Wouldn't this be a serious problem when the weakened magnetic field stops shielding us from the solar winds??
Indeed. Why, all that extra solar wind penetrating down into the atmosphere would add energy to it, causing it to heat up. As the atmosphere circulates that could lead to world-wide effects. You might even call it global warming!
The firmware for the drives (hard drive or optical) lives in the drive itself -- it's burned at the factory. All interaction between the drive and the OS is via standard interfaces (ATA, SCSI, ATAPI, etc) for which there are open source drivers.
There's no such standard interface for high-end audio or video cards (at the low end, it's more standard; every video card can pretend to be a dumb VGA card). Yes there's OpenGL and DirectX, although the latter is hardly an open standard, but for most cards there's still a software layer between OGL calls and hardware register twiddling, and that software lives in the kernel driver, not on the card. Now, if that lived on the card and we could make OpenGL calls (or X Server requests) directly to the card, that'd be different.
Nothing wrong with fishing on Love Canal. The canal was fine, the problem was the (1940s era?) Hooker Chemical dump near Love Canal. That wouldn't have been much of a problem either, if the town hadn't expropriated the old dump site. Hooker Chemical didn't want to sell, but the town forced the issue -- HC put in a proviso that the land never be used for anything. Few years later the town builds a school on it...
Nothing wrong with thalidomide either, so long as you're not female and pregnant. (If you're male and pregnant you have bigger problems;-)
That's because Windows is so used to random stuff happening that it doesn't notice the odd hardware memory bit error. It just figures it's another software error, ignores it, and moves on.
More seriously it probably depends where in the address range the bad memory is, Linux happens to hit something critical and Windows doesn't -- or vice versa on some other machine. In my experience Linux itself is more tolerant of bad memory than some of the apps -- gcc in particular. I started overclocking one box and gcc began throwing all kinds of compile errors on code that compiled cleanly before. Turns out that's a known symptom of slightly flaky memory.
There's code in Linux to allow it to work with known-bad RAM, you just need to tell it the address range to avoid and the VM subsystem marks that as not for use, kind of like a disk drive mapping out a bad sector.
Why in God's holy name does Windows fail to boot one time, and then boot successfully the second time?
Hah. I had something close to that one. A friend's Windows XP Home system. Boot it up, runs fine for about 30 seconds, then locks up hard. Reboot it, works fine for as long as you like. Next time you boot it up, locks up after about 30 seconds. Reboot, works fine. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I booted it up off a Knoppix disc and ran a bunch of hardware tests -- nothing. And no problems with locking up either.
Back to Windows -- same thing.
I eventually realized the pattern: after a clean Windows shutdown, it would lock up 30 seconds after the next boot. After a dirty shutdown (e.g. power cycle or reset button), it would boot up fine. Obviously the Windows shutdown was leaving something in a funky state for next time. Beats me what.
I told my friend she had the choice of doing a re-install and keeping fingers crossed, or always shutting it down with the power switch, or moving to Linux. I don't recall what she did beyond passing the box on to her kids because she'd already got a new one for herself.
Will admitting and giving credit to the source of these diminish their usefulness or change them in any way?
Hey, if you want to give credit to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Zeus, or Jehovah, knock yourself out.
But unless you can demonstrate that they or any other supernatural being still plays a hands-on role in what happens in the universe, it doesn't really make much difference. And if it doesn't make any difference, why should we waste our time on it?
And if you think that He/She/It does play a hands-on role and occasionally interferes with the game to change an outcome -- then I guess the original design wasn't so perfect after all.
And who made the laws and rules which the atoms follow
Humans did -- meaning that the atoms just do what they do, and humans deduced from their behaviour the laws and rules that they follow. We might be wrong, those laws and rules might not hold under certain circumstances we haven't observed yet.
Why do you think any supernatural body "decided" this stuff, or intentionally thought up these rules? If the rules for stacking sodium and chlorine atoms were a little different we could be having this discussion about why salt crystals are octohedral, or hexagonal prisms. (Or perhaps not having at all because life as we know it couldn't exist.)
How come gravity is the weakest of known forces, yet holds the heavenly bodies in their orbits.
Because gravity is monopolar, thus additive, unlike say magnetism. And if it weren't so weak, we'd probably all have collapsed into a black hole a long time ago. Consider the anthropic principle: the only reason you're here to ask these questions is because the values are what they are. (Don't fall into the common mistake that the values are what they are because we're here -- that's mistaking cause and effect. Because they are what they are, we're here to observe.) There may well be other universes with different values where life hasn't arisen or evolved intelligence to ask those questions. There may be other universes with different values where intelligent life already has the answers. Unless those values are mutable it doesn't make any difference to us in this universe.
Where did the immense amount of information stored in your DNA originate?
Same place the immense amount of information stored in the specific arrangement of grains of sand on a particular beach at a specific time originated. And before you say that's not information, try to duplicate that specific arrangement of sand grains by some random process.
The human eye cannot be directly compared to a camera.
Then why bring that comparison up in the first place?
[more silly stuff about eyes]
The human eye can't register single photons. That's why we have things like night-vision goggles and flashlights. And I guess you've never heard of snowblindness There are several different animal eye designs that don't put the layer of nerves over top of the sensor cells -- and they don't have a blind spot. The angular resolution of birds' eyes (particularly raptors) is about an order of magnitude better than that of human eyes. Some animals can see ultraviolet. Humans could too if their lense was replaced with something UV transparent. Pit vipers have a second pair of "eyes" that can see infrared. What was that again about the human eye being the pinnacle of design? Etc, etc.
Come back when you've studied some physics, chemistry, information theory, and biology.
You're right, but you're wrong. Sure, the O2 for the passengers is generated that way, but there are also O2 bottles stored in some of the overhead compartments for the use of cabin personnel, so that they can strap them on and assist passengers.
You owe the GP an apology.
(And if I hadn't already posted in this topic, I'd have probably modded you down.)
The kind [of H2O2] you buy at the drugstore is around 5% and distilling it is dangerous.
Dangerous but not impossible. Do you think suicide bombers worry about dangerous? Making high-concentration peroxide is something some hobbyist experimental rocketry groups do (or at least did up until last week) although they usually do it by sparging which is safer than distillation.
Judges frequently take into account the "chilling effect" something may have on the exercise of a right, and equivalence that to explicitly violating that right. It's pretty much a term of art. Judges are (usually) strict in their use of words -- but in a legal context, not everyday English.
Indeed the actual ruling may well explain exactly that -- all we have is the CNN summary.
"faith" -- you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Reasonable expectation" is not "faith". I have a reasonable expectation that the plane is safe because that plane has made many flights before and because there are numerous instances of that plane design which have also made many flights, and also because there are fairly rigourous requirements that go into an aircraft getting a Certificate of Airworthiness. This is expectation based on reason, evidence, and knowledge. I certainly wouldn't have that expectation of an experimental aircraft of a new design without reviewing the plans myself or seeing the thing fly a few times.
I have a reasonable expectation that other drivers will obey traffic lights because it is in their own self interest to do so, and if they have drivers licenses they had to pass a test on traffic rules and driving ability to get them.
Sure, sometimes it happens that the above reasonable expectations are not accurate reflections of the real world -- planes do fall out of the sky and cars do run red lights. And I take that into account too.
Why then is it not also reasonable that there is a designer that made your eyes, a device more complex and versatile than the most advanced camera?
First, because it raises the question of where this alleged designer came from, what methods he used to implement his design, and why he came up with such a crappy design in the first place.
Second, because human eyes are not more complex and versatile than the most advanced camera. They have lousy color and angular resolution in all but a small area of the sensor surface; the sensor surface itself is buried beneath a layer of tissue; the frequency range sucks -- not so much because of the sensors but because the lens system can't correct for chromatic abberation so it just blocks ultra-violet (otherwise the UV would blur the image); no zoom capability at all, and it has a blind spot for pete's sake. Sure, our eyes aren't too shabby as general purpose image sensors, but they're hardly a pinnacle of optic or sensor design.
If evolution were true and there is not just one designer, why should a chance process not involving ONE mind make these rules the same in the entire universe?
So you're saying that evolution implies multiple designers? LOL! That's funny. Why should rules be different? What would the implications be on what we observe if they were? (Hint: what would the boundary where the rules change be like?)
All design implies a designer, natural or manmade.
So salt crystals, say, are "designed" to be cubic? Funny, I thought it was just a consquence of the way sodium and chlorine atoms stack. So planets are "designed" to be near perfect spheres? Seems to me it's just an inevitable consequence of how gravity works and the strength of materials.
Insisting that all that requires a designer is hardly a step up from primitive animism or belief that everything is controlled by its own personal god. Good grief, man, how do you even manage to use a computer?
It is not in advertisers' (or politicians', and religious leaders', for that matter) interest to have a population capable of critical thinking and making up their own minds from independent research.
Therefore we have an education system and mass (advertiser-supported) media dedicated to suppressing that capability.
Hell, it's not even a concious conspiracy, just a regrettable consequence of advertisers, religious leaders and politicians acting in their own self interest -- and the media acts in the interest of the advertisers who pay them. (Perhaps not even conciously, but by a process of selection.)
Agnostic: I know it is impossible to know for certain whether or not God exists. But I also know that it is impossible to know anything for certain, including this bit of knowledge.
So, you're certain that you know that you don't know.
There is a difference between micro and macroevolution. One is inter and the other intraspecies.
There is no difference. If you think there is, come up with a definition of "species" that also covers species that reproduce asexually, as well as species with non-transitive breeding populations (eg A, B and C where A & B can and do interbreed, and B and C can and do interbreed, but A and C can't and don't.)
There's no objective definition of species, so the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is meaningless. It's something creationists originally came up with so that they could dismiss the observations of evolution happening today as "mere microevolution".
To believe that the cosmos, life, and my soul all come from random interactions and as yet undiscovered scientific principles requires more blind faith in science than I have in my religion.
"Faith in science"? What exactly does that mean? Science is a method for coming up with descriptions of how the world works -- descriptions that can in turn be used to make predictions about causes and effects. Faith doesn't enter into it. It either works or it doesn't, depending on the problem domain.
The question of how your soul (if you or anyone else has a soul) came into being isn't part of that problem domain -- nobody has yet come up with a definition of "soul" that fits anything that science covers.
Where the cosmos came from (vs what has happened in it since) is also not really a question of science, it may not even be a valid question at all. (As Hawking puts it, asking "what was there before the beginning of the universe" is like asking "what is north of the North Pole").
Life? Because at least life on Earth is something that started in the past, we'll never have a definitive answer (unless somebody invents a time machine), but we can certainly come up with testable hypotheses about mechanisms that could have worked. Random interactions? Depends what you mean by "random".
There are plenty of natural principles that cause non-random results (crystal formation, the sphericity of planets, ore veins and bodies, the size distribution of sand/gravel/boulders on beaches, the shape of galaxies, the production of amino acids when you add energy to a reducing atmosphere, etc.) -- the world is hardly a homogenous mass, and that's explainable by natural laws rather than divine intervention. (Of course divine intervention could have created those natural laws, but that's beyond the domain of science -- and doesn't really answer anything.)
Could a series of those non-random results have produced self-replicating molecules? (We already know that they can produce amino acids, lipids, cell-membrane-like microspheres, and a wide assortment of organic compounds previously thought only producable by life processes.) Only the faithful would be so arrogant as to say "absolutely no!", and only those equally arrogant or suffering a total failure of imagination would attempt to quote odds. (And anyone quoting the odds based on an assumption of a few random molecules floating in an ocean is ignorant of many things: geology, geochemistry, deep-ocean vents, catalytic chemistry (the effect on reaction rates of crystalline surface shapes is highly relevant -- certain clays and amino acids, for example), and so on. There are plenty of hints. A good theory will undoubtedly require a cross-disciplinary approach, and there just isn't that much cross communication between geochemists and biochemists, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Closer would be to say "matter is just energy with inertia". Remember the intro to "Bill Nye the Science Guy"? ;-)
Now if only we could figure out how to harness [vacuum energy]
Oh, that's easy. You just need to find something with less energy than the vacuum and tap into the flow.
Wouldn't this be a serious problem when the weakened magnetic field stops shielding us from the solar winds??
Indeed. Why, all that extra solar wind penetrating down into the atmosphere would add energy to it, causing it to heat up. As the atmosphere circulates that could lead to world-wide effects. You might even call it global warming!
The firmware for the drives (hard drive or optical) lives in the drive itself -- it's burned at the factory. All interaction between the drive and the OS is via standard interfaces (ATA, SCSI, ATAPI, etc) for which there are open source drivers.
There's no such standard interface for high-end audio or video cards (at the low end, it's more standard; every video card can pretend to be a dumb VGA card). Yes there's OpenGL and DirectX, although the latter is hardly an open standard, but for most cards there's still a software layer between OGL calls and hardware register twiddling, and that software lives in the kernel driver, not on the card. Now, if that lived on the card and we could make OpenGL calls (or X Server requests) directly to the card, that'd be different.
No offense intended, just enlightenment.
The water would not condensate on the CPU itself ...
make sure that water that condensates on the (cold) case
Aaugh, I can't stand it.
"Condensate" is a noun, it's what you get when water (or other liquid) condenses (verb) on something cold.
Nothing wrong with fishing on Love Canal. The canal was fine, the problem was the (1940s era?) Hooker Chemical dump near Love Canal. That wouldn't have been much of a problem either, if the town hadn't expropriated the old dump site. Hooker Chemical didn't want to sell, but the town forced the issue -- HC put in a proviso that the land never be used for anything. Few years later the town builds a school on it...
;-)
Nothing wrong with thalidomide either, so long as you're not female and pregnant. (If you're male and pregnant you have bigger problems
That's because Windows is so used to random stuff happening that it doesn't notice the odd hardware memory bit error. It just figures it's another software error, ignores it, and moves on.
More seriously it probably depends where in the address range the bad memory is, Linux happens to hit something critical and Windows doesn't -- or vice versa on some other machine. In my experience Linux itself is more tolerant of bad memory than some of the apps -- gcc in particular. I started overclocking one box and gcc began throwing all kinds of compile errors on code that compiled cleanly before. Turns out that's a known symptom of slightly flaky memory.
There's code in Linux to allow it to work with known-bad RAM, you just need to tell it the address range to avoid and the VM subsystem marks that as not for use, kind of like a disk drive mapping out a bad sector.
Why in God's holy name does Windows fail to boot one time, and then boot successfully the second time?
Hah. I had something close to that one. A friend's Windows XP Home system. Boot it up, runs fine for about 30 seconds, then locks up hard. Reboot it, works fine for as long as you like. Next time you boot it up, locks up after about 30 seconds. Reboot, works fine. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I booted it up off a Knoppix disc and ran a bunch of hardware tests -- nothing. And no problems with locking up either.
Back to Windows -- same thing.
I eventually realized the pattern: after a clean Windows shutdown, it would lock up 30 seconds after the next boot. After a dirty shutdown (e.g. power cycle or reset button), it would boot up fine. Obviously the Windows shutdown was leaving something in a funky state for next time. Beats me what.
I told my friend she had the choice of doing a re-install and keeping fingers crossed, or always shutting it down with the power switch, or moving to Linux. I don't recall what she did beyond passing the box on to her kids because she'd already got a new one for herself.
Will admitting and giving credit to the source of these diminish their usefulness or change them in any way?
Hey, if you want to give credit to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Zeus, or Jehovah, knock yourself out.
But unless you can demonstrate that they or any other supernatural being still plays a hands-on role in what happens in the universe, it doesn't really make much difference. And if it doesn't make any difference, why should we waste our time on it?
And if you think that He/She/It does play a hands-on role and occasionally interferes with the game to change an outcome -- then I guess the original design wasn't so perfect after all.
Agreed, but then I'm not a suicide bomber.
And who made the laws and rules which the atoms follow
Humans did -- meaning that the atoms just do what they do, and humans deduced from their behaviour the laws and rules that they follow. We might be wrong, those laws and rules might not hold under certain circumstances we haven't observed yet.
Why do you think any supernatural body "decided" this stuff, or intentionally thought up these rules? If the rules for stacking sodium and chlorine atoms were a little different we could be having this discussion about why salt crystals are octohedral, or hexagonal prisms. (Or perhaps not having at all because life as we know it couldn't exist.)
How come gravity is the weakest of known forces, yet holds the heavenly bodies in their orbits.
Because gravity is monopolar, thus additive, unlike say magnetism. And if it weren't so weak, we'd probably all have collapsed into a black hole a long time ago. Consider the anthropic principle: the only reason you're here to ask these questions is because the values are what they are. (Don't fall into the common mistake that the values are what they are because we're here -- that's mistaking cause and effect. Because they are what they are, we're here to observe.) There may well be other universes with different values where life hasn't arisen or evolved intelligence to ask those questions. There may be other universes with different values where intelligent life already has the answers. Unless those values are mutable it doesn't make any difference to us in this universe.
Where did the immense amount of information stored in your DNA originate?
Same place the immense amount of information stored in the specific arrangement of grains of sand on a particular beach at a specific time originated. And before you say that's not information, try to duplicate that specific arrangement of sand grains by some random process.
The human eye cannot be directly compared to a camera.
Then why bring that comparison up in the first place?
[more silly stuff about eyes]
The human eye can't register single photons. That's why we have things like night-vision goggles and flashlights. And I guess you've never heard of snowblindness There are several different animal eye designs that don't put the layer of nerves over top of the sensor cells -- and they don't have a blind spot. The angular resolution of birds' eyes (particularly raptors) is about an order of magnitude better than that of human eyes. Some animals can see ultraviolet. Humans could too if their lense was replaced with something UV transparent. Pit vipers have a second pair of "eyes" that can see infrared. What was that again about the human eye being the pinnacle of design? Etc, etc.
Come back when you've studied some physics, chemistry, information theory, and biology.
You're right, but you're wrong. Sure, the O2 for the passengers is generated that way, but there are also O2 bottles stored in some of the overhead compartments for the use of cabin personnel, so that they can strap them on and assist passengers.
You owe the GP an apology.
(And if I hadn't already posted in this topic, I'd have probably modded you down.)
The kind [of H2O2] you buy at the drugstore is around 5% and distilling it is dangerous.
Dangerous but not impossible. Do you think suicide bombers worry about dangerous? Making high-concentration peroxide is something some hobbyist experimental rocketry groups do (or at least did up until last week) although they usually do it by sparging which is safer than distillation.
Judges frequently take into account the "chilling effect" something may have on the exercise of a right, and equivalence that to explicitly violating that right. It's pretty much a term of art. Judges are (usually) strict in their use of words -- but in a legal context, not everyday English.
Indeed the actual ruling may well explain exactly that -- all we have is the CNN summary.
No, that's Devo. Maybe if you dissolved them in a suitable solvent you'd get a Devo solution, or Devolution for short...
Or if you spun their discs in the wrong direction you would measure the rotational speed in devolutions per minute (DPM).
Which step in 3.5 billion years of mutation/selection requires that leap of faith?
One way of detecting bombers is to detect the bombs.
Of course, if the bomber slips a bomb into somebody else's luggage, which would you rather detect?
"faith" -- you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Reasonable expectation" is not "faith". I have a reasonable expectation that the plane is safe because that plane has made many flights before and because there are numerous instances of that plane design which have also made many flights, and also because there are fairly rigourous requirements that go into an aircraft getting a Certificate of Airworthiness. This is expectation based on reason, evidence, and knowledge. I certainly wouldn't have that expectation of an experimental aircraft of a new design without reviewing the plans myself or seeing the thing fly a few times.
I have a reasonable expectation that other drivers will obey traffic lights because it is in their own self interest to do so, and if they have drivers licenses they had to pass a test on traffic rules and driving ability to get them.
Sure, sometimes it happens that the above reasonable expectations are not accurate reflections of the real world -- planes do fall out of the sky and cars do run red lights. And I take that into account too.
Why then is it not also reasonable that there is a designer that made your eyes, a device more complex and versatile than the most advanced camera?
First, because it raises the question of where this alleged designer came from, what methods he used to implement his design, and why he came up with such a crappy design in the first place.
Second, because human eyes are not more complex and versatile than the most advanced camera. They have lousy color and angular resolution in all but a small area of the sensor surface; the sensor surface itself is buried beneath a layer of tissue; the frequency range sucks -- not so much because of the sensors but because the lens system can't correct for chromatic abberation so it just blocks ultra-violet (otherwise the UV would blur the image); no zoom capability at all, and it has a blind spot for pete's sake. Sure, our eyes aren't too shabby as general purpose image sensors, but they're hardly a pinnacle of optic or sensor design.
If evolution were true and there is not just one designer, why should a chance process not involving ONE mind make these rules the same in the entire universe?
So you're saying that evolution implies multiple designers? LOL! That's funny. Why should rules be different? What would the implications be on what we observe if they were? (Hint: what would the boundary where the rules change be like?)
All design implies a designer, natural or manmade.
So salt crystals, say, are "designed" to be cubic? Funny, I thought it was just a consquence of the way sodium and chlorine atoms stack. So planets are "designed" to be near perfect spheres? Seems to me it's just an inevitable consequence of how gravity works and the strength of materials.
Insisting that all that requires a designer is hardly a step up from primitive animism or belief that everything is controlled by its own personal god. Good grief, man, how do you even manage to use a computer?
Tell that to the string theorists
;-)
What, that bunch of religious zealots?
Too true. Unfortunately half the population is of below average intelligence.
;-)
Indeed, I'd venture to say that more than half the population is below the average intelligence of Slashdotters.
And of course, the average Slashdotter is below the intelligence of you and me.
Scary, ain't it?
It is not in advertisers' (or politicians', and religious leaders', for that matter) interest to have a population capable of critical thinking and making up their own minds from independent research.
Therefore we have an education system and mass (advertiser-supported) media dedicated to suppressing that capability.
Hell, it's not even a concious conspiracy, just a regrettable consequence of advertisers, religious leaders and politicians acting in their own self interest -- and the media acts in the interest of the advertisers who pay them. (Perhaps not even conciously, but by a process of selection.)
Agnostic: I know it is impossible to know for certain whether or not God exists. But I also know that it is impossible to know anything for certain, including this bit of knowledge.
So, you're certain that you know that you don't know.
Are you sure?
There is a difference between micro and macroevolution. One is inter and the other intraspecies.
There is no difference. If you think there is, come up with a definition of "species" that also covers species that reproduce asexually, as well as species with non-transitive breeding populations (eg A, B and C where A & B can and do interbreed, and B and C can and do interbreed, but A and C can't and don't.)
There's no objective definition of species, so the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is meaningless. It's something creationists originally came up with so that they could dismiss the observations of evolution happening today as "mere microevolution".
To believe that the cosmos, life, and my soul all come from random interactions and as yet undiscovered scientific principles requires more blind faith in science than I have in my religion.
"Faith in science"? What exactly does that mean? Science is a method for coming up with descriptions of how the world works -- descriptions that can in turn be used to make predictions about causes and effects. Faith doesn't enter into it. It either works or it doesn't, depending on the problem domain.
The question of how your soul (if you or anyone else has a soul) came into being isn't part of that problem domain -- nobody has yet come up with a definition of "soul" that fits anything that science covers.
Where the cosmos came from (vs what has happened in it since) is also not really a question of science, it may not even be a valid question at all. (As Hawking puts it, asking "what was there before the beginning of the universe" is like asking "what is north of the North Pole").
Life? Because at least life on Earth is something that started in the past, we'll never have a definitive answer (unless somebody invents a time machine), but we can certainly come up with testable hypotheses about mechanisms that could have worked. Random interactions? Depends what you mean by "random".
There are plenty of natural principles that cause non-random results (crystal formation, the sphericity of planets, ore veins and bodies, the size distribution of sand/gravel/boulders on beaches, the shape of galaxies, the production of amino acids when you add energy to a reducing atmosphere, etc.) -- the world is hardly a homogenous mass, and that's explainable by natural laws rather than divine intervention. (Of course divine intervention could have created those natural laws, but that's beyond the domain of science -- and doesn't really answer anything.)
Could a series of those non-random results have produced self-replicating molecules? (We already know that they can produce amino acids, lipids, cell-membrane-like microspheres, and a wide assortment of organic compounds previously thought only producable by life processes.) Only the faithful would be so arrogant as to say "absolutely no!", and only those equally arrogant or suffering a total failure of imagination would attempt to quote odds. (And anyone quoting the odds based on an assumption of a few random molecules floating in an ocean is ignorant of many things: geology, geochemistry, deep-ocean vents, catalytic chemistry (the effect on reaction rates of crystalline surface shapes is highly relevant -- certain clays and amino acids, for example), and so on. There are plenty of hints. A good theory will undoubtedly require a cross-disciplinary approach, and there just isn't that much cross communication between geochemists and biochemists, for example.