I wonder what the big difference is between this creature and termites? Both digest cellulose (wood) into sugars and use them for energy, right? Gut bacteria do this in termites. Sounds great, but I suspect there's a long road from here to easy biofuel production from cellulose. Otherwise, I'm thinking we'd have come up with an system based on termites already.
Depending on the power line, it's likely the line in TFA was at least 880 volts (what the lines running along the road in a residential area carry), and likely much more. Apparently, New York's subway only runs 625 (here) and DC's Metro trains run 750 V (here). According to this, even a millimeter gap in a conducting stream (like someone's urine) would require around 3000 V to jump it. It's quite likely the pole this guy took down with his car was carrying at least 4000 V (here).
So it looks like the Mythbusters were fine, as far as they went. An electric fence or third rail is very unlikely to be able to electrocute someone through a urine stream because of the air gaps, but there are plenty of electrical transmission lines easily capable of it.
Even how and how much your food is cooked affects its caloric and nutritional content. Cooking makes a lot of molecules easier to absorb, whether that's energy molecules like carbs and fats or vitamins and minerals. That's a big part of what a guy named Richard Wrangham wrote about in a recent book.
'Course I haven't read the whole thing mind you -- just heard interviews, etc. Interesting stuff that we don't usually think about, though.
I agree with the semi-serious argument that all anti-abortion advocates should have to sign up to adopt all the children that their cause prevents being aborted.
As someone opposed to abortion, I also agree. I think most people opposed to abortion would, too. Infants born in the US do not generally have trouble being adopted. In fact, there are so many more people trying to adopt in this country that many go through immense expenditure of time and money to adopt from outside the country.
The bigger adoption problem is unwillingness to adopt older children. They didn't get where they are by growing up in foster care from infancy, but because of some other problems in their lives, so that's a totally separate problem from abortion vs. adoption.
This is my brother Toppy. This is my other brother Toppy. This...
(Of course naming a puppy "Toppy" for "tomorrow's puppy" doesn't make sense at all. As anyone who has ever gotten a puppy knows, today's puppy is tomorrow's DOG.)
Still, I think it would be an improvement of orders of magnitude if science classes in general focused more on:
"how did we learn this?" (i.e., the scientific method, how observations have to be done to eliminate bias, the formulation of competing theories, how experiments are designed, how hypotheses were ruled out, etc.)
as opposed to:
"here is he official list of truth that you have to memorize and then do cute IQ-test-like problems with".
The latter gives the wrong impression of what science is and why it matters.
IAAST (I am a science teacher) and this is the very thing that is starting to happen, I think. That is, I keep hearing rumblings about trying to pare down the "list of truth" items that I must teach my students so we can spend more time exploring how we know and how well we know things. There are many things that we have pieced together about the universe using scientific methods (yes, plural and lower case), but if students just have to take my word for it, they are missing the whole point of science. They have to be able to ask questions and find ways to answer them bit by bit.
Of course, another problem is that science is really on the decline, being replaced by a similar creature called "engineering" in which we are trying to make useful (profitable) things from what science has figured out. Obviously, we need engineers. But we need people who start from saying "Hey, that's odd. What's going on there?" not just "I bet I can fix that."
"It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
--Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Script
If that doesn't convince you to call off the search, I don't know what will.
Re:3 million dollars per year is a pittance
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
"3 million dollars? Compare that to the Iraq war. If we'd directed that money towards, SETI, we could have discovered 100,000 times as many alien civilizations as we have."
Wow! That's true! That would bring us to a total of... let's see, 100,000 times zero...
Actually, I do weigh my ingredients when baking, for just the reason you say. Sure, it required buying a scale, but it basically made all other measuring implements obsolete. Dry ingredients really only make sense weighed, but most liquids (wich are mostly water) can be weighed very easily as well, assuming 1 fl.oz. = 1 oz. (and "a pint's a pound, the world around).
A good source for how to start doing this is Alton Brown's book on baking, "I'm Just Here for More Food." Now, whenever I get a baking recipe from somewhere else, the first thing I do is convert the volues to masses.
Alton is a lot of fun to watch (and his books are pretty great, too), but there is a difference between his cooking and this cooking with purified chemical compounds. Part of the fun of cooking, for me, is getting the ingredients to play well together when each one brings multiple compounds, each of which changes the flavor/texture/etc. of the dish in some way. Alton understands the ways these components interact and works with them within the structure of "normal" food ingredients.
I say all this as a chemist. I enjoy the messiness of the chemistry of cooking. I think using ultrapure compounds in the kitchen just takes out the sport. I say, keep the reagent bottles in the lab, and go make a mess in the kitchen.
This sounds like a new use for an existing drug, which would NOT be automatically approved by the FDA. They only approve medicines for specific uses, so this new use would still need to be evaluated before it would be legal. Of course, there's the shady area of "off-label" uses for a lot of medicines, which helps lots of people, but that doen't make all uses of an approved drug legal.
As a previous poster pointed out, though, this drug would not primarily be used in the US anyhow, and the FDA has no jurisdiction over other countries.
Yes. This is missed on most readers in the U.S., but getting fresh water when you mostly have salt water around is no picnic. Depending on how much the pore shape improves flow, this could make reverse osmosis desalination much more energy efficient. Such high pressures are required (about 60-80 atmospheres, according to Wiki) that a strong and more efficient membrane could make a big difference.
In the end, that's a big way this membrane could reduce CO2 emissions -- by saving energy and preventing us from having to emit as much CO2 in the first place.
Actually, steel's strength comes from its low-level crystalline structure. Adding elements like carbon to iron make it stronger because the atoms fit in the "gaps" between iron atoms. Of course, none of this helps me understand what is meant by "as solid as steel."
Another evolution of the language that really gets me is the death of the adverb, as in the article:
"...a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast."
That's right -- it should be "quickly" or some other adverb to modify the verb "evolve." "Fast," which is an adjective, should only be used to describe a noun.
Am I the only person still bothered by this? I remember at least 10 years ago running across a web site devoted to saving the adverb, but I can't find it any more. Perhaps it simply perished, along with my hopes for my grand children ever using adverbs.
Of course, my hopes are further dashed by the fact that a Harvard mathematician of all people said, "The data hasn't changed," when we all know that the word "data" is the plural of "datum," so if the data haven't changed, that's what he should have said!
What Goodnight and many other "educational" technology proponents miss is that plugging it in to the wall does NOT make education qualitatively different than using more tratitional materials. Giving students the opportunity to interact with the material is the most vital change that needs to, and is, happening in education now.
I am a high school Chemistry teacher, and I use electronic technology when it's appropriate, but mostly it's using old analog technologies to physically apply inks and pigments to surfaces -- WRITING and DRAWING on paper, transparencies, and the whiteboard. Writing and drawing require much higher level understanding and allow for more creativity than point-and-click. Animations, illustrations, and simulations are sometimes great for getting across a point that I am incapable of drawing using stick figures. Also, calculator probe hardware allows us to collect and analyze large sets of data that would be more time consuming using the "analog" tech.
All of this has one purpose: to get the students to interact with and understand the material, and there are many ways to accomplish that. Blind acceptance of electronic technology can kill that goal. A great example is a computer-based lab simulator where students carry out labs on-screen that they could be doing in real life! There is really no substitute for hands-on-chemicals-and-glassware experience.
Yes, the time between generations has a huge impact on evolution rates, since evolution is really the change in gene frequencies over time. This can only happen as genes from parents are passed to children, etc.
We've known for some time that, for example, bacteria can evolve resistance to medicines so much faster than any higher organisms can evolve similar changes. I wonder if the scientists controlled for this difference in time between generations? If not, then I'm not sure they've discovered anything new. Even saying that they are the "first" to look at evolution as protein changes seems odd, since it is the genes that code for proteins and genetic change is typically how evolution is defined.
FTFA: "It does it by simply measuring the reflectivity of human skin," said Daley
This uses the relatively short wave IR that reflects off of the person's skin, not the radiant long wave IR that comes from any warm body. You can get IR film for cameras (and special ) that takes pictures looking pretty much like you'd expect but with some light/dark strangeness. For instance, the green leaves of plants reflect IR very well, so they appear very bright.
A company that will modify your digital camera to take IR photos has some good sample pictures here.
Oh, never mind, I don't really have to. The Tesla Roadster uses 6,831 Li-ion laptop batteries for energy storage. This could be a big problem for the future of electric vehicles!
Generally, when you drop the pressure, the temperature will also drop. A drop in temperature will likely lead to condensation, which this device puports to gather.
I'm not fully convinced by this argument. As you lower gas pressure, the temperature will drop. However, so will the "dew point" of the water, since it is actually the partial pressure of water vapor that determines the temperature at which it will condense. A big enough temperature drop could still condense the water, but you really are working against yourself.
The example of ice freezing on airplane wings works differently, since you are changing from one condensed state of matter (liquid) to another (solid) and pressure makes less difference. In fact, in water, lower pressures favor freezing. (Ice is kept solid at, say, -2 celcius in an ice rink, but the skate blades exert pressure on the ice and melt a thin layer of it, which is why they glide so nicely.)
I much prefer the explanation of mechanically linking the windmill to a sterling engine or some other sort of heat pump that will lower the temperature of normal-pressure air and condense water that way. TFA doesn't acually say this thing generates electricity, and it seems a direct mechanical linkage would be a more efficient way to transfer the energy.
Anyhow, that's my two cents as a Chemistry teacher. We'll all find out when this guy actually announces it fully.
What this discussion and the article seem to assume is that without "free will," there is no responsibility for actions. But what do you mean by free will? That you can actually do anything you want? If you say yes, how about this one: are you able to WANT to do absolutely anything? Do you have to have both of those abilities to have free will? Put another way, how free is "free" will?
The Bible portrays a God with free will, right? I mean, if God doesn't have free will, who can? We might say that of course God can do anything, but can he do evil? If God cannot possibly do evil (as God is the definition of Good), then are you sure that even God has free will?
On top of this, I see no way around the idea that God (as omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-lots-of-other-stuff) is absoulutely in charge over everything that occurs. (We call it sovereignty.) But we are also held responsible for our actions. The statements about Pharoh in Exodus bring this out pretty clearly. God punishes Pharoh for his stubbornness in refusing to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. But then God says he will "harden Pharoh's heart" so he'll continue to refuse.
There's something here beyond what I can fully understand here, but the excuse "I couldn't help it" doesn't seem to carry much weight. I must conclude that I am resonsible for my actions AND that God is sovereign over all things that happen.
In the end, God will be the recipient of worship, praise, adoration, etc. because of His perfection. Would we see this perfection without the experience of humans doing the wrong things? No. So, even though we (even I and all other Christians) continue to do the wrong thing sometimes, and must bear responsibility for those things, they ultimately bring about good: the worship of the one true and perfect God.
Hey, this is exactly the technology that would allow Optimus Prime to come to life! There's no way you could get a truck (or aiprplane, or motorcycle, or...) to sprout legs and arms with wires to worry about. Bring on the wireless!
...but they need to widen their test size a bit. I and my wife both (yes, also a sample size of 2, but that doubles the sample) find that the wrist straps are effective during rides on the Metro (subway in the DC area) and on buses. I ordinarily have a hard time staying comfortable on the train, since it is under ground and has nothing to look at outside the windows, and reading is completely out of the question while riding. While wearing the wrist bands, I am able to read for a solid 1-hour ride (haven't tested longer) without any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the big difference is between this creature and termites? Both digest cellulose (wood) into sugars and use them for energy, right? Gut bacteria do this in termites. Sounds great, but I suspect there's a long road from here to easy biofuel production from cellulose. Otherwise, I'm thinking we'd have come up with an system based on termites already.
Depending on the power line, it's likely the line in TFA was at least 880 volts (what the lines running along the road in a residential area carry), and likely much more. Apparently, New York's subway only runs 625 (here) and DC's Metro trains run 750 V (here). According to this, even a millimeter gap in a conducting stream (like someone's urine) would require around 3000 V to jump it. It's quite likely the pole this guy took down with his car was carrying at least 4000 V (here).
So it looks like the Mythbusters were fine, as far as they went. An electric fence or third rail is very unlikely to be able to electrocute someone through a urine stream because of the air gaps, but there are plenty of electrical transmission lines easily capable of it.
Even how and how much your food is cooked affects its caloric and nutritional content. Cooking makes a lot of molecules easier to absorb, whether that's energy molecules like carbs and fats or vitamins and minerals. That's a big part of what a guy named Richard Wrangham wrote about in a recent book. 'Course I haven't read the whole thing mind you -- just heard interviews, etc. Interesting stuff that we don't usually think about, though.
I agree with the semi-serious argument that all anti-abortion advocates should have to sign up to adopt all the children that their cause prevents being aborted.
As someone opposed to abortion, I also agree. I think most people opposed to abortion would, too. Infants born in the US do not generally have trouble being adopted. In fact, there are so many more people trying to adopt in this country that many go through immense expenditure of time and money to adopt from outside the country.
The bigger adoption problem is unwillingness to adopt older children. They didn't get where they are by growing up in foster care from infancy, but because of some other problems in their lives, so that's a totally separate problem from abortion vs. adoption.
This is my brother Toppy. This is my other brother Toppy. This...
(Of course naming a puppy "Toppy" for "tomorrow's puppy" doesn't make sense at all. As anyone who has ever gotten a puppy knows, today's puppy is tomorrow's DOG.)
Still, I think it would be an improvement of orders of magnitude if science classes in general focused more on: "how did we learn this?" (i.e., the scientific method, how observations have to be done to eliminate bias, the formulation of competing theories, how experiments are designed, how hypotheses were ruled out, etc.) as opposed to: "here is he official list of truth that you have to memorize and then do cute IQ-test-like problems with". The latter gives the wrong impression of what science is and why it matters.
IAAST (I am a science teacher) and this is the very thing that is starting to happen, I think. That is, I keep hearing rumblings about trying to pare down the "list of truth" items that I must teach my students so we can spend more time exploring how we know and how well we know things. There are many things that we have pieced together about the universe using scientific methods (yes, plural and lower case), but if students just have to take my word for it, they are missing the whole point of science. They have to be able to ask questions and find ways to answer them bit by bit.
Of course, another problem is that science is really on the decline, being replaced by a similar creature called "engineering" in which we are trying to make useful (profitable) things from what science has figured out. Obviously, we need engineers. But we need people who start from saying "Hey, that's odd. What's going on there?" not just "I bet I can fix that."
OK, how about this logic of Douglas Adams?
"It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
--Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Script
If that doesn't convince you to call off the search, I don't know what will.
"3 million dollars? Compare that to the Iraq war. If we'd directed that money towards, SETI, we could have discovered 100,000 times as many alien civilizations as we have."
Wow! That's true! That would bring us to a total of... let's see, 100,000 times zero...
Actually, I do weigh my ingredients when baking, for just the reason you say. Sure, it required buying a scale, but it basically made all other measuring implements obsolete. Dry ingredients really only make sense weighed, but most liquids (wich are mostly water) can be weighed very easily as well, assuming 1 fl.oz. = 1 oz. (and "a pint's a pound, the world around).
A good source for how to start doing this is Alton Brown's book on baking, "I'm Just Here for More Food." Now, whenever I get a baking recipe from somewhere else, the first thing I do is convert the volues to masses.
Alton is a lot of fun to watch (and his books are pretty great, too), but there is a difference between his cooking and this cooking with purified chemical compounds. Part of the fun of cooking, for me, is getting the ingredients to play well together when each one brings multiple compounds, each of which changes the flavor/texture/etc. of the dish in some way. Alton understands the ways these components interact and works with them within the structure of "normal" food ingredients.
I say all this as a chemist. I enjoy the messiness of the chemistry of cooking. I think using ultrapure compounds in the kitchen just takes out the sport. I say, keep the reagent bottles in the lab, and go make a mess in the kitchen.
This sounds like a new use for an existing drug, which would NOT be automatically approved by the FDA. They only approve medicines for specific uses, so this new use would still need to be evaluated before it would be legal. Of course, there's the shady area of "off-label" uses for a lot of medicines, which helps lots of people, but that doen't make all uses of an approved drug legal. As a previous poster pointed out, though, this drug would not primarily be used in the US anyhow, and the FDA has no jurisdiction over other countries.
Yes. This is missed on most readers in the U.S., but getting fresh water when you mostly have salt water around is no picnic. Depending on how much the pore shape improves flow, this could make reverse osmosis desalination much more energy efficient. Such high pressures are required (about 60-80 atmospheres, according to Wiki) that a strong and more efficient membrane could make a big difference.
In the end, that's a big way this membrane could reduce CO2 emissions -- by saving energy and preventing us from having to emit as much CO2 in the first place.
Actually, steel's strength comes from its low-level crystalline structure. Adding elements like carbon to iron make it stronger because the atoms fit in the "gaps" between iron atoms. Of course, none of this helps me understand what is meant by "as solid as steel."
Another evolution of the language that really gets me is the death of the adverb, as in the article:
"...a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast."
That's right -- it should be "quickly" or some other adverb to modify the verb "evolve." "Fast," which is an adjective, should only be used to describe a noun.
Am I the only person still bothered by this? I remember at least 10 years ago running across a web site devoted to saving the adverb, but I can't find it any more. Perhaps it simply perished, along with my hopes for my grand children ever using adverbs.
Of course, my hopes are further dashed by the fact that a Harvard mathematician of all people said, "The data hasn't changed," when we all know that the word "data" is the plural of "datum," so if the data haven't changed, that's what he should have said!
*sigh*
What Goodnight and many other "educational" technology proponents miss is that plugging it in to the wall does NOT make education qualitatively different than using more tratitional materials. Giving students the opportunity to interact with the material is the most vital change that needs to, and is, happening in education now.
I am a high school Chemistry teacher, and I use electronic technology when it's appropriate, but mostly it's using old analog technologies to physically apply inks and pigments to surfaces -- WRITING and DRAWING on paper, transparencies, and the whiteboard. Writing and drawing require much higher level understanding and allow for more creativity than point-and-click. Animations, illustrations, and simulations are sometimes great for getting across a point that I am incapable of drawing using stick figures. Also, calculator probe hardware allows us to collect and analyze large sets of data that would be more time consuming using the "analog" tech.
All of this has one purpose: to get the students to interact with and understand the material, and there are many ways to accomplish that. Blind acceptance of electronic technology can kill that goal. A great example is a computer-based lab simulator where students carry out labs on-screen that they could be doing in real life! There is really no substitute for hands-on-chemicals-and-glassware experience.
Yes, the time between generations has a huge impact on evolution rates, since evolution is really the change in gene frequencies over time. This can only happen as genes from parents are passed to children, etc.
We've known for some time that, for example, bacteria can evolve resistance to medicines so much faster than any higher organisms can evolve similar changes. I wonder if the scientists controlled for this difference in time between generations? If not, then I'm not sure they've discovered anything new. Even saying that they are the "first" to look at evolution as protein changes seems odd, since it is the genes that code for proteins and genetic change is typically how evolution is defined.
That's right -- if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features!
Engineers. Good grief.
(Of course, I'd still watch the video...)
FTFA: "It does it by simply measuring the reflectivity of human skin," said Daley
This uses the relatively short wave IR that reflects off of the person's skin, not the radiant long wave IR that comes from any warm body. You can get IR film for cameras (and special ) that takes pictures looking pretty much like you'd expect but with some light/dark strangeness. For instance, the green leaves of plants reflect IR very well, so they appear very bright.
A company that will modify your digital camera to take IR photos has some good sample pictures here.
These are cockroaches we're talking about here, folks. Calling them "genius" at any time of the day is stretching it just a little, yes?
Of course, the same could most likely be said of the person who came to mind when you read the summary, too....
Oh, never mind, I don't really have to. The Tesla Roadster uses 6,831 Li-ion laptop batteries for energy storage. This could be a big problem for the future of electric vehicles!
That's The Ohio State University!
Generally, when you drop the pressure, the temperature will also drop. A drop in temperature will likely lead to condensation, which this device puports to gather.
I'm not fully convinced by this argument. As you lower gas pressure, the temperature will drop. However, so will the "dew point" of the water, since it is actually the partial pressure of water vapor that determines the temperature at which it will condense. A big enough temperature drop could still condense the water, but you really are working against yourself.
The example of ice freezing on airplane wings works differently, since you are changing from one condensed state of matter (liquid) to another (solid) and pressure makes less difference. In fact, in water, lower pressures favor freezing. (Ice is kept solid at, say, -2 celcius in an ice rink, but the skate blades exert pressure on the ice and melt a thin layer of it, which is why they glide so nicely.)
I much prefer the explanation of mechanically linking the windmill to a sterling engine or some other sort of heat pump that will lower the temperature of normal-pressure air and condense water that way. TFA doesn't acually say this thing generates electricity, and it seems a direct mechanical linkage would be a more efficient way to transfer the energy.
Anyhow, that's my two cents as a Chemistry teacher. We'll all find out when this guy actually announces it fully.
What this discussion and the article seem to assume is that without "free will," there is no responsibility for actions. But what do you mean by free will? That you can actually do anything you want? If you say yes, how about this one: are you able to WANT to do absolutely anything? Do you have to have both of those abilities to have free will? Put another way, how free is "free" will?
The Bible portrays a God with free will, right? I mean, if God doesn't have free will, who can? We might say that of course God can do anything, but can he do evil? If God cannot possibly do evil (as God is the definition of Good), then are you sure that even God has free will?
On top of this, I see no way around the idea that God (as omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-lots-of-other-stuff) is absoulutely in charge over everything that occurs. (We call it sovereignty.) But we are also held responsible for our actions. The statements about Pharoh in Exodus bring this out pretty clearly. God punishes Pharoh for his stubbornness in refusing to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. But then God says he will "harden Pharoh's heart" so he'll continue to refuse.
There's something here beyond what I can fully understand here, but the excuse "I couldn't help it" doesn't seem to carry much weight. I must conclude that I am resonsible for my actions AND that God is sovereign over all things that happen.
In the end, God will be the recipient of worship, praise, adoration, etc. because of His perfection. Would we see this perfection without the experience of humans doing the wrong things? No. So, even though we (even I and all other Christians) continue to do the wrong thing sometimes, and must bear responsibility for those things, they ultimately bring about good: the worship of the one true and perfect God.
Hey, this is exactly the technology that would allow Optimus Prime to come to life! There's no way you could get a truck (or aiprplane, or motorcycle, or...) to sprout legs and arms with wires to worry about. Bring on the wireless!
...but they need to widen their test size a bit. I and my wife both (yes, also a sample size of 2, but that doubles the sample) find that the wrist straps are effective during rides on the Metro (subway in the DC area) and on buses. I ordinarily have a hard time staying comfortable on the train, since it is under ground and has nothing to look at outside the windows, and reading is completely out of the question while riding. While wearing the wrist bands, I am able to read for a solid 1-hour ride (haven't tested longer) without any problems.