Waiting a week longer than American audiences (BBC iplayer)
That's hardly the BBC's fault. It's a leftover from the last century, when people in.uk had little contact with people in.us, and so it didn't matter if a particular show took a long time to cross the Atlantic - it still seemed new to those who hadn't seen it before. Nowadays of course most people with internet access have regular contact with others from all over the Anglophone world, and so it becomes annoying if a show airs in America a week before it does in Britain (i.e. Heroes) or in Britain many months before it does in America (i.e. Doctor Who). Suddenly we have to be careful what we say so as not to spoil things for our friends overseas.
Things have improved. The BBC is very close behind the American channels with Heroes. Watchmen was released on the same day on both sides of the ocean. That's thanks to piracy, which has no respect for national boundaries and will quickly copy a new show from one country to another; the legitimate owners need to move quickly if they hope to profit from their work. This is a good thing insofar as the end result will be simultaneous releases of all mainstream media all over the world, to keep ahead of the pirates; I worry, however, that it might endanger the niche material produced by small-time groups for whom synchronised global releases are a fantastic dream.
I'm wondering if the Internet infrastructure really has the bandwidth to support everyone (not just a minority of people) all doing real time streaming.
Does it need to? The only events that need to be streamed in real time are newsflashes and live sports. Anything else can wait - does it matter if you see your show a few hours after it officially aired? Let's say it's 2020, and the makers of the latest cool show have published the latest episode on their private, subscription-only tracker, because that's the way TV works in The Future - does it matter if you don't see it till tomorrow? I don't see why. Just enter your subscriptions into your PVR - cum - BitTorrent client, it downloads the shows as they become available, and you watch them at your leisure.
And for those events which must be streamed live, even today services like Sopcast don't do a bad job of relaying Premiership football to fans around the world. If a legitimate service went into the business of providing such streams, there's such a thing as IP multicast. Sure it's not used much at present, but it's there if the demand arises.
When in human history has encountering a more advanced civilisation ever been good for a less advanced civilisation?
Japan didn't do too badly; once they realised how backward they were they acted quickly to catch up, taking less than ninety years from the Black Ships to Pearl Harbour. A case could perhaps be made for India, whose existence as a unified state rather than countless squabbling principalities is largely a result of the Raj. And awful though the Conquistadors were, the Aztec Empire was a brutal tyranny that enslaved all its neighbours, who were very glad indeed to see the back of Montezuma.
For Christ's sake, we have *cooking directions* on POPTARTS.
Something wrong with that? You may think it's obvious that you just put them in the toaster - not under the grill, then? And for how long should they be toasted, on what temperature? Toast a Pop-Tart too long and too hot and the icing - which is pretty much neat sugar - can melt and begin to caramelise. Then the toast pops up and you pick up your tasty snack - OWWWWWWWWWWWWW HORRIBLY BURNED HAND!
When they were first introduced to the UK, people got the message that these things were to be toasted. But not the message that they were to be toasted on the very lowest setting. Several people did indeed burn themselves quite badly. I remember it well, for I was right livid at the ensuing media panic because it meant I couldn't have Pop-Tarts any more.
If you call them stupid just because their arbitrarily chosen reference point is different from your arbitrarily chosen one, you are the idiot.
Actually, if you consider the two-body situation and work out the relevant equations, the Sun and the Earth revolve around a common centre of mass. Because the Sun vastly outweighs the Earth, that centre of mass is inside the Sun; so it's more correct to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun than vice-versa. There's nothing arbitrary about picking that particular point; the centre of mass is a physically meaningful concept inherent in the mechanical system.
Re:Death, the High Cost of Living
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No offense, but how does that mean in terms of content? Death is also a recurring figure in Family Guy. I don't see how that helps someone draw any sort of conclusion from.
Well, a recurring enough figure that they gave Death two spin-off novels, The High Cost of Living and Time of your Life. It had been established as an aside during Sandman that there was a rule that Death had to spend one day mortal every century, to better understand the subjects of the exercise. The High Cost of Living follows the most recent such day. A day in the life, with Death.
Oh, and Sandman's concept of Death is... rather different in several ways to those you'll be familiar with, which I'll avoid spoiling for you. The lead character of the series, Morpheus, is more formally known as Dream of the Endless, the anthropomorphic personification of dreaming and imagination and one of the most powerful entities in all creation; he is Death's younger brother, the two of them being among the senior members of a highly dysfunctional set of siblings. Death is the first of Dream's family we meet, as an epilogue to the opening story arc in Preludes and Nocturnes.
Not to give away too much by way of spoilers, Dream put it to the magician who had once imprisoned him, upon his escape: "WHAT? You wanted DEATH? Then count yourself lucky for the sake of your species and your petty planet that you did NOT succeed... that instead you snared Death's younger BROTHER... you'll never know how LUCKY you were."
Graphic novel dilettante here, just curious. Sandman?
Sandman makes sense, but it's a series in ten volumes. Watchmen is a one-off. Personally I'd guess you'd get three answers if you asked around the nerd population: Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The Dark Knight Returns.
We all know space western is one of the most interesting and under-used genres - Cowboy Bebop anyone?
I remember long ago watching BraveStarr on Saturday mornings. Something you don't see often - a guy with a super power he never uses because he has a machine that does it better. Strength of the Bear, Ears of the Wolf, Speed of the Puma, and an infrared scanner thing in my hat...
Actually, the economy's fucked because we don't actually make things any more. The trend since the eighties has been for Britain to turn into one big bank. We don't make things - we finance other people to make things, and take a cut of the proceeds. Or rather, we sell their debts on to get the cash up front now and let someone else hold that risk. Or, even more profitably, we wait for someone else to finance yet another someone else to make things, we buy the debt, repackage it, and sell it on to the employees at the firm where they actually make things as a pension scheme.
A huge slice of the British economy consists of moving money about the place. Or pieces of paper representing money. Or electronic structures representing pieces of paper representing money. Or complex derivatives that at some ultimate remove via several people's promises and a whole lot of liabilities have something somewhere to do with money. And now that the world seems to have noticed that quite a lot of what we thought was money actually isn't, this house of cards is coming down quite fast.
In the midst of all this, we have a few hundred thousand people who've turned up from Eastern Europe with their old fashioned ways and they're actually making things. I have to say, I'm not going to be the one to complain about them.
Ceres was once called a planet. Once it was discovered that Ceres did not orbit alone but as part of a vast swarm of similar objects, it was redefined as a new category called an asteroid. The public went with it in time, although through quite a bit of the nineteenth century 'asteroids' were commonly referred to as 'planets' anyway. Same deal with Pluto - the discovery of more and more dwarf planets led to their establishment in their own category.
Why are you so arrogant? Some would say it takes MORE faith (belief in something NOT provable) to believe evolution than it takes to believe ID.
Yeah, but some might say you get what you've been given, if you don't get yours I won't get mine as well. Doesn't make it so. My sink isn't full of fishes for a start.
FWIW, resolution is not the only thing that you can improve in an eye to improve on it. Just off the top of my head there is: focusing ability, range of light intensity, spread of IR spectrum and possibly refresh rate that could be improved on without increasing the resolution.
"Now then, uh, my optical system doesn't appear to have a zoom function."
"No, human eyes don't have a zoom."
"Well then, how do you bring a small object into sharp focus?"
"Well, you just move your head closer to the object."
"I see. Move your head... closer, hmm, to the object. All right, okay. Well, what about other optical effects, like split screen, slow motion, Quantel?"
"No. We don't have them."
"You don't have them. Just the zoom? Hmm."
That is 4 out of 100 Japanese people buying a phone, chose to buy an Apple phone. Hardly earth shattering success if you ask me.
Not bad for a high-cost, high-end, new entrant to the market, though.
I don't know what the Japanese phone market looks like, but in the UK mainstream it's pretty much a straight fight between Sony Ericsson and Nokia. The mass market expects to get the phone free in exchange for signing up for a 12 or 18 month service contract at a reasonable monthly fee. That's where you get big sales figures. Sony and Nokia provide these. The iPhone is pitched at people who are willing to pay extra for the Jesus Phone: unless you sign up for a truly astronomical tariff, the iPhone has a fee up front. Who'll go for that? A small minority, that's who.
I don't think the iPhone was intended for the mainstream. It's competing with things like the Nokia N95 - phones on steroids jammed with nerd toys. That's a niche market. I look at phones like that and I think sure, that would be cool to have - but then I look at the price tag and think maybe not, and then I look at the enormous size of the screen and picture it cracked in my pocket, and then I look at the battery life... And then I go back to the other shelf and pick up the latest Ericsson phone and buy that instead. They provide what I want - good phone functions, good camera, passable internet functionality (enough to get the football scores and web mail), long battery life, physical durability - and they provide it cheap.
This isn't like the iPod, where mp3 players were a niche market that the iPod could make mainstream. The iPhone is trying to break into a market that is already mainstream and already saturated, a market characterised by vicious, cut-throat competition. That the iPhone has made it to 4% in Japan... well, I'm damn impressed by that.
The BBC ran quite a few stories on this subject around 2001/2 and The Power of Nightmares (BBC documentary from 2004) covered it in a lot of detail, and was released into the public domain to ensure it got even wider coverage.
This was because no mainstream American channel would touch that documentary. Can't imagine why not, although I gather the phrase 'we would be crucified if we showed that here' was used at one point. So they released it freely to let the Internet bypass that unfortunate bottleneck.
In case you're interested to see what the media thought you shouldn't, it's right here.
How are large record companies even useful nowadays?
Well, the radio plays what they want you to hear, they tell you it's cool, and you sure believe it. Without a record company you're one more band nobody's heard of: put your mp3s up on your Myspace under a right-on Creative Commons licence if you like, and I'm sure all 27 people who care will download them, and you can keep on flipping burgers and putting on your silly hat. But once you sell out you have marketing. The masses are told by their trusted media sources that you are the new cool thing. That counts for a lot.
Or would you rather keep to your principles and then suddenly get huge overnight because some/b/tard put your music to a looped anime clip and it went viral on Youtube? Because that's how it happens on the internet. You might want to be the next Arctic Monkeys, but the Internet prefers Rick Astley.
Let's say that I sent a ping pong ball, a house brick, and a 20t lump of iron heading away from earth at 5 m/s. I would expect the ping pong ball to slow most quickly, followed by the house brick. In some situations, the lump of iron might be able to escape where the others would not. You'd experience the same effect if you tried to stop a car rolling down hill a ten miles per hour and then compared it to stopping a skate board moving at the same speed. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Yeah. No friction or air resistance in space, that's what you're missing. Oh, and all of physics since Galileo, you're missing that too.
The brick has less mass than the iron lump, true - and so it has proportionately less inertia. But the gravitational force on the brick is also less than that of the iron lump, by the same proportion. The two cancel out. If they have the same velocity, then if one escapes, so does the other. It's the same principle as how a brick will fall at the same speed as a feather, if dropped in a vacuum.
Similarly, if a spaceprobe and an asteroid fly away from the Earth at the same velocity, it doesn't matter whether they're attached or separate: both will follow the same path.
My money says we'll have the capability to defend ourselves against such an impact. The second time.
We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
I'd guess we'll get near miss after near miss, we'll ignore Tunguska-scale impacts at sea and in the tundra and in the desert just like we ignored Shoemaker-Levy 9... Nobody will fund a serious defence until one of these things strikes a city.
Why can't we send a probe that will land on this asteroid and then piggy ride on it.
Physics doesn't work that way.
You seem to think it's like hopping on the back of an old London bus: grab it as it passes and jump up onto the step. But speeds in space are far greater than that. If you try to catch an asteroid as it passes, words like 'splat' or 'crunch' are appropriate. You need to match the asteroid's velocity very closely in order to land on it without being destroyed - and if you can do that, then you're on the same orbit as the asteroid anyway, and you'll go where it goes whether you land or not. So you don't actually need the asteroid to be there.
I suppose you might arrange something cunning with a big net and a lot of bungee rope, if you can pull off an incredibly accurate flight plan, but even so it's unlikely that the asteroid is going to be near any other targets of interest in the near future; it's more worth your while to load up the extra fuel needed to fly direct to the planet or moon you want to study.
... how many other unknown things are hiding in those old images.
Probably millions. It's called 'precovery' - very often, once you discover something new, you'll find that it has already been photographed half a dozen times and been completely ignored. Consider the planet Neptune, discovered in 1846: it turns out that it had already been observed by Galileo, twice, in the course of his studies of Jupiter. He mistook it for a star, although he noted that it appeared to move very slightly relative to other stars.
One person's superior genetics and mating ability isn't going to cause any change to our species. His children might be better off than some others, which is fine, but in a population this large it's not going to alter the state of humanity, nor produce some offshoot of evolved post-humans.
If, as we're looking at here, we're screening embryos and picking out a particular one, I'd agree. That adds nothing new to the gene pool. It won't affect evolution unless it's widely practiced for a very long time, at which point the screening process becomes a selection pressure itself and we end up breeding humans like dogs.
If one person has a mutation that grants him and his descendants a consistent advantage, that is going to affect evolution. Perhaps not noticeably, on its own, but in time that mutant gene will come to predominate in the population, and humans will become ever so slightly different.
Charlie Sheen claims to have slept with over three thousand women -- I doubt that number, but he's rich and reasonably good-looking, so I'm sure he's got a his pick of fertile women, and the means to support a huge number of children if he wanted. Yet he only has one daughter. Meanwhile, Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel manages to have ten kids. My point is that if left to his own devices, the Cletuses of the world wouldn't be likely to even survive into adulthood and get the chance, but we don't live in that type of society.
Well, keep that up and come back in ten thousand years and find very few Charlie Sheens and an awful lot of Cletuses. In these circumstances Cletus is better adapted and more successful at breeding, so he will be favoured by evolution.
When it comes down to actually producing a child, most people seem to manage if they want to.
Perhaps, but some people do it sooner, and are much more prolific about it. Some people are grandparents already at the same age that others are just considering maybe it's time to think about possibly starting a family maybe. It's clear enough whose descendants are going to form the bulk of the future population. Look for a world full of the spawn of teenagers, not the people who wouldn't dream of breeding before thirty.
We're still subject to evolution. Not in the same way as everything else alive, maybe - many, perhaps even most humans aren't even hungry and aren't worried at all about how they're going to find food tomorrow - but we've got selection pressures of our own. We're not threatened by predators or starvation - I'd say our chief threats in Western society are the condom and the Pill, and anybody with the predisposition to avoid such perils will be a more prolific breeder. That's what we're selecting for in our current evolutionary process.
Here's where we differ. Natural selection doesn't happen to 'the species as a whole', it happens to individuals. Surely you'll agree that some people's genetics make them more likely to mate successfully than others? Note that I'm not saying anyone has 'no chance' - that isn't necessary. All that is needed is a differential in the rate of successful reproduction. If my clan consistently has two children per family and your clan has three, then in ten thousand years the population will be dominated by your descendants, not mine. As long as the difference is caused by inheritable genetic factors, that's evolution in action.
Now you explain to me why a mutant gull will produce "more young" than the rest. That's not a given.
If it doesn't do so on average, then it wasn't a beneficial mutation from an evolutionary perspective. Of course in practice it may be that the carrier of some new wonder-gene for great fertility has the misfortune to have his egg dropped off a cliff before he even hatches, or some other accident can wipe out the new trait in its early days - but on the whole, as long as the mutation increases its statistical chances of success, evolution has something to work with.
A gull that has some beneficial trait might have a better chance at surviving longer than his buddies, long enough to reproduce where his buddies won't. That's obvious. But in a large colony, it doesn't much matter -- thus mutant gull has a few baby gulls, and fifty thousand other gulls have normmal baby gulls. The mutant baby gull grows up and the gene pool is diluted.
You're missing the point of what I said about genetics. Genes don't dilute. Either a gull carries the beneficial mutant gene, or it does not: you can't have half the gene or a quarter of the gene. If a gull carrying the beneficial gene produces more surviving young on average than a gull which does not, then the next generation will contain more copies of that gene. The generation after that, even more. Of course the normal version of the gene is also breeding, but just a little more slowly. In the fullness of time, the exponential function wins out, and the original gene is almost wholly replaced by the mutant version. Last time around I figured 1200 or so generations to go from a ratio of 1:100,000 to 1:1, given a mutation whose benefit was one part in six; I suspect that's an overestimate since I didn't account for sex, which will speed up the introduction of the mutant gene into the general population. That would require a substantially more complex model, tracking genes rather than individuals.
Your math is all well and good but human sexuality is far, far more complicated than math, which is another factor I'm not sure you're considering. In any given random city you'll find guys who prefer pale girls with dark hair or guys who prefer tanned blondes. You'll find women who prefer scrawny geeks and women who prefer muscular dudes. Virtually regardless of who you are or your preferred type, you'll find someone.
But there are definitely some types that are more successful at breeding than others, right? Sure, it's possible for a typical/. reader to breed. But it's unusual enough that it's become a running joke. I'd guess that proportionally more of us nerds will die childless than the general population. If what we are is genetically determined (is there a nerd gene? Unlikely to be so simple, but let's go with it) then we are disfavoured by natural selection, and the future will contain proportionally fewer nerds. And again that is evolution.
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That's hardly the BBC's fault. It's a leftover from the last century, when people in .uk had little contact with people in .us, and so it didn't matter if a particular show took a long time to cross the Atlantic - it still seemed new to those who hadn't seen it before. Nowadays of course most people with internet access have regular contact with others from all over the Anglophone world, and so it becomes annoying if a show airs in America a week before it does in Britain (i.e. Heroes) or in Britain many months before it does in America (i.e. Doctor Who). Suddenly we have to be careful what we say so as not to spoil things for our friends overseas.
Things have improved. The BBC is very close behind the American channels with Heroes. Watchmen was released on the same day on both sides of the ocean. That's thanks to piracy, which has no respect for national boundaries and will quickly copy a new show from one country to another; the legitimate owners need to move quickly if they hope to profit from their work. This is a good thing insofar as the end result will be simultaneous releases of all mainstream media all over the world, to keep ahead of the pirates; I worry, however, that it might endanger the niche material produced by small-time groups for whom synchronised global releases are a fantastic dream.
Does it need to? The only events that need to be streamed in real time are newsflashes and live sports. Anything else can wait - does it matter if you see your show a few hours after it officially aired? Let's say it's 2020, and the makers of the latest cool show have published the latest episode on their private, subscription-only tracker, because that's the way TV works in The Future - does it matter if you don't see it till tomorrow? I don't see why. Just enter your subscriptions into your PVR - cum - BitTorrent client, it downloads the shows as they become available, and you watch them at your leisure.
And for those events which must be streamed live, even today services like Sopcast don't do a bad job of relaying Premiership football to fans around the world. If a legitimate service went into the business of providing such streams, there's such a thing as IP multicast. Sure it's not used much at present, but it's there if the demand arises.
Japan didn't do too badly; once they realised how backward they were they acted quickly to catch up, taking less than ninety years from the Black Ships to Pearl Harbour. A case could perhaps be made for India, whose existence as a unified state rather than countless squabbling principalities is largely a result of the Raj. And awful though the Conquistadors were, the Aztec Empire was a brutal tyranny that enslaved all its neighbours, who were very glad indeed to see the back of Montezuma.
Something wrong with that? You may think it's obvious that you just put them in the toaster - not under the grill, then? And for how long should they be toasted, on what temperature? Toast a Pop-Tart too long and too hot and the icing - which is pretty much neat sugar - can melt and begin to caramelise. Then the toast pops up and you pick up your tasty snack - OWWWWWWWWWWWWW HORRIBLY BURNED HAND!
When they were first introduced to the UK, people got the message that these things were to be toasted. But not the message that they were to be toasted on the very lowest setting. Several people did indeed burn themselves quite badly. I remember it well, for I was right livid at the ensuing media panic because it meant I couldn't have Pop-Tarts any more.
Actually, if you consider the two-body situation and work out the relevant equations, the Sun and the Earth revolve around a common centre of mass. Because the Sun vastly outweighs the Earth, that centre of mass is inside the Sun; so it's more correct to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun than vice-versa. There's nothing arbitrary about picking that particular point; the centre of mass is a physically meaningful concept inherent in the mechanical system.
Well, a recurring enough figure that they gave Death two spin-off novels, The High Cost of Living and Time of your Life. It had been established as an aside during Sandman that there was a rule that Death had to spend one day mortal every century, to better understand the subjects of the exercise. The High Cost of Living follows the most recent such day. A day in the life, with Death.
Oh, and Sandman's concept of Death is... rather different in several ways to those you'll be familiar with, which I'll avoid spoiling for you. The lead character of the series, Morpheus, is more formally known as Dream of the Endless, the anthropomorphic personification of dreaming and imagination and one of the most powerful entities in all creation; he is Death's younger brother, the two of them being among the senior members of a highly dysfunctional set of siblings. Death is the first of Dream's family we meet, as an epilogue to the opening story arc in Preludes and Nocturnes.
Not to give away too much by way of spoilers, Dream put it to the magician who had once imprisoned him, upon his escape: "WHAT? You wanted DEATH? Then count yourself lucky for the sake of your species and your petty planet that you did NOT succeed... that instead you snared Death's younger BROTHER... you'll never know how LUCKY you were."
Sandman makes sense, but it's a series in ten volumes. Watchmen is a one-off. Personally I'd guess you'd get three answers if you asked around the nerd population: Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The Dark Knight Returns.
I remember long ago watching BraveStarr on Saturday mornings. Something you don't see often - a guy with a super power he never uses because he has a machine that does it better. Strength of the Bear, Ears of the Wolf, Speed of the Puma, and an infrared scanner thing in my hat...
A huge slice of the British economy consists of moving money about the place. Or pieces of paper representing money. Or electronic structures representing pieces of paper representing money. Or complex derivatives that at some ultimate remove via several people's promises and a whole lot of liabilities have something somewhere to do with money. And now that the world seems to have noticed that quite a lot of what we thought was money actually isn't, this house of cards is coming down quite fast.
In the midst of all this, we have a few hundred thousand people who've turned up from Eastern Europe with their old fashioned ways and they're actually making things. I have to say, I'm not going to be the one to complain about them.
Yeah. What could possibly be worse? 'Wagon Train' to the stars, maybe?
When Captain Morgan buried his ill-gotten gains on an island?
Ceres was once called a planet. Once it was discovered that Ceres did not orbit alone but as part of a vast swarm of similar objects, it was redefined as a new category called an asteroid. The public went with it in time, although through quite a bit of the nineteenth century 'asteroids' were commonly referred to as 'planets' anyway. Same deal with Pluto - the discovery of more and more dwarf planets led to their establishment in their own category.
Yeah, but some might say you get what you've been given, if you don't get yours I won't get mine as well. Doesn't make it so. My sink isn't full of fishes for a start.
Does anyone actually like the Beatles?
I'm torn between a smartarse comment about bears, and another smartarse comment about the Pope...
"Now then, uh, my optical system doesn't appear to have a zoom function." ... closer, hmm, to the object. All right, okay. Well, what about other optical effects, like split screen, slow motion, Quantel?"
"No, human eyes don't have a zoom."
"Well then, how do you bring a small object into sharp focus?"
"Well, you just move your head closer to the object."
"I see. Move your head
"No. We don't have them."
"You don't have them. Just the zoom? Hmm."
Not bad for a high-cost, high-end, new entrant to the market, though.
I don't know what the Japanese phone market looks like, but in the UK mainstream it's pretty much a straight fight between Sony Ericsson and Nokia. The mass market expects to get the phone free in exchange for signing up for a 12 or 18 month service contract at a reasonable monthly fee. That's where you get big sales figures. Sony and Nokia provide these. The iPhone is pitched at people who are willing to pay extra for the Jesus Phone: unless you sign up for a truly astronomical tariff, the iPhone has a fee up front. Who'll go for that? A small minority, that's who.
I don't think the iPhone was intended for the mainstream. It's competing with things like the Nokia N95 - phones on steroids jammed with nerd toys. That's a niche market. I look at phones like that and I think sure, that would be cool to have - but then I look at the price tag and think maybe not, and then I look at the enormous size of the screen and picture it cracked in my pocket, and then I look at the battery life... And then I go back to the other shelf and pick up the latest Ericsson phone and buy that instead. They provide what I want - good phone functions, good camera, passable internet functionality (enough to get the football scores and web mail), long battery life, physical durability - and they provide it cheap.
This isn't like the iPod, where mp3 players were a niche market that the iPod could make mainstream. The iPhone is trying to break into a market that is already mainstream and already saturated, a market characterised by vicious, cut-throat competition. That the iPhone has made it to 4% in Japan... well, I'm damn impressed by that.
This was because no mainstream American channel would touch that documentary. Can't imagine why not, although I gather the phrase 'we would be crucified if we showed that here' was used at one point. So they released it freely to let the Internet bypass that unfortunate bottleneck.
In case you're interested to see what the media thought you shouldn't, it's right here.
Well, the radio plays what they want you to hear, they tell you it's cool, and you sure believe it. Without a record company you're one more band nobody's heard of: put your mp3s up on your Myspace under a right-on Creative Commons licence if you like, and I'm sure all 27 people who care will download them, and you can keep on flipping burgers and putting on your silly hat. But once you sell out you have marketing. The masses are told by their trusted media sources that you are the new cool thing. That counts for a lot.
Or would you rather keep to your principles and then suddenly get huge overnight because some /b/tard put your music to a looped anime clip and it went viral on Youtube? Because that's how it happens on the internet. You might want to be the next Arctic Monkeys, but the Internet prefers Rick Astley.
Yeah. No friction or air resistance in space, that's what you're missing. Oh, and all of physics since Galileo, you're missing that too.
The brick has less mass than the iron lump, true - and so it has proportionately less inertia. But the gravitational force on the brick is also less than that of the iron lump, by the same proportion. The two cancel out. If they have the same velocity, then if one escapes, so does the other. It's the same principle as how a brick will fall at the same speed as a feather, if dropped in a vacuum.
Similarly, if a spaceprobe and an asteroid fly away from the Earth at the same velocity, it doesn't matter whether they're attached or separate: both will follow the same path.
We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
I'd guess we'll get near miss after near miss, we'll ignore Tunguska-scale impacts at sea and in the tundra and in the desert just like we ignored Shoemaker-Levy 9... Nobody will fund a serious defence until one of these things strikes a city.
Physics doesn't work that way.
You seem to think it's like hopping on the back of an old London bus: grab it as it passes and jump up onto the step. But speeds in space are far greater than that. If you try to catch an asteroid as it passes, words like 'splat' or 'crunch' are appropriate. You need to match the asteroid's velocity very closely in order to land on it without being destroyed - and if you can do that, then you're on the same orbit as the asteroid anyway, and you'll go where it goes whether you land or not. So you don't actually need the asteroid to be there.
I suppose you might arrange something cunning with a big net and a lot of bungee rope, if you can pull off an incredibly accurate flight plan, but even so it's unlikely that the asteroid is going to be near any other targets of interest in the near future; it's more worth your while to load up the extra fuel needed to fly direct to the planet or moon you want to study.
I accidentally the whole type of harassment.
Probably millions. It's called 'precovery' - very often, once you discover something new, you'll find that it has already been photographed half a dozen times and been completely ignored. Consider the planet Neptune, discovered in 1846: it turns out that it had already been observed by Galileo, twice, in the course of his studies of Jupiter. He mistook it for a star, although he noted that it appeared to move very slightly relative to other stars.
If, as we're looking at here, we're screening embryos and picking out a particular one, I'd agree. That adds nothing new to the gene pool. It won't affect evolution unless it's widely practiced for a very long time, at which point the screening process becomes a selection pressure itself and we end up breeding humans like dogs.
If one person has a mutation that grants him and his descendants a consistent advantage, that is going to affect evolution. Perhaps not noticeably, on its own, but in time that mutant gene will come to predominate in the population, and humans will become ever so slightly different.
Charlie Sheen claims to have slept with over three thousand women -- I doubt that number, but he's rich and reasonably good-looking, so I'm sure he's got a his pick of fertile women, and the means to support a huge number of children if he wanted. Yet he only has one daughter. Meanwhile, Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel manages to have ten kids. My point is that if left to his own devices, the Cletuses of the world wouldn't be likely to even survive into adulthood and get the chance, but we don't live in that type of society.
Well, keep that up and come back in ten thousand years and find very few Charlie Sheens and an awful lot of Cletuses. In these circumstances Cletus is better adapted and more successful at breeding, so he will be favoured by evolution.
When it comes down to actually producing a child, most people seem to manage if they want to.
Perhaps, but some people do it sooner, and are much more prolific about it. Some people are grandparents already at the same age that others are just considering maybe it's time to think about possibly starting a family maybe. It's clear enough whose descendants are going to form the bulk of the future population. Look for a world full of the spawn of teenagers, not the people who wouldn't dream of breeding before thirty.
We're still subject to evolution. Not in the same way as everything else alive, maybe - many, perhaps even most humans aren't even hungry and aren't worried at all about how they're going to find food tomorrow - but we've got selection pressures of our own. We're not threatened by predators or starvation - I'd say our chief threats in Western society are the condom and the Pill, and anybody with the predisposition to avoid such perils will be a more prolific breeder. That's what we're selecting for in our current evolutionary process.
Here's where we differ. Natural selection doesn't happen to 'the species as a whole', it happens to individuals. Surely you'll agree that some people's genetics make them more likely to mate successfully than others? Note that I'm not saying anyone has 'no chance' - that isn't necessary. All that is needed is a differential in the rate of successful reproduction. If my clan consistently has two children per family and your clan has three, then in ten thousand years the population will be dominated by your descendants, not mine. As long as the difference is caused by inheritable genetic factors, that's evolution in action.
Now you explain to me why a mutant gull will produce "more young" than the rest. That's not a given.
If it doesn't do so on average, then it wasn't a beneficial mutation from an evolutionary perspective. Of course in practice it may be that the carrier of some new wonder-gene for great fertility has the misfortune to have his egg dropped off a cliff before he even hatches, or some other accident can wipe out the new trait in its early days - but on the whole, as long as the mutation increases its statistical chances of success, evolution has something to work with.
A gull that has some beneficial trait might have a better chance at surviving longer than his buddies, long enough to reproduce where his buddies won't. That's obvious. But in a large colony, it doesn't much matter -- thus mutant gull has a few baby gulls, and fifty thousand other gulls have normmal baby gulls. The mutant baby gull grows up and the gene pool is diluted.
You're missing the point of what I said about genetics. Genes don't dilute. Either a gull carries the beneficial mutant gene, or it does not: you can't have half the gene or a quarter of the gene. If a gull carrying the beneficial gene produces more surviving young on average than a gull which does not, then the next generation will contain more copies of that gene. The generation after that, even more. Of course the normal version of the gene is also breeding, but just a little more slowly. In the fullness of time, the exponential function wins out, and the original gene is almost wholly replaced by the mutant version. Last time around I figured 1200 or so generations to go from a ratio of 1:100,000 to 1:1, given a mutation whose benefit was one part in six; I suspect that's an overestimate since I didn't account for sex, which will speed up the introduction of the mutant gene into the general population. That would require a substantially more complex model, tracking genes rather than individuals.
Your math is all well and good but human sexuality is far, far more complicated than math, which is another factor I'm not sure you're considering. In any given random city you'll find guys who prefer pale girls with dark hair or guys who prefer tanned blondes. You'll find women who prefer scrawny geeks and women who prefer muscular dudes. Virtually regardless of who you are or your preferred type, you'll find someone.
But there are definitely some types that are more successful at breeding than others, right? Sure, it's possible for a typical /. reader to breed. But it's unusual enough that it's become a running joke. I'd guess that proportionally more of us nerds will die childless than the general population. If what we are is genetically determined (is there a nerd gene? Unlikely to be so simple, but let's go with it) then we are disfavoured by natural selection, and the future will contain proportionally fewer nerds. And again that is evolution.