The link you provided was about issues with carbohydrates, not fats. I did say that the potato chips provide more carbohydrates (as well as salt) than are probably needed, we're not in disagreement there. But, in moderation, it's not particularly harmful. The effect noted in that abstract also has little to do with cognitive development.
As for "Biochemicals 101", you're right that after exposure to certain chemical conditions and/or heat the fats can be altered. At that point, they're typically referred to as trans-fats. Plenty of food preparation leaves the oil used for cooking unaltered. The Lays I gave the nutritional information for list 0 grams of trans-fats per serving.
There are certainly other sources for those fats. I just cringe every time I see a parent going out of their way to restrict fat in a very young child's diet because they have a knee-jerk reaction that fat is bad. The missing fat almost always gets replaced in the diet by more carbohydrates. Given that, potato chips don't really seem that bad.
The thing about milk is that it's a nutritional formulation specifically intended by nature for infants. Production of milk for infants is pretty much _the_ defining characteristic of mammals. We get our name from the milk producing organs, after all. However, virtually all mammals lose the ability to properly digest some of the principal components of milk as they age. This might actually be an evolutionary feedback effect to wean young and prevent females from being stuck nursing for their entire lives. In any case, most mammals, when they're no longer in early development, are lactose intolerant and drinking milk will cause them distress even if they enjoy it when they're actually drinking it. The discomfort afterwards isn't enough to stop most cats from drinking milk of course, but they're domesticated animals anyway, so their tolerance may be higher than many other mammals. Anyway, humans are pretty exceptional in our tolerance for the stuff, but that's almost certainly an acquired trait, and even among humans, lactose intolerance tends to appear as we age. Also, it's not universal across all humans, lactose intolerance is a lot higher among east Asian populations at much younger ages than most Europeans.
So, milk, or a very good substitute (mother's milk is always preferable when possible for reasons beyond just nutrition) is necessary for infants because that's what it's designed for. It's not necessary for older children or for adults. It contains helpful nutrients, but you can get them in plenty of other ways.
That said, milk and dairy products are delicious. I like all kinds of cheeses and yogurts and ice creams, etc. I'll keep on enjoying them for as long as I can. I just don't insist on them as a necessary part of a diet, because they're not.
As for what kids will be better off drinking. Water works for me. Pretty much all I drink is either water or milk (whole with or without chocolate). Beyond that, grape juice isn't too bad if it has to be sweet to get them to stay hydrated. Also, as much as people complain about sweetened drinks, sodium-glucose transport means that sweetened drinks with a touch of salt hydrate best. As long as they're flavored with dextrose (which is just glucose) or sucrose (breaks down into dextrose and fructose) but preferably not with just fructose. If a drink can be used as a way to get vitamins into a kid that won't eat fruits or vegatables or anything else with vitamins, then the benefits could outweigh the negatives.
It's my understanding that "no danger" is a translated and possibly paraphrased version of what a mouthpiece said to the press and that what the mouthpiece said was a paraphrased version of what the scientists said. If someone can show a well-translated transcript of exactly what was said in their meetings, I might feel differently, but until then, it looks a lot like they're being lynched for nothing. The people of Aquila are just making a human sacrifice to the earthquake gods.
I've now read the article you linked to after writing the previous paragraph and one bit stands out to me: "others see the case as an indictment of the obfuscating, probabilistic language with which scientists characterize the uncertain potential of natural disasters." So, essentially, the seismologists are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They can either explain the risk factors in clear probabilistic terms which the public considers to be "obfuscating", or thy can say things like "no danger", which was not actually a direct statement from the scientists anyway, and was said after multiple tremors a day for months on end and before the 3.9 hit a few hours before the big one. When the 3.9 hit, the seismologists were almost certainly already working on a new assessment of the situation.
It looks like the sorts of things the scientists actually said were:
"It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in 1703 could occur in the short term, but the possibility cannot be totally excluded."
and:
"If you live in L'Aquila, even if there's no swarm, you can never say, 'No problem.' You can never say that in a high-risk region."
It looks like the "no danger" statements were coming from Bernardo De Bernardinis, who is a hydraulic engineer by training, not a seismologist, and was the Vice Director of the Department of Civil Protection. Clearly the "no danger" statement shouldn't have been taken at face value since the area was known to be dangerous and the buildings were known to be deathtraps in an earthquake. Clearly the recent events didn't somehow make the area safer, so the statement should have been something more like "there's no extraordinary new danger".
Oh, absolutely. The health of the agricultural economy is their over-riding concern. Not that they don't have nutritionists who may give good recommendations, but they have another agenda and it influences their recommendations. When those recommendations end up being enforced as the _only_ healthy option, there's a problem.
Yes. The brain is about two thirds fat. Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated facts contribute heavily to brain development. A typical serving of Lays contains 2.5 grams of polyunsaturated fat and 5 grams of monounsaturated fat and 0 grams of trans fats and 1 gram of saturated fat. Now, you may get more carbohydrate and sodium than you should from eating too much in the way of chips, but they're not really inherently unhealthy in and of themselves. The salt and most of the fat are, in fact, necessary nutrients, they're just a problem if they're overdone. For a developing child, a high natural fat diet is usually not a bad thing as long as it doesn't lead to bad habits when they get older.
Nutrition is a complex subject though. Very complex. So complex that pretty much everyone with any sort of system of nutrition they've worked out is wrong. Some things are actual poison, sure, but for most things the right balance for the individual is important and what constitutes the right balance for a given individual varies. It also varies just for that individual during their lifetime. For example, some of those "bad" fats you're worried about can actually be great for developing brains.
Developing cognitive abilities in a young child can involve eating a lot of fats that you probably consider unhealthy and would deny to a child on a knee-jerk response.
BMI is meaningless for individuals. It's for statistical studies on populations, when better data than just height and weight isn't available, but for some reason has become popular among many people, including health care professionals. It uses only height and weight as inputs, so it clearly can only give meaningful results in extreme cases. My first introduction the BMI was when I was a kid and my father mentioned that he'd been told (I think it was by a doctor) that his BMI put him into the obese range. This was quite funny because my father was a professional rugby player when he was younger and stayed in shape. People with clearly visible abdominal muscles, no love handles or other visible fat, etc. are obviously not obese. Real professionals use calipers, or other legitimate measurements for individuals and leave gross approximations like BMI to population statistics and then only if better data isn't available.
Depends on the mix, but it generally doesn't fall into the unhealthy camp. Just watch out for too much added sugar. Probably better to just eat an apple and drink water, of course.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home
Sandwhich was turkey and cheese and was made of bread, so that's the meat, the dairy and the grain, and the banana covers the "fruit or vegetables". A reasonable quantity of potato chips isn't unhealthy, and neither is apple juice. Also, the alternate meal that the girl was given apparently consisted of chicken nuggets.
The USDA requirements are a bit of a joke anyway. They're not really based on particularly good dietary science, they mostly conform to politics rather than real nutritional standards. Meat, vegetables and fruit sure, but dairy and grains? They're not necessarily bad for you, but they're also not requirements. Calcium is important, but you can get it in other ways than dairy, and you can certainly get better sugars, proteins and fats from other sources once you're no longer an infant. Pretty much anything you could get from "grains" (which covers a range of things that are mostly nutritionally just carbohydrates) you can get from a larger vegetable serving.
There are certainly meals that can be put together that aren't healthy, but you probably have to put a lot of effort into doing worse than the typical school lunch in the first place. If the mother in the story had sent her child to school with a big cube of liver, a raw brussels sprout and a bottle of beet juice it would have been a lot healthier than the USDA requirements or the school lunch. Her child would probably beg to be taken away by social services, but the meal would be healthy.
Which of the following is there "no danger" of happening to me: 1. Direct meteorite strike 2. Fatal walrus attack 3. Simultaneous spontaneous nuclear decay of every atom in my body
The question there is, does the scientist whose method worked that time and predicted the earthquake get charged with manslaughter as well? After all, if he hadn't made inaccurate predictions so many times in the past, he might have been taken seriously this time.
Who is to blame for the loss of the sheep? The boy who cried wolf, or the townspeople who didn't come to help him fend it off because he'd cried wolf so many times?
Earthquake prediction is hard. It's unsurprising that mistakes happen. Lynching scientists for this sort of thing is not going to make it any better in future. It will just lead all seismologists working in Italy to always predict disaster in the future.
But this isn't a case of your mechanic making a mistake fixing your car. This is the mechanic doing your yearly vehicle inspection going through the checklist and checking everything off as safe based on the guidelines. They didn't find any play on the wheels, or anything the standard guidelines say is a problem. There was a peculiar harmonic vibration similar to, but not exactly the same as, others they've felt before that weren't a problem. They passed the car. The next day, the front wheel fell off on the highway and you die. Now the mechanic faces manslaughter charges because they didn't recognize that the harmonic vibration they felt was indicative of a problem that wasn't on their checklist.
Ok, you're dead. That's not a good thing. You also might have been better off with a better mechanic who would have recognized the sound as a problem and failed your car. Except that there might not be that many mechanics who would have. The sound was very close to sounds that previously never caused a problem. For that matter, it might have been exactly the same, but in this one freak case, it was a problem. It's hard to say because the physical properties and processes in the struts on your car happen to be very complex and still quite poorly understood (if we're going to keep the car analogy applicable to the real situation).
This all does depend on whether the scientists were doing their jobs and not playing politics, of course. If the decision was pure politics, then maybe I'd support action. It's extremely unlikely that's the case, however. It's likely that the scientists felt that there was genuinely little danger. It's an easy prediction to make because 9 times out of 10, it's true.
When an empirical scientist makes a statement like "there is no danger", they mean something like "the level of danger is below threshold X to within margin of error Y". No seismologist would ever seriously say that there's no chance of a serious earthquake even five minutes from now, no matter what all their gathered instrument data and statistics tell them. Statements like "there is no danger" are for public consumption because the public, on the whole, doesn't really have a clue what these people actually do.
This court case is like prosecuting sports commentators for manslaughter because they predicted a victory for the local team, but the local team lost and the crowd rioted and people were killed. Predicting earthquakes that acutely simply isn't their job. Whether they did a good job or not, this trial is a farce. It's just a mob lynching taking place in a courthouse. Some of the heavily publicized (internationally publicized anyway) court cases in Italy recently (such as the Amanda Knox case) seem to fall along those lines. All politics and little real concern for justice, the victims, or the accused.
Those same people usually say that anyone who has debilitating chronic pain is just fine to work and shouldn't be on disability if they don't spend every second of their lives writhing in absolute agony. Usually, those people are devoid of empathy.
Of course the concept of copyright introduces an artificial monopoly. There is always just one party controlling copyright for a particular work. Most commodities can be considered pretty much the same whoever produces them, but there's only one (legal) party producing a particular piece of Whitney Houston music (well, there may be more than one, but they're all licensees of one copyright holder) and one piece of music is not just the same as any other. Proof positive for this is the article in question. Whitney Houston dies, and the price of her music goes up suddenly. That wouldn't happen if it were just another piece of music. So, what we have here is a monopoly player price gouging. Of course, it's a luxury item, not a necessity, and no one is going to open an anti-trust case on this. Basically it's a really scummy move, and it demonstrates why monopolies are bad, but there's nothing much we can do about it except boycott Sony and tell as many people as possible what a horrible company they are. Of course, many of us have already been doing that for years for some of the other stuff they've pulled.
Also, how many people think this move by Sony may not have actually been a conscious choice? This actually seems like it could be the work of an automatic price adjusting algorithm plugged data mining the web. News sites fill up with Whitney Houston's name and some "popularity" index jumps up in a database somewhere. Someone forgot to include a "good taste" or "basic decency" filter, so poof, up go the prices. That doesn't really make it any better, of course. I'm sick to death of explaining to people that the law of supply and demand was an observation of how things tend to be, not a set of instructions people are legally obliged to follow. Also, since the supply is effectively infinite, clearly there's a problem.
That's a pretty good point. This discussion is, after all, not black and white. There can be harmful side effects from vaccines. In the case you mention, the swine flu vaccine Pandermix appears to have a strong link to the development of narcolepsy in some children. Narcolepsy is almost certainly genetic in origin, but studies suggest that it can be triggered by swine flu, so the risk is almost certainly only to certain children who have those risk factors. It does make it likely that children who got the vaccine would have become narcoleptic if they caught swine flu and possibly other influenza variants as well. Whether development of narcolepsy was inevitable at some point regardless of the vaccine is still an open question.
Looked at from a cold clinical perspective, the results of this unfortunate incident may still not be statistically important versus the overall good of vaccination and, in fact, the medical knowledge gained from it might lead, in the long run, to a way to treat or cure narcolepsy. That, of course, is not going to be much comfort to the parents of those children who might have gone years, or maybe their entire lives without developing this illness nor to the children themselves. They will doubtless blame their doctor. The doctor or doctors, who made the decision to advocate for and/or administer the vaccine knowing that there was some risk, but that it was for the greater good, should shoulder the blame. Not because they made a bad decision, but because that's the only moral position to take when acting for the greater good rather than just acting in the patients immediate best interest. It isn't actually fair to doctors since acting for the greater good actually is in the patients best interest statistically, but when vaccines are concerned it's safer not to be vaccinated at all provided that everyone else in the world is. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma sort of thing. The best overall outcome is if everyone takes a fraction of a smaller pool of risk, otherwise the pool of risk is actually greater and everyone is in a lot more danger. There can be those who parasitically take advantage of the risk pooling without risking themselves, but only so many. So, the doctor should shoulder the blame but, since the doctor is acting in the best interests of _all_ patients and society as a whole, society has to help. This is one of those reasons why it's unimaginable that a modern society wouldn't have socialized medicine. Too much cooperation is required for every practitioner to be an island.
As far as Pandermix goes, if dangerous side effects in a certain part of the population have been identified, then they need to stop using it _if_ the risk is greater than the risk of not vaccinating. Then, whether they continue to administer it or not, they need to identify the risk factors as quickly as possible. Then, if they're still vaccinating with it, they should not vaccinate those who test positive for the risk factors and, if they've stopped vaccinating, they need to determine if the test would make it statistically safe enough to continue.
As far as medicine goes, we're at a funny place right now. We're on the cusp of understanding so many things and we have so many treatments and means of diagnosing illness that we've never had before but at the same time we haven't found good ways to automate many of these diagnostic tools or to reduce their cost and there's actually tremendous pressure from some against doing so. As a result, the vast majority of diagnosable illnesses go undiagnosed and many illnesses that could be treated go untreated. Also, many lives which are no longer worth living (or are not being lived in the case of those in vegetative states) are being extended indefinitely with no actual hope of recovery. At the same time, many who would have had no hope in the past can now survive and live normal lives. Most of the downside is probably transitional. Some of those cases (those types of cases, anyway) where people are being kept alive to no good purpose are going to turn into case
A better analogy would be if the entire area were to be bathed in bright yellow light and if the yellow light were there specifically to drive away people who don't like yellow.
Accusing ID software of "plundering" the idea of multi-player deathmatch for Quake III arena is a bit of a stretch. The original _Doom_ had network deathmatch. True, it was far from the first, but they clearly have a history of it before Quake III.
I think you'll find that nearly all people who make such comparisons don't actually want to defend China, they want to shame the US into trying to be better than it is. Also, enjoying hunting was hardly the worst thing Roosevelt did. His support for eugenics programs in the US was hardly admirable.
The US is a pretty bad offender. I'm pretty sure there aren't many nations, however, which would have a problem forcing people out of any area that could be considered "international" into their own jurisdiction when they have someone they want in their clutches.
I will admit that the US is pretty bad. In modern US jurisprudence they've virtually eliminated the concept of jurisdiction. They tend to consider their own citizens subject to US law wherever they go and other countries citizens subject to US law in their own countries. I believe that there are several court cases in the US affirming the right of the US to kidnap people from other countries to face trial in the US. Those are very bad examples to set for the rest of the world and only encourage actions like the one in the article since they leave one of the loudest potential voices for human rights in the world mute.
The way the definitions usually work, a dictatorship is run by a dictator, and a kingdom is run by a king (or some sort of royal). There often may be little functional difference, but there are often big differences in other areas, especially differences of perception. Otherwise most dictators would just declare themselves royalty. That was one of the biggest mistakes Napoleon made. He was already minor nobility, but a good chunk of his political support came from people who were sick to death of royalty, whereas it didn't endear himself much better to people who demanded royalty lead them because they didn't think of him as "true" royalty.
So, for the question of whether Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship or a monarchy, the answer is that it's a monarchy, despite the similarities. Also it's certainly not an absolute monarchy, neither are dictatorships ever absolute dictatorships. Unless we're talking about an island with only one inhabitant, there's always a power balance. It may swing very much towards the monarch or dictator, or more towards the military, influential families or other groups, religious authorities or towards the people themselves. Some "absolute monarchs" spent their entire lives as virtual prisoners.
This is a straw man argument. There is also no chemical process that will allow me to check my email.
But that's the thing, you're wrong. First of all there's very little doubt that a chemical process could be devised by which you could check your e-mail. None needs to be devised to prove the point however, because, when you check your e-mail, you're already taking part in a very complex chemical process that allows you to check your e-mail. Can you think of any part of the process of you checking your e-mail that involves forces or materials not covered in the term "chemical process"? Usage of electricity and fiber-optic transfer of light certainly are.
I had no idea modular exponentiation could be applied to encryption. If nobody else either had noticed this - then why should we not allow somebody to protect their invention?
The reason lies in the definition of the word "invention". Maybe nobody else noticed it, but it's accepted as fact that it was always there to be noticed and will always be there because it's math. Mathematical principles aren't invented, they're discovered. For example, Isaac Newton didn't invent calculus. You might be le to credit him with discovering the principles of calculus and with inventing a certain method of performing calculus, but the actual underlying math, however complex it might be, is viewed as a truth of the universe. Thus it's discovered rather than invented.
Now, it's true that you can stretch that definition of discovery to cover all invention and claim that all invention is just discovery. After all, all the "inventor" is merely discovering that a particular arrangement of the stuff of the universe (energy, matter, time and maybe space, although that might be covered already in the term "arrangement") achieves a particular, desirable end. You could then see that as an argument that everything should be patentable, but that's a false argument since all the original arguments for patents required that they not cover natural truths and only excepted "inventions" because they weren't. So, unless you go back to the beginning of the argument and justify patents from the start, considering discovery and invention to be the same thing invalidates the idea of patents.
Ok, but the software patent doesn't deal with "performing certain actions on electrons in a certain way". You could be moving the electrons around in completely different ways to still achieve the same end goal. Or you could be using a quantum computer, or a DNA-based computer, or a room full of people working on graph paper, or a positron-based computer, or a steam-powered analytical engine. For chemistry, the patent (presumably) only deals with real molecules. It shouldn't, for example, cover running the same process on computer simulated molecules. There might be other things courts would find it applied to though. If it ever became practical to work with anti-matter, and it turns out that chemistry rules work out the same for antimatter, courts might find that the anti-matter equivalent of a normal matter chemical process is covered by the same patent. Maybe if we found particles of some non-baryonic matter that obeyed an analogue of the chemical behaviour of baryonic matter with other other baryonic matter so that the same processes would form compounds with the same structure, just different constituents, courts would find that the same patents apply. Beyond those scenarios though, the underlying materials are important to chemical patterns. There simply aren't things other than standard baryonic matter that we can actually apply the processes too (apart from the simulations).
Slashdot Mirror
The link you provided was about issues with carbohydrates, not fats. I did say that the potato chips provide more carbohydrates (as well as salt) than are probably needed, we're not in disagreement there. But, in moderation, it's not particularly harmful. The effect noted in that abstract also has little to do with cognitive development.
As for "Biochemicals 101", you're right that after exposure to certain chemical conditions and/or heat the fats can be altered. At that point, they're typically referred to as trans-fats. Plenty of food preparation leaves the oil used for cooking unaltered. The Lays I gave the nutritional information for list 0 grams of trans-fats per serving.
There are certainly other sources for those fats. I just cringe every time I see a parent going out of their way to restrict fat in a very young child's diet because they have a knee-jerk reaction that fat is bad. The missing fat almost always gets replaced in the diet by more carbohydrates. Given that, potato chips don't really seem that bad.
The thing about milk is that it's a nutritional formulation specifically intended by nature for infants. Production of milk for infants is pretty much _the_ defining characteristic of mammals. We get our name from the milk producing organs, after all. However, virtually all mammals lose the ability to properly digest some of the principal components of milk as they age. This might actually be an evolutionary feedback effect to wean young and prevent females from being stuck nursing for their entire lives. In any case, most mammals, when they're no longer in early development, are lactose intolerant and drinking milk will cause them distress even if they enjoy it when they're actually drinking it. The discomfort afterwards isn't enough to stop most cats from drinking milk of course, but they're domesticated animals anyway, so their tolerance may be higher than many other mammals. Anyway, humans are pretty exceptional in our tolerance for the stuff, but that's almost certainly an acquired trait, and even among humans, lactose intolerance tends to appear as we age. Also, it's not universal across all humans, lactose intolerance is a lot higher among east Asian populations at much younger ages than most Europeans.
So, milk, or a very good substitute (mother's milk is always preferable when possible for reasons beyond just nutrition) is necessary for infants because that's what it's designed for. It's not necessary for older children or for adults. It contains helpful nutrients, but you can get them in plenty of other ways.
That said, milk and dairy products are delicious. I like all kinds of cheeses and yogurts and ice creams, etc. I'll keep on enjoying them for as long as I can. I just don't insist on them as a necessary part of a diet, because they're not.
As for what kids will be better off drinking. Water works for me. Pretty much all I drink is either water or milk (whole with or without chocolate). Beyond that, grape juice isn't too bad if it has to be sweet to get them to stay hydrated. Also, as much as people complain about sweetened drinks, sodium-glucose transport means that sweetened drinks with a touch of salt hydrate best. As long as they're flavored with dextrose (which is just glucose) or sucrose (breaks down into dextrose and fructose) but preferably not with just fructose. If a drink can be used as a way to get vitamins into a kid that won't eat fruits or vegatables or anything else with vitamins, then the benefits could outweigh the negatives.
It's my understanding that "no danger" is a translated and possibly paraphrased version of what a mouthpiece said to the press and that what the mouthpiece said was a paraphrased version of what the scientists said. If someone can show a well-translated transcript of exactly what was said in their meetings, I might feel differently, but until then, it looks a lot like they're being lynched for nothing. The people of Aquila are just making a human sacrifice to the earthquake gods.
I've now read the article you linked to after writing the previous paragraph and one bit stands out to me: "others see the case as an indictment of the obfuscating, probabilistic language with which scientists characterize the uncertain potential of natural disasters." So, essentially, the seismologists are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They can either explain the risk factors in clear probabilistic terms which the public considers to be "obfuscating", or thy can say things like "no danger", which was not actually a direct statement from the scientists anyway, and was said after multiple tremors a day for months on end and before the 3.9 hit a few hours before the big one. When the 3.9 hit, the seismologists were almost certainly already working on a new assessment of the situation.
It looks like the sorts of things the scientists actually said were:
"It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in 1703 could occur in the short term, but the possibility cannot be totally excluded."
and:
"If you live in L'Aquila, even if there's no swarm, you can never say, 'No problem.' You can never say that in a high-risk region."
It looks like the "no danger" statements were coming from Bernardo De Bernardinis, who is a hydraulic engineer by training, not a seismologist, and was the Vice Director of the Department of Civil Protection. Clearly the "no danger" statement shouldn't have been taken at face value since the area was known to be dangerous and the buildings were known to be deathtraps in an earthquake. Clearly the recent events didn't somehow make the area safer, so the statement should have been something more like "there's no extraordinary new danger".
Oh, absolutely. The health of the agricultural economy is their over-riding concern. Not that they don't have nutritionists who may give good recommendations, but they have another agenda and it influences their recommendations. When those recommendations end up being enforced as the _only_ healthy option, there's a problem.
Yes. The brain is about two thirds fat. Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated facts contribute heavily to brain development. A typical serving of Lays contains 2.5 grams of polyunsaturated fat and 5 grams of monounsaturated fat and 0 grams of trans fats and 1 gram of saturated fat. Now, you may get more carbohydrate and sodium than you should from eating too much in the way of chips, but they're not really inherently unhealthy in and of themselves. The salt and most of the fat are, in fact, necessary nutrients, they're just a problem if they're overdone. For a developing child, a high natural fat diet is usually not a bad thing as long as it doesn't lead to bad habits when they get older.
Nutrition is a complex subject though. Very complex. So complex that pretty much everyone with any sort of system of nutrition they've worked out is wrong. Some things are actual poison, sure, but for most things the right balance for the individual is important and what constitutes the right balance for a given individual varies. It also varies just for that individual during their lifetime. For example, some of those "bad" fats you're worried about can actually be great for developing brains.
Developing cognitive abilities in a young child can involve eating a lot of fats that you probably consider unhealthy and would deny to a child on a knee-jerk response.
BMI is meaningless for individuals. It's for statistical studies on populations, when better data than just height and weight isn't available, but for some reason has become popular among many people, including health care professionals. It uses only height and weight as inputs, so it clearly can only give meaningful results in extreme cases. My first introduction the BMI was when I was a kid and my father mentioned that he'd been told (I think it was by a doctor) that his BMI put him into the obese range. This was quite funny because my father was a professional rugby player when he was younger and stayed in shape. People with clearly visible abdominal muscles, no love handles or other visible fat, etc. are obviously not obese. Real professionals use calipers, or other legitimate measurements for individuals and leave gross approximations like BMI to population statistics and then only if better data isn't available.
Depends on the mix, but it generally doesn't fall into the unhealthy camp. Just watch out for too much added sugar. Probably better to just eat an apple and drink water, of course.
From the article:
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home
Sandwhich was turkey and cheese and was made of bread, so that's the meat, the dairy and the grain, and the banana covers the "fruit or vegetables". A reasonable quantity of potato chips isn't unhealthy, and neither is apple juice. Also, the alternate meal that the girl was given apparently consisted of chicken nuggets.
The USDA requirements are a bit of a joke anyway. They're not really based on particularly good dietary science, they mostly conform to politics rather than real nutritional standards. Meat, vegetables and fruit sure, but dairy and grains? They're not necessarily bad for you, but they're also not requirements. Calcium is important, but you can get it in other ways than dairy, and you can certainly get better sugars, proteins and fats from other sources once you're no longer an infant. Pretty much anything you could get from "grains" (which covers a range of things that are mostly nutritionally just carbohydrates) you can get from a larger vegetable serving.
There are certainly meals that can be put together that aren't healthy, but you probably have to put a lot of effort into doing worse than the typical school lunch in the first place. If the mother in the story had sent her child to school with a big cube of liver, a raw brussels sprout and a bottle of beet juice it would have been a lot healthier than the USDA requirements or the school lunch. Her child would probably beg to be taken away by social services, but the meal would be healthy.
Which of the following is there "no danger" of happening to me:
1. Direct meteorite strike
2. Fatal walrus attack
3. Simultaneous spontaneous nuclear decay of every atom in my body
The question there is, does the scientist whose method worked that time and predicted the earthquake get charged with manslaughter as well? After all, if he hadn't made inaccurate predictions so many times in the past, he might have been taken seriously this time.
Who is to blame for the loss of the sheep? The boy who cried wolf, or the townspeople who didn't come to help him fend it off because he'd cried wolf so many times?
Earthquake prediction is hard. It's unsurprising that mistakes happen. Lynching scientists for this sort of thing is not going to make it any better in future. It will just lead all seismologists working in Italy to always predict disaster in the future.
But this isn't a case of your mechanic making a mistake fixing your car. This is the mechanic doing your yearly vehicle inspection going through the checklist and checking everything off as safe based on the guidelines. They didn't find any play on the wheels, or anything the standard guidelines say is a problem. There was a peculiar harmonic vibration similar to, but not exactly the same as, others they've felt before that weren't a problem. They passed the car. The next day, the front wheel fell off on the highway and you die. Now the mechanic faces manslaughter charges because they didn't recognize that the harmonic vibration they felt was indicative of a problem that wasn't on their checklist.
Ok, you're dead. That's not a good thing. You also might have been better off with a better mechanic who would have recognized the sound as a problem and failed your car. Except that there might not be that many mechanics who would have. The sound was very close to sounds that previously never caused a problem. For that matter, it might have been exactly the same, but in this one freak case, it was a problem. It's hard to say because the physical properties and processes in the struts on your car happen to be very complex and still quite poorly understood (if we're going to keep the car analogy applicable to the real situation).
This all does depend on whether the scientists were doing their jobs and not playing politics, of course. If the decision was pure politics, then maybe I'd support action. It's extremely unlikely that's the case, however. It's likely that the scientists felt that there was genuinely little danger. It's an easy prediction to make because 9 times out of 10, it's true.
When an empirical scientist makes a statement like "there is no danger", they mean something like "the level of danger is below threshold X to within margin of error Y". No seismologist would ever seriously say that there's no chance of a serious earthquake even five minutes from now, no matter what all their gathered instrument data and statistics tell them. Statements like "there is no danger" are for public consumption because the public, on the whole, doesn't really have a clue what these people actually do.
This court case is like prosecuting sports commentators for manslaughter because they predicted a victory for the local team, but the local team lost and the crowd rioted and people were killed. Predicting earthquakes that acutely simply isn't their job. Whether they did a good job or not, this trial is a farce. It's just a mob lynching taking place in a courthouse. Some of the heavily publicized (internationally publicized anyway) court cases in Italy recently (such as the Amanda Knox case) seem to fall along those lines. All politics and little real concern for justice, the victims, or the accused.
Those same people usually say that anyone who has debilitating chronic pain is just fine to work and shouldn't be on disability if they don't spend every second of their lives writhing in absolute agony. Usually, those people are devoid of empathy.
Of course the concept of copyright introduces an artificial monopoly. There is always just one party controlling copyright for a particular work. Most commodities can be considered pretty much the same whoever produces them, but there's only one (legal) party producing a particular piece of Whitney Houston music (well, there may be more than one, but they're all licensees of one copyright holder) and one piece of music is not just the same as any other. Proof positive for this is the article in question. Whitney Houston dies, and the price of her music goes up suddenly. That wouldn't happen if it were just another piece of music. So, what we have here is a monopoly player price gouging. Of course, it's a luxury item, not a necessity, and no one is going to open an anti-trust case on this. Basically it's a really scummy move, and it demonstrates why monopolies are bad, but there's nothing much we can do about it except boycott Sony and tell as many people as possible what a horrible company they are. Of course, many of us have already been doing that for years for some of the other stuff they've pulled.
Also, how many people think this move by Sony may not have actually been a conscious choice? This actually seems like it could be the work of an automatic price adjusting algorithm plugged data mining the web. News sites fill up with Whitney Houston's name and some "popularity" index jumps up in a database somewhere. Someone forgot to include a "good taste" or "basic decency" filter, so poof, up go the prices. That doesn't really make it any better, of course. I'm sick to death of explaining to people that the law of supply and demand was an observation of how things tend to be, not a set of instructions people are legally obliged to follow. Also, since the supply is effectively infinite, clearly there's a problem.
That's a pretty good point. This discussion is, after all, not black and white. There can be harmful side effects from vaccines. In the case you mention, the swine flu vaccine Pandermix appears to have a strong link to the development of narcolepsy in some children. Narcolepsy is almost certainly genetic in origin, but studies suggest that it can be triggered by swine flu, so the risk is almost certainly only to certain children who have those risk factors. It does make it likely that children who got the vaccine would have become narcoleptic if they caught swine flu and possibly other influenza variants as well. Whether development of narcolepsy was inevitable at some point regardless of the vaccine is still an open question.
Looked at from a cold clinical perspective, the results of this unfortunate incident may still not be statistically important versus the overall good of vaccination and, in fact, the medical knowledge gained from it might lead, in the long run, to a way to treat or cure narcolepsy. That, of course, is not going to be much comfort to the parents of those children who might have gone years, or maybe their entire lives without developing this illness nor to the children themselves. They will doubtless blame their doctor. The doctor or doctors, who made the decision to advocate for and/or administer the vaccine knowing that there was some risk, but that it was for the greater good, should shoulder the blame. Not because they made a bad decision, but because that's the only moral position to take when acting for the greater good rather than just acting in the patients immediate best interest. It isn't actually fair to doctors since acting for the greater good actually is in the patients best interest statistically, but when vaccines are concerned it's safer not to be vaccinated at all provided that everyone else in the world is. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma sort of thing. The best overall outcome is if everyone takes a fraction of a smaller pool of risk, otherwise the pool of risk is actually greater and everyone is in a lot more danger. There can be those who parasitically take advantage of the risk pooling without risking themselves, but only so many. So, the doctor should shoulder the blame but, since the doctor is acting in the best interests of _all_ patients and society as a whole, society has to help. This is one of those reasons why it's unimaginable that a modern society wouldn't have socialized medicine. Too much cooperation is required for every practitioner to be an island.
As far as Pandermix goes, if dangerous side effects in a certain part of the population have been identified, then they need to stop using it _if_ the risk is greater than the risk of not vaccinating. Then, whether they continue to administer it or not, they need to identify the risk factors as quickly as possible. Then, if they're still vaccinating with it, they should not vaccinate those who test positive for the risk factors and, if they've stopped vaccinating, they need to determine if the test would make it statistically safe enough to continue.
As far as medicine goes, we're at a funny place right now. We're on the cusp of understanding so many things and we have so many treatments and means of diagnosing illness that we've never had before but at the same time we haven't found good ways to automate many of these diagnostic tools or to reduce their cost and there's actually tremendous pressure from some against doing so. As a result, the vast majority of diagnosable illnesses go undiagnosed and many illnesses that could be treated go untreated. Also, many lives which are no longer worth living (or are not being lived in the case of those in vegetative states) are being extended indefinitely with no actual hope of recovery. At the same time, many who would have had no hope in the past can now survive and live normal lives. Most of the downside is probably transitional. Some of those cases (those types of cases, anyway) where people are being kept alive to no good purpose are going to turn into case
A better analogy would be if the entire area were to be bathed in bright yellow light and if the yellow light were there specifically to drive away people who don't like yellow.
Accusing ID software of "plundering" the idea of multi-player deathmatch for Quake III arena is a bit of a stretch. The original _Doom_ had network deathmatch. True, it was far from the first, but they clearly have a history of it before Quake III.
I think you'll find that nearly all people who make such comparisons don't actually want to defend China, they want to shame the US into trying to be better than it is. Also, enjoying hunting was hardly the worst thing Roosevelt did. His support for eugenics programs in the US was hardly admirable.
The US is a pretty bad offender. I'm pretty sure there aren't many nations, however, which would have a problem forcing people out of any area that could be considered "international" into their own jurisdiction when they have someone they want in their clutches.
I will admit that the US is pretty bad. In modern US jurisprudence they've virtually eliminated the concept of jurisdiction. They tend to consider their own citizens subject to US law wherever they go and other countries citizens subject to US law in their own countries. I believe that there are several court cases in the US affirming the right of the US to kidnap people from other countries to face trial in the US. Those are very bad examples to set for the rest of the world and only encourage actions like the one in the article since they leave one of the loudest potential voices for human rights in the world mute.
The way the definitions usually work, a dictatorship is run by a dictator, and a kingdom is run by a king (or some sort of royal). There often may be little functional difference, but there are often big differences in other areas, especially differences of perception. Otherwise most dictators would just declare themselves royalty. That was one of the biggest mistakes Napoleon made. He was already minor nobility, but a good chunk of his political support came from people who were sick to death of royalty, whereas it didn't endear himself much better to people who demanded royalty lead them because they didn't think of him as "true" royalty.
So, for the question of whether Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship or a monarchy, the answer is that it's a monarchy, despite the similarities. Also it's certainly not an absolute monarchy, neither are dictatorships ever absolute dictatorships. Unless we're talking about an island with only one inhabitant, there's always a power balance. It may swing very much towards the monarch or dictator, or more towards the military, influential families or other groups, religious authorities or towards the people themselves. Some "absolute monarchs" spent their entire lives as virtual prisoners.
This is a straw man argument. There is also no chemical process that will allow me to check my email.
But that's the thing, you're wrong. First of all there's very little doubt that a chemical process could be devised by which you could check your e-mail. None needs to be devised to prove the point however, because, when you check your e-mail, you're already taking part in a very complex chemical process that allows you to check your e-mail. Can you think of any part of the process of you checking your e-mail that involves forces or materials not covered in the term "chemical process"? Usage of electricity and fiber-optic transfer of light certainly are.
I had no idea modular exponentiation could be applied to encryption. If nobody else either had noticed this - then why should we not allow somebody to protect their invention?
The reason lies in the definition of the word "invention". Maybe nobody else noticed it, but it's accepted as fact that it was always there to be noticed and will always be there because it's math. Mathematical principles aren't invented, they're discovered. For example, Isaac Newton didn't invent calculus. You might be le to credit him with discovering the principles of calculus and with inventing a certain method of performing calculus, but the actual underlying math, however complex it might be, is viewed as a truth of the universe. Thus it's discovered rather than invented.
Now, it's true that you can stretch that definition of discovery to cover all invention and claim that all invention is just discovery. After all, all the "inventor" is merely discovering that a particular arrangement of the stuff of the universe (energy, matter, time and maybe space, although that might be covered already in the term "arrangement") achieves a particular, desirable end. You could then see that as an argument that everything should be patentable, but that's a false argument since all the original arguments for patents required that they not cover natural truths and only excepted "inventions" because they weren't. So, unless you go back to the beginning of the argument and justify patents from the start, considering discovery and invention to be the same thing invalidates the idea of patents.
Ok, but the software patent doesn't deal with "performing certain actions on electrons in a certain way". You could be moving the electrons around in completely different ways to still achieve the same end goal. Or you could be using a quantum computer, or a DNA-based computer, or a room full of people working on graph paper, or a positron-based computer, or a steam-powered analytical engine. For chemistry, the patent (presumably) only deals with real molecules. It shouldn't, for example, cover running the same process on computer simulated molecules. There might be other things courts would find it applied to though. If it ever became practical to work with anti-matter, and it turns out that chemistry rules work out the same for antimatter, courts might find that the anti-matter equivalent of a normal matter chemical process is covered by the same patent. Maybe if we found particles of some non-baryonic matter that obeyed an analogue of the chemical behaviour of baryonic matter with other other baryonic matter so that the same processes would form compounds with the same structure, just different constituents, courts would find that the same patents apply. Beyond those scenarios though, the underlying materials are important to chemical patterns. There simply aren't things other than standard baryonic matter that we can actually apply the processes too (apart from the simulations).