Basically, the soil 'terra preta' is the secret to how these peoples managed to prosper on land which is currently considered to 'poor soil' only suitable for slash and burn. This soil holds on to the soil nutrients even in the face of high rainfall; and enables farming; it's made by mixing charcoal into the soil.
You have to look at the evidence, make theories based on the evidence, and then pick the simplest theory that is consistent with the evidence. ("Ockhams Razor").
A theory like 'primitive people are too stupid to create civilization anyway' is too simple (they can't all be that stupid); and actually looking at the archeological evidence, or even evidence from 'backward' peoples today, it doesn't really line up with this view anyway (if you have a reasonably open mind anyway- you can't really expect racists to suddenly decide that Africans lacked key resources.)
The evidence in the book is nigh-on overwhelming; it's excessively detailed, and having read it (even 1/4 of it), I atleast can easily see that it cannot really have been any other way.
I'm currently reading "Gun, germs and steel" by Jack Diamond which outlines the reasons how europe ended up as top dogs in the world. To oversimplify- it's because Europe is at the same latitude, so crops/animals that are useful at one part spreads very rapidly across the whole continent; and had certain resources such as 3 key crops and a few domesticable animals.
In particular the animals are crucial- animal power is much more efficient than human power, so any animal that can be domesticated multiplies farming effectiveness up enormously; that means that surpluses are produced that creates trading, and that leads to villages, towns and eventually cities.
Additionally, living with your animals means you are more likely to catch diseases from them- that's why the europeans carried nasty diseases that practically annihilated native populations that lacked domesticated animals. The europeans themselves had built up a tolerance over time, so were mostly immune.
Anyway, putting the book to one side, this discovery is particularly interesting. The sustainable farming technology that these 'primitive' people found is actually better than the slash and burn that is used in the Amazon currently. Who would have guessed that stirring in some graphite into the Amazon soil would improve it so much that long term the soil is preserved? In fact the soil they made is still good nearly 5 centuries later, and is sold commercially.
Ok you've made a few errors; which together invalidate the results of your 'analysis'.
a) The atkins diet is a low, not no, carbohydrate diet, most foods, including meat, have some carbohydrate in it.
b) the human brain can live off 50% ketones, not just pure glucose (actually in fact it absorbs plenty of other stuff from the blood too, but it doesn't get energy that way). The liver converts proteins into glucose to take up the slack. The other parts of the body run pretty well on protein and fatty acids.
c) people have died on every conceivable diet out there; that's not the important question- the question is whether they die more oftn on Atkins than other diets; they don't seem to
d) ketogenic diets are used medically for certain disorders; they are not deadly
e) By just ingesting fat and protein, you're stressing your liver and kidneys out.
Even so, most people today die of heart disease or cancer, not kidney disease. It turns out that the Atkins diet is kinder on the heart; any effect on cancer risk is unclear at this point (glucose is somewhat carcinogenic due to glycation, and isn't especially heart friendly either- the heart runs mainly on fat).
Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of foods have carbohydrates in them? Probably not. Nor does anyone else.
Actually if I want to know that, I simply look up the food in USDA nutritional database.
Can the fruit flies also do complex computation on an empty stomach?
Uh, hate to break it to you; they don't do a complex computation on full stomach either. Lazy good for nothing insects; they just can't be bothered, that's their problem. Born idle they are.
"Everyone who is fat is a lazy, weak willed moron!" - um, no actually, check out how effective diets are long term; they can't ALL be like that
"I'd prefer to literally spend several years dying of painful heart disease or cancer than give up my corn dogs!" - Ok... backing away... backing away...
"They're a scientist; so what do they know? I knew a scientist that was wrong about eggs being bad for you once, and they've even been wrong on other occasions!" - trust me, it would be more scary if they were always right
"Low calorie diets don't extend life - they just seem that way" - sounds good, especially if I'm a healthy 95 year old with the illusion that I'm living longer
Well, you didn't actually mention that the reason she was gaining weight was in fact that she was pregnant, and that it wasn't dad's, it was uncle Harry did you? If you had, you'd probably would have been better off in a different country:-)
Even if Tempest can't/. has already covered reading a screen from the flickering light.
Trouble is, LCDs don't flicker significantly; only CRTs (the persistence of phosphors is really quite tiny.)
Still, the scan circuitry for LCDs can in some cases be electromagnetically sniffed and the picture recovered. More carefully designed circuitry may not have this problem though.
laser bounched off the window can extand that range to blocks
Apparently bouncing a laser off a window doesn't work well in practice- the vibrations are too small and any wind gives bigger deflections than the persons voice does.
If he has a laptop then he may be best off just using SSL, a modem, and one of the instant messaging technologies (even something really crude like talk would work).
It all depends on how secure he really needs to be though; in theory they can tap his laptop keyboard remotely, and/or watch his display just by analysing the emitted radio waves. The only solution to that is tempest-level shielding. I do vaguely remember somebody selling a conductive tent that you go inside and it blocks the laptop's emissions.
Of course if he goes the voice route then he has to worry about being physically overheard- it doesn't matter how encrypted his laptop link is then! Similarly if his typing or screen is being videoed; or if somebody subverts his laptop then all bets are off.
If there were enough people, they would get fired into the building at high speed; I suppose you could employ bouncers to deflect them into elevators.
I don't think these kinds of things are a good idea. If there is a big enough crowd the door would speed up until people would get liquidised by the whirling door of death.
The atmosphere and biosphere is not a closed system, because the CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by weathering (CO2 and limestone forms carbonate rocks) and added to the system predominately by volcanic activity and only very much secondarily from human activity (by nearly two orders of magnitude). In addition CO2 is not the primary greenhouse gas, water vapour is far more significant.
Fair point, except I don't want to give my ISP a financial incentive to attack me either.
"Luckily our filtering caught all of your virus and worm laden content from getting onto the internet, but we're going to have to fine you for getting infected in the first place."
The point is that the money they make from T-shirts and stuff like that is cash in hand, not some small percentage from the labels- plus a biggish cut of the gate, plus they sell more albums after the concert too.
...to the government for me getting subverted by a worm/virus?
Wouldn't it be better to give the government an incentive to help solve the problem rather than give them an incentive to get some obscure, amoral, and deeply secret government department to release new and more virulent attacks so as to up their income?
Sure, they probably wouldn't, officially; but why take the risk that some individual in the government would be in a position to benefit from this kind of thing?
These kinds of theoretical problems always sound impossible, but I'm nearly always surprised to find out how often they really do crop up in practice.
Well, the "if you don't do it right, you die" comment is true for ANY space operation.
Um, yeah granted, but the aerobraking window at Mars is particularly narrow- the 'atmosphere' of Mars is very tenuous. Let's put it this way: Buzz Aldrin doesn't like it at all.
Financing shouldn't be hard, though again, a government agency would likely be the one to do it.
Mommy state will help you out? Maybe, if there's votes in it.
But the point is that there's very little relative velocity between you and the elevator - which means you'd probably have a rather large time to have multiple attempts.
Well, the tether is millimeters wide, and you can't hit it with any speed otherwise you cut the tether and possibly open your vehicle to a vacuum. You're approaching it from thousands of kilometers away with an initial approach speed of maybe 1km/s or so. It's pretty much the same as docking with the ISS, only slightly harder and the stakes are even higher.
Aerobraking at Mars is a somewhat tricky proposition. If you don't brake enough you die.
With very clever timing, you might not even need to aerobrake at all, which makes it even easier. You just time your approach so that you and the elevator are at the same point, and that you're at the height on the elevator such that your velocity is the same as the elevator's, and you just grab hold. No stress, no problems.
Yeah right, no stress, unfortunately, if you don't catch the tether you go off into space and die... no pressure, no pressure:-)
(Still, to be fair you can probably have a backup rocket to circularise your orbit around Mars and then they can come and fetch you.)
You'd also be crazy not to build a similar elevator at Mars as well, though this would be a major feat of remote engineering
Not really, you just build it on earth and bung it up the elevator and sling it over and deploy it. It's pretty trivial, in theory. Financing it might be harder though.
You can't destroy it from the ground- if you cut it at ground level it gradually drifts up away from the Earth; and then it's fairly straight forward to repair and reposition it.
To take it out in a big way you would have to load a bomb onto a elevator car and take it up to quite high altitude, taking maybe a few days or a week, before detonating it. Needless to say, with sensible security practices at the embarkation point this is unlikely to be a problem.
The top of the elevator cable goes much faster than escape velocity, so, if you put a payload there and let go, it can reach out as far as places like Jupiter, or Mars or the Moon for that matter. Very useful. That means that access to these places suddenly becomes much easier (the rocket needed to go there suddenly becomes much much smaller- and coming back isn't so bad anyway, because you can aerobrake in the Earths atmosphere like Apollo did.)
You're talking about DLLs. That's basically what they do. Nearly every OS supports them. There are downsides though- they are often harder to write and when they load the disk head has to jump around- the DLL is usually on a different part of the disk than the application so it takes longer to load the first time; whereas if it's all statically linked it's consecutive.
After that it's often quicker for the second, third, fourth etc application, because it's already loaded.
I'm saying that the compiler/OS should be smart enough to "itemize" your entire application in terms of absolute functions/variables needed at compile and run-time.
Well, in C/C++ the unit that gets pulled in is at the object file level- a file gets pulled in or not. The designer decides what to put in the file, so it's up to you for your granularity. However the linker is somewhat smart in that it only pulls in the files that are needed- just pulling in a file that contains a function Z that needs a separate file won't necessarily result in that being pulled in unless function Z is used.
I think Java does something similar, although its unit is the.class file.
Private companies only do things that are profitable, obviously.
Nope. For example, Xerox is a private company- they do(did) tonnes of research, only some of which lead to profitable commercial enterprise. In fact most research doesn't lead anywhere, and isn't government funded.
Where exactly is the profit in exploration?
Don't have a clue, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't any. But that's really not the point. The point is whether things other than exploration can make money in space- and the answer is: yes of course, they can and do. And the government can't sensibly or in the case of NASA, legally address things that do make money in space.
Where is the profit in studying geologic samples from Mars? How about developing technology like the Hubble telescope or various deep space probes to obtain images of distant planets and stars?
Possibly none. That's what NASA should be doing, not messing about with Space Shuttles and the ISS. It's not like NASA is extending the state of the art in these cases at all- the Shuttle is moribund and the ISS is mostly just a somewhat bigger MIR. Where's the exploration there?
The Singular? Why singular? Why is space a program? Presumably you mean it's a government program. What makes you think a bunch of expensive bureaucrats are ever going to do anything useful for you in space? Why does an organisation doing something for 'the good of a country' not equal a form of communism or atleast socialism? Now personally, I'm not against socialism, if it benefits people directly (for example in the UK a health service really does help out the population fairly uniformly- it makes some kind of sense for a tax to cover that)- but in the case of space, specifically NASA, who is benefiting here? A few astronauts mostly, chosen by a bunch of bureaucrats to best spout the party line about how great everything is in NASA, which in turn benefits the bureaucrats. It isn't that great; at best it is OK, and in many cases it is giving terrible value for money.
Space is a place not a program. Space launch needs to be run like along business lines, with some competition, otherwise it ends up getting run like the USSR before the wall came down; and that's pretty much what NASA is- a centralised command economy. These things are not good.
Mind you, it's not that businesses are higher moral entities either; but right now a modicum of competition would help. As an example, how is it that the Space Shuttle, which is more expensive per kg of payload, how is it that it replaced Saturn V? If you had a company that did something dumb like that in a marketplace, they would be dead; their competition would kill them off. No, NASA only survives because they are a monopoly, and a taxation funded one at that.
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Basically, the soil 'terra preta' is the secret to how these peoples managed to prosper on land which is currently considered to 'poor soil' only suitable for slash and burn. This soil holds on to the soil nutrients even in the face of high rainfall; and enables farming; it's made by mixing charcoal into the soil.
A theory like 'primitive people are too stupid to create civilization anyway' is too simple (they can't all be that stupid); and actually looking at the archeological evidence, or even evidence from 'backward' peoples today, it doesn't really line up with this view anyway (if you have a reasonably open mind anyway- you can't really expect racists to suddenly decide that Africans lacked key resources.)
The evidence in the book is nigh-on overwhelming; it's excessively detailed, and having read it (even 1/4 of it), I atleast can easily see that it cannot really have been any other way.
In particular the animals are crucial- animal power is much more efficient than human power, so any animal that can be domesticated multiplies farming effectiveness up enormously; that means that surpluses are produced that creates trading, and that leads to villages, towns and eventually cities.
Additionally, living with your animals means you are more likely to catch diseases from them- that's why the europeans carried nasty diseases that practically annihilated native populations that lacked domesticated animals. The europeans themselves had built up a tolerance over time, so were mostly immune.
Anyway, putting the book to one side, this discovery is particularly interesting. The sustainable farming technology that these 'primitive' people found is actually better than the slash and burn that is used in the Amazon currently. Who would have guessed that stirring in some graphite into the Amazon soil would improve it so much that long term the soil is preserved? In fact the soil they made is still good nearly 5 centuries later, and is sold commercially.
a) The atkins diet is a low, not no, carbohydrate diet, most foods, including meat, have some carbohydrate in it.
b) the human brain can live off 50% ketones, not just pure glucose (actually in fact it absorbs plenty of other stuff from the blood too, but it doesn't get energy that way). The liver converts proteins into glucose to take up the slack. The other parts of the body run pretty well on protein and fatty acids.
c) people have died on every conceivable diet out there; that's not the important question- the question is whether they die more oftn on Atkins than other diets; they don't seem to
d) ketogenic diets are used medically for certain disorders; they are not deadly
e) By just ingesting fat and protein, you're stressing your liver and kidneys out.
Even so, most people today die of heart disease or cancer, not kidney disease. It turns out that the Atkins diet is kinder on the heart; any effect on cancer risk is unclear at this point (glucose is somewhat carcinogenic due to glycation, and isn't especially heart friendly either- the heart runs mainly on fat).
Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of foods have carbohydrates in them? Probably not. Nor does anyone else.
Actually if I want to know that, I simply look up the food in USDA nutritional database.
Uh, hate to break it to you; they don't do a complex computation on full stomach either. Lazy good for nothing insects; they just can't be bothered, that's their problem. Born idle they are.
"I'd prefer to literally spend several years dying of painful heart disease or cancer than give up my corn dogs!" - Ok... backing away... backing away...
"They're a scientist; so what do they know? I knew a scientist that was wrong about eggs being bad for you once, and they've even been wrong on other occasions!" - trust me, it would be more scary if they were always right
"Low calorie diets don't extend life - they just seem that way" - sounds good, especially if I'm a healthy 95 year old with the illusion that I'm living longer
It's not true though- in previous studies the animals on the low calorie diet end up eating more, overall, than the animals on the high calorie diet.
Well, you didn't actually mention that the reason she was gaining weight was in fact that she was pregnant, and that it wasn't dad's, it was uncle Harry did you? If you had, you'd probably would have been better off in a different country :-)
Trouble is, LCDs don't flicker significantly; only CRTs (the persistence of phosphors is really quite tiny.)
Still, the scan circuitry for LCDs can in some cases be electromagnetically sniffed and the picture recovered. More carefully designed circuitry may not have this problem though.
Apparently bouncing a laser off a window doesn't work well in practice- the vibrations are too small and any wind gives bigger deflections than the persons voice does.
It all depends on how secure he really needs to be though; in theory they can tap his laptop keyboard remotely, and/or watch his display just by analysing the emitted radio waves. The only solution to that is tempest-level shielding. I do vaguely remember somebody selling a conductive tent that you go inside and it blocks the laptop's emissions.
Of course if he goes the voice route then he has to worry about being physically overheard- it doesn't matter how encrypted his laptop link is then! Similarly if his typing or screen is being videoed; or if somebody subverts his laptop then all bets are off.
The planet is approximately closed. But that's not important. We're only concerned with the biosphere, and that is not closed.
I don't think these kinds of things are a good idea. If there is a big enough crowd the door would speed up until people would get liquidised by the whirling door of death.
Oh yeah? Those revolving doors? They're rubbish they are! :-)
The atmosphere and biosphere is not a closed system, because the CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by weathering (CO2 and limestone forms carbonate rocks) and added to the system predominately by volcanic activity and only very much secondarily from human activity (by nearly two orders of magnitude). In addition CO2 is not the primary greenhouse gas, water vapour is far more significant.
"Luckily our filtering caught all of your virus and worm laden content from getting onto the internet, but we're going to have to fine you for getting infected in the first place."
The point is that the money they make from T-shirts and stuff like that is cash in hand, not some small percentage from the labels- plus a biggish cut of the gate, plus they sell more albums after the concert too.
Wouldn't it be better to give the government an incentive to help solve the problem rather than give them an incentive to get some obscure, amoral, and deeply secret government department to release new and more virulent attacks so as to up their income?
Sure, they probably wouldn't, officially; but why take the risk that some individual in the government would be in a position to benefit from this kind of thing?
These kinds of theoretical problems always sound impossible, but I'm nearly always surprised to find out how often they really do crop up in practice.
Um, yeah granted, but the aerobraking window at Mars is particularly narrow- the 'atmosphere' of Mars is very tenuous. Let's put it this way: Buzz Aldrin doesn't like it at all.
Financing shouldn't be hard, though again, a government agency would likely be the one to do it.
Mommy state will help you out? Maybe, if there's votes in it.
But the point is that there's very little relative velocity between you and the elevator - which means you'd probably have a rather large time to have multiple attempts.
Well, the tether is millimeters wide, and you can't hit it with any speed otherwise you cut the tether and possibly open your vehicle to a vacuum. You're approaching it from thousands of kilometers away with an initial approach speed of maybe 1km/s or so. It's pretty much the same as docking with the ISS, only slightly harder and the stakes are even higher.
With very clever timing, you might not even need to aerobrake at all, which makes it even easier. You just time your approach so that you and the elevator are at the same point, and that you're at the height on the elevator such that your velocity is the same as the elevator's, and you just grab hold. No stress, no problems.
Yeah right, no stress, unfortunately, if you don't catch the tether you go off into space and die... no pressure, no pressure :-)
(Still, to be fair you can probably have a backup rocket to circularise your orbit around Mars and then they can come and fetch you.)
You'd also be crazy not to build a similar elevator at Mars as well, though this would be a major feat of remote engineering
Not really, you just build it on earth and bung it up the elevator and sling it over and deploy it. It's pretty trivial, in theory. Financing it might be harder though.
To take it out in a big way you would have to load a bomb onto a elevator car and take it up to quite high altitude, taking maybe a few days or a week, before detonating it. Needless to say, with sensible security practices at the embarkation point this is unlikely to be a problem.
After that it's often quicker for the second, third, fourth etc application, because it's already loaded.
I'm saying that the compiler/OS should be smart enough to "itemize" your entire application in terms of absolute functions/variables needed at compile and run-time.
Well, in C/C++ the unit that gets pulled in is at the object file level- a file gets pulled in or not. The designer decides what to put in the file, so it's up to you for your granularity. However the linker is somewhat smart in that it only pulls in the files that are needed- just pulling in a file that contains a function Z that needs a separate file won't necessarily result in that being pulled in unless function Z is used.
I think Java does something similar, although its unit is the .class file.
Nope. For example, Xerox is a private company- they do(did) tonnes of research, only some of which lead to profitable commercial enterprise. In fact most research doesn't lead anywhere, and isn't government funded.
Where exactly is the profit in exploration?
Don't have a clue, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't any. But that's really not the point. The point is whether things other than exploration can make money in space- and the answer is: yes of course, they can and do. And the government can't sensibly or in the case of NASA, legally address things that do make money in space.
Where is the profit in studying geologic samples from Mars? How about developing technology like the Hubble telescope or various deep space probes to obtain images of distant planets and stars?
Possibly none. That's what NASA should be doing, not messing about with Space Shuttles and the ISS. It's not like NASA is extending the state of the art in these cases at all- the Shuttle is moribund and the ISS is mostly just a somewhat bigger MIR. Where's the exploration there?
The Singular? Why singular? Why is space a program? Presumably you mean it's a government program. What makes you think a bunch of expensive bureaucrats are ever going to do anything useful for you in space? Why does an organisation doing something for 'the good of a country' not equal a form of communism or atleast socialism? Now personally, I'm not against socialism, if it benefits people directly (for example in the UK a health service really does help out the population fairly uniformly- it makes some kind of sense for a tax to cover that)- but in the case of space, specifically NASA, who is benefiting here? A few astronauts mostly, chosen by a bunch of bureaucrats to best spout the party line about how great everything is in NASA, which in turn benefits the bureaucrats. It isn't that great; at best it is OK, and in many cases it is giving terrible value for money.
Space is a place not a program. Space launch needs to be run like along business lines, with some competition, otherwise it ends up getting run like the USSR before the wall came down; and that's pretty much what NASA is- a centralised command economy. These things are not good.
Mind you, it's not that businesses are higher moral entities either; but right now a modicum of competition would help. As an example, how is it that the Space Shuttle, which is more expensive per kg of payload, how is it that it replaced Saturn V? If you had a company that did something dumb like that in a marketplace, they would be dead; their competition would kill them off. No, NASA only survives because they are a monopoly, and a taxation funded one at that.