So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.
Yes it would have to be a transplant or stem cell therapy since HIV infects the bone marrow which produces blood and immune cells, and so would necessarily have to be killed.
There are many possible problems and complications from a bone marrow transplant. Stem cell therapy would get rid of the greatest one, the rejection of non-closely matched marrow, but many would remain. Without that therapy, it would be very dangerous to use this route in the majority of cases where close matches can't be found. Leukemia patients won't undergo a transplant in the absence of a close match until the leukemia is about to go into the acute phase and kill them.
A bone marrow transplant has already been used to cure AIDS. But it is not clear that this is the best choice if you have access to modern AIDS drugs.
Yes, natural language communication, where literal pedantic interpretations are rarely the correct ones. Where meaning not explicitly spelled out can be implied by sentence structure and context. What our brains are optimized for, rapidly and automatically sifting through various possible interpretations and rejecting them for various reasons. Such as if one interpretation is nonsensical, but another one makes sense, then our brains will conclude that the latter is likely the correct one. For example "Perseid Meteor Shower" could refer to the meteors' descent itself, or it could refer to the shower as the visible display that is why we even know about the shower in the first place, and why it's famous and it's arrival an event -- an event that will, in fact, be hampered by the full moon.
What's sad is that literalists believe that not exercising this part of their brain is an improvement, and using it a regression.
What's hilarious is that outside of going "Derp! I'm so smart I don't understand everyday English!", this part of the literalist's brain does function normally. They have to deliberately turn it off and ignore it. For example, I'm sure you had no problem with my non-literal usage of "spelled out" above, nor did you have any problem picking up on the unspoken, yet implied message of "You're an idiot."
Well, you know, I've always been worried about a "grey goo" apocalypse, but now that it's happening and it's a bright cheerful orange color instead, I guess I'm okay with it!
The headline had me thinking that the moon was going to be intercepting all those meteors.
The question is why, when if that was the case then the headline should be "Perseid Meteor Shower to Hit the Fucking Moon!"
"Hampered" would be an extremely weird word to use in that context, yah?
Who writes these things?
People used to natural language communication, who unfortunately assume people reading are the same, rather than attempted pedantic literalists.:)
After all, a meteor only becomes a meteor when it hits the earth's atmosphere. So a pedantic reading of the headline would immediately suggest that it can't possibly mean that the Perseids are hitting the moon.
Of course I wouldn't be surprised if some of the debris left by the comet were hitting the moon, but that's not the point.:)
I suspect the reason for this is because when Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda were coming up with these figures, they probably consulted real-life figures and theory and extrapolated, while the author of Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections probably just made up stuff that sounded good.
Actually I think some of the figures were calculated using evidence from the movies and some basic assumptions and math. Like, there's a scene where you see a Star Destroying shooting asteroids and instantly vaporizing them. Making some reasonable calculations from the frame and the scale and using the asteroid's appearance to approximate it's makeup... you end up with a ridiculous amount of energy required to vaporize it.
Or take the Death Star -- the amount of energy needed to make an earth-sized planet explode with the chunks flying apart at tremendous velocity making it highly unlikely they would ever coalesce again requires just stupid amounts of energy.
You can hand-wave the effects on unshielded ships by saying they're using super-alloys or whatever, but really it's just inconsistent. The basic problem is like you said, Star Wars was not about the tech it was about the experience and so things it depicts as normal imply ridiculously powerful weaponry if you try to put them into real terms.
it's just you kinda have to do that in order to do this ST vs SW thing, and the simple fact is that based on what's depicted on screen Star Wars weapons really are many orders of magnitude more powerful than Star Trek ones.
Isn't relativistic mass just a function of rest mass, probably using some Lorentzian style root 1 minus c squared over v squared type thing?
Is rest mass is zero then relativistic mass would be zero too?
(If photons had mass due to special relativistic effects then that mass must be infinite, as photons move at c, and special relativistic equations are all based on the ratio of velocity to c)
Relativistic mass is E/c^2. The reason an object with rest mass moving at c would have infinite mass is because it would have infinite kinetic energy.
Surely photonic space-time curvature comes from their energy, not their mass?
Well if you mean rest mass then obviously not because photons don't have any, and if you mean relativistic mass then you just said is equivalent to "space time curvature comes from their energy, not their energy". It's a tricky thing, because once you accept mass-energy equivalence, then there's little point to talking about any kind of 'mass' except rest mass aka invariant mass.
So the best way to say it would probably be that yes, photons curve space time because of their energy, just like everything else.:)
So, if an object gains or loses mass on absorbing a photon, it's not because the photon has mass, it's because the photon has energy.
And the object does gain (relativistic) mass because it gained energy and energy is mass, so the object having more energy means it has more mass. The photon having energy means it has relativistic mass.
Yes, I am a physicist.
Which explains why you're using "mass" to mean "rest mass", because that's the only time you're talking about "mass" that isn't synonymous and thus redundant with "energy".
But for people who haven't internalized mass-energy equivalence, that Conservation of Mass is just a re-statement of Conservation of Energy, it's important to separate 'mass' and 'rest mass'. After all, 'rest mass' is not conserved.
It means that certain organic chemicals are probably common in the universe. Depending on your desire to believe, that could mean that life is common "out there" or it could mean fuck all. Take your pick.
I prefer the middle ground, and take it to mean "fuck all life out there".
Translation: NCSA found that IBM was trying to lock them in with ultra proprietary technology that would have required IBM's expensive services for the life of the installation.
They only just found out about IBM's business model?!
This is a corollary of relativistic mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2).
A lot of people (and I sympathize because I was one of them for years) mistakenly believe that E=mc^2 is about the energy content of matter, and how you could convert mass to energy via, say, matter/anti-matter annihilation. Which when thought of as converting one form of energy to another is true, but hides the deeper truth: Matter isn't just a type of energy that has mass, all energy has mass, they are really the same thing.
Any item with mass possesses gravity. Light consists of photons, which are massless, and therefore do not exert gravity.
Any item with mass possesses gravity, and light consists of photons, which have energy and therefore mass. The mass of a system is directly proportional to its energy content, as energy is lost so too must mass. An object emitting photons is losing energy and therefore mass, an object absorbing photons is gaining energy and therefore mass.
Photons have no rest mass as far as we know, but that's not the same thing. The total mass of a system containing photons is greater, due to the photon's energy, than a system without. Photons on their own are energy, and therefore exhibit mass, however tiny, and therefore themselves bend space time.
That's not my stance. Those are the questions I'm asking to probe Hazel Whatsit's stance. I think the survival of the species matters. Also to be clear I don't think nuking everyone is a good idea.:P The question is, why isn't this a good idea in Hazel's "minimize suffering, who cares if the species survives" philosophy.
The results are meaningless unless humans are planning on going there.
LOL.
If you think studying Mars is only meaningful in the context of humans going there eventually, then you must really be in a tizzy over scientists studying distant galaxies from shortly after the Big Bang! WTF are they thinking?! Those galaxies may not even exist any more!
Studying Mars teaches us a lot about a variety of subjects that are relevant to the earth and its place in the solar system. We do not have to visit Mars for this to be worthwhile.
And the robots have accomplished almost as much in the years they've been trundling about as a human could have in a day of work up there.
You surely mean "could eventually do in a day, if all goes well", since we'd still be waiting for that mission to begin and in the meantime no science would have been done. Real rovers do a lot more science than hypothetical humans.
Yep. But a permanent human presence on Mars at least does something worthwhile for the species in the long run - one more basket to put our eggs in.
If it isn't self-sustaining, then it's not another basket, it's a place to live out On the Beach only with red sand.
An asteroid impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would still leave the earth a vastly more habitable place for humans than Mars. Treating planets like interchangeable "baskets" so by having more than one means we can afford to lose any arbitrary one is vastly underselling the importance of our home, Spaceship Earth.
So our best bet isn't to rush off trying to boot-strap colonies on other worlds, but to improve our ability to find and track asteroids because given enough advance warning we could prevent the impact. That's a vastly better solution -- and more feasible with today's technology -- than bootstrapping a self-sustaining colony on Mars and watching as the earth gets smoked.
Beyond that, the biggest danger to our "basket" is the sun entering the next phase of its life, and in that case the "basket" is our entire solar system. A Mars colony will be just as fucked when that happens.
Don't get me wrong -- I want to go to Mars, and I specifically want it to be to set up a permanent presence, not just a boot-and-flag hoo-rah mission.
Just, "the science the rovers do is useless if we don't go to Mars" is wrong, and "We need a colony on Mars for human species backup!" is naive, premature, and, well, wrong.:)
The welfare of existing generations in the future and of future generations also matters.
Why? Why do generations not yet born matter? What is their hypothetical future existence to us but a way to propagate the species? Why else would we create them and necessarily restrict our resource usage in consideration for them and thus increase suffering in the present?
But the survival of the species per se does not really matter. We might evolve quite a bit over the coming billion years.
Okay, so if we simply expanded the idea of preserving the "species" to "all human descendants whether they are classified as homo sapien sapiens or not", then it would matter?
Well if we don't care about future generations, and all that matters is minimizing the suffering of the existing generation, given that despite our best efforts everyone will die in varyingly protracted and painful ways, plus necessarily experience additional suffering in their lives to varying extents, the solution is obvious:
Exterminate all human life on earth in the fastest and most painless way possible.
And thus is nuclear disarmament by the Cold War superpowers revealed to be the most evil, anti-human, pro-suffering trend ever. We need more bombs, many more, to blanket the earth with mushroom clouds and ensure no humans live past the initial shockwaves to die the painful and protracted deaths of radiation poisoning.
Yeah, Poe's Law is about how you can never have a satire of an extremist so extreme that it can't be matched by the real thing.
However you can have a satire of an extremist that reveals its nature by being less extreme. For example a real "Screw the enviro-hippie-terrorists" post (or Poe's-Law-invoking satire) would have downplayed the nature of the mining byproducts instead of emphasizing "toxic", "acidic", and "dumping in the local river".
Yeah, that's really going to help when another Chicxulub-sized rock comes by.
By far the best, easiest, and (most importantly) most likely to be available when we need it method of dealing with such a thing is to 1) detect it early and 2) divert it, preventing the catastrophe.
Creating a large enough self-sustaining off-world colony to allow the human race to survive the loss of earth is a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Even dinosaur-killer-sized impactors will leave the earth a more habitable place for humans than Mars is today.
However, identifying such a large object as a potential danger 50 years before its probable impact, and using that time to slowly nudge it out of the way with a gravity tractor, is actually something we could start implementing tomorrow if the need arose.
The catch though is that we have to find it. Thankfully more resources are being spent on searches for such objects than ever before, but we could certainly use more.
Oh, I see. Hey, maybe with the money they're throwing at it they can have such a compensation system. At least one good enough for a scope meant for tourists to look through! But yeah, seems pretty pointless. Why did they say "observatory" in the summary anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
I am, and stop calling me Shirley.
So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.
Yes it would have to be a transplant or stem cell therapy since HIV infects the bone marrow which produces blood and immune cells, and so would necessarily have to be killed.
There are many possible problems and complications from a bone marrow transplant. Stem cell therapy would get rid of the greatest one, the rejection of non-closely matched marrow, but many would remain. Without that therapy, it would be very dangerous to use this route in the majority of cases where close matches can't be found. Leukemia patients won't undergo a transplant in the absence of a close match until the leukemia is about to go into the acute phase and kill them.
A bone marrow transplant has already been used to cure AIDS. But it is not clear that this is the best choice if you have access to modern AIDS drugs.
Yes, natural language communication, where literal pedantic interpretations are rarely the correct ones. Where meaning not explicitly spelled out can be implied by sentence structure and context. What our brains are optimized for, rapidly and automatically sifting through various possible interpretations and rejecting them for various reasons. Such as if one interpretation is nonsensical, but another one makes sense, then our brains will conclude that the latter is likely the correct one. For example "Perseid Meteor Shower" could refer to the meteors' descent itself, or it could refer to the shower as the visible display that is why we even know about the shower in the first place, and why it's famous and it's arrival an event -- an event that will, in fact, be hampered by the full moon.
What's sad is that literalists believe that not exercising this part of their brain is an improvement, and using it a regression.
What's hilarious is that outside of going "Derp! I'm so smart I don't understand everyday English!", this part of the literalist's brain does function normally. They have to deliberately turn it off and ignore it. For example, I'm sure you had no problem with my non-literal usage of "spelled out" above, nor did you have any problem picking up on the unspoken, yet implied message of "You're an idiot."
Well, you know, I've always been worried about a "grey goo" apocalypse, but now that it's happening and it's a bright cheerful orange color instead, I guess I'm okay with it!
The headline had me thinking that the moon was going to be intercepting all those meteors.
The question is why, when if that was the case then the headline should be "Perseid Meteor Shower to Hit the Fucking Moon!"
"Hampered" would be an extremely weird word to use in that context, yah?
Who writes these things?
People used to natural language communication, who unfortunately assume people reading are the same, rather than attempted pedantic literalists. :)
After all, a meteor only becomes a meteor when it hits the earth's atmosphere. So a pedantic reading of the headline would immediately suggest that it can't possibly mean that the Perseids are hitting the moon.
Of course I wouldn't be surprised if some of the debris left by the comet were hitting the moon, but that's not the point. :)
I suspect the reason for this is because when Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda were coming up with these figures, they probably consulted real-life figures and theory and extrapolated, while the author of Star Wars Episode II Incredible Cross-Sections probably just made up stuff that sounded good.
Actually I think some of the figures were calculated using evidence from the movies and some basic assumptions and math. Like, there's a scene where you see a Star Destroying shooting asteroids and instantly vaporizing them. Making some reasonable calculations from the frame and the scale and using the asteroid's appearance to approximate it's makeup... you end up with a ridiculous amount of energy required to vaporize it.
Or take the Death Star -- the amount of energy needed to make an earth-sized planet explode with the chunks flying apart at tremendous velocity making it highly unlikely they would ever coalesce again requires just stupid amounts of energy.
You can hand-wave the effects on unshielded ships by saying they're using super-alloys or whatever, but really it's just inconsistent. The basic problem is like you said, Star Wars was not about the tech it was about the experience and so things it depicts as normal imply ridiculously powerful weaponry if you try to put them into real terms.
it's just you kinda have to do that in order to do this ST vs SW thing, and the simple fact is that based on what's depicted on screen Star Wars weapons really are many orders of magnitude more powerful than Star Trek ones.
Isn't relativistic mass just a function of rest mass, probably using some Lorentzian style root 1 minus c squared over v squared type thing?
Is rest mass is zero then relativistic mass would be zero too?
(If photons had mass due to special relativistic effects then that mass must be infinite, as photons move at c, and special relativistic equations are all based on the ratio of velocity to c)
Relativistic mass is E/c^2. The reason an object with rest mass moving at c would have infinite mass is because it would have infinite kinetic energy.
Surely photonic space-time curvature comes from their energy, not their mass?
Well if you mean rest mass then obviously not because photons don't have any, and if you mean relativistic mass then you just said is equivalent to "space time curvature comes from their energy, not their energy". It's a tricky thing, because once you accept mass-energy equivalence, then there's little point to talking about any kind of 'mass' except rest mass aka invariant mass.
So the best way to say it would probably be that yes, photons curve space time because of their energy, just like everything else. :)
So, if an object gains or loses mass on absorbing a photon, it's not because the photon has mass, it's because the photon has energy.
And the object does gain (relativistic) mass because it gained energy and energy is mass, so the object having more energy means it has more mass. The photon having energy means it has relativistic mass.
Yes, I am a physicist.
Which explains why you're using "mass" to mean "rest mass", because that's the only time you're talking about "mass" that isn't synonymous and thus redundant with "energy".
But for people who haven't internalized mass-energy equivalence, that Conservation of Mass is just a re-statement of Conservation of Energy, it's important to separate 'mass' and 'rest mass'. After all, 'rest mass' is not conserved.
Yes, but most of them didn't come to earth, they are what formed the earth initially out of the dust cloud that birthed our solar system.
It means that certain organic chemicals are probably common in the universe. Depending on your desire to believe, that could mean that life is common "out there" or it could mean fuck all. Take your pick.
I prefer the middle ground, and take it to mean "fuck all life out there".
Translation: NCSA found that IBM was trying to lock them in with ultra proprietary technology that would have required IBM's expensive services for the life of the installation.
They only just found out about IBM's business model?!
This is a corollary of relativistic mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2).
A lot of people (and I sympathize because I was one of them for years) mistakenly believe that E=mc^2 is about the energy content of matter, and how you could convert mass to energy via, say, matter/anti-matter annihilation. Which when thought of as converting one form of energy to another is true, but hides the deeper truth: Matter isn't just a type of energy that has mass, all energy has mass, they are really the same thing.
Any item with mass possesses gravity. Light consists of photons, which are massless, and therefore do not exert gravity.
Any item with mass possesses gravity, and light consists of photons, which have energy and therefore mass. The mass of a system is directly proportional to its energy content, as energy is lost so too must mass. An object emitting photons is losing energy and therefore mass, an object absorbing photons is gaining energy and therefore mass.
Photons have no rest mass as far as we know, but that's not the same thing. The total mass of a system containing photons is greater, due to the photon's energy, than a system without. Photons on their own are energy, and therefore exhibit mass, however tiny, and therefore themselves bend space time.
I thought the new sequel naming convention went:
The Elder Scrolls
2 Elder 2 Scroll
Elder Scrolls
Scrolls
That's not my stance. Those are the questions I'm asking to probe Hazel Whatsit's stance. I think the survival of the species matters. Also to be clear I don't think nuking everyone is a good idea. :P The question is, why isn't this a good idea in Hazel's "minimize suffering, who cares if the species survives" philosophy.
Episode 3 was Hell, not Mars.
The results are meaningless unless humans are planning on going there.
LOL.
If you think studying Mars is only meaningful in the context of humans going there eventually, then you must really be in a tizzy over scientists studying distant galaxies from shortly after the Big Bang! WTF are they thinking?! Those galaxies may not even exist any more!
Studying Mars teaches us a lot about a variety of subjects that are relevant to the earth and its place in the solar system. We do not have to visit Mars for this to be worthwhile.
And the robots have accomplished almost as much in the years they've been trundling about as a human could have in a day of work up there.
You surely mean "could eventually do in a day, if all goes well", since we'd still be waiting for that mission to begin and in the meantime no science would have been done. Real rovers do a lot more science than hypothetical humans.
Yep. But a permanent human presence on Mars at least does something worthwhile for the species in the long run - one more basket to put our eggs in.
If it isn't self-sustaining, then it's not another basket, it's a place to live out On the Beach only with red sand.
An asteroid impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would still leave the earth a vastly more habitable place for humans than Mars. Treating planets like interchangeable "baskets" so by having more than one means we can afford to lose any arbitrary one is vastly underselling the importance of our home, Spaceship Earth.
So our best bet isn't to rush off trying to boot-strap colonies on other worlds, but to improve our ability to find and track asteroids because given enough advance warning we could prevent the impact. That's a vastly better solution -- and more feasible with today's technology -- than bootstrapping a self-sustaining colony on Mars and watching as the earth gets smoked.
Beyond that, the biggest danger to our "basket" is the sun entering the next phase of its life, and in that case the "basket" is our entire solar system. A Mars colony will be just as fucked when that happens.
Don't get me wrong -- I want to go to Mars, and I specifically want it to be to set up a permanent presence, not just a boot-and-flag hoo-rah mission.
Just, "the science the rovers do is useless if we don't go to Mars" is wrong, and "We need a colony on Mars for human species backup!" is naive, premature, and, well, wrong. :)
The welfare of existing generations in the future and of future generations also matters.
Why? Why do generations not yet born matter? What is their hypothetical future existence to us but a way to propagate the species? Why else would we create them and necessarily restrict our resource usage in consideration for them and thus increase suffering in the present?
But the survival of the species per se does not really matter. We might evolve quite a bit over the coming billion years.
Okay, so if we simply expanded the idea of preserving the "species" to "all human descendants whether they are classified as homo sapien sapiens or not", then it would matter?
Gah, you guys wouldn't know majesty if it hit you in the face.
Funny, I was once punched by a Queen for exactly that reason.
Well let me help you out -- regardless of what else that post was, whether earnest or in jest, it was definitely a troll.
Well if we don't care about future generations, and all that matters is minimizing the suffering of the existing generation, given that despite our best efforts everyone will die in varyingly protracted and painful ways, plus necessarily experience additional suffering in their lives to varying extents, the solution is obvious:
Exterminate all human life on earth in the fastest and most painless way possible.
And thus is nuclear disarmament by the Cold War superpowers revealed to be the most evil, anti-human, pro-suffering trend ever. We need more bombs, many more, to blanket the earth with mushroom clouds and ensure no humans live past the initial shockwaves to die the painful and protracted deaths of radiation poisoning.
Dude, poes law.
Yeah, Poe's Law is about how you can never have a satire of an extremist so extreme that it can't be matched by the real thing.
However you can have a satire of an extremist that reveals its nature by being less extreme. For example a real "Screw the enviro-hippie-terrorists" post (or Poe's-Law-invoking satire) would have downplayed the nature of the mining byproducts instead of emphasizing "toxic", "acidic", and "dumping in the local river".
Yeah, that's really going to help when another Chicxulub-sized rock comes by.
By far the best, easiest, and (most importantly) most likely to be available when we need it method of dealing with such a thing is to 1) detect it early and 2) divert it, preventing the catastrophe.
Creating a large enough self-sustaining off-world colony to allow the human race to survive the loss of earth is a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Even dinosaur-killer-sized impactors will leave the earth a more habitable place for humans than Mars is today.
However, identifying such a large object as a potential danger 50 years before its probable impact, and using that time to slowly nudge it out of the way with a gravity tractor, is actually something we could start implementing tomorrow if the need arose.
The catch though is that we have to find it. Thankfully more resources are being spent on searches for such objects than ever before, but we could certainly use more.
True, and the artist's rendition of the observation deck, a big round platform sticking out the side of the building, just screams "boss fight arena!"
Inside, just before you head out onto the deck, there should be a little atrium where you can find crates full of ammunition.
Oh, I see. Hey, maybe with the money they're throwing at it they can have such a compensation system. At least one good enough for a scope meant for tourists to look through! But yeah, seems pretty pointless. Why did they say "observatory" in the summary anyway?