There's some of both. Partly it's better diagnosis and information about these different sensitivities: People are more likely to find out exactly what they are sensitive to, and be able to communicate it better to others. We are also making an effort to make public areas more open to people with these sensitivities, so someone who 20 years ago would just not eat out, now can go and find something on the menu tailored to them in many restaurants.
But there's also the fact that people who grow up in near-sterile environments tend to have hair-trigger immune systems, and therefore are more likely to develop allergies in the first place. When your parents were raising you, they probably didn't sterilize every surface you touched with antibacterial cleaners. They kept it clean, but it wasn't hospital-clean. Many people your age have raised kids in environments that are hospital-clean, or nearly so. A foreign substance is an unusual event for their bodies, and it tends to react with a full-scale alarm. Even when that substance is just a new food, or some pollen.
So we haven't hit the max population point for either of those yet. Fine, I won't argue that. I do think there is one, though when and where it might be I don't have the knowledge to judge. The first is probably further off than the second, just because modern sanitation is vastly better than anything that's been around before. Still, it wouldn't take long for a virulent disease to spread to the whole world these days.
As for the famine... We have made huge strides in agriculture and transportation technologies, no question. The questions are if those strides are sustainable, and what portion of the Earth's surface we can convert to agriculture before causing other problems. (Much of our current farming is not sustainable, in that it depends on a steady supply of fossil fuel, in a multitude of ways. We are also reaching the limits of fishing, in that we have destroyed or nearly destroyed the populations of many major food fish.)
Neither of them is inevitable, with enough applied insight and work. The question is if that will be done quickly enough. And the constantly rising population is just putting further stress on our abilities to improve these, while making it so we need to improve just to keep pace.
I'm just not willing to bet that homo sapiens is the one animal unique enough to escape the normal results of overpopulation.
Bicycles were actually fairly high-tech devices at the time. Especially if you realize that there wasn't a distinction between 'bicycle' and 'motorcycle' for a long time...
Actually, from what is needed for a workable cable, in all of the current suggestions if the cable breaks it'd float down as gently as a piece of paper - since it would weigh less per unit of cross section than a piece of paper.
The 'safety in case something fell' is in a 'probably doesn't really matter where you put it' situation: The ascent to the top of a space elevator is longer than the circumference of the Earth, so where something would fall depends on what it is, where it was on the elevator at the time, weather conditions, etc. Basically, it could in theory fall anywhere at the same latitude at minimum. So, I don't see an advantage in trying to put it in a low-population area. But that's just a light analysis.
Even diamonds it'd be cheaper to just make them here. It would have to be rare elements, as any alloy or compound would be cheaper to just make ourselves.
Unless you want to use the result in space itself, of course. Then you are comparing the cost of sending up the mining and manufacturing equipment vs. the cost of sending up the material itself.
Then of course is the question of whether the Moon might be a better mine: It won't take as much cost to get it to be in a usable location, and it's easier to maneuver on, with higher gravity. On the other hand, it's harder to get the material back off, because of that same higher gravity. (And it may be possible to find an asteroid with easier to reach large quantities of valuable material.)
Interesting as a paper, but I'd be highly skeptical if this would be a financially useful exercise.
The problem is that the roundabout gets full, and the people who are turning left have to be in the outside lane as they cross the oncoming traffic, meaning the opposite direction can't enter. Or you can stop them in the roundabout and not let them turn left, but that just means they back up around the circle. (Or, by adding enough lights to the circle, you might be able to turn it into a complicated version of a standard intersection...)
Most stop signs can be usefully replaced with a roundabout. Some traffic lights can, if they aren't in busy intersections. But be ready to pull out the circle if the intersection starts to get busy; a traffic light will do better then. (Or an interchange, if you've got the money and space.)
Um, no. I've seen those in place. Worst of both worlds. Load them up under traffic, and only one entering direction can operate at a time. (Instead of opposing directions, like in a standard traffic light.)
Even if Macs are expensive, they popularized the idea of a consumer-friendly UI, and the GUI in general. Xerox may have invented the GUI, but without Jobs it would have sat in a lab for who knows how long. He brought it to the masses, and made computers something even non-nerds used on a regular basis. Even if they weren't his computers that they used.
Woz was a better engineer. No question. Jobs had the ability to take a vision of a product, give it to the engineers, and have them make it a reality. And to usually get the idea of the product right. That's not common, and it's what Apple has always been based on.
Much of the rest of the computer industry is following in trails that Apple blazed because of Jobs' vision.
I've actually been a Nielsen family twice. The first time I still had a TV, but no antenna or cable hookup. (I had a VCR though.) Second time, I didn't even have a TV.
I tried explaining this to them, but they could never quite get the concept...
The article basically is talking about a new effect in the 'quantum foam' of the universe, where stuff gets created and destroyed on sub-plank scales. (Where it's spontaneous creation doesn't run into problems with the different conservation laws.)
And they can an do interact via any of the major forces. The supposition here is that the weakest of the forces are pushing them apart, instead of pulling them together. (Like all of the stronger forces are.)
And we have created small amounts of antimatter, on the scale of one (small) atom at the largest. Which we have to contain and hold away from any interactions with normal matter. As I'm not a high-energy or theoretical physict, I can't say whether we've had enough of it on hand at any one point in time to run gravitational tests, but it's possible that they were skipped in favor of easier and more interesting tests in the few fractions of a second we've ever been able to capture any.
This is actually the second such settlement this particular set of lawyers has gotten out of Righthaven, and they've already gotten a cheque from the first one.
Admittedly, the cheque was sent to the wrong address (a previous address that the group had moved out of before starting work on the case, and hadn't used in any of the documents relating to the case), but still.
Given that we are talking about sub-planck-length distances, the distance doesn't really come into play.
(Also, as I understand it, electromagnetic forces can operate over larger distances, but they tend to be canceled out, something that isn't a problem for gravity. I thought I remembered them also being inversely proportional to the surface of the sphere at a radius, where gravity is just inversely proportional to the radius, but I may have been mistaken there.)
Better yet: That magnet you are holding? Between your non-magnetic fingers? It's being held in place by the electromagnetic interactions between your fingers and the metal.
Oh, and the nail? The only reason it's 'an object' is because of the electromagnetic interactions between the atoms making it up. Otherwise, it'd be a pile of iron atoms.
The only reason we think gravity is strong is because of one thing: We don't have any anti-gravity particles, so gravity is always additive. Everything else tends to cancel out, as it occurs in pairs.
Electromagnetism is stronger than gravity. Given that the particles in question also have the opposite charge, and are therefore attracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't make a major difference to them.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be either one, if the drug is targeted enough and the body can recover. Assuming the drug only kills infected cells, and has a 100% kill rate, it's likely it would leave some cells intact that hadn't been infected. Not enough to support normal immune response on their own, but perhaps enough to regrow the rest naturally.
This of course is wild speculation; we wouldn't know until we try. The main point is still that if you can kill (just) the infected cells fairly easily, you are well on your way to designing a treatment. It may not be simple, and it may not be cheap, but you should have options.
So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.
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Sounds like a plan. Revoke all laws 10-20 years after they are passed, unless they can pass again.
Give the congresscritters something to do, so they can feel useful.
There's some of both. Partly it's better diagnosis and information about these different sensitivities: People are more likely to find out exactly what they are sensitive to, and be able to communicate it better to others. We are also making an effort to make public areas more open to people with these sensitivities, so someone who 20 years ago would just not eat out, now can go and find something on the menu tailored to them in many restaurants.
But there's also the fact that people who grow up in near-sterile environments tend to have hair-trigger immune systems, and therefore are more likely to develop allergies in the first place. When your parents were raising you, they probably didn't sterilize every surface you touched with antibacterial cleaners. They kept it clean, but it wasn't hospital-clean. Many people your age have raised kids in environments that are hospital-clean, or nearly so. A foreign substance is an unusual event for their bodies, and it tends to react with a full-scale alarm. Even when that substance is just a new food, or some pollen.
So we haven't hit the max population point for either of those yet. Fine, I won't argue that. I do think there is one, though when and where it might be I don't have the knowledge to judge. The first is probably further off than the second, just because modern sanitation is vastly better than anything that's been around before. Still, it wouldn't take long for a virulent disease to spread to the whole world these days.
As for the famine... We have made huge strides in agriculture and transportation technologies, no question. The questions are if those strides are sustainable, and what portion of the Earth's surface we can convert to agriculture before causing other problems. (Much of our current farming is not sustainable, in that it depends on a steady supply of fossil fuel, in a multitude of ways. We are also reaching the limits of fishing, in that we have destroyed or nearly destroyed the populations of many major food fish.)
Neither of them is inevitable, with enough applied insight and work. The question is if that will be done quickly enough. And the constantly rising population is just putting further stress on our abilities to improve these, while making it so we need to improve just to keep pace.
I'm just not willing to bet that homo sapiens is the one animal unique enough to escape the normal results of overpopulation.
And diseases.
And probably famines.
I think a lot of what frustrates me about technology can be traced back to the fact that the first two rules are in the wrong order.
Bicycles were actually fairly high-tech devices at the time. Especially if you realize that there wasn't a distinction between 'bicycle' and 'motorcycle' for a long time...
Actually, from what is needed for a workable cable, in all of the current suggestions if the cable breaks it'd float down as gently as a piece of paper - since it would weigh less per unit of cross section than a piece of paper.
Meh, I just can't spell. ;)
The 'safety in case something fell' is in a 'probably doesn't really matter where you put it' situation: The ascent to the top of a space elevator is longer than the circumference of the Earth, so where something would fall depends on what it is, where it was on the elevator at the time, weather conditions, etc. Basically, it could in theory fall anywhere at the same latitude at minimum. So, I don't see an advantage in trying to put it in a low-population area. But that's just a light analysis.
Time to invest in Equador? (One of the best places to build a space elevator.)
Even diamonds it'd be cheaper to just make them here. It would have to be rare elements, as any alloy or compound would be cheaper to just make ourselves.
Unless you want to use the result in space itself, of course. Then you are comparing the cost of sending up the mining and manufacturing equipment vs. the cost of sending up the material itself.
Then of course is the question of whether the Moon might be a better mine: It won't take as much cost to get it to be in a usable location, and it's easier to maneuver on, with higher gravity. On the other hand, it's harder to get the material back off, because of that same higher gravity. (And it may be possible to find an asteroid with easier to reach large quantities of valuable material.)
Interesting as a paper, but I'd be highly skeptical if this would be a financially useful exercise.
The problem is that the roundabout gets full, and the people who are turning left have to be in the outside lane as they cross the oncoming traffic, meaning the opposite direction can't enter. Or you can stop them in the roundabout and not let them turn left, but that just means they back up around the circle. (Or, by adding enough lights to the circle, you might be able to turn it into a complicated version of a standard intersection...)
Most stop signs can be usefully replaced with a roundabout. Some traffic lights can, if they aren't in busy intersections. But be ready to pull out the circle if the intersection starts to get busy; a traffic light will do better then. (Or an interchange, if you've got the money and space.)
Um, no. I've seen those in place. Worst of both worlds. Load them up under traffic, and only one entering direction can operate at a time. (Instead of opposing directions, like in a standard traffic light.)
Netflix worked just fine through the browser on the TouchPad from what I've heard... Until the fire sale, when Netflix blocked it.
Even if Macs are expensive, they popularized the idea of a consumer-friendly UI, and the GUI in general. Xerox may have invented the GUI, but without Jobs it would have sat in a lab for who knows how long. He brought it to the masses, and made computers something even non-nerds used on a regular basis. Even if they weren't his computers that they used.
Woz was a better engineer. No question. Jobs had the ability to take a vision of a product, give it to the engineers, and have them make it a reality. And to usually get the idea of the product right. That's not common, and it's what Apple has always been based on.
Much of the rest of the computer industry is following in trails that Apple blazed because of Jobs' vision.
What market advantage would that give Comcast?
I've actually been a Nielsen family twice. The first time I still had a TV, but no antenna or cable hookup. (I had a VCR though.) Second time, I didn't even have a TV.
I tried explaining this to them, but they could never quite get the concept...
The article basically is talking about a new effect in the 'quantum foam' of the universe, where stuff gets created and destroyed on sub-plank scales. (Where it's spontaneous creation doesn't run into problems with the different conservation laws.)
And they can an do interact via any of the major forces. The supposition here is that the weakest of the forces are pushing them apart, instead of pulling them together. (Like all of the stronger forces are.)
And we have created small amounts of antimatter, on the scale of one (small) atom at the largest. Which we have to contain and hold away from any interactions with normal matter. As I'm not a high-energy or theoretical physict, I can't say whether we've had enough of it on hand at any one point in time to run gravitational tests, but it's possible that they were skipped in favor of easier and more interesting tests in the few fractions of a second we've ever been able to capture any.
This is actually the second such settlement this particular set of lawyers has gotten out of Righthaven, and they've already gotten a cheque from the first one.
Admittedly, the cheque was sent to the wrong address (a previous address that the group had moved out of before starting work on the case, and hadn't used in any of the documents relating to the case), but still.
Given that we are talking about sub-planck-length distances, the distance doesn't really come into play.
(Also, as I understand it, electromagnetic forces can operate over larger distances, but they tend to be canceled out, something that isn't a problem for gravity. I thought I remembered them also being inversely proportional to the surface of the sphere at a radius, where gravity is just inversely proportional to the radius, but I may have been mistaken there.)
I'm willing to bet their six-figure-salary lawyers are willing to claim otherwise in a court of law. For years at a time.
Better yet: That magnet you are holding? Between your non-magnetic fingers? It's being held in place by the electromagnetic interactions between your fingers and the metal.
Oh, and the nail? The only reason it's 'an object' is because of the electromagnetic interactions between the atoms making it up. Otherwise, it'd be a pile of iron atoms.
The only reason we think gravity is strong is because of one thing: We don't have any anti-gravity particles, so gravity is always additive. Everything else tends to cancel out, as it occurs in pairs.
Electromagnetism is stronger than gravity. Given that the particles in question also have the opposite charge, and are therefore attracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't make a major difference to them.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be either one, if the drug is targeted enough and the body can recover. Assuming the drug only kills infected cells, and has a 100% kill rate, it's likely it would leave some cells intact that hadn't been infected. Not enough to support normal immune response on their own, but perhaps enough to regrow the rest naturally.
This of course is wild speculation; we wouldn't know until we try. The main point is still that if you can kill (just) the infected cells fairly easily, you are well on your way to designing a treatment. It may not be simple, and it may not be cheap, but you should have options.
Both of those already exist. HIV in particular does both.
So you take the person into a clean room, administer the drug, wait a few weeks for their immune system to grow back (possibly from transplant or stem cell therapy), and they walk out cured. Not a bad deal.