All perceived causation is simply highly likely correlation.
It is an anecdote, which means that it is emprical evidence in support of a non-scientific hypothesis; that CRTs can cause eye damage. The qualitative part was the measure of the worsening of eyesight.
As an anecdote, it is not intended to stand up to the rigors of scientific study. Without doing a controlled study, there is no way I could make the claim that CRTs actually do cause eye damage. However, I did not mean to phrase it as "my dog has fleas, so all dogs have fleas". I meant to say that "my dog has fleas, so at least some fleas attach themselves to some dogs".
Several other posters have commented that it may have been the refresh rate of the CRTs that caused problems, and not the CRT technology itself. Indeed, there seems to be a plethora of anecdotes supporting that position. And it seems consistent with the data set I have gathered, so rest assured I will check the refresh rate of any monitor, CRT or otherwise, that I use from now on.
So I hope we can clarify that I was not trying to prove causation, just that the correlations tended to point in a particular direction based solely on anecdotal evidence and careful observation.
The MiniGRAIL detector is a cryogenic 68 cm diameter spherical gravitational wave antenna made of CuAl(6%) alloy with a mass of 1400 Kg, a resonance frequency of 2.9 kHz and a bandwidth around 230 Hz, possibly higher. The quantum-limited strain sensitivity dL/L would be ~4x10-21. The antenna will operate at a temperature of 20 mK.
IANAPhysicist, but I'll take a crack at it.
-cryogenic = extremely cold -68cm CuAl sphere = ~2 1/4 foot metal sphere made of a copper/aluminum alloy that is 6% "parent" metal (the CuAl) and 94% filler metal. -Mass of 1400kg = ~3100 pounds U.S. -Resonance frequency 2.9kHz = if you were to point a speaker at the sphere and output a soundwave of 2.9kHz, the sphere would have constructive wave interference and actually amplify the sound. -Bandwidth of 230Hz = not sure exactly how to explain this... -gravitational wave antenna = same as the radio antenna on your car: it (in theory, at least) picks up gravity waves so they can be measured -operate at a temperature of 20mK = only 20 1/1000th's of a degree above absolute zero -quantum-limited strain = ? I don't know what this means, sorry.
So physicists - please correct me if I'm wrong on any or all points.
I beg to differ. Spending many hours a day writing résumés in front of a (very high quality) CRT had a seriously detrimental effect on my mother's eyes. She went from having better-than-perfect vision to having to wear bifocals in a very short period of time. Every time she went to the doctor, he had to increase her prescription. As soon as I convinced her to spend the money on an LCD monitor, her vision immediately stopped worsening.
And in case you think it might be related to age, my younger brother, a high school student, has also recently been prescribed glasses due to too many hours in front of a CRT. That finally convinced my father to have an LCD for each PC in the house, thankfully.
So I feel quite justified saying there's a quantitave long-term negative effect on eyesight using CRTs.
I wonder if these new thin CRTs will have the same drawback?
I have been in the same boat for several years now. I almost religiously stay away from MMORPGs precisely for this reason. I tend to only buy games which don't require a great deal of time investment. Lately I've been playing Criterion's Burnout series (2+3), which is a lot of fun and can be played for 10-30 minutes at a time for the most part. Even online, I can hop into BO3 for a game or two and hop back out.
'Course, I often find that the clock has jumped ahead 2 hours when I've only been playing for 15 minutes... It seems that certain games often have time distortion fields surrounding them. Go figure.
Right. So the original question poster is looking for a linux-friendly HDTV PCI card with digital I/O and QAM decoding support, have I got that right?
There seems to be some good information here. Ignore the "DVIco FusionHDTV DVB-T Digital TV Tuner Card"; it's composite and SVHS input only. The MyHD MPD-120 Tuner (actual MPD-120 mfg. product link here) has a DVI-in daughterboard, which is nice (though it doesn't have QAM decoding, apparently). It also outputs IEEE1394, but under Windows XP only, which sucks. But it does have component video analog output. So that might be useful, but doesn't seem to be the holy grail.
I don't mean to be inflammatory - I'm part Native American myself - but AFAIK it wasn't the Europeans who invented scalping. Many (though certainly not all) of the Native American tribes were ruthless warriors who did all they could to eradicate each other. War was not unknown to this people; I hesitate to agree that it was their 'niceness' that failed them.
That's not to say that the Europeans (and later the U.S.) did not do some atrocious things. Some of what was done was unforgiveable. Thank goodness we as a society have come a long way since then.
Imagine a fish who dies and is fossilized. The scales show up as patterns in the fossil, right? In fact, depending on how it's preserved, sometimes you can cut through them and see a fairly accurate cross-section of the scales.
Now imagine a woven rush basket that somehow becomes fossilized (not likely, but just go with it). Now looking at the fossil, you're going to see the rises and falls of the individual reeds as they transverse all the perpendicular reeds in the design, and you'll be able to see the remnants of the grain running across and down the design as well. That's the sort of thing the student was studying - the anklyosaurus had a similar structure, only on a much smaller scale.
Fossilization doesn't turn something into a piece of amorphous rock - it preserves the topography (at least) of what was fossilized. So it's possible to examine not only the major features (skeletal structure, etc.) but also minor ones which were preserved. Some fossils, if preserved before flesh decay occurred (frozen instantly, caught in a tar pit, etc.) can even have the features of skin imprinted on the rock. That's how we know archeopteryx had feathers, for instance.
Sure it went well, and can even be accredited to Clinton... if you ignore the tech boom and the lowly billions of dollars in tax revenue that generated.
I have yet to see anything that proves that Reagan's economic policies caused the recession. Simply saying that "reaganomics obviously doesn't work - see, we had a recession!" is like saying "money doesn't work - see, I don't have any!". It's fallacious to attribute failure to something without some sort of hard data explicitly connecting the two.
The professionals are working from A to B to C to D and researching how to get to E and F, but that's too complicated for most people.
So given the complexity of economics (and the fact that you are insinuating that you are an expert on it), could you offer us some sort of mathematical proof to support your claim that "Supply side economics has been nothing but a hoax from the beginning." I've seen some of the supply-side economics models, and they seem rather compelling. And "nothing but a hoax" is a rather strong statement, logically speaking - are you sure you want to hang your entire argument on an absolute generalization?
I've also seen numerous examples of Colbert's "laissez faire" economics in action, some first-hand. My father was a pilot for one of the richest men in the world. This man owned several aircraft, a feat made possible only by his enormous wealth. Now the people who built those aircraft, the people who maintained those aircraft, the people who scheduled those aircraft, the people who inspected those aircraft, the people who insured those aircraft, and the people who flew those aircraft, were all paid from this man's wealth. We're talking the financial well-being of more than 100 families (including mine) which were entirely dependent on this man's financial status. And that's just to maintain his flight abilities, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of others whose income was generated by doing other kinds of work for him!
Now think about how many others there are that do the same thing. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that there are only 1,000 people who can afford to pay for the full-time services of 3,000 people. (The actual number is much higher, especially if you consider those who have businesses.) Those people alone employ a full 1% of the nation's population (3,000,000+ people)!!
For those born yesterday, look up some history. The US had its greatest economic growth in the 50s, at a time when personal income over $200,000 was taxed at a predatory 90%. The big money went into businesses, not a few rich people, and the economy roared.
...and to continue the history lesson, in the 1960's this was carried to greater heights by LBJ's "full employment" society plans...
...the failure of which lead, in both direct and indirect ways, to the Carter administration's double-digit inflation in the late 1970's...
...which was finally stopped by the Reagan administration's, wait, what was it? Oh, yes, supply-side economic policies...
...which was a "hoax" from the beginning, wasn't that what you said?
the only thing keeping us going is confidence in our economy
The only thing that has kept the economy going since the eradication of the gold standard has been its constituents belief in it. (Or more abstractly, it could be argued, its belief in itself.)
This is aided by the idea that the basic unit of the U.S. economy, the U.S. Dollar, is backed by the "full faith and trust of the government of the United States of America", whatever that means. (For one thing, it means that all Americans are insured for money in the bank for up to $100,000.)
Remember too, that Alexander Hamilton was an enormous proponent of the government operating in a deficit - he felt, among other things, that the debt of a government to its people would incur some accountability (no pun intended) beyond Jefferson's espoused "natural law". One could argue that a government's responsibility to its people is flexible and changing ("...but some animals are more equal than others"), but owed money is owed money in any monetary society, which helps keep the government in check (again, no pun intended).
At first glance, I thought exactly the same thing. One of the advantages of martial arts training is its ability to compensate for things like size and weight. I've known girls who were half my weight that I wouldn't mess with.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized that there were other things to be considered. One is speed, which I think should be included with s&w as a critical component. Also, martial arts is a compensation for lack of some or all of those three factors. This is what equalizes the physical differences between people when they're fighting.
The parent poster is right, though, in thinking that this is much like boxing. Or perhaps, in a more limited context, martial arts competitions. There are rules in place to prevent unexpected or unorthodox maneouvers, and the combatants are (one hopes) roughly similar in skill level. And let me tell you, if two opponents are identical in any three of skill, size, weight, or speed, the fourth factor will cast the deciding vote in the victory*. If I'm told I'm going to fight a guy who's as skilled in karate, as fast, and as heavy as I am, but I have a choice whether he's 6'6" (2m) or 5'4" (1.63m), I am certainly going to choose the smaller guy, because I will have an obvious advantage.
Tying this all back to the bees... The bees only know a couple of moves. They're like boxers in that they have a limited number of things they are capable of doing. Wasps can't learn tae kwon do or judo. (If they could, we'd all be in trouble.) And they have relatively similar skills with their limited abilities. So this means that speed, size, and weight are major components in their battles, and more often than not, the bigger guy is going to win.
Now what would be really interesting would be to take a wasp who has legitimate leader markings from a colony of wasps bred to be much smaller than their normal cousins, and put him in a fight with a non-leader from a colony that's been modified to be bigger than normal. Or vice versa - take a runt from the big tribe, paint him as a leader, and let him loose on the smaller tribe. There may be more to this than markings...
*There are other factors which can decide the outcome, such as determination or desperation, but they are not as quantifiable and are therefore harder to evaluate. They can compensate somewhat, but only to a point.
Are you fucking kidding me??!? Are you seriously suggesting that Opus Dei is responsible for Ashcroft's policies??!?
I know many people have problems with Opus Dei, but what you're saying has tenuous validity at best. Go ahead, back up what you're saying with facts. Is Ashcroft really an OD member? I can't find any reference to Ashcroft which associates him with the OD prelacy.
What's more, the phrase "Praise the Lord" is hardly a solely Catholic saying - believe me, I live in the Bible belt, and Southern Protestans say it more than I've ever heard from Catholics.
So I'm calling you on this:
B*U*L*L*S*H*I*T!
And believe me, I did "praise the Lord" as soon as I read about his resignation. Today is a good, good day.
There's anothing thing (besides the skeleton) that I haven't seen anyone mention yet, which surprises me. This is the first movie (that I can recall, anyway) which Disney put its name on where a human actually dies on-screen.
When the soldier on the flying machine runs into the rock face, there is no way he's escaped. He didn't fall, he didn't jump, he's simply incinerated in the explosion. I was genuinely surprised when it happened, because Disney is just like those old G.I. Joe cartoons - the villians always manage to bail out at the last second. And that didn't happen here.
I can't begin to speculate what that signifies, but since Pixar animation is carefully constructed even by movie-making standards, so it must have been discussed during some of the team meetings. I wonder why they decided to do it that way instead of letting the pilot live.
IIRC, Eisner (who I think is as close as this generation has seen to the antichrist, excepting perhaps Jack Valenti) is already gone. Wasn't he ousted or something last year? I thought Disney had a replacement for him already?
Or maybe it's just 5:00am and I'm hallucinating from lack of sleep. Could be just wishful thinking on my part...:-)
I saw 'the incredibles' tonight and loved it. It was mostly up to Pixar's standards, though the storyline was a bit weaker (albeit more complex) than the previous movies. The humor was definitely there - the whole theatre laughed, and there wasn't a single kid in the audience.
The technical effects were even more amazing, IMHO, than the differences between Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Long hair, long wet hair, it was amazing. The best parts were when I caught myself saying, "hey! that didn't look real!"
But you are right, there are some things in the trailer that didn't make it into the movie itself. But I don't think the movie suffers too much from it.
Good point - I bought my NEC MultiSync LCD1765 based on a Toms Hardware review of a similar monitor. The 1765 doesn't have a DVI input, which almost put me off to it, but I am sooooo glad I have it, I can't even begin to think of life without it.
It's 17" with 1280x1024 native resolution. I used to use it with a ViewSonic N6 video processor and I ran cable TV, my Playstation 2 (as a component source @ 720p) and my computer through it. Even with the fastest PS2 games, I never had a problem with ghosting.
I am doing a dual-monitor setup with my old NEC FE950+ CRT monitor now, and it's amazing how much clearer, brighter, and generally "sweeter" my 1765 is compared to the old CRT.
Can you tell me a time in history when it was not the purpose of war to kill civilians?
I suppose I oversimplified when I said that the purpose of war was to kill people. I think a more accurate statement would be to say that the purpose of war is to subjugate people. In most circumstances, that means killing enough people to inspire the remainder to be docile and obedient.
Now in many circumstances, killing the military element can be enough to subjugate the civilians, but not in all cases, especially in areas of the world where the civilian and military elements are not clearly defined. How do you define 'military'? Only those people who have enlisted as regulars in the armed forces? By that definition, there were an amazing number of "civilian" snipers in Viet Nam... and a great many "civilian" combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. I wonder how many of those are counted in the figure quoted here?
To make matters worse, what do you do with a combatant that hides among civilians? When a sniper takes up residence in a civilian hospital (the likes of which happens regularly), what is the opposing force to do? How many of its own military force is an opposing army to sacrifice before killing the civilians? Whose interests are they supposed to have in mind?
What makes all this interesting is that the armed forces of the United States actually do put the civilian population ahead of its own safety to a large degree, something that is unprecedented in the history of warfare. The U.S. militaries go out of their way to target military targets and leave the civilians in relative safety. This is a change even from WWII, where relatively indiscriminate carpet bombing was the norm. And it's certainly in marked contrast to the tactics used by Al Qaeda in 2001. I don't think they got a single military target, did they?
Now here's an interesting thing... according to The Iraq body count page, the reported number of Iraqi civilians killed post-Saddam in Iraq is just over 16,000. That a far cry from the 100,000 which was estimated for the New Scientist article. Does this mean that less than 1 in 5 civilian deaths is being reported? I think there are some screwy numbers being thrown around here.
And lastly, it's been reported that during Saddam's reign, as many as 2 million people may have died as a result of his rule. So even using the most conservative estimates, we're talking a 20:1 ratio of Saddam's dead to post-Saddam dead. So far I'd say there's not even a comparison.
Having said all that, I must say that I still don't think the invasion of Iraq was justified. But we're stuck with it now, so we have to make the best of it. And I can tell you, that life would be considerably more dangerous for 300+ million Americans if a power void the size of Iraq is left to the radical muslims to take over.
Too bad we can't moderate stories as trolls or flamebait.
It was a war people! The purpose of war is to KILL PEOPLE.
It's funny how attitudes have changed. 200 years ago, we would have cited "empire-building" as the reason for invading Iraq, and the world would have been fine with it, just as they were with the English, Dutch, Spanish, French, Danish, Portuguese, Italians, Russians, and Germans.
How many native americans died during Cortez's conquest of Latin/South America? How many Gauls died during Julius Caesar's conquest of Western Europe? How many Persians died at the hands of Alexander's army?
Heck, it wasn't even until last century that the Ottoman and British Empires were laid to rest!
I'm not saying that invading Iraq was the right thing to do - I went on record then saying that I didn't think we had enough cause to invade. But it is an interesting thing to observe, I think, how much different the worlds' attitude toward empires is now.
If the cochlear bones are damaged, then even bone-conduction won't help with hearing, because it is those three bones that do the actual conversion of air pressure to electrical signals that the brain can decode as sound. Without those specific bones to do the conversion, doing bone conduction is no more useful than, say, holding your fingers up to a person's throat while they're speaking and feeling the vibrations they're making. While it's a useful thing in certain circumstances (and therefore an idea not totally without merit), it's nowhere near the same as true hearing.
Sorry to burst your bubble! Rest assured that it took me a looong time when I was young to understand that my grandmother (whose was deaf from birth) could feel sound, but couldn't hear it.
(commonly referred to as an American, arrogant as we are)
It's not arrogance, it's convenience. The U.S. is probably the only country whose English-language name isn't an adaptation of a common native ethnic group or similar basic name. What should we call ourselves? United Stateseans? USAians? Statesmen? Since our country was named, in English, as a political entity and not an ethnic one, what to call its citizens was not considered. Originally, they were all British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and collectively "colonists". But all that changed on July 4, 1776. And at that point there was only one country in the Western Hemisphere - the United States. There were no other nationalities, and it is reasonable to think that at least some of the colonists fully expected the U.S. to be the only country in the Western Hemisphere at some point anyway! (The concept of "manifest destiny" is proof-in-point that thought was given to U.S. expansion very early on.)
Besides, there isn't likely to be any confusion anyhow - even though, technically, all inhabitants of the North and South American continents are "americans", every other nationality in the hemisphere has a national name by which to call themselves: Canadian, Mexican, Brazilian, Peruvian, Colombian, Chilean, etc. So it's not as if the residents of the U.S. of A. are likely to be confused with anyone else at any rate.
I know it's popular to bash "americans" right now, especially in the U.S., but apply a little Occam's Razor to the question and the answer might not be so damning as you might have thought.
Atoms can only absorb discrete frequencies of radiation
Right - the electrons absorb quanta in discrete energies, photons in this case. But the electrons don't hold on to the energy, they re-emit it. (I know that this is what causes the sky around the setting sun to appear a different color than the sky when the sun is at apex, but I don't remember how that works...)
Now is it the density of the energy/matter that causes a change in the 4D fabric, or is some other 'quantum' effect that causes it? How does the presense of matter change the permeability/permitivity of spacetime?
Slashdot Mirror
All perceived causation is simply highly likely correlation.
It is an anecdote, which means that it is emprical evidence in support of a non-scientific hypothesis; that CRTs can cause eye damage. The qualitative part was the measure of the worsening of eyesight.
As an anecdote, it is not intended to stand up to the rigors of scientific study. Without doing a controlled study, there is no way I could make the claim that CRTs actually do cause eye damage. However, I did not mean to phrase it as "my dog has fleas, so all dogs have fleas". I meant to say that "my dog has fleas, so at least some fleas attach themselves to some dogs".
Several other posters have commented that it may have been the refresh rate of the CRTs that caused problems, and not the CRT technology itself. Indeed, there seems to be a plethora of anecdotes supporting that position. And it seems consistent with the data set I have gathered, so rest assured I will check the refresh rate of any monitor, CRT or otherwise, that I use from now on.
So I hope we can clarify that I was not trying to prove causation, just that the correlation s tended to point in a particular direction based solely on anecdotal evidence and careful observation.
The MiniGRAIL detector is a cryogenic 68 cm diameter spherical gravitational wave antenna made of CuAl(6%) alloy with a mass of 1400 Kg, a resonance frequency of 2.9 kHz and a bandwidth around 230 Hz, possibly higher. The quantum-limited strain sensitivity dL/L would be ~4x10-21. The antenna will operate at a temperature of 20 mK.
IANAPhysicist, but I'll take a crack at it.
-cryogenic = extremely cold
-68cm CuAl sphere = ~2 1/4 foot metal sphere made of a copper/aluminum alloy that is 6% "parent" metal (the CuAl) and 94% filler metal.
-Mass of 1400kg = ~3100 pounds U.S.
-Resonance frequency 2.9kHz = if you were to point a speaker at the sphere and output a soundwave of 2.9kHz, the sphere would have constructive wave interference and actually amplify the sound.
-Bandwidth of 230Hz = not sure exactly how to explain this...
-gravitational wave antenna = same as the radio antenna on your car: it (in theory, at least) picks up gravity waves so they can be measured
-operate at a temperature of 20mK = only 20 1/1000th's of a degree above absolute zero
-quantum-limited strain = ? I don't know what this means, sorry.
So physicists - please correct me if I'm wrong on any or all points.
I beg to differ. Spending many hours a day writing résumés in front of a (very high quality) CRT had a seriously detrimental effect on my mother's eyes. She went from having better-than-perfect vision to having to wear bifocals in a very short period of time. Every time she went to the doctor, he had to increase her prescription. As soon as I convinced her to spend the money on an LCD monitor, her vision immediately stopped worsening.
And in case you think it might be related to age, my younger brother, a high school student, has also recently been prescribed glasses due to too many hours in front of a CRT. That finally convinced my father to have an LCD for each PC in the house, thankfully.
So I feel quite justified saying there's a quantitave long-term negative effect on eyesight using CRTs.
I wonder if these new thin CRTs will have the same drawback?
I have been in the same boat for several years now. I almost religiously stay away from MMORPGs precisely for this reason. I tend to only buy games which don't require a great deal of time investment. Lately I've been playing Criterion's Burnout series (2+3), which is a lot of fun and can be played for 10-30 minutes at a time for the most part. Even online, I can hop into BO3 for a game or two and hop back out.
'Course, I often find that the clock has jumped ahead 2 hours when I've only been playing for 15 minutes... It seems that certain games often have time distortion fields surrounding them. Go figure.
Right. So the original question poster is looking for a linux-friendly HDTV PCI card with digital I/O and QAM decoding support, have I got that right?
There seems to be some good information here. Ignore the "DVIco FusionHDTV DVB-T Digital TV Tuner Card"; it's composite and SVHS input only. The MyHD MPD-120 Tuner (actual MPD-120 mfg. product link here) has a DVI-in daughterboard, which is nice (though it doesn't have QAM decoding, apparently). It also outputs IEEE1394, but under Windows XP only, which sucks. But it does have component video analog output. So that might be useful, but doesn't seem to be the holy grail.
I don't mean to be inflammatory - I'm part Native American myself - but AFAIK it wasn't the Europeans who invented scalping. Many (though certainly not all) of the Native American tribes were ruthless warriors who did all they could to eradicate each other. War was not unknown to this people; I hesitate to agree that it was their 'niceness' that failed them.
That's not to say that the Europeans (and later the U.S.) did not do some atrocious things. Some of what was done was unforgiveable. Thank goodness we as a society have come a long way since then.
Imagine a fish who dies and is fossilized. The scales show up as patterns in the fossil, right? In fact, depending on how it's preserved, sometimes you can cut through them and see a fairly accurate cross-section of the scales.
Now imagine a woven rush basket that somehow becomes fossilized (not likely, but just go with it). Now looking at the fossil, you're going to see the rises and falls of the individual reeds as they transverse all the perpendicular reeds in the design, and you'll be able to see the remnants of the grain running across and down the design as well. That's the sort of thing the student was studying - the anklyosaurus had a similar structure, only on a much smaller scale.
Fossilization doesn't turn something into a piece of amorphous rock - it preserves the topography (at least) of what was fossilized. So it's possible to examine not only the major features (skeletal structure, etc.) but also minor ones which were preserved. Some fossils, if preserved before flesh decay occurred (frozen instantly, caught in a tar pit, etc.) can even have the features of skin imprinted on the rock. That's how we know archeopteryx had feathers, for instance.
Hope that helps!
Sure it went well, and can even be accredited to Clinton... if you ignore the tech boom and the lowly billions of dollars in tax revenue that generated.
I have yet to see anything that proves that Reagan's economic policies caused the recession. Simply saying that "reaganomics obviously doesn't work - see, we had a recession!" is like saying "money doesn't work - see, I don't have any!". It's fallacious to attribute failure to something without some sort of hard data explicitly connecting the two.
The professionals are working from A to B to C to D and researching how to get to E and F, but that's too complicated for most people.
...and to continue the history lesson, in the 1960's this was carried to greater heights by LBJ's "full employment" society plans...
...the failure of which lead, in both direct and indirect ways, to the Carter administration's double-digit inflation in the late 1970's...
...which was finally stopped by the Reagan administration's, wait, what was it? Oh, yes, supply-side economic policies ...
...which was a "hoax" from the beginning, wasn't that what you said?
So given the complexity of economics (and the fact that you are insinuating that you are an expert on it), could you offer us some sort of mathematical proof to support your claim that "Supply side economics has been nothing but a hoax from the beginning." I've seen some of the supply-side economics models, and they seem rather compelling. And "nothing but a hoax" is a rather strong statement, logically speaking - are you sure you want to hang your entire argument on an absolute generalization?
I've also seen numerous examples of Colbert's "laissez faire" economics in action, some first-hand. My father was a pilot for one of the richest men in the world. This man owned several aircraft, a feat made possible only by his enormous wealth. Now the people who built those aircraft, the people who maintained those aircraft, the people who scheduled those aircraft, the people who inspected those aircraft, the people who insured those aircraft, and the people who flew those aircraft, were all paid from this man's wealth. We're talking the financial well-being of more than 100 families (including mine) which were entirely dependent on this man's financial status. And that's just to maintain his flight abilities, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of others whose income was generated by doing other kinds of work for him!
Now think about how many others there are that do the same thing. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that there are only 1,000 people who can afford to pay for the full-time services of 3,000 people. (The actual number is much higher, especially if you consider those who have businesses.) Those people alone employ a full 1% of the nation's population (3,000,000+ people)!!
For those born yesterday, look up some history. The US had its greatest economic growth in the 50s, at a time when personal income over $200,000 was taxed at a predatory 90%. The big money went into businesses, not a few rich people, and the economy roared.
the only thing keeping us going is confidence in our economy
The only thing that has kept the economy going since the eradication of the gold standard has been its constituents belief in it. (Or more abstractly, it could be argued, its belief in itself.)
This is aided by the idea that the basic unit of the U.S. economy, the U.S. Dollar, is backed by the "full faith and trust of the government of the United States of America", whatever that means. (For one thing, it means that all Americans are insured for money in the bank for up to $100,000.)
Remember too, that Alexander Hamilton was an enormous proponent of the government operating in a deficit - he felt, among other things, that the debt of a government to its people would incur some accountability (no pun intended) beyond Jefferson's espoused "natural law". One could argue that a government's responsibility to its people is flexible and changing ("...but some animals are more equal than others"), but owed money is owed money in any monetary society, which helps keep the government in check (again, no pun intended).
At first glance, I thought exactly the same thing. One of the advantages of martial arts training is its ability to compensate for things like size and weight. I've known girls who were half my weight that I wouldn't mess with.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized that there were other things to be considered. One is speed, which I think should be included with s&w as a critical component. Also, martial arts is a compensation for lack of some or all of those three factors. This is what equalizes the physical differences between people when they're fighting.
The parent poster is right, though, in thinking that this is much like boxing. Or perhaps, in a more limited context, martial arts competitions. There are rules in place to prevent unexpected or unorthodox maneouvers, and the combatants are (one hopes) roughly similar in skill level. And let me tell you, if two opponents are identical in any three of skill, size, weight, or speed, the fourth factor will cast the deciding vote in the victory*. If I'm told I'm going to fight a guy who's as skilled in karate, as fast, and as heavy as I am, but I have a choice whether he's 6'6" (2m) or 5'4" (1.63m), I am certainly going to choose the smaller guy, because I will have an obvious advantage.
Tying this all back to the bees... The bees only know a couple of moves. They're like boxers in that they have a limited number of things they are capable of doing. Wasps can't learn tae kwon do or judo. (If they could, we'd all be in trouble.) And they have relatively similar skills with their limited abilities. So this means that speed, size, and weight are major components in their battles, and more often than not, the bigger guy is going to win.
Now what would be really interesting would be to take a wasp who has legitimate leader markings from a colony of wasps bred to be much smaller than their normal cousins, and put him in a fight with a non-leader from a colony that's been modified to be bigger than normal. Or vice versa - take a runt from the big tribe, paint him as a leader, and let him loose on the smaller tribe. There may be more to this than markings...
*There are other factors which can decide the outcome, such as determination or desperation, but they are not as quantifiable and are therefore harder to evaluate. They can compensate somewhat, but only to a point.
Hey, wait a minute - it's not redundant, they're twins!!
Are you fucking kidding me??!? Are you seriously suggesting that Opus Dei is responsible for Ashcroft's policies??!?
I know many people have problems with Opus Dei, but what you're saying has tenuous validity at best. Go ahead, back up what you're saying with facts. Is Ashcroft really an OD member? I can't find any reference to Ashcroft which associates him with the OD prelacy.
What's more, the phrase "Praise the Lord" is hardly a solely Catholic saying - believe me, I live in the Bible belt, and Southern Protestans say it more than I've ever heard from Catholics.
So I'm calling you on this:
B*U*L*L*S*H*I*T!
And believe me, I did "praise the Lord" as soon as I read about his resignation. Today is a good, good day.
There's anothing thing (besides the skeleton) that I haven't seen anyone mention yet, which surprises me. This is the first movie (that I can recall, anyway) which Disney put its name on where a human actually dies on-screen.
When the soldier on the flying machine runs into the rock face, there is no way he's escaped. He didn't fall, he didn't jump, he's simply incinerated in the explosion. I was genuinely surprised when it happened, because Disney is just like those old G.I. Joe cartoons - the villians always manage to bail out at the last second. And that didn't happen here.
I can't begin to speculate what that signifies, but since Pixar animation is carefully constructed even by movie-making standards, so it must have been discussed during some of the team meetings. I wonder why they decided to do it that way instead of letting the pilot live.
IIRC, Eisner (who I think is as close as this generation has seen to the antichrist, excepting perhaps Jack Valenti) is already gone. Wasn't he ousted or something last year? I thought Disney had a replacement for him already?
:-)
Or maybe it's just 5:00am and I'm hallucinating from lack of sleep. Could be just wishful thinking on my part...
I saw 'the incredibles' tonight and loved it. It was mostly up to Pixar's standards, though the storyline was a bit weaker (albeit more complex) than the previous movies. The humor was definitely there - the whole theatre laughed, and there wasn't a single kid in the audience.
The technical effects were even more amazing, IMHO, than the differences between Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Long hair, long wet hair, it was amazing. The best parts were when I caught myself saying, "hey! that didn't look real!"
But you are right, there are some things in the trailer that didn't make it into the movie itself. But I don't think the movie suffers too much from it.
Good point - I bought my NEC MultiSync LCD1765 based on a Toms Hardware review of a similar monitor. The 1765 doesn't have a DVI input, which almost put me off to it, but I am sooooo glad I have it, I can't even begin to think of life without it.
It's 17" with 1280x1024 native resolution. I used to use it with a ViewSonic N6 video processor and I ran cable TV, my Playstation 2 (as a component source @ 720p) and my computer through it. Even with the fastest PS2 games, I never had a problem with ghosting.
I am doing a dual-monitor setup with my old NEC FE950+ CRT monitor now, and it's amazing how much clearer, brighter, and generally "sweeter" my 1765 is compared to the old CRT.
And I paid less than $500 for it.
Can you tell me a time in history when it was not the purpose of war to kill civilians?
I suppose I oversimplified when I said that the purpose of war was to kill people. I think a more accurate statement would be to say that the purpose of war is to subjugate people. In most circumstances, that means killing enough people to inspire the remainder to be docile and obedient.
Now in many circumstances, killing the military element can be enough to subjugate the civilians, but not in all cases, especially in areas of the world where the civilian and military elements are not clearly defined. How do you define 'military'? Only those people who have enlisted as regulars in the armed forces? By that definition, there were an amazing number of "civilian" snipers in Viet Nam... and a great many "civilian" combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. I wonder how many of those are counted in the figure quoted here?
To make matters worse, what do you do with a combatant that hides among civilians? When a sniper takes up residence in a civilian hospital (the likes of which happens regularly), what is the opposing force to do? How many of its own military force is an opposing army to sacrifice before killing the civilians? Whose interests are they supposed to have in mind?
What makes all this interesting is that the armed forces of the United States actually do put the civilian population ahead of its own safety to a large degree, something that is unprecedented in the history of warfare. The U.S. militaries go out of their way to target military targets and leave the civilians in relative safety. This is a change even from WWII, where relatively indiscriminate carpet bombing was the norm. And it's certainly in marked contrast to the tactics used by Al Qaeda in 2001. I don't think they got a single military target, did they?
Now here's an interesting thing... according to The Iraq body count page, the reported number of Iraqi civilians killed post-Saddam in Iraq is just over 16,000. That a far cry from the 100,000 which was estimated for the New Scientist article. Does this mean that less than 1 in 5 civilian deaths is being reported? I think there are some screwy numbers being thrown around here.
And lastly, it's been reported that during Saddam's reign, as many as 2 million people may have died as a result of his rule. So even using the most conservative estimates, we're talking a 20:1 ratio of Saddam's dead to post-Saddam dead. So far I'd say there's not even a comparison.
Having said all that, I must say that I still don't think the invasion of Iraq was justified. But we're stuck with it now, so we have to make the best of it. And I can tell you, that life would be considerably more dangerous for 300+ million Americans if a power void the size of Iraq is left to the radical muslims to take over.
IIRC, IE is the only browser that the US-CERT has issued a statement not to use due to security concerns.
What really worries me is how many U.S. Government agencies and defence contractors still use IE as their standard browser.
Too bad we can't moderate stories as trolls or flamebait.
It was a war people! The purpose of war is to KILL PEOPLE.
It's funny how attitudes have changed. 200 years ago, we would have cited "empire-building" as the reason for invading Iraq, and the world would have been fine with it, just as they were with the English, Dutch, Spanish, French, Danish, Portuguese, Italians, Russians, and Germans.
How many native americans died during Cortez's conquest of Latin/South America? How many Gauls died during Julius Caesar's conquest of Western Europe? How many Persians died at the hands of Alexander's army?
Heck, it wasn't even until last century that the Ottoman and British Empires were laid to rest!
I'm not saying that invading Iraq was the right thing to do - I went on record then saying that I didn't think we had enough cause to invade. But it is an interesting thing to observe, I think, how much different the worlds' attitude toward empires is now.
There was a movie about that, which starred Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi. It was directed by Tim Burton.
:-)
It was a really good movie. I'm sure there's some irony in there somewhere.
If the cochlear bones are damaged, then even bone-conduction won't help with hearing, because it is those three bones that do the actual conversion of air pressure to electrical signals that the brain can decode as sound. Without those specific bones to do the conversion, doing bone conduction is no more useful than, say, holding your fingers up to a person's throat while they're speaking and feeling the vibrations they're making. While it's a useful thing in certain circumstances (and therefore an idea not totally without merit), it's nowhere near the same as true hearing.
Sorry to burst your bubble! Rest assured that it took me a looong time when I was young to understand that my grandmother (whose was deaf from birth) could feel sound, but couldn't hear it.
By the way, they call people from the US Estadounidenses, or roughly, United Statesians.
:-)
Estadounidenses - that's a mouthful in Spanish, much less English!
(commonly referred to as an American, arrogant as we are)
It's not arrogance, it's convenience. The U.S. is probably the only country whose English-language name isn't an adaptation of a common native ethnic group or similar basic name. What should we call ourselves? United Stateseans? USAians? Statesmen? Since our country was named, in English, as a political entity and not an ethnic one, what to call its citizens was not considered. Originally, they were all British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and collectively "colonists". But all that changed on July 4, 1776. And at that point there was only one country in the Western Hemisphere - the United States. There were no other nationalities, and it is reasonable to think that at least some of the colonists fully expected the U.S. to be the only country in the Western Hemisphere at some point anyway! (The concept of "manifest destiny" is proof-in-point that thought was given to U.S. expansion very early on.)
Besides, there isn't likely to be any confusion anyhow - even though, technically, all inhabitants of the North and South American continents are "americans", every other nationality in the hemisphere has a national name by which to call themselves: Canadian, Mexican, Brazilian, Peruvian, Colombian, Chilean, etc. So it's not as if the residents of the U.S. of A. are likely to be confused with anyone else at any rate.
I know it's popular to bash "americans" right now, especially in the U.S., but apply a little Occam's Razor to the question and the answer might not be so damning as you might have thought.
Atoms can only absorb discrete frequencies of radiation
Right - the electrons absorb quanta in discrete energies, photons in this case. But the electrons don't hold on to the energy, they re-emit it. (I know that this is what causes the sky around the setting sun to appear a different color than the sky when the sun is at apex, but I don't remember how that works...)
Now is it the density of the energy/matter that causes a change in the 4D fabric, or is some other 'quantum' effect that causes it? How does the presense of matter change the permeability/permitivity of spacetime?