... when these measurements corroborate the existing (and already very convincing) evidence for sea level rise, the wingnuts will come up with yet another obscure rationalization explaining why they should be discarded or ignored.
You are referring to either the left or right lobe of a wingnut, or the whole thing? Wingnuts are the cutest little darlings. Unlike most nuts with their grasping-sides that rest quietly within a circular area, wingnuts seem to always be begging for attention. "Hey! Look at me!" they cry, their lobes rising like the arms of a child who wants to be picked up. They crave contact with forefingers and thumbs. There is nothing so sad as a wingnut that has never been adjusted. Every time I catch a glimpse of a wingnut that is in a dim recess of something, impossible to reach, I shed a tear for it. Regular nuts are like cats, one glance and you know you'll need special tools to deal with them and even those might not work. Wingnuts are more like dogs, playful, emotional and needy.
Pejorative political slang is become a freak show of Wingnuts versus Moonbats. which both have a pair of wings. Are both of these wings on the same side, like a flounder's eyes? I suppose there is an alternative Universe with left-wingnuts and rightwing-moonbats, blue-dog neocoons all watched over by a Moral Minority.
It's neat but this technique does not seem very wingnut-friendly because, accuracy, er, what. TA seems to have been carefully scrubbed of any indication of the degree of accuracy and that ambiguous "30-fold increase in such data" seems almost calculated to imply greater accuracy or global coverage over existing methods. I suspect they just mean oftener or morer.
I think they mean 650x but all those extra zeroes look so sp00ky! Yea verily, it has increased by four gross, three score and a fortnight. When I was going to St. Ives I met a man with thirteen eyes. Each eye had five anime-glints. How many anime-glints were traveling away from St. Ives?
8,000,000 picocuries/L ~ 1,500 mrem ~ about one full body CT scan per liter drunk. Seriously high, but if every liter the water in this 'most contaminated' well was diluted with 399 liters of non-tritiated water it would be drinkable by EPA standards. (source)
The "next few minutes" is basically just enough time to give the "abandon ship" order.
Just enough time to switch to GEICO. Ogg say, better just to separate saucer section. Bad news for cheap tickets.
Ogg think is not size of ship but shape and area above water make target for wave energy. Ogg duck under water, why cannot ship? Ship need water tightness on top but that just good sense. Silly people stack containers to sky on hippo boat make Ogg angry, just break apart and fill ocean with rubber ducks. Hippo boat has good side and bad side. Ogg think ducks. They bob. Bob bob and little duck heads go up and down. Ogg like that. Ducks no get together and make big duck. Ducks only held together by bond of friendship. Ogg want people think like ducks. Circle things hate to turn over like hippo things but circle thing waste space. Go basalt like Giant's Causeway and Led Zepplin with no naked kids. Make many smaller hexagon boats Ogg say. Stack silly containers on hexagon not into sky but just above water like duck heads. Pieces can come together like hippo boat shape and go fast under good sky or push apart with duck-legs of steel between them good for pushing and flexing, for bad sky, far enough apart to spin to put best side to waves and not lean into each other. Like ducks! Waves come and water comes, little ducks lifted higher than hippo boat then pinch nose and Duck! under top of wave each with duck legs to keep others from turning over. Raft of ducks. A duck raft. Ogg like wave-things and ducks. And hexagons.
It is all as foretold in the gospel of Neal Stephenson, 1992: Snow Crash:
When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull. Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man's ruined head. The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking at significant warez. A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree. Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Stephenson quaintly describes a small computer wired into the brain with a Motorola phone rubber ducky to communicate with the hive mind. When this was written In 1992 the human race had yet to enter the Information age. CompuServe and AOL were not even connected to Internet. It was generally believed that unless specialized hardware was used it would be impossible to subvert our natural desire to think and act independently, attentive to the world around us. How could Stephenson have known?
Computers and networks did exist in 1992 but people still considered 'computer time' to be an activity separate from life itself. Computing was a visceral act. Turning on a computing lamp, we approached the computer --- it never approached us. We'd pick it up, feeling its familiar weight and thumping its spine and crack it open, slowly leafing through pages of compute. More ardent computerers preferred the 'scroll', where the words moved up or down... but always in whole-line jumps, not the jarring and unnerving smooth scrolling of today. But the Tumblr was years in the future. Those ancient scrolls had a beginning and an end and you could clearly see them and operate the cranks. And when you reached the end you went straight to bed. The phones of 1992 were smarter than some people but stupider than most. They did not get along with computers very well, not without hoots and whistles and occasional cursing. Even then computers were smarter than most people but few felt threatened by this, and those who did could easily walk away. There was no need to run, and the computer did not follow them.
What also happened during this time on phones is now only spoken of in a whisper, SMS messaging. SMS left permanent scars on the virtual landscape, whole burnt-out cities of wasted business potential and personal financial ruin. It is impossible to assess the damage. It was and still remains a financial success for communications providers, because people take what's given to them and ask for more. It fostered a ruthless and heartless corporate culture, and utterly destroyed the perception of communications providers that had built slowly over time --- even cherished --- that of the Friendly Postman. Now all communications companies are ruthless fucks, and it cannot be undone... because we remember what those marauding orcs did to us in the early days of cell and SMS messaging. They shattered the taboo that the receiver should never pay, even as they reduced "music on hold" to Tortured Screams of Hell, and dulled the senses with a laughable parody of email. Like a cuddly teddy bea
The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons --- its size inherited from the PC floppy disk.
The form factor of 3.5" floppy drives was decided during the early planning stage of the Great Data Railroad. You can place exactly 16 3.54" (90mm) bare floppy discs side by side within the standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches. For the original 1982 HP single sided format of ~280kB this yields roughly ~4.3mB along every 3.5" of railroad track, or 137 rows along the floor of a a standard 40-foot railroad boxcar without the use of stacking. Thus ~600MB was the capacity of a original single density data railroad car, though it was only only ~1mm in height.
While the floppy disc made data railroads possible, media stacking made them practical. A cylinder of bare floppy media ~10 feet high is roughly 3048 discs, so your standard railroad boxcar held ~1.8TB of floppy storage, in 1982! With an average rail speed of 18mph a single boxcar passes every ~1.5 seconds, which is ~1.2T terabytes or 9200 gigabits per second! By 1998 floppy media storage density had improved ~714-fold, yielding transfer rates of 6568800Gb/s or ~821 TB/s.
So why was floppy data railroad ultimately limited to this 'arbitrary' ~821 TB/s? Northern rail gauge of the US railway based on the English rail system which were based on tramways which used the same jigs used to build wagons whose wheel base was determined by ancient ruts that were left by Roman chariots which were sized to accommodate the width of two horses' asses. As not-quite debunked here.
So the short story is, any chain of decisions regarding technology leads back to some horse's ass.
CURIOUS as to how much 'dark fiber' the NSA may be leasing within the United States for purely domestic purposes, and where. If there are any Mark Kleins out there who have noticed anything funny, do share! This includes fiber leased to anything you may suspect is a shell corporation, for which you (the technician) can see that the paperwork is a bit odd; or an unusual number of individual fibers terminating in a locked room, where the normal requirement is a few.
With the rise of cloud computing the issue is clouded somewhat, there are plenty of start-ups with goofy names whose business models call for more resources than they need. But the discrete number of fibers terminating in a room, especially if routed from/to places which are obviously not associated with the same entity, might be your best clue. A specific scenario is a number of fibers without proper paperwork that run from passive tap/splits to a server room where the traffic is analyzed, streams selected and (leased) fiber is used to push the chosen data somewhere else. Such as Utah. We're looking for evidence of Big Domestic Packet Listen infrastructure.
If you notice something unusual, you might try disconnecting it and see who complains and how quickly. With a little hands-on we could get to the bottom of this much sooner.
If you do not have an interesting story to share, just make something up. We'll know if your tale is relevant, because we're the NSA and we know where our stuff is, and we're only here to help. We are putting out this request for information to find out if anyone else got there first.
CURIOUS as to how much 'dark fiber' the NSA may be leasing within the United States for purely domestic purposes, and where. If there are any Mark Kleins out there who have noticed anything funny, do share! This includes fiber leased to anything you may suspect is a shell corporation, for which you (the technician) can see that the paperwork is a bit odd; or an unusual number of individual fibers terminating in a locked room, where the normal requirement is a few.
With the rise of cloud computing the issue is clouded somewhat, there are plenty of start-ups with goofy names whose business models call for more resources than they need. But the discrete number of fibers terminating in a room, especially if routed from/to places which are obviously not associated with the same entity, might be your best clue. A specific scenario is a number of fibers without proper paperwork that run from passive tap/splits to a server room where the traffic is analyzed, streams selected and (leased) fiber is used to push the chosen data somewhere else. Such as Utah. We're looking for evidence of Big Domestic Packet Listen infrastructure.
If you notice something unusual, you might try disconnecting it and see who complains and how quickly. With a little hands-on we could get to the bottom of this much sooner.
If you do not have an interesting story to share, just make something up. We'll know if your tale is relevant, because we're the NSA and we know where our stuff is, and we're only here to help. We are putting out this request for information to find out if anyone else got there first.
Encrypted filesystem, tiny OS kernel stored as on-chip PROM
Of course I meant ROM not PROM.
To avoid distracting replies like this, head on over to my "How can we improve Slashdot?" suggestion that Slashdot implements an edit feature and show your support. Of course, "[That] discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted." so you won't be able to show your support. Maybe send them an email or add it to your sig. I will as soon as I figure out how magnets work. If you work in the same building, pull the fire alarm to get their attention.
Encrypted filesystem, tiny OS kernel stored as on-chip PROM and a bit of NVRAM. Sorry, no updates to it are possible so they'd better get all the bugs out before release. Kernel has just enough to support to display a prompt and accept the PIN, set up encryption, relinquish control of screen and keyboard and trigger a real OS boot, presenting plain data to the device as if it were a disk controller or memory stick. The phone or whatever doesn't know its data is encrypted.
Let's say three strikes and you're out. First time it's used, a random salt is generated and 3 copies of the salt are written to its NVRAM, along with a hash of the PIN. The encryption key is hash(salt+PIN). Destroying all copies of the salt would render data inaccessible.
Every time a PIN is entered (attempt x=1,2,3) its hash is computed and then salt(x) is read into memory, then salt(x) is destroyed in NVRAM (zeroed). Then the hash of the PIN is checked against the stored hash.
If the PIN is bad, we move on to the next entry. salt(x) remains destroyed.
If the PIN is good, the salt held in memory is rewritten to salt(x), un-destroying it. All other salt() entries are checked to see if they match the salt stored in memory and if they don't match, they are rewritten so there are now 3 good copies. Then encryption is set up and the boot proceeds.
This using of three salt buckets and always writing to them is to protect against a brute force attack where the attacker power-cycles the chip to gain "free" attempts. But also, if you use separate "game over: you lose" code that sets out to destroy the salt, a side-channel attack may be possible where the attacker listens to chip emissions to detect it starting to run and aborts it somehow. By destroying a copy of the salt on every attempt the chip's emissions should offer little or no clue of such branching behavior.
A downside is that yes, NVRAM is being written to and will degrade over time. That's why it is good to have good escrow system in place so the government can help you recover your data./SARC It probably wouldn't hurt if on first use the user has the option of selecting the salt rather than random generation, and a separate option (after successful PIN entry) that displays the salt. This would allow a technician to ''migrate' you onto a new chip that can access the (copied) encrypted filesystem. And the chip itself should be removable so in case of a device failure it can be moved to a new one.
Simple countermeasure! Just boot up your old Aspire One netbook with XP 'beast', an obsolete alternative distribution of XP where anything that stunk of bloat was omitted or disabled or covered with Hazmat stickers or XOR'd out and ridiculous excess like print spoolers are absent, and nothing is guaranteed but things just might load at all, eventually. This screaming monster only takes three times as long to boot as you'd expect. Then the many Atheros Wifi drivers which do not work fail to load successively, then the only one that does work loads, which happens to be part of an "AT&T Communications Manager" ATTCM bundle that no one in their right mind would choose over anything else. ATTCM wastes your time looking for stupid phone devices they've pissed people off by not supporting and finally gets around to the Wifi. A hundred Wifi beacons later it finally gets around to displaying its hello icon on the screen. Another hundred beacons and the ATTCM user interface is beginning to take shape, drawn before your very eyes, it looks like a cross between a haXor serialz generator and a pinball machine. Another hundred beacons go by and you can almost hear it groan like it's passing a turd, and it manages to say "Scanning for Networks". Now it starts to listen for beacons. It won't show you any network names until it has finished looking and going though its profile database with a tiny spoon and making you wait another few seconds, just because. How cute, now it's trying to show the names. Some jump scroll thing appears that you fear to touch because it is so badly implemented you might jump over whole screens. But the arrows don't work right either. The encrypted login takes too long to describe here. But if you manage to glimpse and click on an unsecured network it's like it has to fill in forms and mail them in, it's so slow. You can feel the excruciating agony of a simple Wifi connect, lose yourself to complete despair "obtaining an IP address" because you've installed countless DHCP servers and watched the packets go by and nothing on God's Green Earth takes this long unless you're being bullshitted. Eventually you realize it has been saying "connected" for awhile but you didn't realize it because there are tears in your eyes. If only you'd have remembered to start Firefox as all this was happening it'd only be a minute or so away from displaying, but you didn't because you feared it would slow things down further. Firefox is now loading, sounds like the drive shaft is loose...
TL;DR It's difficult to imagine doing anything in a reckless manner with this setup. I'm safe. Actually it's not as bad as I let on. Or maybe it is and I'm so much worse.
It's more like 99%, 99%, 99%, 99%, 11,000%, 0%, 0%, 0%...
Checking the timeline... you're actually pretty close on that 11,000% figure... but it was really 12,000%. I'm sure Spinal Tap would be puzzled by the coincidence...
19860425 01:00:00 [100%] test begins 19860425 13:05:00 [60%] turbine #2 switched off 19860425 14:00:00 [50%] 19860426 00:26:00 [1%] after rods withdrawn. Too low! Weird! Akimov wants to abort. 19860426 01:00:00 [6%] power should be higher! They do not realize extent of Xe poisoning 19860426 01:19:00 [7%] rose a measly 1% after removing all but 6 rods? They're in deep shit now. 19860426 01:21:00 [7%] 350kg graphite blocks jumping in their sockets. Cavitation, irreparable damage to rod channels. 19860426 01:21:50 [7%]? pressure loss. Irreparable damage to cooling system. 19860426 01:23:40 [7%]? SCRAM! AZ-5 button pushed. Rods jam in channels at ~2.5m instead of descending full 7m. 19860426 01:23:44 [12000%] jammed rod tips cause reactor to surge to 120x full power! BOOM! [steam] then BOOM! [hydrogen] 19860426 01:23:45 [0%] for all practical purposes
After this point one could argue that the reactor actually stayed at '12' for quite a while but we'll give it a rest. So... in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl #4 went to... 12. Let's not do that again. information source, 100%=3200MWt
This sounds so incredibly dangerous. Are the computer models even safe? I wonder if these equations are even safe for chalkboards. If we manage to glimpse a 'naked singularity' Mother Nature will start locking the bathroom door.
Since nobody has come up with a final solution to the waste problem, the costs are infinite.
Could I say, "Until we come up with a solution to the wind-doesn't-blow-all-the-time problem or the ice-storms-can-fuck-em-up-completely problem... the costs are infinite?
Half of the 'final solution' is to fast-burn all the old waste and make energy from it. The waste will sit there patiently until we can do this. The other half of the 'final solution' is a new generation of reactors that do not generate long-lived waste. The basic concept for this was developed 60 years ago by Weinberg. In the world I live in we consider these to be problems to solve. What kind of world do you live in??
Discussing energy topics in these forums is beginning to feel like trying to explain to Elmo why he can't have Christmas every day. "But Santa Claus, Elmo wants Christmas every day! Santa gave Elmo three wishes. They're Elmo's wishes! And Elmo wished for Christmas every day!" Elmo wished for wind and solar power, he thinks the storage problem will solve itself with GrapheneOrSomethingSomehow(tm), Elmo thinks fusion is tomorrow, Elmo wants hydropower in Arizona, Elmo wants to place an iron cap over Yellowstone.
And Elmo hates nuclear energy --- because his parents hate it --- or because they don't. Elmo has not researched the matter.
When you have long-lived actinides in your spent fuel --- the battle to keep costs down or make energy from them in today's thermal spectrum reactors has already been lost. We've known this all along, it's one of the little reasons the US invested heavily in fast breeders, weapons production being the big reason. Current methods involve separating out plutonium and unburnt uranium into MOX (mixed oxide) fuel for re-use, which reduces most waste volume but the actinides are still there. To deal with them completely you need to hit them with 'fast' neutrons from a fission breeder, maybe making energy while doing so --- splitting them into even nastier (but short lived) or final inert products. You can wind up with something that's walk-away safe in, say, 40 years. The atom stewards of the Cold War said, "Yeah it's a problem. Fast breeders will solve it." Then fast breeders in the US started to shut down after a few years of making weapons, they never got around to burning commercial waste. They said, "Yeah it's a problem. Underground storage will solve it." Then the US Gub'mint failed to deliver on that promise too.
The best way to manage long-lived actinides is to manage not to produce them in the first place. Alvin Weinberg knew this in the 1950s and ultimately sacrificed the remainder of his career in an attempt to convince others this was the way. Weinberg's basic design for a two-fluid LFTR which breeds uranium from thorium and actively processes its fluid to keep long-lived actinides from forming is still the most exciting and viable option for a nuclear future in the opinion of myself and many others. Almost 100% burn in the thermal spectrum, and an extremely small waste volume that is walk-away safe in ~300 years.
Yep - the B1700 did this in the 1970s. Been there, done that... (I was a CPU engineer on one of them.)
So from within the dark entrails of Burroughs you were one of the Hardy Boys helping bring to light the Soul of a New Machine? That's awesome, and I'm not Kiddering. What if... those BCD architectures were designed from scratch using today's tools and methods? Is there something the machine could do inherently better or faster, something that benefits from the use of errorless unbounded decimal arithmetic?
The figure is closer to 100%. That 18,000 number sounds suspiciously close to the number of humans whom, if properly rendered reduced and freeze-dried, would comprise a perfect nutritional supplement for a long term Mars Mission and colony. Everybody gets to go into space! It's a win.
Scratching my head here. What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments?
It's evidence on a very specific level, the microbes somehow helping to regulate the length of intestinal villi. We've pretty well established how mammal bodies release stored fat as needed, but the mechanisms that regulate its intake are not as well understood.
So the interesting question becomes, why are we seeing evidence of a 'system' that is capable of actively regulating villi length rather a simple observation like mere presence of 'germ' x results in y. Stated another way, we're seeing evidence of ongoing symbiosis rather than an evolutionary result. Perhaps Akkermansia muciniphila functions as the Winter fat-storage inhibitor and there is significant evolutionary advantage to thinning out in the Spring --- even if the price is reduced nutritional uptake. This is (slightly) counter-intuitive because we are used to thinking of food uptake as something that has been constantly perfected over time (eg more is always better).
Perhaps the article reads a little strange because it involves temperature YET and there is the complete absence of a politically motivated guilt zinger woven into its presentation. But watch the headlines, I'm sure some will bite, viz:
CLIMATE CHANGE INTERFERING WITH NATURE'S FAT STORAGE MECHANISM? AMID CLIMATE FEARS, THERE MAY BE THIN HOT RATS IN OUR FUTURE
Horses have four legs. They have two rear legs, and forelegs in front. Six legs is an odd number of legs for a horse to have. The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore... the United States Equestrian Team has an infinite number of legs.
The U.S. will send 48 rowers to Rio. They will be as forewarned. Forewarned is forearmed. Four arms is an odd number of arms for a rower to have. The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore... the US rowing team has an infinite number of arms.
Sorry folks, but the right to privately encrypt is political "flyover country". You are hard pressed to find a candidate willing to make a deliberate and informed statement about it, and even then, don't be surprised if you get screwed over. No pitchfork mob will rise up with you to redress your grievance. Bill Clinton seemed reasonable until he and his NSA inspired hatchet-men Al Gore and Louis Freeh rolled out the Clipper Chip abomination. It was like lightning from a clear sky. A clear example of the Kindergarten Effect.
Fourth Amendment discussions are often tainted by rhetorical and useless arguments. You can actually tell a lot more about a candidate's fitness to defend civil liberties and freedom from unwarranted government surveillance and law enforcement intrusion by asking them about about the Second Amendment and Roe Vs. Wade. THOSE issues are where the rubber meets the road --- If they and I disagree on those it's a deal-breaker no matter what.
Here's the problem though. Those who land on my side of 2nd Amendment/Roe tend also to think the gub'mint needs to listen to everybody to keep duh terrorist at bay. But then again, they all do... Republicans do it right in your face, Democrats do it secretly and lie through their teeth about doing it. That is why the United States suffered grievous harm when we questioned (and rejected) the fitness of one Ron Paul, a true conservative.
This is really just a continuation of the 'OMG freak out about nuclear thing' that has been with us since the 60s. Nuclear can be bad, but there is also radiation all around us, and we do know how to detect and manage radiation risks.
Small package of radioactive tracer material left unattended. Dude walks past and notices,hey, this shit isn't nailed down. Dude thinks, maybe I can score some bucks off of this. Dude takes it and stashes it somewhere. Dude starts asking around, who wants to buy [this thing?] Everyone says, "Don't let the Americans know you got that. They're fucking crazy!" Dude just gives up. Company searches for the thing. It's gone. Company believes in responsible (wince) disclosure. Company is wincing because Americans shrug at the theft of high explosives. But theft of enough radioactive material to slightly irradiate an area brings on a shit storm. Time passes. Still not found. Someone in the Iraqi ministry realizes that they can fuck with America's mind by leaking the story. The fucking with America's mind begins. Rueters is chosen for the leak because they are staffed with whimpering radiophobes and never seek out the opinions of physicists and nuclear materials experts to corroborate the risk or put potential dose or usage into proper perspective. Rueters releases 'exclusive' wire story with few real details. Everyone dusts off their 'dirty bomb' files and updates them to threat du jour. $ perl -pni.bak -e 's/Bin Laden/ISIS/sgi' Headlines are created posing the new threat. Half of the stories are deliberately obfuscated so there is confusion whether a fission or 'dirty' bomb is being discussed. The dozen or so follow-up interviews where real experts shrug off (or laugh at) dirty bomb threat are left in archives. Google creates a handy new ID=0ahUKEwiCnOigpYHLAhVCKCYKHXhIDZkQqgIIKTAA to group the stories so you can see the silly headlines. Someone at Slashdot does not like nuclear power, because they like solar energy. It doesn't really make sense because to hate nuclear energy is to love natural gas, but there it is. So let's ride the cresting wave of hysteria and fear.
sweet naive assumption that if you don't give it internet, it won't call home. Perhaps it could use other wifi networks? Perhaps it could reach net relayed via your neighbour's TV? Perhaps in the absence of your wifi it can use a completely different (invigilation) frequencies and standard?
Perhaps it takes in bits of protein from moisture and airborne bacteria on the frame Perhaps a small insect becomes trapped in the heat bent Perhaps a gecko loses its tail as a crack in the plastic closes tightly Perhaps the hinged button compartment closes slowly, trapping the whole gecko Perhaps a mouse decides to build a nest by crawling into a rear opening, never seen again Perhaps the kitten is missing Perhaps Chester and his chair has been mostly absorbed. We hear his piteous cries for help
They are gathered in the Control Room where hand gesture snapshots and voice command packets converge. There are speakers everywhere emitting sharp mechanical, animal and human sounds. Small blurry photos taken from thousands of TV cameras float on a giant screen. Some people are standing in front of their TVs trying to find the actual controls (hidden in a hinged compartment) and their faces and giant eyeballs fill the frames.
The people who work in this room exist in a brief timeless moment that continues forever, in which countless desperate people are trying to control their TVs with gestures and voice commands without success. Properly executed transactions are logged by the cloud but repeated failures, especially if the algorithm detects angry or anxious voices, are routed here. The Corporation decided that to improve customer experience, real people would staff rooms like these and try to make sense of the commands as a last resort, issuing instructions back to the TVs as best they can.
More than half of the images and sounds are not people trying to operate their TVs however. There is a cacophony of domestic arguments, screaming puppies and wailing children, laughter, someone banging on pots and pans. The employees' eyes dart back and forth, their ears straining to detect some coherent voice command directed at the TV. There! A drunken voice murmurs "off dammit". Fingers tap on a console and OFF command is sent. Sigh of relief, perhaps we'll meet our quota this shift. Then a low growl rising to a scream and a woman's voice: "You never cared about me! Just leave me alone and get a fucking job!" Fingers tap again and a command is sent that will distract them by playing a loud Samsung demo loop showing happy young people leading an active lifestyle. That is good medicine and maybe it will help, but it helps meet quota. Small child facing camera in tears repeating something indistinct. Is that 'two' and 'tree'? Tap command set channel 23, hope it's OK for children.
Everyone in the room is quietly thinking... what were they thinking. Once upon a time people learned how to control their own TVs and once they learned they taught others, even small children. Now everyone is faced with the task of training machines for voice and you can see how much wasted energy and anguish results from it. They pity the elderly who were given these sets to make their lives easier... and everyone all gathered on the first quiet excited day and everything worked perfectly. Then the kids left and a fan was turned on in the room blowing air into the microphone, and from then on those in the Control Room see an old man alone in a room, in tears, shouting some command obscured by the wind. Two technicians gather for this one, debating what to do. It is decided they will make the TV cycle through channels slowly until they see his expression change. But it never does, perhaps he is tormented by something else.
Then the shift is over, and the next set of employees enters the Control Room. We are now approaching the late hour of peak alcohol, when children are gone, voices are slurred and TVs are sometimes knocked over. It will be a long night.
The world is going to be hit by an asteroid unless we spend trillions on an asteroid defense shield!
For all that other stuff the real risk hinges on issues of personal, political and economic RESTRAINT Everyone will be trying to sell you their favorite answers to those other 'threats' 'till Judgement Day. They'll also be pushing answers (eg DNA splicing pathogen research for 'defense') that carry extreme risk. The asteroid danger is the only real confirmed existential threat here. It will require unanimous effort and the 'weaponization of space' but until it is done we're just waiting to die suddenly. Even the US population being luddites and sheep is not a problem, if you come up with a low-tech solution and manage to enough of convince them.
How 'bout dem Space Nutters, ain't they kooks? Heads in the stars, readin' space booooooks! Plannin' dem missions to launch men 'n probes or spinny-dizzy colonies in LaGrangian lobes wearin' them space suits on Halloween on Earth chewin' the Space fat on for all that it's worth! Dem nugger-mugger Space Huggers way down South stuffin' Space Nutter Central for all that funds allow'th How to be a Space Nutter, only one way to hack it Get yerself a nuke, find an asteroid and smack it!
Look, I'm not arguing that NASA shouldn't be given more money but it's a hard sell when the only reason appears to be "I want it to be bigger".
Be gentle, action often begins with people sensing that something is wrong. When you're grasping in the air you think, maybe things could start happening if they just had more. But how much more? NASA is GO for what?
Everything about self-sustaining colonies is (regrettably) some years away. Exploration is nice, but it is also an unaffordable luxury *IF* there is an unaddressed existential threat. Statisticians who attempt to marginalize existential threats by fronting casino odds should be ignored (or worse). Every time someone suggests we have found almost all potentially hazardous objects, ask about the others. Dinosaurs Are Proof We Need A Space Program. S,M,L,X,2X We are now 50 years into the space age, 40 years since impactor dinosaur extinction reached consensus. There is on this day no viable mission to address this threat, and little interest. Is this evolution in action? It's about buying more time for the human race, and Gaia as we know her today. PRIORITY ONE: HAIVs on the ground or in orbit, ready to deploy on short notice. PRIORITY TWO: Missions to complete our sky survey, especially 'dark' objects. PRIORITY THREE: Everything else, since we (may have) bought some more time.
Slashdot Mirror
... when these measurements corroborate the existing (and already very convincing) evidence for sea level rise, the wingnuts will come up with yet another obscure rationalization explaining why they should be discarded or ignored.
You are referring to either the left or right lobe of a wingnut, or the whole thing? Wingnuts are the cutest little darlings. Unlike most nuts with their grasping-sides that rest quietly within a circular area, wingnuts seem to always be begging for attention. "Hey! Look at me!" they cry, their lobes rising like the arms of a child who wants to be picked up. They crave contact with forefingers and thumbs. There is nothing so sad as a wingnut that has never been adjusted. Every time I catch a glimpse of a wingnut that is in a dim recess of something, impossible to reach, I shed a tear for it. Regular nuts are like cats, one glance and you know you'll need special tools to deal with them and even those might not work. Wingnuts are more like dogs, playful, emotional and needy.
Pejorative political slang is become a freak show of Wingnuts versus Moonbats. which both have a pair of wings. Are both of these wings on the same side, like a flounder's eyes? I suppose there is an alternative Universe with left-wingnuts and rightwing-moonbats, blue-dog neocoons all watched over by a Moral Minority.
It's neat but this technique does not seem very wingnut-friendly because, accuracy, er, what. TA seems to have been carefully scrubbed of any indication of the degree of accuracy and that ambiguous "30-fold increase in such data" seems almost calculated to imply greater accuracy or global coverage over existing methods. I suspect they just mean oftener or morer.
link "up 65,000 percent"
Agreed. Who talks like this?
I think they mean 650x but all those extra zeroes look so sp00ky!
Yea verily, it has increased by four gross, three score and a fortnight.
When I was going to St. Ives I met a man with thirteen eyes.
Each eye had five anime-glints.
How many anime-glints were traveling away from St. Ives?
8,000,000 picocuries/L ~ 1,500 mrem ~ about one full body CT scan per liter drunk.
Seriously high, but if every liter the water in this 'most contaminated' well was diluted with 399 liters of non-tritiated water it would be drinkable by EPA standards. (source)
The "next few minutes" is basically just enough time to give the "abandon ship" order.
Just enough time to switch to GEICO.
Ogg say, better just to separate saucer section. Bad news for cheap tickets.
Ogg think is not size of ship but shape and area above water make target for wave energy. Ogg duck under water, why cannot ship? Ship need water tightness on top but that just good sense. Silly people stack containers to sky on hippo boat make Ogg angry, just break apart and fill ocean with rubber ducks. Hippo boat has good side and bad side. Ogg think ducks. They bob. Bob bob and little duck heads go up and down. Ogg like that. Ducks no get together and make big duck. Ducks only held together by bond of friendship. Ogg want people think like ducks. Circle things hate to turn over like hippo things but circle thing waste space. Go basalt like Giant's Causeway and Led Zepplin with no naked kids. Make many smaller hexagon boats Ogg say. Stack silly containers on hexagon not into sky but just above water like duck heads. Pieces can come together like hippo boat shape and go fast under good sky or push apart with duck-legs of steel between them good for pushing and flexing, for bad sky, far enough apart to spin to put best side to waves and not lean into each other. Like ducks! Waves come and water comes, little ducks lifted higher than hippo boat then pinch nose and Duck! under top of wave each with duck legs to keep others from turning over. Raft of ducks. A duck raft. Ogg like wave-things and ducks. And hexagons.
Ducks really smart. Ogg say ducks rock.
Ogg like rocks too. See Cloaking Technology Could Protect Offshore Rigs From Destructive Waves where Ogg say, Need Gauusian diffusion resonance window.
It is all as foretold in the gospel of Neal Stephenson, 1992: Snow Crash:
When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull. Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man's ruined head. The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking at significant warez. A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree. Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Stephenson quaintly describes a small computer wired into the brain with a Motorola phone rubber ducky to communicate with the hive mind. When this was written In 1992 the human race had yet to enter the Information age. CompuServe and AOL were not even connected to Internet. It was generally believed that unless specialized hardware was used it would be impossible to subvert our natural desire to think and act independently, attentive to the world around us. How could Stephenson have known?
Computers and networks did exist in 1992 but people still considered 'computer time' to be an activity separate from life itself. Computing was a visceral act. Turning on a computing lamp, we approached the computer --- it never approached us. We'd pick it up, feeling its familiar weight and thumping its spine and crack it open, slowly leafing through pages of compute. More ardent computerers preferred the 'scroll', where the words moved up or down... but always in whole-line jumps, not the jarring and unnerving smooth scrolling of today. But the Tumblr was years in the future. Those ancient scrolls had a beginning and an end and you could clearly see them and operate the cranks. And when you reached the end you went straight to bed. The phones of 1992 were smarter than some people but stupider than most. They did not get along with computers very well, not without hoots and whistles and occasional cursing. Even then computers were smarter than most people but few felt threatened by this, and those who did could easily walk away. There was no need to run, and the computer did not follow them.
What also happened during this time on phones is now only spoken of in a whisper, SMS messaging. SMS left permanent scars on the virtual landscape, whole burnt-out cities of wasted business potential and personal financial ruin. It is impossible to assess the damage. It was and still remains a financial success for communications providers, because people take what's given to them and ask for more. It fostered a ruthless and heartless corporate culture, and utterly destroyed the perception of communications providers that had built slowly over time --- even cherished --- that of the Friendly Postman. Now all communications companies are ruthless fucks, and it cannot be undone... because we remember what those marauding orcs did to us in the early days of cell and SMS messaging. They shattered the taboo that the receiver should never pay, even as they reduced "music on hold" to Tortured Screams of Hell, and dulled the senses with a laughable parody of email. Like a cuddly teddy bea
The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons --- its size inherited from the PC floppy disk.
The form factor of 3.5" floppy drives was decided during the early planning stage of the Great Data Railroad. You can place exactly 16 3.54" (90mm) bare floppy discs side by side within the standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches. For the original 1982 HP single sided format of ~280kB this yields roughly ~4.3mB along every 3.5" of railroad track, or 137 rows along the floor of a a standard 40-foot railroad boxcar without the use of stacking. Thus ~600MB was the capacity of a original single density data railroad car, though it was only only ~1mm in height.
While the floppy disc made data railroads possible, media stacking made them practical. A cylinder of bare floppy media ~10 feet high is roughly 3048 discs, so your standard railroad boxcar held ~1.8TB of floppy storage, in 1982! With an average rail speed of 18mph a single boxcar passes every ~1.5 seconds, which is ~1.2T terabytes or 9200 gigabits per second! By 1998 floppy media storage density had improved ~714-fold, yielding transfer rates of 6568800Gb/s or ~821 TB/s.
So why was floppy data railroad ultimately limited to this 'arbitrary' ~821 TB/s? Northern rail gauge of the US railway based on the English rail system which were based on tramways which used the same jigs used to build wagons whose wheel base was determined by ancient ruts that were left by Roman chariots which were sized to accommodate the width of two horses' asses. As not-quite debunked here.
So the short story is, any chain of decisions regarding technology leads back to some horse's ass.
(cross post)
CURIOUS as to how much 'dark fiber' the NSA may be leasing within the United States for purely domestic purposes, and where. If there are any Mark Kleins out there who have noticed anything funny, do share! This includes fiber leased to anything you may suspect is a shell corporation, for which you (the technician) can see that the paperwork is a bit odd; or an unusual number of individual fibers terminating in a locked room, where the normal requirement is a few.
With the rise of cloud computing the issue is clouded somewhat, there are plenty of start-ups with goofy names whose business models call for more resources than they need. But the discrete number of fibers terminating in a room, especially if routed from/to places which are obviously not associated with the same entity, might be your best clue. A specific scenario is a number of fibers without proper paperwork that run from passive tap/splits to a server room where the traffic is analyzed, streams selected and (leased) fiber is used to push the chosen data somewhere else. Such as Utah. We're looking for evidence of Big Domestic Packet Listen infrastructure.
If you notice something unusual, you might try disconnecting it and see who complains and how quickly. With a little hands-on we could get to the bottom of this much sooner.
If you do not have an interesting story to share, just make something up. We'll know if your tale is relevant, because we're the NSA and we know where our stuff is, and we're only here to help. We are putting out this request for information to find out if anyone else got there first.
CURIOUS as to how much 'dark fiber' the NSA may be leasing within the United States for purely domestic purposes, and where. If there are any Mark Kleins out there who have noticed anything funny, do share! This includes fiber leased to anything you may suspect is a shell corporation, for which you (the technician) can see that the paperwork is a bit odd; or an unusual number of individual fibers terminating in a locked room, where the normal requirement is a few.
With the rise of cloud computing the issue is clouded somewhat, there are plenty of start-ups with goofy names whose business models call for more resources than they need. But the discrete number of fibers terminating in a room, especially if routed from/to places which are obviously not associated with the same entity, might be your best clue. A specific scenario is a number of fibers without proper paperwork that run from passive tap/splits to a server room where the traffic is analyzed, streams selected and (leased) fiber is used to push the chosen data somewhere else. Such as Utah. We're looking for evidence of Big Domestic Packet Listen infrastructure.
If you notice something unusual, you might try disconnecting it and see who complains and how quickly. With a little hands-on we could get to the bottom of this much sooner.
If you do not have an interesting story to share, just make something up. We'll know if your tale is relevant, because we're the NSA and we know where our stuff is, and we're only here to help. We are putting out this request for information to find out if anyone else got there first.
Encrypted filesystem, tiny OS kernel stored as on-chip PROM
Of course I meant ROM not PROM.
To avoid distracting replies like this, head on over to my "How can we improve Slashdot?" suggestion that Slashdot implements an edit feature and show your support. Of course, "[That] discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted." so you won't be able to show your support. Maybe send them an email or add it to your sig. I will as soon as I figure out how magnets work. If you work in the same building, pull the fire alarm to get their attention.
Encrypted filesystem, tiny OS kernel stored as on-chip PROM and a bit of NVRAM. Sorry, no updates to it are possible so they'd better get all the bugs out before release. Kernel has just enough to support to display a prompt and accept the PIN, set up encryption, relinquish control of screen and keyboard and trigger a real OS boot, presenting plain data to the device as if it were a disk controller or memory stick. The phone or whatever doesn't know its data is encrypted.
Let's say three strikes and you're out. First time it's used, a random salt is generated and 3 copies of the salt are written to its NVRAM, along with a hash of the PIN. The encryption key is hash(salt+PIN). Destroying all copies of the salt would render data inaccessible.
Every time a PIN is entered (attempt x=1,2,3) its hash is computed and then salt(x) is read into memory, then salt(x) is destroyed in NVRAM (zeroed). Then the hash of the PIN is checked against the stored hash.
If the PIN is bad, we move on to the next entry. salt(x) remains destroyed.
If the PIN is good, the salt held in memory is rewritten to salt(x), un-destroying it. All other salt() entries are checked to see if they match the salt stored in memory and if they don't match, they are rewritten so there are now 3 good copies. Then encryption is set up and the boot proceeds.
This using of three salt buckets and always writing to them is to protect against a brute force attack where the attacker power-cycles the chip to gain "free" attempts. But also, if you use separate "game over: you lose" code that sets out to destroy the salt, a side-channel attack may be possible where the attacker listens to chip emissions to detect it starting to run and aborts it somehow. By destroying a copy of the salt on every attempt the chip's emissions should offer little or no clue of such branching behavior.
A downside is that yes, NVRAM is being written to and will degrade over time. That's why it is good to have good escrow system in place so the government can help you recover your data. /SARC It probably wouldn't hurt if on first use the user has the option of selecting the salt rather than random generation, and a separate option (after successful PIN entry) that displays the salt. This would allow a technician to ''migrate' you onto a new chip that can access the (copied) encrypted filesystem. And the chip itself should be removable so in case of a device failure it can be moved to a new one.
Simple countermeasure! Just boot up your old Aspire One netbook with XP 'beast', an obsolete alternative distribution of XP where anything that stunk of bloat was omitted or disabled or covered with Hazmat stickers or XOR'd out and ridiculous excess like print spoolers are absent, and nothing is guaranteed but things just might load at all, eventually. This screaming monster only takes three times as long to boot as you'd expect. Then the many Atheros Wifi drivers which do not work fail to load successively, then the only one that does work loads, which happens to be part of an "AT&T Communications Manager" ATTCM bundle that no one in their right mind would choose over anything else. ATTCM wastes your time looking for stupid phone devices they've pissed people off by not supporting and finally gets around to the Wifi. A hundred Wifi beacons later it finally gets around to displaying its hello icon on the screen. Another hundred beacons and the ATTCM user interface is beginning to take shape, drawn before your very eyes, it looks like a cross between a haXor serialz generator and a pinball machine. Another hundred beacons go by and you can almost hear it groan like it's passing a turd, and it manages to say "Scanning for Networks". Now it starts to listen for beacons. It won't show you any network names until it has finished looking and going though its profile database with a tiny spoon and making you wait another few seconds, just because. How cute, now it's trying to show the names. Some jump scroll thing appears that you fear to touch because it is so badly implemented you might jump over whole screens. But the arrows don't work right either. The encrypted login takes too long to describe here. But if you manage to glimpse and click on an unsecured network it's like it has to fill in forms and mail them in, it's so slow. You can feel the excruciating agony of a simple Wifi connect, lose yourself to complete despair "obtaining an IP address" because you've installed countless DHCP servers and watched the packets go by and nothing on God's Green Earth takes this long unless you're being bullshitted. Eventually you realize it has been saying "connected" for awhile but you didn't realize it because there are tears in your eyes. If only you'd have remembered to start Firefox as all this was happening it'd only be a minute or so away from displaying, but you didn't because you feared it would slow things down further. Firefox is now loading, sounds like the drive shaft is loose...
TL;DR It's difficult to imagine doing anything in a reckless manner with this setup. I'm safe.
Actually it's not as bad as I let on. Or maybe it is and I'm so much worse.
Soviet reactors go to 11! Oh wait...
It's more like 99%, 99%, 99%, 99%, 11,000%, 0%, 0%, 0%...
Checking the timeline... you're actually pretty close on that 11,000% figure... but it was really 12,000%.
I'm sure Spinal Tap would be puzzled by the coincidence...
19860425 01:00:00 [100%] test begins
19860425 13:05:00 [60%] turbine #2 switched off
19860425 14:00:00 [50%]
19860426 00:26:00 [1%] after rods withdrawn. Too low! Weird! Akimov wants to abort.
19860426 01:00:00 [6%] power should be higher! They do not realize extent of Xe poisoning
19860426 01:19:00 [7%] rose a measly 1% after removing all but 6 rods? They're in deep shit now.
19860426 01:21:00 [7%] 350kg graphite blocks jumping in their sockets. Cavitation, irreparable damage to rod channels.
19860426 01:21:50 [7%]? pressure loss. Irreparable damage to cooling system.
19860426 01:23:40 [7%]? SCRAM! AZ-5 button pushed. Rods jam in channels at ~2.5m instead of descending full 7m.
19860426 01:23:44 [12000%] jammed rod tips cause reactor to surge to 120x full power! BOOM! [steam] then BOOM! [hydrogen]
19860426 01:23:45 [0%] for all practical purposes
After this point one could argue that the reactor actually stayed at '12' for quite a while but we'll give it a rest.
So... in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl #4 went to... 12. Let's not do that again.
information source, 100%=3200MWt
This sounds so incredibly dangerous.
Are the computer models even safe?
I wonder if these equations are even safe for chalkboards.
If we manage to glimpse a 'naked singularity' Mother Nature will start locking the bathroom door.
Obligatory Cyriak
Since nobody has come up with a final solution to the waste problem, the costs are infinite.
Could I say, "Until we come up with a solution to the wind-doesn't-blow-all-the-time problem or the ice-storms-can-fuck-em-up-completely problem... the costs are infinite?
Half of the 'final solution' is to fast-burn all the old waste and make energy from it.
The waste will sit there patiently until we can do this.
The other half of the 'final solution' is a new generation of reactors that do not generate long-lived waste.
The basic concept for this was developed 60 years ago by Weinberg.
In the world I live in we consider these to be problems to solve.
What kind of world do you live in??
Discussing energy topics in these forums is beginning to feel like trying to explain to Elmo why he can't have Christmas every day . "But Santa Claus, Elmo wants Christmas every day! Santa gave Elmo three wishes. They're Elmo's wishes! And Elmo wished for Christmas every day!" Elmo wished for wind and solar power, he thinks the storage problem will solve itself with GrapheneOrSomethingSomehow(tm), Elmo thinks fusion is tomorrow, Elmo wants hydropower in Arizona, Elmo wants to place an iron cap over Yellowstone.
And Elmo hates nuclear energy --- because his parents hate it --- or because they don't. Elmo has not researched the matter.
___
Please see Thorium Remix, collected rants on Slashdot and these letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
I've heard that you can concentrate, extract, and use actinides in what we currently consider spent fuel. How, physically, is that done?
Take a look at this collection of slides by Gus Merwin. You'll find some of your better search terms like there like 'transmutation' (better add 'nuclear' or you might slide into the occult). And an good overview of processing methods and current spent inventories.
When you have long-lived actinides in your spent fuel --- the battle to keep costs down or make energy from them in today's thermal spectrum reactors has already been lost. We've known this all along, it's one of the little reasons the US invested heavily in fast breeders, weapons production being the big reason. Current methods involve separating out plutonium and unburnt uranium into MOX (mixed oxide) fuel for re-use, which reduces most waste volume but the actinides are still there. To deal with them completely you need to hit them with 'fast' neutrons from a fission breeder, maybe making energy while doing so --- splitting them into even nastier (but short lived) or final inert products. You can wind up with something that's walk-away safe in, say, 40 years. The atom stewards of the Cold War said, "Yeah it's a problem. Fast breeders will solve it." Then fast breeders in the US started to shut down after a few years of making weapons, they never got around to burning commercial waste. They said, "Yeah it's a problem. Underground storage will solve it." Then the US Gub'mint failed to deliver on that promise too.
The best way to manage long-lived actinides is to manage not to produce them in the first place. Alvin Weinberg knew this in the 1950s and ultimately sacrificed the remainder of his career in an attempt to convince others this was the way. Weinberg's basic design for a two-fluid LFTR which breeds uranium from thorium and actively processes its fluid to keep long-lived actinides from forming is still the most exciting and viable option for a nuclear future in the opinion of myself and many others. Almost 100% burn in the thermal spectrum, and an extremely small waste volume that is walk-away safe in ~300 years.
___
Please see Thorium Remix, my collected rants on Slashdot and these letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
Yep - the B1700 did this in the 1970s. Been there, done that... (I was a CPU engineer on one of them.)
So from within the dark entrails of Burroughs you were one of the Hardy Boys helping bring to light the Soul of a New Machine? That's awesome, and I'm not Kiddering. What if... those BCD architectures were designed from scratch using today's tools and methods? Is there something the machine could do inherently better or faster, something that benefits from the use of errorless unbounded decimal arithmetic?
probably 2% are baseline qualified
The figure is closer to 100%. That 18,000 number sounds suspiciously close to the number of humans whom, if properly rendered reduced and freeze-dried, would comprise a perfect nutritional supplement for a long term Mars Mission and colony. Everybody gets to go into space! It's a win.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE
Scratching my head here. What's the conclusion to be drawn, from these experiments?
It's evidence on a very specific level, the microbes somehow helping to regulate the length of intestinal villi. We've pretty well established how mammal bodies release stored fat as needed, but the mechanisms that regulate its intake are not as well understood.
So the interesting question becomes, why are we seeing evidence of a 'system' that is capable of actively regulating villi length rather a simple observation like mere presence of 'germ' x results in y. Stated another way, we're seeing evidence of ongoing symbiosis rather than an evolutionary result. Perhaps Akkermansia muciniphila functions as the Winter fat-storage inhibitor and there is significant evolutionary advantage to thinning out in the Spring --- even if the price is reduced nutritional uptake. This is (slightly) counter-intuitive because we are used to thinking of food uptake as something that has been constantly perfected over time (eg more is always better).
Perhaps the article reads a little strange because it involves temperature YET and there is the complete absence of a politically motivated guilt zinger woven into its presentation. But watch the headlines, I'm sure some will bite, viz:
CLIMATE CHANGE INTERFERING WITH NATURE'S FAT STORAGE MECHANISM?
AMID CLIMATE FEARS, THERE MAY BE THIN HOT RATS IN OUR FUTURE
Horses have four legs.
They have two rear legs, and forelegs in front.
Six legs is an odd number of legs for a horse to have.
The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.
Therefore... the United States Equestrian Team has an infinite number of legs.
The U.S. will send 48 rowers to Rio.
They will be as forewarned.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Four arms is an odd number of arms for a rower to have.
The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.
Therefore... the US rowing team has an infinite number of arms.
Sorry folks, but the right to privately encrypt is political "flyover country". You are hard pressed to find a candidate willing to make a deliberate and informed statement about it, and even then, don't be surprised if you get screwed over. No pitchfork mob will rise up with you to redress your grievance. Bill Clinton seemed reasonable until he and his NSA inspired hatchet-men Al Gore and Louis Freeh rolled out the Clipper Chip abomination . It was like lightning from a clear sky. A clear example of the Kindergarten Effect .
Fourth Amendment discussions are often tainted by rhetorical and useless arguments. You can actually tell a lot more about a candidate's fitness to defend civil liberties and freedom from unwarranted government surveillance and law enforcement intrusion by asking them about about the Second Amendment and Roe Vs. Wade. THOSE issues are where the rubber meets the road --- If they and I disagree on those it's a deal-breaker no matter what.
Here's the problem though. Those who land on my side of 2nd Amendment/Roe tend also to think the gub'mint needs to listen to everybody to keep duh terrorist at bay. But then again, they all do... Republicans do it right in your face, Democrats do it secretly and lie through their teeth about doing it. That is why the United States suffered grievous harm when we questioned (and rejected) the fitness of one Ron Paul, a true conservative.
This is really just a continuation of the 'OMG freak out about nuclear thing' that has been with us since the 60s. Nuclear can be bad, but there is also radiation all around us, and we do know how to detect and manage radiation risks.
Small package of radioactive tracer material left unattended.
Dude walks past and notices,hey, this shit isn't nailed down.
Dude thinks, maybe I can score some bucks off of this.
Dude takes it and stashes it somewhere.
Dude starts asking around, who wants to buy [this thing?]
Everyone says, "Don't let the Americans know you got that. They're fucking crazy!"
Dude just gives up.
Company searches for the thing. It's gone.
Company believes in responsible (wince) disclosure.
Company is wincing because Americans shrug at the theft of high explosives.
But theft of enough radioactive material to slightly irradiate an area brings on a shit storm.
Time passes. Still not found.
Someone in the Iraqi ministry realizes that they can fuck with America's mind by leaking the story.
The fucking with America's mind begins.
Rueters is chosen for the leak because they are staffed with whimpering radiophobes and never seek out the opinions of physicists and nuclear materials experts to corroborate the risk or put potential dose or usage into proper perspective.
Rueters releases 'exclusive' wire story with few real details.
Everyone dusts off their 'dirty bomb' files and updates them to threat du jour.
$ perl -pni.bak -e 's/Bin Laden/ISIS/sgi'
Headlines are created posing the new threat.
Half of the stories are deliberately obfuscated so there is confusion whether a fission or 'dirty' bomb is being discussed.
The dozen or so follow-up interviews where real experts shrug off (or laugh at) dirty bomb threat are left in archives.
Google creates a handy new ID=0ahUKEwiCnOigpYHLAhVCKCYKHXhIDZkQqgIIKTAA to group the stories so you can see the silly headlines.
Someone at Slashdot does not like nuclear power, because they like solar energy.
It doesn't really make sense because to hate nuclear energy is to love natural gas, but there it is.
So let's ride the cresting wave of hysteria and fear.
Oh, how long can evil ISIS hold out? How can they possibly resist the diabolical urge to build the single little 'dirty bomb' that no one could ever completely prove would not erase our very existence? Will their tortured minds give in to uncontrollable desires? Can ISIS withstand the temptation to build the 'dirty bomb' that even now beckons to them in these shrill, childish headlines? Will they succumb to the maddening urge to (slightly) irradiate a small area? At the mere! [world press slaps its ass on ISIS' head] Building! [world press slaps its ass on ISIS' head] of a [world press slaps its ass on ISIS' head] single! [world press slaps its ass on ISIS' head] Bomb! The beautiful shiny 'dirty bomb'! The jolly, candy-like 'dirty bomb'! Will they hold out, folks? Can they hold out?
sweet naive assumption that if you don't give it internet, it won't call home.
Perhaps it could use other wifi networks?
Perhaps it could reach net relayed via your neighbour's TV?
Perhaps in the absence of your wifi it can use a completely different (invigilation) frequencies and standard?
Perhaps it takes in bits of protein from moisture and airborne bacteria on the frame
Perhaps a small insect becomes trapped in the heat bent
Perhaps a gecko loses its tail as a crack in the plastic closes tightly
Perhaps the hinged button compartment closes slowly, trapping the whole gecko
Perhaps a mouse decides to build a nest by crawling into a rear opening, never seen again
Perhaps the kitten is missing
Perhaps Chester and his chair has been mostly absorbed.
We hear his piteous cries for help
They are gathered in the Control Room where hand gesture snapshots and voice command packets converge. There are speakers everywhere emitting sharp mechanical, animal and human sounds. Small blurry photos taken from thousands of TV cameras float on a giant screen. Some people are standing in front of their TVs trying to find the actual controls (hidden in a hinged compartment) and their faces and giant eyeballs fill the frames.
The people who work in this room exist in a brief timeless moment that continues forever, in which countless desperate people are trying to control their TVs with gestures and voice commands without success. Properly executed transactions are logged by the cloud but repeated failures, especially if the algorithm detects angry or anxious voices, are routed here. The Corporation decided that to improve customer experience, real people would staff rooms like these and try to make sense of the commands as a last resort, issuing instructions back to the TVs as best they can.
More than half of the images and sounds are not people trying to operate their TVs however. There is a cacophony of domestic arguments, screaming puppies and wailing children, laughter, someone banging on pots and pans. The employees' eyes dart back and forth, their ears straining to detect some coherent voice command directed at the TV. There! A drunken voice murmurs "off dammit". Fingers tap on a console and OFF command is sent. Sigh of relief, perhaps we'll meet our quota this shift. Then a low growl rising to a scream and a woman's voice: "You never cared about me! Just leave me alone and get a fucking job!" Fingers tap again and a command is sent that will distract them by playing a loud Samsung demo loop showing happy young people leading an active lifestyle. That is good medicine and maybe it will help, but it helps meet quota. Small child facing camera in tears repeating something indistinct. Is that 'two' and 'tree'? Tap command set channel 23, hope it's OK for children.
Everyone in the room is quietly thinking... what were they thinking. Once upon a time people learned how to control their own TVs and once they learned they taught others, even small children. Now everyone is faced with the task of training machines for voice and you can see how much wasted energy and anguish results from it. They pity the elderly who were given these sets to make their lives easier... and everyone all gathered on the first quiet excited day and everything worked perfectly. Then the kids left and a fan was turned on in the room blowing air into the microphone, and from then on those in the Control Room see an old man alone in a room, in tears, shouting some command obscured by the wind. Two technicians gather for this one, debating what to do. It is decided they will make the TV cycle through channels slowly until they see his expression change. But it never does, perhaps he is tormented by something else.
Then the shift is over, and the next set of employees enters the Control Room. We are now approaching the late hour of peak alcohol, when children are gone, voices are slurred and TVs are sometimes knocked over. It will be a long night.
OMG! | grep [confirmed threats]
The world is going to be hit by an asteroid unless we spend trillions on an asteroid defense shield!
For all that other stuff the real risk hinges on issues of personal, political and economic RESTRAINT
Everyone will be trying to sell you their favorite answers to those other 'threats' 'till Judgement Day.
They'll also be pushing answers (eg DNA splicing pathogen research for 'defense') that carry extreme risk.
The asteroid danger is the only real confirmed existential threat here.
It will require unanimous effort and the 'weaponization of space' but until it is done we're just waiting to die suddenly.
Even the US population being luddites and sheep is not a problem, if you come up with a low-tech solution and manage to enough of convince them.
How 'bout dem Space Nutters, ain't they kooks?
Heads in the stars, readin' space booooooks!
Plannin' dem missions to launch men 'n probes
or spinny-dizzy colonies in LaGrangian lobes
wearin' them space suits on Halloween on Earth
chewin' the Space fat on for all that it's worth!
Dem nugger-mugger Space Huggers way down South
stuffin' Space Nutter Central for all that funds allow'th
How to be a Space Nutter, only one way to hack it
Get yerself a nuke, find an asteroid and smack it!
One in a growing series of 'them poem' tributes in the style of Mason Williams
Look, I'm not arguing that NASA shouldn't be given more money but it's a hard sell when the only reason appears to be "I want it to be bigger".
Be gentle, action often begins with people sensing that something is wrong. When you're grasping in the air you think, maybe things could start happening if they just had more. But how much more? NASA is GO for what?
How about GO for a Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV): An Innovative Solution to NASA's NEO Impact Threat Mitigation Grand Challenge and Flight Validation Mission Architecture Development?
Everything about self-sustaining colonies is (regrettably) some years away.
Exploration is nice, but it is also an unaffordable luxury *IF* there is an unaddressed existential threat.
Statisticians who attempt to marginalize existential threats by fronting casino odds should be ignored (or worse).
Every time someone suggests we have found almost all potentially hazardous objects, ask about the others.
Dinosaurs Are Proof We Need A Space Program. S,M,L,X,2X
We are now 50 years into the space age, 40 years since impactor dinosaur extinction reached consensus.
There is on this day no viable mission to address this threat, and little interest.
Is this evolution in action?
It's about buying more time for the human race, and Gaia as we know her today.
PRIORITY ONE: HAIVs on the ground or in orbit, ready to deploy on short notice.
PRIORITY TWO: Missions to complete our sky survey, especially 'dark' objects.
PRIORITY THREE: Everything else, since we (may have) bought some more time.
I recently started a thread about this.