The practical application, IMHO, is for society to utilize intelligent people more for tasks that demand high intelligence. Distractability == boredom. In the Age of Enlightenment, this involved funding the highly intelligent to go make use of that intelligence. In the modern era, serious research is often confined to those who stay in academia - and, even then, with universities increasingly funded by corporations to perform all the menial work, the condition of research is pathetic.
What we need are dedicated facilities for the highly intelligent to push them to the limits of their mental capacity, funded not to produce specific results but to see what happens. "Blue sky" from an outside perspective, but not necessarily to the researchers themselves who would be free to do what they wanted. I absolutely guarantee the rewards of such a venture for society would vastly outstrip the costs, and the rewards for the intelligent to be in a meaningful environment rather than a mundane one would be beyond price.
This is something that has been known for a very long time. The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) was pretty much founded on the premise that intelligent kids become disruptive in schools because they're bored witless (ie: become easily distracted) with the humdrum that is necessary for everyone else.
What this article (and summary) should be focussing on is not the fact that intelligent people can be distracted but on why society is under-utilizing their capabilities to such an extent that boredom is possible. Once a problem has been identified and a solution worked on for a specific sector (in this case kids) for 4 decades or more, it is surely not acceptable for the problem to be allowed to fester in all other parts of society. It is surely even less acceptable for researchers to not be aware that solutions already exist but aren't being used.
It's doubtful any of them (barring a handful of very fragile viruses) are "killed" at 100'C (if, by "killed" you mean deactivated beyond any possibility of recovery, since viruses aren't actually alive to begin with). It's far too low a temperature to do much damage. The most you can hope for is to "denature" the protein coating. However, that's reversible (see all articles on how to unboil eggs for details). It also doesn't affect all proteins. Prions are misshapen proteins and the prions that cause vCJD can endure 134'C (and reportedly even higher temperatures). Clearly, any relatively stable RNA strand protected by a protein that will not denature isn't going to be easy to deactivate even temporarily.
Even when you can stun a virus when it's free-floating, you're out of luck if it's a retrovirus and the cell it had embedded itself into is a thermophile. Since there are cells that can survive 130'C, all retroviruses that infect such cells (including "fossil" viruses that are normally inactive in the cell but which can be reactivated under the right conditions) can also survive 130'C.
I'll buy the "profit" argument. But picture a standalone game written in a highly modular fashion, such that any piece can be swapped out for an updated version. Much like the way the linux kernel is, in fact. You now have a game that can be updated forever, if you so wish. Sure, the original copies won't make much after a decade, but the game itself would still be being sold. And if you want to use WoW as an example, I sincerely doubt you'd get far running the very earliest release of the client, particularly if you disallowed any kind of updating. In other words, WoW already uses the rolling release approach and that is why they make as much as they do.
MUD-1 (which is still going strong on British Legends) is one of the oldest online games - if not THE oldest online game. (I'm ignoring games that were capable of multiplayer use, such as the BBC's Double Phantom, but which weren't online in any real sense.)
Having said that, I still play Oolite (the updated version of the 8-bit Elite - still the best space sim ever written) far more often than any online game because online games just aren't there yet.
.....meaning "more profitable". Microsoft is profitable, but I think you'd have a hard time selling the argument that this makes them "better" in any software sense. They are better at making money, and I'm sure plenty of economists would argue that that is the important metric. One of the reasons people pine after the "golden age" of technology is that people who are better at making money are much worse at making something worth the money being paid for it. It's not that the "golden age" actually had products that were great (they weren't), it's that the quality is falling as people divert effort away from engineering as well as they can to promoting as hard as they can.
In the end, a good enough salesman can sell ice to eskimos. A good enough salesman can therefore make money when giving you nothing at all. It's certainly better for the salesman, but how is it better for the consumer? And since companies that produce things are themselves consumers, inferior consumption means inferior output even on the few occasions the companies are being honest and accountable.
For further explanation, please see Isaac Asimov's depiction of how to identify irreversible decay in the Foundation series.
Meh, fire doesn't sterilize that well, and heat can do Bad Things to metal at temperatures high enough to guarantee sterilization.
As for water, it's not good for rough surfaces (where pockets of infection can easily remain at a lower temperature) and a temperature of 100'C is way too low to kill the really nasty viruses. It's not even hot enough to be that good against some bacteria.
I'll agree that it's much better than nothing at all. However, even your standard autoclave is pretty naff at dealing with the full range of items used in medical facilities, which is why MRSA is so problematic.
There's also the issue of Strain 121. It's not listed (as far as I know) as harmful to humans, but the mere fact that a hyperthermophile exists at all is a concern. It means that we will run into harmful bacteria that autoclaves are incapable of stopping.
Yes, the invention that UK and US companies scoffed at, the SA government funded, and has now made the inventor a multi-millionaire.
Why mention that? Because this invention - if it is to succeed - will have to follow a similar path. There's no way on Earth that companies selling highly expensive sterilization systems will want to add a cheap alternative to their sales brochure. And the only way this invention will get refined to the point of being practical and widely distributed is with serious cash - which means a large corporation (see above) or a government providing the seed money.
Having said that, they have to battle inertia. UV lamps can sterilize hospital rooms that have MRSA contamination quickly and easily, but much more expensive and dramatic methods are typically used (largely because they're expensive, dramatic and involve machines that go bing). Inertia is a serious problem in the medical profession. There's good reason for being conservative - you don't want to do more harm than good - but there's plenty of cases where that's merely a pretext for delaying change.
Agreed that you have to treat the patient rather than a list of symptoms, but I would disagree on the definition of "normal". There are bound to be people who have no actual disease but don't fit inside the 2 standard deviations, there are bound to be people who have the disease but fit within what is "normal".
IMHO, the solution is to look more at the underlying mechanisms (where known) and less at what those mechanisms are expected to produce. In your father's case, there's probably some very mild underlying cause that is of absolutely no significance. Now, you can't do this for a lot of conditions at the present time, but that's largely because diagnostic tools have been designed to look for what doctors want to know (the symptoms). There's no market for diagnostic tools that tell you information doctors have never been trained to read.
There are three other issues: first, doctors in countries with no nationalized health system get paid according to how many they treat. If they don't have anyone to treat, they don't have anything to eat. Instead of promoting greater efficiency (as is often claimed), it promotes bogus treatment and over-treatment. Secondly, there is a strong pressure to abuse the legal system by seeing doctors as a source of easy money. Thirdly, the consequence of over-protection is to inhibit the body's immune system and other defensive systems. This creates a situation whereby milder and milder infections are more and more likely to be deadly if not treated.
The problems with dangerous treatments are often due to negligence in hospitals regarding cross-contamination. This has only been identified as a problem for the past 110 years, so perhaps it's still a bit soon to expect practicioners to actually pay attention to such things.
The solution, therefore, is as follows:
Build diagnostic systems that do something useful, like diagnose actual disorders
Nationalize health-care, scrap all health insurance companies, and pay doctors a decent fixed salary
Eliminate the notion of malpractice and allow patients to sue for violations of the Hippocratic Oath (ie: did the doctor choose the path of least harm?)
Alter hygine advice to be balanced rather than total war
Produce a simple booklet that is essentially Florence Nightingale's notes for nurses with current knowledge of sterilization practices (such as UV for killing MRSA)
Tell me a situation where "hate" is a rational and appropriate way to respond. In doing so, please remember that "dislike", "avoidance", "confrontation", "rejection", etc, are not terms of hate. Neither are the terms "deprogramming" (when done right), "questioning", "defiance", "ignoring", "passive resistance", "enforcing the rule of law".
Your example is flawed, however. It is possible to have both emotion and intellect, but the more you have of one, the less you will have of the other. The more emotion you have, the less intellect you have. Hate is an extreme. It is the most absolute emotion on the planet. The brain cannot handle hate and thinking at the same time. Those who live in pure hate make for great Berserkers (the red glaze is a permanent fixture in front of their eyes) but berserkers cease all higher brain functions. It is the nature of that kind of mindset.
Likewise, it is possible to have a high intellect and some emotion - a lot of artist-scientists fall into this category. But if you have absolutely pure intellect, emotion tends to be a little dead.
It's not strictly a simple linear system. Meditating produces a mindset that is free of both emotion and intellect. So it's more a triangle.
Up until now, there were two camps - those who believed intellect was 100% inherited, and those who believed it was 100% environmental.
The evidence for environmental factors contributing to intelligence became overwhelming. Despite long, hard efforts, no genetic trait had been convincingly demonstrated. The result was that the nature vs. nurture argument was taken to be over and the nurture side had won.
These findings reopen the debate (which is right, proper and bloody obvious), but they also make it clear that the brain has to be affected by many different factors. We don't know all the factors, and in the case of genetics we only know =that= genes are involved, we know practically nothing about which genes are involved, to what degree, or how they interact with environmental inputs to produce the conglomerate effect we see in reality.
Everything in the body has identical genes. Unless you are one of a number of people (percentage unknown) who absorbed your own twin before being born. The absorbed twin will have its own DNA. I believe something like 24-25 cases of this have been firmly established in the US.
How the genes differentiate is, as yet, unknown but is likely in part to do with the epigenome. This switches genes on and off, alters how bases map to proteins, etc. It is altered by diet and other chemical signals, so it is logical to assume it is the key to why you're not a totally uniform blob.
It is therefore the epigenome which determines the functioning of a given organ. The DNA can be thought of as a stock library of functions akin to glibc, with the epigenome acting as an API wrapper to selectively expose the functions and to manipulate the results.
So what you're saying is that it is imperitive for the rational media to find True Believers and cause a personal crisis in them until they finally become a True Believer in honest reporting?
There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
I mostly agree. This is, by far, the biggest factor. Genetic makeup comes second. Diet comes third. In fourth place comes tactical education (ie: tailoring what is learned so that it is not only stimulating and engaging but also maximizes brain development). I'd put styled education (ie: picking a style of teaching suitable for the material) fifth or possibly sixth. Rewards come about 279th on the list, punishment at 280th and standardization would be a few million further down the list from that.
I'm assuming the grandparent post is factoring in a baseline of 1/4 the US deficit for the woman spending. Since this is a constant, it can be divided out.
You can't get a brain transplant, true, but there is ample evidence that what you learn, and how intensively you learn, shapes your brain to a significant degree. Shaping your education according to your brain's strengths aught to maximize your ability and might easily take you to a point beyond where genes alone can take you.
Diet will also play a role - diet alters how genes are interpreted, so good genes can certainly be crippled with a poor diet and average genes -may-, under certain circumstances, be enhanced by a good diet. Diet also determines if the materials (and energy) needed to build the brain up are available.
So genes are one factor of several. Telling a kid to work hard or work smart isn't, however, amongst those factors.
It does. To hate requires that you sacrifice all intellect for emotion. Those blinded by love are equally guilty, but are usually less destructive - though there are exceptions. But because it is devoid of intellect, why you hate is immaterial. Mere after-the-fact rationalization. For that reason, talk of "just cause" and other such crap should never be accepted as a reason to hate. There is no reason to hate for reason cannot hate and hate cannot reason.
Far from being "over with", it's put the actual mastermind being all of Al Queda's evil in charge of the organization.
If he could "put out messages", there's a bloody huge security hole. Unless you imagine he was psychic. Finding the security holes within the military would have saved more lives in the long-run.
Sure it would inspire anger. So does killing him. However, capturing him forces the anger to be rash and without forethought, giving us the advantage. Killing him gives those seeking revenge the time needed to plot something far more deadly. That gives them the advantage.
"Book Of Five Rings" states quite clearly that you should ALWAYS keep your foes off-balance.
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The practical application, IMHO, is for society to utilize intelligent people more for tasks that demand high intelligence. Distractability == boredom. In the Age of Enlightenment, this involved funding the highly intelligent to go make use of that intelligence. In the modern era, serious research is often confined to those who stay in academia - and, even then, with universities increasingly funded by corporations to perform all the menial work, the condition of research is pathetic.
What we need are dedicated facilities for the highly intelligent to push them to the limits of their mental capacity, funded not to produce specific results but to see what happens. "Blue sky" from an outside perspective, but not necessarily to the researchers themselves who would be free to do what they wanted. I absolutely guarantee the rewards of such a venture for society would vastly outstrip the costs, and the rewards for the intelligent to be in a meaningful environment rather than a mundane one would be beyond price.
This is something that has been known for a very long time. The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) was pretty much founded on the premise that intelligent kids become disruptive in schools because they're bored witless (ie: become easily distracted) with the humdrum that is necessary for everyone else.
What this article (and summary) should be focussing on is not the fact that intelligent people can be distracted but on why society is under-utilizing their capabilities to such an extent that boredom is possible. Once a problem has been identified and a solution worked on for a specific sector (in this case kids) for 4 decades or more, it is surely not acceptable for the problem to be allowed to fester in all other parts of society. It is surely even less acceptable for researchers to not be aware that solutions already exist but aren't being used.
It's doubtful any of them (barring a handful of very fragile viruses) are "killed" at 100'C (if, by "killed" you mean deactivated beyond any possibility of recovery, since viruses aren't actually alive to begin with). It's far too low a temperature to do much damage. The most you can hope for is to "denature" the protein coating. However, that's reversible (see all articles on how to unboil eggs for details). It also doesn't affect all proteins. Prions are misshapen proteins and the prions that cause vCJD can endure 134'C (and reportedly even higher temperatures). Clearly, any relatively stable RNA strand protected by a protein that will not denature isn't going to be easy to deactivate even temporarily.
Even when you can stun a virus when it's free-floating, you're out of luck if it's a retrovirus and the cell it had embedded itself into is a thermophile. Since there are cells that can survive 130'C, all retroviruses that infect such cells (including "fossil" viruses that are normally inactive in the cell but which can be reactivated under the right conditions) can also survive 130'C.
I'll buy the "profit" argument. But picture a standalone game written in a highly modular fashion, such that any piece can be swapped out for an updated version. Much like the way the linux kernel is, in fact. You now have a game that can be updated forever, if you so wish. Sure, the original copies won't make much after a decade, but the game itself would still be being sold. And if you want to use WoW as an example, I sincerely doubt you'd get far running the very earliest release of the client, particularly if you disallowed any kind of updating. In other words, WoW already uses the rolling release approach and that is why they make as much as they do.
MUD-1 (which is still going strong on British Legends) is one of the oldest online games - if not THE oldest online game. (I'm ignoring games that were capable of multiplayer use, such as the BBC's Double Phantom, but which weren't online in any real sense.)
Having said that, I still play Oolite (the updated version of the 8-bit Elite - still the best space sim ever written) far more often than any online game because online games just aren't there yet.
.....meaning "more profitable". Microsoft is profitable, but I think you'd have a hard time selling the argument that this makes them "better" in any software sense. They are better at making money, and I'm sure plenty of economists would argue that that is the important metric. One of the reasons people pine after the "golden age" of technology is that people who are better at making money are much worse at making something worth the money being paid for it. It's not that the "golden age" actually had products that were great (they weren't), it's that the quality is falling as people divert effort away from engineering as well as they can to promoting as hard as they can.
In the end, a good enough salesman can sell ice to eskimos. A good enough salesman can therefore make money when giving you nothing at all. It's certainly better for the salesman, but how is it better for the consumer? And since companies that produce things are themselves consumers, inferior consumption means inferior output even on the few occasions the companies are being honest and accountable.
For further explanation, please see Isaac Asimov's depiction of how to identify irreversible decay in the Foundation series.
Meh, fire doesn't sterilize that well, and heat can do Bad Things to metal at temperatures high enough to guarantee sterilization.
As for water, it's not good for rough surfaces (where pockets of infection can easily remain at a lower temperature) and a temperature of 100'C is way too low to kill the really nasty viruses. It's not even hot enough to be that good against some bacteria.
I'll agree that it's much better than nothing at all. However, even your standard autoclave is pretty naff at dealing with the full range of items used in medical facilities, which is why MRSA is so problematic.
There's also the issue of Strain 121. It's not listed (as far as I know) as harmful to humans, but the mere fact that a hyperthermophile exists at all is a concern. It means that we will run into harmful bacteria that autoclaves are incapable of stopping.
Yes, the invention that UK and US companies scoffed at, the SA government funded, and has now made the inventor a multi-millionaire.
Why mention that? Because this invention - if it is to succeed - will have to follow a similar path. There's no way on Earth that companies selling highly expensive sterilization systems will want to add a cheap alternative to their sales brochure. And the only way this invention will get refined to the point of being practical and widely distributed is with serious cash - which means a large corporation (see above) or a government providing the seed money.
Having said that, they have to battle inertia. UV lamps can sterilize hospital rooms that have MRSA contamination quickly and easily, but much more expensive and dramatic methods are typically used (largely because they're expensive, dramatic and involve machines that go bing). Inertia is a serious problem in the medical profession. There's good reason for being conservative - you don't want to do more harm than good - but there's plenty of cases where that's merely a pretext for delaying change.
Agreed that you have to treat the patient rather than a list of symptoms, but I would disagree on the definition of "normal". There are bound to be people who have no actual disease but don't fit inside the 2 standard deviations, there are bound to be people who have the disease but fit within what is "normal".
IMHO, the solution is to look more at the underlying mechanisms (where known) and less at what those mechanisms are expected to produce. In your father's case, there's probably some very mild underlying cause that is of absolutely no significance. Now, you can't do this for a lot of conditions at the present time, but that's largely because diagnostic tools have been designed to look for what doctors want to know (the symptoms). There's no market for diagnostic tools that tell you information doctors have never been trained to read.
There are three other issues: first, doctors in countries with no nationalized health system get paid according to how many they treat. If they don't have anyone to treat, they don't have anything to eat. Instead of promoting greater efficiency (as is often claimed), it promotes bogus treatment and over-treatment. Secondly, there is a strong pressure to abuse the legal system by seeing doctors as a source of easy money. Thirdly, the consequence of over-protection is to inhibit the body's immune system and other defensive systems. This creates a situation whereby milder and milder infections are more and more likely to be deadly if not treated.
The problems with dangerous treatments are often due to negligence in hospitals regarding cross-contamination. This has only been identified as a problem for the past 110 years, so perhaps it's still a bit soon to expect practicioners to actually pay attention to such things.
The solution, therefore, is as follows:
The Hercules graphics card. :)
Tell me a situation where "hate" is a rational and appropriate way to respond. In doing so, please remember that "dislike", "avoidance", "confrontation", "rejection", etc, are not terms of hate. Neither are the terms "deprogramming" (when done right), "questioning", "defiance", "ignoring", "passive resistance", "enforcing the rule of law".
Your example is flawed, however. It is possible to have both emotion and intellect, but the more you have of one, the less you will have of the other. The more emotion you have, the less intellect you have. Hate is an extreme. It is the most absolute emotion on the planet. The brain cannot handle hate and thinking at the same time. Those who live in pure hate make for great Berserkers (the red glaze is a permanent fixture in front of their eyes) but berserkers cease all higher brain functions. It is the nature of that kind of mindset.
Likewise, it is possible to have a high intellect and some emotion - a lot of artist-scientists fall into this category. But if you have absolutely pure intellect, emotion tends to be a little dead.
It's not strictly a simple linear system. Meditating produces a mindset that is free of both emotion and intellect. So it's more a triangle.
Up until now, there were two camps - those who believed intellect was 100% inherited, and those who believed it was 100% environmental.
The evidence for environmental factors contributing to intelligence became overwhelming. Despite long, hard efforts, no genetic trait had been convincingly demonstrated. The result was that the nature vs. nurture argument was taken to be over and the nurture side had won.
These findings reopen the debate (which is right, proper and bloody obvious), but they also make it clear that the brain has to be affected by many different factors. We don't know all the factors, and in the case of genetics we only know =that= genes are involved, we know practically nothing about which genes are involved, to what degree, or how they interact with environmental inputs to produce the conglomerate effect we see in reality.
Everything in the body has identical genes. Unless you are one of a number of people (percentage unknown) who absorbed your own twin before being born. The absorbed twin will have its own DNA. I believe something like 24-25 cases of this have been firmly established in the US.
How the genes differentiate is, as yet, unknown but is likely in part to do with the epigenome. This switches genes on and off, alters how bases map to proteins, etc. It is altered by diet and other chemical signals, so it is logical to assume it is the key to why you're not a totally uniform blob.
It is therefore the epigenome which determines the functioning of a given organ. The DNA can be thought of as a stock library of functions akin to glibc, with the epigenome acting as an API wrapper to selectively expose the functions and to manipulate the results.
Because blaming someone else is part of the tradition for the mass media.
You sure? Though you said you heard it on the grepvine.
So what you're saying is that it is imperitive for the rational media to find True Believers and cause a personal crisis in them until they finally become a True Believer in honest reporting?
Since all organs share the same genes...... no. Good attempt at satire, just a few million miles short of the mark.
I mostly agree. This is, by far, the biggest factor. Genetic makeup comes second. Diet comes third. In fourth place comes tactical education (ie: tailoring what is learned so that it is not only stimulating and engaging but also maximizes brain development). I'd put styled education (ie: picking a style of teaching suitable for the material) fifth or possibly sixth. Rewards come about 279th on the list, punishment at 280th and standardization would be a few million further down the list from that.
I'm assuming the grandparent post is factoring in a baseline of 1/4 the US deficit for the woman spending. Since this is a constant, it can be divided out.
You can't get a brain transplant, true, but there is ample evidence that what you learn, and how intensively you learn, shapes your brain to a significant degree. Shaping your education according to your brain's strengths aught to maximize your ability and might easily take you to a point beyond where genes alone can take you.
Diet will also play a role - diet alters how genes are interpreted, so good genes can certainly be crippled with a poor diet and average genes -may-, under certain circumstances, be enhanced by a good diet. Diet also determines if the materials (and energy) needed to build the brain up are available.
So genes are one factor of several. Telling a kid to work hard or work smart isn't, however, amongst those factors.
Your family tree is on Tattooine?
It does. To hate requires that you sacrifice all intellect for emotion. Those blinded by love are equally guilty, but are usually less destructive - though there are exceptions. But because it is devoid of intellect, why you hate is immaterial. Mere after-the-fact rationalization. For that reason, talk of "just cause" and other such crap should never be accepted as a reason to hate. There is no reason to hate for reason cannot hate and hate cannot reason.
Hard drives are easy to beat. Core memory has an estimated lifespan 20-30x that of a hard drive, is impervious to EMP and won't crash if bumped.
How is this a cloud?
Far from being "over with", it's put the actual mastermind being all of Al Queda's evil in charge of the organization.
If he could "put out messages", there's a bloody huge security hole. Unless you imagine he was psychic. Finding the security holes within the military would have saved more lives in the long-run.
Sure it would inspire anger. So does killing him. However, capturing him forces the anger to be rash and without forethought, giving us the advantage. Killing him gives those seeking revenge the time needed to plot something far more deadly. That gives them the advantage.
"Book Of Five Rings" states quite clearly that you should ALWAYS keep your foes off-balance.