I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry.
Stop right there, ATFM (atomic force microscopy of which this is a variant) is done in a vacuum chamber, it has to be because thermal noise would swamp the signal otherwise. This technique cannot image in vivo, regardless of any temporal resolution issues.
It's important because the zeros of the zeta function tell you how the prime numbers are distributed and prime numbers are to number theory as elements are to chemistry, everything you could care about is built out of them. The RH is also related to host of other more esoteric, but no less important conjectures; the truth of a large part of modern mathematics relies on knowing if the RH is true or false.
Although it's unlikely to impact the storage capacity of a flash drive any time soon the zeta function shows up in high energy physics and thus does have real world consequences.
It goes deeper than that. Basically familiar designs are more easily accepted than others. For example, when BMW broke with the smooth, egg like trend in luxury car design of the 90s they received a lot of flack, but current evolutions of the design language (new 5, 3 and 1 series) are not as shocking as the first Bangle (now van Hooydonk) designed cars (7 and 6 series and the Z4) and some are even regarded as beautiful (new 3 series coupe). A more obvious example is the evolution of current car design from the early horseless carriages that resemble nothing more than a traditional horse drawn carriage, and we still retain the names of carriages eg. cabriolet.
On the other hand, my not well informed opinion is that Aptera's design is probably not likely to be the shape of the future. For one, it's high ride height and 3 wheel chassis will lead to a ride with a lot of body roll and possible downforce issues leading to high speed instability. It's ironic that the first thing Aptera's website points out is the roll over capability of the vehicle since it looks like a platform that will roll over in aggressive driving. Regardless of whether it has moose test problems or not it will ride more like a motorcycle than a car and not everyone appreciates that level of body lean. Secondly, the airfoil like profile, while probably very low drag, severely compromises luggage space. A version that could seat 4 people and carry luggage would probably have a different envelope and since that vehicle would serve a larger market would probably be a more accurate reflection of the car of the future. At any rate, there are aerodynamic as well as aesthetic reasons to have a low ride height and I don't think future cars will have a higher ride height than current automobiles.
They are the same thing, (hint what are the units of work)
Can you explain the energy of a photon in terms of "force times distance?"
Sure the energy in a photon is equal to the change in momentum imparted to another object times the distance the object traveled while changing momentum. Hard to measure physically but hardly difficult to describe. A simpler description though is that the energy of the photon is the change in energy it produces in an object it is absorbed by. Its momentum is equal to the change in momentum produced in a object it reflects off.
You can't "dissipate" momentum, regardless of what crazy cool materials you come up with.
What is that supposed to mean? An object with no momentum has no energy, an object with momentum has kinetic energy so changes in energy are also changes in momentum and vice versa. Actually in special relativity the two are explicitly the same: there's only the energy-momentum four vector which is analogous to the kinematic displacement vector four vector. This removes any confusion about energy and momentum being somehow separate considerations.
"I had no idea how long it would take for the prize to be won," said Stephen Wolfram. "It could have taken a year, a decade, or a century. I'm thrilled it was so quick. It's an impressive piece of work."
Alright, that last sentence there is pretty damning. I have heard time and time again on Slashdot that Wolfram just took other people's work, that he had people working underneath him
The charge against Wolfram is that he did not give credit to one of his assistants who proved that a particular 2 state 1 dimensional finite automaton with a neighborhood of 1 was universal. The assistant had also signed a contract that effectively prevented him from releasing the proof on the assistant's own.
& that he didn't actually know what he was talking about in his book. This is some corroborating evidence, in my opinion.
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science makes claims about facts in a wide variety of areas of science especially chaos theory (or nonlinear dynamics or whatever it's called this week) and biology which were either known, discovered by someone unaffiliated with Wolfram, or known to be false (the last being Wolfram's doomed program of a TOE based on network automata). Most of these problems arise from the tone of the book which does not make clear what's original about Wolfram's work (aside from exhaustive study of 1D automata and some simply axiom systems not much) and what is a review of other work. That doesn't mean Wolfram doesn't know what he's talking about, he knows quite a bit, but it's hard to parse that from what is conjecture and as in any major work of such length there are errors.
Wolfram is not the genius he makes himself out to be. I don't believe I will ever read "A New Kind of Science" as I have many other books in front of that one on my list.
Wolfram's reputation as a genius rests on his precociousness as a youth (Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.) and some rather esoteric contributions to the field of particle physics. He also did some early and significant (although perhaps not as significant to other practitioners as to Wolfram himself) work on cellular automata and other discrete systems. A New Kind of Science was Wolfram's attempt to leap from being a bright but unknown outside of his field physicist/mathematician (eg. Ed Witten although since Wolfram didn't publish anything between the early 80's and 2004 or so the comparison is probably unfair to Witten) to Newton, Einstein, or at least Gauss or Euler levels of fame. He failed, but that doesn't mean there is no value in the book, it can serve as a launching point into various not otherwise popular fields of study. I recommend keeping the criticism of the book by area experts close at hand but the book itself can provoke questions and interest in non-experts although it's probably of little value to experts (as compared to the length of the tome).
I've hit Wikipedia to learn that it's a comic strip about a penguin. Is this strip popular amongst nerds?
Well yes, at least among grey-beard nerds who remember the predecessor Bloom County comic strip taking sides on pre-internet, pre-Linux Mac/PC fanboy wars. Take a close look at the design of Oliver's PC, the Banana Junior.
This being Slashdot I suppose it's possible you can't drive and are not interested in cars but everymajormanufacturerhasavariablevalvetimingsystem of one form or another. It's not like no one has heard of it, Honda even appends the fact that their cars have variable valve timing onto the model name.
Outsourcing of management occurs all the time, it's called a corporate merger. Chrysler outsourced its management to Daimler-Benz, although for political purposes it was played up as a merger of equals.
Furthermore by definition the responsibility of a publicly traded company is to its shareholders whose interests are represented by the Board of Trustees and to no one and nothing else. To imagine that imaginary lines on a map are of significance to corporate interest is to delude oneself about the economic structure of the world.
Asexual species are generally thought to be maladaptive from an evolutionary standpoint because once a species changes all members of that species make the same change since they're all clones. So anything that kills the clones easily stands a good chance of wiping out the entire population. Sexual species get around this problem by having so much genetic differentiation among the population that at least some members of the population are able to survive whatever catastrophe wiped out the others. Bacteria get around this problem by exchanging genetic material without reproducing, but rotifers are multicell organisms and cannot do this.
The idea propounded by this paper is that asexual species can adapt to their local environment through mutation, which affects all the clones, such that two populations in different environments will undergo speciation even though they were originally clones of each other. This is not exactly surprising, but apparently it's the first time it's been observed in a multicellular asexual creature so that's interesting.
Krugman's politics are far from well defined, his views on most social issues are unstated and thus unknown. He does comment on economic issues, and to an increasing extent what he views as the mendacity of the Bush administration but there are plenty of self defined right wingers who have criticized Bush's actions too.
Krugman is frequently cited as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in economics and as such is pretty much an orthodox economist. Thus Krugman's unsurprising opposition to corn subsidies, as any orthodox economist he opposes trade distorting subsidies at all times and in all places and naturally would oppose the corn subsidy. The fact that it's on the front page of the news now notwithstanding. He's probably too pro-free trade for much of the traditional left wing, he also is more opposed to deficit spending, and has a more nuanced view of school voucher programs than a typical US left winger. In short, despite his reputation in the media Krugman's social political stance is unknown and his economic position is mostly orthodox (ie. centered not left or right wing) and driven by data analysis not opinon.
As for the Cato Foundation it is a serious policy think tank forming positions based on data, unlike the AEI which has sold whatever reputation it had as a center for serious thought for the benefits of cheerleading for the administration and its allies. Although the Cato Foundation has a charter allying it with a partisan libertarian bias its publications largely are well reasoned and well researched. Since the problems with subsidies have been known to economists of all stripes for at least a century now it's unsurprising that Cato Institute fellows also take the orthodox position with respect to a corn subsidy.
In summary, it's not surprising that Krugman and some Cato Institute fellows agree that corn subsidies should be abolished. What's depressing is anyone would consider an article about this worthy of anymore consideration than one finding polar bears and emperor penguins agree about preferring cold weather in spite of living near opposite poles.
It's interesting that you criticize the poster for asking these questions and describe them as long-ago debunked. But then in your answers, you respond with "Who knows exactly why"
There's a difference between knowing exactly why something occured and knowing the general conditions involved. As an analogy consider the way places like CNBC cover the stock market. Pundits often offer a laundry list of reasons why the stock market prices changed the way they did on any particular day, but fundamentally have no idea what each market participant who actually made a trade, which is what actually causes a change in the price level of the stock market, was thinking when they made the trade. So they don't really know exactly why the price moved, but they know what the mechanism was. Similarly, without a global network of sensors of some kind, or even a historical record covering the globe, no one can know exactly what was going on in the Earth's climatic system during the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age. One can posit theories, about changes in ocean currents, volcanic activity etc. but no one will ever be exactly sure and no theory has such overwhelming support as to be most likely.
You yourself were unable to answer these supposedly long-resolved fallaces, so perhaps these questions are more challenging to your premise than you're willing to admit
There's a difference between answering a question and answering a question to the interlocuter's satisfaction. For example a friend of mine who is a global warming skeptic once asked "if the climate models are so great then I want them to tell me what the temperature is going to be on June 19th of this year". Of course the answer is, no one knows because it not only depends on the climate now, but on what happens between now and June 19th including unpredictable events such as volcanic eruptions, an El Nino or La Nina event, or even a major meteor strike. What can be offered as an answer is a probabilistic range of temperatures conditional on events, so no one know exactly what the temperature is going to be on June 19th but they have a pretty good idea of what's likely. Similarly, no one knows exactly what happened in the past when there was an insufficient record of information to make precise predictions, but they have an idea of what is likely. Again, to say because one doesn't know exactly what caused the Medieval Warm Period, doesn't mean global warming is debunked, anymore than not knowing the exact evolutionary path of the formation of the flagellum falsifies evolution. And to continue to insist for an exact answer is to pass from useful inquiry to pedantic sophistry.
Your questions are talking points from global warming deniers and they have long since been answered. Like the "debate" about evolution, and questions such as the evolution of flagella or the eye, they distract attention from real science and waste people's time answering ignoramuses who refuse to do a little research on their own. Since I've got some free time though, I'll bite.
1) Why is East Antarctica cooling?
The mean surface temperature of the entire globe can be increasing even if local areas are decreasing in temperature. You're confusing the average with the entire distribution.
2) Why has air temperature apparently stabilized?
What?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
Who knows exactly why, but as with Eastern Antarctica there is no evidence that the Medieval Warm Period extended to regions outside of the Northeastern Atlantic and Europe. In general though any changes in climate are the result of a variety of influences: solar irradiation, ocean circulation, changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. Furthermore, for periods of a decade or two, large scale volcanic eruptions can affect climate over reasonably large areas of the globe.
4) What caused the mini Ice Age of the 1700s?
Same answer as 3, there are a variety of factors to consider.
5) Why in the historical record do temperatures rise before CO2 rises?
Because there are a variety of factors involved in a complex feedback loop, and it is not always the case that temperature changes precede greenhouse gas concentration changes. What is not in dispute though, is that current greenhouse gas levels have not been seen in half a million years and during that period the Earth's average temperature was 2-5 degrees Celsius greater than it is now. Admittedly, that's a correlation, not a proof of causation, but is reason for concern. Furthermore it's not in dispute that the majority of the observed increase in greenhouse gas levels is due to human activity, from agriculture to fossil fuel based energy production.
Solar forcing, cloud formation, ocean and atmosphere interactions, and biosphere influences on global climate are all important areas of study. In general, over time as one question after another has been raised about the causes of climate change each of these has been offered as a reason not to worry, and ultimately after careful analysis found to be lacking in explanatory power. The oceans can't absorb all the CO2 (and we wouldn't want that because all the delicious fish would die and we'd be left with an ocean full of jellyfish), plant's can't absorb all the excess either (and switch to respiration in a CO2 rich environment further increasing the problem), careful analysis of solar irradiation data has largely ruled out sunspots as the major driver in current observed climate change and given the speculative nature of the research presented here (the experiment was performed under idealized conditions and the magnitude of the contribution of cloud seeding via cosmic ray flux in the actual atmosphere as opposed to a test tube is still an open question) it is too soon to decide that anthropogenic greenhouse gas formation is not problematic. In fact there are a host of reasons, such as the improving agreement between observed phenomena such as; decreasing glaciation, thawing of the permafrost, and shifts in such climatic phenomena as the monsoon, and predictions based on extrapolations of increased greenhouse gas levels to believe that greenhouse gas concentration changes are the primary driver of current observed climate change. Not the only driving force in the climate system, just the most important one right now.
Also, things like the Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age and so on are largely the result of concentrating on the European climate record and become less significant when the sparser Asian climate record is also considered. The lack of good records of the climate of the tropics mid
What I'm looking for is a way to "charge" spins...Then later "discharging them...
What you are describing is precisely and NMR experiment. You use radiofrequency pulses to set the spin state, you then turn off the pulses and listen, the spin system will relax to the ground state emitting a radiofrequency pulse. There's no particular reason to prefer one particle over another, any quantum system can emulate another of equivalent size, that's one of the reasons Feynman got excited about developing a quantum computer. So you should chose the particle that's easiest to work with, currently for spin physics that's atomic nuclei. There is active research on microscopic NMR. The bigger problem with quantum computing with NMR is that it is difficult to create entangled states, which are necessary for quantum computers, the largest I know of is using the carbons in an alanine molecule to make a 5 qubit computer.
Photons are a reasonable candidate for spin manipulation, although usually what is manipulated is the polarization of the photon not its spin. The problem is to change the spin or polarization of a photon you have to make it interact with some sort of matter and that makes life more difficult.
Strictly speaking the Stern-Gerlach experiment: passing a beam of electrons through a magnetic field and detecting the two resulting beams, doesn't flip the spin it sorts electrons based on their spin.
Controlling the spin of electrons is hard, if you work with an electron beam, perhaps one you filtered to contain only one spin orientation, you have to insulate the beam from the environment to make sure the spins don't interact and change orientation later on. Furthermore the electrons within the beam themselves will interact and a beam of purely one spin state will eventually contain both spin states unless you put energy in the system to keep your spin state energetically favorable, usually by passing the beam through a constant magnetic field, but that will deflect the beam since electrons are charged and that puts limits on how far the beam can travel before it hits something or intersects itself.
Working with electrons bound to atoms is a little easier, you don't have to worry about maintaining a magnetic field along the path of a beam since the electrons aren't going anywhere. On the other hand in a bulk material to have electrons which are free to change spin state they have to be unpaired and atoms or molecules with unpaired spins tend to be highly reactive. Thus they will tend to combine with other atoms or molecules to form combinations whose spin cannot be measured.
This leads to the most common technique of spin manipulation which controls the spins of atomic nuclei in bulk material. Because the electrons shield the nuclei they tend to remain in one spin state for a little while, in fact because the local environment of each nucleus in a bulk material is determined by the combination of a known external magnetic field and the local electron environment you can get information about molecular structure from NMR. To be precise though magnetic resonance techniques both electron and nuclear depend on the fact that in an external magnetic field there will be a slight population difference in spin states for a bulk material. The individual spins will still transition between states due to interactions with the environment but you can hold a large enough number of them in a particular state for long enough to be able to manipulate spins in the desired state for a little while before they decohere.
So to answer your question, the cheapest practical spin manipulation device is an NMR spectrometer. I'm having locating one for sale for cheap, there used to be a couple of companies selling 60MHz and tabletop permanent magnet NMRs for educational use but I can't find any of them now. You can build one yourself for on the order of $2,000, all you need is time, some soldering skills, a permanent magnet in a solenoid configuration, an oscilloscope which is probably the most expensive part, and a circuit diagram for 60MHz oscillator. Or you can use software to simulate NMR experiments.
The holy grail of spin manipulation of course is to trap and manipulate a single atom or molecule, or a small ensemble of such in an entangled state, which is of course what the research article reference above is about.
There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics; the debate is over illegal immigration.
Given the history of US immigration policy that's a disingenuous statement. The legality or illegality of immigration from individual countries is largely arbitrary and is more a consequence of local American issues with race and ethnicity than any rational consideration. For example, the visa lottery is explicitly designed to exclude countries that send a lot of immigrants to the US, but obviously that means supply is not being matched to demand and thus one would expect illegal immigration from those countries.
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand
That seems like a reasonable proposition at first glance, but in reality it's a canard. It's actually counterproductive to select for immigrants who are already financially successful, except for the extremely wealthy like Rupert Murdoch, they are unlikely to create new economic activity that wouldn't have occured anyway, and they compete with the existing middle class for jobs.
the consequent social problems that having an effective sub-class of workers entails.
Actually, after three generations the majority of descendents of immigrants tend to have moved into the middle class. They do not form a self perpetuating underclass. Furthermore the second generation of immigrant descendents tend to outperform natives scholastically, so much of the innovation that drives productivity growth may be tied to relatively open immigration policies, a tighter policy may not only slow population growth but reduce economic growth due to higher productivity as well, but that link is not firmly established. Finally, over the course of their entire lifetime, net proceeds to society both in the form of taxes and income of immigrants tends to be positive, so immigration is in a sense a free lunch. Society may pay more initially for accepting immigrants, but it gets more than its fair share back. There are examples of societies which pick and choose immigrants, Japan and Switzerland for example: both have sclerotic growth rates, aging populations with all the attendant problems that creates, and a growing underclass due to the difficulty of transitioning to a fully enfranchised member of society there.
In short, the distinctions the US draws in its immigration policy allow people to mask their own biases and prejudices under the cover of concern of legality instead of addressing fundamental issues with immigration. As with highway speed limits, US immigration policy allows one to argue about a rather arbitrary distinction of legal and illegal behavior without addressing issues of underlying socioeconomic forces.
I heard on the radio this morning the states are the worlds third most populous country, right after China and India. Surprised me.
You shouldn't be surprised, this has been true for pretty much all of the last 100 years, the link only goes back 50 years but the assertion is true. As with the current mania for wondering what one billion - read that in the voice of Carl Sagan - Chinese are going to do in the future, the question on the minds of the Western European powers entering the 20th century was what all those Americans were going to do.
Anyone know why the US is stilling growing significantly, as opposed to most European countries?
The US has a larger influx of immigrants and a higher birth rate, those are the two dominant factors in that order.
Which demographics are producing most children?
Recent immigrants and the minority ethnic and racial populations, but not African Americans or Jews. The current trend is for Latin Americans and Asians to increase as a percentage of the population with Whites, African Americans and Jews declining.
How much does the number of legal immigrants contribute to the growth?
Between a quarter to a third of total US population growth is due to immigration as opposed to birth.
Perhaps it will simply be a branding thing for MS,
It's the entre for Microsoft into a new industry where they can attempt to become the defacto platform. You're right in that this has nothing to do with Windows, or at least Windows on the desktop, there is little call for a printer driver interface in an engine control unit. F1 is generally regarded as the pinnacle of automotive engineering, with tight turnaround times on modification of parts, little margin for error and generally employing the most advanced techniques. Should Microsoft prove themselves in F1 it would help them leverage the technology to the rest of the auto industry, emerging automakers in China and India would definitely benefit from having world class, inexpensive ECU technology.
For a company of Microsoft's size, even F1 budgets are relatively small change, Microsoft's revenue is about 10 times the combined budgets of all F1 teams. But if Microsoft gets a contract to supply the ECU software for every Toyota, Mercedes or Nissan (all manufacturers competing in F1) that should be enough to wake up the stock again. They may call the technology Windows for Autos or something silly like that (autos.Net?) but like their PDA and cell phone operating systems it will have little to do with the desktop operating system.
You are describing a category of intellectual tools that is quite useful. It's routinely applied in the hard sciences and economics to generate understandable models that describe in a useful way target phenomena...You have to make it simple...but not so simple that the model doesn't reflect the phenomena.
I have no problem with reductionism where it applies. I'd argue that what Graham is doing however is applying a tool that has a very specific niche to a case where it is demonstrably inappropriate. Reductionism is great for computer science and information technology, it would be impossible to design anything as grand as the Yahoo! Shops functionality which earned Graham the freedom to contemplate nonsense, and the massive clusters Yahoo! uses, and the HTTP protocol and the TCP/IP protocol on which it rides, and the copper and fiber optic lines on which the whole system rides without focussing on the specific piece of the problem each one of them solves. And sometimes it's interesting to look back on the history of the development of all the above technologies and attempt to divine a grand story linking them altogether.
That said, one of the primary differences between the hard sciences, of which economics is not one, and the so called soft or social sciences, is precisely the inapplicability of reductionism. There is only one history of the United States, and only one history of the larger global context in which that played, and only one result of a variety of events, perhaps most significantly the two World Wars and the subsequent Cold War, which result in the specific situation the US finds itself in currently. At best one can hypothesize about alternative histories and their likelihoods but there is no experiment that can be performed to establish the parameters of those likelihoods and hence the validity of the hypotheses. Rather the social scientist has to infer from ex post information about underlying processes. One of the difficulties this creates is ambiguity between correlation and causation. For example, is US immigration really that significant? America's best economic performance over a 20 year span occured between 1950 and 1970, immigration to the US was actually at a relative low historically. Furthermore despite current anxiety, current rates of total US immigration are not exceptional with respect to US history, they are about average. Also historically the largest economic powers of a region have tended to attract immigrants: Rome, and the regions over which it exercised control was a significant destination 2 millenia ago, the Chinese built a large wall in an attempt to control migration, fin de siecle France was also a magnet for migration from the colonial hinterlands. Perhaps attractiveness as a destination for migrants is a consequence of rather than a cause of economic vitality, where vitality is measured by the number of new enterprises being formed.
These viewpoints need not be simple. Some people have come up with quite complex fantasies in this way.
I agree they don't need to be simple, but simple ideas are seductive.
Aside from Graham's tendency to extrapolate wildly from a sample size of one: "I felt oppressed as a geek/nerd in high school therefore America oppresses geeks/nerds in high school", "I was successful in a computer tech startup using LISP therefore successful computer tech startups should use LISP", "I now have enough money to indulge my eccentricities and a stage on which to let the stream of my ego's consciousness spew forth without worry about the consequences, therefore I must be a public intellectual". Like Chomsky, I'm sure Mr. Graham is certifiably brilliant within his chosen field of study. Like Dr. Chomsky, Graham tends to mistake brilliance within one field with the capability to achieve deep understanding and useful insight on a variety of unrelated topics.
As a simple counterexample to the current topic I'd offer India's IT sector. Although India has a few world class schools they are nowhere near as numerous as in the US, India does not have a large immigrant population, India's red tape while improving is still closer in style to "in Soviet Russia" than the Rand's libertarian paradise etc. However start up businesses in India are booming, mostly as spin offs of subsidiaries of American tech companies. Likewise Taiwan's semiconductor and electronics manufacturing industry has largely shed its foreign owned component and can be considered a startup success story. Not all start ups form in little red barns, or unkempt Cambridge, MA apartments; Intel formed from disgruntled Fairchild employees, as did Zilog and in a generation or two similar stories are likely to be common in the Indian tech sector.
However the above is not a rigorous counterargument, and is not meant to be. My larger point is merely that if one narrows one view enough the world can seem remarkably simple. And then one starts to believe any story that can explain that simple world. Fortunately most of us have enough of a sense of shame to keep those stories to ourselves. Perhaps Mr. Graham, and Dr. Chomsky and many other public intellectuals should spend their efforts looking into what particular combination of genetics and environment lead to a pathological inability to refrain from espousing cranky theories in public.
And in at least one area, the MB beats the Pro. From the site:
Here's to having one less thing to worry about. Opening and closing your MacBook is a snap, thanks to a magnetic latch that catches without a catch. That means no moving parts to snag, jam, or break.
Nifty. No latch, just a depression to let you open the lid. I like it. Simple, yet elegant. And that's got Apple written all over it.
Looking at the technical specifications there does not seem to be a microphone in the MacBook, compare with the MacBook Pro specifications for example. The wording on the iSight pages for the two machines seem carefully phrased to avoid the indicating that the MacBook has a microphone. For example they mention videoconferencing but not podcasting as they do for the Pro. What are you supposed to do, videoconference in sign language? It seems like a pretty major oversight, I need to get to a store to confirm if this is the case. Does anyone have conclusive information that the MacBook does have a microphone?
Mostly correct, except you forgot to mention that DDT is actually in use in malaria prevention right now in 22 countries. Most of these countries are in Africa, but I'd appreciate it if you'd attempt to distinguish between individual countries and the second largest continent on the planet, since malaria is simply not a big problem in large areas of Africa such as Algeria (11th largest country by area in the world). And to the Steve Milloy fans, fears of creating DDT resistant strains of mosquitos are not unfounded, it's already happened. In short DDT is being used sensibly where appopriate by the people who are actually running malaria combatting programs (unlike Mr. Milloy) and not being used in areas where it's known to be ineffective, like Sri Lanka and increasingly India.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry.
Stop right there, ATFM (atomic force microscopy of which this is a variant) is done in a vacuum chamber, it has to be because thermal noise would swamp the signal otherwise. This technique cannot image in vivo, regardless of any temporal resolution issues.
a) Not all of Holland is below sea level, 75% of it is above sea level.
b) Nitrates can still pollute the ground water then diffuse into the ocean and rivers
It's important because the zeros of the zeta function tell you how the prime numbers are distributed and prime numbers are to number theory as elements are to chemistry, everything you could care about is built out of them. The RH is also related to host of other more esoteric, but no less important conjectures; the truth of a large part of modern mathematics relies on knowing if the RH is true or false.
Although it's unlikely to impact the storage capacity of a flash drive any time soon the zeta function shows up in high energy physics and thus does have real world consequences.
It goes deeper than that. Basically familiar designs are more easily accepted than others. For example, when BMW broke with the smooth, egg like trend in luxury car design of the 90s they received a lot of flack, but current evolutions of the design language (new 5, 3 and 1 series) are not as shocking as the first Bangle (now van Hooydonk) designed cars (7 and 6 series and the Z4) and some are even regarded as beautiful (new 3 series coupe). A more obvious example is the evolution of current car design from the early horseless carriages that resemble nothing more than a traditional horse drawn carriage, and we still retain the names of carriages eg. cabriolet.
On the other hand, my not well informed opinion is that Aptera's design is probably not likely to be the shape of the future. For one, it's high ride height and 3 wheel chassis will lead to a ride with a lot of body roll and possible downforce issues leading to high speed instability. It's ironic that the first thing Aptera's website points out is the roll over capability of the vehicle since it looks like a platform that will roll over in aggressive driving. Regardless of whether it has moose test problems or not it will ride more like a motorcycle than a car and not everyone appreciates that level of body lean. Secondly, the airfoil like profile, while probably very low drag, severely compromises luggage space. A version that could seat 4 people and carry luggage would probably have a different envelope and since that vehicle would serve a larger market would probably be a more accurate reflection of the car of the future. At any rate, there are aerodynamic as well as aesthetic reasons to have a low ride height and I don't think future cars will have a higher ride height than current automobiles.
They are the same thing, (hint what are the units of work)
Sure the energy in a photon is equal to the change in momentum imparted to another object times the distance the object traveled while changing momentum. Hard to measure physically but hardly difficult to describe. A simpler description though is that the energy of the photon is the change in energy it produces in an object it is absorbed by. Its momentum is equal to the change in momentum produced in a object it reflects off.
What is that supposed to mean? An object with no momentum has no energy, an object with momentum has kinetic energy so changes in energy are also changes in momentum and vice versa. Actually in special relativity the two are explicitly the same: there's only the energy-momentum four vector which is analogous to the kinematic displacement vector four vector. This removes any confusion about energy and momentum being somehow separate considerations.
The charge against Wolfram is that he did not give credit to one of his assistants who proved that a particular 2 state 1 dimensional finite automaton with a neighborhood of 1 was universal. The assistant had also signed a contract that effectively prevented him from releasing the proof on the assistant's own.
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science makes claims about facts in a wide variety of areas of science especially chaos theory (or nonlinear dynamics or whatever it's called this week) and biology which were either known, discovered by someone unaffiliated with Wolfram, or known to be false (the last being Wolfram's doomed program of a TOE based on network automata). Most of these problems arise from the tone of the book which does not make clear what's original about Wolfram's work (aside from exhaustive study of 1D automata and some simply axiom systems not much) and what is a review of other work. That doesn't mean Wolfram doesn't know what he's talking about, he knows quite a bit, but it's hard to parse that from what is conjecture and as in any major work of such length there are errors.
Wolfram's reputation as a genius rests on his precociousness as a youth (Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.) and some rather esoteric contributions to the field of particle physics. He also did some early and significant (although perhaps not as significant to other practitioners as to Wolfram himself) work on cellular automata and other discrete systems. A New Kind of Science was Wolfram's attempt to leap from being a bright but unknown outside of his field physicist/mathematician (eg. Ed Witten although since Wolfram didn't publish anything between the early 80's and 2004 or so the comparison is probably unfair to Witten) to Newton, Einstein, or at least Gauss or Euler levels of fame. He failed, but that doesn't mean there is no value in the book, it can serve as a launching point into various not otherwise popular fields of study. I recommend keeping the criticism of the book by area experts close at hand but the book itself can provoke questions and interest in non-experts although it's probably of little value to experts (as compared to the length of the tome).
Well, at least one major industrial company traces its roots to a tinkerer who made his name adapting left over engine parts, in this case WWII surplus.
I've hit Wikipedia to learn that it's a comic strip about a penguin. Is this strip popular amongst nerds?
Well yes, at least among grey-beard nerds who remember the predecessor Bloom County comic strip taking sides on pre-internet, pre-Linux Mac/PC fanboy wars. Take a close look at the design of Oliver's PC, the Banana Junior.
This being Slashdot I suppose it's possible you can't drive and are not interested in cars but every major manufacturer has a variable valve timing system of one form or another. It's not like no one has heard of it, Honda even appends the fact that their cars have variable valve timing onto the model name.
Outsourcing of management occurs all the time, it's called a corporate merger. Chrysler outsourced its management to Daimler-Benz, although for political purposes it was played up as a merger of equals.
Furthermore by definition the responsibility of a publicly traded company is to its shareholders whose interests are represented by the Board of Trustees and to no one and nothing else. To imagine that imaginary lines on a map are of significance to corporate interest is to delude oneself about the economic structure of the world.
Asexual species are generally thought to be maladaptive from an evolutionary standpoint because once a species changes all members of that species make the same change since they're all clones. So anything that kills the clones easily stands a good chance of wiping out the entire population. Sexual species get around this problem by having so much genetic differentiation among the population that at least some members of the population are able to survive whatever catastrophe wiped out the others. Bacteria get around this problem by exchanging genetic material without reproducing, but rotifers are multicell organisms and cannot do this.
The idea propounded by this paper is that asexual species can adapt to their local environment through mutation, which affects all the clones, such that two populations in different environments will undergo speciation even though they were originally clones of each other. This is not exactly surprising, but apparently it's the first time it's been observed in a multicellular asexual creature so that's interesting.
Krugman's politics are far from well defined, his views on most social issues are unstated and thus unknown. He does comment on economic issues, and to an increasing extent what he views as the mendacity of the Bush administration but there are plenty of self defined right wingers who have criticized Bush's actions too.
Krugman is frequently cited as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in economics and as such is pretty much an orthodox economist. Thus Krugman's unsurprising opposition to corn subsidies, as any orthodox economist he opposes trade distorting subsidies at all times and in all places and naturally would oppose the corn subsidy. The fact that it's on the front page of the news now notwithstanding. He's probably too pro-free trade for much of the traditional left wing, he also is more opposed to deficit spending, and has a more nuanced view of school voucher programs than a typical US left winger. In short, despite his reputation in the media Krugman's social political stance is unknown and his economic position is mostly orthodox (ie. centered not left or right wing) and driven by data analysis not opinon.
As for the Cato Foundation it is a serious policy think tank forming positions based on data, unlike the AEI which has sold whatever reputation it had as a center for serious thought for the benefits of cheerleading for the administration and its allies. Although the Cato Foundation has a charter allying it with a partisan libertarian bias its publications largely are well reasoned and well researched. Since the problems with subsidies have been known to economists of all stripes for at least a century now it's unsurprising that Cato Institute fellows also take the orthodox position with respect to a corn subsidy.
In summary, it's not surprising that Krugman and some Cato Institute fellows agree that corn subsidies should be abolished. What's depressing is anyone would consider an article about this worthy of anymore consideration than one finding polar bears and emperor penguins agree about preferring cold weather in spite of living near opposite poles.
Ask yourself why we're using corn for ethanol when Brazil has shown that sugarcane can be used much more efficiently?
Because sugarcane doesn't grow in Iowa?It's interesting that you criticize the poster for asking these questions and describe them as long-ago debunked. But then in your answers, you respond with "Who knows exactly why"
There's a difference between knowing exactly why something occured and knowing the general conditions involved. As an analogy consider the way places like CNBC cover the stock market. Pundits often offer a laundry list of reasons why the stock market prices changed the way they did on any particular day, but fundamentally have no idea what each market participant who actually made a trade, which is what actually causes a change in the price level of the stock market, was thinking when they made the trade. So they don't really know exactly why the price moved, but they know what the mechanism was. Similarly, without a global network of sensors of some kind, or even a historical record covering the globe, no one can know exactly what was going on in the Earth's climatic system during the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age. One can posit theories, about changes in ocean currents, volcanic activity etc. but no one will ever be exactly sure and no theory has such overwhelming support as to be most likely.
You yourself were unable to answer these supposedly long-resolved fallaces, so perhaps these questions are more challenging to your premise than you're willing to admit
There's a difference between answering a question and answering a question to the interlocuter's satisfaction. For example a friend of mine who is a global warming skeptic once asked "if the climate models are so great then I want them to tell me what the temperature is going to be on June 19th of this year". Of course the answer is, no one knows because it not only depends on the climate now, but on what happens between now and June 19th including unpredictable events such as volcanic eruptions, an El Nino or La Nina event, or even a major meteor strike. What can be offered as an answer is a probabilistic range of temperatures conditional on events, so no one know exactly what the temperature is going to be on June 19th but they have a pretty good idea of what's likely. Similarly, no one knows exactly what happened in the past when there was an insufficient record of information to make precise predictions, but they have an idea of what is likely. Again, to say because one doesn't know exactly what caused the Medieval Warm Period, doesn't mean global warming is debunked, anymore than not knowing the exact evolutionary path of the formation of the flagellum falsifies evolution. And to continue to insist for an exact answer is to pass from useful inquiry to pedantic sophistry.
Your questions are talking points from global warming deniers and they have long since been answered. Like the "debate" about evolution, and questions such as the evolution of flagella or the eye, they distract attention from real science and waste people's time answering ignoramuses who refuse to do a little research on their own. Since I've got some free time though, I'll bite.
1) Why is East Antarctica cooling?
The mean surface temperature of the entire globe can be increasing even if local areas are decreasing in temperature. You're confusing the average with the entire distribution.
2) Why has air temperature apparently stabilized?
What?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
Who knows exactly why, but as with Eastern Antarctica there is no evidence that the Medieval Warm Period extended to regions outside of the Northeastern Atlantic and Europe. In general though any changes in climate are the result of a variety of influences: solar irradiation, ocean circulation, changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. Furthermore, for periods of a decade or two, large scale volcanic eruptions can affect climate over reasonably large areas of the globe.
4) What caused the mini Ice Age of the 1700s?
Same answer as 3, there are a variety of factors to consider.
5) Why in the historical record do temperatures rise before CO2 rises?
Because there are a variety of factors involved in a complex feedback loop, and it is not always the case that temperature changes precede greenhouse gas concentration changes. What is not in dispute though, is that current greenhouse gas levels have not been seen in half a million years and during that period the Earth's average temperature was 2-5 degrees Celsius greater than it is now. Admittedly, that's a correlation, not a proof of causation, but is reason for concern. Furthermore it's not in dispute that the majority of the observed increase in greenhouse gas levels is due to human activity, from agriculture to fossil fuel based energy production.
Solar forcing, cloud formation, ocean and atmosphere interactions, and biosphere influences on global climate are all important areas of study. In general, over time as one question after another has been raised about the causes of climate change each of these has been offered as a reason not to worry, and ultimately after careful analysis found to be lacking in explanatory power. The oceans can't absorb all the CO2 (and we wouldn't want that because all the delicious fish would die and we'd be left with an ocean full of jellyfish), plant's can't absorb all the excess either (and switch to respiration in a CO2 rich environment further increasing the problem), careful analysis of solar irradiation data has largely ruled out sunspots as the major driver in current observed climate change and given the speculative nature of the research presented here (the experiment was performed under idealized conditions and the magnitude of the contribution of cloud seeding via cosmic ray flux in the actual atmosphere as opposed to a test tube is still an open question) it is too soon to decide that anthropogenic greenhouse gas formation is not problematic. In fact there are a host of reasons, such as the improving agreement between observed phenomena such as; decreasing glaciation, thawing of the permafrost, and shifts in such climatic phenomena as the monsoon, and predictions based on extrapolations of increased greenhouse gas levels to believe that greenhouse gas concentration changes are the primary driver of current observed climate change. Not the only driving force in the climate system, just the most important one right now.
Also, things like the Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age and so on are largely the result of concentrating on the European climate record and become less significant when the sparser Asian climate record is also considered. The lack of good records of the climate of the tropics mid
What you are describing is precisely and NMR experiment. You use radiofrequency pulses to set the spin state, you then turn off the pulses and listen, the spin system will relax to the ground state emitting a radiofrequency pulse. There's no particular reason to prefer one particle over another, any quantum system can emulate another of equivalent size, that's one of the reasons Feynman got excited about developing a quantum computer. So you should chose the particle that's easiest to work with, currently for spin physics that's atomic nuclei. There is active research on microscopic NMR. The bigger problem with quantum computing with NMR is that it is difficult to create entangled states, which are necessary for quantum computers, the largest I know of is using the carbons in an alanine molecule to make a 5 qubit computer.
Photons are a reasonable candidate for spin manipulation, although usually what is manipulated is the polarization of the photon not its spin. The problem is to change the spin or polarization of a photon you have to make it interact with some sort of matter and that makes life more difficult.
Strictly speaking the Stern-Gerlach experiment: passing a beam of electrons through a magnetic field and detecting the two resulting beams, doesn't flip the spin it sorts electrons based on their spin.
Controlling the spin of electrons is hard, if you work with an electron beam, perhaps one you filtered to contain only one spin orientation, you have to insulate the beam from the environment to make sure the spins don't interact and change orientation later on. Furthermore the electrons within the beam themselves will interact and a beam of purely one spin state will eventually contain both spin states unless you put energy in the system to keep your spin state energetically favorable, usually by passing the beam through a constant magnetic field, but that will deflect the beam since electrons are charged and that puts limits on how far the beam can travel before it hits something or intersects itself.
Working with electrons bound to atoms is a little easier, you don't have to worry about maintaining a magnetic field along the path of a beam since the electrons aren't going anywhere. On the other hand in a bulk material to have electrons which are free to change spin state they have to be unpaired and atoms or molecules with unpaired spins tend to be highly reactive. Thus they will tend to combine with other atoms or molecules to form combinations whose spin cannot be measured.
This leads to the most common technique of spin manipulation which controls the spins of atomic nuclei in bulk material. Because the electrons shield the nuclei they tend to remain in one spin state for a little while, in fact because the local environment of each nucleus in a bulk material is determined by the combination of a known external magnetic field and the local electron environment you can get information about molecular structure from NMR. To be precise though magnetic resonance techniques both electron and nuclear depend on the fact that in an external magnetic field there will be a slight population difference in spin states for a bulk material. The individual spins will still transition between states due to interactions with the environment but you can hold a large enough number of them in a particular state for long enough to be able to manipulate spins in the desired state for a little while before they decohere.
So to answer your question, the cheapest practical spin manipulation device is an NMR spectrometer. I'm having locating one for sale for cheap, there used to be a couple of companies selling 60MHz and tabletop permanent magnet NMRs for educational use but I can't find any of them now. You can build one yourself for on the order of $2,000, all you need is time, some soldering skills, a permanent magnet in a solenoid configuration, an oscilloscope which is probably the most expensive part, and a circuit diagram for 60MHz oscillator. Or you can use software to simulate NMR experiments.
The holy grail of spin manipulation of course is to trap and manipulate a single atom or molecule, or a small ensemble of such in an entangled state, which is of course what the research article reference above is about.
There's no "immigration debate," at least not in mainstream politics; the debate is over illegal immigration.
Given the history of US immigration policy that's a disingenuous statement. The legality or illegality of immigration from individual countries is largely arbitrary and is more a consequence of local American issues with race and ethnicity than any rational consideration. For example, the visa lottery is explicitly designed to exclude countries that send a lot of immigrants to the US, but obviously that means supply is not being matched to demand and thus one would expect illegal immigration from those countries.
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand
That seems like a reasonable proposition at first glance, but in reality it's a canard. It's actually counterproductive to select for immigrants who are already financially successful, except for the extremely wealthy like Rupert Murdoch, they are unlikely to create new economic activity that wouldn't have occured anyway, and they compete with the existing middle class for jobs.
the consequent social problems that having an effective sub-class of workers entails.
Actually, after three generations the majority of descendents of immigrants tend to have moved into the middle class. They do not form a self perpetuating underclass. Furthermore the second generation of immigrant descendents tend to outperform natives scholastically, so much of the innovation that drives productivity growth may be tied to relatively open immigration policies, a tighter policy may not only slow population growth but reduce economic growth due to higher productivity as well, but that link is not firmly established. Finally, over the course of their entire lifetime, net proceeds to society both in the form of taxes and income of immigrants tends to be positive, so immigration is in a sense a free lunch. Society may pay more initially for accepting immigrants, but it gets more than its fair share back. There are examples of societies which pick and choose immigrants, Japan and Switzerland for example: both have sclerotic growth rates, aging populations with all the attendant problems that creates, and a growing underclass due to the difficulty of transitioning to a fully enfranchised member of society there.
In short, the distinctions the US draws in its immigration policy allow people to mask their own biases and prejudices under the cover of concern of legality instead of addressing fundamental issues with immigration. As with highway speed limits, US immigration policy allows one to argue about a rather arbitrary distinction of legal and illegal behavior without addressing issues of underlying socioeconomic forces.
I heard on the radio this morning the states are the worlds third most populous country, right after China and India. Surprised me.
You shouldn't be surprised, this has been true for pretty much all of the last 100 years, the link only goes back 50 years but the assertion is true. As with the current mania for wondering what one billion - read that in the voice of Carl Sagan - Chinese are going to do in the future, the question on the minds of the Western European powers entering the 20th century was what all those Americans were going to do.
Anyone know why the US is stilling growing significantly, as opposed to most European countries?
The US has a larger influx of immigrants and a higher birth rate, those are the two dominant factors in that order.
Which demographics are producing most children?
Recent immigrants and the minority ethnic and racial populations, but not African Americans or Jews. The current trend is for Latin Americans and Asians to increase as a percentage of the population with Whites, African Americans and Jews declining.
How much does the number of legal immigrants contribute to the growth?
Between a quarter to a third of total US population growth is due to immigration as opposed to birth.
It's the entre for Microsoft into a new industry where they can attempt to become the defacto platform. You're right in that this has nothing to do with Windows, or at least Windows on the desktop, there is little call for a printer driver interface in an engine control unit. F1 is generally regarded as the pinnacle of automotive engineering, with tight turnaround times on modification of parts, little margin for error and generally employing the most advanced techniques. Should Microsoft prove themselves in F1 it would help them leverage the technology to the rest of the auto industry, emerging automakers in China and India would definitely benefit from having world class, inexpensive ECU technology.
For a company of Microsoft's size, even F1 budgets are relatively small change, Microsoft's revenue is about 10 times the combined budgets of all F1 teams. But if Microsoft gets a contract to supply the ECU software for every Toyota, Mercedes or Nissan (all manufacturers competing in F1) that should be enough to wake up the stock again. They may call the technology Windows for Autos or something silly like that (autos.Net?) but like their PDA and cell phone operating systems it will have little to do with the desktop operating system.
You are describing a category of intellectual tools that is quite useful. It's routinely applied in the hard sciences and economics to generate understandable models that describe in a useful way target phenomena...You have to make it simple...but not so simple that the model doesn't reflect the phenomena.
I have no problem with reductionism where it applies. I'd argue that what Graham is doing however is applying a tool that has a very specific niche to a case where it is demonstrably inappropriate. Reductionism is great for computer science and information technology, it would be impossible to design anything as grand as the Yahoo! Shops functionality which earned Graham the freedom to contemplate nonsense, and the massive clusters Yahoo! uses, and the HTTP protocol and the TCP/IP protocol on which it rides, and the copper and fiber optic lines on which the whole system rides without focussing on the specific piece of the problem each one of them solves. And sometimes it's interesting to look back on the history of the development of all the above technologies and attempt to divine a grand story linking them altogether.
That said, one of the primary differences between the hard sciences, of which economics is not one, and the so called soft or social sciences, is precisely the inapplicability of reductionism. There is only one history of the United States, and only one history of the larger global context in which that played, and only one result of a variety of events, perhaps most significantly the two World Wars and the subsequent Cold War, which result in the specific situation the US finds itself in currently. At best one can hypothesize about alternative histories and their likelihoods but there is no experiment that can be performed to establish the parameters of those likelihoods and hence the validity of the hypotheses. Rather the social scientist has to infer from ex post information about underlying processes. One of the difficulties this creates is ambiguity between correlation and causation. For example, is US immigration really that significant? America's best economic performance over a 20 year span occured between 1950 and 1970, immigration to the US was actually at a relative low historically. Furthermore despite current anxiety, current rates of total US immigration are not exceptional with respect to US history, they are about average. Also historically the largest economic powers of a region have tended to attract immigrants: Rome, and the regions over which it exercised control was a significant destination 2 millenia ago, the Chinese built a large wall in an attempt to control migration, fin de siecle France was also a magnet for migration from the colonial hinterlands. Perhaps attractiveness as a destination for migrants is a consequence of rather than a cause of economic vitality, where vitality is measured by the number of new enterprises being formed.
These viewpoints need not be simple. Some people have come up with quite complex fantasies in this way.
I agree they don't need to be simple, but simple ideas are seductive.
Aside from Graham's tendency to extrapolate wildly from a sample size of one: "I felt oppressed as a geek/nerd in high school therefore America oppresses geeks/nerds in high school", "I was successful in a computer tech startup using LISP therefore successful computer tech startups should use LISP", "I now have enough money to indulge my eccentricities and a stage on which to let the stream of my ego's consciousness spew forth without worry about the consequences, therefore I must be a public intellectual". Like Chomsky, I'm sure Mr. Graham is certifiably brilliant within his chosen field of study. Like Dr. Chomsky, Graham tends to mistake brilliance within one field with the capability to achieve deep understanding and useful insight on a variety of unrelated topics.
As a simple counterexample to the current topic I'd offer India's IT sector. Although India has a few world class schools they are nowhere near as numerous as in the US, India does not have a large immigrant population, India's red tape while improving is still closer in style to "in Soviet Russia" than the Rand's libertarian paradise etc. However start up businesses in India are booming, mostly as spin offs of subsidiaries of American tech companies. Likewise Taiwan's semiconductor and electronics manufacturing industry has largely shed its foreign owned component and can be considered a startup success story. Not all start ups form in little red barns, or unkempt Cambridge, MA apartments; Intel formed from disgruntled Fairchild employees, as did Zilog and in a generation or two similar stories are likely to be common in the Indian tech sector.
However the above is not a rigorous counterargument, and is not meant to be. My larger point is merely that if one narrows one view enough the world can seem remarkably simple. And then one starts to believe any story that can explain that simple world. Fortunately most of us have enough of a sense of shame to keep those stories to ourselves. Perhaps Mr. Graham, and Dr. Chomsky and many other public intellectuals should spend their efforts looking into what particular combination of genetics and environment lead to a pathological inability to refrain from espousing cranky theories in public.
And in at least one area, the MB beats the Pro. From the site:
Nifty. No latch, just a depression to let you open the lid. I like it. Simple, yet elegant. And that's got Apple written all over it.
The MacBook Pro has the same latch design.
Looking at the technical specifications there does not seem to be a microphone in the MacBook, compare with the MacBook Pro specifications for example. The wording on the iSight pages for the two machines seem carefully phrased to avoid the indicating that the MacBook has a microphone. For example they mention videoconferencing but not podcasting as they do for the Pro. What are you supposed to do, videoconference in sign language? It seems like a pretty major oversight, I need to get to a store to confirm if this is the case. Does anyone have conclusive information that the MacBook does have a microphone?
Mostly correct, except you forgot to mention that DDT is actually in use in malaria prevention right now in 22 countries. Most of these countries are in Africa, but I'd appreciate it if you'd attempt to distinguish between individual countries and the second largest continent on the planet, since malaria is simply not a big problem in large areas of Africa such as Algeria (11th largest country by area in the world). And to the Steve Milloy fans, fears of creating DDT resistant strains of mosquitos are not unfounded, it's already happened. In short DDT is being used sensibly where appopriate by the people who are actually running malaria combatting programs (unlike Mr. Milloy) and not being used in areas where it's known to be ineffective, like Sri Lanka and increasingly India.