I think that using plants (and bacteria) to clean up pollution is a great idea (it's one of the best reasons for protecting wetlands), but there is a potential downside here. Introducing plants and bacteria ('exotic species') into new ecosystems can have some pretty nasty side effects on the existing inhabitants since the exotics can often out compete the locals. This is why kudzu is such a big problem in the Southern US (and is becoming one in the north rapidly). IIRC, kudzu was imported from Asia to prevent erosion, which it does very well. Too bad it grows faster than any other plant in North America and smothers the existing flora. Similarly, purple loosestrife (sp?) was brought in as an ornamental and is rapidly taking over wetlands in the Midwest, and is really only controlled by LOTS of pesticide, burning, and/or an exotic species of beetles.
Also, somebody imported a dozen european swallows (or swifts, I always get them confused) into Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare (I Am Not Making This Up) and they have literally exploded all over the continent.
I'm not saying that 'Poplars Will Rule The Earth!!!', but nothing is an unmixed blessing.
Wow, that takes me back! Traveller had a great, smooth design to the system AND the coolest book design - small volumes in basic black with 1 color-coded stripe. You could jam everything thing you needed into your bookbag and get medieval on the Zhodani over lunch hour... There are days that I'd like to have a FGMP-15, Imperial Marine battledress and a cutlass now.
BTW - Steve Jackson Games (the guy who designed Ogre, Car Wars and Illuminati) have a version of Traveller for the GURPS system out. IIRC, they kept the original cover design for the 1st book in the series.
Your point about gradual transition from H. sapiens to H. superior is an excellent one. However, as another poster pointed out, some people (mainly the poor) will be left behind. This will cause big problems when the two cultures/species inevitably start to have conflicts. Humanity doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to technologically advanced cultures playing nice with less advanced ones - look at the effects of European radiation on natives in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Heck, saying that the Cro-Magnons replaced the Neanderthals through sociological means, not biological, sounds like a prehistoric version of ethnic cleansing - chase them away from the good places to live, cut off their access to resources, kill them if they squak too much...
I agree. It's funny (I guess) that so many of these themes (AI, nanotech, biotech, *tech) have been hashed over so much in SF, keep surprising the rest of the world. Granted, the tendency is for either worst-case or best case scenarios since they for better fiction, but you would think that the writers would get some credit for trying to extrapolate the effects...
I would say that each generation feels threatened by the next. That's why people are always complaining about kids 'these days' having no repect/taste/intelligence/whatever, while their generation had an infinite amount of the same. How many times in the average week do you hear someone say that people used to help each other more, or really care about changing the world, or whatever, but now it's all $$$? These are expressions of feeling threatened, and I am as guilty of them as anyone... Conversely, each new generation sees the old ways of doing things as oppressive and wants to change them as much as the previous generation wants them to stay the same. This means that each generation is a threat to the other. If you don't agree, think about how Microsoft views and is viewed by Mac/Unix/Linux/etc companies. The fact that I see these threats doesn't mean that I think machine evolution is destined to wipe out humanity, it just means that I don't think it's going to be a painless transition. Frankly, I don't want my species to be obsoleted by anyone or anything. Also, you say that these machines will be our cultural descendants, but who's to say that all machines will be from nice, open democratic societies (Stalin 2.0 for anyone?), or that they will automatically be our buddies if they are our cultural offspring. I don't think that anyone would doubt that the United States is the cultural offspring of Great Britain, but this was not a painless process...
CIA guy in trouble? Was there a recent incident? One of the bigwigs (IIRC, it was actually the Director himself) had got into the habit of taking his work home with him on floppies, even if was classified/secret/whatever. Then he'd move the stuff to his hard drive and work on it there. I'm no security/intell guru, but that doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence in the 'I' part of CIA...
Wow, this article is bringing back all the Good Old Stuff - Commodore 64s and old-school Iron Maiden. I gave away my old C64 so now I can't play Attack of the Mutant Camels (or whatever it was...) anymore. Then, my stupid Walkman ate my Live After Death tape in grad school. The CD of it only has about 2/3 the songs, so I can't even really replace it.
I'd love to see my wife's face when I bought an Iron Maiden CD though ('Oh, you're so rebellious, BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH')
It was actually a cheetah, but it was dang cool when they stuck their hand down its throat to pull out a can... and al the 7-Up ads were good too. I also liked the e*trade 'money out the wazoo' ad, but the best was still the cat herding.
My wife was pretty upset about the way she was treated during the game - by those animals the Rams, stopping the Titans on the 1/2 yard line on the last play of the game. Actually, it's probably just as well it didn't go into overtime, since she couldn't decide who to root for.
Actually, Foster did this (at least 3 times to different peer-reviewers, IIRC) in the book. He identified an unattributed poem as a Shakespeare for his dissertation, and got some rather nasty comments back saying it was impossible to ID an author based soley on internal evidence, without any external corroborating data. When he wrote back directly to these reviewers, they were Not Amused, for the most part.
The idea of the ending (Neo can do whatever he wants in The Matrix) was fine, although having a big flashy effects shot is a bit of a stereotype for a Hollywood sci-fi movie. The problem was that it looked pretty cheesy compared to all the earlier effects in the movie... BTW - you're idea about Neo becoming a living agent within the Matrix is a pretty good one - who knows there's 2 sequels coming, maybe you should write a script...
The first smallpox vaccine was getting infected by cowpox, accidentallty or intentionally. The antigens on both viruses are similar enough that there is a good degree of cross-immunity. I don't think that chicken pox is close enough (antigenically) to give the same immunity. ISTR that a few years ago there was a case where someone (at the CDC?) was working with smallpox and got a little sloppy, infecting a co-worker. The co-workers died, so I don't think that chicken pox immunity is enough to bet on. BTW, the original researcher comitted suicide while under quarintine.
we as a species has not been involved in the evolution process for a long long long time....we on the other hand keep things like cancer going because we mate with people that have these genes Sorry if this is a little too bio-geeky, but I was a bio-geek before I decided that IS would be so much fun:) The reason humans haven't been 'involved in evolution' (which, strictly speaking we have 'cuz ANY change in the genes, or the relative frequency of genes, present in a species is evolution) is mostly due to our ability to alter our environment rather than our environment altering us through natural selection. For instance, we could evolve speed to protect us from big predators, but instead we just created lots of weapons and changed habitats for the predators. I live in Illinois which used to be lots and lots of prairie and some woods where predators could live, but is now lots and lots (and lots) of farmland and urban sprawl with essentially no predators bigger than a fox or coyote. No big genetic changes, but the humans are so safe that we actually miss the predators and go to zoos to see them. As for mate selection based on genetic markers for diseases such as cancer, this is not the straightforward proposition that everyone makes it out to be. The links between a disease and a marker are usally along the lines of '47% of people with disease X had mutation Y in our sample of 19 X-sufferers, of course 35% of the Y-mutants don't have X', not 'everybody with disease A has mutation B, and everyone with mutation B has disease A'. These linkages will probably get a lot more accurate when the HGP is complete, but some diseases will just have lots of causes. Cancer is the perfect example - I don't care how resistant your genes say you are to cancer, you'll get cancer if you smoke a carton-a-day while you work as the clean-up crew at Chernobyl. In general people overstate the importance of genetics in this sort of thing. Even something as seemingly simple as eye-color is affected by developmental conditions in the womb (too warm shuts down the enzyme that produces pigment and you get blue eyes), so it shouldn't be surprising that susceptibility to diseases, much less mental/emotional traits, is heavily influenced by the environment. I don't think that too many genetic counselors will be guaranteeing their work even after the HGP is complete. Also, all the genes individually are only a part of the picture. The interactions between the genes, and between the genes and the non-coding DNA are probably as important, if not more. Analyzing all of these interactions, and the interactions between the interactions (if that makes any sense)will probably take a long time, and won't be so easy to mass-produce as the actual genetic sequences. The danger of people making decisions based on anothers genotype is amplified by all of the complexities above (Think about all the problems with DNA evidence such as lab contamination, explaining probability to people not smart enough to get out of jury duty {an old joke,:}, etc. and multiply that by about 1000). Not only is it questionable whether or not they should do so, it is likely that the decisions will be based on insufficient data. If your insurance company rejects you/jacks up your rates because you a carrier of a gene that is sometimes linked to a potentially life-shortening disease, is that fair? I guess it must be, since males with their danged Y chromosome pay higher car insurance (IIRC). If you are running for office should the public know that people with that single base alteration on chromosome 12 that you have are 100 times more likely to go whacko, even though it means 1-in-10,000 rather than 1-in-1,000,000? How about shareholders in the company that wants you as CEO? How about the personnel department at the place you work now? How about the people in your neighborhood?
Sounds like a blast. Do you think people getting that psychotic about fast food will increase support for teaching evolution because it shows our animal heritage?
Is there a real 'Dion Rayford of the Taco Bell incident'? I know that another poster said they know Dion the Hungry, but I seem to remember hearing something similar except that it was a burger joint in Florida. Wow, the birth of a new urban legend... Of course, maybe Dion was just inspired by the earlier story. Or maybe there's a wave of drive-through assaults at fast food places coming and this is Just The Beginning...
WRT how you should backup - Think about it from your customers/users point of view. How stupid will you feel if you have to explain to them that you can't recover data 'cuz the tapes were on site and happenened to get damaged when the water main broke (or whatever)? Also, always do your backups, if only because if you do them you'll never have to use them, but if you miss a day for vacation disaster will strike. Trust me, it happened to me and accounting is still irked about re-entering all those invoices.
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I think that using plants (and bacteria) to clean up pollution is a great idea (it's one of the best reasons for protecting wetlands), but there is a potential downside here. Introducing plants and bacteria ('exotic species') into new ecosystems can have some pretty nasty side effects on the existing inhabitants since the exotics can often out compete the locals. This is why kudzu is such a big problem in the Southern US (and is becoming one in the north rapidly). IIRC, kudzu was imported from Asia to prevent erosion, which it does very well. Too bad it grows faster than any other plant in North America and smothers the existing flora. Similarly, purple loosestrife (sp?) was brought in as an ornamental and is rapidly taking over wetlands in the Midwest, and is really only controlled by LOTS of pesticide, burning, and/or an exotic species of beetles.
Also, somebody imported a dozen european swallows (or swifts, I always get them confused) into Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare (I Am Not Making This Up) and they have literally exploded all over the continent.
I'm not saying that 'Poplars Will Rule The Earth!!!', but nothing is an unmixed blessing.
Wow, that takes me back! Traveller had a great, smooth design to the system AND the coolest book design - small volumes in basic black with 1 color-coded stripe. You could jam everything thing you needed into your bookbag and get medieval on the Zhodani over lunch hour... There are days that I'd like to have a FGMP-15, Imperial Marine battledress and a cutlass now.
BTW - Steve Jackson Games (the guy who designed Ogre, Car Wars and Illuminati) have a version of Traveller for the GURPS system out. IIRC, they kept the original cover design for the 1st book in the series.
'This is Free Trader Beowulf...'
Your point about gradual transition from H. sapiens to H. superior is an excellent one. However, as another poster pointed out, some people (mainly the poor) will be left behind. This will cause big problems when the two cultures/species inevitably start to have conflicts. Humanity doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to technologically advanced cultures playing nice with less advanced ones - look at the effects of European radiation on natives in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Heck, saying that the Cro-Magnons replaced the Neanderthals through sociological means, not biological, sounds like a prehistoric version of ethnic cleansing - chase them away from the good places to live, cut off their access to resources, kill them if they squak too much...
I agree. It's funny (I guess) that so many of these themes (AI, nanotech, biotech, *tech) have been hashed over so much in SF, keep surprising the rest of the world. Granted, the tendency is for either worst-case or best case scenarios since they for better fiction, but you would think that the writers would get some credit for trying to extrapolate the effects...
I would say that each generation feels threatened by the next. That's why people are always complaining about kids 'these days' having no repect/taste/intelligence/whatever, while their generation had an infinite amount of the same. How many times in the average week do you hear someone say that people used to help each other more, or really care about changing the world, or whatever, but now it's all $$$? These are expressions of feeling threatened, and I am as guilty of them as anyone...
Conversely, each new generation sees the old ways of doing things as oppressive and wants to change them as much as the previous generation wants them to stay the same. This means that each generation is a threat to the other. If you don't agree, think about how Microsoft views and is viewed by Mac/Unix/Linux/etc companies.
The fact that I see these threats doesn't mean that I think machine evolution is destined to wipe out humanity, it just means that I don't think it's going to be a painless transition. Frankly, I don't want my species to be obsoleted by anyone or anything.
Also, you say that these machines will be our cultural descendants, but who's to say that all machines will be from nice, open democratic societies (Stalin 2.0 for anyone?), or that they will automatically be our buddies if they are our cultural offspring. I don't think that anyone would doubt that the United States is the cultural offspring of Great Britain, but this was not a painless process...
CIA guy in trouble? Was there a recent incident?
One of the bigwigs (IIRC, it was actually the Director himself) had got into the habit of taking his work home with him on floppies, even if was classified/secret/whatever. Then he'd move the stuff to his hard drive and work on it there.
I'm no security/intell guru, but that doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence in the 'I' part of CIA...
Wow, this article is bringing back all the Good Old Stuff - Commodore 64s and old-school Iron Maiden.
I gave away my old C64 so now I can't play Attack of the Mutant Camels (or whatever it was...) anymore. Then, my stupid Walkman ate my Live After Death tape in grad school. The CD of it only has about 2/3 the songs, so I can't even really replace it.
I'd love to see my wife's face when I bought an Iron Maiden CD though ('Oh, you're so rebellious, BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH')
It was actually a cheetah, but it was dang cool when they stuck their hand down its throat to pull out a can... and al the 7-Up ads were good too. I also liked the e*trade 'money out the wazoo' ad, but the best was still the cat herding.
My wife was pretty upset about the way she was treated during the game - by those animals the Rams, stopping the Titans on the 1/2 yard line on the last play of the game. Actually, it's probably just as well it didn't go into overtime, since she couldn't decide who to root for.
Actually, Foster did this (at least 3 times to different peer-reviewers, IIRC) in the book. He identified an unattributed poem as a Shakespeare for his dissertation, and got some rather nasty comments back saying it was impossible to ID an author based soley on internal evidence, without any external corroborating data. When he wrote back directly to these reviewers, they were Not Amused, for the most part.
The idea of the ending (Neo can do whatever he wants in The Matrix) was fine, although having a big flashy effects shot is a bit of a stereotype for a Hollywood sci-fi movie. The problem was that it looked pretty cheesy compared to all the earlier effects in the movie... BTW - you're idea about Neo becoming a living agent within the Matrix is a pretty good one - who knows there's 2 sequels coming, maybe you should write a script...
The first smallpox vaccine was getting infected by cowpox, accidentallty or intentionally. The antigens on both viruses are similar enough that there is a good degree of cross-immunity. I don't think that chicken pox is close enough (antigenically) to give the same immunity. ISTR that a few years ago there was a case where someone (at the CDC?) was working with smallpox and got a little sloppy, infecting a co-worker. The co-workers died, so I don't think that chicken pox immunity is enough to bet on. BTW, the original researcher comitted suicide while under quarintine.
we as a species has not been involved in the evolution process for a long long long time....we on the other hand keep things like cancer going because we mate with people that have these genes Sorry if this is a little too bio-geeky, but I was a bio-geek before I decided that IS would be so much fun :) The reason humans haven't been 'involved in evolution' (which, strictly speaking we have 'cuz ANY change in the genes, or the relative frequency of genes, present in a species is evolution) is mostly due to our ability to alter our environment rather than our environment altering us through natural selection. For instance, we could evolve speed to protect us from big predators, but instead we just created lots of weapons and changed habitats for the predators. I live in Illinois which used to be lots and lots of prairie and some woods where predators could live, but is now lots and lots (and lots) of farmland and urban sprawl with essentially no predators bigger than a fox or coyote. No big genetic changes, but the humans are so safe that we actually miss the predators and go to zoos to see them. As for mate selection based on genetic markers for diseases such as cancer, this is not the straightforward proposition that everyone makes it out to be. The links between a disease and a marker are usally along the lines of '47% of people with disease X had mutation Y in our sample of 19 X-sufferers, of course 35% of the Y-mutants don't have X', not 'everybody with disease A has mutation B, and everyone with mutation B has disease A'. These linkages will probably get a lot more accurate when the HGP is complete, but some diseases will just have lots of causes. Cancer is the perfect example - I don't care how resistant your genes say you are to cancer, you'll get cancer if you smoke a carton-a-day while you work as the clean-up crew at Chernobyl. In general people overstate the importance of genetics in this sort of thing. Even something as seemingly simple as eye-color is affected by developmental conditions in the womb (too warm shuts down the enzyme that produces pigment and you get blue eyes), so it shouldn't be surprising that susceptibility to diseases, much less mental/emotional traits, is heavily influenced by the environment. I don't think that too many genetic counselors will be guaranteeing their work even after the HGP is complete. Also, all the genes individually are only a part of the picture. The interactions between the genes, and between the genes and the non-coding DNA are probably as important, if not more. Analyzing all of these interactions, and the interactions between the interactions (if that makes any sense)will probably take a long time, and won't be so easy to mass-produce as the actual genetic sequences. The danger of people making decisions based on anothers genotype is amplified by all of the complexities above (Think about all the problems with DNA evidence such as lab contamination, explaining probability to people not smart enough to get out of jury duty {an old joke, :}, etc. and multiply that by about 1000). Not only is it questionable whether or not they should do so, it is likely that the decisions will be based on insufficient data. If your insurance company rejects you/jacks up your rates because you a carrier of a gene that is sometimes linked to a potentially life-shortening disease, is that fair? I guess it must be, since males with their danged Y chromosome pay higher car insurance (IIRC). If you are running for office should the public know that people with that single base alteration on chromosome 12 that you have are 100 times more likely to go whacko, even though it means 1-in-10,000 rather than 1-in-1,000,000? How about shareholders in the company that wants you as CEO? How about the personnel department at the place you work now? How about the people in your neighborhood?
Sounds like a blast. Do you think people getting that psychotic about fast food will increase support for teaching evolution because it shows our animal heritage?
Is there a real 'Dion Rayford of the Taco Bell incident'? I know that another poster said they know Dion the Hungry, but I seem to remember hearing something similar except that it was a burger joint in Florida. Wow, the birth of a new urban legend... Of course, maybe Dion was just inspired by the earlier story. Or maybe there's a wave of drive-through assaults at fast food places coming and this is Just The Beginning...
WRT how you should backup - Think about it from your customers/users point of view. How stupid will you feel if you have to explain to them that you can't recover data 'cuz the tapes were on site and happenened to get damaged when the water main broke (or whatever)? Also, always do your backups, if only because if you do them you'll never have to use them, but if you miss a day for vacation disaster will strike. Trust me, it happened to me and accounting is still irked about re-entering all those invoices.