Making the nanobots solar powered would be a power source that's not susceptible to running out in the manner you're describing. Since the things are tiny, each would require a ridiculously small amount of power to operate, and a small molecular photovoltaic array doesn't seem that hard to make (we can make them now, fer crying out loud). I mean a tree manages to power most of its functions with only sunlight, so I wouldn't think powering a nanobot would be that hard. Worse yet would be a nanobot with a photoarray with some high-charge capacitor/battery device hooked up to it so it could survive outside the sun for $time.
And how do these nanobots make new photoarrays, etch their own circuitboards, etc? I mean, yes, there's silion and such everywhere, but you still need to purify it, dope it, etch it, etc. And with nanobots, the smallest mistake makes it nonfunctional.
And how susceptible would one of these things be to a magnetic field? I mean, would something as benign as a power line mess it up enough that it would be contained? Could we just fire an EMP device at the site of the release and call it a day?
What I'm saying is, nanobots may be a little scary, but they're not so unstoppable that if one got loose, it would all be over. If it drifted across a magnetic field, it would be rendered nonfunctional. If it started reproducing in a particular area, you hit it with an EMP. And it's not going to increase exponentially because far too many are going to be disfunctional enough that they either don't function at all or they simply don't reproduce. An outbreak would be easily containable.
The "grey goo" thing is, frankly, a nonissue. Despite the fact that a few renegade nanobots could deconstruct a bunch of matter, these nanobots would NOT be able to make more nanobots. Why? Because....surprise....you need an energy source and it would be damned hard to find an energy source for self-replicating nanotech to use. I mean, think about it. For a self-replicating nanobot to become an issue they need a self-sustainable energy source, they need a way of giving the new nanobots a self-sustainable energy source, they need to be resistant to weather, cosmic and solar radiation, electromagnetic fields, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This is the same reason why there is nonbacterial organic life on the planet. Because individual species of bacteria have limited environments they can live in, limited speed of infection and decomposition, weaknesses to organic and inorganic compounds, a set growth rate, and can die. Even the worst case scenario of nanobots would most likely result in the entire puddle of grey dust dying off as soon as it ran out of internal energy. A whimper, not a bang. This whole grey goo scare is pure bull.
I don't only watch Indy movies, but I do have to agree that they are quite good. There are few movies as timeless as Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's for sure.
Whether we'll find extraterrestrial life (self-replicating microenvironments that maintain homeostasis) is a given. Whether we'll recognize it as such is something completely different.
And on the briht side, when we finally have the technology to get to this star system, the planets will already have coalesced and enough time will have passed for life to develop (possibly more than enough time if NASA keeps up their present track record).
Also, the whole book is basicaly about child abuse sponsored by the governemnt. Interesting reading, but maybe not the ideal way to create well-adjusted officers.
I don't know if well-adjusted is even relevant. Well-adjusted people don't just go off killing each other. The whole point of the military is to make people poorly-adjusted while they're on the battlefield, but able to control themselves when they return to society.
Not quite. At first, the Buggers didn't realize that humans are individuals rather than a Hive Mind. The Buggers finally got it after the second Bugger War. Humans didn't know that the Buggers had figured that out and were going to leave them alone, so they sent in a preemptive strike to wipe them all out.
Point is, the Buggers weren't always ramen, they were originally quite dangerous, in the same way a kindergardner with a shotgun is dangerous. They didn't know they were going to cause harm by doing what they did and didn't fully comprehend what it was that they had done until quite a long time later.
Though I really don't think that has a whole lot to do with the present military situation...
Curiously, most of the "country" music that I hear on the radio these days sounds just like the second rate rock music of the 1970s, except for the addition of a handful of specific vocal mannerisms and an optional violin or steel guitar.
Probably because they have an annoying tendancy to cover 70's rock music.
In fact, they have a tendancy to cover all sorts of rock music that they have no business covering. I mean, a Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails? Sorry, but Hurt is NOT country music.
Computers determining whether or not they'd "hit it?" Problem is, what happens when the program posts a half-corrupted jpeg of a Windows XP server on Fark.com with the message "I'd hit it!!!1"?
Of all the things that you could call that program, but I doubt you can call that Artificial "Intelligence"...
All I see this doing is allowing the RIAA to determine which songs should be invested in and which shouldn't be. Doesn't add to diversity because all it does is identify hits. If anything, it'll further homogenize corporate radio.
What'll be scary is when they use a modification of this to write top 40 hits, thereby taking people out of the mix entirely. I wonder, could the RIAA support such "musicians" when there is no real "artist" (I don't see them calling the people who wrote the code the artists, for some reason)?
By the way, this was posted over 24 hours ago on Fark. You'd think Slashdot would be a little faster on the updating.
The worst thing about recent vampire movies/TV shows, and books (basically since Anne Rice) is that they have this tendancy to turn what used to be undead badass demons into angsty wimps. If I see another angsty vampire, I swear, I'm going to scream.
The problem with applying swarm logic to financial models is that it seems (to me, at least) that swarm logic requires a certain amount of autonomy of every individual but certain subconscious controls. Try to use conscious controls and it fails. Try to manage it in a particular direction and it fails. Try to centralize as opposed to have autonomous people/units and it fails.
Really, the only financial system that could actually finction like this is free-market capitalism. Other things just don't work in such a way.
Re:Enviorment, not Genes for personality...
on
The Taste of Pain
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ok, so if our personalities were more influenced by Genes, then why aren't all Australians violent people that steal, rape and kill?
Or maybe they were all just political prisoners. Bad argument.
I seriously think that enviorment has alot more to do with it than anything. Perhaps there are Genes that make people lean slightly more towards agressive behaviors. But I think it's much more enviormental than anything else.
Genes may make a person have a more agressive personality, but simply having a gene doesn't mean that gene is expressed. It's called incomplete penetrance. Some genes don't always express themselves. Like cancer. You can have a gene that causes a type of cancer, but you won't necessarily get cancer.
Let's take All Tomorrow's Parties as an example. I think I'm remembering correctly that the ending had the holographic woman "faxing" herself to all the convienence stores that had just installed the "physical fax" machines or whatever they were called. Okay, ignoring the actual possilbility of this, how does this relate to the rest of the story? I admit my memory is fuzzy about the details of the book, but it seemed unrelated to the rest of the story despite being an event that would likely change the world.
Actually, the ending isn't a random event. The core idea in ATP was that at certain moments everything changes (a central tenent of most Gibson stuff, I'd say). The fax machine was a nanotech device, but it was being used for very basic things. Rei (the AI "girl") changes that drastically and breaks down any barrier between computer code and the real world. The effects in the future aren't shown, but that's for you, the reader, to figure out yourself.
That's my view. I could always be wrong though...
But yes, I can definitely understand your point of view. I don't think Stephenson is a "bad" writer...I just think the typical slashdot perspective that he's part of the Holy Trinity (The Stephenson, the Mitnick, and the Holy Torvald) is a little...ummm...overboard, to say the least.
Re:Imagine this idea
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Would you really want a cranial jack? Or would you want to go wifi? Part of me would rather not have an unsightly USB port on the back of my skull, but then, being plugged in all the time woulf make you more vulnerable to hacking. When someone hacks your PC, it's not a huge deal...at worst, you have to reformat your hard drive. But if they hacked your brain...
I see this mainly as a way to have true input/output from a cybernetic prosthesis, allowing the fake leg to do real things. Maybe hardcore MMOG players (read: otaku) would get it as well so they could truly live in those environments and escape reality. Other than than....do people really want the privacy of their own thoughts violated? A mindreading device would crash and burn because everyone has their own secrets they don't want anyone else to know. Though black market industry might take over...consider the House of Blue Lights from Gibson's Burning Chrome. Or chips in two people's brains (one monitoring input and one controlling output) so that one of the people is basically experiencing and controlling the other body. I could see a lot of market for THAT for government, celebrities, and big business...want to go somewhere but you don't want to have to be followed by bodygards? Use a puppet body so no matter what happens to the body, you're still safe at home.
Regardless, this is more likely to become a black market technology. You can use it in too many unethical ways that would never be approved by law but still have both the $$ and desire to be done.
Snow Crash was originally written as a storyline for a comic/graphic novel. So yes, it is a comic book in novel form. Calling a spade a spade is not misplaced condescension. And as for Stephenson's other stuff, Diamond Age was similarly written (although the Neo-Victorian feel simply took that style and jumbled it up into a simple mess). Cryptonomicon went on forever with no intention of ever ending.
And you're complaining about Gibson having bad endings? Gibson endings are somewhat cryptic...something big and groundbreaking has happened...a paradigm shift, you could say. But the full effect of that shift simply hasn't been realized yet. But what's important is the idea that no matter how similar everything looks, everything has changed. Though cryptic, there IS an ending. Stephenson writes and writes and writes and then realizes he needs to end the story and wraps the whole plot up in about 10-20 pages leaves some loose ends out accidentally and says "and they lived happily ever after." I don't see that you have any room to complain here.
The difference isn't about language or how much the writer tells you...it's the writer's purpose for writing in the first place. Yes, Stephenson knows more about how thngs work. Big deal. If I intend to learn about cryptography, I'll read a cryptography text. Stephenson tries to write a novel for enjoyment and then crams in some satire and technology, but in the end, it's a story for fun. Gibson's writing is instead to make you think about ideas.
Also, as far as Vonnegut, Heller, etc. go, they wrote serious books. Catch-22 is a serious book. Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-5....all serious books. Yes, they used humor to get points across, but they were SERIOUS books. Nothing I've read about by Stephenson is serious. It's humor for humor's sake, rather than for the sake of getting a point across.
I'm sure you disagree, but that's my take on it. For the record, I enjoyed Snow Crash a lot (I can't say the same for Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon) but I just don't think it's on the same level as Neuromancer or Count Zero. But that's just my opinion. I could always be wrong.
It's funny. A lot of people hate Idoru, but it's not really all that bad. Like Virtual Light before it, it ends on its own terms but it's not really complete. All Tomorrow's Parties really finishes both of them up.
Everyone also seems to hate The Difference Engine, which I don't quite understand either. I guess I have some personal attachment to it because I'm a paleontology student, but it did seem like a very good book to me. Yes, things went on...and on...and on. Yes, the language was difficult. But when was Gibson EVER easy to read? Yes, he makes you work for everything you get out of his books. But is that really so bad?
As for the difference between Gibson and Stephenson, Gibson writes collages and Stephenson writes comic books. Snow Crash was silly. It was a fun read, yes, but it was silly and impossible to take seriously. The plot was contrived, the atmosphere was so chaotic and often contradicted itself. Cryptonomicon went on and on, and The Diamond Age felt like reading The Difference Engine...but without anything interesting going on at all. He's funny, sure, but I find that Gibson's more subtle humor is far more satisfying.
That said, I liked Pattern Recognition. A lot. It's different from Neuromancer and Count Zero and Virtual Light, but that doesn't mean it sucks.
Only if we decide not to breed with those who exhibit that trait. I know I'm picky, but I've never said "I can't do it with her, she gets hiccups"
Or if somehow hiccups made you more likely to not reach sexual maturity (i.e. Bush, in his infinite wisdom, decided to make hiccupping in public a capital punishment). The problem is, hiccups have NEVER been anything more than annoying...they're not detrimental to our health. Therefore there's no selective force against it. Plus, as it's necessary for our development as embryos, it would be complicated for us to lose that reflex as adults and still retain it as a fetus.
Actually, this is very interesting from an evolutionary perspective. And yes, it can be tested. Hiccuping is a reflex, not a conscious action. Don't believe me? Try to hiccup right now. You can't. Reflexes are built into your nervous system in so-called reflex arcs. If the reflex arc for gill breathing in salamanders (not frogs....frogs lack gills), lungfish, bowfins, etc, then I'd say this would be a pretty sound theory. then you'd of course need a control which doesn't have that reflex and see if that arc is still there. Also, one could find the nerves responsible and deactivate them and see exactly what effects that has. Since this is clearly testable, it is a scientific hypothesis. Whether it HAS been tested is another question.
But yes. This is sound science. And knowing about it would probably be quite important in understanding the evolution of breathing.
The only thing that bothers me is that hiccups seem to be controlled by muscle spasming of the diaphragm. Fish and basal tetrapods don't have a diaphragm. So if this reflex is homologous, I'd be fascinated to find out how.
The problem with capsules is you can't bring a lot of equipment with you. If you're doing science over an extended period of time, especially if you're working with biology as they are doing on the ISS, you need the capacity to bring that up. Space shuttle has that. Capsules don't.
A few more... ,br>
All Tomorrow's Parties-William Gibson
Nanotech is important, but this isn't a doom-and-gloom novel. And, as Gibson typically is, everything's really chaotic until the last 5 pages or so.
The Diamond Age-Neal Stephenson
Nanotech-saturated. Yet once again, not a grey goo novel.
Frankly, Crichton strikes me as a luddite who needs to stop writing alarmism. He uses bad pseudoscience and then uses this limited scientific understanding to start crying chicken little whenever some new idea comes out and changes the scientific paradigm. All it does is freak out the general public and turn scientists into pariahs.
Now if we really want to a game to see if computers are capable of ever besting us, I propose a game of "truth or dare". The only winner is the one least embarrassed. Once they can beat a human at this, I forfiet my humanity.
Eh....depends on a computer. The old iMacs (the technicolored ones) seem pretty shameless. If you can make one of those get embarassed by a little truth or dare, you have to be DAMNED clever. Anyways, what're you gonna do? Dare it to install Microsoft XP as its OS? Ask it how many pornography jpegs are on its harddrive? Ask it if it's ever been pinged without a firewall?
What I really want to see is a computer that can read slashdot articles and post replies. And I'm not talking about easy-to-program "In Soviet Russia" replies, either. My experience shows that at least half of the anonymous cowards who post probably ARE that type of bot...
Curiosity didn't kill the cat, it has made a quantuum-leap in technology for mankind in the last 150 years.
In other words, curiosity didn't kill the cat, but Schroedinger might have.
But seriously, I don't see any SCIENTIFIC evidence for any of these phenomena to solely from a spacecraft. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and the simple fact that people have been able to make these things with planks and rope makes me really doubt that the sole existence of crop circles is extraordinary proof. Plus, despite alien psychology would be alien to us, it would still seem more worthwhile to communicate with us using radio waves, hacked communications satellites, or whatever. If they can decode our language AND ASCII and write a message with correct syntax, you'd think that they'd also have the decryption technology to encode some instructions into a geosyncronous weather satellite or something...have the satellite send back a huge picture that reads "We are here to invade you. Resistance is futile. Bow down to your new overlords."
IF we're really dealing with aliens in these crop circle phenomena, we have to face the fact that we might be dealing with hick aliens. And the last thing I want to see is a rusted-out hulk of a flying saucer propped up on concrete blocks (and I tip my hat to Bill Hicks here).
Slashdot Mirror
And how do these nanobots make new photoarrays, etch their own circuitboards, etc? I mean, yes, there's silion and such everywhere, but you still need to purify it, dope it, etch it, etc. And with nanobots, the smallest mistake makes it nonfunctional.
And how susceptible would one of these things be to a magnetic field? I mean, would something as benign as a power line mess it up enough that it would be contained? Could we just fire an EMP device at the site of the release and call it a day?
What I'm saying is, nanobots may be a little scary, but they're not so unstoppable that if one got loose, it would all be over. If it drifted across a magnetic field, it would be rendered nonfunctional. If it started reproducing in a particular area, you hit it with an EMP. And it's not going to increase exponentially because far too many are going to be disfunctional enough that they either don't function at all or they simply don't reproduce. An outbreak would be easily containable.
The "grey goo" thing is, frankly, a nonissue. Despite the fact that a few renegade nanobots could deconstruct a bunch of matter, these nanobots would NOT be able to make more nanobots. Why? Because....surprise....you need an energy source and it would be damned hard to find an energy source for self-replicating nanotech to use. I mean, think about it. For a self-replicating nanobot to become an issue they need a self-sustainable energy source, they need a way of giving the new nanobots a self-sustainable energy source, they need to be resistant to weather, cosmic and solar radiation, electromagnetic fields, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This is the same reason why there is nonbacterial organic life on the planet. Because individual species of bacteria have limited environments they can live in, limited speed of infection and decomposition, weaknesses to organic and inorganic compounds, a set growth rate, and can die. Even the worst case scenario of nanobots would most likely result in the entire puddle of grey dust dying off as soon as it ran out of internal energy. A whimper, not a bang. This whole grey goo scare is pure bull.
I don't only watch Indy movies, but I do have to agree that they are quite good. There are few movies as timeless as Raiders of the Lost Ark, that's for sure.
Whether we'll find extraterrestrial life (self-replicating microenvironments that maintain homeostasis) is a given. Whether we'll recognize it as such is something completely different.
And on the briht side, when we finally have the technology to get to this star system, the planets will already have coalesced and enough time will have passed for life to develop (possibly more than enough time if NASA keeps up their present track record).
Take that approach, and you'll get a very high false positive for proctologists.
I don't know if well-adjusted is even relevant. Well-adjusted people don't just go off killing each other. The whole point of the military is to make people poorly-adjusted while they're on the battlefield, but able to control themselves when they return to society.
Reading can be quite dangerous. I mean, think of all the trouble a soldier could get into by reading 1984 or Catch-22 or something similar...
Not quite. At first, the Buggers didn't realize that humans are individuals rather than a Hive Mind. The Buggers finally got it after the second Bugger War. Humans didn't know that the Buggers had figured that out and were going to leave them alone, so they sent in a preemptive strike to wipe them all out.
Point is, the Buggers weren't always ramen, they were originally quite dangerous, in the same way a kindergardner with a shotgun is dangerous. They didn't know they were going to cause harm by doing what they did and didn't fully comprehend what it was that they had done until quite a long time later.
Though I really don't think that has a whole lot to do with the present military situation...
...which was used to prove a mathematical point and not a religious/sociological one.
Probably because they have an annoying tendancy to cover 70's rock music.
In fact, they have a tendancy to cover all sorts of rock music that they have no business covering. I mean, a Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails? Sorry, but Hurt is NOT country music.
Computers determining whether or not they'd "hit it?" Problem is, what happens when the program posts a half-corrupted jpeg of a Windows XP server on Fark.com with the message "I'd hit it!!!1"?
Of all the things that you could call that program, but I doubt you can call that Artificial "Intelligence"...
All I see this doing is allowing the RIAA to determine which songs should be invested in and which shouldn't be. Doesn't add to diversity because all it does is identify hits. If anything, it'll further homogenize corporate radio.
What'll be scary is when they use a modification of this to write top 40 hits, thereby taking people out of the mix entirely. I wonder, could the RIAA support such "musicians" when there is no real "artist" (I don't see them calling the people who wrote the code the artists, for some reason)?
By the way, this was posted over 24 hours ago on Fark. You'd think Slashdot would be a little faster on the updating.
The worst thing about recent vampire movies/TV shows, and books (basically since Anne Rice) is that they have this tendancy to turn what used to be undead badass demons into angsty wimps. If I see another angsty vampire, I swear, I'm going to scream.
The problem with applying swarm logic to financial models is that it seems (to me, at least) that swarm logic requires a certain amount of autonomy of every individual but certain subconscious controls. Try to use conscious controls and it fails. Try to manage it in a particular direction and it fails. Try to centralize as opposed to have autonomous people/units and it fails.
Really, the only financial system that could actually finction like this is free-market capitalism. Other things just don't work in such a way.
Or maybe they were all just political prisoners. Bad argument.
Genes may make a person have a more agressive personality, but simply having a gene doesn't mean that gene is expressed. It's called incomplete penetrance. Some genes don't always express themselves. Like cancer. You can have a gene that causes a type of cancer, but you won't necessarily get cancer.
Actually, the ending isn't a random event. The core idea in ATP was that at certain moments everything changes (a central tenent of most Gibson stuff, I'd say). The fax machine was a nanotech device, but it was being used for very basic things. Rei (the AI "girl") changes that drastically and breaks down any barrier between computer code and the real world. The effects in the future aren't shown, but that's for you, the reader, to figure out yourself.
That's my view. I could always be wrong though...
But yes, I can definitely understand your point of view. I don't think Stephenson is a "bad" writer...I just think the typical slashdot perspective that he's part of the Holy Trinity (The Stephenson, the Mitnick, and the Holy Torvald) is a little...ummm...overboard, to say the least.
Would you really want a cranial jack? Or would you want to go wifi? Part of me would rather not have an unsightly USB port on the back of my skull, but then, being plugged in all the time woulf make you more vulnerable to hacking. When someone hacks your PC, it's not a huge deal...at worst, you have to reformat your hard drive. But if they hacked your brain...
I see this mainly as a way to have true input/output from a cybernetic prosthesis, allowing the fake leg to do real things. Maybe hardcore MMOG players (read: otaku) would get it as well so they could truly live in those environments and escape reality. Other than than....do people really want the privacy of their own thoughts violated? A mindreading device would crash and burn because everyone has their own secrets they don't want anyone else to know. Though black market industry might take over...consider the House of Blue Lights from Gibson's Burning Chrome. Or chips in two people's brains (one monitoring input and one controlling output) so that one of the people is basically experiencing and controlling the other body. I could see a lot of market for THAT for government, celebrities, and big business...want to go somewhere but you don't want to have to be followed by bodygards? Use a puppet body so no matter what happens to the body, you're still safe at home.
Regardless, this is more likely to become a black market technology. You can use it in too many unethical ways that would never be approved by law but still have both the $$ and desire to be done.
Snow Crash was originally written as a storyline for a comic/graphic novel. So yes, it is a comic book in novel form. Calling a spade a spade is not misplaced condescension. And as for Stephenson's other stuff, Diamond Age was similarly written (although the Neo-Victorian feel simply took that style and jumbled it up into a simple mess). Cryptonomicon went on forever with no intention of ever ending.
And you're complaining about Gibson having bad endings? Gibson endings are somewhat cryptic...something big and groundbreaking has happened...a paradigm shift, you could say. But the full effect of that shift simply hasn't been realized yet. But what's important is the idea that no matter how similar everything looks, everything has changed. Though cryptic, there IS an ending. Stephenson writes and writes and writes and then realizes he needs to end the story and wraps the whole plot up in about 10-20 pages leaves some loose ends out accidentally and says "and they lived happily ever after." I don't see that you have any room to complain here.
The difference isn't about language or how much the writer tells you...it's the writer's purpose for writing in the first place. Yes, Stephenson knows more about how thngs work. Big deal. If I intend to learn about cryptography, I'll read a cryptography text. Stephenson tries to write a novel for enjoyment and then crams in some satire and technology, but in the end, it's a story for fun. Gibson's writing is instead to make you think about ideas.
Also, as far as Vonnegut, Heller, etc. go, they wrote serious books. Catch-22 is a serious book. Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-5....all serious books. Yes, they used humor to get points across, but they were SERIOUS books. Nothing I've read about by Stephenson is serious. It's humor for humor's sake, rather than for the sake of getting a point across.
I'm sure you disagree, but that's my take on it. For the record, I enjoyed Snow Crash a lot (I can't say the same for Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon) but I just don't think it's on the same level as Neuromancer or Count Zero. But that's just my opinion. I could always be wrong.
It's funny. A lot of people hate Idoru, but it's not really all that bad. Like Virtual Light before it, it ends on its own terms but it's not really complete. All Tomorrow's Parties really finishes both of them up.
Everyone also seems to hate The Difference Engine, which I don't quite understand either. I guess I have some personal attachment to it because I'm a paleontology student, but it did seem like a very good book to me. Yes, things went on...and on...and on. Yes, the language was difficult. But when was Gibson EVER easy to read? Yes, he makes you work for everything you get out of his books. But is that really so bad?
As for the difference between Gibson and Stephenson, Gibson writes collages and Stephenson writes comic books. Snow Crash was silly. It was a fun read, yes, but it was silly and impossible to take seriously. The plot was contrived, the atmosphere was so chaotic and often contradicted itself. Cryptonomicon went on and on, and The Diamond Age felt like reading The Difference Engine...but without anything interesting going on at all. He's funny, sure, but I find that Gibson's more subtle humor is far more satisfying.
That said, I liked Pattern Recognition. A lot. It's different from Neuromancer and Count Zero and Virtual Light, but that doesn't mean it sucks.
Or if somehow hiccups made you more likely to not reach sexual maturity (i.e. Bush, in his infinite wisdom, decided to make hiccupping in public a capital punishment). The problem is, hiccups have NEVER been anything more than annoying...they're not detrimental to our health. Therefore there's no selective force against it. Plus, as it's necessary for our development as embryos, it would be complicated for us to lose that reflex as adults and still retain it as a fetus.
Actually, this is very interesting from an evolutionary perspective. And yes, it can be tested. Hiccuping is a reflex, not a conscious action. Don't believe me? Try to hiccup right now. You can't. Reflexes are built into your nervous system in so-called reflex arcs. If the reflex arc for gill breathing in salamanders (not frogs....frogs lack gills), lungfish, bowfins, etc, then I'd say this would be a pretty sound theory. then you'd of course need a control which doesn't have that reflex and see if that arc is still there. Also, one could find the nerves responsible and deactivate them and see exactly what effects that has. Since this is clearly testable, it is a scientific hypothesis. Whether it HAS been tested is another question.
But yes. This is sound science. And knowing about it would probably be quite important in understanding the evolution of breathing.
The only thing that bothers me is that hiccups seem to be controlled by muscle spasming of the diaphragm. Fish and basal tetrapods don't have a diaphragm. So if this reflex is homologous, I'd be fascinated to find out how.
The problem with capsules is you can't bring a lot of equipment with you. If you're doing science over an extended period of time, especially if you're working with biology as they are doing on the ISS, you need the capacity to bring that up. Space shuttle has that. Capsules don't.
A few more...
,br> All Tomorrow's Parties-William Gibson
Nanotech is important, but this isn't a doom-and-gloom novel. And, as Gibson typically is, everything's really chaotic until the last 5 pages or so.
The Diamond Age-Neal Stephenson
Nanotech-saturated. Yet once again, not a grey goo novel.
Frankly, Crichton strikes me as a luddite who needs to stop writing alarmism. He uses bad pseudoscience and then uses this limited scientific understanding to start crying chicken little whenever some new idea comes out and changes the scientific paradigm. All it does is freak out the general public and turn scientists into pariahs.
Eh....depends on a computer. The old iMacs (the technicolored ones) seem pretty shameless. If you can make one of those get embarassed by a little truth or dare, you have to be DAMNED clever. Anyways, what're you gonna do? Dare it to install Microsoft XP as its OS? Ask it how many pornography jpegs are on its harddrive? Ask it if it's ever been pinged without a firewall?
What I really want to see is a computer that can read slashdot articles and post replies. And I'm not talking about easy-to-program "In Soviet Russia" replies, either. My experience shows that at least half of the anonymous cowards who post probably ARE that type of bot...
In other words, curiosity didn't kill the cat, but Schroedinger might have.
But seriously, I don't see any SCIENTIFIC evidence for any of these phenomena to solely from a spacecraft. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and the simple fact that people have been able to make these things with planks and rope makes me really doubt that the sole existence of crop circles is extraordinary proof. Plus, despite alien psychology would be alien to us, it would still seem more worthwhile to communicate with us using radio waves, hacked communications satellites, or whatever. If they can decode our language AND ASCII and write a message with correct syntax, you'd think that they'd also have the decryption technology to encode some instructions into a geosyncronous weather satellite or something...have the satellite send back a huge picture that reads "We are here to invade you. Resistance is futile. Bow down to your new overlords."
IF we're really dealing with aliens in these crop circle phenomena, we have to face the fact that we might be dealing with hick aliens. And the last thing I want to see is a rusted-out hulk of a flying saucer propped up on concrete blocks (and I tip my hat to Bill Hicks here).