Just sticking within open source Web based applications, especially with the XML generation starting to matter, the vacuum of informed guidance on technology combination and choice slows us down more than anything else... especially seeing our tiny team is never going to have equal access to all possible skills.
This starts out with such perennial issues as what to put in a database and what to put in the file system? What to implement at the server, in the client's browser script, or in applets? What kinds of support tasks are best left in shell scripts and at what point might it be better to commit them to Perl. Or what to consign to ModPerl rather than normal Perl modules. And double many of these questions for when we really can combine SVG with XHTML in widely usable Web pages/applications.
While these kind of choices need to be made at the design stage, they might best work when coupled with enough basic how to information to encourage confidence in a team's ability to see them through to end game, with particular emphasis on how to find and integrate available resources.
There are so many combinations, particularly if we extend consideration to the big end of application development or to widely used proprietary technologies, than there should be potential for a whole series of books on subsets selected with an eye to what combinations actually get used in the real world. My guess is that they might be best presented in the slightly shorter, more readable, sans CD format that Damien Conway aspired to in Object Oriented Perl.
Personally, I'm as happy to have stuff I read once on screen as on dead trees, unless it's the kind of stuff I want to read on trains or on holidays, but stuff I need to keep returning to usually works best in books.
I can't imagine why this and the post immediately below didn't score some "insightful" mods while I've been off acquainting myself with their relevant and useful links.
Beyond the importance and improbability of our moon, I see the Drake equation putting a bit too much reliance on a single estimate of getting from life to intelligent life.
The fossil record makes it plain that bacterial life is relatively easy (or the product of spanspermia, which doesn't change the implications) but that metazoa is hard, one might suspect because the bacteria don't give up easily, being blind to the potential of flourishing as intestinal symbiots.
Even metazoa to intelligence took well over half a billion years, if we equate intelligence for this purpose to the posession of recursive language, whereas we breezed through intelligence to technological in under 100K years, if not without some flirting with self destruction.
The Fermi alternative that we are indeed first still needs to be considered against the possibility that the first may have been less influenced by a cultural duty to subdue the world and instead, when they realised they were unlikely to meet anybody else for a hundred million years (the tail on the probability distribution) have settled for something less than galactic domination.
I just don't believe that every "big question" is at the extreme ends of the scale where cosmologists and particle accelerators seek their answers to the big "Why?"
Newton, Darwin and the others developed their great theories for things a lot closer to human scale and, while some may have felt they were reading the mind of God, they were also clearly focused on the problem at hand. (I say this as an admirer of the interdisciplinary efforts at the likes of Santa Fe Institute, as much more a generalist than a specialist.)
All I ask is a bit of balance so that enough weight is given to research at interplanetary and interstellar scales that we might give ourselves a chance to find their equivalents of plate tectonics, to my mind the most elegant piece of science since Darwin.
My guess is that the government is too embarrassed to show how pitifully few sites have been taken down for the money expended
Yeah, I don't think there is much doubt the whole exercise would not get past the scrutiny of the bean counters if it was all out in the open. At least with films, you have an identifiable product, but you have to wonder whether the vast majority of the relatively few sites they have managed to blacklist might upon scrutiny be shown to have neither aspirations nor likelihood of attracting significant traffic.
However our government's modus operandi seems to have become to use a bottomless slush fund for anything that might scare a few electors into voting for them next time around. And in this the legislature is in league with other arms of law enforcement predicated on growth/empire building which want to make sure that everybody has broken a few laws so they can be incarcerated at their convenience.
Mind you the chilling effect of that legislation coupled with the equally illogical ban on hosting Internet gambling sites in Australia certainly adds to the traffic cartel's disincentive to Australia developing a viable hosting industry/lobby.
When are all the apologists going to recognise that curious (and most likely bored) teens are the main users of porn that features other teens?
I won't clutter this with too many "I was there" stories nor add my view of the value of PDF to prepress operations. But ever since Sun rolled over on its support from its own Display PostScript-based Network extensible Window System (NeWS) in the face of the tide of X, I have been intrigued by how Adobe has managed to become so important to the Web without ever really getting it.
At its heart, Adobe never quite manages to shake its cultural foundation in the (permanent) placement of dots on paper and take on the very different challenge of realising the potential of interactive displays and ever "under construction" documents. (Nor does much of the printing industry but that is another story.)
Having been seduced by PostScript from the start, how do we now deal with the enigmatic prospect that Adobe also appears to be the driving force behind the great white hope of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)?
If I was a politician with half a clue (yeah I know that's oxymoronic) and was presented that list as a guide to what the astronomy and physics (read space science) communities want to invest many billions on in the coming decade(s) they would be sent packing.
During the past decade there has been enormous progress on a much wider range of problems than just the far ends of cosmology and particle physics that are the focus of those eleven questions... much in areas that are a lot closer to home and in those areas progress has been much more rapid and, IMHO, much more interesting.
As planetary creatures, the progress in our knowledge of planetary bodies both in our solar system and beyond has undergone more fundamental revision than either quantum mechanics or relativity has in several decades.
What we really need is research that focuses on how quickly we might grow our endeavours in the planetary arena... issues from orbital mechanics to mineralisation in non-terretrial environments which are going to constrain our abilities to further explore (often robotically) and eventually exploit other parts of the solar system.
If we really want to blue sky, we need look no further than starting serious research into how we might eventually be able to send probes towards nearby stars in the kind of practical timeframes that will require acceleration to a useful fraction of the speed of light... but even that is sure to need serious industrialisation outside earth's gravity well.
Meanwhile we will at least be able to get a much better picture of other solar systems through new generations of instruments... especially space-based instruments.
Yeah I know most of these big picture types are caught up in the dream of finally answering the big "Why?" but the history of science suggests to me that there is no likelihood such an answer will be found any time soon, so it is better to focus on learning what we can about the details so we may better answer "What should I do?"
Not all infinities are created equal
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 1
if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, at least one of those monkeys is going to type the complete works of Shakespeare
Despite the popularity of this myth it has a substantial problem in that the number of possible keystroke sequences grows incomparably faster than the number of monkeys, wordprocessors (surely we wouldn't rely on typewriters in this day and age) and keystrokes. So no matter how many monkeys and typewriters you have, don't expect to produce more than the odd short string which matches exactly the words of the Bard.
if you look at ANYTHING on a large enough scale, you'll begin to see some order
Whatever order you see appears for other reasons. Ignoring the ability of our perception processes to provide an illusion of order in response to initially random stimuli, as in dreams, it is population-wide phenomena like emergence and evolution which produce large scale organisation. These phenomena are actually much more universal than the laws of physics, applying analogously in physical, biological and social worlds... even in computer simulations.
For those who understand how right Linus is
on
The Evolution of Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The challenge is to come to terms with the fact that the bulk of humanity will never see the deep truth in what he is saying.
The mythology of design is pervasive but just plain wrong. Design only ever happens in marginal increments. Quotes about standing on the shoulders of giants come to mind.
A deeper challenge is that most people are incapable of understanding evolution, not because of any lack of inherent intelligence but because they haven't ever gotten out of the comfort zone.
An interesting but neglected mid-80s paper by Marcia Salner, then at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, but now at the University of Illinois at Springfield, as I see following a Google search I now need to spend some time following up on, pointed out that it helps greatly to have got through some genuine crises, firstly to break our naive and seductive faith in the universality of right and wrong answers and secondly to force us to look beyond the naive relativism which first replaces the right-wrong dichotomy.
Evolution, be it biological, social, technical or whatever, is about what works in practice, and even more so about the uses made of its products, because evolution does not happen in a vacuum. (Yes I am using "vacuum" metaphorically. The real vacuum of 3D space is also highly evolved.)
Now I find myself caught up with the even deeper challenge that if too many people actually believed what Linus is saying that the whole system would collapse. It seems only possible to build viable social institutions on rhetoric that does not stand scrutiny.
This is really testing my memory, but I think it was after we upgraded from our IBM 1440 to an early System/360 that our operators discovered they could tune an AM radio to a certain frequency and thereby listen to the puter.
Maybe somebody with a better memory might know a few more details.
I'd prefer to assume that all are acting in good faith, but it gets all too easy to suggest that reports/success of the reestablishment of the thylacine could help get the authorities off the hook on Tasmanian environmental issues.
More than fifty years before the last thylacine died in captivity, the last full blood Tasmanian aborigine died, a race that had been isolated from the rest of humanity for more than ten thousand years.
Thirty years ago, the Tasmanian environmental movement was galvanised by the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the then all-powerful Hydro Electic Commission from building a dam which would drown the remote and ultimately iconic original Lake Pedder. Proposals to drain the dam and restore the original lake persist.
A decade later, a similar campaign against the proposed Gordon below Franklin dam was successful and South West Tasmania gained World Heritage recognition, including the aboriginal art in Fraser Cave named for our then Prime Minister in an attempt to enhance his environmental awareness.
In the last few months it looks as though another predator, the fox, might be trying to get established in Tasmania. I'm sure I heard a report of some more recent evidence that they may indeed have a breeding population which defies thinking about given today's level of environmental awareness.
The Tasmanian government recently retreated from its undertaking to support the outcome of the Tasmania Together process with respect to the unpopular logging of old growth forests to support huge (by Tasmanian standards earnings from wood chip export.
Now I just have to wonder whether the foxes or the politicians will utilise cloning first? My own fondest memory of Tassie was diving with dolphins at Flinders Island, a day I would like to clone.
Just found an interesting recent paper from my armchair via Google, the paper saying with respect to a mtDNA divergence tree:
Whilst diverse, deep-rooting clusters remain in Africa, with different clusters in different parts of the continent, the tree suggests that a single sequence type expanded both through eastern and western Africa and out into Eurasia.
I guess my view may have been originally coloured by the probably naive expectation that the Afro-Americans who provided their mtDNA for the original sample were more likely to be from West Africa, but there is lots of other evidence that places the likely site a long way from the well known pre-erectus sites in East Africa.
In particular, more modern sites tend to be in South Africa, althoug this may in part be because it has been better surveyed than much of the continent. I also see a likelihood of the Kalahari serving to isolate sub-poulations, as evidenced by it being the last refuge for some relatively divergent African peoples following the Bantu expansion.
None of this is any more than suggestive. What I really want is a site where the sea level changes of the last interglacial could have been catalytic.
The collection of 28 bone tools and related artefacts were found in Blombos cave, located on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean at the extreme tip of South Africa.
As an "armchair anthropologist" my working hypothesis is that homo sapiens sapiens differentiated on the west coast of Africa (yeah I know that needs narrowing down) during the previous interglacial and developed a coast hugging culture which enabled them to expand along the mostly narrow and now submerged continental shelf to reach eastern Indonesia by 60K BP.
From there the story is pretty well convered in Tim Flannery's Future Eaters with clearly modern humans island hopping to an Australian continent where erectus had never ventured, and where they found themselves "masters" of the earth, establishing the cultual foundations to underpin 60,000 years of environmental mayhem.
It's my best guess that h.s.s. making the step from being a sexually selected "singing ape" to instinctive users of recursive language provided the reproductive isolation needed for speciation, for bone tools, and for pretty much else we nowadays take for granted.
I felt encouraged by its optimism when I first read Engines of Creation during a stopover at Rangiroa Atoll and saw Drexler at a conference not long after, but his Foresight Institute quickly developed into a vehicle for self promotion with no interest in anything that might bring the original claims into question. And the "gray goo" scare is a key part of their story.
One key question they don't want to even think about is that the whole idea of reproduction makes very little sense. It happened in living cells because there was no other way forward, but given an engineering capability nobody in their right mind would bother trying for reproduction when it is far easier to build a machine which builds other different machines to a few levels of recursion, with production at each level readily constrained by inputs. To achieve the really high levels of production that nanotech will no doubt need for some of its envisaged applications, you might even want to go beyond n**3 processes, but there is no way it will ever go to reproduction and thus turn exponential.
That doesn't mean that there won't be some evil little nanomachines. Just that they are going to be a lot harder to deploy than Drexler and co. want us to believe. If they haven't got some fear to motivate people, who is gonna pay for Foresight's future?
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
While it hasn't quite graduated to being "accepted wisdom" yet, an increasing number of those who look at such questions are persuaded by the idea that a big bang can occur when a black hole collapses, with the rebound from the (almost) singularity creating a new space-time manifold shifted slightly away from the space-time manifold which produced that black hole.
One site I found has more extensive discussion of this scenario.
how on earth (pun intended) did we get here from all of that?
It seems like you might actually need the physice of our cosmos to be tuned to the production of carbon, oxygen, etc. by nucleosythesis of the original hydrogen and helium for the black hole-big bang production cycle to work, so the earth and indeed us are just incidental byproducts of these cosmic requirements.
"Why?" doesn't always have an answer.
A good index is worth more than its content
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
The vast majority of content, even that which finds its way through Slashdot's submission filter and moderation, is best thought of as grey space from both a design and an information perspective.
The information you can gain by just perusing a well presented threaded index, especially one where the overwhelming majority of items are posted with "known" nicks, greatly exceeds what you usually gain from reading rants like this one.
While I find/. a sufficiently interesting approach to keep coming back, there is also something unsatisfying about the feature creep in the main index which obscures the cut and thrust of the generally hurried "discussion" of each topic.
Katz aside, who has long been clearly the best writer on the Net, I would much rather pay for a good index than for any amount of content.
I just don't know whether I've reached the point of needing to pay to hide from advertising.
But I got more interested in its programmability than simply playing it, and that was a vital part of the way forward for more than just games.
And even earlier Apple Panic which I even became pretty good at, at least relative to the younger gamers who hang out at our place.
Guess this is as good a place as any to hide my top five (which is as far as I can seriously get):
Adventure (Colossal Cave)
Tetris (the only one that made their list)
FreeCell (the Linux version)
Apple Panic
Lode Runner
But I do recognise that some others were in that "significant" catgeory that appeals to us oldtimers, some of which I used to enjoy watching over shoulders, but this shouldn't be in any order:
Space Invaders/Asteroids
PacMan
Myst
Pong
The Sims
I have also enjoyed Chess, Scrabble and even Monoply which are amongst the many traditional games that survive the transition rather well.
I don't live there but I visit often, as often as the weekend before last and your post almost reads like you were following me around.
I was silly enough to expect to be able to puchase supermarket food and drink after the rest of the mall had shut on a Thursday evening, and the next night on my way back up Main North Road to my motel I went into a shopping complex which seemed to have lost half its other shops in the shadow of its Coles.
Even though I had earlier driven past hoardes of departing Adelaide High School students, I still cannot discern any meningful difference in strength and distortion between those two "Onkaparinga Bridge" sentences.
One of my reasons for coming over was to visit a great aunt in a generously appointed hospital. Although reasonably bright, she was one of those on the right who the pollies of our now lame duck Liberal governments seek to appeal to, but she won't be voting again.
But I still get frustrated with how Adelaide is so down on itself, when it is far and away the most livable of Australia's five major cities, especially if you overlook the water supply. Sure what had been intended to be factory worker housing has been given over to welfare-dependent single mothers who are manufacturing candidates for youth suicide, and the saga of the Multi Function Polis is fodder for comedians, but these are minor distractions on the lovely setting and extensive tracts of elegant affordable accomodations.
Hey, Port even thrashed the erstwhile invincible Bombers on Saturday night, so never count on a miserable future.
On the original topic of the censorship regime, I don't really expect the Blair clones who are taking over the reigns here will give any priority to bringing The Law into closer correspondence with reality, so whatever chilling effect these laws might have will probably persist.
Slashdot Mirror
Just sticking within open source Web based applications, especially with the XML generation starting to matter, the vacuum of informed guidance on technology combination and choice slows us down more than anything else ... especially seeing our tiny team is never going to have equal access to all possible skills.
This starts out with such perennial issues as what to put in a database and what to put in the file system? What to implement at the server, in the client's browser script, or in applets? What kinds of support tasks are best left in shell scripts and at what point might it be better to commit them to Perl. Or what to consign to ModPerl rather than normal Perl modules. And double many of these questions for when we really can combine SVG with XHTML in widely usable Web pages/applications.
While these kind of choices need to be made at the design stage, they might best work when coupled with enough basic how to information to encourage confidence in a team's ability to see them through to end game, with particular emphasis on how to find and integrate available resources.
There are so many combinations, particularly if we extend consideration to the big end of application development or to widely used proprietary technologies, than there should be potential for a whole series of books on subsets selected with an eye to what combinations actually get used in the real world. My guess is that they might be best presented in the slightly shorter, more readable, sans CD format that Damien Conway aspired to in Object Oriented Perl.
Personally, I'm as happy to have stuff I read once on screen as on dead trees, unless it's the kind of stuff I want to read on trains or on holidays, but stuff I need to keep returning to usually works best in books.
I can't imagine why this and the post immediately below didn't score some "insightful" mods while I've been off acquainting myself with their relevant and useful links.
Beyond the importance and improbability of our moon, I see the Drake equation putting a bit too much reliance on a single estimate of getting from life to intelligent life.
The fossil record makes it plain that bacterial life is relatively easy (or the product of spanspermia, which doesn't change the implications) but that metazoa is hard, one might suspect because the bacteria don't give up easily, being blind to the potential of flourishing as intestinal symbiots.
Even metazoa to intelligence took well over half a billion years, if we equate intelligence for this purpose to the posession of recursive language, whereas we breezed through intelligence to technological in under 100K years, if not without some flirting with self destruction.
The Fermi alternative that we are indeed first still needs to be considered against the possibility that the first may have been less influenced by a cultural duty to subdue the world and instead, when they realised they were unlikely to meet anybody else for a hundred million years (the tail on the probability distribution) have settled for something less than galactic domination.
I just don't believe that every "big question" is at the extreme ends of the scale where cosmologists and particle accelerators seek their answers to the big "Why?"
Newton, Darwin and the others developed their great theories for things a lot closer to human scale and, while some may have felt they were reading the mind of God, they were also clearly focused on the problem at hand. (I say this as an admirer of the interdisciplinary efforts at the likes of Santa Fe Institute, as much more a generalist than a specialist.)
All I ask is a bit of balance so that enough weight is given to research at interplanetary and interstellar scales that we might give ourselves a chance to find their equivalents of plate tectonics, to my mind the most elegant piece of science since Darwin.
My guess is that the government is too embarrassed to show how pitifully few sites have been taken down for the money expended
Yeah, I don't think there is much doubt the whole exercise would not get past the scrutiny of the bean counters if it was all out in the open. At least with films, you have an identifiable product, but you have to wonder whether the vast majority of the relatively few sites they have managed to blacklist might upon scrutiny be shown to have neither aspirations nor likelihood of attracting significant traffic.
However our government's modus operandi seems to have become to use a bottomless slush fund for anything that might scare a few electors into voting for them next time around. And in this the legislature is in league with other arms of law enforcement predicated on growth/empire building which want to make sure that everybody has broken a few laws so they can be incarcerated at their convenience.
Mind you the chilling effect of that legislation coupled with the equally illogical ban on hosting Internet gambling sites in Australia certainly adds to the traffic cartel's disincentive to Australia developing a viable hosting industry/lobby.
When are all the apologists going to recognise that curious (and most likely bored) teens are the main users of porn that features other teens?
I won't clutter this with too many "I was there" stories nor add my view of the value of PDF to prepress operations. But ever since Sun rolled over on its support from its own Display PostScript-based Network extensible Window System (NeWS) in the face of the tide of X, I have been intrigued by how Adobe has managed to become so important to the Web without ever really getting it.
At its heart, Adobe never quite manages to shake its cultural foundation in the (permanent) placement of dots on paper and take on the very different challenge of realising the potential of interactive displays and ever "under construction" documents. (Nor does much of the printing industry but that is another story.)
Having been seduced by PostScript from the start, how do we now deal with the enigmatic prospect that Adobe also appears to be the driving force behind the great white hope of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)?
If I was a politician with half a clue (yeah I know that's oxymoronic) and was presented that list as a guide to what the astronomy and physics (read space science) communities want to invest many billions on in the coming decade(s) they would be sent packing.
During the past decade there has been enormous progress on a much wider range of problems than just the far ends of cosmology and particle physics that are the focus of those eleven questions ... much in areas that are a lot closer to home and in those areas progress has been much more rapid and, IMHO, much more interesting.
As planetary creatures, the progress in our knowledge of planetary bodies both in our solar system and beyond has undergone more fundamental revision than either quantum mechanics or relativity has in several decades.
What we really need is research that focuses on how quickly we might grow our endeavours in the planetary arena ... issues from orbital mechanics to mineralisation in non-terretrial environments which are going to constrain our abilities to further explore (often robotically) and eventually exploit other parts of the solar system.
If we really want to blue sky, we need look no further than starting serious research into how we might eventually be able to send probes towards nearby stars in the kind of practical timeframes that will require acceleration to a useful fraction of the speed of light ... but even that is sure to need serious industrialisation outside earth's gravity well.
Meanwhile we will at least be able to get a much better picture of other solar systems through new generations of instruments ... especially space-based instruments.
Yeah I know most of these big picture types are caught up in the dream of finally answering the big "Why?" but the history of science suggests to me that there is no likelihood such an answer will be found any time soon, so it is better to focus on learning what we can about the details so we may better answer "What should I do?"
The challenge is to come to terms with the fact that the bulk of humanity will never see the deep truth in what he is saying.
The mythology of design is pervasive but just plain wrong. Design only ever happens in marginal increments. Quotes about standing on the shoulders of giants come to mind.
A deeper challenge is that most people are incapable of understanding evolution, not because of any lack of inherent intelligence but because they haven't ever gotten out of the comfort zone.
An interesting but neglected mid-80s paper by Marcia Salner, then at the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, but now at the University of Illinois at Springfield, as I see following a Google search I now need to spend some time following up on, pointed out that it helps greatly to have got through some genuine crises, firstly to break our naive and seductive faith in the universality of right and wrong answers and secondly to force us to look beyond the naive relativism which first replaces the right-wrong dichotomy.
Evolution, be it biological, social, technical or whatever, is about what works in practice, and even more so about the uses made of its products, because evolution does not happen in a vacuum. (Yes I am using "vacuum" metaphorically. The real vacuum of 3D space is also highly evolved.)
Now I find myself caught up with the even deeper challenge that if too many people actually believed what Linus is saying that the whole system would collapse. It seems only possible to build viable social institutions on rhetoric that does not stand scrutiny.
This is really testing my memory, but I think it was after we upgraded from our IBM 1440 to an early System/360 that our operators discovered they could tune an AM radio to a certain frequency and thereby listen to the puter.
Maybe somebody with a better memory might know a few more details.
I'd prefer to assume that all are acting in good faith, but it gets all too easy to suggest that reports/success of the reestablishment of the thylacine could help get the authorities off the hook on Tasmanian environmental issues.
- Tasmania has a long history of electing Greens so in 1998 our "major parties" put aside their pretentions of difference and attempted to send the Greens extinct by reducing the number of state poiticians.
- More than fifty years before the last thylacine died in captivity, the last full blood Tasmanian aborigine died, a race that had been isolated from the rest of humanity for more than ten thousand years.
- Thirty years ago, the Tasmanian environmental movement was galvanised by the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the then all-powerful Hydro Electic Commission from building a dam which would drown the remote and ultimately iconic original Lake Pedder. Proposals to drain the dam and restore the original lake persist.
- A decade later, a similar campaign against the proposed Gordon below Franklin dam was successful and South West Tasmania gained World Heritage recognition, including the aboriginal art in Fraser Cave named for our then Prime Minister in an attempt to enhance his environmental awareness.
- In the last few months it looks as though another predator, the fox, might be trying to get established in Tasmania. I'm sure I heard a report of some more recent evidence that they may indeed have a breeding population which defies thinking about given today's level of environmental awareness.
- The Tasmanian government recently retreated from its undertaking to support the outcome of the Tasmania Together process with respect to the unpopular logging of old growth forests to support huge (by Tasmanian standards earnings from wood chip export.
- On the other side of Bass Strait, there is growing environmental opposition to the Basslink Project to connect the Tasmanian electrical grid to the Australian mainland grid.
Now I just have to wonder whether the foxes or the politicians will utilise cloning first? My own fondest memory of Tassie was diving with dolphins at Flinders Island, a day I would like to clone.Just found an interesting recent paper from my armchair via Google, the paper saying with respect to a mtDNA divergence tree:
Whilst diverse, deep-rooting clusters remain in Africa, with different clusters in different parts of the continent, the tree suggests that a single sequence type expanded both through eastern and western Africa and out into Eurasia.
I guess my view may have been originally coloured by the probably naive expectation that the Afro-Americans who provided their mtDNA for the original sample were more likely to be from West Africa, but there is lots of other evidence that places the likely site a long way from the well known pre-erectus sites in East Africa.
In particular, more modern sites tend to be in South Africa, althoug this may in part be because it has been better surveyed than much of the continent. I also see a likelihood of the Kalahari serving to isolate sub-poulations, as evidenced by it being the last refuge for some relatively divergent African peoples following the Bantu expansion.
None of this is any more than suggestive. What I really want is a site where the sea level changes of the last interglacial could have been catalytic.
The collection of 28 bone tools and related artefacts were found in Blombos cave, located on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean at the extreme tip of South Africa.
As an "armchair anthropologist" my working hypothesis is that homo sapiens sapiens differentiated on the west coast of Africa (yeah I know that needs narrowing down) during the previous interglacial and developed a coast hugging culture which enabled them to expand along the mostly narrow and now submerged continental shelf to reach eastern Indonesia by 60K BP.
From there the story is pretty well convered in Tim Flannery's Future Eaters with clearly modern humans island hopping to an Australian continent where erectus had never ventured, and where they found themselves "masters" of the earth, establishing the cultual foundations to underpin 60,000 years of environmental mayhem.
It's my best guess that h.s.s. making the step from being a sexually selected "singing ape" to instinctive users of recursive language provided the reproductive isolation needed for speciation, for bone tools, and for pretty much else we nowadays take for granted.
I felt encouraged by its optimism when I first read Engines of Creation during a stopover at Rangiroa Atoll and saw Drexler at a conference not long after, but his Foresight Institute quickly developed into a vehicle for self promotion with no interest in anything that might bring the original claims into question. And the "gray goo" scare is a key part of their story.
One key question they don't want to even think about is that the whole idea of reproduction makes very little sense. It happened in living cells because there was no other way forward, but given an engineering capability nobody in their right mind would bother trying for reproduction when it is far easier to build a machine which builds other different machines to a few levels of recursion, with production at each level readily constrained by inputs. To achieve the really high levels of production that nanotech will no doubt need for some of its envisaged applications, you might even want to go beyond n**3 processes, but there is no way it will ever go to reproduction and thus turn exponential.
That doesn't mean that there won't be some evil little nanomachines. Just that they are going to be a lot harder to deploy than Drexler and co. want us to believe. If they haven't got some fear to motivate people, who is gonna pay for Foresight's future?
What caused the big bang? How was it initiated? What were the bounds of the "universe" as it were before the big bang?
While it hasn't quite graduated to being "accepted wisdom" yet, an increasing number of those who look at such questions are persuaded by the idea that a big bang can occur when a black hole collapses, with the rebound from the (almost) singularity creating a new space-time manifold shifted slightly away from the space-time manifold which produced that black hole.
One site I found has more extensive discussion of this scenario.
how on earth (pun intended) did we get here from all of that?
It seems like you might actually need the physice of our cosmos to be tuned to the production of carbon, oxygen, etc. by nucleosythesis of the original hydrogen and helium for the black hole-big bang production cycle to work, so the earth and indeed us are just incidental byproducts of these cosmic requirements.
"Why?" doesn't always have an answer.
The vast majority of content, even that which finds its way through Slashdot's submission filter and moderation, is best thought of as grey space from both a design and an information perspective.
/. a sufficiently interesting approach to keep coming back, there is also something unsatisfying about the feature creep in the main index which obscures the cut and thrust of the generally hurried "discussion" of each topic.
The information you can gain by just perusing a well presented threaded index, especially one where the overwhelming majority of items are posted with "known" nicks, greatly exceeds what you usually gain from reading rants like this one.
While I find
Katz aside, who has long been clearly the best writer on the Net, I would much rather pay for a good index than for any amount of content.
I just don't know whether I've reached the point of needing to pay to hide from advertising.
And even earlier Apple Panic which I even became pretty good at, at least relative to the younger gamers who hang out at our place.
Guess this is as good a place as any to hide my top five (which is as far as I can seriously get):
- Adventure (Colossal Cave)
- Tetris (the only one that made their list)
- FreeCell (the Linux version)
- Apple Panic
- Lode Runner
But I do recognise that some others were in that "significant" catgeory that appeals to us oldtimers, some of which I used to enjoy watching over shoulders, but this shouldn't be in any order:- Space Invaders/Asteroids
- PacMan
- Myst
- Pong
- The Sims
I have also enjoyed Chess, Scrabble and even Monoply which are amongst the many traditional games that survive the transition rather well.I don't live there but I visit often, as often as the weekend before last and your post almost reads like you were following me around.
I was silly enough to expect to be able to puchase supermarket food and drink after the rest of the mall had shut on a Thursday evening, and the next night on my way back up Main North Road to my motel I went into a shopping complex which seemed to have lost half its other shops in the shadow of its Coles.
Even though I had earlier driven past hoardes of departing Adelaide High School students, I still cannot discern any meningful difference in strength and distortion between those two "Onkaparinga Bridge" sentences.
One of my reasons for coming over was to visit a great aunt in a generously appointed hospital. Although reasonably bright, she was one of those on the right who the pollies of our now lame duck Liberal governments seek to appeal to, but she won't be voting again.
But I still get frustrated with how Adelaide is so down on itself, when it is far and away the most livable of Australia's five major cities, especially if you overlook the water supply. Sure what had been intended to be factory worker housing has been given over to welfare-dependent single mothers who are manufacturing candidates for youth suicide, and the saga of the Multi Function Polis is fodder for comedians, but these are minor distractions on the lovely setting and extensive tracts of elegant affordable accomodations.
Hey, Port even thrashed the erstwhile invincible Bombers on Saturday night, so never count on a miserable future.
On the original topic of the censorship regime, I don't really expect the Blair clones who are taking over the reigns here will give any priority to bringing The Law into closer correspondence with reality, so whatever chilling effect these laws might have will probably persist.