Agreed... but given that they're already using population density, roads and electrical power infrastructure, I think they're in a sense double-counting the influence of rivers.
My intent was never to disagree with their conclusions, but rather to criticize their methodology.
Regarding the data from rivers and coastlines: Obviously humans do influence rivers and coastlines. No one would argue that. However they use rivers and coastlines as proxies for human influence. That is, they argue that the presence of rivers and coastlines means that humans will invariably use these rivers and coastlines to travel to new areas and "influence" them. I think that's specious reasoning.
Roads obviously do influence ecosystems. However the previous highest estimate was 600 m on each side. (Forman & Deblinger. Cons. Biol. 14:36-46 (2000), referenced in Sanderson et al) However the authors somewhat arbitrarily raised this to 2 km based on possible errors in mapping the *position*, not *width* of roads. (Note: The 2 km has nothing to do with how far indigenous organims travel.)
I am from India. I spent most of my life in a semi-rural environment. I can tell you, from personal experience, that hunting is a negligible source of food for people in developing countries, regardless of poverty.
The author's 15 km sphere of influence is again absolutely arbitrary. I think it unlikely that people in even the smallest settlements would trek 15 km into virgin ecosystems to hunt, with sufficient frequency to "moderately" influence the environment.
Let me re-emphasize that I do not disagree with the authors' aims or purposes. However I think this study is Bad Science and negatively impacts those aims.
Humans do indeed influence rivers and coastlines. No arguments there.
However the authors feel that rivers and coastlines may be taken as proxies for human influence, since they provide access for humans to physically travel to areas around rivers and coastlines. This strikes me as being a rather tenuous reason to use rivers and coastlines to map human influence. What do you think?
Well, it depends on what they are really trying to show in their map, doesn't it? There is comparatively little space on the planet that looks anything like pre-human wilderness anymore, which is worthwhile to note, whether one's politics involves hugging pandas or eliminating all species that do not, in fact, taste like chicken.
Point taken. However this methodology is too inaccurate to be used as the basis for a purportedly mathematical and scientific analysis.
Their assumptions mean that many pristine national parks will show up as "influenced" merely because there is a human settlement of any kind (even if it's just lights from a park ranger's base camp!) within 15 km.
Another example: they have the entire Rub al Khali (The Empty Quarter) of the Arabian desert, where Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman meet, as being moderately influence. Presumably they feel that workers in the scattered oil wells trek 15 km everyday in order to hunt for food or otherwise influence their environment. Now I know from personal experience that this is not the case, and that the Rub al Khalia is as close to "pre-human wilderness" as it gets. (I lived in the UAE for 2 years.)
I absolutely agree that human influence is pervasive, and I even allowed in my original post that their numbers (83% etc.) might be correct. However my point is that the methods they used are too inaccurate to justify their conclusions.
Reading from the Sanderson et al article on their website ("The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild."):
Their figure of 85% may well be correct, but their methodology is suspect to say the least. 1) As you say, they ignored Antarctica and other islands. 2) They used nine datasets to plot human influence, of which two were RIVERS and COASTLINES. Given that they used independant plots for population density etc, I have to wonder exactly why they feel humans are responsible for the distribution of rivers and coastlines. They assume that the possibility of access by humans implies human interference. 3) They assumed that roads would affect the environment for 2 km to each side, when the highest estimate for ecological impact was 600 m! 4) They assumed that all settlements would also affect environments upto an arbitrary distance of 2 km, based on the error in *position*, not *extent* of map data. 5) Random assertions like: "Hunting no longer supplies a major source of in the Western world, but it does in most of the rest of the world." This is patently false. Very few communities use hunting as a major food source. The vast majority of people around the world are fed by agriculture. But the authors use this statement to justify scoring human influence as "moderate" (4) up to 15 km from settlements on this basis. (They estimated 15 km to be a day's travel.)
I'm sure there are more errors, this was a very cursory reading.
I'm disappointed that this was published in a peer-reviewed journal. This article is in no sense good science, although it makes a fine political manifesto.
I understand the difference between a satellite and a companion. However Cruithne and this body both follow spiral orbits in resonance with the Earth. Neither body orbits the Earth directly. I wanted to know why 2002 AA29 was described as the "first ever" companion object found when 3753 Cruithne was discovered in 1997, and given the discoveries of 1998 UP1 and 2000 PH5.
There is a library that predates Alexandria at what used to be the University of Nalanda, near Pataliputra (Patna) in India. This library existed centruies before the Buddha and Mahavira. I highly recommend a visit, if for some strange reason you happen to be vacationing in Bihar.
Sorry to nitpick, but what the hell kind of a word is "prognistics"? The word you are looking for is prognosis (n. long-term outcome) or prognostic (adj. relating to prognosis). HTH
Actually jeramybsmith is right, in a sense. Large body size is an adaptation to ice ages (best exemplified by the mammalian megafauna, including the wooly mammoth and ground sloths). As the latest ice age recedes, we would naturally see fewer and smaller large land animals. It is energetically and physically difficult and costly to maintain body masses on the order of elephants, rhinos and hippos. In 10k or 20k years, elephants would have either gone extinct or evolved into something much smaller (and correspondingly less cool). Human intervention may have almost pushed them to extinction prematurely, but we may eventually be responsible for saving them in their current form.
Oh hell yes! You don't know how hard I've looked for quality cricket and NFL coverage on the same page. The BBC has great cricket and a little NFL, but Google's page is great.
Strange how it didn't have much on the Premiership or other football though. I guess the ICC Champions Trophy [of cricket] is getting more coverage than whatever football there is.
The current unfinished novel is a Dirk Gently story. There are letters by Douglas Adams saying that the universe of the novel had become much closer to a Guide sort of universe than a Dirk Gently sort of world, and that he planned to convert it to a Hitchhiker's Guide story. It remains, however, a Dirk Gently story.
He had apparently completed parts of three drafts, and the published story has chapters from all three drafts. I don't know how many people here have read "Salmon of Doubt", but I personally found the story extremely intriguing. Unfortunately it ends prematurely, leaving the reader hanging at a very interesting point in the story - "Extreme Winds... May Exist". I highly recommend it, if for nothing more than the insight it provides on Douglas Adams' writing process.
I hope this is somebody's April 1 joke, a few weeks late. If it's not, then that webpage is just really sad. Please be a joke, and not someone's stupendous stupidity manifesting itself most depressingly.
Regarding LOTR, it is quite clearly racist when talking about the haradrim/southrons, with their elephants and scimitars and so forth. But it doesn't bother me at all (I'm Indian myself) because hell, it's just a fricking story about hobbits. Tolkien was trying to echo or foreshadow European history, and Europe's biggest enemies have historically been from the South and East. (OT, possibly something about Europe beeing in the northwest...)
But the racism doesn't detract from the greatness of the story - it's like much of Kipling's work. There is considerable racism implicit in his descriptions of colonial rule, but his work reflects a true love for his reflected homeland.
Tolkien needed a villainous race of men, and since his protagonists are of good anglosaxon stock, a dark-skinned oriental antagonist race makes good sense. There's no malice intended, and that (for me at least) means that his descriptions are not in the least offensive or painful.
The city is definitely NOT part of the Indus valley civilisation. The IVC was located in the INDUS VALLEY, which is now in Pakistan and the north-west of India. Mahabalipuram is in the south-east of the country, and the seventh temple there (still used as a site of worship) is definitely a Hindu temple, dedicated (if I remember correctly from my visits) to Shiva. Another famous Mahabalipuram was supposedly built by the Pandavas, the five brothers who were the heroes of the epic Mahabharata. It's a very cool town, with awe-inspiring architecture and some very nice beaches. Visit, if you get the chance.
Mahabalipuram (or Mamallapuram) is now a moderately large town and a pretty nice resort. I grew up not far from there (in Vellore, Tamil Nadu). I've seen the seventh temple - there are lots of very nice temples and rock-carvings by the seaside. Anyway, the existence of six submerged temples has always been taught as fact, at least when I was in school, and I think that preliminary diving expeditions had already found evidence of a submerged city there. The new discovery doesn't really surprise me.
India has another submerged city : Dwaraka, the legendary abode of Krishna, located (probably) off the west coast a little north of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). I'm pretty sure archaeologists have found some submerged ruins in that area as well, but nothing specific.
Re:Military threats promote innovation
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 1
That sig's hilarious:
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Apparently you have no tolerance for spelling either, Herr Ubermensch!:)
I just want to respond to all the posts on this story and others decrying the DMCA and the CBDTPA.
The reason these laws exist or will exist is that many people, including many slashdot readers, have been pirating music, software and movies like hyperactive baboons for quite some time now. The establishment wouldn't care about DRM or anything like that if all people did with mp3's was to rip 'em and listen to them off their hard drives. But abuse of fair-use privileges has provoked this response. Evil corporations have the right to defend their own intellectual property. That's the law, and it makes sense.
There's no use now in whining like spoilt children. Your own (or your peers' own) actions are directly responsible for the current situation. Tough luck.
Worried your precious website will be overrun by hordes of ravenous, pillaging Linux geeks? Just block any weird, uncivilized, nonstandard browser. That'll show them.
"In the heart and soul of the Universe, there is a reason."
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed... but given that they're already using population density, roads and electrical power infrastructure, I think they're in a sense double-counting the influence of rivers.
My intent was never to disagree with their conclusions, but rather to criticize their methodology.
Regarding the data from rivers and coastlines: Obviously humans do influence rivers and coastlines. No one would argue that. However they use rivers and coastlines as proxies for human influence. That is, they argue that the presence of rivers and coastlines means that humans will invariably use these rivers and coastlines to travel to new areas and "influence" them. I think that's specious reasoning.
Roads obviously do influence ecosystems. However the previous highest estimate was 600 m on each side. (Forman & Deblinger. Cons. Biol. 14:36-46 (2000), referenced in Sanderson et al) However the authors somewhat arbitrarily raised this to 2 km based on possible errors in mapping the *position*, not *width* of roads. (Note: The 2 km has nothing to do with how far indigenous organims travel.)
I am from India. I spent most of my life in a semi-rural environment. I can tell you, from personal experience, that hunting is a negligible source of food for people in developing countries, regardless of poverty.
The author's 15 km sphere of influence is again absolutely arbitrary. I think it unlikely that people in even the smallest settlements would trek 15 km into virgin ecosystems to hunt, with sufficient frequency to "moderately" influence the environment.
Let me re-emphasize that I do not disagree with the authors' aims or purposes. However I think this study is Bad Science and negatively impacts those aims.
Humans do indeed influence rivers and coastlines. No arguments there.
However the authors feel that rivers and coastlines may be taken as proxies for human influence, since they provide access for humans to physically travel to areas around rivers and coastlines. This strikes me as being a rather tenuous reason to use rivers and coastlines to map human influence. What do you think?
Point taken. However this methodology is too inaccurate to be used as the basis for a purportedly mathematical and scientific analysis.
Their assumptions mean that many pristine national parks will show up as "influenced" merely because there is a human settlement of any kind (even if it's just lights from a park ranger's base camp!) within 15 km.
Another example: they have the entire Rub al Khali (The Empty Quarter) of the Arabian desert, where Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman meet, as being moderately influence. Presumably they feel that workers in the scattered oil wells trek 15 km everyday in order to hunt for food or otherwise influence their environment. Now I know from personal experience that this is not the case, and that the Rub al Khalia is as close to "pre-human wilderness" as it gets. (I lived in the UAE for 2 years.)
I absolutely agree that human influence is pervasive, and I even allowed in my original post that their numbers (83% etc.) might be correct. However my point is that the methods they used are too inaccurate to justify their conclusions.
LOL
An infinite line can bound a finite area. Otherwise, Tahiti would be bigger than, say, Montana.
Reading from the Sanderson et al article on their website ("The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild."):
Their figure of 85% may well be correct, but their methodology is suspect to say the least.
1) As you say, they ignored Antarctica and other islands.
2) They used nine datasets to plot human influence, of which two were RIVERS and COASTLINES. Given that they used independant plots for population density etc, I have to wonder exactly why they feel humans are responsible for the distribution of rivers and coastlines. They assume that the possibility of access by humans implies human interference.
3) They assumed that roads would affect the environment for 2 km to each side, when the highest estimate for ecological impact was 600 m!
4) They assumed that all settlements would also affect environments upto an arbitrary distance of 2 km, based on the error in *position*, not *extent* of map data.
5) Random assertions like: "Hunting no longer supplies a major source of in the Western world, but it does in most of the rest of the world." This is patently false. Very few communities use hunting as a major food source. The vast majority of people around the world are fed by agriculture. But the authors use this statement to justify scoring human influence as "moderate" (4) up to 15 km from settlements on this basis. (They estimated 15 km to be a day's travel.)
I'm sure there are more errors, this was a very cursory reading.
I'm disappointed that this was published in a peer-reviewed journal. This article is in no sense good science, although it makes a fine political manifesto.
Different computer programs are different.
We cannot use one system of development to write all the different types of program.
Therefore we need to use a flexible language that does not have a rigid structural or developmental style.
That's it, we're done. We're just going to sit here twiddling our thumbs.
Oh cool! I can scan in a page of doodling and pass it off as a valuable insight into post-modernism. Only 15 more pages to go...
That paper was a waste of time and bandwidth. Be grateful that it is slashdotted.
I understand the difference between a satellite and a companion. However Cruithne and this body both follow spiral orbits in resonance with the Earth. Neither body orbits the Earth directly. I wanted to know why 2002 AA29 was described as the "first ever" companion object found when 3753 Cruithne was discovered in 1997, and given the discoveries of 1998 UP1 and 2000 PH5.
See Weigert for more information.
How is this object considered a "companion" while Cruithne - Earth's "second moon" - is not?
Earth's Second Moon
2nd Moon Orbiting Earth Discovered
Google Search: Cruithne
Is there an astronomer in the house? Or anybody who could clarify this?
There is a library that predates Alexandria at what used to be the University of Nalanda, near Pataliputra (Patna) in India. This library existed centruies before the Buddha and Mahavira. I highly recommend a visit, if for some strange reason you happen to be vacationing in Bihar.
Windows: I *have* a life!
*ducks*
Sorry to nitpick, but what the hell kind of a word is "prognistics"? The word you are looking for is prognosis (n. long-term outcome) or prognostic (adj. relating to prognosis). HTH
Stroke It truly rocks. I've gotten so accustomed to it in three days' use, I already miss it badly on other computers. I highly recommend it.
Actually jeramybsmith is right, in a sense. Large body size is an adaptation to ice ages (best exemplified by the mammalian megafauna, including the wooly mammoth and ground sloths). As the latest ice age recedes, we would naturally see fewer and smaller large land animals. It is energetically and physically difficult and costly to maintain body masses on the order of elephants, rhinos and hippos. In 10k or 20k years, elephants would have either gone extinct or evolved into something much smaller (and correspondingly less cool). Human intervention may have almost pushed them to extinction prematurely, but we may eventually be responsible for saving them in their current form.
Oh hell yes! You don't know how hard I've looked for quality cricket and NFL coverage on the same page. The BBC has great cricket and a little NFL, but Google's page is great.
Strange how it didn't have much on the Premiership or other football though. I guess the ICC Champions Trophy [of cricket] is getting more coverage than whatever football there is.
The current unfinished novel is a Dirk Gently story. There are letters by Douglas Adams saying that the universe of the novel had become much closer to a Guide sort of universe than a Dirk Gently sort of world, and that he planned to convert it to a Hitchhiker's Guide story. It remains, however, a Dirk Gently story.
He had apparently completed parts of three drafts, and the published story has chapters from all three drafts. I don't know how many people here have read "Salmon of Doubt", but I personally found the story extremely intriguing. Unfortunately it ends prematurely, leaving the reader hanging at a very interesting point in the story - "Extreme Winds... May Exist". I highly recommend it, if for nothing more than the insight it provides on Douglas Adams' writing process.
I hope this is somebody's April 1 joke, a few weeks late. If it's not, then that webpage is just really sad. Please be a joke, and not someone's stupendous stupidity manifesting itself most depressingly.
Regarding LOTR, it is quite clearly racist when talking about the haradrim/southrons, with their elephants and scimitars and so forth. But it doesn't bother me at all (I'm Indian myself) because hell, it's just a fricking story about hobbits. Tolkien was trying to echo or foreshadow European history, and Europe's biggest enemies have historically been from the South and East. (OT, possibly something about Europe beeing in the northwest...)
But the racism doesn't detract from the greatness of the story - it's like much of Kipling's work. There is considerable racism implicit in his descriptions of colonial rule, but his work reflects a true love for his reflected homeland.
Tolkien needed a villainous race of men, and since his protagonists are of good anglosaxon stock, a dark-skinned oriental antagonist race makes good sense. There's no malice intended, and that (for me at least) means that his descriptions are not in the least offensive or painful.
The city is definitely NOT part of the Indus valley civilisation. The IVC was located in the INDUS VALLEY, which is now in Pakistan and the north-west of India. Mahabalipuram is in the south-east of the country, and the seventh temple there (still used as a site of worship) is definitely a Hindu temple, dedicated (if I remember correctly from my visits) to Shiva. Another famous Mahabalipuram was supposedly built by the Pandavas, the five brothers who were the heroes of the epic Mahabharata. It's a very cool town, with awe-inspiring architecture and some very nice beaches. Visit, if you get the chance.
Mahabalipuram (or Mamallapuram) is now a moderately large town and a pretty nice resort. I grew up not far from there (in Vellore, Tamil Nadu). I've seen the seventh temple - there are lots of very nice temples and rock-carvings by the seaside. Anyway, the existence of six submerged temples has always been taught as fact, at least when I was in school, and I think that preliminary diving expeditions had already found evidence of a submerged city there. The new discovery doesn't really surprise me.
India has another submerged city : Dwaraka, the legendary abode of Krishna, located (probably) off the west coast a little north of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). I'm pretty sure archaeologists have found some submerged ruins in that area as well, but nothing specific.
That sig's hilarious:
:)
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Apparently you have no tolerance for spelling either, Herr Ubermensch!
The Guardian, and Yahoo
No, I am dead serious. DRM would not exist except for piracy.
I just want to respond to all the posts on this story and others decrying the DMCA and the CBDTPA.
The reason these laws exist or will exist is that many people, including many slashdot readers, have been pirating music, software and movies like hyperactive baboons for quite some time now. The establishment wouldn't care about DRM or anything like that if all people did with mp3's was to rip 'em and listen to them off their hard drives. But abuse of fair-use privileges has provoked this response. Evil corporations have the right to defend their own intellectual property. That's the law, and it makes sense.
There's no use now in whining like spoilt children. Your own (or your peers' own) actions are directly responsible for the current situation. Tough luck.
Worried your precious website will be overrun by hordes of ravenous, pillaging Linux geeks? Just block any weird, uncivilized, nonstandard browser. That'll show them.
"In the heart and soul of the Universe, there is a reason."