FTL travel is not required. You're assuming that space is a ball with a vacuum inside through which light travels. It is not. Here's my understanding of this - if anyone has a better explanation please let's have it:) Light is propagated along the curvature of spacetime (i know that this is vague, but without mathematics it's difficult to explain in natural language). Assume that the galaxy we'll be seeing three billion years from then is a point light source. The light travels in an expanding cone along spacetime. The universe is finite and the light will curve back as it were (some models suggest that this may not be entirely true though). The universe expands and so does the cone of light. We come into being and are in the cone of light at a certain point in (space-) time. The original source has moved but the cone has not. The difficulty here is in visualizing space expansion not as a 3d phenomenon that happens at the boundary of a sphere but also affects its contents.
It's obvious that this is one of your buttons. I am not that fond of the impact factor system. On the contrary. However, at this point in time it is one of the few more or less reliable ways of judging the importance (in terms of readership etc) of a particular publication. And while bullshit has OCCASIONALLY appeared in Science, Cell or Nature, "plenty" is not the word I would use. Generally, standards are high. And if a mid-range journal asks for seven revisions that tells me too that there is politics going on. That is, some editor really wanted it published while others did not like it at all. If a paper is rejected by reviewers twice in a row that is usually grounds for definitive rejection.
And to get back to the original point - this still doesn't mean that the existence of nanobacteria has been proved or that the methods used for the proof were adequate.
Well, occasionally the standard outlets do have it wrong. Most of the times they just adhere to stringent standards of scientific correctness. Sometimes that is a disadvantage but it spares us from having to suffer through junk science most of the time.
I would also like to politely disagree with you on the central role that bacteria play in atherosclerosis. Cholesterol has a lot to do with it, if you look at what happens to people suffering from congenital hypercholesterolemia. They die from atherosclerosis. Homocysteine is not there as a consequence of bacterial infestation but because of hyperhomocysteinemia, a rather common metabolic defect. There is currently no proof for a central role of bacterial/viral infection in atherosclerosis. There is also no proof to the contrary, but if you read your science philosophy you will realize that does not mean that your hypothesis is correct.
Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal. What's even more important is that behaviour as shown by the "nanobacteria" can also be interpreted as being the consequence of conformational changes of proteins in solution induced by the particles. Mutated prions are also capable of doing so (they change the prion normal structure into a beta-sheet), thereby causing disease. Self-assembly of macromolecules also comes to mind as a potential explanation. It is therefore way too early to describe the structures found as "living". Do viruses live? Do prions "live"? They do not, but bacteria certainly do. Craig Venter has rather convincingly shown that most currently known living organisms require a minimum set of genes for metabolism and so on, ie a minimum amount of DNA, organelles, proteins and so on. If the nanobacteria are too small to contain all of that, which they do, I very much doubt they deserve the name bacterium. Their disease-causing potential is a different matter altogether, see the prion diseases. If these structures can accelerate atherosclerosis in model animals I would certainly be intrigued to say the very least.
It's rather more complicated than you think. The light reaching the telescopes is x billion years old, meaning that the objects that emitted the photons have long since moved elsewhere and are no longer there where the telescope sees them. So, when looking out into the universe, you are seeing mirages of the past. The more distant the object, the older its light. So yes, telescopes are time machines in that regard because such is the nature of spacetime - if you look over any given distance you are in effect looking into the past.
That's part of the explanation. The other part is that most "gourmet" coffees are actually being made as an espresso or Turkish/Greek coffee. In both cases, the grounds are extracted using a relatively low amount of really hot water, in the case of espresso also pressurized. This results in far more efficient extraction of fatty fractions (containing caffeine but also cholesterol) than with regular filter processes where sometimes tepid water is being slowly dribbled over (indeed often cheaply made) grounds. Hence the larger amount of caffeine, and the better taste.
You're right. I still do not know whether or not this book is any good if you're interested in SPARK or Ada and want to learn. Wow. This is not a review but a rave. However, the author obviously knows what he's talking about so I would welcome an actual review on Slashdot.
Something good may yet come out of this
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Most Americans do not seem to realize that they have been paying ridiculously LOW prices for gas for years. FYI, regular petrol has cost around 2 euro over here for the past two-three years. And before that, it wasn't much less. American prices are still much lower (2 dollars a gallon is about.50 euro/liter - most Europeans pay FOUR times that amount). The low prices have resulted in excessive petrol consumption in the US, with people buying ever more and ever bigger SUVs. The average American consumes about 7 times more energy than the average European and I think that the low gas prices have contributed to the fact that most Americans do not seem to be aware that energy actually comes at a cost. So, perhaps, the current rise in petrol prices will serve as an eye-opener and lead to a more conscious use of energy. One can always hope, no?
You do have a point, but I disagree on China not being expansionist. Their history clearly shows that, on occasion (when deemed safe to do so without too many political/military consequences) they DO expand at the expense of others. Example in point being Tibet. And if they could get away with it (they cannot now since that would start a major war) they would gobble up Taiwan in the blink of an eye. I should also mention Mongolia in this context.
So, I do appreciate the concerns about a Chinese, perhaps armed, presence in space...
Well, sometimes, when talking to some companies'tech support on the phone, I do get the feeling that tech support has been outsourced to some kind of magical realm where my questions are answered by weird dwarves, fairies and dragons who will only help me if I say the right magical words and will vow to slay the evil CEOrceror:)
Perhaps less obvious is the usefulness of this system for syndrome diagnosis. There, we depend on our visual memory of a dysmorphic "Gestalt" to recognize human malformation syndromes. So far, attempts at some kind of computer-aided diagnosis have failed. Too bad, because syndrome diagnosis like we do it now is error-prone and difficult. This system however may be used to recognize typical "syndrome vectors", so you can feed it a patient's picture and have it say "x% match with oculo-dento-digital dysplasia" or whatever disease comes to mind. Potentially very useful!
Yes, see for instance the KaZaa ruling. Under Dutch law, you're not prohibited from providing a framework for file sharing. The provider is not responsible for illegal actions taken by the users.
Re:Gotta love the 21th Century
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, there's no formal proof that watching what you eat will *extend* your life span. Not paying any attention to it MAY shorten it however. Same goes for exercise. No, this pill or whatever form it takes is definitely the way to go. What I do foresee, however, is Westerners becoming some kind of Struldbrug club (see Larry Niven for what the hell that is) with worn out peripheral nervous systems. And your central nervous system, with its pattern of connections being your personality, will not be that easy to maintain. You could end up more demented than Ronald Reagan but still looking like J Lo (or whatever you prefer).
I can think of another use (although it would take some ingenuity and time to implement it). You can also use it to measure the distance between two cars. If it's too short in relation to the speed they're traveling at, the system could signal to car that's to blame to slow down by signalling to a transponder in said car. I don't think anyone would be really happy with his/her car suddenly slowing down, but many accidents are caused by people failing to keep proper distance. History has shown that you can't trust motorists to properly gauge distance, so I for one would welcome such a system.
It wasn't. Paul Allen is no longer of Microsoft, although he lives off the money he made when he still was part of it. Never mind where the money came from. If this takes off (pun intended), scaled up versions of the Rutan plane may one day bring us hypersonic passenger transport. From Amsterdam to New York in one hour, anyone? It'd be nice to see a private venture beat NASA, ESA and every other *SA out there. AND I would be first in line for the first intercontinental sub-orbital flight.
I myself am used to editing my talks while on the plane and in flight access to the databases that I use will be of great help. Can't wait to get this. Something else though - I'm wondering about in flight information. You can usually get really up-to-date weather info and so on during the flight. I can imagine a scenario where flyers with wi-fi access will know of bad weather and, possibly, impending disaster before it's being announced by the captain (who usually won't announce impending disaster anyway). We could get a new kind of panic - Airport panic (capitalization is intentional:)).
so mod me down:) But I couldn't help but note an interesting bit of synchronicity here. This person called DeVore speaks of Mars - and in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove (HIGHLY recommended, by the way) a Howard DeVore, a really bad guy (TM) operates from Mars... Lovely.
As noted by other posters, this David may be a wine ripoff. I checked their web site and, interestingly, their "technology overview" and pretty much every other link that may be informative in this respect is "temporarily disabled". Something tells me that temporary may be permanent here:)
Yeah, my sentiments exactly. What annoys me even more is the shameless product plugging. I guess all us cool dawgs oughta check da ikea house on our boards before givin a major shout out to da Spotmates grabbin their latte's over at da bucks.
Ugh.
When they go write stuff such as "OMG! I was actually recognized by a Spot fan at work yesterday! It was so surreal and uber awesome" or "Anyway, gotta hit the bucks right now for a Tazo Chai latte! Make it a super day!". Puhleaze, real people (it's supposed to be a reality soap, right?) to whom we are supposed to relate do not talk like a textwriter trying to emulate the way people who are like 20 years younger are talking. And the acting shown in the "Spot Moments" is just awful. I want no part of this crap.
for instance, to have barcodes on the packaging of stuff. For example, this code on the outside of prescription medication could link to the producer's web site, or to medical databases so patients and physicians could easily access important information. It would save hugely on paper. I myself would like to have this on my lab equipment so I could have access to user manuals, technical information, experimental protocols and so on. Let's have it!
I checked out their web site - no details on security other than the assertion that it is "secure". Right. I am assuming that the RFID tag is a passive one and that the paypass terminal needs to authenticate in some way. I do hope so, anyway, because if not, criminals are indeed going to have lots of fun with this. Would anyone be able to tell me how secure communication between a tag and a reader can be obtained?
yeah, right. Kinda like building wall after wall around your fortified position, only to discover that the bad guys are just lobbing the shells over the walls and still blastting the crap out of you...
Slashdot Mirror
FTL travel is not required. You're assuming that space is a ball with a vacuum inside through which light travels. It is not. Here's my understanding of this - if anyone has a better explanation please let's have it :) Light is propagated along the curvature of spacetime (i know that this is vague, but without mathematics it's difficult to explain in natural language). Assume that the galaxy we'll be seeing three billion years from then is a point light source. The light travels in an expanding cone along spacetime. The universe is finite and the light will curve back as it were (some models suggest that this may not be entirely true though). The universe expands and so does the cone of light. We come into being and are in the cone of light at a certain point in (space-) time. The original source has moved but the cone has not. The difficulty here is in visualizing space expansion not as a 3d phenomenon that happens at the boundary of a sphere but also affects its contents.
It's obvious that this is one of your buttons. I am not that fond of the impact factor system. On the contrary. However, at this point in time it is one of the few more or less reliable ways of judging the importance (in terms of readership etc) of a particular publication. And while bullshit has OCCASIONALLY appeared in Science, Cell or Nature, "plenty" is not the word I would use. Generally, standards are high. And if a mid-range journal asks for seven revisions that tells me too that there is politics going on. That is, some editor really wanted it published while others did not like it at all. If a paper is rejected by reviewers twice in a row that is usually grounds for definitive rejection. And to get back to the original point - this still doesn't mean that the existence of nanobacteria has been proved or that the methods used for the proof were adequate.
Well, occasionally the standard outlets do have it wrong. Most of the times they just adhere to stringent standards of scientific correctness. Sometimes that is a disadvantage but it spares us from having to suffer through junk science most of the time. I would also like to politely disagree with you on the central role that bacteria play in atherosclerosis. Cholesterol has a lot to do with it, if you look at what happens to people suffering from congenital hypercholesterolemia. They die from atherosclerosis. Homocysteine is not there as a consequence of bacterial infestation but because of hyperhomocysteinemia, a rather common metabolic defect. There is currently no proof for a central role of bacterial/viral infection in atherosclerosis. There is also no proof to the contrary, but if you read your science philosophy you will realize that does not mean that your hypothesis is correct.
Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal. What's even more important is that behaviour as shown by the "nanobacteria" can also be interpreted as being the consequence of conformational changes of proteins in solution induced by the particles. Mutated prions are also capable of doing so (they change the prion normal structure into a beta-sheet), thereby causing disease. Self-assembly of macromolecules also comes to mind as a potential explanation. It is therefore way too early to describe the structures found as "living". Do viruses live? Do prions "live"? They do not, but bacteria certainly do. Craig Venter has rather convincingly shown that most currently known living organisms require a minimum set of genes for metabolism and so on, ie a minimum amount of DNA, organelles, proteins and so on. If the nanobacteria are too small to contain all of that, which they do, I very much doubt they deserve the name bacterium. Their disease-causing potential is a different matter altogether, see the prion diseases. If these structures can accelerate atherosclerosis in model animals I would certainly be intrigued to say the very least.
It's rather more complicated than you think. The light reaching the telescopes is x billion years old, meaning that the objects that emitted the photons have long since moved elsewhere and are no longer there where the telescope sees them. So, when looking out into the universe, you are seeing mirages of the past. The more distant the object, the older its light. So yes, telescopes are time machines in that regard because such is the nature of spacetime - if you look over any given distance you are in effect looking into the past.
You're right of course - cholesterol is animal-only :) I meant to say saturated fatty acids that can raise you cholesterol levels...
That's part of the explanation. The other part is that most "gourmet" coffees are actually being made as an espresso or Turkish/Greek coffee. In both cases, the grounds are extracted using a relatively low amount of really hot water, in the case of espresso also pressurized. This results in far more efficient extraction of fatty fractions (containing caffeine but also cholesterol) than with regular filter processes where sometimes tepid water is being slowly dribbled over (indeed often cheaply made) grounds. Hence the larger amount of caffeine, and the better taste.
You're right. I still do not know whether or not this book is any good if you're interested in SPARK or Ada and want to learn. Wow. This is not a review but a rave. However, the author obviously knows what he's talking about so I would welcome an actual review on Slashdot.
Most Americans do not seem to realize that they have been paying ridiculously LOW prices for gas for years. FYI, regular petrol has cost around 2 euro over here for the past two-three years. And before that, it wasn't much less. American prices are still much lower (2 dollars a gallon is about .50 euro/liter - most Europeans pay FOUR times that amount). The low prices have resulted in excessive petrol consumption in the US, with people buying ever more and ever bigger SUVs. The average American consumes about 7 times more energy than the average European and I think that the low gas prices have contributed to the fact that most Americans do not seem to be aware that energy actually comes at a cost. So, perhaps, the current rise in petrol prices will serve as an eye-opener and lead to a more conscious use of energy. One can always hope, no?
You do have a point, but I disagree on China not being expansionist. Their history clearly shows that, on occasion (when deemed safe to do so without too many political/military consequences) they DO expand at the expense of others. Example in point being Tibet. And if they could get away with it (they cannot now since that would start a major war) they would gobble up Taiwan in the blink of an eye. I should also mention Mongolia in this context. So, I do appreciate the concerns about a Chinese, perhaps armed, presence in space...
Well, sometimes, when talking to some companies'tech support on the phone, I do get the feeling that tech support has been outsourced to some kind of magical realm where my questions are answered by weird dwarves, fairies and dragons who will only help me if I say the right magical words and will vow to slay the evil CEOrceror :)
Perhaps less obvious is the usefulness of this system for syndrome diagnosis. There, we depend on our visual memory of a dysmorphic "Gestalt" to recognize human malformation syndromes. So far, attempts at some kind of computer-aided diagnosis have failed. Too bad, because syndrome diagnosis like we do it now is error-prone and difficult. This system however may be used to recognize typical "syndrome vectors", so you can feed it a patient's picture and have it say "x% match with oculo-dento-digital dysplasia" or whatever disease comes to mind. Potentially very useful!
Yes, see for instance the KaZaa ruling. Under Dutch law, you're not prohibited from providing a framework for file sharing. The provider is not responsible for illegal actions taken by the users.
Actually, there's no formal proof that watching what you eat will *extend* your life span. Not paying any attention to it MAY shorten it however. Same goes for exercise. No, this pill or whatever form it takes is definitely the way to go. What I do foresee, however, is Westerners becoming some kind of Struldbrug club (see Larry Niven for what the hell that is) with worn out peripheral nervous systems. And your central nervous system, with its pattern of connections being your personality, will not be that easy to maintain. You could end up more demented than Ronald Reagan but still looking like J Lo (or whatever you prefer).
Well, it DOES give new meaning to the phrase "skyrocketing debts", doesn't it?
I can think of another use (although it would take some ingenuity and time to implement it). You can also use it to measure the distance between two cars. If it's too short in relation to the speed they're traveling at, the system could signal to car that's to blame to slow down by signalling to a transponder in said car. I don't think anyone would be really happy with his/her car suddenly slowing down, but many accidents are caused by people failing to keep proper distance. History has shown that you can't trust motorists to properly gauge distance, so I for one would welcome such a system.
It wasn't. Paul Allen is no longer of Microsoft, although he lives off the money he made when he still was part of it. Never mind where the money came from. If this takes off (pun intended), scaled up versions of the Rutan plane may one day bring us hypersonic passenger transport. From Amsterdam to New York in one hour, anyone? It'd be nice to see a private venture beat NASA, ESA and every other *SA out there. AND I would be first in line for the first intercontinental sub-orbital flight.
I myself am used to editing my talks while on the plane and in flight access to the databases that I use will be of great help. Can't wait to get this. Something else though - I'm wondering about in flight information. You can usually get really up-to-date weather info and so on during the flight. I can imagine a scenario where flyers with wi-fi access will know of bad weather and, possibly, impending disaster before it's being announced by the captain (who usually won't announce impending disaster anyway). We could get a new kind of panic - Airport panic (capitalization is intentional :)).
so mod me down :) But I couldn't help but note an interesting bit of synchronicity here. This person called DeVore speaks of Mars - and in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove (HIGHLY recommended, by the way) a Howard DeVore, a really bad guy (TM) operates from Mars... Lovely.
As noted by other posters, this David may be a wine ripoff. I checked their web site and, interestingly, their "technology overview" and pretty much every other link that may be informative in this respect is "temporarily disabled". Something tells me that temporary may be permanent here :)
Yeah, my sentiments exactly. What annoys me even more is the shameless product plugging. I guess all us cool dawgs oughta check da ikea house on our boards before givin a major shout out to da Spotmates grabbin their latte's over at da bucks. Ugh.
When they go write stuff such as "OMG! I was actually recognized by a Spot fan at work yesterday! It was so surreal and uber awesome" or "Anyway, gotta hit the bucks right now for a Tazo Chai latte! Make it a super day!". Puhleaze, real people (it's supposed to be a reality soap, right?) to whom we are supposed to relate do not talk like a textwriter trying to emulate the way people who are like 20 years younger are talking. And the acting shown in the "Spot Moments" is just awful. I want no part of this crap.
for instance, to have barcodes on the packaging of stuff. For example, this code on the outside of prescription medication could link to the producer's web site, or to medical databases so patients and physicians could easily access important information. It would save hugely on paper. I myself would like to have this on my lab equipment so I could have access to user manuals, technical information, experimental protocols and so on. Let's have it!
I checked out their web site - no details on security other than the assertion that it is "secure". Right. I am assuming that the RFID tag is a passive one and that the paypass terminal needs to authenticate in some way. I do hope so, anyway, because if not, criminals are indeed going to have lots of fun with this. Would anyone be able to tell me how secure communication between a tag and a reader can be obtained?
yeah, right. Kinda like building wall after wall around your fortified position, only to discover that the bad guys are just lobbing the shells over the walls and still blastting the crap out of you...