I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

For those like me, who just watched the video and didn't understand the point of view 'til quite late on, the camera is pointing back along the direction of flight.

Also, for some reason the video has strange out-of-focus side-pieces that are distracting and annoying. The view itself is gorgeous and amazing.

Rocks are expected (from operation of simple physics laws), so are not life-y self-causal by particular information.

And what happens when we discover a means to create what we would categorize as life from non-life by way of the operation of simple physics laws?

I mean, we do largely assert that this is what happened. And although we don't know how to "make" it happen today, it may be that its not altogether that exotic.

If something was inevitably going to happen anyway to some matter and energy, due to its statistical distribution and the surrounding thermodynamic regime and fundamental forces, do we say that that future state (or equivalence class of states) required a particular cause (beyond the operation of the simple physical laws on the situation?) No.

That's the rub. Are the sub-cellular molecular interactions of my body not individually quite predictable by the simple physical laws on the situation. Protein folding might be quite complicated, but its guided by simple rules.

Are you categorizing life then as nothing more than emergent deviations from expected outcomes due to the cumultative effects of complex interactions that don't lend themselves well to simpler modelling?

Is then a galaxy alive, if it does something we don't "expect" simply as the cumulative addition of all the sub-processes that we didn't individually model?

Or conversely, if we successfully modeled a life form such that we could predict from simple laws of physics the sorts of things that it will do does that strip from it the label of "life"?

Because that definition of life sounds much like the definition of magic. The more we understand physics the the less will qualify. First we'll reduce simple organisms to predictable machines, then ever more increasingly complicated ones will fall until the robots we build and count as non-life and the insects and bacteria we count as alive intersect...

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.

Male rabbits can't form a new rabbit without female rabbits. Does a male rabbit still count as having all the "information" necessary to form a new rabbit if it can't do it itself? It also lacks key physiology required to transform the information into a new rabbit.

Rabbits have internal information which under the right conditions can be used to form a new rabbit.

What are the right conditions for a population of male rabbits to form a new rabbit?

The rock is just as self-describing; scan the rock see what its made of and that is the information required by a suitable 3rd party contraption to create a new rock.

What makes some sort of scanner + nano-assembler + raw materials capable of reproducing rocks different from a female rabbit and some food capable of processing the informational element handed to it by a male rabbit?

Why not? You could batch program it for delivery twice a day.

All inter-company email slowed to twice a day batches. Every exchange with an external consultant or contractor; every conference call meeting confirmation, everything... goes out at noon and 5 pm?

What issue exactly would twice a day batches even solve?

In a company where you were in charge upper management would literally crucify you, and the regular employees would cheer them on.

As long as the male rabbits are still kicking and breathing, they are sustaining their information patterns that they embody.

So does a rock. I read the definition of life provided as requiring more than just "sustaining their information pattern".

But you can mitigate the hell out of it, I suggest air gapping.

Yes. Lets air-gap the email system. That would work well.

What would you label Al Gore "the polar caps will be gone in twenty years!!!" and the people who believed in drowning polar bears?

What do you call people who said weather would be extreme and unbearable within a few years, but it never happened.

These are extraordinary claims, yet they are proven false time and time again. THE only thing Science has proven, is CO2 levels rising. The rest of the predictive outcomes have been largely falsified.

"Probably even have increased secondary trade" doesn't even begin to cover it. My wife works in ophthalmology and she has four patients who have moved to colorado just because of pot. That's likewise cited as a primary reason that housing prices have increased recently. I find it hard to believe that people would uproot their lives just for weed, but it appears to be happening.
Colorado is making an estimated $1M/day in taxes on pot and that's probably significantly lower than the actual revenue, since because there are virtually no banks (one credit union) that'll deal with marijuana dispensaries, it's a cash-only business so the businesses could in theory only report as much business as they wish, and pocket the rest. If/when more financial institutions start dealing with them, and people feel they can use credit cards to pay for pot, the tax revenues are likely to increase.
It's also not clear that the novelty is outweighed by the convenience. There are a lot of people who didn't use pot previously because it was just a hassle to get and there was a bit of risk involved. The people I know who are long-term smokers have stayed with their black-market dealers because they know it's safe and it's cheaper. But people who want to use it occasionally, or don't know/want to deal with black-market stuff, is apparently a huge market. They may overwhelm the local novelty effect.

Thanks for the nostalgia! I remember when people tried to claim that with a straight face back in the 80s, but no one believed it even then. Can you imagine that someone actually said that ridiculous crap in seriousness once? I'm glad we've moved past those ludicrously mind-bending contortions and can laugh about them now, knowing full well that no one actually thinks that way anymore.

Bzzt. I can share hugs, music, friendship, laughter, pain, and joy with others, but I wouldn't call any of those "possessions".

That presumes scarcity. If I share your post on Twitter, you are not deprived of it. Neither would I be.

So you take a population of rabbits, kill all all the females, and remaining males no longer qualify as life because nothing they can do is going to sustain the information patterns they embody for more than a few more years.

And I guess a Dr. who performs vasectomies is not merely dead, but anti-life. ;)

That more about how math works. Physicists did not care that the calculus of infinitesimal was not rigorous; see especially the Dirac-Delta function. It gave them answers that agreed with experiment which for a Physicist is the best proof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...