bascule

Vaccines do not cause autism. The causes seem almost overwhelmingly genetic: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/10/16/autism.genes.reut/index.html?section=cnn_topstories http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2192611.stm While there is no one "smoking gun" risk factor involved in autism, genetics clearly plays a very important role. There isn't even a statistical correlation between the use or discontinuation of vaccines containing mercury and autism. Countries which have banned them have seen no change in rates of autism.

I'd say one-time pad (OTP) is by far the best approach, with a multipart pad. The simplest way to think of OTP is with the answer to a yes or no question. With two messengers, one could carry the pad and one carry the ciphertext. The ciphertext is the answer to a yes or no question, and the pad tells you whether yes means yes and no means no or whether no means yes and yes means no. So you can capture the messenger, but without the pad you don't know whether his message is what it says or the exact opposite. Now, with a multipart pad you can easily increase the security. Stack another messanger on top of there, who has another yes/no message which indicates whether the messanger who's carrying the first part of the pad really means what they say or the opposite. So the ciphertext could be yes, the first part of the pad could be no, and the second part of the pad could be no. In this way, the first part of the pad actually means the opposite of what it says, which is, yes the message means what it says, and the messanger carrying the first part of the pad meant the opposite of what he sent. This can be scaled up to as many messengers as you want, but you will need them all to arrive successfully to decode the message. If one is captured, you will have to start over, but at least you can ensure that they ALL must be captured for the message to be compromised. In this respect, OTP has mathematically provable perfect security (provided the pad is not compromised, and has a random statistical distribution). The ciphertext is guaranteed to be at least as random as the pad, and no amount of statistical analysis will ever reveal its message.

To me a crackpot is someone who claims they're doing science while instead engaging in pseudoscience/mysticism. This would include Feng Shui consultants ("It's scientific!"), people who claims they can get a positive energy balance from electrolysis or several other sources, Chiropractors who claim they can heal exema, etc.

"The only winning move is not to play" - 'Joshua' (a.k.a. WOPR) from WarGames Seriously though, what constitutes winning? A stable, thriving, violence-free Democracy in Iraq?

The CMBR is slightly above absolute zero yet still plodding on at c

I'd imagine if it were removed your nose would lose a lot of structural integrity

Are you talking about helicopters in general which have a main rotor and a tail rotor, or something like a Chinook with two rotors spinning opposite directions? There's also the Osprey which works on a similar principle, but is more half plane/half helicopter.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/6057734.stm According to an "evolutionary theorist" (economist), H.G. Wells was right and we'll get Morlock and Eloi-like subspecies of humans. Also we'll do okay until the year 3000 at which point we'll begin a gradual decline thanks to overdependence on technology. There will be the beautiful, smart, tall desirable people and the short, ugly, stupid undesirable people. The Eloi-like men will have larger penises and the Eloi-like women will have pert breasts.

Compared to the past catacylsms the planet endured, the effect of man is relatively minor. I'm confident that the problems we cause will eventually be mitigated by future technologies, provided we don't go extinct first.

Architectural and managerial. I designed it, and now I'm overseeing its execution. I'm doing no coding on it whatsoever (per my boss's request). No, it's a pet project of mine being implemented by students at the local university as their senior project. Hardware/bandwidth are being provided through my company. If all goes right, it should quickly become the biggest bandwidth consumer on the Internet.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/10/16/autism.genes.reut/index.html?section=cnn_topstories I consider myself autistic spectrum, and I have gastrointestinal problems (IBS/nausea) and don't exactly have the world's greatest immune system. I think it's very likely I have this gene.

I saw that and was quite excited Martin, but after reading some of the reviews I grew disinterested. I'm all about emergence/epiphenomena, however...

It's really sad to see that in the top 10

Weird, you all use carbon rods for your electrodes? In the past (just making hydrogen from salt water) I was using tungsten plates... never thought of using carbon rods.

So, Daniel Dennett and some other EDGE people attending an Evolution conference were sitting around, and Paris Hilton showed up... http://edge.org/ (Yes, that sounds like the set up for a bad joke, but it actually happened) Too bad big thinkers can't be superstars...

Yep, still waiting... What's the dilly, yo?

That's the same argument creationists use against evolution. You're ad homineming science. Falsifiability and uncertainty are strengths of science, not weaknesses. That's why science creates theories, not laws. Science doesn't perport to know the truth, merely provide the best explanation based on available evidence, and since the available evidence is constantly changing, so must science.

As I recall your last debate on the issue ended with something to the effect of "Just because there's a scientific concensus doesn't mean it's right!"

I just have this natural tendency to dominate any forum in sheer volume of posts. Given enough quantity, it's only natural that I'll put forth some gems. And I'm lucky #13 overall, eh? http://scienceforums.net/memberlist.php?&order=DESC&sort=posts&pp=30 Well watch out Martin, I'm about a dozen posts away from you, heh

That's the first place I ever saw this painting too, and didn't learn its name or history until recently, at which point I fell in love with it. I do remember the scene with the little girl. The version I linked makes her face, and her mother's, appear much brighter than they do in the original, I believe. The interplay of light and shadow in the painting are simply brilliant, and in the original, while her face and her mothers show bright in the very center of the picture, their faces are both masked in shadow. That doesn't seem to come through in the scan I linked.

Seurat was one of the first people (if not the first person) to make use of additive colorspaces. Therein lies the distinction between Impression and Pointilism. Most kitsch painting ever!

That almost certainly isn't the case. The halftone screen was invented by Samuel Simon in 1907, and Seurat died in 1891. Seurat's main inspiration was biological research into the human perception of color and expressing in paint an additive color space which would come about through the long distance perception of juxtaposed colors (additive primaries and secondaries). Halftone screens utilize a subtractive color space, where cyan, magenta, yellow, and black tones are laid on top of one another and mix on the page (just like mixing paint on the canvas), instead of in the mind's eye. Seurat's work is more akin to looking at a TV screen than it is to full color art printed with a halftone screen process.

Yes... it's pretty extensively documented on the web site... however: Hit the nail on the head. It's just a centrally organized BitTorrent which uses in-order transfers. Essentially, it's a server-organized peer network for distributing a central repository of files. Well, I'm trying to apply a system for categorizing algorithm complexity to bandwidth consumption. I guess what I really should be saying is that server bandwith scales logramithically rather than linearly with the number of clients. There's the overhead of control messages, but that's substantially less than serving the actual data (which the server will still do some of in order to guarantee QoS and to make up for data which is no longer available within the peer network) This is essentially a "trickle-down" system where peers with data farther in the file is passed from clients who do have it to those who don't (after initial "seeding" from the server). It's like BitTorrent, but instead of being a big swap meet, you can think of it more like letting hundreds of people read a book at the same time by giving out a few copies of each page to people in line and having them pass the page to the next person when they're done reading it.

My print is approximately 1/4 size of the original (39"x27") but still large enough for the color blending effect to work. Yes! For some reason in my print the young girl and her mom in the center are quite a bit dimmer, and her facial detail is more muddied. The original is at the Art Institute of Chicago But this is neo-Impressionism!

...is now hanging on my wall. Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte: (and ugh, this scan can't come close to doing it justice) This painting embodies Seurat's disdain for the haphazard approach of the Impressionists and the crowning achievement of pointilism/neo-Impressionism. Seurat discarded the whimsical approach to color used by the Impressionists and sought out scientific and biological color theories when developing his pointilist technique. The painting appears as splotches of contrasting colors up close, but from a distance blends into a beautiful, vibrant whole. To me the painting represents the abandoment of a haphazard, unscientific, common-sense approach and the embracing of a sound methodology. And... the colors! There's really nothing else like it, but to appreciate it you really need to view a large print (or the original) from a distance. Perhaps more to the point though, it represents a superbly executed conceptualist masterpiece. Anyway, there's no painting I love more than this one so... just thought I'd share.