale. Since such nanotubes would have many different applications there's a lot of funding for that and that will likely be extremely beneficial to humanity well before it scales up to anything near that needed for a space elevator. Since the nanotube manufacturing is the primary technical hurdle, this is a good thing. I doubt we will see a space elevator in my lifetime, but maybe my children, or their children, will see it. And on that thing ribbon, space travel will finally become as cheap as so many have envisioned it.
According to TFA even older, cruder versions of this equipment can "detect the raised ink patterns on a $20 bill." TFA also notes that the way this works is to make the optical properties of the surface of the object essentially uniform. To some extent this is an extension of existing technologies. There are a fair number of imaging techniques that involve doping the surface of something before trying to image it. For example, when one is using an electron microscope one frequently dopes the target with some helpful metal first. But this is a lot easier to run than that and works on the optical range. And the cameras used themselves seem to be not that expensive. This seems a like a really potentially very groundbreaking technology. And it is a good example of how sometimes the technologies that show up and change things aren't technologies that any futurist or science-fiction writer has anticipated. I'll be very interested to see where this technology goes in ten years.
No, that's just due to me being stupid in writing. Substitute "space" for atmospheric. The whole issue is the EMP from space based nukes. And er yeah, obviously I need to use preview a hell of a lot more.
We need to do more preparations for serious solar flares coming directly at Earth. Electronics are a lot more common now than they used to be. We're somewhat lucky in that we haven't had any really awful flares since the 19th century where some of them were bad enough to actually damage telegraph systems. Now electronics are far more ubiquitous and use much less power so are potentially far more easily damaged. A serious flare could do severe damage to the power grid as well as disable or destroy a lot of satellites we use for regular behavior like communication and GPS. Luckily the GPS sats are mil spec so they are pretty hardened (primarily due to the threat of atmospheric nuke detonations). On the ground we absolutely need to improve our electric grid. If a lot of it collapses it could be very not pretty. Even critical infrastructure like hospitals don't have generators that can run for more than a few days. Unfortunately, utility companies have no incentive to prepare because the events are rare and they won't be held liable if things get really bad. We need more direct regulation mandating that the grid be stable and redundant. If the grid collapses at a really bad time (say in the middle of the summer in a very hot area) a lot of people could die.
We also need to get better at actually predicting flares before they happen so we can brace for a really bad one. This means more solar observation.Given where science funding is right now, and space funding in general, this is unlikely to happen soon.
On the one hand, this is pretty cool, and the general values of Stark Trek (of which free thought and egalitarianism are pretty high on the list) are good things to promote in areas like Jordan. However, the fact that the monarch is already a Trekkie and yet is country is like what it is today doesn't speak highly of how much influence it has really had on him. (Jordan is not nearly as badly off as say Syria, but it is by no means a functioning democracy with human rights. Far from it.) Moreover, the people who go to this will almost certainly be outside tourists, whether Westerners, or rich people from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So this will probably do very little to directly benefit Jordanians, who have a lot of problems. Again, Jordan's problems aren't nearly as severe as many other countries in the region, the literacy rate is the second highest out of it and its immediate neighbors http://www.indexmundi.com/jordan/literacy.html but there's still a decent chunk of around 10% who can't read. And there's severe unemployment- this project might help with that, but it is tough to tell.
The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.
The crater is steep. It will be extremely difficult to get Opportunity out of the crater after it goes in. And there's a massive amount of interesting stuff in the crater to look at. Opportunity also has some functional difficulties (although it has so far been much more functioning than its sister Rover spirit). It is likely that the rover will break before we run out of interesting stuff to look at in the crater.
This is the first major mission to Jupiter since Galileo which was launched in 1989. Unlike Galileo this won't be focusing on the moons as much (which is sort of too bad since they are some of the most interesting things about Jupiter since they might harbor life.) Also, as TFA discusses, this has a lot of stuff to help deal with the high radiation which hasn't been used before. Seeing how exactly that technology works will help out a lot with future probes to high radiation or high magnetic field environments. One other nice thing about this is that we might get more information about the core which is currently hypothesized to be metalic hydrogen because the hydrogen is just under such high pressure that it becomes a solid, and that's freaking awesome.
I have. And the statement still seems to be approximately accurate. In societies with shorter lifespans, the frequency of the deaths of family and friends will be higher. The total number will be the same but that's a distinct issue.
As to people struggling- sure lots of people are struggling. Is the standard now that we can't do anything at all when there are a lot of people struggling? That seems to be a much stricter standard than what you espoused earlier. That means that in order for this to matter, you need to making an even stronger claim than you were earlier. Are you sure you want to do that?
Put bluntly, if you give $100/week locally to someone who is too mentally ill to work, you may allow them to maintain themselves while they are on a programme of recovery and you may stop them from stealing on the streets. But before you consider $10/week to someone healthy but destitute half way across the world, you will have to help battle transport/corruption/crime/illness/etc before that $10 is really going to give the foreigner a fighting chance. To help individuals you must build societies, and you cannot help a society abroad without first maintaining a society at home (it is the society at home which provides the assistance!).
This is the sort of thing that on its surface sounds nice but is both inaccurate and is confused with secondary issues. First you are essentially agreeing here that proximity isn't what actually matters. You are making a pragmatic claim about proximity, rather than a moral claim. It is possible that I misread your earlier claim in which case I have less of an objection to the argument. Does it reflect reality? Not really. The truth is that our society will be able to easily provide support for another society whether or not the mentally ill homeless person gets support. That sort of person being on the margins doesn't substantially impact our society's productivity or stability. If Givewell's data http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villagereach is accurate then giving that money to VillageReach will easily do far more than giving that money to the nearby homeless guy.
No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
People don't want to die. This isn't complicated. Really. Death sucks. Losing friends and family members sucks. Longer lifespans make that less common.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant death was routine and did not cause the majority of people to become chronically unhappy, although our Western bubbles of privilege allow us the luxury of thinking too much about the children.
Historically people get pregnant for a variety of reasons. One obvious one is lack of choice- if you don't have birth control then sex (which humans have a strong desire for) leads to kids pretty quickly. Moreover, people don't want to lose infants but they also want to have children. This isn't necessarily as selfish as wanting kids to take care of in their old age. Many cultures have a belief that having kids is a good thing. Moreover, the loss of infants creating unhappiness has nothing to do with the "Western bubbles of privilege". Sadness at the death of infants occurs not just in privileged Western civilization but in societies all throughout the world, and even in non-human species http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/pictures/110526-gorilla-mother-mourns-dead-baby-science-mourning-feel-emotions-animals/ Moreover if you look at utopian literature from the 17th and 18th centuries, one of thing that shows up repeatedly is the idea that infant death will be the exception rather than the rule. So yeah, it hurt a lot even then.
Moving on to your next claim since you don't like the metrics I was using for happiness levels, do you have another one you would like to use? At this point you seem to be rejecting every possible metric posed. You aren't posing any other metrics or data and are at the same time insisting that you are correct. Do you see why this might not be the most productive stance to take?
Any sensible resource allocation exercise is going to do better bringing everyone in a local unit up to a certain standard of living before it tackles the guy half way across the world.
Actually, that's extremely not obvious to me. Sure, it is easy to tell yourself that that's somehow "sensible" because it fits with basic intuitions. But there's no good moral or ethical reason that proximity should translate into moral importance.
Slashdot Mirror
An alien attack is a really unlikely scenario. Aliens aren't going to deal with the incredibly non-trivial problem of interstellar travel and then decide to go wack the primitive humans. And if they do decide to do that, they are likely to be so far advanced from us that it won't make much of a difference, since humans will be wiped so quickly that Google will be irrelevant. However, the alien scenario does two things that are good: First, a lot of the worst-case scenarios are things which one won't think of in advance. By using scenarios like the alien scenario they help cover a lot of reactions to unanticipated very bad scenarios that no one has even come up with. Second, this sort of thing helps make security wargaming fun. The fact is that a lot of standard wargaming and largescale simulations can be frightfully dull. Using something like aliens helps get people actually involved and potentially have fun with the situation, which will mean they will pay more attention and put more effort in.
Well, he isn't being too much of a hypocrite. Rick Perry earlier said he was against embryonic stem cell research http://www.chron.com/news/article/Perry-speaks-out-against-abortion-stem-cell-1498123.php So instead he's using his own stem cells in a poorly studied and as yet not very well understood process. He could have been a real hypocrite and done something with embryonic stem cells. But nope, he's pushed for the screwing over of science and medicine and he's going to stick with it. Of course, there's the secondary problem that even reliable, well-studied adult stem cell research is based to a large extent on information we got from studying embryonic stem cells. So even if this does work he will be benefiting from the research he despises. So I guess there is a small bit of hypocrisy but it isn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
TFA notes that this work was done by Martin Brasier's team and that Brasier has generally been a strong critic of a lot of the claims about early fossilized life. That may be strong evidence that this claim should be taken seriously. However, there have been times before where scientists have criticized claims coming from other groups even as they've made nearly identical claims. It looks like Brasier et al. have done much more careful chemical work than some of the other early life claims which makes this look promising but this probably won't be completely clear until a bit more work by other groups is done. It is also important to note that it is extremely unlikely that we are finding the very first life. Most likely, life had to be pretty common already in order for it to have a decent chance to leave fossils. This means that one can tentatively guess that life arose at least a few million years before when these fossils were formed.
We keep pushing farther and farther back in time when life arose on Earth. This is important since it helps us figure out just how likely life is to arise in general. The argument goes that if life is easy to start then we should expect to see life arise soon after heavy bombardment of Earth begins. And that's what we do seem to be seeing. This suggests that life may be plentiful. There's a substantial very recent argument against this line of reasoning by David Spiegel and Edwin Turner http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-astrophysicists-logic-downplay-probability-extraterrestrial.html. Spiegel and Turner argued that if it generally takes a lot of time to get intelligent life to develop then intelligent life will have an observer bias since it will only arise on the planets where life started very early. This means that seeing life early on in our history might be something which we should expect even if life arises really rarely.
Hindsight here is wrong. That's a typo. My point was that Mars is generally closer than Jupiter but that it is easier to get ejecta to Mars than Earth. That's what is counterintuitive. Even when Mars and Earth are opposite each other they are only about 15-20 light minutes apart. When Earth and Jupiter are near each other they are still farther away than that.
Two feet per a century is one of the more conservative estimates http://epa.gov/climatechange/effects/coastal/slrmaps_probability.html. Even one foot by 2050 could be potentially devastating. 3 feet in a hundred years (which is not at an extreme estimate) will be economically devastating. Areas like Tuvalu are already running into problems.
Er yes, that's why it is counterintuitive that it is easier to get Jupiter. Wow. I really need to work on the whole preview thing a lot more.
What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.
Actually, many of the suicide bombers don't have crippling poverty. They are more likely to be literate and have college degrees than the general populations from which they spring. One fact that might be particularly interesting to Slashdot is that there's a disproportionate number of terrorists who are engineers. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html and http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers. There's an associated idea known as the Salem Hypothesis which is the observation that in the US, anti-evolution proponents with advanced degrees are disproportionately engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis). Engineers in the United States are also more politically conservative and religious than scientists. There's something weird going on here. But regardless, attributing "crippling poverty" as a major part of why people engage in suicide bombing seems to be off.
Well this is interesting. The fact that it is easier for our ejecta to get to a moon of Jupiter than Mars when Mars is much further away is counterintuitive and cool. But, this means that even if we find life on Europa, unless that life's basic biochemistry is radically different from that on Earth, we won't be getting any useful data about how difficult it is for life to start. The Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation [wikipedia.org] and variants thereof try to get an estimate for how common intelligence life should be. Most of the non-biological parameters (e.g. rate of star formation, how common planets are in star systems) we've been able to pin down estimates for a lot better than we used to (thanks in a large part to the modern ability to detect exoplanets and especially the massive amount of data we've got from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft) [wikipedia.org] although we still don't have a very good idea of exactly how common Earth-like planets are and the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Finder. This strongly suggests that investingating Euorpa won't get a good estimate for this probability. However, it also suggests that Drake's assumption that the chance for life to arise on each planet or moon is independent underestimates the chance for life to arise.
Well this is interesting. The fact that it is easier for our ejecta to get to a moon of Jupiter than Mars when Mars is much further away is counterintuitive and cool. But, this means that even if we find life on Europa, unless that life's basic biochemistry is radically different from that on Earth, we won't be getting any useful data about how difficult it is for life to start. The Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation and variants thereof try to get an estimate for how common intelligence life should be. Most of the non-biological parameters (e.g. rate of star formation, how common planets are in star systems) we've been able to pin down estimates for a lot better than we used to (thanks in a large part to the modern ability to detect exoplanets and especially the massive amount of data we've got from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft) although we still don't have a very good idea of exactly how common Earth-like planets are and the Terrestrial Planet Finder got canceled underestimates the chance for life to arise.
The real threat from sea level rise is zero. It would take a long, long time for all of that ice to melt; generations most likely. People will just naturally move inland as the water level rises. It's not like you're going to wake up in your seventh floor apartment one morning and find out that your balcony would now make a good dock.
There's a lot wrong with this. It doesn't require a full melt for the sea level to rise a few feet. Even a two or three foot rise could have devastating consequences. My parents have a small house in a small town in New England. There house is on a hill and so is pretty safe. But many of the other houses in the area are only a few feet above the high-tide line. If the sea level went up 2 or 3 feet, then when the sea gets really high during storms there would be real damage. Furthermore, some buildings have foundations that go down far which would then lead to problems with the foundations. It doesn't take water up to your balcony window to make the building have problems, that will happen well before that. What do you think will happen to a building with a basement that is partially below the water table? And relocating people takes a massive amount of economic resources and destroys national heritage ("Yes, children, much of where Paul Revere road through you've never heard of. It has been uninhabitable for 30 years." Do you want to have to tell kids that?) And New England isn't the only area that will have problems. New York City right now to keep the subways functioning on dry days pumps out around 13 million gallons of water. http://www.nysun.com/new-york/inside-the-mtas-fight-against-subway-flooding/35672/ And that's just the subways, that's not counting all the other pumps in NYC. Do you realize how much worse that will be from just a 1 or 2 foot increase in water level? Then add to this list a lot of cities in Florida. And that's just the more obviously impacted areas of the US.
And even this ignores the problem in less well-off countries. For example, many people live on small islands in the South Pacific. Consider Tuvalu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu which is not at all well off, and is so small that there's no part of it higher than about 15 feet above sea level. If sea level increases by 2 feet, then most of the island will become inhabitable. That's it. An entire country gone. They lack the money and area to relocate if the worst happens. And not surprisingly, they are a bit pissed off that our failure means that they might have to move. And they aren't the only example. There are literally hundreds of small islands in the Pacific which will suffer from sea level rise. And this isn't the only part of the world that will have trouble. Many South American countries have a lot of people on the coasts.
Then there's also all the secondary environmental problems. Many areas which are now fresh water will become much more saline. Fresh water fish will have problems. Water supplies currently used for drinking water will need to add all sorts of expensive desalinization equipment. Environmentally stressed areas like the Florida Everglades will run into even more problems.
So yeah, there's a serious threat here. And it doesn't require water going that high up. Only a few feet can have devastating economic, environmental and social consequences.
There's no question that there are genetic differences. And some of those differences probably do have to do with intelligence. But it seems clear that this isn't what is happening in this situation. The study in question corrected for education background and prior work/studies. That means that researchers who on paper look the same and have accomplished the same amount scientifically and yet are treated differently based on their race.
That's about... oh... 20 minutes using NSA equipment In order for this sort of thing to be cracked quickly one would need either ridiculously fast computers even by the standards of something like the NSA. It is more plausible that the NSA is aware of improved algorithms that would allow much faster key recovery. In that case, this improvement is likely irrelevant. It is more likely that they will be able to break things due to implementational problems such rather than direct key retreivable. So I'd be more concerned about side-channel attacks and the like. Also, obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/.
I don't have much experience with different e-readers. Just noting that from my personal experience with the Kindle's default handling of PDFs it isn't very good for scientific papers. Diagrams especially don't come out well, and occasionally stuff isn't rendered correctly (although that issue has become nearly non-existent with the new Kindles and the upgrades. I don't know what they did but presumably improved stuff somewhere). I have friends who have had good experiences with the iPad, and for diagrams it is quite nice. You can easily rotate them or zoom in or out using a very intuitive interface.
Over time, there have been more and more ways of getting computers to our scientific work for us. There's been success with this sort of thing for a long time. For example, in math the mid 1990s the Robbins conjecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_algebra was proven using essentially an automated theorem proving system. Similarly, Simon Colton has done work with computer systems that can notice patterns and make novel mathematical definitions and conjectures without human input ahref=http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.htmlrel=url2html-7891http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/colton/joisol.html>. There's been work in other fields as well such as in automated experiment systems in biochemistry http://www.aejournal.net/content/2/1/1.
One interesting thing about TFA is that it is suggesting that powerful enough systems might be able purely through simulation to predict what new compounds are worth investigating. In principle, this could lead eventually to self-improving systems where a system designs better and better algorithms and hardware for itself which it uses to then design even better ones and so on. This sort of Singularity scenario generally seems implausible to me but it is one of the more plausible Singularity scenarios and articles like this make me wonder if it should be taken seriously. Obviously, there are serious limits on that sort of thing, since one runs into the laws of physics and the laws of mathematics eventually. You can't improve algorithms beyond a certain point (you start running into P!=NP sort of issues). And you can't improve physical efficiency beyond the laws of physics. In essence, even if I can look through a search space a 1000 times as fast, that doesn't mean I will find a solution that is a 1000 times as good. But with access to both software and hardware improvements, substantial improvement may be possible.
Of course, at the current stage this is highly limited. The simulations in question in their current forms can at best target specific molecules that look promising. They are very far from actually predicting the exact behavior. Indeed, my old college roomate is a physicist who works on computational physics and related issues, and one thing he and a few others have been working on for a long time is trying to derive accurate behavior for water from quantum mechanical principles. This is still not doable beyond a rough approximation. The computations are simply too difficult. And as TFA notes, figuring out how to synthesize new compounds can still take years. So this is a really interesting result, but it isn't something that is likely to see immediate impact. Still very cool though.
A lot of neat synthesized compounds have been found in nature after they've been made by people. A very similar example is how last year using very similar methods buckyballs (big carbon molecules with 60 carbon atoms in the shape of soccer balls) have been found in space http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/07/carbon_buckyballs_found_in_spa.html. Buckyballs have also been found on Earth in craters from meteorites and they are believed to have been made in the impact. Since buckyballs are large enough to contain very small molecules, there's been work trying to take these buckyballs and trying to extract atoms which were inadvertently trapped during the C60 formation. http://cnx.org/content/m14355/latest/ There's hope that this technique can help us learn about atmospheric issues from long ago as well as learn about isotope ratios and the like.
Unfortunately, Spitzer will not be operating forever. Indeed Spitzer has already run out of liquid helium, making most of its sensitive instruments inoperable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope. Spitzer will likely have very little functionality by 2020. There's some slight good news in that Spitzer is in a heliocentric rather than geocentric orbit, so it won't need to be deorbited (often we need to deorbit satellites so that they don't contribute more space junk or engage in uncontrolled deorbits and hit something back on Earth). So Spitzer can keep working until the very end of its instruments.
The really bad news is that there's a lot of effort to cancel the James Webb Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope which will replace a lot of what Spitzer does and some of what Hubble does. Without Webb, when Spitzer goes, the US will have essentially no major space based telescope capacity. We will have let all that capacity be in the hands of Europe, Japan and China. Just as the center of particle physics moved to Europe when the LHC was built their and the SSC was canceled, so two the center of astrophysics may move to Europe. We are engaging in a slow steady decline. Neil deGrasse Tyson summarized the problem very well- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_F3pw5F_Pc- We have stopped dreaming. The American dream is ending. We might yet stop it, but right now it looks like the US is going the way of all failed empires, falling slowly into stagnation.
And on that thing ribbon
Ugh. Need to pay more attention to preview. Replace "thing" with "thin".
Anyone interested in this issue should read the NIAC report http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/521Edwards.pdf which discusses the issues in detail and the technical problems. Space elevators would make space travel much cheaper. But the technical issues are immense. The NIAC report carefully outlines the major issues and how they might be handled. We would need to make extremely high quality carbon nanotubes at an immense scale. We also would need to put into space a structure orders of magnitude larger than anything we've put in space. Indeed, a space elevator would be one of the largest physical structures ever made by humans. And the engineering hurdles, such as the problems of wind in the lower atmosphere, are massive. But there's nothing about the idea that is physically impossible. The primary issues are issues of scale. And the issues are being worked on. Right now, there's a lot of work on making carbon nanotubes of high quality in a large scale. Since such nanotubes would have many different applications there's a lot of funding for that and that will likely be extremely beneficial to humanity well before it scales up to anything near that needed for a space elevator. Since the nanotube manufacturing is the primary technical hurdle, this is a good thing. I doubt we will see a space elevator in my lifetime, but maybe my children, or their children, will see it. And on that thing ribbon, space travel will finally become as cheap as so many have envisioned it.
According to TFA even older, cruder versions of this equipment can "detect the raised ink patterns on a $20 bill." TFA also notes that the way this works is to make the optical properties of the surface of the object essentially uniform. To some extent this is an extension of existing technologies. There are a fair number of imaging techniques that involve doping the surface of something before trying to image it. For example, when one is using an electron microscope one frequently dopes the target with some helpful metal first. But this is a lot easier to run than that and works on the optical range. And the cameras used themselves seem to be not that expensive. This seems a like a really potentially very groundbreaking technology. And it is a good example of how sometimes the technologies that show up and change things aren't technologies that any futurist or science-fiction writer has anticipated. I'll be very interested to see where this technology goes in ten years.
No, that's just due to me being stupid in writing. Substitute "space" for atmospheric. The whole issue is the EMP from space based nukes. And er yeah, obviously I need to use preview a hell of a lot more.
We need to do more preparations for serious solar flares coming directly at Earth. Electronics are a lot more common now than they used to be. We're somewhat lucky in that we haven't had any really awful flares since the 19th century where some of them were bad enough to actually damage telegraph systems. Now electronics are far more ubiquitous and use much less power so are potentially far more easily damaged. A serious flare could do severe damage to the power grid as well as disable or destroy a lot of satellites we use for regular behavior like communication and GPS. Luckily the GPS sats are mil spec so they are pretty hardened (primarily due to the threat of atmospheric nuke detonations). On the ground we absolutely need to improve our electric grid. If a lot of it collapses it could be very not pretty. Even critical infrastructure like hospitals don't have generators that can run for more than a few days. Unfortunately, utility companies have no incentive to prepare because the events are rare and they won't be held liable if things get really bad. We need more direct regulation mandating that the grid be stable and redundant. If the grid collapses at a really bad time (say in the middle of the summer in a very hot area) a lot of people could die.
We also need to get better at actually predicting flares before they happen so we can brace for a really bad one. This means more solar observation.Given where science funding is right now, and space funding in general, this is unlikely to happen soon.
On the one hand, this is pretty cool, and the general values of Stark Trek (of which free thought and egalitarianism are pretty high on the list) are good things to promote in areas like Jordan. However, the fact that the monarch is already a Trekkie and yet is country is like what it is today doesn't speak highly of how much influence it has really had on him. (Jordan is not nearly as badly off as say Syria, but it is by no means a functioning democracy with human rights. Far from it.) Moreover, the people who go to this will almost certainly be outside tourists, whether Westerners, or rich people from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. So this will probably do very little to directly benefit Jordanians, who have a lot of problems. Again, Jordan's problems aren't nearly as severe as many other countries in the region, the literacy rate is the second highest out of it and its immediate neighbors http://www.indexmundi.com/jordan/literacy.html but there's still a decent chunk of around 10% who can't read. And there's severe unemployment- this project might help with that, but it is tough to tell.
The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.
The crater is steep. It will be extremely difficult to get Opportunity out of the crater after it goes in. And there's a massive amount of interesting stuff in the crater to look at. Opportunity also has some functional difficulties (although it has so far been much more functioning than its sister Rover spirit). It is likely that the rover will break before we run out of interesting stuff to look at in the crater.
This is the first major mission to Jupiter since Galileo which was launched in 1989. Unlike Galileo this won't be focusing on the moons as much (which is sort of too bad since they are some of the most interesting things about Jupiter since they might harbor life.) Also, as TFA discusses, this has a lot of stuff to help deal with the high radiation which hasn't been used before. Seeing how exactly that technology works will help out a lot with future probes to high radiation or high magnetic field environments. One other nice thing about this is that we might get more information about the core which is currently hypothesized to be metalic hydrogen because the hydrogen is just under such high pressure that it becomes a solid, and that's freaking awesome.
Please think that statement through :-).
I have. And the statement still seems to be approximately accurate. In societies with shorter lifespans, the frequency of the deaths of family and friends will be higher. The total number will be the same but that's a distinct issue. As to people struggling- sure lots of people are struggling. Is the standard now that we can't do anything at all when there are a lot of people struggling? That seems to be a much stricter standard than what you espoused earlier. That means that in order for this to matter, you need to making an even stronger claim than you were earlier. Are you sure you want to do that?
Put bluntly, if you give $100/week locally to someone who is too mentally ill to work, you may allow them to maintain themselves while they are on a programme of recovery and you may stop them from stealing on the streets. But before you consider $10/week to someone healthy but destitute half way across the world, you will have to help battle transport/corruption/crime/illness/etc before that $10 is really going to give the foreigner a fighting chance. To help individuals you must build societies, and you cannot help a society abroad without first maintaining a society at home (it is the society at home which provides the assistance!).
This is the sort of thing that on its surface sounds nice but is both inaccurate and is confused with secondary issues. First you are essentially agreeing here that proximity isn't what actually matters. You are making a pragmatic claim about proximity, rather than a moral claim. It is possible that I misread your earlier claim in which case I have less of an objection to the argument. Does it reflect reality? Not really. The truth is that our society will be able to easily provide support for another society whether or not the mentally ill homeless person gets support. That sort of person being on the margins doesn't substantially impact our society's productivity or stability. If Givewell's data http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villagereach is accurate then giving that money to VillageReach will easily do far more than giving that money to the nearby homeless guy.
No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
People don't want to die. This isn't complicated. Really. Death sucks. Losing friends and family members sucks. Longer lifespans make that less common.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant death was routine and did not cause the majority of people to become chronically unhappy, although our Western bubbles of privilege allow us the luxury of thinking too much about the children.
Historically people get pregnant for a variety of reasons. One obvious one is lack of choice- if you don't have birth control then sex (which humans have a strong desire for) leads to kids pretty quickly. Moreover, people don't want to lose infants but they also want to have children. This isn't necessarily as selfish as wanting kids to take care of in their old age. Many cultures have a belief that having kids is a good thing. Moreover, the loss of infants creating unhappiness has nothing to do with the "Western bubbles of privilege". Sadness at the death of infants occurs not just in privileged Western civilization but in societies all throughout the world, and even in non-human species http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/pictures/110526-gorilla-mother-mourns-dead-baby-science-mourning-feel-emotions-animals/ Moreover if you look at utopian literature from the 17th and 18th centuries, one of thing that shows up repeatedly is the idea that infant death will be the exception rather than the rule. So yeah, it hurt a lot even then.
Moving on to your next claim since you don't like the metrics I was using for happiness levels, do you have another one you would like to use? At this point you seem to be rejecting every possible metric posed. You aren't posing any other metrics or data and are at the same time insisting that you are correct. Do you see why this might not be the most productive stance to take?
Any sensible resource allocation exercise is going to do better bringing everyone in a local unit up to a certain standard of living before it tackles the guy half way across the world.
Actually, that's extremely not obvious to me. Sure, it is easy to tell yourself that that's somehow "sensible" because it fits with basic intuitions. But there's no good moral or ethical reason that proximity should translate into moral importance.