That only shows that ~70% of the top 1000 google results were judged to be redundant. The Google algorithm first selects the 1000 most useful results (so you can never actually receive more than 1000 results), and then filters out the ones they consider redundant, which in your case left 283 results. This doesn't mean there aren't 778,000 other pages out there using the term "Cyber Monday".
Unlike encryption, which is basically software, a quantum computer is hardware and the first generation of such may well be very complex and very expensive, so it will likely be far more difficult for others to replicate than encryption.
A better analogy at this point is nuclear weapons. We figured it out, others have figured it out, but even today controls make it very difficult to transfer that technology and most states just don't have it. If the first generation of quantum computers are similarly hyper complicated machines, then we may well see the details of how they operate being classified and new sort of arms race as nations in the know seek to restrict access to machines that could destroy modern encryption.
It can't work forever, but the depending on just how complex the machines turn out to be, it could be decades before more than a handful of countries have the technology. If that is enough time to replace our encryption infrastructure with something even quantum computers can't break, then maybe it isn't too bad a thing.
It's like the atom bomb, eventually others are going to have it too, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to make it easy for them to get that technology.
The fact that the government is considering regulating the technology now does make me wonder whether the NSA, who has been throwing large sums of money at the problem for years, might not be farther along in developing a quantum computer than other people know.
I do research in X-ray and Gamma-Ray astronomy and just wanted to confirm that so far no gamma-ray bursts have ever been observed to come from our own galaxy.
Forgive me, but have you been living under a rock the last year? SGR 1806-20 gave rise to a gamma ray burst last December which was the most lumninous event recieved at Earth in the history of gamma ray astronomy, and it was only 50,000 light years away at the other side of our galaxy.
I'll admit, magnetar star quakes aren't as sexy as high end supernova or compact object mergers, but they are expected to be responsible for some significant precentage of short duration GRBs.
Anyway, it is curious that no gamma-ray bursts occured in our galaxy (yet). It is supposed that such an even would generate enough gamma rays to wipe out the ozone layer, and cause life extinction on earth.
Where were you last December? The most luminous gamma ray event in the history of measurement occurred based on a gamma ray burst on the other side of our own galaxy. That particular event was cause by starquake and crustal reorganization of a magnetar, a rare type of event expected to explain a small precentage of short-duration gamma ray bursts.
To have an important effect on Earth a GRB would need to be within a few tens to a few hundred lightyears (depending on absolute luminosity). Astronomers estimate such close GRBs should occur a few times per billion years. Important in the history of life, but not a large concern on the time scale of human civilization.
Alchemy was the chemistry of its day. There are plenty of ways that Newton overthrow the established views, but dabbling in alchemy would have been a fairly typical thing for a scientist of his day.
The researchers retrieved very many fragments of DNA from their fossils. By comparing the fragments to references for bears and dogs (which are 93% bear, apparently), and excluding human and bacterial sequences, they were able to identify a number of distinctly cave bear fragments. In total this amounts to 26,861 base pairs which was enough to place it within its proper lineage with respect to other bears.
Of course, compared to the 2.3 billion base pairs in a human, they have a rather long way to go before being able to build a meaningful genome. Still, given that this kind of fossilized DNA has never been recovered before, it is a good first step.
Drilling two miles isn't that hard and has certainly been done before. The deepest drill hole on land goes down some 12 km.
But this isn't the same thing. This is trying to drill down 3+ km below the bottom of the Atlantic. In this case the drilling starts under 750 m of water (and only because Atlantis Massif is a relatively high spot on the sea floor). The mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic is their target because it has some of the shallowest Moho in the world. To reach the Moho from a continental section you would probably have to drill 25 km or more even with a good choice of location.
The goal of putting pure nitrogen in tires is actually to avoid the water vapor that comes along with compressed air. Water's vapor pressure is relatively sensitive to changes in temperature (not surprising since it wants to be a liquid at room temperature). As a result, having water vapor in your tires leads to much larger changes in tire pressure as a function of temperature than would occur with pure nitrogen.
However the "much larger" changes are basically irrelevant to ordinary people since tires and cars are designed to tolerate considerable fluctuations in tire pressure. The only place it really matters, and where pure N2 is used consistently, is in professional racing since slight variations in tire pressure can negatively impact the efficiency of high performance vehicles.
I've already posted this on a different thread in this article, but Gates has sunk a considerable chunk of money into the Early College High School Initiative which his foundation helped to found. I don't know if their goals match those of the Aspen Group you cite, but given the time and money involved, I would consider Gates to be a leader in calling for education reform in his own right.
Anyway, that seems to be Gates' view of what the replacement ought to look like, and it doesn't seem to be particularly focused on keeping the worker bees down (at least not more so than typical education movements).
The goal of that organization, based significantly on Gates' funds, is to create schools that blur the line between high school and college. Specifically, they create a "high school" whose curriculum continuously moves into full-time college studies at a local college or university. By eliminating redundant classes and taking some college classes in the 11th and 12th grades, most of the programs they have created aim to get students through high school and college in a total of 6 years rather than the more typical 8+.
Obviously, it is not suitable for all students, but for at least for some it is "superior" in that it eliminates redundancy and the problem of wasting time in high school classes that are irrelevant for college. Many of the programs they have created are targetted towards poor and disadvantaged students who might not go to college at all otherwise. And most of the colleges they work with are low-end and community colleges. It helps provide an education for some of the people where education is most needed, but it isn't really intended for the advanced student with Ivy League or similar ambitions.
As someone that probably operates in the world of the other 1% (academic progammer with computational tasks measured in hours, days, or even weeks), I can still say that it is almost always about the algorithm.
Every once in a while it really is worth careful instruction level optimization when you have a loop that must execute more than 100 million times, or some such. But the biggest gains in computational speed are always about figuring out the best approach to a problem.
This has actually been a far larger problem with totipotent embryonic stem cells than with adult stem cells of the type seen in the article.
It should also be noted that the effect is often different than the common conception of tumors. What is seen (mostly in animal trials, since that is were it has mostly been done) is that injected stem cells which, for example, are meant to help the heart instead decide to turn into bone tissue or nerve tissue or something else that shouldn't be there. This certainly qualifies as a tumor, since it is a detrimental and abnormal growth, but it usually rather different than the kind of malignancy most people think of as cancer.
Adult stem cells from bone marrow are already partially differentiated so they almost always only become cells related to blood or muscle tissues. Hence the risk of them turning into bone or nerve tissue after injection is considerably reduced.
Ultimately, if the use of embryonic stem cells is to be succesful, it may rely on finding ways to program the cells to evolve in a particular desired direction.
Observations from the rovers have been interpreted as indicating neglible erosion at those sites for at least the last 3 billion years. At least for those sites, it appears to rule out any significant surface water or weather for most of Martian history.
There are basically two ways to change sea level. Either by storing large amounts of water in continental ice sheets (i.e. ice ages), or by changing the volume of the oceans.
Plate tectonics and changes in sea floor spreading rates can cause the oceans to become either deeper or shallower over geologic time scales. Since water volume is basically conserved, if the sea floor gets uplifted (on average) then sea level must go up as well, and vice versa. During the Permian, the configuration of continents favored the creation of unusually deep ocean basins. Hence from the perspective of the continents, sea levels went down significantly.
At present, the more common position is that the majority of the extinctions occured during less than 1 million years. So by contrast, Ward's position is quite slow.
Actually a number of scientists are arguing for two short pulses of extinction seperated by approximately 10 million years, with the second one being especially severe. So that would be consistent with Ward's time frame though not with his view of it being one extended event.
It is not obvious to me that changing oxygen levels would be all that destructive. We've known for a while that oxygen levels in the Triassic (following the "Great Dying") where some of the lowest in Earth's history. We have also known that oxygen concentration in the Carboniferous (50-100 Myr earlier) were some of the highest (perhaps 180% of modern value).
In the Carboniferous, what you see (in addition to extra nasty forest fires) is an explosion of gigantism among diffusion limited organisms. Such organisms, mostly insects and amphibans, have respiratory or circulatory systems that are limited by the ability of oxygen to diffuse through them. With higher O2 levels, such animals can develop larger body plans and clearly did in the Carboniferous. By contrast, falling O2 levels would probably be an evolutionary pressure towards dwarfism and smaller body plans.
After the Permian mass extinctions, we do see very few large animals. This might be associated with low O2 levels, but it might also be the results of an ecosystem so disrupted that it can't support large predators.
However, it would be hard to hang the extinctions on oxygen alone since oxygen levels seem to have fallened over a much longer period of time than the extinctions, and would not have affected all organisms equally. Perhaps coupled with volcanism and global warming it is enough, but personally I doubt it. I am inclined to favor models that talk about volcanism or other causes leading to stratification and toxicity in the oceans. If you are going to kill >90% of all oceanic species, it would seem that the best bet is to make the oceans unlivable for them.
However, this debate is likely to continue for a long time and we will no doubt hear many other theories before it is all done.
I don't think that the NSA has substantially better quantum encryption / computing than the rest of us. My main line of evidence is that they are still throwing enormous gobs of money at unclassified research into quantum computing.
One such example is the innocuously named "Laboratory for Physical Sciences". Please note the rather conspicuous key-shaped logo. I toured their facility a few years back while looking for a job. At the time the NSA was buying them just about anything they wanted provided it might have applications in quantum computing. This included a rather sophisticated chip fabrication lab and clean room.
I don't know if we will ever really have quantum computers, but the NSA sure doesn't want to be late to the party if we do.
Yes, the center of Antarctica has gotten colder because of tightening circulation of the Antarctic polar vortex (wind patterns). This is mostly due to another man-made phenomena: the ozone hole. Without ozone you drive up the thermal boundary layer which leads to more intense circulation.
As far as I know this is only clearly significant for the interior of Antartica. I'm not sure what is happening on average around the edges of Antartica, but I know in at least some areas (e.g. Ross Ice Shelf) they see clear warming and diminishing ice.
I don't think anyone thought either rover would last this long
I was at a presentation by one of the members of the rover science teams six weeks ago.
If there are no surprises, he was talking about the rovers possibly lasting till June or July. By that time, he was suggesting that the rover's batteries would no longer be able to hold enough charge to keep the things operating.
For a while they had been expecting that the solar panels would fail first, but apparently the rate of dust accumulation is less than they expected. (Plus "martian carwash" events seem to have cleared off some of the dust. He felt such events were probably caused by dust devils that happened to cross over the rover.)
Geophysics grad student actually, but I have had all the typical physics courses.
Einstein really said E = sqrt(p^2*c^2+m^2*c^4), where E = Energy, p = momentum, c = speed of light, m = rest mass. For things that are not moving this reduces to the more familiar E = mc^2.
Einstein also said, via general relativity, that gravitational fields are controlled by something known as the stress-energy tensor. In essense, it says that gravitational forces result from all energy, momentum and pressure in the universe (though mostly energy unless very high velocities are involved).
EM radiation has energy E = hv, where h is Planck's constant and v is the frequency of light. It has no rest mass (m = 0), but from above we see E = pc = hv => p = hv/c, so it has momentum. Since it has energy it creates a gravitational field, and this field would be equivalent to a particle with the same rest mass energy. [Caveat: Because momentum also contributes to the stress-energy tensor, the fields are not actually identical but the momentum correction is typically small.]
So in short a beam of gamma rays does create a gravitational field (though a very very small one for typically numbers of gamma rays).
Actually, for humans living at sea level, ionizing background radiation (which would include cosmic rays) is only the second biggest source of DNA mutations. The biggest source are so called "thermal" mutations (roughly 40 times as common), which are the natural errors that occur because we are warm and stuff is moving around.
Error correcting enzymes exist in all organisms because everything which is "warm" will have DNA errors that need to be corrected. Bacteria and other organisms that "like" to mutate tend to do a "worse" job of correcting thermal and other errors.
I don't think he is confused, just over simplifying.
Via pair production, gamma rays produce the same kinds of secondary particle showers that the far more common primary cosmic rays do. However, because of momentum conservation, the particle shower is much more tightly focused and produces a distinctive Cherenchov cone that allows gamma rays particle showers to be easily distinguished from cosmic ray showers.
As noted in the article, the fact that gamma are currently being produced in the supernova remnant strongly argues that cosmic rays are also being accelerated there. The physics for this was proposed long ago, but no one has been able to directly measure it.
Slashdot Mirror
That only shows that ~70% of the top 1000 google results were judged to be redundant. The Google algorithm first selects the 1000 most useful results (so you can never actually receive more than 1000 results), and then filters out the ones they consider redundant, which in your case left 283 results. This doesn't mean there aren't 778,000 other pages out there using the term "Cyber Monday".
Unlike encryption, which is basically software, a quantum computer is hardware and the first generation of such may well be very complex and very expensive, so it will likely be far more difficult for others to replicate than encryption.
A better analogy at this point is nuclear weapons. We figured it out, others have figured it out, but even today controls make it very difficult to transfer that technology and most states just don't have it. If the first generation of quantum computers are similarly hyper complicated machines, then we may well see the details of how they operate being classified and new sort of arms race as nations in the know seek to restrict access to machines that could destroy modern encryption.
It can't work forever, but the depending on just how complex the machines turn out to be, it could be decades before more than a handful of countries have the technology. If that is enough time to replace our encryption infrastructure with something even quantum computers can't break, then maybe it isn't too bad a thing.
It's like the atom bomb, eventually others are going to have it too, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to make it easy for them to get that technology.
The fact that the government is considering regulating the technology now does make me wonder whether the NSA, who has been throwing large sums of money at the problem for years, might not be farther along in developing a quantum computer than other people know.
Oops, the most powerful sort of GRBs can actually be dangerous out to several thousand light years. Mea culpa.
I do research in X-ray and Gamma-Ray astronomy and just wanted to confirm that so far no gamma-ray bursts have ever been observed to come from our own galaxy.
Forgive me, but have you been living under a rock the last year? SGR 1806-20 gave rise to a gamma ray burst last December which was the most lumninous event recieved at Earth in the history of gamma ray astronomy, and it was only 50,000 light years away at the other side of our galaxy.
I'll admit, magnetar star quakes aren't as sexy as high end supernova or compact object mergers, but they are expected to be responsible for some significant precentage of short duration GRBs.
Anyway, it is curious that no gamma-ray bursts occured in our galaxy (yet). It is supposed that such an even would generate enough gamma rays to wipe out the ozone layer, and cause life extinction on earth.
Where were you last December? The most luminous gamma ray event in the history of measurement occurred based on a gamma ray burst on the other side of our own galaxy. That particular event was cause by starquake and crustal reorganization of a magnetar, a rare type of event expected to explain a small precentage of short-duration gamma ray bursts.
To have an important effect on Earth a GRB would need to be within a few tens to a few hundred lightyears (depending on absolute luminosity). Astronomers estimate such close GRBs should occur a few times per billion years. Important in the history of life, but not a large concern on the time scale of human civilization.
Alchemy was the chemistry of its day. There are plenty of ways that Newton overthrow the established views, but dabbling in alchemy would have been a fairly typical thing for a scientist of his day.
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public...
Certainly gives plenty of room to argue that it is not distribution if the only documented download was to an agent of the copyright holder.
The researchers retrieved very many fragments of DNA from their fossils. By comparing the fragments to references for bears and dogs (which are 93% bear, apparently), and excluding human and bacterial sequences, they were able to identify a number of distinctly cave bear fragments. In total this amounts to 26,861 base pairs which was enough to place it within its proper lineage with respect to other bears.
Of course, compared to the 2.3 billion base pairs in a human, they have a rather long way to go before being able to build a meaningful genome. Still, given that this kind of fossilized DNA has never been recovered before, it is a good first step.
Drilling two miles isn't that hard and has certainly been done before. The deepest drill hole on land goes down some 12 km.
But this isn't the same thing. This is trying to drill down 3+ km below the bottom of the Atlantic. In this case the drilling starts under 750 m of water (and only because Atlantis Massif is a relatively high spot on the sea floor). The mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic is their target because it has some of the shallowest Moho in the world. To reach the Moho from a continental section you would probably have to drill 25 km or more even with a good choice of location.
The goal of putting pure nitrogen in tires is actually to avoid the water vapor that comes along with compressed air. Water's vapor pressure is relatively sensitive to changes in temperature (not surprising since it wants to be a liquid at room temperature). As a result, having water vapor in your tires leads to much larger changes in tire pressure as a function of temperature than would occur with pure nitrogen.
However the "much larger" changes are basically irrelevant to ordinary people since tires and cars are designed to tolerate considerable fluctuations in tire pressure. The only place it really matters, and where pure N2 is used consistently, is in professional racing since slight variations in tire pressure can negatively impact the efficiency of high performance vehicles.
I've already posted this on a different thread in this article, but Gates has sunk a considerable chunk of money into the Early College High School Initiative which his foundation helped to found. I don't know if their goals match those of the Aspen Group you cite, but given the time and money involved, I would consider Gates to be a leader in calling for education reform in his own right.
Anyway, that seems to be Gates' view of what the replacement ought to look like, and it doesn't seem to be particularly focused on keeping the worker bees down (at least not more so than typical education movements).
Well, arguably Gates has been pushing a superior alternative, at least in terms of what his foundation is funding.
See: http://www.earlycolleges.org/
The goal of that organization, based significantly on Gates' funds, is to create schools that blur the line between high school and college. Specifically, they create a "high school" whose curriculum continuously moves into full-time college studies at a local college or university. By eliminating redundant classes and taking some college classes in the 11th and 12th grades, most of the programs they have created aim to get students through high school and college in a total of 6 years rather than the more typical 8+.
Obviously, it is not suitable for all students, but for at least for some it is "superior" in that it eliminates redundancy and the problem of wasting time in high school classes that are irrelevant for college. Many of the programs they have created are targetted towards poor and disadvantaged students who might not go to college at all otherwise. And most of the colleges they work with are low-end and community colleges. It helps provide an education for some of the people where education is most needed, but it isn't really intended for the advanced student with Ivy League or similar ambitions.
As someone that probably operates in the world of the other 1% (academic progammer with computational tasks measured in hours, days, or even weeks), I can still say that it is almost always about the algorithm.
Every once in a while it really is worth careful instruction level optimization when you have a loop that must execute more than 100 million times, or some such. But the biggest gains in computational speed are always about figuring out the best approach to a problem.
This has actually been a far larger problem with totipotent embryonic stem cells than with adult stem cells of the type seen in the article.
It should also be noted that the effect is often different than the common conception of tumors. What is seen (mostly in animal trials, since that is were it has mostly been done) is that injected stem cells which, for example, are meant to help the heart instead decide to turn into bone tissue or nerve tissue or something else that shouldn't be there. This certainly qualifies as a tumor, since it is a detrimental and abnormal growth, but it usually rather different than the kind of malignancy most people think of as cancer.
Adult stem cells from bone marrow are already partially differentiated so they almost always only become cells related to blood or muscle tissues. Hence the risk of them turning into bone or nerve tissue after injection is considerably reduced.
Ultimately, if the use of embryonic stem cells is to be succesful, it may rely on finding ways to program the cells to evolve in a particular desired direction.
Observations from the rovers have been interpreted as indicating neglible erosion at those sites for at least the last 3 billion years. At least for those sites, it appears to rule out any significant surface water or weather for most of Martian history.
There are basically two ways to change sea level. Either by storing large amounts of water in continental ice sheets (i.e. ice ages), or by changing the volume of the oceans.
Plate tectonics and changes in sea floor spreading rates can cause the oceans to become either deeper or shallower over geologic time scales. Since water volume is basically conserved, if the sea floor gets uplifted (on average) then sea level must go up as well, and vice versa. During the Permian, the configuration of continents favored the creation of unusually deep ocean basins. Hence from the perspective of the continents, sea levels went down significantly.
At present, the more common position is that the majority of the extinctions occured during less than 1 million years. So by contrast, Ward's position is quite slow.
Actually a number of scientists are arguing for two short pulses of extinction seperated by approximately 10 million years, with the second one being especially severe. So that would be consistent with Ward's time frame though not with his view of it being one extended event.
It is not obvious to me that changing oxygen levels would be all that destructive. We've known for a while that oxygen levels in the Triassic (following the "Great Dying") where some of the lowest in Earth's history. We have also known that oxygen concentration in the Carboniferous (50-100 Myr earlier) were some of the highest (perhaps 180% of modern value).
In the Carboniferous, what you see (in addition to extra nasty forest fires) is an explosion of gigantism among diffusion limited organisms. Such organisms, mostly insects and amphibans, have respiratory or circulatory systems that are limited by the ability of oxygen to diffuse through them. With higher O2 levels, such animals can develop larger body plans and clearly did in the Carboniferous. By contrast, falling O2 levels would probably be an evolutionary pressure towards dwarfism and smaller body plans.
After the Permian mass extinctions, we do see very few large animals. This might be associated with low O2 levels, but it might also be the results of an ecosystem so disrupted that it can't support large predators.
However, it would be hard to hang the extinctions on oxygen alone since oxygen levels seem to have fallened over a much longer period of time than the extinctions, and would not have affected all organisms equally. Perhaps coupled with volcanism and global warming it is enough, but personally I doubt it. I am inclined to favor models that talk about volcanism or other causes leading to stratification and toxicity in the oceans. If you are going to kill >90% of all oceanic species, it would seem that the best bet is to make the oceans unlivable for them.
However, this debate is likely to continue for a long time and we will no doubt hear many other theories before it is all done.
I don't think that the NSA has substantially better quantum encryption / computing than the rest of us. My main line of evidence is that they are still throwing enormous gobs of money at unclassified research into quantum computing.
One such example is the innocuously named "Laboratory for Physical Sciences". Please note the rather conspicuous key-shaped logo. I toured their facility a few years back while looking for a job. At the time the NSA was buying them just about anything they wanted provided it might have applications in quantum computing. This included a rather sophisticated chip fabrication lab and clean room.
I don't know if we will ever really have quantum computers, but the NSA sure doesn't want to be late to the party if we do.
Yes, the center of Antarctica has gotten colder because of tightening circulation of the Antarctic polar vortex (wind patterns). This is mostly due to another man-made phenomena: the ozone hole. Without ozone you drive up the thermal boundary layer which leads to more intense circulation.
As far as I know this is only clearly significant for the interior of Antartica. I'm not sure what is happening on average around the edges of Antartica, but I know in at least some areas (e.g. Ross Ice Shelf) they see clear warming and diminishing ice.
I don't think anyone thought either rover would last this long
I was at a presentation by one of the members of the rover science teams six weeks ago.
If there are no surprises, he was talking about the rovers possibly lasting till June or July. By that time, he was suggesting that the rover's batteries would no longer be able to hold enough charge to keep the things operating.
For a while they had been expecting that the solar panels would fail first, but apparently the rate of dust accumulation is less than they expected. (Plus "martian carwash" events seem to have cleared off some of the dust. He felt such events were probably caused by dust devils that happened to cross over the rover.)
Geophysics grad student actually, but I have had all the typical physics courses.
Einstein really said E = sqrt(p^2*c^2+m^2*c^4), where E = Energy, p = momentum, c = speed of light, m = rest mass. For things that are not moving this reduces to the more familiar E = mc^2.
Einstein also said, via general relativity, that gravitational fields are controlled by something known as the stress-energy tensor. In essense, it says that gravitational forces result from all energy, momentum and pressure in the universe (though mostly energy unless very high velocities are involved).
EM radiation has energy E = hv, where h is Planck's constant and v is the frequency of light. It has no rest mass (m = 0), but from above we see E = pc = hv => p = hv/c, so it has momentum. Since it has energy it creates a gravitational field, and this field would be equivalent to a particle with the same rest mass energy. [Caveat: Because momentum also contributes to the stress-energy tensor, the fields are not actually identical but the momentum correction is typically small.]
So in short a beam of gamma rays does create a gravitational field (though a very very small one for typically numbers of gamma rays).
Actually, for humans living at sea level, ionizing background radiation (which would include cosmic rays) is only the second biggest source of DNA mutations. The biggest source are so called "thermal" mutations (roughly 40 times as common), which are the natural errors that occur because we are warm and stuff is moving around.
Error correcting enzymes exist in all organisms because everything which is "warm" will have DNA errors that need to be corrected. Bacteria and other organisms that "like" to mutate tend to do a "worse" job of correcting thermal and other errors.
I don't think he is confused, just over simplifying.
Via pair production, gamma rays produce the same kinds of secondary particle showers that the far more common primary cosmic rays do. However, because of momentum conservation, the particle shower is much more tightly focused and produces a distinctive Cherenchov cone that allows gamma rays particle showers to be easily distinguished from cosmic ray showers.
As noted in the article, the fact that gamma are currently being produced in the supernova remnant strongly argues that cosmic rays are also being accelerated there. The physics for this was proposed long ago, but no one has been able to directly measure it.