There are so many holes in this guy's argument, I'm not really sure where to begin....
Let's start here: "The oldest confirmed microfossils date from approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and there is tentative evidence that life might have existed a few hundred million years before that; but there is no evidence of life before 3.8 billion years ago."
Life began on Earth not too long (in geological terms) after the conditions for supporting life as we know it were available. The Earth is thought to be roughly 4.6 billion years old. It took roughly a billion years before life began (as far as we can tell, since we don't have fossils any older). A billion years is a long time, but the Earth wasn't a very pleasant place during those first billion years. The first 500 million years or so the hot atmosphere was largely composed of water vapor, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, methane, iodine, bromine, chlorine, and argon. The halogens (bromine, iodine, and chlorine) would be pretty hostile to life as they tend to be very reactive (especially chlorine and bromine), especially with all the UV the Earth was getting without any ozone layer to protect it, which would tend to create even more reactive radicals of these elements.
Over the next 500 million or so years, the Earth started to cool a bit. Water started to precipitate into lakes and oceans, CO2 and N2 became predominate, and suddenly life started to showed up and with it came some oxygen (as a result of the metabolism of the forming life).
Now, from that perspective, life pretty much popped up as soon as it could, which says to me, life is almost inevitable, if the conditions are right for it.
The first Eukaryotes (complex life) didn't show up until about 2 billion years ago and multicellular life about a billion years after that. So multicellular life may not be a given. It could have been a seriously improbably fluke. But of billions of planets and billions of galaxies, it's probably bound to happen sometimes.
The author goes on to say, "Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth's early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed."
And he's correct. But maybe if we used a lab the size of a planet and allowed a few hundred million years, we might get the results of abiogenesis. I mean, it happened quickly in geological terms on Earth. That doesn't mean you throw it in a pot, cook it up and you're going to have it the next day.
I could go on and on, but I think it's pretty clear the author has no real concept of what a billion years really is. It's a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY long time. It's plenty of time for a lot of really, really improbable events to take place over and over.
So, if intelligent/sentient life could have evolved here 60 million years ago, why wouldn't that be the case in another solar system?
It comes down to statistics. Assuming space technology doesn't advance much further in the future (and we all know that's pessimistic beyond belief), we could still colonize the entire galaxy in anywhere from 5 to 50 million years. That's with technology and speeds not far beyond where we are now.
5 to 50 million seems like a long time, but at cosmological and even geological time scales, it's nothing. It means that the first species capable of colonizing the galaxy, WILL colonize the galaxy before any other life can get a chance to evolve. At least, there is a very very high probability that will be the case. Life has been on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, but multi-celled life only began 700 million years ago, and we've been around for 200,000 years.
Statistically speaking, it's highly unlikely that two species will evolve and colonize the galaxy in an overlapping stretch of time. It's far more likely that the first one to be able to, will, and this virtually ensures that no other life will evolve to this stage, unless we intentionally let it. Given our history of letting other species survive, I'm not really counting on that.
1: I too believe there's alien life. In fact, I have no doubt that there is.
2: I suspect there's no other intelligent/space faring life in our galaxy, but probably there is in other galaxies. (Fermi paradox and Tipler-Barrow arguments both are pretty convincing to me).
For me, #1 means that we should be careful to make sure our spaceships are bug free so we don't contaminate places we land on with life that could wipe out any indigenous life.
For #2, it means that it's impossible for us to ever have a meaningful conversation with other life (assuming I'm right that there's no other intelligent/spacefaring civilizations in our galaxy).
So, I don't think we need to be too concerned with sending out signals. By the time they reach any other life, we'll either be gone, or we will have colonized the entire galaxy, which means we'd likely be safe from extermination. I suspect those are the only 2 realistic probabilities.
The point is intelligent design basically agrees with evolution but suggests that someone kick started it. There is no science which disagrees with this, I see no reason why this couldn't be taught (for what it is) as a theory in a classroom. Your thoughts?
Because it's NOT science. It's not even a theory (as you call it). It's pure conjecture with absolutely no scientific evidence. On the other hand, evolution is a theory based on an hypothesis and mountains upon mountains of evidence that support that hypothesis.
There's absolutely no science that disagrees with the possibility that Quantum Immortality is a fact. But it's not science. It's philosophy. It's conjecture. So it's not taught as science (and hell, it's probably rarely taught). Yet it's entirely consistent with quantum mechanics.
Just because something isn't impossible doesn't make it science, so that's why it shouldn't be taught.
He's missing the issue. The truth is, I believe some form of "intelligent design." But whether or not I believe it or a billion people believe it is irrelevant. Intelligent design, as has been discussed here and elsewhere, ad infinitum, it's NOT SCIENCE and should not be taught as science or as an alternative to evolution.
On the other hand, if they want to teach it in a Religious Studies type class, I'm all for it. Go for it. That's precisely where it belongs.
I have a patent on sound waves and I'm pretty sure Creative is infringing on that. I was just going to let it go, but after this. Forget it. Time to call the lawyers..
Is it just me or does that look like it came right out of the movie The Abyss? It looks like a yellow, miniature version of their habitat. I'm sure the MPAA is working on their patent lawsuit.
This still seems like a lot more trouble than the existing solution of dropping an aluminum/gallium alloy in water and presto, hydrogen on demand (with aluminum oxide as waste which can be restored to aluminum). No high pressures required, the only production required is the aluminum/gallium alloy. The gallium is completely reusable and the aluminum can be recovered from the aluminum oxide and at commercial production levels would be around the price of gas now. It would get cheaper with time as the processes are streamlined.
The only problematic issue is recovery of the aluminum from aluminum oxide which requires a good deal of electricity (it requires electrolysis). That said, if this step could be done with a green energy source (say wind, solar, geothermal, whatever) then it would be a completely clean source of energy.
Sofge is a contrarian jerk whose only goal is to stir up messes so that he can gain from the attention. This is the "super geek" who blasted the Wii and, as a way of demonstrating a complete inability to connect the dots, he bashed Gary Gygax after Gygax's death. His bashing of Gygax was monumentally stupid because his argument was essentially this: There are much better RPGs than Dungeons and Dragons today, therefore, we ought to remember Gygax as the guy who invented the shitty RPG. He seems to completely miss the fact that none of the games which he talks about as being better than D&D, would likely exist had it not been for Gygax, who pretty much invented the genre. That's like arguing we should remember Thomas Edison as the guy who invented shitty lightbulbs or Henry Ford as the guy who made shitty cars just because there are better versions of those products available today.
As far as I'm concerned, Sofge is no geek. He just likes to stir things up for attention. I'm not going to follow links to his stories anymore and whenever his name is mentioned, I'm going to raise these issues. Not because I have any specific place in my heart for Gygax or the Wii, but because I'm not going to support someone whose writings are largely there just to be controversial and to get the writer attention.
It was Clinton who gave us the DMCA. Not just Republican administrations are corporate puppets.
Presidents don't introduce legislation, Congress does. Presidents have a choice to approve or return a bill. But like everything else in poltiics, there's give and take on both sides, or there should be and often times is, the current administration withstanding. Vetoing the bill means facing a possible veto override or it means some other legislation the president wants passed might not get passed.
But to put the blame on Clinton is very narrow-minded. Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) introduced the bill. He and the people who voted on it really deserve a majority share of the blame.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was going to ask but afraid that there might actually be something called an FTP attachment and then I'd have to turn in my geek credentials for sure.
date people who are religious? These are both stupid questions. How about I date who I want to date and you date who you want to date and let me decide who I should date? I know, a novel question.
As mentioned in the post, a lot of otherwise highly intelligent people sometimes believe in silly things. Why? Because sometimes we find silly things comforting. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as what you believe doesn't require hurting innocent people. What we really need, as a society, is to be less judgmental about people based on stupid things like this. Should you judge someone based on the fact that they believe in astrology? No more than you should judge them based on their religious beliefs, because really, there's very little difference between the two. Neither is really based on science (astrology is based on the location of planets in their orbits relative to Earth, but there's little science beyond that). Both rely entirely on faith.
Just what we need, one more issue to separate out some group that's "different" so that we can demean them and make them feel stupid.
Here we are in a declining economy with tech companies complaining that they can't find the employees with the technical skills here in the States so we keep expanding our H1B visa program.
I can't understand how lawmakers believe they can be doing anything other than exacerbating the problem by trying to teach non-science as science. And frankly, as long as the public supports this kind of crap, they get what they deserve (in terms of a declining economy). Clearly the goal of the Right is to turn this into a second-rate nation.
doesn't tell you a whole lot. What we do know is that most of the extrasolar systems we've found also tend to have Jupiter-like and larger planets and that in the majority of cases, these planets are either fairly close to their stars or in highly eccentric orbits. Either of these conditions would tend to make any "habitable" planets less habitable. A Jupiter-like or larger planet close in or in a highly eccentric orbit would tend to destablize the orbits of any small rocky planets in the habitable zone.
There are so many things that have to come together to make our planet habitable, that I suspect these conditions are a lot less frequently found than a lot of people would hope. That's not to say I don't think is common in the universe. I do. I just think the vast majority (by several orders of magnitude) of it is going to be single-cell (or if not in the form of cells, of equivalent complexity). You need liquid water (which gives you a pretty narrow temperature range at any given pressure), you need something in the atmosphere to protect against stellar radiation (or, if it's a water planet, I suppose something in the water to protect), you need a planet that's active, but not overly active (and lots of factors go into that). Anyway, I suspect true earth-like planets are pretty rare.
There are also studies linking light pollution to increases in breast cancer. On the face of it, might seem a little whacky, but basically the theory is, light at night causes decreased endogenous melatonin production (it doesn't take much light to cause a significant drop in melatonin production) Melatonin is a strong anti-oxidant that they theorize helps keep breast cancer in check. Anyway, that's the current theory to explain the studies.
I'm taking the semester off and I'm thinking I should have taken basket-weaving (a class I would no doubt fail) just to maintain my access to journals. Just the other night, I was looking for information on fairly new algorithms for dealing with image processing and almost every reference I could find was a journal I'd have to pay to get access to.
It seems to me that it's in everyone's best interest to make this information freely available. Think about it, as a programmer, having access to this information may allow me to write better software. If I'm selling that software, I'm a part of the economy and this information may have made the difference between mediocre software people wouldn't pay for and amazing software that's very popular. It's the same with many fields. Many companies can't afford these academic journals for their employees, or maybe only a small subset. It's a boost to the economy for everyone (except the journals) if this stuff is made freely available.
In addition to the economic boost, there's the quality of life boost. These articles can lead to products that improve QOL. Another important incentive.
I can't think of a single reason that journals should be making money (and a nice chunk of change at that) for work which is largely not theirs. They do editing, can help with peer-review and so forth, and obviously printing, but the actual meat, the articles, are the works of others. Subscriptions cost and arm and a leg and if I'm not mistaken, I believe most of these journals don't pay the authors. I think, in fact, many charge the authors!
There is no single correct way to pronounce it. You're just being anal.
You are correct. There are, in fact, 3 accepted pronunciations according to Webster, including the one that rhymes with anal!
I have to say, the submitter had more stick-with-it-ness than me. I lasted about 2 hours with Vista before I reverted to XP. I still periodically run Vista in a VM when my work requires it (mainly to fix Vista-specific problems in our app, which have been few, but major), but it drives me nuts whenever I have to use it. It's simply got to be one of the worst OS experiences I've had.
Being a nerd, I'm the person everyone in my family comes to for computer problems and EVERY single one, so far, that has gotten a new machine with Vista calls me to ask me how to get stuff to work with it or how to revert back to XP. So far that list includes an aunt, an uncle, two cousins, my mother, and my step-mother. Nobody else in my family that I'm aware of is running Vista.
rankly, This is an illustration of why our process of developing medications is ridiculous.
I sympathize with your father's condition, and I can certainly understand your frustration with the drug approval process. While the process has a number of problems, the idea behind it is pretty solid. It takes a long time to determine what the effects of treatments can be. Doctors pledge an oath to do no harm. Part of that is taking steps in ensuring that the treatment they give won't make things worse and the drug approval process is part of that system. It does have problems, but the risk is that they could approve something early and it could do more harm than good. In fact, some things still get through the process and do more harm than good. But the process does limit the damage.
You might argue that people should be able to decide for themselves, but based on what? Most people don't have even a basic knowledge of biology, let alone the knowledge of human physiology and pharmacology to make an educated decision about whether or not an experimental drug is worth the risk. I'm a big supporter of individual rights, but the idea of people making these kinds of decisions for themselves, especially with some of the really insane treatments that get tested, is concerning to me. At what point do you start allowing people to risk their lives for treatment? I'm tempted to say, "Anyone with a terminal disease who's willing." I know a lot of people would be willing and it would speed up trials. The problem is, it goes against the "do no harm" policy that doctors have.
It's a very precarious situation and while I certainly understand your father's predicament, I'm not entirely sure speeding up the trial process would be an overall positive or negative.
I remember back when I was on crutches, I was amazed at how quickly I could go fairly long distances with very little energy expenditure. Basically, you keep your arms stiff, stick the crutches in front of you and swing between them. I would zip by people on the sidewalk and about all it cost in terms of energy was bringing the crutches from behind me to in front of me. In terms of endurance, I could definitely go further at a quick pace on the crutches than I could on just my feet.
Clearly the prosthetic legs provide similar advantages. A fair race would be between this guy and people with similar prosthetic devices, but it would be completely unfair to let him compete against people without the same advantage. That's not to say that having to have your legs amputated is a good thing and I'm sure there are some pretty serious drawbacks. But for a contest like this, it's simply unfair.
Nevertheless, I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff. It's good for the same reason that learning about Ruby and Python is a good thing even if you only ever program in Java or C++.
And why, exactly is that? So that I can stuff yet one more computer language that I'm never going to use into a head that's already so full of trivial, useless information that something has to fall out (usually something occasionally useful, like French or a couple of notes in the pentatonic minor scale) for me to squish something else in?
Frankly, I think Firefox is one of the few OSS projects that needs serious UI work. I find it more than adequate and I'm not sure a major overhaul is something I'll appreciate. But then again, I'm not a big fan of eye candy. I like simple, functional user interfaces far more than pretty, but less functional, ones.
On the other hand, there are a LOT of OSS projects that could use some serious help in the UI department. If you told me KDE or Gnome, or Gimp had done this, I'd be pretty excited. These projects could all use help, in varying degrees, in making their UIs more intuitive.
I have used their speech synthesis products and they're quite impressive. I used one of the voices to dictate a textbook into an MP3 file so that I could then do a book-on-tape type thing to play my textbook in my car. The pronunciation was generally pretty good. I had to define the pronunciation of a few words here and there (it had problems with some of the less common geek words, like "macromolecular"). But after giving it the proper pronunciations, it was quite excellent. The voice sounded natural a good portion of the time.
Microsoft may not have the formats formally specified anywhere...Many, many years ago, shortly before my book was published, Microsoft actually wanted to hire me to write the official documentation for the Segmented Hyper-Graphic (SHG) file format because their own in-house documentation for the format was for an even older, unsupported version.
I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.
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There are so many holes in this guy's argument, I'm not really sure where to begin....
Let's start here: "The oldest confirmed microfossils date from approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and there is tentative evidence that life might have existed a few hundred million years before that; but there is no evidence of life before 3.8 billion years ago."
Life began on Earth not too long (in geological terms) after the conditions for supporting life as we know it were available. The Earth is thought to be roughly 4.6 billion years old. It took roughly a billion years before life began (as far as we can tell, since we don't have fossils any older). A billion years is a long time, but the Earth wasn't a very pleasant place during those first billion years. The first 500 million years or so the hot atmosphere was largely composed of water vapor, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, methane, iodine, bromine, chlorine, and argon. The halogens (bromine, iodine, and chlorine) would be pretty hostile to life as they tend to be very reactive (especially chlorine and bromine), especially with all the UV the Earth was getting without any ozone layer to protect it, which would tend to create even more reactive radicals of these elements.
Over the next 500 million or so years, the Earth started to cool a bit. Water started to precipitate into lakes and oceans, CO2 and N2 became predominate, and suddenly life started to showed up and with it came some oxygen (as a result of the metabolism of the forming life).
Now, from that perspective, life pretty much popped up as soon as it could, which says to me, life is almost inevitable, if the conditions are right for it.
The first Eukaryotes (complex life) didn't show up until about 2 billion years ago and multicellular life about a billion years after that. So multicellular life may not be a given. It could have been a seriously improbably fluke. But of billions of planets and billions of galaxies, it's probably bound to happen sometimes.
The author goes on to say, "Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth's early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed."
And he's correct. But maybe if we used a lab the size of a planet and allowed a few hundred million years, we might get the results of abiogenesis. I mean, it happened quickly in geological terms on Earth. That doesn't mean you throw it in a pot, cook it up and you're going to have it the next day.
I could go on and on, but I think it's pretty clear the author has no real concept of what a billion years really is. It's a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY long time. It's plenty of time for a lot of really, really improbable events to take place over and over.
So, if intelligent/sentient life could have evolved here 60 million years ago, why wouldn't that be the case in another solar system?
It comes down to statistics. Assuming space technology doesn't advance much further in the future (and we all know that's pessimistic beyond belief), we could still colonize the entire galaxy in anywhere from 5 to 50 million years. That's with technology and speeds not far beyond where we are now.
5 to 50 million seems like a long time, but at cosmological and even geological time scales, it's nothing. It means that the first species capable of colonizing the galaxy, WILL colonize the galaxy before any other life can get a chance to evolve. At least, there is a very very high probability that will be the case. Life has been on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, but multi-celled life only began 700 million years ago, and we've been around for 200,000 years.
Statistically speaking, it's highly unlikely that two species will evolve and colonize the galaxy in an overlapping stretch of time. It's far more likely that the first one to be able to, will, and this virtually ensures that no other life will evolve to this stage, unless we intentionally let it. Given our history of letting other species survive, I'm not really counting on that.
1: I too believe there's alien life. In fact, I have no doubt that there is.
2: I suspect there's no other intelligent/space faring life in our galaxy, but probably there is in other galaxies. (Fermi paradox and Tipler-Barrow arguments both are pretty convincing to me).
For me, #1 means that we should be careful to make sure our spaceships are bug free so we don't contaminate places we land on with life that could wipe out any indigenous life.
For #2, it means that it's impossible for us to ever have a meaningful conversation with other life (assuming I'm right that there's no other intelligent/spacefaring civilizations in our galaxy).
So, I don't think we need to be too concerned with sending out signals. By the time they reach any other life, we'll either be gone, or we will have colonized the entire galaxy, which means we'd likely be safe from extermination. I suspect those are the only 2 realistic probabilities.
The point is intelligent design basically agrees with evolution but suggests that someone kick started it. There is no science which disagrees with this, I see no reason why this couldn't be taught (for what it is) as a theory in a classroom. Your thoughts?
Because it's NOT science. It's not even a theory (as you call it). It's pure conjecture with absolutely no scientific evidence. On the other hand, evolution is a theory based on an hypothesis and mountains upon mountains of evidence that support that hypothesis.
There's absolutely no science that disagrees with the possibility that Quantum Immortality is a fact. But it's not science. It's philosophy. It's conjecture. So it's not taught as science (and hell, it's probably rarely taught). Yet it's entirely consistent with quantum mechanics.
Just because something isn't impossible doesn't make it science, so that's why it shouldn't be taught.
He's missing the issue. The truth is, I believe some form of "intelligent design." But whether or not I believe it or a billion people believe it is irrelevant. Intelligent design, as has been discussed here and elsewhere, ad infinitum, it's NOT SCIENCE and should not be taught as science or as an alternative to evolution.
On the other hand, if they want to teach it in a Religious Studies type class, I'm all for it. Go for it. That's precisely where it belongs.
I have a patent on sound waves and I'm pretty sure Creative is infringing on that. I was just going to let it go, but after this. Forget it. Time to call the lawyers..
Wow, this is really new and interesting stuff. I can't quite put my finger on it, but reading it gives me the strangest sense of deja vu.
Is it just me or does that look like it came right out of the movie The Abyss? It looks like a yellow, miniature version of their habitat. I'm sure the MPAA is working on their patent lawsuit.
This still seems like a lot more trouble than the existing solution of dropping an aluminum/gallium alloy in water and presto, hydrogen on demand (with aluminum oxide as waste which can be restored to aluminum). No high pressures required, the only production required is the aluminum/gallium alloy. The gallium is completely reusable and the aluminum can be recovered from the aluminum oxide and at commercial production levels would be around the price of gas now. It would get cheaper with time as the processes are streamlined.
The only problematic issue is recovery of the aluminum from aluminum oxide which requires a good deal of electricity (it requires electrolysis). That said, if this step could be done with a green energy source (say wind, solar, geothermal, whatever) then it would be a completely clean source of energy.
Sofge is a contrarian jerk whose only goal is to stir up messes so that he can gain from the attention. This is the "super geek" who blasted the Wii and, as a way of demonstrating a complete inability to connect the dots, he bashed Gary Gygax after Gygax's death. His bashing of Gygax was monumentally stupid because his argument was essentially this: There are much better RPGs than Dungeons and Dragons today, therefore, we ought to remember Gygax as the guy who invented the shitty RPG. He seems to completely miss the fact that none of the games which he talks about as being better than D&D, would likely exist had it not been for Gygax, who pretty much invented the genre. That's like arguing we should remember Thomas Edison as the guy who invented shitty lightbulbs or Henry Ford as the guy who made shitty cars just because there are better versions of those products available today.
As far as I'm concerned, Sofge is no geek. He just likes to stir things up for attention. I'm not going to follow links to his stories anymore and whenever his name is mentioned, I'm going to raise these issues. Not because I have any specific place in my heart for Gygax or the Wii, but because I'm not going to support someone whose writings are largely there just to be controversial and to get the writer attention.
It was Clinton who gave us the DMCA. Not just Republican administrations are corporate puppets.
Presidents don't introduce legislation, Congress does. Presidents have a choice to approve or return a bill. But like everything else in poltiics, there's give and take on both sides, or there should be and often times is, the current administration withstanding. Vetoing the bill means facing a possible veto override or it means some other legislation the president wants passed might not get passed.
But to put the blame on Clinton is very narrow-minded. Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) introduced the bill. He and the people who voted on it really deserve a majority share of the blame.
Thanks for pointing that out. I was going to ask but afraid that there might actually be something called an FTP attachment and then I'd have to turn in my geek credentials for sure.
date people who are religious? These are both stupid questions. How about I date who I want to date and you date who you want to date and let me decide who I should date? I know, a novel question.
As mentioned in the post, a lot of otherwise highly intelligent people sometimes believe in silly things. Why? Because sometimes we find silly things comforting. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as what you believe doesn't require hurting innocent people. What we really need, as a society, is to be less judgmental about people based on stupid things like this. Should you judge someone based on the fact that they believe in astrology? No more than you should judge them based on their religious beliefs, because really, there's very little difference between the two. Neither is really based on science (astrology is based on the location of planets in their orbits relative to Earth, but there's little science beyond that). Both rely entirely on faith.
Just what we need, one more issue to separate out some group that's "different" so that we can demean them and make them feel stupid.
Here we are in a declining economy with tech companies complaining that they can't find the employees with the technical skills here in the States so we keep expanding our H1B visa program.
I can't understand how lawmakers believe they can be doing anything other than exacerbating the problem by trying to teach non-science as science. And frankly, as long as the public supports this kind of crap, they get what they deserve (in terms of a declining economy). Clearly the goal of the Right is to turn this into a second-rate nation.
doesn't tell you a whole lot. What we do know is that most of the extrasolar systems we've found also tend to have Jupiter-like and larger planets and that in the majority of cases, these planets are either fairly close to their stars or in highly eccentric orbits. Either of these conditions would tend to make any "habitable" planets less habitable. A Jupiter-like or larger planet close in or in a highly eccentric orbit would tend to destablize the orbits of any small rocky planets in the habitable zone.
There are so many things that have to come together to make our planet habitable, that I suspect these conditions are a lot less frequently found than a lot of people would hope. That's not to say I don't think is common in the universe. I do. I just think the vast majority (by several orders of magnitude) of it is going to be single-cell (or if not in the form of cells, of equivalent complexity). You need liquid water (which gives you a pretty narrow temperature range at any given pressure), you need something in the atmosphere to protect against stellar radiation (or, if it's a water planet, I suppose something in the water to protect), you need a planet that's active, but not overly active (and lots of factors go into that). Anyway, I suspect true earth-like planets are pretty rare.
There are also studies linking light pollution to increases in breast cancer. On the face of it, might seem a little whacky, but basically the theory is, light at night causes decreased endogenous melatonin production (it doesn't take much light to cause a significant drop in melatonin production) Melatonin is a strong anti-oxidant that they theorize helps keep breast cancer in check. Anyway, that's the current theory to explain the studies.
I'm taking the semester off and I'm thinking I should have taken basket-weaving (a class I would no doubt fail) just to maintain my access to journals. Just the other night, I was looking for information on fairly new algorithms for dealing with image processing and almost every reference I could find was a journal I'd have to pay to get access to.
It seems to me that it's in everyone's best interest to make this information freely available. Think about it, as a programmer, having access to this information may allow me to write better software. If I'm selling that software, I'm a part of the economy and this information may have made the difference between mediocre software people wouldn't pay for and amazing software that's very popular. It's the same with many fields. Many companies can't afford these academic journals for their employees, or maybe only a small subset. It's a boost to the economy for everyone (except the journals) if this stuff is made freely available.
In addition to the economic boost, there's the quality of life boost. These articles can lead to products that improve QOL. Another important incentive.
I can't think of a single reason that journals should be making money (and a nice chunk of change at that) for work which is largely not theirs. They do editing, can help with peer-review and so forth, and obviously printing, but the actual meat, the articles, are the works of others. Subscriptions cost and arm and a leg and if I'm not mistaken, I believe most of these journals don't pay the authors. I think, in fact, many charge the authors!
There is no single correct way to pronounce it. You're just being anal.
You are correct. There are, in fact, 3 accepted pronunciations according to Webster, including the one that rhymes with anal!
I have to say, the submitter had more stick-with-it-ness than me. I lasted about 2 hours with Vista before I reverted to XP. I still periodically run Vista in a VM when my work requires it (mainly to fix Vista-specific problems in our app, which have been few, but major), but it drives me nuts whenever I have to use it. It's simply got to be one of the worst OS experiences I've had.
Being a nerd, I'm the person everyone in my family comes to for computer problems and EVERY single one, so far, that has gotten a new machine with Vista calls me to ask me how to get stuff to work with it or how to revert back to XP. So far that list includes an aunt, an uncle, two cousins, my mother, and my step-mother. Nobody else in my family that I'm aware of is running Vista.
rankly, This is an illustration of why our process of developing medications is ridiculous.
I sympathize with your father's condition, and I can certainly understand your frustration with the drug approval process. While the process has a number of problems, the idea behind it is pretty solid. It takes a long time to determine what the effects of treatments can be. Doctors pledge an oath to do no harm. Part of that is taking steps in ensuring that the treatment they give won't make things worse and the drug approval process is part of that system. It does have problems, but the risk is that they could approve something early and it could do more harm than good. In fact, some things still get through the process and do more harm than good. But the process does limit the damage.
You might argue that people should be able to decide for themselves, but based on what? Most people don't have even a basic knowledge of biology, let alone the knowledge of human physiology and pharmacology to make an educated decision about whether or not an experimental drug is worth the risk. I'm a big supporter of individual rights, but the idea of people making these kinds of decisions for themselves, especially with some of the really insane treatments that get tested, is concerning to me. At what point do you start allowing people to risk their lives for treatment? I'm tempted to say, "Anyone with a terminal disease who's willing." I know a lot of people would be willing and it would speed up trials. The problem is, it goes against the "do no harm" policy that doctors have.
It's a very precarious situation and while I certainly understand your father's predicament, I'm not entirely sure speeding up the trial process would be an overall positive or negative.
Mod parent up. This is a completely ridiculous article. It's little more than a footnote on a status update of the development.
I remember back when I was on crutches, I was amazed at how quickly I could go fairly long distances with very little energy expenditure. Basically, you keep your arms stiff, stick the crutches in front of you and swing between them. I would zip by people on the sidewalk and about all it cost in terms of energy was bringing the crutches from behind me to in front of me. In terms of endurance, I could definitely go further at a quick pace on the crutches than I could on just my feet.
Clearly the prosthetic legs provide similar advantages. A fair race would be between this guy and people with similar prosthetic devices, but it would be completely unfair to let him compete against people without the same advantage. That's not to say that having to have your legs amputated is a good thing and I'm sure there are some pretty serious drawbacks. But for a contest like this, it's simply unfair.
Nevertheless, I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff. It's good for the same reason that learning about Ruby and Python is a good thing even if you only ever program in Java or C++.
And why, exactly is that? So that I can stuff yet one more computer language that I'm never going to use into a head that's already so full of trivial, useless information that something has to fall out (usually something occasionally useful, like French or a couple of notes in the pentatonic minor scale) for me to squish something else in?
Frankly, I think Firefox is one of the few OSS projects that needs serious UI work. I find it more than adequate and I'm not sure a major overhaul is something I'll appreciate. But then again, I'm not a big fan of eye candy. I like simple, functional user interfaces far more than pretty, but less functional, ones.
On the other hand, there are a LOT of OSS projects that could use some serious help in the UI department. If you told me KDE or Gnome, or Gimp had done this, I'd be pretty excited. These projects could all use help, in varying degrees, in making their UIs more intuitive.
I have used their speech synthesis products and they're quite impressive. I used one of the voices to dictate a textbook into an MP3 file so that I could then do a book-on-tape type thing to play my textbook in my car. The pronunciation was generally pretty good. I had to define the pronunciation of a few words here and there (it had problems with some of the less common geek words, like "macromolecular"). But after giving it the proper pronunciations, it was quite excellent. The voice sounded natural a good portion of the time.
Microsoft may not have the formats formally specified anywhere...Many, many years ago, shortly before my book was published, Microsoft actually wanted to hire me to write the official documentation for the Segmented Hyper-Graphic (SHG) file format because their own in-house documentation for the format was for an even older, unsupported version.
I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.