I agree, the second is an alarming problem. The tragedy of the commons should not be ignored. Large corporations like Disney pillage the shared cultural backlog of content, slap some candy frosting on it, and in some cases, even mangle the story to inject yet another (highly profitable) Disney Princess into the mix, then shut down any other fair use of the public domain stories they blatantly rip off.
Then you have the RIAA and its Canadian counterpart, flagrantly and willfully flaunting copyright law by consistently failing to reimburse or even LISTEN to artists who's music they compiled into unsanctioned "Greatest Hits" albums and sold like hotcakes. I heard they got a wrists slap for that, at worst, despite bleeding millions from artists they ripped off.
Dont even get me started on how Hollywood in general does business.
20 years is a little under a third of a person's expected lifetime. It is a VERY long time in regard to copyright. Are you telling me that as a creator, you cannot possibly recoup your investment in the creation of your works in that time? For real?
OR, are you simply suffering from entitlement complex issues, where you feel your great great grandchildren, who are completely incapable of producing more of YOUR work after you die of old age, are somehow magically more important than anyone else's grandchildren, and therefor deserving of being paid forever and ever and ever? An eternal legacy for your progeny?
Which of us is promoting theft from the community again?
Indeed. The GOP will look at this study and react with incredulity, then decry the researchers as biased, and the study itself as a waste of money and time.
They will then plug their ears and go 'lalalalala' whenever the study gets brought up.
OK, we discovered that planet formation is radically more common than we previously thought. When we designed the parameters of Kepler's mission, we wanted to detect large bodies because they would be easier to detect, and they would give us a statistical sampling we could use to determine how frequent planetary systems are.
We know that now. We aren't so interested in big jupiter size gas giants. They don't get the funding dollars we are looking for. So, now that kepler's initial mission objective is met, we will call it a success, and start a new mission, with tighter controls, looking exclusively for small, rocky planets in the systems we know to have really big gas giants in them.
You only have to produce energy in your core faster than the rate of conversion occuring on your warpfied.
Fly through sparse intergalactic space, and the rate of versions on the shockfront will be low. Your core won't need to be cranking billions of gigajoules of energy for your trip.
Fire that bitch up inside a nebula? Well... that's a whole 'nother ball game, now isn't it?
Amusingly, you could probably make use of the "deadly wave" effect to clear a path through the nebula, though your effective velocity would be sublight.
You pick up a charge, beam it through the nebula, and disperse the gas in front of you by heating it.
Wait a little bit, jump a short distance, and release the particles again. Rinse, repeat.
Eventually a corridor will be swept through the nebula, and non-stop travel would be possible.
For every atomic mass unit that intersects your warp field, that mass unit times the square of the speed of light is how much energy will be added to the "flash".
Now.. fly your starship through the greater megellanic cloud, or through the crab nebula.
A nice idea, but the physics does not work that way.
Think about it this way:
In front of the ship, you "compress" spacetime with an artificial gravity well. At the rear of the ship, you create an inverted gavity well. (Imagine, a gravity "hill"). The hill pushes the ship forwards, and the gravity well pulls it forwards. The two phenomena are perfectly cancelling. (Well is just as deep as the hill is "tall")
The combinaton of these two fields creates the warp bubble.
The warp bubble is necessary, because the ship simply cannot travel faster than light speed, using normal forms of propulsion. Special relativity makes it impossible to achieve lightspeed. (Requires infinite energy!)
Instead, the "massless" bubble gets accellerated, while the ship stays stationary inside! The spacetime bubble has no imposed speed limit, and can easily go FTL.
The problem cited here, is that any particle that comes into contact with the high velocity spacetime bubble will quantum tunnel inside the warpfield, and get carried along. This includes "virtual particles."
Virtual particles are not really particles at all, in the literal sense. They have measurable effects, but cannot themselves be measured. They are really random energy anomalies that form and disapear out of the vacuum of space. (Another, more accurate term for them is "vacuum fluctuations") basically, these events occur as mutually exclusively charged waves, that exist for tiny fractions of a second before cancelling each other, giving spacetime a rough, or "foamy" texture at the quantum mechanical level.
A curious effect of these virtual particles, is that if they can exist long enough to be directly observed (and not just their effects), they gain energy, and become real particles. (This is the basis behind hawking radiation)
Much like the event horizon of a black hole, the edge of the warp field acts as a barrier for quantum tunneling. There is a nonzero chance that some of these quantum virtual particle pairs will have one of their members become trapped behind the bubble's edge as it zips by, preventing mutual annihilation, and forcing the captured particle to become real. The longer the bubble stays up, the more particles will get trapped.
(Quantum tunnelling is what results from the "fuzzy" probability clouds of a particle wave intersecting a thin barrier. The more the fuzzy probability field intersects with the barrier, the greater the chances the particle will suddenly be on the other side. This phenomena is real, and has been scientifically verified. Quite literally, the sun would not shine without quantum tunneling, because nuclear fusion would be impossible without it.)
When the warp bubble drops, those captured particles are released as a dangerous energy wave.
Because the capture occurs as a direct result of the warp bubble's very existence, no amount of "aerodynamic shape" will prevent the steady accumulation of this radiation in the event shock.
The effect would be greatly exacerbated by the ship flying through a nebula, or other gas cloud. The mass energy of those particles is immense, and even small traces like those of interstellar clouds, would result in unbelievable releases of energy when the bubble is turned off.
"Deflectors" are not an option, because they would have to be projected from the starship. The warp bubble causes the starship to cease being causally connected to the outside spacetime, where the gas and dust particles exist. As such, it is impossible for any effect generated by the starship, other than the warpfield itself, to interact with those particles. The ship will simply have to plow through them.
Once the captured particles are tunneled inside the warp field, it might be possible to capture some of it, but more than likely the particles become photons, which can't be herded that way, making en-route collection unlikely.
This leaves the "deadly gamma ray flash" when the ship returns to being causally conncted with the rest of the universe.
It should not be given any credence in terms of policy, how about that?
The assertion that skincolor has any bearing on behavior is not currently supported by science. Unless a specific mechanism linking skincolor with genetic mechanisms that predispose an individual to certain behaviors is demonstrated, the argument simply doesn't hold water.
The point was that *TO ME*, all beer is undrinkable swill. Even the vaunted "high purity" german beers. Tried them. Horsepiss in a glass. Undrinkable.
This is because "What tastes good" is an innately subjective experience. Kids think vegetables are disgusting, but many adults find them delicious. Asserting a profound statement like "Only European beers are worth a shit" discounts that a fair number of people prefer American beers. They just like them better, for one reason or another.
Trying to exclude my opinion on the flavor of beer, because it doesn't meet your preconceptions is just further demonstration of the argument I made previously. I am not like you, therefor my opinion does not count-- you assert this, because your argument is made such that only YOUR point of view matters, is presented such that it is meant to be taken as objective fact, and is put forth for no other purpose but to be divisively ego-masterbatory in nature.
I dont like beer. I think it is gross. Others love the stuff. If you want to drink beer, great. Dont try to make it into a religious experience, because it isn't.
Synthetic enzymes are just around the corner, if the previous week's submission is to be believed.
So, enzymatically generating long double-wall carbon nanotube fibers inside bone matrix seems plausible. (use glucose as the source molecule, shear off oxygen and hydrogen as water, and bind the carbon in place. would probably require a whole new cell morphology though.)
Similar approaches could use existing muscle fiber bundles, and just cause them to grow coiled like that. The magic here, is that because it is coiled, it has more linear contraction overall, which increases the amount of torque force generated. (it's a mechanical advantage thing). Twisting up single muscle fibers without breaking them, then stimulating them, would get similar high-response, high-strength results.
My, what a lovely pile of straw you have created! I hope you didn't have to murder too many strawmen to make it!
1) most dental hygenists I have met take very good care of their teeth, and most don't resort to veneers. Contrary to your vicious assault on that strawman, there *are* american dental hygenists, and they DO take care of their teeth. Fluoride? The effect it has in supressing tooth decay came from american dental hygenists. Fancy that.
2) French Toast. Created at the French House, an american bed and breakfast, according to several noteworthy gastronomists.
3) all beer tastes vile. The manner in which it is served does not matter. It is an acquired taste, much like black liquorice. Arguments over beer are like arguments over religion. Foolish from the beginning, and without real substance, created exclusively to divide and enable spear rattling and jingoistic ego masturbation on the part of the arguer. Insisting upon an objective truth being present in such an intrinsically subjective experience as "favor" is completely irrational.
If they can get the price down significantly, I could see this implemented in things like settop boxes and home based networking equipment.
I could also see it being used intelligently on a bootable network card. (Card has say, a 128mb mram capacity. That's enough for a very robust preboot environment, as well as an actual internal boot image, an MD5 hash cache, and all the software it needs to make sure network and local images match. Basically, the card boots the internal preboot env, then MD5s its local image, MD5s the image on the tftp server, then either updates its image before booting, or skips the image download and boots straight up. This could reduce startup bandwidth in a segment with diskless workstations considerably. The fact that the mram is fast let's you MD5 the image very quickly.)
Having such a large package, without the need for special voltage control, would allow the package to be both moe electronically simple, and permit a fully featured preboot env. Perhaps even an EFI implementation for booting OS images that require it.
There are quite a few places that this early offering could get used for.
To play devil's advocate, this technology would radically increase the number of reproducing homosexuals. This would in turn radically reduce total unwanted pregnancies, by reducing prevelence of genetic predisposition to homosexual relationships.
Many families are able to exist exclusively due to the support infrastructures provided by the extended community.
Requiring full quid pro quo for access to socal infrastructure (outlaw charity) would place very strong natural selection pressure on humans to either exist without those services, or to always equally transact when getting those services.
Eg, you always have to pay for utilities and food. No government support. No exceptions. Charitable work would be illegal. People with genetic disabilities, like ALS, muscular dystrophy, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and pals would all suffer very strong biases against procreation and survival in exactly the same capacities they would as if the society was not in existence. This means they would be aggressively weeded out by the policy, and fewer and fewer people would be born with those disabilities over the following decades, barring spontaneous emergence of those mutations from occupational mutagens.
Such a solution would almost certainly not prevail in the modern world, however. Our insistence on extending human fertility for the infertile (IVF, and friends), extending the lives of people with life threatening genetic illnesses, and weakening our immune systems through increasingly sterile living conditions will result in accumulations of deleterious mutations. (This occurs in captive breeding programs for animals frquently. Preventing the spread of things like hip dysplasia in pedigree'd dogs requires drastic efforts. If left to their own devices, the dogs will readily spread the mutation to the entire breeding group, being artificially sustained by human caretakers, and lacking a natural selection pressure to prevent that spread. Eugenic measures are absolutely required to keep many breeds of domestic dogs from developing such problems. Humans are not magically endowed with protections against the exact same conditons promoting spread of deleterious characteristics, and it is the hight of hubris to assert that they do.)
I would be very interested in genetic assays of ancient populations using exhumed bodies, compared to modern genetic distributions to see if the prevelences of known deleterious mutations have changed. When weighted against harsher environmental conditions, the statistical prevelence of genetic illnesses would give the very dataset this theorist is looking for.
Of course, doing that is also probably not possible, due to cultural issues about disturbing dead bodies.
Neroscientists aren't entirely sure why ECT and TMS work for curing chronic depression, and alleviating several other neurological disorders.
It is suggest that the mechanism is similar to what leukotomies were proscribed for. (A leukotomy is another, less offensive term for a frontal lobotomy, but was actually far more controlled in application, and was done with a wire loop called a leukotome) essentially, it was believed that certain pathological behavior patterns were caused by reinforced neural circuits leading to the thalamus and amygdala that were improperly stimulating that area, leading to the emotional and behavioral problems in the subject. The proceedure was initially intended to sever some of those connections, in a last ditch effort to help patients. At some point however, the proceedure became much less clinical, much less controlled, and performed to quiet long term mental patients instead of help them. This later is where the proceedure got its bad reputation.
ECT uses electrical stimulation to burn out some of the pathways in the brain, with far less collateral damage than leukotomy. TMS does the same thing, but is more controlled.
No-one knows! Hereditary epilepsy has a genetic basis, but why one normal person will go into a seizure, while another wont, when subjected to the same stimulus is a medical mystery.
Epileptic like seizures can be artificially induced with a solenoid array, but this is not considered a safe practice. It does get used on animal models to study seizures though.
It is possible that you could induce such a seizure in another human if you subjected them to a very high gauss oscillating magnetic field of about 20hz for a sustained period. This would simulate the effect of the solenoid array in inducing a seizure. (It should be possible to make a seizure inducing elevator, for instance.)
Epileptic seizures can cause irreversible brain damage, and after having one, your chances of having a second shoot up to 50%. (non predisposed people have a baseline 4% chance.) Any device intended to induce seizures in humans is wildly unethical.
No, epilepsy is a "cascade reaction" in the cortex. Basically, a cluster of neurons, (usually in the visual cortex), gets overloaded with rapidly changing stimulus, and continues to activate after the stimulus ends. This "noise" activity spreads through the cortex from the site of origin, like a ripple on a lake. The activated region remains hyperstimulated until the neurons temporarily shut down.
In many epileptics, they experience visual hallucenations of very complex black and white patterns. (sometimes with vivid colors) these hallucenations quickly overwhelm them, and their whole brain gets overloaded, and then enters a quiescent state for awhile. (unconciousness.) The state of hyperstimulation is the seizure, and is what causes the convulsions.
Essentially, their brain goes haywire for awhile, until the neurons become exhausted from cycling their ion pumps, and shut down. after this sedate period, normal activity can resume, since the anomalous internal stimulation will have abated.
Even epileptics can have such seizures, if the proper stimulus is provided.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, it's silly to shorten it that way. "K-Andromeda" would be a better abbreviation.
I agree, the second is an alarming problem. The tragedy of the commons should not be ignored. Large corporations like Disney pillage the shared cultural backlog of content, slap some candy frosting on it, and in some cases, even mangle the story to inject yet another (highly profitable) Disney Princess into the mix, then shut down any other fair use of the public domain stories they blatantly rip off.
Then you have the RIAA and its Canadian counterpart, flagrantly and willfully flaunting copyright law by consistently failing to reimburse or even LISTEN to artists who's music they compiled into unsanctioned "Greatest Hits" albums and sold like hotcakes. I heard they got a wrists slap for that, at worst, despite bleeding millions from artists they ripped off.
Dont even get me started on how Hollywood in general does business.
20 years is a little under a third of a person's expected lifetime. It is a VERY long time in regard to copyright. Are you telling me that as a creator, you cannot possibly recoup your investment in the creation of your works in that time? For real?
OR, are you simply suffering from entitlement complex issues, where you feel your great great grandchildren, who are completely incapable of producing more of YOUR work after you die of old age, are somehow magically more important than anyone else's grandchildren, and therefor deserving of being paid forever and ever and ever? An eternal legacy for your progeny?
Which of us is promoting theft from the community again?
Sounds like my prior post too.
Same story, and the GOP is doing exactly what I said they would. React with incredulity, then decry the brief as a waste of time.
Just waiting for the waste of money part.
Regardless, plugging their ears and going "Lalalalalala" is EXACTLY what they are doing here. (if a bit hyperbolic an expression)
And yes, I too was modded troll for it. Cheers!
If that were the case, a simple IRS audit of their expense reports would blow it away from orbit.
Indeed. The GOP will look at this study and react with incredulity, then decry the researchers as biased, and the study itself as a waste of money and time.
They will then plug their ears and go 'lalalalala' whenever the study gets brought up.
No, according to the article, the "carne asada burrito" he is "eating" is actually a euphamism for a depraved sex act!
I have a better idea.
We can find a desert planet, and send all the racists there. There are far fewer racists than there are minorities, so the economis work out better.
More like:
OK, we discovered that planet formation is radically more common than we previously thought. When we designed the parameters of Kepler's mission, we wanted to detect large bodies because they would be easier to detect, and they would give us a statistical sampling we could use to determine how frequent planetary systems are.
We know that now. We aren't so interested in big jupiter size gas giants. They don't get the funding dollars we are looking for. So, now that kepler's initial mission objective is met, we will call it a success, and start a new mission, with tighter controls, looking exclusively for small, rocky planets in the systems we know to have really big gas giants in them.
Not necessarily...
You only have to produce energy in your core faster than the rate of conversion occuring on your warpfied.
Fly through sparse intergalactic space, and the rate of versions on the shockfront will be low. Your core won't need to be cranking billions of gigajoules of energy for your trip.
Fire that bitch up inside a nebula? Well... that's a whole 'nother ball game, now isn't it?
Amusingly, you could probably make use of the "deadly wave" effect to clear a path through the nebula, though your effective velocity would be sublight.
You pick up a charge, beam it through the nebula, and disperse the gas in front of you by heating it.
Wait a little bit, jump a short distance, and release the particles again. Rinse, repeat.
Eventually a corridor will be swept through the nebula, and non-stop travel would be possible.
Do the math!
E=MC^2
For every atomic mass unit that intersects your warp field, that mass unit times the square of the speed of light is how much energy will be added to the "flash".
Now.. fly your starship through the greater megellanic cloud, or through the crab nebula.
How big a boom indeed....
A nice idea, but the physics does not work that way.
Think about it this way:
In front of the ship, you "compress" spacetime with an artificial gravity well. At the rear of the ship, you create an inverted gavity well. (Imagine, a gravity "hill"). The hill pushes the ship forwards, and the gravity well pulls it forwards. The two phenomena are perfectly cancelling. (Well is just as deep as the hill is "tall")
The combinaton of these two fields creates the warp bubble.
The warp bubble is necessary, because the ship simply cannot travel faster than light speed, using normal forms of propulsion. Special relativity makes it impossible to achieve lightspeed. (Requires infinite energy!)
Instead, the "massless" bubble gets accellerated, while the ship stays stationary inside! The spacetime bubble has no imposed speed limit, and can easily go FTL.
The problem cited here, is that any particle that comes into contact with the high velocity spacetime bubble will quantum tunnel inside the warpfield, and get carried along. This includes "virtual particles."
Virtual particles are not really particles at all, in the literal sense. They have measurable effects, but cannot themselves be measured. They are really random energy anomalies that form and disapear out of the vacuum of space. (Another, more accurate term for them is "vacuum fluctuations") basically, these events occur as mutually exclusively charged waves, that exist for tiny fractions of a second before cancelling each other, giving spacetime a rough, or "foamy" texture at the quantum mechanical level.
A curious effect of these virtual particles, is that if they can exist long enough to be directly observed (and not just their effects), they gain energy, and become real particles. (This is the basis behind hawking radiation)
Much like the event horizon of a black hole, the edge of the warp field acts as a barrier for quantum tunneling. There is a nonzero chance that some of these quantum virtual particle pairs will have one of their members become trapped behind the bubble's edge as it zips by, preventing mutual annihilation, and forcing the captured particle to become real. The longer the bubble stays up, the more particles will get trapped.
(Quantum tunnelling is what results from the "fuzzy" probability clouds of a particle wave intersecting a thin barrier. The more the fuzzy probability field intersects with the barrier, the greater the chances the particle will suddenly be on the other side. This phenomena is real, and has been scientifically verified. Quite literally, the sun would not shine without quantum tunneling, because nuclear fusion would be impossible without it.)
When the warp bubble drops, those captured particles are released as a dangerous energy wave.
Because the capture occurs as a direct result of the warp bubble's very existence, no amount of "aerodynamic shape" will prevent the steady accumulation of this radiation in the event shock.
The effect would be greatly exacerbated by the ship flying through a nebula, or other gas cloud. The mass energy of those particles is immense, and even small traces like those of interstellar clouds, would result in unbelievable releases of energy when the bubble is turned off.
"Deflectors" are not an option, because they would have to be projected from the starship. The warp bubble causes the starship to cease being causally connected to the outside spacetime, where the gas and dust particles exist. As such, it is impossible for any effect generated by the starship, other than the warpfield itself, to interact with those particles. The ship will simply have to plow through them.
Once the captured particles are tunneled inside the warp field, it might be possible to capture some of it, but more than likely the particles become photons, which can't be herded that way, making en-route collection unlikely.
This leaves the "deadly gamma ray flash" when the ship returns to being causally conncted with the rest of the universe.
It should not be given any credence in terms of policy, how about that?
The assertion that skincolor has any bearing on behavior is not currently supported by science. Unless a specific mechanism linking skincolor with genetic mechanisms that predispose an individual to certain behaviors is demonstrated, the argument simply doesn't hold water.
I have mixed feelings about this.
Asserting that a person acts a certain way because of their skin color is absurd. It should not be tolerated.
Somebody mentioning a suspicious correlation between cultural demographics which involve skin color and and group behaviors is really not.
certainly not!
The point was that *TO ME*, all beer is undrinkable swill. Even the vaunted "high purity" german beers. Tried them. Horsepiss in a glass. Undrinkable.
This is because "What tastes good" is an innately subjective experience. Kids think vegetables are disgusting, but many adults find them delicious. Asserting a profound statement like "Only European beers are worth a shit" discounts that a fair number of people prefer American beers. They just like them better, for one reason or another.
Trying to exclude my opinion on the flavor of beer, because it doesn't meet your preconceptions is just further demonstration of the argument I made previously. I am not like you, therefor my opinion does not count-- you assert this, because your argument is made such that only YOUR point of view matters, is presented such that it is meant to be taken as objective fact, and is put forth for no other purpose but to be divisively ego-masterbatory in nature.
I dont like beer. I think it is gross. Others love the stuff. If you want to drink beer, great. Dont try to make it into a religious experience, because it isn't.
Synthetic enzymes are just around the corner, if the previous week's submission is to be believed.
So, enzymatically generating long double-wall carbon nanotube fibers inside bone matrix seems plausible. (use glucose as the source molecule, shear off oxygen and hydrogen as water, and bind the carbon in place. would probably require a whole new cell morphology though.)
Similar approaches could use existing muscle fiber bundles, and just cause them to grow coiled like that. The magic here, is that because it is coiled, it has more linear contraction overall, which increases the amount of torque force generated. (it's a mechanical advantage thing). Twisting up single muscle fibers without breaking them, then stimulating them, would get similar high-response, high-strength results.
My, what a lovely pile of straw you have created! I hope you didn't have to murder too many strawmen to make it!
1) most dental hygenists I have met take very good care of their teeth, and most don't resort to veneers. Contrary to your vicious assault on that strawman, there *are* american dental hygenists, and they DO take care of their teeth. Fluoride? The effect it has in supressing tooth decay came from american dental hygenists. Fancy that.
2) French Toast. Created at the French House, an american bed and breakfast, according to several noteworthy gastronomists.
3) all beer tastes vile. The manner in which it is served does not matter. It is an acquired taste, much like black liquorice. Arguments over beer are like arguments over religion. Foolish from the beginning, and without real substance, created exclusively to divide and enable spear rattling and jingoistic ego masturbation on the part of the arguer. Insisting upon an objective truth being present in such an intrinsically subjective experience as "favor" is completely irrational.
That's 3 strikes. You're out.
If they can get the price down significantly, I could see this implemented in things like settop boxes and home based networking equipment.
I could also see it being used intelligently on a bootable network card. (Card has say, a 128mb mram capacity. That's enough for a very robust preboot environment, as well as an actual internal boot image, an MD5 hash cache, and all the software it needs to make sure network and local images match. Basically, the card boots the internal preboot env, then MD5s its local image, MD5s the image on the tftp server, then either updates its image before booting, or skips the image download and boots straight up. This could reduce startup bandwidth in a segment with diskless workstations considerably. The fact that the mram is fast let's you MD5 the image very quickly.)
Having such a large package, without the need for special voltage control, would allow the package to be both moe electronically simple, and permit a fully featured preboot env. Perhaps even an EFI implementation for booting OS images that require it.
There are quite a few places that this early offering could get used for.
To play devil's advocate, this technology would radically increase the number of reproducing homosexuals. This would in turn radically reduce total unwanted pregnancies, by reducing prevelence of genetic predisposition to homosexual relationships.
No, trademark the word "product".
Watch the shit hit the fan.
You also have an "unnecessary" physical characteristic, based on that line of reasoning.
Compare the length and lack of bacculum of your penis, with the same organs in all other primates.
Your sexual characteristics are the direct product of artificial selection by millenia of females, based soley on preferences.
Just like a poodle's curly locks.
Nature does exactly what you deride. It is also far less intelligent about its choices. (If choice is even the right word.)
So the solution is to restrict social work?
Many families are able to exist exclusively due to the support infrastructures provided by the extended community.
Requiring full quid pro quo for access to socal infrastructure (outlaw charity) would place very strong natural selection pressure on humans to either exist without those services, or to always equally transact when getting those services.
Eg, you always have to pay for utilities and food. No government support. No exceptions. Charitable work would be illegal. People with genetic disabilities, like ALS, muscular dystrophy, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and pals would all suffer very strong biases against procreation and survival in exactly the same capacities they would as if the society was not in existence. This means they would be aggressively weeded out by the policy, and fewer and fewer people would be born with those disabilities over the following decades, barring spontaneous emergence of those mutations from occupational mutagens.
Such a solution would almost certainly not prevail in the modern world, however. Our insistence on extending human fertility for the infertile (IVF, and friends), extending the lives of people with life threatening genetic illnesses, and weakening our immune systems through increasingly sterile living conditions will result in accumulations of deleterious mutations. (This occurs in captive breeding programs for animals frquently. Preventing the spread of things like hip dysplasia in pedigree'd dogs requires drastic efforts. If left to their own devices, the dogs will readily spread the mutation to the entire breeding group, being artificially sustained by human caretakers, and lacking a natural selection pressure to prevent that spread. Eugenic measures are absolutely required to keep many breeds of domestic dogs from developing such problems. Humans are not magically endowed with protections against the exact same conditons promoting spread of deleterious characteristics, and it is the hight of hubris to assert that they do.)
I would be very interested in genetic assays of ancient populations using exhumed bodies, compared to modern genetic distributions to see if the prevelences of known deleterious mutations have changed. When weighted against harsher environmental conditions, the statistical prevelence of genetic illnesses would give the very dataset this theorist is looking for.
Of course, doing that is also probably not possible, due to cultural issues about disturbing dead bodies.
Neroscientists aren't entirely sure why ECT and TMS work for curing chronic depression, and alleviating several other neurological disorders.
It is suggest that the mechanism is similar to what leukotomies were proscribed for. (A leukotomy is another, less offensive term for a frontal lobotomy, but was actually far more controlled in application, and was done with a wire loop called a leukotome) essentially, it was believed that certain pathological behavior patterns were caused by reinforced neural circuits leading to the thalamus and amygdala that were improperly stimulating that area, leading to the emotional and behavioral problems in the subject. The proceedure was initially intended to sever some of those connections, in a last ditch effort to help patients. At some point however, the proceedure became much less clinical, much less controlled, and performed to quiet long term mental patients instead of help them. This later is where the proceedure got its bad reputation.
ECT uses electrical stimulation to burn out some of the pathways in the brain, with far less collateral damage than leukotomy. TMS does the same thing, but is more controlled.
Welcome to neuroscience.
No-one knows! Hereditary epilepsy has a genetic basis, but why one normal person will go into a seizure, while another wont, when subjected to the same stimulus is a medical mystery.
Epileptic like seizures can be artificially induced with a solenoid array, but this is not considered a safe practice. It does get used on animal models to study seizures though.
It is possible that you could induce such a seizure in another human if you subjected them to a very high gauss oscillating magnetic field of about 20hz for a sustained period. This would simulate the effect of the solenoid array in inducing a seizure. (It should be possible to make a seizure inducing elevator, for instance.)
Epileptic seizures can cause irreversible brain damage, and after having one, your chances of having a second shoot up to 50%. (non predisposed people have a baseline 4% chance.) Any device intended to induce seizures in humans is wildly unethical.
Bah! Proofread you dumbass.
should be 'even non-epileptics can have seizures.'
No, epilepsy is a "cascade reaction" in the cortex. Basically, a cluster of neurons, (usually in the visual cortex), gets overloaded with rapidly changing stimulus, and continues to activate after the stimulus ends. This "noise" activity spreads through the cortex from the site of origin, like a ripple on a lake. The activated region remains hyperstimulated until the neurons temporarily shut down.
In many epileptics, they experience visual hallucenations of very complex black and white patterns. (sometimes with vivid colors) these hallucenations quickly overwhelm them, and their whole brain gets overloaded, and then enters a quiescent state for awhile. (unconciousness.) The state of hyperstimulation is the seizure, and is what causes the convulsions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epileptic_seizure
Essentially, their brain goes haywire for awhile, until the neurons become exhausted from cycling their ion pumps, and shut down. after this sedate period, normal activity can resume, since the anomalous internal stimulation will have abated.
Even epileptics can have such seizures, if the proper stimulus is provided.