... it's so important to have corroboration from other studies.
No argument about, but I think you're under-rating the ability of investigators to tease out confounding factors from the data. Critics of these kinds of studies invariably make up stories about things that might have confused them without considering that they might have already checked that one.
That particular study took place in Europe (primarily in Spain) it and involved nearly 20,000 people:
The researchers examined whether sex, age or adherence to the Mediterranean diet had any influence on the association between baseline coffee consumption and mortality. They observed a significant interaction between coffee consumption and age (p for interaction=0.0016). In those who were at least 45 years old, drinking two additional cups of coffee per day was associated with a 30% lower risk of mortality during follow-up (adjusted HR, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.58-0.85). The association was not significant among younger participants.
The point that you seem to be making is that it might not be a casual relationship, and if you start guzzling coffee it might not save your life--the thing is though, people repeatedly raise grave suspicions that coffee drinking is gonna kill you (somehow). It there's some poisonous effect to drinking coffee it's so tiny it's swamped by the confounding factors you're speculating about.
Coffee is enjoyed by millions of people every day and the 'coffee experience' has become a staple of our modern life and culture. While the current body of research related to the effects of coffee consumption on human health has been contradictory, a new study found that the potential benefits of moderate coffee drinking outweigh the risks in adult consumers for the majority of major health outcomes considered.
Whether it's caffeinated or decaffeinated, coffee is associated with lower mortality, which suggests the association is not tied to caffeine
Scientists have found that people who drink coffee appear to live longer. Drinking coffee was associated with lower risk of death due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease. People who consumed a cup of coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die compared to those who didn't drink coffee. This association was even stronger for those who drank two to three cups a day -- 18 percent reduced chance of death.
A novel five-year study highlights importance of behaviors such as coffee drinking and not smoking on health and survival of HIV-infected patients, report investigators.
Higher coffee consumption is associated with a lower risk of early death, according to new research. The observational study in nearly 20 000 participants suggests that coffee can be part of a healthy diet in healthy people.
I like things like this last study quite a bit: there are people who obsess over the importance of double-blind
clinical trials, but those are invariably an investigation of a single chemical substance on a relatively small
population, often just looking at the incidence of some particular problem ("cancer of the left-pinkie")-- whole
population studies tell you something about the way actual human beings live, and don't make implicit assumptions
like dying of cancer is worse than heart failure (or getting hit by a car...).
We've apparently got an issue at present where the law (and not just in California, thanks for playing) requires labeling
"known carcinogens" without any sense of whether the product as a whole is good or bad for you.
BLOCKQUOTE>
One common trend I've seen with programmers is that we dismiss the latest developments. In my time, we've dismissed the GUI ("I get more done throught the command line"). Then we dismissed the GUI with colors. Then we dismissed the web (yes - I heard that!). Then we dismissed smart phones. Then we dismissed facebook. etc.
Ah, my apologies. I'm clearly out-of-touch: I could've sworn it was the reverse.
Whenever I try playing around with gnome, I always run back to icewm, and the last time that was why.
Can I infer that you actually think that there should be a keyboard control to open up the window control menu, so that the keyboard alternates there are actually useful?
I look at gnome every now and then, but things like that keep sending me back to icewm, where pretty much everything can be controlled by keyboard commands.
Mobile Technology has taken the place of much of our personal computing. The average person can go days or weeks without having to use a traditional PC.
And yet, mobile devices are not actually suitable for serious
creative work (no one writes a smartphone app on a smartphone),
so they're essentially toys that encourage passive consumption.
But the big linux distros are veering from their largely
unsuccessful attempts at competing with Apple and Microsoft on
the desktop to competing with Google for the mobile phone, and
along the way are continually dumbing down their desktop software,
making it harder to use for what it's actually (somewhat) good for.
First it was the keyboard shortcuts getting dropped and/or broken
(I was particularly impressed by gnome's keyboard shortcuts on
the window menu, but without the Alt-Spacebar move to get into
the window menu.... there are reasons I stayed with icewm). Now
they're starting to damage the mouse controls, e.g. with a
scrollbar that's skinnier, and hides away, and doesn't have the
arrows at top and bottom to move in small intervals.
(And by the way... is there a *reason* that the "Page Down" key
doesn't reliably move down one page any more?)
The "shit in the streets" jazz is shall we say, exaggerated, it's a fantasy our conservative friends love to spout to each other (I'm not sure precisely what this obsession says about them, they also seem rather excited about who gets to use which public restroom...).
Twitter can do what it wants - it's a private company. When the Government starts censorship - that's an issue.
Allow me to quote the article under discussion:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted today that the company isn't proud of how some have taken advantage of its service, specifically calling out troll armies, misinformation campaigns and bots.
Taking Jack Dorsey at his word, what can Twitter possibly do to reign in these problems and still remain Twitter? I would suggest the answer is next-to-nothing.
Yeah, maybe it was illegal, maybe it wasn't, and maybe it was a technical violation that no one in their right mind would care about and maybe it wasn't, the point isn't relevant. It has nothing to do with anything in the present discussion, and it has nothing to do with anything actually going on in the present-day world because HILLARY IS NOT PRESIDENT.
Getting the government to be more or less fussy about transparency rules and/or classified information (if any) will not fix social media.
On the other hand, a filter that drops idjits and shills that try to drag discussions off into rat-holes, that would actually be a feature worth having.
You are talking about a platform which has a character limit and has many anonymous individuals and where people can post without thinking. Any one of those by itself can lead to problems. All three together? They all contribute in the same direction: emotion and insult over calm and careful discussion.
Nice to see someone said the obvious right out of the
gate. To take it a step farther: twitter is completely
incapable of doing anything at all that might reduce it's
traffic (it was like, just last quarter that they amazed
the world by reporting a profit for once, right?).
From this we can conclude that advertising supported
media is a complete bust, and it's completely inadequate
for running the information infrastructure of a functional
democracy.
So now we should all start talking about what we're
going to do instead. But what the hell, let's get back
to
right-wing idjits bristling
at the phrase "toxic" and whining about them feminazis...
.. back on February 17, 2011, President Obama... held a private dinner in San Francisco....
We're not sure what was privately discussed at that dinner,
Considering that 2012 was an election year, I'm pretty sure it was:
Like much of the American public, I wish you guys would shut up about her emails already.
If you want to talk about something relevant: Hillary sent hired Brock-puppets out on the net to try to manipulate public opinion during the 2016 primary--
Am I the last person in the United States who remembers this and finds it offensive? Yes, it sucks that the Russian can manipulate "social media" (maybe: "anti-social media"), but it isn't a Good Thing when someone else does it, either.
Perhaps the worst thing that slashdot has contributed to our on-line culture is the idea that not-logged-in means the same thing as "anonymous".
Slashdot accounts are not tied to meatspace. Nothing prevents a brigade of fanatics and shills from opening a gazillion accounts under a gazillion different handles. They're all anonymous, because email is anonymous, because gmail, yahoo mail, etc are all anonymous.
Even if you're using purely silicon solar cells, you still need to
refine the oxide and grow the crystals, the electrical
leads are made of metal, and in general manufacturing any
sort of thin-film electronics involves using some pretty
crazy solvents (look up "hydrofluoric acid" some time) and
if you're going to crank out enough PV cells fast enough to
make a dent in global warming you're talking about doing
this at a phenomenal scale, larger than anything
ever done for IT gadgets.
You're completely making up facts at this point-- you
solar enthusiasts have the idea that the technology is
magical, but it's really and truly just another
technology. There are cool things about it, but it has
drawbacks, and if you're going to pretend you know
something about it you should learn something about it
first...
The PV cell manufacturing process includes a number of hazardous materials, most of which are used to clean and purify the semiconductor surface. These chemicals, similar to those used in the general semiconductor industry, include hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, and acetone. The amount and type of chemicals used depends on the type of cell, the amount of cleaning that is needed, and the size of silicon wafer [4]. Workers also face risks associated with inhaling silicon dust. Thus, PV manufactures must follow U.S. laws to ensure that workers are not harmed by exposure to these chemicals and that manufacturing waste products are disposed of properly.
Thin-film PV cells contain a number of more toxic materials than those used in traditional silicon photovoltaic cells, including gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride[5]. If not handled and disposed of properly, these materials could pose serious environmental or public health threats. However, manufacturers have a strong financial incentive to ensure that these highly valuable and often rare materials are recycled rather than thrown away.
Pure FUD. The writer (in the summary) lost all credibility
when he said carbon capture tech is needed because current
battery prices are too high.
The author did not actually say that (and I just lost all
respect for you, and to tell you the truth I didn't care
who you have respect for to start with). Here it is again:
It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent
renewable sources-- and disdaining others that don't
produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and
fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology-- is
wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult.
robot256 wrote:
Funny thing, though, that renewables and batteries are
already cheap enough to drive fossil plants out of
business.
They're currently subsidized. And the fossil fuel plants
aren't actually going out of business, and by the way
burning natural gas does count as a fossil fuel. (In terms
of C02 release natural gas is only half as bad as coal, but
that's still pretty bad, and methane leaks-- the joys of
fracking-- could easily make it equivalent.)
Carbon capture is important, yes, but we need
it to drive our emissions *negative* in the second half
of this century.
The last IPCC recommended working on biomass with CCS as a
way to do just that.
One beef with the summary is that there currently is no
such thing as fossil fuels with carbon capture technology.
True, it remains a speculative, experimental idea, and
myself I don't hold out much hope that it's workable.
Nevertheless, the policy recommendations of the last IPCC
report recommend trying to develop CCS (along with wind,
solar and nuclear)-- they make the point that if we
did get it working, burning biomass would go from
a carbon-neutral power source to a carbon absorbing
power source. It isn't so much that we're likely to
get functional CCS, but the prize is big enough that it's
worth going after it.
(And to the renewables enthusiasts in the audience: you
can't go on ranting about those arrogant conservatives
ignoring the scientific consensus, and then shrug off the
policy recommendations of the IPCC. They said we need
nuclear. Got it?)
We also need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which we do globally to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually) and force them to cost the full economic value of the pollution they cause.
There you have it. That's step one for any kind of green
energy future, nuclear or not. It's the one thing you'd
think we should all agree on and be pushing for.
Instead the renewables-enthusiasts are telling themselves
solar is going to take off like cellphones if only they can
cheer for it loudly enough.
The thing is renewals may be more expensive up front but
that because they represent the true cost of producing the
energy...
Funny, I was thinking the same thing about nuclear power.
And no one actually does a very good job of making sure the
price of photovaltaics pays for the environmental damage
done in manufacturing them (let alone of disposing of
them).
Nuclear is almost the most expensive form of power there is,
Wrong: Coal power is. It's destroying the planet, and
yet we're still using a lot of it.
You have price confused with "cost"-- our energy markets
are no where near sane about capturing externalities (with
the possible exception of nuclear, where we insist on
paying full-life cycle charges up front, including waste
handling).
It would make the grid more reliable, cleaner, and eventually cheaper. It would require the grid to be upgraded in certain ways but that's not a bad thing. What we have now is rather outdated anyway. Yes we need batteries to do this but again, that's not a bad thing in the long run.
I sincerely hope you religious fanatics don't get us all
killed. The right is in denial about the problem, but the
left is in denial about the solutions.
In addition, there is strong agreement in the literature
that a diversified mix of low-CO2 generation resources
offers the best chance of affordably achieving deep
decarbonization. While it is theoretically possible to
rely primarily (or even entirely) on variable renewable
energy resources such as wind and solar, it would be
significantly more challenging and costly than pathways
that employ a diverse portfolio of resources. In
particular, including dispatchable low-carbon resources in
the portfolio, such as nuclear energy or fossil energy with
carbon capture and storage (CCS), would significantly
reduce the cost and technical challenges of deep
decarbonization.
I don't think I've ever once complained about "bloat" in Firefox. My number one complaint about Firefox has been that they're remarkably lame about supporting the user-customization features (a regular pattern: they roll out a "feature", you do research to figure out how to shut it off, that breaks, you do more research to find out how to shut it off, then... ).
And then they decided to break all of the addons (because "Security!").
Slashdot Mirror
No argument about, but I think you're under-rating the ability of investigators to tease out confounding factors from the data. Critics of these kinds of studies invariably make up stories about things that might have confused them without considering that they might have already checked that one.
That particular study took place in Europe (primarily in Spain) it and involved nearly 20,000 people:
The point that you seem to be making is that it might not be a casual relationship, and if you start guzzling coffee it might not save your life--the thing is though, people repeatedly raise grave suspicions that coffee drinking is gonna kill you (somehow). It there's some poisonous effect to drinking coffee it's so tiny it's swamped by the confounding factors you're speculating about.
To investigate "coffee", go to sciencedaily.com, do a search on term "coffee":
Benefits of drinking coffee outweigh risks, review suggests:
Drinking coffee could lead to a longer life, scientist says
Three to four cups of coffee a day linked to longer life
Three or more cups of coffee daily halves mortality risk in patients with both HIV, HCV
Higher coffee consumption associated with lower risk of early death
I like things like this last study quite a bit: there are people who obsess over the importance of double-blind clinical trials, but those are invariably an investigation of a single chemical substance on a relatively small population, often just looking at the incidence of some particular problem ("cancer of the left-pinkie")-- whole population studies tell you something about the way actual human beings live, and don't make implicit assumptions like dying of cancer is worse than heart failure (or getting hit by a car...).
We've apparently got an issue at present where the law (and not just in California, thanks for playing) requires labeling "known carcinogens" without any sense of whether the product as a whole is good or bad for you.
But if only we had a gui editor at slashdot to keep me from mangling html tags.
BLOCKQUOTE> One common trend I've seen with programmers is that we dismiss the latest developments. In my time, we've dismissed the GUI ("I get more done throught the command line"). Then we dismissed the GUI with colors. Then we dismissed the web (yes - I heard that!). Then we dismissed smart phones. Then we dismissed facebook. etc.
And we were right every time.
Ah, my apologies. I'm clearly out-of-touch: I could've sworn it was the reverse. Whenever I try playing around with gnome, I always run back to icewm, and the last time that was why.
Can I infer that you actually think that there should be a keyboard control to open up the window control menu, so that the keyboard alternates there are actually useful?
I look at gnome every now and then, but things like that keep sending me back to icewm, where pretty much everything can be controlled by keyboard commands.
And yet, mobile devices are not actually suitable for serious creative work (no one writes a smartphone app on a smartphone), so they're essentially toys that encourage passive consumption.
But the big linux distros are veering from their largely unsuccessful attempts at competing with Apple and Microsoft on the desktop to competing with Google for the mobile phone, and along the way are continually dumbing down their desktop software, making it harder to use for what it's actually (somewhat) good for.
First it was the keyboard shortcuts getting dropped and/or broken (I was particularly impressed by gnome's keyboard shortcuts on the window menu, but without the Alt-Spacebar move to get into the window menu.... there are reasons I stayed with icewm). Now they're starting to damage the mouse controls, e.g. with a scrollbar that's skinnier, and hides away, and doesn't have the arrows at top and bottom to move in small intervals.
(And by the way... is there a *reason* that the "Page Down" key doesn't reliably move down one page any more?)
The "shit in the streets" jazz is shall we say, exaggerated, it's a fantasy our conservative friends love to spout to each other (I'm not sure precisely what this obsession says about them, they also seem rather excited about who gets to use which public restroom...).
Allow me to quote the article under discussion:
Taking Jack Dorsey at his word, what can Twitter possibly do to reign in these problems and still remain Twitter? I would suggest the answer is next-to-nothing.
So we need something better than Twitter
Yeah, maybe it was illegal, maybe it wasn't, and maybe it was a technical violation that no one in their right mind would care about and maybe it wasn't, the point isn't relevant. It has nothing to do with anything in the present discussion, and it has nothing to do with anything actually going on in the present-day world because HILLARY IS NOT PRESIDENT.
Getting the government to be more or less fussy about transparency rules and/or classified information (if any) will not fix social media.
On the other hand, a filter that drops idjits and shills that try to drag discussions off into rat-holes, that would actually be a feature worth having.
Really? Hand on... nope, still liberal. Oh well, try again.
Nice to see someone said the obvious right out of the gate. To take it a step farther: twitter is completely incapable of doing anything at all that might reduce it's traffic (it was like, just last quarter that they amazed the world by reporting a profit for once, right?). From this we can conclude that advertising supported media is a complete bust, and it's completely inadequate for running the information infrastructure of a functional democracy.
So now we should all start talking about what we're going to do instead. But what the hell, let's get back to right-wing idjits bristling at the phrase "toxic" and whining about them feminazis...
Considering that 2012 was an election year, I'm pretty sure it was:
Glad to solve this one for you.
Like much of the American public, I wish you guys would shut up about her emails already.
If you want to talk about something relevant: Hillary sent hired Brock-puppets out on the net to try to manipulate public opinion during the 2016 primary--
Am I the last person in the United States who remembers this and finds it offensive? Yes, it sucks that the Russian can manipulate "social media" (maybe: "anti-social media"), but it isn't a Good Thing when someone else does it, either.
Perhaps the worst thing that slashdot has contributed to our on-line culture is the idea that not-logged-in means the same thing as "anonymous". Slashdot accounts are not tied to meatspace. Nothing prevents a brigade of fanatics and shills from opening a gazillion accounts under a gazillion different handles. They're all anonymous, because email is anonymous, because gmail, yahoo mail, etc are all anonymous.
Even if you're using purely silicon solar cells, you still need to refine the oxide and grow the crystals, the electrical leads are made of metal, and in general manufacturing any sort of thin-film electronics involves using some pretty crazy solvents (look up "hydrofluoric acid" some time) and if you're going to crank out enough PV cells fast enough to make a dent in global warming you're talking about doing this at a phenomenal scale, larger than anything ever done for IT gadgets.
You're completely making up facts at this point-- you solar enthusiasts have the idea that the technology is magical, but it's really and truly just another technology. There are cool things about it, but it has drawbacks, and if you're going to pretend you know something about it you should learn something about it first...
Try this: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_e...
robot256 wrote:
The author did not actually say that (and I just lost all respect for you, and to tell you the truth I didn't care who you have respect for to start with). Here it is again:
robot256 wrote:
They're currently subsidized. And the fossil fuel plants aren't actually going out of business, and by the way burning natural gas does count as a fossil fuel. (In terms of C02 release natural gas is only half as bad as coal, but that's still pretty bad, and methane leaks-- the joys of fracking-- could easily make it equivalent.)
The last IPCC recommended working on biomass with CCS as a way to do just that.
True, it remains a speculative, experimental idea, and myself I don't hold out much hope that it's workable.
Nevertheless, the policy recommendations of the last IPCC report recommend trying to develop CCS (along with wind, solar and nuclear)-- they make the point that if we did get it working, burning biomass would go from a carbon-neutral power source to a carbon absorbing power source. It isn't so much that we're likely to get functional CCS, but the prize is big enough that it's worth going after it.
(And to the renewables enthusiasts in the audience: you can't go on ranting about those arrogant conservatives ignoring the scientific consensus, and then shrug off the policy recommendations of the IPCC. They said we need nuclear. Got it?)
There you have it. That's step one for any kind of green energy future, nuclear or not. It's the one thing you'd think we should all agree on and be pushing for.
Instead the renewables-enthusiasts are telling themselves solar is going to take off like cellphones if only they can cheer for it loudly enough.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing about nuclear power.
And no one actually does a very good job of making sure the price of photovaltaics pays for the environmental damage done in manufacturing them (let alone of disposing of them).
Wrong: Coal power is. It's destroying the planet, and yet we're still using a lot of it.
You have price confused with "cost"-- our energy markets are no where near sane about capturing externalities (with the possible exception of nuclear, where we insist on paying full-life cycle charges up front, including waste handling).
Possibly, but that maxes out at around 40 percent of our current electical power needs (not including HVAC and transportation, even). So what else do we do?
I sincerely hope you religious fanatics don't get us all killed. The right is in denial about the problem, but the left is in denial about the solutions.
Actually, I don't see any contradiction at all, and you skipped various other links in this piece such as: Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector from March 2017
I think your sneer-o-matic is stuck.
I don't think I've ever once complained about "bloat" in Firefox. My number one complaint about Firefox has been that they're remarkably lame about supporting the user-customization features (a regular pattern: they roll out a "feature", you do research to figure out how to shut it off, that breaks, you do more research to find out how to shut it off, then... ). And then they decided to break all of the addons (because "Security!").
Right algorithm, but it looks so much cooler written in Rust.