Ya, kids are really going to spend 6-7 hours a day sitting in class "learning" nothing, then come home and spend 2-3 hours actually studying something new and interesting. Some might, but that's the minority.
Well, how about this?
Kids spent six hours a day in class, with twenty or thirty other students. Yes, a teacher can lecture to all of them, but people with kids have probably noticed that 'lecturing' is often not an effective teaching strategy. If we assume that a teacher spends two thirds of his or her time working one-on-one with students, that's still only eight to twelve minutes of individual attention per kid. Sure, there are opportunities for group work, and learning from fellow students, and so forth...but parents who can put in half an hour each day working with their kids can have a significant impact on learning.
The other things parents can do is provide a home environment conducive to learning. Give kids quiet places in the home to read and do homework. Leave books and magazines lying around. Go to museums; see the 'fun' exhibits on bugs and dinosaurs. Visit the library. Formal schooling and informal home education should complement one another--it should never be seen as an either/or proposition, nor should parents feel that spending only twenty minutes here or there is wasted effort.
... you don't have those silly western 'ethics' about doing tests on humans before doing animal tests and being ridiculously sure it's safe.
On the other hand, China was much harder hit by SARS than North America was. In the United States, there were only about thirty cases. If they're afraid that the next outbreak will infect millions of Chinese instead of thousands (with a fatality rate of more than ten percent), then yes--I can see it being sound policy to expedite vaccine development and testing. If there had been an outbreak of a novel disease in the United States that infected seven thousand people and killed seven hundred, I can see the FDA being pressured to rapidly approve trials, too.
Besides--they weren't testing vaccine efficacy by exposing people to the virus. They just tested the volunteers' blood for antibodies to SARS. This gives a pretty good indication that their immune system will respond to the virus without actually risking their health.
Meanwhile, the vaccine is probably made from recombinant protein that mimics the SARS virus' protein coat. Lacking the virus' genetic material, the vaccine cannot cause disease. The worst that is likely to happen would be an allergic reaction, but you can't eliminate that risk with animal testing--eventually you have to put it into a human and see what happens.
In this study I imagine they're using a solubilized form of PEG. It's probably a lower polymeric weight and in a polar/protic solvent--probably aqueous.
Yeah, the solubility depends a lot on the molecular weight of their PEG. I've done a bit of work in drug development, and one of the techniques used to improve the solubility of certain very nonpolar drug candidates is to stick a nice, soluble PEG group on. As you say, it's well suited to work in aqueous systems--like blood.
That's a neat theory. I doubt it.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, if it happened. I too am skeptical on further reflection. If you got cell fusion taking place, wouldn't it mostly be useless--and destructive--fusions between axons and Schwann cells, and that sort of thing? I can't look up their original paper because I'm not at work, but it looks like they were working with pets in a veterinary clinic setting. I presume that the pets' owners weren't keen on having the animals sacrificed to do histology, so I'm quite curious as to how they reached this interesting conclusion.
That's another neat theory. The pharmaceutical industry would love to know how a molecule with no particular shape or form manages to distinguish between "good" and "bad" cells.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. It may be that the newspaper article's author was simplifying or got it plain wrong. There could be a significant change in the membranes of these damaged cells, rendering them more susceptible to a given concentration of PEG. A localized effect may in this case have been misinterpreted by someone (either the researcher or perhaps more likely the writer) as a localized delivery.
Then again, injury and inflammation will increase the permeability of nearby blood vessels. The localization wouldn't be due to any special property of the PEG; it could just be taking advantage of that preexisting physiological response.
I wasn't aware that PEG was safe. Don't you use that stuff punch holes in cellular membranes? Like when making hybridomas (antibody-producing cells used in research).
As they say, the dose makes the poison. Apparently they've got a working concentration of PEG that can be IV injected that is sufficiently low to not harm healthy tissues--the effect is confined to the location of spinal trauma.
Actually, I'd strongly recommend looking at the linked article. As with making hybridomas, the scientists here are deliberately fusing cells together. In this case, the idea is that even if a cell is fatally damaged, fusing it to an adjacent healthy nerve cell can allow it to survive.
Apparently, the PEG also mucks with signalling so that the death of a few cells doesn't lead to apoptosis (cell death) in nearby structures. That's a great bonus. Altogether a very neat result. I'm kind of surprised that this works, actually--I would have expected a lot of fusions between axons and Schwann cells, or something equally useless...very interesting.
Then there's Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which includes a chapter called Los Alamos from below. His observations on physical security on the Manhattan project:
One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate begins to wonder what's happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.
Of course, what Klaus Fuchs demonstrates is that no matter how well you identify people coming in and out of a facility, any identification scheme is powerless against an inside job. And it's people on the inside that know what and where the good stuff is.
The Feynman anecdote demonstrates that the usual response to the unusual hasn't changed much in six decades--if something weird is happening, try to arrest someone.
To be fair, I quite agree with the parent--this does seem to be little more than empire-building by security officials. But I can't resist noting that even the nation's most secret wartime project had some serious security issues. There's just no such thing as a secret--it just sometimes takes Russia or China a couple of years to get the papers.
...the current state of criminal law doesn't really recognize something as "reckless neglect". There is recklessness and there is neglect.
Quite correct. The technical term I was grasping for--but couldn't quite reach, this morning--was "depraved indifference". Deaths as a consequence of depraved indifference qualify as second-degree murder in New York state; in other jurisdictions your mileage may vary. (Here's the PDF of the standard directions to a New York jury for a depraved indifference second degree murder charge; also available the Google HTMLified version.)
Obviously, such a criminal finding might be challenging to come by. You'd have to prove that specific individuals at Union Carbide knew that their facility was unsafe, and that a fatal accident was a reasonably foreseeable outcome, and that they failed to take reasonable steps to protect the public. It is indeed a high bar to clear.
And when did the guy who was five times more productive actually get paid five times more anyway?
When he was paid by number of finished pieces.
To clarify, I meant in the context of software development. Yes, if one is paid for piecework in the widget factory, it is possible to directly associate payment and productivity.
This is much more difficult to do with software. Payment by line of code is absurd, and usually encourages inefficient code. Payment on a per-project basis is possible, but very difficult to implement unless the specificiations are nearly perfectly written in advance. Under those circumstances I also wouldn't consider your coder to really be an employee; he's more of an independent contractor.
Those raising the point of population problems are assuming that the norm of having children in your 20s and 30s will continue.
The other note is that continued survival doesn't necessarily guarantee continued fertility. If women continue to only be able to bear children for two or three decades out of their life, the problem isn't so bad.
Heck, we might have a population shortage. If people decide to spend longer at university before they 'settle down' and have children, then that fertile-and-willing window gets even narrower. Many industrialized countries already have a negative population growth rate before immigration is counted.
Maybe it would be good for the children. Both parents can stay home and raise the kids full time, since they're not trying to squeeze in eighty-hour work weeks to save for their rapidly approaching retirements....
Re:Yeah, because the old way just wasn't effective
on
Live to be 1000 Years Old?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200? Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows, never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you.
Your odds are slightly worse than one in eighteen hundred of dying in any given year due to injury. (About 1 in 2800 of accidental injury; the rest is due to self-inflicted injury or deliberate assault.)
Assuming that figure remains constant throughout your lifetime, your odds of surviving to various ages would be
The distribution of actual injury risk vs. age is more U-shaped in reality. We're prone to accidental injuries while we're very young (getting dropped, falling, sticking fingers in electrical sockets) and while we're older (poorer reflexes, vision, balance, less ability to heal). Obviously our accident risk is going to depend on how well this treatment arrests the aging process, and at what stage.
There's also the possibility that individuals who want to live 'forever' might make a conscious effort not to do so many stupid things, and therefore lower their own risks.
When you move to unionized protection for the workforce, you are essentially mandating compensation for producers to be normalized. Even though you might be 5x more productive than your cube neighbor, your compensation will not reflect that value difference.
Why isn't it possible to include performance incentives in a collective agreement?
And when did the guy who was five times more productive actually get paid five times more anyway?
The parent is correct in that a traditional assembly-line "you will be paid X dollars per hour after Y years of company service" agreement wouldn't work, but that doesn't preclude a more detailed compensation structure. I doubt it would be significantly more unfair than the current system, which rewards good negotiators more than good programmers. And it would address the issue of abusive eighty-hour work weeks.
Several siblings to this post have observed that 9/11 was a terrorist act, whereas the Bhopal incident was an accident.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility. On 9/11, the deaths were the result of a deliberate attempt to kill. In Bhopal, the deaths were a foreseeable result of reckless neglect of safety and concern only for money. In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder*.
If a similar accident took place on U.S. soil, the press, the public, and the politicians would be screaming for blood. Do you think that Dow Chemical could 'accidentally' release a few tons of (say) chlorine, kill a couple thousand people, and then close the book on it with a million or two in settlements and a mea culpa?
(tinfoil hat time): Of course, if they still had them we'd know whether it could have really got to the moon.
Dude, didn't they tell you?
Michael Eisner will continue to control Pixar even after their supposed acrimonious split. Working with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and George Lucas, they will cooperate with the government on certain 'black' projects.
The full-scale Saturn mockups were necessary in the 1960s because CGI animation didn't exist. Now, we can fake the entire Moon landing from the comfort of a server room. Much less expensive that way--this is progress!
Piece the layers together, and you get a photo that has depth of field and is much sharper at each level.
These techniques are used regularly in optical microscopy. There are two chief methods:
Confocal microscopy uses a carefully aligned and placed pinhole to exclude almost all light from outside of the focal plane. By collecting a series of images while moving the microscope's stage vertically, one can build a stack of in-focus images all the way through a 'thick' sample.
Deconvolution microscopy collects a stack of images in a similar manner, but lacks a pinhole to exclude out-of-focus light. Instead, each focal plane is reconstructed in software by analyzing features from the entire stack. This would most closely match the method described by the parent, although it does slightly better: information from slightly out-of-focus images is also used in assembling each feature, improving the signal.
Of course, if you're just interested in a sharp image--if you don't need depth imformation--you might as well just stop down your aperture as far as possible, focus at the hyperfocal distance, and take a single long exposure. (It's much easier than trying to collect all the images for later analysis.)
How about having a camcorder with several differently coloured light sources? By analyzing the correspondingly differently coloured shadows one could create depth information in real time.
I'm afraid that this would get very complicated very fast if you want to photograph scenes containing coloured objects. (Is that a green object illuminated with white light, or a white object illuminated by green light? Or, for that matter, a green object illuminated with green light?)
It might be easier to use multiple strobe sources that trigger in rotation, and increase the video framerate so that one strobe pulse occurs during each frame. One hundred flashes per second, with four strobes, gives 25 frames (with depth discontinuity information) per second. Although you might have to drive the frame rate even higher for human subjects, otherwise the flicker could drive you crazy; all the shadows in the room would wiggle at 25 Hz....
Of course, at the moment functional MRI requires a lot of very expensive, specialized equipment. The scanner itself will run you two or three million dollars, and it will probably set you back a thousand dollars an hour or so for time on it.
Good to see it confirmed, I guess, and I do believe in pure research for research's sake, but even I am moved to say "well, duh!".
The work is not interesting because it demonstrated we work harder when we lie. The correct response to that is, indeed, "well, duh!".
The interesting part is in using functional MRI techniques to find out which parts of the brain are working harder, and why. It might also be interesting to compare these results to certain 'specialized liars'--habitual liars and sociopaths, perhaps--to see if/how the pattern of activation changes in the presence or absence of various mental disorders.
That's pretty low. If you're going to trash something on multiple sites, at least don't just copy and paste the same thing.
You're right. Detailed critiques of published works should be disseminated only when they're positive.
Wait....
If neither Slashdot nor Gamegrene required exclusive rights as a condition of publication, then he's welcome to push his review wherever he wants. There's no point to reinventing the wheel.
So he saved Gamegrene a Slashdotting. Good for him. If you're concerned about him 'trashing' the book on multiple sites, you're more than welcome to write a detailed, insightful, positive review and submit it wherever you want.
The guys at Scaled Composites collected $10,000,000 without a peer reviewed journal of their scientific achievement.
No, but Scaled Composites didn't just hold a press conference and present Mike Melville as the world's first fully privately-funded astronaut, either.
Qualified experts monitored his entire flight from liftoff to touchdown. The public was granted extensive access to all of that information. The Air Force--an outside agency with no vested interest in Scaled Composites--reported their own independent radar altitude measurements.
We don't have comparable access to information about the treated patient's condition. I'm not saying I have reason not to trust this group of researchers, but until I see independent verification of their work (preferably by physicians and scientists from another institution) I'm going to get only moderately excited. They're more credible than the Raelians claiming to have cloned a baby, but Pons and Fleischmann seemed credible too.
...how fast this could transfer the sum of all data (DNA, memory, etc.) contained in a human.
Another poster has already provided an excellent summary of how long it would take to transfer a whole 'human', assuming 100 bytes per atom.
I will note that DNA is actually easy. Since it's massively redundant--just about every cell has a copy of the same stuff--you only need to send it once. The entire human genome is three billion (3E9) base pairs. Each base is one of only four possibilities, so that's just two bits each.
Without annotation, you can fit the entire genome into about 750 megabytes--it will just barely squeeze on to a CD. Actually, there are a number of repetitive features, so it can be compressed further. The genome is big, but it's not huge.
For the first time, a comment that starts "Imagine a Beowulf cluster..." might actually be on topic.
More seriously, the Internet2 is designed for transferring massive scientific data sets between research institutions. The folks at CERN are planning to run experiments that generate terabytes of data per second. They're no doubt going to be using buckets of RAM and monster arrays of drives operating in parallel to keep on top of that. They wouldn't be developing these big pipes of they didn't think they could fill them in the next few years.
A fifty pound rock falling from twenty-odd thousand miles can do a lot of damage and needs no explosives.
Indeed. The total stored energy of TNT is about 4 MJ (megajoules) per kilogram.
The kinetic energy of an object dropped from the Earth-Moon L1 point is about 50 MJ per kilogram. Adding explosives to any such device would be entirely a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, how about this?
Kids spent six hours a day in class, with twenty or thirty other students. Yes, a teacher can lecture to all of them, but people with kids have probably noticed that 'lecturing' is often not an effective teaching strategy. If we assume that a teacher spends two thirds of his or her time working one-on-one with students, that's still only eight to twelve minutes of individual attention per kid. Sure, there are opportunities for group work, and learning from fellow students, and so forth...but parents who can put in half an hour each day working with their kids can have a significant impact on learning.
The other things parents can do is provide a home environment conducive to learning. Give kids quiet places in the home to read and do homework. Leave books and magazines lying around. Go to museums; see the 'fun' exhibits on bugs and dinosaurs. Visit the library. Formal schooling and informal home education should complement one another--it should never be seen as an either/or proposition, nor should parents feel that spending only twenty minutes here or there is wasted effort.
On the other hand, China was much harder hit by SARS than North America was. In the United States, there were only about thirty cases. If they're afraid that the next outbreak will infect millions of Chinese instead of thousands (with a fatality rate of more than ten percent), then yes--I can see it being sound policy to expedite vaccine development and testing. If there had been an outbreak of a novel disease in the United States that infected seven thousand people and killed seven hundred, I can see the FDA being pressured to rapidly approve trials, too.
Besides--they weren't testing vaccine efficacy by exposing people to the virus. They just tested the volunteers' blood for antibodies to SARS. This gives a pretty good indication that their immune system will respond to the virus without actually risking their health.
Meanwhile, the vaccine is probably made from recombinant protein that mimics the SARS virus' protein coat. Lacking the virus' genetic material, the vaccine cannot cause disease. The worst that is likely to happen would be an allergic reaction, but you can't eliminate that risk with animal testing--eventually you have to put it into a human and see what happens.
Yeah, the solubility depends a lot on the molecular weight of their PEG. I've done a bit of work in drug development, and one of the techniques used to improve the solubility of certain very nonpolar drug candidates is to stick a nice, soluble PEG group on. As you say, it's well suited to work in aqueous systems--like blood.
That's a neat theory. I doubt it.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, if it happened. I too am skeptical on further reflection. If you got cell fusion taking place, wouldn't it mostly be useless--and destructive--fusions between axons and Schwann cells, and that sort of thing? I can't look up their original paper because I'm not at work, but it looks like they were working with pets in a veterinary clinic setting. I presume that the pets' owners weren't keen on having the animals sacrificed to do histology, so I'm quite curious as to how they reached this interesting conclusion.
That's another neat theory. The pharmaceutical industry would love to know how a molecule with no particular shape or form manages to distinguish between "good" and "bad" cells.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. It may be that the newspaper article's author was simplifying or got it plain wrong. There could be a significant change in the membranes of these damaged cells, rendering them more susceptible to a given concentration of PEG. A localized effect may in this case have been misinterpreted by someone (either the researcher or perhaps more likely the writer) as a localized delivery.
Then again, injury and inflammation will increase the permeability of nearby blood vessels. The localization wouldn't be due to any special property of the PEG; it could just be taking advantage of that preexisting physiological response.
As they say, the dose makes the poison. Apparently they've got a working concentration of PEG that can be IV injected that is sufficiently low to not harm healthy tissues--the effect is confined to the location of spinal trauma.
Actually, I'd strongly recommend looking at the linked article. As with making hybridomas, the scientists here are deliberately fusing cells together. In this case, the idea is that even if a cell is fatally damaged, fusing it to an adjacent healthy nerve cell can allow it to survive.
Apparently, the PEG also mucks with signalling so that the death of a few cells doesn't lead to apoptosis (cell death) in nearby structures. That's a great bonus. Altogether a very neat result. I'm kind of surprised that this works, actually--I would have expected a lot of fusions between axons and Schwann cells, or something equally useless...very interesting.
Really?
Then there's Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which includes a chapter called Los Alamos from below. His observations on physical security on the Manhattan project:
Of course, what Klaus Fuchs demonstrates is that no matter how well you identify people coming in and out of a facility, any identification scheme is powerless against an inside job. And it's people on the inside that know what and where the good stuff is.The Feynman anecdote demonstrates that the usual response to the unusual hasn't changed much in six decades--if something weird is happening, try to arrest someone.
To be fair, I quite agree with the parent--this does seem to be little more than empire-building by security officials. But I can't resist noting that even the nation's most secret wartime project had some serious security issues. There's just no such thing as a secret--it just sometimes takes Russia or China a couple of years to get the papers.
Quite correct. The technical term I was grasping for--but couldn't quite reach, this morning--was "depraved indifference". Deaths as a consequence of depraved indifference qualify as second-degree murder in New York state; in other jurisdictions your mileage may vary. (Here's the PDF of the standard directions to a New York jury for a depraved indifference second degree murder charge; also available the Google HTMLified version.)
Obviously, such a criminal finding might be challenging to come by. You'd have to prove that specific individuals at Union Carbide knew that their facility was unsafe, and that a fatal accident was a reasonably foreseeable outcome, and that they failed to take reasonable steps to protect the public. It is indeed a high bar to clear.
To clarify, I meant in the context of software development. Yes, if one is paid for piecework in the widget factory, it is possible to directly associate payment and productivity.
This is much more difficult to do with software. Payment by line of code is absurd, and usually encourages inefficient code. Payment on a per-project basis is possible, but very difficult to implement unless the specificiations are nearly perfectly written in advance. Under those circumstances I also wouldn't consider your coder to really be an employee; he's more of an independent contractor.
The other note is that continued survival doesn't necessarily guarantee continued fertility. If women continue to only be able to bear children for two or three decades out of their life, the problem isn't so bad.
Heck, we might have a population shortage. If people decide to spend longer at university before they 'settle down' and have children, then that fertile-and-willing window gets even narrower. Many industrialized countries already have a negative population growth rate before immigration is counted.
Maybe it would be good for the children. Both parents can stay home and raise the kids full time, since they're not trying to squeeze in eighty-hour work weeks to save for their rapidly approaching retirements....
Here's an interesting tabulation of your risks of death due to injury.
Your odds are slightly worse than one in eighteen hundred of dying in any given year due to injury. (About 1 in 2800 of accidental injury; the rest is due to self-inflicted injury or deliberate assault.)
Assuming that figure remains constant throughout your lifetime, your odds of surviving to various ages would be
The distribution of actual injury risk vs. age is more U-shaped in reality. We're prone to accidental injuries while we're very young (getting dropped, falling, sticking fingers in electrical sockets) and while we're older (poorer reflexes, vision, balance, less ability to heal). Obviously our accident risk is going to depend on how well this treatment arrests the aging process, and at what stage.There's also the possibility that individuals who want to live 'forever' might make a conscious effort not to do so many stupid things, and therefore lower their own risks.
Why isn't it possible to include performance incentives in a collective agreement?
And when did the guy who was five times more productive actually get paid five times more anyway?
The parent is correct in that a traditional assembly-line "you will be paid X dollars per hour after Y years of company service" agreement wouldn't work, but that doesn't preclude a more detailed compensation structure. I doubt it would be significantly more unfair than the current system, which rewards good negotiators more than good programmers. And it would address the issue of abusive eighty-hour work weeks.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility. On 9/11, the deaths were the result of a deliberate attempt to kill. In Bhopal, the deaths were a foreseeable result of reckless neglect of safety and concern only for money. In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder*.
If a similar accident took place on U.S. soil, the press, the public, and the politicians would be screaming for blood. Do you think that Dow Chemical could 'accidentally' release a few tons of (say) chlorine, kill a couple thousand people, and then close the book on it with a million or two in settlements and a mea culpa?
*Yes, yes. IANAL.
You might want to be more specific about your requirements. Remember the atomic wristwatch?
"Would you like to buy some MSPlywood to protect your Windows installations?"
Dude, didn't they tell you?
Michael Eisner will continue to control Pixar even after their supposed acrimonious split. Working with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and George Lucas, they will cooperate with the government on certain 'black' projects.
The full-scale Saturn mockups were necessary in the 1960s because CGI animation didn't exist. Now, we can fake the entire Moon landing from the comfort of a server room. Much less expensive that way--this is progress!
These techniques are used regularly in optical microscopy. There are two chief methods:
Confocal microscopy uses a carefully aligned and placed pinhole to exclude almost all light from outside of the focal plane. By collecting a series of images while moving the microscope's stage vertically, one can build a stack of in-focus images all the way through a 'thick' sample.
Deconvolution microscopy collects a stack of images in a similar manner, but lacks a pinhole to exclude out-of-focus light. Instead, each focal plane is reconstructed in software by analyzing features from the entire stack. This would most closely match the method described by the parent, although it does slightly better: information from slightly out-of-focus images is also used in assembling each feature, improving the signal.
Of course, if you're just interested in a sharp image--if you don't need depth imformation--you might as well just stop down your aperture as far as possible, focus at the hyperfocal distance, and take a single long exposure. (It's much easier than trying to collect all the images for later analysis.)
I'm afraid that this would get very complicated very fast if you want to photograph scenes containing coloured objects. (Is that a green object illuminated with white light, or a white object illuminated by green light? Or, for that matter, a green object illuminated with green light?)
It might be easier to use multiple strobe sources that trigger in rotation, and increase the video framerate so that one strobe pulse occurs during each frame. One hundred flashes per second, with four strobes, gives 25 frames (with depth discontinuity information) per second. Although you might have to drive the frame rate even higher for human subjects, otherwise the flicker could drive you crazy; all the shadows in the room would wiggle at 25 Hz....
"I once saved my laptop from a burning building..."
Well, it can't be much worse...
Of course, at the moment functional MRI requires a lot of very expensive, specialized equipment. The scanner itself will run you two or three million dollars, and it will probably set you back a thousand dollars an hour or so for time on it.
The work is not interesting because it demonstrated we work harder when we lie. The correct response to that is, indeed, "well, duh!".
The interesting part is in using functional MRI techniques to find out which parts of the brain are working harder, and why. It might also be interesting to compare these results to certain 'specialized liars'--habitual liars and sociopaths, perhaps--to see if/how the pattern of activation changes in the presence or absence of various mental disorders.
Yeah, but you're still a lousy typist.
You're right. Detailed critiques of published works should be disseminated only when they're positive.
Wait....
If neither Slashdot nor Gamegrene required exclusive rights as a condition of publication, then he's welcome to push his review wherever he wants. There's no point to reinventing the wheel.
So he saved Gamegrene a Slashdotting. Good for him. If you're concerned about him 'trashing' the book on multiple sites, you're more than welcome to write a detailed, insightful, positive review and submit it wherever you want.
No, but Scaled Composites didn't just hold a press conference and present Mike Melville as the world's first fully privately-funded astronaut, either.
Qualified experts monitored his entire flight from liftoff to touchdown. The public was granted extensive access to all of that information. The Air Force--an outside agency with no vested interest in Scaled Composites--reported their own independent radar altitude measurements.
We don't have comparable access to information about the treated patient's condition. I'm not saying I have reason not to trust this group of researchers, but until I see independent verification of their work (preferably by physicians and scientists from another institution) I'm going to get only moderately excited. They're more credible than the Raelians claiming to have cloned a baby, but Pons and Fleischmann seemed credible too.
Another poster has already provided an excellent summary of how long it would take to transfer a whole 'human', assuming 100 bytes per atom.
I will note that DNA is actually easy. Since it's massively redundant--just about every cell has a copy of the same stuff--you only need to send it once. The entire human genome is three billion (3E9) base pairs. Each base is one of only four possibilities, so that's just two bits each.
Without annotation, you can fit the entire genome into about 750 megabytes--it will just barely squeeze on to a CD. Actually, there are a number of repetitive features, so it can be compressed further. The genome is big, but it's not huge.
For the first time, a comment that starts "Imagine a Beowulf cluster..." might actually be on topic.
More seriously, the Internet2 is designed for transferring massive scientific data sets between research institutions. The folks at CERN are planning to run experiments that generate terabytes of data per second. They're no doubt going to be using buckets of RAM and monster arrays of drives operating in parallel to keep on top of that. They wouldn't be developing these big pipes of they didn't think they could fill them in the next few years.
Indeed. The total stored energy of TNT is about 4 MJ (megajoules) per kilogram.
The kinetic energy of an object dropped from the Earth-Moon L1 point is about 50 MJ per kilogram. Adding explosives to any such device would be entirely a waste of time.