You claimed there was no connection between CFS and the immune system. I provided you with my own observations from my own condition, including repeated tests. I provided you with articles from scientific journals that provided mechanisms that correlated with my personal observations.
Your counter is that those pathways could have non-immunological causes (which is true), but you did not provide observations which would indicate that those explanations are more likely than mine. What it comes down to is that you don't trust my observations. Neither did my doctor when I explained that I had conducted repeatable experiments of the effects of milk products on my system. His reply wasn't OK, let's confirm what you're saying, it was flat out "you can't be right, because it conflicts with what I've been taught". No acknowledgement of the limits of our incomplete understanding of the immune system (even if it has made huge progress since the 1980s) or the limits of stability of current immunological models since they are very complex systems and, as you indicated, affected by other factors such as stress. So yes, his approach of refusing to consider those types of observations was unscientific. It's called cherry-picking of data and confirmation bias, and you're doing it at least as much as I might be.
So you have attached great significance to the fact that you had a run of of years with colds, and then a run without colds (something that tends to happen with greater frequency as we get older and develop immunity to many of the common pathogens around us),
I guess you weren't paying attention when I indicated that, now that my CFS is in partial remission, that my susceptibility to colds and viruses is as great and constant as it was prior to me taking flu shots. This invalidates your explanation since, to the best of my knowledge and all evidence from any mirror, I have continued to get older and not suddenly rejuvenated. You have also completely ignored my observations that there was a gradual and observable transition from pure fatigue attacks to standard immune responses. I discovered this pattern early in my recovery, when the only immune system symptoms were inflamed and painful throat lymph nodes 1-2 days prior to fatigue attacks, and it was confirmed as my recovery progressed and my immune responses more gradually approached a standard immune response, so these observations were predictive.
Again, you are ignoring data points because they do not fit your preconceived expectations. That is a much bigger scientific fallacy than the fundamental limitations I was operating under in performing my observations.
In 2002, at the first peak of my illness, I also showed classic symptoms of depression (nobody could tell me what was wrong with me even though I felt like crap - it's depressing). So a lot of people recommended exercise to treat the depression and every time I tried, I triggered a massive fatigue attack. I was lucky that the one exercise that I did continue to do, social dancing, was a short interval aerobic exercise, which also produces endorphins that helped counter the depression. It helped me avoid dropping to as low an emotional and physical bottom as most other CFS patients, but every time I went dancing there was a huge negative physical impact immediately afterwards. It wasn't until I removed dairy products from my diet that my condition actually started, ever so slowly, to improve. So I had an apparent immune system-related trigger (delayed vaccination response), I didn't start seriously improving until removing immune system irritants, and had an immune-related relapse. But according to you, the immune system wasn't a factor? That's ridiculous.
Look, I'm not saying that the pathways aren't complicated and that you can't have other triggers or co-factors (chemical exposure damage/stress, physical or emotional stress), but in every one of your responses you just keep on selectively ignoring all my observations that indicate significant immunological factors because they don't match your preconceptions. That's a poor excuse for scientific process.
And not getting sick one year is hardly such an odd event that it is reasonable to assume that your immune system has been affected. That's why anecdotes of this sort are pretty much worthless
I used to get colds or viruses every winter. Lots of them, every winter without fail. For the multiple years that I took flu shots (>3), prior to getting sick with CFS, I did not get any symptoms of illnesses for the rest of the winter after receiving the flu vaccine. That's not a single coincidence, that's an established pattern with a clear demarcation point. Now that my immune system has partially recovered, I get normal colds/virus infections and symptoms regularly again.
And you are specifically blaming thimerosal, even though the amount is very small (and we now know that this particular form of mercury is rapidly eliminated), and the symptoms of your illness do not resemble the symptoms of mercury toxicity
Nope. I said some additive in the flu shot seems to have been the trigger, and that thimerosal was a possible (even leading) candidate. I also used to have lots of amalgam fillings which are known to slowly leach mercury into the body, so they may have contributed in setting up a sensitivity, or not. However I'm not dead set on it being thimerosal, just that something in the vaccine affected my immune system. If you're willing to propose a different additive in those vaccines as the root cause then I would be willing to listen, but if you completely discount my experiential evidence from the get go, then we're not going to get anywhere - which was the point in my original post.
Although it is not known whether chronic fatigue syndrome is immune related
CFS, particularly as used in the US, has no conclusive test, and is basically an umbrella category of common symptoms which may or may not have different causes. The Canadian definition is somewhat more narrow. Now here's the interesting thing: as my condition gradually improved over a number of years, I was able to notice that fatigue attacks (which initially were not associated with any other standard immune response symptoms other than dull muscle pain), gradually came to be associated with increasingly stronger immune response symptoms, starting with just pain in throat lymph glands, but eventually normalizing to more typical such as runny noses at the same time that the fatigue attack levels decreased. My system still gets messed up if I do anaerobic exercise and I have manage aerobic exercise levels carefully so I'm not completely recovered. Generally I'm much more sensitive to all kinds of stimulants including adrenaline. It's possible that elevated levels of adrenaline from those years with full-blown CFS may have created a sensitivity (sort of the opposite of insulin-tolerance in diabetics).
There have also been indications that many people with CFS have elevated levels of cytokines and that a common cause may be cytokine dysregulation. So maybe not everyone with a CFS diagnosis in the US has an immune system component, but I'm pretty certain that for myself, and many (most?) other CFS patients, there is a significant immune system component.Seriously, your attitude to CFS is very 20th century. There has been a lot of progress on research of this disease in the last 12 years and, while carefully controlled exercise has place in a rehabilitation program, much progress seems to be achieved by people who pay attention to immunological factors.
Yes and no. The problem is that they are fed so much antibiotics that most of it passes through the digestive system, into the stools. The pig manure then gets spread over fields, and the antibiotics get diluted into the groundwater. So now instead of a few pigs acting as incubators for anti-biotic resistant bacteria, you have hectares(!) of ground doing the same. That's why we now also get more and more antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that are less likely to be infecting pigs/cows/chickens.
You also might want to consider what the antibiotics in feed are doing to the animals' digestive systems. When we ingest antibiotics, it attacks our intestinal flora, reducing its effectiveness in helping digestion, and making us more prone to opportunistic infections from ingested bacteria. That's why it's generally recommended that you eat yogurt after a round of anti-biotics, to help replenish your git bacteria. It seems likely that healthy cows and pigs given antibiotcs could be similarly affected, don't you think?
Well, the first year I took the flu vaccine, my immune system was affected. Whereas I frequently used to get colds or other viruses, that year I didn't seem to get a single virus after getting the shot. That sort of thing is pretty memorable when you normally spend half your winters with a runny nose, BTW. This experience was repeated after the next year's flu shot. At the time, I thought it was great.
Then in 2001, about 1 1/2 to 2 months after taking the flu shot, my immune system went crazy and I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. After cutting out dairy in mid-2002 due to a discovery I had become extremely sensitive to milk products, I started to recover slowly until, not yet having made the connection, I got the flu vaccine again, leading after a few weeks to a major CFS relapse.
I had certainly caught the flu plenty of times prior to starting to take the flu shot, so it seems unlikely that any of the individual flu strains in the shot caused my immune system to go bonkers. So one of two things in the flu shots in 2002 and 2003 must have caused the immune dysfunctions: either the combination of the multiple viral strains in the shot, or one of the vaccine additives, of which thimerosal is the most likely candidate. I had been taking the shot for years and the viral strain mix from years earlier should have been completely different, and yet that first shot still caused significant immune system changes. Therefore the non-viral additives which stay constant over the years (and thimerosal in particular due to its mercury content) seem the most likely candidates.
Yeah, I realize I'm only an anecdote, not a statistic. However no matter how much I tried to talk to my doctor about it, he wouldn't listen. If there is systemic bias against observations that there are risks to the immune system from immunization shots, then that confirmation bias places past observations and statistics into question. It's quite possible that there is a segment of the population for whom something in vaccination shots pauses an elevated risk of immune dysfunction, but the existing medical mindset seems to be either that that segment can't exist and the possibility isn't worth consideration and investigation, or that that segment of the population can be sacrificed for the good of the rest.
" "stuffed full of antibiotics and raised in atrocious conditions"?"
please show me scientific evidences that causes any harm in the person eating the pork.
The antibiotics are because the conditions are so cramped that bacterial disease transmission is extremely common. So the factory farms (chicken, pig, cow) are huge incubators for developing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Many of the antibiotics also pass through to the stools, get diluted into the ground and groundwater, and result in an extended environment that allows for the evolution of antibiotic-resistant infections.
So does the person eating the pork get harmed directly due to ingestion? No. But when they or someone else later winds up catching an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain that evolved thanks to the massive use of antibiotics in factory farming of meat animals? Yes.
I'm pretty sure BC used to have the same thing in 70s because I remember them in use at that time, yet didn't touch foot in Ontario until decades later. Those bags seems to have gone out of use since. That might be due to a recycling issue. The bags use less plastic than the gallon jugs, but the plastic in the bags might not be the recyclable type.
They probably figured it out based on the pattern and quantity of ejecta. i.e. to launch boulder of this size this distance and to cover this area with this much ash then, assuming the lava reservoir was roughly the same size as it, the pressure needed to be X.
Questions about vaccinations were actually valid when it came to mercury in thiomersal. However with that preserving agent no longer in use in Western countries (with the exception of multi-dose flu vaccine vials, and increasingly being banned in 3rd world countries as well), those concerns are far less valid. Nevertheless, for some diseases, vaccinations are justified on the basis of rare complications yet those complications become almost non-existent with good nutrition. It's not unreasonable to ask whether the potential risks of unnecessarily stressing the immune system outweigh the diminishing benefits for those specific cases.
Concerns regarding the necessity and justification for vaccines applies to a small subset of the recommended vaccination list. Yet with increasing prevalence of immune-dysfunction related diseases, it's a question that is scientifically significant but is being ignored for two reasons: a) a concern of a slippery slope that acknowledgement of the issue will needlessly feed fears and avoidance of vaccines where there is significant demonstrable benefit, and b) the substantial financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies involved.
Laser-launched solar sails have an old history. While Robert Forward probably explored the concept more deeply than anyone, he wasn't the first. I'm pretty sure I remember a Niven story in the 70s (perhaps one of the Draco's Tavern stories in Convergent Series?) where alien traders drop by our solar system, trade lots of science, technology, and art with humans in exchange for us building laser launchers to send them on their way to their next stop. Now powering those laser launchers would be a big challenge. You can't put it on Mercury because it's not tidally locked to the sun after all. However if you do use a fission reactor to power the lasers, then at least you don't have to accelerate a big heavy fission reactor to a significant fraction of the speed of light, only the crew craft.
I suspect it's not so much the machine as sourcing the power to run the lights. It might be better now that you can use LEDs with a lower power drain rather than back when you had to use incandescents. The other thing is that you wouldn't need just traffic lights, you would also need cameras so that people are aware that if they speed through the construction zone and somebody gets hurt as a result, that there will be a record of which car sped through.
You could probably get an electrician to pull the power out of the streets lighting, but then you would need to pay rates for a skill tradesman for a good chunk of a day, plus transit between sites if he moved between sites in an area to maximize use of his time. You would also need to have the electrician disconnect the equipment at night for it to be put away so that it wouldn't be stolen or so that some idiot passerby doesn't electrocute themselves and sue the city/county/contractor. When conditions/road space allow, you get two trucks with those large moving bulb/LED arrrows that are powered by large solar panels and truck batteries. In the peak summer construction season, it's probably just cheaper to pay the lowest wage you can get away with for two people with signs rather than buy some extra trucks that would sit idle for 4/5 of the year. You can find something else for those sign carriers to do during the winter, or they can go back to school.
But stretching this train of thought, I wonder who would be jurors in a mass murder case.
I guess it would depend on the murder weapon. Stabbing? Cooks, meat/fish packers, and surgeons. Axes? Lumberjacks. Gun? Veterans of police/armed forces, and hunters. Poison? Chemists, pharmacists, and doctors. Blunt object? depends on the object.
The point of the patent system is to allow inventors time to recuperate their investment costs and earn a profit from their invention. It is supposed to protect inventors from more moneyed interests stealing their idea and using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures to out-compete the inventor without any research expenditures because such an outcome would discourage invention. If the patent system only protects the interest of the rich, then it fails at the core goal of acting as an inducement for invention.
Instead it just acts as an additional barrier to entry protecting established actors and has the opposite effect of the intended goal. Established actors don't have as much of an incentive to invest in the production of innovations that could disturb their market position. Some obvious examples would be Kodak and Microsoft.
Not to mention, if you want to see real treason, you need look no further than the Obama administration, which leaked information about the Osama bin Laden raid to try and shore up support for his reelection.
This article seems to pretty clearly refute arguments that Obama's administration was the source of those leaks.
That region was good at science and Math when the _governments_ were Islamist, but a significant percentage of the population was still Christian (much of the region was Christian before Mohamed took over).
"Citation needed". Because as far as I know, a big portion of Persia used to be Zoroastrian prior to the rise of Islam, and Zoroastrianism is not a Christian sect.
I think the GP's point was more related to breastfeeding, where the greatest benefit to an infant is in the first six months. While it is possible for a woman to pump at work and have the man feed the baby breast milk from a bottle at home, it's much easier for the woman to breast-feed the baby directly, and provides better time utilization of the combined parents' time. Realistically, after the breast feeding period, either parent could raise the offspring equally well. You can extend the breast feeding period longer than 6 months of course, but that initial period provides the best improvement in terms of growth and brain development.
I have yet to see an atheistic uprising/rebellion occur, and if/when it does, I will be just as worried about the possibility of a Secular Tyranny emerging from the ashes of rebellion as I would a Religious one.
Surely you've heard of two. They were called the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Yeah, they don't seem to work too well either, for exactly the reasons you point out. It seems to take at least a few reboot cycles to get to a metastable state and you need a strong middle class for that to happen.
It's a cultural problem where Middle Eastern cultures foster the belief that successful men work in business, not in STEM fields. The USA is starting to turn that way as well, based on everyone's observations of who are making the.most money and how the corporate environment, tax code, and laws benefit them.
It's a supply-demand curve problem where the STEM work isn't sufficiently rewarded in comparison to substitutes. Iran are trying to legally restrict supply of female university students. That won't substantially help with their supply for male STEM students, it's only going to cause an overall STEM professional supply problem in the long run. But hey, they're clerics, not economists.
True, but at least one of your choices is a poor one. Type II diabetes, the most common one these days, is primarily due to dietary causes, not genetic ones. As for special dietary requirements, celiac/gluten free has a genetic component but many others are suspected to be environmentally caused.
Oh, and in case that didn't make it clear enough, the point is that it isn't the responsibility of the sample members to make sure that the statistics are representative of the population. It's the responsibility of the data collector / statistician to make sure that his data collection and processing for the sample data provides an accurate representation of the population.
If you collect statistics, then you need to make sure that the sample you are collecting is representative of the population. Otherwise your statistics are invalid. This is basic statistics (and something to keep in mind for poller "Internet Panels" that try to measure anything to do with the general population rather than the Internet using population).
If your sample isn't representative of the population then you need to adjust your results by weighing so that your sample statistics correspond closer to those in the population. Now, maybe Microsoft tried to do something like that but, since there isn't any kind of baseline questionaire when you agree to let them get feedback, it would be pretty difficult for them to establish weighing categories for the sample that can be adjusted to match corresponding category proportions in the Windows user population.
Slashdot Mirror
You claimed there was no connection between CFS and the immune system. I provided you with my own observations from my own condition, including repeated tests. I provided you with articles from scientific journals that provided mechanisms that correlated with my personal observations.
Your counter is that those pathways could have non-immunological causes (which is true), but you did not provide observations which would indicate that those explanations are more likely than mine. What it comes down to is that you don't trust my observations. Neither did my doctor when I explained that I had conducted repeatable experiments of the effects of milk products on my system. His reply wasn't OK, let's confirm what you're saying, it was flat out "you can't be right, because it conflicts with what I've been taught". No acknowledgement of the limits of our incomplete understanding of the immune system (even if it has made huge progress since the 1980s) or the limits of stability of current immunological models since they are very complex systems and, as you indicated, affected by other factors such as stress. So yes, his approach of refusing to consider those types of observations was unscientific. It's called cherry-picking of data and confirmation bias, and you're doing it at least as much as I might be.
I guess you weren't paying attention when I indicated that, now that my CFS is in partial remission, that my susceptibility to colds and viruses is as great and constant as it was prior to me taking flu shots. This invalidates your explanation since, to the best of my knowledge and all evidence from any mirror, I have continued to get older and not suddenly rejuvenated. You have also completely ignored my observations that there was a gradual and observable transition from pure fatigue attacks to standard immune responses. I discovered this pattern early in my recovery, when the only immune system symptoms were inflamed and painful throat lymph nodes 1-2 days prior to fatigue attacks, and it was confirmed as my recovery progressed and my immune responses more gradually approached a standard immune response, so these observations were predictive.
Again, you are ignoring data points because they do not fit your preconceived expectations. That is a much bigger scientific fallacy than the fundamental limitations I was operating under in performing my observations.
In 2002, at the first peak of my illness, I also showed classic symptoms of depression (nobody could tell me what was wrong with me even though I felt like crap - it's depressing). So a lot of people recommended exercise to treat the depression and every time I tried, I triggered a massive fatigue attack. I was lucky that the one exercise that I did continue to do, social dancing, was a short interval aerobic exercise, which also produces endorphins that helped counter the depression. It helped me avoid dropping to as low an emotional and physical bottom as most other CFS patients, but every time I went dancing there was a huge negative physical impact immediately afterwards. It wasn't until I removed dairy products from my diet that my condition actually started, ever so slowly, to improve. So I had an apparent immune system-related trigger (delayed vaccination response), I didn't start seriously improving until removing immune system irritants, and had an immune-related relapse. But according to you, the immune system wasn't a factor? That's ridiculous.
Look, I'm not saying that the pathways aren't complicated and that you can't have other triggers or co-factors (chemical exposure damage/stress, physical or emotional stress), but in every one of your responses you just keep on selectively ignoring all my observations that indicate significant immunological factors because they don't match your preconceptions. That's a poor excuse for scientific process.
Aw, heck. Just Google it.
Another link
I used to get colds or viruses every winter. Lots of them, every winter without fail. For the multiple years that I took flu shots (>3), prior to getting sick with CFS, I did not get any symptoms of illnesses for the rest of the winter after receiving the flu vaccine. That's not a single coincidence, that's an established pattern with a clear demarcation point. Now that my immune system has partially recovered, I get normal colds/virus infections and symptoms regularly again.
Nope. I said some additive in the flu shot seems to have been the trigger, and that thimerosal was a possible (even leading) candidate. I also used to have lots of amalgam fillings which are known to slowly leach mercury into the body, so they may have contributed in setting up a sensitivity, or not. However I'm not dead set on it being thimerosal, just that something in the vaccine affected my immune system. If you're willing to propose a different additive in those vaccines as the root cause then I would be willing to listen, but if you completely discount my experiential evidence from the get go, then we're not going to get anywhere - which was the point in my original post.
CFS, particularly as used in the US, has no conclusive test, and is basically an umbrella category of common symptoms which may or may not have different causes. The Canadian definition is somewhat more narrow. Now here's the interesting thing: as my condition gradually improved over a number of years, I was able to notice that fatigue attacks (which initially were not associated with any other standard immune response symptoms other than dull muscle pain), gradually came to be associated with increasingly stronger immune response symptoms, starting with just pain in throat lymph glands, but eventually normalizing to more typical such as runny noses at the same time that the fatigue attack levels decreased. My system still gets messed up if I do anaerobic exercise and I have manage aerobic exercise levels carefully so I'm not completely recovered. Generally I'm much more sensitive to all kinds of stimulants including adrenaline. It's possible that elevated levels of adrenaline from those years with full-blown CFS may have created a sensitivity (sort of the opposite of insulin-tolerance in diabetics).
There have also been indications that many people with CFS have elevated levels of cytokines and that a common cause may be cytokine dysregulation. So maybe not everyone with a CFS diagnosis in the US has an immune system component, but I'm pretty certain that for myself, and many (most?) other CFS patients, there is a significant immune system component.Seriously, your attitude to CFS is very 20th century. There has been a lot of progress on research of this disease in the last 12 years and, while carefully controlled exercise has place in a rehabilitation program, much progress seems to be achieved by people who pay attention to immunological factors.
Yes and no. The problem is that they are fed so much antibiotics that most of it passes through the digestive system, into the stools. The pig manure then gets spread over fields, and the antibiotics get diluted into the groundwater. So now instead of a few pigs acting as incubators for anti-biotic resistant bacteria, you have hectares(!) of ground doing the same. That's why we now also get more and more antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that are less likely to be infecting pigs/cows/chickens.
You also might want to consider what the antibiotics in feed are doing to the animals' digestive systems. When we ingest antibiotics, it attacks our intestinal flora, reducing its effectiveness in helping digestion, and making us more prone to opportunistic infections from ingested bacteria. That's why it's generally recommended that you eat yogurt after a round of anti-biotics, to help replenish your git bacteria. It seems likely that healthy cows and pigs given antibiotcs could be similarly affected, don't you think?
Well, the first year I took the flu vaccine, my immune system was affected. Whereas I frequently used to get colds or other viruses, that year I didn't seem to get a single virus after getting the shot. That sort of thing is pretty memorable when you normally spend half your winters with a runny nose, BTW. This experience was repeated after the next year's flu shot. At the time, I thought it was great.
Then in 2001, about 1 1/2 to 2 months after taking the flu shot, my immune system went crazy and I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. After cutting out dairy in mid-2002 due to a discovery I had become extremely sensitive to milk products, I started to recover slowly until, not yet having made the connection, I got the flu vaccine again, leading after a few weeks to a major CFS relapse.
I had certainly caught the flu plenty of times prior to starting to take the flu shot, so it seems unlikely that any of the individual flu strains in the shot caused my immune system to go bonkers. So one of two things in the flu shots in 2002 and 2003 must have caused the immune dysfunctions: either the combination of the multiple viral strains in the shot, or one of the vaccine additives, of which thimerosal is the most likely candidate. I had been taking the shot for years and the viral strain mix from years earlier should have been completely different, and yet that first shot still caused significant immune system changes. Therefore the non-viral additives which stay constant over the years (and thimerosal in particular due to its mercury content) seem the most likely candidates.
Yeah, I realize I'm only an anecdote, not a statistic. However no matter how much I tried to talk to my doctor about it, he wouldn't listen. If there is systemic bias against observations that there are risks to the immune system from immunization shots, then that confirmation bias places past observations and statistics into question. It's quite possible that there is a segment of the population for whom something in vaccination shots pauses an elevated risk of immune dysfunction, but the existing medical mindset seems to be either that that segment can't exist and the possibility isn't worth consideration and investigation, or that that segment of the population can be sacrificed for the good of the rest.
The antibiotics are because the conditions are so cramped that bacterial disease transmission is extremely common. So the factory farms (chicken, pig, cow) are huge incubators for developing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Many of the antibiotics also pass through to the stools, get diluted into the ground and groundwater, and result in an extended environment that allows for the evolution of antibiotic-resistant infections.
So does the person eating the pork get harmed directly due to ingestion? No. But when they or someone else later winds up catching an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain that evolved thanks to the massive use of antibiotics in factory farming of meat animals? Yes.
I'm pretty sure BC used to have the same thing in 70s because I remember them in use at that time, yet didn't touch foot in Ontario until decades later. Those bags seems to have gone out of use since. That might be due to a recycling issue. The bags use less plastic than the gallon jugs, but the plastic in the bags might not be the recyclable type.
...was roughly the same size as today,...
They probably figured it out based on the pattern and quantity of ejecta. i.e. to launch boulder of this size this distance and to cover this area with this much ash then, assuming the lava reservoir was roughly the same size as it, the pressure needed to be X.
Questions about vaccinations were actually valid when it came to mercury in thiomersal. However with that preserving agent no longer in use in Western countries (with the exception of multi-dose flu vaccine vials, and increasingly being banned in 3rd world countries as well), those concerns are far less valid. Nevertheless, for some diseases, vaccinations are justified on the basis of rare complications yet those complications become almost non-existent with good nutrition. It's not unreasonable to ask whether the potential risks of unnecessarily stressing the immune system outweigh the diminishing benefits for those specific cases.
Concerns regarding the necessity and justification for vaccines applies to a small subset of the recommended vaccination list. Yet with increasing prevalence of immune-dysfunction related diseases, it's a question that is scientifically significant but is being ignored for two reasons: a) a concern of a slippery slope that acknowledgement of the issue will needlessly feed fears and avoidance of vaccines where there is significant demonstrable benefit, and b) the substantial financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies involved.
Laser-launched solar sails have an old history. While Robert Forward probably explored the concept more deeply than anyone, he wasn't the first. I'm pretty sure I remember a Niven story in the 70s (perhaps one of the Draco's Tavern stories in Convergent Series?) where alien traders drop by our solar system, trade lots of science, technology, and art with humans in exchange for us building laser launchers to send them on their way to their next stop. Now powering those laser launchers would be a big challenge. You can't put it on Mercury because it's not tidally locked to the sun after all. However if you do use a fission reactor to power the lasers, then at least you don't have to accelerate a big heavy fission reactor to a significant fraction of the speed of light, only the crew craft.
I suspect it's not so much the machine as sourcing the power to run the lights. It might be better now that you can use LEDs with a lower power drain rather than back when you had to use incandescents. The other thing is that you wouldn't need just traffic lights, you would also need cameras so that people are aware that if they speed through the construction zone and somebody gets hurt as a result, that there will be a record of which car sped through.
You could probably get an electrician to pull the power out of the streets lighting, but then you would need to pay rates for a skill tradesman for a good chunk of a day, plus transit between sites if he moved between sites in an area to maximize use of his time. You would also need to have the electrician disconnect the equipment at night for it to be put away so that it wouldn't be stolen or so that some idiot passerby doesn't electrocute themselves and sue the city/county/contractor. When conditions/road space allow, you get two trucks with those large moving bulb/LED arrrows that are powered by large solar panels and truck batteries. In the peak summer construction season, it's probably just cheaper to pay the lowest wage you can get away with for two people with signs rather than buy some extra trucks that would sit idle for 4/5 of the year. You can find something else for those sign carriers to do during the winter, or they can go back to school.
I guess it would depend on the murder weapon. Stabbing? Cooks, meat/fish packers, and surgeons. Axes? Lumberjacks. Gun? Veterans of police/armed forces, and hunters. Poison? Chemists, pharmacists, and doctors. Blunt object? depends on the object.
Hmm. Then again, maybe not.
The point of the patent system is to allow inventors time to recuperate their investment costs and earn a profit from their invention. It is supposed to protect inventors from more moneyed interests stealing their idea and using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures to out-compete the inventor without any research expenditures because such an outcome would discourage invention. If the patent system only protects the interest of the rich, then it fails at the core goal of acting as an inducement for invention.
Instead it just acts as an additional barrier to entry protecting established actors and has the opposite effect of the intended goal. Established actors don't have as much of an incentive to invest in the production of innovations that could disturb their market position. Some obvious examples would be Kodak and Microsoft.
This article seems to pretty clearly refute arguments that Obama's administration was the source of those leaks.
"Citation needed". Because as far as I know, a big portion of Persia used to be Zoroastrian prior to the rise of Islam, and Zoroastrianism is not a Christian sect.
I think the GP's point was more related to breastfeeding, where the greatest benefit to an infant is in the first six months. While it is possible for a woman to pump at work and have the man feed the baby breast milk from a bottle at home, it's much easier for the woman to breast-feed the baby directly, and provides better time utilization of the combined parents' time. Realistically, after the breast feeding period, either parent could raise the offspring equally well. You can extend the breast feeding period longer than 6 months of course, but that initial period provides the best improvement in terms of growth and brain development.
Surely you've heard of two. They were called the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Yeah, they don't seem to work too well either, for exactly the reasons you point out. It seems to take at least a few reboot cycles to get to a metastable state and you need a strong middle class for that to happen.
It's a cultural problem where Middle Eastern cultures foster the belief that successful men work in business, not in STEM fields. The USA is starting to turn that way as well, based on everyone's observations of who are making the.most money and how the corporate environment, tax code, and laws benefit them.
It's a supply-demand curve problem where the STEM work isn't sufficiently rewarded in comparison to substitutes. Iran are trying to legally restrict supply of female university students. That won't substantially help with their supply for male STEM students, it's only going to cause an overall STEM professional supply problem in the long run. But hey, they're clerics, not economists.
True, but at least one of your choices is a poor one. Type II diabetes, the most common one these days, is primarily due to dietary causes, not genetic ones. As for special dietary requirements, celiac/gluten free has a genetic component but many others are suspected to be environmentally caused.
Oh, and in case that didn't make it clear enough, the point is that it isn't the responsibility of the sample members to make sure that the statistics are representative of the population. It's the responsibility of the data collector / statistician to make sure that his data collection and processing for the sample data provides an accurate representation of the population.
If you collect statistics, then you need to make sure that the sample you are collecting is representative of the population. Otherwise your statistics are invalid. This is basic statistics (and something to keep in mind for poller "Internet Panels" that try to measure anything to do with the general population rather than the Internet using population).
If your sample isn't representative of the population then you need to adjust your results by weighing so that your sample statistics correspond closer to those in the population. Now, maybe Microsoft tried to do something like that but, since there isn't any kind of baseline questionaire when you agree to let them get feedback, it would be pretty difficult for them to establish weighing categories for the sample that can be adjusted to match corresponding category proportions in the Windows user population.
Sheepdogs have problems watching what wolves do, and yet aren't sheep either.