There are reasons why that's a poor idea. E.g., wider hips pose mobility issues. The system really needs a thorough redesign so that birth doesn't need to fit through the pelvic girdle, but that's far beyond us. The current system was designed for creatures with horizontal body position and small head size. For that it works fine. As it is... it puts strong constraints on development.
Don't think that this is the only place where history impacts evolution, though. Spiders have to drink their dinner because their brain is in a circle around their esophagus (or whatever you call that part of a spider). This worked out fine originally, but spiders became successful, and started growing and getting smarter, so their brains got larger, and now they need a liquid diet. If they get any smarter they won't be able to eat at all.
And speaking of the esophagus, consider the human trachea. Ever have something "go down the wrong pipe"? That's because of a very old design decision that's now apparently impossible to evolve a solution for. The lungs share the plumbing with the gut in the neck and head. There are lots of other similar features calling for a re-factoring of the design, but evolution doesn't work that way. All the intermediates must we not only working, but competitive WRT the prior model. No intermediate regressions allowed. (Except, of course, at times like after a major extinction event, when the selection pressure temporarily becomes quite low.)
You are correct that it is already too late to prevent global warming. It's been happening to some degree since we started farming rice. OTOH, a mild global warming has been advantageous. Without it we'd be entering an ice age. The ramped-up-on-steroids global warming that we've been pushing since the start of the industrial revolution, however, is something else again. We don't know just how bad it's going to get, but I do know that the actual projections have had the higher ends trimmed to avoid political repercussions. (Were the lower ends also trimmed? If so I haven't heard so.) Some of the model results that were excluded actually DO have Antarctica melting, and not just around the edges. Well, that's a lot worse than the mean projections, but the mean projection is that its going to be more than the 2 degrees Celsius that people talk about, probably closer to 4 degrees. That's nearly 8 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's going to mean LOTS of ice melting, and lots of deserts where there used to be farmland. It means that Canada will probably become good farmland...if it can get enough water. Oh, yes. It also means that the temperatures are going to get so high that we can't rely on any of the current models, because wind and ocean currents will shift too much. So we can't be sure where it's going to be wet, where it's going to be dry, or how wet or how dry.
My personal expectation (I'm no specialist, and a bit of a pessimist) is that we'll see over a meter sea level rise before the end of the century. Please note that this is not more extreme than some of the models predict, as some of them talk about 10's of meters, though I'm not sure of the timeline for that. I'm sort of expecting the Tethy's sea to form again for the first time since the Jurassic, but it would be a pretty shallow sea, I'm guessing less than a meter deep in most places...but how deep, of course, depends on the actual rise in sea levels. Maybe some genetic engineer will recreate the pleasiasaur to swim in it.
You have a really weird way of judging validity. Mind you, I do think that Hurricanes should have female names, but to think that has anything to do the validity is... hard to understand.
Maybe the House will change after the next election, but the Senators up for election pretty much guarantee that Republican control of the Senate will continue. Unless, of course, something even worse happens. (Pick any one of hundreds or thousands of possibilities.)
Well, depending on how much you believe the rhetoric, anyone who isn't a white male might feel safer in China. I'm hoping that almost all of it is just rhetoric, but I don't feel any certainty about it. In fact if you believe *some* of the rhetoric anyone who isn't a rich white male might feel safer in China. This strikes me as unlikely, but remembering how a prior German democracy fell it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
OTOH, there are a lot of signs that Trump is not an actual racial bigot, but merely someone who feels right in taking advantage of any power he can get his hands on. I'd feel happier with this interpretation if his cabinet picks were different.
It NEVER made sense. Not ever. In the early days it took inventors and coerced them into chasing around the country looking for people who might be infringing on their patents. As companies took over it became more and more about getting patents so vague that nobody could tell for sure what what infringing, and getting the legal decisions that meant that was a case that would be found in favor of the patent holder.
The basic idea was reasonable, but the implementation was flawed from the beginning, and my guess is that the grant of a monopoly was the basic flaw. Perhaps instead it should have been a law that the government would only buy from the holder, or a licensee, of the patent.
If you try to punch through a car window, all you can expect is broken knuckles. The right tool is a glass cutter, but a sharp piece of hard metal should do in a pinch, provided there's only one layer of glass, and not two layers with a layer of glue between them. I vaguely remember seeing that configuration in some broken car glass, and if that's the case you'd need to first score the layer closest to you, and then strike the delineated area with enough force to not only detach it, but also to shatter the second layer.
OTOH, car glass is all tempered (unless it's an antique, in which case the doors won't lock themselves), so you don't need to worry about sharp edges.
It's not that simple. I personally prefer the mechanical roll-down windows...and my wife strongly prefers a station wagon the size of a mini. So we go looking for a new car...nobody we looked at had mechanical roll-down windows, but the onlly mini-sized station wagon we could find was a used car. Only one instance, too. It's been a decent car in most ways, but I'd still rather be able to roll down the window when the battery is dead or the engine's turned off.
Later I heard about the Volkswagen Rabbit, so there was probably actually a choice if we'd kept looking, but my bet would be that the windows are electrically operated.
Not really. One should read the first part of the first volume, but it's general use is as a reference book(s). I have frequently gone back to parts of volume 2, but I've rarely needed the other volumes. For awhile I was planning to learn MIX but instead I only skimmed over it...and instead learned CDC 6400 assembler, which I had a practical need for. But the first part of volume 1 should be considered mandatory. Read it, know it, and build it into yourself so deeply you forget it...the knowledge is just implicitly there.
That was my first thought. My second thought was..."I wonder how hard it is to recover your laptop when you get back from your trip?" The TSA as a reputation as quite light-fingered, so maybe these are just the ones nobody wanted, because they'd already acquired all they need. Unless you think they are selling them, in which case this is hard to explain.
You can be pretty sure that the process will use lots of energy (relative to, say, grass). So it's unlikely to be competitive even if there are decent sources of energy available (say you steal chloroplasts from some algae, the way some [were they bacteria] do). I'm quite willing to accept that they've found a more efficient carbohydrate synthesis mechanism, but that's a long way from something that's capable of competition with microbes that have been evolving for 4 billion years (plus or minus a bit). That said, if they were to genegineer it into an existing microbe it might be successful in some environments. And that could be a problem. So when they get ready to do that in 15-40 years be sure they've filled out all their environmental impact reports properly. Including recovery strategies in case of a mistake.
Just as catalysts usually get poisoned and need to be regenerated, so enzymes usually suffer degradation in use. In living organisms they're usually they're digested and rebuilt rather than just reconditioned.
So the cost of the enzymes is likely to be a real factor. It's also likely to be a small one...but you can't be really sure without knowing how they are acquired/synthesized/reconditioned.
Chemical reactions slow down remarkably as the temperature drops. I could envision using this as a spore transportation system, but they'd need to pick an asteroid that was either headed out-system (towards another brown dwarf) or headed towards a plausible planet. And the success rate should be expected to be less than that of wind-pollened plants. If they land on a planet they'll be evolving in the kind of environment we know about subject to things like gravity, so they'll probably need to start in an ocean...and we're back where *we* started. (Obviously there are different kinds of planet, and some of them may work, but in each case the evolutionary adaptations required would take a long time and a lot of evolution away from the star-resident form.)
Most of them won't, but the ones doing the largest business are quite likely to, and are quite likely to want to reduce their exposure at somebody else's cost.
That's a pretty big "if". The escape velocity of a star, even a brown dwarf, is pretty high, and if you though that the Earth's atmosphere got in the way of space flight, whew! They'd need to go directly to nuclear rocket.
Then there's the question of how large the minimum intelligent entity would be. They need to be diffuse enough to float. Whoops, that means that their brain "cells" need to communicate with each other via wireless transmission. And that implies at each entity would need a huge transmission spectrum. Possibly they could do it at the microwave level, but they might need to go to terahertz or infrared. But the diffuse means that they require an immense volume.
Then there's the question of what they build the vehicle out of. It has to be something that will float in the area of the cloud within which they can live...or they've got to have some kind of remote manipulator.
I really think that space flight is extremely unlikely for this kind of life form. But they might well be able to think extremely well. Possibly they would be "inherently telepathic" to the extent of only having a group mind, as the individual floating entity would probably be too simple to be intelligent.
I don't think that would suffice, though it's certainly a reasonable weighing consideration. And what they specified as the technique wouldn't suffice, either, though it would reduce the fake news considerably. And invite a "fake news" arms race.
At some point verification requires somebody you reasonably trust actually going and checking. I suppose a video might count, but you need to consider that every video is going to provide you with a biased view, selected by the angles from which observation happens. And fake videos aren't unknown, so you need to start including ways to detect whether the video was altered...which invites another arms race.
And you'll never be really sure. You shouldn't be sure of even things that you personally saw, because memory is fallible.
So consider this program as something that improves the signal-to-noise ratio. If that's the goal there are lots of things that can be done, and the early versions should be succeeded by more advanced versions for a long time. And even the early things are useful.
For comparison, consider the progress in e-mail filters. And the twin problems of false positives and false negatives. Now imagine trying to do without ANY e-mail filter.
It's not a new feature. The "story" is because someone who exhibited a...umh... loose control of his utterances used texting so verbosely during the campaign. Perhaps it was intended as a joke, but it's a joke with a *potential* barb in it.
There's lots of things about the incoming administration where I feel "well, we'll just have to see how things work out.". This is one of the less serious ones, so *I* feel it makes a decent tension relieving joke. When I look at his nominated cabinet, this is the least horrible potentiality of the incoming administration.
You don't want to know how much "*real* affect can the president actually have on one's daily life". The main protection is that he's unlikely to have that as his goal. The executive has been accreting power ever since Lincoln. Probably before, but Lincoln was an inflection point. Currently the "imperial presidency" isn't an overstatement. The checks on his actions are minor, and easily overcome if he's determined.
I believe that there are many places that let you criticize anyone you choose, provided you don't do it in the local language. Has Canada, e.g., ever censored ANYTHING written in Swahili?
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There are reasons why that's a poor idea. E.g., wider hips pose mobility issues. The system really needs a thorough redesign so that birth doesn't need to fit through the pelvic girdle, but that's far beyond us. The current system was designed for creatures with horizontal body position and small head size. For that it works fine. As it is... it puts strong constraints on development.
Don't think that this is the only place where history impacts evolution, though. Spiders have to drink their dinner because their brain is in a circle around their esophagus (or whatever you call that part of a spider). This worked out fine originally, but spiders became successful, and started growing and getting smarter, so their brains got larger, and now they need a liquid diet. If they get any smarter they won't be able to eat at all.
And speaking of the esophagus, consider the human trachea. Ever have something "go down the wrong pipe"? That's because of a very old design decision that's now apparently impossible to evolve a solution for. The lungs share the plumbing with the gut in the neck and head. There are lots of other similar features calling for a re-factoring of the design, but evolution doesn't work that way. All the intermediates must we not only working, but competitive WRT the prior model. No intermediate regressions allowed. (Except, of course, at times like after a major extinction event, when the selection pressure temporarily becomes quite low.)
You are correct that it is already too late to prevent global warming. It's been happening to some degree since we started farming rice. OTOH, a mild global warming has been advantageous. Without it we'd be entering an ice age. The ramped-up-on-steroids global warming that we've been pushing since the start of the industrial revolution, however, is something else again. We don't know just how bad it's going to get, but I do know that the actual projections have had the higher ends trimmed to avoid political repercussions. (Were the lower ends also trimmed? If so I haven't heard so.) Some of the model results that were excluded actually DO have Antarctica melting, and not just around the edges. Well, that's a lot worse than the mean projections, but the mean projection is that its going to be more than the 2 degrees Celsius that people talk about, probably closer to 4 degrees. That's nearly 8 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's going to mean LOTS of ice melting, and lots of deserts where there used to be farmland. It means that Canada will probably become good farmland...if it can get enough water. Oh, yes. It also means that the temperatures are going to get so high that we can't rely on any of the current models, because wind and ocean currents will shift too much. So we can't be sure where it's going to be wet, where it's going to be dry, or how wet or how dry.
My personal expectation (I'm no specialist, and a bit of a pessimist) is that we'll see over a meter sea level rise before the end of the century. Please note that this is not more extreme than some of the models predict, as some of them talk about 10's of meters, though I'm not sure of the timeline for that. I'm sort of expecting the Tethy's sea to form again for the first time since the Jurassic, but it would be a pretty shallow sea, I'm guessing less than a meter deep in most places...but how deep, of course, depends on the actual rise in sea levels. Maybe some genetic engineer will recreate the pleasiasaur to swim in it.
Guess what..... Those two choices aren't contradictory.
You have a really weird way of judging validity. Mind you, I do think that Hurricanes should have female names, but to think that has anything to do the validity is ... hard to understand.
Maybe the House will change after the next election, but the Senators up for election pretty much guarantee that Republican control of the Senate will continue. Unless, of course, something even worse happens. (Pick any one of hundreds or thousands of possibilities.)
Well, depending on how much you believe the rhetoric, anyone who isn't a white male might feel safer in China. I'm hoping that almost all of it is just rhetoric, but I don't feel any certainty about it. In fact if you believe *some* of the rhetoric anyone who isn't a rich white male might feel safer in China. This strikes me as unlikely, but remembering how a prior German democracy fell it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
OTOH, there are a lot of signs that Trump is not an actual racial bigot, but merely someone who feels right in taking advantage of any power he can get his hands on. I'd feel happier with this interpretation if his cabinet picks were different.
It NEVER made sense. Not ever. In the early days it took inventors and coerced them into chasing around the country looking for people who might be infringing on their patents. As companies took over it became more and more about getting patents so vague that nobody could tell for sure what what infringing, and getting the legal decisions that meant that was a case that would be found in favor of the patent holder.
The basic idea was reasonable, but the implementation was flawed from the beginning, and my guess is that the grant of a monopoly was the basic flaw. Perhaps instead it should have been a law that the government would only buy from the holder, or a licensee, of the patent.
To me that actually sounds more plausible than breaking a window. I don't think the weather stripping provides that secure a seat.
If you try to punch through a car window, all you can expect is broken knuckles. The right tool is a glass cutter, but a sharp piece of hard metal should do in a pinch, provided there's only one layer of glass, and not two layers with a layer of glue between them. I vaguely remember seeing that configuration in some broken car glass, and if that's the case you'd need to first score the layer closest to you, and then strike the delineated area with enough force to not only detach it, but also to shatter the second layer.
OTOH, car glass is all tempered (unless it's an antique, in which case the doors won't lock themselves), so you don't need to worry about sharp edges.
It's not that simple. I personally prefer the mechanical roll-down windows...and my wife strongly prefers a station wagon the size of a mini. So we go looking for a new car...nobody we looked at had mechanical roll-down windows, but the onlly mini-sized station wagon we could find was a used car. Only one instance, too. It's been a decent car in most ways, but I'd still rather be able to roll down the window when the battery is dead or the engine's turned off.
Later I heard about the Volkswagen Rabbit, so there was probably actually a choice if we'd kept looking, but my bet would be that the windows are electrically operated.
Not really. One should read the first part of the first volume, but it's general use is as a reference book(s). I have frequently gone back to parts of volume 2, but I've rarely needed the other volumes. For awhile I was planning to learn MIX but instead I only skimmed over it...and instead learned CDC 6400 assembler, which I had a practical need for. But the first part of volume 1 should be considered mandatory. Read it, know it, and build it into yourself so deeply you forget it...the knowledge is just implicitly there.
That was my first thought. My second thought was..."I wonder how hard it is to recover your laptop when you get back from your trip?" The TSA as a reputation as quite light-fingered, so maybe these are just the ones nobody wanted, because they'd already acquired all they need. Unless you think they are selling them, in which case this is hard to explain.
You can be pretty sure that the process will use lots of energy (relative to, say, grass). So it's unlikely to be competitive even if there are decent sources of energy available (say you steal chloroplasts from some algae, the way some [were they bacteria] do). I'm quite willing to accept that they've found a more efficient carbohydrate synthesis mechanism, but that's a long way from something that's capable of competition with microbes that have been evolving for 4 billion years (plus or minus a bit). That said, if they were to genegineer it into an existing microbe it might be successful in some environments. And that could be a problem. So when they get ready to do that in 15-40 years be sure they've filled out all their environmental impact reports properly. Including recovery strategies in case of a mistake.
Just as catalysts usually get poisoned and need to be regenerated, so enzymes usually suffer degradation in use. In living organisms they're usually they're digested and rebuilt rather than just reconditioned.
So the cost of the enzymes is likely to be a real factor. It's also likely to be a small one...but you can't be really sure without knowing how they are acquired/synthesized/reconditioned.
I don't think doing it in public, where others are known to be able to access it, counts. But that's the general idea.
Chemical reactions slow down remarkably as the temperature drops. I could envision using this as a spore transportation system, but they'd need to pick an asteroid that was either headed out-system (towards another brown dwarf) or headed towards a plausible planet. And the success rate should be expected to be less than that of wind-pollened plants. If they land on a planet they'll be evolving in the kind of environment we know about subject to things like gravity, so they'll probably need to start in an ocean...and we're back where *we* started. (Obviously there are different kinds of planet, and some of them may work, but in each case the evolutionary adaptations required would take a long time and a lot of evolution away from the star-resident form.)
Anonymously send someone some random binary data. Prosecution win.
Most of them won't, but the ones doing the largest business are quite likely to, and are quite likely to want to reduce their exposure at somebody else's cost.
That only works if at least one of the candidates is "the right thing".
That's a pretty big "if". The escape velocity of a star, even a brown dwarf, is pretty high, and if you though that the Earth's atmosphere got in the way of space flight, whew! They'd need to go directly to nuclear rocket.
Then there's the question of how large the minimum intelligent entity would be. They need to be diffuse enough to float. Whoops, that means that their brain "cells" need to communicate with each other via wireless transmission. And that implies at each entity would need a huge transmission spectrum. Possibly they could do it at the microwave level, but they might need to go to terahertz or infrared. But the diffuse means that they require an immense volume.
Then there's the question of what they build the vehicle out of. It has to be something that will float in the area of the cloud within which they can live...or they've got to have some kind of remote manipulator.
I really think that space flight is extremely unlikely for this kind of life form. But they might well be able to think extremely well. Possibly they would be "inherently telepathic" to the extent of only having a group mind, as the individual floating entity would probably be too simple to be intelligent.
Distinguish between fake and wrong. They don't mean the same thing.
I don't think that would suffice, though it's certainly a reasonable weighing consideration. And what they specified as the technique wouldn't suffice, either, though it would reduce the fake news considerably. And invite a "fake news" arms race.
At some point verification requires somebody you reasonably trust actually going and checking. I suppose a video might count, but you need to consider that every video is going to provide you with a biased view, selected by the angles from which observation happens. And fake videos aren't unknown, so you need to start including ways to detect whether the video was altered...which invites another arms race.
And you'll never be really sure. You shouldn't be sure of even things that you personally saw, because memory is fallible.
So consider this program as something that improves the signal-to-noise ratio. If that's the goal there are lots of things that can be done, and the early versions should be succeeded by more advanced versions for a long time. And even the early things are useful.
For comparison, consider the progress in e-mail filters. And the twin problems of false positives and false negatives. Now imagine trying to do without ANY e-mail filter.
It's not a new feature. The "story" is because someone who exhibited a ...umh... loose control of his utterances used texting so verbosely during the campaign. Perhaps it was intended as a joke, but it's a joke with a *potential* barb in it.
There's lots of things about the incoming administration where I feel "well, we'll just have to see how things work out.". This is one of the less serious ones, so *I* feel it makes a decent tension relieving joke. When I look at his nominated cabinet, this is the least horrible potentiality of the incoming administration.
You don't want to know how much "*real* affect can the president actually have on one's daily life". The main protection is that he's unlikely to have that as his goal. The executive has been accreting power ever since Lincoln. Probably before, but Lincoln was an inflection point. Currently the "imperial presidency" isn't an overstatement. The checks on his actions are minor, and easily overcome if he's determined.
I believe that there are many places that let you criticize anyone you choose, provided you don't do it in the local language. Has Canada, e.g., ever censored ANYTHING written in Swahili?