Look at the reactions of your fellow americans the next time they see what some of the Jungle tribes eat (Fried arachnid anyone?)
ok, now you are just being silly
You must have stayed in the rich white suburbs if you ever went to many of the Southern places. (namely new mexico and texas).
no, i have been all over. as im sure you are aware, there is a huge problem with the mexican bordering states and illegal immigration so i'll admit that it may be possible that you will find some racist remarks in those regions. but you are treating a very small percent as the whole...when infact i think that an American is more likely to face intolerance in countries abroad nowadays then foreigners would face in the USA.
yes, there really is widespread respect and tolerance. you may encounter the occasional racist but the other 95% of Americans are tolerant of everyone.
for example, consider a dark skinned person entering an American restaurant where >80% of the patrons are "white". no one will even look twice. now consider a white gringo walking into a restaurant in guatemala...that white guy is gonna get some stares, believe me.
i dont know where u have been, but i have lived in the USA my whole life and traveled nearly every inch of it. i have also travelled to south america and europe and let me tell you: ppl in europe are far less tolerant than Americans. i have never been to canada so i cannot comment on any impressions.
as far as the foods go...you are fucking crazy. mexican & chinese food restaurants are one of the most thriving businesses in America, there are like 10 on every street corner. and black bbq restaurants are hugely popular in the south, and of course italian food is popular everywhere.
see, Americans really don't have any native food of their own so we have adopted the foods of others...exactly contrary to what you are trying to claim.
Respect of other cultures is the first step towards world peace. It is also one of the things I find missing the most in USA society today.
what a load of crap.
the USA is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries on the planet. Most Americans are very tolerant and accepting of other peoples cultures, and live amongst each other in peace.
compare this to eastern europe, spain, or africa where different ethnicities are at each others throat constantly.
and what makes canadians so friggin compassionate? because they have to deal with french speaking people?wow
try going to NY city. if you get on a subway train you are likely to have 30+ different nationalities speaking in 10+ different languages all at the same time.
metal hydrides, formed by reacting molecular hydrogen with group I metals, have been around for a long time. a common example is LiH.
hydrogen can be stored as a solid this way, and then liberated by adding to water to the LiH.
there are 3 major problems with this for practical energy use:
1) group I metals are expensive - given that the US alone consume 20 million gallons of gasoline a day, it is hard to see how we could possibly mine that much lithium 2) the liberation rxn is violent, producing temperatures 600 C 3) the hydride must be kept very dry at all times
er sorry, the links didn't paste right:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=4801 9&page=2
and
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=5009 9
i have read texts by bishop, frankel, wald and do carmo on differential geometry and also some texts on differential forms (weintraub and also darling).
i was instructed in diff. geom. by a theoretical physicist. i know what i am talking about.
diff geo is for some reason considered a "grad-level topic". i dont know why since it is nowhere near as difficult (in my opinion) as analysis or topology, which are both "undergrad-level".
diff. geom. is a fun and fascinating subject. and with a modern approach (i.e. looking at tensors as multilinear mappings) it is a very natural subject to study.
understanding general relativity is within reach of most students with an aptitude for math.
first of all, differential geometry utilizes tensor analysis and possibly differential forms, and all that is needed to learn these things is multivariate calculus, linear algebra and a very small amount of topology (in fact, most books on diff. geom. will give you the rigorous definition of a differentiable manifold).
trust me, because i know differential geometry. you are making seem much more difficult then it really is.
now ACTUALLY solving einsteins equation is another matter....and would most likely require some of the other topics you have mentions (partial diff. eq. especially).
even better would be to make the cat (even the "original") in the following way:
1) mate 2 cats, remove the embryo at the blastocyst stage 2) remove the stem cells from the blastocyst and culture them 3) freeze some for later, 4) take some of the previously cultured cells and insert them into a new blastocyst 5) implant the blastocyst back into a pseudo-pregant cat 6) enjoy the cat 7) when the cat dies, repeat the process with some of the frozen stem cells
of course, genes could be altered at any point during the cell culture, thus making a cat with improved attributes over time if so desired.
no, reproduction does solve this since the germ cells never lose their telomeres.
the germ cells are made even before the embryo has developed (for both female and male humans) and are passed on to the next generation. in a sense, you could say that we are all nothing more than the extension of a long germ line - we, the animal, exist only to propogate this line.
embryonic stem cells, like the embryonic germ cells, also express telomerase continuously and the telomeres do not shorten until the ES cells differentiate.
funny you should ask...these ends of the chromosomes are called "telomeres" and current research seems to indicate that they function like a molecular counter.
a fully-grown human is the result of around 50 or so cell divisions. each time the cell divides it loses some of it's telomeres (which are composed of repetitive sequences - interestingly, in nearly all vertebrates the sequence is TTAGGG) due to the way Okazaki fragments are replicated 5'->3' when the chromosomes are copied.
for some reason once the telomeres are no longer elongated, the cell stops dividing. why this happens is currently being researched, but it has been noticed that in early cells (and indeed both embryonic stem and germ line cells retain this ability) there are high levels of the enzyme "telomerase": infact, telomerase actively elongates the telomeres.
it is entirely logical that cell aging and death is merely due to the fact that the cells are no longer dividing+apoptosing and so oxidation damage (due to breathing oxygen and utilizing it in the TCA cycle) accumulates. this is supported by the fact that most aging cells have mitochondria that have sustained massive oxidative damage.
the natural question: is it possible to prevent aging and death by somehow preventing this?
it would seem logical that expressing more telomerase would be one way to immortalize the cell...then again, most cancerous cells have high telomerase levels. and in fact, the T antigen of the SV40 (and indeed other oncogenic viruses) immortalizes human cells by a mechanism that involves telomerase and anti-apoptotic expression.
the ansari prize demonstrates this above all, that the adventurous among us (myself definately NOT included) are willing to push the limits as far as they will go. this _embodies_ the original spirit of the apollo program, mercury, and countless test flights done by Yeager and his generation. this is precisely the spirit that landed us on the moon!
countless other great achievements and discoveries can be made in the same vein. the other poster is incorrect in saying that the public will not tolerate an occasional failure or tragedy. this is simply not the case: the reason that the shuttle disaster grounded our missions is exactly BECAUSE so much money has been wasted. if advancements were continuing to be met then the criticisms of NASA would have been no where near the levels of recent days.
remember the fire that killed the crew of the early apollo missions? did that ground the apollo program? of course not.
massive prizes in place of grants and contracts is NASAs future...whether or not they will realize that now remains to be seen.
recall that he was not awarded the nobel prize until some time afterwards.
when he wrote his papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect, he was just "mr. einstein". no doctorate, he was just a nobody working as a clerk.
the prestige came 20 years later, and we have selectively revised history to suite our own tastes.
was einstein a genius? absolutely. but don't think that he was somehow groomed that way, or was one day magically recognized as such.
we have some evidence that it is real. we also have some evidence that it is not real. infact, the link that i posted last message gives a fair sense of this.
i have left open the possibility that it is real, whereas you have jumped to the conclusion that it is definately not. i have maintained skepticism, whereas you have not.
to say that cold fusion is definately real or definately not real, would be quite foolish, wouldn't you agree?
maybe you didn't realize that oak ridge is part of the DOE program? of course they know about it. also, it has been published in major physics journals, whereas most "cold fusion" papers are rejected.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/4/8
i think that chemists have faced this kind of issue more than physicists have, since the entire history of chemistry shows a familiar story: something is thought impossible because of some previously unknown physical process. i am not saying that this means that cold fusion is real, but that we should be just as willing to accept as to reject.
without healthy skepticism we are not true scientists, merely "believers".
i can only attribute your open sarcasm to lack of skepticism.
how can you completely rule out the possibility of nuclear reactions occuring (albeit very slowly) in a chemistry setting?
and, yes, i know the "energy argument" quite well. but it doesn't account for the fact that the views of quantum physics have changed. what was once thought ridiculous by some is now called "genius" by everyone.
and no, it isn't just taking place in people's basements. folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound and deuterated acetone which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place...in a test tube.
we all look back at einstein, heisenberg, etc. as geniuses now, but they were considered quacks by many in their day...to the victor goes the spoils.
what you are saying is not entirely true. from the selinux website:
"Recognizing the critical role of operating system security mechanisms in supporting security at higher levels, researchers from NSA's Information Assurance Research Group have been investigating an architecture that can provide the necessary security functionality in a manner that can meet the security needs of a wide range of computing environments."
this statement clearly says that they picked linux for a reason...i dont know if "endoresement" is the right word. in addition:
"Linux was chosen as the platform for this work because its growing success and open development environment provided an opportunity to demonstrate that this functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system and, at the same time, contribute to the security of a widely used system. Additionally, the integration of these security research results into Linux may encourage additional operating system security research that may lead to additional improvement in system security."
sounds like an endorsement to me
i have also wondered what the efficiency of a power-plant versus the efficiency of a gas motor is..
since the japanese live on an island, and have very few natural resources of their own, it would seem reasonable that they are all about having fuel efficient cars. also, the japanese auto market really opened up after the oil embargo that was leveraged against the US forced American consumers to buy fuel-efficient cars. so it is natural that the japanese would use these domestic (to them) cars that have already been optimized for gas consumption.
Re:Nature already does the same thing....sorta
on
Blending Mice and Men
·
· Score: 1
i believe that what you are referring to is known as "polar body twinning", and is still only theorized:
i had previously been aware of the problems with DNA testing and the pool size (particularly in maintaining a large DNA database) but not of some of the other probabilities involved.
it just goes to show that a society not founded upon rationality cannot function.
>Canada is doing quite fine, thanks. Im sure there >are quite a few nations out there that feel very >much as though the US has hurt them far more than >helped.
boy, it must be nice in canada not having to pay for medicine or a military, since it is all subsidized by the U.S. consumer and taxpayer.
the same is true for western europe: the only reason that their socialized health system works at all is because the major % of the cost, medicine, is price fixed by their government. which means that the U.S. consumer winds up with the jacked-up prices to cover the loses that the pharmaceutical companies would take otherwise. and so ppl here want to import drugs from canada, drugs that were made here in the USA! if the pharmaceutical companies were to tell the canadian and european governments to face an ultimatum of paying market price their system would collapse. and i wouldn't even think about china providing any innovative drugs; all that comes out of china is sars and the flu.
a drug usually takes at least 10 years to develop, and another 10 getting approved. The cost of this can reach into the billions...and yet if the market were only canada, they would not even break even.
so before denouncing the public good of policies here in the U.S., check to make sure that americans aren't getting an ass-pounding to the benefit of canadians. if you feel that canada would be better off without the U.S. you are incredibly misinformed or naive.
and dont try to tell all about canada's military...can you imagine the size of the military that would be needed to defend an area as large as canada? why bother when the USA is next door? we obviously have no plans to invade canada anytime soon, despite our depiction as being the Huns.
I do not think that I can answer your question exactly.
But..I have been told of studies which describe precisely what you are saying: that had we used radioactive byproducts of coal burning, we would have harnessed more energy from that than by the burning of the coal itself.
Burning coal is hazardous to the health, according to environmental agencies. So it poses the question: is simply using nuclear material for energy, and then dispersing the leftover material more or less hazardous.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the reactions of your fellow americans the next time they see what some of the Jungle tribes eat (Fried arachnid anyone?)
ok, now you are just being silly
You must have stayed in the rich white suburbs if you ever went to many of the Southern places. (namely new mexico and texas).
no, i have been all over. as im sure you are aware, there is a huge problem with the mexican bordering states and illegal immigration so i'll admit that it may be possible that you will find some racist remarks in those regions. but you are treating a very small percent as the whole...when infact i think that an American is more likely to face intolerance in countries abroad nowadays then foreigners would face in the USA.
yes, there really is widespread respect and tolerance. you may encounter the occasional racist but the other 95% of Americans are tolerant of everyone.
for example, consider a dark skinned person entering an American restaurant where >80% of the patrons are "white". no one will even look twice. now consider a white gringo walking into a restaurant in guatemala...that white guy is gonna get some stares, believe me.
i dont know where u have been, but i have lived in the USA my whole life and traveled nearly every inch of it. i have also travelled to south america and europe and let me tell you: ppl in europe are far less tolerant than Americans. i have never been to canada so i cannot comment on any impressions.
as far as the foods go...you are fucking crazy. mexican & chinese food restaurants are one of the most thriving businesses in America, there are like 10 on every street corner. and black bbq restaurants are hugely popular in the south, and of course italian food is popular everywhere.
see, Americans really don't have any native food of their own so we have adopted the foods of others...exactly contrary to what you are trying to claim.
Respect of other cultures is the first step towards world peace. It is also one of the things I find missing the most in USA society today.
what a load of crap.
the USA is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries on the planet. Most Americans are very tolerant and accepting of other peoples cultures, and live amongst each other in peace.
compare this to eastern europe, spain, or africa where different ethnicities are at each others throat constantly.
and what makes canadians so friggin compassionate? because they have to deal with french speaking people?wow
try going to NY city. if you get on a subway train you are likely to have 30+ different nationalities speaking in 10+ different languages all at the same time.
metal hydrides, formed by reacting molecular hydrogen with group I metals, have been around for a long time. a common example is LiH.
hydrogen can be stored as a solid this way, and then liberated by adding to water to the LiH.
there are 3 major problems with this for practical energy use:
1) group I metals are expensive - given that the US alone consume 20 million gallons of gasoline a day, it is hard to see how we could possibly mine that much lithium
2) the liberation rxn is violent, producing temperatures 600 C
3) the hydride must be kept very dry at all times
er sorry, the links didn't paste right:1 9&page=2
9 9
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=480
and
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=500
since u dont believe me, here take a look at some of my posts on this forum:
0 09 9
8 01 9&page=2
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=5
and
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=4
just a bunch of derivatives and vectors, nothing tricky, no secret voodoo needed
why would i be kidding you?
i have read texts by bishop, frankel, wald and do carmo on differential geometry and also some texts on differential forms (weintraub and also darling).
i was instructed in diff. geom. by a theoretical physicist. i know what i am talking about.
diff geo is for some reason considered a "grad-level topic". i dont know why since it is nowhere near as difficult (in my opinion) as analysis or topology, which are both "undergrad-level".
diff. geom. is a fun and fascinating subject. and with a modern approach (i.e. looking at tensors as multilinear mappings) it is a very natural subject to study.
this is not true.
understanding general relativity is within reach of most students with an aptitude for math.
first of all, differential geometry utilizes tensor analysis and possibly differential forms, and all that is needed to learn these things is multivariate calculus, linear algebra and a very small amount of topology (in fact, most books on diff. geom. will give you the rigorous definition of a differentiable manifold).
trust me, because i know differential geometry. you are making seem much more difficult then it really is.
now ACTUALLY solving einsteins equation is another matter....and would most likely require some of the other topics you have mentions (partial diff. eq. especially).
even better would be to make the cat (even the "original") in the following way:
1) mate 2 cats, remove the embryo at the blastocyst stage
2) remove the stem cells from the blastocyst and culture them
3) freeze some for later,
4) take some of the previously cultured cells and insert them into a new blastocyst
5) implant the blastocyst back into a pseudo-pregant cat
6) enjoy the cat
7) when the cat dies, repeat the process with some of the frozen stem cells
of course, genes could be altered at any point during the cell culture, thus making a cat with improved attributes over time if so desired.
no, reproduction does solve this since the germ cells never lose their telomeres.
the germ cells are made even before the embryo has developed (for both female and male humans) and are passed on to the next generation. in a sense, you could say that we are all nothing more than the extension of a long germ line - we, the animal, exist only to propogate this line.
embryonic stem cells, like the embryonic germ cells, also express telomerase continuously and the telomeres do not shorten until the ES cells differentiate.
funny you should ask...these ends of the chromosomes are called "telomeres" and current research seems to indicate that they function like a molecular counter.
a fully-grown human is the result of around 50 or so cell divisions. each time the cell divides it loses some of it's telomeres (which are composed of repetitive sequences - interestingly, in nearly all vertebrates the sequence is TTAGGG) due to the way Okazaki fragments are replicated 5'->3' when the chromosomes are copied.
for some reason once the telomeres are no longer elongated, the cell stops dividing. why this happens is currently being researched, but it has been noticed that in early cells (and indeed both embryonic stem and germ line cells retain this ability) there are high levels of the enzyme "telomerase": infact, telomerase actively elongates the telomeres.
it is entirely logical that cell aging and death is merely due to the fact that the cells are no longer dividing+apoptosing and so oxidation damage (due to breathing oxygen and utilizing it in the TCA cycle) accumulates. this is supported by the fact that most aging cells have mitochondria that have sustained massive oxidative damage.
the natural question: is it possible to prevent aging and death by somehow preventing this?
it would seem logical that expressing more telomerase would be one way to immortalize the cell...then again, most cancerous cells have high telomerase levels. and in fact, the T antigen of the SV40 (and indeed other oncogenic viruses) immortalizes human cells by a mechanism that involves telomerase and anti-apoptotic expression.
mod parent up, this is 100% the case.
the ansari prize demonstrates this above all, that the adventurous among us (myself definately NOT included) are willing to push the limits as far as they will go. this _embodies_ the original spirit of the apollo program, mercury, and countless test flights done by Yeager and his generation. this is precisely the spirit that landed us on the moon!
countless other great achievements and discoveries can be made in the same vein. the other poster is incorrect in saying that the public will not tolerate an occasional failure or tragedy. this is simply not the case: the reason that the shuttle disaster grounded our missions is exactly BECAUSE so much money has been wasted. if advancements were continuing to be met then the criticisms of NASA would have been no where near the levels of recent days.
remember the fire that killed the crew of the early apollo missions? did that ground the apollo program? of course not.
massive prizes in place of grants and contracts is NASAs future...whether or not they will realize that now remains to be seen.
it is also used in cryopreservation of cell lines
recall that he was not awarded the nobel prize until some time afterwards.
when he wrote his papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect, he was just "mr. einstein". no doctorate, he was just a nobody working as a clerk.
the prestige came 20 years later, and we have selectively revised history to suite our own tastes.
was einstein a genius? absolutely. but don't think that he was somehow groomed that way, or was one day magically recognized as such.
you indicate contradiction where there is none.
cold fusion is either real or not.
we have some evidence that it is real. we also have some evidence that it is not real. infact, the link that i posted last message gives a fair sense of this.
i have left open the possibility that it is real, whereas you have jumped to the conclusion that it is definately not. i have maintained skepticism, whereas you have not.
to say that cold fusion is definately real or definately not real, would be quite foolish, wouldn't you agree?
what is your point?
maybe you didn't realize that oak ridge is part of the DOE program? of course they know about it. also, it has been published in major physics journals, whereas most "cold fusion" papers are rejected.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/4/8
i think that chemists have faced this kind of issue more than physicists have, since the entire history of chemistry shows a familiar story: something is thought impossible because of some previously unknown physical process. i am not saying that this means that cold fusion is real, but that we should be just as willing to accept as to reject.
without healthy skepticism we are not true scientists, merely "believers".
i can only attribute your open sarcasm to lack of skepticism.
how can you completely rule out the possibility of nuclear reactions occuring (albeit very slowly) in a chemistry setting?
and, yes, i know the "energy argument" quite well. but it doesn't account for the fact that the views of quantum physics have changed. what was once thought ridiculous by some is now called "genius" by everyone.
and no, it isn't just taking place in people's basements. folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound and deuterated acetone which resulted in a nuclear reaction taking place...in a test tube.
we all look back at einstein, heisenberg, etc. as geniuses now, but they were considered quacks by many in their day...to the victor goes the spoils.
well, i would call it a genuine attempt at tossing something good out there and saying "here, do what you can with it, we think it's an improvement".
if selinux were to go through the kind of code audit that openbsd does, then this may be something of a holy grail of secure systems
but you can hardly call their choice of linux a coincidence...afterall, there are other open source systems that they could have chosen.
what you are saying is not entirely true. from the selinux website: "Recognizing the critical role of operating system security mechanisms in supporting security at higher levels, researchers from NSA's Information Assurance Research Group have been investigating an architecture that can provide the necessary security functionality in a manner that can meet the security needs of a wide range of computing environments." this statement clearly says that they picked linux for a reason...i dont know if "endoresement" is the right word. in addition: "Linux was chosen as the platform for this work because its growing success and open development environment provided an opportunity to demonstrate that this functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system and, at the same time, contribute to the security of a widely used system. Additionally, the integration of these security research results into Linux may encourage additional operating system security research that may lead to additional improvement in system security." sounds like an endorsement to me
i have also wondered what the efficiency of a power-plant versus the efficiency of a gas motor is..
since the japanese live on an island, and have very few natural resources of their own, it would seem reasonable that they are all about having fuel efficient cars. also, the japanese auto market really opened up after the oil embargo that was leveraged against the US forced American consumers to buy fuel-efficient cars. so it is natural that the japanese would use these domestic (to them) cars that have already been optimized for gas consumption.
i believe that what you are referring to is known as "polar body twinning", and is still only theorized:
5 /e xample_student_projects/Sum2000/Twins/twins.html
http://www.gen.umn.edu/faculty_staff/jensen/113
well, that actually depends. it is possible to create chimeras from the embryonic germ line.
1. insert foreign cells into the embryonic germ cells of a partially differentiated embryo: do this for two organisms
2. if the two organism are male and female, then breed them
3. breed siblings, and the resulting new organism will have a full complement of chimeric genes on both chromosomes
or so i have read...
fantastic post.
i had previously been aware of the problems with DNA testing and the pool size (particularly in maintaining a large DNA database) but not of some of the other probabilities involved.
it just goes to show that a society not founded upon rationality cannot function.
>Canada is doing quite fine, thanks. Im sure there >are quite a few nations out there that feel very >much as though the US has hurt them far more than >helped.
boy, it must be nice in canada not having to pay for medicine or a military, since it is all subsidized by the U.S. consumer and taxpayer.
the same is true for western europe: the only reason that their socialized health system works at all is because the major % of the cost, medicine, is price fixed by their government. which means that the U.S. consumer winds up with the jacked-up prices to cover the loses that the pharmaceutical companies would take otherwise. and so ppl here want to import drugs from canada, drugs that were made here in the USA! if the pharmaceutical companies were to tell the canadian and european governments to face an ultimatum of paying market price their system would collapse. and i wouldn't even think about china providing any innovative drugs; all that comes out of china is sars and the flu.
a drug usually takes at least 10 years to develop, and another 10 getting approved. The cost of this can reach into the billions...and yet if the market were only canada, they would not even break even.
so before denouncing the public good of policies here in the U.S., check to make sure that americans aren't getting an ass-pounding to the benefit of canadians. if you feel that canada would be better off without the U.S. you are incredibly misinformed or naive.
and dont try to tell all about canada's military...can you imagine the size of the military that would be needed to defend an area as large as canada? why bother when the USA is next door? we obviously have no plans to invade canada anytime soon, despite our depiction as being the Huns.
I do not think that I can answer your question exactly.
But..I have been told of studies which describe precisely what you are saying: that had we used radioactive byproducts of coal burning, we would have harnessed more energy from that than by the burning of the coal itself.
Burning coal is hazardous to the health, according to environmental agencies. So it poses the question: is simply using nuclear material for energy, and then dispersing the leftover material more or less hazardous.