IIUC Parkinson's is normally terminal...if you don't die of something else fairly quickly. My wife's father died of it, though it did take him several years...but during the last one he was rather incoherent and disoriented. During the early years it was extremely frustrating for him, as one activity after another became impossible.
OTOH, they decided that his case of Parkinsonism was caused by chemical poisoning from his years of developing his own photos. Perhaps other causes would evolve differently.
But you are arguing in favor of a longer and more detailed study. And while you do that study, people who might benefit from the drug, if it works, are suffering and dying.
OTOH, it might not work. Whoops!
There's no obvious way forwards when you're working in ignorance. I favor letting people into an experimental program with blatant warnings, and rules preventing any sponsor from getting more than cost recovery (and, of course, data). This would *NOT* be a double blind study, so it's less than perfectly useful. And that limitation means that there is likely to be a strong placebo effect, which needs to be factored into the evaluation.
I think you're presuming a much stronger understanding of medicine than we possess. I suggest that you follow http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi... (Derek Lowe) for awhile.
I think you haven't been paying any attention to what China has been doing. They sure aren't perfect, but they've been working hard to clean up their act.
Additionally, this is a global problem. But actions are required at the nation level and below. And it's often advantageous for a smaller player to not do their fair share. This doesn't imply that the problem isn't real and isn't severe, it implies that some folk are greedy and don't want to do their fair share. The traditional name of this problem is "the tragedy of the commons", even though that name is misstating the problem that the commons actually had. (The problem actually was the "landlord" took away the ability of the villages to control the usage of the commons.)
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that. I don't remember the mechanism that was supposed to have caused the H2S release, but I think it has happened more than once.
Still, please note that it didn't kill off all life in the previous occurrences. There's no reason to believe it would kill off all life this time. Possibly all mammals, but there's reason to doubt even that much. E.g. mole rats might survive, or other small mammals with uncommon lifestyles that have unusual metabolic features. (Mole rats do much better than most mammals in low oxygen environments...but I don't know how well they do if those are continued over a long period of time.)
I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
OTOH, the deeper ones when they release slowly tend to get eaten by bacteria and get converted to CO2 on their way to the surface.
The problem is the buried organic waste in the permafrost, which I don't believe there's any good measure of. Some of that has already been converted into methane while the permafrost was frozen, and much of the rest will "quickly" be converted into methane as the permafrost thaws.
Now methane in the air has a half-life of around 20 years, and it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, which is what it is converted into when eaten. So if the release is slow enough then what we're talking about is largely an increase in CO2, but if it's rapid then we get a spike because of the much stronger greenhouse gas, methane.
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that.
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
I think it's probably too new for standard tests to have emerged. There will be the normal "road worthy" tests, and smog tests (electric car, pass), but appropriate "driving skill" tests for autonomous vehicles haven't yet been formalized.
So, yes, there is testing and certification, but it's based on the existing standards. It doesn't yet test the autonomous skill level. But liability regulations haven't been waived, and without a "designated driver" there's no intermediate to end up with the charge. (OTOH, corporations seem almost immune to criminal liability. Only financial liability.)
Well, Tesla never claimed to have a autonomous vehicle, though the marketspeak "autopilot" did/does confuse some people. So take them out of the list. That's more a fancy cruise control with some lane following built in. And a bit of collision avoidance, that often works.
That said, in the recent event where a cop ticketed a autonomous car, the "driver" was charged because that's the way the laws are written. If he'd been a passenger that wouldn't have happened. (I'm not sure *who* would get the ticket in that case.) But that wasn't the car creator's scheming, that's just the way the laws were written back when autonomous cars were TV script gimmicks, or possibly even earlier. A driver was assumed to be responsible.
To me the applicable bit of traditional wisdom seems to be: "Be not the first by which the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to cast the old aside." Shakespeare put the words in the mouth of a pompous windbag, but they're still generally good advice.
IIUC, being an autonomous vehicle doesn't exempt you from liability. It may get them off murder charges, but not off liability, and without a "designated driver" they won't have a fall guy. So I expect they'll be rather cautious. Otherwise it could get a bit expensive.
I believe you are correct. I know for certain that my elderly neighbor can't hear a conversation directed at him in a loud voice, though he catches a word or two, and he drives.
Well, IIUC he was a Democrat when that was to his advantage, and switched to being a Republican when *that* was to his advantage. I've never checked this out, so feel free to doubt it.
Last I looked at Crystal it was pretty immature, but that may be a year ago now. How does it do with multiprocessing? Will it support guilds? (For that matter, with Ruby? And if so, when?)
To me guilds made me consider switching back to Ruby, but I haven't seen anything new about them, like, say, a working implementation, even if it had bugs or was slow, in the last year. I'm less interested in the faster execution (though that would be good) than in the easy, seamless, multiprocessing.
Learning a new language is easy. Learning how to use it is difficult. Learning the system specific libraries can be a real pain. Even in the languages I'm most comfortable in, I still need to drop into looking up references whenever I want to use a library I haven't used frequently.
You sure about that? When I studied it (well, informally) birds were said to have branched off before the dinosaurs were a separate group. Sort of like the Pterosaurs, which also branched off before the dinosaurs had separated.
OTOH, all these recent fossils with feathers may have caused people to reorganize things.
If it's based on the article I'm thinking of, it's based on the idea that the Higgs boson is at a meta-stable position, and could fall off...and that if one did anywhere in the universe a bubble of reconfiguration with a more stable Higgs would expand at the speed of light (or possibly faster). This can't currently be shown to be wrong, but seems dubious. OTOH, the probability of a Higgs changing state was calculated to be extremely small...which is why the estimated long time...but, of course, it could have already happened in a place currently outside our light cone.
It's not the only "this could cause the end of the universe" theory out there. The current energy level is called a false vacuum, and may be only metastable. I'm not sure if anyone has calculated what would cause it to collapse, and how likely it is, but it could be true and it could happen. If so, the only way to tell would be to experiment. There are other theories of a similar nature. Brane theory says the big bang was caused by two branes colliding, and they may do it periodically. That one doesn't seem to have anyway to cause it to happen by experimenting, but like the others there's no way of telling before it happens that it's going to happen.
So don't take this theory too seriously. The evidence in support of it is not exclusive to it. There are probably other interpretations than that the Higgs field is only metastable.
This is a case where it's difficult to be specific, because the evidence is scant. If you're only getting one good fossil per thousand years, detecting a decline is dubious. But it does seem that some species of dinosaur were already in decline. And others weren't. A few appear to have been flourishing.
OTOH, accepted theory as of a few years ago is that birds are not descended from dinosaurs, they descend from a line that branched off before the dinosaurs separated from the rest of the reptiles. The ornithiscian dinosaurs had similar hips, but were not ancestral to birds. Neither were birds ancestral to the ornithiscians. They both descend from an earlier ancestor.
Drivers seem to expect me to extract a lot of information by looking at them. Unfortunately, many of them have photo-sensitive glass that makes the interior of the car so dark I can't see them.
If the car is on automatic driving, taking over on your own initiative is a bad mistake, and likely to provide considerably worse results. Additionally, the car handled the even safely for all concerned, so taking over would definitely have been a bad mistake. The question here, though, is "Is 10.8 feet too close?". Drivers come closer to me than that all the time when they're making a turn. (I'm assuming we're talking edges here rather than center of gravity.) It would really be best if we also had an external view, but I doubt one is available.
I'm not sure that the term "natural right" even means. My understanding is that it was invented by a couple of Enlightenment philosophers to sell their ideas, and was picked up by some folks in the US (esp. Thomas Jefferson) to sell *their* ideas. Since then, though, it's been used and abused so often that it's hard to say *what* it means. The original meaning was tied into some particular ideas about religion, which don't currently exist in any religion I know of. (Some of them have the ideas in a more extreme form, or in a restricted form, but that's not the same thing.)
Stable is a relative term. It depends on how long a period of time you are considering. And near depends on what scale you are using also.
If Einstein is correct, their orbits cannot be stable in the long term, but they may well be stable enough to last until the Milky Way merges with Andromeda.
This is because "near" is quite relative. Here it probably means within a few hundred light years. I suppose they might be as closely packed as within a closed globular cluster, in which case they'd average only a couple of light years apart. But stars are small compared to that distance, and space is almost without friction, so while they might alter each others orbit, they'd be highly unlikely to collide, and it would take a triple interaction for two to end up orbiting each other. Additionally, I wouldn't even bet that they were all, or mainly, in the plane of the galaxy. The core is a lot thicker than the arms. Which gives them even more space to move around in.
OTOH, each one is likely to have it's own small accretion disk, so they should be visible, at least occasionally. Perhaps occasionally quite luminous. But expect even the smallest ones to be more massive than the sun, so a planet running into it wouldn't change its orbit noticeably.
Sorry, unless you are proposing that these were primordial black holes that doesn't work, because it would throw off the Lithium balance detected in cosmic dust clouds.
Dark matter has to either be non-baryonic, or it has to have removed itself from interactions before the first stars lit up. (I'm not sure of the details here...it could be that it needs to remove itself before symmetry breaking. Back when I was reading about this primordial black holes weren't believed in [and I'm not sure they are now] so the explanations really skimmed over this lightly, and anyway that was multiple decades ago.)
Well, lots of people have, indeed, rebuilt their lives after a major problem, legal or otherwise. But this isn't a binary situation, and a lot of people have also been prevented from rebuilding their lives. It's *ONE* of the causes of a high rate of recidivism. Admittedly not the only one.
Perhaps it should be like the French Foreign Legion was reputed to be....once you are out you are given a totally new identity that had no link to your prior identity. Of course, there would be the small problem of no employment history...
But the thing is, it SHOULD be the original web page that was required to be removed. But there should also be an internet archive site that kept EVERYTHING, with flags about when it could be indexed (accessed).
The existing Internet Archive is hobbled by laws, underfunded, etc. The proposed archive would require multiple copies and legal immunity as long as it's contents were preserved accurately. OTOH, access to it might well be limited by public policies. It's specifically intended as a historical record. The Net provides the active record.
Slashdot Mirror
IIUC Parkinson's is normally terminal...if you don't die of something else fairly quickly. My wife's father died of it, though it did take him several years...but during the last one he was rather incoherent and disoriented. During the early years it was extremely frustrating for him, as one activity after another became impossible.
OTOH, they decided that his case of Parkinsonism was caused by chemical poisoning from his years of developing his own photos. Perhaps other causes would evolve differently.
But you are arguing in favor of a longer and more detailed study. And while you do that study, people who might benefit from the drug, if it works, are suffering and dying.
OTOH, it might not work. Whoops!
There's no obvious way forwards when you're working in ignorance. I favor letting people into an experimental program with blatant warnings, and rules preventing any sponsor from getting more than cost recovery (and, of course, data). This would *NOT* be a double blind study, so it's less than perfectly useful. And that limitation means that there is likely to be a strong placebo effect, which needs to be factored into the evaluation.
I think you're presuming a much stronger understanding of medicine than we possess. I suggest that you follow http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi... (Derek Lowe) for awhile.
I think you haven't been paying any attention to what China has been doing. They sure aren't perfect, but they've been working hard to clean up their act.
Additionally, this is a global problem. But actions are required at the nation level and below. And it's often advantageous for a smaller player to not do their fair share. This doesn't imply that the problem isn't real and isn't severe, it implies that some folk are greedy and don't want to do their fair share. The traditional name of this problem is "the tragedy of the commons", even though that name is misstating the problem that the commons actually had. (The problem actually was the "landlord" took away the ability of the villages to control the usage of the commons.)
Sorry, that got posted to quickly.
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that. I don't remember the mechanism that was supposed to have caused the H2S release, but I think it has happened more than once.
Still, please note that it didn't kill off all life in the previous occurrences. There's no reason to believe it would kill off all life this time. Possibly all mammals, but there's reason to doubt even that much. E.g. mole rats might survive, or other small mammals with uncommon lifestyles that have unusual metabolic features. (Mole rats do much better than most mammals in low oxygen environments...but I don't know how well they do if those are continued over a long period of time.)
I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
OTOH, the deeper ones when they release slowly tend to get eaten by bacteria and get converted to CO2 on their way to the surface.
The problem is the buried organic waste in the permafrost, which I don't believe there's any good measure of. Some of that has already been converted into methane while the permafrost was frozen, and much of the rest will "quickly" be converted into methane as the permafrost thaws.
Now methane in the air has a half-life of around 20 years, and it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, which is what it is converted into when eaten. So if the release is slow enough then what we're talking about is largely an increase in CO2, but if it's rapid then we get a spike because of the much stronger greenhouse gas, methane.
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that.
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
THIS IS A GUESS!!
I think it's probably too new for standard tests to have emerged. There will be the normal "road worthy" tests, and smog tests (electric car, pass), but appropriate "driving skill" tests for autonomous vehicles haven't yet been formalized.
So, yes, there is testing and certification, but it's based on the existing standards. It doesn't yet test the autonomous skill level. But liability regulations haven't been waived, and without a "designated driver" there's no intermediate to end up with the charge. (OTOH, corporations seem almost immune to criminal liability. Only financial liability.)
Well, Tesla never claimed to have a autonomous vehicle, though the marketspeak "autopilot" did/does confuse some people. So take them out of the list. That's more a fancy cruise control with some lane following built in. And a bit of collision avoidance, that often works.
That said, in the recent event where a cop ticketed a autonomous car, the "driver" was charged because that's the way the laws are written. If he'd been a passenger that wouldn't have happened. (I'm not sure *who* would get the ticket in that case.) But that wasn't the car creator's scheming, that's just the way the laws were written back when autonomous cars were TV script gimmicks, or possibly even earlier. A driver was assumed to be responsible.
To me the applicable bit of traditional wisdom seems to be:
"Be not the first by which the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to cast the old aside."
Shakespeare put the words in the mouth of a pompous windbag, but they're still generally good advice.
IIUC, being an autonomous vehicle doesn't exempt you from liability. It may get them off murder charges, but not off liability, and without a "designated driver" they won't have a fall guy. So I expect they'll be rather cautious. Otherwise it could get a bit expensive.
I believe you are correct. I know for certain that my elderly neighbor can't hear a conversation directed at him in a loud voice, though he catches a word or two, and he drives.
Well, IIUC he was a Democrat when that was to his advantage, and switched to being a Republican when *that* was to his advantage. I've never checked this out, so feel free to doubt it.
Last I looked at Crystal it was pretty immature, but that may be a year ago now. How does it do with multiprocessing? Will it support guilds? (For that matter, with Ruby? And if so, when?)
To me guilds made me consider switching back to Ruby, but I haven't seen anything new about them, like, say, a working implementation, even if it had bugs or was slow, in the last year. I'm less interested in the faster execution (though that would be good) than in the easy, seamless, multiprocessing.
Learning a new language is easy. Learning how to use it is difficult. Learning the system specific libraries can be a real pain. Even in the languages I'm most comfortable in, I still need to drop into looking up references whenever I want to use a library I haven't used frequently.
You sure about that? When I studied it (well, informally) birds were said to have branched off before the dinosaurs were a separate group. Sort of like the Pterosaurs, which also branched off before the dinosaurs had separated.
OTOH, all these recent fossils with feathers may have caused people to reorganize things.
If it's based on the article I'm thinking of, it's based on the idea that the Higgs boson is at a meta-stable position, and could fall off...and that if one did anywhere in the universe a bubble of reconfiguration with a more stable Higgs would expand at the speed of light (or possibly faster). This can't currently be shown to be wrong, but seems dubious. OTOH, the probability of a Higgs changing state was calculated to be extremely small...which is why the estimated long time...but, of course, it could have already happened in a place currently outside our light cone.
It's not the only "this could cause the end of the universe" theory out there. The current energy level is called a false vacuum, and may be only metastable. I'm not sure if anyone has calculated what would cause it to collapse, and how likely it is, but it could be true and it could happen. If so, the only way to tell would be to experiment. There are other theories of a similar nature. Brane theory says the big bang was caused by two branes colliding, and they may do it periodically. That one doesn't seem to have anyway to cause it to happen by experimenting, but like the others there's no way of telling before it happens that it's going to happen.
So don't take this theory too seriously. The evidence in support of it is not exclusive to it. There are probably other interpretations than that the Higgs field is only metastable.
This is a case where it's difficult to be specific, because the evidence is scant. If you're only getting one good fossil per thousand years, detecting a decline is dubious. But it does seem that some species of dinosaur were already in decline. And others weren't. A few appear to have been flourishing.
OTOH, accepted theory as of a few years ago is that birds are not descended from dinosaurs, they descend from a line that branched off before the dinosaurs separated from the rest of the reptiles. The ornithiscian dinosaurs had similar hips, but were not ancestral to birds. Neither were birds ancestral to the ornithiscians. They both descend from an earlier ancestor.
Drivers seem to expect me to extract a lot of information by looking at them. Unfortunately, many of them have photo-sensitive glass that makes the interior of the car so dark I can't see them.
If the car is on automatic driving, taking over on your own initiative is a bad mistake, and likely to provide considerably worse results. Additionally, the car handled the even safely for all concerned, so taking over would definitely have been a bad mistake. The question here, though, is "Is 10.8 feet too close?". Drivers come closer to me than that all the time when they're making a turn. (I'm assuming we're talking edges here rather than center of gravity.) It would really be best if we also had an external view, but I doubt one is available.
That's true. In the city it's parking enforcement that's the revenue stream.
I'm not sure that the term "natural right" even means. My understanding is that it was invented by a couple of Enlightenment philosophers to sell their ideas, and was picked up by some folks in the US (esp. Thomas Jefferson) to sell *their* ideas. Since then, though, it's been used and abused so often that it's hard to say *what* it means. The original meaning was tied into some particular ideas about religion, which don't currently exist in any religion I know of. (Some of them have the ideas in a more extreme form, or in a restricted form, but that's not the same thing.)
Stable is a relative term. It depends on how long a period of time you are considering. And near depends on what scale you are using also.
If Einstein is correct, their orbits cannot be stable in the long term, but they may well be stable enough to last until the Milky Way merges with Andromeda.
This is because "near" is quite relative. Here it probably means within a few hundred light years. I suppose they might be as closely packed as within a closed globular cluster, in which case they'd average only a couple of light years apart. But stars are small compared to that distance, and space is almost without friction, so while they might alter each others orbit, they'd be highly unlikely to collide, and it would take a triple interaction for two to end up orbiting each other. Additionally, I wouldn't even bet that they were all, or mainly, in the plane of the galaxy. The core is a lot thicker than the arms. Which gives them even more space to move around in.
OTOH, each one is likely to have it's own small accretion disk, so they should be visible, at least occasionally. Perhaps occasionally quite luminous. But expect even the smallest ones to be more massive than the sun, so a planet running into it wouldn't change its orbit noticeably.
Sorry, unless you are proposing that these were primordial black holes that doesn't work, because it would throw off the Lithium balance detected in cosmic dust clouds.
Dark matter has to either be non-baryonic, or it has to have removed itself from interactions before the first stars lit up. (I'm not sure of the details here...it could be that it needs to remove itself before symmetry breaking. Back when I was reading about this primordial black holes weren't believed in [and I'm not sure they are now] so the explanations really skimmed over this lightly, and anyway that was multiple decades ago.)
Well, lots of people have, indeed, rebuilt their lives after a major problem, legal or otherwise. But this isn't a binary situation, and a lot of people have also been prevented from rebuilding their lives. It's *ONE* of the causes of a high rate of recidivism. Admittedly not the only one.
Perhaps it should be like the French Foreign Legion was reputed to be....once you are out you are given a totally new identity that had no link to your prior identity. Of course, there would be the small problem of no employment history...
But the thing is, it SHOULD be the original web page that was required to be removed. But there should also be an internet archive site that kept EVERYTHING, with flags about when it could be indexed (accessed).
The existing Internet Archive is hobbled by laws, underfunded, etc. The proposed archive would require multiple copies and legal immunity as long as it's contents were preserved accurately. OTOH, access to it might well be limited by public policies. It's specifically intended as a historical record. The Net provides the active record.