There's also a concern/rumor/claim that anti-biotic soap is no more effective at killing bacteria than non-anti-biotic soap. I've even seen both claims made in the same slashdot post.
It's hard to believe that both are true.
Also, it's important to remember that many anti-biotic substances are naturally occuring. Anti-biotics have been present in the environment for millions of years at completely uncontrolled levels. If it were possible for a super-bacterium to evolve, it is likely that it would have done so by now. What evidence we have suggests that anti-biotic resistance is a costly trick, and the bacteria that develop it are less able to infect healthy organisms, which is why we see anti-biotic resistant strains in hospitals and prisons, where there are lots of immune-compromised people.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the presence of synthetic anti-biotics in our environment, or that we should merrily go on over-dosing ourselves with anti-biotics at every turn.
I wish it were possible to raise environmental and public-health concerns without claiming the world was coming to an end, because any objective look at the facts will always tell you it isn't. This leads to an increasing level of skepticism when none of the terrible predictions come true, which leads to lots of important problems being ignored because the only people who take them seriously are kooks.
Robert J. Sawyer considers something like this in his book "Hominids", which posits an alternative universe where Neaderthal never died out. Everyone in the Neaderthal society is implanted with a device that records their activity in realtime, piped to a physically and cryptographically sealed "Alibi Archive" that can only be accessed by permission of the person being recorded.
While the novel isn't all that great, this idea is extremely interesting. For anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything (like, say, any man who has ever had a close relationship with any woman:-) even a straight digital voice recording would be of value.
More seriously, an ex-girlfriend of mine was a volunteer at a women's shelter, and used to complain that too many cases came down to "he-said/she-said", so I suggested the shelter start using compact, cheap, voice-activated digital recorders to lend to women who were in abusive relationships but who couldn't get anyone to listen to them. So far as I know, this plan has been adopted, although the current state of my relationship with that particular woman precludes my knowing any of the details...
Slavery was outlawed in Britain (1837) before it was in the U.S. (1867)
Women had the vote in New Zealand (1893) before they did in the U.S. (1920) (although in some states women had the vote earlier than that).
So who taught what to whom?
The rights enshrined in the original Bill of Rights were primarily the rights of Englishmen, and the American Rebellion was fought in no small part because the colonists wanted the same rights they would have enjoyed in England.
Both the U.S. and British constitutions have undergone substantial changes over the past 200 years, but even counting from their respective civil wars the constitution of Britain as a parliamentary monarchy is hundreds of years older than that of the United States as a democratic republic.
Offhand, I can't think of a single liberty that the U.S. has lead the rest of the world on.
Freedom of speech is an English ideal. Likewise the freedom to defend one's home. Likewise the idea that only elected representatives have the right to impose direct taxes on the people.
As in the United States, these ideals have often been violated by the government of the day--the current U.S. administration is certainly imprisoning innocent people without trial in Gauntanamo Bay, for example. But the idea of freedom is England's great gift to the world, including the United States. Not the other way around.
The distinguishing feature of the American constitution is that it is a written document, which made America uniquely a nation of laws. That makes the current American attempts to create zones of extra-legal jurisdiction particularly tragic.
I was amused to see the ideal gas law amongst the contenders, written as PV = nRT where n is in some weird units and R is some weird constant.
A much nicer form is:
P = nkT
where n is the number density of particles and k is Boltzmann's constant.
For some reason chemists persist in using 12 divided by the mass of the proton in grams as the basis for all measurement, and this choice leads to a proliferation of strange constants and units. I know there are historical reasons for this, but one only has to look at the way physics has re-invented its notation and concepts repeatedly over the years to realize that historical reasons are no excuse.
Written in a sensible form, the idea gas law is a very beautiful equation, though not so beautiful as the Dirac equation, which is the only differential equation in physics that I'm aware of that describes reality and only reality.
All the other equations we use have non-physical as well as physical solutions, and we quietly throw out the non-physical solutions. We sometimes even try to maintain that mathematics is "unreasonably successful" as a means of describing reality, when we know perfectly well that half of what our equations describe has no physical counter-part, but is just an ugly artefact of an imperfect description.
From TFA: The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team.
Effectively, the Southampton group entered a team in a competition that scores individuals, so the "winners" were individual programs that had the backing of many other individual programs.
An alternative, and arguably superior, means of scoring entries would be one in which teams were scored rather than individual programs. In this contest the Southampton team would not do nearly so well.
If individual scoring continues we can expect to see entries that will attempt to recognize the Southampton programs and put a spanner in their works. These programs will be known as "labour unions", "socialist agitators" or "liberals".
The Southamptonites might counter with a raft of programs that attempt to identify the spoilers, but in this environment it will be hard to do much against them, as their activity will be fundamentally aimed at wrecking rather than winning.
The whole thing starts to look depressingly familiar, doesn't it? And all because the scoring system can be gamed by allowing one program to exploit the efforts of others...
This is something that people on/. ought to understand: the difference between null and zero.
The market value of the linux kernel is null--it does not have one. That's very different from having a value of zero, which would be the case if there were a market and the only way you could transfer ownership of the kernel in that market would be to give it away.
...and that will cost someone money in coping with the resulting ecological changes.
There is one certainty in all of this: the genes spliced into GMOs will get loose in the world due to inter-breeding with non-GM organisms of the same species. This is as certain as losing in Vegas.
So how does this sound: I propose to release novel self-replicating entities into your environment, and I don't know what the consequences will be. I can be almost certain they won't lead to the end of the world as we know it, but on the other hand it isn't a great strech to imagine that my self-replicating entities are going to have a significant effect on the ecosystem you live in and depend upon.
Personally, I'd be very unhappy with someone making this proposal, and the comparisions that come to mind with existing activities, such as selective breeding for domestication, don't really hold water because a) the whole point of GMOs is that they contain genetic combinations that would not occur in nature and b) selective breeding for domestication has already been responsible for major environmental changes.
Domestic species both force out non-domestic ones (as happened with prairie grasses) and due to increased genetic homogeneity may also be more susceptible to disease. So comparing the GMO process to domestication is not entirely reassuring.
"Industrial biology" has been extremely good for us humans in the past hundred-odd years. We can feed ourselves, worldwide, better than at any time in history. But there have been costs, and I'd like to see a really compelling case made for adding to those costs with GMOs.
So far, that case has not been made, and many GMO proponents simply deny that there are going to be costs. Only when they admit to that will there be a meaningful debate. Of course, for that to happen, the "GMOs are the work of Satan" mantra from the other side would have to fall silent as well.
The idea that copyright infringement is theft is very recent and not well-considered. Here is an excellent article outlining the issue, by a Stanford law professor:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id =582602
The gist of the argument is that property law was developed to deal with the problem of "negative externalities", which are things that cost me when someone else uses a good or resource. The traditional example is that your grazing your sheep on my land reduces my ability to graze my sheep there--you have "externalized" (put on to me) some of the cost of grazing your sheep. Property law ensures that people who use a resource "internalize" (take on themselves) the costs and consequences of using the resources they own.
Copyright and patent protection are quite different, as they are concerned with preventing "positive externalities", which are benefits to someone else from my actions. The world is full of such things, from my planting flowers in my front garden to people creating movies that might be downloaded.
The question of whether there needs to be a legal framework for preventing such positive externalities is an open question. Whether or not property law is the appropriate framework for such prevention is even more open.
BTW, anyone want to speculate on H/anti-H bombs? No neutrons to shoot all over the place,
Repeat after me: gamma rays with energies higher than a few MeV make lots and lots of free neutrons when they interact with matter. A surprising number of people on/. are apparently not aware of this well-known fact.
It goes like this: the binding energy of your average nucleon is 6 to 8 MeV. H/anti-H would produce gammas with energies up to just under 1 GeV. In their travels through nearby matter, those gammas will knock quite a few neutrons out of nuclei.
This will have two effects. One, the neutrons will get absorbed by other stuff, producing radioactive isotopes. Two, the nuclei that have been busted up will themselves leave radioactive daughters (just use your imagination for the lame sexist joke at this point, ok, and don't bother to post it, please. "Daughters" is the correct technical term.)
The lifetime of the radioactive products will depend on the average atomic number of stuff the gammas pass through. If it's mostly light elements, the fallout will be short-lived, if it's mostly heavy elements the fallout will be long-lived.
The article describes research into stable positronium (e+/e- bound pair) not anti-hydrogen, so all the energy would come out at in 511 keV gammas, which is nice because the high-energy gammas you'd get from P+/P- annihilation would spall off neutrons from just about everything, and thereby create lots of radioactive fallout.
I'm doubtful that positronium can be stabilized, and hopeful that no one will try too hard.
You've committed a logical fallacy that I call "argumentum ad stultum": argument from stupidity.
Any argument of the form:
X would be stupid.
Therefore no one would do X.
is fallacious because it depends on a hidden premise that is known to be false:
No one would ever do anything stupid.
But we know, for a fact, that people do incredibly stupid things every day. I mean, what president would be stupid enough to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office?
So given that the reasons for believing there was any significant threat from Iraq are all trivially false, and given that the other reasons to invade Iraq are all pretty lame, it is very easy to conclude that Bush et al are either extremely stupid or clinically insane, or some combination of both.
Evil doesn't come into it. Stupidity and megalomania are the only things required, and anyone who knows anything about human history knows that there is no shortage of either, especially in the halls of power.
The problem with this is that the claim "evolution might be false" does not have anything to do with the claim "Christian creationism might be true".
Any number of details of current evolutionary theory might be wrong. There may even be cases where for some reason evolution doesn't occur at all, or where a species was created by the intervention of forces other than variation and natural selection. Humans may actually soon have the ability to design organisms, for example, so we'll have instances of organisms that were not (entirely) produced by evolution. O wait, we already do--they're called domestic animals, and were much studied by some guy named Darwin.
But none of this would add any weight to the claim that Christian creationism might be true. That is, critiquing existing explanations is unrelated to justifying alternative explanations, except that it "opens the field" to an infinite number of alternative hypotheses.
So even if we were able to show that evolution through variation and natural selection simply did not occur, we would have no way of deciding, on that basis alone, that the world was made by YHWH or Chronos or Mazda or Marduk.
"coming along"... "working on"... "chances are good".
All of these equal "not real" if you're a real developer working on real code that needs to run real fast and ship real soon.
As well as being a very easy language to write very slow code in, Java is a terrible language for product support. My company has a product that has a Java front-end, including some blazingly fast graphics stuff (much faster than supposedly leading-edge stuff from IBM, as it happens.) For the first year after product release nearly all of our support calls were due to older or oddball JRE versions on customer machines. We moved to shipping our own JRE (increasing our disk footprint by 25 MB) and all the problems went away.
On top of this, there are major memory managment issues--we are often pushing up against the full 2G limit on Win32, and the wheels come off Java's ability to do anything intelligent with memory management well before that. You can deal with it by being extremely clever, but I'd rather see that cleverness spent on solving real domain problems, not language-related issues.
And don't get me started on the stuff you have to do to seamlessly mix lightweight and heavyweight components.
The developers on my team did a brilliant job of dealing with Java's inadequacies, so brilliant that many people don't believe the front end is written in Java when they first see it. Think about that for a second: a customer sees a clean, responsive UI with standard behavior and no weirdness, and says, "So this is all written in C++, right?"
--Tom
Re:Terraforming or ecosynthesising mars
on
Making Tracks on Mars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Unfortunately for this hypothesis, Venus has no magnetosphere, experiences much stronger solar wind than Mars, and has no shortage of atmosphere.
So Mars' lack of atmosphere is likely due to a combination of factors, with the lack of magentosphere being perhaps necessary but hardly sufficient. The question for terraformers is whether or not it is possible to create and sustain an environment like the one we have on Earth via biological means.
It is worth noting that in the absence of life, Earth would be a lot less habitable than it is. That is, life on Earth has created conditions that are suitable for life on Earth. Or more correctly, life on Earth has found relatively open evolutionary niches due to the actions of other life on Earth. The most obvious thing like this is oxygen, which would weather out of the atmosphere in a few million years were it not a waste product thrown away by plants.
--Tom
Re:Well I'll be damned
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A couple of nW per mCi is going to have pretty limited usefulness. Even if they boost the conversion efficiency substantially (4% at the moment, so the max is 25 times) they're still talking about a miniscule amount of power for a non-miniscule amount of radioactivity.
IAANP, and I've handled mCi sources, and treated them with considerable respect. Even pure beta-emiters like 63Ni (60-odd keV endpoint) generate significant flux of x-rays due to shake-off electrons and bremmstralung (fairly negligable). A mCi pure-beta source is going to be about the limit before you get significant levels of difficult-to-shield radiation from these effects.
The k-shell x-rays from 63Ni (or rather, 63Cu, the decay product) are just under 9 keV, which can be shielded with a bit of lead, but enough that you're talking about a battery that is mostly shielding. You very rapidly burn the size advantage.
And then there's the disposal issue--these things will wind up in landfills, just like every other radioactive source. For example, a typical (micro-curie) calibration source is aluminum-encased and about the size of quarter. I once had a student put one in his pocket, walk out of the lab, and almost spend the source in a vending machine. There is no reasonable protection against stupidity of that nature. And there's so much of it about.
So while I think these things are potentially great for certain remote sensing applications, I don't expect to see one in my cell phone or lap-top any time soon now. If we were able to make a cell phone or laptop that could run comfortably on a mCi source, it would be able to run almost forever on a conventional battery, so the advantage of a radioactive battery is not at all clear.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is correct, and any time you find yourself talking to someone who advocates old-fashion statism to protect the environment, try them out with the slogan: "Coercion is not sustainable."
Coercive policies from the left or right are the antithesis of a truly green society, which must be based on the voluntary commitment of the majority of citizens if it is to be truly sustainable.
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
Loads of falsehoods. For example, wind energy does not kill birds in large numbers.
http://www.nationalwind.org/pubs/avian_collision s. pdf
If this description of the bomb is correct (IANP, but I have very little knowledge of historical designs of nuclear weapons) it should be a cause for concern.
Uranimum bombs are very easy to detonate. Plutonium bombs are much, much harder. This is the fortunate fork of the modern terrorist's dilemma: sufficiently enriched 235U is very hard to produce, but very easy to detonate. 239Pu is relatively easy to produce, but very hard to detonate.
The Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type uranium device that had never been tested--Trinity was an plutonium implosion device. The reason why the uranium bomb hadn't been tested is because it's so damned easy to make the things blow up.
The good news for the modern world is that while we have lots (i.e. many, many tonnes) of plutonium lying around, we have very, very little highly enriched uranium. So a hundred-odd kilos of HEU would be a terrorist's delight.
If this bomb is as described, it should be raised and destroyed.
Back in the day when I was still working directly in research as a pure physicist, I got a lot of null results. People used to tell me that old lie, "A null result is just as good as a positive result."
I got fed up with this after a while, and when other people got positive results, I started telling them, "Don't worry, a positive result is just as good as a null result." It got me a lot of funny looks.
Later, working as an applied physicist, where null results are far less common, I tried to include a section in every paper with the heading "Things that didn't work so well", to describe the stuff I'd tried that hadn't worked well. I think there should be more of this in the scientific literature, and as a reviewer have at times asked authors to explain why their paper only includes stuff that worked--what happened to the failures?
Publishing failures is important for lots of reasons. One is that facts are facts, and we shouldn't just publish the economically valuable ones. The other is that our duty as scientists is to help our colleagues avoid the mistakes we've made, and one important way to do that is to publish them.
"It has always amazed me that the people at the bottom of American society are the ones most willing to serve in the military. They serve, so we don't have to. And all they ask in return is that we never, ever send them into war without a good reason."
Any discussion of the film that misses this point, missed the point.
I am focussed completely on the question of "How does the energy wind up as heat?"
I will grant you any number and type of exotic processes to create the energy in the first place.
But I will not grant you any new physics with regard to converting that energy into heat, because all of the scenarios posited ultimately involve either excited nuclei, or nuclei moving in the lattice, and we know with as much certainty as we know anything what happens when we have excited nuclei or nuclei moving in the lattice.
So you have two completely unrelated problems: one is that there is no known mechanism that can produce the energy in the first place. The second is that once the energy is created, there is no known mechanism that can convert it into heat without a clear-cut radiation signature. That is, even if you have pure d+d->4He fusion, you will always still get both nuetrons and x-rays (and gamma rays, in some cases) due to standard slowing down processes or de-excitation.
No matter what process produces 4He plus a few MeV, the same physics governs the thermalization process, and you have to invoke entirely new physics to govern this process in this case, as well as entirely new physics to govern the generation of the energy in the first place.
So it isn't the lack of explanation of the generated energy that is the big concern for most nuclear physicists. It is the fact that once the energy has been generated, the reaction products have to behave in ways that are completely contrary to a huge body of existing knowledge, both theory and observation.
The thing that we know with certainty is that whatever is going on, it is not a nuclear effect.
It goes like this: in any nuclear effect, you wind up with lots of energy being dumped into a single nucleus. That energy can come out in only a small number of ways, because no matter what process produced the energy, all energy is created equal. And the nucleus is a well understood system.
So either you get gamma rays, neutrons, or nuclear recoil. The suggestion that you get lattice recoil, as occurs in the Mossbauer effect, does not hold water as it would require the lattice to behave in ways that are contrary to known physics, and again: all energy is created equal. Simply because an exotic process produces the energy does not allow us to suspend the rest of the laws of physics once that energy has been created.
If you have gamma rays or neurtrons, particularly in the quantities implied by the rate of energy creation, they are easily detectable. If you have nuclear recoil, you also, necessarily have neutron creation, because given the energies involved you'll knock nuetrons off the recoiling nucleus or the lattice nuclei. Again, it does not matter what exotic unknown process makes the nucleus move: once it is in motion in the lattice we can predict quite accurately how many neutrons will be produced.
Nothing like the expected numbers of neutrons or gamma rays are produced. Ergo, whatever is happening is not a nuclear process.
For what it's worth, IAANP, I have heard Fleishmann speak, and was peripherally involved in some early experiments to (in)validate the 1989 results. I've not thought much about the subject in the past decade, and hope not to do so for another decade. There's too much real science to think about instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Rabbits eat all the grasses, destroying the island ecology and causing mass extinction of other animals.
There's also a concern/rumor/claim that anti-biotic soap is no more effective at killing bacteria than non-anti-biotic soap. I've even seen both claims made in the same slashdot post.
It's hard to believe that both are true.
Also, it's important to remember that many anti-biotic substances are naturally occuring. Anti-biotics have been present in the environment for millions of years at completely uncontrolled levels. If it were possible for a super-bacterium to evolve, it is likely that it would have done so by now. What evidence we have suggests that anti-biotic resistance is a costly trick, and the bacteria that develop it are less able to infect healthy organisms, which is why we see anti-biotic resistant strains in hospitals and prisons, where there are lots of immune-compromised people.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the presence of synthetic anti-biotics in our environment, or that we should merrily go on over-dosing ourselves with anti-biotics at every turn.
I wish it were possible to raise environmental and public-health concerns without claiming the world was coming to an end, because any objective look at the facts will always tell you it isn't. This leads to an increasing level of skepticism when none of the terrible predictions come true, which leads to lots of important problems being ignored because the only people who take them seriously are kooks.
Robert J. Sawyer considers something like this in his book "Hominids", which posits an alternative universe where Neaderthal never died out. Everyone in the Neaderthal society is implanted with a device that records their activity in realtime, piped to a physically and cryptographically sealed "Alibi Archive" that can only be accessed by permission of the person being recorded.
:-) even a straight digital voice recording would be of value.
While the novel isn't all that great, this idea is extremely interesting. For anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything (like, say, any man who has ever had a close relationship with any woman
More seriously, an ex-girlfriend of mine was a volunteer at a women's shelter, and used to complain that too many cases came down to "he-said/she-said", so I suggested the shelter start using compact, cheap, voice-activated digital recorders to lend to women who were in abusive relationships but who couldn't get anyone to listen to them. So far as I know, this plan has been adopted, although the current state of my relationship with that particular woman precludes my knowing any of the details...
Ok, I'll feed the troll.
Slavery was outlawed in Britain (1837) before it was in the U.S. (1867)
Women had the vote in New Zealand (1893) before they did in the U.S. (1920) (although in some states women had the vote earlier than that).
So who taught what to whom?
The rights enshrined in the original Bill of Rights were primarily the rights of Englishmen, and the American Rebellion was fought in no small part because the colonists wanted the same rights they would have enjoyed in England.
Both the U.S. and British constitutions have undergone substantial changes over the past 200 years, but even counting from their respective civil wars the constitution of Britain as a parliamentary monarchy is hundreds of years older than that of the United States as a democratic republic.
Offhand, I can't think of a single liberty that the U.S. has lead the rest of the world on.
Freedom of speech is an English ideal. Likewise the freedom to defend one's home. Likewise the idea that only elected representatives have the right to impose direct taxes on the people.
As in the United States, these ideals have often been violated by the government of the day--the current U.S. administration is certainly imprisoning innocent people without trial in Gauntanamo Bay, for example. But the idea of freedom is England's great gift to the world, including the United States. Not the other way around.
The distinguishing feature of the American constitution is that it is a written document, which made America uniquely a nation of laws. That makes the current American attempts to create zones of extra-legal jurisdiction particularly tragic.
I was amused to see the ideal gas law amongst the contenders, written as PV = nRT where n is in some weird units and R is some weird constant.
A much nicer form is:
P = nkT
where n is the number density of particles and k is Boltzmann's constant.
For some reason chemists persist in using 12 divided by the mass of the proton in grams as the basis for all measurement, and this choice leads to a proliferation of strange constants and units. I know there are historical reasons for this, but one only has to look at the way physics has re-invented its notation and concepts repeatedly over the years to realize that historical reasons are no excuse.
Written in a sensible form, the idea gas law is a very beautiful equation, though not so beautiful as the Dirac equation, which is the only differential equation in physics that I'm aware of that describes reality and only reality.
All the other equations we use have non-physical as well as physical solutions, and we quietly throw out the non-physical solutions. We sometimes even try to maintain that mathematics is "unreasonably successful" as a means of describing reality, when we know perfectly well that half of what our equations describe has no physical counter-part, but is just an ugly artefact of an imperfect description.
From TFA: The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team.
Effectively, the Southampton group entered a team in a competition that scores individuals, so the "winners" were individual programs that had the backing of many other individual programs.
An alternative, and arguably superior, means of scoring entries would be one in which teams were scored rather than individual programs. In this contest the Southampton team would not do nearly so well.
If individual scoring continues we can expect to see entries that will attempt to recognize the Southampton programs and put a spanner in their works. These programs will be known as "labour unions", "socialist agitators" or "liberals".
The Southamptonites might counter with a raft of programs that attempt to identify the spoilers, but in this environment it will be hard to do much against them, as their activity will be fundamentally aimed at wrecking rather than winning.
The whole thing starts to look depressingly familiar, doesn't it? And all because the scoring system can be gamed by allowing one program to exploit the efforts of others...
This is something that people on /. ought to understand: the difference between null and zero.
The market value of the linux kernel is null--it does not have one. That's very different from having a value of zero, which would be the case if there were a market and the only way you could transfer ownership of the kernel in that market would be to give it away.
...and that will cost someone money in coping with the resulting ecological changes.
There is one certainty in all of this: the genes spliced into GMOs will get loose in the world due to inter-breeding with non-GM organisms of the same species. This is as certain as losing in Vegas.
So how does this sound: I propose to release novel self-replicating entities into your environment, and I don't know what the consequences will be. I can be almost certain they won't lead to the end of the world as we know it, but on the other hand it isn't a great strech to imagine that my self-replicating entities are going to have a significant effect on the ecosystem you live in and depend upon.
Personally, I'd be very unhappy with someone making this proposal, and the comparisions that come to mind with existing activities, such as selective breeding for domestication, don't really hold water because a) the whole point of GMOs is that they contain genetic combinations that would not occur in nature and b) selective breeding for domestication has already been responsible for major environmental changes.
Domestic species both force out non-domestic ones (as happened with prairie grasses) and due to increased genetic homogeneity may also be more susceptible to disease. So comparing the GMO process to domestication is not entirely reassuring.
"Industrial biology" has been extremely good for us humans in the past hundred-odd years. We can feed ourselves, worldwide, better than at any time in history. But there have been costs, and I'd like to see a really compelling case made for adding to those costs with GMOs.
So far, that case has not been made, and many GMO proponents simply deny that there are going to be costs. Only when they admit to that will there be a meaningful debate. Of course, for that to happen, the "GMOs are the work of Satan" mantra from the other side would have to fall silent as well.
The idea that copyright infringement is theft is very recent and not well-considered. Here is an excellent article outlining the issue, by a Stanford law professor:
_ id =582602
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract
The gist of the argument is that property law was developed to deal with the problem of "negative externalities", which are things that cost me when someone else uses a good or resource. The traditional example is that your grazing your sheep on my land reduces my ability to graze my sheep there--you have "externalized" (put on to me) some of the cost of grazing your sheep. Property law ensures that people who use a resource "internalize" (take on themselves) the costs and consequences of using the resources they own.
Copyright and patent protection are quite different, as they are concerned with preventing "positive externalities", which are benefits to someone else from my actions. The world is full of such things, from my planting flowers in my front garden to people creating movies that might be downloaded.
The question of whether there needs to be a legal framework for preventing such positive externalities is an open question. Whether or not property law is the appropriate framework for such prevention is even more open.
I'm not treating you like an idiot. If I thought you were an idiot I'd've not replied at all.
Although tone is easily misread, I see that my reply could be read as kinda rude. It was not intended to be. My apologies.
--Tom
BTW, anyone want to speculate on H/anti-H bombs? No neutrons to shoot all over the place,
Repeat after me: gamma rays with energies higher than a few MeV make lots and lots of free neutrons when they interact with matter. A surprising number of people on
It goes like this: the binding energy of your average nucleon is 6 to 8 MeV. H/anti-H would produce gammas with energies up to just under 1 GeV. In their travels through nearby matter, those gammas will knock quite a few neutrons out of nuclei.
This will have two effects. One, the neutrons will get absorbed by other stuff, producing radioactive isotopes. Two, the nuclei that have been busted up will themselves leave radioactive daughters (just use your imagination for the lame sexist joke at this point, ok, and don't bother to post it, please. "Daughters" is the correct technical term.)
The lifetime of the radioactive products will depend on the average atomic number of stuff the gammas pass through. If it's mostly light elements, the fallout will be short-lived, if it's mostly heavy elements the fallout will be long-lived.
--Tom
The article describes research into stable positronium (e+/e- bound pair) not anti-hydrogen, so all the energy would come out at in 511 keV gammas, which is nice because the high-energy gammas you'd get from P+/P- annihilation would spall off neutrons from just about everything, and thereby create lots of radioactive fallout.
I'm doubtful that positronium can be stabilized, and hopeful that no one will try too hard.
--Tom
You've committed a logical fallacy that I call "argumentum ad stultum": argument from stupidity.
Any argument of the form:
X would be stupid.
Therefore no one would do X.
is fallacious because it depends on a hidden premise that is known to be false:
No one would ever do anything stupid.
But we know, for a fact, that people do incredibly stupid things every day. I mean, what president would be stupid enough to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office?
So given that the reasons for believing there was any significant threat from Iraq are all trivially false, and given that the other reasons to invade Iraq are all pretty lame, it is very easy to conclude that Bush et al are either extremely stupid or clinically insane, or some combination of both.
Evil doesn't come into it. Stupidity and megalomania are the only things required, and anyone who knows anything about human history knows that there is no shortage of either, especially in the halls of power.
--Tom
We install our JRE such that it's only used by our application. Wasteful, but at least we play nicely with others.
Strangling Java advocates is completely explicable, in my view.
The problem with this is that the claim "evolution might be false" does not have anything to do with the claim "Christian creationism might be true".
Any number of details of current evolutionary theory might be wrong. There may even be cases where for some reason evolution doesn't occur at all, or where a species was created by the intervention of forces other than variation and natural selection. Humans may actually soon have the ability to design organisms, for example, so we'll have instances of organisms that were not (entirely) produced by evolution. O wait, we already do--they're called domestic animals, and were much studied by some guy named Darwin.
But none of this would add any weight to the claim that Christian creationism might be true. That is, critiquing existing explanations is unrelated to justifying alternative explanations, except that it "opens the field" to an infinite number of alternative hypotheses.
So even if we were able to show that evolution through variation and natural selection simply did not occur, we would have no way of deciding, on that basis alone, that the world was made by YHWH or Chronos or Mazda or Marduk.
--Tom
"coming along"
All of these equal "not real" if you're a real developer working on real code that needs to run real fast and ship real soon.
As well as being a very easy language to write very slow code in, Java is a terrible language for product support. My company has a product that has a Java front-end, including some blazingly fast graphics stuff (much faster than supposedly leading-edge stuff from IBM, as it happens.) For the first year after product release nearly all of our support calls were due to older or oddball JRE versions on customer machines. We moved to shipping our own JRE (increasing our disk footprint by 25 MB) and all the problems went away.
On top of this, there are major memory managment issues--we are often pushing up against the full 2G limit on Win32, and the wheels come off Java's ability to do anything intelligent with memory management well before that. You can deal with it by being extremely clever, but I'd rather see that cleverness spent on solving real domain problems, not language-related issues.
And don't get me started on the stuff you have to do to seamlessly mix lightweight and heavyweight components.
The developers on my team did a brilliant job of dealing with Java's inadequacies, so brilliant that many people don't believe the front end is written in Java when they first see it. Think about that for a second: a customer sees a clean, responsive UI with standard behavior and no weirdness, and says, "So this is all written in C++, right?"
--Tom
Unfortunately for this hypothesis, Venus has no magnetosphere, experiences much stronger solar wind than Mars, and has no shortage of atmosphere.
So Mars' lack of atmosphere is likely due to a combination of factors, with the lack of magentosphere being perhaps necessary but hardly sufficient. The question for terraformers is whether or not it is possible to create and sustain an environment like the one we have on Earth via biological means.
It is worth noting that in the absence of life, Earth would be a lot less habitable than it is. That is, life on Earth has created conditions that are suitable for life on Earth. Or more correctly, life on Earth has found relatively open evolutionary niches due to the actions of other life on Earth. The most obvious thing like this is oxygen, which would weather out of the atmosphere in a few million years were it not a waste product thrown away by plants.
--Tom
A couple of nW per mCi is going to have pretty limited usefulness. Even if they boost the conversion efficiency substantially (4% at the moment, so the max is 25 times) they're still talking about a miniscule amount of power for a non-miniscule amount of radioactivity.
IAANP, and I've handled mCi sources, and treated them with considerable respect. Even pure beta-emiters like 63Ni (60-odd keV endpoint) generate significant flux of x-rays due to shake-off electrons and bremmstralung (fairly negligable). A mCi pure-beta source is going to be about the limit before you get significant levels of difficult-to-shield radiation from these effects.
The k-shell x-rays from 63Ni (or rather, 63Cu, the decay product) are just under 9 keV, which can be shielded with a bit of lead, but enough that you're talking about a battery that is mostly shielding. You very rapidly burn the size advantage.
And then there's the disposal issue--these things will wind up in landfills, just like every other radioactive source. For example, a typical (micro-curie) calibration source is aluminum-encased and about the size of quarter. I once had a student put one in his pocket, walk out of the lab, and almost spend the source in a vending machine. There is no reasonable protection against stupidity of that nature. And there's so much of it about.
So while I think these things are potentially great for certain remote sensing applications, I don't expect to see one in my cell phone or lap-top any time soon now. If we were able to make a cell phone or laptop that could run comfortably on a mCi source, it would be able to run almost forever on a conventional battery, so the advantage of a radioactive battery is not at all clear.
--Tom
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is correct, and any time you find yourself talking to someone who advocates old-fashion statism to protect the environment, try them out with the slogan: "Coercion is not sustainable."
Coercive policies from the left or right are the antithesis of a truly green society, which must be based on the voluntary commitment of the majority of citizens if it is to be truly sustainable.
--Tom
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
n s. pdf
Loads of falsehoods. For example, wind energy does not kill birds in large numbers.
http://www.nationalwind.org/pubs/avian_collisio
--Tom
If this description of the bomb is correct (IANP, but I have very little knowledge of historical designs of nuclear weapons) it should be a cause for concern.
Uranimum bombs are very easy to detonate. Plutonium bombs are much, much harder. This is the fortunate fork of the modern terrorist's dilemma: sufficiently enriched 235U is very hard to produce, but very easy to detonate. 239Pu is relatively easy to produce, but very hard to detonate.
The Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type uranium device that had never been tested--Trinity was an plutonium implosion device. The reason why the uranium bomb hadn't been tested is because it's so damned easy to make the things blow up.
The good news for the modern world is that while we have lots (i.e. many, many tonnes) of plutonium lying around, we have very, very little highly enriched uranium. So a hundred-odd kilos of HEU would be a terrorist's delight.
If this bomb is as described, it should be raised and destroyed.
--Tom
Back in the day when I was still working directly in research as a pure physicist, I got a lot of null results. People used to tell me that old lie, "A null result is just as good as a positive result."
I got fed up with this after a while, and when other people got positive results, I started telling them, "Don't worry, a positive result is just as good as a null result." It got me a lot of funny looks.
Later, working as an applied physicist, where null results are far less common, I tried to include a section in every paper with the heading "Things that didn't work so well", to describe the stuff I'd tried that hadn't worked well. I think there should be more of this in the scientific literature, and as a reviewer have at times asked authors to explain why their paper only includes stuff that worked--what happened to the failures?
Publishing failures is important for lots of reasons. One is that facts are facts, and we shouldn't just publish the economically valuable ones. The other is that our duty as scientists is to help our colleagues avoid the mistakes we've made, and one important way to do that is to publish them.
--Tom
Paraphrase:
"It has always amazed me that the people at the bottom of American society are the ones most willing to serve in the military. They serve, so we don't have to. And all they ask in return is that we never, ever send them into war without a good reason."
Any discussion of the film that misses this point, missed the point.
--Tom
You've missed my point entirely.
I am focussed completely on the question of "How does the energy wind up as heat?"
I will grant you any number and type of exotic processes to create the energy in the first place.
But I will not grant you any new physics with regard to converting that energy into heat, because all of the scenarios posited ultimately involve either excited nuclei, or nuclei moving in the lattice, and we know with as much certainty as we know anything what happens when we have excited nuclei or nuclei moving in the lattice.
So you have two completely unrelated problems: one is that there is no known mechanism that can produce the energy in the first place. The second is that once the energy is created, there is no known mechanism that can convert it into heat without a clear-cut radiation signature. That is, even if you have pure d+d->4He fusion, you will always still get both nuetrons and x-rays (and gamma rays, in some cases) due to standard slowing down processes or de-excitation.
No matter what process produces 4He plus a few MeV, the same physics governs the thermalization process, and you have to invoke entirely new physics to govern this process in this case, as well as entirely new physics to govern the generation of the energy in the first place.
So it isn't the lack of explanation of the generated energy that is the big concern for most nuclear physicists. It is the fact that once the energy has been generated, the reaction products have to behave in ways that are completely contrary to a huge body of existing knowledge, both theory and observation.
--Tom
The thing that we know with certainty is that whatever is going on, it is not a nuclear effect.
It goes like this: in any nuclear effect, you wind up with lots of energy being dumped into a single nucleus. That energy can come out in only a small number of ways, because no matter what process produced the energy, all energy is created equal. And the nucleus is a well understood system.
So either you get gamma rays, neutrons, or nuclear recoil. The suggestion that you get lattice recoil, as occurs in the Mossbauer effect, does not hold water as it would require the lattice to behave in ways that are contrary to known physics, and again: all energy is created equal. Simply because an exotic process produces the energy does not allow us to suspend the rest of the laws of physics once that energy has been created.
If you have gamma rays or neurtrons, particularly in the quantities implied by the rate of energy creation, they are easily detectable. If you have nuclear recoil, you also, necessarily have neutron creation, because given the energies involved you'll knock nuetrons off the recoiling nucleus or the lattice nuclei. Again, it does not matter what exotic unknown process makes the nucleus move: once it is in motion in the lattice we can predict quite accurately how many neutrons will be produced.
Nothing like the expected numbers of neutrons or gamma rays are produced. Ergo, whatever is happening is not a nuclear process.
For what it's worth, IAANP, I have heard Fleishmann speak, and was peripherally involved in some early experiments to (in)validate the 1989 results. I've not thought much about the subject in the past decade, and hope not to do so for another decade. There's too much real science to think about instead.
--Tom