To most of the world, the net is a buzzword. The image is a mess of pornography, hackers, and lawlessness. The reality is... partly the same. The issue is... nothing's wrong with this.
But pedophilia is a wholly different issue. They use the internet to network, to trade both pornography and victims. They use it to stalk. They use it to lure out new victims.
There is a real issue involved for any of us who administer any service online... public backlash against any community that makes itself pedophile friendly will cause no end of headaches. Moreover, it will cause some of us to attack you by means other than legal.
I am both a geek and, in one state, a licenced therapist for victims of sex crimes. I know pedophilia. I've dealt with it, run up against it time after time. It is not a sexual fetish that is simply not socially acceptable. It is the worst form of mental illness I know, and one of only two things that tends to make me physically ill. The other is extremely bad shellfish. I have never met a pedophile that was even remotely well in the head. Why deal with a problem when you can just jail it away? Well, the problem is, we can't. Too many pedophiles get away with it. There are virtually no exhibitors of the disease who do not practice its manifestation... this is something I've become sickeningly aware of. The least harmful still cop feels from victims too young or too terrified or ashamed to speak up. If we could just jail it away, it wouldn't be a problem.
The issue with age of consent isn't (or shouldn't be, in any case) the choice of minors to be sexually active. It is the choice of adults to exploit minors. The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out...
The reason for an age of consent is simple. Sex should not be something a person with power extracts from someone without. Rape can be committed without physical force: blackmail, threat of firing, threats of any other kind... or exploitation of authority status. In short, adults having sex with children are committing rape, in the same sense that that rev. Moon character was...
We geeks are people with power... but often, we are people with neither ethics nor conscience. We consider ourselves a breed apart, above those petty issues. Unfortunately, some of those issues are far from petty.
Please tell me this was a troll. I agree with everything you say here... including the method of punishing sexual offenders... but the line you quoted from my post wasn't that subtle. I was replying to someone who claimed that AIDS was only blameless when aquired through a blood transfusion. I was citing an example of another blameless victim.
At the time I met this woman, I was volunteering at a treatment facility run by the local battered women and children program.
For the record, I don't consider anyone with HIV a just victim. Needle users are sad cases, and I certainly don't think highly of their choices. Those who are still sexually promiscuous without protection are either stupid or in more danger from other factors in their life than HIV, but in the early days of GRIDS, no one knew, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the unwittingly exposed.
Just a note, AC, whoever you are... I suspect you are a teen... pay some attention to writing as an art form. You will gain both the ability to understand more of what others say - intentionally or not - and the ability to say more, more effectively, with more respectability. What you know is what counts - but if you can't communicate it or apply it, it counts by millionths.
In the last year, new versions of many old toons from that era have shown their faces. Some have been good - I point to the decent cgi Beast Wars and its magnificent sequel Beast Machines, which take off from a distant future (cast into the past) of the classic American version of Transformers - but most have been abysmal. G.I. Joe extreme was a joke, extreme Ghostbusters was lackluster, the cgi Voltron 3D is even flatter than the original, and seems to employ the same story and dialog writers, and I'm just relieved that the Robotech 2100 project that was being floated never got off the ground.
The only kind of cartoons that seem to be showing up these days are really crude brainchildren of Ren and Stimpy, cgi based shows, and superhero cartoons. And "generation 2" versions of classics. Of the above, some are rather good... the short bits on Cartoon Network can be rather witty, and of the cgis, the above mentioned TF derivative and the movie-and-book hybrid Starship Troopers are rather well done and, frankly, artisticly beautiful... and WB's Batman shows are actually very good... but for the most part, the "revival" category bites. I liked Star Blazers, but I have this horrifying vision of it in bad cgi with worse writing.
About the only way you can get HIV without having yourself to blame is through a blood transfusion.
A girl I used to know had HIV. She contracted it from a guy who raped her. I'd hate to tell her that she only had herself to blame.
So you consider this a hotly contendable issue? Consider this: Several varieties of cancer are triggered by retroviral activity. That's right... the same type of retroviral activity that AIDS research is trying to block. Among these varieties is the only common form of liver cancer that doesn't come from drinking too much alcohol or diet soda, the only common form of lung cancer that doesn't come from smoking, and a rather nasty heart cancer.
Just because it's labled "AIDS", doesn't mean it's only benefitting victims of that nasty disease.
Cancer tends to be more of a middle class white anglo saxon protestant concern than any other ailment. Other demographics have other primary worries. Geeks and techies tend to be from the same fringe social demographics as the people who get hit by HIV. Personally, I'm glad that our groups' boogymen get some attention.
Oh, and for all that, as a guy who has done both cancer and AIDS research, the funding differential isn't very big. Only in private research, where AIDS is big money and most cancers are treatable with proper regular checkups, and don't get large amounts of cash for treatment, is there a gap.
Let's see... Amazon gets awarded ridiculous blanket patent on simple concept... Amazon gets sued for violating ridiculous blanket patent on simple concept... can you say "instant karma"? Very good, I knew you could.
Seriously, this just goes to highlight the problems with the patent office in the modern age. Someone got a patent for the networked equivalent of a jukebox... kind of makes you wonder about that commercial with the diner that had cheap coffee, lousy food, no choices, and "every performance of every song ever written"... do the people who wrote that commercial know they were talking about a patent violation?
I suspect a patent exists for just about everything I've ever programmed, that I was unaware of, and frankly, couldn't care less about. Sooner or later, one of these is going to get seriously overturned, and that will be used as precedent for overturning the rest. Maybe, if we're lucky, Amazon will accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by getting this patent overturned...
That'll teach me to actually think about dates before I post... I knew this, too. I just couldn't help but flash on the pulp "speculative fiction" of the mid 1940s... should have adjusted down by three years. sigh
May 14, 1945, Washington D.C. In a breaking story, noted adventurer and time traveler Mark Smith returned from a secret mission yesterday, carrying a mysterious contraption. Rumors suggest that this enigmatic object may be the secret to cracking secret Axis information packages, but the president has thus far refused to respond to reporters' questions.
This is exactly what the more speculative end of the field addresses: Can (say) a virus be engineered to (reliably) make a single genetic alteration to a single spot on a specific chromosome in every cell in a patient's body? And if so, can something be done to trigger the expression of the new genetic state in that individual?
There are some ways in which it would not be impossible... skin and hair cells, white and red blood cells, sperm and ovum, for example, all replicate very frequently. Change the stock cells, and the next replication will do it. As a matter of fact, just about anything highly prone to cancer would be a potential target... which makes cancer a very good target.
Personally, I don't think any minor alterations to a virus are going to do it... they don't selectively modify chromosomes, they just invade, insert DNA/RNA, and trigger replication - with a less than desirable result, IE death of the cell. Viral tools can do crude DNA insertation, but not in a way that I would want to use in my own body.
Something more advanced, with pattern matching capacities, could be engineered into a simple psuedovirus structure... there have been chemicals engineered to photoactivate when they intersect some specific long sequence of DNA, though they are not replicative or durable. One of these coupled with a sophisticated insertation molecule might be able to do the mass corrections, though the toxin levels of the one that was engineered might have been prohibitive...
Whatever the form, nanotechnology is extremely young, and will require decades more to mature. Don't go expecting miracles in the next five years...
Unfortunately, the whole gene patent scandal is because of this point exactly... they *are* being awarded exclusive rights because they got there first. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
I have every right to do whatever I want with any gene I've sequenced myself, damnit! I shouldn't have to pay royalties to someone because they sequenced it first!
The analogy is the spanish and portuguese "claims" to the americas, not a translation of Vergil.
The underside of the California Institute of Technology is also riddled with tunnels... and also has undergrads getting initiated to tunnel prowling. Funny thing, though. None of them have the hubris to call it "hacking".
Seriously, has the term "hacking" become that generic? First "surfing", now "hacking"... what's next? "Yeah, yesterday, I went coding with Bubba and Boffo. We got all soaked, and Bubba tore his pants out sliding down that hill, but... "
There is a simple solution to relative motion of satelites, thanks to the computing power now available. As of this point in time, laser ranging is good to a couple of milimeters at a distance of about 100km (hence the usefulness of c as a standard for distance), with our best wavelength limiting filters. This is impossible to achieve in atmosphere, but should not be a problem for a satelite. Additionally, directional calibration can be achieved by near-star placement. Some filtering for far-removed satelites can be achieved by EGM matrix computations of orbit path, allowing a refined positions-relative-to-earth map that can be constantly updated alongside the detector data. All of which is great for the interferometry component.
As for the spectroscopy components, there's no such issue. Mass data compilation from multiple sources just generates a huge time-dependant spectral chart, which can be constantly analyzed for signatures of known compounds. It doesn't matter *where*, as long as you've got the entire terrestrial disk of the star in question. It's a far more brute-force approach than the interferometry, but that's not a big issue. We're just looking for certain blues and greens and infrareds... Particularly the likes of H2O(l), which should *only* exist on one of these terrestrial planets.
Robert Forward is a very good Hard Science Fiction writer, but he suffers from a significant achilles heel. Look at any book he's written; Dragon's Egg and its sequel Starquake had life on virtually all the neutron stars in the sky. Not only did Flight of the Dragonfly (AKA Rocheworld) have life on one of the Rocheworlds, but the sequels placed complex life forms on most of the star's other planets. A small cometlike planet past Pluto has complex life in Camelot 30K, and Saturn is an active biosphere, with carbon based life, in Saturn Rukh. In all of the above, the life has at least one sapient form, capable of relating to humanity (though often with severe *physical* restrictions, not psychological) and somewhere in a level approximating humanity in the last 10,000 years. Even the ones that aren't, in this sense, formulaic, aren't terribly far from the model. Martian Rainbow doesn't actually bring the sapients into the picture - and it has a large focus on the science vs military politics - and it is far more subtle in Timemaster - but it isn't as subtle as, say, Charles Sheffield. And I wouldn't call Sheffield a master of subtlety.
I took a good look at the proposed detector, which is essentially a directional spectroscopic satellite. It looks feasible enough, given enough time and enough satellites, if the initial assumption (that terrestrial planets are common) is correct. It won't produce quick results, I expect.
This is actually a very interesting line of investigation, and one that is highly popular in SF. Instead of the current approach of scanning stars for the results of gravitational perturbations (which I was surprised to see finding sub-Jovian planets), the TPF scans for light in specific emission spectrums - water, maybe oxygen and ozone, perhaps ammonia and methane, nitrogen... I'd assume this would mean using a time-based saturation filter to screen out everything from the star and all the stars behind it, loose ice and dust and complex non spectral light sources and reflectors.
If they're smart, they'll find a way to factor the red/blue shift of the target bodies into the filter, as well as shifting the spectrums. Given enough time, they could build up the period of the target body, and therefore determine its orbital radius...
Of course, that would entail finding the signatures in the first place. Unfortunately, the fact that a dimmer star might have a terrestrial planet very, very close could result in a very high periodic shift (relatively), which might cause problems if a very narrow wavelength filter were being used to stamp out undesirable light sources.
Lots of things for them to think about when building this... and all relying on getting a tremendous amount of ultra-sensitive electronics into orbit. Shame we don't have orbital industry yet.
While I'm glad to see that non-Jovian scale planets have been found, these are obviously still gas giants - and this leads to the conclusion that our solar system may not be typical.
I still intend to look up the characteristics of the stars involved... my guess it they are not sollike... but the fact that gas giants have been detected close enough to their primaries to have 3- and 75- day orbits means that the models that predict gas giants at larger distances and rock/ice bodies in close, with scattered debris interspersed, may be incorrect.
On the positive side, these are only two data points, and the most obvious sort (it's easier to find a planet close to a star, and large, because of reflection), so they may be statistical anomolies yet.
OK, having seen this reference before, and never having seen the little note: The antigravity paint concept first appears in a turn of the century novel by H. G. Wells, which has a crew use it to take a globe to the moon, where they find gold, a breathable atmosphere, and subterranian natives. I wish I remembered the title... it was along the lines of Voyage to the Moon.
No, really. NASA is currently unable to compete for highly qualified programmers, given the price tags everything.com have created... and, having worked with JPL employees, and having seen the things going on in these contracts, I'm rather afraid. Warm-body staffing all over the place. It isn't always that bad, but it happens. And there is no way, with the current budget, that NASA can afford to recruit the best of the best to write their software... at least, not enough of them to keep from being strapped to the wire and undermanned.
Five years ago, the NIH (www,nih.gov) funded an investigation into the viability of these methods of vaccination which found that retrovirus research had a good chance of applicability in combating AIDS. I'm still wondering what happened with a lot of the recommendations of the report, but it remains an extremely good read. Also on the NIH page is a much more detailed announcement of another bionanotech conference.
Bionanotechnology is generally the use of biological products to operate on the nanometer scale. This means engineered activators and gene snippers and diagnostic tools, most of which are based on viruses and cells-with-stuff-on-them.
Nanotechnology is generally the use of inorganic chemicals with measurable quantum and electromechanical interactions. It refers to a technology far more in its infancy, more closely related to condensed matter and surface physics than to biotech.
According to a recent announcement, this version should compile for x86 as well as PPC. I don't have a PC handy to test it on, but am curious what luck others have had with this. --
As a somewhat philosophical physicist (sort of), I read a number of these books. I'm sure this one is a reprint, as I read it a few years ago. Nonetheless, it was a decent read. It also betrayed a great deal of the author's predisposition to a specific conclusion, something that, for example, Dyson was less guilty of. Nonetheless, I have to promote my favorite physicist-turned-thinker at this point: Murray Gell-Mann, the last great nobel prize in Quantum/Particle physics discovery... he found the quark... and author of one of the most enjoyable reads I'm found to date. The book is entitled "The Quark and the Jaguar", and it relates his experiences researching emergent behaviors at his Santa Fe institute... here is a man who does more than pursue justification for his religion in his science.
Gell-Mann's work is actually a must-read for many CS theorists as well, with its insight into the mathematical basis for awareness level complexities. If anything holds the key to AIs, this may be it. The book has been out for six years, and has been on my shelf for five of them. I've tried to loan it out... but the people who are most equipt to understand it seem never to have the time. It isn't technically impossible, but it doesn't condescend either. A most worthwhile read. --
This whole "regulation is evil" is remarkably similar to the arguments I've heard from pro-M$ people against DoJ sanctions.
Right now, there is a large battle going on between DSL providers, Broadband Cable providers, and dialup networks. DSL is winning by a huge margin, primarilly because it is regulated for open access. I had an option of getting Cable from MediaOne (LA area cable service) at discount, because my building provides the basic cable service, or one of about ten DSL companies that could hook it up on my line. I have to say, it was less painful than my local phone service (get reamed by PacBell or... um... just use my cell for everything) choices. Because MediaOne only has RoadRunner, and no one else can provide over that line, I would have been forced to use a service that blocked most of the useful port numbers, and made horrible restrictions on content. (Yes, they do... there are things they mention in the contract that make me sick) Fortunately, DSL was also an option, and with competition, they couldn't afford to pull that sort of thing. Too bad some areas only have cable, with phone lines that can't sustain DSL, or cable providers would go out of business. And that would be just fine by me. If PCs had not been M$ only for so long (like cable lines are service-choiceless), they would never have become big enough to abuse their monopoly the way they have. The same goes for connectivity. If it requires government regulation, so be it. There are times when a less profit motivated party must exert some control, for the good of the consumer, and for the long term good of all.
Could antigravity exist? Maybe. There are a few theories, both old and new, that allow for it in some form or another. Could it be a practical effect used in technology? Unlikely. Allow me to explain in terms of Occam's razor:
We know of four fundamental forces. Electromagnetic force has two points of influence on matter, which cancel each other out. These points of influence seem to be duplicated for magnetic effects (motion dependant inversion of the same thing as electrical), though magnetic monopoles are still an unanswered question. If they exist, they are damned uncommon... Strong nuclear force keeps the atomic and molecular structures of the universe together, and depends on a rather odd set of range dependant rules. Weak nuclear forces are only practically relevant in decay related behaviors. Gravity is the big inconsistant in terms of partical physics... if a graviton exists, it is less certain and measurable than any of the others. There is no solid unifying theory linking gravitational force with the other three. This could be the crack into which antigravity could slip...
But if antigravity is possible, it is so difficult to obtain that it has no measurable impact on the behavior of the observable universe, and it would take a major breakthrough in our understanding of how things work to control it enough to harness it in a controlled fashion...
Gravity is a product of an objects mass, both rest and relativistic. An object in motion relative to you does have greater gravity... and there are allowances for "imaginary rest mass" in some theories - tachyons - but the theoretical effect of this is more than simply bending space the other way. They would never move slower than light, and would move (relative to us) backward in time... and according to all the models I've seen, there would be no interactions with any currently measurable aspect of the (slower than light) universe.
There are other things that play funny games with the universe. Neurtrinos may change their type (and therefore mass) according to a mixing ratio - in other words, they aren't 100% one type of neutrino, but are instead a wave composed of 95% electron neutrinos, 4.5% mu neutrinos, 0.5% tau neutrinos (off the top of my head), and depending on where you measure them, are more likely to come up one or another of the above. That one has been measured experimentally, in a huge water tank that catches neutrinos from the sun, in Japan, called the Super Kamiokande (SuperK) detector. Given things like this, and the holes in the theories that take them into account, anything might be possible. General relativity is only an approximation... it doesn't account for some of the measurable quantum effects, because the scale is wrong... and if there were things in this world, Horatio, that Newton's theory was not meant to describe... perhaps the same is true of Einstein's. --
Christopher Browne has a good reference page for this. I stumbled across it while researching possible database solutions for one of my projects, and it seems to be well maintained and updated. The page can be found at: http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/rdbms.html
A recent commercial features a couple answering the door to a refrigerator repairman. After some confusion (they didn't know the fridge was broken), the repairman informs them that the refrigerator called him... ianticipating an impending breakdown. My friends and I looked at each other in concern. This technology looks like an invitation to burglars, con artists, and other unsavory types, not to mention repair shop scams.
It isn't that I'm a luddite - I'm a programmer, and intend to go into bio/nanotech when I finish grad school. I'd love to have technology take care of my worries for me... if I can check up on it.
I guess that's why I do much of my computing on linux, and the rest on a hacked up customized mac. I don't like being told what to do by my machines. I'd like to be able to tell them what to do with less effort - every scientist, nerd, or geek is inherently lazy, that's why we work so hard - but I still want to tell the damned things what to do!
On the other hand, given the bookmark I keep on SOAR (Berkeley's recipie index) on the computer nearest the kitchen, that icebox thing looks... *drool*
Nah, I'm not a luddite, but spare me the day when I let a machine tell me that I need to go to the doctor, and make sure I pick up some milk on the way home... even if it looks like Claire Danes.
Slashdot Mirror
To most of the world, the net is a buzzword. The image is a mess of pornography, hackers, and lawlessness. The reality is... partly the same. The issue is... nothing's wrong with this.
But pedophilia is a wholly different issue. They use the internet to network, to trade both pornography and victims. They use it to stalk. They use it to lure out new victims.
There is a real issue involved for any of us who administer any service online... public backlash against any community that makes itself pedophile friendly will cause no end of headaches. Moreover, it will cause some of us to attack you by means other than legal.
I am both a geek and, in one state, a licenced therapist for victims of sex crimes. I know pedophilia. I've dealt with it, run up against it time after time. It is not a sexual fetish that is simply not socially acceptable. It is the worst form of mental illness I know, and one of only two things that tends to make me physically ill. The other is extremely bad shellfish. I have never met a pedophile that was even remotely well in the head. Why deal with a problem when you can just jail it away? Well, the problem is, we can't. Too many pedophiles get away with it. There are virtually no exhibitors of the disease who do not practice its manifestation... this is something I've become sickeningly aware of. The least harmful still cop feels from victims too young or too terrified or ashamed to speak up. If we could just jail it away, it wouldn't be a problem.
The issue with age of consent isn't (or shouldn't be, in any case) the choice of minors to be sexually active. It is the choice of adults to exploit minors. The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out...
The reason for an age of consent is simple. Sex should not be something a person with power extracts from someone without. Rape can be committed without physical force: blackmail, threat of firing, threats of any other kind... or exploitation of authority status. In short, adults having sex with children are committing rape, in the same sense that that rev. Moon character was...
We geeks are people with power... but often, we are people with neither ethics nor conscience. We consider ourselves a breed apart, above those petty issues. Unfortunately, some of those issues are far from petty.
Please tell me this was a troll. I agree with everything you say here... including the method of punishing sexual offenders... but the line you quoted from my post wasn't that subtle. I was replying to someone who claimed that AIDS was only blameless when aquired through a blood transfusion. I was citing an example of another blameless victim.
At the time I met this woman, I was volunteering at a treatment facility run by the local battered women and children program.
For the record, I don't consider anyone with HIV a just victim. Needle users are sad cases, and I certainly don't think highly of their choices. Those who are still sexually promiscuous without protection are either stupid or in more danger from other factors in their life than HIV, but in the early days of GRIDS, no one knew, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the unwittingly exposed.
Just a note, AC, whoever you are... I suspect you are a teen... pay some attention to writing as an art form. You will gain both the ability to understand more of what others say - intentionally or not - and the ability to say more, more effectively, with more respectability. What you know is what counts - but if you can't communicate it or apply it, it counts by millionths.
Just a note: cgi => computer generated imagery is correct, no?
I write (in C++) the other sort, and I'm wondering if my brain is coughing up a wrong acronym.
In the last year, new versions of many old toons from that era have shown their faces. Some have been good - I point to the decent cgi Beast Wars and its magnificent sequel Beast Machines, which take off from a distant future (cast into the past) of the classic American version of Transformers - but most have been abysmal. G.I. Joe extreme was a joke, extreme Ghostbusters was lackluster, the cgi Voltron 3D is even flatter than the original, and seems to employ the same story and dialog writers, and I'm just relieved that the Robotech 2100 project that was being floated never got off the ground.
The only kind of cartoons that seem to be showing up these days are really crude brainchildren of Ren and Stimpy, cgi based shows, and superhero cartoons. And "generation 2" versions of classics. Of the above, some are rather good... the short bits on Cartoon Network can be rather witty, and of the cgis, the above mentioned TF derivative and the movie-and-book hybrid Starship Troopers are rather well done and, frankly, artisticly beautiful... and WB's Batman shows are actually very good... but for the most part, the "revival" category bites. I liked Star Blazers, but I have this horrifying vision of it in bad cgi with worse writing.
About the only way you can get HIV without having yourself to blame is through a blood transfusion.
A girl I used to know had HIV. She contracted it from a guy who raped her. I'd hate to tell her that she only had herself to blame.
So you consider this a hotly contendable issue? Consider this: Several varieties of cancer are triggered by retroviral activity. That's right... the same type of retroviral activity that AIDS research is trying to block. Among these varieties is the only common form of liver cancer that doesn't come from drinking too much alcohol or diet soda, the only common form of lung cancer that doesn't come from smoking, and a rather nasty heart cancer.
Just because it's labled "AIDS", doesn't mean it's only benefitting victims of that nasty disease.
Cancer tends to be more of a middle class white anglo saxon protestant concern than any other ailment. Other demographics have other primary worries. Geeks and techies tend to be from the same fringe social demographics as the people who get hit by HIV. Personally, I'm glad that our groups' boogymen get some attention.
Oh, and for all that, as a guy who has done both cancer and AIDS research, the funding differential isn't very big. Only in private research, where AIDS is big money and most cancers are treatable with proper regular checkups, and don't get large amounts of cash for treatment, is there a gap.
Let's see... Amazon gets awarded ridiculous blanket patent on simple concept... Amazon gets sued for violating ridiculous blanket patent on simple concept... can you say "instant karma"? Very good, I knew you could.
Seriously, this just goes to highlight the problems with the patent office in the modern age. Someone got a patent for the networked equivalent of a jukebox... kind of makes you wonder about that commercial with the diner that had cheap coffee, lousy food, no choices, and "every performance of every song ever written"... do the people who wrote that commercial know they were talking about a patent violation?
I suspect a patent exists for just about everything I've ever programmed, that I was unaware of, and frankly, couldn't care less about. Sooner or later, one of these is going to get seriously overturned, and that will be used as precedent for overturning the rest. Maybe, if we're lucky, Amazon will accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by getting this patent overturned...
That'll teach me to actually think about dates before I post... I knew this, too. I just couldn't help but flash on the pulp "speculative fiction" of the mid 1940s... should have adjusted down by three years. sigh
May 14, 1945, Washington D.C. In a breaking story, noted adventurer and time traveler Mark Smith returned from a secret mission yesterday, carrying a mysterious contraption. Rumors suggest that this enigmatic object may be the secret to cracking secret Axis information packages, but the president has thus far refused to respond to reporters' questions.
More information to follow as the story breaks.
This is exactly what the more speculative end of the field addresses: Can (say) a virus be engineered to (reliably) make a single genetic alteration to a single spot on a specific chromosome in every cell in a patient's body? And if so, can something be done to trigger the expression of the new genetic state in that individual?
There are some ways in which it would not be impossible... skin and hair cells, white and red blood cells, sperm and ovum, for example, all replicate very frequently. Change the stock cells, and the next replication will do it. As a matter of fact, just about anything highly prone to cancer would be a potential target... which makes cancer a very good target.
Personally, I don't think any minor alterations to a virus are going to do it... they don't selectively modify chromosomes, they just invade, insert DNA/RNA, and trigger replication - with a less than desirable result, IE death of the cell. Viral tools can do crude DNA insertation, but not in a way that I would want to use in my own body.
Something more advanced, with pattern matching capacities, could be engineered into a simple psuedovirus structure... there have been chemicals engineered to photoactivate when they intersect some specific long sequence of DNA, though they are not replicative or durable. One of these coupled with a sophisticated insertation molecule might be able to do the mass corrections, though the toxin levels of the one that was engineered might have been prohibitive...
Whatever the form, nanotechnology is extremely young, and will require decades more to mature. Don't go expecting miracles in the next five years...
Unfortunately, the whole gene patent scandal is because of this point exactly... they *are* being awarded exclusive rights because they got there first. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
I have every right to do whatever I want with any gene I've sequenced myself, damnit! I shouldn't have to pay royalties to someone because they sequenced it first!
The analogy is the spanish and portuguese "claims" to the americas, not a translation of Vergil.
The underside of the California Institute of Technology is also riddled with tunnels... and also has undergrads getting initiated to tunnel prowling. Funny thing, though. None of them have the hubris to call it "hacking".
Seriously, has the term "hacking" become that generic? First "surfing", now "hacking"... what's next? "Yeah, yesterday, I went coding with Bubba and Boffo. We got all soaked, and Bubba tore his pants out sliding down that hill, but... "
There is a simple solution to relative motion of satelites, thanks to the computing power now available. As of this point in time, laser ranging is good to a couple of milimeters at a distance of about 100km (hence the usefulness of c as a standard for distance), with our best wavelength limiting filters. This is impossible to achieve in atmosphere, but should not be a problem for a satelite. Additionally, directional calibration can be achieved by near-star placement. Some filtering for far-removed satelites can be achieved by EGM matrix computations of orbit path, allowing a refined positions-relative-to-earth map that can be constantly updated alongside the detector data. All of which is great for the interferometry component.
As for the spectroscopy components, there's no such issue. Mass data compilation from multiple sources just generates a huge time-dependant spectral chart, which can be constantly analyzed for signatures of known compounds. It doesn't matter *where*, as long as you've got the entire terrestrial disk of the star in question. It's a far more brute-force approach than the interferometry, but that's not a big issue. We're just looking for certain blues and greens and infrareds... Particularly the likes of H2O(l), which should *only* exist on one of these terrestrial planets.
Robert Forward is a very good Hard Science Fiction writer, but he suffers from a significant achilles heel. Look at any book he's written; Dragon's Egg and its sequel Starquake had life on virtually all the neutron stars in the sky. Not only did Flight of the Dragonfly (AKA Rocheworld) have life on one of the Rocheworlds, but the sequels placed complex life forms on most of the star's other planets. A small cometlike planet past Pluto has complex life in Camelot 30K, and Saturn is an active biosphere, with carbon based life, in Saturn Rukh. In all of the above, the life has at least one sapient form, capable of relating to humanity (though often with severe *physical* restrictions, not psychological) and somewhere in a level approximating humanity in the last 10,000 years. Even the ones that aren't, in this sense, formulaic, aren't terribly far from the model. Martian Rainbow doesn't actually bring the sapients into the picture - and it has a large focus on the science vs military politics - and it is far more subtle in Timemaster - but it isn't as subtle as, say, Charles Sheffield. And I wouldn't call Sheffield a master of subtlety.
I took a good look at the proposed detector, which is essentially a directional spectroscopic satellite. It looks feasible enough, given enough time and enough satellites, if the initial assumption (that terrestrial planets are common) is correct. It won't produce quick results, I expect.
This is actually a very interesting line of investigation, and one that is highly popular in SF. Instead of the current approach of scanning stars for the results of gravitational perturbations (which I was surprised to see finding sub-Jovian planets), the TPF scans for light in specific emission spectrums - water, maybe oxygen and ozone, perhaps ammonia and methane, nitrogen... I'd assume this would mean using a time-based saturation filter to screen out everything from the star and all the stars behind it, loose ice and dust and complex non spectral light sources and reflectors.
If they're smart, they'll find a way to factor the red/blue shift of the target bodies into the filter, as well as shifting the spectrums. Given enough time, they could build up the period of the target body, and therefore determine its orbital radius...
Of course, that would entail finding the signatures in the first place. Unfortunately, the fact that a dimmer star might have a terrestrial planet very, very close could result in a very high periodic shift (relatively), which might cause problems if a very narrow wavelength filter were being used to stamp out undesirable light sources.
Lots of things for them to think about when building this... and all relying on getting a tremendous amount of ultra-sensitive electronics into orbit. Shame we don't have orbital industry yet.
While I'm glad to see that non-Jovian scale planets have been found, these are obviously still gas giants - and this leads to the conclusion that our solar system may not be typical.
I still intend to look up the characteristics of the stars involved... my guess it they are not sollike... but the fact that gas giants have been detected close enough to their primaries to have 3- and 75- day orbits means that the models that predict gas giants at larger distances and rock/ice bodies in close, with scattered debris interspersed, may be incorrect.
On the positive side, these are only two data points, and the most obvious sort (it's easier to find a planet close to a star, and large, because of reflection), so they may be statistical anomolies yet.
OK, having seen this reference before, and never having seen the little note: The antigravity paint concept first appears in a turn of the century novel by H. G. Wells, which has a crew use it to take a globe to the moon, where they find gold, a breathable atmosphere, and subterranian natives. I wish I remembered the title... it was along the lines of Voyage to the Moon.
No, really. NASA is currently unable to compete for highly qualified programmers, given the price tags everything.com have created... and, having worked with JPL employees, and having seen the things going on in these contracts, I'm rather afraid. Warm-body staffing all over the place. It isn't always that bad, but it happens. And there is no way, with the current budget, that NASA can afford to recruit the best of the best to write their software... at least, not enough of them to keep from being strapped to the wire and undermanned.
Five years ago, the NIH (www,nih.gov) funded an investigation into the viability of these methods of vaccination which found that retrovirus research had a good chance of applicability in combating AIDS. I'm still wondering what happened with a lot of the recommendations of the report, but it remains an extremely good read. Also on the NIH page is a much more detailed announcement of another bionanotech conference.
Bionanotechnology is generally the use of biological products to operate on the nanometer scale. This means engineered activators and gene snippers and diagnostic tools, most of which are based on viruses and cells-with-stuff-on-them.
Nanotechnology is generally the use of inorganic chemicals with measurable quantum and electromechanical interactions. It refers to a technology far more in its infancy, more closely related to condensed matter and surface physics than to biotech.
According to a recent announcement, this version should compile for x86 as well as PPC. I don't have a PC handy to test it on, but am curious what luck others have had with this.
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As a somewhat philosophical physicist (sort of), I read a number of these books. I'm sure this one is a reprint, as I read it a few years ago. Nonetheless, it was a decent read. It also betrayed a great deal of the author's predisposition to a specific conclusion, something that, for example, Dyson was less guilty of. Nonetheless, I have to promote my favorite physicist-turned-thinker at this point:
Murray Gell-Mann, the last great nobel prize in Quantum/Particle physics discovery... he found the quark... and author of one of the most enjoyable reads I'm found to date. The book is entitled "The Quark and the Jaguar", and it relates his experiences researching emergent behaviors at his Santa Fe institute... here is a man who does more than pursue justification for his religion in his science.
Gell-Mann's work is actually a must-read for many CS theorists as well, with its insight into the mathematical basis for awareness level complexities. If anything holds the key to AIs, this may be it. The book has been out for six years, and has been on my shelf for five of them. I've tried to loan it out... but the people who are most equipt to understand it seem never to have the time. It isn't technically impossible, but it doesn't condescend either. A most worthwhile read.
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This whole "regulation is evil" is remarkably similar to the arguments I've heard from pro-M$ people against DoJ sanctions.
... um ... just use my cell for everything) choices. Because MediaOne only has RoadRunner, and no one else can provide over that line, I would have been forced to use a service that blocked most of the useful port numbers, and made horrible restrictions on content. (Yes, they do... there are things they mention in the contract that make me sick) Fortunately, DSL was also an option, and with competition, they couldn't afford to pull that sort of thing. Too bad some areas only have cable, with phone lines that can't sustain DSL, or cable providers would go out of business. And that would be just fine by me. If PCs had not been M$ only for so long (like cable lines are service-choiceless), they would never have become big enough to abuse their monopoly the way they have. The same goes for connectivity. If it requires government regulation, so be it. There are times when a less profit motivated party must exert some control, for the good of the consumer, and for the long term good of all.
Right now, there is a large battle going on between DSL providers, Broadband Cable providers, and dialup networks. DSL is winning by a huge margin, primarilly because it is regulated for open access. I had an option of getting Cable from MediaOne (LA area cable service) at discount, because my building provides the basic cable service, or one of about ten DSL companies that could hook it up on my line. I have to say, it was less painful than my local phone service (get reamed by PacBell or
Could antigravity exist? Maybe. There are a few theories, both old and new, that allow for it in some form or another. Could it be a practical effect used in technology? Unlikely. Allow me to explain in terms of Occam's razor:
We know of four fundamental forces.
Electromagnetic force has two points of influence on matter, which cancel each other out. These points of influence seem to be duplicated for magnetic effects (motion dependant inversion of the same thing as electrical), though magnetic monopoles are still an unanswered question. If they exist, they are damned uncommon...
Strong nuclear force keeps the atomic and molecular structures of the universe together, and depends on a rather odd set of range dependant rules.
Weak nuclear forces are only practically relevant in decay related behaviors.
Gravity is the big inconsistant in terms of partical physics... if a graviton exists, it is less certain and measurable than any of the others. There is no solid unifying theory linking gravitational force with the other three. This could be the crack into which antigravity could slip...
But if antigravity is possible, it is so difficult to obtain that it has no measurable impact on the behavior of the observable universe, and it would take a major breakthrough in our understanding of how things work to control it enough to harness it in a controlled fashion...
Gravity is a product of an objects mass, both rest and relativistic. An object in motion relative to you does have greater gravity... and there are allowances for "imaginary rest mass" in some theories - tachyons - but the theoretical effect of this is more than simply bending space the other way. They would never move slower than light, and would move (relative to us) backward in time... and according to all the models I've seen, there would be no interactions with any currently measurable aspect of the (slower than light) universe.
There are other things that play funny games with the universe. Neurtrinos may change their type (and therefore mass) according to a mixing ratio - in other words, they aren't 100% one type of neutrino, but are instead a wave composed of 95% electron neutrinos, 4.5% mu neutrinos, 0.5% tau neutrinos (off the top of my head), and depending on where you measure them, are more likely to come up one or another of the above.
That one has been measured experimentally, in a huge water tank that catches neutrinos from the sun, in Japan, called the Super Kamiokande (SuperK) detector. Given things like this, and the holes in the theories that take them into account, anything might be possible. General relativity is only an approximation... it doesn't account for some of the measurable quantum effects, because the scale is wrong... and if there were things in this world, Horatio, that Newton's theory was not meant to describe... perhaps the same is true of Einstein's.
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Christopher Browne has a good reference page for this. I stumbled across it while researching possible database solutions for one of my projects, and it seems to be well maintained and updated. The page can be found at: http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/rdbms.html
A recent commercial features a couple answering the door to a refrigerator repairman. After some confusion (they didn't know the fridge was broken), the repairman informs them that the refrigerator called him... ianticipating an impending breakdown. My friends and I looked at each other in concern. This technology looks like an invitation to burglars, con artists, and other unsavory types, not to mention repair shop scams.
It isn't that I'm a luddite - I'm a programmer, and intend to go into bio/nanotech when I finish grad school. I'd love to have technology take care of my worries for me... if I can check up on it.
I guess that's why I do much of my computing on linux, and the rest on a hacked up customized mac. I don't like being told what to do by my machines. I'd like to be able to tell them what to do with less effort - every scientist, nerd, or geek is inherently lazy, that's why we work so hard - but I still want to tell the damned things what to do!
On the other hand, given the bookmark I keep on SOAR (Berkeley's recipie index) on the computer nearest the kitchen, that icebox thing looks... *drool*
Nah, I'm not a luddite, but spare me the day when I let a machine tell me that I need to go to the doctor, and make sure I pick up some milk on the way home... even if it looks like Claire Danes.
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