Thanks for the correction. Not sure whether the FDA link was added to the summary after I posted that, or if I'm totally blind.
But I'm having trouble figuring out how 50 rads would be prescribed for a diagnostic (rather than therapeutic) procedure. Even a prolonged CT scan should give a dose 500 times less than this, and the overdose figure of 400 rads should have be enough to kill a fair number of the patients.
Was this a really unusual sort of CT scan, is the FDA confused about units in their press release, or am I?
Typical normal CT scan dose: 1-2 rem Faulty CT scan overdose: 8-16 rem 1950s shoe-salesman's fluoroscope: 10 rem Typical normal Therac-25 dose: 200 rem Malfunctioning Therac-25 dose: 15-20,000 rem
Come on, seriously people. Yes, this is a mistake that needs to be fixed, but millions of kids in the '50s got their feet nuked with this much radiation and lived to become healthy normal adults with normal feet.
The Therac-25 cooked straight through people, leaving a hole of rotting meat behind. This is not even remotely in the same league.
Overall good points, but the anecdote about using sodium for power plant bus bars is ridiculous.
Aluminum has twice the conductivity of sodium. A bus bar made of aluminum the weight of a city bus (14 tonnes) takes about 434 gigajoules of energy to smelt: that's about half an hour's worth of power from a 500-MW power plant.
I don't actually know how heavy these bus bars are, I used the weight of a city bus for pun value, the point is the energy cost of the materials is negligible compared to the power output.
The fact that the UK has a list like that: awesome. The fact that the list is posted on the Web: totally awesome.
Anyway, in answer to your question, remember that the U.S. has a federal court system and 50 different state court systems, all with different rules. I found one state with a vexatious litigant list. Guess which one? (It's not Florida, where Thompson lives.)
Read "Superluminal", by Vonda McIntyre. It's a sci-fi story about a woman who gets a turbopump heart that doesn't beat -- not because she's sick, but because it's a necessary part of becoming a starship pilot. Romance and heartbreak ensue.
I'm not saying that motivation can overcome *any* lethal force... I'm saying that *some* forms of force might be insufficient even if they prove lethal.
Classic case in point: raving lunatic is charging at you with a baseball bat. You shoot him in the arm with a.22 pistol. He might eventually bleed to death, but by god he's going to beat you to a pulp first.
Second, what's wrong with surfing porn at work? Work is a stressful environment, and finding ways to relieve this stress is actually a productive endeavor. Many companies have put in "game rooms"
But for some reason, not many companies have put in "porn rooms". If you can explain why that is, you'll see why porn at work is a bad idea too.
Forbidding jurors from watching TV or reading newspapers while letting them keep their cellphones and PDAs just shows that the courts in your state are being run by someone completely out of touch with the present.
As I said, the court gave specific injunctions against using phones, pdas, and other devices to gather information about the case, but allowed them for personal use in the jury room only. It's the same as TV: you can order a juror to avoid TV news about their case, but nobody would try to forbid them from watching TV entirely.
So on the contrary, I'd claim that my state is *more* in touch with modern communications than other states. It's a more nuanced approach than a heavy-handed outright ban.
Anyway, this is Massachusetts. Are you seriously trying to claim that Massachusetts is a technological backwater?
Proves my point. The Mosquito is a device *designed* to land in the "annoying" range of my graph. It's not going to deter anyone with motivation -- in fact, it's specifically targeted at *unmotivated* people.
Ramp it up 30 dB, and you've got a serious teenager deterrent... but you're also going to hurt innocent little kids.
Replying to my own post... actually, the problem is not just that what's dangerous to one person in a crowd is merely annoying to another. The overlap occurs in individuals too.
If a person is sufficiently motivated, especially if they're well-trained or on drugs, even *lethal* force can be inadequate to stop them.
From what Ladyada has posted here and elsewhere, I'm convinced that it's as effective as the Homeland Security version. Which is, not very.
The basic problem with nonlethal weapons is that they assume there's a range in which a weapon is more than annoying, but less than dangerous: |====annoying===| sweet spot |====dangerous====|
But because people vary in their responses, it looks more like this: |====annoying===|
|====dangerous===| In short, until you deal with the fact that a weapon that will kill Grandma will only make an enraged 250-pound meth addict even angrier, you're wasting your time.
Rules on this vary from state to state: in my case (last summer, in Massachusetts) they didn't take away the phones, but included them in the list of banned information sources.
I actually checked my e-mail and read Slashdot in the jury room, but of course didn't visit any local news websites.
I think taking away phones is a bad idea: suppose some juror's kid got into a car crash, for instance.
... but just to clarify, we were admonished not to read or see information about the case using any medium, tv, newspapers, etc: phones and PDAs were specifically included in this list.
But the point is, they didn't take 'em away from us. And for good reason: suppose some juror's kid got into a car crash or something.
And anyway, sequestered jurors aren't allowed to keep cellphones, while non-sequestered jurors can even watch TV, so the whole point is nonsensical.
That may vary from state to state: it's definitely not true in Massachusetts. (I served on a jury in a criminal case last summer, and the court officers said nothing about phones or PDAs except "turn them off in the courtroom." Not only did I keep my iPhone in my pocket the whole time, I checked my e-mail while in the jury room and nobody cared.)
IANAL, but I served on a jury last summer, and I think the "CSI Effect" is a nice counterbalance to the "Cops are Gods Effect". In the past, jurors accepted any evidence presented by police officers as unambiguous and unquestionable... and DNA evidence especially was treated like a stone tablet handed down from God himself.
Partly as a result of CSI, people now understand that there's good police work and bad police work, and DNA evidence isn't as ironclad as the prosecutor claims.
Case in point: in the trial I served on, the police gathered the DNA evidence in a used paper shopping bag after the item had sat around in the alleged victim's house for a couple days. The item had a mixture of at least four different peoples' DNA on it. The defendant's DNA did match, but the odds that any random person on the street would also match were 1 in 20; the odds that a random person of the defendant's ethnicity would match were 1 in 10 or less.
Having served on a jury with a very good judge this year:
It's the judge's job to explain that complicated legalese to you, as appropriate. The jury's job is to determine facts and apply them to the law as described by the judge: it's the judge's job to determine the applicable laws and explain them to the jury.
All that legalese you'd like to look up on your iPhone, you should be asking the *judge* about, not your phone.
At what point does it become "waste", though? Who gets tagged as the "generator", in cases where one man's garbage is another man's treasure?
Lard, Inc. manufactures vegetable oil, and sells it to McBurgerjoint, who uses it to cook food. McBurgerjoint sells its used cooking oil to BioHippie Inc, which filters it and sells it as diesel fuel to GasNGo, which sells it to consumers. GasNGo goes out of business and dumps a bunch of the biodiesel in a lake. Who pays?
Coalectric Power burns coal in a power plant, producting fly ash. They give the fly ash to Concretorama, who use it as a minor concrete additive. Concretorama sells the concrete to Skylimit Construction, who build a skyscraper with it. The skyscraper eventually gets dynamited, and the concrete rubble is used as landfill. 20 years later, the concrete is found to be contaminated with heavy metals from the fly ash. Who pays?
If you'll permit a little nitpicking, water has about 2-4 times the heat capacity of liquid sodium, depending on phase. Water has one of the highest heat capacities per mass of any common substance. And if you include the energy in the phase change from liquid to gas, it's even better.
Liquid sodium has useful anticorrosion properties and is handy if you want something that stays liquid at high temperature, but from a heat capacity perspective it's got nothing on plain old water.
Optical transmission systems like splitters, lenses, and prisms have geometry issues: if the beams pass through your splitter on the way to the ground, the splitter has to be waaay up in the air.
Your best bet is probably an interference filter placed in front of photovoltaics, with the reflected light going to a solar thermal apparatus.
But that means building tens of square miles of delicate optically-perfect glass. It's going to be freaking expensive, and it's not going to stand up to wind, dust, and bird poop very well.
Average incoming sunlight to a desert location in the southern U.S. is about 300 W/m^2 averaged over the day and year. Let's assume 25% conversion efficiency from sunlight to electricity (better than photovoltaics, but worse than fossil fuels). To produce 300 GW of electricity (about half of present US needs), we need about 4 billion square meters of mirror. (Laid out flat, it'd be an area 63 km on a side. It's a lot of land, but it's doable.)
Let's assume we're making these out of solid aluminum sheets -- if we're talking ordinary glass mirrors here, it's *glass* that's the limiting factor, not aluminum -- about 3 mm thick. That should be enough for a panel to maintain a rigid shape, with a little bit of crossbracing. Anyway, that comes to 12 million cubic meters of aluminum, or 32 million metric tons.
Global aluminum production in 2001 was 25 million metric tons, with another 10 million tons from recycling.
So as long as you build out your solar plants over the course of a decade or so, you'd be using "only" 10% or so of the world supply of aluminum. At current prices of $2000/tonne, it'll cost you $64 billion. If you assume aluminum prices will spike when you do this, maybe $100 billion.
It's not a cheap proposition, but we're talking about powering the whole US here. At $80/megawatt-hour wholesale prices, 300 GW of electricity is worth $210 billion/year.
The electricity produced has a wholesale value Solar panels will eventually need to be replaced, but that's easy: recycle and re-cast them on-site, using solar electric power.
In theory, OSX uses MIME types. In practice, it often doesn't. If I have Preview set up as my default PDF viewer, and I take an ordinary PDF file and change its extension from ".pdf" to ".doc", it might try to open in Word. Or in Acrobat Reader. Or Illustrator. Lord only knows.
The argument for creator and type indicators for files would be a lot stronger if OS X had a coherent type system that actually worked. In practice it's got at least two overlapping systems.
I'll be happy to have *one* that works, whether it's a relic of CP/M or not.
I think students *should* be able to sue the state for educational malpractice, but the bar for litigation is higher when you're following publicly-accepted standards and practices than when you're going against the flow. If Doctor A treats a heart patient with blood pressure medicine and bypass surgery and he dies, that's very different from Doctor B who prescribes a regimen of crystal energy and acupuncture.
Oh, and lexDysic: please, do try to get Marvin an online degree. Seriously. It's a pretty labor-intensive stunt, but it'd probably get national news recognition, and would prove your point way better than a thousand posts to Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the correction. Not sure whether the FDA link was added to the summary after I posted that, or if I'm totally blind.
But I'm having trouble figuring out how 50 rads would be prescribed for a diagnostic (rather than therapeutic) procedure. Even a prolonged CT scan should give a dose 500 times less than this, and the overdose figure of 400 rads should have be enough to kill a fair number of the patients.
Was this a really unusual sort of CT scan, is the FDA confused about units in their press release, or am I?
Typical normal CT scan dose: 1-2 rem
Faulty CT scan overdose: 8-16 rem
1950s shoe-salesman's fluoroscope: 10 rem
Typical normal Therac-25 dose: 200 rem
Malfunctioning Therac-25 dose: 15-20,000 rem
Come on, seriously people. Yes, this is a mistake that needs to be fixed, but millions of kids in the '50s got their feet nuked with this much radiation and lived to become healthy normal adults with normal feet.
The Therac-25 cooked straight through people, leaving a hole of rotting meat behind. This is not even remotely in the same league.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/R/Radiation.html
http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/content/107/1/113.full.pdf
http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm
Overall good points, but the anecdote about using sodium for power plant bus bars is ridiculous.
Aluminum has twice the conductivity of sodium. A bus bar made of aluminum the weight of a city bus (14 tonnes) takes about 434 gigajoules of energy to smelt: that's about half an hour's worth of power from a 500-MW power plant.
I don't actually know how heavy these bus bars are, I used the weight of a city bus for pun value, the point is the energy cost of the materials is negligible compared to the power output.
The fact that the UK has a list like that: awesome.
The fact that the list is posted on the Web: totally awesome.
Anyway, in answer to your question, remember that the U.S. has a federal court system and 50 different state court systems, all with different rules. I found one state with a vexatious litigant list. Guess which one? (It's not Florida, where Thompson lives.)
Read "Superluminal", by Vonda McIntyre. It's a sci-fi story about a woman who gets a turbopump heart that doesn't beat -- not because she's sick, but because it's a necessary part of becoming a starship pilot. Romance and heartbreak ensue.
Replying to both westlake and evilviper, below:
I'm not saying that motivation can overcome *any* lethal force... I'm saying that *some* forms of force might be insufficient even if they prove lethal.
Classic case in point: raving lunatic is charging at you with a baseball bat. You shoot him in the arm with a .22 pistol. He might eventually bleed to death, but by god he's going to beat you to a pulp first.
Second, what's wrong with surfing porn at work? Work is a stressful environment, and finding ways to relieve this stress is actually a productive endeavor. Many companies have put in "game rooms"
But for some reason, not many companies have put in "porn rooms". If you can explain why that is, you'll see why porn at work is a bad idea too.
Forbidding jurors from watching TV or reading newspapers while letting them keep their cellphones and PDAs just shows that the courts in your state are being run by someone completely out of touch with the present.
As I said, the court gave specific injunctions against using phones, pdas, and other devices to gather information about the case, but allowed them for personal use in the jury room only. It's the same as TV: you can order a juror to avoid TV news about their case, but nobody would try to forbid them from watching TV entirely.
So on the contrary, I'd claim that my state is *more* in touch with modern communications than other states. It's a more nuanced approach than a heavy-handed outright ban.
Anyway, this is Massachusetts. Are you seriously trying to claim that Massachusetts is a technological backwater?
Proves my point. The Mosquito is a device *designed* to land in the "annoying" range of my graph. It's not going to deter anyone with motivation -- in fact, it's specifically targeted at *unmotivated* people.
Ramp it up 30 dB, and you've got a serious teenager deterrent ... but you're also going to hurt innocent little kids.
Replying to my own post ... actually, the problem is not just that what's dangerous to one person in a crowd is merely annoying to another. The overlap occurs in individuals too.
If a person is sufficiently motivated, especially if they're well-trained or on drugs, even *lethal* force can be inadequate to stop them.
From what Ladyada has posted here and elsewhere, I'm convinced that it's as effective as the Homeland Security version. Which is, not very.
The basic problem with nonlethal weapons is that they assume there's a range in which a weapon is more than annoying, but less than dangerous:
|====annoying===| sweet spot |====dangerous====|
But because people vary in their responses, it looks more like this:
|====annoying===|
|====dangerous===|
In short, until you deal with the fact that a weapon that will kill Grandma will only make an enraged 250-pound meth addict even angrier, you're wasting your time.
Rules on this vary from state to state: in my case (last summer, in Massachusetts) they didn't take away the phones, but included them in the list of banned information sources.
I actually checked my e-mail and read Slashdot in the jury room, but of course didn't visit any local news websites.
I think taking away phones is a bad idea: suppose some juror's kid got into a car crash, for instance.
... but just to clarify, we were admonished not to read or see information about the case using any medium, tv, newspapers, etc: phones and PDAs were specifically included in this list.
But the point is, they didn't take 'em away from us. And for good reason: suppose some juror's kid got into a car crash or something.
And anyway, sequestered jurors aren't allowed to keep cellphones, while non-sequestered jurors can even watch TV, so the whole point is nonsensical.
That may vary from state to state: it's definitely not true in Massachusetts. (I served on a jury in a criminal case last summer, and the court officers said nothing about phones or PDAs except "turn them off in the courtroom." Not only did I keep my iPhone in my pocket the whole time, I checked my e-mail while in the jury room and nobody cared.)
IANAL, but I served on a jury last summer, and I think the "CSI Effect" is a nice counterbalance to the "Cops are Gods Effect". In the past, jurors accepted any evidence presented by police officers as unambiguous and unquestionable... and DNA evidence especially was treated like a stone tablet handed down from God himself.
Partly as a result of CSI, people now understand that there's good police work and bad police work, and DNA evidence isn't as ironclad as the prosecutor claims.
Case in point: in the trial I served on, the police gathered the DNA evidence in a used paper shopping bag after the item had sat around in the alleged victim's house for a couple days. The item had a mixture of at least four different peoples' DNA on it. The defendant's DNA did match, but the odds that any random person on the street would also match were 1 in 20; the odds that a random person of the defendant's ethnicity would match were 1 in 10 or less.
The jury considered that a reasonable doubt.
Having served on a jury with a very good judge this year:
It's the judge's job to explain that complicated legalese to you, as appropriate. The jury's job is to determine facts and apply them to the law as described by the judge: it's the judge's job to determine the applicable laws and explain them to the jury.
All that legalese you'd like to look up on your iPhone, you should be asking the *judge* about, not your phone.
Betraying my ignorance on EPA laws...
At what point does it become "waste", though? Who gets tagged as the "generator", in cases where one man's garbage is another man's treasure?
Lard, Inc. manufactures vegetable oil, and sells it to McBurgerjoint, who uses it to cook food. McBurgerjoint sells its used cooking oil to BioHippie Inc, which filters it and sells it as diesel fuel to GasNGo, which sells it to consumers. GasNGo goes out of business and dumps a bunch of the biodiesel in a lake. Who pays?
Coalectric Power burns coal in a power plant, producting fly ash. They give the fly ash to Concretorama, who use it as a minor concrete additive. Concretorama sells the concrete to Skylimit Construction, who build a skyscraper with it. The skyscraper eventually gets dynamited, and the concrete rubble is used as landfill. 20 years later, the concrete is found to be contaminated with heavy metals from the fly ash. Who pays?
"In a world where polluting is criminal, only criminals will pollute." ... actually hang on, that would be pretty good actually.
intermediate higher heat-capacity substance
If you'll permit a little nitpicking, water has about 2-4 times the heat capacity of liquid sodium, depending on phase. Water has one of the highest heat capacities per mass of any common substance. And if you include the energy in the phase change from liquid to gas, it's even better.
Liquid sodium has useful anticorrosion properties and is handy if you want something that stays liquid at high temperature, but from a heat capacity perspective it's got nothing on plain old water.
Optical transmission systems like splitters, lenses, and prisms have geometry issues: if the beams pass through your splitter on the way to the ground, the splitter has to be waaay up in the air.
Your best bet is probably an interference filter placed in front of photovoltaics, with the reflected light going to a solar thermal apparatus.
But that means building tens of square miles of delicate optically-perfect glass. It's going to be freaking expensive, and it's not going to stand up to wind, dust, and bird poop very well.
Let's do the math here.
Average incoming sunlight to a desert location in the southern U.S. is about 300 W/m^2 averaged over the day and year. Let's assume 25% conversion efficiency from sunlight to electricity (better than photovoltaics, but worse than fossil fuels). To produce 300 GW of electricity (about half of present US needs), we need about 4 billion square meters of mirror. (Laid out flat, it'd be an area 63 km on a side. It's a lot of land, but it's doable.)
Let's assume we're making these out of solid aluminum sheets -- if we're talking ordinary glass mirrors here, it's *glass* that's the limiting factor, not aluminum -- about 3 mm thick. That should be enough for a panel to maintain a rigid shape, with a little bit of crossbracing. Anyway, that comes to 12 million cubic meters of aluminum, or 32 million metric tons.
Global aluminum production in 2001 was 25 million metric tons, with another 10 million tons from recycling.
So as long as you build out your solar plants over the course of a decade or so, you'd be using "only" 10% or so of the world supply of aluminum. At current prices of $2000/tonne, it'll cost you $64 billion. If you assume aluminum prices will spike when you do this, maybe $100 billion.
It's not a cheap proposition, but we're talking about powering the whole US here. At $80/megawatt-hour wholesale prices, 300 GW of electricity is worth $210 billion/year.
The electricity produced has a wholesale value Solar panels will eventually need to be replaced, but that's easy: recycle and re-cast them on-site, using solar electric power.
In short, it's massive but totally doable.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
http://preview.tinyurl.com/oygcnb
http://seekingalpha.com/article/105000-wholesale-electricity-prices-fall-by-51-to-77
In theory, OSX uses MIME types. In practice, it often doesn't. If I have Preview set up as my default PDF viewer, and I take an ordinary PDF file and change its extension from ".pdf" to ".doc", it might try to open in Word. Or in Acrobat Reader. Or Illustrator. Lord only knows.
The argument for creator and type indicators for files would be a lot stronger if OS X had a coherent type system that actually worked. In practice it's got at least two overlapping systems.
I'll be happy to have *one* that works, whether it's a relic of CP/M or not.
Also it may be less secure since it is using a wireless solution.
Ah, but the packets peep when you peek, and peck if you poke!
I think students *should* be able to sue the state for educational malpractice, but the bar for litigation is higher when you're following publicly-accepted standards and practices than when you're going against the flow. If Doctor A treats a heart patient with blood pressure medicine and bypass surgery and he dies, that's very different from Doctor B who prescribes a regimen of crystal energy and acupuncture.
Oh, and lexDysic: please, do try to get Marvin an online degree. Seriously. It's a pretty labor-intensive stunt, but it'd probably get national news recognition, and would prove your point way better than a thousand posts to Slashdot.