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Matt Lauer confronted President Bush on this in a recent interview. In the interview Lauer incinuated that Mohammed was being kept in one of the CIA's no-longer-secret prisions, and furthermore was subjected to water boarding, in which he was nearly drowned (or submerged until he was stopped breating and then revived) Bush refused to answer any of the allegations, and insisted that revelaing their methods would let terrorists know what to expect. The exchange: Lauer: "It's been reported that with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, he was, what they call 'water-boarded'" Bush: "I'm not going to talk about techniques we use on people. One reason why is that we don't want the enemy to adjust"

TALK LIKE A PIRATE!!!! http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

http://ncte.org http://igda.org http://eff.org http://aclu.org http://thepiratebay.org

Does anyone else think it's funny that the long-discredited Bohr model of electron orbitals is the unofficial symbol of science?

I grew up on a nursery when I was young. There were irrigation ditches everywhere. There were little wooden stoppers you could stick in the ditches in order to redirect them or temporarily stop them up while you worked on them. Anywho, one day when I was like 6 or 7 or so I was playing around with those, and I saw a really cool spider. It was big and black, and had a little red hourglass on it. My dad walked up, wondering what I was doing. I hid the spider from him, and chatted with him for a bit, then he left. Anyway, nothing happened, but I soon discovered that red hourglass meant a black widow, and that they were one of the most poisonous spiders in North America.

I adamantly oppose medical testing on simians. Beyond that, it depends on the animal. There are many forms of medical testing, performed on mice, that I see as being justifiable. It depends if there's an overall net good to the research performed (e.g. if killing 100,000 mice allows us to create a vaccine that can save 100 million people, I'm all for it)

Furries are an Internet subculture which has been finding whatever outlets it can to manifest itself. Essentially it represents a fascination of primarily the generation who grew up in the mid to late '80s who became overly obsessed with anthropomorphic animals (with sexual overtones) from a number of different sources, primarily the television show Thundercats and the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both of which they were exposed to in early childhood, but also any number of sources (heavily compounded over history) including but not limited to: Sonic the Hedgehog, Bucky O'Hare, Looney Tunes, Disney characters (both feautred in WFRR?), Battletoads, and countless other series. After a generation of innundation, a number of individuals, particular those with other sexual problems including gender identity, and especially those who exposed themselves to the drug/rave/burner culture, became increasingly fascinated with what can only be described as anthropomorphic beastiality. A similar sort of subculture has developed in Japan, which is just a cesspool of sexual confusion/exploration/bizarre and creepy fetishism, which has begun feeding the community in the US (and I assume other countries) with very creepy images and video material, including anime series and hentai. Yes, furries are an odd fascination of mine, namely because as an experienced cybernaut always in search of the latest trend (ZEFRANK! so trendy he's almost passe) I've encountered them in many spots I frequented in search of the elusive memes which hadn't yet entered the public spectacle. I found massive furry populations in many of these spots, including Polykarbon, DeviantArt, (I used to be one of those kids that got all obsessed with anime and started drawing it), 4chan, and now the massively multiplayer 3D Wiki, Second Life. Mostly, I harass furries (at least in Second Life). I don't really know why. They kind of piss me off. Mostly because they're fine with doing something as sexually bizarre as, uhh, anthropomorphic beastiality (Hey, it's not illegal, it's just people in costume!) they can be such prudes about anything else. And frankly I find whatever form of, uhh, species identity disorder they seem to have extremely disturbing.

Holy crap! http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/specials/2006/09/11/gupta.what.is.genius.cnn Realtime imaging of the entire brain with nanosecond precision!

I really liked Ze Frank's retelling of his 9/11 experience: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/09/090706.html

I woke up, showered, dressed, and drove to work, listening to my MP3 CD player, the entire time blissfully unaware of what was going on. As soon as I walked into the office the secretary was all "Did you hear? A jet crashed into the Pentagon!" I worked for an atmospheric research group out in the boonies. We had no TV at all, and the only sources of information we had were radios and the Internet. I hopped onto IRC to try to find out what was up. It went something to the effect of: "What happened? I heard a plane crashed into the Pentagon?" "The World Trade Center is gone" "WHAT?" "Here's a video: http://long-lost.url/" I spent about a half hour downloading it. In the meantime there was a lot of "On the Internet they're saying both of the twin towers collapsed" "What? I heard they were just on fire!" "Well I'm getting a video now. We'll be able to see it soon." When I got it I yelled "The video's done" and everyone from my research group crowed around and watched the towers collapse for the first time. And amazement/disbelief/sadness/fear/anger ensued.

As if that's anywhere nearly as cool as the Rule 30 CA: They would be, if people weren't so goddamn insistant that the proofs are nonexistent/wrong/logically flawed in some way. The same holds true for finding statistical distributions of the plaintext in OTP with random ciphertext. I've had people try to argue with me that the ciphertext isn't at least as statistically random as the pad, and that with enough statistical modelling you can recover the plaintext. It's nice that people are starting to stick proofs like this in Wikipedia, so that if someone tries to assert something which has proven to be the opposite, you can just hand them the link, rather than having to argue.

Sure you're not confusing them with the Washington Times? Well, maybe you aren't...

The worst part of cigarettes is the radionucletides, particularly polonium-210 which deposits itself at bronchial bifurcations. Since it forms insoluable compounds, it isn't cleared from the lungs by normal biological processes, and bombards lung tissue with ionizing alpha radiation. Is it possible to produce cigarettes free of nicotine? Yes. Will people want them? Well, only as much as they want decaf coffee... likely much less. Nicotine isn't a carcinogen. A better place to start would be getting rid of the carcinogens in cigarettes, at least as much as possible. (there are carcinogens you can't really get rid of, such as benzopyrene)

Yes, the first setup is just the double split experiment, only using a beam splitter rather than two slits to split the probability wave. It's doing both. The point of the first setup was to show that the second one was based on it, just with down converters on either side of the beam splitter generating entangled photons (or rather, entangled probability waves) Yes There's a laser, going into a beam splitter, and then into down converters: Well, hopefully I've improved the description now...

I can agree with most sides, but mostly the kid. Old people today don't know WTF is up. Try explaining the Singularity to them. Zuh! But, kids I deal with today don't understand pre-Internet life. Ever used a card catalog? Ever had to use a REAL encyclopedia, rather than Wikipedia? Did you listen to your parents record player before you emoed out and bought your own? No? Well then kid, you're completely clueless as to what pre-Internet life was like.

Run a laser through a beam splitter which goes into two fiber optic cables. Have the resulting beams cross. What you will see is an interference pattern. Run the beams coming out of the beam splitter through a pair of down converters which generate entangled photos. Now you end up with two sets of interference patterns. Now, right next to each of the screens, place a "which path detector" on one of the fiber optic cables. Now, whenever either side turns on this device, it destroys the interference pattern on the other side by collapsing the waveform of the entangled particle and thus destroying the interference pattern. The result is two way communication via quantum entanglement. Like morse code you can signal by collapsing the waveform. I've been puzzling myself as to why this can't result in FTL communication. My best guess is: it will take at least distance/c seconds to transmit enough photos to generate a distribution statistically relevant enough to deduce a collapsing vs. uncollapsed waveform from the photons received. Otherwise, it will be ambiguous. Is this the case? Any math to back it up?

Hmm, well, based solely on the fact that tobacco is of the genus Nicotiana, I'm going to guess: NO. Not without GMO/lots of selective breeding. First they have to fix the production process. That's a hell of a lot easier than genetic engineering.

Yup, and that's one of the many feedback loops near the tipping point in the climate system right now. The highly reflective surface albedo of ice is being replaced by the highly absorbant surface albedo of sea water. Melting sea ice doesn't matter, as far as sea level goes. Glaciers, on the other hand...

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/06/death.irwin.greer/index.html?section=cnn_topstories No better time to wait until someone dies than to criticize them. Germaine Greer, best known for her feminist book "The Female Eunuch", said Wednesday Irwin was an "embarrassment" and a "self-deluded animal torturer". So... what do you think?

Oops, I missed the context is Motl. Well I don't know who he is, but when I read stuff like this: It screams "arrogant prick" to me.

Well, and a model optimized to run in some useful fraction of realtime on an enormously powerful supercomputer. Some sort of artificial nutrient-supplying surface for the egg to embed itself in and the placenta attach to. And an artificial world for the child to grow up in, as well as interact with other soft (representations of) humans. I'd imagine at first this would entail modeling a portion of time (say, 5 seconds) for, who knows, years (hopefully not), months, days, then playing this back for one or more humans in VR simulaton, letting them react, then slowing their reactions, captured via VR input, to simulation time, and let the computer modeled human baby experience them.

As much as I would like to believe this is true, I call bullshit: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/09/05/telepathy.reut/index.html?section=cnn_topstories

The point is that market forces won't matter when a market is meaningless. Transhuman technology will accelerate the rate of change exponentially, and inventions will follow which will obliterate the need for a market, namely the Von Neumann Universal Constructor, and a ubiquitous, nanotechnological plaform based upon it. The basic human tasks of collecting energy and computing will be effectively solved. At least, that's the utopian ideal. I don't think soft humans are far off. All that's needed is a comprehensive model of cellular behavior, extended to multicellular systems, and you can grow a human from an artificial fertilized egg.

That's the problem: http://tobaccodocuments.org/youth/CgHmPMI19800402.Me.html The documents are out there. The tobacco companies admitted the problem (uranium progeny entering the production process through fertilizer which deposits a radioactive dust onto the sticky tobacco leaves), admitted they knew the solution, and wrote it off as "probably a valid but expensive point" in internal memos during the '80s which were released as part of the tobacco settlement. And nobody cares. Meanwhile it costs our healthcare system billions. This guy (mentioned in the above paper) is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research here in Boulder. He fought the tobacco companies for years, and failed. Sadly, after he died the tobacco companies released the above document and others where they admit he was right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martell Here's a paper where he measured radioactivity in cigarettes: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/80/5/1285

Well, guess I'll break my self-imposed hiatus on posting here to opine... The real problem with cigarettes, and making them more addictive, is that the manufacturing process introduces known, radioactive toxins. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco_smoking Where the government should definitely step in is in terms of regulating toxins which are exclusively the result of the manufacturing process, including radionucletides and nitrosamine which results from direct-fire curing. I mailed a letter, and a large packet of information supporting it, to my senator, asking him to introduce legislation which would allow the EPA to regulate radionucletides in tobacco. I never received a response. That was somewhat saddening.