If you're following the news about Google Glass, you'll have heard that some people hate having their picture taken. This is a fact that nearly every photojournalist has to deal with. Only those who've been in the industry a very long time will be able to blend into the background and capture the scene without becoming themselves a reality-distorting distraction. The best will do this without disturbing the relationship and trust the reporter must build with the people being interviewed. They might even become "the bad cop" (does anyone remember The Animal from Lou Grant? That jerk photographer that both the interviewee and reporter can share a laugh and a beer with while the reporter builds her story.
Give the reporter an iPhone or DSLR or Google Glass and the reporter becomes that jerk photographer. The relationship between reporter and interviewee disappears as quickly as you can say, "So-long Chicago Sun-Times."
AP (Chicago transcript by Siri): President Obama's state of the unit address was... I'd rather not say. But the corndog mafia sentopolis and will in the Mideast. I don't know. Maybe the genius bar guys could answer that. But North Korean leader... I'm not allowed to delete reminders. Look... a puppy!
We'll see when Telsa (or anyone else) can beat Better Place's distance record of 1172 miles in 24 hours. When Telsa figures out another way to push 22KW into a car in 3 minutes without causing a huge explosion and fire, than we'll have a better idea. Until then, Better Place's technology was the most practical form of electric transport using existing technology. It was a good idea but like many good ideas, it needs to wait until society is ready for it and entrepreneurs know how to sell it. This is by no means the first time we've seen technological regression. The rechargeable battery electric car was invented by French physicist Gaston Planté in 1856. In 1878, a Methodist minister named John Wesley Carhart proved that a steam-powered car he named the “Spark” could travel long distances under its own power.
But when it frightened a valuable horse belonging to industrialist J.I. Case (tractor company owner) to death, it was banished from the city and the world would have to wait until 1886 when Karl Benz and then later Henry Ford would bring back an idea whose time had finally come.
Similar examples of technological regressions and reinventions can be found in the history of electric lighting. Better Place had a better idea for electric car charging, and if we can learn anything from history– most good ideas eventually see the light of day.
If the landing had been faked, one of the most famous quotes in history wouldn't have been flubbed. They would have re-shot it as "One small step for A man..."
The first step (descending from the ladder) would not have been broadcast to the world upside down.
The picture quality would have been better. Even as a 5-year old I remember complaining my dad that the lunar landing picture was bad. (This on a early-1960s rabbit-eared B&W Zenith that didn't show a very clear picture of anything.)
"I believe rules are rules and you break them, you should be punished, not rewarded." - Congratulations, you have met the requirements for German citizenship.
I was going to say "you must be a Good German", but it amounts to the same thing.
Here's another hole in the US educational system, textbooks which portray Germany (indeed much of the world) as having stopped progress in 1945. Germany is now a diverse multi-cultural society you wouldn't recognize Germany from your dusty textbook. The average German is far more liberal, tolerant and open-minded than the majority of Americans and Germany retains its scientific excellence even after exporting some of its brightest to the US back when there was a space race.
Draconian laws with NO EXCEPTIONS EVER (except for politically powerful or those wealthy enough to buy into lawyer-based economy) have made the US less free than most of the western world, certainly less free than most of Europe (including Germany.) The wonderful American concept of written law, applied equally to everyone (except the poor, minorities, immigrants, people in interment camps...) is something to be admired, but to expect that even the gigabytes of man-made law written in our high-entropy language can encode justice for every situation is daft. This failure of written law is why we have a justice system with judges and juries of peers.
have her write a paper on the risks of experimenting with homemade explosives and what safety measures she should have taken, but didn't and how it could be done more safely next time
She should help Conn and Hal Iggulden write "The Dangerous Book for Girls" an updated version of their "The Dangerous book for boys." It's no coincidence that it was not first published in the US. Conn and Hal would probably be spending time at gitmo. My elementary school library had a shelf full of science books with far more dangerous experiments, build a hydrogen balloon, make coal gas, go down to your chemist and buy some quinine of mercury for a fun magic trick. Even in the 70s it was difficult to get the nineteenth century Britain raw materials (who the heck is going to sell a 10-year old HCL or H2SO4? Nowadays it's tough even to get borax for that basement fusion reactor. Now get off my lawn!
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
WTF are you talking about back in the first half of the last century, unless you worked on the farm, you were able to produce enough for you and your family in a 40 hour week with just one adult working and that was with an average of 4 kids. Today, it takes both parents working with an average of 1.4 kids.
Technology may make us more efficient, but it has nothing to do with the economics of providing for a family.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
For a look at what really happened to America's jobless when manual labor jobs disappeared, check out a collaborative NPR Planet Money/This American Life expose on this invisible economy: "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America" The program's podcast "Trends with benefits" is well worth listening to.
In summary, what happens is that manual labor jobs disappear from small American towns and they're replaced with lawyer and bureaucratic desk jobs in large cities, state capitals and Washington D.C. A look at trends in unemployment during the great recession gives us a glimpse of this. But Americans on disability don't appear in any labor department unemployment or employment statistics. What's more, people on disability almost never get off the program. Unlike welfare, people on disability are discouraged from working, their kids are discouraged from doing well in school. Even in comparison the obvious economic mess made by programs to promote debt until death (aka mortgage), the non-productive trillions in the derivative economy, this 200+ billion dollar hole in the US economy is significant specifically because of its social fallout. Uncovering this is the first step in adjusting our economy to a new reality of labor and employment.
Look at this little planet Earth, its moon is HUGE. Only Jupiter and Saturn have bigger moons. Luna is nearly as big as Mercury, half as big as Mars but its home planet hasn't colonized it. Obviously there's no intelligent life there. Let's claim them both for the queen of the galactic empire.
Obama's plan is beyond daft. Asteroids are unstable, there is no place to hide from cosmic radiation or Bremstralung X-rays from solar wind. A mission failure in the lunar capture plan could lead to a global disaster. Could Columbus and Magellan have discovered the New World before they had ever sailed the Mediterranean? Could the Polynesians have found Hawaii and New Zealand if they weren't already experienced navigators amongst the nearby islands of Polynesia? What if the first of England had decided to capture Sumatra and bring the entire island home for the British crown before the British Navy had ever ventured as far as Ireland, would you have considered that to be a good plan? Its better than Obama's plan.
"Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer."
In that there is no cure, yeah, it's a good as nothing becasue it is nothing.
"psychosomatic healing"
There is no such thing. That has been put to rest.
An uncontrolled and unconfirmed article.
I think you mean that this doctor's careful observation published in the British medical journal and cited by the NIH is not a large double-blind peer-reviewed study of the sort that the likes of Merck can afford to commission for such things as its propecia baldlness "cure" (now known to cause permanent side-effects). Are you saying that off-label usage by AMA-approved doctors has not been made with weaker evidence than this? What about Lipitor and other statins? Medi-pushers commission studies to prove statins lower cholesterol. And because cholesterol is an easy to measure stat for the insurance industry, few bothered to study whether these drugs actually reduce the risk of heart disease, strokes and death. The stats are all that matters so taking a cue from Lance Armstrong, pharmabusiness earns millions of dollars on health statistic fakery that would make Lance Armstrong blush.
Do you even know what science is?
I like Feynman's definition: Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself, for instance that we already know everything about the connection between our mind and bodies which has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years should be completely discarded in favor of the medical industry's latest pill.
" And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do."
no, thye don't. Yes the warts will go away, but they will ANYWAYS.
I have spent decades dealing with people like you. watching people die, give there kids bogus treatments, reading good studies.
You are a worthless piece if shit. You spread poor thinking like some sort of infection, and you are proud of you lack of critical thinking skills.
Learn to think.
At first I was going to ignore this post as a simple troll or respond in kind but I see that there is something more here. Your attitude is widely held in the American medical industry and is one of the reasons billions of excess dollars are spent with shorter lifespans and lower quality-of-life than much of the developed world.
I don't know who you think I am. I've always advocated that the best scientific and medical research should be applied along with a healing tool that is millions of years older. You and many in the medical profession seem to be stuck in an unquestioning and blind faith in current medical technology. This arrogance is the opposite of science and impedes scientific progress. This lack of respect for the complexity of the biochemical entity previously known as "a patient" is responsible for far more pain and death than even the worst of non AMA-approved faith-healers.
Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer. It's reasonable to try to separate the efficacy of a new medicine from the efficacy of psychosomatic healing when qualifying a drug. But to ignore the later entirely is not good medicine. Here is a graphic example of the effect of hypnosis on Congenital Ichthyosiform Erythodermia, a disease which did not respond to any recognized treatment and is barely touched by modern medicine. It was considered to be incurable and yet substantial and long-lasting healing took place 5 days after a hypnotic suggestion specifically on the side of the body suggested by the hypnotist. And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do.
My reaction was "So what is the brand of green laser that is putting out 65.5 mw instead of 5mw? And will ThinkGeek be buying up the remaining supply before the government confiscates it?
Probably any of the cheap Chinese imports you find on Ebay but don't buy one. Unscrupulous con artists remove the InfraRed filter so a laser power meter shows it as being "bright", hoping the buyer is ignorant of the fact that most of that brightness is in invisible but damaging wavelengths.
They'll probably do what the MPAA did to retiree Fred Lawrence when he was sued over $600,000 for 4 movies his grandkid downloaded that the kid already owned! First knock the fine down to the point where it only bankrupts her (not several times over, only fair ya' know.) Then make her into RIAA's "community service" slave warning others not to do what she did.
That's all well and good, but "Earth Hour" has nothing to do with "light pollution" - it's about 'showing a commitment to sustainability.'
Light pollution is a clear and easy to understand example of tragedy of the commons. Individuals each acting in their own self interest each causing a relatively small amount of environmental degradation can collectively damage the environment for everyone. Solving this problem is key to solving all sustainability issues and Earth Hour's instantaneous (though temporary) reduction in light pollution is a clear demonstration that small, painless actions by a large number of people can have a positive impact on the environment. The US's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign did the same for litter but it took a decade. Earth Hour has a more immediate, positive and measurable impact on the night sky environment than decades of cleaning oil from beaches and rescuing sea turtles have on these aspects of our environment.
Light pollution is a problem of many people living together in close, industrialized proximity to one another. If "sustainability" requires us to do away with the conveniences and luxuries of modern life such that our cities would produce significantly less light on a consistent basis, then you've identified the crux of the problem right there, and also why the program is destined to fail.
Light pollution to the level it has reached in many western cities is not an unavoidable side-effect of industrialization. It is, in fact, an indicator of technological inefficiency. Several billions of dollars worth of energy spilled into outer space every year does no one any good.
You will never convince people to revert to pre-industrial civilization in order to "protect the earth."
No I won't, nor do I need to. Too many people believe that environmentalism means a return to the past. As I said in an earlier post, the modern LED light bulb uses 1/10th the energy of an Edison bulb and is 4000 times more efficient than the ancient oil lamps they replaced. Environmentalists should celebrate this and paint those obsessed with Edison incandescent bulbs, internal combustion engines and an oil-based economy as the Luddites they are. Sadly, many in the green movement do not have the technological, scientific or media savvy to clarify this point and seem to embrace the "return to the past" meme which will not work. A true environmentalist has a long view of time. What can we learn from the past, what of value will we use by using this technology? What will be the long-term impacts of using this technology. True environmentalism weighs the past and future along with the present. Its understandable that our "now" focused culture would not value the long term educational benefits of Earth Hour.
Earth Hour has a symbolic element but it also has a real and profound positive environmental effect which lasts for exactly 1 hour. Like air pollution, light pollution is a "slow boiled frog" problem. Ask a kid in Beijing what color the sky is and he might say brown or yellow-orange or grey but probably not blue. If things don't improve, the next generation of kids have no idea that the sky is supposed to be blue. Ditto for kids in NYC, Los Angeles, Brussels and thousands of other cities where people have seen stars on TV and movies, maybe even planetariums but never in real life. A well organized Earth Hour can temporarily change that giving the next generation a glimpse of what the night sky is supposed to look like. After seeing that, they'll be less likely to accept McDonalds Laser french fries and other pollution of our night sky with moving, flashing gyrating annoying projected night sky advertising which is sure to come unless enough people say "Not on MY planet!".
"Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic."
Oh god, hippies. Can you just like go talk to someone who gives a shit? I do not.
When approaching air pollution, energy dependence, light pollution, anthropogenic climate change and other tragedies of the commons (a simple concept some true Americans mightn't get until Family Guy explains it), it's important to know which of your neighbors don't give a shit. So while yahoos here can hide behind "Anonymous coward", during Earth Hour all we have to do is look for the redneck with camo gear, "I lov Sarah Palin's intulekt" bumper sticker and a 3 million candlepower Wal-mart floodlight.
Finding the source of any problem is the first step in solving it.
While writing a story about Hannukah and other lighting miracles, I found that modern LEDs can run for 6 months on the equivalent of 1 day's supply of menorah oil. So if you were to attempt to illuminate your house with candles for Earth Hour, you'd consume 4000 times as much oil. Thankfully we don't do that.
Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic. It is also a talking point. "Wow, look at that comet, I wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't turned off the barn light." "The building's landscaping is a bit too bright, I think it looks better against a natural sky.", "Hi neighbor, would you like me to show you Jupiter and the Pleiades through this telescope." , "Hey this is fun, why don't we do it once a week?"
One approach which would encourage companies to do the right thing would be to tax products based on the amount of e-waste they produce but then allow for a small discount if the product is open and repairable. And no I don't care about Apple's and similar company's greenwashing "recycling" campaigns, their 8-12 month planned- obsolescence cycle is an enormous and unnecessary impact on the environment. All I ask is that the companies which benefit enormously from irreparable short-lived products pay for this necessary damage.
I'd vote for truth in advertising laws making it very clear that much of what you "buy" you don't really own. When consumers are treated as criminals and not trusted the use of the products they"buy", call it what it is, rental. So you don't own your Wii, Xbox, Playstation or any of your video games, Blue Ray disks (can't play them overseas), iTunes downloads, Android apps, iPhone apps, your car, your TV, your Windows 8 laptop, your printer. And you certainly don't own your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macbook or any other Apple products.
Now that Joe sixpack has happy bent over and submitted to this state of affairs, corporate giants are free to expand this subscription model to everything from your refrigerator to your clothing. And if you're a citizen of the US, your tax dollars are paying for FBI and other law enforcement agencies against the likes of you. As Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan put it, "We have billionaires to protect!"
I've done a lot of sailing on the Great Lakes and Irish Sea and I can tell you that cold water often brings a kind of dense low fog. There are times when we can see the tops of masts and blue sky above but because the sun is often low at these latitudes, we can't see where the sun is. But sometimes the fog was so bright, I'd wear sun glasses and then I did notice that the zenith blue sky was polarized. What's more, the digital watch we used for sailing was an LCD watch-- which means it polarized display. And the display did darken noticeably when turned at certain angles, so the reflected sky polarization was also discernible. At the time I wondered whether it could be used as a practical form of navigation, but we had a compass. A few years later Loran-C became popular addition to the compass as and then GPS. But when I heard about the theory that an Iceland spar sunstone might have been used for navigation in the high arctic, I'd give it the nod of plausibility. No it isn't as good as a compass, unless you're above 70 degrees magnetic latitude. No it wouldn't work well under conditions of total cloud cover or rain, might not work at all. But I'm sure this kind of low fog is at least as common in the arctic as it is at my latitude and if I were lost without a compass, GPS, Loran-C on a foggy day, you'd better believe I'd break out the sunstone if I had one.
We don't have to follow the "fight fire with fire" methodology. If the weakest force in the universe is pulling an asteroid towards the earth, we needn't use the weakest force in the universe to steer it away. The electromagnetic force is 10^36 times more powerful. Superconducting magnets require only the energy to get them started and keep them cool. Most asteroids are more than one part in a undecillion feromagnetic. So make use of it. And if threat happens to be composed of a diamagnetic material (e.g. comet water), use that to repel it away. Using gravity is just daft unless you have no alternative.
Divide your rent or mortgage by the square footage of your house+garage+basement. Calculate the number of square feet this stuff will occupy to find out how much your "free" stuff costs per month. In much of the US it has been upwards of $1 per square foot per month. So each 19" CRT or "pizza box" Sun or SGI is probably costing a couple of bucks a month depending on how high you can stack them. Is it worth that to you? For most stuff and most people, the answer is sadly no and the value half-life of technology is decreasing every year as manufacturers lock consumers into their planned-obsolescence trap.
If you'll get enough enjoyment out of it, by all means collect it. I hope slashdotters haven't lost their nerdy mojo and are just trying to hoard the good stuff for themselves. But in case people here really lack imagination, here are a few items that might be worth keeping:
All modern hard drives contain strong rare-earth magnets.
At the current price of copper, a CRT yoke magnets and flyback transformer might bring in a few bucks. But first figure out what you're going to do with the rest of it.
Tantalum "Super capacitors" might be of value just for the rare-earth content. But you'd need a lot of them. Better to donate to an electronics recycling charity.
Laser disk players also have Helium neon lasers, beam splitters, high quality servos and optical components.
Early projection TVs and video projectors and studio cameras and projectors might have a cold mirror (interference infrared filter) as well as an interference filter/mirror optical device for splitting white light into red, green and blue channels.
VCRs, Printers have strong motors, gears, solonoids and other electromechanical parts.
Ocilloscopes often contain unusual high-persistance phosphors. Build yourself a scintillation radiation detector or see what happens if you shine a UV LED onto it.
Whatever you do, don't throw it in your ordinary trash. The only thing worse than paying $1000/month rent for a house full of junk is ruining our environment with something that does have value. Check your local area, electronics recycling is a value proposition for some metals (e.g. gold) but also for the rare earth elements in capacitors and hard drive magnets.
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
During one of the Clinton era H1B reforms, this was the proposed policy. I always assumed it was made into law, but when I emigrated to seek better IT employment, I stopped worrying about the fine print of US H1B law, companies rarely obeyed even easy-to-enforce clauses such as the prevailing wage requirement.
It is illegal to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
Of course it is, but for corporations > a certain size, the risk * cost of punishment is insignificant compared to the benefits of ignoring corporate law. Back in the early 90s, a company was blocked from $2 Billion in contracts because of a bribery scandal, they still came out ahead. BP probably came out ahead after the oil spill, AIG, Bernie Madoff, horse meat scandal... Sorry, but we don't live in a world where the "fictional person" of a US corporation has a non-fictional conscience.
Mod parent up. Yes this is a very old problem. Pre Y2K and years prior to my 40th birthday I saw the writing on the wall. I saw how friends with H1Bs were treated as indentured servants, sometimes earning little more than 1/2 what their US-born colleagues earned. I saw how people from certain countries were assumed to have magical mystical IT talent and how people with dubious certificates and knowledge of hot software products (VisualBASIC, DBase 3...), were given the same "irreplaceable" specialized H1B treatment as brain surgeons and PhD level scientific experts.
I saw where US IT jobs were going-- so I followed my outsourced IT career out of the country. And no, I don't particularly miss the short vacations, high taxes, high medical costs, high education costs, long drives and terrible job security many US workers have to put up with. If US companies continue to abuse the H1B system as a cheap labor pool, American workers should consider emigrating to countries where real IT experience is still valued as being worthy of more than a living wage. (e.g. all of Europe, Brazil, most of Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand...)
This is the wrong approach to environmentalism. We need to focus on the big stuff, not on feel-good tokenism like bag bans or super-duper biodegradable coffee cups.
Does the small stuff help? Yes. But...
Yes...But... you should have quit while you were ahead. The small stuff IS the big stuff. "5 bags a week," you say. "No big deal." but there are 1 million others in San Francisco who could say the same thing as could 38 million in California, 300 million in the US, 7 billion in the world. (Yea I know let's suppose only 1/6th of the world's population are wealthy enough to throw away plastic every week, that's only 52 billion bags a year, no big deal right?) Except that it is. We've only been able to produce cheap disposable plastic for a couple of decades and already our oceans are filling with plastic.
Plastic bag bans work and the biggest unintended side-effect is that it will stir up a bunch of self-righteous lawyers paid no-doubt by the bubble-bag industry. I live in Ireland and I've seen this work. In fact of all of the environmental campaigns in my lifetime, only the installation of scrubbers on a nearby coal-power plant (also a "no brainer") had a more direct and dramatic impact than Ireland's plastic bag ban-- this in a country which did not benefit from the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign where Iron Eyes Cody finally guilted enough whiny white Americans out of being jerks to make a difference for a while. I'm not asking everyone to travel to the southern ocean and stop whaling and oil spills. Just don't be a jerk. It isn't as difficult as our nation's cultural inertia makes it seem.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're following the news about Google Glass, you'll have heard that some people hate having their picture taken. This is a fact that nearly every photojournalist has to deal with. Only those who've been in the industry a very long time will be able to blend into the background and capture the scene without becoming themselves a reality-distorting distraction. The best will do this without disturbing the relationship and trust the reporter must build with the people being interviewed. They might even become "the bad cop" (does anyone remember The Animal from Lou Grant? That jerk photographer that both the interviewee and reporter can share a laugh and a beer with while the reporter builds her story.
Give the reporter an iPhone or DSLR or Google Glass and the reporter becomes that jerk photographer. The relationship between reporter and interviewee disappears as quickly as you can say, "So-long Chicago Sun-Times."
AP (Chicago transcript by Siri): President Obama's state of the unit address was... I'd rather not say. But the corndog mafia sentopolis and will in the Mideast. I don't know. Maybe the genius bar guys could answer that. But North Korean leader... I'm not allowed to delete reminders. Look... a puppy!
We'll see when Telsa (or anyone else) can beat Better Place's distance record of 1172 miles in 24 hours. When Telsa figures out another way to push 22KW into a car in 3 minutes without causing a huge explosion and fire, than we'll have a better idea. Until then, Better Place's technology was the most practical form of electric transport using existing technology. It was a good idea but like many good ideas, it needs to wait until society is ready for it and entrepreneurs know how to sell it. This is by no means the first time we've seen technological regression. The rechargeable battery electric car was invented by French physicist Gaston Planté in 1856. In 1878, a Methodist minister named John Wesley Carhart proved that a steam-powered car he named the “Spark” could travel long distances under its own power. But when it frightened a valuable horse belonging to industrialist J.I. Case (tractor company owner) to death, it was banished from the city and the world would have to wait until 1886 when Karl Benz and then later Henry Ford would bring back an idea whose time had finally come.
Similar examples of technological regressions and reinventions can be found in the history of electric lighting. Better Place had a better idea for electric car charging, and if we can learn anything from history– most good ideas eventually see the light of day.
"I believe rules are rules and you break them, you should be punished, not rewarded." - Congratulations, you have met the requirements for German citizenship.
I was going to say "you must be a Good German", but it amounts to the same thing.
Here's another hole in the US educational system, textbooks which portray Germany (indeed much of the world) as having stopped progress in 1945. Germany is now a diverse multi-cultural society you wouldn't recognize Germany from your dusty textbook. The average German is far more liberal, tolerant and open-minded than the majority of Americans and Germany retains its scientific excellence even after exporting some of its brightest to the US back when there was a space race.
Draconian laws with NO EXCEPTIONS EVER (except for politically powerful or those wealthy enough to buy into lawyer-based economy) have made the US less free than most of the western world, certainly less free than most of Europe (including Germany.) The wonderful American concept of written law, applied equally to everyone (except the poor, minorities, immigrants, people in interment camps...) is something to be admired, but to expect that even the gigabytes of man-made law written in our high-entropy language can encode justice for every situation is daft. This failure of written law is why we have a justice system with judges and juries of peers.
have her write a paper on the risks of experimenting with homemade explosives and what safety measures she should have taken, but didn't and how it could be done more safely next time
She should help Conn and Hal Iggulden write "The Dangerous Book for Girls" an updated version of their "The Dangerous book for boys." It's no coincidence that it was not first published in the US. Conn and Hal would probably be spending time at gitmo. My elementary school library had a shelf full of science books with far more dangerous experiments, build a hydrogen balloon, make coal gas, go down to your chemist and buy some quinine of mercury for a fun magic trick. Even in the 70s it was difficult to get the nineteenth century Britain raw materials (who the heck is going to sell a 10-year old HCL or H2SO4? Nowadays it's tough even to get borax for that basement fusion reactor. Now get off my lawn!
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
WTF are you talking about back in the first half of the last century, unless you worked on the farm, you were able to produce enough for you and your family in a 40 hour week with just one adult working and that was with an average of 4 kids. Today, it takes both parents working with an average of 1.4 kids.
Technology may make us more efficient, but it has nothing to do with the economics of providing for a family.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
For a look at what really happened to America's jobless when manual labor jobs disappeared, check out a collaborative NPR Planet Money/This American Life expose on this invisible economy: "Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America" The program's podcast "Trends with benefits" is well worth listening to.
In summary, what happens is that manual labor jobs disappear from small American towns and they're replaced with lawyer and bureaucratic desk jobs in large cities, state capitals and Washington D.C. A look at trends in unemployment during the great recession gives us a glimpse of this. But Americans on disability don't appear in any labor department unemployment or employment statistics. What's more, people on disability almost never get off the program. Unlike welfare, people on disability are discouraged from working, their kids are discouraged from doing well in school. Even in comparison the obvious economic mess made by programs to promote debt until death (aka mortgage), the non-productive trillions in the derivative economy, this 200+ billion dollar hole in the US economy is significant specifically because of its social fallout. Uncovering this is the first step in adjusting our economy to a new reality of labor and employment.
Look at this little planet Earth, its moon is HUGE. Only Jupiter and Saturn have bigger moons. Luna is nearly as big as Mercury, half as big as Mars but its home planet hasn't colonized it. Obviously there's no intelligent life there. Let's claim them both for the queen of the galactic empire.
Obama's plan is beyond daft. Asteroids are unstable, there is no place to hide from cosmic radiation or Bremstralung X-rays from solar wind. A mission failure in the lunar capture plan could lead to a global disaster. Could Columbus and Magellan have discovered the New World before they had ever sailed the Mediterranean? Could the Polynesians have found Hawaii and New Zealand if they weren't already experienced navigators amongst the nearby islands of Polynesia? What if the first of England had decided to capture Sumatra and bring the entire island home for the British crown before the British Navy had ever ventured as far as Ireland, would you have considered that to be a good plan? Its better than Obama's plan.
You're an idiot.
"Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer." In that there is no cure, yeah, it's a good as nothing becasue it is nothing.
"psychosomatic healing" There is no such thing. That has been put to rest.
An uncontrolled and unconfirmed article.
I think you mean that this doctor's careful observation published in the British medical journal and cited by the NIH is not a large double-blind peer-reviewed study of the sort that the likes of Merck can afford to commission for such things as its propecia baldlness "cure" (now known to cause permanent side-effects). Are you saying that off-label usage by AMA-approved doctors has not been made with weaker evidence than this? What about Lipitor and other statins? Medi-pushers commission studies to prove statins lower cholesterol. And because cholesterol is an easy to measure stat for the insurance industry, few bothered to study whether these drugs actually reduce the risk of heart disease, strokes and death. The stats are all that matters so taking a cue from Lance Armstrong, pharmabusiness earns millions of dollars on health statistic fakery that would make Lance Armstrong blush.
Do you even know what science is?
I like Feynman's definition: Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself, for instance that we already know everything about the connection between our mind and bodies which has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years should be completely discarded in favor of the medical industry's latest pill.
" And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do." no, thye don't. Yes the warts will go away, but they will ANYWAYS.
I have spent decades dealing with people like you. watching people die, give there kids bogus treatments, reading good studies.
You are a worthless piece if shit. You spread poor thinking like some sort of infection, and you are proud of you lack of critical thinking skills.
Learn to think.
At first I was going to ignore this post as a simple troll or respond in kind but I see that there is something more here. Your attitude is widely held in the American medical industry and is one of the reasons billions of excess dollars are spent with shorter lifespans and lower quality-of-life than much of the developed world.
I don't know who you think I am. I've always advocated that the best scientific and medical research should be applied along with a healing tool that is millions of years older. You and many in the medical profession seem to be stuck in an unquestioning and blind faith in current medical technology. This arrogance is the opposite of science and impedes scientific progress. This lack of respect for the complexity of the biochemical entity previously known as "a patient" is responsible for far more pain and death than even the worst of non AMA-approved faith-healers.
Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer. It's reasonable to try to separate the efficacy of a new medicine from the efficacy of psychosomatic healing when qualifying a drug. But to ignore the later entirely is not good medicine. Here is a graphic example of the effect of hypnosis on Congenital Ichthyosiform Erythodermia, a disease which did not respond to any recognized treatment and is barely touched by modern medicine. It was considered to be incurable and yet substantial and long-lasting healing took place 5 days after a hypnotic suggestion specifically on the side of the body suggested by the hypnotist. And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do.
My reaction was "So what is the brand of green laser that is putting out 65.5 mw instead of 5mw? And will ThinkGeek be buying up the remaining supply before the government confiscates it?
Probably any of the cheap Chinese imports you find on Ebay but don't buy one. Unscrupulous con artists remove the InfraRed filter so a laser power meter shows it as being "bright", hoping the buyer is ignorant of the fact that most of that brightness is in invisible but damaging wavelengths.
They'll probably do what the MPAA did to retiree Fred Lawrence when he was sued over $600,000 for 4 movies his grandkid downloaded that the kid already owned! First knock the fine down to the point where it only bankrupts her (not several times over, only fair ya' know.) Then make her into RIAA's "community service" slave warning others not to do what she did.
That's all well and good, but "Earth Hour" has nothing to do with "light pollution" - it's about 'showing a commitment to sustainability.'
Light pollution is a clear and easy to understand example of tragedy of the commons. Individuals each acting in their own self interest each causing a relatively small amount of environmental degradation can collectively damage the environment for everyone. Solving this problem is key to solving all sustainability issues and Earth Hour's instantaneous (though temporary) reduction in light pollution is a clear demonstration that small, painless actions by a large number of people can have a positive impact on the environment. The US's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign did the same for litter but it took a decade. Earth Hour has a more immediate, positive and measurable impact on the night sky environment than decades of cleaning oil from beaches and rescuing sea turtles have on these aspects of our environment.
Light pollution is a problem of many people living together in close, industrialized proximity to one another. If "sustainability" requires us to do away with the conveniences and luxuries of modern life such that our cities would produce significantly less light on a consistent basis, then you've identified the crux of the problem right there, and also why the program is destined to fail.
Light pollution to the level it has reached in many western cities is not an unavoidable side-effect of industrialization. It is, in fact, an indicator of technological inefficiency. Several billions of dollars worth of energy spilled into outer space every year does no one any good.
You will never convince people to revert to pre-industrial civilization in order to "protect the earth."
No I won't, nor do I need to. Too many people believe that environmentalism means a return to the past. As I said in an earlier post, the modern LED light bulb uses 1/10th the energy of an Edison bulb and is 4000 times more efficient than the ancient oil lamps they replaced. Environmentalists should celebrate this and paint those obsessed with Edison incandescent bulbs, internal combustion engines and an oil-based economy as the Luddites they are. Sadly, many in the green movement do not have the technological, scientific or media savvy to clarify this point and seem to embrace the "return to the past" meme which will not work. A true environmentalist has a long view of time. What can we learn from the past, what of value will we use by using this technology? What will be the long-term impacts of using this technology. True environmentalism weighs the past and future along with the present. Its understandable that our "now" focused culture would not value the long term educational benefits of Earth Hour.
Earth Hour has a symbolic element but it also has a real and profound positive environmental effect which lasts for exactly 1 hour. Like air pollution, light pollution is a "slow boiled frog" problem. Ask a kid in Beijing what color the sky is and he might say brown or yellow-orange or grey but probably not blue. If things don't improve, the next generation of kids have no idea that the sky is supposed to be blue. Ditto for kids in NYC, Los Angeles, Brussels and thousands of other cities where people have seen stars on TV and movies, maybe even planetariums but never in real life. A well organized Earth Hour can temporarily change that giving the next generation a glimpse of what the night sky is supposed to look like. After seeing that, they'll be less likely to accept McDonalds Laser french fries and other pollution of our night sky with moving, flashing gyrating annoying projected night sky advertising which is sure to come unless enough people say "Not on MY planet!".
"Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic."
Oh god, hippies. Can you just like go talk to someone who gives a shit? I do not.
When approaching air pollution, energy dependence, light pollution, anthropogenic climate change and other tragedies of the commons (a simple concept some true Americans mightn't get until Family Guy explains it), it's important to know which of your neighbors don't give a shit. So while yahoos here can hide behind "Anonymous coward", during Earth Hour all we have to do is look for the redneck with camo gear, "I lov Sarah Palin's intulekt" bumper sticker and a 3 million candlepower Wal-mart floodlight.
Finding the source of any problem is the first step in solving it.
While writing a story about Hannukah and other lighting miracles, I found that modern LEDs can run for 6 months on the equivalent of 1 day's supply of menorah oil. So if you were to attempt to illuminate your house with candles for Earth Hour, you'd consume 4000 times as much oil. Thankfully we don't do that.
Beyond Earth Hour's temporary abatement of light pollution in participating cities, earth hour is symbolic. It is also a talking point. "Wow, look at that comet, I wouldn't have seen that if we hadn't turned off the barn light." "The building's landscaping is a bit too bright, I think it looks better against a natural sky.", "Hi neighbor, would you like me to show you Jupiter and the Pleiades through this telescope." , "Hey this is fun, why don't we do it once a week?"
One approach which would encourage companies to do the right thing would be to tax products based on the amount of e-waste they produce but then allow for a small discount if the product is open and repairable. And no I don't care about Apple's and similar company's greenwashing "recycling" campaigns, their 8-12 month planned- obsolescence cycle is an enormous and unnecessary impact on the environment. All I ask is that the companies which benefit enormously from irreparable short-lived products pay for this necessary damage.
I'd vote for truth in advertising laws making it very clear that much of what you "buy" you don't really own. When consumers are treated as criminals and not trusted the use of the products they"buy", call it what it is, rental. So you don't own your Wii, Xbox, Playstation or any of your video games, Blue Ray disks (can't play them overseas), iTunes downloads, Android apps, iPhone apps, your car, your TV, your Windows 8 laptop, your printer. And you certainly don't own your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macbook or any other Apple products.
Now that Joe sixpack has happy bent over and submitted to this state of affairs, corporate giants are free to expand this subscription model to everything from your refrigerator to your clothing. And if you're a citizen of the US, your tax dollars are paying for FBI and other law enforcement agencies against the likes of you. As Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan put it, "We have billionaires to protect!"
I've done a lot of sailing on the Great Lakes and Irish Sea and I can tell you that cold water often brings a kind of dense low fog. There are times when we can see the tops of masts and blue sky above but because the sun is often low at these latitudes, we can't see where the sun is. But sometimes the fog was so bright, I'd wear sun glasses and then I did notice that the zenith blue sky was polarized. What's more, the digital watch we used for sailing was an LCD watch-- which means it polarized display. And the display did darken noticeably when turned at certain angles, so the reflected sky polarization was also discernible. At the time I wondered whether it could be used as a practical form of navigation, but we had a compass. A few years later Loran-C became popular addition to the compass as and then GPS. But when I heard about the theory that an Iceland spar sunstone might have been used for navigation in the high arctic, I'd give it the nod of plausibility. No it isn't as good as a compass, unless you're above 70 degrees magnetic latitude. No it wouldn't work well under conditions of total cloud cover or rain, might not work at all. But I'm sure this kind of low fog is at least as common in the arctic as it is at my latitude and if I were lost without a compass, GPS, Loran-C on a foggy day, you'd better believe I'd break out the sunstone if I had one.
We don't have to follow the "fight fire with fire" methodology. If the weakest force in the universe is pulling an asteroid towards the earth, we needn't use the weakest force in the universe to steer it away. The electromagnetic force is 10^36 times more powerful. Superconducting magnets require only the energy to get them started and keep them cool. Most asteroids are more than one part in a undecillion feromagnetic. So make use of it. And if threat happens to be composed of a diamagnetic material (e.g. comet water), use that to repel it away. Using gravity is just daft unless you have no alternative.
Use Windows 3.0. No multiple desktop, pager, networking, pager, media player or multitasking.
Your welcome.
Whatever you do, don't throw it in your ordinary trash. The only thing worse than paying $1000/month rent for a house full of junk is ruining our environment with something that does have value. Check your local area, electronics recycling is a value proposition for some metals (e.g. gold) but also for the rare earth elements in capacitors and hard drive magnets.
Anyone here on H-1B should be allowed to seek any job anywhere for the duration of their H-1B stay. They just need to negotiate with the new employer during the 3 year visa term to provide pro-rated compensation to the company that pre-paid to put the H-1B through. That eliminates the indentured servitude and opens the free market to the technical talent, as it should be.
During one of the Clinton era H1B reforms, this was the proposed policy. I always assumed it was made into law, but when I emigrated to seek better IT employment, I stopped worrying about the fine print of US H1B law, companies rarely obeyed even easy-to-enforce clauses such as the prevailing wage requirement.
It is illegal to pay a H1B worker less than the prevailing rate.
Of course it is, but for corporations > a certain size, the risk * cost of punishment is insignificant compared to the benefits of ignoring corporate law. Back in the early 90s, a company was blocked from $2 Billion in contracts because of a bribery scandal, they still came out ahead. BP probably came out ahead after the oil spill, AIG, Bernie Madoff, horse meat scandal... Sorry, but we don't live in a world where the "fictional person" of a US corporation has a non-fictional conscience.
Mod parent up. Yes this is a very old problem. Pre Y2K and years prior to my 40th birthday I saw the writing on the wall. I saw how friends with H1Bs were treated as indentured servants, sometimes earning little more than 1/2 what their US-born colleagues earned. I saw how people from certain countries were assumed to have magical mystical IT talent and how people with dubious certificates and knowledge of hot software products (VisualBASIC, DBase 3...), were given the same "irreplaceable" specialized H1B treatment as brain surgeons and PhD level scientific experts.
I saw where US IT jobs were going-- so I followed my outsourced IT career out of the country. And no, I don't particularly miss the short vacations, high taxes, high medical costs, high education costs, long drives and terrible job security many US workers have to put up with. If US companies continue to abuse the H1B system as a cheap labor pool, American workers should consider emigrating to countries where real IT experience is still valued as being worthy of more than a living wage. (e.g. all of Europe, Brazil, most of Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand...)
This is the wrong approach to environmentalism. We need to focus on the big stuff, not on feel-good tokenism like bag bans or super-duper biodegradable coffee cups.
Does the small stuff help? Yes. But ...
Yes...But... you should have quit while you were ahead. The small stuff IS the big stuff. "5 bags a week," you say. "No big deal." but there are 1 million others in San Francisco who could say the same thing as could 38 million in California, 300 million in the US, 7 billion in the world. (Yea I know let's suppose only 1/6th of the world's population are wealthy enough to throw away plastic every week, that's only 52 billion bags a year, no big deal right?) Except that it is. We've only been able to produce cheap disposable plastic for a couple of decades and already our oceans are filling with plastic.
Plastic bag bans work and the biggest unintended side-effect is that it will stir up a bunch of self-righteous lawyers paid no-doubt by the bubble-bag industry. I live in Ireland and I've seen this work. In fact of all of the environmental campaigns in my lifetime, only the installation of scrubbers on a nearby coal-power plant (also a "no brainer") had a more direct and dramatic impact than Ireland's plastic bag ban-- this in a country which did not benefit from the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign where Iron Eyes Cody finally guilted enough whiny white Americans out of being jerks to make a difference for a while. I'm not asking everyone to travel to the southern ocean and stop whaling and oil spills. Just don't be a jerk. It isn't as difficult as our nation's cultural inertia makes it seem.