This could happen right now -- the AIDS virus has crappy reproductive fidelity. Reverse transcriptase does a lousy job of transcribing RNA to DNA so the offspring have lots of mistakes. It has a very much higher rate of mutation, as a result, than DNA transcription enzymes. So what you see is that DNA-based lifeforms evolve very slowly, and AIDS evolves very rapidly. If it managed to kill off all us humans you could (if you weren't dead) make the case that RNA is "better than" DNA because we all died.
There's a balance point for information stored genetically. If you store a lot of information, you can handle more situations, but reproduce more slowly because your cells take longer to divide. If you pare down your genetics to the bare minimum you are very specialized and do extremely well in precisely one environment, and get outcompeted in any other. Likewise, if you have high-fidelity genetic reproduction, a group of animals with that ancestry will continue to do very well in a fixed environment, but if the environment is changing a lot, lower-fidelity genetic reproduction allows for faster adaption at the cost of individual success, because the vast majority of mutations will be detrimental or deadly to the individuals. But as a group, they'll do better. That's what the AIDS virus does: as a group, they evade our immune system, even though individually they die in large numbers.
We'd love to get our hands on some superconducting FETs. The ones I'm designing around right now have 5 milliohms Rds, and they're *still* getting so hot we have to solder big heat sinks onto the backsides of them.
But this just shifts the problem to the gate drive, because during any finite time period between 'off' and 'on' the FET acts like a big power resistor and heats up. Even if people ever make these so they're superconducting at room temp, they'll still heat up when in the active region. (Or we'd need to develop drivers that could produce instantaneous off/on transition times.) So we'd need ones that could remain superconductive in well over room-temp transients. If you have a superconducting FET that suddenly stops superconducting because of a temperature peak, it'll vaporize just about instantaneously. These would be an exciting gamble.
It's obvious that people use math that works to solve their problems -- counting for crops, zero for accounting, combinatorial digits for representing arbitrarily large numbers.
I think the point that other people are trying to make is that there are lots of examples of the other direction: discoveries made in math, that later on are found to represent the world. People were wrestling with the idea of imaginary numbers -- square roots of negative numbers -- in Greek times. The math they provided turned out to describe impedance in electronics. People found Euler's constant showing up in weird places in math (most notably e^(i * pi) = -1), and then found that it also describes lots of things in nature: the charging of capacitors, growth rate of bacterial populations. Even the Golden Ratio -- the Greeks found it from comparing line lengths in drawings of stars, and 2000 years later biologists found it in Nautilus shells. The same thing is going on in particle physics. I don't know enough to be definitive, but people are making claims that many-dimensional mathematical models that have been playtoys for topological mathematicians for a couple decades also represent a sort of periodic table for subatomic particles. That's the part that's so weird: that mathematics, derived from pure research, sometimes reflect natural constructs, but we don't realize that until after the math is done. It's not the construct causing the math, it's the math causing us to realize the construct.
Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country
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>>And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
>On this point, I disagree with you, though. In the realm of ideas (not entertainment), some ideas have value aside from simple popularity.
For the record, that's a quote from a brilliant play, "The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe", delivered by an ostensibly crazy homeless woman named Trudy. I do agree with you that some things like gravity or light are true (where by 'true' I mean demonstrable, repeatable, verifiable, quantifiable.)
The issue at hand with mass media is that it is innately based on the desire of people to consume it, and those people are primarily adults, so it is difficult to defend the ethics of publishing what people 'should' read -- giving them fresh vegetables rather than candy, to use your metaphor. What they 'should' read reflects a bias in and of itself. One definition of what they 'should' read is what they want. Another is what they're willing to pay for. A third is what is directly relevant to individuals. It's not clear that any of those is better than any other, or better than what any person thinks that the media 'should' present. But since one has the magic word 'money' in it, we all know what will actually be presented.
In the Western US, it's almost silly to not speak some Spanish: a pretty clear alternative. Our current president, despite his problems, does a reasonably good job of speaking Spanish, for instance.
Re:If you ever lived in a foreign country
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I hadn't ever thought about it that way: if the world pretty much revolves around you, you're not really self-centered.
However: >It seems the news stations cater to what people want to watch, instead of what's important.
To the news broadcasters, what people want to watch *is* what's important. The problem is that that's self-amplifying. If a lot of people wanted to watch educational, world-centric news, they'd provide that, and because it's available, more people would start to watch it. And, indeed, that's exactly what Bennet Hazelton is writing about: people watch what everyone else is watching, and then even more people do, and what everyone else is watching is the story about Annette's cat. And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
My dad was in the habit of putting easter eggs in the excess space of the ROM in the test&measurement equipment he designed, but he felt that the only reasonable way of doing it was to make the surprise completely unreachable from a functioning instrument, and only accessible before boot. (As in, you held down a series of buttons and hit the power button, and it'd come up and do its surprise thing and then shut down or jump to the regular boot sequence.) All the code was in the very top address space and there weren't any jumps that went there except for the power-up one. That way he could make sure that the code never ran or got involved in normal operation. Some of his easter eggs later became demos for the salesmen because they showed off the hardware capabilities so beautifully. I do hardware design, and put some graphics into everything I do, whether it's a picture of a bicycle or mountains.
You can make a reasonable rocket using just hydrogen peroxide, as long as the concentration is over about 70%, because there's enough heat given off when it breaks down to vaporize all the H2O2 and all the water making up the rest of the volume. You can add some sort of fuel, if you want, and it increases the specific impulse, but it also greatly increases the complexity. You can't pre-mix the fuel and oxidizer for fear of it exploding, so you have to figure out how to do fuel injection. Traditionally, you pressurize the H2O2 with high-pressure nitrogen or argon and just have a valve between that and the reaction chamber where the silver gauze lives, so the whole control system consists of a valve. Open it and off you go. If you have fuel, you have to figure out how to meter it proportionally to the H2O2 flow, have it pressurized as well or have pumps for it, all sorts of complexities, so it's a lot of complexity for not a huge increase in thrust. The Me163 designers thought it was worth it, but they had a lot more weight budget (and they weren't flying the planes.)
I believe most 'jetpacks' and 'rocketpacks' have been based on peroxide decomposition, in part because the exhaust comes out at several hundred degrees, rather than several thousand, and there's no flame involved, so you don't have to worry about the asbestos trousers (as much).
'poison' is overstating it a bit. We urinate to get rid of ammonia produced from the metabolism of excess proteins. We turn it into urea. Birds turn it into uric acid, fish just dump it overboard. Since it's a waste product, it's obviously not *good* for us, but I've met people, mostly crabby weird old men, who regularly drink their own urine. They claim it makes them live longer. (I think it just makes it SEEM like they're living longer. Or maybe it's the eat-live-goldfish-first-thing-in-morning so nothing worse will happen all day.) But I knew a crazy old coot who was 92 and claimed that he'd been drinking his own urine for like 80 years or something insane like that. Ugh, double or maybe even triple ugh, but apparently not deadly.
I think it's possible that there was no real difference between them and us, and some fluke allowed us to progress faster than them, possibly a mutation in how our brains develop, possibly just stumbling on a better way to harvest food such that suddenly a group of homo sapiens had more spare time to work on eg spear-throwing technology. But from what I've read, I think it's entirely possible that a Neanderthal, raised in modern society with a good education, could well be completely functionally human: reading, driving, working. 99% of what separates us from people 15,000 years ago is education, and from what I've read, it sounds like Neanderthals were competing with Sapiens on all fronts at that point, so it's completely possible they'd be viable in modern society if well-educated.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be a single Neanderthal in a world of humans, especially if one was as functional as I'm postulating. The only way I can see this being an ethical project is if we were to clone a dozen or more so they'd have at least some sense of society.
Last time this subject came up, I recommended Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next science fiction series, because one of the plotlines has to do with a huge multinational company that clones Neanderthals and, because they're literally the property of the company, it uses them as slave labor, having obtained legislation that denies them any more rights than animals. I don't think that's at all likely, but the point of good sci-fi is to extrapolate what might happen to our society, and how that would affect us all.
It seems to me that if we were to do this, we'd have to assume, to start out, that we're going to be dealing with humans, and if they turn out to not have human capabilities we haven't lost anything. But then you have to ask if it's ethical to create humans, knowing they're going to be different. (Would it be ethical to knowingly create autistic children? or children with Down's Syndrome? Are we sure this isn't basically the same thing?)
I'd love to see us creating mammoths. I'm very uncomfortable with Neanderthals, though.
I was reading a Steven Jay Gould essay about this not too long ago. He pointed out that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis coexisted at a similar level of culture and sophistication for tens of thousands of years, and then suddenly the homo sapien civilization took off and we started taking over the world. At about the same time, their culture changed -- their art improved, they started making primitive jewelry. Gould's summary was that they were recognizing our success and in a sad way trying to emulate it themselves, like cargo cults. But from what I've read, it's possible that it could've gone the other way: they could've taken off rather than us, but for some catalyst (maybe a big black monolith?) that we don't really understand yet. I'm betting it had to do with development of speech or of learning to teach. (Many animals learn from observation, but afaik humans are unique in learning to teach other humans how to do things.)
I saw that when hackaday originally wrote it up and was curiously intrigued, let's put it that way. Their setup seems to be lit off by hand rather than remotely. (It just says they used sparklers to light it.) It'd be nice if it were A: automated, so it could be triggered by a remote alarm system, and B: pretty foolproof. Were I to do this, one thing I'd consider is using an external hard drive, or at least a bank of relays on the power to the system, that cut out when the thermite dumps, so you wouldn't have live power in the midst of a metal-based fire.
I wonder if an electrical igniter for model rocket engines could start a sparkler on fire... Hm. Tomorrow's a holiday and I have some time to experiment.
I've read some interesting psychology research done on humans and how they value, and transfer, the concept of filth. It's not logical, and it's pervasive. The basic experiment works like this: you offer the subject two pieces of chocolate. One looks like a bar of chocolate. The other looks like a turd. You ask the subject which one is preferable, and what value it has over the other ("Would you eat the turd over the bar for $1?") Another version, that measures how the brain transfers filth, offers two cups of tea, one stirred with a spoon, the other with a brand-new just-removed-from-package flyswatter. People place a measurable, significant value on the object that isn't associated with filth, even if there isn't actually any filth there. It's just the perception. People mentally mark things as dirty/unhealthy/nasty, and then mark anything that's been touched by those things as similarly filthy. You can measure how much people think types of contact dilute filth ("five-second rule!") and how they perceive filth degrading over time.
And the somewhat ironic thing is that fresh urine is one of the more sterile materials out there. There are orders of magnitude less nasty infectous beasts in a nice frosty cuppa pee than in someone's saliva.
But that doesn't make people like it any better.
It horrifies many people when they go on bike rides along the river and see the waste treatment plants dumping water out into the river upstream of other cities. They realize those other cities are drinking their pee, and they in turn are drinking someone else's pee. I guess that before that point, they think that waste just *vanishes* somehow. Personally, I've often looked at watershed drainage maps and calculated how many people water has been through when it gets to, eg Des Moines compared to Black Hawk, Colorado. (I estimate 4 animals, maybe 1 person, for Black Hawk, and more like 30-70 animals/people for Des Moines.)
You and about 9087902375 other people. These sorts of cases regularly go to the SCOTUS and to the best of my knowledge, the rights of the resource owner have invariably beaten the rights of the surface property owner. Extraction of mineral and water resources is -- or more properly *was* -- much more economically rewarding than surface uses (living and agriculture) so the laws were originally designed to favor the companies who were mining/drilling over the people who were using the surface rights. They've been upheld almost without exception ever since.
It's a trade-off. Here in Colorado, we have a shortage of water mostly because other states need it and we spend so much of what we have on agriculture. On the other hand, we don't have: earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves, volcanoes, or much in the way of fires or floods.
Places where the water is located? are under water an awful lot of the time, it seems like. Every time I read about New Orleans, or a hurricane in Florida, or an earthquake in California, I think, "boy, they should move."
Everywhere has its problems. People live longer in arid environments, and there's enough water for people, just maybe not always for agriculture.
Any water that soaks into your land, you get to keep. You can't corral water. Some examples: you can't make dams to move water to your garden, collect water in buckets from downspouts, or divert streams of water running across your land to your garden.
People have been required to cut down trees adjacent to irrigation ditches and streams because the trees are taking water from the ditches, which comes close to forbidding gardens. And by 'required' I mean these are cases that have gone through many layers of courts, which have uniformly supported the rights of the water right owners.
Western water rights cases are, if I recall correctly, the most common class of cases to go to the US Supreme Court. Hundreds of cases have gone that far.
The problem is: water in the west isn't considered a resource dependent on the property. It is a resource in its own right, and can be bought and sold independent of the property (as can the mineral rights below the property: not to get too complicated but if someone owns mineral rights, digs, finds a vein of minerals, and that vein goes under your house, the owner of the mineral rights can compel you to remove your house, at your cost, to allow access to the mineral rights, on 'your' land.)
>If UV sterilized everything, you'd think the Great Outdoors would be microbe-free, and that's hardly the case
Traditionally, prior to about 1970, people said that you could drink water straight from streams if you saw it running clear in open sunlight for more than about 10 yards. That was specifically because UV is so good at sterilizing stuff. However, since Giardia has spread so widely, and encysts, making it UV-resistant, that's not taught anymore.
>Do this for 40 years, and you'll be just as sharp at 50 as you were at 20.
And as good at mathematics!
I was in a car crash that left me with an only partially functional memory. Things like Scrabble and SET (a venn diagram cardgame) help. What really helps, however, are things like Namenda and Excellon, which are literally memory pills. They make a huge difference. Prescription-only, though.
There's a series of books written by Jasper Fforde, starting with "The Eyre Affair", that are odd and funny science fiction books about an alternate universe where people truly care about books -- they have cults devoted to 'who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare' and such -- but one side-note is that many people own cloned dodos (the heroine of the story has one from a batch that went wrong, so it's kind of stupid and gimpy) but, more relevantly, a huge multinational company that serves as the axis of evil in the series of books has cloned Neanderthals but *owns* them (since it did the work) and uses them as slave labor.
Wow. That was a run-on sentence. Sorry 'bout that.
I agree with other respondents: almost anything, but my (older, discontined) Creative Zen M works beautifully with Amarok, has a radio, plays both video and audio for longer than my 5g ipod, and the video converter (windows only, so far, though you can fake it with ffmpeg) actually works, rather than spending 2 hours crunching only to say it can't convert the file, the way iTunes always seems to. Too bad the Zen looks like a 1980's remote control, but if you're primarily interested in how well it works, rather than how it looks, it's a nifty device.
SL ghost-towns for the same reason that so many other VR's, both textual and visual, have.
1. People go there and build a few cool things and then realize that they're social and want to hang out with other people.
2. People don't live there; they only go there when they want to do something interesting. So there aren't people sleeping and eating and *using* all that space that they've created: they're all gathered together in a few small spaces, interacting.
I think that's a fundamental problem -- not even a design problem, just a problem with human psychology -- that makes any non-goal-oriented VR end up as a vast barren wilderness full of abandoned artistic creations, with all the inhabitants hanging out in one place.
>Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features?
1. If you don't fully understand the technology used, you revert to using a features list as your quality metric. More features for your money equals better perceived value, even if most of those features are stupid or immaterial.
2. It's much easier to add new features than to fix deep underlying problems. It's also easier to sell something "now, with iFooBar software included!" than "now, with less locking-up, blue-screens, and disturbing grinding sounds!"
I question this. Not because I'm against windmills: I'm not, and not because I know: I don't. A very large windmill moves at a much lower RPM than a small one, but that does not necessarily mean that the blade tip speed on the big one is lower than on the small one. On aircraft, 28" long props on KR1's, and the monster 4 meter long prop on the Corsair, both have the tip moving at about the same speed.
For efficiency, you want to have your prop moving as slowly as possible, but for maximum power generation you want to interact with as much air as possible. These guys claim that most wind generators have the tips moving at about 64 m/s. So I'm saying [citation needed.]
I agree entirely with you, but would like to quibble on one minor point. The first guy to bear my last name on North American soil got here 15 generations ago, while two of my grandparents escaped from pre-WWII Germany, so I'm fairly typical. But I dated a lovely woman a few years back whose ancestors were all Cherokee or Paiute, as far as she knew, so while they obviously weren't American citizens back 8000 years ago, they have a lot, a whole, whole lot, to say about what happens to the neighborhood when you let people immigrate. (Mostly joking, of course.)
The other thing that occurs to me, looking around where I work, is that there *is* somewhat of a difference between immigrants and naturally born citizens: all our naturalized or work visa employees have PhD's where I work, and none of our natural-born citizens do.
Slashdot Mirror
This could happen right now -- the AIDS virus has crappy reproductive fidelity. Reverse transcriptase does a lousy job of transcribing RNA to DNA so the offspring have lots of mistakes. It has a very much higher rate of mutation, as a result, than DNA transcription enzymes. So what you see is that DNA-based lifeforms evolve very slowly, and AIDS evolves very rapidly. If it managed to kill off all us humans you could (if you weren't dead) make the case that RNA is "better than" DNA because we all died.
There's a balance point for information stored genetically. If you store a lot of information, you can handle more situations, but reproduce more slowly because your cells take longer to divide. If you pare down your genetics to the bare minimum you are very specialized and do extremely well in precisely one environment, and get outcompeted in any other. Likewise, if you have high-fidelity genetic reproduction, a group of animals with that ancestry will continue to do very well in a fixed environment, but if the environment is changing a lot, lower-fidelity genetic reproduction allows for faster adaption at the cost of individual success, because the vast majority of mutations will be detrimental or deadly to the individuals. But as a group, they'll do better. That's what the AIDS virus does: as a group, they evade our immune system, even though individually they die in large numbers.
We'd love to get our hands on some superconducting FETs. The ones I'm designing around right now have 5 milliohms Rds, and they're *still* getting so hot we have to solder big heat sinks onto the backsides of them.
But this just shifts the problem to the gate drive, because during any finite time period between 'off' and 'on' the FET acts like a big power resistor and heats up. Even if people ever make these so they're superconducting at room temp, they'll still heat up when in the active region. (Or we'd need to develop drivers that could produce instantaneous off/on transition times.) So we'd need ones that could remain superconductive in well over room-temp transients. If you have a superconducting FET that suddenly stops superconducting because of a temperature peak, it'll vaporize just about instantaneously. These would be an exciting gamble.
It's obvious that people use math that works to solve their problems -- counting for crops, zero for accounting, combinatorial digits for representing arbitrarily large numbers.
I think the point that other people are trying to make is that there are lots of examples of the other direction: discoveries made in math, that later on are found to represent the world. People were wrestling with the idea of imaginary numbers -- square roots of negative numbers -- in Greek times. The math they provided turned out to describe impedance in electronics. People found Euler's constant showing up in weird places in math (most notably e^(i * pi) = -1), and then found that it also describes lots of things in nature: the charging of capacitors, growth rate of bacterial populations. Even the Golden Ratio -- the Greeks found it from comparing line lengths in drawings of stars, and 2000 years later biologists found it in Nautilus shells.
The same thing is going on in particle physics. I don't know enough to be definitive, but people are making claims that many-dimensional mathematical models that have been playtoys for topological mathematicians for a couple decades also represent a sort of periodic table for subatomic particles. That's the part that's so weird: that mathematics, derived from pure research, sometimes reflect natural constructs, but we don't realize that until after the math is done. It's not the construct causing the math, it's the math causing us to realize the construct.
>>And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
>On this point, I disagree with you, though. In the realm of ideas (not entertainment), some ideas have value aside from simple popularity.
For the record, that's a quote from a brilliant play, "The Search For Signs Of Intelligent Life In The Universe", delivered by an ostensibly crazy homeless woman named Trudy. I do agree with you that some things like gravity or light are true (where by 'true' I mean demonstrable, repeatable, verifiable, quantifiable.)
The issue at hand with mass media is that it is innately based on the desire of people to consume it, and those people are primarily adults, so it is difficult to defend the ethics of publishing what people 'should' read -- giving them fresh vegetables rather than candy, to use your metaphor. What they 'should' read reflects a bias in and of itself. One definition of what they 'should' read is what they want. Another is what they're willing to pay for. A third is what is directly relevant to individuals. It's not clear that any of those is better than any other, or better than what any person thinks that the media 'should' present. But since one has the magic word 'money' in it, we all know what will actually be presented.
In the Western US, it's almost silly to not speak some Spanish: a pretty clear alternative. Our current president, despite his problems, does a reasonably good job of speaking Spanish, for instance.
I hadn't ever thought about it that way: if the world pretty much revolves around you, you're not really self-centered.
However:
>It seems the news stations cater to what people want to watch, instead of what's important.
To the news broadcasters, what people want to watch *is* what's important.
The problem is that that's self-amplifying. If a lot of people wanted to watch educational, world-centric news, they'd provide that, and because it's available, more people would start to watch it. And, indeed, that's exactly what Bennet Hazelton is writing about: people watch what everyone else is watching, and then even more people do, and what everyone else is watching is the story about Annette's cat. And, because reality is a collective hunch, that *is* what's important, as much as we might like to argue the point.
My dad was in the habit of putting easter eggs in the excess space of the ROM in the test&measurement equipment he designed, but he felt that the only reasonable way of doing it was to make the surprise completely unreachable from a functioning instrument, and only accessible before boot. (As in, you held down a series of buttons and hit the power button, and it'd come up and do its surprise thing and then shut down or jump to the regular boot sequence.) All the code was in the very top address space and there weren't any jumps that went there except for the power-up one. That way he could make sure that the code never ran or got involved in normal operation.
Some of his easter eggs later became demos for the salesmen because they showed off the hardware capabilities so beautifully.
I do hardware design, and put some graphics into everything I do, whether it's a picture of a bicycle or mountains.
You can make a reasonable rocket using just hydrogen peroxide, as long as the concentration is over about 70%, because there's enough heat given off when it breaks down to vaporize all the H2O2 and all the water making up the rest of the volume.
You can add some sort of fuel, if you want, and it increases the specific impulse, but it also greatly increases the complexity. You can't pre-mix the fuel and oxidizer for fear of it exploding, so you have to figure out how to do fuel injection. Traditionally, you pressurize the H2O2 with high-pressure nitrogen or argon and just have a valve between that and the reaction chamber where the silver gauze lives, so the whole control system consists of a valve. Open it and off you go. If you have fuel, you have to figure out how to meter it proportionally to the H2O2 flow, have it pressurized as well or have pumps for it, all sorts of complexities, so it's a lot of complexity for not a huge increase in thrust. The Me163 designers thought it was worth it, but they had a lot more weight budget (and they weren't flying the planes.)
I believe most 'jetpacks' and 'rocketpacks' have been based on peroxide decomposition, in part because the exhaust comes out at several hundred degrees, rather than several thousand, and there's no flame involved, so you don't have to worry about the asbestos trousers (as much).
'poison' is overstating it a bit. We urinate to get rid of ammonia produced from the metabolism of excess proteins. We turn it into urea. Birds turn it into uric acid, fish just dump it overboard. Since it's a waste product, it's obviously not *good* for us, but I've met people, mostly crabby weird old men, who regularly drink their own urine. They claim it makes them live longer. (I think it just makes it SEEM like they're living longer. Or maybe it's the eat-live-goldfish-first-thing-in-morning so nothing worse will happen all day.) But I knew a crazy old coot who was 92 and claimed that he'd been drinking his own urine for like 80 years or something insane like that. Ugh, double or maybe even triple ugh, but apparently not deadly.
I think it's possible that there was no real difference between them and us, and some fluke allowed us to progress faster than them, possibly a mutation in how our brains develop, possibly just stumbling on a better way to harvest food such that suddenly a group of homo sapiens had more spare time to work on eg spear-throwing technology.
But from what I've read, I think it's entirely possible that a Neanderthal, raised in modern society with a good education, could well be completely functionally human: reading, driving, working. 99% of what separates us from people 15,000 years ago is education, and from what I've read, it sounds like Neanderthals were competing with Sapiens on all fronts at that point, so it's completely possible they'd be viable in modern society if well-educated.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be a single Neanderthal in a world of humans, especially if one was as functional as I'm postulating. The only way I can see this being an ethical project is if we were to clone a dozen or more so they'd have at least some sense of society.
Last time this subject came up, I recommended Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next science fiction series, because one of the plotlines has to do with a huge multinational company that clones Neanderthals and, because they're literally the property of the company, it uses them as slave labor, having obtained legislation that denies them any more rights than animals. I don't think that's at all likely, but the point of good sci-fi is to extrapolate what might happen to our society, and how that would affect us all.
It seems to me that if we were to do this, we'd have to assume, to start out, that we're going to be dealing with humans, and if they turn out to not have human capabilities we haven't lost anything. But then you have to ask if it's ethical to create humans, knowing they're going to be different. (Would it be ethical to knowingly create autistic children? or children with Down's Syndrome? Are we sure this isn't basically the same thing?)
I'd love to see us creating mammoths. I'm very uncomfortable with Neanderthals, though.
I was reading a Steven Jay Gould essay about this not too long ago. He pointed out that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis coexisted at a similar level of culture and sophistication for tens of thousands of years, and then suddenly the homo sapien civilization took off and we started taking over the world. At about the same time, their culture changed -- their art improved, they started making primitive jewelry. Gould's summary was that they were recognizing our success and in a sad way trying to emulate it themselves, like cargo cults. But from what I've read, it's possible that it could've gone the other way: they could've taken off rather than us, but for some catalyst (maybe a big black monolith?) that we don't really understand yet. I'm betting it had to do with development of speech or of learning to teach. (Many animals learn from observation, but afaik humans are unique in learning to teach other humans how to do things.)
I saw that when hackaday originally wrote it up and was curiously intrigued, let's put it that way. Their setup seems to be lit off by hand rather than remotely. (It just says they used sparklers to light it.) It'd be nice if it were A: automated, so it could be triggered by a remote alarm system, and B: pretty foolproof. Were I to do this, one thing I'd consider is using an external hard drive, or at least a bank of relays on the power to the system, that cut out when the thermite dumps, so you wouldn't have live power in the midst of a metal-based fire.
I wonder if an electrical igniter for model rocket engines could start a sparkler on fire... Hm. Tomorrow's a holiday and I have some time to experiment.
I've read some interesting psychology research done on humans and how they value, and transfer, the concept of filth. It's not logical, and it's pervasive.
The basic experiment works like this: you offer the subject two pieces of chocolate. One looks like a bar of chocolate. The other looks like a turd. You ask the subject which one is preferable, and what value it has over the other ("Would you eat the turd over the bar for $1?") Another version, that measures how the brain transfers filth, offers two cups of tea, one stirred with a spoon, the other with a brand-new just-removed-from-package flyswatter. People place a measurable, significant value on the object that isn't associated with filth, even if there isn't actually any filth there. It's just the perception. People mentally mark things as dirty/unhealthy/nasty, and then mark anything that's been touched by those things as similarly filthy. You can measure how much people think types of contact dilute filth ("five-second rule!") and how they perceive filth degrading over time.
And the somewhat ironic thing is that fresh urine is one of the more sterile materials out there. There are orders of magnitude less nasty infectous beasts in a nice frosty cuppa pee than in someone's saliva.
But that doesn't make people like it any better.
It horrifies many people when they go on bike rides along the river and see the waste treatment plants dumping water out into the river upstream of other cities. They realize those other cities are drinking their pee, and they in turn are drinking someone else's pee. I guess that before that point, they think that waste just *vanishes* somehow. Personally, I've often looked at watershed drainage maps and calculated how many people water has been through when it gets to, eg Des Moines compared to Black Hawk, Colorado. (I estimate 4 animals, maybe 1 person, for Black Hawk, and more like 30-70 animals/people for Des Moines.)
You and about 9087902375 other people. These sorts of cases regularly go to the SCOTUS and to the best of my knowledge, the rights of the resource owner have invariably beaten the rights of the surface property owner. Extraction of mineral and water resources is -- or more properly *was* -- much more economically rewarding than surface uses (living and agriculture) so the laws were originally designed to favor the companies who were mining/drilling over the people who were using the surface rights. They've been upheld almost without exception ever since.
It's a trade-off. Here in Colorado, we have a shortage of water mostly because other states need it and we spend so much of what we have on agriculture.
On the other hand, we don't have: earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves, volcanoes, or much in the way of fires or floods.
Places where the water is located? are under water an awful lot of the time, it seems like.
Every time I read about New Orleans, or a hurricane in Florida, or an earthquake in California, I think, "boy, they should move."
Everywhere has its problems. People live longer in arid environments, and there's enough water for people, just maybe not always for agriculture.
Any water that soaks into your land, you get to keep. You can't corral water. Some examples: you can't make dams to move water to your garden, collect water in buckets from downspouts, or divert streams of water running across your land to your garden.
People have been required to cut down trees adjacent to irrigation ditches and streams because the trees are taking water from the ditches, which comes close to forbidding gardens. And by 'required' I mean these are cases that have gone through many layers of courts, which have uniformly supported the rights of the water right owners.
Western water rights cases are, if I recall correctly, the most common class of cases to go to the US Supreme Court. Hundreds of cases have gone that far.
The problem is: water in the west isn't considered a resource dependent on the property. It is a resource in its own right, and can be bought and sold independent of the property (as can the mineral rights below the property: not to get too complicated but if someone owns mineral rights, digs, finds a vein of minerals, and that vein goes under your house, the owner of the mineral rights can compel you to remove your house, at your cost, to allow access to the mineral rights, on 'your' land.)
>If UV sterilized everything, you'd think the Great Outdoors would be microbe-free, and that's hardly the case
Traditionally, prior to about 1970, people said that you could drink water straight from streams if you saw it running clear in open sunlight for more than about 10 yards. That was specifically because UV is so good at sterilizing stuff. However, since Giardia has spread so widely, and encysts, making it UV-resistant, that's not taught anymore.
He did. From a Kurosawa film from the '50's. Including the behavior (although not the appearance) of R2D2 and C3P0.
>Do this for 40 years, and you'll be just as sharp at 50 as you were at 20.
And as good at mathematics!
I was in a car crash that left me with an only partially functional memory. Things like Scrabble and SET (a venn diagram cardgame) help. What really helps, however, are things like Namenda and Excellon, which are literally memory pills. They make a huge difference. Prescription-only, though.
There's a series of books written by Jasper Fforde, starting with "The Eyre Affair", that are odd and funny science fiction books about an alternate universe where people truly care about books -- they have cults devoted to 'who really wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare' and such -- but one side-note is that many people own cloned dodos (the heroine of the story has one from a batch that went wrong, so it's kind of stupid and gimpy) but, more relevantly, a huge multinational company that serves as the axis of evil in the series of books has cloned Neanderthals but *owns* them (since it did the work) and uses them as slave labor.
Wow. That was a run-on sentence. Sorry 'bout that.
I agree with other respondents: almost anything, but my (older, discontined) Creative Zen M works beautifully with Amarok, has a radio, plays both video and audio for longer than my 5g ipod, and the video converter (windows only, so far, though you can fake it with ffmpeg) actually works, rather than spending 2 hours crunching only to say it can't convert the file, the way iTunes always seems to. Too bad the Zen looks like a 1980's remote control, but if you're primarily interested in how well it works, rather than how it looks, it's a nifty device.
SL ghost-towns for the same reason that so many other VR's, both textual and visual, have.
1. People go there and build a few cool things and then realize that they're social and want to hang out with other people.
2. People don't live there; they only go there when they want to do something interesting. So there aren't people sleeping and eating and *using* all that space that they've created: they're all gathered together in a few small spaces, interacting.
I think that's a fundamental problem -- not even a design problem, just a problem with human psychology -- that makes any non-goal-oriented VR end up as a vast barren wilderness full of abandoned artistic creations, with all the inhabitants hanging out in one place.
>Why does Microsoft, and apparently Apple, believe what we've been waiting for is more features?
1. If you don't fully understand the technology used, you revert to using a features list as your quality metric. More features for your money equals better perceived value, even if most of those features are stupid or immaterial.
2. It's much easier to add new features than to fix deep underlying problems. It's also easier to sell something "now, with iFooBar software included!" than "now, with less locking-up, blue-screens, and disturbing grinding sounds!"
>have much larger, slower moving blades
I question this. Not because I'm against windmills: I'm not, and not because I know: I don't. A very large windmill moves at a much lower RPM than a small one, but that does not necessarily mean that the blade tip speed on the big one is lower than on the small one. On aircraft, 28" long props on KR1's, and the monster 4 meter long prop on the Corsair, both have the tip moving at about the same speed.
For efficiency, you want to have your prop moving as slowly as possible, but for maximum power generation you want to interact with as much air as possible. These guys claim that most wind generators have the tips moving at about 64 m/s. So I'm saying [citation needed.]
I agree entirely with you, but would like to quibble on one minor point. The first guy to bear my last name on North American soil got here 15 generations ago, while two of my grandparents escaped from pre-WWII Germany, so I'm fairly typical. But I dated a lovely woman a few years back whose ancestors were all Cherokee or Paiute, as far as she knew, so while they obviously weren't American citizens back 8000 years ago, they have a lot, a whole, whole lot, to say about what happens to the neighborhood when you let people immigrate. (Mostly joking, of course.)
The other thing that occurs to me, looking around where I work, is that there *is* somewhat of a difference between immigrants and naturally born citizens: all our naturalized or work visa employees have PhD's where I work, and none of our natural-born citizens do.
Not only him: more than one third of American Nobel Prize winners are immigrants. Many of our best and brightest, and, as people who have worked in agriculture and construction can tell you, many of the hardest-working and most dedicated, are immigrants.