What about mitochondrial deterioration, and beta-amyloid plaque buildup?
"On the bright side, you'll look fantastic until the day you die, and you could live until you're 150. On the downside you'll likely develop mitochondrial disease and Alzheimer's, and will spend your last years good-looking and debilitated, as a vegetable."
These two treatments only address two symptoms and ignore several other major chronic, progressive problems that are part of the spectrum of age-related disorders. I wish her luck trying to sneak off and get any other treatments. Talk about jumping the gun.:(
He has had a hysterectomy, has taken T / lived as a man for eight years, and only a handful of people have ever known him as "her." Here in Ohio, he changed his name easily enough, and his driver's license was easy enough to change, but it ends there.
To change federal status you need to revise your birth certificate, which is up to your state of residence. In some states you can easily change your birth certificate, not in Ohio. As I recall, in Ohio you are still required to prove you have had all of the surgical procedures (in his case, doctor's statements signing off on a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and penile reconstruction) in order to have your birth certificate gender changed. From there you can send in your birth certificate to the department of social security to be issued a new social security card and a new passport.
Alternately, you can lie to the passport people and tell them that your birth certificate has the wrong gender. You send them the copy of your state driver's license as proof, and they correct it, then you send your passport and driver's license as proof to social security, and they correct it. You'll still have the screwed up birth certificate. Thanks, Ohio.
For transgender and intersex people this is archaic. For my state, it's embarrassing. For my friend, it means that a bearded, deep-voiced, guy (in every apparent aspect) still has documentation out there stating that a well-adjusted hetero dude who is obviously a "he" -- believe me you'd never guess -- is still considered a "she."
Just to clarify, the Carrington event was not an extinction event. Yes, it fucked up electrical grid type thingies (devices connected to large antennas of copper strung between stations separated by many miles), but it did not have sufficient energy to vaporize, ionize, or otherwise cook things at the microscopic level of the pits on optical media. Had it actually done so, thee, me, the birdees and the beeses would no longer be here.
Empirical evidence (the more or less continual presence of life on Earth for the past 6,500 to 3.75 billion years) would seem to indicate that our star doesn't misbehave in this fashion, so step back, breathe, and for God's sake cut back on the hyperbole.:)
Terrorist Jim: Bob, we will have you wear the antimagnet cloaking suit. All we have to do is have you walk into a restroom right before you go through the scanner, open this forty gallon Thermos container and pour the liquid nitrogen all over yourself.
You'll walk to airport security and pass through the security check with no problems.
Day of the terrorist strike.
Bob enters the airport dragging a heavy carry-on suitcase. His suit is disproportionately large compared to his body, and seems quite stiff. He moves with great difficulty.
He takes his luggage into the airport restroom and enters a bathroom stall. Witnesses report a hissing noise and a strange fog coming from under the stall door. There's a splashing noise, followed by a sizzling sound and a loud wail. Bob flings open the bathroom stall to reveal his suit, bathed in vapor. Steam rises from his exposed cracked skin. He takes two steps and falls to the floor, writhing in pain, as parts of his suit shatter and skin sloughs from his hands.
Terrorist Jim (upon seeing the news reports): So next time, we strap a small refrigeration unit to Sam's back...
Given time, they'll find their focus. This is the balance I have been waiting for since the Tea Party came into the picture. The US needs a citizen-originated anti-corporatist organization. We need a powerful "grass roots" movement to answer the swing to pro-corporation anti-worker conservatism we've taken. I see OWS as the first step in a corrective turn away from fascism and back towards a more humane democracy. I'm hoping it will eventually provide the yang to the Tea Party's yin.
I was a child of the 60's, raised in the 70's when the 60's optimism was still relatively fresh in some people. I've been waiting for the awakening that was promised but never delivered by the great demonstrations of that era.
It is long overdue.
Test it to see if it can withstand sufficient spin. If it can, tunnel under the surface and create inverse domes, etc. Spin it up. Apply thrust. Live on the ceilings. Find a comet with sufficient hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and trace elements. Send it on the same course, separated by a safe but commutable distance. You have your generation ship and your food supply.
Of course, the thrust to move such huge bodies is a problem, but if we're talking about thousand year journeys I'd hope we would have solved that particular problem.
-Joe
People will take a phenomenon verified by hundreds of scientists in dozens of studies, global warming, and dismiss it because they got stuck in a snow drift. Then they'll turn around and forward an email that cites a brother's wife's uncle's cousin as breathless proof of impending calamity? I know the answer -- people are stupid. The question is purely rhetorical.:)
As the most populous state in the union vis à vis the largest textbook market, it seemed odd to me that California would lose out to Texas in deciding what content textbooks should contain.
How about giving the rest of the US a choice between Texas-styled and California-styled editions of textbooks? Although one version is obviously most cost effective for publishers, two versions isn't as bad as fifty separate editions.
-Joe
they haven't worked in the field long enough. All it takes to develop a different perspective is one twenty four hour work day and a supervisor who complains that his icons are misarranged on his desktop.
It's like reporting on the flavor of turkey in a Vegan magazine, or presenting a paper on the physical evidence for unicorns for peer review by Nature.
Listed somewhat chronologically:
Beowulf, Shelley's "Frankenstein", Verne "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas", Wells "War of the Worlds", Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451", Asimov "I Robot", Ellison "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream", Clarke "Childhood's End", and Card's "Ender's Game".
CCR5 is not about antibodies. I'm one of the individuals with the homozygous (two copies) CCR5 Delta 32 mutation. It's a deletion mutation, meaning that I lack functional receptors HIV-1 binds to on the surface of my T-cells. My understanding is that except for theoretical strains of HIV that bind to the CXCR4 co-receptor, most of the strains prevalent in the wild will have no more effect on me than parvo virus.
That doesn't mean I get a free pass to be irresponsible, but it does mean that I stand a significantly reduced chance of contracting HIV through stupid behavior, that if smallpox ever breaks out I'll be really busy helping to heal the sick, that bubonic plague isn't too much of a problem for me either, but that West Nile can really screw me up.
One through three are good points, and your comment is excellent. The one sticking point for me though is birthing a non-human sentient being for experimental purposes. If it has human-level intelligence, is carried to term, and is used for experimental purposes I feel a line has been crossed.
I feel your point number four is equally as loathsome. For most humans -- at least at a level somewhere below that of the average elected official (ba-dum-bum) -- a brain isn't spare tissue.:)
In my opinion individual rights just about always trump collective rights. About the only exceptions I could think about are when you're talking about minor rights for the individual and very fundamental rights for the society, but I'm hard-pressed to even come up with a good example that doesn't boil down to infringement of the rights of many individuals. The right of society (or even individuals) to advance knowledge does not trump the individual rights to life and liberty, and yet this is exactly what is proposed.
Over the past ten years we have seen the erosion of individual rights in many Western countries. I'm thinking that a neanderthal child will be born, somewhere, in the next hundred years. A question might be whether it occurs in a public lab or a corporate lab. With corporations now allowed to patent genomes, a human-compatible immune system with complete immunity to several of our peskier diseases might be damned attractive. Maybe neanderthals have a better mechanism for processing cholesterol? Wouldn't it be nice to know, and think of the money we could make?
A pertinent discussion might be: what should the legal punishment be for bringing an extinct hominid back to life with no ethical oversight? I'd say it's a crime against humanity on par with NAZI experimentation.
It has nothing to do with the Geico commercials. As other posters have noted, the simple fact of the matter is the "resurrection" of a non-human species, be it homo neanderthalensis (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or homo florensis, will happen some time this century.
The DNA we have extracted from mammoth hair is from two individual mammoths who died between twenty and sixty thousand years ago. The supposed limit of DNA viability is roughly sixty thousand years. H. neanderthalensis went extinct less than fifteen thousand years ago. H. florensis is thought to have been around as recently as the past thirteen thousand years. I'd say we stand a good chance of recovering genetic material from either, or both of these species.
Should we bring these species out of evolutionary retirement? It's a dilemma:
1. How badly do scientists want to cheese off the world's major religions? I am ambivalent towards this. Ya know, some of the self-righteous pious freaks we have walking around spouting nonsense today deserve a swift kick in the nads. Still, is it worth the potential backlash?
2. Is this ethically justifiable? What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study? How will we justify the potential gain in knowledge versus the rights of the resultant being when he or she is carried to term, reared, and socialized? Will he or she have full rights? Will he or she be able to be valued within society? Is some loony with a gun going to go "big game hunting" or "abominatinon-killing"?
3. Someone else in the comments discussed dealing with this individual if he or she is significantly psychologically and mentally different from us. What can we offer such an individual besides life in a high tech zoo?
4. Some things will be forever beyond us. We'll never hear true Neanderthal language, we'll never observe untainted Neanderthal culture, and a feral child experiment with any of the homo genus we'd be capable of bring back is pretty much unconscionable. Are we looking for answers where there are none?
I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?
If they answer "yes" I put a small mark on their application next to their experience. I find this answer indicates naïvété. I hear "I don't have enough experience to have realistic views or expectations of the field." In this case a "yes" answer drops them a bit lower in ranking.
Work in IT long enough that you experience your first dressing down (because his favorite screen saver quit working) from an idiotic supervisor whose idea of advanced technology is a toaster. Work in IT long enough to have your non-IT coworkers complain that they see you around all the time when the network is working correctly, and you disappear (into the NOC) when the network goes down. Work in IT long enough to *not* hear praise at how quickly you recovered the entire system after the server crash, but hear instead about how much overtime you burned (40 hours) in two days.
If you say "yes" after all of that, either you're lying or you're so pumped up on Prozac you could giggle your way through Saw IV.:)
Exactly so. NASA is simply speeding up the process.
Talking about unusual contaminants, in my home town we had a particularly disturbing incident a few years ago at our local reservoir. A fisherman drowned. No body turned up. A month later divers found him, stuck in the city water intake... For a month we had been drinking the most interesting "tea." Three days later they reported his body found washed up on shore. It sounded better in the newspaper.
Once the water has been filtered and treated, its source no longer matters.
-Joe
P.S. What if my toothbrush is shut in the medicine cabinet?
The homozygous CCR5 Delta 32 mutation is believed to occur in one in one hundred individuals of northern European descent. I am one of those individuals. Unfortunately for me, I rolled snake-eyes when it comes to lipid regulation, so hyperlipidemia seems to be poised to do to me (now in my mid 40's) what smallpox, bubonic plague, and HIV cannot.
Several companies offer tests for this allele. Possessing it is not an excuse to be irresponsible. There are variants of HIV that can infect T4 cells using the CCR4 coreceptor, as well as all of the other lovely diseases that can be acquired through unsafe practices.
From what I read it should be possible to create images from paired photons over any distance. If we can read a photon a meter distant by observing its entangled twin, can't we just as easily do the same trick with photons from the edge of the visible universe?
Slashdot Mirror
What about mitochondrial deterioration, and beta-amyloid plaque buildup?
"On the bright side, you'll look fantastic until the day you die, and you could live until you're 150. On the downside you'll likely develop mitochondrial disease and Alzheimer's, and will spend your last years good-looking and debilitated, as a vegetable."
These two treatments only address two symptoms and ignore several other major chronic, progressive problems that are part of the spectrum of age-related disorders. I wish her luck trying to sneak off and get any other treatments. Talk about jumping the gun. :(
Only if we can teach the controversy about Biblical creation?
"he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn."
Their little heads can only hold so much!
He has had a hysterectomy, has taken T / lived as a man for eight years, and only a handful of people have ever known him as "her." Here in Ohio, he changed his name easily enough, and his driver's license was easy enough to change, but it ends there.
To change federal status you need to revise your birth certificate, which is up to your state of residence. In some states you can easily change your birth certificate, not in Ohio. As I recall, in Ohio you are still required to prove you have had all of the surgical procedures (in his case, doctor's statements signing off on a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and penile reconstruction) in order to have your birth certificate gender changed. From there you can send in your birth certificate to the department of social security to be issued a new social security card and a new passport.
Alternately, you can lie to the passport people and tell them that your birth certificate has the wrong gender. You send them the copy of your state driver's license as proof, and they correct it, then you send your passport and driver's license as proof to social security, and they correct it. You'll still have the screwed up birth certificate. Thanks, Ohio.
For transgender and intersex people this is archaic. For my state, it's embarrassing. For my friend, it means that a bearded, deep-voiced, guy (in every apparent aspect) still has documentation out there stating that a well-adjusted hetero dude who is obviously a "he" -- believe me you'd never guess -- is still considered a "she."
Just to clarify, the Carrington event was not an extinction event. Yes, it fucked up electrical grid type thingies (devices connected to large antennas of copper strung between stations separated by many miles), but it did not have sufficient energy to vaporize, ionize, or otherwise cook things at the microscopic level of the pits on optical media. Had it actually done so, thee, me, the birdees and the beeses would no longer be here.
Empirical evidence (the more or less continual presence of life on Earth for the past 6,500 to 3.75 billion years) would seem to indicate that our star doesn't misbehave in this fashion, so step back, breathe, and for God's sake cut back on the hyperbole. :)
Terrorist Jim: Bob, we will have you wear the antimagnet cloaking suit. All we have to do is have you walk into a restroom right before you go through the scanner, open this forty gallon Thermos container and pour the liquid nitrogen all over yourself.
You'll walk to airport security and pass through the security check with no problems.
Day of the terrorist strike.
Bob enters the airport dragging a heavy carry-on suitcase. His suit is disproportionately large compared to his body, and seems quite stiff. He moves with great difficulty.
He takes his luggage into the airport restroom and enters a bathroom stall. Witnesses report a hissing noise and a strange fog coming from under the stall door. There's a splashing noise, followed by a sizzling sound and a loud wail. Bob flings open the bathroom stall to reveal his suit, bathed in vapor. Steam rises from his exposed cracked skin. He takes two steps and falls to the floor, writhing in pain, as parts of his suit shatter and skin sloughs from his hands.
Terrorist Jim (upon seeing the news reports): So next time, we strap a small refrigeration unit to Sam's back ...
Given time, they'll find their focus. This is the balance I have been waiting for since the Tea Party came into the picture. The US needs a citizen-originated anti-corporatist organization. We need a powerful "grass roots" movement to answer the swing to pro-corporation anti-worker conservatism we've taken. I see OWS as the first step in a corrective turn away from fascism and back towards a more humane democracy. I'm hoping it will eventually provide the yang to the Tea Party's yin. I was a child of the 60's, raised in the 70's when the 60's optimism was still relatively fresh in some people. I've been waiting for the awakening that was promised but never delivered by the great demonstrations of that era. It is long overdue.
Test it to see if it can withstand sufficient spin. If it can, tunnel under the surface and create inverse domes, etc. Spin it up. Apply thrust. Live on the ceilings. Find a comet with sufficient hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and trace elements. Send it on the same course, separated by a safe but commutable distance. You have your generation ship and your food supply. Of course, the thrust to move such huge bodies is a problem, but if we're talking about thousand year journeys I'd hope we would have solved that particular problem. -Joe
more moving people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTzMeDiv-7U
People will take a phenomenon verified by hundreds of scientists in dozens of studies, global warming, and dismiss it because they got stuck in a snow drift. Then they'll turn around and forward an email that cites a brother's wife's uncle's cousin as breathless proof of impending calamity? I know the answer -- people are stupid. The question is purely rhetorical. :)
As the most populous state in the union vis à vis the largest textbook market, it seemed odd to me that California would lose out to Texas in deciding what content textbooks should contain. How about giving the rest of the US a choice between Texas-styled and California-styled editions of textbooks? Although one version is obviously most cost effective for publishers, two versions isn't as bad as fifty separate editions. -Joe
they haven't worked in the field long enough. All it takes to develop a different perspective is one twenty four hour work day and a supervisor who complains that his icons are misarranged on his desktop.
It's like reporting on the flavor of turkey in a Vegan magazine, or presenting a paper on the physical evidence for unicorns for peer review by Nature.
Listed somewhat chronologically: Beowulf, Shelley's "Frankenstein", Verne "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas", Wells "War of the Worlds", Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451", Asimov "I Robot", Ellison "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream", Clarke "Childhood's End", and Card's "Ender's Game".
They just don't get it.
CCR5 is not about antibodies. I'm one of the individuals with the homozygous (two copies) CCR5 Delta 32 mutation. It's a deletion mutation, meaning that I lack functional receptors HIV-1 binds to on the surface of my T-cells. My understanding is that except for theoretical strains of HIV that bind to the CXCR4 co-receptor, most of the strains prevalent in the wild will have no more effect on me than parvo virus.
That doesn't mean I get a free pass to be irresponsible, but it does mean that I stand a significantly reduced chance of contracting HIV through stupid behavior, that if smallpox ever breaks out I'll be really busy helping to heal the sick, that bubonic plague isn't too much of a problem for me either, but that West Nile can really screw me up.
One through three are good points, and your comment is excellent. The one sticking point for me though is birthing a non-human sentient being for experimental purposes. If it has human-level intelligence, is carried to term, and is used for experimental purposes I feel a line has been crossed.
:)
I feel your point number four is equally as loathsome. For most humans -- at least at a level somewhere below that of the average elected official (ba-dum-bum) -- a brain isn't spare tissue.
-Joe
Over the past ten years we have seen the erosion of individual rights in many Western countries. I'm thinking that a neanderthal child will be born, somewhere, in the next hundred years. A question might be whether it occurs in a public lab or a corporate lab. With corporations now allowed to patent genomes, a human-compatible immune system with complete immunity to several of our peskier diseases might be damned attractive. Maybe neanderthals have a better mechanism for processing cholesterol? Wouldn't it be nice to know, and think of the money we could make?
A pertinent discussion might be: what should the legal punishment be for bringing an extinct hominid back to life with no ethical oversight? I'd say it's a crime against humanity on par with NAZI experimentation.
-Joe
It has nothing to do with the Geico commercials. As other posters have noted, the simple fact of the matter is the "resurrection" of a non-human species, be it homo neanderthalensis (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or homo florensis, will happen some time this century.
The DNA we have extracted from mammoth hair is from two individual mammoths who died between twenty and sixty thousand years ago. The supposed limit of DNA viability is roughly sixty thousand years. H. neanderthalensis went extinct less than fifteen thousand years ago. H. florensis is thought to have been around as recently as the past thirteen thousand years. I'd say we stand a good chance of recovering genetic material from either, or both of these species.
Should we bring these species out of evolutionary retirement? It's a dilemma:
1. How badly do scientists want to cheese off the world's major religions? I am ambivalent towards this. Ya know, some of the self-righteous pious freaks we have walking around spouting nonsense today deserve a swift kick in the nads. Still, is it worth the potential backlash?
2. Is this ethically justifiable? What could we do with a living genome that we could not do with that genome in a comparative study? How will we justify the potential gain in knowledge versus the rights of the resultant being when he or she is carried to term, reared, and socialized? Will he or she have full rights? Will he or she be able to be valued within society? Is some loony with a gun going to go "big game hunting" or "abominatinon-killing"?
3. Someone else in the comments discussed dealing with this individual if he or she is significantly psychologically and mentally different from us. What can we offer such an individual besides life in a high tech zoo?
4. Some things will be forever beyond us. We'll never hear true Neanderthal language, we'll never observe untainted Neanderthal culture, and a feral child experiment with any of the homo genus we'd be capable of bring back is pretty much unconscionable. Are we looking for answers where there are none?
I guess it comes down to what we can learn versus the risks. I think the one thing we might be able to learn from h. neanderthalensis is how we as a species look to an outside observer. Do we really want them to look us in the eyes and tell us what they see?
I'm not certain we're prepared for it.
-Joe
If they answer "yes" I put a small mark on their application next to their experience. I find this answer indicates naïvété. I hear "I don't have enough experience to have realistic views or expectations of the field." In this case a "yes" answer drops them a bit lower in ranking.
:)
Work in IT long enough that you experience your first dressing down (because his favorite screen saver quit working) from an idiotic supervisor whose idea of advanced technology is a toaster. Work in IT long enough to have your non-IT coworkers complain that they see you around all the time when the network is working correctly, and you disappear (into the NOC) when the network goes down. Work in IT long enough to *not* hear praise at how quickly you recovered the entire system after the server crash, but hear instead about how much overtime you burned (40 hours) in two days.
If you say "yes" after all of that, either you're lying or you're so pumped up on Prozac you could giggle your way through Saw IV.
-Joe
Exactly so. NASA is simply speeding up the process.
... For a month we had been drinking the most interesting "tea." Three days later they reported his body found washed up on shore. It sounded better in the newspaper.
Talking about unusual contaminants, in my home town we had a particularly disturbing incident a few years ago at our local reservoir. A fisherman drowned. No body turned up. A month later divers found him, stuck in the city water intake
Once the water has been filtered and treated, its source no longer matters.
-Joe
P.S. What if my toothbrush is shut in the medicine cabinet?
The homozygous CCR5 Delta 32 mutation is believed to occur in one in one hundred individuals of northern European descent. I am one of those individuals. Unfortunately for me, I rolled snake-eyes when it comes to lipid regulation, so hyperlipidemia seems to be poised to do to me (now in my mid 40's) what smallpox, bubonic plague, and HIV cannot.
Several companies offer tests for this allele. Possessing it is not an excuse to be irresponsible. There are variants of HIV that can infect T4 cells using the CCR4 coreceptor, as well as all of the other lovely diseases that can be acquired through unsafe practices.
-Joe
From what I read it should be possible to create images from paired photons over any distance. If we can read a photon a meter distant by observing its entangled twin, can't we just as easily do the same trick with photons from the edge of the visible universe?
-Joe
Micreor? Asterissimal?