Having a system combine both symbolic logic systems and sensory systems is mentioned in the article as a major focus of research today, but I wonder why this has been split so specifically...maybe someone can help me to understand.
The point at which an understanding of body position is integrated with an overall structure of behavior leading towards a goal seems a mirage, since this isn't necessarily the way animal systems work. The best recreation of natures flexibility in "simple" systems that I've heard of comes from Mark Tilden's analog systems that are controled by tight-loops of feedback that very closely model reflex circuits, but that are capable of recovering from intense deformations of "perfect positioning".
Now, obivously, reflex systems can only go so far, when you have a bot that you want to decide path across a room, there has to be a symbolic understanding of its environment. But it seems to me, from my (albeit very limited) understanding of insect / lower-animal inteligence, that most insects don't actually work up a full symbolic understanding of their surroundings, they just have some sort of sense of direction towards a goal (think moths to light) and then they start the reflex circuits firing to move towards it. I can understand having an end goal of having a full cognitive system comparable to human understanding of the world, but it seems like people might be overshooting the process a bit. We need a greater understanding of the simple systems before we can hope to frog-leap to the big stuff.
To dispute my own point though, I feel its fair to say that the "simple" systems of the animal brain are already currently being modeled to the point that prosthesis for the brain might just be within reach. The success of an artificial hipocampus will prove that modeling the brain isn't necessarily understanding the brain, but it might be easier to learn the systems from our artificial models than the real ones.
Big theories and every bigger gaps
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that since the cosmologists have been working hard since the Big Bang theory was first proposed to work out the manner in which this universe (lets start by not assuming its the only, or one of many, but just...here) came into being. This has worked out well with many other fields since both ends of the spectrum, quantum and astronomical, have been feeding back more solid information (be they constants or otherwise) to "keep the cosmologists on track". But it seems in just the last 5 or so years, the facts about what we *don't* know about the universe are begining to make the theories of cosmology a bit out of touch.
For example back in 1998 when studies of distant supernova gave thorough evidence of an increase in the speed of the universes expansion. Now, this one still seems to be giving headaches to most all the theorists, and it seems to me that working around, or flat out ignoring that fact when building the "big theory" leaves a bit to be desired. Now enter Dark Matter. The lack of a comprehensive understanding of either A) the particle composition of the universe in the order of about 88% or B) an understanding of gravity to a power of 10 gives us yet another piece of the puzzle we're basically clueless about. Now, I understand that the purpose of these kinds of theories is just that, to test out hypotheses against what we do have in terms of fact and go from there, but it seems like maybe we should shelve the Big Theory Of Everything and work a little harder on the Theory of Very Specific Things That We Know We Don't Know.
That being said, IANA(astromomer/cosmologist/physicist) so please, jump down my throat and tell me what *I* don't know because I for one am willing to admit that I don't have it all figured out quite yet.
inside all this, i think we get too caught up on the goals....sometimes a rose is just a rose for all those who think of this as a step forward for the jugernaut of genetic manipulation.... the "real" problem although the backers might disagree is that we don't understand how plants *work*! Both of the research groups themselves tout the benifits this will have for food growth, but think of the benefits this will have to farming not through genetic engineering, but through understanding rices natural growth cycle. The tremendous efficiency increases we've previously seen in growth rates of grain crops has as much come from treating the plants more naturally, but people focus on the association with morally shady or profit driven engineering using this information.
ok ok, and yeah, i know we're not at the center of the universe....what i *meant* by suns movement was the changes in the arc of the sun as seasons change. So wordy though it may be, let me phrase my statement properly for you.
"Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour, one just has to be aware of the arc of the sun across the sky to make any sense of it...in some manner, its amazing that we're not aware of the *change in the sun-arc as the polar tilt changes our orientation to the sun relative to our perpindicular position to the sun as we travel in our oval-shaped orbit around the fusion-ball* through the sky, or the phase of the moon as a civilization. Its not hard to imagine the world in which length of day basically dictated behavior to people, and the changes in earth's seasonal behavior were daily factors in everyones life.
Distrubeted hosting sounds like it would be good news for Dnet but it would mean some complications
Each mirror-site's code would need to have its own verification scheme to validate someones completed blocks (which i think they have now). And it would have to be tamper-proof and/or trusted mirrors since faking a "done with block, this one wasn't it" in the location of the right answer (stat whores) would be a true setback for the project.
Since the full block information wouldn't ever be compiled together on a central server, we might have to give up some of the details from stats. Not having all the block by block count of every persons activity being centralized for stat-computation would probably cut back their bandwidth considerably.
APOD ran a great picture of Ikeya-Zhang last monday, showing how much it has flaired up since coming into the stronger solar wind. Their links give more info about the comet for those interested in such things.
Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour, one just has to be aware of the arc of the sun across the sky to make any sense of it...in some manner, its amazing that we're not aware of the suns movement through the sky, or the phase of the moon as a civilization. Its not hard to imagine the world in which length of day basically dictated behavior to people, and the changes in earth's seasonal behavior were daily factors in everyones life.
I think one of the most fundamentally missed points that hasn't been brought up by any posters i've seen yet is evolution acting on humans through infertility. To say, as the article does, that people are all able to breed therefore all people have a chance to be equally represented in future generations totally ignores possible traits that cause malformed zygotes (sperm meets egg, forms zygote...zygote dies from exposure to chemicals in the womb or from mutation causing deformation at the developmental level). We can know of extreme cases of infertility where no child can develop, since these people will seek treatment, but a carrier of a recessive trait that would kill a zygote in the first 1-20 divisions wouldn't even be something the woman would realize. Since these people have a trait which is being slowly removed from the gene pool, its evolution baby! It seems like an amazing amount of hubris on the part of the article's author to think that our feeble medicine fully bypasses the system in which we all exist. This system doesn't care about curing cancer or heart disease or even malaria...the only thing that defines it is a change in the occurances of every gene we have in our entire populations pool over time, and we've still got that no matter what our medicine does for us.
The article in question skirts the edge of the changing paradigm in bioscience. The "goals" of western medicine for thousands of years has been to fight disease, be it internal or caused by external agents. This has lead to longer lifespans and for many individuals born with defective proteins from mutation, cures to debilitating diseases. These are still major concerns for drug development, and are straightforword since most could potentially (ignorning for the moment delivery/targeting) be solved through the presence of a functioning protein when the body itself can't produce it. But the modern study of cancer and heart/stroke disease has brought a new understanding of the "sources" of disease.
For a population genetics class I took in school, I wrote a draft research grant for a project studying if there were age limiting factors positively selected by nature to limit the age of certain populations. Although my professor did get a good chuckle before "d"ing me, he did say something that caught my ear as blatent established science ego. "That anything would act to limit age goes against the whole understanding of life, that those who live the longest win, produce more young, provide better for them and reflect more of their own genes through greater numbers of offspring". Ok...well, now lets look at cancer. Although the greatest hype (and greatest understanding) of cancer findings revolve around "defective" proteins that cause greater occurances of cancer, the base assumptions about the manner in which cancer forms lies far from the "defective/working copy" model of the body's working.
Copying DNA causes errors, and the body can fix an amazing number of them (end rates: 1 error per 10^9-10^10 bases), although it can't ever fix them all. The more times a cell needs to reproduce to replace damaged or non-functional cells, the more likely it is to lose function in a portion of its working copy of DNA. Cancer forms when these errors occur in specific places, but the general principle is that eventually a certain cell line will accululate enough errors to make it non-functional towards its intended purpose. Does P53 prevent cancer, sure, it lowers the error rate, but as the article mentions, too much p53 and you have other effects. The balance exists and has been selected for because it makes a working body capable of reproducing and caring for its young and then goes away. The premise that there is this one thing, this one chemical or protein or substance that will "unlock" another 50 years of human life is based on the premise that everything else in the human body will remain functioning were it not for that one thing. Evolution has crafted our bodies for their purposes, and none of it has been "tested" after 100 years. So where are we? We prevent a "disease", if you can call something like cancer or heart disease the same as a bacterial infection, only to find...Lo! there's something else that doesn't work after its been churning through our bodies for 80 years.
Geneticists especially are learning the lesson of our war against disease, stemming in large part from the telomerase hype. Hey, look what I found, the cellular time bomb! If we can keep these puppies long, we'll have immortal cells and we'll all live forever! Well, guess what, cell death isn't why we die. Also research into menopausal woman is showing us the same path. Replace estrogen when the body stops making it and we prevent osteoperosis, but estrogen's presense raises rates of heart disease, breast and ovarian cancer. In the end, its all the same message... we die from our bodies falling apart, functioning way past their warranty. And we're just now begining to realize this as we find more and more reasons why one substance doesn't do it all.
I remember seeing an article on Wired talking about an USAF spectrum available to 3g services. It isn't the original contended Army/Navy bandwidth. Anyone know if this applies to the UTMS bandwidth as well?
slinted
I'm trying to figure out who the major players in the comercial superconductor game are, and i'm curious if any/.ers have come across who they're buying the cables from and who's going to be maintaining them...
slinted (ofthehillpeople)
With all the discussions ongoing about the ownership of postings here, and the accountablity Slashdot is owning up to for publishing people comments, one thing i have *not* heard people speaking of is the ever-present question of who/what/where/why the information that at the core begins these discussions comes from. It internet accuracy issue has been all but dropped as of late, and even still, we see more and more "hoaxes" and even more, we see hoaxes succeding brings sick numbers of hits into sites that don't care on the flip side the lesser press about the hoax brings in EVEN MORE HITS (which as we all know, is still seen as all important, even with the stock markets recent trends). I just think that the moderation trends for some discussions brings in more factual information (ie. stories based in fact) and other stories end up with highly moderated opinions (which aren't bad, except that i would just love to heard some sort of secondary confirmation through such posts). I guess thats the crux of it though, the core of the problem lies in the lack of backwords attention by the large audience in really railing the ones responsible for not checking their references. -slinted
Had i not seen someone else mentioning this, i would have chalked it up to my own eyes playing tricks, but yes, at 4:18 am EST Ithaca, NY (US): 42n26, 76w30 to the north, the sky was faintly red in color, it illumintaed such even through several of the clouds that were in the sky
There is obivously lots of differant things that have been published on this subject, so there are lots of facts and statistics out there, more than can be made sense of, but some do stick out upon view of them. One of a biological nature, and is probably the scariest, is that sperm rates have dropped by 45% in the last 45 years (i've seen this from 3 differant sources, i wouldn't have believed it had i seen it from one or two) most likely from chemicals and elements of our diets that cause this to occur, although it has never been locked down to a single compound or food. The second fact that seems to be most prevalent in discussions of this nature, is the almost perfectly linear relationship between women's education levels and birth rates overall. If you look at a population in terms of labor populations and efficiency rates, then it only makes sense that a population has 2x the "workability" if woman are included, plus, and i don't assume to understand why exactly this trend is true, but the arguements for smaller families (ie. more resources invested per child) if educating your children is a high priority, which is more likely if the parents are educated themselves. These kind of discussions need to get out of the mindset that we're talking about the US or even Europe in a big way. These kind of "trends" base MAINLY on the unknown, which is the rapidly changing populations of South East Asia, Africa, and the other developing areas of the world, so it is important to know that everything could go quite opposite what they "expect".
Until I went back and looked, I didn't realize that most of the work in this arena was also done by Craig Venter's TIGR (The Institute for Genome Research). It would seem (from stories like this one) that his "new" organism, might just be new, but will be largely based on the research done in studies using this minimalistic technique.
As a student of genomics, I think this research is a smidge beyond premature and more importantly, potentially dangerous. Much research has been done into the "minimalist bacteria" ie. what is the fewest number of genes needed to create a viable bacteria. This method includes removing genes and seeing if the bacteria is still viable, this has been done....but... The factor involved in this research that differs from this (and what truely bothers me about the research) is the mixing of many differant genes from many differant bacterial strains into a "new" organism. In many ways, one could say that it isn't going to be a "new" life, just a novel one, but the synergetic affect of mixing all these genes could have some tremendously bad affects on the environment (at least in my opinion). When one looks at the affects that foreign species (zebra muscles and gobi's in the great lakes ecosystem, rabbits in australia, etc.) one sees that things which don't belong, while doing *quite* well in these environments, often do so at the cost of other organisms survival. The human genome quite possible only consists of 100,000 genes...when you *really* think about this, that isn't that much at all. One wouldn't think that 100,000 specific enzymatic reactions would be enough to explain human complexity, and inteligence, but it does, which again lends evidence that the 100,000 genes aren't 100,000 independent reactions at all, but the combined affect of 100,000 actions/reactions at once. Being that Dr. Venter (who's been quite busy lately, finishing the Drosophilia genome, squaking about finishing the human genome project before everyone else, etc.) cannot possible know the *combined* affect of the genes he's planning on combining, I can't see how he can know its going to be safe were it to be released into the world at large... Ok, just my 2cents...
The computing power necessary to actually make this work would be great, and it makes me wonder as I often have in the past when I think about personal assistant-style bots. Since it would seem as if this is to be used within the compounds of the ship, why not have a full *powerful* computer somewhere, with a series of radio (IR, any frequency really, as long as it doesn't fry the other componants, or change the channels on the space-tv) towers to keep it ino touch. It just seems that, yes, miniturization is getting there, but as of right now, you're always going to be able to pull more out of a bigger, "landlocked" base computer, and just have this be a peripheral of it. Just a thought...
Slashdot Mirror
Having a system combine both symbolic logic systems and sensory systems is mentioned in the article as a major focus of research today, but I wonder why this has been split so specifically...maybe someone can help me to understand.
The point at which an understanding of body position is integrated with an overall structure of behavior leading towards a goal seems a mirage, since this isn't necessarily the way animal systems work. The best recreation of natures flexibility in "simple" systems that I've heard of comes from Mark Tilden's analog systems that are controled by tight-loops of feedback that very closely model reflex circuits, but that are capable of recovering from intense deformations of "perfect positioning".
Now, obivously, reflex systems can only go so far, when you have a bot that you want to decide path across a room, there has to be a symbolic understanding of its environment. But it seems to me, from my (albeit very limited) understanding of insect / lower-animal inteligence, that most insects don't actually work up a full symbolic understanding of their surroundings, they just have some sort of sense of direction towards a goal (think moths to light) and then they start the reflex circuits firing to move towards it. I can understand having an end goal of having a full cognitive system comparable to human understanding of the world, but it seems like people might be overshooting the process a bit. We need a greater understanding of the simple systems before we can hope to frog-leap to the big stuff.
To dispute my own point though, I feel its fair to say that the "simple" systems of the animal brain are already currently being modeled to the point that prosthesis for the brain might just be within reach. The success of an artificial hipocampus will prove that modeling the brain isn't necessarily understanding the brain, but it might be easier to learn the systems from our artificial models than the real ones.
It seems to me that since the cosmologists have been working hard since the Big Bang theory was first proposed to work out the manner in which this universe (lets start by not assuming its the only, or one of many, but just...here) came into being. This has worked out well with many other fields since both ends of the spectrum, quantum and astronomical, have been feeding back more solid information (be they constants or otherwise) to "keep the cosmologists on track". But it seems in just the last 5 or so years, the facts about what we *don't* know about the universe are begining to make the theories of cosmology a bit out of touch.
For example back in 1998 when studies of distant supernova gave thorough evidence of an increase in the speed of the universes expansion. Now, this one still seems to be giving headaches to most all the theorists, and it seems to me that working around, or flat out ignoring that fact when building the "big theory" leaves a bit to be desired. Now enter Dark Matter. The lack of a comprehensive understanding of either A) the particle composition of the universe in the order of about 88% or B) an understanding of gravity to a power of 10 gives us yet another piece of the puzzle we're basically clueless about. Now, I understand that the purpose of these kinds of theories is just that, to test out hypotheses against what we do have in terms of fact and go from there, but it seems like maybe we should shelve the Big Theory Of Everything and work a little harder on the Theory of Very Specific Things That We Know We Don't Know.
That being said, IANA(astromomer/cosmologist/physicist) so please, jump down my throat and tell me what *I* don't know because I for one am willing to admit that I don't have it all figured out quite yet.
*cough*
inside all this, i think we get too caught up on the goals....sometimes a rose is just a rose
for all those who think of this as a step forward for the jugernaut of genetic manipulation....
the "real" problem although the backers might disagree is that we don't understand how plants *work*! Both of the research groups themselves tout the benifits this will have for food growth, but think of the benefits this will have to farming not through genetic engineering, but through understanding rices natural growth cycle. The tremendous efficiency increases we've previously seen in growth rates of grain crops has as much come from treating the plants more naturally, but people focus on the association with morally shady or profit driven engineering using this information.
ok ok, and yeah, i know we're not at the center of the universe....what i *meant* by suns movement was the changes in the arc of the sun as seasons change. So wordy though it may be, let me phrase my statement properly for you.
"Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour, one just has to be aware of the arc of the sun across the sky to make any sense of it...in some manner, its amazing that we're not aware of the *change in the sun-arc as the polar tilt changes our orientation to the sun relative to our perpindicular position to the sun as we travel in our oval-shaped orbit around the fusion-ball* through the sky, or the phase of the moon as a civilization. Its not hard to imagine the world in which length of day basically dictated behavior to people, and the changes in earth's seasonal behavior were daily factors in everyones life.
It was just eye candy, but at least its *good* eye candy.
Distrubeted hosting sounds like it would be good news for Dnet but it would mean some complications
Each mirror-site's code would need to have its own verification scheme to validate someones completed blocks (which i think they have now). And it would have to be tamper-proof and/or trusted mirrors since faking a "done with block, this one wasn't it" in the location of the right answer (stat whores) would be a true setback for the project.
Since the full block information wouldn't ever be compiled together on a central server, we might have to give up some of the details from stats. Not having all the block by block count of every persons activity being centralized for stat-computation would probably cut back their bandwidth considerably.
APOD ran a great picture of Ikeya-Zhang last monday, showing how much it has flaired up since coming into the stronger solar wind. Their links give more info about the comet for those interested in such things.
Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour, one just has to be aware of the arc of the sun across the sky to make any sense of it...in some manner, its amazing that we're not aware of the suns movement through the sky, or the phase of the moon as a civilization. Its not hard to imagine the world in which length of day basically dictated behavior to people, and the changes in earth's seasonal behavior were daily factors in everyones life.
I think one of the most fundamentally missed points that hasn't been brought up by any posters i've seen yet is evolution acting on humans through infertility. To say, as the article does, that people are all able to breed therefore all people have a chance to be equally represented in future generations totally ignores possible traits that cause malformed zygotes (sperm meets egg, forms zygote...zygote dies from exposure to chemicals in the womb or from mutation causing deformation at the developmental level).
We can know of extreme cases of infertility where no child can develop, since these people will seek treatment, but a carrier of a recessive trait that would kill a zygote in the first 1-20 divisions wouldn't even be something the woman would realize. Since these people have a trait which is being slowly removed from the gene pool, its evolution baby! It seems like an amazing amount of hubris on the part of the article's author to think that our feeble medicine fully bypasses the system in which we all exist. This system doesn't care about curing cancer or heart disease or even malaria...the only thing that defines it is a change in the occurances of every gene we have in our entire populations pool over time, and we've still got that no matter what our medicine does for us.
when was the last time you gave out *your* slashdot name to someone you knew rl?
For a population genetics class I took in school, I wrote a draft research grant for a project studying if there were age limiting factors positively selected by nature to limit the age of certain populations. Although my professor did get a good chuckle before "d"ing me, he did say something that caught my ear as blatent established science ego. "That anything would act to limit age goes against the whole understanding of life, that those who live the longest win, produce more young, provide better for them and reflect more of their own genes through greater numbers of offspring". Ok...well, now lets look at cancer. Although the greatest hype (and greatest understanding) of cancer findings revolve around "defective" proteins that cause greater occurances of cancer, the base assumptions about the manner in which cancer forms lies far from the "defective/working copy" model of the body's working.
Copying DNA causes errors, and the body can fix an amazing number of them (end rates: 1 error per 10^9-10^10 bases), although it can't ever fix them all. The more times a cell needs to reproduce to replace damaged or non-functional cells, the more likely it is to lose function in a portion of its working copy of DNA. Cancer forms when these errors occur in specific places, but the general principle is that eventually a certain cell line will accululate enough errors to make it non-functional towards its intended purpose. Does P53 prevent cancer, sure, it lowers the error rate, but as the article mentions, too much p53 and you have other effects. The balance exists and has been selected for because it makes a working body capable of reproducing and caring for its young and then goes away. The premise that there is this one thing, this one chemical or protein or substance that will "unlock" another 50 years of human life is based on the premise that everything else in the human body will remain functioning were it not for that one thing. Evolution has crafted our bodies for their purposes, and none of it has been "tested" after 100 years. So where are we? We prevent a "disease", if you can call something like cancer or heart disease the same as a bacterial infection, only to find...Lo! there's something else that doesn't work after its been churning through our bodies for 80 years.
Geneticists especially are learning the lesson of our war against disease, stemming in large part from the telomerase hype. Hey, look what I found, the cellular time bomb! If we can keep these puppies long, we'll have immortal cells and we'll all live forever! Well, guess what, cell death isn't why we die. Also research into menopausal woman is showing us the same path. Replace estrogen when the body stops making it and we prevent osteoperosis, but estrogen's presense raises rates of heart disease, breast and ovarian cancer. In the end, its all the same message... we die from our bodies falling apart, functioning way past their warranty. And we're just now begining to realize this as we find more and more reasons why one substance doesn't do it all.
I remember seeing an article on Wired talking about an USAF spectrum available to 3g services. It isn't the original contended Army/Navy bandwidth. Anyone know if this applies to the UTMS bandwidth as well?
slinted
I'm trying to figure out who the major players in the comercial superconductor game are, and i'm curious if any /.ers have come across who they're buying the cables from and who's going to be maintaining them...
slinted (ofthehillpeople)
With all the discussions ongoing about the ownership of postings here, and the accountablity Slashdot is owning up to for publishing people comments, one thing i have *not* heard people speaking of is the ever-present question of who/what/where/why the information that at the core begins these discussions comes from. It internet accuracy issue has been all but dropped as of late, and even still, we see more and more "hoaxes" and even more, we see hoaxes succeding brings sick numbers of hits into sites that don't care on the flip side the lesser press about the hoax brings in EVEN MORE HITS (which as we all know, is still seen as all important, even with the stock markets recent trends). I just think that the moderation trends for some discussions brings in more factual information (ie. stories based in fact) and other stories end up with highly moderated opinions (which aren't bad, except that i would just love to heard some sort of secondary confirmation through such posts). I guess thats the crux of it though, the core of the problem lies in the lack of backwords attention by the large audience in really railing the ones responsible for not checking their references. -slinted
Had i not seen someone else mentioning this, i would have chalked it up to my own eyes playing tricks, but yes, at 4:18 am EST Ithaca, NY (US): 42n26, 76w30 to the north, the sky was faintly red in color, it illumintaed such even through several of the clouds that were in the sky
There is obivously lots of differant things that have been published on this subject, so there are lots of facts and statistics out there, more than can be made sense of, but some do stick out upon view of them. One of a biological nature, and is probably the scariest, is that sperm rates have dropped by 45% in the last 45 years (i've seen this from 3 differant sources, i wouldn't have believed it had i seen it from one or two) most likely from chemicals and elements of our diets that cause this to occur, although it has never been locked down to a single compound or food. The second fact that seems to be most prevalent in discussions of this nature, is the almost perfectly linear relationship between women's education levels and birth rates overall. If you look at a population in terms of labor populations and efficiency rates, then it only makes sense that a population has 2x the "workability" if woman are included, plus, and i don't assume to understand why exactly this trend is true, but the arguements for smaller families (ie. more resources invested per child) if educating your children is a high priority, which is more likely if the parents are educated themselves. These kind of discussions need to get out of the mindset that we're talking about the US or even Europe in a big way. These kind of "trends" base MAINLY on the unknown, which is the rapidly changing populations of South East Asia, Africa, and the other developing areas of the world, so it is important to know that everything could go quite opposite what they "expect".
Until I went back and looked, I didn't realize that most of the work in this arena was also done by Craig Venter's TIGR (The Institute for Genome Research). It would seem (from stories like this one) that his "new" organism, might just be new, but will be largely based on the research done in studies using this minimalistic technique.
As a student of genomics, I think this research is a smidge beyond premature and more importantly, potentially dangerous. Much research has been done into the "minimalist bacteria" ie. what is the fewest number of genes needed to create a viable bacteria. This method includes removing genes and seeing if the bacteria is still viable, this has been done....but... The factor involved in this research that differs from this (and what truely bothers me about the research) is the mixing of many differant genes from many differant bacterial strains into a "new" organism. In many ways, one could say that it isn't going to be a "new" life, just a novel one, but the synergetic affect of mixing all these genes could have some tremendously bad affects on the environment (at least in my opinion). When one looks at the affects that foreign species (zebra muscles and gobi's in the great lakes ecosystem, rabbits in australia, etc.) one sees that things which don't belong, while doing *quite* well in these environments, often do so at the cost of other organisms survival. The human genome quite possible only consists of 100,000 genes...when you *really* think about this, that isn't that much at all. One wouldn't think that 100,000 specific enzymatic reactions would be enough to explain human complexity, and inteligence, but it does, which again lends evidence that the 100,000 genes aren't 100,000 independent reactions at all, but the combined affect of 100,000 actions/reactions at once. Being that Dr. Venter (who's been quite busy lately, finishing the Drosophilia genome, squaking about finishing the human genome project before everyone else, etc.) cannot possible know the *combined* affect of the genes he's planning on combining, I can't see how he can know its going to be safe were it to be released into the world at large... Ok, just my 2cents...
The computing power necessary to actually make this work would be great, and it makes me wonder as I often have in the past when I think about personal assistant-style bots. Since it would seem as if this is to be used within the compounds of the ship, why not have a full *powerful* computer somewhere, with a series of radio (IR, any frequency really, as long as it doesn't fry the other componants, or change the channels on the space-tv) towers to keep it ino touch. It just seems that, yes, miniturization is getting there, but as of right now, you're always going to be able to pull more out of a bigger, "landlocked" base computer, and just have this be a peripheral of it. Just a thought...