expect a lot of free content sites to go belly up. No cookie, no revenue.
This is exactly why Newspapers and TV have been going belly up, ever since the EU passed passed that "Breathtakingly Stupid" law prohibiting shows from storing cookies in my TV and preventing newspapers from storing cookies in my.... ummm.... kitchen.
Once upon a time there was a puppet who loved cookies. All he ate was lots and lots of cookies. He was the Cookie Monster. And kids thought it was funny - Cookies Cookies Cookies Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom!
And then one day some people came in and decided Cookie Monster was a Bad Ifluence. Kids might not realize that this puppet was different and strange and funny, and that real people shouldn't really eat just cookies all day. They decided that the Cookie Monster should be telling kids to eat their fruits and vegetables. So they came in with a big fat knife and cut his balls off. And now he's the Cookies Are A Sometimes Food Monster. Doh.
Eat your spinach Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Eat your broccoli Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Brush your teeth Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Clean your room Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Do your homework Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom!
Someone at Sesame Street needs a Fuck You Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! He's a fucking puppet, he's already portrayed as being "not normal", and he's the fucking Cookie Monster. If you want to lecture kids on healthy eating then you have some other character give the educational speech, and you play them off as the one smart one against the Cookie Monster being the weird dumb one, and that real people can't actually eat that way.
Look at me! I'm the COOOKIE MONSTER! And COOKIES are a SOMETIEMS food! Shoot me. Please.
Duh! Of course there are ads in the webby-innertubes! Rule 34: Generally accepted internet rule that states that pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject.
And what would be a good deal to you? 1% profit margin? 2% profit margin?
You appear to have a reading comprehension problem.
His post in no way targeted PROFIT MARGINS. It bitched about marketing gimmicks (such printing FAKE %800 markup prices for the sole purpose of then offering a fabricated "50% discount" on that price). And in particular he was bitching about money wasted on marketing resulting in higher costs. And most specifically he was agreeing with the grandparent post about the cost of running supermarket fake-discount shopper cards resulting in higher prices than supermarkets without those fake-discount shopper cards.
Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent...
So you can't go to Flash Cookies or any other storage method.
Unless I'm missing something, the breathtakingly stupid" comment and all hysteria about this law are coming from ad marketing interests. Unless I'm missing something, the many exemptions and openings in the law make it pretty well a non-issue for anyone other than ad tracking companies, any more "direct" usage of cookies such as logins and shopping-carts and flash-cookie-game-saves are all clearly permitted. And again, unless I'm missing something this law has pretty well ZERO impact on the direct fact of putting ads in webpages. You do not need to use a cookie at all in order to serve up ads in webpages.
Unless I'm missing something, the only thing this law does is get in the way of "spyware" style methods to hijack the resources and usage of other people's computers to surreptitiously preform identity and behavior tracking.
While I certainly understand why certain companies would be upset by this - companies dedicated to identifying and spying on everyone on the internet - but 'm not particularly sympathetic. Not only do I not particularly appreciate their efforts, they no particular right to make use of other people's computers to store and access their surreptitious tracking data, and they have absolutely no right to expect other people will store this data for them or grant them future access to the sored data, nor to expect the data will be stored and returned unmodified. The only reason their efforts "work" is because most webbrowsers by default comply with these remote storage and access requests. I currently have my browser configured to wipe all-but-two of all cookies at the end of sessions, and I would dearly love to find some Firefox extension that actively corrupted the data returned by these tracking cookies. But just randomly trashing the data in my cookies is no good - I mean something more like randomly swapping tracking cookies with other people, kinda like randomly swapping "supermarket discount cards" with other people every time you go to the supermarket.
I forgot to use the prview buttton. The first line was supposed to be in italics, a quote of the parent post. My post might be pretty confusing if that first line is read as if it were my own opening statement.
Just because it occurs naturally, doesn't mean that a God didn't use this technique to design life on earth.
I realize you're just trying to be fair and reasonable in defense of ID, but you are misrepresenting the Intelligent Design position.
The ID position is that God is an incompetent half-ass Creator. Their position is that Go did NOT create a perfect and complete universe with perfect and complete natural laws. Their position is that forces and mechanisms within the universe are incapable of producing life. Their position is that God had to hand-craft and manually insert life into an imperfect incomplete Creation.
They are desperately clinging to the logic that: (1) The forces and mechanisms within the universe (science) cannot produce life and humans; (2) Life and humans do exist; therefore (3) God exists! Yippee! Now we have Scientific proof of God! And we're so desperate and excited about it because.... ummm well because we're jealous of Science... because our Faith is weak and fragile and intimidated by this science stuff that we don't really understand... we're not stupid yokels we know this science stuff is really good and right and proves stuff and it actually works... and we want this science stuff to support our weak faith and we want it to fit our fundamentalist literalist Dogma about hod God did things.
Intelligent Design's premise is that we can find scientific evidence to establish the existence of a designer. Their argument and their incompetent-creator-God both vanish in a puff of smoke if the "natural forces" within the universe can produce life and humans. Their argument and their small God both vanish in a puff of smoke if God could have been a Matser Creator who created a perfect complete universe with perfect complete laws that he put in place as his "technique" for creating life and humans.
The position that God created the universe and used "nauta" chemistry and evolution as his technique to create life - that position is NOT compatible with Intelligent Design. The idea "God used evolution" is compatible with plain old evolution. It's called theistic evolution, but it lies within the evolution side of this conflict.
The way you phrased your comment you fell into the ID'ers trap, inadvertently repeating one of their lies. You phrased your comment as if evolution equaled atheism, as if evolution somehow meant that God did not exist or that God could not or did not use Chemistry and Physics and Evolution as his technique for creating life.
I certainly agree that it would be quite difficult to make it cost effective, however most of your comments are pretty far off base. It may be impractical, but it's not nearly as absurd as you indicate.
One punk with a gun decides to piss on everybody's day.
And no one cares.
You would probably have to put a few hundred thousand bullet holes before it became danger. A hundred thousand bullet holes works out to one hole per 270 square feet - about two-thousandth of one percent of the surface area. Or more significantly it works out to one bullet hole per fifty-five thousand cubic feet of air. Even if each bullet hole leaked ten cubic feet of low-pressure warm air per minute, it would take nearly four days for a hundred thousand bullet holes to leak the air inside. And that is neglecting the fact that the rising warm air escaping through the holes will likely be completely replaced by cool air drawn in at the bottom. If someone puts a hundred thousand bullet holes in it, you simply close normal exhaust vent at the top. And that's even without any active intake fans. If you do have some sort of emergency fan building on the perimeter you could keep it up long enough to make repairs even if there is a fairly catastrophic hole. Another important note is that holes near the bottom don't much matter - there is essentially zero pressure difference at ground level and air wouldn't bother "leaking" out the hole. The most significant place for holes would be at the top where the hot air balloon effect is pushing up on the top.
The expenses of building such a thing would be astronomical.
Expensive, yes. Astronomical? No...
building an air-tight wall around the city
You don't need an air tight wall. I don't know exactly what sort of perimeter that were planning, but to understand this sort of structure you need to understand that they could in fact build something like this with no wall at all. You could build something like this with an arbitrary hight open perimeter, with nothing more than occasional ropes tying the edges down. The plastic roof sheet would act like a hot air balloon, more than supporting its own weight. Running the roof sheet right down to the ground as a vertical wall would give you much more control of the inside conditions, but you are still going to need pretty big openings to let airflow in, and some pretty significant controllable vents to let hot air escape at the top.
managing water
The dome inherently functions as an enormous fresh water rain capture system for the covered area. It's conceivable the water issue might actually work out to be a small net positive compared to conventional municipal water systems.
managing... waste and air control for an entire square mile contained environment would require exotic technologies
We're not talking some sort of hermetically sealed biodome:D You would have stricter controls on fires and other gaseous emissions, but in general I don't see "waste" control being much different. Yes you'd have air control systems, but upening vents at the top to allow hot hair to naturally escape and opening essentially "giant windows" to let air flow in are hardly "exotic technologies".
I've seen cities fly billions of dollars over budget trying to do relatively simple things like bury an ugly highway running through the city, or prepare to host the Olympic games.
Yes, trying to tunnel a highway under a city is freaking expensive, and constructing a city's worth of complex Olympic facilities is expensive. However to oversimplify, we are basically talking about a huge but fairly simple sheet of plastic with probably kevlar ropes for tiedown and reinforcement. Yes yes, a simplification, but not grossly far off. Yes there's the water system - but that isn't very complex and it is offset by the fact that it supplements/replaces the old municipal system.
It's expensive, probably not cost effective, but not f
I'm sure there's actually probably a better substance than water for the purpose
Actually water is about the ideal storage bank for heat. Water molecules experience a huge about of hydrogen bonding with each other. Any heat energy you add to water largely gets soaked up to break these hydrogen bonds, very little of the energy actually goes into increasing the velocity of the molecules. While it's possible I've missed something, the only substances I have been able to find with a higher specific heat than water are some gases such as hydrogen helium and ammonia. Obviously the cost and low density of gases generally makes them useless for a heat storage bank.
Adding a percentage of alcohol or possibly other substances to water may yield an increase in specific heat, but that only seems to be about a 4% improvement. Unlikely to be worthwhile compared to the simplicity of plain water.
I think about the only chance you might be able to do better than water is maybe if you can find a cheap easy substance that happens to undergo a relatively high heat-capacity phase change within your temperature range. There is work being done on exactly this sort of technology, mostly directed to stabilizing home temperatures and lowering heating and cooling costs, but they do not seem to have found a good cost effective material yet.
I doubt you do much better than a cheap easy mass of water. I'd be most curious to see if anyone can post a comparable or better alternative.
I think that would be more like $30 per month fee, with a $50 surcharge for each truckload of bullshit after the first five truckloads of bullshit (on the mandatory unlimited bullshit plan).
Congratulations! Because your 15 minute time cycle is not synchronized with their 15 minute measurement cycle, you show up as using 74.5% twice in a row and wind up throttled 100% of the time.:D
First, modern humans have been in our current form for something like ten thousand generations
We obviously haven't grow wings lately, but it would be a mistake to think we haven't changed at all. A rather substantial number of genes have been identified as having been selected during the last several tens of thousands of years, and in fact quite a few genes have been identified undergoing current positive or negative selection. A simple case is something like lactose tolerance which has been independently evolved and selected in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. I recall an article about the number of copies of some brain genes increasing on that time scale (some genes have multiple copies, which increases the amount of protein generated from them, which affects function). A fascinating current example is that scientists have found certain genes for bipolar disorder and other mental disorders are currently undergoing POSITIVE evolutionary selection, because certain classes of emotionally unstable people are inclined unstable relationships or promiscuity, and they tend to fail to use contraception. So these emotionally unstable people tend to have many serial relationships leaving a string of children behind to be raised by the more stable partner. It is a kinda twisted example, but it is a very real example of a very real direction currently being explored actively selected for in human evolution. It's a striking and memorable example because it illustrated how evolution doesn't care what we thing is "good" or bad", evolution just selects whatever "works" to yield more offspring.
Giving birth earlier and later menopause all sound like things that would improve selective fitness... but the question is, if they really are selected for, why weren't they selected for five thousand years ago?
The most significant event in human evolution was a huge surge towards larger more flexible brains. Humans are born with "freakishly" huge heads compared to any other primate. Most species can stand and walk virtually from the moment of birth, but human babies are born with such oversized heads that their necks can't even lift their heads.
The limiting factor in head-size at birth is the size of the mother's pelvis and birth canal. Labor and birth is extraordinarily difficult and painful in human females exactly because of the difficulty of trying to birth a huge-headed baby through a barely large enough birth canal.
Up until the advent of modern medicine, a staggering percentage of women died in child birth. I'm not sure, but the number 20% pops to mind. Virtually all of those fatalities are derive from the difficulty and failure to deliver the too-large baby's head through the too-small birth canal.
Modern diets produce faster growth rates in children, and modern medicine eases birth or even uses a C-section to completely avoid the birth canal. In the past pregnancy in younger girl was simply a death sentence for both the mother and baby, physically incapable of delivering the baby through her more limited birth canal. Puberty can and has come at younger ages simply because it is no longer fatal.
As for the delay in menopause, very few people used to lived long enough to even hit menopause. There was negligible pressure for women to remain fertile beyond their typical lifespan. Additionally modern women quite often use birth control to delay child bearing. Modern women generally want to finish college or even establish careers first. There is often talk of hearing the "click ticking", with women delaying their child bearing years right up against the menopause limit. The menopause limit has recently become an extremely active factor strangling the number of children a woman can have. In fact a significant number of career women losing the ability to have even a desired first child because they waited too long.
ten generations is trivial
It obviously does not absolutely indicate the long term future of the entire human race, but even just two or
I think evolutionary change is being stifled by both medicine and civilization.
Modern society certainly has a huge effect in evolution, but it does not diminish the process of evolution.
Reproductive "success" is not genetic anymore, its based on social factors
Genetics affect social factors. It is almost certain the development of human language and intelligence was largely driven by social factors. Individuals who were more intelligent and more linguistically capable would have been far better at climbing the social hierarchy, getting more social support and control. They would have been better at avoiding dangerous social violence, better at building obtaining alliances for mutual defense against violence, better at obtaining food and other resources for themselves and for their ates and for their children. They also would have been far more appealing as mates both because of the previous reasons, but also for the direct reason of "sexual attractiveness" selection for more linguistically skilled mates.
The goal of most humans is no longer to spawn the most progeny.
Evolution doesn't care about goals, and evolution does not care about our values. Evolution only cares about one thing your long term number of descendants.... how many offspring you leave behind and how successful those offspring are in producing more offspring.
There is a particularly striking recent human genetics discovery that demonstrating this point. DNA analysis of large numbers of people over the last few decades has identified quite a few genes that are currently undergoing significant positive evolutionary selection. In particular genes for certain mental illnesses (such as bipolar disorder) are seeing POSITIVE evolutionary selection. People will these mental instabilities are more inclined to promiscuous or intense-but-unstable sexual relationships. They tend to neglect birth control, or only use it erratically. They tend to get pregnant (or get other people pregnant) at a very high rate. Being unstable, they tend to leave that child to be raised by the other partner or by family members, and they move on to the next unstable relationship producing more children.
It doesn't matter if you or I consider mental and emotional instability to be a "bad thing". The evolutionary fact is that people with these genes produce more offspring than average, and those offspring tend to produce more offspring than average. In the long term more complex factors may (or may not) turn against the genes for these forms of mental instability, but it perfectly illustrates that evolution doesn't care what we like or what we want or what we value. Evolution simply selects whatever works - where "works" means producing more copies of the genes.
Medicine and modern society have radically altered the selections pressures on humans, but have not diminished the fact of evolutionary selection. We are no longer threatened by many diseases, being near sighted or far sighted is no longer a significant survival issue, broken bones are rarely crippling or fatal. On the other hand physical tolerance for surgery and anesthesia is a significant selection factor. Physical tolerance for modern medicines is a selection factor - someone with a fatal allergy to penicillin has a problem. Mental capabilities in literacy and basic arithmetic handling money and relevant. The skills and temperament to navigate modern urban and suburban society (humans are still significantly adapted to tribal society where at most a few hundred people in a population all knew each other). One of the largest causes of death today is driving fatalities - so spacial skills and other driving skills are a significant selection pressure. Our modern diet has radically changed - vitamins and starvation have largely vanished as selection issues, but now obesity and diet-related hart disease are major health issues (people will with either be selected towards a better diets, or to selected to better thrive on a modern diet). And on and on and on.
My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
We can mandate that in our next economic stimulus plan.
Slashdot Mirror
expect a lot of free content sites to go belly up. No cookie, no revenue.
This is exactly why Newspapers and TV have been going belly up, ever since the EU passed passed that "Breathtakingly Stupid" law prohibiting shows from storing cookies in my TV and preventing newspapers from storing cookies in my.... ummm.... kitchen.
No cookie, no revenue.
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"a sometimes food"
Once upon a time there was a puppet who loved cookies. All he ate was lots and lots of cookies. He was the Cookie Monster. And kids thought it was funny - Cookies Cookies Cookies Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom!
And then one day some people came in and decided Cookie Monster was a Bad Ifluence. Kids might not realize that this puppet was different and strange and funny, and that real people shouldn't really eat just cookies all day. They decided that the Cookie Monster should be telling kids to eat their fruits and vegetables. So they came in with a big fat knife and cut his balls off. And now he's the Cookies Are A Sometimes Food Monster. Doh.
Eat your spinach Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Eat your broccoli Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Brush your teeth Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Clean your room Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! Do your homework Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom!
Someone at Sesame Street needs a Fuck You Om nom nom nom nom nom nom nom! He's a fucking puppet, he's already portrayed as being "not normal", and he's the fucking Cookie Monster. If you want to lecture kids on healthy eating then you have some other character give the educational speech, and you play them off as the one smart one against the Cookie Monster being the weird dumb one, and that real people can't actually eat that way.
Look at me! I'm the COOOKIE MONSTER! And COOKIES are a SOMETIEMS food! Shoot me. Please.
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Duh! Of course there are ads in the webby-innertubes!
Rule 34: Generally accepted internet rule that states that pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject.
Paris Hilton Banned Burger Ad
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And what would be a good deal to you? 1% profit margin? 2% profit margin?
You appear to have a reading comprehension problem.
His post in no way targeted PROFIT MARGINS. It bitched about marketing gimmicks (such printing FAKE %800 markup prices for the sole purpose of then offering a fabricated "50% discount" on that price). And in particular he was bitching about money wasted on marketing resulting in higher costs. And most specifically he was agreeing with the grandparent post about the cost of running supermarket fake-discount shopper cards resulting in higher prices than supermarkets without those fake-discount shopper cards.
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FLASH COOKIES ;)
The law reads:
So you can't go to Flash Cookies or any other storage method.
Unless I'm missing something, the breathtakingly stupid" comment and all hysteria about this law are coming from ad marketing interests. Unless I'm missing something, the many exemptions and openings in the law make it pretty well a non-issue for anyone other than ad tracking companies, any more "direct" usage of cookies such as logins and shopping-carts and flash-cookie-game-saves are all clearly permitted. And again, unless I'm missing something this law has pretty well ZERO impact on the direct fact of putting ads in webpages. You do not need to use a cookie at all in order to serve up ads in webpages.
Unless I'm missing something, the only thing this law does is get in the way of "spyware" style methods to hijack the resources and usage of other people's computers to surreptitiously preform identity and behavior tracking.
While I certainly understand why certain companies would be upset by this - companies dedicated to identifying and spying on everyone on the internet - but 'm not particularly sympathetic. Not only do I not particularly appreciate their efforts, they no particular right to make use of other people's computers to store and access their surreptitious tracking data, and they have absolutely no right to expect other people will store this data for them or grant them future access to the sored data, nor to expect the data will be stored and returned unmodified. The only reason their efforts "work" is because most webbrowsers by default comply with these remote storage and access requests. I currently have my browser configured to wipe all-but-two of all cookies at the end of sessions, and I would dearly love to find some Firefox extension that actively corrupted the data returned by these tracking cookies. But just randomly trashing the data in my cookies is no good - I mean something more like randomly swapping tracking cookies with other people, kinda like randomly swapping "supermarket discount cards" with other people every time you go to the supermarket.
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Then you'll just find a new charge at the bottom of your Comcast bill:
$30 per month plus $50 per call after the first five calls (mandatory unlimited phone support plan)
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In the beginning was the void, and the void was our knowledge, and some power hungry people saw that void and thought that it was good
Impressive. Me like-ee very much. That one goes into my quotations file.
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I forgot to use the prview buttton. The first line was supposed to be in italics, a quote of the parent post. My post might be pretty confusing if that first line is read as if it were my own opening statement.
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Just because it occurs naturally, doesn't mean that a God didn't use this technique to design life on earth.
I realize you're just trying to be fair and reasonable in defense of ID, but you are misrepresenting the Intelligent Design position.
The ID position is that God is an incompetent half-ass Creator. Their position is that Go did NOT create a perfect and complete universe with perfect and complete natural laws. Their position is that forces and mechanisms within the universe are incapable of producing life. Their position is that God had to hand-craft and manually insert life into an imperfect incomplete Creation.
They are desperately clinging to the logic that:
(1) The forces and mechanisms within the universe (science) cannot produce life and humans;
(2) Life and humans do exist;
therefore
(3) God exists! Yippee! Now we have Scientific proof of God! And we're so desperate and excited about it because.... ummm well because we're jealous of Science... because our Faith is weak and fragile and intimidated by this science stuff that we don't really understand... we're not stupid yokels we know this science stuff is really good and right and proves stuff and it actually works... and we want this science stuff to support our weak faith and we want it to fit our fundamentalist literalist Dogma about hod God did things.
Intelligent Design's premise is that we can find scientific evidence to establish the existence of a designer. Their argument and their incompetent-creator-God both vanish in a puff of smoke if the "natural forces" within the universe can produce life and humans. Their argument and their small God both vanish in a puff of smoke if God could have been a Matser Creator who created a perfect complete universe with perfect complete laws that he put in place as his "technique" for creating life and humans.
The position that God created the universe and used "nauta" chemistry and evolution as his technique to create life - that position is NOT compatible with Intelligent Design. The idea "God used evolution" is compatible with plain old evolution. It's called theistic evolution, but it lies within the evolution side of this conflict.
The way you phrased your comment you fell into the ID'ers trap, inadvertently repeating one of their lies. You phrased your comment as if evolution equaled atheism, as if evolution somehow meant that God did not exist or that God could not or did not use Chemistry and Physics and Evolution as his technique for creating life.
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The parking services was second only to tuition and the football team
Errrr.... wouldn't that make it THIRD to tuition and football? :D
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Bing
Is
Not
Gnu/gle
P.S.
Someone at Microsoft seriously needs to read my sig.
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Next thing you know, they'll make suicide illegal.
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I certainly agree that it would be quite difficult to make it cost effective, however most of your comments are pretty far off base. It may be impractical, but it's not nearly as absurd as you indicate.
One punk with a gun decides to piss on everybody's day.
And no one cares.
You would probably have to put a few hundred thousand bullet holes before it became danger. A hundred thousand bullet holes works out to one hole per 270 square feet - about two-thousandth of one percent of the surface area. Or more significantly it works out to one bullet hole per fifty-five thousand cubic feet of air. Even if each bullet hole leaked ten cubic feet of low-pressure warm air per minute, it would take nearly four days for a hundred thousand bullet holes to leak the air inside. And that is neglecting the fact that the rising warm air escaping through the holes will likely be completely replaced by cool air drawn in at the bottom. If someone puts a hundred thousand bullet holes in it, you simply close normal exhaust vent at the top. And that's even without any active intake fans. If you do have some sort of emergency fan building on the perimeter you could keep it up long enough to make repairs even if there is a fairly catastrophic hole. Another important note is that holes near the bottom don't much matter - there is essentially zero pressure difference at ground level and air wouldn't bother "leaking" out the hole. The most significant place for holes would be at the top where the hot air balloon effect is pushing up on the top.
The expenses of building such a thing would be astronomical.
Expensive, yes. Astronomical? No...
building an air-tight wall around the city
You don't need an air tight wall. I don't know exactly what sort of perimeter that were planning, but to understand this sort of structure you need to understand that they could in fact build something like this with no wall at all. You could build something like this with an arbitrary hight open perimeter, with nothing more than occasional ropes tying the edges down. The plastic roof sheet would act like a hot air balloon, more than supporting its own weight. Running the roof sheet right down to the ground as a vertical wall would give you much more control of the inside conditions, but you are still going to need pretty big openings to let airflow in, and some pretty significant controllable vents to let hot air escape at the top.
managing water
The dome inherently functions as an enormous fresh water rain capture system for the covered area. It's conceivable the water issue might actually work out to be a small net positive compared to conventional municipal water systems.
managing ... waste and air control for an entire square mile contained environment would require exotic technologies
We're not talking some sort of hermetically sealed biodome :D
You would have stricter controls on fires and other gaseous emissions, but in general I don't see "waste" control being much different. Yes you'd have air control systems, but upening vents at the top to allow hot hair to naturally escape and opening essentially "giant windows" to let air flow in are hardly "exotic technologies".
I've seen cities fly billions of dollars over budget trying to do relatively simple things like bury an ugly highway running through the city, or prepare to host the Olympic games.
Yes, trying to tunnel a highway under a city is freaking expensive, and constructing a city's worth of complex Olympic facilities is expensive. However to oversimplify, we are basically talking about a huge but fairly simple sheet of plastic with probably kevlar ropes for tiedown and reinforcement. Yes yes, a simplification, but not grossly far off. Yes there's the water system - but that isn't very complex and it is offset by the fact that it supplements/replaces the old municipal system.
It's expensive, probably not cost effective, but not f
All the pollinating insects and most vertebrate species died. That's pretty grave.
Pfft! Only if you're a pollinating insect or a vertebrate species.
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I'm sure there's actually probably a better substance than water for the purpose
Actually water is about the ideal storage bank for heat. Water molecules experience a huge about of hydrogen bonding with each other. Any heat energy you add to water largely gets soaked up to break these hydrogen bonds, very little of the energy actually goes into increasing the velocity of the molecules. While it's possible I've missed something, the only substances I have been able to find with a higher specific heat than water are some gases such as hydrogen helium and ammonia. Obviously the cost and low density of gases generally makes them useless for a heat storage bank.
Adding a percentage of alcohol or possibly other substances to water may yield an increase in specific heat, but that only seems to be about a 4% improvement. Unlikely to be worthwhile compared to the simplicity of plain water.
I think about the only chance you might be able to do better than water is maybe if you can find a cheap easy substance that happens to undergo a relatively high heat-capacity phase change within your temperature range. There is work being done on exactly this sort of technology, mostly directed to stabilizing home temperatures and lowering heating and cooling costs, but they do not seem to have found a good cost effective material yet.
I doubt you do much better than a cheap easy mass of water. I'd be most curious to see if anyone can post a comparable or better alternative.
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Fair?
I think that would be more like $30 per month fee, with a $50 surcharge for each truckload of bullshit after the first five truckloads of bullshit (on the mandatory unlimited bullshit plan).
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Congratulations! Because your 15 minute time cycle is not synchronized with their 15 minute measurement cycle, you show up as using 74.5% twice in a row and wind up throttled 100% of the time. :D
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And Obama.
Yeah, me too. I had to put the pork-anus ice cream back and had to go with the cookie-dough ice cream instead.
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First, modern humans have been in our current form for something like ten thousand generations
We obviously haven't grow wings lately, but it would be a mistake to think we haven't changed at all. A rather substantial number of genes have been identified as having been selected during the last several tens of thousands of years, and in fact quite a few genes have been identified undergoing current positive or negative selection. A simple case is something like lactose tolerance which has been independently evolved and selected in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. I recall an article about the number of copies of some brain genes increasing on that time scale (some genes have multiple copies, which increases the amount of protein generated from them, which affects function). A fascinating current example is that scientists have found certain genes for bipolar disorder and other mental disorders are currently undergoing POSITIVE evolutionary selection, because certain classes of emotionally unstable people are inclined unstable relationships or promiscuity, and they tend to fail to use contraception. So these emotionally unstable people tend to have many serial relationships leaving a string of children behind to be raised by the more stable partner. It is a kinda twisted example, but it is a very real example of a very real direction currently being explored actively selected for in human evolution. It's a striking and memorable example because it illustrated how evolution doesn't care what we thing is "good" or bad", evolution just selects whatever "works" to yield more offspring.
Giving birth earlier and later menopause all sound like things that would improve selective fitness... but the question is, if they really are selected for, why weren't they selected for five thousand years ago?
The most significant event in human evolution was a huge surge towards larger more flexible brains. Humans are born with "freakishly" huge heads compared to any other primate. Most species can stand and walk virtually from the moment of birth, but human babies are born with such oversized heads that their necks can't even lift their heads.
The limiting factor in head-size at birth is the size of the mother's pelvis and birth canal. Labor and birth is extraordinarily difficult and painful in human females exactly because of the difficulty of trying to birth a huge-headed baby through a barely large enough birth canal.
Up until the advent of modern medicine, a staggering percentage of women died in child birth. I'm not sure, but the number 20% pops to mind. Virtually all of those fatalities are derive from the difficulty and failure to deliver the too-large baby's head through the too-small birth canal.
Modern diets produce faster growth rates in children, and modern medicine eases birth or even uses a C-section to completely avoid the birth canal. In the past pregnancy in younger girl was simply a death sentence for both the mother and baby, physically incapable of delivering the baby through her more limited birth canal. Puberty can and has come at younger ages simply because it is no longer fatal.
As for the delay in menopause, very few people used to lived long enough to even hit menopause. There was negligible pressure for women to remain fertile beyond their typical lifespan. Additionally modern women quite often use birth control to delay child bearing. Modern women generally want to finish college or even establish careers first. There is often talk of hearing the "click ticking", with women delaying their child bearing years right up against the menopause limit. The menopause limit has recently become an extremely active factor strangling the number of children a woman can have. In fact a significant number of career women losing the ability to have even a desired first child because they waited too long.
ten generations is trivial
It obviously does not absolutely indicate the long term future of the entire human race, but even just two or
I think evolutionary change is being stifled by both medicine and civilization.
Modern society certainly has a huge effect in evolution, but it does not diminish the process of evolution.
Reproductive "success" is not genetic anymore, its based on social factors
Genetics affect social factors. It is almost certain the development of human language and intelligence was largely driven by social factors. Individuals who were more intelligent and more linguistically capable would have been far better at climbing the social hierarchy, getting more social support and control. They would have been better at avoiding dangerous social violence, better at building obtaining alliances for mutual defense against violence, better at obtaining food and other resources for themselves and for their ates and for their children. They also would have been far more appealing as mates both because of the previous reasons, but also for the direct reason of "sexual attractiveness" selection for more linguistically skilled mates.
The goal of most humans is no longer to spawn the most progeny.
Evolution doesn't care about goals, and evolution does not care about our values. Evolution only cares about one thing your long term number of descendants.... how many offspring you leave behind and how successful those offspring are in producing more offspring.
There is a particularly striking recent human genetics discovery that demonstrating this point. DNA analysis of large numbers of people over the last few decades has identified quite a few genes that are currently undergoing significant positive evolutionary selection. In particular genes for certain mental illnesses (such as bipolar disorder) are seeing POSITIVE evolutionary selection. People will these mental instabilities are more inclined to promiscuous or intense-but-unstable sexual relationships. They tend to neglect birth control, or only use it erratically. They tend to get pregnant (or get other people pregnant) at a very high rate. Being unstable, they tend to leave that child to be raised by the other partner or by family members, and they move on to the next unstable relationship producing more children.
It doesn't matter if you or I consider mental and emotional instability to be a "bad thing". The evolutionary fact is that people with these genes produce more offspring than average, and those offspring tend to produce more offspring than average. In the long term more complex factors may (or may not) turn against the genes for these forms of mental instability, but it perfectly illustrates that evolution doesn't care what we like or what we want or what we value. Evolution simply selects whatever works - where "works" means producing more copies of the genes.
Medicine and modern society have radically altered the selections pressures on humans, but have not diminished the fact of evolutionary selection. We are no longer threatened by many diseases, being near sighted or far sighted is no longer a significant survival issue, broken bones are rarely crippling or fatal. On the other hand physical tolerance for surgery and anesthesia is a significant selection factor. Physical tolerance for modern medicines is a selection factor - someone with a fatal allergy to penicillin has a problem. Mental capabilities in literacy and basic arithmetic handling money and relevant. The skills and temperament to navigate modern urban and suburban society (humans are still significantly adapted to tribal society where at most a few hundred people in a population all knew each other). One of the largest causes of death today is driving fatalities - so spacial skills and other driving skills are a significant selection pressure. Our modern diet has radically changed - vitamins and starvation have largely vanished as selection issues, but now obesity and diet-related hart disease are major health issues (people will with either be selected towards a better diets, or to selected to better thrive on a modern diet). And on and on and on.
I got to carry a stepladder around JUST so I can I look down on women.
Or you could just become a Republican.
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My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
We can mandate that in our next economic stimulus plan.
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12.5%
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Do you drop a cockroach down your underwear before taking the pills?
I hear they stop working if you don't drop a cockroach down your underwear first.
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