TV news is generally forgettable, but two TV news reports from the '90s really stood out for me:
1. After a series of brush fires considered likely to be arson, a reporter stood in front of a canyon, named the location, and reported the fire dept was saying it would be particularly dangerous if someone started a fire in this canyon or others similar to it, because of reasons X, Y, and Z...
2. After several kids were hospitalized after ingesting jimson weed tea, the news report warned kids not to make jimson weed tea by showing pictures of jimson weed, talking about where it typically grows, which parts of the weed are used, and then saying the side effects include hallucinating for days.
curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change.
That probably makes the most sense for fields that address things like Grand Unified Theory/ Theory of Everything in physics. In fields where the goal for the most part is technology (chemistry,biology, solid state physics) the curve isn't approaching an asymptote, at least not anytime soon.
The posed challenge was "When they can print a motor and power supply", not "when will it make sense to print a motor and power supply". In this case, if you can make a proof of principle speaker, you can make a proof of principle radial motor, neither of which will probably be very practical. One coil, no bearings is enough to make it spin (til the plastic bits melt/wear out).
You're delusional. You have no idea if that speaker's performance even comes close to the performance of a dollar store speaker, how much it cost, how long it took to print and what its useful lifespan is.
More like you're too lazy to read to the end of a comment:
How good a motor and a PSU you can print and how many different printers it would take to make all of the components are other questions.
I have no problems discerning between a proof of concept and a viable commercial device/ viable commercial process. If you wanted to specify the latter, you should have done so in your posed challenge instead of getting snippy later on.
And printing transistors? That's so far away from anything that's even remotely possible, I'm speechless.
You don't get out much, do you?
Fully Printed, High Performance Carbon Nanotube Thin-Film Transistors on Flexible Substrates
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl401934a
Lucent started printing transistors in the '90s. PARC and their partners are developing printed memory, transistors, and sensors as commercial products.
Do you have any inkling of a clue of the material purity required and cleanliness and precision required? Jesus Christ!
Yes I do: very litte. A transistor is DIY at home if you are making them big and primitive, which is sufficient to answer the question you asked. You don't have to make a CPU or mosfets by the truckload to make a single power supply.
airframes are trivial. When they can print a motor and power supply, then maybe they'll have something
They can print copper and silver wire, as well as strontium ferrite magnets. Switching from a linear motor (the 3D printed speaker below) to a rotary motor wouldn't be difficult.
A PSU... capacitors, resistors, semiconductors, induction coils, and transistors can all be printed. How good a motor and a PSU you can print and how many different printers it would take to make all of the components are other questions.
My thoughts are more along the lines of: selling a good lie doesn't make the goal worth the costs. I'd also say there's a big difference between high risk and planned death. A mission without plans for supplies continuing indefinitely or a way back is a suicide mission; a plan that exposes astronauts to a sievert of radiation and engineering mishaps is a high risk one. It's the difference between Kamikazes and the Doolittle (Tokyo bombing) raid.
Yep. And sending the first robot out, running into difficulties, sending out the improved robot, having it fail to deploy, sending out the replacement, realizing there are new problems you want to address, and sending out a new type of robot would still be faster than planning and sending a manned mission. It would also be cheaper, so you could send some robots to Europa and Enceladus too. Why wait til a ~2035 manned mission to learn stuff we could be learning about via robot this decade?
A few more of those 7 points would be difficult to cover in most classrooms, like #1: good psychobabble is pretty much impenetrable to people without at least some university level education in the field(s) it was extracted from. Quite often it is successful because it combines advanced concepts from two completely different fields, leaving potential critics who are experts in one of those fields at a loss because they can't navigate the parts of the claims based in the field they are unfamiliar with (usually math).
Hoyle didn't have doubts about evolution, he had doubts about hypotheses concerning the origin of life (abiogenesis). He thought life came from space via viruses and evolution happened subsequently. The biologists you are talking about for the most part have doubts about aspects of currently accepted theories within evolution, not the fact of evolution itself. Sure there is plenty of stuff to be worked out within evolution: how it has worked under varying circumstances on earth, the increasing variety of hereditary mechanisms and methods of change, how to engineer the evolutionary process in the lab to get the results you want instead of unwanted adaptations, etc. Lots of scientists would love to add their own chapter to evolution; they aren't planning to shitcan it.
and was independent of an individual's physical activity level, caloric intake, sleep timing, age or season. About 20 to 30 minutes of morning light is enough to affect BMI.
What it wasn't independent of: small sample size, short duration, self reported diet.
>We've lost all tolerance for risk or voluntary harm in the pursuit of a larger objective.
In other news, this was the first month without a combat death the US has had in over 10 years. Not that I can say much for some of the objectives involved.
So now if NASA and contractor employees want their careers to progress by working on the largest project in a generation they have to "volunteer" to support the project's suicidal aspect. Sounds like a project where the only winners will be the employment lawyers.
Dangerous does not equal suicide. Are the pilot and parachute manufacturer in the business of guaranteeing that healthy adults purposefully fall to their deaths?
The justification for sending 18 year olds to hell holes has always been that the consequences of not doing so would be much much worse. I won't comment on how often that justification was valid (cause it would get depressing) but in this case we don't even have that justification/rationalization. The only reason is the chance of a "Hey look! I'm on Mars!" tweet/selfie, and the research that could have been done cheaper by robots.
Well here's the big problem: it's not worth it. Sending someone to Mars on a suicide mission wouldn't be a national accomplishment, it would be a national disgrace. We wouldn't learn anything new about Mars that we couldn't learn for fewer $ by sending many, many robotic missions. If the justification is "Gee whiz! I'm on Mars", then explain to me why it would have been worth it for the US to "win" the space race if it meant sending a capsule into space before working out the re-entry technology, so that the first man in space would have been incinerated while everyone in the US listened on radio.
Minor problems:
1. It would pretty much guarantee defunding of NASA. If not, then:
2. Lawsuits filed by your daughter against any contractor that participated in the mission and probably the US govt. as well.
3. Lawsuits filed by employees of NASA and those contractors.
23andMe is a mess; advertising yourself in large print as performing genetic testing but putting "but we don't do medical testing" in the fine print while your real business plan is to rent out peoples genetic and family history data to any corp with deep enough pockets is a bit of a shitshow.
In general, aggressive screening has been extremely useful: pretty much everyone gets screened for PKU, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, MCAD, hypothyroidism, and another ~20 conditions at birth. Vision and hearing, scoliosis, TB and other communicable disease screening are often required for public school entrance. Lipid panels for cardiovascular issues, ALT tests for liver damage, creatinine tests for kidney disease, and various other tests for diabetes are useful throughout adult life. And while colonoscopy may not be the best way to do it screening for colon ca ncer beginning at age 50 makes sense. You are talking about the outliers: the few types of screening where screening itself raises risks or false positives lead to negative consequences or for other reasons screening doesn't end up helping patients overall. I'd add to that list the fad of preventative MRIs.
Overall medicine is increasing the use of screening, not decreasing it. Guidelines will (hopefully) get continually adjusted to throw out the crap, but new tests will always be coming out; most of them more accurate, less invasive, less risky, and/or less expensive than their predecessors.
What I don't understand is why you'll have your DNA tested often. Isn't once good enough until the tech advances or is it advancing significantly yearly?
Pretty much. You would have your genome sequenced once and have the analysis updated as new correlations are validated. The exception would be testing of gene expression levels by looking at mRNA levels. Lots of diseases result in specific changes in gene expression even though the genes themselves haven't undergone any mutation; the changes in expression level can predict the course of the disease and guide therapy decisions.
On the cancer end, BRCA genetic testing can inform decisions likely to considerably lengthen some womens' lives. A bigger impact (or rather, an impact on more people) will come about as biopsy samples are submitted for genetic and gene expression level testing: cancerous cells accumulate lots of mutations, some of which contribute to malignancy. Knowing what those mutations are will help cut down on false positives/false negatives, as well as guide treatment decisions.
Meh. People will be posting their results on facebook soon, if they aren't already. The real challenge will be for people who would like their genetic information kept private (or don't want to know test results) but who have relatives who like to share everything online.
The solution should be something along the lines of forcing insurance companies to cover for hire drivers like they would have to for any other passenger. Why does 'for hire' make any difference what-so-ever in the first place? If I drive 200,000 miles a year and my neighbor drives less than 1000 and both are personal there isn't a premium for one over the other even though the 200,000 miles makes it more risky to insure the one over the other.
If forced to cover for hire drivers they probably would add a huge extra fee to cover the added risk and higher coverage ($1 million minimum in CA); more of their customers will be driving more miles, so the company will end up with more claims overall. The claims will also involve more passengers, so the average expense per claim would rise a bit. They would probably also raise rates after moving violations even more than they do now. I don't think they charge for insurance per-mile because it would be a pain to keep track and would encourage tampering with the odometer/ECU.
Radio dispatchers, the greedy little fucks, want $400-$600 per month, the plate ownjers want $3000 per month to rent a plated cab.
They will fight and bribe all the politicians in city hall to keep their little, very very very high profit turfs.
you left out the taxi medallion owners have $100K to $2.5M sunk into each taxi medallion in some markets. NYC just auctioned off 200 taxi medallions for over $200M. There are over 15,000 taxi medallions in NYC; If NYC turns around and deregulates the taxi turfs then they are facing a ~$30 billion dollar class action law suit from those owners. It would be great to transition to a less regulated market; but the current stakeholders (a lot of them individual drivers with medallions that can't be rented out to others and who have all of their savings plus a monster loan tied into their cab) will not be going quietly into bankruptcy.
Slashdot Mirror
TV news is generally forgettable, but two TV news reports from the '90s really stood out for me:
1. After a series of brush fires considered likely to be arson, a reporter stood in front of a canyon, named the location, and reported the fire dept was saying it would be particularly dangerous if someone started a fire in this canyon or others similar to it, because of reasons X, Y, and Z ...
2. After several kids were hospitalized after ingesting jimson weed tea, the news report warned kids not to make jimson weed tea by showing pictures of jimson weed, talking about where it typically grows, which parts of the weed are used, and then saying the side effects include hallucinating for days.
curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change.
That probably makes the most sense for fields that address things like Grand Unified Theory/ Theory of Everything in physics. In fields where the goal for the most part is technology (chemistry,biology, solid state physics) the curve isn't approaching an asymptote, at least not anytime soon.
The posed challenge was "When they can print a motor and power supply", not "when will it make sense to print a motor and power supply". In this case, if you can make a proof of principle speaker, you can make a proof of principle radial motor, neither of which will probably be very practical. One coil, no bearings is enough to make it spin (til the plastic bits melt/wear out).
You're delusional. You have no idea if that speaker's performance even comes close to the performance of a dollar store speaker, how much it cost, how long it took to print and what its useful lifespan is.
More like you're too lazy to read to the end of a comment:
How good a motor and a PSU you can print and how many different printers it would take to make all of the components are other questions.
I have no problems discerning between a proof of concept and a viable commercial device/ viable commercial process. If you wanted to specify the latter, you should have done so in your posed challenge instead of getting snippy later on.
And printing transistors? That's so far away from anything that's even remotely possible, I'm speechless.
You don't get out much, do you?
Fully Printed, High Performance Carbon Nanotube Thin-Film Transistors on Flexible Substrates
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl401934a
Lucent started printing transistors in the '90s. PARC and their partners are developing printed memory, transistors, and sensors as commercial products.
Do you have any inkling of a clue of the material purity required and cleanliness and precision required? Jesus Christ!
Yes I do: very litte. A transistor is DIY at home if you are making them big and primitive, which is sufficient to answer the question you asked. You don't have to make a CPU or mosfets by the truckload to make a single power supply.
airframes are trivial. When they can print a motor and power supply, then maybe they'll have something
They can print copper and silver wire, as well as strontium ferrite magnets. Switching from a linear motor (the 3D printed speaker below) to a rotary motor wouldn't be difficult.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/12/fully-functional-loudspeaker-3-d-printed
A PSU ... capacitors, resistors, semiconductors, induction coils, and transistors can all be printed. How good a motor and a PSU you can print and how many different printers it would take to make all of the components are other questions.
My thoughts are more along the lines of: selling a good lie doesn't make the goal worth the costs. I'd also say there's a big difference between high risk and planned death. A mission without plans for supplies continuing indefinitely or a way back is a suicide mission; a plan that exposes astronauts to a sievert of radiation and engineering mishaps is a high risk one. It's the difference between Kamikazes and the Doolittle (Tokyo bombing) raid.
Yep. And sending the first robot out, running into difficulties, sending out the improved robot, having it fail to deploy, sending out the replacement, realizing there are new problems you want to address, and sending out a new type of robot would still be faster than planning and sending a manned mission. It would also be cheaper, so you could send some robots to Europa and Enceladus too. Why wait til a ~2035 manned mission to learn stuff we could be learning about via robot this decade?
just getting that out of the way; I'm pretty certain we must disagree about something.
A few more of those 7 points would be difficult to cover in most classrooms, like #1: good psychobabble is pretty much impenetrable to people without at least some university level education in the field(s) it was extracted from. Quite often it is successful because it combines advanced concepts from two completely different fields, leaving potential critics who are experts in one of those fields at a loss because they can't navigate the parts of the claims based in the field they are unfamiliar with (usually math).
Hoyle didn't have doubts about evolution, he had doubts about hypotheses concerning the origin of life (abiogenesis). He thought life came from space via viruses and evolution happened subsequently. The biologists you are talking about for the most part have doubts about aspects of currently accepted theories within evolution, not the fact of evolution itself. Sure there is plenty of stuff to be worked out within evolution: how it has worked under varying circumstances on earth, the increasing variety of hereditary mechanisms and methods of change, how to engineer the evolutionary process in the lab to get the results you want instead of unwanted adaptations, etc. Lots of scientists would love to add their own chapter to evolution; they aren't planning to shitcan it.
Head outside at 9 am for a cigarette break?
It's for your health.
and was independent of an individual's physical activity level, caloric intake, sleep timing, age or season. About 20 to 30 minutes of morning light is enough to affect BMI.
What it wasn't independent of: small sample size, short duration, self reported diet.
>We've lost all tolerance for risk or voluntary harm in the pursuit of a larger objective. In other news, this was the first month without a combat death the US has had in over 10 years. Not that I can say much for some of the objectives involved.
So now if NASA and contractor employees want their careers to progress by working on the largest project in a generation they have to "volunteer" to support the project's suicidal aspect. Sounds like a project where the only winners will be the employment lawyers.
Dangerous does not equal suicide. Are the pilot and parachute manufacturer in the business of guaranteeing that healthy adults purposefully fall to their deaths?
The justification for sending 18 year olds to hell holes has always been that the consequences of not doing so would be much much worse. I won't comment on how often that justification was valid (cause it would get depressing) but in this case we don't even have that justification/rationalization. The only reason is the chance of a "Hey look! I'm on Mars!" tweet/selfie, and the research that could have been done cheaper by robots.
what's the problem with this choice?
Well here's the big problem: it's not worth it. Sending someone to Mars on a suicide mission wouldn't be a national accomplishment, it would be a national disgrace. We wouldn't learn anything new about Mars that we couldn't learn for fewer $ by sending many, many robotic missions. If the justification is "Gee whiz! I'm on Mars", then explain to me why it would have been worth it for the US to "win" the space race if it meant sending a capsule into space before working out the re-entry technology, so that the first man in space would have been incinerated while everyone in the US listened on radio.
Minor problems:
1. It would pretty much guarantee defunding of NASA. If not, then:
2. Lawsuits filed by your daughter against any contractor that participated in the mission and probably the US govt. as well.
3. Lawsuits filed by employees of NASA and those contractors.
23andMe is a mess; advertising yourself in large print as performing genetic testing but putting "but we don't do medical testing" in the fine print while your real business plan is to rent out peoples genetic and family history data to any corp with deep enough pockets is a bit of a shitshow.
In general, aggressive screening has been extremely useful: pretty much everyone gets screened for PKU, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, MCAD, hypothyroidism, and another ~20 conditions at birth. Vision and hearing, scoliosis, TB and other communicable disease screening are often required for public school entrance. Lipid panels for cardiovascular issues, ALT tests for liver damage, creatinine tests for kidney disease, and various other tests for diabetes are useful throughout adult life. And while colonoscopy may not be the best way to do it screening for colon ca ncer beginning at age 50 makes sense. You are talking about the outliers: the few types of screening where screening itself raises risks or false positives lead to negative consequences or for other reasons screening doesn't end up helping patients overall. I'd add to that list the fad of preventative MRIs.
Overall medicine is increasing the use of screening, not decreasing it. Guidelines will (hopefully) get continually adjusted to throw out the crap, but new tests will always be coming out; most of them more accurate, less invasive, less risky, and/or less expensive than their predecessors.
What I don't understand is why you'll have your DNA tested often. Isn't once good enough until the tech advances or is it advancing significantly yearly?
Pretty much. You would have your genome sequenced once and have the analysis updated as new correlations are validated. The exception would be testing of gene expression levels by looking at mRNA levels. Lots of diseases result in specific changes in gene expression even though the genes themselves haven't undergone any mutation; the changes in expression level can predict the course of the disease and guide therapy decisions.
On the cancer end, BRCA genetic testing can inform decisions likely to considerably lengthen some womens' lives. A bigger impact (or rather, an impact on more people) will come about as biopsy samples are submitted for genetic and gene expression level testing: cancerous cells accumulate lots of mutations, some of which contribute to malignancy. Knowing what those mutations are will help cut down on false positives/false negatives, as well as guide treatment decisions.
Spend ~65% of what we do now to recreate one of the European systems.
Spend another ~20% to make our version kick the European version's ass.
Spend the last 15% on bribes to the top stakeholders in our current system to keep them from sabotaging the new one.
Meh. People will be posting their results on facebook soon, if they aren't already. The real challenge will be for people who would like their genetic information kept private (or don't want to know test results) but who have relatives who like to share everything online.
As this efficacy increases, it is highly likely that the best insurance coverage will be based on genomic information.
Actually no; that's been illegal for a few years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act
The solution should be something along the lines of forcing insurance companies to cover for hire drivers like they would have to for any other passenger. Why does 'for hire' make any difference what-so-ever in the first place? If I drive 200,000 miles a year and my neighbor drives less than 1000 and both are personal there isn't a premium for one over the other even though the 200,000 miles makes it more risky to insure the one over the other.
If forced to cover for hire drivers they probably would add a huge extra fee to cover the added risk and higher coverage ($1 million minimum in CA); more of their customers will be driving more miles, so the company will end up with more claims overall. The claims will also involve more passengers, so the average expense per claim would rise a bit. They would probably also raise rates after moving violations even more than they do now. I don't think they charge for insurance per-mile because it would be a pain to keep track and would encourage tampering with the odometer/ECU.
Radio dispatchers, the greedy little fucks, want $400-$600 per month, the plate ownjers want $3000 per month to rent a plated cab. They will fight and bribe all the politicians in city hall to keep their little, very very very high profit turfs.
you left out the taxi medallion owners have $100K to $2.5M sunk into each taxi medallion in some markets. NYC just auctioned off 200 taxi medallions for over $200M. There are over 15,000 taxi medallions in NYC; If NYC turns around and deregulates the taxi turfs then they are facing a ~$30 billion dollar class action law suit from those owners. It would be great to transition to a less regulated market; but the current stakeholders (a lot of them individual drivers with medallions that can't be rented out to others and who have all of their savings plus a monster loan tied into their cab) will not be going quietly into bankruptcy.