I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Just up the canyon was a pair of angry, grumpy old miners whose hobby mine had collapsed during an earthquake. In a Monty Python-esque manner, they rebuilt it and it collapsed again during an earthquake, and they realized that it was exactly one month after the first collapse. They rebuilt it AGAIN and it collapsed again during an earthquake... one month later. So they started tracking earthquakes. One or more small earthquakes each month, like clockwork. Other people were doing the same thing, and finally tracked it to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which was dumping wastes (according to rumor, tens of tons of nerve gas) by injecting them into a 5000 meter deep well. Let me make that clear: they were pumping some of the deadliest toxins known into the ground, and causing earthquakes. How messed-up is that?
Here's a page about other deep injection-caused earthquakes. A number of geologists have made the case that we should start doing this on purpose to trigger small earthquakes and relieve the fault line strain that later produces a big earthquake, but the liability concerns for suits from injuries received in a small, intentional earthquake are too great. I think John McPhee talked about this in his book "The Control Of Nature." If he didn't, he should have.
When MY house got graffitied the other day, I had a note on my door from the local police department within two hours. It said that I had one week to remove the graffiti, after which time I'd get fined. I'm not saying Wikipedia should be held to these standards, but homeowners often are.
Here's a better link to amino-acid-deficient bacteria used for reversion mutation testing, as the standard test for safety of food additives. Again, this is an industry standard test, done thousands of times each day, and it relies on evolution being functional. Not theory, not proposed, but observable, repeatable, and proveable.
So the way you test the mutation-causing tendency (mutagenicity) of a chemical is: you take a bunch of bacteria that are lac-, which is to say they cannot use the sugar lactose as an energy source. You expose them to the chemical in question, dilute them to a known concentration of bacteria per volume of solution, and then try and grow them on an agar plate that contains only lactose as an energy source. You count the number of colonies that grow. Since you know how much material you dumped on the plate, and you know the concentration of bacteria in the material, you know how many bacteria you just dumped in. You divide the number of colonies by the number of bacteria and get a small number, somewhere between 0 and 1. (it'll be a lot closer to zero.) The larger the number, the more mutagenic the chemical. The point being, that it damaged the bacterial DNA, and in repairing the damage, some bacteria managed to start digesting lactose, so they lived. All the others, the ones that weren't damaged or the ones that were damaged some other way, starved.
That is evolution. That is evolution happening in *one* generation.
This test is done every day in every large chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics company in the world, thousands of times. It is an industry standard. It is observable, repeatable, and proveable.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation sez that there have been roughly 10 trillion generations of bacteria in the history of life. If we can see bacteria go from starving to suddenly able to digest and live on lactose in just one generation, how much more could they do in 10 trillion generations? Develop eyes? Seems pretty low-caliber to me. Imagine how much more they could've done in that period if intelligently guided: we'd all be immortal, telepathic, and flying.
Go makeup shopping with your girlfriend some time, and then tell me that people don't automatically value high-price items over low-price with no consideration of 'goodness', whatever that is. Perception is part of the price.
Or take a look at people who spend $20 on Old Navy t-shirts, when they can buy the *same* shirt (as in, made by same company with same fabric) for $8.
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this (particularly the t-shirt thing) and about how in an era of mass-produced items, when the cost of production approaches zero the driving determinant in cost may become its perceived value by others: conspicuous consumption.
There IS a term for this and I wish I could remember what it is. I ran into this idea in a communications course, where they talked about Watergate. Apparently Nixon originally was thought to oppose the idea, so Liddy and Haldeman proposed a scheme that involved helicopters and jet boats and cost millions of dollars, and Nixon said "no way" so they scaled it down a bit to just involve twelve people and complicated timing and stuff and Nixon wavered so they backed down to just a couple guys burglarizing the headquarters on foot and he went for it. Traditional bargaining also involves this psychology, particularly on the seller's side: I've been told "ask for 50% more than what you'll settle for."
I think that they talk about this in Urey's book "Getting To Yes."
I don't know about where you live, but we've had a consistent death every other year in the county where I grew up. I assume it's higher for the state as a whole. Way more people die of hantavirus around here than the plague, but that's mostly because doctors are expecting to see the plague and treatment is very effective once the IMVIC test comes back indicating Y. pestis. The problem is that it's SO FAST that often people feel tired and start coughing and by the time they head towards the doctor they're about halfway to dead. When from 'coughing noticeably' to 'dead' is sometimes less than ten hours you're counting heavily on luck for survival. The good thing is that they can track down everyone you've been in contact with and give them big doses of antibiotics, which solves everything for everyone else.
I purport to have some idea what I'm talking about.
A lot of reputable people say that the 1917-1919 influenza didn't start in the trenches, it started at an Army training base in the United States.
The main reason smallpox is (mostly) gone is because so few species are affected by it, so we could, through immunization and very dedicated pursuit and isolation of infected people, eliminate it throughout the world. It was quite lethal but existed for hundreds, probably thousands of years, killing in cycles as new groups of suseptible people grew up. Same with the Black Plague, which has much higher mortality rates than either smallpox or the Spanish Flu of 1917 -- 70-90%, according to some estimates -- yet has raged in fifteen or more major waves across Europe over 800 years, and still kills people to this day. Or AIDS, which has a 100% (well, 99.99999999%, maybe) mortality rate. All the vector has to do is kill its host significantly more slowly than it spreads: if it can extend its transmissible time, and reduce the minimum dose required for infection, it greatly increases its amplification.
In my epidemiology class, one of the things we talked about was the last 'major' anthrax problem in the US, which was showing up in people who owned horses in places all across the world. They finally tracked it to wool saddle blankets being shipped out of Pakistan. So materials handling can be a good vector for transport. Maybe they were all sniffing their saddle blankets: I don't know.
The Plague, aka The Black Death, aka yersinia pestis, can be fatal within a day of being inhaled, with mortality reaching 80% if untreated (which, until fairly recently, was usually the case, because you were probably dead before they figured out why you were sick) whereas the other major form of infection, bubonic, takes quite a bit longer and has much more predictable symptoms. Septicemic plague is as fast as pneumonic, but it's harder to get, unless you, I dunno, run over an infected prairie dog with a lawnmower and one of its bone fragments gets shot into your leg.
There was a fairly recent article in the IEEE Spectrum about this. Saudi Arabia guarantees its state-owned phone company a profit, based on user fees. VoIP interferes with this, so they've contracted with some California company that writes so-called deep packet filtering software to block VoIP entirely on the networks that the Saudi government can get to. This was discussed in an earlier slashdot thread. Apparently they actually just look at information in the headers, so it should be fairly easy to evade, currently. But I can think of some ways to degrade service by basing intentional packet loss on a statistical analysis of packet frequency, that might work pretty well to make VoIP useless rather than actually outright banning it.
Anyone who doesn't think the Bible is interpreted, doesn't know the Bible. I have yet to meet a Christian, including some of my old-time-in-six-days unreconstructed fundamentalist friends, who lives like the Bible says people are supposed to live. They all rely on interpretation, and more particularly their personal interpretation (as evinced by them living the way all their friends do without having ever rigorously thought about why they're doing what they're doing) to get them through the day.
Next time you meet a guy who claims to be a literalist Christian, ask him how he justifies cutting his hair.
I think proposing the '.xxx' domain and then withdrawing it because of pressure from the Bush administration would count as politically questionable.
The whole argument is stupid and based on the false premise that the Internet is controllable, and that the US or ICANN can be forced to do anything, coz they CAN'T, any more than we can force the Chinese to stop speaking Chinese. But the ICANN didn't win any trust points by bending over for Bush on the pornography thing.
I read the original article in IEEE, and am more than a little curious about it. They seem to claim/imply that they can handle even encrypted data streams. I'm wondering whether it's a statistical filter: whether they're just imposing some sort of packet speed limit and if a stream between X and Y with packet header Z has more than that rate they start randomly deleting packets. I don't see how else they could do this -- but then again, they've been working on it for seven years. If you have any idea, I'd love to know about it.
There's a good Science News article about eye evolution that indicates that there have been many independent developments of the physical hardware supporting an initial light-sensitive patch, but the patch itself might be fairly unique. (Including some groovy stuff about a gene that stimulates spontaneous eye generation all over insect bodies: at the tips of their feet and such.)
This guy agrees, claiming that the light-sensitive patch genes are pretty conserved.
However, this crowd seems to think that although opsins are remarkably well-conserved across different phyla, the controlling genes that the abovementioned people were obsessed by control many other gene families, besides eye development, so it's still possible that there are different complete eye evolution families.
They talk a bit about fish and squid eyes: I didn't know that squids and octopi have inverted (compared to mammals) retinal structures. They must be *very* good at low-light conditions.
One thing to consider is that eyes have apparently evolved multiple times. Spiders have several sets of eyes, that serve different purposes, none of them very similar to mammalian eyes.
This guy writes about one type of crustacean in which males and females have different numbers of eyes, and different types, which seem to have all evolved independently of one another.
I've read some estimates that there are 20 different eye families, with separate evolution backgrounds.
What the ID people consistently fail to realize is that 2 billion years is a long, long, long, long, long time. Since they deny that life's been around for 2 billion years, they can't comprehend how many generations, and how much evolutionary change (aka 'progress'), can happen in that much time. Fifteen trillion generations of bacteria, given some (probably lousy) assumptions, can generate a whole lot of complexity, including eyes. Michael Behe has much more of a chance with bacterial flagellae, but even that isn't 'irreducibly complex'.
The reason (I RTFA in dead-tree form) that Saudi Arabia is blocking VoIP calls is that their stupid government *guarantees profit* for their state-sponsored telco, so VoIP, by depriving them of their legally guaranteed income, is being blocked or badly degraded. Once other companies and countries saw that, a lot of ISP's that offer VoIP started doing the same thing to competitors' services. Kind of makes you wonder how person with ISP A's service is going to call person on ISP B's service, when each is blocking the other's service, doesn't it?
I've gotten clocked doing insane speeds on my bike. Consider: it's carbon-fiber with steel spokes in the wheels. The spokes at the top of the wheel are going twice as fast as I am (like the tops of wheels do) and have the highest radar reflectivity of anything on the bike. One of my biker friends successfully challenge a speeding ticket based on this argument.
I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Their airport is at 9950 feet elevation. I would've had to dig quite a hole to join the Mile High Club. (For some reason, oh maybe it was the sucky performance of airplanes at that altitude, I've never used my pilot certificate in Leadville.)
I tried replying by email but probably screwed it up: I'm good at that. I got a Lincoln SquareWave 175. I'm really impressed with it. Home foundry work is not very difficult, although it takes some space and understanding neighbors. Green sand (water/clay sand) can be mulled with a shovel with acceptable results, unlike oil-based sands, which do require a full muller.
buncha other stuff I was going to say but now I can't remember it all, and I've a bunch of work anyway: more later.
I like your sig. My girlfriend's version of that is: "I like my women like I like my Scotch: twelve years old and full of coke."
(*I* don't feel comfortable using that one, hence the attribution. She's crazy and a girl, so she can get away with it.)
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Just up the canyon was a pair of angry, grumpy old miners whose hobby mine had collapsed during an earthquake. In a Monty Python-esque manner, they rebuilt it and it collapsed again during an earthquake, and they realized that it was exactly one month after the first collapse. They rebuilt it AGAIN and it collapsed again during an earthquake... one month later. So they started tracking earthquakes. One or more small earthquakes each month, like clockwork. Other people were doing the same thing, and finally tracked it to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which was dumping wastes (according to rumor, tens of tons of nerve gas) by injecting them into a 5000 meter deep well. Let me make that clear: they were pumping some of the deadliest toxins known into the ground, and causing earthquakes. How messed-up is that? Here's a page about other deep injection-caused earthquakes. A number of geologists have made the case that we should start doing this on purpose to trigger small earthquakes and relieve the fault line strain that later produces a big earthquake, but the liability concerns for suits from injuries received in a small, intentional earthquake are too great. I think John McPhee talked about this in his book "The Control Of Nature." If he didn't, he should have.
Omnia AOL in quartuor partes divisa est.
I thought about changing my .sig to "analogies are like dead fish" but I didn't figure it was funny enough. Maybe I was wrong.
When MY house got graffitied the other day, I had a note on my door from the local police department within two hours. It said that I had one week to remove the graffiti, after which time I'd get fined. I'm not saying Wikipedia should be held to these standards, but homeowners often are.
Here's a better link to amino-acid-deficient bacteria used for reversion mutation testing, as the standard test for safety of food additives. Again, this is an industry standard test, done thousands of times each day, and it relies on evolution being functional. Not theory, not proposed, but observable, repeatable, and proveable.
That is evolution. That is evolution happening in *one* generation.
This test is done every day in every large chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics company in the world, thousands of times. It is an industry standard. It is observable, repeatable, and proveable.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation sez that there have been roughly 10 trillion generations of bacteria in the history of life. If we can see bacteria go from starving to suddenly able to digest and live on lactose in just one generation, how much more could they do in 10 trillion generations? Develop eyes? Seems pretty low-caliber to me. Imagine how much more they could've done in that period if intelligently guided: we'd all be immortal, telepathic, and flying.
(here's a partial discussion of mutagenesis and restriction plating.)
Go makeup shopping with your girlfriend some time, and then tell me that people don't automatically value high-price items over low-price with no consideration of 'goodness', whatever that is. Perception is part of the price.
Or take a look at people who spend $20 on Old Navy t-shirts, when they can buy the *same* shirt (as in, made by same company with same fabric) for $8.
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this (particularly the t-shirt thing) and about how in an era of mass-produced items, when the cost of production approaches zero the driving determinant in cost may become its perceived value by others: conspicuous consumption.
There IS a term for this and I wish I could remember what it is. I ran into this idea in a communications course, where they talked about Watergate. Apparently Nixon originally was thought to oppose the idea, so Liddy and Haldeman proposed a scheme that involved helicopters and jet boats and cost millions of dollars, and Nixon said "no way" so they scaled it down a bit to just involve twelve people and complicated timing and stuff and Nixon wavered so they backed down to just a couple guys burglarizing the headquarters on foot and he went for it. Traditional bargaining also involves this psychology, particularly on the seller's side: I've been told "ask for 50% more than what you'll settle for." I think that they talk about this in Urey's book "Getting To Yes."
I don't know about where you live, but we've had a consistent death every other year in the county where I grew up. I assume it's higher for the state as a whole. Way more people die of hantavirus around here than the plague, but that's mostly because doctors are expecting to see the plague and treatment is very effective once the IMVIC test comes back indicating Y. pestis. The problem is that it's SO FAST that often people feel tired and start coughing and by the time they head towards the doctor they're about halfway to dead. When from 'coughing noticeably' to 'dead' is sometimes less than ten hours you're counting heavily on luck for survival. The good thing is that they can track down everyone you've been in contact with and give them big doses of antibiotics, which solves everything for everyone else.
I purport to have some idea what I'm talking about.
A lot of reputable people say that the 1917-1919 influenza didn't start in the trenches, it started at an Army training base in the United States.
The main reason smallpox is (mostly) gone is because so few species are affected by it, so we could, through immunization and very dedicated pursuit and isolation of infected people, eliminate it throughout the world. It was quite lethal but existed for hundreds, probably thousands of years, killing in cycles as new groups of suseptible people grew up. Same with the Black Plague, which has much higher mortality rates than either smallpox or the Spanish Flu of 1917 -- 70-90%, according to some estimates -- yet has raged in fifteen or more major waves across Europe over 800 years, and still kills people to this day. Or AIDS, which has a 100% (well, 99.99999999%, maybe) mortality rate. All the vector has to do is kill its host significantly more slowly than it spreads: if it can extend its transmissible time, and reduce the minimum dose required for infection, it greatly increases its amplification.
In my epidemiology class, one of the things we talked about was the last 'major' anthrax problem in the US, which was showing up in people who owned horses in places all across the world. They finally tracked it to wool saddle blankets being shipped out of Pakistan. So materials handling can be a good vector for transport. Maybe they were all sniffing their saddle blankets: I don't know.
The Plague, aka The Black Death, aka yersinia pestis, can be fatal within a day of being inhaled, with mortality reaching 80% if untreated (which, until fairly recently, was usually the case, because you were probably dead before they figured out why you were sick) whereas the other major form of infection, bubonic, takes quite a bit longer and has much more predictable symptoms. Septicemic plague is as fast as pneumonic, but it's harder to get, unless you, I dunno, run over an infected prairie dog with a lawnmower and one of its bone fragments gets shot into your leg.
There was a fairly recent article in the IEEE Spectrum about this. Saudi Arabia guarantees its state-owned phone company a profit, based on user fees. VoIP interferes with this, so they've contracted with some California company that writes so-called deep packet filtering software to block VoIP entirely on the networks that the Saudi government can get to. This was discussed in an earlier slashdot thread. Apparently they actually just look at information in the headers, so it should be fairly easy to evade, currently. But I can think of some ways to degrade service by basing intentional packet loss on a statistical analysis of packet frequency, that might work pretty well to make VoIP useless rather than actually outright banning it.
Anyone who doesn't think the Bible is interpreted, doesn't know the Bible. I have yet to meet a Christian, including some of my old-time-in-six-days unreconstructed fundamentalist friends, who lives like the Bible says people are supposed to live. They all rely on interpretation, and more particularly their personal interpretation (as evinced by them living the way all their friends do without having ever rigorously thought about why they're doing what they're doing) to get them through the day.
Next time you meet a guy who claims to be a literalist Christian, ask him how he justifies cutting his hair.
Dude, it's OUT. And it's good, according to my bush-fanatic friends. I'll try and get it in the next couple days.
Myself, I prefer a little bush every now and then.
Kate Bush, and Gavin Rossdale's old band, too.
I think proposing the '.xxx' domain and then withdrawing it because of pressure from the Bush administration would count as politically questionable.
The whole argument is stupid and based on the false premise that the Internet is controllable, and that the US or ICANN can be forced to do anything, coz they CAN'T, any more than we can force the Chinese to stop speaking Chinese. But the ICANN didn't win any trust points by bending over for Bush on the pornography thing.
I read the original article in IEEE, and am more than a little curious about it. They seem to claim/imply that they can handle even encrypted data streams. I'm wondering whether it's a statistical filter: whether they're just imposing some sort of packet speed limit and if a stream between X and Y with packet header Z has more than that rate they start randomly deleting packets. I don't see how else they could do this -- but then again, they've been working on it for seven years. If you have any idea, I'd love to know about it.
This guy agrees, claiming that the light-sensitive patch genes are pretty conserved.
However, this crowd seems to think that although opsins are remarkably well-conserved across different phyla, the controlling genes that the abovementioned people were obsessed by control many other gene families, besides eye development, so it's still possible that there are different complete eye evolution families.
They talk a bit about fish and squid eyes: I didn't know that squids and octopi have inverted (compared to mammals) retinal structures. They must be *very* good at low-light conditions.
One thing to consider is that eyes have apparently evolved multiple times. Spiders have several sets of eyes, that serve different purposes, none of them very similar to mammalian eyes. This guy writes about one type of crustacean in which males and females have different numbers of eyes, and different types, which seem to have all evolved independently of one another. I've read some estimates that there are 20 different eye families, with separate evolution backgrounds. What the ID people consistently fail to realize is that 2 billion years is a long, long, long, long, long time. Since they deny that life's been around for 2 billion years, they can't comprehend how many generations, and how much evolutionary change (aka 'progress'), can happen in that much time. Fifteen trillion generations of bacteria, given some (probably lousy) assumptions, can generate a whole lot of complexity, including eyes. Michael Behe has much more of a chance with bacterial flagellae, but even that isn't 'irreducibly complex'.
The reason (I RTFA in dead-tree form) that Saudi Arabia is blocking VoIP calls is that their stupid government *guarantees profit* for their state-sponsored telco, so VoIP, by depriving them of their legally guaranteed income, is being blocked or badly degraded.
Once other companies and countries saw that, a lot of ISP's that offer VoIP started doing the same thing to competitors' services. Kind of makes you wonder how person with ISP A's service is going to call person on ISP B's service, when each is blocking the other's service, doesn't it?
I've gotten clocked doing insane speeds on my bike. Consider: it's carbon-fiber with steel spokes in the wheels. The spokes at the top of the wheel are going twice as fast as I am (like the tops of wheels do) and have the highest radar reflectivity of anything on the bike. One of my biker friends successfully challenge a speeding ticket based on this argument.
I grew up in Leadville, Colorado. Their airport is at 9950 feet elevation. I would've had to dig quite a hole to join the Mile High Club.
(For some reason, oh maybe it was the sucky performance of airplanes at that altitude, I've never used my pilot certificate in Leadville.)
>this isn't really thread related any more
I tried replying by email but probably screwed it up: I'm good at that.
I got a Lincoln SquareWave 175. I'm really impressed with it.
Home foundry work is not very difficult, although it takes some space and understanding neighbors. Green sand (water/clay sand) can be mulled with a shovel with acceptable results, unlike oil-based sands, which do require a full muller.
buncha other stuff I was going to say but now I can't remember it all, and I've a bunch of work anyway: more later.
I like your sig. My girlfriend's version of that is: "I like my women like I like my Scotch: twelve years old and full of coke."
(*I* don't feel comfortable using that one, hence the attribution. She's crazy and a girl, so she can get away with it.)