Doctor* "random guy on/." to the rescue: How much coffee do you drink? Coffee contracts the blood vessels in the brain, and as the body gets used to it, their relaxed state becomes more dilated. Dilated blood vessels in the brain gives splitting headaches, so if you drink a lot of coffee, you will get headaches at times when it is a long time since your last cup, e.g. in the morning. It is explained in more detail in this podcast under "your questions".
*I'm not actually a doctor, and this is not medical advice.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just sane. A lot of countries have judges that aren't elected (apparantly, only three countries have elcted judges), exactly because the public sucks at determining what is a reasonable punishment.
Yes, chemistry of the nobel gases is fascinating. However, I don't think oxidation of xenon is going in in vivo. Clathrates might play a role, but not redox-chemistry.
Ahh, yes, another model might explain it. In short, if nerve signals are solitons in the cell membranes, lowering the "melting point" of the membrane would require the solitons to be more energetic. If there is not enough energy present to make the soliton, the nerve signal cannot propagate, which would cause anaesthesia. As xenon is fat soluble, it would have this effect. But that model is highly speculative...
That is a bit of a mystery, yes. WP mentions a hypothesis, where it interacts with the hydrophobic regions of a protein, thus changing the folding. But as long as we have no theory of what causes general anesthesia, it is difficult to speculate about what causes it in one particular instance.
A linear increase in growth implies a quadratic increase in population. Any increase in growth rate would mean a superexponentional increase in population (as has, according to a graph of the time of doubling of human population, been the case in very resent human history)
they don't need to produce heat to maintain a constant body temperature. 1.5 - 2 grams of food will give you 1 gram of fish, although it varies by species. Compare that to a warm blooded animal - where the ratio of food/flesh is 6:1 or worse.
I think danish pigs just passed growing one kg for each three kg of grain they eat, but that is the result of a long time of very selective breeding. And grain is dry, while meat is not, which somewhat skews the numbers.
No, the REAL problem is the large and exponentially growing HUMAN population.
It isn't exponential, as can be seen from the fact that the percentile growth rate isn't constant, but falls slightly. IIRC (from my own mangling of the WP estimates of world population from 1750 onwards), the growth seems to be linearly increasing, which is still trouble brewing.
So, there is ambiguity in the SI system for variables and constants, the prefixes and units have less ambiguity and are left behind, we need to make some there?
If anybody other than a CS uses M as a prefix for a unit, they mean that it is a factor 1000000 larger. If anybody other than a CS use k as a prefix for a unit, it they mean 1000. If a CS uses them in that manner, he means 2^20 and 2^10. How is this unambiguous?
I understand the need for prefixes for the powers of 2, but why use the same letter as something that is almost, but not quite, the same?
The danish mint make a point out of making a lot of special 20 DKK coins (about 4 $), enough that they want get snatched up (I think it is typically 1 million of each, in a population of 5 million). They do this to make it possible to find that (not so) rare treat every time you get money back. Whenever I find one, I eagerly use it, to make sure more people will find one:-) It's not like they will ever be valuable, there are simply to many made.
Anytime you see a b or a B after a K, M, etc. scalar multiplier, you are talking about bits or bytes and are using 1024 instead of 1000. It is not confusing. It is not ambiguous.
So, whenever you have a unit prefixed by M, it means 1000000, except in these two particular case. How is that not confusing and/or ambiguous?
CS has a fucking REASON to use 1024.
SI does not have a fucking reason to use 1000.
CS have a reason for 1024, but none for wanting it to be called k. SI have a reason for wanting every k to mean 1000.
It is fine if you want prefixes which fits the use of one particular field, but don't just take something welldefined and give it a conflicting meaning. That is just asking for trouble, which is exactly what you got.
The algorithm is slightly more sophisticated:
Every company starts with a 6 months grace period, where we will not by their product. Every time they do something unintentionally evil, the grace period starts over. Every time they do something intentionally evil, the grace period is multiplied by 1.4 and starts over.
This worked fine until 1997, when MS' grace period became longer then the remaining lifespan of the universe, sparking suspicion that they planned to use a buffer overflow to reset their grace period. It was thus decided to limit the grace period to 7 years, to avoid possible bugs in the algorithm. Of course, MS' conduct after the revision have dismissed the theory, but the 7 year grace period remains. The 7 year period have also made it possible to purchase IBM goods again, after their grace period had over 9000 since the early 80's.
There is some merit to doing that, chicken are very efficient at eating weeds and insects, and don't touch the trees (if they get enough to eat). So in organic orchards, at least, there is some benefit. I don't now if it is done in conventional orchards, though.
And maybe all the atheists in the world just haven't seen anyone die unexpectedly. (I wonder what the odds of this are?)
Or maybe grief affects everyone differently, and doesn't imply anything about any deity.
Zero. Watching my dad bleed to death did not make me think "wow, there must be a loving god in heaven, loving us all enough to make us die from horrible diseases. How wrong I have been".
Sorry to be off topic, but thank you for writing that response. Thank you very much.
I came across a proposed way of doing just that some years ago: http://www.slate.com/id/68674/ Basically, every time a patent is granted, an auction is performed over the patent*. Now, 9 times out of ten, the government pays the one who applied for the patent the winning bid*, and the patent is released into public domain. 1 time out of ten, the highest bidder pays, and gets the monopoly. So, the one who applied to the patent gets what the market thinks it is worth. He can bid in the auction himself, and have a chance of getting the monopoly. Plus, capital investment is not necessary to get paid for having a good idea.
* To make sure the one who applied for the patent doesn't bid the auction up, it is made as a third-bid-auction, i.e. the one who bid the highest wins, but pays the third-highest bid. That way, you need 3 entities in cahoot to throw the auction (but the details is in the article I linked to). Oh, and the third bid is of course lower then the first, but that lower price is offset by the bidders bidding a bit higher than they would have in a first-bid or second-bid auction.
Yes, why would one company try to make money on curing a disease, if that would remove the market of an unaffiliated company? I mean, isn't that how publically traded companies think, long-term and for the benefit of others? And of course, when you start researching a drug, you can choose if it is actually going to cure patients, or is just going to end up as a treatment. It's not like pharmaceutical research is hard, is it? Or like only one in a thousand drug candidates actually end up as a drug, so you just have to take what you can get.
The short answer is competition. If the customers can take their business elsewhere if they are not pleased with the service or price, there is a real incentive for doing things better or cheaper, even if there is some discomfort for the individual in doing this (working harder, having to fire a colleague). Now, you assume we hold our government accountable for their actions, but in general, the government is to complex for that to work optimally. If one party will mismanage the schools, one will mismanage the public transportation, and one will mismanage healthcare, how do you hold them accountable?
That being said, the public sector tends to become much more effective when they get real competition, ie. when there is a real possibility that they will lose some of their budget if a private company can do the job cheaper or better. The problem with that is that the quality of most of the things government does is extremely hard to quantify, so you risk ending up with private companies doing a second rate job, but being able to tick all the boxes showing that they do a first rate job.
Whoa, there, if you go from 60W to 6,9W you save 53W, if you go from 60W to 15W you save 45W, if saving 53W saves you 23$/y, saving 45W will save you 19,5$/y. But it still pays for itself in 10 years, a bit less if you take into account the price of the CFL.
Well, it is an intriguing idea, and one I have seen suggested before. But it is hard to get from a two-base to a three-base representation. You would need to change a lot of things in one go (inserting 50% more bases, changing the RNA, changing the proteins etc.), which isn't that easy to do in a evolutionary environment. I think it has more to do with redundancy. Changing one base have about a 1/3 chance of not causing a mutation, and the t-RNA doesn't have to be nearly as selective (it doesn't matter if it gets the last base wrong). You could even imagine a start where there were only one t-RNA for each amino acid, and it simply ignored the last base (well almost, with the obvious exceptions)
In the case of prions, what kills you is not the sequence of amino acids, but the folding. You already have the proteins in your body, just folded the right way. And coding protein folding is tricky, do you need to specify every bond angle and length, or are there just 2 positions(folded right, folded wrong), making it one bit? Both are too extreme, but a wide array of foldings will collapse to the sick one, and a wide array will collapse to the healthy one. So, I suppose the question becomes, what is the proportion of the number of foldings collapsing to the sick one to the number of possible foldings. Or, more precisely, the logarithm of that proportion.
I guess Penn and Teller said it best with (quoting from memory):
"We would personally strangle, with our bare hands, every chimp in the world to save one street junkie".
I'm not sure I quite agree, but I have some sympathy for the stand.
Slashdot Mirror
wakes up with a headache every other day.
How much coffee does she drink?
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1455726&cid=30224184
Doctor* "random guy on /." to the rescue:
How much coffee do you drink? Coffee contracts the blood vessels in the brain, and as the body gets used to it, their relaxed state becomes more dilated. Dilated blood vessels in the brain gives splitting headaches, so if you drink a lot of coffee, you will get headaches at times when it is a long time since your last cup, e.g. in the morning. It is explained in more detail in this podcast under "your questions".
*I'm not actually a doctor, and this is not medical advice.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just sane. A lot of countries have judges that aren't elected (apparantly, only three countries have elcted judges), exactly because the public sucks at determining what is a reasonable punishment.
And are apparantly oxidative enough to oxidize O2 to O2 +
Must be tough in this atmosphere...
Yes, chemistry of the nobel gases is fascinating. However, I don't think oxidation of xenon is going in in vivo. Clathrates might play a role, but not redox-chemistry.
Ahh, yes, another model might explain it. In short, if nerve signals are solitons in the cell membranes, lowering the "melting point" of the membrane would require the solitons to be more energetic. If there is not enough energy present to make the soliton, the nerve signal cannot propagate, which would cause anaesthesia. As xenon is fat soluble, it would have this effect. But that model is highly speculative...
That is a bit of a mystery, yes. WP mentions a hypothesis, where it interacts with the hydrophobic regions of a protein, thus changing the folding. But as long as we have no theory of what causes general anesthesia, it is difficult to speculate about what causes it in one particular instance.
Xenon is a general anaestethic, so it isn't just hypoxia.
A linear increase in growth implies a quadratic increase in population. Any increase in growth rate would mean a superexponentional increase in population (as has, according to a graph of the time of doubling of human population, been the case in very resent human history)
they don't need to produce heat to maintain a constant body temperature. 1.5 - 2 grams of food will give you 1 gram of fish, although it varies by species. Compare that to a warm blooded animal - where the ratio of food/flesh is 6:1 or worse.
I think danish pigs just passed growing one kg for each three kg of grain they eat, but that is the result of a long time of very selective breeding. And grain is dry, while meat is not, which somewhat skews the numbers.
No, the REAL problem is the large and exponentially growing HUMAN population.
It isn't exponential, as can be seen from the fact that the percentile growth rate isn't constant, but falls slightly. IIRC (from my own mangling of the WP estimates of world population from 1750 onwards), the growth seems to be linearly increasing, which is still trouble brewing.
So, there is ambiguity in the SI system for variables and constants, the prefixes and units have less ambiguity and are left behind, we need to make some there?
If anybody other than a CS uses M as a prefix for a unit, they mean that it is a factor 1000000 larger. If anybody other than a CS use k as a prefix for a unit, it they mean 1000. If a CS uses them in that manner, he means 2^20 and 2^10. How is this unambiguous?
I understand the need for prefixes for the powers of 2, but why use the same letter as something that is almost, but not quite, the same?
Just making them is probably illegal, even if you can prove you had no intention of using them. It is in Denmark, at least, but we don't use euros.
The danish mint make a point out of making a lot of special 20 DKK coins (about 4 $), enough that they want get snatched up (I think it is typically 1 million of each, in a population of 5 million). They do this to make it possible to find that (not so) rare treat every time you get money back. Whenever I find one, I eagerly use it, to make sure more people will find one :-) It's not like they will ever be valuable, there are simply to many made.
Anytime you see a b or a B after a K, M, etc. scalar multiplier, you are talking about bits or bytes and are using 1024 instead of 1000. It is not confusing. It is not ambiguous.
So, whenever you have a unit prefixed by M, it means 1000000, except in these two particular case. How is that not confusing and/or ambiguous?
CS has a fucking REASON to use 1024. SI does not have a fucking reason to use 1000.
CS have a reason for 1024, but none for wanting it to be called k. SI have a reason for wanting every k to mean 1000. It is fine if you want prefixes which fits the use of one particular field, but don't just take something welldefined and give it a conflicting meaning. That is just asking for trouble, which is exactly what you got.
The algorithm is slightly more sophisticated:
Every company starts with a 6 months grace period, where we will not by their product. Every time they do something unintentionally evil, the grace period starts over. Every time they do something intentionally evil, the grace period is multiplied by 1.4 and starts over.
This worked fine until 1997, when MS' grace period became longer then the remaining lifespan of the universe, sparking suspicion that they planned to use a buffer overflow to reset their grace period. It was thus decided to limit the grace period to 7 years, to avoid possible bugs in the algorithm. Of course, MS' conduct after the revision have dismissed the theory, but the 7 year grace period remains.
The 7 year period have also made it possible to purchase IBM goods again, after their grace period had over 9000 since the early 80's.
There is some merit to doing that, chicken are very efficient at eating weeds and insects, and don't touch the trees (if they get enough to eat). So in organic orchards, at least, there is some benefit. I don't now if it is done in conventional orchards, though.
And maybe all the atheists in the world just haven't seen anyone die unexpectedly. (I wonder what the odds of this are?)
Or maybe grief affects everyone differently, and doesn't imply anything about any deity.
Zero. Watching my dad bleed to death did not make me think "wow, there must be a loving god in heaven, loving us all enough to make us die from horrible diseases. How wrong I have been".
Sorry to be off topic, but thank you for writing that response. Thank you very much.
I came across a proposed way of doing just that some years ago: http://www.slate.com/id/68674/
Basically, every time a patent is granted, an auction is performed over the patent*. Now, 9 times out of ten, the government pays the one who applied for the patent the winning bid*, and the patent is released into public domain. 1 time out of ten, the highest bidder pays, and gets the monopoly. So, the one who applied to the patent gets what the market thinks it is worth. He can bid in the auction himself, and have a chance of getting the monopoly. Plus, capital investment is not necessary to get paid for having a good idea.
* To make sure the one who applied for the patent doesn't bid the auction up, it is made as a third-bid-auction, i.e. the one who bid the highest wins, but pays the third-highest bid. That way, you need 3 entities in cahoot to throw the auction (but the details is in the article I linked to). Oh, and the third bid is of course lower then the first, but that lower price is offset by the bidders bidding a bit higher than they would have in a first-bid or second-bid auction.
Yes, why would one company try to make money on curing a disease, if that would remove the market of an unaffiliated company? I mean, isn't that how publically traded companies think, long-term and for the benefit of others? And of course, when you start researching a drug, you can choose if it is actually going to cure patients, or is just going to end up as a treatment. It's not like pharmaceutical research is hard, is it? Or like only one in a thousand drug candidates actually end up as a drug, so you just have to take what you can get.
The short answer is competition. If the customers can take their business elsewhere if they are not pleased with the service or price, there is a real incentive for doing things better or cheaper, even if there is some discomfort for the individual in doing this (working harder, having to fire a colleague). Now, you assume we hold our government accountable for their actions, but in general, the government is to complex for that to work optimally. If one party will mismanage the schools, one will mismanage the public transportation, and one will mismanage healthcare, how do you hold them accountable?
That being said, the public sector tends to become much more effective when they get real competition, ie. when there is a real possibility that they will lose some of their budget if a private company can do the job cheaper or better. The problem with that is that the quality of most of the things government does is extremely hard to quantify, so you risk ending up with private companies doing a second rate job, but being able to tick all the boxes showing that they do a first rate job.
He wrote "open SOURCE", not "open SORES".
Whoa, there, if you go from 60W to 6,9W you save 53W, if you go from 60W to 15W you save 45W, if saving 53W saves you 23$/y, saving 45W will save you 19,5$/y. But it still pays for itself in 10 years, a bit less if you take into account the price of the CFL.
Well, it is an intriguing idea, and one I have seen suggested before. But it is hard to get from a two-base to a three-base representation. You would need to change a lot of things in one go (inserting 50% more bases, changing the RNA, changing the proteins etc.), which isn't that easy to do in a evolutionary environment. I think it has more to do with redundancy. Changing one base have about a 1/3 chance of not causing a mutation, and the t-RNA doesn't have to be nearly as selective (it doesn't matter if it gets the last base wrong). You could even imagine a start where there were only one t-RNA for each amino acid, and it simply ignored the last base (well almost, with the obvious exceptions)
In the case of prions, what kills you is not the sequence of amino acids, but the folding. You already have the proteins in your body, just folded the right way. And coding protein folding is tricky, do you need to specify every bond angle and length, or are there just 2 positions(folded right, folded wrong), making it one bit? Both are too extreme, but a wide array of foldings will collapse to the sick one, and a wide array will collapse to the healthy one. So, I suppose the question becomes, what is the proportion of the number of foldings collapsing to the sick one to the number of possible foldings. Or, more precisely, the logarithm of that proportion.
I guess Penn and Teller said it best with (quoting from memory):
"We would personally strangle, with our bare hands, every chimp in the world to save one street junkie".
I'm not sure I quite agree, but I have some sympathy for the stand.