I'm not sure anyone has good data on this. It's hard enough getting people to agree on what "more intelligent" means. I certainly can't agree that all home computers have always just been used for games, and I doubt there's ANY data supporting this contention. I've seen kids use computers very creatively when given proper guidance, but that's anecdotal.
As my daughter gets older, I'm going to look hard for software that requires her to think, to create, and to write her own programs. The best tools for this sort of thing have been around for at least a generation: programming languages, word processors, and paint/draw tools.
The article makes the point that this is the first generation to be raised with computers. The problems they have as a result are most probably the result of the previous generation's ignorance of computers. The first generation of anyhting is loaded with bugs. We have the chance now to learn from our mistakes and really use technology as a tool to make the educational process really hum, instead of as a glorifed pacifier.
I'm deeply concerned that he isn't just doing this for tax reasons. I selfishly wanted him to outlive me just long enough so I could appear to him in a dream and tell him what it's like outside the Asylum.
Well, you must remember that the GPS birds are military satellites. They're owned and operated by te U.S Air Force. If they were built to commercial standards, would they be lighter? Probably not - they'd just have more power;bigger solar arrays, batteries, power amps and shunts taking over the mass gained from throwing off "other things." They are, after all, global broadcast satellites with crosslinks, so more power in space translates to smaller, cheaper gear on the ground. They fit on a Delta,and you can't get much cheaper than a Delta by throwing off a little weight, so why sweat weight?
The GPS satellites are not immense. They are middlin' in size, and much smaller than most of the communications satellites being built today. They are also in a fairly high 12 hour orbit, and they can't reenter. They simply don't have enough delta-velocity on board to come close to reentry.
All of the above is unclassified information, but I assure you it's true.
Rubbish. Comet Tempel is just a freaking overgrown snowball. Deep Impact is no more an act of violence than is a geologist breaking a rock open with a hammer.
NASA has been quite publically planning Deep Impact for years. It's purpose is to reveal the presumably pristine, primordial layers of stuff underneath the heavily weathered top layers of the comet.
Comets get heavily damaged from outgassing every time they pass close to the sun, so it isn't like NASA's perpetrating some sort of crime here.
The best argument that we are the first or most advanced species in universe is simply the fact, that we are alive. Sounds strange?
Even without faster-than-light-travel a species with slow interstellar spacetravel could colonize our whole galaxy with a virus-style expansion in less than 30 million years. These are very conservative numbers done by some very anxious physicans, I would guess that it could be done in much less time. As our galaxy is around 10.000 million years old, it could have been colonized more than 300 times even before humans as a species had formed.
This is the old Fermi Paradox. It makes a lot of assumptions. Just five of them are:
An advanced civilization would be interested in colonizing worlds around other stars.
The survivors of the long trips to the first colonies would be able to martial further colonization campaings, rather than just managing to survive on their new worlds.
They would be interested in colonizing our solar system.
If they did colonize our solar system, they would still be here, and:
we'd be able to tell.
No disrespect to Fermi; he was a brilliant guy. However, this shouldn't be taken as any more than a mental lenss to focus contemplation on the topic.
What is the factual basis for all hese assertions about online communities? HAs anyone got any hard, reliable data, or is JK relying purely on anecdotal evidence?
I participate in at least one comunity where many of the members know each personally and in which flaming is rare. That's my anecdotal evidence. I'd liek to see a serious study.
An experiment (probably futile) in replying to an AC:
Atheist lies
The parent article was just stating historical fact, a matter of record, really. And besides, "Atheist" is no longer pejorative, so this isn't even a good flame.
I, for one am delighted that the British are reminding themselves of their scientific heritage for this, their most ambitious space mission yet. It sets up high expectations, but that's what you need to carry something like this forward.
I want to see the Pluto mission go, but apparently, it's being done at the expense of delaying the Europa mission, which is more scientifically compelling, although not as time-constrained.
The obvious question is why not fund both? The reason is that the NASA budget has been effectively frozen for years, and Space Station and Shuttle suck up a large chunk of it. What's left over is used to fund such things as planetary science missions.
Although the large stars that go supernova and seed the galaxy with heavy elements don't live as long as the sun (a few 10^8 years, perhaps?), It seems likely to me that the clock for advanced life forms started about the same time ours did. This is because these huge gamma ray bursts were more common in the early, smaller universe, and may have made the environment very unfriendly to life on the surfaces of planets. However, complex life forms have been evolving for about 600 million years on Earth, and it's not clear to me why they couldn't have started sooner.
> I take exception to a statement in your point #3--
> that ours is a "relatively primitive culture," and how
> that is the reason that we "gobble up" bandwidth.
That's not my point. I submit that a more advanced culture would use far more bandwidth. However, you do make the good point of "primitive relative to what?" It's true there's no empirical data for what constitutes "more advanced." Although we can easily posit a more advanced civilization - even sans utopianism - we can't prove that it's realizable for our species or for any.
> Even if you believe the modern scientific dogma about
> evolution, why should any ET culture be further advanced > than our own?
Don't get me started on the differences between science and dogma!
Is it possible to be further advanced than we are? Of course it is. We're still primitive in a lot of areas. I'll bet any/. reader can name at least 10 things We Do Crudely. Pick our leaders, for example. If we agree that it's possible, and given that we've only had RF capabilities for about a century, then it's overwhelmingly probable that any ET civilization we contact has had it longer than we have. Much longer. See a recent article by Seth Shostak on this.
As for the 50 LY, I was giving the ET radioastronomers the benefit of the doubt - that the early wireless transmissions were detectable.
That's the first I've heard of this. I've registered interest in signing up one or more of the CPUs I control. Apparently, this differes structurally from SETI@Home in that it is a big Monte Carlo study.
The Climate Model they give you takes a year or more to run on a typical PC, unlike SETI@Home 3.0's work units, which take my single-CPU 500 MHz G4 about 6-7 hours to chew through.
SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.
This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:
They're only looking at a frequency band where we would expect to fnd a signal if someone were deliberately trying to contact us. If someone were sending out beacons in random directions, then the signal wouldn't be straightforwardly repeatable. So, they'd have to know we were here. RF signals have only been transmitted from Earth for 100 years or so, and the vast majority of the energy in the last 50 years. So, only nearby civilizations (distance <= 50 LY) could know about us and be sending these signals.
The Arecibo antenna is actually a volcanic caldera, and can only sees a certain band of the celestial sphere, so there could be nearby civilizations transmitting, and SETI @ Home would miss them.
You can make a case that any civilzation capable of contacting us would almost certainly be far more advanced than we are. Given the way communications bandwidth is gobbled up by our relatively primitive culture, they'd probably be using all sorts of sophisticated spread-spectrum technology and a wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum that would make it very tricky for us to intercept and recognize messages not intended for us, even if we were lucky with the geometry.
The SETI@Home people are real scientists, and they kow that they need rock-solid evidence if they're going to claim they found a signal. So, they are bending over backwards - as they should - to find alternative explanations when they do see something anomalous.
The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home will hopefully get comparable attention.
I downloaded NS 6 for the Mac yesterday. Install went smoothly on my G4. I opted out of the AOL stuff using custom install. It irritates me that I have to opt out, but it's easy to do so.
Just curious, how would you feel if your parents told you that your upbringing was largely a waste of their talent and training?
I'd agree with them. It's just reality: babies mostly sleep, cry, sleep, poop, sleep, eat and drool. They need a lot of love and care, but not a lot of intellectual focus.
My mother was a very bright lady who was largely a stay-at-home mom. These days, she'd probably have a career and be a breadwinner on par with her husband. I would have spent more time in daycare. Would it have done me much (additional)damage? I doubt it.
Obviously, the assumption is implict that the reader is a potential parent. If not, feel free to ignore, as usual. And more people are likely to be parents someday than think so when they're young.
Skilled workers are those that work out of passion.. not drones that expect some company/institution to pay for their training.
The truth is that most Americans have little ambitions of hard work.. they would rather be managers. People coming from countries with less IT opportunities trained themselves out of passion with more computers and less money/power in mind.
I generally agree with this, but it tars Americans with far too broad a brush.
It's true that that most talented and productive people - wherever they come from - mostly train themselves. If someone has to take a training course in basic HTML, for example, they're unlikely to become a really good web designer. The principle I would put forth here is that we're each actively responsible for our own skills - for acquiring them, for keeping them competetive, and for recognizing reality if it turns out your not doing what you were born to do. If you listen to the politicians and pundits, you'd think that everyone should be a tech worker - piffle!
I also think most American firms in my experience don't do enough training, or enough of the right kind of training. A lot of us just have too little time to pick something up in a catch-as-catch-can manner. A structured training course can save time, but no one should expect training to convert halfwits into wizards.
I certainly wouldn't demand that anyone else to paying for our daycare as an entitlement. It's not.
However, my lady has a demanding career that's important to her. We could afford for her to stay home, but that's a monstrous waste of her talents and training to sit around waiting for the baby to wake up and be fed or changed. Without a daycare facility at her place of work, she might seek out employment elsewhere (where they either pay more or have daycare, or both), and her critical contribution to her team would then be lost to them. So, it's to the benefit of her other team members that daycare (which costs us about $600/mo) is provided. Competent professional daycare does a child no harm.
BTW, Parenting is one of the best things you'll ever do. I'd start to think about how you're going to prepare for it while still young. And if you're male, don't expect a woman to shoulder all the burden for you.
Although I don't think Dubya (or his nameless minion answering these questions) actaully meant to list the "Approved religions," this does raise a troubling question about Bush's rhetoric. He's constantly talking about faith and "faith based organizations." I wonder what will happen when one of those faith based organizations is the Rastafarians, the Wiccans, or some weird UFO suicide cult? Then there will have to be an approved list, and then where do we go from there?
Too bad we don't hear about getting reason based organizations involved.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure anyone has good data on this. It's hard enough getting people to agree on what "more intelligent" means. I certainly can't agree that all home computers have always just been used for games, and I doubt there's ANY data supporting this contention. I've seen kids use computers very creatively when given proper guidance, but that's anecdotal.
As my daughter gets older, I'm going to look hard for software that requires her to think, to create, and to write her own programs. The best tools for this sort of thing have been around for at least a generation: programming languages, word processors, and paint/draw tools.
The article makes the point that this is the first generation to be raised with computers. The problems they have as a result are most probably the result of the previous generation's ignorance of computers. The first generation of anyhting is loaded with bugs. We have the chance now to learn from our mistakes and really use technology as a tool to make the educational process really hum, instead of as a glorifed pacifier.
I'm deeply concerned that he isn't just doing this for tax reasons. I selfishly wanted him to outlive me just long enough so I could appear to him in a dream and tell him what it's like outside the Asylum.
I guess he'll find out first.
Well, you must remember that the GPS birds are military satellites. They're owned and operated by te U.S Air Force. If they were built to commercial standards, would they be lighter? Probably not - they'd just have more power;bigger solar arrays, batteries, power amps and shunts taking over the mass gained from throwing off "other things." They are, after all, global broadcast satellites with crosslinks, so more power in space translates to smaller, cheaper gear on the ground. They fit on a Delta,and you can't get much cheaper than a Delta by throwing off a little weight, so why sweat weight?
The GPS satellites are not immense. They are middlin' in size, and much smaller than most of the communications satellites being built today. They are also in a fairly high 12 hour orbit, and they can't reenter. They simply don't have enough delta-velocity on board to come close to reentry.
All of the above is unclassified information, but I assure you it's true.
Just going by what the article says, the study found no new "stuff" that could be injected to disable the immune system© On the contrary:
So, I don't see the weapon potential© The protein keeps the immune system from overreacting© Anyway, we already know of an agent for disabling the immune system: HIV infection©
The article mentioned nothing about anything airborne©
Not a corrected link, but another boring goatsex troll. When will these puppies get tired of this?
Rubbish. Comet Tempel is just a freaking overgrown snowball. Deep Impact is no more an act of violence than is a geologist breaking a rock open with a hammer.
NASA has been quite publically planning Deep Impact for years. It's purpose is to reveal the presumably pristine, primordial layers of stuff underneath the heavily weathered top layers of the comet.
Comets get heavily damaged from outgassing every time they pass close to the sun, so it isn't like NASA's perpetrating some sort of crime here.
This is the old Fermi Paradox. It makes a lot of assumptions. Just five of them are:
No disrespect to Fermi; he was a brilliant guy. However, this shouldn't be taken as any more than a mental lenss to focus contemplation on the topic.
I participate in at least one comunity where many of the members know each personally and in which flaming is rare. That's my anecdotal evidence. I'd liek to see a serious study.
An experiment (probably futile) in replying to an AC:
Atheist lies
The parent article was just stating historical fact, a matter of record, really. And besides, "Atheist" is no longer pejorative, so this isn't even a good flame.
I, for one am delighted that the British are reminding themselves of their scientific heritage for this, their most ambitious space mission yet. It sets up high expectations, but that's what you need to carry something like this forward.
BTW, there are still those who claim that Viking discovered evidence of life, but this is a minority viewpoint.
The obvious question is why not fund both? The reason is that the NASA budget has been effectively frozen for years, and Space Station and Shuttle suck up a large chunk of it. What's left over is used to fund such things as planetary science missions.
Although the large stars that go supernova and seed the galaxy with heavy elements don't live as long as the sun (a few 10^8 years, perhaps?), It seems likely to me that the clock for advanced life forms started about the same time ours did. This is because these huge gamma ray bursts were more common in the early, smaller universe, and may have made the environment very unfriendly to life on the surfaces of planets. However, complex life forms have been evolving for about 600 million years on Earth, and it's not clear to me why they couldn't have started sooner.
> I take exception to a statement in your point #3--
> that ours is a "relatively primitive culture," and how
> that is the reason that we "gobble up" bandwidth.
That's not my point. I submit that a more advanced culture would use far more bandwidth. However, you do make the good point of "primitive relative to what?" It's true there's no empirical data for what constitutes "more advanced." Although we can easily posit a more advanced civilization - even sans utopianism - we can't prove that it's realizable for our species or for any.
> Even if you believe the modern scientific dogma about
> evolution, why should any ET culture be further advanced
> than our own?
Don't get me started on the differences between science and dogma!
Is it possible to be further advanced than we are? Of course it is. We're still primitive in a lot of areas. I'll bet any /. reader can name at least 10 things We Do Crudely. Pick our leaders, for example. If we agree that it's possible, and given that we've only had RF capabilities for about a century, then it's overwhelmingly probable that any ET civilization we contact has had it longer than we have. Much longer. See a recent article by Seth Shostak on this.
As for the 50 LY, I was giving the ET radioastronomers the benefit of the doubt - that the early wireless transmissions were detectable.
> I hate to nitpick, but Arecibo is not a volcanic caldera,
> in spite of what the tabloid press might report.
Not entirely a nit - thanks for setting me straight.
I can't remember where I heard it was a caldera, but I'm sure it wasn't the tabloid press. Please!
I think the best view I've ever had of it was in the movie Contact.
The Climate Model they give you takes a year or more to run on a typical PC, unlike SETI@Home 3.0's work units, which take my single-CPU 500 MHz G4 about 6-7 hours to chew through.
http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/
SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.
This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:
The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home will hopefully get comparable attention.
I'd agree with them. It's just reality: babies mostly sleep, cry, sleep, poop, sleep, eat and drool. They need a lot of love and care, but not a lot of intellectual focus.
My mother was a very bright lady who was largely a stay-at-home mom. These days, she'd probably have a career and be a breadwinner on par with her husband. I would have spent more time in daycare. Would it have done me much (additional)damage? I doubt it.
I really hope your kid never reads Slashdot.
If she does, I'll love her anyway.
Obviously, the assumption is implict that the reader is a potential parent. If not, feel free to ignore, as usual. And more people are likely to be parents someday than think so when they're young.
I generally agree with this, but it tars Americans with far too broad a brush.
It's true that that most talented and productive people - wherever they come from - mostly train themselves. If someone has to take a training course in basic HTML, for example, they're unlikely to become a really good web designer. The principle I would put forth here is that we're each actively responsible for our own skills - for acquiring them, for keeping them competetive, and for recognizing reality if it turns out your not doing what you were born to do. If you listen to the politicians and pundits, you'd think that everyone should be a tech worker - piffle!
I also think most American firms in my experience don't do enough training, or enough of the right kind of training. A lot of us just have too little time to pick something up in a catch-as-catch-can manner. A structured training course can save time, but no one should expect training to convert halfwits into wizards.
However, my lady has a demanding career that's important to her. We could afford for her to stay home, but that's a monstrous waste of her talents and training to sit around waiting for the baby to wake up and be fed or changed. Without a daycare facility at her place of work, she might seek out employment elsewhere (where they either pay more or have daycare, or both), and her critical contribution to her team would then be lost to them. So, it's to the benefit of her other team members that daycare (which costs us about $600/mo) is provided. Competent professional daycare does a child no harm.
BTW, Parenting is one of the best things you'll ever do. I'd start to think about how you're going to prepare for it while still young. And if you're male, don't expect a woman to shoulder all the burden for you.
Too bad we don't hear about getting reason based organizations involved.
> If that movie is to scale... That asteroid is pretty big.
It's not all that big - a very sort of average size asteroid. The biggest ones are much bigger.