If you search "set in stone", it appears that usage is a latter day idiom. But, here is the secret to this conundrum. Language and idioms change - shift, migrate, morph - similar but slightly evolved words to express the same idea.
The inherent idea is that something is immutable, indelible, unerasable, uneditable, irrevocable. It is predicated on the idea that you can write, sketch, mockup, proof all you want and still make corrections, like hitting the preview and edit buttons on a Slashdot post, but once you hit submit, your words are eternal, just like when the stone carver finally etches the words into a stele or tombstone.
Writers write. Typographers set. Artists etch. Stone carvers carve. Through history, all such variations have been used. But since carvers carve, one might think that the classical idiom is carved in stone, with the other variations being corrupted forms based on more modern communication paradigms.
So, do what I did. Too bad I cannot post a screen capture, but you can do this yourself. Go to Google Ngram Viewer. Enter (copy-paste) the following line in the search box:
carved in stone,written in stone,set in stone,etched in stone
"Carved in stone" is abundant, going back well before 1800. The other three have arisen just in recent decades. So, prior generations used the idiom correctly. Recent generations have used analogous but technically incorrect variants. Collectively, "written, etched, set" were originally just a tiny fraction of the whole, but recently their usage is rising. This means that current generations have either forgotten the true idiom, have gotten sloppy, or have fallen into a wave of rhetorical monkey-see monkey-do copycat-ism or fadism.
Something else interesting. The "written, etched, set" curves are quite congruent, all showing a rapid uprise starting 1970,then an inflection circa 1990, and now topping out, with "set in stone" becoming asymptotic with or equal to "carved in stone", thus the dominant modern transmigration of the idiom. The "written, etched, set" curves are the classical sigmoidal curves of the Verhulst equation of population dynamics. These curves imply that usage of these variant terms is reaching population saturation, each term in its own camp, with non-traditional verbiage having overtaken classical verbiage.
So, Google is not broken, in fact could be a rather clever historical research tool.
It is hard to imagine, impossible actually, this conversation happening 50 years ago. Circa 1950-1970, parents knew all too well the terror of polio from their childhood years, and the non-trivial, often major risks of measles and rubella, tetanus and diphtheria. If a few unfortunate people had severe side effects of a vaccine, it was of course very sad for that person or family, but a handful of adverse reactions was accepted and respected to protect tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of other lives.
It is easy to dismiss the non-vaxers as just kooks and idiots, as they probably are, but today, without large epidemics of those diseases to keep everyone just a little terrified, the issue becomes out-of-sight-out-of-mind. It is easy then for the herd to forget why we vaccinate, and what the price is for failing to do so. Of course, we have to decide if we castigate and chastise versus dismiss and forgive, those anti-vaxers who place their fear of a one-in-a-million complication above a sense of communal responsibility, participation, and shared risk.
A situation like this is ultimately self-correcting over a cycle of maybe 50 to a 100 years. If too many people fail to vaccinate for whatever reason, and epidemics of deadly disease flareup, then eventually enough people will get scared enough to make enough noise for government to step in or act responsibly as the voice of the overly vocal anti-vaxers die down or start singing the opposite tune. It will just take one loud mouthed or well connected anti-vaxer to have their precious Johnny or Janey die from measles or tetanus or be crippled by polio to start singing a different tune. Unfortunately, public perception and stupidity or governmental cowardice and ineptitude create propagation delays and phase lags in the response to such large social issues, first too slow to act, then too far of an overshoot, such that an even keel steady-as-she goes balance cannot be maintained. Sadly, un-moderated un-referreed adult-free Lord-of-the Flies platforms like Facebook make it all too easy for the kooks to have too much influence.
There is though a simple and elegant solution. If you choose to eschew the common good and fail to participate in the general welfare, so be it. But, if you make your own rules, you must live by those rules. Don't want to vaccinate - fine. But, if your poor Johnny and Janey gets sick with the measles or any such preventable disease, tough, no insurance for you. It's like the Little Red Hen. If you don't want to participate in making the bread, you don't get to eat the bread. Want to save poor little Johnny's life, or spend years rehabilitating him for paralysis or hearing loss or months on a ventilator? Well, sad for the poor kid, but the parents got what they bargained for, and they have to pay for it all themselves, no dipping into the societal funds available to help those who acted responsibly in the interests of the greater good. No vaccination, no problem, but if you get sick from that, No insurance for you - so sayeth Yev Kassem.
There is an intrigue here that goes beyond the mere physics and engineering of it all. This is really about triumphs and folly.
1 - It could be brilliant. This could be the engineering equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem. A brilliant mathematician has a clever insight to answer an interesting problem, writes the notes on a napkin so the story goes, and then the idea is lost. It turns out though that the math problem is not so innocent or trivial, but no one after Fermat can come up with a suitable proof. Perhaps Tesla's experiment was the real deal, but we cannot know now that he is gone.
2 - It could be pure silliness. This occurred in the same era as early flight and early automotive manufacturing. We have all seen those compilation videos of early flight attempts when people built wacky flying-falling machines in their garage with nothing more than just a nifty "idea" devoid of any bonafide engineering. Tesla had the same focus on early electrical science and technologies, and for each clever good idea he had, he might have had another that was a dog.
Were those who failed to fund him close minded fools or insightful sages?
Nothing is stopping anyone from trying now. There are plenty of people with enough technology wealth to fund the experiment if it seemed worthy, but no one is volunteering. It is telling that a modern company like Tesla can honor him with an eponymous name, but not by funding projects not relevant to modern life, instead focusing on technologies that make sense for now, like electric vehicles.
And, times have changed. Even if the idea was scientifically and technically meritorious, it might not be pragmatic or allowable today. Since then, we have developed a robust air travel industry, vital low earth orbit technologies, an electromagnetic spectrum filled with communications, and an overdue appreciation of the environmental hazards of our technologies. Tesla's invention would compete or interfere with them, so might not survive.
Agree, and it's not just the error messages. Ask tech support for help, and it's the same lameness. Go to an MS support forum, and their "experts" know less than a third grader, just enough to read the scripts.
MS has never bothered to provide meaningful support for its users. Remember, you are a user, not a customer. The customers are the hardware OEM's who buy Windows to put on the machines, not you the end user who paid money to the OEM but not to MS, so why should MS care.
The disturbing thing is to think that those inept user interactions might reflect how things work in general throughout the organization.
The disturbing thing is reading some of the commentary in response to this post. I am surprised how many germophobes and pissophobes read/. To clarify, the original article does not report about people peeing their infected urine into a bucket of sand to make funkodelic plaster to spackle your walls. Although, I suppose that some of the respondents, seemingly "under the influence" and having had too much beer tonight might find a bucket of sand a relief.
Quoting the original article: “Biostone: a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth’s most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea – a chemical found in human urine. Pumping bacterial solution into a sand-filled mould, Trimble devised hundreds of experiments over the course of a year until he tweaked the recipe. The microbes eventually metabolised the mixture of sand, urea, and calcium chloride, creating a glue that strongly bound the sand molecules together."
The process uses urea, "a chemical found in urine". Urea is also found in the primordial chemistry of the universe. In humans, urea equals nitrogen. Recall that proteins are chains of amino acids (also primordial chemistry). They have a carboxyl -COOH (the acid) and an amine -NH2 (the amino-) terminus where the end to end polymerization takes place. When proteins degrade, urea (CH4N2O) is the final catabolic product of proteins, which being water soluble is eliminated in the urine. Remember that urine is just a clean ultrafiltrate of the blood, sieved by the kidney, from which unwanted metabolic waste is not resorbed. Urine is stored in the bladder until a socially appropriate opportunity, and in healthy people, it is sterile.
Recall that organic chemistry became a reality of science and industry when urea was synthesized in 1828 by Friedrich Wöhler. Being a carbonyl of two amides, it a useful backbone reagent for making other useful organic compounds. It is used liberally in many medicinal and cosmetic products and in many industrial processes. The majority is used for fertilizer. Those large industrial quantities are manufactured from ammonia and carbon dioxide at large chemical plants, not in a Slurm-like dungeon where drunken frat boys are getting themselves wet. If Biostone ever becomes a product, fret not that you will be living in a house of pee. Who was dumb enough to think that in the first place?
On the subject of "germs", remember, they are on you body by the trillions. They are necessary for our own health and the functionings of the entire biosphere. They are also abundant in industrial processes. The list includes mining and metal extraction, decomposition of oil, production of many drugs, production of many basic organic solvents and workhorse chemicals. They also make your food, such as yogurt and cheese. Imagine that, when you eat yogurt, you are simply eating a giant bacteria culture, as if your Yoplait container was just a fancy shaped Petri dish.
Microbial processes are also important in geology, having much to do with the deposition of stable mineral varnishes and caliches from water soluble salts, i.e, the kind of natural materials that are useful as mortars and cements. Read the article. That is what this study did. It used urea, calcium chloride, and sand to make an accretion that had adhesion and structural strength. The article mentions that ammonia outgassed from the process, meaning the process reverses the production of urea, so even if some nitrogen persists in the caliche, the pissophobes amongst us need not fear to live among the bricks.
After almost two centuries of industrialization, synthetic chemistry, and carbonization trashing the planet we live on, it should be inspiring that there are people making earnest efforts to find better solutions. Think of that next time you smear some skin moisturizer or sun block on your body - read the ingrediant list - urea. Or, if you prefer, take a golden shower.
I use four browsers. I usually open Firefox as my first choice, but I end up using it about equal with Chrome, and together that is more than 95% of my usage. I infrequently, but sometimes, open Edge primarily. However, I allow Edge to remain as the OS default browser, so when I click on a link in an email or some other extra-browser origin, it opens in Edge. Thus, I use Edge with some regularity, but only for brief take-a-looks, and if I intend to play around at that website or save pages, I copy the url and open it in Chrome of Firefox. I also use Cliqz, built on Firefox, for more sensitive browsing. And. once in a blue moon, I use IE last version when pages will not load correctly elsewhere.
I have no special allegiance or favoritism to any single browser. just using whatever is convenient at the moment. Several interesting observations (to me at least) come from this experience.
1 - When MS fought and won the browser wars and vanquished Netscape, they had a product that worked and people wanted. I know all of the history and arguments and reasons against Internet Explorer (non-standardized features, poor security, unfair business practices), but for users, it was robustly featured, useful, and dependable. I am not defending MS or IE, but it makes me wonder how MS could sink so low from where they once were, the Gods of internet software, and now they can hardly make a Dick-and-Jane level product lacking in all of the features that made IE compelling in the earlier days.
2 - Edge is not so entirely awful as many people like to complain about. On the other hand it is terrible in many ways. For instance, you cannot save a webpage from Edge. By using it to open email links and other trivial things, I get to keep an eye on whether it is improving, but not much progress. BUT, now and then there are pages that will not open or render properly on the other browsers but do so perfectly on Edge. One post here wonders if MS is using hidden or non-standard API's, so some pages written for Edge work but trash or crash elsewhere. While such practices, if true, would be disgraceful, it points out that in order to smoothly sail the Internet, having all browsers handy is what you need.
3 - Edge can excel. On example that affected me this month concerns reading large PDF's. I am working on a manuscript that has about 800 pages and numerous graphics. In pdf format, which is a large file, Adobe Acrobat reader crashes, and others render slowly or choppy. Edge handles monster pdf's with grace and speed. Even if Edge does nothing else well, that alone makes it a worthy tool.
4 - By the way, I also this week downloaded some huge pdf's from other sites (scans of historical works), each pdf on the order of 1 GB. Firefox uniformly trashed every one of those pdf's when downloading and saving them, corrupted files not reparable with any pdf repair utility. However, Chrome handled every one flawlessly. Likewise Google maps - Chrome does maps well, Firefox chokes. So, even when it comes to Firefox versus Chrome, neither is perfect. This brings us back to the important idea above - having all browsers handy is what you need.
One post here recounts how MS won the browser wars in part by creating non-standard features that made a lot of web pages unreadable on standards-compliant browsers, and that now Google is doing the same. It would be nice if every company released products that were strictly standards compliant, but if they did so, there would be no distinction between the products, and thus no competition or advancement. As irritating and aggravating as some of the companies and their products and practices are at times, you have to decide if you want to campaign against the crappy this or that product, object on principles, or just accept that all do a good job with some things, and all are dogs in some ways.
Have all of the browsers installed, and have all accessible from a shortcut, and when one does not render or save a page properly, try the next and then the next if needs be. No single browser can handle the whole internet, regardless what their marketing people say or what each of us thinks about the way things ought to be. Having all three just a click away makes your computing life workable.
The irony of this story is that I just walked in from running a special errand. Four days ago, Friday, the Amazon delivery service dropped off a box at my house. It was addressed to someone else. I live in a large metro area. The intended recipient is in the same metro area, but a neighboring town 14 miles away. Our names have no resemblance to each other, none whatsoever, nor was there anything else that could have caused confusion. The shipping label said (paraphrasing) deliver to Fred, 123 Main St., Othercity. The Amazon delivery guy was nowhere close, and he apparently did not even look at the label address, or my address where he delivered it, or used any GPS or other tracking or location confirmation. I am not anticipating any packages, so it is not as though my own package got swapped or has gone missing.
I called Amazon customer service, gave them the tracking number, and they found it right away. They then said "We would pleased for you to keep the item, and we will order a replacement for the buyer direct from the vendor." After verifying that the buyer would indeed get a replacement item, that was the end of the call. I do not know what is in the box, but it would be a long shot that what Fred ordered is something that I could use. Since coincidentally Fred at 123 Main St. is just a short side step on my way to and from work, I dropped it off at his house today. Lucky Fred will now get two of what he ordered. I just returned from that errand, just to read this article.
I can only imagine that the Amazon rep looked at the order details, and if the item was below a certain cost, it was easier for them to authorize a replacement rather than pick up and redeliver the original item. But what if it was an expensive item, or perishable, or a one of a kind antique? I have read various stories of problems with Amazon's own home brewed delivery system that they are trying to build out. What if the package that should have gone to Leh went to Mumbai or Mombasa or Minnesota, or vice versa? Here's hoping that those nice folk at the top of the world all get what they ordered.
So much of the news these days talks about inequality in societal wealth, collapse of traditional businesses and industries, and other gloomy socioeconomic news, even when "the economy" is running well. The idea of fast trading and its variations, day trading, high frequency trading, and their ilk are a vector of these inequities. Letting trades happen at nanosecond scale just amplifies the problems that make money for those who already have it while raising the barrier to ordinary citizens and investors.
It used to be that investment was there to build the economy. If a company needed capital to develop a product or service, or bring it to market, then Wall Street and the exchanges were there so you could sell shares to an investor. It was considered wise to invest for the long term. Leaving your invested capital in a successful company could net you large rewards in 20 or 30 years, at a time in life when you could retire or make good use of your accumulated wealth. The idea of the primary market to capitalize a company is of course still very important.
But recent decades have seen ever increasing activity of the secondary aftermarket, where those who bought shares direct from the company are now trading back and forth with others. It is a game of musical chairs in which the idea is to be left holding the most greenbacks when the music stops. Unlike primary issues of equity to raise money for a company and build wealth in the long run, the aftermarket trades are a zero sum game in which for every winner there is an equal loser, none of which adds wealth to the company. Sure, if a trading frenzy jacks up the stock price, the company can benefit by selling more shares, but all too often these days, companies might not benefit so much as does their CEO and other principle shareholders, nor do higher stock prices translate into better business, profits, and dividends.
The problem is that the markets have a whole lot of psychology and man-in-the-middle and other social stresses on them that make stock price and even whole market movements irrational as measured against mathematical analysis of the facts. Trading and the financial markets are complex non-linear systems, and they can be likened in many ways to electrical circuits with capacitances, reactances, attenuators, amplifiers, propagation delays, and the like, all of which could settle an itchy twitchy circuit or market or else make them go crazy at the wrong times. Adding high frequency switching to a given subcircuit could have very chaotic and disruptive effects (chaos in both the dynamical and the figurative sense). I can foresee where this could result in trades that occur out of order or prematurely with respect to various incoming data, a race condition, which could spark human panic, buy ups, sell offs, and lead to a major market catastrophe. Every time there has been a market crash or collapse, e.g. in the U.S. in 1837, 1929, & 2008, there were any number of pundits swearing they knew better and that it could not happen.
There is nothing inherently good or beneficial to society by having nanosecond trading. Some people will make money, some will lose, the parent companies will derive no benefit, and the inherent value of the company and the products they make and people they serve might end up in jeopardy if a meltdown occurs.
I have a solution to the problem of speedy self serving trading in lieu of long term value investments. A hyperbolic tax scale. No, not exaggerated "hyperbole", but a mathematical inverse function. Short term capital gains tax = some fudge factor divided by time that the stock is held. Tax = k / time. Do some homework to pick a benchmark for k. (If you want to have true zero tax in someone's lifetime, or some floor of a minimum obligatory tax, then you can add offsets, Tax = k / time + minimum, but ignore that for the moment). Suppose that an investor who holds a stock for 2 years pays a 40% capital gains tax, or else maybe 20% at 5 years or something to that effect. Once you pe
There is the old saying that if you think you know the solution, you do not understand the problem. That seems to apply to a lot of technology acquisition in the health fields.
Here is the problem. In medicine, there are some disorders and diagnoses that are very well understood in terms of physiology and pathogenesis, well characterized as to making a correct diagnosis that correlates with an effective response to prescribed treatment, and easy to teach to young physicians who can in turn provide accurate diagnoses and good care to people with those problems.
However, there are also problems that are oddball or non-obvious diagnoses, problems due to occult or infrequent disorders, problems with atypical symptoms or atypical responses to intervention, or else problems that reflect altered or atypical pathogenesis or else disorders of complexity or dysdynamia in complex multi-control systems in which one person's illness has different signs and symptoms than the next person with the same illness. If compared to algorithmic processes such as computer programming, some of these patients and problems would be seen as illogical, out-of-sequence, or data corrupted, yet a valid diagnosis can be made by someone who understands these deeper levels of seeming illogic. Whether or not contemporary doctors and medical education still rise to the challenge is another issue altogether, but when medicine is done right by smart properly educated physicians, correct diagnoses and treatments can be made for very non-obvious problems. This is because genuine intelligence is better than artificial intelligence at doing these non-obvious complex tasks.
But, you say, therein is the value of AI, indeed the whole premise of AI, that it can perceive patterns and associations in data that even smart people will not necessarily see. That may be true, but AI can be no better than the set of data it is trained on. The article states "these companies . . . brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights". Big databases from corporate healthcare enterprises do indeed have lots of data , but it is not necessarily quality or robust or relevant data. It is the kind of perfunctory or bulk data that is filled out into forms, or is coded in ICD and CPT numbers (industry standard diagnosis and procedure codes). The data is curated or trivialized to what can be entered by overworked professionals in order to generate bills, or else by low level billing and data clerks. It is often data that is not relevant to the technical medical issues, and even when it is, it is not the detailed or nuanced data that allows for the oddball, atypical, and one-off diagnoses.
Suppose there are 7 different disorders that can affect the pinky toe, 3 of which are common and readily recognized by medical students and physician extenders, 2 more of which are recognized by the average properly educated physician, and 2 of which are odd and likely to be recognized only by experienced experts. The difference in diagnosis for these latter two might be because the toe points at an angle five degrees different than normal. If the data keeping records have only 4 approved codes to recognize 7 diagnoses, and if there is no place to record the angle of the toe, then the AI training set will not be able to understand the oddball diagnoses. Note as well that the data entry front ends that are often in modern medical records depend on the easy info. The problem is that the easy diagnoses can already be made by people with a baseline education. The one-off diagnoses depend on levels experience of multi-factorial observation and pattern recognition that real experts have but which the medical record is often scant on.
Technology has become a self-indulgent plaything for companies and venture capitalists. "Let's automate or computerize this or that . . . because we can. Isn't this fun?" If you develop enough infrastructure or visibility or limited success to beguile the next dog up th
Stories like this are appearing at a seemingly exponential rise: tech replaces person, or business uses tech to interact with customers. One by one this or that industry latches onto another computerized front end device that is supposed to give the customer a better experience, or else give the proprietor more information or a streamlined operation.
Pardon my naivete or else cynicism, but many times I cannot see the real value in these services. For instance, have restaurant owners adopted these menu-pads because they really perceive (or actually fulfill) a need or value, or because somebody is selling it to them, just a fad that attracts lemmings to a bandwagon steered by a Pied Piper pitchman?
Imagine a simple two-way matrix with four discrete states. The axes are real value of a good or service (valuable or not) versus perceived value (potential customer sees merit or not). (1) Positive real value and positive perceived value is the sweet spot. The item or service sells itself, and company reps, if involved at all, can be useful learning and support resources. (2) Positive real value but negative perceived value - that is an opportunity for legitimate entrepreneurs and marketeers to sway the public toward the better but non-obvious item. (3) Negative real value but positive perceived value - that is the domain of opportunists who do not need to pitch a BS product but can run with the fad and profit from it. (It is worth reading a group psychology classic from 1841, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay.) (4) Negative real and negative perceived value. Ho-hum, "so what" says the market, but therein is the playground of the shyster, charlatan, huckster. You can often bet on this pitchman because "a fool and his money are soon parted", and "there's a sucker born every minute".
So, the question for/.'ers is this. Are these new tech fads customer or proprietor driven, proprietor or pitchman driven, need or vanity driven, value or fad driven? Are tech gizmos sold because a potential customer sees real value and buys based on rational needs or planning, or because the wily salesman sells something based on vanity or popular delusions? I recognize that some innovative uses of tech are legitimate and valuable, others blatantly not. Where on the two-way matrix do these items fall?
It sounds as though despite active disease, stricture, and these technical headaches, that you are active (hiking tall rocks) and thus not acutely complicated by your palsied pill. If you are not sick, then no urgent risk. The big concern of course is that the thing will lodge in the stricture and you will get acutely obstructed.
I assume that your doctors have already tried various things, but on hearing the story anew, several things come to mind. They might have all been done already, but it doesn't hurt to get fresh ideas:
- Steroid boost. I see that that has been tried, but all too often when I hear that steroids were raised, it is often just trivial amounts. If reduction of inflammation and edema will loosen the stricture and de-narrow the lumen, one to two weeks of sizeable doses might be needed, e.g. the kinds of doses used for severe life threatening flares of autoimmune disorders such as lupus or pemphigus.
- Lubrication. Mineral oil is a classic stool softener and lubricant. It is less in favor today because (1) concerns about hydrocarbon aspiration and pneumonitis if you are obstructed and vomiting, and (2) high priced pharmaceutical pills are more in the minds of most physicians these days. If you are not obstructed (sounds like you are not), then a good swig or two of the stuff might help.
- Bulk flow. The concentrated osmotic agents that are used for bowel preps might create a wave of peristalsis and flow that might carry the flotsam forward. This could be a concern if you are obstructed, but evidently you are not. But if you were . . .
- Gastrograffin swallow. This is intestinal x-ray dye. It is very hygroscopic and can induce bulk fluid flows as well as dehydrating the mucosa (lining tissue) of the bowel surface. It is often used as a first line intervention to alleviate an early bowel obstruction before resorting to surgery. A gastrograffin swallow would partly combine the effects of steroids and osmotic agents, which if primed with mineral oil might get the thing to sneak by.
- Technical. If they could see it with the 2-balloon enteroscope, then they might have snagged it except that they either could not reach it or else not grab it with a biopsy forceps. Instead, they could use a stone basket. If the stone baskets are on too short a wire, then weld-solder-splice an extension. Big companies such as Olympus that make the equipment will often make custom modified hardware for special circumstances, and making a 20 or 25 foot long stone basket might be easy if you ask your local rep for help.
None of these are guaranteed to work, but they have a fair chance of doing so, and they are safe. Perhaps one or some of these have not been tried yet, in which case it is worth discussing them with your doctors. Good luck.
Back when, customizable toolbars and drop down menus made it all convenient and discoverable. Then, they went and changed it all up, apparently just because . . . another MS screw-the-user "engineering" arts and crafts project. But, sooner or later, people can adapt or adjust to anything, undoubtedly to the great consternation of the wizards of Redmond. So, just when people have started to learn or memorize the ribbon layout and new icons, time to switch it up again. But fear not my dear alarmed user friends. MS plans to make it easy for you this time. Their software will include a new AI / VR enabled virtual concierge to quide you. He goes by the name of Clippy 2. And since the new icons will be in that thin monoline style, Clippy 2 will keep warm by wearing a t-shirt that says "MS Bob". Of course, input methods need to be as streamilined as the interface, so only 10 keys on your keyboard will work. Clippy 2 will help you discover which ones.
Thanks for your kind reply. I concur completely. As this thread reveals, there have been many influences that got us here. I also share the perspective that the '80's saw the rise of consumerism, "greed is good", and "greed is God". For me, two factors stand out in that transformation. First, the inclination for "everyone" to go to college and get a bachelor degree meant that many people went through degree programs that were not so in prior eras, like marketing-advertising, business-finance, and management. This meant that too many people were over qualified, placed in "managerial" or executive positions to manipulate and massage the numbers, rather than having people who knew skilled trades who could actually make something. Second, federal rules changed that allowed for greater perosnal management of retirement accounts, spawing 401k's and the like. This opened the way for the investment banks and mutual funds to go wild, placing emphasis in the equities markets on short term gain and stock prices rather than intrinsic value and long term profitability of a company. Together, they were a perfect recipe for mergers-and-acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, all kinds of shady and corrupt investment strategies, and too-numerous-to-count scandalous investment stories, not to mention the ascendancy of service related businesses at the expense of manufacturing. Oh my !#@$.
I am enjoying this thread, because so many people have discussed insightful perspectives on the social and economic dynamics behind all of this. If nothing else, one can appreciate that the stresses on modern life bred by the Baby Boom generation are quite complex and multifactorial. As one of those Baby Boomers, here is another perspective on this topic that I have perceived as society has changed over these years. It suggests that some of the deficits of modern society are an unintended consequence of morally righteous movements in that era, activities meant to promote social equality and broader educational opportunities. Note - this is not an argument against education and equality, just an abstract observation of social and economic dynamics.
This thesis can be described as “workforce inflation with wage dilution”.
The post-war period circa 1945-1980 was, in the USA, an era of unprecedented optimism and middle class wealth. People could fulfill the American dream of home ownership, employment, and social security. Yes, there were negatives, like the Cold War and the A-bomb, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Generation Gap, but the anxieties were balanced by the inspirations. There were gadgets galore, easy lifestyle, cultural robustness, and a sense of purpose and mission in projects like the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the United Nations, Rock and Roll, Levittown and the suburbs, Route 66 and the open road, the Space Race, and so many others. This came on the heels of a well tooled industrial infrastructure, a highly skilled workforce (including Rosie the Riveter and the ladies), and a post war surge in college education. So, if you are living in the 50's or 60's, listening to Elvis Presley or Little Richard on your portable radio, watching the Smothers Brothers or the Apollo moon walks on a brand new color TV that you bought at a suburban shopping mall that you drove to in your Chevy or Olds, while the dishes and clothes are being washed automatically for you, life could hardly be imagined to be better.
That unprecedented social ease and economic robustness was the product of just half the population working. In that era, the women stayed home to "tend the hearth", while the men worked. With half the adult population at work, and half at home raising children with family values, then society, for the majority of people, was at a peak of "feeling good". Then came women's lib and educational and social equality, products of the Bay Boom era. Suddenly the workforce is diluted with twice the number of job seekers to do the same number of jobs that gave us unprecedented economic success. This is NOT a diatribe against women or equality. Translated to modern terms, that was the end of an era in which, in a society where committed domestic partnerships were the consistent norm, one partner was out of the house "bringing home the bacon", while the other partner raised the family, crucial to the perpetuation of primary education, values, and social norms for the next generation. So, at that time, we had extraordinary wealth, material largesse based on manufacturing prowess, and cultural optimism which required only half of the adult population to produce, while the other half of the adult population stayed at home to perpetuate respectable social values.
What happens though if the other half, the stay-at-home half, suddenly wants to and does enter the workplace? By spending less time at home, then social mores and family morals risk becoming diluted, corrupted, or forgotten. At the same time, the workforce is now doubled, twice the people working to make what was already a peak or epitome level of material production. The problem is that there is a certain fixed economic value in the existing material production. If a new TV is valued at $100, having two people instead of one to manufacture it does not change its relative value, and thus its retail price cannot vary too much. The company cannot charge $200 because people's wages have not gone up, so $200 is overpr
As I recall, as a kid in the 1950's, Venus seemed to get as much or more interest than Mars as a place to visit, explore, possibly even colonize. Then, the Space Age started, and we could learn some real facts about those worlds. Venus it turns out is a much harsher environment. Your comment points out the great science value of going to Venus. As a hot and wet environment with a dense and rich atmosphere, it is a natural and active geochemistry lab that would probably amaze us. We might discover any number of useful new compounds and materials that could be beneficial here on the home world. Who knows, there is a chance it could be commercialized just by selling the amazing landscape photographs or extraordinary mineral and crystal specimens that might be mined. But that is all just a fantasy without the extraordinary technological development needed to survive there. Mars has its great challenges getting onto the surface safely, but once on the ground, Mars isn't such a tough place.
I have read concepts about using the dense Venutian atmosphere as a way to float dirigible like science platforms. That could prove relatively cheap and easy for long term science, but getting long term vehicles or habitats on the surface is not so certain, nor would the vehicles likely last anywhere near as long as the Martian assets have (Opportunity is now there 14 years). Earth based testing of the technologies or equipment in the Venutian environment would also require a huge commitment of very expensive technologies, using geysers, volcanoes, or deep water sea vents. In contrast, simulating Mars can be done in the Atacama desert or in Antarctica, not so challenging or hard to get to.
So, Mars is cheaper. Mars is safer. Mars is fit for long term human habitation - and therein is the key thing. And, don't discount the science that will come from Mars once real people and geologists and chemists can get there with a rock hammer, a microscope, and a sense of adventure.
Too bad we do not have the budget for both. In the 1960's, cost was no object - we were going to space, and that was that, and we started exploring the entire solar system. Then came war, politics, a bad economy, and social malaise. NASA has been under- or poorly funded for much of the past 40-50 years. If a limited amount has to be carefully spent, it is going to go where there will be the most return on investment, and in the current sociopolitical environment, that return has broader implications that just good science for its own sake or for same vague promise of possibly finding a better superconductor or semiconductor or fossilized antediluvian train conductor or whatever. Of course, if enough people thought there is a valuable scientific harvest to be made at the Morning Star, a write-in campaign to legislators, media, and the various space agencies could pump up enthusiasm for a return to Venus. For now though, with only limited bucks, Buck Rogers is going to Mars.
The end of the first paragraph in the post states "But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon." What I was expecting at that point was an idea in distributed computing. Your processor idles down or else is overwhelmed by a high bandwidth task, so it offloads portions of the job to your refrigerator, cell phone, tablet, washing machine, other desktops. you car, etc. - anything that can be accessed by IoT or peer-to-peer networking or whatever. That makes sense, kind of, if you are doing supercomputing tasks or cryptocurrency mining at home.
However, this turns out to be an idea about using multiple wifi antennas to create interference patterns from which FFT's can decode the dataset - kind of a wifi holography. The problem is that anyone who moves the desk or couch, leaves their bicycle in the room, puts a metal kitchen bowl on a table, turns on a laptop, has their Aunt Tillie sitting in the wrong place, or even just wears a tinfoil hat to tune in or tune out other strange ideas will trash the computation.
It used to be that with relatively few TV channels and finite numbers of radio stations and newspapers, that news could be filtered or curated to things of genuine significance. Now, with seemingly unlimited media outlets, any idea or premature utterance can become "news". A century ago, we fantasized about going to the moon, and then it happened. Just half a century ago, we fantasized about handheld computers and wrist watch televisions, and then it happened. So, ideas can come to fruition, so we cannot be too dismissive. This one however seems to be a big "so what", and "what the hell would one use it for?"
I am not an accountant, I know nothing about the internal workings of Amazon other than what I can read in public media, and I probably do not know what I am talking about. But, I can do some arithmetic.
1 - The summary states that the Amazon warehouse worker makes $24,300.
2 - Amazon is famous for foregoing profits during its first 15-20 years in favor of expansion of services.
Based on these numbers, Amazon's performance in 2017 was: Revenue = $178b Gross profit after cost of revenue = $66b Income after operating expenses = $4b Net income after taxes et al = $3b Employment = 566,000
For prior years: 2016: $2.4b net on $136b revenue, 341,000 employees 2015: $0.6b net on $107b revenue, 231,000 employees
You can see the trend - Amazon is only recently profitable as employees expand with general revenue and profit.
I have no idea how many of the employees are warehouse or fulfillment center employees. I have seen reports that would place the number between 130k and 200k. For the sake of this analysis, assume that other low skilled employees are included, and we will go with 200,000 bottom wage employees.
Assume that Amazon had a fit of good will toward its workers and payed them a liveable non-stressful wage. If in 2017 the $24k current wage was upped to $34k, that is an extra $10k/person/annum x 200k workers = $2 billion extra in wages. That is 2/3's of profit, so Amazon could have afforded it (at the expense of shareholder return).
In 2016, assume a pro rata fewer number of low wage employees, 341k/566k x 200k = 120k. Then, $10k x 120k workers = $1.2 billion = 1/2 of profit, so it was affordable. In 2015, estimate low wage workers at 231k/566k x 200k = 82k. Then, $10k x 82k workers = $0.82 billion = 1/3 greater than profit, so it was not fully affordable.
Going back farther, there was less profit to fund higher wages.
I am not arguing for or against Amazon, nor for or against minimum wages or workers rights or any other sociopolitical point of view. Being in a human services profession, I tend to side with the workers, and it pains me to hear of such situations. However, I also buy from Amazon, and call me a hypocrite if you will, but so do you.
Emotional or political or social points of view aside, it can be seen that Amazon's push to expand did not permit unfettered generous wages during periods of unprofitability. Of course, the counter argument must be made that the higher paid employees, which are greater than half the workforce, could have had reduced wages and bonuses for a more equitable pay scale.
Now that Amazon is coming into the black, the righteous thing to do would be to raise wages. Even better, given how long they operated in the red, and were famously proud to do so, they could do so for another year or two and turn their profits into stock or cash bonuses for the low paid employees, to thank them for their sacrifice during the formative years.
Read the article. It turns out that this is not a scientific journal or communique, not a technical report or abstract, not detailed information written by experts for experts. It is a general interest blog discussing items of scientific interest. It makes no claim to be novel or current. Furthermore, the article is not about the coastline per se. The second half of this very brief article discusses fractals and the relevant concepts about measuring length with respect to scale. While many people on Slashdot know this subject and its implications, many other people out there might not. So, as an informative article for laymen, it is perfectly reasonable for the forum it was published in. Even by those standards, it was still brief and naive, but if you have never encountered the concept before, it was a reasonable enough introduction to the idea. It does make one wonder though why it was posted on Slashdot, being as basic as it is.
However, the post has elicited many comments, and now, a challenge. For those who say the coast length is moot, well no, not really so. True, we can quibble the details, and the coastline is dynamic rather than static, and it all depends on length of your ruler. But that does not invalidate that the measure is important based on context. Examples:
- A boat is tasked to follow the coastline, maintaining a tangent or parallel course at all times, 200 meters of the shoreline. The boat has an aft screw, a certain length (e.g. 60 meters), and a certain rudder turning radius. Assume that the boat is laying cable and furthermore that it must to perform to perfect efficiency so that it can maximize the amount of cable it carries rather than excess fuel. How many kilometers will it ply, how many kilometers of cable are needed, how much fuel in its tanks?
- A coastal highway is being built 100 meters back from the high tide waterline. The road will be 10 meters wide. It will go from town A to town B, 20 kilometers from each other as the crow flies. Concrete and asphalt must be specified. How much of each are needed to complete the project?
- Recent seismic or volcanic activity has altered a coastline, creating a new large rocky mass along the coastline near an urban area. The altered contour creates new wave or current or tidal patterns that threaten erosion to coastline. How much rock, timber, concrete, or whatever will be needed to create a new seawall or jetty to protect human structures? Or, based on the metrics of those waves and tides, what will be the erosion rate along nearby beaches?
In each example, the length of the coastline has a tangible meaning. A rowboat that wants to follow the coast 10 meters away will have a different measure than an oil tanker following 2 kilometers away, but for the problems presented, their relative lengths matter. Based on the physical scales of each problem, the shorter rulers with longer coastlines, and the longer rulers measuring shorter coastlines must all be filtered out to yield the Goldilocks answer. As Obfuscant stated in a response above, "If you're estimating how much it will cost to install coastal protection you will measure how long the protection measure is, not how long the coast is behind it."
So, here is the challenge or invitation. Please respond below with realistic scenarios of a scientific, mathematical, engineering, or commercial nature where the length of the coast does matter for the problem or project at hand. They could be hypothetical or imagined, or they could be real world examples of prior endeavors or ordinary practices.
Someone else here posted a similar comment: "With a 100% corn diet, you'd need ~1,000 WTCs worth of floor space to grown enough calories for Manhattan." This is not traditional farming, so those kinds of calculations need to be amended.
Also - Think of nutrition like a machine. Corn (or any grain or vegetable oil) is carbon and is the fuel to run the body machine. Mineral, vitamins, and other chemicals are the maintenance tools that keep the machine in order and running. Growing carbon energy crops is cheap - that is one of the root causes of having far too much high calorie foods that cause obesity and diabetes. Fruits and vegetables, the "good for the machine" foods, are expensive, one of the reasons that people on limited budgets more easily afford grain based foods and thus have obesity and poor nutrition. Growing carbon fuels can always be done cheaply, in large quantities, and transported cheaply, out on the farm, just as it is done now. Growing more perishable green produce, which does not require such large quantities in your diet, but does require more expensive transport and storage costs, they can be cheaper by growing closer to the point of consumption.
Remember too, that grain or legume production might discard much of the grown biomass such as stems and leaves which are not part of the seeds that are brought to market. In contrast, you use all of the lettuce, all of the basil, etc., so the costs are not comparable. The urban farming project described will be growing the non-energy non-carbon nutrients that do not require nearly as much mass or calories in order to supply the other essential nutrients required in our diets.
No, not a joke, but an idea in integrated efficiency. Build data farms next to or underneath these vertical food farms. The data centers already have a robust energy infrastructure, and the farms have biomass infrastructure, and together they have synergies. Assume that the farm is built with a conventional greenhouse outer structure to capture daytime light, and that it uses the LED's as described in the article for nighttime or interior use.
Then, together, they could operate this way:
1 - In colder weather, heat runoff from the data center will keep the greenhouse heated. This means no heating costs for the farm, and it can operate year round with one major expense eliminated.
2 - In warmer weather where the farm could operate as ordinary greenhouses do, the excess heat from the data center could be used to accelerate non-human food or non-food farming, such as algae or bacteria for food, drug production, and biomass fuel.
3 - Depending on how much sunlight is allocated to the food farming, any biomass thus produced could in turn be used as fuel for running the data center.
4 - If the incoming sunlight could be filtered, everything between 500-700 nm could be diverted to silicon solar cells which have a peak absorption in that range, which is also the range that chlorophyll has no absorption. All captured light could be used where it is most efficient, allowing each "bucket of sunlight" to do double duty with relatively high efficiency, the green-yellow light supplying the data farm, the higher and lower energies supplying the food farm.
Efficiencies and economies would vary with time of year, latitude of each synergistic facility, and so on. So, operations and costs might not be so perfectly automated, but it could work. Right now, we are generating massive amounts of spent heat every time Facebook steals your data, you buy dog food on Amazon, or somebody mines bitcoin. That excess heat should be seen as an already captured natural resource that can be reused.
Well said. But, if you are a fan of Futurama, you might remember an episode that explained the conundrum best. (If you are not a Futurama fan, it is futuristic cartoon series, with one of the key characters being Bender, an irreverent and cynical robot.) In one episode, he is flung to the far reaches of the universe where he meets a non-corporeal entity that might or might not be God. They have a conversation, at the peak of which the entity explains:
"Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch . . . When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
It is sad that in corporate America, doing things right such that they are hardly noticed merits no reward, whereas screw ups win. The big Golden Parachutes that go to CEO's that bankrupt their companies are the most extreme examples.
I too work in health care. I am now employed by a giant corporation that has bought up many local hospitals, a la 1980's style mergers and acquisition, for no benefit to the hospitals or the community or the patients they serve. The depth of stupidity and moral corruption defies belief, yet the system gets away with it because the board is no longer the fiduciaries of the community or sponsoring organization, rather appointed by the corporate heads.
Diatribe aside, IT is a mess. In reading the many comments in this thread, they all ring true as to the ineffectiveness or ineptness of IT in this organization. I am not an IT insider, but I am tech savvy enough to smell the BS. Not to sound overly cynical, but the IT department seems to survive and thrive by NOT solving problems, or by making problems which they then must "fix". I acknowledge that they do something useful in keeping workaday nurses, doctors, and other staff "up and running" at each computer station, but the number of times that systems crash would not be tolerated in reputable companies. My corporate email account is a giant spam bucket filled mostly with messages from IT alerting us to the almost daily crashes or hacks and then congratulating themselves for fixing it.
Everything you said either has the ring of truth, or is readily recognized as the truth by others like ourselves who must live and function within these abortions and evil corruptions of the once honorable and reputable system of hospitals and healthcare in this country. I will however take issue with one statement, ". . . hospital system leadership which has had no serious vested interest in improving outcomes until the last few years." From where I stand, I see nothing now or on the horizon to imply any "interest in improving outcomes". It all seems to be getting worse. Things run in cycles, and maybe in 20 years or 50 years things will flip back to reason, ration, and righteous motivations, but for now, where I am, I see nothing promising.
Where I am, IT and computer infrastructure are only partly a tool to get the job done. Remember, just a few years ago, we got the job done without the IT, and it was done just as well or better. When the products and services and day to day operations are better without the technology, then the technology is more of an indulgent toy rather than a productive tool. The whole IT department then becomes a burdensome expense operating in parallel to the core business of the organization, sometimes at odds with it. And because management seems clueless, IT gets away with insane and expensive projects like periodically replacing all computers and monitors, even though the old ones worked just fine to run low bandwidth low-res text based apps that have the distinctive earmarks of having been first coded with Windows 3.1 or Win 95 era tools.
Aside, I see that several posts have been made here about "the Peter Principle". That principle was published in 1969 in a book by professor Laurence J. Peter, stating that employees in organizations are promoted to their level of incompetence. It is sadly ironic then that my organization is run by a guy named Peter. It is the true and total embodiment of the principle.
This subject brings to mind a question. My post is not about the pros or cons of self driving vehicles or taxi services, not about Waymo versus Uber versus any other. It is an abstract speculation.
Will self driving cars have different types of accidents or injury rates than human driven vehicles? For instance, if there are crashes with injuries, will the ratio of pedestrian versus occupant injuries or fatalities differ between self-driven versus human driven cars, or between different self driving companies or technologies? Will the occupants be safer than ordinary cars, and pedestrians more vulnerable, or vice versa, or no difference? Will property damages likewise be different?
It would take an unfortunate many accidents to get such statistics, but such numbers might ultimately reveal important differences in one proprietary platform versus another. They could show which platform or technology would require better oversight or "retooling".
This question is purely speculative for now. My question is, for those of you that are knowledgeable about the technologies, are there any insights about how car crashes or injuries might differ between human versus self driven vehicles?
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you searched in Google Ngram.
https://books.google.com/ngram...
If you search "set in stone", it appears that usage is a latter day idiom.
But, here is the secret to this conundrum. Language and idioms change - shift, migrate, morph - similar but slightly evolved words to express the same idea.
The inherent idea is that something is immutable, indelible, unerasable, uneditable, irrevocable. It is predicated on the idea that you can write, sketch, mockup, proof all you want and still make corrections, like hitting the preview and edit buttons on a Slashdot post, but once you hit submit, your words are eternal, just like when the stone carver finally etches the words into a stele or tombstone.
Writers write. Typographers set. Artists etch. Stone carvers carve. Through history, all such variations have been used. But since carvers carve, one might think that the classical idiom is carved in stone, with the other variations being corrupted forms based on more modern communication paradigms.
So, do what I did. Too bad I cannot post a screen capture, but you can do this yourself.
Go to Google Ngram Viewer.
Enter (copy-paste) the following line in the search box:
carved in stone,written in stone,set in stone,etched in stone
"Carved in stone" is abundant, going back well before 1800.
The other three have arisen just in recent decades.
So, prior generations used the idiom correctly. Recent generations have used analogous but technically incorrect variants.
Collectively, "written, etched, set" were originally just a tiny fraction of the whole, but recently their usage is rising. This means that current generations have either forgotten the true idiom, have gotten sloppy, or have fallen into a wave of rhetorical monkey-see monkey-do copycat-ism or fadism.
Something else interesting.
The "written, etched, set" curves are quite congruent, all showing a rapid uprise starting 1970,then an inflection circa 1990, and now topping out, with "set in stone" becoming asymptotic with or equal to "carved in stone", thus the dominant modern transmigration of the idiom. The "written, etched, set" curves are the classical sigmoidal curves of the Verhulst equation of population dynamics. These curves imply that usage of these variant terms is reaching population saturation, each term in its own camp, with non-traditional verbiage having overtaken classical verbiage.
So, Google is not broken, in fact could be a rather clever historical research tool.
https://books.google.com/ngram...
It is hard to imagine, impossible actually, this conversation happening 50 years ago. Circa 1950-1970, parents knew all too well the terror of polio from their childhood years, and the non-trivial, often major risks of measles and rubella, tetanus and diphtheria. If a few unfortunate people had severe side effects of a vaccine, it was of course very sad for that person or family, but a handful of adverse reactions was accepted and respected to protect tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of other lives.
It is easy to dismiss the non-vaxers as just kooks and idiots, as they probably are, but today, without large epidemics of those diseases to keep everyone just a little terrified, the issue becomes out-of-sight-out-of-mind. It is easy then for the herd to forget why we vaccinate, and what the price is for failing to do so. Of course, we have to decide if we castigate and chastise versus dismiss and forgive, those anti-vaxers who place their fear of a one-in-a-million complication above a sense of communal responsibility, participation, and shared risk.
A situation like this is ultimately self-correcting over a cycle of maybe 50 to a 100 years. If too many people fail to vaccinate for whatever reason, and epidemics of deadly disease flareup, then eventually enough people will get scared enough to make enough noise for government to step in or act responsibly as the voice of the overly vocal anti-vaxers die down or start singing the opposite tune. It will just take one loud mouthed or well connected anti-vaxer to have their precious Johnny or Janey die from measles or tetanus or be crippled by polio to start singing a different tune. Unfortunately, public perception and stupidity or governmental cowardice and ineptitude create propagation delays and phase lags in the response to such large social issues, first too slow to act, then too far of an overshoot, such that an even keel steady-as-she goes balance cannot be maintained. Sadly, un-moderated un-referreed adult-free Lord-of-the Flies platforms like Facebook make it all too easy for the kooks to have too much influence.
There is though a simple and elegant solution. If you choose to eschew the common good and fail to participate in the general welfare, so be it. But, if you make your own rules, you must live by those rules. Don't want to vaccinate - fine. But, if your poor Johnny and Janey gets sick with the measles or any such preventable disease, tough, no insurance for you. It's like the Little Red Hen. If you don't want to participate in making the bread, you don't get to eat the bread. Want to save poor little Johnny's life, or spend years rehabilitating him for paralysis or hearing loss or months on a ventilator? Well, sad for the poor kid, but the parents got what they bargained for, and they have to pay for it all themselves, no dipping into the societal funds available to help those who acted responsibly in the interests of the greater good. No vaccination, no problem, but if you get sick from that, No insurance for you - so sayeth Yev Kassem.
There is an intrigue here that goes beyond the mere physics and engineering of it all. This is really about triumphs and folly.
1 - It could be brilliant. This could be the engineering equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem. A brilliant mathematician has a clever insight to answer an interesting problem, writes the notes on a napkin so the story goes, and then the idea is lost. It turns out though that the math problem is not so innocent or trivial, but no one after Fermat can come up with a suitable proof. Perhaps Tesla's experiment was the real deal, but we cannot know now that he is gone.
2 - It could be pure silliness. This occurred in the same era as early flight and early automotive manufacturing. We have all seen those compilation videos of early flight attempts when people built wacky flying-falling machines in their garage with nothing more than just a nifty "idea" devoid of any bonafide engineering. Tesla had the same focus on early electrical science and technologies, and for each clever good idea he had, he might have had another that was a dog.
Were those who failed to fund him close minded fools or insightful sages?
Nothing is stopping anyone from trying now. There are plenty of people with enough technology wealth to fund the experiment if it seemed worthy, but no one is volunteering. It is telling that a modern company like Tesla can honor him with an eponymous name, but not by funding projects not relevant to modern life, instead focusing on technologies that make sense for now, like electric vehicles.
And, times have changed. Even if the idea was scientifically and technically meritorious, it might not be pragmatic or allowable today. Since then, we have developed a robust air travel industry, vital low earth orbit technologies, an electromagnetic spectrum filled with communications, and an overdue appreciation of the environmental hazards of our technologies. Tesla's invention would compete or interfere with them, so might not survive.
Agree, and it's not just the error messages. Ask tech support for help, and it's the same lameness. Go to an MS support forum, and their "experts" know less than a third grader, just enough to read the scripts.
MS has never bothered to provide meaningful support for its users. Remember, you are a user, not a customer. The customers are the hardware OEM's who buy Windows to put on the machines, not you the end user who paid money to the OEM but not to MS, so why should MS care.
The disturbing thing is to think that those inept user interactions might reflect how things work in general throughout the organization.
The disturbing thing is reading some of the commentary in response to this post. I am surprised how many germophobes and pissophobes read /. To clarify, the original article does not report about people peeing their infected urine into a bucket of sand to make funkodelic plaster to spackle your walls. Although, I suppose that some of the respondents, seemingly "under the influence" and having had too much beer tonight might find a bucket of sand a relief.
Quoting the original article: “Biostone: a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth’s most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea – a chemical found in human urine. Pumping bacterial solution into a sand-filled mould, Trimble devised hundreds of experiments over the course of a year until he tweaked the recipe. The microbes eventually metabolised the mixture of sand, urea, and calcium chloride, creating a glue that strongly bound the sand molecules together."
The process uses urea, "a chemical found in urine". Urea is also found in the primordial chemistry of the universe. In humans, urea equals nitrogen. Recall that proteins are chains of amino acids (also primordial chemistry). They have a carboxyl -COOH (the acid) and an amine -NH2 (the amino-) terminus where the end to end polymerization takes place. When proteins degrade, urea (CH4N2O) is the final catabolic product of proteins, which being water soluble is eliminated in the urine. Remember that urine is just a clean ultrafiltrate of the blood, sieved by the kidney, from which unwanted metabolic waste is not resorbed. Urine is stored in the bladder until a socially appropriate opportunity, and in healthy people, it is sterile.
Recall that organic chemistry became a reality of science and industry when urea was synthesized in 1828 by Friedrich Wöhler. Being a carbonyl of two amides, it a useful backbone reagent for making other useful organic compounds. It is used liberally in many medicinal and cosmetic products and in many industrial processes. The majority is used for fertilizer. Those large industrial quantities are manufactured from ammonia and carbon dioxide at large chemical plants, not in a Slurm-like dungeon where drunken frat boys are getting themselves wet. If Biostone ever becomes a product, fret not that you will be living in a house of pee. Who was dumb enough to think that in the first place?
On the subject of "germs", remember, they are on you body by the trillions. They are necessary for our own health and the functionings of the entire biosphere. They are also abundant in industrial processes. The list includes mining and metal extraction, decomposition of oil, production of many drugs, production of many basic organic solvents and workhorse chemicals. They also make your food, such as yogurt and cheese. Imagine that, when you eat yogurt, you are simply eating a giant bacteria culture, as if your Yoplait container was just a fancy shaped Petri dish.
Microbial processes are also important in geology, having much to do with the deposition of stable mineral varnishes and caliches from water soluble salts, i.e, the kind of natural materials that are useful as mortars and cements. Read the article. That is what this study did. It used urea, calcium chloride, and sand to make an accretion that had adhesion and structural strength. The article mentions that ammonia outgassed from the process, meaning the process reverses the production of urea, so even if some nitrogen persists in the caliche, the pissophobes amongst us need not fear to live among the bricks.
After almost two centuries of industrialization, synthetic chemistry, and carbonization trashing the planet we live on, it should be inspiring that there are people making earnest efforts to find better solutions. Think of that next time you smear some skin moisturizer or sun block on your body - read the ingrediant list - urea. Or, if you prefer, take a golden shower.
I use four browsers.
I usually open Firefox as my first choice, but I end up using it about equal with Chrome, and together that is more than 95% of my usage.
I infrequently, but sometimes, open Edge primarily. However, I allow Edge to remain as the OS default browser, so when I click on a link in an email or some other extra-browser origin, it opens in Edge. Thus, I use Edge with some regularity, but only for brief take-a-looks, and if I intend to play around at that website or save pages, I copy the url and open it in Chrome of Firefox.
I also use Cliqz, built on Firefox, for more sensitive browsing.
And. once in a blue moon, I use IE last version when pages will not load correctly elsewhere.
I have no special allegiance or favoritism to any single browser. just using whatever is convenient at the moment.
Several interesting observations (to me at least) come from this experience.
1 - When MS fought and won the browser wars and vanquished Netscape, they had a product that worked and people wanted. I know all of the history and arguments and reasons against Internet Explorer (non-standardized features, poor security, unfair business practices), but for users, it was robustly featured, useful, and dependable. I am not defending MS or IE, but it makes me wonder how MS could sink so low from where they once were, the Gods of internet software, and now they can hardly make a Dick-and-Jane level product lacking in all of the features that made IE compelling in the earlier days.
2 - Edge is not so entirely awful as many people like to complain about. On the other hand it is terrible in many ways. For instance, you cannot save a webpage from Edge. By using it to open email links and other trivial things, I get to keep an eye on whether it is improving, but not much progress. BUT, now and then there are pages that will not open or render properly on the other browsers but do so perfectly on Edge. One post here wonders if MS is using hidden or non-standard API's, so some pages written for Edge work but trash or crash elsewhere. While such practices, if true, would be disgraceful, it points out that in order to smoothly sail the Internet, having all browsers handy is what you need.
3 - Edge can excel. On example that affected me this month concerns reading large PDF's. I am working on a manuscript that has about 800 pages and numerous graphics. In pdf format, which is a large file, Adobe Acrobat reader crashes, and others render slowly or choppy. Edge handles monster pdf's with grace and speed. Even if Edge does nothing else well, that alone makes it a worthy tool.
4 - By the way, I also this week downloaded some huge pdf's from other sites (scans of historical works), each pdf on the order of 1 GB. Firefox uniformly trashed every one of those pdf's when downloading and saving them, corrupted files not reparable with any pdf repair utility. However, Chrome handled every one flawlessly. Likewise Google maps - Chrome does maps well, Firefox chokes. So, even when it comes to Firefox versus Chrome, neither is perfect. This brings us back to the important idea above - having all browsers handy is what you need.
One post here recounts how MS won the browser wars in part by creating non-standard features that made a lot of web pages unreadable on standards-compliant browsers, and that now Google is doing the same. It would be nice if every company released products that were strictly standards compliant, but if they did so, there would be no distinction between the products, and thus no competition or advancement. As irritating and aggravating as some of the companies and their products and practices are at times, you have to decide if you want to campaign against the crappy this or that product, object on principles, or just accept that all do a good job with some things, and all are dogs in some ways.
Have all of the browsers installed, and have all accessible from a shortcut, and when one does not render or save a page properly, try the next and then the next if needs be. No single browser can handle the whole internet, regardless what their marketing people say or what each of us thinks about the way things ought to be. Having all three just a click away makes your computing life workable.
The irony of this story is that I just walked in from running a special errand. Four days ago, Friday, the Amazon delivery service dropped off a box at my house. It was addressed to someone else. I live in a large metro area. The intended recipient is in the same metro area, but a neighboring town 14 miles away. Our names have no resemblance to each other, none whatsoever, nor was there anything else that could have caused confusion. The shipping label said (paraphrasing) deliver to Fred, 123 Main St., Othercity. The Amazon delivery guy was nowhere close, and he apparently did not even look at the label address, or my address where he delivered it, or used any GPS or other tracking or location confirmation. I am not anticipating any packages, so it is not as though my own package got swapped or has gone missing.
I called Amazon customer service, gave them the tracking number, and they found it right away. They then said "We would pleased for you to keep the item, and we will order a replacement for the buyer direct from the vendor." After verifying that the buyer would indeed get a replacement item, that was the end of the call. I do not know what is in the box, but it would be a long shot that what Fred ordered is something that I could use. Since coincidentally Fred at 123 Main St. is just a short side step on my way to and from work, I dropped it off at his house today. Lucky Fred will now get two of what he ordered. I just returned from that errand, just to read this article.
I can only imagine that the Amazon rep looked at the order details, and if the item was below a certain cost, it was easier for them to authorize a replacement rather than pick up and redeliver the original item. But what if it was an expensive item, or perishable, or a one of a kind antique? I have read various stories of problems with Amazon's own home brewed delivery system that they are trying to build out. What if the package that should have gone to Leh went to Mumbai or Mombasa or Minnesota, or vice versa? Here's hoping that those nice folk at the top of the world all get what they ordered.
So much of the news these days talks about inequality in societal wealth, collapse of traditional businesses and industries, and other gloomy socioeconomic news, even when "the economy" is running well. The idea of fast trading and its variations, day trading, high frequency trading, and their ilk are a vector of these inequities. Letting trades happen at nanosecond scale just amplifies the problems that make money for those who already have it while raising the barrier to ordinary citizens and investors.
It used to be that investment was there to build the economy. If a company needed capital to develop a product or service, or bring it to market, then Wall Street and the exchanges were there so you could sell shares to an investor. It was considered wise to invest for the long term. Leaving your invested capital in a successful company could net you large rewards in 20 or 30 years, at a time in life when you could retire or make good use of your accumulated wealth. The idea of the primary market to capitalize a company is of course still very important.
But recent decades have seen ever increasing activity of the secondary aftermarket, where those who bought shares direct from the company are now trading back and forth with others. It is a game of musical chairs in which the idea is to be left holding the most greenbacks when the music stops. Unlike primary issues of equity to raise money for a company and build wealth in the long run, the aftermarket trades are a zero sum game in which for every winner there is an equal loser, none of which adds wealth to the company. Sure, if a trading frenzy jacks up the stock price, the company can benefit by selling more shares, but all too often these days, companies might not benefit so much as does their CEO and other principle shareholders, nor do higher stock prices translate into better business, profits, and dividends.
The problem is that the markets have a whole lot of psychology and man-in-the-middle and other social stresses on them that make stock price and even whole market movements irrational as measured against mathematical analysis of the facts. Trading and the financial markets are complex non-linear systems, and they can be likened in many ways to electrical circuits with capacitances, reactances, attenuators, amplifiers, propagation delays, and the like, all of which could settle an itchy twitchy circuit or market or else make them go crazy at the wrong times. Adding high frequency switching to a given subcircuit could have very chaotic and disruptive effects (chaos in both the dynamical and the figurative sense). I can foresee where this could result in trades that occur out of order or prematurely with respect to various incoming data, a race condition, which could spark human panic, buy ups, sell offs, and lead to a major market catastrophe. Every time there has been a market crash or collapse, e.g. in the U.S. in 1837, 1929, & 2008, there were any number of pundits swearing they knew better and that it could not happen.
There is nothing inherently good or beneficial to society by having nanosecond trading. Some people will make money, some will lose, the parent companies will derive no benefit, and the inherent value of the company and the products they make and people they serve might end up in jeopardy if a meltdown occurs.
I have a solution to the problem of speedy self serving trading in lieu of long term value investments. A hyperbolic tax scale. No, not exaggerated "hyperbole", but a mathematical inverse function. Short term capital gains tax = some fudge factor divided by time that the stock is held. Tax = k / time. Do some homework to pick a benchmark for k. (If you want to have true zero tax in someone's lifetime, or some floor of a minimum obligatory tax, then you can add offsets, Tax = k / time + minimum, but ignore that for the moment). Suppose that an investor who holds a stock for 2 years pays a 40% capital gains tax, or else maybe 20% at 5 years or something to that effect. Once you pe
There is the old saying that if you think you know the solution, you do not understand the problem. That seems to apply to a lot of technology acquisition in the health fields.
Here is the problem. In medicine, there are some disorders and diagnoses that are very well understood in terms of physiology and pathogenesis, well characterized as to making a correct diagnosis that correlates with an effective response to prescribed treatment, and easy to teach to young physicians who can in turn provide accurate diagnoses and good care to people with those problems.
However, there are also problems that are oddball or non-obvious diagnoses, problems due to occult or infrequent disorders, problems with atypical symptoms or atypical responses to intervention, or else problems that reflect altered or atypical pathogenesis or else disorders of complexity or dysdynamia in complex multi-control systems in which one person's illness has different signs and symptoms than the next person with the same illness. If compared to algorithmic processes such as computer programming, some of these patients and problems would be seen as illogical, out-of-sequence, or data corrupted, yet a valid diagnosis can be made by someone who understands these deeper levels of seeming illogic. Whether or not contemporary doctors and medical education still rise to the challenge is another issue altogether, but when medicine is done right by smart properly educated physicians, correct diagnoses and treatments can be made for very non-obvious problems. This is because genuine intelligence is better than artificial intelligence at doing these non-obvious complex tasks.
But, you say, therein is the value of AI, indeed the whole premise of AI, that it can perceive patterns and associations in data that even smart people will not necessarily see. That may be true, but AI can be no better than the set of data it is trained on. The article states "these companies . . . brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights". Big databases from corporate healthcare enterprises do indeed have lots of data , but it is not necessarily quality or robust or relevant data. It is the kind of perfunctory or bulk data that is filled out into forms, or is coded in ICD and CPT numbers (industry standard diagnosis and procedure codes). The data is curated or trivialized to what can be entered by overworked professionals in order to generate bills, or else by low level billing and data clerks. It is often data that is not relevant to the technical medical issues, and even when it is, it is not the detailed or nuanced data that allows for the oddball, atypical, and one-off diagnoses.
Suppose there are 7 different disorders that can affect the pinky toe, 3 of which are common and readily recognized by medical students and physician extenders, 2 more of which are recognized by the average properly educated physician, and 2 of which are odd and likely to be recognized only by experienced experts. The difference in diagnosis for these latter two might be because the toe points at an angle five degrees different than normal. If the data keeping records have only 4 approved codes to recognize 7 diagnoses, and if there is no place to record the angle of the toe, then the AI training set will not be able to understand the oddball diagnoses. Note as well that the data entry front ends that are often in modern medical records depend on the easy info. The problem is that the easy diagnoses can already be made by people with a baseline education. The one-off diagnoses depend on levels experience of multi-factorial observation and pattern recognition that real experts have but which the medical record is often scant on.
Technology has become a self-indulgent plaything for companies and venture capitalists. "Let's automate or computerize this or that . . . because we can. Isn't this fun?" If you develop enough infrastructure or visibility or limited success to beguile the next dog up th
The real question is Whills he or wonts he?
If he do, it might be more like Last Whills and Testicles.
Maybe a Star Trek crossover fantasy where they rescue tiny Force whales, "Free Whillsy".
Starring Whills Wheaton.
Stories like this are appearing at a seemingly exponential rise: tech replaces person, or business uses tech to interact with customers. One by one this or that industry latches onto another computerized front end device that is supposed to give the customer a better experience, or else give the proprietor more information or a streamlined operation.
Pardon my naivete or else cynicism, but many times I cannot see the real value in these services. For instance, have restaurant owners adopted these menu-pads because they really perceive (or actually fulfill) a need or value, or because somebody is selling it to them, just a fad that attracts lemmings to a bandwagon steered by a Pied Piper pitchman?
Imagine a simple two-way matrix with four discrete states. The axes are real value of a good or service (valuable or not) versus perceived value (potential customer sees merit or not).
(1) Positive real value and positive perceived value is the sweet spot. The item or service sells itself, and company reps, if involved at all, can be useful learning and support resources.
(2) Positive real value but negative perceived value - that is an opportunity for legitimate entrepreneurs and marketeers to sway the public toward the better but non-obvious item.
(3) Negative real value but positive perceived value - that is the domain of opportunists who do not need to pitch a BS product but can run with the fad and profit from it. (It is worth reading a group psychology classic from 1841, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay.)
(4) Negative real and negative perceived value. Ho-hum, "so what" says the market, but therein is the playground of the shyster, charlatan, huckster. You can often bet on this pitchman because "a fool and his money are soon parted", and "there's a sucker born every minute".
So, the question for /.'ers is this. Are these new tech fads customer or proprietor driven, proprietor or pitchman driven, need or vanity driven, value or fad driven? Are tech gizmos sold because a potential customer sees real value and buys based on rational needs or planning, or because the wily salesman sells something based on vanity or popular delusions? I recognize that some innovative uses of tech are legitimate and valuable, others blatantly not. Where on the two-way matrix do these items fall?
What are your perceptions and insights?
It sounds as though despite active disease, stricture, and these technical headaches, that you are active (hiking tall rocks) and thus not acutely complicated by your palsied pill. If you are not sick, then no urgent risk. The big concern of course is that the thing will lodge in the stricture and you will get acutely obstructed.
I assume that your doctors have already tried various things, but on hearing the story anew, several things come to mind. They might have all been done already, but it doesn't hurt to get fresh ideas:
- Steroid boost. I see that that has been tried, but all too often when I hear that steroids were raised, it is often just trivial amounts. If reduction of inflammation and edema will loosen the stricture and de-narrow the lumen, one to two weeks of sizeable doses might be needed, e.g. the kinds of doses used for severe life threatening flares of autoimmune disorders such as lupus or pemphigus.
- Lubrication. Mineral oil is a classic stool softener and lubricant. It is less in favor today because (1) concerns about hydrocarbon aspiration and pneumonitis if you are obstructed and vomiting, and (2) high priced pharmaceutical pills are more in the minds of most physicians these days. If you are not obstructed (sounds like you are not), then a good swig or two of the stuff might help.
- Bulk flow. The concentrated osmotic agents that are used for bowel preps might create a wave of peristalsis and flow that might carry the flotsam forward. This could be a concern if you are obstructed, but evidently you are not. But if you were . . .
- Gastrograffin swallow. This is intestinal x-ray dye. It is very hygroscopic and can induce bulk fluid flows as well as dehydrating the mucosa (lining tissue) of the bowel surface. It is often used as a first line intervention to alleviate an early bowel obstruction before resorting to surgery. A gastrograffin swallow would partly combine the effects of steroids and osmotic agents, which if primed with mineral oil might get the thing to sneak by.
- Technical. If they could see it with the 2-balloon enteroscope, then they might have snagged it except that they either could not reach it or else not grab it with a biopsy forceps. Instead, they could use a stone basket. If the stone baskets are on too short a wire, then weld-solder-splice an extension. Big companies such as Olympus that make the equipment will often make custom modified hardware for special circumstances, and making a 20 or 25 foot long stone basket might be easy if you ask your local rep for help.
None of these are guaranteed to work, but they have a fair chance of doing so, and they are safe. Perhaps one or some of these have not been tried yet, in which case it is worth discussing them with your doctors.
Good luck.
Back when, customizable toolbars and drop down menus made it all convenient and discoverable. Then, they went and changed it all up, apparently just because . . . another MS screw-the-user "engineering" arts and crafts project. But, sooner or later, people can adapt or adjust to anything, undoubtedly to the great consternation of the wizards of Redmond. So, just when people have started to learn or memorize the ribbon layout and new icons, time to switch it up again. But fear not my dear alarmed user friends. MS plans to make it easy for you this time. Their software will include a new AI / VR enabled virtual concierge to quide you. He goes by the name of Clippy 2. And since the new icons will be in that thin monoline style, Clippy 2 will keep warm by wearing a t-shirt that says "MS Bob". Of course, input methods need to be as streamilined as the interface, so only 10 keys on your keyboard will work. Clippy 2 will help you discover which ones.
Thanks for your kind reply. I concur completely. As this thread reveals, there have been many influences that got us here. I also share the perspective that the '80's saw the rise of consumerism, "greed is good", and "greed is God". For me, two factors stand out in that transformation. First, the inclination for "everyone" to go to college and get a bachelor degree meant that many people went through degree programs that were not so in prior eras, like marketing-advertising, business-finance, and management. This meant that too many people were over qualified, placed in "managerial" or executive positions to manipulate and massage the numbers, rather than having people who knew skilled trades who could actually make something. Second, federal rules changed that allowed for greater perosnal management of retirement accounts, spawing 401k's and the like. This opened the way for the investment banks and mutual funds to go wild, placing emphasis in the equities markets on short term gain and stock prices rather than intrinsic value and long term profitability of a company. Together, they were a perfect recipe for mergers-and-acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, all kinds of shady and corrupt investment strategies, and too-numerous-to-count scandalous investment stories, not to mention the ascendancy of service related businesses at the expense of manufacturing. Oh my !#@$.
I am enjoying this thread, because so many people have discussed insightful perspectives on the social and economic dynamics behind all of this. If nothing else, one can appreciate that the stresses on modern life bred by the Baby Boom generation are quite complex and multifactorial. As one of those Baby Boomers, here is another perspective on this topic that I have perceived as society has changed over these years. It suggests that some of the deficits of modern society are an unintended consequence of morally righteous movements in that era, activities meant to promote social equality and broader educational opportunities. Note - this is not an argument against education and equality, just an abstract observation of social and economic dynamics.
This thesis can be described as “workforce inflation with wage dilution”.
The post-war period circa 1945-1980 was, in the USA, an era of unprecedented optimism and middle class wealth. People could fulfill the American dream of home ownership, employment, and social security. Yes, there were negatives, like the Cold War and the A-bomb, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Generation Gap, but the anxieties were balanced by the inspirations. There were gadgets galore, easy lifestyle, cultural robustness, and a sense of purpose and mission in projects like the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the United Nations, Rock and Roll, Levittown and the suburbs, Route 66 and the open road, the Space Race, and so many others. This came on the heels of a well tooled industrial infrastructure, a highly skilled workforce (including Rosie the Riveter and the ladies), and a post war surge in college education. So, if you are living in the 50's or 60's, listening to Elvis Presley or Little Richard on your portable radio, watching the Smothers Brothers or the Apollo moon walks on a brand new color TV that you bought at a suburban shopping mall that you drove to in your Chevy or Olds, while the dishes and clothes are being washed automatically for you, life could hardly be imagined to be better.
That unprecedented social ease and economic robustness was the product of just half the population working. In that era, the women stayed home to "tend the hearth", while the men worked. With half the adult population at work, and half at home raising children with family values, then society, for the majority of people, was at a peak of "feeling good". Then came women's lib and educational and social equality, products of the Bay Boom era. Suddenly the workforce is diluted with twice the number of job seekers to do the same number of jobs that gave us unprecedented economic success. This is NOT a diatribe against women or equality. Translated to modern terms, that was the end of an era in which, in a society where committed domestic partnerships were the consistent norm, one partner was out of the house "bringing home the bacon", while the other partner raised the family, crucial to the perpetuation of primary education, values, and social norms for the next generation. So, at that time, we had extraordinary wealth, material largesse based on manufacturing prowess, and cultural optimism which required only half of the adult population to produce, while the other half of the adult population stayed at home to perpetuate respectable social values.
What happens though if the other half, the stay-at-home half, suddenly wants to and does enter the workplace? By spending less time at home, then social mores and family morals risk becoming diluted, corrupted, or forgotten. At the same time, the workforce is now doubled, twice the people working to make what was already a peak or epitome level of material production. The problem is that there is a certain fixed economic value in the existing material production. If a new TV is valued at $100, having two people instead of one to manufacture it does not change its relative value, and thus its retail price cannot vary too much. The company cannot charge $200 because people's wages have not gone up, so $200 is overpr
As I recall, as a kid in the 1950's, Venus seemed to get as much or more interest than Mars as a place to visit, explore, possibly even colonize. Then, the Space Age started, and we could learn some real facts about those worlds. Venus it turns out is a much harsher environment. Your comment points out the great science value of going to Venus. As a hot and wet environment with a dense and rich atmosphere, it is a natural and active geochemistry lab that would probably amaze us. We might discover any number of useful new compounds and materials that could be beneficial here on the home world. Who knows, there is a chance it could be commercialized just by selling the amazing landscape photographs or extraordinary mineral and crystal specimens that might be mined. But that is all just a fantasy without the extraordinary technological development needed to survive there. Mars has its great challenges getting onto the surface safely, but once on the ground, Mars isn't such a tough place.
I have read concepts about using the dense Venutian atmosphere as a way to float dirigible like science platforms. That could prove relatively cheap and easy for long term science, but getting long term vehicles or habitats on the surface is not so certain, nor would the vehicles likely last anywhere near as long as the Martian assets have (Opportunity is now there 14 years). Earth based testing of the technologies or equipment in the Venutian environment would also require a huge commitment of very expensive technologies, using geysers, volcanoes, or deep water sea vents. In contrast, simulating Mars can be done in the Atacama desert or in Antarctica, not so challenging or hard to get to.
So, Mars is cheaper. Mars is safer. Mars is fit for long term human habitation - and therein is the key thing. And, don't discount the science that will come from Mars once real people and geologists and chemists can get there with a rock hammer, a microscope, and a sense of adventure.
Too bad we do not have the budget for both. In the 1960's, cost was no object - we were going to space, and that was that, and we started exploring the entire solar system. Then came war, politics, a bad economy, and social malaise. NASA has been under- or poorly funded for much of the past 40-50 years. If a limited amount has to be carefully spent, it is going to go where there will be the most return on investment, and in the current sociopolitical environment, that return has broader implications that just good science for its own sake or for same vague promise of possibly finding a better superconductor or semiconductor or fossilized antediluvian train conductor or whatever. Of course, if enough people thought there is a valuable scientific harvest to be made at the Morning Star, a write-in campaign to legislators, media, and the various space agencies could pump up enthusiasm for a return to Venus. For now though, with only limited bucks, Buck Rogers is going to Mars.
The end of the first paragraph in the post states "But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon." What I was expecting at that point was an idea in distributed computing. Your processor idles down or else is overwhelmed by a high bandwidth task, so it offloads portions of the job to your refrigerator, cell phone, tablet, washing machine, other desktops. you car, etc. - anything that can be accessed by IoT or peer-to-peer networking or whatever. That makes sense, kind of, if you are doing supercomputing tasks or cryptocurrency mining at home.
However, this turns out to be an idea about using multiple wifi antennas to create interference patterns from which FFT's can decode the dataset - kind of a wifi holography. The problem is that anyone who moves the desk or couch, leaves their bicycle in the room, puts a metal kitchen bowl on a table, turns on a laptop, has their Aunt Tillie sitting in the wrong place, or even just wears a tinfoil hat to tune in or tune out other strange ideas will trash the computation.
It used to be that with relatively few TV channels and finite numbers of radio stations and newspapers, that news could be filtered or curated to things of genuine significance. Now, with seemingly unlimited media outlets, any idea or premature utterance can become "news". A century ago, we fantasized about going to the moon, and then it happened. Just half a century ago, we fantasized about handheld computers and wrist watch televisions, and then it happened. So, ideas can come to fruition, so we cannot be too dismissive. This one however seems to be a big "so what", and "what the hell would one use it for?"
I am not an accountant, I know nothing about the internal workings of Amazon other than what I can read in public media, and I probably do not know what I am talking about. But, I can do some arithmetic.
1 - The summary states that the Amazon warehouse worker makes $24,300.
2 - Amazon is famous for foregoing profits during its first 15-20 years in favor of expansion of services.
3 - There is financial information at the following links:
Amazon revenues: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Amazon income: https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/...
Amazon employees: https://www.statista.com/stati...
Amazon profits: https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
Based on these numbers, Amazon's performance in 2017 was:
Revenue = $178b
Gross profit after cost of revenue = $66b
Income after operating expenses = $4b
Net income after taxes et al = $3b
Employment = 566,000
For prior years:
2016: $2.4b net on $136b revenue, 341,000 employees
2015: $0.6b net on $107b revenue, 231,000 employees
You can see the trend - Amazon is only recently profitable as employees expand with general revenue and profit.
I have no idea how many of the employees are warehouse or fulfillment center employees. I have seen reports that would place the number between 130k and 200k.
For the sake of this analysis, assume that other low skilled employees are included, and we will go with 200,000 bottom wage employees.
Assume that Amazon had a fit of good will toward its workers and payed them a liveable non-stressful wage.
If in 2017 the $24k current wage was upped to $34k, that is an extra $10k/person/annum x 200k workers = $2 billion extra in wages.
That is 2/3's of profit, so Amazon could have afforded it (at the expense of shareholder return).
In 2016, assume a pro rata fewer number of low wage employees, 341k/566k x 200k = 120k.
Then, $10k x 120k workers = $1.2 billion = 1/2 of profit, so it was affordable.
In 2015, estimate low wage workers at 231k/566k x 200k = 82k.
Then, $10k x 82k workers = $0.82 billion = 1/3 greater than profit, so it was not fully affordable.
Going back farther, there was less profit to fund higher wages.
I am not arguing for or against Amazon, nor for or against minimum wages or workers rights or any other sociopolitical point of view. Being in a human services profession, I tend to side with the workers, and it pains me to hear of such situations. However, I also buy from Amazon, and call me a hypocrite if you will, but so do you.
Emotional or political or social points of view aside, it can be seen that Amazon's push to expand did not permit unfettered generous wages during periods of unprofitability.
Of course, the counter argument must be made that the higher paid employees, which are greater than half the workforce, could have had reduced wages and bonuses for a more equitable pay scale.
Now that Amazon is coming into the black, the righteous thing to do would be to raise wages. Even better, given how long they operated in the red, and were famously proud to do so, they could do so for another year or two and turn their profits into stock or cash bonuses for the low paid employees, to thank them for their sacrifice during the formative years.
Read the article. It turns out that this is not a scientific journal or communique, not a technical report or abstract, not detailed information written by experts for experts. It is a general interest blog discussing items of scientific interest. It makes no claim to be novel or current. Furthermore, the article is not about the coastline per se. The second half of this very brief article discusses fractals and the relevant concepts about measuring length with respect to scale. While many people on Slashdot know this subject and its implications, many other people out there might not. So, as an informative article for laymen, it is perfectly reasonable for the forum it was published in. Even by those standards, it was still brief and naive, but if you have never encountered the concept before, it was a reasonable enough introduction to the idea. It does make one wonder though why it was posted on Slashdot, being as basic as it is.
However, the post has elicited many comments, and now, a challenge. For those who say the coast length is moot, well no, not really so. True, we can quibble the details, and the coastline is dynamic rather than static, and it all depends on length of your ruler. But that does not invalidate that the measure is important based on context. Examples:
- A boat is tasked to follow the coastline, maintaining a tangent or parallel course at all times, 200 meters of the shoreline. The boat has an aft screw, a certain length (e.g. 60 meters), and a certain rudder turning radius. Assume that the boat is laying cable and furthermore that it must to perform to perfect efficiency so that it can maximize the amount of cable it carries rather than excess fuel. How many kilometers will it ply, how many kilometers of cable are needed, how much fuel in its tanks?
- A coastal highway is being built 100 meters back from the high tide waterline. The road will be 10 meters wide. It will go from town A to town B, 20 kilometers from each other as the crow flies. Concrete and asphalt must be specified. How much of each are needed to complete the project?
- Recent seismic or volcanic activity has altered a coastline, creating a new large rocky mass along the coastline near an urban area. The altered contour creates new wave or current or tidal patterns that threaten erosion to coastline. How much rock, timber, concrete, or whatever will be needed to create a new seawall or jetty to protect human structures? Or, based on the metrics of those waves and tides, what will be the erosion rate along nearby beaches?
In each example, the length of the coastline has a tangible meaning. A rowboat that wants to follow the coast 10 meters away will have a different measure than an oil tanker following 2 kilometers away, but for the problems presented, their relative lengths matter. Based on the physical scales of each problem, the shorter rulers with longer coastlines, and the longer rulers measuring shorter coastlines must all be filtered out to yield the Goldilocks answer. As Obfuscant stated in a response above, "If you're estimating how much it will cost to install coastal protection you will measure how long the protection measure is, not how long the coast is behind it."
So, here is the challenge or invitation. Please respond below with realistic scenarios of a scientific, mathematical, engineering, or commercial nature where the length of the coast does matter for the problem or project at hand. They could be hypothetical or imagined, or they could be real world examples of prior endeavors or ordinary practices.
Post here . . . . . .
Someone else here posted a similar comment:
"With a 100% corn diet, you'd need ~1,000 WTCs worth of floor space to grown enough calories for Manhattan."
This is not traditional farming, so those kinds of calculations need to be amended.
Also -
Think of nutrition like a machine. Corn (or any grain or vegetable oil) is carbon and is the fuel to run the body machine. Mineral, vitamins, and other chemicals are the maintenance tools that keep the machine in order and running. Growing carbon energy crops is cheap - that is one of the root causes of having far too much high calorie foods that cause obesity and diabetes. Fruits and vegetables, the "good for the machine" foods, are expensive, one of the reasons that people on limited budgets more easily afford grain based foods and thus have obesity and poor nutrition. Growing carbon fuels can always be done cheaply, in large quantities, and transported cheaply, out on the farm, just as it is done now. Growing more perishable green produce, which does not require such large quantities in your diet, but does require more expensive transport and storage costs, they can be cheaper by growing closer to the point of consumption.
Remember too, that grain or legume production might discard much of the grown biomass such as stems and leaves which are not part of the seeds that are brought to market. In contrast, you use all of the lettuce, all of the basil, etc., so the costs are not comparable. The urban farming project described will be growing the non-energy non-carbon nutrients that do not require nearly as much mass or calories in order to supply the other essential nutrients required in our diets.
No, not a joke, but an idea in integrated efficiency. Build data farms next to or underneath these vertical food farms. The data centers already have a robust energy infrastructure, and the farms have biomass infrastructure, and together they have synergies.
Assume that the farm is built with a conventional greenhouse outer structure to capture daytime light, and that it uses the LED's as described in the article for nighttime or interior use.
Then, together, they could operate this way:
1 - In colder weather, heat runoff from the data center will keep the greenhouse heated. This means no heating costs for the farm, and it can operate year round with one major expense eliminated.
2 - In warmer weather where the farm could operate as ordinary greenhouses do, the excess heat from the data center could be used to accelerate non-human food or non-food farming, such as algae or bacteria for food, drug production, and biomass fuel.
3 - Depending on how much sunlight is allocated to the food farming, any biomass thus produced could in turn be used as fuel for running the data center.
4 - If the incoming sunlight could be filtered, everything between 500-700 nm could be diverted to silicon solar cells which have a peak absorption in that range, which is also the range that chlorophyll has no absorption. All captured light could be used where it is most efficient, allowing each "bucket of sunlight" to do double duty with relatively high efficiency, the green-yellow light supplying the data farm, the higher and lower energies supplying the food farm.
Efficiencies and economies would vary with time of year, latitude of each synergistic facility, and so on. So, operations and costs might not be so perfectly automated, but it could work. Right now, we are generating massive amounts of spent heat every time Facebook steals your data, you buy dog food on Amazon, or somebody mines bitcoin. That excess heat should be seen as an already captured natural resource that can be reused.
Well said. But, if you are a fan of Futurama, you might remember an episode that explained the conundrum best. (If you are not a Futurama fan, it is futuristic cartoon series, with one of the key characters being Bender, an irreverent and cynical robot.) In one episode, he is flung to the far reaches of the universe where he meets a non-corporeal entity that might or might not be God. They have a conversation, at the peak of which the entity explains:
"Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch . . . When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
It is sad that in corporate America, doing things right such that they are hardly noticed merits no reward, whereas screw ups win. The big Golden Parachutes that go to CEO's that bankrupt their companies are the most extreme examples.
I too work in health care. I am now employed by a giant corporation that has bought up many local hospitals, a la 1980's style mergers and acquisition, for no benefit to the hospitals or the community or the patients they serve. The depth of stupidity and moral corruption defies belief, yet the system gets away with it because the board is no longer the fiduciaries of the community or sponsoring organization, rather appointed by the corporate heads.
Diatribe aside, IT is a mess. In reading the many comments in this thread, they all ring true as to the ineffectiveness or ineptness of IT in this organization. I am not an IT insider, but I am tech savvy enough to smell the BS. Not to sound overly cynical, but the IT department seems to survive and thrive by NOT solving problems, or by making problems which they then must "fix". I acknowledge that they do something useful in keeping workaday nurses, doctors, and other staff "up and running" at each computer station, but the number of times that systems crash would not be tolerated in reputable companies. My corporate email account is a giant spam bucket filled mostly with messages from IT alerting us to the almost daily crashes or hacks and then congratulating themselves for fixing it.
Everything you said either has the ring of truth, or is readily recognized as the truth by others like ourselves who must live and function within these abortions and evil corruptions of the once honorable and reputable system of hospitals and healthcare in this country. I will however take issue with one statement, ". . . hospital system leadership which has had no serious vested interest in improving outcomes until the last few years." From where I stand, I see nothing now or on the horizon to imply any "interest in improving outcomes". It all seems to be getting worse. Things run in cycles, and maybe in 20 years or 50 years things will flip back to reason, ration, and righteous motivations, but for now, where I am, I see nothing promising.
Where I am, IT and computer infrastructure are only partly a tool to get the job done. Remember, just a few years ago, we got the job done without the IT, and it was done just as well or better. When the products and services and day to day operations are better without the technology, then the technology is more of an indulgent toy rather than a productive tool. The whole IT department then becomes a burdensome expense operating in parallel to the core business of the organization, sometimes at odds with it. And because management seems clueless, IT gets away with insane and expensive projects like periodically replacing all computers and monitors, even though the old ones worked just fine to run low bandwidth low-res text based apps that have the distinctive earmarks of having been first coded with Windows 3.1 or Win 95 era tools.
Aside, I see that several posts have been made here about "the Peter Principle". That principle was published in 1969 in a book by professor Laurence J. Peter, stating that employees in organizations are promoted to their level of incompetence. It is sadly ironic then that my organization is run by a guy named Peter. It is the true and total embodiment of the principle.
True, fair enough, well said.
This subject brings to mind a question. My post is not about the pros or cons of self driving vehicles or taxi services, not about Waymo versus Uber versus any other. It is an abstract speculation.
Will self driving cars have different types of accidents or injury rates than human driven vehicles? For instance, if there are crashes with injuries, will the ratio of pedestrian versus occupant injuries or fatalities differ between self-driven versus human driven cars, or between different self driving companies or technologies? Will the occupants be safer than ordinary cars, and pedestrians more vulnerable, or vice versa, or no difference? Will property damages likewise be different?
It would take an unfortunate many accidents to get such statistics, but such numbers might ultimately reveal important differences in one proprietary platform versus another. They could show which platform or technology would require better oversight or "retooling".
This question is purely speculative for now. My question is, for those of you that are knowledgeable about the technologies, are there any insights about how car crashes or injuries might differ between human versus self driven vehicles?