Basically, what you are suggesting is that vaccinations cause autoimmune. Yet, logically, that makes little sense.
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting. Current vaccines do not (or at least are not known to) cause autoimmune disorders, although vaccinations can trigger preexisting autoimmune conditions.
As far as I'm aware, nobody knows exactly what actually causes autoimmune conditions to begin with, beyond that the immune system somehow gets confused about what it should attack. My best guess is that viruses, because they often end up getting their DNA mixed up with DNA from the host, can sometimes end up causing a few cells to produce substances (e.g. proteins) that contain a mixture of the viral coat and some aspect of the host's cells, and that in some rare cases, this causes the immune system to recognize those two things as being related, and starts attacking the host organism inadvertently.
This is, incidentally, exactly how many bacterial vaccines work; they combine some portion of the bacterium's structure with something that the immune system already knows how to attack. I could easily imagine a scenario where a batch of the bacteria genetically engineered to produce those substances gets inadvertently contaminated via viral DNA transfer, resulting in batches of the vaccine that trigger autoimmune conditions, either in a few unlucky individuals, or worse, en masse.
But at least at a conceptual level, vaccines train your immune system to attack certain things, and as your immune system learns what to attack, its reactions to new threats does decrease somewhat. That's why kids who are exposed to more germs by age 1 are less likely to develop allergies later in life. It is unclear to what extent this effect could result in something that you might otherwise have fought off from becoming deadly, but at the very least, it is sufficient reason to approach expansion of vaccination in new areas with some degree of caution, as over-vaccination might turn out to be just as harmful as prophylactic antibiotic use in the long run.
And no, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I've read a lot on the subject over the years.
I'm perhaps a bit younger, since I received several actual anti-bacterial vaccines as a child. You can actually make vaccines using either attenuated live (e.g. tuberculosis, typhoid) or killed (older typhoid, pertussis) bacteria. As you mention, you can also make vaccines to the toxins, although that might be less acceptable for livestock due to the risk of the bacteria being transmitted to a person who isn't vaccinated.
Oh, yeah. I guess that's true, I did get the DPT vaccination. I guess I'm remembering wrong, and they just said that some types of bacteria had properties that made it impractical to vaccinate them, and I mentally incorporated that as "all". *shrugs*
Our capabilities in biology really have advanced a lot in the last little while. It may not have been practical to use anti-bacterial livestock vaccination in the past, but it might be now, if the externalities of antibiotics were accounted.
A good start would be a complete ban on prophylactic use of antibiotics in livestock. Using antibiotics to keep animals in unsafe living conditions from getting sick is a serious abuse of antibiotics. Unfortunately, every time it has come up in Congress (S.621, H.R.1587), it has never made it to a vote. Our government clearly doesn't have the right priorities.
Second the cost is prohibitive. Most mechanics will tell you that on an electric car expect to replace the batteries every 8-10 years and pay 8-10k for them. Add the fact that they cost 5-10k more than a comparable petrol vehicle in the same class. This all adds to the depreciation even if you don't drive it for 5 years.
Most mechanics will also tell you that you'll need a new transmission, engine, and transfer case every ten or fifteen years, and you'll pay $10k for that. Electric motors, barring abuse, should last nearly forever.
Also, electric cars don't have all those extra air quality sensors (O2 sensor, NOX sensor, etc.) that frequently fail, costing hundreds of dollars each time. And they don't have gas hoses that dry rot. And they don't have oil that has to be changed a couple of times per year, or transmission fluid that has to be periodically changed, or coolant that has to be flushed. These things add up.
Nearly all microbes adapt to antibiotics. The reason is that after enough usage 1 of them will develop a resistance to the antibiotic. Then the resistance is normally passed around to others, typically via plasmid. So, just for fun, assume that it takes on average 1T instances of being exposed prior to resistance. If you have stimulated the body to fight the AMR, then we do not have to use antibiotic except for extreme cases.
Well, maybe. Or you may have stimulated the body so much that it doesn't respond to anything as aggressively as it should, and the person ends up not being able to fight off even the less extreme stuff, or worse, responds too often and starts attacking the person's own cells (autoimmune disorders). The more things you vaccinate against, the greater that risk.
I'm absolutely in favor of vaccinating for deadly viral diseases that are highly contagious, but the moment you start to demand mass immunization for every potentially dangerous bacterium that exists in an antibiotic-resistant flavor, many of which don't spread all that easily to healthy individuals, you've crossed the line into large-scale experiment territory, and mandating that everyone be part of the experimental group in such an experiment would be bad at so many levels.
The right place to start is *not* mass vaccination, but rather *targeted* vaccination of populations that are more at risk, e.g. pneumonia and c. diff immunization for people going into nursing homes (or who work in nursing homes). The former is already happening; the latter is a year out or so. If those go well, then *maybe* we can start *slowly* expanding coverage and see what happens, but even then, it should be part of a broader, controlled study.
I wonder how much of that is just because antibiotics are more convenient. There wasn't much progress on an ebola vaccine either, until a whole bunch of people got it.
Back when I was a kid, they taught us that vaccines against bacteria were impossible. It isn't a convenience thing; bacterial vaccines are a lot harder to develop. You can't just use a weakened or inactivated bacteria like you can for viruses, because the immune system won't ever react to it at all without the presence of some other threat. So instead, vaccines against bacteria involve either:
Creating a modified version of the toxin that the bacteria produce that does not harm people as much, but that is close enough to trigger an immune response to the actual toxin whenever bacteria that produce that toxin appear, or
Creating a substance that combines something that the human immune system already attacks with the polysaccharide coat of the bacterium so that the immune system will start to identify that coat as a threat as well.
Either approach is considerably harder than weakening or inactivating a virus, AFAIK.
And that fee covers everything from credit card processing to hosting and bandwidth, which for all of the free app downloads that Spotify enjoys is a non-negligible amount of money.
Actually, it is a negligible amount of money. Credit card processing fees for a company that size are probably a quarter of a percent plus a flat fee of ten cents, or about thirteen cents total per month, which is a full three bucks less than what Apple takes in the first year, and a buck and a half less thereafter. Even for tiny companies with a lot of chargebacks, it won't be more than a couple of percent or so.
There's no way in you-know-where that Spotify uses anywhere near three dollars' worth of bandwidth every month. Right now, a quick Google search for bulk bandwidth comes up with a price of $1300 for a month of 10 gigabit-per-second service. Three dollars, then, would be 23 megabit-per-second usage continuously. For Spotify to break even, they would literally have to ship a new version of their app to each user several times per minute. Heck, even if Netflix streamed 4K video content through Apple's servers, it still wouldn't use three dollars' worth of data per customer.
No, Apple's fees are utterly extortionate, pure and simple. But they can get away with it (for now) because web apps are basically unusable on iOS, and companies that want to make apps available on their platform have no alternative but to distribute them through Apple's store. Apple's recent actions to kill the signing certificates of companies that distributed apps outside the iOS App Store only further serves to drive that point home, just in case anyone might otherwise have considered enterprise distribution as a possible alternative.
So at least prima facie, it looks like Apple is illegally using their position running the app store to give their own products in an unrelated area (music) an unfair competitive advantage, which is a flagrant violation of antitrust laws. And I predict they will repeat these same violations with TV content soon enough.
That said, I don't think breaking Apple up is the right solution, though I would not discount the possibility. The right fix is to compel Apple to stop violating the law and fine them a large enough sum of money that it exceeds the benefit they illegally reap from violating the law — say 15% of all App Store revenue every month until they fix the problem.
IMO, there are only three ways Apple can avoid violating the law here:
Drop the no-competing-payment-systems rule for apps that compete with their own
Drop the no-competing-app-stores rule
Allow single-app distribution direct from vendors' websites similar to the way Developer ID certs work on the Mac
The last one is the best choice, because it benefits everyone equally, allows free software to simply distribute itself directly without Apple having to pay for it (thus allowing Apple to lower their fees considerably), and doesn't create confusing chaos involving multiple app stores, but even the first one, under supervision of a federal antitrust regulator, would also be acceptable. Either way, I have no faith in Apple doing the right thing without legal action, and that makes me sad.
And yes, I've been saying this for years now. It's sad that it took until this year for anybody in the federal government to start paying attention, but now that they are, I suspect Apple's tying agreements and other dubious behavior will receive some much-needed scrutiny in the near future.
Remember, in this world, the ONLY person you can trust 101% implicitly...is YOU.
I don't trust myself to take pictures of me naked, either. That would require trusting my devices. The assumption is that those photos are usually obtained because of a breakup and the guy being a complete a**hole, but that isn't guaranteed to be the case. Devices and accounts get compromised all the time. If images exist on your phone, they can be stolen. The only way to be 100% safe is to ensure that the images do not exist in the first place.
So speaking of creepy, who here wants to connect a laptop to a crude AM radio transmitter, attach a few solar panels, stick it in the middle of Siberia somewhere, and give the intelligence community fits trying to find the pattern?
I'm guessing his significant other at some point said, "If you don't give up that silly music hobby, you'll never hear the end of it," and he decided to prove the point.
Except that it has been demonstrated that DNA can be damaged by resonance. And that analysis involved MRI systems, which operate way down in the MF, HF, and VHF bands.
Think about it for a minute. What would it be like if none of that were valid? Well, wind at 10mph doesn't kill you, and wind at 12mph doesn't kill you; but what about 11.7793mph? Only one way to find out!
For a counterargument, being hit by a bullet at 1 MPH doesn't ever kill you, because it bounces off your skin. But at the right angle, being hit by a bullet at a high enough speed doesn't kill you because it makes a hole straight through the bone on either side of your body, but at a lower speed, it bounces off your rib cage and does more damage that kills you.
In other words: we've already done testing. We even did testing on rats with cell phone radiation cranked up to ridiculous levels--which, on one hand, did cause some problems; but on the other, they used Sprague-Dawley rats for lifetime toxicity studies, which is bad methodology. I'm not surprised ridiculously-high-powered radiation at any frequency is harmful: you wouldn't stick your face in a microwave oven, unless you were completely stupid.
Those studies were on cell phones in the sub-2GHz band. They tell us very little about the effect signals in the 28 GHz or 39 GHz band. Using them as a reference is like saying "This car didn't kill me when it hit me at 5 MPH, so it won't kill me at 50 MPH.":-)
The dead giveaway that all this is fake news is that the quantum computer wasn't moving. Everyone knows that it has to be moving at precisely 88 miles per hour.
It's also worth noting that, at least if the folks on PPRuNe are correct, and assuming I'm understanding correctly, even though the aircraft itself has two AOA sensors, the MCAS system only uses one of them, which is to say that if they disagree, it has no idea.
Worse, from what I've read, this aircraft in its default configuration lacks the extra AoA gauges to independently show the output of the two AoA sensors to tell you that the MCAS system is getting crap data, instead providing only an AoA Disagree light. And apparently, a few don't even have that (WTF?).
It sounds to me like there are multiple aspects of the way the MCAS system was designed that are seriously flawed, any one of which should have resulted in it not being certified to fly. But the most serious of those, assuming I understand correctly, is that this system effectively has no redundancy at all, yet is in a position to seriously wreck the airworthiness of the aircraft.
The sad thing is that both AF447 and these two crashes could probably have been prevented by requiring more sensor redundancy and requiring that the redundant parts be made by at least two (or, ideally, three) different manufacturers, so that simultaneous failures caused by design flaws won't result in failure multiple sensors simultaneously.
Dual systems are standard on aircraft which detect AOA (not all do). It should be obvious to anyone but you that a dual system is redundant, but that the redundancy cannot be automated. If one sensor is giving bad data there's no way of automatically detecting which one is right and which one is wrong. Therefore the computer has to either make a best-guess, or it has to default to a single channel. This, again, is the same on all aircraft which have AOA sensors.
I would argue that either the pilot can recognize whether the plane is about to stall and ignore the AOA sensor entirely, in which case both sensors are non-essential, or the pilot can't, in which case the pilot also can't reliably determine which sensor is wrong. More importantly, if the pilot can, then the avionics systems should be able to do so as well. And if not, then that single backup is only useful when the sensor fails outright (e.g. no output, wiring fault, etc.).
And in this case, because the plane makes critical decisions that impact the airworthiness of the aircraft in response to that data and apparently cannot determine which AOA sensor is lying, having only two AOA sensors just means that the risk of the entire system failing because of incorrect data is twice as high as if it had only one AOA sensor. Assuming it is practical to fly the plane with both stall warnings and MCAS disabled, then everyone would arguably be better off if the aircraft had only a single AOA sensor, statistically speaking. If that were the case, we'd have probably had only one crash in the first two years, instead of two (not that such numbers would be good, mind you, just less appalling).
IMO, having too little redundancy can actually be worse than not having any at all. It seems likely that this aircraft, as designed, cannot be made safe unless Boeing adds either a second pair of independent AOA sensors or a couple of Pitot tubes as backups for resolving disagreements. Two sensors clearly isn't enough, given their apparent propensity for failure at low altitudes.
Pedantically, yes, insofar as molecular motion is heat.:-)
The volume of particle exposure becomes the defining characteristic. Ionizing radiation can cause damage by individual particles (a collision can remove an electron from a molecule, thus breaking a molecular bond), while non-ionizing radiation can cause warming and thus can cause burns via a large volume of particles.
And at the resonant frequencies of the various physical structures, or at sufficiently close subharmonics thereof, at a microscopic level, non-ionizing radiation can also cause enough flexing and stretching to break the covalent bonds that hold together strands of DNA. That was what the study on THz EM concluded. You don't have to break ionic bonds to cause problems. You just have to break physical structures that happen to resonate strongly at those frequencies—basically, the DNA equivalent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
The question then becomes one of what "sufficiently close" means, what the relative amount of risk is at a given frequency, whether there are specific frequencies that, if avoided, eliminate the risk, etc.
The risk of microwave exposure is similar to the risk of getting near a hot object. We can build microwave generators to generate huge amounts of power in a narrow spectrum, so the effect is a bit more spectacular than looking inside your oven: we can basically divert the output of a blowtorch straight into your face. You'd notice.
The problem is that the millimeter wave band extends right up to the bottom edge of the submillimeter-wave band, which is where DNA damage is known to occur because of resonance. It seems fairly unlikely that the band that they currently plan to use (sub-86 GHz) will cause harm, but the closer we get towards 300 GHz (and certainly beyond that), the more we should be cautious. At each step along the way, it stands to reason that there should be at least some safety testing, because we have never used these portions of the EM spectrum before in any meaningful way.
If someone had said thirty years ago that the THz band could be dangerous, we would have likely laughed at them, but they would have been right. These folks don't want a ban. They just want testing. That doesn't sound so unreasonable when talking about use of a whole new frequency band, human exposure to which has historically been limited to cosmic background radiation.
Look at the bars on your phone. Those bars translate into tiny fractions [powerfulsignal.com] of a mW.
Not true. A single bar translates to a fraction of a mW, but four bars can be anywhere from there up to a few hundred watts, depending on how close you are to the tower and how large a radius the tower is covering.
The inverse square law pretty much guarantees that people will be safe from the towers.
Also not true. With 5G service, towers are sprinkled in population centers. Millimeter wave EM won't penetrate buildings very well, and doesn't follow the curvature of the earth very well, so these towers are always close to from the devices they serve, where close is measured in hundreds of feet, not miles.
There is 0 reason to ban the equipment from being put in place.
At this point, that's pretty much pure speculation, because AFAIK no rigorous studies of millimeter-wave radiation in these frequency bands have been done. Your argument amounts to "We don't know it is unsafe, so we have to assume that it is safe," whereas most people tend to prefer "We have no evidence that it is safe, so we have to assume that it is unsafe."
What? You didn't know? Light and EM are the same thing. They're both radio waves. Your wifi antenna does the same thing as a light bulb; so does an X-ray machine.
Of course I know this. Everyone who didn't sleep through high school science knows this. None of what you said contradicts any of what I said. Those mechanical effects have been proven to affect DNA, i.e. ionization is not the only risk.
It's the same frequencies as 4G LTE, plus millimeter wave, which is also non-ionizing.
Ionizing versus non-ionizing kind of misses the point; it promotes the false assumption that ionization damage is the only form of DNA damage that can potentially cause cancer.
Sub-millimeter-wave radiation has been proven, under certain circumstances, to be able to break the chemical bonds that hold DNA together. Most of the time, this has no effect on the host organism, because your body is designed to repair such minor damage, but that doesn't mean it will always do so correctly. In terms of your risk, it is probably very low, but in aggregate across billions of people, even very small probabilities can add up to real harm.
There's a pretty decent chance that Portland's concerns are overblown, and that millimeter-wave radiation is still within the frequency range that is harmless. That said, they are still entirely within their rights to demand a study to prove that the technology is safe before it gets deployed in their community. We know that above a certain frequency, EM can be harmful (ionizing), and we know that way, way below that threshold, it isn't (microwave and below), but there's a huge frequency range in between for which we have little to no data, and this new technology is starting to encroach on that range. Better to be safe than sorry.
So every time anyone loses an hour or gains an hour of sleep and it causes serious health problems, it would be an easily proveable hypothesis, and a theory acceptable to near certainty.
In fact, it is an easily provable hypothesis, and it is thoroughly proven. We do the same experiment every year, and every year, we see the same statistically significant increase in deaths.
Does this statistically significant increase include those who get the same amount of sleep? Are their no effects related to the time of year?
You're assuming that it is generally possible to get the same amount of sleep when your alarm clock wakes you up an hour earlier than usual. It is just barely possible, if you plan very carefully, to start slipping your schedule earlier starting a few days before, to minimize the impact, but most people don't even try, because it is too much of a pain in the backside. So the net effect is that nearly everyone gets an hour less sleep.
And no, this has nothing to do with the time of year. The statistically significant increase is relative to the week before and the week after. There is literally a huge single-day spike in traffic accidents on the Monday after the time change, compared with every other day of the year.
Do our bodies simply know that the standard time is the one true time, that is dangerous to alter lest we die?
Our bodies do have a preference for something vaguely resembling sleeping during the dark hours and being awake during the light hours, but they tolerate a lot. What they don't particularly like is suddenly being forced to get up an hour earlier. It is roughly equivalent to the entire country being jet-lagged on the same day.
Worse, there's a network effect that compounds the problem. Most of the time, car accidents involve more than one vehicle. If one driver is tired, he or she might make a mistake, but when that other person is also tired, he or she is less likely to react to that mistake in a way that prevents the accident.
Here's a little thing that might need explained. According to your apparent sources, the heart attack rate drops when moving back to standard time from Daylight savings time. What causes this? 24 percent increase in spring, and a 21 percent drop in the fall. https://www.sciencealert.com/d...
People often get more sleep on one end, and less sleep on the other end. I would think the difference would be obvious.
I don't necessarily dispute the DST as a killer numbers. But here's the issue. We get to see many accusations. https://fee.org/articles/dayli... REad it. Here the poor fellow is whining about being groggy because of the change in teh fall. Oddly, that's when WebMD says that people have less health problems - when moving back.
On one end, pretty much everybody gets less sleep. On the other end, it varies from person to person. In theory, you should get more sleep, but in practice, ever since they changed the date when the DST change occurs, my body clock starts shifting at or around the earlier date, and I actually start getting less sleep for the week prior to the time change, and only then get a full night's sleep. It is really quite bizarre. But this learned behavior likely explains why the momentary drop in the week after the shift to standard time is less than the momentary spike in the week after the shift to DST.
I never notice the DST shift, but as a frewuent traveler, going between the east and west coast can be a real issue. In fact, if the DST killer is real, flying back anf forth across several time zones should kill people easily. I feel like crap when I'm jet lagged, and quite the same with
The best speculation I've heard about the Lion Air crash was that there was a problem with one of the AOA sensors. There are two such sensors - one on both side of the 737 Max.
One problem is that, if I understand correctly, not all of the 737 aircraft have even so much as an indicator light when the two AOA sensors disagree. At least one airliner (Southwest) insisted on an explicit AOA indicator so you can see both AOA sensors' data and see how much they disagree. But if you don't have that and don't have the indicator light, all you know is that the aircraft keeps trimming the nose down every few seconds. One might still arguably call it pilot error to not recognize the symptoms, but it starts to really blur the lines at that point.
Okay lets suppose that some or all of the stall sensors are malfunctioning. There's another sensor that the computer can look at and that's the altitude. If the ALTITUDE is rapidly falling of course the plane might think, see I was right about this stall! But there's one more thing. Namely if the pilots pulled the stick back and the altitude stops falling the plane should now have enough information to figure out that pushing the stick forward is not the right thing to do.
No, you're trying to grossly oversimplify the problem, and it's causing you to say things that are silly.
Not sure what's silly about that. If the computer says you're beyond the maximum AOA, then pushing the nose up should always cause the aircraft to lose altitude. If a nose up action results in an altitude increase and the sensors still say that the aircraft is beyond the maximum AOA, then the sensors have to be wrong, period, unless I'm missing something about the physics.
There is, of course, a region in which the avionics system would think you're *near* the maximum AOA and a nose-up maneuver would still increase your lift, albeit less than normal. So a nose-up maneuver causing increased altitude during a stall indication isn't *always* an indication that the data is crap, but it certainly could be, if the AOA sensor data is far enough off from reality.
Also, I don't understand why the computers in these planes don't take advantage of all the other sensor data that is at their disposal. The 737 has both pitch/roll inclinometers, GPS, airspeed indicators, and altimeters. With that data, it should be possible to crudely estimate the AOA. The change in velocity relative to the ground is acceleration, which you subtract from the inclinometer data to get your actual angle relative to the earth. Your air speed relative to ground speed gives you some crude indication of how far off your AOA is likely to be (more wind = larger margin of error). And you can also detect an updraft or downdraft with the altimeter to further determine the amount of bias.
If the combination of those pieces of data comes up with an AOA estimate that is radically different from the AOA sensors, then either your inclinometer is stuck, your airspeed indicator is malfunctioning, the GPS ground speed estimate is wrong, or the AOA sensors are lying. And clearly, the AOA data should take priority by default, because it is likely to be the most accurate. But if the numbers are way off for an extended period of time, or if they get farther and farther apart while the pilot is deliberately fighting against the plane's MCAS-derived trim adjustment, that's probably the point where the avionics system should throw up its hands, tell the pilot that it has no idea what is going on, and disable MCAS, or at least clearly alert the pilot that the stall indicator is unreliable and recommend that the pilot override the MCAS-derived trim.
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Avoid the processed crap, get some exercise...that's pretty much the best you can do.
All things in moderation, except moderation, And maybe crack.
That's why in France, they only eat one egg for breakfast. Over there, everybody knows that one egg is un oeuf.
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting. Current vaccines do not (or at least are not known to) cause autoimmune disorders, although vaccinations can trigger preexisting autoimmune conditions.
As far as I'm aware, nobody knows exactly what actually causes autoimmune conditions to begin with, beyond that the immune system somehow gets confused about what it should attack. My best guess is that viruses, because they often end up getting their DNA mixed up with DNA from the host, can sometimes end up causing a few cells to produce substances (e.g. proteins) that contain a mixture of the viral coat and some aspect of the host's cells, and that in some rare cases, this causes the immune system to recognize those two things as being related, and starts attacking the host organism inadvertently.
This is, incidentally, exactly how many bacterial vaccines work; they combine some portion of the bacterium's structure with something that the immune system already knows how to attack. I could easily imagine a scenario where a batch of the bacteria genetically engineered to produce those substances gets inadvertently contaminated via viral DNA transfer, resulting in batches of the vaccine that trigger autoimmune conditions, either in a few unlucky individuals, or worse, en masse.
But the bigger risk, IMO, is the possibility that the vaccine itself could make a superbug more likely. Researchers in Canada and Hong Kong during the 2009–2010 flu season (H1N1) discovered that people who got the 2008 flu shot (with H1N1 coverage) had twice the risk of getting the strain of H1N1 that circulated in the 2009–2010 season as unvaccinated people. Of course, another study in 2017 showed the exact opposite effect, so there are a lot of giant question marks here.
But at least at a conceptual level, vaccines train your immune system to attack certain things, and as your immune system learns what to attack, its reactions to new threats does decrease somewhat. That's why kids who are exposed to more germs by age 1 are less likely to develop allergies later in life. It is unclear to what extent this effect could result in something that you might otherwise have fought off from becoming deadly, but at the very least, it is sufficient reason to approach expansion of vaccination in new areas with some degree of caution, as over-vaccination might turn out to be just as harmful as prophylactic antibiotic use in the long run.
And no, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I've read a lot on the subject over the years.
Oh, yeah. I guess that's true, I did get the DPT vaccination. I guess I'm remembering wrong, and they just said that some types of bacteria had properties that made it impractical to vaccinate them, and I mentally incorporated that as "all". *shrugs*
A good start would be a complete ban on prophylactic use of antibiotics in livestock. Using antibiotics to keep animals in unsafe living conditions from getting sick is a serious abuse of antibiotics. Unfortunately, every time it has come up in Congress (S.621, H.R.1587), it has never made it to a vote. Our government clearly doesn't have the right priorities.
Most mechanics will also tell you that you'll need a new transmission, engine, and transfer case every ten or fifteen years, and you'll pay $10k for that. Electric motors, barring abuse, should last nearly forever.
Also, electric cars don't have all those extra air quality sensors (O2 sensor, NOX sensor, etc.) that frequently fail, costing hundreds of dollars each time. And they don't have gas hoses that dry rot. And they don't have oil that has to be changed a couple of times per year, or transmission fluid that has to be periodically changed, or coolant that has to be flushed. These things add up.
Nearly all microbes adapt to antibiotics. The reason is that after enough usage 1 of them will develop a resistance to the antibiotic. Then the resistance is normally passed around to others, typically via plasmid. So, just for fun, assume that it takes on average 1T instances of being exposed prior to resistance. If you have stimulated the body to fight the AMR, then we do not have to use antibiotic except for extreme cases.
Well, maybe. Or you may have stimulated the body so much that it doesn't respond to anything as aggressively as it should, and the person ends up not being able to fight off even the less extreme stuff, or worse, responds too often and starts attacking the person's own cells (autoimmune disorders). The more things you vaccinate against, the greater that risk.
I'm absolutely in favor of vaccinating for deadly viral diseases that are highly contagious, but the moment you start to demand mass immunization for every potentially dangerous bacterium that exists in an antibiotic-resistant flavor, many of which don't spread all that easily to healthy individuals, you've crossed the line into large-scale experiment territory, and mandating that everyone be part of the experimental group in such an experiment would be bad at so many levels.
The right place to start is *not* mass vaccination, but rather *targeted* vaccination of populations that are more at risk, e.g. pneumonia and c. diff immunization for people going into nursing homes (or who work in nursing homes). The former is already happening; the latter is a year out or so. If those go well, then *maybe* we can start *slowly* expanding coverage and see what happens, but even then, it should be part of a broader, controlled study.
Back when I was a kid, they taught us that vaccines against bacteria were impossible. It isn't a convenience thing; bacterial vaccines are a lot harder to develop. You can't just use a weakened or inactivated bacteria like you can for viruses, because the immune system won't ever react to it at all without the presence of some other threat. So instead, vaccines against bacteria involve either:
Either approach is considerably harder than weakening or inactivating a virus, AFAIK.
As long as you don't get soil-borne anthrax.
From the A6 onwards, Apple's ARM cores are designed by Apple, not off-the shelf cores like Cortex.
Yeah, I know. But then you weakened your stance to include trusting yourself. :-D
Actually, it is a negligible amount of money. Credit card processing fees for a company that size are probably a quarter of a percent plus a flat fee of ten cents, or about thirteen cents total per month, which is a full three bucks less than what Apple takes in the first year, and a buck and a half less thereafter. Even for tiny companies with a lot of chargebacks, it won't be more than a couple of percent or so.
There's no way in you-know-where that Spotify uses anywhere near three dollars' worth of bandwidth every month. Right now, a quick Google search for bulk bandwidth comes up with a price of $1300 for a month of 10 gigabit-per-second service. Three dollars, then, would be 23 megabit-per-second usage continuously. For Spotify to break even, they would literally have to ship a new version of their app to each user several times per minute. Heck, even if Netflix streamed 4K video content through Apple's servers, it still wouldn't use three dollars' worth of data per customer.
No, Apple's fees are utterly extortionate, pure and simple. But they can get away with it (for now) because web apps are basically unusable on iOS, and companies that want to make apps available on their platform have no alternative but to distribute them through Apple's store. Apple's recent actions to kill the signing certificates of companies that distributed apps outside the iOS App Store only further serves to drive that point home, just in case anyone might otherwise have considered enterprise distribution as a possible alternative.
So at least prima facie, it looks like Apple is illegally using their position running the app store to give their own products in an unrelated area (music) an unfair competitive advantage, which is a flagrant violation of antitrust laws. And I predict they will repeat these same violations with TV content soon enough.
That said, I don't think breaking Apple up is the right solution, though I would not discount the possibility. The right fix is to compel Apple to stop violating the law and fine them a large enough sum of money that it exceeds the benefit they illegally reap from violating the law — say 15% of all App Store revenue every month until they fix the problem.
IMO, there are only three ways Apple can avoid violating the law here:
The last one is the best choice, because it benefits everyone equally, allows free software to simply distribute itself directly without Apple having to pay for it (thus allowing Apple to lower their fees considerably), and doesn't create confusing chaos involving multiple app stores, but even the first one, under supervision of a federal antitrust regulator, would also be acceptable. Either way, I have no faith in Apple doing the right thing without legal action, and that makes me sad.
And yes, I've been saying this for years now. It's sad that it took until this year for anybody in the federal government to start paying attention, but now that they are, I suspect Apple's tying agreements and other dubious behavior will receive some much-needed scrutiny in the near future.
I don't trust myself to take pictures of me naked, either. That would require trusting my devices. The assumption is that those photos are usually obtained because of a breakup and the guy being a complete a**hole, but that isn't guaranteed to be the case. Devices and accounts get compromised all the time. If images exist on your phone, they can be stolen. The only way to be 100% safe is to ensure that the images do not exist in the first place.
So speaking of creepy, who here wants to connect a laptop to a crude AM radio transmitter, attach a few solar panels, stick it in the middle of Siberia somewhere, and give the intelligence community fits trying to find the pattern?
I'm guessing his significant other at some point said, "If you don't give up that silly music hobby, you'll never hear the end of it," and he decided to prove the point.
Except that it has been demonstrated that DNA can be damaged by resonance. And that analysis involved MRI systems, which operate way down in the MF, HF, and VHF bands.
For a counterargument, being hit by a bullet at 1 MPH doesn't ever kill you, because it bounces off your skin. But at the right angle, being hit by a bullet at a high enough speed doesn't kill you because it makes a hole straight through the bone on either side of your body, but at a lower speed, it bounces off your rib cage and does more damage that kills you.
And for wind resonance on structures, higher speeds may actually result in less resonance than lower wind speeds.
Those studies were on cell phones in the sub-2GHz band. They tell us very little about the effect signals in the 28 GHz or 39 GHz band. Using them as a reference is like saying "This car didn't kill me when it hit me at 5 MPH, so it won't kill me at 50 MPH." :-)
The dead giveaway that all this is fake news is that the quantum computer wasn't moving. Everyone knows that it has to be moving at precisely 88 miles per hour.
It's also worth noting that, at least if the folks on PPRuNe are correct, and assuming I'm understanding correctly, even though the aircraft itself has two AOA sensors, the MCAS system only uses one of them, which is to say that if they disagree, it has no idea.
Worse, from what I've read, this aircraft in its default configuration lacks the extra AoA gauges to independently show the output of the two AoA sensors to tell you that the MCAS system is getting crap data, instead providing only an AoA Disagree light. And apparently, a few don't even have that (WTF?).
It sounds to me like there are multiple aspects of the way the MCAS system was designed that are seriously flawed, any one of which should have resulted in it not being certified to fly. But the most serious of those, assuming I understand correctly, is that this system effectively has no redundancy at all, yet is in a position to seriously wreck the airworthiness of the aircraft.
The sad thing is that both AF447 and these two crashes could probably have been prevented by requiring more sensor redundancy and requiring that the redundant parts be made by at least two (or, ideally, three) different manufacturers, so that simultaneous failures caused by design flaws won't result in failure multiple sensors simultaneously.
I would argue that either the pilot can recognize whether the plane is about to stall and ignore the AOA sensor entirely, in which case both sensors are non-essential, or the pilot can't, in which case the pilot also can't reliably determine which sensor is wrong. More importantly, if the pilot can, then the avionics systems should be able to do so as well. And if not, then that single backup is only useful when the sensor fails outright (e.g. no output, wiring fault, etc.).
And in this case, because the plane makes critical decisions that impact the airworthiness of the aircraft in response to that data and apparently cannot determine which AOA sensor is lying, having only two AOA sensors just means that the risk of the entire system failing because of incorrect data is twice as high as if it had only one AOA sensor. Assuming it is practical to fly the plane with both stall warnings and MCAS disabled, then everyone would arguably be better off if the aircraft had only a single AOA sensor, statistically speaking. If that were the case, we'd have probably had only one crash in the first two years, instead of two (not that such numbers would be good, mind you, just less appalling).
IMO, having too little redundancy can actually be worse than not having any at all. It seems likely that this aircraft, as designed, cannot be made safe unless Boeing adds either a second pair of independent AOA sensors or a couple of Pitot tubes as backups for resolving disagreements. Two sensors clearly isn't enough, given their apparent propensity for failure at low altitudes.
Pedantically, yes, insofar as molecular motion is heat. :-)
And at the resonant frequencies of the various physical structures, or at sufficiently close subharmonics thereof, at a microscopic level, non-ionizing radiation can also cause enough flexing and stretching to break the covalent bonds that hold together strands of DNA. That was what the study on THz EM concluded. You don't have to break ionic bonds to cause problems. You just have to break physical structures that happen to resonate strongly at those frequencies—basically, the DNA equivalent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
The question then becomes one of what "sufficiently close" means, what the relative amount of risk is at a given frequency, whether there are specific frequencies that, if avoided, eliminate the risk, etc.
The problem is that the millimeter wave band extends right up to the bottom edge of the submillimeter-wave band, which is where DNA damage is known to occur because of resonance. It seems fairly unlikely that the band that they currently plan to use (sub-86 GHz) will cause harm, but the closer we get towards 300 GHz (and certainly beyond that), the more we should be cautious. At each step along the way, it stands to reason that there should be at least some safety testing, because we have never used these portions of the EM spectrum before in any meaningful way.
If someone had said thirty years ago that the THz band could be dangerous, we would have likely laughed at them, but they would have been right. These folks don't want a ban. They just want testing. That doesn't sound so unreasonable when talking about use of a whole new frequency band, human exposure to which has historically been limited to cosmic background radiation.
Not true. A single bar translates to a fraction of a mW, but four bars can be anywhere from there up to a few hundred watts, depending on how close you are to the tower and how large a radius the tower is covering.
Also not true. With 5G service, towers are sprinkled in population centers. Millimeter wave EM won't penetrate buildings very well, and doesn't follow the curvature of the earth very well, so these towers are always close to from the devices they serve, where close is measured in hundreds of feet, not miles.
At this point, that's pretty much pure speculation, because AFAIK no rigorous studies of millimeter-wave radiation in these frequency bands have been done. Your argument amounts to "We don't know it is unsafe, so we have to assume that it is safe," whereas most people tend to prefer "We have no evidence that it is safe, so we have to assume that it is unsafe."
Of course I know this. Everyone who didn't sleep through high school science knows this. None of what you said contradicts any of what I said. Those mechanical effects have been proven to affect DNA, i.e. ionization is not the only risk.
Ionizing versus non-ionizing kind of misses the point; it promotes the false assumption that ionization damage is the only form of DNA damage that can potentially cause cancer.
Sub-millimeter-wave radiation has been proven, under certain circumstances, to be able to break the chemical bonds that hold DNA together. Most of the time, this has no effect on the host organism, because your body is designed to repair such minor damage, but that doesn't mean it will always do so correctly. In terms of your risk, it is probably very low, but in aggregate across billions of people, even very small probabilities can add up to real harm.
There's a pretty decent chance that Portland's concerns are overblown, and that millimeter-wave radiation is still within the frequency range that is harmless. That said, they are still entirely within their rights to demand a study to prove that the technology is safe before it gets deployed in their community. We know that above a certain frequency, EM can be harmful (ionizing), and we know that way, way below that threshold, it isn't (microwave and below), but there's a huge frequency range in between for which we have little to no data, and this new technology is starting to encroach on that range. Better to be safe than sorry.
In fact, it is an easily provable hypothesis, and it is thoroughly proven. We do the same experiment every year, and every year, we see the same statistically significant increase in deaths.
Does this statistically significant increase include those who get the same amount of sleep? Are their no effects related to the time of year?
You're assuming that it is generally possible to get the same amount of sleep when your alarm clock wakes you up an hour earlier than usual. It is just barely possible, if you plan very carefully, to start slipping your schedule earlier starting a few days before, to minimize the impact, but most people don't even try, because it is too much of a pain in the backside. So the net effect is that nearly everyone gets an hour less sleep.
And no, this has nothing to do with the time of year. The statistically significant increase is relative to the week before and the week after. There is literally a huge single-day spike in traffic accidents on the Monday after the time change, compared with every other day of the year.
Do our bodies simply know that the standard time is the one true time, that is dangerous to alter lest we die?
Our bodies do have a preference for something vaguely resembling sleeping during the dark hours and being awake during the light hours, but they tolerate a lot. What they don't particularly like is suddenly being forced to get up an hour earlier. It is roughly equivalent to the entire country being jet-lagged on the same day.
Worse, there's a network effect that compounds the problem. Most of the time, car accidents involve more than one vehicle. If one driver is tired, he or she might make a mistake, but when that other person is also tired, he or she is less likely to react to that mistake in a way that prevents the accident.
Here's a little thing that might need explained. According to your apparent sources, the heart attack rate drops when moving back to standard time from Daylight savings time. What causes this? 24 percent increase in spring, and a 21 percent drop in the fall. https://www.sciencealert.com/d...
People often get more sleep on one end, and less sleep on the other end. I would think the difference would be obvious.
I don't necessarily dispute the DST as a killer numbers. But here's the issue. We get to see many accusations. https://fee.org/articles/dayli... REad it. Here the poor fellow is whining about being groggy because of the change in teh fall. Oddly, that's when WebMD says that people have less health problems - when moving back.
On one end, pretty much everybody gets less sleep. On the other end, it varies from person to person. In theory, you should get more sleep, but in practice, ever since they changed the date when the DST change occurs, my body clock starts shifting at or around the earlier date, and I actually start getting less sleep for the week prior to the time change, and only then get a full night's sleep. It is really quite bizarre. But this learned behavior likely explains why the momentary drop in the week after the shift to standard time is less than the momentary spike in the week after the shift to DST.
I never notice the DST shift, but as a frewuent traveler, going between the east and west coast can be a real issue. In fact, if the DST killer is real, flying back anf forth across several time zones should kill people easily. I feel like crap when I'm jet lagged, and quite the same with
The best speculation I've heard about the Lion Air crash was that there was a problem with one of the AOA sensors. There are two such sensors - one on both side of the 737 Max.
One problem is that, if I understand correctly, not all of the 737 aircraft have even so much as an indicator light when the two AOA sensors disagree. At least one airliner (Southwest) insisted on an explicit AOA indicator so you can see both AOA sensors' data and see how much they disagree. But if you don't have that and don't have the indicator light, all you know is that the aircraft keeps trimming the nose down every few seconds. One might still arguably call it pilot error to not recognize the symptoms, but it starts to really blur the lines at that point.
Not sure what's silly about that. If the computer says you're beyond the maximum AOA, then pushing the nose up should always cause the aircraft to lose altitude. If a nose up action results in an altitude increase and the sensors still say that the aircraft is beyond the maximum AOA, then the sensors have to be wrong, period, unless I'm missing something about the physics.
There is, of course, a region in which the avionics system would think you're *near* the maximum AOA and a nose-up maneuver would still increase your lift, albeit less than normal. So a nose-up maneuver causing increased altitude during a stall indication isn't *always* an indication that the data is crap, but it certainly could be, if the AOA sensor data is far enough off from reality.
Also, I don't understand why the computers in these planes don't take advantage of all the other sensor data that is at their disposal. The 737 has both pitch/roll inclinometers, GPS, airspeed indicators, and altimeters. With that data, it should be possible to crudely estimate the AOA. The change in velocity relative to the ground is acceleration, which you subtract from the inclinometer data to get your actual angle relative to the earth. Your air speed relative to ground speed gives you some crude indication of how far off your AOA is likely to be (more wind = larger margin of error). And you can also detect an updraft or downdraft with the altimeter to further determine the amount of bias.
If the combination of those pieces of data comes up with an AOA estimate that is radically different from the AOA sensors, then either your inclinometer is stuck, your airspeed indicator is malfunctioning, the GPS ground speed estimate is wrong, or the AOA sensors are lying. And clearly, the AOA data should take priority by default, because it is likely to be the most accurate. But if the numbers are way off for an extended period of time, or if they get farther and farther apart while the pilot is deliberately fighting against the plane's MCAS-derived trim adjustment, that's probably the point where the avionics system should throw up its hands, tell the pilot that it has no idea what is going on, and disable MCAS, or at least clearly alert the pilot that the stall indicator is unreliable and recommend that the pilot override the MCAS-derived trim.
What am I missing?