Let's throw in alcohol, too, since both are poisons(and, as a whole, people can't seem to handle alcohol responsibly- I'd be surprised if the death count from alcohol-related deaths isn't higher than cigarettes.)
It is also possible to use alcohol in a responsible manner that apparently results in an increased life expectancy. (Several studies have concluded that moderate consumption of ethanol thins the blood, reducing the incidence of heart disease and stroke. Moderate use of ethanol is also associated with reduced risk of Parkinson's and Alheimer's.) Even 'moderate' use of cigarettes reduces life expectancy, increases the likelihood of a large number of diseases...and makes you smell bad, makes your teeth yellow, and annoys people around you.
I hate to be a stickler, but the problem is not so much with diesel engines, as with the sulfur content of the fuel.
Well...I too hate to stickle, but you're both only partly right.
The big concern with diesel engines is their production of fine particles. Micron-scale particles stay suspended essentially indefinitely in the air until rained out, and are readily inhaled deep into the lungs. A modern, well-tuned diesel engine produces very little in the way of particulates, but sadly most diesels on the road don't meet that standard.
The other issue with diesels is their production of nitrogen oxides, a key component of smog in most urban centres. They're responsible for the delightful brown colour over our cities in summer.
Both of these species could be dealt with (at least in part) by a catalytic converter. However, diesel fuel in most jurisdictions in North America is high in sulfur--up to about 500 parts per million. In addition to contributing to acid rain, the combustion products of this sulfur tend to poison catalytic converters, shortening their lifespan and making their use impractical on most diesel vehicles.
Consequently, the EPA has decided to kill several birds with one stone, and mandated a new, lower limit on the amount of sulfur in diesel fuel. Catalytic converters can then be used on diesel vehicles, reducing both particulates and nitrogen oxides.
Third, these claims are being put out by groups from places like the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
Actually, the group on which the article writer focuses works out of the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. I'm not an expert in cosmology, and I don't know about the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri--but I do know that in general the Max Planck Institute is a pretty respectable name in physics. The article did note that related analyses performed at U of A at Huntsville have generated similar results...and that's a good thing.
You're quite right that they have made some big leaps in some of their reasoning (apparently; as you say, their letter hasn't actually been distributed yet). Since it is just a letter, perhaps some fanciful thinking is permissible...what harm is there in a little imagination? Yes, it smacks of self-promotion--but we should consider that it may not be entirely the fault of the researchers.
In their defense, in the linked article at Space.com, I caught a couple of terms being misused/abused in ways that you don't usually see from astrophysicists. We might have a science writer in a little over his head, looking to write an article sensational enough to appeal to laypeople. I know it happens to medical researchers all the time--dig out some old newspapers, and you'll be pleased to note we've cured cancer on a roughly monthly basis over the last ten years. Looking at the actual quotations from the reseachers in the article (there are only two), they don't seem that sensational.
It could even be that the researchers didn't want a lot of press coverage, but were victims of overzealous PR flunkies. I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt until I actually get to see their publication.
The Mr Mature option is to send it to them personally and tell them to imagine what it would be like if it got posted publicly...
Actually, the technique that would most likely create a response is to gather information on newspaper editors and television news personalities. Deliver it to them with a little note--"So, is the story going to be about this, or is the story going to be this?"
... I had a rather strange tax status for several months last year after someone at a tax office mistyped by NI number (similar to a US SSN).
In Canada, the 'unique government identifier' corresponding to the NI or SSN is the Social Insurance Number (SIN).
It contains checksum information to reduce quite a bit the likelihood of this sort of trouble. The SSN and (apparently) NI don't implement checksumming. Of course, introducing a new number format is decidedly nontrivial. I've heard that the United States is also having trouble because they've realized that the SSN space will soon be exhausted.
Also, it's fairly easy to get one's hands on SINs and SSNs to open the door to a good bit of deliberate mischief; checksumming won't help with that. All told, these identifiers are very convenient for government agencies and private groups, but they create a nasty single point of failure.
While we wont know how a machine does "it" it will always present the right possible actions to us. Microsoft Word 21XX will clearly not need us to search menus if we want to change the formatting of the text.
Word 2000 already makes the formatting changes that it believes I want. I actually am starting to feel bad about myself---my own decisions are so often apparently wrong.
By default, it also hides the menu items it doesn't think I need to know about. The future is now.
So does that mean that I should say that I have 1 gram of wheat or 1 millikilogram when I use the MKS system?
I know you're just joking, but SI (the metric system) does deal explicitly with this. You can use one prefix, at most.
Engineers are in the habit of occasionally abusing this convention--instead of using u (mu, for micro-, 10^-6) as a prefix for some units (uH, microhenries of inductance) they will use mm (millimilli, presumably, as in mmH).
As far as I know, nobody ever combines prefixes associated with exponents that cancel out (partially or fully). It's common sense, really--have you ever seen a computer advertised with 256 milligigabytes of RAM? (Yes, I know that the byte is not an SI unit, but it illustrates the absurdity.)
Phone books...man don't get me started. They should only go out to those who specificly request and pay a s*** load for them. I very rarely use a phone book, because I am able to look things up online and call 411 without of killing a tree.
Someone already does pay a s***load of money for the phone books. Where did you think that big yellow section at the front of the book came from?
For the record, my home computer has been offline for the last month (too busy to make some repairs) so I haven't been able to check phone numbers online. The telephone book is still quite useful for those not perpetually connected to the internet. I don't know about your phone company, but mine is not shy about charging obscene amounts of money for services (like 411) that a few decades ago were free. Calling 411 also doesn't offer the same experience as browsing the yellow pages looking for something.
If you really don't need a phone book, good for you. I'm glad to hear that you recycle yours; you can also give it away to someone else who might need one. But for those of us not wired (at least temporarily) the phone book is a useful tool, not merely an anachronism.
But the English system goes by powers of two; e.g, 16 cups = 8 pints = 4 quarts = 2 half gallon = 1 gallon. Much nicer for computers; no roundoff error there in the floating point processor, and you can change units by a simple shift operation rather than the hugely more time-consuming multiplication by ten. Same logic, different base.
Yes, 3 feet to the yard (for surveyors, 66 feet to the chain), 1760 yards to the mile...
Please, tell me how to use a shift operation to divide by 1760.:P The other nice thing about metric is the consistent prefixes. There is one MKS symbol for length (m), not many (in, ft, yd, mi...) and it can be associated with a set of prefixes (micro, milli, kilo, mega, etc.) that have consistent meaning across all metric units. For us humans, it is easy to find a unit that lets you express values in "comfortable" form--living cells are on the order of 10 micrometers across, not 0.00001 meters; it's 100 kilometers to Grandma's house, not 100000 meters. And since it's in easy powers of ten, I can tell you immediately that you can line up 10^10 cells along the road to Grandma's, if you want to know.
However, if you combined the two.. Imagine the possibilities.
Yes, I'm imagining the possibilities now.
I imagine possibilities in trees, on my neighbour's lawn, out in the street, and little bits of possibilities raining down on the Walmart parking lot around the corner.
A tank of fuel and a tank of oxidizer in my car. Um. Isn't that the sort of thing one might find aboard, say, a rocket? Why don't we see what we can do with liquid hydrogen and oxygen? It works for the Space Shuttle--mostly.
Question: when did Al Gore claim to invent the internet? That's what you (rightly) dispute in your (overly lengthy) tirade--but did he ever make the claim in the first place?
I've seen this purported claim tossed about for years--but when did he say it? Can someone link to a transcript of a speech or interview? I'd appreciate it.
I don't know if he made the claim or not. If he did, it was a dumb thing to say, on par with most other politicians (far be it from me to mention GWB here.) From what I gather, most of what he has said has been fairly bright--he's allowed to have an off day.
For those that are wondering, I didn't vote Bush or Gore in the last election--I don't live in the United States. I'd just like to see someone set the historical record straight on the contentious (tempest in a teapot?) issue.
A moon base would be a perfect place to return from a Mars trip with samples.
Yeah, but then you would have to take the samples (and astronauts, and gear) down into the Moon's gravity well, and eventually bring them back up again. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to a Moon base--it would be a valuable research site for any number of reasons. It's just that if you need a waypoint on the way back from Mars, why not use a preexisting continuously manned space station in earth orbit?
Is anyone actually forced to memorize the periodic table these days?
Yes.
Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...
Believe me, we did. Third year inorganic chemistry. I've forgotten it all again, except for the bits I actually use--which I knew before I took the class and crammed the table in for exams. I don't know about the penguin theory, but I do know that there is no point to rote memorization (except under certain very limited circumstances.)
If I really needed to know some collection of arbitrary facts, then I probably already would have memorized them simply through regular use. (If I have to look something up more than a few times in my CRC Handbook, then I'll probably learn it.) Learning by rote a table that is in the front of every textbook and on the wall of most labs is utterly pointless.
Actually, water-cooling somewhat makes sense for rackmount systems. ... Run the coolant to a radiator in an air-conditioned environment (or even immersed in liquid nitrogen, if temps are too high.)
Eek. I know you're only half serious, but suggesting that a water-filled radiator should be immersed in liquid nitrogen is asking for trouble.
Yes, it will increase the life of your processor. A bit. Probably. It will also definitely save power--only really an issue in a notebook.
On the other hand, I've never had a problem with a CPU being the first component to fail in my computer. (Hard drives with their moving parts tend to go long before.)
Instead of buying a top of the line CPU for the purpose of underclocking (and paying a premium), buy a chip rated for the speed you would have underclocked to. Use the dough you saved to buy a fan--or a second hard drive. If your processor does fail three or four years from now, replacing it with an equivalent CPU will cost you roughly the change in your sofa.
This is scary stuff! I have to personally wonder how much of the "cancer rise rates" are directly related to things like this.. especially the huge jump in Lung Cancer in the last 20 years. It certainly is not only due to smoking, as smoking levels have been decreasing steadily.
Actually, lung cancer rates have been declining in Canada and the United States for the last twenty years or so, and the result is largely attributed to declines in cigarette smoking. The reason why lung cancers increased through the middle decades of this century (despite a relatively stable smoking rate at the time) is a significant lag between increases in smoking rates and increases in lung cancer incidence (and mortality).
Smoking rates increased from World War I, peaking in about 1965. Trends in lung cancer incidence lagged by fifteen to twenty years, peaking around 1985, and declining since. (Source: Canadian Cancer Society.)
Increases in other cancers may have environmental causes, though there are lifestyle factors to consider as well (e.g. the rise in colon cancer is associated with our unhealthy eating habits.) Also, medical science has gotten better at treating some diseases--we're dying more often due to cancer just because we're not getting killed by other ailments.
Basically, from what I have read, it is one step below bubble-boy on the allergen list. Instead of being suceptible to germs, these people are susceptible to gasses and chomicals that most of us tolerate fine.
Nitpicking note--germs are not allergens, and bubble-boy syndrome (severe combined immune deficiency--SCID, IIRC) is a result of a person's inability to produce and maintain a healthy population of immune cells. Allergic reactions typically look and feel like a severe overreaction by the immune system--something that you would never see from a bubble-boy sufferer.
It means that every piece of anything chemically processed that you have in your home slowly breaks down over time, and gives off noxious chemicals. Everything from formaldehyde to radon.
Nit number two. Radon exposure in the home is never the result of chemically processed materials breaking down in the home. Radon gas is formed by the nuclear decay of natural radioisotopes in soil. (Since natural clays are used to make bricks, there may be slightly higher radiation levels in brick buildings, as well.)
Most of us dont notice, but it apparently makes some people _very_ sick. Couple this with todays "need" to make homes virtually air tight, and you have a place that makes reactive people really, really sick.
The airtight buildings of today do concentrate allergens while often simultaneously drying out mucous membranes that would normally keep these nasties out of our lungs, "Sick Building Syndrome" (SBS) may result. Often, the cause of SBS can be traced to one or two contaminants in the environment--moulds in the air system, formaldehyde releases from fresh carpet adhesives, and so forth.
"Multiple Chemical Sensitivity" (MCS) is a disorder characterized by extreme sensitivity to multiple environmental toxins. MCS is still far from being recognized by the medical establishment at large. Here is a good, balanced summary from the American Academy of Family Physicians. Of particular note is the fact that the AMA, the American College of Physicians, the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, and American Academy of Allergy and Immunology have rejected MCS as an organic illness--but then, they could be wrong.
What's all the fuss about? That's what you'd expect when a planet is too close and the star reaches the red giant phase.
On the other hand, it's the first time we've actually been able to observe the phenomenon, which makes it interesting in and of itself. It wasn't so long ago that any evidence of any extrasolar planet was big news, just because nobody had been able to find them before.
It's also a fairly rare event, at least within the volume of space we can readily observe. It's like asking, "What's all the fuss about? A supernova is just what you'd expect when a high-mass star collapses." Yes, it's the expected result, but there is still a good bit of information we can extract that we wouldn't otherwise have access too. It's nice to be able to confirm what happens to planetary systems when stars enter a red giant phase.
Gulp! Would someone please define "much lower" so I can sleep again?
What do you care? It's hydrogen (and other light species like helium) that are escaping at any significant rate. Unless you're breathing the stuff, you have nothing to worry about.
If my assumptions about generation of hydrogen are wrong, someone please correct me!
Hydrogen isn't necessarily generated through electrolysis. There are various chemical reactions that may be used to generate hydrogen--mostly from fossil fuels, however.
Really interesting ways for the future might involve some bioengineering. Bacteria already exist which produce hydrogen from water. Another article here. The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.
I fully expect that with some genetic engineering we will have some very cost-effective hydrogen producing microbes in a matter of years--not decades. Alternately, we might just produce the enzymes (hydrogenases et al.) and use them act directly.
Yes, biosourced hydrogen would require some significant infrastructure--but so does shipping millions of barrels of oil halfway around the world, refining the stuff and separating it into hundreds of different products. I also don't foresee massive fluctuations in the price of sewage due to world events.
For those who read the post, Benetton is putting the RFID tags in the ordinary tags of the clothing. Remove the label from the garment, and no worries.
If all cars became electric cars, you'd only have to upgrade the (relatively few) power stations to improve efficiency every time you found a better way of generating, rather than trying to persuade everyone in the population to change their car(s)!
Yes indeed, it's fortunate that the batteries in an electric vehicle never wear out, and when disposal time comes around they contain no heavy metals, acids, or other nasties. Yes sir. Who here on Slashdot has a laptop for which the supposedly rechargeable battery must be replaced every year or two because it won't hold a charge?
Actually, for certain types of drivers (short trip commuters, mostly) electrics make a lot of sense--but then, so would some infrastructure funding to support good public transit systems. To replace the family car, my money is on the fuel cell--the sooner, the better.
Tabs don't scale well. Beyond the discussion in the article, regarding where new tabs should appear, what happens when there are too many tabs for one row?
I dunno what happens for you, but I keep my tabs running down the right side of the Opera 7 window. I can read what's in each title bar ("Hyatt Discusses Tabs" for this reply; "Slashdot|Hyatt Di..." for the parent posts), and there's room for twenty or so tabs.
As well, it keeps the browser window area narrower, which makes reading text documents more pleasant at 1024x768.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider yourself surprised.
It is also possible to use alcohol in a responsible manner that apparently results in an increased life expectancy. (Several studies have concluded that moderate consumption of ethanol thins the blood, reducing the incidence of heart disease and stroke. Moderate use of ethanol is also associated with reduced risk of Parkinson's and Alheimer's.) Even 'moderate' use of cigarettes reduces life expectancy, increases the likelihood of a large number of diseases...and makes you smell bad, makes your teeth yellow, and annoys people around you.
Well...I too hate to stickle, but you're both only partly right.
The big concern with diesel engines is their production of fine particles. Micron-scale particles stay suspended essentially indefinitely in the air until rained out, and are readily inhaled deep into the lungs. A modern, well-tuned diesel engine produces very little in the way of particulates, but sadly most diesels on the road don't meet that standard.
The other issue with diesels is their production of nitrogen oxides, a key component of smog in most urban centres. They're responsible for the delightful brown colour over our cities in summer.
Both of these species could be dealt with (at least in part) by a catalytic converter. However, diesel fuel in most jurisdictions in North America is high in sulfur--up to about 500 parts per million. In addition to contributing to acid rain, the combustion products of this sulfur tend to poison catalytic converters, shortening their lifespan and making their use impractical on most diesel vehicles.
Consequently, the EPA has decided to kill several birds with one stone, and mandated a new, lower limit on the amount of sulfur in diesel fuel. Catalytic converters can then be used on diesel vehicles, reducing both particulates and nitrogen oxides.
Actually, the group on which the article writer focuses works out of the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. I'm not an expert in cosmology, and I don't know about the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri--but I do know that in general the Max Planck Institute is a pretty respectable name in physics. The article did note that related analyses performed at U of A at Huntsville have generated similar results...and that's a good thing.
You're quite right that they have made some big leaps in some of their reasoning (apparently; as you say, their letter hasn't actually been distributed yet). Since it is just a letter, perhaps some fanciful thinking is permissible...what harm is there in a little imagination? Yes, it smacks of self-promotion--but we should consider that it may not be entirely the fault of the researchers.
In their defense, in the linked article at Space.com, I caught a couple of terms being misused/abused in ways that you don't usually see from astrophysicists. We might have a science writer in a little over his head, looking to write an article sensational enough to appeal to laypeople. I know it happens to medical researchers all the time--dig out some old newspapers, and you'll be pleased to note we've cured cancer on a roughly monthly basis over the last ten years. Looking at the actual quotations from the reseachers in the article (there are only two), they don't seem that sensational.
It could even be that the researchers didn't want a lot of press coverage, but were victims of overzealous PR flunkies. I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt until I actually get to see their publication.
Actually, the technique that would most likely create a response is to gather information on newspaper editors and television news personalities. Deliver it to them with a little note--"So, is the story going to be about this, or is the story going to be this?"
In Canada, the 'unique government identifier' corresponding to the NI or SSN is the Social Insurance Number (SIN).
It contains checksum information to reduce quite a bit the likelihood of this sort of trouble. The SSN and (apparently) NI don't implement checksumming. Of course, introducing a new number format is decidedly nontrivial. I've heard that the United States is also having trouble because they've realized that the SSN space will soon be exhausted.
Also, it's fairly easy to get one's hands on SINs and SSNs to open the door to a good bit of deliberate mischief; checksumming won't help with that. All told, these identifiers are very convenient for government agencies and private groups, but they create a nasty single point of failure.
Word 2000 already makes the formatting changes that it believes I want. I actually am starting to feel bad about myself---my own decisions are so often apparently wrong.
By default, it also hides the menu items it doesn't think I need to know about. The future is now.
I know you're just joking, but SI (the metric system) does deal explicitly with this. You can use one prefix, at most.
Engineers are in the habit of occasionally abusing this convention--instead of using u (mu, for micro-, 10^-6) as a prefix for some units (uH, microhenries of inductance) they will use mm (millimilli, presumably, as in mmH).
As far as I know, nobody ever combines prefixes associated with exponents that cancel out (partially or fully). It's common sense, really--have you ever seen a computer advertised with 256 milligigabytes of RAM? (Yes, I know that the byte is not an SI unit, but it illustrates the absurdity.)
Someone already does pay a s***load of money for the phone books. Where did you think that big yellow section at the front of the book came from?
For the record, my home computer has been offline for the last month (too busy to make some repairs) so I haven't been able to check phone numbers online. The telephone book is still quite useful for those not perpetually connected to the internet. I don't know about your phone company, but mine is not shy about charging obscene amounts of money for services (like 411) that a few decades ago were free. Calling 411 also doesn't offer the same experience as browsing the yellow pages looking for something.
If you really don't need a phone book, good for you. I'm glad to hear that you recycle yours; you can also give it away to someone else who might need one. But for those of us not wired (at least temporarily) the phone book is a useful tool, not merely an anachronism.
Yes, 3 feet to the yard (for surveyors, 66 feet to the chain), 1760 yards to the mile...
Please, tell me how to use a shift operation to divide by 1760. :P The other nice thing about metric is the consistent prefixes. There is one MKS symbol for length (m), not many (in, ft, yd, mi...) and it can be associated with a set of prefixes (micro, milli, kilo, mega, etc.) that have consistent meaning across all metric units. For us humans, it is easy to find a unit that lets you express values in "comfortable" form--living cells are on the order of 10 micrometers across, not 0.00001 meters; it's 100 kilometers to Grandma's house, not 100000 meters. And since it's in easy powers of ten, I can tell you immediately that you can line up 10^10 cells along the road to Grandma's, if you want to know.
Yes, I'm imagining the possibilities now.
I imagine possibilities in trees, on my neighbour's lawn, out in the street, and little bits of possibilities raining down on the Walmart parking lot around the corner.
A tank of fuel and a tank of oxidizer in my car. Um. Isn't that the sort of thing one might find aboard, say, a rocket? Why don't we see what we can do with liquid hydrogen and oxygen? It works for the Space Shuttle--mostly.
I've seen this purported claim tossed about for years--but when did he say it? Can someone link to a transcript of a speech or interview? I'd appreciate it.
I don't know if he made the claim or not. If he did, it was a dumb thing to say, on par with most other politicians (far be it from me to mention GWB here.) From what I gather, most of what he has said has been fairly bright--he's allowed to have an off day.
For those that are wondering, I didn't vote Bush or Gore in the last election--I don't live in the United States. I'd just like to see someone set the historical record straight on the contentious (tempest in a teapot?) issue.
Isn't that where atom bombs come from?
I recommend reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! --in particular the chapter Los Alamos From Below.
Yeah, but then you would have to take the samples (and astronauts, and gear) down into the Moon's gravity well, and eventually bring them back up again. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to a Moon base--it would be a valuable research site for any number of reasons. It's just that if you need a waypoint on the way back from Mars, why not use a preexisting continuously manned space station in earth orbit?
Yes.
Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...
Believe me, we did. Third year inorganic chemistry. I've forgotten it all again, except for the bits I actually use--which I knew before I took the class and crammed the table in for exams. I don't know about the penguin theory, but I do know that there is no point to rote memorization (except under certain very limited circumstances.)
If I really needed to know some collection of arbitrary facts, then I probably already would have memorized them simply through regular use. (If I have to look something up more than a few times in my CRC Handbook, then I'll probably learn it.) Learning by rote a table that is in the front of every textbook and on the wall of most labs is utterly pointless.
...
Run the coolant to a radiator in an air-conditioned environment (or even immersed in liquid nitrogen, if temps are too high.)
Eek. I know you're only half serious, but suggesting that a water-filled radiator should be immersed in liquid nitrogen is asking for trouble.
Yes, it will increase the life of your processor. A bit. Probably. It will also definitely save power--only really an issue in a notebook.
On the other hand, I've never had a problem with a CPU being the first component to fail in my computer. (Hard drives with their moving parts tend to go long before.)
Instead of buying a top of the line CPU for the purpose of underclocking (and paying a premium), buy a chip rated for the speed you would have underclocked to. Use the dough you saved to buy a fan--or a second hard drive. If your processor does fail three or four years from now, replacing it with an equivalent CPU will cost you roughly the change in your sofa.
Actually, lung cancer rates have been declining in Canada and the United States for the last twenty years or so, and the result is largely attributed to declines in cigarette smoking. The reason why lung cancers increased through the middle decades of this century (despite a relatively stable smoking rate at the time) is a significant lag between increases in smoking rates and increases in lung cancer incidence (and mortality).
Smoking rates increased from World War I, peaking in about 1965. Trends in lung cancer incidence lagged by fifteen to twenty years, peaking around 1985, and declining since. (Source: Canadian Cancer Society.)
Increases in other cancers may have environmental causes, though there are lifestyle factors to consider as well (e.g. the rise in colon cancer is associated with our unhealthy eating habits.) Also, medical science has gotten better at treating some diseases--we're dying more often due to cancer just because we're not getting killed by other ailments.
Nitpicking note--germs are not allergens, and bubble-boy syndrome (severe combined immune deficiency--SCID, IIRC) is a result of a person's inability to produce and maintain a healthy population of immune cells. Allergic reactions typically look and feel like a severe overreaction by the immune system--something that you would never see from a bubble-boy sufferer.
It means that every piece of anything chemically processed that you have in your home slowly breaks down over time, and gives off noxious chemicals. Everything from formaldehyde to radon.
Nit number two. Radon exposure in the home is never the result of chemically processed materials breaking down in the home. Radon gas is formed by the nuclear decay of natural radioisotopes in soil. (Since natural clays are used to make bricks, there may be slightly higher radiation levels in brick buildings, as well.)
Most of us dont notice, but it apparently makes some people _very_ sick. Couple this with todays "need" to make homes virtually air tight, and you have a place that makes reactive people really, really sick.
The airtight buildings of today do concentrate allergens while often simultaneously drying out mucous membranes that would normally keep these nasties out of our lungs, "Sick Building Syndrome" (SBS) may result. Often, the cause of SBS can be traced to one or two contaminants in the environment--moulds in the air system, formaldehyde releases from fresh carpet adhesives, and so forth.
"Multiple Chemical Sensitivity" (MCS) is a disorder characterized by extreme sensitivity to multiple environmental toxins. MCS is still far from being recognized by the medical establishment at large. Here is a good, balanced summary from the American Academy of Family Physicians. Of particular note is the fact that the AMA, the American College of Physicians, the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, and American Academy of Allergy and Immunology have rejected MCS as an organic illness--but then, they could be wrong.
On the other hand, it's the first time we've actually been able to observe the phenomenon, which makes it interesting in and of itself. It wasn't so long ago that any evidence of any extrasolar planet was big news, just because nobody had been able to find them before.
It's also a fairly rare event, at least within the volume of space we can readily observe. It's like asking, "What's all the fuss about? A supernova is just what you'd expect when a high-mass star collapses." Yes, it's the expected result, but there is still a good bit of information we can extract that we wouldn't otherwise have access too. It's nice to be able to confirm what happens to planetary systems when stars enter a red giant phase.
What do you care? It's hydrogen (and other light species like helium) that are escaping at any significant rate. Unless you're breathing the stuff, you have nothing to worry about.
Hydrogen isn't necessarily generated through electrolysis. There are various chemical reactions that may be used to generate hydrogen--mostly from fossil fuels, however.
Really interesting ways for the future might involve some bioengineering. Bacteria already exist which produce hydrogen from water. Another article here. The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.
I fully expect that with some genetic engineering we will have some very cost-effective hydrogen producing microbes in a matter of years--not decades. Alternately, we might just produce the enzymes (hydrogenases et al.) and use them act directly.
Yes, biosourced hydrogen would require some significant infrastructure--but so does shipping millions of barrels of oil halfway around the world, refining the stuff and separating it into hundreds of different products. I also don't foresee massive fluctuations in the price of sewage due to world events.
For those who read the post, Benetton is putting the RFID tags in the ordinary tags of the clothing. Remove the label from the garment, and no worries.
Yes indeed, it's fortunate that the batteries in an electric vehicle never wear out, and when disposal time comes around they contain no heavy metals, acids, or other nasties. Yes sir. Who here on Slashdot has a laptop for which the supposedly rechargeable battery must be replaced every year or two because it won't hold a charge?
Actually, for certain types of drivers (short trip commuters, mostly) electrics make a lot of sense--but then, so would some infrastructure funding to support good public transit systems. To replace the family car, my money is on the fuel cell--the sooner, the better.
Come on people, use keyboard shortcuts.
In certain circumstances, it is much easier to hit Alt-F4 (left hand) than to use a close-window gesture (right hand). Think about it.
I dunno what happens for you, but I keep my tabs running down the right side of the Opera 7 window. I can read what's in each title bar ("Hyatt Discusses Tabs" for this reply; "Slashdot|Hyatt Di..." for the parent posts), and there's room for twenty or so tabs.
As well, it keeps the browser window area narrower, which makes reading text documents more pleasant at 1024x768.