Sometimes, when something like that happens, it is your subconscious mind trying to get your attention, and tell you that whatever it is that you are trying to do that requires that particular memory right then is, from his point of view, a really, really bad idea.
Claimer (opposite of disclaimer): I am a trained hypnotist, with a grounding in hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read,... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know that remembering this would cause you extreme pain. Or he may be ticked off at you for some reason, sulking because you've been ignoring his best efforts to help you. (That's his job, that and to protect you, he takes it seriously and he does the very best he knows how at it.)
Hypnosis can help. So can making friends with your subconscious.
No, smallpox does NOT make a good weaponized agent.
One of the key attributes of a bioweapon is controllability. You want it to hit who and where you want it to hit, and you DON'T want it to hit outside that area. In particular, you DON'T want it to be significantly contagious - and smallpox is one of the most horribly contagious diseases known to Man.
Pneumonic anthrax, on the other hand, while highly lethal, is essentially not contagious from person to person. This makes it an ideal bioweapon candidate, as was demonstrated some years back - and they STILL haven't found the $^%#&%$!!! who did it.
With "a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, 16GB of built-in storage and a 16GB microSD card pre-installed", off the top of my head I'd say "Dern tootin' it is powerful enough!"
It hasn't been that many years since that would have been a supercomputer filling a large room, doing really nice ray-traced imagery. It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today, except for the small disk drive. (And multi-gigabyte disk drives haven't been around THAT long.)
A cluster of those puppies, with a big disk server attached, would probably be really nice for doing, uhhh, "stellar lifecycle modeling" on the cheap.
If you are concerned about very-rapid keypresses, or multiple keys pressed at once, you want a MIDI keyboard (as in typically anywhere from 49 to 88 black and white keys, just like on a piano). Very rapid keypresses and multiple keys pressed at once is PRECISELY what piano music is all about.
If you are REALLY dedicated, find an old Sequential Circuits Prophet T8. It had individual key velocity, individual key pressure sensing.
If what you said was true, then the schools that spent lots of money would CONSISTENTLY get better results than the schools that didn't.
The problem is that they don't. New York City and Washington DC have the highest per-pupil expenditures in the United States, and they have the WORST schools in the United States.
Meanwhile, dirt-poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley routinely get better results than schools in New York and Washington DC.
The question nobody ever asks is this: Why is gas so much cheaper in the United States than everywhere else? The drilling is international. The costs are the same. The refining is the same. (Additives are different. I suspect that blending costs are HIGHER in the US than just about everywhere else, but ignore that for the moment.) Pipelines, storage tanks, gasoline tankers, and gas stations are the same everywhere.
So why are Europeans paying twice as much for gasoline?
(Hint: Even in the US, a large chunk of the price of a gallon of gasoline is federal, state, and local taxes.)
The Constitution of the United States of America says, in so many words, that only Congess may declare war, and Congress has passed no such declaration in this matter.
If memory serves me, the last time Congress passed a Declaration of War was World War II. We have had quite a few "police actions" since then, many of which involved deployment of large numbers of troops and large quantities of equipment, expenditure of large quantities of ammunition, and way too many American soldiers coming home in boxes.
Every medication I have ever needed in Bangkok has been OTC there, no prescription required. I did have to do a bit of research once to figure out the correct dosage, when one of my required maintenance meds was not available in Thailand, but a similar (but not equivalent) one was. Most people would have to do an office visit to a doctor for this, but brief office visits are very inexpensive.
I am told that narcotic pain meds are very strictly controlled there. I don't know for certain, I've never needed them there. I have no problem at all with this. If I feel like I've got enough pain that I need narcotics to control it, something is bad enough wrong that I want to see a doctor about it, IMMEDIATELY.
First, before you do ANYTHING else, confess your sins to your doctor and TELL HIM ABOUT THE CHEST PAIN from the Primatene Mist. This may be a warning sign of cardiac (heart) issues developing. Epinephrine WILL hit the heart, far harder than albuterol does.
The proper way to use Primatene Mist in an asthma emergency is to take the puffs and then head for the emergency room. Or call for an ambulance. Primatene Mist buys you about 15 minutes of transit time. That's all it does.
Nebulizers are actually far MORE efficient than measured-dose inhalers (MDIs) at delivering the drugs.
If you are already using a spacer, talk with your physician about inhaled corticosteroids and long-acting bronchodilators.
If you are not already using a spacer, talk with your physician about getting one. They make a HUGE difference in efficiency of measured-dose inhaler (MDI) delivery. They bring them up fairly close to nebulizer efficiency for most patients, although not all. (My source on this is a resident at National Jewish Hospital, in 1995, when I was referred there for full workup for acute uncontrolled asthma. They saved my life, in so many words.)
If your physician gives you any argument WHATSOEVER about prescribing you a spacer, fire him and find one who is not incompetent.
Current standard ER procedure for acute asthma, in the US at least, is 125 mg intravenous Solu-Medrol (methylprednisolone, a POWERFUL corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drug), and albuterol and ipratropium bromide (Atrovent (tm)) nebulizer treatments. If the patient can't tolerate albuterol (about 1 in 16 asthmatics can't), the second choice is terbutaline.
Blood tests and chest X-rays are typically taken at the same time, since other conditions can masquerade as moderate or acute asthma.
Where I live, the ambulance crews have recently started putting asthma patients on albuterol nebulizers in the ambulance, as well as starting IVs with saline (to save time starting the IV in the hospital).
The new HFA inhalers don't get their cost increase from the new propellants. They get it from the prescription system.
The Ventolin HFA albuterol measured-dose inhaler, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, costs US$60 at pretty much any pharmacy in the USA. The exact same inhaler, manufactured by the same company, on the same production lines, costs the equivalent of about US$9 at the pharmacies I've checked in Bangkok, Thailand. The only difference between the two is that the printed label, the packaging, and the package insert are printed in English and Thai script.
US pharmacy clerks are usually surprised to learn this. I remember one of them trying to tell me it wasn't the same drug.
This, incidentally, comes from first-person observation. I am in Bangkok typically twice a year. I have asthma. I buy the inhalers myself, at the local pharmacies.
Recalling that Nixon was elected President in 1968, took office in 1969, was re-elected in 1972, and resigned in '74 or so, noting that these birds first flew in '71, I'd say you're probably looking at it.
And then there was the SR-71 "Blackbird". According to the Wikipedia article, "The SR-71 served with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998." It flew over both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
In summer of 1981, I worked for Charter Information in Austin TX.
They ran a Xerox Sigma 6 (nice machine for the day). They'd moved down from Woburn MA a few years earlier. When they'd set up their offices in Woburn, they'd run a duct from the computer cooling air exhaust to the building HVAC ducts. They reported that they didn't have to start their oil burners at all during Massachusetts winter: the waste heat from the Sigma was enough to heat their entire office suite.
That was over thirty years ago.
You young whippersnappers need to learn some history. And GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
There's an outfit called SpaceX. They build a booster called the Falcon 9. They build a BMF version of it, called the Falcon 9 Heavy.
NASA recently took all the data on the Falcon 9, and shoveled it into their cost model system. Done as a NASA project, Falcon 9 estimates out at something like 7 billion dollars. Done as a Commercial project, with NASA supervision, it still costs out at 1.5 billion. The problem with those estimates is that SpaceX did the whole shebang for about 300 million.
When your cost model system says it will cost five times as much as it actually did, either your cost model system is utter bullstuff, or you've shoveled in a HUGE amount of gold-plating and featherbedding. Probably both.
There has been no acceleration in sea level because melting floating ice does not change the liquid level. A floating object displaces EXACTLY its own weight in the fluid in which it floats.
Imagine a 1 kg icecube. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, the floats with part of the cube above the water's surface. The part under the surface is displacing exactly 1 kg of liquid water, but weighs less. When the cube melts, the resulting 1 kg of liquid water exactly fills in the hole that was being made by the submerged portion of the ice cube.
The family's last dog was named "EPROM", because my Mom, who got very interested in small computers not long before we acquired him, had to do a LOT of erasing and reprogramming on him.
He figured out, after watching the humans in the household, that if he brushed his tail across the front of a certain noisy box, it would stop making that awful racket.
And he noticed that the human would push a certain button on another box and then take him outside to play. One day, he got tired of waiting, and pushed the button himself.
How many dogs do you know who understand, at ANY level, the purpose of a printer's OFFLINE button, or a computer's RESET button?
This is a common misconception, fuelled by people who really hate spaceflight.
The United States (and the world) made HUGE profits on the space program, even after funding Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, from the savings from improved weather prediction (and, in particular, hurricane tracking and landfall location prediction).
We built the boosters, we built the satellites, we saved enough on people not getting killed that the rest of the program was free, in fact immensely profitable.
There is a REASON why the 1960s were some of the most prosperous years on record for the world.
So one of the prices of having those trains is that the trains at night will be full of drunks.
And so will the taxis and buses that carry people from the train stations to their final destination. And so will the sidewalks around the train stations.
I find it very difficult to see this as an advantage. (Neither, for that matter, did Robert Heinlein, when he encountered the problem during his round-the-world tour, chronicled in "Tramp Royale". He'd seen it in his youth, but the practice had died out.)
You talk about someone taking "more than their share".
Who (not what criteria, but which PERSON or PERSONS applying what criteria) determines who gets what share?
I think you do not realize that some person somewhere will make that determination, and he will make that determination in accordance with both the stated criteria and the unstated ones, no matter what systems and criteria are in place, to make it "fair" and "equitable" and yadda-yadda-yadda.
At the risk of feeding an obvious troll, who decides who gets how big a share, and who anointed that person the Arbiter of Shares?
As an example: One of the Scandinavian countries tried a very egalitarian experiment. They put all apartments in the town under the control of one minor clerk, and set all the rents the same. The clerk decided who got what apartment. The theory was that the clerk would do honest allocations, based on need and justice and judgement.
Guess who became, overnight, the most powerful man in town, with the hottest, most desirable women in town immediately ready and willing to do WHATEVER he wanted, in the hopes of getting a nice apartment?
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes, when something like that happens, it is your subconscious mind trying to get your attention, and tell you that whatever it is that you are trying to do that requires that particular memory right then is, from his point of view, a really, really bad idea.
Claimer (opposite of disclaimer): I am a trained hypnotist, with a grounding in hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read, ... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know that remembering this would cause you extreme pain. Or he may be ticked off at you for some reason, sulking because you've been ignoring his best efforts to help you. (That's his job, that and to protect you, he takes it seriously and he does the very best he knows how at it.)
Hypnosis can help. So can making friends with your subconscious.
No, smallpox does NOT make a good weaponized agent.
One of the key attributes of a bioweapon is controllability. You want it to hit who and where you want it to hit, and you DON'T want it to hit outside that area. In particular, you DON'T want it to be significantly contagious - and smallpox is one of the most horribly contagious diseases known to Man.
Pneumonic anthrax, on the other hand, while highly lethal, is essentially not contagious from person to person. This makes it an ideal bioweapon candidate, as was demonstrated some years back - and they STILL haven't found the $^%#&%$!!! who did it.
With "a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, 16GB of built-in storage and a 16GB microSD card pre-installed", off the top of my head I'd say "Dern tootin' it is powerful enough!"
It hasn't been that many years since that would have been a supercomputer filling a large room, doing really nice ray-traced imagery. It is a fairly respectable desktop machine even today, except for the small disk drive. (And multi-gigabyte disk drives haven't been around THAT long.)
A cluster of those puppies, with a big disk server attached, would probably be really nice for doing, uhhh, "stellar lifecycle modeling" on the cheap.
If you are concerned about very-rapid keypresses, or multiple keys pressed at once, you want a MIDI keyboard (as in typically anywhere from 49 to 88 black and white keys, just like on a piano). Very rapid keypresses and multiple keys pressed at once is PRECISELY what piano music is all about.
If you are REALLY dedicated, find an old Sequential Circuits Prophet T8. It had individual key velocity, individual key pressure sensing.
Alternatively, you might look at http://www.buchla.com/series200e.html, and play with their tactile input device.
If what you said was true, then the schools that spent lots of money would CONSISTENTLY get better results than the schools that didn't.
The problem is that they don't. New York City and Washington DC have the highest per-pupil expenditures in the United States, and they have the WORST schools in the United States.
Meanwhile, dirt-poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley routinely get better results than schools in New York and Washington DC.
Correct observation, wrong assumed cause.
The following is first-person data. I personally have been watching this, for several years now.
In the US, a Ventolin (tm) albuterol inhaler costs, retail, about US$60.
In Bangkok, Thailand, that *SAME* Ventolin (tm) albuterol (although they call it salbutamol) inhaler costs 270 baht, which is about US$9.
The prescription MDIs could be "affordable", but probably not under the US prescription system.
There are two sides to the gas prices argument.
The question nobody ever asks is this: Why is gas so much cheaper in the United States than everywhere else? The drilling is international. The costs are the same. The refining is the same. (Additives are different. I suspect that blending costs are HIGHER in the US than just about everywhere else, but ignore that for the moment.) Pipelines, storage tanks, gasoline tankers, and gas stations are the same everywhere.
So why are Europeans paying twice as much for gasoline?
(Hint: Even in the US, a large chunk of the price of a gallon of gasoline is federal, state, and local taxes.)
Please mod this guy up. He is absolutely correct.
The Constitution of the United States of America says, in so many words, that only Congess may declare war, and Congress has passed no such declaration in this matter.
If memory serves me, the last time Congress passed a Declaration of War was World War II. We have had quite a few "police actions" since then, many of which involved deployment of large numbers of troops and large quantities of equipment, expenditure of large quantities of ammunition, and way too many American soldiers coming home in boxes.
Every medication I have ever needed in Bangkok has been OTC there, no prescription required. I did have to do a bit of research once to figure out the correct dosage, when one of my required maintenance meds was not available in Thailand, but a similar (but not equivalent) one was. Most people would have to do an office visit to a doctor for this, but brief office visits are very inexpensive.
I am told that narcotic pain meds are very strictly controlled there. I don't know for certain, I've never needed them there. I have no problem at all with this. If I feel like I've got enough pain that I need narcotics to control it, something is bad enough wrong that I want to see a doctor about it, IMMEDIATELY.
Small specialty retail markup years ago was routinely 100% or more. That's just the cost of doing business.
Yes, I have severe chronic asthma.
First, before you do ANYTHING else, confess your sins to your doctor and TELL HIM ABOUT THE CHEST PAIN from the Primatene Mist. This may be a warning sign of cardiac (heart) issues developing. Epinephrine WILL hit the heart, far harder than albuterol does.
The proper way to use Primatene Mist in an asthma emergency is to take the puffs and then head for the emergency room. Or call for an ambulance. Primatene Mist buys you about 15 minutes of transit time. That's all it does.
Nebulizers are actually far MORE efficient than measured-dose inhalers (MDIs) at delivering the drugs.
If you are already using a spacer, talk with your physician about inhaled corticosteroids and long-acting bronchodilators.
If you are not already using a spacer, talk with your physician about getting one. They make a HUGE difference in efficiency of measured-dose inhaler (MDI) delivery. They bring them up fairly close to nebulizer efficiency for most patients, although not all. (My source on this is a resident at National Jewish Hospital, in 1995, when I was referred there for full workup for acute uncontrolled asthma. They saved my life, in so many words.)
If your physician gives you any argument WHATSOEVER about prescribing you a spacer, fire him and find one who is not incompetent.
Current standard ER procedure for acute asthma, in the US at least, is 125 mg intravenous Solu-Medrol (methylprednisolone, a POWERFUL corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drug), and albuterol and ipratropium bromide (Atrovent (tm)) nebulizer treatments. If the patient can't tolerate albuterol (about 1 in 16 asthmatics can't), the second choice is terbutaline.
Blood tests and chest X-rays are typically taken at the same time, since other conditions can masquerade as moderate or acute asthma.
Where I live, the ambulance crews have recently started putting asthma patients on albuterol nebulizers in the ambulance, as well as starting IVs with saline (to save time starting the IV in the hospital).
Yes, I've been through this routine a few times.
The new HFA inhalers don't get their cost increase from the new propellants. They get it from the prescription system.
The Ventolin HFA albuterol measured-dose inhaler, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, costs US$60 at pretty much any pharmacy in the USA. The exact same inhaler, manufactured by the same company, on the same production lines, costs the equivalent of about US$9 at the pharmacies I've checked in Bangkok, Thailand. The only difference between the two is that the printed label, the packaging, and the package insert are printed in English and Thai script.
US pharmacy clerks are usually surprised to learn this. I remember one of them trying to tell me it wasn't the same drug.
This, incidentally, comes from first-person observation. I am in Bangkok typically twice a year. I have asthma. I buy the inhalers myself, at the local pharmacies.
Recalling that Nixon was elected President in 1968, took office in 1969, was re-elected in 1972, and resigned in '74 or so, noting that these birds first flew in '71, I'd say you're probably looking at it.
And then there was the SR-71 "Blackbird". According to the Wikipedia article, "The SR-71 served with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998." It flew over both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
I think Elon Musk, at SpaceX, might disagree with you.
Obligatory pointer to Arrow's Theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
Oversimplification: Arrow formally proved that you can't build an election system that works for three or more candidates.
In summer of 1981, I worked for Charter Information in Austin TX.
They ran a Xerox Sigma 6 (nice machine for the day). They'd moved down from Woburn MA a few years earlier. When they'd set up their offices in Woburn, they'd run a duct from the computer cooling air exhaust to the building HVAC ducts. They reported that they didn't have to start their oil burners at all during Massachusetts winter: the waste heat from the Sigma was enough to heat their entire office suite.
That was over thirty years ago.
You young whippersnappers need to learn some history. And GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
There's an outfit called SpaceX. They build a booster called the Falcon 9. They build a BMF version of it, called the Falcon 9 Heavy.
NASA recently took all the data on the Falcon 9, and shoveled it into their cost model system. Done as a NASA project, Falcon 9 estimates out at something like 7 billion dollars. Done as a Commercial project, with NASA supervision, it still costs out at 1.5 billion. The problem with those estimates is that SpaceX did the whole shebang for about 300 million.
When your cost model system says it will cost five times as much as it actually did, either your cost model system is utter bullstuff, or you've shoveled in a HUGE amount of gold-plating and featherbedding. Probably both.
There has been no acceleration in sea level because melting floating ice does not change the liquid level. A floating object displaces EXACTLY its own weight in the fluid in which it floats.
Imagine a 1 kg icecube. Because ice is less dense than liquid water, the floats with part of the cube above the water's surface. The part under the surface is displacing exactly 1 kg of liquid water, but weighs less. When the cube melts, the resulting 1 kg of liquid water exactly fills in the hole that was being made by the submerged portion of the ice cube.
The family's last dog was named "EPROM", because my Mom, who got very interested in small computers not long before we acquired him, had to do a LOT of erasing and reprogramming on him.
He figured out, after watching the humans in the household, that if he brushed his tail across the front of a certain noisy box, it would stop making that awful racket.
And he noticed that the human would push a certain button on another box and then take him outside to play. One day, he got tired of waiting, and pushed the button himself.
How many dogs do you know who understand, at ANY level, the purpose of a printer's OFFLINE button, or a computer's RESET button?
This is a common misconception, fuelled by people who really hate spaceflight.
The United States (and the world) made HUGE profits on the space program, even after funding Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, from the savings from improved weather prediction (and, in particular, hurricane tracking and landfall location prediction).
We built the boosters, we built the satellites, we saved enough on people not getting killed that the rest of the program was free, in fact immensely profitable.
There is a REASON why the 1960s were some of the most prosperous years on record for the world.
So one of the prices of having those trains is that the trains at night will be full of drunks.
And so will the taxis and buses that carry people from the train stations to their final destination. And so will the sidewalks around the train stations.
I find it very difficult to see this as an advantage. (Neither, for that matter, did Robert Heinlein, when he encountered the problem during his round-the-world tour, chronicled in "Tramp Royale". He'd seen it in his youth, but the practice had died out.)
I think you misunderstand my point.
You talk about someone taking "more than their share".
Who (not what criteria, but which PERSON or PERSONS applying what criteria) determines who gets what share?
I think you do not realize that some person somewhere will make that determination, and he will make that determination in accordance with both the stated criteria and the unstated ones, no matter what systems and criteria are in place, to make it "fair" and "equitable" and yadda-yadda-yadda.
At the risk of feeding an obvious troll, who decides who gets how big a share, and who anointed that person the Arbiter of Shares?
As an example: One of the Scandinavian countries tried a very egalitarian experiment. They put all apartments in the town under the control of one minor clerk, and set all the rents the same. The clerk decided who got what apartment. The theory was that the clerk would do honest allocations, based on need and justice and judgement.
Guess who became, overnight, the most powerful man in town, with the hottest, most desirable women in town immediately ready and willing to do WHATEVER he wanted, in the hopes of getting a nice apartment?