I can't see why not in the case in that.jpg -- the divot out of one side of the iris would just be a "feature" in the database.
Of course, if you were put into the database "before", it might have a problem "after". But if most of the iris is still intact, maybe it would match enough features.
When I read "iridectomy", I was initially thinking something much more drastic than this.
This is a rumor from TechCrunch. Maybe there's something to it, maybe not. All the other news items reporting this seem to be quoting the one TechCrunch source. Another news item said "A Source Close to Cisco" said there was nothing to the rumor.
Actually, you're thinking of the Shakers. They're the disappearing "no sex at all" sect, not the Quakers. There are Society of Friends churches all over the place, and they're just as likely to have children as anyone else.
Way back when, I went to a talk by Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, who knew a thing or two about high-powered lasers. He said that people who say "just put a mirror on it" to defend against lasers at this power level (over a couple of megawatts per square centimeter) just don't understand lasers. At this power density, at any surface -- that's any surface -- you get a laser-propagated detonation.
I'm not defending Star Wars "lasers", which were (1) visible beams in the vacuum of space, that (2) moved slowly enough that you could see them move. The handguns, they just said they were blasters, which, like phasers, is a made-up term that could be anything.
Eh. Picking nits in the "accuracy" of almost any media sigh-fie is pointless. The writers are Hollywood media types, generally not people with any knowledge of science to speak of. The directors and special effects people aren't any better. Star Trek generally made some attempt at plausibility, though it falls way short most of the time. (Red Matter? Please! Cuisinart of Doom? Give me a break!) Star Wars, on the other hand... as fun a ride as the IV - VI were, when it comes to scientific accuracy, you might as well discuss the scientific accuracy of Harry Potter.
Star Trek often hires science advisers, but they mostly ignore them. I don't think Star Wars has ever bothered.
The people doing Futurama do have a grasp of physics, but accuracy isn't their aim. They do have some fun physics "inside jokes" from time to time.
GATTACA did a pretty decent job. For all its "Woodsy Owl/Fern Gully" stuff, "Avatar" wasn't too bad, though the magnetic fields necessary to levitate those superconducting mountains were flatly ridiculous.
I'd love to see a good SF movie which hired a staff of good science advisers, armed with assault rifles and a license to kill.
I don't care who might abuse the data in what way -- As Doctor Gregory Sullivan (a skeptic of these results) said in the Discover article, "Data is data. That’s the final arbiter." If nuclear decay rates are varying, I very strongly doubt neutrinos are doing it.
I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that major scientific revolutions generally don't come with a scientist shouting "Eureka!" They generally start with a scientist looking at the data and saying "That's funny..." If other researches look at the nuclear decay rates, and also see this sort of variability... That would be really, really funny -- something Really Really Big that we are, at the moment, completely clueless about.
I'm quite confident that the effect, if any, won't much change the dating of fossils, which is what the 4004 BC type creationists want.
If "greens" weren't (as a group, I know there are exceptions) so vehemently, ignorantly, die-hard anti-nuclear-power, I'd be a little more inclined to listen to their point of view. So, I make do with looking at the issues for myself, and deciding what makes sense for myself.
If/when pure electric cars start to become a significant part of the landscape, the electric power generation insanity of the past three decades is going to catch up to all of us in a very big way.
Digg's and Slashdot's faults are pretty much the same: they use a moderation system that doesn't allow the end-user to filter out bad moderators.
For example, on/., it would be trivial to replace meta-moderation with a system that asked:
Would you like to see moderations from this user in the future? If you say no, that person's mods are now 0s to you.
I like that idea a lot. As I understand it, there's a new Digg coming "real soon now" that is going to implement this feature. I'll have to give that a look when it's out of beta.
Others have gone into detail about why Slashdot's moderation system is far superior to Digg's, so I won't rehash that, other than to say I agree completely. I'm not sure how the metamoderation data is used, but it seems to me that it must be to get the generally decent results I see here..
A few years ago, I recall seeing a lot of bitter complaints from some of the more conservative blogs that their Diggs were getting buried by an organized campaign. That never seemed to get any visibility anywhere except on those conservative blogs. Suddenly, it is an issue when some of them seem to have figured out that both sides can play that silly game. Sauce for the goose...
The racist past of the Democratic Party is an interesting story.
Clearly, there were lots of racists who called themselves Democrats, but over the past several decades, with the ascent of people of color in the Democratic Party, those racists would have become more and more uncomfortable as Democrats. Today, a black man is the head of the Democratic Party. By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
So where do you think those racist Democrats went?
And today, the Republican Party also happens to be led by a black man, Michael Steele. That giant flushing sound you hear is your argument going to the appropriate place.
The root of racism is the conviction that race, in and of itself, is Important. Which party is the home of those who are absolutely certain that everything is always about race, and nothing but race?
That's pretty much how I view it -- if everyone had said "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." about the iPod and not bought one, there would never have been the more capable iPods of today.
I am not a "Green." In general, I'm pretty cynical about all the "green this, green that" hype, the "We have to stop burning fossil fuels now or we're all going to DIE" alarmism, etc. I tend to think that a lot of the so-called "Environmental" movement wants to frog-march the surviving remnant of the human race back to a pre-industrial state. But I drive a Prius. It's not exactly the car I wanted (I want a plug-in hybrid with a gasoline-powered generator to charge up the battery for longer trips) but it's a decent step in the right direction. My daily commute is about 50 miles each way, so I think it may come closer to paying off for me, but that wasn't the main consideration.
My Android has come up with some of the most... amazing... interpretations of what I wrote. When I'm remembering to watch its "guesses" like a hawk, and never press the punctuation key until I'm sure it's picked the right word, it's actually nice. Sometimes I only have to type a few characters of a fairly long word.
But if I'm looking at what letters my finger is hitting... Yeah. Very whimsical results. Not as bad as the "Tablespoons" parody of "Jabberwocky as written on an Apple Newton", which was hilarious.
The thing I find most annoying is when I correctly type an actual word in the dictionary, and Android decides that I probably meant some other word.
Not just that, but making a blanket assumption that he knows with complete accuracy everything there is to know about someone's political ideology based on a nine-word signature quote.
Going from there to the conviction that the very well-reasoned posting must be entirely false just because of his irrational reaction to one of Robert Heinlein's snarkier quotes is just the icing on the turd cake.
I have a large quotes file that I rotate through on Usenet, though I don't use them on Slashdot. There are various reasons that each of the quotes tickled my fancy enough to include them in my quotes file. Complete agreement with every possible implication that anyone might possibly construe onto the quotes was never one of those reasons.
The one thing I'd add to your post is the structure of the control rods at Chernobyl, and how they were abused on that fateful day.
The control rods at Chernobyl were "8 meters long, a 1 meter graphite tip, 1 meter of neutral material, and then 5 meters of neutron absorbing material." They had pulled the control rods completely out of the reactor -- all 8 feet of them.
Then, when things started to go non-linear, and they tried to insert them, the first three feet were graphite. More moderator. More reactivity.
My CRC Handbook says that thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more energy available in the earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that...
Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of about $200/pound (1970-something dollars.) That's large enough a potential source that it might as well be infinite.
If we haven't perfected fusion, or built solar power satellites in all that time, we might as well just give up, rip off all our clothes, and climb back into the trees.
No... I forget the guy's name, but he also did a "General Xinchub" costume that was really good, complete with a decent stab at Schlock Mercenary's floating epaulets. (He has closer to the right build for that character - though in this case, he's a little to trim for a proper General Xinchub.)
I've called Comcast customer service a couple of times, and they've been reasonably helpful. But I really hate the "happy-chatty your-best-friend" script that they make the CSRs go through. It's probably part of their attempt to improve the reputation of their customer service. Crazy cat ladies might find it charming. I find it a waste of time.
Well, I recently switched to Comcast. DishTV was OK, and I liked their DVR, but the DSL and POTS from AT&T were... not too good. Decaying old copper infrastructure that goes out or develops horrific noise at every rainstorm, and crumbling insulation on the wires at the junction boxes that flakes off and shorts out every time the technician touches it, and not fast enough to stream audio without constant "buffering" pauses. Streaming video? Ha! I've been waiting for years for AT&T to get around to providing UVerse in my neighborhood, but it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen.
I really hated to go with Comcast. Really, really hated it. But the internet is very fast (I don't utorrent terabytes of movies, so the cap hasn't been an issue) and the voice quality of the phone is good. I save a good bit over Dish + DSL + POTS line, and it'll still be a bit less after the 6-month deal expires.
If uVerse or FIOS is ever available here, I'll grab it in an instant. But I quit holding my breath; I was about to pass out.
Another meme plague I dodged.
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
Well, I'm glad I never got hooked on "Lost". It sounds very PKD-ish, and I find him completely insufferable in general. (I did think "The Man in the High Castle" was OK.)
(The inevitable "If you don't think PKD is the greatest writer in the history of the universe, you're an idiot" screeds happily sent to/dev/null.)
Jay Leno, on (I think) the Friday 5/21 episode, had a quick video summary of the series, which I thought was pretty funny, even though I'm sure I missed a lot of the jokes only knowing about "Lost" second or third hand. (It was a mashup of "Lost" scenes mixed with a number of other "castaways, generally on a beach" scenes from other movies and TV shows, or anything with "Island" in the name. As if the cast of Lost wasn't big enough...)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see why not in the case in that .jpg -- the divot out of one side of the iris would just be a "feature" in the database.
Of course, if you were put into the database "before", it might have a problem "after". But if most of the iris is still intact, maybe it would match enough features.
When I read "iridectomy", I was initially thinking something much more drastic than this.
That's the first hack (literally!) people think of, but an iris scanner won't work on a disembodied eyeball. The iris will be fully dilated.
Of course, if you need to go somewhere controlled by an iris scanner just after a visit to the ophthalmologist... oops!
I was going to go into that -- NPR Science Friday had a segment on this issue about a year ago.
"So long that we've physically adapted to it" is a pretty good indication that humans have been cooking their food for a very long time indeed.
This is a rumor from TechCrunch. Maybe there's something to it, maybe not. All the other news items reporting this seem to be quoting the one TechCrunch source. Another news item said "A Source Close to Cisco" said there was nothing to the rumor.
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/08/31/cisco-has-not-had-talks-about-acquiring-skype-source-says/
Actually, you're thinking of the Shakers. They're the disappearing "no sex at all" sect, not the Quakers. There are Society of Friends churches all over the place, and they're just as likely to have children as anyone else.
Actually, that doesn't generally precede a scientific discovery. It generally precedes getting handed a near-suicidal delivery mission.
Way back when, I went to a talk by Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, who knew a thing or two about high-powered lasers. He said that people who say "just put a mirror on it" to defend against lasers at this power level (over a couple of megawatts per square centimeter) just don't understand lasers. At this power density, at any surface -- that's any surface -- you get a laser-propagated detonation.
I'm not defending Star Wars "lasers", which were (1) visible beams in the vacuum of space, that (2) moved slowly enough that you could see them move. The handguns, they just said they were blasters, which, like phasers, is a made-up term that could be anything.
Eh. Picking nits in the "accuracy" of almost any media sigh-fie is pointless. The writers are Hollywood media types, generally not people with any knowledge of science to speak of. The directors and special effects people aren't any better. Star Trek generally made some attempt at plausibility, though it falls way short most of the time. (Red Matter? Please! Cuisinart of Doom? Give me a break!) Star Wars, on the other hand... as fun a ride as the IV - VI were, when it comes to scientific accuracy, you might as well discuss the scientific accuracy of Harry Potter.
Star Trek often hires science advisers, but they mostly ignore them. I don't think Star Wars has ever bothered.
The people doing Futurama do have a grasp of physics, but accuracy isn't their aim. They do have some fun physics "inside jokes" from time to time.
GATTACA did a pretty decent job. For all its "Woodsy Owl/Fern Gully" stuff, "Avatar" wasn't too bad, though the magnetic fields necessary to levitate those superconducting mountains were flatly ridiculous.
I'd love to see a good SF movie which hired a staff of good science advisers, armed with assault rifles and a license to kill.
I don't care who might abuse the data in what way -- As Doctor Gregory Sullivan (a skeptic of these results) said in the Discover article, "Data is data. That’s the final arbiter." If nuclear decay rates are varying, I very strongly doubt neutrinos are doing it.
I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that major scientific revolutions generally don't come with a scientist shouting "Eureka!" They generally start with a scientist looking at the data and saying "That's funny..." If other researches look at the nuclear decay rates, and also see this sort of variability... That would be really, really funny -- something Really Really Big that we are, at the moment, completely clueless about.
I'm quite confident that the effect, if any, won't much change the dating of fossils, which is what the 4004 BC type creationists want.
And that makes this right... how, exactly?
Dang. There's most of the district's budget shortfall, right there in this one half a billion $ + monument to waste and excess.
If "greens" weren't (as a group, I know there are exceptions) so vehemently, ignorantly, die-hard anti-nuclear-power, I'd be a little more inclined to listen to their point of view. So, I make do with looking at the issues for myself, and deciding what makes sense for myself.
If/when pure electric cars start to become a significant part of the landscape, the electric power generation insanity of the past three decades is going to catch up to all of us in a very big way.
Digg's and Slashdot's faults are pretty much the same: they use a moderation system that doesn't allow the end-user to filter out bad moderators.
For example, on /., it would be trivial to replace meta-moderation with a system that asked:
Would you like to see moderations from this user in the future? If you say no, that person's mods are now 0s to you.
I like that idea a lot. As I understand it, there's a new Digg coming "real soon now" that is going to implement this feature. I'll have to give that a look when it's out of beta.
Others have gone into detail about why Slashdot's moderation system is far superior to Digg's, so I won't rehash that, other than to say I agree completely. I'm not sure how the metamoderation data is used, but it seems to me that it must be to get the generally decent results I see here..
A few years ago, I recall seeing a lot of bitter complaints from some of the more conservative blogs that their Diggs were getting buried by an organized campaign. That never seemed to get any visibility anywhere except on those conservative blogs. Suddenly, it is an issue when some of them seem to have figured out that both sides can play that silly game. Sauce for the goose...
The racist past of the Democratic Party is an interesting story.
Clearly, there were lots of racists who called themselves Democrats, but over the past several decades, with the ascent of people of color in the Democratic Party, those racists would have become more and more uncomfortable as Democrats. Today, a black man is the head of the Democratic Party. By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
So where do you think those racist Democrats went?
And today, the Republican Party also happens to be led by a black man, Michael Steele. That giant flushing sound you hear is your argument going to the appropriate place.
The root of racism is the conviction that race, in and of itself, is Important. Which party is the home of those who are absolutely certain that everything is always about race, and nothing but race?
That's pretty much how I view it -- if everyone had said "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." about the iPod and not bought one, there would never have been the more capable iPods of today.
I am not a "Green." In general, I'm pretty cynical about all the "green this, green that" hype, the "We have to stop burning fossil fuels now or we're all going to DIE" alarmism, etc. I tend to think that a lot of the so-called "Environmental" movement wants to frog-march the surviving remnant of the human race back to a pre-industrial state. But I drive a Prius. It's not exactly the car I wanted (I want a plug-in hybrid with a gasoline-powered generator to charge up the battery for longer trips) but it's a decent step in the right direction. My daily commute is about 50 miles each way, so I think it may come closer to paying off for me, but that wasn't the main consideration.
And it's a pretty darned nice car, overall.
Funny, yes... but also insightful.
My Android has come up with some of the most ... amazing ... interpretations of what I wrote. When I'm remembering to watch its "guesses" like a hawk, and never press the punctuation key until I'm sure it's picked the right word, it's actually nice. Sometimes I only have to type a few characters of a fairly long word.
But if I'm looking at what letters my finger is hitting... Yeah. Very whimsical results. Not as bad as the "Tablespoons" parody of "Jabberwocky as written on an Apple Newton", which was hilarious.
The thing I find most annoying is when I correctly type an actual word in the dictionary, and Android decides that I probably meant some other word.
Plame was outed to the press by Richard Armitage.
Not just that, but making a blanket assumption that he knows with complete accuracy everything there is to know about someone's political ideology based on a nine-word signature quote.
Going from there to the conviction that the very well-reasoned posting must be entirely false just because of his irrational reaction to one of Robert Heinlein's snarkier quotes is just the icing on the turd cake.
I have a large quotes file that I rotate through on Usenet, though I don't use them on Slashdot. There are various reasons that each of the quotes tickled my fancy enough to include them in my quotes file. Complete agreement with every possible implication that anyone might possibly construe onto the quotes was never one of those reasons.
I saved a cool writeup on Chernobyl from the old GEnie forum days:
http://mikevanpelt.com/chernobyl.html
The one thing I'd add to your post is the structure of the control rods at Chernobyl, and how they were abused on that fateful day.
The control rods at Chernobyl were "8 meters long, a 1 meter graphite tip, 1 meter of neutral material, and then 5 meters of neutron absorbing material." They had pulled the control rods completely out of the reactor -- all 8 feet of them.
Then, when things started to go non-linear, and they tried to insert them, the first three feet were graphite. More moderator. More reactivity.
Oops....
My CRC Handbook says that thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more energy available in the earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that...
Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water, at a cost of about $200/pound (1970-something dollars.) That's large enough a potential source that it might as well be infinite.
If we haven't perfected fusion, or built solar power satellites in all that time, we might as well just give up, rip off all our clothes, and climb back into the trees.
No... I forget the guy's name, but he also did a "General Xinchub" costume that was really good, complete with a decent stab at Schlock Mercenary's floating epaulets. (He has closer to the right build for that character - though in this case, he's a little to trim for a proper General Xinchub.)
But... but... but...
This can't happen. The One is President. It's all fluffy bunnies, rainbows, and unicorns now. Hope. Change.
Isn't it?
</sarcasm>
Oh, and I forgot to add...
I've called Comcast customer service a couple of times, and they've been reasonably helpful. But I really hate the "happy-chatty your-best-friend" script that they make the CSRs go through. It's probably part of their attempt to improve the reputation of their customer service. Crazy cat ladies might find it charming. I find it a waste of time.
Well, I recently switched to Comcast. DishTV was OK, and I liked their DVR, but the DSL and POTS from AT&T were ... not too good. Decaying old copper infrastructure that goes out or develops horrific noise at every rainstorm, and crumbling insulation on the wires at the junction boxes that flakes off and shorts out every time the technician touches it, and not fast enough to stream audio without constant "buffering" pauses. Streaming video? Ha! I've been waiting for years for AT&T to get around to providing UVerse in my neighborhood, but it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen.
I really hated to go with Comcast. Really, really hated it. But the internet is very fast (I don't utorrent terabytes of movies, so the cap hasn't been an issue) and the voice quality of the phone is good. I save a good bit over Dish + DSL + POTS line, and it'll still be a bit less after the 6-month deal expires.
If uVerse or FIOS is ever available here, I'll grab it in an instant. But I quit holding my breath; I was about to pass out.
Well, I'm glad I never got hooked on "Lost". It sounds very PKD-ish, and I find him completely insufferable in general. (I did think "The Man in the High Castle" was OK.)
(The inevitable "If you don't think PKD is the greatest writer in the history of the universe, you're an idiot" screeds happily sent to /dev/null.)
Jay Leno, on (I think) the Friday 5/21 episode, had a quick video summary of the series, which I thought was pretty funny, even though I'm sure I missed a lot of the jokes only knowing about "Lost" second or third hand. (It was a mashup of "Lost" scenes mixed with a number of other "castaways, generally on a beach" scenes from other movies and TV shows, or anything with "Island" in the name. As if the cast of Lost wasn't big enough...)