My guess is that the most creative software opportunities will remain in the US for some time, and the more routine development efforts will continue to be transfered overseas.
I'm not a professional programmer, but I do have programming experience, and this statement got me thinking. In the commercial world what are the oppurtunities for "creative" software development?
The only one that comes to mind is game development, and even for some games the creativity is mostly in the art and story and little in the actual programming. Certainly researchers in AI, natural language, and some other areas are being creative, but most of the unusual things seem to be academic rather than commercial.
It's trivially easy for me to think of a wide array of rote programming projects that could be thrown together with existing techniques, but how often do commerical projects involve inventing new ideas and techniques?
I think you're being unduly pessimistic as to the feasibility of constructing IR sensitive eyes.
IIRC, there are a number of animals (some snakes come to mind), that already have a sensitivity to infrared. In which case, it's less a matter of having to design from scratch and more an issue of figuring out how nature does it. Hell, maybe we'll just invent a way to successfully graft snake heat receptors. A daunting task, but not so unapproachable.
Of course whether or not it would ever be useful is still questionably, especially if one has to given up some portion of the normal spectrum in exchange.
Reading the article and looking at the group's website, this doesn't seem all that special. In fact, unless I'm misinterpreting the result, it seems that you could build a Mott insulator with any kind of supercold gas. The real accomplishment was using a Bose-Einstein condensate to very easily construct an arrangement of atoms that would otherwise be technologically very hard. That they did it by means of a quantum phase transition (adjusting the parameters of the potential to produce a qualitative different wave function) is cool, but not exactly new.
It's a neat hack, and I can imagine uses for being able to turn a BEC on and off at will, as well as for atomic arrays, but it just doesn't grab me as being all that radical. I would question calling it a new state of matter. More like a unusual way to make a very special kind of gas. Of course, I might just be missing something.
If you follow the music industry line of reasoning then copy protection should boost sales by curbing piracy. If it's really as big a deal as they want you to believe then this should more than offset the loss of the tax. Hence by economics of scale, we should see cheaper music and cheaper digital media. Of course all of that is predicated on the assumption that the recording industry isn't entirely made up of monopolistic money-grubbing pigs.
Alternatively we can throw copy protection in the trash and keep the high music costs and artificially inflated digital media costs.
Is there a winning situation for the consumer? Not really, unless you can believe that RIAA represents a fair, economically sound industry and you don't care about fair use rights.
According to the ACLU, in Tampa: "[T]he system does not automatically scan the faces of people on the sidewalks - operators must manually zoom in on a citizen's face before it registers in the software"
Which would be the basis for selection bias.
i agree that bias may exist, but that would exist anyhow and there's not much that can be done to prevent other than fire the person if they're caught.
Do you fire the person for being biased even if they don't realize that they are being so? There is a lot of research showing how people can have preferences that they aren't consciously aware of.
I've had submissions marked as accepted that then waited nearly 12 hours before being posted. Slashdot (generally) tries to spread out the submissions on the front page. That you were rejected so quickly probably means that they had already seen and accepted this guy's story but were waiting till after some of the other constitutional issues stories had had some time to be commented on.
So the FBI implements a system of screen capture to know when you are entering your password and what the "virtual keyboard" or other interface looks like. Tracking the mouse is no more difficult either. Hell if they can capture your screen, then they can just look at your files before/after they've been decrypted.
If your computer has been turned against you then there is no hope of using it protect your secrets.
Despite early reports to the contrary, the major antivirus companies came out saying they did not intend to intentionally leave any loopholes for the FBI.
While I don't know if their program works this way, it is possibly to write key loggers in such a way that they only capture keystrokes that are intended for a specific program. For instance, if I knew the details of the PGP program being used, I could record input only when it was the active window.
On the flip side of that coin, the more you bring humans into the equation, the more you open it up to biased based abuse.
If the computer has given you two potential matches regarding similar crimes, then do you pursue the black guy or the white guy? In the Tampa system, the operator had to zoom in on particular faces to run the software, do you believe that there was no profiling in who he choose to look at? Will the operator be as good at eliminating false positives when the person is from a different racial group than he is?
Sure there is a human layer that offers some protection. The machine will never decide guilt or innocence, but the human layer also diminishes many of the bias-nuetral advantages that this technology is purported to have.
The Orwellian danger is having a camera on every curb, and the potential for John Q. Public to be under constant surveillance. I'd expect that most people would be upset or put off if the police followed them around all day watching what they do. The police argue that the contentious and widespread use of cameras is justifiable because facial recognition gives them a legitimate and bias-nuetral use.
The ACLU is saying that the system doesn't work, so there is no good reason for deploying lots of cameras. (Actually they are saying more than that, but that's the part that's easy to agree with.) In any case, it's clear that the survelliance capacity presents a danger even if the intended purpose for the system doesn't work.
Yeah, someday they will figure it out, better than they have.
Right now the best facial identifiers we have are people. Think about how many people you know and can identify by their face. Even people who's names you've forgetten but still recognize on sight. (The problems of mug shots and line-ups not withstanding) under good conditions human beings only very rarely make false positives indicating that a stranger is someone they actually know.
We have evolved a specific part of our brains specialized for identifying human faces, and I see no fundemental reason that computers couldn't someday obtain the same level of skill. Problem being that the computer will be infinitely better at remembering names and other personal details which we forget, which leads to a whole lot of problems.
The biggest flaw with your analysis is that the historical trend is unlikely to describe the future trend in this case.
Given the number of people in and sympathetic to terrorist organizations, I would bet they could get enough volunteers to bring down several planes a year, assuming security couldn't stop them. The direct cost of such a situation would be horrible for us, and secondary costs on morale would be worse. That is the risk one has to counter, not the historical legacy that it doesn't happen. After all, prior to 9-11, history would tell you that jumbo jets are never used as missles.
In my mind the potential risk does justify considerable expense. Now that expense should make sense, no argument there. After all at some point it would be cheaper simpler to tell people that they can have no carry-ons and must strip and put on airline issue clothing. A step even further, you could have two planes fly every route, one for luggage, one for people. Then even if there is a bomb in someone's luggage, only the pilots die. (Of course, who wants to live in that world?)
We can make flying safer, and there is IMO some justification for spending a significant sum to do so, but I agree that it has to be real security and not the illusion of security that we pay for.
There is life on Earth which exists in deep, oceanic trenches, near hot volcanic vents. Since that life could not exist prior to the volcanic vent opening, it can be assumed that the formation of life, at it's most basic, is occuring on a regular basis. These life-forms may or may not have any nucleic structures we would recognise.
Spores, seeds, and other things are known to travel great distances through environments they couldn't actively prosper in. Just because there is a large gap between thermal vents and other places life likes to live, doesn't require that life arrise independantly at the vent. It's nice to think that life might be rather easy to get started, but we don't really have the evidence or understanding to make that judgment.
But it is prooven from ice atmospheric bubbles in ice enclosions (from south pole) that since the whole existence of mankind there was never as much CO2 in the atmosphere than we've currently, and we're still blowing more into it at a rate that has never been there before.
This statement is misleading. Since the existence of man, yes. In the history of the planet, No! C02 levels have been at least 10 TIMES current levels since the advent of life. IIRC, this is the value reported at the time of the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary. On the down side it also correlates well with one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.
Would doing that over again be a bad thing? Yes, I'm sure it would, but you'll also notice that it didn't cause runaway greenhouse and produce a planet like Venus.
While I agree with your post in general, I doubt we are anywhere near bringing on the end of the Earth. However, we probably could muck up our ecosystem pretty badly with global warming and that is probably worth avoiding.
I always thought that the gravity on Mars was low enought that the atmosphere just leaked away.
The escape velocity at the surface of Mars is only a little less than 1/2 of what it is at the surface of the earth. The thermal velocity of a particle scales with the square root of temperature. Hence a gas particle on Mars would only have to be a fourth as hot as it's Earth bound cousin in order to escape.
Now the particle has to not only be hot, but also have enough room to move that it can get away into space without hitting other gases and cooling off. This isn't really a problem since light molecules naturally drift to the higher levels, and in the case of Mars, it's pretty rarified air to begin with. Atmospheres (in the inner planets) drop off dramatically in the scale of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, whereas the planet is several 100,000s of kilometers in radius, so being high in the atmosphere only cuts a few percent off of escape velocity.
Now the real problem here is when you look at the numbers. On Earth, H2 and He won't escape at room temperature. In fact, they have to be heated to between 10 and 100 times room temperature (Kelvin Scale) in order to escape. We assume that cosmic rays, solar wind, and other atmospheric phenomena can give this much energy to an appreciable percentage of H2 and He so that non-neglible amounts bleed away into space. In any case it's not a very fast process at current.
N2 and O2, being 7 and 8 times the mass of He would have to be heated to 7 and 8 times as hot as He to escape. Given the historic composition of the atmosphere on Earth we can assume that this degree of heating is rare enough to have a pretty neglible impact on atmospheric composition.
However, if you have a considerable incidence of unshielded ionizing radiation then single atoms of N and O might be present in significant quanities and would need only 3.5 and 4 times the temperature of He's escape.
As I said, in the beggining, on Mars you can escape while being only 1/4 the escape temperature on Earth. So, yes, it is possible that ionizing radiation produces enough atomic N and O that an appreciable portion of it can escape into space. Temperatures may even be high enough to bleed of non-trivial quantities of N2 and O2 from Mars, but remember it's still a rare event since the temperatures needed are well about the surface temperature and little of the air will ever get hot enough. Could this alone account for the thin martian atmosphere? Probably not. More likely the dominant phenonema involves gases being absorbed into rocks and mineral deposits.
On one final note, thermal differentiation of atmospheric composition was probably most important early in the life of the solar system when the sun was significantly hotter. What is around today isn't likely to change much by virtue of bleeding gases into space.
Since you seem to like credentials, I'll preface this by saying I have degrees in physics and mathematics.
I am shocked by your demeanor. You act far more like the uneducated high school student you accuse dangermouse of being. Besides spouting some of the right buzz words, such as "Abstract Algebra" and making passing references to relevant concepts, such as the set theoretic construction of mathematics, you fail to show the kind of social maturity I would expect in a graduate level student from any discipline.
What's worse, you attack him for offering what is a perfectly valid and respected PHILOSOPHICAL position on the nature of mathematics. Math hasn't and almost certainly won't intrinsically answer every question about the universe. People still have to measure constants and figure out which equations are relevant where.
Math provides a very useful tool for describing the universe. It is useful because it supplies a limitless supply of definitive truths that are guaranteed provided you accept a small set of axioms (true without proof, remember). The whole argument here is about how people feel about those axioms. You obviously belong to the camp that they arrise out of man's perception of intrinsic truths. Others believe that they are merely a fantastically successful description of the universe but that ulitmately there is no referant in the universe onto which they can be pinned. In short that numbers, the rules that govern them, and all that follows are creations of human intellect and have no more factual truth than the sentence: "All unicorns shop at Walmart."
I expect that you have already encountered various alternative mathematical systems. The most intuitive of which tend to be alternative geometries, where the metrics and notions of straight are defined differently. Other people add, subtract or modify axioms from the conventional group that defines the Reals in order to consider alternative or expanded number systems. For example, Strict Constructivists use a set of axioms that defines an alternative number system where most of conventional calculus is clearly inapplicable.
Are the conclusions derived in one system any more or less true than those derived in another? You might want to appeal to the universe for a "right" set of axioms, but once you try that, you have entered into the realm of inference and scientific method, and can no longer make any claim to pure and perfect truth. All of mathematics rests on the assumption of truth of certain virtually self-evident principles. You apparently assume that they are absolute truth everywhere. Others assume that it's only absolute truth within the descriptive framework man has invented. Such a difference of opinion is entirely reasonable.
Gee whiz. Don't tell me someone on/. is concerned about preserving intellectual property rights. Yes it's unfair to the NY Times and this is while there are laws to punish people who do it. Of course it's not horribly likely that NYT will be bothered enough to sue, but technically they could.
If you think this is a philosophical argument, then I think you missed the point.
The most important point isn't whether there are emergent organizing principles at different levels, because everyone knows there are. The real arguments is whether or not "fundemental" particles are really real. The particle physics community believes they've got a grasp on the basic building blocks of reality, but then some solid state boys come along and offer a theory saying they don't really exist at the base of things.
Think of it this way. In the particle physicist mind, you don't need vacuum fluctuations to describe particles. They both have an independent existance. The solid state people have suggested that all particles are merely a consequence of the vacuum fluctuations. You can't have particles without the background.
While the two conflicting viewpoints do arrise from different philosophies, it also seems clear that there is an underlying truth. Either there are particles in full truth, or there is just a vacuum that makes it look like there are fully qualified particles. Ultimately it's the truth that's important, and this seems like an important difference to me.
You are forgetting something. Before the great paradigm shifts in the history of physics (Newton, Einstein, Bohr, etc.), there was always evidence that something was wrong with prevailing theory. Scientists on the front lines weren't "comfortable", they noticed things like the "ultraviolet catastrophe" and the precise spectra of atoms and knew something was wrong.
Today we know that general relativity and quantum mechanics don't work together, but we aren't sure how to fix it (though string theorists try hard).
Eventually it's conceivable that we'll write down some basic laws and then millenia will pass without any evidence that something is still wrong. While you're right that it's impossible to prove that these laws are correct, scientists are very diligent about trying to find holes and if none are found, then everyone will believe we finally know the truth. And perhaps we actually will.
I reread your original post and several others, and I think I may have misinterpreted what you really wanted to know, so I'll try to clarify.
There is energy in everything that has heat. To extract that energy you have to do one of two things: make it colder or decrease it's entropy.
Thermodynamics and conservation of energy guarantee that any mechanical process that makes it colder will cost more energy to perform than the difference between the energy contents in the cold and hot states. Thus you can't have any net gain of energy through a mechanical cooling.
What you can do is bring it into contact with something cooler. Heat energy is transfered from the hot thing to the cool one and in the process you can extract some energy. This is what the devices in the original story do. In fact, ultimately this is what all thermal power sources do, though the details may be obscured by changes in pressure, volume, etc. If you have a convenient hot source, such as "waste" heat, or geothermal power then you can bring it into contact with ambient temperatures and extract power while it cools.
You want to extract heat from the air. Doing it this way, and supposing there is (optimistically) an average differance of 3 degrees C between the ground and the air above it, you could get at most 1% of the energy transfered between the two. This is the thermodynamic ideal. No system will ever do better over so scant a temp difference near room temperature. Air doesn't have that much energy, nor is it a very good conductor of heat, so it doesn't seem like this would ever be worthwhile.
So, yes, you could get energy from the air that way, but that doesn't seem to be what you want. As I said, no mechanical process will give you positive energy gain, and you don't have a cool spot to compare it to, so what else. The other option is to decrease entropy. I don't know how to break the Second Law, so I want to take the entropy and shove it somewhere else. I decrease the entropy of my stuff, which means I get energy out. Unfortunately I increased the entropy of that other stuff, which means I had to put energy in! Thermodynamics tells us that the only time you win in this situation is if that other stuff was colder than the stuff you started with. Yet again you need to have a temperature difference to get any benefit.
So no, you can't extract energy from the room all by itself. You need a temperature difference if you hope to have a net output of energy. Unless of course you know how to build the magic black boxes that lead to a net decrease in the entropy of the universe, in which your Nobel prize and billions await.
I am a physicist and have studied entropy, though it is not my specialty.
At a fundemental level, entropy is a measure of the number of accesible states of a system for a given energy distribution. Presumably you know that temperature is really just a statistical measure of average kinetic energy in a substance. In the simple case of a uniform temperature gas, it's possible to compute the entropy directly, by (a process analogous to) counting the possible ways to arrange the molecules and distribute their kinetic energy such that you still have the same temperature. (Okay it's not really counting cause there is [usually] a continuum of positions and energy values, but the idea is there, only with more integrals.)
Roughly speaking a system is "ordered" or "disordered" based on how much freedom it has in distributing the energy in it's heat. For instance, in highly complicated and stable configurations (e.g. DNA) you can infer that the heat gets distributed only in ways that don't break down the basic structure. Of course with enough heat it will no longer be stable, but that's a different case.
While the number of accesible internal configurations for the heat energy is the basis for entropy, very few people actually use this. What is actually used is a set of laws mathematically derived from this which can be directly applied to macroscopicly measurable quantities. Chemists know more about these areas than I do, but I'll cover a few of the basics.
The most important is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stated simply "Entropy always increases (or stays the same)." Whenever you do anything that moves energy (such as heat) around, the net entropy will increase (except in those rare cases when it stays the same). It is possible to locally decrease the entropy of one system, but you are guaranteed to increase the entropy of everything else by at least the difference.
There is another important trick about entropy. It tells you that it's impossible to transfer energy from heat to any other form with 100% efficiency. Not only that but you can't even do it with arbitrarily close of 100% efficiency unless you have something who's initial temprature is arbitrarily close to 0 degrees Kelvin. Heat engines, any device that changes heat into other forms of energy, depend on having a difference in temperatures available (for instance, cool river water versus hot steam pipe). If you just have a box sitting at room temperature, it can't work.
There is an interesting caveat here. The Second "Law" and most of how we typically apply entropy are based upon something called the Fundemental Assumption of Thermodynamics. Roughly stated: "All possible energy configurations are equally likely". As it turns out this is rarely ever exactly true, but it is so nearly true in almost every concievable macroscopic situation that it makes no difference. Entropy always increases is a mathematically certain law derived from the fundemental assumption and mathematical definitions of temperature, etc, but it is still concievable that their might be systems where the fundemental assumption doesn't apply and entropy might decrease. Over the years there have been a few suggestions for how to build such a thing (mostly at a quantum mechanical level), but no one has ever succeeded.
If someone does build a box that sits on a desk and converts ambient heat into energy output, then they are almost certainly guaranteed a Nobel prize. On the other hand there may be something better than the fundemental assumption, which is exactly true and excludes all possibility of such a wonderful, energy giving black box.
So when you have the money to genetic engineer your offspring, are you going to teach the, to be just as nice to the "normals" whose parents couldn't afford or didn't want to engineer their children?
The kind of research they are referencing is about introducing new genes into adults. (Biological) Virii try to do this all the time. A virus is just some genetic material in a coating that makes it easy to transfer, and once it adds it's genes to the mix you become ill.
It's a bit more complicated with genetic therapies, because you generally don't want the body to fight them off, or kill target cells, but in many cases the idea is still to deliver new genetic material into adult cells. Naturally, you can be more thorough about genetic modifications if you perform them on infants, but a lot of people don't have enough confidence that they know what the effects will be. Gene therapies on adults don't generally change it all at once, so if there are negative side effects you can stop before it's overwhelming.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that the most creative software opportunities will remain in the US for some time, and the more routine development efforts will continue to be transfered overseas.
I'm not a professional programmer, but I do have programming experience, and this statement got me thinking. In the commercial world what are the oppurtunities for "creative" software development?
The only one that comes to mind is game development, and even for some games the creativity is mostly in the art and story and little in the actual programming. Certainly researchers in AI, natural language, and some other areas are being creative, but most of the unusual things seem to be academic rather than commercial.
It's trivially easy for me to think of a wide array of rote programming projects that could be thrown together with existing techniques, but how often do commerical projects involve inventing new ideas and techniques?
I think you're being unduly pessimistic as to the feasibility of constructing IR sensitive eyes.
IIRC, there are a number of animals (some snakes come to mind), that already have a sensitivity to infrared. In which case, it's less a matter of having to design from scratch and more an issue of figuring out how nature does it. Hell, maybe we'll just invent a way to successfully graft snake heat receptors. A daunting task, but not so unapproachable.
Of course whether or not it would ever be useful is still questionably, especially if one has to given up some portion of the normal spectrum in exchange.
Reading the article and looking at the group's website, this doesn't seem all that special. In fact, unless I'm misinterpreting the result, it seems that you could build a Mott insulator with any kind of supercold gas. The real accomplishment was using a Bose-Einstein condensate to very easily construct an arrangement of atoms that would otherwise be technologically very hard. That they did it by means of a quantum phase transition (adjusting the parameters of the potential to produce a qualitative different wave function) is cool, but not exactly new.
It's a neat hack, and I can imagine uses for being able to turn a BEC on and off at will, as well as for atomic arrays, but it just doesn't grab me as being all that radical. I would question calling it a new state of matter. More like a unusual way to make a very special kind of gas. Of course, I might just be missing something.
Well the next question is what do we want?
If you follow the music industry line of reasoning then copy protection should boost sales by curbing piracy. If it's really as big a deal as they want you to believe then this should more than offset the loss of the tax. Hence by economics of scale, we should see cheaper music and cheaper digital media. Of course all of that is predicated on the assumption that the recording industry isn't entirely made up of monopolistic money-grubbing pigs.
Alternatively we can throw copy protection in the trash and keep the high music costs and artificially inflated digital media costs.
Is there a winning situation for the consumer? Not really, unless you can believe that RIAA represents a fair, economically sound industry and you don't care about fair use rights.
According to the ACLU, in Tampa: "[T]he system does not automatically scan the faces of people on the sidewalks - operators must manually zoom in on a citizen's face before it registers in the software"
Which would be the basis for selection bias.
i agree that bias may exist, but that would exist anyhow and there's not much that can be done to prevent other than fire the person if they're caught.
Do you fire the person for being biased even if they don't realize that they are being so? There is a lot of research showing how people can have preferences that they aren't consciously aware of.
I've had submissions marked as accepted that then waited nearly 12 hours before being posted. Slashdot (generally) tries to spread out the submissions on the front page. That you were rejected so quickly probably means that they had already seen and accepted this guy's story but were waiting till after some of the other constitutional issues stories had had some time to be commented on.
So the FBI implements a system of screen capture to know when you are entering your password and what the "virtual keyboard" or other interface looks like. Tracking the mouse is no more difficult either. Hell if they can capture your screen, then they can just look at your files before/after they've been decrypted.
If your computer has been turned against you then there is no hope of using it protect your secrets.
Despite early reports to the contrary, the major antivirus companies came out saying they did not intend to intentionally leave any loopholes for the FBI.
1 /fbi-virus.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001/12/1
While I don't know if their program works this way, it is possibly to write key loggers in such a way that they only capture keystrokes that are intended for a specific program. For instance, if I knew the details of the PGP program being used, I could record input only when it was the active window.
On the flip side of that coin, the more you bring humans into the equation, the more you open it up to biased based abuse.
If the computer has given you two potential matches regarding similar crimes, then do you pursue the black guy or the white guy? In the Tampa system, the operator had to zoom in on particular faces to run the software, do you believe that there was no profiling in who he choose to look at? Will the operator be as good at eliminating false positives when the person is from a different racial group than he is?
Sure there is a human layer that offers some protection. The machine will never decide guilt or innocence, but the human layer also diminishes many of the bias-nuetral advantages that this technology is purported to have.
The Orwellian danger is having a camera on every curb, and the potential for John Q. Public to be under constant surveillance. I'd expect that most people would be upset or put off if the police followed them around all day watching what they do. The police argue that the contentious and widespread use of cameras is justifiable because facial recognition gives them a legitimate and bias-nuetral use.
The ACLU is saying that the system doesn't work, so there is no good reason for deploying lots of cameras. (Actually they are saying more than that, but that's the part that's easy to agree with.) In any case, it's clear that the survelliance capacity presents a danger even if the intended purpose for the system doesn't work.
Yeah, someday they will figure it out, better than they have.
Right now the best facial identifiers we have are people. Think about how many people you know and can identify by their face. Even people who's names you've forgetten but still recognize on sight. (The problems of mug shots and line-ups not withstanding) under good conditions human beings only very rarely make false positives indicating that a stranger is someone they actually know.
We have evolved a specific part of our brains specialized for identifying human faces, and I see no fundemental reason that computers couldn't someday obtain the same level of skill. Problem being that the computer will be infinitely better at remembering names and other personal details which we forget, which leads to a whole lot of problems.
The biggest flaw with your analysis is that the historical trend is unlikely to describe the future trend in this case.
Given the number of people in and sympathetic to terrorist organizations, I would bet they could get enough volunteers to bring down several planes a year, assuming security couldn't stop them. The direct cost of such a situation would be horrible for us, and secondary costs on morale would be worse. That is the risk one has to counter, not the historical legacy that it doesn't happen. After all, prior to 9-11, history would tell you that jumbo jets are never used as missles.
In my mind the potential risk does justify considerable expense. Now that expense should make sense, no argument there. After all at some point it would be cheaper simpler to tell people that they can have no carry-ons and must strip and put on airline issue clothing. A step even further, you could have two planes fly every route, one for luggage, one for people. Then even if there is a bomb in someone's luggage, only the pilots die. (Of course, who wants to live in that world?)
We can make flying safer, and there is IMO some justification for spending a significant sum to do so, but I agree that it has to be real security and not the illusion of security that we pay for.
There is life on Earth which exists in deep, oceanic trenches, near hot volcanic vents. Since that life could not exist prior to the volcanic vent opening, it can be assumed that the formation of life, at it's most basic, is occuring on a regular basis. These life-forms may or may not have any nucleic structures we would recognise.
Spores, seeds, and other things are known to travel great distances through environments they couldn't actively prosper in. Just because there is a large gap between thermal vents and other places life likes to live, doesn't require that life arrise independantly at the vent. It's nice to think that life might be rather easy to get started, but we don't really have the evidence or understanding to make that judgment.
I'm no expert at this, but I'm pretty sure 2000 ft is too deep for coral. My understanding was that they had to be able to see the sun.
But it is prooven from ice atmospheric bubbles in ice enclosions (from south pole) that since the whole existence of mankind there was never as much CO2 in the atmosphere than we've currently, and we're still blowing more into it at a rate that has never been there before.
This statement is misleading. Since the existence of man, yes. In the history of the planet, No! C02 levels have been at least 10 TIMES current levels since the advent of life. IIRC, this is the value reported at the time of the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary. On the down side it also correlates well with one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the Earth.
Would doing that over again be a bad thing? Yes, I'm sure it would, but you'll also notice that it didn't cause runaway greenhouse and produce a planet like Venus.
While I agree with your post in general, I doubt we are anywhere near bringing on the end of the Earth. However, we probably could muck up our ecosystem pretty badly with global warming and that is probably worth avoiding.
I always thought that the gravity on Mars was low enought that the atmosphere just leaked away.
The escape velocity at the surface of Mars is only a little less than 1/2 of what it is at the surface of the earth. The thermal velocity of a particle scales with the square root of temperature. Hence a gas particle on Mars would only have to be a fourth as hot as it's Earth bound cousin in order to escape.
Now the particle has to not only be hot, but also have enough room to move that it can get away into space without hitting other gases and cooling off. This isn't really a problem since light molecules naturally drift to the higher levels, and in the case of Mars, it's pretty rarified air to begin with. Atmospheres (in the inner planets) drop off dramatically in the scale of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, whereas the planet is several 100,000s of kilometers in radius, so being high in the atmosphere only cuts a few percent off of escape velocity.
Now the real problem here is when you look at the numbers. On Earth, H2 and He won't escape at room temperature. In fact, they have to be heated to between 10 and 100 times room temperature (Kelvin Scale) in order to escape. We assume that cosmic rays, solar wind, and other atmospheric phenomena can give this much energy to an appreciable percentage of H2 and He so that non-neglible amounts bleed away into space. In any case it's not a very fast process at current.
N2 and O2, being 7 and 8 times the mass of He would have to be heated to 7 and 8 times as hot as He to escape. Given the historic composition of the atmosphere on Earth we can assume that this degree of heating is rare enough to have a pretty neglible impact on atmospheric composition.
However, if you have a considerable incidence of unshielded ionizing radiation then single atoms of N and O might be present in significant quanities and would need only 3.5 and 4 times the temperature of He's escape.
As I said, in the beggining, on Mars you can escape while being only 1/4 the escape temperature on Earth. So, yes, it is possible that ionizing radiation produces enough atomic N and O that an appreciable portion of it can escape into space. Temperatures may even be high enough to bleed of non-trivial quantities of N2 and O2 from Mars, but remember it's still a rare event since the temperatures needed are well about the surface temperature and little of the air will ever get hot enough. Could this alone account for the thin martian atmosphere? Probably not. More likely the dominant phenonema involves gases being absorbed into rocks and mineral deposits.
On one final note, thermal differentiation of atmospheric composition was probably most important early in the life of the solar system when the sun was significantly hotter. What is around today isn't likely to change much by virtue of bleeding gases into space.
Since you seem to like credentials, I'll preface this by saying I have degrees in physics and mathematics.
I am shocked by your demeanor. You act far more like the uneducated high school student you accuse dangermouse of being. Besides spouting some of the right buzz words, such as "Abstract Algebra" and making passing references to relevant concepts, such as the set theoretic construction of mathematics, you fail to show the kind of social maturity I would expect in a graduate level student from any discipline.
What's worse, you attack him for offering what is a perfectly valid and respected PHILOSOPHICAL position on the nature of mathematics. Math hasn't and almost certainly won't intrinsically answer every question about the universe. People still have to measure constants and figure out which equations are relevant where.
Math provides a very useful tool for describing the universe. It is useful because it supplies a limitless supply of definitive truths that are guaranteed provided you accept a small set of axioms (true without proof, remember). The whole argument here is about how people feel about those axioms. You obviously belong to the camp that they arrise out of man's perception of intrinsic truths. Others believe that they are merely a fantastically successful description of the universe but that ulitmately there is no referant in the universe onto which they can be pinned. In short that numbers, the rules that govern them, and all that follows are creations of human intellect and have no more factual truth than the sentence: "All unicorns shop at Walmart."
I expect that you have already encountered various alternative mathematical systems. The most intuitive of which tend to be alternative geometries, where the metrics and notions of straight are defined differently. Other people add, subtract or modify axioms from the conventional group that defines the Reals in order to consider alternative or expanded number systems. For example, Strict Constructivists use a set of axioms that defines an alternative number system where most of conventional calculus is clearly inapplicable.
Are the conclusions derived in one system any more or less true than those derived in another? You might want to appeal to the universe for a "right" set of axioms, but once you try that, you have entered into the realm of inference and scientific method, and can no longer make any claim to pure and perfect truth. All of mathematics rests on the assumption of truth of certain virtually self-evident principles. You apparently assume that they are absolute truth everywhere. Others assume that it's only absolute truth within the descriptive framework man has invented. Such a difference of opinion is entirely reasonable.
Gee whiz. Don't tell me someone on /. is concerned about preserving intellectual property rights. Yes it's unfair to the NY Times and this is while there are laws to punish people who do it. Of course it's not horribly likely that NYT will be bothered enough to sue, but technically they could.
If you think this is a philosophical argument, then I think you missed the point.
The most important point isn't whether there are emergent organizing principles at different levels, because everyone knows there are. The real arguments is whether or not "fundemental" particles are really real. The particle physics community believes they've got a grasp on the basic building blocks of reality, but then some solid state boys come along and offer a theory saying they don't really exist at the base of things.
Think of it this way. In the particle physicist mind, you don't need vacuum fluctuations to describe particles. They both have an independent existance. The solid state people have suggested that all particles are merely a consequence of the vacuum fluctuations. You can't have particles without the background.
While the two conflicting viewpoints do arrise from different philosophies, it also seems clear that there is an underlying truth. Either there are particles in full truth, or there is just a vacuum that makes it look like there are fully qualified particles. Ultimately it's the truth that's important, and this seems like an important difference to me.
You are forgetting something. Before the great paradigm shifts in the history of physics (Newton, Einstein, Bohr, etc.), there was always evidence that something was wrong with prevailing theory. Scientists on the front lines weren't "comfortable", they noticed things like the "ultraviolet catastrophe" and the precise spectra of atoms and knew something was wrong.
Today we know that general relativity and quantum mechanics don't work together, but we aren't sure how to fix it (though string theorists try hard).
Eventually it's conceivable that we'll write down some basic laws and then millenia will pass without any evidence that something is still wrong. While you're right that it's impossible to prove that these laws are correct, scientists are very diligent about trying to find holes and if none are found, then everyone will believe we finally know the truth. And perhaps we actually will.
I reread your original post and several others, and I think I may have misinterpreted what you really wanted to know, so I'll try to clarify.
There is energy in everything that has heat. To extract that energy you have to do one of two things: make it colder or decrease it's entropy.
Thermodynamics and conservation of energy guarantee that any mechanical process that makes it colder will cost more energy to perform than the difference between the energy contents in the cold and hot states. Thus you can't have any net gain of energy through a mechanical cooling.
What you can do is bring it into contact with something cooler. Heat energy is transfered from the hot thing to the cool one and in the process you can extract some energy. This is what the devices in the original story do. In fact, ultimately this is what all thermal power sources do, though the details may be obscured by changes in pressure, volume, etc. If you have a convenient hot source, such as "waste" heat, or geothermal power then you can bring it into contact with ambient temperatures and extract power while it cools.
You want to extract heat from the air. Doing it this way, and supposing there is (optimistically) an average differance of 3 degrees C between the ground and the air above it, you could get at most 1% of the energy transfered between the two. This is the thermodynamic ideal. No system will ever do better over so scant a temp difference near room temperature. Air doesn't have that much energy, nor is it a very good conductor of heat, so it doesn't seem like this would ever be worthwhile.
So, yes, you could get energy from the air that way, but that doesn't seem to be what you want. As I said, no mechanical process will give you positive energy gain, and you don't have a cool spot to compare it to, so what else. The other option is to decrease entropy. I don't know how to break the Second Law, so I want to take the entropy and shove it somewhere else. I decrease the entropy of my stuff, which means I get energy out. Unfortunately I increased the entropy of that other stuff, which means I had to put energy in! Thermodynamics tells us that the only time you win in this situation is if that other stuff was colder than the stuff you started with. Yet again you need to have a temperature difference to get any benefit.
So no, you can't extract energy from the room all by itself. You need a temperature difference if you hope to have a net output of energy. Unless of course you know how to build the magic black boxes that lead to a net decrease in the entropy of the universe, in which your Nobel prize and billions await.
I am a physicist and have studied entropy, though it is not my specialty.
At a fundemental level, entropy is a measure of the number of accesible states of a system for a given energy distribution. Presumably you know that temperature is really just a statistical measure of average kinetic energy in a substance. In the simple case of a uniform temperature gas, it's possible to compute the entropy directly, by (a process analogous to) counting the possible ways to arrange the molecules and distribute their kinetic energy such that you still have the same temperature. (Okay it's not really counting cause there is [usually] a continuum of positions and energy values, but the idea is there, only with more integrals.)
Roughly speaking a system is "ordered" or "disordered" based on how much freedom it has in distributing the energy in it's heat. For instance, in highly complicated and stable configurations (e.g. DNA) you can infer that the heat gets distributed only in ways that don't break down the basic structure. Of course with enough heat it will no longer be stable, but that's a different case.
While the number of accesible internal configurations for the heat energy is the basis for entropy, very few people actually use this. What is actually used is a set of laws mathematically derived from this which can be directly applied to macroscopicly measurable quantities. Chemists know more about these areas than I do, but I'll cover a few of the basics.
The most important is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stated simply "Entropy always increases (or stays the same)." Whenever you do anything that moves energy (such as heat) around, the net entropy will increase (except in those rare cases when it stays the same). It is possible to locally decrease the entropy of one system, but you are guaranteed to increase the entropy of everything else by at least the difference.
There is another important trick about entropy. It tells you that it's impossible to transfer energy from heat to any other form with 100% efficiency. Not only that but you can't even do it with arbitrarily close of 100% efficiency unless you have something who's initial temprature is arbitrarily close to 0 degrees Kelvin. Heat engines, any device that changes heat into other forms of energy, depend on having a difference in temperatures available (for instance, cool river water versus hot steam pipe). If you just have a box sitting at room temperature, it can't work.
There is an interesting caveat here. The Second "Law" and most of how we typically apply entropy are based upon something called the Fundemental Assumption of Thermodynamics. Roughly stated: "All possible energy configurations are equally likely". As it turns out this is rarely ever exactly true, but it is so nearly true in almost every concievable macroscopic situation that it makes no difference. Entropy always increases is a mathematically certain law derived from the fundemental assumption and mathematical definitions of temperature, etc, but it is still concievable that their might be systems where the fundemental assumption doesn't apply and entropy might decrease. Over the years there have been a few suggestions for how to build such a thing (mostly at a quantum mechanical level), but no one has ever succeeded.
If someone does build a box that sits on a desk and converts ambient heat into energy output, then they are almost certainly guaranteed a Nobel prize. On the other hand there may be something better than the fundemental assumption, which is exactly true and excludes all possibility of such a wonderful, energy giving black box.
So when you have the money to genetic engineer your offspring, are you going to teach the, to be just as nice to the "normals" whose parents couldn't afford or didn't want to engineer their children?
The kind of research they are referencing is about introducing new genes into adults. (Biological) Virii try to do this all the time. A virus is just some genetic material in a coating that makes it easy to transfer, and once it adds it's genes to the mix you become ill.
It's a bit more complicated with genetic therapies, because you generally don't want the body to fight them off, or kill target cells, but in many cases the idea is still to deliver new genetic material into adult cells. Naturally, you can be more thorough about genetic modifications if you perform them on infants, but a lot of people don't have enough confidence that they know what the effects will be. Gene therapies on adults don't generally change it all at once, so if there are negative side effects you can stop before it's overwhelming.