Anyone know of a substitue for Blackboard? Open source or otherwise? I don't use it here at CSUN, but other Universities I deal with do use it. I was actually going to push it for the physics department here, but not now. Thanks.
First, your dam point. You say: When a beaver builds a dam, it's called nature. When man builds a dam, we're destroying nature. Is the purpose of our life not to better our lives? And if so, why should we not be allowed genetic engineering, cloning, going to different planets.
Effectively, you are right. However, just because we can dam every river means we should. Imagine a similar argument: a bear eats a salmon, it's nature. Man eats a salmon, it's destroying nature. If man eats *all* the salmon, which we have in several streams, the salmon never come back. We can eat all the salmon in all the streams and erase that species if we want to.
We have done so in several streams. People pay big money to haul dead salmon carcasses to enrich the soil in those streams. It is pretty clear the benefit was not worth the cost.
It is just a question of scale.
On to your second point: For those don't understand, read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's a scary world that he describes, looking at it from our point of view; however, from the inhabitants point of view, it's a perfect world. Brainwashed, yes, but very few people are unhappy. Furthermore, the few that are too intelligent to live in that world are given their own island, to do as they please.
I want to specifically address the "island" with all the most intelligent live. This is not where the most intelligent go. It was an experiment within the book. John Savage asks why not make everyone ultra-smart. The leader (Ford?) answers that they did this as an experiment - created a whole island of alpha plus-plusses (most intelligent they can make) and it was a disaster: wars, famine, etc. but that now after many years they live in some kind of democracy. (I may have the ending wrong - is it a commune? - but I vividly recall the war part).
My point is, the alpha plus plusses are bred to lead the rest of the population - essentially to boss them around. They are genetically engieneered to be more attractive and taller so that everyone will know who's boss on sight. In fact the one character who goes and finds John Savage is beta plus who is abnormally short (I think he is only as tall as a beta or a beta minus or something) so he is constantly having to remind people to look at his badge or something like that.
Living in America, I kind of treasure the idea that I can be whatever I like: if I am a born leader I do not have to be one if it does not suit my personality or if I am born at the bottom of society I can work my way to the top (yes this can still happen - see for example Bill Clinton whatever you may think of him he was not born to opulant wealth nor power).
Next, everyone in the main society of BNW (Brave New World) is on drugs (soma) which have virtally no side effects (so they still work productively, don't get in traffic wrecks, etc). This drug is explicitly present to allow the people to escape the day to day unchanging shallowness of their life.
Remember, people in this society do not raise their own children nor in any real sense have a family. They have sex purely for fun.
At first this may sound great: sex, drugs, no drawbacks but then you come to what Huxley must have really wanted us to ask: is pleasure all there is to life?
I do not imagine a world like this when I think of a perfect society. I think of one where no one starves, no one goes hungry - but that people choose to be artists and thinkers and scientists. Where people can take up art history as a hobby and write papers on second centruy Roman wall painting if they like - in their spare time - because all the drudgery is taken care of by robots or something and they don't have to work 65 hour weeks just to buy a larger home in the suburbs.
I dream of a world where people create. BNW is a dream where people live and die like cogs in giant wheels: totally impotent. Yes, in both dreams people are happy but for different reasons.
Perhaps that is the origin of gamma ray bursts: civilizations turning their planets into 100 meter diameter spheres with really powerful particle accelerators.
Sure it's massively unlikely, but it would explain why we SETI hasn't heard anything yet.
Imagine if the first signal we decode is: "don't build a particle accelerator larger than 5 kilometers in diameter or you will destroy your whole world."
Um, perhaps you are referring to the nanotechnology aspect of the article, which seems to be really an afterthought for Rees, who is an Astrophysicist.
Rees' main point seems to be centered on the (very) unlikely event that a particle physics experiment could create a black hole or something akin to the big bang.
Sure, I suppose terrorists could build a giant freaking particle accelerator and hold the world for ransom on the off chance that particle physics really does work that way, but it would not be a very effective threat because it is so very unlikely that it does.
It is more likely to generate some new particle (perhaps the Higg's boson) for which we would thank them.
I'm not sure you can "over-sensationalize" the prospect of the whole Earth being turned into a 100 meter sphere of inert goo.
I agree biotechnology and nanotechnology are certainly going to proceede and we should fund them. It is just certain high energy physics experiments should probably be thought about very carefully.
And that is the area in which Rees is most knowledgable: astro and particle physics (they interelate alot - note he is an astrophysicst and this kind of inquiry would not effect his field directly). I doubt he is as much of an expert on nanotech, but he included it somewhere in the end of his book as another place for inquiry.
Yes, the odds of disaster are really slim. Rees is asking, how far from zero should the odds be before we stop research? One in a million? One in a billion? What if there are (say) a million different permutations of the experiment, any of which could trigger the event?
It is pretty obvious to me that we should be thinking about these things and asking things like, don't these particles collide all the time in nature? (Say, in the Sun or near Black Holes, etc) and if the answer is yes, then is there a signal we could look for?
I'm sure people already are doing some back of the envelope calculations, but trying to get funding for this kind of work, as the above post so clearly indicates, is going to be a tough sell to parts of the public. Even the \. crowd who in general would be rather supportive of scientific funding.
...like the first case of cancer linked to cell phone radiation?
Seriously, if it's been 30 years, I would think some better studies could have come out with decisive evidence one way or the other on the cancer issue. The "no, don't cause cancer" I have read are not as convincing as I would like, and the "yes, do have an effect" articles are rather tenuous. Well, it's biology so I know it will take a while and the answer will be complex.
Re:Why isn't Redhat 9 iso's on KaZaA?
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Open Source DRM
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Um because no one put it there. If you have KaZaA, you could put it up.
Re:Weeks is appropriate
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Gamma Ray Burst
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the conventional 0.01s to 1000s figures are how long they last in gamma rays. Do the bursts last longer in other forms of light?
Also, does anyone know what the Wolf-Rayet star has to do with anything? Is it a possible burst candidate? I read the origional article and the gsfs.nasa.gov link and I didn't find any mention of this.
Does the "Wolf-Rayec" star classification refer to a massive star about to collapse?
All Astronomy Picture of the Day ( here) says about it is that Wolf-Rayec stars are around 40x the mass of the sun and provides a broken link:(
To confuse the issue more, Weisstein's World of Science ( here )says Wolf-Rayec stars are: "A type of star whose spectra consist of very wide emission bands as well as absorption lines in the violet region. These lead astronomers to conclude that these stars are surrounded by rapidly expanding shells of gas. Wolf-Rayet stars are classified as irregular variable stars, and are sometimes also called W stars."
From this one might assume Wolf-Rayet stars might already have undergone an event which might have caused a GRB (gamma ray burst)?
Run for your lives! There are scattered reports of the scientists turning into gigantic, green, muscle-bound monsters after beein exposed to the Gamma Ray Burst. Run! Hide! Flee!
Ya that was just moments after said scientists decoded the secret message encoded in the burst which began: "All your base are..."
The (brief) article makes a couple really good points why not many people are going to adopt this now: first, you can use this *or* the computer it is connected to but not both. Second, it is really darn expensive. One could just buy a laptop.
However, when something like this costs way, way less, it might be nice to bring to the kitchen with a recipe from the internet...or when take it to the store to buy the ingredients...or use it as a remote control for the TV or to program the VCR or into the garden to see if those worms look like the ones which eat tomatoes or just help the soil.
All of this is predicated on a few things (which I would focus on if I were designing something like this): one it is light weight (and thus portable), cheap or, if not cheap at least very, very sturdy.
Obviously it has to allow you to use your darn desktop as well - and it should have a long battery life and it should probably have really nice handwriting recognition and a very nice display (otherwise why not use something like a palm pilot form factor with 802.11b?).
Sounds like it has a ways to go, but I could definately see using something very similar to this in the future.
(Oh, of course it would have to be able to display equations properly which my palm never did. Ideally it would recognize all the greek alphabet as handwriting but I'm not holding my breath.)
A large fraction (around half) of all Ph.D's in physics granted in America are to foreign nationals. They come on student visas. Afterwords, they take H1-B visas and get jobs here in America. Yes, they probably suffer all the abuses which have already been discussed: lower pay, working longer hours, far more dependance on a particular employer, etc.
However, the alternative is to send them back to their home countries (where, in my limited experience, most do not want to go) with a PhD in physics.
To get the nice, comfortable American way of life they saw (but sure as hell didn't have) while they were here, might they build their own governments weapons?
Perhaps we should either make these students offers of citizenship (or perminant residency) or not accept them at all - but neither of these options is going to happen any time soon. H-1B is pretty much all we have (that or marrying Americans...not very likely, especially for the men, in Physics departments).
I think the way these employees of Sun were treated is incredibly badly. Tossing out the entire H-1B system might also have problems.
I'm probably in trouble on this one, but here it goes:
I think this problem is unique to engineering. Universities were not created for this kind of thing. Thus you have an inherent conflict between (a) getting a job and (b) learning theory.
Historically, you would get a degree *in a different field* (probably physics or math) then go to professional school, such as law school or medical school (this one would be engineering school) and learn all the latest applied technology there.
I am not saying this is the way things should be, only noting the origin of the conflict. In fact, I think it is great to have a degree in engineering, during which you spend some time learning musty subjects like math, physics, english lit, art history...something else.
I teach physics at a University. (Contrary to what was said earlier, my students are the best part of my job - I think of it like playing a single person RPG versus a massive multiplayer RPG. All other things being equal, it is always nice to interact with people, and help them out where you can.)
Point is, in physics you learn the last 400 years of physics research, in roughly chronological order. You go a long ways before you reach the cutting edge and this is fine because you are trained to become a scientist - not a technician. Seems about half to 2/3 of the posts seem to agree there is an equivelant principle in engineering. I can't comment on that.
All the great pleasures we have in life: college, dating and being single, having children, starting from scratch in business and building a career - are what people talk about when they get old. But, no one wants to go back and do it all over again. Most people do not have another set of children at, say 40 or 50, or go back to college and live in a dorm room, or become single.
Is the temptation there? Certainly, but we are comfortable where we are. We stagnate.
In my field (physics) very very few people I know contribute anything significant after they are 50 or so and most stop having truely new ideas at 30. Even if they are perfect pictures of health. To throw another, say, 100 years onto such careers would be suicide for the field. Arguments over new ideas is largely made when the older generation die - they are never convinced.
I feel many fields (such as programming) may have similar problems, but I don't have the firsthand knowledge I do in physics.
What are these old people going to do? I doubt as a society we will choose to support them. How are we going to phrase the new social security law? You get it when you turn 65, but if you are taking anti-aging treatment you get it when? 10 years after you stop taking the treatment? Enforcement would be difficult at best.
In my opinion this is the most serious problem with life extension.
In physics it is generally termed "to stop working hard". When an old physicist stops being productive, reading up on all the current research, and starts talking about history, what should be done, what should be more funded, etc. If you've hung out at physics departments for any length of time you will find such people. They never retire, never leave, are always going to the talks, sharing knowledge of ancient unsolved problems (no progress in 30 years LOL).
Sure, it is great to have them around, but imagine if we lived to 300 years, but everyone stopped working hard around 60. Right now we work hard for 40 years and relax for the last 10-30, thus the majority still work hard. If we lived to 300, virtually all the faculty would be in the old, relaxed, historical stage. Remember you can't fire them they have tenure.
It is a full time job keeping up with new papers and discoveries in physics. Sure some older people do it. Paul Erdos (perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of all time) did it until the day he died...but he also took stimulents see his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. Exceptional in many ways, asking everyone to be Erods is not going to work on many levels.
Now in private industry, you can fire them and I think this would motivate people to keep up their skills, but honestly, what job could you do for, say 200 years without getting in a rut, ceasing to learn, and pining for the days when you used to program an IBM 360? Know any older programmers?
We already have a problem with discrimination against people who are 50. (Know any programmers in their 50's looking for work? Even at the height of the tech boom? I do and I did - very difficult for them). Think how far worse the problem would be at 300.
You might counter, but with new (drugs/gene theropy/ whatever) people will feel young, they will be physically healther, but I know physicists who are physically fine, but unable to keep up with all the burdons of research for even the 40 year career required of them now. To think of, say 140 or 240 year careers in physics seems outside the relm of possibility. What are these people going to do? Retire and burdon a tiny working class? Work and suppress the ideas of the younger people? This is already a serious problem.
Perhaps programming is not as intense as physics research (I think they are probably equally challenging) so more people can do good work for longer times, but how many? And how long? I'm sure the general youth and libretarian bent of the slashdot community will think they can hack forever. Perhaps you can. I don't know tons of hackers - in fact old hackers must be kind of rare. Perhaps hackers are so well compensated that they won't worry about money but in physics we are not well compensated. I know tons of physicists. Very few are productive past the age of 50 and most have very few new ideas after about 30.
In many fields technology changes quite rapidly and people have a hard time changing the way things are done. Imagine having to teach UNIX shell basics to someone who has been using windows for, not just 5 years but 50 or 100 years?
Such longevity is a recipe for stagnation.
Sure, America has plenty of resources. We could support people working 30 hour weeks or retiring at 50, but right now we have trouble tossing some food to starving people - I think we are a long ways from the kind of society needed to handle that level of stagnation.
And this gets to the central issue. Aging technology, if adopted, would destroy any retirement system such as social security or my retirement plan which pays out forever. And if a vast number of people have great difficulty working past a certain age (which is my contention) they will have to retire, take worse jobs, or stop taking the medication and simply die. Unless we become some kind of ultra socialist contry - which we are no where near doing. An
You said, "You can cure cancer, if you are willing to age at a high rate. You can cure aging, and degenerate into a mass of tumors."
But what is going on *right now* is in violation of this. We are trying to cure cancer by killing tumors, and thus living longer. Sure, cancer treatment is a nasty business and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. However, when it becomes clear the alternative is death, people choose it and live longer.
It seems you are only considering one facet of the approach: genetic manipulation of tumor suppression.
Perhaps we will let all our cells replicate many more times and get loads of tumors, but walk in to a phone booth once per week and have all the tumors zapped by radiation. Perhaps we will find the gene sequence which allows unregulated growth and turn it off. Perhaps we will grow massive freaking tumors, but turn off the gene which causes them to become malignant. The possibilities are vast.
I am not saying any of these are likely solutions, but I think this is a horribly complicated matter and deserves complicated answers.
Alas, the most prestiguous journals (Science, Nature, Scientific American) print the most revolutionary discoveries. This is fraught with peril, at least in the field of Physics.
First, you're talking about very new results which no one has seen before. It is likely, upon further review, that new information will slowly shed more light upon such things. Such revisions will be unlikely to make the pages of said journals.
Second, any Physics discovery is going to be on the very edge of current knowledge - and thus not generally accessable to the public.
One professor I know had second thoughts about publishing in Nature because all the articles in his field in that journal turned out to be wrong later.
Most of what the general public *should* know about Physics is pretty old, very well understood, and experimentally verified over time.
However, that is *not* news. It is not new. Always talking about what we barely understand tends to give the impression that we know little, but the rate of growth is great. In Physics, this is not so. Our knowledge is fairly broad and changes little. Black holes, neutrino mass, and dark matter have had great progress in the last few years, but the ideas are pretty old (order of 40-80 years).
Education of the public is one thing. News is another. A better educated public is in the position to appreciate better science education. Education in America is very accessible. Despite poor test scores, it is possible to get an outstanding high school education in America.
In California community colleges are previlant and still relativly inexpensive (however costs are rising - when the state has low funds we raise tuition; when funds are high we build prisons...). If people want education they can get it. If they choose not to, then they will remain unenlightened and the newspapers will be justified in dumbing down the content until people get it.
As a scientist it disturbs me greatly that science news is so inadequate, however the state of education of the population troubles me far more.
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The cause is, to me, clear. As a whole, Americans do not value education they value money. Some cultures within America do value education and their children are wonderful students and get great educations and do go on to be financially successful. However the majority do not see the value in education. They can make money right now in a job and, as good Americans, have already spent said money last month and the bill is coming in the mail.
The primary difference I see between the students at "prestigious" Universities I have taught at and the students at others is not their intelligence, nor their motivation, but the time they have available to study.
Many are helping their parents pay rent. Most have no health insurance and wind up paying absurd medical bills for minor problems. Several have withdrawn due to employers changing working hours mid semester. My department chair used to get phone numbers and call the employers, ostensively to ensure this was true, until it became too depressing.
I am sure this is not the place to post it, but this is (in my small experience) part of why people don't know as much science as they should.
By my simple calculations, to replace the San Onofre Nuclear power plant near where I live, which generates over 1 gigawatt of power, would require 13.7 million cows.
There are *tons* of cows in the US. According to this report , there were 96 million cows in the US in 1992, of which about 22.6% are dairy cows.
So this could be a pretty big deal (particularly if all cows could be used and not just dairy cows) but it would involve a big fraction of the industry getting involved.
When I toured San Onofre, they mentioned that (1) in California, the power companies must buy power from independent producers at the highest rate they are paying for any power, and (2) pig farmers were selling power to them at that time, and making some pretty good money off of it. That was around 1998-99.
You would think with power costs what they are now, every little farm would be looking into this. I hope they are.
I suspect they are not - or if they are they will find the risks too great.
It would be truely bizzare if we had to genetically breed cows to make them more "gas-y". I can just see it now: dairy cows, meat cows, gas cows...
The one image which keeps popping into my mind when such topics crop up is of starving people in other nations utterly bewindered that we could use all this fertile land...to generate electricity.
Of course the US alone already wastes enough food to save all the starving peoples of the world if we chose to do so - it is just a question of distribution.
Likely you would want to strike the missle early to minimize the spread of whatever nasty stuff it is carrying. I heard reports that shooting the SCUD's down over Israel caused more damage than the SCUDS's would have caused if they struck ground. I'm unsure of the validity of this argument. However if we expand our view to nuclear weapons, *any* detonation would be horrible. Better, perhaps, to keep it nearby whatever country launched it. Or with some planning to spread it out over some uninhabited locale.
mrnick posted the list of reasons given in the article. I feel these are all things an open source model would address well:
10: Too Many are Being Built...eventually code and experts will leak out into the open source sector. Once the tons of people required to code these monsters realize they could get paid to write one that will fail or donate a few spare hours to one that will last the ages, enough may donate some time to make an open source one viable. 9: It Requires a Mastery of Too Many Disciplines...but with open source development an artist can say "gee the art sucks...I'll redraw it" and an programmer can say "gee the AI sucks...I'll rewrite it" 8: A Huge Team is Required...can't get bigger than the whole user base 7: Getting a Credit Card from a Customer is Hard...so you give it away for free or if you don't, just go through a service like PayPal or something. I would pay for an open source MMORPG because I can't possibly host the whole thing myself - but my friends and I could get together and host it (see below). 6: The Online Industry is Counter-Intuitive to Packaged-Goods Company Management...so you don't use a Packaged-Goods company 5: Everything You Know about Single-Player Games is Wrong...thus don't use those people to write it. Sure the current MMORPG's have serious problems - problems they likely won't worry about working out. But in an open source context, many more ideas can be tried and we can see what survives. 4: The Internet Sucks as a Commercial Delivery Platform...thus don't deliver it as a commercial good. Let 1000 people host games and the strongest will survive. 3: Customer Service is Hard...so have no CS. The example given is players loosing items. If it pisses you off that you are loosing items, rewrite the code so you *don't* loose items. If it pisses you off that you can't find a monster, or an item, look at the code and find out how the system works. Should that system be changed? 2: There are Lots of Legal Issues...which would be relieved if we didn't *pay* for a service 1: They Cost Too Much money to Build and Launch!...so distribute the costs over many, many people: let me host one "zone" on a spare Linux box in the corner and my friend Dave will host one zone on his spare box and so on. Sure, we will not be able to have 500 people in one zone at one time, but is that a bad thing?
I am not a mathematician. I have read some of the "simple explanation" of the Riemann hypothesis links and they seem to indicate the hypothesis would lead to a solution for the density of prime numbers, or where to look for prime numbers, rather than the acutal prime numbers themselves.
Could anyone shed some light on this point?
Further, one would assume people looking for large prime numbers would have already assumed the Riemann hypothesis to be correct - and thus their searchs would not really change at all if it is proved so.
From these points, I would think rash statements such as "encryption will be useless" are unlikely to be fruitful.
Lastly, I am aware some mathematical proofs are linked with other proofs in such a way that if one is proven then another must be true. Does the Riemann hypothesis have any such links? If so what are they?
I am saddened to hear that we lost contact with Pioneer 10 because we don't understand the forces acting on it. One would think that since we know gravity pretty well, and we know the relivant masses involved, we could predict the motion of the Pioneer satelites. Alas no. Exotic things like dark matter and photon pressure were invoked to explain the extra attraction (back) towards our sun, and failed. I heard a great talk about this while at U.C. Riverside department of Physics and had the chance to ask about photon pressure myself (yes, they take that into account - it is a far, far larger effect than this). The BBC has an old story on this effect, which I am sure many slashdotters have already heard of, here.
By the way, a similar anomoly is seen in Pioneer 11 and another distant satelite (Ulysses perhaps???).
Also, there is a link at nasa.gov, but at this time it seems broken. I include it for completeness here.
It seems John Anderson and friends have written several articles on this. One which you might find interesing has been published in Physical Review D: here.
Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
This is probably a mistranslation. At least some Biblical scholars argue that the original Hebrew was "camel hair rope" rather than "camel". Makes more sense in context and the mistake would be easy to make.
I'm just curious about this. Assuming the Biblical scholars are right, it would still be impossible (in context) for a cabel hair rope to go through the eye of a needle? Or would it just be pretty darn difficult? Or do we even know?
Anyone have a clear idea why Aluminum blocks would make a good simulation of an asteroid? Naively, I would expect asteroids to be a more loosely packed amalgam of low Z elements - and thus would deliver a smaller shock and thus a smaller electrical current.
The statement only rejects the teaching of creationist pseudo-science in the science curricula. It does not say creationism should not be taught as a religious belief. I don't think any of the scientist would want these students to be intentionally not taught about relgion. Some of the religious opponents do want young people to be ignorant of the scientific evidence for evolution.
It is probably wise to only include in the science curricula what has been arrived at via the scientific method. I don't think anyone believes creationism was arrived at via the scientific method.
First, this is not to say that when two different disciplines contradict one another there should be no conversation on it. However, you first have to know what the disciplines are saying before you have a conversation. I am sure you are all aware that in the US there have been attempts to replace evolution altogether by creationism.
Another example would be the Christian teaching that: Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Verus the implicit "maximize your wealth" philosophy taught in economics classes.
We should see both points of view and decide for ourselves - with their strengths and weaknesses. Scince should be taught in science classes, religion in social sciences, literature or religion classes.
You probably would not read origional science texts as literature as they would not be great examples of writing. (Perhaps some are.) You should not read about religious beliefs which do not make very good science. (Perhaps some do.)
Should there be more integration of knowledge from different fields together? Certainly - but only after the fundamentals are mastered. It is on this we should focus first because despite the well educated slashdot readers, there are many high school students who cannot read or write, and I know from personal experience that many, many of them here at Cal State University Northridge cannot do any algebra at all. I would trade in an instant all their knowledge of evolution for a single decent semester of math.
Please, please remember how poor our education system is in America (please ignore if you aren't in America) before wasting breath and emotion on evolution. There are bigger fish to fry.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know of a substitue for Blackboard? Open source or otherwise? I don't use it here at CSUN, but other Universities I deal with do use it. I was actually going to push it for the physics department here, but not now. Thanks.
First, your dam point. You say:
When a beaver builds a dam, it's called nature. When man builds a dam, we're destroying nature. Is the purpose of our life not to better our lives? And if so, why should we not be allowed genetic engineering, cloning, going to different planets.
Effectively, you are right. However, just because we can dam every river means we should. Imagine a similar argument: a bear eats a salmon, it's nature. Man eats a salmon, it's destroying nature. If man eats *all* the salmon, which we have in several streams, the salmon never come back. We can eat all the salmon in all the streams and erase that species if we want to.
We have done so in several streams. People pay big money to haul dead salmon carcasses to enrich the soil in those streams. It is pretty clear the benefit was not worth the cost.
It is just a question of scale.
On to your second point:
For those don't understand, read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's a scary world that he describes, looking at it from our point of view; however, from the inhabitants point of view, it's a perfect world. Brainwashed, yes, but very few people are unhappy. Furthermore, the few that are too intelligent to live in that world are given their own island, to do as they please.
I want to specifically address the "island" with all the most intelligent live. This is not where the most intelligent go. It was an experiment within the book. John Savage asks why not make everyone ultra-smart. The leader (Ford?) answers that they did this as an experiment - created a whole island of alpha plus-plusses (most intelligent they can make) and it was a disaster: wars, famine, etc. but that now after many years they live in some kind of democracy. (I may have the ending wrong - is it a commune? - but I vividly recall the war part).
My point is, the alpha plus plusses are bred to lead the rest of the population - essentially to boss them around. They are genetically engieneered to be more attractive and taller so that everyone will know who's boss on sight. In fact the one character who goes and finds John Savage is beta plus who is abnormally short (I think he is only as tall as a beta or a beta minus or something) so he is constantly having to remind people to look at his badge or something like that.
Living in America, I kind of treasure the idea that I can be whatever I like: if I am a born leader I do not have to be one if it does not suit my personality or if I am born at the bottom of society I can work my way to the top (yes this can still happen - see for example Bill Clinton whatever you may think of him he was not born to opulant wealth nor power).
Next, everyone in the main society of BNW (Brave New World) is on drugs (soma) which have virtally no side effects (so they still work productively, don't get in traffic wrecks, etc). This drug is explicitly present to allow the people to escape the day to day unchanging shallowness of their life.
Remember, people in this society do not raise their own children nor in any real sense have a family. They have sex purely for fun.
At first this may sound great: sex, drugs, no drawbacks but then you come to what Huxley must have really wanted us to ask: is pleasure all there is to life?
I do not imagine a world like this when I think of a perfect society. I think of one where no one starves, no one goes hungry - but that people choose to be artists and thinkers and scientists. Where people can take up art history as a hobby and write papers on second centruy Roman wall painting if they like - in their spare time - because all the drudgery is taken care of by robots or something and they don't have to work 65 hour weeks just to buy a larger home in the suburbs.
I dream of a world where people create. BNW is a dream where people live and die like cogs in giant wheels: totally impotent. Yes, in both dreams people are happy but for different reasons.
In sho
Perhaps that is the origin of gamma ray bursts: civilizations turning their planets into 100 meter diameter spheres with really powerful particle accelerators.
Sure it's massively unlikely, but it would explain why we SETI hasn't heard anything yet.
Imagine if the first signal we decode is: "don't build a particle accelerator larger than 5 kilometers in diameter or you will destroy your whole world."
Um, perhaps you are referring to the nanotechnology aspect of the article, which seems to be really an afterthought for Rees, who is an Astrophysicist.
Rees' main point seems to be centered on the (very) unlikely event that a particle physics experiment could create a black hole or something akin to the big bang.
Sure, I suppose terrorists could build a giant freaking particle accelerator and hold the world for ransom on the off chance that particle physics really does work that way, but it would not be a very effective threat because it is so very unlikely that it does.
It is more likely to generate some new particle (perhaps the Higg's boson) for which we would thank them.
I'm not sure you can "over-sensationalize" the prospect of the whole Earth being turned into a 100 meter sphere of inert goo.
I agree biotechnology and nanotechnology are certainly going to proceede and we should fund them. It is just certain high energy physics experiments should probably be thought about very carefully.
And that is the area in which Rees is most knowledgable: astro and particle physics (they interelate alot - note he is an astrophysicst and this kind of inquiry would not effect his field directly). I doubt he is as much of an expert on nanotech, but he included it somewhere in the end of his book as another place for inquiry.
Yes, the odds of disaster are really slim. Rees is asking, how far from zero should the odds be before we stop research? One in a million? One in a billion? What if there are (say) a million different permutations of the experiment, any of which could trigger the event?
It is pretty obvious to me that we should be thinking about these things and asking things like, don't these particles collide all the time in nature? (Say, in the Sun or near Black Holes, etc) and if the answer is yes, then is there a signal we could look for?
I'm sure people already are doing some back of the envelope calculations, but trying to get funding for this kind of work, as the above post so clearly indicates, is going to be a tough sell to parts of the public. Even the \. crowd who in general would be rather supportive of scientific funding.
...like the first case of cancer linked to cell phone radiation?
Seriously, if it's been 30 years, I would think some better studies could have come out with decisive evidence one way or the other on the cancer issue. The "no, don't cause cancer" I have read are not as convincing as I would like, and the "yes, do have an effect" articles are rather tenuous. Well, it's biology so I know it will take a while and the answer will be complex.
Um because no one put it there. If you have KaZaA, you could put it up.
I think the conventional 0.01s to 1000s figures are how long they last in gamma rays. Do the bursts last longer in other forms of light?
:(
Also, does anyone know what the Wolf-Rayet star has to do with anything? Is it a possible burst candidate? I read the origional article and the gsfs.nasa.gov link and I didn't find any mention of this.
Does the "Wolf-Rayec" star classification refer to a massive star about to collapse?
All Astronomy Picture of the Day ( here) says about it is that Wolf-Rayec stars are around 40x the mass of the sun and provides a broken link
To confuse the issue more, Weisstein's World of Science ( here )says Wolf-Rayec stars are:
"A type of star whose spectra consist of very wide emission bands as well as absorption lines in the violet region. These lead astronomers to conclude that these stars are surrounded by rapidly expanding shells of gas. Wolf-Rayet stars are classified as irregular variable stars, and are sometimes also called W stars."
From this one might assume Wolf-Rayet stars might already have undergone an event which might have caused a GRB (gamma ray burst)?
Run for your lives! There are scattered reports of the scientists turning into gigantic, green, muscle-bound monsters after beein exposed to the Gamma Ray Burst. Run! Hide! Flee!
Ya that was just moments after said scientists decoded the secret message encoded in the burst which began: "All your base are..."
The (brief) article makes a couple really good points why not many people are going to adopt this now: first, you can use this *or* the computer it is connected to but not both. Second, it is really darn expensive. One could just buy a laptop.
However, when something like this costs way, way less, it might be nice to bring to the kitchen with a recipe from the internet...or when take it to the store to buy the ingredients...or use it as a remote control for the TV or to program the VCR or into the garden to see if those worms look like the ones which eat tomatoes or just help the soil.
All of this is predicated on a few things (which I would focus on if I were designing something like this): one it is light weight (and thus portable), cheap or, if not cheap at least very, very sturdy.
Obviously it has to allow you to use your darn desktop as well - and it should have a long battery life and it should probably have really nice handwriting recognition and a very nice display (otherwise why not use something like a palm pilot form factor with 802.11b?).
Sounds like it has a ways to go, but I could definately see using something very similar to this in the future.
(Oh, of course it would have to be able to display equations properly which my palm never did. Ideally it would recognize all the greek alphabet as handwriting but I'm not holding my breath.)
A large fraction (around half) of all Ph.D's in physics granted in America
are to foreign nationals. They come on student visas. Afterwords, they
take H1-B visas and get jobs here in America. Yes, they probably suffer all
the abuses which have already been discussed: lower pay, working longer hours, far more dependance on a particular employer, etc.
However, the alternative is to send them back to their home countries (where, in my limited experience, most do not want to go) with a PhD in physics.
To get the nice, comfortable American way of life they saw (but sure as hell didn't have) while they were here, might they build their own governments weapons?
Perhaps we should either make these students offers of citizenship (or perminant residency) or not accept them at all - but neither of these options is going to happen any time soon. H-1B is pretty much all we have (that or marrying Americans...not very likely, especially for the men, in Physics departments).
I think the way these employees of Sun were treated is incredibly badly. Tossing out the entire H-1B system might also have problems.
Just FYI.
I'm probably in trouble on this one, but here it goes:
I think this problem is unique to engineering. Universities were not created for this kind of thing. Thus you have an inherent conflict between (a) getting a job and (b) learning theory.
Historically, you would get a degree *in a different field* (probably physics or math) then go to professional school, such as law school or medical school (this one would be engineering school) and learn all the latest applied technology there.
I am not saying this is the way things should be, only noting the origin of the conflict. In fact, I think it is great to have a degree in engineering, during which you spend some time learning musty subjects like math, physics, english lit, art history...something else.
I teach physics at a University. (Contrary to what was said earlier, my students are the best part of my job - I think of it like playing a single person RPG versus a massive multiplayer RPG. All other things being equal, it is always nice to interact with people, and help them out where you can.)
Point is, in physics you learn the last 400 years of physics research, in roughly chronological order. You go a long ways before you reach the cutting edge and this is fine because you are trained to become a scientist - not a technician. Seems about half to 2/3 of the posts seem to agree there is an equivelant principle in engineering. I can't comment on that.
All the great pleasures we have in life: college, dating and being single, having children, starting from scratch in business and building a career - are what people talk about when they get old. But, no one wants to go back and do it all over again. Most people do not have another set of children at, say 40 or 50, or go back to college and live in a dorm room, or become single.
Is the temptation there? Certainly, but we are comfortable where we are. We stagnate.
In my field (physics) very very few people I know contribute anything significant after they are 50 or so and most stop having truely new ideas at 30. Even if they are perfect pictures of health. To throw another, say, 100 years onto such careers would be suicide for the field. Arguments over new ideas is largely made when the older generation die - they are never convinced.
I feel many fields (such as programming) may have similar problems, but I don't have the firsthand knowledge I do in physics.
What are these old people going to do? I doubt as a society we will choose to support them. How are we going to phrase the new social security law? You get it when you turn 65, but if you are taking anti-aging treatment you get it when? 10 years after you stop taking the treatment? Enforcement would be difficult at best.
In my opinion this is the most serious problem with life extension.
In physics it is generally termed "to stop working hard". When an old physicist stops being productive, reading up on all the current research, and starts talking about history, what should be done, what should be more funded, etc. If you've hung out at physics departments for any length of time you will find such people. They never retire, never leave, are always going to the talks, sharing knowledge of ancient unsolved problems (no progress in 30 years LOL).
Sure, it is great to have them around, but imagine if we lived to 300 years, but everyone stopped working hard around 60. Right now we work hard for 40 years and relax for the last 10-30, thus the majority still work hard. If we lived to 300, virtually all the faculty would be in the old, relaxed, historical stage. Remember you can't fire them they have tenure.
It is a full time job keeping up with new papers and discoveries in physics. Sure some older people do it. Paul Erdos (perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of all time) did it until the day he died...but he also took stimulents see his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. Exceptional in many ways, asking everyone to be Erods is not going to work on many levels.
Now in private industry, you can fire them and I think this would motivate people to keep up their skills, but honestly, what job could you do for, say 200 years without getting in a rut, ceasing to learn, and pining for the days when you used to program an IBM 360? Know any older programmers?
We already have a problem with discrimination against people who are 50. (Know any programmers in their 50's looking for work? Even at the height of the tech boom? I do and I did - very difficult for them). Think how far worse the problem would be at 300.
You might counter, but with new (drugs/gene theropy/ whatever) people will feel young, they will be physically healther, but I know physicists who are physically fine, but unable to keep up with all the burdons of research for even the 40 year career required of them now. To think of, say 140 or 240 year careers in physics seems outside the relm of possibility. What are these people going to do? Retire and burdon a tiny working class? Work and suppress the ideas of the younger people? This is already a serious problem.
Perhaps programming is not as intense as physics research (I think they are probably equally challenging) so more people can do good work for longer times, but how many? And how long? I'm sure the general youth and libretarian bent of the slashdot community will think they can hack forever. Perhaps you can. I don't know tons of hackers - in fact old hackers must be kind of rare. Perhaps hackers are so well compensated that they won't worry about money but in physics we are not well compensated. I know tons of physicists. Very few are productive past the age of 50 and most have very few new ideas after about 30.
In many fields technology changes quite rapidly and people have a hard time changing the way things are done. Imagine having to teach UNIX shell basics to someone who has been using windows for, not just 5 years but 50 or 100 years?
Such longevity is a recipe for stagnation.
Sure, America has plenty of resources. We could support people working 30 hour weeks or retiring at 50, but right now we have trouble tossing some food to starving people - I think we are a long ways from the kind of society needed to handle that level of stagnation.
And this gets to the central issue. Aging technology, if adopted, would destroy any retirement system such as social security or my retirement plan which pays out forever. And if a vast number of people have great difficulty working past a certain age (which is my contention) they will have to retire, take worse jobs, or stop taking the medication and simply die. Unless we become some kind of ultra socialist contry - which we are no where near doing. An
You said, "Overpopulation isn't a problem in any western developed country"
But obviously it would become one if we all lived far longer than we do today. Thus the ethis issue.
You said, "You can cure cancer, if you are willing to age at a high rate. You can cure aging, and degenerate into a mass of tumors."
But what is going on *right now* is in violation of this. We are trying to cure cancer by killing tumors, and thus living longer. Sure, cancer treatment is a nasty business and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. However, when it becomes clear the alternative is death, people choose it and live longer.
It seems you are only considering one facet of the approach: genetic manipulation of tumor suppression.
Perhaps we will let all our cells replicate many more times and get loads of tumors, but walk in to a phone booth once per week and have all the tumors zapped by radiation. Perhaps we will find the gene sequence which allows unregulated growth and turn it off. Perhaps we will grow massive freaking tumors, but turn off the gene which causes them to become malignant. The possibilities are vast.
I am not saying any of these are likely solutions, but I think this is a horribly complicated matter and deserves complicated answers.
Alas, the most prestiguous journals (Science, Nature, Scientific American) print the most revolutionary discoveries. This is fraught with peril, at least in the field of Physics.
First, you're talking about very new results which no one has seen before. It is likely, upon further review, that new information will slowly shed more light upon such things. Such revisions will be unlikely to make the pages of said journals.
Second, any Physics discovery is going to be on the very edge of current knowledge - and thus not generally accessable to the public.
One professor I know had second thoughts about publishing in Nature because all the articles in his field in that journal turned out to be wrong later.
Most of what the general public *should* know about Physics is pretty old, very well understood, and experimentally verified over time.
However, that is *not* news. It is not new. Always talking about what we barely understand tends to give the impression that we know little, but the rate of growth is great. In Physics, this is not so. Our knowledge is fairly broad and changes little. Black holes, neutrino mass, and dark matter have had great progress in the last few years, but the ideas are pretty old (order of 40-80 years).
Education of the public is one thing. News is another. A better educated public is in the position to appreciate better science education. Education in America is very accessible. Despite poor test scores, it is possible to get an outstanding high school education in America.
In California community colleges are previlant and still relativly inexpensive (however costs are rising - when the state has low funds we raise tuition; when funds are high we build prisons...). If people want education they can get it. If they choose not to, then they will remain unenlightened and the newspapers will be justified in dumbing down the content until people get it.
As a scientist it disturbs me greatly that science news is so inadequate, however the state of education of the population troubles me far more.
\begin{rant}
The cause is, to me, clear. As a whole, Americans do not value education they value money. Some cultures within America do value education and their children are wonderful students and get great educations and do go on to be financially successful. However the majority do not see the value in education. They can make money right now in a job and, as good Americans, have already spent said money last month and the bill is coming in the mail.
The primary difference I see between the students at "prestigious" Universities I have taught at and the students at others is not their intelligence, nor their motivation, but the time they have available to study.
Many are helping their parents pay rent. Most have no health insurance and wind up paying absurd medical bills for minor problems. Several have withdrawn due to employers changing working hours mid semester. My department chair used to get phone numbers and call the employers, ostensively to ensure this was true, until it became too depressing.
I am sure this is not the place to post it, but this is (in my small experience) part of why people don't know as much science as they should.
By my simple calculations, to replace the San Onofre Nuclear power plant near where I live, which generates over 1 gigawatt of power, would require 13.7 million cows.
There are *tons* of cows in the US. According to this report , there were 96 million cows in the US in 1992, of which about 22.6% are dairy cows.
So this could be a pretty big deal (particularly if all cows could be used and not just dairy cows) but it would involve a big fraction of the industry getting involved.
When I toured San Onofre, they mentioned that (1) in California, the power companies must buy power from independent producers at the highest rate they are paying for any power, and (2) pig farmers were selling power to them at that time, and making some pretty good money off of it. That was around 1998-99.
You would think with power costs what they are now, every little farm would be looking into this. I hope they are.
I suspect they are not - or if they are they will find the risks too great.
It would be truely bizzare if we had to genetically breed cows to make them more "gas-y". I can just see it now: dairy cows, meat cows, gas cows...
The one image which keeps popping into my mind when such topics crop up is of starving people in other nations utterly bewindered that we could use all this fertile land...to generate electricity.
Of course the US alone already wastes enough food to save all the starving peoples of the world if we chose to do so - it is just a question of distribution.
Likely you would want to strike the missle early to minimize the spread of whatever nasty stuff it is carrying. I heard reports that shooting the SCUD's down over Israel caused more damage than the SCUDS's would have caused if they struck ground. I'm unsure of the validity of this argument. However if we expand our view to nuclear weapons, *any* detonation would be horrible. Better, perhaps, to keep it nearby whatever country launched it. Or with some planning to spread it out over some uninhabited locale.
mrnick posted the list of reasons given in the article. I feel these are all things an open source model would address well:
...eventually code and experts will leak out into the open source sector. Once the tons of people required to code these monsters realize they could get paid to write one that will fail or donate a few spare hours to one that will last the ages, enough may donate some time to make an open source one viable. ...but with open source development an artist can say "gee the art sucks...I'll redraw it" and an programmer can say "gee the AI sucks...I'll rewrite it" ...can't get bigger than the whole user base ...so you give it away for free or if you don't, just go through a service like PayPal or something. I would pay for an open source MMORPG because I can't possibly host the whole thing myself - but my friends and I could get together and host it (see below). ...so you don't use a Packaged-Goods company ...thus don't use those people to write it. Sure the current MMORPG's have serious problems - problems they likely won't worry about working out. But in an open source context, many more ideas can be tried and we can see what survives. ...thus don't deliver it as a commercial good. Let 1000 people host games and the strongest will survive. ...so have no CS. The example given is players loosing items. If it pisses you off that you are loosing items, rewrite the code so you *don't* loose items. If it pisses you off that you can't find a monster, or an item, look at the code and find out how the system works. Should that system be changed? ...which would be relieved if we didn't *pay* for a service ...so distribute the costs over many, many people: let me host one "zone" on a spare Linux box in the corner and my friend Dave will host one zone on his spare box and so on. Sure, we will not be able to have 500 people in one zone at one time, but is that a bad thing?
10: Too Many are Being Built
9: It Requires a Mastery of Too Many Disciplines
8: A Huge Team is Required
7: Getting a Credit Card from a Customer is Hard
6: The Online Industry is Counter-Intuitive to Packaged-Goods Company Management
5: Everything You Know about Single-Player Games is Wrong
4: The Internet Sucks as a Commercial Delivery Platform
3: Customer Service is Hard
2: There are Lots of Legal Issues
1: They Cost Too Much money to Build and Launch!
I am not a mathematician. I have read some of the "simple explanation" of the Riemann hypothesis links and they seem to indicate the hypothesis would lead to a solution for the density of prime numbers, or where to look for prime numbers, rather than the acutal prime numbers themselves.
Could anyone shed some light on this point?
Further, one would assume people looking for large prime numbers would have already assumed the Riemann hypothesis to be correct - and thus their searchs would not really change at all if it is proved so.
From these points, I would think rash statements such as "encryption will be useless" are unlikely to be fruitful.
Lastly, I am aware some mathematical proofs are linked with other proofs in such a way that if one is proven then another must be true. Does the Riemann hypothesis have any such links? If so what are they?
I am saddened to hear that we lost contact with Pioneer 10 because we don't understand the forces acting on it. One would think that since we know gravity pretty well, and we know the relivant masses involved, we could predict the motion of the Pioneer satelites. Alas no. Exotic things like dark matter and photon pressure were invoked to explain the extra attraction (back) towards our sun, and failed. I heard a great talk about this while at U.C. Riverside department of Physics and had the chance to ask about photon pressure myself (yes, they take that into account - it is a far, far larger effect than this). The BBC has an old story on this effect, which I am sure many slashdotters have already heard of, here.
By the way, a similar anomoly is seen in Pioneer 11 and another distant satelite (Ulysses perhaps???).
Also, there is a link at nasa.gov, but at this time it seems broken. I include it for completeness here.
It seems John Anderson and friends have written several articles on this. One which you might find interesing has been published in Physical Review D: here.
Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
This is probably a mistranslation. At least some Biblical scholars argue that the original Hebrew was "camel hair rope" rather than "camel". Makes more sense in context and the mistake would be easy to make.
I'm just curious about this. Assuming the Biblical scholars are right, it would still be impossible (in context) for a cabel hair rope to go through the eye of a needle? Or would it just be pretty darn difficult? Or do we even know?
I don't want to misrepresent the Bible.
Anyone have a clear idea why Aluminum blocks would make a good simulation of an asteroid? Naively, I would expect asteroids to be a more loosely packed amalgam of low Z elements - and thus would deliver a smaller shock and thus a smaller electrical current.
The statement only rejects the teaching of creationist pseudo-science in the science curricula. It does not say creationism should not be taught as a religious belief. I don't think any of the scientist would want these students to be intentionally not taught about relgion. Some of the religious opponents do want young people to be ignorant of the scientific evidence for evolution.
It is probably wise to only include in the science curricula what has been arrived at via the scientific method. I don't think anyone believes creationism was arrived at via the scientific method.
First, this is not to say that when two different disciplines contradict one another there should be no conversation on it. However, you first have to know what the disciplines are saying before you have a conversation. I am sure you are all aware that in the US there have been attempts to replace evolution altogether by creationism.
Another example would be the Christian teaching that:
Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Verus the implicit "maximize your wealth" philosophy taught in economics classes.
We should see both points of view and decide for ourselves - with their strengths and weaknesses. Scince should be taught in science classes, religion in social sciences, literature or religion classes.
You probably would not read origional science texts as literature as they would not be great examples of writing. (Perhaps some are.) You should not read about religious beliefs which do not make very good science. (Perhaps some do.)
Should there be more integration of knowledge from different fields together? Certainly - but only after the fundamentals are mastered. It is on this we should focus first because despite the well educated slashdot readers, there are many high school students who cannot read or write, and I know from personal experience that many, many of them here at Cal State University Northridge cannot do any algebra at all. I would trade in an instant all their knowledge of evolution for a single decent semester of math.
Please, please remember how poor our education system is in America (please ignore if you aren't in America) before wasting breath and emotion on evolution. There are bigger fish to fry.