Another way of dealing with radiant energy is careful design of eaves. The sun is higher in the summer and lower in the winter, so by extending the eaves, they largely shade the windows in the summer but leave them open in the winter. Lots of people put up sails (essentially) in the summer to shade the side of the house.
What I've done is use mylar-coated bubblepack, that claims to be 99% reflective for heat, on swinging frames, in the attic. In the summer, the frames are swung up against magnetic catches perpendicular to the sunlight, so the heat radiating in from the roof is reflected right back, while in the winter the frames are parallel to the sunlight and all that radiated heat hits the ceiling of the house itself. You wouldn't think, with 75 cm or so of insulation on top of the ceiling, that it'd matter so much, but it makes a 15 degree C difference in attic temp, which definitely affects the temp inside the house.
Tracking mirrors are very expensive, take enormous amounts of maintenance, and take up a lot of space. It's much better to just dig the house down into the ground as far as you can and rely on the ground heat. Some clever people have been doing stuff with digging a very deep hole, filling it with sand and embedded tubing, then building their house on top, and spending the whole summer pumping heat from the house down into the sand, and relying on it throughout much of the winter. A physicist named Ted Thompson, who was involved with early atomic bomb design, was doing later work with having crawl spaces open to the outside during winter and spraying fine mist into them, forming immense ice piles, then using that for cooling for the early part of the summer. (ice lasts a long time with just a little insulation, if there's enough of it.)
Lakes aren't the problem with mosquitoes: puddles are. Lakes have fish, which eat larvae. Plus, in most locales, salting a lake would probably be illegal and certainly would piss off your neighbors. Turning wetlands into lakes is much more effective, but screws all the wildlife that was living there. And, for the record, alcohol is 100% miscible with water, so in order to burn a lake you'd have to pour roughly 45% of the volume of the lake worth of alcohol in there and burn it. If you're convinced you need to burn a lake, what you want to do is pour oil on the lake and light that up: it floats and doesn't mix.
For the record, I've helped build two houses in your 'at altitude' site, that are very comfortable. They're mostly conventionally built, but are dug well into the ground for some earth-sheltering, have small double- or triple-glazed windows up high (because although this hasn't happened in 40 years, there are records of windows below 2 meters high being crushed in by snowpack in the winter) and lots and lots of insulation jammed in the 8-inch-wide walls with staggered joists (minimizing thermal coupling via the joists.) And, most critically, they're built to be very easy to drain down: open two valves and the whole house water supply dumps into the well from whence it came, so then it's just a matter of dumping potable antifreeze into the showers, toilets, and sinks and cycling it through the clothes washer and dishwasher. Summers are easy, by comparison. The adiabatic lapse rate means that when it's 100F in Denver it's 80F in Leadville. I've seen temps over 80 maybe a dozen times in my life (almost all of them in the last five years.)
If I were to do another one, I'd probably use construction relying on OSB-plywood bonded on either side of 12-inch-thick foam for all the walls and 24" for the roof, and run all the plumbing internal (in standard 2x4 walls) with electricity via surface-mount on the outer walls, or maybe behind a floor moulding, and put a standing-seam roof over the whole works. (Occasional very heavy snow loading and relentless cold -> eaves freeze, water forced back under shingles.) And solar power: lots and lots of solar power. The insolation up there is unfreakingbelievable. You can boil water in a jar by focussing two pieces of aluminum-foil-covered plywood on it. There's a downside to that amount of sunlight: trex and other similar pseudo-wood lasts like 8 years. The UV just fries it. (At noon, when you look straight up, the sky is a deep purple, rather than blue.)
>Right now, its still groupthink and anyone who would say "There are no blackholes!" would get shunned even if he had a compelling argument.
This is a type of false positive/false negative problem. People who are expert in an area tend to dismiss ideas that don't fit into their carefully constructed framework because the vast majority of those ideas are *wrong*, and they're completely correct to dismiss the ideas. A small percentage of people have open minds and accept some of the wrong ideas and get led off on weird tracks, and a small percentage pick up on the few right ideas that stand to overthrow concepts previously accepted as fact, and they're the people who make lots of progress in science.
Let's take evolution as an example. Charles Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution. It existed beforehand, but wasn't generally recognized. What happened was that he saw lots of evidence that did a uniquely good job of convincing him that evolution was happening, so he wrote Origin. At the same time, Alfred Wallace was in the same situation: convincing himself that evolution was happening based on his research, and writing about it. The difference is that Wallace also believed in ghosts, seances, and paranormal experiences, which is probably a large part of why Darwin is a household word whereas Wallace is only known to people who are interested in the history of scientific thought. (Darwin also did a better job of presenting his ideas, but if you look at contemporary writing, Darwin was regarded as a sober, intelligent, religious man who was convinced against his desire, whereas Wallace was seen as somewhat of a loose cannon.)
Groupthink serves a vital purpose: it filters out all the crap. It also filters out the actual innovative ideas, because to someone who isn't in the unique position of having just discovered a new thing and come to understand it, the crap and the innovative ideas look exactly the same. That's the balancing act of science: gleaning insight from meretricious ideas, and it's done, largely, by groupthink.
I've spent a lot of time campaigning and educating in favor of evolution. With that said, Michael Behe is a pretty smart, well-spoken dude, who deserves his PhD even if he's misusing it. I think he's self-deluded, but I don't get the feeling he's anywhere nearly as much a crackpot as this guy. At least he can back up his high-level assumptions with non-clearly-incompetent math.
The thing is: people are scared of new things, people are scared of things originating from sources they don't know or trust, and so forth. We have lots of very good fear reflexes, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years -- they're just overwhelmed today. I try and get people to read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear" and I'm currently working through a book called "Risk" that talks about how to intelligently assess and understand hazards. One of the things the authors talk about is how if Oprah Winfrey hands you a glass of some liquid, and a chemist from a large company hands you a glass of liquid, most people would prefer to drink the one Oprah handed them, if they know nothing about the liquid, because they have preconceived notions of trust. In the same way, people irrationally trust processes they understand (breeding animals to get traits) and don't trust ones they don't understand (cloning.) Biotech is a tool, and could be a very scary and destructive one, but only if people make an effort to develop it that way: it's certainly not innate.
With all that said, I think the stakes are higher when people are designing gene systems because they can do things evolution simply can't in any sort of reasonable timeframe -- evolution isn't going to produce rabid flying vampire cats, while biotech might be able to. Or, more seriously, vibrio cholera redesigned to produce proteolytic enzymes and released into the wild would be pretty horrible. But, again, that requires intent on the part of the engineer. Biotechnology is an amplifier, not an innately dangerous thing.
I'm not disagreeing with your summary, I'm *expanding* it.
Part of why living organisms lose genes they don't need is because, as you've said, if you have two organisms and one is producing unneeded genes and the other isn't, the one who isn't has a very slight competitive advantage. But a larger factor is that mutations in unneeded genes will have no effect on the organism's survival, but will be likely to make the gene nonfunctional. There are mutations going on all the time, across the whole genome; the ones that are deleterious, by the very definition, kill or impede the organism's progress. The ones that aren't deleterious just accumulate. This process is a major way we determine how closely related species are, by measuring the accumulated mutations in unused genes, because they build up linearly over time.
Also, for the record, there are some species of pathogenic bacteria for whom producing genes that help them resist antibiotics make them *more* pathogenic. For those, the bacteria with the extra genes win out in the end, even though they're having to transcribe/translate more material and reproduce somewhat more slowly. It's accurate to say that generally antibiotic resistance is associated with reduced competitiveness with wild-type bacteria in the absence of antibiotics, but that's not 100% true, just generally true.
Along with Adventure, we spent a lot of time on a VAX 11/785 (I believe) playing a game called Hunt. It was multiplayer and each screen showed a top-down section of the maze you were in, like larn, only past that it was like a FPS -- you wandered around, finding ammo, then shooting at other players you saw, using different weapons. A certain amount of ammo let you shoot a bullet, somewhat more a grenade, somewhat more yet an enormous blast that blew up part of the maze, and a whole lot of ammo let you shoot napalm, that ran along corridors without destroying anything (but would pursue people who were running.) I've been trying to find the sourcecode for it for years but haven't even found anyone who has heard of it. Anyone here?
I lived in a lousy part of town, and was burglarized twice within two years. The first time, the burglar kicked in a door and took about $800 worth of stuff. The police came by about an hour after I called them, looked around, said they doubted I'd get any of it back, and duly cranked out a report for me to file with my insurance claim. The second time, I was walking in my front door when the burglar was walking out of it, and I grabbed my backpack out of his hands. THAT time, the police were there within maybe two minutes of my call, two cars plus an unmarked detective car at the house and another two cruising up the way the guy ran; they took pictures of everything and fingerprints from doors, stuff he'd touched and dropped, you name it. One detective told me "we get extremely interested as soon as there's homeowner contact with the burglar."
My point being: the police have different criteria for what's important than you do, and they're professionals with lots of experience. Your history with them sounds like it sucks, and it's likely they were wrong a lot of the time. But you don't know why they're doing what they're doing, and my observation is that their decisions don't seem to be completely arbitrary.
Straight welding goggles *will* do very nearly nothing, with a laser like this -- because they block a lot of incoming light, your eyes dilate, leaving them actually *more* vulnerable to an intense beam. They also wouldn't do anything much to stop a flood of sulfuric acid, either...
Green lasers are limited in output by optical damage to the coatings. They use an IR laser, driving a YAG crystal, driving a frequency doubling crystal, which is the limiting point. The IR is often in the 200 mW range, like these visible DVD lasers, but you only get a couple mW out of the frequency doubler because A: it's a lossy, nonlinear process that's heavily thermally dependent and cheap laser pointers don't tempcontrol their YAGs or frequency doublers, and B: the output coupler coating on the frequency doubler crystals is only rated to a certain power and if you exceed that you'll cook it. If you want high-power green laser diodes, you have to replace the output crystal. (Yes, I've tried, and have some trashed KTP crystals to show for it.)
CD burners are 780-800 nm, in the IR. DVD's are 660, in the red. Blu-Ray are 405 nm, in the deep blue range. For CD and Blu-ray, welding goggles with a #5 shade would be adequate (complete IR and 10,000x visible attenuation) but for this laser you'd want something that had an OD of more like 7-10 in the red range. A good pair of glasses intended for helium-neon lasers or ruby lasers would probably work, but there are safety glasses intended specifically for these diodes, supplied to people who make them. Expect to pay about $350+ new, but ebay has laser safety goggles for cheaper. But get the technical specs on anything you buy used.
As I said in another post, DVD burning uses lasers rated for over 200 mW. You can buy a DVD burner for under $40 and strip out the laser, or you can often buy replacement/repair carriages for burners on ebay for even less.
I haven't yet seen a straight green laser diode -- mine are all frequency doubled. However, many new green LED's are created using silicon nitride, essentially being blue lasers that emit at a longer wavelength, and it's not clear to me why they couldn't do the same thing with a blue diode.
Lasing your eyes with IR sucks, but not as bad as with visible, because the front of your eye is mostly (*mostly*) opaque to IR so you'll just fry your cornea, which can be replaced. Visible will go through the eye optics system, get even more focussed, and fry holes in your retina, which is not repairable. I've worked with people who have gotten big blasts of UV, IR, and green, and only the people who got hit with green had blind spots in their vision. The others had to wear glasses or have lens/cornea replacements, but they had reasonable vision despite that.
I don't know how much a whole ultrasound machine costs. I do know the company for which I was making just the transducer itself -- the handheld part they put on your stomach (if you're pregnant) or up your butt (if you're unlucky) -- was selling them to the people who made the ultrasound machines for between $5000 and $20,000. One assumes the machine, with all the amplifiers and software and video, probably costs quite a bit more than just the transducer itself.
So, yes, $40K is pocket change. A family practitioner who runs his own office might not buy one, but even small group offices with a half-dozen doctors should be able to afford one of these if they think it'd be used often enough. But you could say the same thing about lots of equipment: it's all about return on investment.
First step: destroy US-based netcasters. Second step: once there's nobody local with a financial stake, try and ban netcasting entirely -- filter the whole Internet with some fancy new Congress-approved, poorly-functional software. Sure, encrypted streams might work, but who is going to bother with that? This is the same general progression we watched with mp3's and sharing -- companies, that have interest in quality, provide a central service; their business is outlawed; the service moves to anonymous suppliers who don't have a compelling interest in quality and whose ranks are infiltrated by poisoners who are actively trying to corrupt the system.
What I thought was groovy about Iceland is that the cold water is just like tap water everywhere else, while the hot water smells like a fireworks show. Also interesting: in hotels, there are signs in the bathroom that say "the cold water is potable and passes all international safety standards for drinking water. The hot water is geothermally heated." Reading between the lines: they don't mention the hot water passing international safety standards, nor even being potable. Interesting... I drank plenty coz I like sulfury water, and I didn't die, but it still gave me pause.
My (now ex) girlfriend's glass/jewelry shop was broken into that way repeatedly: she had bars on the windows, a reinforced doorframe, a good lock, but the buildings on either side of her didn't and people broke into them and cut through the wall into her place. And cleaned out the other places, while they were at it... One time they just kicked through drywall, but the others they used a sawzall because there was an exterior wall on one side.
>they do so sometimes at the expense of the education of the boys.
This is only somewhat related, but this might be a perception issue. I just read an interesting book called "Language Myths" about linguistics. One of the things they were talking about was how much women and men speak, and what sort of topics they talk about, for which many of the studies had been done by videotaping schools and schoolteachers. It then went on a tangent about how much more time teachers, male and female alike, spend talking to boys than to girls, even when they're told that they're doing so and are consciously trying to spend more time talking to girls. So, rather than leave the whole works up to observation, the study people got teachers to actually precisely time what they were doing and organize their communications such that they were spending as precisely as possible half their time helping girls, and half helping boys. Then the study people surveyed everyone involved, and *everyone*, teachers, girls, and boys, thought the teachers were spending *far* too much time talking to the girls. As one of the study authors said, "it appears the amount a boy talks is calculated by comparing to other boys talking, and the amount a girl talks is calculated compared to her being silent." So, when we think that a specific education program is concentrating on girls at the expense of boys, it's quite possible we're seeing stuff that's not there.
Not happily, they won't. But once they own a DVD upstairs and another one downstairs, and there exist A: encryption mechanisms for making transfer difficult and B: laws making it illegal to break the encryption, then most of them will pay it. Those who don't will go gallivanting off to the Internet to download already hacked material transcoded to an always-playable format, which is why the industry is aggressively pursuing C: sueing everyone in sight for downloading. coz, see, here's the thing: people who aren't actually involved or actively reading about the filesharing suits don't remember or know if those suits are successful. All they know is that filesharing is dangerous, and buying a second copy of some bad movie so you can watch it upstairs and downstairs both is insurance to prevent getting your financial kneecaps broken by Uncle Disney's goons.
I think the main point of having a judicial system is to maintain public safety. Justice often claims to be about fairness, and I think it tries for what the participants perceive as fair. But justice systems are established to stop crime, maybe even prevent it. If you want to see a system to make life more fair, read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. That's not what I'd call justice, but it is fair.
There isn't anything like consensus on how/where abiogenesis originally occurred, although a lot of people propose mudpots, which have almost zero water shielding. But I think it could just as easily be at deep-sea vents, so maybe.
As I said in the original post: it's likely that every single strand of DNA in our bodies gets broken and repaired fifty times a day, according to some stuff I've read of late about oxidative damage. Obviously, we don't contract cancer in every cell in our bodies fifty times a day. We don't yet know all of why we DO contract cancer, although cells that have both been injured irreparably but non-lethally and with non-operational apoptosis mechanisms, look to be a likely cause. The thing is: animals have far, far better DNA repair machinery than bacteria do. (To be more precise, eukaryotes have much better proofreading and excision-repair fidelity than prokaryotes, largely because of the DNA polymerase enzyme varieties we have.) The claim my friends make is that under levels of background radiation some 10x what we see now, bacteria die more than animals do.
I've lived, and still sometimes live, in one of those eight counties. The income isn't really okay, the crime isn't really great (although crime has a very low effect on lifespan unless you're young, male, black, and live in an urban environment) and there's often a *lot* of pollution. The entire town I grew up in is an EPA superfund site and the streams leaving it were so contaminated with arsenic, selenium, and zinc that when there was a collapse in one of the old mines that drained into the river, all the fish would die for twenty miles downstream. Those streams were all the water supply sources for other towns downstream... If you want low pollution, semi-rural lifestyle, okay incomes, and low crime, look at all of kansas, nebraska, wyoming, north dakota, and montana, none of which have a single county in the highest lifespan grouping. I think the picture that study paints clearly indicates that at least one contributor to lifespan is elevation. Now, it's possible that higher elevation means more sunlight, means more vitamin D production, lack of which has been indicated as a possible cause for multiple sclerosis and a couple other diseases, but that's pretty speculative.
There was a time in the US in the 1920's when radiation was the hip thing and people drank water that was, for lack of a better term, carbonated with radon: actually bubbling with gas. It was a very bad idea -- it's obvious that very high levels of radiation are extremely dangerous. But low levels of radiation have repeatedly been shown to suppress the immune system, which can be a benefit to some people. Radon's particularly nasty because if you inhale it, there's a good chance it'll decay, given its three-day halflife, and at that point the first daughter product has a much higher chance of sticking to something, so you get the whole rest of the decay series emanating from something inside you -- alphas, betas, and gammas. What it comes down to is a tradeoff, of sorts: are the side-effects worse, or is the original problem worse? But that's just like any other treatment, and requires a lot of research, and I don't have any actual evidence one way or the other, just the word of my friends with PhD's.
THAT post is so faulty I don't know where to start, either -- but somehow, I'll manage.
It's possible that some criminals deserve more punishment than a justice system can inflict on them. Likewise, the victims deserve to not have been victimized. They didn't get what they deserved, and criminals don't get what they deserve, either. Here's an important concept: life isn't fair. People rarely get what they deserve. Guess what? you can't fix that. That's just the way life is. Justice doesn't go to 11.
I believe in this old idea called "the punishment should fit the crime." Bigger crime? bigger punishment. To put it another way: as the crime increases, the punishment should increase. That's called 'proportional' -- as the independent variable increases, the dependent variable increases. That's why I say that it should be proportional. You go on to say how the crime's seriousness should determine the punishment's seriousness. That's *PROPORTIONAL*. Either you don't know what the word 'proportional' means or your sentences flat-out contradict each other: I don't know which.
Civilized justice systems should have laws, which are binary: you either haven't broken them or you have, and some system for deciding A: if you've broken the law, and B: how severe the consequences should be. That's part of a judge's job: to assess whether the crime's punishment should be at the minimum or maximum possible severity, in *proportion* to the seriousness of the crime.
I thought about it some more and I can see what you're saying. (You were pretty clear: I was just in a hurry leaving work.) One of your major points is, as you say, that we knew MJ was huge even then. But I *still* disagree, coz, hey, this is slashdot. Do you remember the two years when Hootie and the Blowfish was HUUUUUGE? You could barely turn around without running into stuff about them. Or how about when Rolling Stone put the Talking Heads on the cover, with "America's Best Band" as the title. I love TTH but they're not exactly standing the test of time. This might be before your time, but do you remember when "Eric Clapton Is God" was spraypainted on walls all over the place, and Cream was the biggest thing since the Stones? Find me anyone under the age of 30 who can name, sing, or even whistle a single Cream song. And they were really, really good. Or how about Peter, Paul, and Mary? They were enormous and people were crying because of the depth and power of their (stupid hippie) songs. Or Brad & Jeremy, who were supposed to be bigger than the Beatles... I think there are two different things going on here. One: good bands don't really lose fans even when they start turning out crap, so they tend to stay huge. Consider NIN: people are still buying Trent's records even though he hasn't had one good thing to say since he got rich. Ditto Connor Oberst, imho, yet I know a dozen teens who think that Bright Eyes is the best band since the beginning of time. So, what you get is these lumbering bands with enormous followings, who had a few great, "classic" hits, when they were young, and because they're still crashing about like arthritic monkeys (Elton John has a great way with words, I have to say) people are still listening to them. Groups that are only five years old don't have that fan base. Two: selective memory. Yeah, Floyd and the Beatles and Zep were fantastic, but there were other groups that were huge and cranking out good, well-written stuff at the same time, and we don't list them because we've forgotten about them -- Kansas, Supertramp, Iron Butterfly, The Scorpions, come to mind. By what measure are The Rolling Stones better than Cream? Only one: they're better-remembered. I argue it isn't because they had higher quality, just because they were bigger and productive for longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Another way of dealing with radiant energy is careful design of eaves. The sun is higher in the summer and lower in the winter, so by extending the eaves, they largely shade the windows in the summer but leave them open in the winter. Lots of people put up sails (essentially) in the summer to shade the side of the house.
What I've done is use mylar-coated bubblepack, that claims to be 99% reflective for heat, on swinging frames, in the attic. In the summer, the frames are swung up against magnetic catches perpendicular to the sunlight, so the heat radiating in from the roof is reflected right back, while in the winter the frames are parallel to the sunlight and all that radiated heat hits the ceiling of the house itself. You wouldn't think, with 75 cm or so of insulation on top of the ceiling, that it'd matter so much, but it makes a 15 degree C difference in attic temp, which definitely affects the temp inside the house.
Tracking mirrors are very expensive, take enormous amounts of maintenance, and take up a lot of space. It's much better to just dig the house down into the ground as far as you can and rely on the ground heat. Some clever people have been doing stuff with digging a very deep hole, filling it with sand and embedded tubing, then building their house on top, and spending the whole summer pumping heat from the house down into the sand, and relying on it throughout much of the winter. A physicist named Ted Thompson, who was involved with early atomic bomb design, was doing later work with having crawl spaces open to the outside during winter and spraying fine mist into them, forming immense ice piles, then using that for cooling for the early part of the summer. (ice lasts a long time with just a little insulation, if there's enough of it.)
Lakes aren't the problem with mosquitoes: puddles are. Lakes have fish, which eat larvae. Plus, in most locales, salting a lake would probably be illegal and certainly would piss off your neighbors. Turning wetlands into lakes is much more effective, but screws all the wildlife that was living there. And, for the record, alcohol is 100% miscible with water, so in order to burn a lake you'd have to pour roughly 45% of the volume of the lake worth of alcohol in there and burn it. If you're convinced you need to burn a lake, what you want to do is pour oil on the lake and light that up: it floats and doesn't mix.
For the record, I've helped build two houses in your 'at altitude' site, that are very comfortable. They're mostly conventionally built, but are dug well into the ground for some earth-sheltering, have small double- or triple-glazed windows up high (because although this hasn't happened in 40 years, there are records of windows below 2 meters high being crushed in by snowpack in the winter) and lots and lots of insulation jammed in the 8-inch-wide walls with staggered joists (minimizing thermal coupling via the joists.) And, most critically, they're built to be very easy to drain down: open two valves and the whole house water supply dumps into the well from whence it came, so then it's just a matter of dumping potable antifreeze into the showers, toilets, and sinks and cycling it through the clothes washer and dishwasher.
Summers are easy, by comparison. The adiabatic lapse rate means that when it's 100F in Denver it's 80F in Leadville. I've seen temps over 80 maybe a dozen times in my life (almost all of them in the last five years.)
If I were to do another one, I'd probably use construction relying on OSB-plywood bonded on either side of 12-inch-thick foam for all the walls and 24" for the roof, and run all the plumbing internal (in standard 2x4 walls) with electricity via surface-mount on the outer walls, or maybe behind a floor moulding, and put a standing-seam roof over the whole works. (Occasional very heavy snow loading and relentless cold -> eaves freeze, water forced back under shingles.) And solar power: lots and lots of solar power. The insolation up there is unfreakingbelievable. You can boil water in a jar by focussing two pieces of aluminum-foil-covered plywood on it. There's a downside to that amount of sunlight: trex and other similar pseudo-wood lasts like 8 years. The UV just fries it. (At noon, when you look straight up, the sky is a deep purple, rather than blue.)
Rock on: you're a scholar. Thank you very much.
>Right now, its still groupthink and anyone who would say "There are no blackholes!" would get shunned even if he had a compelling argument.
This is a type of false positive/false negative problem. People who are expert in an area tend to dismiss ideas that don't fit into their carefully constructed framework because the vast majority of those ideas are *wrong*, and they're completely correct to dismiss the ideas. A small percentage of people have open minds and accept some of the wrong ideas and get led off on weird tracks, and a small percentage pick up on the few right ideas that stand to overthrow concepts previously accepted as fact, and they're the people who make lots of progress in science.
Let's take evolution as an example. Charles Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution. It existed beforehand, but wasn't generally recognized. What happened was that he saw lots of evidence that did a uniquely good job of convincing him that evolution was happening, so he wrote Origin. At the same time, Alfred Wallace was in the same situation: convincing himself that evolution was happening based on his research, and writing about it. The difference is that Wallace also believed in ghosts, seances, and paranormal experiences, which is probably a large part of why Darwin is a household word whereas Wallace is only known to people who are interested in the history of scientific thought. (Darwin also did a better job of presenting his ideas, but if you look at contemporary writing, Darwin was regarded as a sober, intelligent, religious man who was convinced against his desire, whereas Wallace was seen as somewhat of a loose cannon.)
Groupthink serves a vital purpose: it filters out all the crap. It also filters out the actual innovative ideas, because to someone who isn't in the unique position of having just discovered a new thing and come to understand it, the crap and the innovative ideas look exactly the same. That's the balancing act of science: gleaning insight from meretricious ideas, and it's done, largely, by groupthink.
I've spent a lot of time campaigning and educating in favor of evolution. With that said, Michael Behe is a pretty smart, well-spoken dude, who deserves his PhD even if he's misusing it. I think he's self-deluded, but I don't get the feeling he's anywhere nearly as much a crackpot as this guy. At least he can back up his high-level assumptions with non-clearly-incompetent math.
Yep, I agree entirely.
The thing is: people are scared of new things, people are scared of things originating from sources they don't know or trust, and so forth. We have lots of very good fear reflexes, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years -- they're just overwhelmed today. I try and get people to read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear" and I'm currently working through a book called "Risk" that talks about how to intelligently assess and understand hazards. One of the things the authors talk about is how if Oprah Winfrey hands you a glass of some liquid, and a chemist from a large company hands you a glass of liquid, most people would prefer to drink the one Oprah handed them, if they know nothing about the liquid, because they have preconceived notions of trust. In the same way, people irrationally trust processes they understand (breeding animals to get traits) and don't trust ones they don't understand (cloning.) Biotech is a tool, and could be a very scary and destructive one, but only if people make an effort to develop it that way: it's certainly not innate.
With all that said, I think the stakes are higher when people are designing gene systems because they can do things evolution simply can't in any sort of reasonable timeframe -- evolution isn't going to produce rabid flying vampire cats, while biotech might be able to. Or, more seriously, vibrio cholera redesigned to produce proteolytic enzymes and released into the wild would be pretty horrible. But, again, that requires intent on the part of the engineer. Biotechnology is an amplifier, not an innately dangerous thing.
I'm not disagreeing with your summary, I'm *expanding* it.
Part of why living organisms lose genes they don't need is because, as you've said, if you have two organisms and one is producing unneeded genes and the other isn't, the one who isn't has a very slight competitive advantage. But a larger factor is that mutations in unneeded genes will have no effect on the organism's survival, but will be likely to make the gene nonfunctional. There are mutations going on all the time, across the whole genome; the ones that are deleterious, by the very definition, kill or impede the organism's progress. The ones that aren't deleterious just accumulate.
This process is a major way we determine how closely related species are, by measuring the accumulated mutations in unused genes, because they build up linearly over time.
Also, for the record, there are some species of pathogenic bacteria for whom producing genes that help them resist antibiotics make them *more* pathogenic. For those, the bacteria with the extra genes win out in the end, even though they're having to transcribe/translate more material and reproduce somewhat more slowly. It's accurate to say that generally antibiotic resistance is associated with reduced competitiveness with wild-type bacteria in the absence of antibiotics, but that's not 100% true, just generally true.
Along with Adventure, we spent a lot of time on a VAX 11/785 (I believe) playing a game called Hunt. It was multiplayer and each screen showed a top-down section of the maze you were in, like larn, only past that it was like a FPS -- you wandered around, finding ammo, then shooting at other players you saw, using different weapons. A certain amount of ammo let you shoot a bullet, somewhat more a grenade, somewhat more yet an enormous blast that blew up part of the maze, and a whole lot of ammo let you shoot napalm, that ran along corridors without destroying anything (but would pursue people who were running.) I've been trying to find the sourcecode for it for years but haven't even found anyone who has heard of it. Anyone here?
I lived in a lousy part of town, and was burglarized twice within two years. The first time, the burglar kicked in a door and took about $800 worth of stuff. The police came by about an hour after I called them, looked around, said they doubted I'd get any of it back, and duly cranked out a report for me to file with my insurance claim. The second time, I was walking in my front door when the burglar was walking out of it, and I grabbed my backpack out of his hands. THAT time, the police were there within maybe two minutes of my call, two cars plus an unmarked detective car at the house and another two cruising up the way the guy ran; they took pictures of everything and fingerprints from doors, stuff he'd touched and dropped, you name it. One detective told me "we get extremely interested as soon as there's homeowner contact with the burglar."
My point being: the police have different criteria for what's important than you do, and they're professionals with lots of experience. Your history with them sounds like it sucks, and it's likely they were wrong a lot of the time. But you don't know why they're doing what they're doing, and my observation is that their decisions don't seem to be completely arbitrary.
I believe I meant to say: The line, "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!" is said by Rainier Wolfcastle when he is swept away by a torrent of sulphuric acid.
You're welcome.
Straight welding goggles *will* do very nearly nothing, with a laser like this -- because they block a lot of incoming light, your eyes dilate, leaving them actually *more* vulnerable to an intense beam. They also wouldn't do anything much to stop a flood of sulfuric acid, either...
Green lasers are limited in output by optical damage to the coatings. They use an IR laser, driving a YAG crystal, driving a frequency doubling crystal, which is the limiting point. The IR is often in the 200 mW range, like these visible DVD lasers, but you only get a couple mW out of the frequency doubler because A: it's a lossy, nonlinear process that's heavily thermally dependent and cheap laser pointers don't tempcontrol their YAGs or frequency doublers, and B: the output coupler coating on the frequency doubler crystals is only rated to a certain power and if you exceed that you'll cook it. If you want high-power green laser diodes, you have to replace the output crystal. (Yes, I've tried, and have some trashed KTP crystals to show for it.)
CD burners are 780-800 nm, in the IR. DVD's are 660, in the red. Blu-Ray are 405 nm, in the deep blue range. For CD and Blu-ray, welding goggles with a #5 shade would be adequate (complete IR and 10,000x visible attenuation) but for this laser you'd want something that had an OD of more like 7-10 in the red range. A good pair of glasses intended for helium-neon lasers or ruby lasers would probably work, but there are safety glasses intended specifically for these diodes, supplied to people who make them. Expect to pay about $350+ new, but ebay has laser safety goggles for cheaper. But get the technical specs on anything you buy used.
As I said in another post, DVD burning uses lasers rated for over 200 mW. You can buy a DVD burner for under $40 and strip out the laser, or you can often buy replacement/repair carriages for burners on ebay for even less.
I haven't yet seen a straight green laser diode -- mine are all frequency doubled. However, many new green LED's are created using silicon nitride, essentially being blue lasers that emit at a longer wavelength, and it's not clear to me why they couldn't do the same thing with a blue diode.
Lasing your eyes with IR sucks, but not as bad as with visible, because the front of your eye is mostly (*mostly*) opaque to IR so you'll just fry your cornea, which can be replaced. Visible will go through the eye optics system, get even more focussed, and fry holes in your retina, which is not repairable. I've worked with people who have gotten big blasts of UV, IR, and green, and only the people who got hit with green had blind spots in their vision. The others had to wear glasses or have lens/cornea replacements, but they had reasonable vision despite that.
I don't know how much a whole ultrasound machine costs. I do know the company for which I was making just the transducer itself -- the handheld part they put on your stomach (if you're pregnant) or up your butt (if you're unlucky) -- was selling them to the people who made the ultrasound machines for between $5000 and $20,000. One assumes the machine, with all the amplifiers and software and video, probably costs quite a bit more than just the transducer itself.
So, yes, $40K is pocket change. A family practitioner who runs his own office might not buy one, but even small group offices with a half-dozen doctors should be able to afford one of these if they think it'd be used often enough. But you could say the same thing about lots of equipment: it's all about return on investment.
First step: destroy US-based netcasters.
Second step: once there's nobody local with a financial stake, try and ban netcasting entirely -- filter the whole Internet with some fancy new Congress-approved, poorly-functional software.
Sure, encrypted streams might work, but who is going to bother with that? This is the same general progression we watched with mp3's and sharing -- companies, that have interest in quality, provide a central service; their business is outlawed; the service moves to anonymous suppliers who don't have a compelling interest in quality and whose ranks are infiltrated by poisoners who are actively trying to corrupt the system.
What I thought was groovy about Iceland is that the cold water is just like tap water everywhere else, while the hot water smells like a fireworks show. Also interesting: in hotels, there are signs in the bathroom that say "the cold water is potable and passes all international safety standards for drinking water. The hot water is geothermally heated." Reading between the lines: they don't mention the hot water passing international safety standards, nor even being potable. Interesting... I drank plenty coz I like sulfury water, and I didn't die, but it still gave me pause.
My (now ex) girlfriend's glass/jewelry shop was broken into that way repeatedly: she had bars on the windows, a reinforced doorframe, a good lock, but the buildings on either side of her didn't and people broke into them and cut through the wall into her place. And cleaned out the other places, while they were at it... One time they just kicked through drywall, but the others they used a sawzall because there was an exterior wall on one side.
>they do so sometimes at the expense of the education of the boys.
This is only somewhat related, but this might be a perception issue. I just read an interesting book called "Language Myths" about linguistics. One of the things they were talking about was how much women and men speak, and what sort of topics they talk about, for which many of the studies had been done by videotaping schools and schoolteachers. It then went on a tangent about how much more time teachers, male and female alike, spend talking to boys than to girls, even when they're told that they're doing so and are consciously trying to spend more time talking to girls. So, rather than leave the whole works up to observation, the study people got teachers to actually precisely time what they were doing and organize their communications such that they were spending as precisely as possible half their time helping girls, and half helping boys. Then the study people surveyed everyone involved, and *everyone*, teachers, girls, and boys, thought the teachers were spending *far* too much time talking to the girls. As one of the study authors said, "it appears the amount a boy talks is calculated by comparing to other boys talking, and the amount a girl talks is calculated compared to her being silent." So, when we think that a specific education program is concentrating on girls at the expense of boys, it's quite possible we're seeing stuff that's not there.
>there is just no chance people will pay it.
Not happily, they won't. But once they own a DVD upstairs and another one downstairs, and there exist A: encryption mechanisms for making transfer difficult and B: laws making it illegal to break the encryption, then most of them will pay it. Those who don't will go gallivanting off to the Internet to download already hacked material transcoded to an always-playable format, which is why the industry is aggressively pursuing C: sueing everyone in sight for downloading. coz, see, here's the thing: people who aren't actually involved or actively reading about the filesharing suits don't remember or know if those suits are successful. All they know is that filesharing is dangerous, and buying a second copy of some bad movie so you can watch it upstairs and downstairs both is insurance to prevent getting your financial kneecaps broken by Uncle Disney's goons.
I think the main point of having a judicial system is to maintain public safety. Justice often claims to be about fairness, and I think it tries for what the participants perceive as fair. But justice systems are established to stop crime, maybe even prevent it. If you want to see a system to make life more fair, read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. That's not what I'd call justice, but it is fair.
There isn't anything like consensus on how/where abiogenesis originally occurred, although a lot of people propose mudpots, which have almost zero water shielding. But I think it could just as easily be at deep-sea vents, so maybe.
As I said in the original post: it's likely that every single strand of DNA in our bodies gets broken and repaired fifty times a day, according to some stuff I've read of late about oxidative damage. Obviously, we don't contract cancer in every cell in our bodies fifty times a day. We don't yet know all of why we DO contract cancer, although cells that have both been injured irreparably but non-lethally and with non-operational apoptosis mechanisms, look to be a likely cause. The thing is: animals have far, far better DNA repair machinery than bacteria do. (To be more precise, eukaryotes have much better proofreading and excision-repair fidelity than prokaryotes, largely because of the DNA polymerase enzyme varieties we have.) The claim my friends make is that under levels of background radiation some 10x what we see now, bacteria die more than animals do.
I've lived, and still sometimes live, in one of those eight counties. The income isn't really okay, the crime isn't really great (although crime has a very low effect on lifespan unless you're young, male, black, and live in an urban environment) and there's often a *lot* of pollution. The entire town I grew up in is an EPA superfund site and the streams leaving it were so contaminated with arsenic, selenium, and zinc that when there was a collapse in one of the old mines that drained into the river, all the fish would die for twenty miles downstream. Those streams were all the water supply sources for other towns downstream... If you want low pollution, semi-rural lifestyle, okay incomes, and low crime, look at all of kansas, nebraska, wyoming, north dakota, and montana, none of which have a single county in the highest lifespan grouping. I think the picture that study paints clearly indicates that at least one contributor to lifespan is elevation. Now, it's possible that higher elevation means more sunlight, means more vitamin D production, lack of which has been indicated as a possible cause for multiple sclerosis and a couple other diseases, but that's pretty speculative.
There was a time in the US in the 1920's when radiation was the hip thing and people drank water that was, for lack of a better term, carbonated with radon: actually bubbling with gas. It was a very bad idea -- it's obvious that very high levels of radiation are extremely dangerous. But low levels of radiation have repeatedly been shown to suppress the immune system, which can be a benefit to some people. Radon's particularly nasty because if you inhale it, there's a good chance it'll decay, given its three-day halflife, and at that point the first daughter product has a much higher chance of sticking to something, so you get the whole rest of the decay series emanating from something inside you -- alphas, betas, and gammas.
What it comes down to is a tradeoff, of sorts: are the side-effects worse, or is the original problem worse? But that's just like any other treatment, and requires a lot of research, and I don't have any actual evidence one way or the other, just the word of my friends with PhD's.
THAT post is so faulty I don't know where to start, either -- but somehow, I'll manage.
It's possible that some criminals deserve more punishment than a justice system can inflict on them. Likewise, the victims deserve to not have been victimized. They didn't get what they deserved, and criminals don't get what they deserve, either. Here's an important concept: life isn't fair. People rarely get what they deserve. Guess what? you can't fix that. That's just the way life is. Justice doesn't go to 11.
I believe in this old idea called "the punishment should fit the crime." Bigger crime? bigger punishment. To put it another way: as the crime increases, the punishment should increase. That's called 'proportional' -- as the independent variable increases, the dependent variable increases. That's why I say that it should be proportional. You go on to say how the crime's seriousness should determine the punishment's seriousness. That's *PROPORTIONAL*. Either you don't know what the word 'proportional' means or your sentences flat-out contradict each other: I don't know which.
Civilized justice systems should have laws, which are binary: you either haven't broken them or you have, and some system for deciding A: if you've broken the law, and B: how severe the consequences should be. That's part of a judge's job: to assess whether the crime's punishment should be at the minimum or maximum possible severity, in *proportion* to the seriousness of the crime.
I thought about it some more and I can see what you're saying. (You were pretty clear: I was just in a hurry leaving work.) One of your major points is, as you say, that we knew MJ was huge even then. But I *still* disagree, coz, hey, this is slashdot.
Do you remember the two years when Hootie and the Blowfish was HUUUUUGE? You could barely turn around without running into stuff about them. Or how about when Rolling Stone put the Talking Heads on the cover, with "America's Best Band" as the title. I love TTH but they're not exactly standing the test of time. This might be before your time, but do you remember when "Eric Clapton Is God" was spraypainted on walls all over the place, and Cream was the biggest thing since the Stones? Find me anyone under the age of 30 who can name, sing, or even whistle a single Cream song. And they were really, really good. Or how about Peter, Paul, and Mary? They were enormous and people were crying because of the depth and power of their (stupid hippie) songs. Or Brad & Jeremy, who were supposed to be bigger than the Beatles...
I think there are two different things going on here. One: good bands don't really lose fans even when they start turning out crap, so they tend to stay huge. Consider NIN: people are still buying Trent's records even though he hasn't had one good thing to say since he got rich. Ditto Connor Oberst, imho, yet I know a dozen teens who think that Bright Eyes is the best band since the beginning of time. So, what you get is these lumbering bands with enormous followings, who had a few great, "classic" hits, when they were young, and because they're still crashing about like arthritic monkeys (Elton John has a great way with words, I have to say) people are still listening to them. Groups that are only five years old don't have that fan base. Two: selective memory. Yeah, Floyd and the Beatles and Zep were fantastic, but there were other groups that were huge and cranking out good, well-written stuff at the same time, and we don't list them because we've forgotten about them -- Kansas, Supertramp, Iron Butterfly, The Scorpions, come to mind. By what measure are The Rolling Stones better than Cream? Only one: they're better-remembered. I argue it isn't because they had higher quality, just because they were bigger and productive for longer.