Diche Bach

This is effectively what radiation therapy does: kill the cancerous tissue, as well as a good bit of the surrounding tissues. However, for certain cancers it is effective and can make the difference. Sadly, given the expense, I don't think either radiation or chemotherapy are practiced on pets. I suspect that even surgical resection of tumors is pretty limited for nonhuman animals. I lost my old buddy "Starbuck" (border terrier) about 3.5 years ago. His liver was konking out and based on the vets recommendation we agreed to have him euthanized. He died right here with us in the living room, and I buried him in the back yard. I was in a state of severe grief for about a week, and I still think of him whenever I go in the back yard. However, I pretty quickly decided to get a new dog (see avatar) and she has become just as much, if not more of a best friend! Nothing quite like getting a 10 week old puppy from a skilled breeder; like a blank canvas of love and friendship just waiting for your devotion.

A historic moment. I've been hoping for the past few years that I'd be alive to see this happen. Quite pleased that I was, and intrigued by what they are discovering. The seemingly parallel orientations of the solar and interstellar magnetic fields are bound to be huge areas for inquiry in the coming years. Did I hear right in the NASA press conference video that Zank said the heliopause is "one million degrees!?" How the heck did Voyager not melt when it passed through that?

No seriously! It _really_ is going to leave for good this time if you keep this up. Heck, only 30,000 years and it will get past the coments!

We are probably only about 100 years from actually understanding what the psyche, much less consciousness "is." Main problem is that we have 10,000 years of non-scientific epistemology blocking the way, and still fairly limited neuroscientific, epigenetic and developmental data. It is going to be slow going because experimenting on human children is not okay. ADDIT: Com'n now, lets not be sexist . . . Fixed.

A movie that provides upclose, detailed, accurate portrayals of EVA in low Earth Orbit, or of life in LEO more generally is much, MUCH needed, and highly praiseworthy. A movie that seriously and effectively portrays (a) the challenges, dangers, risks, costs of this human presence in LEO as well as ( the marvels, opportunities, and possibilities, would be even more praiseworthy. What I see in these trailers is: Terminator in space without guns. Maybe Terminator isn't the right example, but the key thing is: unrealistically high-intensity action. Astronauts bouncing off of space ships, and smashing through solar panels, two astronauts snagging like a pair of bolos with their tether across a solar panel and smashing through . . . LOL! Good entertainment maybe, but naturalistic. Hardly seems like it. Still probably worth a trip to the cinema just for the grandeur of it.

Original Star Trek reruns in the late 1970s.

Looks entertaining. Hopefully it won't be too painfully inaccurate, over-dramatized and unrealistic Good to see a movie that portrays space travel as dangerous, harrowing and risky though. We need that. So what is the rationale, micro-meteorite impacts? ADDIT: watched the longer trailer. Hate to say it but looks like a turkey. Excuse to show lots of cool CGI of astronauts cartwheeling around banging into stuff like pinballs.

I've had a lot of fun engaging in these sorts of discussions in various forums I've been active on over the years. However, it is my understanding that all political discussions are out of bounds for KSP, so I'm gonna sit this one out

Yeah it is a very good point that euscociality may lead to both genetic bottlenecking (are you guys evobio grad students or something ; ?) whereas humans by virtue of our individual difference are tremendous adaptable. If a planet were homogeneous and relatively unchanging, then a eusocial species might actually do better than a more human like 'individualist' species. But on a planet like Earth, which is quite diverse in econiches, and also quite dynamic through time, humans have proven to be tremendously adaptive.

I have to say the whole "modding as a pathway" for creative people to get into the industry is quite fascinating to me; not that I expect to ever do it myself. But I do not know of many previous industries (music or other arts I guess) that have worked quite that way. However it does seem to be a recurring theme: the guys/gals who make the most famous mods for various games eventually wind up landing gigs with studios, even if it is not with the studio that made the game for which they made the famous mod. I've also heard more than one game designer say in interviews: "If you want to break into the industry, make mods."

Not quite sure what you mean by "Earth's pristine nature?" Anyway, have a read of that wiki page if it interests you! It seems to be a pretty well done page. The question of how common life is 'out there' is a bit OT for what the OP asks so we might want to start a separate thread if you want to talk about that more. I remain undecided either way, and would be delighted if we learn that there is life (of ANY sort!) anywhere else except Earth. That would be without a doubt the single most important discovery ever in all of human existence. But at the same time, I find the specific arguments on which the Rare Earth hypothesis is founded to be very difficult to refute or discount. Add to this that, we have virtually no evidence for life anywhere else . . . it is alluringly simple to guess that maybe we are alone in the Milky Way, if not more broadly than that. Also a couple other points that I cannot resist replying to: presently I see that many of the exoplanet researchers are reaching conclusions about their being "hundreds of millions of Earth like exoplanets." However, to my knowledge they have yet to actually confirm any of these planets as having oxygen in their atmospheres. "Earthlike" in this instance really means: planets which are within a size range, density, orbital and rotational period, etc. to put it in the hypothetical "Goldilocks zone" to make it _possible_ for liquid water, and oxygenated atmospheres. Of course even the lack of an oxygen atmosphere does not exclude the possibility of anaerobic life, but what we are really hoping for (and the dream that researchers are trying to 'sell' when the talk about 100 million Earth like exoplanets) are planets which could harbor biologies similar to Earths, be homes to intelligent life and/or viable targets for us to colonize. In this sense, I think that researchers are being a _tad_ bit reckless and creating a false sense of how much they can actually say for certain. The James Webb is probably going to be earth-shattering for this stuff, and I do hope I am alive to hear about that stuff The overall point of the Rare Earth hypothesis vis a vis these "Hundreds of millions of exo-Earths" rhetoric is that . . . the conditions that facilitate the evolution of life, much less complex life, let alone intelligent life, might be far more specific and constrained than the fairly simple parameters that exoplanet researchers are currently considering. All that said, I do not begrudge anyone leaning one way or the other in the 'debate,' as long as everyone is willing to acknowledge that relative rarity or abundance of extraterrestrial life is an about equal possibility at this stage of our knowledge that is good enough for me. In 5 or 10 years when we have even more data on these exoplanets, the balance of evidence one way or another might well shift, and shift quite dramatically. Even though we may be many generations from getting anywhere near any other star, it is nonetheless a very exciting time to be alive in large part because of the incipient revelations of exoplanetary astronomy.

I think we can be confident that a 'civilized' alien life will exhibit the following: 1. Language: the capacity for the creative production (meaning virtually infinite permutations) of abstract symbolic representations unbounded by immediate perception (meaning the capacity to reference things distant in time and space from the interlocutor) as a means to affect very specific changes in the minds of conspecifics, i.e., to communicate information to them. Math, physics, and the majority of human technology depend on language. 2. Tool-making: many animals make and use tools, and there are even plenty who teach tool use to one another. However, human tool use is distinctive in that it involves degrees of indirect inference that no other animal seems troubled to try. By this I mean, that humans have for a very long time, created a seemingly useless 'tool' (or one with very limited utility) as a way to create a second tool, as a way to create third, etc. Modern industry takes this principle to the extreme, but it is arguably at the heart of 'modern' human tool use (although interestingly it may have been present in incipient stages for a long time before we were fully modern). Projective thinking or the ability to imagine the opportunities and constraints that alterations to an object will afford is thus seemingly essential to the emergence of civilization. I tend to think that what we are really talking about here is "Imagination" something we humans tend to have a LOT of and most animals seem to have not too much of. 3. Apart from that, about the only other thing I can think of that would be absolutely requisite is intense sociality of some sort. Arguably in order for culture to emerge you need to have social groups that are large enough, consist of a sufficient diversity of ages and sexes, but the exact details of that could be pretty broad. Something like black bear social organization might not suffice (a species which is social with its mother, but then becomes essentially solitary except for brief interactions between mating males and females) but something as intensely social as most anthropoid primates might not even be necessary.

It is a very interesting idea that a eusocial organism like a wasp or a bee could could evolve into a sentient form that founded a civilization. As there are no 'intelligent' arthropods on Earth (including all of the eusocial insects) it is a bit difficult to imagine how intelligence and civilization could evolve among such creatures. I think I've read that there are some serious allometric and metabolic limitations to tetrapod invertebrates and that might impose a kind of 'thermodynamic boundary' on how large bodied and intelligent eusocial insect like creatures could evolve to be. However, there is even one species of eusocial mammal, the naked mole rat. They are quite successful, though not very "intelligent." Given how incredibly effective the eusocial adaptation is for the hymenoptera and ants, it seems puzzling why there are not more eusocial mammals . . . There is also the idea that, the evolution of life might actually be quite rare for a variety of reasons, an idea often referred to as the Rare Earth Hypothesis. To me this is a beautifully parsimonious explanation to the Fermi Paradox. A corollary of this hypothesis is that, even if life evolves, the emergence of complex biology (1) nucleated cells and (2) multicellular organisms might be equally rare. The fact that life on Earth only developed these astounding innovations after very prolonged periods (about 1.5 to 2 billion years of strictly prokaryotic life before the first eurkaryotes seem to have appeared; and then another billion years before the emergence of multicellular life) but has subsequently undergone astoundingly (relatively) rapid adaptive radiation and complexity also fits with the idea that intelligent life is rare to form.

Actually! one of Claude Levi-Strauss'es most famous theories of "primitive culture" was that it was universally based on "binary opposition! So even if people had not explicitly stated a formal binary theory of information that manifested in a form like modern computer science, it is arguable that an implicit or broadly symbolic intuition for binary opposition is at the heart of all human culture

Wild stuff. I had no idea. Also this resulted in permanent artificial radiation belts in orbit!? Some scary stuff really. So what would happen to the radiation if a similar detonation occurred outside the Earth's magnetic field? Or very high in the Earth's magnetic field?

The idea that the mechanisms or causes of hibernation and coma may or may not be the same is not the point Kryten and I are arguing. Both hibernation or a coma (and possibly cryogenic freezing) involve a person not moving for long periods of time = (ostensibly) the various ill health effects that he describes. A number of animals are able to spend long durations in a state of torpor or hibernation (bats, bears, various rodents, even some primates) and obviously the fact that they emerge from these states to engage in physical activity and apparently even thrive indicates that it is possible for an endotherm to experience these sorts of 'dormant' states and recover. The idea that methods to induce such things in humans that avert the negative consequences might eventually be achieved is not beyond comprehension. But the points of concern about things like muscle atrophy are ones that must be addressed.

Also an "Unemployment AKA Hell!" thread too Whaaa?? Outta hand how? Everybody seems very friendly, polite and generally well within the bounds of good forum etiquette, no? Sure there is a bit of teasing going on but none of it is truly hostile or mean. Rather more like this

People who don't move for weeks and months suffer various forms of harm (including muscle atrophy). Doesn't matter if they are in a coma in Earth gravity or hibernating in a spinning torus of a space ship. The idea of "mitigating" this is difficult to imagine. What are they planning to do, attach several thousands of electrodes to the astronauts to stimulate muscle contractions? These things are _very_interesting; I think those of us who are expressing skepticism are just trying to point out that, there is a lot of time and effort and probably a certain amount of luck, not to mention economic investment (which is always questionable) before this stuff really becomes prototype applicable to space travel. Makes me agree with the person who said up above "give the money to propulsion and power system research." The greatest obstacle right now is getting out of Earth's gravity well cheaply, and until solutions to that problem are found, stuff like this will remain largely useless for economic and pragmatic reasons.

They have been putting lab animals into varying degrees of cyronic chilling for decades. The quickest thing I could find and it is from 1987. Whacked out ideas of sending people to a desolate irradiated hellhole in space with no seeming reason other than to say "we did it" . . . the real benefit of these technologies is going to be in saving lives after traumatic accidents.

Yeah, it was a good video. Really surprised to hear that they've got some very strong evidence now to put the debate to rest about whether Neanderthals were a deadend or not. I distinctly remember an article 10 years or so ago with the title "Neanderthals are not us" and it was based on an analysis of some Neanderthal DNA, mitochondrial DNA if memory serves. Like I've said before, these debates rage, sometimes for years, with proponents of the two or three opposing models/theories seemingly nearly coming to blows and expressing themselves in ways that suggest they feel the conclusion of the debate with confirmation of their veracity is a matter of utmost importance. Then a discovery or breakthrough occurs and *poof* debate pretty much over. Based on my fairly limited understanding of Neanderthals and of biological species differences more generally, my intuition was always that they were just a sub-species of us and that they were assimilated. Nice to see that that there is now some pretty strong evidence to confirm that intuition. Holy crap, Denisova. Never even heard of them. Again, nice to see that the recent human 'bush' of the phylogenetic tree was actually pretty bushy!

Whatever number of electrons actually comprise the information, isn't that a bit misleading to conclude that the electrons "are" the internet? All of the monitors, cables, keyboards, mouses, motherboards, CPUs, power supplies, towers, fiber optic cables, bolts, nuts, screws, poles, etc., . . . given all of those are fully required functional components to make the Internet work, how can you exclude them from the total mass of the Internet? Yes it is somewhat interesting to speculate about what the electrons that mediate the information of the internet amount to, but the Internet itself is IMO a lot more than just those electrons. Its like arguing that an automobile IS its gasoline. Not trying to be a douche, just saying

NGTOne: I'm glad you had a good experience with a more 'free-form' approach to education. This is the approach that I evolved into over the years that I taught University courses and for the courses I taught it worked quite well. Define a syllabus using primary readings (articles form the peer-reviewed literature) that addressed major themes pertinent to the course, have weekly quizzes to keep students on task, require students to lead the class 2/3rds of the time. It worked pretty good at first, even better as I improved the design. However, it would NOT work for many subject matters, it would not work for all 'levels' of course work and it would not necessarily work for all students. I noticed that I many students would seemingly 'flee' as soon as they realized how such a course was to be run. I can only guess that the course design was something they feared. These slots would generally fill up with other students on the wait list though. Some folks clearly struggle if they are given too much autonomy. I think that the single biggest factor that leads to deficiencies in education is that it is instituationalized; but herein is the paradox. If it were not institutionalized then it would be very difficult for education to play a key role in societal order. Once upon a time, education was not institutionalized but 95% of people were illiterate and received virtually no education apart from learning to perform some sort of physical labor in service to a lord or property owner. Here we see the more paradoxical point: the fact that education is in virtually all modern nation states institutionalized and subject to governmental standardization is from an historical standpoint a reflection of reforms to promote equality, upward mobility, and individual empowerment. Ironic that it seems to 'feel' oppressive, hierarchical and stifling for so many people. Education works well when a relatively small number of students are afforded an opportunity to interact with a teacher, someone who knows about a topic, and has a sincere desire to facilitate learning about that topic by others. Here we see additional features of modern education that lead to shorcomings: too many students relative to teachers; teachers who are not actually very expert; teachers who are burnt out or apathetic, even malicious; teachers who either do not really care to help their students learn, or actually are more concerned with establishing their own authority and power than with facilitating learning; related to this last bit, a disturbingly widespread belief among teachers that they as an expert are there to 'dispense' knowledge into the 'empty vessels' of students' minds. Even when someone IS a true expert, this model of how learning or education works still could not be further from the truth. Effective teaching always involves more activity on the part of the student than the teacher, even when the curriculum design is much less open-ended and self-guided as the one you describe above. I fear that for various reasons, none of these problems are going to really be addressed at any time in the near future, perhaps never. Education is now a very well entrenched 'industry' and the pervasive theories about education are deeply entrenched with the perpetuation of the very societal and institutional models that are inherent flaws in the system. Add to this a wide range of political and ideological factors that complicate any actual hope of rectifying problems (e.g., the fetishization of standardized testing seemingly for the sole purpose of setting up a 'filtering' system to screen candidates for any given trajectory or goal). It is all rather disheartening really, and while I have joked in this thread, I do actually feel a great deal of empathy for you. I personally hated High School, but once I got to college I found that I loved it. All I can say is: don't let it get you down. Even it is a bummer, it is worth finishing it, and indeed moving on to college may well reveal that education isn't so bad after all. The best way to learn is to explore something for yourself, but that requires true curiousity and engagement with a topic. While school might actually drain your curiousity about any given topic, try to find those things that you really take an interest in and pursue them and educate yourself, perhaps even find teachers or friends who share those interests.

Love who craft . . .

I have not kept up with developments in the past few years. But up to 4 or 5 years ago, there definitely were experts arguing that Neanderthals were NOT assimilated and were a separate creature with which modern humans did not breed. Seems things are getting more clear as more evidence is assembled. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXtyC9RLY-Q

They were near victims to a crime, not criminals. Geeze, you can be bit heavy handed some lajos . . . It is true though that you should've immediately have called the police in your area. Even just a description of the vehicle and a report on its location and direction when you last saw it could've led to it being stopped and him being spoken to by the police.