Melatonin is one of the body's natural substances - I think the synthetic is supposed to be identical. I used it for a while, then quit, now just starting up again. It evidently works best when taken at the same time every day and then go to bed, not to read. In my case (before) it worked for a while in getting me to sleep but I would still wake up two or three times a night. After a while it quit working entirely. I was not good at the 'same time every day' part, so I think that my body just decided the signals were screwed up and started ignoring it. I have also been told that taking too much will reduce its effectiveness. Now I've just started taking it again, but I'm also taking some other things that help me stay asleep (without knocking me out like Sominex etc.) We'll see.
Good point. I was going to mention that it was originally passed through Congress as the Defense Highway System, and the minimum height of overpasses was set to allow the missile carriers through. California screwed up on some overpasses and had to rebuild them. There was a confluence of military, business (auto industry) and economic (jobs) motivations that combined to get the plan passed.
Big, big problem. I just read an article which was based on an interview with the head guy in charge of taking obsolete nukes apart. It takes a crew of about 100 people a couple of weeks. Now admittedly they are using safe methods, so it could be done faster. But I doubt it can be done in anything like the 10 minutes you are projecting, even with a chainsaw. This also assumes that you know enough about the design of the particular weapon to know where to cut and where not to.
FYI - IIRC Russia has the largest number. We have about 2600, down from 40,000. They have about 4000. That's my recollection from an article a few months ago about disarmament,
Short answer: Logistics. Among other things, atomic weapons have a shelf-life. They have to be torn down and refurbished every so many years. So they have to be shipped from the operational ready location (air base, missile silo, aircraft carrier, submarine base, etc.) to the reprocessing site, then back. Also just like any other military or business equipment inventory, due to various changes in plans or the operational environment, these things need to be moved around to be available when they might be needed.
The US has, at present, about 2600 nukes IIRC, down from a peak of something like 40,000. According to Wikipedia, UK maintains a total stockpile of about 225, of which 3/4 are operational at any given time. Also IIRC Russia has about 4000.
well of course not. The entire UK including Northern Ireland is about 4/5 the size of Oregon. The length of Great Britain is about 800 miles To match NY to LA they'd have to make the trip from bottom to top about four times!:)
Since chance would give him 50/100, it seems like he was trying to game the test. If you don't know anything it's just as hard to get all but one wrong as it is to get all but one right.
Why are they trucking molten aluminum around? Is it because the aluminum smelter is in one part of the city and the places that cast it, roll it, extrude it or whatever are someplace else? Whose idea was that? At least it's not steel, but even aluminum's melting point is 660C so those things are HOT.
I'm too lazy and not competent to do the actual computations, but even if they escaped Earth orbit, I am pretty sure they'd still be in solar orbit. According to Wikipedia, solar escape velocity at Earth's orbital distance is 42 km/s or 151,200 km/hr (about 100,750 mph), which is whizzing along pretty fast.
But thinking about your last point, I think if we can assume that Earth authorities retain jurisdiction in the Earth-moon system and manage to prevent localized conflicts somehow, the first battles are likely to be between commercial entities in the Asteroid belt, where there are already plenty of projectiles on a myriad different orbital paths. In that environment it is possible that the risk from stray projectiles would not be that much different than the risk from random space rocks. But IANARS.
I think projectile weapons (railguns etc.) are likely to be used. But they do have a serious drawback - you are essentially launching a small, fast, heavy satellite. If it doesn't hit the target, it's going to keep going - somewhere. That somewhere might well be your own behind, depending on how the orbital mechanics works out. And if they do hit the target, you've just created a large number of new projectiles with unpredictable orbits. Beam weapons would be cleaner.
Hmm. I wonder if neutron bombs would be the thing - eradicate all living things on the opponent vessel without damaging the vessel, preferably with an associated EMP to destroy all the electronics. At that point the targeted vehicle is a floating heap of raw materials - but without any control systems may be on its way to self-destruction anyway.
If we were sane, we could have laws requiring that all space wars between signatories of the appropriate space war convention would basically play a form of laser tag, where nothing actually gets destroyed and the orbital space is not filled up with junk. That's unlikely, though it might be fun!
You touched on an interesting aspect that a lot of people are not aware of - there are indeed FDA inspectors visiting these plants all over the world. However there are not nearly enough inspectors to go around. IIRC the average plant is only visited once every two or three years. IMHO that is one area where the government should be increasing funding. As I understand, the bigger Indian companies are run pretty well, as the US drug companies also have their own people in there making sure, and of course these companies are also making their own brands and have a reputation to maintain. I'm not so sure about some of the Chinese companies. As we have seen several times lately, many Chinese manufacturers of all sorts of things take the 'pragmatism' principle way too far, and interpret it to mean 'anything you can get away with'. I really do think that is less common in India, which has a much longer experience with western business culture.
They fought wars, went to prison a lot, were entrepreneurs, fighter pilots, firefighters, and a lot of other careers that most people consider crazy. Long ago they were hunters, not farmers.
Historically, people with ADD/ADHD have been very much overrepresented in certain careers - fighter pilots, military in general, fire fighters, explorers, enterpreneurs (as many as 1/2 of entrepreneurs in startup companies have ADD, as of about 1995 the last time I checked), crazy artists, repetitive prison inmates, mountain climbers, thrill seekers of various kinds - and computer geeks. Oddly enough, one of the reasons that many executives have needed secretaries to keep their lives straight is because the secretaries organized their environment. It's a good combination of creativity and methodology. I think a big part of the extreme method-based structure of the Defense Department ('Mother DoD') is to provide the necessary external structure to keep a bunch of crazy ADDers in line and effective.
I suggest reading some of Thom Hartmann's books. He hypothesizes that it's really about hunters vs. farmers. A farmer doesn't need to know what's going on in the woods. He knows January 1st pretty much his whole schedule for the year. So he's very oriented to the schedule, and focuses on one thing all the time - it's all about the schedule and the rules. A hunter-gatherer has to live in the moment, hyper-focusing on the deer they are hunting while at the same time keeping aware of the mountain lion that could leap out of a tree at any moment - he/she operates best when the stress level is high. And he doesn't care what time it is - tomorrow has no meaning. It's all about surviving and succeeding NOW. Surviving and short term success far outweigh the importance of any silly rules. Of course, farmers have been out-breeding hunters for five millenia, so now hunters don't fit into the society very well - except in emergencies. When you need a rocket jockey or a Marine, call for the ADDers - we are needed, but we will never 'fit in'.
The odd thing is that Adderall is not some fancy-schmancy exotic chemical, it is (IIRC) simply a time-release compilation of two or three different salts of Dexedrine. Adderall is already hugely overpriced (although probably heavily discounted for the insurance companies). It seems to me that it shouldn't cost more than 50% more than generic Dexies, which used to be about the cost of NoDoz back when truckers used them to stay awake.
true. Unfortunately (last time I checked) there were no generic time-release versions of Adderall, which means that you have to take multiple pills during the day, and the effect is like a rollercoaster with a cliff at the end.
From what I heard on the radio this AM, there are only about 3500 patients on methotrexate in the US. It's a generic drug, so the profits are low, the potential liability is high, and as noted it has to be made according to the exacting standards for injectables. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if the entire US need for the drug could be produced in a few days of production. So you've got a drug that just doesn't have enough volume to justify maintaining an expensive production line. Switching a production line from one drug to another has to involve basically taking it apart and reassembling it differently, then going through the inspection and correction cycle, then running for a week or two, then doing it all again for another drug.
I had a distant friend years ago with Narcolepsy - and an unfortunate love of driving very fast. That's a bad combiation, although it did result in some wonderful, hair-raising stories. This was long before Adderall. He had a special prescription that allowed him to get Dexedrin in jars that must have held two quarts/liters - must have been a thousand pills in a jar. He was a very big gu (250-300 lbs.?), so he was on pretty high doses - handfulls at a time - and still could fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, wake up a few hours later and pick up where he left off. He went in for detox a couple of times a year.
Just for fun I'll tell one story - he had a 65 mustang, was driving down the highway at well over 100 MPH and fell asleep. He drifted off the road, down into the drainage ditch and was going along (probably with the gas pedal still down, tilted over half in the ditch and half out) just before the highway went under an overpass. At the end of the ditch was a culvert pipe, and the car hit that, went airborne and went end-over-end sideways all the way up the embankment, across the other road, and down the other side where it rested upside down. Witnesses said it did at least five or six full somersaults.
The witnesses watching in horror came up to the car expecting to find a horrible sight. When they got to the car they could see nobody. Finally the EMTs found my friend, sound asleep in the trunk, with nothing but scratches and bruises. He slept through the whole thing, including being pushed back over/through the seats into the trunk (and being cut out of the car.)
Oddly enough, that has a purely evolutionary solution. Let it happen. Soon those who are likely to succumb will weed themselves out of the system. Like many problems, it will be worse for a few years, then it will be over. The culture will change, and people will avoid the stuff like a fatal disease. We presently avoid all sorts of intoxicants that are in the 'fun but fatal' class that are perfectly legal but nobody is dumb enough to inhale or drink them - like half a dozen household chemicals in almost every house.
I used to work in Skid Row (technically it's Skid Road, but that's another story). Down there you'd find the usual alcoholics and such. A few folks got into drinking rubbing alcohol (these are called "rub-a-dubs"), Sterno, or other nasty stuff. The rule of thumb on the street was that folks who got into those would quit or die within a year. So pretty much nobody sank so low. Skid Row is a very Darwinian place. Folks there don't waste time or mental energy bullshitting you (except when panhandling - that's best seen as a special form of 'outside sales').
Let's see what happens to costs now that they are working through the 'man-rated' certification, which will require substantially more inspection, testing and paperwork for every production step, and a lot more fiddly bits in actual flight - the control center may end up being a lot bigger than they planned. Or not - they seem to have a pretty good plan in place, but we won't know until after Space-X has gone through the process and actually launched a few.
It's one thing to build a working spaceship, it's a whole other thing to get the various agency stamps of approval. And every time you change from a 33 mm machine screw to a 34 mm machine screw, it costs another $million to get the device it's holding together re-approved. (No joke - even back in the 1980s it cost about 1 $million to get through certification (UL, CSA and then FDA and possibly FCC) for a medical electronic device, and if you changed a resistor you had to go through it again. Amortize that over 10,000 total units, it starts looking ugly - especially when unit manufacturing costs including amortized development has to be less than 20% of shipping retail!
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No, it's trinary
They have it at WalMart (in the US).
Melatonin is one of the body's natural substances - I think the synthetic is supposed to be identical. I used it for a while, then quit, now just starting up again. It evidently works best when taken at the same time every day and then go to bed, not to read. In my case (before) it worked for a while in getting me to sleep but I would still wake up two or three times a night. After a while it quit working entirely. I was not good at the 'same time every day' part, so I think that my body just decided the signals were screwed up and started ignoring it. I have also been told that taking too much will reduce its effectiveness. Now I've just started taking it again, but I'm also taking some other things that help me stay asleep (without knocking me out like Sominex etc.) We'll see.
Hell why even post at all if nobody is gonna understand you clearly?
Well, this seems to work for about 1/2 the comments on slashdot! :D
Good point. I was going to mention that it was originally passed through Congress as the Defense Highway System, and the minimum height of overpasses was set to allow the missile carriers through. California screwed up on some overpasses and had to rebuild them. There was a confluence of military, business (auto industry) and economic (jobs) motivations that combined to get the plan passed.
Big, big problem. I just read an article which was based on an interview with the head guy in charge of taking obsolete nukes apart. It takes a crew of about 100 people a couple of weeks. Now admittedly they are using safe methods, so it could be done faster. But I doubt it can be done in anything like the 10 minutes you are projecting, even with a chainsaw. This also assumes that you know enough about the design of the particular weapon to know where to cut and where not to.
FYI - IIRC Russia has the largest number. We have about 2600, down from 40,000. They have about 4000. That's my recollection from an article a few months ago about disarmament,
Short answer: Logistics. Among other things, atomic weapons have a shelf-life. They have to be torn down and refurbished every so many years. So they have to be shipped from the operational ready location (air base, missile silo, aircraft carrier, submarine base, etc.) to the reprocessing site, then back. Also just like any other military or business equipment inventory, due to various changes in plans or the operational environment, these things need to be moved around to be available when they might be needed.
The US has, at present, about 2600 nukes IIRC, down from a peak of something like 40,000. According to Wikipedia, UK maintains a total stockpile of about 225, of which 3/4 are operational at any given time. Also IIRC Russia has about 4000.
well of course not. The entire UK including Northern Ireland is about 4/5 the size of Oregon. The length of Great Britain is about 800 miles To match NY to LA they'd have to make the trip from bottom to top about four times! :)
Since chance would give him 50/100, it seems like he was trying to game the test. If you don't know anything it's just as hard to get all but one wrong as it is to get all but one right.
Why are they trucking molten aluminum around? Is it because the aluminum smelter is in one part of the city and the places that cast it, roll it, extrude it or whatever are someplace else? Whose idea was that? At least it's not steel, but even aluminum's melting point is 660C so those things are HOT.
I'm too lazy and not competent to do the actual computations, but even if they escaped Earth orbit, I am pretty sure they'd still be in solar orbit. According to Wikipedia, solar escape velocity at Earth's orbital distance is 42 km/s or 151,200 km/hr (about 100,750 mph), which is whizzing along pretty fast.
But thinking about your last point, I think if we can assume that Earth authorities retain jurisdiction in the Earth-moon system and manage to prevent localized conflicts somehow, the first battles are likely to be between commercial entities in the Asteroid belt, where there are already plenty of projectiles on a myriad different orbital paths. In that environment it is possible that the risk from stray projectiles would not be that much different than the risk from random space rocks. But IANARS.
I think projectile weapons (railguns etc.) are likely to be used. But they do have a serious drawback - you are essentially launching a small, fast, heavy satellite. If it doesn't hit the target, it's going to keep going - somewhere. That somewhere might well be your own behind, depending on how the orbital mechanics works out. And if they do hit the target, you've just created a large number of new projectiles with unpredictable orbits. Beam weapons would be cleaner.
Hmm. I wonder if neutron bombs would be the thing - eradicate all living things on the opponent vessel without damaging the vessel, preferably with an associated EMP to destroy all the electronics. At that point the targeted vehicle is a floating heap of raw materials - but without any control systems may be on its way to self-destruction anyway.
If we were sane, we could have laws requiring that all space wars between signatories of the appropriate space war convention would basically play a form of laser tag, where nothing actually gets destroyed and the orbital space is not filled up with junk. That's unlikely, though it might be fun!
You touched on an interesting aspect that a lot of people are not aware of - there are indeed FDA inspectors visiting these plants all over the world. However there are not nearly enough inspectors to go around. IIRC the average plant is only visited once every two or three years. IMHO that is one area where the government should be increasing funding. As I understand, the bigger Indian companies are run pretty well, as the US drug companies also have their own people in there making sure, and of course these companies are also making their own brands and have a reputation to maintain. I'm not so sure about some of the Chinese companies. As we have seen several times lately, many Chinese manufacturers of all sorts of things take the 'pragmatism' principle way too far, and interpret it to mean 'anything you can get away with'. I really do think that is less common in India, which has a much longer experience with western business culture.
They fought wars, went to prison a lot, were entrepreneurs, fighter pilots, firefighters, and a lot of other careers that most people consider crazy. Long ago they were hunters, not farmers.
More likely, your dad also had ADD - musician, etc. What was your granddad like?
Historically, people with ADD/ADHD have been very much overrepresented in certain careers - fighter pilots, military in general, fire fighters, explorers, enterpreneurs (as many as 1/2 of entrepreneurs in startup companies have ADD, as of about 1995 the last time I checked), crazy artists, repetitive prison inmates, mountain climbers, thrill seekers of various kinds - and computer geeks. Oddly enough, one of the reasons that many executives have needed secretaries to keep their lives straight is because the secretaries organized their environment. It's a good combination of creativity and methodology. I think a big part of the extreme method-based structure of the Defense Department ('Mother DoD') is to provide the necessary external structure to keep a bunch of crazy ADDers in line and effective.
I suggest reading some of Thom Hartmann's books. He hypothesizes that it's really about hunters vs. farmers. A farmer doesn't need to know what's going on in the woods. He knows January 1st pretty much his whole schedule for the year. So he's very oriented to the schedule, and focuses on one thing all the time - it's all about the schedule and the rules. A hunter-gatherer has to live in the moment, hyper-focusing on the deer they are hunting while at the same time keeping aware of the mountain lion that could leap out of a tree at any moment - he/she operates best when the stress level is high. And he doesn't care what time it is - tomorrow has no meaning. It's all about surviving and succeeding NOW. Surviving and short term success far outweigh the importance of any silly rules. Of course, farmers have been out-breeding hunters for five millenia, so now hunters don't fit into the society very well - except in emergencies. When you need a rocket jockey or a Marine, call for the ADDers - we are needed, but we will never 'fit in'.
I think it was one of the Rothschilds, but maybe someone else who described Wall Street as "the world's oldest floating crap game." :D
The odd thing is that Adderall is not some fancy-schmancy exotic chemical, it is (IIRC) simply a time-release compilation of two or three different salts of Dexedrine. Adderall is already hugely overpriced (although probably heavily discounted for the insurance companies). It seems to me that it shouldn't cost more than 50% more than generic Dexies, which used to be about the cost of NoDoz back when truckers used them to stay awake.
true. Unfortunately (last time I checked) there were no generic time-release versions of Adderall, which means that you have to take multiple pills during the day, and the effect is like a rollercoaster with a cliff at the end.
From what I heard on the radio this AM, there are only about 3500 patients on methotrexate in the US. It's a generic drug, so the profits are low, the potential liability is high, and as noted it has to be made according to the exacting standards for injectables. I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if the entire US need for the drug could be produced in a few days of production. So you've got a drug that just doesn't have enough volume to justify maintaining an expensive production line. Switching a production line from one drug to another has to involve basically taking it apart and reassembling it differently, then going through the inspection and correction cycle, then running for a week or two, then doing it all again for another drug.
I had a distant friend years ago with Narcolepsy - and an unfortunate love of driving very fast. That's a bad combiation, although it did result in some wonderful, hair-raising stories. This was long before Adderall. He had a special prescription that allowed him to get Dexedrin in jars that must have held two quarts/liters - must have been a thousand pills in a jar. He was a very big gu (250-300 lbs.?), so he was on pretty high doses - handfulls at a time - and still could fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, wake up a few hours later and pick up where he left off. He went in for detox a couple of times a year.
Just for fun I'll tell one story - he had a 65 mustang, was driving down the highway at well over 100 MPH and fell asleep. He drifted off the road, down into the drainage ditch and was going along (probably with the gas pedal still down, tilted over half in the ditch and half out) just before the highway went under an overpass. At the end of the ditch was a culvert pipe, and the car hit that, went airborne and went end-over-end sideways all the way up the embankment, across the other road, and down the other side where it rested upside down. Witnesses said it did at least five or six full somersaults.
The witnesses watching in horror came up to the car expecting to find a horrible sight. When they got to the car they could see nobody. Finally the EMTs found my friend, sound asleep in the trunk, with nothing but scratches and bruises. He slept through the whole thing, including being pushed back over/through the seats into the trunk (and being cut out of the car.)
Oddly enough, that has a purely evolutionary solution. Let it happen. Soon those who are likely to succumb will weed themselves out of the system. Like many problems, it will be worse for a few years, then it will be over. The culture will change, and people will avoid the stuff like a fatal disease. We presently avoid all sorts of intoxicants that are in the 'fun but fatal' class that are perfectly legal but nobody is dumb enough to inhale or drink them - like half a dozen household chemicals in almost every house.
I used to work in Skid Row (technically it's Skid Road, but that's another story). Down there you'd find the usual alcoholics and such. A few folks got into drinking rubbing alcohol (these are called "rub-a-dubs"), Sterno, or other nasty stuff. The rule of thumb on the street was that folks who got into those would quit or die within a year. So pretty much nobody sank so low. Skid Row is a very Darwinian place. Folks there don't waste time or mental energy bullshitting you (except when panhandling - that's best seen as a special form of 'outside sales').
Let's see what happens to costs now that they are working through the 'man-rated' certification, which will require substantially more inspection, testing and paperwork for every production step, and a lot more fiddly bits in actual flight - the control center may end up being a lot bigger than they planned. Or not - they seem to have a pretty good plan in place, but we won't know until after Space-X has gone through the process and actually launched a few.
It's one thing to build a working spaceship, it's a whole other thing to get the various agency stamps of approval. And every time you change from a 33 mm machine screw to a 34 mm machine screw, it costs another $million to get the device it's holding together re-approved. (No joke - even back in the 1980s it cost about 1 $million to get through certification (UL, CSA and then FDA and possibly FCC) for a medical electronic device, and if you changed a resistor you had to go through it again. Amortize that over 10,000 total units, it starts looking ugly - especially when unit manufacturing costs including amortized development has to be less than 20% of shipping retail!