On the contrary, the Prime Minister in a Westminster style system has much more power than the President of the USA, because the PM fully controls the legislative agenda.
In the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, laws that spend public money or raise taxes must be accompanied by a "Royal Recommendation". Since the Monarch of each country with respect to the exercise of the Royal Prerogative has been an automaton since at least 1936 (and for hundreds of years with respect to the UK and its legal predecessors), acting only on the advice of the Prime Minister, this means that the PM has a veto on whether Parliament can even consider most important bills. Ireland and India have similar rules, but have (appointed) Presidents instead of a (heridtary) Queen and (appointed) Governor-General.
This is Section 56 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (current version): "A vote, resolution, or proposed law for the appropriation of revenue or moneys shall not be passed unless the purpose of the appropriation has in the same session been recommended by message of the Governor-General to the House in which the proposal originated." The Senate and House of Representatives both have rules and standing orders forbidding the debate of votes, resolutions or proposed laws that may not be passed, and the President or Speaker enforces these assiduously.
Moreover, in all of these countries except the UK, either the Royal Assent can be deferred, or the Proclamation can be deferred, in the event Parliament passes a Bill that the Prime Minister does not want. In the UK, the Royal Assent has been automatic and has not involved the Monarch or the Prime Minister since the early Victorian era; Proclamation is not a feature of the UK system -- an Act of Parliament that receives Royal Assent becomes law immediately (or at a future date fixed in the Act itself). It is pretty clear that if it became necessary, the Prime Minister could constitutionally insist that "the Queen withhold Royal Assent in order to consider the Bill" ("la Reyne s'avisera", is the Norman French formalization), which in practice would mean sending a letter to the Department of Constitutional Affairs and the Clerks of both Houses of Parliament.
This is described in Sections 58 (Royal Aseent) and 60 (Proclamation) of the Australian Constitution.
Finally Section 59 of the Australian Constitution uniquely retains the power of Disallowance (it was abolished with respect to Canada and New Zealand, and never existed in the United Kingdom). (It reads: "The Queen may disallow any law within one year from the Governor-General's assent, and such disallowance on being made known by the Governor-General by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, shall annul the law from the day when the disallowance is so made known.")
In effect, these tools represent a Prime Ministerial veto over legislation, available even if the majority of Parliament supports a bill.
Section 59 might actually be used by the new government. It is normally considered a political mistake to do so, but since the campaign dealt with legislation forced through at the end of the Howard premiership, it is plausible that the new Prime Minister can claim an electoral mandate to exercise the power.
In short, the veto powers of a Westminster-style Prime Minister far exceed those of the President, who must veto or not within a short period of time, and whose veto can be overturned by Parliament.
In the Westminster system, the only remedy for Parliament is to refuse to pass the bills the PM actually wants, or to withhold confidence in the government (by declaration of no confidence, or the defeat of a supply bill), which likely would trigger an election. However in that case it is the PM who decides whether to name a replacement, try to secure confidence with a new set of ministers, or set an election date. The Monarch or Governor is expected to act like an automaton in this
Yes. Note the "IDLE" in the response in the dialogue below. I highlight the gmail & openssl responses below.
: user@host ; openssl s_connect -connect imap.gmail.com:imaps [...] * OK Gimap ready for requests from...... 0 CAPABILITY * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA XYZZY 0 OK That's all she wrote!... 0 logout * BYE Logout Requested... 0 OK Quoth the raven, nevermore... read:errno=0 : user@host ;
I'm hoping that the lack of answer on the unencrypted imap well-known-service port is a deliberate policy choice, although it would be OK to offer imap with a requirement that STARTTLS be issued before logins can be attempted.
In Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 Mail.app will, when "use SSL" is checked (it's the default in 10.5), always issue a STARTTLS to an unencrypted service port, and pop up a warning dialogue in the event the other side doesn't support STARTTLS, or insists upon a weak cipher and login method. Mail v3 (10.5) also supports IDLE, by default.
smtp.gmail.com's port 25 (smtp) supports STARTTLS after EHLO/HELO (why not before??) and of course you can connect to port 587 (submission) with "openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com -starttls smtp".
The (proposed) Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe really only consolidates a number of other key treaties and directives into a single document. Very little in TCE is actually new, and the new stuff is mostly a formalization of what the European Union cannot do because of subsidiarity, proportionality and conferral [although this is simply derived from the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (1992)], the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights [already accepted by all member-states], transgression of the broad aims of the EU (democracy, respect for human rights, the rule of law, and so forth), or the scope of the Union.
TCE is mainly of legal interest in establishing the EU as a distinct legal entity with standing in the International community, and most especially in international agreements on behalf of itself. It will still be "run" by the member-states and won't be able to enter into treaties or diplomatic arrangements without the member-states' prior agreement, but once that agreement is achieved, only one signing authority will be needed (that of the Union), instead of the 27 today.
Most of the rest of TCE has already been proposed as secondary treaties likely to be agreed by the member-states over the next two years, even in those that will require plebiscites.
"There is no European constitution, so it isn't possible for an act or law to be unconstitutional in the context of the EC itself"
That TCE has not been fully ratified does not undermine in any way the Treaty of the European Union (Maastricht 1992), The Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty of the European Union and the Treaties establishing the European Communities and certain related acts (Amsterdam 1997), The Treaty of Nice (Nice 2001), or the Draft Treaty amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community (aka Reform Treaty, IGC mandate 2007, member-state vote Lisbon 2007). These represent the constitutional underpinnings of the European Union much as the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701) and the Act of Union (1707) and subsequent acts form the constitutional underpinnings of the United Kingdom.
In the UK, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key statutes. In the European Union, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key treaties. The similarity is not accidental. Much of EU jurisprudence stems from the initial work in the ECJ by Alexander Mackenzie Stuart (appointed by Edward Heath to the ECJ and the inter-governmental treaty negotiation team) and every UK government representative since, despite the incongruous P.R. activity against "creeping Brussels" by the very same governments.
All parties tend to think that codification and consolidation is useful for making the law more predictable and more accessible to everyone, and this is one of the reasons behind the TCE and the proposed Lisbon Treaty to enact some of it. It's also -- again not accidentally -- behind several Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in recent years to consolidate common law rulings, treaty obligations, clauses of various statutes and regulation and modern practice with respect to certain Great Officers of State (like the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor) into single Acts such as the Constitutional Reform Act (2005), and the Human Rights Act (1998).
The parallels between the more consensual aspects of the United Kingdom as a sort of federal state and the European Union as a sort of federal state and several actual federal states created by statutes passed by the Westminster parliament (including three which are presently EU member-states) are pretty obvious to anyone with a background in constitutional law, many of whom tend to be optimistic europhiles as a result. Some familiarity with the UK government's 1950s political positions with respect to post-empire Britain's place in Europe also tends to make EEC/UK parallels obvious, since the forme
You are right that a law is not law unless it has been given Royal Assent (and passed by Parliament), and that the term ultra vires was not used appropriately. You have some details slightly wrong, though.
In the UK and its legal predecessors, ultra vires is an important historical element of constitutional law.
The term describes the use of the royal prerogative (Queen in Council) in conflict with statutory authority (Queen in Parliament).
The latter is supreme. The former may act in a manner which exceeds the authority granted by the latter, and all s uch activity by the Queen or her servants would be called ultra vires actions. This was a source of serious political and social conflict in the late 1500s and early 1600s, leading to the Case of Prerogatives (1611) [which determined that judges would decide what is and is not allowed by statute] and ultimately the events from the English Civil War to the Revolution of 1688.
Political parties arrived in Parliament with the Restoration, and with the establishment of Ministerial accountability to Parliament, party discipline and the total subordination of the King to Parliament, the cases in which royal prerogative (which could no longer be undertaken without recommendation by the Privy Council, i.e., the Prime Minister) would seriously conflict for very with the authority granted by Acts of Parliament dwindled to nearly zero.
(Either Parliament would issue new Acts authorizing the ultra vires actions, or the government would be obliged to resign or survive a general election on the basis of no confidence).
There remains some residual tension between what the government would like to do via regulation that does not require explicit authorization by Parliament, and what the courts believe was/is infra vires concurrent with any controversy over authority. However, the fault line has shifted from exceeding the power granted by statute and using relinquished powers, whether they were given away by Act of Parliament, convention, or treaty.
The final strand involving the use of ultra vires in British constitutional law is the ancient principle that new prerogative powers may not be claimed by the Crown. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) is at the epicentre since it may be exploited (unlawfully!) to enact secondary legislation or modify or repeal primary legislation as Ministerial prerogative. There are mixed opinions about whether the Act as passed is really able to be used in conflict with Parliament's wishes, but there is no doubt of the double-remedy (Ministerial accountability to Parliament, and the judiciary's insistence on the power of review where not expressly and clearly limited by statute).
Next-to-finally, the term will probably see some new exercise in the sense it is normally used in federal systems (the USA and Canada, for instance) now that there is a codified division of power between the UK Parliament and each of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Finally, the constitution of Canada is not entirely contained in one document -- there are twenty-four documents (Acts of both the Canadian and UK parliaments) listed in s52(2) of the Constitution Act (1982). The courts have held that the Canadian constitution comprises several foundational documents which are also part of the unconsolidated UK constitution, e.g. the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), as well as a variety of Acts which are referenced by any of the preceeding. All of these are part of the Constitution of Canada, are subject to the amending formula of the Canadian Constitution, and are co-equal with, and thus not regulated by, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (This was most recently in play in a case objecting to the barring of Catholics from being King or Queen of Canada, O'Donohue v. Canada, 2005 Ont. Ct. Appeal. C40337).
The idea that Royal Assent could be withheld against the wishes of the Prime Minister ignores the result of the English Civil War and Restoration. Monarchs have had little scope for official political action other than on the advice of their Ministers, who in turn must have the consent of Parliament.
The Royal Assent has never been withheld by a Governor-General of Canada acting under his or her own discretion. Every delay of the Royal Assent by the GG (and there have been none since the granting of responsible government by the UK in the 1920s) has been due to the advice of the Prime Minister of Canada, or (prior to the 1920s) the instructions of the UK Colonial or Dominion Secretary (and occasionally the UK Prime Minister directly).
The power asserted by these senior ministers in London in colonial times was called reservation. This power is now legally extinct, since Canada has been a formally independent country since 1982. There is no "appeal to the Queen" in any meaningful sense, since the Queen of Canada is, like the Governor-General, a legal puppet of the Canadian Prime Minister, following the traditions of the Restoration.
The Lieutenant-Governors of the various Canadian provinces still have the power of reservation, which if exercised would make a particular granting of the Royal Assent in right of the province the responsibility of the Governor-General . No Lieutenant-Governor has exercised reservation without orders from Ottawa (meaning the Prime Minister, via the Governor-General).
Since the GG is legally an automaton doing the bidding of the Prime Minister, and the Lieutenant-Governors are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister, reservation is an important residual power of the federal government, and it was used from time to time since Confederation, but not more recently than 1961.
The relevant constitutional authority rests in sections 55 and 90 of the Constitution Act (1867), but reservation today would create a serious political crisis, despite the constitutionality. Moreover, it is not clear that reservation is still legal, since the wording of BNA s55 says a LG "according to his Discretion, but subject to the Provisions of this Act and to Her Majesty's Instructions" may reserve a bill for the signification of the Queen's Pleasure. The Queen in Right of Canada, as a legal entity, has a statutory obligation to grant the Royal Assent automatically unless advised to otherwise by the Prime Minister. This obligation stems from documented practice and statutes like the Royal Assent Act 2002 [S.C. 2002, c. 15]. The Courts have held since the 1930s that the relinquishing of authority flows downwards from the Imperial Crown, to the Federal one, to the Provincial ones, and that therefore "Her Majesty's instructions" require Lieutenants-Governor to signify assent in all cases, unless advised to withhold it by the Premier of the province in question.
In other words, when Canada was granted responsible government, so were the provinces. As the Governor-General of Canada since the 1920s has taken advice from (i.e., operated under the orders of) the Prime Minister of Canada exclusively, the Lieutenant-Governors should take advice only from the Premier of the province. In the early 20th century, the statutes allowed for "more senior" levels of government to overrule more local ones, and it took more than 50 years for statute to catch up with practice between London and Ottawa. It may take another 50 for statute to catch up with practice between Ottawa and the provincial capitals.
In Canada, infra and ultra vires generally describes only legal controversy over the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments (BNA ss91-93 inter alia). Statute and regulation that is incompatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not technical ultra vires, but section 24 of the Charter provides a very broad remedy to anyone affected by the incompatibility. The cou
Since subjective complaints about flickers are now fantastic playgrounds for molecular and evolutionary biologists, broader scientific discipline has been brought into fields that were dominated more by engineering concerns and market feedback on tradeoffs. Display technology is one such field.
In the good old days we had TV, and some studies on persistence of vision and the flicker fusion threshold (based on decades of experiences with film projection) on wide populations demanded a flicker rate of not less than 32 Hz (32 flickers/second). Filmed material recorded at 16 frames/second would be played back at double the flicker rate by having the projector shutter transition from closed to open to closed to open to closed for each frame.
Population studies and mechanical advancements combined to a flicker rate of 48 Hz, both by having three shutter transitions per frame on 16 fps material, and by filming at 24 fps, and playing back at 24 fps with two shutter transitions per frame. The latter proved more durable, and film was for many years a 24 fps / 48 Hz medium. Nowadays, 24 fps / 72 Hz (3 shutter transitions per frame) is more common theatrically, which eliminates the flicker detection from essentially every human viewer.
(As an aside, film was also usually a 4:3 aspect ratio medium prior to television).
The television industry sought to project film at a distance, and took great pains to duplicate several aspects of film, such as the aspect ratio (4:3) and the frame and flicker rate. Unfortunately two aspects of TV technology complicated the matching of film frame rate and flicker rate.
Ultimately, signal clocking was derived from AC power, with the receivers given some clock-recovery circuitry to deal with slight differences in the phase and variations of the local AC power frequency compared to the transmitter. This sort of clock recovery was and remains common in telecommunications.
Because there was a close enough match between 25 frames / second and a 50 Hz flicker rate that in countries with 50 Hz AC power, the film was just accelerated 4%, with each film frame corresponding to one TV "frame". The TV "frame" was actually composed of two fields interlaced together. One field comprised all the odd-numbered scan lines, and the other all the even ones, and the two fields were displayed sequentially. Thus TV in 50Hz regions (mainly outside of North America) approached the 24 fps / 48 Hz flicker rate in film.
The 4% speedup was barely noticeable to TV audiences except for a semitone shift upwards in sound (sound had to be accelerated 4% as well), which usually raises few complaints, which generally can be dealt with by downwards pitch shifting processes. As a North American in Europe, I sometimes notice the timing differences for some films I have seen so many times that I have memorized the dialogue (who here can't do this with Monty Python films or the first Star Wars movies?), but otherwise it's just not something I am aware of.
North American TV also adopted an interlaced approach, where the 60 Hz AC frequency signal was used to clock a 30 "frame" per second, 60 field per second interlaced image. Accelerating film to 30 fps made everything too fast and too high-pitched, so NTSC turned each "frame" into 2.5 fields instead of two. This worked reasonably well with respect to flicker fusion for most viewers, but complicated the de-interlacing process forever.
Digital TV had the opportunity to completely decouple the frame rate from the North American AC frequency, but chose to retain fields as a discrete unit, and retain multiples of 60 for both the frame and field rates, for future recordings in standard and high definition, as well as for compatibility with old standard definition recordings. DVDs were also given this opportunity, and took it -- the video streams on DVDs and their successors are stored as complete frames, with image flickering and interlacing to be done by playback equipment as necessary.
Maggots don't cleanse a wound per se, they just outcompete bacteria when it comes to eating up dead tissues at the site of a wound. Sadly, the dangerous bacteria they swallow in the process are generally passed through the maggots pretty much unharmed. If the patient is lucky, the maggots get fat on their injured tissues, and the bacteria lack the energy to reproduce (bacteriostasis) or starve (bactericide). If the patient is really lucky, less-dangerous contributors to a multiple-strain infection are lysed inside the maggot, or are trapped in maggot excretions. If the patient is really really lucky, lots of opportunistically infective microbes are killed by maggot mucus which contains urea, phenylacetaldehyde, allantoin and a bunch of other antimicrobial secretions.
Maggots are great for dealing with outer-layer necrosis; they debride wounds more completely than a surgeon could. However, maggots are useless when it comes to internal infections, whether those involve internal organs or the blood stream.
Bacteremia (blood stream infection) is the most serious complication of infection by "biofilm" bacteria, followed by infection of the fascia or other inner-layer tissues that maggots cannot reach. However, debriding a necrotizing surface wound can reduce the liklihood of developing internal infections as a complication.
Finally, maggots require as careful handling and management as any other tools that come directly into contact with infected people. They have to be carefully disinfected in advance. Also, they will tend to try to escape and turn into flies, at which point they can carry lots of bacteria -- including the resistant strains they were deployed against in their "youth" -- to new places and new patients. *Their* maggot offspring will not be pre-disinfected, of course.
Flying insects of any variety in a hospital setting are BAD NEWS.
Freezing, cooking, irradiating, or dessicating the meat will kill the relevant bacteria, resistant or not.
Thoroughly washing one's hands after handling any meat that isn't piping hot will prevent almost any transfer.
Not eating meat that isn't fully cooked to at least 60 degrees celsius all the way through will prevent any ingestion.
These procedures would completely eliminate meat as a vector for resistant pathogens.
Most bacterial contamination in meat in OECD countries comes from poor maintenance and cleaning procedures involving grinding and cutting machinery in meat processing plants, or in plants that do supermarket packaging of meat, or in supermarkets themselves. This is stuff growing on already-dead meat, which has too few antibiotic molecules in it to favour resistant strains over non-resistant ones. Antibiotic half-lives are very short (some can be as short as half an hour, although many have half-lives of four to six hours), so discontinuing treatment a day or two before the animal is killed essentially eliminates it from the meat.
Most bacterial contamination involving farm animals is direct contact between manure or rumen and human. Farm workers are at risk of infection, as are workers in slaughterhouses. These infections may or may not be resistant, but they will only spread by close contact, which means that if you are a Kevin Bacon or more away from such people, you are at essentially zero risk.
The problem is that if such workers become infected with a resistant strain and are consequently hospitalized, that strain may be carried to other patients at risk for infection. However, this sort of nosocomial infection is much more prevalent in fully urban settings, and do not seem to disporportionately involve workers in the meat industry.
(It does happen, however -- from time to time there are cases of farmers who present with resistant bacterial infections which are also subsequently found colonizing (or even infecting) the animals on the farm; but then, from time to time urban people present with resistant bacterial infections which are also found colonizing their cats and dogs too).
There are a variety of good veterinary reasons to avoid regular use of antibiotics in food animals that are more obvious than any (human) medical ones.
Another way of looking at it is that in a wild, natural population of Staphylococcus, Enterococcus or Escherichia there is almost always a small number of antibiotic-resistant members. This is useful for these species, since they compete for food and other resources with microbes that produce the antibiotic molecules we concentrate and use as drugs. Non-resistance is much more common, since resistance mechanisms usually involve diverting substantial amounts of energy away from reproduction.
Antibiotics do not create resistance out of thin air, they just may favour resistant members of a mixed population by eliminating the more efficient non-resistant competition.
In lab settings, and in living animals (including humans), stopping the intake of antibiotics will eventually return the microorganism populations to a vast majority of non-resistant members and a few (or even no) resistant ones. However, this can take some time, during which the (symptomless) colonies are dominated by resistant members.
No, resistance to beta-lactam drugs is entirely due to the selection pressure on genes in the bacteria in question (usually Staph. aureus).
B-lactam antibiotics derive from soil fungi -- soil is a nutrient rich but very competitive environment for saprophages (things that gain energy by decomposing dead organic matter) like fungi like Penicillin and Cephalosporin, and also bacteria similar to S. aureus (notably many which are gram positive, using a peptidoglycan pathway with a penicillin-binding-protein in the formation of cellular membranes).
Penicillin species in particular produce b-lactam to interfere with bacterial competitors. This sort of chemical warfare with microbicides is very common in soil dwelling species, and accounts for the majority of antibiotics in common use.
There are a variety of resistance mechanisms available to mutant strains of bacteria susceptible to b-lactam interference, all of which impose a substantial energy cost to the organism expressing the resistance, thus reducing energy available to out-breed competing species (including non-resistant strains). In the wild, this energy cost means that resistant members of a population are very rare, but in clinical settings, the reverse is true: the competitive disadvantage of the extra energy use more than made up for by the ability to survive exposure to beta-lactam antibiotics.
Examples of resistance mechanisms include diverting some energy to the production of penicillinase/beta-lactamase enzymes which break down antibiotics (constantly, or when initially stressed by the antibiotics themselves), the expression of slightly altered cell wall building pathways with slightly less energy-efficient molecules with binding sites which do not fit beta-lactam molecules, or which have a much lower affinity for beta-lactam than the (more efficient) wildtype.
Resistant bacteria colonize many people without causing infection. It's people who are weakened by surgery, trauma, or disease -- people typically found in hospital wards -- who are at risk of infection. Also, infected people are the only people who will usually have any amount of beta-lactam drugs in their systems. Consequently, people in hospital who become infected often become ideal breeding grounds for beta-lactam resistant bacteria like penicillinase-resistant S. aureus strains (VRSA, MRSA, etc.) This is because sick people's immune systems are less able to fight off any bacterial infection, and the presence of beta-lactam antibiotics kill off much of the resistant bacteria's microbial competition.
This is why resistant bacteria are so important in nosocomial settings.
The competitive disadvantage of the various resistance mechanisms means that resistance is much less important outside of such settings, since healthy people's immune systems will generally control overgrowth of or even infection by resistant populations even faster than ordinary wildtype nonresistant ones. However, since infections can run away from an immune system, prescribing beta-lactam antibiotics has to be considered carefully, since it will convert a mainly-nonresistant population into a mainly-nonresistant one. If that new population, forced into dominance by the selection pressure of antibiotic consumption, is not controlled by the infected person's immune system, the result can be catastrophic.
Typically this involves an MRSA-infected patient being hospitalized, thus risking the carriage of MRSA to noninfected patients. Given how expensive and dangerous-to-patients MRSA outbreaks in hospitals are, there is a great deal of pressure on hospital workers to control the carriage of bacteria on nurses' and doctors' uniforms, hands, faces, in their noses or mouths, on bed linens, on linen-handling-staff's hands and uniforms, and so forth.
Unfortunately, control procedures are imperfect (staff often don't follow them rigorously, for example) a
More than half is functional, more than half ends up copied to RNA, the RNA has some dynamic interaction with other RNA and protein in ways we don't know, much of the functional stuff (once called genes) are selectively neutral (or only very weakly subject to natural selection).
Being copied to RNA makes it functional by definition.
RNA interactions have been studied since the formation of the operon theory by Monod, Jacob et al. This is very bizarrely missing from your history, since it is a fundamental part of the central dogma of molbio, in that it explains how genes expression can be regulated without making heritable changes to chromatin.
Your timeline seems to favour the alternative splicing hypothesis, which is orthogonal to the central dogma. AS simply invalidates the one to one mapping between chromosomal subunits and specific proteins. This is very similar to operon theory, and is consistent with the central dogma, in that AS does not make heritable changes to the chromatin itself.
Much more interesting work in potential non-Mandelian heritability is being done by Lundqvist et al., although so far all the HSP and chaperonin are similar to operon theory, in that changes are not carried back into chromatin, even if it turns out that mitosis does not necessarily "reset" the daughter cells to the state that the heritable material would produce in an ideal stress-free environment.
In the sense of Mendel, there are such things as mathematical rules about discrete units of inheritance. But, you're right, the last straightforward link to DNA is broken.
Where is this evidence of the "break" of the theory that DNA is the fundamental carrier of discrete units of inheritance in cellular (including paracellular endosymbiont organelle) life?
Where is the evidence of endogenous mutations to chromatin by cellular life?
So far, the apparent examples of "two-way-ism" have all involved exogenous mutators like viruses and prions, and insufficent shock repsonses to other environmental mutagens.
Lolle, ea (2005) and Rassoulzadegan ea (2006) are interesting but not compelling. The former in particular is the most concrete raising of a two-way-ist hypothesis fully grounded in molecular biology in recent years. Susan Lolle's hypothesis is much finer than that proposed in the paper's abstract. In particular, the "hidden selector" argument is that a set of unfavourable dominant-gene traits are passed on to offspring with a substantial bias towards towards the favourable recessive trait. Robert Pruitt, one of the coauthors, has said several times that the molecular mechanics are not understood, and may be explainable wholly within the central dogma of molecular biologiy, without resorting to any of the proposed proximity interaction extensions to the CD model.
Also, I think you (or whoever wrote all that) fundamentally misunderstand the ENCODE May 2007 papers -- it is much more appropriate to categorize it as exposing a much larger than expected amount of transcription, with regulators selectively preferring some of them. This fits nicely with Lundqvist et al.'s recent work, and does not in any way challenge the central dogma. ENCODE does not support the argument that lots of transcription with surprising lengths and starting points invalidates one-way-ism.
In fact, if anything, ENCODE's work on histone-DNA marshalling is generally supportive of the central dogma.
Finally, I think that drawing analogies to orbital mechanics ("epicycles") and quantum mechanics ("vacuum") are rhetorical devices unworthy of someone with a legitimate argument grounded in molbio mechanics. You also have it backwards: when faced with difficulty in tracing the presence of a sequence of base pairs to its expression (or non-expression), favouring either a two-way hypothesis or a DNA+-hypothesis over a mediator hypothesis conformant with the central dogma is by far the mo
A 747 wouldn't do you much good on Mars either, since the atmosphere there is much thinner.
There is a decent (if outdated) overview of this at X-Plane's site -- X-Plane is a flight simulator based on Blade Element Theory, and its principal author is an effusive geek.
Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault.
"At fault" as in constrains available choices. Check.
Everything is a part of the unbroken chain of cause and effect
and
People do not have free will, that is an illusion. I want you to look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises. Where did that choice come from? Did you choose to bring that choice into your consciousness? How? There is no individual self, there is only the system, infinite and eternal. Mental formations are no different from any sense formations such as sight or sound. Thoughts and feelings are fundamentally the same, even the feeling of, "Who is it that is sensing this?" That too is a mental formation.
My reaction to your argument about free will is that we do not have sufficient evidence of causality. We also cannot model causal interactions at certain energy levels at all right now, and those are of fundamental importance to any physical investigation of the question of "free will".
I'm a philosophical reductionist and do "look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises" -- I tend to think that personality ("mind") is an emergent property of brain ("clump of organic matter") and am comfortable with neurobiology's work on making scientific predictions of the blackbox results of "mind" based on observations (with fMRI, MEG, ASL and dPET/SPECT, for example) of in vivo "brain". Those predictions seem likely to become more useful over time. The philosophers would call this positivist materialism instead of dualism, although at a political level I'm an anti-rationalist partly because of the low quality of analysis tools available now. I am definitely not in the legal positivism camp.
In standard cosmology, this is rooted in the Lambda-CDM model, whose timeline runs roughly like this: in the inflationary epoch, quantum fluctuations led to the cooling of the complexly/randomly distributed quark-gluon plasma into the array of particles in the standard model, which in turn formed more familiar forms of matter through ionized atomic nuclei, then nonionized atoms, and so forth, as well as dark matter. At this point gravity takes over the job of shaping the whole of the large scale structure of the universe, with atomic clouds condensing into molecular ones and selfgravitating into stars and galaxies and so forth.
Because of the difficulties of the two toolsets available to Lambda-CDM (quantum mechanics and general relativity) in dealing with highly curved spacetime (very massive or very energetic elements cause calculation difficulties in both models) we would be unable to make any sort of useful fine-grained prediction even knowing the full energy states of a volume of space during the early post-inflation universe. However, there are a variety of experimental toolsets which may solve some of these calculation problems, so it is not (totally) ridiculous to daydream about a scientifically predictable evolution from an observable state (CMBR) being plausible for cosmic and even small structure formation. Just as better toolsets for analysing the operation of the brain might be able to make useful predictions about the state changes of the body given particular stimuli ("mind reading")
Lots of people object to this almost by reflex ("neo-phrenology" and "neo-astrology" are the sorts of terms used). However the very heart of the objection is the question of whether causality is fundamentally true. We don't know (cf. Bell's inequality), we just take it for granted in energy and spacetime curvature realms in which classical physics works, and get frustrated with the slipperiness of quantum-mechanical causality, especially since QM behaviours probably relate in some fashion to our classical world.
There are a few components to Parliamentary Sovereignty which have different strengths. The three key claims are that Parliament cannot be prevented from legislating in any area except by its own rules; where these rules are set down by a Parliament, they do not bind a subsequent Parliament (with newly (re)elected members); and only Parliament can repeal, reverse, or change an Act of Parliament.
Parliamentary Sovereignty is vastly overstated both as a legal and political concept. This is mostly the fault of A.V. Dicey, who in the 1880s authored a number of influential books on the UK system that rejected the synthesis expressed in (for example) the British North America Act and various Parliamentary manoeuvrings on the question of Irish Home Rule. In particular he argued very strongly on the concept that Parliament could never permanently give away primary legislative ability because a newly elected House of Commons could seize it back under the nonbinding principle, so therefore Irish Home Rule could only ever be a legal fiction.
Dicey was also an opponent of the perverse verdict rule (in which a jury can refuse to pass a guilty verdict) which has been established in England since the late 1600s and the perverse judgement rule (in which the court's presiding officer may give the most lenient, or no, sentence) which is even older. In particular, he believed that both the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the House of Lords had no right to refuse to apply Acts of Parliament. Those two legal bodies disagreed (JCPC was particularly antagonized, since a number of Privy Councillors entitled to participate in it had close ties to the colonies which had won their own home rule not many years before), and with a historical perspective, won convincingly.
Finally, Dicey put enormous faith in the idea that Parliament itself would never pass an outrageously stupid Act of Parliament (figuring that the House of Lords would block such Bills originating from the House of Commons, and vice-versa), and so should not be constrained from doing so. Funnily enough, forty years after his work on the law of the Constitution in which he made this claim, Parliament outraged him by permanently and irrevocably giving up its sovereignty over the Irish Free State.
This was the start of a long trend of the UK Parliament giving up its sovereignty with respect to wide stretches of the then Empire. Although it "could" repeal the Canada Act 1982 (UK) or the Australia Act 1986 (UK), those countries would simply ignore the result (legally) and be pretty pissed off. These stem from the Statute of Westminster (1931) which in turn had more than a decade of legislative and regulatory antecedents in the wake of Irish independence. Repealing or modifying these would have no legal effect outside the territory of the UK, and also would trigger a diplomatic crisis.
One can think of Parliamentary Sovereignty set against the history of several Parliaments dominated by supporters of a given political faction have fumed and stamped feet and put out Acts having been met with resistance ranging from civil war to a simple refusal by lower officers of the Crown (soldiers, sheriffs, police, prosecutors, judges) to enforce them either regionally or across the whole Realm. No Parliament has ever won such a conflict, and most have been short-lived (and fortunately not very violent). Usually after a Constitutional Crisis, the faction in control of the elected House defeated at the ballot box, leading to the establishment of a new controlling faction willing to pass Reform Acts to extend the franchise, to create more members of the unelected House (especially after the Life Peerage Act 1958), or to reduce the power of the House of Lords against that of the House of Commons and the Government of the Day, to negotiate independence (or devolution), and so forth.
All three primary elements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in the UK have been eroded substantially in the past century, and with the c
Their DM candidate is a light neutralino. The masses (roughly 0.1-10 TeV) of their candidate bounds the neutralino-antineutralino annihilation products (the two-gluon combinations and two-photon emissions, in particular, are in a well-defined and fairly narrow space). This will lead to both further decay products (some of which are normal matter) and emissions signatures in the gamma ray range.
This is not especially novel, or especially controversial within the LCDM WIMP space.
I have a hard time getting excited about this because I'm not understanding how they speculate on the formation, evolution, and anihilation signature of these dark stars without falling back on known properties of classical matter.
What's "classical matter"?
Their DM candidate arises from a particular supersymmetry model, and their paper poses a search space for evidence not only of their DM candidate but also of that particular neutrino supersymmetry partner.
It's not exciting, but it is good science, as if observational searches do not reveal the required emissions signatures, it serves as evidence against that particular supersymmetry model. Being able to disprove that model is a step forward from correspondence between it and current data (which also fits the standard model, and other proposals (like string theory)).
Vast numbers of particles in the cat, in the box, and near the box should, through tiny interactions, register the cat's death. It is impossible for the cat's death not to be observed, if observation is merely the fact of particles having different state depending on whether the cat lived or died.
We are not really so much interested in whether the cat is alive or dead except as a proxy for whether a particle has decayed in a tiny clump of matter which undergoes approximately one detectable (via geiger tube) nuclear disintegration per hour. Schroedinger was attempting to demonstrate in QM terms that wave functions can aggregate without collapsing (decoherence).
In GR terms this is not an especially difficult concept because of how it treats simultaneity, so moving the radioactive matter in Schroedinger's experiment far enough away means that the results cannot be known until the information is propagated to an observer by speed-restricted photons. When we look at distant stars that are likely to go nova or supernova "any time now", we are looking back in time. A much closer observer (light-minutes instead of light-millennia) would know and be influenced by the "current" state of the star long before we would, but using lightspeed-limited communications would have no way to give us earlier warning than our telescopes looking in the same direction would.
In astronomy, this happens all the time, and distant objects are always in a superposition. The uncertainty increases with distance. It's just that this is not called decoherence and is not generally though of as especially weird or spooky -- just a limitation of information propagation speed limits.
In the Cat experiment, issues of simultaneity are not considered, but the central problem is still one of whether an isolated "historical" event can have dramatic local effects that go unnoticed. Copenhagen treats the measurement problem of small scale objects in a manner similar to astronomically distant ones: the state cannot be fully determined now, but can be described in terms of probabilities. Examination of the state at different times can converge with the statistical description of the most probable state (no nucleus disintegrated, the star did not nova) and the next most probable state (nucleus disintegrated, the star exploded) and so on, or diverged entirely.
GR provides a reason for differences between objective reality and observed reality -- time lag. QM does not.
One of the main issues that arises in both is whether there are real world consequences for unobserved events -- this is the objective collapse theory question, and focuses on the Copenhagen interpretation's ambiguity with respect to the branching of unobserved behaviours. Copenhagen allows for unbounded aggregates of related waveforms (thus the dead vs alive cat being tied to the nuclear disintegration), objective collapse limits the aggregation (at some point many hours in the future, the cat is assumed to be dead with 100% probability, even though it has not actually been observed).
There is an objective collapse issue in GR as well, in that observations of stars that are supernova candidates can plausibly be made at great distances such that if we take the "years" term of lightyears, enough of those have passed that the candidate supernova has almost certainly exploded.
Is virtual certainty the same as actual certainty? Does it matter whether we "know" that a waveform has collapsed without us having observed it yet? This is the crux of Copenhagen: can we plan on "real" events that have happened but have not yet been measured, or can we only plan on aggregates of probabilties? At what point can we transition from probabilistic interactions with events to real and deterministic ones?
In general, I agree with you -- cloned food animals do not increase health threats for the eaters when subjected to the same inspection and handling regimes as food animals who are sexually reproduced either through the "natural" stud method, artificial insemination, or IVF with implantation, all of which is commonplace.
There is a much greater risk to health from bacterial or fungal contamination between slaughter and retail sale -- and the toxins produced will generally be more harmful than any that can be produced by the food animal, (almost) no matter what genetic damage or mutation may occur. It is hard to envisage the non-deliberate expression in a food animal's meat any substance toxic to humans but harmless to the animal, particularly in mammals. The cloning processes avaialble for mammals do not have obvious pathways wherein such traits could be expressed without genetic modification. A deliberate expression of a toxin in a GMO introduced to the food supply would be a form of food tampering, would probably not pass inspection, and certainily would be easily traced to origin.
Genetic modification and cloning in mammals go hand in hand, however, since some desirable new genes are unlikely to survive sexual reproduction. Cloning a transgenic animal preserves the transgenic trait more cheaply than retargetting to a different animal, especially when the trait does not often "take". Non-breedability of these traits, especially ones which express valuable therapeutic proteins, can be an advantage for commercial or risk management reasons, too.
More subtly, new genes in GMOs also often confer some resistance to toxins -- against herbicides in crops, and against a variety of hepatoxic antibiotics and anabolic steroids in animals. These toxins are then administered to the GMO in doses which would debilitate (most) non-modified organisms of a similar type. Those toxins need to be studied for toxicity to humans (and pets! and waste scavengers!) and bioaccumulation in quantities higher than lab conditions, with the assumption that accidental overdose/overuse may happen routinely in the field.
Mammal clones tend to suffer from premature aging and cancers that are strongly associated with telomere length. Such diseased animals are unpleasant food at best and mildly risky at worst (I would not want to feed my cat beef riddled with metastatic disease markers, but "older animal" meat is no big deal -- his ancestors regularly culled older mammals as prey. He probably quietly eats the occasional old and sick mouse or bird without me knowing, anyway).
Mammal clones are also not completely genetically identical to the donor animal, because there is genetic material present in the organelles of the coopted ovum, which are inherited through their own processes largely independently of the nuclear DNA. There is also a small genetic variability among the cells of most large organisms anyway thanks to natural mutation, so the somatic donor cell may be slightly atypical thanks to chance. Any such slight differences would be maintained as a baseline in the clone.
Finally, research into chaperonins (heat shock proteins, shepherd proteins) is shedding light on what has been well known to breeders of animals which regularly produce litters including homozygous twins -- even naturally genetically identical animals (down to the non-nuclear DNA, so even more identical than clones) can demonstrate phenotype differences due to environmental stressors (and natural mutation). This is especially well known to breeders of spotted mammals. Human parents of identical twins notice physical differences too, and of course there can be differences introduced through inury or illness.
You must show how a copy can be different from the original
Well, there's some up above. Most of these differences aren't really relevant to food safety.
I don't think I need to tell you that the genome of a plant or animal cann
Why bother with the whole animal, when you can produce only the edible parts, with none of the hassle and hazard of the digestive system and its contents (mmm E. coli), the nervous system and it's ethics and morality complications, gristle, bone, hoof, hair or snout?
Clonal meat should just be meat: lean and well toned, yet tender and tasty. A matrix with a consistent arrangement of adipose cells and muscle cells and gaps for nutrient solution to flow through (maybe some RBCs for juice colour and iron content) does not seem like an impossible engineering challenge.
"Texturized animal protein" (to adapt the meat substitute crowd's term) does not need to be attached to an actual brain-equipped animal, willing or otherwise.
No, he shouldn't know this, because it's not true.
There is some work needed to convince a mammalian somatic cell to act as if it were a pair of germline gametes, but there are a variety of ways of doing this, from the purely mechanical (using micropipettes to substitute the nucleus of a fertilized egg with the nucleus of a nongermline cell) to the purely biochemical (coercing a multipotent stem cell into pluripoetic form), to the purely genetic (cloning DNA fragments and repolymerizing them into chromatins). There is substantial middle ground among these three poles, and the point of Dolly was to combine somatic cell nuclear transfer, some nuclear DNA "engineering edits", and some mitigations for differences in organelle DNA.
The mutation rate in Dolly -- and in more modern mammalian clones -- lines up with the expected rate in sexually reproduced animals with the same breeding background. Differences in non-nuclear DNA (mainly in the mitochondria) have not made quantifiable differences on a gross scale (organ size, count, function), and in chemical assays have made no difference to the limit of present measurability. One could easily imagine deliberately using an ovum from a mother with mDNA-inherited mitochondrial disease, but this is not practical, and the most likely result would be a dead blastocyst or zygote followed by spontaneous abortion, rather than the birth of a sickly animal.
The Dolly programme explored two avenues with respect to genetic engineering, one deliberate (inserted genes that express particular (therapeutic) proteins during lactogenesis) and one accidental but super-interesting (premature aging associated with teleomeres, and tumour growth associated with TERT overexpression to maintain telomere length). There was also some work with respect to stem cell coercion which was (imho) under-examined in the wake of the Hwang Woo-Suk scandal.
they are learning this by trial and error
No, they are making hypotheses based on intuition and introspection rooted in strong theory and practical knowledge with respect to the genetic biochemistries of ordinary somatic cells and early blastocytic cells.
The hypotheses are tested empirically, but as the current methods are somewhat error prone, the methods are subject to revision - i.e., they are not only finding proof for or against their hypotheses, they're also learning how to procure that proof more quickly and accurately. That is good science.
Trial and error is also not new to biochemistry -- large array testing is commonplace in molecular biology in particular.
molecules that attach to the dna have a huge impact
If you "attach" a molecule to DNA, you generally kill the organism (or cell) outright.
Generally speaking, any large change to the genetic material of an organism (or cell) will kill it or render it extremely fragile, or stop it from reproducing or drive it into hyperreproduction. Only relatively minor changes can lead to a viable, normal, non-cancerous cell that expresses a significant new phenotype. However, most such minor changes make no phenotypic difference whatsoever -- base pair mutations in non-coding regions of an organism's DNA generally don't do anything at all.
As a molecular biologist and MD you should know
... how molbio works within the context of a healthy human (the "M" isn't used for vets, is it?), and the various things that can go wrong in disease-causing ways. The years it takes to become an MD provides ample experience in avoiding the use of extremely general and uselessly imprecise words like "chemicals" and "molecules" while studying which enzymes are involved in mammalian reproductive cloning and what they appear to do.
It would surprise me that an MD familiar with SCNT vs normal sexual reproduction would have any particular concerns in eating a healthy young clone of a food animal, other t
The queen is still the monarch, and could in theory decide not to sign off on a new law, but in reality she has no power at all. She could never take on the government or even publicly object to anything they do.
You are right, except for the "could in theory decide not to sign off on a new law" part. There is no theoretical basis for that claim any more. The personal residual power has been in abeyance since the 1700s, and a statute extinguishing it has since become law (The Royal Assent Act, 1967). With respect to actions of the Crown, the modern monarch is entirely obliged to follow the advice of the government of the day. Moreover more and more of the activities the Queen performed personally but essentially as an automaton when much younger are now handled by the civil service as a bureaucratic function instead.
No reigning monarch since Victoria has personally been involved in the granting of a royal assent, and in her case the last time was in 1854.
That is: no monarch since then has indiciated through sign manual, affixation of the Great Seal, or even orally, indicated her or his assent to an Act of Parliament passed by both Houses of Parliament (or since the Parliament Act (1911 and 1949) the House of Commons alone in special circumstances. Although in theory (and law) the Queen may personally grant Royal Assent, in practice it is neither necessary nor likely to happen.
The Royal Assent Act (1967) and the Crown Office regulations (2000) set out a formula whereby an "equerry" in the Crown Office (notably The Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, who is an ordinary civil servant and who is also usually the Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Lord Chancellor) or a deputy (another civil servant) sends a form letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons (and since the latest round of changes to the other place) the Speaker of the House of Lords. The Palace and its staff are uninvolved in the process, and are politely notified by form letter, but probably only read about it in the Gazette.
Finally, as the Crown Office is part of the government, and is headed by a Cabinet Minister, the formality of advising the Monarch to grant, reserve or withhold assent to a bill is no longer necessary. This has been the case since at least 1967.
Since it is unusual for the UK House of Commons not to be controlled outright by the government (i.e., having more than half the seats), it is unlikely that the formulas for reserving or withholding assent to ordinary bills will ever be used. However, since it is possible that a government may find itself presented with an Act of Parliament duly passed, but which the government opposes, they remain as reserve powers of the government.
Formally, with the direction of the Minister for the Crown Office (usually the person who is also Lord Chancellor) and the agreement of the Prime Minister, the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery would write a letter to the Speaker (or Speakers, as appropriate) indicating that the monarch will take the bill under consideration before granting assent. This is a polite way of saying: "the government has unilaterally killed your bill".
More importantly, there is a tradition of the Prime Minister consulting with the Queen on a personal level before bills are introduced which affects her personally (title to her legally personal property, revenues, and rights, changes to her constitutional rights to particpate in Parliament, and so forth). This tradition is extended to other members of the immediate Royal Family as well, usually with respect to revenues and rules affecting e.g. Cornwall (the Prince of Wales is the Duke of Cornwall) or (also recently) his membership in the House of Lords.
The "consultation" is a politeness, since ultimately the Queen is obliged to follow the advice of the Prime Minister, notwithstanding her personal objections, those of the Price of Wales, etc. Ultimately, the Queen's Assent is a claim by the gov
Comme je suis complètement con, je passe mon temps à répéter des clichés hyper-chiants sur Slashdot
Je passe mon temps à répéter des clichés hyper chiants chez Slashdot, car je suis un con total.
Subordinate phrases should not be hoisted in front of principal ones in French.
Comme is used for "as in" or "like", as a comparative.
Car is synonymous with and substitutable for parce que ("because", causal linkage), whereas comme is not.
In your principal clause, Je passe mon temps à + inf. is OK idiom, but a rearrangement feels more natural: Je passe mon temps sur Slashdot, à répéter les clichés...
hyper chiants (no hyphen). Nice if you're into science fiction, role playing games, Lisp Machine keyboards, or greek affixes in common use in American English but seen relatively rarely in French, but in itself is a cliché in francophone forums similar to Slashdot. I don't know if you are using irony deliberately, but if that is not your intent then perhaps something like clichés crasseux or perhaps clichés débiles which is much more common idiom, but much less forceful.
How about:
Je passe mon temps sur ce Slashdot, à répéter ses clichés crasseux, malgré qu'ils sont très biens connus. Car je ne suis qu'un ididot, j'ignore tout ce que le destin veut: mes idées seront revenues.
IFR is the only realistic future for nuclear in the 21st century
IFR is part of ancient history from a time when once-through fuel cycles were considered much much less cost effective than operating plutonium fuel cycles. This is not the case now. (In fact, the reverse may be true).
Early commercial PWR designs leveraged HEU production in nuclear weapons programs and did little other than the occasional offline rearrangement of partially depleted fuel rods to gain small burn up gains. HEU production is expensive, and there was a great deal of belief that the plutonium economy would be a substantial advantage in a once-through design. There was a further belief that SEU production would not be much cheaper than higher enrichment, or that natural uranium could produce power with even half of the efficiency of an HEU once-through, much less a breeder using a dramatically reduced amount of HEU plus the same natural Uranium to produce power and transmute fertile wastes (238U mainly) into fissionable fuel (238Pu).
That is, the belief was that only a fast neutron spectrum reactor could efficiently breed inexpensive low-enriched uranium inputs into plutonium (this is called the plutonium economy).
The need for fast breeder reactors to gain from the plutonium economy remains moot. Current commercial thermal neutron spectrum PWR designs (EPR or AP1000 for example) designs gain large enhanced burnup through the transmutation of fertile 238U to 239Pu through downblending (in mixed oxides) or blanketing. Although thermal neutron power generating reactors are not specifically designed for breeding, and are not as efficient as fast reactors for breeding fissiles from impure mixes of fertiles, that is exactly what "enhanced burnup" is. Nobody expected enhanced burnup efficiencies approaching 0.9 in any thermal reactor, let alone one on a mostly once-through fuel cycle (TRISO input). By comparison, IFR's target burnup efficiency was less than 1.25 (these numbers are the ratio of fuel consumed to fuel bred in the reactor) and required nuclear and chemical reprocessing of at least the fuel blanket to maintain the plutonium fuel cycle.
Because of the inefficiencies of once-through cycles well into the 1980s (burnups of 0.1 or less and mainly HEU as input), IFR's on-site electrolytic separation of wastes and reformation of fuel assemblies was considered a large plutonium economy gain.
This has to be understood in the context of thermal reactor designs (PWRs and BWRs) incorporating large pressure vessels enclosing the whole pile. These pressure vessels meant a full shutdown and cooloff was necessary to make any adjustment to the pile in terms of composition or geometry. There was no blanket layer, and little thought for rearranging the pile to improve burnup, although these were later added within the large pressure vessels.
Likewise, IFR began with a single containment vessel housing the core, the blanket layer, cooling systems, and associated equipment.
Let's take a diversion through the evolution of CANDU -- a fundamentally different design developed over the same timeframe as the development of EBR and IFR. (Incidentally, Canadians and Americans were involved on both sides of the border in the development of both designs, and individual personality issues were factors much more than national politics in the engineering and theoretical analyses and comparisons right up to the point where funding was cut for IFR...)
CANDU began with a serious constraint. Canadian heavy industry could not produce the large pressure vessels as used in U.S. light water designs, and focused on making smaller ones from neutron-transparent materials that could be immersed in a low-to-non-pressurized pool of moderator (heavy water for the most part, but various carbons -- hydrocarbons and slurries mainly -- have been used experimentally with some success). These had the advantage of being intrinsically modular -- being small, an entire
which has a positive temperature coefficient in reactivity. A water moderated reactor (the type used by almost all other reactors) has a negative temperature coefficient
You don't really mean temperature coefficient of reactivity. In almost all possible reactor designs, that is strongly negative beyond a few hundred kelvins due to doppler broadening. A great deal of work has gone into designs which increase the falloff temperature by a few hundred more kelvins so as to gain greater power production from the plant as a whole, but on top of doppler broadening of the neutron emission and capture spectra, there is a physical maximum related to the binding energy of the fuel components (components expand or deform, metals melt, ceramics crack apart) beyond which there is a steep falloff in temperature to reactivity. (With current materials science knowledge, beyond about 1250 K the fissiles must be fully dispersed/dissolved in a slurry/suspension/solution involving molten salts or liquid metals in order to remain reactive).
This is why there are substantial cooling systems associated with nuclear power plants -- reactor piles are much more efficient when kept considerably cooler than the reactivity falloff temperature.
The Chernobyl accident is usually discussed in relation to another factor: the positive void coefficient of reactivity.
Technically, voids are areas where there is an absence of normal moderator or coolant.
Voids in themselves can be dangerous in some systems, since they may cause explosions or fires because of chemical (rather than nuclear) reactivity, and there may be safety problems with cavitation and blockage.
Voids are often bubbles of superexpanded coolant or moderator. In water systems (coolant or moderator) that means steam. In other systems that means pockets with a different phase than the coolant or moderator.
In normal operation, some systems cannot form voids at all (some carbon moderated, gas cooled systems, for example) while others have a coefficient exactly equal to zero (voids may form, but do not affect reactivity).
The coefficients are of reactivity however, and one can construct a reactor with a positive void coefficient that does not contribute to a positive feedback loop (or a negative one that does). The reciprocating term is the reactivity coefficient of void formation, which in most reactors is positive (or zero).
Positive coefficients mean that the presence of voids increases the reactivity of the reactor pile, which can lead to more voids forming, which forms a dangerous positive feedback loop.
Negative void coefficients mean that the presence of voids decreases the reactivity of the reactor pile, which usually means fewer voids forming (becasue of a positive reactivity coefficient of void formation), and thus a passively safe negative feedback loop.
Voids may also form in the event of loss of coolant or moderator or pressurization, contamination, or misconfiguration. These are all considered "leaks" of different types. LOCA (loss of coolant accidents) usually form and sustain voids.
A positive void coefficient of reactivity usually combines unsafely with void formation in LOCAs. By comparison, a negative void coefficient of reactivity is usually considered passively safe in the face of LOCAs.
It is entirely possible to build a light water reactor with a positive void coefficient, and CANDU and PHWR derivitives in Asia which are operating have a small positive void coefficient. They are moderated by heavy water.
There are gas-cooled MOX reactors moderated by graphite, which have a negative void coefficient. Several of these are in operation in the UK.
Pebble bed reactors of all types generally have a negative void coefficient and are moderated by pyrolytic carbon and/or graphite, and gas-cooled.
The RBMK design is a gas-cooled MOX reactor moderated by graphite, and has a positive void coefficient
There is little that can be done about old RTGs already deployed in orbits that run the risk of unplanned reentry, and there are lots of ugly RTGs on earth-orbiting spacecraft.
Newer RTGs are pretty safe and are designed with high-profile/low-probability accidents in mind.
The 238Pu used in RTG applications is a strong alpha emitter, and the radiation risk to humans is small particulate entry into the digestive tract, lungs, or open wounds. There is a serious food-chain risk involving calcium intake (especially bone meal) or animal liver tissues where 238Pu is introduced into an environment. Consequently a great deal of the safety engineering done on RTGs involves avoiding the release of small particles of plutonium.
The first step is to use a ceramic rather than metallic form of plutonium. Ceramicized 238Pu has very low chemical reactivity and is less (biochemically) toxic than lead; it's also resilient against shock fragmentation, vaporization, and aerosol formation. Next, the ceramic 238Pu is encased in iridium cladding as a highly heat resistant physical barrier. This in turn is encased in a graphite/activated charcoal/carbon fibre/pyrolitic carbon sandwich or casing for structural strength against a variety of explosions and chemical exposures. Finally everything is embedded in aerogel. The whole assembly is then likely put into a separate aeroshell as a further protection against stresses from a full reentry.
Consequently, the major risk of new RTGs deorbiting is that it might land on something valuable, like a meteor, causing impact damage. The packages are designed to be very hard to open with ordinary tools so as to avoid accidental contamination should someone curious (or interested in scavenging the specific parts) happen to discover one on the ground.
Fallen/stolen RTGs are also of very low proliferation risk, as 238Pu is a poor input into nuclear weapons processes (it can't be used directly in a nuclear weapon, it breeds weaponizable fissiles poorly even in carefully constructed reactor piles, and it acts as an alpha poisoner upon other more economical weapons isotopes interrupting their chain reactions).
That being said ther is no practical way to safely and economically launch nuclear material in bulk quantities
Modern RTGs are very safe to launch.
Discounting the cost of the 238Pu itself, they are also fairly economical -- certainly cheaper than other long-duration power systems, because they don't need especially gentle handling, or an involved post-launch deployment process. They have no moving parts, and are essentially immune to particulate contamination from space debris. The half-life of ~87 years is reasonable for most missions, and far exceeds that of any comparable power system. (A modern RTG also almost always degrades gracefully rather than simply failing in service).
The layered casing is fairly inexpensive in terms of manufacture and component costs, and a modular approach scales well to sizes well beyond launch capability, in terms of total mass and in terms of thermal energy in a modular assembly. (The modular approach also allows for a distribution of mass into multiple small aeroshells that are likely to spread apart on unplanned reentry so as to avoid dropping a large and heavy chunk of material on one spot).
In terms of useful power, the main engineering challenge is with respect to converting heat to power (especially electrical power), since thermocouples are not very efficient. (There are prototype Stirling engine generators, and there are other plausible heat->electrical power systems that could be used instead of thermocouples in some applications).
Unfortunately the 238Pu itself, however, is insanely expensive, and is the principal limit on RTG use.
The entire global stockpile of 238Pu is on the order of low tens of kilograms (perhaps 30 kg).
There is almost no production of 238Pu outside of the Russian Federation, which produces it as a p
No, the relevant centuries-old political theory used by the Founders is nowadays generally called "subsidiarity" among political scientists when talking about federations or other poolings of sovereignty.
The concept is outlined in a number of places in the Constitution, and made explicit in the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.").
The word itself and the modern generalization are found in Rerum Novarum, a papal encyclical by Leo XIII which was concerned in part with individuals not being subordinated to the interests of the state.
"Subsidiarity" (and subsidarily) used in this way is unusual in ordinary modern English (as opposed to political science jargon); in other languages which inherited the word from Latin (including the English spoken a few hundred years ago), it refers to helping, assisting or supplementing actions. That is, subsidiarity means larger political bodies serve to assist smaller ones and ultimately individuals, and not the other way around. Unfortunately, modern English usage is confused by a very similar word that means almost the exact opposite -- subisidiaries of corporations are smaller organizations owned by and operated for the benefit of larger ones.
Decentralization and devolution are almost synonymous words, but denote existing centralization or non-local power over local matters, so the jargon persists when dealing with sovereign entities synthesizing bodies which act on their behalf.
The Tenth Amendment has led to similar arrangements in other Constitutional federations and treaty organizations based on the original ideas of the Founders as well as practical experience among the various branches of the federal and state governments.
The Amendment and its history is also keenly studied elsewhere, where putative founders are still alive. For example, the proposed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe has an equivalent to the Tenth Amendment:
Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence the Union shall act only if and insofar as the objectives of the intended action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.
As with case law surrounding the Tenth Amendment, European Union law has already evolved some tests for subsidiarity. One critical one that gives some politicians headaches is the autonomy criterion, which requires that EU level actions be evaluated on whether it secures greater freedom for the individual, and that the EU should not undertake actions which fail the evaluation.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, the Prime Minister in a Westminster style system has much more power than the President of the USA, because the PM fully controls the legislative agenda.
In the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, laws that spend public money or raise taxes must be accompanied by a "Royal Recommendation". Since the Monarch of each country with respect to the exercise of the Royal Prerogative has been an automaton since at least 1936 (and for hundreds of years with respect to the UK and its legal predecessors), acting only on the advice of the Prime Minister, this means that the PM has a veto on whether Parliament can even consider most important bills. Ireland and India have similar rules, but have (appointed) Presidents instead of a (heridtary) Queen and (appointed) Governor-General.
This is Section 56 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (current version): "A vote, resolution, or proposed law for the appropriation of revenue or moneys shall not be passed unless the purpose of the appropriation has in the same session been recommended by message of the Governor-General to the House in which the proposal originated." The Senate and House of Representatives both have rules and standing orders forbidding the debate of votes, resolutions or proposed laws that may not be passed, and the President or Speaker enforces these assiduously.
Moreover, in all of these countries except the UK, either the Royal Assent can be deferred, or the Proclamation can be deferred, in the event Parliament passes a Bill that the Prime Minister does not want. In the UK, the Royal Assent has been automatic and has not involved the Monarch or the Prime Minister since the early Victorian era; Proclamation is not a feature of the UK system -- an Act of Parliament that receives Royal Assent becomes law immediately (or at a future date fixed in the Act itself). It is pretty clear that if it became necessary, the Prime Minister could constitutionally insist that "the Queen withhold Royal Assent in order to consider the Bill" ("la Reyne s'avisera", is the Norman French formalization), which in practice would mean sending a letter to the Department of Constitutional Affairs and the Clerks of both Houses of Parliament.
This is described in Sections 58 (Royal Aseent) and 60 (Proclamation) of the Australian Constitution.
Finally Section 59 of the Australian Constitution uniquely retains the power of Disallowance (it was abolished with respect to Canada and New Zealand, and never existed in the United Kingdom). (It reads: "The Queen may disallow any law within one year from the Governor-General's assent, and such disallowance on being made known by the Governor-General by speech or message to each of the Houses of the Parliament, or by Proclamation, shall annul the law from the day when the disallowance is so made known.")
In effect, these tools represent a Prime Ministerial veto over legislation, available even if the majority of Parliament supports a bill.
Section 59 might actually be used by the new government. It is normally considered a political mistake to do so, but since the campaign dealt with legislation forced through at the end of the Howard premiership, it is plausible that the new Prime Minister can claim an electoral mandate to exercise the power.
In short, the veto powers of a Westminster-style Prime Minister far exceed those of the President, who must veto or not within a short period of time, and whose veto can be overturned by Parliament.
In the Westminster system, the only remedy for Parliament is to refuse to pass the bills the PM actually wants, or to withhold confidence in the government (by declaration of no confidence, or the defeat of a supply bill), which likely would trigger an election. However in that case it is the PM who decides whether to name a replacement, try to secure confidence with a new set of ministers, or set an election date. The Monarch or Governor is expected to act like an automaton in this
Yes. Note the "IDLE" in the response in the dialogue below. I highlight the gmail & openssl responses below.
... ... ... ...
: user@host ; openssl s_connect -connect imap.gmail.com:imaps
[...]
* OK Gimap ready for requests from
0 CAPABILITY
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA XYZZY
0 OK That's all she wrote!
0 logout
* BYE Logout Requested
0 OK Quoth the raven, nevermore...
read:errno=0
: user@host ;
I'm hoping that the lack of answer on the unencrypted imap well-known-service port is a deliberate policy choice, although it would be OK to offer imap with a requirement that STARTTLS be issued before logins can be attempted.
In Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 Mail.app will, when "use SSL" is checked (it's the default in 10.5), always issue a STARTTLS to an unencrypted service port, and pop up a warning dialogue in the event the other side doesn't support STARTTLS, or insists upon a weak cipher and login method. Mail v3 (10.5) also supports IDLE, by default.
smtp.gmail.com's port 25 (smtp) supports STARTTLS after EHLO/HELO (why not before??) and of course you can connect to port 587 (submission) with "openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com -starttls smtp".
Not so bad, gmail!
TCE is mainly of legal interest in establishing the EU as a distinct legal entity with standing in the International community, and most especially in international agreements on behalf of itself. It will still be "run" by the member-states and won't be able to enter into treaties or diplomatic arrangements without the member-states' prior agreement, but once that agreement is achieved, only one signing authority will be needed (that of the Union), instead of the 27 today.
Most of the rest of TCE has already been proposed as secondary treaties likely to be agreed by the member-states over the next two years, even in those that will require plebiscites.
That TCE has not been fully ratified does not undermine in any way the Treaty of the European Union (Maastricht 1992), The Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty of the European Union and the Treaties establishing the European Communities and certain related acts (Amsterdam 1997), The Treaty of Nice (Nice 2001), or the Draft Treaty amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community (aka Reform Treaty, IGC mandate 2007, member-state vote Lisbon 2007). These represent the constitutional underpinnings of the European Union much as the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701) and the Act of Union (1707) and subsequent acts form the constitutional underpinnings of the United Kingdom.
In the UK, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key statutes. In the European Union, things are "unconstitutional" that are incompatible with these key treaties. The similarity is not accidental. Much of EU jurisprudence stems from the initial work in the ECJ by Alexander Mackenzie Stuart (appointed by Edward Heath to the ECJ and the inter-governmental treaty negotiation team) and every UK government representative since, despite the incongruous P.R. activity against "creeping Brussels" by the very same governments.
All parties tend to think that codification and consolidation is useful for making the law more predictable and more accessible to everyone, and this is one of the reasons behind the TCE and the proposed Lisbon Treaty to enact some of it. It's also -- again not accidentally -- behind several Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in recent years to consolidate common law rulings, treaty obligations, clauses of various statutes and regulation and modern practice with respect to certain Great Officers of State (like the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor) into single Acts such as the Constitutional Reform Act (2005), and the Human Rights Act (1998).
The parallels between the more consensual aspects of the United Kingdom as a sort of federal state and the European Union as a sort of federal state and several actual federal states created by statutes passed by the Westminster parliament (including three which are presently EU member-states) are pretty obvious to anyone with a background in constitutional law, many of whom tend to be optimistic europhiles as a result. Some familiarity with the UK government's 1950s political positions with respect to post-empire Britain's place in Europe also tends to make EEC/UK parallels obvious, since the forme
You are right that a law is not law unless it has been given Royal Assent (and passed by Parliament), and that the term ultra vires was not used appropriately. You have some details slightly wrong, though.
In the UK and its legal predecessors, ultra vires is an important historical element of constitutional law.
The term describes the use of the royal prerogative (Queen in Council) in conflict with statutory authority (Queen in Parliament).
The latter is supreme. The former may act in a manner which exceeds the authority granted by the latter, and all s uch activity by the Queen or her servants would be called ultra vires actions. This was a source of serious political and social conflict in the late 1500s and early 1600s, leading to the Case of Prerogatives (1611) [which determined that judges would decide what is and is not allowed by statute] and ultimately the events from the English Civil War to the Revolution of 1688.
Political parties arrived in Parliament with the Restoration, and with the establishment of Ministerial accountability to Parliament, party discipline and the total subordination of the King to Parliament, the cases in which royal prerogative (which could no longer be undertaken without recommendation by the Privy Council, i.e., the Prime Minister) would seriously conflict for very with the authority granted by Acts of Parliament dwindled to nearly zero.
(Either Parliament would issue new Acts authorizing the ultra vires actions, or the government would be obliged to resign or survive a general election on the basis of no confidence).
There remains some residual tension between what the government would like to do via regulation that does not require explicit authorization by Parliament, and what the courts believe was/is infra vires concurrent with any controversy over authority. However, the fault line has shifted from exceeding the power granted by statute and using relinquished powers, whether they were given away by Act of Parliament, convention, or treaty.
The final strand involving the use of ultra vires in British constitutional law is the ancient principle that new prerogative powers may not be claimed by the Crown. The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) is at the epicentre since it may be exploited (unlawfully!) to enact secondary legislation or modify or repeal primary legislation as Ministerial prerogative. There are mixed opinions about whether the Act as passed is really able to be used in conflict with Parliament's wishes, but there is no doubt of the double-remedy (Ministerial accountability to Parliament, and the judiciary's insistence on the power of review where not expressly and clearly limited by statute).
Next-to-finally, the term will probably see some new exercise in the sense it is normally used in federal systems (the USA and Canada, for instance) now that there is a codified division of power between the UK Parliament and each of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Finally, the constitution of Canada is not entirely contained in one document -- there are twenty-four documents (Acts of both the Canadian and UK parliaments) listed in s52(2) of the Constitution Act (1982). The courts have held that the Canadian constitution comprises several foundational documents which are also part of the unconsolidated UK constitution, e.g. the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), as well as a variety of Acts which are referenced by any of the preceeding. All of these are part of the Constitution of Canada, are subject to the amending formula of the Canadian Constitution, and are co-equal with, and thus not regulated by, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (This was most recently in play in a case objecting to the barring of Catholics from being King or Queen of Canada, O'Donohue v. Canada, 2005 Ont. Ct. Appeal. C40337).
The Suprem
The idea that Royal Assent could be withheld against the wishes of the Prime Minister ignores the result of the English Civil War and Restoration. Monarchs have had little scope for official political action other than on the advice of their Ministers, who in turn must have the consent of Parliament.
The Royal Assent has never been withheld by a Governor-General of Canada acting under his or her own discretion. Every delay of the Royal Assent by the GG (and there have been none since the granting of responsible government by the UK in the 1920s) has been due to the advice of the Prime Minister of Canada, or (prior to the 1920s) the instructions of the UK Colonial or Dominion Secretary (and occasionally the UK Prime Minister directly).
The power asserted by these senior ministers in London in colonial times was called reservation. This power is now legally extinct, since Canada has been a formally independent country since 1982. There is no "appeal to the Queen" in any meaningful sense, since the Queen of Canada is, like the Governor-General, a legal puppet of the Canadian Prime Minister, following the traditions of the Restoration.
The Lieutenant-Governors of the various Canadian provinces still have the power of reservation, which if exercised would make a particular granting of the Royal Assent in right of the province the responsibility of the Governor-General . No Lieutenant-Governor has exercised reservation without orders from Ottawa (meaning the Prime Minister, via the Governor-General).
Since the GG is legally an automaton doing the bidding of the Prime Minister, and the Lieutenant-Governors are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister, reservation is an important residual power of the federal government, and it was used from time to time since Confederation, but not more recently than 1961.
The relevant constitutional authority rests in sections 55 and 90 of the Constitution Act (1867), but reservation today would create a serious political crisis, despite the constitutionality. Moreover, it is not clear that reservation is still legal, since the wording of BNA s55 says a LG "according to his Discretion, but subject to the Provisions of this Act and to Her Majesty's Instructions" may reserve a bill for the signification of the Queen's Pleasure. The Queen in Right of Canada, as a legal entity, has a statutory obligation to grant the Royal Assent automatically unless advised to otherwise by the Prime Minister. This obligation stems from documented practice and statutes like the Royal Assent Act 2002 [S.C. 2002, c. 15]. The Courts have held since the 1930s that the relinquishing of authority flows downwards from the Imperial Crown, to the Federal one, to the Provincial ones, and that therefore "Her Majesty's instructions" require Lieutenants-Governor to signify assent in all cases, unless advised to withhold it by the Premier of the province in question.
In other words, when Canada was granted responsible government, so were the provinces. As the Governor-General of Canada since the 1920s has taken advice from (i.e., operated under the orders of) the Prime Minister of Canada exclusively, the Lieutenant-Governors should take advice only from the Premier of the province. In the early 20th century, the statutes allowed for "more senior" levels of government to overrule more local ones, and it took more than 50 years for statute to catch up with practice between London and Ottawa. It may take another 50 for statute to catch up with practice between Ottawa and the provincial capitals.
In Canada, infra and ultra vires generally describes only legal controversy over the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments (BNA ss91-93 inter alia). Statute and regulation that is incompatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not technical ultra vires, but section 24 of the Charter provides a very broad remedy to anyone affected by the incompatibility. The cou
Since subjective complaints about flickers are now fantastic playgrounds for molecular and evolutionary biologists, broader scientific discipline has been brought into fields that were dominated more by engineering concerns and market feedback on tradeoffs. Display technology is one such field.
In the good old days we had TV, and some studies on persistence of vision and the flicker fusion threshold (based on decades of experiences with film projection) on wide populations demanded a flicker rate of not less than 32 Hz (32 flickers/second). Filmed material recorded at 16 frames/second would be played back at double the flicker rate by having the projector shutter transition from closed to open to closed to open to closed for each frame.
Population studies and mechanical advancements combined to a flicker rate of 48 Hz, both by having three shutter transitions per frame on 16 fps material, and by filming at 24 fps, and playing back at 24 fps with two shutter transitions per frame. The latter proved more durable, and film was for many years a 24 fps / 48 Hz medium. Nowadays, 24 fps / 72 Hz (3 shutter transitions per frame) is more common theatrically, which eliminates the flicker detection from essentially every human viewer.
(As an aside, film was also usually a 4:3 aspect ratio medium prior to television).
The television industry sought to project film at a distance, and took great pains to duplicate several aspects of film, such as the aspect ratio (4:3) and the frame and flicker rate. Unfortunately two aspects of TV technology complicated the matching of film frame rate and flicker rate.
Ultimately, signal clocking was derived from AC power, with the receivers given some clock-recovery circuitry to deal with slight differences in the phase and variations of the local AC power frequency compared to the transmitter. This sort of clock recovery was and remains common in telecommunications.
Because there was a close enough match between 25 frames / second and a 50 Hz flicker rate that in countries with 50 Hz AC power, the film was just accelerated 4%, with each film frame corresponding to one TV "frame". The TV "frame" was actually composed of two fields interlaced together. One field comprised all the odd-numbered scan lines, and the other all the even ones, and the two fields were displayed sequentially. Thus TV in 50Hz regions (mainly outside of North America) approached the 24 fps / 48 Hz flicker rate in film.
The 4% speedup was barely noticeable to TV audiences except for a semitone shift upwards in sound (sound had to be accelerated 4% as well), which usually raises few complaints, which generally can be dealt with by downwards pitch shifting processes. As a North American in Europe, I sometimes notice the timing differences for some films I have seen so many times that I have memorized the dialogue (who here can't do this with Monty Python films or the first Star Wars movies?), but otherwise it's just not something I am aware of.
North American TV also adopted an interlaced approach, where the 60 Hz AC frequency signal was used to clock a 30 "frame" per second, 60 field per second interlaced image. Accelerating film to 30 fps made everything too fast and too high-pitched, so NTSC turned each "frame" into 2.5 fields instead of two. This worked reasonably well with respect to flicker fusion for most viewers, but complicated the de-interlacing process forever.
Digital TV had the opportunity to completely decouple the frame rate from the North American AC frequency, but chose to retain fields as a discrete unit, and retain multiples of 60 for both the frame and field rates, for future recordings in standard and high definition, as well as for compatibility with old standard definition recordings. DVDs were also given this opportunity, and took it -- the video streams on DVDs and their successors are stored as complete frames, with image flickering and interlacing to be done by playback equipment as necessary.
Widescreeen
Maggots don't cleanse a wound per se, they just outcompete bacteria when it comes to eating up dead tissues at the site of a wound. Sadly, the dangerous bacteria they swallow in the process are generally passed through the maggots pretty much unharmed. If the patient is lucky, the maggots get fat on their injured tissues, and the bacteria lack the energy to reproduce (bacteriostasis) or starve (bactericide). If the patient is really lucky, less-dangerous contributors to a multiple-strain infection are lysed inside the maggot, or are trapped in maggot excretions. If the patient is really really lucky, lots of opportunistically infective microbes are killed by maggot mucus which contains urea, phenylacetaldehyde, allantoin and a bunch of other antimicrobial secretions.
Maggots are great for dealing with outer-layer necrosis; they debride wounds more completely than a surgeon could. However, maggots are useless when it comes to internal infections, whether those involve internal organs or the blood stream.
Bacteremia (blood stream infection) is the most serious complication of infection by "biofilm" bacteria, followed by infection of the fascia or other inner-layer tissues that maggots cannot reach. However, debriding a necrotizing surface wound can reduce the liklihood of developing internal infections as a complication.
Finally, maggots require as careful handling and management as any other tools that come directly into contact with infected people. They have to be carefully disinfected in advance. Also, they will tend to try to escape and turn into flies, at which point they can carry lots of bacteria -- including the resistant strains they were deployed against in their "youth" -- to new places and new patients. *Their* maggot offspring will not be pre-disinfected, of course.
Flying insects of any variety in a hospital setting are BAD NEWS.
Freezing, cooking, irradiating, or dessicating the meat will kill the relevant bacteria, resistant or not.
Thoroughly washing one's hands after handling any meat that isn't piping hot will prevent almost any transfer.
Not eating meat that isn't fully cooked to at least 60 degrees celsius all the way through will prevent any ingestion.
These procedures would completely eliminate meat as a vector for resistant pathogens.
Most bacterial contamination in meat in OECD countries comes from poor maintenance and cleaning procedures involving grinding and cutting machinery in meat processing plants, or in plants that do supermarket packaging of meat, or in supermarkets themselves. This is stuff growing on already-dead meat, which has too few antibiotic molecules in it to favour resistant strains over non-resistant ones. Antibiotic half-lives are very short (some can be as short as half an hour, although many have half-lives of four to six hours), so discontinuing treatment a day or two before the animal is killed essentially eliminates it from the meat.
Most bacterial contamination involving farm animals is direct contact between manure or rumen and human. Farm workers are at risk of infection, as are workers in slaughterhouses. These infections may or may not be resistant, but they will only spread by close contact, which means that if you are a Kevin Bacon or more away from such people, you are at essentially zero risk.
The problem is that if such workers become infected with a resistant strain and are consequently hospitalized, that strain may be carried to other patients at risk for infection. However, this sort of nosocomial infection is much more prevalent in fully urban settings, and do not seem to disporportionately involve workers in the meat industry.
(It does happen, however -- from time to time there are cases of farmers who present with resistant bacterial infections which are also subsequently found colonizing (or even infecting) the animals on the farm; but then, from time to time urban people present with resistant bacterial infections which are also found colonizing their cats and dogs too).
There are a variety of good veterinary reasons to avoid regular use of antibiotics in food animals that are more obvious than any (human) medical ones.
Another way of looking at it is that in a wild, natural population of Staphylococcus, Enterococcus or Escherichia there is almost always a small number of antibiotic-resistant members. This is useful for these species, since they compete for food and other resources with microbes that produce the antibiotic molecules we concentrate and use as drugs. Non-resistance is much more common, since resistance mechanisms usually involve diverting substantial amounts of energy away from reproduction.
Antibiotics do not create resistance out of thin air, they just may favour resistant members of a mixed population by eliminating the more efficient non-resistant competition.
In lab settings, and in living animals (including humans), stopping the intake of antibiotics will eventually return the microorganism populations to a vast majority of non-resistant members and a few (or even no) resistant ones. However, this can take some time, during which the (symptomless) colonies are dominated by resistant members.
No, resistance to beta-lactam drugs is entirely due to the selection pressure on genes in the bacteria in question (usually Staph. aureus).
B-lactam antibiotics derive from soil fungi -- soil is a nutrient rich but very competitive environment for saprophages (things that gain energy by decomposing dead organic matter) like fungi like Penicillin and Cephalosporin, and also bacteria similar to S. aureus (notably many which are gram positive, using a peptidoglycan pathway with a penicillin-binding-protein in the formation of cellular membranes).
Penicillin species in particular produce b-lactam to interfere with bacterial competitors. This sort of chemical warfare with microbicides is very common in soil dwelling species, and accounts for the majority of antibiotics in common use.
There are a variety of resistance mechanisms available to mutant strains of bacteria susceptible to b-lactam interference, all of which impose a substantial energy cost to the organism expressing the resistance, thus reducing energy available to out-breed competing species (including non-resistant strains). In the wild, this energy cost means that resistant members of a population are very rare, but in clinical settings, the reverse is true: the competitive disadvantage of the extra energy use more than made up for by the ability to survive exposure to beta-lactam antibiotics.
Examples of resistance mechanisms include diverting some energy to the production of penicillinase/beta-lactamase enzymes which break down antibiotics (constantly, or when initially stressed by the antibiotics themselves), the expression of slightly altered cell wall building pathways with slightly less energy-efficient molecules with binding sites which do not fit beta-lactam molecules, or which have a much lower affinity for beta-lactam than the (more efficient) wildtype.
Resistant bacteria colonize many people without causing infection. It's people who are weakened by surgery, trauma, or disease -- people typically found in hospital wards -- who are at risk of infection. Also, infected people are the only people who will usually have any amount of beta-lactam drugs in their systems. Consequently, people in hospital who become infected often become ideal breeding grounds for beta-lactam resistant bacteria like penicillinase-resistant S. aureus strains (VRSA, MRSA, etc.) This is because sick people's immune systems are less able to fight off any bacterial infection, and the presence of beta-lactam antibiotics kill off much of the resistant bacteria's microbial competition.
This is why resistant bacteria are so important in nosocomial settings.
The competitive disadvantage of the various resistance mechanisms means that resistance is much less important outside of such settings, since healthy people's immune systems will generally control overgrowth of or even infection by resistant populations even faster than ordinary wildtype nonresistant ones. However, since infections can run away from an immune system, prescribing beta-lactam antibiotics has to be considered carefully, since it will convert a mainly-nonresistant population into a mainly-nonresistant one. If that new population, forced into dominance by the selection pressure of antibiotic consumption, is not controlled by the infected person's immune system, the result can be catastrophic.
Typically this involves an MRSA-infected patient being hospitalized, thus risking the carriage of MRSA to noninfected patients. Given how expensive and dangerous-to-patients MRSA outbreaks in hospitals are, there is a great deal of pressure on hospital workers to control the carriage of bacteria on nurses' and doctors' uniforms, hands, faces, in their noses or mouths, on bed linens, on linen-handling-staff's hands and uniforms, and so forth.
Unfortunately, control procedures are imperfect (staff often don't follow them rigorously, for example) a
Being copied to RNA makes it functional by definition.
RNA interactions have been studied since the formation of the operon theory by Monod, Jacob et al. This is very bizarrely missing from your history, since it is a fundamental part of the central dogma of molbio, in that it explains how genes expression can be regulated without making heritable changes to chromatin.
Your timeline seems to favour the alternative splicing hypothesis, which is orthogonal to the central dogma. AS simply invalidates the one to one mapping between chromosomal subunits and specific proteins. This is very similar to operon theory, and is consistent with the central dogma, in that AS does not make heritable changes to the chromatin itself.
Much more interesting work in potential non-Mandelian heritability is being done by Lundqvist et al., although so far all the HSP and chaperonin are similar to operon theory, in that changes are not carried back into chromatin, even if it turns out that mitosis does not necessarily "reset" the daughter cells to the state that the heritable material would produce in an ideal stress-free environment.
Where is this evidence of the "break" of the theory that DNA is the fundamental carrier of discrete units of inheritance in cellular (including paracellular endosymbiont organelle) life?
Where is the evidence of endogenous mutations to chromatin by cellular life?
So far, the apparent examples of "two-way-ism" have all involved exogenous mutators like viruses and prions, and insufficent shock repsonses to other environmental mutagens.
Lolle, ea (2005) and Rassoulzadegan ea (2006) are interesting but not compelling. The former in particular is the most concrete raising of a two-way-ist hypothesis fully grounded in molecular biology in recent years. Susan Lolle's hypothesis is much finer than that proposed in the paper's abstract. In particular, the "hidden selector" argument is that a set of unfavourable dominant-gene traits are passed on to offspring with a substantial bias towards towards the favourable recessive trait. Robert Pruitt, one of the coauthors, has said several times that the molecular mechanics are not understood, and may be explainable wholly within the central dogma of molecular biologiy, without resorting to any of the proposed proximity interaction extensions to the CD model.
Also, I think you (or whoever wrote all that) fundamentally misunderstand the ENCODE May 2007 papers -- it is much more appropriate to categorize it as exposing a much larger than expected amount of transcription, with regulators selectively preferring some of them. This fits nicely with Lundqvist et al.'s recent work, and does not in any way challenge the central dogma. ENCODE does not support the argument that lots of transcription with surprising lengths and starting points invalidates one-way-ism.
In fact, if anything, ENCODE's work on histone-DNA marshalling is generally supportive of the central dogma.
Finally, I think that drawing analogies to orbital mechanics ("epicycles") and quantum mechanics ("vacuum") are rhetorical devices unworthy of someone with a legitimate argument grounded in molbio mechanics. You also have it backwards: when faced with difficulty in tracing the presence of a sequence of base pairs to its expression (or non-expression), favouring either a two-way hypothesis or a DNA+-hypothesis over a mediator hypothesis conformant with the central dogma is by far the mo
A 747 wouldn't do you much good on Mars either, since the atmosphere there is much thinner.
There is a decent (if outdated) overview of this at X-Plane's site -- X-Plane is a flight simulator based on Blade Element Theory, and its principal author is an effusive geek.
"At fault" as in constrains available choices. Check.
and
My reaction to your argument about free will is that we do not have sufficient evidence of causality. We also cannot model causal interactions at certain energy levels at all right now, and those are of fundamental importance to any physical investigation of the question of "free will".
I'm a philosophical reductionist and do "look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises" -- I tend to think that personality ("mind") is an emergent property of brain ("clump of organic matter") and am comfortable with neurobiology's work on making scientific predictions of the blackbox results of "mind" based on observations (with fMRI, MEG, ASL and dPET/SPECT, for example) of in vivo "brain". Those predictions seem likely to become more useful over time. The philosophers would call this positivist materialism instead of dualism, although at a political level I'm an anti-rationalist partly because of the low quality of analysis tools available now. I am definitely not in the legal positivism camp.
In standard cosmology, this is rooted in the Lambda-CDM model, whose timeline runs roughly like this: in the inflationary epoch, quantum fluctuations led to the cooling of the complexly/randomly distributed quark-gluon plasma into the array of particles in the standard model, which in turn formed more familiar forms of matter through ionized atomic nuclei, then nonionized atoms, and so forth, as well as dark matter. At this point gravity takes over the job of shaping the whole of the large scale structure of the universe, with atomic clouds condensing into molecular ones and selfgravitating into stars and galaxies and so forth.
Because of the difficulties of the two toolsets available to Lambda-CDM (quantum mechanics and general relativity) in dealing with highly curved spacetime (very massive or very energetic elements cause calculation difficulties in both models) we would be unable to make any sort of useful fine-grained prediction even knowing the full energy states of a volume of space during the early post-inflation universe. However, there are a variety of experimental toolsets which may solve some of these calculation problems, so it is not (totally) ridiculous to daydream about a scientifically predictable evolution from an observable state (CMBR) being plausible for cosmic and even small structure formation. Just as better toolsets for analysing the operation of the brain might be able to make useful predictions about the state changes of the body given particular stimuli ("mind reading")
Lots of people object to this almost by reflex ("neo-phrenology" and "neo-astrology" are the sorts of terms used). However the very heart of the objection is the question of whether causality is fundamentally true. We don't know (cf. Bell's inequality), we just take it for granted in energy and spacetime curvature realms in which classical physics works, and get frustrated with the slipperiness of quantum-mechanical causality, especially since QM behaviours probably relate in some fashion to our classical world.
Debates on the implica
There are a few components to Parliamentary Sovereignty which have different strengths. The three key claims are that Parliament cannot be prevented from legislating in any area except by its own rules; where these rules are set down by a Parliament, they do not bind a subsequent Parliament (with newly (re)elected members); and only Parliament can repeal, reverse, or change an Act of Parliament.
Parliamentary Sovereignty is vastly overstated both as a legal and political concept. This is mostly the fault of A.V. Dicey, who in the 1880s authored a number of influential books on the UK system that rejected the synthesis expressed in (for example) the British North America Act and various Parliamentary manoeuvrings on the question of Irish Home Rule. In particular he argued very strongly on the concept that Parliament could never permanently give away primary legislative ability because a newly elected House of Commons could seize it back under the nonbinding principle, so therefore Irish Home Rule could only ever be a legal fiction.
Dicey was also an opponent of the perverse verdict rule (in which a jury can refuse to pass a guilty verdict) which has been established in England since the late 1600s and the perverse judgement rule (in which the court's presiding officer may give the most lenient, or no, sentence) which is even older. In particular, he believed that both the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the House of Lords had no right to refuse to apply Acts of Parliament. Those two legal bodies disagreed (JCPC was particularly antagonized, since a number of Privy Councillors entitled to participate in it had close ties to the colonies which had won their own home rule not many years before), and with a historical perspective, won convincingly.
Finally, Dicey put enormous faith in the idea that Parliament itself would never pass an outrageously stupid Act of Parliament (figuring that the House of Lords would block such Bills originating from the House of Commons, and vice-versa), and so should not be constrained from doing so. Funnily enough, forty years after his work on the law of the Constitution in which he made this claim, Parliament outraged him by permanently and irrevocably giving up its sovereignty over the Irish Free State.
This was the start of a long trend of the UK Parliament giving up its sovereignty with respect to wide stretches of the then Empire. Although it "could" repeal the Canada Act 1982 (UK) or the Australia Act 1986 (UK), those countries would simply ignore the result (legally) and be pretty pissed off. These stem from the Statute of Westminster (1931) which in turn had more than a decade of legislative and regulatory antecedents in the wake of Irish independence. Repealing or modifying these would have no legal effect outside the territory of the UK, and also would trigger a diplomatic crisis.
One can think of Parliamentary Sovereignty set against the history of several Parliaments dominated by supporters of a given political faction have fumed and stamped feet and put out Acts having been met with resistance ranging from civil war to a simple refusal by lower officers of the Crown (soldiers, sheriffs, police, prosecutors, judges) to enforce them either regionally or across the whole Realm. No Parliament has ever won such a conflict, and most have been short-lived (and fortunately not very violent). Usually after a Constitutional Crisis, the faction in control of the elected House defeated at the ballot box, leading to the establishment of a new controlling faction willing to pass Reform Acts to extend the franchise, to create more members of the unelected House (especially after the Life Peerage Act 1958), or to reduce the power of the House of Lords against that of the House of Commons and the Government of the Day, to negotiate independence (or devolution), and so forth.
All three primary elements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in the UK have been eroded substantially in the past century, and with the c
This is not especially novel, or especially controversial within the LCDM WIMP space.
What's "classical matter"?
Their DM candidate arises from a particular supersymmetry model, and their paper poses a search space for evidence not only of their DM candidate but also of that particular neutrino supersymmetry partner.
It's not exciting, but it is good science, as if observational searches do not reveal the required emissions signatures, it serves as evidence against that particular supersymmetry model. Being able to disprove that model is a step forward from correspondence between it and current data (which also fits the standard model, and other proposals (like string theory)).
That explains Galois!
We are not really so much interested in whether the cat is alive or dead except as a proxy for whether a particle has decayed in a tiny clump of matter which undergoes approximately one detectable (via geiger tube) nuclear disintegration per hour. Schroedinger was attempting to demonstrate in QM terms that wave functions can aggregate without collapsing (decoherence).
In GR terms this is not an especially difficult concept because of how it treats simultaneity, so moving the radioactive matter in Schroedinger's experiment far enough away means that the results cannot be known until the information is propagated to an observer by speed-restricted photons. When we look at distant stars that are likely to go nova or supernova "any time now", we are looking back in time. A much closer observer (light-minutes instead of light-millennia) would know and be influenced by the "current" state of the star long before we would, but using lightspeed-limited communications would have no way to give us earlier warning than our telescopes looking in the same direction would.
In astronomy, this happens all the time, and distant objects are always in a superposition. The uncertainty increases with distance. It's just that this is not called decoherence and is not generally though of as especially weird or spooky -- just a limitation of information propagation speed limits.
In the Cat experiment, issues of simultaneity are not considered, but the central problem is still one of whether an isolated "historical" event can have dramatic local effects that go unnoticed. Copenhagen treats the measurement problem of small scale objects in a manner similar to astronomically distant ones: the state cannot be fully determined now, but can be described in terms of probabilities. Examination of the state at different times can converge with the statistical description of the most probable state (no nucleus disintegrated, the star did not nova) and the next most probable state (nucleus disintegrated, the star exploded) and so on, or diverged entirely.
GR provides a reason for differences between objective reality and observed reality -- time lag. QM does not.
One of the main issues that arises in both is whether there are real world consequences for unobserved events -- this is the objective collapse theory question, and focuses on the Copenhagen interpretation's ambiguity with respect to the branching of unobserved behaviours. Copenhagen allows for unbounded aggregates of related waveforms (thus the dead vs alive cat being tied to the nuclear disintegration), objective collapse limits the aggregation (at some point many hours in the future, the cat is assumed to be dead with 100% probability, even though it has not actually been observed).
There is an objective collapse issue in GR as well, in that observations of stars that are supernova candidates can plausibly be made at great distances such that if we take the "years" term of lightyears, enough of those have passed that the candidate supernova has almost certainly exploded.
Is virtual certainty the same as actual certainty? Does it matter whether we "know" that a waveform has collapsed without us having observed it yet? This is the crux of Copenhagen: can we plan on "real" events that have happened but have not yet been measured, or can we only plan on aggregates of probabilties? At what point can we transition from probabilistic interactions with events to real and deterministic ones?
There is a much greater risk to health from bacterial or fungal contamination between slaughter and retail sale -- and the toxins produced will generally be more harmful than any that can be produced by the food animal, (almost) no matter what genetic damage or mutation may occur. It is hard to envisage the non-deliberate expression in a food animal's meat any substance toxic to humans but harmless to the animal, particularly in mammals. The cloning processes avaialble for mammals do not have obvious pathways wherein such traits could be expressed without genetic modification. A deliberate expression of a toxin in a GMO introduced to the food supply would be a form of food tampering, would probably not pass inspection, and certainily would be easily traced to origin.
Genetic modification and cloning in mammals go hand in hand, however, since some desirable new genes are unlikely to survive sexual reproduction. Cloning a transgenic animal preserves the transgenic trait more cheaply than retargetting to a different animal, especially when the trait does not often "take". Non-breedability of these traits, especially ones which express valuable therapeutic proteins, can be an advantage for commercial or risk management reasons, too.
More subtly, new genes in GMOs also often confer some resistance to toxins -- against herbicides in crops, and against a variety of hepatoxic antibiotics and anabolic steroids in animals. These toxins are then administered to the GMO in doses which would debilitate (most) non-modified organisms of a similar type. Those toxins need to be studied for toxicity to humans (and pets! and waste scavengers!) and bioaccumulation in quantities higher than lab conditions, with the assumption that accidental overdose/overuse may happen routinely in the field.
Mammal clones tend to suffer from premature aging and cancers that are strongly associated with telomere length. Such diseased animals are unpleasant food at best and mildly risky at worst (I would not want to feed my cat beef riddled with metastatic disease markers, but "older animal" meat is no big deal -- his ancestors regularly culled older mammals as prey. He probably quietly eats the occasional old and sick mouse or bird without me knowing, anyway).
Mammal clones are also not completely genetically identical to the donor animal, because there is genetic material present in the organelles of the coopted ovum, which are inherited through their own processes largely independently of the nuclear DNA. There is also a small genetic variability among the cells of most large organisms anyway thanks to natural mutation, so the somatic donor cell may be slightly atypical thanks to chance. Any such slight differences would be maintained as a baseline in the clone.
Finally, research into chaperonins (heat shock proteins, shepherd proteins) is shedding light on what has been well known to breeders of animals which regularly produce litters including homozygous twins -- even naturally genetically identical animals (down to the non-nuclear DNA, so even more identical than clones) can demonstrate phenotype differences due to environmental stressors (and natural mutation). This is especially well known to breeders of spotted mammals. Human parents of identical twins notice physical differences too, and of course there can be differences introduced through inury or illness.
Well, there's some up above. Most of these differences aren't really relevant to food safety.
Why bother with the whole animal, when you can produce only the edible parts, with none of the hassle and hazard of the digestive system and its contents (mmm E. coli), the nervous system and it's ethics and morality complications, gristle, bone, hoof, hair or snout?
Clonal meat should just be meat: lean and well toned, yet tender and tasty. A matrix with a consistent arrangement of adipose cells and muscle cells and gaps for nutrient solution to flow through (maybe some RBCs for juice colour and iron content) does not seem like an impossible engineering challenge.
"Texturized animal protein" (to adapt the meat substitute crowd's term) does not need to be attached to an actual brain-equipped animal, willing or otherwise.
There is some work needed to convince a mammalian somatic cell to act as if it were a pair of germline gametes, but there are a variety of ways of doing this, from the purely mechanical (using micropipettes to substitute the nucleus of a fertilized egg with the nucleus of a nongermline cell) to the purely biochemical (coercing a multipotent stem cell into pluripoetic form), to the purely genetic (cloning DNA fragments and repolymerizing them into chromatins). There is substantial middle ground among these three poles, and the point of Dolly was to combine somatic cell nuclear transfer, some nuclear DNA "engineering edits", and some mitigations for differences in organelle DNA.
The mutation rate in Dolly -- and in more modern mammalian clones -- lines up with the expected rate in sexually reproduced animals with the same breeding background. Differences in non-nuclear DNA (mainly in the mitochondria) have not made quantifiable differences on a gross scale (organ size, count, function), and in chemical assays have made no difference to the limit of present measurability. One could easily imagine deliberately using an ovum from a mother with mDNA-inherited mitochondrial disease, but this is not practical, and the most likely result would be a dead blastocyst or zygote followed by spontaneous abortion, rather than the birth of a sickly animal.
The Dolly programme explored two avenues with respect to genetic engineering, one deliberate (inserted genes that express particular (therapeutic) proteins during lactogenesis) and one accidental but super-interesting (premature aging associated with teleomeres, and tumour growth associated with TERT overexpression to maintain telomere length). There was also some work with respect to stem cell coercion which was (imho) under-examined in the wake of the Hwang Woo-Suk scandal.
No, they are making hypotheses based on intuition and introspection rooted in strong theory and practical knowledge with respect to the genetic biochemistries of ordinary somatic cells and early blastocytic cells.
The hypotheses are tested empirically, but as the current methods are somewhat error prone, the methods are subject to revision - i.e., they are not only finding proof for or against their hypotheses, they're also learning how to procure that proof more quickly and accurately. That is good science.
Trial and error is also not new to biochemistry -- large array testing is commonplace in molecular biology in particular.
If you "attach" a molecule to DNA, you generally kill the organism (or cell) outright.
Generally speaking, any large change to the genetic material of an organism (or cell) will kill it or render it extremely fragile, or stop it from reproducing or drive it into hyperreproduction. Only relatively minor changes can lead to a viable, normal, non-cancerous cell that expresses a significant new phenotype. However, most such minor changes make no phenotypic difference whatsoever -- base pair mutations in non-coding regions of an organism's DNA generally don't do anything at all.
It would surprise me that an MD familiar with SCNT vs normal sexual reproduction would have any particular concerns in eating a healthy young clone of a food animal, other t
You are right, except for the "could in theory decide not to sign off on a new law" part. There is no theoretical basis for that claim any more. The personal residual power has been in abeyance since the 1700s, and a statute extinguishing it has since become law (The Royal Assent Act, 1967). With respect to actions of the Crown, the modern monarch is entirely obliged to follow the advice of the government of the day. Moreover more and more of the activities the Queen performed personally but essentially as an automaton when much younger are now handled by the civil service as a bureaucratic function instead.
No reigning monarch since Victoria has personally been involved in the granting of a royal assent, and in her case the last time was in 1854.
That is: no monarch since then has indiciated through sign manual, affixation of the Great Seal, or even orally, indicated her or his assent to an Act of Parliament passed by both Houses of Parliament (or since the Parliament Act (1911 and 1949) the House of Commons alone in special circumstances. Although in theory (and law) the Queen may personally grant Royal Assent, in practice it is neither necessary nor likely to happen.
The Royal Assent Act (1967) and the Crown Office regulations (2000) set out a formula whereby an "equerry" in the Crown Office (notably The Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, who is an ordinary civil servant and who is also usually the Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Lord Chancellor) or a deputy (another civil servant) sends a form letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons (and since the latest round of changes to the other place) the Speaker of the House of Lords. The Palace and its staff are uninvolved in the process, and are politely notified by form letter, but probably only read about it in the Gazette.
Finally, as the Crown Office is part of the government, and is headed by a Cabinet Minister, the formality of advising the Monarch to grant, reserve or withhold assent to a bill is no longer necessary. This has been the case since at least 1967.
Since it is unusual for the UK House of Commons not to be controlled outright by the government (i.e., having more than half the seats), it is unlikely that the formulas for reserving or withholding assent to ordinary bills will ever be used. However, since it is possible that a government may find itself presented with an Act of Parliament duly passed, but which the government opposes, they remain as reserve powers of the government.
Formally, with the direction of the Minister for the Crown Office (usually the person who is also Lord Chancellor) and the agreement of the Prime Minister, the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery would write a letter to the Speaker (or Speakers, as appropriate) indicating that the monarch will take the bill under consideration before granting assent. This is a polite way of saying: "the government has unilaterally killed your bill".
More importantly, there is a tradition of the Prime Minister consulting with the Queen on a personal level before bills are introduced which affects her personally (title to her legally personal property, revenues, and rights, changes to her constitutional rights to particpate in Parliament, and so forth). This tradition is extended to other members of the immediate Royal Family as well, usually with respect to revenues and rules affecting e.g. Cornwall (the Prince of Wales is the Duke of Cornwall) or (also recently) his membership in the House of Lords.
The "consultation" is a politeness, since ultimately the Queen is obliged to follow the advice of the Prime Minister, notwithstanding her personal objections, those of the Price of Wales, etc. Ultimately, the Queen's Assent is a claim by the gov
Je passe mon temps à répéter des clichés hyper chiants chez Slashdot, car je suis un con total.
Subordinate phrases should not be hoisted in front of principal ones in French.
Comme is used for "as in" or "like", as a comparative.
Car is synonymous with and substitutable for parce que ("because", causal linkage), whereas comme is not.
In your principal clause, Je passe mon temps à + inf. is OK idiom, but a rearrangement feels more natural: Je passe mon temps sur Slashdot, à répéter les clichés
hyper chiants (no hyphen). Nice if you're into science fiction, role playing games, Lisp Machine keyboards, or greek affixes in common use in American English but seen relatively rarely in French, but in itself is a cliché in francophone forums similar to Slashdot. I don't know if you are using irony deliberately, but if that is not your intent then perhaps something like clichés crasseux or perhaps clichés débiles which is much more common idiom, but much less forceful.
How about:
Je passe mon temps sur ce Slashdot,
à répéter ses clichés crasseux,
malgré qu'ils sont très biens connus.
Car je ne suis qu'un ididot,
j'ignore tout ce que le destin veut:
mes idées seront revenues.
IFR is part of ancient history from a time when once-through fuel cycles were considered much much less cost effective than operating plutonium fuel cycles. This is not the case now. (In fact, the reverse may be true).
Early commercial PWR designs leveraged HEU production in nuclear weapons programs and did little other than the occasional offline rearrangement of partially depleted fuel rods to gain small burn up gains. HEU production is expensive, and there was a great deal of belief that the plutonium economy would be a substantial advantage in a once-through design. There was a further belief that SEU production would not be much cheaper than higher enrichment, or that natural uranium could produce power with even half of the efficiency of an HEU once-through, much less a breeder using a dramatically reduced amount of HEU plus the same natural Uranium to produce power and transmute fertile wastes (238U mainly) into fissionable fuel (238Pu).
That is, the belief was that only a fast neutron spectrum reactor could efficiently breed inexpensive low-enriched uranium inputs into plutonium (this is called the plutonium economy).
The need for fast breeder reactors to gain from the plutonium economy remains moot. Current commercial thermal neutron spectrum PWR designs (EPR or AP1000 for example) designs gain large enhanced burnup through the transmutation of fertile 238U to 239Pu through downblending (in mixed oxides) or blanketing. Although thermal neutron power generating reactors are not specifically designed for breeding, and are not as efficient as fast reactors for breeding fissiles from impure mixes of fertiles, that is exactly what "enhanced burnup" is. Nobody expected enhanced burnup efficiencies approaching 0.9 in any thermal reactor, let alone one on a mostly once-through fuel cycle (TRISO input). By comparison, IFR's target burnup efficiency was less than 1.25 (these numbers are the ratio of fuel consumed to fuel bred in the reactor) and required nuclear and chemical reprocessing of at least the fuel blanket to maintain the plutonium fuel cycle.
Because of the inefficiencies of once-through cycles well into the 1980s (burnups of 0.1 or less and mainly HEU as input), IFR's on-site electrolytic separation of wastes and reformation of fuel assemblies was considered a large plutonium economy gain.
This has to be understood in the context of thermal reactor designs (PWRs and BWRs) incorporating large pressure vessels enclosing the whole pile. These pressure vessels meant a full shutdown and cooloff was necessary to make any adjustment to the pile in terms of composition or geometry. There was no blanket layer, and little thought for rearranging the pile to improve burnup, although these were later added within the large pressure vessels.
Likewise, IFR began with a single containment vessel housing the core, the blanket layer, cooling systems, and associated equipment.
Let's take a diversion through the evolution of CANDU -- a fundamentally different design developed over the same timeframe as the development of EBR and IFR. (Incidentally, Canadians and Americans were involved on both sides of the border in the development of both designs, and individual personality issues were factors much more than national politics in the engineering and theoretical analyses and comparisons right up to the point where funding was cut for IFR...)
CANDU began with a serious constraint. Canadian heavy industry could not produce the large pressure vessels as used in U.S. light water designs, and focused on making smaller ones from neutron-transparent materials that could be immersed in a low-to-non-pressurized pool of moderator (heavy water for the most part, but various carbons -- hydrocarbons and slurries mainly -- have been used experimentally with some success). These had the advantage of being intrinsically modular -- being small, an entire
You don't really mean temperature coefficient of reactivity. In almost all possible reactor designs, that is strongly negative beyond a few hundred kelvins due to doppler broadening. A great deal of work has gone into designs which increase the falloff temperature by a few hundred more kelvins so as to gain greater power production from the plant as a whole, but on top of doppler broadening of the neutron emission and capture spectra, there is a physical maximum related to the binding energy of the fuel components (components expand or deform, metals melt, ceramics crack apart) beyond which there is a steep falloff in temperature to reactivity. (With current materials science knowledge, beyond about 1250 K the fissiles must be fully dispersed/dissolved in a slurry/suspension/solution involving molten salts or liquid metals in order to remain reactive).
This is why there are substantial cooling systems associated with nuclear power plants -- reactor piles are much more efficient when kept considerably cooler than the reactivity falloff temperature.
The Chernobyl accident is usually discussed in relation to another factor: the positive void coefficient of reactivity.
Technically, voids are areas where there is an absence of normal moderator or coolant.
Voids in themselves can be dangerous in some systems, since they may cause explosions or fires because of chemical (rather than nuclear) reactivity, and there may be safety problems with cavitation and blockage.
Voids are often bubbles of superexpanded coolant or moderator. In water systems (coolant or moderator) that means steam. In other systems that means pockets with a different phase than the coolant or moderator.
In normal operation, some systems cannot form voids at all (some carbon moderated, gas cooled systems, for example) while others have a coefficient exactly equal to zero (voids may form, but do not affect reactivity).
The coefficients are of reactivity however, and one can construct a reactor with a positive void coefficient that does not contribute to a positive feedback loop (or a negative one that does). The reciprocating term is the reactivity coefficient of void formation, which in most reactors is positive (or zero).
Positive coefficients mean that the presence of voids increases the reactivity of the reactor pile, which can lead to more voids forming, which forms a dangerous positive feedback loop.
Negative void coefficients mean that the presence of voids decreases the reactivity of the reactor pile, which usually means fewer voids forming (becasue of a positive reactivity coefficient of void formation), and thus a passively safe negative feedback loop.
Voids may also form in the event of loss of coolant or moderator or pressurization, contamination, or misconfiguration. These are all considered "leaks" of different types. LOCA (loss of coolant accidents) usually form and sustain voids.
A positive void coefficient of reactivity usually combines unsafely with void formation in LOCAs. By comparison, a negative void coefficient of reactivity is usually considered passively safe in the face of LOCAs.
It is entirely possible to build a light water reactor with a positive void coefficient, and CANDU and PHWR derivitives in Asia which are operating have a small positive void coefficient. They are moderated by heavy water.
There are gas-cooled MOX reactors moderated by graphite, which have a negative void coefficient. Several of these are in operation in the UK.
Pebble bed reactors of all types generally have a negative void coefficient and are moderated by pyrolytic carbon and/or graphite, and gas-cooled.
The RBMK design is a gas-cooled MOX reactor moderated by graphite, and has a positive void coefficient
Newer RTGs are pretty safe and are designed with high-profile/low-probability accidents in mind.
The 238Pu used in RTG applications is a strong alpha emitter, and the radiation risk to humans is small particulate entry into the digestive tract, lungs, or open wounds. There is a serious food-chain risk involving calcium intake (especially bone meal) or animal liver tissues where 238Pu is introduced into an environment. Consequently a great deal of the safety engineering done on RTGs involves avoiding the release of small particles of plutonium.
The first step is to use a ceramic rather than metallic form of plutonium. Ceramicized 238Pu has very low chemical reactivity and is less (biochemically) toxic than lead; it's also resilient against shock fragmentation, vaporization, and aerosol formation. Next, the ceramic 238Pu is encased in iridium cladding as a highly heat resistant physical barrier. This in turn is encased in a graphite/activated charcoal/carbon fibre/pyrolitic carbon sandwich or casing for structural strength against a variety of explosions and chemical exposures. Finally everything is embedded in aerogel. The whole assembly is then likely put into a separate aeroshell as a further protection against stresses from a full reentry.
Consequently, the major risk of new RTGs deorbiting is that it might land on something valuable, like a meteor, causing impact damage. The packages are designed to be very hard to open with ordinary tools so as to avoid accidental contamination should someone curious (or interested in scavenging the specific parts) happen to discover one on the ground.
Fallen/stolen RTGs are also of very low proliferation risk, as 238Pu is a poor input into nuclear weapons processes (it can't be used directly in a nuclear weapon, it breeds weaponizable fissiles poorly even in carefully constructed reactor piles, and it acts as an alpha poisoner upon other more economical weapons isotopes interrupting their chain reactions).
Modern RTGs are very safe to launch.
Discounting the cost of the 238Pu itself, they are also fairly economical -- certainly cheaper than other long-duration power systems, because they don't need especially gentle handling, or an involved post-launch deployment process. They have no moving parts, and are essentially immune to particulate contamination from space debris. The half-life of ~87 years is reasonable for most missions, and far exceeds that of any comparable power system. (A modern RTG also almost always degrades gracefully rather than simply failing in service).
The layered casing is fairly inexpensive in terms of manufacture and component costs, and a modular approach scales well to sizes well beyond launch capability, in terms of total mass and in terms of thermal energy in a modular assembly. (The modular approach also allows for a distribution of mass into multiple small aeroshells that are likely to spread apart on unplanned reentry so as to avoid dropping a large and heavy chunk of material on one spot).
In terms of useful power, the main engineering challenge is with respect to converting heat to power (especially electrical power), since thermocouples are not very efficient. (There are prototype Stirling engine generators, and there are other plausible heat->electrical power systems that could be used instead of thermocouples in some applications).
Unfortunately the 238Pu itself, however, is insanely expensive, and is the principal limit on RTG use.
The entire global stockpile of 238Pu is on the order of low tens of kilograms (perhaps 30 kg).
There is almost no production of 238Pu outside of the Russian Federation, which produces it as a p
The concept is outlined in a number of places in the Constitution, and made explicit in the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.").
The word itself and the modern generalization are found in Rerum Novarum, a papal encyclical by Leo XIII which was concerned in part with individuals not being subordinated to the interests of the state.
"Subsidiarity" (and subsidarily) used in this way is unusual in ordinary modern English (as opposed to political science jargon); in other languages which inherited the word from Latin (including the English spoken a few hundred years ago), it refers to helping, assisting or supplementing actions. That is, subsidiarity means larger political bodies serve to assist smaller ones and ultimately individuals, and not the other way around. Unfortunately, modern English usage is confused by a very similar word that means almost the exact opposite -- subisidiaries of corporations are smaller organizations owned by and operated for the benefit of larger ones.
Decentralization and devolution are almost synonymous words, but denote existing centralization or non-local power over local matters, so the jargon persists when dealing with sovereign entities synthesizing bodies which act on their behalf.
The Tenth Amendment has led to similar arrangements in other Constitutional federations and treaty organizations based on the original ideas of the Founders as well as practical experience among the various branches of the federal and state governments.
The Amendment and its history is also keenly studied elsewhere, where putative founders are still alive. For example, the proposed Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe has an equivalent to the Tenth Amendment:
As with case law surrounding the Tenth Amendment, European Union law has already evolved some tests for subsidiarity. One critical one that gives some politicians headaches is the autonomy criterion, which requires that EU level actions be evaluated on whether it secures greater freedom for the individual, and that the EU should not undertake actions which fail the evaluation.