I must disagree with this analysis. I have watched every episode, including out-takes and a lot of extra footage. They do indeed do controls and a large number of trials for their experiments. They constantly complain of the limits imposed by the 1-hour time requirements. It is clearly not lab work as it really exists, but as someone who has done real grinding work in the lab, I don't think that there is any better way of killing a love for science in little kids than trying to convince them that repeating an experiment 100 times is fun.
Ages 2 and 5 are a time for wonder and magic. It is not the time to wow them with the scientific method. It works better than any other way of knowing, but it is *not* sexy.
Adding yet another wrinkle is the fact that drug companies are presently the most lucrative business sector on the planet. No that is not a joke. 19% profit in the year 1999.
I am well aware of the argument that they are legally responsible to their stockholders, as appalling as this concept is for the future of the world. This does not change the fact that a previous poster made that they are not making money in SA anyway. It would be fabulous if an industry based on helping people stay healthy actually cared about poeple and not only about profits, eh?
I have been thinking about this exact subject for some time now. Does anyone lese think that there may be a certain inevitability to this? I mean considering how much simpler it would be to send someone's "brain download" to other stars? A sufficiently advanced manufacturing system that would allow that mind to make whatever machine was needed to exist in the environment that it found?
Biological organisms are so fragile that I figure there are a thousand reasons why this would be a good idea. Once you remove the emotional attachment to the body, what is left? Aging, uncontrollable hormonally induced reactions? Given the fragility of the system, which, like all things biological is a well tested but still make shift kludge, wouldn't starting at the begining be better? Build a better human from a kit.
The biological machinery that we are was the only machine that we didn't create, we don't understand it very well and we don't have the docs, I think that my immortality and my ability to cruise around the universe forever would be worth the price of the "ugly bag of mostly water".
I'm sorry but as a Canadian, reading all these posts ( and many others ) about the wonders of capitalism and how it is the One True God(tm) really makes my skin crawl. The anti-trust laws that you seem to hate so much are the reason you can call the other side of the planet without taking out a morgage. The baby-Bells are huge *now*, how big would Bell have been if it hadn't been broken up? Would you be paying the rates you are now? No damn way.
The laws were put in place by your govenment because the rail barons were in serious danger of owning the entire economy back a hundred+ years ago. Why are people now advocating giving bigger business the ability to do the same? With the orgy of aquisition that many multi-nationals are on now, they are already in control of so much of the enconomy that they pretty much do what they please. You should be backing up the laws, not tearing them down!
Face facts, corporations are ruled by the bottom line, they really do not, as an entity, give a damn about the individual, we are collectively consummers of their products and little more. The maxim "self-regulating" is idiotic 10 times over. Watch your back, MS may well be trying something sneakier later, they are ham fisted now, but they are just practicing for buying politicians in the future, don't give them any more to work with.
I think you make a very valid point. For those with enough know-how to install Deb correctly then they can get the distro from all sorts of places, they don't need a store bought version.
I have to say if not for my respect for the companies backing this little adventure I would be seriously suspicious of the motives (read: bandwagon jumping) of this move. I think this will hurt more than help unfortunately:-/
Whoa! Ease up there pilgrim. This is in essence a press release. They still have to mention various important aspects of this, like speed. Also this little beauty is kind of misleading "relatively inexpensive tool (an atomic force microscope)". To get an industrial application out of this you are going to have to do this process in parallel a few hundred times, this is going to be expensive.
Still, you are right and there is serious money to be made. I think that there some very interesting hurdles to be cleared. 1) The substrate (gold) is conductive and ill suited to electronics (to say the least). 2) I wonder how uniform the applied layers of "ink" are? If they are not uniform then stacking several layers on top of one another could get pretty ugly.
Ouch. We need some clarity here. Making sure people understand that both sides were doing terrible things is important but you had better be careful when making blanket statements like For every 'provocation' the Soviets put forward, I can name one that we did right before or after on the same scale geopolitically. . Have you ever heard of the "Gulag archipelago"? or better yet seen it? Say what you will, even the slaughter in Vietnam compares favourably (if such a comparison is possible) to what the Soviets were doing to inhabitants of their own country as well as others.
There is an interesting article in Science Daily about a a 21 year old bull's DNA being used as cloning material, they have a clone up and around right now and are supervising it carefully to see signs of premature aging or suseptability to disease etc...
I don't see a huge problem if the telomeres are truncated due to age or not. Appending a new length to the ends of the chromosomes can't be that difficult anyway since you only have to do it to the original source DNA anyway, of course with ~200 tries to every successful clone this could get tedious fast...
"And this whole research area is where you should be looking if you really want to save species." Great, so we have lots of formerly dead species and can only keep them in Zoos because all the habitat has been paved over. Give that man a giant spatuala for the most self-serving scientist of the year award.
If I am not mistaken Colossus was closer kin to the calculator because it had one single purpose, codebreaking. I guess I can agree with the argument that a computer must be able to accept arbitrary instruction sets with a variable purpose. Otherwise Tic-tac-toe is matrix algebra:-) .
As a teacher-in-training I can tell you that there are a near limitless number of things to be said against traditional educational methods (traditional being the last 70 years or so). These methods worked great for producing factory workers but do a poor job of preparing kids for the now future. Read "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler for a good view on this (and everything else too).
I for one would say that if the educators in Celebration are smart enough to try new things, keep what works and dump what doesn't then they are doing a good service for that community.
As a Canadian slave to the US space program I may be biased here but I really must say that the idea of privatizing NASA makes me cringe. All that idea will do is turn it into a for-profit venture like all the others out there. More harm has been done to the world by "Profit at any price" mentalities than can even be measured. Would you really want one of the best things to come out of the US to be turned into a TV satelite launching tool that can't dredge up the will to make a step beyond our own small sphere? At the moment the gravity well is an expensive place to live, yes, but if you look at the statistics, private enterprise is *awful* at finding new technologies. Using/perfecting them? Excellent, but finding? Terrible. Most companies work on patents and developments from universities and other "free" sources. Invention with an eye to profit seldom ventures far from the bottom line.
One of my physics profs. was present for the Pons/Fleishman original presentation. He said that they were missrepresented horribly. Some doorknobs reported "cold fusion" where "unexplained heat and some neutron production" was said. The physicists present at the talk actually were sort of embarased when P/F suggested cold fusion as a solution. Overcoming electrostatic repulsion enough to cause fusion to occur isn't too likely to happen by simple proximity due to chemical binding.
Slashdot Mirror
I must disagree with this analysis. I have watched every episode, including out-takes and a lot of extra footage. They do indeed do controls and a large number of trials for their experiments. They constantly complain of the limits imposed by the 1-hour time requirements. It is clearly not lab work as it really exists, but as someone who has done real grinding work in the lab, I don't think that there is any better way of killing a love for science in little kids than trying to convince them that repeating an experiment 100 times is fun.
Ages 2 and 5 are a time for wonder and magic. It is not the time to wow them with the scientific method. It works better than any other way of knowing, but it is *not* sexy.
I am well aware of the argument that they are legally responsible to their stockholders, as appalling as this concept is for the future of the world. This does not change the fact that a previous poster made that they are not making money in SA anyway. It would be fabulous if an industry based on helping people stay healthy actually cared about poeple and not only about profits, eh?
I have been thinking about this exact subject for some time now. Does anyone lese think that there may be a certain inevitability to this? I mean considering how much simpler it would be to send someone's "brain download" to other stars? A sufficiently advanced manufacturing system that would allow that mind to make whatever machine was needed to exist in the environment that it found?
Biological organisms are so fragile that I figure there are a thousand reasons why this would be a good idea. Once you remove the emotional attachment to the body, what is left? Aging, uncontrollable hormonally induced reactions? Given the fragility of the system, which, like all things biological is a well tested but still make shift kludge, wouldn't starting at the begining be better? Build a better human from a kit.
The biological machinery that we are was the only machine that we didn't create, we don't understand it very well and we don't have the docs, I think that my immortality and my ability to cruise around the universe forever would be worth the price of the "ugly bag of mostly water".
I'm sorry but as a Canadian, reading all these posts ( and many others ) about the wonders of capitalism and how it is the One True God(tm) really makes my skin crawl. The anti-trust laws that you seem to hate so much are the reason you can call the other side of the planet without taking out a morgage. The baby-Bells are huge *now*, how big would Bell have been if it hadn't been broken up? Would you be paying the rates you are now? No damn way.
The laws were put in place by your govenment because the rail barons were in serious danger of owning the entire economy back a hundred+ years ago. Why are people now advocating giving bigger business the ability to do the same? With the orgy of aquisition that many multi-nationals are on now, they are already in control of so much of the enconomy that they pretty much do what they please. You should be backing up the laws, not tearing them down!
Face facts, corporations are ruled by the bottom line, they really do not, as an entity, give a damn about the individual, we are collectively consummers of their products and little more. The maxim "self-regulating" is idiotic 10 times over. Watch your back, MS may well be trying something sneakier later, they are ham fisted now, but they are just practicing for buying politicians in the future, don't give them any more to work with.
woof
I think you make a very valid point. For those with enough know-how to install Deb correctly then they can get the distro from all sorts of places, they don't need a store bought version.
:-/
I have to say if not for my respect for the companies backing this little adventure I would be seriously suspicious of the motives (read: bandwagon jumping) of this move. I think this will hurt more than help unfortunately
woof
Whoa! Ease up there pilgrim. This is in essence a press release. They still have to mention various important aspects of this, like speed. Also this little beauty is kind of misleading "relatively inexpensive tool (an atomic force microscope)". To get an industrial application out of this you are going to have to do this process in parallel a few hundred times, this is going to be expensive.
Still, you are right and there is serious money to be made. I think that there some very interesting hurdles to be cleared. 1) The substrate (gold) is conductive and ill suited to electronics (to say the least). 2) I wonder how uniform the applied layers of "ink" are? If they are not uniform then stacking several layers on top of one another could get pretty ugly.
woof
Ouch. We need some clarity here. Making sure people understand that both sides were doing terrible things is important but you had better be careful when making blanket statements like For every 'provocation' the Soviets put forward, I can name one that we did right before or after on the same scale geopolitically. . Have you ever heard of the "Gulag archipelago"? or better yet seen it? Say what you will, even the slaughter in Vietnam compares favourably (if such a comparison is possible) to what the Soviets were doing to inhabitants of their own country as well as others.
There is an interesting article in Science Daily about a a 21 year old bull's DNA being used as cloning material, they have a clone up and around right now and are supervising it carefully to see signs of premature aging or suseptability to disease etc...
I don't see a huge problem if the telomeres are truncated due to age or not. Appending a new length to the ends of the chromosomes can't be that difficult anyway since you only have to do it to the original source DNA anyway, of course with ~200 tries to every successful clone this could get tedious fast...
"And this whole research area is where you should be looking if you really want to save species." Great, so we have lots of formerly dead species and can only keep them in Zoos because all the habitat has been paved over. Give that man a giant spatuala for the most self-serving scientist of the year award.
If I am not mistaken Colossus was closer kin to the calculator because it had one single purpose, codebreaking. I guess I can agree with the argument that a computer must be able to accept arbitrary instruction sets with a variable purpose. Otherwise Tic-tac-toe is matrix algebra :-) .
"I've lost my flower," said Tom lackadaisically.
As a teacher-in-training I can tell you that there are a near limitless number of things to be said against traditional educational methods (traditional being the last 70 years or so). These methods worked great for producing factory workers but do a poor job of preparing kids for the now future. Read "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler for a good view on this (and everything else too).
I for one would say that if the educators in Celebration are smart enough to try new things, keep what works and dump what doesn't then they are doing a good service for that community.
Thanks for the info Jon.
As a Canadian slave to the US space program I may be biased here but I really must say that the idea of privatizing NASA makes me cringe. All that idea will do is turn it into a for-profit venture like all the others out there. More harm has been done to the world by "Profit at any price" mentalities than can even be measured. Would you really want one of the best things to come out of the US to be turned into a TV satelite launching tool that can't dredge up the will to make a step beyond our own small sphere? At the moment the gravity well is an expensive place to live, yes, but if you look at the statistics, private enterprise is *awful* at finding new technologies. Using/perfecting them? Excellent, but finding? Terrible. Most companies work on patents and developments from universities and other "free" sources. Invention with an eye to profit seldom ventures far from the bottom line.
- Hope this doesn't fly, or we won't.
One of my physics profs. was present for the Pons/Fleishman original presentation. He said that they were missrepresented horribly. Some doorknobs reported "cold fusion" where "unexplained heat and some neutron production" was said. The physicists present at the talk actually were sort of embarased when P/F suggested cold fusion as a solution. Overcoming electrostatic repulsion enough to cause fusion to occur isn't too likely to happen by simple proximity due to chemical binding.