Natural selection must not only mean that the possession of some combination of attributes confers both survival and the opportunity to procreate, the absence of those attributes must mean the opposite.
No, it's virtually never that clear cut. There'll be some attribute(s) that confer a marginal increase or decrease in the likelihood of individuals to reproduce, or not. It's not all or nothing. Over a hundred generations, though, even a 1% marginal difference adds up to a significant population shift.
Ah, but perhaps the actual result of these tyrant-imposed breeding exercises was that those smart enough to avoid them (either by being elsewhere or by faking whatever qualities the tyrant preferred) continued to reproduce.
Intelligence coupled with situational awareness confers a considerable survival advantage - the best way to survive anything is to be somewhere else when it happens.
(Of course intelligence alone doesn't guarantee reproduction -- as countless slashdotters can attest;-)
(FWIW, as a kid of about 10, back in the 1960s, I had a 45 RPM vinyl record of the Dr. Who theme music, and I watched (the original, B&W) Dr. Who faithfully on CBC (Canada) after school.)
Don't worry about it. Everyone who took it seriously has a UID greater than 600000. Newbies. And it shows.
I thought it was pretty danged funny myself. I've also learned that on/., there is no such thing as a post so mind bogglingly, obviously stupid that nobody will take it seriously.
But that's okay, it just gives the rest of us more to laugh at.;-)
Actually it's pretty easy to export Martian material to just about anywhere, with the construction of a Martian beanstalk. I did a paper on exporting Martian volatiles (organics, water, etc) this way back in 1991.
As for "otherwise it is boring mineral slag", you're probably right about most of it -- so is most of Earth. But consider that Mars has had large meteor impacts, which can lead to rich deposits of nickel, silver, copper, etc (google sudbury basin). It has also has water and has had extensive volcanism, which implies hydrothermal ore concentration mechanisms (stuff like uranium, among many others).
The Atlantic Ocean gets about a half-inch wider each year due to continental drift. Oh, half an inch doesn't sound like much, but multiply that by thousands of miles of coastline, and those tropical storms have a lot more surface area over which to build up strength than they did a few years ago.
And it's just going to keep on getting worse.
(Nobody really believes I'm serious do they? Oh wait, this is Slashdot...)
how many here are really evolutionary biologists? And how many are merely cheering the authorities along.... blindly?
This is one thing that really pisses me off about the way some creationists or iders argue. Just because they're ignorant of biology, statistics, paleontology, chemistry, geology, and what have you, doesn't mean that everyone else who is not an evolutionary biologist is equally ignorant.
I may not be an evolutionary biologist -- I switched my major from life sciences to computer science after second year -- but I certainly know enough -- through direct observation, experimentation, and analytical reasoning -- that I don't "merely cheer the authorities along".
That may not be true of everyone -- the level of science education in this country is abysmal, and the level of critical thinking worse -- but it's certainly more true than the creationists and other faith-based arguers like to pretend.
(NB, this isn't directed at the parent poster, who seems to be more messenger than accuser.)
It shouldn't. To the extent it does, that's probably the result of a few generations of the gemstone business branding synthetic sapphires and rubies as somehow "lesser" than the natural sort.
The truth is, many synthetic products are of higher quality than their natural counterparts, because the process is controlled rather than random. Examples include synthetic motor oil, which lasts much longer between oil changes, or synthetic rubies, which are the only kind good enough to be used in ruby lasers.
Perhaps you're thinking of "artificial" -- which originally just meant manufactured, same as "synthetic", but has certainly acquired a second meaning of "fake".
Well, his FTL thing just looks like an oversimplified variation of Alcubierre's warp drive. The latter might actually work, if we had a supply of negative mass of galactic order of magnitude. Van den Broek came up with a refinement of Alcubierre's idea that only requires modest energy requirements -- but still in the form of negative mass.
Alcubierre's and Van den Broek's solutions do fit within Relativity -- although quantum loop gravity may break them.
Blachford's gravity thing, though -- that's just out to lunch.
I've got a DL740 with 8 Xeons (hyperthreaded, so it looks like 16 CPUs) at the other end of this ssh session. The -C flag to top(1) is your friend, if you actually want to see processes rather than just a list of CPUs.
(Okay, the first couple of times it was kind of a cheap thrill;-)
Sounds a bit like the old Control Data mainframes, with their (60, later 64, bit) CPU and a bunch of (smaller wordsize) PPUs - Peripheral Processor Units.
Some people are like that. Biochemistries differ. I once read a (possibly apocryphal) story about how some people are immune to the addictive effects of heroin. Such people tend to have the sort of personality that would find them in a lab engaged in long term research projects. The guys who invented heroin -- as a less addictive form of morphine -- tried it on themselves first, and it didn't seem particularly addictive...
As I said, probably an apocryphal story. I don't know how easily lab rats get addicted to the stuff, but you'd think they'd try it on those first.
it's just generally a very well thought out series on the same level as shows like Battlestar Galactica.
Three weeks ago I would have called you a raving loony. Then I got the DVDs of the Battlestar Galactica remake (both the miniseries and the UK version of the TV series).
On the off chance anyone else out there is confused, parent is not referring to the original 1970s Battlestar Galactica. (AKA Cattlecar Galaxative, aka whale dreck.)
It's a pretty minor factor, actually. They saw some foam shedding (popcorning) with the old foam, and didn't think anything of it.
Anyway, apparently the hand-applied foam -- in the areas where we've seen big chunks coming off -- still uses the old CFC formula. The enviro-friendly foam is only used in the automated application on the large smooth areas of the tank.
It is the only vehicle capable of RETURNING a payload from orbit.
No.
It may be the only vehicle capable of returning LARGE payloads from orbit, but the Apollo CM did just fine at returning hundreds of pounds of rocks that it didn't bring up with it in the first place. Soyuz doesn't do too shabby a job either.
And of the hundred-plus missions Shuttle has flown, how many returned a big payload? Not counting Spacelab missions -- and wouldn't it have made more sense to leave that module up there as part of a space station? -- I can only think of perhaps two satellite-return missions.
Sure, it's a useful capability to have, but using it for every launch is like using an 18-wheeler when all you need is a minivan.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted. Even though I think re-usable vehicles are the way to go rather than expendables, I agree totally with you that the Shuttle is just Designed Wrong -- and isn't very reusable anyway.
As for "make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift", there's no need for the solids. A Saturn V could put the equivalent of four full Shuttle payloads into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) in one shot, or a complete Shuttle Orbiter. Or, for that matter, Skylab. Or a fully fueled S-IVB stage, LM, and CSM, all set for a trip to the Moon. That thing (the SV) had 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust, the Shuttle has about 5.
The original plan was only for Shuttle to replace medium-lift launchers, retaining the Delta at the low end and Saturn V at the high end. NASA quickly scrapped that plan (along with the Saturn V stacking capability in the VAB and the Saturn V launch towers) when they realized that the existance of a working manned and heavy lift capability (Apollo-Saturn) meant it would be politically easy to cancel Shuttle if (when) that hit budget overruns.
... someone will have to go outside to fix it. The recent mission prove that we have capability to do that.
No.
Pete Conrad proved that 32 years -- thirty-two years! -- ago when he repaired Skylab, which had been damaged on launch.
I've always been impressed by Conrad and Bean's pinpoint landing of Apollo 12 within walking distance of Surveyor III -- which proved we could land on the Moon with sufficient accuracy to think about building lunar bases. I had the opportunity to chat with Pete for a couple of hours once, and asked him what he was proudest of having achieved in space. He told me it wasn't that landing, but rather his repair of Skylab (part of which involved physically manhandling the solar panel mechanism to get it to deploy). That, he told me, proved we could do impromptu work in space (and also saved the rest of the Skylab program).
that was the best atmospheric model available to him at the time.
And it was clearly wrong as applied to Earth, even at the time. Sagan chose to go for the sensationalism, but then he'd been doing that for a while by then.
perhaps it's time to revive the old SF chestnut: One of the species of dinosaur became intelligent.
Funny you should mention that. That's one possible explanation for the background of a series of SF stories I'm in the middle of writing. The evidence is merely that several of the nearer stars have terraformed planets, and the genetic evidence is such that the life on those planets started to diverge from Earth's (and each others') about 65MY ago. There are other explanations, of course, but nobody knows. (Except perhaps the author, and he ain't saying, yet.)
Sagan et al.'s "nuclear winter" scenario derived from dust circulation models based on the global dust storms they saw on Mars. Of course, the minor details -- such as that Mars is only 1/3 the diameter of Earth (thus has only 1 equator-to-pole convection band vs the three bands on Earth), and has no oceans (thus providing a fairly uniform surface for the winds to flow over, vs the disruptions that temperature differences between water and land cause on Earth) and no rainfall (which tends to wash dust/smoke out of the atmosphere) -- which would have shown the scenario to be a bad joke, were ignored.
Ya gotta watch astronomers and physicists, they tend to assume spherical cows.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural selection must not only mean that the possession of some combination of attributes confers both survival and the opportunity to procreate, the absence of those attributes must mean the opposite.
No, it's virtually never that clear cut. There'll be some attribute(s) that confer a marginal increase or decrease in the likelihood of individuals to reproduce, or not. It's not all or nothing. Over a hundred generations, though, even a 1% marginal difference adds up to a significant population shift.
Ah, but perhaps the actual result of these tyrant-imposed breeding exercises was that those smart enough to avoid them (either by being elsewhere or by faking whatever qualities the tyrant preferred) continued to reproduce.
;-)
Intelligence coupled with situational awareness confers a considerable survival advantage - the best way to survive anything is to be somewhere else when it happens.
(Of course intelligence alone doesn't guarantee reproduction -- as countless slashdotters can attest
Dr. Who theme song?
;-)
Can you post the lyrics to that?
(FWIW, as a kid of about 10, back in the 1960s, I had a 45 RPM vinyl record of the Dr. Who theme music, and I watched (the original, B&W) Dr. Who faithfully on CBC (Canada) after school.)
You do not pin your companies communications system on something you cannot sign a SLA agreement with.
What, you mean like Exchange?
Right. I didn't say "everyone who had a UID greater than 600000 took it seriously". Even amongst noobs, stupidity isn't that rampant.
Thank god.
Don't worry about it. Everyone who took it seriously has a UID greater than 600000. Newbies. And it shows.
/., there is no such thing as a post so mind bogglingly, obviously stupid that nobody will take it seriously.
;-)
I thought it was pretty danged funny myself. I've also learned that on
But that's okay, it just gives the rest of us more to laugh at.
Actually it's pretty easy to export Martian material to just about anywhere, with the construction of a Martian beanstalk. I did a paper on exporting Martian volatiles (organics, water, etc) this way back in 1991.
As for "otherwise it is boring mineral slag", you're probably right about most of it -- so is most of Earth. But consider that Mars has had large meteor impacts, which can lead to rich deposits of nickel, silver, copper, etc (google sudbury basin). It has also has water and has had extensive volcanism, which implies hydrothermal ore concentration mechanisms (stuff like uranium, among many others).
It's all the fault of continental drift.
The Atlantic Ocean gets about a half-inch wider each year due to continental drift. Oh, half an inch doesn't sound like much, but multiply that by thousands of miles of coastline, and those tropical storms have a lot more surface area over which to build up strength than they did a few years ago.
And it's just going to keep on getting worse.
(Nobody really believes I'm serious do they? Oh wait, this is Slashdot...)
how many here are really evolutionary biologists? And how many are merely cheering the authorities along.... blindly?
This is one thing that really pisses me off about the way some creationists or iders argue. Just because they're ignorant of biology, statistics, paleontology, chemistry, geology, and what have you, doesn't mean that everyone else who is not an evolutionary biologist is equally ignorant.
I may not be an evolutionary biologist -- I switched my major from life sciences to computer science after second year -- but I certainly know enough -- through direct observation, experimentation, and analytical reasoning -- that I don't "merely cheer the authorities along".
That may not be true of everyone -- the level of science education in this country is abysmal, and the level of critical thinking worse -- but it's certainly more true than the creationists and other faith-based arguers like to pretend.
(NB, this isn't directed at the parent poster, who seems to be more messenger than accuser.)
but
I'll pick up you after work
is not.
It can be, depending on context or emphasis. "I'll pick up the kids after lunch. I'll pick up you after work."
you can't polish a turd
Sure you can. You can even add a gold handle and cabochon sapphires. The parallel here should be obvious -- deep down it's still a turd.
Synthetic connotes "fake"
It shouldn't. To the extent it does, that's probably the result of a few generations of the gemstone business branding synthetic sapphires and rubies as somehow "lesser" than the natural sort.
The truth is, many synthetic products are of higher quality than their natural counterparts, because the process is controlled rather than random. Examples include synthetic motor oil, which lasts much longer between oil changes, or synthetic rubies, which are the only kind good enough to be used in ruby lasers.
Perhaps you're thinking of "artificial" -- which originally just meant manufactured, same as "synthetic", but has certainly acquired a second meaning of "fake".
Well, his FTL thing just looks like an oversimplified variation of Alcubierre's warp drive. The latter might actually work, if we had a supply of negative mass of galactic order of magnitude. Van den Broek came up with a refinement of Alcubierre's idea that only requires modest energy requirements -- but still in the form of negative mass.
Alcubierre's and Van den Broek's solutions do fit within Relativity -- although quantum loop gravity may break them.
Blachford's gravity thing, though -- that's just out to lunch.
Ho hum.
;-)
I've got a DL740 with 8 Xeons (hyperthreaded, so it looks like 16 CPUs) at the other end of this ssh session. The -C flag to top(1) is your friend, if you actually want to see processes rather than just a list of CPUs.
(Okay, the first couple of times it was kind of a cheap thrill
Sounds a bit like the old Control Data mainframes, with their (60, later 64, bit) CPU and a bunch of (smaller wordsize) PPUs - Peripheral Processor Units.
Seriously, though, the stuff does nothing for me.
Some people are like that. Biochemistries differ. I once read a (possibly apocryphal) story about how some people are immune to the addictive effects of heroin. Such people tend to have the sort of personality that would find them in a lab engaged in long term research projects. The guys who invented heroin -- as a less addictive form of morphine -- tried it on themselves first, and it didn't seem particularly addictive...
As I said, probably an apocryphal story. I don't know how easily lab rats get addicted to the stuff, but you'd think they'd try it on those first.
it's just generally a very well thought out series on the same level as shows like Battlestar Galactica.
Three weeks ago I would have called you a raving loony. Then I got the DVDs of the Battlestar Galactica remake (both the miniseries and the UK version of the TV series).
On the off chance anyone else out there is confused, parent is not referring to the original 1970s Battlestar Galactica. (AKA Cattlecar Galaxative, aka whale dreck.)
At least, I hope not.
And all I'll say about that is -- ever notice how close to the 'x' key on a qwerty keyboard is the 'c' key?
It's a pretty minor factor, actually. They saw some foam shedding (popcorning) with the old foam, and didn't think anything of it.
Anyway, apparently the hand-applied foam -- in the areas where we've seen big chunks coming off -- still uses the old CFC formula. The enviro-friendly foam is only used in the automated application on the large smooth areas of the tank.
It is the only vehicle capable of RETURNING a payload from orbit.
No.
It may be the only vehicle capable of returning LARGE payloads from orbit, but the Apollo CM did just fine at returning hundreds of pounds of rocks that it didn't bring up with it in the first place. Soyuz doesn't do too shabby a job either.
And of the hundred-plus missions Shuttle has flown, how many returned a big payload? Not counting Spacelab missions -- and wouldn't it have made more sense to leave that module up there as part of a space station? -- I can only think of perhaps two satellite-return missions.
Sure, it's a useful capability to have, but using it for every launch is like using an 18-wheeler when all you need is a minivan.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted. Even though I think re-usable vehicles are the way to go rather than expendables, I agree totally with you that the Shuttle is just Designed Wrong -- and isn't very reusable anyway.
As for "make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift", there's no need for the solids. A Saturn V could put the equivalent of four full Shuttle payloads into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) in one shot, or a complete Shuttle Orbiter. Or, for that matter, Skylab. Or a fully fueled S-IVB stage, LM, and CSM, all set for a trip to the Moon. That thing (the SV) had 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust, the Shuttle has about 5.
The original plan was only for Shuttle to replace medium-lift launchers, retaining the Delta at the low end and Saturn V at the high end. NASA quickly scrapped that plan (along with the Saturn V stacking capability in the VAB and the Saturn V launch towers) when they realized that the existance of a working manned and heavy lift capability (Apollo-Saturn) meant it would be politically easy to cancel Shuttle if (when) that hit budget overruns.
... someone will have to go outside to fix it. The recent mission prove that we have capability to do that.
No.
Pete Conrad proved that 32 years -- thirty-two years! -- ago when he repaired Skylab, which had been damaged on launch.
I've always been impressed by Conrad and Bean's pinpoint landing of Apollo 12 within walking distance of Surveyor III -- which proved we could land on the Moon with sufficient accuracy to think about building lunar bases. I had the opportunity to chat with Pete for a couple of hours once, and asked him what he was proudest of having achieved in space. He told me it wasn't that landing, but rather his repair of Skylab (part of which involved physically manhandling the solar panel mechanism to get it to deploy). That, he told me, proved we could do impromptu work in space (and also saved the rest of the Skylab program).
that was the best atmospheric model available to him at the time.
And it was clearly wrong as applied to Earth, even at the time. Sagan chose to go for the sensationalism, but then he'd been doing that for a while by then.
perhaps it's time to revive the old SF chestnut: One of the species of dinosaur became intelligent.
Funny you should mention that. That's one possible explanation for the background of a series of SF stories I'm in the middle of writing. The evidence is merely that several of the nearer stars have terraformed planets, and the genetic evidence is such that the life on those planets started to diverge from Earth's (and each others') about 65MY ago. There are other explanations, of course, but nobody knows. (Except perhaps the author, and he ain't saying, yet.)
how do you stop 70 billion tonnes of methane?
Well, we could burn it. That would convert it into harmless water vapor, CO2, and heat.
Oh, wait....
Sagan et al.'s "nuclear winter" scenario derived from dust circulation models based on the global dust storms they saw on Mars. Of course, the minor details -- such as that Mars is only 1/3 the diameter of Earth (thus has only 1 equator-to-pole convection band vs the three bands on Earth), and has no oceans (thus providing a fairly uniform surface for the winds to flow over, vs the disruptions that temperature differences between water and land cause on Earth) and no rainfall (which tends to wash dust/smoke out of the atmosphere) -- which would have shown the scenario to be a bad joke, were ignored.
Ya gotta watch astronomers and physicists, they tend to assume spherical cows.