Ah too bad I don't have mod points. This is what I came to suggest here. It's truly the best of both worlds. I used to have one (received one as a gift), but as it turns out I had never up to that point taken notes in class, and having one such pen didn't change matters much. I did try it for its geek factor, and it was just fantastic. The software wasn't great (and it was windows-only), but maybe things have changed since then.
But if OP's wife is hellbent on getting a tablet (I'm starting to believe it's just one of those solutions in search of a poblem), what I had before the livescribe was an old-school tablet PC (with a wacom tablet and pen as the input mechanism) with Linux on it. There was a pretty straightforward program from the repos that was pretty great as well, it saved all the notes in an xml file, and was exportable to PDF. I bet it still exists... Yup, it's called Xournal, and it's in the Ubuntu 11.10 repos still.
I still don't get the tablet craze, I must say; that tablet was pretty damn cool (and an actual computer at that), and still I ended up selling it on account of me never really using it as much as I thought I would when I bought it.
I wrote in my letter to the primary care that the increased rate was due to "normal physiologic activity".
And in doing so it could be argued that you inadvertently helped the taboo to get even stronger. What's wrong with saying what was actually going on (patient was engaged in sexual activity)? It's unnecessary from a medical PoV, sure, but I find it odd that in your anecdote about the ridiculousness of the taboo surrounding a "normal physiological activity", you had to hide or mask what he was doing from his family doctor.
Simple: You get a contract where they only charge you for what you call. I think those may not be available in the US though, and your only option might be prepaid.
It the percentage of users is THAT ridiculously small, then surely it makes no sense to go and actively develop locks so that users won't be able to access the bootloader, don't you think?
This isn't a winnable debate by the manufacturers, and HTC seems to finally have figured that out.
What I'm really looking forward about this is that the current (to my knowledge) most battery efficient app on the market today (Sipdroid) absolutely DEVOURS my battery, making it impossible for me to leave it running in the background. I'd really love a completely "virtual" phone in the sense that I could use it as a full time SIP phone, but so far, it's either take a charger everywhere I go or just use it for outgoing calls. Hopefully (probably?) Google will make an awesome app that doesn't use a lot of battery, making it usable.
Google providing a SIP account would be great too. One less thing to configure.
And yes, I'm in Europe, and yes I pay less than 15 Euro/month for my calls + internet. It's even a prepaid "plan", so I didn't sign anything./bragging (I DID however have to pay 150 Euro for my free {as in freedom} HTC Magic {yay eBay!}.)
Seriously: the difference between those 2 words is abysmal. And about 80% of the times I see one of them written online they really meant the other one. This cannot be explained by simple ignorance/randomness! The other pair of similar words that are written wrong about 85% of the time are to/too.
Some insight into the phenomenon would be greatly appreciated.
- Name calling - "they did it first" - Feeling superior to the vast majority of the population - Misquoting
Did I miss anything? Oh right. You failed to point out a single counter-argument AND you turned this even further into the debate that it is not. You couldn't be more of a cliché for your typical radical "ultra-scientific" person. And I quote it, of course, because true scientists and rational-thinking people would facepalm at seeing such an ignorant, pointless, empty, off-topic and hateful comment.
Congratulations, you've turned into everything you hate about what you seemingly perceive "religious people" to be.
1) Oh cool, I didn't know about that one. Except it's not a therapy yet. I read it, and am at least mildly curious as to what they mean by "phase 1 clinical trials" (since, if you know anything about those, are done on HEALTHY people to establish safe dosages, pharmacokinetics, that sort of thing... In therapies that are not ethically acceptable to use healthy people for them, they'll jump directly to phase 2 trials). I'm sure it's just a journalistic error, though, so nevermind. It also doesn't say how they're planning to handle the rejection thing. I don't want to seem like i'm crapping on this to defend "my point" (which is on the side of science, mind you), but it still has a long way to go to see if it'll even work. As a cheap-shot comparison, bear in mind that the most horrifying forms of cancer have also been cured on rats (and AIDS in monkeys, IIRC). Hope it works (I really do), but even if it did not much would change in terms of the validity of my points. AND whatever they do, could very PROBABLY be done 1000x better with adult stem cells, if it weren't a company so hellbent on working the political angle, and following on Chris Reeve's "footsteps".
2) Oh, I think what you're referring to is actually ADULT STEM CELLS then. That is indeed one way to de-differentiate adult cells. It doesn't work very well, though. It does make more sense to research THIS path, now, doesn't it?
3) Well, that's just argumentative. I don't know exactly how many cell lines where available, but they WERE available (how many different do you think you'd need?), and besides that's completely ignoring that little tidbit of information that this nonsense only happened in the US. The rest of the world kept on spinning, and losing interest in hESC.
Adult SC have NOT been around that long, what were known as adult stem cells up until very recently were somewhat more differentiated cells. Which was the reason for wanting to research with TRULY omnipotent cells (hESC). Since a few years ago a number of methods have been popping up about creating these sorts of absolutely primitive cells from adult tissues (like TFA). And that's when hESC stopped being relevant in my book.
The embryonic stem cells ban didn't apply to the rest of the world, and still no therapies have derived from embryonic stem cells (wan't there a site devoted to reporting in these?). There are, however, a couple of therapies derived from adult stem cells, both from the US and from other countries. Restricting science is short-sighted and all, but I never really cared for research coming from embryonic stem cells (it just seemed the WRONG approach altogether, when any resulting therapy would need to have the patient placed on lifelong immunosupression, like any transplant patient; but feel free to call me shortsighted). You also need to consider that Bush's ban allowed for research to continue on EXISTING cell lines, and those were pretty plentiful (you know, being stem cells and as such immortal).
I just feel the level of outrage on this particular issue has been very disproportionate; and that it has turned more into an anti-religious argument than a pro-science one.
Ah I agree wholeheartedly. As a 24 y/o without any kids, I can't say that I know what I'm talking about regarding kids, but what I CAN tell you is that at my house we bought our first computer when I was TWELVE. That's right. In a few months I was better at it than anyone in my family, even starting to dabble into simple scripting and programming. It goes without saying that I'm much more proficient at using a computer than anyone of my peers (who had earlier access to computers), and certainly more so than these new generations of kids that were born with computers and the internet... In fact I think those of us who still had to search in books to get information from at school will prove to have an advantage over the young ones. But that's beside the point. The point is that starting "late" into computing doesn't mean you're going to be 'bad' at it, nor is the contrary true. And as parent said, if computers have shown to be DETRIMENTAL to the development of a toddler/infant (and I can totally picture the reasons for it), why would you put him through it? Building blocks and those things you need to match the shape of the object to insert it, and all those kinds of games are what his brain needs at this moment. He has just barely realised that his body has limits and is not part of the rest of the world; now he needs to better understand how it is that that physical world actually works. Gravity, momentum, impenetrability, the law of conservation of matter (and energy, but that's harder to grasp), aerodynamics, hidrodynamics, elasticity, thermodynamics, simple machines; all are concepts that one needs to internalise and have experienced to achieve an intuitive knowledge of physics. And no matter what you say or think, a computer CANNOT provide that. And by being more "flashy" and "soundy" and ADD-inducing than real-life objects, it WILL hurt his curiosity towards the physical realm.
That's called meditation, and I believe I've read some place or another that it MIGHT actually make you feel more rested than an actual nap. I've done it on and off for years... In the end the line between sleeping and that meditative state becomes really blurry, to the point where I've had dreams while simultaneously being listening (and understanding, and being able to repeat afterwards) to something someone was saying...
OK, OK, so I was in class at those times... what's the worst that could happen? (even tho it seems like a joke this post is 100% serious)
Don't get me wrong, a technique to easily prove for a hard to detect and identify disease, that has a low rate of false positives/negatives is still AWESOME.
Too bad in reality what you're describing is VERY VERY rare (and much more so if you also wish it to be cheap). That's why statisticians have created measurements that help when taking clinical decisions. For instance, for a screening test (which seems like this is what it's planed to be) it's perfectly acceptable to have a high sensibility even if it has a low specificity. This way you'll "catch" almost all of the sick people for further study (with more specific, and most likely more expensive/time consuming/invasive/etc tests) even if in the process you "catch" a few healthy people too (which will later be declared so).
That's why when doing actual hard medicine (and taking important decisions regarding implementing certain test and whatnot) these claims do not bode. "100% accuracy" (or any percentage, really) means squat to a statistics-trained professional. There are precise measurements of the effectiveness and potency of a particular test, these mainly been sensibility and specificity. So a particular test may be very sensible yet not very specific (like the mammography, for detecting breast cancer), which means it can have many false positives (but not many false negatives), or the contrary, very specific but not very sensible... There are related concepts like positive predictive value and such, but the important thing is, these things need to be measured before this test can make it's way into everyday clinical practice. If they weren't rated, medicine would be a very obscure art.
Unfortunately, it's been known for a number of years now that the histological characteristics of alzheimers were the accumulation of beta-amyloid and the presence of tau protein, so this test is only that, a test, not any significant discovery on the disease itself...
I, on the other hand, are a super-light sleeper. It is ridiculous the kind of stuff I have to through to be able to get a full night's sleep. If someone in the house so much as gets up from bed (to say, go the bathroom), I WILL wake up (it doesn't take me too long to fall back asleep, but still... my room is pretty isolated from EVERYTHING {2 closed doors to the nearest bathroom away}, and it's not like we have wooden floors for this to be justified; we have a carpet). Even though I live on a 7th floor and my windows are soundproof (well, actually thermally isolating but it's about the same, 2 sheets of glass), some fridays and saturdays I need to put on earplugs to be able to sleep from the noise in the streets from the parties and whatnot (sleeping with the windows open is, of course, impossible... or I'll have to put earplugs to do so). To sleep I need absolute silence, and absolute darkness. In my place, I am almost invariably the last one to go to bed and the first one to wake up, just because it is almost impossible for me to sleep through people going about their business. For this, even earplugs are not enough. I can "feel" their footsteps around the place (I doubt that I actually FEEL them, but the sound of footsteps is so low-frequency that earplugs can't stop it). And lastly, trying to spend a night with someone is an ordeal that ends up with me sleeping 4 or 5 hours at the most (out of sheer exhaustion), and me waking up several times to be on the computer, reading, etc... or just to move the girl to stop her from breathing a particularly noisy way, reclaim space, etc... So I worry what my future holds for me if I ever wish to live with a woman... I'm REALLY counting on the human brain's capacity to adapt to most situations, or otherwise I'm screwed...
So now you see, the grass seems to always be greener on the other side:P
As a scientist (physician) heavily trained on the subject of the scientific method (to be more concrete, evidence-based medicine), I'd like to know a little bit more about this problem with inductive reasoning you cite. The current standard for deciding upon certain medical action is the clinical trial, which has a lot of work put into it (mathematically and statistically) to be reasonably sure of the conclusions of the trial, and also of the causal links established. With the amount of stratified analysis, validation tests, correction of confusion factors, etc., that goes into them, I (and many others) never consider to think that the conclusions might be wrong (as long as the numbers and indicators make sense), except for the (known, and controlled) risk of the results being due to randomness. Could you please enlighten me a bit?
There are likely a lot of other benefits to reasonable sun exposure.
Would you mind enlightening the rest of us mortals? Because nevermind the lack of studies, AFAIK no-one (excepting maybe breatharians) claims any other benefits of sun exposure other than Vitamin D (well, it can temporarily reduce the severity of a couple of skin conditions like psoriasis and acne, but those are fully understood and local effects). Please don't start making 'analogies' to vegetables that don't make any sense. Your last sentence there gave me a little insight into your belief system. It seems you are of the kind with an irrational fear of seemingly obscure diseases and for which certain people try to come up with all sorts of theories to explain why for some of them the incidence has been rising. And many of those people are the ones trying to live "as naturally as possible", which mind you, I have no problem with, as long as they don't try to spread their misconceptions amongst the general population. And for some reason these conspiracy theories DO seem to catch on much much quicker than anything sane science demonstrates. Anyways, just try to remember that "back in the good ol' days" when we were hunters-gatherers, a 40 year old was a venerable elderly. But suffice to say that trying to prevent photoaging doesn't necessarily have anything to do with vanity. As I said in my other post, photoaging and chronic sun exposure go hand in hand with the cumulative damage done to skin cells' DNA, and work their way up towards skin cancer. Just to put your sun loving ideas into perspective, roughly 20% of americans will get some sort of skin cancer. And virtually 100% (as of this moment; hopefully this number will go down since sunscreen was invented in the 70's and has been widely used since the late 80's) of those who get to live to a certain age in some countries like Australia (where there is A LOT of sun and the population is not native) will get actinic keratosis, which are precancerous lesions. So you go ahead and ignore everything doctors have been telling you for years in favour of insubstantial and ethereal benefits; nature knows what's best for you, right? The rest of us will actually use the advancement of science and physiology understanding to our benefit.
Please show me a study linking (causally) any of such agents to higher cancer incidencies... Otherwise just keep your conspiracy theories to yourself (or keep writing the FDA) and make a thicker tinfoil hat. As for me, I'd very much rather stick with your unproven carcinogens (and that even if they were ever to prove themselves as such, they would have a VERY hard time catching up to the sun in that regard) than with a PROVEN one. It's simply what logic and reason dictate. Oh and I AM white and pasty. I also had to grow a beard recently because I look so young I had trouble being taken seriously at work. Apparently people don't like being told what to do by a (n apparent) teenager.
Firstly, I'd like to point out how stupid the notion that "everything in nature MUST have a purpose" is. That is not what Darwin's theory is about at all, and yet people seem to have twisted evolution into some sort of sentient overmind orchestring everything towards some greater good (I'm not only referring to your post, this whole story is full of "well if mammals don't have the enzyme surely there's a reason!". But it's really a phenomenon that happens on almost every/. {and Digg's for that matter} story). Having said that, allow me to tell you why our (caucasians') skin has such a capacity: Because once upon a time, many thousands of years ago, caucasians actually LIVED on the Caucasus (and north-western Europe and Russia too, for that matter) where in winter, the sun is a VERY scarce resource, so much so that the efficiency of their skins to synthesize vit-D was just barely enough to get by; and therefore, people who couldn't synthesize enough Vit-D to remain healthy wouldn't reproduce and would eventually die off. End of story.
You can sit and ponder whether the recommended dosages are actually enough, but in all honesty, with all the years we've been using the scientific method as the backbone of medicine, we would have noticed by now if people who consumed larger amounts were living significantly longer (or developed superpowers, or whatever else you can think of)
Or, you know, you could take a freakin' pill if you're THAT worried about having low vitamin D serum levels... The rest of us over here in sanetown and commonsenseville reckon that as long as our diets are not based on hot pockets and we go out once in a while we'll be Just Fine ® And yes, chances are you will NOT get skin cancer if you forget the sunblock now and then, but there are other things one could worry about. Photoaging, for one. EVERY LITTLE BIT counts on that one. So while I'm not as sun-paranoid as my previous comment would suggest, I also don't think that PURPOSEFULLY forgoing protection is a good philosophy.
Oh no. Not this armchair doctor thing again. * Vitamin D is NOT "the anti-cancer vitamin" It's a molecule that serves as a hormone to regulate calcium metabolism. It also happens to seem to help prevent some types of cancer, due to semi-related processes. But AFAIK, it has only DEMONSTRATED to reduce the incidence of colon cancer. For skin cancer, it has only been suggested. * In developed nations, most of us get way more vitamin D from enriched foods and such than we need. So there is no need to go jumping through hoops to get it. Specially hoops that involve you being exposed to a PROVEN carcinogenic (the sun). And even if you somehow DON'T want to believe we get enough vitamin D as-is, remember that to get your daily dose of vitamin D, you only need to expose your forearms (or the equivalent amount of skin) to th sun for 10 minutes. So trust me, even if you wear tons of sunblock, and spend your day under an umbrella, you WILL be getting more than enough vitamin D that way. Heck, you'll get it in the driving up to the beach before you even see the sea. * Melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer, and definitely right up there amongst the deadliest forms of cancer) is associated with repeated ACUTE sunburns (specially in childhood and early adulthood). Basaliomas and epitheliomas are amongst the most common forms of ANY cancer, and are not very deadly. In fact, when found, they often only need to be removed to treat them. These kinds of cancer are (proven, and causally at that) associated with CHRONIC sun exposure. Every little bit of sun counts for this one, as it has a cumulative effect. * Because of all of this, I think it is pretty stupid to recommend NOT to use sunblock (which would effectively be turning an acute sunburn into a minor exposure), specially when the reason is so that "you can synthetize more of the anti-cancer vitamin". It is also stupid to suggest that everything can be fixed by "taking a vitamin C dose after a sunburn". Where on earth did you get that from? What studies is this claim based on?
This is not to say, things wouldn't be better if people actually used sunblock correctly, or if instead of going to the beach you simply stayed in your mom's basement. But alas, IRL sometimes you need to go the beach to have a little social life. And when you do, you should wear sunblock. Even if you do so incorrectly, some is better than nothing, and even SUGGESTING you should forgo it completely in favor of taking some random pills hoping to cancel out cell damage is stupid, naive, and just irresponsible. I do agree that wearing hats, and long sleeves > sunscreen, but they are not mutually exclusive, you know... and then again, as I said, sometimes you go to the beach to have a good (semi-naked) fun time, not to go hide under a rock.
So please just keep your pseudoscience and personal choices to yourself. Or at least don't recommend people do the same. It's just stupid.
Yeah, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but as a couple of people already pointed out, we actually do get our colonic flora from our mothers' (most of the time) poo (or perineal region, which is essentially the same thing). Of course all throughout our lives it gets modified by our own immune system makeup, eating habits, antibiotic use, etc... But the bacteria that protect us on those first few days/weeks/months come DIRECTLY out of our moms' butts.
But trust me, all of us with a smartphone (that also use skype) did know what Fring was. And apparently that became a problem for Skype. Don't get me wrong, I hate the closedness of Skype, but as it usually happens with other services (MSN messenger, Facebook) I need to use them (as opposed to the open alternatives) because that's what my friends use. Fring allowed us mobile users (pretty much every smartphone is supported) to use Skype; but not only that, it was also a SIP client, for instance. So it was a good way to have both things. Google has been able to sway the balance a bit in the IM front, and a lot of people (yeah, even non-geeks) are moving to gtalk these days. Hopefully they'll do the same with Gizmo5 and bring SIP to the masses, so that this once cool little hip company, that grew too big for it's own good (and now is leaving it's users without a way to use their service) will be reminded of what is really important: It's customers
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Ah too bad I don't have mod points. This is what I came to suggest here. It's truly the best of both worlds. I used to have one (received one as a gift), but as it turns out I had never up to that point taken notes in class, and having one such pen didn't change matters much. I did try it for its geek factor, and it was just fantastic. The software wasn't great (and it was windows-only), but maybe things have changed since then.
But if OP's wife is hellbent on getting a tablet (I'm starting to believe it's just one of those solutions in search of a poblem), what I had before the livescribe was an old-school tablet PC (with a wacom tablet and pen as the input mechanism) with Linux on it. There was a pretty straightforward program from the repos that was pretty great as well, it saved all the notes in an xml file, and was exportable to PDF. I bet it still exists... Yup, it's called Xournal, and it's in the Ubuntu 11.10 repos still.
I still don't get the tablet craze, I must say; that tablet was pretty damn cool (and an actual computer at that), and still I ended up selling it on account of me never really using it as much as I thought I would when I bought it.
Do you any sources to back these claims up? I'm genuinely interested...
I wrote in my letter to the primary care that the increased rate was due to "normal physiologic activity".
And in doing so it could be argued that you inadvertently helped the taboo to get even stronger. What's wrong with saying what was actually going on (patient was engaged in sexual activity)? It's unnecessary from a medical PoV, sure, but I find it odd that in your anecdote about the ridiculousness of the taboo surrounding a "normal physiological activity", you had to hide or mask what he was doing from his family doctor.
Simple: You get a contract where they only charge you for what you call. I think those may not be available in the US though, and your only option might be prepaid.
It the percentage of users is THAT ridiculously small, then surely it makes no sense to go and actively develop locks so that users won't be able to access the bootloader, don't you think?
This isn't a winnable debate by the manufacturers, and HTC seems to finally have figured that out.
Thanks for the tip, will check it out!
What I'm really looking forward about this is that the current (to my knowledge) most battery efficient app on the market today (Sipdroid) absolutely DEVOURS my battery, making it impossible for me to leave it running in the background. I'd really love a completely "virtual" phone in the sense that I could use it as a full time SIP phone, but so far, it's either take a charger everywhere I go or just use it for outgoing calls. Hopefully (probably?) Google will make an awesome app that doesn't use a lot of battery, making it usable.
Google providing a SIP account would be great too. One less thing to configure.
And yes, I'm in Europe, and yes I pay less than 15 Euro/month for my calls + internet. It's even a prepaid "plan", so I didn't sign anything. /bragging (I DID however have to pay 150 Euro for my free {as in freedom} HTC Magic {yay eBay!}.)
*affect
Seriously: the difference between those 2 words is abysmal. And about 80% of the times I see one of them written online they really meant the other one. This cannot be explained by simple ignorance/randomness! The other pair of similar words that are written wrong about 85% of the time are to/too.
Some insight into the phenomenon would be greatly appreciated.
Let's see:
- Name calling
- "they did it first"
- Feeling superior to the vast majority of the population
- Misquoting
Did I miss anything? Oh right. You failed to point out a single counter-argument AND you turned this even further into the debate that it is not. You couldn't be more of a cliché for your typical radical "ultra-scientific" person. And I quote it, of course, because true scientists and rational-thinking people would facepalm at seeing such an ignorant, pointless, empty, off-topic and hateful comment.
Congratulations, you've turned into everything you hate about what you seemingly perceive "religious people" to be.
Oh how I love a good anonymous response.
1) Oh cool, I didn't know about that one. Except it's not a therapy yet. I read it, and am at least mildly curious as to what they mean by "phase 1 clinical trials" (since, if you know anything about those, are done on HEALTHY people to establish safe dosages, pharmacokinetics, that sort of thing... In therapies that are not ethically acceptable to use healthy people for them, they'll jump directly to phase 2 trials). I'm sure it's just a journalistic error, though, so nevermind. It also doesn't say how they're planning to handle the rejection thing. I don't want to seem like i'm crapping on this to defend "my point" (which is on the side of science, mind you), but it still has a long way to go to see if it'll even work. As a cheap-shot comparison, bear in mind that the most horrifying forms of cancer have also been cured on rats (and AIDS in monkeys, IIRC).
Hope it works (I really do), but even if it did not much would change in terms of the validity of my points. AND whatever they do, could very PROBABLY be done 1000x better with adult stem cells, if it weren't a company so hellbent on working the political angle, and following on Chris Reeve's "footsteps".
2) Oh, I think what you're referring to is actually ADULT STEM CELLS then. That is indeed one way to de-differentiate adult cells. It doesn't work very well, though. It does make more sense to research THIS path, now, doesn't it?
3) Well, that's just argumentative. I don't know exactly how many cell lines where available, but they WERE available (how many different do you think you'd need?), and besides that's completely ignoring that little tidbit of information that this nonsense only happened in the US. The rest of the world kept on spinning, and losing interest in hESC.
Adult SC have NOT been around that long, what were known as adult stem cells up until very recently were somewhat more differentiated cells. Which was the reason for wanting to research with TRULY omnipotent cells (hESC). Since a few years ago a number of methods have been popping up about creating these sorts of absolutely primitive cells from adult tissues (like TFA). And that's when hESC stopped being relevant in my book.
The embryonic stem cells ban didn't apply to the rest of the world, and still no therapies have derived from embryonic stem cells (wan't there a site devoted to reporting in these?). There are, however, a couple of therapies derived from adult stem cells, both from the US and from other countries.
Restricting science is short-sighted and all, but I never really cared for research coming from embryonic stem cells (it just seemed the WRONG approach altogether, when any resulting therapy would need to have the patient placed on lifelong immunosupression, like any transplant patient; but feel free to call me shortsighted).
You also need to consider that Bush's ban allowed for research to continue on EXISTING cell lines, and those were pretty plentiful (you know, being stem cells and as such immortal).
I just feel the level of outrage on this particular issue has been very disproportionate; and that it has turned more into an anti-religious argument than a pro-science one.
Ah I agree wholeheartedly.
As a 24 y/o without any kids, I can't say that I know what I'm talking about regarding kids, but what I CAN tell you is that at my house we bought our first computer when I was TWELVE. That's right. In a few months I was better at it than anyone in my family, even starting to dabble into simple scripting and programming. It goes without saying that I'm much more proficient at using a computer than anyone of my peers (who had earlier access to computers), and certainly more so than these new generations of kids that were born with computers and the internet... In fact I think those of us who still had to search in books to get information from at school will prove to have an advantage over the young ones. But that's beside the point.
The point is that starting "late" into computing doesn't mean you're going to be 'bad' at it, nor is the contrary true.
And as parent said, if computers have shown to be DETRIMENTAL to the development of a toddler/infant (and I can totally picture the reasons for it), why would you put him through it? Building blocks and those things you need to match the shape of the object to insert it, and all those kinds of games are what his brain needs at this moment. He has just barely realised that his body has limits and is not part of the rest of the world; now he needs to better understand how it is that that physical world actually works. Gravity, momentum, impenetrability, the law of conservation of matter (and energy, but that's harder to grasp), aerodynamics, hidrodynamics, elasticity, thermodynamics, simple machines; all are concepts that one needs to internalise and have experienced to achieve an intuitive knowledge of physics. And no matter what you say or think, a computer CANNOT provide that. And by being more "flashy" and "soundy" and ADD-inducing than real-life objects, it WILL hurt his curiosity towards the physical realm.
That's called meditation, and I believe I've read some place or another that it MIGHT actually make you feel more rested than an actual nap.
I've done it on and off for years... In the end the line between sleeping and that meditative state becomes really blurry, to the point where I've had dreams while simultaneously being listening (and understanding, and being able to repeat afterwards) to something someone was saying...
OK, OK, so I was in class at those times... what's the worst that could happen? (even tho it seems like a joke this post is 100% serious)
Don't get me wrong, a technique to easily prove for a hard to detect and identify disease, that has a low rate of false positives/negatives is still AWESOME.
Too bad in reality what you're describing is VERY VERY rare (and much more so if you also wish it to be cheap). That's why statisticians have created measurements that help when taking clinical decisions. For instance, for a screening test (which seems like this is what it's planed to be) it's perfectly acceptable to have a high sensibility even if it has a low specificity. This way you'll "catch" almost all of the sick people for further study (with more specific, and most likely more expensive/time consuming/invasive/etc tests) even if in the process you "catch" a few healthy people too (which will later be declared so).
That's why when doing actual hard medicine (and taking important decisions regarding implementing certain test and whatnot) these claims do not bode. "100% accuracy" (or any percentage, really) means squat to a statistics-trained professional. There are precise measurements of the effectiveness and potency of a particular test, these mainly been sensibility and specificity. So a particular test may be very sensible yet not very specific (like the mammography, for detecting breast cancer), which means it can have many false positives (but not many false negatives), or the contrary, very specific but not very sensible...
There are related concepts like positive predictive value and such, but the important thing is, these things need to be measured before this test can make it's way into everyday clinical practice. If they weren't rated, medicine would be a very obscure art.
Unfortunately, it's been known for a number of years now that the histological characteristics of alzheimers were the accumulation of beta-amyloid and the presence of tau protein, so this test is only that, a test, not any significant discovery on the disease itself...
I, on the other hand, are a super-light sleeper. It is ridiculous the kind of stuff I have to through to be able to get a full night's sleep. If someone in the house so much as gets up from bed (to say, go the bathroom), I WILL wake up (it doesn't take me too long to fall back asleep, but still... my room is pretty isolated from EVERYTHING {2 closed doors to the nearest bathroom away}, and it's not like we have wooden floors for this to be justified; we have a carpet). Even though I live on a 7th floor and my windows are soundproof (well, actually thermally isolating but it's about the same, 2 sheets of glass), some fridays and saturdays I need to put on earplugs to be able to sleep from the noise in the streets from the parties and whatnot (sleeping with the windows open is, of course, impossible... or I'll have to put earplugs to do so). To sleep I need absolute silence, and absolute darkness. In my place, I am almost invariably the last one to go to bed and the first one to wake up, just because it is almost impossible for me to sleep through people going about their business. For this, even earplugs are not enough. I can "feel" their footsteps around the place (I doubt that I actually FEEL them, but the sound of footsteps is so low-frequency that earplugs can't stop it). And lastly, trying to spend a night with someone is an ordeal that ends up with me sleeping 4 or 5 hours at the most (out of sheer exhaustion), and me waking up several times to be on the computer, reading, etc... or just to move the girl to stop her from breathing a particularly noisy way, reclaim space, etc... So I worry what my future holds for me if I ever wish to live with a woman... I'm REALLY counting on the human brain's capacity to adapt to most situations, or otherwise I'm screwed...
So now you see, the grass seems to always be greener on the other side :P
As a scientist (physician) heavily trained on the subject of the scientific method (to be more concrete, evidence-based medicine), I'd like to know a little bit more about this problem with inductive reasoning you cite. The current standard for deciding upon certain medical action is the clinical trial, which has a lot of work put into it (mathematically and statistically) to be reasonably sure of the conclusions of the trial, and also of the causal links established. With the amount of stratified analysis, validation tests, correction of confusion factors, etc., that goes into them, I (and many others) never consider to think that the conclusions might be wrong (as long as the numbers and indicators make sense), except for the (known, and controlled) risk of the results being due to randomness.
Could you please enlighten me a bit?
There are likely a lot of other benefits to reasonable sun exposure.
Would you mind enlightening the rest of us mortals? Because nevermind the lack of studies, AFAIK no-one (excepting maybe breatharians) claims any other benefits of sun exposure other than Vitamin D (well, it can temporarily reduce the severity of a couple of skin conditions like psoriasis and acne, but those are fully understood and local effects).
Please don't start making 'analogies' to vegetables that don't make any sense.
Your last sentence there gave me a little insight into your belief system. It seems you are of the kind with an irrational fear of seemingly obscure diseases and for which certain people try to come up with all sorts of theories to explain why for some of them the incidence has been rising. And many of those people are the ones trying to live "as naturally as possible", which mind you, I have no problem with, as long as they don't try to spread their misconceptions amongst the general population. And for some reason these conspiracy theories DO seem to catch on much much quicker than anything sane science demonstrates. Anyways, just try to remember that "back in the good ol' days" when we were hunters-gatherers, a 40 year old was a venerable elderly.
But suffice to say that trying to prevent photoaging doesn't necessarily have anything to do with vanity. As I said in my other post, photoaging and chronic sun exposure go hand in hand with the cumulative damage done to skin cells' DNA, and work their way up towards skin cancer. Just to put your sun loving ideas into perspective, roughly 20% of americans will get some sort of skin cancer. And virtually 100% (as of this moment; hopefully this number will go down since sunscreen was invented in the 70's and has been widely used since the late 80's) of those who get to live to a certain age in some countries like Australia (where there is A LOT of sun and the population is not native) will get actinic keratosis, which are precancerous lesions.
So you go ahead and ignore everything doctors have been telling you for years in favour of insubstantial and ethereal benefits; nature knows what's best for you, right? The rest of us will actually use the advancement of science and physiology understanding to our benefit.
Please show me a study linking (causally) any of such agents to higher cancer incidencies...
Otherwise just keep your conspiracy theories to yourself (or keep writing the FDA) and make a thicker tinfoil hat.
As for me, I'd very much rather stick with your unproven carcinogens (and that even if they were ever to prove themselves as such, they would have a VERY hard time catching up to the sun in that regard) than with a PROVEN one. It's simply what logic and reason dictate.
Oh and I AM white and pasty. I also had to grow a beard recently because I look so young I had trouble being taken seriously at work. Apparently people don't like being told what to do by a (n apparent) teenager.
Firstly, I'd like to point out how stupid the notion that "everything in nature MUST have a purpose" is. That is not what Darwin's theory is about at all, and yet people seem to have twisted evolution into some sort of sentient overmind orchestring everything towards some greater good (I'm not only referring to your post, this whole story is full of "well if mammals don't have the enzyme surely there's a reason!". But it's really a phenomenon that happens on almost every /. {and Digg's for that matter} story).
Having said that, allow me to tell you why our (caucasians') skin has such a capacity: Because once upon a time, many thousands of years ago, caucasians actually LIVED on the Caucasus (and north-western Europe and Russia too, for that matter) where in winter, the sun is a VERY scarce resource, so much so that the efficiency of their skins to synthesize vit-D was just barely enough to get by; and therefore, people who couldn't synthesize enough Vit-D to remain healthy wouldn't reproduce and would eventually die off.
End of story.
You can sit and ponder whether the recommended dosages are actually enough, but in all honesty, with all the years we've been using the scientific method as the backbone of medicine, we would have noticed by now if people who consumed larger amounts were living significantly longer (or developed superpowers, or whatever else you can think of)
Or, you know, you could take a freakin' pill if you're THAT worried about having low vitamin D serum levels...
The rest of us over here in sanetown and commonsenseville reckon that as long as our diets are not based on hot pockets and we go out once in a while we'll be Just Fine ®
And yes, chances are you will NOT get skin cancer if you forget the sunblock now and then, but there are other things one could worry about. Photoaging, for one. EVERY LITTLE BIT counts on that one. So while I'm not as sun-paranoid as my previous comment would suggest, I also don't think that PURPOSEFULLY forgoing protection is a good philosophy.
Oh no. Not this armchair doctor thing again.
* Vitamin D is NOT "the anti-cancer vitamin" It's a molecule that serves as a hormone to regulate calcium metabolism. It also happens to seem to help prevent some types of cancer, due to semi-related processes. But AFAIK, it has only DEMONSTRATED to reduce the incidence of colon cancer. For skin cancer, it has only been suggested.
* In developed nations, most of us get way more vitamin D from enriched foods and such than we need. So there is no need to go jumping through hoops to get it. Specially hoops that involve you being exposed to a PROVEN carcinogenic (the sun). And even if you somehow DON'T want to believe we get enough vitamin D as-is, remember that to get your daily dose of vitamin D, you only need to expose your forearms (or the equivalent amount of skin) to th sun for 10 minutes. So trust me, even if you wear tons of sunblock, and spend your day under an umbrella, you WILL be getting more than enough vitamin D that way. Heck, you'll get it in the driving up to the beach before you even see the sea.
* Melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer, and definitely right up there amongst the deadliest forms of cancer) is associated with repeated ACUTE sunburns (specially in childhood and early adulthood). Basaliomas and epitheliomas are amongst the most common forms of ANY cancer, and are not very deadly. In fact, when found, they often only need to be removed to treat them. These kinds of cancer are (proven, and causally at that) associated with CHRONIC sun exposure. Every little bit of sun counts for this one, as it has a cumulative effect.
* Because of all of this, I think it is pretty stupid to recommend NOT to use sunblock (which would effectively be turning an acute sunburn into a minor exposure), specially when the reason is so that "you can synthetize more of the anti-cancer vitamin". It is also stupid to suggest that everything can be fixed by "taking a vitamin C dose after a sunburn". Where on earth did you get that from? What studies is this claim based on?
This is not to say, things wouldn't be better if people actually used sunblock correctly, or if instead of going to the beach you simply stayed in your mom's basement. But alas, IRL sometimes you need to go the beach to have a little social life. And when you do, you should wear sunblock. Even if you do so incorrectly, some is better than nothing, and even SUGGESTING you should forgo it completely in favor of taking some random pills hoping to cancel out cell damage is stupid, naive, and just irresponsible. I do agree that wearing hats, and long sleeves > sunscreen, but they are not mutually exclusive, you know... and then again, as I said, sometimes you go to the beach to have a good (semi-naked) fun time, not to go hide under a rock.
So please just keep your pseudoscience and personal choices to yourself. Or at least don't recommend people do the same. It's just stupid.
Yeah, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but as a couple of people already pointed out, we actually do get our colonic flora from our mothers' (most of the time) poo (or perineal region, which is essentially the same thing). Of course all throughout our lives it gets modified by our own immune system makeup, eating habits, antibiotic use, etc... But the bacteria that protect us on those first few days/weeks/months come DIRECTLY out of our moms' butts.
But trust me, all of us with a smartphone (that also use skype) did know what Fring was. And apparently that became a problem for Skype.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the closedness of Skype, but as it usually happens with other services (MSN messenger, Facebook) I need to use them (as opposed to the open alternatives) because that's what my friends use. Fring allowed us mobile users (pretty much every smartphone is supported) to use Skype; but not only that, it was also a SIP client, for instance. So it was a good way to have both things.
Google has been able to sway the balance a bit in the IM front, and a lot of people (yeah, even non-geeks) are moving to gtalk these days. Hopefully they'll do the same with Gizmo5 and bring SIP to the masses, so that this once cool little hip company, that grew too big for it's own good (and now is leaving it's users without a way to use their service) will be reminded of what is really important: It's customers