Now be careful. The CFC replacements are potent greenhouse gases. Potent as in 3 orders of magnitude worse than CO2. Is it better to die of skin cancer, or of hunger due to crop failures due to draught due to raising global temperature? I don't know...
Did anyone do analysis of DNA's compressibility from the viewpoint of typical tricks used for files? For example, is there some sort of a transform that could be applied to DNA's information to get it to compress better? I'm thinking of tricks like what firefox uses to compress the patches: the knowledge of structure of executable code is used to transform the code before compressing it, yielding smaller patches.
Hmm, on further inspection the file that I had used long ago for this test was encoded in a peculiarly wasteful way. I'm not in the field, just was helping someone long ago with visualization. I stand corrected.
I agree. I find that Windows used to be almost useless in this department before they implemented a working and useful search function in Windows 7. Windows users usually don't deal with as many installed applications as you get in unices. My macports/bin directory sports about 1600 applications coming from about 150 ports; I assumed the other 50% of 300 ports were all libraries. Even if you organized things per port, you still get more then 100 items to deal with. Windows "Start" menu is a horrible interface for such amount of "applications", it becomes rather annoying as soon as you go past one column-full of entries.
With the search function in both Windows 7 and OS X, I find that I'm pretty much back to command line: I'm way faster typing in partial application/filenames than browsing to them. Never mind that being able to find files by content and not only by names helps a whole lot.
It fits on the CD-R allright. For whatever reason, contents of our DNA compresses into a plain old zip file no worst than executables. 50% reduction in size is a fair bet.
I don't think that the limited manpower available in the OSS community should be drained by taking over maintenance of the monster VB6 is. If anything, it'd be a true-to-form Trojan Horse "gift" from MS to the OSS folk. Just think about it: instead of cool new things being done, people wasting tons of time tinkering with a dead code base, trying to bring it back, reimplementing whatever bits and pieces are necessary to keep it alive, etc. It'd get way more involvement than a software archaeology project deserves. I wouldn't mind if MS simply wiped all of their copies of VB6 codebase.
Umm, VS2008 uses the old engine. VS2010 use the new engine, basically a true-to-form C++ front-end repurposed for online parsing.
Alas, everything is in the execution. One anecdote: for my projects, Qt Creator 2's C++ parser has always done a better job than VS2008's intellisense. Creator uses a custom parser that only approximates C++ language spec, yet still does a better job than VS2008 did. I presume that this "makeshift" parser will be extended so that over time it will slowly approach a true, standards-compliant C++ parser.
If you seriously consider VB6 IDE better than contemporary offerings like Eclipse or Qt Creator, then I'd like what you're having since obviously it gets one seriously out of touch with reality.
Hilscher uses it in some of their communications gateways. From my personal experience in one particular application, the interpreter was too slow to move all the bits and bytes that had to be moved between two systems speaking different protocols, while keeping the communications (machine) cycle at 1ms. YMMV of course, so this is just a specific case, not a generalization.
I think it'd have been much easier for me as a customer if they simply provided an export library exposing relevant APIs in their firmware, provided remote gdb interface, and provided customers with the build of the open source C compiler that they most likely use themselves (their chips use an ARM core). You'd then upload the linked "executable" into the system, it'd get linked there, and executed just like Lua interpeter is being executed.
I don't see any direct benefits from using scripting languages where it's not hard at all to link your own code into the running system. In many embedded applications, you need realtime and deterministic performance. With any garbage-collected language it means that every machine/process cycle when you need to do garbage collection, to keep the overhead distributed across machine cycles. If you do GC too rarely, it may take too long and won't fit into a machine cycle any longer.
Scripting languages kinda lose their appeal if the API exposed to the scripting language has 1:1 mapping to the underlying C API. High-level languages like Python or Lua are supposed to provide benefits because you program at a higher level of abstraction than bare C. Yet if the interface to the system is very low level, you end up writing C-like code in the scripting language. That's especially true if your functionality is fairly simple -- there's no reason to introduce additional layers of abstraction in your own code, after all. Yet the underlying abstractions in the platform you work on may have nice mappings to abstractions of the scripting language (collections, iterators, closures, etc) -- but they are not exposed as such. I'd much prefer straight C to a bastardized Lua.
On reflection I realized there is a simpler way to explain why experiment and observation must be considered primary: they look at reality whereas a theory is only a model of reality.
An experiment or observation must be done for a reason. Now of course you are free to do them just because you have a hunch -- that's a reason in itself, too. Yet in the end the hunch must point you somewhere -- at a theory, that is. And then you compare the two, and only that allows you to understand how much support your experiment gives that theory. Theory is central, because without it you have but a bunch of anecdotes. My pet peeve - psychology is full of experimental data that gives you absolutely no predictive power: there is no theory to predict anything further, no theory that would explain why you might get the results that you get. I should be perhaps explicit and state that lack of predictive power does not make experimental results useless: they after all can (and often do), give someone else a hunch. But proper evaluation of experimental data cannot be done in absence of a theory: without a theory you cannot really control your experiments, because you don't know what's important and what isn't. Of course a theory doesn't automagically give you everything you need for proper experimentation either, it's merely a precursor to good science. Sometimes for good science to happen there need to be bad experiments, published simply for nothing else but others to nitpick on; sometimes we only realize other's mistakes when we see them.
Science is all about predictive power, and for that you need theories. A hypothesis doesn't necessarily have any predictive power. There are plenty of bad theories out there, but at least when you have a bad theory, it gives you a starting point to disprove it. You can't disprove anecdotes: absent someone lying, they are just that, anecdotes.
On weekends I go with 2 cups in the morning and that's it, without any undue effects. Sometimes I skip it completely. That's just one anecdote, of course.
Agreed. Good science needs theory: a mechanism that explains what's going on. For all I know, they didn't control it well and there was a third factor that lowered the risk, while somehow being linked with coffee drinking. Sigh.
Yeah, some people can drink it like water. I like my coffee without sugar, and in the morning I have it with milk, later on without anything added. I could go through 10 cups a day easy. I don't feel like the caffeine has any stimulating effects on me at all. If anything, it makes me sleepy early in the afternoon.
That Seattle Magazine link is half rubbish. The anecdotes are pretty useless and they raise all sorts of red flags, because they are purposefully spun around to support the "argument". The cell charger wire anecdote is especially sad, and its inclusion pretty much wholly discredits the author's integrity. You can't write about science if you have no clue what it's all about. I mean, obviously there are no possible alternate explanations about the charger wire affecting the plant's leaf, right? Plasticizer migration doesn't happen, etc? Naomi Ishisaka is your typical bullshit journalist, if the article is any indication of the quality of her writing.
<rant>BTW, what's with people who fail to link to the articles; linking to slashdot instead? Are html tags so hard to grok?</rant>
The first thing about good science is that you need to have some sort of mechanism to explain your findings. That's what's called a theory. A study without a theory is rubbish, since you can't control it at all -- you don't know what is important and what not. If Lai was a good scientist, he should have a theory explaining his effects. With a theory, there would be plenty of other ways to reproduce the findings -- you should be able to see the effects with isolated cells, for one. As far as I know, he has no theory; I'm all ears for one, though -- if you know something I don't, please link to it. His research is in the same sad group as most of psychology research: plenty of results but no explanation at all. If you start testing things left and right, eventually you will find that something unexpected causes something else. This is pretty useless, though. Feynman explains in depth about how science works, and what are the typical mistakes of scientist-posers.
I am not associated with any sort of RF-related industry. Oh well, the products I design have to undergo EMC testing, and I do use a spectrum analyzer at work for pre-testing, but that's all. I'm not designing any intentional radiators.
It's not that Amazon pays the taxes. The customer is supposed to, per each State's law. Purchases you do online from an out-of-state vendor, should be reported on your state tax forms, and you get a tax obligation on them.
Your first citation (Malyapa et al.) is good science. It shows that the results of your second citation (Lai and Singh) could not be reproduced. So, thanks for citing a counterargument, to quote: Furthermore, we did not confirm the observation that DNA damage is produced in cells of the rat cerebral cortex or the hippocampus after a 2-h exposure to 2450 MHz CW microwaves or at 4 h after the exposure.
They irradiated with absorption of 1W per kg of body mass, and they show that this does not even cause the rats to warm up -- There was no associated rise in the core body temperature of the rats. I'd say it's nothing but expected that microwave irradiation that's not even enough to raise your core temp. up will cause no harm to DNA. To think otherwise would require to rip out and rewrite a whole lot of basic chemistry.
It's one thing to spew nonsense. The other thing is not to read TFA you bothered to cite. You win the intertubez today.
I have to agree. Yet most parents are just too damn stubborn to forgo their silly way of life. And if anyone thinks that school sports in the U.S. are not a way of life, they better come here and see for themselves.
The thing is that there is a threshold. It's not just a direct proportionality. Photons with energy below the threshold of breaking chemical bonds aren't "a little bit dangerous" they're just not (individually) dangerous at all.
Whether a cell phone has any [long term] effects chemically still remains to be seen. I think that's the issue here. However regardless if the energy levels of the radio photons can or can not break chemical bonds, collectively [ or alone] they cause molecular jitter, which is enough to disrupt basic homeostasis. plain and simple.
You seem to be anthropomorphizing the cellphone, like it was some bad dude in a dark alley wanting to get you. It doesn't matter whether the microwave radiation comes from your oven, or from your cellphone, or from an airport radar. All that matters is the wavelength, or per-photon energy, and we know -- due to understanding of the confluence of chemistry and physics -- that certain photon wavelengths at certain energy fluxes just plain old do nothing bad to the atoms and molecules of our bodies. For the microwaves emitted by the cellphone to cause cancer, they'd need to rip chemical bonds or ionize atoms, and they fucking don't. Nothing remains to be seen here -- our basic understanding of chemistry and physics would need to be proven wrong first. The radiation coming off from a cellphone is not somehow privileged due to its royal heritage. Nature doesn't give shit where microwaves come from. They all melt chocolate in your pant pocket just fine, and not much else.
Slashdot Mirror
Now be careful. The CFC replacements are potent greenhouse gases. Potent as in 3 orders of magnitude worse than CO2. Is it better to die of skin cancer, or of hunger due to crop failures due to draught due to raising global temperature? I don't know...
Did anyone do analysis of DNA's compressibility from the viewpoint of typical tricks used for files? For example, is there some sort of a transform that could be applied to DNA's information to get it to compress better? I'm thinking of tricks like what firefox uses to compress the patches: the knowledge of structure of executable code is used to transform the code before compressing it, yielding smaller patches.
Hmm, on further inspection the file that I had used long ago for this test was encoded in a peculiarly wasteful way. I'm not in the field, just was helping someone long ago with visualization. I stand corrected.
It's a nitpick, but -m state --state NEW is a modern way of matching new connections.
Now be careful. Whooshes can interfere constructively. Don't get a hurricane going!
I agree. I find that Windows used to be almost useless in this department before they implemented a working and useful search function in Windows 7. Windows users usually don't deal with as many installed applications as you get in unices. My macports /bin directory sports about 1600 applications coming from about 150 ports; I assumed the other 50% of 300 ports were all libraries. Even if you organized things per port, you still get more then 100 items to deal with. Windows "Start" menu is a horrible interface for such amount of "applications", it becomes rather annoying as soon as you go past one column-full of entries.
With the search function in both Windows 7 and OS X, I find that I'm pretty much back to command line: I'm way faster typing in partial application/filenames than browsing to them. Never mind that being able to find files by content and not only by names helps a whole lot.
It fits on the CD-R allright. For whatever reason, contents of our DNA compresses into a plain old zip file no worst than executables. 50% reduction in size is a fair bet.
I don't think that the limited manpower available in the OSS community should be drained by taking over maintenance of the monster VB6 is. If anything, it'd be a true-to-form Trojan Horse "gift" from MS to the OSS folk. Just think about it: instead of cool new things being done, people wasting tons of time tinkering with a dead code base, trying to bring it back, reimplementing whatever bits and pieces are necessary to keep it alive, etc. It'd get way more involvement than a software archaeology project deserves. I wouldn't mind if MS simply wiped all of their copies of VB6 codebase.
Umm, VS2008 uses the old engine. VS2010 use the new engine, basically a true-to-form C++ front-end repurposed for online parsing.
Alas, everything is in the execution. One anecdote: for my projects, Qt Creator 2's C++ parser has always done a better job than VS2008's intellisense. Creator uses a custom parser that only approximates C++ language spec, yet still does a better job than VS2008 did. I presume that this "makeshift" parser will be extended so that over time it will slowly approach a true, standards-compliant C++ parser.
If you seriously consider VB6 IDE better than contemporary offerings like Eclipse or Qt Creator, then I'd like what you're having since obviously it gets one seriously out of touch with reality.
The IDE won't be released, just the compiler and runtime. Sorry. No big loss, IMHO, VB6 and VC6 should die. Good riddance.
Hilscher uses it in some of their communications gateways. From my personal experience in one particular application, the interpreter was too slow to move all the bits and bytes that had to be moved between two systems speaking different protocols, while keeping the communications (machine) cycle at 1ms. YMMV of course, so this is just a specific case, not a generalization.
I think it'd have been much easier for me as a customer if they simply provided an export library exposing relevant APIs in their firmware, provided remote gdb interface, and provided customers with the build of the open source C compiler that they most likely use themselves (their chips use an ARM core). You'd then upload the linked "executable" into the system, it'd get linked there, and executed just like Lua interpeter is being executed.
I don't see any direct benefits from using scripting languages where it's not hard at all to link your own code into the running system. In many embedded applications, you need realtime and deterministic performance. With any garbage-collected language it means that every machine/process cycle when you need to do garbage collection, to keep the overhead distributed across machine cycles. If you do GC too rarely, it may take too long and won't fit into a machine cycle any longer.
Scripting languages kinda lose their appeal if the API exposed to the scripting language has 1:1 mapping to the underlying C API. High-level languages like Python or Lua are supposed to provide benefits because you program at a higher level of abstraction than bare C. Yet if the interface to the system is very low level, you end up writing C-like code in the scripting language. That's especially true if your functionality is fairly simple -- there's no reason to introduce additional layers of abstraction in your own code, after all. Yet the underlying abstractions in the platform you work on may have nice mappings to abstractions of the scripting language (collections, iterators, closures, etc) -- but they are not exposed as such. I'd much prefer straight C to a bastardized Lua.
On reflection I realized there is a simpler way to explain why experiment and observation must be considered primary: they look at reality whereas a theory is only a model of reality.
An experiment or observation must be done for a reason. Now of course you are free to do them just because you have a hunch -- that's a reason in itself, too. Yet in the end the hunch must point you somewhere -- at a theory, that is. And then you compare the two, and only that allows you to understand how much support your experiment gives that theory. Theory is central, because without it you have but a bunch of anecdotes. My pet peeve - psychology is full of experimental data that gives you absolutely no predictive power: there is no theory to predict anything further, no theory that would explain why you might get the results that you get. I should be perhaps explicit and state that lack of predictive power does not make experimental results useless: they after all can (and often do), give someone else a hunch. But proper evaluation of experimental data cannot be done in absence of a theory: without a theory you cannot really control your experiments, because you don't know what's important and what isn't. Of course a theory doesn't automagically give you everything you need for proper experimentation either, it's merely a precursor to good science. Sometimes for good science to happen there need to be bad experiments, published simply for nothing else but others to nitpick on; sometimes we only realize other's mistakes when we see them.
Science is all about predictive power, and for that you need theories. A hypothesis doesn't necessarily have any predictive power. There are plenty of bad theories out there, but at least when you have a bad theory, it gives you a starting point to disprove it. You can't disprove anecdotes: absent someone lying, they are just that, anecdotes.
On weekends I go with 2 cups in the morning and that's it, without any undue effects. Sometimes I skip it completely. That's just one anecdote, of course.
You deserve a medal, or something ;) AGREED! Loudly so!
Agreed. Good science needs theory: a mechanism that explains what's going on. For all I know, they didn't control it well and there was a third factor that lowered the risk, while somehow being linked with coffee drinking. Sigh.
Yeah, some people can drink it like water. I like my coffee without sugar, and in the morning I have it with milk, later on without anything added. I could go through 10 cups a day easy. I don't feel like the caffeine has any stimulating effects on me at all. If anything, it makes me sleepy early in the afternoon.
That Seattle Magazine link is half rubbish. The anecdotes are pretty useless and they raise all sorts of red flags, because they are purposefully spun around to support the "argument". The cell charger wire anecdote is especially sad, and its inclusion pretty much wholly discredits the author's integrity. You can't write about science if you have no clue what it's all about. I mean, obviously there are no possible alternate explanations about the charger wire affecting the plant's leaf, right? Plasticizer migration doesn't happen, etc? Naomi Ishisaka is your typical bullshit journalist, if the article is any indication of the quality of her writing.
<rant>BTW, what's with people who fail to link to the articles; linking to slashdot instead? Are html tags so hard to grok?</rant>
The first thing about good science is that you need to have some sort of mechanism to explain your findings. That's what's called a theory. A study without a theory is rubbish, since you can't control it at all -- you don't know what is important and what not. If Lai was a good scientist, he should have a theory explaining his effects. With a theory, there would be plenty of other ways to reproduce the findings -- you should be able to see the effects with isolated cells, for one. As far as I know, he has no theory; I'm all ears for one, though -- if you know something I don't, please link to it. His research is in the same sad group as most of psychology research: plenty of results but no explanation at all. If you start testing things left and right, eventually you will find that something unexpected causes something else. This is pretty useless, though. Feynman explains in depth about how science works, and what are the typical mistakes of scientist-posers.
I am not associated with any sort of RF-related industry. Oh well, the products I design have to undergo EMC testing, and I do use a spectrum analyzer at work for pre-testing, but that's all. I'm not designing any intentional radiators.
It's not that Amazon pays the taxes. The customer is supposed to, per each State's law. Purchases you do online from an out-of-state vendor, should be reported on your state tax forms, and you get a tax obligation on them.
Your first citation (Malyapa et al.) is good science. It shows that the results of your second citation (Lai and Singh) could not be reproduced. So, thanks for citing a counterargument, to quote: Furthermore, we did not confirm the observation that DNA damage is produced in cells of the rat cerebral cortex or the hippocampus after a 2-h exposure to 2450 MHz CW microwaves or at 4 h after the exposure.
They irradiated with absorption of 1W per kg of body mass, and they show that this does not even cause the rats to warm up -- There was no associated rise in the core body temperature of the rats. I'd say it's nothing but expected that microwave irradiation that's not even enough to raise your core temp. up will cause no harm to DNA. To think otherwise would require to rip out and rewrite a whole lot of basic chemistry.
It's one thing to spew nonsense. The other thing is not to read TFA you bothered to cite. You win the intertubez today.
Citation please. And they better made sure that there's a proper control to exclude heating as the culprit.
This seems to be par for the course. Just listen to this. And this is a very basic electromagnetics demonstration.
I have to agree. Yet most parents are just too damn stubborn to forgo their silly way of life. And if anyone thinks that school sports in the U.S. are not a way of life, they better come here and see for themselves.
even oxygen seemingly kills us overtime
I think that stupidity kills humans way better than oxygen, though. YMMV, of course.
The thing is that there is a threshold. It's not just a direct proportionality. Photons with energy below the threshold of breaking chemical bonds aren't "a little bit dangerous" they're just not (individually) dangerous at all.
Whether a cell phone has any [long term] effects chemically still remains to be seen. I think that's the issue here. However regardless if the energy levels of the radio photons can or can not break chemical bonds, collectively [ or alone] they cause molecular jitter, which is enough to disrupt basic homeostasis. plain and simple.
You seem to be anthropomorphizing the cellphone, like it was some bad dude in a dark alley wanting to get you. It doesn't matter whether the microwave radiation comes from your oven, or from your cellphone, or from an airport radar. All that matters is the wavelength, or per-photon energy, and we know -- due to understanding of the confluence of chemistry and physics -- that certain photon wavelengths at certain energy fluxes just plain old do nothing bad to the atoms and molecules of our bodies. For the microwaves emitted by the cellphone to cause cancer, they'd need to rip chemical bonds or ionize atoms, and they fucking don't. Nothing remains to be seen here -- our basic understanding of chemistry and physics would need to be proven wrong first. The radiation coming off from a cellphone is not somehow privileged due to its royal heritage. Nature doesn't give shit where microwaves come from. They all melt chocolate in your pant pocket just fine, and not much else.