You can only access 'your' router using the app on your phone. It seems unlikely that they'd push the app's traffic over the local network, rather give you the "feature" of being able to administer your network from anywhere on the internet. If you can change settings from anywhere, so can Google.
I recall something about this with respect to pilots who might at some point encounter a nuclear blast. Part of the training included wearing an eye patch such that in the event of a nuclear detonation the pilot would not be completely blinded.
The orthogonal refers to the fact that the molecule is not naturally part of the E. coli sensing system - and so the synthetic 'message' is not convoluted or otherwise disturbed by the natural processes already taking place in the E. coli. So yes, this would allow individual cells or populations to pass different bits. You cold have as many bits of information as you found 'orthogonal' signaling molecules.
And even if you wanted to "program" this feature, you'd have to deal with the nasty problem of protein folding in silico. Better to leave this entire process highly parallel in wetware.
there is no need to deal with protein folding in silico - we know a LOT about proteins and how they work just from standard biochemical assays. There are literally tens of thousands of characterized molecules with known DNA sequences from which we can pick and choose useful sets - slightly modify if need be - and then recombine in novel ways inside a cell. And we can do it directly - without having to rely on some kind of directed evolution - which is quite slow. It is very hard to program a specific well-defined program into a phage - whereas the molecular biology to add features, protein sequences and other regulatory DNA to E. coli is trivial at this point. This is not about making a better immune system, it is about making one (or something else) that is entirely characterized and programmed - not one that must undergo thousands of generations of (difficult to control for) selection in order to become useful.
...not to calculate anything fancy.
Again, because we can program any arbitrary code into the bugs, it is trivial to make a bacteria that lights up green when it detects particular chemicals. Or that only grow when you have a fever, or that do other similar calculations. There are of course extreme difficulties when you're talking about therapeutics because you're interacting with the human body. But outside the human body it is only a matter of time before you start seeing bacterial sensors on everything. They are cheap, they are robust, and they can enzymatically recognize certain properties that mechanical sensors may have great difficulty doing, or doing rapidly, or cheaply. And when you can link the sensors with a programmable logic, THEN you get the really cool stuff. This research demonstrates the first steps into getting the programmable logic up and running.
They're inserting synthetic genetic code (with known function) into E. coli that will allow individual bugs to respond in predictable ways to other bugs' chemical signals. So, for example, there is a known DNA sequence that encodes a protein that 'recognizes' signal. There is another sequence that encodes a second signal recognition protein. There is a third sequence that encodes a scaffolding that binds the two signal proteins (an AND gate), and it produces some chemical or enzymatic output. This output is often a small molecule other bacteria can then subsequently recognize.
Once you have enough parts (that are found all over biology, and are slowly being annotated and dissected) you can start to create real computers.
This is very much about passing information between individuals. The 'logic' gates are very much still analogue - in that they are leaky and really only useful at a statistical level, but they are working. But small molecules can act as the medium of transmission between two different individual E. coli in a way that very much resembles a computation.
LETTER OF CONCERN
We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers.
Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.
An important consideration is that a large fraction of the population will be subject to the new X-ray scanners and be at potential risk, as discussed below. This raises a number of ‘red flags’. Can we have an urgent second independent evaluation?
The Red Flags
The physics of these X-rays is very telling: the X-rays are Compton-Scattering off outer molecule bonding electrons and thus inelastic (likely breaking bonds).
Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.
The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X- rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high.
In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist. A search, ultimately finding top FDA radiation physics staff, suggests that the relevant radiation quantity, the Flux [photons per unit area and time (because this is a scanning device)] has not been characterized. Instead an indirect test (Air Kerma) was made that emphasized the whole body exposure value, and thus it appears that the danger is low when compared to cosmic rays during airplane travel and a chest X-ray dose.
In summary, if the key data (flux-integrated photons per unit values) were available, it would be straightforward to accurately model the dose being deposited in the skin and adjacent tissues using available computer codes, which would resolve the potential concerns over radiation damage.
Our colleagues at UCSF, dermatologists and cancer experts, raise specific important concerns:
A) The large population of older travelers, >65 years of age, is particularly at risk from the mutagenic effects of the X-rays based on the known biology of melanocyte aging.
B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to mutagenesis- provoking radiation leading to breast cancer. Notably, because these women, who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms, are particularly prone to cancer, X-ray mammograms are not performed on them. The dose to breast tissue beneath the skin represents a similar risk.
C) Blood (white blood cells) perfusing the skin is also at risk.
D) The population of immunocompromised individuals--HIV and cancer patients (see above) is likely to be at risk for cancer induction by the high skin dose.
E) The risk of radiation emission to children and adolescents does not appear to have been fully evaluated.
F) The policy towards pregnant women needs to be defined once the theoretical risks to the fetus are determined.
G) Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.
H) Have the effects
From the letter written by the scientists, not the article written by journalists:
"Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.
The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X- rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high."
If each individual cell received 0.02, this would be accurate. But some cells in your body are receiving a dosage of almost 0, and others of two orders of magnitude more. Such that a given cell near your skin might have an extremely high dose, while internal organs get nothing. There are a lot of sensitive sites near the surface of a human's skin. Their misuse of units is shoddy at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.
Read the letter sent by the scientists. This is true overall, but not true locally. It is true that the total dose your body sees is less than what it sees from cosmic rays (if you average each cell in your body with the total amount of radiation). But it is NOT true at all locally. Your skin cells (and anything near the skin, like white blood cells, breast tissue, testicles, cornea, etc.) all receive VERY high local doses. These do not permeate into the body well, so the average is measured as 'safe' even though for cells on the surface of your body is extraordinarily high.
Apparently this is true for your 'body' as most of the radiation doesn't get much past the skin. But for the skin it can be "1 to 2 orders of magnitude" greater than background cosmic radiation even at altitude according the scientists.
So yeah, your heart sees no more radiation than the trip into the air. But your neck, your eyes, your breasts if you have them, and your testicles if you have them all receive a great deal of local radiation - far more than would be considered safe for a routine examination. But the way the safety is 'calculated' by the people who designed the machine it looks okay on paper.
When you white-list your computer, the suggestions are something like "my home computer", and "office computer 1", and "vacation computer". This simply provides facebook with even more personal information to use in targeted advertising. If anything, though this does enhance security, it is at the expense of even more of the user's privacy.
I just saw this professor speak in a lecture to his peers. His conclusion was that what is preventing his molecules from being 'alive' is their inability to undertake novel action. They only go so far as to maximize their sustainability environment and nothing more. Though the 'environments' he gave the molecules were in fact static. It is only a matter of time before we can test situations which really do test our definitions.
Also be careful how you think about cost - this is a true and completely electric car. It will have a completely different cost curve. FAR fewer moving parts. Many fewer consumables. And no gasoline or oil. A 50k electric (if all the bugs and R&D is done (which is exactly what we're 'paying' Tesla to do)) could cost substantially less than a 30k gasoline car over its lifetime. It's still hard to tell. But it is different.
It is a different situation when going backwards in performance in order to get ahead in the long run. There is a steep energy barrier (that only gets steeper in a truly capitalist market) that needs to be lowered through government funded catalysis. Going from horses to cars was simply a matter of investment. It was inevitable. Going from oil to electric will eventually become inevitable, but we can speed it and aid it to ease the transition.
Their target market IS the average person. But they realize that with the current state of technology that they can't get there. So they start with the premium stuff. Put their best foot forward, and do all the R&D with heavy numbers and package it in a snazzy roadster. Get some cashflow on the ridiculously expensive tech, and then as economies of scale kick in, use that tech to make cheaper and cheaper cars. They are not 80s-Honda-cheap, but neither are they intending to remain a Lotus/Ferrari style market.
Wikileaks has a proposal to get a bunch of different free-speech, safe-harbor, journalist-protection style legislation through Iceland so as to both spur this kind of development, as well as provide a political safe-haven for data. Apparently it has caught on pretty well locally, and with a small population it's not particularly difficult to get such legislation passed on short notice.
The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you. The 'average' wages tell you little about the distribution of wealth in China. There are a number of very well off people living in the large cities. Luxury cars have a 100% luxury tax, and yet you still see countless Ferraris, BMWs & Mercedes. And even if the proportion of the population that is wealthy enough to be a customer of Google is much smaller than in the US or elsewhere, you get to multiply it by their enormous population. I don't have the numbers, but I would wager that by number there are a great deal more (USD) millionaires in China than there are in particular smaller European states, and Google seems to do well in those places.
Youtube is already inaccessible in China and has been for at least 3 years.
Google as a search engine is not particularly interesting to the ordinary citizen in China.
I don't know enough about google's presence in China from their corporate perspective, but from the perspective of someone who lived in China and who works with many Chinese, much more importantly than their google.com, are their backend tools, their technical abilities, their industrial and commercial applications. And I think that is where the strife is taking place, not with the public at large.
While I lived over there I introduced a lot of my friends to gmail and gchat. They provided a means out of the Chinese ecosystem through which they could communicate with friends/others around the world. They liked those tools. I think google's decision may in fact affect mostly those people who are in the know, and have less affect on those who tow the common line.
I guarantee that there will be a 'Apple vs MS vs etc' column that will be posted shortly after each device's debut. Not only do MS and Apple want to be on that list, but a whole host of other companies are releasing products right now just so that they too can be on that list. It would be quite possible to suck up a decent amount of free market space by riding off of Apple's announcement. Apple released this device with these features at this price point, while CompanyA released a similar device with these features at this price point. CompanyA automatically gets free news, a shot at a market and possibly even sales all while riding Apple's momentum.
I'm pretty sure this article is the extension of the MagLev train for which the 'Shanghai Test Track' is a test. That track is to be extended from the shanghai airport all the way to Hangzhou. The land is all bought up. When I was living in Shanghai 2 years ago there was an unprecedented street protest in the city over the health affects the new train's electromagnetic track would have on the landowners near the track (none, actually, but the uneducated populace is weary of being poisoned and killed by political ambitions.
This is a MagLev train. It runs on a special line, not really rails at all. There is a 20km test track that has been around for a while now that takes you from the Shanghai airport to the city. And it does bend. But it banks. The whole train is at a 45-degree angle while it turns. Kinda scary, but it works.
A substantial reason for the existence of this train is political. It is not in any way cost-effective for the job it will be doing. It is a major PR stunt by the government to show its people it has technological prowess. However, they don't actually have that technological prowess as stated above, rather are just buying the products from someone else.
Equivalent by construction does not always imply reducibility. They are different concepts. Sure, results must be validated, and equations of motion are 'true' now as ever. However, as with your string-theory example, there are ways of describing old theories that don't necessarily subsume each other; equivalent logically (in the end), but not of the same construction/limits of each other.
Slashdot Mirror
You can only access 'your' router using the app on your phone. It seems unlikely that they'd push the app's traffic over the local network, rather give you the "feature" of being able to administer your network from anywhere on the internet. If you can change settings from anywhere, so can Google.
I recall something about this with respect to pilots who might at some point encounter a nuclear blast. Part of the training included wearing an eye patch such that in the event of a nuclear detonation the pilot would not be completely blinded.
The orthogonal refers to the fact that the molecule is not naturally part of the E. coli sensing system - and so the synthetic 'message' is not convoluted or otherwise disturbed by the natural processes already taking place in the E. coli. So yes, this would allow individual cells or populations to pass different bits. You cold have as many bits of information as you found 'orthogonal' signaling molecules.
And even if you wanted to "program" this feature, you'd have to deal with the nasty problem of protein folding in silico. Better to leave this entire process highly parallel in wetware.
there is no need to deal with protein folding in silico - we know a LOT about proteins and how they work just from standard biochemical assays. There are literally tens of thousands of characterized molecules with known DNA sequences from which we can pick and choose useful sets - slightly modify if need be - and then recombine in novel ways inside a cell. And we can do it directly - without having to rely on some kind of directed evolution - which is quite slow. It is very hard to program a specific well-defined program into a phage - whereas the molecular biology to add features, protein sequences and other regulatory DNA to E. coli is trivial at this point. This is not about making a better immune system, it is about making one (or something else) that is entirely characterized and programmed - not one that must undergo thousands of generations of (difficult to control for) selection in order to become useful.
...not to calculate anything fancy.
Again, because we can program any arbitrary code into the bugs, it is trivial to make a bacteria that lights up green when it detects particular chemicals. Or that only grow when you have a fever, or that do other similar calculations. There are of course extreme difficulties when you're talking about therapeutics because you're interacting with the human body. But outside the human body it is only a matter of time before you start seeing bacterial sensors on everything. They are cheap, they are robust, and they can enzymatically recognize certain properties that mechanical sensors may have great difficulty doing, or doing rapidly, or cheaply. And when you can link the sensors with a programmable logic, THEN you get the really cool stuff. This research demonstrates the first steps into getting the programmable logic up and running.
They're inserting synthetic genetic code (with known function) into E. coli that will allow individual bugs to respond in predictable ways to other bugs' chemical signals. So, for example, there is a known DNA sequence that encodes a protein that 'recognizes' signal. There is another sequence that encodes a second signal recognition protein. There is a third sequence that encodes a scaffolding that binds the two signal proteins (an AND gate), and it produces some chemical or enzymatic output. This output is often a small molecule other bacteria can then subsequently recognize.
Once you have enough parts (that are found all over biology, and are slowly being annotated and dissected) you can start to create real computers.
This is very much about passing information between individuals. The 'logic' gates are very much still analogue - in that they are leaky and really only useful at a statistical level, but they are working. But small molecules can act as the medium of transmission between two different individual E. coli in a way that very much resembles a computation.
Official government website for the air quality in Shanghai. Decent records, and public.
http://www.envir.gov.cn/Eng/Airep/index.asp
LETTER OF CONCERN
We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers.
Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.
An important consideration is that a large fraction of the population will be subject to the new X-ray scanners and be at potential risk, as discussed below. This raises a number of ‘red flags’. Can we have an urgent second independent evaluation?
The Red Flags
The physics of these X-rays is very telling: the X-rays are Compton-Scattering off outer molecule bonding electrons and thus inelastic (likely breaking bonds). Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.
The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X- rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high.
In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist. A search, ultimately finding top FDA radiation physics staff, suggests that the relevant radiation quantity, the Flux [photons per unit area and time (because this is a scanning device)] has not been characterized. Instead an indirect test (Air Kerma) was made that emphasized the whole body exposure value, and thus it appears that the danger is low when compared to cosmic rays during airplane travel and a chest X-ray dose.
In summary, if the key data (flux-integrated photons per unit values) were available, it would be straightforward to accurately model the dose being deposited in the skin and adjacent tissues using available computer codes, which would resolve the potential concerns over radiation damage.
Our colleagues at UCSF, dermatologists and cancer experts, raise specific important concerns:
A) The large population of older travelers, >65 years of age, is particularly at risk from the mutagenic effects of the X-rays based on the known biology of melanocyte aging.
B) A fraction of the female population is especially sensitive to mutagenesis- provoking radiation leading to breast cancer. Notably, because these women, who have defects in DNA repair mechanisms, are particularly prone to cancer, X-ray mammograms are not performed on them. The dose to breast tissue beneath the skin represents a similar risk.
C) Blood (white blood cells) perfusing the skin is also at risk.
D) The population of immunocompromised individuals--HIV and cancer patients (see above) is likely to be at risk for cancer induction by the high skin dose.
E) The risk of radiation emission to children and adolescents does not appear to have been fully evaluated.
F) The policy towards pregnant women needs to be defined once the theoretical risks to the fetus are determined.
G) Because of the proximity of the testicles to skin, this tissue is at risk for sperm mutagenesis.
H) Have the effects
From the letter written by the scientists, not the article written by journalists:
"Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high.
The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X- rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high."
If each individual cell received 0.02, this would be accurate. But some cells in your body are receiving a dosage of almost 0, and others of two orders of magnitude more. Such that a given cell near your skin might have an extremely high dose, while internal organs get nothing. There are a lot of sensitive sites near the surface of a human's skin. Their misuse of units is shoddy at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.
Read the letter sent by the scientists. This is true overall, but not true locally. It is true that the total dose your body sees is less than what it sees from cosmic rays (if you average each cell in your body with the total amount of radiation). But it is NOT true at all locally. Your skin cells (and anything near the skin, like white blood cells, breast tissue, testicles, cornea, etc.) all receive VERY high local doses. These do not permeate into the body well, so the average is measured as 'safe' even though for cells on the surface of your body is extraordinarily high.
Apparently this is true for your 'body' as most of the radiation doesn't get much past the skin. But for the skin it can be "1 to 2 orders of magnitude" greater than background cosmic radiation even at altitude according the scientists.
So yeah, your heart sees no more radiation than the trip into the air. But your neck, your eyes, your breasts if you have them, and your testicles if you have them all receive a great deal of local radiation - far more than would be considered safe for a routine examination. But the way the safety is 'calculated' by the people who designed the machine it looks okay on paper.
When you white-list your computer, the suggestions are something like "my home computer", and "office computer 1", and "vacation computer". This simply provides facebook with even more personal information to use in targeted advertising. If anything, though this does enhance security, it is at the expense of even more of the user's privacy.
yep. Anki. It's the way to go.
I just saw this professor speak in a lecture to his peers. His conclusion was that what is preventing his molecules from being 'alive' is their inability to undertake novel action. They only go so far as to maximize their sustainability environment and nothing more. Though the 'environments' he gave the molecules were in fact static. It is only a matter of time before we can test situations which really do test our definitions.
Also be careful how you think about cost - this is a true and completely electric car. It will have a completely different cost curve. FAR fewer moving parts. Many fewer consumables. And no gasoline or oil. A 50k electric (if all the bugs and R&D is done (which is exactly what we're 'paying' Tesla to do)) could cost substantially less than a 30k gasoline car over its lifetime. It's still hard to tell. But it is different.
It is a different situation when going backwards in performance in order to get ahead in the long run. There is a steep energy barrier (that only gets steeper in a truly capitalist market) that needs to be lowered through government funded catalysis. Going from horses to cars was simply a matter of investment. It was inevitable. Going from oil to electric will eventually become inevitable, but we can speed it and aid it to ease the transition.
Their target market IS the average person. But they realize that with the current state of technology that they can't get there. So they start with the premium stuff. Put their best foot forward, and do all the R&D with heavy numbers and package it in a snazzy roadster. Get some cashflow on the ridiculously expensive tech, and then as economies of scale kick in, use that tech to make cheaper and cheaper cars. They are not 80s-Honda-cheap, but neither are they intending to remain a Lotus/Ferrari style market.
Wikileaks has a proposal to get a bunch of different free-speech, safe-harbor, journalist-protection style legislation through Iceland so as to both spur this kind of development, as well as provide a political safe-haven for data. Apparently it has caught on pretty well locally, and with a small population it's not particularly difficult to get such legislation passed on short notice.
http://www.wikileaks.org/
The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you. The 'average' wages tell you little about the distribution of wealth in China. There are a number of very well off people living in the large cities. Luxury cars have a 100% luxury tax, and yet you still see countless Ferraris, BMWs & Mercedes. And even if the proportion of the population that is wealthy enough to be a customer of Google is much smaller than in the US or elsewhere, you get to multiply it by their enormous population. I don't have the numbers, but I would wager that by number there are a great deal more (USD) millionaires in China than there are in particular smaller European states, and Google seems to do well in those places.
Youtube is already inaccessible in China and has been for at least 3 years.
Google as a search engine is not particularly interesting to the ordinary citizen in China.
I don't know enough about google's presence in China from their corporate perspective, but from the perspective of someone who lived in China and who works with many Chinese, much more importantly than their google.com, are their backend tools, their technical abilities, their industrial and commercial applications. And I think that is where the strife is taking place, not with the public at large.
While I lived over there I introduced a lot of my friends to gmail and gchat. They provided a means out of the Chinese ecosystem through which they could communicate with friends/others around the world. They liked those tools. I think google's decision may in fact affect mostly those people who are in the know, and have less affect on those who tow the common line.
I guarantee that there will be a 'Apple vs MS vs etc' column that will be posted shortly after each device's debut. Not only do MS and Apple want to be on that list, but a whole host of other companies are releasing products right now just so that they too can be on that list. It would be quite possible to suck up a decent amount of free market space by riding off of Apple's announcement. Apple released this device with these features at this price point, while CompanyA released a similar device with these features at this price point. CompanyA automatically gets free news, a shot at a market and possibly even sales all while riding Apple's momentum.
I'm pretty sure this article is the extension of the MagLev train for which the 'Shanghai Test Track' is a test. That track is to be extended from the shanghai airport all the way to Hangzhou. The land is all bought up. When I was living in Shanghai 2 years ago there was an unprecedented street protest in the city over the health affects the new train's electromagnetic track would have on the landowners near the track (none, actually, but the uneducated populace is weary of being poisoned and killed by political ambitions.
This is a MagLev train. It runs on a special line, not really rails at all. There is a 20km test track that has been around for a while now that takes you from the Shanghai airport to the city. And it does bend. But it banks. The whole train is at a 45-degree angle while it turns. Kinda scary, but it works.
A substantial reason for the existence of this train is political. It is not in any way cost-effective for the job it will be doing. It is a major PR stunt by the government to show its people it has technological prowess. However, they don't actually have that technological prowess as stated above, rather are just buying the products from someone else.
Equivalent by construction does not always imply reducibility. They are different concepts. Sure, results must be validated, and equations of motion are 'true' now as ever. However, as with your string-theory example, there are ways of describing old theories that don't necessarily subsume each other; equivalent logically (in the end), but not of the same construction/limits of each other.