First, I know very well that George Washington wasn't alive during the civil war. I simply didn't want to get into the whole "pro-slavery Confederate Leaders" part implying that the civil war was fought over slavery. Additionally, my own education didn't emphasize that area of history, so I'd have to look-up any contributions made during that time. Even if I did then I doubt I could find a good example that everyone would be familiar with.
Second, do you seriously want me to defend the practice of slavery? It's reprehensible, but, like most anything, isn't pure evil. Since you did call me out on that, though, here goes. There is a reason that the KY state anthem used to contain the line "the darkies are gay", a slave's life was not one without pleasure. A slave's life is simple. They can live without worrying about such things as money or politics. Their responsibilities are clear cut, and if they don't fulfill them there are only short-term consequences (i.e. getting beaten). Some people like a simple life without serious responsibilities. Others abuse their freedom and society is a lot better off without giving them that possibility (some were sold into slavery for that very reason). Furthermore, some slave owners weren't that bad, and merely treated their slaves as indentured field hands. It's not like they didn't work as hard as their slaves, the only difference being that the slaves didn't need to worry about going broke if the crops failed. Being a slave is also preferable to being dead, which a lot of slaves would have been if their enemies didn't sell them to the slave traders. Socially, it birthed a culture, and having slaves ensure that the educated didn't need to contribute to manual labor, which freed them up to make lasting improvements to society.
Now, all that said, let me reiterate. Slavery is bad. These 'benefits' in no way justify its practice. It's just overly simplistic to say it's all bad, just like it's overly simplistic to say that democracy is all good. Virtually nothing is that clear cut.
I agree, but there is an important distinction between stars and species. Stars are fairly objective. I suppose there might be some quibble about the fringe cases, but those are rare. Species, OTOH, are an entirely human concept.
When the biological species concept breaks down (e.g. fossil record, or asexual organisms), there's not really any good distinction between one species and another. Humans are surprisingly consistent in their classifications, but it's still a human construct. Nature couldn't care less and will make fertile mules every now and again. Plus there are something like 20,000 species of bacteria per liter of sea water, which kind of demonstrates the futility of counting.
That said, I could easily state that 80% of species are extinct, and be right if I counted species a certain way. If we had DNA sequenced from every animal that existed then perhaps an objective criteria could be designed, but since that's impossible "species" is subjective. It's like stating the percent of animals that are delicious (an easier number to determine).
The term is "recall bias". If you go around asking people with a serious disease about past habits, they're much more likely to remember them. A normal person will just forget about things that seem inconsequential. A person with a serious disease will jump to blaming such things if you hint that they might be a possible cause. "Come to think of it, I *DID* hold my cell phone up to that side of my head more often!" (Or it might work in reverse, since they know they didn't do whatever you asked about. Either way, they'll think about it a lot harder than your controls will.)
while introducing a new focus on the 'significant contributions' of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war
I'm a little concerned about the way that is worded... Putting a pair of words in quotes generally means that the author doesn't share that opinion. So does someone really believe that slave owners contributed nothing of value to society? George Washington was a slave owner (albeit a progressive one), and he most certainly contributed greatly to American society. It's rather disturbing to me that someone might want to blackwash something like slavery as all bad and only practiced by vile, useless people.
OTOH, slavery is the antithesis of America. Slaves are neither free, nor can they improve their situation through hard work. I'm frankly worried that history is getting to be more focused on "good guys" and "bad guys" than an actual understanding of what lead the "bad guys" to do what they did, and why we see it as "wrong" given a modern perspective. If you just attribute evil acts to "evil" people then you lose sight of what caused those people to become "evil", and insight into how to prevent similar things from happening again. The only thing you can do with "evil people" that you don't understand is kill them, which hardly solves the long-term problem since it's very difficult to kill *all* of them.
That said, I have no idea how the Texas School Board is presenting the concept. They could easily paint slavery as the result of cultural sensitivity, since slavery was the traditional practice in Africa. (So many people seem to think slavery was about white guys going to African and throwing nets over random black villagers.) Or they could state that the Africans were less developed and imply that it wasn't so bad to use them for Western goals since most Americans descended from slaves are better off then their modern-day African counterparts. Presenting perspectives such as these would be very dangerous, since they're half-truths that ignore the bigger picture. Furthermore, they have a very obvious connection to modern politics.
I'm wondering why omit Newton, he was a very devout Christian. One of his greatest regrets was not making a theological breakthrough that matched his scientific discoveries. Heck, he was also a strong advocate of maintaining virginity (perhaps too strongly, he died a virgin and reputedly call that his greatest accomplishment).
Exactly. A few years ago I used to post regularly on a discussion board. Not a great deal, only a few hundred posts, but I'm apparently long-winded since I later determined they contained a couple hundred thousand words. Now, if I'd been a more prolific poster I could have easily posted ten times that amount, and continued for many years.
It probably takes around 1/10th of the time to read something as to write it, so to read a lifetime of work it would take a very long time. What'll happen is that nothing will be read closely, nor in context. The examiners will just scan for distasteful phases. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if they just scanned for keywords to look at your position on various controversial topics.
I'm reminded of a quote by Confucius, "Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!" If you read nearly everything a person has written, then you'd know about all there is to know about most scholarly people. At that point, are you really appointing a respectable person with excellent insight and judgment, or are they the person that happened to best fit the checklist? A person might change their beliefs, so I suppose that's why most judicial appointments are of older folk who have likely solidified their beliefs.
I find it a little hard to believe that it's actual size, since in the series the mechs varied in size episode-to-episode. In some, they're much larger than buildings, whereas in other scenes they climb them (e.g. to evade the Sea of Dirac). At the lower ends, being actual size is kinda big, but not too bad. At the upper ends, it'd be difficult to fit any part of an Eva in a city without taking up a whole block.
It's not that bad from a freedom perspective. You still have control over where you go. You'd lose the ability to make arbitrary and dangerous maneuvers on public roads and the technical ability to flee from the police. Both of those are already illegal, so you have no right to do either. Adding a monitoring system is a distinct issue.
IMHO, the main problem with cars are that they are a symbol. Teenagers conflate the concept of a car with freedom of movement. So cars == freedom == good in the minds of most people. Knives and guns, OTOH, are conflated with homicide. So most people think knives & guns == bad. This simple, literally dog-level intelligence of "cars good, guns bad" seems to override higher thought. Driving a car is not the only way to have freedom of mobility and they maim & kill a lot more people in the US than weapons of all types. What's worse, since driving is seen as a right of passage, a mark of maturity, people cling to it even more so.
IMHO, self-driving cars would been a decent boon to society. Fewer accidents for starters, since they wouldn't be adopted otherwise. Less pollution since you could switch from gasoline to a less energy-dense fuel as you wouldn't be relying on the driver's memory and expectations in designing the vehicle. And getting people off their driving fetish should reduce the glamor of using a car and might help combat the obesity epidemic. It'd put them back into being a tool rather than some mystical thing we center our lives around.
Yes, that's why no cancer is curable. It's a death sentence, just like several decades ago. Drug companies simply make high-priced chemotherapy to squeeze out as much money as possible before you succumb to your illness.
Cancer mortality is measured by 5, 10, 15, 20 year survival rates, you wouldn't be able to tolerate chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation for anywhere near that long. So, if people aren't being treated, suffering symptoms, or dead, what does that imply?
Or, look at it from a business case. Company A has a cheap drug that cures the condition. Company B has an expensive drug that treats, but doesn't cure it. Which company's drug makes more money? Alternately, it takes ~10 years and a billion dollars to make a drug. Are you going to gamble that much on nobody coming out with something superior before you're able to recoup your investment? Or are you going to cure the condition and ensure there's no highly profitable potential market left for your competitors?
For the last paragraph to not be true, there'd have to be collusion of some sort. Do you really think that nobody would spill the beans on that? It'd be squandering trillions and costing millions of lives each year, so could everyone privy to that information really have no morality at all? Or would the aging politicians turn a blind eye to something that would hasten their own mortality? Perhaps the scare-mongering media would keep quiet about it.
This sounds quite promising, but I'd worry about DNA's melting point. Double stranded DNA will melt and become single stranded DNA at around 100 degrees Celsius. However, this melting point is quite variable since GC bonds are ~50% stronger than AT bonds, so the actual melting point could be much higher or much lower. AFAIK doing any sort of calculation requires heat to be produced, so I'd imagine you'd get localized melting of the DNA and disruption of the engineered structure if you did any significant amount of work on it. I'll be interested to see how they solve this problem, since you can't really do much to increase the strength or the number of hydrogen bonds.
Spermatogenesis, the process by which sperm mature from the dividing germ cells you were born with to the swimmers with which you're familiar, takes 64 days. If you kill all your [im]mature sperm then you are sterile for that period of time, and have reduced fertility for a little beyond that as your sperm count recovers. (I've no idea about the variation on that figure, but that's how I've always seen it presented, never "two months".) My initial impression was that the sound waves accomplished this, but that wouldn't explain sterility for the remaining four months.
I'm reminded of Gossypol, which was investigated as a potential male contraceptive pill. It's a toxin that damages the seminiferous epithelium, so no sperm are able to mature. Perhaps an ultrasound could do the same... Unfortunately, it turns out that it was a little too effective, and if your sperm count hit zero then the damage was too severe and regeneration wasn't possible, leading to permanent sterility. It seems plausible that damage by any other means would be similar...
That said, you sperm count doesn't need to hit zero for an effective contraceptive. Of the ~100 - 500 million sperm per shot, 90% are normally viable but only about 1000 of those make it to the egg, and collaborative effort is necessary to penetrate it. OTOH, I suppose you could be ungodly "lucky" and impregnate a woman with a sperm count in the thousands, but that's probably not worth considering (although it is a reason that it wouldn't be 100% effective).
I read it close enough. The same technique is used in amateur genetic engineering. People gardening or farming do the same, on a less sophisticated level. Homebrewers use yeast and aspergillus, both of which can cause disease. If you make an exception for research, would you also make one for hobbies? How about commercial agriculture (e.g. Roundup)? Yogurt making (probiotics)? Pet-raising (zoonotic infections)? All of these activities are breeding more resistant microbes, otherwise they wouldn't be possible. You'd have too many other microbes interfering to achieve the desired effect, so you need to breed resistance in the microbes you want. (IOW, that's exactly the same rationale behind antibiotic resistance in research, but it obviously has far more applications.)
If you want to ban something, the creation and use of biological weapons would be your target. But, IMHO, the loss of liberty would be too great for something so minor. I, for one, like to live in a world where we're free to toss a bug on somebody.
You have hundreds of items on your to-do list? At that point it seems like you'd spend more time managing the list rather than completing the items on it. I personally open a new tab when I encounter something I'd like to read after the current page (e.g. a Google Reader news item), but I don't open so many it'd take an hour or more to get to it.
Honestly, I can think of no worse or more dangerous crime.
You lack imagination!
More seriously, if creating resistant diseases were illegal then you'd shut down basically all genetic research on them. It's fairly standard to give bacteria antibiotic resistance so you can select for the ones that took up the genetic modifications.
Beyond that, your argument relies solely on motivation rather than effect. People stopping antibiotics prematurely are a lot more dangerous than someone intentionally creating shampoo-resistant lice. Promiscuous, unprotected sex breeds horrendous diseases (like the leading preventable cause of blindness). Lice won't kill you outside of some contrived scenario. But if motivations are what's important, then why stop cattle farmers from using vancomycin?
IOW, misguided actions based on good (or neutral) intentions are far more dangerous than pranksters. The world would be hellish if we cared more about what people think rather than what they do. Unfortunately, there seems to be an ever-present trend to do so.
So... what do we call the irrationals on the other side? The people that will "refute" point-by-point every claim a skeptic or denier makes, regardless of what the science says. They're fond of sensationalist hypotheticals, such as how high sea levels would rise if a large ice sheet melted, when the science says it's getting colder. They also love to attribute every last undesirable weather phenomenon to human CO2 production. Cold winter? AGW! Warm winter? AGW! Lightning caused a wildfire? AGW!
I've heard the term "alarmist" used before, but that implies they're just overstating the danger of things that are really happening. IMHO, the anti-industry radical environmentalists are one of the most counterproductive groups of which I am aware. Many of the crazy things they say get attributed to AGW as a whole and turn a lot of armchair skeptics into deniers. Deniers conflate the irrationals with all AGW proponents. Because they know that the crazy things they heard cannot be true, they are convinced that AGW is untrue as well. Giving such individuals a derogatory name would likely help to undo a bit of their counterproductive efforts.
Well, Perl does have taint checking, which I always liked. It refuses to perform an "unsafe" operation (e.g. open() or exec()) with data derived from unsanitized input. It certainly won't stop you from writing insecure programs, but it will catch an occasional oversight.
Would some TSA agent please leak an image of some politician please? One minor enough to still use commercial jets, but important enough to influence policy. That way, after a few comments like "well, obviously he's in favor of the giant building project", there'd be enough ruckus to get rid of these scanners. It's in their favor as well, since I know I definitely would not want to see certain people naked.
Perhaps it was an individual that made the mistake, but if it were a business then there should a fairly obvious set of safeguards. For example, the guy watching the stocks is OKed for trades in the "k" range, but if he tries to make a trade in the "m" range then a middle manager has to sign off on it. For trades in the "b" range I'd imagine the CEO would kinda want to be privy to that decision. Basically, the idea being that for unusually large transactions, get confirmation from someone who isn't doing the exact same thing.
Besides preventing errors like this one, such a system should be present just because it's good management. Also, how much damage do you want to enable one guy to do? He could become disgruntled, or have a brief psychotic episode or something and ruin a company without oversight! (That said, I'm posting this on Slashdot where many an IT folk could probably send their company to the stone age for a month and kill it that way...)
You can do three things with gold in the event of some complete economic meltdown. First, exploit the fact that most people will be in denial and still willing to trade useful items for gold, especially since it has such a strong financial tradition. Second, it's malleable enough that you could probably make stuff out of it using some simple tools. Third, it's easily heavy enough to hit someone with and take their less weaponizable but more useful items.
Wow, and here I thought the three keys I carry around were too many. (I keep separate keyrings for my car and for my rarely used ones). Unfortunately, one is a postbox key, so I can't have it duplicated and do anything interesting. That said, one idea I was toying around with was to duplicate the keys, then get someone with a machine shop to cut the base of the duplicates until they were only as wide as the rest of the key. Then I could swap them out for some unused tools on my pocket multitool. Some googling reveals that this isn't a novel idea.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When things don't behave like nails, some people get flustered and irritated with the "nail" rather than reassess their choice of tool.
This is why I'm curious as to the appeal of lie detectors in courtrooms. If there was an actual physiological change associated with lying, then the whole concept of lawyers and courtrooms becomes obsolete. Asking "Have you committed a crime?" with confirmation from the lie detector would be all that's required. Heck, police could start doing it to all suspects with portable versions, and drop off the people who failed at the local prison. The only point of a judge would be to determine sentence length, which, with a way to know what actually happened and what the motivations were, would basically lead to that just being a checklist. The suspect knew it was illegal? Add 6 months to the sentence.
Now, returning from our trek in fantasy land, lie detectors cannot work. Some people are terrible liars, but you can tell that in a jury trial. Others legitimately believe what they say to be the truth. "Did you commit a crime?" being a prime example. Serious criminals simply do not think like ordinary folk, a fact that should be obvious since ordinary folk (>98-99%) do not commit serious crimes. OTOH, for the situational crimes, the criminal's perception of reality is what would be detected by the lie detector, which probably has little resemblance to actual reality. Situational criminals don't knowingly do something evil, so they aren't "lying", whereas people who have the capacity to knowingly be evil aren't going to be flustered enough to be detected on a lie detector test.
Ok, thanks for mentioning GRACE, that satellite is seriously cool. Also, thanks for the explanation, that certainly makes sense of it. OTOH, the western peninsula of Antarctica doesn't seem to reflect the interior of the continent. It's less inhospitable nature makes it the most studied part, but it also is prone to changes that don't reflect the overall picture of Antarctica. (E.g. sea ice expansion partially, or perhaps completely, offsets the loss of ice on the peninsula.)
The ice loss from the peninsula is quite likely a positive feedback loop which might have been started by AGW, or it might have been started by something else. Either way, I'm a little concerned about that independently of AGW. The 400,000 year ice core temperature measurements show a very cyclic nature with rapid increases every 100,000 years or so. These rapid increases are surely due to positive feedback loops. Somehow, 10,000 years ago, this cycle seems to have been blunted, with a lower maximum and longer duration of semi-stable temperatures.
My main fear is that, AGW or not, these loops may be restarted, or the cooling loops started, either of which would lead to another mass extinction. I'm not too worried about humans, since we're adaptable, but as a biology major I'm horrified at the potential loss in biodiversity. Therefore, I think all this concern about anthropogenic CO2 is a little misplaced, since the cause is far less important than stopping some of those positive feedback loops. I'm unconvinced that completely halting net CO2 production, or even maintaining our current atmospheric temperature would accomplish that. One gripe I have about both AGW proponents and opponents are that they are too concerned about blame ("humans are responsible!", "no we're not!") and [not] correcting [non] destructive behaviors and not nearly concerned enough with reversing the trend rather than merely slowing or stopping it.
It seems I've had a bad run of flash games lately that exemplified a problem present in many games. You might have ten different weapons, each with their own time-consuming upgrade path or whatever, but only a couple are actually useful. Improper balance causes two problems. First, I have to use trial and error to determine what weapon the designers liked in this game. Second, the game becomes either too easy because I have the good weapon, or impossible because I'm not using a good weapon. In other words, strategy is useless, because it's either unnecessary or there's only one valid one (which, again, is determined through trial and error). Older games demonstrated this latter principle by having the boss who's immune to everything except his one weakness, which was only to get people to use the otherwise worthless POS weapon taking up space in your inventory.
The solution isn't to simplify games. That just takes out the trial and error, which makes it less annoying, but equally boring. The solution is to balance perfectly. This is very hard. Sadly, the universe tolerates a lot of mediocrity, so the mediocre game developers will continue to screw this up and make mediocre games. Alternatively, they'll screw it up by adding useless pseudo-variation, like two rapid firing weapons with slightly different damage/reload times, but identical damage per second against high HP enemies. At which point players pick their weapon based on the graphics and animations.
2. Arctic and antarctic to warm faster than rest of the planet - predicted by all models. Observed.
I haven't been keeping up with the latest news in climatology, but the lastIheard Antartica was getting colder, and the sea ice was expanding. This is directly contrary to the prediction that it should be warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world. But AGW is a hydra, so the loss of that head did nothing to it. I assume there's some rationalization for why the prediction is wrong (or even better, that prediction went down the memory hole; AGW has always predicted Antarctica would cool initially).
I was originally a supporter of AGW, became a "skeptic" when I saw data that didn't fit that theory, and became apathetic when I realized that AGW will not be falsified (hence why I'm not going to bother verifying the other claims). There's probably something to it, but it's not a scientific theory so far as I'm concerned, which makes me not really care about it. Runaway CO2 production can't be maintained indefinitely without having effects, so if it gets cut, great. If the economy tanks in the process my student loans will likely become easier to pay back when I start to care about them in a few years.
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First, I know very well that George Washington wasn't alive during the civil war. I simply didn't want to get into the whole "pro-slavery Confederate Leaders" part implying that the civil war was fought over slavery. Additionally, my own education didn't emphasize that area of history, so I'd have to look-up any contributions made during that time. Even if I did then I doubt I could find a good example that everyone would be familiar with.
Second, do you seriously want me to defend the practice of slavery? It's reprehensible, but, like most anything, isn't pure evil. Since you did call me out on that, though, here goes. There is a reason that the KY state anthem used to contain the line "the darkies are gay", a slave's life was not one without pleasure. A slave's life is simple. They can live without worrying about such things as money or politics. Their responsibilities are clear cut, and if they don't fulfill them there are only short-term consequences (i.e. getting beaten). Some people like a simple life without serious responsibilities. Others abuse their freedom and society is a lot better off without giving them that possibility (some were sold into slavery for that very reason). Furthermore, some slave owners weren't that bad, and merely treated their slaves as indentured field hands. It's not like they didn't work as hard as their slaves, the only difference being that the slaves didn't need to worry about going broke if the crops failed. Being a slave is also preferable to being dead, which a lot of slaves would have been if their enemies didn't sell them to the slave traders. Socially, it birthed a culture, and having slaves ensure that the educated didn't need to contribute to manual labor, which freed them up to make lasting improvements to society.
Now, all that said, let me reiterate. Slavery is bad. These 'benefits' in no way justify its practice. It's just overly simplistic to say it's all bad, just like it's overly simplistic to say that democracy is all good. Virtually nothing is that clear cut.
I agree, but there is an important distinction between stars and species. Stars are fairly objective. I suppose there might be some quibble about the fringe cases, but those are rare. Species, OTOH, are an entirely human concept.
When the biological species concept breaks down (e.g. fossil record, or asexual organisms), there's not really any good distinction between one species and another. Humans are surprisingly consistent in their classifications, but it's still a human construct. Nature couldn't care less and will make fertile mules every now and again. Plus there are something like 20,000 species of bacteria per liter of sea water, which kind of demonstrates the futility of counting.
That said, I could easily state that 80% of species are extinct, and be right if I counted species a certain way. If we had DNA sequenced from every animal that existed then perhaps an objective criteria could be designed, but since that's impossible "species" is subjective. It's like stating the percent of animals that are delicious (an easier number to determine).
The term is "recall bias". If you go around asking people with a serious disease about past habits, they're much more likely to remember them. A normal person will just forget about things that seem inconsequential. A person with a serious disease will jump to blaming such things if you hint that they might be a possible cause. "Come to think of it, I *DID* hold my cell phone up to that side of my head more often!" (Or it might work in reverse, since they know they didn't do whatever you asked about. Either way, they'll think about it a lot harder than your controls will.)
while introducing a new focus on the 'significant contributions' of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war
I'm a little concerned about the way that is worded... Putting a pair of words in quotes generally means that the author doesn't share that opinion. So does someone really believe that slave owners contributed nothing of value to society? George Washington was a slave owner (albeit a progressive one), and he most certainly contributed greatly to American society. It's rather disturbing to me that someone might want to blackwash something like slavery as all bad and only practiced by vile, useless people.
OTOH, slavery is the antithesis of America. Slaves are neither free, nor can they improve their situation through hard work. I'm frankly worried that history is getting to be more focused on "good guys" and "bad guys" than an actual understanding of what lead the "bad guys" to do what they did, and why we see it as "wrong" given a modern perspective. If you just attribute evil acts to "evil" people then you lose sight of what caused those people to become "evil", and insight into how to prevent similar things from happening again. The only thing you can do with "evil people" that you don't understand is kill them, which hardly solves the long-term problem since it's very difficult to kill *all* of them.
That said, I have no idea how the Texas School Board is presenting the concept. They could easily paint slavery as the result of cultural sensitivity, since slavery was the traditional practice in Africa. (So many people seem to think slavery was about white guys going to African and throwing nets over random black villagers.) Or they could state that the Africans were less developed and imply that it wasn't so bad to use them for Western goals since most Americans descended from slaves are better off then their modern-day African counterparts. Presenting perspectives such as these would be very dangerous, since they're half-truths that ignore the bigger picture. Furthermore, they have a very obvious connection to modern politics.
I'm wondering why omit Newton, he was a very devout Christian. One of his greatest regrets was not making a theological breakthrough that matched his scientific discoveries. Heck, he was also a strong advocate of maintaining virginity (perhaps too strongly, he died a virgin and reputedly call that his greatest accomplishment).
Exactly. A few years ago I used to post regularly on a discussion board. Not a great deal, only a few hundred posts, but I'm apparently long-winded since I later determined they contained a couple hundred thousand words. Now, if I'd been a more prolific poster I could have easily posted ten times that amount, and continued for many years.
It probably takes around 1/10th of the time to read something as to write it, so to read a lifetime of work it would take a very long time. What'll happen is that nothing will be read closely, nor in context. The examiners will just scan for distasteful phases. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if they just scanned for keywords to look at your position on various controversial topics.
I'm reminded of a quote by Confucius, "Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!" If you read nearly everything a person has written, then you'd know about all there is to know about most scholarly people. At that point, are you really appointing a respectable person with excellent insight and judgment, or are they the person that happened to best fit the checklist? A person might change their beliefs, so I suppose that's why most judicial appointments are of older folk who have likely solidified their beliefs.
I find it a little hard to believe that it's actual size, since in the series the mechs varied in size episode-to-episode. In some, they're much larger than buildings, whereas in other scenes they climb them (e.g. to evade the Sea of Dirac). At the lower ends, being actual size is kinda big, but not too bad. At the upper ends, it'd be difficult to fit any part of an Eva in a city without taking up a whole block.
It's not that bad from a freedom perspective. You still have control over where you go. You'd lose the ability to make arbitrary and dangerous maneuvers on public roads and the technical ability to flee from the police. Both of those are already illegal, so you have no right to do either. Adding a monitoring system is a distinct issue.
IMHO, the main problem with cars are that they are a symbol. Teenagers conflate the concept of a car with freedom of movement. So cars == freedom == good in the minds of most people. Knives and guns, OTOH, are conflated with homicide. So most people think knives & guns == bad. This simple, literally dog-level intelligence of "cars good, guns bad" seems to override higher thought. Driving a car is not the only way to have freedom of mobility and they maim & kill a lot more people in the US than weapons of all types. What's worse, since driving is seen as a right of passage, a mark of maturity, people cling to it even more so.
IMHO, self-driving cars would been a decent boon to society. Fewer accidents for starters, since they wouldn't be adopted otherwise. Less pollution since you could switch from gasoline to a less energy-dense fuel as you wouldn't be relying on the driver's memory and expectations in designing the vehicle. And getting people off their driving fetish should reduce the glamor of using a car and might help combat the obesity epidemic. It'd put them back into being a tool rather than some mystical thing we center our lives around.
Yes, that's why no cancer is curable. It's a death sentence, just like several decades ago. Drug companies simply make high-priced chemotherapy to squeeze out as much money as possible before you succumb to your illness.
Cancer mortality is measured by 5, 10, 15, 20 year survival rates, you wouldn't be able to tolerate chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation for anywhere near that long. So, if people aren't being treated, suffering symptoms, or dead, what does that imply?
Or, look at it from a business case. Company A has a cheap drug that cures the condition. Company B has an expensive drug that treats, but doesn't cure it. Which company's drug makes more money? Alternately, it takes ~10 years and a billion dollars to make a drug. Are you going to gamble that much on nobody coming out with something superior before you're able to recoup your investment? Or are you going to cure the condition and ensure there's no highly profitable potential market left for your competitors?
For the last paragraph to not be true, there'd have to be collusion of some sort. Do you really think that nobody would spill the beans on that? It'd be squandering trillions and costing millions of lives each year, so could everyone privy to that information really have no morality at all? Or would the aging politicians turn a blind eye to something that would hasten their own mortality? Perhaps the scare-mongering media would keep quiet about it.
This sounds quite promising, but I'd worry about DNA's melting point. Double stranded DNA will melt and become single stranded DNA at around 100 degrees Celsius. However, this melting point is quite variable since GC bonds are ~50% stronger than AT bonds, so the actual melting point could be much higher or much lower. AFAIK doing any sort of calculation requires heat to be produced, so I'd imagine you'd get localized melting of the DNA and disruption of the engineered structure if you did any significant amount of work on it. I'll be interested to see how they solve this problem, since you can't really do much to increase the strength or the number of hydrogen bonds.
Spermatogenesis, the process by which sperm mature from the dividing germ cells you were born with to the swimmers with which you're familiar, takes 64 days. If you kill all your [im]mature sperm then you are sterile for that period of time, and have reduced fertility for a little beyond that as your sperm count recovers. (I've no idea about the variation on that figure, but that's how I've always seen it presented, never "two months".) My initial impression was that the sound waves accomplished this, but that wouldn't explain sterility for the remaining four months.
I'm reminded of Gossypol, which was investigated as a potential male contraceptive pill. It's a toxin that damages the seminiferous epithelium, so no sperm are able to mature. Perhaps an ultrasound could do the same... Unfortunately, it turns out that it was a little too effective, and if your sperm count hit zero then the damage was too severe and regeneration wasn't possible, leading to permanent sterility. It seems plausible that damage by any other means would be similar...
That said, you sperm count doesn't need to hit zero for an effective contraceptive. Of the ~100 - 500 million sperm per shot, 90% are normally viable but only about 1000 of those make it to the egg, and collaborative effort is necessary to penetrate it. OTOH, I suppose you could be ungodly "lucky" and impregnate a woman with a sperm count in the thousands, but that's probably not worth considering (although it is a reason that it wouldn't be 100% effective).
I read it close enough. The same technique is used in amateur genetic engineering. People gardening or farming do the same, on a less sophisticated level. Homebrewers use yeast and aspergillus, both of which can cause disease. If you make an exception for research, would you also make one for hobbies? How about commercial agriculture (e.g. Roundup)? Yogurt making (probiotics)? Pet-raising (zoonotic infections)? All of these activities are breeding more resistant microbes, otherwise they wouldn't be possible. You'd have too many other microbes interfering to achieve the desired effect, so you need to breed resistance in the microbes you want. (IOW, that's exactly the same rationale behind antibiotic resistance in research, but it obviously has far more applications.)
If you want to ban something, the creation and use of biological weapons would be your target. But, IMHO, the loss of liberty would be too great for something so minor. I, for one, like to live in a world where we're free to toss a bug on somebody.
You have hundreds of items on your to-do list? At that point it seems like you'd spend more time managing the list rather than completing the items on it. I personally open a new tab when I encounter something I'd like to read after the current page (e.g. a Google Reader news item), but I don't open so many it'd take an hour or more to get to it.
Honestly, I can think of no worse or more dangerous crime.
You lack imagination!
More seriously, if creating resistant diseases were illegal then you'd shut down basically all genetic research on them. It's fairly standard to give bacteria antibiotic resistance so you can select for the ones that took up the genetic modifications.
Beyond that, your argument relies solely on motivation rather than effect. People stopping antibiotics prematurely are a lot more dangerous than someone intentionally creating shampoo-resistant lice. Promiscuous, unprotected sex breeds horrendous diseases (like the leading preventable cause of blindness). Lice won't kill you outside of some contrived scenario. But if motivations are what's important, then why stop cattle farmers from using vancomycin?
IOW, misguided actions based on good (or neutral) intentions are far more dangerous than pranksters. The world would be hellish if we cared more about what people think rather than what they do. Unfortunately, there seems to be an ever-present trend to do so.
So... what do we call the irrationals on the other side? The people that will "refute" point-by-point every claim a skeptic or denier makes, regardless of what the science says. They're fond of sensationalist hypotheticals, such as how high sea levels would rise if a large ice sheet melted, when the science says it's getting colder. They also love to attribute every last undesirable weather phenomenon to human CO2 production. Cold winter? AGW! Warm winter? AGW! Lightning caused a wildfire? AGW!
I've heard the term "alarmist" used before, but that implies they're just overstating the danger of things that are really happening. IMHO, the anti-industry radical environmentalists are one of the most counterproductive groups of which I am aware. Many of the crazy things they say get attributed to AGW as a whole and turn a lot of armchair skeptics into deniers. Deniers conflate the irrationals with all AGW proponents. Because they know that the crazy things they heard cannot be true, they are convinced that AGW is untrue as well. Giving such individuals a derogatory name would likely help to undo a bit of their counterproductive efforts.
Well, Perl does have taint checking, which I always liked. It refuses to perform an "unsafe" operation (e.g. open() or exec()) with data derived from unsanitized input. It certainly won't stop you from writing insecure programs, but it will catch an occasional oversight.
Would some TSA agent please leak an image of some politician please? One minor enough to still use commercial jets, but important enough to influence policy. That way, after a few comments like "well, obviously he's in favor of the giant building project", there'd be enough ruckus to get rid of these scanners. It's in their favor as well, since I know I definitely would not want to see certain people naked.
Perhaps it was an individual that made the mistake, but if it were a business then there should a fairly obvious set of safeguards. For example, the guy watching the stocks is OKed for trades in the "k" range, but if he tries to make a trade in the "m" range then a middle manager has to sign off on it. For trades in the "b" range I'd imagine the CEO would kinda want to be privy to that decision. Basically, the idea being that for unusually large transactions, get confirmation from someone who isn't doing the exact same thing.
Besides preventing errors like this one, such a system should be present just because it's good management. Also, how much damage do you want to enable one guy to do? He could become disgruntled, or have a brief psychotic episode or something and ruin a company without oversight! (That said, I'm posting this on Slashdot where many an IT folk could probably send their company to the stone age for a month and kill it that way...)
You can do three things with gold in the event of some complete economic meltdown. First, exploit the fact that most people will be in denial and still willing to trade useful items for gold, especially since it has such a strong financial tradition. Second, it's malleable enough that you could probably make stuff out of it using some simple tools. Third, it's easily heavy enough to hit someone with and take their less weaponizable but more useful items.
Wow, and here I thought the three keys I carry around were too many. (I keep separate keyrings for my car and for my rarely used ones). Unfortunately, one is a postbox key, so I can't have it duplicated and do anything interesting. That said, one idea I was toying around with was to duplicate the keys, then get someone with a machine shop to cut the base of the duplicates until they were only as wide as the rest of the key. Then I could swap them out for some unused tools on my pocket multitool. Some googling reveals that this isn't a novel idea.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When things don't behave like nails, some people get flustered and irritated with the "nail" rather than reassess their choice of tool.
This is why I'm curious as to the appeal of lie detectors in courtrooms. If there was an actual physiological change associated with lying, then the whole concept of lawyers and courtrooms becomes obsolete. Asking "Have you committed a crime?" with confirmation from the lie detector would be all that's required. Heck, police could start doing it to all suspects with portable versions, and drop off the people who failed at the local prison. The only point of a judge would be to determine sentence length, which, with a way to know what actually happened and what the motivations were, would basically lead to that just being a checklist. The suspect knew it was illegal? Add 6 months to the sentence.
Now, returning from our trek in fantasy land, lie detectors cannot work. Some people are terrible liars, but you can tell that in a jury trial. Others legitimately believe what they say to be the truth. "Did you commit a crime?" being a prime example. Serious criminals simply do not think like ordinary folk, a fact that should be obvious since ordinary folk (>98-99%) do not commit serious crimes. OTOH, for the situational crimes, the criminal's perception of reality is what would be detected by the lie detector, which probably has little resemblance to actual reality. Situational criminals don't knowingly do something evil, so they aren't "lying", whereas people who have the capacity to knowingly be evil aren't going to be flustered enough to be detected on a lie detector test.
Ok, thanks for mentioning GRACE, that satellite is seriously cool. Also, thanks for the explanation, that certainly makes sense of it. OTOH, the western peninsula of Antarctica doesn't seem to reflect the interior of the continent. It's less inhospitable nature makes it the most studied part, but it also is prone to changes that don't reflect the overall picture of Antarctica. (E.g. sea ice expansion partially, or perhaps completely, offsets the loss of ice on the peninsula.)
The ice loss from the peninsula is quite likely a positive feedback loop which might have been started by AGW, or it might have been started by something else. Either way, I'm a little concerned about that independently of AGW. The 400,000 year ice core temperature measurements show a very cyclic nature with rapid increases every 100,000 years or so. These rapid increases are surely due to positive feedback loops. Somehow, 10,000 years ago, this cycle seems to have been blunted, with a lower maximum and longer duration of semi-stable temperatures.
My main fear is that, AGW or not, these loops may be restarted, or the cooling loops started, either of which would lead to another mass extinction. I'm not too worried about humans, since we're adaptable, but as a biology major I'm horrified at the potential loss in biodiversity. Therefore, I think all this concern about anthropogenic CO2 is a little misplaced, since the cause is far less important than stopping some of those positive feedback loops. I'm unconvinced that completely halting net CO2 production, or even maintaining our current atmospheric temperature would accomplish that. One gripe I have about both AGW proponents and opponents are that they are too concerned about blame ("humans are responsible!", "no we're not!") and [not] correcting [non] destructive behaviors and not nearly concerned enough with reversing the trend rather than merely slowing or stopping it.
It seems I've had a bad run of flash games lately that exemplified a problem present in many games. You might have ten different weapons, each with their own time-consuming upgrade path or whatever, but only a couple are actually useful. Improper balance causes two problems. First, I have to use trial and error to determine what weapon the designers liked in this game. Second, the game becomes either too easy because I have the good weapon, or impossible because I'm not using a good weapon. In other words, strategy is useless, because it's either unnecessary or there's only one valid one (which, again, is determined through trial and error). Older games demonstrated this latter principle by having the boss who's immune to everything except his one weakness, which was only to get people to use the otherwise worthless POS weapon taking up space in your inventory.
The solution isn't to simplify games. That just takes out the trial and error, which makes it less annoying, but equally boring. The solution is to balance perfectly. This is very hard. Sadly, the universe tolerates a lot of mediocrity, so the mediocre game developers will continue to screw this up and make mediocre games. Alternatively, they'll screw it up by adding useless pseudo-variation, like two rapid firing weapons with slightly different damage/reload times, but identical damage per second against high HP enemies. At which point players pick their weapon based on the graphics and animations.
2. Arctic and antarctic to warm faster than rest of the planet - predicted by all models. Observed.
I haven't been keeping up with the latest news in climatology, but the last I heard Antartica was getting colder, and the sea ice was expanding. This is directly contrary to the prediction that it should be warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world. But AGW is a hydra, so the loss of that head did nothing to it. I assume there's some rationalization for why the prediction is wrong (or even better, that prediction went down the memory hole; AGW has always predicted Antarctica would cool initially).
I was originally a supporter of AGW, became a "skeptic" when I saw data that didn't fit that theory, and became apathetic when I realized that AGW will not be falsified (hence why I'm not going to bother verifying the other claims). There's probably something to it, but it's not a scientific theory so far as I'm concerned, which makes me not really care about it. Runaway CO2 production can't be maintained indefinitely without having effects, so if it gets cut, great. If the economy tanks in the process my student loans will likely become easier to pay back when I start to care about them in a few years.