Stalin supporting evolution? Oh boy, were you misled. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that whoever told you of the views on evolution in the USSR under Stalin was a creationist, who wanted to villify evolution.
I suggest reading up on Lysenkoism and the effect it had on science in the Soviet Union:
(You'll probably want to look beyond wikipedia for the in-depth story, but it's a place to start.)
Stalin was strongly anti-religious, but he was equally anti-evolutionary. Neither fit well with the beliefs of communism, and while Stalin probably wasn't an idealist, he needed his citizens to buy into a certain worldview. The notion of heredity doesn't gel well with the notion that all humans can be molded to the communist ideal.
Lysenko's "science" was basically Lamarckism revisited in such a way as better fit communism. Genetics and evolutionary biology were labeled "bourgeois science". Actual evidence-based research was written off in favor of what the people in power would rather believe. Sound familiar?
The parallels between Lysenkoism and Creationism (or Intelligent Design, to use the newspeak name for it) are striking. Both were proposed as alternatives to evolution by those who didn't want to have their worldview challenged by science, both were labeled and taught as science (despite failing to meet the scientific criteria), both had the vocal support of people in high places. The underlying "religion" was different - Lysenkoism was rooted in the quasi-religious views of Marxist-Leninism - but beyond that, they're the same story told in radically different countries.
The major difference is scale - evolutionary biology was all but outlawed in the USSR under Stalin, whereas it has not been similarly repressed in the USA. That can be chalked up to the fact that the US doesn't have, and has never had, a party or ruler with that kind of unchecked authority.
This little adventure into pseudoscience crippled Soviet biology for years to come. It can be argued that Russia still hasn't caught up to the rest of the world. An object lesson in why it is important to leave science to scientists, and keep faith, however deeply held, separate.
I mean first up, why the insurance industry? Second, what makes you think anyone has the clout to repress this sort of technology?
Robot limbs that operate at or near the human level have a multitude of uses beyond just prosthetics. Offhand, I can think of hazardous material handling, remote surgery, bomb disposal, space exploration - basically anywhere you want a human hand, and don't want the mess that comes with having a warm body in the immediate area.
If you're right, and the potential to build just such a device has existed for years, then everyone from NASA to the nuclear industry would be all over it. Against that, those pissants in insurance don't stand a chance.
Plus, there's a fairly strong military interest in the prosthetic angle. There are plenty of war-vet amputees who'd benefit, giving DARPA both a practical and a PR benefit if they demonstrated a working model.
I just don't see it happening yet. Note the "leap forward" phrasing - this is still below the level of a bionic hand that can adequately replace the flesh and blood version. We're nowhere near the star wars/bionic man level. I mean, we'll get there, and probably within my lifetime and yours, but stuff like nerve-computer connections and effective tactile senses are still in their infancy.
That part of TFS left me scratching my head. Since nothing short of a black hole or neutron star will actually stop neutrinos, and since every active star in the galaxy gives off neutrino radiation as a byproduct of stellar fusion, shouldn't the noise level be relatively high?
Apart from that, how exactly is this hypothetical neutrino comm generating its signal? Neutrinos are the byproduct of nuclear reactions, and you'd need to generate an awful lot for the signal to be heard over interstellar distances. Are they rapidly switching a fusion source on and off? Perhaps using matter and anti-matter instead? Either way, it'd be somewhat akin to blasting off hydrogen bombs in Morse code.
Final catch, if we don't know how a hypothetical neutrino comm would work, why would we assume it's feasible? I mean, if we're just going to handwave around the technical hurdles in generating a long range signal using exotic particles, why not go the extra mile and assume they're using gravity waves? Same benefits, equally difficult engineering problems.
Not that looking for neutrino signals isn't worth it - it costs us next to nothing to try it, and who knows, they might be right. However, there is a world of difference between "we should look for X in case it's used to contact us" and "they will contact us with X" which is the way the article is pitching it.
That is the law of conservation of energy. All energy sources are finite. Over enough time, they will all be depleted. You cannot create new energy, merely extract potential energy.
Depleted energy isn't gone in the sense of destroyed, it's been converted into useless heat. Its still conserved, but the laws of thermodynamics get in the way of using it.
Might be a good idea to archive the books lest somewhere in the future we re-live something like the Spanish Inquisition where important literature was lost.
Part of what's tripping you up is as innate assumption of linear, inevitable progress. What is true in a modern agrarian society was not true in an ancient hunter-gatherer one.
Think about the basic problem of carting things around. If you belong to a nomadic tribe, you aren't going to own any more than you can carry - which severely limits your options for tools and technology. It's only when we start building permanent settlements (which is what marks the dawn of civilization) that we can afford to own things not immediately necessary to our day to day survival. And permanent settlements weren't established until after we began harvesting crops.
Now, you might ask why we didn't discover agriculture and settle down sooner, given how much benefit we've derived from it. But the answer to that is lack of foresight - we had no idea what we were getting into when we first starting planting crops and taming herds. Ancient man wasn't interested in agriculture as a means of progress, he was interested in it as a means to an end, namely dinner. And the change from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler would have been a risk that went against evolved behavior and cultural tradition, meaning there's a sort of bump of reluctance we had to overcome. Had some of us not taken that risk, we might still be at the level we were in the paleolithic.
As long as we remained on the pre-agricultural side of the divide, human technology was in a state of stasis. We had flint spears for far longer than we've had metalworking of any kind. The tech that defined the last hundred thousand years of human evolution was on the order of pointy sticks - we didn't advance in at all, because it wasn't practical. It's only once we cross that civilization divide that we begin to get the snowballing progress that we've since become so accustomed to, and it's become easy to forget that there was a time before.
As for population, somebody else already covered that. Between a harsher climate, shorter lifespan and a higher infant mortality rate, there were only so many of us that could survive. I don't doubt that some places were probably repopulated many times over, as earlier tribes died off or moved away.
Depends on what they're a haven to, now, doesn't it?
Put another way, anonymity and secrecy can be used for good - anyone living in an oppressive country can attest to that. Or it can be used to send "3n1arg3 y00r p3nis" spam en masse. I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
"Sequestered by geological processes" does not mean "generated geologically". I think you misunderstood my point - the carbon present in fossil fuels has been sequestered as a result of geological processes burying plant and animal matter for a long enough time to allow fossil fuels to form. The "geological process" involved isn't the same as the biological process that bound the carbon up in the first place.
I'm not even going to comment on the phrase "eco-nazi".
As for the actual meat of your argument, there are a great many environmental groups that already support the idea of building solar farms in sunny desert areas. They see it as a tradeoff; you cause X amount of local ecological damage, and avoid Y amount of pollution elsewhere from other power sources that would invariably be used if there existed no alternative.
Most environmentalists, contrary to the "eco-nazi" stereotype, are willing to accept imperfect solutions. Just look at the green support for hydroelectric dams, which also cause serious local ecological damage. Yes, there are those who will accept nothing short of perfection or extinction, but they are squarely in the loony minority. Like most movements, environmentalism runs the range from casual supporters, to serious thinkers, to hardcore zealots, and it makes no sense whatsoever to assume the moderates will react the same way as the loonies.
Since a hypothetical algae based biofuel farm isn't any different in terms of environmental impact than a solar power array, I suspect most green groups would be willing to support the idea.
Why do people keep saying this? It's like they don't actually understand why fossil fuels contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Look, carbon that's locked away underground in the form of fossil fuels isn't part of the carbon cycle. It's been sequestered by geological processes for millions of years, removing it from the air. When we dig it up and burn it, we bring it back into circulation. The total amount of airborne carbon increases; the greenhouse effect gets stronger. This is, in a nutshell, anthropic global warming.
Carbon that's already in the atmosphere can be trapped by photosynthesis. If the plant that trapped the carbon is then burned, or eaten, or even if it just dies and rots, the carbon returns to the air. This is the regular carbon cycle, with or without human intervention, and it doesn't alter the net balance of Co2. It's this process that we employ when we make biodiesel.
Biodiesel doesn't contribute to global warming. At all. The "bio" part means the hydrocarbons were synthesized from plant matter; the carbon in those hydrocarbons came from airborne Co2. As long as you plant biofuel crops, process them, and burn them, the total amount of airborne Co2 will never increase. Every ounce of carbon added to the air is matched by an ounce of carbon removed from the air by the fuel plantation.
Point. Still, regardless of what other hardware is needed to make the system work, you are using self-replicating "solar cells" of a sort. You are, in effect, getting one of your components made cheaply, and replaced constantly. So what it boils down to is whether a bioreactor that produces hydrogen from algae when is more economical than a solar array that produces hydrogen from electrolysis, given the same source of sunlight. This of course is assuming the object of the exercise is hydrogen production.
I agree on the viability of simple biodiesel though. My only real caveat with it is the potential problems associated with dedicating farmland to fuel production. We don't lack for arable land or fresh water in this part of the world, and in this day and age, but if we start farming biodiesel on a meaningful scale, we will run into problems.
Why go all that distance? The US at least has no shortage of sunny desert, and coastal access to two oceans. Either land or sea based biofuel production would be feasible. And after Iraq, I think an increasing number of Americans will want energy independence. Why import fungible goods you can make cheaply and locally? Particularly if the countries exporting said goods are a long way from friendly?
I think the only countries that would actually need fuel imports, if biofuel worked out, would be those lacking in either sufficient space or sunlight.
The trade-off, when comparing these sorts of solutions to direct energy generation, is that we don't need to manufacture algae. Get a few of these mutants made, let em breed, and harness the work. It isn't really that simple, of course, but the first step involved with manufactured solar generators - building the damn things in the first place - is skipped.
Solar cells, or a combination of mirrors and sterling engines, will probably always beat out organisms for pure efficiency. Doesn't mean we don't also want the organisms. Particularly when the object of the exercise is hydrogen production, since water electrolysis isn't very efficient either. In practical economic terms, bioproduction of hydrogen (or other fuels) may make more sense than using generated electricity.
You're right about the water and arable land though. If we start using those to make fuel, they'll be in short supply in no time. OTOH, I've seen proposals for algae produced biofuel that worked with saline water, and could be built in a desert - that would be ideal.
Actually, that is not the case. If you'll read the article, you'll see that the patient could in fact communicate, albeit in a limited way, before the treatment. He was crippled, but his mind was still there.
If you want an analogy, think of a human being as a computer. This guy, in TFA, had a broken sound card - they fixed it. Terri Schiavo had a broken hard drive - one that wasn't just damaged, but was in fact melted. Assuming the damage could have been repaired, what of the data lost? It's not like we had a backup copy of her mind, her memories, or the other aspects of her identity.
There are bound to be cases where we can argue till the cows come home how much of the mind is left. Hers wasn't one of them. Where the forebrain should have been, there was cerebrospinal fluid. There was nothing left. Her case does not compare with the case in TFA.
Now, one day we may be able to repair that kind of damage. But unless we also develop a method for backing up our minds, the way we back up data on a computer, then such a miracle treatment will not restore the patient to who they were.
In Schiavo's case, the autopsy was conclusive. Her brain was horribly atrophied; there was little left beyond the brain stem, which only provides the bare minimum life support functions. Parts of her cerebrum had literally turned to mush. No medical treatment, up to and including science fiction ideas like tissue regeneration, could have properly revived her - there was nothing left of her prior self, in terms of the important stuff like memory, or identity.
At best, some techno-magical resurrection, should such a thing be possible one day, could have left her with an blank infant's mind in an already old body, and bluntly, that sounds every bit like a fate worse than death to me.
Really, the only reason why everyone remembers Terri (and not the many other vegetables whose relatives face the difficult choice of either holding out hope indefinitely or pulling the plug) is that her case got political. Medically, she was not out of the ordinary, and it was pretty clear long before the case ever made it to the public eye that she wasn't coming back. People who've lost most of their brain aren't expected to recover, and since their prognosis worsens over time (due to atrophy), there is little chance of medical science yielding some miracle cure that could help them.
Name an activity and see if you can think of people being addicted to it.
Suicide. Though I'd bet you could get hooked on suicide *attempts*, you'd have a hard time being addicted to killing yourself.
Similarly, I cannot picture somebody being addiction to, say, being mauled by wild bears. That's really the sort of thing that you don't do twice:-)
But, to amend your statement, a person can get hooked on anything pleasurable/stimulating. All they really need is a void in their life that can be filled by doing X, where X is something enjoyable, and not so self destructive that they can only do it once.
Addiction: n. Something that someone enjoys and does frequently.
While I'm not going to dispute the fact that many people do subscribe to this definition, I don't agree that it's the widely understood definition.
Psychological addiction is a well observed phenomenon. Generally, it's seen in cases where a normal pleasurable activity becomes a compulsion, to the point where the person cannot stop or quit. The addicts in these cases are frequently people with underlying problems, whose compulsive behavior is a coping mechanism. You have to understand, "addict" in this context doesn't mean "somebody who does something enjoyable", it's more like "someone who continues to do something after it has ceased to be enjoyable". You also have to understand that genuine psychological addiction is rare, especially when compared with physical addiction (like nicotine).
Religion can be addictive; you need look no further than Jonestown style cults to see this. Yet the majority of people subscribe to one religion or another without throwing away their lives on it. Sex can be addictive, yet the vast majority of the human race are neither virgins nor addicts. Work can be addictive - ever had that one coworker who'd put in overtime endlessly, whether they needed to or not? Yet most people are gainfully employed, and are happy to go home at the end of the day. See the pattern?
Now, are there gaming addicts? Almost certainly. Gaming is, after all, something that regular healthy people enjoy, so it stands to reason that an unhealthy person could get hooked. The flip side to that is that gaming is not uniquely addictive - gaming addiction is but a small faucet of the broader issue of psychological addiction. I really doubt the AMA needs to give it a separate category. And I have no doubt that much of the FUD regarding game "addicts" stems from reasons other than concern for those supposed addicts' welfare - there is money and political power to be had in manufacturing a boogyman.
It's worth remembering that not all adaptations have been like that. Hell, the various AvP games are way better than the AvP movie.
I think the trend is for game adaptations that try to recreate the original movie/comic/whatever to suck. This covers most of the direct movie tie-ins, which as you say are lacking in actual gameplay. Games that simply use the fictional universe established by their parent sources have the potential to be much better.
See for example the long list of Star Wars games - the best ones (KOTOR, Tie Fighter, the Dark Forces/JK series) don't simply take the movies and try to make a game out of them, but instead use the setting without recycling the plot.
I personally think we are maybe 10 years away from finding an impenetrable body armor solution
Impenetrable to what?
Most current suits of body armor can stop a pistol caliber bullet. Rounds designed to pierce armor, or designed to be fired from a more powerful gun, are another story. Armor that will stop a small, soft bullet will still be penetrated by a faster, or less malleable one.
For civilian or police protection, we have nearly impenetrable suits now; increasing their coverage, or decreasing their weight would be more practical (both of which can be achieved by making them out of lighter materials). For something like military protection, well, we may never have impenetrable body armor. Whenever defensive technology gets good enough, the military turns their attention to piercing those defenses; see for example the death of the battleship as a viable class of warship.
Apart from that, conservation of momentum applies. There is an upper limit whereby body armor would remain intact, while the flesh beneath is reduced to a pulp. Though admittedly conservation of momentum also applies to the shooter, and to the recoil of their gun, so there is a similar upper limit for muzzle velocity per unit of projectile mass.
It's not terribly likely that alien pathogens could harm us. Remember that most plain old fashioned terrestrial diseases are only able to infect a limited variety of hosts. HIV originated in chimps (our closest living evolutionary relatives), rabies is limited to mammals, the flu (which is versatile by viral standards) is primarily limited to mammals and birds, etc. Even diseases like malaria which spend parts of their life cycle in very different hosts (us and mosquitoes) are fairly specialized.
Try and imagine dutch elm disease making the transition from trees to humans. Then remember that both host organisms are terrestrial - we're more closely related to trees than we would be to any alien. It's not totally impossible that some alien bacteria could, by some chance, find the human body hospitable (or vice versa), but it isn't very probable.
Plus, the human immune system has a habit of attacking anything remotely foreign. That's why you get problems like allergies and organ rejection. If an alien organism is enough like us to pose an infection risk, then it's also most likely similar enough to trigger an immune response. And the diseases that we face today have had millions of years of evolution to prepare them for our immune system, whereas anything alien has not. So even if life elsewhere is very much like life here, it'll have the same catching up to do that we will. Admittedly pathogens evolve faster than their hosts, but then again these hosts have medical technology to make up the difference.
Fast moving space dust and micro meteors (really the same thing actually) can be stopped by far more mundane means. You don't even really need to stop them per se, you just have to build your spacecraft to survive them. Remember that inflatable stations have been seriously considered - the reason is that a few pinhole leaks aren't going to be the end of the world if you have a contingency in place for them (duct tape perhaps?:-)
Radiation, on the other hand, generally isn't so easy to block. You can mostly ignore it if the spacecraft is unmanned, which is the best solution most of the time, but if you have to have astronauts up there, then they need some sort of shield.
Physical radiation shields generally rely on putting enough mass in the way to protect the people on the other side, and while that's fine for a nuclear reactor or a fallout shelter, it's a bit of an issue when you need to carry all that extra weight up to orbit. Getting the same protection without all the extra weight would be a big advantage. Pity it can't be adapted to non-charged forms of ionizing radiation.
I intend to build a perpetual motion machine. I've been trying for years, and ironically I can't seem to stop.
I'm also hoping to get my anti-aging device working, but it can wait. I don't think I've got the time machine working, or if I will I'll have forgotten to tell me that I did...
Funny, this being slashdot, I'd have thought your first choice would be either a holodeck or seven of nine.:-P (Though admittedly in either case the boobs in question aren't real, but hey.)
Nah, they're still working the kinks out of wooden spears: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimp#Tool_use What's more, they're still in early the beta stage. Spear 1.0 will hopefully have those newfangled flint spearheads:-)
We humans evolved past that point long ago. Now we've moved on to rocket propelled, intercontinental nuclear spears. Proof, if any more was needed, that "more evolved" does not equal "better". And proof that you can't breed for common sense...
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Stalin supporting evolution? Oh boy, were you misled. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that whoever told you of the views on evolution in the USSR under Stalin was a creationist, who wanted to villify evolution.
I suggest reading up on Lysenkoism and the effect it had on science in the Soviet Union:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
(You'll probably want to look beyond wikipedia for the in-depth story, but it's a place to start.)
Stalin was strongly anti-religious, but he was equally anti-evolutionary. Neither fit well with the beliefs of communism, and while Stalin probably wasn't an idealist, he needed his citizens to buy into a certain worldview. The notion of heredity doesn't gel well with the notion that all humans can be molded to the communist ideal.
Lysenko's "science" was basically Lamarckism revisited in such a way as better fit communism. Genetics and evolutionary biology were labeled "bourgeois science". Actual evidence-based research was written off in favor of what the people in power would rather believe. Sound familiar?
The parallels between Lysenkoism and Creationism (or Intelligent Design, to use the newspeak name for it) are striking. Both were proposed as alternatives to evolution by those who didn't want to have their worldview challenged by science, both were labeled and taught as science (despite failing to meet the scientific criteria), both had the vocal support of people in high places. The underlying "religion" was different - Lysenkoism was rooted in the quasi-religious views of Marxist-Leninism - but beyond that, they're the same story told in radically different countries.
The major difference is scale - evolutionary biology was all but outlawed in the USSR under Stalin, whereas it has not been similarly repressed in the USA. That can be chalked up to the fact that the US doesn't have, and has never had, a party or ruler with that kind of unchecked authority.
This little adventure into pseudoscience crippled Soviet biology for years to come. It can be argued that Russia still hasn't caught up to the rest of the world. An object lesson in why it is important to leave science to scientists, and keep faith, however deeply held, separate.
Why would you assume that?
I mean first up, why the insurance industry? Second, what makes you think anyone has the clout to repress this sort of technology?
Robot limbs that operate at or near the human level have a multitude of uses beyond just prosthetics. Offhand, I can think of hazardous material handling, remote surgery, bomb disposal, space exploration - basically anywhere you want a human hand, and don't want the mess that comes with having a warm body in the immediate area.
If you're right, and the potential to build just such a device has existed for years, then everyone from NASA to the nuclear industry would be all over it. Against that, those pissants in insurance don't stand a chance.
Plus, there's a fairly strong military interest in the prosthetic angle. There are plenty of war-vet amputees who'd benefit, giving DARPA both a practical and a PR benefit if they demonstrated a working model.
I just don't see it happening yet. Note the "leap forward" phrasing - this is still below the level of a bionic hand that can adequately replace the flesh and blood version. We're nowhere near the star wars/bionic man level. I mean, we'll get there, and probably within my lifetime and yours, but stuff like nerve-computer connections and effective tactile senses are still in their infancy.
That part of TFS left me scratching my head. Since nothing short of a black hole or neutron star will actually stop neutrinos, and since every active star in the galaxy gives off neutrino radiation as a byproduct of stellar fusion, shouldn't the noise level be relatively high?
Apart from that, how exactly is this hypothetical neutrino comm generating its signal? Neutrinos are the byproduct of nuclear reactions, and you'd need to generate an awful lot for the signal to be heard over interstellar distances. Are they rapidly switching a fusion source on and off? Perhaps using matter and anti-matter instead? Either way, it'd be somewhat akin to blasting off hydrogen bombs in Morse code.
Final catch, if we don't know how a hypothetical neutrino comm would work, why would we assume it's feasible? I mean, if we're just going to handwave around the technical hurdles in generating a long range signal using exotic particles, why not go the extra mile and assume they're using gravity waves? Same benefits, equally difficult engineering problems.
Not that looking for neutrino signals isn't worth it - it costs us next to nothing to try it, and who knows, they might be right. However, there is a world of difference between "we should look for X in case it's used to contact us" and "they will contact us with X" which is the way the article is pitching it.
That is the law of conservation of energy. All energy sources are finite. Over enough time, they will all be depleted. You cannot create new energy, merely extract potential energy.
Depleted energy isn't gone in the sense of destroyed, it's been converted into useless heat. Its still conserved, but the laws of thermodynamics get in the way of using it.
I don't expect the Spanish Inquisition...
Part of what's tripping you up is as innate assumption of linear, inevitable progress. What is true in a modern agrarian society was not true in an ancient hunter-gatherer one.
Think about the basic problem of carting things around. If you belong to a nomadic tribe, you aren't going to own any more than you can carry - which severely limits your options for tools and technology. It's only when we start building permanent settlements (which is what marks the dawn of civilization) that we can afford to own things not immediately necessary to our day to day survival. And permanent settlements weren't established until after we began harvesting crops.
Now, you might ask why we didn't discover agriculture and settle down sooner, given how much benefit we've derived from it. But the answer to that is lack of foresight - we had no idea what we were getting into when we first starting planting crops and taming herds. Ancient man wasn't interested in agriculture as a means of progress, he was interested in it as a means to an end, namely dinner. And the change from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler would have been a risk that went against evolved behavior and cultural tradition, meaning there's a sort of bump of reluctance we had to overcome. Had some of us not taken that risk, we might still be at the level we were in the paleolithic.
As long as we remained on the pre-agricultural side of the divide, human technology was in a state of stasis. We had flint spears for far longer than we've had metalworking of any kind. The tech that defined the last hundred thousand years of human evolution was on the order of pointy sticks - we didn't advance in at all, because it wasn't practical. It's only once we cross that civilization divide that we begin to get the snowballing progress that we've since become so accustomed to, and it's become easy to forget that there was a time before.
As for population, somebody else already covered that. Between a harsher climate, shorter lifespan and a higher infant mortality rate, there were only so many of us that could survive. I don't doubt that some places were probably repopulated many times over, as earlier tribes died off or moved away.
Depends on what they're a haven to, now, doesn't it?
Put another way, anonymity and secrecy can be used for good - anyone living in an oppressive country can attest to that. Or it can be used to send "3n1arg3 y00r p3nis" spam en masse. I think we can agree on the idea that the existence of data havens is a potential godsend, but the misuse of those havens is a huge headache.
"Sequestered by geological processes" does not mean "generated geologically". I think you misunderstood my point - the carbon present in fossil fuels has been sequestered as a result of geological processes burying plant and animal matter for a long enough time to allow fossil fuels to form. The "geological process" involved isn't the same as the biological process that bound the carbon up in the first place.
I'm not even going to comment on the phrase "eco-nazi".
As for the actual meat of your argument, there are a great many environmental groups that already support the idea of building solar farms in sunny desert areas. They see it as a tradeoff; you cause X amount of local ecological damage, and avoid Y amount of pollution elsewhere from other power sources that would invariably be used if there existed no alternative.
Most environmentalists, contrary to the "eco-nazi" stereotype, are willing to accept imperfect solutions. Just look at the green support for hydroelectric dams, which also cause serious local ecological damage. Yes, there are those who will accept nothing short of perfection or extinction, but they are squarely in the loony minority. Like most movements, environmentalism runs the range from casual supporters, to serious thinkers, to hardcore zealots, and it makes no sense whatsoever to assume the moderates will react the same way as the loonies.
Since a hypothetical algae based biofuel farm isn't any different in terms of environmental impact than a solar power array, I suspect most green groups would be willing to support the idea.
Why do people keep saying this? It's like they don't actually understand why fossil fuels contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Look, carbon that's locked away underground in the form of fossil fuels isn't part of the carbon cycle. It's been sequestered by geological processes for millions of years, removing it from the air. When we dig it up and burn it, we bring it back into circulation. The total amount of airborne carbon increases; the greenhouse effect gets stronger. This is, in a nutshell, anthropic global warming.
Carbon that's already in the atmosphere can be trapped by photosynthesis. If the plant that trapped the carbon is then burned, or eaten, or even if it just dies and rots, the carbon returns to the air. This is the regular carbon cycle, with or without human intervention, and it doesn't alter the net balance of Co2. It's this process that we employ when we make biodiesel.
Biodiesel doesn't contribute to global warming. At all. The "bio" part means the hydrocarbons were synthesized from plant matter; the carbon in those hydrocarbons came from airborne Co2. As long as you plant biofuel crops, process them, and burn them, the total amount of airborne Co2 will never increase. Every ounce of carbon added to the air is matched by an ounce of carbon removed from the air by the fuel plantation.
Point. Still, regardless of what other hardware is needed to make the system work, you are using self-replicating "solar cells" of a sort. You are, in effect, getting one of your components made cheaply, and replaced constantly. So what it boils down to is whether a bioreactor that produces hydrogen from algae when is more economical than a solar array that produces hydrogen from electrolysis, given the same source of sunlight. This of course is assuming the object of the exercise is hydrogen production.
I agree on the viability of simple biodiesel though. My only real caveat with it is the potential problems associated with dedicating farmland to fuel production. We don't lack for arable land or fresh water in this part of the world, and in this day and age, but if we start farming biodiesel on a meaningful scale, we will run into problems.
Heh, you're joking, right?
Why go all that distance? The US at least has no shortage of sunny desert, and coastal access to two oceans. Either land or sea based biofuel production would be feasible. And after Iraq, I think an increasing number of Americans will want energy independence. Why import fungible goods you can make cheaply and locally? Particularly if the countries exporting said goods are a long way from friendly?
I think the only countries that would actually need fuel imports, if biofuel worked out, would be those lacking in either sufficient space or sunlight.
The trade-off, when comparing these sorts of solutions to direct energy generation, is that we don't need to manufacture algae. Get a few of these mutants made, let em breed, and harness the work. It isn't really that simple, of course, but the first step involved with manufactured solar generators - building the damn things in the first place - is skipped.
Solar cells, or a combination of mirrors and sterling engines, will probably always beat out organisms for pure efficiency. Doesn't mean we don't also want the organisms. Particularly when the object of the exercise is hydrogen production, since water electrolysis isn't very efficient either. In practical economic terms, bioproduction of hydrogen (or other fuels) may make more sense than using generated electricity.
You're right about the water and arable land though. If we start using those to make fuel, they'll be in short supply in no time. OTOH, I've seen proposals for algae produced biofuel that worked with saline water, and could be built in a desert - that would be ideal.
Does launching one in Starcraft count? Or does it have to be playing Global Thermonuclear War?
Actually, that is not the case. If you'll read the article, you'll see that the patient could in fact communicate, albeit in a limited way, before the treatment. He was crippled, but his mind was still there.
If you want an analogy, think of a human being as a computer. This guy, in TFA, had a broken sound card - they fixed it. Terri Schiavo had a broken hard drive - one that wasn't just damaged, but was in fact melted. Assuming the damage could have been repaired, what of the data lost? It's not like we had a backup copy of her mind, her memories, or the other aspects of her identity.
There are bound to be cases where we can argue till the cows come home how much of the mind is left. Hers wasn't one of them. Where the forebrain should have been, there was cerebrospinal fluid. There was nothing left. Her case does not compare with the case in TFA.
Now, one day we may be able to repair that kind of damage. But unless we also develop a method for backing up our minds, the way we back up data on a computer, then such a miracle treatment will not restore the patient to who they were.
No.
In Schiavo's case, the autopsy was conclusive. Her brain was horribly atrophied; there was little left beyond the brain stem, which only provides the bare minimum life support functions. Parts of her cerebrum had literally turned to mush. No medical treatment, up to and including science fiction ideas like tissue regeneration, could have properly revived her - there was nothing left of her prior self, in terms of the important stuff like memory, or identity.
At best, some techno-magical resurrection, should such a thing be possible one day, could have left her with an blank infant's mind in an already old body, and bluntly, that sounds every bit like a fate worse than death to me.
Really, the only reason why everyone remembers Terri (and not the many other vegetables whose relatives face the difficult choice of either holding out hope indefinitely or pulling the plug) is that her case got political. Medically, she was not out of the ordinary, and it was pretty clear long before the case ever made it to the public eye that she wasn't coming back. People who've lost most of their brain aren't expected to recover, and since their prognosis worsens over time (due to atrophy), there is little chance of medical science yielding some miracle cure that could help them.
Similarly, I cannot picture somebody being addiction to, say, being mauled by wild bears. That's really the sort of thing that you don't do twice
But, to amend your statement, a person can get hooked on anything pleasurable/stimulating. All they really need is a void in their life that can be filled by doing X, where X is something enjoyable, and not so self destructive that they can only do it once.
Psychological addiction is a well observed phenomenon. Generally, it's seen in cases where a normal pleasurable activity becomes a compulsion, to the point where the person cannot stop or quit. The addicts in these cases are frequently people with underlying problems, whose compulsive behavior is a coping mechanism. You have to understand, "addict" in this context doesn't mean "somebody who does something enjoyable", it's more like "someone who continues to do something after it has ceased to be enjoyable". You also have to understand that genuine psychological addiction is rare, especially when compared with physical addiction (like nicotine).
Religion can be addictive; you need look no further than Jonestown style cults to see this. Yet the majority of people subscribe to one religion or another without throwing away their lives on it. Sex can be addictive, yet the vast majority of the human race are neither virgins nor addicts. Work can be addictive - ever had that one coworker who'd put in overtime endlessly, whether they needed to or not? Yet most people are gainfully employed, and are happy to go home at the end of the day. See the pattern?
Now, are there gaming addicts? Almost certainly. Gaming is, after all, something that regular healthy people enjoy, so it stands to reason that an unhealthy person could get hooked. The flip side to that is that gaming is not uniquely addictive - gaming addiction is but a small faucet of the broader issue of psychological addiction. I really doubt the AMA needs to give it a separate category. And I have no doubt that much of the FUD regarding game "addicts" stems from reasons other than concern for those supposed addicts' welfare - there is money and political power to be had in manufacturing a boogyman.
It's worth remembering that not all adaptations have been like that. Hell, the various AvP games are way better than the AvP movie.
I think the trend is for game adaptations that try to recreate the original movie/comic/whatever to suck. This covers most of the direct movie tie-ins, which as you say are lacking in actual gameplay. Games that simply use the fictional universe established by their parent sources have the potential to be much better.
See for example the long list of Star Wars games - the best ones (KOTOR, Tie Fighter, the Dark Forces/JK series) don't simply take the movies and try to make a game out of them, but instead use the setting without recycling the plot.
Most current suits of body armor can stop a pistol caliber bullet. Rounds designed to pierce armor, or designed to be fired from a more powerful gun, are another story. Armor that will stop a small, soft bullet will still be penetrated by a faster, or less malleable one.
For civilian or police protection, we have nearly impenetrable suits now; increasing their coverage, or decreasing their weight would be more practical (both of which can be achieved by making them out of lighter materials). For something like military protection, well, we may never have impenetrable body armor. Whenever defensive technology gets good enough, the military turns their attention to piercing those defenses; see for example the death of the battleship as a viable class of warship.
Apart from that, conservation of momentum applies. There is an upper limit whereby body armor would remain intact, while the flesh beneath is reduced to a pulp. Though admittedly conservation of momentum also applies to the shooter, and to the recoil of their gun, so there is a similar upper limit for muzzle velocity per unit of projectile mass.
It's not terribly likely that alien pathogens could harm us. Remember that most plain old fashioned terrestrial diseases are only able to infect a limited variety of hosts. HIV originated in chimps (our closest living evolutionary relatives), rabies is limited to mammals, the flu (which is versatile by viral standards) is primarily limited to mammals and birds, etc. Even diseases like malaria which spend parts of their life cycle in very different hosts (us and mosquitoes) are fairly specialized.
Try and imagine dutch elm disease making the transition from trees to humans. Then remember that both host organisms are terrestrial - we're more closely related to trees than we would be to any alien. It's not totally impossible that some alien bacteria could, by some chance, find the human body hospitable (or vice versa), but it isn't very probable.
Plus, the human immune system has a habit of attacking anything remotely foreign. That's why you get problems like allergies and organ rejection. If an alien organism is enough like us to pose an infection risk, then it's also most likely similar enough to trigger an immune response. And the diseases that we face today have had millions of years of evolution to prepare them for our immune system, whereas anything alien has not. So even if life elsewhere is very much like life here, it'll have the same catching up to do that we will. Admittedly pathogens evolve faster than their hosts, but then again these hosts have medical technology to make up the difference.
Fast moving space dust and micro meteors (really the same thing actually) can be stopped by far more mundane means. You don't even really need to stop them per se, you just have to build your spacecraft to survive them. Remember that inflatable stations have been seriously considered - the reason is that a few pinhole leaks aren't going to be the end of the world if you have a contingency in place for them (duct tape perhaps? :-)
Radiation, on the other hand, generally isn't so easy to block. You can mostly ignore it if the spacecraft is unmanned, which is the best solution most of the time, but if you have to have astronauts up there, then they need some sort of shield.
Physical radiation shields generally rely on putting enough mass in the way to protect the people on the other side, and while that's fine for a nuclear reactor or a fallout shelter, it's a bit of an issue when you need to carry all that extra weight up to orbit. Getting the same protection without all the extra weight would be a big advantage. Pity it can't be adapted to non-charged forms of ionizing radiation.
I intend to build a perpetual motion machine. I've been trying for years, and ironically I can't seem to stop.
I'm also hoping to get my anti-aging device working, but it can wait. I don't think I've got the time machine working, or if I will I'll have forgotten to tell me that I did...
Funny, this being slashdot, I'd have thought your first choice would be either a holodeck or seven of nine. :-P
(Though admittedly in either case the boobs in question aren't real, but hey.)
Nah, they're still working the kinks out of wooden spears: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimp#Tool_use
What's more, they're still in early the beta stage. Spear 1.0 will hopefully have those newfangled flint spearheads
We humans evolved past that point long ago. Now we've moved on to rocket propelled, intercontinental nuclear spears. Proof, if any more was needed, that "more evolved" does not equal "better". And proof that you can't breed for common sense...