Slashdot Mirror

It's consistent with DAMA and Cogent in the sense that it's ruled out by those experiments at only a few sigma. It's "near" Cogent in the sense that 8 is "near" 25, and it's "near" DAMA in the sense that 35 is "near" 10; that is, it's not near at all. It's ruled out by Xenon by many orders of magnitude. My favorite theoretical model to explain these results is IDM (Italian Dark Matter), which consists of dark matter that only exists in Italy. Presumably similar particles are responsible for whatever makes Guinness taste better in Ireland.

IANA M.D., but it seems to me that when people around your are actually DYING from serious illnesses like cholera, scarlet fever, small pox and many, many more, the medical professionals (who were not in any way gathering statistical information in the 1800s) would tend to disregard all instances of allergies as imagined illnesses. Actual life threatening epidemics sweeping the country EVERY YEAR have a way of sharpening the focus of those who deal human suffering. Are allergy rates rising? Sure, why not. I'd like to see your stats but I'm flexible on this. Are allergy rates higher than in the 1800s? Who knows. There aren't any stats.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.1988.tb02872.x/abstract "It was only in the early 19th century that the disease was carefully described and at that time was regarded as most unusual"

Please don't state your OPINIONS as facts. That's what started this mess in the first place.

I am also old enough to remember chicken pox 'parties' where stupid parents would force their perfectly healthy children to 'go play' with fever-ridden children in horrible itchy agony. I bet you never actually contracted measles or chicken pox from one of those 'parties'

Pre-vaccination, chicken pox and measles are far better as a child than later in life. I don't know whether I got them at a party or elsewhere, but neither chicken pox nor measles were "horrible itchy agony". Maybe they were for some, but don't misrepresent on groups experience for everybodies.

Again, please bring me the stats on the number of people per year who don't 'survive' multiple vaccine injections. I'm curious as to what that would be. Do you think it would be higher or lower than the number of people killed in car accidents each year, or killed by lightning, or killed in trout-fishing accidents, or suffocated by eating too many marshmallows. My lord, lets outlaw Campfire Marshmallows in that case.

No idea, and I have no need of those figures. My question - for what its worth, since you don't seem to be able to read my posts - is what are the negative effects; and I don't mean autism, I mean auto-immune problems in general, such as allergies (which also kill).

Talk about your knee-jerk reactions.

Oh, and by the way, I have this for you about Rubella from Wikipedia: "During the epidemic in the US between 1962–1965, Rubella virus infections during pregnancy were estimated to have caused 30,000 still births and 20,000 children to be born impaired or disabled as a result of CRS (congenital rubella syndrome)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella Thank you but I for one respect life and want everyone to have a fair chance of being born WITHOUT PREVENTABLE BIRTH DEFECTS. Obviously you feel differently and that's your right.

No, I don't feel differently. Test girls for rubella antibodies pre-puberty and then vaccinate as needed; there is no need for this blanket forced medication.

Although other forms of allergic disease were described in antiquity, hay fever is surprisingly modern. Very rare descriptions can be traced back to Islamic texts of the 9th century and European texts of the 16th century. It was only in the early 19th century that the disease was carefully described and at that time was regarded as most unusual. By the end of the 19th century it had become commonplace in both Europe and North America. This paper attempts to chart the growth of hay fever through the medical literature of the 19th century. It is hoped that an understanding of the increase in prevalence between 1820 and 1900 may provide an insight for modern researchers and give some clues into possible reasons for the epidemic nature of the disease today.

4. ???

Sorry, here's one case where step 4 is not question marks. All you need is a good to trade at the destination and this handy future value formula.

Thank you for the correction. The actual number is currently believed to be 3-4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piq.20099/abstract;jsessionid=FEA7D98A86323E4886495C333ADED5A5.d01t01

Humans don't even have the best eyes. Other animals have better frequency response and better focal ranges. Thinking that you are the ultimate endpoint of evolution is pure hubris.

"Best" is what works best for the situation, not what has the most whiz-bang features. Those features come at a price, for example, sensitivity to IR comes with diminished sensitivity to what humans consider visible light. Humans have dominated the planet because of our social structures; eyes that continue to work well enough for old people's purposes into old age permits a more complex social structure. There is no ultimate endpoint of evolution, only a penultimate one, when life ceases. The brain and the eye could have been one thing, but they aren't, and they aren't for very good reasons. We inherited this legacy for the same good reasons. Of course, one of those reasons is that DNA does not control the position of every cell in the body; there are a fixed number of possible outcomes with DNA, though the number is very large. Only so many of them are viable, which trims it down considerably. But maybe if sonic the hedgehog goes crazy during your development then you can get closer to your brain-eye ideal — it produces enlarged optic nerve stalks.

here you go fuck head:

Increases in Longwave forcing inferred from Outward longwave
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Trends in Forcings
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
29000 data sets, press release:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
29000 data sets
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
Global Energy Imbalance:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
Isotopes:
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

Here they are, but I doubt you will try to understand them:

First you need to understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave_radiation

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

"The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER."
no one claims that. Only people claiming that people claim that.

" But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, "
No, it's a scientific issue, what to do about it is a political issue.

" so you've picked your side (democrat) "
hahaha, now your boiling it down to the side of the Aisle?
democrats like:
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jon Huntsman
  Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
  Chris Smith
  Tim Pawlenty
Bob Inglis

oh, wait those are all republicans, my mistake.

In order to support their religious base, The POLITICAL stance of the republicans has been 'no global warming' however if yo look at many of them and there votes, you can see a different picture.
But hey, I actually pay attention to these details, and like researching what different representatives vote for,.
What I don't understand is people like you, who are provably wrong, that keep on spouting your lies. Why?

Original article here (sorry, no free version available). I find ridiculous that they provide (mostly self) references to existing art, but they fail to mention commercial felt-tip silver pens.

By a quick look at the paper, their ink has a resistivity of 2*10^(-4) Ohm*cm (25 C print temperature) which is not so lower than the 5*10^(-4) Ohm*cm commercially available ink. They do reach lower resistivity, but with high temperature annealing, so it cannot be compared directly (and they fail to).

Maybe their ink is more flexible, but again they fail to provide comparison with existing ink.

Their ink has probably lower viscosity due to the use of nanoparticles (they are working between 1 and 10 Pa*s) and this probably allows for the use of rollerball pens, but if felt-tip pens are working fine with a most likely cheaper ink, why should I care?

However they do manage to master the acronyms creation art, providing the catchy PoP shorthening for their groundbreaking pen-on-paper circuit drawing approach...

The Gizmodo article linked in the summary is a blurb based on some research done at the University of Illinois, and, according to that blurb, published in the journal Advanced Materials ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1521-4095 ). Looking at the current issue of Advanced Materials, the work doesn't show up, but there are a slew of other articles that the Slashdot crowd might find very interesting.

In (not only) my opinion he should rather try some weed.

Are cell phones going to be the new tobacco, then?

No.

Duh.

If cell phones were anywhere near as bad as tobacco - or even anywhere near as bad as the doomsayers insist - then the extensive, large-scale, costly, long-term studies already conducted would have picked up a clear effect already.

Detecting the negative health effects of tobacco was some pretty low-hanging epidemiological fruit. Smokers die between ten and fifteen years younger than their non-smoking peers. Between one half and two thirds will die from a smoking-related illness. Their risk of lung cancer is elevated more than tenfold; about one in six smokers will be killed by it.

For cellular phones, the absolute worst-case scenario is a statistically-significant increase in the risk of certain rare cancers, affecting a minuscule portion of the population. The WHO's caution is based principally on a single study that found a 40% increase in glioma incidence among heavy cell phone users; the WHO report noted that while there is reason for suspicion, chance or coincidence couldn't be ruled out as a cause of the apparent effect.

The incidence of central nervous system tumors is something like 7 per 100,000 population per year; gliomas are about half of that total. If we assume that the full 40% increase in risk is real and accurate, then we're looking at something like 1 or 2 cases per 100,000 population per year. This isn't the next tobacco. This isn't tobacco's kid brother. This isn't even tobacco's fifth cousin's hamster. Heavy cell phone use is something like a thousand-fold less risky than lighting up.

You're more likely to be killed by a car (either as a pedestrian or as an occupant), or drowning, or accidental poisoning. You're appreciably more likely to be shot and killed (though slightly less likely to be stabbed to death). Statistically speaking, the average American is quite a bit more likely to deliberately kill himself rather than wait for his cell phone to do it for him.

The most likely way for cell phone use to kill or maim anyone isn't through radiation, but through distracted driving.

Reasonable estimates don't put the total extra cancer death toll due to Chernobyl at more than 1000, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your figure of 10,000 is either totally fabricated or based on faulty assumptions.

Conservative estimates put the total death toll due to Chernobyl at a lot more than 1000. See, for example, this paper , which estimates the death toll in Europe, excluding some of the damaged zones, at more than 10 times your number, and mentions a number of difficulties in establishing the actual toll, the biggest being nobody counting long-term. The comment in the paper on the lack of research on the long-term exposure to low doses is also quite informative.

Fortunately, there are no ways to detect whether a NAT router is being used.

Wait, no, that's trivial.

And there's no active research going as far as trying to count the number of devices behind a consumer NAT router for the specific purpose of stopping people from exceeding the AUP on connected devices.

Oh, never mind.

Like I said, IPv6 NAT has no uses.

Overall, wind is often more expensive (and has to be subsidised as a result), at least per unit of electricity generated, than oil/gas at current prices.

Oil/gas is only "cheaper" because current pricing of oil/gas/coal does not account for it's externalities.

For example, a recent study puts the unaccounted for price of coal in the US somewhere between $140-$242 billion dollars a year.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hidden-cost/?partner=rss&emc=rss
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/full

If these costs (in effect subsidies) were paid for, wind (and other renewables) would be very cost competitive with coal without any additional subsidies.

As it is, subsides for renewable energy just help level the playing field.

According to this paper the specific impulse of this new fuel is actually lower than that of LOX and LH, and comparable to other rocket fuels, It is the density impulse which is 20-30% better. This means that the propellant mass wouldn't increase, although making a smaller, denser fuel source would lead to a smaller rocket overall, with mass and cost savings for the structure. Additionally it's lack of Chlorine would make it more environmentally (and worker) friendly than some of the propellant options, which is always nice. Unfortunately that paper doesn't go into production costs, or any possible issues with storing it (This paper looks like it may have more information along those lines, but I don't have a subscription). I don't know if it can sit in a tank at room temperature like Hydrazine, or needs special care like Oxygen (due to its molecular weight I'm guessing the former.) All in all it does seem like a nice stepping stone between the high functionality of LOX LH, and the economy and convenience of some of the other liquid fuels, but it doesn't appear to be a serious game changer in any way.

As far as your suggestion to launch from buildings, mountains, or balloons, that doesn't actually offer substantial benefits either. While launching from high up would result in lower drag losses, that helps less than you'd expect because a ground launched rocket travels through the densest part of the atmosphere at it's slowest speeds. By the time a rocket is going fast enough that drag would really start to slow it down it is already at a pretty high altitude. If you are trying to make a cheaper rocket you really want to increase it's starting speed much more than its height. The math works out this way because of the fact that our starting radius is 6378 km. As big and impressive at Mount Everest seems to us it's really just a tiny pimple compared to the radius of the earth (brings you to 6386 km), and our entire atmosphere isn't much better.

Your quote of the Greens is spot on, but you will admit that it has nothing to do with the IRV system but rather, as I said earlier, a lack of education. Also the number of seats won by a minor party will always be low due to the size of the electorates. Major parties are obviously more likely to take seats. It isn't meant to be a proportional system, we have that for the upper house.

Also, your comments are about third party and minor party representation is still misleading. Take for example the Tasmanian Legislative Council. According to you, since they are elected via IRV, they should be mostly ALP or coalition. Yet when your look at the results you will see that 11 of the 15 seats are independents!

As for whether voters actually do vote insincerely, I put more stock into the research we have done over the past for years at The Center for Election Science than in a wikipedia entry which most assuredly has been heavily tuned by FairVote, a highly dishonest pro-IRV organization.

You might have your little beef with FairVote whoever they are, but nothing stopping you putting your position up with citations on wikipedia. The article I mentioned cites three references. "Collective Decisions and Voting" by Nicolaus Tideman, "Single transferable vote resists strategic voting" and "An investigation into the relative manipulability of four voting systems". Your argument is remains uncited and the amount of intellectual dishonesty coming from you does your argument no favours.

It wasn't linked to in the article, so here's the actual abstracts for the two papers:

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/31/4/1193
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07425.x/abstract

Theta-Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Alters Cortical Inhibition

Human cortical excitability can be modified by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), but the cellular mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, we show that the pattern of delivery of theta-burst stimulation (TBS) (continuous versus intermittent) differently modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex. Intermittent TBS (iTBS), but not continuous TBS (cTBS), enhanced spontaneous neuronal firing and EEG gamma band power. Sensory evoked cortical inhibition increased only after iTBS, although both TBS protocols increased the first sensory response arising from the resting cortical state. Changes in the cortical expression of the calcium-binding proteins parvalbumin (PV) and calbindin D-28k (CB) indicate that changes in spontaneous and evoked cortical activity following rTMS are in part related to altered activity of inhibitory systems. By reducing PV expression in the fast-spiking interneurons, iTBS primarily affected the inhibitory control of pyramidal cell output activity, while cTBS, by reducing CB expression, more likely affected the dendritic integration of synaptic inputs controlled by other classes of inhibitory interneurons. Calretinin, the third major calcium-binding protein expressed by another class of interneurons was not affected at all. We conclude that different patterns of TBS modulate the activity of inhibitory cell classes differently, probably depending on the synaptic connectivity and the preferred discharge pattern of these inhibitory neurons.

Continuous and intermittent transcranial magnetic theta burst stimulation modify tactile learning performance and cortical protein expression in the rat differently

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can modulate cortical excitability in a stimulus-frequency-dependent manner. Two kinds of theta burst stimulation (TBS) [intermittent TBS (iTBS) and continuous TBS (cTBS)] modulate human cortical excitability differently, with iTBS increasing it and cTBS decreasing it. In rats, we recently showed that this is accompanied by changes in the cortical expression of proteins related to the activity of inhibitory neurons. Expression levels of the calcium-binding protein parvalbumin (PV) and of the 67-kDa isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD67) were strongly reduced following iTBS, but not cTBS, whereas both increased expression of the 65-kDa isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase. In the present study, to investigate possible functional consequences, we applied iTBS and cTBS to rats learning a tactile discrimination task. Conscious rats received either verum or sham rTMS prior to the task. Finally, to investigate how rTMS and learning effects interact, protein expression was determined for cortical areas directly involved in the task and for those either not, or indirectly, involved. We found that iTBS, but not cTBS, improved learning and strongly reduced cortical PV and GAD67 expression. However, the combination of learning and iTBS prevented this effect in those cortical areas involved in the task, but not in unrelated areas. We conclude that the improved learning found following iTBS is a result of the interaction of two effects, possibly in a homeostatic manner: a general weakening of inhibition mediated by the fast-spiking interneurons, and re-established activity in those neurons specifically involved in the learning task, leading to enhanced contrast between learning-induced and background activity.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1097-4679(197410)30:4%3C577::AID-JCLP2270300434%3E3.0.CO;2-8/abstract

your eye can't even tell the difference between light rays entering it from a 3D system vs light rays entering your eyes from the real world, it's the same thing to your eyes.

Apparently you haven't watched any 3D films.

The correct name for what happens in a "3D" cinema or on a "3D" TV is not "3D" - it isn't really significantly more "3D" than a normal perspective image (I'll explain why below). The correct name for the effect is "stereoscopy" and it only reproduces one part, actually a rather unimportant part, of the experience of viewing a true 3-dimensional scene.

In the real world, when you move your gaze from a point at one depth to a point at a different depth, your brain has to cause two changes to take place in your visual system (no doubt amongst many others):

1. 1. Your eyeballs have to be moved so that the point you are looking at is within the most sensitive area of your retina (the fovea). If the new point is further away than the old one, this will require that the eyes move outwards. If closer, they have to move inwards. In addition to keeping the point of interest within both foveas, this alignment is required in order for the brain to "match up" the two images. If the alignment is wrong, the result is that you perceive a double image.
2. 2. The lenses in your eyes have to change shape to bring the new point in focus. The closer a point is to your eyes, the fatter the lens in your eyeball has to be to focus the light onto your retina properly. The lens shape is controlled by tiny muscles called "cilliary muscles". When you look at a real scene, points other than those you are focussing on generally appear blurry.

When looking at a normal perspective image, you don't have to do either of these things. Both pointing and focussing is constant, because as far as the mechanisms for pointing and focussing the eyes are concerned you are simply looking at a coloured rectangle held at a constant distance from the eyes.

With such a perspective image, our brains have absolutely no difficulty reconstructing the full 3-dimensional image purely from the content of the scene. They also have no difficulty keeping this reconstruction separate from the fact that it's really just a flat rectangle. We've been looking at such image for hundreds of years, and moving versions for over a century, and we know it doesn't cause any problems.

With stereoscopy, the brain starts having to do the processing described in point 1. However, point 2 is unchanged. To watch a stereoscopic film involves pointing the eyes, but not focussing them. The lens shapes remain constant, but the eyes now have to point to different depths. This is significantly different both from looking at a normal perspective image and from looking at a real 3-dimensional scene.

Clearly, people can achieve this feat without any great difficulty, or "3D" films would be hard to watch. However, there may indeed be reasons to worry about the early development of the visual system. The trick of pointing and focussing your eyes is not something you are born with. It develops over time, and in a way which crucially depends on the particular input it receives. One extreme way to demonstrate how much visual development depends on input is rather cruel: to rear a cat in total darkness.

Problems with the mechanisms for pointing/focussing the eyes are common - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabismus and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accommodation_(eye)#Disorders_of_accommodation. Can such disorders be caused by presenting stereoscopic images to the eyes for long periods during early development? Nobody knows. Is a warning necessary? I don't know or particularly care - it's just a bit of arse-covering. If I had a small child, would I allow him or he

You *do* close the blinds before having sex, don't you?

But the real issue is that people are too hung up over this in the U.S. If such an incident happened to most normal people in the rest of the world, they would simply take better precautions and move on with their life. Going into a panic over it to the point where you get paranoid and dysfunctional is the wrong way to handle the problem. Also, there would be less of an issue with stalkers and so on if the U.S. wasn't so anally obsessed with maintaining a pseudo-1950s ideal of purity about the human body. I mean, as it was pointed out a couple of days ago here, you can show someone's head being exploded in a PG movie but you show a little too much skin and you're looking at a R rating.

ie - most of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't generally have to worry as much about such issues because sex and the body in media is far more accessible. So there's less of a psychological issue amongst the society because they can easily and simply get their porn or whatever as they need to. You'll note that the most sexually repressed societies are also amongst the most violent, especially in terms of assaults and rape.

Of course, this is barely being touched upon in modern Psychology. The idea that high incidents of rape and physical assault are a result of societal issues and a dysfunctional environment between the sexes and people's views of themselves and their bodies.

Some interesting reading:
http://www.ipce.info/library_2/pdf/prescott_en.pdf (perhaps the first study of its kind, though largely ignored in the U.S. until recently)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1981.tb01068.x/abstract - This is extremely recent and a (long overdue) logical progression of the hypothesis, IMO.

The book "An Interview with The Devil" also has a coupe of great passages in it about this. Though it's mostly tongue-in-cheek humor, there is a valid point to be made about how people who are less able to show affection and obtain closeness with others end up being more violent. You'll note that the U.S. is even worse off than ever before and we also at the same time can't even hug each other or touch each other in public/school/work/etc without fear of being charged with a crime.

It would be interesting to do a study on sexual and physical repression in terms of the collapse of great empires throughout history. I suspect that the results might be quite interesting.

Now, there are correlations (violent video game players have a higher incidence of violent activity)n (further tests are needed for causation).

Apparently they've already established the causation link:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9280.00366/abstract

I've never understood the correlation between having a model next to anything, say a smartphone.

...

I know it's supposed to incite buying the object, but I don't see any link.

Some research which might be illuminating:

• Men Take More Risks When Pretty Women Are Around
• Pretty women make men shortsighted (based on this paper: Wilson & Daly: Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future?)
• Ariely & Loewenstein: The heat of the moment: the effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making

More likely is that it always was a mixture of zone 9 and zone 10 plant life, but you didn't notice until you started looking for things to validate your belief system.

Untrue. Banyan trees could not survive in St. Pete when I was a kid, but could south of Tampa Bay. They now grow 35 miles north of St. Pete. That Passiflora (you DID click the link, right?) is not a subtle indicator, either. Furthermore, the gardening world is full of people who try to push the limits with interesting stuff, looking for microclimates where they can find them. My dad tried to grow papayas, and failed because they froze. They survive now, in the very same neighborhood. Your claim of a zone 9/10 mix also contradicts the climate charts; there are indeed plants that can grow in multiple zones, but for each zone (and even each half-zone) there are indicator species, that grow in one zone, but not the next. If you've got banyan trees, papayas, and passiflora alata, your zone is not 9, it is 10.

A second datapoint, not plant related, is the water supply. There's also been recent predictions of widespread drought in the 20-40 year future, based on climate models. We can "fix" this with population migration. Tampa, FL, is looking into recycling sewage into drinking water.

I also note you conveniently snipped out the bit about the trees. It is well known that annual weeds are happy colonizers; trees are a good deal slower. If climate zones are really moving 100 miles every 16 years in the Southeast (I actually doubt that, I think the 1990 baseline was not kept up to date), I think that some tree crops may cease to be viable economically because of the long "investment" time.

As to the matter of "waiting for certainty is too late", that derives from two things. #1,the excess CO2 will be with us for a long time (centuries -- see, was that so hard?). #2, the temperature increase lags the CO2, because so much heat is sunk into the oceans. #3, as someone noted, you cannot turn an economy on a dime, so even once we decide to cut back, it will take years to do so. So, whatever observed temperature rise it takes for us to decide to put on the brakes, it will take us years to activate the brakes, AND we will have that higher level of CO2 for a century or so, AND the temperature will continue to rise for decades.

The one place I don't have good data, is on what constitutes "certainty", nor on how fast we could actually turn the economy. If our threshold for "certain" is actually not that far from where we are now, then I am wrong, assuming we flipped from skeptic to certain (as a society) in the space of five years (and stayed there). But as near as I can tell, that is not how things are -- you are certainly an example of someone who has taken the tribal approach (to an insulting level, I might add) and cloaked it in a bogus reverence for Science.

Climate models project increased aridity in the 21st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.20398/abstract

I'd expect very little enzyme to be in HFCS as the process involves using a fixed or fluidized bed enzyme reactor where the enzyme is chemically attached to the reactor walls or bed.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cjce.5450640405/abstract

Regularly super-sizing your McD meals can help prevent Alzheimer's. Heck it even reduces your chances of getting cancer.

I'm being serious. Maybe one could use a nicotine patch instead. Here's another study: Beneficial effects of nicotine

From the abstract:

"When chronically taken, nicotine may result in: (1) positive reinforcement, (2) negative reinforcement, (3) reduction of body weight, (4) enhancement of performance, and protection against: (5) Parkinson's disease (6) Tourette's disease (7) Alzheimers disease, (8) ulcerative colitis and (9) sleep apnea. The reliability of these effects varies greatly but justifies the search for more therapeutic applications for this interesting compound.

Not having the actual study, it's hard to say, but it seems like there's some big assumptions here.

http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Looks like it's a meta-study; it seems to quote this: http://is4ie.net/images/Matthews.pdf, quoted by someone else, which is a 2001 study from the US. Also this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1162/108819802763471816/pdf - a study of online book retailing in Japan in 2001.

I may have got this all wrong, and there may be some new UK research I didn't find.

I would never cite wikipedia, but I often find that the references from the wikipedia article would make good sources to cite. This document probably has the material they wanted, and a direct link to it is found in the references section of the wikipedia article: Medical 203. This particular wiki entry does seem well researched and had numerous citations. I know nothing about this area, but I'll bet that the article is accurate...

We excluded sequentially from this analysis men and women who reported a personal history of cancer (n = 21,785), heart attack (n = 11,560), stroke (n = 2,513), or emphysema/other lung disease (n = 9,321) at the time of enrollment. We also excluded individuals with missing data on physical activity (n = 4,240), missing sitting time (n = 2,954), missing or extreme (top and bottom 0.1%) values of body mass index (n = 2,121), or missing smoking status (n = 1,347) at baseline. Finally, to reduce the possibility of undiagnosed serious illness at baseline that would preclude or interfere with physical activity, we excluded individuals who reported both no daily life activities and no light housekeeping (n = 4,730), as well as those who died from any cause within the first year of follow-up (n = 403). After exclusions, the analytical cohort consisted of 123,216 individuals (53,440 men and 69,776 women) with a mean age of 63.6 (standard deviation, 6.0) years in men and 61.9 (standard deviation, 6.5) years in women when enrolled in the study in 1992.

They did record BMIs and what they found was the following:

We examined the association between time spent sitting and total mortality in men and women combined, stratified by body mass index (Table 3). Although time spent sitting and physical activity were more strongly associated with mortality among lean persons (for time spent sitting, P_interaction = 0.06; for physical activity, P_interaction = 0.002), both measures were significantly associated with risk of total mortality regardless of body mass index.

Although everyone "slags off" Symbian (really the S60 UI) and declares "Android forever" and all that crap. it has a microkernel OS with File Servers and the rest - EKA2.

http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/47/04700252/0470025247.pdf

It's out there on hundreds of millions of devices too, and whatever you might say about the UIs ontop of it, it is pretty good in itself.

You have probably never worked with hardware patents.

http://www.wiley.com/legacy/products/subject/business/forbes/ford.html [wiley.com]
----------
In 1879, a Rochester lawyer named George Selden applied for a U.S. patent for a road vehicle powered by a gasoline engine. Through his own delays and those of the government, however, a funny thing happened. Selden, who never built an actual automobile, received the patent on it in 1895, long after other people were building automobiles. In return for a percent of future revenues, Selden assigned the valuable patent to a group of New York financiers in 1897, and they defended it vigorously. In the first years of the century, they settled on a process by which automakers joined the Association of Licensed Automotive Manufacturers (ALAM), which served as a conduit for licensing fees for 1 1/4 percent on annual sales. Most of the country's automakers seemed reconciled to joining ALAM.
---------

Read a little bit about hardware patents. They're the same obvious, lawyer filled crap that software patents are.

I would only ask what is the difference between a software patent and a 'hardware' patent?
Both my brother are fellow engineers. They work in chemical and mechanical fields respectively. They both deal with patents in the same way as us people in software do. That is to say, 99% of the patents they have to deal with are 'no-shit' patents.

I remember not too long ago there were ads about the Toyota Prius and in the ad, they mention how it has over 1000 patents or something crazy like that. Do you really think Ford, GM, Honda... just going about their regular business doing regular incremental improvements would never have come up with 99% of the 'innovations' in the prius?

Patents are patents. What we deem 'obvious' and 'trivial' in the software realm, other fields have had to deal with for generations. They just deal with it by licensing... probably because they are more established and used to it. There's also less of a 'free' movement in the other fields. My brother's company just patented a medical equipment storage device that patents the way things are stored. It's a plastic tray and holes for various pieces of equipment... but the placement is patentable :P By this logic... a software's GUI could be patented.

You mention a compiler being patented. Sure. The fact that it wasn't shows that the software industry is probably much nicer than most other industries in terms of patents. You are darn sure the equivalent of a compiler would have been patented in the mechanical field.

http://www.wiley.com/legacy/products/subject/business/forbes/ford.html
----------
In 1879, a Rochester lawyer named George Selden applied for a U.S. patent for a road vehicle powered by a gasoline engine. Through his own delays and those of the government, however, a funny thing happened. Selden, who never built an actual automobile, received the patent on it in 1895, long after other people were building automobiles. In return for a percent of future revenues, Selden assigned the valuable patent to a group of New York financiers in 1897, and they defended it vigorously. In the first years of the century, they settled on a process by which automakers joined the Association of Licensed Automotive Manufacturers (ALAM), which served as a conduit for licensing fees for 1 1/4 percent on annual sales. Most of the country's automakers seemed reconciled to joining ALAM.
---------

This is how the patent business has always worked. Patenting a gas powered road vehicle would be to the automobile industry as compilers are to the computing industry. And boy did they and do they try and patent everything... But in the end... life went on. Cars were built. Innovations happened. Maybe at a slower pace. Maybe some potential companies were never formed.. Maybe a lawyer got rich undeservingly... but it certainly wasn't the end of the world...

I'm not a defender of software patents... I just don't see the BIG DIFFERENCE between software patents and physical patents.

As to the 'public good'... well that's a vague concept. You seem to associate the public good with GNU or open access. Someone else might say a public good is ensuring stable companies or rewarding the industry or rewarding innovators even if there is a huge overhead. Is it not strange that the two most industrialized and innovation nations (Japan and the USA) both are known for insane patents? There might be something to that... Maybe the business folk are only willing to invest large sums of money on proprietary things... and that drives business and plows money into the industry? Who knows. But arguing the 'public good' is rarely a good argument as no one can agree on what the public good is or if a particular policy actually gets you there.

You might value computer science as a study unto itself. Good for you. That is not my view. I like things brought to market. And in a world of government spending, proper

Since you mention it, where's the intermediate insect wing in the fossil record?

Since insect wings fossilize poorly there has been no such fossil yet discovered. Fortunately, the theory of evolution is not just based on the fossil record. For example, this paper shows evidence for an intermediate insect wing using DNA analysis.

Are you kidding?

You need to do NONE of those things to produce and consume alcohol.

Can you give me any decent research that shows that pot is so much more dangerous than alcohol that it should have those restrictions? It's a pretty facetious question, because you can't. You can't OD on pot. You'd need to smoke like 3000 joints to do that. Or you'd need to eat like 30kg. When researchers looked at pot, they found that it would "moderately impair driving performance alone, but with alcohol, it would "significantly impair driving performance". You know, like alcohol does.

Hang around with an addict? Really? Because "About one in ten of those who ever use cannabis become dependent on it at some time during their 4 or 5 years of heaviest use. This risk is more like the equivalent risk for alcohol (15%) than for nicotine (32%) or opioids (23%)." Yea, it's 1/3 less addicting than alcohol, and 3x less addicting than cigarettes.

You are either very, very naive, or nicely brainwashed in the best Puritanic traditions. Before you post paranoid stuff about drugs, at least learn about them. If not try some. It might help you a great deal.

And crazily enough, I smoked pot 2-3 times in the late 90s. Haven't touched an illegal drug since. What I have done is learn about stuff, before rambling off like a Puritan who's been in deep-freeze for 400 years.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user

Growing a good egg: Metadynamics simulations show that the eggshell protein ovocleidin-17 induces the formation of calcite crystals from amorphous calcium carbonate nanoparticles. Multiple spontaneous crystallization and amorphization events were simulated; these simulations suggest a catalytic cycle that explains the role of ovocleidin-17 in the first stages of eggshell formation (the picture shows one intermediate of this cycle).

And for what it's worth, this article is completely irrelevant to the question at hand, and the egg came well, well before the chicken.

Growing a good egg: Metadynamics simulations show that the eggshell protein ovocleidin-17 induces the formation of calcite crystals from amorphous calcium carbonate nanoparticles. Multiple spontaneous crystallization and amorphization events were simulated; these simulations suggest a catalytic cycle that explains the role of ovocleidin-17 in the first stages of eggshell formation (the picture shows one intermediate of this cycle).

And for what it's worth, this article is completely irrelevant to the question at hand, and the egg came well, well before the chicken.

Ask and ye shall receive... http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123506502/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fange.201000679

The abstract link could hardly be worse. Here is one that actually works for the appropriate paper.

Nice job, slashdot editors.

No, the battle is GM vs non-GM. I will not buy GM food. Nor will many other people. How about this, have GM food labeled then see how many people buy it. Companies like Monsanto fight attempts to require labeling.

The push for profit has given us radical increase in agricultural yield over the past 80 years

One, for most of those 80 years foreign genes were not inserted into plants. Two, more than one thing accounts for increases in yield, And three, a lack of food is not the problem. The problems are political and armed conflicts. With neoliberal policies yields only went up modestly. Here's a story about millions of metric tons of wheat rotting away in a warehouse in India. Another one says how the supply chain is messed up, "Industry experts estimate more than 30% of all fresh produce is lost or spoils before it reaches the market." Many more stories like these can be found. How about in Africa? In the Democratic Republic of Congo looting of crops by armed groups and general insecurity has undermined farming. Or take Zimbabwe. Before Robert Mugabe came to power the country was a bread basket for southern Africa, ie a net food exporter. Food was the one of the biggest if not the biggest cash earner for Zimbabwe. After he came to power he forced white farmers off the farms then gave the land to his cronies, who do not know how to farm. Now Zimbabwe does not grow enough food for its own population.

Quite simply GM will not "fix" the problem of too little food. There's plenty of food so genetic engineering is not needed. To go further Infrastructure: The new gold explains how infrastructure is part of the problem. It blames the rotting food in India on the "country's creaky infrastructure".

Falcon

Herbicide resistance can lead to less herbicide use because you can then apply one herbicide that kills everything but the one thing that is resistant rather than having to apply multiple chemicals depending on what weed you need to eradicate.

Quite the contrary, plants are made herbicide resistant so the plant can be drenched by the herbicide. And as herbicide resistance spreads to the wild even more herbicides or more power herbicides are needed. As it is herbicide resistant weeds were discovered in the early 1970s.

The same could be said for pesticide resistance, perhaps you can apply stronger chemicals but less often which may be safer than having to apply weaker stuff more often.

How about instead of using fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that are natural gas or petroleum based use organic methods. Instead of planting the same crop year after year rotate crops. Instead of monocultures inter-plant different species, companion planting?

Falcon

How much more arsenic will there be? Will the entire ocean die? Will just a few patches of the Gulf die? Or more likely will it not make the tiniest bit of difference?

I found these two abstracts that may help. Langmuir adsorption model is used to determine the effects.

I was trying to put some perspective on the BP oil spill for myself and found it's roughly an Exxon Valdez (E.V) disaster every week (based on approx 50,000 bbls per day), so it's 6 E.V's so far. Considering the amount of damage that was done there, local fisheries are now supported by hatcheries so the overall toxicity of the oil spill has pretty much destroyed the ecosystem. Twenty years later not much seems to have improved and Huffington Post reports not only the human health implications but the same-old same-old response we get from these companies as data collection efforts are simply stopped. Ignorance really is bliss and when it's not possible to do any science and politicians in the future can honestly say "The health implications cannot be determined".

That arsenic is a carcinogen that bio-accumulates in the environment means that even if this catastrophe was to stop right now the human health implications are something that will continue to unfold well into the next generation. Airborne pollutants like Hydrogen Sulfide, which took a week to dissipate from E.V just continue.

Bottom line: No-one knows (A metric ass load?). EPA says you can't harvest fish from seawater with a greater concentration of 0.0175 micrograms of Arsenic. Seawater is more capable of containing As than fresh water and there are many other factors (temperature, organic/inorganic As) that determine toxicity. Pressure from the depth of water is also a factor. I think what is being said here is that the Gulf of Mexico's days as a fishery are pretty much over and it's time to drill the shit out of that oil reserve and empty it as soon as possible.

Lets be realistic No-one is going to take the risk of being the "Oh but you made it worse" person that everyone points fingers at so NO-ONE will do ANYTHING. Right now you are seeing the people standing around the dying person bleeding wondering when someone is going to call the ambulance. I blame the greenies, if they'd have protested more none of this would have ever happened and we could have lived our apathetic little lives without an oil spill of this magnitude. As it so happens now we have to live our apathetic little live without the luxury of ignorance going, tsk tsk that oil spill - so bad tsk tsk.

References; Neff, Bioaccumulation in Marine Organisms: Effect of Contaminants from Oil Well Produced Water

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's an orthogonality problem. If you have a Medieval Warming Period (MWP) -- then temperatures *aren't* unprecedented and become mathematically decoupled from CO2. Mann's "Hockeystick" graph erased the MWP -- problem is, the approach is worthless, and while Mann may believe it (again not conspiracy theory), it isn't true. Thus we still have the MWP (and the RWP, the Minoan, and the Holocene optimum) -- all of which were warmer than today and none of which had AGW contributions.

Well, yeah! The Medieval Warm Period, which was probably local, and restricted to Europe, but with a lower global average temperature... You could at least try to read a bit before spouting talking points...

A challenge to the geeks at slashdot -- read "HARRY_README.txt". If you believe a single thing that comes out of CRU after that, I've got a bridge to sell.

Though you haven't actually linked it, I'll try to answer.

First, let RealClimate speak (scroll down a little)...

HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.

Second, how is this any different from major, even mission critical code in so many other domains? Even in places which could cost thousands of lives (nuclear reactor safety systems, for example... Ever done a code audit on the software for those safety systems)?

Keep in mind that these people aren't professional coders; they're scientists using IDL and Fortran (90, I presume), and probably other languages like Matlab. The code is an implementation of their hypothesis. It's usually ugly, and the first one that works the way they want it. Maintainability? Hah! (note: here, I speak as one who has had to translate "scientist" code into "real" code).

Spouting talking points is hardly critical thinking, which is why you people are called "deniers" and not "skeptics".

I hate to break it to you, but it sounds like the headaches are caused by Capsicum/endorphin withdrawl...

Talk about jumping to conclusions. Capsicum analgesic effect is probably little to do with endorphins as popularly thought. It interacts with the TRPV1 receptor which causes the burning pain. The interesting part is that endocannabinoid anandamide is an activator of this system and paracetamol is also an agonist to TRPV.

A related phenomena to the chilli high (in my mind) is the runner's high. There seems to be a debate if the effect is caused by endorphins, anandamide or some other mechanism. As in most real life cases it is probably a result of many different systems including these. Which may not only explain the runner's high but the pain relief many experience due to exercise. But either way I have not heard of people suffering from head aches because they haven't had their run!

I couldn't find any evidence for an endorphin withdraw as such, the opiates have many symptoms related to withdrawal so if ffreeloader is also experiencing the following symptoms before his chilli hit you may be on to something. :)

sweating, malaise, anxiety, depression, priapism, extra sensitivity of the genitals in females, general feeling of heaviness, cramp-like pains in the limbs, excessive yawning or sneezing, tears, rhinorrhea, sleep difficulties (insomnia), cold sweats, chills, severe muscle and bone aches; nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, and fever.

Some important background that this article doesn't specifically mention (another one I read did), in 2008, that same lab had shown this was possible with mouse stem cells. That's not to knock them, just it's important to point out that these things don't just come from out of the blue, nor does biology move as quick as we would like. This group has been working on showing this goes on in human stem cells for at least 2 years, who knows how long it took them to find this out in mice, or narrow down this one specific protein. Those years between when they discovered it in mice and showing it in humans probably also represents a lot of work. Science is hard.

I would guess that the next step, maybe one they're already working on, is to show that induced pluripotent stem cells can be cultured on this same protein. IPsC are when they take cells from your own body and make them revert back to a similar state to embryonic stem cells, to where they can then be turned into any cell type you want (the advantage there being they're your cells so you wouldn't get tissue rejection like you would with embryonic stem cells.)

Three big barriers to using IPsC for therapy were/are 1. that they were made using viral transfection of cancer-causing genes, 2. culturing them required feeder cells which the article describes why that's bad, and 3. it's hard to completely differentiate a population of pluripotent cells into one cell type you're trying to get. There have been some breakthroughs on 1, last I heard a group had shown you can just culture with modified proteins to induce pluripotency. This is a breakthrough on 2. Unfortunately 3 might be harder. You want to be sure you've differentiated all the stem cells before you put them into a patient. If you inject stem cells into a patient, they're going to get one of the worst types of tumors: teratomas, so you want to be absolutely sure you've gotten them all. And each different cell type seems to differentiate in different ways. We might figure out how to turn stem cells completely into skin cells, but that may not help us learn how to turn a culture of stem cells into brain cells.

Nonetheless, this was an important 2 part solution to a barrier to using stem cells to their full potential. Double kudos to them, they've made a real contribution here.

You can access the actual research paper through this pubmed (national institutes of health) link. You may need to access it through your local university library to get further than the abstract. If you follow through as far as the link from the publisher (Wiley Interscience) you'll see that the paper was actually accepted and published online back in February.

I'm a chemistry professor, and I want to agree with this post and follow-up. The bio side has lots of labs/departments that lean Mac-heavy. In chem, organic chemists have a larger Mac population than society/rest of chemistry, but it's still well under 50%. Physical chemists that are experimentalists are probably using something command-line on their instruments, because they probably built them themselves in the last few decades, and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule applies (plus more modern computers aren't so great at supporting the connections needed, so you'd be rebuilding the whole instrument anyway.) The computational chemists typically use $nix systems, because they're working with computing clusters - though many of them do their analysis on PC/Mac platforms.

BUT, to re-address the original topic - I don't think there IS a good go-to operating system to use in a high school that will prepare students for the higher sciences, because as many have posted so far it depends what those students want to do later in life. As a teaching&research oriented prof who spend 2 days a week in the K-12 system for 4 years doing on-demand professional development and curriculum deepening, I can say that there are two key criteria to use in deciding what tool to use with the students:
- is the tool "ready to hand"? - http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/63450/abstract is an example of what I mean
- are the 'big ideas' the students will develop from the task generalizable enough to be platform-independent?

These are central themes of the Technology in Science Education course I teach, for what it's worth.