(oh, and add to your list - Depending on the results, a flag gets added to your Permanent Medical Record aka the Medical Information Bureau , making it permanently more difficult to get individual health insurance. Remember to get your free yearly credit-style report to see how near-death they think you are. Insurance decisions are not supposed to be based only on your MIB. right.)
While it might not apply to your single-test request, Medical Tourism might help. In your case, for less than the total cost you mention you might be able to fly or drive to a nearby country and get the same test, but in a way that you own the results. More commonly, medical tourism is used to either get an extensive set of medical tests done for a fraction of the U.S. cost (if you could get your HMO to authorize the set in the first place), or to get specific surgeries or dental procedures done for far less than the U.S. cost.
The well-known m.t. hospitals have the same equipment and safety standards as U.S. hospitals, but much cheaper prices. Plus you get your own data and the hospital room is like a resort hotel, sometimes with beach nearby.
As examples, a friend needed $20,000 worth of dental work done (as estimated by U.S. dentists). His total cost was less than $5,000 in Costa Rica (including plane tix: Costa Rica is known for dental m.t.), plus he got some ecotourism time in the rain forests. Several of the m.t. hospitals in Thailand and elsewhere have had their business skyrocket after 2001: families who used to visit the U.S. for their yearly checkups (Mayo clinic or similar) aren't being allowed into the U.S. (i.e. a drop of 40% from Middle Eastern countries. Stop the most U.S. friendly people in these countries from seeing their long-term doctors and keep their money away from U.S. businesses: great PR and great economic planning, with no appreciable safety benefits. ).
M.T. also allows you to truthfully say you're going off for a vacation when you're going to get elective surgery like liposuction or plastic surgery done. On your return you'll get "Hey, you look better...nice tan."
The "this sounds like science fiction, but..." line hints that this isn't the best researched article. They mention Joy but not the person (and the book Age of Spiritual Machines) and most importantly the ideas that provoked Joy's essay. They mention Wells and Baxter, but fail to notice / mention that entire anthologies have been devoted to the topic (Dozois' Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future is a great introduction. Stories from the 1950's through the 1990's.) If science fiction has covered this topic, why not check to see what SF has proposed, to ensure your article isn't reinventing the wheel. They seem to imply that science fiction doesn't get its ideas from real-world developments: that isn't true.
Its as if they were writing about "the future of Open Source" by quoting Stallmam, one recently-famous open source developer, and the Halloween documents. And entirely failed to interview or even mention the existance of Torvalds, Wall, Allman, Eric Raymond, or O'Reilly (website, books and conferences).
He could always stay within an hour or two of his server room. But even then:
Does he want the reputation of a guy who thinks his IT business is as important as heart transplant surgery? If you're an on-call surgeon, you have an excuse to leave in the middle of weddings, funerals, dinner-parties, movies, hikes, religious services, heart-to-heart conversations with loved ones, etc. If you're not leaving for life-or-death matters, it generally starts to look rude. (If you're the minion and the alternative is getting fired, then you have an excuse. This guy is the owner. No excuse.)
Even if he has no social life whatsoever, he'll eventually be hit by the flu, medical emergencies, jury service selection waits (or depositions or a court case), a car accident, or other events that all the willpower in the world won't get you out of.
He needs a backup. If I was a potential customer, I wouldn't care how many paths there are to connect to him... carrier pigeon, ham radio, long-range-telepaths... he himself is the potential single point of failure.
I was on the cell phone talking to a friend: he was stuck waiting in a gov't office to take care of bureaucratic paperwork...
Suddenly he said "Wow, oh wow." I asked what happened. He said "something great, I'll tell you later." Wouldn't say anything more.
Because he'd just scored 20 million points in Drug Wars, after Coke went up to some zillion dollars a kilo. "I was surrounded by security officials- didn't seem like a good time to be talking about dumping heroin," he later told me.
Paine's anti-slave-trade essay was written by "Justice and Humanity." His Common Sense came out anonymously: only later did he choose to be named as its author. And then a little later he went back to anonymity as 'Forester' to discuss Common Sense further. The Federalist Papers weren't as provokative as anti-slavery or anti-British-rule writings, but Hamilton, Madison and Jay still chose to publish anonymously.
Certainly one can't claim that these people weren't willing to fight for their ideals. And they thought anonymous writing was a valid (useful / legal / legitimate) way to bring about democracy and political change.
Seems like most of the time the risky, world-changing ideas require that the idea is publicized, not any particular name. Signing your real name seems orthogonal to getting the word out.
Do you fault 'Written By An Englishman' for not using his real name? He got a good revolution going without it. Or how about 'Publius,' 'Forester' and 'Cato'?
There is one strong use for non-anonymous writing, which is when founding reactionaries change their minds. In this case the use of argument from authority might be more than just taking advantage of human psychology, if the mind change is accompanied by reasons / evidence / data. Otherwise naming names early on mixes the quality of ideas with the fame of the author. [Think about how the "Darwin recounted on his deathbed" idea is used as a pro-creationist argument. Not only is this idea false, its irrelevant. Peer-reviewed research, not famous names, corroborates science.]
While its a bit late on this thread, I have seen these movies. I enjoyed them- they are quite good- but their science fiction background isn't conceptually more advanced than the SF literature of the 60's-70's.
SF writers can't wait for Star Wars to end, too
on
No Need For Trek Anymore
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Because
"What George Lucas may have seen as eternal in his "Star Wars" blockbusters, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique"
It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."
"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."
If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.
Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.
That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. . ..
One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. . ..
I've written that media SF has often been a good few decades behind written SF, especially movies. They quote Richard Morgan in the NYTimes article ("That's the past of science fiction you're talking about, . ..It's just such a huge shame," he said. "Anyone who is a practitioner of science fiction is constantly dogged by the ghettoization of the genre. And a lot of that comes from the very simplistic, 2-D Lucasesque view of what science fiction has to offer."). Star Wars and Star Trek do capture the look and feel of written SF of the 30s and 50's (respectively). But I can't imagine either franchise being able to capture a fraction of the feel or ideas in the first few pages of Morgan's Broken Angels. Digital human freighting, sleeves, future warfare...
The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.
In the US, Bank of America has a picture on the front of the credit card.
When my card was stolen, the thief who went on a 1 day shopping spree simply claimed to be my brother. He had a signed note to prove it, and, funny how that signed note did match the signature on the credit card. Not every store bothered to ask him for that signed note, and no one ever asked the thief for his own identification.
Now my CC signature bar has a partial signature and a "check ID." About twice a year a clerk reads it and then asks to see an ID.
Did you notice that the same article points out how humans share 98% of their DNA with chimps?
Have you read the 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ? When you do, you'll see that evolution predicts the opposite of what you claim-- fossils that match no known species would be a point against evolution. Humans that shared no DNA with bananas, or more DNA with bananas than bats would be a killer hit against evolution. (Note that creationists sometimes say that particular genes are identical (or closer) in two very different species than in seemingly closer species. All of these claims have ended up being false.)
Humans have one less gene than chimps, but human gene 2 looks like exactly like chimp genes 2p and 2q fused together, nonfunctioning broken bits of telomeres right at the fuse point. And it isn't just the working genes- we share nearly all of our broken genes. Example from the FAQ:
"Prediction 2.3: Molecular vestigial characters Vestigial characters should also be found at the molecular level. Humans do not have the capability to synthesize ascorbic acid (otherwise known as Vitamin C), and the unfortunate consequence can be the nutritional deficiency called scurvy. However, the predicted ancestors of humans had this function (as do most other animals except primates and guinea pigs). Therefore, we predict that humans, other primates, and guinea pigs should carry evidence of this lost function as a molecular vestigial character (nota bene: this very prediction was explicitly made by Nishikimi and others and was the impetus for the research detailed below) Confirmation: Recently, the L-gulano--lactone oxidase gene, the gene required for Vitamin C synthesis, was found in humans and guinea pigs. It exists as a pseudogene, present but incapable of functioning... We now have the DNA sequences for this broken gene in chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques. And, as predicted, the malfunctioning human and chimpanzee pseudogenes are the most similar, followed by the human and orangutan genes, followed by the human and macaque genes, precisely as predicted by evolutionary theory. Furthermore, all of these genes have accumulated mutations at the exact rate predicted (the background rate of mutation for neutral DNA regions like pseudogenes).
"There are several other examples of vestigial human genes, including multiple odorant receptor genes, the RT6 protein gene, the galactosyl transferase gene, and the tyrosinase-related gene (TYRL). [refs deleted]"
"According to the theory of common descent, modern living organisms, with all their incredible differences, are the progeny of one single species in the distant past. In spite of the extensive variation of form and function among organisms, several fundamental criteria characterize all life... (1) replication, (2) heritability (3) catalysis, and (4) energy utilization (metabolism). At a very minimum, these four functions are required to generate a physical historical process that can be described by a phylogenetic tree. If every living species descended from an original species that had these four obligate functions, then all living species today should necessarily have these functions (a somewhat trivial conclusion).
Most importantly, however, all modern species should have inherited the structures that perform these functions. Thus, a basic prediction of the genealogical relatedness of all life, combined with the constraint of gradualism, is that organisms should be very similar in the particular mechanisms and structures that execute these four basic life processes...
[Falsifiability of this theory] Based solely on the theory of common descent and the genetics of known organisms, we strongly predict that we will never find any modern species from known phyla on this Earth with a foreign, non-nuclei
Good summary articles by Zimmer and others
on
Hobbit Is A New Species
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· Score: 4, Informative
Carl Zimmer, an excellent science writer, summarizes these latest developments with good background information on his blog. As he writes, H.f. could have been:
A few ordinary pygmies and a microcephalic,
An extraordinary group of Homo sapiens,
Descendants of Indonesian Homo erectus, or
Something completely different.
Carl concludes that these new results make 3 or 4 most likely, explaining why "explanations 3 and 4 seem to come out strongest at the moment. Either one would mean that the Hobbit represents an amazing experiment in hominid brain evolution. They suggest that some human-like features emerged in hominids that were separated from us by two or maybe three million years of evolution. Yet their brains were mosaics, sharing features with us and with other hominids, and also had features of their own. These strange brains, Dr. Morwood argues, allowed Hobbits to do things some pretty elaborate things, such as butcher dwarf elephants or make fires. It would be wonderful to know how these strange brains were wired together, but we have to be content with their shadows. But even shadows can sometimes reveal a lot."
And to hit the pause button on any creationist "there are no missing links" arguments, take a close look at the comparison of hominid skulls, from the very useful 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ -- each evidence complete with examples, references, predictions, and falsifiability tests (the latter two necessary for a theory to be a scientific theory). A shaved and suited Homo erectus is *not* going to be mistaken for a modern Homo sapiens, not with that small brain and strange face (compare especially the forehead and canines, and that he actually uses his wisdom teeth. Ours are on the way out). But he'll obviously be human- upright, great walker, up to 6 feet tall, briefcase filled with stone tools and a fire-starter kit.
And because at least a few of these claims show up in Slashdot threads on biology, here is the Index of Creationist Claims -- CC0 through CC150 covers human evolution -- and the arguments even creationists say to stop using. If your creationist argument is in the index, how about countering the evidence in the index instead of just making the claim?
In reading these articles about the FEC and internet speech, I haven't seen much on anonymity (or pseudonymity) in blogs. How would these regulations apply to the very large number of blogs which aren't in the blogger's real name?
Not that the FEC cares about RedCat19's livejournal opinion on Senator Kerry, but what about sites like Eschaton which for a long time had tens of thousands of readers knowing the owner only as 'Atrios'? Duncan Black didn't reveal his real name because of his employment. Certainly many bloggers don't want their employers to be able to search their political (or any other) opinions. How could the FEC regulate internet political content without forcing people to reveal their true names? Would they add people's blogs to those searchable databases of political donors? (Guess we'd finally be able to find out what percentage of bloggers are unemployed.)...
"In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for--the stories go--once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again:" Vinge
over 3 million Americans had fraudulent ID theft (the worse kind), and 10 million total had some type of ID theft
ID theft victims spent a total of 300 million hours "fixing" their problems.
Fraudulent ID theft averaged $10,000 stolen. The total cost of all ID theft is $50 billion.
the monetary cost to fix fraudulent ID theft averages $1,200 per ID victim.
But in reading this report the bias that "businesses are the true victims" shows up. The $5 billion in costs to the identity victim (and 300 million hours of time) is described as "Individuals whose information is misused bear only a small percentage of the cost of ID Theft" (pg 6). That's a bad way of thinking about it for several reasons:
300 million hours of victims' time = 300 million hours of research and investigative time = a 'donation' of at least a few billion dollars.
The ID theft victim gets hit with real and lasting costs. Companies get to write off their losses, or use insurance and pass their costs on to consumers. A year after ID theft is discovered, the theft is just a blip in a spreadsheet to the companies where the stolen identity was used. The victim will still be writing letters, finding new ramifications, and losing time and sleep over the matter.
Those 300 million hours also = stress, lost time from work, family, charities, plus also extra medical expenses.
"15 percent of ID Theft victims reported that their personal information was misused in nonfinancial ways. The most common such use reported was to present the victim's name and identifying information when someone was stopped by law enforcement authorities or was charged with a crime." What's the cost of your kid seeing you arrested because someone else used your name? Not to mention...
Now that the government gets data from Choicepoint and others, and because the government has no legal responsibility to find or fix bad data in its files, the rest of your life could be hobbled by bad data and you won't quite know why.
So basically Choicepoint and the credit card reporting agencies are creating a "public bad." Like polluters, they force other people and companies to bear the cost of problems they've created. 300 million hours and $5 billion dollars would = fantastic security finished in months if the companies themselves had to pay these costs. Instead, 10 million people are forced to do their own cleanup work, and the fact that 9.999 million people have already done the job doesn't make it any easier for you when you're the victim.
Certainly the *manufacturers* of medicines will tell you to throw away all meds the instant they hit the expiration date (which is the lesser of the manuf.'s expiration date or 1 year from dispensing the med). The patient is the printer, the meds are the ink cartridge... But only a few medicines are known to actually expire, i.e. turn bad after time. Most slowly fade away.
The US Army studied this because they were throwing away millions of dollars worth of medicines each year because of the expiration date. Results? They throw away far, far less meds now:
"Data from the Department of Defense/US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Shelf Life Extension Program, which tests the stability of drug products past their expiration date, showed 84% of 1122 lots of 96 different drug products stored in military facilities in their unopened original container would be expected to remain stable for an average of 57 months after their original expiration date. Some US Army studies on Valium, for example, show that the drug is very stable and completely safe and effective for up to 8 years after manufacture.
Tablets of ciprofloxacin, an expensive antibiotic, were found completely safe and effective when tested 9.5 years after the expiration date.
A recent issue of The Medical Letter quoted not only the above study but others showing expensive medications like amantadine (Symmetrel) and rimantadine (Flumadine) remained stable after storage for 25 years under ambient conditions and retained full antiviral activity after boiling and holding at 65-85 C for several days. Theophylline, in tablet form, shows 90% stability even after 30 years beyond the expiration date. Such stability is not reflected in the manufacturer or pharmacy dating about when tablets or capsules must be discarded. In general, although published data are not available for all medicines, The Medical Letter consultants believe that most drugs stored under reasonable conditions retain at least 70% to 80% of their potency for at least 1 to 2 years after the expiration date, even after the container has been opened (nb: current US Pharmacopoeia [USP] standard is generally 90% potency).
Humans did have some sort of major cultural or medical advance about 30,000 years ago: the relatively sudden change of having many more elders / grandparents stay around much longer than before. Theory here (nature rewards caregivers), and evidence from paleontology recently in the news (can't find source, sorry).
So back then I'm sure that humans could have been having the same debate... "If grandparents hang around that much longer- an extra 30 years- won't they get bored? What if they can't hunt or gather? Where will they live?" Humanity handled it then. We'll learn to handle having our great and great-great grandparents around (or do we really wish them dead? Do we want to keep hearing our grandparents talking about all the friends they've lost, while we ourselves dread the 3am call to hear that a great-aunt or grandparent is dead?)
True, the medical advances of the 20th century got us to a more reliable 75-85 year lifespan. I think its reasonable now to ask medicine to get rid of the worst aging processes which can really degrade the last 10-15 years. If as a side-effect that gets us to, say, 90 years of healthy life followed by 10 years of standard senescence that'll be a respectable gift to give our parents. And then to build up to 130 years of healthy life, followed by 5 years of standard senescence: that'd be a great gift for our kids.
Interesting document. I do get worried anytime I see sentences like (page 9 section 2):
"Once a traveler has been added to the reported list for a flight, subsequent reporting of a traveler with the same name and date of birth for the same flight will be discarded.
Corrections and/or additions to a traveler's data cannot be made after the initial report."
I can just see Mr. Tuttle at customs... "Your *passport* is Canadian, so why did you claim to be Czech? You say the *airline* made a mistake? Hmmmm-- please come to the back room, Mr. Buttle. Doesn't matter that you have a connecting flight..."
The problem comes when they compare the pax list with their databases. In the US even US citizens don't have the right to correct their data, and the FBI has no obligation to ensure their data about you is correct. Already we've seen how good the TSA's system is, putting every Carlos Garcia, John Lewis and David Nelson on theirs Watch-List as it, doing repeated time-consuming checks on all 10 thousand of them each time they fly rather than doing the actual random checks that keep us safer. And now their database is going to have this data for all travel and travelers around the world (because the gov'ts share this info). They'll be so swamped by the millions of false positives that it'll be far more likely that the extraordinarily rare false negative won't be noticed. Makes me feel safer already: cue theme music to Brazil.
Again the "Its a Warning not a Guidebook" Best Essay Ever...on privacy: "The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"[Example of typical gov't database, filled with errors] That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm."
I love the U.S. Constitution and think there's a good reason why Amendment IV refers to persons, not citizens . When you visit the US I hope you can follow your whims without a Sauron's eye of internal police following your every move.
When I traveled to Communist China, I expected to have to write down all the addresses. If I were to have traveled to the USSR last century, I would have expected physical or bureaucratic minders to be watching my location and contacts.
But when traveling in free, democratic countries, signers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I expect to tell the truth about my length of stay, and that the border-guards will want to protect Article 30:
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
That would include working to protect privacy, freedom of speech and association, travel and related freedoms along with fighting against the terrorists who'd want to violate Article 3 ("Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person"). They don't need to know my every move and every friend- not because I have something to hide, but because I have important rights to protect.
When I've been on trips to free countries I've generally only made reservations only if it looks like the hotels could be all booked up (Kyoto in autumns leaf season, say). I wouldn't be able to give specific addresses, only a general itinerary.
From the ever-useful and prescient Canadian Privacy Commissioner's Report, writing about Canada, but its especially applicable to the US (as it warns Canadians not to lose rights the US has recently given up):
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free.
That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada. But that is where we are inexorably headed, if the Government's current initiatives are allowed to proceed..."
[Initiative to collect travel data in and outside of the country]
"All this personal information - more than 30 data elements including every destination to which we travel, who we travel with, how we pay for the tickets (sometimes including credit card numbers), what contact numbers we provide, even any dietary preferences or health-related requirements we communicate to the airline - will be available for an almost limitless range of governmental purposes under the broad information-sharing provisions of the Customs Act...
This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
I commented on this in last month's discussion on de Grey Live to be 1000. In short, AdG and other longer-lifers point out that we'll still be able to die (pandemics, accidents, wars) and we'll want to reduce the chances of those. If everyone thinks they're on the same long-lifeboat then we're more likely to pull together to prevent those alternate death sources. Quoting myself:
Even now we know we shouldn't have neighborhoods / countries / regions where most people think their lifespan is half of the worldwide average, or that they can't control their health or local environment. Their rational behavior can change their health / environment for the worse (nevermind the problem of angry hopeless young men and wars / violence). Pollution spreads. Epidemics spread. It is in everyone's best interest for all people to think that they're all on the same bell curve with regards to health, lifespan, the environment... for everyone to think and live as if they can make it to their 70's.
Of course currently it isn't true: many countries have significantly lower average life expectancies (even without childhood mortality in the mix). But it doesn't take much to change that: once countries hit a per capita GDP around $2000 then average lifespans get into the 60s to 70s. (Clean water, immunizations, basic access to clinics and medical knowledge). Once women have education and job opportunities birthrates go way down (education isn't the only factor, but the most significant one)
So lets say we can fix Aubrey's big 7 problems and can expect to reach 150. These aren't overwhelmingly complex solutions. Molecules can be copied: labs are getting cheaper. Science has always been more bazaar than cathedral, and with the internet open-source biology is even easier.
It may be for the most part "sharing" won't be relevant. We'll be "participating," so will most other people. "The rich" won't have much control over KaZaa-Life, and a billion eyeballs'll be keeping track of the anti-viral wetware on Life-Forge. In this case some people will still die young-- some treatments won't work for all people -- but that'd be just bad luck. You'll still try to live like 150 is possible.
But what if some countries are still on different bell curves: they reasonably can expect to live only 45-55, 65 years if they're lucky. They'll behave differently- taking more risks, discounting the future- not out of anger or jealousy (though never ignore the power of those), but simply because its rational. Using more untested / black-market copies of drugs. Perhaps slightly less likely to use antibiotics in "old" (=60+) age.
AdG writes that epidemics can still get us. Even without malicious intent they'll be more likely to come from the regions where lifespans are 1/3 the average. So again, if the wealthy elite (or 1st world countries generally) want to reach 150, we'll be handing out our telomere lengthening inhibitors and ATase like candy (low-glycolic index candy).
Mutations are very often neutral. "Decades of biochemical evidence have shown that many amino acid mutations, especially of surface residues, have only small effects on protein function and on protein structure (Branden and Tooze 1999, Ch. 3; Harris et al. 1956; Lesk 2001, Chs. 5 and 6, pp. 165-228; Li 1997, p. 2; Matthews 1996). A striking example is that of the c-type cytochromes from various bacteria, which have virtually no sequence similarity. Nevertheless, they all fold into the same three-dimensional structure, and they all perform the same biological role (Moore and Pettigrew 1990, pp. 161-223; Ptitsyn 1998).
Even within species, most amino acid mutations are functionally silent. For example, there are at least 250 different amino acid mutations known in human hemoglobin, carried by more than 3% of the world's population, that have no clinical manifestation in either heterozygotic or homozygotic individuals (Bunn and Forget 1986; Voet and Voet 1995, p. 235). The phenomenon of protein functional redundancy is very general, and is observed in all known proteins and genes.
With this in mind, consider again the molecular sequences of cytochrome c. Cytochrome c is absolutely essential for life - organisms that lack it cannot live. It has been shown that the human cytochrome c protein works in yeast (a unicellular organism) that has had its own native cytochrome c gene deleted, even though yeast cytochrome c differs from human cytochrome c over 40% of the protein. [emphasis added]"
Parahomology explains going from 300 to 301 genes:
"One major consequence of the constraint of gradualism is the predicted existence of parahomology. Parahomology, as the term is used here, is similarity of structure despite difference in function. When one species branches into two species, one or both of the species may acquire new functions. Since the new species must recruit and modify preexisting structures to perform these new functions, the same structure shared by these two species will now perform a different function in each of the two species. This is parahomology. It follows that parahomologous structures have a history that should be explicable from other lines of evolutionary evidence, since derived characteristics (which is what these new functions and structures now are) have evolved from more primitive (i.e. older) structures..."
"...A stunning confirmation of these evolutionary predictions has come from an analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) and Caenorhabditis elegans (a worm). The genomes of both these organisms were sequenced very recently (Barrell 1996; Caenorhabditis elegans Sequencing Consortium 1998). The genes used by the yeast, a unicellular organism, are mostly genes dealing directly with core biochemical functions that all organisms must perform. From an evolutionary perspective, we would expect these genes to be ancient. Thus it was expected and shown that the worm contains a great majority of these genes. In contrast, the extra genes used by the worm, which deal with multicellularity, should be more recently evolved. Phylogenetic analysis has shown that this is exactly the case. The vast majority of extra genes in the worm appear to be directly derived from genes providing core cellular functions, in accordance with evolutionary prediction (Chervitz et al. 1998).
An even larger study of the known eukaryotic genomes has further demonstrated that parahomology is rampant in nature, and that true structural innovation is relatively rare (Rubin et al. 2000).
Of course, neutral mutations and parahomology aren't inconsistent with a designer. On the other hand,
The article you cite ends with "but it does seem that a fully detailed evolutionary explanation for eubacterial flagella is not so distant." Can scientists currently give every detail of every step along the path? No. Can they make a path? Yes. Quoting from the always useful Index of Creationist claims [and it'll be interesting to count how many of them are found in this thread. Better yet if the arguments come from the arguments even creationists say to not use.]:
1. This is an example of
argument from incredulity, because irreducible complexity can evolve naturally. Many of the proteins in the bacterial flagellum or eukaryotic cilium are similar to each other or to proteins for other functions. Their origins can easily be explained by a series of gene duplication events followed by modification and/or cooption, proceeding gradually through intermediate systems different from and simpler than the final flagellum.
One plausible path for the evolution of flagella goes through the following basic stages (keep in mind that this is a summary, and that each major cooption event would be followed by long periods of gradual optimization of function)...
(see site for seven step path)
2. The bacterial flagellum is not even irreducible...
3.Eubacterial flagella, archebacterial flagella, and cilia use entirely different designs for the same function. That is to be expected if they evolved separately, but it makes no sense if they were the work of the same designer.
But anyways, science has barely finished the human genome, and it doesn't yet have enough mammal genomes to reconstruct the mammalian last common ancestor. I wouldn't expect them to have all the genomes needed to show the most likely flagella pathways. On the other hand science / evolution has explained:
Why humans and chimps don't just share nearly all of our genes, but nearly all of our broken genes (and why human gene 2 looks like exactly like chimp genes 2p and 2q fused together, nonfunctioning broken bits of telomeres right at the fuse point).
Transitional forms like reptiles to mammals, dinosaurs to birds, and, yes, apes to human.
Atavisms, Biogeography, Convergence of independent phylogenies and the other 26+ evidences detailed in 29 Evidences for Macroevolution"-- each one individually usable for predictions about (or for falsifying) evolution.
you're out of luck, unless you have a handi-lawyer. If you need to get the contents or just the proof that you made a call to their 800 number, that takes $$$.
Months ago I called large company X to change my account. Listened to their hold [specially composed neverending loop so that you can't count the repeats] 'music' for 20 minutes and waited for every department in X to approve the change, then Nice Service Rep said she'd made and noted the change. I didn't write down NSR's name. Usually I would have- too tired and NSR just seemed so nice.
Next month I noticed the change hadn't been made, which cost me an extra $60. I called X back. My account had no notes, no evidence I'd changed my service or even that I'd called. [And if I wanted to avoid the $60 in charges I should have changed my account earlier, which I obviously hadn't done, I was informed.] Unless I could I give them NSR's name, as NSR'd surely remember authorizing my now wicked request (because all SR's have superhuman memories of the past 2000 calls they've taken) as proof I'm not a liar? No NSR name, no dice.
Couldn't they simply look at their 800 records? [I'd called from a land-line, not my cell, so couldn't prove my call myself] I asked. Certainly: all I had to do was get my lawyer to write the appropriately worded request letter and fill out form DZ-015 and they'd happily comply. My lawyer also has to request form DZ-015 for me. Right: spend $400 to get one bit of evidence that could potentially fix $60 worth of problems.
So a $60 lesson in recordkeeping and choosing which phone to use for calls (cell phone: has records of 800 calls. Landline: allows recording of calls. Which is better?).
There are some bad psychological cognitive dissonance feedback loops showing up here.
If you're an anti-terrorism agent of some kind, and you're sent to investigate green lasers pointing at airplanes, which mode of thinking will make you feel better?
"Terrorism is dangerous and an act of terrorism could kill many people. My very important job is to prevent that, and I want to spend as much time as possible working on the important stuff. We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. He's been embarrassed in the news for being an idiot and in for some community service, but, boy, I'm not going to get those hours back, what a waste of time." or
"...We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. This has to be very important, else I wouldn't have spent all those hours working on this. I caught you and you are going down, mr. terrorist hiding as a techie guy. Oh, you're not a terrorist? Well, I caught you and you are going down, mr. example-to-terrorists hiding as a techie guy."
Just in general people don't like admitting that they've put a lot of time and energy into something that didn't help their main mission. Very hard to get people to believe that old statement of economists: "Sunk costs are irrelevant." Much easier on the ego to think that "What I'm doing *must* be important and relevant, else why would I be doing it?"
And so specifically if legislative bodies threw in DOS attacks, taking pictures of bridges, paying train tix with cash, or failing to know all the lyrics to 'God Bless the USA' into the PATRIOT Act, it *must* be because those are all related to terrorism, not because the FBI hornswoggled them into shoehorning 20 years worth of Xmas wish-lists into the Act during a month of extreme grief and emotion. Nope.
If you're doing important anti-terrorism work then it just isn't possible that you'll get side-tracked. (which is why, had the PATRIOT Act existed in the 20th century, Tesla, the "October Sky" rocketeer, and pretty much every member of pyrotechnics guilds and model rocket clubs would have ended up with SSSS's on their plane tix and plenty of long, recorded talks with the local constabulary. Especially Tesla- scaring the neighbors like that, potentially taking down the grid, born in a foreign country. How'd he even get in? Thank goodness now we're keeping out all those foreign engineering grad students: maybe our science and economy will suffer, but we'll feel safer.)
Submitting a story to Slashdot is the equivalent of using a green laser for astronomy lessons, and the PATRIOT Act should equivalently be used against those who instigate the Slashdot effect.
Sure, you claim your only motivation was to show the audience something new. But people don't really need a group lesson and nifty pointers to learn where comet Machholz or the Andromeda Galaxy are- they should search them out on their own. And ditto with Slashdot. Did you think about what happens when millions of (in)coherent eyeballs go slamming against a website all at once? That site can go down for minutes or hours- customers could be bounced; money could be lost (and as time is money and everyone has only so much time, really, lives could be lost...).
In fact, anytime you bring too much attention to any one site or any one person you could be distracting them and keeping them from doing their necessary work. That's almost as bad as FOIA requests. If only the PATRIOT Act existed before Woodward and Bernstein: they'd have been lucky to only face 25 years. (sarcasm mode off)
Certainly from Yahoo's legal point of view your stored stuff there don't have value: I'm sure their EULA lets them wipe any account to bits for any reason. Ditto (in value) for most ISPs, storage units (without insurance), snailmail (without insurance). They car has a certain value; your writings have only your copyright and is likely to have zero non-sentimental value. But its a Schrödinger's cat uncollapsed wave form sort of likelihood: writing could have all sorts of legal materiality, for example, and you couldn't tell just be looking at it...
"Dude that rox!!11"'s value depends heavily on if its a reply to:
"Hey, I just became a level 10 paladin" vs
"Hey, we have seats in row 3" vs
"Hey, we've figured out how to have windows give an error message if DR-DOS is loaded"
Slashdot Mirror
While it might not apply to your single-test request, Medical Tourism might help. In your case, for less than the total cost you mention you might be able to fly or drive to a nearby country and get the same test, but in a way that you own the results. More commonly, medical tourism is used to either get an extensive set of medical tests done for a fraction of the U.S. cost (if you could get your HMO to authorize the set in the first place), or to get specific surgeries or dental procedures done for far less than the U.S. cost.
The well-known m.t. hospitals have the same equipment and safety standards as U.S. hospitals, but much cheaper prices. Plus you get your own data and the hospital room is like a resort hotel, sometimes with beach nearby.
As examples, a friend needed $20,000 worth of dental work done (as estimated by U.S. dentists). His total cost was less than $5,000 in Costa Rica (including plane tix: Costa Rica is known for dental m.t.), plus he got some ecotourism time in the rain forests. Several of the m.t. hospitals in Thailand and elsewhere have had their business skyrocket after 2001: families who used to visit the U.S. for their yearly checkups (Mayo clinic or similar) aren't being allowed into the U.S. (i.e. a drop of 40% from Middle Eastern countries. Stop the most U.S. friendly people in these countries from seeing their long-term doctors and keep their money away from U.S. businesses: great PR and great economic planning, with no appreciable safety benefits. ).
M.T. also allows you to truthfully say you're going off for a vacation when you're going to get elective surgery like liposuction or plastic surgery done. On your return you'll get "Hey, you look better...nice tan."
Its as if they were writing about "the future of Open Source" by quoting Stallmam, one recently-famous open source developer, and the Halloween documents. And entirely failed to interview or even mention the existance of Torvalds, Wall, Allman, Eric Raymond, or O'Reilly (website, books and conferences).
- Does he want the reputation of a guy who thinks his IT business is as important as heart transplant surgery? If you're an on-call surgeon, you have an excuse to leave in the middle of weddings, funerals, dinner-parties, movies, hikes, religious services, heart-to-heart conversations with loved ones, etc. If you're not leaving for life-or-death matters, it generally starts to look rude. (If you're the minion and the alternative is getting fired, then you have an excuse. This guy is the owner. No excuse.)
- Even if he has no social life whatsoever, he'll eventually be hit by the flu, medical emergencies, jury service selection waits (or depositions or a court case), a car accident, or other events that all the willpower in the world won't get you out of.
He needs a backup. If I was a potential customer, I wouldn't care how many paths there are to connect to him... carrier pigeon, ham radio, long-range-telepaths... he himself is the potential single point of failure.Suddenly he said "Wow, oh wow." I asked what happened. He said "something great, I'll tell you later." Wouldn't say anything more.
Because he'd just scored 20 million points in Drug Wars, after Coke went up to some zillion dollars a kilo. "I was surrounded by security officials- didn't seem like a good time to be talking about dumping heroin," he later told me.
Certainly one can't claim that these people weren't willing to fight for their ideals. And they thought anonymous writing was a valid (useful / legal / legitimate) way to bring about democracy and political change.
Do you fault 'Written By An Englishman' for not using his real name? He got a good revolution going without it. Or how about 'Publius,' 'Forester' and 'Cato'?
There is one strong use for non-anonymous writing, which is when founding reactionaries change their minds. In this case the use of argument from authority might be more than just taking advantage of human psychology, if the mind change is accompanied by reasons / evidence / data. Otherwise naming names early on mixes the quality of ideas with the fame of the author. [Think about how the "Darwin recounted on his deathbed" idea is used as a pro-creationist argument. Not only is this idea false, its irrelevant. Peer-reviewed research, not famous names, corroborates science.]
While its a bit late on this thread, I have seen these movies. I enjoyed them- they are quite good- but their science fiction background isn't conceptually more advanced than the SF literature of the 60's-70's.
I've written that media SF has often been a good few decades behind written SF, especially movies. They quote Richard Morgan in the NYTimes article ("That's the past of science fiction you're talking about, . .
The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.
When my card was stolen, the thief who went on a 1 day shopping spree simply claimed to be my brother. He had a signed note to prove it, and, funny how that signed note did match the signature on the credit card. Not every store bothered to ask him for that signed note, and no one ever asked the thief for his own identification.
Now my CC signature bar has a partial signature and a "check ID." About twice a year a clerk reads it and then asks to see an ID.
Have you read the 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ? When you do, you'll see that evolution predicts the opposite of what you claim-- fossils that match no known species would be a point against evolution. Humans that shared no DNA with bananas, or more DNA with bananas than bats would be a killer hit against evolution. (Note that creationists sometimes say that particular genes are identical (or closer) in two very different species than in seemingly closer species. All of these claims have ended up being false.)
Humans have one less gene than chimps, but human gene 2 looks like exactly like chimp genes 2p and 2q fused together, nonfunctioning broken bits of telomeres right at the fuse point. And it isn't just the working genes- we share nearly all of our broken genes. Example from the FAQ:
"Prediction 2.3: Molecular vestigial characters Vestigial characters should also be found at the molecular level. Humans do not have the capability to synthesize ascorbic acid (otherwise known as Vitamin C), and the unfortunate consequence can be the nutritional deficiency called scurvy. However, the predicted ancestors of humans had this function (as do most other animals except primates and guinea pigs). Therefore, we predict that humans, other primates, and guinea pigs should carry evidence of this lost function as a molecular vestigial character (nota bene: this very prediction was explicitly made by Nishikimi and others and was the impetus for the research detailed below) Confirmation: Recently, the L-gulano--lactone oxidase gene, the gene required for Vitamin C synthesis, was found in humans and guinea pigs. It exists as a pseudogene, present but incapable of functioning... We now have the DNA sequences for this broken gene in chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques. And, as predicted, the malfunctioning human and chimpanzee pseudogenes are the most similar, followed by the human and orangutan genes, followed by the human and macaque genes, precisely as predicted by evolutionary theory. Furthermore, all of these genes have accumulated mutations at the exact rate predicted (the background rate of mutation for neutral DNA regions like pseudogenes).
"There are several other examples of vestigial human genes, including multiple odorant receptor genes, the RT6 protein gene, the galactosyl transferase gene, and the tyrosinase-related gene (TYRL). [refs deleted]"
Evolution predicts a fundamental unity of life, that
- A few ordinary pygmies and a microcephalic,
- An extraordinary group of Homo sapiens,
- Descendants of Indonesian Homo erectus, or
- Something completely different.
Carl concludes that these new results make 3 or 4 most likely, explaining why "explanations 3 and 4 seem to come out strongest at the moment. Either one would mean that the Hobbit represents an amazing experiment in hominid brain evolution. They suggest that some human-like features emerged in hominids that were separated from us by two or maybe three million years of evolution. Yet their brains were mosaics, sharing features with us and with other hominids, and also had features of their own. These strange brains, Dr. Morwood argues, allowed Hobbits to do things some pretty elaborate things, such as butcher dwarf elephants or make fires. It would be wonderful to know how these strange brains were wired together, but we have to be content with their shadows. But even shadows can sometimes reveal a lot."For anyone interested in Hominid species, here is a list and description of 20 main hominids, here are sample fossils for these species, and data on trends in brain sizes by species.
And to hit the pause button on any creationist "there are no missing links" arguments, take a close look at the comparison of hominid skulls, from the very useful 29 Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ -- each evidence complete with examples, references, predictions, and falsifiability tests (the latter two necessary for a theory to be a scientific theory). A shaved and suited Homo erectus is *not* going to be mistaken for a modern Homo sapiens, not with that small brain and strange face (compare especially the forehead and canines, and that he actually uses his wisdom teeth. Ours are on the way out). But he'll obviously be human- upright, great walker, up to 6 feet tall, briefcase filled with stone tools and a fire-starter kit.
And because at least a few of these claims show up in Slashdot threads on biology, here is the Index of Creationist Claims -- CC0 through CC150 covers human evolution -- and the arguments even creationists say to stop using. If your creationist argument is in the index, how about countering the evidence in the index instead of just making the claim?
Not that the FEC cares about RedCat19's livejournal opinion on Senator Kerry, but what about sites like Eschaton which for a long time had tens of thousands of readers knowing the owner only as 'Atrios'? Duncan Black didn't reveal his real name because of his employment. Certainly many bloggers don't want their employers to be able to search their political (or any other) opinions. How could the FEC regulate internet political content without forcing people to reveal their true names? Would they add people's blogs to those searchable databases of political donors? (Guess we'd finally be able to find out what percentage of bloggers are unemployed.)...
- over 3 million Americans had fraudulent ID theft (the worse kind), and 10 million total had some type of ID theft
- ID theft victims spent a total of 300 million hours "fixing" their problems.
- Fraudulent ID theft averaged $10,000 stolen. The total cost of all ID theft is $50 billion.
- the monetary cost to fix fraudulent ID theft averages $1,200 per ID victim.
But in reading this report the bias that "businesses are the true victims" shows up. The $5 billion in costs to the identity victim (and 300 million hours of time) is described as "Individuals whose information is misused bear only a small percentage of the cost of ID Theft" (pg 6). That's a bad way of thinking about it for several reasons:- 300 million hours of victims' time = 300 million hours of research and investigative time = a 'donation' of at least a few billion dollars.
- The ID theft victim gets hit with real and lasting costs. Companies get to write off their losses, or use insurance and pass their costs on to consumers. A year after ID theft is discovered, the theft is just a blip in a spreadsheet to the companies where the stolen identity was used. The victim will still be writing letters, finding new ramifications, and losing time and sleep over the matter.
- Those 300 million hours also = stress, lost time from work, family, charities, plus also extra medical expenses.
- "15 percent of ID Theft victims reported that their personal information was misused in nonfinancial ways. The most common such use reported was to present the victim's name and identifying information when someone was stopped by law enforcement authorities or was charged with a crime." What's the cost of your kid seeing you arrested because someone else used your name? Not to mention...
- Now that the government gets data from Choicepoint and others, and because the government has no legal responsibility to find or fix bad data in its files, the rest of your life could be hobbled by bad data and you won't quite know why.
So basically Choicepoint and the credit card reporting agencies are creating a "public bad." Like polluters, they force other people and companies to bear the cost of problems they've created. 300 million hours and $5 billion dollars would = fantastic security finished in months if the companies themselves had to pay these costs. Instead, 10 million people are forced to do their own cleanup work, and the fact that 9.999 million people have already done the job doesn't make it any easier for you when you're the victim.The US Army studied this because they were throwing away millions of dollars worth of medicines each year because of the expiration date. Results? They throw away far, far less meds now:
(From the cached version of Recycling expensive medications- why not?)So back then I'm sure that humans could have been having the same debate... "If grandparents hang around that much longer- an extra 30 years- won't they get bored? What if they can't hunt or gather? Where will they live?" Humanity handled it then. We'll learn to handle having our great and great-great grandparents around (or do we really wish them dead? Do we want to keep hearing our grandparents talking about all the friends they've lost, while we ourselves dread the 3am call to hear that a great-aunt or grandparent is dead?)
True, the medical advances of the 20th century got us to a more reliable 75-85 year lifespan. I think its reasonable now to ask medicine to get rid of the worst aging processes which can really degrade the last 10-15 years. If as a side-effect that gets us to, say, 90 years of healthy life followed by 10 years of standard senescence that'll be a respectable gift to give our parents. And then to build up to 130 years of healthy life, followed by 5 years of standard senescence: that'd be a great gift for our kids.
The problem comes when they compare the pax list with their databases. In the US even US citizens don't have the right to correct their data, and the FBI has no obligation to ensure their data about you is correct. Already we've seen how good the TSA's system is, putting every Carlos Garcia, John Lewis and David Nelson on theirs Watch-List as it, doing repeated time-consuming checks on all 10 thousand of them each time they fly rather than doing the actual random checks that keep us safer. And now their database is going to have this data for all travel and travelers around the world (because the gov'ts share this info). They'll be so swamped by the millions of false positives that it'll be far more likely that the extraordinarily rare false negative won't be noticed. Makes me feel safer already: cue theme music to Brazil.
Again the "Its a Warning not a Guidebook" Best Essay Ever...on privacy: "The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"[Example of typical gov't database, filled with errors] That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm."
When I traveled to Communist China, I expected to have to write down all the addresses. If I were to have traveled to the USSR last century, I would have expected physical or bureaucratic minders to be watching my location and contacts.
But when traveling in free, democratic countries, signers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I expect to tell the truth about my length of stay, and that the border-guards will want to protect Article 30:
That would include working to protect privacy, freedom of speech and association, travel and related freedoms along with fighting against the terrorists who'd want to violate Article 3 ("Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person"). They don't need to know my every move and every friend- not because I have something to hide, but because I have important rights to protect.When I've been on trips to free countries I've generally only made reservations only if it looks like the hotels could be all booked up (Kyoto in autumns leaf season, say). I wouldn't be able to give specific addresses, only a general itinerary.
From the ever-useful and prescient Canadian Privacy Commissioner's Report, writing about Canada, but its especially applicable to the US (as it warns Canadians not to lose rights the US has recently given up):
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free.
That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada. But that is where we are inexorably headed, if the Government's current initiatives are allowed to proceed..."
[Initiative to collect travel data in and outside of the country]
"All this personal information - more than 30 data elements including every destination to which we travel, who we travel with, how we pay for the tickets (sometimes including credit card numbers), what contact numbers we provide, even any dietary preferences or health-related requirements we communicate to the airline - will be available for an almost limitless range of governmental purposes under the broad information-sharing provisions of the Customs Act...
This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
Even now we know we shouldn't have neighborhoods / countries / regions where most people think their lifespan is half of the worldwide average, or that they can't control their health or local environment. Their rational behavior can change their health / environment for the worse (nevermind the problem of angry hopeless young men and wars / violence). Pollution spreads. Epidemics spread. It is in everyone's best interest for all people to think that they're all on the same bell curve with regards to health, lifespan, the environment... for everyone to think and live as if they can make it to their 70's.
Of course currently it isn't true: many countries have significantly lower average life expectancies (even without childhood mortality in the mix). But it doesn't take much to change that: once countries hit a per capita GDP around $2000 then average lifespans get into the 60s to 70s. (Clean water, immunizations, basic access to clinics and medical knowledge). Once women have education and job opportunities birthrates go way down (education isn't the only factor, but the most significant one)
So lets say we can fix Aubrey's big 7 problems and can expect to reach 150. These aren't overwhelmingly complex solutions. Molecules can be copied: labs are getting cheaper. Science has always been more bazaar than cathedral, and with the internet open-source biology is even easier.
It may be for the most part "sharing" won't be relevant. We'll be "participating," so will most other people. "The rich" won't have much control over KaZaa-Life, and a billion eyeballs'll be keeping track of the anti-viral wetware on Life-Forge. In this case some people will still die young-- some treatments won't work for all people -- but that'd be just bad luck. You'll still try to live like 150 is possible.
But what if some countries are still on different bell curves: they reasonably can expect to live only 45-55, 65 years if they're lucky. They'll behave differently- taking more risks, discounting the future- not out of anger or jealousy (though never ignore the power of those), but simply because its rational. Using more untested / black-market copies of drugs. Perhaps slightly less likely to use antibiotics in "old" (=60+) age.
AdG writes that epidemics can still get us. Even without malicious intent they'll be more likely to come from the regions where lifespans are 1/3 the average. So again, if the wealthy elite (or 1st world countries generally) want to reach 150, we'll be handing out our telomere lengthening inhibitors and ATase like candy (low-glycolic index candy).
Even within species, most amino acid mutations are functionally silent. For example, there are at least 250 different amino acid mutations known in human hemoglobin, carried by more than 3% of the world's population, that have no clinical manifestation in either heterozygotic or homozygotic individuals (Bunn and Forget 1986; Voet and Voet 1995, p. 235). The phenomenon of protein functional redundancy is very general, and is observed in all known proteins and genes.
With this in mind, consider again the molecular sequences of cytochrome c. Cytochrome c is absolutely essential for life - organisms that lack it cannot live. It has been shown that the human cytochrome c protein works in yeast (a unicellular organism) that has had its own native cytochrome c gene deleted, even though yeast cytochrome c differs from human cytochrome c over 40% of the protein. [emphasis added]"
"One major consequence of the constraint of gradualism is the predicted existence of parahomology. Parahomology, as the term is used here, is similarity of structure despite difference in function. When one species branches into two species, one or both of the species may acquire new functions. Since the new species must recruit and modify preexisting structures to perform these new functions, the same structure shared by these two species will now perform a different function in each of the two species. This is parahomology. It follows that parahomologous structures have a history that should be explicable from other lines of evolutionary evidence, since derived characteristics (which is what these new functions and structures now are) have evolved from more primitive (i.e. older) structures..."
"...A stunning confirmation of these evolutionary predictions has come from an analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) and Caenorhabditis elegans (a worm). The genomes of both these organisms were sequenced very recently (Barrell 1996; Caenorhabditis elegans Sequencing Consortium 1998). The genes used by the yeast, a unicellular organism, are mostly genes dealing directly with core biochemical functions that all organisms must perform. From an evolutionary perspective, we would expect these genes to be ancient. Thus it was expected and shown that the worm contains a great majority of these genes. In contrast, the extra genes used by the worm, which deal with multicellularity, should be more recently evolved. Phylogenetic analysis has shown that this is exactly the case. The vast majority of extra genes in the worm appear to be directly derived from genes providing core cellular functions, in accordance with evolutionary prediction (Chervitz et al. 1998).
An even larger study of the known eukaryotic genomes has further demonstrated that parahomology is rampant in nature, and that true structural innovation is relatively rare (Rubin et al. 2000).
Of course, neutral mutations and parahomology aren't inconsistent with a designer. On the other hand,
Human chromosome 2 looks like chimp 2q and 2p fused together. more details here.
Bacterial flagella and eukaryotic cilia are irreducibly complex But anyways, science has barely finished the human genome, and it doesn't yet have enough mammal genomes to reconstruct the mammalian last common ancestor. I wouldn't expect them to have all the genomes needed to show the most likely flagella pathways. On the other hand science / evolution has explained:
Months ago I called large company X to change my account. Listened to their hold [specially composed neverending loop so that you can't count the repeats] 'music' for 20 minutes and waited for every department in X to approve the change, then Nice Service Rep said she'd made and noted the change. I didn't write down NSR's name. Usually I would have- too tired and NSR just seemed so nice.
Next month I noticed the change hadn't been made, which cost me an extra $60. I called X back. My account had no notes, no evidence I'd changed my service or even that I'd called. [And if I wanted to avoid the $60 in charges I should have changed my account earlier, which I obviously hadn't done, I was informed.] Unless I could I give them NSR's name, as NSR'd surely remember authorizing my now wicked request (because all SR's have superhuman memories of the past 2000 calls they've taken) as proof I'm not a liar? No NSR name, no dice.
Couldn't they simply look at their 800 records? [I'd called from a land-line, not my cell, so couldn't prove my call myself] I asked. Certainly: all I had to do was get my lawyer to write the appropriately worded request letter and fill out form DZ-015 and they'd happily comply. My lawyer also has to request form DZ-015 for me. Right: spend $400 to get one bit of evidence that could potentially fix $60 worth of problems.
So a $60 lesson in recordkeeping and choosing which phone to use for calls (cell phone: has records of 800 calls. Landline: allows recording of calls. Which is better?).
If you're an anti-terrorism agent of some kind, and you're sent to investigate green lasers pointing at airplanes, which mode of thinking will make you feel better?
- "Terrorism is dangerous and an act of terrorism could kill many people. My very important job is to prevent that, and I want to spend as much time as possible working on the important stuff. We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. He's been embarrassed in the news for being an idiot and in for some community service, but, boy, I'm not going to get those hours back, what a waste of time." or
- "...We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. This has to be very important, else I wouldn't have spent all those hours working on this. I caught you and you are going down, mr. terrorist hiding as a techie guy. Oh, you're not a terrorist? Well, I caught you and you are going down, mr. example-to-terrorists hiding as a techie guy."
Just in general people don't like admitting that they've put a lot of time and energy into something that didn't help their main mission. Very hard to get people to believe that old statement of economists: "Sunk costs are irrelevant." Much easier on the ego to think that "What I'm doing *must* be important and relevant, else why would I be doing it?"And so specifically if legislative bodies threw in DOS attacks, taking pictures of bridges, paying train tix with cash, or failing to know all the lyrics to 'God Bless the USA' into the PATRIOT Act, it *must* be because those are all related to terrorism, not because the FBI hornswoggled them into shoehorning 20 years worth of Xmas wish-lists into the Act during a month of extreme grief and emotion. Nope.
And so if the TSA puts every every Carlos Garcia, John Lewis and David Nelson on the Watch-List it *must* be worth doing, those repeated time-consuming checks on all 10 thousand of them each time they fly rather than doing the actual random checks that keep us safer.
If you're doing important anti-terrorism work then it just isn't possible that you'll get side-tracked. (which is why, had the PATRIOT Act existed in the 20th century, Tesla, the "October Sky" rocketeer, and pretty much every member of pyrotechnics guilds and model rocket clubs would have ended up with SSSS's on their plane tix and plenty of long, recorded talks with the local constabulary. Especially Tesla- scaring the neighbors like that, potentially taking down the grid, born in a foreign country. How'd he even get in? Thank goodness now we're keeping out all those foreign engineering grad students: maybe our science and economy will suffer, but we'll feel safer.)
Sure, you claim your only motivation was to show the audience something new. But people don't really need a group lesson and nifty pointers to learn where comet Machholz or the Andromeda Galaxy are- they should search them out on their own. And ditto with Slashdot. Did you think about what happens when millions of (in)coherent eyeballs go slamming against a website all at once? That site can go down for minutes or hours- customers could be bounced; money could be lost (and as time is money and everyone has only so much time, really, lives could be lost...).
In fact, anytime you bring too much attention to any one site or any one person you could be distracting them and keeping them from doing their necessary work. That's almost as bad as FOIA requests. If only the PATRIOT Act existed before Woodward and Bernstein: they'd have been lucky to only face 25 years. (sarcasm mode off)
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