uh, I hate to break this to you, but you're experiencing an acceleration of 1g right now, and you have been most of your life...
Exactly, the human body was "built" for 1g; you can't put humans in a spaceship and accelerate with 2g for 25 years or you'll arrive with a dead crew. Even if we had the technology to reach relativistic speeds; we can't accelerate human bodies a lot, so manned interstellar travel would still take generations (for the crews).
Some day, a bunch of different people will come up with a bunch of theories on "super-luminal" travel, then set out to prove their theories. One of them will be proven.
Assuming Einstein was right with his theories of relativity, super-luminous travel or even travel at the speed of light is a major no-go: travelling at the speed of light means instant displacement for the traveller; for the traveller it takes 0 (zero) seconds to move any distance at the speed of light.
So Einsteins relativity doesn't keep you from travelling astronomical distances if you reach speeds close to c, it actually helps you to do so. The big problems are a) the wellknown fact that time for the starting point and the finishing point of the journey goes a whole lot quicker than it does for the traveller (or more accurate: time for the traveller goes slower the faster he moves); and b) the human body can only endure acceleration of about 1g for prelonged periods.
I read that story too, but couldn't make out how autonomous these things are. How do they react to muddy and/or steep slopes, for instance? Does the whole minefield start migrating down the slope once a few sliding mines run out of gas to hop back up again?
Then there is the clearing of these mines after a war, it would be one hell of a job to clear a whole minefield of these.
So in the end this is what truely religious people (like monks) do, they try to reach an ultimate goal that seems impossible to the rational mind, but (some of) the byproducts of the process are quite usefull to society as a whole
Don't underestimate the power of this mindset, in particular that of thes hermetic alchemists, they where furocious explorers due to their philosophy/faith. Take a look at this timeline of famous alchemists, some of the people on there are the founders of modern science (Bacon, Newton).
I always wondered how alchemists continued to find work after without ever making gold.
A true alchemist would call that gold "fools gold". European alchemy was a mix of a strongly magical religious philosophy called hermetism and medieval science. The main axiom of heretism is "as above, so below", or what happens on earth reflects what happens in heaven; where heaven was a state of mind (hemetism as a whole is a mind-oriented religion).
The ultimate goal of hermetic alchemism was the "Transmutation". This was a spiritual (heavenly) transmutation to a higher, godlike state of conciousness (enlightment) which made the mind "golden". According to hermetic philosophy this had to be accompanied by a simultanious physical process of transmutation; transmutation of a lesser element into gold.
So in effect your question comes down to, what will I do when I become spiritually enlightended, like Jesus or the Budha Gautama. The only answer to that would by: find out by getting there.
I mean certain colors you see in very old stained-glass windows (generally in European cathedrals).
We know what ingredients and pigments where used to produce those glasses, but the exact production process is lost. What makes the glasses so special is their "controlled imperfection"; there are bubbles of air and other gasses in the glass that break the light shining through it. It was done by controlling the heat and airflow to the glass while firing, but exactly how it was done is lost for some colors.
I don't remember the exact colors anymore (this is from an arts lecture I took about 20 years ago) so it's hard to find links.
I was taught alchemy is a precursor to chemistry, physics and biology, which originated in China and arrived in Europe through the Middle East. In Europe alchemy was mixed with hermetics, resulting in a "magical" branch, but alchemists in general didn't consider themselves magicians.
Considering something to be "alchemic" implied it to be man-made, not magical; magic came from god(s).
But it does take much knowhow to fire those pots without melting the metal particles or oxidizing them, to keep the copper balance right, etc.
If you think stuff like this is easy, ask yourself why we can't make the enameled glass you see in old cathedrals anymore; while we obviously did know how to make them in medieval times...
I don't follow your reasoning there. We see the father very clearly at work in the OT and the Spirit is mentioned. John's gospel also tells us that Jesus was at work during creation. Why do you think that Jesus and the OT God are incompatible?
Firstly, John is part of the NT so you can't bring up his writings as arguments for parts of the OT.
Then there is my reasoning: if you accept the fact that Jesus was a human (as most of Christianity does today), that human (earthly) Jesus can't be identified with the OT God because he didn't exist yet at the time the various OT books were written. Therefore early Christians introduced the concept of the heavenly (eternal) Christ; without this heavenly Christ you can't unify Jesus with God.
As a (mainstream) Christian you can't claim Jesus was neither all heavenly nor all earthly, because if he was all heavenly (like some Gnostics believed), he would be eternal and couldn't have died at the cross, or if he was all earthly he couldn't be (part of) the OT God (which amongst other reasons lead some Gnostics to deny the OT and its God alltogether).
Rubbish. The LotR movie is based on the books, but the Boromir of the book is quite different fromt he Boromir of the movie. Even if the Koran is in part based on Judaic scripture, any deviation whatsoever means that it is looking at a different idea of God.
But this is what it's all about, the three religions have all different ideas about the same God. Christianity changes mosaic law; Islam changes it in different ways.
Jesus summed up the Mosaic law as 'love the Lord your God with all you heart and mind and soul and strength and your 0enighbour as yourself'. I'd say that that has a pretty charitable bent.
Again, what John or Jesus said isn't part of the OT. Most Jews don't agree on this being the essence of mosaic law (eg. you should not only love but also fear God, as for neighbours: an eye for an eye...).
PS: I'm not particulary interrested in any further theological arguments in this thread.
I'm not aware of the Bible ever telling me that it's my right to go rule people, so don't worry about that one. In fact, it calls for us to be servants instead.
It depends on how you define "human". The bible gives mankind the right to rule nature, and by defining unbelievers as "subhuman", christians have held and traded slaves for centuries.
Actually, they don't. For instance we Christians worship Jesus as God, which the Jews and Muslims refuse to and the Muslim idea of God is very different to the Judeo-Christian one i.e. a distant god who requies you to earn a place in paradise rather than a loving father figure who offers it freely to everyone who simply asks for forgiveness and accepts his love.
If you define the deity by acceptance of (the earthly) Jesus taking part in it then the old testament god cannot be the same god as the god in the new testament. This is the very heracy for which the Gnostics where burned at the stake time after time, because it's Christian dogma it is the same god. Since the Koran is clearly based on Judaic scripture (Ibrahim/Abraham and the tribes comes to mind), the god Muslims worship must be the same god the Jews worship.
The "loving father" concept of this god is almost entrirely Christian, but there is more of a call to charity in the Koran then there is in Judaic scripture.
Is it suddenly wrong for someone to hold a belief and be convinced that it is the only truth and therefore other beliefs are lies?
As long as you don't think it's your (godgiven) right to rule the "fools" that believe in what you precieve to be a lie; no one can stop you.
The Bible clearly states that Jesus is the only way to know God and therefore anyone claiming to following God but denying Jesus is not in fact following him, but rather oppossing him, which is tantamount to being ont he side of the devil, whether the people realise it or not.
Did you know Jesus is a prophet in Islam? So muslims don't deny Jesus' teachings, they just don't believe it is the "final word". You do know that all of Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the same god, do you?
But of course these days political correctness rules supreme so you can't hold ideas beliefs that require that of others to be wrong. Tolerance has come to mean saying that everyone is right rather than being able ot say they are wrong, while respecting their right to chose their beliefs.
Well, in my humble view it all comes down to being able to prove what you say. If you hold opinions about other people you can't prove, it's not only tolerant but also simply polite (not to mention smart) to not state those opinions as facts.
That still doesn't make it illegal. Here in Europe it would be illegal for MS to not allow 3th-party software to run on the hardware they manifacture. In Europe you might very well have the right to reverse engineer the Xbox if Microsoft refuses cooperation on this.
I don't exactly know about Australian law, but it could very well be the geeks in question are playing on this angle: "If you don't cooperate with us, we will do it ourselves legally, and you will have no control over it whatsoever. The proof is in the pudding."
Because it's my Xbox once I bought it. If I don't infringe on copyrights there is no international law to stop an non-US Xbox owner to run anything he likes, or to modify the Xbox until even MS doesn't recognize it anymore.
More so, if MS refuses this, it would be a valid reason for reverse-engineering the Xbox in many countries (interoperability with linux).
It is possible that those charged with enforcing Berne would take a different view. They might see this tax as a simple way around the "formality" requirement. But as John Mark Ockerbloom nicely
points out, Berne only imposes its requirements for the minimum term. If there is a formality problem with structuring this as a tax, then the proposal could be structured to apply only beyond Berne's minimum term.
Why are we seeing this article instead of something on any one of the serious chess machines?
Because this is a serious chess machine! Lately, there have been some pretty amazing developments in chess programming (like scout searching which is considerably faster than alpha-beta searching), so it makes not much sense to build special purpose machines.
Recently Kramnik played a match angainst Deep Fritz 7 running on an 8x Xeon machine. Deep Fritz calculated an average of 2M nodes/sec, while some years before Deep Blue calculated about 200M nodes/sec on special hardware in its match against Kasparov. Still, Deep Fritz plays about as strong as Deep Blue, perhaps even a bit stronger. Programming techniques that prune more nodes from the search-tree allow you to calculate to the same tree depth without evaluating as many nodes.
So in this special territory, software design has taken a lead over the hardware capabilities, unlike almost any other territory in CS.
This is a strawman argument, anyway. The natural transfer of a genetic information across kingdoms/species/etc. is analogous to the artificial insertion of a gene into a plant, not breeding them together to produce some lame mad science experiment.
Please read the original post I was replying to. Can we atleast agree on genetic modification not being equal to breeding? I admit I was pushing it a bit far, but I was trying to make a point.
The first site times out (lot of that happening here in Europe when the US is surfing bigtime lately), I'm aware of the facts on the second site, I know cross-kingdom transfer happens mostly in symbiotes, I even use that in my little doom scenario in another post.
I obviously don't entirely agree with the given interpretation of those facts. Argueing genetic engineering is not that dangerous because most genes have probably been transferred some time in the past to most of the species out there already is pushing it at least as far as I did.
Hybridization occurs naturally only in very closely related species (generally within the same genus). This is different from trying to introduce animal genes into a plant species; chances of this happening in nature are very, very small; chances the resulting creature will be able to reproduce and carry its genes into a next generation are even smaller.
So, yes; evolutional differentiation is not as straightforward as it seems and the species boundary within a genus isn't always clear. This does not warrant mixing genes of very different species is harmless.
My opinion: if it doesn't mate in nature, we shouldn't try to overcome that boundary by genetic manipulation.
I don't see any problems with any modifications like these. Do you really think another protein in a plant is going to cause horrible mutations in humans? It probably won't affect animals with high metabolisms at all.
No, I think that if such a plant is a commercial success, it will be grown large scale in open fields so containment will be impossible. Sooner or later the modified plant will spread into nature and its genes will spread into the gene pool of the (wild) species.
This can have its effect on insects and especially worms, fungi and bacteria that have a some kind of relationship with the species. These creatures in their turn are eaten or otherwise depended upon, and this way the effect could be carried through at least part of the food chain.
I'm not particulary psyched up about mutations in humans, its the small stuff that keeps a biotope running I'm worried about. Simple scenario: a modified plant species causes a symbiotic fungus to evolve into something less benign, resulting in fungal and bacterial sterilisation of parts of the habitat.
The discussion is drifting. You are now talking a bateria that causes a tumor-like desease in a plant by injecting a part of its dna, a bit like a virus does. This is only very remotely related to breeding and hybridization.
Hybridization does occur naturally, but only in very closely related species (for instance in the Blue-winged Warbler and the Golden-winged Warbler). Species from completely different kingdoms will never mate and succesfully reproduce (this is what we were talking originally).
This barrier between widely differentiated species is nature's safeguard against catastrophic changes in the biotope. A species behaves in its environment according to its genes; changes in the genes will modify this behaviour in one way or another. Drastic changes in the genes have the potential to cause drastic behavioural changes. This could mean the end of the species in question and/or of other species who feed on it, are hunted by it, compete with it for food, or depend on it in any other way directly or indirectly.
GE comes down to removing this natural safeguard. It is and will always remain a risky business.
This is exactly the problem: you argue "why wait" so you speed up evolution with genetic modification. You have reduced your hundred thousand years to just one year.
Next year someone else inserts another foreign gene into your plant, and the next year, and the year after that. After just a few decades, your plant would have changed a lot, and you have no way whatsoever of knowing what effects these changes will have on other species because of the short timespan in which they occur.
Read my other posts. I know there is HGT going on, but you don't selectively breed using HGT.
To indicate the difference between GE and breeding once again: I would like to see the first breeder who succeeds in crossing a plant with an insect, but I'm not holding my breath. We are talking species from different biological kingdoms here.
I know about HGT. You could have even mentioned normal viruses, because they inject their own DNA into foreign cells.
The problem is, as you stated yourself, that HTG is very rare, injection in gametes is even more so. It comes down to the frequency of changes to the gene pool of a particular species; GE changes this frequency from milennia to years.
Nobody knows where these sped up changes will lead the species in question, and what the effects of this will be on the biotope. What we do know is that natural evolution can't save us if things go wrong (because it's much to slow).
Can you promise me that, in thousands upon thousands of years of selective breeding, we have not even once managed to breed a mutation which coded for a protein never before expressed in the crop?
Well if we managed to do so, it wouldn't be selective breeding now, would it (call it mutative breeding)? Breeding selects specific existing features in a species. So I can't promise, but if it happened it wasn't done on purpose.
Also note mutations are "freak accidents", with GE you just churn out altered genes that would take eons to evolve by mutation (if at all). GE is messing with evolution on a much bigger scale than selective breeding is.
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Exactly, the human body was "built" for 1g; you can't put humans in a spaceship and accelerate with 2g for 25 years or you'll arrive with a dead crew. Even if we had the technology to reach relativistic speeds; we can't accelerate human bodies a lot, so manned interstellar travel would still take generations (for the crews).
Assuming Einstein was right with his theories of relativity, super-luminous travel or even travel at the speed of light is a major no-go: travelling at the speed of light means instant displacement for the traveller; for the traveller it takes 0 (zero) seconds to move any distance at the speed of light.
So Einsteins relativity doesn't keep you from travelling astronomical distances if you reach speeds close to c, it actually helps you to do so. The big problems are a) the wellknown fact that time for the starting point and the finishing point of the journey goes a whole lot quicker than it does for the traveller (or more accurate: time for the traveller goes slower the faster he moves); and b) the human body can only endure acceleration of about 1g for prelonged periods.
Then there is the clearing of these mines after a war, it would be one hell of a job to clear a whole minefield of these.
So it's on page 395, before we /. yet another poor bastard.
So in the end this is what truely religious people (like monks) do, they try to reach an ultimate goal that seems impossible to the rational mind, but (some of) the byproducts of the process are quite usefull to society as a whole
Don't underestimate the power of this mindset, in particular that of thes hermetic alchemists, they where furocious explorers due to their philosophy/faith. Take a look at this timeline of famous alchemists, some of the people on there are the founders of modern science (Bacon, Newton).
A true alchemist would call that gold "fools gold". European alchemy was a mix of a strongly magical religious philosophy called hermetism and medieval science. The main axiom of heretism is "as above, so below", or what happens on earth reflects what happens in heaven; where heaven was a state of mind (hemetism as a whole is a mind-oriented religion).
The ultimate goal of hermetic alchemism was the "Transmutation". This was a spiritual (heavenly) transmutation to a higher, godlike state of conciousness (enlightment) which made the mind "golden". According to hermetic philosophy this had to be accompanied by a simultanious physical process of transmutation; transmutation of a lesser element into gold.
So in effect your question comes down to, what will I do when I become spiritually enlightended, like Jesus or the Budha Gautama. The only answer to that would by: find out by getting there.
We know what ingredients and pigments where used to produce those glasses, but the exact production process is lost. What makes the glasses so special is their "controlled imperfection"; there are bubbles of air and other gasses in the glass that break the light shining through it. It was done by controlling the heat and airflow to the glass while firing, but exactly how it was done is lost for some colors.
I don't remember the exact colors anymore (this is from an arts lecture I took about 20 years ago) so it's hard to find links.
Considering something to be "alchemic" implied it to be man-made, not magical; magic came from god(s).
If you think stuff like this is easy, ask yourself why we can't make the enameled glass you see in old cathedrals anymore; while we obviously did know how to make them in medieval times...
Firstly, John is part of the NT so you can't bring up his writings as arguments for parts of the OT.
Then there is my reasoning: if you accept the fact that Jesus was a human (as most of Christianity does today), that human (earthly) Jesus can't be identified with the OT God because he didn't exist yet at the time the various OT books were written. Therefore early Christians introduced the concept of the heavenly (eternal) Christ; without this heavenly Christ you can't unify Jesus with God.
As a (mainstream) Christian you can't claim Jesus was neither all heavenly nor all earthly, because if he was all heavenly (like some Gnostics believed), he would be eternal and couldn't have died at the cross, or if he was all earthly he couldn't be (part of) the OT God (which amongst other reasons lead some Gnostics to deny the OT and its God alltogether).
Rubbish. The LotR movie is based on the books, but the Boromir of the book is quite different fromt he Boromir of the movie. Even if the Koran is in part based on Judaic scripture, any deviation whatsoever means that it is looking at a different idea of God.
But this is what it's all about, the three religions have all different ideas about the same God. Christianity changes mosaic law; Islam changes it in different ways.
Jesus summed up the Mosaic law as 'love the Lord your God with all you heart and mind and soul and strength and your 0enighbour as yourself'. I'd say that that has a pretty charitable bent.
Again, what John or Jesus said isn't part of the OT. Most Jews don't agree on this being the essence of mosaic law (eg. you should not only love but also fear God, as for neighbours: an eye for an eye...).
PS: I'm not particulary interrested in any further theological arguments in this thread.
It depends on how you define "human". The bible gives mankind the right to rule nature, and by defining unbelievers as "subhuman", christians have held and traded slaves for centuries.
Actually, they don't. For instance we Christians worship Jesus as God, which the Jews and Muslims refuse to and the Muslim idea of God is very different to the Judeo-Christian one i.e. a distant god who requies you to earn a place in paradise rather than a loving father figure who offers it freely to everyone who simply asks for forgiveness and accepts his love.
If you define the deity by acceptance of (the earthly) Jesus taking part in it then the old testament god cannot be the same god as the god in the new testament. This is the very heracy for which the Gnostics where burned at the stake time after time, because it's Christian dogma it is the same god. Since the Koran is clearly based on Judaic scripture (Ibrahim/Abraham and the tribes comes to mind), the god Muslims worship must be the same god the Jews worship.
The "loving father" concept of this god is almost entrirely Christian, but there is more of a call to charity in the Koran then there is in Judaic scripture.
As long as you don't think it's your (godgiven) right to rule the "fools" that believe in what you precieve to be a lie; no one can stop you.
The Bible clearly states that Jesus is the only way to know God and therefore anyone claiming to following God but denying Jesus is not in fact following him, but rather oppossing him, which is tantamount to being ont he side of the devil, whether the people realise it or not.
Did you know Jesus is a prophet in Islam? So muslims don't deny Jesus' teachings, they just don't believe it is the "final word". You do know that all of Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the same god, do you?
But of course these days political correctness rules supreme so you can't hold ideas beliefs that require that of others to be wrong. Tolerance has come to mean saying that everyone is right rather than being able ot say they are wrong, while respecting their right to chose their beliefs.
Well, in my humble view it all comes down to being able to prove what you say. If you hold opinions about other people you can't prove, it's not only tolerant but also simply polite (not to mention smart) to not state those opinions as facts.
I don't exactly know about Australian law, but it could very well be the geeks in question are playing on this angle: "If you don't cooperate with us, we will do it ourselves legally, and you will have no control over it whatsoever. The proof is in the pudding."
More so, if MS refuses this, it would be a valid reason for reverse-engineering the Xbox in many countries (interoperability with linux).
Because this is a serious chess machine! Lately, there have been some pretty amazing developments in chess programming (like scout searching which is considerably faster than alpha-beta searching), so it makes not much sense to build special purpose machines.
Recently Kramnik played a match angainst Deep Fritz 7 running on an 8x Xeon machine. Deep Fritz calculated an average of 2M nodes/sec, while some years before Deep Blue calculated about 200M nodes/sec on special hardware in its match against Kasparov. Still, Deep Fritz plays about as strong as Deep Blue, perhaps even a bit stronger. Programming techniques that prune more nodes from the search-tree allow you to calculate to the same tree depth without evaluating as many nodes.
So in this special territory, software design has taken a lead over the hardware capabilities, unlike almost any other territory in CS.
Please read the original post I was replying to. Can we atleast agree on genetic modification not being equal to breeding? I admit I was pushing it a bit far, but I was trying to make a point.
The first site times out (lot of that happening here in Europe when the US is surfing bigtime lately), I'm aware of the facts on the second site, I know cross-kingdom transfer happens mostly in symbiotes, I even use that in my little doom scenario in another post.
I obviously don't entirely agree with the given interpretation of those facts. Argueing genetic engineering is not that dangerous because most genes have probably been transferred some time in the past to most of the species out there already is pushing it at least as far as I did.
Hybridization occurs naturally only in very closely related species (generally within the same genus). This is different from trying to introduce animal genes into a plant species; chances of this happening in nature are very, very small; chances the resulting creature will be able to reproduce and carry its genes into a next generation are even smaller.
So, yes; evolutional differentiation is not as straightforward as it seems and the species boundary within a genus isn't always clear. This does not warrant mixing genes of very different species is harmless.
My opinion: if it doesn't mate in nature, we shouldn't try to overcome that boundary by genetic manipulation.
No, I think that if such a plant is a commercial success, it will be grown large scale in open fields so containment will be impossible. Sooner or later the modified plant will spread into nature and its genes will spread into the gene pool of the (wild) species.
This can have its effect on insects and especially worms, fungi and bacteria that have a some kind of relationship with the species. These creatures in their turn are eaten or otherwise depended upon, and this way the effect could be carried through at least part of the food chain.
I'm not particulary psyched up about mutations in humans, its the small stuff that keeps a biotope running I'm worried about. Simple scenario: a modified plant species causes a symbiotic fungus to evolve into something less benign, resulting in fungal and bacterial sterilisation of parts of the habitat.
Hybridization does occur naturally, but only in very closely related species (for instance in the Blue-winged Warbler and the Golden-winged Warbler). Species from completely different kingdoms will never mate and succesfully reproduce (this is what we were talking originally).
This barrier between widely differentiated species is nature's safeguard against catastrophic changes in the biotope. A species behaves in its environment according to its genes; changes in the genes will modify this behaviour in one way or another. Drastic changes in the genes have the potential to cause drastic behavioural changes. This could mean the end of the species in question and/or of other species who feed on it, are hunted by it, compete with it for food, or depend on it in any other way directly or indirectly.
GE comes down to removing this natural safeguard. It is and will always remain a risky business.
Next year someone else inserts another foreign gene into your plant, and the next year, and the year after that. After just a few decades, your plant would have changed a lot, and you have no way whatsoever of knowing what effects these changes will have on other species because of the short timespan in which they occur.
To indicate the difference between GE and breeding once again: I would like to see the first breeder who succeeds in crossing a plant with an insect, but I'm not holding my breath. We are talking species from different biological kingdoms here.
The problem is, as you stated yourself, that HTG is very rare, injection in gametes is even more so. It comes down to the frequency of changes to the gene pool of a particular species; GE changes this frequency from milennia to years.
Nobody knows where these sped up changes will lead the species in question, and what the effects of this will be on the biotope. What we do know is that natural evolution can't save us if things go wrong (because it's much to slow).
Couldn't find a better link, sorry.
Well if we managed to do so, it wouldn't be selective breeding now, would it (call it mutative breeding)? Breeding selects specific existing features in a species. So I can't promise, but if it happened it wasn't done on purpose.
Also note mutations are "freak accidents", with GE you just churn out altered genes that would take eons to evolve by mutation (if at all). GE is messing with evolution on a much bigger scale than selective breeding is.