A while back I looked up the records and average temps for various cities in the Sahara, and was surprised to learn that even tho the Sahara's *average* temperature is higher, its extremes are not as hot as in the depths of the SoCal deserts.
[goes off, finds handy C=F convertor at http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm%5D I see that 50C is 122F. Is Delhi humid or dry? Here it's so dry that if you don't vaseline your eyeballs at night, you wake up with raisins.
My thermometer (which always matches the local NOAA.gov station) on a typical day in high summer: http://www.doomgold.com/misc/thermometer.jpg Couldn't find the pic offhand of the day it hit 122F here. The local NOAA.gov station recorded 121F that day.
We get the sand and fine dust issue too, tho there aren't many people here who work outdoors with a computer (far as I've seen). But I've shoveled a couple inches of fine dust out of clients' PCs that sat near open windows... one I thought about turning into a planter instead, it was that bad:)
California desert. And it gets somewhat hotter over by Ridgecrest and in Death Valley than it does here. Here's the weather station that's in the same microclimate as my place, if you feel an urge to check us out during high summer -- http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=KWJF&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m or http://tinyurl.com/y9pda7q -- I am often outdoors during the heat of the day, tho I don't stand around in the sun any longer than I have to. But I don't have to bring a computer outdoors:)
I've done a lot of summers without air conditioning, with at most a fan. Last summer I never did get around to fixing the swamp cooler, and it was regularly 95 or so in my house. The computer gets an external fan in summer and it helps a lot (20+ degrees difference, just from heat exchange thru the old-fashioned steel case).
Where I live it can hit 122F (with almost no humidity), and it doesn't kill anyone (unless they're stupid). We usually get a month or so of highs at 115F with occasional spikes higher. Drink enough water and stay out of the direct sun and it's perfectly survivable.
And you get used to it... one summer day I was working outside, and thinking what a nice pleasant day it was!! then I went back to the house and checked the thermometer: 118F.
Now that's interesting... and probably explains why colour-blindness didn't get naturally-selected entirely out of the gene pool -- it probably conferred an advantage under certain hunting conditions, sufficiently useful to the entire tribe:
"Hey, Og, we know you trip over the grass, but can you spare a moment to help Gronk spot that deer??"
Considering the miniscule amount (some tiny fraction of a percent) that is ours, out of the very small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to begin with, no, what man does about human CO2 output won't do a damn thing one way or the other.
I remember when water vapour was the big "greenhouse gas". I guess we should have covered up the oceans, eh?
That's why the people who want to "DO SOMETHING!" to halt the Earth's natural warming process scare me more than anything else. If they should succeed in reducing the temperature by so much as half a degree, they could throw us into a new ice age (and do so very rapidly, as climate changes go), and it's quite possible that this could upset the cycle to the point that we never come back out of it.
Imagine a few years in a row like "the year without a summer" and wonder where you'll be growing crops sufficient to feed humanity.
There are a good many castles and suchlike that were lost for taxes, and since they're very expensive to maintain and generally in very poor condition, no one has seen fit to cough up the million pounds or so in back taxes that is required to recover ownership from the British gov't.
The way I found out about this is funny. A friend of a friend does genealogy for a living. He told me he'd found he was heir to this Welsh castle by descent. Then we looked up mine, and lo and behold, here's the same Welsh family line, and I'm a generation ahead of him in line to inherit the same castle! Small world.:)
(Tho I didn't care much and by now can't remember the name of the damned thing! As I recall it's in rough shape tho, likely not restorable.)
This was also when I found out I was part Welsh, which doubtless explains why I often think like a Welshman:)
OR do you sometimes put the keyboard on the desk, sometimes on your knees, sometimes on a lap desk? I do all three and type quite differently (and make different typoes) for each. Do you sometimes type one-handed or three-fingered, but othertimes touch-type correctly? Do you sit with your knees hunched up, or splayed to either side?? Do you lean back or sit up straight? I do all those, and all impact how I type.
The conclusion per this study is that I must be everyman and everyperversion.
"Politicians value those who vote for them over those who do not."
And there we have the root of the problem. They value only those who get them elected, instead of valuing ALL their constituents equally, as they swore to do when they took office. Too bad we can't nail them all for perjury.
Haha, that's the best point ever. Indeed, that's why they're supposed to live in their district. See how well THAT gets enforced...:(
As it stands, the race/income demographics just get used for gerrymandering. So while the theory that it's for our benefit is good if applied by the good and true, in fact it winds up being used solely for the benefit of politicians' election campaigns.
Speaking as a livestock breeder, your pedigree (which is to say, genealogy) may be the only clue in tracking down a genetic disease and perhaps the major clue in finding a cure.
And if you know your family is at-risk as carriers of some lethal defect, it provides the data you need so you can purposefully marry an outcross (unrelated person) to reduce the chance of producing dead children.
Also, it can be interesting for its own sake to know where you came from, especially since personality traits are as much inherited as are physical traits.
Much more rarely, your genealogy may determine that you are due, say, an inheritance. Turns out that courtesy of an ancestor 6 generations back, I'm an heir to a Welsh castle (no kidding, I am) -- if only I care to pay the back taxes on it!
BTW the census bureau does have a policy of not releasing much of this info until after the people are dead, which is why genetic studies usually need to do their own footwork.
Montana's new castle law is even better -- you don't need to be in your house. If someone comes up to you on the street and threatens you, it's THEIR job to back down, not yours. If they threaten you and you shoot them in self-defense, the premise is that you were innocent.
That was kinda my point about the doorway chips -- that it would sound good to the fearful, but in fact wouldn't accomplish a damn thing (other than maybe letting the cops keep an eye on when you come and go from your own house).
Rights are negative things, we need them so we can stop other people from doing things to us that we don't like. When you turn a right around and make it a positive thing, like the "right of medical care" then you also put into place a requirement of service from someone else to implement that right. Your "right" then enslaves that person. That's not freedom.
Exactly so. (Reposting and emphasis added for greater visibility.)
I just had this vision of one of those awful "duty to retreat" states adding a requirement that you must ask the intruder for his RealID before asking him to leave your house.
Side thought: scanners at the doorway that alert the police if anyone without an approved microchip enters your house.
Ugh. There's no end to the invasive scenarios this coughs up. I prefer the shotgun in easy reach. At least it won't have to wait for the cops to arrive.
Further side thought: I wonder if anyone (outside of ghetto areas, where it does happen) has ever been forced to permanently move out of their house under a 'duty to retreat' law?
[puts on canine professional hat with 40 years wear-and-tear]
Actually, you are wrong; let me explain what has been happening with veterinary costs, and please remember that I am a long-time pro dealing directly with this field, so I'm not pulling this out of my ass:
Until about 10 years ago, veterinary care was purely pay-as-you-go, and highly competitive, which kept both costs and prices down. Consequently, almost everyone could afford both basic *and* catastrophic care for their pets.
About 10 years ago, pet insurance came into the picture, and just as with human insurance, it wanted to be absolutely certain that every dollar it had to pay out was justified. So bills began getting itemized, and individualized charges appeared that had previously been lumped as "overhead" and absorbed by the clinic.
Despite that only about 1% (yes, ONE percent) of pets are insured, vets were quick to see the much-higher profits available to them from this new billing system (not coincidentally, vet colleges began teaching "clinic economics" as a primary course and as the emphasis behind the entire profession).
So now instead of a simple bill reading
wound repair, $60
as it would have been before pet insurance, your bill reads more like:
and on and on and all of a sudden that $60 wound repair is a $600 bill that exactly emulates the charge structure from a human hospital bill, as submitted to the human insurance company. This despite that the veterinarian did the exact same work as before the new billing system.
This is why that most common of all veterinary surgical procedures, the uncomplicated spay, has gone from $60 to over $600 in less than 10 years (and recently I've heard prices as high as $1200 in metro areas).
[And if you know what these things actually cost, you realise that the same sort of inflation is being used as when a hospital charges you $300 for a box of kleenix: "sharps disposal" is just throwing a used needle into the plastic disposal container. These containers hold 1000 needles and sell for $3.95 at Costco.]
There was a good study recently that drew a strong correlation between how many layers of insurance came between you and your doctor, and the direct growth of costs to the patient. Turns out there was a big spike when health insurance came into play, and a much bigger spike with the birth of HMOs (which were brought into being by Senator Kennedy's legislation, and look where that got us to today).
I'm also old enough to remember when you could still do pay-as-you-go for human medicine, and how a hospital stay was, even adjusted for inflation, a matter of no more than $300/day (my actual cost for 2 days of hospitalization in 1972 was $200). Insurance and HMOs changed that, more than any other factors.
And here we just went and made the entire health system into one giant HMO, with no choices remaining outside that system. Mark my words, the ultimate cost to patients WILL go up yet again, even if it's disguised as taxes.
Now, are you still sure you wouldn't rather go back to the era of pay-as-you-go, and have coughed up only $60 to fix your dog's leg??
It's ironic that those who most believe that it's okay to steal your life by taking what you spent your life to earn, are also most adamantely against slavery. Makes you wonder what they think slavery IS, eh??
Here's a hint for the socialists in the audience: it is, most fundamentally, taking the fruits of someone else's labour, when they didn't agree to have them taken. (And don't give me that 'exploiting workers is the same thing' bullshit. When you work for someone else, you agree up front that SOME of your "fruits" will become their profits. When you're enslaved, you have no choice, your fruits are simply taken to whatever degree someone else wants to.)
The other benefit goes to corporate medicine, who will no longer need to sue insurance companies to pry payment out of them -- just get paid by the gov't, with no more having to prove every dime was actually spent.
I agree, but the problem is, as someone above points out -- Who do you trust to do the reforms? Majority rule is what got us to this pass. Either a minority rule takes over and reforms the country, or that majority who already run things by proxy (remember, our legislators were elected by a majority vote) come in and make things even worse with more of the same.
Actually, one might consider the 2008 election and Dem supermajority as having "altered or abolished" the previous government, considering the effects they've had since, and having already provided "guards for their security" (meaning their control, not for We The People).
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality."
-- Peter H. Peel
Your sig reminded me of the quote that most singularly illustrates the whole process the Democrats used to ram through this legislation:
"The truly liberal mind is by definition uncertain; it admits it may be wrong, but once set and the decision made the wavering stops, and no sort of hell can sway it."
-- D.F. Jones, THE FALL OF COLOSSUS
Is there a severability clause in this hideous monstrosity?
And I'm still waiting for the explanation as to how the gov't can force me to buy something I can't afford in the first place, and how fining me makes this *more* affordable.
If they are forcing me to pay one way or another, let's be honest and just call it a tax increase.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back I looked up the records and average temps for various cities in the Sahara, and was surprised to learn that even tho the Sahara's *average* temperature is higher, its extremes are not as hot as in the depths of the SoCal deserts.
[goes off, finds handy C=F convertor at http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm%5D I see that 50C is 122F. Is Delhi humid or dry? Here it's so dry that if you don't vaseline your eyeballs at night, you wake up with raisins.
My thermometer (which always matches the local NOAA.gov station) on a typical day in high summer:
http://www.doomgold.com/misc/thermometer.jpg
Couldn't find the pic offhand of the day it hit 122F here. The local NOAA.gov station recorded 121F that day.
We get the sand and fine dust issue too, tho there aren't many people here who work outdoors with a computer (far as I've seen). But I've shoveled a couple inches of fine dust out of clients' PCs that sat near open windows... one I thought about turning into a planter instead, it was that bad :)
California desert. And it gets somewhat hotter over by Ridgecrest and in Death Valley than it does here. Here's the weather station that's in the same microclimate as my place, if you feel an urge to check us out during high summer -- http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=KWJF&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m or http://tinyurl.com/y9pda7q -- I am often outdoors during the heat of the day, tho I don't stand around in the sun any longer than I have to. But I don't have to bring a computer outdoors :)
I've done a lot of summers without air conditioning, with at most a fan. Last summer I never did get around to fixing the swamp cooler, and it was regularly 95 or so in my house. The computer gets an external fan in summer and it helps a lot (20+ degrees difference, just from heat exchange thru the old-fashioned steel case).
Then you have a different problem: even with low humidity, you'll get condensation. This starts to be a problem at about 55 degrees, in my experience.
Maybe keeping it at about 60 degrees would work okay, tho -- if the fridge will go that high.
Where I live it can hit 122F (with almost no humidity), and it doesn't kill anyone (unless they're stupid). We usually get a month or so of highs at 115F with occasional spikes higher. Drink enough water and stay out of the direct sun and it's perfectly survivable.
And you get used to it... one summer day I was working outside, and thinking what a nice pleasant day it was!! then I went back to the house and checked the thermometer: 118F.
Now that's interesting... and probably explains why colour-blindness didn't get naturally-selected entirely out of the gene pool -- it probably conferred an advantage under certain hunting conditions, sufficiently useful to the entire tribe:
"Hey, Og, we know you trip over the grass, but can you spare a moment to help Gronk spot that deer??"
Considering the miniscule amount (some tiny fraction of a percent) that is ours, out of the very small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to begin with, no, what man does about human CO2 output won't do a damn thing one way or the other.
I remember when water vapour was the big "greenhouse gas". I guess we should have covered up the oceans, eh?
That's why the people who want to "DO SOMETHING!" to halt the Earth's natural warming process scare me more than anything else. If they should succeed in reducing the temperature by so much as half a degree, they could throw us into a new ice age (and do so very rapidly, as climate changes go), and it's quite possible that this could upset the cycle to the point that we never come back out of it.
Imagine a few years in a row like "the year without a summer" and wonder where you'll be growing crops sufficient to feed humanity.
Making people ask weird questions ;)
Tho I also breed computers, as the mess o'PCs filling my former dining room can attest -- damn things are as bad as tribbles!! :(
Yeah, by the British government :)
There are a good many castles and suchlike that were lost for taxes, and since they're very expensive to maintain and generally in very poor condition, no one has seen fit to cough up the million pounds or so in back taxes that is required to recover ownership from the British gov't.
The way I found out about this is funny. A friend of a friend does genealogy for a living. He told me he'd found he was heir to this Welsh castle by descent. Then we looked up mine, and lo and behold, here's the same Welsh family line, and I'm a generation ahead of him in line to inherit the same castle! Small world. :)
(Tho I didn't care much and by now can't remember the name of the damned thing! As I recall it's in rough shape tho, likely not restorable.)
This was also when I found out I was part Welsh, which doubtless explains why I often think like a Welshman :)
I ain't married to no one, but between these two responses, it's gonna take me a week to get all the spit off my monitor :D :D :D
OR do you sometimes put the keyboard on the desk, sometimes on your knees, sometimes on a lap desk? I do all three and type quite differently (and make different typoes) for each. Do you sometimes type one-handed or three-fingered, but othertimes touch-type correctly? Do you sit with your knees hunched up, or splayed to either side?? Do you lean back or sit up straight? I do all those, and all impact how I type.
The conclusion per this study is that I must be everyman and everyperversion.
"Politicians value those who vote for them over those who do not."
And there we have the root of the problem. They value only those who get them elected, instead of valuing ALL their constituents equally, as they swore to do when they took office. Too bad we can't nail them all for perjury.
Haha, that's the best point ever. Indeed, that's why they're supposed to live in their district. See how well THAT gets enforced... :(
As it stands, the race/income demographics just get used for gerrymandering. So while the theory that it's for our benefit is good if applied by the good and true, in fact it winds up being used solely for the benefit of politicians' election campaigns.
Speaking as a livestock breeder, your pedigree (which is to say, genealogy) may be the only clue in tracking down a genetic disease and perhaps the major clue in finding a cure.
And if you know your family is at-risk as carriers of some lethal defect, it provides the data you need so you can purposefully marry an outcross (unrelated person) to reduce the chance of producing dead children.
Also, it can be interesting for its own sake to know where you came from, especially since personality traits are as much inherited as are physical traits.
Much more rarely, your genealogy may determine that you are due, say, an inheritance. Turns out that courtesy of an ancestor 6 generations back, I'm an heir to a Welsh castle (no kidding, I am) -- if only I care to pay the back taxes on it!
BTW the census bureau does have a policy of not releasing much of this info until after the people are dead, which is why genetic studies usually need to do their own footwork.
Montana's new castle law is even better -- you don't need to be in your house. If someone comes up to you on the street and threatens you, it's THEIR job to back down, not yours. If they threaten you and you shoot them in self-defense, the premise is that you were innocent.
That was kinda my point about the doorway chips -- that it would sound good to the fearful, but in fact wouldn't accomplish a damn thing (other than maybe letting the cops keep an eye on when you come and go from your own house).
Rights are negative things, we need them so we can stop other people from doing things to us that we don't like. When you turn a right around and make it a positive thing, like the "right of medical care" then you also put into place a requirement of service from someone else to implement that right. Your "right" then enslaves that person. That's not freedom.
Exactly so. (Reposting and emphasis added for greater visibility.)
I just had this vision of one of those awful "duty to retreat" states adding a requirement that you must ask the intruder for his RealID before asking him to leave your house.
Side thought: scanners at the doorway that alert the police if anyone without an approved microchip enters your house.
Ugh. There's no end to the invasive scenarios this coughs up. I prefer the shotgun in easy reach. At least it won't have to wait for the cops to arrive.
Further side thought: I wonder if anyone (outside of ghetto areas, where it does happen) has ever been forced to permanently move out of their house under a 'duty to retreat' law?
And those Spanish and Portuguese were invited into Central and South America, right??
[puts on canine professional hat with 40 years wear-and-tear]
Actually, you are wrong; let me explain what has been happening with veterinary costs, and please remember that I am a long-time pro dealing directly with this field, so I'm not pulling this out of my ass:
Until about 10 years ago, veterinary care was purely pay-as-you-go, and highly competitive, which kept both costs and prices down. Consequently, almost everyone could afford both basic *and* catastrophic care for their pets.
About 10 years ago, pet insurance came into the picture, and just as with human insurance, it wanted to be absolutely certain that every dollar it had to pay out was justified. So bills began getting itemized, and individualized charges appeared that had previously been lumped as "overhead" and absorbed by the clinic.
Despite that only about 1% (yes, ONE percent) of pets are insured, vets were quick to see the much-higher profits available to them from this new billing system (not coincidentally, vet colleges began teaching "clinic economics" as a primary course and as the emphasis behind the entire profession).
So now instead of a simple bill reading
wound repair, $60
as it would have been before pet insurance, your bill reads more like:
office call, $40
15 minutes of triage @ $200/hour, $50
15 minutes of anaesthesia @ $200/hour, $50
30 minutes of surgical time @ $400/hour, $200
2 hours in recovery room @ $50/hour, $100
sutures, 2 packs @ $20 each, $40
needle pack, 2 packs @20 each, $40
antibiotics, 30 pills @ $2 each, $60
demerol, 2cc @ $15/cc, $30
autoclave pack, $20
sharps disposal, $5
and on and on and all of a sudden that $60 wound repair is a $600 bill that exactly emulates the charge structure from a human hospital bill, as submitted to the human insurance company. This despite that the veterinarian did the exact same work as before the new billing system.
This is why that most common of all veterinary surgical procedures, the uncomplicated spay, has gone from $60 to over $600 in less than 10 years (and recently I've heard prices as high as $1200 in metro areas).
[And if you know what these things actually cost, you realise that the same sort of inflation is being used as when a hospital charges you $300 for a box of kleenix: "sharps disposal" is just throwing a used needle into the plastic disposal container. These containers hold 1000 needles and sell for $3.95 at Costco.]
There was a good study recently that drew a strong correlation between how many layers of insurance came between you and your doctor, and the direct growth of costs to the patient. Turns out there was a big spike when health insurance came into play, and a much bigger spike with the birth of HMOs (which were brought into being by Senator Kennedy's legislation, and look where that got us to today).
I'm also old enough to remember when you could still do pay-as-you-go for human medicine, and how a hospital stay was, even adjusted for inflation, a matter of no more than $300/day (my actual cost for 2 days of hospitalization in 1972 was $200). Insurance and HMOs changed that, more than any other factors.
And here we just went and made the entire health system into one giant HMO, with no choices remaining outside that system. Mark my words, the ultimate cost to patients WILL go up yet again, even if it's disguised as taxes.
Now, are you still sure you wouldn't rather go back to the era of pay-as-you-go, and have coughed up only $60 to fix your dog's leg??
It's ironic that those who most believe that it's okay to steal your life by taking what you spent your life to earn, are also most adamantely against slavery. Makes you wonder what they think slavery IS, eh??
Here's a hint for the socialists in the audience: it is, most fundamentally, taking the fruits of someone else's labour, when they didn't agree to have them taken. (And don't give me that 'exploiting workers is the same thing' bullshit. When you work for someone else, you agree up front that SOME of your "fruits" will become their profits. When you're enslaved, you have no choice, your fruits are simply taken to whatever degree someone else wants to.)
The other benefit goes to corporate medicine, who will no longer need to sue insurance companies to pry payment out of them -- just get paid by the gov't, with no more having to prove every dime was actually spent.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
I agree, but the problem is, as someone above points out -- Who do you trust to do the reforms? Majority rule is what got us to this pass. Either a minority rule takes over and reforms the country, or that majority who already run things by proxy (remember, our legislators were elected by a majority vote) come in and make things even worse with more of the same.
Actually, one might consider the 2008 election and Dem supermajority as having "altered or abolished" the previous government, considering the effects they've had since, and having already provided "guards for their security" (meaning their control, not for We The People).
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality."
-- Peter H. Peel
Your sig reminded me of the quote that most singularly illustrates the whole process the Democrats used to ram through this legislation:
"The truly liberal mind is by definition uncertain; it admits it may be wrong, but once set and the decision made the wavering stops, and no sort of hell can sway it."
-- D.F. Jones, THE FALL OF COLOSSUS
$5 cell phone?? Do tell...what's your secret? that's about what one of the damned things would be worth to me.
Is there a severability clause in this hideous monstrosity?
And I'm still waiting for the explanation as to how the gov't can force me to buy something I can't afford in the first place, and how fining me makes this *more* affordable.
If they are forcing me to pay one way or another, let's be honest and just call it a tax increase.