As the other responder stated, I did not say that because a kid goes to public school that their parents don't care.
If a kid goes to private school, it's a near certainty that their parents do care, a lot. If a kid goes to public school, their parents may or may not care. Mine cared enormously.
Here's the kicker: it only takes one or two attention-seeking kids to completely occupy a teacher's time, to the detriment of everyone else in the classroom.
Additionally, not all public schools are bad (either through untrained teachers, or unwilling to learn students).
This conversation, and my posting specifically, are about why, as a category, public schools would perform worse than private schools, as a category. The public high school that I went to had excellent academics and frequently beat Magnet schools and private schools in academic competitions. But that one anecdote doesn't alter the fact that in Ohio, public schools perform worse than private schools.
Perhaps you have yet to really understand how an object model that isn't driven by the constraints of the underlying RDMS can make the problem simpler.
There are vanishingly few cases where following the conventions of an RDBMS will limit your options in OO design. I have certainly come across instances where my initial object design didn't cleanly fit into relational tables, however, the issue was usually revealed to be a problem in the object design that would have caused even more problems later. In my experience, the exercise of co-designing a good database and a good object model usually results in a better overall design.
[OORDBMS's] can often make what is a very complex SQL query into a fairly simple [OQL construct]
I don't object to Object Query Languages and I absolutely agree that when you're looking at the data from an OO perspective, an OQL is very likely to be superior to SQL (if only because the type names will be preserved in the query). However, I get one or more decent OQL implementation with the ORM's I use, so I haven't had to give up OQL with an ORM solution so far.
What I'm objecting to is the loss of SQL and PL-SQL that occurs with OORDBMS's. Relational programming is an extra tool in the toolbox, and a very valuable one for the issues that surround large or complex datasets. Relational programming provides a proof/set theory/mathematical view of your data that is mostly orthogonal to how Object systems want you to think about data. Using an OORDBMS eliminates a whole way of thinking about data.
Perhaps there is more than one way to do it...
Exactly my point. Don't wedge yourself into a corner down the road where an integration that requires SQL can't possibly work just because you chose an OODBMS.
Most private (and parochial) schools get far better results at a lower cost per student. Why do you think that is?
There's no mystery there.
because private schools can discriminate based on their admission, performance, and behavior criteria (they don't have to take everyone)
because private schools have lower student:teacher ratios
because private schools are almost never NEA (union), which allows them to fire poor performing teachers much more quickly.
because the parents who choose to send their children to private schools tend to value education more than your average parent, which correlates with higher expectations and more support from home
Those four reasons lead to a less toxic environment in the classroom, which leads to better motivated teachers (even with the pay cut most private school teachers take), better motivated students, and: far better results.
Its a True OODBMS which is exactly the model that the ORM layers in frameworks like rails are attempting to simulate on a relational database.
That's a very silly statement.
I don't use an ORM to simulate an OODBMS. I use an ORM so that I have a system with both Object Oriented and Relational programming models and can use either one when appropriate. There are a lot of people who don't understand the value of Relational programming, and they think that those of us using RDBMS's would really prefer OODBMS's if only we could see the light...
Drink the kool-aid is more like.
I have yet to see a problem simple enough that I would choose to use an OODBMS over an RDBMS while simultaneously being interesting enough that I would bother working on it in the first place.
I originally had a second friend in the test. But the instructions to not wear the shirts around the friend seems like enough of a separation that no information can pass. I can see, however, that it is necessary to add another intermediary to prevent unconscious signals from ruining the test.
Personally, I have all kinds of allergies to detergents, and other artificial things in the environment, and it seems unfair to me that everyone dismisses this as crazy.
Not knowing anything about you, I speculate that there are three possibilities here: extreme sensitivity, subclinical allergies, and psychosomatic allergies.
Subclinical allergies: There are some quacks who do a bunch of skin-prick tests and claim that the reactions to small amounts of substances injected into your dermis can reveal not only skin allergies, but respiratory and food allergies too! If their tests reveal an allergy to dairy, but you love milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream and have never had a reaction, your allergy is subclinical and is even more dangerous. Presumably more dangerous to their fees because you might realize that there's no way to tell if your lungs or digestive tract are sensitized to a substance by examining the skin on your arm or back.
On subclinical allergies: if you don't have a proximal negative reaction to the substance, you're not allergic. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to make money from you. Check to see if their hand is in your pocket.
Extreme sensitivity: The reaction is real, the substance list is long, and the risk to your person is very high. You carry epi-pens because of your risk level. You've used epi-pens over the last year because of a serious reaction to something.
Psychosomatic allergies: A lot of people have physical reactions to their anxieties. Hives are a very real allergic response to stress. Just stress. To add to that, there are plenty of people who are just really high strung and who are worried about a lot of things, whether from OCD or simply thriving while complaining. Combine the two and you've got someone who has a true allergic reaction to the strangest things, often related to their own fears about cleanliness, hygene, toxins, etc. But that allergic pathway involves the conscious mind of the allergic person.
Based on your observation that you have many reactions to synthetic substances, I would first suspect this is the cause of your reactions. Most double-blind tests of sensitivity to synthetics reveals that people react to being told that something is synthetic, and not on whether it actually is synthetic. Which means that their allergic response is an anxiety response.
It's a bit of a pain to test, but not actually that bad if you really want to know. You'll need a friend, your washing machine (that has presumably only used natural detergents), someone else's washing machine, a synthetic detergent and a natural soap that you can't tell apart by smell, and a bunch of shirts. Put a number on each shirt's tag. Your friend should randomly take half the shirts, write down the numbers, and wash them with natural soap in your washing machine. Take other half of the shirts, write down the numbers, and wash with synthetic detergent in the other washing machine. Dry and fold all of the shirts, individually wrap them in paper, keep them separate. Now you go and ask for two shirts. You may get two natural, two synthetic, or one of each. So long as your friend is mixing it up and not telling you. Wear the two shirts, write down if you have a reaction, go get two more. Don't be wearing any of these shirts when you meet the friend to pick up two more, and don't tell your friend the results until you've worn all of the shirts. Now compare the list of shirts that you reacted to with the list of shirts washed in the synthetic detergent. If you normally get a reaction within minutes, this will be a quick test. If it normally takes a day or more, it could take several weeks.
That's a double-blind test and is basically the only way to tell if the response is psychosomatic or is based on an actual contact sensitivity. I strongly suspect that you'll discover you're really anxious about natural vs. synthetic and that's causing your skin to react.
And no one knows why cancer rates have increased so much in the last few years.
Current theory is that everyone "has cancer" as in everyone's immune system is always actively in the process of fighting, and usually defeating, multiple small cancerous tumors and single malignant cells. As our diagnostic and detection abilities improve, we're finding more and more of these low-grade tumors. So the "cancer rate" goes up.
These new cancers are also helpful for healthcare rhetoric: the healthcare industry is using these newly detectable low-grade cancers to argue that expensive detection and aggressive treatment are worth the cost. They state that mammograms, biopsies, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are largely responsible for a big increase in five-year survival rates from breast cancer. Except that the increase in five-year survival rates doesn't correlate with any of those cancer-fighting methods, but with the discovery of low-grade cancers that appear after menopause and take about 30 years to grow into macro-scale tumors. These low-grade cancers wouldn't have killed you in five years anyway, so for the healthcare industry to take credit for survival is disingenuous at best.
What hasn't changed is the death rate due to cancer. That's pretty much stayed the same for decades, once you control for known carcinogenic behaviors (smoking) and changes in other causes of death that provide more or less time for cancer to appear and develop.
Re:Time for Railroads to make a comeback
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Big Rigs Go High Tech
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· Score: 2, Interesting
However many times you only have one or a few containers going from place A to place B. So you wll need to wait till others are going from A to B as well, because the traibn is not going to drive just for you.
I used to work at a lumberyard in Dayton, Ohio that had a rail spur for deliveries of building supplies. The train did stop just for them. It would stop, cut out the two or three cars for them, then continue on. They paid for the spur to be installed, leased some rail equipment (a yard dog to maneuver the cars around) and also paid fees for the cars that were idle on the spur.
It was a money-making investment for them. It was also at least as fast as getting the supplies via truck. They used the same forklifts to move the supplies on and off the rail cars as they did for the trucks.
The problem with rail is that trucking is heavily subsidized by the interstate highway. Trucking companies get much more value from the highways than they pay in taxes and fees. So much more value that the railways, which have to maintain their own "roads", can only compete on the largest, bulkiest cargoes.
If you eat less energy than you expend you will obviously lose weight
This assertion is asinine and has been repeatedly shown to be unsustainable when evaluated over the medium to long term. When caloric restriction has been attempted in prison and military studies, even including the use of force to maintain the caloric deficit, desperate hunger eventually causes a dropout rate of about 90%. The subsequent rebound in weight returned most people to their previous steady-state weight within six months. The problem isn't portion size. That hypothesis is simply wrong.
I'll even explain exactly what's wrong with the hypothesis: the portion-size hypothesis has as one of it's assumptions that hunger is a conscious process primarily regulated by stomach tension (fullness) and the rational, thinking part of our mind. The second assumption in the portion-size hypothesis is that fat people have repeatedly ignored the stomach tension "satiation" message and therefore consume more calories than are needed.
The fact is that hunger and satiation are instead several competing processes, including stomach tension, but primarily driven by our parasympathetic and endocrine systems and our conscious brain can basically 1) choose what to consume to satisfy the hunger message and 2) choose to ignore hunger and/or satiation messages IN THE SHORT TERM.
So something else is going on to make Americans fatter over the past 30 years. If people were merely ignoring satiation and thereby overeating, it should be easy to limit their caloric intake to what they should need. But it isn't that easy. People are constantly trying that approach and failing. Also, whatever has changed should correlate with something that started about 30 years ago.
One more gigantic hint: Fat and protein make you satiated (rich food, etc.) by controlling hunger hormones. Carbohydrates do not interact with these hormones, meaning that stomach tension is the only limiting factor for carbohydrate intake. This metabolic difference is the lynchpin of weight management.
If you can figure out the solution to the problem, fantastic. If not, take a look at Good Calories, Bad Calories and the solution to the mystery of diet and body composition is spelled out (along with an explanation of how our public policymakers have become complicit in the fattening of America).
Um, not to defend BMI, because I agree it's a moronically bad measure of health, but to be precise, a BMI 24 is just shy of being classified as "overweight" (which starts at 25). Obese is defined as a BMI of 30 or more.
Some other tidbits:
Men tend to be happiest with a BMI between 21 and 23.
Women tend to be happiest with a BMI between 18 and 20.
BMI does not differentiate between muscle and fat, so the guy (or girl) who works out a lot and is fairly muscular is penalized on the BMI scale, despite having very little fat. A much more useful metric is body fat percentage, except that it's rather expensive and annoying to measure accurately.
I have a $100 scale that does an electrostatic measure of body fat, but it's accuracy is suspect just based on the observation that the measurement is different based on whether my bladder is full or whether I've had a recent shower, and finally it's suspect because my friend's scale consistently says my body fat is 3% higher than my scale.
At my previous office, the building was new, so the HVAC system still had a few glitches here and there. The big glitch was the one that turned it on full blast, full cold at 6:30pm and off at 7:00am, but couldn't be turned on at any other time of day (so at 4:30pm in the summer, it was stagnant and sweltering in the building, but you needed to bundle up in winter clothes by 7:00pm).
This did basically end late nights at the office, but wasn't quite what we were hoping for from a very shiny, very new, very expensive office building.
We mentioned that it seemed to be an am/pm issue, maybe the clocks were off? We were told that we weren't HVAC engineers and that we needed to let the experts deal with it. For nine months, we were told this while we escalated weekly complaints through corporate management, leasing company management, building management, etc. During this time various fixes were tried that changed the intensity and temperature of the evening AC, but never fixed the issue.
Every time there was a change, however, our ticket was closed and it was claimed to be fixed. Through all of this, the AC continued to turn on at 6:30pm and shut off at 7:00am.
At the end of this nine-month period, they finally got the AC to run during the day. Blessed thanks to HVAC! When we asked about the fix, we were told that the clocks had been set wrong and that we should thank the building manager for figuring out such a strange and difficult to solve issue.
My big objection to open workspaces is the lack of noise control. As a creative worker (software developer), I get most of my job done by switching back and forth between two modes: discussion mode and focused mode.
Discussion mode is typically animated and noisy; happens at random unpredictable times; most frequently involves the same one or two people, occasionally involves others; often needs a whiteboard; etc.
Focus mode is the rest of the time, mostly happens at my desk, and I need quiet in order to be at my most productive. No music, no white noise, no intercom, no fax machine beeping that it's out of paper, no cell phones with hip-hop ring tones ringing at full volume, no animated discussions happening "right over there".
IMHO, open office plans are the worst of all worlds for creative workers. When I'm in discussion mode, I'm bothering everyone else. And because everyone else needs to have those discussions too, it's nearly impossible for me to really get into focus mode. I don't need to be alone in an office, but the ability to close the door around two or three or four people who can be noisy without disrupting others or be quiet and get some creative work done is not optional, it's essential. If you can't do that, you just turned down the productivity knob by some significant fraction.
C.S. Lewis said that based on biblical writings, Jesus must be one of the following 3 things: the Lord, a liar, or a lunatic.
There are still more alternatives than just that list.
Jesus may have been misquoted.
Jesus may have been several early leaders, and somewhere between 34 A.D. and 50-200 A.D. (when the Gospels were actually written), the story got "simplified".
Jesus may have been fabricated by the pre-gospel Christian storytellers, and what we have in the Gospels is a "best of" collection of stories about an apocryphal idealized founder of a religion.
My progressive scan DVD player over component video to my 40" 1080p television looks good. My HD-DVD player upconverting a DVD over HDMI to my 40" 1080p television looks absolutely fantastic.
Hypocrisy is the worst offense against trust and righteousness that can be made.
Their argument regarding intellectual property is one of righteousness. Their hypocrisy reveals that they are merely a revenue maximizing engine attempting to extract as much profit as possible from a set of rules that they choose to pay attention to only when it suits their self-interest.
The larger discussion about morality, legality and license/copyright violations is fairly complex, but my opinion is that that issue is extremely far away from right/wrong or ethical/unethical, and is instead only in the realm of legal/illegal. The act of making an unauthorized copy of a creative work is illegal, but not immoral (IMHO). If you choose to make such a copy, you're assuming the responsibility for the chance that you may be detected and sued by the **AA, but that's about it. Nobody feels bad about it, and quite honestly, I don't think anyone should feel bad.
Sony, on the other hand, has been pursuing severe penalties for the exact same acts that they are also guilty of. So they're not only acting illegally, but they are also immoral because of their hypocrisy.
however the actual sex talk probably should wait till around puberty
I think that waiting until the hormones are racing through their body is way too late. I was intensely curious about where I came from by the age of 8. I was also masturbating by the age of 6 (practice early! practice often!). I may have been precocious, but I feel strongly that waiting until the edge of puberty is waiting too long.
My mom told me all about the birds and the bees shortly after my eighth birthday at my request. I remember thinking that the descriptions of sex in her words and in the books all seemed quite hairy. Didn't seem very appealing at the time. But when others had questions years down the road, I was usually the one answering.
My own daughter will find out about the birds and the bees before puberty. I do hope she asks her mom, though...
You can build ultra-high speed and/or ultra-high efficiency gated logic with microscopic superconductors. Current superconducting circuits put gallium-arsenide to shame with much lower power density (power density of the isolated circuit, not including the refrigeration).
This invention may mean that you can include the cost of containment and still come out faster and lower power.
My HD-DVD player does an absolutely fantastic job of upscaling regular DVD's to play on my 40" 1080p LCD display. I definitely can tell the difference between HD DVD's and SD DVD's, but it looks so much better than DVD's ever looked from my previous progressive scan component-out DVD player that I'm very happy.
I'm not at all upset that I bought that player. The fact that it happens to play HD DVD's is almost beside the point. I only bought two HD DVD's, and I'll rebuy them on Blu Ray when I eventually go for that format.
I just bought a Lenovo T61p to replace my beloved IBM R50p (along with a T61 for my wife) and I had the exact same fear. Fear not. If anything, the design of the new ThinkPads is even better than the IBMs of yore. The build quality is equivalent. The keyboard is fan-f'ing-tastic. The screens are good, but the UXGA screen on my R50p has a better vertical viewing angle and is brighter than the WUXGA on the new machine. The older UXGA screen is also a little better than the WSXGA+ screen on my wife's T61.
As a counterpoint, a friend decided to save a few bucks and bought a Lenovo 3000 instead of a ThinkPad. As might be expected, you get what you pay for. The 3000 series models do not seem to be at the same quality level as the ThinkPads.
Final bit of advice, if you want the 1920x1200 screen, save yourself the money on the T61p and just upgrade the 15" T61 to WUXGA. It's still got plenty of horsepower to drive the screen and you'll save about $200 with the cheaper (but still NVidia) graphics.
You seem to be confusing skepticism with rejection
So do most self-described post-modernists. That proportion can be increased from "most" to "all" if we limit the set to people who aren't full-time philosophers.
Being critical and/or skeptical is wonderful. One of the first adjectives I use to describe myself is "skeptical". But this is not what the strategy of any post-modernist I've had a chance to speak with so far. All of the post-modernists I encounter dismiss instead of criticize as some sort of argumentative shortcut (presumably leaving the criticism as an exercise to the listener). The real issue is that they aren't critical of why they choose to dismiss their straw men in favor of their own preferred epistemologies.
And real post-modernist authors (the ones who don't take argumentative short cuts) spend most of their time explaining why they aren't saying much. Which is why I believe they've boxed themselves into a small and uninteresting corner of the epistemological multiverse.
So my original (humbly opinionated) description remains.
in this post-modern society, i thought it was wrong to attack anyones bullshit beliefs.
IMHO, post-modernists are highly-educated, effete, self-contradictory nihilists.
According to Lyotard, post-modernism can be defined as "incredulity towards metanarratives". Where metanarratives are attempts to order and explain knowledge and experience. Simple enough, I suppose. Unless you happen to notice that that definition of post-modernism is itself a metanarrative, albeit an entirely negative metanarrative.
So post-modernists should be skeptical of metanarratives (including this one). Leaving nothing to say. As such, post-modernism is an entirely worthless branch of philosophical thought. The only logical behavior that can be directed as a result of post-modernist thought is to avoid making any assertions at all.
Scientologists can believe whatever they want. Attacking their beliefs is the same as attacking Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Budhists, what ever.
Sure, they can believe exactly what they want. It's when they harm people and/or prevent free exit from their organization that it becomes very important to object and object loudly.
There's no universal right or wrong in a post-modern world.
Your assertion may be correct, but it does not substantiate your previous point. There are behaviors that more right and more wrong than other behaviors. Judged by me on the basis of their behaviors, Scientologists are more wrong than the Methodists (to just pull a random name from a hat full of religions).
Actually, IMNSHO, Scientology is pretty much as close to evil as can be observed. They do nothing but destroy.
I've never really seen evolution demonstrated. I've heard plenty of explanations and leaps of logic attached to it, but I've never actually seen anything evolve.
How do you think murder investigators figure things out? Do you think that they try to observe the murder next time and then get him for that one? Or do they extract from the available evidence an explanation of what happened that is 1) possible, 2) consistent, and 3) conclusive.
Second, scientists have observed evolution happening. Many times. There's plenty of evidence of evolution in the appearance, behavior, and DNA of recently living and currently living things (including yours). There's even more evidence of evolution lying around in fossils, though very few observations from fossils are used to support modern theories of evolution (because there's much better evidence elsewhere).
Look, just because you didn't see it happen doesn't mean it didn't happen. You never met your great-great-grandfather either, but you're still pretty certain that someone existed who fit the description.
I don't know who moderated the parent a troll, but you need to inform yourself. Evolution is an observed fact. Natural selection is a scientific theory that provides a comprehensive explanation for the observed facts of evolution.
What most people are doing when they say "Evolution is just a theory" is confusing hypothesis with theory. Or, they are confusing the word theory in common parlance (conjecture) with scientific theory.
A scientific hypothesis is defined as: "A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation."
A scientific theory, on the other hand is defined as: "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
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If a kid goes to private school, it's a near certainty that their parents do care, a lot.
If a kid goes to public school, their parents may or may not care. Mine cared enormously.
Here's the kicker: it only takes one or two attention-seeking kids to completely occupy a teacher's time, to the detriment of everyone else in the classroom.This conversation, and my posting specifically, are about why, as a category, public schools would perform worse than private schools, as a category. The public high school that I went to had excellent academics and frequently beat Magnet schools and private schools in academic competitions. But that one anecdote doesn't alter the fact that in Ohio, public schools perform worse than private schools.
What I'm objecting to is the loss of SQL and PL-SQL that occurs with OORDBMS's. Relational programming is an extra tool in the toolbox, and a very valuable one for the issues that surround large or complex datasets. Relational programming provides a proof/set theory/mathematical view of your data that is mostly orthogonal to how Object systems want you to think about data. Using an OORDBMS eliminates a whole way of thinking about data.Exactly my point. Don't wedge yourself into a corner down the road where an integration that requires SQL can't possibly work just because you chose an OODBMS.
There's no mystery there.
Those four reasons lead to a less toxic environment in the classroom, which leads to better motivated teachers (even with the pay cut most private school teachers take), better motivated students, and: far better results.
I don't use an ORM to simulate an OODBMS. I use an ORM so that I have a system with both Object Oriented and Relational programming models and can use either one when appropriate. There are a lot of people who don't understand the value of Relational programming, and they think that those of us using RDBMS's would really prefer OODBMS's if only we could see the light...
Drink the kool-aid is more like.
I have yet to see a problem simple enough that I would choose to use an OODBMS over an RDBMS while simultaneously being interesting enough that I would bother working on it in the first place.
But maybe I'm just being grumpy. Bah.
I originally had a second friend in the test. But the instructions to not wear the shirts around the friend seems like enough of a separation that no information can pass. I can see, however, that it is necessary to add another intermediary to prevent unconscious signals from ruining the test.
Subclinical allergies: There are some quacks who do a bunch of skin-prick tests and claim that the reactions to small amounts of substances injected into your dermis can reveal not only skin allergies, but respiratory and food allergies too! If their tests reveal an allergy to dairy, but you love milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream and have never had a reaction, your allergy is subclinical and is even more dangerous. Presumably more dangerous to their fees because you might realize that there's no way to tell if your lungs or digestive tract are sensitized to a substance by examining the skin on your arm or back.
On subclinical allergies: if you don't have a proximal negative reaction to the substance, you're not allergic. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to make money from you. Check to see if their hand is in your pocket.
Extreme sensitivity: The reaction is real, the substance list is long, and the risk to your person is very high. You carry epi-pens because of your risk level. You've used epi-pens over the last year because of a serious reaction to something.
Psychosomatic allergies: A lot of people have physical reactions to their anxieties. Hives are a very real allergic response to stress. Just stress. To add to that, there are plenty of people who are just really high strung and who are worried about a lot of things, whether from OCD or simply thriving while complaining. Combine the two and you've got someone who has a true allergic reaction to the strangest things, often related to their own fears about cleanliness, hygene, toxins, etc. But that allergic pathway involves the conscious mind of the allergic person.
Based on your observation that you have many reactions to synthetic substances, I would first suspect this is the cause of your reactions. Most double-blind tests of sensitivity to synthetics reveals that people react to being told that something is synthetic, and not on whether it actually is synthetic. Which means that their allergic response is an anxiety response.
It's a bit of a pain to test, but not actually that bad if you really want to know. You'll need a friend, your washing machine (that has presumably only used natural detergents), someone else's washing machine, a synthetic detergent and a natural soap that you can't tell apart by smell, and a bunch of shirts. Put a number on each shirt's tag. Your friend should randomly take half the shirts, write down the numbers, and wash them with natural soap in your washing machine. Take other half of the shirts, write down the numbers, and wash with synthetic detergent in the other washing machine. Dry and fold all of the shirts, individually wrap them in paper, keep them separate. Now you go and ask for two shirts. You may get two natural, two synthetic, or one of each. So long as your friend is mixing it up and not telling you. Wear the two shirts, write down if you have a reaction, go get two more. Don't be wearing any of these shirts when you meet the friend to pick up two more, and don't tell your friend the results until you've worn all of the shirts. Now compare the list of shirts that you reacted to with the list of shirts washed in the synthetic detergent. If you normally get a reaction within minutes, this will be a quick test. If it normally takes a day or more, it could take several weeks.
That's a double-blind test and is basically the only way to tell if the response is psychosomatic or is based on an actual contact sensitivity. I strongly suspect that you'll discover you're really anxious about natural vs. synthetic and that's causing your skin to react.
These new cancers are also helpful for healthcare rhetoric: the healthcare industry is using these newly detectable low-grade cancers to argue that expensive detection and aggressive treatment are worth the cost. They state that mammograms, biopsies, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy are largely responsible for a big increase in five-year survival rates from breast cancer. Except that the increase in five-year survival rates doesn't correlate with any of those cancer-fighting methods, but with the discovery of low-grade cancers that appear after menopause and take about 30 years to grow into macro-scale tumors. These low-grade cancers wouldn't have killed you in five years anyway, so for the healthcare industry to take credit for survival is disingenuous at best.
What hasn't changed is the death rate due to cancer. That's pretty much stayed the same for decades, once you control for known carcinogenic behaviors (smoking) and changes in other causes of death that provide more or less time for cancer to appear and develop.
It was a money-making investment for them. It was also at least as fast as getting the supplies via truck. They used the same forklifts to move the supplies on and off the rail cars as they did for the trucks.
The problem with rail is that trucking is heavily subsidized by the interstate highway. Trucking companies get much more value from the highways than they pay in taxes and fees. So much more value that the railways, which have to maintain their own "roads", can only compete on the largest, bulkiest cargoes.
I'll even explain exactly what's wrong with the hypothesis: the portion-size hypothesis has as one of it's assumptions that hunger is a conscious process primarily regulated by stomach tension (fullness) and the rational, thinking part of our mind. The second assumption in the portion-size hypothesis is that fat people have repeatedly ignored the stomach tension "satiation" message and therefore consume more calories than are needed.
The fact is that hunger and satiation are instead several competing processes, including stomach tension, but primarily driven by our parasympathetic and endocrine systems and our conscious brain can basically 1) choose what to consume to satisfy the hunger message and 2) choose to ignore hunger and/or satiation messages IN THE SHORT TERM.
So something else is going on to make Americans fatter over the past 30 years. If people were merely ignoring satiation and thereby overeating, it should be easy to limit their caloric intake to what they should need. But it isn't that easy. People are constantly trying that approach and failing. Also, whatever has changed should correlate with something that started about 30 years ago.
One more gigantic hint: Fat and protein make you satiated (rich food, etc.) by controlling hunger hormones. Carbohydrates do not interact with these hormones, meaning that stomach tension is the only limiting factor for carbohydrate intake. This metabolic difference is the lynchpin of weight management.
If you can figure out the solution to the problem, fantastic. If not, take a look at Good Calories, Bad Calories and the solution to the mystery of diet and body composition is spelled out (along with an explanation of how our public policymakers have become complicit in the fattening of America).
Um, not to defend BMI, because I agree it's a moronically bad measure of health, but to be precise, a BMI 24 is just shy of being classified as "overweight" (which starts at 25). Obese is defined as a BMI of 30 or more.
Some other tidbits:
Men tend to be happiest with a BMI between 21 and 23.
Women tend to be happiest with a BMI between 18 and 20.
BMI does not differentiate between muscle and fat, so the guy (or girl) who works out a lot and is fairly muscular is penalized on the BMI scale, despite having very little fat. A much more useful metric is body fat percentage, except that it's rather expensive and annoying to measure accurately.
I have a $100 scale that does an electrostatic measure of body fat, but it's accuracy is suspect just based on the observation that the measurement is different based on whether my bladder is full or whether I've had a recent shower, and finally it's suspect because my friend's scale consistently says my body fat is 3% higher than my scale.
Anyway, fun with numbers.
At my previous office, the building was new, so the HVAC system still had a few glitches here and there. The big glitch was the one that turned it on full blast, full cold at 6:30pm and off at 7:00am, but couldn't be turned on at any other time of day (so at 4:30pm in the summer, it was stagnant and sweltering in the building, but you needed to bundle up in winter clothes by 7:00pm).
This did basically end late nights at the office, but wasn't quite what we were hoping for from a very shiny, very new, very expensive office building.
We mentioned that it seemed to be an am/pm issue, maybe the clocks were off? We were told that we weren't HVAC engineers and that we needed to let the experts deal with it. For nine months, we were told this while we escalated weekly complaints through corporate management, leasing company management, building management, etc. During this time various fixes were tried that changed the intensity and temperature of the evening AC, but never fixed the issue.
Every time there was a change, however, our ticket was closed and it was claimed to be fixed. Through all of this, the AC continued to turn on at 6:30pm and shut off at 7:00am.
At the end of this nine-month period, they finally got the AC to run during the day. Blessed thanks to HVAC! When we asked about the fix, we were told that the clocks had been set wrong and that we should thank the building manager for figuring out such a strange and difficult to solve issue.
*sigh*
My big objection to open workspaces is the lack of noise control. As a creative worker (software developer), I get most of my job done by switching back and forth between two modes: discussion mode and focused mode.
Discussion mode is typically animated and noisy; happens at random unpredictable times; most frequently involves the same one or two people, occasionally involves others; often needs a whiteboard; etc.
Focus mode is the rest of the time, mostly happens at my desk, and I need quiet in order to be at my most productive. No music, no white noise, no intercom, no fax machine beeping that it's out of paper, no cell phones with hip-hop ring tones ringing at full volume, no animated discussions happening "right over there".
IMHO, open office plans are the worst of all worlds for creative workers. When I'm in discussion mode, I'm bothering everyone else. And because everyone else needs to have those discussions too, it's nearly impossible for me to really get into focus mode. I don't need to be alone in an office, but the ability to close the door around two or three or four people who can be noisy without disrupting others or be quiet and get some creative work done is not optional, it's essential. If you can't do that, you just turned down the productivity knob by some significant fraction.
I've heard this stated as "A people hire A people. B people hire C people."
My progressive scan DVD player over component video to my 40" 1080p television looks good.
My HD-DVD player upconverting a DVD over HDMI to my 40" 1080p television looks absolutely fantastic.
Your mileage may vary.
Hypocrisy is the worst offense against trust and righteousness that can be made.
Their argument regarding intellectual property is one of righteousness. Their hypocrisy reveals that they are merely a revenue maximizing engine attempting to extract as much profit as possible from a set of rules that they choose to pay attention to only when it suits their self-interest.
The larger discussion about morality, legality and license/copyright violations is fairly complex, but my opinion is that that issue is extremely far away from right/wrong or ethical/unethical, and is instead only in the realm of legal/illegal. The act of making an unauthorized copy of a creative work is illegal, but not immoral (IMHO). If you choose to make such a copy, you're assuming the responsibility for the chance that you may be detected and sued by the **AA, but that's about it. Nobody feels bad about it, and quite honestly, I don't think anyone should feel bad.
Sony, on the other hand, has been pursuing severe penalties for the exact same acts that they are also guilty of. So they're not only acting illegally, but they are also immoral because of their hypocrisy.
My mom told me all about the birds and the bees shortly after my eighth birthday at my request. I remember thinking that the descriptions of sex in her words and in the books all seemed quite hairy. Didn't seem very appealing at the time. But when others had questions years down the road, I was usually the one answering.
My own daughter will find out about the birds and the bees before puberty. I do hope she asks her mom, though...
You can build ultra-high speed and/or ultra-high efficiency gated logic with microscopic superconductors. Current superconducting circuits put gallium-arsenide to shame with much lower power density (power density of the isolated circuit, not including the refrigeration).
This invention may mean that you can include the cost of containment and still come out faster and lower power.
My HD-DVD player does an absolutely fantastic job of upscaling regular DVD's to play on my 40" 1080p LCD display. I definitely can tell the difference between HD DVD's and SD DVD's, but it looks so much better than DVD's ever looked from my previous progressive scan component-out DVD player that I'm very happy.
I'm not at all upset that I bought that player. The fact that it happens to play HD DVD's is almost beside the point. I only bought two HD DVD's, and I'll rebuy them on Blu Ray when I eventually go for that format.
I just bought a Lenovo T61p to replace my beloved IBM R50p (along with a T61 for my wife) and I had the exact same fear. Fear not. If anything, the design of the new ThinkPads is even better than the IBMs of yore. The build quality is equivalent. The keyboard is fan-f'ing-tastic. The screens are good, but the UXGA screen on my R50p has a better vertical viewing angle and is brighter than the WUXGA on the new machine. The older UXGA screen is also a little better than the WSXGA+ screen on my wife's T61.
As a counterpoint, a friend decided to save a few bucks and bought a Lenovo 3000 instead of a ThinkPad. As might be expected, you get what you pay for. The 3000 series models do not seem to be at the same quality level as the ThinkPads.
Final bit of advice, if you want the 1920x1200 screen, save yourself the money on the T61p and just upgrade the 15" T61 to WUXGA. It's still got plenty of horsepower to drive the screen and you'll save about $200 with the cheaper (but still NVidia) graphics.
Being critical and/or skeptical is wonderful. One of the first adjectives I use to describe myself is "skeptical". But this is not what the strategy of any post-modernist I've had a chance to speak with so far. All of the post-modernists I encounter dismiss instead of criticize as some sort of argumentative shortcut (presumably leaving the criticism as an exercise to the listener). The real issue is that they aren't critical of why they choose to dismiss their straw men in favor of their own preferred epistemologies.
And real post-modernist authors (the ones who don't take argumentative short cuts) spend most of their time explaining why they aren't saying much. Which is why I believe they've boxed themselves into a small and uninteresting corner of the epistemological multiverse.
So my original (humbly opinionated) description remains.
According to Lyotard, post-modernism can be defined as "incredulity towards metanarratives". Where metanarratives are attempts to order and explain knowledge and experience. Simple enough, I suppose. Unless you happen to notice that that definition of post-modernism is itself a metanarrative, albeit an entirely negative metanarrative.
So post-modernists should be skeptical of metanarratives (including this one). Leaving nothing to say. As such, post-modernism is an entirely worthless branch of philosophical thought. The only logical behavior that can be directed as a result of post-modernist thought is to avoid making any assertions at all.Sure, they can believe exactly what they want. It's when they harm people and/or prevent free exit from their organization that it becomes very important to object and object loudly.Your assertion may be correct, but it does not substantiate your previous point. There are behaviors that more right and more wrong than other behaviors. Judged by me on the basis of their behaviors, Scientologists are more wrong than the Methodists (to just pull a random name from a hat full of religions).
Actually, IMNSHO, Scientology is pretty much as close to evil as can be observed. They do nothing but destroy.
How do you think murder investigators figure things out? Do you think that they try to observe the murder next time and then get him for that one? Or do they extract from the available evidence an explanation of what happened that is 1) possible, 2) consistent, and 3) conclusive.
Second, scientists have observed evolution happening. Many times. There's plenty of evidence of evolution in the appearance, behavior, and DNA of recently living and currently living things (including yours). There's even more evidence of evolution lying around in fossils, though very few observations from fossils are used to support modern theories of evolution (because there's much better evidence elsewhere).
Look, just because you didn't see it happen doesn't mean it didn't happen. You never met your great-great-grandfather either, but you're still pretty certain that someone existed who fit the description.
The observations are facts. The widely accepted model that explains the observations and allows predictions of future observations is the theory.
Evolution is both an observed fact and a theory, though I prefer to name the theory "Natural Selection" instead of Evolution.
I don't know who moderated the parent a troll, but you need to inform yourself. Evolution is an observed fact. Natural selection is a scientific theory that provides a comprehensive explanation for the observed facts of evolution.
What most people are doing when they say "Evolution is just a theory" is confusing hypothesis with theory. Or, they are confusing the word theory in common parlance (conjecture) with scientific theory.
A scientific hypothesis is defined as: "A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation."
A scientific theory, on the other hand is defined as: "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."