I don't see how Silver has committed any sort of tort against them.
This is not slander. He's just said "I've mined their data and these are the results. This smells somewhat like a rat. This needs looking into." He was very careful to avoid any direct accusation of impropriety, only saying "This is what patterns like this often mean".
I'm not implying it is. Probably should have said "All the rest of the world is not like this" to make that explicit. I used America as an example because it's most likely that the GGP is American, considering the readership of./
"modern society" != Thailand (or most places in Africa, etc.)
If you don't know about it and you're an American, then yes -- it's your fault. But the rest of the world is not like this.
An African friend of mine told a story where a well-meaning group of aid workers went to a rural village in Africa and explained to them that using condoms during sex would protect against HIV. They didn't have model penises so they had people use their thumbs to practice putting condoms on. A year later, the village had ordered lots of condoms but HIV rates hadn't gone down. Trouble was, the people would put the condoms on their thumbs and then fuck.
Physicists (at least the batch I work with) consider a 2SD signal in the same way: "Hm, this is interesting, let's look at this some more."
If they were physicists they would have proven nothing, just like these guys proved nothing. "Prove" is a funny word. But they have demonstrated something promising.
From your attitude I take it you're involved in science somehow, have a clue what's going on, and consider yourself qualified.
It's clear grandparent doesn't understand the concept of a blind study (where the test subjects don't know what group he's in). Considering that the whole point of science is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, rather than being condescending to him you might try explaining how these trials are done so that's not a factor.
Thanks for making people think we're all elitists.
Because the people who did the trial asked "what is the probability that the difference in infection rates is due to dumb luck rather than any effect of our vaccine", and mathematicians have been studying how to ask this question in a rigorous way for a long damn time.
Well, not everyone, actually. There are nutjobs in Africa (SA Minister of Health, a few years ago -- not sure if Zuma's stuck in a new one) who believe that HIV does not cause AIDS.
I lived in Alabama (Huntsville) for over 20 years, and it's not as bad as you describe. Sure, stuff grows well there, but it's not as though you can't use the roads because of the deer and you can't open your doors for fear of roaches and yellowjackets.
The only real threatening endemic species is rednecks.
Where do you think morphine (and some other opiates) come from? Growing poppies for medical use would be a great industry for the Afghans, but for political reasons we're not allowing them to do that.
Exactly: the problem is "who determines what is lawful?" What if it's a bunch of encrypted bits that they suspect of being unlawful? Figuring out whether those bits consist of kiddie porn or (worse) the new Hollywood movie isn't my ISP's job. Even if I'm not breaking the law, I don't want my ISP wasting resources figuring out if everyone else is either.
Thanks on the errant factor of two, this is what happens when I post before coffee.
They don't sit much further away from a television than from a computer when measured in multiples of the display diagonal. If you're going to calculate apparent brightness of the whole display, then you get another factor of r_display^2 that will cancel the factor of r^2 from moving further away. A 10" display viewed from 3' with a given brightness per square cm will have the same apparent brightness to a viewer as a 40" display from 12' away.
So, fixing my fuckup with the factor of two, that puts my back-of-the-envelope math at around 80 watts. It's good to know that your panel is close to that; I'd be interested to see what percentage of TV's are in this neighborhood and what percentage are way above.
Historically, when fuel standards go up, American carmakers whine; Japanese (and European) carmakers just keep doing what they've been doing all along.
Toyota's figured out how to make a car (the Yaris) for under $12000 -- after American tariffs, no less -- that gets ~41-46mpg highway (depending on elevation), goes 100mph without breaking a sweat, handles well, and has plenty of room on the inside for stuff. I think the Europeans are getting well over 50mpg with bog-standard diesels.
So, I have this eeepc. I don't know exactly how much power the screen itself draws, but I can guess, since the machine draws about ten watts with the screen on at full brightness and six with it off -- so let's say four watts, for a 10" screen. This screen's about the same aspect ratio as a widescreen TV, so no monkey business here. It's been optimized to hell to decrease power usage, obviously, but it hasn't affected the cost much -- the whole computer was $300 or so.
Let's say you want a 40" display. Since area goes as linear dimension squared, if everything scales in the naive way this puts us at 32 watts. If anything this is a conservative estimate, since the 40" display will have fewer pixels than sixteen eeepc screens. Of course, you've got to decode the image, and that requires some computing -- probably no more than 10W for that. Let's say eight watts for sound (since the volume will probably be set at 1W or so, and 12% efficiency seems reasonable), and we're still coming in just at 50W.
Somehow I doubt you can get a 40" television that only uses 50W.
Maybe he's arguing that industry should be dictated to by consumers, through the government the consumers elect? That's what government is supposed to be -- the collective will of the people voting for it.
Your Constitutional argument is meaningless because this is a state action, not a federal one. Per the Federal constitution California can mandate that new televisions come with a rubber duckie if they want.
That's certainly true -- I'm not so fond of modern intensive farming as a general concept. (Although you can certainly do organic farming practices with GM crops too, and as an environmentally- and health-conscious consumer I'd have no problem with that).
By "better than the environment" I mean "better than the status quo", i.e. "better than the stuff that people buy instead of the GMO's they're afraid of" -- which, for most genophobes, is conventionally-farmed.
The things described in that article have nothing to do with the effects of the BT gene itself; they're the result of the abuse of intellectual property laws by Monsanto, which I completely condemn. They're some of the scummiest people around, and I saw that in my time working as a lab tech. But that doesn't make the invention harmful. Do we all have to stop using ReiserFS now that its inventor is a murderer?
You're absolutely right that by tinkering with the genome of plants, we're playing a game that evolution hasn't intended. But I claim that fiddling around with a few genes is FAR less harmful to the delicate balance of ecosystems than a) what we've already done, and b) the alternative to the BT gene.
In the case of cotton, we've taken a rather boring shrub from South America, brought it to a vastly different climate, grown it in large monoculture fields, altered its growing season so it's an annual rather than a perennial, and then bred it (altering its genome!) for maximum lint output and any number of other things.
Compared to this monkeying-about with Nature, the BT gene is small potatoes.
Whether this sort of intensive monoculture farming is a good idea or not isn't the issue -- it's that the disruption to the "endemic organism in its native ecosystem" has already been done.
Then, given that you're going to do this sort of farming, you need pest control. If the choice is between 1) the use of the BT gene, 2) repeated applications of broad-spectrum insecticide (which, according to current economics, it is), 2) is far less harmful.
Sure, transgenics involve monkeying about with the balance of Nature. But they're a whole lot better than blasting all insect life on acres upon acres of fields into oblivion.
I was actually employed by a major university doing studies on pest control and farming practices.
And you clearly have no idea what you're talking about if you think that BT crops grow better on land that's been previously sprayed.
And you clearly didn't read the original post if you thought this had to do anything with the "flourishing" of the plants. In this study the conventional and transgenic crops were planted side-by-side in the same field, and both seemed to "flourish" about the same; the issue is the health of the insect ecosystem, where the transgenic crops were crawling with (harmless) critters because they didn't need harsh insecticide treatments to protect them from pests. The only way you'd know which field you were in was to look down and count bugs.
I don't like Monsanto either; that's a completely separate issue.
The scientific and engineering community doesn't mean the same thing by this word that you mean -- namely, that shit that makes your ass glow green, or whatever.
I propose that people not be allowed to rant and rave about this stuff until they:
--Learn the basics of the electromagnetic spectrum and the sources and engineering uses of radiation at each point along it. --Learn the basics of nuclear radiation, and understand its effects and where it comes from --Leave a Geiger counter near a nuclear power station and take one on a plane across the country at 40,000 feet, and compare the counts
I teach physics labs to premeds at the university. They come in and I'm munching peanuts off of a pretty bright orange tray, and offer them some; some of them accept.
A little later I'm showing them how to use a Geiger counter, and show them radiation from a few sources we have in the room -- lookie, radioactive rocks! Lookie there, a bit of caesium! Oh, wait... where'd these radioactive peanuts come from?
The students freaked out. (For those who don't know, the bright orange glaze on old Fiestaware was made from uranium oxide. It's safe, unless maybe you eat the plate, in which case you have a.01% risk of cancer and a 10% risk of a perforated bowel.)
This isn't an American problem exclusively. Related to this is the scare about "zomg genetically modified organisms!", which is much worse in Europe.
I helped gather data for a study, incidentally, comparing GM and ordinary cotton. The GM cotton had a gene expressing the BT toxin in it, a protein that fucks up caterpillars who eat it rather royally but is harmless to pretty much everything else. The farmers were told to not do anything special with their fields, to use pesticides as normal, etc. (This meant more use of pesticide on the non-GM cotton, obviously.)
Then I wander through the fields and sample the insect population by species. The conventional cotton was something of a wasteland -- here's a lonely little spider, looking for dinner; there are a few ants; here are a shitload of aphids, which are resistant to insecticide.
The GM cotton had a whole pile of bugs, all running around happily eating each other.
GM crops can be *better* for the environment. After all, the BT gene is just a way of putting a pesticide only harmful to a narrow range of insects *into* the crop, so only pests that actually eat it will die. This is a whole lot more targeted than crop-dusting the field with something that'll kill anything that moves with more than four legs. Monsanto's abuse of the patent system is another matter altogether, of course.
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And an explosion can cause blindness, too.
The ban is on weapons *specifically* designed to blind people, as opposed to those for which blindness is merely a side effect.
I don't see how Silver has committed any sort of tort against them.
This is not slander. He's just said "I've mined their data and these are the results. This smells somewhat like a rat. This needs looking into." He was very careful to avoid any direct accusation of impropriety, only saying "This is what patterns like this often mean".
I'm not implying it is. Probably should have said "All the rest of the world is not like this" to make that explicit. I used America as an example because it's most likely that the GGP is American, considering the readership of ./
"modern society" != Thailand (or most places in Africa, etc.)
If you don't know about it and you're an American, then yes -- it's your fault. But the rest of the world is not like this.
An African friend of mine told a story where a well-meaning group of aid workers went to a rural village in Africa and explained to them that using condoms during sex would protect against HIV. They didn't have model penises so they had people use their thumbs to practice putting condoms on. A year later, the village had ordered lots of condoms but HIV rates hadn't gone down. Trouble was, the people would put the condoms on their thumbs and then fuck.
Physicists (at least the batch I work with) consider a 2SD signal in the same way: "Hm, this is interesting, let's look at this some more."
If they were physicists they would have proven nothing, just like these guys proved nothing. "Prove" is a funny word. But they have demonstrated something promising.
From your attitude I take it you're involved in science somehow, have a clue what's going on, and consider yourself qualified.
It's clear grandparent doesn't understand the concept of a blind study (where the test subjects don't know what group he's in). Considering that the whole point of science is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, rather than being condescending to him you might try explaining how these trials are done so that's not a factor.
Thanks for making people think we're all elitists.
Because the people who did the trial asked "what is the probability that the difference in infection rates is due to dumb luck rather than any effect of our vaccine", and mathematicians have been studying how to ask this question in a rigorous way for a long damn time.
Well, not everyone, actually. There are nutjobs in Africa (SA Minister of Health, a few years ago -- not sure if Zuma's stuck in a new one) who believe that HIV does not cause AIDS.
I lived in Alabama (Huntsville) for over 20 years, and it's not as bad as you describe. Sure, stuff grows well there, but it's not as though you can't use the roads because of the deer and you can't open your doors for fear of roaches and yellowjackets.
The only real threatening endemic species is rednecks.
It's not federal money, but this joker spent a great deal of money on, basically, being batshit insane. Oh, and also unconstitutional.
Opium poppies, perhaps.
Where do you think morphine (and some other opiates) come from? Growing poppies for medical use would be a great industry for the Afghans, but for political reasons we're not allowing them to do that.
Alabama has an incredibly friendly climate to things like this. It's never snowbound in winter, and average annual rainfall is 52 inches.
Exactly: the problem is "who determines what is lawful?" What if it's a bunch of encrypted bits that they suspect of being unlawful? Figuring out whether those bits consist of kiddie porn or (worse) the new Hollywood movie isn't my ISP's job. Even if I'm not breaking the law, I don't want my ISP wasting resources figuring out if everyone else is either.
Just forward the bits.
Thanks on the errant factor of two, this is what happens when I post before coffee.
They don't sit much further away from a television than from a computer when measured in multiples of the display diagonal. If you're going to calculate apparent brightness of the whole display, then you get another factor of r_display^2 that will cancel the factor of r^2 from moving further away. A 10" display viewed from 3' with a given brightness per square cm will have the same apparent brightness to a viewer as a 40" display from 12' away.
So, fixing my fuckup with the factor of two, that puts my back-of-the-envelope math at around 80 watts. It's good to know that your panel is close to that; I'd be interested to see what percentage of TV's are in this neighborhood and what percentage are way above.
Thanks for the math correction, btw.
Historically, when fuel standards go up, American carmakers whine; Japanese (and European) carmakers just keep doing what they've been doing all along.
Toyota's figured out how to make a car (the Yaris) for under $12000 -- after American tariffs, no less -- that gets ~41-46mpg highway (depending on elevation), goes 100mph without breaking a sweat, handles well, and has plenty of room on the inside for stuff. I think the Europeans are getting well over 50mpg with bog-standard diesels.
Why can't Ford do this?
So, I have this eeepc. I don't know exactly how much power the screen itself draws, but I can guess, since the machine draws about ten watts with the screen on at full brightness and six with it off -- so let's say four watts, for a 10" screen. This screen's about the same aspect ratio as a widescreen TV, so no monkey business here. It's been optimized to hell to decrease power usage, obviously, but it hasn't affected the cost much -- the whole computer was $300 or so.
Let's say you want a 40" display. Since area goes as linear dimension squared, if everything scales in the naive way this puts us at 32 watts. If anything this is a conservative estimate, since the 40" display will have fewer pixels than sixteen eeepc screens. Of course, you've got to decode the image, and that requires some computing -- probably no more than 10W for that. Let's say eight watts for sound (since the volume will probably be set at 1W or so, and 12% efficiency seems reasonable), and we're still coming in just at 50W.
Somehow I doubt you can get a 40" television that only uses 50W.
Maybe he's arguing that industry should be dictated to by consumers, through the government the consumers elect? That's what government is supposed to be -- the collective will of the people voting for it.
Your Constitutional argument is meaningless because this is a state action, not a federal one. Per the Federal constitution California can mandate that new televisions come with a rubber duckie if they want.
That's certainly true -- I'm not so fond of modern intensive farming as a general concept. (Although you can certainly do organic farming practices with GM crops too, and as an environmentally- and health-conscious consumer I'd have no problem with that).
By "better than the environment" I mean "better than the status quo", i.e. "better than the stuff that people buy instead of the GMO's they're afraid of" -- which, for most genophobes, is conventionally-farmed.
The things described in that article have nothing to do with the effects of the BT gene itself; they're the result of the abuse of intellectual property laws by Monsanto, which I completely condemn. They're some of the scummiest people around, and I saw that in my time working as a lab tech. But that doesn't make the invention harmful. Do we all have to stop using ReiserFS now that its inventor is a murderer?
You're absolutely right that by tinkering with the genome of plants, we're playing a game that evolution hasn't intended. But I claim that fiddling around with a few genes is FAR less harmful to the delicate balance of ecosystems than a) what we've already done, and b) the alternative to the BT gene.
In the case of cotton, we've taken a rather boring shrub from South America, brought it to a vastly different climate, grown it in large monoculture fields, altered its growing season so it's an annual rather than a perennial, and then bred it (altering its genome!) for maximum lint output and any number of other things.
Compared to this monkeying-about with Nature, the BT gene is small potatoes.
Whether this sort of intensive monoculture farming is a good idea or not isn't the issue -- it's that the disruption to the "endemic organism in its native ecosystem" has already been done.
Then, given that you're going to do this sort of farming, you need pest control. If the choice is between 1) the use of the BT gene, 2) repeated applications of broad-spectrum insecticide (which, according to current economics, it is), 2) is far less harmful.
Sure, transgenics involve monkeying about with the balance of Nature. But they're a whole lot better than blasting all insect life on acres upon acres of fields into oblivion.
When you can find prior art in the Jargon File, your patent is stupid.
mmm, troll.
I was actually employed by a major university doing studies on pest control and farming practices.
And you clearly have no idea what you're talking about if you think that BT crops grow better on land that's been previously sprayed.
And you clearly didn't read the original post if you thought this had to do anything with the "flourishing" of the plants. In this study the conventional and transgenic crops were planted side-by-side in the same field, and both seemed to "flourish" about the same; the issue is the health of the insect ecosystem, where the transgenic crops were crawling with (harmless) critters because they didn't need harsh insecticide treatments to protect them from pests. The only way you'd know which field you were in was to look down and count bugs.
I don't like Monsanto either; that's a completely separate issue.
The scientific and engineering community doesn't mean the same thing by this word that you mean -- namely, that shit that makes your ass glow green, or whatever.
I propose that people not be allowed to rant and rave about this stuff until they:
--Learn the basics of the electromagnetic spectrum and the sources and engineering uses of radiation at each point along it.
--Learn the basics of nuclear radiation, and understand its effects and where it comes from
--Leave a Geiger counter near a nuclear power station and take one on a plane across the country at 40,000 feet, and compare the counts
I teach physics labs to premeds at the university. They come in and I'm munching peanuts off of a pretty bright orange tray, and offer them some; some of them accept.
A little later I'm showing them how to use a Geiger counter, and show them radiation from a few sources we have in the room -- lookie, radioactive rocks! Lookie there, a bit of caesium! Oh, wait ... where'd these radioactive peanuts come from?
The students freaked out. (For those who don't know, the bright orange glaze on old Fiestaware was made from uranium oxide. It's safe, unless maybe you eat the plate, in which case you have a .01% risk of cancer and a 10% risk of a perforated bowel.)
This isn't an American problem exclusively. Related to this is the scare about "zomg genetically modified organisms!", which is much worse in Europe.
I helped gather data for a study, incidentally, comparing GM and ordinary cotton. The GM cotton had a gene expressing the BT toxin in it, a protein that fucks up caterpillars who eat it rather royally but is harmless to pretty much everything else. The farmers were told to not do anything special with their fields, to use pesticides as normal, etc. (This meant more use of pesticide on the non-GM cotton, obviously.)
Then I wander through the fields and sample the insect population by species. The conventional cotton was something of a wasteland -- here's a lonely little spider, looking for dinner; there are a few ants; here are a shitload of aphids, which are resistant to insecticide.
The GM cotton had a whole pile of bugs, all running around happily eating each other.
GM crops can be *better* for the environment. After all, the BT gene is just a way of putting a pesticide only harmful to a narrow range of insects *into* the crop, so only pests that actually eat it will die. This is a whole lot more targeted than crop-dusting the field with something that'll kill anything that moves with more than four legs. Monsanto's abuse of the patent system is another matter altogether, of course.
Yes, by depositing so much energy in something that it heats up enough to cause damage. This is how a microwave oven works.
Is that any worse than a conservative who's proud that he's not sorry when he ought to be?