Wouldn't boosting the function of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme help mitigate the damaging effects of alcohol and lessen your hangover? As acetaldehyde is theorized to the be the primary cause of a hangover and at least the primary cause of long term harm, this strikes me as an obvious target for harm reduction research. Especially since this would not mess with the metabolism of ethanol directly (alcohol dehydrogenase - which could make you dangerously drunk, or sober and hungover too fast). The final stage, acetic acid is next to harmless, well it's vinegar basically.
To quote wikipedia:
Ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, and then from acetaldehyde to acetic acid by the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.
The point is to not load up the liver with a multi-part biochemical assault with various drugs and alcohol on top.
Combinations of nasty chemicals are known to react in the liver and result in increased damage. Some compounds can tie up pathways that would be otherwise used to rapidly break down something harmful.
OFTOMH, for example BHT, a widely used food and drink additive (E321), is metabolised by the liver and blocks up the livers capacity to process alcohol and recreational drugs. A big dose of BHT could mean you get dangerously drunk off a small amount of alcohol.
I'm doing some DIY brain surgery while I am writing this, so far I have isolated the area for language and wit, I'm about to apply my patch to overclock it! Muhahah! Soon I will be posting the best slashdot comments ever!
Here goes:
*SUCESS* patch applied sucessfully, so far it seems stable but mayfb &^ng asdhg fsdHkuj ldSfhdj jhll hfhjfds jb ê....
Yes, it's a little complicated by the electronics now and then,
Eh?!? Electonics in many cases simplify things, quite often. Electronic fuel injection may have less discrete parts than an old school carb set up and is much simpler to tune. Infact I've seen some pretty complicated carbuertors and struggled to get motors to run right. Not as delightfully simple (and geeky) as choosing a AFR for a specific RPM on a laptop, and it just works. The ECU handles variability automatically by adapting to inputs from O2 sensors etc. You have to deal with that kind of thing at tune-time when working with carbs. Rebuilding a carb is a nightmare. In my modern fuel injected car the most I've done with the fuel system in 80,000 miles is clean the fuel injectors and replaced that knock sensor. Tuning after modification was as simple as tweaking a few maps, a few dyno runs and it's run that way since.
Best OS: Android IMHO it is more sophisticated than it's competitors. Before you mod me down iPhone fan bois, Android has brought genuine multitasking to the smartphone platform amongst other things. Oh and the aftermarket firmware and themeing community is thriving. It's not great, but it's the newest thing thats making alot of hackers, tweakers and gadget addicts learn to love again. Hopefully an official Google phone will re-center the AOSP and do more than keep the project alive, but really ramp things up.
Worst OS: Solaris without a doubt. In my own experience it doesn't perform like linux does now, ZFS is cool but just confuses me and the userland is the most horrible thing ever.
Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one. I can make a linux pretty, but I'm talking about defaults. Often with some of the most amateurish desktop backgrounds. People make better art with MS Paint. No really they do. http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/incredible-ms-paint-artwork
We were so desperate to beat up on MS after taking so damn long to give us a new OS that when it had problems we blew it out of all proportion, far beyond what empirical facts would support.
I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine. I saw few people with actualy problems and fully consider the Vista bashing phenomona part of the Microsoft hate disease.
I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.
Yes it had problems, but not worse than the XP era. After a few patches these niggles were addresed.
I have to poke fun here: on average, a new Linux distro comes with a multitude of problems preinstalled, mind you they are freatures to a Linux user, not bugs. I'll be honest, I enjoy fixing pre-broken distros and I'm actually throughly bored when I install something like Ubuntu and everything just works.:D
BUT... all the bad PR has forced MS to make Windows 7 a huge improvement. If there is one genuine gripe, it is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Yet through our bleating has paid off, we've been given a good Windows OS.
I disagree. I as an experiment reccently fired up my old Pentium III 512mb workstation which was well specc'd to run Windows XP in it's era, it was slow compared to my more reccent machines to that point I wondered how we ever put up with it, and the thing ran to 100% cpu use on the first javascript laden web page I encountered. This made me realise our perception of performance has changed, and really what we see as simple tasks, such as viewing photos from our digital camera are now much more intensive than you think, because those tasks themselves have a bigger footprint. Best example, I had a 2 megapixel camera then, I have a 12mp now. You need more CPU juice just to scroll thumbnails on these!
The very existence of netbooks and nettops are an admission by the entire industry that the majority of tasks performed by computers these days are served well enough by a "Pentium III", perhaps with the addition of a better GPU than existed back then.
Only to some extent. You wouldn't say that if you actually tried an old system on basic web surfing someone may do today. You'd see a atom really is quite quick. If you try loading slashdot or facebook in firefox would burn the CPU at 100%, infact my web browser performance was CPU-bound. Oh and forget about anything resembling smooth scrolling in web pages.
In my little experiment I found this old pentium III 1ghz to be painfully slow loading images from my mediocre 12-megapixel camera, an experience that is somewhat snappier on my atom netbook.
I used to work with digital images back, then just the same, but they were at most 2 megapixels. So yeah I'm still doing the same list of every day tasks on my quad core rig or atom netbook, but lets not leave out the fact these tasks themselves are now higher fidelity.
Or am I just crazy that I can detect the lag on a atom versus a quad core rig?
No not really, V-engines have a little added complexity, which may drag down reliability, but for all practical purposes there is no dramatic difference that makes a inline superior in peformance and reliability.
A V allows you package more displacement in to smaller overall volume or to have less car to package around given in engine. Weight savings from a V engine boosts handling performance and economy. Yet an inline engine will be cheaper than a V, due to one, block, single manifolds, two camshafts instead of four.
Difference in power may come from firing order, and the path intake charge and exhaust gas take and a small reduction in friction in a Inline 4 or 6. Inline 6s can have a good cross flow set up for top end power when mounted longitudnally in a front engined car (short straight intake runners and 6 into 1 headers, make a good turbo platform. BMW, Nissan and Toyota have exploited this to great effect in racing and in road cars. Aftermarket Nissan Skyline motors with 6-1 turbo manifolds make whopping power.
In the end, V8s rose to greatnews because it was probably the best balance between a number of cylinders, dimensions, displacement etc. A four cylinder block is about as long as you want to go. Big displacement engines need a greater number of pistons to stop the piston speeds getting out of hand along with smoothness reasons. Eight cylinders is just right, for big power or a big engine.
A inline 6, and a 90 degree V12 and a boxer six are probably the three ideal engines, having perfect balance. The greatest engine of them all on the balance of all considerations, including, cost, complexity and packaging is the inline four. That's why V8s are made out of two of them:
American V8s most often really are just two inline four engines stuck together. Right down to the split-plane (cross-plane) crankshaft. Yes there are hack mechanics who have lopped off one bank of cylinders to make a inline four, it works. Unfortunatley cross-plane crankshafts have a lot of drawbacks including difficult to control vibration, unbalanced piston movement, poorer exhaust scavanging in certain exhaust configuartions and need for counterweights that add rotational inertia. Yes every American V8 you drove had a dirty kludge under the hood.
IMHO, a real V8 has a flat plane crankshaft. Truly the correct format for a V8, better firing order, more power, more balance and even better sound:)
Hypothesis: Cellphones give you the brain cancers.
Test of hypothesis: There would be a world wide pandemic of unexplained tumours, that would stand out strongly in heavy cellphone using developing nations. This, thanks to the billions of cellphones out there and ubiqutous bath of cellphone radiation we're bathed in worldwide. We'd see a overall increase in cancers maybe, but a marked increase in a specific type of cancer, as a result of the characteristics here, such as specific brain tumours in the side of the head.
Results: There isn't any. Or if there is an effect, it's very very small, such that 'there isn't any' is still valid for all practical purposes. Any claimed correlation is tenuous at best, what few studies their are haven't showed anything worth more study, and we're a long way from any causal proof. Orders of magnitude smaller than gee, I don't know, exposure to actual chemical carcinogens, sunlight and bad lifestyle?
(EMF could be carinogenic, I would believe high-voltage powerlines cause cancer, due to the sheer energies involved, and the fact the people with cancer have probably lived under them for decades.)
IE has been diluted by three different versions. IE6 is only really held on to by organisations that developed everything for IE6, and subsequently had everything break when testing IE7. This despite IE6 barely working on half the internet now. Ironically Mircosoft's attempt at lock-in in the past has backfired, few outfits have updated to IE7, less to IE8.
The character with the Commodorre 64 is Australian.
If Flight of the Conchords taught me nothing else, it's that New Zealand finally got dial-up modems for their Commodore 64's a couple of years ago. Also, they have sheep.
When Australia's Internet filtering plans go ahead, their internet will be like a 300 baud moden on a C64.
The simplest-piece-of-code-I-ever-wrote-that-did-a-kick-ass-thing, was a few lines to scan a test file for comercial breaks. Usual TV volume is about 70-80% of peak with longer spells of quiet, and the adverts are heavily compressed and really don't have any quiet periods. Algorithimically that is easy to find and mark. From there you can cut, skip or mute as desired.
An hour of standard television is 90gb of raw data approximatley, this varies with PAL/NTSC and HD standards would be a factor of 2x 4x and more. I would hope this was ignored, but I somehow doubt that. They likely considered a compressed stream of data rather than raw images.
The actual bitrate of information content of TV is lower of course, and varies greatly. In some cases a negative bitrate: reality TV can actually suck information out of your head.
They are infact concerned about facebook (et al) becoming an internet in itself. This troubles them because these more or less closed networks of considerable size that are all but walled off from the rest of the internet. Indeed they are not searchable by google.
If it's not searchable Google can't make revenue on it. Facebook alone now probably accounts for a bit fraction of all internet useage. Indeed people I know spend more time on it than they do sleeping.
You guys all still think Google is competeing with Microsoft?
Openness goes both ways. All roads lead to Google, is how they want it, how they spin it though, is by claiming how much is passing outbound on these two-way roads. We just aren't looking at exactly how much google gains out of these because we're still excited over these new gifts to the community.
It's a fundamental tenet of capticalism that nothing is done unless it is seen to be beneficial to the company (not accounting for asshatery however).
From a tinfoil hat wearing point of view it's not implausible that it could be Google wanting to reshape the industry in a certain way to suit itself.
Have you actually seen the iPhone app store? There's like 50 different fart button apps. Infact, I've heard jokes that the app store is really the same 100 applications 1000 times over. The point isn't too far from the truth however. The app store is completely glutted.
+1 informative: We'll be able to smell the zombie hordes coming. That's a useful observation, thank you. (I'm making a note for our organisations's zombie apocolypse business continuity plan)
Slashdot Mirror
Ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, and then from acetaldehyde to acetic acid by the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.
"Hypoglycemia, dehydration, acetaldehyde intoxication, and vitamin B12 deficiency are all theorized causes of hangover symptoms".
so how can you authoritatively assert what causes a hangover when the scientists, at least according to that article, aren't even sure?
Presumably because they don't get invited to the right kind of parties at university to gather data.
There is no substitute for field work.
The point is to not load up the liver with a multi-part biochemical assault with various drugs and alcohol on top.
Combinations of nasty chemicals are known to react in the liver and result in increased damage. Some compounds can tie up pathways that would be otherwise used to rapidly break down something harmful.
OFTOMH, for example BHT, a widely used food and drink additive (E321), is metabolised by the liver and blocks up the livers capacity to process alcohol and recreational drugs. A big dose of BHT could mean you get dangerously drunk off a small amount of alcohol.
I'm doing some DIY brain surgery while I am writing this, so far I have isolated the area for language and wit, I'm about to apply my patch to overclock it! Muhahah! Soon I will be posting the best slashdot comments ever!
....
Here goes:
*SUCESS* patch applied sucessfully, so far it seems stable but mayfb &^ng asdhg fsdHkuj ldSfhdj jhll hfhjfds jb ê
Yes, it's a little complicated by the electronics now and then,
Eh?!? Electonics in many cases simplify things, quite often. Electronic fuel injection may have less discrete parts than an old school carb set up and is much simpler to tune. Infact I've seen some pretty complicated carbuertors and struggled to get motors to run right. Not as delightfully simple (and geeky) as choosing a AFR for a specific RPM on a laptop, and it just works. The ECU handles variability automatically by adapting to inputs from O2 sensors etc. You have to deal with that kind of thing at tune-time when working with carbs. Rebuilding a carb is a nightmare. In my modern fuel injected car the most I've done with the fuel system in 80,000 miles is clean the fuel injectors and replaced that knock sensor. Tuning after modification was as simple as tweaking a few maps, a few dyno runs and it's run that way since.
Best OS: Android IMHO it is more sophisticated than it's competitors. Before you mod me down iPhone fan bois, Android has brought genuine multitasking to the smartphone platform amongst other things. Oh and the aftermarket firmware and themeing community is thriving. It's not great, but it's the newest thing thats making alot of hackers, tweakers and gadget addicts learn to love again. Hopefully an official Google phone will re-center the AOSP and do more than keep the project alive, but really ramp things up.
Worst OS: Solaris without a doubt. In my own experience it doesn't perform like linux does now, ZFS is cool but just confuses me and the userland is the most horrible thing ever.
Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one. I can make a linux pretty, but I'm talking about defaults. Often with some of the most amateurish desktop backgrounds. People make better art with MS Paint. No really they do. http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/incredible-ms-paint-artwork
We were so desperate to beat up on MS after taking so damn long to give us a new OS that when it had problems we blew it out of all proportion, far beyond what empirical facts would support.
:D
... all the bad PR has forced MS to make Windows 7 a huge improvement. If there is one genuine gripe, it is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Yet through our bleating has paid off, we've been given a good Windows OS.
I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine. I saw few people with actualy problems and fully consider the Vista bashing phenomona part of the Microsoft hate disease.
I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.
Yes it had problems, but not worse than the XP era. After a few patches these niggles were addresed.
I have to poke fun here: on average, a new Linux distro comes with a multitude of problems preinstalled, mind you they are freatures to a Linux user, not bugs. I'll be honest, I enjoy fixing pre-broken distros and I'm actually throughly bored when I install something like Ubuntu and everything just works.
BUT
The very existence of netbooks and nettops are an admission by the entire industry that the majority of tasks performed by computers these days are served well enough by a "Pentium III", perhaps with the addition of a better GPU than existed back then.
Only to some extent. You wouldn't say that if you actually tried an old system on basic web surfing someone may do today. You'd see a atom really is quite quick. If you try loading slashdot or facebook in firefox would burn the CPU at 100%, infact my web browser performance was CPU-bound. Oh and forget about anything resembling smooth scrolling in web pages.
In my little experiment I found this old pentium III 1ghz to be painfully slow loading images from my mediocre 12-megapixel camera, an experience that is somewhat snappier on my atom netbook.
I used to work with digital images back, then just the same, but they were at most 2 megapixels. So yeah I'm still doing the same list of every day tasks on my quad core rig or atom netbook, but lets not leave out the fact these tasks themselves are now higher fidelity.
Or am I just crazy that I can detect the lag on a atom versus a quad core rig?
No not really, V-engines have a little added complexity, which may drag down reliability, but for all practical purposes there is no dramatic difference that makes a inline superior in peformance and reliability.
:)
A V allows you package more displacement in to smaller overall volume or to have less car to package around given in engine. Weight savings from a V engine boosts handling performance and economy. Yet an inline engine will be cheaper than a V, due to one, block, single manifolds, two camshafts instead of four.
Difference in power may come from firing order, and the path intake charge and exhaust gas take and a small reduction in friction in a Inline 4 or 6. Inline 6s can have a good cross flow set up for top end power when mounted longitudnally in a front engined car (short straight intake runners and 6 into 1 headers, make a good turbo platform. BMW, Nissan and Toyota have exploited this to great effect in racing and in road cars. Aftermarket Nissan Skyline motors with 6-1 turbo manifolds make whopping power.
In the end, V8s rose to greatnews because it was probably the best balance between a number of cylinders, dimensions, displacement etc. A four cylinder block is about as long as you want to go. Big displacement engines need a greater number of pistons to stop the piston speeds getting out of hand along with smoothness reasons. Eight cylinders is just right, for big power or a big engine.
A inline 6, and a 90 degree V12 and a boxer six are probably the three ideal engines, having perfect balance. The greatest engine of them all on the balance of all considerations, including, cost, complexity and packaging is the inline four. That's why V8s are made out of two of them:
American V8s most often really are just two inline four engines stuck together. Right down to the split-plane (cross-plane) crankshaft. Yes there are hack mechanics who have lopped off one bank of cylinders to make a inline four, it works. Unfortunatley cross-plane crankshafts have a lot of drawbacks including difficult to control vibration, unbalanced piston movement, poorer exhaust scavanging in certain exhaust configuartions and need for counterweights that add rotational inertia. Yes every American V8 you drove had a dirty kludge under the hood.
IMHO, a real V8 has a flat plane crankshaft. Truly the correct format for a V8, better firing order, more power, more balance and even better sound
Hypothesis: Cellphones give you the brain cancers.
Test of hypothesis: There would be a world wide pandemic of unexplained tumours, that would stand out strongly in heavy cellphone using developing nations. This, thanks to the billions of cellphones out there and ubiqutous bath of cellphone radiation we're bathed in worldwide. We'd see a overall increase in cancers maybe, but a marked increase in a specific type of cancer, as a result of the characteristics here, such as specific brain tumours in the side of the head.
Results: There isn't any. Or if there is an effect, it's very very small, such that 'there isn't any' is still valid for all practical purposes. Any claimed correlation is tenuous at best, what few studies their are haven't showed anything worth more study, and we're a long way from any causal proof. Orders of magnitude smaller than gee, I don't know, exposure to actual chemical carcinogens, sunlight and bad lifestyle?
(EMF could be carinogenic, I would believe high-voltage powerlines cause cancer, due to the sheer energies involved, and the fact the people with cancer have probably lived under them for decades.)
IE has been diluted by three different versions. IE6 is only really held on to by organisations that developed everything for IE6, and subsequently had everything break when testing IE7. This despite IE6 barely working on half the internet now. Ironically Mircosoft's attempt at lock-in in the past has backfired, few outfits have updated to IE7, less to IE8.
Males are four to five times more likely to Autism Spectrum Disorders including Asperger syndrome than females. Conincidence?
If Flight of the Conchords taught me nothing else, it's that New Zealand finally got dial-up modems for their Commodore 64's a couple of years ago. Also, they have sheep.
When Australia's Internet filtering plans go ahead, their internet will be like a 300 baud moden on a C64.
No, please don't us VPNs to continue your piracy. There may be a day that merely encrypting traffic puts you under suspiction if not automatic guilt.
Nitpick: So 39% is "almost 50%"?? I would have called that "almost 40%". Then again that is a /. summary.
The simplest-piece-of-code-I-ever-wrote-that-did-a-kick-ass-thing, was a few lines to scan a test file for comercial breaks. Usual TV volume is about 70-80% of peak with longer spells of quiet, and the adverts are heavily compressed and really don't have any quiet periods. Algorithimically that is easy to find and mark. From there you can cut, skip or mute as desired.
An hour of standard television is 90gb of raw data approximatley, this varies with PAL/NTSC and HD standards would be a factor of 2x 4x and more. I would hope this was ignored, but I somehow doubt that. They likely considered a compressed stream of data rather than raw images.
The actual bitrate of information content of TV is lower of course, and varies greatly. In some cases a negative bitrate: reality TV can actually suck information out of your head.
the_mod_points_i_was_going_to_give_you > /dev/null
Now rm -rf * off my lawn!
They want to *be* your Internet
They are infact concerned about facebook (et al) becoming an internet in itself. This troubles them because these more or less closed networks of considerable size that are all but walled off from the rest of the internet. Indeed they are not searchable by google.
If it's not searchable Google can't make revenue on it. Facebook alone now probably accounts for a bit fraction of all internet useage. Indeed people I know spend more time on it than they do sleeping.
You guys all still think Google is competeing with Microsoft?
Openness goes both ways. All roads lead to Google, is how they want it, how they spin it though, is by claiming how much is passing outbound on these two-way roads. We just aren't looking at exactly how much google gains out of these because we're still excited over these new gifts to the community.
It's a fundamental tenet of capticalism that nothing is done unless it is seen to be beneficial to the company (not accounting for asshatery however).
From a tinfoil hat wearing point of view it's not implausible that it could be Google wanting to reshape the industry in a certain way to suit itself.
That is the theory in a nutshell. Indeed Mars has more than enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, solar wind has eroded it.
(I do believe though that temperature plays helpful a role in titans thick atmosphere, despite half the surface gravity of mars)
Titan has a very thick atmosphere and about half the gravity of Mars.
This wouldn't be such an issue if they were torturing and imprisioning the right online journalists.
...
Dear Tehran,
Please find attached my list of bloggers I don't like, their IP addresses, home address and a sample of their inain trite drivel
Have you actually seen the iPhone app store? There's like 50 different fart button apps. Infact, I've heard jokes that the app store is really the same 100 applications 1000 times over. The point isn't too far from the truth however. The app store is completely glutted.
+1 informative: We'll be able to smell the zombie hordes coming. That's a useful observation, thank you. (I'm making a note for our organisations's zombie apocolypse business continuity plan)