Hmm. I best have done this in bold:
Now, you can't compare "complexity" to chromosome counts . ..
It was more for amusement than anything else. It gave me a giggle to compare humans unfavorably to duck-billed platypuses.
Personally I think that defining life as more or less "complex" is iffy at best. Your points about the number of genes is exactly right. Does having more genes make an organism more or less complex? What if there's fewer genes, but more interactions between genes, variation in gene expression, and the like?
LETTERSPACING0 KERNING0Tim BernersLee formally introduced his world wide web project to the world on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
It always boggles my mind when content management software and the output to the web gets so confused. Don't people test these things? I almost envision a new entry to the Fifteen Years list on BBC.
August, 2006 Content Management Craze Hits the Web
IT Managers around the world decide they have to install content management systems in order to be more "modern". The Internet collapses briefly until valiant web designers revert to simple text editors to recreate the web.
It's funny when people claim that things are evolving into "higher" or "lower" forms, as if people are the obvious pinnacle of the process.
What's happening is that the rate of change in the environment is faster than many species can keep up. When you have 10,000 individuals in a population and they breed every 5 years, they can only "absorb" so much change. When you have a species that has billions of individuals and reproduce every 20 minutes, they can take massive environmental change and thrive in it.
The genetic diversity in the bigger population is vast and there's bound to be some individuals with higher tolerance of whatever the change is, be it increased temperatures, environmental toxins, or loss of food supplies. If one individual has the gene that boosts survival, it can propagate through the species very rapidly due to short lifespans.
Think of the human species as the biological equivalent as a comet hitting the earth and you've got it about right.
I'd be tempted to go straight for nuclear. Solar has problems with dust storms and the fact that less solar energy reaches mars. With nuclear, you get heat as a bonus side effect. I'd worry more about cosmic rays on the way to mars than living next to a reactor. Plus, deploying a thousand square miles of solar panels is really hard.
Once you have power and heat, you have to worry about water and shelter. I'd do it all remotely via robots, mining and building away. The whole thing would be extremely expensive and the result would be a bunch of people living in tunnels a long way from Earth. It's hard to say if the payoff is worth it at the moment.
All it takes is a suitably large gravity well. Black holes have been doing this since the dawn of time.
But seriously, all the new light bending materials I've been reading about look neat, but seem to be focused on certain wavelengths. Broad spectrum invisibility will likely be pretty tough.
Well, it's currently illegal to dump waste at sea due to the London Convention, so don't expect this solution any time soon.
Also, subduction zones aren't particularly stable and predictable, so the waste would likely spew about rather than being neatly sucked away. There was an article on New Scientist about this.
It's a good test of whether or not you have an addictive personality. I've actually been dusting off my collection lately, playing for fun with my son. I deliberately didn't kill him, just to show a point.
Back in the day, I used to play cutthroat for cards, but these days I get much more enjoyment from making theme decks and killing people in interesting ways. I also haven't bought a card in close to a decade. It's a waste of time.
I did end up making a Neverwinter Nights modification called Demon Cards. It has a pool of 100 cards, you can play against NPCs or other players, and there's no cost beyond the basic NWN game. It's not identical to Magic, but has some of that same deck-building fun.
For example, the moon gets massive exposure to cosmic rays. Storing DNA up there on the surface is a joke. Their DNA would turn into useless goo within a few years.
If you have to shield from meteor impact and radiation, that should take care of two of the disasters mentioned in the article (meteor impact and nuclear war).
I suppose by "semi-permanent", I meant that methylization was a fairly sturdy structure compared to other methods of blocking transcription. This is in comparison to RNAi, which is fairly temporary.
DNA is the fundamental unit of information
I suppose we could go over semantics forever. Lots of stuff carries information. I'd argue that everything carries information in some form or another. Prions, viruses, and raw RNA seem to do just fine without any DNA. What I was trying to get across is that there were lots of biological mechanisms that carried and processed information, not just DNA.
To claim that you are smarter than the creator of the universe is pure hubris.
Guilty as charged.:)
I am tempted to summon Occam's Razor in this case. It's sort of like the "Little Man in the Coke Machine" argument. Sure, the Coke cans might be dropped down by a little man inside the vending machine when I put in my money. The simpler mechanical answer is more likely, though.
In this case, I'd argue that a super-intelligent being might take pity on me and make DNA that didn't fall apart and get cancer, make my knees non-screwed up, and my sinuses drain outside my body instead of down my throat.
Who knows? Maybe the universe was created by a Book of Job God who likes to punish us to teach us to be good. I never did understand the part about Job being okay with getting a new wife after God killed off his old one, but maybe Job was a swinger or something.
Sorry for wandering off topic. I blame the coffee.
I can't wait until someone sets up a bounty system for this. Essentially people would buy and mount one of these on their cars and drive around "interesting" areas. License plates would be tracked and sent to a central database with a GPS and time stamp. You could then purchase tracking information for certain license plates, with a portion of the proceeds going back to the original owner.
Essentially you'd end up with "bounty hunters" cruising bad parts of town looking for stolen vehicles and the like. On the other end, you'd have people driving around L.A. and New York, trying to figure out which celebrity is staying and whose home for the night.
Over ten years ago, the hot new field in biology was "gene expression". We already knew about DNA, but there was a lot of "junk DNA" that seemed weird, as well as lots of questions around when and how DNA was actually turned into working proteins.
It turns out there's some vastly complex actions around how genes are actually expressed. Methylization semi-permanently deactivates DNA. Other things control the unfolding of DNA so that they're accessible to be exposed. Much of the "junk dna" is probably not junk, but rather controls gene expression to some degree.
The bottom line is that DNA is only the bottom rung of how information is stored and manipulated in the nifty little computers that are our cells. This is also a great context to talk about evolution - no sane intelligent designer would make a cell this way. If you think about small changes over billions of years, though, you can see how the warping and twisting of DNA could produce interesting results that are passed down from generation to generation.
I decided to expand the topic a bit, talking about both benefits and risks. There has been some discussion about the risks of the collider. From the wikipedia article:
It has been predicted by Savas Dimopoulos and Greg Landsberg that if the scale of quantum gravity is near 1 TeV, then the LHC may produce black holes.[5] Due to a concern for public safety, CERN performed a study to investigate whether dangerous events such as the creation of micro black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles could occur.[6] The report indicates that none of these events will pose any risk: micro black holes are specifically stated to be harmless due to the Hawking radiation process. Frank Wilczek at Princeton University has stated in an article in Scientific American that cosmic ray collisions occur at much higher energies than may be found in manmade particle accelerators today, so it is unlikely that a particle accelerator would produce a dangerous black hole. However, some physicists and members of the general public remain concerned about the safety of the LHC. Wilczek states that strangelet creation and expansion is very improbable but not impossible.[7] John Nelson at Birmingham University stated of the RHIC that "it is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk - but I could not prove it."[8] In academia there is some question of whether Hawking radiation is correct.[9]
Rumor has it that during the first A-bomb test, the scientists were taking bets on whether they'd ignite the atmosphere. I wonder what the odds of creating a black hole might be?
One of the things common with very basic research is that it's hard to justify what benefits will come out of it. The first folks playing with radioactive materials all died of cancer, little knowing their sacrifice would completely change geopolitics for decades to come.
The collider will give us a better view of basic particle interactions. Will it give us anti-gravity or make our teeth whiter? Probably not, but unexpected things will likely come of it.
The interesting part is not that it exists, but that if you apply the theory empty space has 120 orders of magnitude more energy than the visible universe. Still, you can take the same theory and apply it to a hydrogen atom and get a number that is validated by experiment to nine decimal points. So the big question is, how do you use the same theory (relativity and quantum mechanics) to make a great prediciton about hydrogen atoms and a terrible prediction about vaccuum energy?
Still, the point of the article isn't about vaccuum energy, but rather the anthropic principle. The concept is that there's a constant in our universe that almost precisely cancels out this vaccuum energy. This is purely by chance and we see it because if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be around to talk about it.
There's a funny picture on the company's site. It looks like some sort of strange Hannibal Lecter simulator, with the svelte tech trying to find the tastiest part to start nibbling on.
I almost rated this as "off topic" until I realized it was a reference to Footfall, by Larry Niven. It refers to showing submission so that agressive actions stop. Strangely put, but at least I understand the post now.
But if I were going to name two things that seem to help, they would be:
Few, smart people Smaller groups of developers (preferrably one) seem to get so much more done than tons of people working on a project, requiring coordination and creation of standards. I realize this is often mocked, comparing it to the mythic hero developer, locked away and producing great code. Still, in real-life situations I've seen big development groups fail or work at a snail's pace while the single smart person cranks out application after application.
Evolutionary prototyping. This is similar to agile programming, basically coming up with something that works and refining it until it's "good enough". I find applications are never firmly done, but rather the fixes and upgrades slow over time. Now if you're building missles or medical equipment, this isn't the best approach, but for most normal business software, I find it works best.
Slashdot Mirror
"These fools worship Transformers!"
-- Astrotrain, reading a.t.t. ("The God Gambit")
You'll find more ironically amusing ones here
Hmm. I best have done this in bold: .
Now, you can't compare "complexity" to chromosome counts . .
It was more for amusement than anything else. It gave me a giggle to compare humans unfavorably to duck-billed platypuses.
Personally I think that defining life as more or less "complex" is iffy at best. Your points about the number of genes is exactly right. Does having more genes make an organism more or less complex? What if there's fewer genes, but more interactions between genes, variation in gene expression, and the like?
LETTERSPACING0 KERNING0Tim BernersLee formally introduced his world wide web project to the world on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
It always boggles my mind when content management software and the output to the web gets so confused. Don't people test these things? I almost envision a new entry to the Fifteen Years list on BBC.
August, 2006
Content Management Craze Hits the Web
IT Managers around the world decide they have to install content management systems in order to be more "modern". The Internet collapses briefly until valiant web designers revert to simple text editors to recreate the web.
Now, you can't compare "complexity" to chromosome counts, but I'd suggest that there's some rather complex little critters out there.
It's funny when people claim that things are evolving into "higher" or "lower" forms, as if people are the obvious pinnacle of the process.
What's happening is that the rate of change in the environment is faster than many species can keep up. When you have 10,000 individuals in a population and they breed every 5 years, they can only "absorb" so much change. When you have a species that has billions of individuals and reproduce every 20 minutes, they can take massive environmental change and thrive in it.
The genetic diversity in the bigger population is vast and there's bound to be some individuals with higher tolerance of whatever the change is, be it increased temperatures, environmental toxins, or loss of food supplies. If one individual has the gene that boosts survival, it can propagate through the species very rapidly due to short lifespans.
Think of the human species as the biological equivalent as a comet hitting the earth and you've got it about right.
All they had him say was "My crew, my ship." and he got the part.
I'd be tempted to go straight for nuclear. Solar has problems with dust storms and the fact that less solar energy reaches mars. With nuclear, you get heat as a bonus side effect. I'd worry more about cosmic rays on the way to mars than living next to a reactor. Plus, deploying a thousand square miles of solar panels is really hard.
Once you have power and heat, you have to worry about water and shelter. I'd do it all remotely via robots, mining and building away. The whole thing would be extremely expensive and the result would be a bunch of people living in tunnels a long way from Earth. It's hard to say if the payoff is worth it at the moment.
All it takes is a suitably large gravity well. Black holes have been doing this since the dawn of time.
But seriously, all the new light bending materials I've been reading about look neat, but seem to be focused on certain wavelengths. Broad spectrum invisibility will likely be pretty tough.
Well, it's currently illegal to dump waste at sea due to the London Convention, so don't expect this solution any time soon.
Also, subduction zones aren't particularly stable and predictable, so the waste would likely spew about rather than being neatly sucked away. There was an article on New Scientist about this.
It's a good test of whether or not you have an addictive personality. I've actually been dusting off my collection lately, playing for fun with my son. I deliberately didn't kill him, just to show a point.
Back in the day, I used to play cutthroat for cards, but these days I get much more enjoyment from making theme decks and killing people in interesting ways. I also haven't bought a card in close to a decade. It's a waste of time.
I did end up making a Neverwinter Nights modification called Demon Cards. It has a pool of 100 cards, you can play against NPCs or other players, and there's no cost beyond the basic NWN game. It's not identical to Magic, but has some of that same deck-building fun.
For example, the moon gets massive exposure to cosmic rays. Storing DNA up there on the surface is a joke. Their DNA would turn into useless goo within a few years.
If you have to shield from meteor impact and radiation, that should take care of two of the disasters mentioned in the article (meteor impact and nuclear war).
This personal helicopter can be flow for an hour or so and travels around 55 mph. Not as sexy as a jet pack, but it's far more utilitarian.
Plus, there's no cache in Google. Somewhere, in dim rack room, a server cries out in pain.
I suppose by "semi-permanent", I meant that methylization was a fairly sturdy structure compared to other methods of blocking transcription. This is in comparison to RNAi, which is fairly temporary.
:)
DNA is the fundamental unit of information
I suppose we could go over semantics forever. Lots of stuff carries information. I'd argue that everything carries information in some form or another. Prions, viruses, and raw RNA seem to do just fine without any DNA. What I was trying to get across is that there were lots of biological mechanisms that carried and processed information, not just DNA.
To claim that you are smarter than the creator of the universe is pure hubris.
Guilty as charged.
I am tempted to summon Occam's Razor in this case. It's sort of like the "Little Man in the Coke Machine" argument. Sure, the Coke cans might be dropped down by a little man inside the vending machine when I put in my money. The simpler mechanical answer is more likely, though.
In this case, I'd argue that a super-intelligent being might take pity on me and make DNA that didn't fall apart and get cancer, make my knees non-screwed up, and my sinuses drain outside my body instead of down my throat.
Who knows? Maybe the universe was created by a Book of Job God who likes to punish us to teach us to be good. I never did understand the part about Job being okay with getting a new wife after God killed off his old one, but maybe Job was a swinger or something.
Sorry for wandering off topic. I blame the coffee.
I can't wait until someone sets up a bounty system for this. Essentially people would buy and mount one of these on their cars and drive around "interesting" areas. License plates would be tracked and sent to a central database with a GPS and time stamp. You could then purchase tracking information for certain license plates, with a portion of the proceeds going back to the original owner.
Essentially you'd end up with "bounty hunters" cruising bad parts of town looking for stolen vehicles and the like. On the other end, you'd have people driving around L.A. and New York, trying to figure out which celebrity is staying and whose home for the night.
Think of it as Little Brother.
Over ten years ago, the hot new field in biology was "gene expression". We already knew about DNA, but there was a lot of "junk DNA" that seemed weird, as well as lots of questions around when and how DNA was actually turned into working proteins.
It turns out there's some vastly complex actions around how genes are actually expressed. Methylization semi-permanently deactivates DNA. Other things control the unfolding of DNA so that they're accessible to be exposed. Much of the "junk dna" is probably not junk, but rather controls gene expression to some degree.
The bottom line is that DNA is only the bottom rung of how information is stored and manipulated in the nifty little computers that are our cells. This is also a great context to talk about evolution - no sane intelligent designer would make a cell this way. If you think about small changes over billions of years, though, you can see how the warping and twisting of DNA could produce interesting results that are passed down from generation to generation.
Science is rarely boring.
Since F-Secure detects it, does that imply it's not popular?
One of the things common with very basic research is that it's hard to justify what benefits will come out of it. The first folks playing with radioactive materials all died of cancer, little knowing their sacrifice would completely change geopolitics for decades to come.
The collider will give us a better view of basic particle interactions. Will it give us anti-gravity or make our teeth whiter? Probably not, but unexpected things will likely come of it.
The interesting part is not that it exists, but that if you apply the theory empty space has 120 orders of magnitude more energy than the visible universe. Still, you can take the same theory and apply it to a hydrogen atom and get a number that is validated by experiment to nine decimal points. So the big question is, how do you use the same theory (relativity and quantum mechanics) to make a great prediciton about hydrogen atoms and a terrible prediction about vaccuum energy?
Still, the point of the article isn't about vaccuum energy, but rather the anthropic principle. The concept is that there's a constant in our universe that almost precisely cancels out this vaccuum energy. This is purely by chance and we see it because if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be around to talk about it.
It's on topic and highly relevant, really. ;)
There's a funny picture on the company's site. It looks like some sort of strange Hannibal Lecter simulator, with the svelte tech trying to find the tastiest part to start nibbling on.
I almost rated this as "off topic" until I realized it was a reference to Footfall, by Larry Niven. It refers to showing submission so that agressive actions stop. Strangely put, but at least I understand the post now.
YA RLY!
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