Slashdot Mirror

"American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. "

Actually, the US is far from the best performer in these metrics, given its size. For example, the US had won 323 Nobel Prizes by 2010, which works out to about 1.02 per million inhabitants. For comparison, here is how some other countries fare (using population figures from Wikipedia):

UK: 1.83/million

Germany: 1.29/million

France: 0.86/million

Sweden: 2.8/million

So, the US does better than France, but is certainly not the top.

I had a friend who was violently mugged here in the UK, and the police weren't even interested in taking a statement. They just told him to go to the hospital if he felt dizzy (the robbers hit him over the head).

When a UK journalist gets mugged though, he gets star treatment

How about a selfie at the bottom of the ocean? Where's the tourist market for that?

You mean something like James Cameron at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? There is also a pretty brisk business of people who are trying to get married on the deck of the Titanic.... literally. Note the selfie in that last link in particular.

There actually is a pretty brisk tourism market for that..... so what are you talking about again? That space tourism won't happen until the underwater deep sea market for tourism is penetrated? Already happened.

There's this marvelous service called a safe deposit box that banks offer...

In the UK at least, banks very rarely offer safety deposit boxes any more:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...

If the land can be used for farming but not houses because of infrasound, then it is still uninhabitable. Further, if there are no houses there is typically little energy demand in the area, therefore you need long distance interconnect which brings its own environmental concerns - e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Offshore wind marine environment damage is an EU concern, not mine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

Oh, and oil rigs can be havens for _some_ marine life too... doesn't mean oil is environment benefit overall.

It looks to me like you've got that completely wrong, not the least of which is the strategic weapons Ukraine had were developed by the Soviet Union of which both Russia and Ukraine were a part. As to the rest ...

Half of Ukraine's electricity is from nuclear power. That have 13 reactors now, and plan to add 11 more. Access to enriched nuclear materials isn't likely to be much of a problem.

Ukraine's strange love for nuclear power

Missile

Ukraine is capable of producing advanced intercontinental range ballistic missiles, and its missile industry is second only to Russia's among the former Soviet republics. The linchpin of this industry is the former Yuzhnoye Scientific Production Association, arguably the preeminent intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) design and production facility in the Former Soviet Union, whose capabilities are matched only by a handful of U.S. and Russian missile enterprises.

According to this article, it seems that many of the people who do survive, do so because the flights were shorter.

See if you can find this to watch: Don't Panic - The Truth About Population

Kramatorsk: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27012612

They'll use this to fund attacks on hair salons in London!!

Here's a link to a story about IMEIs routinely being worked around - by the dodgy phone shop in your neighbourhood, not by SIS.

Arthur C. Clarke probably had the most "hits" with future tech of any sci-fi author I know of. He and a Russian predicted satellites in 1945. He's had a few others, and there are more if you google him and "predictions". He was not only a writer but a bit of a scientist and avid scuba diver til the day he died. Wish I could have met him.

1998: "'God of the Internet' is dead "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...
"Jon Postel, a key figure in the development of the Internet from its inception, died at the weekend of heart problems aged 55."

Now, thanks to a successful internet, I have learned all about how to prevent and reverse heart disease by eating more vegetables and getting enough vitamin D (a problem for many indoors-oriented technies). Sadly, too late for Jon. Hopefully not too late for Roblimo though?
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

The failure to adopt SQLite as a de-facto "Standard" for web browsers shows a deep problem, since a shared FOSS codebase is probably the best standard we can have.
http://programmers.stackexchan...

Contrast that with suggestions of making de-facto standards by on the ground successes with working code. Which is what SQLite has done in a whole area of embedded storage.

Like Alan Kay has said, any standard with more than three lines is ambiguous. I can agree having had to work implementing a couple standards at IBM.

As long as they apply their shoehorned definition consistently. Until Jupiter sufficiently "clears its neighborhood" around its orbit, it ain't a planet either. Neither is the Earth or Mars, for that matter. It is sad that so many people think this thing is "settled" when in fact it represents a pretty ugly face that shows that vocal minorities can bully just as effectively in science as outside it.

Anyone who has ever had these little bastards in their house ...

.. like in Virginia Beach?

IBD has a history of a negative view of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and so I'm not especially inclined to see their incredulity is anything other than ideology.

Um.... IBD are the same idiots who published an editorial claiming that if Hawking had been forced to get health care from a national health-care system then he would have been killed by a DEATH PANEL. Suggesting that they have 'a history of a negative view' is hardly a fair representation of their previous material. For them to be talking about other people's credibility on the subject is laughable.

is not helping!! What would be useful is a list of popular services affected by this issue the BBC is at least making a start here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...

Computer/Electronic waste is already such a huge problem that whole companies exist whose existance is to ship that waste to 3rd world countries where they are more or less dumped to contaminate water & soils.
Since from everything I've read Graphene is nearly indestructable.... "It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap [cling film]." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/pro...

Before it becomes the next asbestos or coal-ash.. that no one "wants in their town"... anyone heard how Graphene based waste would be handled??

But the question is, given that any musician's ultimate target is to eventually have an audience, shouldn't how an instrument sounds to them be the quintessential point of evaluating the quality of an instrument?

Not just that. Performing is totally intertwined with feeling and mood. It's quite possible that someone can play better on a $1M violin than on a $30K violin even when objectively, they're equivalent.

ISTR a study that found that watching the performances was more important than hearing them when picking out the eventual competition winners.

Found a reference:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

Also, these ancient strads have stood the test of time. Even if a modern violin is as great now - will it still be as great at the end of a virtuoso's career? Or perhaps it will improve with age. I would guess that the ancient violins are probably more stable (assuming equivalent care regime)

Ha ha ha ; Royal Bank of Scotland let's cut costs by outsourcing.

CAPTCHA: didactic; who says the NSA isn't interfering with our Slashdot experience ;-)

The wikipedia article on Zebra's links to the following for a possible explanation to the origin of these stripes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16944753

Notice anything similar?

There was a similar story a few months back, also from the BBC, about a study with slightly different conclusions than polarisation of light.It concluded that the stripes cause optical illusions when moving. Link.

Photos of the school were then tweeted and shared in status updates — a reply to images of Beltran Leyva's corpse being shared on social media.

I wonder, why the cartels can't think of anything positive to say? They can, for example, emphasize the fact, that their products are primarily targeting the rich, while providing well-paying jobs for the impoverished youth, funding ample charitable donations, and investment in local communities...

By poisoning the "1%" (also known as the "golden billion"), they are spreading the wealth and leveling the playing field — without even ever forcing anyone to participate...

Clearly, the PR-masters working for the thugs have a lot to learn yet.

UK figures are 5000 deaths per year from traffic pollution vs 1800 from road accidents.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

I know, I know...citation, citation.

a) I'm not your !@#$% google. I've already read and researched this crap. It's not my responsibility to deal with your laziness.

b) quick google and you'll find your citations.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/hi...

http://geography.about.com/od/...

People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.

Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.

That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.

Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.

I've tasted whale, it isn't tasty.

Apparently most younger Japanese aren't much into it themselves either, and the "tradition" isn't, really. From this report:-

For [Mitoshi Noguchi] there is nothing wrong with eating whale, it reminds him of school lunch.

"When we were growing up we didn't have ample supply of food, so this was meat for us, our protein," he says. "So when we eat it now it's very reminiscent. It's delicious."

Mr Noguchi is in late middle age, but on the same table is one of his much younger colleagues, Yoshitaka Takayanagi, born after the meat was phased out in Japanese schools. Few Japanese eat whale regularly these days, especially the young, and he has only eaten it twice before.

This covers the phenomenon in general in more depth:-

So why does Japan exert so much diplomatic effort on this issue? The official line is that whaling is an integral part of Japanese culture, a practice dating back hundreds of years.

That isn't quite true. A few coastal communities, like Wakayama, have been hunting whales for centuries, traditionally with hand-held harpoons.

But the rest of Japan only became familiar with eating whale during the 20th Century, as modern ships with harpoon-guns became available. Whale meat was especially widespread in the difficult years after the Second World War, when it was seen as a cheap source of protein.

But as incomes rose, people switched to imported beef, or fish like tuna and salmon. With such an abundance of high-quality protein available these days, few Japanese see the point in eating whale, which doesn't taste that special.

There are other reasons for Japan's determined campaign.

"If the current ban on hunting whales is allowed to become permanent," says Hideki Moronuki, at the Fisheries Agency, the government department leading the campaign, "activists may direct their efforts to restricting other types of fishing."

As Japan consumes more fish than any other nation, it worries about possible curbs on its fishing activities in open seas for species like tuna.

Officials also like to claim that whales damage fish stocks because of the quantities they eat, although this is largely dismissed by scientists in the rest of the world.

But perhaps the biggest factor is resentment of being told by other countries what Japan can and cannot do.

"Why do people in the west make such a big deal about our very limited hunting of whales?" asks Hideki Moronuki.

"How would they feel if we told Americans they couldn't hunt deer, or if we told Australians to stop hunting kangaroos?"

I've tasted whale, it isn't tasty.

Apparently most younger Japanese aren't much into it themselves either, and the "tradition" isn't, really. From this report:-

For [Mitoshi Noguchi] there is nothing wrong with eating whale, it reminds him of school lunch.

"When we were growing up we didn't have ample supply of food, so this was meat for us, our protein," he says. "So when we eat it now it's very reminiscent. It's delicious."

Mr Noguchi is in late middle age, but on the same table is one of his much younger colleagues, Yoshitaka Takayanagi, born after the meat was phased out in Japanese schools. Few Japanese eat whale regularly these days, especially the young, and he has only eaten it twice before.

This covers the phenomenon in general in more depth:-

So why does Japan exert so much diplomatic effort on this issue? The official line is that whaling is an integral part of Japanese culture, a practice dating back hundreds of years.

That isn't quite true. A few coastal communities, like Wakayama, have been hunting whales for centuries, traditionally with hand-held harpoons.

But the rest of Japan only became familiar with eating whale during the 20th Century, as modern ships with harpoon-guns became available. Whale meat was especially widespread in the difficult years after the Second World War, when it was seen as a cheap source of protein.

But as incomes rose, people switched to imported beef, or fish like tuna and salmon. With such an abundance of high-quality protein available these days, few Japanese see the point in eating whale, which doesn't taste that special.

There are other reasons for Japan's determined campaign.

"If the current ban on hunting whales is allowed to become permanent," says Hideki Moronuki, at the Fisheries Agency, the government department leading the campaign, "activists may direct their efforts to restricting other types of fishing."

As Japan consumes more fish than any other nation, it worries about possible curbs on its fishing activities in open seas for species like tuna.

Officials also like to claim that whales damage fish stocks because of the quantities they eat, although this is largely dismissed by scientists in the rest of the world.

But perhaps the biggest factor is resentment of being told by other countries what Japan can and cannot do.

"Why do people in the west make such a big deal about our very limited hunting of whales?" asks Hideki Moronuki.

"How would they feel if we told Americans they couldn't hunt deer, or if we told Australians to stop hunting kangaroos?"

and

Dumping $2.6 million worth of editable food

What's wrong with this picture?

Africa, the continent in need of this kind of aid, refuses to take even GMO food aid:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/afr...
Which is eminently safer than whatever's in this peanut butter.

It's often been said: The world doesn't have a food shortage problem. It has a distribution problem.

African, one of the most famine stricken places on earth has 60% of the worlds uncultivated arable land.
http://philmatibeceo.wordpress...

In the U.S. where food is plentiful, we end up throwing food away if it's even remotely suspect of carrying sickness.

It makes perfect sense to me.

You joke, but here you go.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...

Try carrying a kitchen knife in your pocket sometime and pulling it out in such a way that results in your doing more damage to someone else than to yourself.

...if only someone could invent some sort of "wrapper" for the blade that would allow a fixed blade to be carried safely and drawn out when desired without inflicting injury on the user. Maybe they could call it a "knife condom", or maybe a "knife carrier", or maybe they would invent a completely new word for it like "sheath".

They could even make universal sheaths that support different types of knives, so that the sheath could be used for a knife that wasn't specifically designed for it.

Oh well.

You may be correct that kitchen knives are used mostly in crimes of passion, but don't underestimate the violence inherent in criminals. For example, once the UK finished effectively banning firearms, they were saddened to find that criminals switched to knives instead. What was their reaction? Knife control laws. Obviously, once those laws were in place, it made kitchen knives more popular for use in crime, so their natural reaction was to start calling for a ban on kitchen knives.

Since they are attempting to treat the symptom rather than the cause, I look forward to a future where the UK calls for a succession of such laws: kitchen knife control, steel pipe control, brick control, rock control, and, ultimately, stick control.

It's probably nothing to do with black holes, but one of the pioneers of solid-state lasers was on The Life Scientific this morning. If it's available in your area it's well worth a listen.

Here is a list of the current ten theories on the disappearance of flight MH370.

Unfortunately, you have a saying in that. Well, not unless you don't have any friends, which may not even save you depending on where you live. Well, I suppose you could always move to Ecuador....

What executions? Wesley Clark propaganda much? And what is the difference from the international law point of view? And when Kosovo will be given back to Serbia?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/323420.stm

Are you fucking kidding me? Bug fixes for a currency?

Not unprecedented in the real world: New pound coin designed to combat counterfeiting

No. Just one example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

"Michael Adebolajo has been given a whole-life term and Michael Adebowale has been jailed for a minimum of 45 years for murdering Fusilier Lee Rigby."

Well, that's a complete lie.
Moron

How is it a lie?

I guess you are referring to the recent call not to label girls who take charge as "bossy". IMHO they have a point - men who take charge as seen as leaders, women are often derided as bossy for doing exactly the same thing. It's not just men saying it either, women call each other bossy just as much if not more.

But hay, a feminist said it so there must be some underlying man-hatred motive, right?

It can actually be pretty fast if tweaked a bit.

And you can soup up a Yugo, too.

"...the aspirations of many Americans to be gentlemen (or gentlewomen) farmers..."...And they said that was a purely British disease...what next? Will youse guys all start listening to The Archers http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme... (1950), is still running (January 2014), and is the world's longest-running soap opera with a total of over 16,800 episodes

This is what we know so far, a good summary ...

Fukushima: Is fear of radiation the real killer?

...In that case how does Professor Suzuki explain the 33 confirmed cases of thyroid cancer his team have found?

"In Japan there has never been a survey on this scale done before," he said. "Once you start using very sensitive equipment to check for thyroid cancer in a very large group of children then you will inevitably find an increase in the number of cases. That is why we are seeing the increase now. These cases are not related to the nuclear disaster."

Prof Suzuki says his team will need to carry on their work for many more years to be sure that the children of Fukushima are in the clear. But he and other experts now say they think there will be very few, or even zero, extra childhood cancers because of Fukushima.
'Took everything'

That does not mean that the Fukushima disaster is not taking lives. According to the government's own figures, in the last three years more than 1,600 Fukushima evacuees have died from causes that are "related to the disaster" ...

full article at,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

So, which of those key players are in the newly formed government?

Let's see. Out of 19 ministers, 3 are from Tyahnybok's "Svoboda". scoring such important spheres as agriculture and ecology. Really, the only serious position that they have is that of vice prime minister. The majority of the rest are from "Batkivshchyna", which is a mainstream European-oriented liberal party, and then there are a few independents straight from Maidan. Yarosh's "Right Sector" didn't get any spots at all (and they said that they aren't seeking them), and the only way they are involved in the new government is by having a representative on the country's National Security and Defense Council.

So, which "far right government" are we talking about, again?

Oh, and while we are at it, speaking of "Right Sector" and Yarosh. Are you aware of the fact that they have explicitly came out in support of Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians who supported Maidan? Do you know that on the website of Tryzub (the organization that Yarosh leads, and one of the members of the Right Sector coalition), they list fascism and Nazism alongside with communism in the list of their "ideologies harmful to Ukrainian nation"?

Here is an official interview that one of the Right Sector's high-ranked members gave to BBC (in Russian) - does he sound like a crazy far right extremist to you there when he speaks about human rights and democratic freedoms, broadening freedom of speech and of gathering, or about their plan for Crimea which includes proportional representation of languages in accordance with the demographics (i.e. 60% Russian, 20% Ukrainian, 20% Tatar and others), or about nationality being primarily and ethnicity being of no importance?

Scotland?

They wouldn't dare invade Scotland.

And we have these too.

Half of Ukraine's electricity is from nuclear power. That have 13 reactors now, and plan to add 11 more.

Ukraine's strange love for nuclear power

Missile

Ukraine is capable of producing advanced intercontinental range ballistic missiles, and its missile industry is second only to Russia's among the former Soviet republics. The linchpin of this industry is the former Yuzhnoye Scientific Production Association, arguably the preeminent intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) design and production facility in the Former Soviet Union, whose capabilities are matched only by a handful of U.S. and Russian missile enterprises.

>It's the one Jewish school that they pick on.

No, it isn't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...

However, one Jewish reference gets the propaganda industry into full swing.

Sorry, the link should be http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h/

I've already posted about the BBC documentary (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h%5C) but it was quite interesting to see the effects on twins of low carb vs low fat diets.

Surprisingly, the twin on the low-carb diet demonstrated problems with both mental and physical performance. The mental performance was essentially day-trading stocks (Which neither twin had experience of) and the physical performance involved cycling. Although your body can burn fat to produce energy, it doesn't do it quickly enough for hard exercise, so you end up burning muscle mass instead which is typically the opposite effect that you want from exercise.

There was an interesting BBC Horizon documentary (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h/) on food a couple of weeks ago that tried having a pair of twins go on high fat or high sugar diets for a month. The really interesting part was at the end of the show where they discovered that the very worst foods were ones with a 50/50 fat/sugar ratio. Apparently, fat and carbohydrates aren't found together in nature, so our bodies are tricked by that combination into finding it irresistible.