As someone with Asperger's who does not give a f*** what my supposed 'intelligence quotient' is (as if some scalar could explain a HUMAN BEING!), I feel the need to say here that I think 'social intelligence' is every bit as broad and deep a use of mental faculties, if not more, than solving physics problems or writing code or what have you. I have learned this in a slow and arduous way, and although I am sure of it, I would say that it can't be proven. But for my revelatory journey, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" by David Foster Wallace, and Blink and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell come to mind.
That being said, I do agree that autistic people can be extremely gifted. Autism in its milder forms seems to me to be the extreme of an adaptive specialization for interpreting the world symbolically, and some of the most famed scientists and mathematicians may have used such differences in their basic mental faculties. Trying to rank humans seems pretty trivializing to me.
Cocaine is ~10x smaller dose than caffeine for its LD50. Cocaine acts on epinephrine pathways, which promote built-in stimulation cascades, whereas caffeine blocks neuron adenosine signalling, causing neurons to remain in a metabolically fast state. So increasing cocaine dosage = exponential-type increase in cascade of certain effects, whereas caffeine's metabolic effects are more linear.
caffeine ld50 in rats: 192 mg/kg
cocaine ld50 in rabbits: 15 mg/kg
I have known people to ingest 1.2-1.4g of caffeine. They felt awful, but didn't even throw up. That much coke would endanger the life of someone not highly habituated.
In amounts the equivalent of say, snorting a line of cocaine, you would cause *serious damage. What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
An 'average' line of coke is 50-100mg. That's a cup of coffee (a small one at Starbuck's; their large drip has ~300).
Wealth taxes don't seem wise. But why not tax the huge loans? Perhaps a lot of loans could be taxed. Not mortgages obviously because that would be double-indemnity, but huge securities-based loans are obviously too safe for our collective good, no?
I have heard of egregious prices for complex new drugs before. I had a roommate who received a tumor-necrosis-factor inhibiting drug for free, that cost thousands of dollars a month. I Do Not want to be inflammatory, nor to impugn the reputation of a hard-working company that sounds very nice and ethical, but I have been wondering about this huge-price+free-for-low-income bracket for a while now, and I have a question: Do the companies that offer these coupons get a tax write-off for the price of the medication they give away?
First the social network will be for PhDs, then grad students will be on almost immediately, then the really good undergrad students will want on so that they can get ahead, and pretty soon you've got facebook elite. If it's just open to begin with, then I don't see what differentiates this fabled network except the potential for tailored design. I think that brave and free-thinking people are more dynamic than a one-stop social network. And people will feel threatened by it, and others will be trying to co-opt it.... Perhaps if there was some arbitrary entrance requirement, like verifiable proof of having passed an accredited partial diff eq class, then you'd get something that would last, but perhaps not very interesting.
How about 12 year term limit for Senate and House, and then watch how it is taken advantage of, and respond accordingly? I think that having 1 year in 12 a chance to vote in a combination of reps and senators would be healthy.
I am wondering, this stuff is really far away for microchips, but what about PVs? I am trying to find info on how they got the conductivity to be better, and if it is being used for junctions in photovoltaics.
I am well aware that molybdenum is being used for backing contacts. Actually that is part of why I am posting this, because it is making searching more complicated.
How about a sponge-like smart phone, that you have to reach inside and work like a sock puppet? The display will be a round thing on the end. C'mon Samsung BE CREATIVE!
I dunno. I think that the oxygen content is the issue, more than the abundance of silicon. Perhaps on a planet where all of the oxygen is tied up in iron or aluminum, silicon could make some complex chemistry with sulfur, phosphorus, and/or other elements. And why not life primarily made of silicon that extensively uses carbon, like carbon life extensively uses phosphorus?
I do think that carbon-based life that dwells in ammonia and carbon dioxide is more likely than silicon-based life, but I don't think these ideas are on par with werewolves and vampires at all.
Yeah unemployment is a good thing! I totally agree. However, I think that money is still the main reward. People would be satiated by a general welfare stipend, because most people are trained to seek sufficient money for their wants, and then they enjoy themselves.
Maybe we should provide housing by way of obtaining welfare certificates, and food stamps seem to work all right. And we need more prizes because they do work, just not on everyone.
I'm not going to scour the comments to see if anyone already said this yet, but I didn't see it, so here goes.
Iodine is used for the methylation step in the reaction process, and there are other ways to do it. They are not as efficient, and slower, and messier, and basically produce a lot more toxic waste and a dirtier product. So even if the DEA actually managed to block all sources of iodine, they would arguably be doing more damage than good.
If you ask me, trying to control chemicals is pointless. It's the addicts that need attention, not the chemists. But it's way sexier trying to bust criminals than help poor people.
If it were true that light doesn't travel at c because of lots of interactions in its trajectory, wouldn't its speed look different over different distances? It seems to be exactly the same whether you do an experiment in a lab, Earth-orbit distances, solar-system distances, or any larger scales, except for interactions that we can currently explain pretty well.
I still think that something is wonky about these neutrino results. Independent confirmation or nada.
The bulk of the conduction goes through the lowest-resistance path, which is also going to be the first one to connect (more conduction = more ionization = faster-growing path). Also, it need not be the shortest path. Therefore, the greater the volume, the lower the resistance. I think you misunderstood my initial post.
Resistance is divided by the area of the resistor. For instance, to resistors in parallel have R 1/(1/R1 +1/R2), which makes the R drop mighty fast for many resistors. When I learned as a teen that lightning is in the 10's to 100's of millions of volts, I thought that sounded really low for spanning such distances. But the resistor (sky) is obviously really big, so it made sense, I thought.
So basically what I'm trying to say is that I never considered it a mystery, but I guess that was just my ignorance. Also, according to this idea of mine, having the simulated lightning jumping between two points greatly narrows the size of the resistor. If he was running one tower and looking for the greatest arc distance in any direction then I suppose he would observe arcs more in keeping with the lengths lightning achieves.
Also I saw in a book from WWII era, that St. Elmo's fire-type glow was observed in 50 V submarine systems using gigantic amperages. So perhaps there is some poorly-understood effect that gives 5x arcs to lightning, but it may be an amperage-based corona effect that he wouldn't get from amperages that are relatively low compared to lightning.
I think 1 really great musician is more important than 10 crappy lawyers. (And vice versa.)
If black people or other minorities don't take to silicon tech, so what? Although I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers drifted into the population equilibrium eventually.
I think that selling everyone on a 2 year food stockpile is much more realistic than tapping the power in any meaningful way.
I don't know much about the infrastructure needed to extract geothermal, but it seems like a novel and massive extraction system would have to be implemented, probably by far the largest human endeavor to date, and it would have to theoretically guarantee that eruptions would not occur in the proximity before anything was actually put in the ground.
I'd say that this novel system would need to be a slow energy leak, where at most ~1% of the extracted energy would actually be directed to meaningful work via electricity or other means. And it would need to be designed to account for the changing terrain and incredible hazards.
Given our collective lack of meaningful implementations to even stopgap other dire trends (eg global warming), I'd say such a project would founder indefinitely.
The thing will build until it is ready to blow, and then we will barely prepare ourselves with enough food right before it goes off. I hate that this is what to expect, but human history is clear about this kind of thing. We can only hope that its behavior turns out to be predictable.
Which part of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." is unclear? Searching your cell phone without a warrant is a blatantly clear violation.
I guess a car hasn't been an "effect" for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone with Asperger's who does not give a f*** what my supposed 'intelligence quotient' is (as if some scalar could explain a HUMAN BEING!), I feel the need to say here that I think 'social intelligence' is every bit as broad and deep a use of mental faculties, if not more, than solving physics problems or writing code or what have you. I have learned this in a slow and arduous way, and although I am sure of it, I would say that it can't be proven. But for my revelatory journey, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" by David Foster Wallace, and Blink and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell come to mind.
That being said, I do agree that autistic people can be extremely gifted. Autism in its milder forms seems to me to be the extreme of an adaptive specialization for interpreting the world symbolically, and some of the most famed scientists and mathematicians may have used such differences in their basic mental faculties.
Trying to rank humans seems pretty trivializing to me.
Cocaine is ~10x smaller dose than caffeine for its LD50. Cocaine acts on epinephrine pathways, which promote built-in stimulation cascades, whereas caffeine blocks neuron adenosine signalling, causing neurons to remain in a metabolically fast state. So increasing cocaine dosage = exponential-type increase in cascade of certain effects, whereas caffeine's metabolic effects are more linear.
cocaine ld50 in rabbits: 15 mg/kg
I have known people to ingest 1.2-1.4g of caffeine. They felt awful, but didn't even throw up. That much coke would endanger the life of someone not highly habituated.
In amounts the equivalent of say, snorting a line of cocaine, you would cause *serious damage. What's to keep your average marker-sniffing high school student from cracking these open and going to town (and then to the hospital)?
An 'average' line of coke is 50-100mg. That's a cup of coffee (a small one at Starbuck's; their large drip has ~300).
Yeah do this! My penny jar would get me a car!
Wealth taxes don't seem wise. But why not tax the huge loans? Perhaps a lot of loans could be taxed. Not mortgages obviously because that would be double-indemnity, but huge securities-based loans are obviously too safe for our collective good, no?
why not? Just trying to be cool IMO. Now not using Google, that has real-world ramifications, no matter what you think of them.
I have heard of egregious prices for complex new drugs before. I had a roommate who received a tumor-necrosis-factor inhibiting drug for free, that cost thousands of dollars a month. I Do Not want to be inflammatory, nor to impugn the reputation of a hard-working company that sounds very nice and ethical, but I have been wondering about this huge-price+free-for-low-income bracket for a while now, and I have a question: Do the companies that offer these coupons get a tax write-off for the price of the medication they give away?
First the social network will be for PhDs, then grad students will be on almost immediately, then the really good undergrad students will want on so that they can get ahead, and pretty soon you've got facebook elite. If it's just open to begin with, then I don't see what differentiates this fabled network except the potential for tailored design. I think that brave and free-thinking people are more dynamic than a one-stop social network. And people will feel threatened by it, and others will be trying to co-opt it.... Perhaps if there was some arbitrary entrance requirement, like verifiable proof of having passed an accredited partial diff eq class, then you'd get something that would last, but perhaps not very interesting.
Giant babies? Deceased wives?
How about 12 year term limit for Senate and House, and then watch how it is taken advantage of, and respond accordingly? I think that having 1 year in 12 a chance to vote in a combination of reps and senators would be healthy.
looks fake to me
http://www.hm.com/us/product/95470?article=95470-B
I am wondering, this stuff is really far away for microchips, but what about PVs? I am trying to find info on how they got the conductivity to be better, and if it is being used for junctions in photovoltaics.
I am well aware that molybdenum is being used for backing contacts. Actually that is part of why I am posting this, because it is making searching more complicated.
How about a sponge-like smart phone, that you have to reach inside and work like a sock puppet? The display will be a round thing on the end. C'mon Samsung BE CREATIVE!
We're all staring that the beginnings of silicon-based life right now.
I dunno. I think that the oxygen content is the issue, more than the abundance of silicon. Perhaps on a planet where all of the oxygen is tied up in iron or aluminum, silicon could make some complex chemistry with sulfur, phosphorus, and/or other elements. And why not life primarily made of silicon that extensively uses carbon, like carbon life extensively uses phosphorus?
I do think that carbon-based life that dwells in ammonia and carbon dioxide is more likely than silicon-based life, but I don't think these ideas are on par with werewolves and vampires at all.
how about Frinkium? Bombastium also comes to mind. Or just break with the -iums and call one flubber.
Yeah unemployment is a good thing! I totally agree. However, I think that money is still the main reward. People would be satiated by a general welfare stipend, because most people are trained to seek sufficient money for their wants, and then they enjoy themselves.
Maybe we should provide housing by way of obtaining welfare certificates, and food stamps seem to work all right. And we need more prizes because they do work, just not on everyone.
I'm not going to scour the comments to see if anyone already said this yet, but I didn't see it, so here goes.
Iodine is used for the methylation step in the reaction process, and there are other ways to do it. They are not as efficient, and slower, and messier, and basically produce a lot more toxic waste and a dirtier product. So even if the DEA actually managed to block all sources of iodine, they would arguably be doing more damage than good.
If you ask me, trying to control chemicals is pointless. It's the addicts that need attention, not the chemists. But it's way sexier trying to bust criminals than help poor people.
If it were true that light doesn't travel at c because of lots of interactions in its trajectory, wouldn't its speed look different over different distances? It seems to be exactly the same whether you do an experiment in a lab, Earth-orbit distances, solar-system distances, or any larger scales, except for interactions that we can currently explain pretty well.
I still think that something is wonky about these neutrino results. Independent confirmation or nada.
The bulk of the conduction goes through the lowest-resistance path, which is also going to be the first one to connect (more conduction = more ionization = faster-growing path). Also, it need not be the shortest path. Therefore, the greater the volume, the lower the resistance. I think you misunderstood my initial post.
Resistance is divided by the area of the resistor. For instance, to resistors in parallel have R 1/(1/R1 +1/R2), which makes the R drop mighty fast for many resistors. When I learned as a teen that lightning is in the 10's to 100's of millions of volts, I thought that sounded really low for spanning such distances. But the resistor (sky) is obviously really big, so it made sense, I thought.
So basically what I'm trying to say is that I never considered it a mystery, but I guess that was just my ignorance. Also, according to this idea of mine, having the simulated lightning jumping between two points greatly narrows the size of the resistor. If he was running one tower and looking for the greatest arc distance in any direction then I suppose he would observe arcs more in keeping with the lengths lightning achieves.
Also I saw in a book from WWII era, that St. Elmo's fire-type glow was observed in 50 V submarine systems using gigantic amperages. So perhaps there is some poorly-understood effect that gives 5x arcs to lightning, but it may be an amperage-based corona effect that he wouldn't get from amperages that are relatively low compared to lightning.
^This.
I think 1 really great musician is more important than 10 crappy lawyers. (And vice versa.)
If black people or other minorities don't take to silicon tech, so what? Although I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers drifted into the population equilibrium eventually.
If it turned out that Jerry Coyne was a childish militant atheist, I think the mistake falls squarely on Haught for engaging him in the first place.
A guy ought to stick to his word, is all I'm saying.
I think that selling everyone on a 2 year food stockpile is much more realistic than tapping the power in any meaningful way.
I don't know much about the infrastructure needed to extract geothermal, but it seems like a novel and massive extraction system would have to be implemented, probably by far the largest human endeavor to date, and it would have to theoretically guarantee that eruptions would not occur in the proximity before anything was actually put in the ground.
I'd say that this novel system would need to be a slow energy leak, where at most ~1% of the extracted energy would actually be directed to meaningful work via electricity or other means. And it would need to be designed to account for the changing terrain and incredible hazards.
Given our collective lack of meaningful implementations to even stopgap other dire trends (eg global warming), I'd say such a project would founder indefinitely.
The thing will build until it is ready to blow, and then we will barely prepare ourselves with enough food right before it goes off. I hate that this is what to expect, but human history is clear about this kind of thing. We can only hope that its behavior turns out to be predictable.
Which part of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." is unclear? Searching your cell phone without a warrant is a blatantly clear violation.
I guess a car hasn't been an "effect" for a long time.