The article says that bats are blind. That is not true... Bats have reasonably good eyesight. If they were truly blind, then streetlights would not bother them a bit.
As other have commented - We have one single data point to work from. The science on whether E.T. exists is far from settled, and probably never will be unless we actually do make contact.
Suggested reading: "The Aliens Are Coming" - Ben Miller "Five Billion Years of Solitude" - Lee Billings "Rare Earth" - Ward Brownlee "Weird Life" - David Toomey
About 15 years ago I set up a wiring closet in my house. Over time I have learned some important lessons.
My house is only 1300 ft^2 with one level. It is built on a slab, so there is no basement. Fortunately the attic provides reasonably good access to the interior walls.
I ran at least one RG-6 coax, one CAT-5 (there was no such thing as CAT-6 back then) and one 4-wire telephone to a plate in every room. Most rooms have more than one plate. Some plates have two coax. Everything goes back to a central closet - really just a piece of plywood on the wall in the closet where the furnace and water heater are. I ran a dedicated 15-amp power circuit to the wiring panel with 4 pairs of outlets (16 total).
I do not subscribe to cable TV, so the coax has largely been unused. I have both television and FM antennas on the roof, and that uses a couple of the outlets to get to the back of my main hi-fi system.
The 4-wire telephone jacks also get very little use. I wish I had pulled two CAT-5 to every plate. One of them could be used for telephone systems including various PBX-like systems.
A few years after doing all of this, I added line-level audio to the wiring panel. I wish I had done that earlier. If you run line-level audio, be sure to use really good double-shielded cabling for it. I did not, and it picks up a fair bit of 60hz buzz.
I have tried some home automation stuff using X-10 devices. Some of them work and some do not. Reliability has been a big problem.
Here are my suggestions. Much of this echos comments from others.
1) You cannot have too many plates in each room. One per wall is not too many. Yes, that includes the bathrooms! 2) You cannot have too much power in each room. At least one 20-amp circuit per bedroom, preferably two, and separate from the lights in that room. At least one 20 amp circuit per wall in the family living spaces (living room, family room, multimedia room etc.) At least two or three 20 amp circuits on the kitchen counters. More 20 amp circuits in the garage and basement. 3) At least two Cat-6 per plate. 4) At least one RG-6 coax per plate. Two on some plates, especially if you think you might run a satellite or something to it. 5) At least one line-level audio pair to each plate. 6) Leave plenty of room in the conduits. Mine are jammed so full I cannot get anything more through them, and they only go about three feet from the plywood panel up to the attic. 7) Leave good stout pulling strings in every conduit. 8) Plates on the outside is a good idea. I have not needed them, but I don't have a deck or hot tub. 9) I don't really like any of the lighting controller systems that are available. X-10 is really old and lame. Insteon is not reliable. Z-Wave is hackable. Belkin WeMo depends on third-party servers. 10) Bring neutrals into every light switch box. 11) Running security wiring while the walls are open is good, even if you are not going to use it. 12) Whole-house surge protection and GFI. 13) Buy an electrical panel that is twice what you think you will need. This means both amperage capacity and number of circuits. 14) Make a provision for connecting a whole-house generator. 15) Run at least three speaker wire pairs from the front to the back of any place you might put a home theater system. 16) Run some HDMI cabling to the center of the ceiling where you might hang a projector. Also put a power circuit up there. 17) Same goes for any place you might put a VESA mount. Run HDMI, power and Ethernet to the back of any television.
There is not yet one inch of Google fiber actually run here in Olathe. I figure minimum 6 months before they start laying it, and several years before it is available to more than a few.
All this discussion about tankless water heaters is interesting, but you will get FAR more bang for your buck by dumping more insulation in the attic, replacing drafty windows, weather stripping doors etc. None of this is going to wow your friends until you start comparing utilitiy bills. I added a layer of R-19 unfaced batts to my attic in late 1999. Payback in lower gas and electric bills was less than 6 months, and it has been free money since then.
For cool stuff on not too much money, I suggest setting up some X-10 controllers and using your computer to run them. It's not hard to do and costs only a few hundred dollars for the basics. You can set up porch lights to run on a sudown-sunup schedule. Set internal night lights to turn on at bedtime. Set your coffee pot to turn on a half-hour before you have breakfast.
A weather station is also cool but will set you back $400 or $500. Connect it to a computer and publish it on the Internet.
It is possible to get a thermostat in every room, then set up a control system so that conditioned air goes only to rooms that need it. The vents are controlled by inflatable bags so they can let air go only where it is needed. No clue how much it would cost, probably quite a bit.
My sister works as a Medical Assistant in a very small family practice. In fact, the practice is so small that my sister and the doctor are the entire staff. They hire an electronic medical records service from "the cloud". This service makes it possible for every patient of their practice to have on-line access to their records. The records get updated in near real-time because both my sister and the doctor use tablet computers. The tablets go everywhere, even the exam rooms, so as notes are taken they go directly to the patient's records.
I have not heard any details about how many of their patients actually USE this service. I would bet no more than half, since many of their patients are geriatric cases - too old to want to bother to learn how to use a computer.
My sister and the doctor both are very much in favor of this kind of access to medical records. They think it makes their job easier. It gets more details to the patients and it does not tie up the phone just to be reading records to someone. It also lets patients remind themselves about treatment decisions that have been made.
It requires an ActiveX object to access the records and so is useful only for Internet Explorer users. The vendor is supposed to be working on a way for Mac users to get access as well, but they are not there yet. Firefox and Linux? Ferget it! Heck, they just added support for IE 9 and 64-bit Windows a few months ago.
My parents did not have enough money to send me to college, and I had pretty bad grades in high school. Basic attitude problem... I wound up getting a job doing computer support for Radio Shack and later GRiD Systems. They had education benefits, so at age 30 I started college part time evenings with the intent of getting a B.S. in Computer Science.
Over the next ten years GRiD Systems vanished, I got another job (which I still have), and slowly I achieved the goal. At age 40 I graduated with a GPA over 3.98.
The degree has probably helped me keep my job, though it did nothing for my pay. I already get paid handsomely.
It's worth noting that I make a living as a Windows expert, but I do not have ANY of the Microsoft credentials that are often required. I've been around enough that I don't need those letters to prove I know what I know.
My opinion is it's never too late. Start now, get the degree you want, and don't be too surprised when things come out totally different than what you expected. Life happens...
My grandmother is another good example. She was widowed at age 54 with an 8th grade education and no job. She got a GED, then a college degree as a teacher. She taught art in public schools for 12 years before retiring at age 70.
I worked with Dr. Worsey to open a cave
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 1
In late 2001 and the first half of 2002 a bunch of cavers worked to open a new entrance to Carroll Cave. Dr. Worsey provided the explosives expertise and training. He arranged for the donation of explosives and blasting caps. Most important, he and his students provided transportation of the explosives from the magazine to the dig site and back. Using nothing but volunteer labor, we blasted a hole 30 inches in diameter 120 feet straight down through limestone to get the new entrance. The new entrance is now the main way to get into Carroll Cave. Without Dr. Worsey's help we would never have got it done.
While helping with the blasting I attended a week-long training session for work. At the beginning of the session everyone was asked to tell something interesting about themselves. I had just spent the weekend handling explosives, so I told the class that a bomb-sniffing dog would probably go positive on me. Naturally I had to explain and show pictures, with the consequence that we started 45 minutes late.
The first time I worked the dig we were about 50 feet down. The blasting was still throwing debris out the top of the hole, so we parked all the cars several hundred feet away. From 50 feet down and 200 feet away the blasts were strong enough to set off car alarms.
Standing at the bottom of a hole 30 inches in diameter and 100 feet deep with a bucket of dynamite hanging by your head makes one think very carefully about what you are doing. Dynamite is actually quite safe. You cannot set it off with fire, though you probably could set it off with a large firecracker. The really dangerous item is the electrical blasting cap. We kept those in a locked box away from the digging until the last possible minute. Only one person handled the electrical detonator while everyone else stood WAY back.
The only serious injury we had during the whole project was a broken foot when one guy dropped a jackhammer with the point down. We had zero injuries from explosives. There were assorted cuts and bruises from working around sharp metal and an air compressor way beyond its prime.
Carroll Cave has a web site with many pictures of the dig project. If you are really interested, Google on it. I don't think the server can handle a SlashDot effect, so I won't post the URL here.
I'd like to add a little different persepctive to this long thread... that of the Corporate America PC user.
I work for a major reinsurance company on the team that builds the desktop coreloads (among other things). We currently use Windows NT 4.0 as our standard desktop operating system. Planning is under way to convert to Windows 2000, a task we hope to complete in a year or so.
One thing I think gets lost in the debate over operating systems is this: Operating systems exist to support applications. They have no other purpose in life.
Linux is not and never will be used on any desktop in our company. It doesn't matter how good the operating system is, or how stable, or how friendly the GUI is. Nothing matters except the availability of applications.
As an insurance company, we are heavily regulated by state and federal governments in all countries where we operate. Complying with those regulations consumes as much as 1/3 of our staff time. The applications we use to help us comply are available only for Windows - no other operating system, not even MAC.
Among the applications we depend on: Freedom AS2000, which prepares our Blue and Yellow annual statements. Premium Pro, which prepares premium tax returns for state and municipal entities. Tracker - Keeps track of our agent appointments. Mosaic - prints policies that conform to state regulations. RMS Catrater - evaluates property casualty exposures for windstorms, flood and earthquake risk. TAS - analyzes policies in our Life Reinsurance portfolio for exposure and reserving. Silverplume, AM Best, AXCO and OneSource - Various databases of information on other insurance companies and insurance regulations. Outlook 2000 - because we require MAPI-compliant email.
Not one of these applications will run in anything but Windows. This is just the beginning. We have almost 500 known applications in our environment and none of them work in anything but Windows. A very few, such as Office, have Linux or Mac equivalents, but they are the exceptions.
Even if we could change some users to Linux, we would not. The cost of supporting two operating systems is more than twice what it costs to support one. Some might argue that Linux costs less to support than Windows. My view is that it doesn't matter how much less Linux might cost to support. What matters is the applications we must run.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says that bats are blind. That is not true ... Bats have reasonably good eyesight. If they were truly blind, then streetlights would not bother them a bit.
"Blind as a bat" is completely wrong.
"The Information" by James Gleick
"Light Years" by Brian Clegg
Just finished "13.8" by John Gribbin
Brian Krebs has a blog post today claiming the NYT is incorrectly attributing these claims.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/blowing-the-whistle-on-bad-attribution/
As other have commented - We have one single data point to work from. The science on whether E.T. exists is far from settled, and probably never will be unless we actually do make contact.
Suggested reading:
"The Aliens Are Coming" - Ben Miller
"Five Billion Years of Solitude" - Lee Billings
"Rare Earth" - Ward Brownlee
"Weird Life" - David Toomey
About 15 years ago I set up a wiring closet in my house. Over time I have learned some important lessons.
My house is only 1300 ft^2 with one level. It is built on a slab, so there is no basement. Fortunately the attic provides reasonably good access to the interior walls.
I ran at least one RG-6 coax, one CAT-5 (there was no such thing as CAT-6 back then) and one 4-wire telephone to a plate in every room. Most rooms have more than one plate. Some plates have two coax. Everything goes back to a central closet - really just a piece of plywood on the wall in the closet where the furnace and water heater are. I ran a dedicated 15-amp power circuit to the wiring panel with 4 pairs of outlets (16 total).
I do not subscribe to cable TV, so the coax has largely been unused. I have both television and FM antennas on the roof, and that uses a couple of the outlets to get to the back of my main hi-fi system.
The 4-wire telephone jacks also get very little use. I wish I had pulled two CAT-5 to every plate. One of them could be used for telephone systems including various PBX-like systems.
A few years after doing all of this, I added line-level audio to the wiring panel. I wish I had done that earlier. If you run line-level audio, be sure to use really good double-shielded cabling for it. I did not, and it picks up a fair bit of 60hz buzz.
I have tried some home automation stuff using X-10 devices. Some of them work and some do not. Reliability has been a big problem.
Here are my suggestions. Much of this echos comments from others.
1) You cannot have too many plates in each room. One per wall is not too many. Yes, that includes the bathrooms!
2) You cannot have too much power in each room. At least one 20-amp circuit per bedroom, preferably two, and separate from the lights in that room. At least one 20 amp circuit per wall in the family living spaces (living room, family room, multimedia room etc.) At least two or three 20 amp circuits on the kitchen counters. More 20 amp circuits in the garage and basement.
3) At least two Cat-6 per plate.
4) At least one RG-6 coax per plate. Two on some plates, especially if you think you might run a satellite or something to it.
5) At least one line-level audio pair to each plate.
6) Leave plenty of room in the conduits. Mine are jammed so full I cannot get anything more through them, and they only go about three feet from the plywood panel up to the attic.
7) Leave good stout pulling strings in every conduit.
8) Plates on the outside is a good idea. I have not needed them, but I don't have a deck or hot tub.
9) I don't really like any of the lighting controller systems that are available. X-10 is really old and lame. Insteon is not reliable. Z-Wave is hackable. Belkin WeMo depends on third-party servers.
10) Bring neutrals into every light switch box.
11) Running security wiring while the walls are open is good, even if you are not going to use it.
12) Whole-house surge protection and GFI.
13) Buy an electrical panel that is twice what you think you will need. This means both amperage capacity and number of circuits.
14) Make a provision for connecting a whole-house generator.
15) Run at least three speaker wire pairs from the front to the back of any place you might put a home theater system.
16) Run some HDMI cabling to the center of the ceiling where you might hang a projector. Also put a power circuit up there.
17) Same goes for any place you might put a VESA mount. Run HDMI, power and Ethernet to the back of any television.
how much good is this? If my doctor prescribes an app, then will my insurance company pay for the cell phone required to run it?
Something tells me they will not.
There are still three of us in the world who refuse to own a cell phone.
Hhhmmmph.
There is not yet one inch of Google fiber actually run here in Olathe. I figure minimum 6 months before they start laying it, and several years before it is available to more than a few.
In that time much can change.
All this discussion about tankless water heaters is interesting, but you will get FAR more bang for your buck by dumping more insulation in the attic, replacing drafty windows, weather stripping doors etc. None of this is going to wow your friends until you start comparing utilitiy bills. I added a layer of R-19 unfaced batts to my attic in late 1999. Payback in lower gas and electric bills was less than 6 months, and it has been free money since then.
For cool stuff on not too much money, I suggest setting up some X-10 controllers and using your computer to run them. It's not hard to do and costs only a few hundred dollars for the basics. You can set up porch lights to run on a sudown-sunup schedule. Set internal night lights to turn on at bedtime. Set your coffee pot to turn on a half-hour before you have breakfast.
A weather station is also cool but will set you back $400 or $500. Connect it to a computer and publish it on the Internet.
It is possible to get a thermostat in every room, then set up a control system so that conditioned air goes only to rooms that need it. The vents are controlled by inflatable bags so they can let air go only where it is needed. No clue how much it would cost, probably quite a bit.
My sister works as a Medical Assistant in a very small family practice. In fact, the practice is so small that my sister and the doctor are the entire staff. They hire an electronic medical records service from "the cloud". This service makes it possible for every patient of their practice to have on-line access to their records. The records get updated in near real-time because both my sister and the doctor use tablet computers. The tablets go everywhere, even the exam rooms, so as notes are taken they go directly to the patient's records.
I have not heard any details about how many of their patients actually USE this service. I would bet no more than half, since many of their patients are geriatric cases - too old to want to bother to learn how to use a computer.
My sister and the doctor both are very much in favor of this kind of access to medical records. They think it makes their job easier. It gets more details to the patients and it does not tie up the phone just to be reading records to someone. It also lets patients remind themselves about treatment decisions that have been made.
It requires an ActiveX object to access the records and so is useful only for Internet Explorer users. The vendor is supposed to be working on a way for Mac users to get access as well, but they are not there yet. Firefox and Linux? Ferget it! Heck, they just added support for IE 9 and 64-bit Windows a few months ago.
Over the next ten years GRiD Systems vanished, I got another job (which I still have), and slowly I achieved the goal. At age 40 I graduated with a GPA over 3.98.
The degree has probably helped me keep my job, though it did nothing for my pay. I already get paid handsomely.
It's worth noting that I make a living as a Windows expert, but I do not have ANY of the Microsoft credentials that are often required. I've been around enough that I don't need those letters to prove I know what I know.
My opinion is it's never too late. Start now, get the degree you want, and don't be too surprised when things come out totally different than what you expected. Life happens...
My grandmother is another good example. She was widowed at age 54 with an 8th grade education and no job. She got a GED, then a college degree as a teacher. She taught art in public schools for 12 years before retiring at age 70.
In late 2001 and the first half of 2002 a bunch of cavers worked to open a new entrance to Carroll Cave. Dr. Worsey provided the explosives expertise and training. He arranged for the donation of explosives and blasting caps. Most important, he and his students provided transportation of the explosives from the magazine to the dig site and back. Using nothing but volunteer labor, we blasted a hole 30 inches in diameter 120 feet straight down through limestone to get the new entrance. The new entrance is now the main way to get into Carroll Cave. Without Dr. Worsey's help we would never have got it done. While helping with the blasting I attended a week-long training session for work. At the beginning of the session everyone was asked to tell something interesting about themselves. I had just spent the weekend handling explosives, so I told the class that a bomb-sniffing dog would probably go positive on me. Naturally I had to explain and show pictures, with the consequence that we started 45 minutes late. The first time I worked the dig we were about 50 feet down. The blasting was still throwing debris out the top of the hole, so we parked all the cars several hundred feet away. From 50 feet down and 200 feet away the blasts were strong enough to set off car alarms. Standing at the bottom of a hole 30 inches in diameter and 100 feet deep with a bucket of dynamite hanging by your head makes one think very carefully about what you are doing. Dynamite is actually quite safe. You cannot set it off with fire, though you probably could set it off with a large firecracker. The really dangerous item is the electrical blasting cap. We kept those in a locked box away from the digging until the last possible minute. Only one person handled the electrical detonator while everyone else stood WAY back. The only serious injury we had during the whole project was a broken foot when one guy dropped a jackhammer with the point down. We had zero injuries from explosives. There were assorted cuts and bruises from working around sharp metal and an air compressor way beyond its prime. Carroll Cave has a web site with many pictures of the dig project. If you are really interested, Google on it. I don't think the server can handle a SlashDot effect, so I won't post the URL here.
I'd like to add a little different persepctive to this long thread ... that of the Corporate America PC user.
I work for a major reinsurance company on the team that builds the desktop coreloads (among other things). We currently use Windows NT 4.0 as our standard desktop operating system. Planning is under way to convert to Windows 2000, a task we hope to complete in a year or so.
One thing I think gets lost in the debate over operating systems is this: Operating systems exist to support applications. They have no other purpose in life.
Linux is not and never will be used on any desktop in our company. It doesn't matter how good the operating system is, or how stable, or how friendly the GUI is. Nothing matters except the availability of applications.
As an insurance company, we are heavily regulated by state and federal governments in all countries where we operate. Complying with those regulations consumes as much as 1/3 of our staff time. The applications we use to help us comply are available only for Windows - no other operating system, not even MAC.
Among the applications we depend on: Freedom AS2000, which prepares our Blue and Yellow annual statements. Premium Pro, which prepares premium tax returns for state and municipal entities. Tracker - Keeps track of our agent appointments. Mosaic - prints policies that conform to state regulations. RMS Catrater - evaluates property casualty exposures for windstorms, flood and earthquake risk. TAS - analyzes policies in our Life Reinsurance portfolio for exposure and reserving. Silverplume, AM Best, AXCO and OneSource - Various databases of information on other insurance companies and insurance regulations. Outlook 2000 - because we require MAPI-compliant email.
Not one of these applications will run in anything but Windows. This is just the beginning. We have almost 500 known applications in our environment and none of them work in anything but Windows. A very few, such as Office, have Linux or Mac equivalents, but they are the exceptions.
Even if we could change some users to Linux, we would not. The cost of supporting two operating systems is more than twice what it costs to support one. Some might argue that Linux costs less to support than Windows. My view is that it doesn't matter how much less Linux might cost to support. What matters is the applications we must run.