The wiki article pretty much nails it down to spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia, plentiful in the area where the red rain was found, as well as many other places in the world.
Spores don't divide at 121C or 300C.
Yet, we are now treated to the suggestion that because the same wave lengths of light as are found in some remote part of the galaxy can be induced when samples are bombarded with some (conveniently unspecified) light source..
Fluorescence doesn't work that way.
Somehow I suspect we would not be discussing this if a crackpot was not involved.
Well, what defines a "crackpot"? The people described their materials, methods, and results. Those are not consistent with spores. There are three possibilities: (1) the experiments were carried out incorrectly, (2) the authors deliberately lied, or (3) the experimental results are as described.
How can one proceed? Peer review may uncover gross errors in their experimental procedures, in which case they would have to go back and redo their experiments.
If there are no gross errors, there's no reason not to publish the results; they are still implausible, but not obviously wrong.
The only way to figure out what's going on is to try and replicate the experiments a few times. Once people do that, we'll know. Until that's done, the issue is simply unresolved. There's no need to call people "crackpot" over it, but there's no reason to believe the results either.
A lot of research results these days are put up on Arxiv and other publication servers prior to publication and without peer review. There is nothing unusual about that, and nothing wrong with that. It's the way many sciences work these days. Some journals may summarily reject such papers, but that's probably not a policy they can stick to in the long run.
As for peer review, it's a convenience for working scientists to weed out obviously bad papers so that they don't have to waste time on it, nothing more. If you work in a field, you are as qualified as the peer reviewers. In fact, often you're more qualified because many "peer reviewers" are simply graduate students.
Peer review publication is a simple quality criterion for non-experts outside a field, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific work to be good or valid. For that, you really need to use your own head and discuss the work with others.
There are tons of tilt-shift lenses for DSLRs. Most people these days don't bother, though: they correct on the computer or (even better) assemble a large number of photos into a vertical panorama. You can also remove people easily that way.
I have been using a Mac Mini for that for a while. I don't think it's a good solution. A few apps work well with a TV interface, but as a full computer, it requires quite a bit of interaction to keep it updated and working, but OS X isn't all that convenient to use on a TV. You can kind of work around that by using remote desktop. It also didn't deal well with overscan and didn't give me a full set of video modes and I never found a workaround for that. And a Mac Mini is very expensive compared to PCs, netbooks, or mini-PCs.
This should also be extended to copyright and clearly unenforceable license terms: companies should not be allowed to claim "intellectual property" that they don't have the rights to.
Energy is already cheaper than it has ever been in human history, and we are destroying more topsoil, not less. That's because, no matter how cheap energy becomes, it's still cheaper to destroy the topsoil than to produce by other means.
You have a government issued ID with a government-issued ID number. Phone companies are required to collect this information and verify it with the government. They also generally require banking information for billing purposes, and make sure that that's consistent with the registered user of the phone as well. Yes, you can try to privately sell a SIM card registered under your name to someone else and manage to get by with prepaid cards. But that's a risky thing to do, because if the phone is used for some illicit purpose, the police will come to you. Even if you can prove you didn't do the crime, intending to get around registration requirements itself may cause trouble. There are some ways around this (e.g. roaming SIM cards), but most people are fully registered and tracked.
As for the Internet, Internet connections are also registered with the government under your name, and your provider is required to keep a record of all your connections, and it's illegal to set up open access points. Of course, it's easier to communicate clandestinely with Internet protocols, including going through foreign proxies, but if you try, that itself is often detectable and suspicious.
Where Germany wins over a place like Saudi Arabia is that they generally use all this tracking and surveillance only against actual crimes, although it's probably only a matter of time until those protections erode and governments will start using it for political purposes. Some of the people responsible for the laws and technology had plenty of experience from fascist and communist regimes.
If you want to argue that our civilization and economy can survive hitting global resource limits, the burden of proof is on you. There are numerous examples of civilizations that have self-destructed when faced with resource limits. I know of none beyond hunter-gatherer societies that have lived sustainably. And our economists consider zero growth to be a major economic disaster.
Gee gosh, so we didn't manage to get reporters onto all of them
The US military should release names, pictures, locations, and numbers of all civilians killed. If they don't, it's basically a cover-up.
Look, if there's say, bad training, or poor morale that's causing troops to be trigger-happy, or careless, then by all means, we should fix it up.
There won't be any political pressure to do this until voters are actually aware of it.
But if it's just, the Taliban is picking fights in crowded market places, or they're shooting rockets from among civilians, then melting back into the crowds, it does make it hard to avoid tragedies like those described in the reports. If anything, the reports just a description of what normally happens in war.
But it does raise the political and moral issue why we are in Afghanistan in the first place, and whether the money spent and human lives lost are justified. That discussion, too, can only be had if the public actually knows what's going on.
At the beginning of these wars, we were promised that they would be quick, effective, cheap, and "clean". When the data contradicts this (as it does), we need to know about it.
There are many organizations that leak, not just Wikileaks. In aggregate, their leaks are unbiased. It isn't necessary that each individual organization is unbiased. Furthermore, you don't need to know the motivation or sources behind the release of verifiable facts; the facts remain unchanged by who released the data or why. The US government has had more than enough opportunity to respond to the facts disclosed by Wikileaks.
Secrecy (protection of sources) is the only way leaks are feasible. You know that, and so your comment is really an underhanded attack on Wikileaks.
Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially.
And where many economists get it wrong is in not realizing that this is not sustainable. You can print exponentially much money and delude yourself into believing that there is perpetual growth, but food production and population growth invariably will hit a wall. We're still growing because we're using up finite resources at an enormous rate; once they are gone, human populations will crash.
Now you understand how Right-wingers feel at being labeled 'The American Taliban.' Seriously, judging any movement by it's most extreme elements is silly.
There are left/right-wingers, moderates, and centrists. The something-wingers are, by definition, the "most extremist elements".
This puts Tv on demand at the pricepoint that even cheap-ass ol' me will even pay.
Many of the big cable providers give you movies on demand for very little money already (I don't know whether they include TV shows, but I suspect they do).
So if I get rid of Comcast or Dish at even the low price rate of $39.00 a month.
You still pay for Internet access, and the difference between Internet and Internet+cable isn't that large (at least for my provider).
At that point, you also don't have to worry about impacts anymore, since you can simply steer away from the big ones are are protected from the small ones.
Are you so stupid as to thing a misinterpreted and unenforceable clause
Really? And you know this how?
And that means that they'll now control everything that's published? Are you fucking KIDDING me?
I already can't view my DVDs on a Linux box or transfer iTunes movies I have purchased to other devices. Amazon and Apple both have deleted content they don't like from people's devices. YouTube, Google, Yahoo, and others delete controversial content frequently, often completely ignoring fair use provisions. The only reason we can still break DVDs is because the crypto in them was deliberately weak (due to export restrictions.
In a few years, all books, videos, photos, almost our entire history and intellectual life will be on the Internet. Patents and cryptography will ensure that you can view it only on devices controlled by a few companies. That's what we're heading for.
It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards',
"Standards" aren't a legal concepts, they are just what people agree on. So, there is no way of enforcing any such requirements. And why do you think h.264 has those patents in the first place? Most of what they patent is nearly useless from a compression point of view. The whole purpose of the MPEG-LA consortium is to create a proprietary standard covered by enough patents that there cannot be any patent unencumbered implementations. And since MPEG-LA members make the hardware and software that most people use, they can impose such standards on you, whether it's good for you or not, and whether you realize what's going on or not.
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The wiki article pretty much nails it down to spores of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia, plentiful in the area where the red rain was found, as well as many other places in the world.
Spores don't divide at 121C or 300C.
Yet, we are now treated to the suggestion that because the same wave lengths of light as are found in some remote part of the galaxy can be induced when samples are bombarded with some (conveniently unspecified) light source..
Fluorescence doesn't work that way.
Somehow I suspect we would not be discussing this if a crackpot was not involved.
Well, what defines a "crackpot"? The people described their materials, methods, and results. Those are not consistent with spores. There are three possibilities: (1) the experiments were carried out incorrectly, (2) the authors deliberately lied, or (3) the experimental results are as described.
How can one proceed? Peer review may uncover gross errors in their experimental procedures, in which case they would have to go back and redo their experiments.
If there are no gross errors, there's no reason not to publish the results; they are still implausible, but not obviously wrong.
The only way to figure out what's going on is to try and replicate the experiments a few times. Once people do that, we'll know. Until that's done, the issue is simply unresolved. There's no need to call people "crackpot" over it, but there's no reason to believe the results either.
A lot of research results these days are put up on Arxiv and other publication servers prior to publication and without peer review. There is nothing unusual about that, and nothing wrong with that. It's the way many sciences work these days. Some journals may summarily reject such papers, but that's probably not a policy they can stick to in the long run.
As for peer review, it's a convenience for working scientists to weed out obviously bad papers so that they don't have to waste time on it, nothing more. If you work in a field, you are as qualified as the peer reviewers. In fact, often you're more qualified because many "peer reviewers" are simply graduate students.
Peer review publication is a simple quality criterion for non-experts outside a field, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific work to be good or valid. For that, you really need to use your own head and discuss the work with others.
All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad
It's not about whether Flash sucks (it does), it's about having the choice instead of having Jobs make the choice for me.
There are tons of tilt-shift lenses for DSLRs. Most people these days don't bother, though: they correct on the computer or (even better) assemble a large number of photos into a vertical panorama. You can also remove people easily that way.
I have been using a Mac Mini for that for a while. I don't think it's a good solution. A few apps work well with a TV interface, but as a full computer, it requires quite a bit of interaction to keep it updated and working, but OS X isn't all that convenient to use on a TV. You can kind of work around that by using remote desktop. It also didn't deal well with overscan and didn't give me a full set of video modes and I never found a workaround for that. And a Mac Mini is very expensive compared to PCs, netbooks, or mini-PCs.
Netbooks or laptops are small, quiet, come with built-in power backup, and a second screen besides your TV for installing stuff.
This should also be extended to copyright and clearly unenforceable license terms: companies should not be allowed to claim "intellectual property" that they don't have the rights to.
Energy is already cheaper than it has ever been in human history, and we are destroying more topsoil, not less. That's because, no matter how cheap energy becomes, it's still cheaper to destroy the topsoil than to produce by other means.
Well, it's more like "at least they are not as bad as the Saudis".
You have a government issued ID with a government-issued ID number. Phone companies are required to collect this information and verify it with the government. They also generally require banking information for billing purposes, and make sure that that's consistent with the registered user of the phone as well. Yes, you can try to privately sell a SIM card registered under your name to someone else and manage to get by with prepaid cards. But that's a risky thing to do, because if the phone is used for some illicit purpose, the police will come to you. Even if you can prove you didn't do the crime, intending to get around registration requirements itself may cause trouble. There are some ways around this (e.g. roaming SIM cards), but most people are fully registered and tracked.
As for the Internet, Internet connections are also registered with the government under your name, and your provider is required to keep a record of all your connections, and it's illegal to set up open access points. Of course, it's easier to communicate clandestinely with Internet protocols, including going through foreign proxies, but if you try, that itself is often detectable and suspicious.
Where Germany wins over a place like Saudi Arabia is that they generally use all this tracking and surveillance only against actual crimes, although it's probably only a matter of time until those protections erode and governments will start using it for political purposes. Some of the people responsible for the laws and technology had plenty of experience from fascist and communist regimes.
And on the other hand, there are billions of people living in hunger and poverty in the world.
You cannot infer anything from what's going on in the wealthy, resource intensive economies of the West about humanity as a whole.
If you want to argue that our civilization and economy can survive hitting global resource limits, the burden of proof is on you. There are numerous examples of civilizations that have self-destructed when faced with resource limits. I know of none beyond hunter-gatherer societies that have lived sustainably. And our economists consider zero growth to be a major economic disaster.
Gee gosh, so we didn't manage to get reporters onto all of them
The US military should release names, pictures, locations, and numbers of all civilians killed. If they don't, it's basically a cover-up.
Look, if there's say, bad training, or poor morale that's causing troops to be trigger-happy, or careless, then by all means, we should fix it up.
There won't be any political pressure to do this until voters are actually aware of it.
But if it's just, the Taliban is picking fights in crowded market places, or they're shooting rockets from among civilians, then melting back into the crowds, it does make it hard to avoid tragedies like those described in the reports. If anything, the reports just a description of what normally happens in war.
But it does raise the political and moral issue why we are in Afghanistan in the first place, and whether the money spent and human lives lost are justified. That discussion, too, can only be had if the public actually knows what's going on.
At the beginning of these wars, we were promised that they would be quick, effective, cheap, and "clean". When the data contradicts this (as it does), we need to know about it.
There are many organizations that leak, not just Wikileaks. In aggregate, their leaks are unbiased. It isn't necessary that each individual organization is unbiased. Furthermore, you don't need to know the motivation or sources behind the release of verifiable facts; the facts remain unchanged by who released the data or why. The US government has had more than enough opportunity to respond to the facts disclosed by Wikileaks.
Secrecy (protection of sources) is the only way leaks are feasible. You know that, and so your comment is really an underhanded attack on Wikileaks.
Even cheap energy isn't going to help indefinitely: topsoil is eroding rapidly and arable land is decreasing. Fishing has also declined greatly.
Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially.
And where many economists get it wrong is in not realizing that this is not sustainable. You can print exponentially much money and delude yourself into believing that there is perpetual growth, but food production and population growth invariably will hit a wall. We're still growing because we're using up finite resources at an enormous rate; once they are gone, human populations will crash.
Now you understand how Right-wingers feel at being labeled 'The American Taliban.' Seriously, judging any movement by it's most extreme elements is silly.
There are left/right-wingers, moderates, and centrists. The something-wingers are, by definition, the "most extremist elements".
Bender? Is that you?
You don't need SQL in order to get ACID properties. And some common SQL-like languages don't provide ACID.
Furthermore, SQL wasn't designed for what it is being used for today; SQL was meant to be a database interaction language for non-experts.
And "information theory" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means...
Bluetooth is very low power, and it basically doesn't use power if it's not used.
This puts Tv on demand at the pricepoint that even cheap-ass ol' me will even pay.
Many of the big cable providers give you movies on demand for very little money already (I don't know whether they include TV shows, but I suspect they do).
So if I get rid of Comcast or Dish at even the low price rate of $39.00 a month.
You still pay for Internet access, and the difference between Internet and Internet+cable isn't that large (at least for my provider).
At that point, you also don't have to worry about impacts anymore, since you can simply steer away from the big ones are are protected from the small ones.
Are you so stupid as to thing a misinterpreted and unenforceable clause
Really? And you know this how?
And that means that they'll now control everything that's published? Are you fucking KIDDING me?
I already can't view my DVDs on a Linux box or transfer iTunes movies I have purchased to other devices. Amazon and Apple both have deleted content they don't like from people's devices. YouTube, Google, Yahoo, and others delete controversial content frequently, often completely ignoring fair use provisions. The only reason we can still break DVDs is because the crypto in them was deliberately weak (due to export restrictions.
In a few years, all books, videos, photos, almost our entire history and intellectual life will be on the Internet. Patents and cryptography will ensure that you can view it only on devices controlled by a few companies. That's what we're heading for.
And morons like you are cheering it along.
Wow! They contributed Linux kernel extensions to let Linux run on their Hyper-V platform! Amazing! Will wonders never cease?
It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards',
"Standards" aren't a legal concepts, they are just what people agree on. So, there is no way of enforcing any such requirements. And why do you think h.264 has those patents in the first place? Most of what they patent is nearly useless from a compression point of view. The whole purpose of the MPEG-LA consortium is to create a proprietary standard covered by enough patents that there cannot be any patent unencumbered implementations. And since MPEG-LA members make the hardware and software that most people use, they can impose such standards on you, whether it's good for you or not, and whether you realize what's going on or not.