For those who aren't familiar with his work, Dr. Gould did more than write "The Mismeasure of Man" although that was an excellent piece of work.
He was also Professor of Biology, Geology and History of Science at Harvard. For many years he wrote a wide-ranging and fascinating column, "This View of Life", in Natural History magazine. He was tireless in his efforts at promoting the teaching of science in the public schools and became the bane of the so-to-speak Scientific Creationists.
And that is ignoring his greatest accomplishments. He was one of the great lights of evolutionary biology in the 20th century. His work with Eldredge (Eldridge?) on punctuated equilibrium led to some of the most fertile research on the rates and methods by which change happens in the natural world.
Stephen Gould was that rarest of beasts - a cultured scientist who could make difficult, advanced concepts easy to grasp. He had a brilliant intellect, a witty and gentle sense of humor and an inspired gift for teaching and writing.
Science, in fact all human culture is much poorer today. Sophia (the Hebrew spirit of wisdom) has turned her face from us. Why did he leave us so soon when we still need him to fight the good fight against igorance and superstition? When will we see one like him again?
Several people have already pointed out that "natural" doesn't mean "good for you". Perhaps a little more emphasis is in order.
Back when I did more botany I discovered that plants produce chemicals that do two basic sorts of things:
1)Produce more plant tissue by making food, growing, reproducing, or something of the sort
2)Bug killer. Stuff that makes them poisonous or unpalatable to things that eat them at the macroscopic or microscopic level.
Our favorite alkaloid - caffeine - is the second sort of chemical. We just happen to find the effects useful or pleasurable. Think about it, a bug that has its appetite suppressed and is jittery is going to eat less of you and eat that less efficiently.
Other perfectly natural substances like oil of wormwood will eat holes in your brain because that is what makes it worth the metabolic cost to the plant to produce them. Dead bugs don't eat you if you are a plant.
Women's Self Defense, actually. In our advanced class we do a total sensory overload thing where they work up to fighting multiple attackers with three loud soundtracks, different colored lights blinking at different frequencies, bad smelling fog, obstacles on the floor, and my wife shooting a starter pistol. Unfortunately, a lot of them say "This is just like a night at a club."
If you want to join we have a position open for UNpadded attacker...
Good web design is like good music or good writing. It's only good insofar as it meets the desires and expectations of the audience. My wife and I think Son Seals and Koko Taylor are The S**t. The 18 year old young women in our WSD are bored with them. They like (boring, rhytmless, tuneless:-) techno.
Some people LIKE lots of Flash, animated buttons and dancing bologna on the screen. I like clean and simple. Each is appropriate for different tasks.
The question is, as always, "What problem are you trying to solve?"
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
*sigh*
First, these aren't "mutant" flies. The only place where being irradiated turns the recipient into a mutant is the pages of Marvel comics. A mutation would exist if a sperm cell or ovum were altered. The offspring that arose from it would be the 'mutant'.
Second, the treated flies are sterile. That's the whole point of the exercise. They will mate with female tse tse flies who won't produce little tse-tse flies.
Third this is not a new technique. It was first (I believe) done with the screw-worm fly in Texas. It worked quite well there. Saved the cattle industry billions of dollars. If the female only mates once and her partner is sterile she won't reproduce. Note that I said "only mates once". This technique does not do any good if the female mates with more than one male. So it works with some species but not with others.
Fourth, someone said that if there are even two fertile flies the whole thing will be for naught. Not so. Biological control is a game of averages and percentages. You don't get absolutes very often. If the number of tse-tse flies can be significantly reduced it will still be a public health boon and a godsend to people with livestock.
The late Isaac Asimov wrote a story about forty years ago on just this subject. Vat-grown meat had become the standard. So much so that people had forgotten its genetic origins.
The narrator is an expert witness at Senate hearings on a new product. Very tasty and digestible. Extremely popular. The story ends just as the narrator is about to define an old mostly-forgotten word - "Cannibal"
My wife and I have read the books about a hundred times. We know exactly what is going to happen. We were still on the edges of our chairs. Tiel was in tears. It exceeded all our expectations.
The changes and interpretations were good ones.
I don't know how we will wait another two years to see it all come out.
The technology is cool. No doubt about it. And the idea of not having to change your radio presets or hunt for stations on long drives is attractive.
But solutions running around in search or problems is a great way to go broke. As we saw after the Internet Bubble.
This article was very much from the 'supplier' side. As a possible consumer or satellite radio I have a few questions that will need some serious answers before I shell out a couple hundred for a radio and over a hundred a year for a service which I can get nominally for free right now.
1) Will the programming be any better? The choice of music on American radio has been getting worse and worse, more and more homogenized for a couple decades (cf. Clearcase). What guarantee is there that I won't be shelling out big bucks for the same crud?
2) One of the attractions of satellite radio is that you pay for it. So the provider doesn't have to underwrite the enterprise through advertising. So the customer doesn't get five minutes of commercials every seven-and-a-half minutes. The article spills a lot of ink about the opportunities for advertisers. Again the question, why pay a premium for the same annoying ads you can already get for free?
3) What sort of variety is there in the programming. The article points out that a lot of important genres aren't covered by regular radio offerings. Will the new providers actually do this? Or will they go for the most popular stuff and end up as an imitation of what is already out there (once again, already out there for free)? Will I be able to hear Samba, Afro/Pop, Chicago Blues and Bluegrass? Or will it be Top 40, "Classic" Rock, watered-down hip hop, and Country-Western?
For those who don't know what sgt_getraer is talking about visit the page this week. The owner of FC got a letter (posted on the front of his site) demanding that he turn over the names of anonymous posters who said unpleasant things about a company he mentioned as being in financial trouble. The names were wanted in connection with a libel suit filed by the company.
William Gibson, Charles Sheffield, and Orson Scott Card
I think not. These three are chiefly remarkable because they found a parade and got to the head of it or, at best, appealed to some very specific, topical part of the zeitgeist. The world hasn't quite turned out like they thought (Japanese ascendancy for Gibson's example). I'm willing to bet that they don't speak to anything as common to the human condition as, say, Ring Lardner, O. Henry, or Runyon. And who reads them any more?
If any of today's popular writing survives it will probably be Dr. Suess.
It's really not bad, certainly less dangerous and less explosive than the propane tanks and natural gas we have learned to accept. Much less so than tanks full of gasoline.
The most famous evidence of the unacceptable dangers of hydrogen was the Hindenburg explosion. A close look at the film shows some interesting results. The hydrogen went up (literally). The huge fire was caused by the diesel from the engines burning.
Then too, you have to consider "normal accidents" as well as the flashier exceptional ones. Burning hydrocarbons produce things link carbon monoxide. Not good. Very poisonous. Very insidious. Burning hydrogen produces water vapor. Much less nasty.
Of course, if you get your hydrogen by electrolyzing water and use electricity from burning fossil fuels you are still producing unpleasant stuff. But smokestacks are easier to track down and fit with scrubbers and other anti-pollution devices.
CCR wasn't talking about this, but it's apropos. Here are just a few of the problems I see:
Legally a voice recording can be evidence (wiretaps and whatnot). Now it will be easy to falsify evidence. After a few abuses this will lead to the end of voice evidence
With Shrek and Final Fantasy as the first steps in video and this technology in audio say bye-bye to extras
Eventually, the same thing will apply to most actors
Candidates won't even have to give their own stump speeches.
You'd need an AI that was better than the collective judgement of the Supreme Court for the last forty years. All jokes aside it just ain't gonna happen
Every time a new restriction to our rights is planned the drag out:
Porn
Terrorism
Crackers
Drugs
This time, it has to be porn. The real target is people sharing files, period. But rather than get into a discussion about what (used to) constitute fair use they need a demon. If it plays on one of the four fears above they have a good excuse for doing whatever they want. It didn't work so well with encryption (even though they invoked all four). Saying "It would hurt Sony's business model" isn't quite sexy enough. So it has to be one of the Four.
Look for more restrictions on file sharing period sometime soon
As electronic communications become more regulated and "more like" other aspects of life it was inevitable that the ACLU would become concerned with them.
High time. We could use an experienced and effective advocate like them
I've seen something similar, years ago, in the Bay of Fundy(sp?) in Canada. The idea isn't new.
Then as now there are two problems.The first is technical, the second is a problem of will.
1) Reliability is always a question. How high will the swells and tide be?
2) Like the fuel cell and the super-efficient car we've had the technology available for decades. The problem is money and desire. With the fossil fuel companies owning the governments there is little will in the public sector to develop this stuff. The private sector energy companies (Ayn Rand Fundamentalists notwithstanding) has no stake in upsetting their own applecart.
The problem with both of these is that Brian Herbert and his collaborator aren't Frank Herbert.
Two of the great strengths of the original Dune books were FH's use of mystery and fascinating point of view characters.
He didn't give you all the information in great expository lumps. You got just enough for the story to make sense and trusted that the rest would come. The current books plop it all down in front of you leaving nothing for the imagination and nothing to make you wonder what's going on.
The other is the characters. In the original series you got inside the minds of people who were very very different from you and me. Many were also much more intelligent and subtle than Herbert himself. A very neat trick for an author. The current crop is flat and ordinary. Disappointing.
La Allah Y'Ha Il Dollar-There is no God but Dollar
on
The Corporate Republic
·
· Score: 1
Think for a moment about a corporation. The law says it's a person but has none of the responsibilities of a person. It is potentially immortal. And by its very charter it can have no conscience and no consideration for ANYTHING except maximizing profit. An officer of a corporation has (and I quote) "A Fiduciary duty to maximize stockholder equity." This means that any action, any at all, which does not serve to increase profit to the greatest degree possible is not permissible. Also, look at how the popular press views The Market. It has replaced the Deity. The Market is omnipotent; nothing can withstand it. It is omniscient; if there is a need or a desire The Market will know about it. It is omnibenevolent; if The Market is allowed to do exactly what it wants everyone will be perfectly happy. I used to be an economist before I realized just how flawed the (pseudo) science behind the field was
Slashdot Mirror
He was also Professor of Biology, Geology and History of Science at Harvard. For many years he wrote a wide-ranging and fascinating column, "This View of Life", in Natural History magazine. He was tireless in his efforts at promoting the teaching of science in the public schools and became the bane of the so-to-speak Scientific Creationists.
And that is ignoring his greatest accomplishments. He was one of the great lights of evolutionary biology in the 20th century. His work with Eldredge (Eldridge?) on punctuated equilibrium led to some of the most fertile research on the rates and methods by which change happens in the natural world.
Again, he will be missed.
Stephen Gould was that rarest of beasts - a cultured scientist who could make difficult, advanced concepts easy to grasp. He had a brilliant intellect, a witty and gentle sense of humor and an inspired gift for teaching and writing.
Science, in fact all human culture is much poorer today. Sophia (the Hebrew spirit of wisdom) has turned her face from us. Why did he leave us so soon when we still need him to fight the good fight against igorance and superstition? When will we see one like him again?
Several people have already pointed out that "natural" doesn't mean "good for you". Perhaps a little more emphasis is in order.
Back when I did more botany I discovered that plants produce chemicals that do two basic sorts of things:
1)Produce more plant tissue by making food, growing, reproducing, or something of the sort
2)Bug killer. Stuff that makes them poisonous or unpalatable to things that eat them at the macroscopic or microscopic level.
Our favorite alkaloid - caffeine - is the second sort of chemical. We just happen to find the effects useful or pleasurable. Think about it, a bug that has its appetite suppressed and is jittery is going to eat less of you and eat that less efficiently.
Other perfectly natural substances like oil of wormwood will eat holes in your brain because that is what makes it worth the metabolic cost to the plant to produce them. Dead bugs don't eat you if you are a plant.
Women's Self Defense, actually. In our advanced class we do a total sensory overload thing where they work up to fighting multiple attackers with three loud soundtracks, different colored lights blinking at different frequencies, bad smelling fog, obstacles on the floor, and my wife shooting a starter pistol. Unfortunately, a lot of them say "This is just like a night at a club."
If you want to join we have a position open for UNpadded attacker...
Good web design is like good music or good writing. It's only good insofar as it meets the desires and expectations of the audience. My wife and I think Son Seals and Koko Taylor are The S**t. The 18 year old young women in our WSD are bored with them. They like (boring, rhytmless, tuneless :-) techno.
Some people LIKE lots of Flash, animated buttons and dancing bologna on the screen. I like clean and simple. Each is appropriate for different tasks.
The question is, as always, "What problem are you trying to solve?"
First, these aren't "mutant" flies. The only place where being irradiated turns the recipient into a mutant is the pages of Marvel comics. A mutation would exist if a sperm cell or ovum were altered. The offspring that arose from it would be the 'mutant'.
Second, the treated flies are sterile. That's the whole point of the exercise. They will mate with female tse tse flies who won't produce little tse-tse flies.
Third this is not a new technique. It was first (I believe) done with the screw-worm fly in Texas. It worked quite well there. Saved the cattle industry billions of dollars. If the female only mates once and her partner is sterile she won't reproduce. Note that I said "only mates once". This technique does not do any good if the female mates with more than one male. So it works with some species but not with others.
Fourth, someone said that if there are even two fertile flies the whole thing will be for naught. Not so. Biological control is a game of averages and percentages. You don't get absolutes very often. If the number of tse-tse flies can be significantly reduced it will still be a public health boon and a godsend to people with livestock.
A bottom-dwelling aquatic filter-feeding crustacean. To all intents what we have here isn't a scorpion. It's a lobster.
Once again, science fiction to the rescue!
The late Isaac Asimov wrote a story about forty years ago on just this subject. Vat-grown meat had become the standard. So much so that people had forgotten its genetic origins.
The narrator is an expert witness at Senate hearings on a new product. Very tasty and digestible. Extremely popular. The story ends just as the narrator is about to define an old mostly-forgotten word - "Cannibal"
My wife and I have read the books about a hundred times. We know exactly what is going to happen. We were still on the edges of our chairs. Tiel was in tears. It exceeded all our expectations.
The changes and interpretations were good ones.
I don't know how we will wait another two years to see it all come out.
The technology is cool. No doubt about it. And the idea of not having to change your radio presets or hunt for stations on long drives is attractive.
But solutions running around in search or problems is a great way to go broke. As we saw after the Internet Bubble.
This article was very much from the 'supplier' side. As a possible consumer or satellite radio I have a few questions that will need some serious answers before I shell out a couple hundred for a radio and over a hundred a year for a service which I can get nominally for free right now.
1) Will the programming be any better? The choice of music on American radio has been getting worse and worse, more and more homogenized for a couple decades (cf. Clearcase). What guarantee is there that I won't be shelling out big bucks for the same crud?
2) One of the attractions of satellite radio is that you pay for it. So the provider doesn't have to underwrite the enterprise through advertising. So the customer doesn't get five minutes of commercials every seven-and-a-half minutes. The article spills a lot of ink about the opportunities for advertisers. Again the question, why pay a premium for the same annoying ads you can already get for free?
3) What sort of variety is there in the programming. The article points out that a lot of important genres aren't covered by regular radio offerings. Will the new providers actually do this? Or will they go for the most popular stuff and end up as an imitation of what is already out there (once again, already out there for free)? Will I be able to hear Samba, Afro/Pop, Chicago Blues and Bluegrass? Or will it be Top 40, "Classic" Rock, watered-down hip hop, and Country-Western?
We saw this in Britain. We see it in the US. *sigh*
For those who don't know what sgt_getraer is talking about visit the page this week. The owner of FC got a letter (posted on the front of his site) demanding that he turn over the names of anonymous posters who said unpleasant things about a company he mentioned as being in financial trouble. The names were wanted in connection with a libel suit filed by the company.
No libel -> no lawsuit -> no problems for FC
I think not. These three are chiefly remarkable because they found a parade and got to the head of it or, at best, appealed to some very specific, topical part of the zeitgeist. The world hasn't quite turned out like they thought (Japanese ascendancy for Gibson's example). I'm willing to bet that they don't speak to anything as common to the human condition as, say, Ring Lardner, O. Henry, or Runyon. And who reads them any more?
If any of today's popular writing survives it will probably be Dr. Suess.
It's really not bad, certainly less dangerous and less explosive than the propane tanks and natural gas we have learned to accept. Much less so than tanks full of gasoline.
The most famous evidence of the unacceptable dangers of hydrogen was the Hindenburg explosion. A close look at the film shows some interesting results. The hydrogen went up (literally). The huge fire was caused by the diesel from the engines burning.
Then too, you have to consider "normal accidents" as well as the flashier exceptional ones. Burning hydrocarbons produce things link carbon monoxide. Not good. Very poisonous. Very insidious. Burning hydrogen produces water vapor. Much less nasty.
Of course, if you get your hydrogen by electrolyzing water and use electricity from burning fossil fuels you are still producing unpleasant stuff. But smokestacks are easier to track down and fit with scrubbers and other anti-pollution devices.
They aren't new. They've been a staple at organic food stores for years. Of course, how many slashdotters shop at organic food stores ;-)
The purple potato is one of the ancestral Peruvian ur-potatoes. It's quite high in nutrients and tastes delicious.
You'd need an AI that was better than the collective judgement of the Supreme Court for the last forty years. All jokes aside it just ain't gonna happen
Every time a new restriction to our rights is planned the drag out: Porn Terrorism Crackers Drugs This time, it has to be porn. The real target is people sharing files, period. But rather than get into a discussion about what (used to) constitute fair use they need a demon. If it plays on one of the four fears above they have a good excuse for doing whatever they want. It didn't work so well with encryption (even though they invoked all four). Saying "It would hurt Sony's business model" isn't quite sexy enough. So it has to be one of the Four. Look for more restrictions on file sharing period sometime soon
As electronic communications become more regulated and "more like" other aspects of life it was inevitable that the ACLU would become concerned with them. High time. We could use an experienced and effective advocate like them
...has been around for a while (cf. Fred Hoyle). Given the researcher it's going to be a nearly religious argument within the scientific community.,
Then as now there are two problems.The first is technical, the second is a problem of will.
1) Reliability is always a question. How high will the swells and tide be?
2) Like the fuel cell and the super-efficient car we've had the technology available for decades. The problem is money and desire. With the fossil fuel companies owning the governments there is little will in the public sector to develop this stuff. The private sector energy companies (Ayn Rand Fundamentalists notwithstanding) has no stake in upsetting their own applecart.
Two of the great strengths of the original Dune books were FH's use of mystery and fascinating point of view characters. He didn't give you all the information in great expository lumps. You got just enough for the story to make sense and trusted that the rest would come. The current books plop it all down in front of you leaving nothing for the imagination and nothing to make you wonder what's going on. The other is the characters. In the original series you got inside the minds of people who were very very different from you and me. Many were also much more intelligent and subtle than Herbert himself. A very neat trick for an author. The current crop is flat and ordinary. Disappointing.
Think for a moment about a corporation. The law says it's a person but has none of the responsibilities of a person. It is potentially immortal. And by its very charter it can have no conscience and no consideration for ANYTHING except maximizing profit. An officer of a corporation has (and I quote) "A Fiduciary duty to maximize stockholder equity." This means that any action, any at all, which does not serve to increase profit to the greatest degree possible is not permissible. Also, look at how the popular press views The Market. It has replaced the Deity. The Market is omnipotent; nothing can withstand it. It is omniscient; if there is a need or a desire The Market will know about it. It is omnibenevolent; if The Market is allowed to do exactly what it wants everyone will be perfectly happy. I used to be an economist before I realized just how flawed the (pseudo) science behind the field was