No cure for cancer, but at least a partial cure for unfounded optimism about finding a cure for cancer can be found in this talk by Lee Hartwell, Nobel prize winner and head of the Fred Hutchinson cancer center in Seattle:
Not only is it wrong to view all cancers as a single disease, it may be wrong to view the cancer in a single patient as a single disease. Cancer is genetically unstable, and it may turn out that the nature of the stability is plausibly modelled by assuming the cancer is using genetic (oh the irony) algorithms. IOW, past a certain point (e.g., metastasis), the cancer cells (at least a small minority of them), may be constantly spitting out all manner of genetic mutations at a high rate. This would help explain the extreme adaptability of most forms of cancer metastasis to whatever treatment you care to throw at them. As Judah Folkman said, every time a patient's cancer returns, it seems to have learned about new growth factors.
If you're worried about cancer, focus on prevention, not on the hope of a cure.
The untrue, but unchangeable, folklore of Google Adsensers (people who try to make
a living via free search engine traffic to web pages that display Google ads) is
that it's crucial for your Google rankings that your website be hosted on
a server with a "static IP" (I don't know why people can't say "IP address" anymore in that community).
These are the folks that will pay more, and more, and more for the privilege of having their
own IP addresses as scarcity increases.
Thus, Google money will ultimately and indirectly fund the switch to IPV6,
as ISPs serving the hordes of must-have-my-own-static-address Adsensers
will be able to afford conversion.
The best thing that can be done to accelerate this process is to perpetuate
the myth that it's crucial for your search engine rankings to host your
website on a server with its own static IP address.
It's called tax law. When your U.S. corporation makes a profit, it has to either spend it or pay a hefty tax on it. Neither Google nor Microsoft are paying the hefty taxes. They instead earmark the cash for future use. Small corporations are routinely nailed for this and declared to be simply holding companies (and forced to pay the tax). When you get big enough, you can get away with flouting this law, although when the amount is so flagrant as in Microsoft and Google, you will sometimes hear rumblings in the press about the issue. In fact, the most rumblings in the press about Microsoft sitting on a cash pyramid without paying taxes on it came right before they broke down and paid their first-ever dividend.
The only interesting thing about Knol is that it is a
new low in Google's continuing brand dilution.
Although Google has already spewed out an incoherent product
mix, they had previously still retained at least this minor
degree of focus:
we index and monetize content; we do not create content
With Knol, the final clear line in making Google a distinct
brand is fuzzed.
They don't create content, well, sorta, maybe,
they "manage" the creation of content.
Of course, you could argue this line was already crossed when
they went into the blogging business.
Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model.
This model goes like this:
Get a highly profitable monopoly.
Watch gigantic sums of cash accumulate.
Panic at the thought of actually distributing that cash to shareholders, as the law requires.
Start throwing money at any additional product line you can think of, believing that because
you got that first profitable monopoly (largely by luck), you are Really Smart, and therefore
you can make money at anything.
Watch with relief as stockholders don't notice how much of their money you
are shoveling into the fire, because your core monopoly is still making huge profits.
Spend years telling yourself that having divisions that lose gigantic sums of money
for years means you are now a "long term" strategist.
Drift slowly into decay like the Soviet Union, still powerful, still important,
but internally depressing, wasteful, and decrepit.
The most profitable company this year was Exxon-Mobil.
A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product
had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits
that it then distributes, largely electronically.
Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers,
retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office,
and pay out all the profits as dividends.
It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.
Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that
the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the
tools we use and the environment we manipulate.
This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept,
and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability
to export intelligence into the environment,
so that we can then be "dumb in peace".
When will they learn? Greed guarantees failure for yet another e-book reader entry. Only $400? Wow, I can buy a laptop and donate another for that price. Let's go over what you need to succeed One More Time:
Price: $400 is a non-starter. Shoot for $200 for the opening price, with price reductions to follow.
Hardware Openness: Hardware companies don't know how to make software. Open the hardware up from the beginning. Give out free SDKs. Let skins and mods proliferate. This sucks in the geeky early adopter, who will then start selling his geeky peers on the device.
Decrease Information Friction: Don't eyeball every source of information as a profit stream -- instead,
focus on how damned easy you can make it for people to get information onto your hardware (think of why YouTube succeeded and Google Video had to fold).
Profits from Platform: Of course, you have to make money or you won't bother to make the device.
Focus on being the platform that all e-book readers are based on.
Think long-term. Think profits from volume. Think of being the AdWords/AdSense of e-books (you can pay and get X content ad-free, or not pay and get it with ads).
Some org with bucks should retaliate by threatening to start a campaign to get users to use strong encryption on all email. If everybody's email client was encrypting the payload, Big Brother would be worse off than they are now. Whether they would see the logic of that or not, is questionable, but it might at least raise the debate among the Washington intellegentsia: stick to warrants before you push everybody into using software that will render the warrants much harder to execute.
I will then start blacklisting every incoming server delivering e-mail to one of those 8,192 addresses.
Ooops. As the trend of zombies that use the "normal" MTA of their infected owners increases,
you will increasingly be blacklisting valid (and large) email servers.
This will definitely eliminate a lot of spam. And a lot of valid mail as well.
I figure that with 8,192 spamtrap addresses and 100-200 user addresses, most spam zombies will be far more likely to hit the spamtrap addresses first where they may be automagically blacklisted.
I think you underestimate the number of unique IP addresses in the larger zombie armies.
Probably you could get better results with less effort by simply
checking the CBL after greylisting.
I've watched repeatedly as my wife did software job searching in good times and bad. The difference between her and everyone else (many of whom didn't get jobs, or took forever to find jobs, or got inferior jobs) is that she focused on the actual skills required to find a good job.
She sent out lots of resumes, not just picking a few job listings that looked cool
(there's often no telling a pig from a poke based on the job listing, ya gotta interview to get
an idea of which jobs are really good).
She worked on job hunting every day, not just when the Sunday paper came out.
She kept organized, and made job-hunting a project,
which means keep a list of where resumes have been sent,
when it was time for a follow-up call, etc.
She networked, which is how most people find jobs.
Riddle: an American, an Indian, a Chinese, and a Mexican all applied for the same programming job -- which one got it?
Answer: the one who had a friend who worked at the same company.
Networking means talking to anybody in the business, or anybody who knows somebody in the business.
Networking means staying in contact with your school alums,
or coworkers from past software jobs.
Networking means talking to folks at your church, your parents' friends anybody
who might be in a software company or know someone in a software company is
a potentially useful networking contact.
If I should ever (shudder) have to find a real job again,
I will most certainly put my wife in charge of directing my efforts.
Skills are important for getting a programming job,
but job-hunting skills can put you way ahead of most of your programming peers.
The whole Linus/SVN thing is actually revealing. It helps explain why Linux continues to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop. When you want to go after a broad user base that already has quite useful options, you have to bend your technical dreams to external forces, rather than blindly (and falsely) believing that whatever your idea of technical superiority is will win in the marketplace.
Thus, most of the world will keep using Windows on the desktop and ignore
what Linus says about that, and most of the version control world will keep using
SVN and ignore what Linus says about that as well.
Do you like apples?
Well, SVN/CVS is getting most of the actual version control work in the world
done -- so how do ya like them apples?
There's nothing more pathetic in the marketplace than someone kvetching that
their product should be winning because it's "better".
It hails back to a false sense of entitlement that many people
seem to have inherited these days.
Why restrict yourself to Linux tools just because you're developing a Linux app this week? I do all development (both Windows and Linux) from my Windows machine.
When coding for Windows, I have my editor open editing local files, and a console window open, for doing builds or whatever.
When coding for Linux, I have my editor open editing what looks like local files (but are actually a network share of the Linux development directory), and a Putty console window open, for doing builds or whatever.
It helps that my editor is Visual SlickEdit, which is very smart and flexible about handling end-of-line conventions. It also provides most of the IDE conveniences of Visual Studio.
Another thing I found out is that you can't get an optimal amount of Vitamin D from supplements because it is all preformed vitamin D so your blood levels will track your intake, and nobody really knows exactly how much is best. When skin gets exposed to sunlight on the other hand, the vitamin D is stored and released appropriately to maintain the optimum concentration (assuming there's enough sunlight).....
Yes, we are still learning how much is best.
No, we are not completely without informed opinions.
It is generally accepted that serum 25OH-D status is the best indicator of Vitamin D status.
There is an emerging consensus that you need to keep your serum levels above 70 or 80nmol/L to keep your skeleton from falling apart as you age.
Who said they were waiting to see that too much vitamin D causes some other serious illness? It causes "hypercalcemia", at least.
Please cite your cases. Or perhaps you meant to say "COULD cause hypercalcemia in some patients, but rarely in any who have not take INDUSTRIAL amounts of the substance". You may want to start by reviewing Vieth's seminal paper in which he systematically dismantles published accounts of Vitamin D poisoning.
If you were to consume a bottle of vitamin D supplements that would be lethal
Now you have passed along an utter untruth. You're probably unaware that it is not uncommon in Europe for doctors to use "stoss therapy" to assure Vitamin D status in particular patients.
Stoss therapy consists of an annual injection of perhaps 150,000IU to 300,000IU -- much, much more than can be found in your local grocery store bottle of Vitamin D. I seem to recall a recent study in which infants (infants!) with rickets were given 600,000IU. I personally took an entire bottle (90,000IU) of Vitamin D3 the last time I started coming down with a cold (checks pulse -- yes, still completely alive!).
Can anyone make a useful comment about those sunlamp things, *please*?
If you elect to use sunlamps, buy from someone who can supply the relative known fraction of UVA/UVB (you want UVB for D production -- you don't really want the UVA that much).
Sperti is a possibility.
There is a flourescent bulb that really closely emulates the sun's UV frequency power ratios. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it's only being used in industrial hoods, not consumer sun lamps.
I just want some dam numbers!
Get the #1, most important number: go to your doctor and get a prescription
for a test to measure your 25OH-vitamin D serum levels.
Make sure the test technology is either Diasorin RIA,
or high-performance liquid chromotography with tandem mass spectrometry
(or just insist on going to Quest Diagnostics -- I *think* they now uniformly
use the latter technology).
Not necessarily. There is a hypothesis (probably turning into a theory before long) that local tissue conversion of 25OH-D3 to 1,25OH-D3 ceases as soon as serum levels of 25OH-D3 start to decline. What that means is, people who go generate lots of 25OH-D3 in a short period by going to the beach, followed by little or no vitamin D from sun or supplements, may actually be putting themselves in the same boat as folks who get little or no Vitamin D at all (with respect to preventing colon/prostate/breast/etc. cancer, that is).
Deciding whether this is true or not has to take a back seat to proving that
Vitamin D can affect cancer epidemiology.
But if you are really want to bet on Vitamin D to keep you cancer free,
don't focus on getting lots of Vitamin D. Instead,
get your serum levels of 25OH-D3 measured a couple times of year,
and focus on trying to keep it at a reasonable level year round, instead
of dipping during the winter.
The "correct dose" depends on how much you have now. You really have to get your serum 25OH-D3 measured to know how many IU per day you would need to achieve a target serum level. Worse, unless you totally avoid UVB exposure, you'll need more at some times of year, and less at others.
However, because I know nobody will really follow the advice to see your doctor and get your serum levels measured, most people could probably safely follow Heaney's conjecture that 2,200IU or more might be required to get your serum levels up to... basically the level that researchers are coming to believe is required just to keep your skeleton from falling apart as you age. (Evolution probably did not really intend us to be just about the only animal who gets osteoporosis when we get old.)
That's a very good reason why you should measure your serum 25OH-D3 before starting to slam down large doses of Vitamin D. It's unfortunate that I can walk into a Quest Diagnostics office in the U.S. and get a (potentially devastating) PSA test done without a doctor's prescription, but I can't buy a test to measure my serum D3 without first finding (and paying!) a doctor to write me some scrip for it.
Ah, I think I've stumbled over "The Marshall Protocol" before. They say they've got this disease "beat" -- were they able to cure your case?
Most likely because we have really good data on how many cancers we expect to see in a group of women of a particular size and age range and medical history. Also, women tend to be getting screened more aggressively. Looking at prostate cancer for something like this is not such a good choice, because to get results as quickly as 4 years, you have to look at older men, thus requiring a bigger starting group because more of your patients will die off of things like heart disease. Prostate cancer also tends to be slower growing, which increases the time required before you can claim to see results.
If you want to see if something can affect a lot of cancers, and want to get your results relatively quickly, you probably want to start with a group of women, not men.
Yes, but it's been a long, hard road from that first epidemiological hint to this study (which in turn, will only be the first in a long series of attempts to make a definitive statement about Vitamin D and cancer).
Here's what's wrong with your question:
pick a car at random from a random parking
lot and tell me how much gas I have to add
to fill the tank.
"Ah, you say, I can't do that unless I measure
how much gas is in that tank already!".
That's exactly why no one can say "This is
precisely how much D3 you should take to
achieve thus and such serum level."
What foods do you eat? What latitude do you live at?
What time of year is it?
Just some of the things that influence your current
serum levels of Vitamin D3.
However, we do have at least two studies that give
rough estimates of the dose/response for taking Vitamin D3.
Go to your doctor, get a prescription for a D3 serum level
and make him/her do the calculations.
Also, keep in mind that there's weeks of lag time between
when you start taking D3 pills and when your serum levels
level off -- do don't remeasure too soon and then overshoot.
The reason that be is this: a fair-skinned person sitting naked in the sun at the equator may make as much as 20,000IU of Vitamin D in 20 minutes. Now go to your grocery store and find a multi-vitamin with Vitamin D in it. It will likely have about 200IU in it. Now try taking 100 of those so you will get the same effect as sitting in the equatorial sun for 20 minutes. Ooops -- you just overdosed on a lot of other substances!
This discovery that the body makes huge amounts of Vitamin D via sunlight is part of what led to the revolution in Vitamin D research.
It's hard to look at that number and not ask: WHY, did we evolve to make such large amounts of Vitamin D?
That's part of why lots of old Vitamin D research is useless and invalid.
Let's see, do women who take 200IU of Vitamin D a day have fewer bone fractures?
Who cares?
That's like adding a teaspoon of gasoline to a car to test whether gasoline
makes cars go further without stopping or not -- you'll discover a teaspoon
makes no statistical difference, so you've "proved" that gasoline has no
effect on how far a car can go without stopping!
but it is still important to routinely use sunscreen whenever sun exposure is longer than 10 to 15 minutes.
Well, that's a good recommendation if you're a black person trying to get rickets.
Although it would be simpler if we were all the same color as the people who write
shoddy nutrition information, the reality is that we come in lots of different
kinds of skin shades. The safety rules for sun exposure depend on your skin type,
but it's worth noting that sunscreen is much better at blocking UVB that creates
Vitamin D than it is at blocking UVA that causes skin cancer.
Hopefully, sunscreen that is actually effective for UVA will be widely
available someday.
In the meantime, the simplest sun safety rule is: terminate sun exposure
well before your skin starts to redden. Do not ever get burns!
gets processed by the liver, then 'activated' in the kidneys and off it goes and does good things.
Well, you're only about 10 years behind the research with that description, which puts you even with most doctors. The revolution in Vitamin D research came with the discovery that D is "activated" (25OH-D3 turns into 1,25OH-D3) in a variety of different tissues of the body, not just the kidneys.
Which body tissues do we know can "activate" Vitamin D3? Here's some: prostate tissue, colon tissue, breast tissue. Where are some popular places that cancer likes to form? Same list. Hmmm.
no Vitamin D production only starts to cause problems after several months.
You might be right, but I'm betting not. Here, things get interesting.
In general, significant (not the 200IU your doctor will tell you to take) levels of Vitamin D3 pretty much always correlate with "better outcome" when it comes to cancer. Even folks with skin cancer who have higher levels of D3 do better than folks who don't. But, there are a few puzzling instances where studies find a U-shaped curve. In other words, they find some instances where people with medium levels of Vitamin D3 do better than those with low -- but those with high levels of Vitamin D3 do as bad as those with low levels! What explains these contradictions?
There is a simple hypothesis (far from proved, but I'll bet my pill taking regimen on it for now) that explains this: local tissue conversion of 25OH-D3 to 1,25OH-D3 shuts down as soon as serum levels of 25OH-D3 start to decline, and doesn't start up again until serum levels stabilize.
If this hypothesis is true, then allowing your vitamin D3 serum levels to drop during the winter may be as bad for you as just having low levels of vitamin D3 all year round.
Once upon a time, I wondered in print why no activist virus writer had yet created a virus that simply watches for Windows dialog boxes that look like license agreements and then automatically simulates pressing the "I Agree" button. If widespread enough, this would render the legality of such "buy before you agree" licenses moot.
Here is yet another candidate for activist virus writers: a virus that secretly submits searches and performs browses to "spam" the spying that ISPs do on their customers. It could make regular searches and browses for ever-expanding variations of things like: "murder", "real estate", "bomb making", "viagra", "assasinate", "penny stocks", and so on.
Eventually, spying advertisers would have to conclude that everybody wants to buy one of everything, and spying governments would have to conclude that everyone is a terrorist.
I have no wish to help criminals evade the law,
but I have a greater wish to screw with anybody who thinks they
have a right to spy on folks without a court order.
I think one of the most overlooked tools for an amateur filmmaker is Martin Hash's Animation Master. $300 (cheaper for students). True, it's sold as an animation product, but you can load up your video as a rotoscope and animate (or just plain tinker) over the top of it. People sell "titling" software for more than that, and you can assuredly do the most whizbang titling you can imagine with this feature-jammed package, plus a whole lot more.
On the downside, any full-featured animation software is darn complex, so you need some geek attitude to get into A:M. OTOH, there's plenty of amateur talent that uses the package, so if you have any budget at all, you might be able buy the work you need.
Disclaimer: I sound like I own stock in the company, but they actually cost me money, since I tend to buy a new upgrade every year. All I get in return is that the relatives actually ask to see my home movies instead of fleeing the room when the DVD goes in:-).
Slashdot Mirror
No cure for cancer, but at least a partial cure for unfounded optimism about finding a cure for cancer can be found in this talk by Lee Hartwell, Nobel prize winner and head of the Fred Hutchinson cancer center in Seattle:
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=2669
Not only is it wrong to view all cancers as a single disease, it may be wrong to view the cancer in a single patient as a single disease. Cancer is genetically unstable, and it may turn out that the nature of the stability is plausibly modelled by assuming the cancer is using genetic (oh the irony) algorithms. IOW, past a certain point (e.g., metastasis), the cancer cells (at least a small minority of them), may be constantly spitting out all manner of genetic mutations at a high rate. This would help explain the extreme adaptability of most forms of cancer metastasis to whatever treatment you care to throw at them. As Judah Folkman said, every time a patient's cancer returns, it seems to have learned about new growth factors.
If you're worried about cancer, focus on prevention, not on the hope of a cure.
The untrue, but unchangeable, folklore of Google Adsensers (people who try to make a living via free search engine traffic to web pages that display Google ads) is that it's crucial for your Google rankings that your website be hosted on a server with a "static IP" (I don't know why people can't say "IP address" anymore in that community). These are the folks that will pay more, and more, and more for the privilege of having their own IP addresses as scarcity increases. Thus, Google money will ultimately and indirectly fund the switch to IPV6, as ISPs serving the hordes of must-have-my-own-static-address Adsensers will be able to afford conversion.
The best thing that can be done to accelerate this process is to perpetuate the myth that it's crucial for your search engine rankings to host your website on a server with its own static IP address.
It's called tax law. When your U.S. corporation makes a profit, it has to either spend it or pay a hefty tax on it. Neither Google nor Microsoft are paying the hefty taxes. They instead earmark the cash for future use. Small corporations are routinely nailed for this and declared to be simply holding companies (and forced to pay the tax). When you get big enough, you can get away with flouting this law, although when the amount is so flagrant as in Microsoft and Google, you will sometimes hear rumblings in the press about the issue. In fact, the most rumblings in the press about Microsoft sitting on a cash pyramid without paying taxes on it came right before they broke down and paid their first-ever dividend.
The only interesting thing about Knol is that it is a new low in Google's continuing brand dilution. Although Google has already spewed out an incoherent product mix, they had previously still retained at least this minor degree of focus: we index and monetize content; we do not create content With Knol, the final clear line in making Google a distinct brand is fuzzed. They don't create content, well, sorta, maybe, they "manage" the creation of content. Of course, you could argue this line was already crossed when they went into the blogging business.
Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model. This model goes like this:
The most profitable company this year was Exxon-Mobil. A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits that it then distributes, largely electronically. Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers, retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office, and pay out all the profits as dividends. It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.
Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the tools we use and the environment we manipulate. This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept, and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability to export intelligence into the environment, so that we can then be "dumb in peace".
Some light reading:
When will they learn? Greed guarantees failure for yet another e-book reader entry. Only $400? Wow, I can buy a laptop and donate another for that price. Let's go over what you need to succeed One More Time:
That's right. And people should realize that English never changes.
I always thought that "PC" stood for "plain courtesy". It seems to fit just fine everywhere I see someone ranting about "political correctness".
Some org with bucks should retaliate by threatening to start a campaign to get users to use strong encryption on all email. If everybody's email client was encrypting the payload, Big Brother would be worse off than they are now. Whether they would see the logic of that or not, is questionable, but it might at least raise the debate among the Washington intellegentsia: stick to warrants before you push everybody into using software that will render the warrants much harder to execute.
I will then start blacklisting every incoming server delivering e-mail to one of those 8,192 addresses.
Ooops. As the trend of zombies that use the "normal" MTA of their infected owners increases, you will increasingly be blacklisting valid (and large) email servers. This will definitely eliminate a lot of spam. And a lot of valid mail as well.
I figure that with 8,192 spamtrap addresses and 100-200 user addresses, most spam zombies will be far more likely to hit the spamtrap addresses first where they may be automagically blacklisted.
I think you underestimate the number of unique IP addresses in the larger zombie armies. Probably you could get better results with less effort by simply checking the CBL after greylisting.
I've watched repeatedly as my wife did software job searching in good times and bad. The difference between her and everyone else (many of whom didn't get jobs, or took forever to find jobs, or got inferior jobs) is that she focused on the actual skills required to find a good job.
She sent out lots of resumes, not just picking a few job listings that looked cool (there's often no telling a pig from a poke based on the job listing, ya gotta interview to get an idea of which jobs are really good). She worked on job hunting every day, not just when the Sunday paper came out. She kept organized, and made job-hunting a project, which means keep a list of where resumes have been sent, when it was time for a follow-up call, etc.
She networked, which is how most people find jobs. Riddle: an American, an Indian, a Chinese, and a Mexican all applied for the same programming job -- which one got it? Answer: the one who had a friend who worked at the same company. Networking means talking to anybody in the business, or anybody who knows somebody in the business. Networking means staying in contact with your school alums, or coworkers from past software jobs. Networking means talking to folks at your church, your parents' friends anybody who might be in a software company or know someone in a software company is a potentially useful networking contact.
If I should ever (shudder) have to find a real job again, I will most certainly put my wife in charge of directing my efforts. Skills are important for getting a programming job, but job-hunting skills can put you way ahead of most of your programming peers.
The whole Linus/SVN thing is actually revealing. It helps explain why Linux continues to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop. When you want to go after a broad user base that already has quite useful options, you have to bend your technical dreams to external forces, rather than blindly (and falsely) believing that whatever your idea of technical superiority is will win in the marketplace.
Thus, most of the world will keep using Windows on the desktop and ignore what Linus says about that, and most of the version control world will keep using SVN and ignore what Linus says about that as well. Do you like apples? Well, SVN/CVS is getting most of the actual version control work in the world done -- so how do ya like them apples?
There's nothing more pathetic in the marketplace than someone kvetching that their product should be winning because it's "better". It hails back to a false sense of entitlement that many people seem to have inherited these days.
Just like closed-source, for-profit orgs. OSS is really growing up! :-)
Why restrict yourself to Linux tools just because you're developing a Linux app this week? I do all development (both Windows and Linux) from my Windows machine.
When coding for Windows, I have my editor open editing local files, and a console window open, for doing builds or whatever.
When coding for Linux, I have my editor open editing what looks like local files (but are actually a network share of the Linux development directory), and a Putty console window open, for doing builds or whatever.
It helps that my editor is Visual SlickEdit, which is very smart and flexible about handling end-of-line conventions. It also provides most of the IDE conveniences of Visual Studio.
And you can find Vieth's explanation of why there is no RDA for Vitamin D here: Vitamin D insufficiency: no recommended dietary allowance exists for this nutrient
Yes, we are still learning how much is best. No, we are not completely without informed opinions. It is generally accepted that serum 25OH-D status is the best indicator of Vitamin D status. There is an emerging consensus that you need to keep your serum levels above 70 or 80nmol/L to keep your skeleton from falling apart as you age.
Please cite your cases. Or perhaps you meant to say "COULD cause hypercalcemia in some patients, but rarely in any who have not take INDUSTRIAL amounts of the substance". You may want to start by reviewing Vieth's seminal paper in which he systematically dismantles published accounts of Vitamin D poisoning.
Now you have passed along an utter untruth. You're probably unaware that it is not uncommon in Europe for doctors to use "stoss therapy" to assure Vitamin D status in particular patients. Stoss therapy consists of an annual injection of perhaps 150,000IU to 300,000IU -- much, much more than can be found in your local grocery store bottle of Vitamin D. I seem to recall a recent study in which infants (infants!) with rickets were given 600,000IU. I personally took an entire bottle (90,000IU) of Vitamin D3 the last time I started coming down with a cold (checks pulse -- yes, still completely alive!).
If you elect to use sunlamps, buy from someone who can supply the relative known fraction of UVA/UVB (you want UVB for D production -- you don't really want the UVA that much). Sperti is a possibility. There is a flourescent bulb that really closely emulates the sun's UV frequency power ratios. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it's only being used in industrial hoods, not consumer sun lamps.
Get the #1, most important number: go to your doctor and get a prescription for a test to measure your 25OH-vitamin D serum levels. Make sure the test technology is either Diasorin RIA, or high-performance liquid chromotography with tandem mass spectrometry (or just insist on going to Quest Diagnostics -- I *think* they now uniformly use the latter technology).
Not necessarily. There is a hypothesis (probably turning into a theory before long) that local tissue conversion of 25OH-D3 to 1,25OH-D3 ceases as soon as serum levels of 25OH-D3 start to decline. What that means is, people who go generate lots of 25OH-D3 in a short period by going to the beach, followed by little or no vitamin D from sun or supplements, may actually be putting themselves in the same boat as folks who get little or no Vitamin D at all (with respect to preventing colon/prostate/breast/etc. cancer, that is).
Deciding whether this is true or not has to take a back seat to proving that Vitamin D can affect cancer epidemiology. But if you are really want to bet on Vitamin D to keep you cancer free, don't focus on getting lots of Vitamin D. Instead, get your serum levels of 25OH-D3 measured a couple times of year, and focus on trying to keep it at a reasonable level year round, instead of dipping during the winter.
The "correct dose" depends on how much you have now. You really have to get your serum 25OH-D3 measured to know how many IU per day you would need to achieve a target serum level. Worse, unless you totally avoid UVB exposure, you'll need more at some times of year, and less at others.
However, because I know nobody will really follow the advice to see your doctor and get your serum levels measured, most people could probably safely follow Heaney's conjecture that 2,200IU or more might be required to get your serum levels up to... basically the level that researchers are coming to believe is required just to keep your skeleton from falling apart as you age. (Evolution probably did not really intend us to be just about the only animal who gets osteoporosis when we get old.)
That's a very good reason why you should measure your serum 25OH-D3 before starting to slam down large doses of Vitamin D. It's unfortunate that I can walk into a Quest Diagnostics office in the U.S. and get a (potentially devastating) PSA test done without a doctor's prescription, but I can't buy a test to measure my serum D3 without first finding (and paying!) a doctor to write me some scrip for it.
Ah, I think I've stumbled over "The Marshall Protocol" before. They say they've got this disease "beat" -- were they able to cure your case?
Most likely because we have really good data on how many cancers we expect to see in a group of women of a particular size and age range and medical history. Also, women tend to be getting screened more aggressively. Looking at prostate cancer for something like this is not such a good choice, because to get results as quickly as 4 years, you have to look at older men, thus requiring a bigger starting group because more of your patients will die off of things like heart disease. Prostate cancer also tends to be slower growing, which increases the time required before you can claim to see results.
If you want to see if something can affect a lot of cancers, and want to get your results relatively quickly, you probably want to start with a group of women, not men.
Yes, but it's been a long, hard road from that first epidemiological hint to this study (which in turn, will only be the first in a long series of attempts to make a definitive statement about Vitamin D and cancer).
Here's what's wrong with your question: pick a car at random from a random parking lot and tell me how much gas I have to add to fill the tank. "Ah, you say, I can't do that unless I measure how much gas is in that tank already!". That's exactly why no one can say "This is precisely how much D3 you should take to achieve thus and such serum level."
What foods do you eat? What latitude do you live at? What time of year is it? Just some of the things that influence your current serum levels of Vitamin D3.
However, we do have at least two studies that give rough estimates of the dose/response for taking Vitamin D3. Go to your doctor, get a prescription for a D3 serum level and make him/her do the calculations. Also, keep in mind that there's weeks of lag time between when you start taking D3 pills and when your serum levels level off -- do don't remeasure too soon and then overshoot.
The reason that be is this: a fair-skinned person sitting naked in the sun at the equator may make as much as 20,000IU of Vitamin D in 20 minutes. Now go to your grocery store and find a multi-vitamin with Vitamin D in it. It will likely have about 200IU in it. Now try taking 100 of those so you will get the same effect as sitting in the equatorial sun for 20 minutes. Ooops -- you just overdosed on a lot of other substances!
This discovery that the body makes huge amounts of Vitamin D via sunlight is part of what led to the revolution in Vitamin D research. It's hard to look at that number and not ask: WHY, did we evolve to make such large amounts of Vitamin D?
That's part of why lots of old Vitamin D research is useless and invalid. Let's see, do women who take 200IU of Vitamin D a day have fewer bone fractures? Who cares? That's like adding a teaspoon of gasoline to a car to test whether gasoline makes cars go further without stopping or not -- you'll discover a teaspoon makes no statistical difference, so you've "proved" that gasoline has no effect on how far a car can go without stopping!
First of all, one cup of milk contains a completely unknown amount of Vitamin D. Spot checks have found levels all the way down to zero.
Second, we don't know what the daily need for this vitamin is. I refer you to Vieth's Vitamin D insufficiency: no recommended dietary allowance exists for this nutrient
Well, that's a good recommendation if you're a black person trying to get rickets. Although it would be simpler if we were all the same color as the people who write shoddy nutrition information, the reality is that we come in lots of different kinds of skin shades. The safety rules for sun exposure depend on your skin type, but it's worth noting that sunscreen is much better at blocking UVB that creates Vitamin D than it is at blocking UVA that causes skin cancer. Hopefully, sunscreen that is actually effective for UVA will be widely available someday.
In the meantime, the simplest sun safety rule is: terminate sun exposure well before your skin starts to redden. Do not ever get burns!
Well, you're only about 10 years behind the research with that description, which puts you even with most doctors. The revolution in Vitamin D research came with the discovery that D is "activated" (25OH-D3 turns into 1,25OH-D3) in a variety of different tissues of the body, not just the kidneys.
Which body tissues do we know can "activate" Vitamin D3? Here's some: prostate tissue, colon tissue, breast tissue. Where are some popular places that cancer likes to form? Same list. Hmmm.
You might be right, but I'm betting not. Here, things get interesting.
In general, significant (not the 200IU your doctor will tell you to take) levels of Vitamin D3 pretty much always correlate with "better outcome" when it comes to cancer. Even folks with skin cancer who have higher levels of D3 do better than folks who don't. But, there are a few puzzling instances where studies find a U-shaped curve. In other words, they find some instances where people with medium levels of Vitamin D3 do better than those with low -- but those with high levels of Vitamin D3 do as bad as those with low levels! What explains these contradictions?
There is a simple hypothesis (far from proved, but I'll bet my pill taking regimen on it for now) that explains this: local tissue conversion of 25OH-D3 to 1,25OH-D3 shuts down as soon as serum levels of 25OH-D3 start to decline, and doesn't start up again until serum levels stabilize.
If this hypothesis is true, then allowing your vitamin D3 serum levels to drop during the winter may be as bad for you as just having low levels of vitamin D3 all year round.
Once upon a time, I wondered in print why no activist virus writer had yet created a virus that simply watches for Windows dialog boxes that look like license agreements and then automatically simulates pressing the "I Agree" button. If widespread enough, this would render the legality of such "buy before you agree" licenses moot.
Here is yet another candidate for activist virus writers: a virus that secretly submits searches and performs browses to "spam" the spying that ISPs do on their customers. It could make regular searches and browses for ever-expanding variations of things like: "murder", "real estate", "bomb making", "viagra", "assasinate", "penny stocks", and so on. Eventually, spying advertisers would have to conclude that everybody wants to buy one of everything, and spying governments would have to conclude that everyone is a terrorist.
I have no wish to help criminals evade the law, but I have a greater wish to screw with anybody who thinks they have a right to spy on folks without a court order.
I think one of the most overlooked tools for an amateur filmmaker is Martin Hash's Animation Master. $300 (cheaper for students). True, it's sold as an animation product, but you can load up your video as a rotoscope and animate (or just plain tinker) over the top of it. People sell "titling" software for more than that, and you can assuredly do the most whizbang titling you can imagine with this feature-jammed package, plus a whole lot more.
On the downside, any full-featured animation software is darn complex, so you need some geek attitude to get into A:M. OTOH, there's plenty of amateur talent that uses the package, so if you have any budget at all, you might be able buy the work you need.
Disclaimer: I sound like I own stock in the company, but they actually cost me money, since I tend to buy a new upgrade every year. All I get in return is that the relatives actually ask to see my home movies instead of fleeing the room when the DVD goes in :-).