Why do we not market sugar as "cancer-free sweetener?"
Because sugar does indirectly cause cancer. Fat is a carcinogen. Not just the grease you eat, but the flab you carry around, that your body makes out of refined sugar, or any sugar (including fructose) if you eat more than you burn.*
Reference Reference "Early studies noted the association of obesity and kidney cancer among women; however, more recent studies have also found an increased risk among overweight men."
How fat can be a carcinogen:
Your body fat doesn't just sit there. It makes estrogen-like hormones. Even in guys. The more of these you have circulating, the more likely your prostate (or your breasts--yes, males too) will develop a tumor.
It correlates with colon cancer. Cause unknown.
Fat-soluble anything gets stored in your fat. If you have lots of fat, any fat-soluble poisons (natural or man-made) that you consume have a place to stay. Less fat, less room for stored fat-soluble molecules.
Long article on diet as a factor in cancer. Interesting related transcript of a meeting about a weight-loss drug. *"Once the... monosaccharides [get] into the blood circulatory system they can pass directly into the liver, where fructose and galactose are converted into glucose....Excess glucose will be stored as glycogen mainly in liver and muscle cells or in form of metabolized fat in adipocytes." here and plenty more sources.
...possessing a live snakehead is illegal in 13 states. Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia are not among them... (from the article linked above by pamri)
The big question is, with the level of ugly on that guy, who would WANT to keep one? Live or otherwise. It don't look like good eatin' either.
Re, could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land...?
It's live wiggling proof that intermediate forms exist. An argument sometimes used against Darwinian evolution is that something in between species A and B couldn't compete with the fully functional A creatures now in their prime, nor would it yet have the equipment needed to be a successful B. But this guy looks like he's succeeding quite well as A fish that's Becoming amphibious (given a few tens of millions of years). If that's possible now, why not in the past as well?
This site Precambrian Earth is a red hot mix of geology (from a lot longer ago than our amphibious ancestors) and what might be religion.
How a blind person can "use" a drawing
on
Drawing For The Blind
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Re, If they're "visually impaired", how are they going to enjoy their own work?
Drawings aren't all just to look at.
Suppose you're visually impaired or even completely blind. You could use this tool for drawing architectural plans, circuit diagrams, garden layouts, org charts--anything you want.
Re, Molten metal will burn through unprotected skin....I sure don't want to be in a room when its raining molten metal!
I have seen it happen on a small scale. One day many years ago we young idiots were casting bullets for the long rifle and poured the lead into the mold while it still had a bit of water in it. It exploded out and a drop of it hit my brother's arm. Yes, it did burn right into the flesh, and that was only lead with its front-porch melting point.
If its trajectory had been slightly different it would have hit his eye.
well, this is fine indeed. I can finally realize my dream of melting basalt at my house. But now what to do with all those old CDs I was keeping to make a solar oven with?
Info on the elements, OT but close (no bronze or basalt, but iron: http://www.speclab.com/elements/ Has melting points and a lot of other data apparently cribbed from CRC.
You used to could check them out from NASA if you were a teacher at an accredited institution--or something like that. You'd get a pebble inside a lucite hockey puck, suitable for viewing under a microscope. I know somebody who checked one out, then slept with it in his bed (he also used it in a space exhibit at a student fair).
Couldn't find anything at the JSC site about this in a quick search. Maybe they don't do it any more, or maybe their site is hard to find things on.
I'd like to see a worldwide snapshot database combined with post-911-level pattern recognition routines.
Upload your grandmother's album and find out: Who is that standing there at the beach with Dad and Aunt Edna in 1952? The database project would be able to figure it out.
What a boon for genealogists.
(And, yes, a problem for people with something to hide about what they were doing in 1952 or who their ancestor was in 1876. But it's going to be a transparent society anyway, and we're going to have to get used to it.)
Kear Lsalgkot Reaker,
Re, 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard. Lure they are. They're e.actly oqqosite each other, ohich makes them conceptually equivasent to the qart of your brain that,an't uell left from right.
Re,...at some point english speakers used it to represent any God. This is not its origin however as it wasn't meant to be generic term...
Sure it was. Monotheism only arrived in what would become the English-speaking world about 1500 years ago. The word "god" definitely predates the advent of the Christian religion into the consciousness of the Britons. You can tell this by observing that it has a cognate in German, Gott, which means that the word goes back at least as far as the time before the future English speakers and the future German speakers parted company.
Note also that God, when used as the name (not category) of a deity, is capitalized because it is a proper noun. Failing to capitalize a proper noun to show you don't believe that the referent exists is a misuse of typography; if god (as a proper noun referring to the Jewish-Christian-Muslim deity), then also jupiter, venus, thor, weyland smith, etc., which are clearly incorrect.
Re What I didn't understand and that time is that for us Europeans the word "patriot" has a different meaning than it has in the US
Exactly. Two points:
We (Americans) have nothing in common besides being here. No common ethnicity, language, religion, political ideas, etc. The only thing we have in common is citizenship and sometimes not even that. Kind of like Slashdotters.
The citizens (or subjects) of other countries expect to be defined by their nationality. Americans expect their nation to be defined by them.
I saw a talk by a non-American, come to denounce us for our sins, who berated us for flying that militaristic symbol, the flag, over everything from our front yards to car dealerships. She did not understand that we don't see the thing as military at all. Goodness no. It's just plain old not a military symbol. If anything, it brings to mind schools. The icon for a school on American maps is a tiny flag like a squared-off P.
Possibly the flag of her country is used strictly in a military context. But we have NO OTHER THING in common. So we use the flag as a unifying symbol. It just means "us", not "us and our politics" because we don't agree on politics; not "us and our religion" because we don't agree on religion; not "us and our government" because at any given time half or more of the country doesn't like the current administration. It really does symbolize the people and their ideals.
(The flag has been misused of course, but so has every symbol in the world, and they can't be judged by their abusers.)
Solaris trailer: After waiting about 6 minutes to download the whole thing, in small format, I saw a few seconds of nebulous moving pictures that could have been sent as an animated GIF at a fraction of the nuisance value. Just because something CAN be done with a fancier technology, doesn't mean it OUGHTA be.
In much of the United States, the Corps of Engineers builds dams on local streams to create lakes for recreation and water supply. For instance, look at this satellite image of Dallas. All those lakes are artificial and are made from tiny, even intermittent Texas streams, very much unlike the rivers found elsewhere. So, in a sense, there are bodies of water that exist only in the vicinity of cities in this part of the world. If they affect weather, that is more than I know.
all Lem's books are about people... That is probably because you are more people-oriented yourself. I think I liked the mysterious structures because that kind of thing, and its real-life counterparts such as this speak to me more than stories about people, although I read classic literature also and like it very much.
The book has scenes of unearthly beauty which did not appear in the original Russian movie. For instance: the vast, wonderful, possibly sentient structures that grew on Solaris. These (a major plot element in the book) did not appear in the 1972 movie--a real disappointment.
From the article: Dr Jose Morales, the head of the White Udder cloning project at the Havana Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, is confident a breakthrough is imminent. "We're very close," he said. "We have big things coming. This project is very important to Commandante Castro."
I bet some appropriate technology measures would fit the situation better than this. Or even just the old cure-all: training and education. Cuba overcame illiteracy. Surely they could also provide county agent-like services to their farmers to overcome the described decline in cattle health and performance. Here's a description of county agents from 1925. This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that Communists would be good at--government paternalism. Paternalistic or not, extension agents vastly improved the practices and lifestyle of rural Americans for the better during the mid-20th century.
On the question of whether milk is good for you, it's got a lot of protein, calcium, and fat that you need when you're very young. And fortunately children aren't generally lactose-intolerant. That sets in, when it does, after puberty usually.
The keyboard does serve us well, but if it ever gets an update this could be it. The virtual keyboard might be hard to use at first, but it also might be able to switch instantly from one mode to another using simultaneous voice commands or (what I've been waiting for a long time) foot pedals. Not just Shift and Ctrl but Roman/Cyrillic/Hiragana quick changes, and of course your own macro "keys" by the dozen.
Virtual keyboard possibilities:
Change the size of keys to your own specs. I want that!
Modify their relative positions--not the alphabet keys but the others.
Have the arrow keys an inch in the air above the rest.
Have certain keys play a note when I get near them because they're the ones I always hit by accident when trying to do something else, or make them three inches off to the side or...
...in a vertical invisible panel perpendicular to the "keyboard." This starts to merge with the finger-pointing idea.
Exactly right. I'll never forget getting my hands on a Xerox Star system in about 1983. I'd used a mouse as a CAD drafter, but to use one working with text, to be able to add images, drag items, and so on--it opened a whole new world. And who can forget the impact of the first Mac? It changed the world. So could this.
Suppose a geek prefers not to use finger-pointing. Fine. Don't use it. But they shouldn't waste their time being contemptuous of the average user's needs. Anything that empowers the individual is a step forward. Besides different levels of knowledge, people have different styles of interacting with the world--verbal, visual, etc. Let 'em all have what they need.
Instead it's insisting that a human interact at every mind-numbing repetitive step...
Only if you don't also have the option of a command-line interface. There's nothing wrong with adding more potential features for those that want them--as long as they can also be disabled for those that don't want them.
It's the lack of this last option that has embittered you, probably. Being forced to use kindergarten-style interfaces. What's needed is a sophistication-level adjustment, starting with Command Line Only or even Just the Bits and ranging all the way up through My Very Own Computer Helper(TM).
That was 1981. The flies weren't irradiated enough--which was an industrial accident of sorts, not enough quality control at the insect irradiating plant (which was in Mexico). I don't think you can blame careless procedure in a foreign production facility on the governor of California no matter how much you personally dislike him.
* are nontoxic
* are biodegradable
* can be used at low concentrations
* are highly species specific
Hazards or difficulties associated with their use include the facts that:
* resistance to pheromones could potentially evolve (although it would then be difficult for insects to find mates!)
* it is expensive and takes a long time to achieve commercial production." More than you wanted to know about gypsy moths
In reading up about this I found that some of the same people who don't like pesticides also don't like Bt and pheromones. You wonder how they're going to like a deforested Pacific Northwest if those moths get loose up there.
Re, ... dying of brain disease in the year 2075... because we were too busy looking for space waterslides...
You want the money spent on medical science so you (and everybody else) can live longer. That's fine, except: Why? There is no point in mere continued metabolism without enjoyment or purpose, and a lot of people, including me, believe that learning is an excellent and enjoyable activity and a worthy goal. My life would be poorer without astronomical research and all I do is read about it on space.com. When I had cancer last year, yes, it would have been nice if they could have said "Here, take this, you're cured," but would I swap the Hubble telescope for it? No way. What is life without things like this in it?
You also want the money spent on reforming bad situations in the world, such as poverty and cruelty. Again, a very fine thing. But it is not possible, even if desirable, to focus entirely on reform and repair. There are two reasons:
- It won't work. People with a scientific bent WILL research, artists will create, comedians will perform, etc., even in the most puritanical society and even at the highest cost to themselves.
- It makes for a self-destructive society. Not the individuals, the culture itself. For instance, the French Revolution. "The revolution has no need of scientists," someone said when they cut off Lavoisier's head. Unbalanced (in the literal sense, not meaning deranged) societies don't last, can't last, and don't leave the world perceptibly better after they go.
Slashdot Mirror
Because sugar does indirectly cause cancer. Fat is a carcinogen. Not just the grease you eat, but the flab you carry around, that your body makes out of refined sugar, or any sugar (including fructose) if you eat more than you burn.*
Reference
Reference "Early studies noted the association of obesity and kidney cancer among women; however, more recent studies have also found an increased risk among overweight men."
How fat can be a carcinogen:
- Your body fat doesn't just sit there. It makes estrogen-like hormones. Even in guys. The more of these you have circulating, the more likely your prostate (or your breasts--yes, males too) will develop a tumor.
- It correlates with colon cancer. Cause unknown.
- Fat-soluble anything gets stored in your fat. If you have lots of fat, any fat-soluble poisons (natural or man-made) that you consume have a place to stay. Less fat, less room for stored fat-soluble molecules.
Long article on diet as a factor in cancer.Interesting related transcript of a meeting about a weight-loss drug.
*"Once the
Whether or not you agree with Darwin on the subject of evolution, he's entertaining and educational.
No need to go so far as the library. You can find his books here.
Launch it with an electromagnetic rail gun. Extreme high speeds, no rockets.
...possessing a live snakehead is illegal in 13 states. Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia are not among them... (from the article linked above by pamri)
The big question is, with the level of ugly on that guy, who would WANT to keep one? Live or otherwise. It don't look like good eatin' either.
Re, could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land...?
...many millions (billions) of years ago...
It's live wiggling proof that intermediate forms exist. An argument sometimes used against Darwinian evolution is that something in between species A and B couldn't compete with the fully functional A creatures now in their prime, nor would it yet have the equipment needed to be a successful B. But this guy looks like he's succeeding quite well as A fish that's Becoming amphibious (given a few tens of millions of years). If that's possible now, why not in the past as well?
Re,
Geologic time on a short page
Geologic time on a long page
Links to a lot of geological time charts
This site Precambrian Earth is a red hot mix of geology (from a lot longer ago than our amphibious ancestors) and what might be religion.
Re, If they're "visually impaired", how are they going to enjoy their own work?
Drawings aren't all just to look at.
Suppose you're visually impaired or even completely blind. You could use this tool for drawing architectural plans, circuit diagrams, garden layouts, org charts--anything you want.
Re, Molten metal will burn through unprotected skin....I sure don't want to be in a room when its raining molten metal!
I have seen it happen on a small scale. One day many years ago we young idiots were casting bullets for the long rifle and poured the lead into the mold while it still had a bit of water in it. It exploded out and a drop of it hit my brother's arm. Yes, it did burn right into the flesh, and that was only lead with its front-porch melting point.
If its trajectory had been slightly different it would have hit his eye.
You be careful, now, hear?
well, this is fine indeed. I can finally realize my dream of melting basalt at my house. But now what to do with all those old CDs I was keeping to make a solar oven with?
Info on the elements, OT but close (no bronze or basalt, but iron: http://www.speclab.com/elements/ Has melting points and a lot of other data apparently cribbed from CRC.
P.S. don't forget this
You used to could check them out from NASA if you were a teacher at an accredited institution--or something like that. You'd get a pebble inside a lucite hockey puck, suitable for viewing under a microscope. I know somebody who checked one out, then slept with it in his bed (he also used it in a space exhibit at a student fair).
Couldn't find anything at the JSC site about this in a quick search. Maybe they don't do it any more, or maybe their site is hard to find things on.
I'd like to see a worldwide snapshot database combined with post-911-level pattern recognition routines.
Upload your grandmother's album and find out: Who is that standing there at the beach with Dad and Aunt Edna in 1952? The database project would be able to figure it out.
What a boon for genealogists.
(And, yes, a problem for people with something to hide about what they were doing in 1952 or who their ancestor was in 1876. But it's going to be a transparent society anyway, and we're going to have to get used to it.)
Kear Lsalgkot Reaker, ,an't uell left from right.
Re, 'L' and 'S' aren't even remotely close to one another on the keyboard.
Lure they are. They're e.actly oqqosite each other, ohich makes them conceptually equivasent to the qart of your brain that
--ti.mg;vmg;v
Re, ...at some point english speakers used it to represent any God. This is not its origin however as it wasn't meant to be generic term...
Sure it was. Monotheism only arrived in what would become the English-speaking world about 1500 years ago. The word "god" definitely predates the advent of the Christian religion into the consciousness of the Britons. You can tell this by observing that it has a cognate in German, Gott, which means that the word goes back at least as far as the time before the future English speakers and the future German speakers parted company.
Note also that God, when used as the name (not category) of a deity, is capitalized because it is a proper noun. Failing to capitalize a proper noun to show you don't believe that the referent exists is a misuse of typography; if god (as a proper noun referring to the Jewish-Christian-Muslim deity), then also jupiter, venus, thor, weyland smith, etc., which are clearly incorrect.
Exactly. Two points:
- We (Americans) have nothing in common besides being here. No common ethnicity, language, religion, political ideas, etc. The only thing we have in common is citizenship and sometimes not even that. Kind of like Slashdotters.
- The citizens (or subjects) of other countries expect to be defined by their nationality. Americans expect their nation to be defined by them.
I saw a talk by a non-American, come to denounce us for our sins, who berated us for flying that militaristic symbol, the flag, over everything from our front yards to car dealerships. She did not understand that we don't see the thing as military at all. Goodness no. It's just plain old not a military symbol. If anything, it brings to mind schools. The icon for a school on American maps is a tiny flag like a squared-off P.Possibly the flag of her country is used strictly in a military context. But we have NO OTHER THING in common. So we use the flag as a unifying symbol. It just means "us", not "us and our politics" because we don't agree on politics; not "us and our religion" because we don't agree on religion; not "us and our government" because at any given time half or more of the country doesn't like the current administration. It really does symbolize the people and their ideals.
(The flag has been misused of course, but so has every symbol in the world, and they can't be judged by their abusers.)
Solaris trailer: After waiting about 6 minutes to download the whole thing, in small format, I saw a few seconds of nebulous moving pictures that could have been sent as an animated GIF at a fraction of the nuisance value. Just because something CAN be done with a fancier technology, doesn't mean it OUGHTA be.
In much of the United States, the Corps of Engineers builds dams on local streams to create lakes for recreation and water supply. For instance, look at this satellite image of Dallas. All those lakes are artificial and are made from tiny, even intermittent Texas streams, very much unlike the rivers found elsewhere. So, in a sense, there are bodies of water that exist only in the vicinity of cities in this part of the world. If they affect weather, that is more than I know.
all Lem's books are about people... That is probably because you are more people-oriented yourself. I think I liked the mysterious structures because that kind of thing, and its real-life counterparts such as this speak to me more than stories about people, although I read classic literature also and like it very much.
The book has scenes of unearthly beauty which did not appear in the original Russian movie. For instance: the vast, wonderful, possibly sentient structures that grew on Solaris. These (a major plot element in the book) did not appear in the 1972 movie--a real disappointment.
Hope the new movie does better.
From the article: Dr Jose Morales, the head of the White Udder cloning project at the Havana Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, is confident a breakthrough is imminent. "We're very close," he said. "We have big things coming. This project is very important to Commandante Castro."
I bet some appropriate technology measures would fit the situation better than this. Or even just the old cure-all: training and education. Cuba overcame illiteracy. Surely they could also provide county agent-like services to their farmers to overcome the described decline in cattle health and performance. Here's a description of county agents from 1925. This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that Communists would be good at--government paternalism. Paternalistic or not, extension agents vastly improved the practices and lifestyle of rural Americans for the better during the mid-20th century.
On the question of whether milk is good for you, it's got a lot of protein, calcium, and fat that you need when you're very young. And fortunately children aren't generally lactose-intolerant. That sets in, when it does, after puberty usually.
P.S. Slashdot meetup URL
Virtual keyboard possibilities:
P.S. Slashdot meetup URL
Intuitive interfaces have their place...
Exactly right. I'll never forget getting my hands on a Xerox Star system in about 1983. I'd used a mouse as a CAD drafter, but to use one working with text, to be able to add images, drag items, and so on--it opened a whole new world. And who can forget the impact of the first Mac? It changed the world. So could this.
Suppose a geek prefers not to use finger-pointing. Fine. Don't use it. But they shouldn't waste their time being contemptuous of the average user's needs. Anything that empowers the individual is a step forward. Besides different levels of knowledge, people have different styles of interacting with the world--verbal, visual, etc. Let 'em all have what they need.
Re, What if the interface "thinks" that you're going to attempt to load one program, when in reality...
The ONE new feature I would like best on my computer is for it to know what I mean when I say "Stop! No! I didn't mean that!"
Instead it's insisting that a human interact at every mind-numbing repetitive step...
Only if you don't also have the option of a command-line interface. There's nothing wrong with adding more potential features for those that want them--as long as they can also be disabled for those that don't want them.
It's the lack of this last option that has embittered you, probably. Being forced to use kindergarten-style interfaces. What's needed is a sophistication-level adjustment, starting with Command Line Only or even Just the Bits and ranging all the way up through My Very Own Computer Helper(TM).
That was 1981. The flies weren't irradiated enough--which was an industrial accident of sorts, not enough quality control at the insect irradiating plant (which was in Mexico). I don't think you can blame careless procedure in a foreign production facility on the governor of California no matter how much you personally dislike him.
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/dec97/moth12 97.htm Popular-style article h eets/fs-generic_lep.htm very technical, EPA-orientedt m Article about an insect population simulation program. m Dr. Pat Muir's notes for a college class, short, readable. Excerpt:
http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/biopesticides/facts
http://www.wcrl.ars.usda.gov/cec/papers/jce93-9.h
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2174.html Using bt instead
http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/Trevey/Gypsy.htm Vermont, long piece, "gyplure"
http://www.orst.edu/instruction/bi301/chemcont.ht
"The advantages of pheromone use include the facts that they:
* are nontoxic
* are biodegradable
* can be used at low concentrations
* are highly species specific
Hazards or difficulties associated with their use include the facts that:
* resistance to pheromones could potentially evolve (although it would then be difficult for insects to find mates!)
* it is expensive and takes a long time to achieve commercial production."
More than you wanted to know about gypsy moths
In reading up about this I found that some of the same people who don't like pesticides also don't like Bt and pheromones. You wonder how they're going to like a deforested Pacific Northwest if those moths get loose up there.
P.S. URL for the meetup
Re,
... dying of brain disease in the year 2075 ... because we were too busy looking for space waterslides...
You want the money spent on medical science so you (and everybody else) can live longer. That's fine, except: Why? There is no point in mere continued metabolism without enjoyment or purpose, and a lot of people, including me, believe that learning is an excellent and enjoyable activity and a worthy goal. My life would be poorer without astronomical research and all I do is read about it on space.com. When I had cancer last year, yes, it would have been nice if they could have said "Here, take this, you're cured," but would I swap the Hubble telescope for it? No way. What is life without things like this in it?
You also want the money spent on reforming bad situations in the world, such as poverty and cruelty. Again, a very fine thing. But it is not possible, even if desirable, to focus entirely on reform and repair. There are two reasons:
- It won't work. People with a scientific bent WILL research, artists will create, comedians will perform, etc., even in the most puritanical society and even at the highest cost to themselves.
- It makes for a self-destructive society. Not the individuals, the culture itself. For instance, the French Revolution. "The revolution has no need of scientists," someone said when they cut off Lavoisier's head. Unbalanced (in the literal sense, not meaning deranged) societies don't last, can't last, and don't leave the world perceptibly better after they go.