There are several similar stories in the US. Some cities have found the hard way that eliminating various "pest" species, including pigeons and rats, leads to huge increases in the insects that eat the garbage that those species had been hogging for themselves. If you want to clean up such pests, you need to also clean up all the garbage. Pigeons and rats are actually much better at this than humans.
There was also a story some years back about a farming area in California where the people decided to eradicate "vermin", which included skunks and foxes. They succeeded so well that the area was overrun with mice. It got so bad that people had trouble driving down the roads due to the slippery surface caused by all the squashed mice. When the story was written up, people from all over started offering to trap some of their local skunks and foxes and ship them out to control the mice. The folks there weren't too amused by these gracious offers.
In our area (the western suburbs of Boston), a few years ago there was a heavy outbreak of lawn grubs that devastated most of the lawns. We and a few neighbors didn't have any problems, though. We refused to spray our lawns, and we have woods nearby. We started meeting skunks when we came home an night, and we also saw a lot of small "divots" where the skunks had dug up grubs. We pressed the dug-up grass back in the hole, and everything was fine.
We did have a couple of incidents in which a young skunk claimed our back yard as his territory, and threatened us when we came home at night. But we found that we could calmly explain to him that it was ok; we were just going into the house. He reacted by slowly walking away, while keeping a careful eye on us.
We didn't have any mice in the house that year, either.
Similarly, I've worked as a software "consultant" developer at quite a number of companies over the years, and I've seen Macs everywhere. The pattern is interesting: Most of the non-IT management uses Macs, while the IT people have the usual ongoing war between the Microsoft and the linux (or Sun) fanboys. The attitude of the non-IT management folks is generally "Those IT geeks can keep their user-hostile PCs; we'll just stick with something that dummies like us can actually use without swearing and tearing our hair out twice a minute."
They approve purchases of Microsoft (and/or IBM) junk because they believe that the IT people will get all sulky and sabotage anything else foisted on them. They buy Macs out of their own department's budget. Either IT is willing to support Macs, or there's a separate Mac support group somewhere else. Not that the Macs (or linux or Sun) machines need much support, of course.
Now, this is just a string of personal anecdotes; I don't pretend to know what the rest of the world is doing. But I know of a number of companies where Apple can sell very easily, because the non-IT management already knows and loves them.
When someone asks "Can Apple penetrate the corporation?" they are really asking "Can Apple subvert IT departments' love of Microsoft and IBM?" This is going to be a much harder sell. The IT people who are amenable to weaning are also likely to know about Sun, Red Hat, and the others. So those are Apple's real competitors. If an IT department is Microsoft-only, chances are that nobody there will even listen to anyone trying to sell them something else, no matter how good it might be.
I got a Mac Powerbook a few years back, partly so that I could really learn what was so good (and bad;-) about it. Now I can talk fairly knowledgably to the non-IT management types about the pros and cons of the topic. But I haven't found any way to talk to IT types about the topic at all. It's simply not open to discussion. Some of them already hate MS, but those already have a non-MS laptop of their own and don't need convincing. The rest aren't about to listen to someone like me.
I did have some fun a couple of years back, on a project where I'd been told that all the IT folks were dyed-in-the-wool IBM- and Microsoft-lover types. When I asked individuals, I actually found that almost all of them had linux on their home machine, and at least half had finagled a linux box at work, too. They worked on IBM/MS machines because that's what they were paid for, but they all wanted a good machine for their own use. Sometimes their work machine was dual-boot; sometimes they had two machines. And a few also had Macs.
The real problem is the intransigence of IT management, whose careers are married to IBM and/or Microsoft. In many corporations, everyone else is already convinced.
Of course, as a multi-computer sort of geek, I wouldn't have seen any corporation where everyone loves IBM and/or MS. I wouldn't even be invited inside the doors of such places. So take my comments with a big "FWIW".
Is it legal to operate a private (as opposed to public, i.e. government-run) library?
Hmmm... I have a "home office" with a lot of bookcases filled with books. I sometimes loan a book to a friend. Am I running a private library?
For that matter, if someone (perhaps a guest in my home or a burglar) takes a book without my permission, can I be prosecuted for copyright infringement? How about if they don't take the book, but just make copies of a few pages on the Xerox machine in the corner, and take those copies?
It seems to me that, what with the advent of "telecommuting", this sort of thing can only become more common. Can all be guilty of copyright infringement if we let anyone (even a burglar) have access to our home library?
And how is this really different from similar sharing (perhaps inadvertently) of the same copyrighted information on our computer's hard disk?
IANAL, so I'd like to find some coherent (i.e., non-legalese) explanations of all this. Yes, I've read a lot on the topic. What I've read has only made me more nervous about my future liabilities.
I used to think that helping educate others by sharing information was a Good Thing...
Heh; you're right. English sparrows are both small and similar to the native song sparrows that frequent our feeder (at the rate of maybe one song sparrow to every 100 English sparrows), so they're not good targets. But starlings are quite distinctive and a lot bigger, so there should be no problem using them as targets.
Of course, shooting guns within city limits, even here in the burbs, is sorta frowned on.
A while back in another forum, I read a discussion of the recent rapid decline of the English sparrow population in England. There were suggestions that Americans could trap a few million of the cute little buggers and ship them back to their ancestral homeland. Other objected that it would have to be a few billion to make a real dent in their North American population. But the discussion died without anyone describing a practical way to trap that many of them.
Now if we could find an equivalent of the varroa mite for English Sparrows...
Here in New England, one of the effects of the loss of honeybees has been a very visible recovery of native pollinators. At least it's visible if you have a garden and pay attention to what's happening there. In our yard, we've seen a huge increase in the number of bumblebees over the past few years. We used to see only a few per day; now in the summer you can almost always see several at a time. Of course, you don't get a whole lot of honey from a bumblebee's nest.
Anyway, the local wildlife people have long considered the honeybee an alien invader, much like English sparrows and starlings. They were introduced to North America by humans, and have crowded out many native species.
The natives are doing much better with the honeybees mostly gone. Now if we could find something that kills off English sparrows and starlings in large numbers. Honeybees at least provide honey, but nobody can think of anything that those two kinds of birds are good for.
You're probably right that early life on Earth was adapted to (conditions partly caused by) large impacts. But by 65 million years ago, this was certainly no longer true, since such impacts had decreased to insignificance. We still have thermophiles, of course, because there's a lot of hot spots on the planet, plus all the bacteria living deep down in the crust.
I'd thought of mentioning the idea that Earth now has a species that can deflect asteroids. I didn't mostly to keep the note short. But it's an interesting idea. We don't actually know yet whether our planet actually has such an intelligent species. We might find out, next month or next year or 50,000 years from now. We can hope it's true.
But this wouldn't necessarily have an evolutionary impact. For that, we'd need to have the asteroid deflection produce a differential survival rate in the next generation. If the asteroid is deflected entirely, there would be no differential survival rate, and no evolutionary impact.
The only way it would have an evolutionary effect is if something truly evil were to happen: The asteroid could be deflected enough by to hit a different part of the Earth, and exterminate the people there. This would give an evolutionary advantage to the neighbors and relatives of the people who deflected it. While we may shudder at the thought, we should probably face the fact that we have governments whose leaders just might do such a thing.
You can't make a reasonable argument that our intelligence is an adaptation to impact events. There's no evidence I've read that suggests this. If our intelligence works to prevent an impact, this would at best be classified as a "secondary adaptation", in the sense that our brains coincidentally happen to work for something different than what they evolved for. We see this all the time, of course. I'm typing this on a computer, and nobody would argue that our brains evolved as tools to use computers. I used my hands and feet to drive a car a while ago, and our hands and feet certainly didn't evolve in an environment of cars that my ancestors needed to drive. And so on for assorted redirected adaptations.
I do hope that our intelligence turns out to suffice for deflecting big rocks from the sky. But I wouldn't claim that out intelligence is an adaptation to do such things. Such a claim would need some extraordinary supporting evidence.
Clearly, sir, your statements have no place in a scientific debate. Those numbers you so lightly toss around add up to 146%.
Heh. Very good. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw once, showing a road leading into a bucolic small town. At the side of the road was a sign that read something like:
He was wondering why we teach about Roman mythology, gods and so forth. Does that have any more validity than astrology?
Well, there is a visible pattern here. What Roman mythology, gods and "so forth" seem to have in common is that they are historically significant ideas that nobody still believes. But things like astrology and Christianity still have populations of believers. So, although they may be historically significant and worth teaching about, it's reasonable for a teacher to be wary of them. Even if you are careful to restrict your teaching to just the documentable history of such topics, you are risking being noticed by the True Believers, who will make your life miserable.
A truly rational educational system would insist that students learn about belief systems (religious, political, whatever) that have historic significance. But there is good reason to avoid such topics when there is a likelihood that current adherents of such beliefs will take action against you.
OTOH, there's little danger that followers of Jove or Mithras will try to get you fired for mentioning them in your history class.
(And on the third hand, you might want to be careful with Mithras. Some historians have pointed out that his life story is remarkably similar to Jesus's, but Mithras was first. This has obvious implications for the credibility of the Jesus story, so teaching about Mithras risks provoking outrage in at least a small population of the followers of Jesus.;-)
How the hell do you electroplate a non-conducting surface?
With difficulty.;-)
Actually, some years ago, I saw a demo by a fellow who was pretty good at such tricks. He had some finished pieces that were gold-plated wood and ceramic. He explained that the material he used were actually (slightly) porous, and had been saturated with salt water. The result still didn't conduct electricity very well, and the plating process was slow. But with gold, you only want a layer that's a few atoms thick. His demo basically consisted in wiring up his pieces of wood and ceramic, which had been coated with wax over most of their surface, and lowering them into his plating solution. You could walk away and come back in half an hour or so, and see that there was already a visible gold layer on the uncoated spots.
It is a lot faster if the core material conducts well. I think his demo was pretty much a display of virtuosity. Gold paint would be a lot faster. And for something like a dome of a building, gold leaf would probably be more practical.
Also, you can't evolve slowly to resist antibiotics.
Sure you can (at least if you're a bacterium;-). It's happening right now with the "antibacterial" soaps that are widely sold in the US.
What happens is typical with such chemicals: When you apply some of it to a body part such as hands, there may be enough to kill the bacteria right there. But at the edge of the treated area there is a gradient of the antibiotic's concentration, which falls to zero over some distance. Within this gradient, there are bacteria with differing susceptibility to that particular antibiotic. Thus, withing the gradient zone, the more susceptible bacteria die, while the less susceptible bacteria live. This slightly increases the frequence of whatever genes provided the slightly better resistance of the survivors.
The bacteria in question have generation times that may be under an hour in good conditions. So over weeks or months, they can produce thousands of generations. If you are repeatedly applying the same antibiotic to small areas of your body, you are repeatedly producing gradient zones that further select for slightly better resistance to that antibiotic.
It's the evolutionary process at work right on the surface of your body, and it should be no surprise that the end result is a population of bacteria with good resistance to the antibiotic in your soap.
This process is one of the better examples of why the article's topic is significant. By suppressing understanding of "evolution", we haven't just dealt with an abstract academic theory. We have also created a society in which people are actively selecting bacteria for resistance to antibiotics. People are doing this because they don't understand how bacteria evolve such resistance. Most of them don't even believe in evolution. But the evolutionary process doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. Like gravity and many other abstract academic theories, evolution works even if you don't believe in it.
Does this mean that whatever happens to organisms/populations is an evolutionary process?... Your message reminds me of the Popper's objection to evolution: it is impossible to disprove it since whichever way organisms turn out is fine from the evolutionary standpoint.
Nah; it's only "evolution" if it affects the distribution of genes in the next generation. Of course, Darwin didn't know about genes, since genetics was still in the future. People knew that offspring inherited characteristics from their parents, but nobody knew how it worked. It took another century to find and verify the physical mechanism. He just explained how the evolutionary process works, without knowing the mechanism of inheritance.
It's pretty easy to come up with things that are "neutral" in the evolutionary process, and biologists often consider the possibility that some genetic variations are not actually significant. Thus, I have blue eyes, while other humans have brown eyes; there seems to be no survival value in humans to a particular iris color. Similar examples of trivial variation exist in many species. It's not unusual for biologists to hypothesize that some characteristic is "neutral", i.e., neither harmful nor beneficial.
At the other extreme, consider the K-T impact event 65 million years back. This would not be considered an "evolutionary event" for most of the species, because most species were simply exterminated and no longer evolved at all. Also, it's not something that the evolutionary process could adapt to, since asteroid impacts are too rare and utterly unpredictable by any genetic mechanism. The survivors survived mostly due to the blind luck of being far enough away from the impact site, in a place where they could find enough food and shelter to get through the next few years. Survivors were mostly small, opportunistic omnivores, of course, and there's an obvious explanation for this. But still, the survivors weren't adapted to asteroid impacts in any meaningful sense, and neither are their descendants.
It's common to argue that evolutionary theory is trivial and tautological, because it merely asserts that whoever survives is a survivor. But this is a "straw man" argument that's based on an extreme generalization while ignoring significant details. In the case of evolution, the significant parts include the fact that characteristics are inherited from parents, but the inheritance is error prone. This results in offspring that vary slightly from the parents, and many of the variations affect survivability. This in turn affects the relative frequency of characteristics in later generations. When you include such details, the evolutionary process is no longer trivial. And it's no longer clear that everything is necessarily of evolutionary significance.
Hey, when I was a kid a bunch of us experimented with smoke signals. It was fun, and I don't actually remember any adults giving us a hard time about it. We were even "playing with fire", but it was obvious that we were doing it in a safe (if rather smokey) way.
It didn't have a very good bit rate, though.
I've read the RFC that describes the Avian Carrier Protocol. I wonder if anyone has designed a smoke-signal protocol for the Internet?
It might be fun to consider using a cell phone with a camera, plus some image-recognition software, to detect the smoke signal from a distance and convert it to electronic bits. But I suppose the phone companies would prevent us from doing it. Some companies are just no fun at all.
SPs (or phone companies) have ligitimate reasons to be concerned about what you run.
No; they have illegitimate reasons. We should have an inalienable right to communicate as we wish, by whatever means we wish. Corporate control of our communication is a guaranteed disaster for everyone but the owners of the corporation.
In particular, the main design goal of the Internet was to end the traditional stranglehold of equipment suppliers and comm companies over communication. Look up the early docs of the ARPAnet; its primary design goal was to make it possible for any piece of equipment from any vendor to communicate with any other piece of equipment from any other vendor. The vendors had always blocked such universal communication, and the US's Dept of Defense was fed up with it. The companies that supply the equipment still put any roadblocks they can in the way of communicating with their competitors' equipment. The phone companies are especially good at this, at least here in the US.
It's true that this is very easy to understand why the companies would be concerned with what we run on our machines. But this concern is not in any reasonable sense legitimate. It's the worst possible way you could run a comm system. We should continue to fight it any way we can.
The only legitimate restrictions should be that malformed packets may be dropped, and "bandwidth hogs" may be throttled to a reasonable speed limit (i.e., whatever speed they've paid for). But note that such restrictions have little if anything to do with what software you or I may be running. Or with the content of our data packets, for that matter.
Well CD sales are still the most popular method to get music, and that is DRM free (and mostly rootkit free).
Indeed. And buying the CD has a lot of advantages. The first is that you have a good backup of the music that's on your computer. When you get a new computer (or have to reinstall your OS), you don't have to go through the complex, failure-prone scheme, different for every online music provider, to transfer the license to the new machine; you just rip the CD again.
And with a CD, you can explain how great it is by sending a track to a friend, who will then buy the CD. With DRM, there's no way I can show a friend how great a recording is, because it won't play on their machine. This is the real problem with DRM: It kills the traditional "Hey, listen to this!" way of increasing sales through sharing by fans. Any artist who wants his/her music spread around will understand this.
In our house, we just had a 3-year-old (just out of warantee;-) Mac that needed a new disk. It seems that this made it a "new" computer, and nothing was registered. So everything we had that was licensed needed to be relicensed. What a pain in the ass! Three months later, it's still not actually done, due to the complexity of the task (which really is different for every provider). We'll probably just forget about the remaining things, most of which we don't use much. This is a strong argument, in our minds, for saying the hell with Apple, and getting a linux-compatible laptop for our next machine. The linux crowd is getting pretty good at dealing with DRM...
If Wal*Mart serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop shopping there. Eventually, we see stores fail -- even big ones,...
Hmmm... This doesn't seem to work very well. I haven't shopped at a Wal*Mart in over a decade, and they're still doing business. They've grown, in fact.
So how long after I stop shopping there can I expect them to fail?
(This isn't an isolated non-failure, either. I haven't bought anything from Microsoft for over a decade, and they're still doing pretty well, too.)
I am exploring "lower case" ID. The claim is that intelligent design/interference in life is not detectable. As a general statement, this appears to be false.
Well, yeah; but this is part of the obvious fact that all but one of the replies here obviously missed the point of my original wise-crack. I was pointing out that, to an astronomer with technology as good (or bad;-) as ours, the radio signature of the Earth would be very obviously "intelligently designed". That is, it would be obvious to any being capable of detecting our radio spectrum that it isn't the result of any natural processes. It has to have been produced by equipment built by thinking creatures of some sort. This, and the inferences that could be made from our signal, was the point of the 1978 Science article. We are broadcasting to our galactic neighborhood the fact that there's an intelligent species on a planet orbiting our sun. Our signal has filled a sphere with a radius of about 80 light-years, and there are a couple thousand stars inside that sphere. If there's an astronomer inside that radius with technology as good as what we had in 1978, he/she/it knows we're here, and knows more about us than most of us might expect. Even without being able to decode program content, a lot can be learned about us from the carrier waves of our broadcasts.
Actually, most of the detectable signal is from the BMEWS military radar systems and the most powerful TV broadcasts. Those have only reached 40 or 50 light years. But there are still a lot of stars within that sphere.
Anyway, it has been amusing to see people pick out the two words "intelligently designed", and take off on a minor flame fest without ever bothering to understand the original intent of those words. This misunderstanding is probably a better joke than my original bit of word play. OTOH, it's an old story. People have this way of picking a word or two out of what someone says, and running on with some sort of rant involving just those few words, without bothering to pay attention to what the original speaker was talking about.
Now lessee what few words here will be extracted for the next flaming rants...
Oh, I'm not claiming that they're undetectable. There are several other possibilities. One is that they're around, but are good enough at their disguises that we don't notice them. But a determined detective might. Some time back, there was a cute bit of Sherlock Holmes fanfic about his last case, in which a group of flying-saucer nuts hired him to look for evidence of visiting aliens. He found the evidence in short order, and identified some aliens that weren't careful enough to fool him. He reported his results to the saucer nuts, who paid him. Then, a few days later, he got a visit from one of the aliens, who made him an interesting job offer. I've forgotten the title of the story.
Actually, my favorite possibility is that the aliens are here, and aren't particularly careful about hiding. They've learned that even when they announce themselves, nobody takes them seriously. So they go about their jobs of collecting data about human society, while walking around openly with only pro-forma disguises. It helps here that the field workers sent to Earth are from species that look very much like humans, so the disguises consist of only minor cosmetics, local clothing, and maybe a hairpiece for some of them.
Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
Not nearly correct. Google for "Eavesdropping The Radio Signature of the Earth", the title of an article by W.T. Sullivan and C Wetherill in the Jan 27, 1978 issue of Science. You'll get links to a number of cached copies of it online, and also some discussions.
One of the hits is to a NASA article on the same topic with updated info and some pretty graphs. It also contains the comment "On a cosmically infinitesimal time scale, Earth has indeed become a very bright planet, outshining the Sun by orders of magnitude in certain narrow frequency ranges."
The general idea is that, first, our radio/TV/radar broadcasts aren't omni-directional; from the start our broadcasts have used antennas that broadcast most of their energy horizontally. The resulting 2-dimensional dispersion pattern reaches much farther than an omni-directional signal of the same energy would. Over time, each broadcast station does send in all directions, but from any one direction, the station appears to fade in and then fade out some minutes later, twice a day. The frequency is doppler-shifted due to the Earth's rotation, and also varies over a year due to our orbit around the sun.
And, second, with our own technology, we could detect the most powerful our own broadcasts from anywhere within the sphere that they've reached. This was the basic question in the Science article. But they also addressed a more interesting question: Assuming our own technology, and the ability to measure the signal's spectrum but not decipher program content, what could be deduced about the senders? The results were quite impressive.
Figuring out which star system the signals come from was trivial (to an astronomer). After a year or so of data collection, the planet's orbit would be known, as would the planet's size. The presence of a large satellite (including its orbit and approximate mass) would also be known. It would be clear that the senders are primarily active during the daytime and early evening.
Further study would generate a rough map of all the broadcast stations. They would be concentrated in narrow bands separating two different sorts of terrain. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, the conclusion would be that the planet is roughly 3/4 water and 1/4 land, and we live on land, primarily along the coasts.
Even more study would determine from spectrum details that there were several different kinds of technology in use to generate the broadcasts, and each kind of equipment was distributed across patches of land that we might call "nations", with some kinds of hardware used by nations not close to each other, implying long-distance technological sharing among coalitions of nations.
It was interesting reading 30 years ago. (But I do remember thinking that it might be a good thing if the actual program content couldn't be decoded.;-)
If they were here in the first 99% of those 10 billion years, they would have missed us. We may be marked as a "potential revisit" but the likelihood of any existing lifeforms knowing that we are here is very small.
Actually, if they are living (or have automated monitors) within a radius of roughly 80 light years, they know we're here. We've been broadcasting our presence via radio waves for about that long now, and our broadcasts are unmistakably "intelligently designed".
Of course, it just might be that the speed of light is a hard upper bound that can't be violated in our universe. In that case, we might still have some time before visitors come calling.
Our best bet is to continue scanning the skies for possible incoming messages (which might or might not be addressed to us).
I'd bet that Steve Jobs is right now wishing that people would just stop sending him copies of TFA. I mean, he probably really laughed the first time he read it, but by the 25th time...
The translation by itself isn't nearly as entertaining as reading both.
This is why it's always a good idea to present the original texts alongside a translation. Sure, as in this example, most people won't be able to read and understand the original. But some will, and (again as in this example) those people can help verify that the translation is accurate.
Just think of all of history's warfare that could have been prevented if if were a legal requirement that translations always be presented side-by-side with the original. Holy books would always include the original, so the mistranslations would be visible to those with a bit of knowledge. Politicians wouldn't get away with "straw-man" distortions of their enemies' statements, because the distorted version would be accompanied by the original.
But I guess we know why such an idea couldn't possibly be accepted, especially not by our religious or political leaders. Probably not by our corporate leaders, either.
Umm, last I understood it, scientists ARE researchers...
Well, the most famous scientist of the previous century, Albert Einstein, wasn't primarily a researcher. Yes, in his early days, he did lab work, as pretty much any budding scientist will do. But his work that made him famous was all theoretical mathematical physics, done with little more equipment than pencil and paper (and brain). He primarily studied the results of the researchers, and came up with theories to explain those results.
The terms "science" and "research" are related, of course, and often go together, but they refer to different kinds of activities. You can do either without doing the other. So the phrase "scientific research" isn't redundant.
When doing either, it does help a lot if you're familiar with the other.
I would count historians as scientists. Why wouldn't they be?
Actually, some historians are scientists, and others aren't. It depends on whether they're using scientific methods in their research. In the field of history, there is a lot of very valuable research that doesn't require scientific methods. Just digging around in archives for old records, collating them, and publishing summaries on narrow topics can be extremely valuable to other historians. Finding survivors of events, interviewing them, and writing down their comments can be valuable non-scientific historical research.
A similar thing happens in some scientific fields. There is a lot of valuable biological data from non-scientists who have merely done a lot of observations of something where they live and written down detail notes. Thus many people have left behind detailed, dated records of what sort of birds and other animals were visiting their backyard feeders. Astronomy depends on a flock of amateurs constantly scanning the night skies and reporting changes. You don't need to be a trained scientist to do this; you just need to be a good observer who is willing to put in the time (and maybe buy some equipment). You can get a subspecies or a comet named after you, while the scientists get theories based on your data named after them.
History and some sciences can really benefit from massive low-level data collection. The science is in the analysis of the data, not so much in the collection of the data.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several similar stories in the US. Some cities have found the hard way that eliminating various "pest" species, including pigeons and rats, leads to huge increases in the insects that eat the garbage that those species had been hogging for themselves. If you want to clean up such pests, you need to also clean up all the garbage. Pigeons and rats are actually much better at this than humans.
There was also a story some years back about a farming area in California where the people decided to eradicate "vermin", which included skunks and foxes. They succeeded so well that the area was overrun with mice. It got so bad that people had trouble driving down the roads due to the slippery surface caused by all the squashed mice. When the story was written up, people from all over started offering to trap some of their local skunks and foxes and ship them out to control the mice. The folks there weren't too amused by these gracious offers.
In our area (the western suburbs of Boston), a few years ago there was a heavy outbreak of lawn grubs that devastated most of the lawns. We and a few neighbors didn't have any problems, though. We refused to spray our lawns, and we have woods nearby. We started meeting skunks when we came home an night, and we also saw a lot of small "divots" where the skunks had dug up grubs. We pressed the dug-up grass back in the hole, and everything was fine.
We did have a couple of incidents in which a young skunk claimed our back yard as his territory, and threatened us when we came home at night. But we found that we could calmly explain to him that it was ok; we were just going into the house. He reacted by slowly walking away, while keeping a careful eye on us.
We didn't have any mice in the house that year, either.
Similarly, I've worked as a software "consultant" developer at quite a number of companies over the years, and I've seen Macs everywhere. The pattern is interesting: Most of the non-IT management uses Macs, while the IT people have the usual ongoing war between the Microsoft and the linux (or Sun) fanboys. The attitude of the non-IT management folks is generally "Those IT geeks can keep their user-hostile PCs; we'll just stick with something that dummies like us can actually use without swearing and tearing our hair out twice a minute."
;-) about it. Now I can talk fairly knowledgably to the non-IT management types about the pros and cons of the topic. But I haven't found any way to talk to IT types about the topic at all. It's simply not open to discussion. Some of them already hate MS, but those already have a non-MS laptop of their own and don't need convincing. The rest aren't about to listen to someone like me.
They approve purchases of Microsoft (and/or IBM) junk because they believe that the IT people will get all sulky and sabotage anything else foisted on them. They buy Macs out of their own department's budget. Either IT is willing to support Macs, or there's a separate Mac support group somewhere else. Not that the Macs (or linux or Sun) machines need much support, of course.
Now, this is just a string of personal anecdotes; I don't pretend to know what the rest of the world is doing. But I know of a number of companies where Apple can sell very easily, because the non-IT management already knows and loves them.
When someone asks "Can Apple penetrate the corporation?" they are really asking "Can Apple subvert IT departments' love of Microsoft and IBM?" This is going to be a much harder sell. The IT people who are amenable to weaning are also likely to know about Sun, Red Hat, and the others. So those are Apple's real competitors. If an IT department is Microsoft-only, chances are that nobody there will even listen to anyone trying to sell them something else, no matter how good it might be.
I got a Mac Powerbook a few years back, partly so that I could really learn what was so good (and bad
I did have some fun a couple of years back, on a project where I'd been told that all the IT folks were dyed-in-the-wool IBM- and Microsoft-lover types. When I asked individuals, I actually found that almost all of them had linux on their home machine, and at least half had finagled a linux box at work, too. They worked on IBM/MS machines because that's what they were paid for, but they all wanted a good machine for their own use. Sometimes their work machine was dual-boot; sometimes they had two machines. And a few also had Macs.
The real problem is the intransigence of IT management, whose careers are married to IBM and/or Microsoft. In many corporations, everyone else is already convinced.
Of course, as a multi-computer sort of geek, I wouldn't have seen any corporation where everyone loves IBM and/or MS. I wouldn't even be invited inside the doors of such places. So take my comments with a big "FWIW".
Is it legal to operate a private (as opposed to public, i.e. government-run) library?
... I have a "home office" with a lot of bookcases filled with books. I sometimes loan a book to a friend. Am I running a private library?
...
Hmmm
For that matter, if someone (perhaps a guest in my home or a burglar) takes a book without my permission, can I be prosecuted for copyright infringement? How about if they don't take the book, but just make copies of a few pages on the Xerox machine in the corner, and take those copies?
It seems to me that, what with the advent of "telecommuting", this sort of thing can only become more common. Can all be guilty of copyright infringement if we let anyone (even a burglar) have access to our home library?
And how is this really different from similar sharing (perhaps inadvertently) of the same copyrighted information on our computer's hard disk?
IANAL, so I'd like to find some coherent (i.e., non-legalese) explanations of all this. Yes, I've read a lot on the topic. What I've read has only made me more nervous about my future liabilities.
I used to think that helping educate others by sharing information was a Good Thing
Target practice!
...
Heh; you're right. English sparrows are both small and similar to the native song sparrows that frequent our feeder (at the rate of maybe one song sparrow to every 100 English sparrows), so they're not good targets. But starlings are quite distinctive and a lot bigger, so there should be no problem using them as targets.
Of course, shooting guns within city limits, even here in the burbs, is sorta frowned on.
A while back in another forum, I read a discussion of the recent rapid decline of the English sparrow population in England. There were suggestions that Americans could trap a few million of the cute little buggers and ship them back to their ancestral homeland. Other objected that it would have to be a few billion to make a real dent in their North American population. But the discussion died without anyone describing a practical way to trap that many of them.
Now if we could find an equivalent of the varroa mite for English Sparrows
Here in New England, one of the effects of the loss of honeybees has been a very visible recovery of native pollinators. At least it's visible if you have a garden and pay attention to what's happening there. In our yard, we've seen a huge increase in the number of bumblebees over the past few years. We used to see only a few per day; now in the summer you can almost always see several at a time. Of course, you don't get a whole lot of honey from a bumblebee's nest.
Anyway, the local wildlife people have long considered the honeybee an alien invader, much like English sparrows and starlings. They were introduced to North America by humans, and have crowded out many native species.
The natives are doing much better with the honeybees mostly gone. Now if we could find something that kills off English sparrows and starlings in large numbers. Honeybees at least provide honey, but nobody can think of anything that those two kinds of birds are good for.
You're probably right that early life on Earth was adapted to (conditions partly caused by) large impacts. But by 65 million years ago, this was certainly no longer true, since such impacts had decreased to insignificance. We still have thermophiles, of course, because there's a lot of hot spots on the planet, plus all the bacteria living deep down in the crust.
I'd thought of mentioning the idea that Earth now has a species that can deflect asteroids. I didn't mostly to keep the note short. But it's an interesting idea. We don't actually know yet whether our planet actually has such an intelligent species. We might find out, next month or next year or 50,000 years from now. We can hope it's true.
But this wouldn't necessarily have an evolutionary impact. For that, we'd need to have the asteroid deflection produce a differential survival rate in the next generation. If the asteroid is deflected entirely, there would be no differential survival rate, and no evolutionary impact.
The only way it would have an evolutionary effect is if something truly evil were to happen: The asteroid could be deflected enough by to hit a different part of the Earth, and exterminate the people there. This would give an evolutionary advantage to the neighbors and relatives of the people who deflected it. While we may shudder at the thought, we should probably face the fact that we have governments whose leaders just might do such a thing.
You can't make a reasonable argument that our intelligence is an adaptation to impact events. There's no evidence I've read that suggests this. If our intelligence works to prevent an impact, this would at best be classified as a "secondary adaptation", in the sense that our brains coincidentally happen to work for something different than what they evolved for. We see this all the time, of course. I'm typing this on a computer, and nobody would argue that our brains evolved as tools to use computers. I used my hands and feet to drive a car a while ago, and our hands and feet certainly didn't evolve in an environment of cars that my ancestors needed to drive. And so on for assorted redirected adaptations.
I do hope that our intelligence turns out to suffice for deflecting big rocks from the sky. But I wouldn't claim that out intelligence is an adaptation to do such things. Such a claim would need some extraordinary supporting evidence.
Clearly, sir, your statements have no place in a scientific debate. Those numbers you so lightly toss around add up to 146%.
;-)
Heh. Very good. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw once, showing a road leading into a bucolic small town. At the side of the road was a sign that read something like:
SMALLVILLE
Population: 1575
Established: 1842
Altitude: 948
Total: 4465
(Those numbers are aligned on my screen, but probably not on yours.
He was wondering why we teach about Roman mythology, gods and so forth. Does that have any more validity than astrology?
;-)
Well, there is a visible pattern here. What Roman mythology, gods and "so forth" seem to have in common is that they are historically significant ideas that nobody still believes. But things like astrology and Christianity still have populations of believers. So, although they may be historically significant and worth teaching about, it's reasonable for a teacher to be wary of them. Even if you are careful to restrict your teaching to just the documentable history of such topics, you are risking being noticed by the True Believers, who will make your life miserable.
A truly rational educational system would insist that students learn about belief systems (religious, political, whatever) that have historic significance. But there is good reason to avoid such topics when there is a likelihood that current adherents of such beliefs will take action against you.
OTOH, there's little danger that followers of Jove or Mithras will try to get you fired for mentioning them in your history class.
(And on the third hand, you might want to be careful with Mithras. Some historians have pointed out that his life story is remarkably similar to Jesus's, but Mithras was first. This has obvious implications for the credibility of the Jesus story, so teaching about Mithras risks provoking outrage in at least a small population of the followers of Jesus.
How the hell do you electroplate a non-conducting surface?
;-)
With difficulty.
Actually, some years ago, I saw a demo by a fellow who was pretty good at such tricks. He had some finished pieces that were gold-plated wood and ceramic. He explained that the material he used were actually (slightly) porous, and had been saturated with salt water. The result still didn't conduct electricity very well, and the plating process was slow. But with gold, you only want a layer that's a few atoms thick. His demo basically consisted in wiring up his pieces of wood and ceramic, which had been coated with wax over most of their surface, and lowering them into his plating solution. You could walk away and come back in half an hour or so, and see that there was already a visible gold layer on the uncoated spots.
It is a lot faster if the core material conducts well. I think his demo was pretty much a display of virtuosity. Gold paint would be a lot faster. And for something like a dome of a building, gold leaf would probably be more practical.
Also, you can't evolve slowly to resist antibiotics.
;-). It's happening right now with the "antibacterial" soaps that are widely sold in the US.
Sure you can (at least if you're a bacterium
What happens is typical with such chemicals: When you apply some of it to a body part such as hands, there may be enough to kill the bacteria right there. But at the edge of the treated area there is a gradient of the antibiotic's concentration, which falls to zero over some distance. Within this gradient, there are bacteria with differing susceptibility to that particular antibiotic. Thus, withing the gradient zone, the more susceptible bacteria die, while the less susceptible bacteria live. This slightly increases the frequence of whatever genes provided the slightly better resistance of the survivors.
The bacteria in question have generation times that may be under an hour in good conditions. So over weeks or months, they can produce thousands of generations. If you are repeatedly applying the same antibiotic to small areas of your body, you are repeatedly producing gradient zones that further select for slightly better resistance to that antibiotic.
It's the evolutionary process at work right on the surface of your body, and it should be no surprise that the end result is a population of bacteria with good resistance to the antibiotic in your soap.
This process is one of the better examples of why the article's topic is significant. By suppressing understanding of "evolution", we haven't just dealt with an abstract academic theory. We have also created a society in which people are actively selecting bacteria for resistance to antibiotics. People are doing this because they don't understand how bacteria evolve such resistance. Most of them don't even believe in evolution. But the evolutionary process doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. Like gravity and many other abstract academic theories, evolution works even if you don't believe in it.
Does this mean that whatever happens to organisms/populations is an evolutionary process? ... Your message reminds me of the Popper's objection to evolution: it is impossible to disprove it since whichever way organisms turn out is fine from the evolutionary standpoint.
Nah; it's only "evolution" if it affects the distribution of genes in the next generation. Of course, Darwin didn't know about genes, since genetics was still in the future. People knew that offspring inherited characteristics from their parents, but nobody knew how it worked. It took another century to find and verify the physical mechanism. He just explained how the evolutionary process works, without knowing the mechanism of inheritance.
It's pretty easy to come up with things that are "neutral" in the evolutionary process, and biologists often consider the possibility that some genetic variations are not actually significant. Thus, I have blue eyes, while other humans have brown eyes; there seems to be no survival value in humans to a particular iris color. Similar examples of trivial variation exist in many species. It's not unusual for biologists to hypothesize that some characteristic is "neutral", i.e., neither harmful nor beneficial.
At the other extreme, consider the K-T impact event 65 million years back. This would not be considered an "evolutionary event" for most of the species, because most species were simply exterminated and no longer evolved at all. Also, it's not something that the evolutionary process could adapt to, since asteroid impacts are too rare and utterly unpredictable by any genetic mechanism. The survivors survived mostly due to the blind luck of being far enough away from the impact site, in a place where they could find enough food and shelter to get through the next few years. Survivors were mostly small, opportunistic omnivores, of course, and there's an obvious explanation for this. But still, the survivors weren't adapted to asteroid impacts in any meaningful sense, and neither are their descendants.
It's common to argue that evolutionary theory is trivial and tautological, because it merely asserts that whoever survives is a survivor. But this is a "straw man" argument that's based on an extreme generalization while ignoring significant details. In the case of evolution, the significant parts include the fact that characteristics are inherited from parents, but the inheritance is error prone. This results in offspring that vary slightly from the parents, and many of the variations affect survivability. This in turn affects the relative frequency of characteristics in later generations. When you include such details, the evolutionary process is no longer trivial. And it's no longer clear that everything is necessarily of evolutionary significance.
Hey, when I was a kid a bunch of us experimented with smoke signals. It was fun, and I don't actually remember any adults giving us a hard time about it. We were even "playing with fire", but it was obvious that we were doing it in a safe (if rather smokey) way.
It didn't have a very good bit rate, though.
I've read the RFC that describes the Avian Carrier Protocol. I wonder if anyone has designed a smoke-signal protocol for the Internet?
It might be fun to consider using a cell phone with a camera, plus some image-recognition software, to detect the smoke signal from a distance and convert it to electronic bits. But I suppose the phone companies would prevent us from doing it. Some companies are just no fun at all.
SPs (or phone companies) have ligitimate reasons to be concerned about what you run.
No; they have illegitimate reasons. We should have an inalienable right to communicate as we wish, by whatever means we wish. Corporate control of our communication is a guaranteed disaster for everyone but the owners of the corporation.
In particular, the main design goal of the Internet was to end the traditional stranglehold of equipment suppliers and comm companies over communication. Look up the early docs of the ARPAnet; its primary design goal was to make it possible for any piece of equipment from any vendor to communicate with any other piece of equipment from any other vendor. The vendors had always blocked such universal communication, and the US's Dept of Defense was fed up with it. The companies that supply the equipment still put any roadblocks they can in the way of communicating with their competitors' equipment. The phone companies are especially good at this, at least here in the US.
It's true that this is very easy to understand why the companies would be concerned with what we run on our machines. But this concern is not in any reasonable sense legitimate. It's the worst possible way you could run a comm system. We should continue to fight it any way we can.
The only legitimate restrictions should be that malformed packets may be dropped, and "bandwidth hogs" may be throttled to a reasonable speed limit (i.e., whatever speed they've paid for). But note that such restrictions have little if anything to do with what software you or I may be running. Or with the content of our data packets, for that matter.
"Do you have any sources on this?"
;-) Mac that needed a new disk. It seems that this made it a "new" computer, and nothing was registered. So everything we had that was licensed needed to be relicensed. What a pain in the ass! Three months later, it's still not actually done, due to the complexity of the task (which really is different for every provider). We'll probably just forget about the remaining things, most of which we don't use much. This is a strong argument, in our minds, for saying the hell with Apple, and getting a linux-compatible laptop for our next machine. The linux crowd is getting pretty good at dealing with DRM ...
Well CD sales are still the most popular method to get music, and that is DRM free (and mostly rootkit free).
Indeed. And buying the CD has a lot of advantages. The first is that you have a good backup of the music that's on your computer. When you get a new computer (or have to reinstall your OS), you don't have to go through the complex, failure-prone scheme, different for every online music provider, to transfer the license to the new machine; you just rip the CD again.
And with a CD, you can explain how great it is by sending a track to a friend, who will then buy the CD. With DRM, there's no way I can show a friend how great a recording is, because it won't play on their machine. This is the real problem with DRM: It kills the traditional "Hey, listen to this!" way of increasing sales through sharing by fans. Any artist who wants his/her music spread around will understand this.
In our house, we just had a 3-year-old (just out of warantee
If Wal*Mart serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop shopping there. Eventually, we see stores fail -- even big ones, ...
... This doesn't seem to work very well. I haven't shopped at a Wal*Mart in over a decade, and they're still doing business. They've grown, in fact.
Hmmm
So how long after I stop shopping there can I expect them to fail?
(This isn't an isolated non-failure, either. I haven't bought anything from Microsoft for over a decade, and they're still doing pretty well, too.)
I am exploring "lower case" ID. The claim is that intelligent design/interference in life is not detectable. As a general statement, this appears to be false.
;-) as ours, the radio signature of the Earth would be very obviously "intelligently designed". That is, it would be obvious to any being capable of detecting our radio spectrum that it isn't the result of any natural processes. It has to have been produced by equipment built by thinking creatures of some sort. This, and the inferences that could be made from our signal, was the point of the 1978 Science article. We are broadcasting to our galactic neighborhood the fact that there's an intelligent species on a planet orbiting our sun. Our signal has filled a sphere with a radius of about 80 light-years, and there are a couple thousand stars inside that sphere. If there's an astronomer inside that radius with technology as good as what we had in 1978, he/she/it knows we're here, and knows more about us than most of us might expect. Even without being able to decode program content, a lot can be learned about us from the carrier waves of our broadcasts.
...
Well, yeah; but this is part of the obvious fact that all but one of the replies here obviously missed the point of my original wise-crack. I was pointing out that, to an astronomer with technology as good (or bad
Actually, most of the detectable signal is from the BMEWS military radar systems and the most powerful TV broadcasts. Those have only reached 40 or 50 light years. But there are still a lot of stars within that sphere.
Anyway, it has been amusing to see people pick out the two words "intelligently designed", and take off on a minor flame fest without ever bothering to understand the original intent of those words. This misunderstanding is probably a better joke than my original bit of word play. OTOH, it's an old story. People have this way of picking a word or two out of what someone says, and running on with some sort of rant involving just those few words, without bothering to pay attention to what the original speaker was talking about.
Now lessee what few words here will be extracted for the next flaming rants
Oh, I'm not claiming that they're undetectable. There are several other possibilities. One is that they're around, but are good enough at their disguises that we don't notice them. But a determined detective might. Some time back, there was a cute bit of Sherlock Holmes fanfic about his last case, in which a group of flying-saucer nuts hired him to look for evidence of visiting aliens. He found the evidence in short order, and identified some aliens that weren't careful enough to fool him. He reported his results to the saucer nuts, who paid him. Then, a few days later, he got a visit from one of the aliens, who made him an interesting job offer. I've forgotten the title of the story.
Actually, my favorite possibility is that the aliens are here, and aren't particularly careful about hiding. They've learned that even when they announce themselves, nobody takes them seriously. So they go about their jobs of collecting data about human society, while walking around openly with only pro-forma disguises. It helps here that the field workers sent to Earth are from species that look very much like humans, so the disguises consist of only minor cosmetics, local clothing, and maybe a hairpiece for some of them.
Omni-directional radio of terrestrial origin has very little chance of ever being received in another solar system.
;-)
Not nearly correct. Google for "Eavesdropping The Radio Signature of the Earth", the title of an article by W.T. Sullivan and C Wetherill in the Jan 27, 1978 issue of Science. You'll get links to a number of cached copies of it online, and also some discussions.
One of the hits is to a NASA article on the same topic with updated info and some pretty graphs. It also contains the comment "On a cosmically infinitesimal time scale, Earth has indeed become a very bright planet, outshining the Sun by orders of magnitude in certain narrow frequency ranges."
The general idea is that, first, our radio/TV/radar broadcasts aren't omni-directional; from the start our broadcasts have used antennas that broadcast most of their energy horizontally. The resulting 2-dimensional dispersion pattern reaches much farther than an omni-directional signal of the same energy would. Over time, each broadcast station does send in all directions, but from any one direction, the station appears to fade in and then fade out some minutes later, twice a day. The frequency is doppler-shifted due to the Earth's rotation, and also varies over a year due to our orbit around the sun.
And, second, with our own technology, we could detect the most powerful our own broadcasts from anywhere within the sphere that they've reached. This was the basic question in the Science article. But they also addressed a more interesting question: Assuming our own technology, and the ability to measure the signal's spectrum but not decipher program content, what could be deduced about the senders? The results were quite impressive.
Figuring out which star system the signals come from was trivial (to an astronomer). After a year or so of data collection, the planet's orbit would be known, as would the planet's size. The presence of a large satellite (including its orbit and approximate mass) would also be known. It would be clear that the senders are primarily active during the daytime and early evening.
Further study would generate a rough map of all the broadcast stations. They would be concentrated in narrow bands separating two different sorts of terrain. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, the conclusion would be that the planet is roughly 3/4 water and 1/4 land, and we live on land, primarily along the coasts.
Even more study would determine from spectrum details that there were several different kinds of technology in use to generate the broadcasts, and each kind of equipment was distributed across patches of land that we might call "nations", with some kinds of hardware used by nations not close to each other, implying long-distance technological sharing among coalitions of nations.
It was interesting reading 30 years ago. (But I do remember thinking that it might be a good thing if the actual program content couldn't be decoded.
[I]f they had come, they would have stayed.
So how do you know that we^H^Hthey aren't here right now?
If they were here in the first 99% of those 10 billion years, they would have missed us. We may be marked as a "potential revisit" but the likelihood of any existing lifeforms knowing that we are here is very small.
...
Actually, if they are living (or have automated monitors) within a radius of roughly 80 light years, they know we're here. We've been broadcasting our presence via radio waves for about that long now, and our broadcasts are unmistakably "intelligently designed".
Of course, it just might be that the speed of light is a hard upper bound that can't be violated in our universe. In that case, we might still have some time before visitors come calling.
Our best bet is to continue scanning the skies for possible incoming messages (which might or might not be addressed to us).
And hope it's not just spam
I'd bet that Steve Jobs is right now wishing that people would just stop sending him copies of TFA. I mean, he probably really laughed the first time he read it, but by the 25th time ...
The translation by itself isn't nearly as entertaining as reading both.
This is why it's always a good idea to present the original texts alongside a translation. Sure, as in this example, most people won't be able to read and understand the original. But some will, and (again as in this example) those people can help verify that the translation is accurate.
Just think of all of history's warfare that could have been prevented if if were a legal requirement that translations always be presented side-by-side with the original. Holy books would always include the original, so the mistranslations would be visible to those with a bit of knowledge. Politicians wouldn't get away with "straw-man" distortions of their enemies' statements, because the distorted version would be accompanied by the original.
But I guess we know why such an idea couldn't possibly be accepted, especially not by our religious or political leaders. Probably not by our corporate leaders, either.
Why can't all execs speak like that?
Because then you'd understand them.
Umm, last I understood it, scientists ARE researchers...
Well, the most famous scientist of the previous century, Albert Einstein, wasn't primarily a researcher. Yes, in his early days, he did lab work, as pretty much any budding scientist will do. But his work that made him famous was all theoretical mathematical physics, done with little more equipment than pencil and paper (and brain). He primarily studied the results of the researchers, and came up with theories to explain those results.
The terms "science" and "research" are related, of course, and often go together, but they refer to different kinds of activities. You can do either without doing the other. So the phrase "scientific research" isn't redundant.
When doing either, it does help a lot if you're familiar with the other.
I would count historians as scientists. Why wouldn't they be?
Actually, some historians are scientists, and others aren't. It depends on whether they're using scientific methods in their research. In the field of history, there is a lot of very valuable research that doesn't require scientific methods. Just digging around in archives for old records, collating them, and publishing summaries on narrow topics can be extremely valuable to other historians. Finding survivors of events, interviewing them, and writing down their comments can be valuable non-scientific historical research.
A similar thing happens in some scientific fields. There is a lot of valuable biological data from non-scientists who have merely done a lot of observations of something where they live and written down detail notes. Thus many people have left behind detailed, dated records of what sort of birds and other animals were visiting their backyard feeders. Astronomy depends on a flock of amateurs constantly scanning the night skies and reporting changes. You don't need to be a trained scientist to do this; you just need to be a good observer who is willing to put in the time (and maybe buy some equipment). You can get a subspecies or a comet named after you, while the scientists get theories based on your data named after them.
History and some sciences can really benefit from massive low-level data collection. The science is in the analysis of the data, not so much in the collection of the data.