Go home and sleep it off, Officer C. You're slurring at the keyboard and think your job is sexy. And if you come to work with your uniform having questionable stains on it again, you're gonna get a write-up...
Seriously, did you even read the damned summary before you post?
Yes, and then I promptly spit mountain dew all over my keyboard because it was yet another in a long string of examples of poor editorial control on slashdot. The study talks about insects, but do you see the specific insect mentioned in the summary? Nope. In fact, the study is about whether the number of these insects in a given area leads to increase mortality... but the summary talks about a "hypothesis" that trees are good for your health. Da fuq they get there?
So I replied to it, and predictably, everyone else who didn't click on the link and realize the summary was a horribly mangled piece of shit modded me down and insulted me just as you did.
But yeah, I'm sure you identified the major problem with the whole study in 10 seconds.
Insults like this, for example. The major problem with the study is not the data, it's the conclusion. Go back and read my damned post again -- I'm deriding the "Trees r grate! lol!" conclusion drawn by the summary of the study. The study itself is flawed not because of its method of data collection but because of the conclusions being drawn from the study. This is an exploratory research study.
A study that was done over several years analyzing 17 years of collected data. But it's wrong, because there is absolutely no way they thought to correct for human behavior, no matter what the summary says.
Yes, and your hand waving and wild gesticulations must mean they're absolutely correct, because nobody has ever gotten an analysis wrong in science, especially not after doing it for "over several years" analyzing "17 years of collected dat--" hangon, sorry, phone's ringing. "Hello? Oh, hello there global climate change research! Yes. Yes. No. Yeah, I know, right? Well, I'll do that. You take care too." Okay, sorry about that, where was I now? Oh right, snarking your snark...
Next time, you could even try reading the full paper before you comment and call them "amateur scientists." Especially when they, you know, have already thought of everything you've pointed out.
Sorry, but I didn't call them amateur scientists. I said there was bad science here. People are drawing conclusions unsupported by the data. And if you go look at the PBS article, you might just find that, unlike the study itself, the people they're talking to do infact make the assertion that "trees = healthy", which is not at all what the data said.
But you keep right on mischaracterizing people's comments and building straw men... it's a real popular past time on NuSlash(tm) nowadays... who needs facts when you can just slam someone for making a thoughtful post that asks a few questions about what the summary posted by the editors concludes. The only thing missing in this shit-slinging snark fest is a wikipedia link to something totally irrelevant and a reply in all caps to the effect of "You don't know what you're talking about". Anonymous Coward, you know what to do...
Isn't what this work studied. They correlated a specific insect cause of tree death with human welfare. The methodology was specifically constructed to remove confounding factorsâ" things like air pollution killing both the trees and the humans.
What is testing has, at best, a loose relation with what it set out to prove. The test was "the loss of 100 million trees to the emerald ash borer", but they looked at "the relationship between emerald ash borer presence and county-level mortality." These aren't the same thing. What they were looking at was how many of these insects were present. They concluded that the more of these insects in the area, the higher the mortality rate. The trees are the insects principal food, and it's easier to measure the number of trees in an area than the number of insects.
That isn't to say the research is flawless but it was deeper and more carefully constructed that your slashdot arm-chair-expert off the hip comment gives it credit for.
So what you're saying is this "arm-chair-expert off the hip" person is right -- the research is flawed. Which was the point. And unlike an Anonymous Coward "arm-chair insulter", I provided clear reasoning which many people responded to and asked me to be modded up and that it was, indeed, poor science -- a fact you aren't disputing.
The fact that I only pointed out failings exist and didn't go into great detail studying the study, as it were, appears to be the only source of your disrespect, but you're too afraid to actually post under your own name because you know you're making an ad hominid attack.. but figured that remaining anonymous and kow-towing the popular opinion that girls on slashdot must be stupid would get your comment modded up, and me down, because the moderators don't stop and think anymore about what's actually being said... they just go with their feelings.
The methodology is exactly what I'm attacking: That this correlation justifies their conclusion. It doesn't. I actually have the full study pulled up and had looked at it some time before slashdot posted it to the front page -- and having looked it over, I think it's nice as a piece of exploratory research, but I disagree vehemently with both PBS and the OP's summary of the study -- they take a single correlation and somehow expand it to mean "trees = better health".
That's not what the study said. That's not what the science says. And that's not what I said either. To get to that conclusion requires a lot more data than this single point, which doesn't even show a strong correlation. It hasn't reached a level of statistical importance that would even justify further research. And while yes, there is a "growing body of evidence" that the natural environment provides health benefits... well fucking duh. How is that advancing our knowledge in any meaningful way? It isn't! We already knew that living inside the core of a nuclear reactor is worse for your health than living in the suburb it serves. Duh, of course environment has an impact on health.
But it is amazingly, confoundingly difficult, to say what in the environment causes health benefits. There's very little solid ground to stand on here; Most of what we know is correlative, and weak at best. A lot, and I mean a lot of additional research has to be done before we can even get past those stupid stickers on bottles of oxygen that say "Known to cause cancer in the State of California" let alone to the point where we can confidently start making changes to the environment knowing they will most likely lead to improvements in human health.
That's the state of the art as it exists today, and that's not something being said by a "arm-chair expert" as an "off the hip comment"... but by the majority of the scientific community. And frankly, I feel sorta dirty having to justify the call for more data, and more research... it's the single most commonly heard thing amongst scientists... "Well, the data looks promising, but I think we need to study this more before we draw any conclusions." I've said pretty much exactly that, and I get slapped in the face by jerks like you for being an "arm chair expert"... *shakes head* Really disappointed, slashdot...
It requires officers to have 'reasonable grounds' to believe the law was broken.
Officer A: "Hey Lou, you see that cell phone?" Officer B: "Yeah man, I do." Officer A: "And the car's wrecked, right?" Officer B: "Sure is, Lou." Officer A: "Well there you have it. Reasonable grounds. Cell phone in plain site at the scene of an accident. No different than finding a beer bottle in the back seat and 'reasonably' concluding he could have been drunk..." Officer B: "Sounds like a plan. Hey, you know we can't ordinarily go into glove boxes without a warrant, but I think I might have heard something vibrating in there!" Officer A: "Could be a cell phone. Better open it up and look." Officer B: "It sure could man... it sure could... hey, isn't it so much easier not having to ask anyone before we do whatever the hell we feel like these days?" Officer A: "Sure is! Checks and balances, audits, constitutional freedoms... they were just slowing us down all these years."
Take a good look guys. This guy just committed a basic mistake in method. He made a leap unsupported by the facts. The presence and quantity of trees may be correlated with healthier people, but that in no way means there's a connection. He hasn't controlled for environmental factors. The most basic would be answering the question -- why are there more trees in a given area? In densely populated urban areas, there will be fewer trees, obviously... and we know cities have more pollution than a prestine wilderness. But that doesn't mean the trees are what's making people healthy... it could just be that the absence of pollution is.
This is an incomplete analysis and an attempt by an amateur scientist to start with a conclusion and work his way back to find supporting facts, while ignoring the fact that in science, you do things the other way around. And if you don't, you get crap like this.
I'm not about to go throw myself in a lake and start tree bathing because I think it'll improve my health... at best it'll be a placebo reaction. At worst, it'll kill me due to my allergies. What I'd do instead is try to find populations where trees are present at various threshold concentrations and match the environments as closely as possible so the only control would be the number of trees in a given area, and see if the correlation still holds.
Oh, and something to be aware of... richer neighborhoods have more trees than poorer neighborhoods, to the point that if you take satellite photography of a large metropolitan area, that alone can predict to a high degree of accuracy where the rich people live. Is this because they can afford to keep their environment cleaner as well?
You have to control for human behavior in this, or your analysis is broken.
Hmm, I must have been absent the day our history class learned about Nazi experiments in implanting electrodes in the antennae of Jews so as to control them with cute little RF backpacks...
I really shouldn't have to say this... I mean, it ought to be painfully obvious, but I see you got modded up on this, so I feel compelled to respond: what the fuck are you smoking, man? Er, I mean, Citation Needed. Seriously...
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
I wonder if God said anything about our cruelty to each other and slow destruction of the planet... domination was inevitable. Destruction wasn't.
RF cockroach backpacks are just an advanced technique for exercising dominion over a creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 100% authorized by the relevant deity.
This technology has been around since the time of the greeks, who discovered that electricity caused dead frogs to twitch. It's been long known that muscles of animals (including cockroaches) respond to electrical impulses. Adding an RF 'backpack' to the equation doesn't change the underlying science or make it new. We've known how to modulate RF to carry signals since the turn of the last century.
Must be a real slow news day on Slashdot to be letting quotes from the Bible and paranoid blithering about nazis and jews get modded up...
I think you may have missed the point. From my reading, her/his point was that these "hipsters" really aren't geeks per se. Especially in the world of hardware and computing.
Yeah, well... trying to get some people to the whooshing noise was the point is a lost cause.
To your (rather loud) point, installing Ubuntu then giving up after you realize that the command line is necessary is actually a pretty good test of the "hipster" mentality. Having a Macbook, github account and endless copypasta from stackexchange does not qualify one as a rails guru, or IOS programmer or anything else either. Just someone who is interested in image over substance. Jmho.
Bingo. Gold star for this guy. Unlike the previous poster, who was last seen riding the short bus. -_-
It jumped the shark when they sold out to Dice. Now it's just another stagnating cesspool of hipsters who think owning an iPhone and have installed linux on their old dilapidated computer (and, quickly finding they couldn't do anything with it without RTFM, gave up, much like their collection of unread 'classic' books) makes them geeks. You can tell because when someone posts a well-written but politically unpopular comment, they're modded down, while one liners supporting the party line get +5s, though they're about as intellectually stimulating as a twinky is at being healthy.
Nothing says "mainstream culture" like group think and people patting themselves on the back for regurgitating what the other 'popular people' say. Geeks, real ones I mean, have a wide diversity of opinion and frequently debate endlessly for hours over pointless minutae like whether Han shot first or not or rage over calling the 'higgs' the 'god particle'. In fact, you can usually tell you're in the company of fellow geeks because they're having a grand old time being disagreeable with each other, and in fact make a game out of it! Nothing charms a geek quite as much as vehemently disagreeing about which Star Trek captain was the best... and whipping out slide rules and technical manuals to have a proper go of it. Don't get me wrong though -- it's all faux outrage, with about as much real emotion as telling someone their favorite bands sucks. Yeah, okay, and?
That's the difference. And that's what Slashdot has lost. There's no diversity of opinion anymore... which is another way of saying... there's not very many geeks left on the site... just pretenders...
The supplier is not throwing the tantrum. Take my word on that for now.
I didn't say you were saying that. I said other people were saying that. I did not say that myself.
But I do know there are forces opposed to the NRC... to its very existence.
Yes. They're called capitalists, and left to their own devices, we'd all be swimming in our own sewage and slaves to mega corporations in some dystopic alternate reality. It's okay, you can call them out on it, I won't say anything.
For the moment, please understand that you don't understand quite what's going on over there.
I don't think it's really necessary for me to have intimate knowledge of the situation. Party A is pointing the finger at Party B. Party B is pointing the finger at Party A. And all the people living in the area, who need clean, cheap, reliable energy are getting... is the finger. I'm not really in much of a mood for caring much about details on it... Someone fucked up. And in cases of fuckups in this country, profit-oriented thinking is almost invariably the source of it. So... whoever thinks they're most entitled to profit is the at-fault party. I know, it's overly simplistic, it ignores all the details, but... it's surprisingly accurate. Unfortunately.
But this thing about shutting down two plants which are otherwise capable of being repaired and restored to a good, safe and reliable operation? Based on everything I know, it's not merely "nuclear economics." There's a lot more.
Well, I'm not in the position you are, so maybe, with specific information, I can be convinced otherwise, but "nuclear economics" is just a fancy way of saying someone who felt they should be making money on this isn't making as much as they feel entitled to. Now, as to who that is, or what complex bureaucratic clusterfuck surrounds that person so as to obscure their identity so we can grab our pitchforks and tar and feather the asshole... meh!
I have no problems with the NRC. I have no problems with the people in (what's left) of our nuclear industry. I have a problem with a government listening to morons, politicians, and businessmen, and ignoring the needs of its people. And those people, in that area, need electricity. They deserve electricity. There isn't a good reason why the largest economic power on the planet can't deliver turn of the last century amenities at an affordable, safe, and reliable way.
There are plenty of bad ones however. I suspect the bad one you're sore about in particular is the profiteering asshats who own the plant. I'm strongly inclined to agree with you, if that's your position, simply because past experience has shown me that in this country, the Almighty Dollar is the cause of almost every train wreck that makes the news and there's no evidence this one's any different.
It's not just artistic. I can see a commercial application to this: Automobile fabrication. Think of how much faster you could produce them, and the reliability, if you could create a metal support shell and then bond arbitrary shapes of plastic to it. Creating the body of a vehicle... hell, repairing the body would be much easier. Just cut away the damaged section and press the button labelled "reform" and in a few hours, you've got yourself a new bumper. Didn't even have to repair the old one. Bonds with the original materials... just as strong as before.
Considering how effing expensive car repair is now, I can well imagine how well loved a bay with a 3D printer loaded for 'Car' would be. Next time someone keys your car, you get a crease in the door, whatever... just drive it into your handy 3D printer-equipped body shop and in an hour they're done and busy repainting the affected panel.
I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
We invented this technology and now, due to anti-nuclear regulations, we no longer have the people, resources, factories, or technical capability, to create nuclear pressure vessels or many of the components needed to build a reactor. Unless of course it's for the military. A single supplier, in another country, can "throw a tantrum" as you say, and deprive one of our major metropolitan areas with electricity.
And yet it's the fault of the electric company in your view, and the supplier in another's view. Well, bluntly stated -- where the fuck is my own government on this? Where's our own industry? Why can't we build our own damn nuclear reactors? Oh... right... anti-nuclear idiocy and impossibly high standards along with a morass of NIMBY government, red tape, etc. No... sorry, they didn't cut their nose off in spite of their face: Our government did.
"massive amounts of food poisoning " What!?!? 70% of the people in your country get food poisoning daily?
1 in 6 americans get food poisoning annually. In Britain, about 5 million people annually get food poisoning. The population of Britain is about 63 million, or a rate of about 1 in 14.
I think a rate of over double in a country with similar eating habits, socioeconomic status, and climate, constitutes massive.
The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest and this is how we do it.
Yeah, worrying about a few hundred tons of waste we can easily bury deep in a mountain somewhere and forget about it for "literally thousands of years" is clearly inferior to cooking our planet to the point that it is no longer inhabitable.
. The promise of truly safe nuclear power will never be delivered upon due to human greed and incompetence.
No, it'll never be delivered upon because most of the human population will have died off in the next 150 years or so because we'll no longer have enough fertile land to support our current population due to global climate changed caused by fossil fuels. That's the entire planet, you know... billions are going to die from starvation because of fucking morons like yourself that are so worried about a few kilotons of nuclear waste you're willing to let the whole planet die. Also, coal power plants produce more nuclear radiation yearly than all the nuclear accidents in the entire history of the human race including our weapons testing and use.
But yeah man, let's keep trumpeting the "It has to be perfect" mantra, while we choke our planet to death with less than perfect fossil fuels.
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
Well, when I say "cost center", I mean they look at IT resources the same way they look at paper towels for the bathroom... a necessary expense you should spend as little as possible on. Unfortunately, that's what they teach MBAs and the like in college. Doubly-unfortunate, they listen and never bother thinking on their own, or listening to people in the field.
The difference between the cheapest solution and the second cheapest solution is usually the difference between "will work 4 out of 5 times" and "will last 3--5 years and not give us any problems." And the difference is usually 5% or less. Guess which one they always pick?
I have never seen anyone fired for doing his job well. I have seen people fired for being insubordinate and abusive (though not often enough!). Are you sure you know the difference?
Yes. I have 14 years of industry experience. I've seen more than you, kid.
What year, exactly, did America pass its golden age? You'd be surprised how many times people have said "America has passed its prime", over the decades before you were even a passing thought in your parents minds before you were born.
It would be the point when children have less than their parents. Or about 20 years ago now.
The thing about MUDs were, it was very up front about your options: Go North, Go West, or Get Eaten By Grue. Modern MMOs try to sell themselves as "fully immersive", but just try running out of the battlefield area once... flashing red lights and your character either explodes, or magically teleports. Very realistic... I know that when I make a wrong turn in my car, if I don't make a u-turn in the next 60 seconds, my car explodes and the police are sent out to pick up little bits of me splattered all over the roadway and other drivers.
I guess my point is... MUDs didn't hide the fact that there were limitations, and in fact turned it into clever logic puzzles and such to solve. They were about having fun and thinking your way out, rather than focusing on beautiful walls of text and then having your only option being pressing ENTER repeatedly, which is what today's MMOs feel like.
The older games were more creative, and they made do with a lot less. Today it's all about achieving technical perfection but without any real substance.
But look around you. You want Somalia? Russia? India? China?
Okay first, I get your point. And I agree with it. The rule of law is essential to civilization. So let me put that out there first.
But, if you look at the history of every empire, every major civilization, you will find a pattern of increasing legal complexity to the point that the system itself caves under its own excesses. It becomes pathological and toxic to the purpose it was meant to serve, and ultimately strangles itself. If you read enough anthropology you find that civilization is cyclical -- it starts with anarchy, advances to a golden age, and then dies of increasing bureaucratic, legal, and political complexity, and the cycle repeats.
America has passed its golden age. It is now on the downward slope towards eventual anarchy. The rule of law is becoming less and less accessible to more and more people. Crime rates are up. Incarceration is up. The government is spending more and more on law enforcement every year, and more and more on military as well. These things are classic signs of a society accelerating towards oblivion. I don't know that it can be reversed. I have yet to see a historical example where it was. I'd like to think it is possible, but empirically, that's a spot of wishful thinking more than anything.
I know I was brief and snarky in the OP, but there is an underlying truth: This complexity does not serve the interests of the common person. It serves wealthy interests. So when I hear about the corruption of the system and people in it saying "Oh no, this guy went too far" I take it with a big grain of salt. Maybe it is going too far, but that's the general trend... and since I know of no way of reversing or correcting it, it's not really newsworthy for me. It's just history repeating.
I'd like to implement some type of software to record where the fiber cables run, what pit number they are jointed in, which fiber is spliced to which, and what internal customer is using which fiber path through the system. Knowing what fibers are free for use is also a requirement, and I'd love to record details of what equipment was put in where, for asset and warranty tracking. Extra points if I can give Engineering access to help them design things better!"
At the risk of appearing less geeky than my peers... use a sketch pad. I'm perfectly serious about this. We've been using building blue prints since the Roman times and they've served humanity pretty well. Expensive software solutions and asset management databases solve the problem too, but they're invariably varying degrees of out of date and did I mention they cost a lot?
Engineers understand blue prints. I know paper is a little 90s, but it works, it's universally understood, and it's cheap. If you were dealing with high level IT people for this, maybe I'd suggest the high priced software solution because they'd be happy to waste hours maintaining it and sending out e-mails reminding people to update the information in it... don't ask me why computer geeks love that kind of overhead, I don't know. I'm guilty of it too.
But these are not those people. They're engineers that block print everything and have marginal computer skills on the best of days. Give them a pencil and tell them to write neatly. You'll save on aspirin.
IAAL and I can tell you Mr. McAleese will not be a member of the bar much longer. As attorney offenses go, this is toxic / nuclear.
Is it toxic because Apple is a giant company that most members of Congress are in love with and would secretly bang in the men's bathroom? I'm totally serious: They're the largest company on Earth... why the hell does anyone care how much, often, or with what merit, they're sued? I'm not a lawyer, but as an average person, I'm thoroughly convinced the courts exist solely so rich people can try and out-douche each other. Poor people get no representation. So since this is one rich douchebag engaging another rich douchebag, the very thing our court systems and patent law caters to... why would anyone ban them from practicing law? They're simply doing what everyone else is... they're just smaller... and not as good at it.
I know I'm going to hell for this, but I read "futuristic" and "tessellation" in the summary and immediately thought of Loki from The Avengers. Terrible villain really, just went bad because he had daddy issues. *cough* Crap... going off topic and triggering a flame war from marvel lovers. Yeah. I'm taking the special bus to hell now...
Holy wall of text, batman. I feel we should build a Plinth upon which to erect this comment, for never before, and perhaps never again, will a person as completely encompass why the acronym "tl;dr" was invented.
Let's wind back the clock a few months to the 3rd week in February. It's late at night and Jon Stewart pops in; "So 'imminent threat'... in other words, imminent... or not imminent. Broadly speaking, imminent in the geological sense. So, wait, we can kill an American who is in al Qaeda or al Qaeda-adjacent if they post an imminent danger, and by 'imminent,' we mean eventual?â Oh, but it gets better... he went on to point out how the definition of "unlawful combatant" pretty much means "whoever the fuck we say". Go watch the episode -- 3rd week, February.
No, really. Honest truth. I mean, yeah, it's coming from a comedian, but it doesn't mean he's wrong: The original poster is spot on.. by the executive branch of the US government's definition, "imminent" means "whenever", and "terrorist" means, whoever we say. Really really. Oh, and a friendly piece of advice? You need to lighten up, both in terms of your attitude and your, achem, predeliction for beating dead horses with dictionaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Officer C: oooh, sexty!
Go home and sleep it off, Officer C. You're slurring at the keyboard and think your job is sexy. And if you come to work with your uniform having questionable stains on it again, you're gonna get a write-up...
Seriously, did you even read the damned summary before you post?
Yes, and then I promptly spit mountain dew all over my keyboard because it was yet another in a long string of examples of poor editorial control on slashdot. The study talks about insects, but do you see the specific insect mentioned in the summary? Nope. In fact, the study is about whether the number of these insects in a given area leads to increase mortality... but the summary talks about a "hypothesis" that trees are good for your health. Da fuq they get there?
So I replied to it, and predictably, everyone else who didn't click on the link and realize the summary was a horribly mangled piece of shit modded me down and insulted me just as you did.
But yeah, I'm sure you identified the major problem with the whole study in 10 seconds.
Insults like this, for example. The major problem with the study is not the data, it's the conclusion. Go back and read my damned post again -- I'm deriding the "Trees r grate! lol!" conclusion drawn by the summary of the study. The study itself is flawed not because of its method of data collection but because of the conclusions being drawn from the study. This is an exploratory research study.
A study that was done over several years analyzing 17 years of collected data. But it's wrong, because there is absolutely no way they thought to correct for human behavior, no matter what the summary says.
Yes, and your hand waving and wild gesticulations must mean they're absolutely correct, because nobody has ever gotten an analysis wrong in science, especially not after doing it for "over several years" analyzing "17 years of collected dat--" hangon, sorry, phone's ringing. "Hello? Oh, hello there global climate change research! Yes. Yes. No. Yeah, I know, right? Well, I'll do that. You take care too." Okay, sorry about that, where was I now? Oh right, snarking your snark...
Next time, you could even try reading the full paper before you comment and call them "amateur scientists." Especially when they, you know, have already thought of everything you've pointed out.
Sorry, but I didn't call them amateur scientists. I said there was bad science here. People are drawing conclusions unsupported by the data. And if you go look at the PBS article, you might just find that, unlike the study itself, the people they're talking to do infact make the assertion that "trees = healthy", which is not at all what the data said.
But you keep right on mischaracterizing people's comments and building straw men... it's a real popular past time on NuSlash(tm) nowadays... who needs facts when you can just slam someone for making a thoughtful post that asks a few questions about what the summary posted by the editors concludes. The only thing missing in this shit-slinging snark fest is a wikipedia link to something totally irrelevant and a reply in all caps to the effect of "You don't know what you're talking about". Anonymous Coward, you know what to do...
There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees.
From the summary of the article::
'Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health.
Isn't what this work studied. They correlated a specific insect cause of tree death with human welfare. The methodology was specifically constructed to remove confounding factorsâ" things like air pollution killing both the trees and the humans.
What is testing has, at best, a loose relation with what it set out to prove. The test was "the loss of 100 million trees to the emerald ash borer", but they looked at "the relationship between emerald ash borer presence and county-level mortality." These aren't the same thing. What they were looking at was how many of these insects were present. They concluded that the more of these insects in the area, the higher the mortality rate. The trees are the insects principal food, and it's easier to measure the number of trees in an area than the number of insects.
That isn't to say the research is flawless but it was deeper and more carefully constructed that your slashdot arm-chair-expert off the hip comment gives it credit for.
So what you're saying is this "arm-chair-expert off the hip" person is right -- the research is flawed. Which was the point. And unlike an Anonymous Coward "arm-chair insulter", I provided clear reasoning which many people responded to and asked me to be modded up and that it was, indeed, poor science -- a fact you aren't disputing.
The fact that I only pointed out failings exist and didn't go into great detail studying the study, as it were, appears to be the only source of your disrespect, but you're too afraid to actually post under your own name because you know you're making an ad hominid attack.. but figured that remaining anonymous and kow-towing the popular opinion that girls on slashdot must be stupid would get your comment modded up, and me down, because the moderators don't stop and think anymore about what's actually being said... they just go with their feelings.
The methodology is exactly what I'm attacking: That this correlation justifies their conclusion. It doesn't. I actually have the full study pulled up and had looked at it some time before slashdot posted it to the front page -- and having looked it over, I think it's nice as a piece of exploratory research, but I disagree vehemently with both PBS and the OP's summary of the study -- they take a single correlation and somehow expand it to mean "trees = better health".
That's not what the study said. That's not what the science says. And that's not what I said either. To get to that conclusion requires a lot more data than this single point, which doesn't even show a strong correlation. It hasn't reached a level of statistical importance that would even justify further research. And while yes, there is a "growing body of evidence" that the natural environment provides health benefits... well fucking duh. How is that advancing our knowledge in any meaningful way? It isn't! We already knew that living inside the core of a nuclear reactor is worse for your health than living in the suburb it serves. Duh, of course environment has an impact on health.
But it is amazingly, confoundingly difficult, to say what in the environment causes health benefits. There's very little solid ground to stand on here; Most of what we know is correlative, and weak at best. A lot, and I mean a lot of additional research has to be done before we can even get past those stupid stickers on bottles of oxygen that say "Known to cause cancer in the State of California" let alone to the point where we can confidently start making changes to the environment knowing they will most likely lead to improvements in human health.
That's the state of the art as it exists today, and that's not something being said by a "arm-chair expert" as an "off the hip comment"... but by the majority of the scientific community. And frankly, I feel sorta dirty having to justify the call for more data, and more research... it's the single most commonly heard thing amongst scientists... "Well, the data looks promising, but I think we need to study this more before we draw any conclusions." I've said pretty much exactly that, and I get slapped in the face by jerks like you for being an "arm chair expert"... *shakes head* Really disappointed, slashdot...
Or maybe they could submit a request to the NSA.
Not really necessary. TFA:
It requires officers to have 'reasonable grounds' to believe the law was broken.
Officer A: "Hey Lou, you see that cell phone?"
Officer B: "Yeah man, I do."
Officer A: "And the car's wrecked, right?"
Officer B: "Sure is, Lou."
Officer A: "Well there you have it. Reasonable grounds. Cell phone in plain site at the scene of an accident. No different than finding a beer bottle in the back seat and 'reasonably' concluding he could have been drunk..."
Officer B: "Sounds like a plan. Hey, you know we can't ordinarily go into glove boxes without a warrant, but I think I might have heard something vibrating in there!"
Officer A: "Could be a cell phone. Better open it up and look."
Officer B: "It sure could man... it sure could... hey, isn't it so much easier not having to ask anyone before we do whatever the hell we feel like these days?"
Officer A: "Sure is! Checks and balances, audits, constitutional freedoms... they were just slowing us down all these years."
Sometimes, you need the proper study just to verify your hunch isn't entirely wrong -- everything else is an anecdote or a guess.
Or exploratory research. :)
Take a good look guys. This guy just committed a basic mistake in method. He made a leap unsupported by the facts. The presence and quantity of trees may be correlated with healthier people, but that in no way means there's a connection. He hasn't controlled for environmental factors. The most basic would be answering the question -- why are there more trees in a given area? In densely populated urban areas, there will be fewer trees, obviously... and we know cities have more pollution than a prestine wilderness. But that doesn't mean the trees are what's making people healthy... it could just be that the absence of pollution is.
This is an incomplete analysis and an attempt by an amateur scientist to start with a conclusion and work his way back to find supporting facts, while ignoring the fact that in science, you do things the other way around. And if you don't, you get crap like this.
I'm not about to go throw myself in a lake and start tree bathing because I think it'll improve my health... at best it'll be a placebo reaction. At worst, it'll kill me due to my allergies. What I'd do instead is try to find populations where trees are present at various threshold concentrations and match the environments as closely as possible so the only control would be the number of trees in a given area, and see if the correlation still holds.
Oh, and something to be aware of... richer neighborhoods have more trees than poorer neighborhoods, to the point that if you take satellite photography of a large metropolitan area, that alone can predict to a high degree of accuracy where the rich people live. Is this because they can afford to keep their environment cleaner as well?
You have to control for human behavior in this, or your analysis is broken.
Hmm, I must have been absent the day our history class learned about Nazi experiments in implanting electrodes in the antennae of Jews so as to control them with cute little RF backpacks...
I really shouldn't have to say this... I mean, it ought to be painfully obvious, but I see you got modded up on this, so I feel compelled to respond: what the fuck are you smoking, man? Er, I mean, Citation Needed. Seriously...
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
I wonder if God said anything about our cruelty to each other and slow destruction of the planet... domination was inevitable. Destruction wasn't.
RF cockroach backpacks are just an advanced technique for exercising dominion over a creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 100% authorized by the relevant deity.
This technology has been around since the time of the greeks, who discovered that electricity caused dead frogs to twitch. It's been long known that muscles of animals (including cockroaches) respond to electrical impulses. Adding an RF 'backpack' to the equation doesn't change the underlying science or make it new. We've known how to modulate RF to carry signals since the turn of the last century.
Must be a real slow news day on Slashdot to be letting quotes from the Bible and paranoid blithering about nazis and jews get modded up...
I think you may have missed the point. From my reading, her/his point was that these "hipsters" really aren't geeks per se. Especially in the world of hardware and computing.
Yeah, well... trying to get some people to the whooshing noise was the point is a lost cause.
To your (rather loud) point, installing Ubuntu then giving up after you realize that the command line is necessary is actually a pretty good test of the "hipster" mentality. Having a Macbook, github account and endless copypasta from stackexchange does not qualify one as a rails guru, or IOS programmer or anything else either. Just someone who is interested in image over substance. Jmho.
Bingo. Gold star for this guy. Unlike the previous poster, who was last seen riding the short bus. -_-
It was fun while it lasted.
It jumped the shark when they sold out to Dice. Now it's just another stagnating cesspool of hipsters who think owning an iPhone and have installed linux on their old dilapidated computer (and, quickly finding they couldn't do anything with it without RTFM, gave up, much like their collection of unread 'classic' books) makes them geeks. You can tell because when someone posts a well-written but politically unpopular comment, they're modded down, while one liners supporting the party line get +5s, though they're about as intellectually stimulating as a twinky is at being healthy.
Nothing says "mainstream culture" like group think and people patting themselves on the back for regurgitating what the other 'popular people' say. Geeks, real ones I mean, have a wide diversity of opinion and frequently debate endlessly for hours over pointless minutae like whether Han shot first or not or rage over calling the 'higgs' the 'god particle'. In fact, you can usually tell you're in the company of fellow geeks because they're having a grand old time being disagreeable with each other, and in fact make a game out of it! Nothing charms a geek quite as much as vehemently disagreeing about which Star Trek captain was the best... and whipping out slide rules and technical manuals to have a proper go of it. Don't get me wrong though -- it's all faux outrage, with about as much real emotion as telling someone their favorite bands sucks. Yeah, okay, and?
That's the difference. And that's what Slashdot has lost. There's no diversity of opinion anymore... which is another way of saying... there's not very many geeks left on the site... just pretenders...
The supplier is not throwing the tantrum. Take my word on that for now.
I didn't say you were saying that. I said other people were saying that. I did not say that myself.
But I do know there are forces opposed to the NRC... to its very existence.
Yes. They're called capitalists, and left to their own devices, we'd all be swimming in our own sewage and slaves to mega corporations in some dystopic alternate reality. It's okay, you can call them out on it, I won't say anything.
For the moment, please understand that you don't understand quite what's going on over there.
I don't think it's really necessary for me to have intimate knowledge of the situation. Party A is pointing the finger at Party B. Party B is pointing the finger at Party A. And all the people living in the area, who need clean, cheap, reliable energy are getting... is the finger. I'm not really in much of a mood for caring much about details on it... Someone fucked up. And in cases of fuckups in this country, profit-oriented thinking is almost invariably the source of it. So... whoever thinks they're most entitled to profit is the at-fault party. I know, it's overly simplistic, it ignores all the details, but... it's surprisingly accurate. Unfortunately.
But this thing about shutting down two plants which are otherwise capable of being repaired and restored to a good, safe and reliable operation? Based on everything I know, it's not merely "nuclear economics." There's a lot more.
Well, I'm not in the position you are, so maybe, with specific information, I can be convinced otherwise, but "nuclear economics" is just a fancy way of saying someone who felt they should be making money on this isn't making as much as they feel entitled to. Now, as to who that is, or what complex bureaucratic clusterfuck surrounds that person so as to obscure their identity so we can grab our pitchforks and tar and feather the asshole... meh!
I have no problems with the NRC. I have no problems with the people in (what's left) of our nuclear industry. I have a problem with a government listening to morons, politicians, and businessmen, and ignoring the needs of its people. And those people, in that area, need electricity. They deserve electricity. There isn't a good reason why the largest economic power on the planet can't deliver turn of the last century amenities at an affordable, safe, and reliable way.
There are plenty of bad ones however. I suspect the bad one you're sore about in particular is the profiteering asshats who own the plant. I'm strongly inclined to agree with you, if that's your position, simply because past experience has shown me that in this country, the Almighty Dollar is the cause of almost every train wreck that makes the news and there's no evidence this one's any different.
It's not just artistic. I can see a commercial application to this: Automobile fabrication. Think of how much faster you could produce them, and the reliability, if you could create a metal support shell and then bond arbitrary shapes of plastic to it. Creating the body of a vehicle... hell, repairing the body would be much easier. Just cut away the damaged section and press the button labelled "reform" and in a few hours, you've got yourself a new bumper. Didn't even have to repair the old one. Bonds with the original materials... just as strong as before.
Considering how effing expensive car repair is now, I can well imagine how well loved a bay with a 3D printer loaded for 'Car' would be. Next time someone keys your car, you get a crease in the door, whatever... just drive it into your handy 3D printer-equipped body shop and in an hour they're done and busy repainting the affected panel.
I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
We invented this technology and now, due to anti-nuclear regulations, we no longer have the people, resources, factories, or technical capability, to create nuclear pressure vessels or many of the components needed to build a reactor. Unless of course it's for the military. A single supplier, in another country, can "throw a tantrum" as you say, and deprive one of our major metropolitan areas with electricity.
And yet it's the fault of the electric company in your view, and the supplier in another's view. Well, bluntly stated -- where the fuck is my own government on this? Where's our own industry? Why can't we build our own damn nuclear reactors? Oh... right... anti-nuclear idiocy and impossibly high standards along with a morass of NIMBY government, red tape, etc. No... sorry, they didn't cut their nose off in spite of their face: Our government did.
"massive amounts of food poisoning " What!?!? 70% of the people in your country get food poisoning daily?
1 in 6 americans get food poisoning annually. In Britain, about 5 million people annually get food poisoning. The population of Britain is about 63 million, or a rate of about 1 in 14.
I think a rate of over double in a country with similar eating habits, socioeconomic status, and climate, constitutes massive.
The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest and this is how we do it.
Yeah, worrying about a few hundred tons of waste we can easily bury deep in a mountain somewhere and forget about it for "literally thousands of years" is clearly inferior to cooking our planet to the point that it is no longer inhabitable.
. The promise of truly safe nuclear power will never be delivered upon due to human greed and incompetence.
No, it'll never be delivered upon because most of the human population will have died off in the next 150 years or so because we'll no longer have enough fertile land to support our current population due to global climate changed caused by fossil fuels. That's the entire planet, you know... billions are going to die from starvation because of fucking morons like yourself that are so worried about a few kilotons of nuclear waste you're willing to let the whole planet die. Also, coal power plants produce more nuclear radiation yearly than all the nuclear accidents in the entire history of the human race including our weapons testing and use.
But yeah man, let's keep trumpeting the "It has to be perfect" mantra, while we choke our planet to death with less than perfect fossil fuels.
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
Well, when I say "cost center", I mean they look at IT resources the same way they look at paper towels for the bathroom... a necessary expense you should spend as little as possible on. Unfortunately, that's what they teach MBAs and the like in college. Doubly-unfortunate, they listen and never bother thinking on their own, or listening to people in the field.
The difference between the cheapest solution and the second cheapest solution is usually the difference between "will work 4 out of 5 times" and "will last 3--5 years and not give us any problems." And the difference is usually 5% or less. Guess which one they always pick?
I have never seen anyone fired for doing his job well. I have seen people fired for being insubordinate and abusive (though not often enough!). Are you sure you know the difference?
Yes. I have 14 years of industry experience. I've seen more than you, kid.
What year, exactly, did America pass its golden age? You'd be surprised how many times people have said "America has passed its prime", over the decades before you were even a passing thought in your parents minds before you were born.
It would be the point when children have less than their parents. Or about 20 years ago now.
The thing about MUDs were, it was very up front about your options: Go North, Go West, or Get Eaten By Grue. Modern MMOs try to sell themselves as "fully immersive", but just try running out of the battlefield area once... flashing red lights and your character either explodes, or magically teleports. Very realistic... I know that when I make a wrong turn in my car, if I don't make a u-turn in the next 60 seconds, my car explodes and the police are sent out to pick up little bits of me splattered all over the roadway and other drivers.
I guess my point is... MUDs didn't hide the fact that there were limitations, and in fact turned it into clever logic puzzles and such to solve. They were about having fun and thinking your way out, rather than focusing on beautiful walls of text and then having your only option being pressing ENTER repeatedly, which is what today's MMOs feel like.
The older games were more creative, and they made do with a lot less. Today it's all about achieving technical perfection but without any real substance.
But look around you. You want Somalia? Russia? India? China?
Okay first, I get your point. And I agree with it. The rule of law is essential to civilization. So let me put that out there first.
But, if you look at the history of every empire, every major civilization, you will find a pattern of increasing legal complexity to the point that the system itself caves under its own excesses. It becomes pathological and toxic to the purpose it was meant to serve, and ultimately strangles itself. If you read enough anthropology you find that civilization is cyclical -- it starts with anarchy, advances to a golden age, and then dies of increasing bureaucratic, legal, and political complexity, and the cycle repeats.
America has passed its golden age. It is now on the downward slope towards eventual anarchy. The rule of law is becoming less and less accessible to more and more people. Crime rates are up. Incarceration is up. The government is spending more and more on law enforcement every year, and more and more on military as well. These things are classic signs of a society accelerating towards oblivion. I don't know that it can be reversed. I have yet to see a historical example where it was. I'd like to think it is possible, but empirically, that's a spot of wishful thinking more than anything.
I know I was brief and snarky in the OP, but there is an underlying truth: This complexity does not serve the interests of the common person. It serves wealthy interests. So when I hear about the corruption of the system and people in it saying "Oh no, this guy went too far" I take it with a big grain of salt. Maybe it is going too far, but that's the general trend... and since I know of no way of reversing or correcting it, it's not really newsworthy for me. It's just history repeating.
I'd like to implement some type of software to record where the fiber cables run, what pit number they are jointed in, which fiber is spliced to which, and what internal customer is using which fiber path through the system. Knowing what fibers are free for use is also a requirement, and I'd love to record details of what equipment was put in where, for asset and warranty tracking. Extra points if I can give Engineering access to help them design things better!"
At the risk of appearing less geeky than my peers... use a sketch pad. I'm perfectly serious about this. We've been using building blue prints since the Roman times and they've served humanity pretty well. Expensive software solutions and asset management databases solve the problem too, but they're invariably varying degrees of out of date and did I mention they cost a lot?
Engineers understand blue prints. I know paper is a little 90s, but it works, it's universally understood, and it's cheap. If you were dealing with high level IT people for this, maybe I'd suggest the high priced software solution because they'd be happy to waste hours maintaining it and sending out e-mails reminding people to update the information in it... don't ask me why computer geeks love that kind of overhead, I don't know. I'm guilty of it too.
But these are not those people. They're engineers that block print everything and have marginal computer skills on the best of days. Give them a pencil and tell them to write neatly. You'll save on aspirin.
IAAL and I can tell you Mr. McAleese will not be a member of the bar much longer. As attorney offenses go, this is toxic / nuclear.
Is it toxic because Apple is a giant company that most members of Congress are in love with and would secretly bang in the men's bathroom? I'm totally serious: They're the largest company on Earth... why the hell does anyone care how much, often, or with what merit, they're sued? I'm not a lawyer, but as an average person, I'm thoroughly convinced the courts exist solely so rich people can try and out-douche each other. Poor people get no representation. So since this is one rich douchebag engaging another rich douchebag, the very thing our court systems and patent law caters to... why would anyone ban them from practicing law? They're simply doing what everyone else is... they're just smaller... and not as good at it.
I know I'm going to hell for this, but I read "futuristic" and "tessellation" in the summary and immediately thought of Loki from The Avengers. Terrible villain really, just went bad because he had daddy issues. *cough* Crap... going off topic and triggering a flame war from marvel lovers. Yeah. I'm taking the special bus to hell now...
Holy wall of text, batman. I feel we should build a Plinth upon which to erect this comment, for never before, and perhaps never again, will a person as completely encompass why the acronym "tl;dr" was invented.
Let's wind back the clock a few months to the 3rd week in February. It's late at night and Jon Stewart pops in; "So 'imminent threat'... in other words, imminent... or not imminent. Broadly speaking, imminent in the geological sense. So, wait, we can kill an American who is in al Qaeda or al Qaeda-adjacent if they post an imminent danger, and by 'imminent,' we mean eventual?â Oh, but it gets better... he went on to point out how the definition of "unlawful combatant" pretty much means "whoever the fuck we say". Go watch the episode -- 3rd week, February.
No, really. Honest truth. I mean, yeah, it's coming from a comedian, but it doesn't mean he's wrong: The original poster is spot on.. by the executive branch of the US government's definition, "imminent" means "whenever", and "terrorist" means, whoever we say. Really really. Oh, and a friendly piece of advice? You need to lighten up, both in terms of your attitude and your, achem, predeliction for beating dead horses with dictionaries.