Missing the point, perhaps?
on
Fluid Logic Chips
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· Score: 2, Informative
As someone who does academic research in microfluidics, I should probably comment on this and some of the perceptions of it.
This stuff will not WILL NOT ever replace electronic circuitry. I don't think anyone who works with microfluidic applications would seriously claim this. There is just too large of a speed differential between fluids and semiconductors. Do you want your computer making decisions on the millisecond time scale (fluidics) or the subnanosecond time scale (silicon)? This work is a little misguided, and somewhat misleading as it tries to mimic electronic circuitry. Fluidic logic was rightly given up as a techy-backwater thirty years ago. There is tremendous potential in this field, however, when people start to think out of the box of usual engineering.
There are some really cool fluid physics that take over at these length scales. You can't have turbulence (the Reynold's number is far too low) so neighboring streams are totally laminar, and stay separate until they mix by slow diffusion. Buoyant forces dominate over convective forces (the Grashoff number is low), so you can do biology and chemistry experiments in these systems that were previously only practical in microgravity. For a tiny fraction of the cost, mind you... most microfluidicists use a channel-making process that employs photolithography, so you can use the economy of scale to do a f^Hckton of experiments for pennies on the dollar. Better than hoping your precious bugs survive the next shuttle flight.
This stuff is already having a serious impact in biotech and big pharma. The Human Genome Project wouldn't have been possible without technology that used these physics to shunt little packets of fluid around. Synthetic chemists use it to make thousands of variations on whatever drug they're working on.
Do some googling if you're interested... the field is booming right now.
Oh, and these guys are almost certainly using computers to drive their input pumps. Cheating, sorta...
Jon, where in the Constitution (or the Bill of Rights) is the right of privacy specifically guaranteed? Other than the 4th amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure (which the Supreme Court seems hellbent on gutting) there is no guarantee of the right of a person to privacy. The ninth amendment is usually taken to constitute a right of privacy. though it doesn't specifically mention the word. IIRC, Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v. Wade relied heavily on precedent involving the 9th amendment. Any constitutional lawyers feel like commenting?
... I voted about 2 weeks ago. I live in Oregon, which has mandated vote-by-mail for all elections for the past 4 years. On the other hand, our liberalized voter initiative system has resulted in 26-some ballot measures this time around, plus a voter pamphlet the size of a medium-sized town's phonebook. Don't get me wrong; I think our initiative system is a great thing, as it helps to keep grandstanding local politicians in line. It just results in a two hour voting experience (give or take), if you want to make informed choices on all candidates and measures. So all you poor bastards standing in line today get a sympathetic chuckle. Who'd I vote for? The shrub, and may god (tm) have mercy on my soul. I've had a difficult time separating Gore from Clinton's Zaphod Beeblebrox-ish behavior (I really don't care that he got his knob lobbed by Monica... I do care that he perjured himself and suborned perjury). Plus, I hate to say, what has the federal government done for me lately? DMCA, Carnivore, rapacious taxation, asset forfeiture, and a long, never-ending, 9-month+ attempt to eke a pittance to pay for school from the Dept. of Ed, to name only a few. I remind myself that our founding belligerents, ahem, fathers were irate over a 4 percent tax; today, the average American pays something like 51 percent of their gross income to federal. state, and local governments. At this point, anything that sends the feds to Jenny Craig will suffice, hence, the semi-literate good ol'boy from Texas got my vote. I'm not a republican, and never will be one. At least, not until they kick the bible-thumpers to the curb, which just ISN'T going to happen. I'm still not sure what to make of the Supreme Court FUD... as far as I know, the only justices likely to retire/die anytime soon are Rehnquist (a staunch conservative) and Stevens (a staunch liberal). Perhaps I'll vote for a democrat for US senator the next time around, so if and when Bush tries to appoint some fundamentalist knuckle-dragger to the court there will at least be some opposition. So it goes...
Re:What ever happened to ... (off topic)
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
As far as cold fusion goes, chemists and physicists have more or less ripped it a new one. The excess heat produced has been shown to be a result of a garden-variety exothermic reaction. Unfortunately, some quacks still think it'll solve the world's ills. The situation is a good lesson on why peer review is infinitely more preferable to popular literature review (ahem! cough, cough.. P=NP on/.... cough:)
Quoth the article:
"If you square the charge of the electron and then divide it by the speed of light times Planck's constant, all the dimensions (mass, time and distance) cancel out, yielding a so-called "pure number" -- alpha, which is just slightly over 1/137. But why is it not precisely 1/137 or some other value entirely? Physicists and even mystics
have tried in vain to explain why. "
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I may be), but the elctrons charge is 1.602*10^-19 C, the speed of light is 2.998*10^8 m/s, and Planck's constant is 6.626*10^-34 J*s. Performing the operation described above, e^2/(c*h), one gets 1.289*10^-13, which is about ten powers of ten away from 1/137 (0.00730). WTF?
Ummm... weapons-grade plutonium IS spacecraft-grade plutonium. Same isotope: Pu-239. The degree of purity may be different, but it's basically the same stuff they put in Cassini that they put in nuclear weapons. Pu-233, another isotope, has apparently been used to power seismic equipment for the Apollo missions, but that's it as far as its use in NASA.
I think you're referring to the eclipse of Mercury in 1917 (1918?). IANAP, but I think the apehelion of Mercury's orbit was at (slight) variance with the value predicted by classical mechanics. Einstein was able to accurately predict the value observed during the eclipse using the general relativistic assumption of gravitational light-bending. Frame-dragging and geodesic precession are different facets of general relativity than what was proved 80 years ago.
While Sandia Labs has produced some excellent R&D in the civilian sector, they are first and foremost a weapons laboratory. Nanotechnology is no different from any sufficiently powerful tech, that is, with power comes a price. Quantum physics gave us computers, among other things, but also enabled global thermonuclear war. Biotech has a similar benefit/hazard relationship. Imagine nanomachines that could selectively ablate neurons in certain brain areas, or micronized hunter/killer machines that directly attack pulmonary nerves. Again, with power comes a responsibility to safely implement it, something that SNL is notorious for overlooking. I have it on good word that SNL is working on something "diabolical"... though I know not what it is. Perhaps this is it.
Mitnick's probationary ban from computers ends three years from today, no? I predict he will be hired immediately as a security consultant once it's over, likely by one or more of the firms he cracked, and likely for mucho $$$. A similar thing happened to Phiber Optik once he was released from prison. Apart from the prosecution's (and the trial judge's) abominable rape of his right to a speedy trial, I really don't have much sympathy for the guy...
I agree with the message of your statement, but take issue with the source. More accurately, Machiavelli held that the strength of a republic was rooted in the virtue of its prince, not its citizens. Citizens/subjects/serfs were only pawns to be kept in check by fear of their prince. Machiavelli was never much of a populist, unfortunately, and the context of his rhetoric makes it difficult to extrapolate his vision of a virtuous prince to a model of a virtous citizen.
"This deal is evidence of how powerful the Internet tide is," said Don Luskin, a mutual fund manager at OpenFund. "Even an inferior product that happens to have a well-known brand has been able to do well." This is nothing new. Time and time again we have seen this sort of performance from inferior tech: VHS vs. Betamax, M$ Windows vs. OS2 vs. Linux, Tucker Motors vs. the rest of Detroit (way back in the 1950's!). AOL knows very well that their product is sub-standard; yet they know how to trump this in the marketplace: name recognition. Hence, floods of trial CDs (fodder for my CDRW), desktop visibility in win95, etc, etc. I worked tech support for AOL during the shift to flat-rate pricing, and for about a year afterwards. During that time, their revenue focus moved from time-by-the-hour (which wasn't all that profitable to begin with) to third-party advertising, which is remarkably similar to a TV-corporation's profit method. In fact, I quit when they started making techies sell various things to people who called for help. Their market dominance has not been achieved from providing something others do not, but by shrewd marketing. Compare them to M$ in the 1980's: M$ always took an existing product (CPM-DOS, Mac OS, WordPerfect, etc.), produced an inferior copy as version 1.0, and proceeded to eke out bugfixes and upgrades while trumpeting throughout advertising space the perceived "benefits" of their product. Case in point: Anyone remember Windoze 1.0? The best technology does not always win; rather, winning takes google-plex-scale marketing, a willingness to copy existing tech, and failing that, underhanded business techniques.
Guinness mixes "soured" beer in with its import draught at about 3% v/v. Souring is accomplished by inoculating a beer wort with lactobacillus bacteria, or, for those of us who don't have access to a microbiology lab AND who live in an area with a high airborne concentration of lactob's (such as Dublin), letting the wort sit open for a few days. Incidentally, this is why it is a bitch and a half for a homebrewer to "copy" Guinness. Thus, a possible reason for the unique behavior of Guinness bubbles is the different solvation environment accorded by the lactic acid produced by the bacteria. However, as any chemist worth his bathtub knows, carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid (especially under pressure!), although the equlibrium for the reaction lies strongly with CO2. Who knows... the only other beer that I know of that contains lactic acid (other than my local zymurgist's frequently foul-tasting disasters) is Belgian lambic. It may be interesting to compare the bubble dynamics of Guinness with lambic, though prohibitively expensive if you live in America... decent lambic goes for $7-$12 a 12 oz. bottle, if you're lucky enough to find it stateside.
"Dr." Mills has long been known to flood the USPTO (no, I don't like them any more than the rest of you) with fradulent patent claims for contraptions that violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that is, perpetual motion machines. If he has, as is claimed on his website, "stitched together quantum mechanics and relativity", why has he not been awarded the Nobel prize, or at the very least, been recognized as a serious player in theoretical physics? This is almost as bad as those who claim they can produce water from light, and (IMHO) is offensive to bring up in an interview of a Nobel laureate.
I dispute your claim that pornography is a "relatively new concept in human history". Hindu has had a long tradition of artwork that would be considered sexually explicit by western terms, going back far before even the Roman Empire. Also, the Japanese have, for centuries, traditionally distributed pillow books (basically a how-to picture book for newlyweds) amongst their young adults. Western culture came into contact with these phenomena, and others, long before Victorian archaeologists dug up Pompeii. However, if you want to talk about sexual dysfunction and Victorians... well, I haven't got all day:P...
Actually, Einstein did not believe in time travel. Solutions of his equations allowing for such temporal displacement were worked out by others, including Kurt Godel, pariah of 1930s mathematics and an excellent nomination for this list. Einstein reportedly lamented the day pure mathematicians got ahold of his equations, for reasons similar to his distrust of quantum theory. See Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter) and Hyperspace (Kaku) for references.
I believe it was Freeman Dyson (I may be wrong in the source... corrections are welcome) who examined the consequences of two species, one more advanced than the other, meeting each other for the first time. In short, it corresponds to historical meetings between different human civilizations, such as the Spanish and the Aztecs. These encounters have always ended badly for those less advanced (and the criterion for "advanced" is rather slim indeed; Spaniards had guns and horses, Aztecs didn't... small advantages in technology can make a world of difference). Also, remember that the Spanish introduced smallpox (among other things) to the New World, resulting in catastrophic loss of life in the native population. Should Europa turn out to have, at a minumum, single-cell life or its equivalent, we may inadvertently end up unleashing the "Andromeda strain" upon them (or, of course, they may actually BE the Andromeda strain).
A difficulty with silicon-based life forms is that contact with oxygen would produce silicon dioxide upon exhaling/excreting/sliming/etc... SiO2 then immediately polymerizes into sea sand. Water would likely correspond with atmospheric presence of oxygen. Perhaps oxygen is a poison for such creatures, equivalent to cyanide in carbon-based lifeforms... although, maybe they shit sand:P
You can read about Jodorowsky's Dune here: http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dune.html There is some fascinating concept art from HR Giger, as well as an incoherent ramble by Jodorowski. If I remember correctly, Herbert and Jodorowski had serious disagreements over the script... I think Jodorowsky wanted Duke Leto to be castrated onscreen, or some such nonsense. Ridley Scott (see Alien, Bladerunner) was also considered for the director's chair, and would have likely been the best choice for it, considering the alternatives.
Xenu.net was based in Norway, a country that likely has different free speech laws than the US... likely a reason why EFF has not spoken up. However, Co$ enjoys a more tolerant position in the US, due to their tax-exempt status (they bullied the IRS, strange but true, into granting this status... you can read about it on xenu.net mirrors). Also, for all you Christians out there, Hubbard was a disciple of Aleister Crowley, a.k.a. the Beast 666, founder of modern satanism, back in the 30s-40s. He was not a favorite of Crowley's, as evidenced by Crowley's written remarks on Hubbard's "idiocy". Crowley's bit was that once you moved up far enough in his hierarchy, you'd start your own religion according to your personal belief system. Interesting, to say the least...
Conspicuously absent in Weinberg's essay is the enormous problem of quantizing the gravitational force, i.e. the Holy Grail of modern physics. Not even string theory answers this (although Ranmujan -style modular functions hold some promise, be it insanely difficult to deduce). Also, once the theory is proposed, it must be tested (duh!)... the mere thought of a Plank scale event occurring within even a few gigaparsecs of Earth scares the living daylights out of me. Wasn't it LaPlace who said "We have solved all the major problems in physics" around the (last) turn of the century (never mind that pesky blackbody radiation problem). This sounds suspiciously similar.
Ok. Here's the "real deal". There is an electrostatic repulsion involved in fusing two particles (in fact, that's why practical fusion has proved to be such a gargantuan pain in the ass). However, if this repulsion is overcome, the following situation results: Consider the fusion of a proton and a neutron to form deuteurium: proton (1.007825 grams/mol) + neutron(1.008665 g/mol) ===> deuterium (2.01410 g/mol) This contradicts the "basic physics" you refer to, specifically conservation of mass. The resulting mass of deuterium is.00239 g/mol less than it should be, if you sum the masses of the proton and neutron. Enter Einstein: E=mc^2 Plug the value for the missing mass into this equation (obviously after converting g/mol => kg/mol), and you get a resulting energy release of 2.15*10^8 kJ/mol, that is, one fucking obscene amount of energy. BTW, I pulled this out of a freshman general chemistry book (Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity, Kotz and Treichel, 3rd Edition, ISBN 0-03-001291-0). You don't need that much "qualification" to answer this.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who does academic research in microfluidics, I should probably comment on this and some of the perceptions of it.
This stuff will not WILL NOT ever replace electronic circuitry. I don't think anyone who works with microfluidic applications would seriously claim this. There is just too large of a speed differential between fluids and semiconductors. Do you want your computer making decisions on the millisecond time scale (fluidics) or the subnanosecond time scale (silicon)? This work is a little misguided, and somewhat misleading as it tries to mimic electronic circuitry. Fluidic logic was rightly given up as a techy-backwater thirty years ago. There is tremendous potential in this field, however, when people start to think out of the box of usual engineering.
There are some really cool fluid physics that take over at these length scales. You can't have turbulence (the Reynold's number is far too low) so neighboring streams are totally laminar, and stay separate until they mix by slow diffusion. Buoyant forces dominate over convective forces (the Grashoff number is low), so you can do biology and chemistry experiments in these systems that were previously only practical in microgravity. For a tiny fraction of the cost, mind you... most microfluidicists use a channel-making process that employs photolithography, so you can use the economy of scale to do a f^Hckton of experiments for pennies on the dollar. Better than hoping your precious bugs survive the next shuttle flight.
This stuff is already having a serious impact in biotech and big pharma. The Human Genome Project wouldn't have been possible without technology that used these physics to shunt little packets of fluid around. Synthetic chemists use it to make thousands of variations on whatever drug they're working on.
Do some googling if you're interested... the field is booming right now.
Oh, and these guys are almost certainly using computers to drive their input pumps. Cheating, sorta...
Jon, where in the Constitution (or the Bill of Rights) is the right of privacy specifically guaranteed? Other than the 4th amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure (which the Supreme Court seems hellbent on gutting) there is no guarantee of the right of a person to privacy. The ninth amendment is usually taken to constitute a right of privacy. though it doesn't specifically mention the word. IIRC, Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v. Wade relied heavily on precedent involving the 9th amendment. Any constitutional lawyers feel like commenting?
... I voted about 2 weeks ago. I live in Oregon, which has mandated vote-by-mail for all elections for the past 4 years. On the other hand, our liberalized voter initiative system has resulted in 26-some ballot measures this time around, plus a voter pamphlet the size of a medium-sized town's phonebook. Don't get me wrong; I think our initiative system is a great thing, as it helps to keep grandstanding local politicians in line. It just results in a two hour voting experience (give or take), if you want to make informed choices on all candidates and measures. So all you poor bastards standing in line today get a sympathetic chuckle. Who'd I vote for? The shrub, and may god (tm) have mercy on my soul. I've had a difficult time separating Gore from Clinton's Zaphod Beeblebrox-ish behavior (I really don't care that he got his knob lobbed by Monica... I do care that he perjured himself and suborned perjury). Plus, I hate to say, what has the federal government done for me lately? DMCA, Carnivore, rapacious taxation, asset forfeiture, and a long, never-ending, 9-month+ attempt to eke a pittance to pay for school from the Dept. of Ed, to name only a few. I remind myself that our founding belligerents, ahem, fathers were irate over a 4 percent tax; today, the average American pays something like 51 percent of their gross income to federal. state, and local governments. At this point, anything that sends the feds to Jenny Craig will suffice, hence, the semi-literate good ol'boy from Texas got my vote. I'm not a republican, and never will be one. At least, not until they kick the bible-thumpers to the curb, which just ISN'T going to happen. I'm still not sure what to make of the Supreme Court FUD... as far as I know, the only justices likely to retire/die anytime soon are Rehnquist (a staunch conservative) and Stevens (a staunch liberal). Perhaps I'll vote for a democrat for US senator the next time around, so if and when Bush tries to appoint some fundamentalist knuckle-dragger to the court there will at least be some opposition. So it goes...
As far as cold fusion goes, chemists and physicists have more or less ripped it a new one. The excess heat produced has been shown to be a result of a garden-variety exothermic reaction. Unfortunately, some quacks still think it'll solve the world's ills. The situation is a good lesson on why peer review is infinitely more preferable to popular literature review (ahem! cough, cough.. P=NP on /. ... cough :)
Quoth the article: "If you square the charge of the electron and then divide it by the speed of light times Planck's constant, all the dimensions (mass, time and distance) cancel out, yielding a so-called "pure number" -- alpha, which is just slightly over 1/137. But why is it not precisely 1/137 or some other value entirely? Physicists and even mystics have tried in vain to explain why. " Correct me if I'm wrong (and I may be), but the elctrons charge is 1.602*10^-19 C, the speed of light is 2.998*10^8 m/s, and Planck's constant is 6.626*10^-34 J*s. Performing the operation described above, e^2/(c*h), one gets 1.289*10^-13, which is about ten powers of ten away from 1/137 (0.00730). WTF?
Ummm... weapons-grade plutonium IS spacecraft-grade plutonium. Same isotope: Pu-239. The degree of purity may be different, but it's basically the same stuff they put in Cassini that they put in nuclear weapons. Pu-233, another isotope, has apparently been used to power seismic equipment for the Apollo missions, but that's it as far as its use in NASA.
Give Egosurf a try... it gives some rather interesting results.
I think you're referring to the eclipse of Mercury in 1917 (1918?). IANAP, but I think the apehelion of Mercury's orbit was at (slight) variance with the value predicted by classical mechanics. Einstein was able to accurately predict the value observed during the eclipse using the general relativistic assumption of gravitational light-bending. Frame-dragging and geodesic precession are different facets of general relativity than what was proved 80 years ago.
While Sandia Labs has produced some excellent R&D in the civilian sector, they are first and foremost a weapons laboratory. Nanotechnology is no different from any sufficiently powerful tech, that is, with power comes a price. Quantum physics gave us computers, among other things, but also enabled global thermonuclear war. Biotech has a similar benefit/hazard relationship. Imagine nanomachines that could selectively ablate neurons in certain brain areas, or micronized hunter/killer machines that directly attack pulmonary nerves. Again, with power comes a responsibility to safely implement it, something that SNL is notorious for overlooking. I have it on good word that SNL is working on something "diabolical"... though I know not what it is. Perhaps this is it.
Mitnick's probationary ban from computers ends three years from today, no? I predict he will be hired immediately as a security consultant once it's over, likely by one or more of the firms he cracked, and likely for mucho $$$. A similar thing happened to Phiber Optik once he was released from prison. Apart from the prosecution's (and the trial judge's) abominable rape of his right to a speedy trial, I really don't have much sympathy for the guy...
I agree with the message of your statement, but take issue with the source. More accurately, Machiavelli held that the strength of a republic was rooted in the virtue of its prince, not its citizens. Citizens/subjects/serfs were only pawns to be kept in check by fear of their prince. Machiavelli was never much of a populist, unfortunately, and the context of his rhetoric makes it difficult to extrapolate his vision of a virtuous prince to a model of a virtous citizen.
"This deal is evidence of how powerful the Internet tide is," said Don Luskin, a mutual fund manager at OpenFund. "Even an inferior product that happens to have a well-known brand has been able to do well." This is nothing new. Time and time again we have seen this sort of performance from inferior tech: VHS vs. Betamax, M$ Windows vs. OS2 vs. Linux, Tucker Motors vs. the rest of Detroit (way back in the 1950's!). AOL knows very well that their product is sub-standard; yet they know how to trump this in the marketplace: name recognition. Hence, floods of trial CDs (fodder for my CDRW), desktop visibility in win95, etc, etc. I worked tech support for AOL during the shift to flat-rate pricing, and for about a year afterwards. During that time, their revenue focus moved from time-by-the-hour (which wasn't all that profitable to begin with) to third-party advertising, which is remarkably similar to a TV-corporation's profit method. In fact, I quit when they started making techies sell various things to people who called for help. Their market dominance has not been achieved from providing something others do not, but by shrewd marketing. Compare them to M$ in the 1980's: M$ always took an existing product (CPM-DOS, Mac OS, WordPerfect, etc.), produced an inferior copy as version 1.0, and proceeded to eke out bugfixes and upgrades while trumpeting throughout advertising space the perceived "benefits" of their product. Case in point: Anyone remember Windoze 1.0? The best technology does not always win; rather, winning takes google-plex-scale marketing, a willingness to copy existing tech, and failing that, underhanded business techniques.
Guinness mixes "soured" beer in with its import draught at about 3% v/v. Souring is accomplished by inoculating a beer wort with lactobacillus bacteria, or, for those of us who don't have access to a microbiology lab AND who live in an area with a high airborne concentration of lactob's (such as Dublin), letting the wort sit open for a few days. Incidentally, this is why it is a bitch and a half for a homebrewer to "copy" Guinness. Thus, a possible reason for the unique behavior of Guinness bubbles is the different solvation environment accorded by the lactic acid produced by the bacteria. However, as any chemist worth his bathtub knows, carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid (especially under pressure!), although the equlibrium for the reaction lies strongly with CO2. Who knows... the only other beer that I know of that contains lactic acid (other than my local zymurgist's frequently foul-tasting disasters) is Belgian lambic. It may be interesting to compare the bubble dynamics of Guinness with lambic, though prohibitively expensive if you live in America... decent lambic goes for $7-$12 a 12 oz. bottle, if you're lucky enough to find it stateside.
"Dr." Mills has long been known to flood the USPTO (no, I don't like them any more than the rest of you) with fradulent patent claims for contraptions that violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that is, perpetual motion machines. If he has, as is claimed on his website, "stitched together quantum mechanics and relativity", why has he not been awarded the Nobel prize, or at the very least, been recognized as a serious player in theoretical physics? This is almost as bad as those who claim they can produce water from light, and (IMHO) is offensive to bring up in an interview of a Nobel laureate.
I dispute your claim that pornography is a "relatively new concept in human history". Hindu has had a long tradition of artwork that would be considered sexually explicit by western terms, going back far before even the Roman Empire. Also, the Japanese have, for centuries, traditionally distributed pillow books (basically a how-to picture book for newlyweds) amongst their young adults. Western culture came into contact with these phenomena, and others, long before Victorian archaeologists dug up Pompeii. However, if you want to talk about sexual dysfunction and Victorians... well, I haven't got all day :P...
Actually, Einstein did not believe in time travel. Solutions of his equations allowing for such temporal displacement were worked out by others, including Kurt Godel, pariah of 1930s mathematics and an excellent nomination for this list. Einstein reportedly lamented the day pure mathematicians got ahold of his equations, for reasons similar to his distrust of quantum theory. See Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter) and Hyperspace (Kaku) for references.
I believe it was Freeman Dyson (I may be wrong in the source... corrections are welcome) who examined the consequences of two species, one more advanced than the other, meeting each other for the first time. In short, it corresponds to historical meetings between different human civilizations, such as the Spanish and the Aztecs. These encounters have always ended badly for those less advanced (and the criterion for "advanced" is rather slim indeed; Spaniards had guns and horses, Aztecs didn't... small advantages in technology can make a world of difference). Also, remember that the Spanish introduced smallpox (among other things) to the New World, resulting in catastrophic loss of life in the native population. Should Europa turn out to have, at a minumum, single-cell life or its equivalent, we may inadvertently end up unleashing the "Andromeda strain" upon them (or, of course, they may actually BE the Andromeda strain).
A difficulty with silicon-based life forms is that contact with oxygen would produce silicon dioxide upon exhaling/excreting/sliming/etc... SiO2 then immediately polymerizes into sea sand. Water would likely correspond with atmospheric presence of oxygen. Perhaps oxygen is a poison for such creatures, equivalent to cyanide in carbon-based lifeforms... although, maybe they shit sand :P
You can read about Jodorowsky's Dune here: http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dune.html There is some fascinating concept art from HR Giger, as well as an incoherent ramble by Jodorowski. If I remember correctly, Herbert and Jodorowski had serious disagreements over the script... I think Jodorowsky wanted Duke Leto to be castrated onscreen, or some such nonsense. Ridley Scott (see Alien, Bladerunner) was also considered for the director's chair, and would have likely been the best choice for it, considering the alternatives.
Xenu.net was based in Norway, a country that likely has different free speech laws than the US... likely a reason why EFF has not spoken up. However, Co$ enjoys a more tolerant position in the US, due to their tax-exempt status (they bullied the IRS, strange but true, into granting this status... you can read about it on xenu.net mirrors). Also, for all you Christians out there, Hubbard was a disciple of Aleister Crowley, a.k.a. the Beast 666, founder of modern satanism, back in the 30s-40s. He was not a favorite of Crowley's, as evidenced by Crowley's written remarks on Hubbard's "idiocy". Crowley's bit was that once you moved up far enough in his hierarchy, you'd start your own religion according to your personal belief system. Interesting, to say the least...
Conspicuously absent in Weinberg's essay is the enormous problem of quantizing the gravitational force, i.e. the Holy Grail of modern physics. Not even string theory answers this (although Ranmujan -style modular functions hold some promise, be it insanely difficult to deduce). Also, once the theory is proposed, it must be tested (duh!)... the mere thought of a Plank scale event occurring within even a few gigaparsecs of Earth scares the living daylights out of me. Wasn't it LaPlace who said "We have solved all the major problems in physics" around the (last) turn of the century (never mind that pesky blackbody radiation problem). This sounds suspiciously similar.
Ok. Here's the "real deal". There is an electrostatic repulsion involved in fusing two particles (in fact, that's why practical fusion has proved to be such a gargantuan pain in the ass). However, if this repulsion is overcome, the following situation results: Consider the fusion of a proton and a neutron to form deuteurium: proton (1.007825 grams/mol) + neutron(1.008665 g/mol) ===> deuterium (2.01410 g/mol) This contradicts the "basic physics" you refer to, specifically conservation of mass. The resulting mass of deuterium is .00239 g/mol less than it should be, if you sum the masses of the proton and neutron. Enter Einstein: E=mc^2 Plug the value for the missing mass into this equation (obviously after converting g/mol => kg/mol), and you get a resulting energy release of 2.15*10^8 kJ/mol, that is, one fucking obscene amount of energy. BTW, I pulled this out of a freshman general chemistry book (Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity, Kotz and Treichel, 3rd Edition, ISBN 0-03-001291-0). You don't need that much "qualification" to answer this.