Plants don't make carbon vanish or turn into something else. You realize that when a dead plant decomposes, it releases as much carbon back into the atmosphere as if you'd burned it? Plants only trap carbon for a brief period of time (extremely brief considering how long it takes fossil fuels to form). Grow all the hemp you want. It won't do a bit of good unless you bury millions of tons of it deeply enough (and air-tight enough) that the carbon is trapped for a very long time. Of course, this will strip our farmland soil of vital nutrients we need to grow food for our expanding population, which might kill us a lot more quickly than global warming.
The Earth has a very short-term carbon cycle where plants and animals capture and release carbon from the atmosphere. It's a self-sustaining cycle where the carbon goes from the air to the plants to the animals that eat them, and then back into the air when plants or animals die. If you remove or add a bunch of either plants or animals, it doesn't affect the amount of carbon in the cycle, but it can affect how it moves through the cycle.
The Earth also has a MUCH longer cycle where carbon is trapped underground and turns into fossil fuels slowly over millions of years. Over the course of millenia, erosion and tectonic activity unearth some of it and put the carbon back into the atmosphere. However, we're digging up several millions of years worth of stored carbon and dumping it back into the atmosphere in a very short period of time, greatly accelerating the long-term cycle. Growing more plants will not remove the carbon from the cycle, and can't possibly provide anything more than very short-term gains (unless you manage to bury enough to replace the carbon in the oil we dig out of the ground every day).
How many space shuttle flights have lasted over 500 days? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the total is 0. It is very possible for stress to build up over time, for fears to increase over time. In the case of the Mars trip, I would think the farther you got from Earth (and any chance of help being sent to you), the more it would weigh upon your mind.
While I agree, there's one important psychological factor this study left out, and that's the potential fear that you may not make it back. I don't know how they'd be able to successfully simulate that.
"In any case, don't you have to activate Siri somehow, like pressing a button?"
Not sure. I don't have an iPhone, and my iPod Touch died soon after I upgraded it (backlight went out). Obviously Siri won't help her during those times when she can't figure out how to turn the phone on. But hopefully there's an "always on" option to Siri so it will always be available as long as she can figure out how to power up the phone.
Great quote about the keyboard, BTW. About turning her phone on, my wife's is always: "It doesn't make sense to use the 'Off' button to turn the phone on, damnit! They should use some common sense when designing these things." When something takes me a while to figure out, I tend to remember it more because it was a pain, so for me remembering is a pain-avoidance mechanism. My wife seems to get pleasure from complaining (and/or self-righteous anger), so for her forgetting is a pleasure-seeking mechanism. At least, that's the only idea I can come up with to make any sense out of it.
How narrow-minded of you. It would be a strength for people like my wife, who somehow managed to graduate from a University with a decent GPA yet can't ever remember how to turn her phone on (no matter how many times I show her). She probably wouldn't realize that a phone could actually perform a search like that (much less figure out how) without an assistant to tell/remind her. Siri would be a great help to me because I could tell her to ask the damn phone and leave me in peace.;-) And my wife and I aren't even that old. I have parents, and even grand-parents, still living that Siri would help.
For myself, I'm more excited about what AI technology like this could lead to than where it is today. Things like this have to be taken in baby steps, and IMO this seems like an impressive step even if the actual product is not all that useful.
From what I hear, you're not supposed to use tab whitespace in Python anyway:
s_p_oneil.NitpickeryScore += 1;#) Add another for a syntactically valid smiley icon
Actually, when I hit preview, it converted my 2 spaces into 4 for some reason, so I'll have to give you that one. Someone should give the/. devs a hard time for not making posts Python-safe. I think I just pushed myself into the "owning my own bat-leth" category, or perhaps even a storm-trooper costume.;-)
You should get a +5 funny for all the problems you managed to embed into two lines of code that keep programmers from resisting the urge to nit-pick. My first thoughts were the mis-spelling of loneliness, the non-standard indentation for Python (which requires you to be anal about indentation), the avoidance of +=, and the unnecessary semi-colon at the end of the line.
"Searching for the word "car" will bring up topics related to a car, like insurance, pricing and safety ratings. WireDoo is still being built and not available to the public yet."
So Google goes out of its way to try to filter out all the crap you don't want to see (not counting Google's ads, but they try to axe sites trying to rig things to redirect your search), and WireDoo goes out of its way to add even more crap that you don't want to see? That sounds extremely unappealing. What do you type if you JUST want to see cars? Do you have to rig it by only typing things related to cars, like tires, windshields, steering wheels, etc.? How many obscure car references do you have to combine to avoid getting all the crap you don't want bloating your search and slowing you down?
Are you comparing retail price? That's an entirely different ball game, as you have to account for the fact that retail stores do their best to rip off uninformed consumers. If I'm running a chain of plant nurseries, I doubt I'd pay the same amount for daffodils and tulips. However, if I can get away with it, I'll charge the same price (the higher price, of course) when selling them, and most likely advertise the heck out of the over-priced daffodils to increase my profit margin. However, that doesn't equate to the person growing the tulips having a lower profit margin than the person growing the daffodils.
I think you have it backwards. The more rare things are, the more they're worth. So if you take the time to dig up your bulbs each year, and some other slob doesn't, your tulips will end up being worth more. Your muscari bulbs, on the other hand, won't be worth squat once the market is flooded with 12 trillion of them.
"Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking."
The importance of these game jams is to come up with original ideas. The devs know they can't possibly finish something hard or ambitious in that time frame, so they try to come up with something really off-the-wall that can be squeezed into a short development time frame. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
"I prefer games made by someone with love and with all the time needed to polish it properly:)"
That's what the game developers do after game jam if the game idea they came up with worked well. Just look at World of Goo, which followed Tower of Goo, which was developed in a similar fashion.
I imagine bio-engineering would be the direction to take to avoid that. If scientists can design a self-replicating micro-organism to extract oxygen from the soil and release it (and then die without leaving something toxic behind), it may be possible to make Mars easier for humans to live on. Yes it's a big "if", but it's an area scientists are making a lot of progress in, so I wouldn't discount it completely.
Actually, there are quite a few more problems with this idea. If the masses love it but the brighter people don't, we could be stuck with it on all browsers. To make matters worse, a change like this would require web developers everywhere to test all their web pages both ways (paged and scrolling) to make sure page breaks don't come at the wrong place. And of course, Microsoft, Firefox, Chrome, etc. won't implement their "paging" the same way, causing web developers to have to test everything 8 different ways instead of 4. Do we allow web developers to add their own page breaks? What if they do and it looks great on IE but formatting differences cause it to break at the top of the page on other browsers? What if you have linked JavaScript controls that end up being on different pages?
I disagree. If I was writing an article like that, I would give it a temporary pseudonym to avoid awkward wording every time I needed to refer to the animal. If I was speaking aloud, I would be even more likely to do it to avoid dragging the conversation out longer than necessary. It would be both painful to write and painful to read a phrase like "this hypothetical animal with properties similar to the mythical kraken" fifty times. Since I'm not a lawyer, I wouldn't feel the need to bu ultra-clear by explicitly stating that "from here on out, this document will refer to this unnamed animal as a kraken". It's already implied, IMO.
"And, says McMenamin, there is one modern predator that does exactly this - the octopus. He suggests that the remains may indicate the existence of a giant octopus, similar to the Kraken of kegend."
I'm surprised their spell-checker didn't catch the mis-spelling of "legend", but my point is that he's talking about the possible existence of an undiscovered animal. If it hasn't been discovered, it hasn't been given a name, so it makes sense to compare it to something people can relate to. An octopus has no bones, so I'm not sure what kind of fossils we'd be able to find from an ancient giant octopus. Maybe a giant beak?
"...to help people with schizophrenia improve the deficits in attention and memory that are often associated with the disorder..."
So they're going to take crazy people and try to make them smarter and more focused without trying to address the craziness. Is anyone worried about this? Do we really need more Hannibal Lecters in this world? (Part joke, part serious.)
I agree that this probably won't create a significant amount of ozone. However, regarding ozone not being a problem in the lower atmosphere, that's not what I've read. I've read the ozone can be found in harmful levels anywhere that smog is a problem (e.g California, New England, DC):
Slashdot Mirror
Plants don't make carbon vanish or turn into something else. You realize that when a dead plant decomposes, it releases as much carbon back into the atmosphere as if you'd burned it? Plants only trap carbon for a brief period of time (extremely brief considering how long it takes fossil fuels to form). Grow all the hemp you want. It won't do a bit of good unless you bury millions of tons of it deeply enough (and air-tight enough) that the carbon is trapped for a very long time. Of course, this will strip our farmland soil of vital nutrients we need to grow food for our expanding population, which might kill us a lot more quickly than global warming.
The Earth has a very short-term carbon cycle where plants and animals capture and release carbon from the atmosphere. It's a self-sustaining cycle where the carbon goes from the air to the plants to the animals that eat them, and then back into the air when plants or animals die. If you remove or add a bunch of either plants or animals, it doesn't affect the amount of carbon in the cycle, but it can affect how it moves through the cycle.
The Earth also has a MUCH longer cycle where carbon is trapped underground and turns into fossil fuels slowly over millions of years. Over the course of millenia, erosion and tectonic activity unearth some of it and put the carbon back into the atmosphere. However, we're digging up several millions of years worth of stored carbon and dumping it back into the atmosphere in a very short period of time, greatly accelerating the long-term cycle. Growing more plants will not remove the carbon from the cycle, and can't possibly provide anything more than very short-term gains (unless you manage to bury enough to replace the carbon in the oil we dig out of the ground every day).
Austrian? Maybe they should call this one the UEFInator.
Hanz: Aww, you're such a little girlie boot record.
Franz: We're going to "boot" you up.
IMO the most important study is the combination of the two.
Man, that was a good one. If I hadn't already posted on this one, I'd mod you up. ;-)
But the participants still know it's a simulation with help on the other side of the door if something potentially dangerous occurs.
How many space shuttle flights have lasted over 500 days? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the total is 0. It is very possible for stress to build up over time, for fears to increase over time. In the case of the Mars trip, I would think the farther you got from Earth (and any chance of help being sent to you), the more it would weigh upon your mind.
While I agree, there's one important psychological factor this study left out, and that's the potential fear that you may not make it back. I don't know how they'd be able to successfully simulate that.
"In any case, don't you have to activate Siri somehow, like pressing a button?"
Not sure. I don't have an iPhone, and my iPod Touch died soon after I upgraded it (backlight went out). Obviously Siri won't help her during those times when she can't figure out how to turn the phone on. But hopefully there's an "always on" option to Siri so it will always be available as long as she can figure out how to power up the phone.
Great quote about the keyboard, BTW. About turning her phone on, my wife's is always: "It doesn't make sense to use the 'Off' button to turn the phone on, damnit! They should use some common sense when designing these things." When something takes me a while to figure out, I tend to remember it more because it was a pain, so for me remembering is a pain-avoidance mechanism. My wife seems to get pleasure from complaining (and/or self-righteous anger), so for her forgetting is a pleasure-seeking mechanism. At least, that's the only idea I can come up with to make any sense out of it.
Then you look like a crazy person talking to the voices in your head. But I suppose it's better to look crazy than to look stupid.
How narrow-minded of you. It would be a strength for people like my wife, who somehow managed to graduate from a University with a decent GPA yet can't ever remember how to turn her phone on (no matter how many times I show her). She probably wouldn't realize that a phone could actually perform a search like that (much less figure out how) without an assistant to tell/remind her. Siri would be a great help to me because I could tell her to ask the damn phone and leave me in peace. ;-) And my wife and I aren't even that old. I have parents, and even grand-parents, still living that Siri would help.
For myself, I'm more excited about what AI technology like this could lead to than where it is today. Things like this have to be taken in baby steps, and IMO this seems like an impressive step even if the actual product is not all that useful.
Good one. ;-)
From what I hear, you're not supposed to use tab whitespace in Python anyway: ;#) Add another for a syntactically valid smiley icon
s_p_oneil.NitpickeryScore += 1
Actually, when I hit preview, it converted my 2 spaces into 4 for some reason, so I'll have to give you that one. Someone should give the /. devs a hard time for not making posts Python-safe. I think I just pushed myself into the "owning my own bat-leth" category, or perhaps even a storm-trooper costume. ;-)
You should get a +5 funny for all the problems you managed to embed into two lines of code that keep programmers from resisting the urge to nit-pick. My first thoughts were the mis-spelling of loneliness, the non-standard indentation for Python (which requires you to be anal about indentation), the avoidance of +=, and the unnecessary semi-colon at the end of the line.
So what does that make my nit-pickery score?
"Searching for the word "car" will bring up topics related to a car, like insurance, pricing and safety ratings. WireDoo is still being built and not available to the public yet."
So Google goes out of its way to try to filter out all the crap you don't want to see (not counting Google's ads, but they try to axe sites trying to rig things to redirect your search), and WireDoo goes out of its way to add even more crap that you don't want to see? That sounds extremely unappealing. What do you type if you JUST want to see cars? Do you have to rig it by only typing things related to cars, like tires, windshields, steering wheels, etc.? How many obscure car references do you have to combine to avoid getting all the crap you don't want bloating your search and slowing you down?
Wouldn't it be ironic if the US military ended up being the ones to come up with a cheap reliable green energy source?
Did they have to use "gut" bacteria? I hear it's what gives crap its lovely odor.
Are you comparing retail price? That's an entirely different ball game, as you have to account for the fact that retail stores do their best to rip off uninformed consumers. If I'm running a chain of plant nurseries, I doubt I'd pay the same amount for daffodils and tulips. However, if I can get away with it, I'll charge the same price (the higher price, of course) when selling them, and most likely advertise the heck out of the over-priced daffodils to increase my profit margin. However, that doesn't equate to the person growing the tulips having a lower profit margin than the person growing the daffodils.
I think you have it backwards. The more rare things are, the more they're worth. So if you take the time to dig up your bulbs each year, and some other slob doesn't, your tulips will end up being worth more. Your muscari bulbs, on the other hand, won't be worth squat once the market is flooded with 12 trillion of them.
Well, duh. (It surprises me that I'm unable to find anyone else posting this comment.)
"Often it is a good and original idea, but the implementation is lacking."
The importance of these game jams is to come up with original ideas. The devs know they can't possibly finish something hard or ambitious in that time frame, so they try to come up with something really off-the-wall that can be squeezed into a short development time frame. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
"I prefer games made by someone with love and with all the time needed to polish it properly :)"
That's what the game developers do after game jam if the game idea they came up with worked well. Just look at World of Goo, which followed Tower of Goo, which was developed in a similar fashion.
I imagine bio-engineering would be the direction to take to avoid that. If scientists can design a self-replicating micro-organism to extract oxygen from the soil and release it (and then die without leaving something toxic behind), it may be possible to make Mars easier for humans to live on. Yes it's a big "if", but it's an area scientists are making a lot of progress in, so I wouldn't discount it completely.
However, I'd be more worried about this:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/
If that's true, you'd be fighting a losing battle no matter what you do.
Actually, there are quite a few more problems with this idea. If the masses love it but the brighter people don't, we could be stuck with it on all browsers. To make matters worse, a change like this would require web developers everywhere to test all their web pages both ways (paged and scrolling) to make sure page breaks don't come at the wrong place. And of course, Microsoft, Firefox, Chrome, etc. won't implement their "paging" the same way, causing web developers to have to test everything 8 different ways instead of 4. Do we allow web developers to add their own page breaks? What if they do and it looks great on IE but formatting differences cause it to break at the top of the page on other browsers? What if you have linked JavaScript controls that end up being on different pages?
I disagree. If I was writing an article like that, I would give it a temporary pseudonym to avoid awkward wording every time I needed to refer to the animal. If I was speaking aloud, I would be even more likely to do it to avoid dragging the conversation out longer than necessary. It would be both painful to write and painful to read a phrase like "this hypothetical animal with properties similar to the mythical kraken" fifty times. Since I'm not a lawyer, I wouldn't feel the need to bu ultra-clear by explicitly stating that "from here on out, this document will refer to this unnamed animal as a kraken". It's already implied, IMO.
"And, says McMenamin, there is one modern predator that does exactly this - the octopus. He suggests that the remains may indicate the existence of a giant octopus, similar to the Kraken of kegend."
I'm surprised their spell-checker didn't catch the mis-spelling of "legend", but my point is that he's talking about the possible existence of an undiscovered animal. If it hasn't been discovered, it hasn't been given a name, so it makes sense to compare it to something people can relate to. An octopus has no bones, so I'm not sure what kind of fossils we'd be able to find from an ancient giant octopus. Maybe a giant beak?
"...to help people with schizophrenia improve the deficits in attention and memory that are often associated with the disorder..."
So they're going to take crazy people and try to make them smarter and more focused without trying to address the craziness. Is anyone worried about this? Do we really need more Hannibal Lecters in this world? (Part joke, part serious.)
I agree that this probably won't create a significant amount of ozone. However, regarding ozone not being a problem in the lower atmosphere, that's not what I've read. I've read the ozone can be found in harmful levels anywhere that smog is a problem (e.g California, New England, DC):
http://www.epa.gov/region1/airquality/
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/23c.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/report-finds-that-washington-baltimore-among-smoggiest-cities-in-the-country/2011/09/21/gIQAYqv8kK_story.html
If you Google it, you can probably find a bunch more.