Uh, yeah. The massive die-off you're talking about is called a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction. It can happen with any gram-negative bacteria (which has endotoxin/lipopolysaccharide), and can easily throw somebody into septic shock. It's also a particularly common problem with spirochetes (syphilis, Lyme).
Sooo many things wrong with this. For starters, viruses aren't even really alive, even though they interact with living things. So they don't really die, although it is possible to destroy them. For nexters, viruses don't have any ribosomes, so they can't possibly make (let alone release) toxins or anything else. Somebody doesn't have a f***ing clue what he/she is talking about. Magnets. Um, yeah, right.
Wow. Where to begin? I would assert that Malthus has not (yet) been proven wrong, even though he lived too early to see effective birth control and the Green Revolution. I will believe that he has been shown to be wrong and the "demographic transitionists" proven right once the population of the planet has actually stabilized at a sustainable level. It hasn't. We have some reason for hope because the world's population is not increasing in relative terms as fast as it once was and because we have areas of local stabilization; unfortunately in absolute terms the population is increasing about as fast as it ever has (though I acknowledge the predictions say this will change soon), and demonstrated areas of local stabilization are not guarantees that the planet as a whole will be able to that's not the same as proving that the world as a whole will get there without a major catastrophe caused by overpopulation. The Green Revolution *has* given humanity a reprieve, as we have vastly increased the carrying capacity of our planet. This is not the same as a pardon, as it yet remains to be seen whether or not this is sustainable in the long run. And by the way, Malthus was even right about the Green Revolution as well, despite not having foreseen it- human population exploded as a result of the increased availability of food, and in areas where we've not yet had a 'demographic transition', the population of the poor has continued to expand to meet the available means of subsistence, except to the extent it is "kept in check by misery and vice." I totally hear what you're saying about human progress and absolute numbers of scientists, and I even buy into that argument to a point. Your argument still presumes that there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel and that mankind will continue to be able to build telescopes powerful enough to always keep seeing such light, and that wealth and power will be distributed evenly enough such that the vast mass of humanity will benefit from future 'progress'. I'd like to think all of those things will be true, but wishful thinking isn't always an appropriate method to make prognostications.
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
Speaking of asymmetrical warfare, SAMs are pretty expensive. Helium, hydrogen, and hot air aren't. if I were an insurgent designing a counter-weapon system, I'd think about fighting fire with fire--both figuratively and literally, in this case. That is, I'd build a bunch of tiny contact-fused thermite bombs (maybe with a small amount of a petroleum jelly/napalm-like element for stickiness), wait for a day without a lot of crosswind, then get underneath my flying-football-field sized target and simultaneously launch a wave of small balloons from multiple locations with said bombs rigged to go off when they encounter something on the way up.
Almost right, but totally wrong. The solution in this case is to hire at least two women. Frankly, the more, the better. 10 guys and 1 woman = total adversarial situation, especially if she's young and attractive. 10 guys and a few women = much more balanced,much more normal working environment. Everybody is less tense; even if jokes are told, they're a lot less likely to come across as harrassing and a lot less likely to cause offense because there's a lot less of a power differential and feeling of "me vs. them".
Good point. Now that SCOTUS has determined that corporations are really people, coporations presumably have the same rights as rich people to bribe with impunity.
There was one, and only one mega-fail here. It didn't happen today. It happened when Apple made their announcement of "Let's talk iPhone" and then failed to keep expectations within line. Everybody has now been buzzing about the dual iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 announcement for the past couple of weeks. Without an iPhone 5 announcement to be made today, Apple needed to kill that rumor DEAD. Instead, they've managed to totally underwhelm the world with a new product launch for a fine incremental update for something that would have looked fairly decent if examined in its own light. Mr. Cook, I'm sorry to inform you that you just flunked the oral portion of your CEO marketing exam and that the board is likely soon going to be announcing your imminent departure from the top spot. Nice knowing you.
It seems like it would only be fair to collect the names, phone numbers, addressess, friend lists, family info, credit information, and general background info along with as much dirt as possible on all of the employees of Social Intelligence Corporation, starting with managerial/executive level ones. Place a few ads offering to sell said information to anyone who wants it, particularly targeting those who believe they were fired or weren't hired as a result of this SICk company's 'service', et voilà: karmically sublime $profit.
...in thinking that it's way past time for Sony's leadership to commit ritual seppuku?(*) Failing that, a simple dissolution of the company's assets and returning them to shareholders could work. I mean, sheesh.
(*) I seem to recall such a thing slightly helping Toshiba's once badly soiled image in the wake of a certain 3-axis milling machine/espionage incident. Not that I've forgiven Toshiba yet...
Set 'X' equal to at least 50, and don't forget to include spinoff companies. That way, chances are that if you've accumulated enough power to cause significant mischief, you won't be able to cash in until after you're dead. Not that that would stop everybody...
*snort*. I think the seriously bright minds were more likely bright enough to google around a bit and learn about things like the Interplanetary Transport Network.
Speaking as a generally liberal person, I'd have to agree with this. While I believe there should continue to be a strong separation of church and state, I don't think see anything at all wrong with students being encouraged to examine the question of whether or not there should be. After all, the whole point of a "liberal" education (in the classical sense) is to encourage dogma-free thinking (including the freedom to examine the pros and cons of dogma-free thinking).
Martin, If you dig just a little bit deeper, you'll find that this bunny burrow goes a very long way down. Hypovitaminosis D has been implicated in just about every disease under the sun (so to speak). Not surprising when you learn that our ancestors were making 5,000+ units per day in their skin, back before we all turned into residents of air-conditioned caves who smear on chemicals to "protect" us from sunshine on those rare occasions that we do venture outdoors.
The key to understanding why vitamin D is so important is to know that it's actually not a true vitamin at all, but rather a pre-hormone; the active hormone (calcitriol) is involved in a myriad of regulatory pathways all over our body, most significantly in the immune system as well as in calcium regulation. Calcitriol is also essential to normal growth, including neural development; deficiency during pregnancy is associated with autism in children.
Deficiency during childhood is associated with many autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
Deficiency during adulthood is associated with coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, vulnerability to viral infections (including influenza and the common cold, which are far more prevalent in the winter months), vulnerability to certain bacterial infections (most prominently including tuberculosis), and at least 17 different types of cancer, most notably including breast, colon, prostate, and (ironically enough) melanoma.
If you start to look into diseases that are significantly more prevalent in dark-skinned people (who are more protected against the rays of the sun but unfortunately also not so good at making enough Vitamin D outside of tropical environments), you can begin (but only begin) to understand the extent of the problem.
The current RDA for Vitamin D has somewhere between zero and nothing to do with actual human requirements for the substance; fortunately that's actively changing as the medical community gets more aware of the situation, but in the meantime you can consider current amount of Vitamin D supplementation in food to fall into the "near homeopathic dose" category.
Current official medical recommendations are to take enough Vitamin D to achieve measured serum levels of at least 30 ng/ml of 25(OH)-D (calcidiol), but a growing number of doctors who have looked into this a bit further (including myself) think that the goal should actually be somewhere in the 60-80 ng/ml range, particularly for cancer prevention.
Try taking 5000 units of D per day, not per week, and seriously consider doing that for the rest of your life unless/until you move someplace at least semitropical where you can get a good sunbathing session in every week. And despite what your doctor says about "just make sure it says Vitamin D on the front of the label", you (a)probably want to make that Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol), not Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol), and (b) probably do NOT want a formulation with extra calcium in it.
Although low wages might interfere with job satisfaction, relatively high wages are no guarantee of quality or emotional investment. Trust me, I'm a doctor.
"Ignore" is not quite the same as "disbelieve". Stalin had good reason to disbelieve, because it didn't make any sense for Germany to take on the Soviet Union while they were still heavily involved with the U.K., and he quite reasonably didn't think Hitler would be stupid enough to invade before 1942. He was wrong about that. And it wasn't exactly "insane dictatorial policies of the Communists", it was more like "insane dictatorial policies of a megalomaniac named Joseph Stalin, who was quite willing to kill/purge anyone and everyone whom he (probably rightly) believed might be a significant personal threat." When it comes down to it, Stalin's purges of the Russian communist party leadership also killed any chance that a more idealized form of actual communism might have ever had there. What remained instead was an apparatus of terror, manipulation, and dictatorial control that remained communist in name only, and it concentrated power in the hands of one man whom even Lenin had come to fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah. The massive die-off you're talking about is called a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction. It can happen with any gram-negative bacteria (which has endotoxin/lipopolysaccharide), and can easily throw somebody into septic shock. It's also a particularly common problem with spirochetes (syphilis, Lyme).
Sooo many things wrong with this. For starters, viruses aren't even really alive, even though they interact with living things. So they don't really die, although it is possible to destroy them. For nexters, viruses don't have any ribosomes, so they can't possibly make (let alone release) toxins or anything else. Somebody doesn't have a f***ing clue what he/she is talking about. Magnets. Um, yeah, right.
Wow. Where to begin? I would assert that Malthus has not (yet) been proven wrong, even though he lived too early to see effective birth control and the Green Revolution. I will believe that he has been shown to be wrong and the "demographic transitionists" proven right once the population of the planet has actually stabilized at a sustainable level. It hasn't. We have some reason for hope because the world's population is not increasing in relative terms as fast as it once was and because we have areas of local stabilization; unfortunately in absolute terms the population is increasing about as fast as it ever has (though I acknowledge the predictions say this will change soon), and demonstrated areas of local stabilization are not guarantees that the planet as a whole will be able to that's not the same as proving that the world as a whole will get there without a major catastrophe caused by overpopulation. The Green Revolution *has* given humanity a reprieve, as we have vastly increased the carrying capacity of our planet. This is not the same as a pardon, as it yet remains to be seen whether or not this is sustainable in the long run. And by the way, Malthus was even right about the Green Revolution as well, despite not having foreseen it- human population exploded as a result of the increased availability of food, and in areas where we've not yet had a 'demographic transition', the population of the poor has continued to expand to meet the available means of subsistence, except to the extent it is "kept in check by misery and vice." I totally hear what you're saying about human progress and absolute numbers of scientists, and I even buy into that argument to a point. Your argument still presumes that there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel and that mankind will continue to be able to build telescopes powerful enough to always keep seeing such light, and that wealth and power will be distributed evenly enough such that the vast mass of humanity will benefit from future 'progress'. I'd like to think all of those things will be true, but wishful thinking isn't always an appropriate method to make prognostications.
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
It's hard to get awarded a multi-million dollar contract to build a weather balloon.
The civil war you describe is already being fought. There's a major battle held every 2 years, typically on a Tuesday in early November.
Speaking of asymmetrical warfare, SAMs are pretty expensive. Helium, hydrogen, and hot air aren't. if I were an insurgent designing a counter-weapon system, I'd think about fighting fire with fire--both figuratively and literally, in this case. That is, I'd build a bunch of tiny contact-fused thermite bombs (maybe with a small amount of a petroleum jelly/napalm-like element for stickiness), wait for a day without a lot of crosswind, then get underneath my flying-football-field sized target and simultaneously launch a wave of small balloons from multiple locations with said bombs rigged to go off when they encounter something on the way up.
Technology that will prepare us to fight the World War I of the 21st century!
Never hire women.
Almost right, but totally wrong. The solution in this case is to hire at least two women. Frankly, the more, the better. 10 guys and 1 woman = total adversarial situation, especially if she's young and attractive. 10 guys and a few women = much more balanced,much more normal working environment. Everybody is less tense; even if jokes are told, they're a lot less likely to come across as harrassing and a lot less likely to cause offense because there's a lot less of a power differential and feeling of "me vs. them".
Good point. Now that SCOTUS has determined that corporations are really people, coporations presumably have the same rights as rich people to bribe with impunity.
Nothing new/useful to see here. Move along, move along. Feel free to Google "ECMO" as you're heading out the door....
Logical; my inner pyro tells me that there will *always* be sh*t to burn.
or not a pedantic asshole
There was one, and only one mega-fail here. It didn't happen today. It happened when Apple made their announcement of "Let's talk iPhone" and then failed to keep expectations within line. Everybody has now been buzzing about the dual iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 announcement for the past couple of weeks. Without an iPhone 5 announcement to be made today, Apple needed to kill that rumor DEAD. Instead, they've managed to totally underwhelm the world with a new product launch for a fine incremental update for something that would have looked fairly decent if examined in its own light. Mr. Cook, I'm sorry to inform you that you just flunked the oral portion of your CEO marketing exam and that the board is likely soon going to be announcing your imminent departure from the top spot. Nice knowing you.
Porky?
They mean "at a very minimum, smart enough to read the FAQ so people know what they mean by smart."
It seems like it would only be fair to collect the names, phone numbers, addressess, friend lists, family info, credit information, and general background info along with as much dirt as possible on all of the employees of Social Intelligence Corporation, starting with managerial/executive level ones. Place a few ads offering to sell said information to anyone who wants it, particularly targeting those who believe they were fired or weren't hired as a result of this SICk company's 'service', et voilà: karmically sublime $profit.
...in thinking that it's way past time for Sony's leadership to commit ritual seppuku?(*) Failing that, a simple dissolution of the company's assets and returning them to shareholders could work. I mean, sheesh. (*) I seem to recall such a thing slightly helping Toshiba's once badly soiled image in the wake of a certain 3-axis milling machine/espionage incident. Not that I've forgiven Toshiba yet...
Set 'X' equal to at least 50, and don't forget to include spinoff companies. That way, chances are that if you've accumulated enough power to cause significant mischief, you won't be able to cash in until after you're dead. Not that that would stop everybody...
*snort*. I think the seriously bright minds were more likely bright enough to google around a bit and learn about things like the Interplanetary Transport Network.
Speaking as a generally liberal person, I'd have to agree with this. While I believe there should continue to be a strong separation of church and state, I don't think see anything at all wrong with students being encouraged to examine the question of whether or not there should be. After all, the whole point of a "liberal" education (in the classical sense) is to encourage dogma-free thinking (including the freedom to examine the pros and cons of dogma-free thinking).
Martin, If you dig just a little bit deeper, you'll find that this bunny burrow goes a very long way down. Hypovitaminosis D has been implicated in just about every disease under the sun (so to speak). Not surprising when you learn that our ancestors were making 5,000+ units per day in their skin, back before we all turned into residents of air-conditioned caves who smear on chemicals to "protect" us from sunshine on those rare occasions that we do venture outdoors.
The key to understanding why vitamin D is so important is to know that it's actually not a true vitamin at all, but rather a pre-hormone; the active hormone (calcitriol) is involved in a myriad of regulatory pathways all over our body, most significantly in the immune system as well as in calcium regulation. Calcitriol is also essential to normal growth, including neural development; deficiency during pregnancy is associated with autism in children.
Deficiency during childhood is associated with many autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
Deficiency during adulthood is associated with coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, vulnerability to viral infections (including influenza and the common cold, which are far more prevalent in the winter months), vulnerability to certain bacterial infections (most prominently including tuberculosis), and at least 17 different types of cancer, most notably including breast, colon, prostate, and (ironically enough) melanoma.
If you start to look into diseases that are significantly more prevalent in dark-skinned people (who are more protected against the rays of the sun but unfortunately also not so good at making enough Vitamin D outside of tropical environments), you can begin (but only begin) to understand the extent of the problem.
The current RDA for Vitamin D has somewhere between zero and nothing to do with actual human requirements for the substance; fortunately that's actively changing as the medical community gets more aware of the situation, but in the meantime you can consider current amount of Vitamin D supplementation in food to fall into the "near homeopathic dose" category.
Current official medical recommendations are to take enough Vitamin D to achieve measured serum levels of at least 30 ng/ml of 25(OH)-D (calcidiol), but a growing number of doctors who have looked into this a bit further (including myself) think that the goal should actually be somewhere in the 60-80 ng/ml range, particularly for cancer prevention.
Try taking 5000 units of D per day, not per week, and seriously consider doing that for the rest of your life unless/until you move someplace at least semitropical where you can get a good sunbathing session in every week. And despite what your doctor says about "just make sure it says Vitamin D on the front of the label", you (a)probably want to make that Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol), not Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol), and (b) probably do NOT want a formulation with extra calcium in it.
Although low wages might interfere with job satisfaction, relatively high wages are no guarantee of quality or emotional investment. Trust me, I'm a doctor.
"Ignore" is not quite the same as "disbelieve". Stalin had good reason to disbelieve, because it didn't make any sense for Germany to take on the Soviet Union while they were still heavily involved with the U.K., and he quite reasonably didn't think Hitler would be stupid enough to invade before 1942. He was wrong about that. And it wasn't exactly "insane dictatorial policies of the Communists", it was more like "insane dictatorial policies of a megalomaniac named Joseph Stalin, who was quite willing to kill/purge anyone and everyone whom he (probably rightly) believed might be a significant personal threat." When it comes down to it, Stalin's purges of the Russian communist party leadership also killed any chance that a more idealized form of actual communism might have ever had there. What remained instead was an apparatus of terror, manipulation, and dictatorial control that remained communist in name only, and it concentrated power in the hands of one man whom even Lenin had come to fear.