My father used to talk about this. There were still a few electrics around in the 1920s when he was a kid. He said you had to be a little careful of them, as they were so quiet they could start moving without you realizing it.
The trick is coming up with a sound that pedestrians will notice, but doesn't become terribly annoying compared to the good it does.
(Vibration activated car alarms are a good example of being quite annoying while doing little worthwhile.)
You've likely got good genetics working in your favor.
It's not just about getting fat. High fat diets tend to be correlated with slightly higher rates of cancers of the colon etc. Some of this is likely that the fats are a concentrated source of calories, and tend to push out some of the higher fiber foods that have lower calorie density. (That's my own guess, take it for what it's worth.)
Another odd, but not heavily supported data point is the study that noted a weight gain trend in lab animals on controlled diets during the same period that we've had the weight trend in the developed world. Could that be an environmentatl factor? Sure. Needs a lot more looking at.
But a lot of the fat often gets combined with high glycemic index carbs, like in potato chips.
The problem with putting all of the blame on particular food processing is that a lot of the problems showed up at least partly before some of the moves to those. Example, the big move to hydrogenated fats in fast food and the like was in the 80s. Yes, Crisco and others were around, but there were a lot of animal source fats and naturally highly saturated oils that were used (the tropicals). We moved away from them on the advice of CSPI and others. Then it turned out that trans fats generated by hydrogenation may be worse.
As to irradiation, up until fairly recently such a low percentage of food was irradiated blaming current food related problems on it is pretty sketchy at best.
I've lived through enough reversals in food guidance to figure that the best advice is moderation in all of it. Eat a balanced diet, and get regular exercise and you've got most of the benefit right there.
The food industry takes a lot of rap, but very little credit for the demonstrable improvements in food. Take a look at the rates of food poisoning and stomach cancer in the early 1900s. There have been dramatic drops in them. Natural toxins from bacteria and other food spoiling organisms aren't just accidently bad like some modern additives, they have evolved specifically to be very damaging to life forms other than the ones that made them.
Some of that improvement is due to refrigeration and better packaging. Some of that is due to the very preservatives that get such a bad rap. Often the "natural" preservatives have problems of their own. Salting something highly is one example. If you've got the genetics for salt saving (sodium retention) it's a big factor in high blood pressure, a known killer.
But, a lot of the idea that by modifying diet in relatively small ways, you can get great effects is wishfull thinking. Some things are known to work. Caloric restriction works, at least if you're a mouse or a lot of other species. It's not so clear in humans.
On the plus side for your approach, the paleo diet is the latest fad among the transhumanists and others. So in some years we'll probably have some good diet on low grain diets.
CSPI was a big part of the push for removing saturates in the 80s. Until they decided trans fats were worse than saturates, and then they reversed course. So, now we're going back to using more tropical oils.
In 1980 did you think we'd be fighting only low tech forces, or did you think we would possibly get into it with the Russians?
Oh, wait. You probably weren't even born then.
Comm systems often stay around a lot longer than people expect. I can't tell what will happen in the next N years, but building in a known and easily fixed vulnerability is kinda silly.
BTW, these same "camel jockeys" also have been monitoring unencrypted transmissions from our "high tech" reconnaisance drones. Admittedly that's not an incredible feat, but it shows they aren't completely ignorant and clueless.
When someone tells me that the big car companies are supressing the 200 mpg carburetor that will work on a 2 ton vehicle, I call bullshit just on the basis of physics.
When someone tells me that this carburetor is already easily available to play with like a simple change in diet, and yet no one is demonstrably using it successfully. I call bullshit again.
Can diet improve insulin response in type 2 diabetes? Of course! That's why physicians always modify the diet as part of the therapy for it.
So can moderate exercise. Walking daily is a good thing (tm).
Does a magic diet cure it by itself. In a rare and atypical case, maybe. Not likely in most people.
This sounds a lot like the old PLRS/JTIDS hybrid (Position Location Reporting System/Joint Tactical Information Dissemination System) ideas that were being shown off around the US Army Signal Center in 1980 or so. It would have relayed back the location of each unit, and allowed messages to be sent back and forth.
GPS didn't exist yet, so you kept location with timing between the nodes of the network. It was text messages at that time. Very limited, but still the core of the idea.
When encryptable packet switched radio came to the fore, it was one possible way to implement this on a more advanced basis. You could also make sigint and traffic analysis very difficult by dropping cheap realys/decoys all over the place. It would have been robust, as you destroy one, you still have many many paths to get your message through. Fill up network with bogus traffic so that traffic levels wouldn't spike before an operation. Or, spike them in one area as a ruse and then do something in a different area.
I fear, though that the US is getting overly used to fighting forces that have limited technological abilities. They probably won't make the investment to do the decoying and traffic loading that would make this safe against a more advanced military.
Yes, they do have them in urban environments especially. But, issuing identical type smart phones to all your soldiers tags them even then.
So what if there are a few journalists or civilian with the same phones are among them? Would that stop someone if they could get, say, 45% of the time a soldier?
And out in the back areas where the population density is low, the rate is even better.
And, if you're going to use the phones in those back areas for more than voice, you have to have a reasonably modern cell network. So, the army sets one up. Even better. They'll probably encrypt it, so if you can't read the traffic, just blow it up to be sure.
Even today, in our highly wired developed world, radio silence had a definite place. If I'm going to be carrying something that chirps every few millisconds to seconds, I want to be able to silence it.
And, BTW, walking up to 100 meters from the objective and then suddenly ceasing all the radio emissions the opposing force has been seeing is another Big Clue(tm) that something is about to happen.
The mice that you mention were already telomerase deficient. Putting it back helped some.
The mice had a switchable expression of telomerase. When it was off, they had poor development and some of the symptoms of aging at the cellular level. When it was turned back on, they got better.
This is interesting, but not some magic bullet. It was a bit like showing that mice who can't produce insulin are diabetic, and then when insulin is switched back on, they get better. It doesn't tell you how to cure diabetes.
Humans age differently than mice. Besides, the mice in the study will still get old and die.
There are a lot of other factors in what is a very tangled complex process of aging that varies from one type of creature to another.
The studies on paleo diet have been very mixed as yet.
There are people who still eat that sort of diet with little or no processed fats in bush areas of the world still. Though you get claims of long life, it's anecdotal and more often bragging than reality.
The myth of the healthy savage has been around for quite some while, and it crops up repeatedly with relatively little to back it up.
On the other hand, there is good evidence that modern diet has some real downsides especially when combined with being sedentary. We just don't know all the details and combinations yet.
Mom Nature rarely uses single biochemical pathways when several interlinked ones will do. It makes figuring out the straight of it very difficult.
So, you're going to put a comm device on every soldier that emits RF much of the time?
You better seed the whole place with decoy receiver transmitters or relay devices.
Else a military with any level of technical sophistication will use it to target and trigger munitions.
(I had a similar idea when I was in the Army still in the 80s. But it involved specifically putting out more decoys to act as relays than there were soldiers/real radios. Some of them moving, so that wouldn't be a way to decide which was real. Wasn't very practical at the time due to limits on the computing power available.)
The big problem in the diet of developed countries with oils is not the source of them.
The widely agreed problem with oils in the developed world diet is: "Too much."
They all have similar chemistry and mostly differ in the specific balance of different fatty acids that make them up and in some of the trace chemicals that come along with them.
You may quibble about the type of fats and oils, but you'll get pretty broad agreement that we eat too much fat and oil. And rotund sort that I am, I'm a poster child for it.
The problem is, they tend to taste so good, and humans are poor at abstaining or limiting things which taste good.
Glad to know that primitive peoples who don't use those kinds of oils are so healthy and age so well...
FYI, coconut oil is not totally saturated (IV 14 or so). Even in its ultrahardened (by hydrogenation) form, it can still undergo oxidative breakdown and form peroxides in one of the early steps. It admittedly does so at a slower rate than highly unsaturated oils.
How do I know? I worked in a quality control lab that measured the iodine value (a measure of saturation) and the peroxide value (a measure of oxidative deterioration) in coconut oils among many others.
Both butterfat (IV 30 or so) and lamb fat (IV also around 30) are not completely saturated. They also undergo oxidative decay of this sort.
Essentially no natural source oil is completely saturated. The only ones I've seen that were have been chemically prepared synthetics (Captex 300 comes to mind)
FYI number 2: The coconut oil is deodorized as well. It also is sometimes hardened with hydrogenation depending on the application.
My facility was set up for kosher processing and we didn't do animal based oils. But many processed animal fats are also deodorized with high temperature steam just like plant oils.
There are a whole range of other questionable things in your post beyond the lack of knowledge of oil chemistry.
There are many well known reasons for accelerated aging of skin in some people. Over exposure to sun. Smoking. Genetics, etc.
Hell must be freezing over. I'm in agreement with RMS about something.:)
Cloud computing is IMHO a bad idea if relied on by itself. It can be a piece of a computing environment, but relying only on centralized servers to store data and serve apps has many downsides. (Remember the SideKick phone fiasco?)
A laptop running a version of Linux from CD with local storage for data, and automatic synchronization of data with a central server over the net is far more effective.
It lets you work on your data when you have no connection, but still lets you have the advantage of being able to reach it from most anywhere or any machine when you do have the connection.
It's secure. When it reboots, the OS is the original version. Your data may have been diddled with, but this would happen even if it had been stored on Google's central servers.
Further, it's much more flexible as you don't have to wait for Google to vet apps before you use them.
As to people saying "If you don't like it, don't use it.", that's fine, but if this succeeds in the market, it sets what is available in the future. People learn to not be in control of their data or computing environment.
I don't want that level of control being outsourced to someone other than me, or my organization.
Yes, it's secure. It reloads the original OS if it detects a change. It only lets a limited selection of apps to run.
It stores everything on servers, so I have to connect to the net to access my data. (Anyone remember the SideKick fiasco?)
Meaning, that much of the time I won't have access because I'm down in the basement of some old building on the edge of town, etc, etc, lather, rinse, wish it had a dialup as it'd be more useful than this dreck.
If I want freedom and mobility like that, I can just handcuff myself to a steel post.
Running Knoppix off a CD in a real netbook would be a dream compared to this, and secure as well.
If I were the Big Brother from the old Apple commercial and wanted to control my minions utterly, this would be my wet dream.
(It'd be useful for some corporate situations where usefulness should be limited to a small set of operations. I assume it has a way to put an allowed site list or some such, but maybe not even that.)
The wooden ships must go along with all those wooden swords the Japanese military have carried since heaven knows when, and the wooden type 3 heavy machine guns their infantry was using in WW-2.
Slashdot Mirror
My father used to talk about this. There were still a few electrics around in the 1920s when he was a kid. He said you had to be a little careful of them, as they were so quiet they could start moving without you realizing it.
The trick is coming up with a sound that pedestrians will notice, but doesn't become terribly annoying compared to the good it does.
(Vibration activated car alarms are a good example of being quite annoying while doing little worthwhile.)
You've likely got good genetics working in your favor.
It's not just about getting fat. High fat diets tend to be correlated with slightly higher rates of cancers of the colon etc. Some of this is likely that the fats are a concentrated source of calories, and tend to push out some of the higher fiber foods that have lower calorie density. (That's my own guess, take it for what it's worth.)
Another odd, but not heavily supported data point is the study that noted a weight gain trend in lab animals on controlled diets during the same period that we've had the weight trend in the developed world. Could that be an environmentatl factor? Sure. Needs a lot more looking at.
But a lot of the fat often gets combined with high glycemic index carbs, like in potato chips.
The problem with putting all of the blame on particular food processing is that a lot of the problems showed up at least partly before some of the moves to those. Example, the big move to hydrogenated fats in fast food and the like was in the 80s. Yes, Crisco and others were around, but there were a lot of animal source fats and naturally highly saturated oils that were used (the tropicals). We moved away from them on the advice of CSPI and others. Then it turned out that trans fats generated by hydrogenation may be worse.
As to irradiation, up until fairly recently such a low percentage of food was irradiated blaming current food related problems on it is pretty sketchy at best.
I've lived through enough reversals in food guidance to figure that the best advice is moderation in all of it. Eat a balanced diet, and get regular exercise and you've got most of the benefit right there.
The food industry takes a lot of rap, but very little credit for the demonstrable improvements in food. Take a look at the rates of food poisoning and stomach cancer in the early 1900s. There have been dramatic drops in them. Natural toxins from bacteria and other food spoiling organisms aren't just accidently bad like some modern additives, they have evolved specifically to be very damaging to life forms other than the ones that made them.
Some of that improvement is due to refrigeration and better packaging. Some of that is due to the very preservatives that get such a bad rap. Often the "natural" preservatives have problems of their own. Salting something highly is one example. If you've got the genetics for salt saving (sodium retention) it's a big factor in high blood pressure, a known killer.
But, a lot of the idea that by modifying diet in relatively small ways, you can get great effects is wishfull thinking. Some things are known to work. Caloric restriction works, at least if you're a mouse or a lot of other species. It's not so clear in humans.
On the plus side for your approach, the paleo diet is the latest fad among the transhumanists and others. So in some years we'll probably have some good diet on low grain diets.
CSPI was a big part of the push for removing saturates in the 80s. Until they decided trans fats were worse than saturates, and then they reversed course. So, now we're going back to using more tropical oils.
In 1980 did you think we'd be fighting only low tech forces, or did you think we would possibly get into it with the Russians?
Oh, wait. You probably weren't even born then.
Comm systems often stay around a lot longer than people expect. I can't tell what will happen in the next N years, but building in a known and easily fixed vulnerability is kinda silly.
BTW, these same "camel jockeys" also have been monitoring unencrypted transmissions from our "high tech" reconnaisance drones. Admittedly that's not an incredible feat, but it shows they aren't completely ignorant and clueless.
Your trolling-foo is weak young padawan.
When someone tells me that the big car companies are supressing the 200 mpg carburetor that will work on a 2 ton vehicle, I call bullshit just on the basis of physics.
When someone tells me that this carburetor is already easily available to play with like a simple change in diet, and yet no one is demonstrably using it successfully. I call bullshit again.
Can diet improve insulin response in type 2 diabetes? Of course! That's why physicians always modify the diet as part of the therapy for it.
So can moderate exercise. Walking daily is a good thing (tm).
Does a magic diet cure it by itself. In a rare and atypical case, maybe. Not likely in most people.
Cool. Then it automatically alerts me when it moves. Nice. :)
Not just spoofing it. Just home in on it and blow it up. It's a big loud radio source.
You have a relatively small number of central nodes that you can take out and play havoc with communications.
This sounds a lot like the old PLRS/JTIDS hybrid (Position Location Reporting System/Joint Tactical Information Dissemination System) ideas that were being shown off around the US Army Signal Center in 1980 or so. It would have relayed back the location of each unit, and allowed messages to be sent back and forth.
GPS didn't exist yet, so you kept location with timing between the nodes of the network. It was text messages at that time. Very limited, but still the core of the idea.
When encryptable packet switched radio came to the fore, it was one possible way to implement this on a more advanced basis. You could also make sigint and traffic analysis very difficult by dropping cheap realys/decoys all over the place. It would have been robust, as you destroy one, you still have many many paths to get your message through. Fill up network with bogus traffic so that traffic levels wouldn't spike before an operation. Or, spike them in one area as a ruse and then do something in a different area.
I fear, though that the US is getting overly used to fighting forces that have limited technological abilities. They probably won't make the investment to do the decoying and traffic loading that would make this safe against a more advanced military.
Yes, they do have them in urban environments especially. But, issuing identical type smart phones to all your soldiers tags them even then.
So what if there are a few journalists or civilian with the same phones are among them? Would that stop someone if they could get, say, 45% of the time a soldier?
And out in the back areas where the population density is low, the rate is even better.
And, if you're going to use the phones in those back areas for more than voice, you have to have a reasonably modern cell network. So, the army sets one up. Even better. They'll probably encrypt it, so if you can't read the traffic, just blow it up to be sure.
Even today, in our highly wired developed world, radio silence had a definite place. If I'm going to be carrying something that chirps every few millisconds to seconds, I want to be able to silence it.
And, BTW, walking up to 100 meters from the objective and then suddenly ceasing all the radio emissions the opposing force has been seeing is another Big Clue(tm) that something is about to happen.
The mice that you mention were already telomerase deficient. Putting it back helped some.
The mice had a switchable expression of telomerase. When it was off, they had poor development and some of the symptoms of aging at the cellular level. When it was turned back on, they got better.
This is interesting, but not some magic bullet. It was a bit like showing that mice who can't produce insulin are diabetic, and then when insulin is switched back on, they get better. It doesn't tell you how to cure diabetes.
Humans age differently than mice. Besides, the mice in the study will still get old and die.
There are a lot of other factors in what is a very tangled complex process of aging that varies from one type of creature to another.
"This is why we need to institute mandatory human experimentation!"
We already have it. It's called living on modern society.
We also have a great variation in the experiments being done, what with the striking variation of how people live and eat worldwide.
The problem is deciding just who would constitute a control group. :)
The studies on paleo diet have been very mixed as yet.
There are people who still eat that sort of diet with little or no processed fats in bush areas of the world still. Though you get claims of long life, it's anecdotal and more often bragging than reality.
The myth of the healthy savage has been around for quite some while, and it crops up repeatedly with relatively little to back it up.
On the other hand, there is good evidence that modern diet has some real downsides especially when combined with being sedentary. We just don't know all the details and combinations yet.
Mom Nature rarely uses single biochemical pathways when several interlinked ones will do. It makes figuring out the straight of it very difficult.
IFF, TL;DR
(IFF is now In Fire Fight :)
So, you're going to put a comm device on every soldier that emits RF much of the time?
You better seed the whole place with decoy receiver transmitters or relay devices.
Else a military with any level of technical sophistication will use it to target and trigger munitions.
(I had a similar idea when I was in the Army still in the 80s. But it involved specifically putting out more decoys to act as relays than there were soldiers/real radios. Some of them moving, so that wouldn't be a way to decide which was real. Wasn't very practical at the time due to limits on the computing power available.)
The big problem in the diet of developed countries with oils is not the source of them.
The widely agreed problem with oils in the developed world diet is: "Too much."
They all have similar chemistry and mostly differ in the specific balance of different fatty acids that make them up and in some of the trace chemicals that come along with them.
You may quibble about the type of fats and oils, but you'll get pretty broad agreement that we eat too much fat and oil. And rotund sort that I am, I'm a poster child for it.
The problem is, they tend to taste so good, and humans are poor at abstaining or limiting things which taste good.
As opposed to the cholesterol that your own body makes, for example?
Where are you coming up with this unnatural cholesterol in the diet?
Just who is expensively synthesizing cholesterol and adding it to foods? (As opposed to cheaply getting it from its many many natural sources.)
Glad to know that primitive peoples who don't use those kinds of oils are so healthy and age so well...
FYI, coconut oil is not totally saturated (IV 14 or so). Even in its ultrahardened (by hydrogenation) form, it can still undergo oxidative breakdown and form peroxides in one of the early steps. It admittedly does so at a slower rate than highly unsaturated oils.
How do I know? I worked in a quality control lab that measured the iodine value (a measure of saturation) and the peroxide value (a measure of oxidative deterioration) in coconut oils among many others.
Both butterfat (IV 30 or so) and lamb fat (IV also around 30) are not completely saturated. They also undergo oxidative decay of this sort.
Essentially no natural source oil is completely saturated. The only ones I've seen that were have been chemically prepared synthetics (Captex 300 comes to mind)
FYI number 2: The coconut oil is deodorized as well. It also is sometimes hardened with hydrogenation depending on the application.
My facility was set up for kosher processing and we didn't do animal based oils. But many processed animal fats are also deodorized with high temperature steam just like plant oils.
There are a whole range of other questionable things in your post beyond the lack of knowledge of oil chemistry.
There are many well known reasons for accelerated aging of skin in some people. Over exposure to sun. Smoking. Genetics, etc.
This will go to hundreds of comments, as people write: "I watch something else, so logically that means I are smart."
The hospitals should prepare for an onslaught of shoulder strains from the liberals all attempting to pat themselves on the back.
And the pure gold, is that you can come back tomorrow with a study saying that liberals are disloyal by nature, or some such.
Then all the conservatives will have similar rates of commenting and shoulder injuries as their deepest beliefs are confirmed.
And what does this accumplish? Why, confirmation of eyes on pages, so ad revenues go up. Slashdot is a business, after all. Yay!
Shocked to find that his semi-confidential information has been plastered all over the internet and newspapers.
I wonder what he did that would make people want to do that? ;)
Hell must be freezing over. I'm in agreement with RMS about something. :)
Cloud computing is IMHO a bad idea if relied on by itself. It can be a piece of a computing environment, but relying only on centralized servers to store data and serve apps has many downsides. (Remember the SideKick phone fiasco?)
A laptop running a version of Linux from CD with local storage for data, and automatic synchronization of data with a central server over the net is far more effective.
It lets you work on your data when you have no connection, but still lets you have the advantage of being able to reach it from most anywhere or any machine when you do have the connection.
It's secure. When it reboots, the OS is the original version. Your data may have been diddled with, but this would happen even if it had been stored on Google's central servers.
Further, it's much more flexible as you don't have to wait for Google to vet apps before you use them.
As to people saying "If you don't like it, don't use it.", that's fine, but if this succeeds in the market, it sets what is available in the future. People learn to not be in control of their data or computing environment.
I don't want that level of control being outsourced to someone other than me, or my organization.
Yes, it's secure. It reloads the original OS if it detects a change. It only lets a limited selection of apps to run.
It stores everything on servers, so I have to connect to the net to access my data. (Anyone remember the SideKick fiasco?)
Meaning, that much of the time I won't have access because I'm down in the basement of some old building on the edge of town, etc, etc, lather, rinse, wish it had a dialup as it'd be more useful than this dreck.
If I want freedom and mobility like that, I can just handcuff myself to a steel post.
Running Knoppix off a CD in a real netbook would be a dream compared to this, and secure as well.
If I were the Big Brother from the old Apple commercial and wanted to control my minions utterly, this would be my wet dream.
(It'd be useful for some corporate situations where usefulness should be limited to a small set of operations. I assume it has a way to put an allowed site list or some such, but maybe not even that.)
Generally for practice and duels, but usually not for full out warfare.
Unless, of course you actually were Miyamoto Musashi. Then you were so good it probably didn't matter.
Ah.
The wooden ships must go along with all those wooden swords the Japanese military have carried since heaven knows when, and the wooden type 3 heavy machine guns their infantry was using in WW-2.
There's still a good bit of such iron around from the German fleet that was scuttled at Scapa Flow after WW1.
Ssh! Don't tell the microbes, or they'll hitch a ride on a passing container ship and gobble that up too.
Already donate to EFF. And, if you happen to ever be near Urbana, Illinois, yeah, I'd buy you one.
Otherwise, as Sylvester Q. Pussycat says, "It's the sediment that counts." :)