I neglected to state, in my original posting, that the Arizona Republic article I cited indicated that the planned Norad operation was originally scheduled for 1998.
Jerry Pournelle has used this subject phrase for many years as his accolade for products of which he thinks highly.
I have no idea of when he started using the phrase nor any idea of when Apple introduced it.
Does anyone else no who was the actual originator of phrase>
Hijacking to force release prisoner release?
on
Saving Lives with Design
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have read that government officials thought that Osama wanted to force prisoner release by commercial aircraft highjacking; perhaps of the mullah behind the original World Trade Center bombing.
On the other hand, I was aware of a Norad exercise that was to address using hijacked planes as missiles. Right after the release of the 9/11 Commision Report, some bright, informed soul at the Arizona Republic ran a brief story about the planned Norad exercise which it turned out had never actually been carried out.
If the Norad exercise had been carried out, the lines of authority that were completely lacking 9/11/2001 and caused so much confusion and wasted time would have been documented and perhaps thousands of lives could have been saved.
I figure that if I, a retired citsen could have been aware of the concept of using high-jacked commercial aircraft as missiles, there was no excuse for high government officials to have been unaware of the concept.
Lots of high-ranking heads spent too much time in posterior dark places.
Inasmuch as no one has, insofar as I've read, any way of detecting that a large gamma burst occurred for any of the mass extinctions, I think that we should settle for the things we can detect.
For instance, the greatest mass extinction that occured at the end of the Permian Period was associated with the largest surface outpourings of magma that the earth has ever experienced. These episodes poison the air and the water on a worldwide basis. No need for hypothetical gamma bursts to explain the largest extinction.
Jerry Pounelle's "Punctuated Equilibria"? Good grief! It was Steven Jay Gould and Miles Eldridge who formulated that theory based upon their interprestation of the fossil record.
To expand a bit on evought's reference to the genetic cause of sickle-cell anemia, I refer to "The Misunderstood Gene" by Michel Morange. On page 51, he states, regarding the genetic defect which causes sickle-cell anemia, "It should be added that, in men, this mutation can sometimes lead to sterility; indeed, in some cases, this is the only sympton."
It just goes to show how complex molecular genetics is.
The anonymous coward who started (IIRC) this topic wrote very knowlegeably. The work on araibidopsis (sp?) needs to be replicated and, if successful, fanned out to other plants.
When the basis for epigenetics was discovered, it was in the the favorite animal genetic study species, C. elegans. The initial conclusion was that the results were so novel that they probably occurred in no other critter. Subsequent research revealed that epigenetics acts in every multicellular critter. It also resulted in recognition that the rather ignorant conclusion that non-coding DNA in genomes was junk resulted from the fact that genetic research had discoveries to make.
The investigator(s?) who reported the recovery of ancient genes admitted that it might or might not be limited to araibidops. If it's really a fundamental discovery, it damned sure won't be limited to one plant species.
I would have sworn that it was in/. that I read about an individual of some public awareness (sorry that I can't remember who; a penalty for growing elderly) who was not allowed to board a plane because of a requet for some irrelevant (to him) information which had never been required before. I ewxpected to see the matter brought up under this topic.
The individual asked why and was told that it was required by the Patriot Act. He asked to see what law? No one at the airport could tell him. Afterward he tried to pursue that matter through legal channels, but was told that the law requiring that information was secret.
So, not only does the Patriot Act prohibit telling individuals that they are under surveillance as a consequence of that Act, it contains material that prevents telling affected individuals what law they are running afoul of in their lives.
I"m pleased that somebody jumped on the safety problems immediately. Remember the shuttle which disintegrated and killed it's seven-person crew because no one has ever tested what effect a piece of booster insulation would have on the shuttles heat shield material? And when some presumably half-assed computer program indicated that there shoudn't have been any damamge, that management wouldn't allow anyone to even try to determine via telephoto photography whether there was underside damage?
Will the civilians be more rigorous? They'll have to test, test, and test some more. Let's hope.
Anyone else think that 2010 sounds much too optimistic?
For starters, at every conception, a almost-always unique MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) comes into existence. This is the celluar identifier for all of the organism's cells, including stem cells.
Thus, for stem cell therapy, there is an initial problem of not being able to use stem cells for any other individual without suppressing the immune system of that indiviudal. Doing that suppresses any ability of the indivduals immune system being able to suppress any random cancer cells tht might appear in the individual.
The only workaround seems to be to cultivate stem cells from the individual to be treated therapeutically and modify the resultant stem cells as the basis for some therapy.
Secondly, there is a rapidly evolving area in molecular genetics called "epigenetics" whose potential impact on stem cell therapies is still under study.
Epigenetics deals with the function of some chunks of RNA (called micro RNA)in what used to be called "junk DNA" that functions genetically by attaching methyl groups to certain regions of genes to, generally, silence those genes. Micro RNA is a part of the genome passed to offspring, but I don't remember offhand the female-male contribution roles or even if they are already determined.
Just more stuff to make it apparent that stem cell therapies are not a slam-dunk type of certainty.
Yea and verily, most especially with dogs, cats, and pigeons. The selection factors for "success" were provided by humans, but it creates proof that small mutations do occur and that the offspring do respond to the selection factors.
There are theories as to its mechanisms. Note I said "theory", not "hypothesis"; in general, a theory is the best you can do when describing a process in science. The common use of 'theory' to mean 'unproven concept' is not the way science uses it.
Judging by my experience with more recent graduates of the high school from which I matriculated in absentia in 1945, it is very difficult to convince lay persons that a hyothesis does not become a theory until facts that demonstrate it have accumulated. When the facts were based on predictions not made by any previous theory, the theory reaaly becomes rock-solid.
Irrelevant preaching in "Jurassic Park"
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
The Jeff Goldblum character in "Jurassic Park" did a lot of preaching about the Park being so complex that it could not really be controlled.
Yet, when the disaster unrolled, it was not in any way the result of complexity. Rather, the disaster was the result of deliberate sabotage by a trusted insider.
That's a Crichton habit which bugs be severely.
Re:The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Santschi
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
Several years ago, I read of an ant parasite whose life cycle includes sheep. When one of these parasites matures in the body of an ant, it causes the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass. There, it can be eaten by a sheep to continue the parasite's life cycle.
We had an extememly weird happening in Metro Phoenix within that last week or so. An expensive car, Porsche or something like that, hit another vehicle from behind. No one was in the Porsche. Police began checking backward from the scene of the accident. Two blocks back, they found the body of the man who had been driving the vehicle. Witnesses who had seen the accident develop said the driver had climbed through the roof onto the top of the car. From there, he either fell or jumped to his death.
Hi family later claimed that some parasite had infected his brain during a trip to Mexico. The supposition was that the man's frontal cortex, which consequences can be worked out, had been damaged by the parasite.
Anyone wonder why the image of an ant climbing to the tip of a blade of grass came to my mind?
I went to the site and clicked on Download. When I was informed that the software was going to download AND install, I decided to hell with it. I like to reflect on downloaded stuff before I actually install it.
Maybe if someone reports back good experience rather than conjectures, maybe I'll reconsider... if I can find the URL again.
The way I understood the situation, IBM was throwing its weight, in the ANSI subcommittee, to have EBCDIC rather than ASCII become the standard. Bob and another brilliant chap, the late Eric Clamons, were able to carry the day using the logic and utility built in to ASCII as convincing arguments. I feel fortunate to have known and worked with both of them.
No. I was the tester in a team for TEX, a powerful scripting language marketed by Honeywell Information Systems from about 1978 through 1986. Bob was the marketeer and undoubtedly contributed to the design.
Back in about 1964, when I was an engineer and a member of the Cincinnati-Dayton Chapter of the ACM, I was surprised to learn from busines-programming members that 2-digit year representation was being used. We agreed that it had better not be too long before the 2-digit year was replaced in databases.
When Bob's article on the Y2K problem appeared in 1971, I was surprised that nothing had been done. Of course, disk storage space was still quite pricey. I thought that Bob's article would stir things up.
When Y2K finally publicly surfaced in 1998 or 1999, I was stunned that not a damned thing had been done since Bob's definitive 1971 article on the topic.
Last year when I was proofing a local guru friend's in-process book ("The Healthy PC" by Carey Holzman, Osborne-McGraw Hill), we fell into a dispute (which I lost, of course) about his belief that Y2K should be described as a bug (because that's the way it was presented to the public) rather than a temporary disk space-saving convenience which had lived much too long.
I got in touch with Bob Bemer, with whom I had worked in the 1970s and 1980s, about what had actually gone down. He was very gracious and sent me a URL for a definitive newspaper article on Y2K: http://www.bobbemer.com/weingart.htm
Bob was a very gracious person, as someone else observed, and both pleasant and impressive to work with; I knew somewhat of what he had accomplished.
About 15 or 20 years ago, a large reverse osmosis desalination plant costing about $400 million was built near the Mexican border on the lower Colorado River. The intent was to meet treaty requirements to reduce the salinity of the water flowing into Mexico. I think that it was to be gas-powered.
I don't remember whether the failure to put it into operation was lack of funding or bad choice of technology. Every couple of years the topic comes up here in Arizona and it's always said that it would be too expensive to put it into operation.
I don't know whether the Mexican government gave up on the treaty or whether the necessary people have been bought.
With a five or six year drought now in effect, one would expect some constructive thinking, but it doesn't seem to happen.
We have golf courses up the wazoo (more per capita than anyplace else in the world, I believe), mostly using grey water. Every once in a while some developer will sneakily start pumping groundwater and then there's bad publicity and usage is sometimes actually changed.
Do an all-words search on "delsalination Colorado River" and you'll learn more that I remember about what went wrong. Sad, sad, sad.
In southern Arizona, at Green Valley, there is a silo which has been kept intact, except for the missile itself. I found it an interesting and impressive place to visit. They still have the radar fan antennas surrounding the silo which were intended to detect ground intruders. Somehow, it was seeing those surface radar antennas that made me feel how lucky that those of us who are still alive are to be in that condition. Basically, scarey stuff!
A computer wipe out
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a very ancient experience which occured on an IBM704 noticeably before there was any such thing as an operating system.
I had written an application which, when run, wiped 32K of RAM words clean with the same image in every word. I had to get after-hours computer time and proceeded to insert a print statement following by an abort in the source code (Fortran) in order to track the problem down.
Turned out to be an input error. The input utility I was employing used the character in column one of the data cards to indicate the type of data.
I finally determined that my assistant, who had prepared the input data for my test case had put a 3 instead of a 4 in the first column of a data card resulting in what would have been a quite reasonable integer value becoming a floating point number in the machine.
That resulted in a very long-running loop which stored the same number in every word of the machines RAM.
Thereafter, every appplication that I wrote had an input data check for every integer value to ensure that its value did not exceed the source code dimension of the array into which data were to be written.
One of the most confusing bugs I ever encountered was when I determined the obvious fix and then got the same conditions as before.
The fix looked good and showed as expected in a dump. I finally determined, by careful code checking, that there was another error downstream which produced exactly the same results. The second fix resolved the matter.
There is one aspect of cactus group phasing whose genetic basis has not been worked out.
The plants of seemingly any given species of cactus will all bloom concurrently, an obvious necessity for reproduction. This occurs within different populations a great distance apart.
Seemingly, it has to be dependent on length of day, perhaps temperature range, too. However, the genetics have not yet been determined. Cactus genetic studies seem thus far to be limited to working out the sometimes confusing relationships between genera and, in some cases, species.
There no need for networking which is only a concept in the mind of human observers-interpreters.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing to add to the Subject question. Inquiring mind wonders.
I neglected to state, in my original posting, that the Arizona Republic article I cited indicated that the planned Norad operation was originally scheduled for 1998.
Jerry Pournelle has used this subject phrase for many years as his accolade for products of which he thinks highly.
I have no idea of when he started using the phrase nor any idea of when Apple introduced it.
Does anyone else no who was the actual originator of phrase>
I have read that government officials thought that Osama wanted to force prisoner release by commercial aircraft highjacking; perhaps of the mullah behind the original World Trade Center bombing.
On the other hand, I was aware of a Norad exercise that was to address using hijacked planes as missiles. Right after the release of the 9/11 Commision Report, some bright, informed soul at the Arizona Republic ran a brief story about the planned Norad exercise which it turned out had never actually been carried out.
If the Norad exercise had been carried out, the lines of authority that were completely lacking 9/11/2001 and caused so much confusion and wasted time would have been documented and perhaps thousands of lives could have been saved.
I figure that if I, a retired citsen could have been aware of the concept of using high-jacked commercial aircraft as missiles, there was no excuse for high government officials to have been unaware of the concept.
Lots of high-ranking heads spent too much time in posterior dark places.
Inasmuch as no one has, insofar as I've read, any way of detecting that a large gamma burst occurred for any of the mass extinctions, I think that we should settle for the things we can detect.
For instance, the greatest mass extinction that occured at the end of the Permian Period was associated with the largest surface outpourings of magma that the earth has ever experienced. These episodes poison the air and the water on a worldwide basis. No need for hypothetical gamma bursts to explain the largest extinction.
Jerry Pounelle's "Punctuated Equilibria"? Good grief! It was Steven Jay Gould and Miles Eldridge who formulated that theory based upon their interprestation of the fossil record.
Shame on you, tlambert.
To expand a bit on evought's reference to the genetic cause of sickle-cell anemia, I refer to "The Misunderstood Gene" by Michel Morange. On page 51, he states, regarding the genetic defect which causes sickle-cell anemia, "It should be added that, in men, this mutation can sometimes lead to sterility; indeed, in some cases, this is the only sympton."
It just goes to show how complex molecular genetics is.
The anonymous coward who started (IIRC) this topic wrote very knowlegeably. The work on araibidopsis (sp?) needs to be replicated and, if successful, fanned out to other plants.
When the basis for epigenetics was discovered, it was in the the favorite animal genetic study species, C. elegans. The initial conclusion was that the results were so novel that they probably occurred in no other critter. Subsequent research revealed that epigenetics acts in every multicellular critter. It also resulted in recognition that the rather ignorant conclusion that non-coding DNA in genomes was junk resulted from the fact that genetic research had discoveries to make.
The investigator(s?) who reported the recovery of ancient genes admitted that it might or might not be limited to araibidops. If it's really a fundamental discovery, it damned sure won't be limited to one plant species.
I would have sworn that it was in /. that I read about an individual of some public awareness (sorry that I can't remember who; a penalty for growing elderly) who was not allowed to board a plane because of a requet for some irrelevant (to him) information which had never been required before. I ewxpected to see the matter brought up under this topic.
The individual asked why and was told that it was required by the Patriot Act. He asked to see what law? No one at the airport could tell him. Afterward he tried to pursue that matter through legal channels, but was told that the law requiring that information was secret.
So, not only does the Patriot Act prohibit telling individuals that they are under surveillance as a consequence of that Act, it contains material that prevents telling affected individuals what law they are running afoul of in their lives.
I"m pleased that somebody jumped on the safety problems immediately. Remember the shuttle which disintegrated and killed it's seven-person crew because no one has ever tested what effect a piece of booster insulation would have on the shuttles heat shield material? And when some presumably half-assed computer program indicated that there shoudn't have been any damamge, that management wouldn't allow anyone to even try to determine via telephoto photography whether there was underside damage?
Will the civilians be more rigorous? They'll have to test, test, and test some more. Let's hope.
Anyone else think that 2010 sounds much too optimistic?
For starters, at every conception, a almost-always unique MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) comes into existence. This is the celluar identifier for all of the organism's cells, including stem cells.
Thus, for stem cell therapy, there is an initial problem of not being able to use stem cells for any other individual without suppressing the immune system of that indiviudal. Doing that suppresses any ability of the indivduals immune system being able to suppress any random cancer cells tht might appear in the individual.
The only workaround seems to be to cultivate stem cells from the individual to be treated therapeutically and modify the resultant stem cells as the basis for some therapy.
Secondly, there is a rapidly evolving area in molecular genetics called "epigenetics" whose potential impact on stem cell therapies is still under study.
Epigenetics deals with the function of some chunks of RNA (called micro RNA)in what used to be called "junk DNA" that functions genetically by attaching methyl groups to certain regions of genes to, generally, silence those genes. Micro RNA is a part of the genome passed to offspring, but I don't remember offhand the female-male contribution roles or even if they are already determined.
Just more stuff to make it apparent that stem cell therapies are not a slam-dunk type of certainty.
My copy of Visual Route shows copyright span from 1996-2002 to Visual Ware.
Wouldn't that seem to be prior art for a copyright granted in 2005?
Narchie Troll pronounced:
Evolution is a fact. It's been observed.
Yea and verily, most especially with dogs, cats, and pigeons. The selection factors for "success" were provided by humans, but it creates proof that small mutations do occur and that the offspring do respond to the selection factors.
There are theories as to its mechanisms. Note I said "theory", not "hypothesis"; in general, a theory is the best you can do when describing a process in science. The common use of 'theory' to mean 'unproven concept' is not the way science uses it.
Judging by my experience with more recent graduates of the high school from which I matriculated in absentia in 1945, it is very difficult to convince lay persons that a hyothesis does not become a theory until facts that demonstrate it have accumulated. When the facts were based on predictions not made by any previous theory, the theory reaaly becomes rock-solid.
The Jeff Goldblum character in "Jurassic Park" did a lot of preaching about the Park being so complex that it could not really be controlled.
Yet, when the disaster unrolled, it was not in any way the result of complexity. Rather, the disaster was the result of deliberate sabotage by a trusted insider.
That's a Crichton habit which bugs be severely.
Several years ago, I read of an ant parasite whose life cycle includes sheep. When one of these parasites matures in the body of an ant, it causes the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass. There, it can be eaten by a sheep to continue the parasite's life cycle.
We had an extememly weird happening in Metro Phoenix within that last week or so. An expensive car, Porsche or something like that, hit another vehicle from behind. No one was in the Porsche. Police began checking backward from the scene of the accident. Two blocks back, they found the body of the man who had been driving the vehicle. Witnesses who had seen the accident develop said the driver had climbed through the roof onto the top of the car. From there, he either fell or jumped to his death.
Hi family later claimed that some parasite had infected his brain during a trip to Mexico. The supposition was that the man's frontal cortex, which consequences can be worked out, had been damaged by the parasite.
Anyone wonder why the image of an ant climbing to the tip of a blade of grass came to my mind?
I had a RAID 0 consisting of two IBM 40 Gig drives. As isorox noted and I discovered, one drive goes bad and you loose everything. Never again.
I went to the site and clicked on Download. When I was informed that the software was going to download AND install, I decided to hell with it. I like to reflect on downloaded stuff before I actually install it.
... if I can find the URL again.
Maybe if someone reports back good experience rather than conjectures, maybe I'll reconsider
The way I understood the situation, IBM was throwing its weight, in the ANSI subcommittee, to have EBCDIC rather than ASCII become the standard. Bob and another brilliant chap, the late Eric Clamons, were able to carry the day using the logic and utility built in to ASCII as convincing arguments. I feel fortunate to have known and worked with both of them.
No. I was the tester in a team for TEX, a powerful scripting language marketed by Honeywell Information Systems from about 1978 through 1986. Bob was the marketeer and undoubtedly contributed to the design.
Back in about 1964, when I was an engineer and a member of the Cincinnati-Dayton Chapter of the ACM, I was surprised to learn from busines-programming members that 2-digit year representation was being used. We agreed that it had better not be too long before the 2-digit year was replaced in databases.
When Bob's article on the Y2K problem appeared in 1971, I was surprised that nothing had been done. Of course, disk storage space was still quite pricey. I thought that Bob's article would stir things up.
When Y2K finally publicly surfaced in 1998 or 1999, I was stunned that not a damned thing had been done since Bob's definitive 1971 article on the topic.
Last year when I was proofing a local guru friend's in-process book ("The Healthy PC" by Carey Holzman, Osborne-McGraw Hill), we fell into a dispute (which I lost, of course) about his belief that Y2K should be described as a bug (because that's the way it was presented to the public) rather than a temporary disk space-saving convenience which had lived much too long.
I got in touch with Bob Bemer, with whom I had worked in the 1970s and 1980s, about what had actually gone down. He was very gracious and sent me a URL for a definitive newspaper article on Y2K:
http://www.bobbemer.com/weingart.htm
Bob was a very gracious person, as someone else observed, and both pleasant and impressive to work with; I knew somewhat of what he had accomplished.
About 15 or 20 years ago, a large reverse osmosis desalination plant costing about $400 million was built near the Mexican border on the lower Colorado River. The intent was to meet treaty requirements to reduce the salinity of the water flowing into Mexico. I think that it was to be gas-powered.
I don't remember whether the failure to put it into operation was lack of funding or bad choice of technology. Every couple of years the topic comes up here in Arizona and it's always said that it would be too expensive to put it into operation.
I don't know whether the Mexican government gave up on the treaty or whether the necessary people have been bought.
With a five or six year drought now in effect, one would expect some constructive thinking, but it doesn't seem to happen.
We have golf courses up the wazoo (more per capita than anyplace else in the world, I believe), mostly using grey water. Every once in a while some developer will sneakily start pumping groundwater and then there's bad publicity and usage is sometimes actually changed.
Do an all-words search on "delsalination Colorado River" and you'll learn more that I remember about what went wrong. Sad, sad, sad.
In southern Arizona, at Green Valley, there is a silo which has been kept intact, except for the missile itself. I found it an interesting and impressive place to visit. They still have the radar fan antennas surrounding the silo which were intended to detect ground intruders. Somehow, it was seeing those surface radar antennas that made me feel how lucky that those of us who are still alive are to be in that condition. Basically, scarey stuff!
This is a very ancient experience which occured on an IBM704 noticeably before there was any such thing as an operating system.
I had written an application which, when run, wiped 32K of RAM words clean with the same image in every word. I had to get after-hours computer time and proceeded to insert a print statement following by an abort in the source code (Fortran) in order to track the problem down.
Turned out to be an input error. The input utility I was employing used the character in column one of the data cards to indicate the type of data.
I finally determined that my assistant, who had prepared the input data for my test case had put a 3 instead of a 4 in the first column of a data card resulting in what would have been a quite reasonable integer value becoming a floating point number in the machine.
That resulted in a very long-running loop which stored the same number in every word of the machines RAM.
Thereafter, every appplication that I wrote had an input data check for every integer value to ensure that its value did not exceed the source code dimension of the array into which data were to be written.
This was Fortran around 1960. The Ur days!
One of the most confusing bugs I ever encountered was when I determined the obvious fix and then got the same conditions as before.
The fix looked good and showed as expected in a dump. I finally determined, by careful code checking, that there was another error downstream which produced exactly the same results. The second fix resolved the matter.
There is one aspect of cactus group phasing whose genetic basis has not been worked out.
The plants of seemingly any given species of cactus will all bloom concurrently, an obvious necessity for reproduction. This occurs within different populations a great distance apart.
Seemingly, it has to be dependent on length of day, perhaps temperature range, too. However, the genetics have not yet been determined. Cactus genetic studies seem thus far to be limited to working out the sometimes confusing relationships between genera and, in some cases, species.
There no need for networking which is only a concept in the mind of human observers-interpreters.