Agreed! I don't know about any ancient Mars civilizations, but it doesn't seem at all farfetched that simple life forms could thrive on Mars. Life finds a way to live. That's its job.
Concerning your comment on personal beliefs and religion in science, check out the "Religion, Philosophy. Society, and Science" section of this paper. Crazy stuff.
I agree wholeheartedly that the public has no idea about a lot of things. I am a card-carrying member of the public, and I only blindly stumbled across this research a month ago. But shouldn't something this important be a part of the general conversation? Shouldn't we at least have heard about this? Why is this research buried in some obscure website instead of being posted on NASA's home page?
As for the issue of proof... I agree that this one experiment does not constitute undeniable proof of life on Mars. However, the results of the experiment met and exceeded pre-mission criteria for life detection. It was only after the fact that all of these other alternative explanations came about. I think that Ockham's Razor applies here: if it looks like a duck and quacks, it's probably a duck. Even if it isn't a duck, it deserves serious consideration.
Which leads me to this point: According to the expert that NASA paid to design and perform the experiment, there is positive evidence that there is life on Mars. However, NASA takes the opposite view: "The biology experiment produced no evidence of life at either landing site". This is not what their own chief scientist on the experiment in question believes. If he's a quack, why did they hire him?
So, if NASA has doubts about the validity of the results, then why aren't they be sending more life-detection experiments to Mars? Wouldn't that be the scientific thing to do? No other lander (past or planned) has direct life detection experiments. Why not?
One scientist that was quoted in the article, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, was the lead scientist on a life detection experiment that was aboard the 1976 Viking lander mission. He's been trying to tell NASA and the world for the past 3 decades that "the Viking LR experiment detected living microorganisms in the soil of Mars". Check out this paper. Amazing stuff. Truly amazing.
After reading this paper and several others by Dr. Levin, I have to wonder why the general public has no idea about these findings. Don't they merit public discussion? Why don't *any* of NASA's planned Mars missions contain direct life-detection experiments? IANACT (Conspiracy Theorist), but something smells fishy to me.
"Field people keep reporting memory card corruptions.
McKinney continues to say "gather more information" with serial numbers etc.
This has been going on for several years, and appears to be getting worse. "
ref
"Note that distributing this software is extremely dangerous. Our smart card format has absolutely no security, so if someone were to get a copy of this software and a reader, they could stand at the ballot station and quietly burn new voter cards all day"
ref
"Well, in the past we got a version of GEMS certified in South Carolina that was incapable of satisfying South Carolina's state reporting requirements. In short, had the state cert board done their jobs, we would not have been certified in South Carolina in the first place. We did not shoot ourselves in the foot by attaching a specified export to a release level. We shot ourselves in the foot by taking a version of GEMS to certification that was incapable of running their elections"
reference
"...in the numerous Florida recounts we had many situations where the Ballot Accounting Forms and Accu Vote tapes did not match. When we reprocessed the ballots at the precinct level, we did come up with again a third differentiating number of ballots cast in some precincts and overall." (emphasis mine)
reference
"Please report any corrupted memory cards to me from elections. I've had one in Santa Barbara tonight. I'm curious how many more we have. We are entering another cycle of elections without this fixed I guess." (emphasis mine)
reference
I read some of the messages in the list, and saw some interesting (incrimimating?) stuff, but I don't know who to tell. Is anyone collecting excerpts from the messages? It seems that the womanpower of/. could be used to read these messages and gather any exerpts that might be useful. We just need a repository and some organization.
The next message in the list is also interesting:
"Also have report from Marin regarding 3 precincts with significant "passed ballots", i.e., ballot going thru
AccuVote without being counted. Anyone else experiencing this?" (emphasis mine)
reference
Read some of the messages for yourself. All it takes is a little wading through the normal boring company emails to get to the good stuff...
recommended related reading
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you've never read it, I highly recommend The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
It has enough sex talk in it to satisfy your prurient interests. Not the gross squshy kind, but the clean, technical sex that will hit/.ers right in the honeypot.
The comet tail example is a good one. However, the question was not whether the solar wind exists (which your example shows quite nicely), but if a *highly reflective* solar sail would work in the face of such A Mighty Wind.
If the comet in question and its tail were made of a highly (perfectly?) reflective material, then your example would be more persuasive. I haven't seen any proposals for creating a solar sail out of dirt and ice...
On second thought, since no perfectly reflective material exists (right?), then the difference between solar sail building materials is only a matter of efficiency. A sail made of dirt and ice might even work better than a sail made of mylar or mithril..
Only recently (post Java1.1) has Sun viewed itself as MS's competition. When Java was created, Sun was a hardware shop. They created Java to commoditize the OS - if the OS is a commodity, they sell more hardware to run it on.
They hired MS to help them with marketing: "Write Once, Run Anywhere" just doesn't ring true if it won't run on windos.
The thing is, Microsoft was two or three steps ahead of them. MS knew that Java would be a hit and that one day Sun would become a real competitor on the software front. So they "embrace and extend" Java and helped make the "best" JVM out there. Once things started picking up for Sun, Billy G threw a curve.
Sun was enjoying the economic boom and doing quite well selling their hardware and improving Java. But Java was not their cash-cow. It was a way to sell hardware. "Develop your Java apps on your cheap windows boxen, then depoy them on our latest mega-machine!" They still didn't see the money in Java itself. But MS did...
And MS decided to "extend" the Java 1.1 spec by leaving out RMI. Oh man, how I loathed them for that. What a dirty trick. But it worked, and Sun sued them and MS didnt care, and now Scott McNeally hates MS more than he likes Sun.
And that is why Sun is falling apart. They have now become the MS competitors that Bill Gates knew they would be 10 years ago. A very comfortable and well-understood position that MS can handle. The hardware sales languish, and their their original business model collects dust in the corner while their CEO rants about MS. It sucked anyways (IBM already did it), but they have yet to rewrite it.
However, the reason that Joel brought up Sun wasn't to show how blind rage at Microsoft can cause Java. It was to show how a company can ignore basic economic principles and commoditize the very thing they are trying to sell. Not a very smart business plan, IMVHO.
I remember an experiment in a college physics course where the experimenter used a hollow tube of clear lucite and a small laser to demonstrate total internal reflection. The laser is (shined, shown, pointed ?) into one end edge of the lucite, and initially passes right through. Not too exciting...
But eventually the experimenter happens upon the Critical Angle, and voila! Total Internal Reflection! The laser beam swirls around the tube , and you can actually see the exact path it takes as it reflects off the inside of the lucite. Then it shoots out the other end of the tube in some not-so-random direction.
I know that this experiment is more of a demonstration than a results-producing test, but it really got the attention of the class, even those students who didn't give a hoot about physics. It is asthetically beautiful, and it is a great demonstration of the way that fiber optics work. If only my high school teachers had shown us things like this...
Why would infrared be affected any differently than visible light? After all, they're just different wavelengths of the same thing...
I think that if they actually could pull this off, then a heat-sensing system would have just as much trouble picking out the soldiers as an unaided observer.
go back a reread Necromancer... Gibson already thought of this
Full-screen 3D games (the only kind I play) use Immediate Mode, not Retained mode - so it seems that you would want an API that concentrates on getting Immediate Mode right. Lo and behold! - OpenGL was designed from the ground up for Immediate Mode using hardware rendering.
In his post, Katz ignores the fact that the people that Apple is targeting will make up a large percentage of the next middle-class demographic:
Harry and Martha in Dubuque decide which products will enter the mainstream and last, not college kids editing movies or downloading music and DVDs, or using firewire ports to fiddle with video clips
These "college kids" are potential computer buyers, and when their kids start begging for a new computer in 2010, they will remember the iMac they used to burn DVDs way back in 2002. Apple knows what they are doing... my iMac using friends are even more zealous about their machines than the typical Slashdotter is about Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they just attach a windshield wiper on each panel. Just run it every week or so. Am I missing something here?
Agreed! I don't know about any ancient Mars civilizations, but it doesn't seem at all farfetched that simple life forms could thrive on Mars. Life finds a way to live. That's its job.
Concerning your comment on personal beliefs and religion in science, check out the "Religion, Philosophy. Society, and Science" section of this paper. Crazy stuff.
As for the issue of proof... I agree that this one experiment does not constitute undeniable proof of life on Mars. However, the results of the experiment met and exceeded pre-mission criteria for life detection. It was only after the fact that all of these other alternative explanations came about. I think that Ockham's Razor applies here: if it looks like a duck and quacks, it's probably a duck. Even if it isn't a duck, it deserves serious consideration.
Which leads me to this point: According to the expert that NASA paid to design and perform the experiment, there is positive evidence that there is life on Mars. However, NASA takes the opposite view: "The biology experiment produced no evidence of life at either landing site". This is not what their own chief scientist on the experiment in question believes. If he's a quack, why did they hire him?
So, if NASA has doubts about the validity of the results, then why aren't they be sending more life-detection experiments to Mars? Wouldn't that be the scientific thing to do? No other lander (past or planned) has direct life detection experiments. Why not?
After reading this paper and several others by Dr. Levin, I have to wonder why the general public has no idea about these findings. Don't they merit public discussion? Why don't *any* of NASA's planned Mars missions contain direct life-detection experiments? IANACT (Conspiracy Theorist), but something smells fishy to me.
the horror
"Field people keep reporting memory card corruptions. McKinney continues to say "gather more information" with serial numbers etc. This has been going on for several years, and appears to be getting worse. "
ref
"Note that distributing this software is extremely dangerous. Our smart card format has absolutely no security, so if someone were to get a copy of this software and a reader, they could stand at the ballot station and quietly burn new voter cards all day"
ref
this one is bad. scary.
"Well, in the past we got a version of GEMS certified in South Carolina that was incapable of satisfying South Carolina's state reporting requirements. In short, had the state cert board done their jobs, we would not have been certified in South Carolina in the first place. We did not shoot ourselves in the foot by attaching a specified export to a release level. We shot ourselves in the foot by taking a version of GEMS to certification that was incapable of running their elections" reference
and another
yet another:
"...in the numerous Florida recounts we had many situations where the Ballot Accounting Forms and Accu Vote tapes did not match. When we reprocessed the ballots at the precinct level, we did come up with again a third differentiating number of ballots cast in some precincts and overall." (emphasis mine)
reference
"Please report any corrupted memory cards to me from elections. I've had one in Santa Barbara tonight. I'm curious how many more we have. We are entering another cycle of elections without this fixed I guess." (emphasis mine)
/. could be used to read these messages and gather any exerpts that might be useful. We just need a repository and some organization.
reference
I read some of the messages in the list, and saw some interesting (incrimimating?) stuff, but I don't know who to tell. Is anyone collecting excerpts from the messages? It seems that the womanpower of
The next message in the list is also interesting:
"Also have report from Marin regarding 3 precincts with significant "passed ballots", i.e., ballot going thru AccuVote without being counted. Anyone else experiencing this?" (emphasis mine)
reference
Read some of the messages for yourself. All it takes is a little wading through the normal boring company emails to get to the good stuff...
It has enough sex talk in it to satisfy your prurient interests. Not the gross squshy kind, but the clean, technical sex that will hit /.ers right in the honeypot.
Ooh baby... you extended my phenotype!
If the comet in question and its tail were made of a highly (perfectly?) reflective material, then your example would be more persuasive. I haven't seen any proposals for creating a solar sail out of dirt and ice...
On second thought, since no perfectly reflective material exists (right?), then the difference between solar sail building materials is only a matter of efficiency. A sail made of dirt and ice might even work better than a sail made of mylar or mithril..
Maybe that was your point?
If you haven't done so already, go read Ender's Game and it's sequels by Orson Scott Card. You'll love 'em...
The thing is, Microsoft was two or three steps ahead of them. MS knew that Java would be a hit and that one day Sun would become a real competitor on the software front. So they "embrace and extend" Java and helped make the "best" JVM out there. Once things started picking up for Sun, Billy G threw a curve.
Sun was enjoying the economic boom and doing quite well selling their hardware and improving Java. But Java was not their cash-cow. It was a way to sell hardware. "Develop your Java apps on your cheap windows boxen, then depoy them on our latest mega-machine!" They still didn't see the money in Java itself. But MS did...
And MS decided to "extend" the Java 1.1 spec by leaving out RMI. Oh man, how I loathed them for that. What a dirty trick. But it worked, and Sun sued them and MS didnt care, and now Scott McNeally hates MS more than he likes Sun.
And that is why Sun is falling apart. They have now become the MS competitors that Bill Gates knew they would be 10 years ago. A very comfortable and well-understood position that MS can handle. The hardware sales languish, and their their original business model collects dust in the corner while their CEO rants about MS. It sucked anyways (IBM already did it), but they have yet to rewrite it.
However, the reason that Joel brought up Sun wasn't to show how blind rage at Microsoft can cause Java. It was to show how a company can ignore basic economic principles and commoditize the very thing they are trying to sell. Not a very smart business plan, IMVHO.
But eventually the experimenter happens upon the Critical Angle, and voila! Total Internal Reflection! The laser beam swirls around the tube , and you can actually see the exact path it takes as it reflects off the inside of the lucite. Then it shoots out the other end of the tube in some not-so-random direction.
I know that this experiment is more of a demonstration than a results-producing test, but it really got the attention of the class, even those students who didn't give a hoot about physics. It is asthetically beautiful, and it is a great demonstration of the way that fiber optics work. If only my high school teachers had shown us things like this...
cheers, Matt
I think that if they actually could pull this off, then a heat-sensing system would have just as much trouble picking out the soldiers as an unaided observer.
go back a reread Necromancer... Gibson already thought of this
I'm sure there have been developments in uber-cool tricked out cars since MegaCar debuted, but I find it hard to care too much.
Is the poster looking for a big wow! factor, or something more practical?
Just keepin you on your toes ;)