The problem I've noticed with a lot of Libertarian arguments on topics like this is that they omit the biggest part of choice, which is information. Without informed choice, no good decisions can be made. If product A and product B are both supposed to cure missing limbs, but product A is a miracle pill that makes you regrow arms and legs and what-not and product B is a 2X4 with a nail in it, which would you choose? How would you know which to choose without information? How would you know that Product B is far inferior if the company were able to silence their critics like the "doctor" in this article?
Obviously, my example is hyperbole, but it was done to make a point. Without informed choice, there really is no valid choice.
That he did, and by letter you are correct. However, I interpreted "socialist nations" to mean nations that have predominantly socialist or otherwise left-leaning political parties in current or recent majorities and social welfare systems similar to equal to Scandinavian Welfare.
Should those 12% that are too disabled to work be abandoned to the winter and the wolves? Should the government shut down just so those 30% can hold their heads high while they starve, thankful that they aren't doing something so terrible as working for a government?
The things shared in common by Linus Torvalds and the founder of SpaceX is that they were both already economically mobile and had the money to move to a different country. The US is a great place to be if you are wealthy, as there are very few items or services that are denied to someone with means. As a personal opinion, I believe that extends to the US legal and political system as well. If you are poor, either because you were born in to poverty or you ended up in poverty, your prospects are very limited.
This isn't to say that I don't love my country, I certainly do, but I love the country that offers a level playing field where someone who is bright and creative can succeed through a combination of innovation and hard work. What I don't love is the country we have become, where monied interests are given every opportunity, and the poor are left to eek out whatever existence they can.
Funny enough, the only companies that I've dealt with that still offer pensions are either foreign owned (specifically European owned) or are public utilities and municipalities. (but pensions are going away as budgets get slashed in the name of "austerity")
One thing I learned working for Germans is that they love to complain. There is a joke I heard while over there that when old Germans die and go to Heaven they complain about the lax admission requirements.
However, you even hint that you want to make changes to the social contract and you will find your political prospects in the toilet or in the welcoming arms of the NDP. (the Nazi party without the cool uniforms) This isn't to say that the taxes aren't high in Germany and the Scandinavian Socialist countries, but you certainly get what you pay for. At the same time, stories of Welfare Queens do well over there, even if the people telling them would be very hard pressed to actually find one.
Humm... as has already been mentioned below, they use the volumetric printers that do everything with lasers and polyester resin then vapor deposit the nickel.
I don't have one of those printers but I know where I could rent time on one. I don't have the skills in Maya or AUTOCAD to make the shape they describe, but I imagine someone proficient in that software could hack something together. The vapor depositing of the nickel would be a pain. The only metal deposit work I've done has been with gold on samples for SEMs and TEMs and I know that nickel has a higher melting point.
One thing I'm noticing though is that all of these barriers are skill related. I would imagine a good industrial process engineer could figure out a really nifty way to do this stuff on a large scale. The vapor deposit process, I imagine, is well understood and we have tons of consumer electronic products that use it. Large scale 3D printing might be a bit trickier.
Once that part gets licked, it seems like this material would be a heck of a lot easier to make then aerogel. As your aerogel block gets larger, the more time you have to spend on all parts of the process. A bigger block takes longer to wash and age, and has to be in supercritical drying for a more significant period. Otherwise, your gel is cloudy and dense and that's not why you're making aerogel in the first place!
The ultraviolet laser in to polymer IS 3D printing using the same exact process that the first 3D printers used. It isn't the extrusion type that the Maker folks are bashing together in their garages, but you can rent time on a machine with that level precision. Heck a couple of SIGGRAPHs ago you could bring a 3D model in one of several formats and they would print it for you as a demo.
The problem with aerogels is that they can be very finicky during production, and unless you make them hydrophobic (or is it hydrophillic?) they can start to dissolve from as little as a single drop of sweat.
Some friends and I got some lab equipment during a "Lost Our Grant" sale, which included a high-pressure autoclave. We thought making aerogel would be a hoot, but damn is that stuff difficult to produce. It is relatively cheap, but during the supercritical drying phase, you'd best not bump the autoclave, and you better have mixed everything right. That stuff is like the comedy souffle of the future.
Anyway, the novelty wears off after you've played with the stuff for 20 minutes. The novelty of watching the cat bat it around takes about an hour.
The donations page is amusing. For a donation of half a million dollars, you can have the base named after you. Personally, I'd love to see this actually happen, but the skeptic in me is...well, you know.
Still, if I had the two-hundred and fifty thousand laying around that would get a spacecraft named after me, I'd do it. Then I'd ask to name the seventh craft in the fleet and submit my middle name so it could be Blake's 7.
Are you mad?!?! You like the idea of naked oiled youths zipping through the aether in astervarka, possibly meeting psychic aliens and bringing them home?
Do you really want to meet the nude dude with the Ood?
Really, the only thing that helps in ceph spotting is practice and experience. One of my buddies is an absolute natural at spotting octopuses and the midden is the best place to start. From there, watch for rock and coral formations that are slightly off in color from those around them or have a slight ripple. Octopus camouflage is great, but not perfect.
The polarized lenses will help a bit if the animal is on a rock or sand. They can't affect the reflectivity of their skin and blocking out circular polarization will help. I don't think IR is going to help much because light in that wavelength transmits so poorly through water. I don't know if you could get a hold of one, but lasers and LED lights that are heavy in the blue/green spectrum will make the iridophores much more apparent. The LEDs tend to work better because you have a wider frequency band to work with.
Go slow. I was once floating in about 5 feet of water, just resting and letting the light current push me toward the spot on the beach where I had left my stuff. Suddenly, I saw two eyes pop up out of the rocks on a stalk. After a few moments, I saw that the stalk was attached to an octopus and it slowly crept out of the hole, over some other rocks, around a fan coral, and in to another hole that was an obvious octopus den. Octopuses watch for sudden motion, so the more like a log or cloud shadow you look, the easier time you'll have.
Finally, familiarity. When I was studying squid behavior in the field, the squid got used to the team floating above them and were much more apt to act naturally. The squadron we were watching on that trip got very used to us and wouldn't even scatter when we moved or splashed around. The alpha-female of the group, Trinity, would even pull interested males toward me and see how close they would get before freaking out. (flash red black) The closer they would come, the more likely it was she would mate with them.
This led to much squid sex less than a foot from my face.
Ok, we're getting off in to a really wonky area. There is a reason that behavioral and social biology are called the soft sciences, and it is because you can't produce any standard numbers against which data can be compared. This is doubly true for intelligence. We get even wonkier because we're comparing mammals to mollusks. Sure, they both live in the ocean and can perform tasks that far exceed the abilities of other animals but on some very fundamental levels they might as well be from different planets.
I will say that I'm not really up on my whales and dolphins any more than I know about them as predators of cephalopods, but I will debate you on the intelligence question. As "smart" as they appear, squid and octopus are still mollusks. Their instincts and basic reflexes are no more complex than their cousins the snails, slugs, and bivalves. Yes, they have developed an intelligence that occasionally allows them to react in ways that are counter to instinct, but they don't do it often or with consistency.
Octopuses don't plan. They can remember, especially if they are using spacial memory, but they can't think ahead. They really can't anticipate more than a few moments in advance, which is on par with dogs, parrots, and infant humans.
Dolphins, on the other hand, are constantly displaying this ability. One of the most obvious uses is when a pod of dolphins traps schools of feeder fish by blowing bubbles under then, and then swimming around the school at high speed in tighter and tighter circles. The dolphins are able to anticipate the motions of the school of fish and adjust their motions accordingly.
Having said that, if you can post some links to the studies you're reading, then please do so! Please prove me wrong! I'd be happy to be able to wave those in the face of the cetacean researchers I know.
Oh, and to keep babbling, social intelligence is a lot more important than you seem to think. I never said that social skills were required for intelligence, as that would elevate ants and bees instinctual process to something we'd call intelligence, which isn't the case. What I said was that dolphins have much more social intelligence than octopuses and that is a sign of higher thinking. Troupes, as opposed to packs, hives, or flocks, are at-will structures. An ant doesn't make the choice to join the hive, and a dove doesn't select one flock over another. However, dolphins and whales do join pods outside of their family groups, and chimps engage in all sorts of social group creation. The memory and abstract thinking required to approach and join another troupe (be it a dolphin pod, gorilla pack, or clique of humans) is absolutely massive. You have to build a mental map of an ever changing social structure, understand the hierarchy, understand your own place in that hierarchy, and learn the values, taboos, and symbols that are used to communicate the troupe structure.
That is a load of work that you don't even notice that you're doing, and it is probably the reason that human brains are so utterly gigantic when taken in proportion to our body mass.
So why is it important? In our case, it is only through social intelligence that we manage to survive at all. Humans, and our close ancestors are sacks of hairy meat with very little in the way of natural defenses. We have no claws, blunt teeth, low strength, soft skins, no camouflage abilities, terrible eye-sight, poor hearing, and limited mobility when compared with the rest of the animal kingdom. Individually, we're pretty helpless, even when confronted with a non-apex predator. Hell, a medium sized domestic dog CAN kill you. Together though, we start having a multiplicative effect on one another. We can plan, organize, communicate, and anticipate. As the number of humans grows, the social structures we build can last much longer than an individual member of the group. Through those structures we pass on knowledge and experience, which substitute nicely for instinct. Through these structures we have been able to perpetuate ideas that have led to things like the Great Pyramid and the moon landings. None of that would have been possible without social intelligence.
Yeah, that squid dirty talk can get down right nasty at times. I once watched a male approach the alpha-female of the group and flash lateral silver, followed by double oreo. She wasn't in the mood for any of his advances, so she flashed red and ate him.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I've noticed with a lot of Libertarian arguments on topics like this is that they omit the biggest part of choice, which is information. Without informed choice, no good decisions can be made. If product A and product B are both supposed to cure missing limbs, but product A is a miracle pill that makes you regrow arms and legs and what-not and product B is a 2X4 with a nail in it, which would you choose? How would you know which to choose without information? How would you know that Product B is far inferior if the company were able to silence their critics like the "doctor" in this article?
Obviously, my example is hyperbole, but it was done to make a point. Without informed choice, there really is no valid choice.
That he did, and by letter you are correct. However, I interpreted "socialist nations" to mean nations that have predominantly socialist or otherwise left-leaning political parties in current or recent majorities and social welfare systems similar to equal to Scandinavian Welfare.
You've got me there, as I'm sure that socialized medicine and other "socialist" things are limited to only those countries.
Should those 12% that are too disabled to work be abandoned to the winter and the wolves? Should the government shut down just so those 30% can hold their heads high while they starve, thankful that they aren't doing something so terrible as working for a government?
The things shared in common by Linus Torvalds and the founder of SpaceX is that they were both already economically mobile and had the money to move to a different country. The US is a great place to be if you are wealthy, as there are very few items or services that are denied to someone with means. As a personal opinion, I believe that extends to the US legal and political system as well. If you are poor, either because you were born in to poverty or you ended up in poverty, your prospects are very limited.
This isn't to say that I don't love my country, I certainly do, but I love the country that offers a level playing field where someone who is bright and creative can succeed through a combination of innovation and hard work. What I don't love is the country we have become, where monied interests are given every opportunity, and the poor are left to eek out whatever existence they can.
Funny enough, the only companies that I've dealt with that still offer pensions are either foreign owned (specifically European owned) or are public utilities and municipalities. (but pensions are going away as budgets get slashed in the name of "austerity")
But hey! Choice!
One thing I learned working for Germans is that they love to complain. There is a joke I heard while over there that when old Germans die and go to Heaven they complain about the lax admission requirements.
However, you even hint that you want to make changes to the social contract and you will find your political prospects in the toilet or in the welcoming arms of the NDP. (the Nazi party without the cool uniforms) This isn't to say that the taxes aren't high in Germany and the Scandinavian Socialist countries, but you certainly get what you pay for. At the same time, stories of Welfare Queens do well over there, even if the people telling them would be very hard pressed to actually find one.
You're confusing socialism for The People's Republic of China and the scare stories about Russia in the 1980s as told by Americans to other Americans.
Places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, and Germany are phenomenal when it comes to variety and choice in job.
Perhaps a bit of world travel and turning off Fox News would do you good.
Done.
http://www.opencongress.org/
I wonder if this is why my water pressure has been crap the last couple of days.
Humm... as has already been mentioned below, they use the volumetric printers that do everything with lasers and polyester resin then vapor deposit the nickel.
I don't have one of those printers but I know where I could rent time on one. I don't have the skills in Maya or AUTOCAD to make the shape they describe, but I imagine someone proficient in that software could hack something together. The vapor depositing of the nickel would be a pain. The only metal deposit work I've done has been with gold on samples for SEMs and TEMs and I know that nickel has a higher melting point.
One thing I'm noticing though is that all of these barriers are skill related. I would imagine a good industrial process engineer could figure out a really nifty way to do this stuff on a large scale. The vapor deposit process, I imagine, is well understood and we have tons of consumer electronic products that use it. Large scale 3D printing might be a bit trickier.
Once that part gets licked, it seems like this material would be a heck of a lot easier to make then aerogel. As your aerogel block gets larger, the more time you have to spend on all parts of the process. A bigger block takes longer to wash and age, and has to be in supercritical drying for a more significant period. Otherwise, your gel is cloudy and dense and that's not why you're making aerogel in the first place!
The ultraviolet laser in to polymer IS 3D printing using the same exact process that the first 3D printers used. It isn't the extrusion type that the Maker folks are bashing together in their garages, but you can rent time on a machine with that level precision. Heck a couple of SIGGRAPHs ago you could bring a 3D model in one of several formats and they would print it for you as a demo.
The problem with aerogels is that they can be very finicky during production, and unless you make them hydrophobic (or is it hydrophillic?) they can start to dissolve from as little as a single drop of sweat.
Some friends and I got some lab equipment during a "Lost Our Grant" sale, which included a high-pressure autoclave. We thought making aerogel would be a hoot, but damn is that stuff difficult to produce. It is relatively cheap, but during the supercritical drying phase, you'd best not bump the autoclave, and you better have mixed everything right. That stuff is like the comedy souffle of the future.
Anyway, the novelty wears off after you've played with the stuff for 20 minutes. The novelty of watching the cat bat it around takes about an hour.
That snake is long, I bet it could slither seven miles. I'd like to ride that snake baby. But he's old, and his skin is cold.
It looks like the time portal happened and one of the twonky engineers from the future is now working at Microsoft.
'Does not... does to!' exchanges do not make for thought-provoking reading.
Do too.
Oh man, I would have gotten that headshot but my turbine was spooling down.
I'm skeptical, but the US (discounting the previous programs) did it in 9 years from the unmanned Saturn launches to the first landing.
That was all done with slide rules and paper.
Can we do it much faster, better, and more accurately now with computers, AUTO-CAD, CNC, and iPads? Sure, but will we?
I hope so, but again, skepticism runs rampant.
The donations page is amusing. For a donation of half a million dollars, you can have the base named after you. Personally, I'd love to see this actually happen, but the skeptic in me is...well, you know.
Still, if I had the two-hundred and fifty thousand laying around that would get a spacecraft named after me, I'd do it. Then I'd ask to name the seventh craft in the fleet and submit my middle name so it could be Blake's 7.
Are you mad?!?! You like the idea of naked oiled youths zipping through the aether in astervarka, possibly meeting psychic aliens and bringing them home?
Do you really want to meet the nude dude with the Ood?
>marine biologists having to constantly correct people's statements
Technically, this would be marine exobiologists.
But that's not the point. If they did have complex organisms, I would hope they were squid-like.
Will we be asked to trust the Gorton's Space Man?
Really, the only thing that helps in ceph spotting is practice and experience. One of my buddies is an absolute natural at spotting octopuses and the midden is the best place to start. From there, watch for rock and coral formations that are slightly off in color from those around them or have a slight ripple. Octopus camouflage is great, but not perfect.
The polarized lenses will help a bit if the animal is on a rock or sand. They can't affect the reflectivity of their skin and blocking out circular polarization will help. I don't think IR is going to help much because light in that wavelength transmits so poorly through water. I don't know if you could get a hold of one, but lasers and LED lights that are heavy in the blue/green spectrum will make the iridophores much more apparent. The LEDs tend to work better because you have a wider frequency band to work with.
Go slow. I was once floating in about 5 feet of water, just resting and letting the light current push me toward the spot on the beach where I had left my stuff. Suddenly, I saw two eyes pop up out of the rocks on a stalk. After a few moments, I saw that the stalk was attached to an octopus and it slowly crept out of the hole, over some other rocks, around a fan coral, and in to another hole that was an obvious octopus den. Octopuses watch for sudden motion, so the more like a log or cloud shadow you look, the easier time you'll have.
Finally, familiarity. When I was studying squid behavior in the field, the squid got used to the team floating above them and were much more apt to act naturally. The squadron we were watching on that trip got very used to us and wouldn't even scatter when we moved or splashed around. The alpha-female of the group, Trinity, would even pull interested males toward me and see how close they would get before freaking out. (flash red black) The closer they would come, the more likely it was she would mate with them.
This led to much squid sex less than a foot from my face.
Ok, we're getting off in to a really wonky area. There is a reason that behavioral and social biology are called the soft sciences, and it is because you can't produce any standard numbers against which data can be compared. This is doubly true for intelligence. We get even wonkier because we're comparing mammals to mollusks. Sure, they both live in the ocean and can perform tasks that far exceed the abilities of other animals but on some very fundamental levels they might as well be from different planets.
I will say that I'm not really up on my whales and dolphins any more than I know about them as predators of cephalopods, but I will debate you on the intelligence question. As "smart" as they appear, squid and octopus are still mollusks. Their instincts and basic reflexes are no more complex than their cousins the snails, slugs, and bivalves. Yes, they have developed an intelligence that occasionally allows them to react in ways that are counter to instinct, but they don't do it often or with consistency.
Octopuses don't plan. They can remember, especially if they are using spacial memory, but they can't think ahead. They really can't anticipate more than a few moments in advance, which is on par with dogs, parrots, and infant humans.
Dolphins, on the other hand, are constantly displaying this ability. One of the most obvious uses is when a pod of dolphins traps schools of feeder fish by blowing bubbles under then, and then swimming around the school at high speed in tighter and tighter circles. The dolphins are able to anticipate the motions of the school of fish and adjust their motions accordingly.
Having said that, if you can post some links to the studies you're reading, then please do so! Please prove me wrong! I'd be happy to be able to wave those in the face of the cetacean researchers I know.
Oh, and to keep babbling, social intelligence is a lot more important than you seem to think. I never said that social skills were required for intelligence, as that would elevate ants and bees instinctual process to something we'd call intelligence, which isn't the case. What I said was that dolphins have much more social intelligence than octopuses and that is a sign of higher thinking. Troupes, as opposed to packs, hives, or flocks, are at-will structures. An ant doesn't make the choice to join the hive, and a dove doesn't select one flock over another. However, dolphins and whales do join pods outside of their family groups, and chimps engage in all sorts of social group creation. The memory and abstract thinking required to approach and join another troupe (be it a dolphin pod, gorilla pack, or clique of humans) is absolutely massive. You have to build a mental map of an ever changing social structure, understand the hierarchy, understand your own place in that hierarchy, and learn the values, taboos, and symbols that are used to communicate the troupe structure.
That is a load of work that you don't even notice that you're doing, and it is probably the reason that human brains are so utterly gigantic when taken in proportion to our body mass.
So why is it important? In our case, it is only through social intelligence that we manage to survive at all. Humans, and our close ancestors are sacks of hairy meat with very little in the way of natural defenses. We have no claws, blunt teeth, low strength, soft skins, no camouflage abilities, terrible eye-sight, poor hearing, and limited mobility when compared with the rest of the animal kingdom. Individually, we're pretty helpless, even when confronted with a non-apex predator. Hell, a medium sized domestic dog CAN kill you. Together though, we start having a multiplicative effect on one another. We can plan, organize, communicate, and anticipate. As the number of humans grows, the social structures we build can last much longer than an individual member of the group. Through those structures we pass on knowledge and experience, which substitute nicely for instinct. Through these structures we have been able to perpetuate ideas that have led to things like the Great Pyramid and the moon landings. None of that would have been possible without social intelligence.
Thanks!
Yeah, that squid dirty talk can get down right nasty at times. I once watched a male approach the alpha-female of the group and flash lateral silver, followed by double oreo. She wasn't in the mood for any of his advances, so she flashed red and ate him.
If I had the power to breathe underwater and summon squid with mind powers, no one would ever see me on land again.