Anybody interested in this should check out Ronald Wright's "A scientific Romance".

A world some unknown centuries in the future. London is a flooded swamp.

http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Romance-Novel-Ronald-Wright/dp/0312199996

Oh for the love of god, can we all get some sense and stop talking about the Singularity as if it's anything else but pathological wishful thinking?

I like what sci-fi author Neal Stephenson said, about he can't help but be struck by the structural similarities between "the singularity" and the Rapture of St. John the Divine.

Let's face it - hardware gets better, software is still shit. And without decent software, the hardware is just a really complicated space heater.

And never mind global warming, which, it's probably far too late to stop anyway. The real scary thing is peak oil. You want your body replaced by a server farm in an age where we're not sure we can keep the power on?

James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis, said something recently about how we'll be lucky if the population by the end of the century is 20% of what it currently is.

The Singularity is a distraction from the quite serious problems we need to address, like, last week.

104? That's not even above average!

Not to be all 'tooting my own horn', but last time I did an IQ test, I came in around 145. I'm at my work computer now, so I'm typing this on Vista w/Firefox. But if I was at home I'd be writing this on latest version of Mandriva.

I wonder what you'd see if you got into the 140-160 IQ range? Not may macs is my guess...

Hey, alisong76, you don't need a doc to see that. A co-worker of mine and I see crows doing this all the time in the alley behind our building.

The first time my co-worker (who'd seen it before) pointed it out to me, I thought this was part of an elaborate prank. You'll see the clever little buggers not just drop a nut (chestnuts, I think, they're all over the place here in vancouver) in the alley, but they'll stand next to the target nut, then look down the long, straight alley, looking at cars coming, and line up the nut so it'll get run over.

Car goes by, nut is cracked, happy crows.

Um, couple of different things wrong with this study:

1) It's a survey of readers, not, say, a survey of NAS or NIH scientists.

2) Probably a large number are students. 1 in 5 seems, if anything, too low for students.

3) Most of these are the ADD treatment drugs of Adderall, Dexedrine, and Ritalin, etc.

What possible argument can you make against this? You might make an comparison to performance enhancing drugs in sport. But we're not talking about sport. If a researcher can get a viable cancer treatment in 3 years instead of 5 (or an HIV vaccine, or whatever) by pulling the occasional amphetamine-fueled all night-er, who wants to complain?

Finally, if anybody can tell me why it's ok to give this sort of drug to a hyperactive 9-year-old, and not OK to prescribe these drugs to an adult who has not only more insight into their own condition, but the choice to take the drug or not, I'm listening.

OK, leaving aside discussion of whether or not a 'liquid bomb' is theoretically possible using nitroglycerin or something, is there anybody with a strong engineering or chemistry background that thinks the synthesis of Hexomethane triperoxide in an airport bathroom is feasible?

And even if you assume their highly-dubious and short-on-details plan for synthesizing HMTP in an airplane bathroom is possible, um, then you can determine whether or not a liquid can be allowed to come on board with a simple 'sniff test'. Anybody with concentrated peroxide disguised in some other container gets arrested, pretty simple.

C'mon, boingboing, for shame, printing this story so un-critically!

You could've at least mentioned that the idea of trying to explain alleged paranormal phenomena using various pseudo-scientific mis-understandings (deliberate or otherwise) has been attempted hundreds of times before, never has the results been replicated by a neutral party.

Quantum theory sounds really "science-ey", and most of 'the masses' don't understand it, but at the same time, you hear about it all the time in pop culture. So most people don't know the math/physics of quantum 'stuff' to debunk this sort of thing.

Whereas if these quacks, er, I mean, researchers, had suggested that the poltergeists could be explained by "fluxuations of the aether" then they'd be laughed out of the room.

Not many people know what that would mean either, but they'd know it's bunk.

For #20, and anybody else talking about the sustainability of eating meat, peak oil, etc, I hate to burst your bubble, but if you think vegan/vegetarianism is the most sustainable/efficient way of eating, you've fallen into the trap of thinking that because something is currently a certain way, that therefore it must necessarily be that way, by definition.

Yes, our current way of raising meat is horribly inefficient. 70 kg of grain for every kg of beef, right? And don't get me started on feeding corn to cows.

However, if you were going to set up your food production system to make the most efficient production per acre of arable land, the diet you would pick is a _mostly_ vegetarian diet, but you'd still eat meat. About 1/4-1/2 of what the average north american eats, but you'd still eat meat.

It has to do with the fact that when you let fields go fallow, you can use them for grazing livestock, you can feed livestock parts of plants that are indigestible to humans, and you can use them for milk production.

Am I the only one who's ever heard the theory that the reason cows are 'sacred' in some cultures is because, given pre-industrial farming techniques and a high population density, the cow is more useful as a "milk and fertilizer factory" than a "meat factory"?

Dude, this guy seems to me, to be about a fifty-cent cab ride away from the serious nutjobs who claim that super-high doses of vitamins combined with fasting and colonics can cure your cancer. Who are only about a 50-cent cab ride away from faith healers.

In a previous century, this guy would be a leader of a heretical religious sect.

This guy saying that by 2030 we'll be uploading our consciousness into computer systems makes me thing of old-school science fiction describing a future where by 2010 we're gearing up for interstellar travel.

Besides, one way or the other, I got two words for this guy: Peak Oil.

James Lovelock, the guy who coined the term "Gaia Hypothesis", says that between peak oil and climate change, we'll be lucky if the human population is 20% of our current numbers.

Singularity within 50 years? If we've still got the power on in 50 years, I'll consider ourselves ahead of the game.

FWIW, a couple of months ago I spoke to a shaw tech support rep who told me flat-out, no dissembling or qualifiers, that they don't throttle BT, period.

I could see Shaw being deceptive in marketing or something, but I doubt they'd tell a flat-out lie. Of course, he could've been mistaken, but the fact that I get the same results on speedtest.net with or without BT client running suggests that he was telling the truth about throttling, anyway.

So I sent an email to shaw today saying that I'd heard that they don't shape or throttle, can they confirm this for me? I'll email the results, if I get a reply.

Um, what we really need is something like international labor agreements and environmental agreements to go along with trade treaties.

Cost of labor is the only reason people offshore their manufacturing. You can hire people in India or China for what, 10% of what that employee would cost in the US? 5%?

We all accept that 'dumping' is unfair, and ought to be illegal, i.e. I can't come into a marketplace, sell goods at a loss, and drive all other competitors out of business.

So what we've done with offshore manufacturing is institutionalize a system that isn't too far from the definition of dumping.