Hint: it's a terrible idea unless the algae sinks when it dies. If you're burning it, then the CO2 is just going back into the atmosphere. The atmosphere's CO2 levels need to be brought down, and the biofuel algae solution is only relevant after we've fixed the problem through some more permanent means.
It's true that there is latency in recovery from greenhouse gasses. Plants are only a temporary solution, since much of what they capture will eventually be released back into the atmosphere. You can read some statistics here about how the concentrations of the major gasses have changed. The numbers at the bottom for residence time can be interpreted as "how long it stays in the atmosphere", i.e. how long before a reduction is noticed. CO2's huge variability is because most of the time when CO2 leaves the atmosphere, it goes into the top layer of the ocean, and then comes back out again. It can take up to 500 years for the carbon to actually work further down into the ocean and become completely removed from the system.
But this hardly means no action should be taken—it means that simply stopping isn't enough. We need to actively reduce the greenhouse effect by removing moreCO2 from the atmosphere than we're putting in so we can reach sustainable levels again. That's not an excuse to stop production, and claiming it might be makes you look like a spoiled brat.
Supporters of climate change research don't behave religiously because they aren't religious; the evidence is very solid and they're simply reacting logically. I'm glad we nipped that fallacy in the bud before it got out of hand. Conversely, though, I'm surprised you didn't try to blame environmental science for the ELF.
I just want to know: do you keep these in a text editor and just paste them over, or did you write this one on the spot? C'mon. You'll never be a successful troll if you're that brazen. You have to lead people on with ambiguous comments first.
As a Canadian, I like to think of Obama forcing cake down into faces of the Republican party with one hand while trying to (ineptly) fix everything else with his other hand. Better to have awkward, clumsy progress in sorta the right direction than none at all.
Well, first, I admit that I was being sarcastic when I listed out those criteria. People aren't chosen to be scientists, and it's extremely disingenuous of the summary's author to claim otherwise. Moreover, what they're doing in bio-hackerspaces isn't even research in most cases—while Genspace is genuinely equipped to do real molecular biology work, the equipment they have is so limited that the kinds of experiments you can perform wouldn't really be worthy of publication. Instead the appeal is more towards synthetic biology and education. Someone somewhere has been blinded to the difference between "science" and "engineering" because biological techniques are involved, which is annoying.
Assuming you already have a 20-80k education to know what to do with it in the first place, and a practised lab technique, and... when you get down to it, it's not something you'd really want to risk getting caught doing by performing it in a public space.
There was a bit of sarcasm in my post, I think. You're correct that most people in DIYbio aren't interested in research. It's mostly about hobbyists getting a chance to tinker in a hands-on fashion, perhaps with a practical engineering project if they're ambitious. Even with DIYbio, an outsider contributing to modern biology is as unlikely as an outsider contributing to modern physics—but it would be even moreso without access to these tools. For much the same reason, you wouldn't expect someone working at a regular hackerspace to advance robotics or electrical engineering.
I think the greatest value these labs can provide is in giving senior high school students, high school graduates saving up to go to college, and older people considering a second career the opportunity to give biology a serious cross-examination. As both a programmer and biologist, I've met several CS students who had no idea what biology was about, and were surprised and curious when I explained that it's a giant reverse-engineering project focused on understanding the behaviour of self-replicating molecular machines, and not merely the fine art of sitting around and counting deer as they were taught in high school.
In my opinion that falls outside of the purview of needing a bio lab, and is more in the "let's just go pick up some malaria" category. The accessibility of a bio hacker-space can't really be implicated unless it is providing something that wouldn't be readily available in the environment already.
The important thing is that you've answered all of your questions and you're satisfied with the answer.
The alternative answer is that it is stupendously hard to do anything dangerous in a biology lab, unless you spend millions of dollars on equipment and supplies. The idea of any individual or group less powerful than a small government or large corporation doing anything dangerous with a bio lab is pointless low-budget sci-fi wankery. With no effort and no training, you could just go to Africa and bring back some Malaria-infested mosquitos, and cause far more damage. It's a complete waste of time to worry about the abuse of biology for nefarious ends.
We sure are. Our degrees are in Latin and everything.
The parameters are "do you have the patience and dedication to get a four-year degree?", "how about a two-year research project after that?", "okay, what if we replace that last one with a five-year research project instead?", "can you afford it all given your socioeconomic situation?", "can you devote your career to it?", "are you not already trapped in another career?". If the answer to all of these is "yes", then the king has hand-picked you. Otherwise you'd be SOL without a bio-hacker space like this.
16 platforms is pretty impressive, granted—but Doom has been ported to at least 35 different systems, including every system Flashback appeared on except the CD-i and FM Towns. That's still more ports for Flashback than either Quake or Quake 2, though, so you have a pretty good point. (Of course, everything is dwarfed by the unbelievable number of different machines that can play Zork, or even more broadly, some clone of Tetris.)
Relaxing our standards about what constitutes "truly multiplatform," I think most would say that Doom would be a worthy heir to the title of "gets ported to everything." To a lesser extent this can also be said of Quake 2.
So you're saying you're inclined to disregard all claims of danger without examining the reasons behind them? Or does that only apply to the thought that the world you grew up in may one day change?
You're right, but at least one source (filext) supports the existence of.JIFF for JPEG images. Even more zany, JFIF is technically the name of a container for JIF (with just one F) data. So that's quite a mess.
I like your proposal, and it's hard to think of anything more perfect—as long as italics are the only style with potential semantic meaning. If someone puts down their French loanword in bold by accident, that's going to be a bit of back-tracking. Just make sure the top-level list (the one Bob selects from) doesn't actually narrow down to only interpretations of the chosen text style (i.e. include under italics the major usage categories for bold, underline, etc. as well), and you should be golden.
Just to play it safe, maybe include a more traditional 'format flood fill' tool for people doing bulk edits in a long document—e.g. Dave chooses "convert to ship name" from a menu when he's editing a page about ships, and then clicks on several usages of the unqualified italics tag, turning all of them into ship names.
Nah, that's a fair argument. The best we can hope for with a semantic web is a system that degrades gracefully for legacy/lazy content. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. Society still benefits as a whole whenever any information is made more easily accessible.
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Hint: it's a terrible idea unless the algae sinks when it dies. If you're burning it, then the CO2 is just going back into the atmosphere. The atmosphere's CO2 levels need to be brought down, and the biofuel algae solution is only relevant after we've fixed the problem through some more permanent means.
It's true that there is latency in recovery from greenhouse gasses. Plants are only a temporary solution, since much of what they capture will eventually be released back into the atmosphere. You can read some statistics here about how the concentrations of the major gasses have changed. The numbers at the bottom for residence time can be interpreted as "how long it stays in the atmosphere", i.e. how long before a reduction is noticed. CO2's huge variability is because most of the time when CO2 leaves the atmosphere, it goes into the top layer of the ocean, and then comes back out again. It can take up to 500 years for the carbon to actually work further down into the ocean and become completely removed from the system.
But this hardly means no action should be taken—it means that simply stopping isn't enough. We need to actively reduce the greenhouse effect by removing moreCO2 from the atmosphere than we're putting in so we can reach sustainable levels again. That's not an excuse to stop production, and claiming it might be makes you look like a spoiled brat.
Supporters of climate change research don't behave religiously because they aren't religious; the evidence is very solid and they're simply reacting logically. I'm glad we nipped that fallacy in the bud before it got out of hand. Conversely, though, I'm surprised you didn't try to blame environmental science for the ELF.
I just want to know: do you keep these in a text editor and just paste them over, or did you write this one on the spot? C'mon. You'll never be a successful troll if you're that brazen. You have to lead people on with ambiguous comments first.
As a Canadian, I like to think of Obama forcing cake down into faces of the Republican party with one hand while trying to (ineptly) fix everything else with his other hand. Better to have awkward, clumsy progress in sorta the right direction than none at all.
Sorry, just let me go dump fifty megatons of fertilizer into the ocean; I'll be right back...
Woah, woah. Hold on a second. Why do you think the war for resources is inevitable, exactly?
Well, first, I admit that I was being sarcastic when I listed out those criteria. People aren't chosen to be scientists, and it's extremely disingenuous of the summary's author to claim otherwise. Moreover, what they're doing in bio-hackerspaces isn't even research in most cases—while Genspace is genuinely equipped to do real molecular biology work, the equipment they have is so limited that the kinds of experiments you can perform wouldn't really be worthy of publication. Instead the appeal is more towards synthetic biology and education. Someone somewhere has been blinded to the difference between "science" and "engineering" because biological techniques are involved, which is annoying.
Assuming you already have a 20-80k education to know what to do with it in the first place, and a practised lab technique, and... when you get down to it, it's not something you'd really want to risk getting caught doing by performing it in a public space.
There was a bit of sarcasm in my post, I think. You're correct that most people in DIYbio aren't interested in research. It's mostly about hobbyists getting a chance to tinker in a hands-on fashion, perhaps with a practical engineering project if they're ambitious. Even with DIYbio, an outsider contributing to modern biology is as unlikely as an outsider contributing to modern physics—but it would be even moreso without access to these tools. For much the same reason, you wouldn't expect someone working at a regular hackerspace to advance robotics or electrical engineering.
I think the greatest value these labs can provide is in giving senior high school students, high school graduates saving up to go to college, and older people considering a second career the opportunity to give biology a serious cross-examination. As both a programmer and biologist, I've met several CS students who had no idea what biology was about, and were surprised and curious when I explained that it's a giant reverse-engineering project focused on understanding the behaviour of self-replicating molecular machines, and not merely the fine art of sitting around and counting deer as they were taught in high school.
Alrighty then.
In my opinion that falls outside of the purview of needing a bio lab, and is more in the "let's just go pick up some malaria" category. The accessibility of a bio hacker-space can't really be implicated unless it is providing something that wouldn't be readily available in the environment already.
(Disclaimer: in practice.)
The important thing is that you've answered all of your questions and you're satisfied with the answer.
The alternative answer is that it is stupendously hard to do anything dangerous in a biology lab, unless you spend millions of dollars on equipment and supplies. The idea of any individual or group less powerful than a small government or large corporation doing anything dangerous with a bio lab is pointless low-budget sci-fi wankery. With no effort and no training, you could just go to Africa and bring back some Malaria-infested mosquitos, and cause far more damage. It's a complete waste of time to worry about the abuse of biology for nefarious ends.
We sure are. Our degrees are in Latin and everything.
The parameters are "do you have the patience and dedication to get a four-year degree?", "how about a two-year research project after that?", "okay, what if we replace that last one with a five-year research project instead?", "can you afford it all given your socioeconomic situation?", "can you devote your career to it?", "are you not already trapped in another career?". If the answer to all of these is "yes", then the king has hand-picked you. Otherwise you'd be SOL without a bio-hacker space like this.
That's an interesting choice of concern. Why do you believe you haven't been presented with evidence?
16 platforms is pretty impressive, granted—but Doom has been ported to at least 35 different systems, including every system Flashback appeared on except the CD-i and FM Towns. That's still more ports for Flashback than either Quake or Quake 2, though, so you have a pretty good point. (Of course, everything is dwarfed by the unbelievable number of different machines that can play Zork, or even more broadly, some clone of Tetris.)
Relaxing our standards about what constitutes "truly multiplatform," I think most would say that Doom would be a worthy heir to the title of "gets ported to everything." To a lesser extent this can also be said of Quake 2.
The inventors coined the slogan "choosy programmers choose GIF." So, yeah—it's deliberate.
So you're saying you're inclined to disregard all claims of danger without examining the reasons behind them? Or does that only apply to the thought that the world you grew up in may one day change?
You're right, but at least one source (filext) supports the existence of .JIFF for JPEG images. Even more zany, JFIF is technically the name of a container for JIF (with just one F) data. So that's quite a mess.
More importantly, it conflicts. JIFF is another (albeit obscure) name for JPEG. (Joint Photographic Experts Group Image File Format.)
I like your proposal, and it's hard to think of anything more perfect—as long as italics are the only style with potential semantic meaning. If someone puts down their French loanword in bold by accident, that's going to be a bit of back-tracking. Just make sure the top-level list (the one Bob selects from) doesn't actually narrow down to only interpretations of the chosen text style (i.e. include under italics the major usage categories for bold, underline, etc. as well), and you should be golden.
Just to play it safe, maybe include a more traditional 'format flood fill' tool for people doing bulk edits in a long document—e.g. Dave chooses "convert to ship name" from a menu when he's editing a page about ships, and then clicks on several usages of the unqualified italics tag, turning all of them into ship names.
Nah, that's a fair argument. The best we can hope for with a semantic web is a system that degrades gracefully for legacy/lazy content. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. Society still benefits as a whole whenever any information is made more easily accessible.
Nearly simple. That just defines a threshold on how much effort the user has to take before apathy sets in. :)
The important thing is that you're focusing on non-hideous and non-cumbersome representations. :)