Well, in an electronic system, you're going to be generating a significant amount of entropy by virtue of the design of the system. i.e., memory chips get hot as you push the current through to maintain their state.
But in general, I think you're making the problem more complex than it has to be. Since we're talking about a theoretical demon, the simplest "computational form" the demon could talk (or the simplest computer the demon could use, if you prefer) is a Turing machine. In this case, the demon is writing his measurements on an long piece of tape. As long as he has more tape, he need not erase and, since he's a theoretically perfect and reversible demon, he can sort his molecules as he will, "violating" the second law. But eventually, he'll run out of tape, and then in order to continue sorting molecules, he'll have to restore the tape to the original blank status.
Bennett's (and Landauer's actually) insight was that this erasure would invariably lead to an increase in entropy. The tape takes some physical form: whatever you wish. The information on the tape is therefore, physically speaking, some ordered collection of particles: it doesn't matter whether this ordered collection is a pencil mark or some atomic-scale or smaller bit representation. When you "erase the tape," you're turning this ordered collection representing something into a disordered collection representing nothing.
In slightly different words, the "mark on the tape" is something that distinguishes the represented information from the background noise of the tape system. Erasure involves removing this distinguishing feature and turning it back into the background noise from whence it came.
Interestingly, there does not turn out to be a necessary entropy increase when writing to the tape, although in practical applications (i.e. electronic or magnetic memory used in real computers now) there is quite a large increase in any operation. I believe you can avoid this entropy increase from writing by running the computer slowly enough that all processes are thermodynamically reversible. It is because erasure by definition disorders information (and because information must be physically represented) that you cannot avoid an entropy increase upon erasure no matter how hard you try.
No, I'm not deliberately trying to play on an ambiguity of definition. (Nor am I a physicist. although I am a physics student.) But anything stored in memory has to be stored physically. Therefore the erasure of that memory is a physical process that increases entropy.
Yes, but he can't just measure it...he has to take some action based on the measurement. In other words, as Bennett argued, he has to perform some sort of computation. Computation requires memory --> information. Unless he has an infinite tape to write on, he'll have to erase that information. Erasing information increases entropy.
In other words, the demon's information is not free, and therefore, he cannot violate the second law.
The system you describe would not violate the second law. Yes, you could use this plasma valve as a gate between two chambers at equal temperature. But you're putting energy in to keep the plasma there....and the collisions of the plasma with the gas particles will heat the gas (increasing entropy).
In theoretical thermal rectifiers in general, the interaction of the gas with, for example, the gate or the thermal interactions of the pawl in Feynman's ratchet cannot be disregarded and is often the key to seeing how a particular reincarnation of the demon fails to violate the second law.
Bennett's work, referenced by another post, kills the poor little demon on even more solid theoretical ground.
This, by the way, is one major sign that KDE is maturing. I confirm for my part, anecdotally, that 3.1 is considerably faster than previous versions of KDE. This speed increase is a sign that the project is reaching maturation. Exciting stuff.
This airplane is right in line with the move away from hub/spoke - it'll have huge range (747/777 range) but smaller capacity. That way distant but medium-sized markets could be served directly without a hub, but also without a jet with excess capacity.
Two days ago I flew a Boston-Seattle nonstop and the jet was a 737-700 (Alaska). What, a 737 transcontinental? Sure, why not. I think that's the sort of use (well, maybe longer range) that this jet would be aimed at.
-SymphonicMan
Re:Lost bullshit education, work hard
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
Feel free to email me in response if you'd agree that there's little point in continuing to post Score: 1 posts that few else read anyway.:)
There is a difference between the liberal arts and REALLY arbitrary and absurd "scholarly" topics that are an absurd undergraduate program for anyone that isn't simply going to inherit their parents wealth. Harvard teaches a lot of things REALLY well. Harvard, because of its wealth and endowment, is able to conduct lots of "research" in scholarly persuits. I picked "classics" as an absurd example.
You're confusing teaching and research. Yes, you could make the argument that a lot of humanities research is bogus and the professorships are platforms for political bullshit. (I know you didn't say that, but I'm going to because part of me understands this cynical view) But at the same time, teaching the humanities, even if it's sanskrit literature, is still fundamentally liberal arts. I don't see how there's any inherent difference career-wise going from classics or sanskrit literature to law or business school vs. going from history to law or business school, or english to law or business school.
what is the difference between studying Philosophy at Harvard or "Classics" at Harvard? One focuses on analytical skills and reads classical literature to accomplish that, the other focuses on studying classical works for their own sake.
I'm pretty sure that the study of any literature is analytical by nature. One would certainly "think" differently coming from a classics background vs. a philosophy background, but each set of analytical skills is valuable in a broader context.
I think you're overestimating the specificity of "obscure" humanities fields. You suggest that detail-oriented biology would be useless. I agree. It's the method of thinking about biology that you're supposed to take away. And the method of thinking about humanities is acquired whether you major in anthropology or classics, or at least there is a common subset of analytical skills.
As for providing for offspring....not everyone has or wants to have children. This is a lifestyle choice like any other. I am truly happy for you, however, that you have chosen to have children in a stable family and intend to do your damndest to provide for them.
Financial aid. Yes, the middle class gets screwed. We also get screwed with taxes. That's a fundamental problem with the structure of our society, IMO. But that ridiculous truth of financial aid applies to all private schools (i.e., don't get suckered in by the third-tier private school at 25g/year). I don't have the answer to this question. My point was simply that elite private schools are no longer class-based by "virtue" of sticker price - that 30% of income is theoretically possible. Also remember that those financial aid calculations are based on a standard government formula; you typically get similar offers from separate schools. The party line is "we're need-blind, we want you to be able to come here if you get in [our projections of your need come from the government, sorry if you disagree]." That said, yes, indeed, there is always more money available from the school. Negotiate.:)
Yeah, there are snotty prep types here. They stick together because no one else cares to talk to them. Heh.;) Seriously, though, it's a lower percentage than the public conception (or my conception before I came), and dropping all the time. And, I'll be sure to avoid their frisbee games around finals time. I'll be too busy buried in chem, taylor series, and Locke at that point to play frisbee, anyhow.
-SymphonicMan
Re:Lost bullshit education, work hard
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
Born rich? Go to Harvard to drink $8 cups of coffees and study the "classics." Sorry, but that's a luxury for the idle rich.
Want to spend $100k studying garbage? If you parents have millions? Great.
I go to Harvard, and I don't study the "classics," nor do I spend $100k studying garbage.
First of all, the list cost of private college across the board is very similar, Ivy league or not. Furthermore, financial aid significantly drives that list price down, often down to the level of a public college. The list tuition figures always quoted for college are misleading, as financial aid has also been rising rapidly. For many, Harvard is the least expensive college choice...including state schools. Or at least, matching cost.
I am not "idle rich," nor are my classmates. I've met very few no-work-rich-prep-school types here. I have two roommates; both them and myself went to public high school.
Finally, Harvard doesn't teach "bullshit". I never thought I'd wind up in the ivy league; I was aiming at a technical career, not some stuck up half assed law degree. What I realized as I considered my options was that Harvard is simply a liberal arts school like any other in the country, just....better than any other private liberal arts school in the country.;) (bias) But a Harvard education is not bullshit by your technical meritocratic standard. I can study CS here, or biochemistry, or physics, if I want to. In fact, that's what a liberal arts college is all about - being able to study anything. Including "garbage" like Plato and Aristotle. Ever thought that maybe studying classics is a decent preparation for business school and an entry into your "white collar" world?
Besides, how "useful" is the biology they teach now going to be in ten years? Hint: It'll all be obsolete. It's not what you study in college that makes college grads make so much more - it's that you study at all.
But the main point is, you're making a flamebait generalization about Harvard and private colleges in general when you have no ground for your argument besides a cost/benefit analysis that is based on overinflated cost data. And a good bit of pompous spite for those who don't study what you think is "practical". Your kids...are you going to force them to be doctors and engineers? What if they love music, or poetry? What if they'd be happier writing novels and barely surviving than making $80K as an engineer?
I think this post has more arrogance and bullshit in it than anyone I've met yet at Harvard.
I appreciate your sentiment but you're targetting the wrong person. Portman's majoring in Psychology at Harvard. Not exactly the recipe for dumb. And the fact that she, with a budding movie career, decided to go to college just screams that she's on the ball in the intellectual department. I agree, her performance in Clones is poor, but come on - the script sucks, just like all the other Star Wars movies. Go ahead and blame Lucas all you want, but you're stereotyping Portman quite unfairly.
And besides, Lucas' script isn't all that sexist towards her character. She shows as much courage as Leia on multiple occasions. Who knows why the hell she falls for Anakin, but that's due to weak romantic understanding on the part of Lucas. Remember, the character of the relationship between Han and Leia is vastly different than the character of the relationship between Padme and Anakin....or at least the character as we might imagine it written by a decent scriptwriter. The Padme/Anakin relationship presents a greater challenge for Lucas, evidently, than the Han/Leia relationship....and he fails miserably. And the "whoops my shirt got ripped, here's my midriff" thing is dumb, but a lot less sexist-dumb than Leia at the beginning of ROTJ...and yet you call that Leia scene "ok" because she kicks some ass in it. But Padme kicks some ass in her scene, too...at least as much ass as one can kick armed with only a blaster against hordes of battle droids.
According to the Netcraft poke, http://www.beavton.k12.or.us, the public webserver for the Beaverton (Oregon) School District, runs Linux/Apache. Interesting. Guess the ban on non-Windows and non-Mac machines doesn't extend to things that actually require stability.:)
The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.
One major misconception running around here right now is that the instructor submits the papers. This is not true. The students create an account on the site, join a virtual "class" on the site using login information given to them by their instructor, and then are asked to submit their own papers by the instructor.
If you look at the technology brief on the site, you'll find that it's actually quite impressive technologically speaking, I think. Is it 100% effective? No. But as their FAQ (or whatever) points out, it doesn't have to be. It just has to make plagiarism more time-intensive than actually doing the work. The problem that their service is responding to is that the internet has made it much easier to use somebody else's work (large, searchable, easy to copy by definition). Basiscally, turnitin.com is primarily an internet-plagiarism prevention system - i.e. it's especially targeted at online term paper mills, etc.
Our high school uses this service. Basically, they ask every student to submit their papers to the service. That's what the submitter meant when he said "placebo". The instructors actually tend not to find plagiarism using this service, because the students know that if they submit plagiarized papers submitted to turnitin.com, they will be caught and subject to disciplinary action. The system acts as a deterrent.
I'm not sure how the school pays (in response to your "cashing in")for the service, but I think it's either based on monthly subscription (or similar) or perhaps it's based on a per paper fee.
Your mistake - you're not creating an entire new human, you're growing ONLY an organ. You're not growing a baby, taking out its liver, and then killing it.
According to the Scientific American article (which you should read now), the company, Advanced Cell Technology, is not pursuing research on reproductive cloning. What they are pursuing is research on therapeutic cloning. Without going into details (go read the article), what this will eventually allow researchers to do is grow organs, tissues, etc. from the intended receipient's own stem cells. The stem cells are created using cloning. If this becomes reality, the benefits will be huge. It's called "regenerative medicine" (quoting their CEO) for a reason.
Reproductive cloning is more difficult. While the first stage is the same - insert new DNA into egg, prompt the start of division - reproductive cloning has many more steps required to create a baby. First of all, as far as I know, babies can't be grown in vitro, so you have to implant the cloned egg into a mother. There is massive potential for danger here, not only to the growing embryo but also to the mother. Furthermore, there are issues that have yet to be resolved, such as the possibility that cloned DNA is already "aged," leading to shorter life for the cloned person or animal. Neither of these absolutely critical issues is even touched by this research. Reproductive cloning is a long, long way off.
On the other hand, it appears therapeutic cloning is making much progress. I for one am excited by the possibilites, and I think that any legislative reaction to this research is purely reactive and would ignore the facts. I see no ethical problems with this research whatsoever, and neither did the ethical board overseeing this research.
It's actually a different store. Portland name: Powell's Books. Chicago name: Powell's Book Store. Semantics, I know, but Portland-Powell's website (powells.com) lists only stores in the Portland, OR area.
In Portland, Oregon, where I live, we have a chain of local stores called "Powell's Books". This is an independent chain, doesn't operate outside the area, and is one of the largest independent booksellers left in the country. It's a great store, in part because of a shelving policy they have. Like many bookstores, Powell's sells used books.
There's more, though. They shelve the used books right alongside the new books. So if I walk into Powells and want to buy a copy of a book, more often than not I walk out with a used copy.
This is an almost exact realspace parallel with what Amazon is "guilty" of doing. Why does Amazon get this letter, then? Because it's a big target and it's in cyberspace, home of criminals and intellectual property pirates. Bah. My open note to Jeff Bezos: Tell the Author's Guild to go to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
"Intel didn't design the Centrino CPU's...some 3rd party Indian fab did. And they look a lot more like an AMD or Motorola chip than an Intel."
Sorry, that's just wrong. The Pentium M is based on a Pentium III core, and it was designed by Intel engineers in Israel.
And then Anakin Skywalker will jump over some sort of alien lava shark on his surfboard....
Actually, Intel is leading development of an open source driver for the Centrino MiniPCI card (Pro/wireless 2100).
Way to tamper with evidence. You might have wanted to post that anonymously....
re: fade in. They use javascript, slowly decreasing the rgb values from 255 to 0 (white to grey to black). Look at the source.
Well, in an electronic system, you're going to be generating a significant amount of entropy by virtue of the design of the system. i.e., memory chips get hot as you push the current through to maintain their state.
But in general, I think you're making the problem more complex than it has to be. Since we're talking about a theoretical demon, the simplest "computational form" the demon could talk (or the simplest computer the demon could use, if you prefer) is a Turing machine. In this case, the demon is writing his measurements on an long piece of tape. As long as he has more tape, he need not erase and, since he's a theoretically perfect and reversible demon, he can sort his molecules as he will, "violating" the second law. But eventually, he'll run out of tape, and then in order to continue sorting molecules, he'll have to restore the tape to the original blank status.
Bennett's (and Landauer's actually) insight was that this erasure would invariably lead to an increase in entropy. The tape takes some physical form: whatever you wish. The information on the tape is therefore, physically speaking, some ordered collection of particles: it doesn't matter whether this ordered collection is a pencil mark or some atomic-scale or smaller bit representation. When you "erase the tape," you're turning this ordered collection representing something into a disordered collection representing nothing.
In slightly different words, the "mark on the tape" is something that distinguishes the represented information from the background noise of the tape system. Erasure involves removing this distinguishing feature and turning it back into the background noise from whence it came.
Interestingly, there does not turn out to be a necessary entropy increase when writing to the tape, although in practical applications (i.e. electronic or magnetic memory used in real computers now) there is quite a large increase in any operation. I believe you can avoid this entropy increase from writing by running the computer slowly enough that all processes are thermodynamically reversible. It is because erasure by definition disorders information (and because information must be physically represented) that you cannot avoid an entropy increase upon erasure no matter how hard you try.
No, I'm not deliberately trying to play on an ambiguity of definition. (Nor am I a physicist. although I am a physics student.) But anything stored in memory has to be stored physically. Therefore the erasure of that memory is a physical process that increases entropy.
Yes, but he can't just measure it...he has to take some action based on the measurement. In other words, as Bennett argued, he has to perform some sort of computation. Computation requires memory --> information. Unless he has an infinite tape to write on, he'll have to erase that information. Erasing information increases entropy.
In other words, the demon's information is not free, and therefore, he cannot violate the second law.
The system you describe would not violate the second law. Yes, you could use this plasma valve as a gate between two chambers at equal temperature. But you're putting energy in to keep the plasma there....and the collisions of the plasma with the gas particles will heat the gas (increasing entropy).
In theoretical thermal rectifiers in general, the interaction of the gas with, for example, the gate or the thermal interactions of the pawl in Feynman's ratchet cannot be disregarded and is often the key to seeing how a particular reincarnation of the demon fails to violate the second law.
Bennett's work, referenced by another post, kills the poor little demon on even more solid theoretical ground.
This, by the way, is one major sign that KDE is maturing. I confirm for my part, anecdotally, that 3.1 is considerably faster than previous versions of KDE. This speed increase is a sign that the project is reaching maturation. Exciting stuff.
This airplane is right in line with the move away from hub/spoke - it'll have huge range (747/777 range) but smaller capacity. That way distant but medium-sized markets could be served directly without a hub, but also without a jet with excess capacity.
Two days ago I flew a Boston-Seattle nonstop and the jet was a 737-700 (Alaska). What, a 737 transcontinental? Sure, why not. I think that's the sort of use (well, maybe longer range) that this jet would be aimed at.
-SymphonicMan
Feel free to email me in response if you'd agree that there's little point in continuing to post Score: 1 posts that few else read anyway. :)
There is a difference between the liberal arts and REALLY arbitrary and absurd "scholarly" topics that are an absurd undergraduate program for anyone that isn't simply going to inherit their parents wealth. Harvard teaches a lot of things REALLY well. Harvard, because of its wealth and endowment, is able to conduct lots of "research" in scholarly persuits. I picked "classics" as an absurd example.
You're confusing teaching and research. Yes, you could make the argument that a lot of humanities research is bogus and the professorships are platforms for political bullshit. (I know you didn't say that, but I'm going to because part of me understands this cynical view) But at the same time, teaching the humanities, even if it's sanskrit literature, is still fundamentally liberal arts. I don't see how there's any inherent difference career-wise going from classics or sanskrit literature to law or business school vs. going from history to law or business school, or english to law or business school.
what is the difference between studying Philosophy at Harvard or "Classics" at Harvard? One focuses on analytical skills and reads classical literature to accomplish that, the other focuses on studying classical works for their own sake.
I'm pretty sure that the study of any literature is analytical by nature. One would certainly "think" differently coming from a classics background vs. a philosophy background, but each set of analytical skills is valuable in a broader context.
I think you're overestimating the specificity of "obscure" humanities fields. You suggest that detail-oriented biology would be useless. I agree. It's the method of thinking about biology that you're supposed to take away. And the method of thinking about humanities is acquired whether you major in anthropology or classics, or at least there is a common subset of analytical skills.
As for providing for offspring....not everyone has or wants to have children. This is a lifestyle choice like any other. I am truly happy for you, however, that you have chosen to have children in a stable family and intend to do your damndest to provide for them.
Financial aid. Yes, the middle class gets screwed. We also get screwed with taxes. That's a fundamental problem with the structure of our society, IMO. But that ridiculous truth of financial aid applies to all private schools (i.e., don't get suckered in by the third-tier private school at 25g/year). I don't have the answer to this question. My point was simply that elite private schools are no longer class-based by "virtue" of sticker price - that 30% of income is theoretically possible. Also remember that those financial aid calculations are based on a standard government formula; you typically get similar offers from separate schools. The party line is "we're need-blind, we want you to be able to come here if you get in [our projections of your need come from the government, sorry if you disagree]." That said, yes, indeed, there is always more money available from the school. Negotiate. :)
Yeah, there are snotty prep types here. They stick together because no one else cares to talk to them. Heh. ;) Seriously, though, it's a lower percentage than the public conception (or my conception before I came), and dropping all the time. And, I'll be sure to avoid their frisbee games around finals time. I'll be too busy buried in chem, taylor series, and Locke at that point to play frisbee, anyhow.
-SymphonicMan
Born rich? Go to Harvard to drink $8 cups of coffees and study the "classics." Sorry, but that's a luxury for the idle rich.
Want to spend $100k studying garbage? If you parents have millions? Great.
I go to Harvard, and I don't study the "classics," nor do I spend $100k studying garbage.
First of all, the list cost of private college across the board is very similar, Ivy league or not. Furthermore, financial aid significantly drives that list price down, often down to the level of a public college. The list tuition figures always quoted for college are misleading, as financial aid has also been rising rapidly. For many, Harvard is the least expensive college choice...including state schools. Or at least, matching cost.
I am not "idle rich," nor are my classmates. I've met very few no-work-rich-prep-school types here. I have two roommates; both them and myself went to public high school.
Finally, Harvard doesn't teach "bullshit". I never thought I'd wind up in the ivy league; I was aiming at a technical career, not some stuck up half assed law degree. What I realized as I considered my options was that Harvard is simply a liberal arts school like any other in the country, just....better than any other private liberal arts school in the country. ;) (bias) But a Harvard education is not bullshit by your technical meritocratic standard. I can study CS here, or biochemistry, or physics, if I want to. In fact, that's what a liberal arts college is all about - being able to study anything. Including "garbage" like Plato and Aristotle. Ever thought that maybe studying classics is a decent preparation for business school and an entry into your "white collar" world?
Besides, how "useful" is the biology they teach now going to be in ten years? Hint: It'll all be obsolete. It's not what you study in college that makes college grads make so much more - it's that you study at all.
But the main point is, you're making a flamebait generalization about Harvard and private colleges in general when you have no ground for your argument besides a cost/benefit analysis that is based on overinflated cost data. And a good bit of pompous spite for those who don't study what you think is "practical". Your kids...are you going to force them to be doctors and engineers? What if they love music, or poetry? What if they'd be happier writing novels and barely surviving than making $80K as an engineer?
I think this post has more arrogance and bullshit in it than anyone I've met yet at Harvard.
I appreciate your sentiment but you're targetting the wrong person. Portman's majoring in Psychology at Harvard. Not exactly the recipe for dumb. And the fact that she, with a budding movie career, decided to go to college just screams that she's on the ball in the intellectual department. I agree, her performance in Clones is poor, but come on - the script sucks, just like all the other Star Wars movies. Go ahead and blame Lucas all you want, but you're stereotyping Portman quite unfairly.
And besides, Lucas' script isn't all that sexist towards her character. She shows as much courage as Leia on multiple occasions. Who knows why the hell she falls for Anakin, but that's due to weak romantic understanding on the part of Lucas. Remember, the character of the relationship between Han and Leia is vastly different than the character of the relationship between Padme and Anakin....or at least the character as we might imagine it written by a decent scriptwriter. The Padme/Anakin relationship presents a greater challenge for Lucas, evidently, than the Han/Leia relationship....and he fails miserably. And the "whoops my shirt got ripped, here's my midriff" thing is dumb, but a lot less sexist-dumb than Leia at the beginning of ROTJ...and yet you call that Leia scene "ok" because she kicks some ass in it. But Padme kicks some ass in her scene, too...at least as much ass as one can kick armed with only a blaster against hordes of battle droids.
Don't flame from ignorance, please.
According to the Netcraft poke, http://www.beavton.k12.or.us, the public webserver for the Beaverton (Oregon) School District, runs Linux/Apache. Interesting. Guess the ban on non-Windows and non-Mac machines doesn't extend to things that actually require stability. :)
-SymphonicMan
The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.
SymphonicMan
(my high school uses the service)
Funny. :)
I believe the original submitter meant it was a placebo because the service's greatest value is actually deterrence.
-SymphonicMan
(My high school uses the service)
As I just replied to someone else, the students submit the papers.
-SymphonicMan
(My high school uses this service)
One major misconception running around here right now is that the instructor submits the papers. This is not true. The students create an account on the site, join a virtual "class" on the site using login information given to them by their instructor, and then are asked to submit their own papers by the instructor.
-SymphonicMan
(My high school uses the service)
If you look at the technology brief on the site, you'll find that it's actually quite impressive technologically speaking, I think. Is it 100% effective? No. But as their FAQ (or whatever) points out, it doesn't have to be. It just has to make plagiarism more time-intensive than actually doing the work. The problem that their service is responding to is that the internet has made it much easier to use somebody else's work (large, searchable, easy to copy by definition). Basiscally, turnitin.com is primarily an internet-plagiarism prevention system - i.e. it's especially targeted at online term paper mills, etc.
-SymphonicMan
Our high school uses this service. Basically, they ask every student to submit their papers to the service. That's what the submitter meant when he said "placebo". The instructors actually tend not to find plagiarism using this service, because the students know that if they submit plagiarized papers submitted to turnitin.com, they will be caught and subject to disciplinary action. The system acts as a deterrent.
I'm not sure how the school pays (in response to your "cashing in")for the service, but I think it's either based on monthly subscription (or similar) or perhaps it's based on a per paper fee.
-SymphonicMan
"create new life and then harvest it"
Your mistake - you're not creating an entire new human, you're growing ONLY an organ. You're not growing a baby, taking out its liver, and then killing it.
According to the Scientific American article (which you should read now), the company, Advanced Cell Technology, is not pursuing research on reproductive cloning. What they are pursuing is research on therapeutic cloning. Without going into details (go read the article), what this will eventually allow researchers to do is grow organs, tissues, etc. from the intended receipient's own stem cells. The stem cells are created using cloning. If this becomes reality, the benefits will be huge. It's called "regenerative medicine" (quoting their CEO) for a reason.
Reproductive cloning is more difficult. While the first stage is the same - insert new DNA into egg, prompt the start of division - reproductive cloning has many more steps required to create a baby. First of all, as far as I know, babies can't be grown in vitro, so you have to implant the cloned egg into a mother. There is massive potential for danger here, not only to the growing embryo but also to the mother. Furthermore, there are issues that have yet to be resolved, such as the possibility that cloned DNA is already "aged," leading to shorter life for the cloned person or animal. Neither of these absolutely critical issues is even touched by this research. Reproductive cloning is a long, long way off.
On the other hand, it appears therapeutic cloning is making much progress. I for one am excited by the possibilites, and I think that any legislative reaction to this research is purely reactive and would ignore the facts. I see no ethical problems with this research whatsoever, and neither did the ethical board overseeing this research.
-SymphonicMan
It's actually a different store. Portland name: Powell's Books. Chicago name: Powell's Book Store. Semantics, I know, but Portland-Powell's website (powells.com) lists only stores in the Portland, OR area.
-SymphonicMan
In Portland, Oregon, where I live, we have a chain of local stores called "Powell's Books". This is an independent chain, doesn't operate outside the area, and is one of the largest independent booksellers left in the country. It's a great store, in part because of a shelving policy they have. Like many bookstores, Powell's sells used books.
There's more, though. They shelve the used books right alongside the new books. So if I walk into Powells and want to buy a copy of a book, more often than not I walk out with a used copy.
This is an almost exact realspace parallel with what Amazon is "guilty" of doing. Why does Amazon get this letter, then? Because it's a big target and it's in cyberspace, home of criminals and intellectual property pirates. Bah. My open note to Jeff Bezos: Tell the Author's Guild to go to hell.
-SymphonicMan