How many times have you been in this situation: many of your co-workers and friends have gone to see a movie and everyone seems to be chattering about it. You find yourself left out of lunch discussion or not getting jokes because your missed it. The problem is, the movie just doesn't sound interesting to you, or you don't have time, or you're waiting for the DVD release. Now replace "movie" with "video game" or "book" or maybe even "technical paper outside your area of expertise."
Spoilers in Wikipedia allow me to be "in" on every piece of pop culture that I don't particularly care about without commitment of time and money. If I decide I want to see the whole picture, I'll check it out. Usually, though, all you need to know are the bullet points!
My parents had a theory about this. When I was young, Ritalin was the biggest fad. Better than half the elementary school was on it, and every day they would line up around the corner to get their medication. Further, it was recommended for nearly every child in the school whenever they got in trouble of any kind.
The contributing factors that made the perfect storm of Ritalin were as follows: -The drug company wanted to sell as much Ritalin as possible. -The company bought legislation that classified ADHD as a learning disability, so that schools got more money for each child who was diagnosed. -The same legislation meant that if you qualified for government assistance, you'd get more money for each child that was on Ritalin.
So the school now became the company's taxpayer-financed agent to push Ritalin, a drug required long-term to treat a condition that no one quite understood. The school had a financial incentive to have the psychologist diagnose everyone he could with ADHD, and if you were on welfare they could extend an incentive to you as well. I can offer one other piece of evidence: I had a friend whose parents did not want to give him these drugs under any circumstance as they understood neither ADHD nor the effects of the drug. When they were pressuring the family to medicate him, they handed his parents a stack of teacher's notes ostensibly to show he's been acting up. As my friend's parents looked at the notes, they noticed that some of the notes had inconsistencies such as wrong gender (she vs. he) and wrong name. The administration making the Ritalin sales pitch had taken notes about a child with ADHD and simply changed the name on them! At this point, they pulled my friend out of school and moved to a different area.
Ultimately, I'm not surprised that this is the case. I'm only surprised that it took so long for people to see through the ruse. I'm happy that my parents did, and sad that most of my friends' parents could not be convinced that ADHD was for my generation a huge drug-pushing scam!
Suppose Apple would like to give away a free or reduced-price iPhone, for instance. A user not willing to pay for the ad-free iPhone would now be a potential customer if they were willing to deal with periodic advertisements with Apple recouping the lost hardware profits from the advertising. From a consumer's point of view, this is just another option: if you don't want to pay for or use ad-subsidized hardware, pay for the ad-free version or buy something else.
I installed this on my work and home PC with no obvious problems, and was really pleased with the responsiveness.
It wasn't until later that I realized that Flash no longer responds to mouse clicks. It makes YouTube and Pandora hard to use, and other Flash apps nearly impossible to use. A workaround was recommended, which unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on loading a Flash app.
The idea is that if your immune system learns to recognize an antigen similar to, but not sufficiently similar to, the antigen of a new threat, then your body may mount a less effective immune defense against the variant than it already knows. In other words, your body learns to fight seasonal strain of flu, then encounters similar H1N1. Now your body produces antibodies to the original flu, which bind more weakly to H1N1 proteins than an antibody that would have been made especially for H1N1, leading to an overall more severe infection than you otherwise would have had.
I was at the American Physical Society meeting last week, and was initially surprised that the distribution of laptops was about 1/3 each Windows, Linux (usually Ubuntu), and Apple. I would have expected that given the density of users UNIX clusters there that Linux would have been preferred, but then I remembered that Apple has a UNIX terminal out of the box. Windows, by comparison, needed a separate SSH client and XWin32 in order to work remotely, and even then didn't work well. It was the combination of compatibility with the systems that I worked with and compatibility with existing hardware that got me to switch to Linux, but in the sense that in most people's eyes the OS choices are Windows and MacOS, I can see why a lot of grad students and faculty would choose Apple.
Nonetheless, I doubt that the academic crowd is exactly the demographic Ballmer wants to cater to. There's just not enough of us to matter.
I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was trying to say quite the opposite--since they are not mutually exclusive, people could simultaneously become more religious but reject the brand of religious fundamentalism that tries to play the role of science since it fails to produce useful results.
I agree that people are likely to become more religious in the tumultous future ahead of us, but I simultaneously expect their influence in terms of science to decline. I believe that they became more influential in the last couple of decades mostly because the enormous surpluses allowed inefficient ideas to survive on the dime of a few religious think tanks. The fact that there is precisely zero demand for flood geologists or creationist antibiotics coupled with reduced tithing from congregations is likely to silence the religious lobby very quickly.
Again, I am far more optimistic about the US scientific workforce. My view here may be skewed from being a graduate student in a school full of brilliant and ambitious young scientists, but I personally know several who went on to start new business in recent years. Myself and a friend are currently in the process of starting one of our own. I would cast the recession in a different light as an opportunity to get better deals from suppliers, hire workers for relatively low wages, and to eat the lunch of much larger companies that have failed. An interesting note is that our department's number of applicants shrinks during economic boom times, and grows during busts. In fact, according to our department head, the number of applicants spikes two or three years in advance of a recession. This may be an artifact of my note above: when efficiency is not at a premium, the market is a lot less interested in advanced science.
So yes, I have looked around--and I understand that your opinion is an artifact of what you see every day. I hope it gives you some encouragement that while many people are losing their jobs, new work is already springing up in the ashes of the old.
While I agree that hard times do push people towards being more religious, I'm a somewhat more hopeful for the prospects of science in the US. While I know very little about the history leading up to the Dark Ages (Roman Empire Collapses->???->Renaissance), and I've never been to anywhere ending in "stan", the key difference between the US today and those situations is that in the latter there is very little in terms of science providing useful and immediate answers. We have an infrastructure of research labs in place as well a world-class population of scientists and engineers here and now that can give people a viable alternative to fundamentalism, and I am convinced that in the event of a "put up or shut up" situation that Biblical literalists will be unable to compete.
On the plus side, the resolution isn't forbidding that Dawkins speak. Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.
"Whereas the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded university..."
I read that the US has lost 650,000 jobs in the last month. Maybe enough bad debt, cold and hunger will finally get people to realize that real science can be a vehicle to productive jobs and accept that their 6000 year old Earth hypothesis doesn't hold water.
The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).
Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.
I thought there was no way that Y2K9 would affect me, then the girlfriend asked me to check on a flight for her--and I found that United Airlines' website returns 2008 flight data if you search for flight information for Jan. 1 or Jan. 2 2009! How amateur is that?
On many parts of a substation, insulation wouldn't matter.
A friend of mine is the chief engineer for an array of power plants in the area. Apparently he once found the exploded body of a guy who had opened up a 20,000V feeder and was using a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, both insulated. He was dead before the tools ever came into contact with the transformer coils.
I believe three limbs were broken off by the arc, one arm and both legs, all cauterized so that there was surprisingly little blood.
The copper thieves have been very successful though: in what he believes was an inside job, some people entered a mothballed plant through a tunnel from a nearby substation and took about $20,000 worth of copper from lines that came directly off of the generator. I believe there were tens of feet of this wire, about 1-2" in diameter, that they removed in chunks and transported out underground.
The worst case, however, was a bit more scary. At one point some copper thieves got into the same mothballed plant, found a locked door, turned on a forklift and rammed the door with the forklift until the forklift fell down some nearby stairs and got stuck. DHS then got interested in the plant since had the thief made it into this room, he would have been able to shut down power for the entire city of Pittsburgh (the plant was mothballed, but the substation controls in this room were active)! Now the plant's fitted with IR cameras and anyone who gets spotted is likely to be answering some questions courtesy of the DHS cowboys.
I'm sorry, but that's got to be one of the most naive things I've ever heard. Considering all polymers, there are arbitrarily many different permutations of the known elements available in a pure substance and then considering all mixtures thereof we have more different concoctions than can be enumerated. While certainly the properties of many of these have been well-understood or could be inferred from known experiment, there are many that await only someone with imagination to discover and apply.
Reading your analogy about games, http://www.newgrounds.com/ might also be an eye-opener. Many of those games are whipped up by talented hobbyists but still get a lot of play.
Back when I was in elementary school, we actually had a really good gifted program. You had to take two separate IQ tests with different examiners and have a "sufficiently high" IQ both times to get in. The tests were several hours long apiece, and little toy puzzles were involved amid math and vocabulary. They never told you the results, but for several hundred kids here were only a handful of students in the program--twelve I think. It was a big deal when we got someone new. They were unbelievably bright and the program excused you from some classes to read books of your choosing, got you access to independent tutors (I learned algebra in third grade), and brought you to a number of quiz-style and little engineering competitions.
Then some parents complained, and they lowered the standards so that anyone could get in if their parents called and asked.
I eventually stopped going because the program became so prohibitively overcrowded with people who never wanted to do any of the high-level activities. They wanted to sit and talk. At that point, it boasted as many people that barely qualified at an average skill level much less a gifted skill level. Bottom line is, every parent wants their kid to be the a genius. Everyone can tell you that placing a below-average student in a room with geniuses will not make this a reality. I guess the idea is that if your child receives the treatment developed for the best of the best, or becomes friends with much brighter students, maybe your child will have some extra opportunities to improve. It's a large-scale prisoner's dilemma: if the better and worse students are separate and receive the training suited to their abilities, they both do better. If just one or two of the average students were mixed with the best ones, it might benefit them immensely. However, when all of the students are aggregated together, no one receives training best suited to their skill level and everyone suffers.
That's why I don't have much hope of this situation ever being rectified. In the prisoner's dilemma, everyone ends up uniformly crappy.
In my years of playing pinball whenever possible (which was not very often), I broke a total of five machines while playing. Four of these five instances were caused during multiball sequences. In the other instance, the machine lit on fire.
I guess the engineers are good at designing a table where the system can survive a single impact or a ball cannot go somewhere it's not supposed to alone, but when multiple balls are involved it's a lot less predictable. On the "Jurassic Park" table, for example, during multiball the T-Rex bent down to pick up a hapless ball, and then in an attempt to save its friend the other ball ricocheted off of a drop target and lodged... directly on the joint on T-Rex's neck. Something on the T-Rex snapped and it could not stand back up, ensuring that all balls hitting its corpse would roll directly in to the sink. On a "Harley-Davidson" table, I hit three balls into the same hole at the same time, and the actuator was not powerful enough to bump them back out onto the table. After some convulsing it got them back out, but all future balls hit into that hole caused the game to jolt so powerfully that it would tilt itself.
Before my local arcade sold off all of its games and converted to a pool hall, it seemed that the new pinball machines were becoming way easier--I could play for nearly an hour on "Big Hurt" pinball before finally sinking--and that in the interest of making the games more appealing to new players, they used much larger targets that lent themselves to damage during multiball.
If I were a pinball manufacturer, I'd seriously consider eliminating multiball so as to reduce the number of failures. Unfortunately, this is one of the most exciting parts of the game--but faced with the removal of the genre entirely, it might be a worthwhile sacrifice.
You don't actually need a liter of these crystals per 83 liters of CO2 you want to capture.
The point is that you can capture the CO2 and then perform some treatment on the crystals (perhaps heating or reducing the surrounding air pressure) to re-extract the CO2--much like soaking up water in a sponge then squeezing it to get the water back out. In that light, it becomes a bit more interesting since now you have the possibility of extracting carbon dioxide selectively and putting it somewhere else with a relatively small quantity of the crystals. This brings a new issue: what, exactly, do you do with this huge volume of stored CO2?
They say they can tailor this to specific molecules. Right now, some of the worst pollutants coming out of coal and oil burning devices are your sulfur and nitrogen oxides. By modifying the crystals to selectively extract these you could cost-effectively reduce these serious but trace pollutants from your exhaust, or even selectively filter them from air entering buildings through intakes and reasonably. All you'd have to do is periodically cycle your crystals into a regeneration system as described above and run the extracted gas through a catalyst.
They're one step off. Such a toll system would certainly get more people to take side roads, use mass transit, or drive at off-peak hours but simultaneously reward the people who decide to pay the toll by improving traffic congestion. Under the described system, carpoolers would pay some middle additional per-person cost (toll / number of occupants). Why not place carpoolers in the same class as the first three alternatives by waiving the toll for multiple-occupant vehicles, in this way penalizing only the pathological case of the single-occupant vehicle?
Note as you drive down the expressway how over 3/4 of cars (more like 9/10 last time I tried this statistic) are single-occupant vehicles. I imagine that for most people it would not be a difficult task to find a friend who lives nearby you who also works nearby. After Pittsburgh cut service on their mass transit even more, I ended up taking this option--even when there is a schedule conflict, it's usually not a problem for one of us to sit around and read or find something to do until the other is ready to go. This is an alternative to poor-smelling, unreliable or nonexistent mass transit and options that are often not tractable such as walking or riding a bike.
When parking costs $10 a day, gas prices are over $3/gallon, and possible tolls are added up it makes a lot of sense to carpool and split parking and gas. It will make even more sense when all riders are given a larger savings on the cost of the toll.
Slashdot Mirror
What would the impact have been on Earth if this had been pointing directly towards us? Would it have been on the scale of the Carrington event?
How many times have you been in this situation: many of your co-workers and friends have gone to see a movie and everyone seems to be chattering about it. You find yourself left out of lunch discussion or not getting jokes because your missed it. The problem is, the movie just doesn't sound interesting to you, or you don't have time, or you're waiting for the DVD release. Now replace "movie" with "video game" or "book" or maybe even "technical paper outside your area of expertise."
Spoilers in Wikipedia allow me to be "in" on every piece of pop culture that I don't particularly care about without commitment of time and money. If I decide I want to see the whole picture, I'll check it out. Usually, though, all you need to know are the bullet points!
My parents had a theory about this. When I was young, Ritalin was the biggest fad. Better than half the elementary school was on it, and every day they would line up around the corner to get their medication. Further, it was recommended for nearly every child in the school whenever they got in trouble of any kind.
The contributing factors that made the perfect storm of Ritalin were as follows:
-The drug company wanted to sell as much Ritalin as possible.
-The company bought legislation that classified ADHD as a learning disability, so that schools got more money for each child who was diagnosed.
-The same legislation meant that if you qualified for government assistance, you'd get more money for each child that was on Ritalin.
So the school now became the company's taxpayer-financed agent to push Ritalin, a drug required long-term to treat a condition that no one quite understood. The school had a financial incentive to have the psychologist diagnose everyone he could with ADHD, and if you were on welfare they could extend an incentive to you as well. I can offer one other piece of evidence: I had a friend whose parents did not want to give him these drugs under any circumstance as they understood neither ADHD nor the effects of the drug. When they were pressuring the family to medicate him, they handed his parents a stack of teacher's notes ostensibly to show he's been acting up. As my friend's parents looked at the notes, they noticed that some of the notes had inconsistencies such as wrong gender (she vs. he) and wrong name. The administration making the Ritalin sales pitch had taken notes about a child with ADHD and simply changed the name on them! At this point, they pulled my friend out of school and moved to a different area.
Ultimately, I'm not surprised that this is the case. I'm only surprised that it took so long for people to see through the ruse. I'm happy that my parents did, and sad that most of my friends' parents could not be convinced that ADHD was for my generation a huge drug-pushing scam!
When two people are on an elevator and one farts, they both know who did it.
I don't see this technology as being bad at all.
Suppose Apple would like to give away a free or reduced-price iPhone, for instance. A user not willing to pay for the ad-free iPhone would now be a potential customer if they were willing to deal with periodic advertisements with Apple recouping the lost hardware profits from the advertising. From a consumer's point of view, this is just another option: if you don't want to pay for or use ad-subsidized hardware, pay for the ad-free version or buy something else.
I just gave that a try, but Flash apps don't load at all for me after making said changes. :(
Thanks for the info, though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they fix this soon! Not having flash is pretty annoying.
~Ben
I installed this on my work and home PC with no obvious problems, and was really pleased with the responsiveness.
It wasn't until later that I realized that Flash no longer responds to mouse clicks. It makes YouTube and Pandora hard to use, and other Flash apps nearly impossible to use. A workaround was recommended, which unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on loading a Flash app.
~Ben
This might have something to do with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
The idea is that if your immune system learns to recognize an antigen similar to, but not sufficiently similar to, the antigen of a new threat, then your body may mount a less effective immune defense against the variant than it already knows. In other words, your body learns to fight seasonal strain of flu, then encounters similar H1N1. Now your body produces antibodies to the original flu, which bind more weakly to H1N1 proteins than an antibody that would have been made especially for H1N1, leading to an overall more severe infection than you otherwise would have had.
~Ben
Done and done:
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Western_internet_censorship:_The_beginning_of_the_end_or_the_end_of_the_beginning%3F
I was at the American Physical Society meeting last week, and was initially surprised that the distribution of laptops was about 1/3 each Windows, Linux (usually Ubuntu), and Apple. I would have expected that given the density of users UNIX clusters there that Linux would have been preferred, but then I remembered that Apple has a UNIX terminal out of the box. Windows, by comparison, needed a separate SSH client and XWin32 in order to work remotely, and even then didn't work well. It was the combination of compatibility with the systems that I worked with and compatibility with existing hardware that got me to switch to Linux, but in the sense that in most people's eyes the OS choices are Windows and MacOS, I can see why a lot of grad students and faculty would choose Apple.
Nonetheless, I doubt that the academic crowd is exactly the demographic Ballmer wants to cater to. There's just not enough of us to matter.
~Ben
If you are a Verizon Wireless customer like me, the number to call to opt out is given in the actual legal document, here:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/globalText?contentType=Legal%20Notice&textId=181
It takes about two minutes.
~Ben
I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was trying to say quite the opposite--since they are not mutually exclusive, people could simultaneously become more religious but reject the brand of religious fundamentalism that tries to play the role of science since it fails to produce useful results.
~Ben
I agree that people are likely to become more religious in the tumultous future ahead of us, but I simultaneously expect their influence in terms of science to decline. I believe that they became more influential in the last couple of decades mostly because the enormous surpluses allowed inefficient ideas to survive on the dime of a few religious think tanks. The fact that there is precisely zero demand for flood geologists or creationist antibiotics coupled with reduced tithing from congregations is likely to silence the religious lobby very quickly.
Again, I am far more optimistic about the US scientific workforce. My view here may be skewed from being a graduate student in a school full of brilliant and ambitious young scientists, but I personally know several who went on to start new business in recent years. Myself and a friend are currently in the process of starting one of our own. I would cast the recession in a different light as an opportunity to get better deals from suppliers, hire workers for relatively low wages, and to eat the lunch of much larger companies that have failed. An interesting note is that our department's number of applicants shrinks during economic boom times, and grows during busts. In fact, according to our department head, the number of applicants spikes two or three years in advance of a recession. This may be an artifact of my note above: when efficiency is not at a premium, the market is a lot less interested in advanced science.
So yes, I have looked around--and I understand that your opinion is an artifact of what you see every day. I hope it gives you some encouragement that while many people are losing their jobs, new work is already springing up in the ashes of the old.
~Ben
While I agree that hard times do push people towards being more religious, I'm a somewhat more hopeful for the prospects of science in the US. While I know very little about the history leading up to the Dark Ages (Roman Empire Collapses->???->Renaissance), and I've never been to anywhere ending in "stan", the key difference between the US today and those situations is that in the latter there is very little in terms of science providing useful and immediate answers. We have an infrastructure of research labs in place as well a world-class population of scientists and engineers here and now that can give people a viable alternative to fundamentalism, and I am convinced that in the event of a "put up or shut up" situation that Biblical literalists will be unable to compete.
Just a for-instance that I found amusing:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090303/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_iphone_mullah
~Ben
On the plus side, the resolution isn't forbidding that Dawkins speak. Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.
"Whereas the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded university..."
I read that the US has lost 650,000 jobs in the last month. Maybe enough bad debt, cold and hunger will finally get people to realize that real science can be a vehicle to productive jobs and accept that their 6000 year old Earth hypothesis doesn't hold water.
~Ben
They really shit the jackpot.
The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).
Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.
~Ben
I thought there was no way that Y2K9 would affect me, then the girlfriend asked me to check on a flight for her--and I found that United Airlines' website returns 2008 flight data if you search for flight information for Jan. 1 or Jan. 2 2009! How amateur is that?
~Ben
On many parts of a substation, insulation wouldn't matter.
A friend of mine is the chief engineer for an array of power plants in the area. Apparently he once found the exploded body of a guy who had opened up a 20,000V feeder and was using a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, both insulated. He was dead before the tools ever came into contact with the transformer coils.
I believe three limbs were broken off by the arc, one arm and both legs, all cauterized so that there was surprisingly little blood.
The copper thieves have been very successful though: in what he believes was an inside job, some people entered a mothballed plant through a tunnel from a nearby substation and took about $20,000 worth of copper from lines that came directly off of the generator. I believe there were tens of feet of this wire, about 1-2" in diameter, that they removed in chunks and transported out underground.
The worst case, however, was a bit more scary. At one point some copper thieves got into the same mothballed plant, found a locked door, turned on a forklift and rammed the door with the forklift until the forklift fell down some nearby stairs and got stuck. DHS then got interested in the plant since had the thief made it into this room, he would have been able to shut down power for the entire city of Pittsburgh (the plant was mothballed, but the substation controls in this room were active)! Now the plant's fitted with IR cameras and anyone who gets spotted is likely to be answering some questions courtesy of the DHS cowboys.
~Ben
I'm sorry, but that's got to be one of the most naive things I've ever heard. Considering all polymers, there are arbitrarily many different permutations of the known elements available in a pure substance and then considering all mixtures thereof we have more different concoctions than can be enumerated. While certainly the properties of many of these have been well-understood or could be inferred from known experiment, there are many that await only someone with imagination to discover and apply.
Case in point: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-11/11-year-quest-create-disappearing-colored-bubbles
Reading your analogy about games, http://www.newgrounds.com/ might also be an eye-opener. Many of those games are whipped up by talented hobbyists but still get a lot of play.
~Ben
From the article, the location where he dumped Nina must be approximately here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.833531,-122.182109
~Ben
Back when I was in elementary school, we actually had a really good gifted program. You had to take two separate IQ tests with different examiners and have a "sufficiently high" IQ both times to get in. The tests were several hours long apiece, and little toy puzzles were involved amid math and vocabulary. They never told you the results, but for several hundred kids here were only a handful of students in the program--twelve I think. It was a big deal when we got someone new. They were unbelievably bright and the program excused you from some classes to read books of your choosing, got you access to independent tutors (I learned algebra in third grade), and brought you to a number of quiz-style and little engineering competitions.
Then some parents complained, and they lowered the standards so that anyone could get in if their parents called and asked.
I eventually stopped going because the program became so prohibitively overcrowded with people who never wanted to do any of the high-level activities. They wanted to sit and talk. At that point, it boasted as many people that barely qualified at an average skill level much less a gifted skill level. Bottom line is, every parent wants their kid to be the a genius. Everyone can tell you that placing a below-average student in a room with geniuses will not make this a reality. I guess the idea is that if your child receives the treatment developed for the best of the best, or becomes friends with much brighter students, maybe your child will have some extra opportunities to improve. It's a large-scale prisoner's dilemma: if the better and worse students are separate and receive the training suited to their abilities, they both do better. If just one or two of the average students were mixed with the best ones, it might benefit them immensely. However, when all of the students are aggregated together, no one receives training best suited to their skill level and everyone suffers.
That's why I don't have much hope of this situation ever being rectified. In the prisoner's dilemma, everyone ends up uniformly crappy.
~Ben
In my years of playing pinball whenever possible (which was not very often), I broke a total of five machines while playing. Four of these five instances were caused during multiball sequences. In the other instance, the machine lit on fire.
I guess the engineers are good at designing a table where the system can survive a single impact or a ball cannot go somewhere it's not supposed to alone, but when multiple balls are involved it's a lot less predictable. On the "Jurassic Park" table, for example, during multiball the T-Rex bent down to pick up a hapless ball, and then in an attempt to save its friend the other ball ricocheted off of a drop target and lodged... directly on the joint on T-Rex's neck. Something on the T-Rex snapped and it could not stand back up, ensuring that all balls hitting its corpse would roll directly in to the sink. On a "Harley-Davidson" table, I hit three balls into the same hole at the same time, and the actuator was not powerful enough to bump them back out onto the table. After some convulsing it got them back out, but all future balls hit into that hole caused the game to jolt so powerfully that it would tilt itself.
Before my local arcade sold off all of its games and converted to a pool hall, it seemed that the new pinball machines were becoming way easier--I could play for nearly an hour on "Big Hurt" pinball before finally sinking--and that in the interest of making the games more appealing to new players, they used much larger targets that lent themselves to damage during multiball.
If I were a pinball manufacturer, I'd seriously consider eliminating multiball so as to reduce the number of failures. Unfortunately, this is one of the most exciting parts of the game--but faced with the removal of the genre entirely, it might be a worthwhile sacrifice.
~Ben
You don't actually need a liter of these crystals per 83 liters of CO2 you want to capture.
The point is that you can capture the CO2 and then perform some treatment on the crystals (perhaps heating or reducing the surrounding air pressure) to re-extract the CO2--much like soaking up water in a sponge then squeezing it to get the water back out. In that light, it becomes a bit more interesting since now you have the possibility of extracting carbon dioxide selectively and putting it somewhere else with a relatively small quantity of the crystals. This brings a new issue: what, exactly, do you do with this huge volume of stored CO2?
They say they can tailor this to specific molecules. Right now, some of the worst pollutants coming out of coal and oil burning devices are your sulfur and nitrogen oxides. By modifying the crystals to selectively extract these you could cost-effectively reduce these serious but trace pollutants from your exhaust, or even selectively filter them from air entering buildings through intakes and reasonably. All you'd have to do is periodically cycle your crystals into a regeneration system as described above and run the extracted gas through a catalyst.
~Ben
They're one step off. Such a toll system would certainly get more people to take side roads, use mass transit, or drive at off-peak hours but simultaneously reward the people who decide to pay the toll by improving traffic congestion. Under the described system, carpoolers would pay some middle additional per-person cost (toll / number of occupants). Why not place carpoolers in the same class as the first three alternatives by waiving the toll for multiple-occupant vehicles, in this way penalizing only the pathological case of the single-occupant vehicle?
Note as you drive down the expressway how over 3/4 of cars (more like 9/10 last time I tried this statistic) are single-occupant vehicles. I imagine that for most people it would not be a difficult task to find a friend who lives nearby you who also works nearby. After Pittsburgh cut service on their mass transit even more, I ended up taking this option--even when there is a schedule conflict, it's usually not a problem for one of us to sit around and read or find something to do until the other is ready to go. This is an alternative to poor-smelling, unreliable or nonexistent mass transit and options that are often not tractable such as walking or riding a bike.
When parking costs $10 a day, gas prices are over $3/gallon, and possible tolls are added up it makes a lot of sense to carpool and split parking and gas. It will make even more sense when all riders are given a larger savings on the cost of the toll.
~Ben