That's a good point although in looking up the size of prion protein I found some articles suggesting that there are some mutant forms which cause it. Presumably those mutations predispose the protein to fold the wrong way. You're right, folding wasn't represented by bits, but the same goes for bunnie's avian-swine flu virus. Simply typing out the nucleotide or amino acid code won't do anything, neither will actually generating a stretch of DNA or RNA that is the virus' genome, the virus still needs proteins to activate, so it's not just data that kills you.
If I'm not mistaken, there are some plant viruses that are only RNA. I don't know a whole lot about them, but I think there's probably some RNA enzyme activity that goes on there, so again it's not quite "data" that kills there.
Ditto, the team of geniuses/smart people working at google are frankly far better at their job than Bob, our IT guy. Bob's nice and all, but, well, he's not exactly google material, and there's only one of him, etc. Gmail goes down once, Bobmail goes down once a week.
It would actually take less than that, though it wouldn't spread the same way. Remember that prions are proteins that can kill you rather than whole viruses. The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits. "Bit calculator" tells me that would be 0.185 kbytes.
Granted, this wouldn't be airborne death, would be extremely slow, and wouldn't cause a pandemic, but still, far less data.
Even if you were to go the viral route, at least one virus is tricky in that it produces multiple proteins from overlapping reading frames. That is, the same sections of RNA genome (sendai uses RNA instead of DNA) is read in multiple ways to make different functional proteins, one protein might be formed from reading AUG GAU GGG CAG, which would make the amino acid sequence MDGQ, but that could aso be read as A UGG *AUG* GGC AG where the starred AUG is the start, making a protein of MG. I find that pretty cool, because as Carl Sagan pointed out, try doing that with english. "Romancement to get her" can be spaced differently to produce "roman cement together" is the longest he could come up with and it doesn't even make sense. Viruses make whole proteins that work. Anyway, the point of all that was that viruses can in some cases double up, so it would take even fewer nucleotides to produce the same amount of protiens.
To be fair they also modded the GP troll, when the pun there was even more obvious. Mods today just want a totally serious discussion of trademarked duck noises without any puns.
Which... when you think about it, is pretty hilarious.
I too want to skip right to the goals of research without having to actually go through the slow, torturous process of getting there, without any of the inevitable dead-ends. Do we really have to research cancer treatments, have an idea, test it on multiple levels to make sure it works and doesn't kill you, develop it, just to cure cancer? Why can't we skip right to the part where we cure cancer?
Along those same lines, why do I have to make a cake or buy one in order to have my cake or eat it? Why can't I just eat a cake without actually procuring one? I keep reading about new cakes and yet if you want a cake what happens? You still have to buy it or bake it. Why? I'll tell you why, stupid causality. If only we could fiat right past that.
~
Sorry for all the sarcasm. The reason there are so many non-starters in learning how to cure cancer is BECAUSE WE DON'T ALREADY KNOW HOW TO CURE CANCER.
Actually I take that footnote back, the NIH just awarded me a $12 million grant to study whether or not grant-writing agencies award more grants to grants that have nano stuck in there, based on that post.
Just convince grant-awarding agencies and organizations that nano =/= OMGFUNDITNOW and the problem will fix itself.
(note that I have no idea if they actually throw money at anything nano, I wasn't willing to test it by writing up a grant with nano thrown in and wait for it to get approved or rejected just to see if this joke works or not)
However, with marketing -- you can send any number of suit-monkeys out to cut deals with drink manufacturers, t-shirt companies, magazines.. etc. All without detracting from the potential quality of your final product.
Your argument might be more convincing to me if I weren't familiar with EA's products and their quality, or rather, the lack therof.
What EA actually does is more like having a woman make a baby in a month, removes the baby after that month, and the 8 other women put makeup on it to try to detract from the fact that it is a disgusting abomination. The marketing is to convince people it's a baby instead of an embryo. Then they do the same thing next month.
One of my biology heroes, Ramon y Cajal, was also interested in cannons. When he was 11, he also had his own cannon (although he did build it himself.) He used it to destroy the gates of his hometown, got thrown in jail. Almost immediately upon his release he built a bigger one which blew up, injuring himself in the process. This seems to have curbed his interest in cannons. He still led a pretty wild life after that as well. He settled down a bit after contracting malaria, tuberculosis, and having seven kids, and made the foundations of neuroscience. We still refer to him as the father of neuroscience in fact.
Again though, Cajal did build his cannon, not his dad. Here's hoping though he doesn't have to injure himself, get malaria or tuberculosis, but does do some great things in life.
Well... I didn't understand any of the key parts of that to be honest. I was wondering though about level of detection. How much cancer do these cancer patients have? If they are, for example, on death's door of lung cancer, they might be exhaling large amounts of a chemical produced by the tumors. For this to be of real use in preventative medicine, you'd want to detect the cancer before there were obvious signs, before the cancer spreads, when it's just a few cells.
It will be amazing if this thing can detect cancers when they are still small and easy to treat. If it generally only detects tumors when they are of a certain surface area, and that surface area is more than the surface area of a lung tumor that has already metastasized, it would still probably be useful, but less so.
I'm assuming this information is in the actual article in nature nanotechnology, which I can't access right now.
PS. It occurs to me that it might not be a spelling issue, it might be that maneouverability is specific to air or sea and maneuverability is applicable to only land, or something similar. My argument still applies though.
I very much doubt that maneouverability(sic) will become irrelevant. The last time someone put all their trust in weaponry at the expense of maneouverability(sic) it did not go so well for them.
I'm no military tactician, but it would seem to me that aircraft carriers are a very successful example of how maneuverability can be abandoned even at sea for weaponry.
By the way, google agrees with my way of spelling maneuverability. I'm not going to claim that either Google or I are better authorities on spelling than you, I just want to point out that we have numbers on our side. 1,540,001 versus 13,700.:-P
Well, since the article was "india's first stealth fighter" I kind of assumed.
My point is this: because we have the capability, that doesn't mean the technology is obsolete. It's only obsolete if you're fighting us. India's planes aren't "irrelevant" because they're presumably going to be fighting Pakistan if they're fighting anyone. Did Lockheed sell Pakistan that technology?
But I wonder is how much longer this will matter. The Lockheed video on their DAS [youtube.com] for the F-35 pretty much asserts that the system makes maneuverability irrelevant. I realize that it's a vendor sales presentation, but at the same time I know off-bore-sight missiles are pretty much a done deal. Stealthiness helps some, but I doubt it would be enough as these systems keep improving. It seems soon the primary factor in air to air combat will be the quality of radar and missiles that are available.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so? We're going to be fighting each other or something? Is Lockheed going to be selling their stuff to Pakistan?
Thus, my opinion is scientific; your opinion is quasi-religious. I admit that all scientific explanations for the working of man's mind are incomplete, but at least they're rational.
Minor point: I didn't endorse any opinion on the nature of the mind, I was just pointing out your hypocrisy.
More importantly, to say it's incomplete is an overstatement, as is "my opinon is scientific." Both viewpoints make assumptions without evidence on the same scale. Few people would argue that thoughts are impulses carried over neurons, but to have much proof that free will doesn't exist, you would have to find a way around the uncertainty principle.
It comes back down to you have different asssumptions than other people and you like yours better.
I'm not sure why people make the mistake of trying to fight concepts which are not based on logic or evidence WITH logic or evidence. Sometimes such concepts make predictions or have parts which can be specifically tested, like young earth creationism, but the illogical core of "God created the world/universe" isn't going to be disproven to people who believe it with logic or evidence any more than young earth creationists are going to convince scientists that the world was created in 7 days by quoting bible passages. You're saying "people are wrong, I've got science," even if you weren't dramatically overstating things, who do you expect to convince?
Come to think of it, now I'M trying to disprove an illogical belief using logic...
*) The US has this quasi-religious fallacy that the mind is somehow less a biological entity than the body, so while we are limited by physical disability/limitation/programming, mental disability/limitation/programming somehow doesn't exist because it runs contrary to the philosophy about man running as a free rational entity. On the contrary, the mind is just another biological function, and driving someone to suicide (i.e. by manipulating their mind until they think of death as the only way out) is as much murdering them as pushing them onto a sword.
citation needed.
You're saying that an entire country is wrong in how it thinks of the mind? By what standard? I have a guess: your standard here is "I think something different." Specifically, you have one quasi-religious belief, and a lot of other people don't, so everyone else is wrong.
Googling "how do I blow up government buildings" is going to attract the attention of shub internet no matter how many bogus queries you put before or after it.
If anyone is wondering the answer to that question but doesn't want to attract the attention of the "shub" internet, I've got the answer right here. There is usually somewhere on the building a small thermal exhaust port approximately 2 meters wide. A direct hit with a proton torpedo should cause a chain reaction that will destroy it. I should caution you that ONLY a direct hit will cause a chain reaction.
This game actually sounds neat, but in my experience "attempting to engage with a lot of the issues you see on transhumanist websites" is a lot like trying to hold a conversation with a 9/11 Truther or Intelligent Design proponent - I'd rather have root canal surgery.
Maybe you should have said "attempting to engage with a lot of the issues you see on transhumanist websites... I'd rather die a slow painful death from a tooth abscess."
(Kidding, at least I started off that way, then I probably just overthought it.)
First of all, the mechanism and scale of the waste is noteworthy, this is pork that's vying with military contracts for sheer size. Some waste is inevitable, not this much. Second, this isn't a case of simple government waste, this is a case of a private corporation wasting my taxes. I'd say this is "Ridiculous primary system aligned perfectly to help government and private industry waste your money."
The biggest wastes of taxpayer money aren't government-only, they're when the government teams up with private companies. Fiscal conservatives love to point out government waste, but ignore the more egregious examples with private industry. I wonder if it's because it implies there is no perfect financial solution, or if it's because it's an argument against defense spending and medicare.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the glass mirrors could be destroyed in seconds or days...
Minutes or hours, on the other hand, absolutely cannot be used to measure the destruction of the mirrors.
That's a good point although in looking up the size of prion protein I found some articles suggesting that there are some mutant forms which cause it. Presumably those mutations predispose the protein to fold the wrong way. You're right, folding wasn't represented by bits, but the same goes for bunnie's avian-swine flu virus. Simply typing out the nucleotide or amino acid code won't do anything, neither will actually generating a stretch of DNA or RNA that is the virus' genome, the virus still needs proteins to activate, so it's not just data that kills you.
If I'm not mistaken, there are some plant viruses that are only RNA. I don't know a whole lot about them, but I think there's probably some RNA enzyme activity that goes on there, so again it's not quite "data" that kills there.
Ditto, the team of geniuses/smart people working at google are frankly far better at their job than Bob, our IT guy. Bob's nice and all, but, well, he's not exactly google material, and there's only one of him, etc. Gmail goes down once, Bobmail goes down once a week.
It would actually take less than that, though it wouldn't spread the same way. Remember that prions are proteins that can kill you rather than whole viruses. The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits. "Bit calculator" tells me that would be 0.185 kbytes.
Granted, this wouldn't be airborne death, would be extremely slow, and wouldn't cause a pandemic, but still, far less data.
Even if you were to go the viral route, at least one virus is tricky in that it produces multiple proteins from overlapping reading frames. That is, the same sections of RNA genome (sendai uses RNA instead of DNA) is read in multiple ways to make different functional proteins, one protein might be formed from reading AUG GAU GGG CAG, which would make the amino acid sequence MDGQ, but that could aso be read as A UGG *AUG* GGC AG where the starred AUG is the start, making a protein of MG. I find that pretty cool, because as Carl Sagan pointed out, try doing that with english. "Romancement to get her" can be spaced differently to produce "roman cement together" is the longest he could come up with and it doesn't even make sense. Viruses make whole proteins that work. Anyway, the point of all that was that viruses can in some cases double up, so it would take even fewer nucleotides to produce the same amount of protiens.
To be fair they also modded the GP troll, when the pun there was even more obvious. Mods today just want a totally serious discussion of trademarked duck noises without any puns.
Which... when you think about it, is pretty hilarious.
Yeah, well I copyrighted "get offa my lawn" so you owe me like a million dollars.
I was hoping we were going to be able to duck the obligatory puns with this one.
I know, I would have chosen "symbolicsistotallyawesome.com"
I too want to skip right to the goals of research without having to actually go through the slow, torturous process of getting there, without any of the inevitable dead-ends. Do we really have to research cancer treatments, have an idea, test it on multiple levels to make sure it works and doesn't kill you, develop it, just to cure cancer? Why can't we skip right to the part where we cure cancer?
Along those same lines, why do I have to make a cake or buy one in order to have my cake or eat it? Why can't I just eat a cake without actually procuring one? I keep reading about new cakes and yet if you want a cake what happens? You still have to buy it or bake it. Why? I'll tell you why, stupid causality. If only we could fiat right past that.
~
Sorry for all the sarcasm. The reason there are so many non-starters in learning how to cure cancer is BECAUSE WE DON'T ALREADY KNOW HOW TO CURE CANCER.
Actually I take that footnote back, the NIH just awarded me a $12 million grant to study whether or not grant-writing agencies award more grants to grants that have nano stuck in there, based on that post.
Just convince grant-awarding agencies and organizations that nano =/= OMGFUNDITNOW and the problem will fix itself.
(note that I have no idea if they actually throw money at anything nano, I wasn't willing to test it by writing up a grant with nano thrown in and wait for it to get approved or rejected just to see if this joke works or not)
However, with marketing -- you can send any number of suit-monkeys out to cut deals with drink manufacturers, t-shirt companies, magazines.. etc. All without detracting from the potential quality of your final product.
Your argument might be more convincing to me if I weren't familiar with EA's products and their quality, or rather, the lack therof.
What EA actually does is more like having a woman make a baby in a month, removes the baby after that month, and the 8 other women put makeup on it to try to detract from the fact that it is a disgusting abomination. The marketing is to convince people it's a baby instead of an embryo. Then they do the same thing next month.
One of my biology heroes, Ramon y Cajal, was also interested in cannons. When he was 11, he also had his own cannon (although he did build it himself.) He used it to destroy the gates of his hometown, got thrown in jail. Almost immediately upon his release he built a bigger one which blew up, injuring himself in the process. This seems to have curbed his interest in cannons. He still led a pretty wild life after that as well. He settled down a bit after contracting malaria, tuberculosis, and having seven kids, and made the foundations of neuroscience. We still refer to him as the father of neuroscience in fact.
Again though, Cajal did build his cannon, not his dad. Here's hoping though he doesn't have to injure himself, get malaria or tuberculosis, but does do some great things in life.
Building weapons isn't using them. "Getting to first base for virginity" would fit a little better.
Well... I didn't understand any of the key parts of that to be honest. I was wondering though about level of detection. How much cancer do these cancer patients have? If they are, for example, on death's door of lung cancer, they might be exhaling large amounts of a chemical produced by the tumors. For this to be of real use in preventative medicine, you'd want to detect the cancer before there were obvious signs, before the cancer spreads, when it's just a few cells.
It will be amazing if this thing can detect cancers when they are still small and easy to treat. If it generally only detects tumors when they are of a certain surface area, and that surface area is more than the surface area of a lung tumor that has already metastasized, it would still probably be useful, but less so.
I'm assuming this information is in the actual article in nature nanotechnology, which I can't access right now.
PS. It occurs to me that it might not be a spelling issue, it might be that maneouverability is specific to air or sea and maneuverability is applicable to only land, or something similar. My argument still applies though.
I very much doubt that maneouverability(sic) will become irrelevant. The last time someone put all their trust in weaponry at the expense of maneouverability(sic) it did not go so well for them.
I'm no military tactician, but it would seem to me that aircraft carriers are a very successful example of how maneuverability can be abandoned even at sea for weaponry.
By the way, google agrees with my way of spelling maneuverability. I'm not going to claim that either Google or I are better authorities on spelling than you, I just want to point out that we have numbers on our side. 1,540,001 versus 13,700. :-P
Well, since the article was "india's first stealth fighter" I kind of assumed.
My point is this: because we have the capability, that doesn't mean the technology is obsolete. It's only obsolete if you're fighting us. India's planes aren't "irrelevant" because they're presumably going to be fighting Pakistan if they're fighting anyone. Did Lockheed sell Pakistan that technology?
But I wonder is how much longer this will matter. The Lockheed video on their DAS [youtube.com] for the F-35 pretty much asserts that the system makes maneuverability irrelevant. I realize that it's a vendor sales presentation, but at the same time I know off-bore-sight missiles are pretty much a done deal. Stealthiness helps some, but I doubt it would be enough as these systems keep improving. It seems soon the primary factor in air to air combat will be the quality of radar and missiles that are available.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so? We're going to be fighting each other or something? Is Lockheed going to be selling their stuff to Pakistan?
Thus, my opinion is scientific; your opinion is quasi-religious. I admit that all scientific explanations for the working of man's mind are incomplete, but at least they're rational.
Minor point: I didn't endorse any opinion on the nature of the mind, I was just pointing out your hypocrisy.
More importantly, to say it's incomplete is an overstatement, as is "my opinon is scientific." Both viewpoints make assumptions without evidence on the same scale. Few people would argue that thoughts are impulses carried over neurons, but to have much proof that free will doesn't exist, you would have to find a way around the uncertainty principle.
It comes back down to you have different asssumptions than other people and you like yours better.
I'm not sure why people make the mistake of trying to fight concepts which are not based on logic or evidence WITH logic or evidence. Sometimes such concepts make predictions or have parts which can be specifically tested, like young earth creationism, but the illogical core of "God created the world/universe" isn't going to be disproven to people who believe it with logic or evidence any more than young earth creationists are going to convince scientists that the world was created in 7 days by quoting bible passages. You're saying "people are wrong, I've got science," even if you weren't dramatically overstating things, who do you expect to convince?
Come to think of it, now I'M trying to disprove an illogical belief using logic...
*) The US has this quasi-religious fallacy that the mind is somehow less a biological entity than the body, so while we are limited by physical disability/limitation/programming, mental disability/limitation/programming somehow doesn't exist because it runs contrary to the philosophy about man running as a free rational entity. On the contrary, the mind is just another biological function, and driving someone to suicide (i.e. by manipulating their mind until they think of death as the only way out) is as much murdering them as pushing them onto a sword.
citation needed.
You're saying that an entire country is wrong in how it thinks of the mind? By what standard? I have a guess: your standard here is "I think something different." Specifically, you have one quasi-religious belief, and a lot of other people don't, so everyone else is wrong.
Googling "how do I blow up government buildings" is going to attract the attention of shub internet no matter how many bogus queries you put before or after it.
If anyone is wondering the answer to that question but doesn't want to attract the attention of the "shub" internet, I've got the answer right here. There is usually somewhere on the building a small thermal exhaust port approximately 2 meters wide. A direct hit with a proton torpedo should cause a chain reaction that will destroy it. I should caution you that ONLY a direct hit will cause a chain reaction.
This game actually sounds neat, but in my experience "attempting to engage with a lot of the issues you see on transhumanist websites" is a lot like trying to hold a conversation with a 9/11 Truther or Intelligent Design proponent - I'd rather have root canal surgery.
But by getting a root canal, you would be using science and technology to improve your physical characteristics and in a small way you'd be affirming that suffering tooth pain is unnecessary and undesirable. So basically you're transhuman if you do, transhuman if you don't. Or maybe that was just a convoluted way of saying "Less talk more transhumanism."
Maybe you should have said "attempting to engage with a lot of the issues you see on transhumanist websites... I'd rather die a slow painful death from a tooth abscess."
(Kidding, at least I started off that way, then I probably just overthought it.)
First of all, the mechanism and scale of the waste is noteworthy, this is pork that's vying with military contracts for sheer size. Some waste is inevitable, not this much. Second, this isn't a case of simple government waste, this is a case of a private corporation wasting my taxes. I'd say this is "Ridiculous primary system aligned perfectly to help government and private industry waste your money."
The biggest wastes of taxpayer money aren't government-only, they're when the government teams up with private companies. Fiscal conservatives love to point out government waste, but ignore the more egregious examples with private industry. I wonder if it's because it implies there is no perfect financial solution, or if it's because it's an argument against defense spending and medicare.
I liked that bit too, because it suggests that there are kids out there who DON'T realize that if their phone is smoking, that's a bad sign.