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User: kinnell

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  1. Re:Nonsense. on Mental Illness Reduces Lifespan As Much as Smoking · · Score: 1

    it's not clear how mental disorders could be causing early deaths.

    This is a positively idiotic statement.

    It simply means that there is not enough scientific data to support any hypothesis conclusively, not that they have no clue whatsoever. Do you have any data to back up your hypothesis or is it just "common sense"?

  2. Re:But do they need it? on Astronauts' Hearts Change Shape In Space · · Score: 1

    More to the point, I wonder if a more spherical shape isn't more efficient in micro gravity and this is what drives the change. The heart no longer has to pump blood uphill, so it would stand to reason that a shape which generates less force while using less energy would be optimum, and out bodies tend to be pretty good at finding the most energy efficient way of adapting to the environment they are in.

  3. Re:Antiseptic Mouthwash Raises Heart Attack Risk on Friendly Fungus Protects Our Mouths From Invaders · · Score: 2

    You have to appreciate the irony that they find a new symbiotic fungus with clear health benefits and immediately try and use it to develop a novel way to kill fungus.

  4. Re:Calories on Soylent: No Food For 30 Days · · Score: 2

    Counting calories is a very effective way to lose/gain weight. Sure you don't know *exactly* how many your body is burning, but if you don't lose or gain weight at 3000 calories, and maintain the same lifestyle, you can be sure that you will lose about a pound a week at 2500 calories, or gain a pound a week at 3500 calories/day. Sure not everybody wants to or has to do that, but it works.

    When you restrict calories in, the first thing that happens is your body lowers it's energy expenditure by making you tired and lowering non-essential processes in the body. Then it will catabolise muscle, because muscle is more expensive metabolically than fat. Only then will it start to lower fat. You will get to your target weight, but you will have less muscle mass (unhealthy in itself) burning less energy and a body which thinks it's in a state of famine and will drive you to binge eat to increase fat stores whenever food is available. In short you will lose weight but will set yourself up for even more weight gain in the future, or at least a lifetime of chronic stress inducing hunger. This is why 98% of people who do calorie restriction diets fail.

  5. Re:fucking idiot on Ask Slashdot: Legal Advice Or Loopholes Needed For Manned Space Program · · Score: 1

    If you have the resources to put somebody in space, you can afford to pay a lawyer to answer this question....

    Still, it's an interesting topic for discussion

  6. Re:Oblig on TEPCO Workers Remove Wrong Pipe Get Splashed With Radioactive Water · · Score: 0

    What we have here as far as I can see is two incidents caused by human error in which there were no serious consequences. What's the news, that humans make mistakes? If people can make stupid mistakes in a nuclear power station and not cause any serious problems it just shows that the systems and procedures in place are well designed and managed.

  7. Re:Make lots of them. on Ask Slashdot: Permanent Preservation of Human Knowledge? · · Score: 1

    If you're planning for the fall and rise of civilisation, you need to prepare for the possibility of deliberate destruction.

    Indeed. This is how the dark ages came about.

  8. Re:He's right on Terrible Advice From a Great Scientist · · Score: 1

    We don't just learn maths in order to calculate. Maths trains our minds to reason.

  9. Re:This is not new on The Mathematics of the Lifespan of Species · · Score: 1

    humans have, of course, cheated death to some extent, so we're outliers, though it is worth noting that prehistoric humans had a max. lifespan of around 40 years...

    No. prehistoric humans had a life expectancy of 25-40 years. Life expectancy is the mean age at death not the maximum lifespan. Given that we are genetically identical to prehistoric man, I think it's fair to say that they're maximum lifespan was somewhere between 100 and 120 years just like us.

  10. Re:Remove the obvious structural weaknesses on White House Must Answer Petition To 'Build Death Star' · · Score: 1

    Childs play - I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters.

    You hurt small animals for fun as a kid? You must be some kind of psychopath.

    Sooo, how many meters long are the medium-sized animals on your planet? And about the large ones...

    I don't think they exist

  11. Re:But that's not the real problem. on To Encourage Biking, Lose the Helmets · · Score: 3, Funny

    The problem I have is that all the issues you raise also apply to pedestrians, yet suggest to a pro-helmet cyclist that they should wear a helmet when walking across the road and they just laugh. I have no problem with people wearing helmets, in fact I would encourage it, but I want the choice for myself.

  12. Re:The reason is simple. on Why Ultrabooks Are Falling Well Short of Intel's Targets · · Score: 1

    Although I wanted to punch a hole in the wall when I had to buy a Thunderbolt cable for $50 0_o, there is no reason they should be that expensive but that is Apple pricing for you.

    Thunderbolt uses active cables. There is a circuit at each end of the cable which handles the physical transmission. This means the cables will always be expensive, although costs will probably come down if thunderbolt becomes mainstream and economies of scale kick in. It's also a reason why thunderbolt probably won't become mainstream.

  13. Re:"Einstein's brain, that revolutionized physics. on iPad App Offers Detailed Images of Einstein's Brain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I also find the idea that there was something unique about Einstein's brain that made him a genius. IMHO what set him apart wasn't his academic brilliance, which was nothing special going by his school performance, it was his ability to think up daft questions like "if I were riding a light beam and shone a torch in front of me, how fast would the light from the torch travel?".

  14. Re:Oh wait, I get it now... on 180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become Vegetarians, Move Out of Africa · · Score: 1

    Our brains are around 30% larger in relation to other primates, hence we need additional nutrients for ours to develop fully.

  15. Re:More interesting than that... on 180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become Vegetarians, Move Out of Africa · · Score: 1

    Nonsense. The fossil record shows that human brain sizes shrunk after the agricultural revolution. We developed large brains through eating large amounts of fat and protein from meat.

  16. Re:This is crap. on 'Social Jetlag' May Be Making You Fat · · Score: 2

    Your weight is a result of calories in vs. calories out.

    Nothing else.

    While that's technically true, it misses the problem completely because you ignore why people eat more than they need. People eat because they are hungry. Why would someone with enough body fat to power their sedentary lifestyle for weeks still feel hungry? That's the problem, and there's a ton of evidence that it's screwed up hormonal signalling from a poor diet and lifestyle which makes people hungry when they shouldn't be. Poor sleep patterns is part of the problem, even if an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise comprises the bulk of it.

  17. Re:Really? on The Pirate Bay On Track To Be Banned In the UK? · · Score: 1

    Moreover, by providing links to infringing material, they are also helping the content owners. They could quite happily download all the torrents, identify the IP addresses of seeders, have the courts issue warrants to identify the seeders from their IP addresses and pursue copyright claims against the individuals. Of course that would be more costly, so lets break the internet so they can increase their profit margins.

  18. Re:OMG! OMG! on An Early Look At Mac OS X 10.8 · · Score: 1

    If Apple paid Foxconn more do you really think the factory workers would earn more?

  19. Re:meanwhile: on NinjaVideo.net Founder Gets 14 Months · · Score: 1

    To be fair, in this case their prison sentences seem to be somewhat proportional to the money they made from the site.

    Only if you think it's reasonable that copyright infringement should be a criminal act. Remember that copyright is an artificail monopoly granted to provide a profit motive, and the only harm infringement does is to profit margins. In a fair legal system, the only reasonable punishment would be a claim for monetary loss settled in a civil suit. Copyright infringement should be treated much like breach of contract, but due to lobbying and corruption, big media have managed to convince government that copyright infringement is theft, which it isn't.

  20. Re:I've always wondered about this on Fine Structure Constant May Not Be So Constant · · Score: 1

    But I've always wondered how we know that the speed of light is the same regardless

    This comes from the electromagnetic nature of light. When considered as a wave, light is composed of an oscillating electric field. As the electric field changes it induces an oscillating magnetic field. As the magentic field changes it induces an electric field again, and so on, such that the electric and magnetic fields regenerate each other. According to Maxwells laws, such a wave can only sustain itself at a specific speed: the speed of light. This speed is determined by the permeability and permitivity of the medium it travels in, hence the speed of light varies in different materials.

    (I also am not a physicist, but I remember this from school ;)

  21. Mockup on MC Hammer Launches a Search Engine · · Score: 2

    WireDoo

    ______________________

    [Search] [Stop] [Hammer Time!]

  22. Re:Haven't gamed in a while, but,,, on Women Remain the Ignored Audience In Gaming · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just an educated guess, but I expect the vasty majority of game designers are men and it's not so much that they're trying to aim their games at men as that they're designing games that they would like to play.

  23. Re:I don't want to have to yell at my phone in pub on Sophisticated Voice Commands the Next Big Step For Smartphones, Says Woz · · Score: 2

    This pretty much sums up my experiences with voice recognition technology.

  24. Re:How long does this process take? on Star Falls Into Black Hole · · Score: 1

    As I understand it, it would take an eternity from our point of view for the star to fall in the black hole completely due to the time dilation in the vicinity of the black hole. However, I believe what they're seeing is just the start of the event. A star is effectively a huge nuclear explosion kept in equilibrium by a massive gravitational field. As the star approached the black hole, the gravitational field from the black hole would gradually reduce that of the star on the near side until at some point it would no longer be enough to contain the nuclear reaction. At this point the matter in the star would be explode in the direction of the black hole. This would probably accelerate as the star itself lost mass and hence gravitational field strength. It's the rapidity of this reaction which causes the gamma ray burst, not the process of the matter actually falling into the black hole, which would probably look like a regular accretion disc. I'd guess the whole process would be over fairly quickly.

    I'm not an astrophysicist, but this is my hand-wavey explanation of what happened. Hopefully someone better qualified will elaborate, or tell me I'm writing bollocks :)

  25. Re:Yet another problem on ATMs That Dispense Gold Bars Coming To America · · Score: 1

    How is it diffferent from a regular ATM, apart from the loot being less liquid?

    Gold is untraceable and you can convert it to hard currency anywhere in the world. Large quantities of cash are very hard to spend unless you have a money laundering scheme.