The twist ending is nothing new; see just about any of the shows from the Hitchcock TV episodes. Although I gotta agree with you, Usual Suspects was an excellent movie. I thought I had it pegged as standard cops & robbers crap from the start, and I gotta admit they got me.
A lot of people trash everything as "unoriginal" because they can compare it to something else (ref Star Wars is a space western, etc.). Well, hell, you can compare just about anything. An old Lit prof of mine in college once claimed that Shakespeare did every possible plot in his plays, provided you boiled it all down to the basic elements. He proved it by having the class (there were about 25-30 of us) shout out things we thought countered his claim. None of us could refute him; this was '94 or '95.
Stories are reflections of life, hopes, and dreams. All people have had the same lives and hopes and dreams for thousands of years. Their constant reuse does not make a story unoriginal. A story filled with older plot elements arranged in a different or unique way can be, and is, original.
Feel and interface are subjective. Some may like Explorer due to its familiarity and simplicity, I agree, but I personally don't like it very much.
My favorite browser is Opera...mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, threading, well done popup blocking, and did I mention mouse gestures?. Not that it's the only browser with some of those, but it is very fast and low on bloat. And I think it's the only one with the gestures. Not to mention the M2 mail client is really nice (once you sit down and get used to it). You just gotta know beforehand that not all pages load well. But in my browsing experience, 90% of the pages I visit have no difficulty. Most of the 10% have only minor formatting problems.
I think the problem is less technical than psychological. Many MD's aren't going to think of their phone/pager as a vector. They wash their hands after each patient, but can contaminate their hands when they touch their phone or pager to turn it off (an unconscious move for most MD's).
If the risk is brought to their attention, they wil react. Most are actuely aware of the special vector issues in a hospital. The banning of phones in the hospital was probably a little severe; just the knowledge of the risk would probably be enough to cause the MD's to take their own precautions.
Water is (believe it or not) nonconductive. Pure water has a resistance in the megaOhm range (18 MOhm water is considered "ultrapure").
It becomes highly conductive once "impurities" (salts and some gasses) have been introduced. Alcohols can dissolve salts, and will become conductive once they do. It probably won't be too much of a risk, though, as that small alcohols (such as ethanol and propanol) evaporate very quickly. The major problem would be that repeated use of alcohol would eventually degrade the plastic; the alcohol would probably slowly dissolve the organics in the plastic.
You are aware, however, that it is difficult to advance technology without money, right? And with this type of technology, it is impossible to significantly advance without money.
There are a number of problems with NASA today. One is lack of Congressional & Executive support, in the form of leadership, vision, and money. Mostly money. This helps take care of that.
As Edison would put it, we did not fail. We found another way to not make a launch system.
The shuttle was a good experiment, it was good to do it. However, it went on far too long.
We kept throwing good money after bad, trying to salvage something from it, and we lost the gamble. In hindsight, it was a bad choice, but at the time (the 80s, early 90s), there was good reason to think it would work and we could salvage the program. It turns out the detractors were right. Now, let's move on. Back to the drawing board. In the meantime, we need something that we know works well; and the last truly successful design was Apollo.
Re:What is wrong with unmanned flight?
on
The Return of Apollo?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Echoes one of my personal favorite short stories, for the ending, if nothing else.
Niven's "Bottom of a Hole" (or a similar sounding title). Two men are talking, one very old man (about 150, I think; born pre-WWI) and one younger man, born after the colonization of the solar system. The age difference isn't addressed again until the end, and you've kind of forgotten it by that point.
At the end, the question of "Why explore, why seek esoteric knowledge?" comes up. The younger man asserts that entering space was not to seek esoteric knowledge, that the benefits of going into space are obvious, and lists them.
The old man counters by asking, "But did they know about all that before they went?". The younger instantly replies "Of course they did!", then remembers the other man's age, and adds, "Didn't they?"
The rest of the story was OK...not great. But that last line stuck with me.
It's funny, this story came up as the QOTD when I logged in yesterday. I wish I remember what the quoted source was...
Anyway, the blurb said that although it may have been the first computer bug, the term 'bug' had been used to refer to technical problems in radio operations for many years prior.
I disagree with that. In the 50's and 60's people wrote of exploring the solar system in the 80's and 90's, and colonizing it in the early 00's. That was in the next 40-50 years for them, and many believed it was possible, even likely. With the space race going on at the time, everyone assumed that we would have a base on the moon by 1985.
Now, however, we know that isn't true. Very few see us extensively colonizing the solar system in the next 50, 60 or even 100 years. Well, more maybe in 100 years. The point is, most of us would be skeptical about that happening in out lifetimes.
I agree with an earlier poster: The future has become mundane. We have robot pets, just not the same as they were envisioned. We have instantaneous global communication and information networks, exploration of the planets, and pocket computers, but it's just not what we thought it would be. Too much fiction ran smack into too much reality, and the predictive fiction became boring, even depressing. Today, Niven had us with manned missions to all planets. Heinlein had rebellions on the moon. Pournelle had us with a world government, and an FTL drive coming next year.
The future ain't what it used to be, and that, I think, is the problem. Not only did the fantasy not come true (like it was supposed to), it doesn't look like we ever will see it come true.
Sword and sorcery doesn't have the same problem: No one expects (or hopes) it to come true. I don't know about you, but I read SF with the hopes that my kids might be able to do that.
Depending on how hot it was, the asphalt could get pretty soft. You can easily push your thumb into it on really hot days. Here in Houston, there are days when a soda can is "harder than the asphalt itself". In fact, a lot of roads here don't even use regular asphalt. It would get pushed right off the road by passing cars during the summer, like a slow motion boat wake.
So, the fact that the tiles are also harder than the asphalt is about as shocking as the tiles themselves.
I'm a bitter liberal type now? Damn damn damn! I always thought I was a conservative, but because this scares the piss right out of me, and you said that that makes me a bitter liberal type, I guess I must be.
I got the supplement portion from some of the other research the group did. I tend to mix together all the research one group does when I'm talking about one paper...sorry for the confusion.
Take a look at the rest of their studies, there are a few. They pretty much just show that increasing Ca intake alone does not help prevent fractures.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by mixing two points...I was saying simply that the objective of the study was to assay for correlation between calcium intake and fracture incidence. It was not looking specifically at milk, therefore they don't claim that the increase seen in the one group was due to milk (that would get them slaughtered on review). They merely state the correlation. The lack of future publication on that bit of data would suggest (but not confirm) that it was a statistical glitch.
From this post, it would seem that we agree. Exercise is a major player in bone density, probably a more important player than diet. If that's what the article was saying, then I retract my statement about the article contradicting the paper. It's just that your original post seemed to suggest that this study claimed that milk itself was somehow harmful. If I misinterpreted, I apologize.
You ought to check out the other paper from '97 by this group. They showed that (in men) even after you correct for personal activity level (exercise!) and a host of other factors, daily intake of calcium has little or no impact on fracture incidence or bone density. That would indicate that a corrected factor (exercise, perhaps?) was responsible for any variation that there may be.
That study was not focused on milk. It was generalized on calcium intake from all food and supplement sources. I'm not referring to the article you linked, but to the paper by Feskanich that it references.
According to their study, there is an increased risk of fracture with increased calcium intake, not just milk intake. The linked article quoting the paper is actually using the paper to advocate something the paper warns against (i.e., increasing calcium intake).
I love that they call it shallow, it just adds to the humor of the situation (well, it would be funny if it weren't so damn scary). There is a quote next to the article:
Many students seem to think, apparently, that the internet is a law free zone
Followed at the end by:
Mr Oppenheim also said the RIAA was immume from rules on unreasonable searches on the internet, because it did not have links with law enforcement agencies.
Immune to the law? Who sees the internet as a "law-free zone"?
This could fall under the same category as evidence gatherd by a PI. However, in the case of the RIAA, it's like the PI gathering the information and then bringing charges himself. IANAL, but the way I understand it, the spirit of illegal search & seizure was to ensure that those that enforced the law could not search citizens at will; searches must be approved by a higher authority. I guess applying that to what is posted on a public server is a different story, though...
I dunno, it just seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
Re:I have researched this phenomenon
on
Nietzsche's Toxicology
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The same thing happens in many models, the one I am most familiar with is hypoxia. Exposing cultures, in situ tissues or even whole animals to short periods of "light" hypoxia will protect them from more severe hypoxia for a period of time. (Look on Pubmed for Kitakaze and his research on nucleotidase in the heart). However, the effect is short term. It only lasts for a few hours.
THe long term exposer acts almost like many many priming doses, and, in those people that exhibit greater adaptive response, the therapy will then be less effective. and the caveat, If the large dose of radiation is too large, you will not see this adaptive response
Although I don't know what the limits are in your work, I imagine (perhaps incorrectly) that the doses given in most radiation treatments are a bit large for adaptive response to kick in before the damage is too great. Besides, the (observed!) drecrease in efficacy of radiation treatment over time is probably quite well explained by natural selection. The first few doses kill off the cancerous cells that are sensitive to radiation, leaving only those that are less sensitive.
It's not always good, either. If you prime your liver with ethanol, and get the cleanup pathways activated, then take in a sublethal (for normal circumstances) dose of methanol, it will kill you. Because the pathways are already going full blast, the methanol is converted into its toxic breakdown products much more rapidly. Ying and Yang.
One last thing, because most of these responses are due to the activiation of a repair pathway, the protection given is short lived. These pathways are timed, and shut down after the stimulus is gone, at least normally. This is a Good Thing. Repair pathways gone awry are not good (some tumors, fibrosis, "Proud Flesh").
There is such a thing known as "water intoxication". It is EXTREMELY rare, and you have to be either very determined or very stupid to drink that much water. Here are a fewarticles on it.
Basically, you drink too much water (or don't pee enough) and you wind up diluting the electrolytes in your blood. This causes disruptions in the transmissions of nerve impulses, muscle contractions, etc. Like I said, very, very rare, and hard to get simply by drinking too much water. You'd have to drink insanely massive quantities in a very short period of time.
Everyone (yes EVERYONE) watching a movie knows sound can't travel in a vacuum!
I think you're putting a bit too much confidence on the knowledge base of Joe Schmuckatelli. I doubt everyone watching knows that. Many might, but I doubt all do.
Although I agree that the "silence in space" thing makes it more dramatic, the majority of viewers probably do not. They want the dramatic crack-boom of an explosion. Heck, even the explosions they put in action movies aren't terribly realistic. Ever seen dynamite or plastic explosive go offf? There's not a huge fireball like in most movies. It's a lot of dust, wind, and you feel the explosion almost more than you hear it (you hear it, too, but my experience is that the vibration in my ribs is more jarring than the sound, execpt up close)
Proof in point that it doesn't sell: When was the last Firefly episode aired? I loved that show, although the sound thing was the only scientifically real thing in the series.
It's not about creativity of plot, but creativity of special effects. It's about making eye (and ear) candy.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people trash everything as "unoriginal" because they can compare it to something else (ref Star Wars is a space western, etc.). Well, hell, you can compare just about anything. An old Lit prof of mine in college once claimed that Shakespeare did every possible plot in his plays, provided you boiled it all down to the basic elements. He proved it by having the class (there were about 25-30 of us) shout out things we thought countered his claim. None of us could refute him; this was '94 or '95.
Stories are reflections of life, hopes, and dreams. All people have had the same lives and hopes and dreams for thousands of years. Their constant reuse does not make a story unoriginal. A story filled with older plot elements arranged in a different or unique way can be, and is, original.
My favorite browser is Opera...mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, threading, well done popup blocking, and did I mention mouse gestures?. Not that it's the only browser with some of those, but it is very fast and low on bloat. And I think it's the only one with the gestures. Not to mention the M2 mail client is really nice (once you sit down and get used to it). You just gotta know beforehand that not all pages load well. But in my browsing experience, 90% of the pages I visit have no difficulty. Most of the 10% have only minor formatting problems.
If the risk is brought to their attention, they wil react. Most are actuely aware of the special vector issues in a hospital. The banning of phones in the hospital was probably a little severe; just the knowledge of the risk would probably be enough to cause the MD's to take their own precautions.
It becomes highly conductive once "impurities" (salts and some gasses) have been introduced. Alcohols can dissolve salts, and will become conductive once they do. It probably won't be too much of a risk, though, as that small alcohols (such as ethanol and propanol) evaporate very quickly. The major problem would be that repeated use of alcohol would eventually degrade the plastic; the alcohol would probably slowly dissolve the organics in the plastic.
There are a number of problems with NASA today. One is lack of Congressional & Executive support, in the form of leadership, vision, and money. Mostly money. This helps take care of that.
"We will never break the sound barrier"
The shuttle was a good experiment, it was good to do it. However, it went on far too long.
We kept throwing good money after bad, trying to salvage something from it, and we lost the gamble. In hindsight, it was a bad choice, but at the time (the 80s, early 90s), there was good reason to think it would work and we could salvage the program. It turns out the detractors were right. Now, let's move on. Back to the drawing board. In the meantime, we need something that we know works well; and the last truly successful design was Apollo.
Niven's "Bottom of a Hole" (or a similar sounding title). Two men are talking, one very old man (about 150, I think; born pre-WWI) and one younger man, born after the colonization of the solar system. The age difference isn't addressed again until the end, and you've kind of forgotten it by that point.
At the end, the question of "Why explore, why seek esoteric knowledge?" comes up. The younger man asserts that entering space was not to seek esoteric knowledge, that the benefits of going into space are obvious, and lists them.
The old man counters by asking, "But did they know about all that before they went?". The younger instantly replies "Of course they did!", then remembers the other man's age, and adds, "Didn't they?"
The rest of the story was OK...not great. But that last line stuck with me.
"You have a few new books to pick your bedtime story from...."
an OFF switch!
Anyway, the blurb said that although it may have been the first computer bug, the term 'bug' had been used to refer to technical problems in radio operations for many years prior.
BRAVO!
Any links to some more technical info on this technology? Specifically, what are the mediators they are using? That may be a limiting factor here.
Now, however, we know that isn't true. Very few see us extensively colonizing the solar system in the next 50, 60 or even 100 years. Well, more maybe in 100 years. The point is, most of us would be skeptical about that happening in out lifetimes.
I agree with an earlier poster: The future has become mundane. We have robot pets, just not the same as they were envisioned. We have instantaneous global communication and information networks, exploration of the planets, and pocket computers, but it's just not what we thought it would be. Too much fiction ran smack into too much reality, and the predictive fiction became boring, even depressing. Today, Niven had us with manned missions to all planets. Heinlein had rebellions on the moon. Pournelle had us with a world government, and an FTL drive coming next year.
The future ain't what it used to be, and that, I think, is the problem. Not only did the fantasy not come true (like it was supposed to), it doesn't look like we ever will see it come true.
Sword and sorcery doesn't have the same problem: No one expects (or hopes) it to come true. I don't know about you, but I read SF with the hopes that my kids might be able to do that.
So, the fact that the tiles are also harder than the asphalt is about as shocking as the tiles themselves.
I'm a bitter liberal type now? Damn damn damn! I always thought I was a conservative, but because this scares the piss right out of me, and you said that that makes me a bitter liberal type, I guess I must be.
Crap.
Hats off, man. That takes gonads. SERIOUS gonads. Hell, it takes balls just to watch the damn show, much less ADMIT you watch it...
Take a look at the rest of their studies, there are a few. They pretty much just show that increasing Ca intake alone does not help prevent fractures.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by mixing two points...I was saying simply that the objective of the study was to assay for correlation between calcium intake and fracture incidence. It was not looking specifically at milk, therefore they don't claim that the increase seen in the one group was due to milk (that would get them slaughtered on review). They merely state the correlation. The lack of future publication on that bit of data would suggest (but not confirm) that it was a statistical glitch.
From this post, it would seem that we agree. Exercise is a major player in bone density, probably a more important player than diet. If that's what the article was saying, then I retract my statement about the article contradicting the paper. It's just that your original post seemed to suggest that this study claimed that milk itself was somehow harmful. If I misinterpreted, I apologize.
You ought to check out the other paper from '97 by this group. They showed that (in men) even after you correct for personal activity level (exercise!) and a host of other factors, daily intake of calcium has little or no impact on fracture incidence or bone density. That would indicate that a corrected factor (exercise, perhaps?) was responsible for any variation that there may be.
once it's been spiked with P. pestis.
According to their study, there is an increased risk of fracture with increased calcium intake, not just milk intake. The linked article quoting the paper is actually using the paper to advocate something the paper warns against (i.e., increasing calcium intake).
Many students seem to think, apparently, that the internet is a law free zone
Followed at the end by:
Mr Oppenheim also said the RIAA was immume from rules on unreasonable searches on the internet, because it did not have links with law enforcement agencies.
Immune to the law? Who sees the internet as a "law-free zone"?
This could fall under the same category as evidence gatherd by a PI. However, in the case of the RIAA, it's like the PI gathering the information and then bringing charges himself. IANAL, but the way I understand it, the spirit of illegal search & seizure was to ensure that those that enforced the law could not search citizens at will; searches must be approved by a higher authority. I guess applying that to what is posted on a public server is a different story, though...
I dunno, it just seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
THe long term exposer acts almost like many many priming doses, and, in those people that exhibit greater adaptive response, the therapy will then be less effective. and the caveat, If the large dose of radiation is too large, you will not see this adaptive response
Although I don't know what the limits are in your work, I imagine (perhaps incorrectly) that the doses given in most radiation treatments are a bit large for adaptive response to kick in before the damage is too great. Besides, the (observed!) drecrease in efficacy of radiation treatment over time is probably quite well explained by natural selection. The first few doses kill off the cancerous cells that are sensitive to radiation, leaving only those that are less sensitive.
It's not always good, either. If you prime your liver with ethanol, and get the cleanup pathways activated, then take in a sublethal (for normal circumstances) dose of methanol, it will kill you. Because the pathways are already going full blast, the methanol is converted into its toxic breakdown products much more rapidly. Ying and Yang.
One last thing, because most of these responses are due to the activiation of a repair pathway, the protection given is short lived. These pathways are timed, and shut down after the stimulus is gone, at least normally. This is a Good Thing. Repair pathways gone awry are not good (some tumors, fibrosis, "Proud Flesh").
Basically, you drink too much water (or don't pee enough) and you wind up diluting the electrolytes in your blood. This causes disruptions in the transmissions of nerve impulses, muscle contractions, etc. Like I said, very, very rare, and hard to get simply by drinking too much water. You'd have to drink insanely massive quantities in a very short period of time.
I think you're putting a bit too much confidence on the knowledge base of Joe Schmuckatelli. I doubt everyone watching knows that. Many might, but I doubt all do.
Proof in point that it doesn't sell: When was the last Firefly episode aired? I loved that show, although the sound thing was the only scientifically real thing in the series.
It's not about creativity of plot, but creativity of special effects. It's about making eye (and ear) candy.