acupunctute [...] has been tested and found effective.
I think Randi's $1M prize is open to acupuncture. Also doing a quick check of PubMed, I don't see any studies showing benefit. Granted this was a quick search.
Benefit relative to placebo. Placebos are very effective in treating pain. So both statements could in fact be true.
All true - and also helped by the fact that chronic pain is one area where the placebo effect is particularly powerful. Powerful enough to be effective in over 50% of cases. That will get you a lot of testimonials.
I think you've got it! Everything is the same. A doctor is the same as a school teacher is the same as a CEO of a multinational.... Everything is equal. Nothing is better or worse than anything else. Therefore, all outcomes should be equal. All jobs should be guaranteed, all salaries should be the same, all products cost the same.... It's all equal. The only reason anything deviates from this is because people are greedy and evil, so we set up a government to keep that from happening.
In a perfect world, everyone would get a car. All cars are equal, so it doesn't matter which one - Yugo or BMW, whatever - they are all equal and guaranteed. In fact, since nobody wants a Yugo and everyone wants a nice luxury sedan, the BMW M5 is the only car anyone can make from now on. And everyone gets one. That's a huge market - and since an M5 takes so much labor to create, just think of the jobs we created! Same goes for food, clothes, housing.... same for everyone everywhere. You invented the computer and built a company that provides them for everyone - great! you get a car and an apartment, just like the guy who is supposed to clean the bath downstairs, but usually doesn't show up for work. I can't foresee any problems with such a system.
Ok, I stand corrected. Apparently the President just released his version of the plan this afternoon. Who knew he read Slashdot? I feel so powerful. Now maybe I can get him to do something about the DMCA?
The President doesn't have that much power. Love or hate Obama and what he wanted to do, but if it were just up to him, some sort of health care legislation would have passed by now.
Yeah, but what kind? For whatever reason* he never has put forth his own healthcare reform plan.
*OK, I strongly suspect I know the reason. He's no idiot. It is much better politics to say "I demand reform now" and wait for a bill to get produced and accepted by the majority than it is to send your own detailed proposal up to the Hill and have everyone on both sides of the aisle shoot it down. Very few things sent to the Hill by the President are anything other than "Dead On Arrival", even when your party has an absolute and unassailable majority. And he is also smart enough to know that the president gets the credit for things that happen on his watch, whether he has anything to do with it or not. Bill Clinton's supporters still champion things like his welfare reform that were shoved down his throat (er, passed over his administration's objections) by an opposition congress. Actually, that is probably the best of all possible worlds for a politician. Have the opposition push through legislation that you agree with. If it fails, you can blame them. If it succeeds, you take credit. Perfect. Of course, that didn't work out so well for Bush Sr. The Dems attached tax increases to every bill that came through until he acquiesced and compromised on a tax increase to keep the government moving. They hung him from his "no new taxes" petard. Still, I'm betting that the President is playing this one smart. He gets what he wants without his fingerprints on any one provision that some interest group or another doesn't like, or else he doesn't get anything and he can campaign on that. Somehow, despite a filibuster-proof majority, it is republican obstructionism that prevented healthcare from passing last year. Pretty politically astute, I'd say.
How about making it even less hard. Remove boundaries to competition (state by state regulation) and subsidize the poor. Done and dusted.
Blue Cross / Blue Shield is already non-profit in most cases, so adding non-profit orgs doesn't even need to be done. In one fell swoop you've solved almost everything.
You eliminated medicaid (subsidize the poor), indexed medicare for income (eliminate it and subsidize the poor), eliminated the uninsured (oops, that one isn't so easy. You'd have to have an individual mandate to get everyone insured and allow the law to block "preexisting conditions" restrictions).
I live and work in the US. I don't have any trouble getting myself or my wife and children in to see the doctor on demand Same day for same day type things, a week or two at most for more mundane things. I can walk into any hospital in an emergency and get treated immediately for emergency type things.
When I had a small spider bite over one eye, they did a head CT just to be sure the resulting infection hadn't entered the eye capsule. I was treated in-hospital for 4 days with IV antibiotics and a full team of specialists. All covered under my health plan, no questions asked.
The great thing about it is if I don't like the coverage, I can just go to another provider. The bad thing is that, like most people in the US, my coverage is tied to my employer - so changing to a different provider would incur an additional penalty (loss of employer subsidy) because of that.
Moore's law has to do with the number of transistors on a processor. So this doesn't directly impact Moore's law, unless they are also much smaller transistors that can be packed more densely. We use Moore's law as a proxy for "faster", but that's not what it entails - although more transistors has meant faster so far.
IBM research is typically the traditional 10 years away - but not this one... from TFA:
"This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, this is real," he says. "This development is really going to turn into a communications device not too long from now."
So, I won't be playing Crysis on this transistor next month, but I might be using it to make a phone call "not too long from now".
Because graphene is really, really slippery. Two sheets of graphene will slide over each other with very little friction. This is why you can use graphite powder as an effective dry lubricant. This is similar to the problem with using carbon nanotubes as a structural material. You have a very hard time reaching the theoretical strength of the tubes or sheets into the material as a whole because they don't bond well to anything, particularly not each other. If you could figure a way to polymerize graphene sheets with some sort of dopant, you'd sacrifice some (or a lot) of the tensile strength, but you'd still create a massively strong material.
Before the crappy "So it's like a pencil? I guess erasing the RAM will make eraser dust everywhere in the computer" jokes start flowing in, it's graphene not graphite.
Graphene and graphite are the same thing. Graphite consists of multiple single sheets of graphene.
No, no. that's "The Wall". The correct quote would have something to do with "Us and Them" having the "Money" and "Time" for "The Great Gig In the Sky". (only funnier and more and pithy)
You seem to be under the impression that politicians are agreeing with the scientific consensus on climate change because of their scientific understanding and enlightenment. You are way, way, way too credulous. They agree because it fits their agenda, no other reason. Other politicians disagree with it for the same reason.
And just how the hell do you expect to fly men to these near-Earth asteroids? The shuttle ain't gonna do it. We'd need to develop a replacement vehicle.
FTFA:
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.
Yep, that's brilliant. After you've already looked into a new heavy lift rocket and are in the middle of the development process, let's scrap the whole program. Then let's start a new program to look into developing a new heavy lift rocket. With that kind of thinking, you could get a good job in the government.
Tell you what - since according to your philosophy we can pick and choose where our money goes - however much of my taxes is going to the military? Send 75% of that to NASA instead. Welfare? Send 90% of that to NASA instead.
I'm perfectly willing to pay for NASA via my taxes if I also get to stipulate what I'm NOT willing to pay for.
This is genius! I wonder what the federal budget would look like if that's how everything got funded? Your tax return has percentage allocations for all of the various departments and you get to do the allocation. I bet NASA would do pretty well. Probably at least two orders of magnitude more money. Medical research too. Military spending would go up in some areas, down in others - but those entitlement programs... boy, would they be in trouble. Farm subsidies? Good luck with that. Corporate bailouts? Yeah, right.
MBGMorden, you are really on to something here.
Of course, the "super-wealthy teenage girl reality show subsidy" and the "football subsidy" would probably do pretty well too. Oh well....
By far our biggest problems are entitlement programs, and frankly, politicians from Congress right up the President are cowards when it comes to dealing with them.
I don't think you can honestly call this president and this congress cowards on dealing with entitlements. They have boldly pushed forward for a new entitlement program to dwarf all the others - an entitlement that targets everyone in the country, not just specific interest groups. No, they are not cowardly about dealing with entitlements at all. They just prefer to deal with entitlements in a way that you would probably see as utterly irrational.
Several short exposures don't capture more light than a single long exposure. In fact, they capture far less.
Right, but atmospheric motion blurs long exposures, and background noise accumulates as well. So you take several short exposures and add them together. sort of the amateur's version of adaptive optics. TFA mentions he uses about 30 frames to make an image.
I don't want you to go on for pages, but am I curious:
who are you to say 207 years of Supreme Court decisions are wrong?
I'll chime in for him. Two words - Dred Scott. That goes back to the mid 1800's. Wrong in every sense of the word - legally, intellectually, morally. Just plain wrong. There's plenty more after that, but you'd be hard pressed to find more wrong than "perfectly wrong". And any human being can say that it was wrong - you don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar for that one.
When is the last time you actually saw Mickey Mouse in anything new? I don't even think I've seen him in much of their advertising lately...
You don't have kids, do you? Check out the Disney channels sometime... they have all kinds of Mickey Mouse stuff, including his own show - The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. CGI cartoon goodness for 5 year old kids. Ok, it pretty much sucks, but it is new.
But you're not providing enough information for it to be relevant. If the normal flue kills 0.00001% of younger healthy people, and this new flu doubles the chance of a younger healthy person to die, it's still doesn't matter because it's not significant.
Show me some numbers, then start making claims. As of yet all I've heard is scare mongering.
The numbers from the initial outbreak reports were one in six. So for a country the size of the US, you could expect 1/3 to catch the flu and 1/6 of those to die - or around 16 million. That's a pretty scary number.
Of course, the early numbers turned out to be wrong. But that took a couple of months to figure out. It still turned out to have a relatively high mortality rate for flu.
It's cool that you understand the risk and consequences of being wrong on the flu - there is a very low individual chance of a healthy adult dying of influenza in any given year.
It is a little less cool that you are willing to serve as an incubator and dispersal mechanism for influenza virus for those around you who might not be as trivially threatened by a bout of flu.
And since you are citing risk level in your analysis at the start, concluding with pride that you won't take a vaccine because of the mercury in Thimerosol.... wow. Maybe it would help if you were to check the amount of Thimerosol (and mercury) in a vaccine to put some context to your thoughts. You probably have several orders of magnitude more mercury (in total) circulating in your blood right now, just from the air pollution around you. The amounts involved are just tiny, most flu vaccines are.25 or.5 ml. That's one quarter of one thousandth of 1 liter. In fact, if you just dumped that little vial of vaccine into a glass of water, it would pass the safety limits for safe drinking water. There's just not that much stuff in there. And that is for those vaccines that still include Thimerosol as a preservative. Most don't anymore, due to regulations in some jurisdictions and publicity from silly celebrities who don't understand the difference between micro-, milli- and kilo- prefixes.
As for your specific concerns about the H1N1, the prefilled syringes from all of the manufacturers contain no Thimerosol. The 10-dose vials come with 10 mcg. of Thimerosol. If you did happen to get one of these doses, you'd get the same amount of mercury from drinking 250ml of water that is deemed completely safe by the government, but contains trace amounts of mercury just below the legal limit.
Somehow the Bt toxin makes its way through the bug's digestive system to kill it. Why is it so unbelievable that some of the toxin makes it through a human's digestive system?
--PM
from the Wikipedia article:
The toxicity of each Bt type is limited to one or two insect orders, and is nontoxic to vertebrates and many beneficial arthropods.
I'll echo Seraphim's point. Do some more reading on non-animal kingdom organisms. They certainly respond in ways that are exactly similar to what you would term "pain." Many of them can communicate attacks to nearby relatives - who receive the message and prepare their defenses. What is this if not screams of pain? Just because they use chemical signaling rather than audible sounds for their communication medium doesn't mean they aren't exhibiting the same responses. Just because they don't use nerves to transmit signals internally doesn't mean those signals aren't sent.
There are multitudes of examples, but because large organisms are more impressive, I'll recommend that you start with Acacia trees. They can actually warn other trees in the area when antelope herds begin grazing on them. The other trees will then produce toxins that stop the animals from eating them.
They were saying the same thing 30 years ago. I'll issue the same challenge to you now that I used to use back then: If you really believe that an alternative method to animal testing exists and is better - go out and market it. You'll be a very wealthy man by the end of the week. Fabulously, ridiculously wealthy. Animal testing is hideously expensive, and everyone who has to do it would gladly use an alternative given the chance. These economics are what drives innovation in the areas of new research models, as well as speed and scalability. The moralizing of a fringe group who is too far removed from agrarian society to understand the natural world has minimal impact, at best. Mostly they just force researchers to waste money on more security.
Slashdot Mirror
acupunctute [...] has been tested and found effective. I think Randi's $1M prize is open to acupuncture. Also doing a quick check of PubMed, I don't see any studies showing benefit. Granted this was a quick search.
Benefit relative to placebo. Placebos are very effective in treating pain. So both statements could in fact be true.
All true - and also helped by the fact that chronic pain is one area where the placebo effect is particularly powerful. Powerful enough to be effective in over 50% of cases. That will get you a lot of testimonials.
I think you've got it! Everything is the same. A doctor is the same as a school teacher is the same as a CEO of a multinational.... Everything is equal. Nothing is better or worse than anything else. Therefore, all outcomes should be equal. All jobs should be guaranteed, all salaries should be the same, all products cost the same.... It's all equal. The only reason anything deviates from this is because people are greedy and evil, so we set up a government to keep that from happening.
In a perfect world, everyone would get a car. All cars are equal, so it doesn't matter which one - Yugo or BMW, whatever - they are all equal and guaranteed. In fact, since nobody wants a Yugo and everyone wants a nice luxury sedan, the BMW M5 is the only car anyone can make from now on. And everyone gets one. That's a huge market - and since an M5 takes so much labor to create, just think of the jobs we created! Same goes for food, clothes, housing.... same for everyone everywhere. You invented the computer and built a company that provides them for everyone - great! you get a car and an apartment, just like the guy who is supposed to clean the bath downstairs, but usually doesn't show up for work. I can't foresee any problems with such a system.
Ok, I stand corrected. Apparently the President just released his version of the plan this afternoon. Who knew he read Slashdot? I feel so powerful. Now maybe I can get him to do something about the DMCA?
The President doesn't have that much power. Love or hate Obama and what he wanted to do, but if it were just up to him, some sort of health care legislation would have passed by now.
Yeah, but what kind? For whatever reason* he never has put forth his own healthcare reform plan.
*OK, I strongly suspect I know the reason. He's no idiot. It is much better politics to say "I demand reform now" and wait for a bill to get produced and accepted by the majority than it is to send your own detailed proposal up to the Hill and have everyone on both sides of the aisle shoot it down. Very few things sent to the Hill by the President are anything other than "Dead On Arrival", even when your party has an absolute and unassailable majority. And he is also smart enough to know that the president gets the credit for things that happen on his watch, whether he has anything to do with it or not. Bill Clinton's supporters still champion things like his welfare reform that were shoved down his throat (er, passed over his administration's objections) by an opposition congress. Actually, that is probably the best of all possible worlds for a politician. Have the opposition push through legislation that you agree with. If it fails, you can blame them. If it succeeds, you take credit. Perfect. Of course, that didn't work out so well for Bush Sr. The Dems attached tax increases to every bill that came through until he acquiesced and compromised on a tax increase to keep the government moving. They hung him from his "no new taxes" petard. Still, I'm betting that the President is playing this one smart. He gets what he wants without his fingerprints on any one provision that some interest group or another doesn't like, or else he doesn't get anything and he can campaign on that. Somehow, despite a filibuster-proof majority, it is republican obstructionism that prevented healthcare from passing last year. Pretty politically astute, I'd say.
How about making it even less hard. Remove boundaries to competition (state by state regulation) and subsidize the poor. Done and dusted.
Blue Cross / Blue Shield is already non-profit in most cases, so adding non-profit orgs doesn't even need to be done. In one fell swoop you've solved almost everything.
You eliminated medicaid (subsidize the poor), indexed medicare for income (eliminate it and subsidize the poor), eliminated the uninsured (oops, that one isn't so easy. You'd have to have an individual mandate to get everyone insured and allow the law to block "preexisting conditions" restrictions).
I live and work in the US. I don't have any trouble getting myself or my wife and children in to see the doctor on demand Same day for same day type things, a week or two at most for more mundane things. I can walk into any hospital in an emergency and get treated immediately for emergency type things.
When I had a small spider bite over one eye, they did a head CT just to be sure the resulting infection hadn't entered the eye capsule. I was treated in-hospital for 4 days with IV antibiotics and a full team of specialists. All covered under my health plan, no questions asked.
The great thing about it is if I don't like the coverage, I can just go to another provider. The bad thing is that, like most people in the US, my coverage is tied to my employer - so changing to a different provider would incur an additional penalty (loss of employer subsidy) because of that.
Moore's law has to do with the number of transistors on a processor. So this doesn't directly impact Moore's law, unless they are also much smaller transistors that can be packed more densely. We use Moore's law as a proxy for "faster", but that's not what it entails - although more transistors has meant faster so far.
"This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, this is real," he says. "This development is really going to turn into a communications device not too long from now."
So, I won't be playing Crysis on this transistor next month, but I might be using it to make a phone call "not too long from now".
Because graphene is really, really slippery. Two sheets of graphene will slide over each other with very little friction. This is why you can use graphite powder as an effective dry lubricant. This is similar to the problem with using carbon nanotubes as a structural material. You have a very hard time reaching the theoretical strength of the tubes or sheets into the material as a whole because they don't bond well to anything, particularly not each other. If you could figure a way to polymerize graphene sheets with some sort of dopant, you'd sacrifice some (or a lot) of the tensile strength, but you'd still create a massively strong material.
Before the crappy "So it's like a pencil? I guess erasing the RAM will make eraser dust everywhere in the computer" jokes start flowing in, it's graphene not graphite.
Graphene and graphite are the same thing. Graphite consists of multiple single sheets of graphene.
No, no. that's "The Wall". The correct quote would have something to do with "Us and Them" having the "Money" and "Time" for "The Great Gig In the Sky". (only funnier and more and pithy)
You seem to be under the impression that politicians are agreeing with the scientific consensus on climate change because of their scientific understanding and enlightenment. You are way, way, way too credulous. They agree because it fits their agenda, no other reason. Other politicians disagree with it for the same reason.
But it is the National Air and Space Museum, so maybe there is some kind of ironic commentary there....
And just how the hell do you expect to fly men to these near-Earth asteroids? The shuttle ain't gonna do it. We'd need to develop a replacement vehicle.
FTFA:
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.
Yep, that's brilliant. After you've already looked into a new heavy lift rocket and are in the middle of the development process, let's scrap the whole program. Then let's start a new program to look into developing a new heavy lift rocket. With that kind of thinking, you could get a good job in the government.
Tell you what - since according to your philosophy we can pick and choose where our money goes - however much of my taxes is going to the military? Send 75% of that to NASA instead. Welfare? Send 90% of that to NASA instead.
I'm perfectly willing to pay for NASA via my taxes if I also get to stipulate what I'm NOT willing to pay for.
This is genius! I wonder what the federal budget would look like if that's how everything got funded? Your tax return has percentage allocations for all of the various departments and you get to do the allocation. I bet NASA would do pretty well. Probably at least two orders of magnitude more money. Medical research too. Military spending would go up in some areas, down in others - but those entitlement programs... boy, would they be in trouble. Farm subsidies? Good luck with that. Corporate bailouts? Yeah, right.
MBGMorden, you are really on to something here.
Of course, the "super-wealthy teenage girl reality show subsidy" and the "football subsidy" would probably do pretty well too. Oh well....
By far our biggest problems are entitlement programs, and frankly, politicians from Congress right up the President are cowards when it comes to dealing with them.
I don't think you can honestly call this president and this congress cowards on dealing with entitlements. They have boldly pushed forward for a new entitlement program to dwarf all the others - an entitlement that targets everyone in the country, not just specific interest groups. No, they are not cowardly about dealing with entitlements at all. They just prefer to deal with entitlements in a way that you would probably see as utterly irrational.
Several short exposures don't capture more light than a single long exposure. In fact, they capture far less.
Right, but atmospheric motion blurs long exposures, and background noise accumulates as well. So you take several short exposures and add them together. sort of the amateur's version of adaptive optics. TFA mentions he uses about 30 frames to make an image.
I don't want you to go on for pages, but am I curious: who are you to say 207 years of Supreme Court decisions are wrong?
I'll chime in for him. Two words - Dred Scott. That goes back to the mid 1800's. Wrong in every sense of the word - legally, intellectually, morally. Just plain wrong. There's plenty more after that, but you'd be hard pressed to find more wrong than "perfectly wrong". And any human being can say that it was wrong - you don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar for that one.
When is the last time you actually saw Mickey Mouse in anything new? I don't even think I've seen him in much of their advertising lately...
You don't have kids, do you? Check out the Disney channels sometime... they have all kinds of Mickey Mouse stuff, including his own show - The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. CGI cartoon goodness for 5 year old kids. Ok, it pretty much sucks, but it is new.
But you're not providing enough information for it to be relevant. If the normal flue kills 0.00001% of younger healthy people, and this new flu doubles the chance of a younger healthy person to die, it's still doesn't matter because it's not significant.
Show me some numbers, then start making claims. As of yet all I've heard is scare mongering.
The numbers from the initial outbreak reports were one in six. So for a country the size of the US, you could expect 1/3 to catch the flu and 1/6 of those to die - or around 16 million. That's a pretty scary number.
Of course, the early numbers turned out to be wrong. But that took a couple of months to figure out. It still turned out to have a relatively high mortality rate for flu.
It's cool that you understand the risk and consequences of being wrong on the flu - there is a very low individual chance of a healthy adult dying of influenza in any given year.
It is a little less cool that you are willing to serve as an incubator and dispersal mechanism for influenza virus for those around you who might not be as trivially threatened by a bout of flu.
And since you are citing risk level in your analysis at the start, concluding with pride that you won't take a vaccine because of the mercury in Thimerosol.... wow. Maybe it would help if you were to check the amount of Thimerosol (and mercury) in a vaccine to put some context to your thoughts. You probably have several orders of magnitude more mercury (in total) circulating in your blood right now, just from the air pollution around you. The amounts involved are just tiny, most flu vaccines are .25 or .5 ml. That's one quarter of one thousandth of 1 liter. In fact, if you just dumped that little vial of vaccine into a glass of water, it would pass the safety limits for safe drinking water. There's just not that much stuff in there. And that is for those vaccines that still include Thimerosol as a preservative. Most don't anymore, due to regulations in some jurisdictions and publicity from silly celebrities who don't understand the difference between micro-, milli- and kilo- prefixes.
As for your specific concerns about the H1N1, the prefilled syringes from all of the manufacturers contain no Thimerosol. The 10-dose vials come with 10 mcg. of Thimerosol. If you did happen to get one of these doses, you'd get the same amount of mercury from drinking 250ml of water that is deemed completely safe by the government, but contains trace amounts of mercury just below the legal limit.
Hello,
Somehow the Bt toxin makes its way through the bug's digestive system to kill it. Why is it so unbelievable that some of the toxin makes it through a human's digestive system?
--PM
from the Wikipedia article:
The toxicity of each Bt type is limited to one or two insect orders, and is nontoxic to vertebrates and many beneficial arthropods.
That's why.
I'll echo Seraphim's point. Do some more reading on non-animal kingdom organisms. They certainly respond in ways that are exactly similar to what you would term "pain." Many of them can communicate attacks to nearby relatives - who receive the message and prepare their defenses. What is this if not screams of pain? Just because they use chemical signaling rather than audible sounds for their communication medium doesn't mean they aren't exhibiting the same responses. Just because they don't use nerves to transmit signals internally doesn't mean those signals aren't sent.
There are multitudes of examples, but because large organisms are more impressive, I'll recommend that you start with Acacia trees. They can actually warn other trees in the area when antelope herds begin grazing on them. The other trees will then produce toxins that stop the animals from eating them.
They were saying the same thing 30 years ago. I'll issue the same challenge to you now that I used to use back then: If you really believe that an alternative method to animal testing exists and is better - go out and market it. You'll be a very wealthy man by the end of the week. Fabulously, ridiculously wealthy. Animal testing is hideously expensive, and everyone who has to do it would gladly use an alternative given the chance. These economics are what drives innovation in the areas of new research models, as well as speed and scalability. The moralizing of a fringe group who is too far removed from agrarian society to understand the natural world has minimal impact, at best. Mostly they just force researchers to waste money on more security.