This is directly related to my thesis work, so I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about.
The main significance is that they're stunningly well-preserved examples of a fauna which predates the Cambrian Explosion - this might increase the chances that sensible attributions to extant animal phyla can ultimately be made.
One hears a lot of nonsense about the Ediacarans, but there's a substantial body of opinion that they're nothing more than Cnidarians - and possibly Cnidarian-like Ctenophore ancestors (ie, Jellyfish and Anemones). An explosion of these creatures probably predated the explosion of biomineralization which marked the Cambrian Boundary.
Of course you'll find people who argue for all sorts of bizzare interpretations of these thingies, but Simon Conway Morris has produced a really nice series of fossil Cnidarians (Cloudina, IIRC) which start in the Ediacaran and cross over the Cambrian boundary.
They're probably just Cnidarians, with a few Ctenophore-like things and sponges thrown in. Maybe if we're lucky they'll even find a worm-like bilateral ancestor.
I started it up again last week just for fun. The whole "sneaking around in a dungeon full of zombies" thing was really well done. I seriously jumped a few time, like when turning around to discover two of those "crouching skeleton viking" guys sneaking up on me. Or when running away for dear life with a fire elemental hot on my tail.
Spending money like an idiot, drinking to an excess, being only turned on by bimbos with no brains, beating eachother senseless with tire irons or whatever, shooting people you hate, getting shot at by people who hate you, eating only at drive thru, drinking alize and crystal, attending strip clubs like they were the new church, membership at the The Player'S Club, Gucci, bling-bling, bust
Riiiiiight.... with Daddy and Mommy's money. I think this kind of thing is just another outlet of "validated" rebellion the way Rock music was in the 70's - an ultimately safe way for middle-class kids to pretend they're pushing the boundaries.
The real people who actually live that lifestyle are revolting thugs.
There is a use for Sun Workstations apart from being a server?
I'm only partially trolling with that - I'm no IT person, but I've been in a great many places with a great many Sun Workstations, and can count the number of times I've seen someone sitting at one of them actually working on one or two hands.
Nicely put - but you probably won't get modded up because not enough mods have the experience to detect hard-core truth when they see it.
I find that science has one factor in common with most other businesses - contacts are just about everything. Obviously you have to be able to put out or you won't get a seat at the table, but all the same I've seen plenty of very talented people go nowhere because they don't play the politics very well or at all.
I agree completely with your numbers - I've seen one or two 2-year postdocs (and those had some very special circumstances which were *all about* politics), but just about everyone else is in it for at least a solid 5-6 years, as you say.
I'm pretty sure he hits the button without even considering whether he knows the answer - he's been caught out like that a couple of times, having pushed the button but with no idea what the answer is. I suspect he just trusts to his vast knowledge of trivia.
My daughter has started rooting against him - "Enough!", she yells, "Ken is getting boring! Somebody make him lose!"
Personally I think he will just decide to walk once he hits $1000000.
I bought myself a nice new 486 DX4/100 chip and went to insert it in the motherboard. Annoyingly, upon insertion I bent one of the pins and it wouldn't work.
I reached out for the nearest pointy thing with which to ever-so-carefully bend the prong back into shape.
It turns out a pencil was not the best thing to use - I rendered to entire motherboard useless via graphite shavings.
All the same, with a new motherboard the chip itself worked fine...
This is the closest the spacecraft is going to get to the rings, yet I really was hoping to see the individual components of the rings themselves. I've seen the intro to Voyager, and I wanted to see tumbling boulders...
Me too - all the same you can make out some structural detail in these pictures if you download the big 1024x1024-ish versions (ie, clumpiness and brightness variation). Since the pixel size is still on the order of hundreds of meters (IIRC) that's the best we'll probably get...
All the same if they decide to do a close run by the rings four or five years from now when the mission is winding down, it would be very cool indeed to see some real detail. Here's hoping.
The Soviet Union collapsed in no small part under the weight of its own failed and stupid economic system.
Reagan of course inherits quite a bit of undeserved congratulations as a result. If the collapse had come in 1980 the pudits would have said Regan's mere election had caused the collapse.
Correlation, not causation. The people who stood their own frail bodies in front of the tanks deserve a hell of a lot more praise than Reagan.
Ellison said: "Through this litigation, I have come to realize that AOL respects the rights of authors and artists, and has a comprehensive system for addressing the complaints of copyright holders.
Wow - I'm genuinely impressed that they managed to get that much out of him. I'd at least expect that he would have gotten pissed off, thrown a tantrum, and then insist that they refer to him by a silly name in the press release.
That really is one of my favourite episodes as well - Fry blithely annoucing "Well, I killed my grandfather", Zoidbergs's "Are you coming on to me?", plus the many subtle and not-so-subtle UFO mythology gags (ie, Harry Truman sneaking into the Roswell base in a crate). I'm sure it has to be one of the top five episodes.
These are some really nasty slides for a talk - basic presentation design says you shouldn't blast your audience with endless text in little fonts. The slide design leaves a lot to be desired - by the time they're done reading the slide they will have missed what the presenter is saying.
We have exactly one example of an earthlike planet. That's not much in the way of data, true. On the other hand it is an indisputable, actual, real example of life evolving on a planet.
Parsimony pretty much dictates that before we can consider as realistic other, purely hypothetical modes of life we need to understand the apparent distribution (or lack thereof) of planets with earthlike biomarkers.
I can come up with all sorts of extraordinary ideas about how life might work on other worlds. So can you. All the same I'd argue that making a survey that specifically looks for conditions which we know for certain can be associated with life is the first and logical scientific step which can should taken on this subject.
I actually don't understand people having objections to such a survey - imagine finding two or three strongly supported oxygen/CO2/water worlds within a few hundred light years!
I'd put a lot of it down to the post-9/11 environment. They would have to dump a truckload of money on me before I'd even think about moving to the US anymore. This isn't antiamericanism - I'd honestly just be scared witless to live there as a foreign national - one no longer has any obvious legal rights. From what I've seen it is apparently quite possible to be thrown in jail for years at a time with no representation, no rights, no due process, etc.
I think the sins of the news media today are mostly ones of omission, rather than active misinformation.
Most news reporters still like to think of themselves as objective seekers of the truth - but they also know what is "appropriate" or "practical" to talk about and what "crosses the line". This is the real ghost in the machine - the unspoken areas of omission. They're often pretty critical to understanding context.
Problem is that I no longer trust the "trustworthy" news sources. CNN tries to sound balanced but just ends up repeating whatever the US administration said today. FOX is so absorbed in jingoist dogma that they repeat whatever the administration said today and then gush about how wonderful it is. ABC/CBS/NBC/whatever don't cover enough actual news to be worth noticing.
Honestly, for all their faults I'm finding weblogs of various sorts more directly valuable than TV news (too politically charged and beholden to advertisters to be truly objective) AND print news (too late, and too beholden to advertisers to rock the boat).
Re:Can somebody explain something?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Point taken, but I was thinking more along the lines of fumaroles/hot vents/whatever they are called. Of course I'm hobbled here by my utter uselessness in geology/geochemistry, so I should probably just shut up.:)
Re:Can somebody explain something?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm no geochemist, but it really seems to me like they're jumping the gun on this one. We *know* Mars had volcanic activity which can produce methane, and we don't know that there isn't any currently. We know **nothing** about life on Mars. Parsimony dictates that we presume geo(areo?)chemistry or volcanism until it can be clearly shown to be of another origin.
Cost of Lifting Things
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm starting to think we'll never see any real space development until a new, radical propulsion technology comes along. Until then, it just costs too much to heave things out of the gravity well. Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.
Once we have the new technology, space will be roughly on par with ocean exploration for cost.
Slashdot Mirror
This is directly related to my thesis work, so I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about.
The main significance is that they're stunningly well-preserved examples of a fauna which predates the Cambrian Explosion - this might increase the chances that sensible attributions to extant animal phyla can ultimately be made.
One hears a lot of nonsense about the Ediacarans, but there's a substantial body of opinion that they're nothing more than Cnidarians - and possibly Cnidarian-like Ctenophore ancestors (ie, Jellyfish and Anemones). An explosion of these creatures probably predated the explosion of biomineralization which marked the Cambrian Boundary.
Of course you'll find people who argue for all sorts of bizzare interpretations of these thingies, but Simon Conway Morris has produced a really nice series of fossil Cnidarians (Cloudina, IIRC) which start in the Ediacaran and cross over the Cambrian boundary.
They're probably just Cnidarians, with a few Ctenophore-like things and sponges thrown in. Maybe if we're lucky they'll even find a worm-like bilateral ancestor.
I started it up again last week just for fun. The whole "sneaking around in a dungeon full of zombies" thing was really well done. I seriously jumped a few time, like when turning around to discover two of those "crouching skeleton viking" guys sneaking up on me. Or when running away for dear life with a fire elemental hot on my tail.
Good fun, that game.
Spending money like an idiot, drinking to an excess, being only turned on by bimbos with no brains, beating eachother senseless with tire irons or whatever, shooting people you hate, getting shot at by people who hate you, eating only at drive thru, drinking alize and crystal, attending strip clubs like they were the new church, membership at the The Player'S Club, Gucci, bling-bling, bust
Riiiiiight.... with Daddy and Mommy's money. I think this kind of thing is just another outlet of "validated" rebellion the way Rock music was in the 70's - an ultimately safe way for middle-class kids to pretend they're pushing the boundaries.
The real people who actually live that lifestyle are revolting thugs.
There is a use for Sun Workstations apart from being a server?
I'm only partially trolling with that - I'm no IT person, but I've been in a great many places with a great many Sun Workstations, and can count the number of times I've seen someone sitting at one of them actually working on one or two hands.
I'm very curious but really can't be bothered to search down the information: what are the final minimum and recommended system specs?
It was a running joke from a (very long running) British sitcom called Are You Being Served?
Mrs. Slocombe was always worried about her pussy - the poor thing didn't like being left alone, she'd be up stroking the little dear all night...
It is important to realize that she was talking about her cat.
Nicely put - but you probably won't get modded up because not enough mods have the experience to detect hard-core truth when they see it.
I find that science has one factor in common with most other businesses - contacts are just about everything. Obviously you have to be able to put out or you won't get a seat at the table, but all the same I've seen plenty of very talented people go nowhere because they don't play the politics very well or at all.
I agree completely with your numbers - I've seen one or two 2-year postdocs (and those had some very special circumstances which were *all about* politics), but just about everyone else is in it for at least a solid 5-6 years, as you say.
I'm pretty sure he hits the button without even considering whether he knows the answer - he's been caught out like that a couple of times, having pushed the button but with no idea what the answer is. I suspect he just trusts to his vast knowledge of trivia.
My daughter has started rooting against him - "Enough!", she yells, "Ken is getting boring! Somebody make him lose!"
Personally I think he will just decide to walk once he hits $1000000.
I bought myself a nice new 486 DX4/100 chip and went to insert it in the motherboard. Annoyingly, upon insertion I bent one of the pins and it wouldn't work.
I reached out for the nearest pointy thing with which to ever-so-carefully bend the prong back into shape.
It turns out a pencil was not the best thing to use - I rendered to entire motherboard useless via graphite shavings.
All the same, with a new motherboard the chip itself worked fine...
This is the closest the spacecraft is going to get to the rings, yet I really was hoping to see the individual components of the rings themselves. I've seen the intro to Voyager, and I wanted to see tumbling boulders...
Me too - all the same you can make out some structural detail in these pictures if you download the big 1024x1024-ish versions (ie, clumpiness and brightness variation). Since the pixel size is still on the order of hundreds of meters (IIRC) that's the best we'll probably get...
All the same if they decide to do a close run by the rings four or five years from now when the mission is winding down, it would be very cool indeed to see some real detail. Here's hoping.
Actually I was thinking of this, specifically. Yeltsin's finest hour, to be followed by a great many less fine ones.
The Soviet Union collapsed in no small part under the weight of its own failed and stupid economic system.
Reagan of course inherits quite a bit of undeserved congratulations as a result. If the collapse had come in 1980 the pudits would have said Regan's mere election had caused the collapse.
Correlation, not causation. The people who stood their own frail bodies in front of the tanks deserve a hell of a lot more praise than Reagan.
Wow - I'm genuinely impressed that they managed to get that much out of him. I'd at least expect that he would have gotten pissed off, thrown a tantrum, and then insist that they refer to him by a silly name in the press release.
I thought the whole deal with real estate was that "they stopped making it". Here they can make more ad infinitum. Perpendicularly if necessary.
That really is one of my favourite episodes as well - Fry blithely annoucing "Well, I killed my grandfather", Zoidbergs's "Are you coming on to me?", plus the many subtle and not-so-subtle UFO mythology gags (ie, Harry Truman sneaking into the Roswell base in a crate). I'm sure it has to be one of the top five episodes.
These are some really nasty slides for a talk - basic presentation design says you shouldn't blast your audience with endless text in little fonts. The slide design leaves a lot to be desired - by the time they're done reading the slide they will have missed what the presenter is saying.
Wish I had mod points to hand out. Too right.
We have exactly one example of an earthlike planet. That's not much in the way of data, true. On the other hand it is an indisputable, actual, real example of life evolving on a planet.
Parsimony pretty much dictates that before we can consider as realistic other, purely hypothetical modes of life we need to understand the apparent distribution (or lack thereof) of planets with earthlike biomarkers.
I can come up with all sorts of extraordinary ideas about how life might work on other worlds. So can you. All the same I'd argue that making a survey that specifically looks for conditions which we know for certain can be associated with life is the first and logical scientific step which can should taken on this subject.
I actually don't understand people having objections to such a survey - imagine finding two or three strongly supported oxygen/CO2/water worlds within a few hundred light years!
I'd put a lot of it down to the post-9/11 environment. They would have to dump a truckload of money on me before I'd even think about moving to the US anymore. This isn't antiamericanism - I'd honestly just be scared witless to live there as a foreign national - one no longer has any obvious legal rights. From what I've seen it is apparently quite possible to be thrown in jail for years at a time with no representation, no rights, no due process, etc.
Gah - thanks but no thanks.
I think the sins of the news media today are mostly ones of omission, rather than active misinformation.
Most news reporters still like to think of themselves as objective seekers of the truth - but they also know what is "appropriate" or "practical" to talk about and what "crosses the line". This is the real ghost in the machine - the unspoken areas of omission. They're often pretty critical to understanding context.
Problem is that I no longer trust the "trustworthy" news sources. CNN tries to sound balanced but just ends up repeating whatever the US administration said today. FOX is so absorbed in jingoist dogma that they repeat whatever the administration said today and then gush about how wonderful it is. ABC/CBS/NBC/whatever don't cover enough actual news to be worth noticing.
Honestly, for all their faults I'm finding weblogs of various sorts more directly valuable than TV news (too politically charged and beholden to advertisters to be truly objective) AND print news (too late, and too beholden to advertisers to rock the boat).
Point taken, but I was thinking more along the lines of fumaroles/hot vents/whatever they are called. Of course I'm hobbled here by my utter uselessness in geology/geochemistry, so I should probably just shut up. :)
I'm no geochemist, but it really seems to me like they're jumping the gun on this one. We *know* Mars had volcanic activity which can produce methane, and we don't know that there isn't any currently. We know **nothing** about life on Mars. Parsimony dictates that we presume geo(areo?)chemistry or volcanism until it can be clearly shown to be of another origin.
I'm starting to think we'll never see any real space development until a new, radical propulsion technology comes along. Until then, it just costs too much to heave things out of the gravity well. Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.
Once we have the new technology, space will be roughly on par with ocean exploration for cost.
I recall seeing an ad for something like this in Byte magazine circa 1979.