I'm a trifle surprised that the ISS would be using ammonia in its refrigeration system. I understand that it is a common terrestrial choice(though mostly in industrial systems, not home use equipment, even if well sealed) because it's pretty good at being a refrigerant and dirt cheap; but it's not a terribly pleasant chemical. Not death on a stick or anything; but an gas that readily dissolves in water to form an alkaline solution potentially strong enough to be a tissue damage risk(good thing that only unimportant stuff like our eyes and lungs are naturally moist, right?).
Given that anything lofted into orbit automatically costs some thousands of dollars a kilogram, I would have expected a slightly more price-insensitive choice, probably one of the fancier halogenated hydrocarbons, or a mixture of them.
Does anyone know why ammonia was used instead? Is it that a leak would be dangerous even if the refrigerant were 'the warm fragrance of a spring day'; because of the life-critical nature of the refrigeration system and the relatively tiny volume of breathable atmosphere aboard the station, making using a less noxious refrigerant little more than a way of avoiding alkali burns and asphyxiating or overheating instead? Is ammonia sufficiently superior(per unit mass, volume, or both) that it would be heroically more expensive to ship a different refrigerant into orbit? Some other factor I'm not considering?
Aside from the 'ignorance' and 'marketing' effects, it's arguably a testament to the fact that people will forgive a great many sins if the price is right.
Even considering VMware's periodic moves into 'We still have the x86 virtualization market by the balls, right?' pricing models, being able to do virtualization on practically disposable Dell pizzaboxes looks like a revelation if you've previously been enjoying the pleasure of juggling your PVUs, subcapacity licenses, capped and uncapped LPARs, and similar not-at-all-complex-or-painfully-expensive goodness.
It's hard to argue with Big Blue's historical priority in most cases(barring certain exceptions when Amdahl played the AMD to IBM's Intel and did something plucky); but their prices sting.
A nontrivial amount of 'progress' in hardware is really a story of the toy microcontrollers running DOS (that mortals could actually afford) gradually reinventing or acquiring features old enough to have owned hideous polyester disco suits; but historically only available on IBM systems that leased for the GDP of a small nation state...
Arguably more so. SC3000 adds additional complexity; but the general consensus is that it didn't really retain the same coherent elegance in doing so. SC4000, in stock form, is a mess, though I'm told that the right collection of mods really helps.
The most recent one? Less of a sequel, more of an atrocity.
Back when Uber announced that they were 'limiting' "God View" in order to improve customer privacy, I advanced the not-especially-insightful hypothesis that this was more or less entirely about looking less like a bunch of egregious assholes, and would be at best irrelevant, and at worst actively damaging, to customer privacy.
Sure looks to me like this is one of those exciting new uses that they've found for the data, and likely not the last one, nor the most unpleasant.
I suspect that it's worse than that: Unless the UK has miraculously sprouted an ample supply of people both skilled in computing concepts and willing to put up with schoolchildren for relatively little money, I can't escape the sinking feeling that this situation involves a bunch of "Pressing Buttons in MS Office!" courses, whose teachers feel intimidated because kids these days can fingerpaint on their iDevices.
It would be nice if it were better than that, and it actually involved reasonably skilled teachers being surprised and impressed by the level of expertise of students picking up computational matters on their own; but it's hard to sustain that belief. Unless they specifically call it "CS", 'Computing' tends to be something rather less inspiring.
I'd be fascinated to see a (reasonably large scale) 'neural network' simulation in the biological sense of 'neural network', rather than the computer science analogy. Life extension aside, it would certainly be a very neat piece of gear.
It would also catapult the old philosophical chestnut of whether a perfect copy of you is you, or a distinct person very similar to you who will go on and live their own immortal life while you shrivel and die from the dusty pages of PHIL101 to practical application. That would be interesting to watch.
For that reason, I assume the more concerned brand of would-be immortal will attempt to 'Ship of Theseus' his brain into an immortal simulation, one neuron at a time, in the hopes of avoiding the creation of an immortal replica. Should be good fun.
One of the most common attempted treatments of this issue. Results mixed, side effects often severe, especially for bystanders. Hats frequently humorous and/or impressive.
Allegedly(this could be one of those apocrypha that is false; but just too perfect to be discarded), certain poisons historically well regarded for having ambiguous symptoms and being hard to reliably prove, either in illness or postmortem, were referred to as 'inheritance powder' because of their popularity with impatient successors to assorted worldly goods, titles, and offices.
Personally, if I were a life-extended tycoon, I wouldn't be too sure that merely avoiding old age counts as avoiding death; and I'd even suspect that avoiding old age makes certain other possibilities markedly more likely...
Similar; but with the extra emotional zest provided by inherited instinct that is almost certainly older than humanity, older than language, and goes right back to some insignificant little fuzzy thing running like hell from something toothy in the Triassic period. One of those affective phenomena that, pretend otherwise as we might like, the little internal monologue we think of as a 'self' floats like a small boat on very, very, deep water.
Not getting your moon colony sucks and all; but not even space nutters have substantial portions of their endocrine system dedicated to pumping a chemical cocktail of visceral fear into their bloodstream at the thought of lack of moonbase.
I'm certainly not betting on strong AI; but there is the alternate possibility that tech guys are putting their money into aging not because it has better absolute odds; but because the odds of strong AI saving them from inevitable death are zero whether it works or not, while the odds on aging may be lousy; but the upside involves their getting to be conscious for some additional amount of time.
'Immortality', as an organism, is actually comparatively easy. We think of bacteria and the like as being 'immortal', and humans as having 'ancestors' and 'descendants', because bacteria are just unicellular goo all the time and we don't have much incentive to distinguish between the cell that divided and the resulting two cells; but our biological function is no less continuous than that of organisms we think of as 'immortal'.
You were produced from live gametes, which were produced by cellular division in live parents, and they from live gametes, and so on, at least back to the point where your ancestors were some sort of small shrew-like mammal, and quite possibly a great deal further back than that. Depending on the messy, poorly fossilized, and somewhat uncertain question of the origin of life on earth, possibly all the way back.
Doesn't really do 'you' much good, though. Odds are very good that you'll experience less than a century of consciousness; barring substantial medical advances in the near future they are effectively perfect that you'll be dead well south of 150. Regardless of whether or not you continue your biological line, 'you' as a conscious entity are toast, probably in the relatively near future. Mere biological immortality isn't what these guys want. They want continuity of consciousness, something that humans have not had much success with.
In light of that goal, AI research is effectively taking a long shot on having really interesting kids. It won't make you any less dead.
Arguably (on a systemic level, not on the level of how wonderful your current IT guy isn't) 'IT' being something that attracts actual talent qualifies as 'non drill respect'.
As long as "IT" means 're-image the desktops and reboot the mailserver when it needs it, monkey!', you aren't exactly going to get the IT people whose prowess impresses you. On the plus side, you'll save money. On the minus side, it's going to be a bloodbath if you get unlucky in terms of hostile attention.
So long as 'IT' is handled as a cost-center, necessary-evil, bunch of obstructionist ethernet janitors, that's how it'll be. On the plus side, modern technology is actually pretty easy to use, so if nothing atypically bad happens you can get away with some fairly dubious expertise at the wheel, and save accordingly; but if that's the philosophy at work you probably won't end up with an IT group capable of rising very far to the occasion should things go to hell(either because something that shouldn't have been complex went bad, or because lizard squad is on you).
What is unclear, at present, is how, culturally and financially, any but the most zealously paranoid and deep pocketed companies and state entities are going to have IT groups that are good for much more than the bare minimum. So long as you don't expect IT to be much better than a bunch of fuckups, there really isn't any reason to pay more or recruit more carefully(doing day-to-day IT is really more logistics and a little scripting than anything even remotely approaching CS or even code monkeying); but if that is how IT groups are recruited, no sane person will expect better of them; because why would they be capable of better?
(Please note, I freely acknowledge, as an institution's IT person, that I'd be up shit creek if something genuinely nontrivial came gunning for me. I'm a hell of a lot cheaper than a real expert, I have good rapport with the users, strong command of standard logistics and management tools, things go nice and smooth; but I'm hardly a guru, nor do I expect to be treated as one. However, that's why I'm skeptical about this 'drill' thing. If you want to know that We Are Fucked if things get serious, I can tell you that for free(though we do have backup tapes, and I am perfectly capable of restoring, were the hypothetical attack to stop); but if you aren't interested in doing anything that might actually make you less fucked; because that'd cost a whole lot more, upset users, or both, what's the drill for? Perhaps there are organizations that actually live in ignorance, believing that they have hardcore experts willing to do routine IT stuff at relatively low prices; but those are likely a delusional minority. Everyone else just knows that having a bulletproof IT team would be an eye-watering outlay(that would spend most of its time twiddling its thumbs and swappping the occasional toner cartridge until something actually happens), while having an adequate-for-daily-use IT team is markedly cheaper and you can always claim that you 'followed industry best practices' if something goes pear shaped.)
Arguably, the Systran and Google thing would make it even more interesting to the linguist types. Throwing up your hands and saying that "It's, like, intersubjective, man." is an acceptable conclusion in the looser humanities circles; but having a built-in 'rosetta stone', in the form of a set of (nasty; but ultimately tractable) engineering numbers along with a gigantic natural language mess would be an unbelievable boon to team linguistics. Ghastly enough to see a few zillion of them through their doctoral programs; but, thanks to the 'rosetta stone' ultimately the possibility of a happy ending. Not going to happen; but I know a few who would murder a village for an outcome like that.
We don't need 'fire drills', we need Cold War style 'bend over and kiss your ass goodbye' drills. Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone, or any technique that prevents drills from turning into impromptu coffee breaks within a couple of rounds. People sharp enough to be with drilling just aren't fooled, and the dumb ones aren't much use.
Unless IT security gets real, non drill, respect, what's the point? Any moron can point at a production environment and say "yeah, we could be doing that; but users and/or management would punch us." And this isn't even referring to esoteric stuff, I'm talking about boring, included-by-default stuff like software restriction policies(make sure that user-writeable locations and executable locations are a disjoint set and watch most trivial drive by and phishing attacks melt away...) Until we get to at least that level, why fuck around?
And it might well be; but it was Untuit, among others, who helped save. Us from the crushing fascism of having the IRS provide us with the estimate of what whe owe(which they obviously calculate anyway in order to look for discrepancies.) Hire your own independent person if your position suits it; but it is absurd, (and directly a side effect of lobbying by people who ought to be lined up and shot, in the gut, and allowed to die slowly) how little the IRS can simplify even the most prosaic of tax returns without a private middleman taking their pound of flesh.
As much as it would be a (probably bloody, horrific) nuisance, can you imagine how excited the linguists would be? A 2nd Babel event would be ~11eventy-billion linguistics PhDs in one capricious exercise of divine power.
As quoth Menken, astute theorist of democracy with American characteristics: "democracy is the theory that the common man knows what he wants; and deserves to get it good and hard."
Given that her truly special brand of crazy only comes out when she fears homosexuals are near(eg. Crouching behind a bush to keep a timorous eye on a gay rights march), she probably found the focus on assorted hellhole theocracies comforting.
NASA also has a hand in a variety of satellite projects which, while pretty uncontroversially 'space', mean that NASA data, if not necessarily scientists they directly employ, end up in terrestrial research fairly frequently. Lots of neat stuff you can efficiently keep tabs on from orbit, especially if you have coverage in a suitably broad assortment of wavelengths.
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I'm a trifle surprised that the ISS would be using ammonia in its refrigeration system. I understand that it is a common terrestrial choice(though mostly in industrial systems, not home use equipment, even if well sealed) because it's pretty good at being a refrigerant and dirt cheap; but it's not a terribly pleasant chemical. Not death on a stick or anything; but an gas that readily dissolves in water to form an alkaline solution potentially strong enough to be a tissue damage risk(good thing that only unimportant stuff like our eyes and lungs are naturally moist, right?).
Given that anything lofted into orbit automatically costs some thousands of dollars a kilogram, I would have expected a slightly more price-insensitive choice, probably one of the fancier halogenated hydrocarbons, or a mixture of them.
Does anyone know why ammonia was used instead? Is it that a leak would be dangerous even if the refrigerant were 'the warm fragrance of a spring day'; because of the life-critical nature of the refrigeration system and the relatively tiny volume of breathable atmosphere aboard the station, making using a less noxious refrigerant little more than a way of avoiding alkali burns and asphyxiating or overheating instead? Is ammonia sufficiently superior(per unit mass, volume, or both) that it would be heroically more expensive to ship a different refrigerant into orbit? Some other factor I'm not considering?
Aside from the 'ignorance' and 'marketing' effects, it's arguably a testament to the fact that people will forgive a great many sins if the price is right.
Even considering VMware's periodic moves into 'We still have the x86 virtualization market by the balls, right?' pricing models, being able to do virtualization on practically disposable Dell pizzaboxes looks like a revelation if you've previously been enjoying the pleasure of juggling your PVUs, subcapacity licenses, capped and uncapped LPARs, and similar not-at-all-complex-or-painfully-expensive goodness.
It's hard to argue with Big Blue's historical priority in most cases(barring certain exceptions when Amdahl played the AMD to IBM's Intel and did something plucky); but their prices sting.
A nontrivial amount of 'progress' in hardware is really a story of the toy microcontrollers running DOS (that mortals could actually afford) gradually reinventing or acquiring features old enough to have owned hideous polyester disco suits; but historically only available on IBM systems that leased for the GDP of a small nation state...
Efficiency and progress are ours once more; now that we have the neutron bomb.
Is it as enjoyable as the newer versions?
Arguably more so. SC3000 adds additional complexity; but the general consensus is that it didn't really retain the same coherent elegance in doing so. SC4000, in stock form, is a mess, though I'm told that the right collection of mods really helps.
The most recent one? Less of a sequel, more of an atrocity.
Back when Uber announced that they were 'limiting' "God View" in order to improve customer privacy, I advanced the not-especially-insightful hypothesis that this was more or less entirely about looking less like a bunch of egregious assholes, and would be at best irrelevant, and at worst actively damaging, to customer privacy.
Sure looks to me like this is one of those exciting new uses that they've found for the data, and likely not the last one, nor the most unpleasant.
I suspect that it's worse than that: Unless the UK has miraculously sprouted an ample supply of people both skilled in computing concepts and willing to put up with schoolchildren for relatively little money, I can't escape the sinking feeling that this situation involves a bunch of "Pressing Buttons in MS Office!" courses, whose teachers feel intimidated because kids these days can fingerpaint on their iDevices.
It would be nice if it were better than that, and it actually involved reasonably skilled teachers being surprised and impressed by the level of expertise of students picking up computational matters on their own; but it's hard to sustain that belief. Unless they specifically call it "CS", 'Computing' tends to be something rather less inspiring.
I'd be fascinated to see a (reasonably large scale) 'neural network' simulation in the biological sense of 'neural network', rather than the computer science analogy. Life extension aside, it would certainly be a very neat piece of gear.
It would also catapult the old philosophical chestnut of whether a perfect copy of you is you, or a distinct person very similar to you who will go on and live their own immortal life while you shrivel and die from the dusty pages of PHIL101 to practical application. That would be interesting to watch.
For that reason, I assume the more concerned brand of would-be immortal will attempt to 'Ship of Theseus' his brain into an immortal simulation, one neuron at a time, in the hopes of avoiding the creation of an immortal replica. Should be good fun.
One of the most common attempted treatments of this issue. Results mixed, side effects often severe, especially for bystanders. Hats frequently humorous and/or impressive.
Henrietta Lacks appears to be kicking Telomeres right in their pessimistic helices these days... By mass, she's livelier than ever.
Of course, I'm guessing that that isn't precisely what these guys had in mind.
Allegedly(this could be one of those apocrypha that is false; but just too perfect to be discarded), certain poisons historically well regarded for having ambiguous symptoms and being hard to reliably prove, either in illness or postmortem, were referred to as 'inheritance powder' because of their popularity with impatient successors to assorted worldly goods, titles, and offices.
Personally, if I were a life-extended tycoon, I wouldn't be too sure that merely avoiding old age counts as avoiding death; and I'd even suspect that avoiding old age makes certain other possibilities markedly more likely...
Similar; but with the extra emotional zest provided by inherited instinct that is almost certainly older than humanity, older than language, and goes right back to some insignificant little fuzzy thing running like hell from something toothy in the Triassic period. One of those affective phenomena that, pretend otherwise as we might like, the little internal monologue we think of as a 'self' floats like a small boat on very, very, deep water.
Not getting your moon colony sucks and all; but not even space nutters have substantial portions of their endocrine system dedicated to pumping a chemical cocktail of visceral fear into their bloodstream at the thought of lack of moonbase.
I'm certainly not betting on strong AI; but there is the alternate possibility that tech guys are putting their money into aging not because it has better absolute odds; but because the odds of strong AI saving them from inevitable death are zero whether it works or not, while the odds on aging may be lousy; but the upside involves their getting to be conscious for some additional amount of time.
'Immortality', as an organism, is actually comparatively easy. We think of bacteria and the like as being 'immortal', and humans as having 'ancestors' and 'descendants', because bacteria are just unicellular goo all the time and we don't have much incentive to distinguish between the cell that divided and the resulting two cells; but our biological function is no less continuous than that of organisms we think of as 'immortal'.
You were produced from live gametes, which were produced by cellular division in live parents, and they from live gametes, and so on, at least back to the point where your ancestors were some sort of small shrew-like mammal, and quite possibly a great deal further back than that. Depending on the messy, poorly fossilized, and somewhat uncertain question of the origin of life on earth, possibly all the way back.
Doesn't really do 'you' much good, though. Odds are very good that you'll experience less than a century of consciousness; barring substantial medical advances in the near future they are effectively perfect that you'll be dead well south of 150. Regardless of whether or not you continue your biological line, 'you' as a conscious entity are toast, probably in the relatively near future. Mere biological immortality isn't what these guys want. They want continuity of consciousness, something that humans have not had much success with.
In light of that goal, AI research is effectively taking a long shot on having really interesting kids. It won't make you any less dead.
I assume that, if they've considered it at all, the plan is 'an immune system indistinguishable from magic; also no nasty autoimmune diseases.'
Arguably (on a systemic level, not on the level of how wonderful your current IT guy isn't) 'IT' being something that attracts actual talent qualifies as 'non drill respect'.
As long as "IT" means 're-image the desktops and reboot the mailserver when it needs it, monkey!', you aren't exactly going to get the IT people whose prowess impresses you. On the plus side, you'll save money. On the minus side, it's going to be a bloodbath if you get unlucky in terms of hostile attention.
So long as 'IT' is handled as a cost-center, necessary-evil, bunch of obstructionist ethernet janitors, that's how it'll be. On the plus side, modern technology is actually pretty easy to use, so if nothing atypically bad happens you can get away with some fairly dubious expertise at the wheel, and save accordingly; but if that's the philosophy at work you probably won't end up with an IT group capable of rising very far to the occasion should things go to hell(either because something that shouldn't have been complex went bad, or because lizard squad is on you).
What is unclear, at present, is how, culturally and financially, any but the most zealously paranoid and deep pocketed companies and state entities are going to have IT groups that are good for much more than the bare minimum. So long as you don't expect IT to be much better than a bunch of fuckups, there really isn't any reason to pay more or recruit more carefully(doing day-to-day IT is really more logistics and a little scripting than anything even remotely approaching CS or even code monkeying); but if that is how IT groups are recruited, no sane person will expect better of them; because why would they be capable of better?
(Please note, I freely acknowledge, as an institution's IT person, that I'd be up shit creek if something genuinely nontrivial came gunning for me. I'm a hell of a lot cheaper than a real expert, I have good rapport with the users, strong command of standard logistics and management tools, things go nice and smooth; but I'm hardly a guru, nor do I expect to be treated as one. However, that's why I'm skeptical about this 'drill' thing. If you want to know that We Are Fucked if things get serious, I can tell you that for free(though we do have backup tapes, and I am perfectly capable of restoring, were the hypothetical attack to stop); but if you aren't interested in doing anything that might actually make you less fucked; because that'd cost a whole lot more, upset users, or both, what's the drill for? Perhaps there are organizations that actually live in ignorance, believing that they have hardcore experts willing to do routine IT stuff at relatively low prices; but those are likely a delusional minority. Everyone else just knows that having a bulletproof IT team would be an eye-watering outlay(that would spend most of its time twiddling its thumbs and swappping the occasional toner cartridge until something actually happens), while having an adequate-for-daily-use IT team is markedly cheaper and you can always claim that you 'followed industry best practices' if something goes pear shaped.)
Arguably, the Systran and Google thing would make it even more interesting to the linguist types. Throwing up your hands and saying that "It's, like, intersubjective, man." is an acceptable conclusion in the looser humanities circles; but having a built-in 'rosetta stone', in the form of a set of (nasty; but ultimately tractable) engineering numbers along with a gigantic natural language mess would be an unbelievable boon to team linguistics. Ghastly enough to see a few zillion of them through their doctoral programs; but, thanks to the 'rosetta stone' ultimately the possibility of a happy ending. Not going to happen; but I know a few who would murder a village for an outcome like that.
I wouldn't marry Michelle Bachmann if I were trying to cure my insatiable lust for sexy man-meat; but probably.
We don't need 'fire drills', we need Cold War style 'bend over and kiss your ass goodbye' drills. Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone, or any technique that prevents drills from turning into impromptu coffee breaks within a couple of rounds. People sharp enough to be with drilling just aren't fooled, and the dumb ones aren't much use. Unless IT security gets real, non drill, respect, what's the point? Any moron can point at a production environment and say "yeah, we could be doing that; but users and/or management would punch us." And this isn't even referring to esoteric stuff, I'm talking about boring, included-by-default stuff like software restriction policies(make sure that user-writeable locations and executable locations are a disjoint set and watch most trivial drive by and phishing attacks melt away...) Until we get to at least that level, why fuck around?
Thank god for the free market, no?
And it might well be; but it was Untuit, among others, who helped save. Us from the crushing fascism of having the IRS provide us with the estimate of what whe owe(which they obviously calculate anyway in order to look for discrepancies.) Hire your own independent person if your position suits it; but it is absurd, (and directly a side effect of lobbying by people who ought to be lined up and shot, in the gut, and allowed to die slowly) how little the IRS can simplify even the most prosaic of tax returns without a private middleman taking their pound of flesh.
Dunno what kind of 'average' you come from; but the average American is a fair way from reporting jack when it comes to any income aside from wages.
As much as it would be a (probably bloody, horrific) nuisance, can you imagine how excited the linguists would be? A 2nd Babel event would be ~11eventy-billion linguistics PhDs in one capricious exercise of divine power.
As quoth Menken, astute theorist of democracy with American characteristics: "democracy is the theory that the common man knows what he wants; and deserves to get it good and hard."
Given that her truly special brand of crazy only comes out when she fears homosexuals are near(eg. Crouching behind a bush to keep a timorous eye on a gay rights march), she probably found the focus on assorted hellhole theocracies comforting.
NASA also has a hand in a variety of satellite projects which, while pretty uncontroversially 'space', mean that NASA data, if not necessarily scientists they directly employ, end up in terrestrial research fairly frequently. Lots of neat stuff you can efficiently keep tabs on from orbit, especially if you have coverage in a suitably broad assortment of wavelengths.