There are occasional exceptions to the rules (Boa constrictor comes to mind), but for the vast majority of cases, the ICZN is 'The Rule Book'.
FYI, there is another "grand renaming" in the pipeline, due to the description and naming of a partial leg in about 1880. Tyrannosaurus appears to have been described (partially) from a handful of bones over 20 years before Barnum Brown found, described and named the iconic near-complete skeleton.
ICZN does have rules to cover this situation now - if the taxon with the invalid name (in this case, Tyrannosaurus) haas been used in more than 50 publications over a period of more than 25 years prior to the recognition of synonymy, then the original name may be suppressed and the seemingly invalid junior synonym remain as the recognised synonym. In short, if it'll cause too much disruption to the literature then there's no need to accept the change. So it seems that the name Tyrannosaurus is safe, unless something else turns up out of the nomenclatural woodwork.
Re:That's all good, but, can we drill yet?
on
More Antarctic Dinosaurs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, if scientists are allowed to dig for dinosaurs, I'd like go set myself up with an oil well for, ummm, "research purposes"...
A speaker at last month's conference on "South Atlantic Petroleum Systems", where Antarctica was the "elephant seal in the room which no one mentioned", summarised the prospectivity of Antarctica thus : "Don't drill on an Archean shield (East Antarctica); don't drill in an active volcanic island arc (West Antarctica/ Antarctic Peninsula) ; and for the remaining area, where there are real uncertainties about presence of and quality of source rocks, and the thermal history of the area to mature those source rocks, and the sediment sources to provide clastic reservoir rocks... well in that marine basin you've got to be prepared to dodge icebergs the size of Belgium."
It's your money. You have the hassle of organising it ; I'll do your wellsite geology. It'll be $1000/day if you're starting in the next 3 years, beyond that I'm not able to commit myself to a price, but it's likely to be higher.
At that time the climate in the area between 55 and 65 degrees south was not that of today's Falkland Islands. The world was several degrees warmer.
My original posting put the comparable region as between the Falklands and part of the West Antarctic Peninsula (via Tierra del Fuego) ; that covers quite a few degrees of change.
In a European comparison, compare Central England and Norway just south of the Arctic Circle.
Imagine the antarctic being near the equator when dinosaurs were around.
Why imagine the Antarctic at the equator at this time when the original article, the message I posted, and kdawson's editing of this all pointed out that the palaeolatitude of the site at the time of life/ burial of the fossilised organisms was between 55 and 65 degrees. These figures aren't just pulled out of people's arses, you know - in this case it's based on a combination of palaeomagnetic work on dyke swarms throughout the region, volume considerations constraining plate reconstructions, and environmental analyses of petroleum source rocks (and more particularly their marine fossil microfaunas) in the region all coming together to synthesise (check your dictionary!!) a detailed understanding of the palaeogeography of the region. I gave up 2 days of my life to a conference on this stuff last month ; I don't see why you should get away without some of the joy too. My mention that "the area was between 55 and 65 degrees south" (taken from the original paper) probably represents several man-months of work spread over a half-dozen disciplines working in as many universities over the last decade. Even the much-maligned kdawson recognised it as a significant point to preserve in editing my original post.
The fossils are presently in the Antarctic ; at the time of life/ burial of these animals, the palaeolatitude is estimated as 55 to 65 degrees S, an interval which covers the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas (notoriously covered in sheep), a fair amount of Argentine pampas (with cattle and some agriculture), Tierra del Fuego (barely habitable), and some of the West Antarctic Peninsula (uninhabited) ; in a continental climate setting, the interval from Edmonton (Canada) to the Great Slave Lake would be an appropriate comparison. With the exception of the WAP, all these areas have indigenous mammalian herbivores in abundance, though no major reptilian (whatever that paraphyletic grouping means ; for a start, it ignores the living dinosaurs) faunas.
Still funnier is that a lot of the Flintstones ideas showed up in Larry Niven's known space series like Gift from Earth.
Care to elaborate? Bearing in mind that I polished off about 3 chapters of "Gift From Earth" last night, and it's not my first reading of GFE (or any other Niven Known Space story).
You can call yourself Brontosaurus if you want ; you can call yourself "late for lunch" if you want. Your choice of name is not constrained by the rules of the ICZN, and probably not by anyone else (though I think that France and possibly New Zealand will refuse to register the birth of a child under a wildly silly or unpronounceable name ; although given some Maori names I've heard, I don't see that the NZ rules would be too restrictive).
the initial work is already done: the www has injected so much graphics into computer presentaions that hi-speed broad band is now necessary for "surfing".
Set up your Adblock filters. When you see an advert that you don't like, Adblock the whole domain that the advert comes from. Your speed of surfing will improve ; the sites that make their advertising too intrusive will die. Everyone is happy (apart from the advertising industry, who as professional liars should be initiated into their industry by hanging, drawing and quartering ; twice).
I thought we just had a slew of articles around the internet telling us that email is dead and it's all about myspace and instant messaging?
That article was about children and the cannon-fodder produced by universities. Real people still use email to prevaricate around the stuff they should have finished last month.
From the point of view of disposal, the main thing is keeping it out of the water supply and away from people. Not really that hard, until you start getting alarmists crying about the problems.
Yeah, that's right, just put the stuff under a mountain in an internally-draining desert basin, a hundred miles from the nearest town.
Reasonably easy to do in America (though quite why they are looking so closely at a relatively unstable volcanic pile does ask for some explanations) ; not so easy to do in, for example, Britain, or the Netherlands. We don't have any deserts (an important criterion for minimising the amount of water flushing through the system) ; we don't have anywhere on the mainland that is 10 miles from a population centre (well, define "population centre" ; 10 houses? , 100? , 1000?) ; we don't have "internal drainage basins" (which almost by definition will have a salt lake or salt flats in a central location ; see Wikipedia on Endorheic basins) ; and we can't get more than 75 miles from a coast or tidal estuary. Which is why, of course, the most likely sites for the UK's nuclear waste dumps are on coastal hillsides (Drigg ; Douneray), where the leaking waste can seep off site (through the relatively porous Old Red Sandstone Group sandstones on both sites) and into the sea, where it will be washed off to the non-atlas location called "Away" (latitude and longitude unknown).
I'm not an alarmist - hell, I've almost certainly got 150grams more of un-depleted uranium compounds in my house than you have - but one does have to be reasonably careful about these materials. I already live in (arguably) the most radioactive city in the UK ; there's no absolute "safety" in these things, only relative safety. Is the risk from a set dose of radiation less than the radiological risk of taking two international flights a year?
My two cents worth (a bit less than a penny these days - the dollar is under 49p now, and still falling; I'll have to start charging three cents for these rants) is that there are perfectly feasible technical solutions available for the problem of disposing of the by-products of the nuclear industry. Some important problems are in finding a geologically suitable place to put the nasty stuff, but they're not too-demanding problems. MUCH more important problems revolve around maintaining adequate oversight of the materials - Yucca Mountain might be far enough from anywhere else (I've not paid more than passing attention to this SEP(Someone Else's Problem), so I don't have more than a vague idea of it's location or geology) that you can just pour concrete on top of the filled repository, then dynamite the entrance tunnels (with patches of infill with human skulls) and forget about it. The UK, Europe in general, Japan too - we simply don't have the option of putting the stuff far-enough "Away" to not have to maintain it. At which point the integral of risk against time shifts to making the political oversight of the maintenance of the repository much more important than the geological and engineering risks. Which is why I always make the proposal that any long-term storage of any long-lived poisons should be done by placing the repository under the appropriate seat of government. The only way that politicians can be trusted to maintain adequate oversight of such materials is if they are going to be the first people to be wading around in the glowing green goo that might result from a failure of maintenance expenditure. "enlightened self-interest" is a polite way of saying "doing the right thing because there's a gun to my head" ; but it's nonetheless effective.
It's also a good way of ensuring that the politicians remember the opinion most people have of them.
There is another ha-ha-but-serious proposal for dealing with high-level waste.
how would they sell you the same product over and over again?
They won't be "selling" you the film ; they'll be leasing you the right to access content from the disc which you've brought, which lease will have as parts of the terms and conditions :
that the displaying hardware can contact the content leasing company at will (probably via the internet in some form);
that the content leasing company (formerly known as the "film studio") can change the content leased to you at will;
that the operating capabilities of the displaying hardware can be changed at will by the content leasing companies (through the internet connection) including your hardware being permanently disabled as the result of other people in other jurisdictions doing things to their content displaying hardware which are legal in their jurisdiction but may not be in the interests of the content leasing companies in your jurisdiction;
naturally, failure of the content leasing person to deliver verifiable billing information to the content leasing company will be a violation of the contract, rendering the content on the disc inaccessible until further payment is made;
and probably many more improvements in operating practices (as seen by the content leasing companies, if not by you, the content leasing person)...
Do you remember that experience which you used to have of going to the box office, paying your money over the counter, then going into the Big Room to watch the movie ONCE (without rewind, pause or replay) ? Well, that "cinema" experience is coming to a sofa in your living room Real Soon Now. (Assuming that you swallow the bullshit advertising for the current rash of DVD replacements, all of which replace the most important technical consideration of DVDs, which is that the content has escaped the control of the content leasing companies.)
According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination.
In the phrase of my favourite science fiction author, Larry Niven, "Just think of it as evolution in action".
For the hard-of-thinking out there in SlashdotLand (you don't know who you are, and if you could figure out how to use a mirror, you'd still not recognise yourself by that description), that means : the parents and or guardians who are so gullible as to base child-care decisions on TV programme snippets on youTube (edited out of context by people whose sole knowledge of the topic in question is most likely to be the whole programme they've edited), are the caregivers who are most likely to kill their charges through their stupidity. This will have the beneficial (if unintentional) side effect of raising the average intelligence of the population, through culling the bottom end of the population. This is the same effect that makes the average rabbit somewhat faster at running than the average fox.
Some might contend that this is terribly unfair on those who are too poor to afford proper health advice. To such a charge, I respond "So what?"
I have yet to see league-high letters of fire in the dawn light spelling out "the world is a fair place", or any other evidence to support an assertion that the world is a fair, or even nice, place. There were no guarantees given on conception, and the systems that run the world (quantum chromodymamics, gravity) don't necessarily cause the development of fairness. Worse - I find it hard to believe that people can afford the computing power and bandwidth to view a YouTube video, but be unable to afford some sort of access to quality health advice or education. So there is a serious problem of prioritisation of expenditures there too.
[I'm assuming that TFA was written for an American audience who expect 40% of their population to have no healthcare provision, and who expect half of bankruptcies to involve medical bills. Again, this is tough - being born in the uncivilized world, or being born poor, has always been bad for your life expectancy. So being born poor, in America, to stupid parents who value entertainment more highly than the value investing in health information, is likely to be detrimental to your health. "Film" as the saying goes, "at eleven."
(BTW, I'm not saying that it's impossible for there to be significant problems with vaccinations, or other complex medical technologies ; but there are much better places to get information about these things. If you know enough about the internet to know of YouTube, then one would hope that you'd already committed "www.cdc.gov" to memory as a starting place for health-related enquiries. It took 14 characters typing and two clicks to get to some useful information.)
Somebody please tell congress that they don't have jurisdiction on other planets.
s / planets / countries
BTW, I think that the US congress is considered a proper noun, and thus should be capitalised. Unless you're talking about the Indian Congress Party, or perhaps the physical act of congress?
Wavelength effects what color you precieve, it has nothing to do with resolution.
Back to school for you. On your way to remedial Physics, call in at the English class too - the words you were needing were "affects" (for "effects") and "perceive" (for "precieve"). I'll let you off with the "color" since you're probably an American. Can we take the obligatory conversation about falling school standards for granted, and move on to bemoaning the knee-jerk responses that "forum" discussions so often provoke. By the way, you can get web browsers that will do spell checking for you.
I don't find the suggestion that it's a "distribution" issue credible. Since the machines are being made in China/ SEAsia by robots, then it's as easy to ship a container of them to Australia or Europe as it is to the States. So "distribution" isn't an issue.
When is the last time you shipped something internationally by container?
Errr, about 3 weeks ago. It's not something I do more than about 5 times a year. HazMat, electronics, laboratories, whatever. Total pain in the arse every time, but perfectly do-able.
He may have customs in place for the US and nowhere else
Which kind of begs the question of how he's getting the goods past customs at the exporting end? I don't know the rules in Taiwan, or in China, but I'd be astonished if there wasn't tax to pay as the goods leave the country as well as taxes to be paid on entering the receiving country. It's complicated enough between Britain, it's EU partners, and Norway.
How many fit in a container? Would you be willing to wait until the container is full?
10ft, 20ft, 30ft or full-size 40ft container?
One product only? or bundled up with a couple of tons of other stuff going from the same source factory to the same destination country? How many in a 10ft container? Guessing at 1 cubic foot per laptop (including all it's protective packaging and remembering the last time I brought a retail laptop - 16 inch square by 6 inch deep ; I'm using Imperial measure because it's convenient fractions of the inner dimensions of a shipping container), and a 10ft container being 10ft X 8ft X 6ft (you can't stack them too deep without crushing the bottom layers) you're looking at around 480 per contiainer. Call it 500 for round numbers ; 2000 in a 40ft container. Not huge numbers per container - maybe they do the packaging at the pallet level rather than the individual laptop. There are companies that specialise in forwarding freight internationally. And a lot of them are an awful lot cheaper the likes of DHL - whose specialism is fast delivery, not economical delivery. DHL aren't the people to talk to when you've got a 20ft, 12 ton laboratory module to ship to the Gulf States and you're not too fussed if it takes 6 weeks or 8 to get there, because you've still got to build the instruments for it once the lab is shipping. [I'm trying to remember who we used for that job - Pentagon, Circle, or Paragon? - all freight forwarding companies with offices on the same industrial estate as our office. I know that one of them has recently sent a friend of mine to live in China as their "man on the ground".]
International operations aren't easy,
You don't say! And there I was wondering why we spent over an hour at last Thursday's project meeting debating whether to run the next 2 years of operations from the UK, Norway, or Ireland, and which time zone to run the jobs in. Of course, the different laws in Norway concerning local employment levels add a bit of complication, which the legal people are going to have to look at. But meantime, Logistics out of Aberdeen (and the rig on Aberdeen time), while Operations are going to alternate between Aberdeen and Norway. Lovely.
I would suspect it is exactly such "distribution" problems that resulted in the offer being made the way it is.
That is exactly what shipping companies are for. If you want to do it yourself, feel free. But be aware that what you do once every couple of months is a daily occurrence for a shipping company, and they'll almost always do a better job quicker and cheaper than you could. Frankly, if Negroponte and his crew aren't farming out this sort of detail to professionals, then they're wasting a lot of their own time effort and someone else's money.
Sounds like you met some typical members of the Xtian herd. Actually, just to make them feel less persecuted, I'll point out that they share many opinions with members of the Muslim herd too, particularly members of the fundamentalist divisions of the religion. (They may claim to be members of different religions, but from the perspective of really other religions, they're all trivial variations on Judaism.)
But most people who lack critical thinking abilities are drawn to fundamental Christianity for some reason.
Fundamentalist religions - not just Xtianity. "Critical thinking" in it's many and varied forms is normally banned, to the point of excommunication, banishment, torture or death in theocracies for precisely this reason. "Theocracies" includes pretty much all "Western" societies prior to 1600 (+/-, we've no need to get picky about calendars). That must make life pretty fraught in the developing theocracy of Gilead, for you poor people. but don't worry, I'm sure that your authorities are carefully preserving your online writing, so that you can be tried appropriately for your crimes, as they will be defined.
One minor quibble : you say "And even if someone did tell him there were cavemen in 100 AD -- I don't know -- ". Well, you can rest fairly well assured that there were still "cave men" within any reasonable definition in 100AD :
the UK has considerable records of cave dwellings being in use form the Middle Ages until as late as the 1930s (present calendar), for one definition of caveman (and by 100AD their huge communal building projects such as Silbury Hill, Stonehenge, Callanish, Skara Brae... had mostly been redundant for one or two millennia, throwing more problems at the YECs)
SW (US)America certainly had "Native Americans" living in complex villages based in cave systems in the early hundreds AD, so it's pretty safe to assume that people were using these caves before then;
modern New Guinea has still got natives living without metal goods (though the numbers are decreasingly rapidly) in areas of natural karst, so again it is a safe bet that these societies were still existent to some degree 1900 years ago. And 2900 years ago. And 29000 years ago. And pretty likely 39000 years ago.
I doubt this location is so remote that there isn't some way to link it up or at least to store the data and then periodically retrieve it.
It'd cost a bundle, and might not work (rain, when it comes, is very heavy)
At least two people on Slashdot have visited the site (OK, Slashdot does have a rather abnormal readership), which takes it from "really remote" to just "moderately remote". I've been to bits of cave where (literally) more people have walked on the Moon, and I wouldn't describe tham as particularly remote. Hard and not particularly rewarding to get to, but hardly "remote" in the way that large parts of Antarctica are. Hmmm, bad example - I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where models for oil exploration in Antarctica were being discussed, which takes the level of remoteness down somewhat. A combination of solar cells, battery-backed storage, and a modicum of intelligence in the machine to do motion detection should make a reasonably robust surveillance system perfectly feasible. And if the place is *only* 3 hours by vehicle from a national park centre of some sort then there's going to be enough traffic for a "park ranger / guide / guard" person to get in and dump the data several times a year. Hell, I've heard enough crazy theories about this place over the years (I think von Daniken was the first person I heard about it from!) that I'd be willing to stump up a couple of hundred bucks into the pot to get an answer. Or I'd try pitching the idea to a TV company for an hour of Discovery Channel filler.
Like fuck they do. I've been struggling to get my head round one of the damned things for about 2 months now and I'm really, really glad that the colleague who I brought the damned thing off has offered to buy it back if I'm still unhappy in a couple of weeks. I have to say that having just re-enabled the wireless adapter, at least that bit of it has worked. Of course, the impossibility of finding a Mac-compatible webcam last night was just another typically Mac pain in the arse. Nope, I've given the platform a more than fair crack of the whip, and I just don't have the time to waste on learning all it's ins and outs (along with several variants of Unix, Symbian's ER05 (Psion) system, and up to 4 major versions of Windows in any one day).
I wonder if part of the reason for the lower than expected demand was that they've not allowed international buyers, while the laptop has garnered international attention.
[SNIP]
And then we saw the "only for US and Canadian residents" notice and our hearts sunk.
Same issue here - I'd love to have been involved in this, but being in the Rest of The World, I'm discriminated against. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
I don't find the suggestion that it's a "distribution" issue credible. Since the machines are being made in China/ SEAsia by robots, then it's as easy to ship a container of them to Australia or Europe as it is to the States. So "distribution" isn't an issue. Which doesn't leave a lot of possible reasons : tax deals ; some propriatory or IP issues that aren't being mentioned publically ; or Negroponte and associates have some political tie up. It doesn't particularly bother me - it's just another bunch of Septics acting just like all previous generations of Septics.
Welcome to the internet. Population: every smug, religion-hating atheist on the planet.
I know at least three religion-hating atheists who're not on the Internet. Which implies that you're a pathetic god-squaddie who doesn't realise that you're even more outnumbered and wrong than you already think you are.
Perhaps I should try to persuade them to get onto the internet, but they have so much fun taking the piss out of god-squaddies as they go in and out of the few remaining churches in town.
The BBC is not a company. The BBC has a guaranteed source of income - the license fee.
Guaranteed... for the moment.
'Auntie' (as the Beeb are often nicknamed here, in memory of innumerable pimps, ponces and back-street abortionists), is very well aware that the license fee is unpopular and may not continue indefinitely.
is the fact that all British people watching television pay directly to the BBC, by law,
You do not pay the license fee for watching television. You pay the license fee for possession of equipment capable of receiving and de-coding television signals. If that equipment sits unpowered and locked into a Faraday box that blocks any incoming signals... you are still liable for the license fee (and implicitly for the registration into a database of people who possess such equipment). That last point is why, when you buy a piece of television-reception equipment the retailer is required to record and communicate your address details. (The retailer is not required to check if the details are real, so Messers Michael Mouse and Daniel Duck have brought a number of such items on my credit card, for their residence in Quackersville. The retailer is required to get the address of the buyer if the equipment is described as being for export, closing that obvious loophole.)
A small proportion of the TV license fee also goes for supporting the radio system. Previously one could get a distinct license for possession of radio reception equipment, and if one had a radio but no TV, one was required to get the radio license. A third distinct license was required for possession of equipment for transmitting radio signals, and that license points to the original reason for these requirements : control of radio use during WW2 - the appropriate legislation is the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1948 (as amended).
Auntie are well aware of the perceived unfairness (and hence the possibility of legal challenge) consequent on their discrimination against certain groups of users. Since this has the potential to undermine the main part of their funding base (viz : the license fee), they'd have to be stupid to ignore it. Whether they're seriously trying to act in an even-handed manner, or whether they're doing the minimum they think that they can get away with is an open question, but I don't think that they are ignoring the issue.
The BBC do include a considerable number of techy persons who obviously have no fear of Open Source software ; however there are also abundances of lawyers (who couldn't give a rat's arse one way or the other about Open Source, if they understood the question) and multitudes of Arts and Media people (unsurprisingly) who really deeply care about getting paid for their work, and who believe the (other) lawyers and marketing people who tell them they won't get paid without DRM. That the argument is technically incorrect, legally dubious, and morally corrupt doesn't stop it being made. After all, we're at the interface between marketing and the law here : by comparison Pol Pot was a paragon of moral rectitude.
Going through the rest of your reply, I see more arguments and one "table", I wish/. would allow html tables, you ran off on a spreadsheet with numbers you made up, without any real data. As I provided links to data as well as links to articles on how some governments are concerned about declining birthrates due to improvements in economic opportunities, educations, and or equality can you provide any data to back up your assertion that these won't reduce population?
Go back to read the table. As a SlashDotter, I can safely assume that you can reconstruct the spreadsheet used to produce the table from the figures I gave in my original message. It doesn't use anything more complicated than [this cell]=[that cell]*[constant]+[other cell].
I am not asserting that there is no link between female (or universal) education and population levels. I'm asserting that it takes at least one and more likely two whole generations before improved education etc levels start to significantly reduce overall populations.
Let's look at some of your cited data
you point out that in the American ruling classes, population is just about stable now, just over 50 years (just under 2 generations) since the last of the laws banning married women from remaining in employment were dropped. I think that supports my assertion that it'll take about 2 generations for population levels to drop AFTER the equalising of opportunities in a population.
The other side of the coin is that those portions of the US population who have attained equality of opportunity more recently (generally, poor immigrants ; non-suburban Afro-Americans ; the poor in general) are implied to still be breeding at more-than replacement levels. While it's very un-PC to say so, you do hear the white-supremacist Nazi shits making exactly that sort of claim, and backing it up with data. The Nazis might be scum, but that can spot a socially significant statistic when it leaps out at them.
I don't see much relevance to the Japanese, European and Taiwanese headlines either. For them to be supporting your position of instant linkage between equality of opportunity and population levels, then a rise in the Japanese stock market leads to instant pregnancies at a detectable rate, with a compression of normal pregnancies into a period comparable to a headline-writer's attention span. Miraculous (but since the people involved are probably not Xtian, that would explain AnswersInGenesis not shouting about the news). The your citing of the European and Taiwanese reports seems to express astonishment that people can lead an active sex life without getting either pregnant or diseased. This may be newsworthy in America, but not in the rest of the world. The Taiwanese report also makes an implicit equation between [getting married] and [having children]. This equation is no stronger than approximately correct - I'm quite certain that my marriage intentions and vows did not include any mention of having children, and I'm also certain that I've not had my vasectomy reversed since I got married. (I'll spare you the details of how difficult it was to get a vasectomy when un-married and un-bred in the past ; I'm told that it's trivial now.) doing a quick body count of my friends (rather than my colleagues, who I don't get to choose)... I'm getting approximate parity between the number of married couples with offspring (some are inherited) and the number without offspring and with declared intentions (or inappropriate genders) of not having offspring. "Marriage" does not equal "having children".
The California report again talks about a link between various educational programmes and pregnancy rates (there is an implicit equation there between "pregnancy rate" and "birth rate" ; again we know that this is only approximately correct), but it doesn't talk about population levels and how long it takes for changed birth rates to
Which doesn't reduce the population, it only reduces the rate of population growth.
By improving education, equality, and economic opportunity the population will reduce.
A blank assertion which (without significant elaboration) is unlikely to be correct.
The replacement rate or fertility rate to maintain a steady population is more than 2 children per female.
Later in your missive you say that the fertility rate for the USA is a touch over 2.1 children per female (on average), and that's leading to at most slow population growth. That sounds about correct. For people who don't like thinking about these things, the seemingly "extra" 0.1-something children per female makes up for the one child in 20 who dies without reproducing (through death before fecundity, death without successful breeding, or by choice). Without that "extra" 0.1 child per female, the population declines.
However in developed nations where there is equality and educational as well as economic opportunities the birth rate is below 2 births per female
So, at 2.1-something children per female (your figure), that would class America as not being a developed nation. Hmmm. Are you sure you mean to say that? And the additional implication that America isn't a land of equality, educational or economic opportunity? I've been accused of being anti-American, but I've never claimed things like that.
By increasing, improving, these 3 factors in Africa the population will decline there. Admittedly it won't happen instantaneously but within a short tyme it will. It may take 20 or 30 years but it can happen.
Let's work that out numerically : take a million people, at a population growth rate of 0.25 children per person per half-decade. (That's one child per couple per decade, or 4 per couple per 40 years - a recipe for growth, but averaged over a lifetime not incredible.) I'll run the population (on a spreadsheet ; I'm lazy) for 50 years, then I'll half the growth rate to 0.125 children/couple per decade. Each half-decade I'll kill-off one tenth of the population too. This isn't an exercise in real demographics, but a very crude and simplistic model. Let's see the numbers:
Obviously this extremely crude model has some surrealities - 5-year-old people are in the breeding population and someone who is 90 years old has the same chance of death (in the next 5 years) as someone who is 20. But it covers an important point too - although the population growth RATE and the number of people added per half-decade declines precipitously after year 50 (imagine the news headlines that year!), the population doesn't stop growing for over 50 years.
Blunt fact of demographics : birth rates have had little effect on hu
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, there is another "grand renaming" in the pipeline, due to the description and naming of a partial leg in about 1880. Tyrannosaurus appears to have been described (partially) from a handful of bones over 20 years before Barnum Brown found, described and named the iconic near-complete skeleton.
ICZN does have rules to cover this situation now - if the taxon with the invalid name (in this case, Tyrannosaurus) haas been used in more than 50 publications over a period of more than 25 years prior to the recognition of synonymy, then the original name may be suppressed and the seemingly invalid junior synonym remain as the recognised synonym. In short, if it'll cause too much disruption to the literature then there's no need to accept the change. So it seems that the name Tyrannosaurus is safe, unless something else turns up out of the nomenclatural woodwork.
A speaker at last month's conference on "South Atlantic Petroleum Systems", where Antarctica was the "elephant seal in the room which no one mentioned", summarised the prospectivity of Antarctica thus : "Don't drill on an Archean shield (East Antarctica); don't drill in an active volcanic island arc (West Antarctica/ Antarctic Peninsula) ; and for the remaining area, where there are real uncertainties about presence of and quality of source rocks, and the thermal history of the area to mature those source rocks, and the sediment sources to provide clastic reservoir rocks
It's your money. You have the hassle of organising it ; I'll do your wellsite geology. It'll be $1000/day if you're starting in the next 3 years, beyond that I'm not able to commit myself to a price, but it's likely to be higher.
My original posting put the comparable region as between the Falklands and part of the West Antarctic Peninsula (via Tierra del Fuego) ; that covers quite a few degrees of change.
In a European comparison, compare Central England and Norway just south of the Arctic Circle.
I have a vague memory that it was. One of Captain America's occasional foes, if my memory is serving me right.
Why imagine the Antarctic at the equator at this time when the original article, the message I posted, and kdawson's editing of this all pointed out that the palaeolatitude of the site at the time of life/ burial of the fossilised organisms was between 55 and 65 degrees. These figures aren't just pulled out of people's arses, you know - in this case it's based on a combination of palaeomagnetic work on dyke swarms throughout the region, volume considerations constraining plate reconstructions, and environmental analyses of petroleum source rocks (and more particularly their marine fossil microfaunas) in the region all coming together to synthesise (check your dictionary!!) a detailed understanding of the palaeogeography of the region.
I gave up 2 days of my life to a conference on this stuff last month ; I don't see why you should get away without some of the joy too.
My mention that "the area was between 55 and 65 degrees south" (taken from the original paper) probably represents several man-months of work spread over a half-dozen disciplines working in as many universities over the last decade. Even the much-maligned kdawson recognised it as a significant point to preserve in editing my original post.
The fossils are presently in the Antarctic ; at the time of life/ burial of these animals, the palaeolatitude is estimated as 55 to 65 degrees S, an interval which covers the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas (notoriously covered in sheep), a fair amount of Argentine pampas (with cattle and some agriculture), Tierra del Fuego (barely habitable), and some of the West Antarctic Peninsula (uninhabited) ; in a continental climate setting, the interval from Edmonton (Canada) to the Great Slave Lake would be an appropriate comparison. With the exception of the WAP, all these areas have indigenous mammalian herbivores in abundance, though no major reptilian (whatever that paraphyletic grouping means ; for a start, it ignores the living dinosaurs) faunas.
Care to elaborate? Bearing in mind that I polished off about 3 chapters of "Gift From Earth" last night, and it's not my first reading of GFE (or any other Niven Known Space story).
You can call yourself Brontosaurus if you want ; you can call yourself "late for lunch" if you want. Your choice of name is not constrained by the rules of the ICZN, and probably not by anyone else (though I think that France and possibly New Zealand will refuse to register the birth of a child under a wildly silly or unpronounceable name ; although given some Maori names I've heard, I don't see that the NZ rules would be too restrictive).
Set up your Adblock filters. When you see an advert that you don't like, Adblock the whole domain that the advert comes from.
Your speed of surfing will improve ; the sites that make their advertising too intrusive will die. Everyone is happy (apart from the advertising industry, who as professional liars should be initiated into their industry by hanging, drawing and quartering ; twice).
That article was about children and the cannon-fodder produced by universities. Real people still use email to prevaricate around the stuff they should have finished last month.
Yeah, that's right, just put the stuff under a mountain in an internally-draining desert basin, a hundred miles from the nearest town.
Reasonably easy to do in America (though quite why they are looking so closely at a relatively unstable volcanic pile does ask for some explanations) ; not so easy to do in, for example, Britain, or the Netherlands. We don't have any deserts (an important criterion for minimising the amount of water flushing through the system) ; we don't have anywhere on the mainland that is 10 miles from a population centre (well, define "population centre" ; 10 houses? , 100? , 1000?) ; we don't have "internal drainage basins" (which almost by definition will have a salt lake or salt flats in a central location ; see Wikipedia on Endorheic basins) ; and we can't get more than 75 miles from a coast or tidal estuary.
Which is why, of course, the most likely sites for the UK's nuclear waste dumps are on coastal hillsides (Drigg ; Douneray), where the leaking waste can seep off site (through the relatively porous Old Red Sandstone Group sandstones on both sites) and into the sea, where it will be washed off to the non-atlas location called "Away" (latitude and longitude unknown).
I'm not an alarmist - hell, I've almost certainly got 150grams more of un-depleted uranium compounds in my house than you have - but one does have to be reasonably careful about these materials. I already live in (arguably) the most radioactive city in the UK ; there's no absolute "safety" in these things, only relative safety. Is the risk from a set dose of radiation less than the radiological risk of taking two international flights a year?
My two cents worth (a bit less than a penny these days - the dollar is under 49p now, and still falling; I'll have to start charging three cents for these rants) is that there are perfectly feasible technical solutions available for the problem of disposing of the by-products of the nuclear industry. Some important problems are in finding a geologically suitable place to put the nasty stuff, but they're not too-demanding problems. MUCH more important problems revolve around maintaining adequate oversight of the materials - Yucca Mountain might be far enough from anywhere else (I've not paid more than passing attention to this SEP(Someone Else's Problem), so I don't have more than a vague idea of it's location or geology) that you can just pour concrete on top of the filled repository, then dynamite the entrance tunnels (with patches of infill with human skulls) and forget about it. The UK, Europe in general, Japan too - we simply don't have the option of putting the stuff far-enough "Away" to not have to maintain it. At which point the integral of risk against time shifts to making the political oversight of the maintenance of the repository much more important than the geological and engineering risks. Which is why I always make the proposal that any long-term storage of any long-lived poisons should be done by placing the repository under the appropriate seat of government. The only way that politicians can be trusted to maintain adequate oversight of such materials is if they are going to be the first people to be wading around in the glowing green goo that might result from a failure of maintenance expenditure. "enlightened self-interest" is a polite way of saying "doing the right thing because there's a gun to my head" ; but it's nonetheless effective.
It's also a good way of ensuring that the politicians remember the opinion most people have of them.
There is another ha-ha-but-serious proposal for dealing with high-level waste.
They won't be "selling" you the film ; they'll be leasing you the right to access content from the disc which you've brought, which lease will have as parts of the terms and conditions :
Do you remember that experience which you used to have of going to the box office, paying your money over the counter, then going into the Big Room to watch the movie ONCE (without rewind, pause or replay) ? Well, that "cinema" experience is coming to a sofa in your living room Real Soon Now. (Assuming that you swallow the bullshit advertising for the current rash of DVD replacements, all of which replace the most important technical consideration of DVDs, which is that the content has escaped the control of the content leasing companies.)
Where?
As a working geologist, with a non-trivial application of interest in evolution, where do you think my understanding of evolution is wrong.
You've made a charge. Defend it.
For the hard-of-thinking out there in SlashdotLand (you don't know who you are, and if you could figure out how to use a mirror, you'd still not recognise yourself by that description), that means : the parents and or guardians who are so gullible as to base child-care decisions on TV programme snippets on youTube (edited out of context by people whose sole knowledge of the topic in question is most likely to be the whole programme they've edited), are the caregivers who are most likely to kill their charges through their stupidity. This will have the beneficial (if unintentional) side effect of raising the average intelligence of the population, through culling the bottom end of the population. This is the same effect that makes the average rabbit somewhat faster at running than the average fox.
Some might contend that this is terribly unfair on those who are too poor to afford proper health advice. To such a charge, I respond "So what?"
I have yet to see league-high letters of fire in the dawn light spelling out "the world is a fair place", or any other evidence to support an assertion that the world is a fair, or even nice, place. There were no guarantees given on conception, and the systems that run the world (quantum chromodymamics, gravity) don't necessarily cause the development of fairness. Worse - I find it hard to believe that people can afford the computing power and bandwidth to view a YouTube video, but be unable to afford some sort of access to quality health advice or education. So there is a serious problem of prioritisation of expenditures there too.
[I'm assuming that TFA was written for an American audience who expect 40% of their population to have no healthcare provision, and who expect half of bankruptcies to involve medical bills. Again, this is tough - being born in the uncivilized world, or being born poor, has always been bad for your life expectancy. So being born poor, in America, to stupid parents who value entertainment more highly than the value investing in health information, is likely to be detrimental to your health. "Film" as the saying goes, "at eleven."
(BTW, I'm not saying that it's impossible for there to be significant problems with vaccinations, or other complex medical technologies ; but there are much better places to get information about these things. If you know enough about the internet to know of YouTube, then one would hope that you'd already committed "www.cdc.gov" to memory as a starting place for health-related enquiries. It took 14 characters typing and two clicks to get to some useful information.)
s / planets / countries
BTW, I think that the US congress is considered a proper noun, and thus should be capitalised. Unless you're talking about the Indian Congress Party, or perhaps the physical act of congress?
Back to school for you. On your way to remedial Physics, call in at the English class too - the words you were needing were "affects" (for "effects") and "perceive" (for "precieve"). I'll let you off with the "color" since you're probably an American.
Can we take the obligatory conversation about falling school standards for granted, and move on to bemoaning the knee-jerk responses that "forum" discussions so often provoke.
By the way, you can get web browsers that will do spell checking for you.
Errr, about 3 weeks ago. It's not something I do more than about 5 times a year. HazMat, electronics, laboratories, whatever. Total pain in the arse every time, but perfectly do-able.
Which kind of begs the question of how he's getting the goods past customs at the exporting end? I don't know the rules in Taiwan, or in China, but I'd be astonished if there wasn't tax to pay as the goods leave the country as well as taxes to be paid on entering the receiving country. It's complicated enough between Britain, it's EU partners, and Norway.
10ft, 20ft, 30ft or full-size 40ft container?
One product only? or bundled up with a couple of tons of other stuff going from the same source factory to the same destination country? How many in a 10ft container? Guessing at 1 cubic foot per laptop (including all it's protective packaging and remembering the last time I brought a retail laptop - 16 inch square by 6 inch deep ; I'm using Imperial measure because it's convenient fractions of the inner dimensions of a shipping container), and a 10ft container being 10ft X 8ft X 6ft (you can't stack them too deep without crushing the bottom layers) you're looking at around 480 per contiainer. Call it 500 for round numbers ; 2000 in a 40ft container. Not huge numbers per container - maybe they do the packaging at the pallet level rather than the individual laptop.
There are companies that specialise in forwarding freight internationally. And a lot of them are an awful lot cheaper the likes of DHL - whose specialism is fast delivery, not economical delivery. DHL aren't the people to talk to when you've got a 20ft, 12 ton laboratory module to ship to the Gulf States and you're not too fussed if it takes 6 weeks or 8 to get there, because you've still got to build the instruments for it once the lab is shipping. [I'm trying to remember who we used for that job - Pentagon, Circle, or Paragon? - all freight forwarding companies with offices on the same industrial estate as our office. I know that one of them has recently sent a friend of mine to live in China as their "man on the ground".]
You don't say! And there I was wondering why we spent over an hour at last Thursday's project meeting debating whether to run the next 2 years of operations from the UK, Norway, or Ireland, and which time zone to run the jobs in. Of course, the different laws in Norway concerning local employment levels add a bit of complication, which the legal people are going to have to look at. But meantime, Logistics out of Aberdeen (and the rig on Aberdeen time), while Operations are going to alternate between Aberdeen and Norway. Lovely.
That is exactly what shipping companies are for. If you want to do it yourself, feel free. But be aware that what you do once every couple of months is a daily occurrence for a shipping company, and they'll almost always do a better job quicker and cheaper than you could. Frankly, if Negroponte and his crew aren't farming out this sort of detail to professionals, then they're wasting a lot of their own time effort and someone else's money.
Fundamentalist religions - not just Xtianity. "Critical thinking" in it's many and varied forms is normally banned, to the point of excommunication, banishment, torture or death in theocracies for precisely this reason. "Theocracies" includes pretty much all "Western" societies prior to 1600 (+/-, we've no need to get picky about calendars). That must make life pretty fraught in the developing theocracy of Gilead, for you poor people. but don't worry, I'm sure that your authorities are carefully preserving your online writing, so that you can be tried appropriately for your crimes, as they will be defined.
One minor quibble : you say "And even if someone did tell him there were cavemen in 100 AD -- I don't know -- ". Well, you can rest fairly well assured that there were still "cave men" within any reasonable definition in 100AD :
At least two people on Slashdot have visited the site (OK, Slashdot does have a rather abnormal readership), which takes it from "really remote" to just "moderately remote". I've been to bits of cave where (literally) more people have walked on the Moon, and I wouldn't describe tham as particularly remote. Hard and not particularly rewarding to get to, but hardly "remote" in the way that large parts of Antarctica are. Hmmm, bad example - I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where models for oil exploration in Antarctica were being discussed, which takes the level of remoteness down somewhat.
A combination of solar cells, battery-backed storage, and a modicum of intelligence in the machine to do motion detection should make a reasonably robust surveillance system perfectly feasible. And if the place is *only* 3 hours by vehicle from a national park centre of some sort then there's going to be enough traffic for a "park ranger / guide / guard" person to get in and dump the data several times a year.
Hell, I've heard enough crazy theories about this place over the years (I think von Daniken was the first person I heard about it from!) that I'd be willing to stump up a couple of hundred bucks into the pot to get an answer. Or I'd try pitching the idea to a TV company for an hour of Discovery Channel filler.
Like fuck they do.
I've been struggling to get my head round one of the damned things for about 2 months now and I'm really, really glad that the colleague who I brought the damned thing off has offered to buy it back if I'm still unhappy in a couple of weeks.
I have to say that having just re-enabled the wireless adapter, at least that bit of it has worked. Of course, the impossibility of finding a Mac-compatible webcam last night was just another typically Mac pain in the arse.
Nope, I've given the platform a more than fair crack of the whip, and I just don't have the time to waste on learning all it's ins and outs (along with several variants of Unix, Symbian's ER05 (Psion) system, and up to 4 major versions of Windows in any one day).
[SNIP]
Same issue here - I'd love to have been involved in this, but being in the Rest of The World, I'm discriminated against. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
I don't find the suggestion that it's a "distribution" issue credible. Since the machines are being made in China/ SEAsia by robots, then it's as easy to ship a container of them to Australia or Europe as it is to the States. So "distribution" isn't an issue. Which doesn't leave a lot of possible reasons : tax deals ; some
propriatory or IP issues that aren't being mentioned publically ; or Negroponte and associates have some political tie up. It doesn't particularly bother me - it's just another bunch of Septics acting just like all previous generations of Septics.
I know at least three religion-hating atheists who're not on the Internet. Which implies that you're a pathetic god-squaddie who doesn't realise that you're even more outnumbered and wrong than you already think you are.
Perhaps I should try to persuade them to get onto the internet, but they have so much fun taking the piss out of god-squaddies as they go in and out of the few remaining churches in town.
'Auntie' (as the Beeb are often nicknamed here, in memory of innumerable pimps, ponces and back-street abortionists), is very well aware that the license fee is unpopular and may not continue indefinitely.
You do not pay the license fee for watching television. You pay the license fee for possession of equipment capable of receiving and de-coding television signals. If that equipment sits unpowered and locked into a Faraday box that blocks any incoming signals
A small proportion of the TV license fee also goes for supporting the radio system. Previously one could get a distinct license for possession of radio reception equipment, and if one had a radio but no TV, one was required to get the radio license. A third distinct license was required for possession of equipment for transmitting radio signals, and that license points to the original reason for these requirements : control of radio use during WW2 - the appropriate legislation is the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1948 (as amended).
Auntie are well aware of the perceived unfairness (and hence the possibility of legal challenge) consequent on their discrimination against certain groups of users. Since this has the potential to undermine the main part of their funding base (viz : the license fee), they'd have to be stupid to ignore it. Whether they're seriously trying to act in an even-handed manner, or whether they're doing the minimum they think that they can get away with is an open question, but I don't think that they are ignoring the issue.
The BBC do include a considerable number of techy persons who obviously have no fear of Open Source software ; however there are also abundances of lawyers (who couldn't give a rat's arse one way or the other about Open Source, if they understood the question) and multitudes of Arts and Media people (unsurprisingly) who really deeply care about getting paid for their work, and who believe the (other) lawyers and marketing people who tell them they won't get paid without DRM. That the argument is technically incorrect, legally dubious, and morally corrupt doesn't stop it being made. After all, we're at the interface between marketing and the law here : by comparison Pol Pot was a paragon of moral rectitude.
Go back to read the table. As a SlashDotter, I can safely assume that you can reconstruct the spreadsheet used to produce the table from the figures I gave in my original message. It doesn't use anything more complicated than [this cell]=[that cell]*[constant]+[other cell].
I am not asserting that there is no link between female (or universal) education and population levels. I'm asserting that it takes at least one and more likely two whole generations before improved education etc levels start to significantly reduce overall populations.
Let's look at some of your cited data
A blank assertion which (without significant elaboration) is unlikely to be correct.
Later in your missive you say that the fertility rate for the USA is a touch over 2.1 children per female (on average), and that's leading to at most slow population growth. That sounds about correct. For people who don't like thinking about these things, the seemingly "extra" 0.1-something children per female makes up for the one child in 20 who dies without reproducing (through death before fecundity, death without successful breeding, or by choice). Without that "extra" 0.1 child per female, the population declines.
So, at 2.1-something children per female (your figure), that would class America as not being a developed nation. Hmmm. Are you sure you mean to say that? And the additional implication that America isn't a land of equality, educational or economic opportunity? I've been accused of being anti-American, but I've never claimed things like that.
Let's work that out numerically : take a million people, at a population growth rate of 0.25 children per person per half-decade. (That's one child per couple per decade, or 4 per couple per 40 years - a recipe for growth, but averaged over a lifetime not incredible.) I'll run the population (on a spreadsheet ; I'm lazy) for 50 years, then I'll half the growth rate to 0.125 children/couple per decade. Each half-decade I'll kill-off one tenth of the population too. This isn't an exercise in real demographics, but a very crude and simplistic model. Let's see the numbers :
Year Population Born Died Carry forward
0 1000000 250000 100000 1150000
5 1150000 287500 115000 1322500
10 1322500 330625 132250 1520875
15 1520875 380219 152088 1749006
20 1749006 437252 174901 2011357
25 2011357 502839 201136 2313061
30 2313061 578265 231306 2660020
35 2660020 665005 266002 3059023
40 3059023 764756 305902 3517876
45 3517876 879469 351788 4045558
50 4045558 505695 404556 4146697
55 4146697 518337 414670 4250364
60 4250364 531296 425036 4356623
65 4356623 544578 435662 4465539
70 4465539 558192 446554 4577177
75 4577177 572147 457718 4691607
80 4691607 586451 469161 4808897
85 4808897 601112 480890 4929119
90 4929119 616140 492912 5052347
95 5052347 631543 505235 5178656
100 5178656 647332 517866 5308122
Obviously this extremely crude model has some surrealities - 5-year-old people are in the breeding population and someone who is 90 years old has the same chance of death (in the next 5 years) as someone who is 20. But it covers an important point too - although the population growth RATE and the number of people added per half-decade declines precipitously after year 50 (imagine the news headlines that year!), the population doesn't stop growing for over 50 years.
Blunt fact of demographics : birth rates have had little effect on hu