Yeah, Mars is one thing, but if this hits Earth, it could wipe out the dinosaurs all over again!
This posting seems to suggest that you thing that [something] hitting the Earth had something significant to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Why is this? Nothing significant is known to have hit the Earth in the quarter-million years (say, around 5000 dinosaur generations) between the Chicxulub impactor and the extinction of the dinosaurs. Whatever killed off the dinosaurs, it's unlikely to have been the Chicxulub impact (though that probably didn't help them).
Oh, you get your science news from the popular press? How quaint.
A perfectly valid point. Which depends on the Bad Guys knowing that you are the person with the password. So, if you're aware that you're in a situation like that, then you start by designing your security model around the assumption that one or more of the factors needed for access to the system has been (ahemm) wrenched open (sorry!), and design a system that would be tolerant against that, and would fail safe in such a way that the Bad Guys beating the guy they've caught to death with the wrench would not yield them enough information. Then you have to publicise the design for the system, to provide some degree of protection for your staff.
Here's a proposal : access to your hyper-secure system requires the presence of three or more from a group of 5 trusted people. ("trusted" includes that you trust all of them to know, understand and apply the best of individual password attacks.) All of the quorum of trusted people need to be physically present to enter their passwords (whatever technology you use to implement this). So, you've just made the Bad Guy's task much harder. "Pour encourager les autres", you make sure that the password holders know this. You leave it to themselves to arrange their own travel and working schedules to make it possible for the data to be accessible when necessary and for it to be even harder for the Bad Guys to get the necessary 3-at-once ; since they're intelligent security experts with an interest in not having a short conversation with a long wrench, you can rely on them to make the Bad Guy's task as hard as possible. You then don't document what they do, you just pay their reasonable expenses in cash without asking (remember : you TRUST these people). You now have a workable, hyper-secure system. Next year, BeanCounter Central see the cash disbursements, decide they want some of that, and steal the resources, leading to a failure of the designed scheme. Your trusted staff get a one-way trip to a dark room, your data gets leaked. And you'll get the blame.
I can see the logic behind putting oversight of studies of exobiology under NASA overview. It may seem distant from engineering, but one of the really big questions that NASA is charged with pursuing is the question of "is there life out there". That makes studying potential ways of forming life, including ones that could happen off the Earth, an appropriate question for NASA funding. This particular result has more to do (arguably, and my previous post lays grounds for some of those arguments) with the possible development of life on, say, Europa than on Earth. But that's within NASA's bailiwick. Despite your repetition, the experimental verification that a nucleotide base can be formed in lightning-free, ice-rich conditions (BTW, I was trying to d/l the paper last night, but the site wasn't playing ball.) is a significant step forward in understanding the constraints of life formation in non-terrestrial locations as well as (arguably, see previous post) of significant relevance for studies of the formation of life on Earth.
Yes, the last couple of decades of human activity in space have been somewhat disappointing. I recall my parents getting their first TV after the first moon landing and before the last one. Maybe humanity is going to pass the torch of controlling the rest of the solar system to another country (China , FSU , Japan? , India?? ) in the lead. But humanity is still going out there, and that's better than nothing. If we stay in one place, we (the species that you and I are members of) are eventually going to become nothing.
OK, so the thief finds your wallet, learns where you live,
Sorry, could you fill in the few steps between a thief finding (or more likely, stealing) my wallet and him then knowing my address. What are the steps in between? 1 - "find" wallet. 2 - tie wallet onto string and dowse over a laptop displaying Google Earth to find my home address. 3 - break in.
Or : 1 - "find" wallet. 2 - find something in my wallet that can be directly traced back to my address in less time than it takes me to get home from where the wallet was stolen. 3 - break in.
What in my wallet can be directly traced back to my address? My bank cards - sorry, no ; unless you're the police acting through official channels, all such conversations include "and what is your address?" at a very early stage. My business cards? Will get you the address of my employer. And all staff there know that giving out personal contact details is a sacking offence (which is why most people simply don't wish to have access to such information, if they need to contact me, they go to someone with a need-to-know ; what you don't know you can't tell). It may come as a surprise, but some of us have long lived with the concept that a lost wallet might potentially lead to unwanted visitors, so we strip our wallets of such information. It's not as if it's hard to do.
It also verifies that your input is actually being recognized in a way that prevents shoulder surfing. Some people also can tell if they accidentally hit an extra key, etc. The login prompts that just show a blank password field don't indicate if the system/network link just threw a fit and isn't responding.
There's a system that I am meant to log into several times a day : this lovely heap of shit (FirstClass, used by the Open University, open.ac.uk) will remember your password for you, but when you're entering it, it will display approximately 10 asterisks regardless of the length of your password, and regardless of the number of characters that you've entered, and regardless of the state of the comms link (I know - I've pulled the network cable while trying to go through the log-in ; it doesn't care and doesn't throw an error). Truly, it is a wonderful piece of bad interface design.
I think that FirstClass is from an external source, so some other people may have the pleasure of using it. Me, I just use the web interface only, and let the installed desktop version hang.
a valid point of discussion, just as it's valid to discuss terrorism when referring to Islam, the Crusades when referring to Catholicism/Christianity,
Just in case you've been living inside a cave (or womb) for the last 40 years, I'll just sharpen the point by re-arranging it : "it's valid to discuss terrorism when referring to Catholicism/Christianity, the Crusades when referring to Islam," Obviously I speak from a country where Christian bombings have been the norm for most of my life (as a consequence of the Catholic/ Protestant insanity), and I write in a time when the 14th (approx) Crusade is soon to start on it's second decade. Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose.That's what religions are for - making excuses to kill people instead of doing something useful.
And why should anyone care? Seriously poor editing if the editor didn't predict that response.
OK, didn't take long to find out (Wikipedia): "Glenn Lee Beck (born February 10, 1964) is an American talk radio and television host, conservative political commentator, author, and... " total non-entity. So, thanks to Slashdot's poor editorial standards, I've wasted about 3 minutes of my life (while, I must say, doing other more interesting things too). Thanks guys. Not.
There are numerous problems with Miller-Urey experiment as a viable process for formation of pre-biotic molecules. Principle amongst these are those of dilution (the various molecules are likely to be highly diluted in the oceans, and many, many different species of molecule are produced), inappropriate chemistry (the highly reducing methane-ammonia-CO2 atmosphere of the 1950s M-U experiments has long since been considered unlikely for the Hadean/ Archean Earth ; a slightly-reducing nitrogen-CO2 atmosphere is considered much more likely) and UV damage (the UV light produced by the abundant lightning in a M-U scenario does nasty things to other molecules generated, including making insoluble organic tars). The attempts to achieve similar chemistry using simple organic chemicals concentrated on the junctions between ice crystals with some solar UV input is a deliberate attempt to examine scenarios that may be more realistic than a M-U atmosphere in Hadean/ Archean Earth (e.g., under "SnowBall Earth" conditions) and to broaden the examination of pre-biotic synthetic possibilities under possible pre-accretion conditions.
Just as an FYI : I finished reading "Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins" by Robert M. Hazen (2005), ISBN-10: 0309094321 about 3 hours ago, and am considering which of the numerous references are worth following up on. A fascinating subject, and if your chemistry is moderate (first year university level), well worth a read, if you're interested in this topic. Precisely the points that you've missed in your knee-jerk leap into the "arcist" camp (as Miller is sometimes referred to) are covered extensively in that book. And also, to be honest, in Cairns-Smith's books from the mid-1980s ; these issues are hardly cutting-edge stuff.
That said... uracil produced in naturalistic scenarios ; interesting, undoubtedly; nice work, definitely; important, possibly but not certainly. The question of "which came first - genetics or metabolism?" is a big open question, and there's no reason to believe that uracil (or even a pyrimidine-derivative of any sort) was involved at all in the first genetic system regardless of whether or not there was an existing metabolic system around to make the necessary parts. (It's nearly consensus that DNA replaced RNA at a relatively recent stage in the evolution of early life ; but before RNA... TNA? PNA? PAH-stacks? AGC-S's clay-mineralogy? That an RNA-based genetics is somewhat simpler than a DNA-based one does not reduce the complexity of RNA-based genetics.
My current favorite hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth are those championed by Martin and Russell.
I've been reading Russell et al's work for a few years now, and I must admit that their geological insights gel nicely with my geological experience about how fluids move and mix. Their interpretation of Wachterhsauser's (too late in the night for all the umlaut's or spelling checks) "sulphide world" ideas is interesting enough for me to be considering a raid on the library to read up Wachterhsauser's original papers (oh noes! 300+pages!). An interesting sideway's nod to AGC-S too (who I saw lecture while I was still a student, and I still remember it). Whether they're right is another question ; but they've certainly got some interesting, testable ideas.
If they can support Creative Commons *and* DRM users...
Ummm - that implies that there are a significant number of users of electronic readers who can *only* read DRM'd books. Since I've been using my eBook reader (a couple of weeks use on any random set of AA cells; touchscreen ; also works and is used as a general purpose computer) without DRM for the thick end of a decade now, and I've managed to get through nearly a tenth of the reading material I downloaded on dial-up, then for someone to persuade me to change eBook reader, they'd have to come out with a more attractive offering. And the inability to read anything other than DRM'd data formats would be a disability which would rule out an eBook reader for me. There's around 90 years worth of reading material sitting on my CF card, all of which I've chosen and said "I want to read THIS", and "that", but not "that, that or that" ; all in plain text files. A reader that can't read them, isn't a reader.
-Is there an eBook reader that can only read material with DRM on it, and which can't read plain text?
-If so, what's it's market share, and how fast is it decreasing?
I wonder about all the difficulty that would happen in the US (sorry - here is US for my geo-centric self)
I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure that you'd find that there is abundant case law in your jurisdiction to address cases like this. There is nothing new about people disappearing for a while, either due to medical issues (say, sudden illness makes you unconscious when you're travelling ; you don't have ID on you ; your hotel doesn't post you as missing, they just sell your goods to cover your bill. Months or years later you regain consciousness in hospital ; maybe you have amnesia.), mental health issues, or you just want to disappear. It might seem strange from today's perspective, but it's not that long ago that credit cards didn't exist, many people didn't drive (and in this jurisdiction there has never been a habit of carrying a driving license, even if you have one), and few people had reason to carry a passport (internal or external). So people being unconscious and unknown was nothing wildly uncommon.
Oh, I forgot. You're in America, so if your credit card didn't show sufficient balance, you'd have been thrown out of the hospital, if you'd even have been allowed in the doors. Well, in that case the only case law you' would have will be from the people who deliberately disappear, then reappear, and form the mad. But for certain, there will be case law.
And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?)
Sorry to break the rules and inject some data into a religious war, but Antarctica has a lot more than one computer-using penguin. The multiple nationalities with multiple permanently occupied bases have large numbers of permanently-connected computers down there. I've seen it cited in the past that Antarctica has the highest proportion of Linux-driven computers of any continent ; this may still be true, because there aren't that many clueless trailer-trash inbred retards who buy their internet machines at Walmart, and a high proportion of scientists, technicians and... well, nerds. I believe there's a magic money machine ("ATM" in American English?) at McMurdo Sound ; I wonder if it's a Tux, an OS/2 (still quite likely, I'm told, for MMMs) or even, horror of horrors, a Windoze Box?
I never actually compared the long distance odometer readings to actual distance traveled
That seems like such a tremendously difficult experiment to carry out. Have you consulted with the massed brains of CERN, SSC and SuperKamiokande to try to work out the experimental details, or do you think that it's within the scope of reader of a website that advertises itself as "News for Nerds" to try something nerdish, such as... (shock, horror!) an experiment. OK, I'll take "I don't have any appropriate long distance trips planned, where the long distance will reduce the effects of detours, lane changes, etc to negligible." as a valid excuse.
to figure out if the speedometer needle is just aimed a few degrees too far to the right, or if the calibration of the axle rotation to distance traveled is just slightly off.
I don't know what rules your country has, but in Britain an odometer (and therefore the speedometer which is it's differential w.r.t. time) isn't considered miscalibrated until it's out by more than 10% either way. Other errors to consider would be over/ under inflation of tyres (when measured at their running temperature, not when static ; i.e. you'd need to change the amount of air in the tyres as the warm up/ cool down), the depth of the tread on the tyre (the legal minimum is 2mm, but a new tyre can easily have a tread depth of 8 or 9mm (I didn't measure the new ones I brought a month or so ago, but it was approaching 10mm). The tread variation is a good 3% variation by itself.
Oh, hang on - odds-on you're in a country where automatics are common? Don't they slip the clutch a lot, which would add it's own inaccuracies?
No, seriously, the wife thinks I should be getting a new pair or several. And it's criteria like this that makes shopping for shoes so much easier, because it gives me an important criterion to judge by.
And a first post too? "Woo," as they say in Septica, "Hoo!"
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
You've missed out the "discredited" in "a discredited theory".
OK, that's maybe being a bit harsh on Ryan & Pitmann, whose ideas you refer to. Their theory was reasonable, plausible, and testable. It has been tested and found to be at the least flawed, if not completely unworkable. As I recall - and I'm only working from memory - one of the predictions of the Ryan/ Pitmann theory was that there would be, amongst other things, mega-dunes and other evidence of upper-flow regime erosion and redeposition in the throat of the Bhosporous. But what has been found, by shallow seismic imaging, is evidence of multiple strong flows form the Bhosporous, at multiple times, with variable spacings. So the Ryan/ Pitmann hypothesis of one Black Sea flood is disproved by the evidence. That their broader hypothesis (that the level in the Black Sea has risen substantially in pre-to-peri-historic times) is supported, but it may well have been a case of getting a couple of metres rise every few years, with a particularly midi-flood. To the best of my knowledge, one of the original authors (Ryan, or Pitmann ; I don't recall which) has dropped the idea after working it for a half-decade or so, while the other is continuing to try and work variations on the idea. Science is like that - attractive hypotheses get slain (or at least, maimed) by ugly facts.
If this rift is going to become a new ocean, the water must come from somewhere.
Yes, the water must come from somewhere. But to make a volume below sea level into which sea water can flood, you'll have to move one or two blocks of crust to the sides to make that "accommodation space". That space will come by moving the other sides of the appropriate continental blocks into the oceans. Which will raise the level of the seas in those oceans (probably the global ocean system). Which will make the breach of the spill point happen all the sooner. Geologically, the working assumption is that the volume of water in the oceans is constant. What can change more easily is the volume of the ocean basins. The largest contribution to changing that is by varying the density of rock in the seabed, either by temperature changes (which is what is happening with the rifting) or by hydration of rocks (which takes water out of the oceans... quid pro quo).
If it all comes at once, we could see a massive loss of life and property,
We'd see massive movement of people and property into the highly active volcanic region first. At which point, you tell people "if you go there, you will die. Or any descendants you have who remain there will die there. you may as well face your problems here rather than try to run away there. Besides, life is probably easier here than down in that rift. Seriously - there won't even be any soil for a half-millennium or so. Spider soup (made without any drinking water ; there isn't any) is going to be your main food." I'd make humanitarian aid available - a sufficient number of body bags with a nice flammable lining which will make cremation easy. One would need a timing mechanism, so that the last person to die could put on the lights.
Even Pournelle and Niven have seemingly hung up their stirrups.
I don't know about Pournelle, but I've had two new Known Space collaborations from Niven and one outside Known Space in the last 3 years. I think that he's writing at a "when I see an interesting idea" rate. Sort of like... he's retired.
(The bedside book table has an un-opened Charlie Stross (my first CS) ; an opened and half-read F&SF ; this month's F&SF ; a book on biogenesis ; a "spotter's guide to phyla" ; and as of the postman coming this lunchtime, this month's JGSL and Geoscientist. Plus university coursework.)
There isn't in a closed environment like a shuttle to Mars.
We (as a species) have experience of running two closed environments. One is going badly down the pan after a few tens of thousands of years of human use ; the other is about a billionth of the size (real billion) and survived about 2 weeks before they had to start adding some molecules and removing others.
Closed environments are something that our species are going to have to learn about one of these centuries, if only for getting to Alpha Centauri. We're likely to need the technologies much, much sooner. So why there isn't any significant work on maintaining closed environments is beyond me. It's not as if it can't be done on Earth ; and it's not as if it can't be done without humans (for a long, long time, anyway) ; and it's not as if it has inherent ethical problems. By the time you've got a closed environment on the second generation of pigs, it's a pretty safe bet that humans could live in it. That would be about a 100-fold improvement on the current state of the art.
Anecdotal, yet really painful. Well, that clinches it! Just like that guy accused of being a child rapist and murderer, it was a horrible fate for the kid, therefore that slimeball is guilty as sin.
What does it matter whether or not he was innocent and had a cast-iron alibi. He's dead now and swinging from the tree outside the courthouse, so all is good in the world.
Dude, someone has to tell people out there that the entire freak'n universe is radio active.
(and also with reference to bemenaker's comment) There is an old and perfectly true saying that we live on a fission reactor and are in orbit around a fusion reactor. As you say to the idiots of the universe - live with it.
(I used to use un-depleted uranium salts to add a certain !zing! to my home brew.)
... to build a 1:10^8 scale model of the flying Scotsman, complete with London-Edinburgh track. That would be on the order of a micron across, so you might even try making the track/ landscape with something resembling conventional chip-making technology. That sounds too close to being serious. I'd better add a "<G>".
Cut-My-Own-Throat Al-Dibblah in Small gods, IIRC : "Pets can be source of great comfort in times of turmoil. And in times of famine too, of course." Or words to that general effect. I'll try to pick up a Korean cookbook - on my way out of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
This posting seems to suggest that you thing that [something] hitting the Earth had something significant to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Why is this?
Nothing significant is known to have hit the Earth in the quarter-million years (say, around 5000 dinosaur generations) between the Chicxulub impactor and the extinction of the dinosaurs. Whatever killed off the dinosaurs, it's unlikely to have been the Chicxulub impact (though that probably didn't help them).
Oh, you get your science news from the popular press? How quaint.
Subject says it all.
A perfectly valid point. Which depends on the Bad Guys knowing that you are the person with the password. So, if you're aware that you're in a situation like that, then you start by designing your security model around the assumption that one or more of the factors needed for access to the system has been (ahemm) wrenched open (sorry!), and design a system that would be tolerant against that, and would fail safe in such a way that the Bad Guys beating the guy they've caught to death with the wrench would not yield them enough information. Then you have to publicise the design for the system, to provide some degree of protection for your staff.
Here's a proposal : access to your hyper-secure system requires the presence of three or more from a group of 5 trusted people. ("trusted" includes that you trust all of them to know, understand and apply the best of individual password attacks.) All of the quorum of trusted people need to be physically present to enter their passwords (whatever technology you use to implement this). So, you've just made the Bad Guy's task much harder. "Pour encourager les autres", you make sure that the password holders know this. You leave it to themselves to arrange their own travel and working schedules to make it possible for the data to be accessible when necessary and for it to be even harder for the Bad Guys to get the necessary 3-at-once ; since they're intelligent security experts with an interest in not having a short conversation with a long wrench, you can rely on them to make the Bad Guy's task as hard as possible. You then don't document what they do, you just pay their reasonable expenses in cash without asking (remember : you TRUST these people).
You now have a workable, hyper-secure system.
Next year, BeanCounter Central see the cash disbursements, decide they want some of that, and steal the resources, leading to a failure of the designed scheme. Your trusted staff get a one-way trip to a dark room, your data gets leaked. And you'll get the blame.
SNAFU
I can see the logic behind putting oversight of studies of exobiology under NASA overview. It may seem distant from engineering, but one of the really big questions that NASA is charged with pursuing is the question of "is there life out there". That makes studying potential ways of forming life, including ones that could happen off the Earth, an appropriate question for NASA funding.
This particular result has more to do (arguably, and my previous post lays grounds for some of those arguments) with the possible development of life on, say, Europa than on Earth. But that's within NASA's bailiwick.
Despite your repetition, the experimental verification that a nucleotide base can be formed in lightning-free, ice-rich conditions (BTW, I was trying to d/l the paper last night, but the site wasn't playing ball.) is a significant step forward in understanding the constraints of life formation in non-terrestrial locations as well as (arguably, see previous post) of significant relevance for studies of the formation of life on Earth.
Yes, the last couple of decades of human activity in space have been somewhat disappointing. I recall my parents getting their first TV after the first moon landing and before the last one. Maybe humanity is going to pass the torch of controlling the rest of the solar system to another country (China , FSU , Japan? , India?? ) in the lead. But humanity is still going out there, and that's better than nothing. If we stay in one place, we (the species that you and I are members of) are eventually going to become nothing.
Sorry, could you fill in the few steps between a thief finding (or more likely, stealing) my wallet and him then knowing my address. What are the steps in between?
1 - "find" wallet.
2 - tie wallet onto string and dowse over a laptop displaying Google Earth to find my home address.
3 - break in.
Or :
1 - "find" wallet.
2 - find something in my wallet that can be directly traced back to my address in less time than it takes me to get home from where the wallet was stolen.
3 - break in.
What in my wallet can be directly traced back to my address? My bank cards - sorry, no ; unless you're the police acting through official channels, all such conversations include "and what is your address?" at a very early stage. My business cards? Will get you the address of my employer. And all staff there know that giving out personal contact details is a sacking offence (which is why most people simply don't wish to have access to such information, if they need to contact me, they go to someone with a need-to-know ; what you don't know you can't tell).
It may come as a surprise, but some of us have long lived with the concept that a lost wallet might potentially lead to unwanted visitors, so we strip our wallets of such information. It's not as if it's hard to do.
There's a system that I am meant to log into several times a day : this lovely heap of shit (FirstClass, used by the Open University, open.ac.uk) will remember your password for you, but when you're entering it, it will display approximately 10 asterisks regardless of the length of your password, and regardless of the number of characters that you've entered, and regardless of the state of the comms link (I know - I've pulled the network cable while trying to go through the log-in ; it doesn't care and doesn't throw an error). Truly, it is a wonderful piece of bad interface design.
I think that FirstClass is from an external source, so some other people may have the pleasure of using it. Me, I just use the web interface only, and let the installed desktop version hang.
You're not a magician until you get SlashCode to replace these six asterisks "******" with my password, in the archived page.
Just in case you've been living inside a cave (or womb) for the last 40 years, I'll just sharpen the point by re-arranging it :
"it's valid to discuss terrorism when referring to Catholicism/Christianity, the Crusades when referring to Islam,"
Obviously I speak from a country where Christian bombings have been the norm for most of my life (as a consequence of the Catholic/ Protestant insanity), and I write in a time when the 14th (approx) Crusade is soon to start on it's second decade.
Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose.That's what religions are for - making excuses to kill people instead of doing something useful.
And why should anyone care?
Seriously poor editing if the editor didn't predict that response.
OK, didn't take long to find out (Wikipedia): "Glenn Lee Beck (born February 10, 1964) is an American talk radio and television host, conservative political commentator, author, and ... " total non-entity.
So, thanks to Slashdot's poor editorial standards, I've wasted about 3 minutes of my life (while, I must say, doing other more interesting things too). Thanks guys. Not.
There are numerous problems with Miller-Urey experiment as a viable process for formation of pre-biotic molecules. Principle amongst these are those of dilution (the various molecules are likely to be highly diluted in the oceans, and many, many different species of molecule are produced), inappropriate chemistry (the highly reducing methane-ammonia-CO2 atmosphere of the 1950s M-U experiments has long since been considered unlikely for the Hadean/ Archean Earth ; a slightly-reducing nitrogen-CO2 atmosphere is considered much more likely) and UV damage (the UV light produced by the abundant lightning in a M-U scenario does nasty things to other molecules generated, including making insoluble organic tars).
The attempts to achieve similar chemistry using simple organic chemicals concentrated on the junctions between ice crystals with some solar UV input is a deliberate attempt to examine scenarios that may be more realistic than a M-U atmosphere in Hadean/ Archean Earth (e.g., under "SnowBall Earth" conditions) and to broaden the examination of pre-biotic synthetic possibilities under possible pre-accretion conditions.
Just as an FYI : I finished reading "Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins" by Robert M. Hazen (2005), ISBN-10: 0309094321 about 3 hours ago, and am considering which of the numerous references are worth following up on. A fascinating subject, and if your chemistry is moderate (first year university level), well worth a read, if you're interested in this topic.
Precisely the points that you've missed in your knee-jerk leap into the "arcist" camp (as Miller is sometimes referred to) are covered extensively in that book. And also, to be honest, in Cairns-Smith's books from the mid-1980s ; these issues are hardly cutting-edge stuff.
That said ... uracil produced in naturalistic scenarios ; interesting, undoubtedly; nice work, definitely; important, possibly but not certainly. The question of "which came first - genetics or metabolism?" is a big open question, and there's no reason to believe that uracil (or even a pyrimidine-derivative of any sort) was involved at all in the first genetic system regardless of whether or not there was an existing metabolic system around to make the necessary parts. (It's nearly consensus that DNA replaced RNA at a relatively recent stage in the evolution of early life ; but before RNA ... TNA? PNA? PAH-stacks? AGC-S's clay-mineralogy? That an RNA-based genetics is somewhat simpler than a DNA-based one does not reduce the complexity of RNA-based genetics.
I've been reading Russell et al's work for a few years now, and I must admit that their geological insights gel nicely with my geological experience about how fluids move and mix. Their interpretation of Wachterhsauser's (too late in the night for all the umlaut's or spelling checks) "sulphide world" ideas is interesting enough for me to be considering a raid on the library to read up Wachterhsauser's original papers (oh noes! 300+pages!). An interesting sideway's nod to AGC-S too (who I saw lecture while I was still a student, and I still remember it).
Whether they're right is another question ; but they've certainly got some interesting, testable ideas.
Ummm - that implies that there are a significant number of users of electronic readers who can *only* read DRM'd books. Since I've been using my eBook reader (a couple of weeks use on any random set of AA cells; touchscreen ; also works and is used as a general purpose computer) without DRM for the thick end of a decade now, and I've managed to get through nearly a tenth of the reading material I downloaded on dial-up, then for someone to persuade me to change eBook reader, they'd have to come out with a more attractive offering. And the inability to read anything other than DRM'd data formats would be a disability which would rule out an eBook reader for me. There's around 90 years worth of reading material sitting on my CF card, all of which I've chosen and said "I want to read THIS", and "that", but not "that, that or that" ; all in plain text files. A reader that can't read them, isn't a reader.
-Is there an eBook reader that can only read material with DRM on it, and which can't read plain text?
-If so, what's it's market share, and how fast is it decreasing?
Odd ; my 3.8 installation is running about 51MB on Vista 32-bit.
That link for OldVersions looks worth a raiding session.
I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure that you'd find that there is abundant case law in your jurisdiction to address cases like this. There is nothing new about people disappearing for a while, either due to medical issues (say, sudden illness makes you unconscious when you're travelling ; you don't have ID on you ; your hotel doesn't post you as missing, they just sell your goods to cover your bill. Months or years later you regain consciousness in hospital ; maybe you have amnesia.), mental health issues, or you just want to disappear.
It might seem strange from today's perspective, but it's not that long ago that credit cards didn't exist, many people didn't drive (and in this jurisdiction there has never been a habit of carrying a driving license, even if you have one), and few people had reason to carry a passport (internal or external). So people being unconscious and unknown was nothing wildly uncommon.
Oh, I forgot. You're in America, so if your credit card didn't show sufficient balance, you'd have been thrown out of the hospital, if you'd even have been allowed in the doors.
Well, in that case the only case law you' would have will be from the people who deliberately disappear, then reappear, and form the mad.
But for certain, there will be case law.
Don't you just hate boring answers.
Sorry to break the rules and inject some data into a religious war, but Antarctica has a lot more than one computer-using penguin. The multiple nationalities with multiple permanently occupied bases have large numbers of permanently-connected computers down there. I've seen it cited in the past that Antarctica has the highest proportion of Linux-driven computers of any continent ; this may still be true, because there aren't that many clueless trailer-trash inbred retards who buy their internet machines at Walmart, and a high proportion of scientists, technicians and ... well, nerds.
I believe there's a magic money machine ("ATM" in American English?) at McMurdo Sound ; I wonder if it's a Tux, an OS/2 (still quite likely, I'm told, for MMMs) or even, horror of horrors, a Windoze Box?
That seems like such a tremendously difficult experiment to carry out. Have you consulted with the massed brains of CERN, SSC and SuperKamiokande to try to work out the experimental details, or do you think that it's within the scope of reader of a website that advertises itself as "News for Nerds" to try something nerdish, such as ... (shock, horror!) an experiment. OK, I'll take "I don't have any appropriate long distance trips planned, where the long distance will reduce the effects of detours, lane changes, etc to negligible." as a valid excuse.
I don't know what rules your country has, but in Britain an odometer (and therefore the speedometer which is it's differential w.r.t. time) isn't considered miscalibrated until it's out by more than 10% either way. Other errors to consider would be over/ under inflation of tyres (when measured at their running temperature, not when static ; i.e. you'd need to change the amount of air in the tyres as the warm up/ cool down), the depth of the tread on the tyre (the legal minimum is 2mm, but a new tyre can easily have a tread depth of 8 or 9mm (I didn't measure the new ones I brought a month or so ago, but it was approaching 10mm). The tread variation is a good 3% variation by itself.
Oh, hang on - odds-on you're in a country where automatics are common? Don't they slip the clutch a lot, which would add it's own inaccuracies?
No, seriously, the wife thinks I should be getting a new pair or several. And it's criteria like this that makes shopping for shoes so much easier, because it gives me an important criterion to judge by.
And a first post too? "Woo," as they say in Septica, "Hoo!"
You've missed out the "discredited" in "a discredited theory".
OK, that's maybe being a bit harsh on Ryan & Pitmann, whose ideas you refer to. Their theory was reasonable, plausible, and testable. It has been tested and found to be at the least flawed, if not completely unworkable. As I recall - and I'm only working from memory - one of the predictions of the Ryan/ Pitmann theory was that there would be, amongst other things, mega-dunes and other evidence of upper-flow regime erosion and redeposition in the throat of the Bhosporous. But what has been found, by shallow seismic imaging, is evidence of multiple strong flows form the Bhosporous, at multiple times, with variable spacings. So the Ryan/ Pitmann hypothesis of one Black Sea flood is disproved by the evidence. That their broader hypothesis (that the level in the Black Sea has risen substantially in pre-to-peri-historic times) is supported, but it may well have been a case of getting a couple of metres rise every few years, with a particularly midi-flood.
To the best of my knowledge, one of the original authors (Ryan, or Pitmann ; I don't recall which) has dropped the idea after working it for a half-decade or so, while the other is continuing to try and work variations on the idea.
Science is like that - attractive hypotheses get slain (or at least, maimed) by ugly facts.
Yes, the water must come from somewhere. But to make a volume below sea level into which sea water can flood, you'll have to move one or two blocks of crust to the sides to make that "accommodation space". That space will come by moving the other sides of the appropriate continental blocks into the oceans. Which will raise the level of the seas in those oceans (probably the global ocean system). Which will make the breach of the spill point happen all the sooner. ... quid pro quo).
Geologically, the working assumption is that the volume of water in the oceans is constant. What can change more easily is the volume of the ocean basins. The largest contribution to changing that is by varying the density of rock in the seabed, either by temperature changes (which is what is happening with the rifting) or by hydration of rocks (which takes water out of the oceans
We'd see massive movement of people and property into the highly active volcanic region first. At which point, you tell people "if you go there, you will die. Or any descendants you have who remain there will die there. you may as well face your problems here rather than try to run away there. Besides, life is probably easier here than down in that rift. Seriously - there won't even be any soil for a half-millennium or so. Spider soup (made without any drinking water ; there isn't any) is going to be your main food."
I'd make humanitarian aid available - a sufficient number of body bags with a nice flammable lining which will make cremation easy. One would need a timing mechanism, so that the last person to die could put on the lights.
I don't know about Pournelle, but I've had two new Known Space collaborations from Niven and one outside Known Space in the last 3 years. I think that he's writing at a "when I see an interesting idea" rate. Sort of like ... he's retired.
(The bedside book table has an un-opened Charlie Stross (my first CS) ; an opened and half-read F&SF ; this month's F&SF ; a book on biogenesis ; a "spotter's guide to phyla" ; and as of the postman coming this lunchtime, this month's JGSL and Geoscientist. Plus university coursework.)
Pulse, absence of. Check.
We (as a species) have experience of running two closed environments. One is going badly down the pan after a few tens of thousands of years of human use ; the other is about a billionth of the size (real billion) and survived about 2 weeks before they had to start adding some molecules and removing others.
Closed environments are something that our species are going to have to learn about one of these centuries, if only for getting to Alpha Centauri. We're likely to need the technologies much, much sooner. So why there isn't any significant work on maintaining closed environments is beyond me. It's not as if it can't be done on Earth ; and it's not as if it can't be done without humans (for a long, long time, anyway) ; and it's not as if it has inherent ethical problems. By the time you've got a closed environment on the second generation of pigs, it's a pretty safe bet that humans could live in it. That would be about a 100-fold improvement on the current state of the art.
What does it matter whether or not he was innocent and had a cast-iron alibi. He's dead now and swinging from the tree outside the courthouse, so all is good in the world.
(and also with reference to bemenaker's comment)
There is an old and perfectly true saying that we live on a fission reactor and are in orbit around a fusion reactor.
As you say to the idiots of the universe - live with it.
(I used to use un-depleted uranium salts to add a certain !zing! to my home brew.)
... to build a 1:10^8 scale model of the flying Scotsman, complete with London-Edinburgh track.
That would be on the order of a micron across, so you might even try making the track/ landscape with something resembling conventional chip-making technology.
That sounds too close to being serious. I'd better add a "<G>".
Cut-My-Own-Throat Al-Dibblah in Small gods, IIRC : "Pets can be source of great comfort in times of turmoil. And in times of famine too, of course." Or words to that general effect.
I'll try to pick up a Korean cookbook - on my way out of the country.