It is true that few viewers will see the increased spatial resolution of 4K without expensive large screens, and even less so for 8K.
But increased spatial resolution is far from the only change in the the new UHD Premium broadcast standards ("4K") or the Super Hi-Vision ("8K") standard mentioned in this story, and all of these other changes have a huge impact that the normal viewer can easily see, no matter what size the TV.
Firstly there is increased colour gamut - before UHD Premium the standard was the BT. 709 colour space, which could only mathematically represent a small subset of the colours that human vision can see. (For example, Pantone's colour of the year 2013, Pantone Emerald 17-5641, can not be represented in BT. 709). The new broadcast standard enlarge the colour space to BT. 2020, which is much larger. Current devices can display roughly the DCI-P3 (digital cinema) colour space, which is already larger than BT. 709. BT. 2020 provides future room for growth beyond even that.
Secondly, there is increased bit depth. Instead of using 8 bits per channel, UHD Premium provides for 10 or 12 bits, and Super Hi-Vision requires 12. 8 bits per channel is just not enough for shadow detail (have you noticed how many videos just have a splotchery of large dark gray blocks in the shadow regions), and causes banding and posterisation in areas of smooth colour gradation like skies and sunsets. (Blu-rays mitigate this by having human compressionists continuously adapt the compression algorithm's parameters on a per-scene basis to work around this).
Then there is increased dynamic range. The current range of brightnesses BT. 709 supports can roughly be described as "everything from black to a glossy white paper under sunlight". Real-world scenes go beyond that, i.e. specular highlights on metal, or the heart of flames, and UHD Premium and Super Hi-Vision provides for that. The idea is not that the entire scene should be brightened to the point that you suntan in front of your TV, but that detail should not be lost by clipping specular highlights, flames, sunsets, full moons and the like.
Then there is increased temporal resolution: UHD Premium and Super Hi-Vision allow frame rates up to 120fps. This will make a large difference in sports with fast-moving objects, it gives additional creative freedom to directors of photography should they decide their stories are better told with higher frame rates.
"Our hardware, our rules"?
So, just because a company pays the water bill and thus owns the water, does that mean they can lace the taps in the ladies' bathroom with contraceptives?
Just because I own my hi-fi, does that mean I may put the speakers on the balcony, point them at the neighbours, and play it at top volume at midnight?
Just because I own a baseball bat, that means I can hit you in the head with it?
Since when has the rule "the person who owns an object has total say of any actions performed by or in relation to it" ever applied to any part of society?
One interesting source of natural trans fats is from ruminants: dairy, beef (grass-fed more so than grain-fed), and the like.
The symbiotic bacteria in a cow's rumen ferment cellulose into fatty acids. Did you know cows are fativores? They may swallow grass, but what they actually absorb is mostly fat.
Some of these fatty acids are trans fatty acids, such as vaccenic acid.
However, since humans have been hunting ruminants for millenia, we have co-evolved with those ruminant trans fats in our diet, to the extent that the evidence seems to be that they are benificial (or, to put it another way, that their absence is detrimental).
So next time you read the label of your feta cheese, and see "Trans fats: 1g" on it, relax. That most likely just refers to natural ruminant fatty acids, which unfortunately need to be totalled up and labelled under the trans fat heading. Iit would be less confusing if regulation excluded ruminant fatty acids, since they are not what we are concerned about.
The induction phase of the Atkins diet is mostly a ketogenic diet. For the treatment of epilepsy, there are now a handful of variations on the original ketogenic diet used since the 1920s, one of these is known as the "Modified Atkins".
However, there are stricter metabolic goals when on a ketogenic diet and special things to watch out for (too much protein can knock one out of ketosis, for example), so it is best to approach a ketogenic diet as a specialty topic in its own right rather than as something that a different low-carb diet may or may not achieve as a side effect.
There is a lot of recent research on the neuroprotective properties of a ketogenic diet, not just for Alzheimer's, but also for Parkinsons and stroke. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/ for example.
This comment is actually much more relevant to the OP than it may seem.
As the OP says, Parkinsonson's is essentially a fuel crisis of the brain due to impaired mitochondrial function.
One way to fix this would be to repair the mitochondrial function, as the OP article tries to.
But another way would be to find an alternative fuel source for the brain.
Those who promote coconut oil point of that it it specifically the metabolism of glucose that is impaired in Parkinson's (hence the modern trend of calling it Type III Diabetes). But there are many other energy substrates used my mitochondria, and ketones is one type that brain cells can also make use of.
Coconut oil is high in MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides), which have the unique property of being immediately converted to ketones in the liver. Thus the point of the coconut oil is to give the starving brain something else to run on.
Another way to raise ketones is by using a ketogenic diet (hence the name), as was the standard effective treatment for epilepsy early last century before drugs became available (and ketogenic diets have been making a comeback as alternative treatment when drugs don't help).
In a ketogenic diet, the vast majority of one's energy is derived from fat sources, not carbohydrates. As a side effect of metabolising fat for energy all over the body, ketones are released at a much higher level than otherwise, and these ketones themselves are then available as fuel for the brain (and other tissues).
Glucose is one of many energy sources that cells can use, but it is far from the only one. Fatty acids, ketones and lactic acid can be utilized for energy too.
One thing that makes glucose special is that it can be used anaerobically, which makes it useful to fuel sudden bursts of activity that exceed the availability of oxygen. But it is much less efficient when used this way, and some of the other fuels listed above are just as efficient, if not more so, when used normally (aerobically).
The other thing that make glucose special is that high levels of it are damaging, because glucose is just so darn reactive. Which is why your body has intricate systems for bringining it down - the normal amount of glucose in the blood is just aboud a teaspoon or two, total.
But somehow we looked at the fact that the body has intricate mechanisms for managing glucose levels, and instead of concluding "glucose is a kind of neccesary evil", we concluded "glucose is the be-all and end-all of energy metabolism, the only fuel that counts".
Every bit of code written by a developer represents a hypothesis that "this will have desired behaviour X in the context of the production environment".
Anything that lengthens the time between when that hypothesis was formed, and when that hypothesis is validated or invalidated, decreases productivity in a non-linear way.
This could be anything like:
There is no proper testing, so developers have to wait months for the system to be released so they can get the bug reports then,
There is a test suite, but it takes ages to run,
It takes ages to build/compile the system,
Developer lacks the skills to extract the maximum amount of feedback from a single "edit/compile/test/whatever" cycle, so it takes many more cycles to validate the original code,
The underlying system/development environment/build system is flaky and often behaves in unanticipated nondeterministic ways, so the developer has to spend a lot of cycles rebuilding/retesting to get a sort of statistical sense whether the code will "work" more often than not,
The system involves large database backup files which take ages to copy and restore to a development environment, so it takes ages to work on and validate a production data fix,
Deployment of the system to a production, staging, or development environment takes ages and/or is a manual brittle process, so it takes ages to validate whether code will in fact work in the context of the actual complete system,
and so on and so forth.
In my experience issues like these are often the number one source of productivity issues in any team and environment.
This does not negate that individual developer skill is a large factor in performance differences, because skilled developers know how to mitigate or prevent such long feedback loop times.
Years ago we wrote a lot of test code that would "screen scrape" our app's HTML. If there were significant differences, it would amongst other things open the retrieved HTML in a browser, for the developer's perusal.
So once we decided to pull a prank on Joe. I modified the HTTP screen scraper to:
Later that day Joe came storming in, white-faced, and softly announced: "I think we've been hacked or something. Someone's hosting a porn site on my development box!"
"Defect Injection". Yeah. That's what it was. A sophisticated QA technique, yes sir.
Everybody's going on about how this article confirms that "girls want bad boys", when in actual fact it merely underscores that "bad boys get more girls".
It seems to me that the bad boys "get" the girls through deceit.
Maybe girls really do want the nice, stable guys - and the bad boys are expert at acting the part, but more suavely than the real nice guys could, since they're not limited by actually meaning anything they say.
Gemstone also stands for the failure of a particular kind of business model. These people (and others) had a mature OO programming language that was orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, had object persistence, had a great IDE, and supported distributed programming over 15 years ago, and they pissed it all away by making it too expensive and too proprietary. That's changing.
You can download GemStone/S 64 Web Edition for free, and use it free (for commercial use, too!). Only when your database grows beyond about 2 gigs, you need to get a license, which is about $7000 a year.
I suppose hiding their Smalltalk heritage by calling their system "Gemstone/S" and being forced to incorporate Ruby in order to make their platform attractive is the ultimate indignity. They haven't incorporated ruby into GemStone/S to make it attractive; they haven't incorporated it into GemStone/S at all.
How do you update the application code? By filing in the source code, or whatever mechanism your Smalltalk source control tool of choice provides.
Don't know the specifics of what they do in Maglev for ruby.
Won't you still need to manually write a converter for the data from one format to another? Of course. If, for example, you decide to store birthdates for your customer objects too, you'd need to write a "for" loop that loops over all your customer objects and assigns an initial value to their birthdate attribute.
Because the runtime of an OODB program is measured in years, not hours, the layout of its objects tends to change a lot. And the libraries and runtimes tend to support this, whereas in plain old programs it is not supported.
In GemStone/S, they support this amongs other things by allowing you to have "previous versions" of a Person class. So, to add birthdate to a Person, you'd load a new version of the Person class, loop over all instances of the previous version, frob their data, and continue running.
But the frobbing code would be plain old Smalltalk (or Ruby, in the case of Maglev; or Java, in the case of GemStone/J) code.
And how is this better than just up front writing your persistence like we've always been doing? It's better because the object model of persistent data is identical to the object model of plain old data as you've used it in non-persistent code.
Look, here's pseudocode for a non-persisten Person object constructor (I'l spare you the Smalltalk syntax):
You make it sound as if the object oriented database and the Smalltalk implementation are two separate products. Which is a common misconception.
To oversimplify, GemStone's Smalltalk VM is an OODB. It adds the following features to the language:
1) Begin transaction, commit transaction, abort transaction.
2) All of your process space, your global variables, your datastructures etc. are persisted. You can switch power-cycle your computer and have the same program running as used to run before.
I'm sure they did the same for Ruby with maglev.
This approach cuts out layers and layers of persistence crap. Bye bye object-relational persistence mapping crud.
Not noticing another car until after initiating the manuever is a symptom that your driving skills aren't quite what you think they are - because you are supposed to check and ensure the lane is clear before starting to change lanes.
Agreed.
However, what I meant to express is the notion of redundancy: good driving skills consist of both checks and balances to prevent you from doing something stupid (i.e. looking in your blind spot before you start a maneuvre) as well as checks to make you aware of doing something stupid before it gets out of hand (i.e. checking your blind spot again as you are busy doing the maneuvre).
It would take a failure at both ends to cause an accident.
That said, I am no expert on aviation and I am agreement that 0 failures in a redundant chain of N checks is much better than xN failures.
Isn't the safety of an activity determined by the number of actual accidents, and not by the number of near-accidents?
For example, I've been driving about 14 years without ever causing an accident (or at least, none that I was involved in to know of:-). However, I often find myself in the situation of almost making an accident.
Fo example, you start to do a lane change, and suddenly, before you actually enter the other lane, you notice another car there, and abort the lane change. The point of driving experience and skill is it also helps you to cope with the near-accidents that your driving skills failed to prevent.
Surely something similar is relevant to flying too?
Seriously, multilingual domain names are a pain (for the whole humanity). Visiting japan, last year, I saw a lot of servers using japanish simplified language on it. As a foreigner, I hadn't the minimal idea about what the site was (without clicking on ot).
So you say multilingual names are a pain for the whole of humanity - Japanese names are a pain to for the Japanese, Greek names are a pain for the greek, etc. - just because you, as English speaker, can't read them?
I think you can safely assume that when you stumble across a URL in a script or language you can't read, that the entire website it leads to will be unreadable in the same way. And so you don't need to follow the link anyway. Problem solved.
Somehow I doubt that someone like you, who doesn't know whether and how "their" characters are actually "available" to you, would really consider it a loss if you can't navigate to a website that is entirely written in "their characters" which you can't read anyway.
All of these "us xenophobic anglophiles are going to be segregated from the foreign-language websites" arguments ring extremely hollow.
If it's going to use characters not present on normal keyboards, what's the point? Why not just use IP addresses?
The point is the same as it is in English, for English speakers: a word is more meaningful than a string of IP numbers.
Really, I promise you, people can read those "weird" other scripts, even if you can't.
Oh, and by the way, the Chinese etc. do have ways to type their own alphabets, more natural than just typing a string of numbers - as you, who can't see any obvious way to do so on your so-called "normal" keyboard, seem to think.
Why would the rock 2.8 km below surface be an "inhospitable environment"?
Sure, its inhospitable to badgers and ferns and algea and all kinds of surface life we are already familiar with.
But to geobacteria and friends it might be a quite cozy environment. No seasons to worry about, no hurricanes, no day/night fluctuations, just a nice constant temperature and chemical gradient from the deeper to the surface rock.
Your argument seems to be "the main article is trash because George Monbiot wrote some trash elsewhere". Yet you offer no proof that what he wrote elsewhere is trash, other than an out-of-context quote and a non-sequitur about life expectancy.
Just after the paragraph you quote, George Monbiot writes:
"This is not to suggest that poverty causes happiness. In southern Ethiopia people desperately want better healthcare, better education, better housing and sanitation, not to mention smart clothes, motorbikes, refrigerators and radios. But while poverty does not cause happiness, there appears to be some evidence that wealth causes misery."
So:
1) His argument is a heck of a lot more subtle than your straw-man version of it, 2) What the heck does average life expectancy have to do with his argument? 3) What exactly is your point?
But toxoplasmosa gondii is able to hide from the immune system, usually in cysts in the muscles or the brain. So the number of people with antibodies to it is roughly the number of people who have it hidden away in their bodies.
Apparently toxoplasmosa is only a danger for pregnant women if they get their *first* ever infection while pregnant, during the last trimester.
And you can get it from unwashed veggies and undercooked meat (see the first paragraph about toxoplasmosa hiding away in muscle).
But as head of a religious studies department, attacking a given faith is just unprofessional.
Why? Are heads of philosophy departments also forbidden to make disparaging remarks about Existensialism, or Post-Modernism?
And why are Christians allowed to say that Hindus worship demons, or that Atheists have no morality and only reject God so they can fornicate as much they like, or that Catholics are the spawn of the Anti-Christ without nearly as much of an uproar?
Remember, he made his remarks in the chatgroup of an areligious society on campus. Christians make some pretty harsh remarks in the privacy of their Bible-study groups, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...
Or we can compromise and measure storage by the kibiton and mebiton.
It is true that few viewers will see the increased spatial resolution of 4K without expensive large screens, and even less so for 8K.
But increased spatial resolution is far from the only change in the the new UHD Premium broadcast standards ("4K") or the Super Hi-Vision ("8K") standard mentioned in this story, and all of these other changes have a huge impact that the normal viewer can easily see, no matter what size the TV.
Firstly there is increased colour gamut - before UHD Premium the standard was the BT. 709 colour space, which could only mathematically represent a small subset of the colours that human vision can see. (For example, Pantone's colour of the year 2013, Pantone Emerald 17-5641, can not be represented in BT. 709). The new broadcast standard enlarge the colour space to BT. 2020, which is much larger. Current devices can display roughly the DCI-P3 (digital cinema) colour space, which is already larger than BT. 709. BT. 2020 provides future room for growth beyond even that.
Secondly, there is increased bit depth. Instead of using 8 bits per channel, UHD Premium provides for 10 or 12 bits, and Super Hi-Vision requires 12. 8 bits per channel is just not enough for shadow detail (have you noticed how many videos just have a splotchery of large dark gray blocks in the shadow regions), and causes banding and posterisation in areas of smooth colour gradation like skies and sunsets. (Blu-rays mitigate this by having human compressionists continuously adapt the compression algorithm's parameters on a per-scene basis to work around this).
Then there is increased dynamic range. The current range of brightnesses BT. 709 supports can roughly be described as "everything from black to a glossy white paper under sunlight". Real-world scenes go beyond that, i.e. specular highlights on metal, or the heart of flames, and UHD Premium and Super Hi-Vision provides for that. The idea is not that the entire scene should be brightened to the point that you suntan in front of your TV, but that detail should not be lost by clipping specular highlights, flames, sunsets, full moons and the like.
Then there is increased temporal resolution: UHD Premium and Super Hi-Vision allow frame rates up to 120fps. This will make a large difference in sports with fast-moving objects, it gives additional creative freedom to directors of photography should they decide their stories are better told with higher frame rates.
"Our hardware, our rules"? So, just because a company pays the water bill and thus owns the water, does that mean they can lace the taps in the ladies' bathroom with contraceptives? Just because I own my hi-fi, does that mean I may put the speakers on the balcony, point them at the neighbours, and play it at top volume at midnight? Just because I own a baseball bat, that means I can hit you in the head with it? Since when has the rule "the person who owns an object has total say of any actions performed by or in relation to it" ever applied to any part of society?
One interesting source of natural trans fats is from ruminants: dairy, beef (grass-fed more so than grain-fed), and the like.
The symbiotic bacteria in a cow's rumen ferment cellulose into fatty acids. Did you know cows are fativores? They may swallow grass, but what they actually absorb is mostly fat.
Some of these fatty acids are trans fatty acids, such as vaccenic acid.
However, since humans have been hunting ruminants for millenia, we have co-evolved with those ruminant trans fats in our diet, to the extent that the evidence seems to be that they are benificial (or, to put it another way, that their absence is detrimental).
So next time you read the label of your feta cheese, and see "Trans fats: 1g" on it, relax. That most likely just refers to natural ruminant fatty acids, which unfortunately need to be totalled up and labelled under the trans fat heading. Iit would be less confusing if regulation excluded ruminant fatty acids, since they are not what we are concerned about.
The induction phase of the Atkins diet is mostly a ketogenic diet. For the treatment of epilepsy, there are now a handful of variations on the original ketogenic diet used since the 1920s, one of these is known as the "Modified Atkins".
However, there are stricter metabolic goals when on a ketogenic diet and special things to watch out for (too much protein can knock one out of ketosis, for example), so it is best to approach a ketogenic diet as a specialty topic in its own right rather than as something that a different low-carb diet may or may not achieve as a side effect.
There is a lot of recent research on the neuroprotective properties of a ketogenic diet, not just for Alzheimer's, but also for Parkinsons and stroke. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/ for example.
This comment is actually much more relevant to the OP than it may seem.
As the OP says, Parkinsonson's is essentially a fuel crisis of the brain due to impaired mitochondrial function.
One way to fix this would be to repair the mitochondrial function, as the OP article tries to.
But another way would be to find an alternative fuel source for the brain.
Those who promote coconut oil point of that it it specifically the metabolism of glucose that is impaired in Parkinson's (hence the modern trend of calling it Type III Diabetes). But there are many other energy substrates used my mitochondria, and ketones is one type that brain cells can also make use of.
Coconut oil is high in MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides), which have the unique property of being immediately converted to ketones in the liver. Thus the point of the coconut oil is to give the starving brain something else to run on.
Another way to raise ketones is by using a ketogenic diet (hence the name), as was the standard effective treatment for epilepsy early last century before drugs became available (and ketogenic diets have been making a comeback as alternative treatment when drugs don't help).
In a ketogenic diet, the vast majority of one's energy is derived from fat sources, not carbohydrates. As a side effect of metabolising fat for energy all over the body, ketones are released at a much higher level than otherwise, and these ketones themselves are then available as fuel for the brain (and other tissues).
Sugar is the most basic kind of energy source.
I wish I knew where this meme came from.
Glucose is one of many energy sources that cells can use, but it is far from the only one. Fatty acids, ketones and lactic acid can be utilized for energy too.
One thing that makes glucose special is that it can be used anaerobically, which makes it useful to fuel sudden bursts of activity that exceed the availability of oxygen. But it is much less efficient when used this way, and some of the other fuels listed above are just as efficient, if not more so, when used normally (aerobically).
The other thing that make glucose special is that high levels of it are damaging, because glucose is just so darn reactive. Which is why your body has intricate systems for bringining it down - the normal amount of glucose in the blood is just aboud a teaspoon or two, total.
But somehow we looked at the fact that the body has intricate mechanisms for managing glucose levels, and instead of concluding "glucose is a kind of neccesary evil", we concluded "glucose is the be-all and end-all of energy metabolism, the only fuel that counts".
Crazy.
Every bit of code written by a developer represents a hypothesis that "this will have desired behaviour X in the context of the production environment".
Anything that lengthens the time between when that hypothesis was formed, and when that hypothesis is validated or invalidated, decreases productivity in a non-linear way.
This could be anything like:
In my experience issues like these are often the number one source of productivity issues in any team and environment.
This does not negate that individual developer skill is a large factor in performance differences, because skilled developers know how to mitigate or prevent such long feedback loop times.
Years ago we wrote a lot of test code that would "screen scrape" our app's HTML. If there were significant differences, it would amongst other things open the retrieved HTML in a browser, for the developer's perusal.
So once we decided to pull a prank on Joe. I modified the HTTP screen scraper to:
if (hostname() == 'joescomputer'):
downloadURL = 'www.xxx-lotsa-pink.com'
else:
downloadURL = 'localhost:8080/ourApp'
Later that day Joe came storming in, white-faced, and softly announced: "I think we've been hacked or something. Someone's hosting a porn site on my development box!"
"Defect Injection". Yeah. That's what it was. A sophisticated QA technique, yes sir.
Actually, "object" is an even better translation of "voorwerp".
And it makes better sense in context too: "astronomers find mystery object" sounds find. "Astronomers find mystery thing" sounds stilted.
Everybody's going on about how this article confirms that "girls want bad boys", when in actual fact it merely underscores that "bad boys get more girls".
It seems to me that the bad boys "get" the girls through deceit.
Maybe girls really do want the nice, stable guys - and the bad boys are expert at acting the part, but more suavely than the real nice guys could, since they're not limited by actually meaning anything they say.
You can download GemStone/S 64 Web Edition for free, and use it free (for commercial use, too!). Only when your database grows beyond about 2 gigs, you need to get a license, which is about $7000 a year. I suppose hiding their Smalltalk heritage by calling their system "Gemstone/S" and being forced to incorporate Ruby in order to make their platform attractive is the ultimate indignity. They haven't incorporated ruby into GemStone/S to make it attractive; they haven't incorporated it into GemStone/S at all.
Maglev is a distinct product.
Don't know the specifics of what they do in Maglev for ruby. Won't you still need to manually write a converter for the data from one format to another? Of course. If, for example, you decide to store birthdates for your customer objects too, you'd need to write a "for" loop that loops over all your customer objects and assigns an initial value to their birthdate attribute.
Because the runtime of an OODB program is measured in years, not hours, the layout of its objects tends to change a lot. And the libraries and runtimes tend to support this, whereas in plain old programs it is not supported.
In GemStone/S, they support this amongs other things by allowing you to have "previous versions" of a Person class. So, to add birthdate to a Person, you'd load a new version of the Person class, loop over all instances of the previous version, frob their data, and continue running.
But the frobbing code would be plain old Smalltalk (or Ruby, in the case of Maglev; or Java, in the case of GemStone/J) code. And how is this better than just up front writing your persistence like we've always been doing? It's better because the object model of persistent data is identical to the object model of plain old data as you've used it in non-persistent code.
Look, here's pseudocode for a non-persisten Person object constructor (I'l spare you the Smalltalk syntax):
createPerson(aName, aSurname)
name
surname
Here's pseudocode for the equivalent code inside a persistent OODB:
createPerson(aName, aSurname)
name
surname
commit()
Compare this to using a relational database in as a backing store for objects intended to be used in an OO program.
Basically, GemStone, a company which has been working on large-scale object-oriented database systems and a Smalltalk implementation (GemStone/S)
You make it sound as if the object oriented database and the Smalltalk implementation are two separate products. Which is a common misconception.To oversimplify, GemStone's Smalltalk VM is an OODB. It adds the following features to the language:
1) Begin transaction, commit transaction, abort transaction.
2) All of your process space, your global variables, your datastructures etc. are persisted. You can switch power-cycle your computer and have the same program running as used to run before.
I'm sure they did the same for Ruby with maglev.
This approach cuts out layers and layers of persistence crap. Bye bye object-relational persistence mapping crud.
Not noticing another car until after initiating the manuever is a symptom that your driving skills aren't quite what you think they are - because you are supposed to check and ensure the lane is clear before starting to change lanes.
Agreed.
However, what I meant to express is the notion of redundancy: good driving skills consist of both checks and balances to prevent you from doing something stupid (i.e. looking in your blind spot before you start a maneuvre) as well as checks to make you aware of doing something stupid before it gets out of hand (i.e. checking your blind spot again as you are busy doing the maneuvre).
It would take a failure at both ends to cause an accident.
That said, I am no expert on aviation and I am agreement that 0 failures in a redundant chain of N checks is much better than xN failures.
Isn't the safety of an activity determined by the number of actual accidents, and not by the number of near-accidents?
:-). However, I often find myself in the situation of almost making an accident.
For example, I've been driving about 14 years without ever causing an accident (or at least, none that I was involved in to know of
Fo example, you start to do a lane change, and suddenly, before you actually enter the other lane, you notice another car there, and abort the lane change. The point of driving experience and skill is it also helps you to cope with the near-accidents that your driving skills failed to prevent.
Surely something similar is relevant to flying too?
Seriously, multilingual domain names are a pain (for the whole humanity). Visiting japan, last year, I saw a lot of servers using japanish simplified language on it. As a foreigner, I hadn't the minimal idea about what the site was (without clicking on ot).
So you say multilingual names are a pain for the whole of humanity - Japanese names are a pain to for the Japanese, Greek names are a pain for the greek, etc. - just because you, as English speaker, can't read them?
I think you can safely assume that when you stumble across a URL in a script or language you can't read, that the entire website it leads to will be unreadable in the same way. And so you don't need to follow the link anyway. Problem solved.
Their characters are not available to me.
Somehow I doubt that someone like you, who doesn't know whether and how "their" characters are actually "available" to you, would really consider it a loss if you can't navigate to a website that is entirely written in "their characters" which you can't read anyway.
All of these "us xenophobic anglophiles are going to be segregated from the foreign-language websites" arguments ring extremely hollow.
If it's going to use characters not present on normal keyboards, what's the point? Why not just use IP addresses?
The point is the same as it is in English, for English speakers: a word is more meaningful than a string of IP numbers.
Really, I promise you, people can read those "weird" other scripts, even if you can't.
Oh, and by the way, the Chinese etc. do have ways to type their own alphabets, more natural than just typing a string of numbers - as you, who can't see any obvious way to do so on your so-called "normal" keyboard, seem to think.
Why would the rock 2.8 km below surface be an "inhospitable environment"?
Sure, its inhospitable to badgers and ferns and algea and all kinds of surface life we are already familiar with.
But to geobacteria and friends it might be a quite cozy environment. No seasons to worry about, no hurricanes, no day/night fluctuations, just a nice constant temperature and chemical gradient from the deeper to the surface rock.
http://www.neatpatch.com/ is a company that makes a product that will help make service loops easier to manage in many situations.
Your argument seems to be "the main article is trash because George Monbiot wrote some trash elsewhere". Yet you offer no proof that what he wrote elsewhere is trash, other than an out-of-context quote and a non-sequitur about life expectancy.
Just after the paragraph you quote, George Monbiot writes:
"This is not to suggest that poverty causes happiness. In southern Ethiopia people desperately want better healthcare, better education, better housing and sanitation, not to mention smart clothes, motorbikes, refrigerators and radios. But while poverty does not cause happiness, there appears to be some evidence that wealth causes misery."
So:
1) His argument is a heck of a lot more subtle than your straw-man version of it,
2) What the heck does average life expectancy have to do with his argument?
3) What exactly is your point?
But toxoplasmosa gondii is able to hide from the immune system, usually in cysts in the muscles or the brain. So the number of people with antibodies to it is roughly the number of people who have it hidden away in their bodies.
Apparently toxoplasmosa is only a danger for pregnant women if they get their *first* ever infection while pregnant, during the last trimester.
And you can get it from unwashed veggies and undercooked meat (see the first paragraph about toxoplasmosa hiding away in muscle).
But as head of a religious studies department, attacking a given faith is just unprofessional.
Why? Are heads of philosophy departments also forbidden to make disparaging remarks about Existensialism, or Post-Modernism?
And why are Christians allowed to say that Hindus worship demons, or that Atheists have no morality and only reject God so they can fornicate as much they like, or that Catholics are the spawn of the Anti-Christ without nearly as much of an uproar?
Remember, he made his remarks in the chatgroup of an areligious society on campus. Christians make some pretty harsh remarks in the privacy of their Bible-study groups, too.
You install an in-development package from the experimental Sid distribution - and when it fails say Linux is not ready for the Desktop?
By that argument, Windows XP is not ready for the desktop either, because Longhorn build nr. 1823 b0rked some computer somewhere.