I'll second that. Saw it not too long ago, and I was relatively blown away. Smart, bizzare, poetic, and funny movie. It is perhaps aimed at more of a children's market, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. My daughter (who is about 6) liked it a lot, although it's a bit scary in places for the littlest ones.
You need live nuclei and live eggs, plus a host mammoth mother to gestate the fetus. Because none of these are available, 'Jurassic Park' to the contrary, it won't succeed
Feh. This is why I don't care much for "medical ethicists". He leaves no room for clever tricks to get around the (large number of) problems inherent in the issue, spitting out a bunch of generalizations and negativity based in his own misconceptions of the process.
As a rule, I find the automatic response of a "medical ethicist" to any potential advance is "No". God only knows how many people their clever little arguments are going to kill over the next few decades. The sad thing is that the process has been institutionalized now, and will continue to act as an impediment to real medical/biotechnological progres for decades to come.
How does this fellow define "live" eggs and/or sperm, anyway? You do need intact chromosomes, but their plan to generate 88% mammoths is perfectly viable provided they can get decent sperm. Since nobody has (to my knowledge) even looked at this issue yet, his statement is meaningless.
I think it reflects badly on the academic art world, not art in general, that this man's work cannot be taken seriously. His work was appreciated by millions and influenced the vision of the universe of entire generations.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of great art?
There's a distinct snobbery at work here, but in the end who really cares - his work did what it set out to do.
I hope the question posed in the topic wasn't really serious. If New York (or anywhere else) were partially destroyed neither you nor I nor anyone you know would have the slightest say in the rebuilding process - land owners would make these decisions on an individual basis. What we would see, I'm quite certain, is a lot of wealthy individuals buying up the land at firesale prices (assuming it was livable).
Oh, I don't think it's impossible at all. I'm just not optimistic in the near term (say, 30-40 years). In the long term (>50 years) I actually think it is almost a certainty.
Maybe it's just a forest-for-the-trees effect, but working in a biochem lab I'm constantly struck by the gigantic complexity we're faced with in the metabolic processes of even the simplest cells, and by the sketchy nature of our understanding of the overall picture right now. This is not to put the field down - we know orders of magnitude more now than we did even a decade ago. The (real) work on the ageing process has only just begun, however.
That being said, there are a couple of hopeful threads. Some real progress is being made on understanding the nature of the caloric restriction effect, and it seems like the idea of a simple pill which mimics the effect isn't completely out of the question.
Personally I'm sure it will come out about five minutes after I die.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans
A fair bit of (theoretical!) work has been done on this topic in the last decade or so. Frankly I'm too tired right now to go look up the references, but I've been to a couple of population genetics seminars by people active in this area. The basic upshot is that the "aging process" (as measured by the inflection point in the curve describing the age-linked decline in metabolic function, repair efficiency, etc) for a given species tends to kick in at about the age of the average lifespan of that organism in the wild.
Humans in the wild presumably lived on average around 30-35 years before being snuffed out by cave bears, infections, or angry neighbours. There's no advantage to being able to live efficiently to 200 years if you're already dead at 35, so natural selection doesn't operate to keep your body in peak form for that extended time. If you suddenly develop a mutation that allows you to live to 200, it doesn't help any of your descendants a bit, since on average they are all dead at 35 as well.
One fellow even worked out a rough calculation for how long it's going to take natural selection to notice that we're living much longer on average, and for our descendants to start living longer on that basis (this was done by extrapolation from (IIRC) fruitfly data). Be of good cheer: 30000 years or so from now, people will be living much longer.:)
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Actually I think this is all a pretty interesting issue. What is it about the influence of American culture that makes it so pervasive and insidious that it pretty much instantly infects and metastasizes inside cultures hundreds or even thousands of years older?
Rationalism? Well, maybe to a degree, but I don't think the WWF, Rosie O'Donnell, and When Aliens Attack IV really represents the height of the Western Rational tradition.
Freedom? Hmmmm... again maybe to a degree but probably not in the way people are thinking about. Consumerism (of which I freely admit to being an addict as much as the next guy) tends to blur over and confuse itself with Freedom, but it isn't freedom in the same sense that the framers of the constitution thought about. What it is about is a much more elementary and slightly infantile wish for instant gratification and godlike immediate access to all objects of desire. This is a human universal, so the appeal there is obvious...
The Big Corporate Conspiracy? It always comes up, but moving past the tinfoil-hat brigade there's an element of truth there all the same. Shows and advertisments are both crafted to go under our rational radar and appeal to the idea of the life we wish we had. We tune in to a show or watch a movie because we are entertained - traditional cultural stuff is often enjoyable in a forced and strained way (kind of like a visit with Grandma) but the latest Arnie movie is a cheap date who wants to go home with you right now. Who doesn't like that? The Corporate Media (hate using that term, but let's not pretend it doesn't exist) craft the American Media Experience to appeal instantly to everyone, and they do it in a darwinian environment that encourages doing it better all the time. Can the ten-thousandth retelling of Fred the Barber and His Magic Scissors compete with Sex In The City?
The real problem with this is that people tend to confuse success with value. I think that's what angers the anti-american-culture reactionaries.
Evolutionary Biology has essentially ignored the possability that there may be interplanetary contributions
Well, speaking as an evolutionary biologist I don't think that's entirely fair.
Lots of people in the evolution community have an interest in astronomy and are no strangers to Hoyle's Panspermia notion, the idea of a primary seeding of Earthly life from Martian life, and associated concepts.
What has been missing, obviously, is any kind of evidence to suggest that there is an interplanetary contribution to Earthly evolution (sans pretty clearly established ones like impact effects). If anyone can provide solid evidence of such a link then evolutionary scientists would be all over it like a dirty shirt, believe you me.:) Any paper solidly demonstrating such a thing would be an instant Nature or Science publication.
I think that's a perfectly fair question - you really didn't need to post it as AC:)
The question (and the possible answer) are fundamental, vis, is life on Earth a great cosmic coincidence, or is it something which can happen anywhere in the universe given the right starting conditions?
Right now we don't know the answer - volumes of speculation exist to say both "yes" and "no", but in the end we do not know the answer. If we find indisputable evidence that life has evolved elsewhere, this is a big answer - the know that the universe may actually be bursting with life-filled planets (esp. since we'd have two such planets in one solar system, barring the primary transfer hypothesis of course). This isn't somebody's obscure interest in the origins of some spectral line in the atmosphere of a single star somewhere, this is a deeply fundamental question about the universe.
we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc
Do you have a reference for this? I don't mean that in a challenging way - I'm honestly curious. Having read lots of astronomical literature (as an interested party in another discipline), pretty much all I've ever heard is the typical lines about being "on the edge of an arm" or "between two arms", but I have yet to see a primary reference on this topic.
According to Burnham, I believe, the bright star cloud in Cygnus represents looking along the axis of one of the nearby arms (or along the interior of an arm, possibly), as does the star cloud 180 degrees opposite, which I cannot at the moment recall.
I'd be very interested in references to any actual literature in which this is examined.
Not hardly, man. I recall watching the "handshake" live - I guess I was in grade 3, and had limited interest in space at the time, but that was the first time I clearly recall seeing a big event (even if it was only a stage-managed PR stunt) happening realtime on TV.
Organized fraud leading directly to the impoverishment of tens of thousands and loss of thousands of jobs? Knowing and conspiratorial breach of trust at a public company reaping tens or hundreds or even billions of dollars in illicit profits? These are not serious crimes? Apparently some sadsack loser trying to sell an ounce of dope to some other pathetic nitwit is committing a bigger crime. Sheesh.
Indeed. This is a line you see a lot these days (from Republican attack robots like Anne Coulter). The FACT is that it is a consequence of Gingrich-led Republican-initiated deregulation. The government "got off the back" of big business.
Indeed. That's what I personally find so scary about all of this. Of course we have to be more vigilant right now - anyone who doesn't think there's a truly serious threat is deluding themselves, and it is pretty hard to come down against the government for making changes that allow them to more easily track down the bad guys.
That being said, where is the out? The War Against Terror will never be over, because terror (read: asymmetrical warfare) is the weapon of the disempowered against the powerful. As long as literally billions of people on the planet don't have clean drinking water, let alone access to education and so on, then there will be an endless supply of rage to feed the other end of the process.
They have us between a rock and a hard place - it is very hard to argue against harsh measures to weed out the terrorists ("but why do you want to make things easy for them?") but on the other hand that means we're supporting the creation of a de facto police state (and I don't think that's entirely hyperbole) with no discernable way of ever getting things back to normal again.
After all, politicians just love to give up power once they have it.
Totally agreed. This will eliminate what little "suspension of disbelief" is required to watch, for instance, "Scrubs". The popups are bad enough in the credits, but once it comes in the middle of the show, the show itself will begin to feel like nothing more than a commerical.
Nobody respects or values a commercial.
This will certainly do it for me. Any show, no matter how alluringly brain-melting, will be off my list instantly if this kind of crap starts up.
There are pretty active campaigns in the USA to shut down MP3 trading, "warez", movie trading, etc etc. We all know how well that has worked. You can't get any of that stuff on the net anymore.:)
Same deal here - as long as the net gets in to China, things that the government doesn't want the people to see will get in there too. Its the nature of the net, and the Chinese people are not stupid. If they want to see it, they'll find a way.
Of course the government was going to try to throttle the information flow - that's what they do. This is one dike that is waaay to big for even their fingers, I think.
Hey, don't count out the oldsters completely. My mom just hit 80, and she's the local guru in her retirement home. She installed her own webcam recently, regularly does her own tape backups, still does semi-pro desktop publishing work for the local orchestra, and so on. Of course I do a fair bit of support work (tho I got her set up with VNC lately and that reduces the aggravation of telephone support).
That being said I'm not gonna encourage her to move to linux - she's 80 after all, and the learning curve undeniably gets steeper at that age. Win98 does everything she's going to actually need.
Re:Other Book Genres
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Personally (not that anyone will care, but just add to the thread):
- History: currently reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower - A Portrait of The World Before the War, a somewhat episodic but interesting review of the late 19th century. There are some fascinating correspondances with the current climate (the chapter on the anarchists is particularly interesting - I was a bit vague on them before, but there is a real resonance with the current terrorist threat).
For fiction I used to be a big fan of John Irving - I think The Hotel New Hampshire remains my favourite book of his, though I'm less enchanted with his recent stuff.
LOL. Thanks for the flashback. I still remember lining my quarters up for a turn to play that game. Usually ended too quickly (as I sucked), but it was always a favourite...
There's a great deal of information on the Good Omens movie at a Terry Gilliam fansite called Dreams. Apparently they're actually playing down the comedic aspects of the book. This seems like kind of a smart idea to me - the book done as a faux-serious metaphysical drama, combined with Gilliam's warped worldmaking talents, could really work. A straight-up adaption of the book's (mostly conceptual, descriptive) jokes might fall flat...
Excuse me? Terry is primarily a director, responsible for cinematic masterpieces like Brazil, Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, and the (underrated, IMHO) Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Perhaps you're thinking of Terry Pratchett, who co-wrote the book with Gaiman?
1.5 million keeps the full science team on salary for a year, plus buys all of the associated frills. Seems pretty sad to me - they could get decent shots of Amalthea with a few hours of work by the techs who actually do the trajectory and camera pointing work, but that doesn't fall within established protocols.
Feh. If NASA falls prey to that kind of pointy-headed desk-jockey thinking, then I suspect the glory days may really be behind them.
Actually the whole thing seems like a pretty sad story to me - he's clearly a clever guy battling against a debilitating mental illness. In the end the "Alice" concept was interesting and original, but its a one-note song. He doesn't seem to have moved beyond it in any significant research-linked sense, and it seems like his illness is probably the reason.
It doesn't strike me as an "endearingly odd and brilliant" character story at all. Just an unfortunate tale about a man's fight against his own bad brain chemistry.
Good grief - how did you manage 100 per night? I do maybe 20 on average, and even then with work/kids/other stuff I find it difficult to keep at it regularly. Then again I have a pretty slow scanner...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second that. Saw it not too long ago, and I was relatively blown away. Smart, bizzare, poetic, and funny movie. It is perhaps aimed at more of a children's market, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. My daughter (who is about 6) liked it a lot, although it's a bit scary in places for the littlest ones.
You need live nuclei and live eggs, plus a host mammoth mother to gestate the fetus. Because none of these are available, 'Jurassic Park' to the contrary, it won't succeed
Feh. This is why I don't care much for "medical ethicists". He leaves no room for clever tricks to get around the (large number of) problems inherent in the issue, spitting out a bunch of generalizations and negativity based in his own misconceptions of the process.
As a rule, I find the automatic response of a "medical ethicist" to any potential advance is "No". God only knows how many people their clever little arguments are going to kill over the next few decades. The sad thing is that the process has been institutionalized now, and will continue to act as an impediment to real medical/biotechnological progres for decades to come.
How does this fellow define "live" eggs and/or sperm, anyway? You do need intact chromosomes, but their plan to generate 88% mammoths is perfectly viable provided they can get decent sperm. Since nobody has (to my knowledge) even looked at this issue yet, his statement is meaningless.
I think it reflects badly on the academic art world, not art in general, that this man's work cannot be taken seriously. His work was appreciated by millions and influenced the vision of the universe of entire generations.
Isn't that pretty much the definition of great art?
There's a distinct snobbery at work here, but in the end who really cares - his work did what it set out to do.
I hope the question posed in the topic wasn't really serious. If New York (or anywhere else) were partially destroyed neither you nor I nor anyone you know would have the slightest say in the rebuilding process - land owners would make these decisions on an individual basis. What we would see, I'm quite certain, is a lot of wealthy individuals buying up the land at firesale prices (assuming it was livable).
Oh, I don't think it's impossible at all. I'm just not optimistic in the near term (say, 30-40 years). In the long term (>50 years) I actually think it is almost a certainty.
Maybe it's just a forest-for-the-trees effect, but working in a biochem lab I'm constantly struck by the gigantic complexity we're faced with in the metabolic processes of even the simplest cells, and by the sketchy nature of our understanding of the overall picture right now. This is not to put the field down - we know orders of magnitude more now than we did even a decade ago. The (real) work on the ageing process has only just begun, however.
That being said, there are a couple of hopeful threads. Some real progress is being made on understanding the nature of the caloric restriction effect, and it seems like the idea of a simple pill which mimics the effect isn't completely out of the question.
Personally I'm sure it will come out about five minutes after I die.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans
A fair bit of (theoretical!) work has been done on this topic in the last decade or so. Frankly I'm too tired right now to go look up the references, but I've been to a couple of population genetics seminars by people active in this area. The basic upshot is that the "aging process" (as measured by the inflection point in the curve describing the age-linked decline in metabolic function, repair efficiency, etc) for a given species tends to kick in at about the age of the average lifespan of that organism in the wild.
Humans in the wild presumably lived on average around 30-35 years before being snuffed out by cave bears, infections, or angry neighbours. There's no advantage to being able to live efficiently to 200 years if you're already dead at 35, so natural selection doesn't operate to keep your body in peak form for that extended time. If you suddenly develop a mutation that allows you to live to 200, it doesn't help any of your descendants a bit, since on average they are all dead at 35 as well.
One fellow even worked out a rough calculation for how long it's going to take natural selection to notice that we're living much longer on average, and for our descendants to start living longer on that basis (this was done by extrapolation from (IIRC) fruitfly data). Be of good cheer: 30000 years or so from now, people will be living much longer. :)
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Actually I think this is all a pretty interesting issue. What is it about the influence of American culture that makes it so pervasive and insidious that it pretty much instantly infects and metastasizes inside cultures hundreds or even thousands of years older?
Rationalism? Well, maybe to a degree, but I don't think the WWF, Rosie O'Donnell, and When Aliens Attack IV really represents the height of the Western Rational tradition.
Freedom? Hmmmm... again maybe to a degree but probably not in the way people are thinking about. Consumerism (of which I freely admit to being an addict as much as the next guy) tends to blur over and confuse itself with Freedom, but it isn't freedom in the same sense that the framers of the constitution thought about. What it is about is a much more elementary and slightly infantile wish for instant gratification and godlike immediate access to all objects of desire. This is a human universal, so the appeal there is obvious...
The Big Corporate Conspiracy? It always comes up, but moving past the tinfoil-hat brigade there's an element of truth there all the same. Shows and advertisments are both crafted to go under our rational radar and appeal to the idea of the life we wish we had. We tune in to a show or watch a movie because we are entertained - traditional cultural stuff is often enjoyable in a forced and strained way (kind of like a visit with Grandma) but the latest Arnie movie is a cheap date who wants to go home with you right now. Who doesn't like that? The Corporate Media (hate using that term, but let's not pretend it doesn't exist) craft the American Media Experience to appeal instantly to everyone, and they do it in a darwinian environment that encourages doing it better all the time. Can the ten-thousandth retelling of Fred the Barber and His Magic Scissors compete with Sex In The City?
The real problem with this is that people tend to confuse success with value. I think that's what angers the anti-american-culture reactionaries.
Evolutionary Biology has essentially ignored the possability that there may be interplanetary contributions
Well, speaking as an evolutionary biologist I don't think that's entirely fair.
Lots of people in the evolution community have an interest in astronomy and are no strangers to Hoyle's Panspermia notion, the idea of a primary seeding of Earthly life from Martian life, and associated concepts.
What has been missing, obviously, is any kind of evidence to suggest that there is an interplanetary contribution to Earthly evolution (sans pretty clearly established ones like impact effects). If anyone can provide solid evidence of such a link then evolutionary scientists would be all over it like a dirty shirt, believe you me. :) Any paper solidly demonstrating such a thing would be an instant Nature or Science publication.
I think that's a perfectly fair question - you really didn't need to post it as AC :)
The question (and the possible answer) are fundamental, vis, is life on Earth a great cosmic coincidence, or is it something which can happen anywhere in the universe given the right starting conditions?
Right now we don't know the answer - volumes of speculation exist to say both "yes" and "no", but in the end we do not know the answer. If we find indisputable evidence that life has evolved elsewhere, this is a big answer - the know that the universe may actually be bursting with life-filled planets (esp. since we'd have two such planets in one solar system, barring the primary transfer hypothesis of course). This isn't somebody's obscure interest in the origins of some spectral line in the atmosphere of a single star somewhere, this is a deeply fundamental question about the universe.
we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc
Do you have a reference for this? I don't mean that in a challenging way - I'm honestly curious. Having read lots of astronomical literature (as an interested party in another discipline), pretty much all I've ever heard is the typical lines about being "on the edge of an arm" or "between two arms", but I have yet to see a primary reference on this topic.
According to Burnham, I believe, the bright star cloud in Cygnus represents looking along the axis of one of the nearby arms (or along the interior of an arm, possibly), as does the star cloud 180 degrees opposite, which I cannot at the moment recall.
I'd be very interested in references to any actual literature in which this is examined.
Not hardly, man. I recall watching the "handshake" live - I guess I was in grade 3, and had limited interest in space at the time, but that was the first time I clearly recall seeing a big event (even if it was only a stage-managed PR stunt) happening realtime on TV.
Organized fraud leading directly to the impoverishment of tens of thousands and loss of thousands of jobs? Knowing and conspiratorial breach of trust at a public company reaping tens or hundreds or even billions of dollars in illicit profits? These are not serious crimes? Apparently some sadsack loser trying to sell an ounce of dope to some other pathetic nitwit is committing a bigger crime. Sheesh.
Indeed. This is a line you see a lot these days (from Republican attack robots like Anne Coulter). The FACT is that it is a consequence of Gingrich-led Republican-initiated deregulation. The government "got off the back" of big business.
Indeed. That's what I personally find so scary about all of this. Of course we have to be more vigilant right now - anyone who doesn't think there's a truly serious threat is deluding themselves, and it is pretty hard to come down against the government for making changes that allow them to more easily track down the bad guys.
That being said, where is the out? The War Against Terror will never be over, because terror (read: asymmetrical warfare) is the weapon of the disempowered against the powerful. As long as literally billions of people on the planet don't have clean drinking water, let alone access to education and so on, then there will be an endless supply of rage to feed the other end of the process.
They have us between a rock and a hard place - it is very hard to argue against harsh measures to weed out the terrorists ("but why do you want to make things easy for them?") but on the other hand that means we're supporting the creation of a de facto police state (and I don't think that's entirely hyperbole) with no discernable way of ever getting things back to normal again.
After all, politicians just love to give up power once they have it.
Totally agreed. This will eliminate what little "suspension of disbelief" is required to watch, for instance, "Scrubs". The popups are bad enough in the credits, but once it comes in the middle of the show, the show itself will begin to feel like nothing more than a commerical.
Nobody respects or values a commercial.
This will certainly do it for me. Any show, no matter how alluringly brain-melting, will be off my list instantly if this kind of crap starts up.
There are pretty active campaigns in the USA to shut down MP3 trading, "warez", movie trading, etc etc. We all know how well that has worked. You can't get any of that stuff on the net anymore. :)
Same deal here - as long as the net gets in to China, things that the government doesn't want the people to see will get in there too. Its the nature of the net, and the Chinese people are not stupid. If they want to see it, they'll find a way.
Of course the government was going to try to throttle the information flow - that's what they do. This is one dike that is waaay to big for even their fingers, I think.
Hey, don't count out the oldsters completely. My mom just hit 80, and she's the local guru in her retirement home. She installed her own webcam recently, regularly does her own tape backups, still does semi-pro desktop publishing work for the local orchestra, and so on. Of course I do a fair bit of support work (tho I got her set up with VNC lately and that reduces the aggravation of telephone support).
That being said I'm not gonna encourage her to move to linux - she's 80 after all, and the learning curve undeniably gets steeper at that age. Win98 does everything she's going to actually need.
Personally (not that anyone will care, but just add to the thread):
- History: currently reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower - A Portrait of The World Before the War, a somewhat episodic but interesting review of the late 19th century. There are some fascinating correspondances with the current climate (the chapter on the anarchists is particularly interesting - I was a bit vague on them before, but there is a real resonance with the current terrorist threat).
Another big favourite recently was A World Lit Only By Fire - The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. Many medieval history books can be pretty dry, but this one is a cracking good read.
For fiction I used to be a big fan of John Irving - I think The Hotel New Hampshire remains my favourite book of his, though I'm less enchanted with his recent stuff.
LOL. Thanks for the flashback. I still remember lining my quarters up for a turn to play that game. Usually ended too quickly (as I sucked), but it was always a favourite...
There's a great deal of information on the Good Omens movie at a Terry Gilliam fansite called Dreams. Apparently they're actually playing down the comedic aspects of the book. This seems like kind of a smart idea to me - the book done as a faux-serious metaphysical drama, combined with Gilliam's warped worldmaking talents, could really work. A straight-up adaption of the book's (mostly conceptual, descriptive) jokes might fall flat...
Excuse me? Terry is primarily a director, responsible for cinematic masterpieces like Brazil, Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, and the (underrated, IMHO) Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Perhaps you're thinking of Terry Pratchett, who co-wrote the book with Gaiman?
1.5 million keeps the full science team on salary for a year, plus buys all of the associated frills. Seems pretty sad to me - they could get decent shots of Amalthea with a few hours of work by the techs who actually do the trajectory and camera pointing work, but that doesn't fall within established protocols.
Feh. If NASA falls prey to that kind of pointy-headed desk-jockey thinking, then I suspect the glory days may really be behind them.
Actually the whole thing seems like a pretty sad story to me - he's clearly a clever guy battling against a debilitating mental illness. In the end the "Alice" concept was interesting and original, but its a one-note song. He doesn't seem to have moved beyond it in any significant research-linked sense, and it seems like his illness is probably the reason.
It doesn't strike me as an "endearingly odd and brilliant" character story at all. Just an unfortunate tale about a man's fight against his own bad brain chemistry.
I wish you hadn't posted as AC - if you get the software up and running I would _love_ to get a copy. Unless you're planning to go commercial with it?
Good grief - how did you manage 100 per night? I do maybe 20 on average, and even then with work/kids/other stuff I find it difficult to keep at it regularly. Then again I have a pretty slow scanner...