Funny thing, back in the 1950s and even 1960s when the healthcare industry was almost entirely private, costs were much, much lower. Most people either had insurance through work or unions, or didn't have any. Hospitals were either private or non-profit. Two other things that didn't exist to the same extent were the expectation of heroic measures for everyone all the time, and the litigation industry.
Interestingly, right now there is a huge exodus of doctors, either from treating Medicare/Medicaid patients or from the business entirely. In the state where I live it's increasingly difficult to get a primary care physician if you don't already have one. My PCP is responsible for over 3000 patients, and has to run from one 15-minute appointment to the next. I wouldn't be surprised to see him quitting soon.
I just read about a study that showed that when doctors were informed of the cost of prescription drugs, they tended to prescribe cheaper drugs with the same efficacy, instead of the ones that the pharma rep pitched last week.
Actually that's pretty hard to do - especially the costs. I have read recently about someone who wanted (after the fact in this case) to find out what it cost for his treatment, and was finally shot down by Medicare, which told him to quit asking. Not only were the hospital and doctors not required to tell him, neither was Medicare.
Interestingly, a recent study by Consumer Reports evaluating outcomes (I think using re-admissions and deaths for a common set of serious ailments) at 2600 hospitals around the US found that outcomes at the 'top tier' and famous hospitals were actually generally not all that good - solidly in the middle range of hospitals nationwide, and substantially below the hospitals, often unheralded, that had the best average outcomes. This might possibly be partially justified on the basis that those hospitals might be getting tougher cases, but not completely.
What the US and Europe have is basically due to historical accident. After WWII, when Europe was a broken mess, it was necessary to get some kind of health care going to just keep people from dying on the street - there was essentially no economic system operating in many countries. (I think there was also a large impact of the european socialist movements of the 1930s, despite the 'socialist' aspects of fascism.) So the new governments established national health care pretty much everywhere, and during the 1950s extended that to many other socialist ideals.
Meanwhile, in the US, that need did not exist. The postwar economic boom (accelerated by the Marshall Plan, which loaned money to Europe that had to be spent on American goods, making Caterpillar Tractor and others very, very happy) meant that very soon after the war companies were competing for employees. Even during the war some companies had established company-run health care, such as Kaiser Industries who built zillions of Jeeps. After the war the demand for employees and the flood of new easy money made it easy for companies to provide health care either themselves or through the unions. So there was no real interest in any form of national health care for several decades. This system actually worked pretty well for a long time, until US companies started feeling the impact of foreign competition in the late 1960s, and until changes in tort law (particularly class actions) and in people's attitudes started the avalanch of legal, liability, and insurance-related costs.
Medicine as a whole (in the US, and also increasingly elsewhere in the developed countries) has been highly distorted by insurance, litigation and regulation, and also by lingering effects of tech advances. The availability of insurance has made it almost impossible to _not_ treat everything, no matter how expensive and how unlikely the recovery is. As one result, in the US (IIRC) over 1/2 of all medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. Insurance also greatly diminishes price sensitivity - from the patient's point of view, "I paid for it, I should get whatever I need". Obviously the last six months of life are likely to cost more because people who die are likely to have been very sick, but too much is spent for too little benefit. If I have a terminal illness, I don't want anyone to spend an extra $30,000 or $100,000 just to keep me alive another six months. But there is almost no force toward reducing costs, and many forces toward increasing costs. Increasing costs actually benefit insurance companies, because this increases their overall revenues - they "have to" charge more due to the increased costs.
Liability has been one of several factors that have resulted in the replacement of reusable tools and materials with disposables, which end up costing a lot more but protect the service provider from liability. And the same concern has almost eliminated competition even in this area - a case in point I am familiar with is the one-foot piece of PVC tubing that constitutes the heart of the blood pump in a kidney machine. Every hospital essentially has to buy this PVC tubing (in a disposable sterile pack) from the kidney machine vendor, because if they bought this on the open market, even if no problems occurred, the hospital could get sued. The vendor charged $150 per piece for this tubing clear back in 1978. This tubing is identical to tubing you can buy at the hardware store for $1 per foot today, but it is cut to length, "inspected", sterilized and packaged. And of course, part of the cost to the vendor is its own liability insurance.
Other cases in point I am personally familiar with: I used to know a heart surgeon. His liability insurance was more than 1/3 of his gross income for the entire office. Someone else I knew had breast cancer and had breast surgery, and got implants (about 15 years ago). Her doctor billed insurance $9500 and after two years of re-submission, arguments, re-re-submission, etc., finally got paid about $5000. This single doctor had two full-time insurance billing people - his only other employee was a receptionist. He told us that if my friend had just come in and paid with a VISA card, he could have charged about $1200 - that was the difference between the costs of insurance and personal payments.
Nietzche was just one example from an interesting book, "The Creative Process", originally published in the 1960s IIRC - apparently it's still in print. It's a collection of 50 essays by well-known thinkers including Nietzche and Einstein, I was just paraphrasing from long-ago memory. Most/all of the essays involve that plateau-leap-plateau-leap cycle of creativity. So it's not just him.
WRT the Nazi collection, another book points out something interesting - another philosopher that was "adopted" by the Nazis was Max Weber, whose work was not at all supportive of the Nazi world view but whose works could be used by them. According to Alan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind"), Weber's work was all the rage, but completely misunderstood, among the European socialists of the 1930s. His work and terminology was turned inside out and most of the original meaning stripped out, and then was brought over to the US and adopted by the folks who taught in American schools of education in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was taught to the budding new teachers who taught them to us Boomers in the 1950s and 1960s. So it turns out that many of the "grand new ideas" of the 1960s were not new, were not grand, and were in fact empty phrases from the socialists of the 1930s whose meanings had been inverted from what Max Weber originally meant. And now here we are.
The plan when I was working on the system was to transport it in and out, and I think it was to be scrubbed before leaving the plant at that time. But I left before the first prototype was shipped to Westinghouse for integration - in fact before the first one was even built and powered up. We actually talked about mini-cooling towers to accelerate the convective flow, but that didn't look like it was going to work. We also talked about heat pipes - as I recall the customers weren't going to be happy about yet another liquid in the building. And then the boss insisted on firing the only guy who could do the heat flow computations!:P
The whole project was a progression of designs, followed by new constraints, followed by new designs, rinse and repeat. We literally completely redesigned the physical system three complete times while I was there, all under the original 1/2 price contract. If our executive had any balls he would have gone after Westinghouse for change orders. As it was, Westinghouse basically got their product paid for largely by the $500K SBIR grant. But for my company it turned that SBIR into a going business, which was the whole point, so it all worked out.
I went out to Waltz Mill (at least I think that was the place - the name rings a bell) on an earlier project, which was just programming a simpler three-axis controller for some one-off project but I don't recall what it did. I saw the official arm only once, before we really got started on the controller. I don't think that was out there - I think that was somewhere in Pittsburgh. But it was a while ago so I could be wrong.
Funny, now I'm in the process of leaving the job I'm at and looking for an project lead, project manager or IT director position!:) But, as my sig shows, I have an extracurricular interest as well. One of the cool things of life today is we have time and resources for multiple careers.
It's too short a season to grapple with so harsh a critique of this minor a transgression. Wow, you managed to get three of them into a single sentence!:) How about "The season is too short to spend it grappling with such a harsh critique of a transgression this minor".
Our brains read predicively, constructing the most probable usage as we go. (There was an article on slashdot about this recently). In this case, I would say that "of this minor a transgression" is first interpreted by our brains first as referring to a minor - a person of age less than 18. Then we run into "a transgression", which breaks our predictive model. So at first we will try to add a comma, making it "of this minor, a transgression", which seems to imply that this poor child was possibly the result of some midnight tryst. But that seems unlikely, so we backtrack, and try "of this transgression, which was minor", finally arriving at the most probable meaning. That's a lot of work for our poor brains to do, and it illustrates why (contrary to your assertion), it is neither efficient, not correctly loading the point. The point is not the minor, it is the transgression. (The same analysis applies to the other two instances in your sentence - "It is too short a season" is the natural reading. So you are forcing the reader to backtrack and reconstruct for each instance. And "so harsh a critique" is just a poor substitute for "such a harsh critique", but I'll assume you added that one just for completeness and grins!:)
Back when Myst came out on the Mac, my then-wife got sucked in. She was glued to the computer for a couple of weeks. She would say, "I'll be right down" at 10 PM and finally come to bed at 3AM or 4AM. I don't know if she ever got through the whole thing. I helped/watched for a while here and there, and it was pretty interesting. Afterwards, she told me she finally understood how I could get so focused on the computer and lose track of time. So that was a win.
So, I'm not a gamer (outside of a bit of Solitaire, but if they can make it as interesting and engaging as they did before, more power to them.
Sigh. A few years ago (2005, actually) I played around with a Peltier junction body part warmer/cooler but did not carry it past a prototype. My idea was to take the place of hot/cold pads on sports injuries, help with backaches, etc. The idea was that this unit could replace both ice packs and hot pads, and even cycle between them, and provide the heat or cold at a precise temperature for a long time. I still have the prototype stuck in a box somewhere. It actually worked, but the hardest thing was getting rid of the excess heat when acting as an 'ice pack' - Peltier junctions aren't very efficient, so heat sinks and maybe fans are necessary, which reduces battery life,...
As city-based life becomes more global and the lights are on all the time, it seems plausible that some humans and their associated animals (cats?) might go toward some form of continuous wakefulness - as it is now, some stock traders are essentially living 24 hour lives, taking cat naps every so often. And I have read that there are a few people (I think a few dozen in the US) who indeed never sleep, so the gene profile is out there. There is still the problem of reproduction - how many kids are stock traders likely to have?
Another subgroup that might show this evolutionary change over time would be those who in the future live in Space, where the time is almost entirely arbitrary. If one lives in a habitat that spins on its axis every few minutes to simulate gravity, and revolves around the Earth with a period that could be from every 90 minutes to every month or more, depending on the orbital height, then maintaining a 24 hour-based schedule would only be advantageous for keeping up with friends on a particular Earthly location, and there would be advantages to not needing to sleep.
Find this book: "Mind Games", published around 1970. Find some friends, go through the exercises (doing each set a few times per week until you've mastered each level or whatever), over a period of about 2-3 months. This was the 'textbook' for a cool class I took a long time ago, called "Altered States of Consciousness Problem Solving Workshop". The purpose of the class was to research the potential for setting subjects with a problem, have them go into these altered states, and then record the results they came up with while in the altered state.
It's well known that many creative people (and probably everybody) will have problems they are not really thinking of consciously, and after days, weeks, months or years suddenly come up with the answer. Nietzche wrote about having had disabling migraines for a year, until one night he went for a walk, and on the top of a mountain the entire text of "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" came to him all at once, and he went home and copied it down.
By the end of the class I was in fairly complete control of my dreams - I could set myself a problem and solve it in my sleep; I could alter the plot of dreams - they're MY dreams, it's MY world, and I can make anything happen the way I want - think of yourself as Gandalf in the dream; and as an added bonus I could program myself to sleep for any given time from a few minutes to 10 hours, and wake up accurately on the dot, fully refreshed.
I often would program myself to sleep for several minutes between classes. This was harder if I was already sleep deprived though.
I still have a bit of the skill but not much. Mostly I don't have the self-discipline habit to do the walk down into the subconscious state. I like to think I could though, if I put my mind to it.
... because of a manufacturing issue that leaves it with too high a density of defects.
Sorry, after a long time, I have to put myGrammar Nazi hat on for (I think) the first time. It's not just you, this is just the example that tipped me over the edge - much like the "leaves it with too high [of] a" phrasing leaves the reader tipping off into.... what?
This type of construction has become endemic in conversation in the last few years, and I'm sorry, but it's cumbersome, ungainly, unsightly, and painful to hear or see. Perhaps, just perhaps, if I say something, this bad practice will lose some momentum and die out.
I would like to suggest to everyone who uses this "too high of X" construction, to consider using something more like this: "... leaves it with a defect density that is too high." See, that flows, it keeps the primary objective phrase (leaves it with a defect density) nicely collected, with the modifying phrase (that is too high) also nicely collected. IANA GN to the point of recognizing if the problem is a split infinitive or other formal error, but I know the original is bad.
Interesting to hear the end of the story. As I alluded to in my comment, I did not leave on a good note and didn't keep in contact - but I felt that I did the right thing. Where I truly failed was in not being a better politician, and not being able to convince management that the project cost problem was his, not mine - if he wanted to do the project for 1/2 of the cost of development, he needed to go find money. I think he could have done that. (For that matter, I _know_ he could have done that - he could have written a personal check for it without touching his own petty cash, although he was not the founder so that wasn't likely.) For myself, I marked it as a success as the original design that I came up with turned into a real product that was successful at least for a time.
I'm still curious - how did they handle cooling? I don't recall the numbers, but passive convective cooling was not going to work, especially since at least one major customer would not allow a big finned heat sink, much less fans. I suppose that if the machine were just going to be kept there, a lot of these problems would be reduced because it wouldn't be necessary to wash it down and remove it, which was the original plan.
Even before my then-company got involved, Westinghouse had a working robot, but was having trouble with hysteresis in the motor system - the arm would jump all over the place and shudder constantly when not in motion. So they came to us to see if we could fix the problem. We quickly determined that the cycle time of their original prototype controller was too slow. The controller needed to be able to respond at least twice as fast as the highest resonant frequency in the arm. In some cases stronger damping can be used instead but there are lots of issues with that in a robotics application - speed goes away, for one.
I lobbied some for an opportunity for a site visit to at least one plant, or even a Westinghouse simulator, but never got the go ahead. It would have given all of us on the dev team a better sense of what we were dealing with.
I left the project before it got to the point of having an official product name (at least as far as I can recall), so I don't know if it was ROSA or not. I worked for the company (and ran the control systems group) for the company who built the controller. And it's true, 80 lbs is low for the entire six-axis system - I was avoiding complexity in my comment.
A big part of the problem was that the 'packaging' constraints continually changed as new information was collected from the various plants. Originally the control system was constrained to (IIRC) 200 lbs. and was going to be one box that could be rolled into the steam generator facility. Then it turned out that it would have to be carried into some facilities because there was no way to roll anything in due in part to the piping issue. So it was broken into two boxes of 120 lbs. each (including the extra weight due to the second box, plumbing, etc.). Then it turned out it would have to be carried up ladders (LADDERS!!!???) in some plants, and oh by the way, the maximum OSHA weight was 80 lbs. per box. I left the company shortly after that, but they were considering going to a fourth box at that point.
So, as you say, in at least some sense it had to be brought into the plants in a semi-disassembled form. I know that some plants would never, never, allow the boxes to be opened inside the facility and then brought back out so I'm not sure what you mean by 'taking it apart' - I assume you mean unplugging the wiring (and plumbing? I left before that issue was fully resolved) sections. They were unhappy enough just about plugging and unplugging the connections.
For those who aren't familiar, the motor controllers for a pretty hefty six-axis robot are pretty big themselves, and even at something like 95% efficiency generate a lot of heat. So in addition to the pure electrical constraints (at the time I left the design team was divided between advocates of 400 or 480 Hz power, which made transformers small and light, vs. 60Hz power, which made things cheaper), the question of how to get rid of the heat was a big problem. There were thoughts of running a cooling system outside, but some plants would not allow air, water, or anything else besides electricity to flow in and out of the facility (rightly so), but that meant that the controllers had to have some huge convective cooling capacity without using fans.
My recollection of the steam tubing thickness may be incorrect, as this was around 1990, but that was my recollection. I wondered about it back then as it would seem to be inefficient, but I wasn't knowledgeable regarding the pressures involved.
Point of trivia - I left because I refused to fire the one very knowledgeable but expensive consulting engineer we had at the time who I thought was essential to the success of the product. He was the one who worked out the true power and heat budgets for the system. There was basically him, me, and two junior programmers. The project was going over the budget the CEO had agreed to with the client, which was less than 1/2 the budget we had worked out internally and bid to the client originally. So they fired me, then fired the engineer.
Back in 1990 or thereabouts, I worked for a company building a robotic system to be used in maintaining nuclear plants - in particular replacing old steam generator tubes. I learned some things.
- some plants are so clean that you might set off the radiation alarms going IN to the plant. (This is in fact how the problem with Radon in homes was discovered. A plant worker set off the alarms going in to work at one of these very clean plants.) - the rules for what you can and can't bring into the steam generator structure (for example) vary wildly from one company to another. This applies to things in hoses as well. - others are the nuclear equivalent to the guy down the street with a couple of busted trucks in his yard. - similarly, the design rules for the engineering and construction drawings for different plants ranged from aerospace quality to kindergarten sketches. One actual drawing for an outbuildings I reviewed back in 1985 for a different project - studying the possibility of scanning plant drawings into CAD - was a huge sepia toned mess, with the entire building on one drawing - structural, plumbing, electrical, finish work,... In several places changed had been accomplished by literally cutting a piece of the drawing out and taping a new piece in. - especially back in the 1960s, when most US facilities were designed, US plants were defined as buildings, construction projects, and were designed by architects (with the help of some engineers). Each plant was different, and so each plant had different mistakes - misrouted piping that crossed through other pipes and had to be rerouted in the field, or just crossing essential walkways at waist height; cabling that wouldn't fit or couldn't be pulled through the original routing trays,... Try carrying an 80 pound robot controller box down a walkway with 1/2 dozen pipes running across it at different heights! - In France and other places, all the plants were defined as machines, like airplanes, so they were all essentially the same design. When a mistake or a fault was found in one, it could be prevented or fixed in all the others at the same time much like the FAA rules on airplanes - when a problem shows up the whole fleet can be inspected. - the water in the 'hot' side (going through the reactor, out to the heat exchanger) and the 'warm' side (from the heat exchanger to the steam generator) is so pure that it eats stainless steel. The steam generator tubes were (IIRC) over an inch thick stainless, and over 20 years that thickness would erode away until the tubes were at risk of blowing out. - the key facts: When these plants were designed, the AEC controlled the industry. And the brilliant strategy for life planning was, "We'll build a plant, run it for 20 years, fill it with concrete, and leave it there for 50,000 years." (Yes, really). There were no serious plans for actually maintaining the internal systems like the steam generators. Then in the 70s that wasn't going to work. So for another 20 years, the plan was, "We'll hire day labor off the street. Each guy can work for two days, then he'll have had his lifetime dose of radiation and can never do this work again." (When I got involved Westinghouse was finally trying to come up with a robotic system to replace those guys.) - finally, there are weird things about the high voltages around power plants that you have to be aware of, like avoiding leaving long power cords laying around - the voltage differentials on the ground can generate enough (induced?) current in the cord to cook it.
IANA suit expert, but it seems to me that for the primary need of keeping one's insides where they belong, there is minimal need for air inside the suit, except possibly the head - really just the breathing system and the eyes. The key thing for most of the suit is to replace the air pressure we are used to with some other form of constraint. Today I watched a thing about those Speedo swim suits that MIchael Phelps et al used in their record Olympic swims. Among other things, they were very tight fitting. Even neoprene diving wetsuits provide a lot of constriction, although they are designed for a different purpose. So I wonder if even the MIT suit might be trying too hard with their directional stretch.
As a supporter of and somewhat-participant in the commercial space industry, I would prefer the term 'infant' to 'infantile' - the connotations are entirely different.:)
OTOH, it's true there are some in this industry (as in all industries) with a big too much hope and not quite enough reason! The public image of space, especially as presented in the media, has encouraged people think that it's really not rocket science any more. My great hope is that commercial space efforts will take the ball away from the politicians to some extent, so it can grow more naturally. But the fact remains that space is hard, extremely demanding, will take much more time and money than many people realize, and suffers fools not at all. But I hope and believe that we can do it, together.
This has been argued many times. You have to look at the total picture. The early huge gains from HFT were because it was a new technology, and there was a tech bubble around it (which coincided with some other bubbles, but that's aside the point). Now essentially every significant institution is doing it, and most of the pure-HFT entities are having trouble making any money because the spreads have shrunk ever closer to zero - that is a good thing in general, as it moves the market ever closer to the ideal they talk about in Econ 101 - any new piece of information that comes into the market is quickly incorporated into the pricing, and the 'ringing' that used to occur is damped out quickly by opposing 'traders'.
This has become so effective that, except for unusual events like an announcement about a particular company or market segment or political situation or whatever, nearly all individual stocks (outside penny stocks etc.) follow the macroeconomic situation in parallel.
Even when a big mistake happens, between the opposing algorithms 'covering' each other by buying or selling counter to each other and the various mechanisms put into place to short-circuit sudden anomalies, those anomalies are sorted out within minutes. Back in the old days an anomaly could take hours, days, weeks or years to get fixed.
HFT (and related tech) also makes it possible for Schwab, for example, to allow you to buy, sell or hold 153.73215 shares of a stock, because your 'trade' is nearly always executed solely within the Schwab computer system and never sees the real market - the Schwab computer system bundles your virtual trade with others to drive their HFT algorithm to actually buy or sell as required.
TL;DR - HFT just makes the approximation of the market to the macroeconomic situation less digital, closer to the 'true' analog state, and makes it easier for everyone to participate.
Indeed. My first computer job was running an IBM 1130 clone. It had a one MB 14 inch hard drive, plus a 5MB Winchester 'washing machine' - removable cartridges contained 5MB on five platters, and the head arm was driven by a 5 Horsepower stepping motor. The thing walked across the floor when certain jobs were run. One amusing program (on cards, as you note) was an assembler program that played music. This worked by sending certain bitpattern signals to the Winchester drive, and the EMI on the channel was strong enough that you could put an AM radio (one of those early one-transister types) on top of the console, and it would play 'Jingle Bells' or whatever. There was even a data deck of cards to play different songs.
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Funny thing, back in the 1950s and even 1960s when the healthcare industry was almost entirely private, costs were much, much lower. Most people either had insurance through work or unions, or didn't have any. Hospitals were either private or non-profit. Two other things that didn't exist to the same extent were the expectation of heroic measures for everyone all the time, and the litigation industry.
Interestingly, right now there is a huge exodus of doctors, either from treating Medicare/Medicaid patients or from the business entirely. In the state where I live it's increasingly difficult to get a primary care physician if you don't already have one. My PCP is responsible for over 3000 patients, and has to run from one 15-minute appointment to the next. I wouldn't be surprised to see him quitting soon.
I just read about a study that showed that when doctors were informed of the cost of prescription drugs, they tended to prescribe cheaper drugs with the same efficacy, instead of the ones that the pharma rep pitched last week.
Actually that's pretty hard to do - especially the costs. I have read recently about someone who wanted (after the fact in this case) to find out what it cost for his treatment, and was finally shot down by Medicare, which told him to quit asking. Not only were the hospital and doctors not required to tell him, neither was Medicare.
Interestingly, a recent study by Consumer Reports evaluating outcomes (I think using re-admissions and deaths for a common set of serious ailments) at 2600 hospitals around the US found that outcomes at the 'top tier' and famous hospitals were actually generally not all that good - solidly in the middle range of hospitals nationwide, and substantially below the hospitals, often unheralded, that had the best average outcomes. This might possibly be partially justified on the basis that those hospitals might be getting tougher cases, but not completely.
What the US and Europe have is basically due to historical accident. After WWII, when Europe was a broken mess, it was necessary to get some kind of health care going to just keep people from dying on the street - there was essentially no economic system operating in many countries. (I think there was also a large impact of the european socialist movements of the 1930s, despite the 'socialist' aspects of fascism.) So the new governments established national health care pretty much everywhere, and during the 1950s extended that to many other socialist ideals.
Meanwhile, in the US, that need did not exist. The postwar economic boom (accelerated by the Marshall Plan, which loaned money to Europe that had to be spent on American goods, making Caterpillar Tractor and others very, very happy) meant that very soon after the war companies were competing for employees. Even during the war some companies had established company-run health care, such as Kaiser Industries who built zillions of Jeeps. After the war the demand for employees and the flood of new easy money made it easy for companies to provide health care either themselves or through the unions. So there was no real interest in any form of national health care for several decades. This system actually worked pretty well for a long time, until US companies started feeling the impact of foreign competition in the late 1960s, and until changes in tort law (particularly class actions) and in people's attitudes started the avalanch of legal, liability, and insurance-related costs.
Medicine as a whole (in the US, and also increasingly elsewhere in the developed countries) has been highly distorted by insurance, litigation and regulation, and also by lingering effects of tech advances. The availability of insurance has made it almost impossible to _not_ treat everything, no matter how expensive and how unlikely the recovery is. As one result, in the US (IIRC) over 1/2 of all medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. Insurance also greatly diminishes price sensitivity - from the patient's point of view, "I paid for it, I should get whatever I need". Obviously the last six months of life are likely to cost more because people who die are likely to have been very sick, but too much is spent for too little benefit. If I have a terminal illness, I don't want anyone to spend an extra $30,000 or $100,000 just to keep me alive another six months. But there is almost no force toward reducing costs, and many forces toward increasing costs. Increasing costs actually benefit insurance companies, because this increases their overall revenues - they "have to" charge more due to the increased costs.
Liability has been one of several factors that have resulted in the replacement of reusable tools and materials with disposables, which end up costing a lot more but protect the service provider from liability. And the same concern has almost eliminated competition even in this area - a case in point I am familiar with is the one-foot piece of PVC tubing that constitutes the heart of the blood pump in a kidney machine. Every hospital essentially has to buy this PVC tubing (in a disposable sterile pack) from the kidney machine vendor, because if they bought this on the open market, even if no problems occurred, the hospital could get sued. The vendor charged $150 per piece for this tubing clear back in 1978. This tubing is identical to tubing you can buy at the hardware store for $1 per foot today, but it is cut to length, "inspected", sterilized and packaged. And of course, part of the cost to the vendor is its own liability insurance.
Other cases in point I am personally familiar with: I used to know a heart surgeon. His liability insurance was more than 1/3 of his gross income for the entire office. Someone else I knew had breast cancer and had breast surgery, and got implants (about 15 years ago). Her doctor billed insurance $9500 and after two years of re-submission, arguments, re-re-submission, etc., finally got paid about $5000. This single doctor had two full-time insurance billing people - his only other employee was a receptionist. He told us that if my friend had just come in and paid with a VISA card, he could have charged about $1200 - that was the difference between the costs of insurance and personal payments.
Cool. I'm thinking of buying a new copy myself - I lost mine some years ago due to a basement flood.
Nietzche was just one example from an interesting book, "The Creative Process", originally published in the 1960s IIRC - apparently it's still in print. It's a collection of 50 essays by well-known thinkers including Nietzche and Einstein, I was just paraphrasing from long-ago memory. Most/all of the essays involve that plateau-leap-plateau-leap cycle of creativity. So it's not just him.
WRT the Nazi collection, another book points out something interesting - another philosopher that was "adopted" by the Nazis was Max Weber, whose work was not at all supportive of the Nazi world view but whose works could be used by them. According to Alan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind"), Weber's work was all the rage, but completely misunderstood, among the European socialists of the 1930s. His work and terminology was turned inside out and most of the original meaning stripped out, and then was brought over to the US and adopted by the folks who taught in American schools of education in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was taught to the budding new teachers who taught them to us Boomers in the 1950s and 1960s. So it turns out that many of the "grand new ideas" of the 1960s were not new, were not grand, and were in fact empty phrases from the socialists of the 1930s whose meanings had been inverted from what Max Weber originally meant. And now here we are.
The plan when I was working on the system was to transport it in and out, and I think it was to be scrubbed before leaving the plant at that time. But I left before the first prototype was shipped to Westinghouse for integration - in fact before the first one was even built and powered up. We actually talked about mini-cooling towers to accelerate the convective flow, but that didn't look like it was going to work. We also talked about heat pipes - as I recall the customers weren't going to be happy about yet another liquid in the building. And then the boss insisted on firing the only guy who could do the heat flow computations! :P
The whole project was a progression of designs, followed by new constraints, followed by new designs, rinse and repeat. We literally completely redesigned the physical system three complete times while I was there, all under the original 1/2 price contract. If our executive had any balls he would have gone after Westinghouse for change orders. As it was, Westinghouse basically got their product paid for largely by the $500K SBIR grant. But for my company it turned that SBIR into a going business, which was the whole point, so it all worked out.
I went out to Waltz Mill (at least I think that was the place - the name rings a bell) on an earlier project, which was just programming a simpler three-axis controller for some one-off project but I don't recall what it did. I saw the official arm only once, before we really got started on the controller. I don't think that was out there - I think that was somewhere in Pittsburgh. But it was a while ago so I could be wrong.
Funny, now I'm in the process of leaving the job I'm at and looking for an project lead, project manager or IT director position! :) But, as my sig shows, I have an extracurricular interest as well. One of the cool things of life today is we have time and resources for multiple careers.
It's too short a season to grapple with so harsh a critique of this minor a transgression. :)
Wow, you managed to get three of them into a single sentence!
How about "The season is too short to spend it grappling with such a harsh critique of a transgression this minor".
Our brains read predicively, constructing the most probable usage as we go. (There was an article on slashdot about this recently). In this case, I would say that "of this minor a transgression" is first interpreted by our brains first as referring to a minor - a person of age less than 18. Then we run into "a transgression", which breaks our predictive model. So at first we will try to add a comma, making it "of this minor, a transgression", which seems to imply that this poor child was possibly the result of some midnight tryst. But that seems unlikely, so we backtrack, and try "of this transgression, which was minor", finally arriving at the most probable meaning. That's a lot of work for our poor brains to do, and it illustrates why (contrary to your assertion), it is neither efficient, not correctly loading the point. The point is not the minor, it is the transgression. (The same analysis applies to the other two instances in your sentence - "It is too short a season" is the natural reading. So you are forcing the reader to backtrack and reconstruct for each instance. And "so harsh a critique" is just a poor substitute for "such a harsh critique", but I'll assume you added that one just for completeness and grins! :)
Back when Myst came out on the Mac, my then-wife got sucked in. She was glued to the computer for a couple of weeks. She would say, "I'll be right down" at 10 PM and finally come to bed at 3AM or 4AM. I don't know if she ever got through the whole thing. I helped/watched for a while here and there, and it was pretty interesting. Afterwards, she told me she finally understood how I could get so focused on the computer and lose track of time. So that was a win.
So, I'm not a gamer (outside of a bit of Solitaire, but if they can make it as interesting and engaging as they did before, more power to them.
Yep, that's it. Thanks! :)
Sigh. A few years ago (2005, actually) I played around with a Peltier junction body part warmer/cooler but did not carry it past a prototype. My idea was to take the place of hot/cold pads on sports injuries, help with backaches, etc. The idea was that this unit could replace both ice packs and hot pads, and even cycle between them, and provide the heat or cold at a precise temperature for a long time. I still have the prototype stuck in a box somewhere. It actually worked, but the hardest thing was getting rid of the excess heat when acting as an 'ice pack' - Peltier junctions aren't very efficient, so heat sinks and maybe fans are necessary, which reduces battery life, ...
As city-based life becomes more global and the lights are on all the time, it seems plausible that some humans and their associated animals (cats?) might go toward some form of continuous wakefulness - as it is now, some stock traders are essentially living 24 hour lives, taking cat naps every so often. And I have read that there are a few people (I think a few dozen in the US) who indeed never sleep, so the gene profile is out there. There is still the problem of reproduction - how many kids are stock traders likely to have?
Another subgroup that might show this evolutionary change over time would be those who in the future live in Space, where the time is almost entirely arbitrary. If one lives in a habitat that spins on its axis every few minutes to simulate gravity, and revolves around the Earth with a period that could be from every 90 minutes to every month or more, depending on the orbital height, then maintaining a 24 hour-based schedule would only be advantageous for keeping up with friends on a particular Earthly location, and there would be advantages to not needing to sleep.
Find this book: "Mind Games", published around 1970. Find some friends, go through the exercises (doing each set a few times per week until you've mastered each level or whatever), over a period of about 2-3 months. This was the 'textbook' for a cool class I took a long time ago, called "Altered States of Consciousness Problem Solving Workshop". The purpose of the class was to research the potential for setting subjects with a problem, have them go into these altered states, and then record the results they came up with while in the altered state.
It's well known that many creative people (and probably everybody) will have problems they are not really thinking of consciously, and after days, weeks, months or years suddenly come up with the answer. Nietzche wrote about having had disabling migraines for a year, until one night he went for a walk, and on the top of a mountain the entire text of "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" came to him all at once, and he went home and copied it down.
By the end of the class I was in fairly complete control of my dreams - I could set myself a problem and solve it in my sleep; I could alter the plot of dreams - they're MY dreams, it's MY world, and I can make anything happen the way I want - think of yourself as Gandalf in the dream; and as an added bonus I could program myself to sleep for any given time from a few minutes to 10 hours, and wake up accurately on the dot, fully refreshed.
I often would program myself to sleep for several minutes between classes. This was harder if I was already sleep deprived though.
I still have a bit of the skill but not much. Mostly I don't have the self-discipline habit to do the walk down into the subconscious state. I like to think I could though, if I put my mind to it.
... because of a manufacturing issue that leaves it with too high a density of defects.
Sorry, after a long time, I have to put myGrammar Nazi hat on for (I think) the first time. It's not just you, this is just the example that tipped me over the edge - much like the "leaves it with too high [of] a" phrasing leaves the reader tipping off into.... what?
This type of construction has become endemic in conversation in the last few years, and I'm sorry, but it's cumbersome, ungainly, unsightly, and painful to hear or see. Perhaps, just perhaps, if I say something, this bad practice will lose some momentum and die out.
I would like to suggest to everyone who uses this "too high of X" construction, to consider using something more like this: "... leaves it with a defect density that is too high." See, that flows, it keeps the primary objective phrase (leaves it with a defect density) nicely collected, with the modifying phrase (that is too high) also nicely collected. IANA GN to the point of recognizing if the problem is a split infinitive or other formal error, but I know the original is bad.
Interesting to hear the end of the story. As I alluded to in my comment, I did not leave on a good note and didn't keep in contact - but I felt that I did the right thing. Where I truly failed was in not being a better politician, and not being able to convince management that the project cost problem was his, not mine - if he wanted to do the project for 1/2 of the cost of development, he needed to go find money. I think he could have done that. (For that matter, I _know_ he could have done that - he could have written a personal check for it without touching his own petty cash, although he was not the founder so that wasn't likely.) For myself, I marked it as a success as the original design that I came up with turned into a real product that was successful at least for a time.
I'm still curious - how did they handle cooling? I don't recall the numbers, but passive convective cooling was not going to work, especially since at least one major customer would not allow a big finned heat sink, much less fans. I suppose that if the machine were just going to be kept there, a lot of these problems would be reduced because it wouldn't be necessary to wash it down and remove it, which was the original plan.
Even before my then-company got involved, Westinghouse had a working robot, but was having trouble with hysteresis in the motor system - the arm would jump all over the place and shudder constantly when not in motion. So they came to us to see if we could fix the problem. We quickly determined that the cycle time of their original prototype controller was too slow. The controller needed to be able to respond at least twice as fast as the highest resonant frequency in the arm. In some cases stronger damping can be used instead but there are lots of issues with that in a robotics application - speed goes away, for one.
I lobbied some for an opportunity for a site visit to at least one plant, or even a Westinghouse simulator, but never got the go ahead. It would have given all of us on the dev team a better sense of what we were dealing with.
The 90% rule here is a good lesson for everyone.
I left the project before it got to the point of having an official product name (at least as far as I can recall), so I don't know if it was ROSA or not. I worked for the company (and ran the control systems group) for the company who built the controller. And it's true, 80 lbs is low for the entire six-axis system - I was avoiding complexity in my comment.
A big part of the problem was that the 'packaging' constraints continually changed as new information was collected from the various plants. Originally the control system was constrained to (IIRC) 200 lbs. and was going to be one box that could be rolled into the steam generator facility. Then it turned out that it would have to be carried into some facilities because there was no way to roll anything in due in part to the piping issue. So it was broken into two boxes of 120 lbs. each (including the extra weight due to the second box, plumbing, etc.). Then it turned out it would have to be carried up ladders (LADDERS!!!???) in some plants, and oh by the way, the maximum OSHA weight was 80 lbs. per box. I left the company shortly after that, but they were considering going to a fourth box at that point.
So, as you say, in at least some sense it had to be brought into the plants in a semi-disassembled form. I know that some plants would never, never, allow the boxes to be opened inside the facility and then brought back out so I'm not sure what you mean by 'taking it apart' - I assume you mean unplugging the wiring (and plumbing? I left before that issue was fully resolved) sections. They were unhappy enough just about plugging and unplugging the connections.
For those who aren't familiar, the motor controllers for a pretty hefty six-axis robot are pretty big themselves, and even at something like 95% efficiency generate a lot of heat. So in addition to the pure electrical constraints (at the time I left the design team was divided between advocates of 400 or 480 Hz power, which made transformers small and light, vs. 60Hz power, which made things cheaper), the question of how to get rid of the heat was a big problem. There were thoughts of running a cooling system outside, but some plants would not allow air, water, or anything else besides electricity to flow in and out of the facility (rightly so), but that meant that the controllers had to have some huge convective cooling capacity without using fans.
My recollection of the steam tubing thickness may be incorrect, as this was around 1990, but that was my recollection. I wondered about it back then as it would seem to be inefficient, but I wasn't knowledgeable regarding the pressures involved.
Point of trivia - I left because I refused to fire the one very knowledgeable but expensive consulting engineer we had at the time who I thought was essential to the success of the product. He was the one who worked out the true power and heat budgets for the system. There was basically him, me, and two junior programmers. The project was going over the budget the CEO had agreed to with the client, which was less than 1/2 the budget we had worked out internally and bid to the client originally. So they fired me, then fired the engineer.
Back in 1990 or thereabouts, I worked for a company building a robotic system to be used in maintaining nuclear plants - in particular replacing old steam generator tubes. I learned some things.
- some plants are so clean that you might set off the radiation alarms going IN to the plant. (This is in fact how the problem with Radon in homes was discovered. A plant worker set off the alarms going in to work at one of these very clean plants.) ... In several places changed had been accomplished by literally cutting a piece of the drawing out and taping a new piece in. ... Try carrying an 80 pound robot controller box down a walkway with 1/2 dozen pipes running across it at different heights!
- the rules for what you can and can't bring into the steam generator structure (for example) vary wildly from one company to another. This applies to things in hoses as well.
- others are the nuclear equivalent to the guy down the street with a couple of busted trucks in his yard.
- similarly, the design rules for the engineering and construction drawings for different plants ranged from aerospace quality to kindergarten sketches. One actual drawing for an outbuildings I reviewed back in 1985 for a different project - studying the possibility of scanning plant drawings into CAD - was a huge sepia toned mess, with the entire building on one drawing - structural, plumbing, electrical, finish work,
- especially back in the 1960s, when most US facilities were designed, US plants were defined as buildings, construction projects, and were designed by architects (with the help of some engineers). Each plant was different, and so each plant had different mistakes - misrouted piping that crossed through other pipes and had to be rerouted in the field, or just crossing essential walkways at waist height; cabling that wouldn't fit or couldn't be pulled through the original routing trays,
- In France and other places, all the plants were defined as machines, like airplanes, so they were all essentially the same design. When a mistake or a fault was found in one, it could be prevented or fixed in all the others at the same time much like the FAA rules on airplanes - when a problem shows up the whole fleet can be inspected.
- the water in the 'hot' side (going through the reactor, out to the heat exchanger) and the 'warm' side (from the heat exchanger to the steam generator) is so pure that it eats stainless steel. The steam generator tubes were (IIRC) over an inch thick stainless, and over 20 years that thickness would erode away until the tubes were at risk of blowing out.
- the key facts: When these plants were designed, the AEC controlled the industry. And the brilliant strategy for life planning was, "We'll build a plant, run it for 20 years, fill it with concrete, and leave it there for 50,000 years." (Yes, really). There were no serious plans for actually maintaining the internal systems like the steam generators. Then in the 70s that wasn't going to work. So for another 20 years, the plan was, "We'll hire day labor off the street. Each guy can work for two days, then he'll have had his lifetime dose of radiation and can never do this work again." (When I got involved Westinghouse was finally trying to come up with a robotic system to replace those guys.)
- finally, there are weird things about the high voltages around power plants that you have to be aware of, like avoiding leaving long power cords laying around - the voltage differentials on the ground can generate enough (induced?) current in the cord to cook it.
IANA suit expert, but it seems to me that for the primary need of keeping one's insides where they belong, there is minimal need for air inside the suit, except possibly the head - really just the breathing system and the eyes. The key thing for most of the suit is to replace the air pressure we are used to with some other form of constraint. Today I watched a thing about those Speedo swim suits that MIchael Phelps et al used in their record Olympic swims. Among other things, they were very tight fitting. Even neoprene diving wetsuits provide a lot of constriction, although they are designed for a different purpose. So I wonder if even the MIT suit might be trying too hard with their directional stretch.
As a supporter of and somewhat-participant in the commercial space industry, I would prefer the term 'infant' to 'infantile' - the connotations are entirely different. :)
OTOH, it's true there are some in this industry (as in all industries) with a big too much hope and not quite enough reason! The public image of space, especially as presented in the media, has encouraged people think that it's really not rocket science any more. My great hope is that commercial space efforts will take the ball away from the politicians to some extent, so it can grow more naturally. But the fact remains that space is hard, extremely demanding, will take much more time and money than many people realize, and suffers fools not at all. But I hope and believe that we can do it, together.
Replying to myself, "and the user interface takes the third 90% of the time."
"The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time; the last 10% of the work takes the second 90% of the time".
This has been argued many times. You have to look at the total picture. The early huge gains from HFT were because it was a new technology, and there was a tech bubble around it (which coincided with some other bubbles, but that's aside the point). Now essentially every significant institution is doing it, and most of the pure-HFT entities are having trouble making any money because the spreads have shrunk ever closer to zero - that is a good thing in general, as it moves the market ever closer to the ideal they talk about in Econ 101 - any new piece of information that comes into the market is quickly incorporated into the pricing, and the 'ringing' that used to occur is damped out quickly by opposing 'traders'.
This has become so effective that, except for unusual events like an announcement about a particular company or market segment or political situation or whatever, nearly all individual stocks (outside penny stocks etc.) follow the macroeconomic situation in parallel.
Even when a big mistake happens, between the opposing algorithms 'covering' each other by buying or selling counter to each other and the various mechanisms put into place to short-circuit sudden anomalies, those anomalies are sorted out within minutes. Back in the old days an anomaly could take hours, days, weeks or years to get fixed.
HFT (and related tech) also makes it possible for Schwab, for example, to allow you to buy, sell or hold 153.73215 shares of a stock, because your 'trade' is nearly always executed solely within the Schwab computer system and never sees the real market - the Schwab computer system bundles your virtual trade with others to drive their HFT algorithm to actually buy or sell as required.
TL;DR - HFT just makes the approximation of the market to the macroeconomic situation less digital, closer to the 'true' analog state, and makes it easier for everyone to participate.
Indeed. My first computer job was running an IBM 1130 clone. It had a one MB 14 inch hard drive, plus a 5MB Winchester 'washing machine' - removable cartridges contained 5MB on five platters, and the head arm was driven by a 5 Horsepower stepping motor. The thing walked across the floor when certain jobs were run. One amusing program (on cards, as you note) was an assembler program that played music. This worked by sending certain bitpattern signals to the Winchester drive, and the EMI on the channel was strong enough that you could put an AM radio (one of those early one-transister types) on top of the console, and it would play 'Jingle Bells' or whatever. There was even a data deck of cards to play different songs.