Do they? So they do. What does mine say? Oh, it's the empty set. Maybe I should change it to match the "current location" field, whenever I update that. (Well, it is an editable field after all! Not a WORM field, as it plainly should be. Shows how important FB consider it to be.)
I'm sure that they can deduce nationality information. Which is not the same as being told it. And it is prone to getting things wrong : they could well deduce from my associations etc that I'm culturally a Brit. What nationality I am on the other hand, could change any day I choose to change it (and I am half-considering changing it) ; but it's pretty unlikely that my cultural identity would change noticeably.
Back to my original point though : one's nationality is not likely very important to advertisers. An advertiser on FB could deduce that I'm Russian, despite logging in from Tanzania, and could care less ; if however I buy something from them, then they care about whether or not my credit card clears. Likewise, I don't care if the company paying me is British, Cuban, North Korean, Canadian, or Iranian. It really doesn't matter a bit to me. Hell, I've even worked for Americans before.
And what was the original topic of discussion? Oh yes, some pseudo-legalistic threat to censor the posts of Indian people posting either on "facebook.in" , the posts Indian people read, or posts by Indians through other portals. (I can't see how the minister's possible jurisdiction could extend any further?) That needs some sort of legal basis, and without some high degree of confidence in the "nationality", it's so completely open to challenge that it's ridiculous.
The whole thing is ridiculous anyway, in the sense of "open to ridicule", which is what its receiving. But it would also be ridiculous and unworkable if you (Facebook) didn't have some answer to the question "does this legislation apply to this user's account?". I wonder if they took a deliberate choice that "we don't need nationality information for the advertising, and if we don't have it, then legislative attacks (such as the one they're exposed to here) are going to have problems at all sorts of levels."
Of course, it's equally possible that when the system was first set up, the assumption was "everyone is American" (given that it was an American college site... even that sounds pretty surprising - lots of foreigners there ; maybe they really didn't care), and then they chose to never add a request for nationality information.
On the other hand, quite pure (95%+) deposits of silicon dioxide, from which you can start your purification processing, is a lot more common on the surface of the Earth than diamond. Or reasonably pure graphite, for that matter.
The cost of silicon chips is almost entirely in the processing, not in the raw materials. Clean sand with 95%+ SiO2 costs almost exactly the same as the fuel to move it from the mine to the first processing plant.
At that point, if you've got an industrial source of reasonably pure molybdenum (which there is - it's used in considerable tonnages in the steel industry), you tap into that. And start purifying it.
100% of items handed in, have been handed in -- what a surprise! How do they track lost items that were not handed in?
It shouldn't be that difficult. The statistics would be a but wobbly, giving fairly wide error bars, but the data should be available.
(Caveat : this applies to Scotland ; it may not apply to the rest of Britain, let alone Australia ; the German system doesn't seem terribly different). I've lost mobile phones in the past - in the back of taxis normally - and on one occasion out of IIRC three, it's been in the police's lost property office (most taxi companies are pretty good about this ; it's ultimately not in their interest to not do so). Each time I go into the lost property office, they take a note of my name, a description of the item lost, and the approximate location (because a lot of taxi companies only make one run to the lost property office a week ; perfectly reasonable, no charges of "theft by finding" if there's an established record from the company and some sort of record-keeping). So, those records of lost property enquiries constitute a sample of the actual amount of lost property. The records of lost property actually handed in constitutes a different sample of the actual amount of lost property. The "hit rate" of matching lost property to enquiries should be enough to tie the two data sets together. I think the situation is comparable to a capture-tag-release-recapture-count tags experiment for estimating populations of wild animals, which is a standard operation. Hyper-geometric distribution, IIRC.
Oops, phone calls... got to go and be transport for people.
In unrelated news, Facebook tells India it will grandly give them all secret profile information on any indian national no matter what country they live in
I had to go and check, but in this country at least, Facebook doesn't collect nationality information. Presumably, they don't think it's important for selling you stuff.
The location you're posting from, where you went to school, etc, are only weak and very unreliable guides to nationality, citizenship, etc. If people followed them, then I've been Canadian, American, British, Scottish, Irish, Egyptian, Qatari, and Tanzanian so far this year. Oh, Spanish too. (Which reminds me to investigate the dual-citizenship possibilities before I need to renew my passport.)
I must remember to have a session of deleting adverts, marking every one as sexually offensive or uninteresting. Not that I'm trying to poison their database or anything.
Their tactics involve large numbers of archers with poison arrows ringing a solo elephant from all sides,
My emphasis on the "solo". Which is the point of the "ankle-snapper" type of traps.
Next time I'm in Africa (a few weeks), I'll see if I can find a game warden to discuss the efficacy of elephant herding techniques with. ("Hamish Something" the Logistics manager, who lives in-country, is likely to know who I need to talk to) But I'll maintain my caveat that these are not the same species, and detailed behaviours are likely to differ between the species. Indeed, they may well be "cultural" differences (to open another large can of wriggly worms), and so differ between proboscidean "clans".
I don't know much about Coelacanths, but considering that they've been found now living off of South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania,
About 1998 an ichthyologist (Erdmann? I can't be bothered checking) was walking through a fish market on holiday in Indonesia. to his face-palming astonishment, he met a coelacanth coming the other way. On a sack trolly. He was so astonished that he only got one photo of it before someone brought it and took it away. But that was enough. With modest additional work, he established the existence of a second population of the genus Latimeria in Indonesia. That has since been shown to be a separate species. But they're decidedly more widespread fishes than was thought until then.
These days, when (it's not an "if") someone pays me to go to PNG, or WA, or somewhere like the Keeling islands (http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=-12.586732,96.844482&spn=5.10221,10.821533&t=h&z=7&vpsrc=6) or Sri Lanka... this will be one pair of eyes that will be keeping very well peeled.
Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent.
Both points are granted. For ELEPHANTS. Which are not Mastodons. They're very closely related, it's certainly true, but complex issues like "intelligence" (what the hell do we mean by that anyway?) and behaviour vary a lot over quite short taxonomic distances.
Humans, anatomically modern humans with a few percent of Neanderthal and another few percent of Denisovan, are not the stupidest of creatures either.
Further down-thread the issue of pit traps and cliffs gets aired, again. A "Flintstone" model of pit trap would have a 15ft tall mastodon falling into a 16ft deep pit, and the straw man is trotted out that digging such a pit would have made the process energetically inefficient. Which is true. But you don't need a pit that's big enough to drown your mastodon in, you just need one that is deep enough (and unexpected enough) that it sprains or breaks one of the mastodon's four legs. Now, exactly how deep that is, I don't know precisely. But I do know that the elephant enclosure at a zoo I visited was surrounded by a "moat" around a metre deep and a metre wide, with a fence on the outside (to keep the humans out!). That gives a very much more credible scale of trap.
Now, put your 1m wide x 1m deep x (how wide?) mastodon trap across a pathway through dense woods (to channel the beasts), disguise it by felling a small tree across one side of the trap (so the panicked, chased mastodons don't see it as anything other than a tree across the path... set the herd running (spears, flaming brands, arrows, and a lot of strategic running away) in the desired direction... mastodon after mastodon after mastodon successfully gets over the trap, until one that is big enough, and clumsy enough trips. With luck it breaks it's neck, or one of the other beasts does the job for you ; pessimistically it just sprains a muscle. But you know which one it is : it's the one that can't keep up with the rest of the herd. At which point, it may not have stopped moving, but it is dead. Meat on (fewer than the normal number of) legs.
If I can figure it, our ancestors could figure it. Neither of us had our bloodlines too polluted by politicians or bankers.
You should also remember that humans primarily hunted Pygmy Mammoth, not the giant kind,
Why hunt pygmy mammoths when every population of mammoths (pygmy, giant, polkadot) contains small and relatively easily confused mammoths called babies? Thin skinned, they'd be relatively vulnerable to projectile weapons. get them bleeding, then keep harassing the herd to move along until the baby drops behind or just flat-out dies. As long as you take care to keep distance from the adults, and have co-operative, communicating hunters (to deflect attention from anyone who is cornered by an angry adult)... all should be manageable.
People did succeed in capturing and killing elephants in pre-gun times. But it would probably have not been a very efficient use of time.
If I were teleported into the palaeolithic and grunted-at to organise a mammoth hunt, I'd have looked at building pit-fall traps, tree-trunk tripwires and that sort of thing, before using fire and/ or weaponry to drive a stampede at my "killing ground". If one of them breaks a leg (or even it's neck!) on one of the traps, then we pile in with the spears until it's dead, then eat for a week ; if none of them trip, we spend a day re-camouflaging the traps (women and children's work!) while others (ruffty-tuffty men's work!) turn the herd, or go and start driving a naive herd towards the traps.
Should work. The same techniques may also work with bison etc, but you might want to put punji sticks around the trips. Again, they don't need to kill a beast themselves, merely hurt them badly enough that they'll be unable to keep up with the herd.
We don't know the habits of these animal very well, but most assuredly our ancestors did, for they used the bones by the thousands to build shelters. It's pretty implausible that they didn't have mammoth burgers too.
Those are reasonable concerns, Jeremiah. But in practice, you'd almost certainly be using an elephant as a surrogate dam, so perforce your mammoth would be growing up in elephant society. Which would mean that our behavioural study of "the mammoth" would be hopelessly shot from day one.
But accepting that, the interest in cloning the animal to see what it looks like (and what it tastes like)... is adequate justification, to my mind.
Sorry : that ellipsis was rule 34 kicking in. Mammoth blowing. I've seen elephant blowing. Someone would do it. Someone else would pay to see it being done. Quite a few "someone else"s would. There : we're onto "step 3 : profit".
I can't summon the energy to try to fit any more slashdot memes in.
Well, have we learned anything from living Coelacanths that we didn't already know from their fossils?
You've seen fossils of Latimeria? That's interesting, and it must be relatively new, because around 2003, I visited the man who literally wrote the book on coelacanths (ISBN : 0412784807) in his fossil-coelacanth-strewn lair, and he didn't mention any fossils of Latimeria. (Mind you, there was still vigorous debate at the time of whether the newly-discovered Indonesian population was the same species as the East African population.)
Where were the fossil Latimeria found? Oh, hang on, I should be able to work this out : you'd need somewhere that has "recently" (I'm a geologist - last couple of million years is "recently" to me) emerged from the sea, after previously being an area of submarine deposition. That rules out the majority of the East African coast (where I've been working for most of the last 6 months). Add in an extant environment for a Latimeria species... and the fossils would have to be from somewhere in Indonesia.
Do you have the reference? (I am being half serious.)
People regularly throw around the number 40 as being the minimum number of people to keep a diverse gene pool going, could that roughly be true for mammoths too?
"Throw around" sounds about as precise as this is. There isn't a huge amount of actual data about this.
If you look at every colonisation of any island by any species, then the minimum that is needed to start a colony is the arrival of a single pregnant female. For long-lived, slow breeding species such as humans (and elephants, and presumably mammoths), that's likely to be very dodgy on both the population genetics front, and the simple question of whether or not there are enough hands to feed enough mouths.
But in practice, that's not how things would happen. If you have a classical colonisation scenario of your beasties being caught on vegetation rafts in a flood (or on ice floes) every few decades, and carried to Terra Nova, then there's a reasonable chance of a newcomer arriving in the incipient colony every few decades. And it doesn't particularly matter if it's a male or female that arrives. That does a lot of good for population genetics.
There was a study published a few years ago of a wolf pack in southern Sweden. They're isolated from the main Finno-Russian population by a combination of tough landscape and many miles of unfriendly farmers, despite them being a protected species. The pack was, for a long time (I haven't read the paper for several years!), in pretty desperate straits genetically, with poor breeding success, and to the researchers following them were seeing a variety of diseases of in-breeding. (They could do a complete unambiguous family tree by doing DNA analyses on wolf turds, and track new pups.) The pack's size was stable at around a dozen, despite there being abundant wild(-ish) land and game for the pack to expand into. Then in the mid-90s one single solitary male (I think) wolf managed to make it through the gauntlet of central Sweden to meet up with the pack. Within a few years the pup count was rising rapidly, and the degree of consanguinity in the pups was dropping substantially. That's the effect of, literally, one incomer.
So, although 40-odd may be bandied around as a minimum safe population size, it's not a well-founded figure. It's also likely to be a decidedly different figure for different species.
Returning to the mammoth population subject : If I were planning a cloning/ breeding programme, I'd probably start by trying to clone a male. (Reasoning : the first one off the production line is going to be a "learning experience", and you really want to get your cows right for breeding from.) Then, learning lessons from "M1" and continuing genetic analysis of the raw material from new mammoth finds, I'd work on preparing my first cow : "F1".
(I've already realised that I'd have to do some careful background research to try to identify a restricted population of mammoth genetic material, in both time and space ; there's likely a lot of endemism in the populations, and mixing dissimilar genomes could cause issues. Say, one population has digestive genes optimised for grasses, while another population lived on leaves from trees... not good to mix them, at least not while learning mammoth biology.)
Back to the population : I've now got a (probably flawed) M1 and an F1 (hopefully better). It's going to be years before F1 is fit to attempt to breed, so I'd now turn back to trying to make a better M2 (say I'm only going to get to use one elephant's uterus per year). Then F2 ; then F3 ; then F4. By now, I'll be getting close to being able to breed off F1 (I think ; IANA mammoth keeper ; then again, no-one else is), so I'd better start to attend to my stock of males. I'm making the (not unjustified) assumption that modifying male's sperm is going to be cheaper and easier than modifying eggs, so I can use more-or-less off the shelf genetic engineering techniques to bring parts of
The Boy Scouts used to be a great organization. But recently it has became a utter mess pushing a religious agenda upon the kids.
The Boy Scouts have always been explicit about requiring their brainwashees to sign up for indoctrination in support of Queen, Country and God. They are, after all, a recruitment service for the army. Baden-Powell set them up explicitly to try to improve the average fitness and skill set of squaddies after his abysmal experiences with regular troops in the Boer War. In contrast, he had relatively good service from local Boer youths who formed a reconnaissance and sabotage corps for him : skills and tactics that he learned from them formed the basis for "Scouting for Boys".
The Scouts were not quite as God-sucking and militaristic as the Boys Brigade though. They really were the Hitler Youth in the making.
Peter Ward is a well-respected geologist, and I'm sure his book is well-written (I've read others by him, and numerous papers too) and well-researched. That doesn't make him right. Point (1) is much debated, but by no means a consensus. Point (2) is something we simply don't know about - some locked planets may be inimicable to life ; some may be more plainly pro-life than Earth. Consensus does not exist. Point (3) may or may not be important for within-solar system objects. Point (3) may or may not be important for extra-solar system objects. A weak consensus exists that both are probably important, but how important is not clear.
Points under (4) are more complex. The presence of (astrophysicist's use) metals is essential to any life chemistry that uses metals (atoms more complex than hydrogen and helium). But the metal content is not much related to a star's stability and duration. Size, on the other hand, is important to duration. However, low mass may well be associated with high variability of luminosity. So... there's not even a simple model to have a consensus on.
It's good to see that you're reading around on the subject. But you need to read more widely.
Until NASA starts qualifying its planets
NASA has asserted ownership and property rights over the light intensity data that it is releasing to the species? Can you cite the law under which it is making this assertion? And what is the jurisdiction of this alleged law?
You've got some fundamental misconceptions about how Kepler works.
Remember that Kepler looks at stars using the "transit" method. Basically it stares at the little point of light for a looooong time, never blinking and waits to see if the light drops just a teeny bit due to something passing in front of it. How long? Well since it has to calculate the orbital period,
Firstly, Kepler doesn't stare at any point of light : it stares at a point in space with a detector that covers (in Libraries of congress per blue whale) the area of your fist at arms length. At frequent intervals it notes down the brightness of every point-like source of light in that field of view, records those observations, zeros the detector, records some engineering data, then starts the next observation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Every few days, a batch of data is sent to the ground. Lather rinse and repeat for the 3.5 years mission duration.
The definition of "point-like source" is probably adjustable from the ground (they fiddled with the focus by a few microns a while ago). The duration of exposures are probably variable (they may use different lengths in a cycle, to widen the effective sensitivity range of the detector). But the satellite itself makes no analysis of the data beyond checking it's pointing and recording positions and intensities of the "point-like sources". As the pointing shifts, the apparent position of the "point-like sources" on the detector shifts, so the correlation of sources between catalogues of locations and intensities will need checking on the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they? So they do. What does mine say? Oh, it's the empty set. Maybe I should change it to match the "current location" field, whenever I update that. (Well, it is an editable field after all! Not a WORM field, as it plainly should be. Shows how important FB consider it to be.)
I'm sure that they can deduce nationality information. Which is not the same as being told it. And it is prone to getting things wrong : they could well deduce from my associations etc that I'm culturally a Brit. What nationality I am on the other hand, could change any day I choose to change it (and I am half-considering changing it) ; but it's pretty unlikely that my cultural identity would change noticeably.
Back to my original point though : one's nationality is not likely very important to advertisers. An advertiser on FB could deduce that I'm Russian, despite logging in from Tanzania, and could care less ; if however I buy something from them, then they care about whether or not my credit card clears. Likewise, I don't care if the company paying me is British, Cuban, North Korean, Canadian, or Iranian. It really doesn't matter a bit to me. Hell, I've even worked for Americans before.
And what was the original topic of discussion? Oh yes, some pseudo-legalistic threat to censor the posts of Indian people posting either on "facebook.in" , the posts Indian people read, or posts by Indians through other portals. (I can't see how the minister's possible jurisdiction could extend any further?) That needs some sort of legal basis, and without some high degree of confidence in the "nationality", it's so completely open to challenge that it's ridiculous.
The whole thing is ridiculous anyway, in the sense of "open to ridicule", which is what its receiving. But it would also be ridiculous and unworkable if you (Facebook) didn't have some answer to the question "does this legislation apply to this user's account?".
I wonder if they took a deliberate choice that "we don't need nationality information for the advertising, and if we don't have it, then legislative attacks (such as the one they're exposed to here) are going to have problems at all sorts of levels."
Of course, it's equally possible that when the system was first set up, the assumption was "everyone is American" (given that it was an American college site ... even that sounds pretty surprising - lots of foreigners there ; maybe they really didn't care), and then they chose to never add a request for nationality information.
Time to squash a pile of adverts.
On the other hand, quite pure (95%+) deposits of silicon dioxide, from which you can start your purification processing, is a lot more common on the surface of the Earth than diamond. Or reasonably pure graphite, for that matter.
But for certain, the first has a very much lower coefficient of fiction.
At that point, if you've got an industrial source of reasonably pure molybdenum (which there is - it's used in considerable tonnages in the steel industry), you tap into that. And start purifying it.
"Get out! We don't serve superluminal particles in here!" said the bar man.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
[cymbal crash]
That would be an Apple-flavoured neutrino then, not an electron-, muon- or tau-flavoured neutrino?
Evidence, please. Including some basic physics for the detector.
It shouldn't be that difficult. The statistics would be a but wobbly, giving fairly wide error bars, but the data should be available.
(Caveat : this applies to Scotland ; it may not apply to the rest of Britain, let alone Australia ; the German system doesn't seem terribly different). I've lost mobile phones in the past - in the back of taxis normally - and on one occasion out of IIRC three, it's been in the police's lost property office (most taxi companies are pretty good about this ; it's ultimately not in their interest to not do so). Each time I go into the lost property office, they take a note of my name, a description of the item lost, and the approximate location (because a lot of taxi companies only make one run to the lost property office a week ; perfectly reasonable, no charges of "theft by finding" if there's an established record from the company and some sort of record-keeping).
So, those records of lost property enquiries constitute a sample of the actual amount of lost property.
The records of lost property actually handed in constitutes a different sample of the actual amount of lost property.
The "hit rate" of matching lost property to enquiries should be enough to tie the two data sets together. I think the situation is comparable to a capture-tag-release-recapture-count tags experiment for estimating populations of wild animals, which is a standard operation. Hyper-geometric distribution, IIRC.
Oops, phone calls ... got to go and be transport for people.
I had to go and check, but in this country at least, Facebook doesn't collect nationality information. Presumably, they don't think it's important for selling you stuff.
The location you're posting from, where you went to school, etc, are only weak and very unreliable guides to nationality, citizenship, etc. If people followed them, then I've been Canadian, American, British, Scottish, Irish, Egyptian, Qatari, and Tanzanian so far this year. Oh, Spanish too. (Which reminds me to investigate the dual-citizenship possibilities before I need to renew my passport.)
I must remember to have a session of deleting adverts, marking every one as sexually offensive or uninteresting. Not that I'm trying to poison their database or anything.
On a scale from "zero" to "impressive", that's impressive. Got to pass that one on to Dad (a retired chemist).
My emphasis on the "solo".
Which is the point of the "ankle-snapper" type of traps.
Next time I'm in Africa (a few weeks), I'll see if I can find a game warden to discuss the efficacy of elephant herding techniques with. ("Hamish Something" the Logistics manager, who lives in-country, is likely to know who I need to talk to) But I'll maintain my caveat that these are not the same species, and detailed behaviours are likely to differ between the species. Indeed, they may well be "cultural" differences (to open another large can of wriggly worms), and so differ between proboscidean "clans".
About 1998 an ichthyologist (Erdmann? I can't be bothered checking) was walking through a fish market on holiday in Indonesia. to his face-palming astonishment, he met a coelacanth coming the other way. On a sack trolly. He was so astonished that he only got one photo of it before someone brought it and took it away. But that was enough. With modest additional work, he established the existence of a second population of the genus Latimeria in Indonesia. That has since been shown to be a separate species. But they're decidedly more widespread fishes than was thought until then.
These days, when (it's not an "if") someone pays me to go to PNG, or WA, or somewhere like the Keeling islands (http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=-12.586732,96.844482&spn=5.10221,10.821533&t=h&z=7&vpsrc=6) or Sri Lanka ... this will be one pair of eyes that will be keeping very well peeled.
Manis mastodon?
Both points are granted. For ELEPHANTS. Which are not Mastodons. They're very closely related, it's certainly true, but complex issues like "intelligence" (what the hell do we mean by that anyway?) and behaviour vary a lot over quite short taxonomic distances.
Humans, anatomically modern humans with a few percent of Neanderthal and another few percent of Denisovan, are not the stupidest of creatures either.
Further down-thread the issue of pit traps and cliffs gets aired, again. A "Flintstone" model of pit trap would have a 15ft tall mastodon falling into a 16ft deep pit, and the straw man is trotted out that digging such a pit would have made the process energetically inefficient. Which is true. But you don't need a pit that's big enough to drown your mastodon in, you just need one that is deep enough (and unexpected enough) that it sprains or breaks one of the mastodon's four legs. Now, exactly how deep that is, I don't know precisely. But I do know that the elephant enclosure at a zoo I visited was surrounded by a "moat" around a metre deep and a metre wide, with a fence on the outside (to keep the humans out!). That gives a very much more credible scale of trap.
Now, put your 1m wide x 1m deep x (how wide?) mastodon trap across a pathway through dense woods (to channel the beasts), disguise it by felling a small tree across one side of the trap (so the panicked, chased mastodons don't see it as anything other than a tree across the path ... set the herd running (spears, flaming brands, arrows, and a lot of strategic running away) in the desired direction ... mastodon after mastodon after mastodon successfully gets over the trap, until one that is big enough, and clumsy enough trips. With luck it breaks it's neck, or one of the other beasts does the job for you ; pessimistically it just sprains a muscle. But you know which one it is : it's the one that can't keep up with the rest of the herd. At which point, it may not have stopped moving, but it is dead. Meat on (fewer than the normal number of) legs.
If I can figure it, our ancestors could figure it. Neither of us had our bloodlines too polluted by politicians or bankers.
Why hunt pygmy mammoths when every population of mammoths (pygmy, giant, polkadot) contains small and relatively easily confused mammoths called babies? Thin skinned, they'd be relatively vulnerable to projectile weapons. get them bleeding, then keep harassing the herd to move along until the baby drops behind or just flat-out dies. As long as you take care to keep distance from the adults, and have co-operative, communicating hunters (to deflect attention from anyone who is cornered by an angry adult) ... all should be manageable.
People did succeed in capturing and killing elephants in pre-gun times. But it would probably have not been a very efficient use of time.
If I were teleported into the palaeolithic and grunted-at to organise a mammoth hunt, I'd have looked at building pit-fall traps, tree-trunk tripwires and that sort of thing, before using fire and/ or weaponry to drive a stampede at my "killing ground". If one of them breaks a leg (or even it's neck!) on one of the traps, then we pile in with the spears until it's dead, then eat for a week ; if none of them trip, we spend a day re-camouflaging the traps (women and children's work!) while others (ruffty-tuffty men's work!) turn the herd, or go and start driving a naive herd towards the traps.
Should work. The same techniques may also work with bison etc, but you might want to put punji sticks around the trips. Again, they don't need to kill a beast themselves, merely hurt them badly enough that they'll be unable to keep up with the herd.
We don't know the habits of these animal very well, but most assuredly our ancestors did, for they used the bones by the thousands to build shelters. It's pretty implausible that they didn't have mammoth burgers too.
That's not a problem, as long as the radius of curvature is sufficiently small.
He can have my UID when he prys the password from my cold dead fingers.
This is a sign of favour.
But accepting that, the interest in cloning the animal to see what it looks like (and what it tastes like) ... is adequate justification, to my mind.
Sorry : that ellipsis was rule 34 kicking in. Mammoth blowing. I've seen elephant blowing. Someone would do it. Someone else would pay to see it being done. Quite a few "someone else"s would. There : we're onto "step 3 : profit".
I can't summon the energy to try to fit any more slashdot memes in.
You've seen fossils of Latimeria? That's interesting, and it must be relatively new, because around 2003, I visited the man who literally wrote the book on coelacanths (ISBN : 0412784807) in his fossil-coelacanth-strewn lair, and he didn't mention any fossils of Latimeria. (Mind you, there was still vigorous debate at the time of whether the newly-discovered Indonesian population was the same species as the East African population.)
Where were the fossil Latimeria found? Oh, hang on, I should be able to work this out : you'd need somewhere that has "recently" (I'm a geologist - last couple of million years is "recently" to me) emerged from the sea, after previously being an area of submarine deposition. That rules out the majority of the East African coast (where I've been working for most of the last 6 months). Add in an extant environment for a Latimeria species ... and the fossils would have to be from somewhere in Indonesia.
Do you have the reference? (I am being half serious.)
"Throw around" sounds about as precise as this is. There isn't a huge amount of actual data about this.
If you look at every colonisation of any island by any species, then the minimum that is needed to start a colony is the arrival of a single pregnant female. For long-lived, slow breeding species such as humans (and elephants, and presumably mammoths), that's likely to be very dodgy on both the population genetics front, and the simple question of whether or not there are enough hands to feed enough mouths.
But in practice, that's not how things would happen. If you have a classical colonisation scenario of your beasties being caught on vegetation rafts in a flood (or on ice floes) every few decades, and carried to Terra Nova, then there's a reasonable chance of a newcomer arriving in the incipient colony every few decades. And it doesn't particularly matter if it's a male or female that arrives. That does a lot of good for population genetics.
There was a study published a few years ago of a wolf pack in southern Sweden. They're isolated from the main Finno-Russian population by a combination of tough landscape and many miles of unfriendly farmers, despite them being a protected species. The pack was, for a long time (I haven't read the paper for several years!), in pretty desperate straits genetically, with poor breeding success, and to the researchers following them were seeing a variety of diseases of in-breeding. (They could do a complete unambiguous family tree by doing DNA analyses on wolf turds, and track new pups.) The pack's size was stable at around a dozen, despite there being abundant wild(-ish) land and game for the pack to expand into. Then in the mid-90s one single solitary male (I think) wolf managed to make it through the gauntlet of central Sweden to meet up with the pack. Within a few years the pup count was rising rapidly, and the degree of consanguinity in the pups was dropping substantially. That's the effect of, literally, one incomer.
So, although 40-odd may be bandied around as a minimum safe population size, it's not a well-founded figure. It's also likely to be a decidedly different figure for different species.
Returning to the mammoth population subject : If I were planning a cloning/ breeding programme, I'd probably start by trying to clone a male. (Reasoning : the first one off the production line is going to be a "learning experience", and you really want to get your cows right for breeding from.) Then, learning lessons from "M1" and continuing genetic analysis of the raw material from new mammoth finds, I'd work on preparing my first cow : "F1".
(I've already realised that I'd have to do some careful background research to try to identify a restricted population of mammoth genetic material, in both time and space ; there's likely a lot of endemism in the populations, and mixing dissimilar genomes could cause issues. Say, one population has digestive genes optimised for grasses, while another population lived on leaves from trees ... not good to mix them, at least not while learning mammoth biology.)
Back to the population : I've now got a (probably flawed) M1 and an F1 (hopefully better). It's going to be years before F1 is fit to attempt to breed, so I'd now turn back to trying to make a better M2 (say I'm only going to get to use one elephant's uterus per year). Then F2 ; then F3 ; then F4. By now, I'll be getting close to being able to breed off F1 (I think ; IANA mammoth keeper ; then again, no-one else is), so I'd better start to attend to my stock of males. I'm making the (not unjustified) assumption that modifying male's sperm is going to be cheaper and easier than modifying eggs, so I can use more-or-less off the shelf genetic engineering techniques to bring parts of
The Boy Scouts have always been explicit about requiring their brainwashees to sign up for indoctrination in support of Queen, Country and God. They are, after all, a recruitment service for the army. Baden-Powell set them up explicitly to try to improve the average fitness and skill set of squaddies after his abysmal experiences with regular troops in the Boer War. In contrast, he had relatively good service from local Boer youths who formed a reconnaissance and sabotage corps for him : skills and tactics that he learned from them formed the basis for "Scouting for Boys".
The Scouts were not quite as God-sucking and militaristic as the Boys Brigade though. They really were the Hitler Youth in the making.
(In English, please.)
Wouid you give a shit if your sister was involved? Of course not. Are you part of the solution, or just incidental association?
My suspicion too. (See post above.)
Points under (4) are more complex. The presence of (astrophysicist's use) metals is essential to any life chemistry that uses metals (atoms more complex than hydrogen and helium). But the metal content is not much related to a star's stability and duration. Size, on the other hand, is important to duration. However, low mass may well be associated with high variability of luminosity. So ... there's not even a simple model to have a consensus on.
It's good to see that you're reading around on the subject. But you need to read more widely.
NASA has asserted ownership and property rights over the light intensity data that it is releasing to the species? Can you cite the law under which it is making this assertion? And what is the jurisdiction of this alleged law?
Firstly, Kepler doesn't stare at any point of light : it stares at a point in space with a detector that covers (in Libraries of congress per blue whale) the area of your fist at arms length. At frequent intervals it notes down the brightness of every point-like source of light in that field of view, records those observations, zeros the detector, records some engineering data, then starts the next observation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Every few days, a batch of data is sent to the ground. Lather rinse and repeat for the 3.5 years mission duration.
The definition of "point-like source" is probably adjustable from the ground (they fiddled with the focus by a few microns a while ago). The duration of exposures are probably variable (they may use different lengths in a cycle, to widen the effective sensitivity range of the detector). But the satellite itself makes no analysis of the data beyond checking it's pointing and recording positions and intensities of the "point-like sources". As the pointing shifts, the apparent position of the "point-like sources" on the detector shifts, so the correlation of sources between catalogues of locations and intensities will need checking on the ground.