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I hope you take back the "barely literate people" part because it is untrue.

Really? And you know that becasue that is what you feel, or you actually did some research?

"Illiteracy is increasing in China, despite a 50-year-old campaign to stamp it out and a declaration by the government in 2000 that it had been nearly eradicated. The reasons are complex, from the cost of a rural education to the growing appeal of migrant work that draws Chinese away from classrooms and toward far-off cities. "
"From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by 33 percent"
"Since 70% of China's population live in the countryside, and rural adult illiteracy rates are high and the gender disparities are also large in the countryside, the priority and the difficult area of literacy work lies in rural areas."

Just becasue the facts get in the way of your feeling of "the way things should be", don't let that stop you from judging others who point the facts out. Talk about feeling superior.

I wouldn't be so dismissive. You can readthis report

Basically, what happens when you make the base of the mountains unable to trap moisture. You get less snow, which is undoubtedly less protection for the glacier. It may even manifest as increased melt, but it is not a temperature-induced melt. It all stems from environment becoming drier, and less water product deposited and even more transported away.

To say the glaciers are shrinking because of temperature increase (melt) is to completely ignore the nature of glaciers and reduce it to one thing: temperature. Glaciers are also made of water.

Also see this, not pay-walled

I'm guessing that they managed to coax the potatoes into maintaining their normal osmotic balance when watered with brackish water.

And guessing is all you can do here.

How does a one paragraph blurb in an obscure website warrant a slash dot post. (And no, I'm not exactly new here.)

There isn't a shred of attribution, no backup data, no contact information, nothing there but an assertion that potatoes were picked. Even the exif info was stripped from the photo.

Further, its not particularly newsworthy. Its been studied before by the USDA. http://www.springerlink.com/content/x217188337503232/

Perk? Maybe not, but caffeine improves focus, cognition, and memory recall. At least that is what these studies show, and most of them account for withdraw.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21812869
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y414x83288221635/
http://www.stormingmedia.us/28/2891/A289133.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yj8v0h54w05x222q/
http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=7943
http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,9;journal,31,55;linkingpublicationresults,1:119922,1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7k04226627g6326/

Perk? Maybe not, but caffeine improves focus, cognition, and memory recall. At least that is what these studies show, and most of them account for withdraw.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21812869
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y414x83288221635/
http://www.stormingmedia.us/28/2891/A289133.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yj8v0h54w05x222q/
http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=7943
http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,9;journal,31,55;linkingpublicationresults,1:119922,1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7k04226627g6326/

Perk? Maybe not, but caffeine improves focus, cognition, and memory recall. At least that is what these studies show, and most of them account for withdraw.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21812869
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y414x83288221635/
http://www.stormingmedia.us/28/2891/A289133.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yj8v0h54w05x222q/
http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=7943
http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,9;journal,31,55;linkingpublicationresults,1:119922,1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7k04226627g6326/

So lets look at a cancer that typically occur in people under 40.

Well...the tall bit might be closer to the mark than you think. There is actually a statistically significant correlation between height and job status (measured by seniority/management) one paper where this is demonstrated is (paywall) - http://www.springerlink.com/content/j886735267666r8p/ Also CEO salary has a correlation to attractiveness (irrespective of company performance) - http://www.hrmreport.com/news/corporate-salary-depends-on-attractiveness/

H.264 doesn't actually use a DCT, but a non-exact integer approximation to a DCT, the Integer Cosine Transform, which is exactly invertible,, at the cost of a slightly loss of accuracy in the transform coefficients . (Floating point DCTs have rounding errors, and thus are not exactly invertible. If content is encoded multiple times, then the numerical noise introduced by this will accumulate to troublesome levels.)

I can confirm that; a friend of my recently defended her PhD thesis describing the growth and development peculiarities of Brassica Chinensis when exposed to different combinations of LED lighting - blue, red, and both.
Her research is a part of a big Russian space project; she works on problems of farming edible plants in spacecraft (with all the problems arising from that). Pretty awesome, if you ask me. An earlier paper of hers on the same subject can be found at Springerlink.

There is this mass group-think happening here were 99% of the posters say something about how it is just harmless fun.

Well, it isn't. People get badly hurt by them. Esophageal injury from a plastic bottle containing dry ice. One of the children in this case nearly died. If you do a Google search for 'dry ice injury' or 'dry ice accident' you can find plenty. Such as this one from Dry Ice Experiments Feedback:

I was reading your web page about the accident involving the dry ice and the loss of the woman's sight. On July 3, 1999 a similar accident happened in my family.
My then three year old son was seriously injured, He lost one of his eyes, his right thumb was 75% severed and broken, his left thumb was 50% severed and he had a gash about 4 inches long on his stomach. I had also never heard of this and was mortified. My son is now doing wonderful and we are very vocal about it to let people know what can happen with what I found out after the fact to be called "dry ice bombs".
Angela Hinkhouse

Lots of accidents on video at YouTube.

Yeah. All good harmless fun.

Not.

That's interesting, I have not come across this before.

I last worked in computational linguistics over five years ago and but when I left there were a good supply of techniques for automatically extracting meaning from an unknown text.

My own research was able to build up both a dendrogram and word vectors from any sufficiently large corpus, and a quick google search turned up http://www.springerlink.com/content/fp17278783422256/ which shows that the field is continuing to develop. I would expect that by now it would be pretty easy to feed a text like this in and get word associations out. From your word associations, building up a basic dictionary will still need you to bootstrap associated concepts but at least the task is much smaller and there's a lot of support for checking.

I don't recall much successful research into automatic parsing of unknown languages, but since I left the field it could've progressed. Shallow parsing would be a good place to start. Since the language's stemming is unknown you're going to be hard-pressed to parse it anyway but POS tagging should be doable.

I have not done any work with cyphered texts, so I'm assuming that approaches to natural languages will apply. No doubt there is research in this area, I'm just not familiar with it.

There was nothing unintentional about it. Socrates describes himself as a gadfly in Plato's 'Defence of Socrates'. It seems to have been his signature style...

Also, Socrates was 70 and, according to Xenophon, was committing the ancient Athenian version of 'suicide by cop'.

Xenophon describes Socrates as saying that '[i]f my years are prolonged, I know that the frailties of old age will inevitably be realised, - that my vision must be less perfect and my hearing less keen, that I shall be slower to learn and more forgetful of what I have learned. If I perceive my decay and take to complaining, how... could I any longer take pleasure in life?'

http://www.springerlink.com/content/x7286wq826173461/

Determining and remembering eye color is a thing only women do.

Research says otherwise: http://www.springerlink.com/content/766n130226m12n24/

It makes sense that blue-eyed people of both sexes would fixate on blue eyes, since it's a very recent genetic modification (less than 10,000 years) and it does provide an indicator to paternity - but only for blue-eyed people who mate with other blue-eyed people. Since females don't have the same concerns over paternity, it makes sense that it would express itself in action only through blue-eyed males - and that's what we see. Blue-eyed males show a distinct preference for blue-eyed females.

What it doesn't explain is popular culture's ideation of blue eyes - after all, I don't see blue-eyed people buying contact lenses to change their eye color to brown. Similarly, there are a lot more brown-haired people coloring their hair blonde than the other way around.

Then again, maybe it does explain it. After all, if 3/4 of the population couldn't care less either way, but 1/4 has a strong biologically-based preference for blue eyes, the overall preference is going to be skewed towards blue eyes - and that's what we see. In less than 10,000 years, the genes for blue eyes have gone from 1 individual with a freak mutation to large portions of the population.

Note also that recent research suggests that the human optics system may be a type known as blocked tetrachromatic instead of trichromatic (with one set of frequencies blocked by the optics system) and that some women may be functionally tetrachromatic due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, one of which occasionally carries a mutated gene for one of the light receptors (which would really make them blocked pentachormats since the 4th functional receptor is different from the 4th "blocked" receptor of the human baseline condition, so they've got five photo receptor types, like butterflies, only with one of them blocked) . Looking for Madam Tetrachromat .

Online test: Are You a Tetrachromat?

That refers specifically to the link to vaccines, and Wakefield faked the intestinal data in his subjects, but there are still others who think that there is something to the gut symptom correlation.
Erikson et al (2005) http://www.springerlink.com/content/l13786n2151314t6/ looked at all the evidence and found lots of people looking at it, but the stuff that was published has a wide range in the level of scientific rigor.
If there is a correlation (and there really might be one), it's a whole lot more complicated than a simple cause-effect one.

A system like this shouldn't have too much trouble identifying pedestrian "walk/don't walk" traffic signals and giving an audio signal when they turn red or green. GPS locations of known traffic lights should make this even easier. That would make navigating through a city much easier for the visually impaired. There's some research in this area (link, link) already, but having a system like this in place makes it much more likely for a real, usable production system to eventually end up in the hands of the people who need it.

A system like this shouldn't have too much trouble identifying pedestrian "walk/don't walk" traffic signals and giving an audio signal when they turn red or green. GPS locations of known traffic lights should make this even easier. That would make navigating through a city much easier for the visually impaired. There's some research in this area (link, link) already, but having a system like this in place makes it much more likely for a real, usable production system to eventually end up in the hands of the people who need it.

The blocks are as distinctive as all the non negative single digit numbers in the decimal system - actually, less so - there are 10 possible digits for the latter, whearas there are only 5 possible tetronimoes.

The Tetris blocks are based on the mathematical entities known as polyominos, specifically, the subgroup containing 5 orthogonally connected squares (not counting reflections and rotations).

It should be as patentable and copyright as PI - ie not at all, since it is strongly based on a branch of mathematics, specifically on the problem of how to tile such shapes, which has been the subject of a few papers, such as this and this

I'd be on to Google to claim they equally infringe YOUR game and Google them to drop their game too.

Experimental evidence of transmutation of Hg into Au under laser exposure of Hg nanodrops in D2O

http://www.springerlink.com/content/711615204x0740m7/

Single Bubble Sonoluminescence

http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~pokailin/acad/72.pdf

Not all plants react the same way .

I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter , he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.

Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hard problem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.

It was the treatment of tonsillar squamous cell carcinoma but I can't find the reference at present. Read about it in med school.

However, may I draw your attention to a couple of other cancers that seem to benefit from localised immune activation due to injected bacteria:

Stomach: http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v84/n4/abs/6691599a.html
Mouth: http://www.springerlink.com/content/rw3kk056t4014t5j/
Bladder: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20205607

There really are some studies suggesting small amounts of mercury, and other heavy metals, may be healthy.

Hormetic Effects of Heavy Metals in Aquatic Snails: Is a Little Bit of Pollution Good?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y54l3x43016p6530/

The Changing Science of Toxicology -- Hormesis Makes a Comeback
http://www.mongabay.com/external/toxicology_1203.htm

Wikipedia entry regarding hormesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Ron

There are additional alkaloids in tobacco that inhibit MAO's and research is showing that these MAO Inhibitors have a synergistic effect on addiction when combined with nicotine. http://www.springerlink.com/content/78756648h2300v80/ Without the MAOI's, nicotine alone (as found in e-cigarettes and FDA approved products like Nicoderm or Nicotrol) is still somewhat addictive but doesn't have nearly the habit forming properties of whole tobacco alkaloids.

Hmm... Then why are companies like Iron Mountain building out LARGE datacenters in caves?

(In most cases, former mines/quarries.)

1) Not caves large enough to drive vehicles in - many mines meet this criteria

Those are mines or tunnels, not caves. If they insist on calling it a cave, they should specify "man made" cave or risk getting the NSS, ACC, USGS, USFWS and a few other organizations on their ass

... 3) Not if they're above the water table - many are. Iron Mountain's is, and apparently they're planning on using a nearby underground lake for cooling soon.

Natural caves are typically formed by running water, they are nature's storm drains. You dont have to be below a water table for rainwater to fill a cave, mine or other hole in the ground. Water follows gravity, which typically goes down, and since holes in the ground generally go down to stay underground, water tends to follow. If the exit isnt large enough, it will fill the hole. How do you think the underground lake formed? I hope they are going through the EPA and USGS and other orgs to get approval on using that lake, as its probably the source for well water for miles around, and could have consequences if not done correctly. Karst Pollution is serious business, and Illinois a notable karst region.

4) Not if built/designed correctly. 5) Iron Mountain and the like would prefer to disagree with you on that.

Again, see response to item 1.

-Tm
nss#45759

You know, I thought that at first too, and maybe you know more than I, but the article I linked says they occur naturally.

Minute quantities of the fullerenes, in the form of C60, C70, C76, and C84 molecules, are produced in nature, hidden in soot and formed by lightning discharges in the atmosphere.[6] Recently, fullerenes were found in a family of minerals known as Shungites in Karelia, Russia.

I looked up a few sources, and they agree. Here is one that looks legit: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w3856554l87733w3/fulltext.pdf?page=1

Casinos are specifically and carefully designed to exploit people's natural instincts (for example, no windows so you have no sense of time) and mental illnesses; the layout of the floor is done purposefully, as are the style of the games. There's a wealth of information out there for anyone with access to Google Scholar, for example, like this:

The pattern of convictions for various categories of crime in the population of the United Kingdom was compared with the corresponding pattern in a sample of addictive gamblers drawn from Gamblers Anonymous in the U.K. A distinctive pattern of income-generating crime was found to be statistically associated with pathological gambling. This pattern was compared with other distinctive patterns associated with the intake of alcohol and with various other drugs and it was found to resemble most closely that of addiction to narcotic drugs. The possible role of gambling as a contributory cause of crime is discussed in the light of what is known of the issues surrounding other addictions as causes of their distinctive patterns of crime.

I don't care if my neighbor plays poker. I do care if I have to pay money because my neighbor plays poker.

You have to pay when your neighbor robs the local convenience store to pay the rent/mortgage/grocer (or their gambling debts, or just to gamble more), loses the house/apartment anyway, and their spouse and child are now homeless and on welfare. Or the person becomes homeless, with no health insurance, and ends up in the hospital. Or goes mentally insane and stabs you on the street corner for the $10 in your wallet.

Take a look at the police spending in any community pre-and-post casino. It always skyrockets after the casinos move in, because casinos attract the desperate, mentally ill, and criminal.

Sheesh, over 500 comments, this is going to get lost in the wash. Smoking makes you smarter, guys. Believe me. Five hundred years back we had tracks for roads, open drains, squalor, plagues, et cetera. Look at us now. We've got electricity, cars, computers, and rockets to the moon. The Allies won the war because everybody smoked like troopers. Hitler didn't, and look at the mess he made of every last thing he touched. But Einstein did, along with lots of other smart guys. Helps focus the mind you see. And without it, people lose their edge. Don't believe me? Think about why we don't have rockets to the moon any more. It's fashionable to knock smoking these days, but here's a couple of journal articles discussing smoking and intellectual ability: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f43533n81707641r/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/pj50566667r72779/

Sheesh, over 500 comments, this is going to get lost in the wash. Smoking makes you smarter, guys. Believe me. Five hundred years back we had tracks for roads, open drains, squalor, plagues, et cetera. Look at us now. We've got electricity, cars, computers, and rockets to the moon. The Allies won the war because everybody smoked like troopers. Hitler didn't, and look at the mess he made of every last thing he touched. But Einstein did, along with lots of other smart guys. Helps focus the mind you see. And without it, people lose their edge. Don't believe me? Think about why we don't have rockets to the moon any more. It's fashionable to knock smoking these days, but here's a couple of journal articles discussing smoking and intellectual ability: http://www.springerlink.com/content/f43533n81707641r/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/pj50566667r72779/

The other thing you should know about cochlear implants is that even if the surgery goes perfectly, you will probably lose any residual hearing you have in that ear. Threading the wire with the electrodes through the cochlea mostly destroys your ability to hear out of that ear. (Although they are getting better: http://www.springerlink.com/content/b006u72218767748/ ) For people who are completely deaf, this "loss" isn't a big deal, but if amplification can work, go with that!

The limit on how things sound is based on how densely they can pack the electrodes on the implant. Each electrode corresponds to a frequency, so the world sounds a bit like it's on autotune. As with Moore's Law, every generation, the engineers can get more electrodes closer together, which means more targeted frequencies. But you can't easily upgrade the implant without another surgery. There are some cool software tricks that I've heard about that can simulate the in-between frequencies and reduce the T-Pain effect.

:)

I guess you haven't tried verifying it yourself - by all means, please do.

AGW does not rest on CO2 absorption - that is logarithmic and at the levels we're at in modern times (280ppm+) the effect of a doubling or tripling will go unnoticed.

http://brneurosci.org/co2.html (fig. 4)

AGW rests on speculated positive feedbacks, and all the models assume these to be true in their calculations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming#Positive_feedback_effects

Those positive feedbacks have not been observed, on the contrary, at least one of the speculated feedbacks has instead been observed to be negative.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m2054qq6126802g8/?p=e209f4ac50044f93a421b19e0a636d4b&pi=0

Thus, the existing AGW models have been falsified.

For more information, look up the "scientific method" and read some Popper.

Hard to say, because they have several skulls and some of the vertebrae and other postcranial bits, but they don't mention anything about the tail in the paper (it's open access -- yay!). Statistically, it probably didn't have one, because only rare sauropods are known to have a thagomizer, but it's possible.

You are so far out of touch it's a waste of time talking to you. Nevertheless, because your naivete is good for a laugh:

1. Inertial guidance systems more than accurate enough to find a given block in a specified city have been around since the 1950's. A retarded calculator could do the job, much less a half-decent P4 chip. 2. Shape templates are also childishly easy. You aren't talking about anything sophisticated or error-proof; nothing much more complicated than a silhouette or quick scan through a few thousand images would do the trick. From a given height and orientation there's only so many shapes that fit a semi or a train, or a particular office building. A basic camera and desktop PC can read ASLAN from human hands, for fuck sake. What do you need with "computer vision", especially when a mistake will probably still do damage? Anything here would be more than sophisticated enough to do the job:

http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/72734/Automated--shape--detection

http://www.springerlink.com/content/xx452562rw513402/

http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/Research/MatlabFns/othersites.html

A lot of very expensive American ordnance wound up pounding the hell out of civilian targets in the former Yugoslavia because some nasty-minded people figured out all you needed to simulate a SAM site was a microwave oven and a few basic tools. Get a clue.

Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
My counter-proposition is that if religion is abolished, large tracts of population would disappear. Religion/dogma seems to be the only thing that keeps some people going.
Faced with an alternative of continuing living and committing suicide, what are the options ?
1) Realize that life is as likely to be good as bad, decide to die
2) Hope that life is on average good and continue living.
3) Believe that "god" or "gods" or whatever made will give you good times in future/heaven in return for bad things you suffer and then continue living.
*Buddhism might be an oddity- It seems to believe that life is on average sad, but a "middle path" can lead to happiness
Some preliminary evidence http://www.gallup.com/poll/108625/more-religious-countries-lower-suicide-rates.aspx http://www.springerlink.com/content/rg63kp2jfw8k7e5d/

Ya, no global warming since 1995, but in the last 15 years the island of Sagar has been losing ground to rising oceans.

So what? There are two effects to keep in mind here. First, apparently the island is being rapidly eroded away. That's a common process for islands exposed to ocean to experience. For example, it happens on the eastern coast of the US quite frequently. Human activity probably has resulted in the loss of protective wetlands too (much as has occurred along the coast of Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico). It says nothing about the sea level. Second, the island appears to be in a delta region. That often results in sinking of the land due to the weight of new river sediment.

According to Wikipedia, sea level has risen 20 cm in the past 120 years. While that is a significant amount, there's no way that it can explain the current problems with Sagar Island.

our middle class is dying because our government has neglected necessary social structures that don't build themselves outside of government control or encouragement.

Our middle class is dying because our government, measured as a percentage of GNP, has gone from 3% (1776 to 1920) to nearly 40% today. The middle class is being crushed by the amount of taxes they have to pay to support the government the poor have voted into place. Either they make it, and move up to the rich, or are crushed and fall into the poor.

The idea that the "poor" lobby has any power whatsoever is laughable.

The idea that a 50% voting block that votes as a block (More for me!) has no power is laughable.

You Robin Hood scenario is as baseless as the existence of a vast class of "welfare queens".

Strange that you would pick "welfare queens" because it IS the woman's vote that has turned our government from "We'll let you take care of yourself" to "We'll force you to take care of everyone!"

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/WashTimesWomensSuff112707.html <---- the US example.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x737rhv91438554j/ <----Swizerland (women's suffrage in 1971).

Want to increase your take-home pay by 35%? Repeal the 19th Amendment.

I timothy 6:9-10 But they that WILL be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.

For the LOVE of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

All gambling, online or off, has the same root cause: the love of money (greed). There is a massive amount of highly credible research that proves it has very negative effects on the individual, family unit, and society. Here is just one of thousands of articles.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/rn2235135662lm80/

Nothing wrong with being rich. What is wrong is the lust to be rich. Huge difference.

So any form of gambling is bad. Period.

Studies have pretty convincingly shown that people who work with children with autistic spectrum disorders (such as my wife) are about 95% accurate at diagnosing the disease based upon video of their 1st birthday parties. In other words, they where showing symptoms before the vaccines in question were given. Parent may not recognize the symptoms until their child hit 30 months, but the symptoms where there all along. Parents often will deny the diagnosis (and get mad at the diagnosing physician) after it is made. It's understandable why they do so. It's also understandable why the need to find someone or something apart from their own genome to blame for the disease.

One study is at this site. It is by no means the only one, but just the first one that showed up in a Google search.

Notice when there are outbreaks of measles, etc. they never tell you what percentage of those infected were 'vaccinated', do they... I wonder why...

Rubbish.

They most certainly do. Around a third of children infected with measles will have been vaccinated but they have milder infections and are far less likely to die of them. Take a look at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14506371, http://www.jstor.org/pss/30106702, and http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv6714265t3l8150/ for some examples.

Your statement is even more absurd when you consider the research that must be done to determine the probability of successful vaccination. In the case of the MMR vaccine it's only around 80%, IIRC. Luckily most children are surrounded by vaccinated people who wont spread it to them.

I don't know if you're trolling or honestly believe a big medical conspiracy is out to kill you but either way, you're wrong.

No, DES is not a group.

Let's say there was a 2-bit version of DES as in your example. For a 2-bit data block, there are 2^2 = 4 possible values. That means there are 4! = 24 possible permutations, but there are only 2^2 = 4 keys. So not all the possible permutations are generatable by a single key, and what Campbell and Weiner proved in 1993 was that successive applications of DES with different keys produce (in general) one of those "lost" permutations that can't be done with a single key.

Because it's a good idea to keep the spleen around?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m177445104341g46/

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/health/09diab.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=

Purchase Power Parity from CIA Factbook-

"This is the measure most economists prefer when looking at per-capita welfare and when comparing living conditions or use of resources across countries."

Germany was much more socialist in early nineties. And the standard of living was also quite higher than now

Nominal GDP per person contradicts your statement. As does real GDP per person. For good measure here is a study done in 2003:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p634gl14222451n1/

An excerpt:

"During the past ten years, quality of life improved in the former German Democratic
Republic (GDR), but such came with some self-inflicted problems."

Those problems are explained:

"Germany's structural problems today are a reflection of unsound fiscal and monetary policies of the 1990s."

So, not only are Germans better of by every measure I can find, the socialist fiscal and monetary policies of the 1990's are to blame for any structural problems today.

In answer to my own question: http://www.springerlink.com/content/c2u10m3511536m5x/ Now all we need is a firefox plugin!

Links that are not reputable or factual but seem to support my case... (but I'm not a doctor so I can't tell)

http://archinte.highwire.org/cgi/content/summary/90/4/513
http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0442e/a0442e0m.htm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/28630.php
http://www.alternet.org/story/274/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/280264/obese_britons_also_at_risk_for_malnutrition.html?cat=51
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r718533228ph9g55/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8581766
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S155072890800600X ...but in all truth I am not nearly as qualified as you are to talk about these things. I'm parroting things I've seen in biased documentaries. I bow before your might.

It's no big deal either way. Details of practical attacks on the GSM protocols were published in the Journal of Cryptology last year, the article is behind a pay wall here. There are no technical details in the NY Times article and I can't be arsed to track down the original source but I would guess that the main difference is that last years work attacked the protocols used, rather than the underlying encryption system. So in particular, the break on A5/3 used a weakness caused by operators using A5/1 on the same network.

Anyway, well said. The NYT article seems fundamentally flawed and has led to a huge (predictable for slashdot) thread below on the merits of security through obscurity. Completely irrelevant here as the algorithms involved were published and have been known for a long time. We only find out that systems are weak because people try to break them and publish the results. Papers like this are essential for us to make progress.

The ability to transfer mitochondria is definitely possible, and has been for over a decade- see here for instance, where it was performed between two species of mice. I doubt they bothered with the process though, for several reasons. Mitochondrial transfer has an admittedly low success rate, and of course nuclear transfer has a low success rate, so that to produce a viable clone with both procedures would be extremely difficult. The mtDNA also has a higher mutation rate than nuclear DNA due to the reactive oxygen species the mitochondrion cranks out. It might be that there isn't much meaningful interspecies variation between the mtDNA of extinct ibex and the living egg donor, especially in relation to intraspecies variation.

Also, the mitochondrial DNA in most mammals is about 17,000 base pairs. The average mammalian nuclear genome is a few billion base pairs. The nuclear DNA represents over 99.99% of the total DNA, and given that I'd assume domestic goat mtDNA to have at the very least a 98% concurrence with Pyrenean ibex mtDNA, you'd be looking at a variability consistent with the overall error rate of DNA. The preservation, cloning, and IVF steps likely swamp interspecies mtDNA variation as an overall source of genetic error.

There was recently a story about how people with a high-fat, high-sugar diet have different microbes in their stomach that allow them to absorb a higher % of calories from those fat/sugar than a more moderate diet.

Some have made quite a fuss over the methane coming from cows. Considering how many people there are on this planet, it probably makes more sense to focus on the methane coming from people.
The mix of intestinal flora affects the amounts of methane and other gases a person produces. Perhaps diet modification and other efforts to affect human floral balance could reduce our contributions of this greenhouse gas.

The high-corn diet that fattens up feed-lot cattle affects more than their weight (and methane production?). Because of the higher acidity present in corn-fed cattle as compared with range fed, the e-coli they carry adapts. The e-coli adapted to higher acidity is far more of a problem for humans than that from range-fed cattle.

Maybe it's time that we start thinking of bad diet as another form of pollution.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/98/9.17.98/cattle_feeding.html

http://www.nbafoodadvocate.com/corn-fed-cattle-bigger-cows-bigger-e-coli-threat-more-foodborne-illness-1177

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6328959.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r24j133q21u1g838/

Geochemistry of the Earth and the Moon. Isotope geochemistry is particularly useful. And it can be compared to meteorites (i.e. undifferentiated/less differentiated material left over from the solar system formation).

Let's not forget the rampant cannibalism...