Avatar was ridiculous on multiple levels, and we could build interstellar craft [wikipedia.org] right now if we wanted.
This is also not even close to "real-life". The fact that Project Orion is theoretically possible using present-day technology says nothing about whether it's practical, and even less about whether it's useful (since we know of no other habitable planets). I do agree with Carl Sagan's suggestion for what to do with our nuclear weapons, however.
However I suggest that we try to colonize this solar system first; Mars and Venus could probably be transformed into near-earthlike conditions, and Moon and other dead rocks too small to hold an atmosphere could support bubble-city colonies.
None of which will happen without either a massive increase in our GDP and technological abilities, or ruinously high taxes and/or deficits. And even if we started now, none of the people going to see Avatar would be alive to walk on the Moon or Mars, not that they'd be able to afford it anyway.
I hope that all of this will happen someday, and I'd like to see NASA laying the groundwork for it (by doing basic research, not feel-good stunts), and personally, I really want my own spaceship, but we're talking about multi-century projects here.
The director himself considers that his most important mission.
No, the National Review propagandist who wrote the article quoted an interview with Al Jazeera that claimed the director said this. Even if it's an accurate quote and not pulled out of context (which given the source, I doubt), it doesn't reveal anything other than Bolden's crappy media skills. It's awfully credulous of right-wingers to immediately take this at face value, considering that they've spent the last year-and-a-half denouncing everyone who even considered voting for Obama as delusional, besotted fools.
People flock to movies about space (Avatar has already grossed a billion bucks) but I don't see any interest in real-life space exploration outside a few buffs.
Keep in mind that while Avatar was unusually well-thought-out for a science fiction movie, interstellar travel is not even close to "real-life", so this doesn't really prove anything.
Even more brainless is that the same commenter posted the same link a total of four times in this thread, and got modded up twice. The author of the article, Byron York, is a writer for National Review, which would probably accuse Obama of pandering to Muslims if he wasn't personally drowning Arab infants in pig urine on live TV. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that either Bolden misspoke, or York is quoting the interview very selectively.
If successful, the robot in the moon will give ammunition to Obama's anti-space supporters who have wanted to redirect all NASA money into the welfare system for many years.This mission will signal the end of American manned space exploration.
The silliest thing about this tired, predictable troll is that none of the complaints that I've read about NASA's manned space program are calling for the government to spend less money on NASA. If anything, most of us would prefer that NASA's budget be increased substantially, but for more robots and deep-space probes, instead of massive money pits like Constellation and the ISS. (It's always funny how "redistribution of wealth" is acceptable when it's directed towards bloated aerospace contractors.) Personally, I'm not sorry to see the shuttle being retired, and I think a manned Mars mission is a waste of money right now, but I also really hope SpaceX is successful, and I'd probably wet my pants with excitement if Obama resurrected the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. (For the unfamiliar, this probe would have had multiple ion engines powered by a nuclear reactor, and thus wouldn't have been totally dependent on gravity assists - perhaps a good test case for future manned ships, but Bush canceled it in favor of a Mars trip, presumably using conventional chemical rockets. Ugh.)
They have multiple space stations going up, all controlled by the PLA.
I call bullshit. Just because some scientist or CCP apparatchik bragged in an interview with state-controlled media about China's glorious planes to colonize space, doesn't mean it's going to happen. Back in 2002 some Chinese space scientist was claiming that they'd have a manned moon landing and possibly even the start of a lunar base by 2010, which led to credulous stories in the BBC and other Western media. What we're seeing now is more of the same.
I have no doubt that China could do much of this stuff if it wanted to - but only at massive expense, and it's nothing that the US or EU or maybe even Russia couldn't do just as well. It probably won't happen, because bragging rights alone aren't worth flushing a huge chunk of your GDP down the toilet. Meanwhile, the US is also hard at work on high-powered lasers, and I'm willing to bet we're far ahead of China on that front, even though Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative died a quick and welcome death more than 20 years ago.
Oh well, many people throw pretty much everything (and anytime) behind Iron Curtain into "totalitarian"; might as well treat it as the accepted term, applied on equal terms...
This is partly because the governing ideology remained explicitly totalitarian, even if the governments themselves relaxed a little bit after Stalin's death. One of the books I'm reading now mentions Hungary as a place where citizens were allowed slightly more economic and social freedom, essentially as a way of keeping them from trying to disrupt the status quo. Yugoslavia was apparently pretty similar - citizens could travel without an exit visa. Poland (your place?) held onto Catholicism. The single-party rule and police states stuck around, of course, but those don't by themselves define a totalitarian regime.
North Korea is genuinely unique right now - only one or two other countries still require exit visas (Cuba and maybe Turkmenistan, I think), very few personality cults survive (same places, basically), and I don't think any country has such a vast system of prison camps. The entire country is basically a personal fief of the Kim dynasty. Somalia or eastern Congo may be more violent, but nowhere comes close to NK for sheer creepiness.
That's not shooting citizens or throwing them to jails?
You misread my comment. I wasn't claiming that purely authoritarian regimes are inherently less deadly - although the death toll usually isn't in the millions - only that the level of state control over individual life is different. Also, I wouldn't characterize many "Communist" regimes as truly totalitarian, including the Soviet Union post-Brezhnev; most of them eventually decayed into pretty standard corrupt oligarchies. It's the degree of social engineering (and the willingness to murder in pursuit of same) that sets genuinely totalitarian regimes apart.
Personally, I think the USA would be far more in line with what the Libertarians are advocating if it weren't for allowing the Judicial branch of govt to subvert so many laws by creating rulings that changed their original intent.
Perhaps, but some of the more. . . creative judicial rulings have changed the laws in ways that are much more in line with libertarian philosophy - for instance, Brown v. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, and I could probably come up with dozens more if I had time. Some of the legal reasoning seems specious to me, and God knows the Supreme Court has managed to slip in some real doozies (Kelo, Raich,...), but it's simply embarrassing that parts of this country still had sodomy laws into the 21st century, and that it took an unelected court to correct the situation. Remember, even a representative democracy isn't immune to the tyranny of the majority.
People forget that S. Korea was also a bit totalitarian for few decades after the war.
Authoritarian, not totalitarian. The military dictators running South Korea until the 1980s were not nice people, and the citizens living there didn't have any of the freedoms that people living in Western nations take for granted, and the post-war economic conditions weren't great either, but they didn't shoot people or throw them in prison camps for trying to leave the country, or make it illegal to own a radio that could tune into more than one station, and I don't think they had creepy personality cults either.
Very few modern countries have been authentically totalitarian - Nazi Germany and most (but not all) Communist nations were the most famous, also Taliban Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, but that's about it. I'm not very familiar with Spanish or Italian Fascism, but my impression is that they were more. . . restrained. Arguably Iran, "Myanmar", and Saudi Arabia have certain characteristics of totalitarian regimes, and a few others such as Saddam's Iraq certainly had the cults of personality, but they're inconsistent. Most dictatorships are simply authoritarian - violent, corrupt, and lawless, certainly, but less interested in mind control. I wouldn't want to live in any of those countries either, and I think the many of the US's strategic alliances were tragic mistakes (or outright immoral), but there is a difference nonetheless.
The Mars direct program layed out in the mid 90s pegged the cost at 20-30 billion over 10 years to put 3 teams of 4 astronauts (two scientists and two engineers each) onto nearly overlapping stays of 1.5 years apiece.
Constellation was already billions of dollars over budget without even giving us a working launcher. I don't think the Mars Direct estimate was remotely realistic. Of course the real cost is still only a fraction of our yearly defense budget, but I can think of much better uses of tens of billions of dollars of other people's money.
Honestly, If I had 50 billion lieing around, hell yes that is EXACTLY what I'd do. I couldn't think of a better project to put it towards. I mean seriously, past a certain point you've got all the boats, mansions, and cars you can want, and you're just saving up to buy your own country. Why not go to mars instead?
I have no objection to a private investor spending $50 billion to get to Mars (it might actually be possible at that cost, if you cut out the government). In fact, I think this is exactly what should happen eventually, instead of yet another pissing match between imperial powers - but if I had $50 billion lying around, there are still a lot of sick and hungry people on this planet who can't help themselves and certainly aren't going to get any help from their government or ours. I also think it would be more efficient to research new technologies that might make interplanetary travel faster and easier, instead of pouring the money into thoroughly obsolete chemical rockets.
it was at least 100 years before spain, england, and france started seriously exploiting the resources of the new world, and even longer before your first permanant colonies started springing up.
Actually, Spain started exploiting it almost immediately, and was colonizing Hispaniola (and attempting to convert or enslave the inhabitants) by the end of the 15th century. It only took two years after Columbus discovered the New World for the Spanish and Portuguese to sign a treaty dividing it up. The real colonization of the mainland didn't start for another few decades, however. It took a little while longer for the British and French to join in the plunder, but that's probably because they were too busy fighting each other. Britain didn't really become a major maritime power until the end of the 16th century when it wasted the Spanish Armada.
The big difference, anyway, is that the Americas had breathable air, fresh water, native food sources, and slave labor - everything you need to start building a permanent settlement, which the moon and Mars do not have. I actually agree that we should eventually colonize space, but unlike many of the posters here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect this to happen within my lifetime, nor do I think the government should be spending vast amounts of money to do it, given how many problems we have left to solve on this planet. But if you manage to get your hands on a couple hundred billion dollars, by all means, go right ahead.
China will have a *permanent* manned lunar base by 2025. They *will* do this, not just talk about it.
So far, they've done a lot more talking than doing. It seems more imminent than it probably is only because credible news sources took the claims of some Chinese scientists too seriously, and because "OMFG China is becoming a superpower" stories have been in vogue for the past decade and becoming even more common. The first stories I could find on this were from 2002, and suggested that China might have a manned moon landing by 2010. Right now they're claiming that they might have a manned moon landing by 2020, or maybe 2030, or they might set up a lunar base by 2030, but none of this appears to be actually funded yet.
I'm sure they could do this if they really wanted to, just like the US could have landed someone on Mars decades ago, but it's probably going to take just as long for them to actually get around to it. The problem, as always, is not that the technology isn't available, it's that the available technology is so cripplingly expensive and the tangible rewards so limited. One of the claims is that they'll mine the lunar surface for He-3 for fusion power. . . which still hasn't even been proven, and with ITER climbing above $20 billion, behind schedule and already reduced in size, I'm not optimistic about that changing any time soon.
Right now it's to China's advantage - or at least its leaders think it is - to make these bold claims so they can impress everyone and throw their weight around just like the USA has been doing for the last 65 years. There's no reason why China can't continue to become wealthier and a true superpower, but their government is so tin-eared that I doubt it's going to be as rapid and smooth a rise as our local prophets of doom seem to think. Once they start getting sucked into resource wars and citizens of Third-World countries start burning Chinese flags outside their embassies and the tens-of-millions of surplus young Chinese men realize that they're never getting laid ever, their progress may slow down a little bit.
There's another concern about special equipment as well -- for instance, in the US, some types of glassware needed to explore chemistry, and perhaps to some extent biology, have been classified as "drug paraphernalia" by our insane government.
Precision scales too. Any lab that does (bio)chemistry will have one of these - digital ones that can accurately measure quantities in micrograms. The suppliers won't sell to anyone except reputable institutions or companies, and the owners have to follow special rules for disposing of them, because they're considered drug paraphernalia. A lot of other lab equipment like centrifuges, chromatography systems, spectroscopes, and microscopes can be bought from university surplus departments or biotech liquidation auctions, but there will always be a few items that are nearly impossible to get.
Of course for molecular biology in general, the expense rather than availability of the equipment is the real issue. Stuff like X-ray crystallography is simply too expensive for a hobbyist even if you're picking up secondhand parts.
With the number of people contributing to Folding@Home etc I would have thought that something like this would have happened long ago.
Folding@Home is simulating the process of protein folding, not trying to guess the final structure. In fact, the F@H researchers already know the final structure - that's why they chose those proteins, because they're well-studied and experimentally tractable. FoldIt, on the other hand, isn't trying to present a physically accurate depiction of the process, it's just a way to guess what the folded protein will look like using as little CPU time as possible.
The funniest part is people assuming this will end up being a cure. Big Pharma has no interest in cures, just mildly effective maintenance drugs one has to keep purchasing in perpetuity.
Put down the bong and learn a little about how the real world works. Big Pharma only has a very limited monopoly on selling drugs. If and when the FDA finally approves it, they've only got maybe a decade and a bit left on the patent to make as much money as possible before dozens of generics in Third World countries start churning out copies at a fraction of the cost. (Heck, many of them don't even wait until the patent has expired.) How much more do you think a cure for influenza is worth than a "mildly effective maintenance drug"? It's certainly worth a lot more to me. Every government in the world that can afford it will be scrambling to buy it, which is probably several billion dollars in sales alone. If it's really the first and only cure on the market, they barely need to advertise, because every news outlet in the country will be screaming "FLU CURED". They will spend a decade basking in public appreciation and be remembered as "the company that cured the flu". I think this is probably worth many billions more than the potential of 50 years competing with cheap generics.
There is a more practical consideration, which is that patents have to be published, so if they really went out of their way to fuck up the cure to make it less effective for no other reason than long-term profit (which, again, does not exist), not only will someone else figure out the real cure eventually, the company looks like a bunch of assholes, more so than normal.
That said, I also doubt this is going to end up being a cure, simply because I have very limited faith in computational drug design, just like everyone else who's spent any time at all doing experimental biochemistry.
At least I wised up before the general election. If only I could take back the vote for him in the primary, the sweat equity I put in on the campaign trail and all of the people that I had previously convinced to vote for him.
. . . and if you could, no doubt President Clinton would this very day be making all of your dreams come true, right? Or President Edwards (shudders).
I'm disappointed by Obama too, but I had much more realistic expectations than most people who voted for him, and nothing he's done has particularly shocked me. Even in retrospect, I still wouldn't have voted for any of the other white-collar criminals, demagogues, and sheer lunatics who wanted the job.
But I could argue that putting a small, permanent, self-sustained human outpost on the Moon or Mars is possible with technologies currently available. Borderline possible, but still.
In theory, yes, it is "possible", if we're willing to pour an unlimited amount of tax dollars into the program. If you take away the "self-sustained" aspect, it becomes slightly more feasible, but still obscenely expensive. Personally, I hope we do both, eventually, but I'm not willing to see hundreds of billions in tax dollars spent to rush to accomplish this, versus, say, eradicating infectious disease or eliminating dependence on fossil fuels, both of which will improve far more lives here on Earth in much less time.
And yes, I know we spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on "defense", and no, I'm not happy about that either.
Colonization of other worlds is clearly impossible without manned flight.
Colonization of other worlds (which ones did you have in mind, by the way?) is clearly impossible without technologies that don't exist on Earth right now and won't exist for at least another few decades. Spending many billions of dollars on chemical rockets isn't going to get the job done.
I'm guessing it will take no more than a month for a combination of "conservative" and "progressive" blogs to rev up their teams of dittoheads to start flooding Twitter with politically themed messages, thus totally skewing the results. Same principle as Google-bombing, I guess. As someone who already views Twitter as almost entirely content-free, I can't say I'm particularly dismayed by this possibility. . . but anything that encourages the self-absorbed political zealots of this country can't possibly be good.
No one is asking to see the data before papers can be published.
The comment I was replying to left that somewhat in doubt. It can genuinely take 10 years to figure out a problem before you're anywhere close to publishing, although in crystallography that is much less common than it used to be. And some publicly-funded researchers do indeed have to release their data immediately, whether or not they're ready to publish. These are special cases, and I'm inclined to favor such a policy anyway, but there are drawbacks.
Give academics the respect and credit they deserve for collecting vast quantities of high quality data rather than merely for the 2 page paper they write about some interesting statistical anomalies they found in said data and this ceases to be a problem.
The problem is that interpreting raw scientific data is enormously time-consuming, because there's so much information available that we can't possibly assimilate it all. I have a PhD in biochemistry and advanced training in crystallography, but I couldn't look at a ribosome structure and easily figure out what it meant, because I don't know very much about ribosomes. The people solving the structure, on the other hand, have exactly the background necessary to perform detailed analyses, and they will undoubtedly notice things that completely escape me. And I think you're understating the value of the scientific literature. A 2 page paper on statistical anomalies won't get you a faculty position at a major university, but a well-written 10 page paper on the meaning of a crystal structure certainly can. This is even more the case if they took additional time to perform non-crystallographic experiments to verify new hypotheses.
I don't deny that there are issues with our system, but you're completely missing the point of writing papers. Simply generating massive amounts of data isn't considered science - figuring out what it means is. I say this as someone who is very good at generating data quickly, but not particularly good at interpreting it. Now I write data analysis software instead, and leave the question-asking to more suitable minds.
If a lab has been spending my tax money for 10 years, I want my employees to give me my data right Goddamn now.
Okay, but does that mean you should get to see the data before they're done analyzing it, before they can write a paper on their results? If we instituted such a rule, there would be nothing to stop scientists from bombarding their competitors with FOIA requests, and using the released data to scoop them. At the very least we'd need embargo rules, but even that won't entirely prevent abuses of the system. Most basic research isn't just a system of data factories, careful analysis by experts is essential for interpreting the results, and if scientists don't have some assurance that they'll be permitted to publish these analyses before their competitors stomp all over them, the academic system would simply break down. (Or is that what you want?)
my experience of this situation comes from protein crystallography and deposition of the hard won data there
Ah, a fellow crystallographer. Welcome, brother!
I was about to post a similar comment. However, I only agree with you up to a point. Once you publish a paper reporting the structure, all of the raw data should be made publicly available (including diffraction images - although deposition of those isn't quite feasible yet). I would apply the same standard to any other field: you shouldn't publish until you are comfortable releasing the underlying data. I don't care if you're still working on some super-secret follow-up paper, as far as I'm concerned your publication is useless if I can't go to the PDB and download the coordinates. And if you're using public resources to solve your structure (like NIH funding, or one of the DOE's synchrotrons), your results are public property.
There was once intense resistance to even mandating coordinate deposition (long before I got started in the field), which just sounds insane now. Some of the people doing the most complaining were in fact some of the best funded. A decade later, the field went through the same bullshit whining with regard to reflection data. Now most journals require both coordinates and reflections, and not only has the field not suffered in the slightest, many more studies are now possible and the majority of structures can be solved without experimental phasing. If we'd left things the way the naysayers wanted it, every group attempting to study, say, ribosome structure would have to either plead with more senior groups for coordinates in order to solve their structures (and, almost certainly, further bloat the author lists and potentially cede some control over their project - which, I imagine, would have suited the senior faculty just fine), or waste half a decade making heavy metal derivatives. It is difficult to convey to non-crystallographers how huge a waste of time and money - most of it coming from tax dollars - this scenario would be.
Now, where it gets messy is situations where you have to release data ASAP, instead of waiting until publication. American structural genomics groups do this (it may be a requirement of the NIH), but PDB deposition is more of an endpoint in itself for them, and no one is going to bother trying to scoop them on most of those proteins. Genomics centers also do this. A grad school classmate of mine worked on a sequencing project where much of the gruntwork was performed by the DOE, and they had extremely strict release rules. She complained that other groups (of bioinformaticists) could start analyzing the data before she'd had a chance to complete her own studies, because the outsiders didn't have to spend a lot of time thoroughly annotating the genome before publishing. (I don't think it held her back in the end - she graduated with several papers in Science.) In many situations like this, to obtain the data you need to agree to an embargo on publications, to prevent that sort of underhanded behavior. I saw an article retraction recently where the scientific content was undisputed, but the investigators had (unintentionally, it appeared) broken an embargo by submitting the paper when they did.
In general, I think the scientific community - especially the part funded by the public - should err on the side of maximum disclosure of data, and I don't have much sympathy for the researchers in this story (and I'm not particularly sympathetic towards "climate skeptics" either). I do worry that rules will be used to harass researchers in supposedly controversial fields (Richard Lenski's adventures with Conservapedia are a particularly nauseating example), but as a scientist, I also think the benefits of making massive amounts of data available to anyone are far too important to let these risks bother us, and the drawbacks of keeping such data private are much worse than having to fight off the occasional knuckle-dragging lunatic.
Slashdot Mirror
Avatar was ridiculous on multiple levels, and we could build interstellar craft [wikipedia.org] right now if we wanted.
This is also not even close to "real-life". The fact that Project Orion is theoretically possible using present-day technology says nothing about whether it's practical, and even less about whether it's useful (since we know of no other habitable planets). I do agree with Carl Sagan's suggestion for what to do with our nuclear weapons, however.
However I suggest that we try to colonize this solar system first; Mars and Venus could probably be transformed into near-earthlike conditions, and Moon and other dead rocks too small to hold an atmosphere could support bubble-city colonies.
None of which will happen without either a massive increase in our GDP and technological abilities, or ruinously high taxes and/or deficits. And even if we started now, none of the people going to see Avatar would be alive to walk on the Moon or Mars, not that they'd be able to afford it anyway.
I hope that all of this will happen someday, and I'd like to see NASA laying the groundwork for it (by doing basic research, not feel-good stunts), and personally, I really want my own spaceship, but we're talking about multi-century projects here.
As far as sexual assault goes, groping is the least evil.
. . . and this is exactly why the vast majority of the public (especially the female half) doesn't take geek complaints about DRM seriously.
The director himself considers that his most important mission.
No, the National Review propagandist who wrote the article quoted an interview with Al Jazeera that claimed the director said this. Even if it's an accurate quote and not pulled out of context (which given the source, I doubt), it doesn't reveal anything other than Bolden's crappy media skills. It's awfully credulous of right-wingers to immediately take this at face value, considering that they've spent the last year-and-a-half denouncing everyone who even considered voting for Obama as delusional, besotted fools.
People flock to movies about space (Avatar has already grossed a billion bucks) but I don't see any interest in real-life space exploration outside a few buffs.
Keep in mind that while Avatar was unusually well-thought-out for a science fiction movie, interstellar travel is not even close to "real-life", so this doesn't really prove anything.
Even more brainless is that the same commenter posted the same link a total of four times in this thread, and got modded up twice. The author of the article, Byron York, is a writer for National Review, which would probably accuse Obama of pandering to Muslims if he wasn't personally drowning Arab infants in pig urine on live TV. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that either Bolden misspoke, or York is quoting the interview very selectively.
If successful, the robot in the moon will give ammunition to Obama's anti-space supporters who have wanted to redirect all NASA money into the welfare system for many years.This mission will signal the end of American manned space exploration.
The silliest thing about this tired, predictable troll is that none of the complaints that I've read about NASA's manned space program are calling for the government to spend less money on NASA. If anything, most of us would prefer that NASA's budget be increased substantially, but for more robots and deep-space probes, instead of massive money pits like Constellation and the ISS. (It's always funny how "redistribution of wealth" is acceptable when it's directed towards bloated aerospace contractors.) Personally, I'm not sorry to see the shuttle being retired, and I think a manned Mars mission is a waste of money right now, but I also really hope SpaceX is successful, and I'd probably wet my pants with excitement if Obama resurrected the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. (For the unfamiliar, this probe would have had multiple ion engines powered by a nuclear reactor, and thus wouldn't have been totally dependent on gravity assists - perhaps a good test case for future manned ships, but Bush canceled it in favor of a Mars trip, presumably using conventional chemical rockets. Ugh.)
They have multiple space stations going up, all controlled by the PLA.
I call bullshit. Just because some scientist or CCP apparatchik bragged in an interview with state-controlled media about China's glorious planes to colonize space, doesn't mean it's going to happen. Back in 2002 some Chinese space scientist was claiming that they'd have a manned moon landing and possibly even the start of a lunar base by 2010, which led to credulous stories in the BBC and other Western media. What we're seeing now is more of the same.
I have no doubt that China could do much of this stuff if it wanted to - but only at massive expense, and it's nothing that the US or EU or maybe even Russia couldn't do just as well. It probably won't happen, because bragging rights alone aren't worth flushing a huge chunk of your GDP down the toilet. Meanwhile, the US is also hard at work on high-powered lasers, and I'm willing to bet we're far ahead of China on that front, even though Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative died a quick and welcome death more than 20 years ago.
Oh well, many people throw pretty much everything (and anytime) behind Iron Curtain into "totalitarian"; might as well treat it as the accepted term, applied on equal terms...
This is partly because the governing ideology remained explicitly totalitarian, even if the governments themselves relaxed a little bit after Stalin's death. One of the books I'm reading now mentions Hungary as a place where citizens were allowed slightly more economic and social freedom, essentially as a way of keeping them from trying to disrupt the status quo. Yugoslavia was apparently pretty similar - citizens could travel without an exit visa. Poland (your place?) held onto Catholicism. The single-party rule and police states stuck around, of course, but those don't by themselves define a totalitarian regime.
North Korea is genuinely unique right now - only one or two other countries still require exit visas (Cuba and maybe Turkmenistan, I think), very few personality cults survive (same places, basically), and I don't think any country has such a vast system of prison camps. The entire country is basically a personal fief of the Kim dynasty. Somalia or eastern Congo may be more violent, but nowhere comes close to NK for sheer creepiness.
That's not shooting citizens or throwing them to jails?
You misread my comment. I wasn't claiming that purely authoritarian regimes are inherently less deadly - although the death toll usually isn't in the millions - only that the level of state control over individual life is different. Also, I wouldn't characterize many "Communist" regimes as truly totalitarian, including the Soviet Union post-Brezhnev; most of them eventually decayed into pretty standard corrupt oligarchies. It's the degree of social engineering (and the willingness to murder in pursuit of same) that sets genuinely totalitarian regimes apart.
Personally, I think the USA would be far more in line with what the Libertarians are advocating if it weren't for allowing the Judicial branch of govt to subvert so many laws by creating rulings that changed their original intent.
Perhaps, but some of the more. . . creative judicial rulings have changed the laws in ways that are much more in line with libertarian philosophy - for instance, Brown v. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, and I could probably come up with dozens more if I had time. Some of the legal reasoning seems specious to me, and God knows the Supreme Court has managed to slip in some real doozies (Kelo, Raich, ...), but it's simply embarrassing that parts of this country still had sodomy laws into the 21st century, and that it took an unelected court to correct the situation. Remember, even a representative democracy isn't immune to the tyranny of the majority.
People forget that S. Korea was also a bit totalitarian for few decades after the war.
Authoritarian, not totalitarian. The military dictators running South Korea until the 1980s were not nice people, and the citizens living there didn't have any of the freedoms that people living in Western nations take for granted, and the post-war economic conditions weren't great either, but they didn't shoot people or throw them in prison camps for trying to leave the country, or make it illegal to own a radio that could tune into more than one station, and I don't think they had creepy personality cults either.
Very few modern countries have been authentically totalitarian - Nazi Germany and most (but not all) Communist nations were the most famous, also Taliban Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, but that's about it. I'm not very familiar with Spanish or Italian Fascism, but my impression is that they were more. . . restrained. Arguably Iran, "Myanmar", and Saudi Arabia have certain characteristics of totalitarian regimes, and a few others such as Saddam's Iraq certainly had the cults of personality, but they're inconsistent. Most dictatorships are simply authoritarian - violent, corrupt, and lawless, certainly, but less interested in mind control. I wouldn't want to live in any of those countries either, and I think the many of the US's strategic alliances were tragic mistakes (or outright immoral), but there is a difference nonetheless.
The Mars direct program layed out in the mid 90s pegged the cost at 20-30 billion over 10 years to put 3 teams of 4 astronauts (two scientists and two engineers each) onto nearly overlapping stays of 1.5 years apiece.
Constellation was already billions of dollars over budget without even giving us a working launcher. I don't think the Mars Direct estimate was remotely realistic. Of course the real cost is still only a fraction of our yearly defense budget, but I can think of much better uses of tens of billions of dollars of other people's money.
Honestly, If I had 50 billion lieing around, hell yes that is EXACTLY what I'd do. I couldn't think of a better project to put it towards. I mean seriously, past a certain point you've got all the boats, mansions, and cars you can want, and you're just saving up to buy your own country. Why not go to mars instead?
I have no objection to a private investor spending $50 billion to get to Mars (it might actually be possible at that cost, if you cut out the government). In fact, I think this is exactly what should happen eventually, instead of yet another pissing match between imperial powers - but if I had $50 billion lying around, there are still a lot of sick and hungry people on this planet who can't help themselves and certainly aren't going to get any help from their government or ours. I also think it would be more efficient to research new technologies that might make interplanetary travel faster and easier, instead of pouring the money into thoroughly obsolete chemical rockets.
it was at least 100 years before spain, england, and france started seriously exploiting the resources of the new world, and even longer before your first permanant colonies started springing up.
Actually, Spain started exploiting it almost immediately, and was colonizing Hispaniola (and attempting to convert or enslave the inhabitants) by the end of the 15th century. It only took two years after Columbus discovered the New World for the Spanish and Portuguese to sign a treaty dividing it up. The real colonization of the mainland didn't start for another few decades, however. It took a little while longer for the British and French to join in the plunder, but that's probably because they were too busy fighting each other. Britain didn't really become a major maritime power until the end of the 16th century when it wasted the Spanish Armada.
The big difference, anyway, is that the Americas had breathable air, fresh water, native food sources, and slave labor - everything you need to start building a permanent settlement, which the moon and Mars do not have. I actually agree that we should eventually colonize space, but unlike many of the posters here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect this to happen within my lifetime, nor do I think the government should be spending vast amounts of money to do it, given how many problems we have left to solve on this planet. But if you manage to get your hands on a couple hundred billion dollars, by all means, go right ahead.
China will have a *permanent* manned lunar base by 2025. They *will* do this, not just talk about it.
So far, they've done a lot more talking than doing. It seems more imminent than it probably is only because credible news sources took the claims of some Chinese scientists too seriously, and because "OMFG China is becoming a superpower" stories have been in vogue for the past decade and becoming even more common. The first stories I could find on this were from 2002, and suggested that China might have a manned moon landing by 2010. Right now they're claiming that they might have a manned moon landing by 2020, or maybe 2030, or they might set up a lunar base by 2030, but none of this appears to be actually funded yet.
I'm sure they could do this if they really wanted to, just like the US could have landed someone on Mars decades ago, but it's probably going to take just as long for them to actually get around to it. The problem, as always, is not that the technology isn't available, it's that the available technology is so cripplingly expensive and the tangible rewards so limited. One of the claims is that they'll mine the lunar surface for He-3 for fusion power. . . which still hasn't even been proven, and with ITER climbing above $20 billion, behind schedule and already reduced in size, I'm not optimistic about that changing any time soon.
Right now it's to China's advantage - or at least its leaders think it is - to make these bold claims so they can impress everyone and throw their weight around just like the USA has been doing for the last 65 years. There's no reason why China can't continue to become wealthier and a true superpower, but their government is so tin-eared that I doubt it's going to be as rapid and smooth a rise as our local prophets of doom seem to think. Once they start getting sucked into resource wars and citizens of Third-World countries start burning Chinese flags outside their embassies and the tens-of-millions of surplus young Chinese men realize that they're never getting laid ever, their progress may slow down a little bit.
There's another concern about special equipment as well -- for instance, in the US, some types of glassware needed to explore chemistry, and perhaps to some extent biology, have been classified as "drug paraphernalia" by our insane government.
Precision scales too. Any lab that does (bio)chemistry will have one of these - digital ones that can accurately measure quantities in micrograms. The suppliers won't sell to anyone except reputable institutions or companies, and the owners have to follow special rules for disposing of them, because they're considered drug paraphernalia. A lot of other lab equipment like centrifuges, chromatography systems, spectroscopes, and microscopes can be bought from university surplus departments or biotech liquidation auctions, but there will always be a few items that are nearly impossible to get.
Of course for molecular biology in general, the expense rather than availability of the equipment is the real issue. Stuff like X-ray crystallography is simply too expensive for a hobbyist even if you're picking up secondhand parts.
With the number of people contributing to Folding@Home etc I would have thought that something like this would have happened long ago.
Folding@Home is simulating the process of protein folding, not trying to guess the final structure. In fact, the F@H researchers already know the final structure - that's why they chose those proteins, because they're well-studied and experimentally tractable. FoldIt, on the other hand, isn't trying to present a physically accurate depiction of the process, it's just a way to guess what the folded protein will look like using as little CPU time as possible.
The funniest part is people assuming this will end up being a cure. Big Pharma has no interest in cures, just mildly effective maintenance drugs one has to keep purchasing in perpetuity.
Put down the bong and learn a little about how the real world works. Big Pharma only has a very limited monopoly on selling drugs. If and when the FDA finally approves it, they've only got maybe a decade and a bit left on the patent to make as much money as possible before dozens of generics in Third World countries start churning out copies at a fraction of the cost. (Heck, many of them don't even wait until the patent has expired.) How much more do you think a cure for influenza is worth than a "mildly effective maintenance drug"? It's certainly worth a lot more to me. Every government in the world that can afford it will be scrambling to buy it, which is probably several billion dollars in sales alone. If it's really the first and only cure on the market, they barely need to advertise, because every news outlet in the country will be screaming "FLU CURED". They will spend a decade basking in public appreciation and be remembered as "the company that cured the flu". I think this is probably worth many billions more than the potential of 50 years competing with cheap generics.
There is a more practical consideration, which is that patents have to be published, so if they really went out of their way to fuck up the cure to make it less effective for no other reason than long-term profit (which, again, does not exist), not only will someone else figure out the real cure eventually, the company looks like a bunch of assholes, more so than normal.
That said, I also doubt this is going to end up being a cure, simply because I have very limited faith in computational drug design, just like everyone else who's spent any time at all doing experimental biochemistry.
At least I wised up before the general election. If only I could take back the vote for him in the primary, the sweat equity I put in on the campaign trail and all of the people that I had previously convinced to vote for him.
. . . and if you could, no doubt President Clinton would this very day be making all of your dreams come true, right? Or President Edwards (shudders).
I'm disappointed by Obama too, but I had much more realistic expectations than most people who voted for him, and nothing he's done has particularly shocked me. Even in retrospect, I still wouldn't have voted for any of the other white-collar criminals, demagogues, and sheer lunatics who wanted the job.
But I could argue that putting a small, permanent, self-sustained human outpost on the Moon or Mars is possible with technologies currently available. Borderline possible, but still.
In theory, yes, it is "possible", if we're willing to pour an unlimited amount of tax dollars into the program. If you take away the "self-sustained" aspect, it becomes slightly more feasible, but still obscenely expensive. Personally, I hope we do both, eventually, but I'm not willing to see hundreds of billions in tax dollars spent to rush to accomplish this, versus, say, eradicating infectious disease or eliminating dependence on fossil fuels, both of which will improve far more lives here on Earth in much less time.
And yes, I know we spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on "defense", and no, I'm not happy about that either.
Colonization of other worlds is clearly impossible without manned flight.
Colonization of other worlds (which ones did you have in mind, by the way?) is clearly impossible without technologies that don't exist on Earth right now and won't exist for at least another few decades. Spending many billions of dollars on chemical rockets isn't going to get the job done.
I'm guessing it will take no more than a month for a combination of "conservative" and "progressive" blogs to rev up their teams of dittoheads to start flooding Twitter with politically themed messages, thus totally skewing the results. Same principle as Google-bombing, I guess. As someone who already views Twitter as almost entirely content-free, I can't say I'm particularly dismayed by this possibility. . . but anything that encourages the self-absorbed political zealots of this country can't possibly be good.
No one is asking to see the data before papers can be published.
The comment I was replying to left that somewhat in doubt. It can genuinely take 10 years to figure out a problem before you're anywhere close to publishing, although in crystallography that is much less common than it used to be. And some publicly-funded researchers do indeed have to release their data immediately, whether or not they're ready to publish. These are special cases, and I'm inclined to favor such a policy anyway, but there are drawbacks.
Give academics the respect and credit they deserve for collecting vast quantities of high quality data rather than merely for the 2 page paper they write about some interesting statistical anomalies they found in said data and this ceases to be a problem.
The problem is that interpreting raw scientific data is enormously time-consuming, because there's so much information available that we can't possibly assimilate it all. I have a PhD in biochemistry and advanced training in crystallography, but I couldn't look at a ribosome structure and easily figure out what it meant, because I don't know very much about ribosomes. The people solving the structure, on the other hand, have exactly the background necessary to perform detailed analyses, and they will undoubtedly notice things that completely escape me. And I think you're understating the value of the scientific literature. A 2 page paper on statistical anomalies won't get you a faculty position at a major university, but a well-written 10 page paper on the meaning of a crystal structure certainly can. This is even more the case if they took additional time to perform non-crystallographic experiments to verify new hypotheses.
I don't deny that there are issues with our system, but you're completely missing the point of writing papers. Simply generating massive amounts of data isn't considered science - figuring out what it means is. I say this as someone who is very good at generating data quickly, but not particularly good at interpreting it. Now I write data analysis software instead, and leave the question-asking to more suitable minds.
If a lab has been spending my tax money for 10 years, I want my employees to give me my data right Goddamn now.
Okay, but does that mean you should get to see the data before they're done analyzing it, before they can write a paper on their results? If we instituted such a rule, there would be nothing to stop scientists from bombarding their competitors with FOIA requests, and using the released data to scoop them. At the very least we'd need embargo rules, but even that won't entirely prevent abuses of the system. Most basic research isn't just a system of data factories, careful analysis by experts is essential for interpreting the results, and if scientists don't have some assurance that they'll be permitted to publish these analyses before their competitors stomp all over them, the academic system would simply break down. (Or is that what you want?)
my experience of this situation comes from protein crystallography and deposition of the hard won data there
Ah, a fellow crystallographer. Welcome, brother!
I was about to post a similar comment. However, I only agree with you up to a point. Once you publish a paper reporting the structure, all of the raw data should be made publicly available (including diffraction images - although deposition of those isn't quite feasible yet). I would apply the same standard to any other field: you shouldn't publish until you are comfortable releasing the underlying data. I don't care if you're still working on some super-secret follow-up paper, as far as I'm concerned your publication is useless if I can't go to the PDB and download the coordinates. And if you're using public resources to solve your structure (like NIH funding, or one of the DOE's synchrotrons), your results are public property.
There was once intense resistance to even mandating coordinate deposition (long before I got started in the field), which just sounds insane now. Some of the people doing the most complaining were in fact some of the best funded. A decade later, the field went through the same bullshit whining with regard to reflection data. Now most journals require both coordinates and reflections, and not only has the field not suffered in the slightest, many more studies are now possible and the majority of structures can be solved without experimental phasing. If we'd left things the way the naysayers wanted it, every group attempting to study, say, ribosome structure would have to either plead with more senior groups for coordinates in order to solve their structures (and, almost certainly, further bloat the author lists and potentially cede some control over their project - which, I imagine, would have suited the senior faculty just fine), or waste half a decade making heavy metal derivatives. It is difficult to convey to non-crystallographers how huge a waste of time and money - most of it coming from tax dollars - this scenario would be.
Now, where it gets messy is situations where you have to release data ASAP, instead of waiting until publication. American structural genomics groups do this (it may be a requirement of the NIH), but PDB deposition is more of an endpoint in itself for them, and no one is going to bother trying to scoop them on most of those proteins. Genomics centers also do this. A grad school classmate of mine worked on a sequencing project where much of the gruntwork was performed by the DOE, and they had extremely strict release rules. She complained that other groups (of bioinformaticists) could start analyzing the data before she'd had a chance to complete her own studies, because the outsiders didn't have to spend a lot of time thoroughly annotating the genome before publishing. (I don't think it held her back in the end - she graduated with several papers in Science.) In many situations like this, to obtain the data you need to agree to an embargo on publications, to prevent that sort of underhanded behavior. I saw an article retraction recently where the scientific content was undisputed, but the investigators had (unintentionally, it appeared) broken an embargo by submitting the paper when they did.
In general, I think the scientific community - especially the part funded by the public - should err on the side of maximum disclosure of data, and I don't have much sympathy for the researchers in this story (and I'm not particularly sympathetic towards "climate skeptics" either). I do worry that rules will be used to harass researchers in supposedly controversial fields (Richard Lenski's adventures with Conservapedia are a particularly nauseating example), but as a scientist, I also think the benefits of making massive amounts of data available to anyone are far too important to let these risks bother us, and the drawbacks of keeping such data private are much worse than having to fight off the occasional knuckle-dragging lunatic.