Cows fart methane much more than they burp it. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for Slashdot maintaining a genteel tone in its titles. So, herewith, the improved version: "Cows that let out less methane to be cabbage patched."
on the whole planet. I heard him speak at the LA WorldCon a few years ago, and I was blown away. There was an immediacy, a direct contact he made with what felt like every single one of us in that huge audience. Somebody who can have that effect in -- and probably from -- realspace might well feel that the internet is lacking something.
Mod parent up! As I read this, it's modded 3, "interesting." This is one of the most relevant comments in the whole thread. get your act together, moderators!
By your own argument aren't you completely unqualified to even comment on this issue?
Erm . . . that's precisely my point.
And, yes, as a matter of fact I do think a biologist is somewhat more qualified than a physicist to discuss climatology. Our science shares a lot more of that fuzzy uncertainty and all-around total unpredictability that physicists don't seem to be used to. I could have told the folks planning on dumping iron to remove CO2 was never going to work. That one was obvious to any biologist, or at least any biologist who didn't flunk basic ecology.
He's a physicist. All he's done is show that non-specialists aren't necessarily as good as specialists at understanding the evidence.
I'm a biologist, and a good one if I do say so myself. I'm also convinced that faster than light travel (and the necessary new physics) is just waiting to be discovered. I'm sure the physics community will be immediately rethinking all their principles now.
The bacterium can't attack live plants. Mauthbaux made good points about the fact that genetically engineered bacteria are usually made dependent on some factor they won't get in the wild, precisely to deal with the problem of escapes. The TR article does not mentionwhether this was done, however.
The point that it only attacks dead plants doesn't mean we're home free. Lots of people live inside dead plants (wood), so there could still be a huge problem if this thing did a sci-fi (or should I say SyFy) and gobbled all the world's wood and paper into grey goo. But the bacterium only works in solution, so there again, unless you live in a monsoon jungle, there probably won't be enough ambient water around.
who've been dumbed down. There's some scary-good ones out there. (Haldeman, anyone?) The problem is the gatekeepers: the publishers, the producers, the editors, the agents. They're all desperate for the-story-that-makes-a-trillion-bucks, so all they'll buy is remakes of old success. Then they can't figure out why it's not a success now.
The problem is our distribution system, such as clothheads who think Syfy is going to appeal to anyone. Sounds like some new fizzy drink.
A centralized source of Linux info would be GREAT! Especially if it had a search function that pointed you to a good complete answer to inexpertly phrased questions. Right now, pointing newbies at Google is one of the big linux turnoffs for them.
I've been a college prof for 25+ years. No, she can't do that. Yes, she's going to be sued to beggary by the first student who takes this to court. I'd suggest a class action suit, since there are obviously many people involved. This is just plain outrageous. She can demand the return of her own property or the university's. She can't demand your property, even if it does mean she has to spend time writing new tests.
... what can be explained by stupidity. I've been in and around universities for decades. Not schools, admittedly, but they're not that much smarter just because they have Ph.D.s.:/
a) Most people in education barely know linux exists. I was running XP in virtualization under Ubuntu one day when a guy from IT came over to put Active Directory on everyone's computers. (Long story.) This guy in *IT* had never seen anything like it before. "That's so cool," he said.
b) For the faculty, using some other OS is inconceivable. Literally. Trying to explain some of this stuff to them feels just like going all the way back to teaching kids the alphabet.
c) They're so far away from having a clue, they don't know they don't have a clue. The teacher in the post probably felt about like you would if somebody removed all the books and computers from class and substituted comics. I mean, look at the ga-ga reaction: "How dare you try to feed these children drivel instead of Solid Practical Experience?"
Well, obviously, I'm going to disagree with your comment. About my profound lack of understanding, that is. "Hydroxy" is just an OH group, "butylated" refers to a couple of 3-carbon compounds attached to the toluene center. I'm not familiar with BHT metabolism, but I'd be willing to bet money that the OH and "butyls" are split off and you'll be dealing with that toluene center at some point.
You're right that merely having toluene as part of a different and much more complicated molecule does not mean it'll be metabolized in a way that produces the toluene component. But given BHT's structure, I'd bet, as a biologist, that the body is dealing with that breakdown product. Which is why I say let others be the guinea pigs.:/
BHT stands for butylated hydroxytoluene. I'd be worried about the metabolites of anything that has toluene as a component. Think paint thinner. That stuff is not healthy in any significant quantity. BHT has been used as a food preservative since way back, but that too doesn't mean it's good for you. And it implies it's NOT good for you in any appreciable quantity. The reason things work as preservatives is because they're more or less toxic to living things, like bacteria, but in larger quantities also to larger living things.
Let someone else be the guinea pig on this....
this is where the web opens up new worlds
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No, seriously. Haselton wants to tap into a wisdom-of-crowds effect to find the good stuff we're missing. So long as opinions are independent, many people do converge on the right answer more often than few people.
In the good old days, getting enough people to see or hear a piece of creative work was a logistical nightmare. Using the kind of "peer review" he's talking about would have been impossible, even though it's a really promising approach. But the web could make it easy. It's the same kind of quantum shift, with equally huge ramifications, as the way the printing press made ideas accessible to many more people than before.
Facilitating good ideas and making them visible pretty much defines a civilization. Finding a way to get good ideas known is about as non-trivial as it gets. Because even though developed countries have grown rather good at the facilitating part, we're still wasting 99% of our good people at the visibility end.
You may have noticed by now that good people are hard to find. It'd be like climbing out of the Middle Ages if we stopped wasting 99% of them.
I second that. Just read the pirated ebook. The only person with a right to your money is the author, so if you can find her/him, send a check. To answer your demographic questions: I'm a Baby Boomer, who's been working with computers since the early 80s, and the internet since it's early Bitnet, Lynx, etc., beginnings, and who's also a published author. So, no, I'm not just advocating "ripping off" other people's work.
True. But the MacD's and KFC's blobs live less long, not more. Back to the drawing board on that theory, I guess./*mutters to self: Must have misplaced a decimal point somewhere. Or is this all in imperial measures?? Oh, no-o-o-o....*/
The Cambrian explosion was some 560 million years ago. Around then life went from being pretty much just blobs or ferny-looking aggregates of single cells to the huge diversity of life we're used to these days.
The difference between the pre- and post-Cambrian is that sexual reproduction and death were invented.
Both of those will slow down together with increased life span. So the longer we live, the more boring we'll get. If the gods really decide to give us what we want, I guess we'll probably converge right back on blobs.
Sad, really.
Maybe not so good, but . . .
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Nerds are essential Somali pirates, too. The BBC recently had a story that ex-fishermen and ex-militia are two of the three types of pirates. The third is geeks. "The technical experts, who are the computer geeks and know how to operate the hi-tech equipment needed to operate as a pirate - satellite phones, GPS and military hardware."
Yeah. as I said, I've had issues. Sometimes they were even Issues. Don't get me started on cups, for instance, before they saw the error of their ways.
What I was trying to say was that nowadays if you get off the straight and narrow in WinXP you're generally in worse trouble than under linux (at least the brown side of the Force:D ). That's a change.
Then Vista went and widened the difference by an order of magnitude or two. I'm still trying to figure out what the thinking was behind that . . . .
but I moved to Ubuntu anyway a few years back when M$ started turning off purchased, but unregistered, copies of Office. So I had my share of issues back in the day.
A while ago I was helping somebody get some software running and printing under Windows, and . . . gawd! . . . they had to install a driver. It's been a couple of years since I had to do anything so primitive. Everything just works.
That's when it finally dawned on me that the times they are a'changin.
Slashdot Mirror
I know. I know. They really come out of the turnip patch.
Cows fart methane much more than they burp it. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for Slashdot maintaining a genteel tone in its titles. So, herewith, the improved version: "Cows that let out less methane to be cabbage patched."
on the whole planet. I heard him speak at the LA WorldCon a few years ago, and I was blown away. There was an immediacy, a direct contact he made with what felt like every single one of us in that huge audience. Somebody who can have that effect in -- and probably from -- realspace might well feel that the internet is lacking something.
Mod parent up! As I read this, it's modded 3, "interesting." This is one of the most relevant comments in the whole thread. get your act together, moderators!
is that the guy who invented it died before I could kill him.
Pirate's Bay took over Warner Bros., you idiots. They boarded via the downloaded songs on the CEO's iPod.
For a text-based browser, you have to know how to read, for God's sake.
By your own argument aren't you completely unqualified to even comment on this issue?
Erm . . . that's precisely my point.
And, yes, as a matter of fact I do think a biologist is somewhat more qualified than a physicist to discuss climatology. Our science shares a lot more of that fuzzy uncertainty and all-around total unpredictability that physicists don't seem to be used to. I could have told the folks planning on dumping iron to remove CO2 was never going to work. That one was obvious to any biologist, or at least any biologist who didn't flunk basic ecology.
He's a physicist. All he's done is show that non-specialists aren't necessarily as good as specialists at understanding the evidence.
I'm a biologist, and a good one if I do say so myself. I'm also convinced that faster than light travel (and the necessary new physics) is just waiting to be discovered. I'm sure the physics community will be immediately rethinking all their principles now.
The bacterium can't attack live plants. Mauthbaux made good points about the fact that genetically engineered bacteria are usually made dependent on some factor they won't get in the wild, precisely to deal with the problem of escapes. The TR article does not mentionwhether this was done, however.
The point that it only attacks dead plants doesn't mean we're home free. Lots of people live inside dead plants (wood), so there could still be a huge problem if this thing did a sci-fi (or should I say SyFy) and gobbled all the world's wood and paper into grey goo. But the bacterium only works in solution, so there again, unless you live in a monsoon jungle, there probably won't be enough ambient water around.
who've been dumbed down. There's some scary-good ones out there. (Haldeman, anyone?) The problem is the gatekeepers: the publishers, the producers, the editors, the agents. They're all desperate for the-story-that-makes-a-trillion-bucks, so all they'll buy is remakes of old success. Then they can't figure out why it's not a success now.
The problem is our distribution system, such as clothheads who think Syfy is going to appeal to anyone. Sounds like some new fizzy drink.
A centralized source of Linux info would be GREAT! Especially if it had a search function that pointed you to a good complete answer to inexpertly phrased questions. Right now, pointing newbies at Google is one of the big linux turnoffs for them.
Word.
And the 'tard has apparently never heard of thin-film PV which is getting better-than-10% efficiencies already.
I've been a college prof for 25+ years. No, she can't do that. Yes, she's going to be sued to beggary by the first student who takes this to court. I'd suggest a class action suit, since there are obviously many people involved. This is just plain outrageous. She can demand the return of her own property or the university's. She can't demand your property, even if it does mean she has to spend time writing new tests.
It wasn't broke, but somebody in Marketing just had to fix it.
... what can be explained by stupidity. I've been in and around universities for decades. Not schools, admittedly, but they're not that much smarter just because they have Ph.D.s. :/
a) Most people in education barely know linux exists. I was running XP in virtualization under Ubuntu one day when a guy from IT came over to put Active Directory on everyone's computers. (Long story.) This guy in *IT* had never seen anything like it before. "That's so cool," he said.
b) For the faculty, using some other OS is inconceivable. Literally. Trying to explain some of this stuff to them feels just like going all the way back to teaching kids the alphabet.
c) They're so far away from having a clue, they don't know they don't have a clue. The teacher in the post probably felt about like you would if somebody removed all the books and computers from class and substituted comics. I mean, look at the ga-ga reaction: "How dare you try to feed these children drivel instead of Solid Practical Experience?"
Well, obviously, I'm going to disagree with your comment. About my profound lack of understanding, that is. "Hydroxy" is just an OH group, "butylated" refers to a couple of 3-carbon compounds attached to the toluene center. I'm not familiar with BHT metabolism, but I'd be willing to bet money that the OH and "butyls" are split off and you'll be dealing with that toluene center at some point.
:/
You're right that merely having toluene as part of a different and much more complicated molecule does not mean it'll be metabolized in a way that produces the toluene component. But given BHT's structure, I'd bet, as a biologist, that the body is dealing with that breakdown product. Which is why I say let others be the guinea pigs.
BHT stands for butylated hydroxytoluene. I'd be worried about the metabolites of anything that has toluene as a component. Think paint thinner. That stuff is not healthy in any significant quantity. BHT has been used as a food preservative since way back, but that too doesn't mean it's good for you. And it implies it's NOT good for you in any appreciable quantity. The reason things work as preservatives is because they're more or less toxic to living things, like bacteria, but in larger quantities also to larger living things.
Let someone else be the guinea pig on this....
No, seriously. Haselton wants to tap into a wisdom-of-crowds effect to find the good stuff we're missing. So long as opinions are independent, many people do converge on the right answer more often than few people.
In the good old days, getting enough people to see or hear a piece of creative work was a logistical nightmare. Using the kind of "peer review" he's talking about would have been impossible, even though it's a really promising approach. But the web could make it easy. It's the same kind of quantum shift, with equally huge ramifications, as the way the printing press made ideas accessible to many more people than before.
Facilitating good ideas and making them visible pretty much defines a civilization. Finding a way to get good ideas known is about as non-trivial as it gets. Because even though developed countries have grown rather good at the facilitating part, we're still wasting 99% of our good people at the visibility end.
You may have noticed by now that good people are hard to find. It'd be like climbing out of the Middle Ages if we stopped wasting 99% of them.
I second that. Just read the pirated ebook. The only person with a right to your money is the author, so if you can find her/him, send a check. To answer your demographic questions: I'm a Baby Boomer, who's been working with computers since the early 80s, and the internet since it's early Bitnet, Lynx, etc., beginnings, and who's also a published author. So, no, I'm not just advocating "ripping off" other people's work.
True. But the MacD's and KFC's blobs live less long, not more. Back to the drawing board on that theory, I guess. /*mutters to self: Must have misplaced a decimal point somewhere. Or is this all in imperial measures?? Oh, no-o-o-o ....*/
The Cambrian explosion was some 560 million years ago. Around then life went from being pretty much just blobs or ferny-looking aggregates of single cells to the huge diversity of life we're used to these days.
The difference between the pre- and post-Cambrian is that sexual reproduction and death were invented.
Both of those will slow down together with increased life span. So the longer we live, the more boring we'll get. If the gods really decide to give us what we want, I guess we'll probably converge right back on blobs.
Sad, really.
Nerds are essential Somali pirates, too. The BBC recently had a story that ex-fishermen and ex-militia are two of the three types of pirates. The third is geeks. "The technical experts, who are the computer geeks and know how to operate the hi-tech equipment needed to operate as a pirate - satellite phones, GPS and military hardware."
Yeah. as I said, I've had issues. Sometimes they were even Issues. Don't get me started on cups, for instance, before they saw the error of their ways.
:D ). That's a change.
What I was trying to say was that nowadays if you get off the straight and narrow in WinXP you're generally in worse trouble than under linux (at least the brown side of the Force
Then Vista went and widened the difference by an order of magnitude or two. I'm still trying to figure out what the thinking was behind that . . . .
but I moved to Ubuntu anyway a few years back when M$ started turning off purchased, but unregistered, copies of Office. So I had my share of issues back in the day.
A while ago I was helping somebody get some software running and printing under Windows, and . . . gawd! . . . they had to install a driver. It's been a couple of years since I had to do anything so primitive. Everything just works.
That's when it finally dawned on me that the times they are a'changin.