My first one as well. I had a computer science teaching assistant ask the class what language we programmed in once. I answered, "Fortran." The whole class laughed, and she said, "No, seriously."
New York City, perhaps, but the summary says the deal was passed for New York state. Buffalo has a median income of $66k and a median home price of $94k, which means a family making $125k is doing pretty well. And Buffalo is still in the state of New York.
That's good. I spend a lot of time in stores reading labels of juices, and most of them use a base of apple, pear, orange, or white grape juice, with just a small amount of other fruit juices to slightly change the flavor.
Are there any scientific studies out there which show that orange, apple, pear, or white grape juice are actually healthier for you than drinking sugar water with a multi-vitamin? I've seen some articles which say that fructose is not the preferred energy source for either the muscles or brain, and says it behaves more like fat in the body than the other simple sugars (glucose and sucrose). So I'm not convinced 200 calories of orange juice is better for your body than 200 calories of Coca-Cola. One cup of orange juice (248 grams) is about 100 calories, while 330 mL of Coke (give or take 330 grams) is 140 calories, which means the same glass of either one gives you about the same number of calories.
And I just used up my mod points. Too bad. I mean, sure, the visualization doesn't necessarily give an idea of how difficult it would be to launch (the width of one of the dots looks to be approximately the same as the Paris metropolitan area, and I'm guessing the altitudes can be offset by enough to ensure that even if the dots appear to be in the same place at the same time that they don't collide).
I've just never seen 4000 things orbiting earth before, and the illustration of the flight paths shows that it's not nearly as chaotic as I expected. So thanks. I guess my take-home message (that it's not as bad as expected) may not match what you were trying to show, but I still found it neat.
I agree with this. Not even activity level, but how much you sweat in general.
I've lived in tropical climates before for long periods (months to years). After a month or two, I'm putting salt on everything I can. I drink 3-4 liters of filtered water a day, but I spend much of the day sweating (I prefer to have windows open as opposed to air-conditioning even if it means sweating a little...if it means sweating a lot, I turn on AC).
Salt: it's what the body craves (if your water turnover rate is really high).
"Anyway, since just about anyone can hit a deer with a $300 "slug gun" all the good hunting spots fill up real quick with inexperienced hunters on the few days when "slug gun" hunting is allowed."
You can say the same thing about any rifle (well,.270 and higher...not sure I'd use a.22 for deer). A 12-gauge slug is what, three quarters of an inch wide? If you're a good marksman, you can group your shots at minute-of-angle, or 1 inch at 100 yards. Going from a one quarter inch wide bullet (.30) to 3/4 inch isn't going to make that much of a difference. The slug drops a lot faster, too. If you zero your slug gun at 50 yards, it'll drop 5 inches by 150 yards. Rifles have a much flatter trajectory.
In parts of the midwest (where there is a higher population density), rifles are outlawed and you can only hunt with slug guns, because the slug drops so much faster (less likely to stray into a population zone). When I was growing up, you couldn't use rifles in a lot of places. That seems to be changing. Now Iowa and Illinois are the last two states that are slug-only.
Or were you saying that it's easier to hit a deer with a slug gun than with a handgun or bow? When I think deer hunting, I think rifle, so I automatically compare against that.
I would argue that using a handgun for protection against a large bear is silly. It takes a grizzly, what, a little over 3 seconds to cover 100 yards? A 12-gauge slug delivers about 1600 foot pounds of energy at 100 yards. The 10mm stats that I find list a maximum of 1000 foot pounds, and that's at the muzzle, where the 12-gauge slug has almost 3000 foot pounds of energy. Some.50 AE rounds get 2000 foot pounds at the muzzle, so maybe that's what you were thinking of. In addition, a good pistol marksman will be able to hit accurately at 50 yards, while 100 yards is easy with a slug gun. So, easier to aim, longer range, and more energy. If the bear is standing still and not charging, then anything would probably work, since you just have to fire up in the air and not at the bear.
To be honest, I'd have a hard time concentrating if there was a grizzly charging me, so I can't say my aim would be the best. Better chance with a slug gun than a handgun!
It's free when you never carry a balance (automatic payment every month in full) or take a cash advance. Might not work for everyone, but maybe the GP is one of them.
I was living abroad once and a family member sent me a care package. A box of food, inside which they had put a card. I guess they originally had planned to just mail the card, because it was in its own envelope and addressed, though it did not have a stamp. When they decided to send a package, they put together the package, slipped the card/envelope inside, and sent it all.
A couple months later, I went to the local post office and was handed the envelope. Addressed, but no stamp. Someone in the post office (or customs) opened up the package, removed the card, kept the package, and sent the card along to the final destination.
I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. If I had never received the card, at least I could have pretended that the whole package was simply lost. Somehow that feels a bit better than knowing someone stole everything else.
I had always heard that rule and style of play differences allowed American football players to hit harder, thus resulting in a more violent sport.
A little google searching found a 2016 study from the The American Journal of Sports Medicine on injuries in collegiate football and rugby in the US. The authors found, "Overall injury rates were substantially higher in collegiate rugby compared with football. Similarities between sports were observed in the most common injury types (sprains and concussions), locations (lower extremity and head), and mechanisms (direct player contact). Upper extremity injuries were more common in rugby, and the rate of season-ending injuries was similar between sports." (emphasis mine) So it looks like I was wrong, at least at the university level.
Although rates were similar for concussions despite that American football players wear helmets to protect their head. So perhaps they do hit harder and/or at different angles? Either that or the helmets don't actually protect their heads.
The authors note some studies in the introduction which indicate injury rates in professional football may be substantially higher.
I agree with you, libraries have bigger challenges.
However, this is a story about a Google-funded project. I can't imagine Google funding libraries to do things which are not related somehow to computers. While perhaps not every library has the time/interest to participate in this, if some do, more power to them.
To be fair, large hydro infrastructure is built to last for decades, too, and also carries very large safety risks. One good example of this is Kariba Dam on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are concerns that the plunge pool is going to undercut the foundation and cause a dam collapse, threatening an estimated 3.5 million people living downstream. So the governments are investing another almost $300 million to reshape the pool. The dam was built before 1960, although part of the powerhouse was upgraded in the past few years. Large dams last for decades, and it seems people are trying to push them to a century or more now.
Or what about Mosul Dam, in Iraq? People debate over which one is more dangerous.
I think large hydro carries the potential for significant loss of human life if not done well. Returning to your original point, though, large hydro does have one advantage over nuclear in this department: the parts with changing technology are not the ones that will cause catastrophic failure. If a turbine fails, you lose power production. It takes a breach of the dam itself to threaten massive amounts of life. I'm not convinced that dam construction has undergone revolutionary changes in the past half century, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.
Amazing, isn't it? People often underestimate the power of walking, veggies, and drinking water. Walking takes longer than more active exercise to burn the same amount of calories, true, but it's easier on the body. Veggies and water don't taste as good as other things. Even after years of doing it, I can't say I enjoy the taste of most veggies. But my body feels better when I eat them. Short-term pleasure vs. long-term satisfaction, I suppose.
I understand that people seem to store calories with varying degrees of efficiency. My body seems bad at storing calories, which means I can eat more than others and not gain weight (although that's changing as I get older). If someone tells me they tried doing this for months and saw no benefits, well, perhaps they are one of those unfortunate people who are super-efficient at storing calories, and therefore need some other method to lose weight. But it seems to me that this is always a good first step to try.
I prefer a different glib solution: continue to buy their products and get rid of agricultural subsidies.
Sadly, while I like the spirit behind this, it doesn't always have the effect you hope for. Tiko, Cameroon, is surrounded by plantations (think they are Del Monte owned). Instead of employing locals they give the jobs to immigrants from Equatorial Guinea and pay them less, so that even by southern Cameroonian stands Tiko is poor. It was always a bit depressing to pass through. Most of the money seems to go right into the bosses' pockets. I would focus on purchasing "Fair Trade" products from those countries instead of the standard grocery store fruit by the big companies.
My guess is yes. These effects are because of ordering in the system, which means the enthalpic gain is more than the entropic cost. The entropic cost is higher at higher temperatures. So if they display this behavior at room temperature, lowering the temperature to where methane is liquid (even at infinite pressure, the temperature has to be below about 180 K to get a liquid phase, if my memory of the coexistence curve is accurate) is going to reduce the entropic cost even further, which should make them even more likely to self-assemble. So you should at least get some organization, which might be enough to have a cell membrane replacement.
It would be fun to see a methane-membrane protein. I wonder if you could create it by taking a regular membrane protein and making all the polar residues non-polar and vice versa. That would probably really mess up the folding, though.
Sure...the same lipids that are found in the phospholipid bilayer in our own cells. The hydrophilic end is methane-phobic, and the hydrophobic end is methane-philic. This would cause them to organize in the reverse direction so that the hydrocarbon tail is solvent-exposed. There seems to be some work on the subject, perhaps starting with Rand et al, Biochemistry, vol. 29, pp. 76--87 (1990), though it's really not my field so I'm not familiar with all the literature.
It's funny, I agreed with you about Unity the first couple times I tried it. Then I updated to Ubuntu 11.10, and Unity popped up by default again. I took a few deep breaths, figured out how to fix what was really bothering me (windows always pop up in the upper right, so the top is blocked by the menu bar...holding down alt and clicking anywhere let's me move the window without a thought)...and then I completely forgot about it. In fact, I just had to do a google search to make sure I am still using Unity (turns out I am...Unity 3D, even).
Maybe I just had a shorter list of things that bothered me than you, but I was rabidly against Unity the first couple times I used it. Now I no longer see what the big deal is, and it's as smooth as anything else for me. YMMV, of course.
Not true. It really depends on your field. eV, kcal/mol, and Hartrees are all common energy units in different areas of chemistry and physics, even though Joules are the SI unit (unless you're equating the metric system with non-SI units, but if so the definition of "metric system" is really unclear to me).
Just take care to cook or bleach vegetables before eating. No synthetic fertilizers means waste products are often used (in some places, human waste). I'm all for reduce, reuse, recycle, but that's a great way to get amoebic dysentery.
My favorite response to the "natural" people is: Natural? So is arsenic. Doesn't mean I'm going to eat a lot of it.
The more I read about it (in scientific journals), the more I agree with your position (regarding fats and sugars...I've always read the ingredient lists on natural foods to see how healthy they are, and some of them are quite healthy). From what I can tell, it seems to strongly depend on the person. In other words, if cutting calories doesn't help, switch to fats and proteins and see if that does. Are you concerned about cholesterol or kidney problems due to a high fat/protein diet?
There is a similar system in Helsinki. However, you only use the card when you get on the bus. So the authorities only know when you got on, not where you got off...at least until you take the return trip.:)
People have covered most of the important points so far, but I'd say another great feature is waking people up in the first place. Here in Japan, the Kobe earthquake in the mid 1990s struck just before 6AM, when many people are still sleeping. Friends have told me that it was not a very fun thing to wake up to. Better to be mentally prepared than in a panicked sleep-fog.
If you have access to scientific journals, it looks like some of the studies referenced in the introduction of Westercamp and Bailey, AIDS Behav, vol 11, p. 341--355 (2007) might be what you're looking for. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't comment on their validity, but unless someone else can point to a more recent refuting article, I'm willing to believe it.
I always thought the same thing about Coca-cola, but I asked a Chinese friend about it, and he said it's not the case. He actually thought it was quite a clever marketing scheme, since it translated to something like, "Good flavor in the mouth".
Okay, given that "Chinese" is a rather vague term, it's possible that it means "Bite the wax tadpole" (I read a version which used "the" instead of "a", but close enough) in some region. Sadly, it doesn't seem like the horrible marketing decision that I once thought it was. Too bad, because that story is funnier.
Slashdot Mirror
My first one as well. I had a computer science teaching assistant ask the class what language we programmed in once. I answered, "Fortran." The whole class laughed, and she said, "No, seriously."
New York City, perhaps, but the summary says the deal was passed for New York state. Buffalo has a median income of $66k and a median home price of $94k, which means a family making $125k is doing pretty well. And Buffalo is still in the state of New York.
That's good. I spend a lot of time in stores reading labels of juices, and most of them use a base of apple, pear, orange, or white grape juice, with just a small amount of other fruit juices to slightly change the flavor.
Are there any scientific studies out there which show that orange, apple, pear, or white grape juice are actually healthier for you than drinking sugar water with a multi-vitamin? I've seen some articles which say that fructose is not the preferred energy source for either the muscles or brain, and says it behaves more like fat in the body than the other simple sugars (glucose and sucrose). So I'm not convinced 200 calories of orange juice is better for your body than 200 calories of Coca-Cola. One cup of orange juice (248 grams) is about 100 calories, while 330 mL of Coke (give or take 330 grams) is 140 calories, which means the same glass of either one gives you about the same number of calories.
And I just used up my mod points. Too bad. I mean, sure, the visualization doesn't necessarily give an idea of how difficult it would be to launch (the width of one of the dots looks to be approximately the same as the Paris metropolitan area, and I'm guessing the altitudes can be offset by enough to ensure that even if the dots appear to be in the same place at the same time that they don't collide).
I've just never seen 4000 things orbiting earth before, and the illustration of the flight paths shows that it's not nearly as chaotic as I expected. So thanks. I guess my take-home message (that it's not as bad as expected) may not match what you were trying to show, but I still found it neat.
I agree with this. Not even activity level, but how much you sweat in general.
I've lived in tropical climates before for long periods (months to years). After a month or two, I'm putting salt on everything I can. I drink 3-4 liters of filtered water a day, but I spend much of the day sweating (I prefer to have windows open as opposed to air-conditioning even if it means sweating a little...if it means sweating a lot, I turn on AC).
Salt: it's what the body craves (if your water turnover rate is really high).
"Anyway, since just about anyone can hit a deer with a $300 "slug gun" all the good hunting spots fill up real quick with inexperienced hunters on the few days when "slug gun" hunting is allowed."
You can say the same thing about any rifle (well, .270 and higher...not sure I'd use a .22 for deer). A 12-gauge slug is what, three quarters of an inch wide? If you're a good marksman, you can group your shots at minute-of-angle, or 1 inch at 100 yards. Going from a one quarter inch wide bullet (.30) to 3/4 inch isn't going to make that much of a difference. The slug drops a lot faster, too. If you zero your slug gun at 50 yards, it'll drop 5 inches by 150 yards. Rifles have a much flatter trajectory.
In parts of the midwest (where there is a higher population density), rifles are outlawed and you can only hunt with slug guns, because the slug drops so much faster (less likely to stray into a population zone). When I was growing up, you couldn't use rifles in a lot of places. That seems to be changing. Now Iowa and Illinois are the last two states that are slug-only.
Or were you saying that it's easier to hit a deer with a slug gun than with a handgun or bow? When I think deer hunting, I think rifle, so I automatically compare against that.
I would argue that using a handgun for protection against a large bear is silly. It takes a grizzly, what, a little over 3 seconds to cover 100 yards? A 12-gauge slug delivers about 1600 foot pounds of energy at 100 yards. The 10mm stats that I find list a maximum of 1000 foot pounds, and that's at the muzzle, where the 12-gauge slug has almost 3000 foot pounds of energy. Some .50 AE rounds get 2000 foot pounds at the muzzle, so maybe that's what you were thinking of. In addition, a good pistol marksman will be able to hit accurately at 50 yards, while 100 yards is easy with a slug gun. So, easier to aim, longer range, and more energy. If the bear is standing still and not charging, then anything would probably work, since you just have to fire up in the air and not at the bear.
To be honest, I'd have a hard time concentrating if there was a grizzly charging me, so I can't say my aim would be the best. Better chance with a slug gun than a handgun!
It's free when you never carry a balance (automatic payment every month in full) or take a cash advance. Might not work for everyone, but maybe the GP is one of them.
I was living abroad once and a family member sent me a care package. A box of food, inside which they had put a card. I guess they originally had planned to just mail the card, because it was in its own envelope and addressed, though it did not have a stamp. When they decided to send a package, they put together the package, slipped the card/envelope inside, and sent it all.
A couple months later, I went to the local post office and was handed the envelope. Addressed, but no stamp. Someone in the post office (or customs) opened up the package, removed the card, kept the package, and sent the card along to the final destination.
I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. If I had never received the card, at least I could have pretended that the whole package was simply lost. Somehow that feels a bit better than knowing someone stole everything else.
I had always heard that rule and style of play differences allowed American football players to hit harder, thus resulting in a more violent sport.
A little google searching found a 2016 study from the The American Journal of Sports Medicine on injuries in collegiate football and rugby in the US. The authors found, "Overall injury rates were substantially higher in collegiate rugby compared with football. Similarities between sports were observed in the most common injury types (sprains and concussions), locations (lower extremity and head), and mechanisms (direct player contact). Upper extremity injuries were more common in rugby, and the rate of season-ending injuries
was similar between sports." (emphasis mine) So it looks like I was wrong, at least at the university level.
Although rates were similar for concussions despite that American football players wear helmets to protect their head. So perhaps they do hit harder and/or at different angles? Either that or the helmets don't actually protect their heads.
The authors note some studies in the introduction which indicate injury rates in professional football may be substantially higher.
I can never tell if people are swearing at me or helpfully responding in working Perl code.
Me: "Does anyone know why my following script produces B instead of A?"
Response: "%&^*()...!#@$##"
Me: "Thanks! I think."
I agree with you, libraries have bigger challenges.
However, this is a story about a Google-funded project. I can't imagine Google funding libraries to do things which are not related somehow to computers. While perhaps not every library has the time/interest to participate in this, if some do, more power to them.
To be fair, large hydro infrastructure is built to last for decades, too, and also carries very large safety risks. One good example of this is Kariba Dam on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are concerns that the plunge pool is going to undercut the foundation and cause a dam collapse, threatening an estimated 3.5 million people living downstream. So the governments are investing another almost $300 million to reshape the pool. The dam was built before 1960, although part of the powerhouse was upgraded in the past few years. Large dams last for decades, and it seems people are trying to push them to a century or more now.
Or what about Mosul Dam, in Iraq? People debate over which one is more dangerous.
I think large hydro carries the potential for significant loss of human life if not done well. Returning to your original point, though, large hydro does have one advantage over nuclear in this department: the parts with changing technology are not the ones that will cause catastrophic failure. If a turbine fails, you lose power production. It takes a breach of the dam itself to threaten massive amounts of life. I'm not convinced that dam construction has undergone revolutionary changes in the past half century, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.
Amazing, isn't it? People often underestimate the power of walking, veggies, and drinking water. Walking takes longer than more active exercise to burn the same amount of calories, true, but it's easier on the body. Veggies and water don't taste as good as other things. Even after years of doing it, I can't say I enjoy the taste of most veggies. But my body feels better when I eat them. Short-term pleasure vs. long-term satisfaction, I suppose.
I understand that people seem to store calories with varying degrees of efficiency. My body seems bad at storing calories, which means I can eat more than others and not gain weight (although that's changing as I get older). If someone tells me they tried doing this for months and saw no benefits, well, perhaps they are one of those unfortunate people who are super-efficient at storing calories, and therefore need some other method to lose weight. But it seems to me that this is always a good first step to try.
I prefer a different glib solution: continue to buy their products and get rid of agricultural subsidies.
Sadly, while I like the spirit behind this, it doesn't always have the effect you hope for. Tiko, Cameroon, is surrounded by plantations (think they are Del Monte owned). Instead of employing locals they give the jobs to immigrants from Equatorial Guinea and pay them less, so that even by southern Cameroonian stands Tiko is poor. It was always a bit depressing to pass through. Most of the money seems to go right into the bosses' pockets. I would focus on purchasing "Fair Trade" products from those countries instead of the standard grocery store fruit by the big companies.
My guess is yes. These effects are because of ordering in the system, which means the enthalpic gain is more than the entropic cost. The entropic cost is higher at higher temperatures. So if they display this behavior at room temperature, lowering the temperature to where methane is liquid (even at infinite pressure, the temperature has to be below about 180 K to get a liquid phase, if my memory of the coexistence curve is accurate) is going to reduce the entropic cost even further, which should make them even more likely to self-assemble. So you should at least get some organization, which might be enough to have a cell membrane replacement.
It would be fun to see a methane-membrane protein. I wonder if you could create it by taking a regular membrane protein and making all the polar residues non-polar and vice versa. That would probably really mess up the folding, though.
Sure...the same lipids that are found in the phospholipid bilayer in our own cells. The hydrophilic end is methane-phobic, and the hydrophobic end is methane-philic. This would cause them to organize in the reverse direction so that the hydrocarbon tail is solvent-exposed. There seems to be some work on the subject, perhaps starting with Rand et al, Biochemistry, vol. 29, pp. 76--87 (1990), though it's really not my field so I'm not familiar with all the literature.
It's funny, I agreed with you about Unity the first couple times I tried it. Then I updated to Ubuntu 11.10, and Unity popped up by default again. I took a few deep breaths, figured out how to fix what was really bothering me (windows always pop up in the upper right, so the top is blocked by the menu bar...holding down alt and clicking anywhere let's me move the window without a thought)...and then I completely forgot about it. In fact, I just had to do a google search to make sure I am still using Unity (turns out I am...Unity 3D, even).
Maybe I just had a shorter list of things that bothered me than you, but I was rabidly against Unity the first couple times I used it. Now I no longer see what the big deal is, and it's as smooth as anything else for me. YMMV, of course.
Not true. It really depends on your field. eV, kcal/mol, and Hartrees are all common energy units in different areas of chemistry and physics, even though Joules are the SI unit (unless you're equating the metric system with non-SI units, but if so the definition of "metric system" is really unclear to me).
Just take care to cook or bleach vegetables before eating. No synthetic fertilizers means waste products are often used (in some places, human waste). I'm all for reduce, reuse, recycle, but that's a great way to get amoebic dysentery.
Sulla was beneficent? Really? Proscription doesn't rate high on my list of nice acts.
From what I've read about him, at least, he was not a benevolent dictator. Maybe I've just been reading the wrong things.
My favorite response to the "natural" people is: Natural? So is arsenic. Doesn't mean I'm going to eat a lot of it.
The more I read about it (in scientific journals), the more I agree with your position (regarding fats and sugars...I've always read the ingredient lists on natural foods to see how healthy they are, and some of them are quite healthy). From what I can tell, it seems to strongly depend on the person. In other words, if cutting calories doesn't help, switch to fats and proteins and see if that does. Are you concerned about cholesterol or kidney problems due to a high fat/protein diet?
There is a similar system in Helsinki. However, you only use the card when you get on the bus. So the authorities only know when you got on, not where you got off...at least until you take the return trip. :)
People have covered most of the important points so far, but I'd say another great feature is waking people up in the first place. Here in Japan, the Kobe earthquake in the mid 1990s struck just before 6AM, when many people are still sleeping. Friends have told me that it was not a very fun thing to wake up to. Better to be mentally prepared than in a panicked sleep-fog.
If you have access to scientific journals, it looks like some of the studies referenced in the introduction of Westercamp and Bailey, AIDS Behav, vol 11, p. 341--355 (2007) might be what you're looking for. I'm not an expert in the field so I can't comment on their validity, but unless someone else can point to a more recent refuting article, I'm willing to believe it.
I always thought the same thing about Coca-cola, but I asked a Chinese friend about it, and he said it's not the case. He actually thought it was quite a clever marketing scheme, since it translated to something like, "Good flavor in the mouth".
Okay, given that "Chinese" is a rather vague term, it's possible that it means "Bite the wax tadpole" (I read a version which used "the" instead of "a", but close enough) in some region. Sadly, it doesn't seem like the horrible marketing decision that I once thought it was. Too bad, because that story is funnier.