Once we are talking anything remotely related to Biology, where nothing makes sense except in the light of Evolution (to quote Theodosius Dobzhansky), it is grossly negligent to just use it in such a metaphysical context. This word has been appropriated by Darwin, and the newer "car design evolved"-like usages stem from an incorrect understanding of evolution and thus should cease to be used in such a fashion, it makes language less precise and in turn dilutes the public understanding of evolution even more.
Oh, substrate in that sense. Life on earth is not running on such an intermediate substrate, we are running on the "universe" itself.
What you think of is e.g. the idea of "Wang Carpets" from Diaspora (obscure SF reference). Those systems have to work against entropy in the first place, and then rules on top of that produce patterns that evolve. Same for in-silico evolution. Sure, it shows how evolution works, but they are in their own universe.
I would not follow you to that extreme. For some substrate to evolve it has to be able to replicate itself, i.e. locally work against entropy. The following steps of mutation due to imperfect copies and selection are then simple or even self-evident. I wonder if you could call the process before that point a competition between non-replicating substrates to become the first one to replicate itself.
And if science finally manages to crack the abiogenesis nut there, I can still appease those of more religious conviction that a simple god has to build everything himself, but that awesome being you worship made the universe so that life and thus us just sprung from its ingenious rules.
Off topic: No, Newtonian physics also predicts that starlight will bend around a massive object., and observing the famous eclipse of 1919 was mostly about how much light would bend. Some recent publications even suggest that Eddingtons observations were not good enough to decide either way, but that science just wanted something more than wonderful formulas to make the old guard give up Newton already.
On topic:The concept that girls suck at math (and after more and more school years, the gap indeed widens) is related to just this. A study (can't find it right now) found that girl's math performance was related to how much fear of math, "I was always bad at math" and other negative vibes they got from their female teachers. My take is that it is more socially acceptable for women to openly share their insecurities* than for than for men, and girls (being more... social? Is that actually more than a stereotype?) pick up on that.
* or even boast with them, the whole anti-intellectual pride of being bad at something or not being an elitist. I wonder what the mechanics behind that are...
I hope that really soon now(tm) the mobile phone operating systems (the linux based ones at least), will become interchangeable.
Some of the newer Android hardware is quite neat, yet an OS so tightly coupled with Google-Everything is not quite to my taste. I would love to put Maemo/MeeGo on these devices. Sorry, Nokia:/
I agree it would be a rather unusual upbringing, but I don't think it would be worse than being a child of a celebrity. And the general public would most certainly not be allowed to point fingers at them, as in "Zoo". The scientist would treat them as equals I would hope. But yes, this scenario is enough for a hundred ethics commissions.
Now, seeing whether or not this person's immune system could stand up to today's stronger viruses [..]
That experiment was run (unintentionally, the "infected blankets" story nonwithstanding) already, and wiped out most Native Americans, so no need to repeat that.
We pretty much know why, as well: The genetic bottleneck while crossing the Bering strait reduced their immune system complexity to a fraction of the happily mingling Eurasian/African population.
Do you mean "disabled" because the cloning process of ancient DNA is flakey? I'll give you that, but so far nothing but human arrogance indicates that Neanderthals were dumber than us (It was even on Slashdot: New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal).
And even if it results in a mentally challenged individual, that doesn't mean his life will be terrible. You know, disabled human beings exist here and now...
Clone the guy and see if he is capable of learning and living in this more advanced human environment.
5,000 years are not much of a difference. As it says in the article, the Innuit diverge from the "Eurasia" Genepool by more than 10,000 years, and the entire population of the Americas does as well. Though it would still be interesting if both populations had homologous adaptations to cold weather or already had them in Siberia.
if he can then there will be a lot to say about god and darwin.
No. Again, it is survival of the fittest, for whatever fitness function the environment, inter and intraspecies competition sets up for you.
What is being worked on is cloning a Neanderthal human, which went extinct about 50,000 years ago - some think we were the cause (well, "we" being what later became part of the European population). And some think homo neanderthalensis might have been smarter than homo sapiens, but again, fitness doesn't necessarily take that into account.
Another thing people usually forget about when clearing cookies is that Flash has cookies too and they don't clear along. When have you last time cleared them? Probably never. You can use BleachBit" to clear those along with other software, history and temp data.
Flash cookies are indeed something nasty, I was quite stumped when I found out about this.
My solution was to delete related directories on every login now: rm -rf ~/.macromedia
rm -rf ~/.adobe/Flash_Player
I fear with client side SQL dbs in HTML5 this will need a DROP TABLE....; statement as well. Or I'll do it the other way around by deleting my "polluted" browser config and copying a clean one over every time.
1) Type "about:config" in the addressbar, if you haven't been there before you must confirm that you are actually a geek.
2) Filter for "useragent", then append whatever you want to the general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment key.
3) Help -> About shows your current user agent, btw.
4) Wait for lawsuits? Or Profit? I forgot...
While inventions might be more or less independent of literature (but who knows how many inventors were inspired by it), the acceptance of new technology by the general public can be influenced by it. Take for example the (alleged) enthusiasm for robots by the Japanese vs. the much more sceptical stance in the West.
Science literacy and SF also go hand in hand I would claim, positive effects for the economy aren't hard to imagine there. But this also goes the other way, sadly, bad science fiction with their Mad Scientist and the Doomsday Devices come to mind. Or destruction of the One Prototype magically erases the knowledge of how they build it out of everyone's mind.
No, more like Greg Egan the Australian SF Author. Minus the interesting but dystopian goldmining aspect though.
Thinking along these lines, scanned and uploaded brains could become a stopgap until "real" AI is invented. With all kinds of (non-)human rights issues.
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food.
That does not make sense, dogs are carnivores and thus compete with humans for food, twice even, first the food which feeds their prey, and then the prey.
Pigs who are omnivores and can't digest cellulose are already problematic, probably why Judaism and Islam forbids eating them.
Keeping and domesticating dogs in such early stages of civilization just to eat them them seems unlikely. Still the variation of dogs in southern China could be from breeding, but at a much later state when it became a luxury good, think Conspicuous Consumption. Which is another explanation for the mentioned pig-taboo: Too many farmers imitated the few wealthy ones that could afford holding pigs, thus resulting in a famine since no one wanted to be the first to give up pig farming. And to stop this race to the bottom (I think that is the game theory name) in the end "God" via a wise prophet commands them to stop this silliness.
What's scary about that number is that I had *nothing* to drink in the last 3 hours, and no booze at all that entire day... So where did the.02 come from?
Apart from a miscalibrated reader, fermentation in your digestive tract or already in fruits that were not cooled. Microorganisms which know how to metabolise sugar in the absense of oxygen are everywhere, and alcohol is often the wasteproduct there. You might have heard the stories about wild animals getting drunk after eating fruit - how do you think humans got hooked onto the whole booze thing in the first place?
I once at an apple and a few hours later was tested with a BAC of 0.01 per mille.
I absolutely second this, and for those still playing I hope you know about the D2X-XL and DXX-Rebirth Projects (though these two seem to be at odds with each other) that keep the codebase updated and have ported the game to Linux.
However since this game or concept in general requires specialized input devices (i.e. a joystick) which nobody buys anymore for a PC I don't think this will go anywhere. Maybe on a console, but you are even less likely to find fans there I fear. And then there is of course the true 3D movement which would probably confuse standard FPS players, though I credit this game for my near total absence of motion sickness!
It is quite obvious how dependent civilization is on electricity, and most gov'ts give out the advice to be prepared for a few days or even weeks without electricity and other resulting amenities such as water and fresh food in the supermarket - but how many people actually follow up on that? Especially a big city in the middle of such a blackout would have serious problems with everything being just-in-time delivered.
Raising awareness and preparedness of such a SHTF scenario has a better ROI than pumping 1000x that money into a military project to defeat yet another hypothetical terrorist scare. And if I were a terrorist I'd certainly have other plans with even a halfway decent nuke on a boat than fire it into the sky.
It is probably looped around the aorta because it once was the nerve for the 6th gill/pharyngeal arch which moved posterior and dragged the nerve with it. Other gill arches became part of the jaw, and some can now be found in our ear as the central part of our hearing system!
Not the best 2001/2010 reference there, I admit, but at least one - not off topic!
The proper question would have been whether the resolution was high enough to make out whether the dark blob is make up from little obelisks that multiply.
Fortunately, the drives with the newer [non-TRIM] firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
I wonder how they managed that without the TRIM command, i.e. without the OS telling the HD which parts can be nulled because they are not needed anymore. Did they hide more pages from the OS which are then nulled regardless to hack together something like a buffer? But that would still show terrible write performance once that overflows. Did they implement deep-data-inspection for the most common filesystems so the HD now knows when something is deleted?
At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
I'm planning the same thing once the prices are right and TRIM is supported, though I'll probably keep the old spinning-platter drive local. Then we are one step back/forward to the old unix days where/bin was on the fast, and/usr/ on the slower but much bigger drive.
As with virtualisation (ok, more mainframes than unix there), everything old is new again - can't wait to use the underrated Sys-Req key to switch between Linux and Windows instances that are virtualized by the hardware!
Yes, evolution does not care about the individual, just the result. I dare say all personality disorders - hell, all diseases of young age! - that have a genetic cause and have a prevalence of more than >1% increase the overall fitness of the species either directly or because the poor suckers that get the two copies of it don't outweigh the advantage for the others.
I even expect the cancer rate to be fine tuned between making a species too static in an ever changing world and killing too many individuals. Some species, IIRC crocodiles, practically never get cancer, so it probably is not a limitation of the eukaryotic cell.
Another example is of course homosexuality, understanding went from "It can't be natural - it is the end of the line for the individual's genes!", to finding more and more animal species enjoying it to actually being able to explain that it (male h.) benefits the female line. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene comes to mind again.
How the hell are they going to guarantee the keeping of the data?
By using a closed and hard-to-reverse-engineer (think Skype) binary as the linchpin of this setup. It will checksum files, report back to the server and then somehow penalize you for deleting stuff or "cheating" otherwise, e.g. by offering less peers.
Sure sounds interesting though, and I hope an open specification of this or something similar comes out of it, though identifying leechers and freeloaders in such a setup would be a lot more complicated, I could only think of a computationally intensive method, demanding a new checksum with a salt inserted somewhere among the data. And doing the same for shared computation short of computing it twice is impossible.
If this becomes an open and free standard (and I had an actual SDSL 10/10Mbit connection) I would trust (encrypted) backups there a lot more than on my USB-Stick or my Server - Linus' quote would finally become true!
OLEDs might be the future for most displays (has the problem of a low blue life span been solved yet?), however when it comes to competing with direct sunlight all they can do is try to outshine it - not a competition any technology so far has won.
Transreflective LCDs, where the backlight transmits its own light but also reflects incoming light, are much better solution there. And for mostly static displays of course ePaper which will hopefully get faster pixel switching time and colour in the future.
If one side had established the ultimate and sustainable high ground on the moon, a full scale war including use of nuclear weapons might not have been considered so bad. Sortof the same arguments against the Star Wars programme and other stuff that is feasible now but would break one side out of MAD - that such technology seems to make nuclear war winnable.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, and malaria meant "bad air" once.
Once we are talking anything remotely related to Biology, where nothing makes sense except in the light of Evolution (to quote Theodosius Dobzhansky), it is grossly negligent to just use it in such a metaphysical context. This word has been appropriated by Darwin, and the newer "car design evolved"-like usages stem from an incorrect understanding of evolution and thus should cease to be used in such a fashion, it makes language less precise and in turn dilutes the public understanding of evolution even more.
Oh, substrate in that sense. Life on earth is not running on such an intermediate substrate, we are running on the "universe" itself.
What you think of is e.g. the idea of "Wang Carpets" from Diaspora (obscure SF reference). Those systems have to work against entropy in the first place, and then rules on top of that produce patterns that evolve. Same for in-silico evolution. Sure, it shows how evolution works, but they are in their own universe.
I would not follow you to that extreme. For some substrate to evolve it has to be able to replicate itself, i.e. locally work against entropy. The following steps of mutation due to imperfect copies and selection are then simple or even self-evident. I wonder if you could call the process before that point a competition between non-replicating substrates to become the first one to replicate itself.
And if science finally manages to crack the abiogenesis nut there, I can still appease those of more religious conviction that a simple god has to build everything himself, but that awesome being you worship made the universe so that life and thus us just sprung from its ingenious rules.
Off topic: No, Newtonian physics also predicts that starlight will bend around a massive object., and observing the famous eclipse of 1919 was mostly about how much light would bend. Some recent publications even suggest that Eddingtons observations were not good enough to decide either way, but that science just wanted something more than wonderful formulas to make the old guard give up Newton already.
On topic:The concept that girls suck at math (and after more and more school years, the gap indeed widens) is related to just this. A study (can't find it right now) found that girl's math performance was related to how much fear of math, "I was always bad at math" and other negative vibes they got from their female teachers. My take is that it is more socially acceptable for women to openly share their insecurities* than for than for men, and girls (being more... social? Is that actually more than a stereotype?) pick up on that.
* or even boast with them, the whole anti-intellectual pride of being bad at something or not being an elitist. I wonder what the mechanics behind that are...
Some of the newer Android hardware is quite neat, yet an OS so tightly coupled with Google-Everything is not quite to my taste. I would love to put Maemo/MeeGo on these devices. Sorry, Nokia :/
I agree it would be a rather unusual upbringing, but I don't think it would be worse than being a child of a celebrity. And the general public would most certainly not be allowed to point fingers at them, as in "Zoo". The scientist would treat them as equals I would hope. But yes, this scenario is enough for a hundred ethics commissions.
Now, seeing whether or not this person's immune system could stand up to today's stronger viruses [..]
That experiment was run (unintentionally, the "infected blankets" story nonwithstanding) already, and wiped out most Native Americans, so no need to repeat that.
We pretty much know why, as well: The genetic bottleneck while crossing the Bering strait reduced their immune system complexity to a fraction of the happily mingling Eurasian/African population.
Do you mean "disabled" because the cloning process of ancient DNA is flakey? I'll give you that, but so far nothing but human arrogance indicates that Neanderthals were dumber than us (It was even on Slashdot: New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal).
And even if it results in a mentally challenged individual, that doesn't mean his life will be terrible. You know, disabled human beings exist here and now...
And for further ethical discussion, read all 990 comments from these experts here: Should We Clone a Neanderthal?
Clone the guy and see if he is capable of learning and living in this more advanced human environment.
5,000 years are not much of a difference. As it says in the article, the Innuit diverge from the "Eurasia" Genepool by more than 10,000 years, and the entire population of the Americas does as well. Though it would still be interesting if both populations had homologous adaptations to cold weather or already had them in Siberia.
if he can then there will be a lot to say about god and darwin.
No. Again, it is survival of the fittest, for whatever fitness function the environment, inter and intraspecies competition sets up for you.
What is being worked on is cloning a Neanderthal human, which went extinct about 50,000 years ago - some think we were the cause (well, "we" being what later became part of the European population). And some think homo neanderthalensis might have been smarter than homo sapiens, but again, fitness doesn't necessarily take that into account.
Another thing people usually forget about when clearing cookies is that Flash has cookies too and they don't clear along. When have you last time cleared them? Probably never. You can use BleachBit" to clear those along with other software, history and temp data.
Flash cookies are indeed something nasty, I was quite stumped when I found out about this. ....; statement as well. Or I'll do it the other way around by deleting my "polluted" browser config and copying a clean one over every time.
My solution was to delete related directories on every login now:
rm -rf ~/.macromedia
rm -rf ~/.adobe/Flash_Player
I fear with client side SQL dbs in HTML5 this will need a DROP TABLE
The quick manual way:
1) Type "about:config" in the addressbar, if you haven't been there before you must confirm that you are actually a geek.
2) Filter for "useragent", then append whatever you want to the general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment key.
3) Help -> About shows your current user agent, btw.
4) Wait for lawsuits? Or Profit? I forgot...
And as long as 4.2.2.2 remains ping-able so I can quickly whether just DNS or the net in general is down I'm okay with any reallocation.
While inventions might be more or less independent of literature (but who knows how many inventors were inspired by it), the acceptance of new technology by the general public can be influenced by it. Take for example the (alleged) enthusiasm for robots by the Japanese vs. the much more sceptical stance in the West.
Science literacy and SF also go hand in hand I would claim, positive effects for the economy aren't hard to imagine there. But this also goes the other way, sadly, bad science fiction with their Mad Scientist and the Doomsday Devices come to mind. Or destruction of the One Prototype magically erases the knowledge of how they build it out of everyone's mind.
No, more like Greg Egan the Australian SF Author. Minus the interesting but dystopian goldmining aspect though. Thinking along these lines, scanned and uploaded brains could become a stopgap until "real" AI is invented. With all kinds of (non-)human rights issues.
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food.
That does not make sense, dogs are carnivores and thus compete with humans for food, twice even, first the food which feeds their prey, and then the prey.
Pigs who are omnivores and can't digest cellulose are already problematic, probably why Judaism and Islam forbids eating them.
Keeping and domesticating dogs in such early stages of civilization just to eat them them seems unlikely. Still the variation of dogs in southern China could be from breeding, but at a much later state when it became a luxury good, think Conspicuous Consumption. Which is another explanation for the mentioned pig-taboo: Too many farmers imitated the few wealthy ones that could afford holding pigs, thus resulting in a famine since no one wanted to be the first to give up pig farming. And to stop this race to the bottom (I think that is the game theory name) in the end "God" via a wise prophet commands them to stop this silliness.
What's scary about that number is that I had *nothing* to drink in the last 3 hours, and no booze at all that entire day... So where did the .02 come from?
Apart from a miscalibrated reader, fermentation in your digestive tract or already in fruits that were not cooled. Microorganisms which know how to metabolise sugar in the absense of oxygen are everywhere, and alcohol is often the wasteproduct there.
You might have heard the stories about wild animals getting drunk after eating fruit - how do you think humans got hooked onto the whole booze thing in the first place?
I once at an apple and a few hours later was tested with a BAC of 0.01 per mille.
I absolutely second this, and for those still playing I hope you know about the D2X-XL and DXX-Rebirth Projects (though these two seem to be at odds with each other) that keep the codebase updated and have ported the game to Linux.
However since this game or concept in general requires specialized input devices (i.e. a joystick) which nobody buys anymore for a PC I don't think this will go anywhere.
Maybe on a console, but you are even less likely to find fans there I fear. And then there is of course the true 3D movement which would probably confuse standard FPS players, though I credit this game for my near total absence of motion sickness!
It is quite obvious how dependent civilization is on electricity, and most gov'ts give out the advice to be prepared for a few days or even weeks without electricity and other resulting amenities such as water and fresh food in the supermarket - but how many people actually follow up on that? Especially a big city in the middle of such a blackout would have serious problems with everything being just-in-time delivered.
Raising awareness and preparedness of such a SHTF scenario has a better ROI than pumping 1000x that money into a military project to defeat yet another hypothetical terrorist scare. And if I were a terrorist I'd certainly have other plans with even a halfway decent nuke on a boat than fire it into the sky.
The diagram here http://www.voiceproblem.org/glossary/images_05.asp does a better job of showing what evolution did there.
It is probably looped around the aorta because it once was the nerve for the 6th gill/pharyngeal arch which moved posterior and dragged the nerve with it. Other gill arches became part of the jaw, and some can now be found in our ear as the central part of our hearing system!
Not the best 2001/2010 reference there, I admit, but at least one - not off topic!
The proper question would have been whether the resolution was high enough to make out whether the dark blob is make up from little obelisks that multiply.
Fortunately, the drives with the newer [non-TRIM] firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
I wonder how they managed that without the TRIM command, i.e. without the OS telling the HD which parts can be nulled because they are not needed anymore. Did they hide more pages from the OS which are then nulled regardless to hack together something like a buffer? But that would still show terrible write performance once that overflows. Did they implement deep-data-inspection for the most common filesystems so the HD now knows when something is deleted?
At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
I'm planning the same thing once the prices are right and TRIM is supported, though I'll probably keep the old spinning-platter drive local. Then we are one step back/forward to the old unix days where /bin was on the fast, and /usr/ on the slower but much bigger drive.
As with virtualisation (ok, more mainframes than unix there), everything old is new again - can't wait to use the underrated Sys-Req key to switch between Linux and Windows instances that are virtualized by the hardware!
Yes, evolution does not care about the individual, just the result. I dare say all personality disorders - hell, all diseases of young age! - that have a genetic cause and have a prevalence of more than >1% increase the overall fitness of the species either directly or because the poor suckers that get the two copies of it don't outweigh the advantage for the others.
I even expect the cancer rate to be fine tuned between making a species too static in an ever changing world and killing too many individuals. Some species, IIRC crocodiles, practically never get cancer, so it probably is not a limitation of the eukaryotic cell.
Another example is of course homosexuality, understanding went from "It can't be natural - it is the end of the line for the individual's genes!", to finding more and more animal species enjoying it to actually being able to explain that it (male h.) benefits the female line. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene comes to mind again.
How the hell are they going to guarantee the keeping of the data?
By using a closed and hard-to-reverse-engineer (think Skype) binary as the linchpin of this setup. It will checksum files, report back to the server and then somehow penalize you for deleting stuff or "cheating" otherwise, e.g. by offering less peers.
Sure sounds interesting though, and I hope an open specification of this or something similar comes out of it, though identifying leechers and freeloaders in such a setup would be a lot more complicated, I could only think of a computationally intensive method, demanding a new checksum with a salt inserted somewhere among the data. And doing the same for shared computation short of computing it twice is impossible.
If this becomes an open and free standard (and I had an actual SDSL 10/10Mbit connection) I would trust (encrypted) backups there a lot more than on my USB-Stick or my Server - Linus' quote would finally become true!
OLEDs might be the future for most displays (has the problem of a low blue life span been solved yet?), however when it comes to competing with direct sunlight all they can do is try to outshine it - not a competition any technology so far has won.
Transreflective LCDs, where the backlight transmits its own light but also reflects incoming light, are much better solution there. And for mostly static displays of course ePaper which will hopefully get faster pixel switching time and colour in the future.
Or the version without aliens:
If one side had established the ultimate and sustainable high ground on the moon, a full scale war including use of nuclear weapons might not have been considered so bad. Sortof the same arguments against the Star Wars programme and other stuff that is feasible now but would break one side out of MAD - that such technology seems to make nuclear war winnable.