Ah, ruby, polite as ever. Now please show me the functional diversity on phosphazenes, anything except being a base? And show me the stable phosphazenes without carbon based attachements. Also, show me a phophazene polymer that could be used for information storage. They are useful reagents, but making up a biochemistry on that basis? Highly doubtful.
Germany. Don't get me wrong, we have our own share of absolutely crappy food, but I still was baffled after watching the first part of Jamie's show. Pizza for breakfast? For school kids? Out of cartons that read "Cheese/Cheese substitute Pizza"??
Don't see anything fundamentally against it. However, as the emergence of life seems to be a rather rare event, I still favor the oceans - more chemicals there, more energy. Everything going on in the deep biosphere is damn slow due to resource constraints. In my opinion, the chance for life emerging is still higher in the oceans.
The potentially arsenic-"based" bacteria are still carbon based. Only the phosphate links in the sugar-phosphate backbone of their DNA are possible replaced by arsenate links, possible the phosphates in their ATP or GTP, too. This is interesting, but not too surprising, as arsenic is chemically quite close to phosphorus.
I am not arguing that earth-like conditions are a necessity, but that there are hard limits on conditions. If you want to have life you need a chemistry that is sufficiently complex to store information and to build structures. With that, you are down to carbon. Nothing else (with the very, very low possibility of silicon being an exception) makes a sufficiently complex chemistry. You need metabolism, so you need some kind of energy gradient and therefor chemical dynamics on a timescale that makes exploiting that gradient possible. Another hard limit. Those limits are not given by taking earth as a standard, this is basic thermodynamics, in the end.
I wouldn't say that we generally assume conditions to be necessarily earth-like for life to arise. However, there are hard constraints on conditions that allow complex chemistry to happen - and those limit the habitable range. Basically, the only reasonably complex chemistry happens with carbon - so you are automatically limited to conditions where carbon compounds are stable. That sets an upper bound for temperatures, for example. On the other hand, you want some reactivity - life has to be dynamic, after all. That gives you a lower bound for temperatures. Earth happens to be in the middle there, but there are quite some deviations from earth-like conditions where life would be possible, biochemically.
On the topic of school food, I can only recommend having a look at Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. As a European, seeing what some schools in the US feed to the kids was quite some WTF moment.
Maybe - but quality is not necessary for success - for example, you can always substitute convenience for quality. See the fast food industry. WoW is kinda the highly processed food of the MMO industry.
It's somewhat different, though - the deep sea regions still get a constant supply of nutrients that basically rain down from the more productive ocean layers. In the deep geosphere, all the worms can live off are lithotrophic bacteria that live from certain anorganic chemicals found down there. But yeah, in the end, not surprising - life seems always to find a way.
So your argument is that because you can't use certain facilities as a parent, like restaurants, no one should have them? Because you feel that you cannot shop by foot because you have kids, greengrocers in the neighbourhood are impossible? You know, the suburbia model is pretty much American only? I wonder who people in Europe manage. Also, you are projecting the way cities are laid out now in America on how they can be laid out. Why would a workplace in the neighbourhood mean proximity to a commercial zone? That's exactly not what I am talking about. I am talking about mixed zones that cover every aspect of life, being more than sleeping quarters for the corporate zombies. And what are "random influences"? The big bad news-projected wolf out to get your precious kids?
Before talking about your presumed intelligence, you might want to read up on some history and some economic theory. Capitalism ends up with the accumulation of, who would have thought it, capital, in the hands of the few. With the accumulation of capital comes power. With that power, the few shape society to the detriment of all others. Lobbying for protective laws is not the intent, but the end result of capitalism. Essential part of capitalism, however, is all other believing that one day, they might be in the place of the few and yield the whip themselves. That delusion keeps the system going.
You know, one can be for a certain form of government regulation of the market while being against another form of government regulation of the market. I realize that this concept might be too complicated for a free market libertarian, but, well, if you try really, really hard to think about it, you might learn something.
True, that probably is why it works. It just see the contrast to other games with much less broad appeal, where you can actually get a decent pug without people acting like total assholes. But that's the price you pay for the large market share, I guess...
Kinda doubt that, given that the MMO with the worst community is going strongest at the moment. There seems to be no interest in a globally decent community, as long as you can carve out your own decent environment, as in a guild, and ignore the rest.
Pretty much, yeah. I don't have to hang around in the flywheel room, after all. Just put the thing into some decent concrete bunker and let it spin away. No need for anyone to stand right beside it - it contrast to my ultracentrifuge.
All great ideas, but from the sparse information in the article, I see the main problem in that this project is just a continuation of the suburbia paradigm. And that paradigm is wrong in any conceivable way. It's industrialized feedlot farming of middle class workers. Where are the shops in walkable distance? Where are the schools, the community centers, the local neighborhood pubs and restaurants? Where are the workplaces close to home? All I see are homes, homes, homes. As long as it depends on heavy commuting for every single activity out of your house, it is not remotely green, not even with public transport. Worse, it is a sleeping ghetto for the middle class. And that is wrong on so many social aspects.
Probably by too many posts here lately that stated that scientist would fake anything just to keep the funding up - see the climate discussions. The "they do it all for the funding" - meme is an insult to every scientist in my opinion. Not sure about the OP - my sarcasm detector might need recalibration, I grant you that.
Of course. Scientist are positively rolling in cash. That's after all the whole reason why they are doing science. They could do an honest job for less money and go into banking. But no, it is all about the grants.
Well, I guess that touches one of the main misconceptions when it comes to interpretation of scientific work. "Common sense" is not a scientific argument. It lacks rigor. And more often than not, common sense is just plain wrong.
That can be handled. Never worked with flywheels, but I had my fair share of work with ultracentrifuges. Basically the same thing - big ass rotors getting spun up in a vacuum to reach hundreds of thousands of G's of centripetal acceleration at the sample. I have seen one fail - scary, but it got contained. Mostly, the engineers know what they are doing. Didn't stop me from hauling ass every time one of the things made only one slightly weird sound, though...
It is indeed a different world. I come from a totally different field, but I am working with a couple of electrical engineers these days. When we had a talk about power supply systems, one of them made a comment that really opened up my eyes on how stuff works - "When you talk AC power lines - don't think about electrons moving around in wires. The energy is in the field. The wires are not for moving electrons, they are just guidance structures to direct the fields where we want them to go."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in. Let's test if we can lure them with Manowar as well. Then again, that might put them into an uber-shark rage. Dangerous, that.
Ah, ruby, polite as ever. Now please show me the functional diversity on phosphazenes, anything except being a base? And show me the stable phosphazenes without carbon based attachements. Also, show me a phophazene polymer that could be used for information storage. They are useful reagents, but making up a biochemistry on that basis? Highly doubtful.
Close, but no cigar. As a Brit, the quality of American school food probably wouldn't have had me flabbergasted ;)
Now I am digging through my age-old backups to find the Alpha Centauri install disc...
Germany. Don't get me wrong, we have our own share of absolutely crappy food, but I still was baffled after watching the first part of Jamie's show. Pizza for breakfast? For school kids? Out of cartons that read "Cheese/Cheese substitute Pizza"??
Don't see anything fundamentally against it. However, as the emergence of life seems to be a rather rare event, I still favor the oceans - more chemicals there, more energy. Everything going on in the deep biosphere is damn slow due to resource constraints. In my opinion, the chance for life emerging is still higher in the oceans.
The potentially arsenic-"based" bacteria are still carbon based. Only the phosphate links in the sugar-phosphate backbone of their DNA are possible replaced by arsenate links, possible the phosphates in their ATP or GTP, too. This is interesting, but not too surprising, as arsenic is chemically quite close to phosphorus.
I am not arguing that earth-like conditions are a necessity, but that there are hard limits on conditions. If you want to have life you need a chemistry that is sufficiently complex to store information and to build structures. With that, you are down to carbon. Nothing else (with the very, very low possibility of silicon being an exception) makes a sufficiently complex chemistry. You need metabolism, so you need some kind of energy gradient and therefor chemical dynamics on a timescale that makes exploiting that gradient possible. Another hard limit. Those limits are not given by taking earth as a standard, this is basic thermodynamics, in the end.
I wouldn't say that we generally assume conditions to be necessarily earth-like for life to arise. However, there are hard constraints on conditions that allow complex chemistry to happen - and those limit the habitable range. Basically, the only reasonably complex chemistry happens with carbon - so you are automatically limited to conditions where carbon compounds are stable. That sets an upper bound for temperatures, for example. On the other hand, you want some reactivity - life has to be dynamic, after all. That gives you a lower bound for temperatures. Earth happens to be in the middle there, but there are quite some deviations from earth-like conditions where life would be possible, biochemically.
On the topic of school food, I can only recommend having a look at Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. As a European, seeing what some schools in the US feed to the kids was quite some WTF moment.
Maybe - but quality is not necessary for success - for example, you can always substitute convenience for quality. See the fast food industry. WoW is kinda the highly processed food of the MMO industry.
It's somewhat different, though - the deep sea regions still get a constant supply of nutrients that basically rain down from the more productive ocean layers. In the deep geosphere, all the worms can live off are lithotrophic bacteria that live from certain anorganic chemicals found down there. But yeah, in the end, not surprising - life seems always to find a way.
Here is at least some information for it at Nature. Wherever there is some usable energy, some kind of life seems to attach to it. Fascinating.
So your argument is that because you can't use certain facilities as a parent, like restaurants, no one should have them? Because you feel that you cannot shop by foot because you have kids, greengrocers in the neighbourhood are impossible? You know, the suburbia model is pretty much American only? I wonder who people in Europe manage. Also, you are projecting the way cities are laid out now in America on how they can be laid out. Why would a workplace in the neighbourhood mean proximity to a commercial zone? That's exactly not what I am talking about. I am talking about mixed zones that cover every aspect of life, being more than sleeping quarters for the corporate zombies. And what are "random influences"? The big bad news-projected wolf out to get your precious kids?
Before talking about your presumed intelligence, you might want to read up on some history and some economic theory. Capitalism ends up with the accumulation of, who would have thought it, capital, in the hands of the few. With the accumulation of capital comes power. With that power, the few shape society to the detriment of all others. Lobbying for protective laws is not the intent, but the end result of capitalism. Essential part of capitalism, however, is all other believing that one day, they might be in the place of the few and yield the whip themselves. That delusion keeps the system going.
You know, one can be for a certain form of government regulation of the market while being against another form of government regulation of the market. I realize that this concept might be too complicated for a free market libertarian, but, well, if you try really, really hard to think about it, you might learn something.
The Black Iron Prison is alive and well, indeed.
True, that probably is why it works. It just see the contrast to other games with much less broad appeal, where you can actually get a decent pug without people acting like total assholes. But that's the price you pay for the large market share, I guess...
Kinda doubt that, given that the MMO with the worst community is going strongest at the moment. There seems to be no interest in a globally decent community, as long as you can carve out your own decent environment, as in a guild, and ignore the rest.
Pretty much, yeah. I don't have to hang around in the flywheel room, after all. Just put the thing into some decent concrete bunker and let it spin away. No need for anyone to stand right beside it - it contrast to my ultracentrifuge.
All great ideas, but from the sparse information in the article, I see the main problem in that this project is just a continuation of the suburbia paradigm. And that paradigm is wrong in any conceivable way. It's industrialized feedlot farming of middle class workers. Where are the shops in walkable distance? Where are the schools, the community centers, the local neighborhood pubs and restaurants? Where are the workplaces close to home? All I see are homes, homes, homes. As long as it depends on heavy commuting for every single activity out of your house, it is not remotely green, not even with public transport. Worse, it is a sleeping ghetto for the middle class. And that is wrong on so many social aspects.
Probably by too many posts here lately that stated that scientist would fake anything just to keep the funding up - see the climate discussions. The "they do it all for the funding" - meme is an insult to every scientist in my opinion. Not sure about the OP - my sarcasm detector might need recalibration, I grant you that.
Of course. Scientist are positively rolling in cash. That's after all the whole reason why they are doing science. They could do an honest job for less money and go into banking. But no, it is all about the grants.
Well, I guess that touches one of the main misconceptions when it comes to interpretation of scientific work. "Common sense" is not a scientific argument. It lacks rigor. And more often than not, common sense is just plain wrong.
That can be handled. Never worked with flywheels, but I had my fair share of work with ultracentrifuges. Basically the same thing - big ass rotors getting spun up in a vacuum to reach hundreds of thousands of G's of centripetal acceleration at the sample. I have seen one fail - scary, but it got contained. Mostly, the engineers know what they are doing. Didn't stop me from hauling ass every time one of the things made only one slightly weird sound, though...
It is indeed a different world. I come from a totally different field, but I am working with a couple of electrical engineers these days. When we had a talk about power supply systems, one of them made a comment that really opened up my eyes on how stuff works - "When you talk AC power lines - don't think about electrons moving around in wires. The energy is in the field. The wires are not for moving electrons, they are just guidance structures to direct the fields where we want them to go."