Hope I’ll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
It’s That Time Of Year Again
Hope I’ll see some of you at the Space Access conference in Phoenix next month.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Attendees will get to hear John Carmack talk about cool vehicles like this one.
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
The Economics Of “Free”
A fascinating and very useful article on the value of waste. It’s must reading for anyone who wants to entrepreneur on the web, in my opinion. I found the byline amusing:
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail
Will he be giving the book away?
[Via Geek Press]
Not So Identical
Apparently “identical” twins don’t even have identical genetics:
Identical twins emerge when a zygote — the fertilized egg that develops into an embryo — splits into two embryos. As such, they should have the same genomes. The researchers speculate that as the cells making up each embryo divide over and over again during development in the womb, mistakes occur as dividing cells shuffle copies of their DNA into daughter cells.
But genetic differences between identical twins might also accumulate after development over a twin’s life as well. “I think all our genomes are under constant change,” Bruder told LiveScience.
I think that this has implications for cloning as well. It may not be possible to exactly clone an individual, and the differences could turn out to be quite noticeable.
[Update in the evening]
Per some comments, the key point in this story is that it has long been known that there are differences in twins (personality, eyesight, fingerprints, etc.). But those are things that can arise even from an identical genome. The genes are not a blueprint, but rather a recipe, and even if a recipe is followed carefully, the results are not always guaranteed to be the same. The point of the article is that, contrary to previous theories that obvious differences in twins could be attributed solely to different environments, that the genome itself wasn’t necessarily the same. That is new.
Which Is Greener?
Driving, or walking? John Tierney stirs up a hornet’s nest of vegans and other morally overrighteous high-horse riders (see comments). I mean, to question Ed Begley, Jr. Isn’t that just the height of apostacy?
This reminds me of a piece that I’ve been thinking of writing about overall energy and fuel costs, including human fuel. With the ethanol boondoggle, we’ve gone back to the point at which we’re using crops for transportation (something we largely left behind at the end of the nineteenth century) and we now have increasing prices in both food and fuel as they compete with each other for the same farmland. This isn’t a good trend for the Third World (consider that one of the effects of the ethanol subsidies has been a dramatic increase in corn and tortilla costs in Mexico, making a poor country even more so).
How The Mighty Have Fallen
AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape. I think that the beginning of the end was when they acquired it. But it lives on, really, in the Mozilla products.
How It Went Down
Gizmodo has a video and the story on the satellite hit.
Oh, and so much for the naysayers who said it wouldn’t work. Wishful thinking, one suspects.
They’ve been poo-pooing this since the eighties, going back to Tsipis and Garwin in SciAm. A good example of Clarke’s First Law, about elderly and distinguished scientists.
Bingo
Apparently the shooting gallery was a success.
A defense official says a missile launched from a Navy ship in the Pacific hit the U.S. spy satellite it was targeting 130 miles above Earth’s surface. Full details are not yet available.
Presumably, we’ll find out just how successful it was in the coming days.