Mice and rats in the wild don't die of cancer. Usually they get eaten. Sometimes they pick up other diseases. If nearly all human beings were eaten by some creature higher on the food chain--say, dragons--before the age of thirty, humans wouldn't have to worry about cancer, either. Lab animals only get cancer when a) they are kept in clean cages and cared for so that they live for years beyond their 'normal' lifespan, b) researchers deliberately induce tumour formation, and/or c) the mice have been bred (or genetically altered a la Harvard mouse) specifically to be susceptible to cancer.
That said, if you were sitting on a jury for the trial of someone who killed a spammer, would you vote for conviction?
Um, yes? Premeditated murder is one of those things that most civilized societies prefer not to condone. (Save for when approved by the state in times of war, or when commited by the U.S. 'corrections' system.) Talk about a disproportionate response. Spammers are really, really, really annoying, and they're thieves without question--but we stopped hanging thieves more than a century ago.
On the other hand, maybe if someone just gave a spammer a really good beating, I could let that slide...
The target must be those who hire the spammers. After all, spammers are doing this for the money. No money, no spam.
But if current spammers are grossly inconvenienced, their costs to do business will go up. That cost will be passed on to the people who hire the spammers. (Guess what--spammers don't send junk email just for kicks. They're in it for the money.)
If spamming becomes unpleasant enough for its practitioners, they'll have to price themselves out of the market just to try to break even. Fewer companies will hire them, and we can go after those organizations through other means. Right now there are too many companies who will hire a spammer--we need to make it too expensive to do so.
Wow, what a useless source of stastistical information. Aside from being Slashdotted at the moment, there is a nasty selection bias associated with these data. Like phone-in polls, this is not a random sample.
The question we can try to answer is: do people who spend long periods unemployed do so because they waste their time filling out on-line surveys?
Well...maybe, but if this process actually removed a lot of stuff from the smoke, then you'd be wasting all that marijuana, wouldn't you? The problem is that bubbles in the bong have a relatively small ratio of surface area to volume, so most of the particles in the bubble never 'see' the surrounding water.
Perhaps if you modify the concept a bit--a larger volume of water, a system to generate smaller bubbles, and lots of baffles to keep the bubbles submerged for longer periods of time.
Another trick might be to create a water fog in an enclosed space. The very tiny droplets are quite good at removing particles and odours.
After either process, you will have to add a dehumidification stage, because the air will be at effectively 100% humidity--not good for people or computers. Also, instead of worrying about filtering air, you'll have to filter the water...still, the novelty of adding a bong to your computer lab might be worth all the trouble.;)
Disclaimer. I haven't used the Ionic Breeze, nor any other such air purifier. I haven't read the Consumer Reports evaluation, either. (Consequently, I am a typical Slashdot poster.)
I gather that CR's chief complaint was the lack of a fan to draw air past its blades. Perhaps the performance of the unit varies wildly depending on how much ambient air circulation there is. An earlier anecdotal report cites good performance in a school classroom. Well, there's going to be lots of dust to work on, and having twenty or thirty kids fidgeting all day in a confined space will keep the air moving. This poster also cites good performance in a room with a ceiling fan.
Perhaps CR chose a dust size or type that wasn't picked up well by the Ionic Breeze, or perhaps their test wasn't sensitive enough, or perhaps all of the other models tested did happen to perform significantly better. They probably tested in still air, but not having the report, I cannot say for certain.
Last lets say by a miracle you won and your employer was forced to rehire you. Would you really want to continue to work there?
Rehiring isn't necessarily the only--or even the best--outcome in a wrongful dismissal suit. In most North American jurisdictions, courts are free to award appropriate severance pay, as well as legal costs. If there is demonstrable malice, there may be additional punitive damages awarded.
Also, just by filing a suit (or even threatening one) one can often convince the top brass at a company to clean house--get rid of lower-level supervisors that might have created the unpleasant work environment in the first place. In that case, rehiring might not be so unpleasant.
Yeah, that makes your company a lot safer. Instead of having the gun in the hands of a female -- trained at its use, at that -- it's out in the parking lot.
Couldn't she leave it locked securely and safely at home? Why does a newspaper reporter have to carry a gun? (Most newspeople avoid carrying firearms specifically because it is more likely to make them targets.) If she isn't a field reporter, by what rationale does she need a gun in the newspaper office at all?
Also, as a part time, volunteer peace officer, is the gun really necessary outside of her duties in that capacity? Is it appropriate for her to use her status as a part time peace officer to circumvent the intent of the state's concealed carry laws as well as her employer's policies?
But what do I know? I'm a socialist pinko lefty Canadian.
What methods have we used in the past to kill the following...Vaccinations.
There is one other way to eliminate a virus. If you treat and isolate all infected individuals, and the disease doesn't have any animal hosts, then you get rid of a virus. We're still at that early stage with SARS, where it is possible to catch and trace each infection.
If we're on the ball now, then we can eliminate this virus without a widespread vaccination campaign and decades of effort. What if polio or smallpox appeared today, rather than in antiquity? If public health officials caught them early, they might just become textbook footnotes--maybe a few hundred or a few thousand cases of each.
A "revolution" would be something that the average person would notice.
Well, alternatives were considered to Biotechnology Revolution, but they were rejected. We didn't think it would be as dramatic if we called it the Biotechnology Occasional-Flurry-of-Media-Hype or the Biotechnology Steady-Flow-Of-Incremental-Improvements.
Think about it--who here watches CSI? Show me one episode where some sort of DNA testing and matching didn't play a role*. Now tell me...when did that happen? Even the shiniest new technologies get absorbed into our collective subconscious after a little bit of media coverage. We don't really remember what life was like before those technologies, and don't think about the changes.
*(Rhetorical question; if such an episode exists, I don't need to hear about it.)
From my research doctors say SARS kills 15 percent of everyone of all AGES.
My statements are based on the figures for Canada only. I live near Toronto and I do health-related research, so I have been following the development of SARS moderately closely.
My information is from recent news conferences held by public health officials. I don't have a link to breakdowns by age, but here is a link to an article (CanWest News and Associated Press, April 27) stating (my italics),
Officials were unable to say if he had underlying medical problems, unlike
a 44-year-old York Region man who earlier became the first middle-aged, otherwise healthy Canadian to die of SARS.
In the Canadian outbreak, the higher case-fatality ratio appears to be linked to the older age of the patients, who frequently have underlying chronic disease.
Also the virus mutates, the more it learns about how our immune systems work, the more vulnerable we become, so even you can survive it while its killing at a rate of 15%, when it mutates again it might kill at 25%, and then when it mutates again it might go up to 40%, so eventually over a period of years it could reach a 90% death rate or higher, so this disease is no joke, the Flu does not mutate like this.
Er. No. The virus doesn't benefit from killing its host, or even crippling it rapidly. A virus isn't a malevolent being, bent on cold-blooded murder. Its evolution will be guided by whatever mutations allow it to make more copies of itself. It is just as likely to mutate into something that just gives you a bad case of the sniffles, so you can keep going to work and give copies of it to all your coworkers.
Finally, influenza does mutate like this. That's why a new flu vaccine comes out every year--the protein coat of the flu virus changes from year to year, and health officials have to try and hit a moving target. If there is a new and unexpected mutation, we could face a Spanish flu type epidemic very easily. Fortunately, SARS actually isn't bad practice for this type of situation, so that health officials will be ready for the next flu epidemic. See a new disease? Stomp on it. Hard. That's how to handle it. This disease is certainly no joke--but it doesn't warrant panic.
There was a local news report about a village where they've had a mobile phone mast for the past 10 years and the amount of cancer cases has gone up significantly...
A 'village'...how many people is that? Two or three hundred? 'Significantly'--what is meant by that? Here's a hypothetical case. Question: If between 1980 and 1990 there are four cases of cancer, and between 1990 and 2000 there are eight cases in this little village, what does that tell us?
Answer: Nothing. The newsmedia will be on their hind legs shouting that the cancer rate has doubled! The village statistician might tell you that the sample is too small--it's just as likely that there will only be two more cases between 2000 and 2010. The epidemiologist down the street will note that a lot of people have moved into the new retirement community, and that older people are more likely to develop cancers. The local toxicologist (it's a village full of professionals) could observe that a refinery closed upstream about twenty years ago, and is probably leaching mutagenic nasties into the creek. The town dietitian sees that McDonald's opened a new restaurant in the village about fifteen years ago, and wonders.
So what's the solution? Blame the cell tower. Why? Because you can see it. It sticks up. It's obvious. It's easy. The drunk drops his keys in a dark alley. He immediately steps out of the alley and begins to carefully scrutinize the gound around a nearby street light. Why? Because they light is better over there.
You've supplied us with an anecdotal report of an anecdotal report. Recent large-scale studies of EMFs show no link between moderate electric or magnetic fields (comparable to those associated with living near power lines or the use of cellular phones) and cancer. Gee.
SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold.
I'm going to set aside the common cold because it doesn't kill people. HIV does now face a massive and directed effort to study the virus and associated illness. There are probably a lot of people in public health who wish we'd jumped on that one a lot sooner.
Tuberculosis is bacterial, but that's not particularly important to the point at hand. A vaccine that provides partial protection (50 to 80% protection) exists and is used in parts of the world where TB is most common. TB can be treated by a mixture of antibiotics and other drugs. The full course runs six months to a year, and failure to follow the treatment regimen can lead to drug resistant forms of the bacterium.
There is a little less public hype around TB because is spreads much more slowly. It is possible to carry the bacterium for years without symptoms and without spreading the disease to others. Last year I was working in the research wing of a hospital where a case of TB was discovered among the staff. There was an intelligent, coordinated, and very thorough response by public health officials and the hospital's own infection control staff. TB skin tests were administered to all research staff, and chest x-rays taken where indicated.
My point is that TB is a known quantity--we know how to detect it, how to treat it, and how to control it. With a new disease like SARS, we don't have all that information, so in good conscience we must err on the side of caution.
Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.
You're saying that a fatality rate of 5-20% is nothing to worry about? Influenza typically kills about 0.1% of those infected, mostly among the elderly or immune compromised. The Spanish flu in 1918-1919 killed approximately 500,000 in the United States. The average annual death toll is closer to 20,000, and that number is falling because of wider adoption of annual flu vaccines. If SARS infected 5% of the U.S. population (the Spanish flu reached 5-10% of the population) it would kill more than two million people. If we can get preventive measures off the ground now that contain and ultimately eliminate the disease in the next couple of months, that's great. If we don't contain the disease, I want to have other strategies waiting in the wings.
the people who die from influenza are old and weak. SARS kills healthy young people, like you and me.
Actually, in areas with access to modern medical care (Toronto, for example) most fatalities are limited to individuals who are elderly, have other conditions, or are immune compromised. Out of twenty deaths in Canada, only two were healthy individuals under fifty.
You give 8 of the most powerful businessmen in America SARS.
Did he just threaten Steve Jobs! How Dare he!
If you think Steve Jobs is one of the eight most powerful businessmen in America, then you've been reading Slashdot too long. Go outside and buy a newspaper. Now.
Most of the most powerful businessmen are part of--or advising--the GWB cabinet.
As a whole our society has seen millions of dollars spent on research on a disease that has only killed 295 people out of over six billion.
How many people does it have to kill before we decide that it's important?
I'm actually pleased to see millions of dollars being spent now, both on contact tracing and quarantines, and on longer term research projects. If the disease can be contained at this early stage, that's a tremendous public health success, IMHO. How much time, money, and effort could have been saved (and lost productivity avoided) if we hadn't had to deal with the bubonic plague?
After decades of effort, the World Health Organization is finally close to eradication of polio. How many billions of dollars were spent there? How many iron lungs did we buy before developing a vaccine? How many people were paralyzed? The earliest evidence of polio dates back to roughly 1500 BC--but suppose it appeared today. Let's say there were only two thousand cases--total--before medical science put out that brush fire. Perhaps twenty cases of permanent paralysis, a couple of deaths, a footnote in medical literature. People might complain that the response was 'disproportionate'. Money well spent, I think.
The problem with any new disease is that you just don't know. Far better to hit too hard than to let loose the next smallpox, Spanish flu, or pneumonic plague. If we discover that SARS has a large animal reservoir or something similar, we'll be glad that we started vaccine-related research now rather than later.
I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits.
SARS seems to kill between five and ten percent of its victims, and it can be spread through aerosolized droplets. In Ontario, most new cases are occurring among health care workers. Quite frankly, if the ambulance attendants are able to do their jobs while wearing appropriate protective equipment, good for them. Remember, they're also protecting your grandmother from the last patients to use the ambulance.
I live just outside of Toronto. Many of my friends live and work in the city--some in downtown hospitals. After an initial uproar, the average person on the street is only mildly concerned about SARS. Most are quite happy to put up with a little inconvenience now to (hopefully) avoid endemic disease later.
Consider the synchrotron [usask.ca] and a thriving biotech sector as just a couple of examples.
Why is the new synchrotron located in Saskatchewan? I humbly submit that it is because it is smarter to build a large facility--one that generates significant radiation, not to mention powerful electric and magnetic fields--in a province that is mostly flat, mostly empty, and has low real estate costs.
Why a thriving biotech sector? Might have something to do with agribusiness...a whole heck of a lot of Saskatchewan is farmland.
You're right, Saskatchewan is not exclusively flat farmland, and there was no need for the grandparent poster to be rude. But cut him some slack--he probably just couldn't think of the names of any cities in Saskatchewan. Looking at the map generated from the traceroute, his complaint seems valid--the dot for Canada really is in the middle of nowhere (maybe in Prince Albert National Park--even the most devoted fans of Saskatchewan's budding technology industries won't claim that that is a bastion of high technology).
I always thought that Mars lacked the gravity to hold a sufficient amount of greenhouse gases.
Well, that depends on how long you want to hold the gases. At any given temperature, the molecules of a gas at thermal equilibrium (or practically speaking, anywhere close to it) will have some distribution of speeds. Some molecules will travel faster, some slower. The mathematical expression characterizing this range of speeds is the Maxwell distribution. Here's a mathematical treatment of the Maxwell distribution; this page presents a nifty Java applet showing how this equilibrium takes place.
Note that a plot of population vs. speed, the Maxwell distribution tails off at higher velocities, but never actually goes to zero. In an atmosphere, this means that a small number of molecules will periodically get kicked up to above escape velocity through collisions with other molecules in the gas. If they happen to be heading the right direction, then they will escape into space.
Each molecule in a gas (on average) has roughly the same amount of kinetic energy. Earth's atmosphere contains very little hydrogen and helium because these light elements travel faster for a given amount of kinetic energy and escape more readily. A good part of the velocity distribution for these species is above escape velocity. Oxygen and nitrogen (not to mention water vapour and carbon dioxide) are significantly heavier, and bleed off at a much lower rate.
Moving to Mars. The surface gravity is only about forty percent that on Earth, if I remember correctly. It's a much shallower gravity well, and escape velocity is much lower (5 km/s on Mars vs. 11 km/s for Earth). Since kinetic energy is a function of the square of velocity, it takes a significantly smaller push to move a molecule out of Mars' hold. Nevertheless, there actually is still only a very small tail of the Maxwell distribution that sits above Mars' escape velocity.
I should also mention that there are sputtering processes that remove gas from the Martian atmosphere. Lacking a strong magnetic field to deflect the solar wind, a significant amount of gas is lost to sputtering, as well.
Nevertheless, even the most pessimistic estimates suggest that an atmosphere similar to Earth's would last tens of thousands on years on Mars. A short lifespan in terms of planetary evolution--a long time for human beings. Even the Moon would take from one to ten thousand years (depending upon who you ask) to bleed off an Earth-like atmosphere. Recall that Mars has surface features strongly suggestive of flowing surface water. (Liquid water requires an appreciable atmosphere, otherwise it just boils off.) That sort of erosion takes a long time to happen, which further supports the notion that Mars can hold on to an atmosphere, at least for a few million years at a time.
Noon is defined by most people as the time that the sun is in the middle of the sky. Let's keep it that way.
Too late. In most places, local solar noon hasn't been used as a time standard for more than a century. Depending upon where you live within your time zone, the local solar noon can be different from standard time by a half hour or worse--and I'm not going to mention the impact of Daylight Saving Time.
Correcting--or not correcting--the time through use of leap seconds makes a difference of less than half a minute per century. The leap second correction is too coarse for almost any scientific work, and much too fine for the average person on the street.
Why not have a leap minute, where necessary, once every two or three centuries? It will still be dark at midnight, and we reduce the hassle of dealing with time discontinuities by a couple orders of magnitude.
America is to blame! We are only 5% of the Earth's population, but we use 80% of the angular momentum.
It's the failure of the world's industrialized nations to use renewable power sources. By drilling for oil, millions of tons of heavy crude are removed from the the depths of the earth and brought to ground level. Since angular momentum is conserved, the earth's rotation slows slightly to compensate for the now-larger moment of inertia. Extraction of metals from mines also contributes to the problem.
Granted, we have in part compensated by dumping large amounts of waste into deep parts of the ocean, and cutting down trees--but it's not enough! We need to begin a massive campaign to raze the forests and dump mercury and lead into oceanic trenches. Hopefully, we will one day be able to restore the Earth's rotation.
OK, we can slashdot a webiste, surely we can fix this. Ok, on 3 let's all start running west. 1...2...3...
It only works until we stop running--mostly likely when, like lemmings, we plunge off the cliffs of California and into the Pacific Ocean. (Readers in other jurisdictions please substitute an appropriate body of water.)
With a manned mission to Mars possibly less than 20 years away, shouldn't we start looking at timekeeping systems that aren't tied to this rock?
Actually, it's been done. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, a Martian colony did adopt a clock customized for the local conditions.
The Martian day is twenty-four hours, forty minutes long, roughly. Mars kept a twenty-four hour clock, with hours, minutes, and seconds remaining the same length. The colony then added a forty minute period (the 'timeslip', if I remember correctly) after midnight. During this period the clocks (all digital) would stop for forty minutes at 24:00, then resume counting at 0:00 the follwing day.
Though neat for dramatic purposes, I would think it more useful to simply run the clocks for a short twenty-fifth hour, forty minutes long. Days could be counted--forget months--for a total of 669 Mars days per year.
The single most useful thing about such a technique is that it preserves the length of the second. Since any human presence on Mars would likely be a scientific outpost for many years, maintaining the second is very important for many measurements. I don't want to have to deal with a kludgy factor of 1.03 in comparing times.
Slashdot Mirror
Mice and rats in the wild don't die of cancer. Usually they get eaten. Sometimes they pick up other diseases. If nearly all human beings were eaten by some creature higher on the food chain--say, dragons--before the age of thirty, humans wouldn't have to worry about cancer, either. Lab animals only get cancer when
a) they are kept in clean cages and cared for so that they live for years beyond their 'normal' lifespan,
b) researchers deliberately induce tumour formation, and/or
c) the mice have been bred (or genetically altered a la Harvard mouse) specifically to be susceptible to cancer.
Um, yes? Premeditated murder is one of those things that most civilized societies prefer not to condone. (Save for when approved by the state in times of war, or when commited by the U.S. 'corrections' system.) Talk about a disproportionate response. Spammers are really, really, really annoying, and they're thieves without question--but we stopped hanging thieves more than a century ago.
On the other hand, maybe if someone just gave a spammer a really good beating, I could let that slide...
But if current spammers are grossly inconvenienced, their costs to do business will go up. That cost will be passed on to the people who hire the spammers. (Guess what--spammers don't send junk email just for kicks. They're in it for the money.)
If spamming becomes unpleasant enough for its practitioners, they'll have to price themselves out of the market just to try to break even. Fewer companies will hire them, and we can go after those organizations through other means. Right now there are too many companies who will hire a spammer--we need to make it too expensive to do so.
The question we can try to answer is: do people who spend long periods unemployed do so because they waste their time filling out on-line surveys?
Perhaps if you modify the concept a bit--a larger volume of water, a system to generate smaller bubbles, and lots of baffles to keep the bubbles submerged for longer periods of time.
Another trick might be to create a water fog in an enclosed space. The very tiny droplets are quite good at removing particles and odours.
After either process, you will have to add a dehumidification stage, because the air will be at effectively 100% humidity--not good for people or computers. Also, instead of worrying about filtering air, you'll have to filter the water...still, the novelty of adding a bong to your computer lab might be worth all the trouble. ;)
I gather that CR's chief complaint was the lack of a fan to draw air past its blades. Perhaps the performance of the unit varies wildly depending on how much ambient air circulation there is. An earlier anecdotal report cites good performance in a school classroom. Well, there's going to be lots of dust to work on, and having twenty or thirty kids fidgeting all day in a confined space will keep the air moving. This poster also cites good performance in a room with a ceiling fan.
Perhaps CR chose a dust size or type that wasn't picked up well by the Ionic Breeze, or perhaps their test wasn't sensitive enough, or perhaps all of the other models tested did happen to perform significantly better. They probably tested in still air, but not having the report, I cannot say for certain.
Rehiring isn't necessarily the only--or even the best--outcome in a wrongful dismissal suit. In most North American jurisdictions, courts are free to award appropriate severance pay, as well as legal costs. If there is demonstrable malice, there may be additional punitive damages awarded.
Also, just by filing a suit (or even threatening one) one can often convince the top brass at a company to clean house--get rid of lower-level supervisors that might have created the unpleasant work environment in the first place. In that case, rehiring might not be so unpleasant.
Couldn't she leave it locked securely and safely at home? Why does a newspaper reporter have to carry a gun? (Most newspeople avoid carrying firearms specifically because it is more likely to make them targets.) If she isn't a field reporter, by what rationale does she need a gun in the newspaper office at all?
Also, as a part time, volunteer peace officer, is the gun really necessary outside of her duties in that capacity? Is it appropriate for her to use her status as a part time peace officer to circumvent the intent of the state's concealed carry laws as well as her employer's policies?
But what do I know? I'm a socialist pinko lefty Canadian.
There is one other way to eliminate a virus. If you treat and isolate all infected individuals, and the disease doesn't have any animal hosts, then you get rid of a virus. We're still at that early stage with SARS, where it is possible to catch and trace each infection.
If we're on the ball now, then we can eliminate this virus without a widespread vaccination campaign and decades of effort. What if polio or smallpox appeared today, rather than in antiquity? If public health officials caught them early, they might just become textbook footnotes--maybe a few hundred or a few thousand cases of each.
No, but if you put a web server and some neon lights in an AK-47 magazine, you will.
Well, alternatives were considered to Biotechnology Revolution, but they were rejected. We didn't think it would be as dramatic if we called it the Biotechnology Occasional-Flurry-of-Media-Hype or the Biotechnology Steady-Flow-Of-Incremental-Improvements.
Think about it--who here watches CSI? Show me one episode where some sort of DNA testing and matching didn't play a role*. Now tell me...when did that happen? Even the shiniest new technologies get absorbed into our collective subconscious after a little bit of media coverage. We don't really remember what life was like before those technologies, and don't think about the changes.
*(Rhetorical question; if such an episode exists, I don't need to hear about it.)
My statements are based on the figures for Canada only. I live near Toronto and I do health-related research, so I have been following the development of SARS moderately closely.
My information is from recent news conferences held by public health officials. I don't have a link to breakdowns by age, but here is a link to an article (CanWest News and Associated Press, April 27) stating (my italics),
The World Health Organization indicates that as of April 26, there were 142 cases of SARS in Canada, associated with 18 deaths.
Further, the WHO placed the global case-fatality rate at 4%. They state that
Also the virus mutates, the more it learns about how our immune systems work, the more vulnerable we become, so even you can survive it while its killing at a rate of 15%, when it mutates again it might kill at 25%, and then when it mutates again it might go up to 40%, so eventually over a period of years it could reach a 90% death rate or higher, so this disease is no joke, the Flu does not mutate like this.
Er. No. The virus doesn't benefit from killing its host, or even crippling it rapidly. A virus isn't a malevolent being, bent on cold-blooded murder. Its evolution will be guided by whatever mutations allow it to make more copies of itself. It is just as likely to mutate into something that just gives you a bad case of the sniffles, so you can keep going to work and give copies of it to all your coworkers.
Finally, influenza does mutate like this. That's why a new flu vaccine comes out every year--the protein coat of the flu virus changes from year to year, and health officials have to try and hit a moving target. If there is a new and unexpected mutation, we could face a Spanish flu type epidemic very easily. Fortunately, SARS actually isn't bad practice for this type of situation, so that health officials will be ready for the next flu epidemic. See a new disease? Stomp on it. Hard. That's how to handle it. This disease is certainly no joke--but it doesn't warrant panic.
A 'village'...how many people is that? Two or three hundred? 'Significantly'--what is meant by that? Here's a hypothetical case. Question: If between 1980 and 1990 there are four cases of cancer, and between 1990 and 2000 there are eight cases in this little village, what does that tell us?
Answer: Nothing. The newsmedia will be on their hind legs shouting that the cancer rate has doubled! The village statistician might tell you that the sample is too small--it's just as likely that there will only be two more cases between 2000 and 2010. The epidemiologist down the street will note that a lot of people have moved into the new retirement community, and that older people are more likely to develop cancers. The local toxicologist (it's a village full of professionals) could observe that a refinery closed upstream about twenty years ago, and is probably leaching mutagenic nasties into the creek. The town dietitian sees that McDonald's opened a new restaurant in the village about fifteen years ago, and wonders.
So what's the solution? Blame the cell tower. Why? Because you can see it. It sticks up. It's obvious. It's easy. The drunk drops his keys in a dark alley. He immediately steps out of the alley and begins to carefully scrutinize the gound around a nearby street light. Why? Because they light is better over there.
You've supplied us with an anecdotal report of an anecdotal report. Recent large-scale studies of EMFs show no link between moderate electric or magnetic fields (comparable to those associated with living near power lines or the use of cellular phones) and cancer. Gee.
I'm going to set aside the common cold because it doesn't kill people. HIV does now face a massive and directed effort to study the virus and associated illness. There are probably a lot of people in public health who wish we'd jumped on that one a lot sooner.
Tuberculosis is bacterial, but that's not particularly important to the point at hand. A vaccine that provides partial protection (50 to 80% protection) exists and is used in parts of the world where TB is most common. TB can be treated by a mixture of antibiotics and other drugs. The full course runs six months to a year, and failure to follow the treatment regimen can lead to drug resistant forms of the bacterium.
There is a little less public hype around TB because is spreads much more slowly. It is possible to carry the bacterium for years without symptoms and without spreading the disease to others. Last year I was working in the research wing of a hospital where a case of TB was discovered among the staff. There was an intelligent, coordinated, and very thorough response by public health officials and the hospital's own infection control staff. TB skin tests were administered to all research staff, and chest x-rays taken where indicated.
My point is that TB is a known quantity--we know how to detect it, how to treat it, and how to control it. With a new disease like SARS, we don't have all that information, so in good conscience we must err on the side of caution.
Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.
You're saying that a fatality rate of 5-20% is nothing to worry about? Influenza typically kills about 0.1% of those infected, mostly among the elderly or immune compromised. The Spanish flu in 1918-1919 killed approximately 500,000 in the United States. The average annual death toll is closer to 20,000, and that number is falling because of wider adoption of annual flu vaccines. If SARS infected 5% of the U.S. population (the Spanish flu reached 5-10% of the population) it would kill more than two million people. If we can get preventive measures off the ground now that contain and ultimately eliminate the disease in the next couple of months, that's great. If we don't contain the disease, I want to have other strategies waiting in the wings.
Actually, in areas with access to modern medical care (Toronto, for example) most fatalities are limited to individuals who are elderly, have other conditions, or are immune compromised. Out of twenty deaths in Canada, only two were healthy individuals under fifty.
Did he just threaten Steve Jobs! How Dare he!
If you think Steve Jobs is one of the eight most powerful businessmen in America, then you've been reading Slashdot too long. Go outside and buy a newspaper. Now.
Most of the most powerful businessmen are part of--or advising--the GWB cabinet.
How many people does it have to kill before we decide that it's important?
I'm actually pleased to see millions of dollars being spent now, both on contact tracing and quarantines, and on longer term research projects. If the disease can be contained at this early stage, that's a tremendous public health success, IMHO. How much time, money, and effort could have been saved (and lost productivity avoided) if we hadn't had to deal with the bubonic plague?
After decades of effort, the World Health Organization is finally close to eradication of polio. How many billions of dollars were spent there? How many iron lungs did we buy before developing a vaccine? How many people were paralyzed? The earliest evidence of polio dates back to roughly 1500 BC--but suppose it appeared today. Let's say there were only two thousand cases--total--before medical science put out that brush fire. Perhaps twenty cases of permanent paralysis, a couple of deaths, a footnote in medical literature. People might complain that the response was 'disproportionate'. Money well spent, I think.
The problem with any new disease is that you just don't know. Far better to hit too hard than to let loose the next smallpox, Spanish flu, or pneumonic plague. If we discover that SARS has a large animal reservoir or something similar, we'll be glad that we started vaccine-related research now rather than later.
I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits.
SARS seems to kill between five and ten percent of its victims, and it can be spread through aerosolized droplets. In Ontario, most new cases are occurring among health care workers. Quite frankly, if the ambulance attendants are able to do their jobs while wearing appropriate protective equipment, good for them. Remember, they're also protecting your grandmother from the last patients to use the ambulance.
I live just outside of Toronto. Many of my friends live and work in the city--some in downtown hospitals. After an initial uproar, the average person on the street is only mildly concerned about SARS. Most are quite happy to put up with a little inconvenience now to (hopefully) avoid endemic disease later.
Why is the new synchrotron located in Saskatchewan? I humbly submit that it is because it is smarter to build a large facility--one that generates significant radiation, not to mention powerful electric and magnetic fields--in a province that is mostly flat, mostly empty, and has low real estate costs.
Why a thriving biotech sector? Might have something to do with agribusiness...a whole heck of a lot of Saskatchewan is farmland.
You're right, Saskatchewan is not exclusively flat farmland, and there was no need for the grandparent poster to be rude. But cut him some slack--he probably just couldn't think of the names of any cities in Saskatchewan. Looking at the map generated from the traceroute, his complaint seems valid--the dot for Canada really is in the middle of nowhere (maybe in Prince Albert National Park--even the most devoted fans of Saskatchewan's budding technology industries won't claim that that is a bastion of high technology).
Well, that depends on how long you want to hold the gases. At any given temperature, the molecules of a gas at thermal equilibrium (or practically speaking, anywhere close to it) will have some distribution of speeds. Some molecules will travel faster, some slower. The mathematical expression characterizing this range of speeds is the Maxwell distribution. Here's a mathematical treatment of the Maxwell distribution; this page presents a nifty Java applet showing how this equilibrium takes place.
Note that a plot of population vs. speed, the Maxwell distribution tails off at higher velocities, but never actually goes to zero. In an atmosphere, this means that a small number of molecules will periodically get kicked up to above escape velocity through collisions with other molecules in the gas. If they happen to be heading the right direction, then they will escape into space.
Each molecule in a gas (on average) has roughly the same amount of kinetic energy. Earth's atmosphere contains very little hydrogen and helium because these light elements travel faster for a given amount of kinetic energy and escape more readily. A good part of the velocity distribution for these species is above escape velocity. Oxygen and nitrogen (not to mention water vapour and carbon dioxide) are significantly heavier, and bleed off at a much lower rate.
Moving to Mars. The surface gravity is only about forty percent that on Earth, if I remember correctly. It's a much shallower gravity well, and escape velocity is much lower (5 km/s on Mars vs. 11 km/s for Earth). Since kinetic energy is a function of the square of velocity, it takes a significantly smaller push to move a molecule out of Mars' hold. Nevertheless, there actually is still only a very small tail of the Maxwell distribution that sits above Mars' escape velocity.
I should also mention that there are sputtering processes that remove gas from the Martian atmosphere. Lacking a strong magnetic field to deflect the solar wind, a significant amount of gas is lost to sputtering, as well.
Nevertheless, even the most pessimistic estimates suggest that an atmosphere similar to Earth's would last tens of thousands on years on Mars. A short lifespan in terms of planetary evolution--a long time for human beings. Even the Moon would take from one to ten thousand years (depending upon who you ask) to bleed off an Earth-like atmosphere. Recall that Mars has surface features strongly suggestive of flowing surface water. (Liquid water requires an appreciable atmosphere, otherwise it just boils off.) That sort of erosion takes a long time to happen, which further supports the notion that Mars can hold on to an atmosphere, at least for a few million years at a time.
Explorers seek to visit the moon by travelling in a large hollow cannonball, launched on their way by some tons of guncotton.
Too late. In most places, local solar noon hasn't been used as a time standard for more than a century. Depending upon where you live within your time zone, the local solar noon can be different from standard time by a half hour or worse--and I'm not going to mention the impact of Daylight Saving Time.
Correcting--or not correcting--the time through use of leap seconds makes a difference of less than half a minute per century. The leap second correction is too coarse for almost any scientific work, and much too fine for the average person on the street.
Why not have a leap minute, where necessary, once every two or three centuries? It will still be dark at midnight, and we reduce the hassle of dealing with time discontinuities by a couple orders of magnitude.
It's the failure of the world's industrialized nations to use renewable power sources. By drilling for oil, millions of tons of heavy crude are removed from the the depths of the earth and brought to ground level. Since angular momentum is conserved, the earth's rotation slows slightly to compensate for the now-larger moment of inertia. Extraction of metals from mines also contributes to the problem.
Granted, we have in part compensated by dumping large amounts of waste into deep parts of the ocean, and cutting down trees--but it's not enough! We need to begin a massive campaign to raze the forests and dump mercury and lead into oceanic trenches. Hopefully, we will one day be able to restore the Earth's rotation.
It only works until we stop running--mostly likely when, like lemmings, we plunge off the cliffs of California and into the Pacific Ocean. (Readers in other jurisdictions please substitute an appropriate body of water.)
Actually, it's been done. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, a Martian colony did adopt a clock customized for the local conditions.
The Martian day is twenty-four hours, forty minutes long, roughly. Mars kept a twenty-four hour clock, with hours, minutes, and seconds remaining the same length. The colony then added a forty minute period (the 'timeslip', if I remember correctly) after midnight. During this period the clocks (all digital) would stop for forty minutes at 24:00, then resume counting at 0:00 the follwing day.
Though neat for dramatic purposes, I would think it more useful to simply run the clocks for a short twenty-fifth hour, forty minutes long. Days could be counted--forget months--for a total of 669 Mars days per year.
The single most useful thing about such a technique is that it preserves the length of the second. Since any human presence on Mars would likely be a scientific outpost for many years, maintaining the second is very important for many measurements. I don't want to have to deal with a kludgy factor of 1.03 in comparing times.
That's the sound of Bill Gates having an orgasm when he thinks about how much money your company paid for a broken copy of Office.