The figure is now much closer to the 1 in 75 that the UK is reporting, which means that it's much more likely to be honestly reported. The less than half figure that the US previously claimed never rang true - it's genetic, not magic, so the incidence rate aught to reflect the gene pool you have to work with. The US and UK are genetically very similar, so the incidence rate aught to be very similar.
I would be far more interested in knowing why it has been dishonestly reported in the past and whether the now-caught willfully inaccurate reporting will lead to the various US medical boards asking serious questions. I doubt it. That kind of discrepancy can't be the result of a few bad eggs, and there's absolutely bugger all chance that they'd discipline the sheer number of pdocs that would have been required to create an error on that scale.
Silicon isn't the preferred material for solar cells, so I can ignore that part. I specified an increase in production, so I can ignore the annual production part. You never asked about cost, so I can ignore that part. Solar can be reflected, so you only need a large mirror and a much smaller collecting area, so I can ignore your calculation for size. What does that leave me with? Well, absolutely bugger all. Your claims simply aren't meaningful. They make assumptions about a methodology and a state of industry that, by definition, would not exist if solar were to be used to completely replace oil. It's like arguing that oil itself is useless as a fuel on the basis of oil production volumes in ancient Greece and the difficulty of burning tar sands in-situ. It should be obvious to anyone but a moron that the moment oil became interesting as a fuel that production went up and a more appealing form was produced.
So, by using solar tech as it was in the 80s as your starting point, what does that make you?
Agreed it's not a win under realistic assumptions. Fortunately, the challenge didn't make realistic assumptions so I could ignore all of the deficits.:) The article was ok, but made the assumption that you couldn't have relays (which solves many of the problems of absorption and beam spread, albeit at higher cost). For practical, realistic purposes, sufficient staging points would make it cost-prohibitive, I agree, but that's an economic problem and a political problem, not a technical one.
Solar on the ground is good, yes, but you need a mixed approach -- solar heaters are MUCH more efficient than solar panels in environments where it is cloudy a lot, and a big use of domestic power involves heating things (buildings, water, etc) which means no loss through energy conversion. Solar panels are good when it really is electricity you want AND when the skies are usually clear, which is fine but because it's more localized you also have to have a much better distribution grid to use it efficiently.
Solar on the ground won't produce more power on the ground than fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, at least not to the point of having people standing round in awe (the sole criterion of the challenge), but if you're willing to conserve energy a bit better then solar on the ground is quite capable of meeting all actual energy *needs* (as opposed to energy wants) for long enough for other energy sources (such as fusion) to come on-tap. As an adjunct to high-yield sources, and as an insurance against N-day blackouts (which do happen alarmingly often in Europe and the US), solar is perfectly good even in the very long term. Especially if some of the technologies promising 10x higher efficiency actually end up providing that.
The Earth receives 174 petawatts (PW) of incoming solar radiation (insolation) at the upper atmosphere. Approximately 30% is reflected back to space while the rest is absorbed by clouds, oceans and land masses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy)
Ok, so the 30% that's reflected back is free to use with zero ecological impact. That's 43.2 petawatts of zero-impact energy. The GP said "assume solar cells are 100% efficient", so I'm going to do so. (Space-based solar cells are already in use, so that's legit.) The question is how to get that energy to the Earth's surface safely.
However, the question asked was NOT "how would you do it", but "how long would it take". Building and launching that many solar panels into space, if you went at it Manhattan Project-style, might take, oh, 5 years or so. During that time, you'd need to revamp the power distribution grid 'cos this power has to be transmitted to a single location and not to multiple distribution points. In turn, that means better high-temp superconductors. With serious investment, I could see that taking maybe a decade to develop. Installation can be done simultaneous with the satellite deployment, so there's no additional time required for that.
Ok, so 15 years with serious funding of the sciences and the space industry.
So, to answer your question, we could be at the tenth release of awe-inspiring solar energy before exhausting supplies (assuming 150 years is even possible for oil given that consumption is now so inefficient it continued going UP during the recent global recession).
The small furry creature from Alpha Centauri is now feeling discriminated against!
Seriously, there's a lot wrong with tests - they generally measure your test-taking ability not your skill/knowledge in the subject, any test that can be passed by a simple keyword recognition system is measuring your memory only, etc - but the "problems" given are not amongst the things wrong.
It is CERTAINLY wrong not to mention evolution - if you want to take an R.E. exam, that's down the hall, third on your right, through the window. Yes, the one without stairs on the outside.
...with a lack of privacy is that there's a lack of accountability. If an institution gets incorrect data on you, it's not that institution's fault - it's not their data - and even if they fix it it will break again because the bad data is still out there. There's no central authoritative source when there's no privacy, which means that nobody is at fault when mistakes are made, and nobody is responsible for cleaning the mess up.
There's a whole raft of other problems, but I fail to see how reliable data could possibly be an impediment to anything - let alone progress. Quality and reliability are surely the pillars on which sustainable progress is achievable. Eliminate privacy, you eliminate the only means by which progress is possible.
Yeah, I know, TFA says nothing about privacy being an impediment, but TFS (the "fine" summary) does and I suspect far too many buy into the whole idea.
That seems to happen a lot. *trynottomentionwallstreet* *trynottomentionwallstreet*
The worrying thing is that it basically legitimizes patent trolling in that those wanting to organize a patent troll company now have a template to work from where they know they have a good chance of sponging lots of money and then escaping cleanly. Sure, the ending needs a little work, but most of the template is now proven solid.
Agreed. Those tend to be thinner on the ground, though, which is incredibly annoying. There's also a lot less awareness of acceleration patches and ports, which I suspect has led to a lower adoption level than would have otherwise been the case. I can't remember the last person I talked to who was aware that such software even existed.
Hardware encryption is still not widely available and Linux support for it where it does exist isn't great (drivers belong in the kernel, especially drivers you need a high level of security for, but there's so much antipathy towards encryption in the kernel that hardware drivers that merely happen to involve encryption have a very hard time of it).
As such, SSH is more CPU-intensive (unnecessarily, since a chip could offload the CPU-intensive part of the workload), which means there will be times when SSH is exactly the wrong thing to use. If you're running a Linux box in as close to hard realtime mode as possible, your admin activities must have as light a fingerprint as possible. Yes, ideally hardware encryption would be widely available and widely used, then SSH would be viable in those situations as it would be no more disruptive than any other protocol but provide the security other protocols do not.
The other case to consider is end-to-end IPSec. What is the point in encrypting traffic twice? The obvious advantage of IPSec is that everything is encrypted, from start to finish, including protocols that don't have any support for encryption. Everything is protected. Ok, not many people run all LAN and extranet connections over p2p IPSec, but they could. What does SSH buy you in those cases? If anything, there's a lot of skepticism in the crypto community towards stacking encryption because that's a much-less scrutinized case and therefore potentially less secure.
Not too many cell towers get dropped in puddles. I don't know about the airports you've been through, but it seems unlikely the routers are regularly clensed of coca cola or thrown haphazardly across rooms. Consumer electronics owned by the morons commonly referred to as "average people" are unlikely to be maintained at all (never mind well) and are very likely damaged. Most of those LI-ION battery explosions/fires you've heard of on Slashdot were due to incompetent maintenance and/or damage done by the consumer, not due to faulty design.
That's not to say I agree with, or believe in, the claims, but if electronics were to cause problems then it would be the electronics owned by the brainless wonders of the world that I'd worry about most, not the electronics owned and maintained with some semblance of passable quality.
Given that there aren't any liquid explosives capable of downing a plane, chances (remote or otherwise) aren't important factors in what goes on in these decisions,
Build it across both. The increased distance between the extreme ends of the telescope will give you a larger virtual dish (which is the whole point of the telescope) and the increase in lines of longitude mean that you get longer to observe something.
Frankly, old-timers in any field tend to be horribly conservative. In archaeology, techniques like thermofluorescence, atomic mass spectrometry, etc, are 15+ years old but are only now starting to be used -- and almost exclusively by younger generations with more flexible minds. I've been privileged to see techniques being introduced into fields like inorganic biochemistry by the brute-force of innovative thinking by people unsatisfied by existing methods.
I may have missed something but the 16T MRI appears to have only been used on rodents, but where they got hold of enough bankers to develop it, I don't know.
Not entirely true. Grains harvested in the Mesopotamian region for the past 20,000 years contain a fungus that produces potent antibiotics. This was discovered by analyzing those who drank beer (albeit over a paltry 8,000 years) and finding the residue in the bones. Once the source was traced back to the fungus, it was obvious that anyone eating grains in the Middle East since the advent of farming (20,000 years ago) will have had "modern medicine".
Before then? Well, honey is another rich source of antibiotics. It's also a hygroscopic material, so applying it to burns will not only kill bacteria but will also reduce inflammation, build-ups of toxins, etc.
It's unclear when Neolithic man first developed brain surgery, but there's no question that he did and that patients survived.
So man has had a LOT of medical assistance for a very long time. Not as much as in modern times, true, but it wasn't zero. Not by a long way.
Molecules absorb at very specific frequencies, so provided you don't emit microwave radiation at the hydroxide bond frequency or any other frequencies "reserved" by biochemistry, you should be safe enough. That means that you need to be very selective about microwave frequency components, which in turn means specific sized magnets won't be usable at all. Those not in the automatically excluded list will depend on how good you are at ensuring genuinely harmful frequencies either don't occur or don't reach the person.
Of course, it's very easy to talk about absorption bands. It's much, much harder to build very high-power devices that stay out of said bands.
Agreed. That question is one that worries a lot of climate experts because existing models have to make certain simplifying assumptions - one of which is that the climate can't leap from one "strange attractor" to another, that processes can start and stop but don't catapult between states. However, we know that chaotic systems (and the climate is a chaotic system) do indeed catapult between states. We also know that the degree of change needed for a leap is difficult to predict - there isn't a smooth division between one region of stability and another, the boundary is fractal.
James Lovelock, the developer of Gaia theory, has reached the conclusion that the leap has already taken place, that the climate is already homing in on a new, hotter, equilibrium state. I am not convinced of that, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the boundary can't be far off.
I don't know when Australia's desert conditions began, but the giant kangaroo and other now-extinct megafauna almost certainly didn't live in one. As such, man-made climate change there is a possibility.
Thanks for that! I'd remembered seeing a reference to it, but hadn't found the original article and couldn't find where I'd seen the original reference. However memory works, I need an upgrade. A 16K expansion pack should suffice.
Now, if the neuron can indeed be coded this way, it would explain why just a few rat neurons can handle a flight simulator just fine. It would also explain why current models of biological neurons always fell short of reality -- as most models had assumed neurons stored a single state. This would imply neurons can store a good deal more than that and that the "range" of states is a lot more flexible.
Technically, the FDA has already stated that 7.3T MRI is approved for clinical use, so any hold-ups between the 3T and 7.3T range is arguably in violation of their own approval process. Further, scanners for medical research using live patients do not need FDA approval and can go at high as they like, which is why there are 3-4 9.1T scanners already in use. Patients with actual clinical need can also gain access to non-approved systems, subject to all manner of waivers and disclaimers.
Improving sensitivity is good, yes, but so far most of the micro-T MRIs are useless for brain scans of live patients.
The main problem with high-T MRI is that the impact of magnetic radiation on the brain is still largely unknown. We don't know what dosage is safe, we only know what doesn't appear to kill people. On that basis, it would not surprise me if the limit went up to 9.1T at some point as that has been shown to not cause people's brains to melt and doesn't appear to cause the kinds of tumours described in the pilot episode of Space: 1999.
However, obviously I'm all for improved image quality. So long as the two approaches can be mixed without hitting diminishing returns, they should be.
Agreed. Not completely convinced on the SuperPAC, as that risks introducing spin, but absolutely we need to understand why things happen if we're to modify them and we absolutely need to make sure that things aren't swept under the rug. I recognize people change, but change cannot happen without first acknowledging that there was something to change in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as it's not a French Letter.
Doesn't that mean the DHS should be arrested?
The figure is now much closer to the 1 in 75 that the UK is reporting, which means that it's much more likely to be honestly reported. The less than half figure that the US previously claimed never rang true - it's genetic, not magic, so the incidence rate aught to reflect the gene pool you have to work with. The US and UK are genetically very similar, so the incidence rate aught to be very similar.
I would be far more interested in knowing why it has been dishonestly reported in the past and whether the now-caught willfully inaccurate reporting will lead to the various US medical boards asking serious questions. I doubt it. That kind of discrepancy can't be the result of a few bad eggs, and there's absolutely bugger all chance that they'd discipline the sheer number of pdocs that would have been required to create an error on that scale.
Silicon isn't the preferred material for solar cells, so I can ignore that part.
I specified an increase in production, so I can ignore the annual production part.
You never asked about cost, so I can ignore that part.
Solar can be reflected, so you only need a large mirror and a much smaller collecting area, so I can ignore your calculation for size.
What does that leave me with? Well, absolutely bugger all. Your claims simply aren't meaningful. They make assumptions about a methodology and a state of industry that, by definition, would not exist if solar were to be used to completely replace oil. It's like arguing that oil itself is useless as a fuel on the basis of oil production volumes in ancient Greece and the difficulty of burning tar sands in-situ. It should be obvious to anyone but a moron that the moment oil became interesting as a fuel that production went up and a more appealing form was produced.
So, by using solar tech as it was in the 80s as your starting point, what does that make you?
Agreed it's not a win under realistic assumptions. Fortunately, the challenge didn't make realistic assumptions so I could ignore all of the deficits. :) The article was ok, but made the assumption that you couldn't have relays (which solves many of the problems of absorption and beam spread, albeit at higher cost). For practical, realistic purposes, sufficient staging points would make it cost-prohibitive, I agree, but that's an economic problem and a political problem, not a technical one.
Solar on the ground is good, yes, but you need a mixed approach -- solar heaters are MUCH more efficient than solar panels in environments where it is cloudy a lot, and a big use of domestic power involves heating things (buildings, water, etc) which means no loss through energy conversion. Solar panels are good when it really is electricity you want AND when the skies are usually clear, which is fine but because it's more localized you also have to have a much better distribution grid to use it efficiently.
Solar on the ground won't produce more power on the ground than fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, at least not to the point of having people standing round in awe (the sole criterion of the challenge), but if you're willing to conserve energy a bit better then solar on the ground is quite capable of meeting all actual energy *needs* (as opposed to energy wants) for long enough for other energy sources (such as fusion) to come on-tap. As an adjunct to high-yield sources, and as an insurance against N-day blackouts (which do happen alarmingly often in Europe and the US), solar is perfectly good even in the very long term. Especially if some of the technologies promising 10x higher efficiency actually end up providing that.
The Earth receives 174 petawatts (PW) of incoming solar radiation (insolation) at the upper atmosphere. Approximately 30% is reflected back to space while the rest is absorbed by clouds, oceans and land masses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy)
Ok, so the 30% that's reflected back is free to use with zero ecological impact. That's 43.2 petawatts of zero-impact energy. The GP said "assume solar cells are 100% efficient", so I'm going to do so. (Space-based solar cells are already in use, so that's legit.) The question is how to get that energy to the Earth's surface safely.
However, the question asked was NOT "how would you do it", but "how long would it take". Building and launching that many solar panels into space, if you went at it Manhattan Project-style, might take, oh, 5 years or so. During that time, you'd need to revamp the power distribution grid 'cos this power has to be transmitted to a single location and not to multiple distribution points. In turn, that means better high-temp superconductors. With serious investment, I could see that taking maybe a decade to develop. Installation can be done simultaneous with the satellite deployment, so there's no additional time required for that.
Ok, so 15 years with serious funding of the sciences and the space industry.
So, to answer your question, we could be at the tenth release of awe-inspiring solar energy before exhausting supplies (assuming 150 years is even possible for oil given that consumption is now so inefficient it continued going UP during the recent global recession).
The small furry creature from Alpha Centauri is now feeling discriminated against!
Seriously, there's a lot wrong with tests - they generally measure your test-taking ability not your skill/knowledge in the subject, any test that can be passed by a simple keyword recognition system is measuring your memory only, etc - but the "problems" given are not amongst the things wrong.
It is CERTAINLY wrong not to mention evolution - if you want to take an R.E. exam, that's down the hall, third on your right, through the window. Yes, the one without stairs on the outside.
...with a lack of privacy is that there's a lack of accountability. If an institution gets incorrect data on you, it's not that institution's fault - it's not their data - and even if they fix it it will break again because the bad data is still out there. There's no central authoritative source when there's no privacy, which means that nobody is at fault when mistakes are made, and nobody is responsible for cleaning the mess up.
There's a whole raft of other problems, but I fail to see how reliable data could possibly be an impediment to anything - let alone progress. Quality and reliability are surely the pillars on which sustainable progress is achievable. Eliminate privacy, you eliminate the only means by which progress is possible.
Yeah, I know, TFA says nothing about privacy being an impediment, but TFS (the "fine" summary) does and I suspect far too many buy into the whole idea.
That seems to happen a lot. *trynottomentionwallstreet* *trynottomentionwallstreet*
The worrying thing is that it basically legitimizes patent trolling in that those wanting to organize a patent troll company now have a template to work from where they know they have a good chance of sponging lots of money and then escaping cleanly. Sure, the ending needs a little work, but most of the template is now proven solid.
Leave the sun out of it. They're being investigated for enough crimes as it is.
Agreed. Those tend to be thinner on the ground, though, which is incredibly annoying. There's also a lot less awareness of acceleration patches and ports, which I suspect has led to a lower adoption level than would have otherwise been the case. I can't remember the last person I talked to who was aware that such software even existed.
Hardware encryption is still not widely available and Linux support for it where it does exist isn't great (drivers belong in the kernel, especially drivers you need a high level of security for, but there's so much antipathy towards encryption in the kernel that hardware drivers that merely happen to involve encryption have a very hard time of it).
As such, SSH is more CPU-intensive (unnecessarily, since a chip could offload the CPU-intensive part of the workload), which means there will be times when SSH is exactly the wrong thing to use. If you're running a Linux box in as close to hard realtime mode as possible, your admin activities must have as light a fingerprint as possible. Yes, ideally hardware encryption would be widely available and widely used, then SSH would be viable in those situations as it would be no more disruptive than any other protocol but provide the security other protocols do not.
The other case to consider is end-to-end IPSec. What is the point in encrypting traffic twice? The obvious advantage of IPSec is that everything is encrypted, from start to finish, including protocols that don't have any support for encryption. Everything is protected. Ok, not many people run all LAN and extranet connections over p2p IPSec, but they could. What does SSH buy you in those cases? If anything, there's a lot of skepticism in the crypto community towards stacking encryption because that's a much-less scrutinized case and therefore potentially less secure.
Not too many cell towers get dropped in puddles. I don't know about the airports you've been through, but it seems unlikely the routers are regularly clensed of coca cola or thrown haphazardly across rooms. Consumer electronics owned by the morons commonly referred to as "average people" are unlikely to be maintained at all (never mind well) and are very likely damaged. Most of those LI-ION battery explosions/fires you've heard of on Slashdot were due to incompetent maintenance and/or damage done by the consumer, not due to faulty design.
That's not to say I agree with, or believe in, the claims, but if electronics were to cause problems then it would be the electronics owned by the brainless wonders of the world that I'd worry about most, not the electronics owned and maintained with some semblance of passable quality.
Given that there aren't any liquid explosives capable of downing a plane, chances (remote or otherwise) aren't important factors in what goes on in these decisions,
Build it across both. The increased distance between the extreme ends of the telescope will give you a larger virtual dish (which is the whole point of the telescope) and the increase in lines of longitude mean that you get longer to observe something.
Frankly, old-timers in any field tend to be horribly conservative. In archaeology, techniques like thermofluorescence, atomic mass spectrometry, etc, are 15+ years old but are only now starting to be used -- and almost exclusively by younger generations with more flexible minds. I've been privileged to see techniques being introduced into fields like inorganic biochemistry by the brute-force of innovative thinking by people unsatisfied by existing methods.
It may be the answer to the French Paradox! We need to conduct in-depth research. NIST should deliver all Slashdotters with a case of red each.
I may have missed something but the 16T MRI appears to have only been used on rodents, but where they got hold of enough bankers to develop it, I don't know.
Not entirely true. Grains harvested in the Mesopotamian region for the past 20,000 years contain a fungus that produces potent antibiotics. This was discovered by analyzing those who drank beer (albeit over a paltry 8,000 years) and finding the residue in the bones. Once the source was traced back to the fungus, it was obvious that anyone eating grains in the Middle East since the advent of farming (20,000 years ago) will have had "modern medicine".
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/antibiotic-beer/
Before then? Well, honey is another rich source of antibiotics. It's also a hygroscopic material, so applying it to burns will not only kill bacteria but will also reduce inflammation, build-ups of toxins, etc.
It's unclear when Neolithic man first developed brain surgery, but there's no question that he did and that patients survived.
So man has had a LOT of medical assistance for a very long time. Not as much as in modern times, true, but it wasn't zero. Not by a long way.
Molecules absorb at very specific frequencies, so provided you don't emit microwave radiation at the hydroxide bond frequency or any other frequencies "reserved" by biochemistry, you should be safe enough. That means that you need to be very selective about microwave frequency components, which in turn means specific sized magnets won't be usable at all. Those not in the automatically excluded list will depend on how good you are at ensuring genuinely harmful frequencies either don't occur or don't reach the person.
Of course, it's very easy to talk about absorption bands. It's much, much harder to build very high-power devices that stay out of said bands.
Agreed. That question is one that worries a lot of climate experts because existing models have to make certain simplifying assumptions - one of which is that the climate can't leap from one "strange attractor" to another, that processes can start and stop but don't catapult between states. However, we know that chaotic systems (and the climate is a chaotic system) do indeed catapult between states. We also know that the degree of change needed for a leap is difficult to predict - there isn't a smooth division between one region of stability and another, the boundary is fractal.
James Lovelock, the developer of Gaia theory, has reached the conclusion that the leap has already taken place, that the climate is already homing in on a new, hotter, equilibrium state. I am not convinced of that, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the boundary can't be far off.
I don't know when Australia's desert conditions began, but the giant kangaroo and other now-extinct megafauna almost certainly didn't live in one. As such, man-made climate change there is a possibility.
Thanks for that! I'd remembered seeing a reference to it, but hadn't found the original article and couldn't find where I'd seen the original reference. However memory works, I need an upgrade. A 16K expansion pack should suffice.
Now, if the neuron can indeed be coded this way, it would explain why just a few rat neurons can handle a flight simulator just fine. It would also explain why current models of biological neurons always fell short of reality -- as most models had assumed neurons stored a single state. This would imply neurons can store a good deal more than that and that the "range" of states is a lot more flexible.
My bad, it's 11T. See links below for info.
This is the existing 9T MRI with 80cm bore.
http://medgadget.com/2007/12/94_tesla_monster_mri.html
This is the whole-body 11T MRI being built
http://irfu.cea.fr/en/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/ast_visu.php?id_ast=3058
Some of the underlying technology:
http://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/print/2551
http://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/10402-software-platform-for-mri-phased-array-system-design-optimization
http://www.hfmmagazine.com/hfmmagazine_app/jsp/articledisplay.jsp?dcrpath=AHA/PubsNewsArticleGen/data/0403HFM_NEWS_Construction
http://www.aapm.org/meetings/05am/pdf/18-2826-94182-387.pdf
Technically, the FDA has already stated that 7.3T MRI is approved for clinical use, so any hold-ups between the 3T and 7.3T range is arguably in violation of their own approval process. Further, scanners for medical research using live patients do not need FDA approval and can go at high as they like, which is why there are 3-4 9.1T scanners already in use. Patients with actual clinical need can also gain access to non-approved systems, subject to all manner of waivers and disclaimers.
Improving sensitivity is good, yes, but so far most of the micro-T MRIs are useless for brain scans of live patients.
The main problem with high-T MRI is that the impact of magnetic radiation on the brain is still largely unknown. We don't know what dosage is safe, we only know what doesn't appear to kill people. On that basis, it would not surprise me if the limit went up to 9.1T at some point as that has been shown to not cause people's brains to melt and doesn't appear to cause the kinds of tumours described in the pilot episode of Space: 1999.
However, obviously I'm all for improved image quality. So long as the two approaches can be mixed without hitting diminishing returns, they should be.
Agreed. Not completely convinced on the SuperPAC, as that risks introducing spin, but absolutely we need to understand why things happen if we're to modify them and we absolutely need to make sure that things aren't swept under the rug. I recognize people change, but change cannot happen without first acknowledging that there was something to change in the first place.