I read that article about the 'silver lining' and how good it was that the TSA now 'understands'.... The problem was that they plainly and obviously made zero effort to understand AT ALL before they tried pulling this on the non-commercial flights. What. The. Heck? You should at least research something that you're trying to regulate, not to mention actually talk to organizations involved in it, before trying to enact a daft draft.
Yet another dark mark showing the attitude of the TSA's leadership.
Rework the design so that instead of a pilot you have a circular ring in the center that can allow the craft to float over a prepared object (or person?) and, using some kind of servo, attach it to the craft to be delivered to a hard-to-reach area. With GPS the craft can auto-release at a designated location and height.
Be neat to auto-guide the craft to a location, deliver an object, then return to base for recharging. Then reverse the path to return the object (or person's new location?) back.
True enough, yet the body holds together despite all this complexity and figures a lot of all this out on its own. Like I said before, who knows how much more we will learn about the human body and its mechanics in the next 50 to 100 years? Maybe we can find a way to distinguish those diseases using something supplementary to the white blood cell. Perhaps (and I'm just tossing out ideas) something small (artificial protein?) that can be 'added' to all normal cells as an enhanced early warning device when something that gets by the white blood cells? *shrug* I don't know how feasible that is *right now* but maybe some time in the future when we finally know all the stuff the body is doing. Heck knows viruses manage to take over entire cells so adding minor tattletale 'features' might be possible.
I promise you I have plenty of imagination! (Try checking out my site!) But I might very well level the same accusation at you, for lingering so much on health problems. Really, though, your probe comes up against some harsh prerequisites: we're still trying to figure out how to deal with cancer and HIV in the lab. When we finally do figure out how to beat them reliably, the most sensible thing to do would be to issue an update to the human genome so it can do the job itself. A symbiont would be a lot riskier.
Wasn't so much the idea as the tone of your initial counter-argument that had me 'linger' so much on this possibility. All I initially said was that the topic was the next step towards something like a possible symbiotic anti-disease creation not that it could be done using technology right now. My reaction was 'huh?!' when I saw your response. For all we know a medical breakthrough or two could allow it to be done fifty or a hundred years from now... or it could not. We don't know. You don't know... even if you are a biologist. I dared to dream of the future and got slapped down.That's why I got mildly annoyed at the negative vibe I got.
That being said, I actually did briefly explore the possibility of engineering a pair of symbionts for one of my undergraduate projects. We were looking at the idea of attaching bacteria to the worm C. elegans so that the bacteria could feed the worm a type of gene suppressing-molecule called siRNA. Our main project was making C. elegans easier to engineer, and the bacterium in question (E. coli) is exceedingly well-understood, so we kind of approached the idea as a form of backward compatibility with other engineering projects.
In the end, we abandoned it when we realised that E. coli is one of the major food sources for C. elegans—it was a little like strapping hamburgers to the body of an exceedingly hungry person, in that it was doomed to fail to accomplish anything useful, no matter how delicious it may have been to the worm.
You tried, you failed, and that's a good example if an odd visualization. If you'd mentioned this in the beginning I'd've been less annoyed for the info's sake alone.
However, if it is symbiotic organisms that get your mind going, one application would be in using siRNA in humans to get around the whole "icky genome patching" issue, which is sure to garner complaints from lots of people. At present, RNA interference experiments in humans typically involve syringes; pills don't work since our digestive systems are much too acidic. siRNA also doesn't last very long. Using so many syringes would be an unpleasant way to keep oneself protected—but having an on-board organism that could release the appropriate RNA under specified times might be highly practical. It does have has its limitations, however, in that it can only turn genes off, not supplement them. Such a guest organism would most likely have to be a genetically population of leukocytes, since there are few ideas in medicine worse than "let's put undetectable bacteria into the bloodstream and watch what happens!" However, this would allow for a "detection –> silencing" cycle for dealing with genetic disorders, cancers, and even particularly vexing viruses like HIV.
Symbiotic organism? Not really. Ways to permanently defend against all diseases, past to future, would be more accurate. The current human immune system might be excellent but there is obviously a need to improve detection of diseases. White blood cells can do a lot but they need to learn how to identify some invaders better without wiping out their host. It sounds like figuring out how to defend against AIDS is doing better and cancer the same way (ironically using the former's methods).
It would be nice if one could program the current immune system with a broad range identifier would eliminate all but the rarest of virus infe
...except in cyber-warfare, obviously. If I were them, I'd be planning mock 'hacking raids' on their facilities every second week with external and internal software. Two teams alternating attacking and defending with random member swaps after every cycle and in depth discussions on what both sides did after each 'battle'.
The 'super-epic flare' was a subtle bit of sarcasm in regards to the 'epic flare' of the posted story. The flare was unusual but not something most familiar with CMEs would consider 'epic'. I suppose it was too subtle for you to pick up and thus I apologize. Insulting me over something that petty (and for my 'rant' that backups are a good thing?), however, is more an indication of your age being closer towards the single digits than mine.
Humans don't need augmentation to help them fight disease. That's what they've evolved to do, and they do it pretty well as long as they're healthy.
Yesssss.... Forgive me if I don't go to the local hospital and visit all the AIDS and cancer patients and repeat that.
I'm just throwing out ideas but, again, thy negativeness knows no bounds. If you've already come up with a Wonderdrug/vaccine that can cure every disease ever known and those that will come then I will bow to your wisdom.
And on that note, good luck outperforming the native biology without causing an immune disorder.
That's right, nobody needs artificial hearts! Oh, wait.... And, yes, I know they aren't as good as a real heart or that the body usually tries to reject it. Finding ways to fix that is called 'progress' and 'positive thinking'. Doctors actually do implant things in people in order to try to save them and, yes, they might actually find a way to do what I described--or perhaps they will come up with something else. As long as someone comes up with the ability to help/assist the body automatically defeat new generation of diseases without years of research I'll be happy.
Not looking for that from you though--no imagination.
Design flaw and hardware failure: locating the backup diesel generators in a basement under the reactors, such that they were guaranteed to flood if water entered the area.
True, but only in 20/20 hindsight. Nobody expected water to enter the basement.
You truly deserve to be on that reactor's design team. Where on Earth are you getting this? A basement is the lowest part and water naturally flows down there. Even if you have air locks (and panicking humans are likely to not shut doors unless automatic) that doesn't matter in a severe earthquake.
Lovely amount of 'that can't happen' and no 'this might work'. Can you think of something outside the box that might work?
Say, implant/grow something in human body that creates cells akin to white blood cells that 'capture' invaders. When cells go to the place they go when they die have something there that can take in a sample of the 'dummy' white blood cells and analyze it. If it can connect to the brain via nervous system or though chemical transmission then could things be analyzed and self-diagnosed enough to create a counter? I'm trying to be semi-realistic here but, hey, sci-fi is inspiration so it only has to come close.
Seriously, the telecomms are sloooowly moving on fiber-optic lines. Should have been serious starts on that years ago as a backup to satellites at the very least. One super-epic flare and kiss those satellites good bye, no matter how hardened they are, and they will take months if not years to completely replace. What do you do in the meantime? Oops?
On the plus side, though, all the spy sats in the world would also be fried. Always a silver lining....
There's a recent Gundam anime called Gundam AGE where in eps 2 they have a super 3D printer that designs and 'prints out' weapons. Series is a bit low in quality storyline but the animation of this system was an interesting visualization of something like that.
Actually, who are the ones that got the most the spending that created the debt? A list of who and when during the years would make for some interesting reading, I'd bet.
I mean, I would think that any terrorist group that can do serious damage to the U.S. would do some research on how NOT to get caught like this.
The stupid, prideful, and arrogant ones might get through due to equal amounts of stupidity, pride, and arrogance on the agency's side (think 9/11) but all they do is piss the other half a billion Americans off. Starting major conflicts -- sometime not declaring war-- and getting the U.S. into massive debts so perhaps it did work in a going-down-in-flames way.
Makes me wonder what a really smart bunch of terrorists could do... not that most planes are unlikely to become targets. (Given that American passengers are NOT likely to co-operate with 'do nothing and you'll all get through this alive' anymore.) Given the financial state of the U.S. I'd think taking out big money makers for U.S. would become targets to make matters worse. Like, say, motion picture studios.
Slashdot Mirror
Not possible to create a new sub-set that prevents that? (You'd know more than I.) Who watches the watchers?
I read that article about the 'silver lining' and how good it was that the TSA now 'understands'. ...
The problem was that they plainly and obviously made zero effort to understand AT ALL before they tried pulling this on the non-commercial flights. What. The. Heck?
You should at least research something that you're trying to regulate, not to mention actually talk to organizations involved in it, before trying to enact a daft draft.
Yet another dark mark showing the attitude of the TSA's leadership.
Rework the design so that instead of a pilot you have a circular ring in the center that can allow the craft to float over a prepared object (or person?) and, using some kind of servo, attach it to the craft to be delivered to a hard-to-reach area. With GPS the craft can auto-release at a designated location and height.
Be neat to auto-guide the craft to a location, deliver an object, then return to base for recharging. Then reverse the path to return the object (or person's new location?) back.
So what do you get if you merge V with Zorro?
True enough, yet the body holds together despite all this complexity and figures a lot of all this out on its own. Like I said before, who knows how much more we will learn about the human body and its mechanics in the next 50 to 100 years? Maybe we can find a way to distinguish those diseases using something supplementary to the white blood cell. Perhaps (and I'm just tossing out ideas) something small (artificial protein?) that can be 'added' to all normal cells as an enhanced early warning device when something that gets by the white blood cells? *shrug* I don't know how feasible that is *right now* but maybe some time in the future when we finally know all the stuff the body is doing. Heck knows viruses manage to take over entire cells so adding minor tattletale 'features' might be possible.
Probably hanging out with the local preacher and, you know, if you become friends with him you can hang out with the Big Guy.
At least, that's what the preacher says and he'd never lie about that... just remember to bring your tithe along with you.
P.S. Isn't Halloween supposed to be the night when you scare away demons with masks? I suppose inviting them in for tea is much better.
Be even cooler if he could learn to interface with it directly using biometrics between the artificial and the real to pick up nerve signals.
Went to see your page. All was forgiven when I saw the entry on politicians of the world--heartily agree.
I promise you I have plenty of imagination! (Try checking out my site!) But I might very well level the same accusation at you, for lingering so much on health problems. Really, though, your probe comes up against some harsh prerequisites: we're still trying to figure out how to deal with cancer and HIV in the lab. When we finally do figure out how to beat them reliably, the most sensible thing to do would be to issue an update to the human genome so it can do the job itself. A symbiont would be a lot riskier.
Wasn't so much the idea as the tone of your initial counter-argument that had me 'linger' so much on this possibility. All I initially said was that the topic was the next step towards something like a possible symbiotic anti-disease creation not that it could be done using technology right now. My reaction was 'huh?!' when I saw your response. For all we know a medical breakthrough or two could allow it to be done fifty or a hundred years from now... or it could not. We don't know. You don't know... even if you are a biologist. I dared to dream of the future and got slapped down.That's why I got mildly annoyed at the negative vibe I got.
That being said, I actually did briefly explore the possibility of engineering a pair of symbionts for one of my undergraduate projects. We were looking at the idea of attaching bacteria to the worm C. elegans so that the bacteria could feed the worm a type of gene suppressing-molecule called siRNA. Our main project was making C. elegans easier to engineer, and the bacterium in question (E. coli) is exceedingly well-understood, so we kind of approached the idea as a form of backward compatibility with other engineering projects.
In the end, we abandoned it when we realised that E. coli is one of the major food sources for C. elegans—it was a little like strapping hamburgers to the body of an exceedingly hungry person, in that it was doomed to fail to accomplish anything useful, no matter how delicious it may have been to the worm.
You tried, you failed, and that's a good example if an odd visualization. If you'd mentioned this in the beginning I'd've been less annoyed for the info's sake alone.
However, if it is symbiotic organisms that get your mind going, one application would be in using siRNA in humans to get around the whole "icky genome patching" issue, which is sure to garner complaints from lots of people. At present, RNA interference experiments in humans typically involve syringes; pills don't work since our digestive systems are much too acidic. siRNA also doesn't last very long. Using so many syringes would be an unpleasant way to keep oneself protected—but having an on-board organism that could release the appropriate RNA under specified times might be highly practical. It does have has its limitations, however, in that it can only turn genes off, not supplement them. Such a guest organism would most likely have to be a genetically population of leukocytes, since there are few ideas in medicine worse than "let's put undetectable bacteria into the bloodstream and watch what happens!" However, this would allow for a "detection –> silencing" cycle for dealing with genetic disorders, cancers, and even particularly vexing viruses like HIV.
Symbiotic organism? Not really. Ways to permanently defend against all diseases, past to future, would be more accurate. The current human immune system might be excellent but there is obviously a need to improve detection of diseases. White blood cells can do a lot but they need to learn how to identify some invaders better without wiping out their host. It sounds like figuring out how to defend against AIDS is doing better and cancer the same way (ironically using the former's methods).
It would be nice if one could program the current immune system with a broad range identifier would eliminate all but the rarest of virus infe
...except in cyber-warfare, obviously. If I were them, I'd be planning mock 'hacking raids' on their facilities every second week with external and internal software. Two teams alternating attacking and defending with random member swaps after every cycle and in depth discussions on what both sides did after each 'battle'.
Someone else obviously did something similar.
The 'super-epic flare' was a subtle bit of sarcasm in regards to the 'epic flare' of the posted story. The flare was unusual but not something most familiar with CMEs would consider 'epic'. I suppose it was too subtle for you to pick up and thus I apologize. Insulting me over something that petty (and for my 'rant' that backups are a good thing?), however, is more an indication of your age being closer towards the single digits than mine.
Humans don't need augmentation to help them fight disease. That's what they've evolved to do, and they do it pretty well as long as they're healthy.
Yesssss.... Forgive me if I don't go to the local hospital and visit all the AIDS and cancer patients and repeat that.
I'm just throwing out ideas but, again, thy negativeness knows no bounds. If you've already come up with a Wonderdrug/vaccine that can cure every disease ever known and those that will come then I will bow to your wisdom.
And on that note, good luck outperforming the native biology without causing an immune disorder.
That's right, nobody needs artificial hearts! Oh, wait....
And, yes, I know they aren't as good as a real heart or that the body usually tries to reject it. Finding ways to fix that is called 'progress' and 'positive thinking'. Doctors actually do implant things in people in order to try to save them and, yes, they might actually find a way to do what I described--or perhaps they will come up with something else. As long as someone comes up with the ability to help/assist the body automatically defeat new generation of diseases without years of research I'll be happy.
Not looking for that from you though--no imagination.
True, but only in 20/20 hindsight. Nobody expected water to enter the basement.
You truly deserve to be on that reactor's design team. Where on Earth are you getting this? A basement is the lowest part and water naturally flows down there. Even if you have air locks (and panicking humans are likely to not shut doors unless automatic) that doesn't matter in a severe earthquake.
Earthquake = Gaping cracks
Gaping cracks = Leaks
Tsunami + Leaks = Flooding basement.
And this was in Japan. How could they NOT take that into account? Especially after they knew their wall was too short.
Lovely amount of 'that can't happen' and no 'this might work'. Can you think of something outside the box that might work?
Say, implant/grow something in human body that creates cells akin to white blood cells that 'capture' invaders. When cells go to the place they go when they die have something there that can take in a sample of the 'dummy' white blood cells and analyze it. If it can connect to the brain via nervous system or though chemical transmission then could things be analyzed and self-diagnosed enough to create a counter? I'm trying to be semi-realistic here but, hey, sci-fi is inspiration so it only has to come close.
Seriously, the telecomms are sloooowly moving on fiber-optic lines. Should have been serious starts on that years ago as a backup to satellites at the very least. One super-epic flare and kiss those satellites good bye, no matter how hardened they are, and they will take months if not years to completely replace. What do you do in the meantime? Oops?
On the plus side, though, all the spy sats in the world would also be fried. Always a silver lining....
But if they included the dreaded arch enemy of the Pandas--Stairs--then there would be trouble.
I vote for Snickerdoodle!
Thanks. Noticed but can't edit.
Nice. Next step towards creating genetic symbotes that a person can interact with to mentally self-diagnose, control, and regenerate the body!
Nice piece of non-physically driven motion (after initial nudge). No physical wear if the pieces don't touch each other.
If that puck were in a complete vacuum in a supercooled chamber I wonder how long that puck would rotate?
There's a recent Gundam anime called Gundam AGE where in eps 2 they have a super 3D printer that designs and 'prints out' weapons. Series is a bit low in quality storyline but the animation of this system was an interesting visualization of something like that.
I'd like to see the ratio of successful ideas versus failed ones against the ratio of politician promises successfully made verses failed ones.
Meh. I tried Mafia Wars without paying anything and eventually got sick of waiting--so I quit.
Really, when you start paying to get ahead of someone else that's not skill and thus zero achievement/satisfaction. Sadly, too many people don't care.
Actually, who are the ones that got the most the spending that created the debt? A list of who and when during the years would make for some interesting reading, I'd bet.
I mean, I would think that any terrorist group that can do serious damage to the U.S. would do some research on how NOT to get caught like this.
The stupid, prideful, and arrogant ones might get through due to equal amounts of stupidity, pride, and arrogance on the agency's side (think 9/11) but all they do is piss the other half a billion Americans off. Starting major conflicts -- sometime not declaring war-- and getting the U.S. into massive debts so perhaps it did work in a going-down-in-flames way.
Makes me wonder what a really smart bunch of terrorists could do... not that most planes are unlikely to become targets. (Given that American passengers are NOT likely to co-operate with 'do nothing and you'll all get through this alive' anymore.) Given the financial state of the U.S. I'd think taking out big money makers for U.S. would become targets to make matters worse. Like, say, motion picture studios.