They run for long periods, but in cities, a substantial amount of that time is spent not moving. They also do a lot of stopping, and some of that energy can be recaptured with regenerative braking.
It still may require regulatory changes. In some places, an individual cab can run literally 24 hours a day, swapping out drivers. It saves on parking; one of the problems with having to re-charge is that it needs to be somewhere while that happens. In downtown, that space can be at a premium. I know places where the parking space costs more than the apartment.
(Also, often the vehicles themselves are given licenses affixed permanently to the vehicle, which are very limited in number. A New York taxi medallion sells for tens of thousands of dollars.)
Better Place's battery swap plan might just do it, though. If they can run for an 8 hour (or, often, 12 hour) shift, and swap out battery and driver at the same time, it could be near optimal.
Logan's Run is a classic, but watching it, it's painfully obvious that it's based on a short story. There's a short story's worth of ideas in there, stretched out first pathetically, then painfully:
Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea. It's all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming. And they came instead. So I store them here. I'm ready. And you're ready. It's my job. To freeze you. Protein, plankton...
At least having Garland on board means it's unlikely to be turned into the obvious thing, a pure action film. There's definitely deep flaws in the original, though the underlying story is worth being told visually. Just please, no cardboard robots.
I think the goal here is to use the dessicant JUST as a dessicant, separate from the heat pump aspect of the evaporative cooling.
But within that evaporative cooling system, you've got the right idea. You use a fluid (not water, but something with a lower evaporation point) that evaporates when exposed to the room air, cooling it. Then you pump that gas outside and recompress it, heating it (quite hot, well above the outside air temperatures) but liquifying it.
The trick is that you then let it cool to the outdoor temperature using nothing more than a fan. It's heating up the outdoors, but you don't much care about that. You can then pump the liquid back inside, where it will evaporate again.
There's a net increase in entropy but you've produced cooler temperatures where you want them, inside. It cost you energy to produce it, in the process of compressing it.
You can use a similar system with the desiccant liquid, only you're no longer concerned about the phase change. You can use the outdoor heat to drive off the extra liquid it's absorbed, then let it cool. This all happens outside, rather than inside; your "hot" zone is easily solar heated with black panels, and the "cool" zone has white panels and a fan. The hot zone is well above ambient temperature, and you're using the temperature differential to produce dry (or drier) desiccant. You can then pump the desiccant back to where it can absorb humidity inside the house.
So You first remove the moisture to make the evaporative cooling process more efficient, but by doing so you heated the air?
Seems to me that if you remove that to a separate heat exchanger, you do heat and humidify the air, but you heat it some place you don't care about. Much the same as the air conditioning part of the system, in fact, though it will increase the size and complexity of the system.
Doing it all efficiently seems like a challenge, but if it produces more cool air for less money (it's brutal where I am today), I'll take it.
In this process, you heat it, as the summary mentions.
And how much does that cost?
I'd imagine it's the sort of thing you could get for free/cheap if you were clever, using solar heat to heat it and a fan to re-cool it back to ambient temperature once it had concentrated. (You'd need to get it cool again or it would be a lousy desiccant, which is precisely why it was heated in the first place, to drive off the humidity.)
If you had to use energy to desiccate it, I suspect you'd end up with a zero-sum game. (Negative, presumably, it being mechanical.)
It also sounds like a messy process, the kind where things crystallize and clog pipes and otherwise fail in the ways that mechanical objects like to.
We're talking about a horror movie here, and they can be incredibly cheap. Big special effects cost money, but it's usually scarier if you catch only glimpses of the monster. The real emotional impact is in the reactions.
Blair Witch Project was shot for under $25k (though high-end editing and sound were applied later, ballooning the price before it hit theaters). Paranormal Activity was shot for $11k. They're treated like documentaries, which means that the audience will forgive and even expect things like poor sound, poor lighting, cheap video, bad framing, etc.
The film can only sustain itself for maybe 90 minutes, so they can only take in $130k, but that's plenty for a low budget horror flick.
The same thing applies to real documentaries, and I think aspiring documentary makers could avail themselves of this model. But clearly if you want to do "real" movies this way you're going to have to add zeroes to the price tag.
They repeatedly refer to it as a "spaceship", and that's what I said it was. It moves, rather than really replicating.
But the replication wasn't the interesting part in the first place; they've long known how to do that. (In fact, they imply that they can turn it into a replicator quite easily.)
Reading between the lines, it's the first time they've achieved this movement with a particular kind of construction, one that will be more "programmable" than your basic glider gun. Which is interesting, within the game, though it sounds as if various bloggers are intent on making it more than that.
There really are no long-term storage problems once we get reliable and inexpensive orbital insertions.
Why not just feed it to your unicorn instead?
It seems to me that "It's no problem, once we've invented technologies that are not even on the drawing board" isn't much of an argument. Neither is "Probably safer than the other designs we thought were safe."
I'm all for adding more nuclear power, but trivializing the difficulties and dismissing alternatives with conspiracy theories (what, nuclear power doesn't have "special interests"?) makes the case weaker rather than stronger.
Reading in between the lines of the article, it sounds like this thing manages to create the copy before the destruction of the original is complete, unlike a glider which is basically moving itself. But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.
Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.
In this particular case, I did mean "prescriptions". They are recommending a course of action, an experiment that can be performed. It's more than just a prediction about an experiment that couldn't be performed in practice.
But yes, that prescription includes a prediction about what will happen when you do the experiment.
I don't have any perfect solutions, but I'd say a radically different way of solving the problem would be to make people pay for it, even a small amount.
If you catch misbehavior, you boot them without refund. And refuse to accept that credit card account as payment again. It doesn't eliminate the trolls, but it makes it harder. (It also helps pay for the fact that you need staff to review troll reports, and since that job involves looking at trolls all day...)
There's also a Slashdot-esque solution, separating the anons from the newbies from the people who have earned reputations. Let people set the level at which they choose to browse.
Added to all this an automatic "I can tell you're trolling" detector might save some grief (people might get trolled and not report it, letting the troll go on), but they're going to need more than that.
The way I read this, it says, "ChatRoulette is a great idea. The only problem is that there's too much penis. Get rid of that and it'll be fine."
Uh, no. Trolls will troll. Showing your junk to the camera is the easiest and most obvious way, but even if you cut that out you'll just face the next thing down the pike. You're never going to out-grief the trolls.
They're going to need something a lot more sophisticated than that. Google's Safe Search uses word context clues. It's far from perfect, but it seems to do a reasonably good job. If ChatRoulette doesn't want to be overrun with trolls, they're going to need to think at least that creatively, which means gathering up a lot more information than "that looks like teh peener".
The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.
The incumbent is Jim DeMint. Last I saw, his approval rating was +15 points. He's not going anywhere, no matter who the Democrats run. The other guy wasn't going to win, either.
Knuth didn't get anything wrong
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There isn't any "off by ten error", and this isn't telling us anything we don't already know (in CS terms): implementation on an actual computer can be different in performance from an abstract machine.
What the author is saying (quite well) is that the virtual memory performance amounts to cache misses, which cause extra performance overhead. He found a case where it was significant and got a 10x speedup in his particular application.
The article is a little over-zealous its characterization, though it's careful to note that this is not actually a theoretical novelty. The summary, on the other hand, bastardizes and exaggerates it.
The article is interesting, and worth reading, but if you RTFS without RTFA you'll be dumber than you were before. Thanks, kdawson.
The process of science goes back and forth between theory and experiment. The theory step is important, since it helps guide experiment.
So it's not "just" a pretty theory, in the sense of one that sits on the shelf and doesn't do anything. It makes prescriptions; it's participating in the back-and-forth between theoreticians and experimentalists.
The "show" here is a proof, or rather, a calculation. They describe what kind of experiment can be used to test the calculation (on a Bose-Einstein condensate in free-fall).
The experiment isn't trivial, and these theoreticians won't be the ones doing it. They publish the theory, and everybody else looks at it to see if it's worth the time and money to set up an experiment. That's pretty much canonical science going on there, and doesn't merit being dismissed as "just a pretty theory".
Compared to a probe that goes to the moon, mines helium 3, returns to earth, and then puts it into a reactor that doesn't currently exist even on paper, $20 billion for ITER is pocket change.
Re:You mean THAT'S what the game is all about?
on
Theremin Guitar Hero
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· Score: 1
That would make an interesting game, but it may not move quite fast enough to grab people.
A chord in Guitar Hero is a single button, at least at the early stages, and there are only 5 buttons. (Several chords map to the same button, and not in a particularly musical way.) You get big bang for very little effort, nothing compared to the effort of getting even from G to Am and back. That isn't terribly difficult, as guitar things go, but it still involves getting 4 different fingers to move to different places at the same time PLUS the that analog strings (even with frets) are harder to manage than digital buttons (not to mention having to miss the bass E on the Am).
Unfortunately, that ease is a trap. Nothing you learn on Guitar Hero translates to an actual guitar, except maybe a little very elementary musical concepts like "the beat". A real guitar has a longer lead time, and Guitar Hero offers a huge reward early. It's a good game; it's just a lousy way to learn guitar.
You can try to merge the two, but in the end a real guitar is a lot harder than a Guitar Hero controller and that's going to make the initial game-play less rewarding. (Too bad, because the guitar offers a lot more to do than 5 buttons.)
Re:You mean THAT'S what the game is all about?
on
Theremin Guitar Hero
·
· Score: 1
The key novelty behind Guitar Hero is that the objects aren't falling randomly. They fall in a predictable pattern, guided by the music.
For previous games, you're catching random things. The randomness is part of the fun. If it were predictable, it would be boring. The music is just there for entertainment; shut it off and you're not losing anything.
You can't really play Guitar Hero without the music. You need to be precisely on the beat, and the music guides you to that beat. Playing the game has a kinesthetic, integrative feel to it that previous games lacked, a new kind of fun. If you're not listening to the music, you will fail at the game.
And it's not just random music, either. It's music you know very well already. You already know what's coming up, but that doesn't mean it's trivial. It's a bit like the feeling of playing an instrument, only far, far easier. (In fact, actual musicians have some trouble with it; they're good at the beat but the arbitrariness of the chords conflicts with what they already know.)
You can even learn a tiny bit about how the music works. You'd do better learning a real instrument, but that means months of Mary Had A Little Lamb rather than jumping straight to thrash metal.
So it's a different game from what you're used to. No, not earth-shaking stuff, but in the end it's all just video games. You might give it a try.
UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable."
Well, that seems to be rather the heart of the matter, doesn't it?
How much is NPG's overhead, and what are their profit margins? The service they provide is solely the prestige: they are the most exclusive journal, getting the most important papers subject to (presumably) the most stringent reviews.
The price of the journal helps contribute to that prestige: anybody can open a free journal. But nearly all of it goes to profit, as they don't pay either the referees or the authors.
So, if their overhead is so high that they can't afford to give the UC a break on the price, then there's either some cost factor that I'm missing, or they have exaggerated idea of what their prestige is worth.
It's an estimation. All data points that old are estimates, and thinner on the ground than you'd like. So each new data point is potentially very handy in establishing the chronology of what happened when on the continent.
Either the people were there earlier, or the bird there later, than previously thought. They have reason to believe it's the former (20,000 year old fossils should be easier to find than 40,000 year old ones), and it fits well into a picture that humans came and helped wipe the bird out. They've found skeletons of this bird in the same caves as evidence of human habitation, but the timing is hard to sort out. This data point helps make the picture more clear, if still not perfectly clear.
This is all correct; I was rather oversimplifying. (And felt like my post was too long even with that.)
In fact, some drugs we do use today are no better than placebos. This is most notably true of antidepressants, which were developed for use in severe depression but do little in mildly depressed patients. When tested rigorously they do little better (or no better) than placebo, but the placebo effect is good enough to produce some good. This is known to the doctors and even some of the patients, but they find benefit in it anyway.
Still, what I was really addressing was the widespread use of placebos, which I just don't expect to catch on. The placebos work in part against a background of drugs which do work, and if you were to introduce a cure-all panacea placebo I doubt it would do much good and might even hinder the ability of real drugs to achieve the placebo part of their effect.
The placebo effect is real but less reliable than drugs. It does some good, but not all that much good, usually only a few percent.
And they rely on your belief that they are real drugs. If you were a good medical consumer you'd research your drugs before taking them, and you'd run into "this is just a sugar pill" pretty fast.
Every medical study controls for the placebo effect. If a drug doesn't work better than placebo, they don't sell it.
Often, the placebo test is also used as a control for "no intervention at all". Often people get better without even so much as a placebo. The marginal benefit of the placebo, combined with the necessity for secrecy, means there's no point in giving you the actual placebo.
Slashdot Mirror
They run for long periods, but in cities, a substantial amount of that time is spent not moving. They also do a lot of stopping, and some of that energy can be recaptured with regenerative braking.
It still may require regulatory changes. In some places, an individual cab can run literally 24 hours a day, swapping out drivers. It saves on parking; one of the problems with having to re-charge is that it needs to be somewhere while that happens. In downtown, that space can be at a premium. I know places where the parking space costs more than the apartment.
(Also, often the vehicles themselves are given licenses affixed permanently to the vehicle, which are very limited in number. A New York taxi medallion sells for tens of thousands of dollars.)
Better Place's battery swap plan might just do it, though. If they can run for an 8 hour (or, often, 12 hour) shift, and swap out battery and driver at the same time, it could be near optimal.
Huh. So it is. Thanks.
Logan's Run is a classic, but watching it, it's painfully obvious that it's based on a short story. There's a short story's worth of ideas in there, stretched out first pathetically, then painfully:
Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea. It's all here, ready. Fresh as harvest day. Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea. And then it stopped coming. And they came instead. So I store them here. I'm ready. And you're ready. It's my job. To freeze you. Protein, plankton...
At least having Garland on board means it's unlikely to be turned into the obvious thing, a pure action film. There's definitely deep flaws in the original, though the underlying story is worth being told visually. Just please, no cardboard robots.
I think the goal here is to use the dessicant JUST as a dessicant, separate from the heat pump aspect of the evaporative cooling.
But within that evaporative cooling system, you've got the right idea. You use a fluid (not water, but something with a lower evaporation point) that evaporates when exposed to the room air, cooling it. Then you pump that gas outside and recompress it, heating it (quite hot, well above the outside air temperatures) but liquifying it.
The trick is that you then let it cool to the outdoor temperature using nothing more than a fan. It's heating up the outdoors, but you don't much care about that. You can then pump the liquid back inside, where it will evaporate again.
There's a net increase in entropy but you've produced cooler temperatures where you want them, inside. It cost you energy to produce it, in the process of compressing it.
You can use a similar system with the desiccant liquid, only you're no longer concerned about the phase change. You can use the outdoor heat to drive off the extra liquid it's absorbed, then let it cool. This all happens outside, rather than inside; your "hot" zone is easily solar heated with black panels, and the "cool" zone has white panels and a fan. The hot zone is well above ambient temperature, and you're using the temperature differential to produce dry (or drier) desiccant. You can then pump the desiccant back to where it can absorb humidity inside the house.
So You first remove the moisture to make the evaporative cooling process more efficient, but by doing so you heated the air?
Seems to me that if you remove that to a separate heat exchanger, you do heat and humidify the air, but you heat it some place you don't care about. Much the same as the air conditioning part of the system, in fact, though it will increase the size and complexity of the system.
Doing it all efficiently seems like a challenge, but if it produces more cool air for less money (it's brutal where I am today), I'll take it.
In this process, you heat it, as the summary mentions.
And how much does that cost?
I'd imagine it's the sort of thing you could get for free/cheap if you were clever, using solar heat to heat it and a fan to re-cool it back to ambient temperature once it had concentrated. (You'd need to get it cool again or it would be a lousy desiccant, which is precisely why it was heated in the first place, to drive off the humidity.)
If you had to use energy to desiccate it, I suspect you'd end up with a zero-sum game. (Negative, presumably, it being mechanical.)
It also sounds like a messy process, the kind where things crystallize and clog pipes and otherwise fail in the ways that mechanical objects like to.
We're talking about a horror movie here, and they can be incredibly cheap. Big special effects cost money, but it's usually scarier if you catch only glimpses of the monster. The real emotional impact is in the reactions.
Blair Witch Project was shot for under $25k (though high-end editing and sound were applied later, ballooning the price before it hit theaters). Paranormal Activity was shot for $11k. They're treated like documentaries, which means that the audience will forgive and even expect things like poor sound, poor lighting, cheap video, bad framing, etc.
The film can only sustain itself for maybe 90 minutes, so they can only take in $130k, but that's plenty for a low budget horror flick.
The same thing applies to real documentaries, and I think aspiring documentary makers could avail themselves of this model. But clearly if you want to do "real" movies this way you're going to have to add zeroes to the price tag.
They repeatedly refer to it as a "spaceship", and that's what I said it was. It moves, rather than really replicating.
But the replication wasn't the interesting part in the first place; they've long known how to do that. (In fact, they imply that they can turn it into a replicator quite easily.)
Reading between the lines, it's the first time they've achieved this movement with a particular kind of construction, one that will be more "programmable" than your basic glider gun. Which is interesting, within the game, though it sounds as if various bloggers are intent on making it more than that.
There really are no long-term storage problems once we get reliable and inexpensive orbital insertions.
Why not just feed it to your unicorn instead?
It seems to me that "It's no problem, once we've invented technologies that are not even on the drawing board" isn't much of an argument. Neither is "Probably safer than the other designs we thought were safe."
I'm all for adding more nuclear power, but trivializing the difficulties and dismissing alternatives with conspiracy theories (what, nuclear power doesn't have "special interests"?) makes the case weaker rather than stronger.
And doesn't a glider do that?
Reading in between the lines of the article, it sounds like this thing manages to create the copy before the destruction of the original is complete, unlike a glider which is basically moving itself. But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.
Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.
In this particular case, I did mean "prescriptions". They are recommending a course of action, an experiment that can be performed. It's more than just a prediction about an experiment that couldn't be performed in practice.
But yes, that prescription includes a prediction about what will happen when you do the experiment.
I don't have any perfect solutions, but I'd say a radically different way of solving the problem would be to make people pay for it, even a small amount.
If you catch misbehavior, you boot them without refund. And refuse to accept that credit card account as payment again. It doesn't eliminate the trolls, but it makes it harder. (It also helps pay for the fact that you need staff to review troll reports, and since that job involves looking at trolls all day...)
There's also a Slashdot-esque solution, separating the anons from the newbies from the people who have earned reputations. Let people set the level at which they choose to browse.
Added to all this an automatic "I can tell you're trolling" detector might save some grief (people might get trolled and not report it, letting the troll go on), but they're going to need more than that.
The way I read this, it says, "ChatRoulette is a great idea. The only problem is that there's too much penis. Get rid of that and it'll be fine."
Uh, no. Trolls will troll. Showing your junk to the camera is the easiest and most obvious way, but even if you cut that out you'll just face the next thing down the pike. You're never going to out-grief the trolls.
They're going to need something a lot more sophisticated than that. Google's Safe Search uses word context clues. It's far from perfect, but it seems to do a reasonably good job. If ChatRoulette doesn't want to be overrun with trolls, they're going to need to think at least that creatively, which means gathering up a lot more information than "that looks like teh peener".
The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.
The incumbent is Jim DeMint. Last I saw, his approval rating was +15 points. He's not going anywhere, no matter who the Democrats run. The other guy wasn't going to win, either.
There isn't any "off by ten error", and this isn't telling us anything we don't already know (in CS terms): implementation on an actual computer can be different in performance from an abstract machine.
What the author is saying (quite well) is that the virtual memory performance amounts to cache misses, which cause extra performance overhead. He found a case where it was significant and got a 10x speedup in his particular application.
The article is a little over-zealous its characterization, though it's careful to note that this is not actually a theoretical novelty. The summary, on the other hand, bastardizes and exaggerates it.
The article is interesting, and worth reading, but if you RTFS without RTFA you'll be dumber than you were before. Thanks, kdawson.
The process of science goes back and forth between theory and experiment. The theory step is important, since it helps guide experiment.
So it's not "just" a pretty theory, in the sense of one that sits on the shelf and doesn't do anything. It makes prescriptions; it's participating in the back-and-forth between theoreticians and experimentalists.
The "show" here is a proof, or rather, a calculation. They describe what kind of experiment can be used to test the calculation (on a Bose-Einstein condensate in free-fall).
The experiment isn't trivial, and these theoreticians won't be the ones doing it. They publish the theory, and everybody else looks at it to see if it's worth the time and money to set up an experiment. That's pretty much canonical science going on there, and doesn't merit being dismissed as "just a pretty theory".
The moon doesn't shine (in this sense). The moon reflects. Take away the sun, and the moon is dark.
Compared to a probe that goes to the moon, mines helium 3, returns to earth, and then puts it into a reactor that doesn't currently exist even on paper, $20 billion for ITER is pocket change.
That would make an interesting game, but it may not move quite fast enough to grab people.
A chord in Guitar Hero is a single button, at least at the early stages, and there are only 5 buttons. (Several chords map to the same button, and not in a particularly musical way.) You get big bang for very little effort, nothing compared to the effort of getting even from G to Am and back. That isn't terribly difficult, as guitar things go, but it still involves getting 4 different fingers to move to different places at the same time PLUS the that analog strings (even with frets) are harder to manage than digital buttons (not to mention having to miss the bass E on the Am).
Unfortunately, that ease is a trap. Nothing you learn on Guitar Hero translates to an actual guitar, except maybe a little very elementary musical concepts like "the beat". A real guitar has a longer lead time, and Guitar Hero offers a huge reward early. It's a good game; it's just a lousy way to learn guitar.
You can try to merge the two, but in the end a real guitar is a lot harder than a Guitar Hero controller and that's going to make the initial game-play less rewarding. (Too bad, because the guitar offers a lot more to do than 5 buttons.)
The key novelty behind Guitar Hero is that the objects aren't falling randomly. They fall in a predictable pattern, guided by the music.
For previous games, you're catching random things. The randomness is part of the fun. If it were predictable, it would be boring. The music is just there for entertainment; shut it off and you're not losing anything.
You can't really play Guitar Hero without the music. You need to be precisely on the beat, and the music guides you to that beat. Playing the game has a kinesthetic, integrative feel to it that previous games lacked, a new kind of fun. If you're not listening to the music, you will fail at the game.
And it's not just random music, either. It's music you know very well already. You already know what's coming up, but that doesn't mean it's trivial. It's a bit like the feeling of playing an instrument, only far, far easier. (In fact, actual musicians have some trouble with it; they're good at the beat but the arbitrariness of the chords conflicts with what they already know.)
You can even learn a tiny bit about how the music works. You'd do better learning a real instrument, but that means months of Mary Had A Little Lamb rather than jumping straight to thrash metal.
So it's a different game from what you're used to. No, not earth-shaking stuff, but in the end it's all just video games. You might give it a try.
UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable."
Well, that seems to be rather the heart of the matter, doesn't it?
How much is NPG's overhead, and what are their profit margins? The service they provide is solely the prestige: they are the most exclusive journal, getting the most important papers subject to (presumably) the most stringent reviews.
The price of the journal helps contribute to that prestige: anybody can open a free journal. But nearly all of it goes to profit, as they don't pay either the referees or the authors.
So, if their overhead is so high that they can't afford to give the UC a break on the price, then there's either some cost factor that I'm missing, or they have exaggerated idea of what their prestige is worth.
It's an estimation. All data points that old are estimates, and thinner on the ground than you'd like. So each new data point is potentially very handy in establishing the chronology of what happened when on the continent.
Either the people were there earlier, or the bird there later, than previously thought. They have reason to believe it's the former (20,000 year old fossils should be easier to find than 40,000 year old ones), and it fits well into a picture that humans came and helped wipe the bird out. They've found skeletons of this bird in the same caves as evidence of human habitation, but the timing is hard to sort out. This data point helps make the picture more clear, if still not perfectly clear.
This is all correct; I was rather oversimplifying. (And felt like my post was too long even with that.)
In fact, some drugs we do use today are no better than placebos. This is most notably true of antidepressants, which were developed for use in severe depression but do little in mildly depressed patients. When tested rigorously they do little better (or no better) than placebo, but the placebo effect is good enough to produce some good. This is known to the doctors and even some of the patients, but they find benefit in it anyway.
Still, what I was really addressing was the widespread use of placebos, which I just don't expect to catch on. The placebos work in part against a background of drugs which do work, and if you were to introduce a cure-all panacea placebo I doubt it would do much good and might even hinder the ability of real drugs to achieve the placebo part of their effect.
The placebo effect is real but less reliable than drugs. It does some good, but not all that much good, usually only a few percent.
And they rely on your belief that they are real drugs. If you were a good medical consumer you'd research your drugs before taking them, and you'd run into "this is just a sugar pill" pretty fast.
Every medical study controls for the placebo effect. If a drug doesn't work better than placebo, they don't sell it.
Often, the placebo test is also used as a control for "no intervention at all". Often people get better without even so much as a placebo. The marginal benefit of the placebo, combined with the necessity for secrecy, means there's no point in giving you the actual placebo.