Fictional Town "Eureka" To Become Real? 337
Zarath writes "The fictional town of Eureka (from the TV series by the same name) is going to potentially become a real life town as the University of Queensland, in Australia, plans to build a multibillion-dollar 'brain city' dedicated to science and research. The city, hoping to hold at least 10,000 people, is looking to attract 4,500 of the brightest scientists from around the world to live and work there. The city is planned to be built west of the city of Brisbane, in Queensland. While not funded by the Department of Defense (like the [city of the] TV series), the potential for such a community is very interesting and exciting."
Slashlolcatz (Score:4, Funny)
Fictional Town "Eureka" to Becomes Real?
They forgot to link to the image for this story [icanhascheezburger.com].
We already have one... (Score:5, Insightful)
but we call ours Los Alamos...
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I thought, we call it "Silicon Valley" — and it didn't need government sponsorship to come into being...
Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd be betting on Los Alamos should the two ever go head to head.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We already have one... (Score:4, Insightful)
DARPA's money helped some, but it didn't cause the creation of Oracle, Sybase, SGI, HP, or Sun — the companies, which were developing even before Internet.
Also, DARPA stopped funding Internet funding Internet long before the emergence of giants like Google or Cisco in the valley. Much as Statists would like to attribute good things to the State's intervention, they don't have many legs to stand on.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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That Government was/is a customer of some of those firms in no way supports the claim, they owe their existence to the it.
Aye-aye-aye! Name-calling — how sad... Given the government's wonderful successes in education, highway upkeep, and pensions — wanting it to also expand into healthcare
Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aye-aye-aye! Name-calling — how sad... Given the government's wonderful successes in education, highway upkeep, and pensions — wanting it to also expand into healthcare — whose mental faculties are we supposed to question?
Anyone who has an "all-or-nothing" mentality. Anyone who points to a few government successes and concludes the government has a Midas touch for making things work is clearly an idiot. Anyone who points to a few government failures and concludes the government never does anything right is equally idiotic. Sane and rational people look at the specifics of a proposal and decide whether it's a good idea or not, rather than immediately conclude it's a good idea or a bad idea based on whether it involves government or not.
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it's not just that it was a customer (Score:4, Informative)
The first tenant at the famed Stanford Research Park was Varian, and the government was at the time Varian's only customer. Many of the other spin-offs were organized around government-funded research labs, many also at/near Stanford, the most famous of which was probably Engelbart's lab (which invented the mouse).
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>>> None of those companies would have gotten anywhere without... government contracts.
But remember - most of our inventions go back to Edison Labs. He didn't receive government funds, but instead did it partly for his own enjoyment & partly to earn profit off his creations. Same applies to the other inventors of the day like Tesla or Bell. All of today's inventions ultimately trace back to a period (1800s) when Washington D.C. was little more than swampland & took a non-active role in b
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Actually, it was; "government" was simply known as Ogg the Chieftain back then.
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Corporation can often be the worst researchers, everyone knows treating the symptoms is far more profitable than curing the disease. There are many areas of research where the results end up in the the public domain for the greater good. Examples are treating vermin species by introducing predators to reduce their numbers, this takes a considerable amount of research to be done successfully, generates absolutely no profit but can save billions.
Consider the rate of research that was achieved by government
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Not that lack of legs to stand on has stopped them in the past. Gore invented the internet and now we find out thatMcCain invented the Blackberry!
McCain invented fire.
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McCain invented fire
You know that story .. the one that begins with "In the beginning, there was..."
But the two cases are not equivalent. (Score:5, Interesting)
B.) You were creating an implied equivalancy between two "equally ridiculous", "equally false" public statements. Which isn't so nice when one of those statements not only isn't equivalently false but was, in fact, used as a key part of a still ongoing and successful campaign to establish and maintain the larger and equally false supposed equivalency between the level of lying and overall fraud between Democrats and Republicans.
After years as a policy guy trying to change behavior through reason I came to the sad conclusion that behavior is, in fact, largely determined not by fact but by perception and that many of the most destructive false perceptions are those spread mostly under the cover of "I'm just joking", which is no different from the frat boy who hits one of the "nerds" in the face, knocking him down, and then claims that the nerd has no legitimate grounds to be angry, let alone fight back. After all, "I was just messing with you".
Sorry, I have no opinion of nor much interest in your intent; I post in response to expected consequences.
Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the 1980's, the BBC produced a Horizon documentary, which covered the growth of Silicon Valley. The first company was Fairchild Semiconductor, which then formed many offshoot companies, and that tradition continued until there were hundreds of companies. In many cases, research funding was provided to the universities to solve various problems, which then allowed the students and staff to set up their own companies once the project was finished.
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No, Silicon Valley is where we send all the losers who think that they're geniuses.
Re:We already have one... (Score:4, Funny)
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Nah, just corporate welfare in the form of juicy defense contracts. Oh, did you think people just got together one day to build computers for which there was no commercial market from the goodness of their hearts? Oh, and what's this Internet thing all about? How did it start?
Hmmm. I think you're an idiot. Go pave your own highway system to drive on too while you're at it.
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NASA Ames Research Center, Various California State universities, and gigantic piles of federal research money are deeply involved there. Silicon Valley is interesting in that there is a lot of entrepreneurial activity with largely civilian application that exists as well(unlike, say, Los Alamos, which is pretty much military R&D); but it is an OMG triumph of Free
Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Informative)
I thought, we call it "Silicon Valley" — and it didn't need government sponsorship to come into being...
Hmm, I think you're forgetting that if you trace back further Silicon Valley has connections with the Space and Military programs - here [cnet.com] and here [wikipedia.org]. I think I'd conclude that there's a complex set of influences favoring the creation of Silicon Valley.
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of a good "private industry is inherently more efficient" fantasy...
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I thought, we call it "Silicon Valley" — and it didn't need government sponsorship to come into being...
Hmm, I think you're forgetting that if you trace back further Silicon Valley has connections with the Space and Military programs - here [cnet.com] and here [wikipedia.org]. I think I'd conclude that there's a complex set of influences favoring the creation of Silicon Valley.
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of a good "private industry is inherently more efficient" fantasy...
If you think back further, apple orchards started silicon valley.
-Taylor
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What happens if this "Brain City" becomes a military target for an anti-western nation, or any nation that might oppose scientific thought? All it would take is a single attack to wipe-out so much research and great thinkers.
Don't we try to avoid the single point of failure and prefer distributed networks for this reason?
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Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Informative)
Then we should build Shockwave Rider's Precipice (Score:3, Interesting)
That John Brunner [wikipedia.org] was a pretty sharp guy.
Re:We already have one... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget Huntsville, AL (Cummings Research Park), and it's second in size compared to Triangle Research Park in North Carolina.
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And just like Los Alamos, I fully expect this to have some serious problems finding people to come do the unskilled labor. When they do, it comes with some subtle social problems. There is no small degree of resentment among those who, unable to afford housing in Los Alamos, are forced to commute from less expensive surrounding areas. A community like this sounds good on paper, but in practice, it's complicated. If Los Alamos could uproot and relocate for no cost today to a less isolated area, I think it wo
Birth rate (Score:5, Funny)
A town entirely full of science geeks ?
Well, at least they shouldn't expect a very high birth rate...
Re:Birth rate (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with this city is that it is far too large. The largest that you can build a stable "brain" city is 5,000. After that point, interference from the various doomsday machines under its soil will make its imminent destruction more and more certain.
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Clone away, clone away. Might be an interesting prospect...
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But the kids that are born.... I wouldn't want to compete with them to get into a college.
IQ not always additive (Score:5, Funny)
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Ahh, we'll have to call that "Mendel's Revenge"
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Two of the smartest people I have ever met married and began cranking out kids. They now have one of the biggest collection of marginal morons you have ever seen. Nice kids, yes. Well behaved kids, yes. But they don't have the sense God gave a herd of cows. All I can figure is that the parents IQ waves were 180 degrees out of phase. Either that, or they are putting on one helluva show when company is around.
Um, I think this proves that they did become much much smarter. The thing is smarter people seem very
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Actually I have an uncanny ability and aptitude for IQ tests. I've done several under proper conditions, as well as being assessed by a university psychology department. In many respects I'm an "idiot savant" for them, as I seem to really struggle with real world problem solving, yet get absurd results on the tests intuitively.
For me at least the scores from IQ tests measure my ability to do IQ tests, and seem to be very weakly correlated to any practical measure of intelligence.
Re:Birth rate (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe 23andme (genetics company run by a girlfriend of one of the Google founders; also funded by Google) should get on figuring out the cause of that.
Re:Birth rate (Score:5, Informative)
Autism rates are up all over North America. Lots of research points to the ridiculous amount of cocktail vaccines that are now given to children. The drugs are approved in isolation but handed out mixed together and no one knows what happens when you combine them.
Research points to no such thing. Anecdotes point to that. And unfortunately, since autism symptoms appear right around the same time that the vaccines are administered, you get a lovely case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc [wikipedia.org]. Spreading out the vaccines is more likely to reduce the correlation by delaying the vaccines past the point where symptoms occur, and creating periods in a child's life where they are vulnerable to diseases that deafen, deform or kill them.
The far more likely hypothesis is better screening (and in some cases, false diagnoses) increasing the observed rate. In many cases, one or both parents have a familial history of autistic symptoms, but the lack of a described and well known disorder during their childhood meant they were never diagnosed. The increased incidence in Silicon Valley is likely linked to this; tech geeks tend to fall on the autistic end of the spectrum, so a whole community of tech geeks marrying tends to increase the odds of autistic children.
I blame... (Score:3, Interesting)
Benzene [wikipedia.org], Toluene [wikipedia.org], basically most of the stuff that's in gasoline, and MMT [wikipedia.org] ... these are all more likely sources than vaccinations. People just get regular exposure to these chemicals, it's part of our car culture ...
Just look at that MMT molecule - it looks fucking badass! Hehe, wow - look at this, an easy Google search and the EPA hands this right to me:
"One recent California study reported that a modest increase in the incidence of autism was associated with the highest 25% of manganese air concentratio
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I thought there were a few studies showing abnormally high rates of aspergers and autism (related or not) in areas with high numbers of tech workers and nerds.
That said, I'm entirely willing to believe that by the time any of these studies filtered down to the mass media level they were completely disproven or misunderstood. If you have a link to something more accurate on the matter I'd be glad to read it. My understanding of AS and Autism extends to the wikipedia pages and a recent diagnosis of AS of my a
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The genetic links are strong, and would be difficult for any rational person to ignore. I'd wager that those 'areas with high numbers of tech workers and nerds' have a disproportionately high disposition to being on the spectrum in their gene pool.
That being said, I'd wager that you - yes you reading this now - are on the spectrum somewhere. Some are more extreme than others (such as my youngest son) but the traits are easy to find once you recognize them for what they are. Some people with mild-to-moder
Eureka (Score:2, Informative)
I thought nerds preferred the cold dark of their parents basements or garages, to any kind of socialization? This will be an awkward experiment in itself. I'll bet you that only pseudo-nerds get in and they spend all the grant money on Warcraft gold, and sheep pr0n.
Not entirely true (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought nerds preferred the cold dark of their parents basements or garages, to any kind of socialization?
Not entirely true. Geeks love to be around geeks, and only get awkward in the general population. We nerds are highly gregarious whenever we're in friendly company.
As an example go check out a gaming convention.
BTW, I think this town sounds like a lot of fun. I'm probably not bright/geeky enough to be invited to live there, but it would be cool to visit. I'm betting it would be worth it just for all the little inside jokes you'd see around. I'll bet the graffiti alone would be worth it.
Re:Eureka (Score:5, Funny)
I thought nerds preferred the cold dark of their parents basements or garages, to any kind of socialization?
Didn't you read the summary? They're "looking to attract 4,500 of the brightest scientists from around the world" for a city that's supposed "to hold at least 10,000 people". So obviously they're accounting for all the parents as well.
Would they need that many "filler" people? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been in some of the most famous concentrations of smart people in the world and I see no reasons to
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All the houses are going to be just an empty room above ground with an extensive basement complex. You have the choice of the basement of the Sheriff from Eureka or Kevin Smith form the last Die Hard.
Re:Eureka (Score:5, Interesting)
One resident recalled that "the Hill dwellers were amateur everything: hikers, riders, photographers, ethnographers, mineralogists, musicians, and artists-craftsmen in all assorted fields. Saturday nights they partied and square danced. Sundays they fished or exploited their hobbies."
The parties were frequent and well attended. Resident Jean Bacher recalled that "Saturday nights, the mesa rocked... fenced in as we were, our social life was a pipeline through which we let off steam."
Some of the most brilliant minds of the last century seemed perfectly capable of having fun together and blowing off steam. Maybe this time there will be more LAN parties than square dances, but people will figure out how to get together.
Re:Eureka (Score:5, Funny)
These are not the actions of normal people.
Reallys? (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like funs!
Hmm... good idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... good idea... (Score:5, Funny)
...keep all of our best and brightest in one location. What could possibly go wrong?
When the oil runs out, they'll be kicking the asses of the marauding biker gangs with their soy-powered roadsters?
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You could increase security for that town, essentially making everyone living elsewhere a second-class citizen.
Re:Hmm... good idea... (Score:4, Informative)
We already tried it, New Harmony, IN. [wikipedia.org]
They tried it twice. Once a group of 'doers' and no thinkers and again with a group of 'thinkers' and no doers. Both failed.
Not as much of a failure as people think. (Score:3, Interesting)
welcome to 50 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or what Walt Disney dreamed EPCOT would be. Too bad after he died they turned EPCOT into a worlds fair that never ends.
Australia the perfect place (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it is fairly isolated. If it gets blown up, space-time torn, or radiated, there is less chance of contamination to other continents.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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looking in from outside, it's hard to tell the difference between a voluntary relocation of scientists to akademgorodok and a forced relocation of scientists to the gulag
Re:Sounds like what the Soviets did (Score:4, Interesting)
Western countries didn't have Stalin's paranoia. Stalin moved so many scientists to Akademgorodok (Academic Village) in deep Siberia in order to segregate and more easily control them.
Oh, and they did breed. Some of the smartest young Russians I've met were born and raised in Akademgorodok.
Re:Sounds like what the Soviets did (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually, it's very reasonable. Soviets also tried to separate scientists into academies (which were research-oriented) and universities (which were teaching-oriented). And this system is not good, because the real good scientists cannot capture young people soon enough. We have remnants of such a system in Czech Republic, and the people from academies are competing to teach, because that way they can get fresh minds. It's not a good idea at all to separate teaching and research.
goodluckwiththat (Score:5, Insightful)
This, being the same Australia that's introducing filtering and censorship to its entire Internet?
Yeah, good luck with that... Oh, and enjoy your forthcoming Dark Age.
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Not only that, nearly everything down there is poisonous. Spiders that will kill you as soon as look at you. Spiders [telegraph.co.uk] bigger than your head eating birds. Many of the top 10 venomous snakes are Australian. They have deadly jellyfish, octopus, they even have a venomous mammal. And if all that weren't enough, they imported a poisonous toad!
Would intelligent people move to Australia?
I keed I keed. Sort of. Still, those spiders really give me the willies. Giant orb, huntsman, funnelweb, red back, white t
Why is this a good idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't seen the show, so forgive me if the writers have handled my objections in some clever fashion in one of the episodes, but..
I don't see the upside to this, it's easier now than ever before for people to collaborate remotely, negating much of the need for being in the same physical location.
I do see a downside to this, putting all our intellectual eggs in one basket makes a pretty attractive target for terrorists, whether they be Islamic, Luddite, or some other group in the future that isn't particularly keen on progress or reason as a means of dealing with reality.
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To your first point: Science stagnates if all meetings are via webex. You need scientists of different disciplines meeting at the bar to really advance human knowledge.
To your second point: it saddens me that everything is viewed through the lens of terrorism these days. Give it up. Terrorism will happen no matter what; we shouldn't design our lives around it.
Location of the city (Score:3, Funny)
Instead of building it west of Brisbane, they should build it east of Brisbane, where they can be free from outside influence.
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Er .. East of Brisbane means the pacific ocean ...
Didn't the Soviets do this? (Score:2)
I seem to recall these sorts of things ending badly for the inhabitants when gov't funding dried up after the collapse of the USSR. Hopefully, Australia's economy can keep something like this afloat...
-B
In Soviet Russia? (Akademgorodok) (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds a bit like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademgorodok [wikipedia.org] except actually open and international. (also not in Siberia)
It's not a typo (Score:2, Funny)
It's not a typo in the headline, it was submitted by "Tokey" from Metalocalypse.
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And that makes it not a typo?
Artificial towns fail (Score:5, Interesting)
Towns and cities are located and populated naturally. Towns are near a river or a port or an important crossroads. Or they grew up from nothing over the course of many decades. The people that live there settled there for natural reasons, usually related to jobs and opportunity.
Towns can be created artificially. Almost every attempt to do it is a failure though. Success usually takes HUGE amounts of money and some other factor to draw people to the location. This one claims to have the money, but they probably don't have enough. And it seems to lack any other incentive to draw folks there.
And this one looks pretty dismal (Score:2)
The ratio of 2:1 is not enough.
What? The bright guys get no gophers? Who will run the Starbucks?
You need minions.
Besides, there already is a Eureka [wikipedia.org]
And, duuude, I bet that one already stocked with waiters and janitor types.
Re:Artificial towns fail (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you couldn't just artifically make a city [wikipedia.org] in the middle of nowhere and have it grow
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Or an example [wikipedia.org] a little closer to the proposed location.
I found it (Score:2)
Eureka! [google.com]
Most scientific advances don't start with the phrase "eureka" but rather, "that's odd".
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When you find it, SHE'LL be the one doing the exclaiming.
Brain City? Have you seen that show? (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds more like Research Triangle Park, Silicon Valley, CERN, or many other university backed commercial regions.
Call me when they have that invisible bridge thing working.
They should make the city underwater... (Score:5, Funny)
...and let scientist do research in any field they want without goverment intervention. What could go wrong?
Becomes? (Score:2)
Slashdot editors will have to take a grammar test before being allowed access to the city..
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Slashdot editors should have to take a grammar test before being allowed to access the site. Or maybe a test if they're drunk, very much like this test. [slashdot.org]
you won't get a town full of smart people (Score:5, Insightful)
you'll get a town full of people who have a desperate and ego-driven need to be seen as smart
kind of like joining mensa. anyone who needs that sort of attention and reinforcement is not exactly niels bohr
the smart guys in any room are always low key and in the back, not attention whores
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Citation needed.
Or I could just start talking about the "low key" personalities of Franz Liszt, Amadeus Mozart, Richard Feynman, Esther Dyson, F. Scott Fitzgerald . . .
Eureka's Castle (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, wasn't this a castle, and not a city? I don't recall those muppets as being exceptionally brilliant. Most scientists don't have magical worldviews, either.
That trick never works (Score:2)
Imagine it as a loan application... (Score:2)
You want to spend how much money to do what, exactly? What's the estimated market demand for it? How long before you see a return on the investment? How have predecessors fared in this arena, and what do you intend to take away from that?
Personally, I see zero demand for this. I'm willing to bet that the even the world's 'brightest minds' want to be able to rub elbows with the rest of the world from time to time. A more balanced community, such as Southern California, would seem, to me at least, to be
Isn't this what the internet was suppose to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Los Alamos made sense in the day where even simple telephones were unreliable and getting large amounts of documentation from team to team would take hours if not days and there would be no real accounting for the integrity of them once they got there. But today this kind of thing is sadly out of touch with technology. Not to mention that there is a presumption that a great number of high end scientists will get along under one roof. This is doubtful, at best.
Guess they'll use Star Trek Money (Score:2)
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People is already happy having all, from the best and the brightest minds, to the worst ones, in ONE PLANET, and think that any investment in space is a waste. So for them should be nothing wrong with that city.
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Tell that blogger to fix his damn MIME types. Fucking force-download a jpg...