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From which of those do you suggest fat was removed in the 70 and "replaced with huge amounts of sugar"?

Cat chow, for one. Cat count as obligate carnivores. They have zero need for sugar in their diet - They can't taste it), they can't even properly metabolize it. Bad for them. They do, however, have a high need for fat and protein.

And it pisses me off every time I go shopping for cat chow that I have to pay literally twice as much to get cat food that doesn't have 15-25% added carbs in it. Cat food should not have any carbs, except what comes incidental to whatever kind of horse they use as the basic ingredient. And you think you can't go wrong buying tinned more-or-less fresh meat for fluffy? Nope. Many brands even add sugar to that.

That said, I have to agree with you that wild marmosets probably don't eat a lot of doughnuts. ;)

I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation

Perhaps you heard this. But you can't just conclude on that alone that coal is bad. It is possible to scrub the output of the smokestacks. Coal ash is even easier to keep contained.

Despite the sarcastic tone, everyone, even you, realizes nuclear power is dangerous. It might seem that the main question is, are the benefits worth the dangers? On balance, the answer seems to be yes, nuclear is worth doing. But hang on. Costs and benefits should be the big question, but sadly there are some other factors to consider. Given human failings, which is the safer power source? Nuclear power can be generated safely, but will it? Such is the pressure to make a profit that operators will cut corners on safety to save a few dollars. We have careful analysis and fairly good consensus on the measures that must be taken to operate a nuclear power plant with reasonable safety, and then that all gets thrown out the window when a plant is built on the coast, with a wall that is not high enough. They gambled that a tsunami of enough magnitude to top the inadequate wall they built would not happen during the plant's lifetime. They were wrong.

It's even worse than that. The owners deliberately fudged the data on tsunamis. They had enough information to know that they needed a higher wall. Instead, they took a fool's course. They leaned hard on the engineers to approve a lower height for the wall. At a plant further south, the chief engineer bravely fought back and refused to authorize a wall he knew would not be adequate. The owners, being greedy fools, complained bitterly about the additional expense, and threatened to fire the engineer for not "cooperating". This kind of unfair pressure is very common in our capitalist systems. Might as well threaten to fire the universe for not being nice enough. Today, the result is that that other plant came through the tsunami intact. But it didn't matter, because Fukushima, where the engineers bowed to the pressure, failed spectacularly and now the entire nuclear power industry is teetering on the edge.

The owners did not trouble to understand the scope of the gamble they were taking on behalf of everyone, and it was their responsiblity to understand. Then, having upped the risk of a nuclear disaster to unacceptable levels that we the public would never have agreed to had we known, they went further. They skimped on the design and maintenance of various backup systems. Diesel powered emergency generators were located below what the water level would be if a tsunami should top the wall. If a tsunami happened, disaster was guaranteed.

I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take

I'm not impressed. Ultimately, it couldn't take the punishment. Almost isn't good enough, not with something as dangerous as nuclear power.

Another bit of deliberate blindness too often paraded here is ignoring alternative power. When compared to only coal, nuclear looks pretty good. But coal is a low standard to beat. How does nuclear power stack up against solar, wind, and water? Not so well.

Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.

Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.

(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)

In the fifties and sixties, it was one of the marketing points for Coca-Cola that its Coke would give a boost upon consumption.

This one? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamins-minerals-and-microrna

The remaining 1% of the time (when I need to find an app by name), I hit the Win key and start typing

The problem here is that while you're typing, the context of the currently open applications' windows disappears. It's like the effect of amnesia while going through a doorway. It'd be fine if the Start Screen were semi-transparent, but because it's opaque and full-screen, it forces a subconscious context switch. And that's why I still install Classic Shell, so that the search-by-name box doesn't distract me by covering everything.

Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.

Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.

(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)

Your brain uses about 1/5 your resting metabolic rate according to this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=thinking-hard-calories

Proof that younger people are more likely to die than people who drink less: Younger people have a greater probability of being alive. People who are alive die with a probability of 1. On the other hand, dead people drink nothing. There are more dead people than alive people, and people who drink less have a good chance of being dead. Dead people don't die (except in rare cases when they were actually undead in the first place).

You say that you suspect that they work. But there is no data to support that. In fact, most 12 steppers fail, and the success rate for 12 steppers is as low as the success rate for people just deciding to quit without using the 12 step program. Penn and Teller did an episode of their show "Bullshit" that talked about 12 step programs and gave some interesting data on its success. I'll suggest that you may want to see it before telling more people why you think 12 step programs work. They do not. You can usually find copyright infringing episodes of this show on You Tube. This supposed report is just more Bullshit.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-alcoholics-anonymous-work

Brief summary: There is evidence that it works; it's not overwhelming because of the nature of the program. (Particularly, you can't ethically prescribe a control group of "I'm going to prescribe you no help whatsoever", so the studies that include a no-help group are always naturalistic rather than controlled.) In the controlled studies they reviewed that compared AA to other psychological therapies (cognitive behaviour therapy and motivational enhancement therapy), AA performed at least as well as those therapies.

Further, about 40 percent of AA members drop out during the first year (although some may return), raising the possibility that the people who remain may be the ones who are most motivated to improve.

It sounds like those same people would have been just as successful at SOS or any other group that would support them in their goal of quitting drinking. Maybe, those same people would have quite without AA or any help because they were so motivated.

What needs to be done is take two groups of highly motivated people - one in AA and the other on their own - and see what happens.

Again, we're back to a self selection group.

Do you mean this one? Where they didn't count the people who dropped out early on?

Yes, because in evaluating the efficacy of substance abuse programs the national standard when looking at recidivism is to look at those who have completed the program. Drop out rates are reported, but they don't impact the recidivism rate. That can only be measure once somebody completes the program. That is the same methodology used for private counselling related to substance abuse, too. So, when they say 40% for AA and 56% for private counselling, they are comparing apples with apples and only talking about those who completed therapy. The dropout rate for both is very high, which is why when court ordered, there is regular reporting back to the courts on attendance.

This isn't unique to substance abuse, most medical treatments follow this practice. If somebody starts chemo for cancer and drops out, it does not count against the effectiveness of that type of chemo for that type of cancer. It does get reported so that doctors are aware of what the dropout rate is so they can help the patient through it.

Put differently, when evaluating the effectiveness of any treatment, you need to look at patients who actually completed the treatment. It is important to know how many did not complete the treatment and why they didn't, but that doesn't change the effectiveness for those who do complete the treatment.

Do you mean this one? Where they didn't count the people who dropped out early on?

so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.

Correct. The data given as a putative "response" is irrelevant to the question on so many levels it hurts. It doesn't state what the connection between sunspots and solar activity is; it shows the normal 11-year sunspot cycle, not anything different or unusual, and it shows only about one and a half cycles, not enough of a long term time series to even judge whether sunspot number (much less solar output) is going up or down.

So, with respect to the request, "Could you give a citation for that 'lowered solar output?' "-- fail.

But-- as you go on to demonstrate-- it does serve excellently to completely change the subject, and thus does its job of distracting people from noticing that there is no evidence whatsoever for the original assertion by changing the topic to a discussion of the relationship between sunspots and climate.

On that subject, the best data at the moment seems to show that the onset of the "little ice age" cooling was correlated with volcanic eruptions, and hid little or nothing to do with sunspots.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/eruptions-not-quiet-sun-may-have-triggered-little-ice-age/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=volcanoes-may-have-sparked

Canola POLLEN can travel for kilometres, therefore his fields could have been accidentally contaminated in the previous generation

Nobody disputes that. Small amounts of gene flow are expected and aren't a legal issue.

he plants next season's crop full of GM genes and bam, field of roundupready canola

Not a whole field full. And remember that it was the "concentration or extent" that the judge was citing, not just that the RR trait showed up.

if the US places sanctions on China

When Chinese dumping interferes with a political agenda the US doesn't hesitate to slap tariffs on stuff.

Things that aren't politically suitable for photo-ops, however, get the "oh noes tradewar" treatment if someone has the temerity to suggest tariffs.

I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.

Here's the podcast (jump to 2 minutes in): http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=psychopathys-bright-side-kevin-dutt-12-12-29

Yeah, but is that better or worse than random selection? Random selection is going to produce a ton of false positives and a lot of false negatives.

In other words: if they randomly select 10% of the passengers and 1 out of 1,000 is a terrorist or drug mule, it means that 90% of all "bad guys" will get through without a problem (90% false negative rate), and it means that virtually everyone (999 out of every 1000 people) who gets searched will be innocent (99.9% false positive rate).

If people can pickout people for screening, and they do better than random, then using a random system would be worse.

BTW, I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.

Here's the podcast (jump to 2 minutes in): http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=psychopathys-bright-side-kevin-dutt-12-12-29

here are links to some articles i found on the first page of google: http://inhabitat.com/nyc/new-york-citys-bureaucracy-slowing-down-construction-of-residential-solar-panels/ http://www.thestate.com/2012/10/14/2480345/why-solar-power-rarely-shines.html http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/solar-at-home/2009/06/04/what-you-really-need-to-install-solar-a-cpa/

from the first page of google : http://inhabitat.com/nyc/new-york-citys-bureaucracy-slowing-down-construction-of-residential-solar-panels/ http://www.thestate.com/2012/10/14/2480345/why-solar-power-rarely-shines.html http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/solar-at-home/2009/06/04/what-you-really-need-to-install-solar-a-cpa/

FYI :) More than half is nuclear:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/

Even worse is the contradiction between his denial of Global Warming and his stated position of "stronger national defense". The Pentagon acknowledges that Climate Change poses threats to national defense as an "accelerant of instability and conflict."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-military-forges-ahead-with-plans-to-combat-climate-change

Why has it become ultra conservative?

If you had a time machine and went back to the summer of 2003 and said "Hey we all still will be using Windows XP and even prefering it! Also many here will hate change and demand 3 year old GUIs too!"

You would be laughed at!

But lets look what happened?

In the good old days Windows and Linux just worked. You could customize Windows for many apps with this new 1990s thing called a task bar. You could organize your start menu with frequently used documents. In Linux you could customize it to your heart contents. Ubuntu 6.06 was gorgous! Its fonts were AA back then before patent lawsuits. You could turn on COmpiviz and make water effects apps catching on fire when you closed them, cpu monitors on the top Gnone task bar!

You could multitask easily on the screen and life was good. Good old days in computing when things were so much better. May those days rest in peace :-( ... only bad thing is we had crappy cell phones then. So now we must only use cell phone single tasking simplistic craplets to replace what we supperiorly had before. Fuck that!

Yes a galaxy 4 beat my cyr... whatever the fuck I ran 10 years ago in greenscreen glory with its .mid ringtones but at what cost? That my desktop now is unusuable iwth an ugly orange full screen WIndows 8.1 news applet loads with no recourse besides a doorway amesia inducing OS? Fuck that. I will keep my Windows 7 and CentOS 6 for the next 10 years. I wont change!

Not because I am an old man but because we know better. Maybe Windows 9 and Gnome 4 will change my opinion? But I like to move forward and man this is so backwards. Even Windows 3.0 let me multitask easier and had prettier graphics. Here I have a supercomputer GPU and it emulates EGA graphics with no aero WTF

Workflows or not my users hate the cloud as things that could be resolved within 6 hours take 1 week now as they have to call Indian help desk which calls us who then calls the cloud provider where they call two other departments to fix the problem. Not hey email bill our exchange admin to fix this asap! Then after lunch it is solved.

I feel sorry for them and makes me want to quit I.T. Everything is getting worse

Once again we have Anachragnome posting his crackpot conspiracy theories about me. If you bothered reading his post above and find it persuasive, then you should read this post of his, and note this line:

This is East Germany, all over again--the NSA literally has us spying on each other, inadvertently or not.

Anachragnome seems to think that everyone is spying for the NSA. Who is it doing all this mutual spying? If you stop and think for even a moment you realize that the idea is nonsense. But it does play into his fear inducing agenda, including attempts to make people suspicious and fear me. He is engaging in the very same sort of behavior he is complaining about. By spreading fear he hopes to control people, to stamp out opinions he finds disagreeable, and control discussions. Ask yourself - are you living in fear? I don't. And yet he seems to want you to. Why?

Anachragnome seems to find great significance, even to the point of it being evidence that I am a government agent, that I have a different viewpoint, a minority viewpoint among the population of posters on Slashdot. For some reason he can't accept that different viewpoints don't constitute a conspiracy. What is the purpose of having civil rights if we all have to believe the same thing? I thought that was what fascism was about.

Further evidence that his claims are nonsense is the fact that he thinks that I am both an NSA plant and that I have multiple accounts named with a common theme, no doubt including the recently created troll accounts that have been trying to harass me of late (coid fjord, and co1d fjord). That would seem to be pretty pathetic tradecraft if that were the case. His view is just another sad example of a crank seeing a pattern in the noise that doesn't really exist, and thinking it significant. Go ahead and read from the two troll accounts. I don't think you'll find much evidence to support Anachragnome's nonsense view. (If you think you have, read more of the thread and check UIDs.)

Apparently the only people that disagree with him are spies. Bow to his power, or you may be branded a "shill" and "forum breaker." Submit to his fear. He expects you to inform on each other. Obey him, or you may be branded a traitor too.

Or maybe he is just a crank full of suspicion and fear that should be ignored. Take your pick.

The Europe has had MRSA since 1994 (first case was internal to the Netherlands):

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/10/16/drug-resistant-staph-infections-in-europe-could-mark-start-of-a-new-epidemic/

Just FYI.

Solar doesn't have to be photovoltaics. Don't forget about molten salt as energy storage. Utah is a good spot to do some of that.

When you start a full-screen application, such as a Windows Store app or the Windows 8 Start Screen, you lose the visual context of having the application semi-visible in the background, and you tend to forget what you were working on. The effect has been called doorway amnesia; see also my previous comments. Classic Shell makes it about as tolerable as Windows 7.

I see. John Horgan wants "the humanities" to teach "skepticism" for...

wait for it...

evolution.

I am hoping that you know this but I am compelled to respond to your post. I feel like I'm potentially preaching to the choir here but, well, it could be possible that you don't know this. If you don't then, well, I feel sad for you but not in a bad way. The quote is pretty common... The quote is also usually finished with a statement about how the USSR just used a pencil.

The reality is that NASA didn't develop (or pay for the development) of the space pen at all. It was developed by Fisher, at their own expense, and with no guarantee that it would be purchased by NASA for use in space. What had happened was that NASA had paid way too much money for some mechanical pencils and the public found out about the expensive pencils and all hell broke loose. Keep in mind how much we were spending on the space race at the time, be sure to convert those dollars to today's dollars for a true comparison. Americans were well and truly pissed and justifiably so.

Citation

What the above link sort of touches on is the trouble with the idea of using a pencil, which is something you hadn't mentioned at all but I'll bring it up in order to be complete. One of the reasons that I understand a pencil is a bad idea (while sort of mentioned in the article they don't go into in at any depth and don't cover this specifically) is that every time you write there are microscopic fragments of graphite that break away. In a weightless environment they can go all over the place and graphite is also a very good conductor of electricity. The various electronics were very sensitive at the time and while most systems had a backup any point of failure was seen as a bad thing. The small bits of graphite could conceivably float away, enter a computer system, and cause a short - which wouldn't necessarily result in a fire but could possibly be a Bad Thing® and *could* potentially cause a fire in and of itself. (I'm not sure how well pencils themselves burn or how much the flammability of the pencil itself was a concern that actually was for NASA to be honest.)

That is, as near as I can remember, how the story was relayed to me by someone who worked on the earlier Apollo missions. The conversation was over more than one beer (and about a lot more than that) so I may have missed something. The linked citation pretty much goes along with the story as he detailed it.

If I may digress a bit... I was not alive for the earliest launches but I do recall watching the first humans on the moon on television. My parents told me the cliché about how I could do that someday but I never really wanted to walk on the moon. It did change me though. It made me interested in the technology and the computers that got them there. I didn't want to walk on the moon but I did want to work one of those giant beeping machines with the interesting dials and gauges on the ground and maybe visit space for a little while just to experience weightlessness but I wouldn't want to stay there for long. Not every little boy wanted to be an astronaut when we grew up, some of us wanted to play with the machines that went beep instead. And, well, that was me. I never did get to play with NASA's beeping machines but I've was in front of a computer for pretty much all of my professional life and still sit in front of one now that I'm retired.

Thanks to both for your answers. It seems I misread this article about the limits of quantum computing.

Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.

I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.

Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.

I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.

Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.

I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.

Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.

Naturally, the platform has to be mainstream enough to appeal to everyone possible. The reality is that the party has been co-opted by extremists hostile to some important pieces of science that impact policy. Here's your cites:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B (Yeah, it's Obama's list, but most would certainly embrace the denier label)
Exhibit C [youtube.com]

There are enough dangerous nuts in the great GOP Venn diagram (and a considerable overlap with elected officials) that the GP is basically correct.

Perhaps the original poster was speaking of your beloved politicians?

Exhibit A
Exhibit B (Yeah, it's Obama's list, but most would certainly embrace the denier label)
Exhibit C

People will judge you by the leaders you choose. Perhaps if you and your party voted for rational human beings we'd have more respect for you?

"A. Are you saying just because a technology can be used for harm it should be abandoned or suppressed?"

Actually, no I didn't say anything remotely resembling that. I think I pointed out if you are going to tote up the upside you should probably at least keep it in your mind there is a down side to most technologies. Their cost can be extremely steep, especially when you whistle past the grave yard and ignore them.

Fossil fuels for example have been a boon to the energy input equation driving civilization, as long as they don't start a run away greenhouse effect and wipe out life as we know it.

You seem to be a poster child for "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Well, if the point you are trying to make is so superficial, thanks for pointing out the obvious. Every technology is a double edged sword. It doesn't take a genious to realize any tool can be used for good or ill. The story itself simply points out that measurable economic gains have been realized in developing genomic technology. But it would be moronic to take that to mean we are headed for a modern day gold rush where every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a pan can go out and make a mess of things by doing rogue biotech. Throughout human history, Plenty of technological advances have shaped and shifted society in countless ways. You can't deal with it by cowering in fear at the unknown. As a whole, we've adapted and matured. Sure, we will probably make a few mistakes along the way, but we generally learn from those we make and avoid a lot more that the smarter ones among us have already foreseen.

"Just because the technology makes it more feasible doesn't mean we are reckless enough to flirt with it again"

Keep telling yourself that, and hope you have good genes.

My genes happen to be excellent, thank you very much. I've benefited enormously from choosing my ancestors wisely. However, I place far greater value in the wisdom of civilization and culture. I don't agree with everything he's published, but I think you can gain a bit of perspective by reading a bit of Steven Pinker. I am inclined to believe eugenics of the kind you are afraid of (ie. wholesale crimes against humanity) are obsolete human endeavors that will go the way of such things as institutionalized slavery, human sacrifices, and other social institutions that we as a society have outgrown. I suppose an argument can be made for some types of control over reproduction that can constitute some form of eugenics. For example, it is now possible for couples to receive genetic counseling and manage the risk(s) of possible congenital defects in their children. Ethical or not? That *is* a intelligent discussion worth having.

"this stuff is not so easy to do accidentally"

Yea, its so tough there are DIY home geneticists "using the Synthetic Biology Parts Registry to engineer yogurt bacteria to produce prozac"

As someone who has actually participated in iGEM, I'm afraid you have a grossly skewed understanding of how synthetic biology is done. The link you've provided demonstrates in principle how to do genetic engineering. Its akin to how anyone with enough undergraduate physics can in principle construct a fission bomb. Again, that only happens in the movie reality of Hollywood. But seriously, all participating iGEM teams doing this kind of synthetic biology are heavily supported by sponsorship from industry players and academic entities with money, lab facility, and other vital resources such as the wealth of experience provided by project mentors (usually university professors or Ph.Ds in the field). These are not home gene

"A. Are you saying just because a technology can be used for harm it should be abandoned or suppressed?"

Actually, no I didn't say anything remotely resembling that. I think I pointed out if you are going to tote up the upside you should probably at least keep it in your mind there is a down side to most technologies. Their cost can be extremely steep, especially when you whistle past the grave yard and ignore them.

Fossil fuels for example have been a boon to the energy input equation driving civilization, as long as they don't start a run away greenhouse effect and wipe out life as we know it.

You seem to be a poster child for "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

"Just because the technology makes it more feasible doesn't mean we are reckless enough to flirt with it again"

Keep telling yourself that, and hope you have good genes.

"this stuff is not so easy to do accidentally"

Yea, its so tough there are DIY home geneticists "using the Synthetic Biology Parts Registry to engineer yogurt bacteria to produce prozac"

Go fuck yourself.

http://planetsave.com/2011/12/10/newest-epa-report-confirms-fracking-fluids-contaminating-pavillion-wyoming-water-supply/

“The presence of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethersand the assortment of other organic components is explained as the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fracking-linked-water-contamination-federal-agency

If Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years as existing major sources (re-purposing from old warheads) dry up and are not replaced with new mines.

Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage.

Yes there are limited reserves of uranium like everything else on the planet, but there is a lot more than 5 years... more like 200 according to this article. This is important because it buys us time to get technologies which are actually clean (looking at you, solar energy researchers) up to the speed of our current energy sources. Or find something else

The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).

Coal plant ash filtering has improved since 1978 as well, it would be interesting to see more recent numbers.

The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).

Panspermia http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/10/15/the-panspermia-paradox/

Please point to a single lie. Just one. All my numbers are from IPCC and similar sources. Where is the lie? Again, from what I have actually said, not from what the voices in your head says.

You said earlier:

Do not forget that renewables are extreme polluters though. The most common, wind and solar, uses rare-earth minerals which are strip-mined in China in a process that devestates city after city, river after river and mile after square mile of fertile land. When it comes to absolute pollution, Solar (for example) has a devestating impact on the environment.

And later:

Goodnes. I wish you'd try to read what I actually said rather than what the little green dude on your shoulder is whispering in your ear (you forgot your meds again btw). I have never said that solar panels will not reduce CO2 emissions, I said that producing them creates a lot of pollution. Remember, Pollution and CO2 are not the same thing. Pollution is not CO2 - in this case I was talking about the process of mining rare-earth minerals which is extremely polluting, and believe it or not, CO2 is not, never has been, and never will be a pollutant. Again, please respond to what I actually write, not the voices in your head and what they are trying to tell you I am writing.

From the article I linked to, but you didn't read:

One of the most promising photovoltaic technologies is based on cadmium telluride, but cadmium is one of the worst heavy metals. Still, if we compare direct emissions from production of cadmium telluride cells with coal power plants, toxic emissions would up 300 times lower," said researcher Vasilis Fthenakis, an environmental engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

So you can't weasel out of the truth again:

Even taking into account the low efficiency of thin-film solar cells or the energy needed to purify silicon for the other types of PV, all proved to entail significantly fewer emissions in their entire life cycle than the fossil fuels needed to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.

In fact, most of their dirty side derived from the indirect emissions of the coal-burning power plants or other fossil fuels used to generate the electricity for PV manufacturing facilities.

Norway thinks it is taking big steps against CO2 emissions. The steps are purely symbolic of course. Buying quota and taxing gas guzzlers. Moronic both.

Tonnes of CO2 Per Capita in 2010:
17.31 United States
8.01 Norway

Well, they're doing something right, aren't they? Or are the facts only questionable when they don't fit your worldview?

I don't care that much about the "Virtual Nude" thing. (Although I might care more if I were an attractive young female, I guess.)

My objection to the thing is the X-ray radiation. I am by no means convinced these things are safe.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-glossed-over-cancer-concerns

Four doctors from the University of California, San Francisco wrote an open letter expressing their grave concerns based on their expertise. They listed dangers of these scanners and requested to see the safety studies and get access to the raw data of the safety studies; they also asked for the names of the people who conducted the safety studies. The government's answer boiled down to "our experts have studied this and it's safe". Completely non-responsive to the listed concerns and not sharing any data.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833083

So I never yet have let them scan me; I always have requested the pat-down. When they ask if I would prefer it in private, I tell them no. I'd rather the patdown be out in the open where anyone could watch. I have no particular reason to think any TSA agent would give me extra trouble in private, but I'd prefer as much publicity as possible.

I guess millimeter wave isn't ionizing radiation? That's a giant improvement right there. Maybe the new machines are safe? Safer, anyway.

A worm or two might help: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/15/parasitic-worm-eggs-ease-intestinal-ills-by-changing-gut-macrobiota/
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/44092.php

But stool transplants might still be preferable...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/2013/01/29/killer-cats/

Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity

neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

I had put this as an article but it was declined.

2-3 million years ago 300km inside the arctic circle CO2 levels were 400 ppm and temps were 8C above present. This according to an article published last week in the journal Science covered by Scientific American (link to journal in that article). Lake sediments find 7 varieties of fir tree pollen. This verdant period doubtless had countless bacteria, plants, insects, mammals now extinct because between then and now have been a whole lot of very cold years interspersed with some brief 10-15000 year periods of temperatures like the current. These species failed to adapt to the climate that is our current day. Firs don't grow there now. Humans are not to blame for that - there weren't any. This condition had likely persisted for millions of years prior, though intermittent rapid cold/hot spells did punctuate the climate cycles and cause widespread extinctions.

Life adapts. That's what it does. Life is a plague that cannot be stopped short of a supernova or the impact of something the size of Mars that sterilizes the entire surface by turning it to magma to 4km depth - and I'm not even sure about the latter as such an impact will kick the life off to circle the sun to land again when the planet has cooled enough to accept it. Species go extinct all the time and new species are born every minute. Every corner that has any form of energy will be populated by forms of life that use that energy and higher forms that feed on those, ultimately capturing carbon in stable forms. That is another thing that life-as-we-know-it does that has led to our current bitterly cold climate.

Humans use intelligence and common effort to surmount environmental challenges - that's what we do. There are humans that live on Antarctica and in the furthest terrestrial reaches of the arctic circle. If the Arctic Circle rises in temperatures by 8C again - or even 16C - then Mankind gets more arable land and living space, not less, because polar temps increase disproportionately to equatorial temps. Plants and animals move north quite rapidly. The vast Alaskan, Canadian and Russian permafrost becomes cropland. We move freight over the poles year-round, opening ports and resorts on the northern shores. And we lose Florida, New Orleans and South Texas. That's inconvenient. People have to move. The US probably has to annex Canada. I'm not buying the whole coral reef thing since those reefs are over 3 million years old and have survived the descent into the cold and back again very many times. That means they evolved in a climate that wasn't as crisp as our current era and should thrive when their natural habitat is restored.

You can complain about this if you want to but you cannot change the outcome. For every person on Earth who cares enough to act to reverse climate are fifty who either stand to benefit from climate change or have too many more pressing issues to care, and their efforts are more than enough to counteract any green movement that could occur short of a world government with levels of control that is not to be wish'd. Do you think Canadians and Russians live in fear of global warming? Do you think if the US converts entirely to hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar and gas that we will stop digging up the coal? No. We will just export it to absolve ourselves of the guilt of burning it and the CO2 will still happen someplace where our clean burning regulations don't apply. Those coal mines have debts to pay. Same with high-sulfur oil.

These cycles are how nature motivates humans to evacuate equatorial regions and inhabit a wider world. It's what drove us out of Africa time and again. And the relapses to the cold drive local populations to equatorial regions for long times, increasing differentiation in the isolation periods, which leads to competition and strife when warmth and commerce resumes and finds a winner amongs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i&index=1

The making of the world's smallest movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i"

By Larry Greenemeier, Scientific Amererican:

What is the “final frontier”? Star Trek fans will tell you it’s space. Filmmaker/aquanaut James Cameron will tell you it’s the ocean’s depths. IBM, however, is thinking much smaller.

The company’s research division on Wednesday released a stop-motion movie whose main character is a stick figure only a few atoms in size. “A Boy and His Atom” is the story, not surprisingly, of a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and proceeds to play with his new friend by dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. It may not be an Oscar-winning script, but the performance does mark a breakthrough in scientists’ ability to capture, position and shape individual atoms with precision using temperature, pressure and vibrations.

“Think of this as Claymation—you shape your Wallace and Gromit, put them in your scene and take a picture of it,” says Andreas Heinrich, principle investigator at IBM Research. “Then you change the position of the characters and take another picture.” Heinrich and his team arranged and rearranged atoms to create 242 distinct frames later stitched together to make their movie, which Guinness World Records has certified as the tiniest stop-motion film ever made.

IBM researchers relied on a bit of movie magic to bring Atom to life (see video below). Each of the dots used to make the character is actually a molecule of carbon monoxide resting on a copper surface, framed so that the audience can see only the oxygen atoms (the carbon atoms are off screen). The researchers used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope to magnify the atoms’ surfaces more than 100 million times. The microscope features an extremely sharp needle that the researchers used to move the molecules to specific locations.

This ability to manipulate individual atoms has big implications for the future of computing and communications. Engineers have managed to shrink certain components within today’s magnetic disk drives down to a few dozen nanometers. “We’re interested in exploring data movement and storage at the atomic scale,” the stuff of quantum computing, Heinrich says. Whereas a classic computer uses bits—a zero or a one—to store information, a quantum computer lets you—in principle at least—have a zero and a one at the same time in a quantum bit (or a qubit).” If you can do both of these at the same time, you can calculate answers faster than any computer using classic bits,” he says, adding that his lab’s mission is to determine whether atoms can someday be harnessed for computation and data storage.

In a tie-in with the upcoming film "Star Trek into Darkness," IBM Research created this nanometer-sized image of the Enterprise. Courtesy of IBM Research.

IBM researchers decided to make their movie last year after publishing the results of years of atomic storage experiments, Heinrich says. “The general public should know about this kind of work and be interested in it,” he adds. “The best way to do that is to make a movie that is told in the language of science although doesn’t necessarily tell a scientific story. It tells a human story of a boy dancing with his friend.”

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/05/01/ibm-movie-does-claymation-at-the-atomic-scale-video/

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

(2) Sherman and Mangano, the authors of the paper you linked to an article about, are kooks. Just google on their names together, and you'll find plenty of info discrediting their claims, e.g.: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/20/researchers-trumpet-another-flawed-fukushima-death-study/

(3) The Open Journal of Pediatrics appears to be one of the many open-access journals these days that have no standards for publication. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html for more about these journals. I support the concept of open-access journals, but many of them are junk journals.

(4) Sherman and Mangano's junk science didn't get blocked by evil governments or evil corporations. They put it on the internet and nobody interfered with them.

Some top Google results for "fasting cancer chemotherapy": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fasting-might-boost-chemo
"Fasting appears to protect normal cells from chemotherapy's toxic effects by rerouting energy from growing and reproducing to internal maintenance. But cancer cells do not undergo this switch to self-repair and so continue to be susceptible to drug-induced damage -- making for what the researchers call a differential stress resistance. Fasting, then, the authors wrote, should enhance the power of chemotherapies without having to resort to "the more typical strategy of increasing the toxicity of drugs.""

So fasting during chemotherapy works in part precisely because it protects the chemotherapy patient's normal cells from becoming weakened.

Human trials are starting up:
"Clinical Trials: Short-Term Fasting Before Chemotherapy in Treating Patients With Cancer"
http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01175837

Research by Valter Longo, of the University of South California (USC) in Los Angeles on mice:
"Fasting May Boost Chemo By Weakening Cancer Cells"
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/241454.php
"He and his colleagues found, for example, that repeated cycles of fasting with chemotherapy cured 1 in 5 mice with a highly aggressive form of children's neuroendocrine cancer, and 40% of mice with a less severe form. In either case, no mice survived when treated only with chemo. For their study, in which they used used cancer cells and mice, Longo and colleagues found that for all the cancers they tested, fasting combined with chemotherapy improved survival, slowed tumor growth and/or limited the spread of tumors. They found that fasting without chemotherapy, slowed the growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, fasting was as effective as chemotherapy."

Cancer patients looking into it:
"48 hr Fasting before Chemo"
http://csn.cancer.org/node/237518

Here are two books related to fasting in general.

One is from a century ago by Upton Sinclair:
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/fasting-cure-for-health.html

One from a decade or two ago by Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting.html
"Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time. In my practice I have seen fasting eliminate lupus and arthritis, remove chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema, health the digestive tract in patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and quickly eliminate cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and angina. In these cases the recoveries were permanent: fasting enabled longtime disease suffers unchain themselves from their multiple toxic dugs and even eliminate the need for surgery, which was recommended to some of them as their only solution."

One problem of course in Western Medicine is than an oncologist can't justifying charging, say, $20,000 for telling a potential customer just to stop eating for a bit. Not sure if the source is accurate, but the sentiment probably is:
http://www.doctoryourself.com/longevity.html
"One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive.
The other three-quarters keeps your doctor alive.
(Hieroglyph found in an ancient Egyptian tomb.) "

But ultimately, while fasting can help some people, people need to eat healthier long term. One big problem with people today fasting is that there is so many to

Wish I had some mod points to mod parent up. It's bang on.

AMS confirmed (to much higher precision) the excess already observed by PAMELA and Fermi. This is interesting. It is also a long way from even an indirect detection of dark matter. Meanwhile, there is no evidence for SUSY. None. Nada.