It's because Google Ads are driven by keywords on whatever page it's attached to, so that the ads are more "targeted" than just coming up at random. We're discussing Scientology, and Scientology has Google Ads, so the (ahem) "appropriate" *cough* ads show up.
I saw "treatment" in this article title and was immediately interested for many reasons, but I expected alcohol/drug abuse problems to come up. My main "hobby horse" is that MAINSTREAM alcohol and drug treatment consists of, and is run by, members of 12-step groups (Alcholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc.), which are interently religious (despite the "spiritual, not religious" claim) and have no scientific basis. The influence of "steppism" is so pervasive that it strongly influences addiction research in the USA to the point of looking for genetic causes of addictive behaviors and for other evidence that such behaviors are "diseases" (ideas promoted by the step groups, whose members' PR efforts through front groups such as NCADD and CASA have been so effective that much of the general public believes these things). Any research that involves attempting to REDUCE drinking or drug use, rather than demanding abstinence from its subjects, is verboten and regarded as dangerous!
AC, you're very lucky you didn't get sucked into Al-Anon or ACOA or some such (or maybe you did and you immediately rejected it and/or didn't tell that part of your story). Twelve step groups are the LEAST trustworthy environment I can think of. I was in AA and was a "true believer" for two years (see Box 1980/letters section, April 1990 AA Grapevine magazine for how "grateful" I was), but then I started seeing the cracks in the "perfect" program and started analyzing (going against the slogan "utilize, don't analyze) the step programs, and it took several more years to deprogram myself, verify that these things had NO basis in science or logic, and finally stop going to meetings. Meanwhile I saw too many people commit suicide due to the cognitive dissonance and conflicting messages, with their action always being blamed on "this disease," "he could not be honest with himself" or "he could not see our way of life."
The reason one of every hundred US citizens is in prison is MOSTLY due to the War On Drugs. Furthermore, drug offendors get "good behavior points" toward earlier release for attending religious (not just "spiritual") 12-step based groups in prison, clearly against the First Amendment (even those on death row are guaranteed freedom of religion, yet many are required to attend Alcoholics Aonymous and other groups by Government agents), yet the ACLU wants every prisoner to have access an electrical power outlet.
Really, most bottled water is just tap water, a plastic bottle, and marketing. I put my tap water through a tabletop filter pitcher before drinking it. Yeah, I'm a little bit paranoid about what might be in tap water.
And I can't stand that these news articles use a comparison such as "three light bulbs" (which in the middle of the growing popularity of CF bulbs is more vague than ever - 7W? 11? 13? 25? 50? 60? 75? 100??? What's an order of magnitude between friends, anyway?) instead of just stating the number of watts of electric power the thing consumes.
One thing I do to help keep my mind sharp is the "SAT Question Of The Day" at collegeboard.com - you can set it up to email the URL for the new one every day. I've been doing this for years, but I've only had the site keeping track of my answer percentages for the last half year or so. My percentages of correct answers in in the 92-93 percent range (most questions are simple and easy, but some can be tricky), but no doubt many Slashdotters of all ages can do better than me.
There are surely similar "questions of the day" out there. I've heard of one for nursing students. Does anyone know of any more that general Slashdotters would enjoy?
There are also "word of the day" emails you can sign up for from m-w.com and other dictionary sites.
On the physical side, I take a multivitamin once a day and 500mG of Vitamin C twice a day. I think that (and the Quaker 5-minute oatmeal every morning) helps mentally as well as physically.
Fifteen years ago I quit smoking, and around ten years ago I did sprint triathlons and on Olympic-distance tri, but I'm not nearly as active now (but I've still quit smoking). Also, I quit drinking 20 years ago. I don't know what damage I did to my brain in my 20's, but I'm just trying not to add to it.
As far as "doing even more" for diet (and exercise, which also matters but somewhat less, compared to a good diet vs. junk food) there are several stages of what you can do (I've been wanting to do the Walford/CRON thing for a while now, but it hasn't been easy):
Light-Duty is the book "Younger Next Year." It's aimed at those of us 50 and above, but much younger people can learn from it.
Medium to Heavy Duty is "Beyond the 120 Year Diet" by (the late) Roy Walford. It's CRON: Caloric Reduction (eating substantially fewer calories) with Optimal Nutrition (carefully choosing food for its nutritional values as well as "supplements" - vitamins and such). Excellent stuff for mind and body.
Extreme Duty is Ray Kurzweil's book "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" in which he not only does CRON but many other things such as taking 150 pills a day and weekly intravenous stuff. It looks a little 'out there' even compared to Walford's stuff, but Kurzweil just might be onto something.
I'm not familiar with Wikisource and there's surly a lot of overlap in content between these, but for older public-domain books there's the venerable (in net.time, anyway) Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.org/
I second that commotion, even if it is from an AC. Just the ability to post YASID's (Yet Another Story ID - read the r.a.s.w FAQ) is invaluable when a scene or situation from a story comes to mind that you read decades ago but can't remember the author or title to save your life...it's one corner of Usenet that's still alive and thriving in spite of the spam posts.
Looks like at least part of your problem is "where do I find a particular title?" Bookfinder and Addall have already been mentioned, but there are other ways and sources if you're okay with used books (many excellent novels are out of print and thus ONLY available used), in RL (if you're willing to dig) as well as more online. I discuss these and more here: http://ben-bradley.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-and-where-i-buyget-books.html
Six months ago I bought the Star Trek/New Generation novels "A Time To Be Born" and "A Time To Die" at a thrift store for 25 cents. I "don't read" ST novels, but I was going to put them up on paperbackswap.com to send out to get "points" for books I really want. Unfortunately, I started reading...it's an 8-book series and I'm now on book 7. I got books 3 through 8 on paperbackswap.com, and have the ones I've read listed on there.
It's space opera, the science sucks in these things, but I found the books entertaining because I liked the ST "New Generation" TV series and am of course familiar with the character. But once I get to the end of this, I swear I'll never read another ST novel. Give me some Real Hard SF, as in (an slightly older novel I recently read) Greg Bear's Eon.
The amounc of mercury in CF's is indeed a VERY SMALL AMOUNT compared to what I've personally SEEN, and heard about others being exposed to:
When I was a child at the pediatrician's examining room (40+ years ago) they used blood pressure meters (whatever they were called) that used MERCURY in them, much like a thermometer. The mercury went up and down in a vertical glass tube driven by air pressure in the arm cuff, indicating blood pressure. I saw one that was BROKEN with the mercury pooling in the bottom of the case. The doctor saw it was broken and removed it from the room, and came back with another of the same model that wasn't broken, and of course measured my blood pressure with it.
In a high school science class there was a plastic squirt-bottle of mercury, and a girl had put a drop into the palm of her hand and was playing with it, pushing it around with a finger. The teacher came in and saw what she was doing, and he calmly but firmly told her "When you're through playing with that, carefully put it all back into the bottle, and before you eat lunch, be sure to was your hands very, very thoroughly." I was rather interested in playing with it myself, but after hearing the teacher say that, it reminded me that mercury was Not Safe, that a very small amount ingested could kill (MUCH less than what that girl held in her hand!) and I lost any interest in touching it. Thinking about it now, I'd be surprised if there is ANY such mercury in high school science classes or labs thesedays that isn't left over and long-forgotten from decades ago.
As an adult an aquaintance told about remodeling old houses and taking the mercury out of old nechanican thermostats (they used mercury in a glass tube that tilted one way would connect two wires stuck into the tube, turning on the heating system. The tube was mounted on a spiral of bimetallic metal, which would change the tilt with temperature). He told of putting the mercury into a jug, that they had collected the mercury from dozens of those things, then someone stole the jug (one can only hope the thief disposed of it properly).
Mercury is indeed dangerous to human health, and it's good to know that "CF's have such-ahd-such amount of mercury in them." As I've grown older, optimizing my health and safety have become more important to me (I don't drive drunk, because, well I don't drink - I quit smoking 16 years ago, always wear my seat belt, eat healthier, get some exercise, etc) but the amount in CF bulbs is not a particular worry for me, and doesn't stop me from buying and using them out of fear that one might break with me in the room.
Just "using a high-frequency PWM" won't guarantee it won't blink, unless your powering the circuit from a battery or a $200 regulated bench power supply.
The PWM circuit is ultimately powered by the 60 Hz (USA, 50Hz in many other areas) AC waveform, usually full-wave rectified and fed into a we-hope-sufficiently-large electrolytic capacitor. The output voltage of this peaks with the AC waveform peak, then falls as current is pulled from it, to minumum just before the waveform approaches the other peak, giving a 120Hz near-sawtooth waveform. If the capacitor doesn't have a sufficient value and the remaining voltage variation isn't accounted for in the circuitry powering the LEDs, the the LED light output WILL vary at a 120Hz rate.
Fortunately it's easy enough to compensate for this, dynamically changing the PWM so the LED output remains constant with the varying DC sawtooth waveform input (any PC switching power supply does just this to keep its output voltages stable). Unfortunately, this costs a penny more (at least!) than a "just-as-bright" flickering-LED solution, so this may not be the ultimate "market solution." Furthermore, electrolytics tend to go bad, losing their capacitance over many years, so a perfectly fine or "low-flicker" LED light may be flickering like hell well before the end of its otherwise-useful life.
There's already the "tape tax" law from the early '90's, in which a tax on blank tape was distributed to the RIAA/record companies to supposedly be distributed to the artists who were losing sales to "home taping." It also applies to "audio CD-R's" that I don't think anyone uses anymore. They were needed on standalone CD recorders which were crippled not to record on standard data CD-R's. You had to pay the "tape tax" to record anything ob those recorders, even your own original music!
The RIAA's ultimate goal is to tax the bits coming out of A/D converters so they can "plug" the "analog hole" as well as having full control over of making digital copies of anything.
A news report warns consumers that some local TV news videos may actually be propaganda platforms of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). According to this article, the following tip-offs may indicate that a news report may be from the RIAA are:
* Shockingly Bad Video
* Poorly Paced
* "Fly In" Bullet Points done in Microsoft Movie Maker
* Shown in Unusal Places on Your Local Newscast.
* Trust your eye. If it looks like schlock, it's probably from the RIAA.
Finally, if the video says that Christmas-themed cellphone ringtones are one of several "cool, innovative" ways of buying music, you may be looking at an RIAA-produced video.
Slashdot Mirror
But OF COURSE outsourcing creates jobs! It just creates them "over there."
Huh? I thought it was my Thetans that needed defragging.
I never understood Hubbard's *hack* "theology") *barf* but maybe it's good that I don't understand...
It's because Google Ads are driven by keywords on whatever page it's attached to, so that the ads are more "targeted" than just coming up at random. We're discussing Scientology, and Scientology has Google Ads, so the (ahem) "appropriate" *cough* ads show up.
A religion does two things: Prays to God, and passes the collection basket.
Scientology is not a religion.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a religion.
I saw "treatment" in this article title and was immediately interested for many reasons, but I expected alcohol/drug abuse problems to come up. My main "hobby horse" is that MAINSTREAM alcohol and drug treatment consists of, and is run by, members of 12-step groups (Alcholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc.), which are interently religious (despite the "spiritual, not religious" claim) and have no scientific basis. The influence of "steppism" is so pervasive that it strongly influences addiction research in the USA to the point of looking for genetic causes of addictive behaviors and for other evidence that such behaviors are "diseases" (ideas promoted by the step groups, whose members' PR efforts through front groups such as NCADD and CASA have been so effective that much of the general public believes these things). Any research that involves attempting to REDUCE drinking or drug use, rather than demanding abstinence from its subjects, is verboten and regarded as dangerous!
AC, you're very lucky you didn't get sucked into Al-Anon or ACOA or some such (or maybe you did and you immediately rejected it and/or didn't tell that part of your story). Twelve step groups are the LEAST trustworthy environment I can think of. I was in AA and was a "true believer" for two years (see Box 1980/letters section, April 1990 AA Grapevine magazine for how "grateful" I was), but then I started seeing the cracks in the "perfect" program and started analyzing (going against the slogan "utilize, don't analyze) the step programs, and it took several more years to deprogram myself, verify that these things had NO basis in science or logic, and finally stop going to meetings. Meanwhile I saw too many people commit suicide due to the cognitive dissonance and conflicting messages, with their action always being blamed on "this disease," "he could not be honest with himself" or "he could not see our way of life."
There's much more info about the step group phenomenon and its dangers online at these links:
http://www.morerevealed.com/
http://www.orange-papers.org/
http://www.peele.net/
Just so people know, Alcoholics Anonymous isn't the answer either.
The reason one of every hundred US citizens is in prison is MOSTLY due to the War On Drugs. Furthermore, drug offendors get "good behavior points" toward earlier release for attending religious (not just "spiritual") 12-step based groups in prison, clearly against the First Amendment (even those on death row are guaranteed freedom of religion, yet many are required to attend Alcoholics Aonymous and other groups by Government agents), yet the ACLU wants every prisoner to have access an electrical power outlet.
Really, most bottled water is just tap water, a plastic bottle, and marketing. I put my tap water through a tabletop filter pitcher before drinking it. Yeah, I'm a little bit paranoid about what might be in tap water.
And I can't stand that these news articles use a comparison such as "three light bulbs" (which in the middle of the growing popularity of CF bulbs is more vague than ever - 7W? 11? 13? 25? 50? 60? 75? 100??? What's an order of magnitude between friends, anyway?) instead of just stating the number of watts of electric power the thing consumes.
One thing I do to help keep my mind sharp is the "SAT Question Of The Day" at collegeboard.com - you can set it up to email the URL for the new one every day. I've been doing this for years, but I've only had the site keeping track of my answer percentages for the last half year or so. My percentages of correct answers in in the 92-93 percent range (most questions are simple and easy, but some can be tricky), but no doubt many Slashdotters of all ages can do better than me.
There are surely similar "questions of the day" out there. I've heard of one for nursing students. Does anyone know of any more that general Slashdotters would enjoy?
There are also "word of the day" emails you can sign up for from m-w.com and other dictionary sites.
On the physical side, I take a multivitamin once a day and 500mG of Vitamin C twice a day. I think that (and the Quaker 5-minute oatmeal every morning) helps mentally as well as physically.
Fifteen years ago I quit smoking, and around ten years ago I did sprint triathlons and on Olympic-distance tri, but I'm not nearly as active now (but I've still quit smoking). Also, I quit drinking 20 years ago. I don't know what damage I did to my brain in my 20's, but I'm just trying not to add to it.
As far as "doing even more" for diet (and exercise, which also matters but somewhat less, compared to a good diet vs. junk food) there are several stages of what you can do (I've been wanting to do the Walford/CRON thing for a while now, but it hasn't been easy):
Light-Duty is the book "Younger Next Year." It's aimed at those of us 50 and above, but much younger people can learn from it.
Medium to Heavy Duty is "Beyond the 120 Year Diet" by (the late) Roy Walford. It's CRON: Caloric Reduction (eating substantially fewer calories) with Optimal Nutrition (carefully choosing food for its nutritional values as well as "supplements" - vitamins and such). Excellent stuff for mind and body.
Extreme Duty is Ray Kurzweil's book "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" in which he not only does CRON but many other things such as taking 150 pills a day and weekly intravenous stuff. It looks a little 'out there' even compared to Walford's stuff, but Kurzweil just might be onto something.
One photo is worth a thousand proofs:
http://greggsutter.com/mt/archives/manWomanControlPanel.jpg
If you don't care how much you pay, Denon makes a decent Ethernet cable at a Rolls Royce price:
http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp
Check out the Amazon reviews!
http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B000I1X6PM/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/105-8770533-9603641?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
...and if that doesn't immediately close it, ctrl-alt-delete to see what's running, or if I really want to panic, the power plug.
I get the netflux things on cnn all the time.
Woops, NASA forgot the Entangled Particles...
I'm not familiar with Wikisource and there's surly a lot of overlap in content between these, but for older public-domain books there's the venerable (in net.time, anyway) Gutenberg Project:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
I second that commotion, even if it is from an AC. Just the ability to post YASID's (Yet Another Story ID - read the r.a.s.w FAQ) is invaluable when a scene or situation from a story comes to mind that you read decades ago but can't remember the author or title to save your life...it's one corner of Usenet that's still alive and thriving in spite of the spam posts.
Looks like at least part of your problem is "where do I find a particular title?" Bookfinder and Addall have already been mentioned, but there are other ways and sources if you're okay with used books (many excellent novels are out of print and thus ONLY available used), in RL (if you're willing to dig) as well as more online. I discuss these and more here:
http://ben-bradley.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-and-where-i-buyget-books.html
Six months ago I bought the Star Trek/New Generation novels "A Time To Be Born" and "A Time To Die" at a thrift store for 25 cents. I "don't read" ST novels, but I was going to put them up on paperbackswap.com to send out to get "points" for books I really want. Unfortunately, I started reading...it's an 8-book series and I'm now on book 7. I got books 3 through 8 on paperbackswap.com, and have the ones I've read listed on there.
It's space opera, the science sucks in these things, but I found the books entertaining because I liked the ST "New Generation" TV series and am of course familiar with the character. But once I get to the end of this, I swear I'll never read another ST novel. Give me some Real Hard SF, as in (an slightly older novel I recently read) Greg Bear's Eon.
Actually, as this story demonstrates, this is becoming true everywhere.
But OF COURSE /. has a purpose: To publicize and discuss new games!
This 'game' sounds too much like work, er, uh, life, and I don't mean the cellular automation thing.
Still running 3.1?
That 10,000 hours of computer time will be available from a wristwatch in two or three years.
I, for one, welcome our new HP-01 overlords.
The amounc of mercury in CF's is indeed a VERY SMALL AMOUNT compared to what I've personally SEEN, and heard about others being exposed to:
When I was a child at the pediatrician's examining room (40+ years ago) they used blood pressure meters (whatever they were called) that used MERCURY in them, much like a thermometer. The mercury went up and down in a vertical glass tube driven by air pressure in the arm cuff, indicating blood pressure. I saw one that was BROKEN with the mercury pooling in the bottom of the case. The doctor saw it was broken and removed it from the room, and came back with another of the same model that wasn't broken, and of course measured my blood pressure with it.
In a high school science class there was a plastic squirt-bottle of mercury, and a girl had put a drop into the palm of her hand and was playing with it, pushing it around with a finger. The teacher came in and saw what she was doing, and he calmly but firmly told her "When you're through playing with that, carefully put it all back into the bottle, and before you eat lunch, be sure to was your hands very, very thoroughly." I was rather interested in playing with it myself, but after hearing the teacher say that, it reminded me that mercury was Not Safe, that a very small amount ingested could kill (MUCH less than what that girl held in her hand!) and I lost any interest in touching it. Thinking about it now, I'd be surprised if there is ANY such mercury in high school science classes or labs thesedays that isn't left over and long-forgotten from decades ago.
As an adult an aquaintance told about remodeling old houses and taking the mercury out of old nechanican thermostats (they used mercury in a glass tube that tilted one way would connect two wires stuck into the tube, turning on the heating system. The tube was mounted on a spiral of bimetallic metal, which would change the tilt with temperature). He told of putting the mercury into a jug, that they had collected the mercury from dozens of those things, then someone stole the jug (one can only hope the thief disposed of it properly).
Mercury is indeed dangerous to human health, and it's good to know that "CF's have such-ahd-such amount of mercury in them." As I've grown older, optimizing my health and safety have become more important to me (I don't drive drunk, because, well I don't drink - I quit smoking 16 years ago, always wear my seat belt, eat healthier, get some exercise, etc) but the amount in CF bulbs is not a particular worry for me, and doesn't stop me from buying and using them out of fear that one might break with me in the room.
Just "using a high-frequency PWM" won't guarantee it won't blink, unless your powering the circuit from a battery or a $200 regulated bench power supply.
The PWM circuit is ultimately powered by the 60 Hz (USA, 50Hz in many other areas) AC waveform, usually full-wave rectified and fed into a we-hope-sufficiently-large electrolytic capacitor. The output voltage of this peaks with the AC waveform peak, then falls as current is pulled from it, to minumum just before the waveform approaches the other peak, giving a 120Hz near-sawtooth waveform. If the capacitor doesn't have a sufficient value and the remaining voltage variation isn't accounted for in the circuitry powering the LEDs, the the LED light output WILL vary at a 120Hz rate.
Fortunately it's easy enough to compensate for this, dynamically changing the PWM so the LED output remains constant with the varying DC sawtooth waveform input (any PC switching power supply does just this to keep its output voltages stable). Unfortunately, this costs a penny more (at least!) than a "just-as-bright" flickering-LED solution, so this may not be the ultimate "market solution." Furthermore, electrolytics tend to go bad, losing their capacitance over many years, so a perfectly fine or "low-flicker" LED light may be flickering like hell well before the end of its otherwise-useful life.
There's already the "tape tax" law from the early '90's, in which a tax on blank tape was distributed to the RIAA/record companies to supposedly be distributed to the artists who were losing sales to "home taping." It also applies to "audio CD-R's" that I don't think anyone uses anymore. They were needed on standalone CD recorders which were crippled not to record on standard data CD-R's. You had to pay the "tape tax" to record anything ob those recorders, even your own original music!
The RIAA's ultimate goal is to tax the bits coming out of A/D converters so they can "plug" the "analog hole" as well as having full control over of making digital copies of anything.
Or at least partly. They confuse the issues so badly I didn't know what to think the other day when I first saw it. I'm not even sure if they're talking about the article story or not:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2008/01/02/lklv.hostin.music.chetry.cnn
A news report warns consumers that some local TV news videos may actually be propaganda platforms of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). According to this article, the following tip-offs may indicate that a news report may be from the RIAA are:
* Shockingly Bad Video
* Poorly Paced
* "Fly In" Bullet Points done in Microsoft Movie Maker
* Shown in Unusal Places on Your Local Newscast.
* Trust your eye. If it looks like schlock, it's probably from the RIAA.
Finally, if the video says that Christmas-themed cellphone ringtones are one of several "cool, innovative" ways of buying music, you may be looking at an RIAA-produced video.
So the RIAA is saying that "Real" compilations suck...