Lump of Carbon

Comment Threads

• Heteromeles commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  I should point out that, while organismal DNA is not a great mechanism for preserving information in deep time, it probably has a bunch of uses in the short or medium term. For example, you could put an information-containing virus on a condom, and pass the condom to a male to have sex with a woman. She becomes the carrier of the virus in her endometrial cells, and when she has her period, you can collect the virus off the used tampons and decode it. Hard to detect otherwise, unless you know who had sex with whom, and who doctored...
• Greg Tingey commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Sorry, just this once, but no. WE appear (note that word) to have an engineering solution that works ... should we not ( IF it does work) expand upon it, without worrying too much as to what makes it go, for the time being at least. Surely, if it really was/is a con/perpetual motion machine, it would have shown up as such, by now, given the extensive testing? Alternative explanations welcomed, by all and sundry....
• Elderly Cynic commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  You should have read what I said more carefully. So far, the attempts of replication have looked less convincing than the original. They are still trying to exclude spurious effects. http://io9.gizmodo.com/no-german-scientists-have-not-confirmed-the-impossibl-1720573809...
• Greg Tingey commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  The NASA paper is going to be very interesting, then, isn't it?...
• Elderly Cynic commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Perhaps. I am not optimistic. FAR too many papers, even ones not as highly charged as this one, are more obfuscation or bogosity than mathematics or science....