The vast majority of developed nations have already figured out how to make health care affordable, its really not some big mystery. Cover everyone, and then its uniformly affordable regardless of your present need. The principle isn't any different than social security, which has been rock solid for decades.
For what its worth, this doesn't even require that the government actually run the plan, it works out just fine as a private affair as long as everyone is covered.
Of course there is always the possibility that lame politicians will cave-in to the point where the effort will be doomed, but thats a different problem not related to the concept itself.
We should take care to differentiate between what the media is payed to spout-off, those who have been trained to regurgitate what the TV tells them, and what ordinary Americans actually think if you ask them for an honest opinion without spinning the context.
What we are hearing right now is the old money interests talking, not the American people.
Along with libraries and the educational system, internet access is another means (and now the preferred medium) for informational access. The internet is even better than books and teachers, because now we can work remotely, so it has a real a direct economic impact.
Suppose, for a thought experiment, that we took a modern developed nation and removed all access to the internet. In a matter of a few years they would fall behind with respect to the global economy. Let a hundred years pass and they would appear to outsiders as some kind of primitive society where people don't know basic facts. You may not need internet access NOW to survive, but if you cut yourself off from the internet for a few generations, I guarantee your genetic line would be in serious danger.
Induction isn't a quantum-scale effect, just plain old electromagnetics. Floating pins (that is, any pin configured as an input but not connected to a circuit) are notorious for causing strange effects that mess up both digital logic and analog sensing. Some pretty spooky behavior can result, like states that change when you wave your hand over the chip (due to the capacitance created by the proximity of the hand).
The input pin-state doesn't allow significant current to flow, and all microcontrollers use it as the default state on power-up since it negates the possibility of a short circuit. But if an input isn't connected to anything, it will generate spontaneous readings due to charge accumulation / current drift--some of which might be inductive but it can also be plain old resistive pathways since there are no perfect insulators (for example a PCB might look like a resistor of a few dozen megaohms, or even less if the board is dirty from handling).
This is easily dealt with by grounding the unused pins, either externally or internally (by switching it to an output low state). This comes up often enough that forgetting to assert disconnected pins to ground is what I'd call a classic "101" embedded hardware design bug. I've done it a few times myself and had various apparently inexplicable results followed by feeling stupidity when I realize whats actually happening.
You would have to build a custom speaker to actually reproduce frequencies below 20hz, and you'd need special equipment to verify its actually working since you can't hear anything that low. Chances are if you got anything at all out of your system it would have been overtones from distortion.
FWIW, the "brown note" hypothesis was tested on Mythbusters and it didn't hold up. It has no scientific basis.
The maximum safe exposure levels of light (as a function of wavelength) is well known and documented, e.g. by OSHA or other occupational standards bodies. Incurring temporary blindness isn't necessarily dangerous and is sometimes used in vision science studies. The procedure is called "bleaching" as it relates to a temporary chemical depletion of the rhodopsin pigment. Its not permanent blindness so I don't think the Geneva ban would apply.
The choice of green light in the original dazzler is smart because it saves power (green being close to the peak wavelength sensitivity for the human retina), and its also a relatively safe color to look at. Blue is an order of magnitude or so more dangerous. Red is safer but not as visible so the power requirements would be much greater.
The people who cooked up this $250 hack don't seem to be aware of that fact that light damage is wavelength dependent and have made theirs with full RGB color... so yeah, this is why we give money to the pros.
Astronomy being a science of very-remote observation might not be so great for kids... direct interaction with the environment is an important factor in early education. The idea might be exciting to them, but the technical reality of all the physics is rather intricate. Now, actual telescope hacking would be great fun, but its a bit advanced technically for primary education. Lots of modern astronomy is done with automated telescopes and statistical/computational image analysis to find interesting objects and test hypotheses, but I don't think a $20 scope will get you into that activity.
Anyways, I can find those objects in two seconds with a google search, in 10x the resolution of any hobby telescope, and that is enough for most people.
Lots of products have solid state compasses. The cheap ones are 2-axis and also need an accelerometer to compensate for platform pitch/roll, and also have an undefined heading when tilted exactly 90 degrees. If they don't include the accelerometer then it has to be held level to get an accurate reading (just like an old needle compass).
All compasses are slow and basically require the platform to be stationary for say, 20-50 msec, so if your platform is expected to be undergoing any significant motion you need a unit that integrates gyros also with a kalman filter, e.g., http://vectornav.com/products/74-vn-100
The problems mentioned in TFA including tilt error and local magnetic disturbances (to some extent) are solved by using an integrated 3-axis gyro+accelerometer+magnetometer unit, such as this one: http://vectornav.com/products/74-vn-100
True its not cheap, but if I'm getting a new sensory organ I'd like it to be high quality...:)
Worldwide we use something on the order of 10^20 J energy per year. Fortunately the sun pumps out 10^31 J per day, a decent proportion of which actually hits us as it subtends a solid angle of about.5 degrees at this distance.
There may be some cause for concern with power sources that could drain from the angular momentum of the earth, such as tidal power... or maybe even this kite idea? I'm speculating here, but the earth's angular momentum with respect to its center is only on the order of 10^23 J and its a "non-renewable" resource so we might actually be able to make an impact on the length of the day. And that would probably be much harder to fix than this little global warming issue we currently have.
It is possible to make a broadband resonator using a fractal design. These are common in audio acoustics, the most basic design is the quadratic residue diffuser.
Garbage collection is notoriously problematic for programs that are doing something that requires temporal predictability or a fast response time, because the GC has to interrupt the running program to clean up, and the interruptions can be quite long in duration (tens of milliseconds or worse).
This new G1 collector has a soft real-time bound so its a nice middle ground between hard RT Java (which is proprietary, I'm pretty sure, and probably also not so great with performance as is often the case with hard real-time), and the standard but temporally unpredictable throughput-oriented concurrent-mark-sweep GC.
By the way, using malloc() is potentially just as bad for time-critical code, since if there is a page fault, this can invoke a very expensive system call that effectively freezes your code until it returns.
Most benchmarks, e.g., as found in various programming language shoot-outs, only measure throughput, so the subtleties of timing-related behavior and related performance problems are not well known.
The whole point of the using the scanner is to make sure that EVERY object is checked--either by hand or sent through xray. In fact the first question the TSA person asks when you enter is if your pockets are entirely empty.
So either they didn't administer the instructions properly, or you didn't answer the question correctly.
I'd love to rail on the TSA also but the truth is, the rules for what you can take on a plane and how to pack it are clearly stated, and 99% of their work is spent correcting people who are too lazy and/or incompetent and/or self-absorbed to actually read and comprehend those rules.
The TSA doesn't make the drama, its the passengers.
IRS deduction is 55 cents per mile, accounting for the fixed and variable costs. However accounting only for the fixed costs leaves you with 24 cents per mile (see the IRS formulation for "medical and moving" miles). In other words, depreciation and interest (or lease payments) is about 56% of the cost. I'd call those costs an optional luxury expense.
Taking the standard distance of 12k miles per year gives a deduction of over $6000. Which in my case at least is excessive by a factor of about 3x.
There are good reasons to take public transit (congestion, pollution, time), its just that this cost argument seems rather poorly formulated.
The cost estimate for public transit is the actual cost that you pay as an individual to ride the bus or train. It doesn't factor in the cost to the public, i.e. taxes.
Meanwhile, the cost estimate for driving is the theoretical cost that includes the cost of owning and maintaining the car itself in addition to gas etc. Depending on the actual worth and reliability of your car, this estimate can be quite generous.
So one of them integrates hidden costs, and the other one ignores them... apples to oranges.
NYC is only the poster child to us in the USA where we've got abysmally low standards. Light rail in London, for example, is better by an order of magnitude. More trains, more stops, less overcrowding.
Any bloke can use a thread and a few locks, or toss in some OpenMP pragmas on a for-loop. But what about: priority inversion, memory barriers, atomic operations, lock-free data structures, concurrency under deadline scheduling, deterministic concurrency, automated task-graph analysis. Not advanced concepts?
Goats have a key advantage over lawnmowers in that they have no problem with steep terrain, poison oak and so on, which is of crucial importance since the famous berkeley/oakland hills firestorm of 1991. So, they are not an uncommon sight around these parts.
Incidentally most of California's native plants and grasses were destroyed about a century+ ago when unrestricted grazing by goats and sheep was allowed. The native grass was replaced by the fast-growing stuff that dies every summer and now keeps the goats employed... in other words, the "golden hills of california" are man-made.:)
Typically these signals are recorded with very fancy and very small microphones that are inserted into the ear canal by a licensed audiologist. But that is for research purposes, and MAYBE its possible to get something usable for a biometric ID without semi-invasive microphones...
Interestingly OAE is a binaural effect. It comes from the auditory cortex, not the ear, so you can literally put a sound into the right ear and record the emission out the left ear.
OAE is thought to be a reflex response connected with the ear's automatic gain compensation system. One theory is that people with a faster OAE response are more resistant to hearing damage (there is a population of individuals who have exceptionally small age-related hearing loss).
There is also spontaneous OAE, i.e., tinnitus, that can come and go according to various unknown factors including stress, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of developed nations have already figured out how to make health care affordable, its really not some big mystery. Cover everyone, and then its uniformly affordable regardless of your present need. The principle isn't any different than social security, which has been rock solid for decades.
For what its worth, this doesn't even require that the government actually run the plan, it works out just fine as a private affair as long as everyone is covered.
Of course there is always the possibility that lame politicians will cave-in to the point where the effort will be doomed, but thats a different problem not related to the concept itself.
We should take care to differentiate between what the media is payed to spout-off, those who have been trained to regurgitate what the TV tells them, and what ordinary Americans actually think if you ask them for an honest opinion without spinning the context.
What we are hearing right now is the old money interests talking, not the American people.
Along with libraries and the educational system, internet access is another means (and now the preferred medium) for informational access. The internet is even better than books and teachers, because now we can work remotely, so it has a real a direct economic impact.
Suppose, for a thought experiment, that we took a modern developed nation and removed all access to the internet. In a matter of a few years they would fall behind with respect to the global economy. Let a hundred years pass and they would appear to outsiders as some kind of primitive society where people don't know basic facts. You may not need internet access NOW to survive, but if you cut yourself off from the internet for a few generations, I guarantee your genetic line would be in serious danger.
Induction isn't a quantum-scale effect, just plain old electromagnetics. Floating pins (that is, any pin configured as an input but not connected to a circuit) are notorious for causing strange effects that mess up both digital logic and analog sensing. Some pretty spooky behavior can result, like states that change when you wave your hand over the chip (due to the capacitance created by the proximity of the hand).
The input pin-state doesn't allow significant current to flow, and all microcontrollers use it as the default state on power-up since it negates the possibility of a short circuit. But if an input isn't connected to anything, it will generate spontaneous readings due to charge accumulation / current drift--some of which might be inductive but it can also be plain old resistive pathways since there are no perfect insulators (for example a PCB might look like a resistor of a few dozen megaohms, or even less if the board is dirty from handling).
This is easily dealt with by grounding the unused pins, either externally or internally (by switching it to an output low state). This comes up often enough that forgetting to assert disconnected pins to ground is what I'd call a classic "101" embedded hardware design bug. I've done it a few times myself and had various apparently inexplicable results followed by feeling stupidity when I realize whats actually happening.
You would have to build a custom speaker to actually reproduce frequencies below 20hz, and you'd need special equipment to verify its actually working since you can't hear anything that low. Chances are if you got anything at all out of your system it would have been overtones from distortion.
FWIW, the "brown note" hypothesis was tested on Mythbusters and it didn't hold up. It has no scientific basis.
The maximum safe exposure levels of light (as a function of wavelength) is well known and documented, e.g. by OSHA or other occupational standards bodies. Incurring temporary blindness isn't necessarily dangerous and is sometimes used in vision science studies. The procedure is called "bleaching" as it relates to a temporary chemical depletion of the rhodopsin pigment. Its not permanent blindness so I don't think the Geneva ban would apply.
The choice of green light in the original dazzler is smart because it saves power (green being close to the peak wavelength sensitivity for the human retina), and its also a relatively safe color to look at. Blue is an order of magnitude or so more dangerous. Red is safer but not as visible so the power requirements would be much greater.
The people who cooked up this $250 hack don't seem to be aware of that fact that light damage is wavelength dependent and have made theirs with full RGB color... so yeah, this is why we give money to the pros.
They should have spring admission to kindergarten! November baby here and I'm about a year older than most of my classmates.
Astronomy being a science of very-remote observation might not be so great for kids... direct interaction with the environment is an important factor in early education. The idea might be exciting to them, but the technical reality of all the physics is rather intricate. Now, actual telescope hacking would be great fun, but its a bit advanced technically for primary education. Lots of modern astronomy is done with automated telescopes and statistical/computational image analysis to find interesting objects and test hypotheses, but I don't think a $20 scope will get you into that activity.
Anyways, I can find those objects in two seconds with a google search, in 10x the resolution of any hobby telescope, and that is enough for most people.
I wish these fellows the best of luck... :)
Lots of products have solid state compasses. The cheap ones are 2-axis and also need an accelerometer to compensate for platform pitch/roll, and also have an undefined heading when tilted exactly 90 degrees. If they don't include the accelerometer then it has to be held level to get an accurate reading (just like an old needle compass).
All compasses are slow and basically require the platform to be stationary for say, 20-50 msec, so if your platform is expected to be undergoing any significant motion you need a unit that integrates gyros also with a kalman filter, e.g., http://vectornav.com/products/74-vn-100
The problems mentioned in TFA including tilt error and local magnetic disturbances (to some extent) are solved by using an integrated 3-axis gyro+accelerometer+magnetometer unit, such as this one: http://vectornav.com/products/74-vn-100
True its not cheap, but if I'm getting a new sensory organ I'd like it to be high quality... :)
Seems like it would be better to just simulate in on the computer. Legos submerged in glycerin sounds like a terrible mess.
1 LED embedded in a contact lens. VGA resolution is now only 5 orders of magnitude away. Better start coding those augmented reality apps!
Worldwide we use something on the order of 10^20 J energy per year. Fortunately the sun pumps out 10^31 J per day, a decent proportion of which actually hits us as it subtends a solid angle of about .5 degrees at this distance.
There may be some cause for concern with power sources that could drain from the angular momentum of the earth, such as tidal power... or maybe even this kite idea? I'm speculating here, but the earth's angular momentum with respect to its center is only on the order of 10^23 J and its a "non-renewable" resource so we might actually be able to make an impact on the length of the day. And that would probably be much harder to fix than this little global warming issue we currently have.
It is possible to make a broadband resonator using a fractal design. These are common in audio acoustics, the most basic design is the quadratic residue diffuser.
Garbage collection is notoriously problematic for programs that are doing something that requires temporal predictability or a fast response time, because the GC has to interrupt the running program to clean up, and the interruptions can be quite long in duration (tens of milliseconds or worse).
This new G1 collector has a soft real-time bound so its a nice middle ground between hard RT Java (which is proprietary, I'm pretty sure, and probably also not so great with performance as is often the case with hard real-time), and the standard but temporally unpredictable throughput-oriented concurrent-mark-sweep GC.
By the way, using malloc() is potentially just as bad for time-critical code, since if there is a page fault, this can invoke a very expensive system call that effectively freezes your code until it returns.
Most benchmarks, e.g., as found in various programming language shoot-outs, only measure throughput, so the subtleties of timing-related behavior and related performance problems are not well known.
The whole point of the using the scanner is to make sure that EVERY object is checked--either by hand or sent through xray. In fact the first question the TSA person asks when you enter is if your pockets are entirely empty.
So either they didn't administer the instructions properly, or you didn't answer the question correctly.
I'd love to rail on the TSA also but the truth is, the rules for what you can take on a plane and how to pack it are clearly stated, and 99% of their work is spent correcting people who are too lazy and/or incompetent and/or self-absorbed to actually read and comprehend those rules.
The TSA doesn't make the drama, its the passengers.
IRS deduction is 55 cents per mile, accounting for the fixed and variable costs. However accounting only for the fixed costs leaves you with 24 cents per mile (see the IRS formulation for "medical and moving" miles). In other words, depreciation and interest (or lease payments) is about 56% of the cost. I'd call those costs an optional luxury expense.
Taking the standard distance of 12k miles per year gives a deduction of over $6000. Which in my case at least is excessive by a factor of about 3x.
There are good reasons to take public transit (congestion, pollution, time), its just that this cost argument seems rather poorly formulated.
The cost estimate for public transit is the actual cost that you pay as an individual to ride the bus or train. It doesn't factor in the cost to the public, i.e. taxes.
Meanwhile, the cost estimate for driving is the theoretical cost that includes the cost of owning and maintaining the car itself in addition to gas etc. Depending on the actual worth and reliability of your car, this estimate can be quite generous.
So one of them integrates hidden costs, and the other one ignores them... apples to oranges.
OK, so you drive a brand new hummer, and your driving record is the poster child of reckless endangerment.
NYC is only the poster child to us in the USA where we've got abysmally low standards. Light rail in London, for example, is better by an order of magnitude. More trains, more stops, less overcrowding.
Any bloke can use a thread and a few locks, or toss in some OpenMP pragmas on a for-loop. But what about: priority inversion, memory barriers, atomic operations, lock-free data structures, concurrency under deadline scheduling, deterministic concurrency, automated task-graph analysis. Not advanced concepts?
Goats have a key advantage over lawnmowers in that they have no problem with steep terrain, poison oak and so on, which is of crucial importance since the famous berkeley/oakland hills firestorm of 1991. So, they are not an uncommon sight around these parts.
Incidentally most of California's native plants and grasses were destroyed about a century+ ago when unrestricted grazing by goats and sheep was allowed. The native grass was replaced by the fast-growing stuff that dies every summer and now keeps the goats employed... in other words, the "golden hills of california" are man-made. :)
Typically these signals are recorded with very fancy and very small microphones that are inserted into the ear canal by a licensed audiologist. But that is for research purposes, and MAYBE its possible to get something usable for a biometric ID without semi-invasive microphones...
Interestingly OAE is a binaural effect. It comes from the auditory cortex, not the ear, so you can literally put a sound into the right ear and record the emission out the left ear.
OAE is thought to be a reflex response connected with the ear's automatic gain compensation system. One theory is that people with a faster OAE response are more resistant to hearing damage (there is a population of individuals who have exceptionally small age-related hearing loss).
There is also spontaneous OAE, i.e., tinnitus, that can come and go according to various unknown factors including stress, etc.
Quick, quaff a unicorn chaser!