Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
-- Montaigne
Apologies for the long and ill-edited reply, but here is some backing for the factual points in my original post, along with some more on the speculative points, which were clearly labeled as such in my original post, as I think you'll find on a closer reading.
"Bizarre things are going on that we are just beginning to get a handle on," says Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at the Institute of Child Health in London. Consider the pregnant Dutch women who starved during the famine of the Second World War. Not unexpectedly, they had small babies. Far more surprisingly, those babies went on to have small babies, even though the postwar generation was well fed and no genes had been tinkered with.
[interesting article with more examples of non-genetic inheritance and gene imprinting. Google on "heritable methylation" for many more.]
non-constancy of evolution - see "punctuated equilibrium" - related to parasite co-evolution in simulations see Ray above
Sexual selection often unrelated to fitness - a commonplace. See peacocks, stags, Pamela Anderson, homosexuals etc. The signs of desirability become divorced from the reality and lead to more waste in display than ultimate reproductive or survival benefit.
Mitochondria as indispensable commensal organisms with an independent genetic lineage, e. coli and other gut organisms as affecting fitness either way (improved digestion/ peritonitis) - (look it up yourself) Further, the mitochondria are inherited through the ova's cytoplasm.
Immune systems in mammalian infants are initialized from the mothers to a large degree through the colostrum (first milk) and additionally through regular milk. Breastfeeding: Unraveling the Mysteries of Mother's Milk Medscape Women's Health eJournal 1(5), 1996. by Margit Hamosh, PhD, Georgetown University Medical Center http://www.asklenore.info/breastfeeding/additional _reading/mysteries.htm
http://www.calfnotes.com/pdffiles/CN050.pdf the number of leukocytes in colostrum can easily exceed 1,000,000 cells/ml. Colostral leukocytes are primarily composed of lymphocytes (23%), neutrophils (38%) and macrophages (40%)....Colostral lymphocytes can survive in the intestinal tract due to the lack of proteases found in the intestine during the first 24 hours after birth and the presence of protease inhibitors such as trypsin inhibitor. Further, leukocytes have been shown to be absorbed into bloodstream of the newborn.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fessler/ pubs/F&A2004InfantMouthing.pdf IgA from breast milk provides protection against all microbes the mother has or has had in her intestinal tract, as the mother's intestinal Peyer's patches send SIgA against current antigens to the mammary glands, and memory lymphocytes able to target past antigens congregate there as well during lactation [39]. These passively transmitted antib
My dad is a pathologist with over 25 years experience running a hospital laboratory. He says the Red Cross is just this side of organized crime. They take blood donations and RENT the blood to hospitals for something like $100/unit for about 3 weeks. Then, instead of freezing it, they either destroy it or sell it for components. This policy, along with their effective monopoly creates severe blood shortages, extorts money from gravely injured people and the continual artificial crises give them propaganda opportunities to look like heroes. In many other ways the American Red Cross is bureaucratic, inept, wasteful, callous and self-serving. They have huge reserves, palatial offices and they do not deserve your support. Don't give them anything without making sure they will use your gift as you direct, and get it in writing.
"the transmitter has to have a very powerful amplifier because it's power is going to be spread over a huge bandwidth"
I don't understand - what are the pratical limiting specs of UWB amplifiers? While I can see peak power might have to be high for an impulse waveform, the average power should still be quite low compared to most kinds of radio.
Also, it sounds like your SDR might likely have problems with a lot of other kinds of interference, too. How does it react to cheap AC motors running nearby?
Glad to see that a smart post got modded up. Darwin's theories are only a little closer to today's evolutionary theory than Ptolomy's are to Einstein's. Yes, survival of the fit is still a major component of evolution, but sexual selection has less to do with fitness than had been supposed, cooperation and co-evolution are more important than had been asserted, and heritability is far more complicated than had been believed. The central dogma of biochemistry (DNA->RNA->proteins [only]) has proven false, aquired methylation patterns can be inheirited, along with cytoplasmic, immune, and epigenetic/develpopmental influences that are not encoded in the base sequence of DNA. Evolution is not constant in pace as had been supposed, nor is random mutation the primary source of variations (aside from sex/crossover) as had been asserted. Species are less seperate than had been thought and genetic material often finds its way into one species from other species or even kingdoms by a variety of mechanisms. Pressures from commensal and parasitic organisms have as much or more to do with the evolution of species than predation per se. And despite denials of some in the field, biology still has no plausible hypothesis of the origin or even the nature of the first cells, let alone actual scientific verification. Despite the pant-hooting teritorial dispays from supposed scientists, the irreducible complexity argument is still one that has not been overcome, much as I would like to see that happen. Not even the origin of all the amino acids is fully explained yet, AFIK - certainly the sparks-and-soup experiments did not produce all the needed amino acids.
Someday these gaps in our knowledge will be explained rather than merely explained away, but the worst and most dangerous kind of pseudoscience comes from those who claim that science is already complete and attack those who point out evidence which isn't explained by current theories. Evolution is a fact, but it is not one single theory, but rather a changing assortment of related hypotheses, many of which will never be scientifically verified in the most rigorous sense of the term, and even if they were, would not categorically disprove hypotheses such as that intelligence is inherent in the universe and started the ball of life rolling or that life originally evolved on another planet and was seeded here by accident or on purpose, or any of hundreds of speculative variations on our current orthodox conjectures.
For some things you are right - particle board will never match real wood, artificial coffee or chocolate or latex-coated "safe" sex isn't anything like the real thing, artificial sweteners are the work of the devil, etc. OTOH, Quake won't ever match the warm, (red, sticky...) sense of personal interaction provided by the old-fashioned pointy stick, nor are modern iatrogenic diseases proper substitutes for authenic, natural smallpox, polio, tuberculosis and dysentery.
However, there are a lot of people out there who think "natural" means "better", and it just isn't true in general. Science is better than "common sense" for figuring out the world. Nylon rope is better than hemp for strength and durability. Metal tools are better than stone for just about everything. Machine-spun thread is finer, stronger and more consistent than hand-spun; machine-woven cloth of a given type is tighter and more durable than hand-woven; machine-sewn seams are stronger, tighter and more even than hand-stitched. Allopathic medicine is better at curing illness than natural medicine, and chemical cleaning, sanitation and pest-killing products are WAY better than natural methods at preventing illness. And of course, most artificially produced things are so much cheaper that for most people the proper comparison isn't artificial vs. natural but rather artificial vs. nothing at all. (admittedly, in some cases "nothing at all" is the better choice.)
Most commonly-adopted, technologically-advanced ways of doing things are measurably better than the methods they replaced for achieving their *instrumental* purposes. Where natural things still usually beat out artificial ones is in directly satisfying the senses with the complexity and texture that human minds and spirits have evolved to enjoy.
Re:How Apple can drive MS into a berserker frenzy:
on
Has Google Peaked?
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· Score: 1
So you hook people on OSX while getting them to wear out their ipods more quickly - how is this a problem for Apple?
From the user's point of view, those with spare partitions could move the files there, and those with DVD-R could burn the OS. Or keep most of the files on the single partition, if that's all that's available, and just the boot stuff on the burned CD or DVD. Ipod HDD life is not really that big a problem.
How Apple can drive MS into a berserker frenzy:
on
Has Google Peaked?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Cringely:
Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version -- OS 10.4 -- on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?
It wouldn't kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn't hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple's store.
I have only one comment on this: BWA-HA-HA-HA! But it'll never happen.
You are right about the torture being a systematic policy laid down from the top, but Karpinski was just a scapegoat. She couldn't get anything she needed to run things, had her authority taken away early on over the cellblocks where the abuses occured and could not inspect the prison at night when the abuses occured. Here is a fraction of a very informative recent interview with Karpinski:
Karpinski says she did not know about the torture occurring in Cellblocks 1-A and 1-B at Abu Ghraib because it took place at night. She didn't live at Abu Ghraib, and nobody was permitted to travel at night due to the dangerous road conditions. The first she heard about the torture was on January 12, 2004. She was never allowed to speak to the people who had worked on the night shift. She "was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them."
When Karpinski inquired, "What's this about photographs?" the sergeant replied, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking." When Karpinski asked to see the log books, the sergeant told her that the Criminal Investigation Division had taken everything except for something on a pole outside the little office they were using.
"It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. "And then a handwritten message over to the side that appeared to be the same handwriting as the signature, and that signature was Secretary Rumsfeld's. And it said, 'Make sure this happens' with two exclamation points. And that was the only thing they had. Everything else had been confiscated."
Karpinski tried to get information, but "nobody knew anything, nobody - at least, that's what they were claiming. The Company Commander, Captain Reese, was tearful in my office and repeatedly told me he knew nothing about it, knew nothing about it," Karpinski said. But in a later plea bargain he entered into after the Taguba Report came out, "Captain Reese said that not only did he know about it, but he was told not to report it to his chain of command, and he was told that by Colonel Pappas. And he claimed that he saw General Sanchez out there on several occasions witnessing the torture of some of the security detainees."
The first time Karpinski got any clarification about the photographs was January 23, 2004. The criminal investigator, Colonel Marcelo, came into Karpinski's office and showed her the pictures. "When I saw the pictures I was floored," Karpinski said. "Really, the world was spinning out of control when I saw those pictures, because it was so far beyond and outside of what I imagined. I thought that maybe some soldiers had taken some pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire or in their cell or something like that. I couldn't imagine anything like what I saw in those photographs."....
Karpinski said, however, "The truth has been uncovered, but it's been suffocated and it has not been released with the results of the investigation." She added, "McClellan and Rumsfeld can get up on their high horse and say that there've been no fewer than 15 investigations that were conducted. But every one of those investigations is under the control of the Secretary of Defense. And every one of those investigations is run and led by a person who can lose their job under Rumsfeld's fist."
There is a way to do that - it's called a disclosure. You have to pay several hundred dollars in filing fees, with the certainty that you'll never see a dime back. For some reason it isn't as popular as they hoped when they started the program.
Even without a lawyer, it's still 1,000s of dollars, and the patent you get WILL be worthless against anyone who cares enough to try to break it. Claims drafting is an art more difficult than writing man pages in anapestic heptameter, and even in the unbelieveably unlikely event you do it perfectly, you still better not have any prior art in anything EVER published or produced ANYWHERE, plus a spare few hundred thousand to pay your attorneys to prosecute EACH infringer. Then, even if you get a judgement in your favor (which you won't) if the defendant can simply reincorparate under a different name and force you to prosecute the whole thing over again. If you have enough money to use a patent, you're already rich enough to sue most potential competitors into the ground for no reason at all, anyway. A patent just makes the process more convenient.
Disagree? How many cases can you cite where an individual inventor who drafted his own claims has actually collected a judgement against a well-financed corporation? Or even covered his expenses with royalties? You'll get way better odds taking your filing fees to Vegas, my friend.
So they got issued patents on prior art. A patent is just a license to sue - and one you must exercise consistently to keep. If undisclosed prior art is introduced at trial, the patent-holder loses. If the subject matter is obvious, they lose. All they have really gotten is a license to sue and lose, assuming the opposing party is sufficiently well-lawyered.
The big problem is not the requirements for getting a patent, it's that the requirements are not enforced. The bigger problem with the patent system is really a problem with the legal system in general - its real purpose is to make lawyers rich, and those who cannot make lawyers rich are ushered quickly out the door.
"And the more iternal components you have, the lower your reliability."
That's what the military "thinks", but it just isn't true. Adding fuses, protection diodes, extra bypass capacitors, redundant fail-safe circuits, and often active monitoring circuits all increase real-world reliability. And extra fans are particularly important, especially since they fail all the time, particularly in cheap PSUs. Adding additional non-protective components in the critical circuit path does reduce reliability, but it's not true in general.
Yes, you can overpay for a PSU - but a cheap PSU is hardly ever a bargain. There is hardly another part of a computer where "you get what you pay for" is so true.
It has 2 x16 PCI-e slots, so, yes you can run SLI. Not only that, those slots are both true x16, unlike on consumer boards where you are sharing a single bus, thus effectively making them x8 slots. Which is not actually all that big a problem because the graphics cards (Nvidia at least, which is the only one that counts in this segment at the moment) do not use the bandwidth effectively yet, at least compared with cards like Myrinet's.
Note: this post regurgitated from half-digested gpgpu.org posts - go there if you actually want to read someone who knows what he is talking about.
"If more contemporary comparisons are sought, we need only compare the current black literacy rate in the United States (56 percent) with the rate in Jamaica (98.5 percent)--a figure considerably higher than the American white literacy rate (83 percent)."...
Footnote 1: The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictments, from the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of other credible sources, it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology. But in a larger sense the author urges every reader to trust personal judgment over "numerical" evidence, whatever the source. During the writer's 30-year classroom experience, the decline in student ability to comprehend difficult text was marked, while the ability to extract and parrot "information" in the form of "facts" was much less affected. This is a product of deliberate pedagogy, to what end is the burden of my essay.
The percentage of people aged 15-24 who can, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement related to their everyday life. 2004 - 94.5%
The problem is that it is very difficult to find comparable statistics for different countries. See http://www.arthurhu.com/index/literacy.htm for a listing of various statistics. Depending on the definition, US literacy rates range from 99.5% (essentially assuming everyone who ever went to school can read) to 50% (for reading comprehension at roughly an 8th-grade level). According to the most rigorous statistics using actual reading tests, at least 23% of people in the US are illiterate or subliterate. (http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/facts_overview.htm l)
So, you may well be right that Jamaica has a lower literacy rate than the US, but the data are equivocal.
Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences,...
I think it's a pretty safe bet that this is not going to happen. Where's the funding going to come from?
My thought here was that bulk molecular nanotechnology (not loose replicators, mind you, but devices produced by molecular mills) will allow surveying and recording of huge volumes of sites all over the world. Virtually all the interesting sites would get micron-level attention, with full positional, chemical, magnetic, isotopic etc. data, and the whole Earth's crust would be explored to the temperature limits of the technology to a resolution of better than a few centimeters within a few decades. Here's a back-of-the envelope calulation to show it's plausible given the kind of capabilities Drexler laid out in Nanosystems:
The top 10 km of the crust is about 5E9 km^3, or 5E24 cc. Assuming one 50-micron nanobot per cm^2 of surface, that's only 6.4E5 m^3 of nanobots, which could travel, say, 1 m through rock in 1000 minutes, or 10km in 19 years. Gathering 1kB on each cc yields 5E27 bytes. Storing on the order of 100 bits per cubic nanometer yields a database of about 0.4 cubic meters, a cube 3/4 meter on a side. Given the volume of the nanobots, hundreds of MB per cc would be a more likely amount of data gathered. Obviously all these numbers could be off substantially, but I tend to think that they will mostly turn out to be conservative. The computational capacity to interpret the data will likewise be far beyond our current frame of reference.
A similar calulation could be done for the exploration of the biosphere, observing the genetics and physiology of every macroscopic organism on Earth at a very fine level.
It will be reassuring to have a backup tape handy in case anything happens to Earth.
The shares they sell have 1/10 the votes per share as the ones retained by the company and its founders. Even if this were not so, they would only need 33% to override any shareholder vote that went less than 75% against them; given the voting structure, they only need to control 3.3% of the company's value to achieve the same effect.
Further, their IPO docs state that they have no intention of ever paying a dividend. Given the increasing competition they face, their poor record of protecting their Adwords customers from fraud, their stratospheric price-to earnings ratio, and the frequent gigantic insider stock sales since the IPO, this is a stock to short-sell, not buy.
In unrelated news, Savantissimo is issuing 14 million shares in his holding company, which has a diversified portfolio of obsolete computer equipment, stale nachos, tatty SF books as well as a marginally serviceable toothbrush. Liabilities disclosed in the filing include one lazy know-it-all Gen-Xer. Offering price will be $285 per share.
Savantissimo Holdings International Tippling said it intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general slacker purposes, including non-working capital, capital dissipation and possible acquisitions of small guacamole-producing nations or possibly cool stuff.
The company, however, said it has no current agreements or commitments to any material acquisitions. Pending acquisitions, SHI Tippling plans to invest the proceeds in highly liquid, ingestion-grade beverages, according to the SEC document.
That should read: "issue another 1 Million shares" to give 2 million shares total in the market, if we're sticking to simple math. If they do a stock split, then it's a bit different. The amount of dilution will depend on what % of stock is held by the company and how much of that is sold to the public.
Occam's razor says not to multiply hypotheses without reason. Old Bill had nothing to say about what size Hilbert spaces God finds neccesary, but as a medieval theologan he would have been more likely to demand a reason why there should be some finite limit than the converse.
That the different outcomes or causes all occur (depending on whether one looks at it from the mathematically equivalent many-futures or many-histories points of view) is only a single hypothesis, and at that, only one that suggests that we simply assume that the math says what it appears to say. It is in fact conceptually simpler to suppose that the wave function goes on with parts becoming hidden from us than to theorize that the wave function is frequently unpredictably interrupted by this miraculous and inexplicable collapse of the state vector to a single value.
I meant it in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. I suspect that there is no randomness to quantum misbehavior at all, just sheer quasi-conscious cussedness.
"Dear, you have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things, but notional; you have to let them know who's boss." --Hazel Meade Stone AKA Gwen Novak, Cat Who Walks Through Walls, pg 106, by Robert A. Heinlein, patron saint of percussive maintenance.
When textbook buying became centralized the quality of the materials went way down. Read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" for an account of how incestuous the relationship between publishers and textbook committees was even in the '60s. The people making the decisions are just not capable. Nor are the teachers, for the most part. Having a hard science or engineering degree is no help in getting hired as a public-school teacher in most states - an "education degree" is required, and to get one of those you have to be a rather dim herd animal or you'll be driven nuts by the inanity.
A detailed account of the incredible dumbing down of the public by the policies of state schooling can be found in The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. (full text online)
As far as "just one universe" goes, more theoretical physicists prefer the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics than any other. But science still has a long ways to go to catch up even to the available evidence in many fields.
40 years ago geologists were swearing up and down that continental drift was a crackpot theory. Today they atill claim that geologic hydrocarbons are all the result of fossil life, despite all the methane and other HCs in the gas giants and their moons and despite oil being found in solid primordial granite.
Biologists still get huffy and irrational when you point out that they still don't have a clue how the first cells formed.
Archaeologists still believe in the Clovis theory, no matter how much pre-Clovis stuff turns up, a pattern of willful ignorance that is repeated over and over throughout the world.
Essentially all the new physical theories will be seen as the most transparent bull - inflation, the age and structure of the universe, the standard model, M-theory...
Psychiatric drug therapy of today will be seen in the same light as trying to fix jet engines using nothing but fuel additives. Most current forms of morality and immorality will be demonstrated to be correctable mental defects.
All sex laws and taboos will be seen as medieval.
More than 99.9% of people in the solar system will be able to outscore 99.9% of today's people on today's mental tests, but we would regard most of them as cheating. They will regard their enhancements as part of themselves or as corrective devices, like eyeglasses are today.
The concept of privacy, even for thoughts, will be as antique and nominal as the divine right of kings is today; nevertheless, people will be more free in the sense of usable personal power than they ever were in the past.
Global cooling will be a concern, but manageable.
Only a few fundamentalists will keep traditional 100% human bodies, or for that matter just one body. Some will have as many bodies as todays people have shirts.
Most "persons" in existence will not have been born at all. Greater than 90% of the population will have predominantly non-biological substrates, but some of these will have been born, while many of the mostly bio-based people will not have been. The sentient population will exceed 1 trillion by most measures, but will be difficult to decide how to count the self-aware corporations, partials and copies, distributed intellects, acorporeal persons and so forth. Most people will be very young by today's standards, but this will have little correlation with experience and knowledge, which will not necessarily be linked with personal histories.
Lamarck will be seen as not all that far off the mark. Epigenetic and protein-reaction-web engineering will be a basic ability like computer programming is today. The supposed decoding of the human genome at the end of the 20th century will be regarded as about as complete as Columbus' understanding of world geography. Virtually everything important will be in the introns, methylation etc. and in protein regulation of the genetic molecules.
Genetics (and other substrate codes) will be seen as easier to correct than personal environmental history , but not by much.
The expression "willful ignorance" will be seen as self-evidently redundant.
The theory of relativity will have undergone significant modifications.
Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences, and today's theories will be seen as wrong in virtually every respect.
Teleportation will be commonplace, but will be based on information rather than matter per se traversing distances.
Eric Drexler's predictions in Engines of Creation and Nanosystems will be seen as being as over-conservative as Ben Franklin's speculations about the use of electricity.
Consciousness will be more fully understood than quantum mechanics is today. Indeed, they will turn out to be related, but only in a very vaguely similar manner to most of the 20th century speculations in that vein.
There will have been at least one more war which killed over 1,000,000 people, but none in at least 30 years.
Strong AI will show up late in the game, and won't take off instantly, but will have far surpassed human levels in every way in the late decades of the 21st century.
Slashdot Mirror
-- Montaigne
Apologies for the long and ill-edited reply, but here is some backing for the factual points in my original post, along with some more on the speculative points, which were clearly labeled as such in my original post, as I think you'll find on a closer reading.
Heritability and environmental / developmental alteration of methylation and thus gene expression: Control of Gene Expression in Eukaryotes by Phillip McClean
http://www.cc.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/mcclean/plsc 431/geneexpress/eukaryex5.htm
http://www.ifgene.org/vines.htm
[interesting article with more examples of non-genetic inheritance and gene imprinting. Google on "heritable methylation" for many more.]
...Colostral lymphocytes can survive in the intestinal tract due to the lack of proteases found in the intestine during the first 24 hours after birth and the presence of protease inhibitors such as trypsin inhibitor. Further, leukocytes have been shown to be absorbed into
Parasites and evolution:
Evolution, Ecology and Optimization of Digital Organisms by Thomas S. Ray
http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml. html
see also Lynn Margolis' work
non-constancy of evolution - see "punctuated equilibrium" - related to parasite co-evolution in simulations see Ray above
Sexual selection often unrelated to fitness - a commonplace. See peacocks, stags, Pamela Anderson, homosexuals etc. The signs of desirability become divorced from the reality and lead to more waste in display than ultimate reproductive or survival benefit.
Mitochondria as indispensable commensal organisms with an independent genetic lineage, e. coli and other gut organisms as affecting fitness either way (improved digestion/ peritonitis) - (look it up yourself)
Further, the mitochondria are inherited through the ova's cytoplasm.
Immune systems in mammalian infants are initialized from the mothers to a large degree through the colostrum (first milk) and additionally through regular milk. Breastfeeding: Unraveling the Mysteries of Mother's Milk Medscape Women's Health eJournal 1(5), 1996.
by Margit Hamosh, PhD, Georgetown University Medical Center
http://www.asklenore.info/breastfeeding/additional _reading/mysteries.htm
http://www.calfnotes.com/pdffiles/CN050.pdf
the number of leukocytes in colostrum can easily exceed 1,000,000 cells/ml. Colostral leukocytes are primarily composed of lymphocytes (23%), neutrophils (38%) and macrophages (40%).
bloodstream of the newborn.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fessler/ pubs/F&A2004InfantMouthing.pdf
IgA from breast milk provides protection against all microbes the mother has or has had in her intestinal tract, as the mother's intestinal Peyer's patches send SIgA against current antigens to the mammary glands, and memory lymphocytes able to target past antigens congregate there as well during lactation [39]. These passively transmitted antib
My dad is a pathologist with over 25 years experience running a hospital laboratory. He says the Red Cross is just this side of organized crime. They take blood donations and RENT the blood to hospitals for something like $100/unit for about 3 weeks. Then, instead of freezing it, they either destroy it or sell it for components. This policy, along with their effective monopoly creates severe blood shortages, extorts money from gravely injured people and the continual artificial crises give them propaganda opportunities to look like heroes. In many other ways the American Red Cross is bureaucratic, inept, wasteful, callous and self-serving. They have huge reserves, palatial offices and they do not deserve your support. Don't give them anything without making sure they will use your gift as you direct, and get it in writing.
"the transmitter has to have a very powerful amplifier because it's power is going to be spread over a huge bandwidth"
I don't understand - what are the pratical limiting specs of UWB amplifiers? While I can see peak power might have to be high for an impulse waveform, the average power should still be quite low compared to most kinds of radio.
Also, it sounds like your SDR might likely have problems with a lot of other kinds of interference, too. How does it react to cheap AC motors running nearby?
That would be a veg^H^H^Hhumanitarian course, but we'd be really bad for your cholesterol.
Glad to see that a smart post got modded up. Darwin's theories are only a little closer to today's evolutionary theory than Ptolomy's are to Einstein's. Yes, survival of the fit is still a major component of evolution, but sexual selection has less to do with fitness than had been supposed, cooperation and co-evolution are more important than had been asserted, and heritability is far more complicated than had been believed. The central dogma of biochemistry (DNA->RNA->proteins [only]) has proven false, aquired methylation patterns can be inheirited, along with cytoplasmic, immune, and epigenetic/develpopmental influences that are not encoded in the base sequence of DNA. Evolution is not constant in pace as had been supposed, nor is random mutation the primary source of variations (aside from sex/crossover) as had been asserted. Species are less seperate than had been thought and genetic material often finds its way into one species from other species or even kingdoms by a variety of mechanisms. Pressures from commensal and parasitic organisms have as much or more to do with the evolution of species than predation per se. And despite denials of some in the field, biology still has no plausible hypothesis of the origin or even the nature of the first cells, let alone actual scientific verification. Despite the pant-hooting teritorial dispays from supposed scientists, the irreducible complexity argument is still one that has not been overcome, much as I would like to see that happen. Not even the origin of all the amino acids is fully explained yet, AFIK - certainly the sparks-and-soup experiments did not produce all the needed amino acids.
Someday these gaps in our knowledge will be explained rather than merely explained away, but the worst and most dangerous kind of pseudoscience comes from those who claim that science is already complete and attack those who point out evidence which isn't explained by current theories. Evolution is a fact, but it is not one single theory, but rather a changing assortment of related hypotheses, many of which will never be scientifically verified in the most rigorous sense of the term, and even if they were, would not categorically disprove hypotheses such as that intelligence is inherent in the universe and started the ball of life rolling or that life originally evolved on another planet and was seeded here by accident or on purpose, or any of hundreds of speculative variations on our current orthodox conjectures.
For some things you are right - particle board will never match real wood, artificial coffee or chocolate or latex-coated "safe" sex isn't anything like the real thing, artificial sweteners are the work of the devil, etc. OTOH, Quake won't ever match the warm, (red, sticky...) sense of personal interaction provided by the old-fashioned pointy stick, nor are modern iatrogenic diseases proper substitutes for authenic, natural smallpox, polio, tuberculosis and dysentery.
However, there are a lot of people out there who think "natural" means "better", and it just isn't true in general. Science is better than "common sense" for figuring out the world. Nylon rope is better than hemp for strength and durability. Metal tools are better than stone for just about everything. Machine-spun thread is finer, stronger and more consistent than hand-spun; machine-woven cloth of a given type is tighter and more durable than hand-woven; machine-sewn seams are stronger, tighter and more even than hand-stitched. Allopathic medicine is better at curing illness than natural medicine, and chemical cleaning, sanitation and pest-killing products are WAY better than natural methods at preventing illness. And of course, most artificially produced things are so much cheaper that for most people the proper comparison isn't artificial vs. natural but rather artificial vs. nothing at all. (admittedly, in some cases "nothing at all" is the better choice.)
Most commonly-adopted, technologically-advanced ways of doing things are measurably better than the methods they replaced for achieving their *instrumental* purposes. Where natural things still usually beat out artificial ones is in directly satisfying the senses with the complexity and texture that human minds and spirits have evolved to enjoy.
So you hook people on OSX while getting them to wear out their ipods more quickly - how is this a problem for Apple?
From the user's point of view, those with spare partitions could move the files there, and those with DVD-R could burn the OS. Or keep most of the files on the single partition, if that's all that's available, and just the boot stuff on the burned CD or DVD. Ipod HDD life is not really that big a problem.
I have only one comment on this: BWA-HA-HA-HA!
But it'll never happen.
There is a way to do that - it's called a disclosure. You have to pay several hundred dollars in filing fees, with the certainty that you'll never see a dime back. For some reason it isn't as popular as they hoped when they started the program.
Even without a lawyer, it's still 1,000s of dollars, and the patent you get WILL be worthless against anyone who cares enough to try to break it. Claims drafting is an art more difficult than writing man pages in anapestic heptameter, and even in the unbelieveably unlikely event you do it perfectly, you still better not have any prior art in anything EVER published or produced ANYWHERE, plus a spare few hundred thousand to pay your attorneys to prosecute EACH infringer. Then, even if you get a judgement in your favor (which you won't) if the defendant can simply reincorparate under a different name and force you to prosecute the whole thing over again. If you have enough money to use a patent, you're already rich enough to sue most potential competitors into the ground for no reason at all, anyway. A patent just makes the process more convenient.
Disagree? How many cases can you cite where an individual inventor who drafted his own claims has actually collected a judgement against a well-financed corporation? Or even covered his expenses with royalties? You'll get way better odds taking your filing fees to Vegas, my friend.
So they got issued patents on prior art. A patent is just a license to sue - and one you must exercise consistently to keep. If undisclosed prior art is introduced at trial, the patent-holder loses. If the subject matter is obvious, they lose. All they have really gotten is a license to sue and lose, assuming the opposing party is sufficiently well-lawyered.
The big problem is not the requirements for getting a patent, it's that the requirements are not enforced. The bigger problem with the patent system is really a problem with the legal system in general - its real purpose is to make lawyers rich, and those who cannot make lawyers rich are ushered quickly out the door.
"And the more iternal components you have, the lower your reliability."
That's what the military "thinks", but it just isn't true. Adding fuses, protection diodes, extra bypass capacitors, redundant fail-safe circuits, and often active monitoring circuits all increase real-world reliability. And extra fans are particularly important, especially since they fail all the time, particularly in cheap PSUs. Adding additional non-protective components in the critical circuit path does reduce reliability, but it's not true in general.
Yes, you can overpay for a PSU - but a cheap PSU is hardly ever a bargain. There is hardly another part of a computer where "you get what you pay for" is so true.
"no SLI on this board for some reason"
It has 2 x16 PCI-e slots, so, yes you can run SLI. Not only that, those slots are both true x16, unlike on consumer boards where you are sharing a single bus, thus effectively making them x8 slots. Which is not actually all that big a problem because the graphics cards (Nvidia at least, which is the only one that counts in this segment at the moment) do not use the bandwidth effectively yet, at least compared with cards like Myrinet's.
Note: this post regurgitated from half-digested gpgpu.org posts - go there if you actually want to read someone who knows what he is talking about.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
Here is another source on Jamaican literacy rates:
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?
The problem is that it is very difficult to find comparable statistics for different countries. See http://www.arthurhu.com/index/literacy.htm for a listing of various statistics. Depending on the definition, US literacy rates range from 99.5% (essentially assuming everyone who ever went to school can read) to 50% (for reading comprehension at roughly an 8th-grade level). According to the most rigorous statistics using actual reading tests, at least 23% of people in the US are illiterate or subliterate. (http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/facts_overview.ht
So, you may well be right that Jamaica has a lower literacy rate than the US, but the data are equivocal.
My thought here was that bulk molecular nanotechnology (not loose replicators, mind you, but devices produced by molecular mills) will allow surveying and recording of huge volumes of sites all over the world. Virtually all the interesting sites would get micron-level attention, with full positional, chemical, magnetic, isotopic etc. data, and the whole Earth's crust would be explored to the temperature limits of the technology to a resolution of better than a few centimeters within a few decades. Here's a back-of-the envelope calulation to show it's plausible given the kind of capabilities Drexler laid out in Nanosystems:
The top 10 km of the crust is about 5E9 km^3, or 5E24 cc. Assuming one 50-micron nanobot per cm^2 of surface, that's only 6.4E5 m^3 of nanobots, which could travel, say, 1 m through rock in 1000 minutes, or 10km in 19 years. Gathering 1kB on each cc yields 5E27 bytes. Storing on the order of 100 bits per cubic nanometer yields a database of about 0.4 cubic meters, a cube 3/4 meter on a side. Given the volume of the nanobots, hundreds of MB per cc would be a more likely amount of data gathered. Obviously all these numbers could be off substantially, but I tend to think that they will mostly turn out to be conservative. The computational capacity to interpret the data will likewise be far beyond our current frame of reference.
A similar calulation could be done for the exploration of the biosphere, observing the genetics and physiology of every macroscopic organism on Earth at a very fine level.
It will be reassuring to have a backup tape handy in case anything happens to Earth.
The shares they sell have 1/10 the votes per share as the ones retained by the company and its founders. Even if this were not so, they would only need 33% to override any shareholder vote that went less than 75% against them; given the voting structure, they only need to control 3.3% of the company's value to achieve the same effect.
Further, their IPO docs state that they have no intention of ever paying a dividend. Given the increasing competition they face, their poor record of protecting their Adwords customers from fraud, their stratospheric price-to earnings ratio, and the frequent gigantic insider stock sales since the IPO, this is a stock to short-sell, not buy.
In unrelated news, Savantissimo is issuing 14 million shares in his holding company, which has a diversified portfolio of obsolete computer equipment, stale nachos, tatty SF books as well as a marginally serviceable toothbrush. Liabilities disclosed in the filing include one lazy know-it-all Gen-Xer. Offering price will be $285 per share.
Savantissimo Holdings International Tippling said it intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general slacker purposes, including non-working capital, capital dissipation and possible acquisitions of small guacamole-producing nations or possibly cool stuff.
The company, however, said it has no current agreements or commitments to any material acquisitions. Pending acquisitions, SHI Tippling plans to invest the proceeds in highly liquid, ingestion-grade beverages, according to the SEC document.
That should read: "issue another 1 Million shares" to give 2 million shares total in the market, if we're sticking to simple math. If they do a stock split, then it's a bit different. The amount of dilution will depend on what % of stock is held by the company and how much of that is sold to the public.
Occam's razor says not to multiply hypotheses without reason. Old Bill had nothing to say about what size Hilbert spaces God finds neccesary, but as a medieval theologan he would have been more likely to demand a reason why there should be some finite limit than the converse.
That the different outcomes or causes all occur (depending on whether one looks at it from the mathematically equivalent many-futures or many-histories points of view) is only a single hypothesis, and at that, only one that suggests that we simply assume that the math says what it appears to say. It is in fact conceptually simpler to suppose that the wave function goes on with parts becoming hidden from us than to theorize that the wave function is frequently unpredictably interrupted by this miraculous and inexplicable collapse of the state vector to a single value.
I meant it in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. I suspect that there is no randomness to quantum misbehavior at all, just sheer quasi-conscious cussedness.
"Dear, you have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things, but notional; you have to let them know who's boss."
--Hazel Meade Stone AKA Gwen Novak, Cat Who Walks Through Walls, pg 106, by Robert A. Heinlein, patron saint of percussive maintenance.
Why is it that Jamaica has a higher literacy rate than the US, then?
When textbook buying became centralized the quality of the materials went way down. Read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" for an account of how incestuous the relationship between publishers and textbook committees was even in the '60s. The people making the decisions are just not capable. Nor are the teachers, for the most part. Having a hard science or engineering degree is no help in getting hired as a public-school teacher in most states - an "education degree" is required, and to get one of those you have to be a rather dim herd animal or you'll be driven nuts by the inanity.
A detailed account of the incredible dumbing down of the public by the policies of state schooling can be found in The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. (full text online)
As far as "just one universe" goes, more theoretical physicists prefer the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics than any other. But science still has a long ways to go to catch up even to the available evidence in many fields.
40 years ago geologists were swearing up and down that continental drift was a crackpot theory. Today they atill claim that geologic hydrocarbons are all the result of fossil life, despite all the methane and other HCs in the gas giants and their moons and despite oil being found in solid primordial granite.
Biologists still get huffy and irrational when you point out that they still don't have a clue how the first cells formed.
Archaeologists still believe in the Clovis theory, no matter how much pre-Clovis stuff turns up, a pattern of willful ignorance that is repeated over and over throughout the world.
Essentially all the new physical theories will be seen as the most transparent bull - inflation, the age and structure of the universe, the standard model, M-theory...
Psychiatric drug therapy of today will be seen in the same light as trying to fix jet engines using nothing but fuel additives. Most current forms of morality and immorality will be demonstrated to be correctable mental defects.
All sex laws and taboos will be seen as medieval.
More than 99.9% of people in the solar system will be able to outscore 99.9% of today's people on today's mental tests, but we would regard most of them as cheating. They will regard their enhancements as part of themselves or as corrective devices, like eyeglasses are today.
The concept of privacy, even for thoughts, will be as antique and nominal as the divine right of kings is today; nevertheless, people will be more free in the sense of usable personal power than they ever were in the past.
Global cooling will be a concern, but manageable.
Only a few fundamentalists will keep traditional 100% human bodies, or for that matter just one body. Some will have as many bodies as todays people have shirts.
Most "persons" in existence will not have been born at all. Greater than 90% of the population will have predominantly non-biological substrates, but some of these will have been born, while many of the mostly bio-based people will not have been. The sentient population will exceed 1 trillion by most measures, but will be difficult to decide how to count the self-aware corporations, partials and copies, distributed intellects, acorporeal persons and so forth. Most people will be very young by today's standards, but this will have little correlation with experience and knowledge, which will not necessarily be linked with personal histories.
Lamarck will be seen as not all that far off the mark. Epigenetic and protein-reaction-web engineering will be a basic ability like computer programming is today. The supposed decoding of the human genome at the end of the 20th century will be regarded as about as complete as Columbus' understanding of world geography. Virtually everything important will be in the introns, methylation etc. and in protein regulation of the genetic molecules.
Genetics (and other substrate codes) will be seen as easier to correct than personal environmental history , but not by much.
The expression "willful ignorance" will be seen as self-evidently redundant.
The theory of relativity will have undergone significant modifications.
Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences, and today's theories will be seen as wrong in virtually every respect.
Teleportation will be commonplace, but will be based on information rather than matter per se traversing distances.
Eric Drexler's predictions in Engines of Creation and Nanosystems will be seen as being as over-conservative as Ben Franklin's speculations about the use of electricity.
Consciousness will be more fully understood than quantum mechanics is today. Indeed, they will turn out to be related, but only in a very vaguely similar manner to most of the 20th century speculations in that vein.
There will have been at least one more war which killed over 1,000,000 people, but none in at least 30 years.
Strong AI will show up late in the game, and won't take off instantly, but will have far surpassed human levels in every way in the late decades of the 21st century.