My boss also experienced awful headaches when he tried to quit drinking coffee. The headaches lasted for days until he finally gave in and started drinking coffee again. It's a very common withdraw symptom.
The problem with coffee is that not only do you build a tolerance for it, but the withdraw symptoms match the symptoms you were originally trying to treat, namely alertness. See this (for example, I've seen other studies that come to the same conclusion): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm
If you consume caffeine regularly, you won't receive any net benefit at all. With gum, at least you're getting fresh breath for a while.
Re:Ken Murray's blog
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The study, published online in the journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, reports that frequent coffee drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing effects and the stimulatory effects of caffeine. While frequent consumers may feel alerted by coffee, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal. And given the increased propensity to anxiety and raised blood pressure induced by caffeine consumption, there is no net benefit to be gained.
Caffeine is highly addictive, and you cannot simply quit without severe side effects if you drink coffee daily. My boss tried to quit once years ago, and had the worst headaches of his life.
You can quit, but you have to ease off of it, not simply stop unless you want to experience terrible pain.
I would guess that he's a sociopath given his grandiose view of himself, can't do any wrong, lies constantly, is always the victim, etc. However, most sociopaths aren't that stupid. I've only ever known one personally, and he was brilliant--which is a hell of a lot worse than a guy like this turkey.
You don't need to convince me. While earning my aerospace engineering degree we were forced to use both imperial and metric units. Metric was far easier to use in many cases, especially when dealing with calculations of force and mass. The unit for mass in imperial is slugs. To see why it's so inconvenient, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass)
That's not exactly the purpose of the electoral college. The primary purpose was two-fold:
1) For the federal government to not step on states' rights. Leaving the decision of how to allocate each state's votes to the individual state was a way of allowing them more power over federal elections. 2) To ensure only qualified candidates are elected. The hope was each state's legislature would be smart enough to only nominate people to the electoral college who wouldn't vote for a ridiculously unqualified person for president.
However, both of those points don't really apply any longer. The party system's primaries are now responsible for qualifying for president. Every state has essentially designated its ability to choose people for the electoral college to each party with the legislature having no role in the decision process.
I have no idea why we should continue to have an electoral college. It isn't serving the purpose it was originally created for. The only thing it's doing is giving less populous states more power towards choosing the president at the expense of larger states. IIRC, a vote cast in Wyoming has roughly the same power as 17 votes in California.
It's funny. The military, in some ways, is the most progressive part of the American government. Where was metric first widely adopted? Where was racial integration first introduced? Where did we first phase out the use of pennies?
Cut the politicians out of the bureaucracy and you can actually make some progress.
No, we didn't come from a single, common ancestor. However, that doesn't mean we aren't related to each other.
Think about it this way: You have two parents, four grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. If you go back just a few dozen generations, you will reach a number that exceeds the population of the world. Obviously, you couldn't have that many individual ancestors at that generation. Instead, some of your ancestors were related to each other.
Geneticists have done a study of the smallest possible population of humans that could give rise to the current amount of diversity. Based on their study, the smallest population possible was a few 10s of thousands a few million years ago IIRC.
I argue that Al Gore had more votes. Your counter argument is something rather orthogonal to that. You're trying to argue whether one should vote for him (I'm guessing...). What does that have to do with him winning more votes?
I'm not sure that's any better. Many elections lately have been close enough that a single state could throw the result.
With a standard, national election system both parties would be interested in fairness. With each state in charge of their election with a member of one party or the other in charge of the election process, they have incentives and the ability to tamper with ballots.
They don't have mail-in ballots where you live? In Colorado, it's pretty easy to get your ballot mailed to you. Then you can either mail it back or drop it off. A heck of a lot more convenient than waiting in line to vote.
You seem to be forgetting about Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in American history. Or the Wright Brothers and their rather handy invention. Einstein was greeted as a hero when he first visited the US in 1921 and was more than welcome to immigrate here later. The US certainly wasn't anti-science then.
They also didn't view it as a conflict between religion and science except for evolution. Many of the original NASA astronauts and engineers were deeply religious. That didn't stop them from figuring out how to make multi-stage rockets capable of landing on the moon.
If you go back enough generations, everyone is related to everyone else. The claim I found (but couldn't confirm) is that Obama is George Washington's 2nd cousin, 9 times removed. Their common ancestor is 12 generations back, George Washington's great grandparents. Do you know how many 2nd cousins, 9 times removed you have? I estimated it to be nearly 300,000. The population of the US around the time George Washington was born was less than 3 million, giving Obama a 10% chance of being related to him.
Those are very rough odds, but it hopefully gives you an idea that having such a distant relationship isn't improbable at all. Also, the source I found for that information isn't reliable, it's possible they aren't related (or at least, their relation is even more distant). We are all Nth cousins, Y times removed from each other after all.
Alas, it's the same for me. I've never bought an Apple product and never will. Most people who would buy Apple products probably couldn't care less about how many people commit suicide in their factories in China or how underhanded they are in anti-competitive practices elsewhere. They are the model corporation (in the worst possible sense), yet I bet more than a few people in the occupy movement love to use Apple products.
They are very similar to the European Galileo satellites. They are similar to GPS, but use different frequencies than GPS.
Originally, China was involved with the development of the Galileo constellation. They backed out because they didn't feel like they had a big enough voice in its development.
The Chinese constellation, Compass, is intended to be as accurate as GPS. They will almost certainly have their constellation fully deployed long before Europe gets their act together and finishes the Galileo system.
By the way, GPS doesn't only provide positioning service. Each satellite also has a detector for nuclear explosions and can quickly locate the position of any nuke going off on, or above, the surface.
Who does the US rely on for GPS? Only themselves of course, so this isn't exactly a good example.
Within 10-15 years, China will be deeply effected by their housing bubble as Japan was in the 90s. Unlike Japan, the primary thing maintaining social stability in China is continued economic growth. Without this, China will be facing very serious internal problems.
I recently read a Chinese article about how many celebrities in China have dual citizenship so that they can leave the country quickly. Many politically connected families send their girls overseas for college and the rich send both their boys and girls overseas. While this gives them an advantage for jobs within China, it also makes it easier for them to leave China in an emergency. They are very worried about social unrest, and I don't blame them.
I think you're right, but it has a big effect. Almost anyone who has much to lose won't take chances of being openly critical of the government online. Students, youth and people who don't have government jobs may feel safer criticizing the government. But people with high government jobs or who are related to someone with a job like that seem to be more cautious.
My wife was from a politically connected family in Beijing. She saw first-hand some of the awful corruption there, but would never post anything about it online for fear of getting her family in trouble.
I don't know if they actually would get in trouble, but she was certainly cowed by the Chinese government and I'm sure she isn't the only one.
America is very different than China. But simply having more online freedom than China shouldn't be a goal of course.
In America, content can be removed capriciously online. Sometimes people are sued by corporations. In the worst case scenario where you're caught red-handed sharing a movie online that hasn't been released in the theaters yet, you could be sent to jail for 2 years.
In China, you can write something online that offends a government official. You will then be summoned or taken to a police station. You could then spend the next 8-10 years at a labor camp and many other bad things can (and would) happen to you. On the plus side, you can upload as many movies as you want without repercussion over there. That's not a very good trade in my opinion.
There's also a limit to how much an ablative heat shield can endure. After a certain point, the contents behind the heat shield will bake.
It would be best if the mountain was near water so that if there's a launch failure there's less danger of ground casualties and it also gives a splashdown option for the astronauts.
Perhaps Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a good spot for such a launch. It's near the equator too so there would be a little extra velocity from the rotation of the earth for a prograde orbit.
America is still a very rich country. Even if we paid $10/gallon at the pump, we'd still be paying lower taxes than Germans (no VAT here and lower income and property tax). We paid very high taxes during WWII and certainly didn't 'dismantle' our modern civilization, quite the opposite actually.
That money doesn't just go 'poof'. In Germany, you can get a free college education (and by 'you', I literally mean you if you are fluent in German regardless of where you're from). They also have high-speed rail, a substantial industrial sector (largest in Europe), and relatively low unemployment.
If gas prices went up, consumption of gas would surely go down, meaning more money would stay in the American economy rather than going overseas.
No doubt it would be painful, but there's no painless way of digging out of the huge debt the US is already in.
In short, they can't without significantly adding to the cost. They are at the limit of what can be shielded using current technology (I'm referring to the heat shield). Any shield larger, needed to protect a larger payload, would cook the payload. There's some ideas on how to make larger heat shields, but they haven't been tested (or even built) yet.
I don't even know if there's a rocket large enough to carry such a large vehicle to Mars as the one you're proposing.
Finally, the cost doesn't proportionally go up with extra weight on the vehicle. They go up exponentially. It would probably be cheaper to send two identical vehicles than to send one that weighs twice as much.
If the interviewer has any brains, I'm sure they'd grant some amount of syntax mistakes so long as you show the basic understanding of pointers. If you wrote:
struct abcd {
abcd* next;
int value; }
rather than:
struct abcd {
struct abcd* next;
int value; };
I don't think they would hold it against you. Even if you forget the name of C's memory allocation function malloc() and just wrote memory_allocator() I think that would be fine since anyone can quickly look up function names in a normal working environment.
If you are used to using references in Java and forget C's * syntax for pointers, they'd probably just ask you more questions about that to make sure you understand how linked lists are supposed to work.
On the other hand, if they simply took the code you wrote and gave you a pass/fail on whether it compiled and worked then that would be ridiculous.
At least they didn't ask to code a linked list in Java. In C it's trivial with pointers. In Java, I would be stuck at "Why?" since there's already a LinkedList container. I'm only partially kidding.
It's not really that unfair of a question because the answer is so simple and fundamental. It basically shows that you understand the concept of pointers and memory allocation, which even in Java is relevant due to the similarity to references.
I have. While the fear of being alone is common enough, I haven't heard of anyone at that age believe there's a significant chance they will die if left alone. This isn't a fear she told others about. As far as I can determine, I'm the only one she told about why she didn't want to be alone.
She also didn't seem to have any mental disorder. I'm familiar with several different ones, and she seemed completely normal with the exception of not wanting to be alone for any significant length of time.
On top of that, the odds of this happening while she was alone were very low. Out of the entire year we spent together, there were only 4 or 5 days she spent several hours or more alone. She had a full-time job and almost always had days off on the same days I did.
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My boss also experienced awful headaches when he tried to quit drinking coffee. The headaches lasted for days until he finally gave in and started drinking coffee again. It's a very common withdraw symptom.
The problem with coffee is that not only do you build a tolerance for it, but the withdraw symptoms match the symptoms you were originally trying to treat, namely alertness. See this (for example, I've seen other studies that come to the same conclusion): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm
If you consume caffeine regularly, you won't receive any net benefit at all. With gum, at least you're getting fresh breath for a while.
What he said is based on several studies (not conducted by Mormons). Here's one, just for example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm
The study, published online in the journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, reports that frequent coffee drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing effects and the stimulatory effects of caffeine. While frequent consumers may feel alerted by coffee, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal. And given the increased propensity to anxiety and raised blood pressure induced by caffeine consumption, there is no net benefit to be gained.
Caffeine is highly addictive, and you cannot simply quit without severe side effects if you drink coffee daily. My boss tried to quit once years ago, and had the worst headaches of his life.
You can quit, but you have to ease off of it, not simply stop unless you want to experience terrible pain.
I would guess that he's a sociopath given his grandiose view of himself, can't do any wrong, lies constantly, is always the victim, etc. However, most sociopaths aren't that stupid. I've only ever known one personally, and he was brilliant--which is a hell of a lot worse than a guy like this turkey.
You don't need to convince me. While earning my aerospace engineering degree we were forced to use both imperial and metric units. Metric was far easier to use in many cases, especially when dealing with calculations of force and mass. The unit for mass in imperial is slugs. To see why it's so inconvenient, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass)
That's not exactly the purpose of the electoral college. The primary purpose was two-fold:
1) For the federal government to not step on states' rights. Leaving the decision of how to allocate each state's votes to the individual state was a way of allowing them more power over federal elections.
2) To ensure only qualified candidates are elected. The hope was each state's legislature would be smart enough to only nominate people to the electoral college who wouldn't vote for a ridiculously unqualified person for president.
However, both of those points don't really apply any longer. The party system's primaries are now responsible for qualifying for president. Every state has essentially designated its ability to choose people for the electoral college to each party with the legislature having no role in the decision process.
I have no idea why we should continue to have an electoral college. It isn't serving the purpose it was originally created for. The only thing it's doing is giving less populous states more power towards choosing the president at the expense of larger states. IIRC, a vote cast in Wyoming has roughly the same power as 17 votes in California.
It's funny. The military, in some ways, is the most progressive part of the American government. Where was metric first widely adopted? Where was racial integration first introduced? Where did we first phase out the use of pennies?
Cut the politicians out of the bureaucracy and you can actually make some progress.
No, we didn't come from a single, common ancestor. However, that doesn't mean we aren't related to each other.
Think about it this way: You have two parents, four grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. If you go back just a few dozen generations, you will reach a number that exceeds the population of the world. Obviously, you couldn't have that many individual ancestors at that generation. Instead, some of your ancestors were related to each other.
Geneticists have done a study of the smallest possible population of humans that could give rise to the current amount of diversity. Based on their study, the smallest population possible was a few 10s of thousands a few million years ago IIRC.
I argue that Al Gore had more votes. Your counter argument is something rather orthogonal to that. You're trying to argue whether one should vote for him (I'm guessing...). What does that have to do with him winning more votes?
I'm not sure that's any better. Many elections lately have been close enough that a single state could throw the result.
With a standard, national election system both parties would be interested in fairness. With each state in charge of their election with a member of one party or the other in charge of the election process, they have incentives and the ability to tamper with ballots.
They don't have mail-in ballots where you live? In Colorado, it's pretty easy to get your ballot mailed to you. Then you can either mail it back or drop it off. A heck of a lot more convenient than waiting in line to vote.
You seem to be forgetting about Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in American history. Or the Wright Brothers and their rather handy invention. Einstein was greeted as a hero when he first visited the US in 1921 and was more than welcome to immigrate here later. The US certainly wasn't anti-science then.
They also didn't view it as a conflict between religion and science except for evolution. Many of the original NASA astronauts and engineers were deeply religious. That didn't stop them from figuring out how to make multi-stage rockets capable of landing on the moon.
If you go back enough generations, everyone is related to everyone else. The claim I found (but couldn't confirm) is that Obama is George Washington's 2nd cousin, 9 times removed. Their common ancestor is 12 generations back, George Washington's great grandparents. Do you know how many 2nd cousins, 9 times removed you have? I estimated it to be nearly 300,000. The population of the US around the time George Washington was born was less than 3 million, giving Obama a 10% chance of being related to him.
Those are very rough odds, but it hopefully gives you an idea that having such a distant relationship isn't improbable at all. Also, the source I found for that information isn't reliable, it's possible they aren't related (or at least, their relation is even more distant). We are all Nth cousins, Y times removed from each other after all.
Al Gore had more votes nationwide. Bush won because we have an archaic, balkanized voting system.
Alas, it's the same for me. I've never bought an Apple product and never will. Most people who would buy Apple products probably couldn't care less about how many people commit suicide in their factories in China or how underhanded they are in anti-competitive practices elsewhere. They are the model corporation (in the worst possible sense), yet I bet more than a few people in the occupy movement love to use Apple products.
They are very similar to the European Galileo satellites. They are similar to GPS, but use different frequencies than GPS.
Originally, China was involved with the development of the Galileo constellation. They backed out because they didn't feel like they had a big enough voice in its development.
The Chinese constellation, Compass, is intended to be as accurate as GPS. They will almost certainly have their constellation fully deployed long before Europe gets their act together and finishes the Galileo system.
By the way, GPS doesn't only provide positioning service. Each satellite also has a detector for nuclear explosions and can quickly locate the position of any nuke going off on, or above, the surface.
Who does the US rely on for GPS? Only themselves of course, so this isn't exactly a good example.
Within 10-15 years, China will be deeply effected by their housing bubble as Japan was in the 90s. Unlike Japan, the primary thing maintaining social stability in China is continued economic growth. Without this, China will be facing very serious internal problems.
I recently read a Chinese article about how many celebrities in China have dual citizenship so that they can leave the country quickly. Many politically connected families send their girls overseas for college and the rich send both their boys and girls overseas. While this gives them an advantage for jobs within China, it also makes it easier for them to leave China in an emergency. They are very worried about social unrest, and I don't blame them.
I think you're right, but it has a big effect. Almost anyone who has much to lose won't take chances of being openly critical of the government online. Students, youth and people who don't have government jobs may feel safer criticizing the government. But people with high government jobs or who are related to someone with a job like that seem to be more cautious.
My wife was from a politically connected family in Beijing. She saw first-hand some of the awful corruption there, but would never post anything about it online for fear of getting her family in trouble.
I don't know if they actually would get in trouble, but she was certainly cowed by the Chinese government and I'm sure she isn't the only one.
America is very different than China. But simply having more online freedom than China shouldn't be a goal of course.
In America, content can be removed capriciously online. Sometimes people are sued by corporations. In the worst case scenario where you're caught red-handed sharing a movie online that hasn't been released in the theaters yet, you could be sent to jail for 2 years.
In China, you can write something online that offends a government official. You will then be summoned or taken to a police station. You could then spend the next 8-10 years at a labor camp and many other bad things can (and would) happen to you. On the plus side, you can upload as many movies as you want without repercussion over there. That's not a very good trade in my opinion.
That volcano isn't too active. We already have a couple of observatories on top of it.
There's also a limit to how much an ablative heat shield can endure. After a certain point, the contents behind the heat shield will bake.
It would be best if the mountain was near water so that if there's a launch failure there's less danger of ground casualties and it also gives a splashdown option for the astronauts.
Perhaps Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a good spot for such a launch. It's near the equator too so there would be a little extra velocity from the rotation of the earth for a prograde orbit.
America is still a very rich country. Even if we paid $10/gallon at the pump, we'd still be paying lower taxes than Germans (no VAT here and lower income and property tax). We paid very high taxes during WWII and certainly didn't 'dismantle' our modern civilization, quite the opposite actually.
That money doesn't just go 'poof'. In Germany, you can get a free college education (and by 'you', I literally mean you if you are fluent in German regardless of where you're from). They also have high-speed rail, a substantial industrial sector (largest in Europe), and relatively low unemployment.
If gas prices went up, consumption of gas would surely go down, meaning more money would stay in the American economy rather than going overseas.
No doubt it would be painful, but there's no painless way of digging out of the huge debt the US is already in.
In short, they can't without significantly adding to the cost. They are at the limit of what can be shielded using current technology (I'm referring to the heat shield). Any shield larger, needed to protect a larger payload, would cook the payload. There's some ideas on how to make larger heat shields, but they haven't been tested (or even built) yet.
I don't even know if there's a rocket large enough to carry such a large vehicle to Mars as the one you're proposing.
Finally, the cost doesn't proportionally go up with extra weight on the vehicle. They go up exponentially. It would probably be cheaper to send two identical vehicles than to send one that weighs twice as much.
If the interviewer has any brains, I'm sure they'd grant some amount of syntax mistakes so long as you show the basic understanding of pointers. If you wrote:
struct abcd {
abcd* next;
int value;
}
rather than:
struct abcd {
struct abcd* next;
int value;
};
I don't think they would hold it against you. Even if you forget the name of C's memory allocation function malloc() and just wrote memory_allocator() I think that would be fine since anyone can quickly look up function names in a normal working environment.
If you are used to using references in Java and forget C's * syntax for pointers, they'd probably just ask you more questions about that to make sure you understand how linked lists are supposed to work.
On the other hand, if they simply took the code you wrote and gave you a pass/fail on whether it compiled and worked then that would be ridiculous.
At least they didn't ask to code a linked list in Java. In C it's trivial with pointers. In Java, I would be stuck at "Why?" since there's already a LinkedList container. I'm only partially kidding.
It's not really that unfair of a question because the answer is so simple and fundamental. It basically shows that you understand the concept of pointers and memory allocation, which even in Java is relevant due to the similarity to references.
I have. While the fear of being alone is common enough, I haven't heard of anyone at that age believe there's a significant chance they will die if left alone. This isn't a fear she told others about. As far as I can determine, I'm the only one she told about why she didn't want to be alone.
She also didn't seem to have any mental disorder. I'm familiar with several different ones, and she seemed completely normal with the exception of not wanting to be alone for any significant length of time.
On top of that, the odds of this happening while she was alone were very low. Out of the entire year we spent together, there were only 4 or 5 days she spent several hours or more alone. She had a full-time job and almost always had days off on the same days I did.