I have a 15 year old car that I'm rather fond of due to all the good times I've been through with it, but when the next major repair becomes necessary, it's going to the dump.
On the other hand, I've got a clock that my grandfather built decades ago, and it's still running smoothly. Hubble continues to collect useful data. It was designed and built as a finely-crafted scientific instrument, not as a disposable consumer product.
The article mentions that they don't want to risk stranding astronauts at Hubble since there's no haven there to rescue them if something should go wrong. So they *have* to use robots.
Hm. What's the minimum crew to launch a Shuttle? Could they do it with three? Can they carry out a Hubble repair with that small crew, too?
If that would work, then you just tuck a Soyuz capsule into the cargo bay. It still leaves quite a bit of space for equipment and repair supplies, and gives the astronauts a way home in the unlikely event of trouble.
I've heard estimates that suggest up to ten percent of spending on healthcare in the U.S. is related to billing and insurance issues--just figuring out who has to pay for what. Public health care at least solves that problem, plus it usually fixes a schedule of fees and precisely delineates what procedures are covered.
Somehow, the world?s ATM banking systems have managed to get by with a bare minimum of fraud for more than 20 years by relying upon only four-digit codes. So what do the banking geeks grasp about password management?
Gee, maybe it has something to do with those little ATM cards. And powerful physical security for the hardware. And their own private networks. And they can charge a buck or two on each transaction to maintain the system. And they still have to deal with some fraud related to people who install false fronts on existing machines or set up entirely corrupt hardware to capture cards and PINs.
If webmail accounts had only a four-digit PIN, then it would be very easy for a script kiddie to throw random PINs at random accounts. Three thousand accounts tested(figure you get locked out after three failed attempts) and you've almost certainly got access. It's entirely a different problem, and the author should know better.
Yeah... tell me ? how much would new cures for Parkinson disease or whole knowledge about Antarctic ecosystem be worth when one nice rock would appear on a collision course with our humble little planet?
Actually, I was more concerned with military spending being the second priority. Though now that you mention it, the chance of a rock capable of wiping out civilization showing up in the next ten thousand years or so is pretty remote. (I'd put significantly better odds on civilization being wiped out by that higher military spending, for example.) Yeah--I would rather have a cure for Parkinson's.
Is that Elderly are a helluva a lot more dangerous than drunk drivers and should really be taken off the road.
Dangerous drivers--be they drunk, elderly, or just distracted by their phones--should all be off the streets. I don't see any reason to privilege one group of dangerous drivers over another. The fact that drunk and dangerous elderly drivers still seem to be on the road doesn't support the notion that other dangerous drivers should be ignored.
Simply put...I see tons of people driving on the cell phones - and driving fine. Sometimes a momentary reaction issue...yes. But when I see a drunk driver they are all over 2 or three lanes. They nearly hit everyone. They often run off the road. Somehow it is hard for me to accept that I can see a 100+ cell phone users who are supposedly "more impaired" and they don't perform as poorly as drunk drivers.
As another poster has already asked--how do you know that you didn't pass hundreds of drunk drivers who were staying in their lanes, driving along, but with much slower reaction times? Unless they're actually holding up flasks, you can't measure blood alcohol remotely. As a frequent pedestrian in a large city, I will gladly submit my own (subjective and anecdotal) opinion that drivers on cell phones are less aware of their surroundings.
And I am sorry....a cell phone user is NOT more impaired than a drunk driver. It is political BS. I refuse to buy it and no statistic will prove it to me.
And I am sorry...tobacco use is NOT more likely to kill me than the local nuclear plant. It is political BS. I refuse to buy it and no statistic will prove it to me.
Seriously--people are really bad at assessing risks. This is the type of question that statistics are designed for. Relative risks, odds ratios, confidence intervals. Feel free to provide specific criticism of the study methodology, and note where errors or biases may have been introduced. Don't try to tell me that anecdotal evidence is inherently more reliable for risk assessment than large-scale statistical analysis.
"The numbers....come down to milliseconds"
If you pull the study (it's online here in PDF format) then the total difference is reaction time is on average 130 ms, or about 12 feet at 60 mph (3.5 m at 100 km/h).
The key? is to know if you can multi-task or not. If you can't multi-task than DON'T USE A CELL PHONE AND DRIVE AT THE SAME TIME unless it's an emergency. A little common sense, and a little less stupidity will bring the human race a long way!
The problem is that people tend to be very poor judges of their own abilities. Ask anybody--they will tell you that they are an above average driver, but that there sure are a lot of idiots out on the road. People don't notice their own bad habits, unless and until they actually hit somebody. That's the whole point of a distraction--it means that you don't notice when you're making mistakes. I'm not saying that the parent poster is a bad driver, but that I don't trust people in general to be able to make that assessment.
Especially considering that space exploration is in the long run the most important and beneficial government program of all (with military being the second).
Eh?
I suspect that there might be some rather important things going on in some otheragencies. Just a thought. I suppose it depends how one chooses to define 'important' and 'beneficial'.
Normally you need less fuel to stop a spacecraft than to get it moving because you have burned up half the fuel getting the craft moving. Since fuel is the majority of the weight, stopping a probe is a lot easier than starting it. In reality the fuel to stop a probe is still significant enough, NASA uses aerobraking or orbital tricks when possible to save that weight.
Respectfully, the parent poster has the correct idea but not the correct math. In order to accelerate an object using chemical propulsion and then decelerate it again--the save delta-v at both ends--one requires more fuel for acceration than deceleration. It's not half the fuel to accelerate and half to decelerate, because on the acceleration half of the journey one is accelerating both the payload and the braking fuel.
In the case where a payload is carrying a very small amount of fuel, the approximation that equal fuel is used accelerating and decelerating is okay. In this case, where we're looking at maneouvres involving significant delta-v, these ships will tend to carry a lot more fuel than that. That must be accounted for. Briefly, and in simplified form,
acceleration(at time 't') = force / mass(at time 't')
mass(at time 't') = initial mass - (burn time)*(fuel burn rate)
delta-v = integral of acceleration over burn time = integral (force / (initial mass - (burn time)*(fuel burn rate))
The problem becomes enormously worse if you use ground propulsion, because you need to store enough energy in the form of fuel to counteract the amount of energy you are pumping into it from the ground.
The point is that if you wanted that energy otherwise, you'd have to loft it in chemical fuel. You get the acceleration delta-v 'for free', because you don't have to put that fuel into space. For a given acceleration and deceleration with the ground-based system, you have to carry less than half the fuel you would with chemical rockets alone. Note as well that if you're launching missions to planets further from the Sun, you don't have to get rid of all of the energy you put in. Your craft needs a net increase in energy just to climb up the Sun's gravity well.
If you could carry enough rocket power to stop that speed, you could carry enough rocket power to build up that speed, and we wouldn't need exotic ground-based propulsion systems.
Eh? No....
Let's suppose that just to stop from that speed you need to be carrying a ship that's about 90% fuel by mass. (For a ship of mass x, you need 9x of fuel to stop it.) To accelerate the whole thing up to cruising speed, you now need nine times the mass of the ship plus braking fuel: 90x.
If a ground-based propulsion system can save you a factor of nine or ten (or even three or four--say that adding a sail doubles the weight of the craft plus braking fuel combination) in the weight you have to lift off the earth, then it's quite possible that the economics will start to look very good very quickly.
Excape capsules could be created that take up 1/2 the space, could survive re-entry, and easily fit within the cargo area. Wouldn't that be much cheaper than a sister shuttle at the ready?
In principle, perhaps. On the other hand, the Shuttles are only supposed to be used for a few more missions and NASA is looking for a stopgap backup system now. Designing and testing a new escape capsule system would take years and cost billions of dollars, and probably not be ready until after the current generation of Shuttles are retired.
Escape capsules might make sense for the next generation of craft.
Hmmm...for a quick and dirty solution, you could put two Soyuz capsules in the cargo bay. From here, the dimensions suggest that you could still have some space left over in the cargo bay. (Soyuz diameter 2.7 m, length 7 m. Shuttle cargo bay is 18.3 m length and 4.6 m width.) The Soyuz capsules could be stripped down a bit, too.
Why would there ever be a use for mice with human brains?
Ever wanted to study neurons in a living system? Human neurons? Want to understand Alzheimer's disease, or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), or Parkinson's?
There are limits to the studies you can conduct in a petri dish. You certainly can't grow a chunk of brain in a dish and have it model anything anywhere near what happens in real life. And patients with ALS complain if you ask to sacrifice them halfway through disease progression so that you can run tests on their tissue.
Cancer biologists have been growing human tumours in immune deficient mice for years, and molecular biologists have a whole toolbox of techniques for expressing human genes in mice. This is just another technique for building more accurate model systems to investigate biology and--hopefully--cure diseases.
Even if scientists grow a mouse with 100% human brain cells, it's still a brain the size of your fingertip, in a body that's treated like a mouse. The creature won't be sitting there thinking, "If I could get out of the cage (and I had bigger paws) I could post on Slashdot." It's no more inhumane than other lab techniques involving animals.
This seems like a legitamate GATT / WTO offense. It would be pretty fun to see these agreements actually work for the benefit of the US by overturning the software ban.
The United States has a long history of using and abusing multilateral trade agreements and organizations. The U.S. government regularly ignores WTO rulings that are not favourable to American interests. Ask Canada about this, for example with respect to softwood lumber.
The United States is welcome to get into a pissing match with China over subsidies, duties, import/export restrictions, and the like--but I'm pretty sure that China has the right to restrict whether or not certain products are sold within their borders. The WTO gets involved if a country is unfairly subsidizing or privileging local products over imported equivalents; I don't think they have standing to interfere with a government forbidding a product because it is 'obscene' or similar.
Indeed, Microsoft pumps a lot of money into various charitable causes --- again, only a good thing.
Strictly speaking--in this case at least--the money is being donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not by Microsoft. To be fair, Microsoft does make charitable contributions to buy goodwill and strategic advertising placement (oops, slipped into bitter cynicism there) but this isn't one of those occasions.
The Gates Foundation exists to assuage any guilt Bill has about pillaging the marketplace, as well as to attempt to adjust his legacy. Like Rockefeller, he'd rather be immortalized as a philanthropist than as a robber baron.
That said, I'm glad that somebody is stepping up on this one. Immunization is one of the single most effective steps that can be taken in public health, both in terms of effect on lives and in terms of cost-effectiveness. I find it very disturbing that basic immunizations aren't available to everyone, if for no other reason than because it will make life better for the rest of us.
The United States government missed out on a great public relations opportunity. If it spent on public health--immunizations and clean water--what it spent to invade Iraq, it could have bought the goodwill of literally billions of people.
Well, I think it's great and sounds like a really fun game, but I don't think it'll teach anyone math. I think it might be true that if you already know some trig and basic physics you'll do better...but I doubt it would stand up as a learning tool.
I'd look at it as more of a 'problem set'. People very seldom learn things in a vacuum, working only from a book. In formal education, you get a lesson from a teacher or professor, and use the book as a reference work to cement ideas, fill in and recapitulate details, and as a source of trial problems to practice skills.
Instead of being told, "Do problems six through twenty of Chapter 3 by Monday morning", you could be advised to "Sink six German warships in Scenarios 3 and 4, and for bonus marks describe techniques that can be used to target a ship that is following an arc with constant radius of curvature and speed." It's still very much a book and pencil type of problem, but the presentation is different.
I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I feel games can replace textbooks and practice problems--more that they can be a supplement.
On the other hand, games like Silent Hunter (a submarine simulator) seem to have the potential to teach a great deal of applied physics and trigonometry. Forget the "a train leaves Chicago at 3:00pm; another leaves New York at 4:30pm, both travel at 60 mph..." type of problems. Now you get to do vectors, and moving frames of reference (you, the targets, your torpedos) and trigonometry out the wazoo. And you get to save the world. How's that?
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it. Things change so much from what it was even when you were growning up.
Some older people deal with it quite well. My grandfather is 85 and upgrades his computer more often than I do mine. In the last few years he's made the shift to digital cameras after several decades as an analog photographer. He's a big hit with his female friends because he can tweak photos to remove double chins and smooth out wrinkles.
His political leanings are somewhat conservative, though since he's Canadian that still puts him somewhere around a moderate Democrat. I don't think we're ever going to get him to like Thai food, either.
Aging doesn't have to mean becoming a calcified stick in the mud--it's just a great excuse for a certain portion of the population.
As it should: there have been very few medical advances that have actually increased human lifespan or health. Many medical advances feed on fear of the inevitable, have increased suffering needlessly, and are a bottomless financial pit.
Really?
I suspect most medical advances increase either lifetime or quality of life.
Lens replacements allow thousands of people to see. Hip replacements allow thousands of people to walk. Blood thinners and antihypertensive drugs have prevented millions of heart attacks. Antibiotics, despite their still-too-frequent misuse, have saved millions of lives and continue to do so. New drugs for HIV have added years to the lives of infected individuals. Insulin allows many diabetics to lead full lives. Vaccines eliminated smallpox and have nearly eliminated poliomyelitis, as well as sharply reducing the incidence of a host of other diseases. Advanced medical imaging (MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, etc.) means faster, more accurate diagnosis of a host of illnesses.
Heck, decongestants and mild analgesics let me get a good night's sleep when I have a bad cold.
I'm curious about which 'medical advances' have 'increased suffering needlessly'.
It moves, consumes, grows, reacts to stimuli, and reproduces.
Actually, I find it hard to say that a virus does any those things. Let's look at those in order. A virus...
...moves: If you're talking about locomotion--no, it doesn't. Viruses get pushed around passively. Once assembled and released, they float around until they hit something that sticks to their protein coat. This is not to say that locomotion is a requirement for life, but viruses don't do it.
...consumes: Again, not really. It doesn't photosynthesize. It doesn't absorb nutrients from its environment. It doesn't barbecue steak. It can hijack the machinery of a living cell to make more viruses, but I'll come back to that.
...grows: Nope. Once a virus is assembled, its size and shape remain essentially fixed. If you look at sputum from someone with a cold, you won't find little baby viruses and giant overweight viruses. Barring mutations, all the viable viruses you find will be identical. Particularly durable viruses may undergo reversible changes in shape caused by dehydration, but that's no more growth than soaking and drying a towel.
...reacts to stimuli: I don't know where this comes from. About the only 'stimulus' a virus can respond to is binding to a cell surface, in which case it fuses to the cell and dumps its genetic cargo inside. It's not much more complicated than a soap bubble 'responding' to the 'stimulus' of hitting a wall by bursting.
...and reproduces: The replication and synthesis of new viral matter (proteins and DNA or RNA) is carried out by the machinery of the host cell, not the virus. Though viruses are pretty much self-assembling once all their bits are present in a cell, this doesn't imply life either. Disturbing a supersaturated sugar solution will cause crystals of sugar to form, but even though they're highly ordered, they aren't alive. If I take a toaster to a machine shop, the guys inside can make me an identical toaster. They could even set up an assembly line and make millions of them. That doesn't make toasters alive.
But more simply, your immune system kills the[m] (if it works right). If it is killed, then it dies, and if it dies then it had to be alive first.
You're just begging the question here. The immune system recognizes viruses; it inactivates them; it digests them--but that doesn't mean that viruses have to be alive, or have to be killed. The body is capable of digesting any number of different macromolecular structures. (Are sugars alive? Naked RNA? Collagen?) Cutting a toaster into tiny pieces certainly renders it nonfunctional, but few would say it has been killed. Fewer still would suggest that it had been alive.
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On the other hand, I've got a clock that my grandfather built decades ago, and it's still running smoothly. Hubble continues to collect useful data. It was designed and built as a finely-crafted scientific instrument, not as a disposable consumer product.
Hm. What's the minimum crew to launch a Shuttle? Could they do it with three? Can they carry out a Hubble repair with that small crew, too?
If that would work, then you just tuck a Soyuz capsule into the cargo bay. It still leaves quite a bit of space for equipment and repair supplies, and gives the astronauts a way home in the unlikely event of trouble.
Why not?
Less than it does now?
I've heard estimates that suggest up to ten percent of spending on healthcare in the U.S. is related to billing and insurance issues--just figuring out who has to pay for what. Public health care at least solves that problem, plus it usually fixes a schedule of fees and precisely delineates what procedures are covered.
If webmail accounts had only a four-digit PIN, then it would be very easy for a script kiddie to throw random PINs at random accounts. Three thousand accounts tested(figure you get locked out after three failed attempts) and you've almost certainly got access. It's entirely a different problem, and the author should know better.
Actually, I was more concerned with military spending being the second priority. Though now that you mention it, the chance of a rock capable of wiping out civilization showing up in the next ten thousand years or so is pretty remote. (I'd put significantly better odds on civilization being wiped out by that higher military spending, for example.) Yeah--I would rather have a cure for Parkinson's.
Dangerous drivers--be they drunk, elderly, or just distracted by their phones--should all be off the streets. I don't see any reason to privilege one group of dangerous drivers over another. The fact that drunk and dangerous elderly drivers still seem to be on the road doesn't support the notion that other dangerous drivers should be ignored.
Simply put...I see tons of people driving on the cell phones - and driving fine. Sometimes a momentary reaction issue...yes. But when I see a drunk driver they are all over 2 or three lanes. They nearly hit everyone. They often run off the road. Somehow it is hard for me to accept that I can see a 100+ cell phone users who are supposedly "more impaired" and they don't perform as poorly as drunk drivers.
As another poster has already asked--how do you know that you didn't pass hundreds of drunk drivers who were staying in their lanes, driving along, but with much slower reaction times? Unless they're actually holding up flasks, you can't measure blood alcohol remotely. As a frequent pedestrian in a large city, I will gladly submit my own (subjective and anecdotal) opinion that drivers on cell phones are less aware of their surroundings.
And I am sorry....a cell phone user is NOT more impaired than a drunk driver. It is political BS. I refuse to buy it and no statistic will prove it to me.
And I am sorry...tobacco use is NOT more likely to kill me than the local nuclear plant. It is political BS. I refuse to buy it and no statistic will prove it to me.
Seriously--people are really bad at assessing risks. This is the type of question that statistics are designed for. Relative risks, odds ratios, confidence intervals. Feel free to provide specific criticism of the study methodology, and note where errors or biases may have been introduced. Don't try to tell me that anecdotal evidence is inherently more reliable for risk assessment than large-scale statistical analysis.
"The numbers....come down to milliseconds"
If you pull the study (it's online here in PDF format) then the total difference is reaction time is on average 130 ms, or about 12 feet at 60 mph (3.5 m at 100 km/h).
The key? is to know if you can multi-task or not. If you can't multi-task than DON'T USE A CELL PHONE AND DRIVE AT THE SAME TIME unless it's an emergency. A little common sense, and a little less stupidity will bring the human race a long way!
The problem is that people tend to be very poor judges of their own abilities. Ask anybody--they will tell you that they are an above average driver, but that there sure are a lot of idiots out on the road. People don't notice their own bad habits, unless and until they actually hit somebody. That's the whole point of a distraction--it means that you don't notice when you're making mistakes. I'm not saying that the parent poster is a bad driver, but that I don't trust people in general to be able to make that assessment.
Eh?
I suspect that there might be some rather important things going on in some other agencies. Just a thought. I suppose it depends how one chooses to define 'important' and 'beneficial'.
Respectfully, the parent poster has the correct idea but not the correct math. In order to accelerate an object using chemical propulsion and then decelerate it again--the save delta-v at both ends--one requires more fuel for acceration than deceleration. It's not half the fuel to accelerate and half to decelerate, because on the acceleration half of the journey one is accelerating both the payload and the braking fuel.
In the case where a payload is carrying a very small amount of fuel, the approximation that equal fuel is used accelerating and decelerating is okay. In this case, where we're looking at maneouvres involving significant delta-v, these ships will tend to carry a lot more fuel than that. That must be accounted for. Briefly, and in simplified form,
The problem becomes enormously worse if you use ground propulsion, because you need to store enough energy in the form of fuel to counteract the amount of energy you are pumping into it from the ground.The point is that if you wanted that energy otherwise, you'd have to loft it in chemical fuel. You get the acceleration delta-v 'for free', because you don't have to put that fuel into space. For a given acceleration and deceleration with the ground-based system, you have to carry less than half the fuel you would with chemical rockets alone. Note as well that if you're launching missions to planets further from the Sun, you don't have to get rid of all of the energy you put in. Your craft needs a net increase in energy just to climb up the Sun's gravity well.
Eh? No....
Let's suppose that just to stop from that speed you need to be carrying a ship that's about 90% fuel by mass. (For a ship of mass x, you need 9x of fuel to stop it.) To accelerate the whole thing up to cruising speed, you now need nine times the mass of the ship plus braking fuel: 90 x.
If a ground-based propulsion system can save you a factor of nine or ten (or even three or four--say that adding a sail doubles the weight of the craft plus braking fuel combination) in the weight you have to lift off the earth, then it's quite possible that the economics will start to look very good very quickly.
In principle, perhaps. On the other hand, the Shuttles are only supposed to be used for a few more missions and NASA is looking for a stopgap backup system now. Designing and testing a new escape capsule system would take years and cost billions of dollars, and probably not be ready until after the current generation of Shuttles are retired.
Escape capsules might make sense for the next generation of craft.
Hmmm...for a quick and dirty solution, you could put two Soyuz capsules in the cargo bay. From here, the dimensions suggest that you could still have some space left over in the cargo bay. (Soyuz diameter 2.7 m, length 7 m. Shuttle cargo bay is 18.3 m length and 4.6 m width.) The Soyuz capsules could be stripped down a bit, too.
Wow. That's a great Freudian typo. 'Seeing the sites' is surfing the net. :)
True...but what sells better?
Perhaps, but I bet the people who are left all have really big cubicles now.
Ever wanted to study neurons in a living system? Human neurons? Want to understand Alzheimer's disease, or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), or Parkinson's?
There are limits to the studies you can conduct in a petri dish. You certainly can't grow a chunk of brain in a dish and have it model anything anywhere near what happens in real life. And patients with ALS complain if you ask to sacrifice them halfway through disease progression so that you can run tests on their tissue.
Cancer biologists have been growing human tumours in immune deficient mice for years, and molecular biologists have a whole toolbox of techniques for expressing human genes in mice. This is just another technique for building more accurate model systems to investigate biology and--hopefully--cure diseases.
Even if scientists grow a mouse with 100% human brain cells, it's still a brain the size of your fingertip, in a body that's treated like a mouse. The creature won't be sitting there thinking, "If I could get out of the cage (and I had bigger paws) I could post on Slashdot." It's no more inhumane than other lab techniques involving animals.
The United States has a long history of using and abusing multilateral trade agreements and organizations. The U.S. government regularly ignores WTO rulings that are not favourable to American interests. Ask Canada about this, for example with respect to softwood lumber.
The United States is welcome to get into a pissing match with China over subsidies, duties, import/export restrictions, and the like--but I'm pretty sure that China has the right to restrict whether or not certain products are sold within their borders. The WTO gets involved if a country is unfairly subsidizing or privileging local products over imported equivalents; I don't think they have standing to interfere with a government forbidding a product because it is 'obscene' or similar.
Strictly speaking--in this case at least--the money is being donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not by Microsoft. To be fair, Microsoft does make charitable contributions to buy goodwill and strategic advertising placement (oops, slipped into bitter cynicism there) but this isn't one of those occasions.
The Gates Foundation exists to assuage any guilt Bill has about pillaging the marketplace, as well as to attempt to adjust his legacy. Like Rockefeller, he'd rather be immortalized as a philanthropist than as a robber baron.
That said, I'm glad that somebody is stepping up on this one. Immunization is one of the single most effective steps that can be taken in public health, both in terms of effect on lives and in terms of cost-effectiveness. I find it very disturbing that basic immunizations aren't available to everyone, if for no other reason than because it will make life better for the rest of us.
The United States government missed out on a great public relations opportunity. If it spent on public health--immunizations and clean water--what it spent to invade Iraq, it could have bought the goodwill of literally billions of people.
Finally, someone explains what .NET is supposed to do.
I'd look at it as more of a 'problem set'. People very seldom learn things in a vacuum, working only from a book. In formal education, you get a lesson from a teacher or professor, and use the book as a reference work to cement ideas, fill in and recapitulate details, and as a source of trial problems to practice skills.
Instead of being told, "Do problems six through twenty of Chapter 3 by Monday morning", you could be advised to "Sink six German warships in Scenarios 3 and 4, and for bonus marks describe techniques that can be used to target a ship that is following an arc with constant radius of curvature and speed." It's still very much a book and pencil type of problem, but the presentation is different.
I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I feel games can replace textbooks and practice problems--more that they can be a supplement.
(Score: -1, Missed Point)
On the other hand, games like Silent Hunter (a submarine simulator) seem to have the potential to teach a great deal of applied physics and trigonometry. Forget the "a train leaves Chicago at 3:00pm; another leaves New York at 4:30pm, both travel at 60 mph..." type of problems. Now you get to do vectors, and moving frames of reference (you, the targets, your torpedos) and trigonometry out the wazoo. And you get to save the world. How's that?
Some older people deal with it quite well. My grandfather is 85 and upgrades his computer more often than I do mine. In the last few years he's made the shift to digital cameras after several decades as an analog photographer. He's a big hit with his female friends because he can tweak photos to remove double chins and smooth out wrinkles.
His political leanings are somewhat conservative, though since he's Canadian that still puts him somewhere around a moderate Democrat. I don't think we're ever going to get him to like Thai food, either.
Aging doesn't have to mean becoming a calcified stick in the mud--it's just a great excuse for a certain portion of the population.
Really?
I suspect most medical advances increase either lifetime or quality of life.
Lens replacements allow thousands of people to see. Hip replacements allow thousands of people to walk. Blood thinners and antihypertensive drugs have prevented millions of heart attacks. Antibiotics, despite their still-too-frequent misuse, have saved millions of lives and continue to do so. New drugs for HIV have added years to the lives of infected individuals. Insulin allows many diabetics to lead full lives. Vaccines eliminated smallpox and have nearly eliminated poliomyelitis, as well as sharply reducing the incidence of a host of other diseases. Advanced medical imaging (MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, etc.) means faster, more accurate diagnosis of a host of illnesses.
Heck, decongestants and mild analgesics let me get a good night's sleep when I have a bad cold.
I'm curious about which 'medical advances' have 'increased suffering needlessly'.
It's also known as Liquid Schwartz.
Actually, I find it hard to say that a virus does any those things. Let's look at those in order. A virus...
But more simply, your immune system kills the[m] (if it works right). If it is killed, then it dies, and if it dies then it had to be alive first.
You're just begging the question here. The immune system recognizes viruses; it inactivates them; it digests them--but that doesn't mean that viruses have to be alive, or have to be killed. The body is capable of digesting any number of different macromolecular structures. (Are sugars alive? Naked RNA? Collagen?) Cutting a toaster into tiny pieces certainly renders it nonfunctional, but few would say it has been killed. Fewer still would suggest that it had been alive.
How do I know when the data have arrived?