Punishment for such offense was to be completely ignored, as if you didn't exist.
Well, you had ceased to exist, to all practical intents and purposes, the moment that you told your OLR to drop all messages To or From a particular UID at the header collecting stage. You'd only see the UIDs go by if you actually watched the terminal session running, as the list of new messages to download was compiled ; then the KILL filter did it's job and the only other sign of the existence of the Damned that you'd see would be if an unDamned person quoted the Damned one. You could filter out that too, if you really wanted to make someone an un-person.
I cancelled my CompuServe account the day AOL bought them. I would never have anything to do with AOL.
I often wished that I had. On the other hand, the hankering for something to replace CompuServe was one of the things that stimulated me to get into the likes of SlashDot. [Marvin]Sad, isn't it?[/Marvin]
I was a sysop, and even a wizop (Wizard Sysop, basically "root" of the forum), and have seen much of the shit which started when AOL took over. That basically killed the spirit. It's a real pity that I signed a pretty badass NDA, otherwise all that would make for a great book on how *not* to run an online service.
Agreed on all your points. The AOL-ization of CIS drove me away after a year or two. When does the NDA time out? The 12th of Never? And surely someone has bust the NDA by now. I know it even applied to what functions an OLR needed to implement for a SysOp or WizOp. Totally bizzare, paranoid system.
[100025,3053] is so much more euphonious than... well, I don't even know my SlashDot ID, even though I know it's one of those 5-digit ones that some of the noobs think have some significance. ([15477] It seems as I Preview.) But they only mean that you've been around a decade or two - and what's significant about that?
15" e-ink laptop? Yes, please. Actually that tech would wonderfully compliment a netbook or something like an ancient Psion 5 or something in between, coming full circle on the PDA front.
After my first mobile phone was banned from being taken to work (along with the small number of other people's mobiles that were around), I was looking at replacement technologies. I hemmed and hawed between going for a Psion 5 and waiting for eInk displays to come to market.
My Psion is still working 10 years (and several screens, cases and motherboards, but not data) later, and eInk is barely here. One of my few good calls on technology - normally me adopting a technology is it's kiss of death.
Since the summary didnt tell it: "Extreme Associates produced and distributed sexually degrading material that portrayed women in the most vile and depraved manner imaginable,"
It may not be your taste, but that sounds like "high art" to me.
Oh, didn't various Supreme Courts rule on that a few years ago. Something about photos of Robert Mapelthorpe buggering himself with a bull-whip? One of my colleagues has a photo of that on his living room ceiling, above the dining table.
Could it be that H2O, N2 and O2 were created from the decomposition of very hot rocks?
By the time that you've got your rocks molten, their water, CO2 and ammonia (nitrogen in it's most-likely protoplanetary form) would have pretty-much fucked right off. At the time that the Moon was formed (giant impact hypothesis, still the best one running), much of the depth of the mantle was temporarily ejected into low proto-Earth orbit, and at sufficient temperatures that significant amounts of such volatile ions as sodium were also lost from the material that accreted into orbit to form the Moon. This can be quite clearly seen in the composition of lunar rock samples - noticeably sodium deficient and as dry as a bone.
In planetary science, it is uncontroversial that no-matter how wet the Earth was when it formed, it was fairly well dried out by the time the Moon had formed. Consequently, the Earth then had to acquire it's volatile load (water, nitrogen-as-ammonia, carbon dioxide) after the Giant Impact. Since the Giant Impact would have necessarily (?? well, most likely) involved the mutual accretion of the two largest bodies remaining in the Earth's orbital range form the Sun, there wouldn't have been much left to accrete after that. So, most of the Earth's volatiles must have come form somewhere else.
That's one line of "geologically-based" thinking that leads to the Earth's non-volatile and volatile components having different origins. There's a simpler, astrophysically-based line of thinking that leads to the same conclusion from different premises : many meteorites contain a class of devitrified formerly-glassy chondrules called CAIs (Calcium-Aluminium[-rich] Inclusions) which give some of the oldest ages in the solar system (from our inventory of samples, but these are well and diversely sampled from stony meteorites, and give a coherent thermal history) ; the de-vitrified glassy textures tell that they were metamorphosed from a glass at temperatures consonant with their surrounding mineralogies in their various meteorites, and the fact that they were previously glasses tells us that they had got hot enough to melt and then cooled fast enough to become glassy. That tells us something about the thermal history of the early times of the solar proto-planetary disc. Which in turn tells us something about the early heating history of the sun. Which ties in with our understanding of nuclear fusion, which is good enough to make bombs if not power plants. And the whole lot boils down to (pun not intended)... in the early accretion of the Earth, and most meteorites, anywhere much Sunwards of the asteroid belt was too hot for water-ice (let alone ammonia-ice or carbon-dioxide-ice) to be stable.
The early Earth (and Mercury, Venus and to a lesser degree Mars) was pretty dry when it accreted. All got significant amounts of their volatile inventory later in the formation of the Solar System, after the "rocky" planets had essentially completed forming.
I am not aware (IANA Planetary Scientist, but I am a geologist by trade, currently steering a horizontal oil well) if the accumulation of water ice evaporated from the "rocky planets" region onto the proto-Jupiter is currently "fingered" as what tipped that one into becoming big enough to start to accrete hydrogen directly. But I am pretty sure that it has been suggested. The modelling is, as I think I've hinted, complex.
But the PS story is clear : the terrestrial planets got most of their volatiles AFTER they had effectively finished accreting.
Hmm, have we got the well sidetracked yet? Oh dear. Oh very dear.
Do they just really hate round numbers or something?
They probably did use round numbers originally, just not in the currency it's been translated into (and no, I don't keep a mental track of what the USD's exchange rates are as it doesn't matter to me. So guess for yourself what the original currency was.)
Concerning the actual idea in the summary - why should anyone be surprised? Anything that presents a metric is going to get fools pushing that metric. Some people buy a car with an unnecessarily large engine, others try for a high score at Civilisation. What's news?
Seriously - who cares about Blu-Ray? Why pay out in the order of a thousand pounds to completely replace your entire TV system - from screen to player to the stand that the TV is on to replacing the shelves on the wall behind the TV with ones that can accommodate a flat panel display - everything has to go. And for what? No increase in quality and a lot more hassles.
I don't see this entire generation of technologies getting sufficient traction to make me replace everything. I'll look at the issue again in a decade or so and see if anything is still surviving then.
(I should point out that it was the wife's idea to get a TV. I was perfectly happy with the radio, and that's still mostly what I use the TV system for, since it's radio reception is better than the analogue radio. I might try looking at DAB when it's settled down a bit.)
If the gaming industry wants me to spend money on games, then they're going to have to produce some games that actually have genuine interest to them. Run around and shoot things? Been there, done that, got bored with Quake (I, not II). Go online? Why? Frankly, I've recently removed OpenArena (another run-around-and-shoot-things game) from the machine and I'm still trundling on with alternating sessions of CIV or UFO-enemy-unknown. I've not met anything with the long-standing interest of those games in 20-odd years (OK, 17-odd for UFO), and until the games industry can produce something competitive to those, I don't see any reason to invest my money in them.
The various Tomb Raiders did make a reasonable attempt at filling that niche - and I still get copies for the works machines for downtime. (We consider it to be less troublesome to supply something ourselves for people's off-shift time, rather than letting them install anything that they want to. It is a *works* machine, after all.) So, 3-for-a-tenner new games works fine for us.
It seems to me, however, to be the most solid data point we've got.
(The "it" being that the present-day mass extinction event is human-caused.)
Yes, you're probably right that the present mass extinction is probably the best understood of the lot, in terms of causes. Over it's 0.05Ma (approx.) duration this mass extinction has closely coincided in time with the entry of humans to particular areas, as well as to anthropogenic effects on climate, landscape and habitats. Of course, being a continuing situation, it's also amenable to experimentation, which would give us the prospect of understanding it quite well by the time that it is over. Say, in another 0.05Ma.
Equally importantly is the valid question of whether there will be any humans around in 0.05Ma. That's not a question that gets as much visceral attention as it should, IMHO.
As for previous mass extinctions - we're very much in the dark about their causes.
The P-E (Palaeocene-Eocene) extinction event - argued as the consequence of a global warming event of about 0.15Ma duration caused by discharging what has been described as "the methane clathrate carbon capacitor" into the atmosphere. Which may be true - we're doing experiments on that at the moment. We'll find the answer (or have a much better understanding of the question) in about 0.001Ma or less.
The K-T (end-Cretaceous) extinction event was preceded by an asteroid impact event. By about 0.3Ma. Which leaves us uninformed about the causes of the mass extinction. The broadly contemporaneous occurrence of a flood basalt event may be related - and the presence of un-reworked dinosaur egg fragments in inter-lava soils strongly argues that the flood basalts did not follow the extinction of the dinosaurs, though it may have preceded the extinction - but we don't have sufficient precision of dating to be really sure. Nor do we know well what the pollution effects of the flood basalt were. Which is contrary to the impression you'd get from some popular science publications.
The T-J (Triassic-Jurassic) extinction event was nearly coincident with the formation of the astrobleme chain that includes the 200+ km diameter multi-ring Mainicougain. Well, only about 12Ma away, according to some. Whether that's significant or not is not known. On the other hand, it's also approximately coincident with the CAMP flood basalt sequence, as well as can be determined. But no-one is really sure, in part because flood basalt events are sufficiently common that there is a good chance of there being one happening at any randomly chosen moment in time.
We simply don't have enough data to be sure what the origins of previous mass extinction events were. For some, we've got moderately good evidence, but no real "smoking gun" evidence. Even the best-characterised ones - the present day and the P-E events - don't get to a criminal level of proof ("beyond reasonable doubt"), and are little beyond the civil level of proof ("on the balance of probabilities" ; your jurisprudence standards probably vary in detail).
I don't follow this. If the supercluster is pulling us in, it's also pulling in the intergalactic gas. We should be flowing along with that gas, not blasting through it.
The inter-galactic gas of the Local Group will hit the inter-galactic gas of the supercluster (Virgo) resulting in shock waves which will be transmitted to gas within the component galaxies, with possibly significant effects within those galaxies. Clearer now?
We already know why one extinction event happened. The current one is caused by us. These leads me to believe that there may be some variety in causes of mass extinctions, and that no single theory will cut it.
Hmm, that logic doesn't stack up. "We know of the cause of one extinction event." Do we? which event? and what is the cause? Then you seem to imply that we know that the cause of the current extinction event is "us", which is probably true but certainly not undisputed, let alone fully proven. So, are you counting this as a second data point, from which you impute a trend?
(NB : I'm a geologist by profession. So double check what you think is the accepted cause of some non-current extinction event. It's likely that I'm more familiar with the literature than you are.)
But of course the writer meant a very large increase. The curious thing here is the question of how the media adopted the term "quantum", which basically means the smallest change possible, and uses it to describe very large changes. It's easy to understand why they might not understand the actual technical definition as physicists use it, but how they could get the magnitude so wrong is a real mystery.
There's a "law" of Usenet, that every dispute will inevitably result in one protagonist accusing the other of being a Nazi (or Hitler's love-child, or something equally disreputable) ; it has a corollary that when this occurs, there is no more useful content to the dispute. this is IIRC "Godwin's Law.
There's a similarly well-founded "law" which states that any post complaining about someone's spelling or grammar will itself contain significant spelling and/or grammatical mistakes. Sorry, "speelung" mistakes. I can't remember that "law's" name ; perhaps it has several.
Depressingly, there is a third similarly well-founded law, concerning the likelihood of introducing serious error when trying to explain technical concepts in public.
Your analogy between the physicist's use of "quantum" and money is OK to a degree, but has an important misleading effect which isn't present in a physicist's (or chemist's) use of the term. From what you say, a reader could draw the inference that a system at an energy level of 13.24 dollars (or electron-volts, eV) could change to a state of 13.23 eV, or to 13.25 eV, but not to 13.242456 eV. This inference would (generally) be false.
While the energy levels of some systems can be calculated ab initio (and as understanding improves, this can be done for more and more complex systems), for most, it cannot. Where ab initio calculations have been done, and where data has been recorded from nature, the spacing of energy levels is generally not even, as your monetary analogy implies.
It's a nice try as an analogy, but this incorrect implication is quite serious. The same can be said of the "Floors on a skyscraper" analogy, unless you get quite explicit about the irregular spacing of the floors. It's not an easy concept for some people.
In fact, our Sun is more massive than 90% of stars (I might misremember this number, but it should be pretty close).
If you're looking to improve your estimate by a factor of about 2 at each degree of approximation, that's good enough for a first or second approximation.
The Sun is not an "average" star, but it's nothing unusual on a galactic scale. For a comparison, try counting the number of languages spoken in a household - most households use just one, but in excess of 10% of households would use 2 (the national language plus the family's traditional language) and several percent three languages (national, mum's language, dad's language). You very probably know at least one polyglot household, and it wouldn't be exactly surprising if you yourself came from a polyglot household.
When you're doing statistical analyses of data you have to be quite precise about what you mean by "unusual", expressed in statistical lingo as a "confidence level" (or a minor variant of this). Anything much lower than a confidence level of 15% really isn't giving much more than an indication of which way to direct further investigations - you've got a 1-in-3 chance of getting the same result by chance even if the hypothesis under test is incorrect and the null hypothesis is correct. A 5% confidence level is worth betting small change or the price of a pint of beer on. A 1% confidence level might be worth investing a day or two of salary. A 0.1% confidence level is a career-affecting decision.
YMMV, the cheque is in the post, etc, etc. To a confidence level of 10%.
Thanks. Haven't managed to finish it yet. I hate disaster flicks, disaster books don't fare much better apparently.
Lucifer's Hammer is good - worth the investment of effort. I've heard it described as considerably better than "Footfall", from which it was a spin-off ; I'm re-reading Footfall for the first time while I've read Lucifer several times. ("Lucifer" was originally an idea for the alien attack novel which became "Footfall" ; the ETs dropped an asteroid on Earth as a softening-up tactic. Niven and Pournelle decided to split the themes into separate novels.)
Isolate the genes from this girl and send people out to populate mars or the moon on one way trips. Imagine uninterrupted lifetimes spent exploring the stars.
And to continue in the same vein... A hundred generations later, on planet Earth (that'd be a little on the far side of 5000CE, putting them about as far from us as we are from the Trojan War)... Some things, like the laws of physics and the unreliability of record-keeping, haven't changed in a hundred generations (ask Homer The Blind how to use a chariot on a Bronze-Age battlefield), so everyone has forgotten about these "Searchers" who were sent out in the first half of the second millennium. The Searchers, meanwhile, have been out, playing tricks with relativity, inspecting nearby stellar systems and generally having a long period of working hard and risking their lives for the stay-at-home people's potential gain. The Searchers haven't found anything worth colonising (if they did, the news would come back at 100% of Legal Maximum; but not the Searchers ; why take the risks?), so it's safe to assume that they've not had a fun time of it.
The Searchers get back to earth to find either stone-age agriculture scrabbling to survive in the wrecked environment, or fat, lazy slobs. The Searchers have effectively perfect environmental control (otherwise, they've been dead for milennia), and have individually been working hard for a hundred human generations.
In either case, you've just created a new species who are likely to take over, one way or another. Let's hope the Searchers don't like the taste of short-life humans. Or, lets hope that they do.
Thanks for that. Even the abstract is quite informative. I may print out the paper in full, to peruse while I mow the lawn tomorrow.
For the clinically lazy (i.e., over half the population of SlashDot), the abstract:
In 1932, Bidder postulated that senescence results from ''continued action of a (genetic) regulator (of development) after growth ceases (maturation occurs).'' A 16-year-old girl who physically appears to be an infant has not been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality. The subject's anthropometric measurements are that of an 11-month-old. Coordinated development of structures for swallowing/breathing has not occurred resulting in dysfunctional digestive and respiratory systems. Brain structure, proprioception and neuroendocrine functions are infantile. Dental and bone ages are pre-teen, while telomere length and telomerase inactivity suggest a cellular age at least comparable to her chronological age. Sub-telomeric microdeletions known to be responsible for developmental delay and chromosomal imbalances are not present. Findings suggest that the subject suffers from ''developmental disorganization'' resulting from spontaneous mutation of Bidder's putative ''regulator'' of development, thereby providing an opportunity to locate and identify developmental gene(s) responsible for ensuring integrated and coordinated change in form and function from conception to adulthood. If their continued expression beyond maturation erodes internal order to promote senescence then further study of her DNA and testing of homologous genes in animal models may provide clues to genetic determinants of aging and human life span.
Hmmm, that suggests obvious experiments to try. Have you tried sending any soldiers to war who have been drained of blood already? What's their mortality rate, compared to the run-of-the-mill 19-year-old under-achiever?
...Memento (who *was* he talking to on the phone all the time?),
If I recall correctly (and I've only seen the film twice, at a spacing of about 5 years, so I have real doubts about my remembering correctly), TheAmnesiac ("Lenny"?) was repeatedly seen trying to call the barmaid who set him up for the meeting with "Teddy - do not trust him" who eventually may have got shot as if he was the original perpetrator.
That was a really weird film. One of these days I'll get the DVD and spend a week trying to figure out what was really going on. Remember that you get to see any particular scene or conversation about 4 times on average. (Not all scenes - an average!!)
Do I detect a slight note of schadenfreude there? That the "there is no such thing as society", "devil take the hindmost", extreme right-wingers who make up the Capitalism Fan Club, are now just a little less happy that they're getting to feel the shit on the end of the shitty stick that they've been happily wielding for generations. I can just see you oozing sympathy for the poor little bunnies, exposed as they are to the cold, hard realisation that there are people who can do their jobs just as well, but cheaper. [baby-speak]"Poor likkle-ikkle kwapitalists, Big Daddy Capitalist just buggered you and thrown your ass out on the street for a cheaper bit of fresh meat? Ah, diddums."[/baby-speak] Did they expect anything else? No seriously, did they expect to get anything other than "shat on and spat on and raped and abused" (name that song - from one of the best albums of all time)?
Sympathy for the little bunnies from me? Not an iota. For what it's worth, our Indian staff, we employ on the same contract as our UK staff, who are on the same contract as our European staff, who are on the same contract as our Eastern European staff. Everyone is on the same contract. Senior staff are required (not expected, required) to mentor junior staff (which is why on my last job, Pete and I, totalling over 40 years of experience, were taking a back seat to one of our Latvian staff with only 6 years of experience and a child-career-break. It's the break-out into team-leader for that one, and about a 15% pay rise.) We do this for a competitive advantage - our competitors are all in the habit of only hiring, as cheaply as possible, in Eastern Europe and India. So, as the news gets around in those markets that there is another employer in that market who hires on normal contracts and rates, all of a sudden our competitors find that they can't recruit anyone, and have to move onto the next source of cheap labour. Meanwhile, we get to pick and choose amongst the people that they've paid to recruit and train. (Incidentally, we have a rule, uniformly applied, of a minimum of 5 years experience ; we know our industry and we know why there's a 50 to 70 % drop out rate in the first 5 years. It's the on-site work 24x7x{14 or 21 or 28 or 42), and some people can't take it.)
Startling lack of respect for unanticipated dangers
[spelling corrected - you didn't have your spelling checker enabled for the title field, did you?] Which unanticipated danger - that of accidentally creating a Ripley-fancying Alien (extremely low probability), or that of being shot by the neighbours or the authorities when they come to smash down the gates to your garage and burn your house. I mean castle. I mean Schloss. And that should be "stab you with pitchforks" instead of "shot". Castles and pitchforks are so much more traditional for budding Igors. Besides, who says they're unanticipated? Possibly their understanding of biology is somewhat more sophisticated than your own.
I read this story about 6 months ago, in a different publication ; I didn't find it disturbing, except from the safety-from-the-public issues I mention above.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you had ceased to exist, to all practical intents and purposes, the moment that you told your OLR to drop all messages To or From a particular UID at the header collecting stage. You'd only see the UIDs go by if you actually watched the terminal session running, as the list of new messages to download was compiled ; then the KILL filter did it's job and the only other sign of the existence of the Damned that you'd see would be if an unDamned person quoted the Damned one.
You could filter out that too, if you really wanted to make someone an un-person.
I often wished that I had. On the other hand, the hankering for something to replace CompuServe was one of the things that stimulated me to get into the likes of SlashDot.
[Marvin]Sad, isn't it?[/Marvin]
Agreed on all your points. The AOL-ization of CIS drove me away after a year or two.
When does the NDA time out? The 12th of Never?
And surely someone has bust the NDA by now. I know it even applied to what functions an OLR needed to implement for a SysOp or WizOp. Totally bizzare, paranoid system.
[100025,3053] is so much more euphonious than ... well, I don't even know my SlashDot ID, even though I know it's one of those 5-digit ones that some of the noobs think have some significance. ([15477] It seems as I Preview.) But they only mean that you've been around a decade or two - and what's significant about that?
100025,3053
I think I looked at Golden Compass, but ended up using Virtual Access.
After my first mobile phone was banned from being taken to work (along with the small number of other people's mobiles that were around), I was looking at replacement technologies. I hemmed and hawed between going for a Psion 5 and waiting for eInk displays to come to market.
My Psion is still working 10 years (and several screens, cases and motherboards, but not data) later, and eInk is barely here. One of my few good calls on technology - normally me adopting a technology is it's kiss of death.
It may not be your taste, but that sounds like "high art" to me.
Oh, didn't various Supreme Courts rule on that a few years ago. Something about photos of Robert Mapelthorpe buggering himself with a bull-whip? One of my colleagues has a photo of that on his living room ceiling, above the dining table.
Doesn't ring any bells here.
But for an ant-scary story, look for "Sandkings" by George RR Martin.
This story was published in (IIRC) American Scientist a month or two ago. Yep, here we go : A Cipher to Thomas Jefferson.
Loath though I am to send money to America, I do find myself strongly tempted to subscribing to that magazine. Seriously good brain-fodder.
By the time that you've got your rocks molten, their water, CO2 and ammonia (nitrogen in it's most-likely protoplanetary form) would have pretty-much fucked right off. At the time that the Moon was formed (giant impact hypothesis, still the best one running), much of the depth of the mantle was temporarily ejected into low proto-Earth orbit, and at sufficient temperatures that significant amounts of such volatile ions as sodium were also lost from the material that accreted into orbit to form the Moon. This can be quite clearly seen in the composition of lunar rock samples - noticeably sodium deficient and as dry as a bone.
In planetary science, it is uncontroversial that no-matter how wet the Earth was when it formed, it was fairly well dried out by the time the Moon had formed. Consequently, the Earth then had to acquire it's volatile load (water, nitrogen-as-ammonia, carbon dioxide) after the Giant Impact. Since the Giant Impact would have necessarily (?? well, most likely) involved the mutual accretion of the two largest bodies remaining in the Earth's orbital range form the Sun, there wouldn't have been much left to accrete after that. So, most of the Earth's volatiles must have come form somewhere else.
That's one line of "geologically-based" thinking that leads to the Earth's non-volatile and volatile components having different origins. There's a simpler, astrophysically-based line of thinking that leads to the same conclusion from different premises : many meteorites contain a class of devitrified formerly-glassy chondrules called CAIs (Calcium-Aluminium[-rich] Inclusions) which give some of the oldest ages in the solar system (from our inventory of samples, but these are well and diversely sampled from stony meteorites, and give a coherent thermal history) ; the de-vitrified glassy textures tell that they were metamorphosed from a glass at temperatures consonant with their surrounding mineralogies in their various meteorites, and the fact that they were previously glasses tells us that they had got hot enough to melt and then cooled fast enough to become glassy. That tells us something about the thermal history of the early times of the solar proto-planetary disc. Which in turn tells us something about the early heating history of the sun. Which ties in with our understanding of nuclear fusion, which is good enough to make bombs if not power plants. And the whole lot boils down to (pun not intended) ... in the early accretion of the Earth, and most meteorites, anywhere much Sunwards of the asteroid belt was too hot for water-ice (let alone ammonia-ice or carbon-dioxide-ice) to be stable.
The early Earth (and Mercury, Venus and to a lesser degree Mars) was pretty dry when it accreted. All got significant amounts of their volatile inventory later in the formation of the Solar System, after the "rocky" planets had essentially completed forming.
I am not aware (IANA Planetary Scientist, but I am a geologist by trade, currently steering a horizontal oil well) if the accumulation of water ice evaporated from the "rocky planets" region onto the proto-Jupiter is currently "fingered" as what tipped that one into becoming big enough to start to accrete hydrogen directly. But I am pretty sure that it has been suggested. The modelling is, as I think I've hinted, complex.
But the PS story is clear : the terrestrial planets got most of their volatiles AFTER they had effectively finished accreting.
Hmm, have we got the well sidetracked yet? Oh dear. Oh very dear.
They probably did use round numbers originally, just not in the currency it's been translated into (and no, I don't keep a mental track of what the USD's exchange rates are as it doesn't matter to me. So guess for yourself what the original currency was.)
Concerning the actual idea in the summary - why should anyone be surprised? Anything that presents a metric is going to get fools pushing that metric. Some people buy a car with an unnecessarily large engine, others try for a high score at Civilisation. What's news?
Seriously - who cares about Blu-Ray?
Why pay out in the order of a thousand pounds to completely replace your entire TV system - from screen to player to the stand that the TV is on to replacing the shelves on the wall behind the TV with ones that can accommodate a flat panel display - everything has to go. And for what? No increase in quality and a lot more hassles.
I don't see this entire generation of technologies getting sufficient traction to make me replace everything. I'll look at the issue again in a decade or so and see if anything is still surviving then.
(I should point out that it was the wife's idea to get a TV. I was perfectly happy with the radio, and that's still mostly what I use the TV system for, since it's radio reception is better than the analogue radio. I might try looking at DAB when it's settled down a bit.)
... just how??
If the gaming industry wants me to spend money on games, then they're going to have to produce some games that actually have genuine interest to them. Run around and shoot things? Been there, done that, got bored with Quake (I, not II). Go online? Why?
Frankly, I've recently removed OpenArena (another run-around-and-shoot-things game) from the machine and I'm still trundling on with alternating sessions of CIV or UFO-enemy-unknown. I've not met anything with the long-standing interest of those games in 20-odd years (OK, 17-odd for UFO), and until the games industry can produce something competitive to those, I don't see any reason to invest my money in them.
The various Tomb Raiders did make a reasonable attempt at filling that niche - and I still get copies for the works machines for downtime. (We consider it to be less troublesome to supply something ourselves for people's off-shift time, rather than letting them install anything that they want to. It is a *works* machine, after all.) So, 3-for-a-tenner new games works fine for us.
(The "it" being that the present-day mass extinction event is human-caused.)
Yes, you're probably right that the present mass extinction is probably the best understood of the lot, in terms of causes. Over it's 0.05Ma (approx.) duration this mass extinction has closely coincided in time with the entry of humans to particular areas, as well as to anthropogenic effects on climate, landscape and habitats. Of course, being a continuing situation, it's also amenable to experimentation, which would give us the prospect of understanding it quite well by the time that it is over. Say, in another 0.05Ma.
Equally importantly is the valid question of whether there will be any humans around in 0.05Ma. That's not a question that gets as much visceral attention as it should, IMHO.
As for previous mass extinctions - we're very much in the dark about their causes.
We simply don't have enough data to be sure what the origins of previous mass extinction events were. For some, we've got moderately good evidence, but no real "smoking gun" evidence. Even the best-characterised ones - the present day and the P-E events - don't get to a criminal level of proof ("beyond reasonable doubt"), and are little beyond the civil level of proof ("on the balance of probabilities" ; your jurisprudence standards probably vary in detail).
The inter-galactic gas of the Local Group will hit the inter-galactic gas of the supercluster (Virgo) resulting in shock waves which will be transmitted to gas within the component galaxies, with possibly significant effects within those galaxies.
Clearer now?
Hmm, that logic doesn't stack up. "We know of the cause of one extinction event." Do we? which event? and what is the cause?
Then you seem to imply that we know that the cause of the current extinction event is "us", which is probably true but certainly not undisputed, let alone fully proven. So, are you counting this as a second data point, from which you impute a trend?
(NB : I'm a geologist by profession. So double check what you think is the accepted cause of some non-current extinction event. It's likely that I'm more familiar with the literature than you are.)
There's a "law" of Usenet, that every dispute will inevitably result in one protagonist accusing the other of being a Nazi (or Hitler's love-child, or something equally disreputable) ; it has a corollary that when this occurs, there is no more useful content to the dispute. this is IIRC "Godwin's Law.
There's a similarly well-founded "law" which states that any post complaining about someone's spelling or grammar will itself contain significant spelling and/or grammatical mistakes. Sorry, "speelung" mistakes. I can't remember that "law's" name ; perhaps it has several.
Depressingly, there is a third similarly well-founded law, concerning the likelihood of introducing serious error when trying to explain technical concepts in public.
Your analogy between the physicist's use of "quantum" and money is OK to a degree, but has an important misleading effect which isn't present in a physicist's (or chemist's) use of the term. From what you say, a reader could draw the inference that a system at an energy level of 13.24 dollars (or electron-volts, eV) could change to a state of 13.23 eV, or to 13.25 eV, but not to 13.242456 eV. This inference would (generally) be false.
While the energy levels of some systems can be calculated ab initio (and as understanding improves, this can be done for more and more complex systems), for most, it cannot. Where ab initio calculations have been done, and where data has been recorded from nature, the spacing of energy levels is generally not even, as your monetary analogy implies.
It's a nice try as an analogy, but this incorrect implication is quite serious. The same can be said of the "Floors on a skyscraper" analogy, unless you get quite explicit about the irregular spacing of the floors. It's not an easy concept for some people.
If you're looking to improve your estimate by a factor of about 2 at each degree of approximation, that's good enough for a first or second approximation.
The Sun is not an "average" star, but it's nothing unusual on a galactic scale. For a comparison, try counting the number of languages spoken in a household - most households use just one, but in excess of 10% of households would use 2 (the national language plus the family's traditional language) and several percent three languages (national, mum's language, dad's language). You very probably know at least one polyglot household, and it wouldn't be exactly surprising if you yourself came from a polyglot household.
When you're doing statistical analyses of data you have to be quite precise about what you mean by "unusual", expressed in statistical lingo as a "confidence level" (or a minor variant of this). Anything much lower than a confidence level of 15% really isn't giving much more than an indication of which way to direct further investigations - you've got a 1-in-3 chance of getting the same result by chance even if the hypothesis under test is incorrect and the null hypothesis is correct. A 5% confidence level is worth betting small change or the price of a pint of beer on. A 1% confidence level might be worth investing a day or two of salary. A 0.1% confidence level is a career-affecting decision.
YMMV, the cheque is in the post, etc, etc. To a confidence level of 10%.
Lucifer's Hammer is good - worth the investment of effort. I've heard it described as considerably better than "Footfall", from which it was a spin-off ; I'm re-reading Footfall for the first time while I've read Lucifer several times. ("Lucifer" was originally an idea for the alien attack novel which became "Footfall" ; the ETs dropped an asteroid on Earth as a softening-up tactic. Niven and Pournelle decided to split the themes into separate novels.)
And to continue in the same vein ... A hundred generations later, on planet Earth (that'd be a little on the far side of 5000CE, putting them about as far from us as we are from the Trojan War) ...
Some things, like the laws of physics and the unreliability of record-keeping, haven't changed in a hundred generations (ask Homer The Blind how to use a chariot on a Bronze-Age battlefield), so everyone has forgotten about these "Searchers" who were sent out in the first half of the second millennium.
The Searchers, meanwhile, have been out, playing tricks with relativity, inspecting nearby stellar systems and generally having a long period of working hard and risking their lives for the stay-at-home people's potential gain.
The Searchers haven't found anything worth colonising (if they did, the news would come back at 100% of Legal Maximum; but not the Searchers ; why take the risks?), so it's safe to assume that they've not had a fun time of it.
The Searchers get back to earth to find either stone-age agriculture scrabbling to survive in the wrecked environment, or fat, lazy slobs.
The Searchers have effectively perfect environmental control (otherwise, they've been dead for milennia), and have individually been working hard for a hundred human generations.
In either case, you've just created a new species who are likely to take over, one way or another. Let's hope the Searchers don't like the taste of short-life humans. Or, lets hope that they do.
Thanks for that. Even the abstract is quite informative. I may print out the paper in full, to peruse while I mow the lawn tomorrow.
For the clinically lazy (i.e., over half the population of SlashDot), the abstract :
Hmmm, that suggests obvious experiments to try. Have you tried sending any soldiers to war who have been drained of blood already? What's their mortality rate, compared to the run-of-the-mill 19-year-old under-achiever?
If I recall correctly (and I've only seen the film twice, at a spacing of about 5 years, so I have real doubts about my remembering correctly), TheAmnesiac ("Lenny"?) was repeatedly seen trying to call the barmaid who set him up for the meeting with "Teddy - do not trust him" who eventually may have got shot as if he was the original perpetrator.
That was a really weird film. One of these days I'll get the DVD and spend a week trying to figure out what was really going on. Remember that you get to see any particular scene or conversation about 4 times on average. (Not all scenes - an average!!)
Do I detect a slight note of schadenfreude there? That the "there is no such thing as society", "devil take the hindmost", extreme right-wingers who make up the Capitalism Fan Club, are now just a little less happy that they're getting to feel the shit on the end of the shitty stick that they've been happily wielding for generations. I can just see you oozing sympathy for the poor little bunnies, exposed as they are to the cold, hard realisation that there are people who can do their jobs just as well, but cheaper.
[baby-speak]"Poor likkle-ikkle kwapitalists, Big Daddy Capitalist just buggered you and thrown your ass out on the street for a cheaper bit of fresh meat? Ah, diddums."[/baby-speak]
Did they expect anything else? No seriously, did they expect to get anything other than "shat on and spat on and raped and abused" (name that song - from one of the best albums of all time)?
Sympathy for the little bunnies from me? Not an iota.
For what it's worth, our Indian staff, we employ on the same contract as our UK staff, who are on the same contract as our European staff, who are on the same contract as our Eastern European staff. Everyone is on the same contract. Senior staff are required (not expected, required) to mentor junior staff (which is why on my last job, Pete and I, totalling over 40 years of experience, were taking a back seat to one of our Latvian staff with only 6 years of experience and a child-career-break. It's the break-out into team-leader for that one, and about a 15% pay rise.)
We do this for a competitive advantage - our competitors are all in the habit of only hiring, as cheaply as possible, in Eastern Europe and India. So, as the news gets around in those markets that there is another employer in that market who hires on normal contracts and rates, all of a sudden our competitors find that they can't recruit anyone, and have to move onto the next source of cheap labour. Meanwhile, we get to pick and choose amongst the people that they've paid to recruit and train.
(Incidentally, we have a rule, uniformly applied, of a minimum of 5 years experience ; we know our industry and we know why there's a 50 to 70 % drop out rate in the first 5 years. It's the on-site work 24x7x{14 or 21 or 28 or 42), and some people can't take it.)
What is this linkage that you imply between personal wealth and medical treatment?
Oh, I forgot - you live in America. My commiserations.