Yep, time for all the baggage to go by a separate cargo plane, so only that pilot is at risk. All passengers will strip at the gate.
Strip at the gate... yes. Cavity search... only terr'sts could object. Pass the gate and you get a 10^10 second active data recorder glued to your head. If you object, then Big Brother has a nice quiet island for you to die on.
None of which leave me either informed or interested in how many ml per fl.oz . What is a fl.oz (US, UK, AU, or any other in terms of ml? And for that matter, how many gallons to a cubic metre?
... having an earthquake-free, flood-free, zero-g lab would probably help ...
Well, the first two of these criteria are reasonably easy to achieve : don't build in California or elsewhere on the western edge of the Americas ; don't build in Taiwan or Japan ; don't build in much of Indonesia ; you'd probably want to avoid the Mediterranean too ; most of the rest of the world is pretty much OK from the earthquake point of view. Flood-proofing is simpler : any site with a 100m freeboard above any local drainage and a slope of a few % across the site (so water has an inclination to flow downhill, and a local downhill to flow too) ; after that, you only really need to worry about the precipitation directly on site.
I don't see fab plants moving into space any time soon (much though I'd like to).
The zero-g thing might be useful, but for really fine fabrication I'd have thought that vibration within the machinery would be more of an issue. To deal with that, the one thing that you don't want is cosmo-/taiko-/astro-nauts trudging around in their boots. An orbital fab would be automated.
armed with what *looks* like a normal cellphone or pocket radio.....
And what makes you think that you'll be allowed to take such devices on board? Already (viz : the last decade or so) we're required at the baggage search to put all such devices into the hold, and it won't be much longer before we're required to remove the batteries and stow them into the baggage separately.
Carry-on baggage? What's that?
Don't want every one of your bags searched by a human? Well, the train station is several miles that way, and there are car hire places over there. No sir, your ticket isn't refundable ; didn't you read the revised terms & conditions.
Flying is too expensive (to the environment) already and the price needs to rise until people stop doing it ; the security theatre is just one way of bringing the price up.
US and UK measurements since they are mostly the same (fluid ounce are different.)
Two points :
the UK is officially metric (though it must be admitted there are a fair number of people who're resisting the change. But they'll die out eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later.)
There are nonetheless significant differences between "traditional measures" in both countries. I don't know what a fluid ounce is in either country (my kitchen measuring jug has ml on it, and that's what I use ; when I got a cook book, I checked to see that it had proper measures, not traditional ones, before I brought it), but I do recall an American of my acquaintance once telling me that "a pint's a pound, the world around" as some mnemonic poem from his youth ; after a couple of seconds I thought (and typed) "Hang on, a gallon is the volume of water that weighs 10pounds (that's about the only "traditional" measure relationship that I remember from when I was a child), and there are eight (2^3) pints to a gallon, so there can't be 1.0 pounds to the pint."
I don't remember what we finally decided was the difference between the countries - whether gallons/pound, or pounds, or pints/gallon differed - but there is a difference.
While this may sound like a nice adventure, going into space, if I had a billion, its the last thing I would ever want to do, because it is so risky. [SNIP] So certainly, it is a huge gamble, and not one I would be comfortable with.
Chill out man, he's not asking you to go, he's planning to go himself. Not knowing the guy personally I can't say for sure, but there's a high probability that he's big enough, old enough and ugly enough to make these choices for himself. IIRC, he was a graduate student when starting up Google, which was over 10 years ago ; with the age of majority in the States being 21, that means that he's either a citizen with the right to assess risks for himself, or he got his bachelors degree before he was 11. I don't recall any news stories about the latter, so I deduce that he is actually not a minor. That means that he can make these choices for himself.
(I'm taking the age when you're allowed to buy intoxicants as being an indicator of when the state really thinks that you're responsible for your own actions. In many countries there are anomalies in the age at which this is set, and in associated obligations and restrictions. For example, some countries will allow you to join the army to die before they'll allow you to vote to choose the politicians who will tell you where to go and die.)
No amount of proof will turn the head of a devout creationist, since God, via the Bible (or the creationist's interpretation of it) is the ultimate authority.
Don't forget - across the world (viz: outside the USA) there is a significant problem from fundamentalist Islamic creationism which is having severe effects on the educational and technological bases of many countries with major Islamic populations.
Indeed, while the Islamist creationists may take their ideas, techniques and spelling mistakes from the (mostly Protestant) Christian fundamentalists, the influence that the Islamists have in some countries is inspiring to the fundamentalist Christians in the west. Every time a Saudi woman is barred from getting into her car to drive, a western Christian fundamentalist takes a breath of inspiration and redoubles their efforts to control the thoughts of other people's children. I can't imagine what inspiration the Christian fundamentalists take from their fellow fundamentalists doing suicide bombings etc, but I'm sure it's a profound response.
I'll be (slightly) fair to the monotheistic fundamentalists (Christians of various mobs, Muslims of many septs, and additionally branches of Judaism too - all the same religion, all worshiping the god of Abraham) by adding that it is not impossible that there are Hindu creationists, Buddhist creationists etc out there. Maybe even Zoroastrian creationists out there too (another monotheistic religion, not noticeably related to the Abrahamic religions). But they don't cause anything like the amount of trouble to non-believers that the Christian and Islamic creationists do.
I've yet to hear a Norse-pantheon creationist claiming that the Moon landings were faked because the photos of the earth from outside didn't show the Midgard Serpent, and that eclipse photos don't show Fenrirwolf catching the sun. But I'm sure Slashdot's wide readership can come up with an example.
What exactly would the military use a supercomputer for?
Military shit. Move along, citizen.
s/citizen/civilian/
Hold it there, civilian! Just why are you asking? Put these handcuffs on and come along with us to this cellar in an anonymous building. Or we'll hit you with the next-generation Tazer. We designed it using this machine, for longer battery life and better interaction with your nervous system. You won't die of a heart attack, but you will feel like you're having one.
Big-screen TVs and X.1 surround sound systems are becoming the norm in houses. [SNIP details] It may be a while before the average person has that setup,
It may be a very long while. Work out the resource implications of aspiring to have 7 billion people housed that way ; work out how big your cities would have to become ; work out how people are going to be able to get around in those cities and then work out where the people are going to park their transport devices.
You probably don't realise how privileged you are. Go into town and visit a friend or a colleague who lives in an apartment in a tower block. Now work out how to fit a "home theatre" in there. Building volume and land area are limited resources just as much as petrol or platinum are limited resources.
[a] species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles.
Quite a while ago (2000) there was a report in Nature : "Isolation of a 250 million-year-old halotolerant bacterium from a primary salt crystal" Nature, v407, p897- 900.
While this hasn't been widely accepted, largely due to concern over contamination in the laboratory, it is a serious claim. Indeed, one of the critics of Vreeland's 250 million-year claim is also a worker on this ice core material (see Science v317 p0111 (2007) "Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland").
If this bacteria can pass through microbiological filters, wtf is keeping it in the lab?
Errr, probably the use of standard lab techniques. UV to kill any that gets into the air ; oxidising agents (hypochlorite or ozone?) and/or heat in the waste water ; incinerate contaminated materials and disposable equipment ; non-disposable equipment goes into the autoclave (a sophisticated pressure cooker). Just the usual suspects. (When I was a student, going down to the microbiology labs for a party after closing time at the pub was normal ; we didn't die.)
wtf is keeping it from eating our flesh?
Just because it's a bacterium doesn't mean to say that it necessarily wants to eat your flesh. Remember that you've almost certainly got several kilos of bacteria sloshing around inside you at this moment in time. Are they eating your flesh too?
They could have at least had the decency to die and become oil. I'm tired of filling my HumVee for $200.
You chose to drive ; you chose to buy a penis-extension with stupid efficiency ; you're looking for sympathy. Tough luck.
I'm annoyed by the rapid oil price rise - I'd got my £5 on oil reaching 100 USD/bbl (Brent blend) in 2010, and I've lost that 1 pint bet. Now I'm not even sure if I should bet on USD200/bbl for 2009 or 2010. Damned difficult decision. But at least it's not going to change the cost of my car filling up (£0/month).
Get a better car, if you have to have one. I doubt you'll be able to find someone stupid enough to buy the HumBug.
That nets out to 5.36 feet of ice accumulation per year. Two miles of ice is roughly 10500 feet, or 1970 years. What am I missing? Non-linear accumulation?
And the lateral spreading as the ice squeezes out to the margins of the ice sheet.
1) Cut continuous core from surface. 2) Count the layers from surface down to get a raw. 3) When you come across layers of dust, check the raw year-count and try to correlate with events like a Laki eruption (2 in the last millennium or so), Tambora, Pinatubo,... all the usual suspects. This will give you a crude cross-check. Chemical stratigraphy and mineralogy of the dust can tell you which volcano is responsible for any particular dust ban (or at least, reduce the number of suspects). 4) When you're doing more detailed analysis of the core, look for things like variations in the Be-10 content etc to try to correlate with the solar cycle. Magnetostratigraphy doesn't work in ice (I think).
To pass through a microbiological filter, how did they find it?
Most likely they were examining part of the core and they "slabbed" it for ease of handling and recording. Core comes out of the ground as cylinders, so all faces are curved, and that makes it hard to examine, measure and photograph (looking for dust bands, flow lines etc). So SOP is to cut the core along a chord (leaving two unequal segments) and then to cut the larger segment into two equal halves. Typically (for rock cores, in the oil industry), one of the large segments goes to each partner in the project and the small initial segment goes to the government ; in this case I'd expect one large segment to go straight back to the core store for any necessary replications in the future, while the other large segment and the small one are taken off for whatever your experiment is.
These two cuts will generate significant waste rock or ice. If I were doing this, with normal 1m-long core sections, I'd clean off the saw and table after each section (giving ice shavings in 1m-long bags), then melt each bag separately and "plate" each bag separately. "Plating" is the taking of an innoculum at (various) dilutions into (various different nutrients) petri dishes and/ or culture bottles and incubating. You'd also check the "blank" regularly - plating your dilution saline, etc. It sounds like they plated both the raw melted ice AND melted ice that had been put through a microbial filter and got the same results from both.
Obviously their experimental protocol had been designed to include microbiological sampling, so one can assume that clean-room techniques were in operation further up the material-handling pipeline.
Sadly the proof that P=NP that was etched into the ice was melted as scientists began the process of extracting the vengeful bacteria.
No, what the bacterium actually wrote was "I've discovered a proof that P=NP, but this glacier margin is too small to contain it."
(Yes, I do know that the ice core was extracted from a central area of the ice cap, nowhere near the margin. But I couldn't resist the Fermat reference once it occurred to me.)
Occam's razor is a tool which you can choose to apply or not, and you can choose how aggressively you apply it ; the formulation I tend to use most often is to "avoid the generation of excessive unnecessary entities in an explanation", and often one can have honest disagreements about valid explanations for phenomena. That's particularly the case when there's a paucity of evidence on an issue. (I am of course talking about general problem solving in life or in work. For example, correlating lithological sections between offset wells and the current well, when you only have a partial suite of measurements on the current well and you're working in real time ; it's a real question how many entities are necessary to invoke in order to get a good model of what is happening. Bigger questions like "science or god" have no shortage of evidence.)
Of course, everyone (including YEC's) believe in these principles and apply them to their lives all the time
That's the thing ; they want the benefits of science, but they're unwilling to take the necessary underpinnings of methods of analysis. The disgusting hypocrites should go back to living in shit-filled caves and dieing in childbirth. But they don't have the courage of their convictions.
I would personally expect them to be much lower based on my observations from living in another country, though I readily admit I have no evidence to back this up.
I've met (in real life, non-trivially, on repeated occasions) two serious YECs in the last couple of decades and one such online idiot. (I don't count the people I've met in obviously biased places like talk.origins ; YECs actively seek these places out for masochistic sex-displacement activities.) To a first approximation I'll have met several thousands of people on a similar basis over the same period, who were not YECs (or who kept their beliefs quiet out of cowardice. As a professional geologist, I'd expect all people who I meet professionally to know what my position would be on creationism, and most people I meet socially would have "what do you do for a living?" somewhere in the top half-dozen questions exchanged.)
So, for the UK, that suggests that the prevalence of YEC meme infestation is on the order of 1 per thousand of the population. Or, to be more precise, the prevalence of people infested with the memes for [ {courage || reckless envangelism} && YEC ] is around 1 per thousand. It is possible that there are more examples of the YEC meme around, but the people bearing the meme see me coming and hide.
I don't let YECs get away with their sloppy excuse for thinking in public. Regardless of their position (toolpusher or teacher), I consider it to be part of my professional obligation.
In Switzerland you also get your assault rifles to take home with you after your military service. Your country is still quite sane, it expects its citizens to act in favor of their country unless proven otherwise.
On the plus side though, IF I understand Swiss citizenship laws correctly (and I emphasise the "IF"), then you don't have an automatic right of citizenship on the basis of birth location or anything else ; you have to apply for citizenship yourself, pass the exams, then get your township/ voting district (canton?) to vote on whether or not they'll accept you.
I'm not clear if those ballots have to be secret or not (or if it varies from canton to canton) ; some Swiss have noticed that it's unduly difficult for eastern Europeans, niggers (in the offensive sense of "anyone non-Caucasian", given the context), gypsies (both Roma and Didicoi) and German-speakers and many other groups of "undesirable aliens" to attain Swiss citizenship. The other legal impedimenta to citizenship would probably keep out the really "undesirable aliens" who are (shh!) poor, leaving simple racism at the ballot as the remaining suspected restraint.
When did Switzerland allow those pesky, demanding damned women to vote? Over several decades until 1990. But if they're the people you want to emulate... well that's your choice. At least you have a choice.
[In answer to a request for evidence to back up a claim that India was civilized before China was "even populated."] About 5 thousand years of history? The Indus River valley? Culturally, early Chinese society was more Indian than what we currently identify as "Chinese". Much of the pre-history/early history of China is shaped by mythological retelling and cultural identity.
The Indus River Valley civilisation, if you'll pardon my spelling, cities such as "Mojhendro daro", the proto-writing that may be embodied by the abundant seals and "identity markings" found in the artefacts... yes, I'm moderately familiar with the civilisation ; 5000 years ago sounds about right for that civilisation. Approximately contemporaneous with the stone circles that surround sub-tropical Aberdeen here, or even Stonehenge and Durrington Walls (if you were watching the Nat.Geo. programme last night). All very well and good. This establishes that India (loosely, in a pre-Partition sense) had a significant civilisation in excess of 5000 years ago. Which is one half of your assertion. The other half of your assertion is that China wasn't even populated at this time. Considering that pre-human anthropoid apes have been reported from fossil sites from China for around a century, with dating going back to 1.7 million years ; that hearth sites have been dated back as far as 1.36million years; that all realistic (non-alien astronaut) theories of the peopling of the Americas have that initial Western hemisphere population passing through the general area of Mongolia/ North China prior to ca.14000 BP ; that China has an extensive and increasing record of pottery discoveries (see this paper for example, "In late 1980s and 1990s, more cave sites were excavated in southern China. Within these sites, five pieces of early pottery sherds were found from layer 5 at Miaoyan, in Guilin, Guangxi Province; the pottery samples were dated to 15660±260 b.p. [...] and 15560±500 b.p. [...]. Two pottery pots unearthed at Yuchanyan [...] dated to 14810±230 b.p. [...] and 12320±120 b.p.[...]" ; that semi-historical records reported in China in the early years BC imply dates for the then-documented history going back to before 2000BC or before 4000BP.
It is very difficult to have a civilisation appear without a significant population, and the presence of the strongly prehistoric pottery dated to over 10000BP coupled with the non-trivial documentary evidence for an organised, bureaucratic civilisation around 4000BP makes your assertion that "India was civilised before China was populated" unsupportable, in my opinion.
(I note that the Wikipedia article on the Indus Valley (a.k.a Harappan) civilisation puts it's dates around 2600-1700 BC, which is 4600-3700 BP and thus overlapping with the Chinese documentary indications. Which makes it post-date a number of our local artefacts.)
I'm registered for one of these, because the idea seems quite handy ; I'm a little more concerned that last week the person managing the pre-registration list accidentally sent out one of those "sdfsdffds" test emails to (it would seem) a large proportion of the people who've registered. Very embarrassing, and at least the guy put his name to the "Sorry" email a few hours later. But it's worrying none-the-less. (He put his hands up to it, which is why I'm not naming the account it came from. If the person in the cubical next to you at Elonex is turning red about the ears, tell him to stop reading/. )
Slashdot Mirror
None of which leave me either informed or interested in how many ml per fl.oz . What is a fl.oz (US, UK, AU, or any other in terms of ml?
And for that matter, how many gallons to a cubic metre?
Leave the dark ages.
I don't see fab plants moving into space any time soon (much though I'd like to).
The zero-g thing might be useful, but for really fine fabrication I'd have thought that vibration within the machinery would be more of an issue. To deal with that, the one thing that you don't want is cosmo-/taiko-/astro-nauts trudging around in their boots. An orbital fab would be automated.
Carry-on baggage? What's that?
Don't want every one of your bags searched by a human? Well, the train station is several miles that way, and there are car hire places over there. No sir, your ticket isn't refundable ; didn't you read the revised terms & conditions.
Flying is too expensive (to the environment) already and the price needs to rise until people stop doing it ; the security theatre is just one way of bringing the price up.
- the UK is officially metric (though it must be admitted there are a fair number of people who're resisting the change. But they'll die out eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later.)
- There are nonetheless significant differences between "traditional measures" in both countries. I don't know what a fluid ounce is in either country (my kitchen measuring jug has ml on it, and that's what I use ; when I got a cook book, I checked to see that it had proper measures, not traditional ones, before I brought it), but I do recall an American of my acquaintance once telling me that "a pint's a pound, the world around" as some mnemonic poem from his youth ; after a couple of seconds I thought (and typed) "Hang on, a gallon is the volume of water that weighs 10pounds (that's about the only "traditional" measure relationship that I remember from when I was a child), and there are eight (2^3) pints to a gallon, so there can't be 1.0 pounds to the pint."
I don't remember what we finally decided was the difference between the countries - whether gallons/pound, or pounds, or pints/gallon differed - but there is a difference.Just join the 19th century and get with SI.
Not knowing the guy personally I can't say for sure, but there's a high probability that he's big enough, old enough and ugly enough to make these choices for himself.
IIRC, he was a graduate student when starting up Google, which was over 10 years ago ; with the age of majority in the States being 21, that means that he's either a citizen with the right to assess risks for himself, or he got his bachelors degree before he was 11. I don't recall any news stories about the latter, so I deduce that he is actually not a minor. That means that he can make these choices for himself.
(I'm taking the age when you're allowed to buy intoxicants as being an indicator of when the state really thinks that you're responsible for your own actions. In many countries there are anomalies in the age at which this is set, and in associated obligations and restrictions. For example, some countries will allow you to join the army to die before they'll allow you to vote to choose the politicians who will tell you where to go and die.)
Indeed, while the Islamist creationists may take their ideas, techniques and spelling mistakes from the (mostly Protestant) Christian fundamentalists, the influence that the Islamists have in some countries is inspiring to the fundamentalist Christians in the west. Every time a Saudi woman is barred from getting into her car to drive, a western Christian fundamentalist takes a breath of inspiration and redoubles their efforts to control the thoughts of other people's children. I can't imagine what inspiration the Christian fundamentalists take from their fellow fundamentalists doing suicide bombings etc, but I'm sure it's a profound response.
I'll be (slightly) fair to the monotheistic fundamentalists (Christians of various mobs, Muslims of many septs, and additionally branches of Judaism too - all the same religion, all worshiping the god of Abraham) by adding that it is not impossible that there are Hindu creationists, Buddhist creationists etc out there. Maybe even Zoroastrian creationists out there too (another monotheistic religion, not noticeably related to the Abrahamic religions). But they don't cause anything like the amount of trouble to non-believers that the Christian and Islamic creationists do.
I've yet to hear a Norse-pantheon creationist claiming that the Moon landings were faked because the photos of the earth from outside didn't show the Midgard Serpent, and that eclipse photos don't show Fenrirwolf catching the sun. But I'm sure Slashdot's wide readership can come up with an example.
s/citizen/civilian/
Hold it there, civilian! Just why are you asking? Put these handcuffs on and come along with us to this cellar in an anonymous building. Or we'll hit you with the next-generation Tazer. We designed it using this machine, for longer battery life and better interaction with your nervous system. You won't die of a heart attack, but you will feel like you're having one.
You probably don't realise how privileged you are. Go into town and visit a friend or a colleague who lives in an apartment in a tower block. Now work out how to fit a "home theatre" in there. Building volume and land area are limited resources just as much as petrol or platinum are limited resources.
While this hasn't been widely accepted, largely due to concern over contamination in the laboratory, it is a serious claim. Indeed, one of the critics of Vreeland's 250 million-year claim is also a worker on this ice core material (see Science v317 p0111 (2007) "Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland").
I'm annoyed by the rapid oil price rise - I'd got my £5 on oil reaching 100 USD/bbl (Brent blend) in 2010, and I've lost that 1 pint bet. Now I'm not even sure if I should bet on USD200/bbl for 2009 or 2010. Damned difficult decision. But at least it's not going to change the cost of my car filling up (£0/month).
Get a better car, if you have to have one. I doubt you'll be able to find someone stupid enough to buy the HumBug.
1) Cut continuous core from surface. ... all the usual suspects. This will give you a crude cross-check. Chemical stratigraphy and mineralogy of the dust can tell you which volcano is responsible for any particular dust ban (or at least, reduce the number of suspects).
2) Count the layers from surface down to get a raw.
3) When you come across layers of dust, check the raw year-count and try to correlate with events like a Laki eruption (2 in the last millennium or so), Tambora, Pinatubo,
4) When you're doing more detailed analysis of the core, look for things like variations in the Be-10 content etc to try to correlate with the solar cycle. Magnetostratigraphy doesn't work in ice (I think).
Enough detail?
These two cuts will generate significant waste rock or ice. If I were doing this, with normal 1m-long core sections, I'd clean off the saw and table after each section (giving ice shavings in 1m-long bags), then melt each bag separately and "plate" each bag separately. "Plating" is the taking of an innoculum at (various) dilutions into (various different nutrients) petri dishes and/ or culture bottles and incubating. You'd also check the "blank" regularly - plating your dilution saline, etc. It sounds like they plated both the raw melted ice AND melted ice that had been put through a microbial filter and got the same results from both.
Obviously their experimental protocol had been designed to include microbiological sampling, so one can assume that clean-room techniques were in operation further up the material-handling pipeline.
(Yes, I do know that the ice core was extracted from a central area of the ice cap, nowhere near the margin. But I couldn't resist the Fermat reference once it occurred to me.)
So, for the UK, that suggests that the prevalence of YEC meme infestation is on the order of 1 per thousand of the population. Or, to be more precise, the prevalence of people infested with the memes for [ {courage || reckless envangelism} && YEC ] is around 1 per thousand. It is possible that there are more examples of the YEC meme around, but the people bearing the meme see me coming and hide.
I don't let YECs get away with their sloppy excuse for thinking in public. Regardless of their position (toolpusher or teacher), I consider it to be part of my professional obligation.
I ask purely in the spirit of unpleasant prurience, like wanting to see of that baseball bat really will fit in sideways. Splinters and all. Dry.
I'm not clear if those ballots have to be secret or not (or if it varies from canton to canton) ; some Swiss have noticed that it's unduly difficult for eastern Europeans, niggers (in the offensive sense of "anyone non-Caucasian", given the context), gypsies (both Roma and Didicoi) and German-speakers and many other groups of "undesirable aliens" to attain Swiss citizenship. The other legal impedimenta to citizenship would probably keep out the really "undesirable aliens" who are (shh!) poor, leaving simple racism at the ballot as the remaining suspected restraint.
When did Switzerland allow those pesky, demanding damned women to vote? Over several decades until 1990. But if they're the people you want to emulate ... well that's your choice. At least you have a choice.
The Indus River Valley civilisation, if you'll pardon my spelling, cities such as "Mojhendro daro", the proto-writing that may be embodied by the abundant seals and "identity markings" found in the artefacts
The other half of your assertion is that China wasn't even populated at this time. Considering that pre-human anthropoid apes have been reported from fossil sites from China for around a century, with dating going back to 1.7 million years ; that hearth sites have been dated back as far as 1.36million years; that all realistic (non-alien astronaut) theories of the peopling of the Americas have that initial Western hemisphere population passing through the general area of Mongolia/ North China prior to ca.14000 BP ; that China has an extensive and increasing record of pottery discoveries (see this paper for example, "In late 1980s and 1990s, more cave sites were excavated in southern China. Within these sites, five pieces of early pottery sherds were found from layer 5 at Miaoyan, in Guilin, Guangxi Province; the pottery samples were dated to 15660±260 b.p. [...] and 15560±500 b.p. [...]. Two pottery pots unearthed at Yuchanyan [...] dated to 14810±230 b.p. [...] and 12320±120 b.p.[...]" ; that semi-historical records reported in China in the early years BC imply dates for the then-documented history going back to before 2000BC or before 4000BP.
It is very difficult to have a civilisation appear without a significant population, and the presence of the strongly prehistoric pottery dated to over 10000BP coupled with the non-trivial documentary evidence for an organised, bureaucratic civilisation around 4000BP makes your assertion that "India was civilised before China was populated" unsupportable, in my opinion.
(I note that the Wikipedia article on the Indus Valley (a.k.a Harappan) civilisation puts it's dates around 2600-1700 BC, which is 4600-3700 BP and thus overlapping with the Chinese documentary indications. Which makes it post-date a number of our local artefacts.)
I'm registered for one of these, because the idea seems quite handy ; I'm a little more concerned that last week the person managing the pre-registration list accidentally sent out one of those "sdfsdffds" test emails to (it would seem) a large proportion of the people who've registered. Very embarrassing, and at least the guy put his name to the "Sorry" email a few hours later. But it's worrying none-the-less. /. )
(He put his hands up to it, which is why I'm not naming the account it came from. If the person in the cubical next to you at Elonex is turning red about the ears, tell him to stop reading