What is worse about carbonated milk is that the carbonic acid completely undoes the good affects of calcium: it is a bone mass depletor (not to mention exceedingly damaging to the teeth).
It has not been proven that this phenomenon [shortening of the telomere] is associated to Progeria, but it is a possibility. Genetically defective (shorter) telomeres could
allow for cells that age, and die, drastically faster than in the average healthy person.
Each time the cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. The the DNA strands aren't copied all the way to the end, and
they down like a fuse. Right next to the telomeres is vital metabolic proteins, so when the telomeres are exhausted
the next cell division damages those genes and kills the cell. This is, fundamentally speaking, the cell's aging
process.
Is this by any chance the mechanism for expression of the disease Progeria, the premature aging disease that strikes children? If these children have a genetic mutation where the telomeres are shorter (perhaps the division of the cells of the fetus shortened the teleomeres, oops), then they're already pretty old by the time they're born, and experience all the standard age-related diseases, e.g. poor healing capacity and general degeneration.
Is it possible that the occurence of a large number of sunspots increases the mutation rate of the flu virus, therefore causing an outbreak of the disease as no one's immune to it yet?
We could sell the results to the Japanese restraunts and make a fortune.
Or not...:
"These giant rings may appeal as a rare culinary treat. However, cancel the order for a giant wok as the squid tastes of ammonia, commonly used in strong household cleaners. Animals such as giant squid use ammonia, a very light gas, for buoyancy, allowing them to move up into less deep waters for feeding."
s long as I can get into UBC, the university I
really want to go to
I hope you aren't planning on taking the computer science program at UBC? I have been informed by my colleagues that SFU's is magnitudes better (I don't know by experience myself; I went to UVic...)
Now, as for UBC Engineering, they're okay - at least they've learned how to suspend VW Beetles off of bridges.:)
Since almost all universities outside of BC assume some knowledge [of calculus]...
Yeah, the BC Mathematics 12 program (when I took it, in 1991) only had a week of calculus in it, but then there was the optional Calculus 12, which covered everything in the first university math course, as well as parts of the second one.
I recall my chem teacher briefly teaching us some stuff on electron shells (s, p, d shells, valences, energy levels etc), and saying "I'm not really supposed to teach this stuff anymore - the university profs decided that since the students got a really screwed up understanding of this topic, they decided it would be better if we left it out entirely." Perhaps the same was the case of calculus too - I can imagine that some high school math teachers wouldn't be able to effectively explain calculus, if they had been constrained to thinking about stupid geometry proofs and equation balancing for twenty years.
in almost every class, the teachers like ok I would teach this but the provincal doesn't require it, so out it
goes.
Really? In the english class I took in junior high (grades 8-10), we weren't taught any of the normal crap like rhyming words or recognizing different forms of essays - we did whacked projects like writing the back story for an Indiana Jones-esque adventure (the teacher maintains he came up with the concept years before Hollywood ripped him off), writing rebuttal letters to an angry parent's tirade against novels like "Brave New World" or "Johnny Got His Gun", or writing a modernized form of Romeo and Juliet (again, ages before the Hollywood version). About two weeks before the final exam period, he'd get a copy of the exam and sit at the front of the class flipping through it, quickly teaching us anything we needed to know to breeze through the exam.. it was totally cool.
Tony Aish, if you're out there, thank you - you made a boring subject much more interesting, and I learned way more as well!
standardized exams...ust like your school's final exams, except everyone across
the province is taking the same one.
That's exactly what BC (and from what I hear, Alberta too) does - the provincial exam is written by the ministry, and everyone sits it at the same time.
Someone else mentioned that you get a second crack at the exam - which I loved. If you happened to take a course in the first half of the year (most schools had grade 12 courses compressed into one half of the year or the other), you could sit the exam again in June - it is a different exam, but standardized just the same way. If you score higher the second time, that's the score that goes on your permanent record. (The same is the case for the special "scholarship exam", a 1 hour optional exam immediately following the normal exam, where the scores are used to determine scholarship awards. Except english, which was a 3 hour exam and the normal exam was also used for the scholarship scores.)
In every case where I sat an exam twice, I scored better the second time - which really pissed me off actually, because one scholarship (a big one for my university) was decided by April, so they only used the scores from the exams taken in January - my January scores weren't high enough to get the big scholarship, but my June ones were!!
"The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather
their test-taking skills," Dr. Atkinson wrote. "I concluded what many others have concluded -- that
America's overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system."
I find this quite interesting, but it makes sense with everything else I have read about the progression of the education system - more and more schools are teaching children not to think critically, examine facts, compute, and reason, but just give them "job skills" and train them to pass the standardized tests.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, the entrance requirements for universities are indexed against scores on the final exams for various required courses (english, science, social studies, mathematics, etc) in grades 11 and 12. Therefore, in order to qualify for university admission, one has to master the subjects being studied, not "lists of analogies"...
Just by
being there, Nike is improving conditions... Hell, globalization as a form of third-world aid seems to be the only kind that does any good!
In a large number of cases, the country's conditions got to the way they were because of offshore corporations arriving to begin with. For example, a mining corporation getting the land rights to a mountain so they can dig it up for ore. The subsistence farmers are displaced, so they move to the cities to find work. The mining operations pollute the river, which kills the fish which sustain another part of the population living at the mouth of the river. Cattle can no longer graze at the river, destroying another group of people's way of life. The people may *now* wish to work in a factory for 18 hours a day, but they were sure better off before they were shoved off of their original lands...
My existence does not cause others to starve. In fact, because I'm gainfully employed, I make things that help others to eat.
You are forgetting the things that you are consuming - which, if you are a suburbanite with a moderately-sized home and commute to work in a car on a highway every day, may very well consume more resources than you help produce.
One thing is for sure, is that all of us in the modern world consume far more resources than our fair share. It's time to spread that around a little more...
radio stations like pay royalties and stuff to, uh, like record companies
Indeed, and those royalties don't often manage to trickle down to the artist whose talent is being sold. Courtney Love gave a very good speech on this - how the artist gets shafted and the record companies get rich.
Absinth is an alcoholic drink
containing Wormwood extract that is banned in every country in the world except for the Czech Republic and Andorra. It's a
hallucinogenic drink.
Absinth is now legal in Canada; I have seen news reports that the Liquor Distribution Branch of BC will soon start carrying it.
My nickname is Welsh, for "green woman". Basically I decided what phrase I wanted, then went to a few web language pages and experimented with different languages until I found a phrase that sounded pretty nifty:)
Sorry.. a more updated version of the Viridian site, as well as a totally-up-to-date-save-the-last-message list archive, can be found here. Much apologies!
Bruce Sterling has been doing more writing on the California energy crisis, on his Viridian Design mailing list. You can read the Viridian Manifesto here, and read the list archives here (although the archive is lagging a bit behind the mailing list at the moment).
In the past I have defended Pluto being a planet; but, after looking at what else is out there of around the size of Pluto and comparing
them to other planets, I'm not so sure.
I agree - we have traditionally considered Pluto to be a planet, but it behaves so strangely that it counts just as well as something else.
That reminds me of the near-earth object (Asteroid 3753 Cruithne) that was considered for "moon of Earth" status...
Slashdot Mirror
Swedish Chef translator here!!!!
References:
carbonated beverages linked to bone fractures in teenaged girls
ditto
an article disputing the above
Another shining example of what too much slashdot can do to a mind...
Theory page on telomeres:
Is this by any chance the mechanism for expression of the disease Progeria, the premature aging disease that strikes children? If these children have a genetic mutation where the telomeres are shorter (perhaps the division of the cells of the fetus shortened the teleomeres, oops), then they're already pretty old by the time they're born, and experience all the standard age-related diseases, e.g. poor healing capacity and general degeneration.
Is it possible that the occurence of a large number of sunspots increases the mutation rate of the flu virus, therefore causing an outbreak of the disease as no one's immune to it yet?
Check out this Tom Toles comic about SATs.
I dunno, I always thought it was just being crafty. :) 2001-03-15 14:08:19
I shudder to think we might have "Scheme schemas" soon... :)
Or not...:
"These giant rings may appeal as a rare culinary treat. However, cancel the order for a giant wok as the squid tastes of ammonia, commonly used in strong household cleaners. Animals such as giant squid use ammonia, a very light gas, for buoyancy, allowing them to move up into less deep waters for feeding."
I hope you aren't planning on taking the computer science program at UBC? I have been informed by my colleagues that SFU's is magnitudes better (I don't know by experience myself; I went to UVic...)
Now, as for UBC Engineering, they're okay - at least they've learned how to suspend VW Beetles off of bridges. :)
Yeah, the BC Mathematics 12 program (when I took it, in 1991) only had a week of calculus in it, but then there was the optional Calculus 12, which covered everything in the first university math course, as well as parts of the second one.
I recall my chem teacher briefly teaching us some stuff on electron shells (s, p, d shells, valences, energy levels etc), and saying "I'm not really supposed to teach this stuff anymore - the university profs decided that since the students got a really screwed up understanding of this topic, they decided it would be better if we left it out entirely." Perhaps the same was the case of calculus too - I can imagine that some high school math teachers wouldn't be able to effectively explain calculus, if they had been constrained to thinking about stupid geometry proofs and equation balancing for twenty years.
Really? In the english class I took in junior high (grades 8-10), we weren't taught any of the normal crap like rhyming words or recognizing different forms of essays - we did whacked projects like writing the back story for an Indiana Jones-esque adventure (the teacher maintains he came up with the concept years before Hollywood ripped him off), writing rebuttal letters to an angry parent's tirade against novels like "Brave New World" or "Johnny Got His Gun", or writing a modernized form of Romeo and Juliet (again, ages before the Hollywood version). About two weeks before the final exam period, he'd get a copy of the exam and sit at the front of the class flipping through it, quickly teaching us anything we needed to know to breeze through the exam.. it was totally cool.
Tony Aish, if you're out there, thank you - you made a boring subject much more interesting, and I learned way more as well!
That's exactly what BC (and from what I hear, Alberta too) does - the provincial exam is written by the ministry, and everyone sits it at the same time.
Someone else mentioned that you get a second crack at the exam - which I loved. If you happened to take a course in the first half of the year (most schools had grade 12 courses compressed into one half of the year or the other), you could sit the exam again in June - it is a different exam, but standardized just the same way. If you score higher the second time, that's the score that goes on your permanent record. (The same is the case for the special "scholarship exam", a 1 hour optional exam immediately following the normal exam, where the scores are used to determine scholarship awards. Except english, which was a 3 hour exam and the normal exam was also used for the scholarship scores.)
In every case where I sat an exam twice, I scored better the second time - which really pissed me off actually, because one scholarship (a big one for my university) was decided by April, so they only used the scores from the exams taken in January - my January scores weren't high enough to get the big scholarship, but my June ones were!!
I find this quite interesting, but it makes sense with everything else I have read about the progression of the education system - more and more schools are teaching children not to think critically, examine facts, compute, and reason, but just give them "job skills" and train them to pass the standardized tests.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, the entrance requirements for universities are indexed against scores on the final exams for various required courses (english, science, social studies, mathematics, etc) in grades 11 and 12. Therefore, in order to qualify for university admission, one has to master the subjects being studied, not "lists of analogies"...
In a large number of cases, the country's conditions got to the way they were because of offshore corporations arriving to begin with. For example, a mining corporation getting the land rights to a mountain so they can dig it up for ore. The subsistence farmers are displaced, so they move to the cities to find work. The mining operations pollute the river, which kills the fish which sustain another part of the population living at the mouth of the river. Cattle can no longer graze at the river, destroying another group of people's way of life. The people may *now* wish to work in a factory for 18 hours a day, but they were sure better off before they were shoved off of their original lands...
Now that's what I call spinning a yarn!
It's not like BIND holds the internet together or anything.
You are forgetting the things that you are consuming - which, if you are a suburbanite with a moderately-sized home and commute to work in a car on a highway every day, may very well consume more resources than you help produce.
One thing is for sure, is that all of us in the modern world consume far more resources than our fair share. It's time to spread that around a little more...
Indeed, and those royalties don't often manage to trickle down to the artist whose talent is being sold. Courtney Love gave a very good speech on this - how the artist gets shafted and the record companies get rich.
Absinth is now legal in Canada; I have seen news reports that the Liquor Distribution Branch of BC will soon start carrying it.
My nickname is Welsh, for "green woman". Basically I decided what phrase I wanted, then went to a few web language pages and experimented with different languages until I found a phrase that sounded pretty nifty :)
Sorry.. a more updated version of the Viridian site, as well as a totally-up-to-date-save-the-last-message list archive, can be found here. Much apologies!
Bruce Sterling has been doing more writing on the California energy crisis, on his Viridian Design mailing list. You can read the Viridian Manifesto here, and read the list archives here (although the archive is lagging a bit behind the mailing list at the moment).
I agree - we have traditionally considered Pluto to be a planet, but it behaves so strangely that it counts just as well as something else.
That reminds me of the near-earth object (Asteroid 3753 Cruithne) that was considered for "moon of Earth" status...