I think conviction should be a function of both your opinion of the relevant facts and your degree of certainty in the relevant facts.
Look, you're entitled to your ever so condescending opinion. But please don't pretend you've made any effort to reconcile it with relevant facts. Three minutes with Google quickly demonstrates that your lead premise is fundamentally mistaken.
Cancer curing and remediation is not an obscure application of stem cell research which someone making a modest effort to understand might reasonably miss; it's one of the principle areas of interest in the field and there are currently practiced therapies using adult stem cells harvested from blood and marrow.
1. Why are doctors and scientists so excited about human embryonic stem cells?
Stem cells have potential in many different areas of health and medical research. To start with, studying stem cells will help us to understand how they transform into the dazzling array of specialized cells that make us what we are. Some of the most serious medical conditions, such as cancer and birth defects, are due to problems that occur somewhere in this process.
...
2. Have human embryonic stem cells been used successfully to treat any human diseases yet?
... HSCs (hematopoietic stem cells) are now used in order to treat leukemia, lymphoma and several inherited blood disorders.
I mean do other companies actually sit around in high backed chairs and think of how to "do evil"?
Of course they do, they just describe it in code words like "synergize our value add", "optimize our risk senarios", "innovate", or "increase shareholder value".
It's producing CO2 from biomass. Which means that carbon was recently pulled out of the atmostphere via matabolic processing in plants. This process can be a part of a sustainable carbon cycle.
CO2 is not evil and is required at certain levels to maintain the climactic balance and sustain biological cycles.
Digging vast amounts of formerly sequestered carbon out of the earth and injecting it into the atmosphere is where the global warming greenhouse effect is coming from. This process doesn't seem to do that.
A friend of mine ran crack... sent the results to his sysadmin, with a note asking the sysadmin to implement crack system-wide, and was promptly reprimanded.
You didn't do a correct analysis of the economic benefits from this deduction.
Section 179 lets you essentially accelerate your depreciation to the year of purchase. It doesn't give you a new deduction, it just lets you advance your depreciation deduction fully to the first year.
From the numbers you gave, I'm deriving that you paid ~$35K for your truck, and your incrmental tax rate is 9/35, or 25.7%.
If you hadn't taken the 179 deduction, you would have probably used a straightline depreciation over 5 years, and taken a $7K/yr deduction in this year and the next 4 years.
Over time you would have had the same absolute $value tax savings. Of course by taking several years you would have realized those savings in future dollars instead of today's dollars. If you use a 5% cost of capital rate, your actual net gain in todays dollars is roughly $820.
At a gas price of $2/G, and an assumed 30MPG difference between the F150 and a Civic Hybrid, that $820 would have been saved at the pump in the first 12,300 miles.
I'm ignoring other variables, such as: the difference in initial price and ongoing maintenance of the vehicles in question, non fuel-economy benefits and capabilities of the two vehicles, changes in future tax law, changes in future gas prices, some state and federal tax credits for hybrid purchases, and your ability to afford the purchase without the upfront savings. However, on a purely financial trade-off of future fuel expense vs accelerated tax deduction, it's hard for me to see how the truck is more economic for you than the hybrid, even in the first year of ownership.
One other factor: by depreciating your vehicle as a business asset (through 5-year or S179), you lower your cost basis on that vehicle. If you ever sell the vehicle, for tax purposes the entire sale price of the vehicle will now be considered a capital gain and you will have to pay taxes on that gain. This has no effect if you intend to drive it into the junk yard, but most folks do not, so part of your $9K tax savings is really an advance against a future tax obligation on the future sale of your vehicle.
One temporarily profitable company in an industry does not make the whole industry profitable. A number of folks, most notably "The Oracle of Omaha" Warren Buffett, have analyzed the airline industry and determined it's been a net loss for all activety since inception:
"... despite putting in billions and billions and billions of dollars, the net return to owners from being in the entire airline industry, if you owned it all, and if you put up all this money, is less than zero."
"Please provide examples of a credible (ie. non-conspiracy theorist) source suggesting that Republicans might abuse a security hole."
Salon.com - Voter terrorism: For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.
System effciencies will depend on the efficiency of your electrical power generation as well as the electrolysis processes. Some slides in here indicate 25-30% with conventional electric power plants and large scale electrolysis.
Higher system efficiencies approaching 50% are possible using thermochemical water splitting processes.
Yeah hydrogen is NOT a good energy source in our terrestrial environment. It is a very good battery (energy/mass) and a system built upon its use for energy storage and transport, and for distributed portable power generation (cars), may be substantially more energy efficient and substantially less polluting than our current one.
"There is NO physically reasonable scenario in which all or most of the ribbon encounters the atmosphere EITHER in a small space OR in a short time."
Really? What do you base that on? I just watched the animation again. In this model, about 25% of the fastest moving end of the cable breaks off and a away, the rest falls. The last 5-10% of the cable slaps the earth in a couple of the final frames. So what are the energy dynamics?
Is it inconceivable that that last 5% of the ribbon length carries 30-50% of the entire kinetic energy of the system? So how bad is a terajoule released over a million square meters for 10 minutes? It's about 2000 Watts/m^2. Probably nothing to worry about. About twice the mean solar intercept for the area in question for 10 minutes.
"I'm in the middle of a multi-MEGATON event right now -- but since it's otherwise known as a sunny September day"
Righto. Please notice I'm actually using the solar intercept energy as a comparison point. Remember your multi-MEGATON event is spread over a much vaster area (the hemispherical area of the planet surface) then a one meter by 1000km ribbon impact.
Even so, that solar energy, at lower density, fuels large atmospheric effects (hurricanes, tornados) known to produce substantial destructive effects on human habitation:) I want to see some atmospheric modeling. Does the cable fall and disintegration seed the largest storm system we've ever seen? Not unimaginable.
Further, what happens 15 years later when we have not the one, but dozens, or hundreds of elevators, including "heavy lifters" weighing in at 70,000 tons instead of 700 tons? Will the catistrophic fall of one ribbon, sweep down 20-50% of the others? They're all placed in a very tight equatorial band.
Sorry, yourself: the NIAC analysis has a bit of handwaving. In fact it's the principle one I'm complaining about. And yes I read it a couple years ago and sent similar objections back then.
First it tries to assert that most of the cable mass won't re-enter the atmosphere. This might be the most likely case -- a meterological, accidental or intentional attack severing the cable within the atmosphere does mean only a small mass returns to earth; but the worst case is a break near the outer end of the cable, losing the counterweight (maybe 5% of the total mass) and the remaining 95% of the mass returns to earth because the new center of mass is below a stable orbit point.
Claiming the cable "disintegrates" is nice, but doesn't address the issue. It doesn't matter if the total mass is less than the amount of dust captured by the earth each year. Ask how much energy is released in the disintegration. Disintegration is not benign. If too much energy is released too quickly in too small a space you will have some serious conseqeunces.
The animations are sweet, thanks for pointing me to em. But they don't quite answer my question: how much energy is released, how quickly, over how large an area? Perhaps I'll find time to download his admittedly disarrayed code and see if I can enhance it to calculate energy release over time and volume in the atmospheric entry, but I suspect I don't have the physics knowledge to do that right.
I readily admit my calculations were back of the envelope. But at least they're addressing the issue the elevator proponents are glossing over: energy release! My orbital energy calculations say the proposed elevator is going to potentially release nearly a kiloton of energy in the worst case scenario. Very large, sudden energy release events are *bad*. Especially when they happen near people and their homes.
As to my being too lazy to do some quick research -- try again. I didn't find the animations, but I certainly knew of your primary study reference and find it unconvincing in this regard. When calculating the kinetic energy release, I did used google to find the radius of geosync and the earth surface, and to look up a Joules to Kiloton conversion so as to cast the energy result in terms of large explosive events people are somewhat familiar with for context. I'll aplogize for not being a physicist nor an atmospheric modeler, and being pretty darn rusty at orbital dynamics. But those are specialities I would expect the elevator builders to have and employ to properly study feasibility and safety concerns about this project.
I'm not objecting to the idea of building a space elevator at all. I've been interested in the concept since before Clarke and Sheffield popularized it in their 1979 novels. I'd just like it done with real science and engineering so it works and make sense and strikes a reasonable balance between risk and benefit.
> Edwards' reference design: ribbon roughly 1 m by 1 mm, total mass ~700 tons
OK, so just how dangerous is 700 tons of material falling from geosync orbit?
Geosync orbital speed is 3,066 m/s.
Equatorial surface speed is 464 m/s.
Orbital Energy(J) is 1/2 * mass(kg) * velocity(m/s)^2
1 Short Ton = 907.185 kg
The energy released when 99% of the 700 short ton elevator falls from geosync is roughly 2.9 TeraJoules (2.9e12 Joules), or about 0.7 Kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 14 Kilotons.
So this thing releases a *lot* of energy when it falls, but an order of magnitude less than a smallish atomic bomb.
The next question is over what period of time is this energy released over how large an area? The claim is the object will "burn up" in the atmosphere. I don't remember enough to calculate how fast the ribbon will fall or how fast its energy will dissapate in the atmosphere.
I surmise the disappation is a few seconds (the ribbon is probably travelling a couple km/sec when it "enters" the atmosphere if we assume its speed is similar to the difference in orbital velocities). The area is roughly 1m x earth circumference, or 40 million m^2. If the energy is disappated over about 10 seconds over this area, that's about 7000 Watts/m^2, or about 5 times the amount of mean solar energy received by the earth.
From these estimates, I think it will be a spectactuar event. Probably, very bright and causing local meterologic effects; but unlikely to be spectacularly destructive -- in line with LiftPort's and others' claims.
I wish one of the elevator advocates would actually publish a more detailed analysis, showing their figures and assumptions instead of the hand-waving "it'll burn up in the atmosphere" claim.
> Nationwide, more money is collected from fuel taxes than is spent on roads.
Care to cite any sources for your claim?
Studies I've seen report that in the US, fuel and vehicle tax revenues only cover between 50% and 80% of the direct cost of road building and maintenance.
This figure doesn't even account for a bunch of road maintenance and support services that are often paid out of state/county/city general funds. Nor does it account for other indirect auto/road subsidies such as tax breaks for supplying parking, and externalities such as the health consequences & clean-up costs of pollution, nor the military and diplomatic cost of protecting US oil interests.
I'd love to see our available transit options compete on a real level playing field. But I'm really tired of hearing folks carp about bus, train, light-rail subsidies while the auto, airline, and truck industries gobble tens of billions in hidden subsidies annually.
"Douglas was always full of ideas. Many of them mine. Seriously, he was wonderfully stimulating company. You don't believe me? Buy this."
--John Cleese
First and only authorized documentary of beloved author and visionary, Douglas Adams.
Narrated by Sandman Creator, Neil Gaiman, the film features exclusive, never-before seen footage of Douglas Adams, with contributions from over 30 of his closest family and friends.
The Lisa 1, an especially rare collectible computer, goes for around $10K whenever it shows up.
Which is almost exactly what it sold for brand new in 1983. Using an average of 5% interest over 22 years, this "classic" has depreciated by roughly 65% in real dollar terms.
Course, that's much better value retention than a random 286 AT machine from the same era.
Post a sample extended regex that isn't working for you -- it's hard to debug a problem without an example which demonstrates it. What version of perl are you using?
Does anyone here know how to do multi-line regexes in perl?
Um, RTFM?
There are plenty of examples of the extended multi-line form in the standard docs and it works just fine.
Simple answer, use the "/x" modifier at the end of your expression to set extended mode. In this mode, whitespace is ignored (unless escaped) within the regex and you can insert comments.
Hmmm, in the last 5 years
Cisco stock is up about 5-10% and has outperformed the S&P-500, Nasdaq, and Dow indexes. Yeah it was extremely over-priced in 2000, but so were a lot of companies.
Cisco is still earning about $3B/yr on about $18B in revenue.
The money you buried is now soggy... isn't it time you switched to IPv6 (which Cisco mostly only gives lip service to anyway)?
You can still do NAT like stuff with IPv6, you just don't have to. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap a switch or router or just a patch cable and have all your open internet connections still work instead of being dropped?
Brian Thomas is a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University in California. He used MATLAB (running on a Sun Solaris 2.7 workstation and commanded remotely through Telnet) to manipulate equations and run the model. He'd like to thank Dr. Joan Roughgarden for teaching him the vast majority of what he knows about population dynamics, and he would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this little treatise, because he is keen on spending a goodly portion of his career communicating science to intelligent but non-technical audiences (like you!).
Slashdot Mirror
Except if A/P > B/P, then (A+Y)/P > (B+Y)/P.
Except that's not the formula being evaluated. It's actually
P1/A > P2/B
which doesn't neccessarily imply
P1/(A+Y) > P2/(B+Y)
Cancer curing and remediation is not an obscure application of stem cell research which someone making a modest effort to understand might reasonably miss; it's one of the principle areas of interest in the field and there are currently practiced therapies using adult stem cells harvested from blood and marrow.
"+5 Interesting," my foot.
Healthcare Questions
1. Why are doctors and scientists so excited about human embryonic stem cells?
Stem cells have potential in many different areas of health and medical research. To start with, studying stem cells will help us to understand how they transform into the dazzling array of specialized cells that make us what we are. Some of the most serious medical conditions, such as cancer and birth defects, are due to problems that occur somewhere in this process.
...
2. Have human embryonic stem cells been used successfully to treat any human diseases yet?
... HSCs (hematopoietic stem cells) are now used in order to treat leukemia, lymphoma and several inherited blood disorders.
Of course they do, they just describe it in code words like "synergize our value add", "optimize our risk senarios", "innovate", or "increase shareholder value".
It's producing CO2 from biomass. Which means that carbon was recently pulled out of the atmostphere via matabolic processing in plants. This process can be a part of a sustainable carbon cycle.
CO2 is not evil and is required at certain levels to maintain the climactic balance and sustain biological cycles.
Digging vast amounts of formerly sequestered carbon out of the earth and injecting it into the atmosphere is where the global warming greenhouse effect is coming from. This process doesn't seem to do that.
It could have been much worse!
Section 179 lets you essentially accelerate your depreciation to the year of purchase. It doesn't give you a new deduction, it just lets you advance your depreciation deduction fully to the first year.
From the numbers you gave, I'm deriving that you paid ~$35K for your truck, and your incrmental tax rate is 9/35, or 25.7%.
If you hadn't taken the 179 deduction, you would have probably used a straightline depreciation over 5 years, and taken a $7K/yr deduction in this year and the next 4 years.
Over time you would have had the same absolute $value tax savings. Of course by taking several years you would have realized those savings in future dollars instead of today's dollars. If you use a 5% cost of capital rate, your actual net gain in todays dollars is roughly $820.
At a gas price of $2/G, and an assumed 30MPG difference between the F150 and a Civic Hybrid, that $820 would have been saved at the pump in the first 12,300 miles.
I'm ignoring other variables, such as: the difference in initial price and ongoing maintenance of the vehicles in question, non fuel-economy benefits and capabilities of the two vehicles, changes in future tax law, changes in future gas prices, some state and federal tax credits for hybrid purchases, and your ability to afford the purchase without the upfront savings. However, on a purely financial trade-off of future fuel expense vs accelerated tax deduction, it's hard for me to see how the truck is more economic for you than the hybrid, even in the first year of ownership.
One other factor: by depreciating your vehicle as a business asset (through 5-year or S179), you lower your cost basis on that vehicle. If you ever sell the vehicle, for tax purposes the entire sale price of the vehicle will now be considered a capital gain and you will have to pay taxes on that gain. This has no effect if you intend to drive it into the junk yard, but most folks do not, so part of your $9K tax savings is really an advance against a future tax obligation on the future sale of your vehicle.
Salon.com - Voter terrorism: For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.
Electrolysis can be greater than 70% efficient at converting electrical energy into chemical energy (splitting water). How efficient is the electrolysis of water?
System effciencies will depend on the efficiency of your electrical power generation as well as the electrolysis processes. Some slides in here indicate 25-30% with conventional electric power plants and large scale electrolysis.
Higher system efficiencies approaching 50% are possible using thermochemical water splitting processes.
Yeah hydrogen is NOT a good energy source in our terrestrial environment. It is a very good battery (energy/mass) and a system built upon its use for energy storage and transport, and for distributed portable power generation (cars), may be substantially more energy efficient and substantially less polluting than our current one.
Really? What do you base that on? I just watched the animation again. In this model, about 25% of the fastest moving end of the cable breaks off and a away, the rest falls. The last 5-10% of the cable slaps the earth in a couple of the final frames. So what are the energy dynamics?
Is it inconceivable that that last 5% of the ribbon length carries 30-50% of the entire kinetic energy of the system? So how bad is a terajoule released over a million square meters for 10 minutes? It's about 2000 Watts/m^2. Probably nothing to worry about. About twice the mean solar intercept for the area in question for 10 minutes.
"I'm in the middle of a multi-MEGATON event right now -- but since it's otherwise known as a sunny September day"
Righto. Please notice I'm actually using the solar intercept energy as a comparison point. Remember your multi-MEGATON event is spread over a much vaster area (the hemispherical area of the planet surface) then a one meter by 1000km ribbon impact.
Even so, that solar energy, at lower density, fuels large atmospheric effects (hurricanes, tornados) known to produce substantial destructive effects on human habitation :) I want to see some atmospheric modeling. Does the cable fall and disintegration seed the largest storm system we've ever seen? Not unimaginable.
Further, what happens 15 years later when we have not the one, but dozens, or hundreds of elevators, including "heavy lifters" weighing in at 70,000 tons instead of 700 tons? Will the catistrophic fall of one ribbon, sweep down 20-50% of the others? They're all placed in a very tight equatorial band.
First it tries to assert that most of the cable mass won't re-enter the atmosphere. This might be the most likely case -- a meterological, accidental or intentional attack severing the cable within the atmosphere does mean only a small mass returns to earth; but the worst case is a break near the outer end of the cable, losing the counterweight (maybe 5% of the total mass) and the remaining 95% of the mass returns to earth because the new center of mass is below a stable orbit point.
Claiming the cable "disintegrates" is nice, but doesn't address the issue. It doesn't matter if the total mass is less than the amount of dust captured by the earth each year. Ask how much energy is released in the disintegration. Disintegration is not benign. If too much energy is released too quickly in too small a space you will have some serious conseqeunces.
The animations are sweet, thanks for pointing me to em. But they don't quite answer my question: how much energy is released, how quickly, over how large an area? Perhaps I'll find time to download his admittedly disarrayed code and see if I can enhance it to calculate energy release over time and volume in the atmospheric entry, but I suspect I don't have the physics knowledge to do that right.
I readily admit my calculations were back of the envelope. But at least they're addressing the issue the elevator proponents are glossing over: energy release! My orbital energy calculations say the proposed elevator is going to potentially release nearly a kiloton of energy in the worst case scenario. Very large, sudden energy release events are *bad*. Especially when they happen near people and their homes.
As to my being too lazy to do some quick research -- try again. I didn't find the animations, but I certainly knew of your primary study reference and find it unconvincing in this regard. When calculating the kinetic energy release, I did used google to find the radius of geosync and the earth surface, and to look up a Joules to Kiloton conversion so as to cast the energy result in terms of large explosive events people are somewhat familiar with for context. I'll aplogize for not being a physicist nor an atmospheric modeler, and being pretty darn rusty at orbital dynamics. But those are specialities I would expect the elevator builders to have and employ to properly study feasibility and safety concerns about this project.
I'm not objecting to the idea of building a space elevator at all. I've been interested in the concept since before Clarke and Sheffield popularized it in their 1979 novels. I'd just like it done with real science and engineering so it works and make sense and strikes a reasonable balance between risk and benefit.
OK, so just how dangerous is 700 tons of material falling from geosync orbit?
Geosync orbital speed is 3,066 m/s.
Equatorial surface speed is 464 m/s.
Orbital Energy(J) is 1/2 * mass(kg) * velocity(m/s)^2
1 Short Ton = 907.185 kg
The energy released when 99% of the 700 short ton elevator falls from geosync is roughly 2.9 TeraJoules (2.9e12 Joules), or about 0.7 Kilotons. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 14 Kilotons.
So this thing releases a *lot* of energy when it falls, but an order of magnitude less than a smallish atomic bomb.
The next question is over what period of time is this energy released over how large an area? The claim is the object will "burn up" in the atmosphere. I don't remember enough to calculate how fast the ribbon will fall or how fast its energy will dissapate in the atmosphere.
I surmise the disappation is a few seconds (the ribbon is probably travelling a couple km/sec when it "enters" the atmosphere if we assume its speed is similar to the difference in orbital velocities). The area is roughly 1m x earth circumference, or 40 million m^2. If the energy is disappated over about 10 seconds over this area, that's about 7000 Watts/m^2, or about 5 times the amount of mean solar energy received by the earth.
From these estimates, I think it will be a spectactuar event. Probably, very bright and causing local meterologic effects; but unlikely to be spectacularly destructive -- in line with LiftPort's and others' claims.
I wish one of the elevator advocates would actually publish a more detailed analysis, showing their figures and assumptions instead of the hand-waving "it'll burn up in the atmosphere" claim.
Care to cite any sources for your claim?
Studies I've seen report that in the US, fuel and vehicle tax revenues only cover between 50% and 80% of the direct cost of road building and maintenance.
This figure doesn't even account for a bunch of road maintenance and support services that are often paid out of state/county/city general funds. Nor does it account for other indirect auto/road subsidies such as tax breaks for supplying parking, and externalities such as the health consequences & clean-up costs of pollution, nor the military and diplomatic cost of protecting US oil interests.
I'd love to see our available transit options compete on a real level playing field. But I'm really tired of hearing folks carp about bus, train, light-rail subsidies while the auto, airline, and truck industries gobble tens of billions in hidden subsidies annually.
The Going Rate: What it Really Costs to Drive
Summary here
"Douglas was always full of ideas. Many of them mine. Seriously, he was wonderfully stimulating company. You don't believe me? Buy this."
--John Cleese
First and only authorized documentary of beloved author and visionary, Douglas Adams.
Narrated by Sandman Creator, Neil Gaiman, the film features exclusive, never-before seen footage of Douglas Adams, with contributions from over 30 of his closest family and friends.
Which is almost exactly what it sold for brand new in 1983. Using an average of 5% interest over 22 years, this "classic" has depreciated by roughly 65% in real dollar terms.
Course, that's much better value retention than a random 286 AT machine from the same era.
perl -e 'print "This program is VERY good looking, and VERY easy to understand\n";'
Ipv6 addresses are 128 bits, so there are 2^128 ~= 3.4E+38 addresses. Log10(2^128) ~= 38.5.
So IPv6 has a bit over the cube-root of a Googol addresses.
Standards consortium's exist.
Post a sample extended regex that isn't working for you -- it's hard to debug a problem without an example which demonstrates it. What version of perl are you using?
Um, RTFM? There are plenty of examples of the extended multi-line form in the standard docs and it works just fine.
Simple answer, use the "/x" modifier at the end of your expression to set extended mode. In this mode, whitespace is ignored (unless escaped) within the regex and you can insert comments.
Cisco is still earning about $3B/yr on about $18B in revenue.
The money you buried is now soggy... isn't it time you switched to IPv6 (which Cisco mostly only gives lip service to anyway)?
You can still do NAT like stuff with IPv6, you just don't have to. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap a switch or router or just a patch cable and have all your open internet connections still work instead of being dropped?
You just described BrightMail's approach, though they anticipated you by about 3.5 years and went and got a patent for your Step 3.
So what happens when these guys line up against the Maxwell's Demons in the Nano Series?
Brian Thomas is a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University in California. He used MATLAB (running on a Sun Solaris 2.7 workstation and commanded remotely through Telnet) to manipulate equations and run the model. He'd like to thank Dr. Joan Roughgarden for teaching him the vast majority of what he knows about population dynamics, and he would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this little treatise, because he is keen on spending a goodly portion of his career communicating science to intelligent but non-technical audiences (like you!).