Back in '06 Disney basically payed Pixar to come and fix the problems in their animation department, too. Disney's turned a corner since Michael Eisner left, and doesn't scare me as much as it used to.
Pollution is actually worse . . . there is more pollution than ever. Where do you live?
There's a chance he lives in Ohio, where improvements in water quality have prevented the river from catching fire since 1969. Quoting from the Wiki article:
Water quality has improved and, partially in recognition of this improvement, the Cuyahoga River was designated as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers in 1998. . . River reaches that were once devoid of fish now support 44 species. The most recent survey in 2008 revealed the two most common species in the river were hogsuckers and spotfin shiners, both moderately sensitive to water quality.
Alternately, he might be from England:
. . . the Clean Air Act [of] 1956 . . . started life as a private members bill promoted by Sir Gerald Nabarro in the aftermath of the Great London Smog of 1952. This event saw the deaths of between 4,000 and 12,000 people[citation needed] as a direct result of air pollution. The original Act was updated by the 1968 and 1993 Clean Air Acts. These Acts require that considerable areas of the UK have been declared as Smoke Control Areas where the use of solid fuel is either prohibited or only allowed in special appliances.
I'm going to assume that since I haven't in my lifetime heard of people literally dying in the western world due to smog inhalation that the situation has improved somewhat since 1952.
No, we don't live in a pristine wilderness where no industrial byproducts contaminate the natural world. Yes, there are more steps we can (and should) take to continue to reduce the impact of industry on all (esp. human) life on Earth. But to claim that we're somehow getting worse despite all of our efforts is either ignorant or delusional.
Perhaps I should ask, "Where do you live?" For what it's worth, India, China, and many places in Africa are legitimate answers if you want to hold a "pollution is worse today" position.
Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
Hang on, that almost sounds like wanting people to do original research. I thought that was against Wikipedia policy. Training professional historians and getting them access to raw information sources would probably do wonders for the article quality, but I somehow doubt that the Cult of Wales would put up with such heresy. A lack of professionalism was taken as a known side-effect of volunteer-driven content creation, and considered a lesser evil than allowing any crackpot theorist to use the wiki as a soapbox (which allowing original research opens the door for).
That being said, having a few senior editors get technical writing courses and convincing organizations that publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles to open their archives to the public would both be great ideas.
Welcome to Slashdot! Come over to my Slashdot journal, I've made a post there that explains my methods and how I got my results. Comments are open, so I'll gladly respond to any further questions you have there.
I made a comment a while back detailing money I saved switching to a solid state drive (SSD) from a standard spinning-rust hard drive (HDD). Since then I've gotten a request to detail my procedure. It's not difficult or complicated, so I'll explain it here.
Actually, it was 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schweitzer
And it's been pretty discredited since then.
If all else fails, Google these things and look for the magic words: Consensus between independent researchers with respectable backgrounds.
Without that, nothing means anything. Just this woman career path and the subjects of her official qualifications are enough to worry me.
From the wikipedia article you quoted:
A more recent study (October 2010) published in PLoS ONE contradicts the conclusion of Kaye and supports Schweitzer's original conclusion.[14]
14^ Peterson, JE; Lenczewski, ME; Reed, PS (October 2010). Stepanova, Anna. ed. "Influence of Microbial Biofilms on the Preservation of Primary Soft Tissue in Fossil and Extant Archosaurs". PLoS ONE 5 (10): 13A. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013334.
It sounds like her research isn't as discredited as you make it sound.
What part of her official qualifications are in question? Would you rather that her Ph.D. in Biology come from an institution more prestigious than Montana State University? The field she's working in is quite new; there are very few specimens of intact tissue from that long ago, and not many people are working on it. Broad consensus is hard to reach in young fields, if only because of the small number of qualified researchers.
I'm not saying that we should start conspiracy theories that "the Man" is keeping her down, nor that we should look at her results with unskeptical credulity. On the other hand, your response to her research sounds like an ad hominem attack instead of an actual argument about the research's merit. Cut the girl some slack; if she's wrong she'll have plenty of rope to hang herself with. If she's right, though, we shouldn't reject her results just because they disagree with our preconceived notions.
Aeon: one of a class of powers or beings conceived as emanating from the Supreme Being and performing various functions in the operations of the universe.
I see that you like dictionary.com as a reference. I prefer Merriam-Webster:
aeonnoun \-n, -än\
1: an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time : age
2 a usually eon : a very large division of geologic time usually longer than an era
b : a unit of geologic time equal to one billion years
Matches definition 2 and World English Dictionary entry from dictionary.com.
I'm a sucker for archaic spellings and exaggeration, what can I say?
Thanks for cluing me in to an alternate definition. I am not up on my gnostic terminology, so I thought it an odd editorial choice to put that definition first. Several other dictionaries do the same, though, so I guess it's time to update my vocabulary =)
Is this why we haven't heard much from Mary Schwietzer lately? Six years ago she isolated soft tissue remnants from inside a T-rex femur.
More recently, Charlotte Oskam (Biologist at Murdoch University in Australia) identified DNA in fossilized egg shells.
We've always known that DNA was unlikely to survive the passage of aeons, this just puts a number to it. Specific conditions could still allow better than typical preservation, and so I dislike making an absolute statement that we'll never find it. Hopefully those who are still looking for the elusive ancient DNA will take this study as a way to focus their search rather than have their funding cut.
And that is different to today....how?
The difference is that this is being marketed as a "boarding gate", not as a remote checkpoint. To me, at least, that suggests much closer proximity to a specific plane and checking being done much closer to boarding time, thus being more likely to cause disruptions to the flight schedule. Add to this the already-mentioned issue of more severe response than you'd get with a metal detector, and you're set for frequent, pointless, expensive disruptions to air travel. People grumble about the security checks now, it'll be worse if it's happening at every gate right at boarding time.
The truly paranoid among us would also argue that the necessary increase in security personnel due to the security being distributed rather than centralized would be a selling point for the TSA rather than a liability. After all, we can't let an opportunity to expand police powers slip by, can we? =P
I clicked through out of pure curiosity over how a hyphen would be rendered differently in serif vs sans-serif...
and left disappointed =(
I thought most big rigs were already running a central tire inflation system; wouldn't a self-inflating tire be redundant for your fleet?
Try using iOS 5 in your shiny new iPhone 5 for sale since next Friday.
What? I think I need to brush up on my Douglas Adams, that sentence is written in a tense I'm not familiar with.
Your comment appears to suggest that iPhone 4 users will be forced to upgrade to the iPhone 5, and that no other option exists. I know we're knee deep in fanbois here, but owners of previous iPhone versions have multiple options available to them:
Seriously, the upgrade isn't mandatory...
Let's put it in your post's terms:
A=Argentine Peso
B=Paypal $US
C=Black Market $US
According to the article:
A=B/4.7, x=1/4.7
B=C, y=1
xy=1/4.7
A=C/6.3
A!=xyC
This is exactly what arbitrage is, and the free-market solution would eventually be that the black market rate would change to 4.7Peso/dollar.
Who boots their computer everyday? Most of the people who I know boot once per month - if that.
People whose work computer is a laptop and who take it home every night. On these rigs sleep & suspend tend to take as long as a full shutdown and restart, so there's no benefit to leaving it on during transport. Almost everyone I work with does a full shutdown when they leave at night. Argue all you want that it's a lousy setup, and I'll agree with you; on the other hand, corporate computing environments are like that.
I could have made a comparison between various power modes and HDD vs SSD, but honestly it wouldn't have been worth it. I don't work in an IT shop, and my managers barely even realize that there's a difference between shutdown and sleep mode. I made the best business case I could, we all got the hardware I wanted, and everyone has more time to do their work now. Mileage varies on how that translates to extra productivity =)
"The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is." -- Narciso Yepes
