Brain to body size ratio is VERY highly correlated with intelligence when you're talking about animals in general, and also quite highly correlated when you're talking about several primate or hominid species (which the study is). Even in modern humans, which don't show anywhere near the variation in brain to body size ratio that exists even with our direct lineage hominids, as you point out yourself, an R^2 of 0.4 means (roughly) that 40 percent of the variation in IQ is explained by brain to body size ratio differences. It's not an "old chestnut." Brain size is not the only determinant of intelligence, but it's a major factor. THE major factor when you're looking at closely related species with large variations in brain size, such as primates or hominids.
Furthermore, the study is not talking about brain size per se, but brain development. If you look at children with abnormal brain development you will definitely see a very strong correlation with IQ.
Sure. But YOU were made (by your parents) in such a way that you are adapted to eat meat. If you want to be one of the miserable evolutionary transition individuals experiencing a major environmental change, knock yourself out. Make sure you have a fair chance of dying or otherwise being rendered reproductively incapable, or you're wasting your time.
PhD comics is about grad school. In grad school you're supposed to learn how to learn what you need to know. If you lack skills when you come out, it's because you failed.
Ha. If you require a Mac Pro to develop software for a phone you're doing something seriously wrong. Apple's dev tools work just fine on my old circa 2008 MacBook or old mini.
Yeah, you could buy a bunch of devices to test on, but if you're not a big company you can just get some friends to test for you.
Anyway, none of that is different than development for any other system.
Apparently you don't know what leeching is. Nor what OS X is.
Darwin is based on BSD UNIX. It's not really a copy anymore since it's been under independent development for more than a decade. Darwin is a complete, working, open source OS.
OS X is Darwin with a proprietary GUI and a few other non-essential proprietary bits added in.
Certainly the pill was a revolution because women could take it without a man even knowing, but it wasn't the first safe, effective contraception. That would be the condom, which has a LONG history.
We had effective contraception and abortion LONG before the 60s. There is a long history of resource rich societies NOT breeding as much as would be expected from a simple resource utilization model.
Scarce resources don't stop people from having kids. Rather the opposite is true for humans.
Africa needs education all right, but it also needs things like water, available food and security so the people who need the education are healthy enough and have time to get it.
Ask the 1% what they would do with $2.6 billion and they'd say "invest in some hedge funds, HFT companies, etc." These guys want to do something that a) generates more actual wealth and b) advances our capabilities as a species.
What scientists? Are you talking about the random Slashdotter who wrote the summary? Or maybe you're talking about the list of mostly self made billionaires who are supporting this project? Those guys definitely don't know how to extract cash from the populace. Nope.
You can sell all sorts of things to people on Earth if you have lots of resources in space. Fuel for satellites, probes, boosters, etc. Manufactured goods, especially those that can be made much more easily in microgravity.
The problem with the Earth and moon is that yes, they're big and there are lots of resources in them, but all the ones we're really interested in are heavy and thus concentrated at their cores. It's tough to get down there.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are small and their cores are readily accessible, not that you need to do that because they're not differentiated like planets and big moons are. Although if you do mine one from the inside out, when you're done you have an awesome space castle.
This (http://comenius.susqu.edu/biol/312/mical97a.pdf) paper is a bit old, but they estimate that only 16-18% of the carbon in landfilled newsprint is released back into the air. Even if you double that, you're still sequestering most of it. If you capture the methane that's produced and burn it, you're offsetting other carbon sources. The forestry industry, including pulp and paper, actually has remarkably low fossil fuel use in production because a lot of the energy comes from burning wood scraps, which is carbon neutral. So even if you've got very effective decomposition in landfills and you don't capture the methane, you probably still have net sequestration of carbon by burying paper.
Given lots of energy, you can synthesize organics, and as oil gets more expensive at some point it will be cheaper to do so. Electronics manufacturing would probably be much cheaper and easier in space, and we might even get to a point where the bulk of our electronics are manufactured there and shipped down.
The summary added the gold bit. It's very unlikely they're planning on mining gold (exclusively). They're probably going to mine an asteroid for everything they can get out of it - every metal and mineral you can think of. I seriously doubt they're going to do a 500 ton asteroid either (unless it's as a demonstration). If you can move a 500 ton asteroid, you can move a 5000 ton one, and their press release specifically talked about adding "trillions" of dollars to the global GDP.
Not to mention a cheap source of resources in orbit is much more valuable than resources on the ground.
Chopping down forests for paper decreases CO2 emissions because where most of the paper is used and made those forests are replanted. You end up with a net loss if you burn the paper, but most of it ends up in landfills eventually.
Everything else you mentioned is a CO2 producer though.
Sure, but entirely impossible that those pilots would post about it on Slashdot. Unless JJ wants a quick exit from the hypersonic plane flying game and a head start on the classified federal prison one.
Slashdot Mirror
Brain to body size ratio is VERY highly correlated with intelligence when you're talking about animals in general, and also quite highly correlated when you're talking about several primate or hominid species (which the study is). Even in modern humans, which don't show anywhere near the variation in brain to body size ratio that exists even with our direct lineage hominids, as you point out yourself, an R^2 of 0.4 means (roughly) that 40 percent of the variation in IQ is explained by brain to body size ratio differences. It's not an "old chestnut." Brain size is not the only determinant of intelligence, but it's a major factor. THE major factor when you're looking at closely related species with large variations in brain size, such as primates or hominids.
Furthermore, the study is not talking about brain size per se, but brain development. If you look at children with abnormal brain development you will definitely see a very strong correlation with IQ.
Sure. But YOU were made (by your parents) in such a way that you are adapted to eat meat. If you want to be one of the miserable evolutionary transition individuals experiencing a major environmental change, knock yourself out. Make sure you have a fair chance of dying or otherwise being rendered reproductively incapable, or you're wasting your time.
There are examples of wild species giving milk to non-related members of the same species or other species.
Also, a modern cow wouldn't survive very long off a farm, so the cows would probably consent given the ability.
PhD comics is about grad school. In grad school you're supposed to learn how to learn what you need to know. If you lack skills when you come out, it's because you failed.
A graph without error bars is meaningless.
Ha. If you require a Mac Pro to develop software for a phone you're doing something seriously wrong. Apple's dev tools work just fine on my old circa 2008 MacBook or old mini.
Yeah, you could buy a bunch of devices to test on, but if you're not a big company you can just get some friends to test for you.
Anyway, none of that is different than development for any other system.
Apparently you don't know what leeching is. Nor what OS X is.
Darwin is based on BSD UNIX. It's not really a copy anymore since it's been under independent development for more than a decade. Darwin is a complete, working, open source OS.
OS X is Darwin with a proprietary GUI and a few other non-essential proprietary bits added in.
BSD is still open source. You can download any of several flavours here. If you want to download Apple's version, it's here (and elsewhere).
Certainly the pill was a revolution because women could take it without a man even knowing, but it wasn't the first safe, effective contraception. That would be the condom, which has a LONG history.
We had effective contraception and abortion LONG before the 60s. There is a long history of resource rich societies NOT breeding as much as would be expected from a simple resource utilization model.
Scarce resources don't stop people from having kids. Rather the opposite is true for humans.
Africa needs education all right, but it also needs things like water, available food and security so the people who need the education are healthy enough and have time to get it.
Did you just call that elegant??
Stupid.
Ask the 1% what they would do with $2.6 billion and they'd say "invest in some hedge funds, HFT companies, etc." These guys want to do something that a) generates more actual wealth and b) advances our capabilities as a species.
What scientists? Are you talking about the random Slashdotter who wrote the summary? Or maybe you're talking about the list of mostly self made billionaires who are supporting this project? Those guys definitely don't know how to extract cash from the populace. Nope.
You can sell all sorts of things to people on Earth if you have lots of resources in space. Fuel for satellites, probes, boosters, etc. Manufactured goods, especially those that can be made much more easily in microgravity.
"It's the constraints of the world"
Which is why these guys want to bring in some opportunity from OUTSIDE the world.
The problem with the Earth and moon is that yes, they're big and there are lots of resources in them, but all the ones we're really interested in are heavy and thus concentrated at their cores. It's tough to get down there.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are small and their cores are readily accessible, not that you need to do that because they're not differentiated like planets and big moons are. Although if you do mine one from the inside out, when you're done you have an awesome space castle.
Actually, a lot of Earth's resource rich areas are... ancient large asteroid impact craters.
This (http://comenius.susqu.edu/biol/312/mical97a.pdf) paper is a bit old, but they estimate that only 16-18% of the carbon in landfilled newsprint is released back into the air. Even if you double that, you're still sequestering most of it. If you capture the methane that's produced and burn it, you're offsetting other carbon sources. The forestry industry, including pulp and paper, actually has remarkably low fossil fuel use in production because a lot of the energy comes from burning wood scraps, which is carbon neutral. So even if you've got very effective decomposition in landfills and you don't capture the methane, you probably still have net sequestration of carbon by burying paper.
Given lots of energy, you can synthesize organics, and as oil gets more expensive at some point it will be cheaper to do so. Electronics manufacturing would probably be much cheaper and easier in space, and we might even get to a point where the bulk of our electronics are manufactured there and shipped down.
The summary added the gold bit. It's very unlikely they're planning on mining gold (exclusively). They're probably going to mine an asteroid for everything they can get out of it - every metal and mineral you can think of. I seriously doubt they're going to do a 500 ton asteroid either (unless it's as a demonstration). If you can move a 500 ton asteroid, you can move a 5000 ton one, and their press release specifically talked about adding "trillions" of dollars to the global GDP.
Not to mention a cheap source of resources in orbit is much more valuable than resources on the ground.
He's not necessarily an idiot. Maybe he's just illiterate.
Chopping down forests for paper decreases CO2 emissions because where most of the paper is used and made those forests are replanted. You end up with a net loss if you burn the paper, but most of it ends up in landfills eventually.
Everything else you mentioned is a CO2 producer though.
Maybe if they put LEDs on it....
Sure, but entirely impossible that those pilots would post about it on Slashdot. Unless JJ wants a quick exit from the hypersonic plane flying game and a head start on the classified federal prison one.