Bullshit, I'm in my mid-30s and I can still hear 17 kHz, and I know others in my age range who have even better hearing. I'm pretty sure most of us who didn't spend their 20s in loud nightclubs or concerts (at least not without musicians' earplugs), or nowadays blasting headphones directly into our ears, still have good high frequency hearing for another couple of decades.
Most of these people are economic migrants, not refugees. In the case of Syrians now flooding into Europe, for example, most did not come directly from Syria — they came from migrant camps in Turkey. Turkey is a stable and safe country, but doesn't provide quite the level of social services and economic opportunities that a Western European country does. Of course, as has been pointed out in various places, the German government is worried about an aging population and needs young workers, so they opened the gates under the pretense of humanitarian reasons — preservation of culture, values, and social cohesion be damned.
The integers extended by some irrational, say sqrt(2), requires use of real numbers but does not involve uncountable infinities or infinite information.
Only if you're limiting the accepted irrational numbers to a countable subset of R. That's not very useful. For example, it was demonstrated in a paper a few years ago that if you could have infinite precision real weights for the connections of an artificial recurrent neural network, that would allow super-Turing processing. However, your restriction would break that and any other such approaches (and, of course, physics also breaks it -- such a thing cannot exist in the universe -- which was my point).
It is just applying logical rules on various abstract structures. There is no requirement that they be "real" in the sense of being the result of some measurement in the real world. That also doesn't require assumptions beyond basic deductive logic working.
You seem to have missed the point. I was saying that humans cannot solve non-computable problems in the general case. Mathematicians have the same theoretical limits as a digital computer. The "just applying logical rules on various abstract structures" is not solving non-computable problems (siome of the simplest examples of these are listed in http://mathoverflow.net/questi... ); it's an action that can be mapped to a computational process (and even in cases where said process cannot be effectively simplified beyond an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation of mathematicians' brains and their environs, it's still computational).
You should be asking this question of a physicist, not a mathematician — mathematical Platonism is just another religion.
Physics is clear on the question: there is a limit of entropy/information density in any finitly-bounded region of space. Initially this was demonstrated for flat spacetime in a result known as the Bekenstein bound, and was later extended to de Sitter spacetimes (and we're in an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime according to accepted cosmology). This means that physical quantities cannot be arbitrary precision (real-valued), because you can encode infinite information in a real number and that contravenes the aforementioned bound. Thus, real numbers are not real, and uncountable infinities do not exist in the physical universe. This severely limits the mathematics that actually applies to reality at a fundamental level.
Combining the above together with the fact that any causally connected system in the universe is finite in size (the limitations being accelerating expansion and the speed of light resulting in a cosmological horizon), any physical entity can be fully described by a non-deterministic linear bound automaton, which is a class of mechanistic information processing entities, even less powerful than Turing machines. That includes the human brain, and also the system comprised of the sum total of all human brains and any intelligent artifacts we ever create interacting together. The class of problems a non-deterministic LBA can solve is pretty limited. So how can mathematicians think and talk about concepts like uncountable infinities and everything in mathematics that depends on them, if their brains are based on physics in which these concepts play no part?
Let's separate the existence of thoughts on such concepts from the concepts themselves having any reality. The former are obviously connected to the physical universe via their neural correlates. As for the latter, they're easily explained as an extension of the sort of heuristics the brain uses in virtually all aspects of its functionality, as is well-known from cognitive psychology. As an example, concepts like the number pi (to a given number of digits) are just shorthands for their generative processes (to a given number of iterations or recursions). Even while mathematicians think about problems that are outside the class of those which are computable, their brains are not applying any magical non-computable processes to solve them. It's a combination of not really solving them (which would be impossible as they're not real) but processing them in other ways based on the assumption they're real, the luck and lack thereof of stochastic search that cognition oft relies on, and, without a doubt in some cases, accepting "solutions" which are wrong but unknowably so.
that there is yet another reason. The new lieberal Prime Minister Trudeau told Obama in his first phone call with him several days ago that Canada is pulling out of the US-led coalition against ISIS. I'm sure the libtards will claim that this had nothing whatsoever to do with Obama less than a week later canceling Keystone XL. Yeah, and my name is Donald Duck! Obama could have canceled this on many occasions before, especially while the previous Canadian administration was pestering him about getting approval.
While Canada's few aircraft in Syria were of little practical significance, this was a symbolic "fuck you" to the Americans and an indication that we Canadians are a shifty ally. Moreover, it shows the naive belief that if you leave ISIS alone, ISIS will leave you alone. The new PM has within a few short days of his term already managed to offend the US and show weakness to the terrorists.
One more thing worth mentioning is that, to the extent that one of the contributing reasons for blocking the pipeline was to decrease competition for oil exports (the KXL oil was designated for export after refining in the south, and the US also exports refined oil), that is against NAFTA rules. If such reasoning can be demonstrated, Trans-Canada has a case it can take to a NAFTA tribunal a maybe the WTO. Saying "but it's not in the best interests of America" makes the fallacy of looking at this one issue specifically, rather than the trading partnership as a whole — trading partnerships are in their essence quid pro quo, and you're obliged to do certain things that don't benefit you but help your partner, just as the partner is obliged to do so in return. If you don't like the terms, pull out of the agreement or renegotiate it rather than cheat and use bullshit excuses.
By the way, claiming environmental concerns is hypocrisy when the US has an order of magnitude more oil pipeline already, and California oil production is so much dirtier than the Alberta oil sands.
I'd like to caution the reader to take TFA with a grain of salt, lest they decide to use it as an excuse to feel better about getting less than the recommended 7.5-8 hours of sleep. Specifically, I'd like to note the following:
1. The study in question concerns the sleep requirements of people who have a lifestyle incomparable to yours.
2. The sleep pattern in TFA for a primitive society is different not only from yours, but also from what appears to have been the natural tendency for pre-industrial civilization (at least I Europe) for quite a few centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
3. The study does not and is unable to take into account any of the very long-term effects of less sleep, in terms of possible influences on old-age brain diseases such as Alzheimers or other dementias. A primitive forager doesn't usually live to an age where such things are an issue. The physiological evidence, though, ought to make you pause and think about the fact that you need enough deep sleep in order to allow microchannels in your brain to expand and allow increased flow of cerebrospinal fluid to wash away harmful metabolic byproducts. There's more to sleep than, as was fashionable to think for a while, consolidation of memories into long-term storage. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... and several related papers.
** Having compete sleep cycles is more important than the exact time. If you look at various somnograms, you can see that the average sleep cycle (down to the deepest sleep stage then I again into REM) is around 90 minutes long, except the first sleep cycle of the night which is closer to 120 minutes (the 8 hour recommendation corresponds to five sleep cycles). It's worth making sure your alarm is set such that it doesn't wake you during a deep sleep stage of a cycle, because you'll wake feeling worse than even if you had woken up earlier at the end of the previous sleep cycle (during REM). This is why a half hour offset from your usual alarm time in either direction can potentially make a huge difference.
While, as is the case with any film critic, one is bound to disagree with at least some of the ratings a given critic gives to the movies he reviews, the golden skill of Ebert was that reading his reviews would tell you whether you would like the movie, not just whether he did. While I often agreed with his ratings, there were numerous times I didn't, and in those cases I knew that I'd rate the movie differently merely from reading the review, without having seen the film yet (and every time I did follow up by watching it, my expectations were confirmed).
MSF/Doctors Without Borders has been adamant there were no Taliban shooting from the hospital, and MSF has a lot more credibility (they're comparable to Red Cross) than the Afghan police that reported this as supposedly a fire base. Not to mention that the police have a clear revenge motive against MSF, as they are known to have long been complaining that MSF treats patients from all sides, including the Taliban, indiscriminately.
it simply won't run Google Play Services-dependent apps (though all other Android apps worked when sideloaded)
Can't tell if you're trolling or just ignorant. Google Play Services and dependent apps run fine on BB10 (I'm running them on my Passport, along with the Google Play Store). Regularly updated downloads for the patched versions in the first post at http://forums.crackberry.com/a...
Google Play Services. This is not open source, but it is needed to run many of the apps. (this is also why I can't run some of the Android apps on my BB Z10)
I can't tell if you're trolling, but you can run Google Play Services on BlackBerry (I'm running them on my Passport, for example, along with dependent apps like Snapchat, or even the Google Play Store). Regularly updated patched versions of the Google services are in the top post at http://forums.crackberry.com/a...
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee where the government is the employer of last resort. This is still a form of Keneysian intervention, but a very direct one. Decreasing unemployment raises aggregate demand and brings on recovery from the recession. Inflation doesn't occur until you approach full employment. But at the same time as the recession is over, and since such work offered by the public sector is at or just below minimum wage, most would move back to private sector jobs. "Free money" is not given to those who are able to work and are simply failing to find employment, and is reserved for the severely disabled and so on — unlike the current situation.
You mention that dogs are social as a contrast to cats; however, that distinction is exaggerated. Domestic cats (as in the species, whether actually in human residences or feral) are solitary hunters, but they're frequently social in their leisure time -- something that is not merely an artifact of them being in a domestic environment, as every feral cat colony demonstrates. This aspect of their behavior is further extended into being even more social because humans are something akin to pseudo-mothers to the cat (various behaviors, such as the continuation of meowing and kneading beyond kittenhood, are obvious clues).
This is one of the rare cases where I wish there was a "+1 Troll" moderation option. Skilled in the art, indeed — you're one of a dying breed. As a form of sincere flattery I plagiarized your post to/sci/ on a well-known imageboard.
When (or if) quantum computers become practical they will make existing forms of encryption useless.
Uh, no. It will only make breaking certain popular public-key cryptosystems practical. There are quantum-safe public-key systems, and most symmetric ones are also safe (at best, using a quantum computer with symmetric systems is equivalent to halving the key size — with an obvious way to compensate).
Edward Geist received his Ph.D. in history....His research interests include emergency management in nuclear disasters, Soviet politics and culture, and the history of nuclear power and weapons.
Once again, Slashdot editors fail to do basic vetting of sources. The only qualification for something to be posted here appears to be whether it will work as click-bait. You also have to love how the summary refers to him as "Stanford's Edward Moore Geist". You hear dear readers? He's from Stanford! That means academic authority! So, is he in Stanford's computer science department? Or engineering perhaps?
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
kheldan has a long history of ranting and shamelessly relying on cherrypicked "evidence", as well as hyperbole and other such rhetorical devices to make his "the sky is falling"- and "things were better in the old days"-themed flamebait posts. That he laments the trolling of others is the pinnacle of hypocrisy, and that ought not be lost on moderators here.
In his post higher up in this thread, he reveals an elitist attitude:
I'd almost wish it would go back to being accessible only by Universities, the government, and the military.
This, as well as hi anti-freedom of speech commentary, is in line with the statist views he often expresses.
The real degeneracy of Slashdot and the Internet at large is comprised of the stifling effects on free speech driven by governments and a number number of other institutions, with kheldan being one of their cheerleaders. The best times on Slashdot were not during kheldan's early years, as he would have you believe; I well remember them as the years before he ever joined and brought his odious statist, elitist views.
And kheldan: I've seen innumerous much more thoughtful, eloquent, insightful, and — above all — honest posts on 4chan than the shitposting record you've left here.
Unorthodox treatments are being developed, however. One of the new/experimental treatments for bipolar is ketamine (yes, the same anesthetic commonly used recreationally as a dissociative). It's particularly useful for helping with treatment-refractory depressive phases in bipolar patients, while not making the manic phases any worse. There are a few papers; here's one: http://www.nature.com/tp/journ... There are also recent and ongoing studies using psylocybin (magic mushrooms) to treat major depression and PTSD, as well as at least one study treating PTSD with MDMA (Ecstasy). The interesting thing about these approaches is not that they're also recreational drugs, but that there is indication that these are not indefinite supportive treatments but something more akin to a cure. In the case of psylocybin, specifically, a Johns Hopkins study showed that a single dose in a therapeutic setting can bring on permanent positive personality changes.
And of course, one of the links cited is a story in CounterPunch that extensively quotes a Greenpeace official. What is CounterPunch, you might ask? First line in the Wikipedia article about it:
CounterPunch is a monthly magazine published in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as "muckraking with a radical attitude".[1] It has been described as left-wing by both supporters and detractors.[2][3][4]
This magazine is about as merely "left-wing" as the Death Valley in Mojave is merely "warm" in the summer.
This news is particularly sad to me on a personal level, as bumblebees are one of the few insects that both tolerate you petting them lightly, and are fuzzy enough to make it rewarding (moths are the other, but they're quite fragile). Unlike honeybees and wasps, they rarely sting, and their slowness cuts the danger even further to making it essentially nil. I've never been stung by a bumblebee. The slow flight also makes it pretty easy to pet them while they're busy feeding on nectar and pollinating, and if you're gentle, they barely react to your touch (just don't touch the wings, obviously).
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit, I'm in my mid-30s and I can still hear 17 kHz, and I know others in my age range who have even better hearing. I'm pretty sure most of us who didn't spend their 20s in loud nightclubs or concerts (at least not without musicians' earplugs), or nowadays blasting headphones directly into our ears, still have good high frequency hearing for another couple of decades.
Oh, so that's why 16% — one in six — of the French support ISIS, you despicable Islam apologist! http://www.newsweek.com/16-fre...
Most of these people are economic migrants, not refugees. In the case of Syrians now flooding into Europe, for example, most did not come directly from Syria — they came from migrant camps in Turkey. Turkey is a stable and safe country, but doesn't provide quite the level of social services and economic opportunities that a Western European country does. Of course, as has been pointed out in various places, the German government is worried about an aging population and needs young workers, so they opened the gates under the pretense of humanitarian reasons — preservation of culture, values, and social cohesion be damned.
The integers extended by some irrational, say sqrt(2), requires use of real numbers but does not involve uncountable infinities or infinite information.
Only if you're limiting the accepted irrational numbers to a countable subset of R. That's not very useful. For example, it was demonstrated in a paper a few years ago that if you could have infinite precision real weights for the connections of an artificial recurrent neural network, that would allow super-Turing processing. However, your restriction would break that and any other such approaches (and, of course, physics also breaks it -- such a thing cannot exist in the universe -- which was my point).
It is just applying logical rules on various abstract structures. There is no requirement that they be "real" in the sense of being the result of some measurement in the real world. That also doesn't require assumptions beyond basic deductive logic working.
You seem to have missed the point. I was saying that humans cannot solve non-computable problems in the general case. Mathematicians have the same theoretical limits as a digital computer. The "just applying logical rules on various abstract structures" is not solving non-computable problems (siome of the simplest examples of these are listed in http://mathoverflow.net/questi... ); it's an action that can be mapped to a computational process (and even in cases where said process cannot be effectively simplified beyond an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation of mathematicians' brains and their environs, it's still computational).
You should be asking this question of a physicist, not a mathematician — mathematical Platonism is just another religion.
Physics is clear on the question: there is a limit of entropy/information density in any finitly-bounded region of space. Initially this was demonstrated for flat spacetime in a result known as the Bekenstein bound, and was later extended to de Sitter spacetimes (and we're in an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime according to accepted cosmology). This means that physical quantities cannot be arbitrary precision (real-valued), because you can encode infinite information in a real number and that contravenes the aforementioned bound. Thus, real numbers are not real, and uncountable infinities do not exist in the physical universe. This severely limits the mathematics that actually applies to reality at a fundamental level.
Combining the above together with the fact that any causally connected system in the universe is finite in size (the limitations being accelerating expansion and the speed of light resulting in a cosmological horizon), any physical entity can be fully described by a non-deterministic linear bound automaton, which is a class of mechanistic information processing entities, even less powerful than Turing machines. That includes the human brain, and also the system comprised of the sum total of all human brains and any intelligent artifacts we ever create interacting together. The class of problems a non-deterministic LBA can solve is pretty limited. So how can mathematicians think and talk about concepts like uncountable infinities and everything in mathematics that depends on them, if their brains are based on physics in which these concepts play no part?
Let's separate the existence of thoughts on such concepts from the concepts themselves having any reality. The former are obviously connected to the physical universe via their neural correlates. As for the latter, they're easily explained as an extension of the sort of heuristics the brain uses in virtually all aspects of its functionality, as is well-known from cognitive psychology. As an example, concepts like the number pi (to a given number of digits) are just shorthands for their generative processes (to a given number of iterations or recursions). Even while mathematicians think about problems that are outside the class of those which are computable, their brains are not applying any magical non-computable processes to solve them. It's a combination of not really solving them (which would be impossible as they're not real) but processing them in other ways based on the assumption they're real, the luck and lack thereof of stochastic search that cognition oft relies on, and, without a doubt in some cases, accepting "solutions" which are wrong but unknowably so.
stupider then
Oh, the irony!
there's be
I believe the original quote from Oscar Gamble was “They don't think it be like it is, but it do.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Gamble
then he gets credit for
The ride never ends!
it's ridiculously fucking stupid
You can say that again!
she is architect of much of the Obama policy Bibi haters
So she designed the Bibi haters of Obama policy?
nominee then Sanders
By now I'm pretty sure one of your keyboard, fingers, or brain hates you with a passion.
that there is yet another reason. The new lieberal Prime Minister Trudeau told Obama in his first phone call with him several days ago that Canada is pulling out of the US-led coalition against ISIS. I'm sure the libtards will claim that this had nothing whatsoever to do with Obama less than a week later canceling Keystone XL. Yeah, and my name is Donald Duck! Obama could have canceled this on many occasions before, especially while the previous Canadian administration was pestering him about getting approval.
While Canada's few aircraft in Syria were of little practical significance, this was a symbolic "fuck you" to the Americans and an indication that we Canadians are a shifty ally. Moreover, it shows the naive belief that if you leave ISIS alone, ISIS will leave you alone. The new PM has within a few short days of his term already managed to offend the US and show weakness to the terrorists.
One more thing worth mentioning is that, to the extent that one of the contributing reasons for blocking the pipeline was to decrease competition for oil exports (the KXL oil was designated for export after refining in the south, and the US also exports refined oil), that is against NAFTA rules. If such reasoning can be demonstrated, Trans-Canada has a case it can take to a NAFTA tribunal a maybe the WTO. Saying "but it's not in the best interests of America" makes the fallacy of looking at this one issue specifically, rather than the trading partnership as a whole — trading partnerships are in their essence quid pro quo, and you're obliged to do certain things that don't benefit you but help your partner, just as the partner is obliged to do so in return. If you don't like the terms, pull out of the agreement or renegotiate it rather than cheat and use bullshit excuses.
By the way, claiming environmental concerns is hypocrisy when the US has an order of magnitude more oil pipeline already, and California oil production is so much dirtier than the Alberta oil sands.
I'd like to caution the reader to take TFA with a grain of salt, lest they decide to use it as an excuse to feel better about getting less than the recommended 7.5-8 hours of sleep. Specifically, I'd like to note the following:
1. The study in question concerns the sleep requirements of people who have a lifestyle incomparable to yours.
2. The sleep pattern in TFA for a primitive society is different not only from yours, but also from what appears to have been the natural tendency for pre-industrial civilization (at least I Europe) for quite a few centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
3. The study does not and is unable to take into account any of the very long-term effects of less sleep, in terms of possible influences on old-age brain diseases such as Alzheimers or other dementias. A primitive forager doesn't usually live to an age where such things are an issue. The physiological evidence, though, ought to make you pause and think about the fact that you need enough deep sleep in order to allow microchannels in your brain to expand and allow increased flow of cerebrospinal fluid to wash away harmful metabolic byproducts. There's more to sleep than, as was fashionable to think for a while, consolidation of memories into long-term storage. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... and several related papers.
** Having compete sleep cycles is more important than the exact time. If you look at various somnograms, you can see that the average sleep cycle (down to the deepest sleep stage then I again into REM) is around 90 minutes long, except the first sleep cycle of the night which is closer to 120 minutes (the 8 hour recommendation corresponds to five sleep cycles). It's worth making sure your alarm is set such that it doesn't wake you during a deep sleep stage of a cycle, because you'll wake feeling worse than even if you had woken up earlier at the end of the previous sleep cycle (during REM). This is why a half hour offset from your usual alarm time in either direction can potentially make a huge difference.
While, as is the case with any film critic, one is bound to disagree with at least some of the ratings a given critic gives to the movies he reviews, the golden skill of Ebert was that reading his reviews would tell you whether you would like the movie, not just whether he did. While I often agreed with his ratings, there were numerous times I didn't, and in those cases I knew that I'd rate the movie differently merely from reading the review, without having seen the film yet (and every time I did follow up by watching it, my expectations were confirmed).
MSF/Doctors Without Borders has been adamant there were no Taliban shooting from the hospital, and MSF has a lot more credibility (they're comparable to Red Cross) than the Afghan police that reported this as supposedly a fire base. Not to mention that the police have a clear revenge motive against MSF, as they are known to have long been complaining that MSF treats patients from all sides, including the Taliban, indiscriminately.
it simply won't run Google Play Services-dependent apps (though all other Android apps worked when sideloaded)
Can't tell if you're trolling or just ignorant. Google Play Services and dependent apps run fine on BB10 (I'm running them on my Passport, along with the Google Play Store). Regularly updated downloads for the patched versions in the first post at http://forums.crackberry.com/a...
Now that you can even run Google Play Services on BB10, the only Android apps that don't work are ones that use native code.
Google Play Services. This is not open source, but it is needed to run many of the apps. (this is also why I can't run some of the Android apps on my BB Z10)
I can't tell if you're trolling, but you can run Google Play Services on BlackBerry (I'm running them on my Passport, for example, along with dependent apps like Snapchat, or even the Google Play Store). Regularly updated patched versions of the Google services are in the top post at http://forums.crackberry.com/a...
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee where the government is the employer of last resort. This is still a form of Keneysian intervention, but a very direct one. Decreasing unemployment raises aggregate demand and brings on recovery from the recession. Inflation doesn't occur until you approach full employment. But at the same time as the recession is over, and since such work offered by the public sector is at or just below minimum wage, most would move back to private sector jobs. "Free money" is not given to those who are able to work and are simply failing to find employment, and is reserved for the severely disabled and so on — unlike the current situation.
You mention that dogs are social as a contrast to cats; however, that distinction is exaggerated. Domestic cats (as in the species, whether actually in human residences or feral) are solitary hunters, but they're frequently social in their leisure time -- something that is not merely an artifact of them being in a domestic environment, as every feral cat colony demonstrates. This aspect of their behavior is further extended into being even more social because humans are something akin to pseudo-mothers to the cat (various behaviors, such as the continuation of meowing and kneading beyond kittenhood, are obvious clues).
and he'll run it all over your Linux.
With apologies to Mae West for this awful paraphrase.
This is one of the rare cases where I wish there was a "+1 Troll" moderation option. Skilled in the art, indeed — you're one of a dying breed. As a form of sincere flattery I plagiarized your post to /sci/ on a well-known imageboard.
When (or if) quantum computers become practical they will make existing forms of encryption useless.
Uh, no. It will only make breaking certain popular public-key cryptosystems practical. There are quantum-safe public-key systems, and most symmetric ones are also safe (at best, using a quantum computer with symmetric systems is equivalent to halving the key size — with an obvious way to compensate).
From his bio at http://fsi.stanford.edu/people...:
Edward Geist received his Ph.D. in history....His research interests include emergency management in nuclear disasters, Soviet politics and culture, and the history of nuclear power and weapons.
Once again, Slashdot editors fail to do basic vetting of sources. The only qualification for something to be posted here appears to be whether it will work as click-bait. You also have to love how the summary refers to him as "Stanford's Edward Moore Geist". You hear dear readers? He's from Stanford! That means academic authority! So, is he in Stanford's computer science department? Or engineering perhaps?
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Oh, wait...
In his post higher up in this thread, he reveals an elitist attitude:
I'd almost wish it would go back to being accessible only by Universities, the government, and the military.
This, as well as hi anti-freedom of speech commentary, is in line with the statist views he often expresses.
The real degeneracy of Slashdot and the Internet at large is comprised of the stifling effects on free speech driven by governments and a number number of other institutions, with kheldan being one of their cheerleaders. The best times on Slashdot were not during kheldan's early years, as he would have you believe; I well remember them as the years before he ever joined and brought his odious statist, elitist views.
And kheldan: I've seen innumerous much more thoughtful, eloquent, insightful, and — above all — honest posts on 4chan than the shitposting record you've left here.
Unorthodox treatments are being developed, however. One of the new/experimental treatments for bipolar is ketamine (yes, the same anesthetic commonly used recreationally as a dissociative). It's particularly useful for helping with treatment-refractory depressive phases in bipolar patients, while not making the manic phases any worse. There are a few papers; here's one: http://www.nature.com/tp/journ... There are also recent and ongoing studies using psylocybin (magic mushrooms) to treat major depression and PTSD, as well as at least one study treating PTSD with MDMA (Ecstasy). The interesting thing about these approaches is not that they're also recreational drugs, but that there is indication that these are not indefinite supportive treatments but something more akin to a cure. In the case of psylocybin, specifically, a Johns Hopkins study showed that a single dose in a therapeutic setting can bring on permanent positive personality changes.
Whether you agree with parent post or not, it would be interesting to see what response it engenders.
I love nuclear, but let's be fair here: tritium is radioactive, with a half-life of just over 12 years.
CounterPunch is a monthly magazine published in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as "muckraking with a radical attitude".[1] It has been described as left-wing by both supporters and detractors.[2][3][4]
This magazine is about as merely "left-wing" as the Death Valley in Mojave is merely "warm" in the summer.
This news is particularly sad to me on a personal level, as bumblebees are one of the few insects that both tolerate you petting them lightly, and are fuzzy enough to make it rewarding (moths are the other, but they're quite fragile). Unlike honeybees and wasps, they rarely sting, and their slowness cuts the danger even further to making it essentially nil. I've never been stung by a bumblebee. The slow flight also makes it pretty easy to pet them while they're busy feeding on nectar and pollinating, and if you're gentle, they barely react to your touch (just don't touch the wings, obviously).