It's true that slavery has been all but universal at least since the rise of agriculture; however, there have been very few states where a large enough proportion of the total population to be economically significant were slaves, Pretty much the only historical examples are ancient Rome and Greece, and the plantation economies of the Americas. American experience is not altogether unique, but it is certainly very far from the norm.
The last people born as slaves in the American South died in my lifetime.
From TFA: "one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2’s unprecedented precision."
Also bollocks. Retinal gene therapy (which so far has really got no further than proof-of-concept) has been going of for a while. There was (among several examples) a very brief gene therapy study in Moorfields Eye Hospital in London for Leber's Amaurosis a few years back, It basically showed you can get the gene into the retina, but so far nobody has significantly benefited in real life.
"First operation inside the human eye" my arse. *Every* modern cataract operation is an operation inside the eye. The membrane-peeling described in the link is a standard vitrectomy operation. I have two colleagues who between them do several a week and have done for years. So far (not very) as this is anything new at all, it is automated assistance to a human surgeon.
This is basically regurgitated publicity handout crap.
Very happy with the touch-screen XPS 13 and Ubuntu. Basically no trouble that I didn't create myself.
Specifically, I immediately tried to upgrade to 16.04 from the (working-fine) out-of-the-box 14.04, which failed, and then discovered that there was bug in the Ubuntu installer so it couldn't cope with the SSD.
But all work-roundable with pretty minimal googling. I might have been more worried if I wasn't used to setting up linuxes on laptops (first time I did it, I needed a framebuffer for the video. Tell that to 'the young people of today, they don't believe you.) But surely the same is true for pretty such anyone who would actually *want* linux on a laptop?
The only other real problem I had was video (working, but tearing), which all got better with xorg-edgers. Again, not difficult to solve with a bit of searching.
Since then, it All. Just. Works. So to speak. And it's very nice hardware.
That's exactly wrong and terrible advice if any diabetic believes it. Diabetic retinopathy is best treated (and often urgently *needs* treatment to prevent permanent damage) *before* the patient notices symptoms.( I am an ophthalmologist who specialises in exactly this field.)
Nonsense. Diabetic retinopathy is very treatable. (It's actually probably the most valuable thing I myself do during my working week.)
Certainly it doesn't always work in every case. But that's true of any treatment you care to mention.
Panretinal photocoagulation (with lasers) has saved the sight of hundreds of thousands of people. Over the past few years, on top of this, there have been major advances using antiVEGF treatments like Lucentis/ranibizumab.
It is *eminently* worthwhile for diabetics to be screened for eye disease. The problem is not that we can't treat it - it's that treatment is best done *before* the patient notices any problem. Hence, screening.
Incidentally nobody sent *me* this famous email. What's the deal? Why aren't I on this mailing list? Was it something I said? Perhaps I only imagine I work for the NHS...
What is this "cataract medication" of which you speak?
Last I heard, the only thing for cataracts was surgery. I'm an eye surgeon. That's what I'm going to be doing tomorrow morning. I hope. The organisation failed to replace our microsurgical instruments to cut costs (you need several sets to run an operating list) and last week I had to cancel half the operations.
The thing about not doing cataract operations if the other eye could still see well has never been NHS policy. It *has* been implemented by individual health boards because they had no bloody money to pay for it because our wonderful government thinks that we should have a system like you enlightened Americans where the insurance companies in the middel can rip off both the sick and the health workers and make big donations to the ruling party from their pickings. It is deliberately starving the NHS of funding in order to drive people into private healthcare.
This has nothing, absolutely nothing, with whether government knows better than ordinary people. In fact, it's driven by government ideologues who want to destroy health care provision for everyone too poor to support them with big fat donations. I believe you have such creatures in the USA too?
Exactly.
If you read the words "the gene for..." relating to human beings in anything other than a medical context, you can be 95% certain that reading further is a waste of your time. This reveals a basically magical, not scientific, idea of what "genes" are. Or a scammer.
Even in medical contexts, there is a vast gap between identifying a genetic variation associated with a disease and figuring out what the gene actually does and how the disease actually arises. It's the *beginning* of the real research.
A lot of this crap works along the lines of "Ooh, people with abnormalities in this gene can't speak" from which is deduced "Eureka! we've found the gene for language!"
The dead giveaway on Theranos is the splurging of publicity in mass mainstream media without anything at all published in relevant peer-reviewed specialist journals.
As soon as anyone asks why they would do that, the answer is obvious. You'd think.
Kenji Miyazawa, a very well known Japanese author of mainly children's stories, was very interested in Esperanto. The anime version of his "Midnight on the Galactic Railroad" has Esperanto in all the written materials you see in honour of this.
This was in the early part of the twentieth century, when there was a lot more interest in Esperanto worldwide. It probably is the case that there was at any rate more interest in it in Japan than you might have expected.
(They spoke Aramaic long before they became Christian, of course.)
The people in question call themselves Assyrians at the present day; there are some Akkadian words preserved in their Aramaic language even now, although Akkadian itself probably died out in the earlier part of the first millennium BC.
The name "Syriac" is itself from a worn-down version of the same name; it was once used pretty much as the equivalent of "Aramaic" but is now generallly used to describe only one particular version of Aramaic which was a major literary language of Western Asia in early Christian times, and is still used as a liturgical language by Nestorian Christians as far afield as India. The script is used to write several modern Aramaic languages spoken by Christians.
These ancient communities have suffered greatly in the Middle East wars of recent times, and a huge proportion have left as refugees.
Wrong Assyrians. The ones you're thinking of spoke Akkadian and wrote cuneiform.
Eventually their (Christian) descendants ended up speaking Aramaic like practically everyone else in the Near East at the time (it was the official language in the Western part of the Persian Empire); the modern Assyrian language is one of the many forms of modern Aramaic (now split into several different languages, much as Latin evolved into several different languages over much the same period) and this script is properly called Syriac, specifically Estrangela.
"About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss. "
It doesn't actually say what "this extreme form" is, exactly. Presumably cut out in editing and nobody noticed that this was left stranded. There was probably a reference to so-called "high myopia", which does indeed cause people typically in their teens to go from the ordinary fully-corrected-with-glasses myopia to being much more so, with potential "myopic degeneration" of the retina. It's a mystery why this only happens to some myopes.
The figures are scaremongering. Although this has indeed been a notable public health problem for a good while - the government of Singapore has been concerned about it for over a decade - it is nonsense that 10% of student-age people will go blind from it.
I'm an ophthalmologist. I specialise in diseases of the retina.
It's not hard at all. I suspect you don't actually know any Muslims. Hint: that nice neurosurgeon in your local hospital - she's good. That bastard killing other Muslims in Iraq - bad.
It's not very clear from TFA, but if "virus" is supposed to refer to plague, the hopeful jihadist seems lacking in even basic microbiological knowledge. I don't think I'll start panicking just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that slavery has been all but universal at least since the rise of agriculture; however, there have been very few states where a large enough proportion of the total population to be economically significant were slaves, Pretty much the only historical examples are ancient Rome and Greece, and the plantation economies of the Americas. American experience is not altogether unique, but it is certainly very far from the norm. The last people born as slaves in the American South died in my lifetime.
I have to wonder whether asking this on /. counts as a sort of metatroll ...
Exactly so. Calling it a "robot" is a marketing ploy.
From TFA: "one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2’s unprecedented precision."
Also bollocks. Retinal gene therapy (which so far has really got no further than proof-of-concept) has been going of for a while. There was (among several examples) a very brief gene therapy study in Moorfields Eye Hospital in London for Leber's Amaurosis a few years back, It basically showed you can get the gene into the retina, but so far nobody has significantly benefited in real life.
"First operation inside the human eye" my arse. *Every* modern cataract operation is an operation inside the eye. The membrane-peeling described in the link is a standard vitrectomy operation. I have two colleagues who between them do several a week and have done for years. So far (not very) as this is anything new at all, it is automated assistance to a human surgeon.
This is basically regurgitated publicity handout crap.
The UK government ignored a petition about the Brexit vote which had four million signatures.
Very happy with the touch-screen XPS 13 and Ubuntu. Basically no trouble that I didn't create myself.
Specifically, I immediately tried to upgrade to 16.04 from the (working-fine) out-of-the-box 14.04, which failed, and then discovered that there was bug in the Ubuntu installer so it couldn't cope with the SSD.
But all work-roundable with pretty minimal googling. I might have been more worried if I wasn't used to setting up linuxes on laptops (first time I did it, I needed a framebuffer for the video. Tell that to 'the young people of today, they don't believe you.) But surely the same is true for pretty such anyone who would actually *want* linux on a laptop?
The only other real problem I had was video (working, but tearing), which all got better with xorg-edgers. Again, not difficult to solve with a bit of searching.
Since then, it All. Just. Works. So to speak. And it's very nice hardware.
That's exactly wrong and terrible advice if any diabetic believes it. Diabetic retinopathy is best treated (and often urgently *needs* treatment to prevent permanent damage) *before* the patient notices symptoms.( I am an ophthalmologist who specialises in exactly this field.)
Nonsense. Diabetic retinopathy is very treatable. (It's actually probably the most valuable thing I myself do during my working week.)
Certainly it doesn't always work in every case. But that's true of any treatment you care to mention.
Panretinal photocoagulation (with lasers) has saved the sight of hundreds of thousands of people. Over the past few years, on top of this, there have been major advances using antiVEGF treatments like Lucentis/ranibizumab.
It is *eminently* worthwhile for diabetics to be screened for eye disease. The problem is not that we can't treat it - it's that treatment is best done *before* the patient notices any problem. Hence, screening.
Priapism? Well, I suppose it makes you go blind ...
The cornea does not have a "reticulum." Either.
Incidentally nobody sent *me* this famous email. What's the deal? Why aren't I on this mailing list? Was it something I said? ...
Perhaps I only imagine I work for the NHS
What is this "cataract medication" of which you speak?
Last I heard, the only thing for cataracts was surgery. I'm an eye surgeon. That's what I'm going to be doing tomorrow morning. I hope. The organisation failed to replace our microsurgical instruments to cut costs (you need several sets to run an operating list) and last week I had to cancel half the operations.
The thing about not doing cataract operations if the other eye could still see well has never been NHS policy. It *has* been implemented by individual health boards because they had no bloody money to pay for it because our wonderful government thinks that we should have a system like you enlightened Americans where the insurance companies in the middel can rip off both the sick and the health workers and make big donations to the ruling party from their pickings. It is deliberately starving the NHS of funding in order to drive people into private healthcare.
This has nothing, absolutely nothing, with whether government knows better than ordinary people. In fact, it's driven by government ideologues who want to destroy health care provision for everyone too poor to support them with big fat donations. I believe you have such creatures in the USA too?
That doubtless explains why most Muslims are not Arabs, and many Arabs are not Muslims.
Exactly. ..." relating to human beings in anything other than a medical context, you can be 95% certain that reading further is a waste of your time.
If you read the words "the gene for
This reveals a basically magical, not scientific, idea of what "genes" are. Or a scammer.
Even in medical contexts, there is a vast gap between identifying a genetic variation associated with a disease and figuring out what the gene actually does and how the disease actually arises. It's the *beginning* of the real research.
A lot of this crap works along the lines of "Ooh, people with abnormalities in this gene can't speak" from which is deduced "Eureka! we've found the gene for language!"
The dead giveaway on Theranos is the splurging of publicity in mass mainstream media without anything at all published in relevant peer-reviewed specialist journals.
As soon as anyone asks why they would do that, the answer is obvious. You'd think.
I'm perfectly happy with the old version of Linux, with the sex robots. You can always uninstall them if you need the disc space.
Yes and no
Kenji Miyazawa, a very well known Japanese author of mainly children's stories, was very interested in Esperanto. The anime version of his "Midnight on the Galactic Railroad" has Esperanto in all the written materials you see in honour of this.
This was in the early part of the twentieth century, when there was a lot more interest in Esperanto worldwide. It probably is the case that there was at any rate more interest in it in Japan than you might have expected.
(They spoke Aramaic long before they became Christian, of course.)
The people in question call themselves Assyrians at the present day; there are some Akkadian words preserved in their Aramaic language even now, although Akkadian itself probably died out in the earlier part of the first millennium BC.
The name "Syriac" is itself from a worn-down version of the same name; it was once used pretty much as the equivalent of "Aramaic" but is now generallly used to describe only one particular version of Aramaic which was a major literary language of Western Asia in early Christian times, and is still used as a liturgical language by Nestorian Christians as far afield as India. The script is used to write several modern Aramaic languages spoken by Christians.
These ancient communities have suffered greatly in the Middle East wars of recent times, and a huge proportion have left as refugees.
It says "John, house of Ephraim."
Who says the Internet isn't educational?
Wrong Assyrians. The ones you're thinking of spoke Akkadian and wrote cuneiform.
Eventually their (Christian) descendants ended up speaking Aramaic like practically everyone else in the Near East at the time (it was the official language in the Western part of the Persian Empire); the modern Assyrian language is one of the many forms of modern Aramaic (now split into several different languages, much as Latin evolved into several different languages over much the same period) and this script is properly called Syriac, specifically Estrangela.
"About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss. "
It doesn't actually say what "this extreme form" is, exactly. Presumably cut out in editing and nobody noticed that this was left stranded. There was probably a reference to so-called "high myopia", which does indeed cause people typically in their teens to go from the ordinary fully-corrected-with-glasses myopia to being much more so, with potential "myopic degeneration" of the retina. It's a mystery why this only happens to some myopes.
The figures are scaremongering. Although this has indeed been a notable public health problem for a good while - the government of Singapore has been concerned about it for over a decade - it is nonsense that 10% of student-age people will go blind from it.
I'm an ophthalmologist. I specialise in diseases of the retina.
It's not hard at all. I suspect you don't actually know any Muslims. Hint: that nice neurosurgeon in your local hospital - she's good. That bastard killing other Muslims in Iraq - bad.
It's not very clear from TFA, but if "virus" is supposed to refer to plague, the hopeful jihadist seems lacking in even basic microbiological knowledge. I don't think I'll start panicking just yet.
What, nobody make the XKCD reference yet? Too proud?
http://xkcd.com/1361/