I wonder if this could be used as a sort of cheap way to evaluate problems like sleep apnea. It seems to support most of the read-outs that you'd need to examine. Of course, it doesn't replace a medical evaluation, as interpretation of the results can be tricky. But, it might be a good way for someone who's uninsured to get some data.
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident.
Here in the U.S., when cars started coming out with chipped ignition keys, some insurers followed similar reasoning. Whenever a car with the security feature was stolen, they pretty much decided that the owner had to be in on the theft. As a result, purchasing a car with electronic security features was a good way to put yourself in jeopardy, or at least render your insurance worthless.
Eventually, enough thieves were busted red-handed while compromising such systems that the evidence became irrefutable, but it took a long time for some companies to acknowledge it.
Personally, I have a great love of science and discovery, and I believe machines are far more suitable solutions to the equations that trade-off between matter, energy, and time in space travel. But I also realize that, scientists often face not a choice between an expensive human and a cheap disposable machine, but rather a choice between an expensive human and nothing; politically the decision to allocate a budget is often not based on NASA's production of data, but rather on NASA's production of Big Heroes and USA-Rah-Rah-Rah. I have no doubt that the money saved by eliminating human exploration will largely not be re-purposed to more efficient manners of scientific discovery.
By far our biggest problems are entitlement programs, and frankly, politicians from Congress right up the President are cowards when it comes to dealing with them. You think the housing bubble was a time bomb? Wait until the entitlements check comes due.
They are cowards because we, the people, demand that they be cowards.
It is a common error to delude oneself into believing the trappings of power and strength are power and strength themselves. You see it all the time, when folks fritter away their home equity loans on big-vroom SUVs and fancy appliances, allowing ourselves the delusion (for a temporary while) that we've still "got it made", as long as they have these things around them. In truth, had we the wisdom to forgo these external symbols of a comfortable existence, the American Dream would be much more alive today.
I perceive the response to the U.S. withdrawl from manned space exploration in much the same way. "Asia is taking the lead because they're still launching Spam-in-a-Can into space! Therefore, we need to launch more Spam-in-a-Can, and it will make us stronger!" I find there's a certain cargo-cult mistaking of which was cause, and which was effect. In the past, we have had a great deal of technological innovations associated with the space exploration program -- but it is a mistake to think because we're launching rockets we're driving innovation. It is was exactly the other way around; because we had a such strong base in engineering and science we were able to create the technologies to launch those rockets.
China and India's increasing economic and technological competence are what have allowed them to take the lead now, and it's a mistake to think that we can stay ahead if we just keep up with appearances. We can play mid-life crisis and blow our remaining resources on the equivalent of a fancy sports car, and make-believe we're still a studly, vigorous nation. But to the rest of the world, we just look increasingly ridiculous.
So as you shrink things, pretty soon, you can't start a fire. The fire loses heat over its surface area faster than itrs volume can generate it. Which is why you don't see flames smaller than a certain, much larger than micrometer, size.
So if I'm understanding this argument correctly, the limitation can also be understood in terms of the time window available in which to extract the energy decreases, as the engine scales down. At a material level, the heat dissipation has a limit as well -- for conduction, it can't be any faster than the speed of sound (within the material comprising the engine).
While we don't have any information on the frequency at which the piezo engine operates, it could be very high, allowing for nearly instant energy extraction. We could possibly be approaching the limit at which the two limitations compete.
Of course idiots still want beachfront property as close to the ocean as they can get, so the obvious solution is to have Congress subsidize rebuilding the beaches and paying for flood insurance.
They want to be close to the water and have a great view. In Harvey Cedars, NJ, there was a beach replenishment project that resulted in an interesting twist -- a couple who were unhappy that beachfront replenishment was going to ruin their house's first-floor view of the ocean sued (and won) $480,000.
Some species of Sea Slugs have another similar interesting ability -- to adsorb and host nematocysts (stinging cells) from jellyfish and hydrozoans they've eaten, and use them for their own defense. The mechanism is substantially different (foreign cells are sequestered in specialized sacs, compared to the intracellular hosting of an organelle) though.
I did 6 months of that multiple times. Its not too bad.
Then again, your paycheck is being deposited to the proper account, the chow is regular and nutritious, and the guys next to you are your fellow sailors. I imagine it's an entirely different experience when your looking for a job, counting the remaining yen in your wallet, lying next to a bunch of strangers similar only in their unfortunate circumstances.
Don't kid yourself. People used to say the same thing about Japan.
And increasingly are saying similar things about South Korea and Taiwan as well.
In China's case though, the country will likely straddle both high and low end segments. The richer coastal regions will continue to climb the value lander, while low-end manufacturing probably will be pushed into the poorer interior, where labor will remain cheap enough to sustain it for some time.
I could go on and on here, but I think it would be a bit shocking for games made in another country to include an alien religion, like Christianity is in Japan. Even Japanese games that include Christianity might not quite get it... it might be used the way Western games use pagan religious elements.
Quite so. Christian symbols and themes are used quite a bit in anime and manga, often to lend an air of the exotic and mystical, as an explanation for a character's supernatural powers, or as an excuse to dress a cute girl in a wimple. It tends to focus on the occultish or fetishistic elements.
There are some rare occasions where you do you see it treated seriously -- for instance, one of Lone Wolf and Cub's sections which revolve around the persecution of Japanese Christians during the Tokugawa era.
I say that Google profits from connecting users to content. It is a service that most web publishers appreciate greatly. Google, unlike any other search engine ever, goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible. Google is constantly on the hunt for people who game their system. That's why they succeed.
The quote's a good contrast with Altavista, which started out with "least-skewed" results, but declined when they were attacked by search engine gamers flooding the results with crap that they never really got very good at filtering out. All the while adding various portal features that cluttered up the site and tried to push users towards content they weren't looking for.
There's something a little like that in the Murasaki Anthology (R. Silverberg, ed.), a collection of SF stories in a shared world by various authors. There is a species (the Chujoans) that looks fairly primitive to the human visitors, but actually turns out to be the descendants of a race with high advanced biotech skills far ahead of our own. The role of the inscrutable hidden god is played by the carpet whales.
There's even a character that goes native, although not voluntarily and not as hero -- well, I guess this last part is kind of a stretch.
In Lactobacillus brevis ATCC 367 and other organisms, GOLLD RNA resides in an apparent prophage. We therefore monitored GOLLD RNA transcription in L. brevis cultures grown with mitomycin C, an antibiotic that commonly induces prophages to lyse their hosts22. Increased GOLLD RNA expression correlates with bacteriophage particle production, and DNA corresponding to the GOLLD RNA gene is packaged into phage particles
The role of GOLLD RNA is uncertain enough, and the GOLLD-virus relationship close enough, that it might be reasonable to suggest that they have not found a new RNA structure in bacteria, but a new class of RNA structure in a virus (which is odd enough it may give us a new group of viruses). Since these bacteria are uncultured or only recently cultured, they are poorly characterized, we might not really have a good idea of whether there is some "normal" type of this bacteria that is free of the RNA structure, and that the structure is merely an artifact of being infected.
Of course, given how messy host-virus relationships can be, it's entirely possible you could have a species of bacteria universally infected by this jumbo-RNA-producing virus, or that they might have reached some sort of symbiosis, with GOLLD playing some role beneficial to the host. Likewise, while HEARO hasn't been associated with a prophage, it's role in moving in and out of the genome could suggest it was introduced by a phage at some point in the past, and has since acquired an identity and role in the host of it's own.
The general argument that assumes RF frequencies have no impact goes something like this: 1: RF radiation is equivalent to X amount of heat. 2: X amount of heat has no significant biological impact.
I've learned to be very careful assuming what biological systems will and won't interact with. I mentioned to my dad, a chemical engineer, that biological systems can fractionate isotopes. Blew his mind, because he was used to thinking of isotopes as all forming equivalent bonds and being indistinguishable that way (but they behave kinetically slightly differently, and biological systems have cascades of one kinetic reaction after another).
It's part 1 of the argument that I have trouble with. RF energy generates a rapidly shifting electric field, which torques polar molecules around. This motion gets thermalized extremely quickly, but that's not quite the same as being thermal energy. I sometimes wonder if we're mentally papering-over some similar sort of subtle difference in biological systems, because we're so used to it not mattering in bulk systems.
Or perhaps we could add some peroxides to the ice, to adjust the stoichiometry of the fuel mix? Or maybe add a turbopump to inject some air into the combustion chamber, during the atmospheric portion of the flight?
I think a lot of the hesitancy in allowing vigorous armed responses has less to do with accidentally killing an innocent, than with larger issues like the possibility of triggering an international incident. For a government, having an occasional merchant sailor be kidnapped or killed, is much less of a hassle than the diplomatic tangles that could occur when something goes wrong. If a US sailor passing through Iranian waters shoots up a pirate craft, and kills a Russian prisoner aboard, it's going to get messy.
I see a lot of pooh-poohing of the chance something might go wrong, but remember that you're dealing with real life messiness. You may not always be dealing with clear-headed thinkers. In real life you get people who are spooked, gung-ho, inebriated, or just plain stupid. Likewise, "repeated warnings" don't always carry the guarantee you think they might -- for instance, there was some case involving a civilian airplane shoot-down, where the pilots heard the warnings on the radio, and were like "Man, that other plane out there better turn around, they're starting to sound really serious!"
Current pirates may not be all that subtle in how they go about their business, but they will adapt to an armed response. Perhaps they'll start disguising themselves as innocent traffic; perhaps they'll actually be riding on innocent traffic, with some poor fisherman or local ferry getting pressed into service. Or maybe they'll have a handful of hostages from their previous pirating adventures serving as human shields. Escalation is to be expected.
In any case, it's possible the popularity of non-lethal techniques like these may have less to do with protecting sailors, and more with ship-owners looking to cover their butts on all sides without spending too much money.
Sounds like an old high school science experiment. Take two microscope slides (flat pieces of glass) lay one on top of another with a thin shim separating them at one end, illuminate this with a monochromatic light and see the fringes. With white light, the peaks for each wavelength would occur at different locations, resulting in a 'rainbow'.
With group insurance policies, you have a certain amount of protection. But for individual contracts, it really works against the whole point of having insurance in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
were the result of an an April fools joke
Well, I'm sure there was some kind of zany hijinks involved:
"Honey, of course I'll pull out before I... APRIL FOOLS!" *splork*
Slip your belt over its jaws. The muscles are very powerful when closing, but poorly developed when opening.
Whoa... someone took the Kaplan Prep course for the exam!
I use a hammer for that.
The Hammer is my Penis.
I wonder if this could be used as a sort of cheap way to evaluate problems like sleep apnea. It seems to support most of the read-outs that you'd need to examine. Of course, it doesn't replace a medical evaluation, as interpretation of the results can be tricky. But, it might be a good way for someone who's uninsured to get some data.
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident.
Here in the U.S., when cars started coming out with chipped ignition keys, some insurers followed similar reasoning. Whenever a car with the security feature was stolen, they pretty much decided that the owner had to be in on the theft. As a result, purchasing a car with electronic security features was a good way to put yourself in jeopardy, or at least render your insurance worthless.
Eventually, enough thieves were busted red-handed while compromising such systems that the evidence became irrefutable, but it took a long time for some companies to acknowledge it.
Personally, I have a great love of science and discovery, and I believe machines are far more suitable solutions to the equations that trade-off between matter, energy, and time in space travel. But I also realize that, scientists often face not a choice between an expensive human and a cheap disposable machine, but rather a choice between an expensive human and nothing; politically the decision to allocate a budget is often not based on NASA's production of data, but rather on NASA's production of Big Heroes and USA-Rah-Rah-Rah. I have no doubt that the money saved by eliminating human exploration will largely not be re-purposed to more efficient manners of scientific discovery.
By far our biggest problems are entitlement programs, and frankly, politicians from Congress right up the President are cowards when it comes to dealing with them. You think the housing bubble was a time bomb? Wait until the entitlements check comes due.
They are cowards because we, the people, demand that they be cowards.
It is a common error to delude oneself into believing the trappings of power and strength are power and strength themselves. You see it all the time, when folks fritter away their home equity loans on big-vroom SUVs and fancy appliances, allowing ourselves the delusion (for a temporary while) that we've still "got it made", as long as they have these things around them. In truth, had we the wisdom to forgo these external symbols of a comfortable existence, the American Dream would be much more alive today.
I perceive the response to the U.S. withdrawl from manned space exploration in much the same way. "Asia is taking the lead because they're still launching Spam-in-a-Can into space! Therefore, we need to launch more Spam-in-a-Can, and it will make us stronger!" I find there's a certain cargo-cult mistaking of which was cause, and which was effect. In the past, we have had a great deal of technological innovations associated with the space exploration program -- but it is a mistake to think because we're launching rockets we're driving innovation. It is was exactly the other way around; because we had a such strong base in engineering and science we were able to create the technologies to launch those rockets.
China and India's increasing economic and technological competence are what have allowed them to take the lead now, and it's a mistake to think that we can stay ahead if we just keep up with appearances. We can play mid-life crisis and blow our remaining resources on the equivalent of a fancy sports car, and make-believe we're still a studly, vigorous nation. But to the rest of the world, we just look increasingly ridiculous.
So as you shrink things, pretty soon, you can't start a fire. The fire loses heat over its surface area faster than itrs volume can generate it.
Which is why you don't see flames smaller than a certain, much larger than micrometer, size.
So if I'm understanding this argument correctly, the limitation can also be understood in terms of the time window available in which to extract the energy decreases, as the engine scales down. At a material level, the heat dissipation has a limit as well -- for conduction, it can't be any faster than the speed of sound (within the material comprising the engine).
While we don't have any information on the frequency at which the piezo engine operates, it could be very high, allowing for nearly instant energy extraction. We could possibly be approaching the limit at which the two limitations compete.
Of course idiots still want beachfront property as close to the ocean as they can get, so the obvious solution is to have Congress subsidize rebuilding the beaches and paying for flood insurance.
They want to be close to the water and have a great view. In Harvey Cedars, NJ, there was a beach replenishment project that resulted in an interesting twist -- a couple who were unhappy that beachfront replenishment was going to ruin their house's first-floor view of the ocean sued (and won) $480,000.
Some species of Sea Slugs have another similar interesting ability -- to adsorb and host nematocysts (stinging cells) from jellyfish and hydrozoans they've eaten, and use them for their own defense. The mechanism is substantially different (foreign cells are sequestered in specialized sacs, compared to the intracellular hosting of an organelle) though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucus_atlanticus
This is really quire unfair when you look at the magazine historically.
Popular Mechanics published science and craft projects for both kids and adults for the better part of 100 years.
It's amazing how better written old Popular Mechanics were, a lot closer to what Make magazine is now, at least in spirit.
By comparison, modern day issues are mostly consumer-toy magvertisements and fluff pieces.
Here's all the help you need: http://www.google.com/
And for people who still need a bit more help...
http://lmgtfy.com/
I did 6 months of that multiple times. Its not too bad.
Then again, your paycheck is being deposited to the proper account, the chow is regular and nutritious, and the guys next to you are your fellow sailors.
I imagine it's an entirely different experience when your looking for a job, counting the remaining yen in your wallet, lying next to a bunch of strangers similar only in their unfortunate circumstances.
Don't kid yourself. People used to say the same thing about Japan.
And increasingly are saying similar things about South Korea and Taiwan as well.
In China's case though, the country will likely straddle both high and low end segments. The richer coastal regions will continue to climb the value lander, while low-end manufacturing probably will be pushed into the poorer interior, where labor will remain cheap enough to sustain it for some time.
I could go on and on here, but I think it would be a bit shocking for games made in another country to include an alien religion, like Christianity is in Japan. Even Japanese games that include Christianity might not quite get it... it might be used the way Western games use pagan religious elements.
Quite so. Christian symbols and themes are used quite a bit in anime and manga, often to lend an air of the exotic and mystical, as an explanation for a character's supernatural powers, or as an excuse to dress a cute girl in a wimple. It tends to focus on the occultish or fetishistic elements.
There are some rare occasions where you do you see it treated seriously -- for instance, one of Lone Wolf and Cub's sections which revolve around the persecution of Japanese Christians during the Tokugawa era.
I say that Google profits from connecting users to content. It is a service that most web publishers appreciate greatly. Google, unlike any other search engine ever, goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible. Google is constantly on the hunt for people who game their system. That's why they succeed.
The quote's a good contrast with Altavista, which started out with "least-skewed" results, but declined when they were attacked by search engine gamers flooding the results with crap that they never really got very good at filtering out. All the while adding various portal features that cluttered up the site and tried to push users towards content they weren't looking for.
There's something a little like that in the Murasaki Anthology (R. Silverberg, ed.), a collection of SF stories in a shared world by various authors. There is a species (the Chujoans) that looks fairly primitive to the human visitors, but actually turns out to be the descendants of a race with high advanced biotech skills far ahead of our own. The role of the inscrutable hidden god is played by the carpet whales.
There's even a character that goes native, although not voluntarily and not as hero -- well, I guess this last part is kind of a stretch.
The PS9, featuring ultraviolet Ray 5D technology is set to drop in another month. Think I'll wait for that.
Pfft -- I heard they're cutting the cost because they're dropping PS8 backwards compatibility.
From the published article in Nature:
In Lactobacillus brevis ATCC 367 and other organisms, GOLLD RNA resides in an apparent prophage. We therefore monitored GOLLD RNA transcription in L. brevis cultures grown with mitomycin C, an antibiotic that commonly induces prophages to lyse their hosts22. Increased GOLLD RNA expression correlates with bacteriophage particle production, and DNA corresponding to the GOLLD RNA gene is packaged into phage particles
The role of GOLLD RNA is uncertain enough, and the GOLLD-virus relationship close enough, that it might be reasonable to suggest that they have not found a new RNA structure in bacteria, but a new class of RNA structure in a virus (which is odd enough it may give us a new group of viruses). Since these bacteria are uncultured or only recently cultured, they are poorly characterized, we might not really have a good idea of whether there is some "normal" type of this bacteria that is free of the RNA structure, and that the structure is merely an artifact of being infected.
Of course, given how messy host-virus relationships can be, it's entirely possible you could have a species of bacteria universally infected by this jumbo-RNA-producing virus, or that they might have reached some sort of symbiosis, with GOLLD playing some role beneficial to the host. Likewise, while HEARO hasn't been associated with a prophage, it's role in moving in and out of the genome could suggest it was introduced by a phage at some point in the past, and has since acquired an identity and role in the host of it's own.
The general argument that assumes RF frequencies have no impact goes something like this:
1: RF radiation is equivalent to X amount of heat.
2: X amount of heat has no significant biological impact.
I've learned to be very careful assuming what biological systems will and won't interact with. I mentioned to my dad, a chemical engineer, that biological systems can fractionate isotopes. Blew his mind, because he was used to thinking of isotopes as all forming equivalent bonds and being indistinguishable that way (but they behave kinetically slightly differently, and biological systems have cascades of one kinetic reaction after another).
It's part 1 of the argument that I have trouble with. RF energy generates a rapidly shifting electric field, which torques polar molecules around. This motion gets thermalized extremely quickly, but that's not quite the same as being thermal energy. I sometimes wonder if we're mentally papering-over some similar sort of subtle difference in biological systems, because we're so used to it not mattering in bulk systems.
Or perhaps we could add some peroxides to the ice, to adjust the stoichiometry of the fuel mix? Or maybe add a turbopump to inject some air into the combustion chamber, during the atmospheric portion of the flight?
I think a lot of the hesitancy in allowing vigorous armed responses has less to do with accidentally killing an innocent, than with larger issues like the possibility of triggering an international incident. For a government, having an occasional merchant sailor be kidnapped or killed, is much less of a hassle than the diplomatic tangles that could occur when something goes wrong. If a US sailor passing through Iranian waters shoots up a pirate craft, and kills a Russian prisoner aboard, it's going to get messy.
I see a lot of pooh-poohing of the chance something might go wrong, but remember that you're dealing with real life messiness. You may not always be dealing with clear-headed thinkers. In real life you get people who are spooked, gung-ho, inebriated, or just plain stupid. Likewise, "repeated warnings" don't always carry the guarantee you think they might -- for instance, there was some case involving a civilian airplane shoot-down, where the pilots heard the warnings on the radio, and were like "Man, that other plane out there better turn around, they're starting to sound really serious!"
Current pirates may not be all that subtle in how they go about their business, but they will adapt to an armed response. Perhaps they'll start disguising themselves as innocent traffic; perhaps they'll actually be riding on innocent traffic, with some poor fisherman or local ferry getting pressed into service. Or maybe they'll have a handful of hostages from their previous pirating adventures serving as human shields. Escalation is to be expected.
In any case, it's possible the popularity of non-lethal techniques like these may have less to do with protecting sailors, and more with ship-owners looking to cover their butts on all sides without spending too much money.
Sounds like an old high school science experiment. Take two microscope slides (flat pieces of glass) lay one on top of another with a thin shim separating them at one end, illuminate this with a monochromatic light and see the fringes. With white light, the peaks for each wavelength would occur at different locations, resulting in a 'rainbow'.
What you're referring to is known as "Newton's Rings":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_rings
One of the major issues in private health insurance today is Recission, the nullification of your insurance contract:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/06/healthcare-ceos-shoot-themselves-foot
http://digg.com/health/Understanding_the_rare_practice_of_recission
With group insurance policies, you have a certain amount of protection. But for individual contracts, it really works against the whole point of having insurance in the first place.