You can find out more about "Tasmanian Tigers" at The Thylacine Museum. In reality it's a marsupial, not a mammal, and so it's closer to an opossum than a feline like a tiger. The only reason it's called a "tiger" is because of its stripes, as seen in the photo at the top of this webpage about mysterious animals. And it may not even be extinct...
The crew of a Mars mission will be 50-somethings who will die of natural causes before they have a chance to develop cancer from radiation exposure during a Mars trip. Send somebody in their late 20s or early 30s like Apollo/Shuttle and they are going to have some obvious and serious health problems from the trip before they live out their lives. Most people don'r realize how serious radiation in space is. The biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar flares. During the Apollo program there was an August 1972 flare which could have subjected an astronaut to 20,000 REM in 14 hours - 20 to 40 times the lethal dose. Luckily Apollo 16 was back and Apollo 17 was still on the pad. On a Mars mission there won't be any such luck. It lasts YEARS instead of a week and radiation exposure is UNAVOIDABLE. Once you get outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, you are literally on your own in the unknown...
I read it as a teen when it first came out as a "beach book" on a trip to Clearwater, FL, and it HAD to be interesting to divert my attention away from all those bikinis... I'd never seen so many of 'em in my life.
In the "new stuff about amino acids" department, several researchers have recently discovered that there is a fifth taste in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It has been called umami and has been extensively researched at Howard Hughes Medical Center. Naturally the Japanese have established a whole new research center on this at SRUT (Japanese character module required) so can a special edition of Iron Chef be far behind?
From the TiVo FAQ:" In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality." This seems to work best if you do it when a prerecorded program is being played...
Volume Graphics has some interesting software to go along with the kind of display hardware talked about in the article. With VGs stuff you can "capture" a three D displayed image based on voxels and slice-and-dice it...
Everybody interested in this should read John Budzinski's article of a few years ago on this topic. His optimism in this article sprung from the surprising turnaround in annual federal budgets from deficits to surpluses. In the last years of the Clinton Administration the Government took in more than it spent for the first time since 1969 and actually looked like we would start paying off the Federal debt accumulated during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s - a total of SIX TRILLION DOLLARS OF DEBT. But hey, Dubya won, tax cuts passed, and now the US is back in deficit spending. Now the GOP has got bills in Congress to raise the debt ceiling and it's back to business as usual...
Not many people remember that the real thing that made Apollo possible was a net federal SURPLUS in the treasury from the boom in the 1950s - we had to spend the money on SOMETHING, and part of what we spent it on was going to the moon. We also spent it on Vietnam, touched the tarbaby, and BANG we haven't seen a net federal surplus in the Treasury since. Currently we have a net Federal deficit of SIX TRILLION DOLLARS and it is going UP. With Social Security threatening bankruptcy in the 2020s or 2030s, we probably won't ever get back to a surplus in the Trasury for a very long time...
This basic structural difference in the US Treasury from the 1960s and the 2000s is why any talk now of getting to Mars is just a sham. I get very depressed on this subject. During the late 1960s and early 1970s as a teen, it seemed the sky was the limit and it was VERY exciting. Now, as a middle aged man, I truly believe I will go to my grave without ever seeing humans on another world again. I truly feel sorry for those alive today that never have seen humans walking on other worlds for real, not in the movies, and have NO IDEA of the uplift to the heart and soul it brings...
Huh. Unintentional. The links are different, but the one I referred to does indeed reroute to the payola link in the article. I SWEAR I didn't take any cash from Slashdot to do that! Ok, to put some original payola link up, here's Moondog's (a.k.a Alan Freed's final sign-off speech after resigning in disgrace from radio...
A brief history of the original 1950s payola scandal is here. Another interesting payola scandal that I don't think ever went anywhere is that Salon ran an article accusing the US government of payola for having Hollywood run anti-drug plots...
Hmmm. Works on mine, which is a hacked Phillips with dual 100GB hard drives. I loaded the code while a recorded program was running and it gave me a sequence of three beeps that I had never heard before. Then the 30 sec skip worked like the FAQ said. My suggestion - try entering the code WHILE A RECORDED PROGRAM IS RUNNING.
How long can electronics last in space? NASA contacted the Pioneer 6 spacecraft after 35 years in space. An even more interesting question is how long LIFE can last in space. The Surveyor III camera brought back from the moon by Apollo 12 had bacteria in it from where somebody had coughed on it. Commenting on this, astronaut Pete Conrad (who died recently in a motorbike accident) said, "I always thought the most significant thing we found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it..."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:" In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
Apology not necessary but appreciated anyway. You are obviously from the world of print and more considered thought because of your willingness to think, reflect, and yes, even change your opinions. Wow. That's not just a true rarity on/., its a true rarity anywhere. I salute you.
This thread may have grown stupid but it sure has been fun to see what a totally offhanded comment in my review has sparked in the way of heated commentary about my academic background, which is hilarious to me since it was so long ago and never that big of a deal to me. Here's my final word - or rather, my wife's. She's utterly AMAZED that Slashdotters would latch on to college degrees like a terrier on a rat and NOT ONE PERSON has found it unusual that I would read ANKOS at 4AM in a Motel 6 bathroom....
Well, I was kind of making a joke. This stuff is going on in a cell, see, and from a human point of view it happens automatically, see...You are absolutely correct it is a systems control problem with LOTS of complex feedback loops. The interesting thing to me is that ultimately there has to be a statistical or probability aspect to it. You have x hundred or thousand enzymes floating around in there, and x hundred or thousand precursor molecules that represent intermediate components in a biochemical pathway, and only when the corresponding protein enzymes and precursors collide does anything happen. In that sense it IS kind of a CA. But really, the vast majority of thermal/brownian motion collusions between molecules in cells result in no action (or rather, reaction) at all. Perhaps this is the key to how to crack this code...so much emphasis has been on the reactions, when what really needs to be modelled is just how infrequently those reactions occur compared to the collusions that hamper their occurance...
The starting point for this has to be the classic Boehringer Mannheim "Biochemical Pathways" charts which you can access on the Web here and here. Just click on one of the squares and it will present you with a blow-up of that section of the chart. These are also available as HUGE wallcharts on paper you can order from here. Amazing, ain't it? How the proteins produced by DNA manage to work together as catalysts to create the chemicals needed to form an organism is almost totally unknown, yet by definition it is a cellular automaton problem!
To read up on all of this stuff, start with this, then for more details go here and here. After you've skimmed all of the above, pick a site from here or here or here and keep going. It never stops.
Wolfram is the first to admit that there are several areas he is clueless about. Somewhere I read that one of his office workers mentioned they were going to a Super Bowl party and he wanted to know what that was. Of course, he IS from England...
Hey, I admitted up front that I had not "read" ANKOS (as in, "think about and consider the subtlties of every single word the author has written") because to do otherwise and claim I HAD read the book would generate 10 times the number of negative comments saying, impossible, the reviewer is just blowing smoke. It was meant as a flag to take the review that follows with a grain of salt, altho I ***do*** think what I wrote is a pretty good summary of what a reader will find when they pick up ANKOS for the first time. The release of ANKOS is news - lots of people have been waiting lots of years to see it. Wait until a true "reviewer" has really "read" ANKOS and it's no longer a current event - hey, journalistically it's a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. At least I was up front with what the true situation was and produced something (I think) worthwhile as an orientation to ANKOS. The real next step, as pointed out elsewhere in these posts, is to go straight to the horse's mouth and for Slashdot to interview Wolfram...his contact info is here.
When I said I hadn't read ANKOS, I was just trying to be right up front and wave a flag that said, "Take what follows with a grain of salt, I'm not claiming it's the pure unadulterated truth." If I'd taken the other tact, claiming or alluding that I actually HAD read ANKOS, there would be ten times the number of complaints justifiably saying I was just blowing smoke. On a book like this, I imagine it's an editorial balancing act to make a decision on when to run an ANKOS review. It's newsworthy because lots of people have been waiting many years for it and it's put out by one of the stars of computer science, so you want to publish something now. But it's so HARD TO READ (as in, think the author's words thru to understand the nuances of what he's getting at) that if Slashdot waited for anybody to really READ it, it wouldn't be news anymore. I did the most thorough job of skimming I could and did the best job I could to focus on what each of the chapters were about in turn. I think that what I wrote gives somebody who has never even seen a copy of ANKOS a pretty fair idea of what to expect if they decide to read it themselves (and I hope they do). My goal in writing my essay has been met. The next step I think is to arrange a Slashdot interview of Wolfram like somebody suggested elsewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
You can find out more about "Tasmanian Tigers" at The Thylacine Museum. In reality it's a marsupial, not a mammal, and so it's closer to an opossum than a feline like a tiger. The only reason it's called a "tiger" is because of its stripes, as seen in the photo at the top of this webpage about mysterious animals. And it may not even be extinct...
The crew of a Mars mission will be 50-somethings who will die of natural causes before they have a chance to develop cancer from radiation exposure during a Mars trip. Send somebody in their late 20s or early 30s like Apollo/Shuttle and they are going to have some obvious and serious health problems from the trip before they live out their lives. Most people don'r realize how serious radiation in space is. The biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar flares. During the Apollo program there was an August 1972 flare which could have subjected an astronaut to 20,000 REM in 14 hours - 20 to 40 times the lethal dose. Luckily Apollo 16 was back and Apollo 17 was still on the pad. On a Mars mission there won't be any such luck. It lasts YEARS instead of a week and radiation exposure is UNAVOIDABLE. Once you get outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, you are literally on your own in the unknown...
I read it as a teen when it first came out as a "beach book" on a trip to Clearwater, FL, and it HAD to be interesting to divert my attention away from all those bikinis ... I'd never seen so many of 'em in my life.
This is, of course, how Michael Crichton's original bestseller The Andromeda Strain ended when it was written almost a quarter century ago. As this review so aptly notes, TAS is still ahead of its time. Perhaps it's worth a quick (re)read?
In the "new stuff about amino acids" department, several researchers have recently discovered that there is a fifth taste in addition to sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It has been called umami and has been extensively researched at Howard Hughes Medical Center. Naturally the Japanese have established a whole new research center on this at SRUT (Japanese character module required) so can a special edition of Iron Chef be far behind?
From the TiVo FAQ:" In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality." This seems to work best if you do it when a prerecorded program is being played...
Wow. Thank you for sharing that.
Volume Graphics has some interesting software to go along with the kind of display hardware talked about in the article. With VGs stuff you can "capture" a three D displayed image based on voxels and slice-and-dice it...
Everybody interested in this should read John Budzinski's article of a few years ago on this topic. His optimism in this article sprung from the surprising turnaround in annual federal budgets from deficits to surpluses. In the last years of the Clinton Administration the Government took in more than it spent for the first time since 1969 and actually looked like we would start paying off the Federal debt accumulated during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s - a total of SIX TRILLION DOLLARS OF DEBT. But hey, Dubya won, tax cuts passed, and now the US is back in deficit spending. Now the GOP has got bills in Congress to raise the debt ceiling and it's back to business as usual... Not many people remember that the real thing that made Apollo possible was a net federal SURPLUS in the treasury from the boom in the 1950s - we had to spend the money on SOMETHING, and part of what we spent it on was going to the moon. We also spent it on Vietnam, touched the tarbaby, and BANG we haven't seen a net federal surplus in the Treasury since. Currently we have a net Federal deficit of SIX TRILLION DOLLARS and it is going UP. With Social Security threatening bankruptcy in the 2020s or 2030s, we probably won't ever get back to a surplus in the Trasury for a very long time... This basic structural difference in the US Treasury from the 1960s and the 2000s is why any talk now of getting to Mars is just a sham. I get very depressed on this subject. During the late 1960s and early 1970s as a teen, it seemed the sky was the limit and it was VERY exciting. Now, as a middle aged man, I truly believe I will go to my grave without ever seeing humans on another world again. I truly feel sorry for those alive today that never have seen humans walking on other worlds for real, not in the movies, and have NO IDEA of the uplift to the heart and soul it brings...
Huh. Unintentional. The links are different, but the one I referred to does indeed reroute to the payola link in the article. I SWEAR I didn't take any cash from Slashdot to do that! Ok, to put some original payola link up, here's Moondog's (a.k.a Alan Freed's final sign-off speech after resigning in disgrace from radio...
A brief history of the original 1950s payola scandal is here. Another interesting payola scandal that I don't think ever went anywhere is that Salon ran an article accusing the US government of payola for having Hollywood run anti-drug plots...
Hmmm. Works on mine, which is a hacked Phillips with dual 100GB hard drives. I loaded the code while a recorded program was running and it gave me a sequence of three beeps that I had never heard before. Then the 30 sec skip worked like the FAQ said. My suggestion - try entering the code WHILE A RECORDED PROGRAM IS RUNNING.
How long can electronics last in space? NASA contacted the Pioneer 6 spacecraft after 35 years in space. An even more interesting question is how long LIFE can last in space. The Surveyor III camera brought back from the moon by Apollo 12 had bacteria in it from where somebody had coughed on it. Commenting on this, astronaut Pete Conrad (who died recently in a motorbike accident) said, "I always thought the most significant thing we found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it..."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
From the TiVo FAQ:" In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip. This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However, this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
Apology not necessary but appreciated anyway. You are obviously from the world of print and more considered thought because of your willingness to think, reflect, and yes, even change your opinions. Wow. That's not just a true rarity on /., its a true rarity anywhere. I salute you.
Buy it directly from Wolfram's company here.
This thread may have grown stupid but it sure has been fun to see what a totally offhanded comment in my review has sparked in the way of heated commentary about my academic background, which is hilarious to me since it was so long ago and never that big of a deal to me. Here's my final word - or rather, my wife's. She's utterly AMAZED that Slashdotters would latch on to college degrees like a terrier on a rat and NOT ONE PERSON has found it unusual that I would read ANKOS at 4AM in a Motel 6 bathroom....
Well, I was kind of making a joke. This stuff is going on in a cell, see, and from a human point of view it happens automatically, see...You are absolutely correct it is a systems control problem with LOTS of complex feedback loops. The interesting thing to me is that ultimately there has to be a statistical or probability aspect to it. You have x hundred or thousand enzymes floating around in there, and x hundred or thousand precursor molecules that represent intermediate components in a biochemical pathway, and only when the corresponding protein enzymes and precursors collide does anything happen. In that sense it IS kind of a CA. But really, the vast majority of thermal/brownian motion collusions between molecules in cells result in no action (or rather, reaction) at all. Perhaps this is the key to how to crack this code...so much emphasis has been on the reactions, when what really needs to be modelled is just how infrequently those reactions occur compared to the collusions that hamper their occurance...
The starting point for this has to be the classic Boehringer Mannheim "Biochemical Pathways" charts which you can access on the Web here and here. Just click on one of the squares and it will present you with a blow-up of that section of the chart. These are also available as HUGE wallcharts on paper you can order from here. Amazing, ain't it? How the proteins produced by DNA manage to work together as catalysts to create the chemicals needed to form an organism is almost totally unknown, yet by definition it is a cellular automaton problem! To read up on all of this stuff, start with this, then for more details go here and here. After you've skimmed all of the above, pick a site from here or here or here and keep going. It never stops.
Wolfram is the first to admit that there are several areas he is clueless about. Somewhere I read that one of his office workers mentioned they were going to a Super Bowl party and he wanted to know what that was. Of course, he IS from England...
Hey, I admitted up front that I had not "read" ANKOS (as in, "think about and consider the subtlties of every single word the author has written") because to do otherwise and claim I HAD read the book would generate 10 times the number of negative comments saying, impossible, the reviewer is just blowing smoke. It was meant as a flag to take the review that follows with a grain of salt, altho I ***do*** think what I wrote is a pretty good summary of what a reader will find when they pick up ANKOS for the first time. The release of ANKOS is news - lots of people have been waiting lots of years to see it. Wait until a true "reviewer" has really "read" ANKOS and it's no longer a current event - hey, journalistically it's a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. At least I was up front with what the true situation was and produced something (I think) worthwhile as an orientation to ANKOS. The real next step, as pointed out elsewhere in these posts, is to go straight to the horse's mouth and for Slashdot to interview Wolfram...his contact info is here.
When I said I hadn't read ANKOS, I was just trying to be right up front and wave a flag that said, "Take what follows with a grain of salt, I'm not claiming it's the pure unadulterated truth." If I'd taken the other tact, claiming or alluding that I actually HAD read ANKOS, there would be ten times the number of complaints justifiably saying I was just blowing smoke. On a book like this, I imagine it's an editorial balancing act to make a decision on when to run an ANKOS review. It's newsworthy because lots of people have been waiting many years for it and it's put out by one of the stars of computer science, so you want to publish something now. But it's so HARD TO READ (as in, think the author's words thru to understand the nuances of what he's getting at) that if Slashdot waited for anybody to really READ it, it wouldn't be news anymore. I did the most thorough job of skimming I could and did the best job I could to focus on what each of the chapters were about in turn. I think that what I wrote gives somebody who has never even seen a copy of ANKOS a pretty fair idea of what to expect if they decide to read it themselves (and I hope they do). My goal in writing my essay has been met. The next step I think is to arrange a Slashdot interview of Wolfram like somebody suggested elsewhere...