PS: I read the author's intended meaning, but the statement is very ambiguous,there's really no right/wrong way to read it. It could be fixed by changing it to something like "There are 64 ways to arrange 4 letters into codons". Reading comprehension is a valuable skill but so it clear expression. A well written piece has the ability to communicate concepts accurately and unambiguously to a broad range of comprehension skills (even if it's aimed at a specialised audience).
But let's not be too harsh, Slashdot summaries are written by amateurs, I don't mean that as an insult, I've posted a couple of my own amateur summaries. The author of this summary is probably kicking himself over his choice of words - repeat that exercise often and the quality will improve. Communication skills are not something geeks are renowned for, which is a shame since most are worth listening to. At 55 I'm still tyring to improve mine, I was in the top 5% of Aussie school kids for reading comprehension when at HS (my English teacher thought my friend and I had cheated, lol). I just assumed that meant I was good at writing too, it wasn't until I went to uni at age 30 that I realised my English teacher was right to be skeptical, my writing skills really were inadequate.
It's easy to practice what you enjoy like (say) programming, it's much harder finding enthusiasm to practice what your not so good at. In my 20+yrs experience as a software developer, this is why so many geeks have trouble communicating with "suits". They wrongly assume that what they write is comprehensible because they wrote it, and if you can't comprehend it then you must be either ignorant or a "moron".
Agreed, reading comprehension is harder than it sounds, however the summary does say. " there are 64 ways of combining four letters". The first time I read the summary my brain auto-corrected it to "three" without letting me know. I had to go back and re-read the summary to see where the first post got 4^4 from.
A new species is _only_ formed when one line is split into two lines.
Yes, but pinpointing the "split", is quite a problem. You don't need fossils to show this 'problem', it can be seen in what are known as "ring species" that are alive today.
Basically one species spreads both directions along a circular geological boundary. Despite the fact that all individuals along the expanding route can breed with the different races on either side of them, when the two expanding ends of the population meet at the other side of the boundary, they have become distinct species that can no longer interbreed. There is no point along the genetic line where the species forked, yet fork they did since each "end" of the route is a different species.
Another more linear example (like the fossil record) are the changes that occur as a species expands it's range up a tall mountain, there's a continuum of slight genetic variations from the species at the bottom of the mountain to the (different) species at the top. Again, there is no point on the genetic continuum where it can be said the species "split".
Same thing with the second amendment, there was no such thing as an assault rifle, RPG, machine gun, hand grenade, ICBM, bazooka, etc. These are all "arms" but were not even imagined at the time so they can't possibly have been considered by the people who wrote the 2nd.. Think about it, how many minute men with muskets and horse drawn cannons would it take to stop a couple of dedicated teenagers in a fully loaded off-road assault vehicle. The people who founded the US were intelligent (many were scientifically trained), they were obviously good men with good intentions (by the standards of the day). However nobody, not even Ben Franklin, had that kind of foresight when they put pen to paper and spelt out their vision of a "good as it gets" society.
The reason codifying morality never quite works is that morality is an innate emotional response akin to our sense of taste or smell. God did not carve it in stone and tell us to obey "or else", rather we felt it so strongly that we attempted to set it in stone to convince others to obey, that kind of "blueprint for society" has been extraordinarily successful over the last 2k years or so, in fact I cannot think of any civilization at any point in time does not revolve around a relatively short primary set of rules.
What the constitution does for a nation is lay down a pre-defined cultural morality with proscribed punishments and rewards that (if you're lucky) can be tweaked to fit the physical and psychological needs of the people well beyond the point where the original culture and morality that gave birth to the constitution no longer exist (eg: Jefferson is seen as a "founding father" but would not be allowed to own 700 slaves these days, even though he was considered a generous and benevolent slave owner by many of his own slaves.
Yep, the key is to give the various levels the various levels the power to watch each other, like the various branches of government within a state are meant to "balance" power and put a "check" on overreach. Civilization is an invention, we evolved to live in groups of a couple of hundred and that's why a small town can usually organise and take care of itself quite well. Our brains simply can't handle (let alone care about) all the individuals in a million strong city. Every human society if hierarchical, it's the only hammer we have to build civilizations. Yes it's possible to think of different ways of building civilizations, but in practice our tribal instincts always win the day.
It spread an average of 2km day, people can and do walk faster and further than that on a daily basis, it wasn't just the speed difference between human legs and Toyota wheels, it was simply that most people did not travel, period. Travelling anywhere your face was unknown was exceedingly dangerous and the king's men who patrolled the roads and woods normally frowned upon peasants wandering around the countryside by themselves, if you were in the woods for no good reason then you were a poacher, if you were out on the road for no good reason you were either a highwayman or an unwelcome Gypsy (Queen Elizabeth's the 1st name for Egyptians). Most people were farmers or servants of one kind or another, they worked their arse off for the landlord for the privilege of living on the lord's land and using the lord's market place/village. In short systematic economic slavery across all of Europe was the norm before the industrial revolution, Victorian era factories full of kids may look unbelievably inhumane to modern eyes but they were a godsend to the majority of peasants who were living and working in even harsher conditions.
Not sure when it changed and it probably changed in different places at different times. The ordinary peasant didn't go anywhere, Noblemen and Lords owned all land, they did not like their peasant wandering from one village to the next and they certainly didn't like peasants hunting game on "crown land". Today crown land is public land, back then it belonged to the crown and they were not willing to share with anyone, particularly a lowly peasant. Peasants worked/mined the land, they were allowed to keep just enough for themselves to keep them alive.
The effects of this are still with us, there are hundreds of different accents across the UK, there at least half a dozen in Yorkshire alone. That only happens when groups don't talk to each other regularly. This doesn't mean everyone was isolated, wealthy merchants, priests, and the upper class were free to come and go as they pleased. These were the people in society who owned the land and everything on it, including the peasants.
I think the end of that way of life came with the cotton mills in Manchester and surrounds. People started flocking to cities for jobs in the mills, much the same way as modern day Chinese have flocked to the new industrial cities over the last 40yrs. the crossroads of England, Ireland and Scotland is where the original Luddite movement was formed and it's no coincidence that's also where the industrial revolution started, Luddites were basically rich folk, they weren't religious nutters fighting progress they were fighting other rich folk who's factories were "stealing" their peasant workers.
Do you recall that Mr. Greenwald's lover was carrying electronic copies of many documents with him, as well as a scribbled note with the password?
Yes, I also seem to recall the UK government "probed" Mr Greenwald's lover for 8-9 hour before letting him thru the border. Pretty sure they wouldn't have done that if they had found a "spy". What Snowden did was most certainly illegal. I'm not so sure it was "wrong", but I'm sure as hell that baying for his crucifixion based on what been reported so far is immoral. .
Having said that I think there' more than political "coincidence" to the timing. Just prior to it hitting the news Obama was loudly beating his chest telling the world he was "not going to put up with cyber spying from China". The meeting was supposed to be a big deal, Obama was going to get tough with "cyber-spies", the meeting was blown off the front pages by the Snowden story. Talk about "egg meets face", the US tried to claim the moral high ground by loudly proclaiming it was China who was spying on everyone, it's my contention the Chinese responded by pulling Uncle Sam's pants down in front of the whole world (politically speaking).
When you look at the political powerhouses on the planet, Russia, US, EU and China, it's China (a federation of ancient empires) that shows the most unity at the top and given it's miraculous economic rise from famines to fortunes over the last 40yrs they have very strong support amongst the people. "Good", "evil", "apathetic", doesn't matter what kind of empire/republic it is, unity will win the day when push turns to shove..
AFAIK, that's the way the majority of Journals operate, most don't care that the author will hand out electronic copies to anyone who asks, many will post it on their university's web site. It's an anachronism these days, it was originally aimed at stopping other journals from just copying and printing the good stuff after other had gone to the trouble of reviewing it. Academic publishing is a two way street the academics and journals need each other because "publish or perish" applies to both sides. Because of this symbiotic relationship journals are not widely regarded as "greedy capitalists", sure subscriptions are expensive compared to (say) people magazine, but if you pay peanuts for a job then only monkeys are going to apply.
Having said that. The GP has every right to be cautiously optimistic and somewhat cynical. It's an extraordinary claim, but regardless of it's pedigree, a solitary paper with the ink still drying is not extraordinary evidence.
Why should WHEN you sleep matter. Night or day, as long as you get the needed sleep.
Some people may simply have a more efficient "cleaning" system, and need less sleep.
But I have other concerns with this finding, because it suggests this fluid replacement only
occurs when the brain is not awake, yet we know that there is vast amounts of neural activity
when the brain is asleep and dreaming.
Why should WHEN you sleep matter.
Give shift work a go, not just for a couple of days, try it for a few years. It's like a permanent hang over only without the headache. However I agree, according to MRI scans the brain is actually MORE active during sleep than when it's awake, and not just during dreaming. It's an interesting finding but the "hypothesis" in the summary doesn't make sense to me either, nor can I see anything that resembles it in the abstract. Perhaps the "hypothesis" is just the submitter's speculation?
And you can't even be mad at this one since it is done by undergrads.
Yes, actually you can....
Seriously, a press beat up about a bunch of collage kids screwing up their class science project makes you "mad"? - And who are you mad at? - Strangely it's not the "journalist" who manufactured the beat up, it's the kids!! Little wonder the American public are so easily manipulated via their own media outlets.
OTOH, if you wire a rats pleasure center up to a lever it can pull to give itself pleasure, the sucker will hang on to that lever until it dies of exhaustion.
People have short memories. The "smoking gun" was that infamous memo that wasn't acted upon, that's where "national security" was compromised, it was in no way a keystone cops screw up, it was a "noob" mistake at the highest level. Yes, the buck stopped on the presidents desk but in this case it shouldn't have. It should have been promptly delegated to the appropriate TLA for further action.
Clinton and his battle hardened adviser Clarke were fools to be obsessed by a rich, disgruntled, ex-CIA partisan called Bin-Laden, remember? That other rich, disgruntled, ex-CIA partisan, Saddam, the one who tried to kill Bush's daddy, he was the real threat, remember? Come to think of it, I take that back, it wasn't a "noob mistake", it was an extreme over-abundance of hubris on behalf of a new administration. When they fell asleep at the wheel the shit hit the fan. Their response to the splattering sound was by contrast prompt, well executed, and largely effective. After consulting a story about a goat for seven whole minutes, they turned around and shot the messengers they had foolishly ignored.
Every new generation is "shocked" by the same old "revelation", Nixon, McCarthy, Hoover, Kissinger, these names mean fuck all to anyone under 30.
after Al Qaeda showed everyone how infiltration can really be done
I guess you must have missed the UK's efforts in the lead up to WW2, planting Cambridge teenagers amongst the ranks of Hitler's brown-shirts not long after they formed. . Not to mention the European resistance efforts during the war, or the sinking of the German U boat fleet via deception (MITM hack by the legendary Alan Turing), or the ambush at the battle of midway which was also a result of a MITM hack of enemy comms at the highest level.
The contribution of soot to climate change is dwarfed by our GHG and aerosols emissions, however it would have been much higher in the mid 20th century before clean air laws were instituted throughout the western world. Some soot lands on ice and speeds up the melt as you describe but most of the soot falls directly into the ocean which absorbs the extra heat it is carrying. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, it is steadily warming due to our efforts, it's temperature defines the type of climate we have. Due to it's sheer size it has an immense thermal inertia, even without humans it will continue to warm for at least another 50yrs just to reach thermal equilibrium with the current +/-ve climate forcing from humans. The rise in ocean temps over the next 50yrs will represent the human induced climate forcings of the last half of the 20th century.
The economic equation is fairly simple, spend the next 50yrs replacing the vast bulk of the dirty energy infrastructure built over the last 50yrs with clean infrastructure solar/wind/nuke/tidal/geothermal/did I leave someone's pet project out?). By mid-century we are no longer changing the climate, by the end of the century the climate has reached a new stable thermal equilibrium, which, all things being equal will slowly cool down to pre-industrial temps in a millennia or two by absorbing the extra carbon into the Earth's crust.
The ability of the Earth's crust to absorb the extra carbon would be severely curtailed if the oceans became too acidic for shellfish to grows shells, but at that point the Earth's surface will look like an overworked goat farm and it will make little difference to the goat herders who survive the rapidly accelerating "sixth great extinction" we are experiencing today.
Sure it will cost a gazillion dollars to replace that infrastructure but we've already spent that building the current infrastructure, and since coal plants don't last forever we will be doing it all over again in the next 50yrs anyway. Civilization has outgrown coal like we outgrew the horse and cart, it's time to push the luddites, vested interests and useful idiots back into the political wilderness where they belong. It's time to put engineers in the driver's seat, preferably arrogant showmen like Edison, Jobs, Gates, who can assemble other people's inventions into a viable industry.
My personal favourite is hydrogen fuel cells for most portable energy needs such as cars, you could also use you car to supply several homes with electricity, or just build a fuel cell generator into the home, we can get rid of a lot of the fragile wiring that blocks out the modern sky, no more wide area blackouts every time the wind changes direction. But there's not much point doing that unless you can produce bulk hydrogen cleanly cheaper than you can produce it the dirty way. Doing it with sunlight or wind is a great example of a closed loop. H2O + energy => H2 + O2 => H20, the troposphere is more or less chemically saturated with H2O so it simply falls back into the ocean within a week or two. So if we are really lucky the 22nd century will be warm and damp and the mass migrations inland will have ceased.
I'm old, I don't need to gossip to let people know what I think. If I don't like someone then they know it and so does everyone else, at no point do I need to say a bad word about the object of my loathing. However I also realise gossip is a basic human behaviour that is impossible to avoid. Without it society would not function because "gossip" is just another word for "peer pressure", without gossip there is no social pressure to conform, and without some level of conformity there's no cooperation.
Yep, basic social protocols haven't changed in a long time. My grandpa would have summed it up with something like "Don't air dirty laundry in public". or maybe "take the fight outside". She used SciAm because it had the broadest reach, she was out to crucify this guy's reputation and kill his career, which he may well deserve. However by using, as opposed to asking, SciAm to build the cross for her she has abandoned the moral high ground and picked a undignified and unprofessional gutter brawl in SciAM's show room. Go to any testosterone fuelled work site and you will find both people in a fight will be looking at the sack, you will also see other workers try to pull them apart before "the boss sees it". In another words she failed to show basic self restraint in public when quietly provoked in private, she lacks the dignity and manners that even "Bubba the slaughterman" displays while he's on the clock.
Natural justice would see both of them out of the journalistic trade, but an "undignified and unprofessional gutter brawl" does have a way of attracting a crowd.;)
This is why responsibility is ASSIGNED and not assumed.
Personal responsibility: The act of ASSIGNING responsibility to one's self. Now it is time for you to inject a thesaurus into your bookshelf.
BTW: The "deterministic" universe at our scale is built on a foundation of perfect randomness, "reality" is a probability curve that in practice can only be calculated by watching it happen. The subtle paradox about perfect randomness is that perfect randomness has a predictable behaviour. Mind predictably emerges from matter like cyclones predictably emerge from tropical seas, they are both specific patterns in matter that survive for fleeting moments and then dissipate. There is no point to it, you are free to impose your own meaning, if you have one.
Zoloft + alcohol = a fucked up, suicidal personality. I've seen 5 families wrecked over the last 10yrs, 2 ended up in jail. I've also seen Zoloft help people but none of those were drinkers. Alcohol lowers inhibition, Zoloft lowers anxiety. You need some anxiety to tell yourself that what your doing is potentially wrong/dangerous, you need some inhibitions to stop you from compulsively acting out every thought. A good doctor knows all this and will train his patients to self-monitor their anxiety levels while on the drug, sadly far too many try to make it "go away" with a script.
From a pragmatic developer's POV I'd say the invisible hand is still stroking Microsoft's cock because "the market" says MS Office is as "good as it gets" for now. For better or worse, by hook or by crook, Office is embedded in the corporate environment. Today, you still need Office to communicate with corporate customers who don't give a flying fuck what else you do, they just want you to read the word document and fill out the excel spread sheet they sent you.
So while I don't like the way MS gained their monopoly, they were held to account long ago through the courts. From a pragmatic business POV, I have to agree with today's CIO's, given the environment they would have to be insane to stop buying Office licenses. That sort of bravery is best left to governments who have a big influence on electronic document formats because for many corporations the government is also their biggest customer. Which leads me to believe that eventually governments will define standard document formats with the same rigour they define standard weights and measures. Personally I think we are not ready for that yet since significant improvements are still occurring at a rapid pace.
The market is still working out these sort of issues and slowly defining what "electronic document" means, the government has an important role to play in ensuring the result is something that "raises all boats". Governments were early adopters of electronic communications, their choices propelled the Office and Adobe boats into orbit. In many ways both products deserved their reward. But soon they will have to step down from the podium in much the same way the railroad barons did.
What we have gained from the evolution of electronic documents since the WordStar generation has concentrated wealth into new hands but at the same time it has brought about a genuine technological revolution in human communications which is just as significant as the invention of the printing press and may eventually be seen as up there with the invention of writing itself. For a simple example, when I was a kid the Jetsons was a big hit, but adults also speculated that one day robots would build things and serve us, nobody really suspected they would replace the vast majority of (say) bank tellers within their own life time.
Theoretically this is supposed to give us more leisure time but in practice it just raises our standard of living by allowing us to do more with the same amount of time. (assuming you're lucky enough to live somewhere with humane labour laws).
Humans still communicate emotions with screams, hoots, moans and laughter like other great apes do, sometime in the last 100Kyrs we started talking and our obscure species suddenly (geologically speaking) shot to the top of the food chain. The change in the geological record is as dramatic as the Cambrian explosion - only in reverse. Most of those changes have been concentrated into the last 500yrs or so, on face value the geological record of the advent of humans looks like an asteroid strike, the only lasting thing that gives it away as human activity is the fact that asteroids with high levels of plutonium and plastic are exceedingly rare.
Language gave us the ability to organise, plan and share experiences at the tribal level, writing notched it up to the civilization level, printing made two way communication available to millions of citizens and educated foreigners', each of these events lead to significant changes in the way humans organise their societies (most notably the size and complexity of tasks that could be undertaken by significantly larger groups of people). The internet will, or already has, reached N-to-N communication at the species level. I believe it will rapidly overtake and outperform religion in it's role of unifying people's across political/cultural borders.
I'm in my 50's, I think the next century will see a spectacular jump in human capabilities and it will be as a direct result of the internet's potential for new
That was actually a serious concern before we started blowing up Pacific islands for practice. It was thought that the bomb could trigger a chain reaction that fused all of the Nitrogen in the atmosphere in one very brief but spectacular flash of high energy radiation. Contrary to what some have claimed the boffins on the Manhattan project did not just cross their fingers and light the fuse, they rigorously demonstrated that it could not happen long before they had a working bomb. It's actually quite an interesting historical story and well worth a browsing in WP (ie: I can't be bothered looking it up and posting the links for you;)
Slashdot Mirror
PS: I read the author's intended meaning, but the statement is very ambiguous,there's really no right/wrong way to read it. It could be fixed by changing it to something like "There are 64 ways to arrange 4 letters into codons". Reading comprehension is a valuable skill but so it clear expression. A well written piece has the ability to communicate concepts accurately and unambiguously to a broad range of comprehension skills (even if it's aimed at a specialised audience).
But let's not be too harsh, Slashdot summaries are written by amateurs, I don't mean that as an insult, I've posted a couple of my own amateur summaries. The author of this summary is probably kicking himself over his choice of words - repeat that exercise often and the quality will improve. Communication skills are not something geeks are renowned for, which is a shame since most are worth listening to. At 55 I'm still tyring to improve mine, I was in the top 5% of Aussie school kids for reading comprehension when at HS (my English teacher thought my friend and I had cheated, lol). I just assumed that meant I was good at writing too, it wasn't until I went to uni at age 30 that I realised my English teacher was right to be skeptical, my writing skills really were inadequate.
It's easy to practice what you enjoy like (say) programming, it's much harder finding enthusiasm to practice what your not so good at. In my 20+yrs experience as a software developer, this is why so many geeks have trouble communicating with "suits". They wrongly assume that what they write is comprehensible because they wrote it, and if you can't comprehend it then you must be either ignorant or a "moron".
Agreed, reading comprehension is harder than it sounds, however the summary does say. " there are 64 ways of combining four letters". The first time I read the summary my brain auto-corrected it to "three" without letting me know. I had to go back and re-read the summary to see where the first post got 4^4 from.
A new species is _only_ formed when one line is split into two lines.
Yes, but pinpointing the "split", is quite a problem. You don't need fossils to show this 'problem', it can be seen in what are known as "ring species" that are alive today.
Basically one species spreads both directions along a circular geological boundary. Despite the fact that all individuals along the expanding route can breed with the different races on either side of them, when the two expanding ends of the population meet at the other side of the boundary, they have become distinct species that can no longer interbreed. There is no point along the genetic line where the species forked, yet fork they did since each "end" of the route is a different species.
Another more linear example (like the fossil record) are the changes that occur as a species expands it's range up a tall mountain, there's a continuum of slight genetic variations from the species at the bottom of the mountain to the (different) species at the top. Again, there is no point on the genetic continuum where it can be said the species "split".
Same thing with the second amendment, there was no such thing as an assault rifle, RPG, machine gun, hand grenade, ICBM, bazooka, etc. These are all "arms" but were not even imagined at the time so they can't possibly have been considered by the people who wrote the 2nd.. Think about it, how many minute men with muskets and horse drawn cannons would it take to stop a couple of dedicated teenagers in a fully loaded off-road assault vehicle. The people who founded the US were intelligent (many were scientifically trained), they were obviously good men with good intentions (by the standards of the day). However nobody, not even Ben Franklin, had that kind of foresight when they put pen to paper and spelt out their vision of a "good as it gets" society.
The reason codifying morality never quite works is that morality is an innate emotional response akin to our sense of taste or smell. God did not carve it in stone and tell us to obey "or else", rather we felt it so strongly that we attempted to set it in stone to convince others to obey, that kind of "blueprint for society" has been extraordinarily successful over the last 2k years or so, in fact I cannot think of any civilization at any point in time does not revolve around a relatively short primary set of rules.
What the constitution does for a nation is lay down a pre-defined cultural morality with proscribed punishments and rewards that (if you're lucky) can be tweaked to fit the physical and psychological needs of the people well beyond the point where the original culture and morality that gave birth to the constitution no longer exist (eg: Jefferson is seen as a "founding father" but would not be allowed to own 700 slaves these days, even though he was considered a generous and benevolent slave owner by many of his own slaves.
Everyone votes for the whole pile of pork in order to keep the one program that actually benefits them personally.
Now your getting it, welcome to democracy, one for all and all for oneself. Worst system ever, apart from all the others.
Yep, the key is to give the various levels the various levels the power to watch each other, like the various branches of government within a state are meant to "balance" power and put a "check" on overreach. Civilization is an invention, we evolved to live in groups of a couple of hundred and that's why a small town can usually organise and take care of itself quite well. Our brains simply can't handle (let alone care about) all the individuals in a million strong city. Every human society if hierarchical, it's the only hammer we have to build civilizations. Yes it's possible to think of different ways of building civilizations, but in practice our tribal instincts always win the day.
It spread an average of 2km day, people can and do walk faster and further than that on a daily basis, it wasn't just the speed difference between human legs and Toyota wheels, it was simply that most people did not travel, period. Travelling anywhere your face was unknown was exceedingly dangerous and the king's men who patrolled the roads and woods normally frowned upon peasants wandering around the countryside by themselves, if you were in the woods for no good reason then you were a poacher, if you were out on the road for no good reason you were either a highwayman or an unwelcome Gypsy (Queen Elizabeth's the 1st name for Egyptians). Most people were farmers or servants of one kind or another, they worked their arse off for the landlord for the privilege of living on the lord's land and using the lord's market place/village. In short systematic economic slavery across all of Europe was the norm before the industrial revolution, Victorian era factories full of kids may look unbelievably inhumane to modern eyes but they were a godsend to the majority of peasants who were living and working in even harsher conditions.
Not sure when it changed and it probably changed in different places at different times. The ordinary peasant didn't go anywhere, Noblemen and Lords owned all land, they did not like their peasant wandering from one village to the next and they certainly didn't like peasants hunting game on "crown land". Today crown land is public land, back then it belonged to the crown and they were not willing to share with anyone, particularly a lowly peasant. Peasants worked/mined the land, they were allowed to keep just enough for themselves to keep them alive.
The effects of this are still with us, there are hundreds of different accents across the UK, there at least half a dozen in Yorkshire alone. That only happens when groups don't talk to each other regularly. This doesn't mean everyone was isolated, wealthy merchants, priests, and the upper class were free to come and go as they pleased. These were the people in society who owned the land and everything on it, including the peasants.
I think the end of that way of life came with the cotton mills in Manchester and surrounds. People started flocking to cities for jobs in the mills, much the same way as modern day Chinese have flocked to the new industrial cities over the last 40yrs. the crossroads of England, Ireland and Scotland is where the original Luddite movement was formed and it's no coincidence that's also where the industrial revolution started, Luddites were basically rich folk, they weren't religious nutters fighting progress they were fighting other rich folk who's factories were "stealing" their peasant workers.
Do you recall that Mr. Greenwald's lover was carrying electronic copies of many documents with him, as well as a scribbled note with the password?
Yes, I also seem to recall the UK government "probed" Mr Greenwald's lover for 8-9 hour before letting him thru the border. Pretty sure they wouldn't have done that if they had found a "spy". What Snowden did was most certainly illegal. I'm not so sure it was "wrong", but I'm sure as hell that baying for his crucifixion based on what been reported so far is immoral. .
Having said that I think there' more than political "coincidence" to the timing. Just prior to it hitting the news Obama was loudly beating his chest telling the world he was "not going to put up with cyber spying from China". The meeting was supposed to be a big deal, Obama was going to get tough with "cyber-spies", the meeting was blown off the front pages by the Snowden story. Talk about "egg meets face", the US tried to claim the moral high ground by loudly proclaiming it was China who was spying on everyone, it's my contention the Chinese responded by pulling Uncle Sam's pants down in front of the whole world (politically speaking).
When you look at the political powerhouses on the planet, Russia, US, EU and China, it's China (a federation of ancient empires) that shows the most unity at the top and given it's miraculous economic rise from famines to fortunes over the last 40yrs they have very strong support amongst the people. "Good", "evil", "apathetic", doesn't matter what kind of empire/republic it is, unity will win the day when push turns to shove..
AFAIK, that's the way the majority of Journals operate, most don't care that the author will hand out electronic copies to anyone who asks, many will post it on their university's web site. It's an anachronism these days, it was originally aimed at stopping other journals from just copying and printing the good stuff after other had gone to the trouble of reviewing it. Academic publishing is a two way street the academics and journals need each other because "publish or perish" applies to both sides. Because of this symbiotic relationship journals are not widely regarded as "greedy capitalists", sure subscriptions are expensive compared to (say) people magazine, but if you pay peanuts for a job then only monkeys are going to apply.
Having said that. The GP has every right to be cautiously optimistic and somewhat cynical. It's an extraordinary claim, but regardless of it's pedigree, a solitary paper with the ink still drying is not extraordinary evidence.
Opps, cocked up the quotes in that post.
Why should WHEN you sleep matter. Night or day, as long as you get the needed sleep.
Some people may simply have a more efficient "cleaning" system, and need less sleep.
But I have other concerns with this finding, because it suggests this fluid replacement only occurs when the brain is not awake, yet we know that there is vast amounts of neural activity when the brain is asleep and dreaming.
Why should WHEN you sleep matter.
Give shift work a go, not just for a couple of days, try it for a few years. It's like a permanent hang over only without the headache. However I agree, according to MRI scans the brain is actually MORE active during sleep than when it's awake, and not just during dreaming. It's an interesting finding but the "hypothesis" in the summary doesn't make sense to me either, nor can I see anything that resembles it in the abstract. Perhaps the "hypothesis" is just the submitter's speculation?
And you can't even be mad at this one since it is done by undergrads.
Yes, actually you can....
Seriously, a press beat up about a bunch of collage kids screwing up their class science project makes you "mad"? - And who are you mad at? - Strangely it's not the "journalist" who manufactured the beat up, it's the kids!! Little wonder the American public are so easily manipulated via their own media outlets.
OTOH, if you wire a rats pleasure center up to a lever it can pull to give itself pleasure, the sucker will hang on to that lever until it dies of exhaustion.
Be warned, if you work for big blue and they show you the "who stole my cheese" video, it generally means your whole department is about to be axed.
People have short memories. The "smoking gun" was that infamous memo that wasn't acted upon, that's where "national security" was compromised, it was in no way a keystone cops screw up, it was a "noob" mistake at the highest level. Yes, the buck stopped on the presidents desk but in this case it shouldn't have. It should have been promptly delegated to the appropriate TLA for further action.
Clinton and his battle hardened adviser Clarke were fools to be obsessed by a rich, disgruntled, ex-CIA partisan called Bin-Laden, remember? That other rich, disgruntled, ex-CIA partisan, Saddam, the one who tried to kill Bush's daddy, he was the real threat, remember? Come to think of it, I take that back, it wasn't a "noob mistake", it was an extreme over-abundance of hubris on behalf of a new administration. When they fell asleep at the wheel the shit hit the fan. Their response to the splattering sound was by contrast prompt, well executed, and largely effective. After consulting a story about a goat for seven whole minutes, they turned around and shot the messengers they had foolishly ignored.
after Al Qaeda showed everyone how infiltration can really be done
I guess you must have missed the UK's efforts in the lead up to WW2, planting Cambridge teenagers amongst the ranks of Hitler's brown-shirts not long after they formed. . Not to mention the European resistance efforts during the war, or the sinking of the German U boat fleet via deception (MITM hack by the legendary Alan Turing), or the ambush at the battle of midway which was also a result of a MITM hack of enemy comms at the highest level.
The contribution of soot to climate change is dwarfed by our GHG and aerosols emissions, however it would have been much higher in the mid 20th century before clean air laws were instituted throughout the western world. Some soot lands on ice and speeds up the melt as you describe but most of the soot falls directly into the ocean which absorbs the extra heat it is carrying. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, it is steadily warming due to our efforts, it's temperature defines the type of climate we have. Due to it's sheer size it has an immense thermal inertia, even without humans it will continue to warm for at least another 50yrs just to reach thermal equilibrium with the current +/-ve climate forcing from humans. The rise in ocean temps over the next 50yrs will represent the human induced climate forcings of the last half of the 20th century.
The economic equation is fairly simple, spend the next 50yrs replacing the vast bulk of the dirty energy infrastructure built over the last 50yrs with clean infrastructure solar/wind/nuke/tidal/geothermal/did I leave someone's pet project out?). By mid-century we are no longer changing the climate, by the end of the century the climate has reached a new stable thermal equilibrium, which, all things being equal will slowly cool down to pre-industrial temps in a millennia or two by absorbing the extra carbon into the Earth's crust.
The ability of the Earth's crust to absorb the extra carbon would be severely curtailed if the oceans became too acidic for shellfish to grows shells, but at that point the Earth's surface will look like an overworked goat farm and it will make little difference to the goat herders who survive the rapidly accelerating "sixth great extinction" we are experiencing today.
Sure it will cost a gazillion dollars to replace that infrastructure but we've already spent that building the current infrastructure, and since coal plants don't last forever we will be doing it all over again in the next 50yrs anyway. Civilization has outgrown coal like we outgrew the horse and cart, it's time to push the luddites, vested interests and useful idiots back into the political wilderness where they belong. It's time to put engineers in the driver's seat, preferably arrogant showmen like Edison, Jobs, Gates, who can assemble other people's inventions into a viable industry.
My personal favourite is hydrogen fuel cells for most portable energy needs such as cars, you could also use you car to supply several homes with electricity, or just build a fuel cell generator into the home, we can get rid of a lot of the fragile wiring that blocks out the modern sky, no more wide area blackouts every time the wind changes direction. But there's not much point doing that unless you can produce bulk hydrogen cleanly cheaper than you can produce it the dirty way. Doing it with sunlight or wind is a great example of a closed loop. H2O + energy => H2 + O2 => H20, the troposphere is more or less chemically saturated with H2O so it simply falls back into the ocean within a week or two. So if we are really lucky the 22nd century will be warm and damp and the mass migrations inland will have ceased.
Hell, may have even just been one rogue developer who nobody gave permission to put it there.
It's a safe bet their law team already have that at the top of the whiteboard.
I'm old, I don't need to gossip to let people know what I think. If I don't like someone then they know it and so does everyone else, at no point do I need to say a bad word about the object of my loathing. However I also realise gossip is a basic human behaviour that is impossible to avoid. Without it society would not function because "gossip" is just another word for "peer pressure", without gossip there is no social pressure to conform, and without some level of conformity there's no cooperation.
Yep, basic social protocols haven't changed in a long time. My grandpa would have summed it up with something like "Don't air dirty laundry in public". or maybe "take the fight outside". She used SciAm because it had the broadest reach, she was out to crucify this guy's reputation and kill his career, which he may well deserve. However by using, as opposed to asking, SciAm to build the cross for her she has abandoned the moral high ground and picked a undignified and unprofessional gutter brawl in SciAM's show room. Go to any testosterone fuelled work site and you will find both people in a fight will be looking at the sack, you will also see other workers try to pull them apart before "the boss sees it". In another words she failed to show basic self restraint in public when quietly provoked in private, she lacks the dignity and manners that even "Bubba the slaughterman" displays while he's on the clock.
;)
Natural justice would see both of them out of the journalistic trade, but an "undignified and unprofessional gutter brawl" does have a way of attracting a crowd.
This is why responsibility is ASSIGNED and not assumed.
Personal responsibility: The act of ASSIGNING responsibility to one's self. Now it is time for you to inject a thesaurus into your bookshelf.
BTW: The "deterministic" universe at our scale is built on a foundation of perfect randomness, "reality" is a probability curve that in practice can only be calculated by watching it happen. The subtle paradox about perfect randomness is that perfect randomness has a predictable behaviour. Mind predictably emerges from matter like cyclones predictably emerge from tropical seas, they are both specific patterns in matter that survive for fleeting moments and then dissipate. There is no point to it, you are free to impose your own meaning, if you have one.
Zoloft + alcohol = a fucked up, suicidal personality. I've seen 5 families wrecked over the last 10yrs, 2 ended up in jail. I've also seen Zoloft help people but none of those were drinkers. Alcohol lowers inhibition, Zoloft lowers anxiety. You need some anxiety to tell yourself that what your doing is potentially wrong/dangerous, you need some inhibitions to stop you from compulsively acting out every thought. A good doctor knows all this and will train his patients to self-monitor their anxiety levels while on the drug, sadly far too many try to make it "go away" with a script.
From a pragmatic developer's POV I'd say the invisible hand is still stroking Microsoft's cock because "the market" says MS Office is as "good as it gets" for now. For better or worse, by hook or by crook, Office is embedded in the corporate environment. Today, you still need Office to communicate with corporate customers who don't give a flying fuck what else you do, they just want you to read the word document and fill out the excel spread sheet they sent you.
So while I don't like the way MS gained their monopoly, they were held to account long ago through the courts. From a pragmatic business POV, I have to agree with today's CIO's, given the environment they would have to be insane to stop buying Office licenses. That sort of bravery is best left to governments who have a big influence on electronic document formats because for many corporations the government is also their biggest customer. Which leads me to believe that eventually governments will define standard document formats with the same rigour they define standard weights and measures. Personally I think we are not ready for that yet since significant improvements are still occurring at a rapid pace.
The market is still working out these sort of issues and slowly defining what "electronic document" means, the government has an important role to play in ensuring the result is something that "raises all boats". Governments were early adopters of electronic communications, their choices propelled the Office and Adobe boats into orbit. In many ways both products deserved their reward. But soon they will have to step down from the podium in much the same way the railroad barons did.
What we have gained from the evolution of electronic documents since the WordStar generation has concentrated wealth into new hands but at the same time it has brought about a genuine technological revolution in human communications which is just as significant as the invention of the printing press and may eventually be seen as up there with the invention of writing itself. For a simple example, when I was a kid the Jetsons was a big hit, but adults also speculated that one day robots would build things and serve us, nobody really suspected they would replace the vast majority of (say) bank tellers within their own life time.
Theoretically this is supposed to give us more leisure time but in practice it just raises our standard of living by allowing us to do more with the same amount of time. (assuming you're lucky enough to live somewhere with humane labour laws).
Humans still communicate emotions with screams, hoots, moans and laughter like other great apes do, sometime in the last 100Kyrs we started talking and our obscure species suddenly (geologically speaking) shot to the top of the food chain. The change in the geological record is as dramatic as the Cambrian explosion - only in reverse. Most of those changes have been concentrated into the last 500yrs or so, on face value the geological record of the advent of humans looks like an asteroid strike, the only lasting thing that gives it away as human activity is the fact that asteroids with high levels of plutonium and plastic are exceedingly rare.
Language gave us the ability to organise, plan and share experiences at the tribal level, writing notched it up to the civilization level, printing made two way communication available to millions of citizens and educated foreigners', each of these events lead to significant changes in the way humans organise their societies (most notably the size and complexity of tasks that could be undertaken by significantly larger groups of people). The internet will, or already has, reached N-to-N communication at the species level. I believe it will rapidly overtake and outperform religion in it's role of unifying people's across political/cultural borders.
I'm in my 50's, I think the next century will see a spectacular jump in human capabilities and it will be as a direct result of the internet's potential for new
That was actually a serious concern before we started blowing up Pacific islands for practice. It was thought that the bomb could trigger a chain reaction that fused all of the Nitrogen in the atmosphere in one very brief but spectacular flash of high energy radiation. Contrary to what some have claimed the boffins on the Manhattan project did not just cross their fingers and light the fuse, they rigorously demonstrated that it could not happen long before they had a working bomb. It's actually quite an interesting historical story and well worth a browsing in WP (ie: I can't be bothered looking it up and posting the links for you ;)