Since the offspring is so dependant on the mother for food for many years after birth, the species needs to ensure that the mother lives to provide.
Species, schmecies. From an evolutionary point of view, I don't give a damn whether your children survive - indeed, I might be happier if they don't, less competition for my own kids!
If this is true, then I'd say it's because it's in the baby's interests. Look: You're about to be born. You are likely to be partially or totally dependent on your mother for many years. It is therefore in your interests to prolong her life if you can, especially since the stress of giving birth will probably damage her health.
Look, this whole 5 senses thing goes back to Aristotle. He was just trying to find some order in a chaotic world. So the dude was wrong. Give him a break, he's dead, ok?
Yeah. He was wrong. That's OK. Trouble is, he was wrong about just about every single thing he tried, and then got cited as an unassailable authority by just about everyone in Europe for over a thousand years.
Arguments like these should not take place within NASA...however, calling the big bang a theory is actually correct.
Yes, But.
This guy wanted 'theory' appended to every mention of the Big Bang in order to allow for the possibility not of a Steady State universe, or of an oscillating universe, but of intelligent design.
This is a major WTF.
Intelligent design, quite apart from being creationism in presentable clothes, is all about biology. It's about alleged irreducible complexity. It's about how living things got the way they are. It has bugger all to do with the Hubble drift or the cosmic microwave background.
I suspect, in fact, that even the intelligent design crowd would want to disown this clown. Their best hope of avoiding widespread recognition that they're creationists under a false flag is to pretend that it's all about biology. It's a scientific quarrel with Darwin. It's about evolution being inadequate. Once the intelligent design flag is raised over cosmology too, it becomes very clear what the name of the intelligent designer is supposed to be.
When I studied for my degree in physics the Big Bang was certainly described as a theory. I'd understand a "model" to be something you construct around a "theory" - the two are not really alternatives.
I recall the terminology being 'the Hot Big Bang model'. The theory this model was based upon was the General Theory of Relativity.
The Big Bang is pretty well established, as I understand it, insofar as the Universe was certainly much hotter and denser in the distant past, and that at something like 300,000 years in the expanding, cooling universal fireball cooled sufficiently to become transparent, leaving its mark in the cosmic microwave background to this day.
It's what happens before that which is interesting. The details of the microwave background indicate that there's more to the story than just that. There's inflationary theory, which is fairly well accepted as the most likely scenario but not entirely well explained, and a whole zoo of weirdness falling out of the GUT du jour. And then there are the string theorists, who I swear just sit around doing acid and playing with hypergeometry equations...
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Big sweeping arm movements (sword swinging) will tire you out after a relatively short while.
Big sweeping arm movements (sword swinging) will get you killed after a relatively short while. Watch how fencing is actually done next time it's on at the Olympics. There's none of this flashy Errol Flynn slashing and flourishing of the sword. It's all about relatively small, precise, quick movements.
Focus, schmocus; even assuming that 100% of the energy yield of every nuclear bomb on earth goes into shifting the Moon, with none at all wasted in light or heat, it wouldn't affect it noticeably. The Moon is really, really heavy.
Sit down some time and work out the kinetic energy of the Moon. It masses 7.36E22 kilos, and is moving at about 1 km/s. That's 7.36E28 joules, or 1.75E13 megatons. The entire population of the earth is only some 6E9 people, so perhaps if every single person on the earth had a few thousand H-bombs and we let them all off at once on the Moon, we might just affect its orbit significantly...
Been watching Space 1999 and Dragonball lately, I suppose? Sorry, guys: moving small planets around (and the Moon is not far off the size of Mercury) takes a lot of energy. Presumably Muten Roshi was able to unleash an energy blast comparable to 10,000,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs when he blew up the moon at the Tenkaichi Budokai...
Suppose you are brewery whose product basically defines the character of this capital city. Beer sales are good locally and abroad; and secondary effects from tourism and transportation employment have a positive effect. Therefore, the city thinks the water provided to the brewery is worth more; and tries to charge the brewery above and beyond. Not only that; but any establishment which sells this beer has to pay more for sewage fees.
Would you believe that the site on which Arthur Guinness chose to build his brewery came with the right to abstract water from Dublin's mains supply, at a low flat rate?
Presumably whoever made that agreement was expecting the construction of housing tenements or something like that. Whoops.
The city got very upset when they realised what was going on. Far too much of the city's water supply was getting turned into Guinness. The brewery was indeed getting a free lunch here. It took a long struggle, both legal and on one occasion violent, before the brewery were able to secure their water supply from the city's attempts to correct their earlier error.
It eventually became clear that the conversion of Dublin's water supply into Guinness wasn't actually upsetting anybody; quite the contrary:-)
These things can be controlled remotely. Just think for a few seconds about how much you learn every time you get shot down in a game (any kind of game). While if it had been your body you'd be dead, instead your skills improve. Humans with one life versus humans with a at least a few... the latter will win, eventually.
This would immediately lead to the military recruiting gamers. Amusing. Suddenly the USAF is full of fighter nerds. God help us if they ever make a sequel to Top Gun then.
More seriously, yes, humans would likely improve - although I imagine pilots today put in a good deal of simulator time. I wonder, however, about whether they'd always come to surpass the computers. Moore's Law aside, I'd guess that the AIs used for air-to-air combat wouldn't be programmed so much as bred. Genetic algorithms, that's the key. Set up a really sophisticated combat flight sim on a massive computer network. Throw in a bunch of AIs. Let them fight to the death. Pick out the last, say, survivor, produce a bunch of copies with small mutations, and fight out the next generation...
That could well get you a really awesome fighter AI. However, it could also get you an AI that won by running and hiding while everyone else killed each other, or a lineage of AIs that know exactly how to handle each other's entire repertoire but have no way to respond to something new that's thrown at them by a human. You'd probably have to do some selective breeding.
I would bet one of the biggest issues is finding ways to cut the latency.
Yeah. Down goes your stealth bomber, and you're screaming at the enemy u l4m3r, i w45 in l4g! n0 f41r! Bad thing. There'll never be a way to cut the latency beyond the speed of light limit. Besides that, though, if the enemy hears that you're using remote controlled drones, he'll jam the frequencies you're using - or, worse yet, decipher the code your transmissions use and turn the drones right back against you...
One of the first UAV experiments was the Snark. So many crashed into the waters off the test facility that they were called Snark Infested Waters. We've come a long way since then.
because modern air combat consists of standing off at a 20+mile range and firing some AMRAAMS
In which case humans are completely superfluous. The real fighting's already being done by a kamikaze robot pilot, aboard the missile. Why do we need to put a human in harm's way aboard the missile launch platform?
Even assuming that the AI pilots are markedly inferior to humans, there's still a great advantage to using them. They're cheap. Training a pilot is an expensive thing to do and it takes a lot of time. Losing a pilot is bad news. Losing significant numbers of pilots also has the effect of undermining political support at home - every letter sent to the mother of someone who isn't coming home chips away a little at the mindless jingoism that you need to have to conduct a war.
So, let's suppose that the AI drones are so crap that the kill ratio is ten to one - a human pilot will on average bring down ten AIs before being killed himself. This need not be a problem. A computer program costs nothing to copy, and the hardware's relatively cheap, and robots don't have families. Throw a hundred AIs into the air and let them all be slaughtered if necessary. Who cares? Make 'em kamikaze if you like. It still costs less than training humans to do it.
For a Western army, recruiting humans is expensive, because citizens of very rich countries expect to be paid well to risk their lives. Probably the economics work out differently for the likes of China, but for the USA... let's fill the sky with droids.
But really... A good pilot in an F-22 is probably better than any of the drones that will be developed in 10 years.
The best pilot in the world still blacks out at about 9G. Even if the drone isn't as tactically capable as the human, it can survive far greater physical hardship. What use is your intelligence, your skill, your human flair for battle, against an adversary that can turn at speeds that would leave you a gooey mess in the cockpit?
A serious fighter drone would just slaughter human pilots, just on the superior performance of an aircraft that doesn't have to worry about keeping the pilot alive. It would be like Spitfires going up against a Harrier.
Foreign powers killing natives, natives repelling the foreign powers, natives killing each other.
Foreign powers offering natives guns in exchange for slaves, and suggesting that since they'll be back in a few months' time, it might be worth the natives' while going and enslaving the village over the hill, who haven't got guns...
Ah, I'm just swelling with patriotism at the thought of Britain's glorious history;-)
And on a third note - How much of this organization will be concerned with the truthfulness, usefulness, or goodness of the information being sent? It's one thing to be able to see the Tienamin Square results unfiltered by Google, it'd be another thing to be spending a $3M grant on ways to sneak porn (or illegal stuff) past the government proxies.
No it isn't. It's exactly the same. Information on what happened in Tiananment Square is 'illegal stuff' in China.
Free speech is free speech, whether it's political protest or Lady Chatterley's Lover. If we're setting up to monitor censorship, we should not differentiate here, lest we become censors ourselves.
In the summer, keep the AC temp up a little, and use a good old fashioned box fan, or open a window. I don't know your climate so this may be less practical.
This is the UK; domestic air conditioning is virtually unknown. We don't normally get very many days in a year where the thermometer gets far above 25, and by jingo we're going to appreciate them when they do turn up!
I'd suggest reading Prey by Michael Crichton to comprehend the true extent and ease with which certain people could develop serious threats using nanotech.
Bloody hell. Every time there's a global warming story, some goon who's mistaken a thriller novel for a scientific paper cites Crichton as evidence that it's all a lefty environmentalist conspiracy. Now Crichton gets raised as an authority on nanotech.
That does it. Next time there's a story on genetics or cloning, I'm going to say it's a bad idea because look what happened in Jurassic Park.
It's finds like this which make me wonder: are there still what we consider to be "dinosaurs" - and what were considered "dragons" prior to 1850 or so - roaming the remote places of the earth?
Sure there are. They've got quite a lot smaller, grown feathers, and learned to fly, though.
I doubt there's any really big animals left to be discovered on land. The likes of giant dinosaurs need to eat a lot. A breeding colony of those things would be hard to hide.
So: don't hold your breath waiting for the discovery of the Lost World, or for Nessie... if cryptozoology is your thing, then my money's on the Yeti.
Toshiba is well known (and for many despised) in Japan for being a missile-building defense contractor for Japan's army that they aren't supposed to have because of previous war-mongering. Now they are buying nuclear production capabilities. Anyone? Concerns?
You're a bit paranoid there, I think. The Japanese are heavily dependent on nuclear power - I think more so even than France. They have plenty of experience with nuclear fission, they have plenty of radioactives of all kinds available. If Japan wanted a bomb, they could build one any time they like. It's really not so very hard, if you have the fissile material and appropriate machine tools.
Personally I think Japan won't build a bomb unless seriously provoked, though. What with the way the war ended, and with the Lucky Dragon incident, and with Gojira, the Japanese aren't fond of atom bombs. If North Korea tested one, then maybe Japan would start converting some of their stockpiled fissionables into bombs, but not before.
In Canada during the recent federal election campaign an add ran on national TV showing nuclear power as a clean air alternative to existing technology. The ad sported the requisite azure blue skys and big fluffy white clouds while touting nuclear power.
To be fair, that's what nuclear power stations put into the atmosphere. Big fluffy white clouds.
It always annoys me when a TV news segment or a documentary illustrates 'carbon dioxide emissions' with a shot of a power station's cooling towers. The big fat ones, with the huge clouds coming out the top. All that's coming out of there is steam. The CO2 is coming out of the big tall chimney, over there, guys... that's right, the one that's nowhere near as photogenic...
Or is that the worst part? It's certainly the scariest.
It's pretty damn bad.
Let's see... 1. He thinks the Big Bang is not well established. Right away that puts him on the extreme fringe of cosmology. But it's not quite beyond the pale. 2. He thinks Intelligent Design is the alternative. Huh? I thought that was about biology and the origins of life, not the universe as a whole... unless, of course, Intelligent Design actually IS Book of Genesis creationism in disguise? 3. He doesn't even MENTION the Steady State theory. Fred Hoyle spins in grave.
Can't imagine why he wouldn't mention Steady State, given that it's the most plausible alternative to Big Bang theory. But then, it seems he thinks the Big Bang precludes a divine creator... he'd really hate an eternal Universe with neither beginning nor end, then;)
What, you found a game so good that you never want to buy another?
I would explain in greater length, but I've got a whole bunch of chaos speeders poised to overrun Yang's territory in the next few turns. And I'm prototyping a line of nerve-gas needlejets with which to assail the main centres of the alien factions. Nobody minds, when you gas aliens.
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Species, schmecies. From an evolutionary point of view, I don't give a damn whether your children survive - indeed, I might be happier if they don't, less competition for my own kids!
If this is true, then I'd say it's because it's in the baby's interests. Look: You're about to be born. You are likely to be partially or totally dependent on your mother for many years. It is therefore in your interests to prolong her life if you can, especially since the stress of giving birth will probably damage her health.
Yeah. He was wrong. That's OK. Trouble is, he was wrong about just about every single thing he tried, and then got cited as an unassailable authority by just about everyone in Europe for over a thousand years.
I tell you what, the computer running these things better be secure...
* puts together a cunning means to pwnz them, and a nifty blue and white logo with a scrolling quote from Catcher in the Rye *
Now, if you'll excuse me I have a pharmaceuticals giant to bully.
Yes, But.
This guy wanted 'theory' appended to every mention of the Big Bang in order to allow for the possibility not of a Steady State universe, or of an oscillating universe, but of intelligent design.
This is a major WTF.
Intelligent design, quite apart from being creationism in presentable clothes, is all about biology. It's about alleged irreducible complexity. It's about how living things got the way they are. It has bugger all to do with the Hubble drift or the cosmic microwave background.
I suspect, in fact, that even the intelligent design crowd would want to disown this clown. Their best hope of avoiding widespread recognition that they're creationists under a false flag is to pretend that it's all about biology. It's a scientific quarrel with Darwin. It's about evolution being inadequate. Once the intelligent design flag is raised over cosmology too, it becomes very clear what the name of the intelligent designer is supposed to be.
I recall the terminology being 'the Hot Big Bang model'. The theory this model was based upon was the General Theory of Relativity.
The Big Bang is pretty well established, as I understand it, insofar as the Universe was certainly much hotter and denser in the distant past, and that at something like 300,000 years in the expanding, cooling universal fireball cooled sufficiently to become transparent, leaving its mark in the cosmic microwave background to this day.
It's what happens before that which is interesting. The details of the microwave background indicate that there's more to the story than just that. There's inflationary theory, which is fairly well accepted as the most likely scenario but not entirely well explained, and a whole zoo of weirdness falling out of the GUT du jour. And then there are the string theorists, who I swear just sit around doing acid and playing with hypergeometry equations...
Big sweeping arm movements (sword swinging) will get you killed after a relatively short while. Watch how fencing is actually done next time it's on at the Olympics. There's none of this flashy Errol Flynn slashing and flourishing of the sword. It's all about relatively small, precise, quick movements.
Focus, schmocus; even assuming that 100% of the energy yield of every nuclear bomb on earth goes into shifting the Moon, with none at all wasted in light or heat, it wouldn't affect it noticeably. The Moon is really, really heavy.
Sit down some time and work out the kinetic energy of the Moon. It masses 7.36E22 kilos, and is moving at about 1 km/s. That's 7.36E28 joules, or 1.75E13 megatons. The entire population of the earth is only some 6E9 people, so perhaps if every single person on the earth had a few thousand H-bombs and we let them all off at once on the Moon, we might just affect its orbit significantly...
Been watching Space 1999 and Dragonball lately, I suppose? Sorry, guys: moving small planets around (and the Moon is not far off the size of Mercury) takes a lot of energy. Presumably Muten Roshi was able to unleash an energy blast comparable to 10,000,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs when he blew up the moon at the Tenkaichi Budokai...
Would you believe that the site on which Arthur Guinness chose to build his brewery came with the right to abstract water from Dublin's mains supply, at a low flat rate?
Presumably whoever made that agreement was expecting the construction of housing tenements or something like that. Whoops.
The city got very upset when they realised what was going on. Far too much of the city's water supply was getting turned into Guinness. The brewery was indeed getting a free lunch here. It took a long struggle, both legal and on one occasion violent, before the brewery were able to secure their water supply from the city's attempts to correct their earlier error.
It eventually became clear that the conversion of Dublin's water supply into Guinness wasn't actually upsetting anybody; quite the contrary :-)
This would immediately lead to the military recruiting gamers. Amusing. Suddenly the USAF is full of fighter nerds. God help us if they ever make a sequel to Top Gun then.
More seriously, yes, humans would likely improve - although I imagine pilots today put in a good deal of simulator time. I wonder, however, about whether they'd always come to surpass the computers. Moore's Law aside, I'd guess that the AIs used for air-to-air combat wouldn't be programmed so much as bred. Genetic algorithms, that's the key. Set up a really sophisticated combat flight sim on a massive computer network. Throw in a bunch of AIs. Let them fight to the death. Pick out the last, say, survivor, produce a bunch of copies with small mutations, and fight out the next generation...
That could well get you a really awesome fighter AI. However, it could also get you an AI that won by running and hiding while everyone else killed each other, or a lineage of AIs that know exactly how to handle each other's entire repertoire but have no way to respond to something new that's thrown at them by a human. You'd probably have to do some selective breeding. I would bet one of the biggest issues is finding ways to cut the latency.
Yeah. Down goes your stealth bomber, and you're screaming at the enemy u l4m3r, i w45 in l4g! n0 f41r! Bad thing. There'll never be a way to cut the latency beyond the speed of light limit. Besides that, though, if the enemy hears that you're using remote controlled drones, he'll jam the frequencies you're using - or, worse yet, decipher the code your transmissions use and turn the drones right back against you...
Yeah. This one's a Boojum.
It's tough, isn't it? I'd suggest you find a different career path, to be honest; perhaps you might try steel driving?
In which case humans are completely superfluous. The real fighting's already being done by a kamikaze robot pilot, aboard the missile. Why do we need to put a human in harm's way aboard the missile launch platform?
Even assuming that the AI pilots are markedly inferior to humans, there's still a great advantage to using them. They're cheap. Training a pilot is an expensive thing to do and it takes a lot of time. Losing a pilot is bad news. Losing significant numbers of pilots also has the effect of undermining political support at home - every letter sent to the mother of someone who isn't coming home chips away a little at the mindless jingoism that you need to have to conduct a war.
So, let's suppose that the AI drones are so crap that the kill ratio is ten to one - a human pilot will on average bring down ten AIs before being killed himself. This need not be a problem. A computer program costs nothing to copy, and the hardware's relatively cheap, and robots don't have families. Throw a hundred AIs into the air and let them all be slaughtered if necessary. Who cares? Make 'em kamikaze if you like. It still costs less than training humans to do it.
For a Western army, recruiting humans is expensive, because citizens of very rich countries expect to be paid well to risk their lives. Probably the economics work out differently for the likes of China, but for the USA... let's fill the sky with droids.
The best pilot in the world still blacks out at about 9G. Even if the drone isn't as tactically capable as the human, it can survive far greater physical hardship. What use is your intelligence, your skill, your human flair for battle, against an adversary that can turn at speeds that would leave you a gooey mess in the cockpit?
A serious fighter drone would just slaughter human pilots, just on the superior performance of an aircraft that doesn't have to worry about keeping the pilot alive. It would be like Spitfires going up against a Harrier.
Foreign powers offering natives guns in exchange for slaves, and suggesting that since they'll be back in a few months' time, it might be worth the natives' while going and enslaving the village over the hill, who haven't got guns...
Ah, I'm just swelling with patriotism at the thought of Britain's glorious history ;-)
No it isn't. It's exactly the same. Information on what happened in Tiananment Square is 'illegal stuff' in China.
Free speech is free speech, whether it's political protest or Lady Chatterley's Lover. If we're setting up to monitor censorship, we should not differentiate here, lest we become censors ourselves.
This is the UK; domestic air conditioning is virtually unknown. We don't normally get very many days in a year where the thermometer gets far above 25, and by jingo we're going to appreciate them when they do turn up!
Bloody hell. Every time there's a global warming story, some goon who's mistaken a thriller novel for a scientific paper cites Crichton as evidence that it's all a lefty environmentalist conspiracy. Now Crichton gets raised as an authority on nanotech.
That does it. Next time there's a story on genetics or cloning, I'm going to say it's a bad idea because look what happened in Jurassic Park.
Sure there are. They've got quite a lot smaller, grown feathers, and learned to fly, though.
I doubt there's any really big animals left to be discovered on land. The likes of giant dinosaurs need to eat a lot. A breeding colony of those things would be hard to hide.
So: don't hold your breath waiting for the discovery of the Lost World, or for Nessie... if cryptozoology is your thing, then my money's on the Yeti.
Bloody cricket.
You're a bit paranoid there, I think. The Japanese are heavily dependent on nuclear power - I think more so even than France. They have plenty of experience with nuclear fission, they have plenty of radioactives of all kinds available. If Japan wanted a bomb, they could build one any time they like. It's really not so very hard, if you have the fissile material and appropriate machine tools.
Personally I think Japan won't build a bomb unless seriously provoked, though. What with the way the war ended, and with the Lucky Dragon incident, and with Gojira, the Japanese aren't fond of atom bombs. If North Korea tested one, then maybe Japan would start converting some of their stockpiled fissionables into bombs, but not before.
To be fair, that's what nuclear power stations put into the atmosphere. Big fluffy white clouds.
It always annoys me when a TV news segment or a documentary illustrates 'carbon dioxide emissions' with a shot of a power station's cooling towers. The big fat ones, with the huge clouds coming out the top. All that's coming out of there is steam. The CO2 is coming out of the big tall chimney, over there, guys... that's right, the one that's nowhere near as photogenic...
It's pretty damn bad.
Let's see... 1. He thinks the Big Bang is not well established. Right away that puts him on the extreme fringe of cosmology. But it's not quite beyond the pale. 2. He thinks Intelligent Design is the alternative. Huh? I thought that was about biology and the origins of life, not the universe as a whole... unless, of course, Intelligent Design actually IS Book of Genesis creationism in disguise? 3. He doesn't even MENTION the Steady State theory. Fred Hoyle spins in grave.
Can't imagine why he wouldn't mention Steady State, given that it's the most plausible alternative to Big Bang theory. But then, it seems he thinks the Big Bang precludes a divine creator... he'd really hate an eternal Universe with neither beginning nor end, then ;)
I would explain in greater length, but I've got a whole bunch of chaos speeders poised to overrun Yang's territory in the next few turns. And I'm prototyping a line of nerve-gas needlejets with which to assail the main centres of the alien factions. Nobody minds, when you gas aliens.
From the link I followed to get to this story:
Games: 86 games for the 360, 45 for the PS3 16 of 3 comments
That's... weird.