Lane discipline (or a lack thereof) is responsible for most accidents, which is why law enforcement's obsession with speeding is so obnoxious. The fact that police would rather be sitting on the side of the road clocking for speeders (because it's easy and hard to contest in court) and ignoring all of the inattentive drivers changing lanes without looking or signaling, failing to yield the passing lane and encouraging passing on the right, and so on is a damn shame.
Don't all of the autonomous cars plan to dump control back to the human when they can't handle a situation? How many seconds before a fatal incident will the car have to return control to the human for the courts to side with the manufacturer that the car was not driving autonomously (at the moment of the incident)? Will the fact that the human is asleep or reading a book and not able to react quickly enough figure into that time?
Negotiation is fine and dandy, but agreeing to be charged with, and plead guilty to, a crime that both you and the prosecutor know that you didn't commit in order to avoid being tried for a crime that the prosecutor suspects that you actually did commit makes a mockery of the justice system.
Clinton is solidly establishment, pro-corporate-worldwide-hegemony, so as "a foreigner who doesn't even live in the US", expect to see a LOT more TTP, TTIP, and the like rammed down your throats (with the appropriate "motivation" for your governments to sign them and sell you out). If you liked the foreign policies of Bush and Obama, you'll like those of Clinton.
...we are not really that different, and we could easily work together. And change things.
It's no accident that in public discourse our differences are amplified and our overwhelming similarities are downplayed. "Changing things" is not on the agenda.
That example may be a solution in search of a problem, but there are other more useful possibilities.
What's with all of the stream of consciousness "reporting" lately? How about you take a few minutes to think of some compelling uses for this sort of thing and then write about those examples in your summary?
It's one thing to see crap like this in Slashdot summaries, but it's increasingly showing up in "legitimate" news. It comes across as stupid and lazy, and that's coming from someone who's posting to Slashdot from work.
Why not. If you can help quell unreasonable fears for a few bucks, just do it.
A stunt like this amplifies unreasonable fears, not quells them. Just like it did when the CD handed out iodine and dosimeters in the US during the cold war and those fears were much more reasonable.
For a guy calling himself 'mdsolar', how many pro-solar power articles have you seen him post? He doesn't even seem to be pro-renewable energy or anti-fossil fuel, just solidly anti-nuclear.
I'm convinced that he's actually an Eliza bot run by the coal industry.
The unforgivable sin was the damage to the handhelds (including calculators).
Way to dig up buried memories. I still cringe when I have to pull the emergency, last resort 49g+ out of the drawer. I got it after my 48GX was run over by a truck, which I think is the only way one of those old things actually ever die. Thankfully you can still pick them up on ebay.
DNA isn't chewed up by enzymes that are commonly found in the environment. You're thinking of RNA. The information stored in DNA is mainly destroyed by UV or other ionizing radiation.
DNA is extremely stable in the environment at room temperature. It's very common in labs to store DNA at room temperature dried onto filter paper. I have some plasmids on paper that I inherited from my advisor that she inherited from her advisor and they survived just fine. 20k years is a bit extreme, but even just storing your data in DNA on the floor of the data center would be more long-lived than putting it on hard drives.
Maybe it's time for some of these poorly managed companies to drop some of the ballast in management, then. Screwing around with the productivity and morale of the actual money-generators of the company while retaining a dozen layers of parasitic management isn't a winning strategy.
My wife has done all of the above and asked me to show her how to change the car's oil. Additionally, she wants to watch or help every time I fix an appliance and is way better at carpentry than me. She insists that I teach our daughter how to fix things, shoot well, and be generally capable as she grows up. Maybe it's just the females that you've selected/made that are defective!;)
Of course, I regularly cook, clean, and do all of the above, too.
It doesn't imply perfect repair, only the complete mitigation of tumorigenicity. If, eg, a double break in DNA can't be repaired, the cell is killed (typically through apoptosis). If the cell is completely removed from function, then the chance of it becoming a tumor is zero and thus we have a threshold. There are cases of perfect repair, too, as in certain single strand breaks or protein damage. Not every bit of radiation is absorbed by DNA or even hits anything.
The threshold may be low and is almost certainly lower than what we'd consider a high dose. The idea of "no threshold" has no plausible mechanism, though.
Thank you for your insights. To be clear are you referring to external exposure from ionizing radiation as opposed to internal exposure to ionizing radiation from absorbing radioactive isotopes that remain in the body?
The source of the exposure isn't really important to the repair mechanisms. What is important is the extent and nature of the damage: DNA modifications, protein modifications, and heating. Internal vs external exposure only determines which tissues are affected, the rate/duration of the dose, and the specific type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma). But as far as an individual cell is concerned, all that is important is the rate of exposure.
Very interesting, is this in humans or animals?
Is what in humans or animals? I don't personally study radiation-induced tumorigenesis, but I'm familiar with the concepts. Biochemistry works pretty much the same way in humans and mice, though we definitely have our differences.
This work says:Linear extrapolation of high LET radiation from high to low doses probably underestimates the risk at low doses in some cases. Is this what you mean?
I was referring to the dose-response relationship and the saturation of enzymes, which are foundations of biochemistry. I'll check out that paper because I'm curious, but I have to wonder if a 40 year old review paper is the best source. If it's concentrating on doses higher than most people would ever be expected to experience ("up to 100 rads" was mentioned in the abstract and this is the first journal I've found that my uni doesn't provide access to), then I could see all of that reviewed data being well above any realistic threshold. Biochem is all about rates, and high rates of exposure could easily saturate any system that could repair damage. Even small tumors are often (disturbingly often, you don't even want to think about it) cleared from the body, so the idea of linear cumulative dose doesn't seem to make sense, even in the case of punctuated moderate doses.
Sure, however that is a far cry from the OP's claim that the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) model having been discredited decades ago. Where, when, who by? What's the new model?.
It's not my field, so the best that I can offer is a solid "beats me", but it does seem a little unconvincing from a biochemical perspective. What would be the mechanism?
Simple way to check what? A tumor prone mouse line would have been specifically modified to not handle cancer cells properly and typically develop spontaneous tumors due to non-radiogenic causes (ie doesn't relate to the topic at hand).
What results would you expect and what significance would you give to those results?
As a biochemist, LNT doesn't really make much sense when applied to a biological system. It seems odd that there wouldn't be any threshold when we know that there are biological mechanisms for repairing radiation induced damage. Also, a linear response is at odds with the saturation of these mechanisms which usually manifests as a sigmoidal dose-response and with normal immunological recognition and destruction of cancerous cells.
LNT is used because it is very conservative and a better model hasn't been soundly demonstrated yet. From a public policy standpoint, that is perfectly reasonable. Don't mistake policy for scientific proof, though.
It also eliminates the need for a minimum wage which alleviates a lot of pressure on small and fledgling businesses. This is how you bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
My thoughts exactly. Imagine all of those horrible people at work who don't want to be there, make everything difficult for everybody around them, and generally decrease the productivity of the place. Now imagine them all gone!
Honestly, it's my personal opinion that the US needs someone else to beat us to a major milestone in space. We've fallen into a bit of a winners dilemma. We've beaten everyone else, why do we need to keep trying? I think if China beats the US to Mars, you'll see the political will materialize around the space program again.
For the most part, the US got whomped by the USSR in major milestones in space. Besides landing a human on the moon and some amazing unmanned planetary and outer system probes, they beat us at nearly every early milestone: ICBM, probe to orbit, animal in space, human in space, spacewalk, woman in space, probe to moon (orbit, impact, and soft landing), image of dark side of moon, return of moon sample to earth, space station,...
Your last sentence is spot on, though. Getting beat by the Russians was the perfect motivator for our space program.
This is a great answer. To add to that, the US government runs quite a few national research laboratories that are having to turn away potential researchers and push out existing researchers because there is too little money allocated to keeping research staff.
Where I work, well equipped and built up labs are sitting empty because there is no money set aside to actually hire people to work in the labs. The budgets barely keep up with inflation and often come with so many new mandated projects that money has to be stripped from already running projects to start the new ones.
That's an interesting take on your memory situation. My memory is much worse, which led me to get very good at problem solving.
Early math and science courses, especially the ones where you need to memorize formula were hell until I got really fast at rederiving them on the spot. Such tests are typically timed for people who don't need to do any more than recall the formula, so I often didn't complete them at first. My teachers would comment on how I was clearly intelligent and they couldn't understand why I did so poorly on the tests. Before too long, I got fast enough for it not to be an issue anymore. School was easy, even getting my PhD was easy, but I talk more about potential solutions to the problems that are being discussed instead of rattling off papers and authors like a typical academic. Bringing up a great paper written by that guy, you know, from that one university, doesn't quite have the same effect.
I'm ok with losing the little memory that I have because I rarely use it. I'm terrified of losing my ability to quickly think through problems.
You're not arguing against anything I actually said. I know how the schedules are defined.
You said: "Take cannabis for example; why is it a schedule 1 drug? It has hardly any of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs. Yet it's there because it bothers people on moral grounds." And in that regard it fits right in. It has almost all of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs: it bothers people on moral grounds.
Most of the schedule 1 drugs are hallucinogenics, even though several of them (including cannabis) have medical potential. Secondly, even though schedule 1 drugs are supposed be "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence," there are actually very few addictive drugs on that schedule. Those are all on schedule 2, even though many of the drugs on that schedule haven't been used medically for many decades. Heroin aside, if you hear of somebody becoming addicted to a drug, it's almost assuredly a schedule 2 drug.
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They seem to be able to shoot people with guns, let's get them shooting people with cameras before we prosecute.
Have you seen what happens when police shoot their guns? We're going to need to get them some wide angle cameras!
Lane discipline (or a lack thereof) is responsible for most accidents, which is why law enforcement's obsession with speeding is so obnoxious. The fact that police would rather be sitting on the side of the road clocking for speeders (because it's easy and hard to contest in court) and ignoring all of the inattentive drivers changing lanes without looking or signaling, failing to yield the passing lane and encouraging passing on the right, and so on is a damn shame.
Don't all of the autonomous cars plan to dump control back to the human when they can't handle a situation? How many seconds before a fatal incident will the car have to return control to the human for the courts to side with the manufacturer that the car was not driving autonomously (at the moment of the incident)? Will the fact that the human is asleep or reading a book and not able to react quickly enough figure into that time?
Negotiation is fine and dandy, but agreeing to be charged with, and plead guilty to, a crime that both you and the prosecutor know that you didn't commit in order to avoid being tried for a crime that the prosecutor suspects that you actually did commit makes a mockery of the justice system.
Clinton is solidly establishment, pro-corporate-worldwide-hegemony, so as "a foreigner who doesn't even live in the US", expect to see a LOT more TTP, TTIP, and the like rammed down your throats (with the appropriate "motivation" for your governments to sign them and sell you out). If you liked the foreign policies of Bush and Obama, you'll like those of Clinton.
...we are not really that different, and we could easily work together. And change things.
It's no accident that in public discourse our differences are amplified and our overwhelming similarities are downplayed. "Changing things" is not on the agenda.
That example may be a solution in search of a problem, but there are other more useful possibilities.
What's with all of the stream of consciousness "reporting" lately? How about you take a few minutes to think of some compelling uses for this sort of thing and then write about those examples in your summary?
It's one thing to see crap like this in Slashdot summaries, but it's increasingly showing up in "legitimate" news. It comes across as stupid and lazy, and that's coming from someone who's posting to Slashdot from work.
Why not. If you can help quell unreasonable fears for a few bucks, just do it.
A stunt like this amplifies unreasonable fears, not quells them. Just like it did when the CD handed out iodine and dosimeters in the US during the cold war and those fears were much more reasonable.
For a guy calling himself 'mdsolar', how many pro-solar power articles have you seen him post? He doesn't even seem to be pro-renewable energy or anti-fossil fuel, just solidly anti-nuclear.
I'm convinced that he's actually an Eliza bot run by the coal industry.
You bought three because you need three of them or because the first two broke?
I like a lot of Monoprice's stuff, but their headphones don't last long at all. They sound great while they last, though.
The unforgivable sin was the damage to the handhelds (including calculators).
Way to dig up buried memories. I still cringe when I have to pull the emergency, last resort 49g+ out of the drawer. I got it after my 48GX was run over by a truck, which I think is the only way one of those old things actually ever die. Thankfully you can still pick them up on ebay.
DNA isn't chewed up by enzymes that are commonly found in the environment. You're thinking of RNA. The information stored in DNA is mainly destroyed by UV or other ionizing radiation.
DNA is extremely stable in the environment at room temperature. It's very common in labs to store DNA at room temperature dried onto filter paper. I have some plasmids on paper that I inherited from my advisor that she inherited from her advisor and they survived just fine. 20k years is a bit extreme, but even just storing your data in DNA on the floor of the data center would be more long-lived than putting it on hard drives.
Maybe it's time for some of these poorly managed companies to drop some of the ballast in management, then. Screwing around with the productivity and morale of the actual money-generators of the company while retaining a dozen layers of parasitic management isn't a winning strategy.
My wife has done all of the above and asked me to show her how to change the car's oil. Additionally, she wants to watch or help every time I fix an appliance and is way better at carpentry than me. She insists that I teach our daughter how to fix things, shoot well, and be generally capable as she grows up. Maybe it's just the females that you've selected/made that are defective! ;)
Of course, I regularly cook, clean, and do all of the above, too.
It doesn't imply perfect repair, only the complete mitigation of tumorigenicity. If, eg, a double break in DNA can't be repaired, the cell is killed (typically through apoptosis). If the cell is completely removed from function, then the chance of it becoming a tumor is zero and thus we have a threshold. There are cases of perfect repair, too, as in certain single strand breaks or protein damage. Not every bit of radiation is absorbed by DNA or even hits anything.
The threshold may be low and is almost certainly lower than what we'd consider a high dose. The idea of "no threshold" has no plausible mechanism, though.
Thank you for your insights. To be clear are you referring to external exposure from ionizing radiation as opposed to internal exposure to ionizing radiation from absorbing radioactive isotopes that remain in the body?
The source of the exposure isn't really important to the repair mechanisms. What is important is the extent and nature of the damage: DNA modifications, protein modifications, and heating. Internal vs external exposure only determines which tissues are affected, the rate/duration of the dose, and the specific type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma). But as far as an individual cell is concerned, all that is important is the rate of exposure.
Very interesting, is this in humans or animals?
Is what in humans or animals? I don't personally study radiation-induced tumorigenesis, but I'm familiar with the concepts. Biochemistry works pretty much the same way in humans and mice, though we definitely have our differences.
This work says:Linear extrapolation of high LET radiation from high to low doses probably underestimates the risk at low doses in some cases. Is this what you mean?
I was referring to the dose-response relationship and the saturation of enzymes, which are foundations of biochemistry. I'll check out that paper because I'm curious, but I have to wonder if a 40 year old review paper is the best source. If it's concentrating on doses higher than most people would ever be expected to experience ("up to 100 rads" was mentioned in the abstract and this is the first journal I've found that my uni doesn't provide access to), then I could see all of that reviewed data being well above any realistic threshold. Biochem is all about rates, and high rates of exposure could easily saturate any system that could repair damage. Even small tumors are often (disturbingly often, you don't even want to think about it) cleared from the body, so the idea of linear cumulative dose doesn't seem to make sense, even in the case of punctuated moderate doses.
Sure, however that is a far cry from the OP's claim that the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) model having been discredited decades ago. Where, when, who by? What's the new model?.
It's not my field, so the best that I can offer is a solid "beats me", but it does seem a little unconvincing from a biochemical perspective. What would be the mechanism?
Simple way to check what? A tumor prone mouse line would have been specifically modified to not handle cancer cells properly and typically develop spontaneous tumors due to non-radiogenic causes (ie doesn't relate to the topic at hand).
What results would you expect and what significance would you give to those results?
As a biochemist, LNT doesn't really make much sense when applied to a biological system. It seems odd that there wouldn't be any threshold when we know that there are biological mechanisms for repairing radiation induced damage. Also, a linear response is at odds with the saturation of these mechanisms which usually manifests as a sigmoidal dose-response and with normal immunological recognition and destruction of cancerous cells.
LNT is used because it is very conservative and a better model hasn't been soundly demonstrated yet. From a public policy standpoint, that is perfectly reasonable. Don't mistake policy for scientific proof, though.
It also eliminates the need for a minimum wage which alleviates a lot of pressure on small and fledgling businesses. This is how you bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
That is a very significant observation.
My thoughts exactly. Imagine all of those horrible people at work who don't want to be there, make everything difficult for everybody around them, and generally decrease the productivity of the place. Now imagine them all gone!
Honestly, it's my personal opinion that the US needs someone else to beat us to a major milestone in space. We've fallen into a bit of a winners dilemma. We've beaten everyone else, why do we need to keep trying? I think if China beats the US to Mars, you'll see the political will materialize around the space program again.
For the most part, the US got whomped by the USSR in major milestones in space. Besides landing a human on the moon and some amazing unmanned planetary and outer system probes, they beat us at nearly every early milestone: ICBM, probe to orbit, animal in space, human in space, spacewalk, woman in space, probe to moon (orbit, impact, and soft landing), image of dark side of moon, return of moon sample to earth, space station, ...
Your last sentence is spot on, though. Getting beat by the Russians was the perfect motivator for our space program.
Pssh, all of the important details are in the summary: "To confirm messages are being encrypted, a padlock icon will appear in the chat UI."
What more do you need to know?
This is a great answer. To add to that, the US government runs quite a few national research laboratories that are having to turn away potential researchers and push out existing researchers because there is too little money allocated to keeping research staff.
Where I work, well equipped and built up labs are sitting empty because there is no money set aside to actually hire people to work in the labs. The budgets barely keep up with inflation and often come with so many new mandated projects that money has to be stripped from already running projects to start the new ones.
That's an interesting take on your memory situation. My memory is much worse, which led me to get very good at problem solving.
Early math and science courses, especially the ones where you need to memorize formula were hell until I got really fast at rederiving them on the spot. Such tests are typically timed for people who don't need to do any more than recall the formula, so I often didn't complete them at first. My teachers would comment on how I was clearly intelligent and they couldn't understand why I did so poorly on the tests. Before too long, I got fast enough for it not to be an issue anymore. School was easy, even getting my PhD was easy, but I talk more about potential solutions to the problems that are being discussed instead of rattling off papers and authors like a typical academic. Bringing up a great paper written by that guy, you know, from that one university, doesn't quite have the same effect.
I'm ok with losing the little memory that I have because I rarely use it. I'm terrified of losing my ability to quickly think through problems.
No, that doesn't define a schedule 1 drug.
You're not arguing against anything I actually said. I know how the schedules are defined.
You said: "Take cannabis for example; why is it a schedule 1 drug? It has hardly any of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs. Yet it's there because it bothers people on moral grounds." And in that regard it fits right in. It has almost all of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs: it bothers people on moral grounds.
Most of the schedule 1 drugs are hallucinogenics, even though several of them (including cannabis) have medical potential. Secondly, even though schedule 1 drugs are supposed be "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence," there are actually very few addictive drugs on that schedule. Those are all on schedule 2, even though many of the drugs on that schedule haven't been used medically for many decades. Heroin aside, if you hear of somebody becoming addicted to a drug, it's almost assuredly a schedule 2 drug.