You better not bring up some bullshit about mitochondrian DNA, since there was nothing in the grandparent's post that excluded the poster from being female.
Actually, it's unlikely that the grandparent post was referring to a female sperm donor being tracked down by her offspring.
Men contribute less than half of nuclear DNA to a male child (and the kid in the article is a boy) because there is significantly less DNA in the Y chromosome than in the X.
The point of CNC machining is precision down to the tenth or half-tenth thousand.
That's just not true. I do a lot of CNC at 0.005" or coarser tolerances. CNC is also great for turning out lots of repetitive work (drilling and tapping thousands of holes for optical breadboards, turning out dozens of widgets). CNC is also good for complex curves. On the other hand, if I'm machinging rectalinear or circular surfaces and want 0.00001" tolerances, I can do as well by hand with a good solid machine. That way, I can set up compound slides to give me good precision and measure between each cut.
Just because some CNC machines are good for some high-precision work doesn't mean either that CNC is the best way to do any precision job or that CNC is only valuable for doing precision work. CNC can be hugely useful for some loose-tolerance work and some high-tolerance work is better done manually. It's often a question of whether it's faster to create and check the routing code or to cut manually.
As to the technocracy argument, I can't see how you can have a centrally planned economy without that.
Exactly. I argue that centrally planning and democracy are fundamentally opposed. Marx said nothing about central planning, but Lenin and Stalin loved it because they did not want a democracy: once they had the power to themselves they didn't want to share it.
There's no fundamental reason you couldn't have a democratically controlled economy, as opposed to a centrally planned one, but it doesn't seem feasible. On the other hand, it's also important to note that many champions of the free market, such as Ayn Rand, prefer anarchy to democracy because democracy restricts individual freedom of choice. Consider, for instance, the democratic support for Jim Crow laws in the American South. Less rabid than Rand are Hamilton, Jay, and Madison; particularly Federalist X, which warns that too much democracy can lead to tyrrany by the majority and rule by faction.
Personally, I prefer democracy even with all its warts.
No one voted on the price of anything, or even on the experts that would set prices.
Thanks for the fascinating historical account. I don't know anything about Indian economic history and it's great of you to present this tidbit to whet my appetite for reading up on the subject.
I would only quibble that strictly speaking, this sort of arrangement is closer to a technocracy (government by experts) than a democracy. At best, India is a republic, in the sense of the word introduced in the early days of the United States, or a representative democracy (Mill's term). The distinction is very important because of questions of accountability when the exercise of power is delegated.
The problem, as I see it is more than bandwidth: it really is about accountability. When the power to set prices is delegated, the motives of the agent to whom the power is delegated may differ from those of the principal who delegates them. This gives rise to so-called non-market failures in bureaucratic institutions, which policy analysts call "shirking."
Bandwidth considerations (or bounded rationality, if you will) prohibit direct democratic economic planning and delegating the planning to technocrats, whether elected or appointed, introduces serious problems with accountability. The accountability problems may not be insuperable, but they are real as any historical study of centrally planned economies will demonstrate.
It costs me about 10 cents in syrup, ice, and equipment depreciation. I decide to charge 25 cents for a snow cone. Is that OK in your communist democracy? Is that pricing and production level completely my choice as a free individual?
It's a democracy. The People would vote on what you could charge. In a democracy, you have to do what a majority of the people vote for, whether you personally like it or not.
The system you seem to like is called anarchy, where everyone gets to make his own choice as a free individual.
No, the real problem are patents and patented organisms in general...
How so? If we ban GM, patents will be irrelevant. Patents are only a problem if we accept that there WILL be GM organisms, so they are relevant only to the question HOW we should manage GM crops, not the question WHETHER to permit genetic modification of crops in the first place.
Issues with these foods intermingling with other crops via pollen transfer.
Seeds from crops that are genetically modified can be rendered "sterile," by design, thus preventing farmers from creating "seed banks."
Anti-GM: The greatest danger of GM crops is that there will be too many of them. They will spread and mingle their modified genes with wild plants and other crops.
Pro-GM: We can make sure that our GM crops are sterile. Then there's no way for this to happen.
Anti-GM: Now the greatest danger of GM crops is that there will not be enough of them. Poor farmers will be shut out from the bounty of GM.
Confused bystander: So is the problem with GM crops that there will be too much or too little of them?
I don't care if those deaths occur in Libya or Long Island, Kenya to Kansas, Pretoria to Peoria. Do we need 'em all? Did we need me to live? Are we overpopulated?
It's been consistently demonstrated that reducing infant mortality is the first step to reducing fertility rates and thus stabilizing population. It's no coincidence that population grows the slowest in nations that have low infant mortality. Check Joel Cohen's How Many People Can The Earth Support? for details.
I was too snide in my comments, and for that I owe the poster an apology.
But my major point stands. The source is someone posting to slashdot, claiming privileged information that is not subject to independent verification, telling us to trust him because he's part of a government agency (specifically the military).
Just because someone is a government functionary does not mean that I trust him when he makes claims based on evidence that's not available for scrutiny. I'm not saying that I lose sleep worrying about GPS, but that I don't find the argument, "If the military isn't worried, neither should you be" even remotely persuasive.
In other words, if the military isn't worried about it, neither should we be.
I just love it when someone says, "I'm from the government. Trust me."
Capturing Osama bin Laden and building a functioning democracy in Iraq are even greater priorities for the military than maintaining GPS operations. According to the Commander in Chief, things are going swimmingly on both of those fronts so if I follow this logic, if the military is not worried about Iraq or Osama, neither should we be.
Rydberg's constant (about 11 inverse microns) tells us about the emission spectrum of hydrogen atoms and other related quantities. The R in PV = nRT is the ideal gas constant (about 8.3 Joules per mole-Kelvin), which is the product of Avogadro's number and the Boltzmann constant.
WTF is the FIRE department doing with a volt/amp meter? Most (cheap) volt meters don't measure past 1000 volts AC/DC.
Just to amplify your comment, most (cheap) volt meters have too low a resistance to measure potential on a tiny capacitor, such as a human body (~250 pF), because the voltmeter would discharge the capacitor before it could get a reading.
Someone else replied about measuring downed power lines, but that would: (a) not require a voltmeter to read over 1000 volts and (b) not require an ultra-high-impedance static-charge electrometer.
BTW, let's do the numbers: 40,000 volts across a 250 pF capacitor would have potential energy of 1/2 CV^2 = 0.2 Joules. If you think that 0.2 Joules is enough energy to melt macroscopic amounts of plastic or burn carpet, much less almost enough to incinerate a human body, I have a hot investment tip for you.
If you take Econ beyond the freshman level, you'll discover that intellectual property is nonrival, so it doesn't satisfy the supply-demand relations that characterize the market for steel. This means that you can't apply a simplistic supply-demand argument about the profits at equilibrium. The whole point of a patent system is to prevent these nonrival goods from becoming nonexclusive and hence public. In other words, the monopoly status of a patent-holder is not a bug, but a feature.
Indeed, when patents expire competition drives the cost of generic drugs down so they're much cheaper in the US than in Canada or Europe. Most people don't need super-expensive brand-name drugs. There are lots of effective, safe generics out there.
Big pharma is not always involved anyway. Where the new technology is clinical tests rather than drugs, a small startup can usually market the invention itself. Some of these startups are criticised in the Fortune piece. It's a small startup company, not a big pharma, that's getting more than $2000 in royalties for each patient tested for BRCA-1 and -2 mutations; Another small company, Chiron pretty much owns the Hepatitis C genome, so it has a lock on tests for Hep-C infections, which is why they're so expensive.
The main restriction to new players entering the drug market (as opposed to the clinical test market) to compete with big pharma is the cost of doing clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy. The best way to open the market up would be to remove government (FDA) regulation of drugs.
We tried it back before the FDA existed and too many people were dying from taking unproven drugs.
In any event, the main beneficiaries of Bayh-Dole are not big pharma but little pharma---small startups who take the ideas from the university lab and develop them into potentially useful drugs. There is a very active venture-capital market to invest in these small startups (Techno-Venture Management, etc.)
If the initial tests are promising, then even with a healthy dose of VC, the small players are not set up to do massive phase-III clinical trials, large-scale manufacturing, and marketing, so at this point, they usually sell out to a big pharma house and collect a large paycheck for the VC investors.
How would this change if Congress, rather than the private market, supplied the capital to the startups?
No. The Bayh-Dole act was not trying to stimulate inventing. Bayh and Dole recognized that there was lots of great inventing going on before they introduced their bill.
The problem they were trying to address was that lots of these patented inventions were not being produced and marketed because although inventors may invent things for free, companies will only produce and sell something if they can make money.
The big problem Bayh-Dole attempts to address is that a pharmaceutical company is unlikely invest tens of millions of dollars on clinical trials to verify the safety and efficacy of a newly-invented drug if the company does not have exclusive patent rights.
New processes like Gasification of coal allow it to be burnt significantly cleaner, with significantly less water consumption and a much lower amount of mecury released. Tack onto that the ease and economy of scale to impliment carbon scrubbers, filters, and new technology on a few hundred massive coal burning plants across the US as opposed to hundreds of millions of cars.
No coal fired plants have carbon scrubbers and there's no plan to install them any time soon because carbon sequestration does not exist and will not exist for decades. Until it does, burning gasoline will be much more greenhouse-friendly than burning coal.
Current coal technology (not talking about 150 years ago) is very dirty. That's why there's all the controversy over the President's "Clear Skies Act."
I'd love to see wind developed.
I'd also love to see coal cleaned up.
In the meantime it would be much more environmentally friendly to let cars continue to burn relatively clean gasoline and focus on cleaning up the hundreds of dirty coal plants that are currently generating electricity for the grid. That would get you much more environmental benefit than worrying about hydrogen cars.
After you have cleaned up the coal-fired electric plants then we can think about hydrogen cars.
To make hydrogen you do not make electricity from coal and electrolyze water. That's incredibly inefficient. You burn coal in the presence of water vapor (coal gasification). The carbon grabs oxygen from the water, producing CO and leaves hydrogen behind. This is much more energy efficient.
Megajoule for megajoule, steam reformation of coal into hydrogen is much cheaper than electrolysis from wind power.
As to controlling emissions, we have zero technology to control CO2 emissions from coal plants and a megajoule of hydrogen produced from coal produces many times as much CO2 as a megajoule of gasoline burned in an internal combustion engine.
Moreover gasoline simply does not have mercury, so it's easier to control mercury emissions from automobile tailpipes (do nothing) than from coal burning facilities (expensive filters/scrubbers).
Finally, as I said before, the environmental impact of coal mines is thousands of times worse than the impact of oil wells.
even if we are getting hydrogen by using energy created at centralized coal processing plants we are still creating less polution then everyone running gas.
How do you figure this? Coal is more carbon-intensive than gasoline, so burning coal to produce hydrogen puts more CO2 into the air than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline.
Coal also produced more sulfur and mercury emissions than gasoline and creates toxic and caustic ash that must be disposed of.
Finally, coal mines cause more environmental damage, especially via acid runoff, than oil wells.
High prices are a form of rationing - it's just dependent upon individual choices instead of governmental fiat.
New Orleans tried a free-market approach to rationing transportation out of the city during the evacuation and it didn't work so well.
If the government had stepped in and interfered with the free market for transportation, many lives could have been saved. Even if saving these lives would not have been Pareto optimal, it certainly would have been better than what did happen.
how many of the people trapped in New Orleans were agriculturalists? I suspect none.
New Orleans is built on a flood plain not because of agriculture but shipping. If you're going to build a deep water port on the Mississippi river, you need to do so near the water.
At the very least, stop taxing everyone else to subsidize flood insurance for people who insist on building in flood-prone areas.
If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves.
Get with the times. For almost three decades the federal law has specified that houses built after 1975 pay actuarial rates for federal flood insurance, so FEMA breaks even. There is no taxpayer subsidy on these houses.
The problem for older houses is more difficult. Suppose you built your house when an area was not flood-prone, but then the Corps of Engineers built levees upstream that channeled other people's floods onto your doorstep? Now you live in a floodplain because of someone else's action. Is it your fault that someone else built levees or paved over wetlands?
In the case of New Orleans, they have mostly themselves to blame for the flood hazard---the city has been subsiding because of the levees and pumping out ground water and has been perhaps the most active supporter of building levees and channelizing the Mississippi---but people living elsewhere, such as on the Bayous, are suffering from the environmental effects of the federal government's decisions about managing the river and thus deserve some relief.
That you think a scientist's knowledge of economics would be relevent to his opinions about the nature of climate change says a lot.
In a profound paper, "The Resolution of Technically Intensive Public Policy Disputes," [Science, Technology and Human Values 9(1), 39-50 (1984).] political scientist Harvey Brooks noted that when experts on nuclear energy were polled about three questions:
How quickly is demand for electricity likely to rise over the next 20 years?
How great are the reserves of high-grade uranium ore?
How quickly will the cost to produce photovoltaic cells drop?
their opinions clustered. Although there is no reason for the demand for the supply of uranium to affect the cost of making of photovoltaics or vice-versa, almost all scientists believed either that
electricity demand would rise quickly,
that uranium was in short supply,
and that photovoltaics would remain expensive
or else
that electricity demand would rise slowly,
that uranium was plentiful,
and that photovoltaics would quickly drop in cost.
Further interviews found that opinions on these three scientific questions (scientific in the sense that predictions could be proved true or false by comparing them to what actually transpired) correlated strongly with political opinions about the desirability of building fast breeder reactors: those in the first camp (high demand, little uranium, expensive solar power) favored a crash program to build lots of breeder reactors while those in the second camp (moderate demand, plentiful uranium, cheap solar power) tended to oppose a crash program to build breeder reactors.
This illustrates the extent to which, in cases where hypotheses cannot be conclusively proved or disproved (i.e., in Alvin Weinberg's term, the hypotheses are trans-scientific), scientists' opinions about purely scientific matters are inevitably colored by their political positions. This effect has been seen in many other cases, but Brooks was one of the first to identify it.
Old people get hip fractures, because they are SICK and debilitated. 50% of old people who get a hip fracture wind up dying within a year, not from the fracture, but because they are already dying.
Actually, a large fraction of hip fractures occur because bones are weak from osteoporosis not systemic disease. Following hip fracture, bed rest causes further muscular atrophy and also inhibits clearing the lungs and airways, which sets the stage for acute pneumonia in people who were not particularly sick before the fracture.
Regular strength training can reduce osteoporosis, strengthen muscles and bone, and thus prevent hip fractures and their sequellae.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's unlikely that the grandparent post was referring to a female sperm donor being tracked down by her offspring.
Men contribute less than half of nuclear DNA to a male child (and the kid in the article is a boy) because there is significantly less DNA in the Y chromosome than in the X.
That's just not true. I do a lot of CNC at 0.005" or coarser tolerances. CNC is also great for turning out lots of repetitive work (drilling and tapping thousands of holes for optical breadboards, turning out dozens of widgets). CNC is also good for complex curves. On the other hand, if I'm machinging rectalinear or circular surfaces and want 0.00001" tolerances, I can do as well by hand with a good solid machine. That way, I can set up compound slides to give me good precision and measure between each cut.
Just because some CNC machines are good for some high-precision work doesn't mean either that CNC is the best way to do any precision job or that CNC is only valuable for doing precision work. CNC can be hugely useful for some loose-tolerance work and some high-tolerance work is better done manually. It's often a question of whether it's faster to create and check the routing code or to cut manually.
Exactly. I argue that centrally planning and democracy are fundamentally opposed. Marx said nothing about central planning, but Lenin and Stalin loved it because they did not want a democracy: once they had the power to themselves they didn't want to share it.
There's no fundamental reason you couldn't have a democratically controlled economy, as opposed to a centrally planned one, but it doesn't seem feasible. On the other hand, it's also important to note that many champions of the free market, such as Ayn Rand, prefer anarchy to democracy because democracy restricts individual freedom of choice. Consider, for instance, the democratic support for Jim Crow laws in the American South. Less rabid than Rand are Hamilton, Jay, and Madison; particularly Federalist X, which warns that too much democracy can lead to tyrrany by the majority and rule by faction.
Personally, I prefer democracy even with all its warts.
Thanks for the fascinating historical account. I don't know anything about Indian economic history and it's great of you to present this tidbit to whet my appetite for reading up on the subject.
I would only quibble that strictly speaking, this sort of arrangement is closer to a technocracy (government by experts) than a democracy. At best, India is a republic, in the sense of the word introduced in the early days of the United States, or a representative democracy (Mill's term). The distinction is very important because of questions of accountability when the exercise of power is delegated.
The problem, as I see it is more than bandwidth: it really is about accountability. When the power to set prices is delegated, the motives of the agent to whom the power is delegated may differ from those of the principal who delegates them. This gives rise to so-called non-market failures in bureaucratic institutions, which policy analysts call "shirking."
Bandwidth considerations (or bounded rationality, if you will) prohibit direct democratic economic planning and delegating the planning to technocrats, whether elected or appointed, introduces serious problems with accountability. The accountability problems may not be insuperable, but they are real as any historical study of centrally planned economies will demonstrate.
It's a democracy. The People would vote on what you could charge. In a democracy, you have to do what a majority of the people vote for, whether you personally like it or not.
The system you seem to like is called anarchy, where everyone gets to make his own choice as a free individual.
How so? If we ban GM, patents will be irrelevant. Patents are only a problem if we accept that there WILL be GM organisms, so they are relevant only to the question HOW we should manage GM crops, not the question WHETHER to permit genetic modification of crops in the first place.
Seeds from crops that are genetically modified can be rendered "sterile," by design, thus preventing farmers from creating "seed banks."
Anti-GM: The greatest danger of GM crops is that there will be too many of them. They will spread and mingle their modified genes with wild plants and other crops.
Pro-GM: We can make sure that our GM crops are sterile. Then there's no way for this to happen.
Anti-GM: Now the greatest danger of GM crops is that there will not be enough of them. Poor farmers will be shut out from the bounty of GM.
Confused bystander: So is the problem with GM crops that there will be too much or too little of them?
It's been consistently demonstrated that reducing infant mortality is the first step to reducing fertility rates and thus stabilizing population. It's no coincidence that population grows the slowest in nations that have low infant mortality. Check Joel Cohen's How Many People Can The Earth Support? for details.
But my major point stands. The source is someone posting to slashdot, claiming privileged information that is not subject to independent verification, telling us to trust him because he's part of a government agency (specifically the military).
Just because someone is a government functionary does not mean that I trust him when he makes claims based on evidence that's not available for scrutiny. I'm not saying that I lose sleep worrying about GPS, but that I don't find the argument, "If the military isn't worried, neither should you be" even remotely persuasive.
I just love it when someone says, "I'm from the government. Trust me."
Capturing Osama bin Laden and building a functioning democracy in Iraq are even greater priorities for the military than maintaining GPS operations. According to the Commander in Chief, things are going swimmingly on both of those fronts so if I follow this logic, if the military is not worried about Iraq or Osama, neither should we be.
You mean half a joule? Drop a can of coke from four inches to experience this awe-inspiring energy.
Rydberg's constant (about 11 inverse microns) tells us about the emission spectrum of hydrogen atoms and other related quantities. The R in PV = nRT is the ideal gas constant (about 8.3 Joules per mole-Kelvin), which is the product of Avogadro's number and the Boltzmann constant.
Just to amplify your comment, most (cheap) volt meters have too low a resistance to measure potential on a tiny capacitor, such as a human body (~250 pF), because the voltmeter would discharge the capacitor before it could get a reading.
Someone else replied about measuring downed power lines, but that would: (a) not require a voltmeter to read over 1000 volts and (b) not require an ultra-high-impedance static-charge electrometer.
BTW, let's do the numbers: 40,000 volts across a 250 pF capacitor would have potential energy of 1/2 CV^2 = 0.2 Joules. If you think that 0.2 Joules is enough energy to melt macroscopic amounts of plastic or burn carpet, much less almost enough to incinerate a human body, I have a hot investment tip for you.
Indeed, when patents expire competition drives the cost of generic drugs down so they're much cheaper in the US than in Canada or Europe. Most people don't need super-expensive brand-name drugs. There are lots of effective, safe generics out there.
Big pharma is not always involved anyway. Where the new technology is clinical tests rather than drugs, a small startup can usually market the invention itself. Some of these startups are criticised in the Fortune piece. It's a small startup company, not a big pharma, that's getting more than $2000 in royalties for each patient tested for BRCA-1 and -2 mutations; Another small company, Chiron pretty much owns the Hepatitis C genome, so it has a lock on tests for Hep-C infections, which is why they're so expensive.
The main restriction to new players entering the drug market (as opposed to the clinical test market) to compete with big pharma is the cost of doing clinical trials to determine safety and efficacy. The best way to open the market up would be to remove government (FDA) regulation of drugs.
We tried it back before the FDA existed and too many people were dying from taking unproven drugs.
In any event, the main beneficiaries of Bayh-Dole are not big pharma but little pharma---small startups who take the ideas from the university lab and develop them into potentially useful drugs. There is a very active venture-capital market to invest in these small startups (Techno-Venture Management, etc.)
If the initial tests are promising, then even with a healthy dose of VC, the small players are not set up to do massive phase-III clinical trials, large-scale manufacturing, and marketing, so at this point, they usually sell out to a big pharma house and collect a large paycheck for the VC investors.
How would this change if Congress, rather than the private market, supplied the capital to the startups?
The problem they were trying to address was that lots of these patented inventions were not being produced and marketed because although inventors may invent things for free, companies will only produce and sell something if they can make money.
The big problem Bayh-Dole attempts to address is that a pharmaceutical company is unlikely invest tens of millions of dollars on clinical trials to verify the safety and efficacy of a newly-invented drug if the company does not have exclusive patent rights.
In what way is this personal theory different from Chomsky's old notion of innate universal grammar?
No coal fired plants have carbon scrubbers and there's no plan to install them any time soon because carbon sequestration does not exist and will not exist for decades. Until it does, burning gasoline will be much more greenhouse-friendly than burning coal.
Current coal technology (not talking about 150 years ago) is very dirty. That's why there's all the controversy over the President's "Clear Skies Act."
I'd love to see wind developed.
I'd also love to see coal cleaned up.
In the meantime it would be much more environmentally friendly to let cars continue to burn relatively clean gasoline and focus on cleaning up the hundreds of dirty coal plants that are currently generating electricity for the grid. That would get you much more environmental benefit than worrying about hydrogen cars.
After you have cleaned up the coal-fired electric plants then we can think about hydrogen cars.
Megajoule for megajoule, steam reformation of coal into hydrogen is much cheaper than electrolysis from wind power. As to controlling emissions, we have zero technology to control CO2 emissions from coal plants and a megajoule of hydrogen produced from coal produces many times as much CO2 as a megajoule of gasoline burned in an internal combustion engine.
Moreover gasoline simply does not have mercury, so it's easier to control mercury emissions from automobile tailpipes (do nothing) than from coal burning facilities (expensive filters/scrubbers).
Finally, as I said before, the environmental impact of coal mines is thousands of times worse than the impact of oil wells.
How do you figure this? Coal is more carbon-intensive than gasoline, so burning coal to produce hydrogen puts more CO2 into the air than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline.
Coal also produced more sulfur and mercury emissions than gasoline and creates toxic and caustic ash that must be disposed of.
Finally, coal mines cause more environmental damage, especially via acid runoff, than oil wells.
New Orleans tried a free-market approach to rationing transportation out of the city during the evacuation and it didn't work so well.
If the government had stepped in and interfered with the free market for transportation, many lives could have been saved. Even if saving these lives would not have been Pareto optimal, it certainly would have been better than what did happen.
New Orleans is built on a flood plain not because of agriculture but shipping. If you're going to build a deep water port on the Mississippi river, you need to do so near the water.
If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves.
Get with the times. For almost three decades the federal law has specified that houses built after 1975 pay actuarial rates for federal flood insurance, so FEMA breaks even. There is no taxpayer subsidy on these houses.
The problem for older houses is more difficult. Suppose you built your house when an area was not flood-prone, but then the Corps of Engineers built levees upstream that channeled other people's floods onto your doorstep? Now you live in a floodplain because of someone else's action. Is it your fault that someone else built levees or paved over wetlands?
In the case of New Orleans, they have mostly themselves to blame for the flood hazard---the city has been subsiding because of the levees and pumping out ground water and has been perhaps the most active supporter of building levees and channelizing the Mississippi---but people living elsewhere, such as on the Bayous, are suffering from the environmental effects of the federal government's decisions about managing the river and thus deserve some relief.
In a profound paper, "The Resolution of Technically Intensive Public Policy Disputes," [Science, Technology and Human Values 9(1), 39-50 (1984).] political scientist Harvey Brooks noted that when experts on nuclear energy were polled about three questions:
- How quickly is demand for electricity likely to rise over the next 20 years?
- How great are the reserves of high-grade uranium ore?
- How quickly will the cost to produce photovoltaic cells drop?
their opinions clustered. Although there is no reason for the demand for the supply of uranium to affect the cost of making of photovoltaics or vice-versa, almost all scientists believed either that- electricity demand would rise quickly,
- that uranium was in short supply,
- and that photovoltaics would remain expensive
or elseFurther interviews found that opinions on these three scientific questions (scientific in the sense that predictions could be proved true or false by comparing them to what actually transpired) correlated strongly with political opinions about the desirability of building fast breeder reactors: those in the first camp (high demand, little uranium, expensive solar power) favored a crash program to build lots of breeder reactors while those in the second camp (moderate demand, plentiful uranium, cheap solar power) tended to oppose a crash program to build breeder reactors.
This illustrates the extent to which, in cases where hypotheses cannot be conclusively proved or disproved (i.e., in Alvin Weinberg's term, the hypotheses are trans-scientific), scientists' opinions about purely scientific matters are inevitably colored by their political positions. This effect has been seen in many other cases, but Brooks was one of the first to identify it.
Actually, a large fraction of hip fractures occur because bones are weak from osteoporosis not systemic disease. Following hip fracture, bed rest causes further muscular atrophy and also inhibits clearing the lungs and airways, which sets the stage for acute pneumonia in people who were not particularly sick before the fracture.
Regular strength training can reduce osteoporosis, strengthen muscles and bone, and thus prevent hip fractures and their sequellae.