like Carpet Rock in Arizona, the remnant of an immense steel-reinforced dam?
There's a new one on me - one might expect Google to have some reference to such a thing, but no such luck... Any pointers?
The closest I see at the moment is a travel magazine site with some excellent pictures and a reference to a buried stone pavement elsewhere, but nothing on the dam itself. My original source is on paper, and is almost certainly filed at ``home-home'' 350km southeast of here.
Piri Riese's map, the Nancy pterodactyl, the [warning: weird link!] plate-gold chain embedded in a piece of natural coal in Illinois, copper arrowheads and human femurs embedded together 400ft underground in a US silver mine (sorry, can't remember the exact location), the Salzburg cube, an [bizarre page alert again!] ancient silver vase embedded in solid rock in Massachusetts, a wooden model aircraft from an egyptian tomb with negative dihedral and vertical tailfin which glides stably, ancient South American roads which run absolutely level for hundreds of miles including through mountains and across precipitous gorges (some still in use today), the 20,000+ tonne shaped stone block dropped near Sacsahuaman, 35km over two mountain ranges and a river gorge from the nearest possible quarry, 2000 tonne blocks of Andesite (damn hard stone) in temple walls many meters above ground level, ancient engravings too small to see without a microscope, alloys which we can't duplicate today (eg non-rusting Iron Pillar in India), earth pyramids in China which dwarf Giza, and an earth mound (100% topsoil) 5km across, the Coso artefact, yadda yadda.
Totally weirded out yet? No? Then click on more of those links! (-:
I'll dig up some better references for you but only if you're serious.
On the religious side, consider Moses' crossing point halfway down the Gulf of Aquaba (at the time considered to part of the Red Sea), complete with horse and human skeletons, chariot parts from very specific chariots, weapons, and Phoenecian memorial pillars on each beach, plus much more.
You seem to be talking about simple crystallization. I am talking about a molecule manipulating its environment to produce another copy of the same molecule.
Yes, that's what the seed of a crystal does. It collects unstructured molecules from its environment and adds them to its structure. The amount of regularity is great, but the amount of information is not far from zero.
the smallest known (Mycoplasma genitalium) consists of 470 genes (another poster placed this at 400) with a 580,000 base-pair genome
Actually, I'm talking about something like this [mit.edu]. Something that does not necessarily fit all of our current definitions of what life is, but which could lead to it eventually.
Actually, it does fit our definitions of what life is, under the subhead ``fragment.'' What the MIT researchers have done is isolate one property of a pre-existing biological reaction which is itself part of an immense chicken-and-egg problem. They have not generated anything essentially new, nor anything which could form spontaneously, or form from pre-biotic material, or exist outside a very specialised laboratory environment. Like cloning, this is a modification of what already exists, not development from scratch.
More importantly, think about those 580,000 base pairs. That's over half a million combinations (choice of 4 at each point) which have been randomly generated, selected, and integrated into the population in only 4 billion years, which is asking a bit much, even ignoring the problem of the complex machinery within which said generation and selection takes place, and of propagating a change through squillions of precursors.
Now zoom out from genitalium to a huamn cell. Roughly three billion base-pairs in 4 billion years, or a year and a third per base-pair. Tall order? It reaches past the Moon, my friend!
[discussing Dawkins' Weasel and the ev program] Of course if we no longer need a deity to explain the actual origin of life, people will continue to squeeze him into whatever gaps are left.
What we're seeing with these programs is not deity being squeezed into a niche ecology, it's people putting their wishful materialistic ideas into practice. And this has been good because in each case it then becomes possible to test a discrete model and highlight the flaws in it. This makes it easier to amend the flawed thinking behind the models. In each case, this has helped Diety to shoulder His way back into the general scientific consciousness.
What each model essentially illustrates is that you can't reach your target without presupposing extensive design. Take the weasel as a simple example. It has 100% selectivity. Nature has a very, very small fraction of 1% selectivity. The weasel takes forever at 99% selectivity and can't win if you reduce the selectivity below about 96%. The weasel is also selecting from a very restricted range, knows its target (teleology), and can survive with any number of ``defective'' cells.
I wonder if it's just being delayed, or if someone's buying time to think of answers? If so, they're largely wasting their time. The God Factor, although still chocker with factual content, relies much more on personal testimonies and less on dry factoids.
...all yolking aside, could a collection of ova within a single Ogg file be called a roe? If so, I can imagine a music shop name white now: ``Unhygenix, Oggmonger.''
They know how to rip their CDs into mp3s, they know how to play mp3s, they know how to download mp3s, etc.
Soon they will also know how to feed them to an MP3-to-Ogg converter so the thought-police don't ding them a royalty for every audio file on their disks.
...TheGodFactor (Amazon don't seem to have it but everyone else does), also by John F Ashton. Qualifications? You want qualifications? For the taking, by the truckload! Quoting from the intro to the first of the fifty authors:
JOHN R DE LAETER
Professor de Laeter is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Curtin University of Technology in Australia [about 15km from here], where he was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Development. He holds a BSc in physics and BEd in education, both with first class honours, a PhD in physics and a DSc in physics, all from the University of Western Australia. Professor de Laeter has served as chairman of the International Commission on Atomic Weights and Isotopic Abundances, and is presently the Australian Academy of Science's representative on that Commission. He has published approximately 200 research papers and was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Royal Society of Western Australia in 1993. A minor planet is named after Professor de Laeter in recognition of his contributions to astrophysics. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia.
He also has all but one unit of a BSc in Philosophy, which he abandoned because it wasn't answering his questions, and he wasn't exactly dying for extra letters after his name. (-:
The origin of life had to be by supernatural creation, because life is too complex to arise through natural processes.
Also, 640k should be enough for everyone.
Actually, it takes about 3G - if you're talking in terms of base-pairs - to make a human genome. And where did that all come from? A couple of trillion consecutive incredibly lucky accidents? Yes?
OK, right... hmmm... are you interested in owning a bridge? Only $USD10,000 down secures you the first option on the lease, it's got a steady revenue stream and fabulous subleasing possibilities. Made out of lasting rivetted steel, it's a great little money-spinner. It may also enlarge or stiffen your penis or breasts, supply you with toner, leather jackets, search engine entries and hot teen babes, besides solving every mortgage and credit problem you could ever imagine.
Judaism and Islam basically parallel Christianity in origins, except Talmudic Judaism is really off in the weeds compared with traditional Judaism, and there's extra rubbish about the world spinning on a bull's horn tacked on by some variants of Islam. Christianity as a social organisation is a pretty diverse conglomerate and you'll get philosophical hits in every part of the spectrum if you look hard enough.
There are plenty of other origins in various religions around the world, but non of them are ex nihilo, and the vast majority were essentially dispelled by TIROS I (the first weather satellite, which sent down bulk photos - incidentally, TIROS I was designed by a Christian Creationist named Dr Gary D Gordon), if not already killed soon after the invention of the telescope.
Some of these odd little cultures, however, are absolute rippers! For example, search for ``sirius'' in this page.
Since we don't have any idea how complex the simplest self-replicating molecule is, speculating on the odds of its forming is a bit pointless, don't you think?
The simplest ``self-replicating'' molecule is one atom. Oxygen ice, for example, forms more of itself from surrounding liquid oxygen on the more temperate planets of our solar system. But if we're talking structure, maybe salt's two-atom cubic form will do.
However, if we're talking about something that actively seeks out food to convert to more of itself, either a larger ``it'' or more ``its,'' the smallest known (Mycoplasma genitalium) consists of 470 genes (another poster placed this at 400) with a 580,000 base-pair genome, of which about 300 are absolutely essential. Informed speculation has gone as low as 100 genes (which would imply around 130,000 base-pairs), going beyond this requires a hive- or colony-like structure and some means of collating enough genes to start a new group collective organism.
By contrast, each of your cells harbours DNA to the tune of around 3 billion bases. If a strand of this DNA were unwound, it would be several meters long. If your proteins also uncurled you'd look like the dust puppy from UserFriendy. At the other end of the scale, one of the smallest known (parasitic) organisms is the Q-beta virus, at 3 genes totalling about 4500 base-pairs. This is a long, long way from standalone.
This brings to mind the Tierra program (sorry, couldn't find a good link). It was a system that simulated evolution in a simple way.
To be sure, and like Mr Dawkin's facetious weasel stunt (100% selectivity base on bare-faced teleology indeed! I fart in his general direction:-), or the more complex but similarly flawed ev program, the simulation had somewhere to start, intelligently designed rules to live by, and an intelligently designed, relatively benign ``environment'' to develop in.
Crystals don't have food, at least not in the sense that organisms do,
There is no conceptual difference between a crystal assimilating structure from a surrounding solution, and a macrophage ingesting other organisms or organic particles, except that the macrophage's filtering is generally better.
The prokaryote with the smallest genome has roughly 400 genes, [...] so ten times "simpler" than a prokaryote isn't dead.
Excellent! Name any standalone self-reproducing unit - either observed or with reasonable indirect evidence - with circa 40 genes and I'll agree with you.
BTW, contrast a crystal structure (repeating pattern of one to dozens of atoms) with 400 genes, each consisting of specific chromosomes, each consisting of specific proteins, each consisting of specific amino acids, each far more complex than the most complex crystal.
At the levels we're talking about, saying that something is "alive" or "dead" is not particularly enlightening, and usually misleading. There is no hard and fast line between "alive" and "dead."
Then let's draw one. ``Unable to continue growing or reproducing,'' or more succinctly, ``Positive nett entropy.''
Ten times simpler than prokaryotic may not be alive in the sense that a prokaryote is "alive," but that doesn't mean it's inorganic, or has no complexity, or even no self-reproducing complexity.
Yes, it does. Anything ten times simpler than prokaryotic has insufficient cellular machinery to survive unaided. By ``unaided,'' I mean that anything that simple has to be a parasite, and a parasite implies a host, and a host must be around ten times more complicated, but we're starting with something (in the original) ``a million times simpler.'' And if you delete the cellular machinery, there's this enormous gap left between the organisational ability of a simple crystal, and that of a ``simple'' (many millions of atoms) cell which no developmental theory seriously begins to cover. And we haven't even got to the Cambrian Explosion yet,
Weeelll... not quite right. The program which generates the chip intelligently selects and randomly modifies portions of the existing design (initally generated randomly) based on the performance (if any) of previous iterations. For example, the winner of the first iteration got the door prize for actually having an output. Any output.
For this to match real life, BTW, you need to postulate the pre-existance of FPGA-equivalents - chemicals at least as complex as RNA although RNA itself would not turn the trick - and some kind of teleology to permit selection to operate well in advance of where it would normally kick in, else the critter is quickly crushed by its own genetic burden.
This sounds suspiciously like my lovely wife.
And mine! Perzactly! It's part of The Rules, don'cha know? (-:
In other words it needs an immune system, a system of acquiring or making food, etc...
Even crystals have to have a way of acquiring food, and that's generally by existing in a strong solution of their ingredients. Can you postulate a viable solution of protolife?
The first form of "life" (ie, a self replicating chemical) would probably be a million times simpler than anything that could survive today.
No.
In detail, a million times simpler is dead. Ten times simpler than prokaryotic is generally dead.
In even more detail, a couple of billion years is nothing like enough. Given stupidly optimistic conditions (e.g. entire universe made of the correct amino acids, target critter many times simpler than anything known today), a trillion years is many, many, many zeroes too few.
Even the wildly-extrapolating scientists are guessing that this particular pond scum was on it's way (and how did it know what its way was?) to becoming parsley, sage and rosemary in thyme.
...from a scaled-down version of Bucky Fuller's Old Man River city [pictures RH column bottom, Google or Babelfish will translate for you], probably sans the canopy. Heaps of bandwidth, regular supply trucks, an airstrip not too far away, copious silent pole-free solar power (but some wind gennies tucked away somewhere for the few low-sun days).
Other sites you may consider include near Broome, with it's fabulous beaches, or Denmark, much colder and more crowded but with many lovely large trees, or perhaps somewhere along the scenic vehicle-destroying Gibb River Road.
(some Hamersely views included here, mostly from Transmission Hill (AKA Wireless Hill or Radio Hill depending on sobriety levels) at Paraburdoo, Western Australia, some Broome views in the earlier sessions).
Which is uniquie because it's stunningly responsive for Microsoft.
Consider IE's recent broken-MIME-handling vulnerability, in which you could get an EXE file silently run by shipping it from your webserver with a mime type like audio/x-midi; it's been in IE for at least six years and it took Microsoft three months from the initial public outcry to the fix.
35,000 users / 300 servers => 117 users per server. I could do that with PostFix and 300 matchbox '386es! IBM have TWO MILLION USERS on ONE zSeries box, no sweat, for much less than the software cost alone of running two million Exchange clients. Now that is `scales well'!
Damn Microsoft and their abuse of terminology! An `embedded' system should not require 64 or 128MB of RAM and gigabytes of disk!PS: visit Bynari for another Exchange alternative, including alternative clients.
After a few months of that, no more garbage problem, and a nice thinly spread ring of scrapmetal around Phobos' equator to recycle. Plus a new stellar object for the rubbernecks to find and follow. (-:
Of course, it might take a bit of time and money to move that many gigatonnes of rock, but then it's always harder to fix stuff than to muck it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The closest I see at the moment is a travel magazine site with some excellent pictures and a reference to a buried stone pavement elsewhere, but nothing on the dam itself. My original source is on paper, and is almost certainly filed at ``home-home'' 350km southeast of here.
Totally weirded out yet? No? Then click on more of those links! (-:
I'll dig up some better references for you but only if you're serious.
On the religious side, consider Moses' crossing point halfway down the Gulf of Aquaba (at the time considered to part of the Red Sea), complete with horse and human skeletons, chariot parts from very specific chariots, weapons, and Phoenecian memorial pillars on each beach, plus much more.
In the case of jet-powered or rocket-powered airplanes (think Nebelwurfer) it's the one not on fire which falls out of the sky.
Elastic bands are the only safe way. (-:
Yes, that's what the seed of a crystal does. It collects unstructured molecules from its environment and adds them to its structure. The amount of regularity is great, but the amount of information is not far from zero.
Actually, it does fit our definitions of what life is, under the subhead ``fragment.'' What the MIT researchers have done is isolate one property of a pre-existing biological reaction which is itself part of an immense chicken-and-egg problem. They have not generated anything essentially new, nor anything which could form spontaneously, or form from pre-biotic material, or exist outside a very specialised laboratory environment. Like cloning, this is a modification of what already exists, not development from scratch.
More importantly, think about those 580,000 base pairs. That's over half a million combinations (choice of 4 at each point) which have been randomly generated, selected, and integrated into the population in only 4 billion years, which is asking a bit much, even ignoring the problem of the complex machinery within which said generation and selection takes place, and of propagating a change through squillions of precursors.
Now zoom out from genitalium to a huamn cell. Roughly three billion base-pairs in 4 billion years, or a year and a third per base-pair. Tall order? It reaches past the Moon, my friend!
What we're seeing with these programs is not deity being squeezed into a niche ecology, it's people putting their wishful materialistic ideas into practice. And this has been good because in each case it then becomes possible to test a discrete model and highlight the flaws in it. This makes it easier to amend the flawed thinking behind the models. In each case, this has helped Diety to shoulder His way back into the general scientific consciousness.
What each model essentially illustrates is that you can't reach your target without presupposing extensive design. Take the weasel as a simple example. It has 100% selectivity. Nature has a very, very small fraction of 1% selectivity. The weasel takes forever at 99% selectivity and can't win if you reduce the selectivity below about 96%. The weasel is also selecting from a very restricted range, knows its target (teleology), and can survive with any number of ``defective'' cells.
AFAICT it doesn't actually get decoded and re-encoded, but transcoded. The implication is that there will be no bonus glitches.
I wonder if it's just being delayed, or if someone's buying time to think of answers? If so, they're largely wasting their time. The God Factor, although still chocker with factual content, relies much more on personal testimonies and less on dry factoids.
You might like to try ordering direct from an Australian retailer.
(Apologies to Goscinny and Underzo)
Soon they will also know how to feed them to an MP3-to-Ogg converter so the thought-police don't ding them a royalty for every audio file on their disks.
He also has all but one unit of a BSc in Philosophy, which he abandoned because it wasn't answering his questions, and he wasn't exactly dying for extra letters after his name. (-:
Are you sure you're not thinking of Princess Fiona fighting the Merry Men?
Actually, it takes about 3G - if you're talking in terms of base-pairs - to make a human genome. And where did that all come from? A couple of trillion consecutive incredibly lucky accidents? Yes?
OK, right... hmmm... are you interested in owning a bridge? Only $USD10,000 down secures you the first option on the lease, it's got a steady revenue stream and fabulous subleasing possibilities. Made out of lasting rivetted steel, it's a great little money-spinner. It may also enlarge or stiffen your penis or breasts, supply you with toner, leather jackets, search engine entries and hot teen babes, besides solving every mortgage and credit problem you could ever imagine.
There are plenty of other origins in various religions around the world, but non of them are ex nihilo, and the vast majority were essentially dispelled by TIROS I (the first weather satellite, which sent down bulk photos - incidentally, TIROS I was designed by a Christian Creationist named Dr Gary D Gordon), if not already killed soon after the invention of the telescope.
Some of these odd little cultures, however, are absolute rippers! For example, search for ``sirius'' in this page.
Hope that's answered your question. (-:
The simplest ``self-replicating'' molecule is one atom. Oxygen ice, for example, forms more of itself from surrounding liquid oxygen on the more temperate planets of our solar system. But if we're talking structure, maybe salt's two-atom cubic form will do.
However, if we're talking about something that actively seeks out food to convert to more of itself, either a larger ``it'' or more ``its,'' the smallest known (Mycoplasma genitalium) consists of 470 genes (another poster placed this at 400) with a 580,000 base-pair genome, of which about 300 are absolutely essential. Informed speculation has gone as low as 100 genes (which would imply around 130,000 base-pairs), going beyond this requires a hive- or colony-like structure and some means of collating enough genes to start a new group collective organism.
By contrast, each of your cells harbours DNA to the tune of around 3 billion bases. If a strand of this DNA were unwound, it would be several meters long. If your proteins also uncurled you'd look like the dust puppy from UserFriendy. At the other end of the scale, one of the smallest known (parasitic) organisms is the Q-beta virus, at 3 genes totalling about 4500 base-pairs. This is a long, long way from standalone.
To be sure, and like Mr Dawkin's facetious weasel stunt (100% selectivity base on bare-faced teleology indeed! I fart in his general direction
There is no conceptual difference between a crystal assimilating structure from a surrounding solution, and a macrophage ingesting other organisms or organic particles, except that the macrophage's filtering is generally better.
Excellent! Name any standalone self-reproducing unit - either observed or with reasonable indirect evidence - with circa 40 genes and I'll agree with you.
BTW, contrast a crystal structure (repeating pattern of one to dozens of atoms) with 400 genes, each consisting of specific chromosomes, each consisting of specific proteins, each consisting of specific amino acids, each far more complex than the most complex crystal.
Then let's draw one. ``Unable to continue growing or reproducing,'' or more succinctly, ``Positive nett entropy.''
Yes, it does. Anything ten times simpler than prokaryotic has insufficient cellular machinery to survive unaided. By ``unaided,'' I mean that anything that simple has to be a parasite, and a parasite implies a host, and a host must be around ten times more complicated, but we're starting with something (in the original) ``a million times simpler.'' And if you delete the cellular machinery, there's this enormous gap left between the organisational ability of a simple crystal, and that of a ``simple'' (many millions of atoms) cell which no developmental theory seriously begins to cover. And we haven't even got to the Cambrian Explosion yet,
GAME OVER PLAYER <1>
Weeelll... not quite right. The program which generates the chip intelligently selects and randomly modifies portions of the existing design (initally generated randomly) based on the performance (if any) of previous iterations. For example, the winner of the first iteration got the door prize for actually having an output. Any output.
For this to match real life, BTW, you need to postulate the pre-existance of FPGA-equivalents - chemicals at least as complex as RNA although RNA itself would not turn the trick - and some kind of teleology to permit selection to operate well in advance of where it would normally kick in, else the critter is quickly crushed by its own genetic burden.
And mine! Perzactly! It's part of The Rules, don'cha know? (-:
Even crystals have to have a way of acquiring food, and that's generally by existing in a strong solution of their ingredients. Can you postulate a viable solution of protolife?
No.
In detail, a million times simpler is dead. Ten times simpler than prokaryotic is generally dead.
In even more detail, a couple of billion years is nothing like enough. Given stupidly optimistic conditions (e.g. entire universe made of the correct amino acids, target critter many times simpler than anything known today), a trillion years is many, many, many zeroes too few.
Weeeeelll, I wouldn't be so sure. Defining ``motion'' can be a bit touchy when you get down a ways in scale.
Ah, so you were there...? (-:
Then perhaps you can explain a few things for us then, like Carpet Rock in Arizona, the remnant of an immense steel-reinforced dam?
This post comes with no warranty. Do not try this at home. Or anywhere else.
Other sites you may consider include near Broome, with it's fabulous beaches, or Denmark, much colder and more crowded but with many lovely large trees, or perhaps somewhere along the scenic vehicle-destroying Gibb River Road.
(some Hamersely views included here, mostly from Transmission Hill (AKA Wireless Hill or Radio Hill depending on sobriety levels) at Paraburdoo, Western Australia, some Broome views in the earlier sessions).
Which is uniquie because it's stunningly responsive for Microsoft.
Consider IE's recent broken-MIME-handling vulnerability, in which you could get an EXE file silently run by shipping it from your webserver with a mime type like audio/x-midi; it's been in IE for at least six years and it took Microsoft three months from the initial public outcry to the fix.
What can I say? ``Bynari?'' Visit http://www.bynari.com/ (no commercial connection).
35,000 users / 300 servers => 117 users per server. I could do that with PostFix and 300 matchbox '386es! IBM have TWO MILLION USERS on ONE zSeries box, no sweat, for much less than the software cost alone of running two million Exchange clients. Now that is `scales well'!
Damn Microsoft and their abuse of terminology! An `embedded' system should not require 64 or 128MB of RAM and gigabytes of disk!PS: visit Bynari for another Exchange alternative, including alternative clients.
Of course, it might take a bit of time and money to move that many gigatonnes of rock, but then it's always harder to fix stuff than to muck it up.