Word of mouth, unfortunately. It was called "information mechanics" (which has been used to describe several unrelated things as well). Then the word was that it not only explained gravity but derived several of the "fundamental" constants from others to some large number (9?) of significant digits.
The thing I do remember from the not-fully-grokked explanation was that gravity in the theory was related to the smaller amount of information needed to represent the relative positions of objects when they are closer together and the energy involved in the information in question.
And according to the guy who mentioned it, the original work was very hard to follow.
I'm wondering if this is the same stuff - either finally presented by the original guy in a form that is more readily accepted by the physics community, rediscovered by someone more articulate, or more fully worked out by either or both.
The thing about outsourcing to the far east and india is that all the good people already left for the western economies where they get paid more.
Not all of 'em.
But (up to a year or two ago at least) virtually all of the good ones that stayed had been fully employed - and able to command decent salaries, move up into management if they had the skill set, and/or spin out and start their own companies. So US corps which were jumping on the outsourcing-for-cost-reduction bandwagon after it became the big thing ended up only able to hire from the remaining crowd of primarily third-stringers, incompetents, language-challenged, or otherwise less effective potential employees.
And this, of course, (combined with the communication problems of administering projects across time shifts and cultural differences) ended up producing a lot of business process disasters and a lot of stereotypes of outsourced employees as less productive than those in the US.
My neighbour claimed 10 to 12 hours studying per day. In reality I caught her more than once just staring out of the window, not really studying. For her that was part of "studying" but in reality it isn't.
Yes it was.
At such times she might have been:
- Thinking about what she had just read and working through the implications.
- Transferring information from mid-term to long-term memory.
- Clearing the fatigue biases in certain neurons/synapses so they'll process the next chunk of information more normally.
- Quiescing parts of the brain (such as the visual-verbal connection used in reading) that would otherwise send signals that would "jog the elbow" of the part she was using at the time to "study". or performing any of several other neural operations that are definitely part of "studying".
So it seems to me it may be your definition of what constitutes "studying" that's in need of revision.
Also: There's a lot of variation both in how brains work and in how people use them. You might be able to absorb a subject well in concentrated chunks, performing some of the above tasks in such short bursts that you don't notice them. You might have stronger interconnections between some parts of your brain that let you avoid some of the techniques that might require you to look at something neutral - or weaker links between others that avoid interference or let you do things in parallel (like backgrounding the transfer to mid-term to long-term memory of one item while processing and short-term memory are working on the next.) Or you might just have a different "studying" skill set, resulting in a different set of behaviors.
How is Interpol (or another international organization) going to harm an ordinary citizen...
When you can't bring them to justice? Any way they want.
Just like any other police functionary in a situation where he is himself beyond the reach of the law.
There are LOTS of examples of such behavior, historical and current, domestic and foreign. Most of the laws and legal precedent put in place to stop or redress this behavior are exactly what just got waived.... in the course of their official duties?
How do you prove they were acting OUTSIDE their "official duties" when you can't bring the legal system to bear?
As WP and the law itself clearly states, agents of International Organizations are immune from prosecution for official acts only.
Since they and their property are immune from suits, how does an ordinary citizen protect himself from them, obtain redress if they have damaged him by their illegal behavior, or even determine that they have committed a crime so he can beg a federal prosecutor to act?
While it is true that Cheney was probably not at fault, there's also the fact that Cheney and co. delayed reporting the incident until his blood-alcohol level had plenty of time to drop. Which would be a crime in itself, if I had done it.
I have never heard of any state where there was a requirement to report such accidents within a given amount of time.
(I suppose you could claim it was obstruction of justice IF his blood alcohol WAS up and he delayed deliberately to avoid testing positive. But there'd be no crime if it wasn't and you'd have to prove it was up to prosecute - catch 22.)
If you want an example of an actual case similar to what was alleged about Cheney, consider Lake County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Russell Purdock, who (allegedly while drunk - and later run around by buddies until he could sober up) ran his speedboat at 45-50 MPH (in the dark) over a sailboat - after which the prosecutor went after the operator of the sailboat. (Prosecutor claims the sailboaters were drunk and running without lights. Witnesses say the lights were on and an investigator says the lights were on before the crash and out after because the crash shorted the wiring - leaving evidence of this in the form of cut wires and a blown fuse, if I recall correctly.)
Well that just makes no sense. If you were effectively offering higher than contract rates of pay, I don't know a single contractor who would turn that down. I've done a lot of contracting, and would always have been willing to take such an offer.
And I've done a lot of contracting and DID take such offers - with lower salary but startup equity. Contracting means you pay your own benefits and have lots of other extra costs so a (far) lower salary with a good bennies package is not a hardship - especially if accompanied by a reasonable spin of the stock-option roulette wheel.
It's not like the employment contract comes with some long term commitment that you can't back out of. Yours must have been a really exceptional case... did you have some problem with your work environment maybe?
Or perhaps your employment contract's I.P. and/or non-compete provisions were too restrictive - like to a career killing level. Why don't you look over the boilerplate your lawyer laid down? Contractors value having the option to move on and do NOT contracts that turn them into serfs.
(California I.P. employment law is a big reason the Silicon Valley phenomenon happened here and has been so hard to replicate elsewhere: If you invent something that is not in your company's business plan and they don't want to pursue it - and you didn't do it on company time or with company resources (which would be hard to prove anyhow) - YOU own the idea, regardless of what the employment contract says. You can get together with a couple buddies, raise some seed capital, walk out, set up shop across the street, and develop it.)
There's much to your first paragraphs' claim. But you picked the wrong example:
That's why Cheney can shoot a man in the face, and get away with it.
As I understand it ( I wasn't invited B-) ) the guy walked out in front of the firing line while Cheney was shooting (and thus focussed on his target), making it an honest accident. Yes you're supposed to be sure of your target. But Cheney apparently checked properly before focusing down and people DO screw up
The guy who got shot concurred with this, as did the cops. But these things always get investigated just to be sure. And the other interpretation is such a nice fit to the news media's and opposition politicians' templates that it got promulgated regardless.
Now you can always twist a tinfoil hat down tighter and claim that this was a coverup and proves your point. But why bother (unless you want to rag on Cheney, now with his hands OFF most of the levers of power, for some other reason)? There are plenty of REAL and UNAMBIGUOUS examples you could use.
(As for me, while my politics is about as different from Cheney's as Ron Paul's are from Bush's, I wouldn't decline an invitation to do some recreational shooting with him out of concern for my safety.)
Back in the day I used to help a vet implant zebra embryos in horses.
Speaking of equines, I'm hoping this will be tried with Quaggas for the extinct DNA donors.
Zebras are essentially a striped wild donkey that is essentially not domesticable. Quaggas were an apparently a close relative that domesticated just fine and were quite useful. But they were allowed to go extinct in the mid 1800s, when the wild ones were hunted to extinction and contact with other parts of the world led the farmers who used quaggas to switch to other equines (think "fad").
Ought to be reasonably easy to pull this with zebras or donkeys for the egg donors and hosts, reconstructing the lost species (for potential breeding and mule-making programs later). There's already a project to "breed them back" from the plains zebra (which they are really a variant of) and there are 23 known stuffed-and-mounted specimens.
[The nuclear DNA is so high a percentage etc. that a DNA-only transplant might be considered a full reconstruction.]
Also: They can always clone the mitochondrial DNA into something suitable (like goats again) and later harvest eggs with the right mitochondria, insert DNA from members of a wrong-mitochondira reconstruction, and produce new clones with both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of the species to be recovered.
Fly in the ointment might be if the co-evolving mitochondrial and nuclear DNA had diverged sufficiently between the egg donor and extinct species that the communication between the cell and the mitochondria is hosed and you can't get a viable reconstruction with nuclear DNA only. But this communication is sufficiently simple and conserved that this seems unlikely. You start from a host egg of a closely-related species to avoid a vast number of similar potential screwups between the donor egg's existing machinery (or the host mother's biology ditto) and the implanted DNA's version of the same systems, any of which might make the effort fail. The mitochondria are just one more of the donor's systems (which happens to have its own DNA.)
I take it you never heard the radio ads for "nature's healthy trinity" (an intestinal flora repopulating capsule product consisting of three bacterial lines that you'll find in most brands of yogurt.)
In fact many brands of yogurt contain five beneficial bacterial lines and are a fine way to repopulate your gut if the antibiotics (or "colon cleansing") have thrown the population out of balance.
Look, the plot is basically Dances with Wolves in Space,
Really?
The trailer I saw made it look like "evil corporation hires government and/or mercenaries to clean out the natives in order to seize their resources while not even attempting to rationalize this for PR". That sounded like a cross between Smurfs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Blinky Bill (save us from the wood chip mill).
Either way I don't plan to see it. All that great graphics and they use it to push politically-correct stereotypes until any chance of enjoying the film is gone.
Got flying islands (without settlements by the natives) because of the Mcguffin substance? Why not just snag some of those and stuff 'em in a refinery? (Answer: No story...)
Unfortunately, nickel-iron batteries aren't all that efficient. Their charging voltage is considerably higher than their discharging voltage and they also leak more stored power than, say, lead-acids. They're not what you want for storing line power for occasional outages unless you can afford the cost of the lost power.
Upside is that they last virtually forever. So if you have, say, a renewable-energy powered site with a considerable surplus of power on the average (such as micro-hydro that's not TOO micro), they can cut your long-term costs and maintenance requirements drastically. But if you're paying for grid power or even more per KWHr for solar panels or windmills, you'll probably be ahead to size the sources a bit lower and replace lead-acids every decade or so.
Let's see what the lifetime of this gadget is if/when it arrives. I understand the lifetime issue is a solved problem. (One solution uses buckytubes for the substrate of the electrode that oxidizes and is responsible for older generation Lithium batteries' relatively short (and fixed) lifetimes. The tubes only oxidize at the ends, and very slowly, so they last a LONG time.)
The new fast-charge Lithium designs are far more energy efficient than lead-acid. If this is a decade-or-better lifetime device, isn't overpriced (fat chance with a Japanese company...), isn't displaced by something even better, and actually makes it to market, it could displace lead-acids for renewable-energy power storage and make additional sites cross the cost-breakeven barrier for RE versus grid power.
I was doing contract programming at one of the auto companies, in a plant that made "bumper shocks" along with other parts, when a defective weld caused one to fire its piston through an assembly line worker in another plant and killed him. The whole plant was in mourning. (And thank goodness I was in a different product line...)
Gently stopping a 5mph car in a matter of inches, without incurring driving-safety-imparing damage, requires very large and very-well-controlled forces. Bumper shock absorbers (at least that model) are (extremely) pressurized with nitrogen, to keep the fluids in the correct place and act as an initial "spring" during the first part of the travel in a crash, before the fluid friction is ramped up. If the weld holding the piston in fails you have a good approximation to a high-powered pistol firing a large slug.
Of course the manufacturers try REALLY HARD to make sure the welds and the cylinders are solid, given the possible damages if one fails. So getting one to fail in the field is tough. But any manufacturing process (short of single-atom-placement-and-check nanotech and maybe even that) can be expected to have a few defective parts slip through inspection.
What is truly depressing is that Americans didn't learn a damn thing from their own mistakes in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and the mistakes of all the Empires past:...
Trust me: Lots (the bulk) of Americans learned the lessons just fine. And we're well aware of Afghanistan's nickname: The Graveyard of Empires.
Unfortunately, our ruling class still thinks it can use the war as an excuse to expand its own power and wealth (at far greater cost to the rest of the nation). They don't yet believe they've come to the point that the damage will exceed the profit in THEIR cases and that it's thus time to pull the plug.
What's happening now is that the factions of the bulk of the American population are realizing the ruling class has finally cut the government off from the population's control and is pushing it into a runaway failure mode. So they're organizing to attempt to bring said ruling class to heel (in the hopes of heading off the need for more drastic solutions, with their higher costs and still greater risks in case of failure).
Thus the excitement at the town-hall meetings. And thus the two flavors of the Tea Party movement - coming out of the Libertarian / Paulite and the Paleo-conservative factions - and the recent overtures from the anti-war factions of the left wing for an alliance with them.
The issue with the theory is that it violates the Newtonian rule of conservation of momentum.
No it doesn't. As Maxwell figured out long ago, EM field can carry momentum.
But in doing so they propagate away, rather than vanishing in the mutual-annihilation of the quantum-vacuum virtual particles.
This implies that the energy they apply will break the cancellation of the virtual particle pair enough to leave a photon behind, propagating away with the other half of the (conserved) momentum. (Perhaps this would be the result of bremsstrahlung as they accelerate the virtual particles before they zap out.) This would fix both momentum and mass-energy conservation.
If so they've just found another way to make a quantum light source (or even a laser, if it amplifies similar photons).
This invention, if it pans out, would be more like a propeller for spacecraft, pushed by and pushing against the short-lived particles that spring in and out of existence in vacuum. I have to imagine that the amount of thrust would be minuscule, but not having to carry reaction mass would be a huge advantage.
Which makes me wonder if you'd end up with a particle beam to "react against" as a result.
Virtual particle pairs can exist because they mutually-annihilate with a lifetime so short the product of it with their masses is less than the uncertainty principle limit. If nothing interacts with them meanwhile their "values" all cancel out in the annihilation, leaving nothing. But if your device interacts with (one or both of) them, in a way that changes its own momentum, it also changes the momentum of the virtual particles. If they then annihilate without leaving something behind you've broken conservation of momentum.
Things interacting with virtual particles sufficiently energetically can do things like separate them, preventing (or modifying) the annihilation, leaving the particles (or some hunk of them) behind, and consuming enough energy to "create" the particle pair (or whatever) left behind.
(If I have these right...) Example: Pair forms near an event horizon, one falls in (giving the other enough energy to escape). Result: Hawking radiation. (The one falling in is preferentially an anti-particle for something inside the hole, and thus the hole eventually decays.) Another example: Consider an energetic nucleus which can't quite break apart due to a potential barrier. A pair forms on the high part of the potential barrier. The antiparticle for a particle (or fraction of it) trying to escape is sucked in and zaps its new partner instead of the original, while the equivalent particle flies away on the outside of the barrier. Result: Beta decay. (The nucleus has no "clock". Instead the random nature of the vacuum fluctuations gives a constant probability per unit time of the virtual particle pair happening in just the right way, leading to the long-term exponential decay.)
I'd be willing to bet that, if this DOES work, the energy input will result in some reaction with the virtual particles that prevents their total mutual-annihilation. Instead some residue particle(s) will be "created" and propagate away in the direction opposite the thrust. Thus will both momentum and mass-energy be conserved. And the machinery will produce a very energetic beam of something for an "exhaust".
But I'd LOVE it if this proves to be incorrect. (Or if the "beam" is dark matter, or the interaction somehow ends up transferred as a push against the rest of the mass of the universe as a whole, as gravity radiation pushing/pulling on whatever it hits - resulting in an inverse-square "pressor" or "tractor" beam, etc.)
... this approach on the other hand involves stimulating existing nerve cells to row more axons which are the electrical connections between nerve cells.
Which is particularly interesting because (if I understand it correctly) the initial growth of a long axon involves the nerve cell starting where the axon will end, crawling amoeba-style to the vicinity where the (multiple) dendrites will hook up while stringing the axon out behind it, then settling in and putting out the web of dendrites and making synapses for the incoming signals and logic.
This implies a second mechanism for re-wiring a new axon when the old one gets cut. (Though perhaps it's a longer-range variant on a usually short-range mechanism for hooking up the axon locally at the start of the cable-stringing process.)
I just don't get it-- seems like the whole benefit of an e-reader is to remove the need for old-style publishers.
And that's the key.
This is an old-style publisher trying to avoid being eliminated and bankrupted as the readers desert old-style publishers for new-style "content delivered electronically" (publisherese for text documents).
By trojan-horsing a "publisher-freindly" e-book reader he hopes to hang on to some of the future market.
IMHO even if he could have gotten away with it he doomed his project by letting the readers know up front that the engineering is being done with the publishers' interest prioritized above the theirs.
But who knows? Maybe it will have enough bells and whistles, a good enough initial cost structure and advertising campaign, and/or enough desirable exclusive content (ala VHS drubbing Betamax) that he'll acquire a following.
Learning to use the "man" command is important,...
But only SOME of it is in "man". (And "man/apropos" is polluted by the enormous number of X subroutines documented there for people writing X clients.)
Some is in html hypertext that can be reached by various "help" keys scattered around menus and applications.
Some is in "info" - a legacy text-based hypertext browser from the GNU project. (You have to navigate it with emacs-style keystrokes, rather than using a browser (though I've seen browser-based access to it in a redhat distribution).) When an "info" documented application has a man page at all it typically is very sketchy and says it may be out of date and non-canonical, with the real document in info. (I'm a vi-thian rather than an emax-ian so info's navigation system bugs me considerably.)
IMHO "info" documents should have been ported to html by now and a single, perhaps browser-like, interface to ALL the documentation (not just parts of it) with decent navigation, indexing/indices, and find features, should be available in any given linux distribution (preferably all of them) and MADE OBVIOUS to newbies.
= = = =
When trying to learn the system itself, a bigger problem even than the flaky and scattered documentation is the lack of "breadcrumbs" in the graphic interfaces to the various configuration tools, which give you no idea what configuration files they manipulate and what they do to them. This interface-candy acts as a barrier to learning the guts. Linux (and its collection of system daemons and their related file arrangements) was historically administered by direct configuration file editing. But linux configuration file arrangement and daemon compliment is enough different from the other unixes that internals lore learned on the latter doesn't always transfer well.
Slashdot Mirror
Word of mouth, unfortunately. It was called "information mechanics" (which has been used to describe several unrelated things as well). Then the word was that it not only explained gravity but derived several of the "fundamental" constants from others to some large number (9?) of significant digits.
The thing I do remember from the not-fully-grokked explanation was that gravity in the theory was related to the smaller amount of information needed to represent the relative positions of objects when they are closer together and the energy involved in the information in question.
And according to the guy who mentioned it, the original work was very hard to follow.
I'm wondering if this is the same stuff - either finally presented by the original guy in a form that is more readily accepted by the physics community, rediscovered by someone more articulate, or more fully worked out by either or both.
Make that 16 seconds plus turnarounds and miscelaney. (Can't do simple arithmetic this morning.)
Minified alone, the base jQuery library is 56KB. That's probably where the majority of your size was coming from.
And on 28k dialup (which some people - like me at one site - are lucky to get) that's 20 seconds (more with TCP turnarounds).
Can someone help? I'm having trouble finding the verb in the story title.
The verb is "Gates".
The thing about outsourcing to the far east and india is that all the good people already left for the western economies where they get paid more.
Not all of 'em.
But (up to a year or two ago at least) virtually all of the good ones that stayed had been fully employed - and able to command decent salaries, move up into management if they had the skill set, and/or spin out and start their own companies. So US corps which were jumping on the outsourcing-for-cost-reduction bandwagon after it became the big thing ended up only able to hire from the remaining crowd of primarily third-stringers, incompetents, language-challenged, or otherwise less effective potential employees.
And this, of course, (combined with the communication problems of administering projects across time shifts and cultural differences) ended up producing a lot of business process disasters and a lot of stereotypes of outsourced employees as less productive than those in the US.
My neighbour claimed 10 to 12 hours studying per day. In reality I caught her more than once just staring out of the window, not really studying. For her that was part of "studying" but in reality it isn't.
Yes it was.
At such times she might have been:
- Thinking about what she had just read and working through the implications.
- Transferring information from mid-term to long-term memory.
- Clearing the fatigue biases in certain neurons/synapses so they'll process the next chunk of information more normally.
- Quiescing parts of the brain (such as the visual-verbal connection used in reading) that would otherwise send signals that would "jog the elbow" of the part she was using at the time to "study".
or performing any of several other neural operations that are definitely part of "studying".
So it seems to me it may be your definition of what constitutes "studying" that's in need of revision.
Also: There's a lot of variation both in how brains work and in how people use them. You might be able to absorb a subject well in concentrated chunks, performing some of the above tasks in such short bursts that you don't notice them. You might have stronger interconnections between some parts of your brain that let you avoid some of the techniques that might require you to look at something neutral - or weaker links between others that avoid interference or let you do things in parallel (like backgrounding the transfer to mid-term to long-term memory of one item while processing and short-term memory are working on the next.) Or you might just have a different "studying" skill set, resulting in a different set of behaviors.
How is Interpol (or another international organization) going to harm an ordinary citizen ...
When you can't bring them to justice? Any way they want.
Just like any other police functionary in a situation where he is himself beyond the reach of the law.
There are LOTS of examples of such behavior, historical and current, domestic and foreign. Most of the laws and legal precedent put in place to stop or redress this behavior are exactly what just got waived. ... in the course of their official duties?
How do you prove they were acting OUTSIDE their "official duties" when you can't bring the legal system to bear?
As WP and the law itself clearly states, agents of International Organizations are immune from prosecution for official acts only.
Since they and their property are immune from suits, how does an ordinary citizen protect himself from them, obtain redress if they have damaged him by their illegal behavior, or even determine that they have committed a crime so he can beg a federal prosecutor to act?
While it is true that Cheney was probably not at fault, there's also the fact that Cheney and co. delayed reporting the incident until his blood-alcohol level had plenty of time to drop. Which would be a crime in itself, if I had done it.
I have never heard of any state where there was a requirement to report such accidents within a given amount of time.
(I suppose you could claim it was obstruction of justice IF his blood alcohol WAS up and he delayed deliberately to avoid testing positive. But there'd be no crime if it wasn't and you'd have to prove it was up to prosecute - catch 22.)
If you want an example of an actual case similar to what was alleged about Cheney, consider Lake County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Russell Purdock, who (allegedly while drunk - and later run around by buddies until he could sober up) ran his speedboat at 45-50 MPH (in the dark) over a sailboat - after which the prosecutor went after the operator of the sailboat. (Prosecutor claims the sailboaters were drunk and running without lights. Witnesses say the lights were on and an investigator says the lights were on before the crash and out after because the crash shorted the wiring - leaving evidence of this in the form of cut wires and a blown fuse, if I recall correctly.)
Well that just makes no sense. If you were effectively offering higher than contract rates of pay, I don't know a single contractor who would turn that down. I've done a lot of contracting, and would always have been willing to take such an offer.
And I've done a lot of contracting and DID take such offers - with lower salary but startup equity. Contracting means you pay your own benefits and have lots of other extra costs so a (far) lower salary with a good bennies package is not a hardship - especially if accompanied by a reasonable spin of the stock-option roulette wheel.
It's not like the employment contract comes with some long term commitment that you can't back out of. Yours must have been a really exceptional case ... did you have some problem with your work environment maybe?
Or perhaps your employment contract's I.P. and/or non-compete provisions were too restrictive - like to a career killing level. Why don't you look over the boilerplate your lawyer laid down? Contractors value having the option to move on and do NOT contracts that turn them into serfs.
(California I.P. employment law is a big reason the Silicon Valley phenomenon happened here and has been so hard to replicate elsewhere: If you invent something that is not in your company's business plan and they don't want to pursue it - and you didn't do it on company time or with company resources (which would be hard to prove anyhow) - YOU own the idea, regardless of what the employment contract says. You can get together with a couple buddies, raise some seed capital, walk out, set up shop across the street, and develop it.)
There's much to your first paragraphs' claim. But you picked the wrong example:
That's why Cheney can shoot a man in the face, and get away with it.
As I understand it ( I wasn't invited B-) ) the guy walked out in front of the firing line while Cheney was shooting (and thus focussed on his target), making it an honest accident. Yes you're supposed to be sure of your target. But Cheney apparently checked properly before focusing down and people DO screw up
The guy who got shot concurred with this, as did the cops. But these things always get investigated just to be sure. And the other interpretation is such a nice fit to the news media's and opposition politicians' templates that it got promulgated regardless.
Now you can always twist a tinfoil hat down tighter and claim that this was a coverup and proves your point. But why bother (unless you want to rag on Cheney, now with his hands OFF most of the levers of power, for some other reason)? There are plenty of REAL and UNAMBIGUOUS examples you could use.
(As for me, while my politics is about as different from Cheney's as Ron Paul's are from Bush's, I wouldn't decline an invitation to do some recreational shooting with him out of concern for my safety.)
Back in the day I used to help a vet implant zebra embryos in horses.
Speaking of equines, I'm hoping this will be tried with Quaggas for the extinct DNA donors.
Zebras are essentially a striped wild donkey that is essentially not domesticable. Quaggas were an apparently a close relative that domesticated just fine and were quite useful. But they were allowed to go extinct in the mid 1800s, when the wild ones were hunted to extinction and contact with other parts of the world led the farmers who used quaggas to switch to other equines (think "fad").
Ought to be reasonably easy to pull this with zebras or donkeys for the egg donors and hosts, reconstructing the lost species (for potential breeding and mule-making programs later). There's already a project to "breed them back" from the plains zebra (which they are really a variant of) and there are 23 known stuffed-and-mounted specimens.
[The nuclear DNA is so high a percentage etc. that a DNA-only transplant might be considered a full reconstruction.]
Also: They can always clone the mitochondrial DNA into something suitable (like goats again) and later harvest eggs with the right mitochondria, insert DNA from members of a wrong-mitochondira reconstruction, and produce new clones with both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of the species to be recovered.
Fly in the ointment might be if the co-evolving mitochondrial and nuclear DNA had diverged sufficiently between the egg donor and extinct species that the communication between the cell and the mitochondria is hosed and you can't get a viable reconstruction with nuclear DNA only. But this communication is sufficiently simple and conserved that this seems unlikely. You start from a host egg of a closely-related species to avoid a vast number of similar potential screwups between the donor egg's existing machinery (or the host mother's biology ditto) and the implanted DNA's version of the same systems, any of which might make the effort fail. The mitochondria are just one more of the donor's systems (which happens to have its own DNA.)
I take it you never heard the radio ads for "nature's healthy trinity" (an intestinal flora repopulating capsule product consisting of three bacterial lines that you'll find in most brands of yogurt.)
In fact many brands of yogurt contain five beneficial bacterial lines and are a fine way to repopulate your gut if the antibiotics (or "colon cleansing") have thrown the population out of balance.
Look, the plot is basically Dances with Wolves in Space,
Really?
The trailer I saw made it look like "evil corporation hires government and/or mercenaries to clean out the natives in order to seize their resources while not even attempting to rationalize this for PR". That sounded like a cross between Smurfs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Blinky Bill (save us from the wood chip mill).
Either way I don't plan to see it. All that great graphics and they use it to push politically-correct stereotypes until any chance of enjoying the film is gone.
Got flying islands (without settlements by the natives) because of the Mcguffin substance? Why not just snag some of those and stuff 'em in a refinery? (Answer: No story...)
Unfortunately, nickel-iron batteries aren't all that efficient. Their charging voltage is considerably higher than their discharging voltage and they also leak more stored power than, say, lead-acids. They're not what you want for storing line power for occasional outages unless you can afford the cost of the lost power.
Upside is that they last virtually forever. So if you have, say, a renewable-energy powered site with a considerable surplus of power on the average (such as micro-hydro that's not TOO micro), they can cut your long-term costs and maintenance requirements drastically. But if you're paying for grid power or even more per KWHr for solar panels or windmills, you'll probably be ahead to size the sources a bit lower and replace lead-acids every decade or so.
Let's see what the lifetime of this gadget is if/when it arrives. I understand the lifetime issue is a solved problem. (One solution uses buckytubes for the substrate of the electrode that oxidizes and is responsible for older generation Lithium batteries' relatively short (and fixed) lifetimes. The tubes only oxidize at the ends, and very slowly, so they last a LONG time.)
The new fast-charge Lithium designs are far more energy efficient than lead-acid. If this is a decade-or-better lifetime device, isn't overpriced (fat chance with a Japanese company...), isn't displaced by something even better, and actually makes it to market, it could displace lead-acids for renewable-energy power storage and make additional sites cross the cost-breakeven barrier for RE versus grid power.
I was doing contract programming at one of the auto companies, in a plant that made "bumper shocks" along with other parts, when a defective weld caused one to fire its piston through an assembly line worker in another plant and killed him. The whole plant was in mourning. (And thank goodness I was in a different product line...)
Gently stopping a 5mph car in a matter of inches, without incurring driving-safety-imparing damage, requires very large and very-well-controlled forces. Bumper shock absorbers (at least that model) are (extremely) pressurized with nitrogen, to keep the fluids in the correct place and act as an initial "spring" during the first part of the travel in a crash, before the fluid friction is ramped up. If the weld holding the piston in fails you have a good approximation to a high-powered pistol firing a large slug.
Of course the manufacturers try REALLY HARD to make sure the welds and the cylinders are solid, given the possible damages if one fails. So getting one to fail in the field is tough. But any manufacturing process (short of single-atom-placement-and-check nanotech and maybe even that) can be expected to have a few defective parts slip through inspection.
What is truly depressing is that Americans didn't learn a damn thing from their own mistakes in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and the mistakes of all the Empires past: ...
Trust me: Lots (the bulk) of Americans learned the lessons just fine. And we're well aware of Afghanistan's nickname: The Graveyard of Empires.
Unfortunately, our ruling class still thinks it can use the war as an excuse to expand its own power and wealth (at far greater cost to the rest of the nation). They don't yet believe they've come to the point that the damage will exceed the profit in THEIR cases and that it's thus time to pull the plug.
What's happening now is that the factions of the bulk of the American population are realizing the ruling class has finally cut the government off from the population's control and is pushing it into a runaway failure mode. So they're organizing to attempt to bring said ruling class to heel (in the hopes of heading off the need for more drastic solutions, with their higher costs and still greater risks in case of failure).
Thus the excitement at the town-hall meetings. And thus the two flavors of the Tea Party movement - coming out of the Libertarian / Paulite and the Paleo-conservative factions - and the recent overtures from the anti-war factions of the left wing for an alliance with them.
Interesting times.
Well to keep with the unix philisophy of small reusable components the following should be done:
[8 bullet items deleted]
And just as with any other aircraft-related project, when the weight of the documentation exceeds the weight of the aircraft it will be ready to fly.
The issue with the theory is that it violates the Newtonian rule of conservation of momentum.
No it doesn't. As Maxwell figured out long ago, EM field can carry momentum.
But in doing so they propagate away, rather than vanishing in the mutual-annihilation of the quantum-vacuum virtual particles.
This implies that the energy they apply will break the cancellation of the virtual particle pair enough to leave a photon behind, propagating away with the other half of the (conserved) momentum. (Perhaps this would be the result of bremsstrahlung as they accelerate the virtual particles before they zap out.) This would fix both momentum and mass-energy conservation.
If so they've just found another way to make a quantum light source (or even a laser, if it amplifies similar photons).
This invention, if it pans out, would be more like a propeller for spacecraft, pushed by and pushing against the short-lived particles that spring in and out of existence in vacuum. I have to imagine that the amount of thrust would be minuscule, but not having to carry reaction mass would be a huge advantage.
Which makes me wonder if you'd end up with a particle beam to "react against" as a result.
Virtual particle pairs can exist because they mutually-annihilate with a lifetime so short the product of it with their masses is less than the uncertainty principle limit. If nothing interacts with them meanwhile their "values" all cancel out in the annihilation, leaving nothing. But if your device interacts with (one or both of) them, in a way that changes its own momentum, it also changes the momentum of the virtual particles. If they then annihilate without leaving something behind you've broken conservation of momentum.
Things interacting with virtual particles sufficiently energetically can do things like separate them, preventing (or modifying) the annihilation, leaving the particles (or some hunk of them) behind, and consuming enough energy to "create" the particle pair (or whatever) left behind.
(If I have these right...) Example: Pair forms near an event horizon, one falls in (giving the other enough energy to escape). Result: Hawking radiation. (The one falling in is preferentially an anti-particle for something inside the hole, and thus the hole eventually decays.) Another example: Consider an energetic nucleus which can't quite break apart due to a potential barrier. A pair forms on the high part of the potential barrier. The antiparticle for a particle (or fraction of it) trying to escape is sucked in and zaps its new partner instead of the original, while the equivalent particle flies away on the outside of the barrier. Result: Beta decay. (The nucleus has no "clock". Instead the random nature of the vacuum fluctuations gives a constant probability per unit time of the virtual particle pair happening in just the right way, leading to the long-term exponential decay.)
I'd be willing to bet that, if this DOES work, the energy input will result in some reaction with the virtual particles that prevents their total mutual-annihilation. Instead some residue particle(s) will be "created" and propagate away in the direction opposite the thrust. Thus will both momentum and mass-energy be conserved. And the machinery will produce a very energetic beam of something for an "exhaust".
But I'd LOVE it if this proves to be incorrect. (Or if the "beam" is dark matter, or the interaction somehow ends up transferred as a push against the rest of the mass of the universe as a whole, as gravity radiation pushing/pulling on whatever it hits - resulting in an inverse-square "pressor" or "tractor" beam, etc.)
... this approach on the other hand involves stimulating existing nerve cells to row more axons which are the electrical connections between nerve cells.
Which is particularly interesting because (if I understand it correctly) the initial growth of a long axon involves the nerve cell starting where the axon will end, crawling amoeba-style to the vicinity where the (multiple) dendrites will hook up while stringing the axon out behind it, then settling in and putting out the web of dendrites and making synapses for the incoming signals and logic.
This implies a second mechanism for re-wiring a new axon when the old one gets cut. (Though perhaps it's a longer-range variant on a usually short-range mechanism for hooking up the axon locally at the start of the cable-stringing process.)
So, just before the cancer kill you, you get smart enough to cure it?
This has been used as a plot element for a graphic novel character (at least once). See "Empowered" by Alan Moore.
Caution: Graphics and dialog are not safe for work.
I just don't get it-- seems like the whole benefit of an e-reader is to remove the need for old-style publishers.
And that's the key.
This is an old-style publisher trying to avoid being eliminated and bankrupted as the readers desert old-style publishers for new-style "content delivered electronically" (publisherese for text documents).
By trojan-horsing a "publisher-freindly" e-book reader he hopes to hang on to some of the future market.
IMHO even if he could have gotten away with it he doomed his project by letting the readers know up front that the engineering is being done with the publishers' interest prioritized above the theirs.
But who knows? Maybe it will have enough bells and whistles, a good enough initial cost structure and advertising campaign, and/or enough desirable exclusive content (ala VHS drubbing Betamax) that he'll acquire a following.
Learning to use the "man" command is important, ...
But only SOME of it is in "man". (And "man/apropos" is polluted by the enormous number of X subroutines documented there for people writing X clients.)
Some is in html hypertext that can be reached by various "help" keys scattered around menus and applications.
Some is in "info" - a legacy text-based hypertext browser from the GNU project. (You have to navigate it with emacs-style keystrokes, rather than using a browser (though I've seen browser-based access to it in a redhat distribution).) When an "info" documented application has a man page at all it typically is very sketchy and says it may be out of date and non-canonical, with the real document in info. (I'm a vi-thian rather than an emax-ian so info's navigation system bugs me considerably.)
IMHO "info" documents should have been ported to html by now and a single, perhaps browser-like, interface to ALL the documentation (not just parts of it) with decent navigation, indexing/indices, and find features, should be available in any given linux distribution (preferably all of them) and MADE OBVIOUS to newbies.
= = = =
When trying to learn the system itself, a bigger problem even than the flaky and scattered documentation is the lack of "breadcrumbs" in the graphic interfaces to the various configuration tools, which give you no idea what configuration files they manipulate and what they do to them. This interface-candy acts as a barrier to learning the guts. Linux (and its collection of system daemons and their related file arrangements) was historically administered by direct configuration file editing. But linux configuration file arrangement and daemon compliment is enough different from the other unixes that internals lore learned on the latter doesn't always transfer well.