The Romans came up with the idea of building stuff out of brick faced, marble veneered concrete rather than solid blocks of dressed marble. The result looked the same as the solid blocks of dressed marble the Greeks used, but cost only a fraction of the price. They then took the savings and plowed it into building on a monumental scale.
It's pretty clear: without their awesome concrete, Ancient Rome wouldn't be Rome. Each of its million inhabitants received over a cubic meter of water a day, supplied by concrete aqueducts. Most of them were housed in high rise apartment blocks typically five or in some cases eight stories in height -- which if made from brick would have required walls two meters thick at the base. They were entertained in "baths" -- what we'd call today a health club -- up to 100,000 m^2 in area and large enough to serve three thousand guests at a time. Marble veneered concrete construction allowed those huge gymnasium complexes to be built in just a few years. The Baths of Diocletian took just eight years to build, and 1700 years later house part of the National Roman Museum.
Don't underestimate how tough and smart someone like Xi or Putin has to be to get where he was, just because his values are alien. These men are not the scion of the hereditary ruling dynasty, they're the end result of merciless political natural selection. You can beat them, but not through intimidation or bullshitting them into submission.
That's not just counting your chickens before they're hatched; it's more like counting your chickens before they've evolved.
This is like peace in the Middle East. Every generation or so there's an outbreak of hope that inevitably founders on the fact that parties that need to participate depend on conflict for their political legitimacy. That's North Korea in a nutshell.
Now I wish Trump well in this; he may not be the person I'd want across the negotiating table from Xi Jinping, but Kim Jong Un... that's just crazy enough it might work... a little bit, for a while.
Every person in charge of acquiring new material for a big media company is always on the lookout for the same thing, only different. That's because the financial backers have two, largely mutually exclusive goals: guaranteed audiences and a runaway hit. In economic terms they're looking for an investment with higher than normal returns for its risk.
That's why pop culture is so clogged with retreads. It's only a matter of time before we see Star Trek: With Tits.
Now I happen to know more about publishing than movie making, so I'll focus on that for a moment. New authors submit their manuscripts on spec to agents and publisher acquisition editors. These agents and editors are usually pretty sharp, but that makes their time valuable. So someone like an intern has to wade through the "slush pile". It's a horrible job because 99.9% of the slushpile is pure rubbish.
What the slushpile reader does for hours on end is skim the first page, and toss, skim the first page, and toss. The first page is about ten lines of text in standard manuscript format. But if an algorithm could make the first cut, it would be able to examine entire manuscripts for the desired combination of (a) resemblance to past hits and (b) differences from recently published books, winnowing hundreds or thousands of manuscripts down to a couple dozen candidates fit for human eyes.
The exact same process could be used for movie or TV spec scripts. American broadcast TV shows often have a problem ginning up enough story ideas to fill an entire season, but accepting spec scripts means someone has to deal with the slushpile. So there's usually a couple of writers-don't-have-any-ideas episodes each season. If you could process a couple of thousand spec scripts and pick a dozen candidates that fit the show, you might find an idea you could use.
Try this and see if the symptoms go away is the best choice in many cases. The doctor *could* treat a minor injury that will heal itself with steroids, but it's not worth the risk.
Most things people complain are best left to get better on their own. Or they require interventions that people don't want to go along with. People don't want to restrict calories, they want a magic pill that makes the pounds melt away. There are drug treatments that will do that, but they're dangerous enough that gastric bypass surgery is a less radical choice.
If traditional medicine "actually worked", as you put it, people wouldn't need to desperately search for alternatives.
Just 'sayin...
If you find a lump on your testicle, I highly recommend you show it to an oncologist rather than a witch-doctor. Even metastasized testicular cancer has a survival rate of 73% with modern treatments; early stage cancer survival rates are close to 100%.
On the other hand, if you have stage IV pancreatic cancer, by all means consult the witch doctor. At the very least he's got as good a shot as anyone at treating the existential dimension of what you're going through.
The fact that medicine acknowledges that it can't do everything is the reason it advances so rapidly. Witch-doctoring traditions also improve over time, to the point that healing traditions are well worth looking into for scientists, but what science does in years takes generations of trial and error.
Well, the man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one.:)
I'll take your points one by one.
(1) Taurine and Tyrosine are both stimulants, and stimulants are the one class of substances that have strong evidence supporting them. However my point is that it's debatable whether they actually make your brain better. They unquestionably are useful in forcing your brain to do things it doesn't want to do.
(2) The notion that nootropics are far-fetched is simply an evaluation of plausibility -- similar to the notion that oxygen free speaker cables make your stereo sound better. If you could devise a double-blind study which showed people could hear the difference, then I'd be delighted to endorse your claims.
(3) Sure; not knowing how something works doesn't prove it can't work. But if you don't have proof that something works, shouldn't you at least have an argument for why it's a plausible that it might work? The evidence for most putative nootropics is that they have been shown promising for treating various forms of dementia. But a drug which helps with the cognitive side effects of Parkinson's isn't necessarily going to make a healthy person smarter. That's like claiming a non-amputee can run faster by strapping a wooden leg to his knee. So if you want to claim that drug makes ordinary people smarter you need either proof or at least show that the mechanism of action is relevant to healthy people.
Medical research: medical science stagnating for the last 30 years: tell that to someone who has cancer. This is simply the adult version of lack of object permanence; just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean nothing is happening.
a) Reputation is a lousy guide to supplements because the whole industry runs on hype, hope, and moving onto the next thing when people discover that chromium picolinate can't really make the pounds "melt away". Given wishful thinking, it takes a long time to undo the hype, and by then you've gone through two or three next big things.
b) Studies are a lousy way for a layman to judge something is effective, which is why marketers love to cite them. You can prove almost anything by citing -- unchallenged -- carefully chosen studies because science produces spurious, one-off results all the time. The gold standard for evidence is a systematic review paper published in a high impact scientific journal. Point to one of those supporting a putative nootropic, and I'm there.
c) Recommendations by on-line doctors: Now I'm suspecting that you must be writing a parody.
d) testimonials: this is just point (a) reiterated.
e) Product maturity: this is actually a good piece of advice.
The use of nootropics by engineering types reminds me very much of the use of "supplements" by body builders. There actually are things that work -- in fact there's a remarkable amount of overlap in the things mental and physical jocks need to do to maximize performance. Get plenty of high quality sleep. Good diet. Daily exercise. Caffeine. In fact if you include coffee and tea, the use of nootropics is nearly universal among desk workers.
The marketing of nootropic products to mental jocks looking for an edge is remarkably similar to the snake oil marketing aimed at athletes. Take a substance where an (typically very minor) effect has been seen in a couple of studies and conflate evidence with proof. Now if you think about what the brain is, the idea that there is a single non-food molecule that will make it work better is pretty-far fetched. What exactly is this magical formula supposed to be doing in the brain? And by "exact", I mean which specific brain structures are being changed and how? The answer is, usually, nobody knows, but they have some promising studies, or sometimes just a single promising study.
Here's the thing about complex systems like the brain, or the troposphere for that matter: they are rich sources of contradictory evidence and statistical outliers. A single study or even a handful of studies is evidence, but it's not proof.
Now for bodybuilding there are two, or maybe three supplements that are safe and have evidence for useful effect, but I'd argue that there are unlikely to be any true nootropic compounds. That include caffeine. People use caffeine to offset the effects of inadequate sleep and meals heavy on refined carbohydrates that trigger insulin brain fogs. They also use caffeine to interfere with a natural brain function that promotes our survival: boredom. Boredom evolved so you don't waste too much time on things that aren't going to get you fed or laid in the near future -- a category of tasks that includes most desk work. So in a way, caffeine is actually an anti-nootropic.
In 1961 US Army converted an old Liberty ship called the SS Charles H Cugle into a floating power plant back in 1961, pretty much with exactly the purpose: to provide a mobile electricity generation station for remote areas. The newly renamed MH-1A Sturgis was towed to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975, then mothballed.
The Russian project is much more powerful, employing a pair of nuclear icebreaker reactors to generate a total of 140 MW, 14x the power of the old Sturgis. to obtain this kind of power in a compact ship-borne package, the KLT-40 reactors use nearly more highly enriched uranium than is typical in land based reactors: 40% to 90% rather than 3%-5%.
But you can use someone else's trademarks when they refer to the actual goods, and in this case the goods the customer is interested in is the software itself.
What I find curious is that they intend to take in 7 million gallons and then discharge 4.3 million gallons of treated wastewater. Why not recycle that 4.3 million gallons and take in only the 2.7 million gallons lost to evaporation?
I have to conclude that the discharge water is too contaminated for the plant to use in its own processes. That might not be an environmental deal-breaker; dilution plus degradation of the contaminants may well result in negligible environmental impact. But that's certainly what I'd be looking at if I had the authority to permit or deny the discharge.
Of course regulators can only enforce the law. If the law permits discharging water contaminated this way then it's up to the factory, which will choose the cheapest legal approach.
Slashdot Mirror
A BSCS only gets you to the foothills of that particular mountain range.
The Romans came up with the idea of building stuff out of brick faced, marble veneered concrete rather than solid blocks of dressed marble. The result looked the same as the solid blocks of dressed marble the Greeks used, but cost only a fraction of the price. They then took the savings and plowed it into building on a monumental scale.
It's pretty clear: without their awesome concrete, Ancient Rome wouldn't be Rome. Each of its million inhabitants received over a cubic meter of water a day, supplied by concrete aqueducts. Most of them were housed in high rise apartment blocks typically five or in some cases eight stories in height -- which if made from brick would have required walls two meters thick at the base. They were entertained in "baths" -- what we'd call today a health club -- up to 100,000 m^2 in area and large enough to serve three thousand guests at a time. Marble veneered concrete construction allowed those huge gymnasium complexes to be built in just a few years. The Baths of Diocletian took just eight years to build, and 1700 years later house part of the National Roman Museum.
While it does sound like bullshit, I wouldn't necessarily assume a social scientist, particularly a young one, doesn't have any IT skills.
A "glitch" is something that happens to you. This was something Twitter did to itself.
Don't underestimate how tough and smart someone like Xi or Putin has to be to get where he was, just because his values are alien. These men are not the scion of the hereditary ruling dynasty, they're the end result of merciless political natural selection. You can beat them, but not through intimidation or bullshitting them into submission.
Stimulants, every last one.
You can't discuss anything political these days without feeding a few trolls.
You don know the Art of the Deal was ghostwritten.
That just goes to show how clever Trump is!
Indeed. I'd put him on a level with Gwyneth Paltrow.
You don know the Art of the Deal was ghostwritten.
Yeah, and more of them.
That's not just counting your chickens before they're hatched; it's more like counting your chickens before they've evolved.
This is like peace in the Middle East. Every generation or so there's an outbreak of hope that inevitably founders on the fact that parties that need to participate depend on conflict for their political legitimacy. That's North Korea in a nutshell.
Now I wish Trump well in this; he may not be the person I'd want across the negotiating table from Xi Jinping, but Kim Jong Un... that's just crazy enough it might work... a little bit, for a while.
Well, people are voting with their feet -- or at least their dollars.
Every person in charge of acquiring new material for a big media company is always on the lookout for the same thing, only different. That's because the financial backers have two, largely mutually exclusive goals: guaranteed audiences and a runaway hit. In economic terms they're looking for an investment with higher than normal returns for its risk.
That's why pop culture is so clogged with retreads. It's only a matter of time before we see Star Trek: With Tits.
Now I happen to know more about publishing than movie making, so I'll focus on that for a moment. New authors submit their manuscripts on spec to agents and publisher acquisition editors. These agents and editors are usually pretty sharp, but that makes their time valuable. So someone like an intern has to wade through the "slush pile". It's a horrible job because 99.9% of the slushpile is pure rubbish.
What the slushpile reader does for hours on end is skim the first page, and toss, skim the first page, and toss. The first page is about ten lines of text in standard manuscript format. But if an algorithm could make the first cut, it would be able to examine entire manuscripts for the desired combination of (a) resemblance to past hits and (b) differences from recently published books, winnowing hundreds or thousands of manuscripts down to a couple dozen candidates fit for human eyes.
The exact same process could be used for movie or TV spec scripts. American broadcast TV shows often have a problem ginning up enough story ideas to fill an entire season, but accepting spec scripts means someone has to deal with the slushpile. So there's usually a couple of writers-don't-have-any-ideas episodes each season. If you could process a couple of thousand spec scripts and pick a dozen candidates that fit the show, you might find an idea you could use.
Try this and see if the symptoms go away is the best choice in many cases. The doctor *could* treat a minor injury that will heal itself with steroids, but it's not worth the risk.
Most things people complain are best left to get better on their own. Or they require interventions that people don't want to go along with. People don't want to restrict calories, they want a magic pill that makes the pounds melt away. There are drug treatments that will do that, but they're dangerous enough that gastric bypass surgery is a less radical choice.
If traditional medicine "actually worked", as you put it, people wouldn't need to desperately search for alternatives.
Just 'sayin...
If you find a lump on your testicle, I highly recommend you show it to an oncologist rather than a witch-doctor. Even metastasized testicular cancer has a survival rate of 73% with modern treatments; early stage cancer survival rates are close to 100%.
On the other hand, if you have stage IV pancreatic cancer, by all means consult the witch doctor. At the very least he's got as good a shot as anyone at treating the existential dimension of what you're going through.
The fact that medicine acknowledges that it can't do everything is the reason it advances so rapidly. Witch-doctoring traditions also improve over time, to the point that healing traditions are well worth looking into for scientists, but what science does in years takes generations of trial and error.
I'm not really against the concept of nootropics, I'm just against trusting marketers to solve your problems for you.
Well, the man more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. :)
I'll take your points one by one.
(1) Taurine and Tyrosine are both stimulants, and stimulants are the one class of substances that have strong evidence supporting them. However my point is that it's debatable whether they actually make your brain better. They unquestionably are useful in forcing your brain to do things it doesn't want to do.
(2) The notion that nootropics are far-fetched is simply an evaluation of plausibility -- similar to the notion that oxygen free speaker cables make your stereo sound better. If you could devise a double-blind study which showed people could hear the difference, then I'd be delighted to endorse your claims.
(3) Sure; not knowing how something works doesn't prove it can't work. But if you don't have proof that something works, shouldn't you at least have an argument for why it's a plausible that it might work? The evidence for most putative nootropics is that they have been shown promising for treating various forms of dementia. But a drug which helps with the cognitive side effects of Parkinson's isn't necessarily going to make a healthy person smarter. That's like claiming a non-amputee can run faster by strapping a wooden leg to his knee. So if you want to claim that drug makes ordinary people smarter you need either proof or at least show that the mechanism of action is relevant to healthy people.
Medical research: medical science stagnating for the last 30 years: tell that to someone who has cancer. This is simply the adult version of lack of object permanence; just because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean nothing is happening.
a) Reputation is a lousy guide to supplements because the whole industry runs on hype, hope, and moving onto the next thing when people discover that chromium picolinate can't really make the pounds "melt away". Given wishful thinking, it takes a long time to undo the hype, and by then you've gone through two or three next big things.
b) Studies are a lousy way for a layman to judge something is effective, which is why marketers love to cite them. You can prove almost anything by citing -- unchallenged -- carefully chosen studies because science produces spurious, one-off results all the time. The gold standard for evidence is a systematic review paper published in a high impact scientific journal. Point to one of those supporting a putative nootropic, and I'm there.
c) Recommendations by on-line doctors: Now I'm suspecting that you must be writing a parody.
d) testimonials: this is just point (a) reiterated.
e) Product maturity: this is actually a good piece of advice.
The use of nootropics by engineering types reminds me very much of the use of "supplements" by body builders. There actually are things that work -- in fact there's a remarkable amount of overlap in the things mental and physical jocks need to do to maximize performance. Get plenty of high quality sleep. Good diet. Daily exercise. Caffeine. In fact if you include coffee and tea, the use of nootropics is nearly universal among desk workers.
The marketing of nootropic products to mental jocks looking for an edge is remarkably similar to the snake oil marketing aimed at athletes. Take a substance where an (typically very minor) effect has been seen in a couple of studies and conflate evidence with proof. Now if you think about what the brain is, the idea that there is a single non-food molecule that will make it work better is pretty-far fetched. What exactly is this magical formula supposed to be doing in the brain? And by "exact", I mean which specific brain structures are being changed and how? The answer is, usually, nobody knows, but they have some promising studies, or sometimes just a single promising study.
Here's the thing about complex systems like the brain, or the troposphere for that matter: they are rich sources of contradictory evidence and statistical outliers. A single study or even a handful of studies is evidence, but it's not proof.
Now for bodybuilding there are two, or maybe three supplements that are safe and have evidence for useful effect, but I'd argue that there are unlikely to be any true nootropic compounds. That include caffeine. People use caffeine to offset the effects of inadequate sleep and meals heavy on refined carbohydrates that trigger insulin brain fogs. They also use caffeine to interfere with a natural brain function that promotes our survival: boredom. Boredom evolved so you don't waste too much time on things that aren't going to get you fed or laid in the near future -- a category of tasks that includes most desk work. So in a way, caffeine is actually an anti-nootropic.
In 1961 US Army converted an old Liberty ship called the SS Charles H Cugle into a floating power plant back in 1961, pretty much with exactly the purpose: to provide a mobile electricity generation station for remote areas. The newly renamed MH-1A Sturgis was towed to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975, then mothballed.
The Russian project is much more powerful, employing a pair of nuclear icebreaker reactors to generate a total of 140 MW, 14x the power of the old Sturgis. to obtain this kind of power in a compact ship-borne package, the KLT-40 reactors use nearly more highly enriched uranium than is typical in land based reactors: 40% to 90% rather than 3%-5%.
Well, people being sheep was given, but what all this proves is that social media companies are wolves.
Apparently this one.
But you can use someone else's trademarks when they refer to the actual goods, and in this case the goods the customer is interested in is the software itself.
What I find curious is that they intend to take in 7 million gallons and then discharge 4.3 million gallons of treated wastewater. Why not recycle that 4.3 million gallons and take in only the 2.7 million gallons lost to evaporation?
I have to conclude that the discharge water is too contaminated for the plant to use in its own processes. That might not be an environmental deal-breaker; dilution plus degradation of the contaminants may well result in negligible environmental impact. But that's certainly what I'd be looking at if I had the authority to permit or deny the discharge.
Of course regulators can only enforce the law. If the law permits discharging water contaminated this way then it's up to the factory, which will choose the cheapest legal approach.
Or if you want to be able to power the thing up quickly, say to take a second shot.
Well, sure. But why should anyone care?