I didn't say you weren't a qualified teacher, I said you didn't include the costs for one. If you're happy working for free, I've got some stuff for you to do. If you don't need a qualified teacher to teach, you'd be happy with your kids going to a school and being taught by whatever homeless guy happened to be closest? There are quite a few of them, and they work cheap.
You're spectacularly failing to make your point then. You can't just say "hey, I bought $800 worth of books and taught my kids so public schools should be able to do the same!" Take that $800 and add the four hours a day of rent or mortgage/maintenance/taxes on your house, plus salary for yourself, plus insurance, plus a supplement for the extra costs to deal with special needs, and you'll start to get a more reasonable estimate. American public schools might be terribly inefficient, I don't know. But your accounting is pretty ridiculous.
You can't ever get two quarks very far apart. That property arises because the gluon, the force carrier for the strong force, has a strong charge of it's own. That's as if photons were electrically charged. When two quarks exchange virtual gluons the gluons exchange virtual gluons with everything around as well. The bigger the distance between the quarks, the more space for colour charged gluons between them, so the stronger the force.
When you pull two quarks further and further apart, at some point it's energetically favourable for a couple of virtual quarks to pop into existence and you end up with a couple of mesons instead of two free quarks. That's what happens in accelerators: nobody ever sees quarks, they see sprays of particles that indicate a hadron was blown apart and the constituent quarks then reformed into hadrons.
Sure, that worked so well for operating systems. And smartphones. After those had been patched once or twice there were no more exploits ever.
If your smartphone gets hacked it's annoying. You format it, install the security update, and hope it doesn't happen too often. If your brakes get hacked you've got a bit bigger problem.
They rated cars on various factors that they thought would predict vulnerability to hacking. The Jeep they hacked rated highest, IIRC, but right up there with it were the Escalade and a Lexus sedan. It's an industry-wide problem. Actually, it's worse than that. These things are really baby SCADA systems, and SCADA security is pretty crappy in all industries.
Taxpayers have expressed their unwillingness to pay lots of money for research. So research, depending on the field, is funded to some extent by industry. Taxpayers are especially unwilling to pay for medical research on diseases that don't affect them.
The Henrietta Lacks story doesn't seem to have any real similarities with what the GP said at all.
HL was treated with the standard of care for a tumour. Cells acquired during that treatment were then used for research, apparently without informed consent. That sample, which could have come from anyone, happened to be the first one that was successfully immortalized. The only reason that particular story is more than just an example of some of the shadiness that went on before we had international conventions on informed consent in human research is that the HL cells happened to be used to generate a research cell line that was then widely distributed. It's famous because of the PITA it would have been for everyone to destroy their HL cell cultures and start again with cells with a properly obtained progenitor.
That's one of the issues in the US that kind of puzzled me. We check IDs when you vote. It's not a problem, because everyone can provide the required ID. If it's actually a problem in the US, my question would not be "is it racism to require an ID to vote?" but rather "how racist is our society that significant portions of it can't identify themselves sufficiently to vote?"
That's silly. You just didn't include any of the extra costs: a building for the class, a qualified teacher, heating, air conditioning, etc. Properly accounted, you probably spent many times what a public school spends per student.
Wikipedia says moxibustion is treatment with dried mugwort. I'm not sure how that helps you create an electric current.
Regardless of whether the Chinese may have made some small currents by accidentally using dissimilar metals or something, this study doesn't have anything to say about ancient Chinese acupuncture because the ancient Chinese didn't have the ability to create controlled currents of this kind, and there's no evidence they even tried. You can't do a study of prayer combined with chemotherapy and then claim the result supports prayer because "the chemo is just to make it work faster because everyone's in such a hurry these days!"
PS: Edison? I guess you're probably American? There were one or two minor people working on electricity before Edison got around to discovering it.
The problem in this case is when those practices interfere with further scientific evolution. The placebo effect is a wonderful thing, and exploiting it when you've got no other choices is a great idea. But when it starts interfering with the development of things that actually work better, it is a problem. Not to mention the other negative effects of a significant portion of a modern society believing in woo.
You know that most of the established pharma companies make certain drugs for rare diseases and either give them away for free or charge completely nominal amounts for them, right?
There is a new breed of startup company that buys up the rights to such treatments and raises their price by a hundred thousand percent (that's not hyperbole) though. Those guys are absolutely bastards.
The pharma industry has engaged in some pretty questionable things at various times, but they're not demons.
Acupuncturists don't work for free. You can't put surgery in a pill either, yet surgeons are a pretty entrenched part of "western medicine."
You can't put an FDA stamp on acupuncture because it hasn't shown efficacy in the required two large multi centre randomized placebo controlled double blind clinical trials. If it did, you certainly could get FDA approval for the equipment and acceptance of the technique as a standard of care for the approved disorder.
You were right until you got to the end. The placebo effect works incredibly well, which is why the only medical study that's credible at all is a placebo controlled, double blind one. Placebos can shrink tumours and cure real, physically verifiable diseases. Billions aren't spent recruiting twice the number of subjects so you can administer placebos because people somehow haven't figured out how to use objective outcome measures.
Prophets use the same technique. Say something sufficiently vague, find a sufficiently credible audience, and all of a sudden you can't help but be right.
The Chinese concept of chi doesn't really match mitochondria very well. Except in very specific cases, mitochondria don't flow anywhere, and they aren't energy. The energy that does flow is in the form of glucose in the blood, and you can't change it much, nor the functioning of the mitochondria, by traditional methods of affecting chi.
The numbers quoted in the summary aren't error rates anyway. They're percentages of total errors.
It's probably a bit difficult to compare actual error rates. Medical devices are subject to very strict adverse event reporting. Surgeons, not so much.
The quality of Slashdot has really gone downhill. Some stuff has happened in optics since the 1800s. It's theoretically possible with metamaterials to make a lens that can resolve features substantially smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Theoretically, you can make a lens out of metamaterials that can resolve features smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
The proposal is to put a small base near a pole, mine water, turn it into fuel, and ship it up to a Langrange point. Outbound ships can refuel on their way to Mars (manned) or elsewhere (robotic). It sounds like a reasonable reason to go to the moon.
There's also some interesting things you could do with science experiments on the moon. Lots of hard vacuum, low gravity and radio silence on the far side.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that one matches up a little closer to chi all right. All except for the little tester device.
I didn't say you weren't a qualified teacher, I said you didn't include the costs for one. If you're happy working for free, I've got some stuff for you to do. If you don't need a qualified teacher to teach, you'd be happy with your kids going to a school and being taught by whatever homeless guy happened to be closest? There are quite a few of them, and they work cheap.
You're spectacularly failing to make your point then. You can't just say "hey, I bought $800 worth of books and taught my kids so public schools should be able to do the same!" Take that $800 and add the four hours a day of rent or mortgage/maintenance/taxes on your house, plus salary for yourself, plus insurance, plus a supplement for the extra costs to deal with special needs, and you'll start to get a more reasonable estimate. American public schools might be terribly inefficient, I don't know. But your accounting is pretty ridiculous.
It shouldn't be terribly difficult to write some spectral analysis software for it, if you can figure out how to talk to their hardware.
You can't ever get two quarks very far apart. That property arises because the gluon, the force carrier for the strong force, has a strong charge of it's own. That's as if photons were electrically charged. When two quarks exchange virtual gluons the gluons exchange virtual gluons with everything around as well. The bigger the distance between the quarks, the more space for colour charged gluons between them, so the stronger the force.
When you pull two quarks further and further apart, at some point it's energetically favourable for a couple of virtual quarks to pop into existence and you end up with a couple of mesons instead of two free quarks. That's what happens in accelerators: nobody ever sees quarks, they see sprays of particles that indicate a hadron was blown apart and the constituent quarks then reformed into hadrons.
It's called colour confinement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sure, that worked so well for operating systems. And smartphones. After those had been patched once or twice there were no more exploits ever.
If your smartphone gets hacked it's annoying. You format it, install the security update, and hope it doesn't happen too often. If your brakes get hacked you've got a bit bigger problem.
They rated cars on various factors that they thought would predict vulnerability to hacking. The Jeep they hacked rated highest, IIRC, but right up there with it were the Escalade and a Lexus sedan. It's an industry-wide problem. Actually, it's worse than that. These things are really baby SCADA systems, and SCADA security is pretty crappy in all industries.
Taxpayers have expressed their unwillingness to pay lots of money for research. So research, depending on the field, is funded to some extent by industry. Taxpayers are especially unwilling to pay for medical research on diseases that don't affect them.
The Henrietta Lacks story doesn't seem to have any real similarities with what the GP said at all.
HL was treated with the standard of care for a tumour. Cells acquired during that treatment were then used for research, apparently without informed consent. That sample, which could have come from anyone, happened to be the first one that was successfully immortalized. The only reason that particular story is more than just an example of some of the shadiness that went on before we had international conventions on informed consent in human research is that the HL cells happened to be used to generate a research cell line that was then widely distributed. It's famous because of the PITA it would have been for everyone to destroy their HL cell cultures and start again with cells with a properly obtained progenitor.
If the odds are 276M:1 to win $300 million on a $1 bet then you're not stupid for playing.
That's one of the issues in the US that kind of puzzled me. We check IDs when you vote. It's not a problem, because everyone can provide the required ID. If it's actually a problem in the US, my question would not be "is it racism to require an ID to vote?" but rather "how racist is our society that significant portions of it can't identify themselves sufficiently to vote?"
That's silly. You just didn't include any of the extra costs: a building for the class, a qualified teacher, heating, air conditioning, etc. Properly accounted, you probably spent many times what a public school spends per student.
And make the winning numbers something meaningful to him so he has a good, natural story for why he picked them. Daughter's birthday or something.
Wikipedia says moxibustion is treatment with dried mugwort. I'm not sure how that helps you create an electric current.
Regardless of whether the Chinese may have made some small currents by accidentally using dissimilar metals or something, this study doesn't have anything to say about ancient Chinese acupuncture because the ancient Chinese didn't have the ability to create controlled currents of this kind, and there's no evidence they even tried. You can't do a study of prayer combined with chemotherapy and then claim the result supports prayer because "the chemo is just to make it work faster because everyone's in such a hurry these days!"
PS: Edison? I guess you're probably American? There were one or two minor people working on electricity before Edison got around to discovering it.
The problem in this case is when those practices interfere with further scientific evolution. The placebo effect is a wonderful thing, and exploiting it when you've got no other choices is a great idea. But when it starts interfering with the development of things that actually work better, it is a problem. Not to mention the other negative effects of a significant portion of a modern society believing in woo.
You know that most of the established pharma companies make certain drugs for rare diseases and either give them away for free or charge completely nominal amounts for them, right?
There is a new breed of startup company that buys up the rights to such treatments and raises their price by a hundred thousand percent (that's not hyperbole) though. Those guys are absolutely bastards.
The pharma industry has engaged in some pretty questionable things at various times, but they're not demons.
Acupuncturists don't work for free. You can't put surgery in a pill either, yet surgeons are a pretty entrenched part of "western medicine."
You can't put an FDA stamp on acupuncture because it hasn't shown efficacy in the required two large multi centre randomized placebo controlled double blind clinical trials. If it did, you certainly could get FDA approval for the equipment and acceptance of the technique as a standard of care for the approved disorder.
You were right until you got to the end. The placebo effect works incredibly well, which is why the only medical study that's credible at all is a placebo controlled, double blind one. Placebos can shrink tumours and cure real, physically verifiable diseases. Billions aren't spent recruiting twice the number of subjects so you can administer placebos because people somehow haven't figured out how to use objective outcome measures.
Prophets use the same technique. Say something sufficiently vague, find a sufficiently credible audience, and all of a sudden you can't help but be right.
The Chinese concept of chi doesn't really match mitochondria very well. Except in very specific cases, mitochondria don't flow anywhere, and they aren't energy. The energy that does flow is in the form of glucose in the blood, and you can't change it much, nor the functioning of the mitochondria, by traditional methods of affecting chi.
If electricity is required to make acupuncture work it kind of shoots down the "credibility" provided by "used for thousands of years by the Chinese!"
It would be interesting to see if the electricity is necessary or not.
The overall numbers are in the summary. The patient injury rate was 0.08%.
Chalk up an error for yourself then. The actual rate is 99.92% success, where success is defined as no patient injury.
The numbers quoted in the summary aren't error rates anyway. They're percentages of total errors.
It's probably a bit difficult to compare actual error rates. Medical devices are subject to very strict adverse event reporting. Surgeons, not so much.
The quality of Slashdot has really gone downhill. Some stuff has happened in optics since the 1800s. It's theoretically possible with metamaterials to make a lens that can resolve features substantially smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Theoretically, you can make a lens out of metamaterials that can resolve features smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
The proposal is to put a small base near a pole, mine water, turn it into fuel, and ship it up to a Langrange point. Outbound ships can refuel on their way to Mars (manned) or elsewhere (robotic). It sounds like a reasonable reason to go to the moon.
There's also some interesting things you could do with science experiments on the moon. Lots of hard vacuum, low gravity and radio silence on the far side.