Now I realize that if people actually want to go to space, then there's a demand in the market that isn't being filled. Companies can profit by figuring out how to fill that demand. They'll try and fail a lot but they'll use their own money to do it.
No, they won't. Companies are not necessarily interested in advancing humanity, but getting ahead in the next 1-5 years. There is very little incentive for a private company to spend 15 billion dollars a year on anything that won't pay off in a decade. (If you don't believe me, start your own company sometime!)
Governments can fund BIG projects with uncertain but (if successful) huge outcomes. America became a world superpower (in part) because it's not afraid to fund such things. I would rather have the government triple NASA's budget rather than buy a couple more golf balls for GM execs...
Unfortunately, as long as the average techie in the USA has this myopic pseudo-libertarian "if it's worth doing some private company is going to do it" attitude, our children will only dream of the the glory days when there were Americans who walked on another heavenly body. By then, the expertise (and the infrastructure) to do such things may have been irretrievably lost.
[The best thing Obama or any other leader can do is to inspire a clear and concrete vision for the next 10 years and put in the framework to support it. But this boils down to general political will, which is sadly lacking].
The PiSight HMD promises 187 degrees horizontal and 84 degrees vertical FOV by tiling DLP chips. I have yet to see it myself, but the units start somewhere around $20K and go up depending on how much FOV you want). 1900x1200 per eye (kind of low, but higher than anything out there).
The problem to solve with HMDs is not just field of view or resolution--you also need to solve the convergence and accommodation problems.
I envision a future HMD unit integrating eye tracking and auto focus which exploits the way the human eye really sees (few degrees at a time, in extremely high resolution) instead of trying to render a very high resolution image at interactive frame rates. I imagine the fact that this has not been built is due to the catch-22 involving low demand and high cost [when only the military can afford your hardware and is willing to pay for it, there is absolutely NO incentive to mass produce it]
In the meantime, the state of the art in VR is still in systems like the CAVE. I think the Iowa State VRAC CAVE has something amazing like 16 Mpixel resolution...
I am waiting for one of the game companies to start exploiting this. In the meantime, get yourself a pair of NuVision Cinema LCD shutter glasses (around $100), a $500 emitter, and a DLP 3DTV device for under $3000 if you are serious about home-based VR. If you can drive the 3DTV device (NVidia is releasing drivers for it... there is also hardware available from RealD), the quality is stunning. (You're on your own with head tracking...but there are cheap solutions out there such as the WiiMote based hacks...I've only used the more expensive solutions).
Seriously, you can probably find "29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air" of anything in air...
Molecular mass of cocaine = 303.353 g/ mol
29 picograms in 1000 L =.029 picograms in 1 L = 17 464 210 350 amu in 1 L / 303.353 amu = 57,570,587 molecules per liter / 2 = 28,785,293.5 molecules per breath
Grab your breathing masks!!! [I'm sure my dimensions are off...but I don't think I'm that far off the estimate]
That's funny...my first assignment ever (1st day of 1st grade) was to copy three pages of straight lines. I didn't do it. Nor did I copy the three pages of slanted lines (slashes and backslashes) for the next two days. I got away with this...
I'm afraid my early start into skipping homework has allowed me to suffer later in life (I still can't read my own writing) and caught up with me in high school right around AP calculus.
I have tried to improve my penmanship by starting with the same slanted line exercise, but to no avail. I also can't really draw...but not for lack of trying.
Carried to an extreme, such things are bad. But don't knock penmanship just because it was difficult to learn at the time.
Perhaps I will make sure that such assignments are more fun for my own kids...
I was looking at this as a replacement for WAY more expensive systems like OptiTrack or the Flock of Birds. It's a bit limited in that it does not seem to let you "point" at a certain things...the video looked like it created a "bump" roughly where your hand is.
I wonder if you could refine such a system using electrostatic sensors alone to resolve individual fingers and hand orientation.
With some refinement and augmentation from a single camera, it could turn into a gesture recognition system for VR or a video game interface much better than the Wii. Of course, it still doesn't solve the head tracking problem... [Perhaps full-human body tracking with a bunch of these sensors behind a 3D projection screen?]
This is the problem. We don't need to be in space any more than we need to send pictures to hand held devices, talk to people on the other side of the globe, discuss ideas on vast virtual bulletin boards, or step into machines that fly (ancient cautionary tales exist about the last one).
Our needs are limited to food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Most of us don't even need the capability to leave the town we were born in unless required by war, famine, etc. As much as I love this planet, I would like us to have the capability to get out for the same reason you might want to leave your town if you needed (or desired) to.
Also...feel free to make fun of childish obsessions with certain works of fiction--but remember that your smart phone was just an imaginative Sci-Fi prop 30 years ago!
We are still doing things. Quite a bit of things. The only difference is we don't really need human beings up there to do these tasks, thus you don't hear about the missions and discoveries. It's not big news unless a human is physically involved, generally.
This is a fatal strategic mistake for an organization that relies on the the enthusiasm of humans for its existence.
I think you'll get a lot more advancement towards space exploration if you have a permanent base on the moon and HAVE to solve the problems that you will have in space.
Heck, I think you'll get a lot more advancement if you have a HARD deadline for getting to the Moon, getting to Mars, etc (more than one prime-time NASA related speech in 8 years by a president will help). You also need to fire every bureaucrat and contractor that has not contributed to a flying mission in the last 10 years.
It also doesn't help that we have raised a generation of unimaginative dolts whose concept of the ultimate in technology is limited by the next smart phone.
I'm afraid even Linux is popular enough that "open source" exploits exist. I'd suggest a good, modern, and transparent firewalling solution with a more obscure (but secure) OS like VMS.
It would give the enemy a LOT more work to do to develop custom exploits, which they probably won't be able to get through (with enough vigilance -- something like paper & printer logs and trained admins to look through them)
English, at this time in the World's history, is what Latin used to be in the middle ages for science, technology, and especially computer science. [On the last point: I challenge anyone to find a CS-related manuscript from 1554 not written in Latin:) ]
There is a critical mass of information already available in English, and most educated people in the non-English-speaking world understand this.
Even if there is a community of "native language" programmers (scientists, researchers, etc.) they will be putting themselves at a disadvantage because
* Their audience will be a lot smaller
* They will need to "re-invent the wheel" or rely on English speakers to access the continuously evolving body of knowledge out there
(That being said, non-English technical discussions sound unnecessarily peppered with English to me)
When I was in college, laptops were too expensive and slow. But the real reason to have the labs (besides the shared space) is the fact that the computers there are guaranteed to be working, have the correct software (and correct licenses) on them, and that they free you from having to carry anything (provided that the campus is large enough and the labs are everywhere...as was the case in my school).
(Occasionally I'd use the telnet-only library search computers to work on my CS homework in secluded corners of the library--some of the most productive times I've ever had...but I date myself)
Khanna hopes that the team's findings will pave the way toward investigating how the aluminum clusters can be recycled for continual usage and how the conditions for the release of hydrogen can be controlled. "It looks as though we might be able to come up with ways to remove the hydroxyl group that remains attached to the aluminum clusters after they generate hydrogen so that we can reuse the aluminum clusters again and again," he said.
Please call us when you do. In the meantime, I'll see if I can market my magic catalyst which allows you go get hydrogen from water using sodium atoms...at room temperature!!
The glasses in the picture look like Circular Passive Polarized ones sold by RealD. These glasses are used either with Passive-Polarized LCD monitors or more complicated passive-polarized dual projection systems (or an actively polarized Z-Screen if you're really rich).
The advantage of this technology is that you DON'T need a high refresh rate, and the technology does not cut the refresh rate in half (instead, it cuts the resolution in half, but you hardly notice when you're playing the game).
Google Arisawa P240W (high end, $2000, best I've seen on a 24" monitor) or Zalman Trimon (low end, $500, still acceptable).
I hope Sony puts 3D capable PS machines on the market. Then 3D will make sense for game parlor type of places, which is where it is most suited right now.
Disclaimer: I own a company that distributes these monitors...
You're living in the right time and the right place.
Weasel your way into the most fascinating graduate level courses you can. Go to SIGGRAPH. Find good internships. Code for peanuts for a while, just for the experience. Mess around with a bunch of different technologies for fun.
An airliner is not a closed-source black box. It's more like a "shared-source" product where the customer (i.e., not the passenger) gets service contracts, service manuals, blueprints, training, etc. from the manufacturer. Parts used in the aerospace industry undergo a lot more testing, verification & validation, and more federally mandated reviews than you can imagine. Airplanes even have their own on-board communication protocols designed for redundancy (ARINC 664, ARINC 429, etc.)
Consumer electronics, for the most part, are black boxes with "no user serviceable parts inside." Normally, this is OK -- you won't die if your cell phone dies. If, however, your enemy managed to disable 99% of all cell phones in your country, you could suffer greater consequences. (The same goes for computers, cars, etc. ).
First of all, I'm not an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist. I don't generally believe that anyone is out to get me. I run Vista on my laptop (and Linux on less important hardware).
This, however, is making me think seriously about the need for open source hardware.
What's happening to the Zunes (even though I'm sure they'll fix it shortly) might be the tip of the iceberg for what might happen to the rest of our hardware, either through design or negligence.
I've never seen the firmware running my computer's BIOS, my cell phone or my car. Normally, I wouldn't bother to look. But the fact is that 99% of the hardware we rely on is capable of doing the same thing, with much worse consequences. None of us know what kind of backdoors or bugs exist.
This is not good.
The bad thing is, I don't see many alternatives out there. Android is a good start. The Arduino board seems like a nice toy. What else can we do? Is there a viable way of setting up incentives so that the big manufacturers start releasing open sourced firmware?
I was just about to say the same thing myself. You couldn't really run it fast enough for realtime compression (not with today's technology, at least), but a variant of this might be really good for downloadable content (long compression, fast download, fast decompression). I'm thinking downloading a 'video' version of this to a low-powered cell phone over a very low bandwidth connection....
BTW, although the idea is similar, I don't think this is the same thing as fractal compression.
Anyone I talk to in the car knows to shut up and suspend the conversation if I say "hold on" (which I will say when I'm changing lanes, if there's more traffic than usual, etc.) They also know not to take offense if I say "traffic" and hang up immediately.
The distraction of a cell phone conversation comes when the person keeps talking when you're fighting for your life in intense traffic.
Perhaps we need to develop a standard set of language for such situations and run the tests mentioned in the article again using those.
I know I probably sound like one of those people who say "yeah, but I KNOW how to drive drunk." I hate those people...
The MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) I think is a pretty good example of a test that actually tests knowledge and the ability to apply it. I have taught the physics module of this test to college students at Kaplan for a summer, and the easiest way to get students to pass the test is to actually teach them the physics principles required. I hear the national board exams required for physicians are pretty thorough also.
I'm not for "teaching to the test" but if the test is sufficiently advanced, such an education can provide a good "floor."
There will always be lazy teachers who will not bother to go beyond the test. For the lucky students, there are also truly inspirational teachers (I, unfortunately, was not one) who will go above and beyond.
I believe the true fear of the teachers is 1) the test is stupid, and the students won't want to go beyond it OR 2) The teachers are themselves not capable of passing the test
|You could've said the same thing about the earth not being the center of the universe, gunpowder, medicine, or automobiles
You might have a point about gunpowder. I will also add biological warfare, nuclear warfare, oppression, torture, slavery, and other evils man inflicts upon man (or woman), to the evils for which we might get judged by a just God. I'm hoping mercy will overcome judgement.
You need not subscribe to a particular religion to see for yourself that the points about medicine and Geocentricism are nonsensical. Just because some religious people were horribly wrong in the past does not invalidate all discussion about what we should fear from a just God.
Even if you are an agnostic, it should be easy enough to see that creating a thinking, living human being who might suffer in our world just to satisfy our scientific curiosity is something we ought to think twice about
This is the worst (potentially feasible) idea I've heard of.
Even in a world where moral relativism is pushing the limits of outright folly, there are good reasons to not do such things:
1) We'd be dealing with a human species. That means you'd essentially have a human on your hands, to raise like you'd raise any other kid. Except he'd be ugly, different, and WAY more difficult to handle than your average 2 year old.
2) Someone will have to be responsible for this person for the rest of his life. If he's not at the same cognitive level as us, this will be perceived as a burden. If he IS as smart as us, then we'll have to answer for bringing him into a world where he is the ONLY representative of his species.
3) We might have the unintended consequence of resurrecting ugly social movements/ideas like racism an phrenology. The "speciesm" we will be committing and legitimizing by the act of creating a human being for research will have spillovers into racist thought.
4) We will have to deal with having created a human being for scientific research purposes. The ensuing debate about balancing research interests with human rights will NOT end with human rights getting the upper hand.
5) For those of us who know there is a God, I don't think I have to speak of the hubris of doing such a thing or the possible consequences beyond what is outlined above.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they won't. Companies are not necessarily interested in advancing humanity, but getting ahead in the next 1-5 years. There is very little incentive for a private company to spend 15 billion dollars a year on anything that won't pay off in a decade. (If you don't believe me, start your own company sometime!)
Governments can fund BIG projects with uncertain but (if successful) huge outcomes. America became a world superpower (in part) because it's not afraid to fund such things. I would rather have the government triple NASA's budget rather than buy a couple more golf balls for GM execs...
Unfortunately, as long as the average techie in the USA has this myopic pseudo-libertarian "if it's worth doing some private company is going to do it" attitude, our children will only dream of the the glory days when there were Americans who walked on another heavenly body. By then, the expertise (and the infrastructure) to do such things may have been irretrievably lost.
[The best thing Obama or any other leader can do is to inspire a clear and concrete vision for the next 10 years and put in the framework to support it. But this boils down to general political will, which is sadly lacking].
The PiSight HMD promises 187 degrees horizontal and 84 degrees vertical FOV by tiling DLP chips. I have yet to see it myself, but the units start somewhere around $20K and go up depending on how much FOV you want). 1900x1200 per eye (kind of low, but higher than anything out there).
The problem to solve with HMDs is not just field of view or resolution--you also need to solve the convergence and accommodation problems.
I envision a future HMD unit integrating eye tracking and auto focus which exploits the way the human eye really sees (few degrees at a time, in extremely high resolution) instead of trying to render a very high resolution image at interactive frame rates. I imagine the fact that this has not been built is due to the catch-22 involving low demand and high cost [when only the military can afford your hardware and is willing to pay for it, there is absolutely NO incentive to mass produce it]
In the meantime, the state of the art in VR is still in systems like the CAVE. I think the Iowa State VRAC CAVE has something amazing like 16 Mpixel resolution...
I am waiting for one of the game companies to start exploiting this. In the meantime, get yourself a pair of NuVision Cinema LCD shutter glasses (around $100), a $500 emitter, and a DLP 3DTV device for under $3000 if you are serious about home-based VR. If you can drive the 3DTV device (NVidia is releasing drivers for it ... there is also hardware available from RealD), the quality is stunning. (You're on your own with head tracking...but there are cheap solutions out there such as the WiiMote based hacks...I've only used the more expensive solutions).
Seriously, you can probably find "29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air" of anything in air...
Molecular mass of cocaine = 303.353 g/ mol
29 picograms in 1000 L = .029 picograms in 1 L = 17 464 210 350 amu in 1 L / 303.353 amu = 57,570,587 molecules per liter / 2 = 28,785,293.5 molecules per breath
Grab your breathing masks!!!
[I'm sure my dimensions are off...but I don't think I'm that far off the estimate]
That's funny...my first assignment ever (1st day of 1st grade) was to copy three pages of straight lines. I didn't do it. Nor did I copy the three pages of slanted lines (slashes and backslashes) for the next two days. I got away with this...
I'm afraid my early start into skipping homework has allowed me to suffer later in life (I still can't read my own writing) and caught up with me in high school right around AP calculus.
I have tried to improve my penmanship by starting with the same slanted line exercise, but to no avail. I also can't really draw...but not for lack of trying.
Carried to an extreme, such things are bad. But don't knock penmanship just because it was difficult to learn at the time.
Perhaps I will make sure that such assignments are more fun for my own kids...
Hey, I never said anything about FoSS :) But do check out ARToolkit (free as in beer).
I was looking at this as a replacement for WAY more expensive systems like OptiTrack or the Flock of Birds. It's a bit limited in that it does not seem to let you "point" at a certain things...the video looked like it created a "bump" roughly where your hand is.
I wonder if you could refine such a system using electrostatic sensors alone to resolve individual fingers and hand orientation.
With some refinement and augmentation from a single camera, it could turn into a gesture recognition system for VR or a video game interface much better than the Wii. Of course, it still doesn't solve the head tracking problem... [Perhaps full-human body tracking with a bunch of these sensors behind a 3D projection screen?]
This is the problem. We don't need to be in space any more than we need to send pictures to hand held devices, talk to people on the other side of the globe, discuss ideas on vast virtual bulletin boards, or step into machines that fly (ancient cautionary tales exist about the last one).
Our needs are limited to food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Most of us don't even need the capability to leave the town we were born in unless required by war, famine, etc. As much as I love this planet, I would like us to have the capability to get out for the same reason you might want to leave your town if you needed (or desired) to.
Also...feel free to make fun of childish obsessions with certain works of fiction--but remember that your smart phone was just an imaginative Sci-Fi prop 30 years ago!
This is a fatal strategic mistake for an organization that relies on the the enthusiasm of humans for its existence.
I think you'll get a lot more advancement towards space exploration if you have a permanent base on the moon and HAVE to solve the problems that you will have in space.
Heck, I think you'll get a lot more advancement if you have a HARD deadline for getting to the Moon, getting to Mars, etc (more than one prime-time NASA related speech in 8 years by a president will help). You also need to fire every bureaucrat and contractor that has not contributed to a flying mission in the last 10 years.
It also doesn't help that we have raised a generation of unimaginative dolts whose concept of the ultimate in technology is limited by the next smart phone.
I'm afraid even Linux is popular enough that "open source" exploits exist. I'd suggest a good, modern, and transparent firewalling solution with a more obscure (but secure) OS like VMS.
It would give the enemy a LOT more work to do to develop custom exploits, which they probably won't be able to get through (with enough vigilance -- something like paper & printer logs and trained admins to look through them)
English, at this time in the World's history, is what Latin used to be in the middle ages for science, technology, and especially computer science. [On the last point: I challenge anyone to find a CS-related manuscript from 1554 not written in Latin :) ]
There is a critical mass of information already available in English, and most educated people in the non-English-speaking world understand this.
Even if there is a community of "native language" programmers (scientists, researchers, etc.) they will be putting themselves at a disadvantage because
* Their audience will be a lot smaller
* They will need to "re-invent the wheel" or rely on English speakers to access the continuously evolving body of knowledge out there
(That being said, non-English technical discussions sound unnecessarily peppered with English to me)
When I was in college, laptops were too expensive and slow. But the real reason to have the labs (besides the shared space) is the fact that the computers there are guaranteed to be working, have the correct software (and correct licenses) on them, and that they free you from having to carry anything (provided that the campus is large enough and the labs are everywhere...as was the case in my school).
(Occasionally I'd use the telnet-only library search computers to work on my CS homework in secluded corners of the library--some of the most productive times I've ever had...but I date myself)
Please call us when you do. In the meantime, I'll see if I can market my magic catalyst which allows you go get hydrogen from water using sodium atoms...at room temperature!!
For ideas:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm
[Mirror: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:Czfkx2_qDggJ:sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm+http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
]
(He had our attention when he rolled into the lecture hall on a liquid-nitrogen propelled tricycle..)
[Prof. Sprott -- sorry about the Slashdotting...]
The glasses in the picture look like Circular Passive Polarized ones sold by RealD. These glasses are used either with Passive-Polarized LCD monitors or more complicated passive-polarized dual projection systems (or an actively polarized Z-Screen if you're really rich).
The advantage of this technology is that you DON'T need a high refresh rate, and the technology does not cut the refresh rate in half (instead, it cuts the resolution in half, but you hardly notice when you're playing the game).
Google Arisawa P240W (high end, $2000, best I've seen on a 24" monitor) or Zalman Trimon (low end, $500, still acceptable).
I hope Sony puts 3D capable PS machines on the market. Then 3D will make sense for game parlor type of places, which is where it is most suited right now.
Disclaimer: I own a company that distributes these monitors...
Perhaps even special effects...
You're living in the right time and the right place.
Weasel your way into the most fascinating graduate level courses you can. Go to SIGGRAPH. Find good internships. Code for peanuts for a while, just for the experience. Mess around with a bunch of different technologies for fun.
With a bit of luck, it might pay off...
An airliner is not a closed-source black box. It's more like a "shared-source" product where the customer (i.e., not the passenger) gets service contracts, service manuals, blueprints, training, etc. from the manufacturer. Parts used in the aerospace industry undergo a lot more testing, verification & validation, and more federally mandated reviews than you can imagine. Airplanes even have their own on-board communication protocols designed for redundancy (ARINC 664, ARINC 429, etc.)
Consumer electronics, for the most part, are black boxes with "no user serviceable parts inside." Normally, this is OK -- you won't die if your cell phone dies. If, however, your enemy managed to disable 99% of all cell phones in your country, you could suffer greater consequences. (The same goes for computers, cars, etc. ).
First of all, I'm not an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist. I don't generally believe that anyone is out to get me. I run Vista on my laptop (and Linux on less important hardware).
This, however, is making me think seriously about the need for open source hardware.
What's happening to the Zunes (even though I'm sure they'll fix it shortly) might be the tip of the iceberg for what might happen to the rest of our hardware, either through design or negligence.
I've never seen the firmware running my computer's BIOS, my cell phone or my car. Normally, I wouldn't bother to look. But the fact is that 99% of the hardware we rely on is capable of doing the same thing, with much worse consequences. None of us know what kind of backdoors or bugs exist.
This is not good.
The bad thing is, I don't see many alternatives out there. Android is a good start. The Arduino board seems like a nice toy. What else can we do? Is there a viable way of setting up incentives so that the big manufacturers start releasing open sourced firmware?
RMS, where are you???
I was just about to say the same thing myself. You couldn't really run it fast enough for realtime compression (not with today's technology, at least), but a variant of this might be really good for downloadable content (long compression, fast download, fast decompression). I'm thinking downloading a 'video' version of this to a low-powered cell phone over a very low bandwidth connection....
BTW, although the idea is similar, I don't think this is the same thing as fractal compression.
Thank you. Best Slashdot reply I've received so far...
(Yes, I was suspecting a BS powered business model)
Wow, that is amazing!!!
Now if someone could tell me what the baseline of this increase is, we might actually learn something...
(seriously, does anyone know what the efficiency of current nano-piezoelectric power generators are?)
Anyone I talk to in the car knows to shut up and suspend the conversation if I say "hold on" (which I will say when I'm changing lanes, if there's more traffic than usual, etc.) They also know not to take offense if I say "traffic" and hang up immediately.
The distraction of a cell phone conversation comes when the person keeps talking when you're fighting for your life in intense traffic.
Perhaps we need to develop a standard set of language for such situations and run the tests mentioned in the article again using those.
I know I probably sound like one of those people who say "yeah, but I KNOW how to drive drunk." I hate those people...
The MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) I think is a pretty good example of a test that actually tests knowledge and the ability to apply it. I have taught the physics module of this test to college students at Kaplan for a summer, and the easiest way to get students to pass the test is to actually teach them the physics principles required. I hear the national board exams required for physicians are pretty thorough also.
I'm not for "teaching to the test" but if the test is sufficiently advanced, such an education can provide a good "floor."
There will always be lazy teachers who will not bother to go beyond the test. For the lucky students, there are also truly inspirational teachers (I, unfortunately, was not one) who will go above and beyond.
I believe the true fear of the teachers is 1) the test is stupid, and the students won't want to go beyond it OR 2) The teachers are themselves not capable of passing the test
|You could've said the same thing about the earth not being the center of the universe, gunpowder, medicine, or automobiles
You might have a point about gunpowder. I will also add biological warfare, nuclear warfare, oppression, torture, slavery, and other evils man inflicts upon man (or woman), to the evils for which we might get judged by a just God. I'm hoping mercy will overcome judgement.
You need not subscribe to a particular religion to see for yourself that the points about medicine and Geocentricism are nonsensical. Just because some religious people were horribly wrong in the past does not invalidate all discussion about what we should fear from a just God.
Even if you are an agnostic, it should be easy enough to see that creating a thinking, living human being who might suffer in our world just to satisfy our scientific curiosity is something we ought to think twice about
This is the worst (potentially feasible) idea I've heard of.
Even in a world where moral relativism is pushing the limits of outright folly, there are good reasons to not do such things:
1) We'd be dealing with a human species. That means you'd essentially have a human on your hands, to raise like you'd raise any other kid. Except he'd be ugly, different, and WAY more difficult to handle than your average 2 year old.
2) Someone will have to be responsible for this person for the rest of his life. If he's not at the same cognitive level as us, this will be perceived as a burden. If he IS as smart as us, then we'll have to answer for bringing him into a world where he is the ONLY representative of his species.
3) We might have the unintended consequence of resurrecting ugly social movements/ideas like racism an phrenology. The "speciesm" we will be committing and legitimizing by the act of creating a human being for research will have spillovers into racist thought.
4) We will have to deal with having created a human being for scientific research purposes. The ensuing debate about balancing research interests with human rights will NOT end with human rights getting the upper hand.
5) For those of us who know there is a God, I don't think I have to speak of the hubris of doing such a thing or the possible consequences beyond what is outlined above.
Next up: vat grown ninjas?
What is the most fascinating technical problem you've ever solved?