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| In the 9/13/07 E-R there was
a story about a 16 year-old who raped a 19 year
old CSU Chico student back in 2000. He wasn't caught at the time, but
DNA evidence was taken at the scene of that crime. The criminal was later
caught (2004) for committing armed robberies in Chico and is serving
8 years in prison for those acts. A recent law allows DNA to be drawn from criminals and compared to evidence collected at unsolved crimes. The fellow who allegedly committed a rape in 2000 is now being shipped up to Butte County to stand trial for a crime that he may have committed. He's facing a new 20 year sentence. Technology can have some frightening side effects. It seems to be removing a lot of the obscurity most people expect when they lead non-public lives. Cell phones designed to locate you in an emergency, could also be used to locate you for other reasons. The expanded market place of the Internet means that opportunities to purchase goods and services also expose your personal information to criminals. We've yet to see a technological society use these capabilities against its populace, but if human history tells us anything it will probably happen. In the case of DNA cross checking of incarcerated criminals I think this is an appropriate use of technological advances. Criminal recidivism is well documented, and once convicted your rights as a citizen in a free society are curtailed. Keeping bad people off the street is a good thing. It would be nice if we could keep them from going bad to start with but that's an advance we haven't achieved yet. But for some reason the news story triggered thoughts of technological changes that have occurred in my lifetime. Cell phones, wide use of computers and the Internet, high speed digital transmission of data, dramatic advances in the biological sciences, and many other advances are occurring around us. It's hard to see a "golden age" when you're living in it. But the explosion of advances created by science in the last 50-60 years is stunning when you sit down and ponder it. It really makes me wonder what I'll see before I die, and what my children will see. As somebody in the technology industry I can attest to how difficult something as common as a cell phone is to design and build. Somebody in the finance line of work could probably tell us how difficult it is to produce in such quantities that they can almost be given away. In the E-R story we see a connection between the hard sciences and social sciences. If those connections accelerate the face of society will change. |
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CI Challenge: Can you guess what it is? Winner: Gregg Payne, see comments below for the answer. |
The Other Chico DNA
8 Comments
Lon
About Me: Fasten your seatbelts for an exhilarating trip through Chico's public policy; I guarantee it's marginally better than public access TV.
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Modern science has created another new opportunity for future entrepreneurs...
http://chico.craigslist.org/for/423478560.html
Dang, I guess those guys didn't like my ad to sell "somebody else's DNA" to throw off forensic investigators.
Some kook must have thought I was serious.
Gregg,
They may not want you on Craig's List, but over at Lon's List your post is still alive, well, and pretty funny. I do think you made a mistake in the post and added an extra 0 to the IQ number.
Gregg's short lived Craig's List post...
http://www.longlazner.com/LonGlazner/dna.jpg
Lon
Haven't had any takers yet.
So your CI Challenge looks like it might be a little too obscure... again. Kind of like the abstract illustration of bee hair.
Gregg,
You ignorant slut. Every now and then I like to post a challenge for the Mensa gang. There's somebody out there that knows what this is, or can figure it out.
But here's a clue... hmmm I think I'll rhyme...
this looks like modern art,
but that's only a shell,
it changed the world as we know it,
like Alexander Graham Bell.
Lon
Would that be the gang that knows the skin of a buckeye seed when they see it?
That would be one funny looking telephone...
Thanks for the clue...How about the first transistor.
On July 1, 1948 the Bell System unveiled the transistor, a joint invention of Bell Laboratories scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain.
Gregg,
It looks like I'll have to take back the disparaging comment (of SNL fame). And you can probably put the 0 back on to your IQ from the failed Craig's List ad.
That is the first transistor from Bell Labs. I believe another type of transistor was developed and unveiled in Germany that same year.
The transistor is arguably the most important invention of the 20th century. As an amplifier and digital switch it lies at the heart of every major electronics invention. Processing power provided by shrinking transistor sizes are what have allowed the biological sciences to analyze and model their breakthroughs. Virtually everything produced today requires transistors at some point (including food, fabric, building materials, and information).
Here is a good information link...
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/index.html
From one of the pages on the link...
The invention got little attention at the time, either in the popular press or in industry. But Shockley saw its potential. He left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California. He hired superb engineers and physicists, but, according to physical chemist Harry Sello, Shockley's personality drove out eight of his best and brightest. Those "traitorous eight" founded a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight, went on to form Intel Corporation. They (and others at Texas Instruments) co-invented the integrated circuit. Today, Intel produces billions of transistors daily on its integrated circuits, yet Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley earned very little money from their research. Nonetheless, Shockley's company was the beginning of Silicon Valley.
Bardeen left Bell Labs for the University of Illinois, where he won a second Nobel Prize. Brattain stayed on for several years, and then left to teach. Shockley lost his company and taught at Stanford for a while, and then got involved in a notorious controversy over race, genetics and intelligence that destroyed his reputation.
In the 1950s and 1960s, most U.S. companies chose to focus their attentions on the military market in producing transistor products. That left the door wide open for Japanese engineers like Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, who founded a new company named Sony Electronics that mass-produced tiny transistorized radios. Bell Labs' President Emeritus Ian Ross said that part of their success lay in developing the ability to quickly mass-produce transistors.
The transistorized radio changed the world, opening up the information age. Information could quickly be scattered to the ends of the Earth, to the point that historian Charles Stewart heard about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. from Bedouin tribesmen in the Sahara shortly after it happened.
Lon
My, what a bunch of smarty pantses you all are.