If research money comes from a government, that research has been politicized. If popular or vocal minority biases influence what research is legal, that research has been politicized. Speaking as a scientist, my own view is that it should not be politicized at all.
I suppose there should be some limits on what is investigated, but I do not think that someone else's ethics should govern the work a researcher does. If research really does hazard the safety or health of people or environment, then probably it should be under very close monitoring. However, far too often the decisions about "appropriate" research are based upon scientific ignorance, annecdotal "evidence," and the political unwillingness to hurt some lot's feelings by telling them we don't really care any more about their feelings than they care about ours. Nor should what research is permitted or testing "approved" be based upon the speed with which "research" can be commercialized, marketed, and profited from.
As regards trusting Bush or Nader, surely you jest.
I believe that the real objection the members of the RIAA have to P2P is that it makes it possible for artists to distribute music without them. P2P permits real artistic freedom. This, far more than any "theft" is what scares them. However, theft is clearly illegal and it gives the RIAA a means, through lawsuit, legislation, and "technology" of preventing or slowing the shift of artists to independence. Their objection to P2P is much the same as Microsoft's is to open source. It leaves them unneeded and unwanted.
Bronze age. Not that those terms are as meaningful as you might think!
Especially when the last agricultural use of flint that I know of was on Cyprus where threshing sled blades of flint were being made up into the 1950s. The tractor powered thresher finally crowded out animal traction threshing sledges, within our, well my, lifetime.
Re:Interesting twisted misconceptions...
on
The Casimir Effect
·
· Score: 2
I was wondering. As an archaeologist, I usually only pay attention to physics as entertainment. I have a friend however, who is a physicist, who has frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the standard model and what he refers as the "epicycle" problem of adding complexity in order to continue ironing out the contradictions that keep intruding. He recommended a book on electromagnetic cosmological theory.
I have been wondering how on one hand a Bose-Einstein condensate can be produced, thanks to the operation of the uncertainty principal, and yet IBM can still apparently herd individual atoms into patterns of smiley-faces and other interesting patterns, which seems to violate the uncertainty principal, since the location and momentum of the atoms employed must both be pretty well fixed in order to produce a readable image as claimed. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
There still is no evidence that global warming really exists not to mention that it would be caused by human action.
There is plenty of evidence that the globe is warming. The issue is whether there is any contribution by human activity, and if there is, how important is the contribution. The data is quite unbiased, but it is also more or less ambiguous in terms of cause. There is interesting photo-based data from Mars that, based upon evidence of extensive sublimation of CO2 in the south polar region, suggests that Mars also is warming up. This has some pretty interesting implications all by itself. Taken in conjunction with warming in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada, as well as geographically unbalanced changes in Anarctica, it may be that the whole solar system is in for a hot time. Tune Rush out, check some real unbiased sources, and draw some independent conclusions.
It is a fact. Word seems to get cranky, especially if you are editing a document on more than one version, e.g. Office 97 and 2000. Word will occasionally turn and eat its young. I have been using SO 5.2 to rescue these documents every so often for over a year. You may lose some formatting in heavily formatted areas, but Word will open the document again. Wordperfect 5.1 could so pretty creepy stuff as well. I used to keep five disks backing up my thesis because once in a while WP would tie a knot in the file that reveal codes could not isolate or cure.
I do believe that Linus' point just might be that a patent is supposedly for a "non-obvious" idea. If you or he can come up with an idea without benefit of digging it out of someone else's patent, the idea can not have been as obscure and "original" as the jackass that patented the idea thought, or the over-worked, under endowed patent office clerk assumed. The fact that some mediocre mind has a brain cramp and actually has an idea, doesn't mean that many others, more nimble minded had not already devised,would not,or could not devise the self-same idea independently at need, because to them it was and always had been and would always be obvious. Far too many of the mentally lame file patents these days shrilly proclaiming their invention of the obvious. Worse, they turn about and sell their patents to the unscrupulous, who then display all the worst behaviour of parasites.
In fact, I suspect that many creative minds don't bother patenting ideas, while those who do, do so because of the fear that they may never again experience the rare event of a creative thought.
the original article would help, or perhaps carefully reading the original post. The poster is incorrect about spelling the plural of "virus" as "virii" but did accurately restate from the article that The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria..
Ignoring the spelling blunder, the poster has offered a portion the original article's gist. There was no mix-up of bacteria and viruses.
It's not up to scientists to disprove extraterrestial anal rapes, healing crystals, haunted houses, and so forth.
One of the enormous handicaps that science operates under, and one of the real reasons that many people believe things that their neighborhood science teacher would call irrational, is that one positive "fact" "disproves" all arguments contrary. Normal science dodges this bullet among the in-group by calling for extraordinary proof for things that are unreasonable or in apparent violation of "natural law," at least as we understand it.
Normal people - i.e. not scientifically indoctrinated - see coincidences or "weird events" and say to each other, "that is strange." The scientifically indoctrinated on the other hand work to rationalize or otherwise explain the observation or experience, cloaking it in respectability. A good example is the evident desperation with which UFO "debunkers" attempt to explain away other peoples experiences. Not uncommonly the results are as weird as the original claims, but of course, they don't violate "natural law." In reality, I suspect that both extremes in this process are working hard at agendas that have little to do with extraordinary claims and more to do with authoritarian dominance games. Many of us in science are prone to forget that science is a simplification of reality, a smoothed graph that approximates the real thing. At the same time many laymen crave the strange and new, forgetting that coincidence realy does happen, and that their vision can be foxed and their judgement mislead. There is a substantial grey area out there and it will keep science occupied understanding it for a long time.
There was quite a little condescention in the mathematician's reply to the author, and there were problems with assumptions he suggested as well. You could almost suspect he was trying to redirect the reporter's attention, no, wait . . .
in as much as what i have been taught as a catholic, the "threat to religion" aspect of finding life beyond earth is baloney. please keep in mind that fundamentalists make a small part of the religious community. and often they give the mainstream a bad name.
Have no concerns about that. The Catholic Church is an old and adaptable organization that has long since taken steps to avoid the extremes of fundamentalists. My point is that the religious fundamentalist mentality - which is not limited to Christianity - will tend to have problems with any discovery that appears to move humanity and the earth even farther from the centrality and uniqueness they hold to be our real place in the universe.
Mod this one down. The writer did not read the source material, otherwise he (I use the pronoun in a non-discriminatory manner) would have known that the magnetite form does not occur on earth "living or not" but forms only in living cells. Also, the "tiny fossilized bacteria" issue is still actively being argued over. It has never been settled.
The big deal would be that life existed, or perhaps exists beyond the earth. This has very important implications for how common life could be beyond the solar system. It raises the issue of whether life is actually native to the earth or if a massive asteroidal strike blew chunks of Mars into space seeding the earth - we could ALL be Martians. It is also a massive problem for Christian and Muslim religious fundamentalists, since they hold a strongly defended belief in the specialness of life, of intelligence, and of the earth as the center of God's interest. Finding life in some remote spot on earth is not a challenge to convention and established thought, since we already know that it exists here where ever the conditions of chemical and energy availability permit. Then of course there are political and potential health issues if we were to retrieve living material from Mars.
Would Martian bacteria be dangerous to terrestrial systems? What about carrying earth bacteria in the other direction? Will we breaking the Galactic Federation's laws regarding the transfer of biologically active material? Will Florida, Texas, California and other entities establish agricultural inspection stations at NASA launch and reception facilities? It can be a VERY big deal.
It has been a long time since I read this, however, bacteria in aqueous environments need to orient to sources of food, energy, and other needs. I believe that the hypothesis was tested and verified to the researchers' satisfaction by manipulating the magnetic environment around experimental laboratory populations of bacteria.
Evolutionarily, the two ready means for living systems to map their environment are radiation sources such as light and heat, and magnetism. If bacteria simply relied on chance to locate such sources of necessary materials, they may be at a competitive disadvantage to bacteria who are able to "map" sources of necessities. The strange part of the idea is not the tiny, bacterial compasses; it's the idea that bacteria can store information at some level. It raises some very interesting questions about memory.
Based on this information, if the earth loses about 1 second every year, and given: 60 secs/min *60 min/hr *24 hrs/day, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. It follows then that in 86,400 years, the earth stops and starts turning backwards. Obviously this has to be the explanation for geomagnetic reversals. The earth as a washing machine.
The reality of life in the 21st Century is that, thanks to 9/11, someone attempting to hijack an airliner will be lucky to survive the passengers' response. The last reported bomber on a commercial aircraft arrived at the destination airport trussed in the belts of, IIRC, twenty-odd passengers.
Other friends of mine have seen drunken, abusive passengers put on notice by other pasengers that they need to cool it or suffer the consequences. Outcome: suddenly quiet drunken passengers. Alert citizens have always been able to protect themselves better than the government ever could.
I believe that your numbers are suspect in several ways. First, there is no guarantee that faster than light travel is possible. If it isn't, then the human exploration of this galaxy will take far longer than 30 ky. Next, while life may be very likely, there is nothing to say that "intelligence," as we know it, is common, or even an adaptive advantage over evolutionary spans of time. Piers Anthony IIRC suggested in The Macroscope that most intelligent life simply failed to survive the industrial period. The book was fiction, but the suggestion is appropriate.
Cultural and technical changes - progress if you will (but I won't) - require lots of head space. "Traditional" cultures are traditional because they are stored solely in the heads of their carriers. Traditional cultures are extremely vulnerable to the loss of members, if the society is too complex. Thus simple cultures survive by redundant storage of the essential information that defines the operational aspects of the society. Once the ability to store information "extrasomatically" comes along (i.e. writing) more complex civilizations become possible and technical change can occur more rapidly because a literate civilization can support intellectual as well as craft specialization.
If you consider it, it is fairly obvious that population growth rates and technical advances heterodyne on each other. The problem that can affect the number of intelligent species (as we understand intelligence) that can make into space comes as the growth of population passes the "knee" in a yeast growth type curve. At that point we have entered a race between environmental degradation, technological advance, and the exhaustion of critical resources. If and only if technological advance can establish a population off planet, if and only if technological advance can offset environmental degradation and resource scarcity can species then start to really explore space.
You can imagine from this that some intelligent species with very slowly growing, or stable populations probably have little reason, except perhaps curiousity, for leaving a planet. More might reach the yeast growth stage, fail in the technical-environmental-resource arena and become extinct or under go drastic reductions. Another few may actually make it off their home planet and into interplanetary or perhaps intersellar space.
Probably on a majority, nothing we could recognize as intelligence ever appears.
Slashdot Mirror
If research money comes from a government, that research has been politicized. If popular or vocal minority biases influence what research is legal, that research has been politicized. Speaking as a scientist, my own view is that it should not be politicized at all.
I suppose there should be some limits on what is investigated, but I do not think that someone else's ethics should govern the work a researcher does. If research really does hazard the safety or health of people or environment, then probably it should be under very close monitoring. However, far too often the decisions about "appropriate" research are based upon scientific ignorance, annecdotal "evidence," and the political unwillingness to hurt some lot's feelings by telling them we don't really care any more about their feelings than they care about ours. Nor should what research is permitted or testing "approved" be based upon the speed with which "research" can be commercialized, marketed, and profited from.
As regards trusting Bush or Nader, surely you jest.
I believe that the real objection the members of the RIAA have to P2P is that it makes it possible for artists to distribute music without them. P2P permits real artistic freedom. This, far more than any "theft" is what scares them. However, theft is clearly illegal and it gives the RIAA a means, through lawsuit, legislation, and "technology" of preventing or slowing the shift of artists to independence. Their objection to P2P is much the same as Microsoft's is to open source. It leaves them unneeded and unwanted.
Bronze age. Not that those terms are as meaningful as you might think!
Especially when the last agricultural use of flint that I know of was on Cyprus where threshing sled blades of flint were being made up into the 1950s. The tractor powered thresher finally crowded out animal traction threshing sledges, within our, well my, lifetime.
I was wondering. As an archaeologist, I usually only pay attention to physics as entertainment. I have a friend however, who is a physicist, who has frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the standard model and what he refers as the "epicycle" problem of adding complexity in order to continue ironing out the contradictions that keep intruding. He recommended a book on electromagnetic cosmological theory.
I have been wondering how on one hand a Bose-Einstein condensate can be produced, thanks to the operation of the uncertainty principal, and yet IBM can still apparently herd individual atoms into patterns of smiley-faces and other interesting patterns, which seems to violate the uncertainty principal, since the location and momentum of the atoms employed must both be pretty well fixed in order to produce a readable image as claimed. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
There still is no evidence that global warming really exists not to mention that it would be caused by human action.
There is plenty of evidence that the globe is warming. The issue is whether there is any contribution by human activity, and if there is, how important is the contribution. The data is quite unbiased, but it is also more or less ambiguous in terms of cause. There is interesting photo-based data from Mars that, based upon evidence of extensive sublimation of CO2 in the south polar region, suggests that Mars also is warming up. This has some pretty interesting implications all by itself. Taken in conjunction with warming in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada, as well as geographically unbalanced changes in Anarctica, it may be that the whole solar system is in for a hot time. Tune Rush out, check some real unbiased sources, and draw some independent conclusions.
For a considerably more detailed and thorough discussion of clathrates or "gas hydrates," the following page Clathrates at Weslyan is handy.
Just wondering, but are you perhaps a proponent of electromagnetic theories of cosmology and somewhat disappointed in the standard model?
The last I heard, Seoul was still in Korea, so perhaps that has something to do with their being accessible there.
It is a fact. Word seems to get cranky, especially if you are editing a document on more than one version, e.g. Office 97 and 2000. Word will occasionally turn and eat its young. I have been using SO 5.2 to rescue these documents every so often for over a year. You may lose some formatting in heavily formatted areas, but Word will open the document again. Wordperfect 5.1 could so pretty creepy stuff as well. I used to keep five disks backing up my thesis because once in a while WP would tie a knot in the file that reveal codes could not isolate or cure.
On the contrary ... 9/11 demonstrated precisely why separation of church and state is a good thing. ...
Why is your acceptance that church state separation is a good thing "on the contrary" to the original poster's assertion of the same?
Slashdot just happens to be the one place where I can vent about the rampant equivelence of the two terms in the media and thus in common usage. :)
Same here. Too many cranks in the family.
I do believe that Linus' point just might be that a patent is supposedly for a "non-obvious" idea. If you or he can come up with an idea without benefit of digging it out of someone else's patent, the idea can not have been as obscure and "original" as the jackass that patented the idea thought, or the over-worked, under endowed patent office clerk assumed. The fact that some mediocre mind has a brain cramp and actually has an idea, doesn't mean that many others, more nimble minded had not already devised,would not,or could not devise the self-same idea independently at need, because to them it was and always had been and would always be obvious. Far too many of the mentally lame file patents these days shrilly proclaiming their invention of the obvious. Worse, they turn about and sell their patents to the unscrupulous, who then display all the worst behaviour of parasites.
In fact, I suspect that many creative minds don't bother patenting ideas, while those who do, do so because of the fear that they may never again experience the rare event of a creative thought.
You are quite correct. I read the article first and "read" what I expected in the OP. Mea culpa.
the original article would help, or perhaps carefully reading the original post. The poster is incorrect about spelling the plural of "virus" as "virii" but did accurately restate from the article that The method uses an enzyme from bacteriophages, virii which attack bacteria. .
Ignoring the spelling blunder, the poster has offered a portion the original article's gist. There was no mix-up of bacteria and viruses.
Really, isn't the storage requirements for politicians determined by mental capacity. You should be fine.
It's not up to scientists to disprove extraterrestial anal rapes, healing crystals, haunted houses, and so forth.
One of the enormous handicaps that science operates under, and one of the real reasons that many people believe things that their neighborhood science teacher would call irrational, is that one positive "fact" "disproves" all arguments contrary. Normal science dodges this bullet among the in-group by calling for extraordinary proof for things that are unreasonable or in apparent violation of "natural law," at least as we understand it.
Normal people - i.e. not scientifically indoctrinated - see coincidences or "weird events" and say to each other, "that is strange." The scientifically indoctrinated on the other hand work to rationalize or otherwise explain the observation or experience, cloaking it in respectability. A good example is the evident desperation with which UFO "debunkers" attempt to explain away other peoples experiences. Not uncommonly the results are as weird as the original claims, but of course, they don't violate "natural law." In reality, I suspect that both extremes in this process are working hard at agendas that have little to do with extraordinary claims and more to do with authoritarian dominance games. Many of us in science are prone to forget that science is a simplification of reality, a smoothed graph that approximates the real thing. At the same time many laymen crave the strange and new, forgetting that coincidence realy does happen, and that their vision can be foxed and their judgement mislead. There is a substantial grey area out there and it will keep science occupied understanding it for a long time.
There was quite a little condescention in the mathematician's reply to the author, and there were problems with assumptions he suggested as well. You could almost suspect he was trying to redirect the reporter's attention, no, wait . . .
Just for the heck of it, check the origin of "prime." One might not be a prime, but it is "primus." ;-)
in as much as what i have been taught as a catholic, the "threat to religion" aspect of finding life beyond earth is baloney. please keep in mind that fundamentalists make a small part of the religious community. and often they give the mainstream a bad name.
Have no concerns about that. The Catholic Church is an old and adaptable organization that has long since taken steps to avoid the extremes of fundamentalists. My point is that the religious fundamentalist mentality - which is not limited to Christianity - will tend to have problems with any discovery that appears to move humanity and the earth even farther from the centrality and uniqueness they hold to be our real place in the universe.
Mod this one down. The writer did not read the source material, otherwise he (I use the pronoun in a non-discriminatory manner) would have known that the magnetite form does not occur on earth "living or not" but forms only in living cells. Also, the "tiny fossilized bacteria" issue is still actively being argued over. It has never been settled.
The big deal would be that life existed, or perhaps exists beyond the earth. This has very important implications for how common life could be beyond the solar system. It raises the issue of whether life is actually native to the earth or if a massive asteroidal strike blew chunks of Mars into space seeding the earth - we could ALL be Martians. It is also a massive problem for Christian and Muslim religious fundamentalists, since they hold a strongly defended belief in the specialness of life, of intelligence, and of the earth as the center of God's interest. Finding life in some remote spot on earth is not a challenge to convention and established thought, since we already know that it exists here where ever the conditions of chemical and energy availability permit. Then of course there are political and potential health issues if we were to retrieve living material from Mars.
Would Martian bacteria be dangerous to terrestrial systems? What about carrying earth bacteria in the other direction? Will we breaking the Galactic Federation's laws regarding the transfer of biologically active material? Will Florida, Texas, California and other entities establish agricultural inspection stations at NASA launch and reception facilities? It can be a VERY big deal.
It has been a long time since I read this, however, bacteria in aqueous environments need to orient to sources of food, energy, and other needs. I believe that the hypothesis was tested and verified to the researchers' satisfaction by manipulating the magnetic environment around experimental laboratory populations of bacteria.
Evolutionarily, the two ready means for living systems to map their environment are radiation sources such as light and heat, and magnetism. If bacteria simply relied on chance to locate such sources of necessary materials, they may be at a competitive disadvantage to bacteria who are able to "map" sources of necessities. The strange part of the idea is not the tiny, bacterial compasses; it's the idea that bacteria can store information at some level. It raises some very interesting questions about memory.
Based on this information, if the earth loses about 1 second every year, and given: 60 secs/min *60 min/hr *24 hrs/day, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. It follows then that in 86,400 years, the earth stops and starts turning backwards. Obviously this has to be the explanation for geomagnetic reversals. The earth as a washing machine.
The reality of life in the 21st Century is that, thanks to 9/11, someone attempting to hijack an airliner will be lucky to survive the passengers' response. The last reported bomber on a commercial aircraft arrived at the destination airport trussed in the belts of, IIRC, twenty-odd passengers.
Other friends of mine have seen drunken, abusive passengers put on notice by other pasengers that they need to cool it or suffer the consequences. Outcome: suddenly quiet drunken passengers. Alert citizens have always been able to protect themselves better than the government ever could.
I believe that your numbers are suspect in several ways. First, there is no guarantee that faster than light travel is possible. If it isn't, then the human exploration of this galaxy will take far longer than 30 ky. Next, while life may be very likely, there is nothing to say that "intelligence," as we know it, is common, or even an adaptive advantage over evolutionary spans of time. Piers Anthony IIRC suggested in The Macroscope that most intelligent life simply failed to survive the industrial period. The book was fiction, but the suggestion is appropriate.
Cultural and technical changes - progress if you will (but I won't) - require lots of head space. "Traditional" cultures are traditional because they are stored solely in the heads of their carriers. Traditional cultures are extremely vulnerable to the loss of members, if the society is too complex. Thus simple cultures survive by redundant storage of the essential information that defines the operational aspects of the society. Once the ability to store information "extrasomatically" comes along (i.e. writing) more complex civilizations become possible and technical change can occur more rapidly because a literate civilization can support intellectual as well as craft specialization.
If you consider it, it is fairly obvious that population growth rates and technical advances heterodyne on each other. The problem that can affect the number of intelligent species (as we understand intelligence) that can make into space comes as the growth of population passes the "knee" in a yeast growth type curve. At that point we have entered a race between environmental degradation, technological advance, and the exhaustion of critical resources. If and only if technological advance can establish a population off planet, if and only if technological advance can offset environmental degradation and resource scarcity can species then start to really explore space.
You can imagine from this that some intelligent species with very slowly growing, or stable populations probably have little reason, except perhaps curiousity, for leaving a planet. More might reach the yeast growth stage, fail in the technical-environmental-resource arena and become extinct or under go drastic reductions. Another few may actually make it off their home planet and into interplanetary or perhaps intersellar space.
Probably on a majority, nothing we could recognize as intelligence ever appears.