This will mean that big pharma will have to run an order of magnitude more studies until they can find the one study which can be published because it shows a positive correlation.
[yes, I know statistics don't really work that way]
Actually they kind of do!
A tactic that Pharma companies have pulled many times in the past is to try and kept generic drugs off the market by showing that they are not equivalent to the proprietary product. And they do this by running a couple of dozen of animal studies, with the animals being given the two different products, with various physiological parameters being monitored. When one of these parameters is found to differ between the two drugs by p > 0.05 they submit the result to the FDA declaring that the two drugs are not equivalent in their effects (the parameter of course has nothing to do with the drug's actual pharmacological effect).
Now with this standard they will have to run 200 or so tests to find one that exceeds p > 0.005.
This is a likely hypothesis - ubiquitous exposure to trace level synthetic chemicals. Many synthetic chemicals have shown estrogenic effects (including a number of plastic ingredients), and cumulative exposure to tiny quantities may be driving this. It is difficult to test though - the exposure is everywhere, and effects may be delayed many years. Is it prenatal exposure, childhood exposure, adult exposure, all of the above?
This is a common tactic for industries and big businesses -- claiming anyone that has any contact with their product in any capacity other than as a simple consumer has a job "created" by them. The American Petroleum Institute claims that oil companies employ 9.5 million people but everyone in any retail business that has a gas pump or sells oil off the shelf is one of those people. By the same token the farm lobby counts anyone who deals with any agricultural product is employed by "farming". So if you work in a 7-11 you are employed both by the petroleum industry and the farm industry (since both types of products are sold), and if they add Apple iPhone cables to their inventory, they would be employed by Apple too!
No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them.
Because there are lots and lots of occultations available to pick from, and NASA went to Patagonia because it wanted a junket there?
If it were just a matter of "picking a star" then the occultation could have been observed at any random ground based observatory. In fact even in Patagonia that could not tell which telescope would be in the correct position. The fact that this does not work on Earth should tip you off that your proposal is nonsensical. Being "in space" does not change the occultation odds.
The disk of 2014 MU69 subtends about E-18 (a million trillionth) of the celestial sphere, which means that even with several billion fairly easy to observe stars in the Milky Way the odds of an occultation at a useful time (before New Horizons does its fly-by) is negligible if you are restricted to a single observing path.
Of course he got paid a hefty sum in return for that NDA. Are you suggesting that it is a good strategy to deceive the court? You can bet that any attorneys for the scamware company will be eager to call that to judge's attention.
Oops - miscalculation: the energy gain is at best only a factor of 11, once you account for canceling the lunar orbital velocity of 1 km/sec. This assumes you are OK with the mass taking 2 weeks to fall to Earth (half the orbital period of the moon). If you want it to fall faster still more energy must be invested in it, reducing the gain even more.
Heinlein's fiction is as bad a physics text as it is a sociology or economics text. This is not to disparage Heinlein, simply to point out that plot points in fiction are just plot points. All science fiction, and all fiction generally, shares this trait.
The lunar bombardment scenario has a couple of problems. The energy gain from firing something from the moon is only about 22-fold (11.2 km/sec / 2.38 km/sec)^2), so that to do any extensive damage on Earth a still enormous amount of electrical energy needs to be put through the mass accelerator.
Another is that the projectile is not really all that cheap. Although the mass is mostly rock, viewing it as just a "cheap rock" is wrong. Rocks in this size range cannot bring a lot of kinetic energy to the ground on Earth. Entry stresses ( deceleration force and dynamic pressure) cause them to shatter and explode in the atmosphere. This can only work if a high-tensile strength shell that can withstand extreme heating is used to hold the rocks (say a steel or titanium shell). And of course this high strength shell also needs a mechanically strong aluminum coil mounted on it for the mass driver to act on. This makes each projectile a significantly costly industrial item that must be manufactured for each shot and would limit the launch rate.
And then there is the problem that that 10 G mass driver could not be hidden at all. The very first shot would show exactly where its end point is (what with radar and all), it would not get too many shots off before the warhead from Earth took it out. A huge investment of resources with little result.
That's the problem with using fiction as a text to "learn" from - the author is free to ignore anything that does not make it a "good story".
Fiction. There was $27.2 billion in general unsecured debt from general unsecured bondholders who did not have "first dibs" on the money. They were in the same asset class ("seniority") as the United Auto Workers pension fund. It is up to the administrator of the bankruptcy how creditors in the same class are treated. As it happened, the bondholders ended up with a 10% ownership share so they were not left out in the cold.
"While the game's digital monsters materialise as if in the real world, they don't interact with it. A Snorlax might appear next to a tree, but the catlike creature won't peek from behind it."
Turkey didn't exist 10.000 years ago. Call it Anatolia or the Black Sea Area. There's no reason to dumb down this stuff on Slashdot, is there?
Here is a correction to the article:
*Correction, 19 June, 3:50 p.m.: The map has been updated to reflect the fact that type A cats came from Turkey, and type C from Egypt. It has been further updated because the original version mislabeled the Black Sea as the Caspian Sea.
At least they are no longer calling the Black Sea the "Caspian Sea"!
Exactly. Turkey was just a trial run, after the analyses was done and the kinks worked out they really went for it in Egypt. All in the name of world domination! They succeeded, where many an evil mastermind has utterly failed.
The abstract of the Nature paper does include this sentence: "While the cat’s worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period in the Near East..."
By comparison with their ancestors (wolves), dogs are stuck in a state of perennial puppyhood. Dogs became domesticated by never growing up - they're always stuck in a childish state.
Neotony is a big part of it, as has been shown by Dmitri Belyaev in the Russian Red Fox experiment, but that is not the whole story. Belyaev's work showed significant domestication (and emergence of neotenous traits) in only a few dozen generations. But dogs have undergone selection for about 10,000 generations, and also have developed some other remarkable traits beyond just accepting humans.
For example dogs have a remarkable ability to learn and respond to words and can learn to recognize several hundred words, similar to the ability of a two and a half year old (roughly). They process word recognition in the same region of the brain that humans use for speech. Dogs also exhibit a "theory of mind", being able to guess what human intentions are. If you point at something, a dog will look at what you are pointing at, showing that they understand your intention in making the gesture. No other animal, not even apes, show this ability.
It has been difficult to do comparative intelligence studies in cats because cats aren't interested in cooperating.
[BTW claiming that dogs are as smart as a 5 year old, as some posters here do, is ridiculous. They aren't that smart.]
Clearly you understand nothing about metallurgy, or science in general. Coal is still a very valuable and necessary hydrocarbon. (You kinda have to have it to make steel for your wind-turbines, dumbA$$), not everything can be made with plastics derived from unicorn turds comprised of hemp residue.
Shill harder
Pot calling kettle.
Only 2% of U.S. coal production is used in making steel (and only deposits of high grade metallurgical coal can be used for this, most coal cannot).
Two-thirds of the steel "produced" in the U.S. each year now is from recycled iron and steel scrap, a process that uses electricity only as a power source (even special metallurgical coke would contaminate the nice clean scrap going in). So yeah, wind turbines make steel just fine.
That's great if you have a hill to pump the water up to. Out here on the Great Plains we don't have many hills.
With high voltage DC power lines (a technology that has been in commercial use for 80 years) you do not have to have the hill nearby. Transmission losses for 800 KV lines is a only a 8% percent loss going from San Diego to Portland Maine, the longest possible CONUS distance. Going from the Midwest to a location with pumped storage is probably going to be 1/3 that distance with losses of 2-3%.
The actual losses in using pumped storage (energy in-energy out) ranges over 14-25%. Battery losses (depending on technology) range over 5-35%
This these two efficiencies reveal something very important that almost everyone on/. ignores. The principal means to deal with power load mismatches with a renewable grid is having a better grid: one that can ship electricity from where it is being produced to where it is needed. Long-distance transmission is more efficient than any storage technology. This grid should include Canada and Mexico too, for even greater advantages. Canada can build and sell pumped storage capacity, Mexico can generate solar power.
Once you create a continent-wide power grid load balancing gets a lot easier and the need for storage shrinks dramatically. When the is a high evening load in the East where most Americans live, the sun is shining out west, and the wind is blowing somewhere in the Midwest.
Currently pumped storage in the U.S. is 2.2% of total grid capacity, and plans exist to increase that to 6.2% in the years ahead. That provides a lot of load shifting capacity.
That cable networks are not going to respond to this situation by offering better value for the money! Monopolies never do.
Cable TV prices have been increasing at four times the rate of inflation for years. Forcing people to buy bundles of channels instead of a la carte offerings for less money, etc., etc.
At the conference, Mayer said one of the things she was looking forward to in her post-Yahoo life was using Gmail again. "I am always faster when using a tool I designed myself," she added.
It is too bad she did not redesign Yahoo Mail. Then the company would have gotten something of value from her tenure.
Slashdot Mirror
This will mean that big pharma will have to run an order of magnitude more studies until they can find the one study which can be published because it shows a positive correlation.
[yes, I know statistics don't really work that way]
Actually they kind of do!
A tactic that Pharma companies have pulled many times in the past is to try and kept generic drugs off the market by showing that they are not equivalent to the proprietary product. And they do this by running a couple of dozen of animal studies, with the animals being given the two different products, with various physiological parameters being monitored. When one of these parameters is found to differ between the two drugs by p > 0.05 they submit the result to the FDA declaring that the two drugs are not equivalent in their effects (the parameter of course has nothing to do with the drug's actual pharmacological effect).
Now with this standard they will have to run 200 or so tests to find one that exceeds p > 0.005.
... light sweet crude...
I have always thought that sounds like the perfect date.
This is a likely hypothesis - ubiquitous exposure to trace level synthetic chemicals. Many synthetic chemicals have shown estrogenic effects (including a number of plastic ingredients), and cumulative exposure to tiny quantities may be driving this. It is difficult to test though - the exposure is everywhere, and effects may be delayed many years. Is it prenatal exposure, childhood exposure, adult exposure, all of the above?
This is a common tactic for industries and big businesses -- claiming anyone that has any contact with their product in any capacity other than as a simple consumer has a job "created" by them. The American Petroleum Institute claims that oil companies employ 9.5 million people but everyone in any retail business that has a gas pump or sells oil off the shelf is one of those people. By the same token the farm lobby counts anyone who deals with any agricultural product is employed by "farming". So if you work in a 7-11 you are employed both by the petroleum industry and the farm industry (since both types of products are sold), and if they add Apple iPhone cables to their inventory, they would be employed by Apple too!
No need to meddle with the orbits of any of the space based telescopes. Just pick a different star to use for occultation for each of them.
Because there are lots and lots of occultations available to pick from, and NASA went to Patagonia because it wanted a junket there?
If it were just a matter of "picking a star" then the occultation could have been observed at any random ground based observatory. In fact even in Patagonia that could not tell which telescope would be in the correct position. The fact that this does not work on Earth should tip you off that your proposal is nonsensical. Being "in space" does not change the occultation odds.
The disk of 2014 MU69 subtends about E-18 (a million trillionth) of the celestial sphere, which means that even with several billion fairly easy to observe stars in the Milky Way the odds of an occultation at a useful time (before New Horizons does its fly-by) is negligible if you are restricted to a single observing path.
Link to the claimed interview?
You need to prove that your 'facts' exist.
Never heard of that song before. Thanks!
Of course he got paid a hefty sum in return for that NDA. Are you suggesting that it is a good strategy to deceive the court? You can bet that any attorneys for the scamware company will be eager to call that to judge's attention.
Currently moon rocks sell for about the price of gem diamonds on the open market, around $1000-$2000 a gram.
Yes, there are moon rocks available for sale right now - lunar meteorites. So there is already a price ceiling on any rocks imported from the moon.
Oops - miscalculation: the energy gain is at best only a factor of 11, once you account for canceling the lunar orbital velocity of 1 km/sec. This assumes you are OK with the mass taking 2 weeks to fall to Earth (half the orbital period of the moon). If you want it to fall faster still more energy must be invested in it, reducing the gain even more.
Heinlein's fiction is as bad a physics text as it is a sociology or economics text. This is not to disparage Heinlein, simply to point out that plot points in fiction are just plot points. All science fiction, and all fiction generally, shares this trait.
The lunar bombardment scenario has a couple of problems. The energy gain from firing something from the moon is only about 22-fold (11.2 km/sec / 2.38 km/sec)^2), so that to do any extensive damage on Earth a still enormous amount of electrical energy needs to be put through the mass accelerator.
Another is that the projectile is not really all that cheap. Although the mass is mostly rock, viewing it as just a "cheap rock" is wrong. Rocks in this size range cannot bring a lot of kinetic energy to the ground on Earth. Entry stresses ( deceleration force and dynamic pressure) cause them to shatter and explode in the atmosphere. This can only work if a high-tensile strength shell that can withstand extreme heating is used to hold the rocks (say a steel or titanium shell). And of course this high strength shell also needs a mechanically strong aluminum coil mounted on it for the mass driver to act on. This makes each projectile a significantly costly industrial item that must be manufactured for each shot and would limit the launch rate.
And then there is the problem that that 10 G mass driver could not be hidden at all. The very first shot would show exactly where its end point is (what with radar and all), it would not get too many shots off before the warhead from Earth took it out. A huge investment of resources with little result.
That's the problem with using fiction as a text to "learn" from - the author is free to ignore anything that does not make it a "good story".
I am not letting a corporation install bugging devices in my home, and I am sure as hell not going to pay for the privilege.
Please explain this "thinming" thing. Anything like a "thin mint"? Those are tasty!
Fiction. There was $27.2 billion in general unsecured debt from general unsecured bondholders who did not have "first dibs" on the money. They were in the same asset class ("seniority") as the United Auto Workers pension fund. It is up to the administrator of the bankruptcy how creditors in the same class are treated. As it happened, the bondholders ended up with a 10% ownership share so they were not left out in the cold.
"While the game's digital monsters materialise as if in the real world, they don't interact with it. A Snorlax might appear next to a tree, but the catlike creature won't peek from behind it."
Its almost as if the creatures weren't real!
Not just Australia. The state of Georgia was also founded as a penal colony. And one quarter of all British immigrants to the (now) United States were prisoners sent as temporarily enslaved ("indentured") labor.
Also, when did we become a species?
Since forever.
3. Logic.
One of the classes of things included with other classes in a genus.
The set of things within one of these classes.
Turkey didn't exist 10.000 years ago. Call it Anatolia or the Black Sea Area. There's no reason to dumb down this stuff on Slashdot, is there?
Here is a correction to the article:
*Correction, 19 June, 3:50 p.m.: The map has been updated to reflect the fact that type A cats came from Turkey, and type C from Egypt. It has been further updated because the original version mislabeled the Black Sea as the Caspian Sea.
At least they are no longer calling the Black Sea the "Caspian Sea"!
Exactly. Turkey was just a trial run, after the analyses was done and the kinks worked out they really went for it in Egypt. All in the name of world domination! They succeeded, where many an evil mastermind has utterly failed.
The abstract of the Nature paper does include this sentence: "While the cat’s worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period in the Near East..."
There is the old joke about the difference between dogs and cats/
Dogs think: “These people feed me, provide for me, give me shelter, and love me. They must be a God!”
Cats think: “These people feed me, provide for me, give me shelter and love me. I must be a God!”
By comparison with their ancestors (wolves), dogs are stuck in a state of perennial puppyhood. Dogs became domesticated by never growing up - they're always stuck in a childish state.
Neotony is a big part of it, as has been shown by Dmitri Belyaev in the Russian Red Fox experiment, but that is not the whole story. Belyaev's work showed significant domestication (and emergence of neotenous traits) in only a few dozen generations. But dogs have undergone selection for about 10,000 generations, and also have developed some other remarkable traits beyond just accepting humans.
For example dogs have a remarkable ability to learn and respond to words and can learn to recognize several hundred words, similar to the ability of a two and a half year old (roughly). They process word recognition in the same region of the brain that humans use for speech. Dogs also exhibit a "theory of mind", being able to guess what human intentions are. If you point at something, a dog will look at what you are pointing at, showing that they understand your intention in making the gesture. No other animal, not even apes, show this ability.
It has been difficult to do comparative intelligence studies in cats because cats aren't interested in cooperating.
[BTW claiming that dogs are as smart as a 5 year old, as some posters here do, is ridiculous. They aren't that smart.]
Clearly you understand nothing about metallurgy, or science in general. Coal is still a very valuable and necessary hydrocarbon. (You kinda have to have it to make steel for your wind-turbines, dumbA$$), not everything can be made with plastics derived from unicorn turds comprised of hemp residue. Shill harder
Pot calling kettle.
Only 2% of U.S. coal production is used in making steel (and only deposits of high grade metallurgical coal can be used for this, most coal cannot).
Two-thirds of the steel "produced" in the U.S. each year now is from recycled iron and steel scrap, a process that uses electricity only as a power source (even special metallurgical coke would contaminate the nice clean scrap going in). So yeah, wind turbines make steel just fine.
That's great if you have a hill to pump the water up to. Out here on the Great Plains we don't have many hills.
With high voltage DC power lines (a technology that has been in commercial use for 80 years) you do not have to have the hill nearby. Transmission losses for 800 KV lines is a only a 8% percent loss going from San Diego to Portland Maine, the longest possible CONUS distance. Going from the Midwest to a location with pumped storage is probably going to be 1/3 that distance with losses of 2-3%.
The actual losses in using pumped storage (energy in-energy out) ranges over 14-25%. Battery losses (depending on technology) range over 5-35%
This these two efficiencies reveal something very important that almost everyone on /. ignores. The principal means to deal with power load mismatches with a renewable grid is having a better grid: one that can ship electricity from where it is being produced to where it is needed. Long-distance transmission is more efficient than any storage technology. This grid should include Canada and Mexico too, for even greater advantages. Canada can build and sell pumped storage capacity, Mexico can generate solar power.
Once you create a continent-wide power grid load balancing gets a lot easier and the need for storage shrinks dramatically. When the is a high evening load in the East where most Americans live, the sun is shining out west, and the wind is blowing somewhere in the Midwest.
Currently pumped storage in the U.S. is 2.2% of total grid capacity, and plans exist to increase that to 6.2% in the years ahead. That provides a lot of load shifting capacity.
That cable networks are not going to respond to this situation by offering better value for the money! Monopolies never do.
Cable TV prices have been increasing at four times the rate of inflation for years. Forcing people to buy bundles of channels instead of a la carte offerings for less money, etc., etc.
At the conference, Mayer said one of the things she was looking forward to in her post-Yahoo life was using Gmail again. "I am always faster when using a tool I designed myself," she added.
It is too bad she did not redesign Yahoo Mail. Then the company would have gotten something of value from her tenure.