You find me a university that will give me tenure and a paid ten-year sabbatical to find out, and I'll give it a shot.
The two professors that I've known to be interested in (different aspects of this same question) both carried full teaching loads, like everyone else. What makes you so special?
My personal POV... the whole universe is alive,... full of love,... all living beings share a collective super-consciousness,... could be that less people perceive the world this way.
I'd be extremely careful about which bars you go to with that philosophy. In some bars you might get interesting propositions which would broaden... some parts of your anatomy. In other bars, you'd end up naked and wet for much less pleasant reasons.
Nearly everything I was told in jr. high and high school science classes was more misleading than Slashdot headlines and summaries...
Wow, that's scary. When your nation starts to slide into barbarism, do you have your exit strategy organised. Or have you left already, before the big exodus starts and everyone starts to close their borders to your fellow citizens?
The creative forces behind this video have put some thought into it.
[SNIGGER] Someone else has been reading the same sources as inspired that Terry Pratchett quote that I cited earlier. Actually, I'll cite it again, because this locus is considerably more apposite.
"It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking at the one under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices it's disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well." Equal Rites, p.188, 1987 (my copy)
Isn't suggesting that abiogenesis was anything but a fluke creationism?
See my discussion above of the degrees of freedom available to different types of molecule, which are intrinsic to the atoms themselves.
Combined with the experience that complex systems are more efficient at using the energy that passes through them, this suggests (to me) that increasingly complex systems become inevitable. Whether that inevitably leads to "life" in a way that further discredits the long since utterly discredited presence of religion in physical science, is a more open question. Answering this question would be one of the biggest outcomes from discovering any other form of life anywhere in the universe.
Some scientists observed various metal molecules joining together into a helix structure.
Reference please? I like to try keep reasonably well up on current science, but I can't think what you could possibly be referring to here, apart from some misunderstanding of talk about magnetic vortices in semiconductors. Or possibly the rather weird symmetries of pseudo-pentasymmetric crystals?
The significance of the helical shape of DNA/ RNA is slight compared to the difference in strength between bonds between the strands of the helix (between the "complimentary bases" that form the "rungs" of the iconic ladder) and the strength of the bonds along the length of the helix (the "stringers" or "styles" in the ladder icon). If the bonds between stringers were of comparable strength to the bonds between halves of a rung, then the ladder would fall apart and be unable to act as an information store. Imagine taking a backup tape and cutting it into sections 1 bit long? Totally unusable! ; The same tape cut into sections 10 bits long? Pretty useless. Sections 100bits long? now you might be able to get somewhere, particularly if the breaks in one stringer are not aligned with the breaks in the other stringer. And you're starting to see the logic behind the "shotgun" sequencing method.
I'm not aware of any metal structure (in the sense of, individual atoms arranged with delocalised bonding electrons, which is a crude definition of "metal" ; it's the delocalised electrons that give the "metallic" lustre, conductivity, etc that are typical of metals) which has sufficient contrast of bonding strength in different directions to remain metals and act as hereditary information stores.
As a geologist, I sometimes think about the analogous questions for mineral structures. We have "chain", "sheet" and "network" silicates to play with, which are certainly capable of storing and transmitting information. But in most cases we can't strength-orientation contrasts of hundreds to one. So, mineral fibres are rarely a hundred times as long as they are wide. Mineral sheets on the other hand can easily have hundreds of times the sheet area compared to their edge areas. Indeed, a Glasgow University chemist called Alan Graham Cairns-Smyth has seriously proposed this as a starter for the generation of hereditary systems, before they were taken-over by more efficient organic molecules.
Why would organic molecules be more efficient than minerals? Essentially because they've more degrees of freedom to form shapes with than either metals (4 to 8 d.f. per molecular building block) minerals (the 4 to 8 d.f. for metals, which are components, plus another 2 to 4 d.f. in chain silicates (depending on how you link up the silicate "tetrahedra") and another 2 to 4 d.f. in sheet silicates, plus several more d.f. in choosing how to stack up the differences between chains and sheets. In an organic molecule though you've got around 4 d.f. (from choosing the next atom in a chain) plus 2 to 4 d.f. (for the valence of the next atom) plus another 3 to 4 d.f. from the orientation of the next atom's bonds. And those d.f. add on with essentially every atom in the molecule which isn't a hydrogen atom. In short, you can build more complex shapes of molecules with organics than you can with minerals.
I really, really want to see another life chemistry ; it'll answer so many questions. And beg so many more.
Maybe rocks are intelligent. How would we know? Has anybody thought to ask?
Terry Pratchett addressed this nicely, not in a RoundWorld context:
"It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking at the one under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices it's disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well." (Equal Rites, p.188)
Makes me think - how could plate tectonics work in a DiscWorld context?
Particularly when you know that (as most people in this part of the world learn in school) that Australia was originally settled after people walked here from Indonesia. Back then, the sea level was lower and there was a land bridge between the two.
Have you heard of the Wallace Line? Running between Borneo and Bali (west) and Sulawesi and Lombok (East), it's a deep water channel that persisted through at least the most recent ice ages (when there have been anatomically modern humans around to be obstructed by it).
There's also the "Lydekker Line" further east which separates (less deeply) the Eastern part of Indonesia and the NW of the Australia/ PNG/ other_little_bits continental landmass. Yes, we do know that sea levels (and therefore coastlines) were different in the past. But the Australian continent was still (for as long as there have been mammals (well, for as long as there has been a distinction between placental and marsupial mammals)) the Australian continent. PNG is just a crumpled edge to Australia.
Until you can see "over the horizon", then not being able to see some "over there" to go to has always been a considerable obstacle to exploration. Making that leap of imagination was the thing that Christopher Columbus has rightly been celebrated for (while he was correctly castigated at the time for getting his sums wrong and condemning himself and his crews to starvation in the trackless ocean. They were just lucky that the Americas got in the way; whether the Americas were 'lucky' is a separate question.).
Howver far into the future the mainstay resources will shift. Currently oil literally drives us. It used to be food(people, horses,etc). It will probably be the element that enables FTL.
You've got a point, but in the intermediate future - after the oil wars have declined because there simply isn't enough of it to fuel a military-industrial complex (let alone domestic vehicles) - I'd suspect that the driver for wars will be something relatively prosaic. (BTW, I write this as an oil geologist, and "intermediate future" is within my lifetime and therefore quite likely within your lifetime. Worry about this.)
That "something" will be fresh water. Or lack of fresh water. Or you and your neighbour having access to different amounts of fresh water. Don't worry about your neighbour's neighbours, because you're going to have to go through your neighbour to get access to their resources.
One would like to think that NASA's PR department have learned the meaning of the phrase "spelling checker".
Might I recommend a browser family called FireFox? They have an integrated spelling checker which you can use. You can even tell it which languages you speak, or are attempting to write, and it will try to correct your errors. Oh, I see the problem.
at what point does a stone that happens to have been eroded/chipped naturally into the rough shape of an axe-head become a stone that has been intentionally crafted by (pre)human hands.
Well, a technical answer to your question would probably take several dozen papers in the realms of the neurobiology and psychology of image processing, with all sorts of excursions into computerised image processing etc. Add in some/.-isms about automated facial recognition by CCTV and you've got 2/3 of the thread that it would take to answer your question accurately.
I'm a geologist ; I look at rocks for a living. I look at perhaps 10,000 rock samples a year and do rough (50~200 word) descriptions for around 1/3 of them. I look at rocks more than the average man in the street. Accepted?
A few years ago, strolling around a lake shore in the Urals (near Satka, FWIW), I spotted little flakes of flint in the shoreline debris. 3-4mm by 5-7mm by under a mm thick, very sharp edge ; simple weakly conchoidal fracture surface on one face, the two opposite faces met at an obtuse angle to define a shallow ridge parallel to the longer axis of the fragments. Clearly part of a tool, not natural ; the shape would have worked as a long spear point, or as a scraper, but it was too thin to make a good slicing tool - it would have broken transverse to it's axis (as indeed, it had). To my eye, it was clearly an artefact. That was as clear as the fact that it was of a rock type that I hadn't seen at all in that day's walking, which is something that anyone can notice, if they've looked at a few tens of thousands of lumps of rock in the last few years. It's an experience thing, as I regularly show to 3rd-party trainee geologists by looking down the microscope for 10 seconds and then telling them where to look in the field of view to see the various important features which they take 5 minutes to find. The client-trainee had no idea how I'd know to "go up" instead of "go down" to get from a tight MDT point to one that gave usable mobility to sample. I could have told her, but it would have taken most of the 40 minutes we had per measurement point ; all the data necessary was on the log scroll sitting on the desk, but she hasn't learned to assimilate it, and with it being her first time doing this job, she simply didn't know where to look. It is part of my job to teach, but it's also part of my job to not waste time at $250/minute.
Experience is a big thing when recognising things like this. Having a vocabulary and a set of mental "search images" appropriate to the task is also a big help, because it means that you can vocalise what you perceive as being important observations (you can tell I'm not a Neolithic arrowhead specialist from my appalling description above). And now, it's lunch time. Which is also important.
No. They would need a hundred, to have enough genetic variation to survive permanently.
Wellllll... there's a substantial kernel of truth in there, but the reality is not as clearly cut as you (or your sources) make out. It's true that isolated breeding populations of very small size do tend to have problems with consanguinity and relatively high rates of expression of deleterious mutations, but on the flip side of that, the small population size means that the population can genetically drift much faster than a larger population can. So, if the small population "comes up with" new phenotypes (short hand for something more like "selects from randomly-presented combinations of established and mutated genes", but considerably longer) which are well adapted to their isolated environment, they can achieve local dominance rapidly.
How small those populations are... is a very moot point, and almost certainly the numbers are different for different genera (since this process is a common route of speciation, it's pointless to talk at a species level).
An example - within living memory, the island of St.Kilda (60-some km west of the western Hebrides) was abandoned by it's human population, with consanguinity being cited as one of their major concerns. The population at the time of evacuation was 36 people (though the population profile would have been abnormal, having lost many of it's younger members in recent years). We can take this as an estimate of somewhat below the minimum population size necessary for an isolated human population. In contrast, before World War I the population seems to have been more-or-less stable in the high 70s or low 80s. Granted this is not an entirely isolated population, but it does give an indication. Perhaps better or more numerous data is available from the more numerous small Pacific Ocean islands, but again they're not entirely isolated.
In contrast, a recent report (I don't have the reference with me, but it was quite widely reported) of an isolated wolf pack in southern Sweden showed that it was suffering severely from inbreeding with around 8 members. But in contrast the appearance of a single unrelated individual male wolf in the late 1990s (IIRC) practically reversed the long-term decline of the pack. This suggests that the viable minimum population size for canines may be as low as the dozens.
Excluding social factors, the number of pairings available in a population 'n' scales as (n^2-n)/4 ; if pairings are not lifelong... well, you get the picture.
For the SF fan - it's never puzzled me why the "colony world" type of story sticks (more or less) to monogamous couples and nuclear families (it's a fictional device), I suspect that in a real-world scenario that couldn't be allowed. What sort of a solution would have to be brought up, I don't know. Maybe the women starting pregnancies alternately by natural means and by IVF "from the egg and sperm banks, at random". But I suspect that "something would have to be done" to get the population gene pool bigger, faster.
For the anthropologist... there's a scenario about Australia (or any random non-African continent) being colonised by a single woman, pregnant with a male foetus, being blown on a raft/ boat/ flood debris raft across from Indonesia. Not impossible, but decidedly implausible. Individuals getting blown off course in small coast-hugger boats, landing on the Australia shore at intervals of less than (say) a decade, and eventually two of opposite sexes surviving for long enough to meet... that seems much more credible. And a decade later, another human arrives, and a decade later, another arrives. Pretty soon, you've got a substantial colony (I make it less than a century to reach a population of about 30 adults even with some fairly pessimistic assumptions about mortality rates).
I thought the whole point of aircan instead of vacuum is to avoid static electricity zapping the computer?
Moving air rapidly over a non-conducting surface is a recipe for generating static.
If you find you're needing that S&R helicopter to come and pick you out of the water, do NOT grab hold of the wire trailing below the winchman as he's lowered into the water near you. That's there to discharge the static the helicopter accumulates in flight, and people have had heart attack from grabbing at the leader wire. Likewise - use the earthing strap BEFORE you attach the fuel hose.
The airspeed across a helicopter's rotor is going to be in the same order of magnitude as that coming out of an air can. Which raises a potential (sorry, couldn't resist! Sorry again!!) problem in static-sensitive equipment.
DP? Only ever been on a couple of those puppies, man. Anchors for us, even if they're on 2 miles of wire. Each.
Hell I bet you get to go back to shore just about every day.
Where are you going to get the helicopters, or the pilots? It was a 2 hour flight with one refuelling to get out here for 18 PAX, so that's a maximum of 36 passengers that pair of pilots could have moved in a working day. These days the helicopter business is in the horrible position of actually having to train people from scratch, now that the military pilots have cottoned on to the fact that they can go to fixed wing when they de-mob. Terrible shock for the industry, having to work in a competitive market place with a group of people willing and capable to move to a better employer.
As for "not at sea" : well, the 65 knot winds and waves breaking onto the main deck (57 to 109 ft above sealevel, depending on the wave) would belie that.
UNREP and VERTREP? Oh, some sort of stores movements in the Navy. Well, hardly unknown - we're currently waiting on weather conditions to offload a couple of hundred tons of oil-based mud, load up with several hundred tons of containerised and basketed tools and chemicals. That of course is WHEN the sea state allows the service boats to get alongside (26ft+ heave on each vessel, in variable phase) without impacting us (or us impacting them - same difference) ; then, once the master of each of those vessels is happy to come alongside (within 20ft), the crane operators have to be happy to swing their booms around too, with up to 27 tons on the main hoist, then land the MRI scanner tools without banging them hard enough to damage them.
Nope, up here in the sub-tropical north, we don't know anything about bad weather. It's been a quiet storm this last 24 hours - no rigs have pulled their anchors. And just to make the point, the rig has just yawed off-orientation so that we've lost internet connection while I've been writing this. Oh well, it'll come back, eventually.
Where are you operating in the Navy? I'm trying to negotiate my way into up-coming work in the South Falkland and Malvinas Basins (around 56S/59W), which is looking like it'll be fun with high overpressure downhole and at least one refuelling on a boat deck somewhere for the helicopter from shore. Or maybe we'll have to crew-change in a basket transfer from a boat onto the rig, which really does not appeal in the Roaring Forties.
Well, that was a perfect illustration of the problems though. I finished writing the above just before 09:00, then [BOOM] something breaks (at the shore end of the connection) and the whole rig lost communications (telephony, web, email, everything on the network) until about 20:00. The only thing left for troubleshooting was the ship-to-shore. Well, it's fixed now, but will SlashDot accept a 10-hour old form?
And don't say "I run $OS", Korean banks won't deal with you online if you don't run Windows and therefore can't accept ActiveX.
Oh, I'll remember that if the job in North Korea ever comes up and I find that I need to set up a separate bank account to move the money into the rest of my accounts.
Say, it's January 15, right? So what's W doing in 5 days?
If he's got any sense, he'll be enjoying a long lie in bed.
But it's G.W.Bush we're talking about, so he'll probably be up at the crack of dawn for a jog in the rain and smog, on a hard road. Uphill. And into the wind. What have I forgotten? Oh, midges - there should be midges, millions of midges. No sense at all, that man.
(I'm assuming that Jan-19 is the date that the American Presidency changes hands.)
I think that is sad that I was 37 years old the first time to see it with my own eyes.
Well, that's something to blame your parents for, but if they were similarly deprived, there's no benefit to recriminations. Just show them the sight yourself, and make sure to educate any other kids in the family.
A few years ago I was visiting a friend in his late 40s... actually I was there because I wanted to show him Comet Hyakutake, so that dates it to 1996-03-24 or -25. Which was stunning enough, given that he has a pretty dark sky at his house. He also had some pretty good hashish, which added to the evening. But to my amazement, given that he lived in such a dark sky site for about a decade, he'd never seen the Milky Way himself. Well, we sorted out that problem, and it prompted me to get a planisphere and keep it in the briefcase. Then we got his 6-year-old son out of his bed to see the sights too, which was a good night all round.
Just get an iPhone with the biggest data plan they offer. Seriously.
Might work, might not. If I cared to ask the guy at work who keeps on trying to show off his iPhone, then I might find out. But I can't say that I'm bothered to find out what internet browsing on a 9cm screen is like.
However, having wandered around more than a few ports in a variety of cities on a variety of continents, I can tell you to keep the iPhone hidden, and to keep a reasonable quality cellphone available. If you don't have something to give to the muggers, just expect them to kill you and take what you were protecting anyway. If you let them have something that looks believably valuable, you might get away with your iPhone, your data, and your face intact. Might.
Sounds like this is a scheme for introducing people to different ways of life. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But the problem with meeting different ways of life is that you may get more than you're expecting. Depending on gender, take contraceptives ; not depending on gender, carry condoms and a (fake) letter from your doctor about your positive HIV test (in BIG print!). (The latter is not for the health authorities - it's to persuade the rapist-to-be to use a condom on you, so that YOU don't catch THEIR diseases. You never know - they might be so put off that you might even get away without being raped.) Oh, did I puncture your dreams of an idyllic cruise? Well, better punctured now than in a dark alley in the docks.
And do not expect the same laws to apply in the port country as apply at home (wherever that is). Seriously, do not.
Internet access at sea is quite slow though, its doubtful that he will be able to upload many photos during this time period.
I was getting download speeds of about 5MB/s last weekend, using a satellite link. Better than I get from home. Come to think of it - better than I get when I'm in the office too.
OK, that's on a Shell rig, and it seems as if Shell have seriously bumped up their normal offshore installation datalink capabilities in the last 18 months. This was on a temporarily-hired rig ; they may have better on their permanently-plumbed installations because they've always got the trivial prospect of pigging one of the gas export pipelines with yet-another fibre-optic cable.
The best thing to do if you'll be near coastal is to have a cellular modem in your laptop.
You're pretty lucky to get those working 30km offshore. Plus, they tend to not work too well through three thicknesses of 5mm steel plate before getting to free air. The Faraday Cage effects don't help either.
I know this because I am a professional mariner.
I spend most of my working life at sea too. If that's the state of communications on your boat... well, you're probably at the moving-stuff-around end of the business, not at the knowledge end of the business. The gamut of what's available extends from sending multi-gigabyte digests of a seismic shoot to shore in near-real time to just needing to get some god-awful hodge-podge of a multi-megabyte spreadsheet file with next week's crew-change rosters into the Master's email box. Having said that, last time I worked with seismic they would send the boxes of tapes to shore on each crew change helicopter, every couple of days. Not a deep marine situation.
if they did offer that, then you'd come up with another reason why not to buy it. stop lying and just say you don't like paying for music. it's ok.
OK - I'll admit it. I don't like paying for music, so I don't. then again, I don't like not paying for music, so I don't do that either. Actually, I don't like listening to music at all, either music that I've chosen, or that someone else has chosen against my wishes. But people seem to keep on forcing me to listen to the damned stuff on the bus, in the shopping centre, in the bar, in the office (when I go there), in the canteen at work. Everywhere I go, there's this audible pollution being hammered into my ears by people who don't even have the non-excuse of acceptable taste.
Could someone please invent a form of DRM for my ears, so that I could charge the music's owner a fee for the use of my ears?
(by the way, this isn't a joke ; I threw my music collection into two carrier bags in 1994 and gave it to a friend, because it got in the way of having a conversation. Seriously, if I could make people pay me for the use (abuse) of my ears as I walk down the street, I'd be very interested. Let those people who want to damage their hearing put little "buds" in their ears and groove on to the commands of the CyberLord ; me, I want to hear what's going on around me.
I'd do it, but I don't believe I could live with myself.
Why not? Parting the over-endowed retarded from their cash has always been morally defensible, as you're unlikely to put the money to as bad a use as it's previous caretaker.
Especially if I had to give up ubiquitous broadband.
Ubiquitous broadband as in "in every house", or as in "in every corner of every room of the house, so I can post on Slashdot while I shower". If it's the latter, make arrangements for IR laser as a transmission medium on a room-by-room basis. But you really can't stand having CAT5 coils around, even for making a lot of money?
BUT WHY does SlashDot occasionally downgrade users to a 25-char-wide compose box?
* "We want to visit places and collect interesting rocks" is nowhere near as exciting as * "We need to go find out about 'them' before 'they' come and find out about us"
You're not a geologist, are you? You poor deluded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H depraved^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H deprived fool, don't you know what pleasures you've been missing.
"Statistically speaking, you will die. "
Statistically speaking, no you won't: from Adam to-date, less than half of Humankind has ever died,
References please?
This is an oft-repeated line, sometimes expressed as "now that the living outnumber the dead". It's bollocks. OK - that's a bit harsh. It's wrong, significantly wrong.
Depending on your assumptions, the actual numbers are moderately variable. In 2002, a writer for the Population Reference Bureau published one set of assumptions at http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf , and came up with around 106,456,367,669 people born since an initial pair in 50,000BCE, so that the 2002 population of 6,215,000,000 represented 5.8% of the total number of humans ever born.
It's actually an interesting exercise in programming and modelling to study - you can use any system you want, but it lends itself to spreadsheeting, because you can be quite subtle about how you modify your model. I could provide you with a sheet I did some years ago, but the process of developing your own is instructive, and worth putting a couple of hours into.
Urgh - I just found that spreadsheet. I did it in 2000, in a discussion prompted by a retard of a creationist (a retard by the pretty retarded standards of that group). It's not a new question.
Slashdot Mirror
The two professors that I've known to be interested in (different aspects of this same question) both carried full teaching loads, like everyone else. What makes you so special?
I'd be extremely careful about which bars you go to with that philosophy. In some bars you might get interesting propositions which would broaden ... some parts of your anatomy. In other bars, you'd end up naked and wet for much less pleasant reasons.
Wow, that's scary. When your nation starts to slide into barbarism, do you have your exit strategy organised. Or have you left already, before the big exodus starts and everyone starts to close their borders to your fellow citizens?
[SNIGGER] Someone else has been reading the same sources as inspired that Terry Pratchett quote that I cited earlier. Actually, I'll cite it again, because this locus is considerably more apposite.
See my discussion above of the degrees of freedom available to different types of molecule, which are intrinsic to the atoms themselves.
Combined with the experience that complex systems are more efficient at using the energy that passes through them, this suggests (to me) that increasingly complex systems become inevitable. Whether that inevitably leads to "life" in a way that further discredits the long since utterly discredited presence of religion in physical science, is a more open question. Answering this question would be one of the biggest outcomes from discovering any other form of life anywhere in the universe.
Reference please? I like to try keep reasonably well up on current science, but I can't think what you could possibly be referring to here, apart from some misunderstanding of talk about magnetic vortices in semiconductors. Or possibly the rather weird symmetries of pseudo-pentasymmetric crystals?
The significance of the helical shape of DNA/ RNA is slight compared to the difference in strength between bonds between the strands of the helix (between the "complimentary bases" that form the "rungs" of the iconic ladder) and the strength of the bonds along the length of the helix (the "stringers" or "styles" in the ladder icon). If the bonds between stringers were of comparable strength to the bonds between halves of a rung, then the ladder would fall apart and be unable to act as an information store. Imagine taking a backup tape and cutting it into sections 1 bit long? Totally unusable! ; The same tape cut into sections 10 bits long? Pretty useless. Sections 100bits long? now you might be able to get somewhere, particularly if the breaks in one stringer are not aligned with the breaks in the other stringer. And you're starting to see the logic behind the "shotgun" sequencing method.
I'm not aware of any metal structure (in the sense of, individual atoms arranged with delocalised bonding electrons, which is a crude definition of "metal" ; it's the delocalised electrons that give the "metallic" lustre, conductivity, etc that are typical of metals) which has sufficient contrast of bonding strength in different directions to remain metals and act as hereditary information stores.
As a geologist, I sometimes think about the analogous questions for mineral structures. We have "chain", "sheet" and "network" silicates to play with, which are certainly capable of storing and transmitting information. But in most cases we can't strength-orientation contrasts of hundreds to one. So, mineral fibres are rarely a hundred times as long as they are wide. Mineral sheets on the other hand can easily have hundreds of times the sheet area compared to their edge areas. Indeed, a Glasgow University chemist called Alan Graham Cairns-Smyth has seriously proposed this as a starter for the generation of hereditary systems, before they were taken-over by more efficient organic molecules.
Why would organic molecules be more efficient than minerals? Essentially because they've more degrees of freedom to form shapes with than either metals (4 to 8 d.f. per molecular building block) minerals (the 4 to 8 d.f. for metals, which are components, plus another 2 to 4 d.f. in chain silicates (depending on how you link up the silicate "tetrahedra") and another 2 to 4 d.f. in sheet silicates, plus several more d.f. in choosing how to stack up the differences between chains and sheets. In an organic molecule though you've got around 4 d.f. (from choosing the next atom in a chain) plus 2 to 4 d.f. (for the valence of the next atom) plus another 3 to 4 d.f. from the orientation of the next atom's bonds. And those d.f. add on with essentially every atom in the molecule which isn't a hydrogen atom. In short, you can build more complex shapes of molecules with organics than you can with minerals.
I really, really want to see another life chemistry ; it'll answer so many questions. And beg so many more.
Terry Pratchett addressed this nicely, not in a RoundWorld context :
Makes me think - how could plate tectonics work in a DiscWorld context?
Have you heard of the Wallace Line? Running between Borneo and Bali (west) and Sulawesi and Lombok (East), it's a deep water channel that persisted through at least the most recent ice ages (when there have been anatomically modern humans around to be obstructed by it).
There's also the "Lydekker Line" further east which separates (less deeply) the Eastern part of Indonesia and the NW of the Australia/ PNG/ other_little_bits continental landmass. Yes, we do know that sea levels (and therefore coastlines) were different in the past. But the Australian continent was still (for as long as there have been mammals (well, for as long as there has been a distinction between placental and marsupial mammals)) the Australian continent. PNG is just a crumpled edge to Australia.
Until you can see "over the horizon", then not being able to see some "over there" to go to has always been a considerable obstacle to exploration. Making that leap of imagination was the thing that Christopher Columbus has rightly been celebrated for (while he was correctly castigated at the time for getting his sums wrong and condemning himself and his crews to starvation in the trackless ocean. They were just lucky that the Americas got in the way; whether the Americas were 'lucky' is a separate question.).
You've got a point, but in the intermediate future - after the oil wars have declined because there simply isn't enough of it to fuel a military-industrial complex (let alone domestic vehicles) - I'd suspect that the driver for wars will be something relatively prosaic. (BTW, I write this as an oil geologist, and "intermediate future" is within my lifetime and therefore quite likely within your lifetime. Worry about this.)
That "something" will be fresh water. Or lack of fresh water. Or you and your neighbour having access to different amounts of fresh water. Don't worry about your neighbour's neighbours, because you're going to have to go through your neighbour to get access to their resources.
One would like to think that NASA's PR department have learned the meaning of the phrase "spelling checker". Might I recommend a browser family called FireFox? They have an integrated spelling checker which you can use. You can even tell it which languages you speak, or are attempting to write, and it will try to correct your errors. Oh, I see the problem.
Well, a technical answer to your question would probably take several dozen papers in the realms of the neurobiology and psychology of image processing, with all sorts of excursions into computerised image processing etc. Add in some /.-isms about automated facial recognition by CCTV and you've got 2/3 of the thread that it would take to answer your question accurately.
I'm a geologist ; I look at rocks for a living. I look at perhaps 10,000 rock samples a year and do rough (50~200 word) descriptions for around 1/3 of them. I look at rocks more than the average man in the street. Accepted?
A few years ago, strolling around a lake shore in the Urals (near Satka, FWIW), I spotted little flakes of flint in the shoreline debris. 3-4mm by 5-7mm by under a mm thick, very sharp edge ; simple weakly conchoidal fracture surface on one face, the two opposite faces met at an obtuse angle to define a shallow ridge parallel to the longer axis of the fragments. Clearly part of a tool, not natural ; the shape would have worked as a long spear point, or as a scraper, but it was too thin to make a good slicing tool - it would have broken transverse to it's axis (as indeed, it had). To my eye, it was clearly an artefact. That was as clear as the fact that it was of a rock type that I hadn't seen at all in that day's walking, which is something that anyone can notice, if they've looked at a few tens of thousands of lumps of rock in the last few years. It's an experience thing, as I regularly show to 3rd-party trainee geologists by looking down the microscope for 10 seconds and then telling them where to look in the field of view to see the various important features which they take 5 minutes to find. The client-trainee had no idea how I'd know to "go up" instead of "go down" to get from a tight MDT point to one that gave usable mobility to sample. I could have told her, but it would have taken most of the 40 minutes we had per measurement point ; all the data necessary was on the log scroll sitting on the desk, but she hasn't learned to assimilate it, and with it being her first time doing this job, she simply didn't know where to look. It is part of my job to teach, but it's also part of my job to not waste time at $250/minute.
Experience is a big thing when recognising things like this. Having a vocabulary and a set of mental "search images" appropriate to the task is also a big help, because it means that you can vocalise what you perceive as being important observations (you can tell I'm not a Neolithic arrowhead specialist from my appalling description above). And now, it's lunch time. Which is also important.
Wellllll ... there's a substantial kernel of truth in there, but the reality is not as clearly cut as you (or your sources) make out. It's true that isolated breeding populations of very small size do tend to have problems with consanguinity and relatively high rates of expression of deleterious mutations, but on the flip side of that, the small population size means that the population can genetically drift much faster than a larger population can. So, if the small population "comes up with" new phenotypes (short hand for something more like "selects from randomly-presented combinations of established and mutated genes", but considerably longer) which are well adapted to their isolated environment, they can achieve local dominance rapidly.
How small those populations are ... is a very moot point, and almost certainly the numbers are different for different genera (since this process is a common route of speciation, it's pointless to talk at a species level).
An example - within living memory, the island of St.Kilda (60-some km west of the western Hebrides) was abandoned by it's human population, with consanguinity being cited as one of their major concerns. The population at the time of evacuation was 36 people (though the population profile would have been abnormal, having lost many of it's younger members in recent years). We can take this as an estimate of somewhat below the minimum population size necessary for an isolated human population. In contrast, before World War I the population seems to have been more-or-less stable in the high 70s or low 80s. Granted this is not an entirely isolated population, but it does give an indication. Perhaps better or more numerous data is available from the more numerous small Pacific Ocean islands, but again they're not entirely isolated.
In contrast, a recent report (I don't have the reference with me, but it was quite widely reported) of an isolated wolf pack in southern Sweden showed that it was suffering severely from inbreeding with around 8 members. But in contrast the appearance of a single unrelated individual male wolf in the late 1990s (IIRC) practically reversed the long-term decline of the pack. This suggests that the viable minimum population size for canines may be as low as the dozens.
Excluding social factors, the number of pairings available in a population 'n' scales as (n^2-n)/4 ; if pairings are not lifelong ... well, you get the picture.
For the SF fan - it's never puzzled me why the "colony world" type of story sticks (more or less) to monogamous couples and nuclear families (it's a fictional device), I suspect that in a real-world scenario that couldn't be allowed. What sort of a solution would have to be brought up, I don't know. Maybe the women starting pregnancies alternately by natural means and by IVF "from the egg and sperm banks, at random". But I suspect that "something would have to be done" to get the population gene pool bigger, faster.
For the anthropologist ... there's a scenario about Australia (or any random non-African continent) being colonised by a single woman, pregnant with a male foetus, being blown on a raft/ boat/ flood debris raft across from Indonesia. Not impossible, but decidedly implausible. Individuals getting blown off course in small coast-hugger boats, landing on the Australia shore at intervals of less than (say) a decade, and eventually two of opposite sexes surviving for long enough to meet ... that seems much more credible. And a decade later, another human arrives, and a decade later, another arrives. Pretty soon, you've got a substantial colony (I make it less than a century to reach a population of about 30 adults even with some fairly pessimistic assumptions about mortality rates).
And quite right too. Bloody paediatrician, you should be hung. Hung like a strange fruit, not like a donkey.
You jerk off on people's knees too. You DOG! does your perversion know no bounds?
Moving air rapidly over a non-conducting surface is a recipe for generating static.
If you find you're needing that S&R helicopter to come and pick you out of the water, do NOT grab hold of the wire trailing below the winchman as he's lowered into the water near you. That's there to discharge the static the helicopter accumulates in flight, and people have had heart attack from grabbing at the leader wire. Likewise - use the earthing strap BEFORE you attach the fuel hose.
The airspeed across a helicopter's rotor is going to be in the same order of magnitude as that coming out of an air can. Which raises a potential (sorry, couldn't resist! Sorry again!!) problem in static-sensitive equipment.
DP? Only ever been on a couple of those puppies, man. Anchors for us, even if they're on 2 miles of wire. Each.
Where are you going to get the helicopters, or the pilots? It was a 2 hour flight with one refuelling to get out here for 18 PAX, so that's a maximum of 36 passengers that pair of pilots could have moved in a working day. These days the helicopter business is in the horrible position of actually having to train people from scratch, now that the military pilots have cottoned on to the fact that they can go to fixed wing when they de-mob. Terrible shock for the industry, having to work in a competitive market place with a group of people willing and capable to move to a better employer.
As for "not at sea" : well, the 65 knot winds and waves breaking onto the main deck (57 to 109 ft above sealevel, depending on the wave) would belie that.
UNREP and VERTREP? Oh, some sort of stores movements in the Navy. Well, hardly unknown - we're currently waiting on weather conditions to offload a couple of hundred tons of oil-based mud, load up with several hundred tons of containerised and basketed tools and chemicals. That of course is WHEN the sea state allows the service boats to get alongside (26ft+ heave on each vessel, in variable phase) without impacting us (or us impacting them - same difference) ; then, once the master of each of those vessels is happy to come alongside (within 20ft), the crane operators have to be happy to swing their booms around too, with up to 27 tons on the main hoist, then land the MRI scanner tools without banging them hard enough to damage them.
Nope, up here in the sub-tropical north, we don't know anything about bad weather. It's been a quiet storm this last 24 hours - no rigs have pulled their anchors. And just to make the point, the rig has just yawed off-orientation so that we've lost internet connection while I've been writing this. Oh well, it'll come back, eventually.
Where are you operating in the Navy? I'm trying to negotiate my way into up-coming work in the South Falkland and Malvinas Basins (around 56S/59W), which is looking like it'll be fun with high overpressure downhole and at least one refuelling on a boat deck somewhere for the helicopter from shore. Or maybe we'll have to crew-change in a basket transfer from a boat onto the rig, which really does not appeal in the Roaring Forties.
Well, that was a perfect illustration of the problems though. I finished writing the above just before 09:00, then [BOOM] something breaks (at the shore end of the connection) and the whole rig lost communications (telephony, web, email, everything on the network) until about 20:00. The only thing left for troubleshooting was the ship-to-shore. Well, it's fixed now, but will SlashDot accept a 10-hour old form?
Because, Sally, some acne-ridden children of the 1990s hold the opinion that people who existed pre-1990s are incapable of designing systems properly.
Now shut the fuck up and grease yourself. For the object of this exercise, I'm going to call you "Roger, the cabin boy" ; is that OK Sally?
Oh, I'll remember that if the job in North Korea ever comes up and I find that I need to set up a separate bank account to move the money into the rest of my accounts.
If he's got any sense, he'll be enjoying a long lie in bed.
But it's G.W.Bush we're talking about, so he'll probably be up at the crack of dawn for a jog in the rain and smog, on a hard road. Uphill. And into the wind. What have I forgotten? Oh, midges - there should be midges, millions of midges. No sense at all, that man.
(I'm assuming that Jan-19 is the date that the American Presidency changes hands.)
Well, that's something to blame your parents for, but if they were similarly deprived, there's no benefit to recriminations. Just show them the sight yourself, and make sure to educate any other kids in the family.
A few years ago I was visiting a friend in his late 40s ... actually I was there because I wanted to show him Comet Hyakutake, so that dates it to 1996-03-24 or -25. Which was stunning enough, given that he has a pretty dark sky at his house. He also had some pretty good hashish, which added to the evening. But to my amazement, given that he lived in such a dark sky site for about a decade, he'd never seen the Milky Way himself. Well, we sorted out that problem, and it prompted me to get a planisphere and keep it in the briefcase. Then we got his 6-year-old son out of his bed to see the sights too, which was a good night all round.
Might work, might not. If I cared to ask the guy at work who keeps on trying to show off his iPhone, then I might find out. But I can't say that I'm bothered to find out what internet browsing on a 9cm screen is like.
However, having wandered around more than a few ports in a variety of cities on a variety of continents, I can tell you to keep the iPhone hidden, and to keep a reasonable quality cellphone available. If you don't have something to give to the muggers, just expect them to kill you and take what you were protecting anyway. If you let them have something that looks believably valuable, you might get away with your iPhone, your data, and your face intact. Might.
Sounds like this is a scheme for introducing people to different ways of life. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But the problem with meeting different ways of life is that you may get more than you're expecting. Depending on gender, take contraceptives ; not depending on gender, carry condoms and a (fake) letter from your doctor about your positive HIV test (in BIG print!). (The latter is not for the health authorities - it's to persuade the rapist-to-be to use a condom on you, so that YOU don't catch THEIR diseases. You never know - they might be so put off that you might even get away without being raped.) Oh, did I puncture your dreams of an idyllic cruise? Well, better punctured now than in a dark alley in the docks.
And do not expect the same laws to apply in the port country as apply at home (wherever that is). Seriously, do not.
I was getting download speeds of about 5MB/s last weekend, using a satellite link. Better than I get from home. Come to think of it - better than I get when I'm in the office too.
OK, that's on a Shell rig, and it seems as if Shell have seriously bumped up their normal offshore installation datalink capabilities in the last 18 months. This was on a temporarily-hired rig ; they may have better on their permanently-plumbed installations because they've always got the trivial prospect of pigging one of the gas export pipelines with yet-another fibre-optic cable.
You're pretty lucky to get those working 30km offshore. Plus, they tend to not work too well through three thicknesses of 5mm steel plate before getting to free air. The Faraday Cage effects don't help either.
I spend most of my working life at sea too. If that's the state of communications on your boat ... well, you're probably at the moving-stuff-around end of the business, not at the knowledge end of the business. The gamut of what's available extends from sending multi-gigabyte digests of a seismic shoot to shore in near-real time to just needing to get some god-awful hodge-podge of a multi-megabyte spreadsheet file with next week's crew-change rosters into the Master's email box. Having said that, last time I worked with seismic they would send the boxes of tapes to shore on each crew change helicopter, every couple of days. Not a deep marine situation.
OK - I'll admit it. I don't like paying for music, so I don't. then again, I don't like not paying for music, so I don't do that either.
Actually, I don't like listening to music at all, either music that I've chosen, or that someone else has chosen against my wishes. But people seem to keep on forcing me to listen to the damned stuff on the bus, in the shopping centre, in the bar, in the office (when I go there), in the canteen at work. Everywhere I go, there's this audible pollution being hammered into my ears by people who don't even have the non-excuse of acceptable taste.
Could someone please invent a form of DRM for my ears, so that I could charge the music's owner a fee for the use of my ears?
(by the way, this isn't a joke ; I threw my music collection into two carrier bags in 1994 and gave it to a friend, because it got in the way of having a conversation. Seriously, if I could make people pay me for the use (abuse) of my ears as I walk down the street, I'd be very interested. Let those people who want to damage their hearing put little "buds" in their ears and groove on to the commands of the CyberLord ; me, I want to hear what's going on around me.
Does that make me a heretic?
Why not? Parting the over-endowed retarded from their cash has always been morally defensible, as you're unlikely to put the money to as bad a use as it's previous caretaker.
Ubiquitous broadband as in "in every house", or as in "in every corner of every room of the house, so I can post on Slashdot while I shower". If it's the latter, make arrangements for IR laser as a transmission medium on a room-by-room basis. But you really can't stand having CAT5 coils around, even for making a lot of money?
BUT WHY does SlashDot occasionally downgrade users to a 25-char-wide compose box?
You're not a geologist, are you? You poor deluded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H depraved^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H deprived fool, don't you know what pleasures you've been missing.
References please?
This is an oft-repeated line, sometimes expressed as "now that the living outnumber the dead". It's bollocks. OK - that's a bit harsh. It's wrong, significantly wrong.
Depending on your assumptions, the actual numbers are moderately variable. In 2002, a writer for the Population Reference Bureau published one set of assumptions at http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf , and came up with around 106,456,367,669 people born since an initial pair in 50,000BCE, so that the 2002 population of 6,215,000,000 represented 5.8% of the total number of humans ever born.
It's actually an interesting exercise in programming and modelling to study - you can use any system you want, but it lends itself to spreadsheeting, because you can be quite subtle about how you modify your model. I could provide you with a sheet I did some years ago, but the process of developing your own is instructive, and worth putting a couple of hours into.
Urgh - I just found that spreadsheet. I did it in 2000, in a discussion prompted by a retard of a creationist (a retard by the pretty retarded standards of that group). It's not a new question.