Actually, it brings to mind some mythology movie I don't remember the name of...the hero-type character would attack the snake-monster thing, but upon severing a limb, the limb became yet another snake-monster.
That would be Hercules vs. the Hydra.
I read lots of Greek mythology as a child, but I was appalled to realise that I only remember whoe was involved in this battle because of the Disney movie. Help, there's something wrong with my culture...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's just not going to happen. Mutations happen randomly, and therefore most mutations that happen to non-junk DNA will break something important.
Mutations that happen to intron DNA are as likely to put something extra in as they are to take something out. So the only factor that could cause a shrunken genome would be a strong selection pressure in favour of it. Perhaps if lower food requirements or faster healing after injury resulted from removal of the introns, then we'd see a progressive downsizing of the genome of humans in the wild over a period of several hundred thousand years.
But I think it's also necessary to take into account to what degree civilisation might mitigate against these selection pressures with its health care programs, free education systems, equal rights legislation, abundant food supply, restrictions against murder, etc. Most of all, remember that successful individuals in today's civilised societies aren't likely to produce that many more offspring than less successful individuals with slightly poorer genes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
The last time I studied this stuff was back at University 12 years ago. I think you'd be fairly surprised to know just how well genetics was understood even then.
In other words, we know with a high degree of certainty that introns aren't involved in regular gene transcription, because we do know exactly how gene transcription works.
A gene first needs to be switched on and off by a specific signals from other nearby genes, and then they need to have the correct start and stop sequences if they are to be transcribed at all. Introns by definition are stretches of DNA which do not have these operon genes. And without operons, it's like having a program with a subroutine which has no statement to call it. It might just as well not be there at all.
There are various mechanisms via which non-coding DNA can get into the genome: viral insertion, inversion, other kinds of mutation. Maybe even uptake from free DNA floating in the air. Or in your food. We don't know for sure about those last two. The point is that the introns get there by accident just like the good stuff does. But the introns are DNA mutations that didn't result in transcribable genes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If someone could provide an appropriate address and case number, maybe some of us could write to the judge with friend of the court representations explaining (i) that the patent is trivial, (ii) that Amazon know this, and (iii) they are just using this injunction, the patents system and the legal system as a whole as delaying tactics to obtain an unfair commercial advantage.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think the previous poster's worry is well founded. I'm 35 now. 22 years ago I seat in the classroom of Modern Physics Department of University of Science & technology of China (USTC) with 157 classmates who are averagely 6 years older than me.
Every parent like to see that their kids are smarter than others. This drive parents to invent (or easily adopt) all kinds of standard to prove their point. Sometimes their force their kids fit into the framework with which they measure smartness. Most of the time, if not all, they don't know what kind of impact this will bring to their beloved children. And they fight firecely against those who disagree.
I know that "hothousing" children has been fairly common amongst academic families in China. I remember when I was little, seeing a four-year-old Chinese boy on TV doing algebra and speaking multiple languages (his parents were University academics). The only thing I can say about this practice is that it's a matter of balance. Some parents will get it right, others will push too hard for a single narrow goal which isn't appropriate for that child. In that case it's really a form of child abuse.
But I don't believe for a minute that it invalidates the whole concept of accelerated education. In my opinion the key thing is to keep the curriculum broad and proceed at a pace the child feels comfortable with. Learning should be fun.
I still like to claim that I'm smarter than the average. Whether this is true or not it keep me wandering what I would have been if I were not entered USTC so early.
I think you need to realise that applying a term like "smart" or "clever" is a hopeless attempt to reduce the multidimensional world of human capability down to one single easy measurement. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. I'd guess that you must have got something out of your time at university, it just wasn't what you personally needed to exploit the areas where you had the most potential. Heaven knows, the University system isn't right for everyone. I went to Uni at the age of 18 and found out only much too late that I simply wasn't ready. Learning wasn't fun any more, suddenly "fun" was women and beer and...all that stuff. After a shining school career my academic performance bombed, and never recovered in time. Maybe if I'd gone to work for a year or two to learn some discipline, gain a sense of perspective and get all the teen lust out of my system, things would have been different. Who knows.
After I graduated from USTC, I found myself less competent than my other collegues for a simple reason -- I can't write a proper report. I'm still suffering from this deadly shortcome which drove me started my own company here in Holland so I don't need to report to anyone.
If you have difficulty writing reports maybe you suffer from a mild form of dyslexia. But then, dyslexia is just a convenient label for one particular brain syndrome that just happens to be easily detectable. There must be many other disorders of language processing (or logical reasoning ability) which are harder to identify and some of these might not even have names yet. Possibly a very large proportion of the world's population suffers from one or more of these syndromes to a varying degree. There was a discussion here on Slashdot some weeks ago about the prevalence of mild autism (Asperger's syndrome) in "geek" types which was basically about the same thing.
When these syndromes have names it can sound a bit scary. No-one wants to be thought of as subnormal, a candidate for "special needs" teaching. But I really think that there is a continuous range of ability in all our mental skills and what you get born with is pretty much the luck of the draw. Some people are born with a very low score in one particular aptitude and there's nothing that can be done about that because the neural machinery for that skill just isn't there, i.e. you can't cure dyslexia. But you make up for it by exploiting all the other skills that you have, and you might have a very high score in one or more of those.
Vive la difference, as the French say. What a boring world it would be if we were all the same.
I like to think that insofar as there is any purpose at all in life, it is to be the best that you can be; to take what potential you have and make the most of it. Starting your own company in a foreign country is no small achievement in itself, it certainly shows balls.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You misunderstand me. Of course grammar exists but it is not a complete, consistent logical system like mathematics (is meant to be), it is completely invented, mostly by accident.
The result is that there are some phrase structures which you want to add to in order to complete the sentence but you can't do it without breaking the rules or generating a sentence of incomprehensible drivel.
Most people prefer to break the rules than spout drivel, so for complex sentences in the real world, grammar often breaks down.
BTW, It's obvious that there is an innate potential for grammar in the human brain but I don't agree with Chomsky that we are all born with the same basic grammatical structures hardwired. If you wonder how it is that so many of us end up sharing a similar meta-grammar (to coin a phrase) then you ought to read William H Calvin's book The Cerebral Code (yes, the whole thing is online, thanks Prof!). He shows at the end precisely how neural structures to support basic grammar could form spontaneously to enable thoughts about who did what to whom, and with what. The same structures are probably used to generate the word order when the thought is spoken.
You may have noticed that the higher apes (principally chimps and gorillas) used in language experiments have demonstrated the ability to form simple grammatical structures too. There were also reputedly some experiments with an African Grey parrot which demonstrated similar ability (but I've not often heard the work cited and don't know how reliable it is).
PS. If you like Calvin's book, his latest one Lingua ex Machina is all about the evolutionary development of language. Like all of his books this one's online too.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think your concerns are misplaced (and that of the child psychologists too).
A year ago I realised I had to get my son his own computer when he started giving me technical support ("Just log on as root and delete the lock file, Dad"..."Dad, just get on the net and download the newest driver").
So I got him a PC last Christmas and by now he's a fairly competent Win98 user. He still gives me technical support sometimes, but I'm a bit more competent with Win98 these days so I don't need it so often. And now he's got his own Windows box at least I can get to my Linux machine, which he used to hijack so he could play xboing.
He celebrated his 6th birthday last week.
I gave him the PC mainly to play educational games appropriate to his age and ability and to access an encyclopedia, and there is no doubt that, in conjunction with books, homework and instructional videos it has helped to improve his maths and reading skills which are way beyond the norm for his age. He reads books written for 12 year olds. Though the contribution of the computer to all of that is probably fairly small.
However, he also plays games such as Wormz Armageddon, Doom, Heretic, Quake, Tomb Raider and a host of others. His favourites are strategy games, namely Age of Empires and Populous. You'd be amazed at how quickly he learned how to operate these games. Much faster than I did.
I'm not saying that it's turned him into a military genius or an expert in government or anything like that. But these strategy games are certainly training him to evaluate a range of options, to formulate and carry out a plan. I know because when he works out how to get over a difficult point in the game he just loves to make me sit and watch while he demonstrates his plan in action.
Sometimes I also supplement his education with books and blackboard chalk-and-talk sessions. We play question-and-answer in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography and whatever else comes up.
Every evening we watch old Star Trek videos together over dinner (the boy's already addicted;o).
But despite all this he still loves to play make-believe and rough-and-tumble with his little sister and with his friends. He loves to watch Cartoon Network. He loves to make music and sing along while I bash out old Beatles and Pink Floyd songs on the guitar. Most of all (and ever since he was old enough to sit up) he loves to draw and paint (with real paper, not on the computer), and make models out of scrap materials.
Oh, and he also loves his karate, swimming and football lessons.
I therefore hardly think that using the coputer regularly is about to turn him into an autist. He is an athletic, articulate, creative, intelligent, sensitive, enthusiastic, sociable, loving, mischievous little boy. Quite normal, though perhaps a little better endowed upstairs than most his age.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are some child psychologists and left-of-centre educationalists who think there is something wrong with giving your child an educational head start. They somehow seem to imagine that the child misses out on an important experience of childhood in some way. This is arrant nonsense.
If I succeed in my plans for him he will be neither a geek nor a jock but an all-rounder in every sense. Remember the great men of the Renaissance? That's the model I'm working to. By enabling him to exercise his abilities in every possible dimension, he will have the greatest opportunity to discover where his own interests lie and to choose his own destiny. Hopefully he'll also retain an active interest in music, arts, sciences, sport etc.
It's be really swell if I could also steer him safely past the bad choices I made later on in life, but that's probably hoping for too much:o(
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
All good advice, but you forgot the first and best step to ensuring your rights and freedoms. Namely, get a gun and arm yourself.
Idiot. That's nothing more than a sure method of removing yourself from the gene pool. Or do you really imagine that you could shoot at government officials and they'd just let you off "Oh, sorry sir, we didn't realise you had a gun, that's all right then".
This is a Western-style democracy, not a Western-style gunfight, dickbrain.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
This is the "many worlds" or "many histories" interpretation of quantum mechanics.
If this interpretation is correct, (and if travel backwards in time is possible) then all it means is that the time traveller is then forced to live out the rest of his life in the parallel reality ensuing from his intervention.
The reality he comes from, however, still exists as do all other possible realities. So the time traveller is unable to actually change anything; all he can do is pick a different timeline for himself to live in. And even then, other versions of himself will take different actions with varying degrees of success.
The many histories theory quite effectively disposes with the entire concept of free will because in that theory each individual chooses every possible option at each instant.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You are assuming that the world would get its act together in enough time to deflect the asteroid while it was still far away. Is it your experience that governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the say-so of a few techies? Like, for example, Y2K? It seems much more likely that by the time the govts. were willing to acknowledge the problem the thing would be almost on top of us and quite obviously heading straight for us.
So, I'm thinking, how far in advance do we have to apply the kick? Will the politicians get their act together in time?
There are a few important figures missing from your example - the mass and velocity of the asteroid.
We'll talk about mass later.
Mean orbital velocity is about 20 km/sec for a typical asteroid out in the belt, but if one is nudged out of orbit it'll pick up velocity as it falls toward the sun from its old orbital radius of about 2AU "down" to the Earth's orbital radius at 1AU (1AU=1.5e11m).
PE=-GMm/R gives delta E = -GMm.(1/R-1/r)
and KE=mv**2/2 gives delta v = sqrt(2GM.(1/R-1/r))
Mass of the sun is 1.9e30 kg and G=6.7e-11 whatsits so the asteroid has picked up a delta v of about 30km/sec by the time it crosses the Earth's path. Total velocity therefore reaches about 50km/sec by the time it's in our neighborhood but this may vary by an order of magnitude.
OK so the energy of detonation might deliver energy of 1e17 Joules but how much of that can be imparted to the asteroid? Some will be wasted in heating the asteroid, some will be directed obliquely etc. Assume pessimistically 1e15 J (about 1% of the blast energy) is transferred to the asteroid as kinetic energy.
Now with regard to the mass of the intruder: we're only interested in sizes that would justify a deflection attempt. On the other hand if it's too big there's nothing we can do. A typical asteroid, according to my handly old Chemical Rubber Company data book, masses about 1e17 kg. The biggest are about 1e20 kg. An asteroid (too small to have a name) might massing about 10 million tonnes would be a mere speck.
To give an idea of relative scale, the Earth is about 6e24 kg.
If the asteroid does mass only 10e10 kg then imparting 10e15 J as kinetic energy will give it a lateral velocity of sqrt(2E/m) ~ 500 m/s. That's a hefty kick!
We just want it to miss the atmosphere. We don't have to worry about tidal effects since an asteroid of this size wouldn't exert a gravitational pull on the ocean anything like the moon's unless it passed by at an altitude of only a couple of hundred meters. So we have to deflect, as you said, only by the Earth's radius (6.4e6 m) by the time it crosses our orbit. At 500m/s this takes 12800 seconds. Only about three and a half hours! We're saved.
But if the asteroid masses 10e17 kg, then our 10e15 J only gives a sideways acceleration of about 0.14 m/s. You'd have to detonate 530 days before the asteroid reached us. At that time, the asteroid still has to travel thousands of millions of kilometers before it reaches us. The situation is even worse when you consider that it would take months for the warhead to reach the asteroid. So we'd need to know three to five years in advance when the asteroid is in a much less threatening orbit.
Even if Earth-based telescopes were good enough, and we had massive banks of computers tracking all the asteroids, would we even notice that far in advance, that there was a risk? If we did, how sure could we be reasonably sure that it was really going to hit us? Governments are unlikely to stump up the cash for an asteroid deflection mission if there isn't a clear and present danger.
Maybe there are many asteroids each year that get into an orbit which could possibly hit us five years later. We could hardly afford to launch missions to hit them all. IMO we just don't have the resources yet to protect us against big "planet killer" asteroids like in the movies. We need to have a network of big weapons platforms out there between us and the belt, ready to shoot down rogue asteroids immediately they wander into a clearly dangerous orbit.
Disclaimer: most of my calculations are very rough first-order approximations based on high-school physics. I am not an orbital mechanics expert. Nor, indeed, a rocket scientist;o)
BTW, so far at least, really high-impulse ion drives exist only in the realm of science fiction. NASA's current ion drives only provide a fraction of a meter per second squared. The main advantages are simplicity, cheapness and smaller lighter craft. They won't get us to the asteroid belt in two weeks, anyway.
But a renewed interest in manned space flight would inevitably mean increased investment into propulsion research. The money needed for that isn't going to materialise out of this armageddon project, I seriously doubt enough people would take it seriously enough to put up with an increase in taxes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
We need Corel because we need diversity in the market. On their own, Corel will provide us with a useful and different product. If Red hat buy them out, why would they bother to fund two competing but essentially similar development efforts?
I'd much rather see Corel and Red Hat competing against each other. This looks like a monopoly in the making.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the US, Europe and Australia we are seeing the same kinds of stories over and over again. Governments are seeking to restrict our freedom and invade our privacy. Corporations are increasingly enabled by absence of legislation or the introduction of new legislation to do the same, through unauthorised collection of private information and through aggressive pursual of intellectual property rights.
As thongs stand, parliametary democracies as in the UK, US and Australia allow governments with a strong majority (achieved through electoral processes which favour the powerful) and individual lobby groups to ride roughshod over our rights and freedoms.
It's high time that we got ourselves some government that serves the interests of the people.
We need to establish a new kind of democracy that removes the ability of corporations to buy political favours, that forces governments to listen to their electorate and to act in the way we tell them to.
In my opinion we have in the internet a very useful tool via which to organise ourselves politically. But our governments want to control that too by censorship, by outlawing the private use of encryption, and by continually snooping on our conversations with the likes of Echelon and upcoming advances in AI-directed intelligent listening.
The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. If we don't get our act together soon, it will no longer be possible to change anything.
If you want your children to be free, then we must all campaign, demonstrate, orchestrate petitions, write to our MPs or Congressmen, boycott goods produced by corporations, make our voices heard.
Ranting about it on slashdot is just preaching to the converted.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're right, of course. I was inappropriately extrapolating from the purely local case PE ~ mgh (proportional to separation) and forgot that over significant distances PE=-G.m1.m2/r (*inversely* proportional to separation but with reversed sign). Somewhat counter-intuitive, but damn I should have remembered that. OK, put me in the sludge tank...:o\
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
You'd be hard pressed to find any natural varieties in cash crops. Cross breading is little different from genetic engineering...
But that's it precisely. Would mankind ever have risen out of a nomadic lifestyle if we had been prevented from developing arable crops and domesticated animals? Agriculture would have been impossible and as a result we would never have become civilised; we would still be grubbing about in the dirt for roots, worms and bugs.
If this agreement would take away the right of millions of people to continue a natural, traditional and sustainable means of feeding themselves which they have practised for thousands of years, then it is hideously, unjustifiably wrong no matter who else stands to gain.
And if, in addition, it is deemed essential only to protect the biotechnology industry (which hasn't been around for long and doesn't affect all that many people), then the biotechnology industry is clearly unsustainable and should be abandoned.
This nonsense must be stopped now. I'm sorry, I'm just too choked up about this, there don't seem to be any adequate words to describe my fury.
If this goes through I'll buy no more products from Mars. I don't want to eat genetically modified food anyway, and especially if doing so takes business away from subsistence farmers in poor countries.
Of course the Ghanaian farmer quoted in the article is obviously not a subsistence farmer; he's in the report because he's royalty, he's educated and articulate in English. But cocoa accounts for a major portion of Ghana's exports and many poor farmers grow it. If they lose control of their own plant stock it will be an unmitigated disaster.
BTW I've known a few Ghanaians (all Ashante) and I have the utmost respect for them. They are a truly decent and honourable people (I know it's non-PC to say things like that but then...I'm a non-PC kind of guy). However this isn't just about Ghana. Greedy corporations are attempting to pull the same trick all over the third world.
Vote with your pocket. Buy all the African and Asian produce you can, but buy it raw, not prepackaged by the big multinational corporations. Now I'm off to write a vitriolic email to Mars corp.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the US, foreign knowledge, use and invention are all excluded when ``prior art'' is considered in relation to a US patent application.
If that's true, then surely US Patents can have no legal validity whatsoever outside the US, with or without the WTO. But then, how can a patent on a cocoa gene taken out by a US company be used against farmers in Ghana?
Either I'm missing something important or else there is a massive inconsistency here. It ought to be a simple matter for each national government to make its own decision about whether to accept or refuse the legal validity of US patents. I had thought these were only recognised when there was some sort of reciprocal arrangement. But the situation you describe doesn't look very reciprocal.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum. After all, how much money did the US spend on Star Wars? And with so little to show for it in the end.
We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.
Besides, it would be a blast.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well, I am an armchair physicist all right. mea culpa. Though I hope I do better than most (such hubris!).
You raise an interesting point and while I agree that most of philosophy is horseshit, ontology and epistemiology are a different matter as they are the only tools available for examining what lies beyond the scope of our instruments. Your assertions are far from meaningless.
However I must still disagree with them.
Quantum mechanics has been called the most successful physical theory of all time, by virtue of the number of predictions it has made which have been experimentally verified. But this is mot really the point.
My understanding is that quantum theory is so abstract that it is qualitatively different to all other fields of human study. It is believed by many that quantum theory is the substratum which underpins not only the universe, not only all that which exists, but in fact all universes and all that could possibly exist in any sense at all, anywhere.
So, to suggest that quantum is just another flawed "human" interpretation no better than theology is somewhat wide of the mark, IMO.
However, I don't think there is a single person in the world who would seriously claim to understand quantum theory. It is, after all, an incomplete theory, and our current understanding must therefore be an oversimplification. All the same, if we ever manage to fill in the holes it will still be a quantum theory and I think the essential principles we use in quantum mechanics today will remain intact.
There is one line of investigation I read about which seems to suggest that quantum theory might be an inevitable consequence of number theory. If true this would be an astounding result as it would mean that the universe is literally created out of mathematics. Maybe the entire cosmos follows inevitably from Bertrand Russell's simple method of constructing the set of natural integers. Wow!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
For Pete's sake, get a spell checker, will you? Spelling is *not* supposed to be made up as you go along. I almost needed Babelfish just to read what you wrote!
The real problime is that you need to be trained as a linguist to understand what the structer of many seantences are and even linguestes aruge a LOT.
IMO, linguistics is just as woolly as psychology. That's why they argue; because many of the more subtle assertions about grammar that have been published aren't much more than unsubstantiated opinion.
The human brain uses grammar up to a point, and then dispenses with it. There is no reason to expect that the grammar that has evolved in every language has to be completely regular. So you can formulate a consistent set of grammatical rules to deal with basic usage, but the more complex things get the more often the rules will be broken.
The difference between linguistics and zoology or botany is that the latter subjects only attempt to catalogue a finite number of real living species. But when grammatical rules are flexible or disposable, the number of potential structures is almost as limitless as the number of potential utterances (which Chomsky put a number to, I seem to remember).
In this case, beyond a small core of prescriptive grammar everything else is purely descriptive. To catalogue the resulting infinity of possible verbal blunders and call this zoo a formal grammar is pointless.
Also, even with simple phrases you can have two different interpretations (and two complete but mutually exclusive superimposed structures) whose meaning cannot be resolved without context.
Because of all this, a phrase structural approach, or any other rule based method is ultimately doomed. However, insofar as the linguistics community utilises Artifical Intelligence concepts (as in natural language processing studies), they are it appears still dominated by those who swear by symbolic logic.
I'm inclined to believe that the most effective natural language parsers will always be connectionist rather than rule-based. Connection machines (such as neural nets) can encompass rule-based logic but also have the flexibility to make an "educated guess". Thus they are much more capable of parsing ungrammatical language.
After all, our brains work the very same way when we speak or listen.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, about 5 years. CCD's are improving rapidly, because research is now funded by the popularity of digital cameras in the domestic market.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Actually, it brings to mind some mythology movie I don't remember the name of...the hero-type character would attack the snake-monster thing, but upon severing a limb, the limb became yet another snake-monster.
That would be Hercules vs. the Hydra.
I read lots of Greek mythology as a child, but I was appalled to realise that I only remember whoe was involved in this battle because of the Disney movie. Help, there's something wrong with my culture...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It's also the ISO code for the currency.
I believe you are thinking of "GBP".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's just not going to happen. Mutations happen randomly, and therefore most mutations that happen to non-junk DNA will break something important.
Mutations that happen to intron DNA are as likely to put something extra in as they are to take something out. So the only factor that could cause a shrunken genome would be a strong selection pressure in favour of it. Perhaps if lower food requirements or faster healing after injury resulted from removal of the introns, then we'd see a progressive downsizing of the genome of humans in the wild over a period of several hundred thousand years.
But I think it's also necessary to take into account to what degree civilisation might mitigate against these selection pressures with its health care programs, free education systems, equal rights legislation, abundant food supply, restrictions against murder, etc. Most of all, remember that successful individuals in today's civilised societies aren't likely to produce that many more offspring than less successful individuals with slightly poorer genes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The last time I studied this stuff was back at University 12 years ago. I think you'd be fairly surprised to know just how well genetics was understood even then.
In other words, we know with a high degree of certainty that introns aren't involved in regular gene transcription, because we do know exactly how gene transcription works.
A gene first needs to be switched on and off by a specific signals from other nearby genes, and then they need to have the correct start and stop sequences if they are to be transcribed at all. Introns by definition are stretches of DNA which do not have these operon genes. And without operons, it's like having a program with a subroutine which has no statement to call it. It might just as well not be there at all.
There are various mechanisms via which non-coding DNA can get into the genome: viral insertion, inversion, other kinds of mutation. Maybe even uptake from free DNA floating in the air. Or in your food. We don't know for sure about those last two. The point is that the introns get there by accident just like the good stuff does. But the introns are DNA mutations that didn't result in transcribable genes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If someone could provide an appropriate address and case number, maybe some of us could write to the judge with friend of the court representations explaining (i) that the patent is trivial, (ii) that Amazon know this, and (iii) they are just using this injunction, the patents system and the legal system as a whole as delaying tactics to obtain an unfair commercial advantage.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think the previous poster's worry is well founded. I'm 35 now. 22 years ago I seat in the classroom of Modern Physics Department of University of Science & technology of China (USTC) with 157 classmates who are averagely 6 years older than me.
Every parent like to see that their kids are smarter than others. This drive parents to invent (or easily adopt) all kinds of standard to prove their point. Sometimes their force their kids fit into the framework with which they measure smartness. Most of the time, if not all, they don't know what kind of impact this will bring to their beloved children. And they fight firecely against those who disagree.
I know that "hothousing" children has been fairly common amongst academic families in China. I remember when I was little, seeing a four-year-old Chinese boy on TV doing algebra and speaking multiple languages (his parents were University academics). The only thing I can say about this practice is that it's a matter of balance. Some parents will get it right, others will push too hard for a single narrow goal which isn't appropriate for that child. In that case it's really a form of child abuse.
But I don't believe for a minute that it invalidates the whole concept of accelerated education. In my opinion the key thing is to keep the curriculum broad and proceed at a pace the child feels comfortable with. Learning should be fun.
I still like to claim that I'm smarter than the average. Whether this is true or not it keep me wandering what I would have been if I were not entered USTC so early.
I think you need to realise that applying a term like "smart" or "clever" is a hopeless attempt to reduce the multidimensional world of human capability down to one single easy measurement. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. I'd guess that you must have got something out of your time at university, it just wasn't what you personally needed to exploit the areas where you had the most potential. Heaven knows, the University system isn't right for everyone. I went to Uni at the age of 18 and found out only much too late that I simply wasn't ready. Learning wasn't fun any more, suddenly "fun" was women and beer and...all that stuff. After a shining school career my academic performance bombed, and never recovered in time. Maybe if I'd gone to work for a year or two to learn some discipline, gain a sense of perspective and get all the teen lust out of my system, things would have been different. Who knows.
After I graduated from USTC, I found myself less competent than my other collegues for a simple reason -- I can't write a proper report. I'm still suffering from this deadly shortcome which drove me started my own company here in Holland so I don't need to report to anyone.
If you have difficulty writing reports maybe you suffer from a mild form of dyslexia. But then, dyslexia is just a convenient label for one particular brain syndrome that just happens to be easily detectable. There must be many other disorders of language processing (or logical reasoning ability) which are harder to identify and some of these might not even have names yet. Possibly a very large proportion of the world's population suffers from one or more of these syndromes to a varying degree. There was a discussion here on Slashdot some weeks ago about the prevalence of mild autism (Asperger's syndrome) in "geek" types which was basically about the same thing.
When these syndromes have names it can sound a bit scary. No-one wants to be thought of as subnormal, a candidate for "special needs" teaching. But I really think that there is a continuous range of ability in all our mental skills and what you get born with is pretty much the luck of the draw. Some people are born with a very low score in one particular aptitude and there's nothing that can be done about that because the neural machinery for that skill just isn't there, i.e. you can't cure dyslexia. But you make up for it by exploiting all the other skills that you have, and you might have a very high score in one or more of those.
Vive la difference, as the French say. What a boring world it would be if we were all the same.
I like to think that insofar as there is any purpose at all in life, it is to be the best that you can be; to take what potential you have and make the most of it. Starting your own company in a foreign country is no small achievement in itself, it certainly shows balls.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You misunderstand me. Of course grammar exists but it is not a complete, consistent logical system like mathematics (is meant to be), it is completely invented, mostly by accident.
The result is that there are some phrase structures which you want to add to in order to complete the sentence but you can't do it without breaking the rules or generating a sentence of incomprehensible drivel.
Most people prefer to break the rules than spout drivel, so for complex sentences in the real world, grammar often breaks down.
BTW, It's obvious that there is an innate potential for grammar in the human brain but I don't agree with Chomsky that we are all born with the same basic grammatical structures hardwired. If you wonder how it is that so many of us end up sharing a similar meta-grammar (to coin a phrase) then you ought to read William H Calvin's book The Cerebral Code (yes, the whole thing is online, thanks Prof!). He shows at the end precisely how neural structures to support basic grammar could form spontaneously to enable thoughts about who did what to whom, and with what. The same structures are probably used to generate the word order when the thought is spoken.
You may have noticed that the higher apes (principally chimps and gorillas) used in language experiments have demonstrated the ability to form simple grammatical structures too. There were also reputedly some experiments with an African Grey parrot which demonstrated similar ability (but I've not often heard the work cited and don't know how reliable it is).
PS. If you like Calvin's book, his latest one Lingua ex Machina is all about the evolutionary development of language. Like all of his books this one's online too.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think your concerns are misplaced (and that of the child psychologists too).
;o).
:o(
A year ago I realised I had to get my son his own computer when he started giving me technical support ("Just log on as root and delete the lock file, Dad"..."Dad, just get on the net and download the newest driver").
So I got him a PC last Christmas and by now he's a fairly competent Win98 user. He still gives me technical support sometimes, but I'm a bit more competent with Win98 these days so I don't need it so often. And now he's got his own Windows box at least I can get to my Linux machine, which he used to hijack so he could play xboing.
He celebrated his 6th birthday last week.
I gave him the PC mainly to play educational games appropriate to his age and ability and to access an encyclopedia, and there is no doubt that, in conjunction with books, homework and instructional videos it has helped to improve his maths and reading skills which are way beyond the norm for his age. He reads books written for 12 year olds. Though the contribution of the computer to all of that is probably fairly small.
However, he also plays games such as Wormz Armageddon, Doom, Heretic, Quake, Tomb Raider and a host of others. His favourites are strategy games, namely Age of Empires and Populous. You'd be amazed at how quickly he learned how to operate these games. Much faster than I did.
I'm not saying that it's turned him into a military genius or an expert in government or anything like that. But these strategy games are certainly training him to evaluate a range of options, to formulate and carry out a plan. I know because when he works out how to get over a difficult point in the game he just loves to make me sit and watch while he demonstrates his plan in action.
Sometimes I also supplement his education with books and blackboard chalk-and-talk sessions. We play question-and-answer in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography and whatever else comes up.
Every evening we watch old Star Trek videos together over dinner (the boy's already addicted
But despite all this he still loves to play make-believe and rough-and-tumble with his little sister and with his friends. He loves to watch Cartoon Network. He loves to make music and sing along while I bash out old Beatles and Pink Floyd songs on the guitar. Most of all (and ever since he was old enough to sit up) he loves to draw and paint (with real paper, not on the computer), and make models out of scrap materials.
Oh, and he also loves his karate, swimming and football lessons.
I therefore hardly think that using the coputer regularly is about to turn him into an autist. He is an athletic, articulate, creative, intelligent, sensitive, enthusiastic, sociable, loving, mischievous little boy. Quite normal, though perhaps a little better endowed upstairs than most his age.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are some child psychologists and left-of-centre educationalists who think there is something wrong with giving your child an educational head start. They somehow seem to imagine that the child misses out on an important experience of childhood in some way. This is arrant nonsense.
If I succeed in my plans for him he will be neither a geek nor a jock but an all-rounder in every sense. Remember the great men of the Renaissance? That's the model I'm working to. By enabling him to exercise his abilities in every possible dimension, he will have the greatest opportunity to discover where his own interests lie and to choose his own destiny. Hopefully he'll also retain an active interest in music, arts, sciences, sport etc.
It's be really swell if I could also steer him safely past the bad choices I made later on in life, but that's probably hoping for too much
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's the one, thanks.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
All good advice, but you forgot the first and best step to ensuring your rights and freedoms. Namely, get a gun and arm yourself.
Idiot. That's nothing more than a sure method of removing yourself from the gene pool. Or do you really imagine that you could shoot at government officials and they'd just let you off "Oh, sorry sir, we didn't realise you had a gun, that's all right then".
This is a Western-style democracy, not a Western-style gunfight, dickbrain.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
But, it's not fair.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
This is the "many worlds" or "many histories" interpretation of quantum mechanics.
If this interpretation is correct, (and if travel backwards in time is possible) then all it means is that the time traveller is then forced to live out the rest of his life in the parallel reality ensuing from his intervention.
The reality he comes from, however, still exists as do all other possible realities. So the time traveller is unable to actually change anything; all he can do is pick a different timeline for himself to live in. And even then, other versions of himself will take different actions with varying degrees of success.
The many histories theory quite effectively disposes with the entire concept of free will because in that theory each individual chooses every possible option at each instant.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Sorry about the excessive bold text, I tried to turn it off but obviously typoed it. Lesson: NEVER submit without a preview :o(
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You are assuming that the world would get its act together in enough time to deflect the asteroid while it was still far away. Is it your experience that governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the say-so of a few techies? Like, for example, Y2K? It seems much more likely that by the time the govts. were willing to acknowledge the problem the thing would be almost on top of us and quite obviously heading straight for us.
;o)
So, I'm thinking, how far in advance do we have to apply the kick? Will the politicians get their act together in time?
There are a few important figures missing from your example - the mass and velocity of the asteroid.
We'll talk about mass later.
Mean orbital velocity is about 20 km/sec for a typical asteroid out in the belt, but if one is nudged out of orbit it'll pick up velocity as it falls toward the sun from its old orbital radius of about 2AU "down" to the Earth's orbital radius at 1AU (1AU=1.5e11m).
PE=-GMm/R gives delta E = -GMm.(1/R-1/r)
and KE=mv**2/2 gives delta v = sqrt(2GM.(1/R-1/r))
Mass of the sun is 1.9e30 kg and G=6.7e-11 whatsits so the asteroid has picked up a delta v of about 30km/sec by the time it crosses the Earth's path. Total velocity therefore reaches about 50km/sec by the time it's in our neighborhood but this may vary by an order of magnitude.
OK so the energy of detonation might deliver energy of 1e17 Joules but how much of that can be imparted to the asteroid? Some will be wasted in heating the asteroid, some will be directed obliquely etc. Assume pessimistically 1e15 J (about 1% of the blast energy) is transferred to the asteroid as kinetic energy.
Now with regard to the mass of the intruder: we're only interested in sizes that would justify a deflection attempt. On the other hand if it's too big there's nothing we can do. A typical asteroid, according to my handly old Chemical Rubber Company data book, masses about 1e17 kg. The biggest are about 1e20 kg. An asteroid (too small to have a name) might massing about 10 million tonnes would be a mere speck.
To give an idea of relative scale, the Earth is about 6e24 kg.
If the asteroid does mass only 10e10 kg then imparting 10e15 J as kinetic energy will give it a lateral velocity of sqrt(2E/m) ~ 500 m/s. That's a hefty kick!
We just want it to miss the atmosphere. We don't have to worry about tidal effects since an asteroid of this size wouldn't exert a gravitational pull on the ocean anything like the moon's unless it passed by at an altitude of only a couple of hundred meters. So we have to deflect, as you said, only by the Earth's radius (6.4e6 m) by the time it crosses our orbit. At 500m/s this takes 12800 seconds. Only about three and a half hours! We're saved.
But if the asteroid masses 10e17 kg, then our 10e15 J only gives a sideways acceleration of about 0.14 m/s. You'd have to detonate 530 days before the asteroid reached us. At that time, the asteroid still has to travel thousands of millions of kilometers before it reaches us. The situation is even worse when you consider that it would take months for the warhead to reach the asteroid. So we'd need to know three to five years in advance when the asteroid is in a much less threatening orbit.
Even if Earth-based telescopes were good enough, and we had massive banks of computers tracking all the asteroids, would we even notice that far in advance, that there was a risk? If we did, how sure could we be reasonably sure that it was really going to hit us? Governments are unlikely to stump up the cash for an asteroid deflection mission if there isn't a clear and present danger.
Maybe there are many asteroids each year that get into an orbit which could possibly hit us five years later. We could hardly afford to launch missions to hit them all. IMO we just don't have the resources yet to protect us against big "planet killer" asteroids like in the movies. We need to have a network of big weapons platforms out there between us and the belt, ready to shoot down rogue asteroids immediately they wander into a clearly dangerous orbit.
Disclaimer: most of my calculations are very rough first-order approximations based on high-school physics. I am not an orbital mechanics expert. Nor, indeed, a rocket scientist
BTW, so far at least, really high-impulse ion drives exist only in the realm of science fiction. NASA's current ion drives only provide a fraction of a meter per second squared. The main advantages are simplicity, cheapness and smaller lighter craft. They won't get us to the asteroid belt in two weeks, anyway.
But a renewed interest in manned space flight would inevitably mean increased investment into propulsion research. The money needed for that isn't going to materialise out of this armageddon project, I seriously doubt enough people would take it seriously enough to put up with an increase in taxes.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
What are you on about?
Archer was a Tory candidate for Lord Mayor, not Labour. and he's out of the contest now because some dirty dealings from his past were revealed.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
We need Corel because we need diversity in the market. On their own, Corel will provide us with a useful and different product. If Red hat buy them out, why would they bother to fund two competing but essentially similar development efforts?
I'd much rather see Corel and Red Hat competing against each other. This looks like a monopoly in the making.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the US, Europe and Australia we are seeing the same kinds of stories over and over again. Governments are seeking to restrict our freedom and invade our privacy. Corporations are increasingly enabled by absence of legislation or the introduction of new legislation to do the same, through unauthorised collection of private information and through aggressive pursual of intellectual property rights.
As thongs stand, parliametary democracies as in the UK, US and Australia allow governments with a strong majority (achieved through electoral processes which favour the powerful) and individual lobby groups to ride roughshod over our rights and freedoms.
It's high time that we got ourselves some government that serves the interests of the people.
We need to establish a new kind of democracy that removes the ability of corporations to buy political favours, that forces governments to listen to their electorate and to act in the way we tell them to.
In my opinion we have in the internet a very useful tool via which to organise ourselves politically. But our governments want to control that too by censorship, by outlawing the private use of encryption, and by continually snooping on our conversations with the likes of Echelon and upcoming advances in AI-directed intelligent listening.
The window of opportunity is closing rapidly. If we don't get our act together soon, it will no longer be possible to change anything.
If you want your children to be free, then we must all campaign, demonstrate, orchestrate petitions, write to our MPs or Congressmen, boycott goods produced by corporations, make our voices heard.
Ranting about it on slashdot is just preaching to the converted.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're right, of course. I was inappropriately extrapolating from the purely local case PE ~ mgh (proportional to separation) and forgot that over significant distances PE=-G.m1.m2/r (*inversely* proportional to separation but with reversed sign). Somewhat counter-intuitive, but damn I should have remembered that. OK, put me in the sludge tank...:o\
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You'd be hard pressed to find any natural varieties in cash crops. Cross breading is little different from genetic engineering...
But that's it precisely. Would mankind ever have risen out of a nomadic lifestyle if we had been prevented from developing arable crops and domesticated animals? Agriculture would have been impossible and as a result we would never have become civilised; we would still be grubbing about in the dirt for roots, worms and bugs.
If this agreement would take away the right of millions of people to continue a natural, traditional and sustainable means of feeding themselves which they have practised for thousands of years, then it is hideously, unjustifiably wrong no matter who else stands to gain.
And if, in addition, it is deemed essential only to protect the biotechnology industry (which hasn't been around for long and doesn't affect all that many people), then the biotechnology industry is clearly unsustainable and should be abandoned.
This nonsense must be stopped now. I'm sorry, I'm just too choked up about this, there don't seem to be any adequate words to describe my fury.
If this goes through I'll buy no more products from Mars. I don't want to eat genetically modified food anyway, and especially if doing so takes business away from subsistence farmers in poor countries.
Of course the Ghanaian farmer quoted in the article is obviously not a subsistence farmer; he's in the report because he's royalty, he's educated and articulate in English. But cocoa accounts for a major portion of Ghana's exports and many poor farmers grow it. If they lose control of their own plant stock it will be an unmitigated disaster.
BTW I've known a few Ghanaians (all Ashante) and I have the utmost respect for them. They are a truly decent and honourable people (I know it's non-PC to say things like that but then...I'm a non-PC kind of guy). However this isn't just about Ghana. Greedy corporations are attempting to pull the same trick all over the third world.
Vote with your pocket. Buy all the African and Asian produce you can, but buy it raw, not prepackaged by the big multinational corporations. Now I'm off to write a vitriolic email to Mars corp.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In the US, foreign knowledge, use and invention are all excluded when ``prior art'' is considered in relation to a US patent application.
If that's true, then surely US Patents can have no legal validity whatsoever outside the US, with or without the WTO. But then, how can a patent on a cocoa gene taken out by a US company be used against farmers in Ghana?
Either I'm missing something important or else there is a massive inconsistency here. It ought to be a simple matter for each national government to make its own decision about whether to accept or refuse the legal validity of US patents. I had thought these were only recognised when there was some sort of reciprocal arrangement. But the situation you describe doesn't look very reciprocal.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum. After all, how much money did the US spend on Star Wars? And with so little to show for it in the end.
We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.
Besides, it would be a blast.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Well, I am an armchair physicist all right. mea culpa. Though I hope I do better than most (such hubris!).
You raise an interesting point and while I agree that most of philosophy is horseshit, ontology and epistemiology are a different matter as they are the only tools available for examining what lies beyond the scope of our instruments. Your assertions are far from meaningless.
However I must still disagree with them.
Quantum mechanics has been called the most successful physical theory of all time, by virtue of the number of predictions it has made which have been experimentally verified. But this is mot really the point.
My understanding is that quantum theory is so abstract that it is qualitatively different to all other fields of human study. It is believed by many that quantum theory is the substratum which underpins not only the universe, not only all that which exists, but in fact all universes and all that could possibly exist in any sense at all, anywhere.
So, to suggest that quantum is just another flawed "human" interpretation no better than theology is somewhat wide of the mark, IMO.
However, I don't think there is a single person in the world who would seriously claim to understand quantum theory. It is, after all, an incomplete theory, and our current understanding must therefore be an oversimplification. All the same, if we ever manage to fill in the holes it will still be a quantum theory and I think the essential principles we use in quantum mechanics today will remain intact.
There is one line of investigation I read about which seems to suggest that quantum theory might be an inevitable consequence of number theory. If true this would be an astounding result as it would mean that the universe is literally created out of mathematics. Maybe the entire cosmos follows inevitably from Bertrand Russell's simple method of constructing the set of natural integers. Wow!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
For Pete's sake, get a spell checker, will you? Spelling is *not* supposed to be made up as you go along. I almost needed Babelfish just to read what you wrote!
The real problime is that you need to be trained as a linguist to understand what the structer of many seantences are and even linguestes aruge a LOT.
IMO, linguistics is just as woolly as psychology. That's why they argue; because many of the more subtle assertions about grammar that have been published aren't much more than unsubstantiated opinion.
The human brain uses grammar up to a point, and then dispenses with it. There is no reason to expect that the grammar that has evolved in every language has to be completely regular. So you can formulate a consistent set of grammatical rules to deal with basic usage, but the more complex things get the more often the rules will be broken.
The difference between linguistics and zoology or botany is that the latter subjects only attempt to catalogue a finite number of real living species. But when grammatical rules are flexible or disposable, the number of potential structures is almost as limitless as the number of potential utterances (which Chomsky put a number to, I seem to remember).
In this case, beyond a small core of prescriptive grammar everything else is purely descriptive. To catalogue the resulting infinity of possible verbal blunders and call this zoo a formal grammar is pointless.
Also, even with simple phrases you can have two different interpretations (and two complete but mutually exclusive superimposed structures) whose meaning cannot be resolved without context.
Because of all this, a phrase structural approach, or any other rule based method is ultimately doomed. However, insofar as the linguistics community utilises Artifical Intelligence concepts (as in natural language processing studies), they are it appears still dominated by those who swear by symbolic logic.
I'm inclined to believe that the most effective natural language parsers will always be connectionist rather than rule-based. Connection machines (such as neural nets) can encompass rule-based logic but also have the flexibility to make an "educated guess". Thus they are much more capable of parsing ungrammatical language.
After all, our brains work the very same way when we speak or listen.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction