First off, #3 on the list appears to be NASA's "Columbia" supercomputer (Earth Simulator is #4). Your point is worth commenting on, though. IBM holds both of the top 2 spots with their amazing Blue Gene systems, but it appears that some of the systems down the list get more GFlops per processor- note that Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene uses 65536 procs to deliver an Rmax of 136800, while NEC's Earth Simulator gets 35860 from 5120 procs. That's roughly 7GFlops per processor for the E.S. versus 2 and change for the Blue Gene machines (and I mean very roughly- I understand that things like interconnect speeds and instruction sets can be just as important as processor speed). Similarly, Blue Gene/L gets less than three times the Rmax of Columbia using over six times the procs.
That's no knock on the Blue Gene systems; fastest is fastest, after all- it's just interesting that there are a wide variety of ways, ranging from clusters of commodity hardware to bespoke vector processor systems, to build a top supercomputer.
You realize that it's only about 9:40PM now on the East Coast, right? Unless you had some east coast in mind other than the one for the U.S. That's not terribly late, you know, especially for caffeine-fueled geeks.
To steer this comment back on topic though, I'd like to thank Mr. Kilby for his tremendous accomplishment; the modern world owes much to your work (and of course to that of Mr. Noyce as well). I was at UIUC in 2000 when Jack Kilby (BSEE '47) won his Nobel Prize, and I remember the publicity at the time. He was recognized during halftime of a football game that fall- I swear he got more cheers than the team did any time that season.
Qwerty? How many other words in the English language start with "qw?"
Admittedly, I did have to do some digging to find the preferred pronunciation of "Dvorak"- I had been pronouncing it like the name of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (of "From the New World" fame), which is usually pronounced "dvôr'zhäk," sounding sort of like "vor-jahk." However, although August Dvorak, inventor of the Dvorak keyboard, was a cousin of Antonin, according to this site, the inventor's family prefers an Americanized pronunciation. Dvorak. Duh-vor-ack. Not that hard, is it?
also, we dropped two thirds of our national anthem because, well, we really couldn't be bothered singing the entire thing.
Curiously enough, we Americans actually did the same thing- "The Star-Spangled Banner" has four stanzas, of which the first is the only one familiar to most Americans.
O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust!"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Interestingly enough, Francis Scott Key's poem contains one mention of God, in the rarely sung
fourth stanza, and no mention at all of "America" or "The United States."
Most of the large lab equipment that comes in at my job is packaged as the article notes, very large cardboard boxes shrinkwrapped and belted to wooden pallets, usually with foam peanuts or rigid polystyrene forms to cushion the device inside. Forklifts and pallet jacks can then be used to easily move incredibly heavy objects around.
I do not doubt, though, that many items are still packed in wooden or metal crates. The problem with these crates in video games, in my opinion, is not the mystery of how crates got to their location without the use of a pallet/forklift combo. That can be mildly amusing (and more so if the crates are too large to fit through any entrances to the room). The real frustration with crates is they generally mean the designers are trying to be creative, but have failed. When games started putting items in destructible crates, it was hailed as a move towards realism and immersion- ammo, medicine, etc. was mostly found in boxes, like in the real world, not floating and rotating in midair, Quake-style.
Unfortunately, every game that features this then ruins the realism by treating the act of opening a box and retrieving an item in the most unrealistic way possible: your character uses a melee weapon (often, a crowbar) to smash a wooden crate completely into splinters to reveal a tiny item. The splinters persist for two seconds and magically vanish. It was fine for Half-Life in 1998, but you might think game developers might have clued into the fact that when most people in reality use crowbars to open wooden crates, they use the crowbar to carefully pry open a side, not smash the box to bits. Would you really smash a box apart with a crowbar (much less shoot the thing) if you thought it might contain grenades or rockets? And while in reality, I have seen some very small items packed in much larger boxes (often because a company doing the shipping has a "smallest" box much larger than the item in question), in games I have seen wooden crates large enough to hold a pair of refrigerators; when smashed, they reveal a single ammo magazine or medkit. While the addition of destructible crates to games, particularly FPS games, was a stab at realism, it tends to just make it so that whenever you want to grab a powerup, you need to switch weapons, hit the crate a couple times, grab the item, and switch weapons back. That's not realistic- that's annoying.
Far worse are the indestructible crates many games feature- see one of these, and a stupid crate pushing or stacking puzzle is sure to follow. While improvements have been recently made (thanks, HL2!), picking up crates, walking with them in your hands, and setting them down where they need to be placed is usually a clumsy affair in a first-person shooter, one that often involves a crate appearing to float in front of you with no visible means of support, and a "setting down" where the box is awkwardly tossed in front of the player, hopefully in the place where the player wants it. There is rarely any actual intellectual challenge in crate puzzles, since "build a staircase of crates to the exit" and "push the crate on top of the floor switch" pretty much exhaust the possibilities.
That being said, a number of my all-time favorite games consist largely of smashing or pushing boxes when there's a break in the combat, so it's not exactly a gamekiller when the game has crates, just an annoyance- same as the preponderance of time spent in sewer tunnels and HVAC ducts in many otherwise stellar games. For many games, it's worth noting the OMM quote for the Start-to-Crate analysis of DOOM (which starts the player facing a barrel, round cousin to the crate):"I remembered this game being better than science has shown it to actually be."
I mean, the article is interesting enough, and relevant given the recent nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea, but this information is widely available and is far from technical. The principal thing that keeps everyone from possessing weapons-grade fissile material is the processing, a step "informatively" denoted with a pair of arrows.
If you want plutonium, you need to have a working fission reactor, which ostensibly makes you subject to regular inspection (and is hard to hide). If you want Highly Enriched Uranium, the enrichment process requires things like production scale mass spectrometers, giant centrifuges, and nasty chemicals (uranium hexafluoride, anyone?)- basically, a large amount of equipment that serves little other obvious purpose.
Of course, what we've seen with North Korea in particular is that the rest of the world knowing you're try to build nukes isn't always a deterrent to building nukes anymore, and in fact makes a handy bargaining chip where you agree to stop making plutonium in exchange for something you want, and then once you get it, continue making plutonium anyway.
An excellent article, and one that deservedly surfaces whenever diamonds are discussed here, but I think it's worth noting that at the end of the article, the author predicts the imminent demise of De Beers and expensive diamonds, pointing to factors like cheap Australian diamonds not under the purview of the cartel, and political upheavals in sub-Saharan Africa.
Twenty-three years later, we still have De Beers and their slick advertising, battered and bruised, perhaps, but still largely in control of the industry. Cheap diamonds from Australia and Canada (Survived.) Namibian independence? (Survived.) The end of apartheid in South Africa? (Survived.) Civil wars and coups in most of the countries where De Beers gets their stones? (It's likely they came out stronger.) The "blood diamonds" scandal? (Some bad press, maybe lost sales, but they're still doing fine for a company which many people now know was, and is, built on atrocity and suffering.)
The point is, De Beers has been remarkably tenacious, and in many ways ruthless, in maintaining their position as the world's diamond syndicate. Whenever disaster looms, they seem to be able to stave it off with brillant marketing, backroom deals, or leveraging their monopoly position to force potential competitors from the market. Trust me, I'd be very happy to see them absolutely buried under mountains of manufactured diamonds. But, as Epstein notes, De Beers has done a remarkable job of selling diamonds at prices far beyond whatever intrinsic value they have- even with more clever marketing and strongarm tactics, I don't know that they could survive a future where diamonds are cheaper than glass- but I don't think they're ready to fold up their tent anytime soon.
At least one major edition translated to English and published in the U.S. gave it the title "Magister Ludi," for whatever reason- in fact, it was until that title that many Americans first encountered it. You are absolutely correct that "The Glass Bead Game" is a more faithful translation of the German title, "Das Glasperlenspiel," and indeed, my copy of said book bears the title, "The Glass Bead Game."
Still, I wouldn't consider anyone who used the former title to be incorrect- I'm sure the book they read had that title on it, after all. It's all a question of how literally a given translator translates an original title- another example is Sartre's "Huis Clos," which is more familiar to many Anglophones as "No Exit," but more literally means, "Closed Door."
I think a Pearl Harbor movie that focused on Dorie Miller could be excellent- you could certainly make a story out of the whole "defending a country that treats him as a second class citizen" angle.
In terms of your historical argument, it's clear that Buena Vista didn't give a crap about history anyway, as it had a character who fought in the Battle of Britain, at Pearl Harbor, and flew on the Doolittle raid, when in actuality no single person did all those things. Also, it's 1941 and no one in the U.S. Navy smokes or curses. If they had greatly expanded the brief heroic act of one real life person to give it more screen time, it would have been quite minor compared to the egregious factual errors in the movie they did make.
Heh, I'm orginally from Bloomington, IL, which I guess made me pretty close to Normal (sorry). It's worth noting that there's also a (very) small town in Illinois named Oblong, which once led the fantastic newspaper headline "Normal Man Weds Oblong Woman."
The successful utilization of a carbon host to store lithium ions in the rechargeable negative electrode has led to the commercial development of lithium-ion cells. In commercial cells, the positive electrode is primarily a lithiated metal oxide, which also contains graphite to improve the electronic conductivity of the electrode.
The electrochemical reaction at the negative electrode in lithium-ion cells is the intercalation of lithium ions into graphite: the lithium ions in the electrolyte enter the space between the layer planes of graphite during charge. The distance between the graphite layer planes expands by about 10% to accommodate the lithium ions. The resulting material can be chemically represented as LixC6. When the cell is discharged, the lithium ions are removed from the graphite structure and return to the electrolyte. The maximum amount of lithium ions that is stored in graphite is equivalent to x = 1 (LiC6). Other carbons have been used which yield values of "x" that may be greater or less than one. One of the attractive features of this electrode is long cycle life that is observed when the reversible insertion and removal of lithium ions occur without mechanical degradation of the graphite structure. Currently, lithium-ion technology represents the most rapidly growing (in production volume) rechargeable battery system in the world.
So, it doesn't appear to be a true ionic salt, in the sense that something like lithium chloride would be. This sort of intercalation is a good demonstration of how while "chemical bond" usually conjures up an image of solid spheres connected by a rod, like in those plastic model sets, in actuality a bond can be delocalized. In particular, there is a fascinating group of substances known as the metallocenes which feature a metal ion sandwiched between planar carbon rings. Not bonded to a carbon, but instead complexed with the entire aromatic ring structure. Graphite consists of planes of these carbon ring systems fused together to form a planar sheet (graphene). While strong covalent bonds hold carbon atoms in a graphene plane together, far weaker forces hold the planes together, so that lithium ions can squeeze in between and take up residence. As such, lithium ion batteries are quite different from, say alkaline batteries in that rather than the production of current by a reduction/oxidation reaction between a pair of substances. In Li-ion batteries, the potential is provided by lithium ions themselves shuttling out of the graphite lattice- as the grandparent noted, they are sometimes referred to as "rocker" or "swing" batteries because of the back-and-forth movement of Li ions through use and recharge cycles.
In general, carbon has some rather limited and screwy ionic chemistry, owing to its place on the periodic table- there's a distinct preference for covalent rather than ionic bonding - even carbon halides are generally considered covalent. Carbocations and carbanions are both important species in organic chemistry reactions, but in most cases are not very stable- they tend to be transition states that end up as an uncharged final product. There are of course many known organic ion compounds- acetate ion, from acetic acid (vinegar) is a familar example- but generally it ends up being other atoms in the compound, usually oxygen or nitrogen, which can actually be said to carry the charge most of the time. Even in organometallic compounds, generally the metal-carbon bond has covalent character- there are some important exceptions though, usually brought about using very strong nonaqueous bases like sodium amide. Even "carbide" compounds are generally network solids, which is to say, covalent. Calcium carbide, CaC2, might qualify, though if you try to dissolve it in water, you do not get carbide ions in solution, but rather acetylene gas. You can of course make ionic compounds out of any element- just provide the
Gladwell Interview at espn.com
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Blink
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's actually a fascinating interview with Malcolm Gladwell at ESPN's Page 2 site wherein the interview asks Gladwell to apply some of the ideas of "Blink" to the world of sports. His responses illustrate some of the insights of the book, but also some of the things that make Gladwell's logic rather frustrating. For example, Michael Lewis's book "Moneyball" comes up in conversation (for those unfamiliar, it suggests using comprehensive statistical analysis and a focus on particular stats to evaluate a baseball player, rather than the subjective eye of a scout or "conventional wisdom"). Going by Gladwell's thesis, though, you would think he would insist that an expert scout could make a snap judgement about a player and be more correct than some egghead analyzing statistics. Just as in one of the examples in "Blink" where an art expert can just glance at a statue and "know" it to be a fake, you would think a scout could briefly watch a player play and "know" whether he is the real deal or a bust.
Gladwell responds, though:
"I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions -- like predicting hitting ability -- that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well."
So the question becomes, then, how do we know when we can make an appropriate snap judgement about something? Why is "this statue looks like a fake" reasonable but "this guy looks like an athlete" not?
Gladwell makes the point that too much data can hinder, rather than help, but you end up needing to make a judgement on how much data is too much then. One of the examples Gladwell gives in "Blink" is of doctors making better diagnoses of heart trouble when they have less data- they jump to the heart, rather than investigating everything else chest pain could be. But do you really want your doctor operating on less than complete information- and if so, where do you set the line at? "Sorry, Doc, I'm afraid if I tell you how long I've had this pain, you might misdiagnose me."
I agree largely with Gladwell's ideas that snap judgements can be better than waffling, but he definitely should have done more to point out differences between good snap decisions and bad ones- he points out the "Warren Harding Effect" where someone "appears qualified" for something, but doesn't say enough in my opinion about knowing when your prejudices are boldly leading your gut astray.
No, the grandparent is correct- the James West Space Telescope will indeed be in a Lissajous orbit- that is the name for a particular type of orbit around a Lagrange point and is a slight variation on the simpler "halo" orbit (basically just an ellipse or circle around the Lagrange point). This may seem counterintuitive, as the Lagrange points are just empty points in space, but in fact you can orbit spacecraft around them just as you would any celestial body. In the case of (IIRC) Langrange points L1, L2, and L3, you pretty much have to do this- those points are unstable, so some station keeping is required (about once a month at L2). The principal advantage of the quasiperiodic Lissajous orbit at L2 is that it experiences fewer eclipses (L2 is collinear with the sun and earth), important for probes using solar panels. An example of a recent mission using a Lissajous orbit around L2 was the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
Yes, this certainly is one of those pretentious places with food so expensive and dainty that you're certain that food critics are the only patrons. (Who else has both 5 hours AND 500 dollars to spend on a single meal?) I mean, I love the geeky tech "kitchen science" stuff that chefs are getting into, a major feature of acolytes of Charlie Trotter, including Cantu here-I mean, as the article notes, he also plans to buy a class IV laser to create dishes that are "impossible through conventional means." That's pretty sweet. Also, the use of liquid nitrogen in cuisine- though it's funny to see star chefs "discover" something university science students have known for generations. I'm all for fun with food- the lasers and superconductors are simply one up on the blowtorches and flambes before them- pure flair for presentation.
But, I do agree that much of the "postmodern" haute cuisine has gotten way out of hand, what with "deconstructed" dishes and foamed sea water (I'm not kidding) and instructions to the diners on how to properly eat each dish. It's all become a bit too precious and baroque, and while I like that Chicago is being recognized for culinary innovation, I'm more of a steakhouse/deep dish pizza place guy myself.
This is a neat idea, but liquid mercury has a density of 13593 kilograms/cubic meter. The article does not mention how deep the pool of mercury would be, but even if the mercury is only 1 cm deep, my back of the envelope calculations for a 100m mirror (which treat the mirror as a cylinder with radius 50m and height 1cm) would require 1068 metric tons of mercury.
First off, this far outstrips our present launch capability. Second, we would require a much more reliable method of sending things into space before we decided to send up a significant amount of liquid mercury, given that a failed launch of a rocket carrying a large tank of mercury would be a major ecological disaster. It's a great idea in theory- pouring a bunch of liquid into a bowl would be certainly preferable to the tremendous amount of skill and effort required to properly build and polish large telescope mirrors- but I'm not sure how long it would be before this idea becomes even remotely practical.
I had much the same disappointment with Civ3 (though it's still one of my favorite games)- while Civ3 improved much of the gameplay from SMAC, it didn't have quite the same feeling to it. I missed the quotations, both those taken from books supposedly written by the faction leaders (which really fleshed out their personalities) and those from human history, mostly from political and ethical philosophy texts- how many other games quote from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death?
I also wished there would have been Wonder completion movies like the Secret Project movies in Alpha Centauri. Seeing your grand Civ3 capital stuffed with Wonders is pretty sweet, but completion of The Space Elevator, with a short clip of a craft gliding up a slender cable to a captured asteroid terminus while the accented voice of Academician Prokhor Zakharov whispers, "In one moment, earth. In the next, heaven." is unforgettable.
I just posted: As was demonstrated by the experiment's use of tumor necrosis factor
I'm a dork- wrong TNF- it was transcription factor nuclear factor- this is what happens when you're out of the biochem game for too long. In my defense, I only found this out by looking up the Science article mentioned by another poster; these are the sorts of critical details the submitted articles lack. Also, it thankfully doesn't change my point about apoptosis.
From what I can glean from the information, I guess the idea is that there are certain biochemical signaling pathways which depend on the frequency pattern of a messenger molecule interacting with a target, rather than a simple off/on response. As was demonstrated by the experiment's use of tumor necrosis factor, I'd think the area where something like that would come into play would be apoptosis. The default program for your cells is "kill thyself," and that only gets changed if your cells receive signals that tell them to survive. A frequency-based signal could be a good way to determine if a cell is functioning normally- send a simple signal to a damaged cell, and it still might answer back fine. Send a more complex "coded" signal, though, and the appropriate cellular machinery to interpret the pattern may no longer be in place. If the coded message was necessary for survival, the damaged cell would hopefully then commit seppuku.
But as they suggest in the article, the same signaling molecule could conceivably be used for several coded signals, so caution would be needed with a drug that targets a signaling pathway which overlaps with others. However, there are plenty of more mundane signaling pathways where signaling molecules are used for many functions- molecules like cAMP and cGMP (one of the side effects of Viagra is transient blue-green color blindness, the result of cyclic GMP being the messenger molecule in two very different systems), calcium ions (mentioned in the article). Also, cell signals often trigger cascades of intracellular signals (like the protein phosphorylations parent mentions) that multiply the effect and spread it to a variety of cellular functions. That sort of thing has been known for awhile though. It's hard to say what's really meant by this terrible article- I read the press release, I read the "article"- which is not a journal article but rather a short blurb in a biotech industry council magazine- no useful details there, either.
It can be a pretty hazy definition, but generally pure carbon structures like nanotubes, fullerenes, diamonds, and graphite are considered to be inorganic. The presence of carbon in a compound is a necessary but not sufficient condition for "organicity," as a number of compounds which contain carbon, like carbon dioxide, carbon disulfide, calcium carbonate, and potassium cyanide, are not considered by most chemists to be organic compounds.
Perhaps the best definition that I could give for an organic compound is that it contains carbon in a reduced state. Generally (and almost always for compounds found in nature), that means at least one carbon in the compound is bonded to hydrogen. When plants carry out photosynthesis, they take an inorganic compound, CO2, and use a complex series of reactions catalyzed by enzymes to incorporate it into an organic molecule, glucose (C6H12O6). In the net balance, oxygens are pulled off of carbon dioxide (to our great benefit) and hydrogens are added on. The electronic properties of carbon atoms are altered in a way that makes them "organic."
Now, there are some places where this definition can get fuzzy, and they include the carbon allotropes like diamond and graphite. You can think of a carbon nanotube as a tessellation of fused benzene rings (in fact, some of the companies that make nanotubes use benzene as the starting material). However, benzene is organic (C6H6), and so are naphthalene (2 fused benzene rings, C10H8), anthracene, etc. As more and more rings are fused, though, the proportion of carbon to hydrogen increases greatly until the compound essentially consists exclusively of carbon bonded to carbon, which is an inorganic bond. No need to have your ignorance excused, though- as I said, it's a hazy definition, and the unfortunately terminology of "organic and inorganic" comes down to us from the days when people thought "organic" compounds possessed a sort of vital force that inorganic ones did not.
As for the point about LEDs, I don't know nearly as much in that area, but as the AC who responded to you already pointed out, there aren't light-emitting diodes involved here. As I understand it, the idea here is to create electron guns like those found in a CRT on a molecular scale. In the way that a the point on a lightning rod can "bleed off" charge, these nanotubes or diamond dust motes would bleed off electrons into a vacuum, where they'd fly across and excite a phosphor screen. I know that carbon nanotubes and certain doped diamonds can have semiconductor properties; presumably these would be used to control the current that bleeds off each nanoparticle, and consequently what you see on the screen.
It is a thorny ethical issue, I will grant you. What are the other options, though? Focusing on the Cambodian AIDS drug trial you mentioned, what are the alternatives to a study with placebo? The drug in question was of interest because it could have possibly lessened the spread of HIV among those in high-risk groups. Therefore, a high-risk group was needed. If you just gave out pills to everyone in the research study and saw a decreased incidence of transmission, then you really don't have any idea what caused that decrease- was it the drug, the placebo effect of taking a drug, increased awareness of the possibility of contracting HIV by taking part in a study of contracting HIV? Or were there greater statistical effects across all of Cambodia/Southeast Asia/Earth regarding HIV transmission among sex workers?
I love the appeals to ethics presented in that lifeissues article you linked to. First off, regarding the Cambodian health minister's comments that animal studies should be done instead, he does know that it's the Human Immunodeficiency Virus because it only causes disease in humans, right? That attempting to use the drug in a trial that tests efficacy against SIV transmission in chimpanzees, for instance, would likely produce zero useful data for human use? The main point of argument, though is whether Cambodian sex workers can provide informed consent to take part in a drug trial. But isn't automatically assuming that they could not based on their group background alone the worst sort of paternalism? By getting this trial shut down, a choice has been taken away from those women regarding their own healthcare. Rallying against a drug trial on the grounds that the setup would have only potentially protected some of its participants could get protection from HIV transmission ignores the present reality, which is that currently all of those women are now in a de facto control group. All are now at risk for contracting HIV instead of merely some if that drug were successful.
Yes, the utilitarian ethical calculus sucks, putting some lives at risk to save many more. I guess according to whoever did that jaundiced commentary in that article, that it makes me an amoral monster, but I'll take "some lives saved" over "no lives saved" any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Generally when new drugs meant to treat life-threatening are tested in clinical trials, the procedure is to test against the accepted treatment if one exists rather than against a true placebo. For example, a new cancer drug would be matched against a more traditional course of therapy. This has the advantage not only of ensuring that both the experimental and control groups get treated, but also provides a head-to-head test of the new drug and the old drug. No one is doing a Tuskegee Experiment-type trial now where mortally sick people are left untreated in the interests of science. Primum no nocere is supposed to be the guiding principle, after all. What good would having a sugar pill control do in a trial for an AIDS or cancer drug anyway? Of course a new antiretroviral is going to outperform dextrose in prolonging life and health in an AIDS patient. No useful science is produced in finding out the placebo group has a 100% mortality rate. What matters is whether the new drug has demonstrable advantages over the old drugs, be it as more efficacy, fewer side effects, fewer doses, etc.
Now, in the case of less serious conditions, yes, sometimes sugar pills are handed out to study volunteers. But what alternative is there in many cases? The placebo (and for that matter, the nocebo) effect is quite real, and should be accounted for. Those crazy side effects you hear about in prescription medication commercials? While of course some of those are from the medication itself, there are always people who report effects like headache, fatigue, dry mouth, and nausea- in both the experimental and placebo groups. It's worthwhile knowing whether it's the medication which causes these symptoms, or rather just the anxiety that comes naturally from taking a strange new pill.
By the same token, drugs shouldn't be on the market if they can't beat Placebex (R) in efficacy- and that can be surprisingly difficult to establish. From personal experience, I've noticed minor aches and pains tend to clear up when I take an OTC pain reliever- but I often start to feel better before the drug has had time to take effect. It's as though the action itself of doing something about that nagging headache induces my body to help out in doing something about that nagging headache. That sort of thing needs to be sorted out in order to know what a drug really does and how well it does it, and double blind studies with placebo are the only certain way to do that.
First off, you have the Julian and Gregorian calendars reversed- the Julian calendar is named for Julius Caesar, and is based off of the calendar he enacted in Rome. The key mistakes made regarding dates in the Julian calendar, however, were made several centuries later by the monk Dionysus the Little- it was he who adapted the Julian calendar (which originally had dates based on the accepted date of the founding of Rome) to a Christian standard- the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately, modern scholarship suggests Dionysus was a few years off, and that the historical Jesus would have been born some time between 8-4BC, depending on who you ask. Key to the earlier dating is that many of the early events in the life of Jesus depend on Herod the Great being alive at the time, and a number of reliable Roman sources put his death around 4BC.
The Gregorian calendar was more of a matter of fixing some minor yet steadily accruing inaccuracies in the Julian calendar, particularly the realization that the Julian rules for leap years were causing extra days to pile on over the centuries (a year is roughly 365.24 days, but adding a day every 4 years treats the year as being 365.25 days). Pope Gregory XIII, for whom the calendar is named, decreed in 1582 that years that end in 00 but are not divisible by 400 (like 1900, but not 2000) would no longer be leap years. Also, in order to to get rid of the extra days created by running under the Julian calendar for 1600 years, Greg announced that nearly two weeks in October 1582 would be removed from the calendar. Problem solved, except that in 1582 the Catholic Church did not have the absolute authority it once possessed, and so the Eastern Orthodox folks and the English stayed with the Julian calendar for several more centuries.
As for the question of, "Were there two Herods?" the answer is much simpler: Yes. Herod the Great, as mentioned, died in roughly 4BC; his son, Herod Antipas, then took the throne- it is he who is said to have obtained the head of John the Baptist.
Indeed, and it should also be noted that fuel cells from electrolysed water would really be introducing far less "new" water into the environment than conventionally burned fossil fuels. The products of complete combustion of a hydrocarbon are carbon dioxide and water vapor. Not only does the combustion of fossil fuels release carbon into the atmosphere that had been sequestered for millions of years, but it also leads to the reintroduction of hydrogen as well. It's not a very serious effect- the earth is much better equipped to handle a bit more water than a bit more carbon dioxide- but it's worth pointing out that the production of water vapor is not a valid argument against hydrogen fuel cells.
Re:They should make a law against this.
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NBA Rejects EA Deal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Heck, even EA has some history with this idea- I remember owning NBA Live 96, and as had customarily been the case with NBA basketball video games, Michael Jordan was conspicuously absent due to contractual issues. However, if you used the player creation system and entered in the name "Michael Jordan," the system would offer as default a baldheaded 6'6" shooting guard from North Carolina who happened to have amazingly good stats.
On the flip side, however, I believe one of the failings of the notoriously unpopular "Madden 64" on N64 was its lack of an NFL license when virtually every other NFL game that year had one. Truly an epic matchup between the team in yellow helmets and the team in orange helmets. Games based on NCAA sports work out fine because no one can make a game with player names; if EA starts snatching up exclusive official league licenses, they can produce games that seem more "legitimate" than those of competitors, just by virtue of offering league content that their competitors lacked access to.
There several reasons why a brain transplant would be far more difficult than any other organ transplant. Foremost among them is the difficulty in reattaching/regrowing nerves. Even in cases of hand transplants, which do reattach nerves, patients generally do not recover the full control and tactile sensitivity of a normal hand. In particular, the twelve pairs of cranial nerves would have to be reattached and made functional again- without them, the patient would be unable to speak, see, hear, smell, digest food, or even breathe. Might as well stay in the terminally ill body.
Also, unlike other organs, the brain does not take well to transportation. Unlike a liver, kidney, or even heart, you can't just keep a brain in a cooler filled with ice, contrary to what Aqua Teen Hunger Force teaches us. Brain cells deprived of oxygen can begin to die in as few as 5 minutes. Once again, who even among the terminally ill would want to attempt a brain transplant if by far the most likely outcomes were death, a vegetative state, or other severe brain damage?
That being said, I wouldn't consider such a transplant to be forever outside the abilities of surgeons. Keeping a brain alive outside the body should not be an insurmountable challenge- you might be able to store it in an oxygenated blood substitute like PFC, for instance. And of course after decades of work, advances in reattaching and regenerating nerves are being made that once seemed impossible. Nevertheless, I think due to sheer complexity a successful human brain transplant will not take place in the next 50 years, and if anything, the need for such a procedure will have been made obsolete by the possibility of transfer of human consciousness to digital media, as was suggested by another poster.
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That's no knock on the Blue Gene systems; fastest is fastest, after all- it's just interesting that there are a wide variety of ways, ranging from clusters of commodity hardware to bespoke vector processor systems, to build a top supercomputer.
To steer this comment back on topic though, I'd like to thank Mr. Kilby for his tremendous accomplishment; the modern world owes much to your work (and of course to that of Mr. Noyce as well). I was at UIUC in 2000 when Jack Kilby (BSEE '47) won his Nobel Prize, and I remember the publicity at the time. He was recognized during halftime of a football game that fall- I swear he got more cheers than the team did any time that season.
Admittedly, I did have to do some digging to find the preferred pronunciation of "Dvorak"- I had been pronouncing it like the name of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (of "From the New World" fame), which is usually pronounced "dvôr'zhäk," sounding sort of like "vor-jahk." However, although August Dvorak, inventor of the Dvorak keyboard, was a cousin of Antonin, according to this site, the inventor's family prefers an Americanized pronunciation. Dvorak. Duh-vor-ack. Not that hard, is it?
Also, 200th post!
I do not doubt, though, that many items are still packed in wooden or metal crates. The problem with these crates in video games, in my opinion, is not the mystery of how crates got to their location without the use of a pallet/forklift combo. That can be mildly amusing (and more so if the crates are too large to fit through any entrances to the room). The real frustration with crates is they generally mean the designers are trying to be creative, but have failed. When games started putting items in destructible crates, it was hailed as a move towards realism and immersion- ammo, medicine, etc. was mostly found in boxes, like in the real world, not floating and rotating in midair, Quake-style.
Unfortunately, every game that features this then ruins the realism by treating the act of opening a box and retrieving an item in the most unrealistic way possible: your character uses a melee weapon (often, a crowbar) to smash a wooden crate completely into splinters to reveal a tiny item. The splinters persist for two seconds and magically vanish. It was fine for Half-Life in 1998, but you might think game developers might have clued into the fact that when most people in reality use crowbars to open wooden crates, they use the crowbar to carefully pry open a side, not smash the box to bits. Would you really smash a box apart with a crowbar (much less shoot the thing) if you thought it might contain grenades or rockets? And while in reality, I have seen some very small items packed in much larger boxes (often because a company doing the shipping has a "smallest" box much larger than the item in question), in games I have seen wooden crates large enough to hold a pair of refrigerators; when smashed, they reveal a single ammo magazine or medkit. While the addition of destructible crates to games, particularly FPS games, was a stab at realism, it tends to just make it so that whenever you want to grab a powerup, you need to switch weapons, hit the crate a couple times, grab the item, and switch weapons back. That's not realistic- that's annoying.
Far worse are the indestructible crates many games feature- see one of these, and a stupid crate pushing or stacking puzzle is sure to follow. While improvements have been recently made (thanks, HL2!), picking up crates, walking with them in your hands, and setting them down where they need to be placed is usually a clumsy affair in a first-person shooter, one that often involves a crate appearing to float in front of you with no visible means of support, and a "setting down" where the box is awkwardly tossed in front of the player, hopefully in the place where the player wants it. There is rarely any actual intellectual challenge in crate puzzles, since "build a staircase of crates to the exit" and "push the crate on top of the floor switch" pretty much exhaust the possibilities.
That being said, a number of my all-time favorite games consist largely of smashing or pushing boxes when there's a break in the combat, so it's not exactly a gamekiller when the game has crates, just an annoyance- same as the preponderance of time spent in sewer tunnels and HVAC ducts in many otherwise stellar games. For many games, it's worth noting the OMM quote for the Start-to-Crate analysis of DOOM (which starts the player facing a barrel, round cousin to the crate):"I remembered this game being better than science has shown it to actually be."
If you want plutonium, you need to have a working fission reactor, which ostensibly makes you subject to regular inspection (and is hard to hide). If you want Highly Enriched Uranium, the enrichment process requires things like production scale mass spectrometers, giant centrifuges, and nasty chemicals (uranium hexafluoride, anyone?)- basically, a large amount of equipment that serves little other obvious purpose.
Of course, what we've seen with North Korea in particular is that the rest of the world knowing you're try to build nukes isn't always a deterrent to building nukes anymore, and in fact makes a handy bargaining chip where you agree to stop making plutonium in exchange for something you want, and then once you get it, continue making plutonium anyway.
Twenty-three years later, we still have De Beers and their slick advertising, battered and bruised, perhaps, but still largely in control of the industry. Cheap diamonds from Australia and Canada (Survived.) Namibian independence? (Survived.) The end of apartheid in South Africa? (Survived.) Civil wars and coups in most of the countries where De Beers gets their stones? (It's likely they came out stronger.) The "blood diamonds" scandal? (Some bad press, maybe lost sales, but they're still doing fine for a company which many people now know was, and is, built on atrocity and suffering.)
The point is, De Beers has been remarkably tenacious, and in many ways ruthless, in maintaining their position as the world's diamond syndicate. Whenever disaster looms, they seem to be able to stave it off with brillant marketing, backroom deals, or leveraging their monopoly position to force potential competitors from the market. Trust me, I'd be very happy to see them absolutely buried under mountains of manufactured diamonds. But, as Epstein notes, De Beers has done a remarkable job of selling diamonds at prices far beyond whatever intrinsic value they have- even with more clever marketing and strongarm tactics, I don't know that they could survive a future where diamonds are cheaper than glass- but I don't think they're ready to fold up their tent anytime soon.
Still, I wouldn't consider anyone who used the former title to be incorrect- I'm sure the book they read had that title on it, after all. It's all a question of how literally a given translator translates an original title- another example is Sartre's "Huis Clos," which is more familiar to many Anglophones as "No Exit," but more literally means, "Closed Door."
In terms of your historical argument, it's clear that Buena Vista didn't give a crap about history anyway, as it had a character who fought in the Battle of Britain, at Pearl Harbor, and flew on the Doolittle raid, when in actuality no single person did all those things. Also, it's 1941 and no one in the U.S. Navy smokes or curses. If they had greatly expanded the brief heroic act of one real life person to give it more screen time, it would have been quite minor compared to the egregious factual errors in the movie they did make.
Heh, I'm orginally from Bloomington, IL, which I guess made me pretty close to Normal (sorry). It's worth noting that there's also a (very) small town in Illinois named Oblong, which once led the fantastic newspaper headline "Normal Man Weds Oblong Woman."
So, it doesn't appear to be a true ionic salt, in the sense that something like lithium chloride would be. This sort of intercalation is a good demonstration of how while "chemical bond" usually conjures up an image of solid spheres connected by a rod, like in those plastic model sets, in actuality a bond can be delocalized. In particular, there is a fascinating group of substances known as the metallocenes which feature a metal ion sandwiched between planar carbon rings. Not bonded to a carbon, but instead complexed with the entire aromatic ring structure. Graphite consists of planes of these carbon ring systems fused together to form a planar sheet (graphene). While strong covalent bonds hold carbon atoms in a graphene plane together, far weaker forces hold the planes together, so that lithium ions can squeeze in between and take up residence. As such, lithium ion batteries are quite different from, say alkaline batteries in that rather than the production of current by a reduction/oxidation reaction between a pair of substances. In Li-ion batteries, the potential is provided by lithium ions themselves shuttling out of the graphite lattice- as the grandparent noted, they are sometimes referred to as "rocker" or "swing" batteries because of the back-and-forth movement of Li ions through use and recharge cycles.
In general, carbon has some rather limited and screwy ionic chemistry, owing to its place on the periodic table- there's a distinct preference for covalent rather than ionic bonding - even carbon halides are generally considered covalent. Carbocations and carbanions are both important species in organic chemistry reactions, but in most cases are not very stable- they tend to be transition states that end up as an uncharged final product. There are of course many known organic ion compounds- acetate ion, from acetic acid (vinegar) is a familar example- but generally it ends up being other atoms in the compound, usually oxygen or nitrogen, which can actually be said to carry the charge most of the time. Even in organometallic compounds, generally the metal-carbon bond has covalent character- there are some important exceptions though, usually brought about using very strong nonaqueous bases like sodium amide. Even "carbide" compounds are generally network solids, which is to say, covalent. Calcium carbide, CaC2, might qualify, though if you try to dissolve it in water, you do not get carbide ions in solution, but rather acetylene gas. You can of course make ionic compounds out of any element- just provide the
Gladwell responds, though:
"I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions -- like predicting hitting ability -- that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well."
So the question becomes, then, how do we know when we can make an appropriate snap judgement about something? Why is "this statue looks like a fake" reasonable but "this guy looks like an athlete" not?
Gladwell makes the point that too much data can hinder, rather than help, but you end up needing to make a judgement on how much data is too much then. One of the examples Gladwell gives in "Blink" is of doctors making better diagnoses of heart trouble when they have less data- they jump to the heart, rather than investigating everything else chest pain could be. But do you really want your doctor operating on less than complete information- and if so, where do you set the line at? "Sorry, Doc, I'm afraid if I tell you how long I've had this pain, you might misdiagnose me."
I agree largely with Gladwell's ideas that snap judgements can be better than waffling, but he definitely should have done more to point out differences between good snap decisions and bad ones- he points out the "Warren Harding Effect" where someone "appears qualified" for something, but doesn't say enough in my opinion about knowing when your prejudices are boldly leading your gut astray.
No, the grandparent is correct- the James West Space Telescope will indeed be in a Lissajous orbit- that is the name for a particular type of orbit around a Lagrange point and is a slight variation on the simpler "halo" orbit (basically just an ellipse or circle around the Lagrange point). This may seem counterintuitive, as the Lagrange points are just empty points in space, but in fact you can orbit spacecraft around them just as you would any celestial body. In the case of (IIRC) Langrange points L1, L2, and L3, you pretty much have to do this- those points are unstable, so some station keeping is required (about once a month at L2). The principal advantage of the quasiperiodic Lissajous orbit at L2 is that it experiences fewer eclipses (L2 is collinear with the sun and earth), important for probes using solar panels. An example of a recent mission using a Lissajous orbit around L2 was the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
But, I do agree that much of the "postmodern" haute cuisine has gotten way out of hand, what with "deconstructed" dishes and foamed sea water (I'm not kidding) and instructions to the diners on how to properly eat each dish. It's all become a bit too precious and baroque, and while I like that Chicago is being recognized for culinary innovation, I'm more of a steakhouse/deep dish pizza place guy myself.
First off, this far outstrips our present launch capability. Second, we would require a much more reliable method of sending things into space before we decided to send up a significant amount of liquid mercury, given that a failed launch of a rocket carrying a large tank of mercury would be a major ecological disaster. It's a great idea in theory- pouring a bunch of liquid into a bowl would be certainly preferable to the tremendous amount of skill and effort required to properly build and polish large telescope mirrors- but I'm not sure how long it would be before this idea becomes even remotely practical.
I also wished there would have been Wonder completion movies like the Secret Project movies in Alpha Centauri. Seeing your grand Civ3 capital stuffed with Wonders is pretty sweet, but completion of The Space Elevator, with a short clip of a craft gliding up a slender cable to a captured asteroid terminus while the accented voice of Academician Prokhor Zakharov whispers, "In one moment, earth. In the next, heaven." is unforgettable.
I'm a dork- wrong TNF- it was transcription factor nuclear factor- this is what happens when you're out of the biochem game for too long. In my defense, I only found this out by looking up the Science article mentioned by another poster; these are the sorts of critical details the submitted articles lack. Also, it thankfully doesn't change my point about apoptosis.
Trying to head off the flames,
-reverseengineer
But as they suggest in the article, the same signaling molecule could conceivably be used for several coded signals, so caution would be needed with a drug that targets a signaling pathway which overlaps with others. However, there are plenty of more mundane signaling pathways where signaling molecules are used for many functions- molecules like cAMP and cGMP (one of the side effects of Viagra is transient blue-green color blindness, the result of cyclic GMP being the messenger molecule in two very different systems), calcium ions (mentioned in the article). Also, cell signals often trigger cascades of intracellular signals (like the protein phosphorylations parent mentions) that multiply the effect and spread it to a variety of cellular functions. That sort of thing has been known for awhile though. It's hard to say what's really meant by this terrible article- I read the press release, I read the "article"- which is not a journal article but rather a short blurb in a biotech industry council magazine- no useful details there, either.
Perhaps the best definition that I could give for an organic compound is that it contains carbon in a reduced state. Generally (and almost always for compounds found in nature), that means at least one carbon in the compound is bonded to hydrogen. When plants carry out photosynthesis, they take an inorganic compound, CO2, and use a complex series of reactions catalyzed by enzymes to incorporate it into an organic molecule, glucose (C6H12O6). In the net balance, oxygens are pulled off of carbon dioxide (to our great benefit) and hydrogens are added on. The electronic properties of carbon atoms are altered in a way that makes them "organic."
Now, there are some places where this definition can get fuzzy, and they include the carbon allotropes like diamond and graphite. You can think of a carbon nanotube as a tessellation of fused benzene rings (in fact, some of the companies that make nanotubes use benzene as the starting material). However, benzene is organic (C6H6), and so are naphthalene (2 fused benzene rings, C10H8), anthracene, etc. As more and more rings are fused, though, the proportion of carbon to hydrogen increases greatly until the compound essentially consists exclusively of carbon bonded to carbon, which is an inorganic bond. No need to have your ignorance excused, though- as I said, it's a hazy definition, and the unfortunately terminology of "organic and inorganic" comes down to us from the days when people thought "organic" compounds possessed a sort of vital force that inorganic ones did not.
As for the point about LEDs, I don't know nearly as much in that area, but as the AC who responded to you already pointed out, there aren't light-emitting diodes involved here. As I understand it, the idea here is to create electron guns like those found in a CRT on a molecular scale. In the way that a the point on a lightning rod can "bleed off" charge, these nanotubes or diamond dust motes would bleed off electrons into a vacuum, where they'd fly across and excite a phosphor screen. I know that carbon nanotubes and certain doped diamonds can have semiconductor properties; presumably these would be used to control the current that bleeds off each nanoparticle, and consequently what you see on the screen.
I love the appeals to ethics presented in that lifeissues article you linked to. First off, regarding the Cambodian health minister's comments that animal studies should be done instead, he does know that it's the Human Immunodeficiency Virus because it only causes disease in humans, right? That attempting to use the drug in a trial that tests efficacy against SIV transmission in chimpanzees, for instance, would likely produce zero useful data for human use? The main point of argument, though is whether Cambodian sex workers can provide informed consent to take part in a drug trial. But isn't automatically assuming that they could not based on their group background alone the worst sort of paternalism? By getting this trial shut down, a choice has been taken away from those women regarding their own healthcare. Rallying against a drug trial on the grounds that the setup would have only potentially protected some of its participants could get protection from HIV transmission ignores the present reality, which is that currently all of those women are now in a de facto control group. All are now at risk for contracting HIV instead of merely some if that drug were successful.
Yes, the utilitarian ethical calculus sucks, putting some lives at risk to save many more. I guess according to whoever did that jaundiced commentary in that article, that it makes me an amoral monster, but I'll take "some lives saved" over "no lives saved" any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Now, in the case of less serious conditions, yes, sometimes sugar pills are handed out to study volunteers. But what alternative is there in many cases? The placebo (and for that matter, the nocebo) effect is quite real, and should be accounted for. Those crazy side effects you hear about in prescription medication commercials? While of course some of those are from the medication itself, there are always people who report effects like headache, fatigue, dry mouth, and nausea- in both the experimental and placebo groups. It's worthwhile knowing whether it's the medication which causes these symptoms, or rather just the anxiety that comes naturally from taking a strange new pill.
By the same token, drugs shouldn't be on the market if they can't beat Placebex (R) in efficacy- and that can be surprisingly difficult to establish. From personal experience, I've noticed minor aches and pains tend to clear up when I take an OTC pain reliever- but I often start to feel better before the drug has had time to take effect. It's as though the action itself of doing something about that nagging headache induces my body to help out in doing something about that nagging headache. That sort of thing needs to be sorted out in order to know what a drug really does and how well it does it, and double blind studies with placebo are the only certain way to do that.
The Gregorian calendar was more of a matter of fixing some minor yet steadily accruing inaccuracies in the Julian calendar, particularly the realization that the Julian rules for leap years were causing extra days to pile on over the centuries (a year is roughly 365.24 days, but adding a day every 4 years treats the year as being 365.25 days). Pope Gregory XIII, for whom the calendar is named, decreed in 1582 that years that end in 00 but are not divisible by 400 (like 1900, but not 2000) would no longer be leap years. Also, in order to to get rid of the extra days created by running under the Julian calendar for 1600 years, Greg announced that nearly two weeks in October 1582 would be removed from the calendar. Problem solved, except that in 1582 the Catholic Church did not have the absolute authority it once possessed, and so the Eastern Orthodox folks and the English stayed with the Julian calendar for several more centuries.
As for the question of, "Were there two Herods?" the answer is much simpler: Yes. Herod the Great, as mentioned, died in roughly 4BC; his son, Herod Antipas, then took the throne- it is he who is said to have obtained the head of John the Baptist.
Indeed, and it should also be noted that fuel cells from electrolysed water would really be introducing far less "new" water into the environment than conventionally burned fossil fuels. The products of complete combustion of a hydrocarbon are carbon dioxide and water vapor. Not only does the combustion of fossil fuels release carbon into the atmosphere that had been sequestered for millions of years, but it also leads to the reintroduction of hydrogen as well. It's not a very serious effect- the earth is much better equipped to handle a bit more water than a bit more carbon dioxide- but it's worth pointing out that the production of water vapor is not a valid argument against hydrogen fuel cells.
On the flip side, however, I believe one of the failings of the notoriously unpopular "Madden 64" on N64 was its lack of an NFL license when virtually every other NFL game that year had one. Truly an epic matchup between the team in yellow helmets and the team in orange helmets. Games based on NCAA sports work out fine because no one can make a game with player names; if EA starts snatching up exclusive official league licenses, they can produce games that seem more "legitimate" than those of competitors, just by virtue of offering league content that their competitors lacked access to.
Also, unlike other organs, the brain does not take well to transportation. Unlike a liver, kidney, or even heart, you can't just keep a brain in a cooler filled with ice, contrary to what Aqua Teen Hunger Force teaches us. Brain cells deprived of oxygen can begin to die in as few as 5 minutes. Once again, who even among the terminally ill would want to attempt a brain transplant if by far the most likely outcomes were death, a vegetative state, or other severe brain damage?
That being said, I wouldn't consider such a transplant to be forever outside the abilities of surgeons. Keeping a brain alive outside the body should not be an insurmountable challenge- you might be able to store it in an oxygenated blood substitute like PFC, for instance. And of course after decades of work, advances in reattaching and regenerating nerves are being made that once seemed impossible. Nevertheless, I think due to sheer complexity a successful human brain transplant will not take place in the next 50 years, and if anything, the need for such a procedure will have been made obsolete by the possibility of transfer of human consciousness to digital media, as was suggested by another poster.