The World is Flat offers a more balanced, more near-term vision of this. Friedman's vision is neither utopian or dystopian. The technologies that Kurzweil discusses aren't for everyone, and won't benefit everyone equally. Yes, technology does permit massive improvements in productivity for many activities, but not all. Those people, companies, and countries that can't (or refuse to) compete globally won't share Kurzweil's utopia. For some, the future may be a race to the bottom, for others it's about enjoying a nice slice of a growing global pie.
Actually, they're not the same on two levels. First, people are more comfortable with ad-supported "free" email services. Will people want to see ads while working on a document or spreadsheet. I know I wouldn't and I suspect that most employers wouldn't want their employees distracted by ads (if possible).
Second, and more importantly, I'd argue that words in email are far more likely to be useful for adwords purposes. Emails often talk about the things we plan to do, places we're going, things we own/plan to buy, life events (birthdays, xmas, etc.). These life activities have significant commercial tie-ins. If a friend tells us about a great new product/book/band/vacation spot then its very logical that adwords tied to that item will be relevant, clicked on, and bought from. Office documents don't have this consumption-related immediacy, at least mine don't.
Google's plan may be to eventually capture all your documents and email and "workflow" on their servers, thereby tying you permanently to their world, exposing you to paid adverts and other paid services as they wish. They get total access for data mining.
I think you are right in this regard. The key is whether Office documents contain enough good data to improve advertising performance and whether users will accept ads in the context of Office use.
Although I'm sure that Google could do this, its not clear that Google will want to do this. Where's the money? Would Google ads appear in the margins of all my documents while I work on them? Would people accept that intrusion? Would people actually click through? I know that the vast majority of the Office document work that I do would generate $0 revenue for Google because very little of it relates to buying stuff. And for people that work in offices, most of them have little buying authority, so adwords sold on the Office site would be a loser for advertisers.
As much as some people (myself included) would love for Google to kill MS, its not clear that Google has a business rationale for entry into the Office market.
I've noticed, for example, that the "Macintosh" (the computer) section of Google News often has non-Macintosh-related stories about sports, crimes, political events, etc. just because a person named "Macintosh" was named in the story. Smarter semantic analysis of news stories would help better categorize articles.
This is the type of device that's perfect for someone who wants to take digital pictures, but doesn't want a PC (or a Mac or a Linux machine). I was talking to an engineer from a large European telecom company and he told me about an increase the numbers of non-PC-owners with digital cameras. They keep all their photos on memory cards (cards are so cheap its pennies per photo), print directly from the card (at shops or with printers that accept memory cards), show their photos on TVs, etc. No PC required.
With a camera that can email or post photos to a website, its just another reason not to get a PC (for some people).
IBM thought they were king because they thought hardware was the real source of value. MS proved them wrong as Windows/Office software became the standard and PCs became commodities.
MS thinks they are the king because they think software is the real source of value. Google is out to prove that services (search, gmail, froogle, adwords, etc.) are the real source of value.
MS knows this and is trying to get into services, but I wonder if MSN search et al are the OS/2 of the day -- a dinosaur's attempt to compete on a changed playing field.
What stops people (router makers, network software designers, etc.) from adding an zone-based over-layer to the DNS system. For most traffic, the local packets would use their local DNS. But, if you want to go international, you wrap your request in something that routes that request to the appropriate international gateway to that zone where it is unwrapped and sent to the remote DNS. From a UI standpoint, addresses would get an over-the-top level domain so that we might have www.google.com.ru, www.google.com.us, www.google.com.ch, etc. would resolve to their respective zones.
Of course, the current install-base of systems might be somewhat unhappy (or at least restricted to accessing only their local zones), but I'd bet some clever individuals would create nice proxies that create backward compatible gateways. And given the massive size of IPv6, I'm sure someone can do an international version of NAT to remap conflicted DNS entries between zones.
First most of the processes that people call "science" (in the art v. science dichotomy) are really engineering -- in the sense that they are applying existing knowledge to achieve some stated outcome (engineering) rather than discovering/creating totally new knowledge through a process of hypothesis and experiment (science).
Second, I see a difference between engineering and hacking in terms of knowability of the outcome. If you can design a product or solve a problem from start to finish, without much or any testing, and it the solution does exactly what you expect it to do, it more on the engineering end of the spectrum. If the hacking is more a matter of "messing around" or "trying different solutions' it is less engineering.
Third, I'm not sure why people would call it "art" unless the result is judged on aesthetic, rather than practical grounds. A beautiful case-mod or algorithm might be art (in the eye of a geeky beholder), but a hack that unlocks a cellphone may be more in the realm of applied knowledge (science) or experimentation (science).
I forgot to mention that part. She uses a Logitech MX510 (8-button, scroll-wheel) for desktop mousing and an old, much-loved beige Apple ADB keyboard (with USB adaptor). The laptop actually sits behind the Cinema display, resting on its open edges (bottom of keyboard & top of screen) like an A-frame house with the screen turned off.
My wife uses a small 12" powerbook attached to a large 22" cinema display for a good combo of mobile usability and desktop usability. The DVI port on that laptop means she's not cramped by the 12" screen most of the time. And the 12" size/ 4.5 lb weight makes for better portability.
MS makes a valid point in claiming that they have a better knowledge of WHO the user is. Having a profile of the searcher helps create better, more-targetted ad choices. That way users see more relevant ads, advertisers get more click-throughs and purchases, and the adserving company gains more revenue. I wonder if Google will use GMail and search history to change its ad targetting. GMail would seem to offer an interesting opportunity to segment users/searchers into psychographic groups that are far more useful than profile data (e.g. age, occupation, etc.)
It would be interesting to do side-by-side searches from two computers used by two different heavy GMail users (or a GMail-user and non-GMail-user) with very different interests (and e-mail contents). It might reveal if Google is using GMail for profiling and changing its ads to suit what it thinks the user might want. One could also do tests to see if prior search history influences Google's ad choices in future searches.
Search (or advertizing) is actually a dialog between the user and the search engine (or advertizer), and the better the search engine/ad-server understands the user, the better for everyone.
Sir, respectfully, you are talking through your hat. This specific solar car race has inspired the development of a 98% efficiency electrical drive system.
True. But I never said that prior races weren't instrumental in developing key technologies and apologize if I gave that impression. My point was that at some point the technological challenge shifts (has shifted) from prototyping the technologies for one-off test vehicles for races to creating the technologies for commercialization/mass-production.
Unfortunately, all the real development has already been done. Now, using standard parts, bought off the shelf, a car can be built that travels at the posted speed limits and still charge the battery. The method for building a successful solar car has been reduced to a formula: Use THESE solar cells, THAT motor/controller package and have a body shaped like THIS, for slippery aerodynamics.
My point, exactly. The component technologies have plateaued and now each team is just replicating prior technologies. The vehicle is largely perfected. Barring poor design choices (e.g., you don't need a test vehicle to know that a vehicle will be dangerous in a crosswind), sloppy craftsmanship, or inept management, all of the recent racers are good vehicles.
The Solar Car race is now merely a quaint anachronism. The rules body actively moves to stifle any true innovation, much like Formula 1 racing etc.
My point, exactly. These races are fun, provide good marketing, but don't solve the real challenge to commercialization.
I dunno... any time you have people pushing a technological envelope something useful usually comes out of it. Sometimes in unexpected ways.
I agree 100%. The question is: which technological envelopes need to be pushed to get solar power commercialized? Is it the base technology of the vehicle or is it the design-for-manufacturing issues and manufacturing system that need the most development now? I'd wager that engineers have a very good understanding of the properties of solar power, power electronics, aerodynamics, motive systems, braking systems, battery systems, etc. Sure, they need to create an integrated design and test it, but a good engineer team should be able to create a competent vehicle.
What we really don't understand is how to make these vehicles practical -- affordable and usable in everyday driving. Perhaps the contest could be modified to push the envelope toward these goals. Perhaps the rules should require: a) all contest vehicles carry two people and 50 pounds of cargo; b) all contest vehicles be climate controlled to XX degrees; c) all support vehicles must be solar powered and adhere to these rules, too. This forces teams to make cheaper, more practical, more useful vehicle designs that must be replicatable (to create the support team fleet). And if these rules are infeasible, I'd suggest that solar powered vehicles are infeasible.
As much as I love these contests, I'm not sure they provide much beyond marketing. The skills and technologies needed to create a hand-built, one-off, contest-winner are totally different from those needed to create a factory that makes millions of mass-produced, affordable, everyday vehicles. Its not that hard to make "a" solar-powered car where student labor is free and the solar vehicle runs with a caravan of gas-powered support vehicles. But the real key is to create the manufacturing infrastructure to make millions of them at an affordable price. Other problems, such as a shortage of polysilicon and increasing solar cell prices highlight this problem of mass production and have a much bigger effect on the adoption of solar power.
I hope these contests continue, but I also hope people don't think that these contests are solving the real-world problems of applying solar power.
I'm sure the root cause of cowboy coding is in Microsoft's quest for being able to put check marks in feature boxes so PHBs can pick MS software as having the most "features." Back in the 80s there used to be a number of standalone outlining applications and high-quality outliners embedded in competing word processors. Then Word got an "outliner." That this "outliner" never worked and still doesn't work to this day is irrelevant. It enabled MS to put a check mark in the outliner feature box and eliminate user's arguments that they need a non-MS product because they need an outliner.
Checkbox marketing -- about the only way to market when non-users make purchase decisions -- drives software companies to bolt-on features without regard to consistency of or destructive interactions between features.
The bees drink the nectar from flowers and regurgitate/vomit it into cells in their hive on their return. I wouldn't call it "cud" because they don't bring it back up, chew on it, and then swallow it as part of an extended digestive process such as ruminant mammals use. And it's certainly NOT piss because the nectar isn't absorbed by the digestive system and filtered out by some kidney-like organ (now honeydew from aphids is effectively piss, but that's another matter).
Why do they insist on binary classifications. I'm sure that no matter what criteria you pick (and I'm sure the list would be very long), you will find bodies that seem like planets but don't fit 100% of the criteria.
We can't even agree within the limited sample size of this solar system on the definition of "planet." What happens when we get really good at finding objects that orbit other stars and have hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of potentially planet-like objects to classify. I'm sure will hit some real stumpers. What if we find two massive "planets" orbiting each other while they orbit a star? Is only the bigger one a true "planet" even if the "moon" has 10 times the mass of the Earth? Or what if we find some dwarf stellar system with a nice array of "planets" that all happen to be the same size class as our or Jupiter's moons?
The binary categories aren't even that useful. Surely some larger "non-planets" will have some planet-like properties for astronomical/terraforming/exploration purposes?
My point is that the world isn't binary. Objects around stars exist in a multidimensional continuum of sizes, compositions, histories, orbits, etc. Why not just list those properties and not waste time force-fitting the bodies into categories that only have crude predictive power.
Let's use AOL disk passwords
on
Name That Worm
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Instead of hard-to-remember ID numbers for malware, why not use those funky passwords that AOL puts on their CDs for creating new accounts. I'd like to here about viruses names such as WONTON-FLOES or GRAVEL-TAPE, to use two passwords from recently mailed AOL CDs.
This is really cool, but I hope they control for two of the less-than-ideal behaviors of markets.
1) There are two ways to "be right" in a market. First, I can make the right choice as to the actual ending outcome. This a buy-and-hold strategy. Or, second, I can make the right choice as to the direction of price movements in the market. This is the speculator's buy-and-sell strategy. The first strategy means the the market converges on the "true" expected value. The second strategy leads to bubbles and crashes that don't provide as much useful data on the actually variable being modeled by the market. Google wants to encourage the first type of trading, but not totally suppress the second type of trading because speculators provide liquidity in markets.
2) Manipulators can "cause" events to occur in the way that maximizes their return, but suboptimizes Googles performance. If I bet that a given project will be done in October and it looks like its getting done early, what stops me from causing a small delay? Of if the project is being delayed too much, what stops me from descoping the project or doing a fast, low-quality job to complete the project within my chosen time frame. In either case, I can manipulate the outcome to win in the market, but hurt Google.
Note that I don't include insider trading in the list problems. Google doesn't really care if the market is fair, only that it provides accurate predictions. In fact, Google might encourage insider trading as a way to encourage communication inside the company. The more people that share their "inside" information on upcoming strategic, the better.
This study assumes that everyone who is a member of a given narrow interest group is also a member of the same set of other groups. A Republican who is Jewish, gay, an educator, and interested in gardening (yes, I actually do know someone who fits this description) would be a member of a rather diverse set of groups. Or, on Amazon, a given person might enjoy books on renaissance Europe, enterprise software, global travel, and women's issues (another friend). And I, who like technology and frequent/., know both of these people.
Although the internet may let like-minded people become very interconnected and absorbed by their own group's mindset, it doesn't stop people from belonging to diverse groups and being exposed to multiple mindsets.
They could simulate walking up and down hills with this thing. Biasing the ball to preferentially rotate in a a particular direction would create a simulated gravity gradient. The user would definitely find it hard to walk "up hill" and easy to walk "down hill". It couldn't do stairs, only slopes, but it could give the user a real work-out.
Old versions of Office have entire books devoted to their bugs. When we moved from Office 98 to Office 2004, we noticed that most of the bugs were still in the program even though it was 3 versions later.
Is Office 12 just a UI rearrangement of the same defective code?
So whilst the probability of life travelling between worlds might be some low probability (call it Z), then it might still be that Z.Px.Tx > Pe.Te - which would make exogenesis (panspermia) more probable than endogenesis.
That's a very interesting argument. I would suspect, however, that Z is such a small number as to swamp all the other terms. A panspermic chunk must gain enough velocity to escape the gravity well of its planet AND star yet not have so much velocity that it doesn't get captured by our Sun's gravity well (yet not penetrate too deeply into the Sun's gravity well that the chunk gets baked). And life on the chunk must survive its ejection from its home planet.
Moreover, the effective value of N can't be that large, since panspermic chunks from only nearby stellar system have any hope of reaching Earth. The umpteen hundred million planets on the other side of the galaxy don't contribute much to the population of chunks floating about. My guess is that the probability of a chunk getting to Earth is worse than proportional to 1/d^3 -- stars twice as far away have less than 1/8 the chance of delivering a chunk here. I say 1/d^3 to reflect the combination of 1/d^2 projection of objects over distance times 1/d for the slow accumulation of damage over millions of years of floating in interstellar space. Thus, I'd bet the effective N is not high at all (less than 10 to 100). Moreover, N will be small unless Px is nearly 1 so that many local star systems spawn endogenous life. But if Px is near 1 for a large population of local planetary systems, then why should we think that Pe is very small. And if Pe isn't tiny, then we're back to a high chance of endogenous life on Earth.
Even the Tx/Te ratio isn't as high as it might seem since Px was zero at the beginning of the universe because there were no heavy elements. Only after a sufficient number of supernovae and second generation stellar systems formed would Px rise. In fact the Earth's relatively late arrival probably means that Pe is higher than the Px of older systems born before the galaxy accumulated as much heavy elements. Tx is also down-modulated by life-destroying events. If life formed on a planet that was then sterilized by a supernova, gamma ray burst, etc. billions of years before Earth became habitable, then such a high Px planet would be unlikely to contribute much to the chance of spawning life on Earth. It seems like the ratio of Tx/Te might only 10 to 50 or so.
Finally, even if Px > Pe, there's the assumption that life arising on these high Px planets can survive on Earth. One might suggest that a high Px planet is like a lush tropical environment -- very conducive to life -- and that Earth's postulated low Pe status makes Earth relatively desert-like. What is the likelihood that a life form adapted to a high Px, tropical planet, would survive on a low Pe, desert world? I'm not saying life can't adaptt, only that not all high Px worlds spwan life than can survive on Earth. This likelihood that Earth might be effectively uninhabitable by life from a high Px world means the effective Px is lower (or Z is even worse).
I agree with (and enjoyed) your arguments about N, Tx/Te, Px/Pe, but I seriously doubt that the numerical values of these ratios trumps the incredibly small probabilities of an interstellar transfer of a viable lifeform. My suspicion is that Z has a very very large negative exponent that outweighs these other terms.
Until we can visit other planets in other star systems, we'll have a hard time estimating all these numbers. And, ultimately, the panspermia theory is impossible to falsify as we can never prove it did not happen, only that it has a relatively low probability of having happened.
Slashdot Mirror
The World is Flat offers a more balanced, more near-term vision of this. Friedman's vision is neither utopian or dystopian. The technologies that Kurzweil discusses aren't for everyone, and won't benefit everyone equally. Yes, technology does permit massive improvements in productivity for many activities, but not all. Those people, companies, and countries that can't (or refuse to) compete globally won't share Kurzweil's utopia. For some, the future may be a race to the bottom, for others it's about enjoying a nice slice of a growing global pie.
Actually, they're not the same on two levels. First, people are more comfortable with ad-supported "free" email services. Will people want to see ads while working on a document or spreadsheet. I know I wouldn't and I suspect that most employers wouldn't want their employees distracted by ads (if possible).
Second, and more importantly, I'd argue that words in email are far more likely to be useful for adwords purposes. Emails often talk about the things we plan to do, places we're going, things we own/plan to buy, life events (birthdays, xmas, etc.). These life activities have significant commercial tie-ins. If a friend tells us about a great new product/book/band/vacation spot then its very logical that adwords tied to that item will be relevant, clicked on, and bought from. Office documents don't have this consumption-related immediacy, at least mine don't.
Google's plan may be to eventually capture all your documents and email and "workflow" on their servers, thereby tying you permanently to their world, exposing you to paid adverts and other paid services as they wish. They get total access for data mining.
I think you are right in this regard. The key is whether Office documents contain enough good data to improve advertising performance and whether users will accept ads in the context of Office use.
As much as some people (myself included) would love for Google to kill MS, its not clear that Google has a business rationale for entry into the Office market.
I've noticed, for example, that the "Macintosh" (the computer) section of Google News often has non-Macintosh-related stories about sports, crimes, political events, etc. just because a person named "Macintosh" was named in the story. Smarter semantic analysis of news stories would help better categorize articles.
With a camera that can email or post photos to a website, its just another reason not to get a PC (for some people).
MS thinks they are the king because they think software is the real source of value. Google is out to prove that services (search, gmail, froogle, adwords, etc.) are the real source of value.
MS knows this and is trying to get into services, but I wonder if MSN search et al are the OS/2 of the day -- a dinosaur's attempt to compete on a changed playing field.
What stops people (router makers, network software designers, etc.) from adding an zone-based over-layer to the DNS system. For most traffic, the local packets would use their local DNS. But, if you want to go international, you wrap your request in something that routes that request to the appropriate international gateway to that zone where it is unwrapped and sent to the remote DNS. From a UI standpoint, addresses would get an over-the-top level domain so that we might have www.google.com.ru, www.google.com.us, www.google.com.ch, etc. would resolve to their respective zones.
Of course, the current install-base of systems might be somewhat unhappy (or at least restricted to accessing only their local zones), but I'd bet some clever individuals would create nice proxies that create backward compatible gateways. And given the massive size of IPv6, I'm sure someone can do an international version of NAT to remap conflicted DNS entries between zones.
Second, I see a difference between engineering and hacking in terms of knowability of the outcome. If you can design a product or solve a problem from start to finish, without much or any testing, and it the solution does exactly what you expect it to do, it more on the engineering end of the spectrum. If the hacking is more a matter of "messing around" or "trying different solutions' it is less engineering.
Third, I'm not sure why people would call it "art" unless the result is judged on aesthetic, rather than practical grounds. A beautiful case-mod or algorithm might be art (in the eye of a geeky beholder), but a hack that unlocks a cellphone may be more in the realm of applied knowledge (science) or experimentation (science).
By any chance does your wife type a lot?
I forgot to mention that part. She uses a Logitech MX510 (8-button, scroll-wheel) for desktop mousing and an old, much-loved beige Apple ADB keyboard (with USB adaptor). The laptop actually sits behind the Cinema display, resting on its open edges (bottom of keyboard & top of screen) like an A-frame house with the screen turned off.
My wife uses a small 12" powerbook attached to a large 22" cinema display for a good combo of mobile usability and desktop usability. The DVI port on that laptop means she's not cramped by the 12" screen most of the time. And the 12" size/ 4.5 lb weight makes for better portability.
MS makes a valid point in claiming that they have a better knowledge of WHO the user is. Having a profile of the searcher helps create better, more-targetted ad choices. That way users see more relevant ads, advertisers get more click-throughs and purchases, and the adserving company gains more revenue. I wonder if Google will use GMail and search history to change its ad targetting. GMail would seem to offer an interesting opportunity to segment users/searchers into psychographic groups that are far more useful than profile data (e.g. age, occupation, etc.)
It would be interesting to do side-by-side searches from two computers used by two different heavy GMail users (or a GMail-user and non-GMail-user) with very different interests (and e-mail contents). It might reveal if Google is using GMail for profiling and changing its ads to suit what it thinks the user might want. One could also do tests to see if prior search history influences Google's ad choices in future searches.
Search (or advertizing) is actually a dialog between the user and the search engine (or advertizer), and the better the search engine/ad-server understands the user, the better for everyone.
Sir, respectfully, you are talking through your hat. This specific solar car race has inspired the development of a 98% efficiency electrical drive system.
True. But I never said that prior races weren't instrumental in developing key technologies and apologize if I gave that impression. My point was that at some point the technological challenge shifts (has shifted) from prototyping the technologies for one-off test vehicles for races to creating the technologies for commercialization/mass-production.
Unfortunately, all the real development has already been done. Now, using standard parts, bought off the shelf, a car can be built that travels at the posted speed limits and still charge the battery. The method for building a successful solar car has been reduced to a formula: Use THESE solar cells, THAT motor/controller package and have a body shaped like THIS, for slippery aerodynamics.
My point, exactly. The component technologies have plateaued and now each team is just replicating prior technologies. The vehicle is largely perfected. Barring poor design choices (e.g., you don't need a test vehicle to know that a vehicle will be dangerous in a crosswind), sloppy craftsmanship, or inept management, all of the recent racers are good vehicles.
The Solar Car race is now merely a quaint anachronism. The rules body actively moves to stifle any true innovation, much like Formula 1 racing etc.
My point, exactly. These races are fun, provide good marketing, but don't solve the real challenge to commercialization.
I dunno ... any time you have people pushing a technological envelope something useful usually comes out of it. Sometimes in unexpected ways.
I agree 100%. The question is: which technological envelopes need to be pushed to get solar power commercialized? Is it the base technology of the vehicle or is it the design-for-manufacturing issues and manufacturing system that need the most development now? I'd wager that engineers have a very good understanding of the properties of solar power, power electronics, aerodynamics, motive systems, braking systems, battery systems, etc. Sure, they need to create an integrated design and test it, but a good engineer team should be able to create a competent vehicle.
What we really don't understand is how to make these vehicles practical -- affordable and usable in everyday driving. Perhaps the contest could be modified to push the envelope toward these goals. Perhaps the rules should require: a) all contest vehicles carry two people and 50 pounds of cargo; b) all contest vehicles be climate controlled to XX degrees; c) all support vehicles must be solar powered and adhere to these rules, too. This forces teams to make cheaper, more practical, more useful vehicle designs that must be replicatable (to create the support team fleet). And if these rules are infeasible, I'd suggest that solar powered vehicles are infeasible.
As much as I love these contests, I'm not sure they provide much beyond marketing. The skills and technologies needed to create a hand-built, one-off, contest-winner are totally different from those needed to create a factory that makes millions of mass-produced, affordable, everyday vehicles. Its not that hard to make "a" solar-powered car where student labor is free and the solar vehicle runs with a caravan of gas-powered support vehicles. But the real key is to create the manufacturing infrastructure to make millions of them at an affordable price. Other problems, such as a shortage of polysilicon and increasing solar cell prices highlight this problem of mass production and have a much bigger effect on the adoption of solar power.
I hope these contests continue, but I also hope people don't think that these contests are solving the real-world problems of applying solar power.
I'm sure the root cause of cowboy coding is in Microsoft's quest for being able to put check marks in feature boxes so PHBs can pick MS software as having the most "features." Back in the 80s there used to be a number of standalone outlining applications and high-quality outliners embedded in competing word processors. Then Word got an "outliner." That this "outliner" never worked and still doesn't work to this day is irrelevant. It enabled MS to put a check mark in the outliner feature box and eliminate user's arguments that they need a non-MS product because they need an outliner.
Checkbox marketing -- about the only way to market when non-users make purchase decisions -- drives software companies to bolt-on features without regard to consistency of or destructive interactions between features.
The bees drink the nectar from flowers and regurgitate/vomit it into cells in their hive on their return. I wouldn't call it "cud" because they don't bring it back up, chew on it, and then swallow it as part of an extended digestive process such as ruminant mammals use. And it's certainly NOT piss because the nectar isn't absorbed by the digestive system and filtered out by some kidney-like organ (now honeydew from aphids is effectively piss, but that's another matter).
Why do they insist on binary classifications. I'm sure that no matter what criteria you pick (and I'm sure the list would be very long), you will find bodies that seem like planets but don't fit 100% of the criteria.
We can't even agree within the limited sample size of this solar system on the definition of "planet." What happens when we get really good at finding objects that orbit other stars and have hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of potentially planet-like objects to classify. I'm sure will hit some real stumpers. What if we find two massive "planets" orbiting each other while they orbit a star? Is only the bigger one a true "planet" even if the "moon" has 10 times the mass of the Earth? Or what if we find some dwarf stellar system with a nice array of "planets" that all happen to be the same size class as our or Jupiter's moons?
The binary categories aren't even that useful. Surely some larger "non-planets" will have some planet-like properties for astronomical/terraforming/exploration purposes?
My point is that the world isn't binary. Objects around stars exist in a multidimensional continuum of sizes, compositions, histories, orbits, etc. Why not just list those properties and not waste time force-fitting the bodies into categories that only have crude predictive power.
Instead of hard-to-remember ID numbers for malware, why not use those funky passwords that AOL puts on their CDs for creating new accounts. I'd like to here about viruses names such as WONTON-FLOES or GRAVEL-TAPE, to use two passwords from recently mailed AOL CDs.
Perhaps American bloggers will now need Reporters without Borders Guide to Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. Ironic that the land that once stood for "free speech" should need advice from a Paris-based organization on the topic.
This is really cool, but I hope they control for two of the less-than-ideal behaviors of markets.
1) There are two ways to "be right" in a market. First, I can make the right choice as to the actual ending outcome. This a buy-and-hold strategy. Or, second, I can make the right choice as to the direction of price movements in the market. This is the speculator's buy-and-sell strategy. The first strategy means the the market converges on the "true" expected value. The second strategy leads to bubbles and crashes that don't provide as much useful data on the actually variable being modeled by the market. Google wants to encourage the first type of trading, but not totally suppress the second type of trading because speculators provide liquidity in markets.
2) Manipulators can "cause" events to occur in the way that maximizes their return, but suboptimizes Googles performance. If I bet that a given project will be done in October and it looks like its getting done early, what stops me from causing a small delay? Of if the project is being delayed too much, what stops me from descoping the project or doing a fast, low-quality job to complete the project within my chosen time frame. In either case, I can manipulate the outcome to win in the market, but hurt Google.
Note that I don't include insider trading in the list problems. Google doesn't really care if the market is fair, only that it provides accurate predictions. In fact, Google might encourage insider trading as a way to encourage communication inside the company. The more people that share their "inside" information on upcoming strategic, the better.
This study assumes that everyone who is a member of a given narrow interest group is also a member of the same set of other groups. A Republican who is Jewish, gay, an educator, and interested in gardening (yes, I actually do know someone who fits this description) would be a member of a rather diverse set of groups. Or, on Amazon, a given person might enjoy books on renaissance Europe, enterprise software, global travel, and women's issues (another friend). And I, who like technology and frequent /., know both of these people.
Although the internet may let like-minded people become very interconnected and absorbed by their own group's mindset, it doesn't stop people from belonging to diverse groups and being exposed to multiple mindsets.
They could simulate walking up and down hills with this thing. Biasing the ball to preferentially rotate in a a particular direction would create a simulated gravity gradient. The user would definitely find it hard to walk "up hill" and easy to walk "down hill". It couldn't do stairs, only slopes, but it could give the user a real work-out.
Old versions of Office have entire books devoted to their bugs. When we moved from Office 98 to Office 2004, we noticed that most of the bugs were still in the program even though it was 3 versions later.
Is Office 12 just a UI rearrangement of the same defective code?
1. Create atmosphere on moon
2. Drop vacuum cleaner by parachute
3. Suck up regolith for 30 seconds
4. Profit!
So whilst the probability of life travelling between worlds might be some low probability (call it Z), then it might still be that Z.Px.Tx > Pe.Te - which would make exogenesis (panspermia) more probable than endogenesis.
That's a very interesting argument. I would suspect, however, that Z is such a small number as to swamp all the other terms. A panspermic chunk must gain enough velocity to escape the gravity well of its planet AND star yet not have so much velocity that it doesn't get captured by our Sun's gravity well (yet not penetrate too deeply into the Sun's gravity well that the chunk gets baked). And life on the chunk must survive its ejection from its home planet.
Moreover, the effective value of N can't be that large, since panspermic chunks from only nearby stellar system have any hope of reaching Earth. The umpteen hundred million planets on the other side of the galaxy don't contribute much to the population of chunks floating about. My guess is that the probability of a chunk getting to Earth is worse than proportional to 1/d^3 -- stars twice as far away have less than 1/8 the chance of delivering a chunk here. I say 1/d^3 to reflect the combination of 1/d^2 projection of objects over distance times 1/d for the slow accumulation of damage over millions of years of floating in interstellar space. Thus, I'd bet the effective N is not high at all (less than 10 to 100). Moreover, N will be small unless Px is nearly 1 so that many local star systems spawn endogenous life. But if Px is near 1 for a large population of local planetary systems, then why should we think that Pe is very small. And if Pe isn't tiny, then we're back to a high chance of endogenous life on Earth.
Even the Tx/Te ratio isn't as high as it might seem since Px was zero at the beginning of the universe because there were no heavy elements. Only after a sufficient number of supernovae and second generation stellar systems formed would Px rise. In fact the Earth's relatively late arrival probably means that Pe is higher than the Px of older systems born before the galaxy accumulated as much heavy elements. Tx is also down-modulated by life-destroying events. If life formed on a planet that was then sterilized by a supernova, gamma ray burst, etc. billions of years before Earth became habitable, then such a high Px planet would be unlikely to contribute much to the chance of spawning life on Earth. It seems like the ratio of Tx/Te might only 10 to 50 or so.
Finally, even if Px > Pe, there's the assumption that life arising on these high Px planets can survive on Earth. One might suggest that a high Px planet is like a lush tropical environment -- very conducive to life -- and that Earth's postulated low Pe status makes Earth relatively desert-like. What is the likelihood that a life form adapted to a high Px, tropical planet, would survive on a low Pe, desert world? I'm not saying life can't adaptt, only that not all high Px worlds spwan life than can survive on Earth. This likelihood that Earth might be effectively uninhabitable by life from a high Px world means the effective Px is lower (or Z is even worse).
I agree with (and enjoyed) your arguments about N, Tx/Te, Px/Pe, but I seriously doubt that the numerical values of these ratios trumps the incredibly small probabilities of an interstellar transfer of a viable lifeform. My suspicion is that Z has a very very large negative exponent that outweighs these other terms.
Until we can visit other planets in other star systems, we'll have a hard time estimating all these numbers. And, ultimately, the panspermia theory is impossible to falsify as we can never prove it did not happen, only that it has a relatively low probability of having happened.