Well, yes. As it is now, the El-Cheapo(tm) 5 mW red laser pointer is subject to the same $10K penalty as the 2-Watt green laser.
I know it's asking too much to ask someone to read the linked article, but could you at least read the Slashdot summary? Even with the included grammatical error, it's pretty easy to read.
The FBI has launched a targeted, 60-day program that will offer up to a $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft.
This isn't a penalty for an offender, it's a reward for information leading to an arrest. And it isn't a flat $10K bounty; it's an "up to" amount. Presumably there's a sliding scale from "multiple strikes with 2-watt green laser causing missed approaches by passenger jets" ($10K cash) through "1-milliwatt red pointer annoying Cessnas" ($50 Starbucks gift card) down to "idiot waving flashlight at traffic 'copters" (gentle pat on head).
Well, to be fair I was mostly poking fun at PRMan's complete failure to substantiate his claim, rather than trying to offer a serious counterexample.
That said, Newton is illustrative for one essential point--his religious views don't actually affect the content or reliability of his mathematical and scientific work. Teachers don't need to change how they present Newton's models of gravity or geometric optics because of his religious beliefs, no matter how heartfelt, enthusiastic, arcane, occult or dated those beliefs might now be. The same thing holds true for the (very tiny number of) practicing scientists who hold young-Earth creationist views today. Their personal religious beliefs don't matter, just their scientific publications.
I assume that what PRMan is really upset about is that (young-Earth) creationism and the mess of special pleading, cherry picking, and outright misrepresentation that make up so-called "creation science" aren't given equal time and an uncritical presentation, to which I shrug.
There is a lot of science that is easily reproducible that cannot be taught in a school science classroom because it came from a "creationist". Like you, I demand that ALL science should be uncensored.
Isaac Newton was a staunch creationist who put a great deal of time and effort into literal interpretation of the Bible. (Fun fact: Newton was born on Christmas day!) It's too bad that America's children are sheltered from learning his Laws because of their unfortunate association with a Christian wingnut.
Oh, what's that? Darn. Well, which creationists are doing actual science that is being concealed from children? I mean, surely an advocate of creationist teachings wouldn't make grand claims based in personal beliefs and tenuous or nonexistent evidence....
To play devil's advocate for a moment, a plea rate above 95% could also result from an effective, fair justice system that investigated crimes thoroughly, collected good-quality evidence in an open and transparent manner, and only laid charges in cases where there was strong evidence of guilt on the part of the accused....
Heck, if prosecutors were sufficiently resource-constrained, they would be incented to allow criminals to go free in order to avoid the time, expense, and effort of trials; charges would only be pursued against the shoo-in cases....
Just sayin'. The plea rate isn't the slam-dunk argument you think it is.
Not so much. 22,000 is a goodly number of people, but it represents almost exactly 1% of people who have signed up so far. It's aggravating and stressful and certainly not a good thing, but it's also not the epic disaster that you seem to think it is. (And honestly, prior to the ACA, how many of those people would have been dealing with different but equally frustrating problems from their insurers anyway--and how many just wouldn't have access to health insurance at all?)
Oh definitely! This still leaves the ultrasound creating bubbles, cooking tissue, emitters being inserted in nasty places... and the resolution is nothing compared to a PET scan for detection.
Okay, it's pretty obvious that you don't know how the technology works either.
The sensitivity of PET scanning may be better under some circumstances and for some organs and tissues; it's early days for affinity-tagged microbubble contrast in ultrasound, whereas PET is an older, more mature technology. PET is also quite good for scanning large volumes. On the other hand, its spatial resolution is crap compared to virtually any other imaging modality (save for its poor cousin SPECT)--including run-of-the-mill ultrasound. PET scanning requires exposure to a goodly bit of ionizing radiation; ultrasound is one of the few imaging modalities that does not.
Under anything like normal conditions (with or without microbubble contrast), ultrasound imaging does not create bubbles or cause significant heating of tissue. The microbubbles discussed here are exogenous and introduced intravenously (for most types of studies); once in the body they tend to break down within a few tens of minutes. The microbubbles are typically tens of microns in size and are carried harmlessly through the circulatory system. Gas from burst bubbles escapes readily through the lungs.
You use PET scanning to look for distant metastases throughout the body, and a positive PET signal indicates the need for further investigation rather than representing a firm diagnosis by itself. Ultrasound with affinity-tagged microbubbles is used to interrogate a (suspected) primary tumour and the immediately surrounding tissue; it's a different clinical problem entirely.
As a side bonus, ultrasound is probably hands-down the cheapest imaging modality available to clinicians--which means that instruments are plentiful and fast access is readily available even to patients who don't happen to live near a major hospital's radiology department.
The idea of using microbubbles to enhance ultrasound contrast is at least thirty years old.
Microbubbles have been used both experimentally and commercially as a contrast-enhancing agent in ultrasound imaging for at least twenty years.
Coupling affinity probes (like antibodies) to microbubbles in order to increase their specificity has been done for more than a decade. Extensive work has been done in tissue and animal models. (The study in the Slashdot story is just another mouse study.)
Unlike the study promoted here, there are a number of published reports - as well as clinical trials - involving use of these probe-coupled microbubbles in real human beings to study real people with real diseases. (See for example this 2012 review.) It's nice that UNC is studying this stuff and it's good to see the number of targets for this technique being increased...but breathless press releases aside, this particular study isn't really cutting-edge.
...same thing in Reykjanes. I fully expect people to freak out, given that's where three quarters of our population lives;)
Is Reykjavik on the Reykjanes peninsula proper, or just next to it? (Sure, I'll give you Keflavik and Hafnarfjörður, but they ain't three quarters of the population.:D)
Besides, the bits where they would be drilling would presumably be near the existing geothermal power plants, in the middle of hundreds of square kilometers of lava fields. The worst that could happen to this terrain already happened, and relatively recently (mostly in the last ten thousand years, and sometimes within the last millennium) and it already looks it.
I suppose the Blue Lagoon could be destroyed, but...meh, tourists.
Given that you started out this thread insisting that cash sales of organs would be appropriate and ethical as long as they were "not under duress", I'm pretty sure you've wandered an awfully long way from the point that you were failing to make.
If your only solution to crappy healthcare coverage in the United States (alone among civilized countries) is to sell the organs of the working poor to the wealthy, then you're part of the problem.
Medical payments for new procedures for the family of the donor would be OK.
Wow, that's just sick, and the worst kind of not-OK. "Sorry; your wife's health insurance doesn't provide sufficient coverage for her breast cancer treatment. But we now have an E-Z Pay option where you can sell us your kidney in exchange for a couple of rounds of radiation therapy."
Requirement potential sellers take a lie-detector test, show they are in good health financially and physically...
The point is that people who are in good financial health and well-enough informed to give legitimate consent don't generally choose to risk their lives to sell an organ for cash. Nobody says "I think I'll roll the dice on a 1 in 400 chance of death associated with this hepatectomy because I'd just like to see an extra twenty grand on my bank statement". Such sales will nearly always be to fulfill some unmet financial need or want.
You're also going to have trouble finding physicians and surgeons to carry out these procedures. Contrary to the perception of them as soulless, money-seeking robots, they tend to actually have pretty refined ethical senses. Speaking as a person who has made a voluntary, altruistic organ donation to a loved one, I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed throughout the process by the efforts made by the transplant team to ensure that I fully apprehended the risks associated with the procedure, and that my choice was entirely voluntary and uncoerced (including bribery or payments).
Among other steps, I underwent a psych screening, physical exams with a couple of doctors, and interviews with a couple of the transplant hospital's surgeons. One thing that very much stuck with me was a conversation with one of the transplant surgeons as part of the informed consent process. He told me that these procedures were already very difficult for these surgeons, ethically speaking, because a very big part of their training emphasizes not carrying out procedures that have no health benefit to the patient. For organ donors, the surgery will never make them better; it can only make them worse, and it may kill them. For surgeons, the absolute worst-case scenario in their line of work is to bring a perfectly healthy patient into the hospital, perform a medically-unnecessary procedure, and debilitate or kill that person who otherwise probably had forty healthy years left. The surgeon I spoke to noted that he hadn't lost any patients yet (knock on wood), but that he knew surgeons who had had the experience. He told me that it had changed them; that it had been enormously traumatic.
While it's not too difficult to find transplant surgeons who can reconcile the ethical dilemma in play when a patient is willing to risk their health for the benefit of a child, sibling, parent, spouse, or other loved one, I suspect that you're going to have a lot more pushback when you ask those same surgeons to hazard the lives of healthy people in exchange for mortgage payments or a new car.
Everyone I know gets the Navy to come to their rescue for Medical problems. Why are people upset, I don't understand.
Apparently you don't. It turns out that in most moderately civilized countries - and also in the United States - if you need urgent medical care while on an isolated island and there aren't any other good transportation options then the government pitches in. In the U.S., the Coast Guard maintains a substantial fleet of search and rescue ships and aircraft which are frequently used for medical evacuations of patients from remote locations. If you Google using keywords like "medevac" and "coast guard', you'll have no problem finding scores of incidents. Here's just one from a few weeks ago.
Ecuador, being a small nation, doesn't have a separate Navy and Coast Guard; the functions of the latter are performed by the former. So...yeah, if you have a serious medical issue in a remote area, the Navy is the go-to option for emergency transportation--whether you're an internet billionaire or not.
Well, not in any meaningful sense of the word 'tried'.
They minted a bunch of $1 coins and no one wants them.
How do coins and small denomination banknotes enter circulation? Hint--it's generally not through random members of the public wandering into their local bank and saying "Please, good sir, I'd like to withdraw fifty ones and a half dozen rolls of dimes!" It's predominantly through businesses which carry out cash transactions. Individual members of the public get twenties from the ATM, and exchange them for goods and services...and smaller denomination notes and coins at retailers.
So the form of currency in circulation isn't actually determined by what "everyone" wants; it's down to what retail businesses want, in their short- to mid-term planning horizon. Now, if you gave those businesses a firm choice of "Keep the current paper banknotes" versus "Switch to dollar coins", a lot of them would probably be on board. Their handling costs are a little bit lower for coins than for notes (coins are slightly faster, easier, and cheaper to count, in addition to being more durable) and coins are generally more resistant to counterfeiting (not a big issue for dollar notes, but still).
The problem is, the choice that America was offered wasn't quite that choice. It was "Keep the current paper banknotes" versus "Keep the current paper banknotes, and add a second form factor for the same denomination, forever and ever, because we're going to keep minting paper notes too". Even then, there was some adoption from organizations and businesses that did a high volume of low-cost and automated transactions where the reduced handling costs would still make a difference: vending machines, laundromats, parking facilities, public transit systems, etc.
The biggest beneficiary of a switch - the entire U.S. population, through reduced minting costs generated by not replacing worn-out dollar notes every few months - didn't get to directly make the choice; it was made for them by retailers who didn't want to deal with a temporary inconvenience.
Those that think contraception is wrong shouldn't have to buy it. As employers, they are being told to pay for something they believe is morally wrong. They believe that by being complicit, they risk hell. So they wish to simply not do it. They want to decide what is best for themselves.
They are, of course, welcome to do that. No employer in the United States, as far as I am aware, is compelled by the federal government to offer its employees health insurance. If these employers wished to stick to their particular and dubious bit of moral high ground, all they have to do is stop offering their employees a health plan. Top up those employees' salaries with the amount the company isn't shelling out. Problem solved; the company doesn't have to pay for insurance that covers contraceptives (or blood transfusions, or chemotherapy, or abortions for rape victims, or whichever religious hobby horse the company's executives are on about).
But these employers seem unwilling to exercise their complete freedom to opt out of buying these horrible, tainted, health insurance plans of the devil. They really want to buy their employees some insurance, for two entirely and purely selfish reasons. The first is that these employers really like the favorable tax treatment and deductions that they get buying the insurance as a company. (For some reason, they have lost track of how a quid pro quo is supposed to work--the government gives them a tax break, and in exchange they have to spend some of that money in a way that follows government guidelines.)
The second reason is that if these employers just gave their employees money in lieu of insurance, they wouldn't be able to exercise any control over what sort of immoral insurance their employees bought on the open market. These employers like to be able to dictate the terms, conditions, and especially the limitations of their employees' healthcare, and what those employees are allowed to do with their own bodies. Letting employees have the freedom to buy their own insurance means giving up that control.
So that's the two part problem. Employers want to enjoy a tax break without fulfilling the requirements to earn it, and employers want to control their employees' bodies seven days a week, and not just nine to five. Nobody's being forced to pay for something they believe is morally wrong; they're just moaning because they don't like the reasonable conditions associated with a rather lucrative tax break.
The fact that only 49 of them (well, probably some of these are full districts, so the number of schools will be greater) are banning books should be celebrated.
The concern I would have here is that we have no way of knowing what fraction of all book bannings come to the attention of NCAC. Particularly if a ban is implemented by a single school, banning a book from the curriculum may only directly affect one or two classrooms' worth of children. Not all of those students (or even their parents) may necessarily be aware that a ban has been applied. In subsequent years, no one may have any inkling that the ban exists; the book will have silently disappeared from the curriculum. The syllabus doesn't usually include a list of the books that aren't being taught. So for those reasons, I suspect that the number given - 49 instances - represents a very significant under-reporting.
On the other hand, that same under-reporting gives me a (small) measure of comfort with respect to the other number in the summary: the purported 53% year-over-year increase in bannings. Without ready access to more data, it's entirely possible that the increase in cases is not due to an increase in bannings (undoubtedly a bad thing) but due to an increase in awareness regarding the NCAC and their Kids' Right to Read Project which would make these incidents more likely to be reported and challenged when they do occur (which would be a good thing).
... it's just that it's likely based on a specific frequency and it would "interrupt" the absorption of certain nutrients... Cells have what is called a "Calcium gate" and that resonates depending on what signals it gets from the cell nucleus and this impacts what types of ionized molecules are let through -- attracted to the net positive potassium charge inside the cell...
Okay, who the hell is modding up this sort of nonsense about magical resonance of calcium channels? I don't even know where to begin to address the abuses of terminology and confusion about mechanism in the parent post.
I'm not sure if this is part of the textbooks or not, but it will be I'm fairly sure.
All this revenue that could be pulled by the one time largest shipper in the US, but for some reason, they keep losing billions a year.
There are a number of regulations imposed on the USPS which prevent it from competing effectively with UPS and FedEx in certain markets. One of the most relevant to this discussion is that the USPS is not allowed to own its own fleet of cargo aircraft.
Yes, you read that correctly. The USPS must contract with private suppliers for air shipment capacity. Some USPS freight is carried by the cargo arms of domestic airlines like Delta and United. A big chunk of USPS air freight, though, goes by FedEx because the USPS isn't allowed to carry it themselves.
Whoops. They are using proxy data not actual temperature data. That means heavy, subjective processing of the data right there. Just because these particular scientists see phenomena that they want and are paid to see, doesn't mean it actually exists.
In much the same way that noting a several hundred degree temperature rise, a flickering increase in ambient light levels, and an odour of smoke in my living room are just proxy data which may suggest that my couch is on fire.
But please feel free to sit there and claim that the "fire hypothesis" is a purely subjective construct created by a left-wing conspiracy, while you close your eyes and plug your ears and fail to present any robustly credible alternate explanation.
In medicine, innovative things happen all the time. When *you* go to the doctor, you get the same ol' thing that has been done since 1952.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to someone who writes down such utter bollocks, but I'll bite.
The very first cancer patient was treated with cobalt-60 irradiation in late 1951, in London, Ontario--so I suppose that slips into your 1952 window (though the instruments used in those preliminary 1951 tests bear very little resemblance to those used today). The first use of a clinical linear accelerator for high-energy radiotherapy wasn't until 1956, at Stanford.
The first clinical x-ray CT scanner was used in 1971; it took five minutes to collect a slice of data, and more than two hours to process that data into a rather low-resolution image. PET scanning using FDG started around 1976. The first commercial MR imagers appeared around 1980, after a decade or so of futzing about with technical challenges.
The drug cisplatin wasn't approved by the FDA until 1978; it was the first discovered of a line of platinum-containing antineoplastic drugs. The drug taxol received FDA approval in late 1992. It was the first clinically-used taxane, a family of compounds which inhibit microtubule formation and thereby disrupt cell division. Rituximab was approved in 1997. It was the first anti-cancer monoclonal antibody therapy; there are now more than a dozen. Imatinib was the first small-molecule kinase inhibitor for cancer therapy, approved in 2001.
All of the above techniques and therapies are available to *you* and in routine use today - when they haven't been superseded by even newer developments. I hate to break it to you, but this ain't your grandma's oncology.
And the fact that the "fixed" Tesla still sucks up enough power to drain the battery in any other car overnight, every night...
I'm kind of wondering if "sucks up" is really the right verb to be using here. I mean, the article's author notes that the battery pack has a nominal 85 kWh capacity. Losing 1.1 kWh in 24 hours (note, not just "overnight") from a fully-charged battery pack is a shade less than 1.3% of the total capacity per day; if it maintained that rate of discharge, it would drain the battery pack in about 2.5 months.
The question I have, then, is how much of that consumption is replenishment of unavoidable self-discharge from the batteries, versus actual electricity used to power the various onboard electronics packages. That is, even if you physically cut every connection between the car and the battery pack in the evening, how much would the charge need to be topped up come morning?
They could have been intending to use it to make dirty bomb what could have exposed hundreds, if not thousands to such an ugly death.
That's a bit of a stretch. If they had intended to use it for that purpose, they would have had to have known what they were stealing in the first place--and they wouldn't have opened the damn container and irradiated themselves in the first place. (For that matter, they wouldn't have abandoned the cobalt-60 after the carjacking.)
While they're probably not nice people, and they may not even be good people, it's not fair or reasonable to assign karmic penalties based on a worst-case what-if scenario. If you're going to play that game, you might as well say that all carjackers deserve slow, painful death because they could use the stolen vehicle to run over kittens and baby seals.
"There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."
The U.S. holds that certain classes of speech are of sufficiently limited social value that they may be regulated by the state without violating the strictures of the First Amendment. Effectively, the difference is that Germany applies a slightly different definition of what constitutes obscenity warranting regulation.
Honestly, I can see where they're coming from, and it's interesting to compare where the U.S. stands on the regulation of Hitler versus Hustler.
Freedom of speech isn't safe. In fact it is very dangerous. That is why the United States has that first in its bill of rights, because it is so dangerous, you need a powerful law to keep it intact.
The U.S. position, generally speaking, is that it's okay to sell a kid a Neo-Nazi tract, but not a copy of Playboy. It's okay to hold a public rally demanding the execution of all the Jews in America, but in most places it remains an illegal public nuisance for a women to attend that rally topless. (Unless, of course, the toplessness is part of the 'message' of the rally, in which case it's protected speech...maybe.)
So, we're guessing about imagined economies of scale that may or may not, hypothetically speaking, materialize, in the best-case scenario of a fully-developed, mature technology, probably some decades hence.
...the estimated cost of the electricity generated by such a system could be 20 to 30 cents per kWh...
Our wild-assed guess ranges over a factor of 1.5 anyway.
...approaching the cost of other conventional renewable energy technologies.
"Approaching", in this instance, meaning "costing twice as much as" pholtovoltaic systems, which already sit at the expensive end of the renewable spectrum.
Instead of taking his word as gospel, do your own research:...Per Wikipedia, somewhere around 18,200 Model S' have been sold since 2012; 3-4 of them have caught on fire...
So far, what you're telling me is that Musk's rate of about 1 in 6000 - about 3 fires in 18,000 cars - is accurate.
Ford sold over 250,000 Fusions in 2013 alone, and if you can find a figure for how many of those caught on fire, I'd bet dollars to pesos that the percentage will be far lower than that of the Model S.
And now you're telling me that Musk is wrong because of...your gut feeling. While I guess that's more honest than just making up an absurdly high percentage like you did in your first post, you still aren't bringing any useful information to the table.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes. As it is now, the El-Cheapo(tm) 5 mW red laser pointer is subject to the same $10K penalty as the 2-Watt green laser.
I know it's asking too much to ask someone to read the linked article, but could you at least read the Slashdot summary? Even with the included grammatical error, it's pretty easy to read.
The FBI has launched a targeted, 60-day program that will offer up to a $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of anyone who intentionally aims a laser at an aircraft.
This isn't a penalty for an offender, it's a reward for information leading to an arrest. And it isn't a flat $10K bounty; it's an "up to" amount. Presumably there's a sliding scale from "multiple strikes with 2-watt green laser causing missed approaches by passenger jets" ($10K cash) through "1-milliwatt red pointer annoying Cessnas" ($50 Starbucks gift card) down to "idiot waving flashlight at traffic 'copters" (gentle pat on head).
Well, to be fair I was mostly poking fun at PRMan's complete failure to substantiate his claim, rather than trying to offer a serious counterexample.
That said, Newton is illustrative for one essential point--his religious views don't actually affect the content or reliability of his mathematical and scientific work. Teachers don't need to change how they present Newton's models of gravity or geometric optics because of his religious beliefs, no matter how heartfelt, enthusiastic, arcane, occult or dated those beliefs might now be. The same thing holds true for the (very tiny number of) practicing scientists who hold young-Earth creationist views today. Their personal religious beliefs don't matter, just their scientific publications.
I assume that what PRMan is really upset about is that (young-Earth) creationism and the mess of special pleading, cherry picking, and outright misrepresentation that make up so-called "creation science" aren't given equal time and an uncritical presentation, to which I shrug.
There is a lot of science that is easily reproducible that cannot be taught in a school science classroom because it came from a "creationist". Like you, I demand that ALL science should be uncensored.
Isaac Newton was a staunch creationist who put a great deal of time and effort into literal interpretation of the Bible. (Fun fact: Newton was born on Christmas day!) It's too bad that America's children are sheltered from learning his Laws because of their unfortunate association with a Christian wingnut.
Oh, what's that? Darn. Well, which creationists are doing actual science that is being concealed from children? I mean, surely an advocate of creationist teachings wouldn't make grand claims based in personal beliefs and tenuous or nonexistent evidence....
No wonder the plea rate in the US exceeds 95%.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, a plea rate above 95% could also result from an effective, fair justice system that investigated crimes thoroughly, collected good-quality evidence in an open and transparent manner, and only laid charges in cases where there was strong evidence of guilt on the part of the accused....
Heck, if prosecutors were sufficiently resource-constrained, they would be incented to allow criminals to go free in order to avoid the time, expense, and effort of trials; charges would only be pursued against the shoo-in cases....
Just sayin'. The plea rate isn't the slam-dunk argument you think it is.
clusterfuck?
Not so much. 22,000 is a goodly number of people, but it represents almost exactly 1% of people who have signed up so far. It's aggravating and stressful and certainly not a good thing, but it's also not the epic disaster that you seem to think it is. (And honestly, prior to the ACA, how many of those people would have been dealing with different but equally frustrating problems from their insurers anyway--and how many just wouldn't have access to health insurance at all?)
Oh definitely! This still leaves the ultrasound creating bubbles, cooking tissue, emitters being inserted in nasty places... and the resolution is nothing compared to a PET scan for detection.
Okay, it's pretty obvious that you don't know how the technology works either.
The sensitivity of PET scanning may be better under some circumstances and for some organs and tissues; it's early days for affinity-tagged microbubble contrast in ultrasound, whereas PET is an older, more mature technology. PET is also quite good for scanning large volumes. On the other hand, its spatial resolution is crap compared to virtually any other imaging modality (save for its poor cousin SPECT)--including run-of-the-mill ultrasound. PET scanning requires exposure to a goodly bit of ionizing radiation; ultrasound is one of the few imaging modalities that does not.
Under anything like normal conditions (with or without microbubble contrast), ultrasound imaging does not create bubbles or cause significant heating of tissue. The microbubbles discussed here are exogenous and introduced intravenously (for most types of studies); once in the body they tend to break down within a few tens of minutes. The microbubbles are typically tens of microns in size and are carried harmlessly through the circulatory system. Gas from burst bubbles escapes readily through the lungs.
You use PET scanning to look for distant metastases throughout the body, and a positive PET signal indicates the need for further investigation rather than representing a firm diagnosis by itself. Ultrasound with affinity-tagged microbubbles is used to interrogate a (suspected) primary tumour and the immediately surrounding tissue; it's a different clinical problem entirely.
As a side bonus, ultrasound is probably hands-down the cheapest imaging modality available to clinicians--which means that instruments are plentiful and fast access is readily available even to patients who don't happen to live near a major hospital's radiology department.
Microbubbles have been used both experimentally and commercially as a contrast-enhancing agent in ultrasound imaging for at least twenty years.
Coupling affinity probes (like antibodies) to microbubbles in order to increase their specificity has been done for more than a decade. Extensive work has been done in tissue and animal models. (The study in the Slashdot story is just another mouse study.)
Unlike the study promoted here, there are a number of published reports - as well as clinical trials - involving use of these probe-coupled microbubbles in real human beings to study real people with real diseases. (See for example this 2012 review.) It's nice that UNC is studying this stuff and it's good to see the number of targets for this technique being increased...but breathless press releases aside, this particular study isn't really cutting-edge.
...same thing in Reykjanes. I fully expect people to freak out, given that's where three quarters of our population lives ;)
Is Reykjavik on the Reykjanes peninsula proper, or just next to it? (Sure, I'll give you Keflavik and Hafnarfjörður, but they ain't three quarters of the population. :D)
Besides, the bits where they would be drilling would presumably be near the existing geothermal power plants, in the middle of hundreds of square kilometers of lava fields. The worst that could happen to this terrain already happened, and relatively recently (mostly in the last ten thousand years, and sometimes within the last millennium) and it already looks it.
I suppose the Blue Lagoon could be destroyed, but...meh, tourists.
If your only solution to crappy healthcare coverage in the United States (alone among civilized countries) is to sell the organs of the working poor to the wealthy, then you're part of the problem.
Medical payments for new procedures for the family of the donor would be OK.
Wow, that's just sick, and the worst kind of not-OK. "Sorry; your wife's health insurance doesn't provide sufficient coverage for her breast cancer treatment. But we now have an E-Z Pay option where you can sell us your kidney in exchange for a couple of rounds of radiation therapy."
Sick, sick, sick.
Requirement potential sellers take a lie-detector test, show they are in good health financially and physically...
The point is that people who are in good financial health and well-enough informed to give legitimate consent don't generally choose to risk their lives to sell an organ for cash. Nobody says "I think I'll roll the dice on a 1 in 400 chance of death associated with this hepatectomy because I'd just like to see an extra twenty grand on my bank statement". Such sales will nearly always be to fulfill some unmet financial need or want.
You're also going to have trouble finding physicians and surgeons to carry out these procedures. Contrary to the perception of them as soulless, money-seeking robots, they tend to actually have pretty refined ethical senses. Speaking as a person who has made a voluntary, altruistic organ donation to a loved one, I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed throughout the process by the efforts made by the transplant team to ensure that I fully apprehended the risks associated with the procedure, and that my choice was entirely voluntary and uncoerced (including bribery or payments).
Among other steps, I underwent a psych screening, physical exams with a couple of doctors, and interviews with a couple of the transplant hospital's surgeons. One thing that very much stuck with me was a conversation with one of the transplant surgeons as part of the informed consent process. He told me that these procedures were already very difficult for these surgeons, ethically speaking, because a very big part of their training emphasizes not carrying out procedures that have no health benefit to the patient. For organ donors, the surgery will never make them better; it can only make them worse, and it may kill them. For surgeons, the absolute worst-case scenario in their line of work is to bring a perfectly healthy patient into the hospital, perform a medically-unnecessary procedure, and debilitate or kill that person who otherwise probably had forty healthy years left. The surgeon I spoke to noted that he hadn't lost any patients yet (knock on wood), but that he knew surgeons who had had the experience. He told me that it had changed them; that it had been enormously traumatic.
While it's not too difficult to find transplant surgeons who can reconcile the ethical dilemma in play when a patient is willing to risk their health for the benefit of a child, sibling, parent, spouse, or other loved one, I suspect that you're going to have a lot more pushback when you ask those same surgeons to hazard the lives of healthy people in exchange for mortgage payments or a new car.
Everyone I know gets the Navy to come to their rescue for Medical problems. Why are people upset, I don't understand.
Apparently you don't. It turns out that in most moderately civilized countries - and also in the United States - if you need urgent medical care while on an isolated island and there aren't any other good transportation options then the government pitches in. In the U.S., the Coast Guard maintains a substantial fleet of search and rescue ships and aircraft which are frequently used for medical evacuations of patients from remote locations. If you Google using keywords like "medevac" and "coast guard', you'll have no problem finding scores of incidents. Here's just one from a few weeks ago.
Ecuador, being a small nation, doesn't have a separate Navy and Coast Guard; the functions of the latter are performed by the former. So...yeah, if you have a serious medical issue in a remote area, the Navy is the go-to option for emergency transportation--whether you're an internet billionaire or not.
They tried.
Well, not in any meaningful sense of the word 'tried'.
They minted a bunch of $1 coins and no one wants them.
How do coins and small denomination banknotes enter circulation? Hint--it's generally not through random members of the public wandering into their local bank and saying "Please, good sir, I'd like to withdraw fifty ones and a half dozen rolls of dimes!" It's predominantly through businesses which carry out cash transactions. Individual members of the public get twenties from the ATM, and exchange them for goods and services...and smaller denomination notes and coins at retailers.
So the form of currency in circulation isn't actually determined by what "everyone" wants; it's down to what retail businesses want, in their short- to mid-term planning horizon. Now, if you gave those businesses a firm choice of "Keep the current paper banknotes" versus "Switch to dollar coins", a lot of them would probably be on board. Their handling costs are a little bit lower for coins than for notes (coins are slightly faster, easier, and cheaper to count, in addition to being more durable) and coins are generally more resistant to counterfeiting (not a big issue for dollar notes, but still).
The problem is, the choice that America was offered wasn't quite that choice. It was "Keep the current paper banknotes" versus "Keep the current paper banknotes, and add a second form factor for the same denomination, forever and ever, because we're going to keep minting paper notes too". Even then, there was some adoption from organizations and businesses that did a high volume of low-cost and automated transactions where the reduced handling costs would still make a difference: vending machines, laundromats, parking facilities, public transit systems, etc.
The biggest beneficiary of a switch - the entire U.S. population, through reduced minting costs generated by not replacing worn-out dollar notes every few months - didn't get to directly make the choice; it was made for them by retailers who didn't want to deal with a temporary inconvenience.
Those that think contraception is wrong shouldn't have to buy it. As employers, they are being told to pay for something they believe is morally wrong. They believe that by being complicit, they risk hell. So they wish to simply not do it. They want to decide what is best for themselves.
They are, of course, welcome to do that. No employer in the United States, as far as I am aware, is compelled by the federal government to offer its employees health insurance. If these employers wished to stick to their particular and dubious bit of moral high ground, all they have to do is stop offering their employees a health plan. Top up those employees' salaries with the amount the company isn't shelling out. Problem solved; the company doesn't have to pay for insurance that covers contraceptives (or blood transfusions, or chemotherapy, or abortions for rape victims, or whichever religious hobby horse the company's executives are on about).
But these employers seem unwilling to exercise their complete freedom to opt out of buying these horrible, tainted, health insurance plans of the devil. They really want to buy their employees some insurance, for two entirely and purely selfish reasons. The first is that these employers really like the favorable tax treatment and deductions that they get buying the insurance as a company. (For some reason, they have lost track of how a quid pro quo is supposed to work--the government gives them a tax break, and in exchange they have to spend some of that money in a way that follows government guidelines.)
The second reason is that if these employers just gave their employees money in lieu of insurance, they wouldn't be able to exercise any control over what sort of immoral insurance their employees bought on the open market. These employers like to be able to dictate the terms, conditions, and especially the limitations of their employees' healthcare, and what those employees are allowed to do with their own bodies. Letting employees have the freedom to buy their own insurance means giving up that control.
So that's the two part problem. Employers want to enjoy a tax break without fulfilling the requirements to earn it, and employers want to control their employees' bodies seven days a week, and not just nine to five. Nobody's being forced to pay for something they believe is morally wrong; they're just moaning because they don't like the reasonable conditions associated with a rather lucrative tax break.
The fact that only 49 of them (well, probably some of these are full districts, so the number of schools will be greater) are banning books should be celebrated.
The concern I would have here is that we have no way of knowing what fraction of all book bannings come to the attention of NCAC. Particularly if a ban is implemented by a single school, banning a book from the curriculum may only directly affect one or two classrooms' worth of children. Not all of those students (or even their parents) may necessarily be aware that a ban has been applied. In subsequent years, no one may have any inkling that the ban exists; the book will have silently disappeared from the curriculum. The syllabus doesn't usually include a list of the books that aren't being taught. So for those reasons, I suspect that the number given - 49 instances - represents a very significant under-reporting.
On the other hand, that same under-reporting gives me a (small) measure of comfort with respect to the other number in the summary: the purported 53% year-over-year increase in bannings. Without ready access to more data, it's entirely possible that the increase in cases is not due to an increase in bannings (undoubtedly a bad thing) but due to an increase in awareness regarding the NCAC and their Kids' Right to Read Project which would make these incidents more likely to be reported and challenged when they do occur (which would be a good thing).
... it's just that it's likely based on a specific frequency and it would "interrupt" the absorption of certain nutrients ... Cells have what is called a "Calcium gate" and that resonates depending on what signals it gets from the cell nucleus and this impacts what types of ionized molecules are let through -- attracted to the net positive potassium charge inside the cell...
Okay, who the hell is modding up this sort of nonsense about magical resonance of calcium channels? I don't even know where to begin to address the abuses of terminology and confusion about mechanism in the parent post.
I'm not sure if this is part of the textbooks or not, but it will be I'm fairly sure.
Hmm.
I've not seen research on it yet.
Oh.
All this revenue that could be pulled by the one time largest shipper in the US, but for some reason, they keep losing billions a year.
There are a number of regulations imposed on the USPS which prevent it from competing effectively with UPS and FedEx in certain markets. One of the most relevant to this discussion is that the USPS is not allowed to own its own fleet of cargo aircraft.
Yes, you read that correctly. The USPS must contract with private suppliers for air shipment capacity. Some USPS freight is carried by the cargo arms of domestic airlines like Delta and United. A big chunk of USPS air freight, though, goes by FedEx because the USPS isn't allowed to carry it themselves.
Whoops. They are using proxy data not actual temperature data. That means heavy, subjective processing of the data right there. Just because these particular scientists see phenomena that they want and are paid to see, doesn't mean it actually exists.
In much the same way that noting a several hundred degree temperature rise, a flickering increase in ambient light levels, and an odour of smoke in my living room are just proxy data which may suggest that my couch is on fire.
But please feel free to sit there and claim that the "fire hypothesis" is a purely subjective construct created by a left-wing conspiracy, while you close your eyes and plug your ears and fail to present any robustly credible alternate explanation.
In medicine, innovative things happen all the time. When *you* go to the doctor, you get the same ol' thing that has been done since 1952.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to someone who writes down such utter bollocks, but I'll bite.
The very first cancer patient was treated with cobalt-60 irradiation in late 1951, in London, Ontario--so I suppose that slips into your 1952 window (though the instruments used in those preliminary 1951 tests bear very little resemblance to those used today). The first use of a clinical linear accelerator for high-energy radiotherapy wasn't until 1956, at Stanford.
The first clinical x-ray CT scanner was used in 1971; it took five minutes to collect a slice of data, and more than two hours to process that data into a rather low-resolution image. PET scanning using FDG started around 1976. The first commercial MR imagers appeared around 1980, after a decade or so of futzing about with technical challenges.
The drug cisplatin wasn't approved by the FDA until 1978; it was the first discovered of a line of platinum-containing antineoplastic drugs. The drug taxol received FDA approval in late 1992. It was the first clinically-used taxane, a family of compounds which inhibit microtubule formation and thereby disrupt cell division. Rituximab was approved in 1997. It was the first anti-cancer monoclonal antibody therapy; there are now more than a dozen. Imatinib was the first small-molecule kinase inhibitor for cancer therapy, approved in 2001.
All of the above techniques and therapies are available to *you* and in routine use today - when they haven't been superseded by even newer developments. I hate to break it to you, but this ain't your grandma's oncology.
And the fact that the "fixed" Tesla still sucks up enough power to drain the battery in any other car overnight, every night...
I'm kind of wondering if "sucks up" is really the right verb to be using here. I mean, the article's author notes that the battery pack has a nominal 85 kWh capacity. Losing 1.1 kWh in 24 hours (note, not just "overnight") from a fully-charged battery pack is a shade less than 1.3% of the total capacity per day; if it maintained that rate of discharge, it would drain the battery pack in about 2.5 months.
The question I have, then, is how much of that consumption is replenishment of unavoidable self-discharge from the batteries, versus actual electricity used to power the various onboard electronics packages. That is, even if you physically cut every connection between the car and the battery pack in the evening, how much would the charge need to be topped up come morning?
They could have been intending to use it to make dirty bomb what could have exposed hundreds, if not thousands to such an ugly death.
That's a bit of a stretch. If they had intended to use it for that purpose, they would have had to have known what they were stealing in the first place--and they wouldn't have opened the damn container and irradiated themselves in the first place. (For that matter, they wouldn't have abandoned the cobalt-60 after the carjacking.)
While they're probably not nice people, and they may not even be good people, it's not fair or reasonable to assign karmic penalties based on a worst-case what-if scenario. If you're going to play that game, you might as well say that all carjackers deserve slow, painful death because they could use the stolen vehicle to run over kittens and baby seals.
Banning calls for "racial hatred" is a slippery slope. Where along the line do you start arresting people?
In a slightly different place on the same slope as the United States. You would do well to read the link the grandparent post provides, to Wikipedia's article on Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. In the unanimous decision of the court, Justice Murphy wrote:
"There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."
The U.S. holds that certain classes of speech are of sufficiently limited social value that they may be regulated by the state without violating the strictures of the First Amendment. Effectively, the difference is that Germany applies a slightly different definition of what constitutes obscenity warranting regulation.
Honestly, I can see where they're coming from, and it's interesting to compare where the U.S. stands on the regulation of Hitler versus Hustler.
Freedom of speech isn't safe. In fact it is very dangerous. That is why the United States has that first in its bill of rights, because it is so dangerous, you need a powerful law to keep it intact.
The United States gets to lecture other countries on this point after it develops a consistent and enlightened position on "obscenity" and public exposure of women's breasts.
The U.S. position, generally speaking, is that it's okay to sell a kid a Neo-Nazi tract, but not a copy of Playboy. It's okay to hold a public rally demanding the execution of all the Jews in America, but in most places it remains an illegal public nuisance for a women to attend that rally topless. (Unless, of course, the toplessness is part of the 'message' of the rally, in which case it's protected speech...maybe.)
At a full-scale facility...
So, we're guessing about imagined economies of scale that may or may not, hypothetically speaking, materialize, in the best-case scenario of a fully-developed, mature technology, probably some decades hence.
...the estimated cost of the electricity generated by such a system could be 20 to 30 cents per kWh...
Our wild-assed guess ranges over a factor of 1.5 anyway.
...approaching the cost of other conventional renewable energy technologies.
"Approaching", in this instance, meaning "costing twice as much as" pholtovoltaic systems, which already sit at the expensive end of the renewable spectrum.
Instead of taking his word as gospel, do your own research:...Per Wikipedia, somewhere around 18,200 Model S' have been sold since 2012; 3-4 of them have caught on fire...
So far, what you're telling me is that Musk's rate of about 1 in 6000 - about 3 fires in 18,000 cars - is accurate.
Ford sold over 250,000 Fusions in 2013 alone, and if you can find a figure for how many of those caught on fire, I'd bet dollars to pesos that the percentage will be far lower than that of the Model S.
And now you're telling me that Musk is wrong because of...your gut feeling. While I guess that's more honest than just making up an absurdly high percentage like you did in your first post, you still aren't bringing any useful information to the table.