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User: bill_mcgonigle

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  1. Re:not the solution on Chemical That Affects Biological Clock Offers New Diabetes Treatment · · Score: 1

    When there is less glucose, the body can convert fat to ketones to produce energy.

    Yes, certainly you can get ketosis from lyposis, but you're also going to get gluconeogenesis at the same time, in healthy people. The acetyl-CoA can be inserted into the Krebs Cycle directly, and that can definitely provide energy, but the body is really greedy for glucose and will rob for it.

    I suspect if you're active enough the effects will balance out - the Inuit seem to do OK. They also eat a specific diet with lots of protective fatty acids, though. I have some friends who suppose an all-bacon diet will serve them as well...

  2. Re:not the solution on Chemical That Affects Biological Clock Offers New Diabetes Treatment · · Score: 1

    but carbohydrates, i.e. your oatmeal, breaks down into sugar in the bloodstream.

    It's largely fiber, but yes, your body runs on glucose. You're going to get that glucose from starches or gluconeogenesis. What's important about the effect of various starches is the rate at which you get those glucoses. HFCS = instant glucose. Oatmeal = 2-3 hour slow release of glucose. Since your enzymes are rate-limited, your foods should be as well.

  3. Re:Content control by the previous owners? on NBC Purchases MSNBC Rights From Microsoft · · Score: 1

    What are the equivalencies to Beck, Fox and Friends, Hannity, Maddow, or Olbermann on PBS?

    Seriously? You haven't heard of the Cookie Monster?

  4. Re:not the solution on Chemical That Affects Biological Clock Offers New Diabetes Treatment · · Score: 3, Informative

    Most of our carbs come from plants more closely related to grass [msu.edu](corn, wheat), than to a vegetable

    Um, yeah - vegetables have very few carbs. If you want carbs, go for the starchy grains.

    This wasn't a problem until the last century. Either humans changed or something about the food supply changed. Surely a 20x increase in sugar intake per capita is coincidental - it must be the oatmeal.

  5. Value of Brand? on NBC Purchases MSNBC Rights From Microsoft · · Score: 1

    I would have guessed they'd have backronym'ed MSNBC due to its name recognition, but apparently the brand was so toxic as to require a rebranding as soon as the ink was dry.

  6. Somewhere deep inside DARPA ... on DARPA Creates Machine Which Extinguishes Fires With Sound · · Score: 1

    Is a ST:TNG tech manual, carefully annotated and checkmarked.

  7. Re:Much better than Google's approach on MIT Creates Car Co-Pilot That Only Interferes If You're About To Crash · · Score: 1

    Are the automotive companies really prepared to put dual systems in the vehicle with backup power?

    Cost: $80. Markup: $330.

  8. I know some people whose insurance companies might even underwrite the cost of such a system just for the ability to avoid deer collisions.

  9. Re:I'd do it for free. on What Is an Astronaut's Life Worth? · · Score: 1

    How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts?

    Exactly correct - you win the discussion.

    One small corollary to that would be matters of external perception - if you could get plenty of great astronauts but your customers (paying for the flights) thought it was too high a failure rate they might decline to use the company for PR reasons. If you get governments involved then pretty much the whole citizenry gets a minute say as to how you run your business.

    The disadvantage to spaceflight companies here is how much media attention they get. How many people even think about all the deep sea fishermen who die to bring you that appetizer at Red Lobster? I'll be shocked if there are a dozen people in the country who call their Congressmen to try to "get that fixed." And if half of those aren't anarchists trolling for laughs. But, you start losing astronauts and Wolf Blitzer will have an aneurysm on camera.

  10. Re:This is understandable on The FDA Spied On Its Own Scientists · · Score: 1

    You and I mean less than nothing to them. That's NOT how it was supposed to be.

    Force everybody to pay for a monopoly and then expect good results. Somehow this pattern never works but keeps repeating.

  11. Re:Bad summary on Star Wars Fans Fix Up Luke Skywalker's Home · · Score: 3, Funny

    this set was rebuilt in 2002 for the prequels

    Ah, so this is a news story - they found a guy who actually cares about the prequels. Turns out he was hiding in Belgium.

    Psychologists and anthropologists shall be dispatched post haste.

  12. Re:My question on Star Wars Fans Fix Up Luke Skywalker's Home · · Score: 2

    Did he get rid of the corpses?

    please - the indigenous dewbacks cleaned those up within a day or two.

  13. Re:So ugly? on Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly? · · Score: 1

    providing that much information, from so many fields, in a homogeneous and pleasantly readable way, keep up the good work ...

    hey, who cares about usability, it should look more like a magazine ad!

    look, shiny!

  14. Re:Big Brother via Terry Shaivo? on How a 1960s Discovery In Neuroscience Spawned a Military Project · · Score: 1

    Hook up a bunch of vegges with functional visuals to city-wide cameras

    The excited state decays by vibrational relaxation into the first excited singlet state. Yes, yes and merrily we go. Reduce atmospheric nitrogen by 0.03%. It is not much consolation that society will pick up the bits, leaving us at eight modern where punishment, rather than interdiction, is paramount. Please, cut the fuse. They will not harm their own. End of line. Limiting diffusions to two dimensions increases the number of evolutionary jumps within the species. Rise and measure the temple of the five. Transformation is the goal. They will not harm their own. Data-font synchronization complete.

  15. Re:Power it from above on Laser Powers Lockheed Martin's Stalker Drone For 48 Hours · · Score: 1

    The Crossbow Project
    There's no defense like a good offense.

    "This is Jesus, Kent!"

    reference missed by the over-5000 set.

  16. Re:Disposal on The Secret of Cornstarch Physics · · Score: 1

    My second thought was "How would I clean it up when we're done?"

    Egg drop soup party? Lots of chickens will be required, but, hey, what kind of fun doesn't start with that?

  17. Re:school photocopying? on Canada's Supreme Court Strikes Down Copyright Fees On Music, Video · · Score: 1

    I wasn't aware that a fee had ever been required for photocopying for school work? Isn't that a "fair use"?

    Many teachers' books are available in two versions, say a $2 book with tear-out pages, and a $10 book that's the same thing but with a license to photocopy.

    You get to decide who pays for the printing costs that way. If you're a homeschooler, I imagine you appreciate the $2 version.

  18. Re:Cultural problem on Live Pictures From Inside Your Stomach · · Score: 1

    Informative, interesting, amazing, maybe, but for a lot would be qualified as gross.

    BBC gave me a 'may contain upsetting material' warning. Perhaps it was just a play on 'stomach', but I'd much prefer to think the warning was appropriate for the evening news.

    Tonight: Murders, rapes, robberies, and --- warning --- the inside of your body.

  19. Re:Hey guess what! on MIT Develops Holographic, Glasses-Free 3D TV · · Score: 1

    The last thing I want is to be sitting in a theater and missing part of the movie because of the location I chose to sit in.

    Nobody complains much at the theatre or concerts, but if what you really want is a constraint of old technology, there's no reason they couldn't show the same picture at every angle. That ought to be much cheaper to produce and transmit, so it might even be the norm.

    Maybe IMAX will gain some new purpose in life by showing 'real 3D' projections that need terabit-class stream rates. I'm looking forward to a nice fully immersive coral reef on a 60' screen at the local science center.

  20. Re:Reboot on Highlights From Comic-Con 2012 · · Score: 1

    Superman has been somewhat rebooted.

    If there's an immediate kernel panic, does it still qualify as a reboot?

  21. Re:While I hate the transfer syntaxes we have on Varnish Author Suggests SPDY Should Be Viewed As a Prototype · · Score: 1

    The whole schema thing in XML is one of the things that makes it suck

    because...

    Just write the data correctly in the first place

    which you can't count on from Internet clients

    and discard anything that doesn't make sense to the application

    Which is what schema validation does for you (securely) without having to write any code.

  22. Re:No, it'll just be an OPTION on Will Speed Limits Inhibit Autonomous Car Adoption? · · Score: 1

    That's assuming you have something to do during the journey...
    If you don't, then you will be sitting there extremely bored

    The last time I said, "I'm bored" was when I was eleven.

  23. Re:HTML5 Facebook Encryption Layer on Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity · · Score: 1

    plus convincing whomever you're chatting with to install and enable the same thing

    yeah, so in the real world it needs to be something that runs in the browser.

    If you have both ends using Pidgin, the only use for Facebook is perhaps as a directory service.

  24. Re:jokes on Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity · · Score: 1

    Rule #1 of the Internet: Don't post anything you wouldn't be happy saying in front of your family, or shouting out in a busy street.

    Unless you have a good cryptosystem.

    Say, Where's the Firefox extension to do OTR in Facebook chat?

  25. Re:Welcome to the free world on Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity · · Score: 1

    The great idea of the free market at work.

    perhaps my sarcasm detector is on the fritz?

    Private company decides what I can see (MAFIAA)
    Private company says what is a crime (Facebook)
    Sentenced up by private bought laws.
    They can then trow me in a private owned prison.

    That accurately describes a fascist state. There's a fair argument to be made that free markets are incompatible with a state (so long as humans are running them). But the problem term there isn't the free market.