Last I heard the expectation was that a magnetic reversal would take something like a century and that during which time the field would not just disappear and then reappear in the other polarity, but instead do something more akin to the poles wandering around and ending up near the opposite spin pole from their former location. While the field strength might vary substantially as well, we wouldn't be completely without a direction-indicating field (though we might have east and west poles for a while and we also might have low enough field to be a cosmic ray/solar flare hazard).
A century or three is a LOT of pigeon generations. The pigeons would not be without a magnetic navigational reference that was usable and essentially stable on a several-season basis.
It is amazing really...how often, how companies will grind their W2's (young ones) into the ground, for nothing, willingly lose them, but pay a major premium for a contractor to come in and do the same thing or fix things, etc.
It isn't just IT, work has changed.
As someone who was consulting back in the '70s and '80s, I can testify that it was like that then, too. The consultants got paid a hefty premium and the W2s got ground down. (I understand it was also that way in what was high tech - electronics - before computers were the norm.)
Consultants got the big bux. (It was fun having the ATMs ask me if I'd typoed when I deposited my paycheck.) But they also were even more disposable than W2.
Then Ross Perot broke it for private consultants (by lobbying for a change to the tax law that put the client at risk if a contractor failed to pay his taxes and was working directly or through a firm he controlled. (That's when I switched from contracting directly to through-a-firm or doing W2.) A couple big auto companies got seriously burned and contracts dried up for consultants who weren't working through somebody else's firm (like Ross Perot's EDS).
I understand that, in modern Silicon Valley at least, some clients are willing to take the risk these days, so people who have hung out their shingle can get contracts again.
And in about two months the corporate workplace will become unbearable, as executives who have read this begin deploying all sorts of intrusive big-brother measures.
With these measures deployed, anyone doing any innovation will show up on their profiles as trying to crack and is likely to be fired or harassed.
Ordinary workers will perceive their management as not trusting them, which will in turn encourage them to become untrustworthy.
Speaking of Einstein, I understand his brain was donated to a research institution.
If some of it is still around it might be interesting to check his genome and find out how it deviates from the Human Genome Project reference.
Granted some of his intelect might be the result of training, nurture, and/or a "birth defect but GOOD mind you". But if there's a genetic basis for improved intelligence (or its potential) that would be a good place to look.
What I have seen, both in my personal and professional lives, that would make far more impact for society is finding the genes for discipline, for rationality, for work ethic, for compassion to others. Solve those, and you'll improve our society far more than trying to create a planet of Einstein's.
IMHO you might get the biggest bang for the work by researching and finding a cure for psychopathy (by the "sociopathic behavior due to brain abnormality rather than training" definition") This is something akin to color-blindness but for conscience. Psychopaths are pretty common (about one in a hundred) and if they don't come up with a compensation that turns them into an acceptable citizen they do harm far in excess to their numbers. (Sociopaths-by-training may be more common but they're also more trainable-out-of-it.) The bulk of legal systems and moral codes is about finding a way to handle these people.
So far the best "treatment" found seems to be teaching them Objectivism. It gives them a logical reason that accepting a particular set of behavioral rules starting with the non-aggression principle is good for THEIR interests. They may become very abrasive good citizens. But they still become people you can interact with and not have to count your fingers and relatives afterward.
(Some religions also succeed a bit at reforming some psychopaths. But other psychopaths are happy to fake a conversion if it gets them benefits and/or sets up suckers for bilking. It's hard to fake being an Objectivist without actually accepting the philosophy and becoming one.)
Sociopathy and Psychopathy (by one set of definitions the former being learned and the latter being innate) aren't necessarily something that is easy to recognize. Nor is it clear that an observer with somewhat raised intelligence (but still working behind the news-media filter) would have any significantly increased success in recognizing them, let alone avoiding supporting them.
Further, a well-compensated psychopath may actually perform better in certain positions where their decisions may drastically affect people's lives and livelihoods: Military officers, business managers, government officials, surgeons,... The emotional detachment allows them to think more clearly about the big picture of life-affecting decisions rather than getting emotionally hung up on avoiding short-term harm. The important thing here is the "well compensated" adjective: The good of others must not be deleted from the evaluation function.
Unfortunately, psychopathy also drastically improves performance in sales and political campaigning - especially if it's NOT taking into account harm to others. The ability to lie with a straight face is invaluable here. "Sincerity is the key. Once you can fake that, the rest is easy." So political systems select very strongly for Psychopaths.
I've never been able to understand how some people manage to reconcile belief in the Christian God with guns and military.
You mean the guy who went around literally whipping peddlers because they were selling stuff in his temple?
Not to mention telling his disciples to buy swords (the "assault weapons of choice" of the day), selling their clothing if necessary to raise the money.
The grandfather poster is confused because he doesn't understand the theology.
Starting with the commandment commonly mistranslated as "Thou shalt not kill". It used a different word and would be more correctly rendered as "Thou shalt not commit the crime of murder." It explicitly did not cover a lot of things, including the use of deadly force in self-defence, defence of home and family, executions, and war. (Jesus' "turn the other cheek" prescription, and when to apply it, is a separate issue.)
If you want a better understanding, start by looking up the "just war" doctrine. Meanwhile, don't hallucinate nonexistent hypocrisy by projecting the misunderstandings you've been taught onto others' behavior.
Zimmerman's whole case seems to ride on him "feeling threatened" which apparently makes it okay to murder people in Florida.
In most states (I'm not sure of the details for Florida) the standard is not whether HE felt threatened. The standard is whether a REASONABLE AND PRUDENT person IN HIS SITUATION would feel threatened - at risk of the loss of "life or limb".
As to "murder" there's a difference between that and "justifiable homicide". If the prosecutor thinks he has enough evidence to prove the former, expect him to bring it to court to let a judge or jury decide.
Are they going to include how Jobs and Woz raised seed capital by selling "blue boxes" (long distance call billing bypass devices) to organized crime? (As documented by Esquire magazine.)
What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?
I'm not sure which "do not eat" signal they're talking about. But one that I do know a little about is the one that prevents rejection of a placenta and multiple sclerosis.
The immune system apparently recognizes and avoids attacking its own body primarily by:
- Editing the sections of DNA coding for antibodies to produce a bunch of small clones of proto-antibody-producing cells that randomly react to all sorts of stuff.
- Shortly after birth (when most of mommy's random cellular components have been purged from baby's body) letting these clones take a grand tour of baby's body - and anybody who recognizes anything dies off.
- Then the survivors (who don't recognize any tissue in baby) turn themselves on and get ready to do a growth spurt if they recognize a target at the same time they're getting an "I'm being damaged" signal (i.e. histamine). Result: A no-autoimmune immune system. Well, almost.
A significant problem is that there are a few tissues that aren't deployed yet when the baby is just born. One such tissue is the myelin sheaths of the nerves. Another, of course, is placental tissue from a pregnancy. (Unlike tribbles, humans aren't born pregnant.) If nothing were done about this, the immune system tissues would be a time-bomb, ready to go into attack mode if it happens to see a damage signal near a nerve or a placenta. This would result in multiple sclerosis or spontaneous abortion - both very big negative scores in the evolutionary game. So the immune system has a patch.
The main myelin protein has a short sequence that tells the immune system that this is a late-blooming tissue, so leave it alone. (I'm guessing this may be the "do not eat" signal they're talking about.) Placental tissue has the same sequence. There are lots of opportunities for failure, of course. (Defects in the signal molecules, disease organisms mimicing it, etc.) But when this patch is working right the nerves and a new baby are protected without significantly degrading the immune system's response to diseases.
This, by the way, is the reason nursing on cow's milk is a risk factor for MS. Milk has a protein related to the myelin sheath protein, but with the "do not eat" signal slightly different. As a result a baby may develop an allergy to that component of cow's milk - and thus to the common stretch of the myelin protein. Result: Autoimmune reaction to the myelin sheaths.
The good part is that the members seem to be declaring their conflicts and recusing themselves (sometimes over half of them) rather than participate in decisions when they have a conflict. I wish this were the case with more commissions regulating other industries.
This is characteristic of all government regulation organizations. It's called "regulatory capture". Virtually anyone who has the expertise to regulate an industry developed that expertise by working in the industry - typically in high positions - and being interested in it. So the regulatory boards end up stacked with people with conflicts of interest (even if the boards pay well enough for the members to divest themselves of all current financial ties).
-- but rather than the traditional AIDs payload of "don't attack anything" going into them you alter the HIV virus's DNA to train the T-Cells to kill cancers
You also artificially assemble the engineered virus from components and don't include the code that says "make lots more of me".
Also, the tatroos detect magnetic, not electric, fields. So you might be able to tell if the line was VERY heavily loaded. But just being hot won't affect the tattoo.
And it is one of the benefits of free universal healthcare; when it is necessary with regular checkups, even if expensive, there's no health insurance company there to complain.
The downside, of course, is that you pay for it in higher taxes. And for another one for each member of the out-of-work family down the street.
Then when it gets too expansive for the government to afford, they try to patch it by reducing services. Like with cancer surgery waiting list time longer than the time it takes the cancer to become inoperable. Or decision-making committees deciding who is old and sick enough that it makes financial sense to let them die and use the resources for people still young and productive.
Of course once the healthcare is single-payer there's no alternative to go to. If the "death panel" says you die, you die.
(Yes, the original Obamacare legislation didn't have "death panels". They were in a companion bill passed around the same time.)
Proof that:
1) it works at industrial scale and in particular that
2) the papers claiming the containment fails at practical time scales and thus requires more energy input than it produces are wrong.
They're working on that now. With about 2M in funding from the Navy - which requires that the results not be published until the final report at the end of each segment of the project.
... the apparatus exposed to neutron flux is mostly a hard vacuum, a vacuum chamber, and a lacy electromagnet structure.
Oh, yes. And the collection electrodes. Still very little material subject to the low neutron flux.
One nice thing about polywell: If it DOES work you can get something like 85% of the fusion energy out as DC. And at voltages within about a factor of 2 of the current DC power transmission line running along the western side of the US. From there it's very easy to efficiently transform it to line power.
(In fact, now that semiconductor technology is up to it, it might make sense to upgrade the DC long-haul transmission systems to the predominant-electrode natural output voltage of a polywell reactor system if/when it is developed and deployed. Teala/Westinghouse's AC beat Edison/GE's DC for over a century because efficient and inexpensive voltage conversion was available/better for AC than DC with the tech of the times. But DC is inherently less lossy to transport with a given amount of material, once it's converted, and the technology is now up to the conversion.)
And "aneutronic" reactions, such as p+B11 -> 3 He4, produce very few of those, because they're only produced by low-quantity side reactions involving things like impurities and combustion products of the basic reaction.
As for hard gammas, they're still stopped by adequate shielding, like any other ionizing radiation. And they're also stopped by TURNING OFF THE REACTOR, rather than hanging around for millennia like, say, Co60.
Assuming the reaction can be made to pass break-even, the apparatus exposed to neutron flux is mostly a hard vacuum, a vacuum chamber, and a lacy electromagnet structure. Very little material to require sequestration and disposal after decomissioning.
what kind of a bozo looks at an unexpected result, from an incredibly complex first-one, never-been-done before kind of a machine, and jumps to the conclusion "FASTER THAN LIGHT"!
Not the original authors. They published something that can be summarized as "This is probably experimental error but we haven't found a bug in the setup. We're announcing it just in case there is something real here and also to get more eyes to look at the issue and see what the problem might be."
you do realise that the phase is already smeared by the microphone, the preamplifier and probably a channel EQ? To say nothing of room acoustics in the playback environment.
A good electret condenser microphone had an amazingly flat and phase-accurate response. Preamp equalization was the inverse of preemphasis and canceled in phase as well as frequency. Channel equalization could foul up phase response - but wasn't commonly used on sounds where this would be an issue.
As I pointed out, Time Windows use a hack to deal with room acoustics. The woofer is at the top of the tower, which is an accoustic transmission line driven by the backside wave (ala bass reflex). A pair of ports at the bottom are sized to correctly load it when letting the energy escape near the bottom, preventing the wave from bouncing back up and emerging through the driver. The transmission line is loaded with a fiberglass stuffing that attenuates higher frequencies in a way that models the diffraction of the driver's front wave around the tower on its way to bounce off the wall behind the speaker. When positioned according to the instructions, the unit is just far enough from the wall that the wave from the bottom ports cancels the wave that diffracts around the speaker and bounces from the wall. Thus the wall "disappears". You still have the acoustic effects of the side and back wall, furniture, and third bounce from those off the "disappeared" wall. But that actually helps, by making the rest of the room and its contents remain audible, while the speakers and the wall behind them become a window on the performance.
The majority of vinyl cut since the mid '70s utilised a digital delay. I'm sure the surface noise and scratches really benefitted from these speakers though, especially records cut on lathes using non-oversampling 32kHz 12 bit delays. As for the phase accuracy of consumer grade dolby decoding... HA!
Which is why you should buy your vinyl from Mobile Fidelity Sound or the like. Pressed into virgin vinyl (no ground up labels to make hisses and pops), their disk master cut using analog equipment at a reduced speed, no phase-trashing filtering, etc. You still need a pre-disk master good enough to take advangage of this or you still have issues. But many good masters do exist. And even when the original master isn't ideal the disk master cutting doesn't make it substantially worse, giving you something substantially better than an original commercial release.
I can't make heads or tails whether having my DNA promoter regions methylated or demethylated is good for me or not.
Exercise switches on expression of certain muscle-related genes in muscles. Film at eleven.
Surprise, surprise! What did they expect?
IMHO they're just discovering the details of some signaling pathways in muscles, probably related to rebuilding damage and strengthening muscles as a result of exercise.
... but I wonder just how practical it is to produce these strings on a large scale.
It would be tough with natural spider silk draglines.
But both the chemical and mechanical structure and construction mechanisms of spider silk are now reasonably understood, and arbitrary protein synthesis by genetic engineering of bacteria is well developed.
So now that the concept is proven it should be straightforward to make synthetic dragline violin strings if a market for them develops.
Oversampling (i.e. 192kHz) allows much more room to develop a good anti-aliasing filter. [... filters] designed for the higher sampling rate can have more linear phase.
This is an especially serious issue for percussive sounds, which have both a very broad spectrum and a strong sensitivity to phase errors in reconstruction.
The broad spectrum means there's a lot of energy in the high frequencies that map into the audible range due to sampling aliases. Oversampling lets filters have greater image attenuation.
Percussive sounds are very short and the phase relationship between the harmonics must be maintained to keep them short when reconstructed. So a non-flat phase response in the antialiasing filters lengthens the time of the reconstructed sound. This is VERY audible, making the sounds "muddy" rather than "crisp". Phase distortion also interferes with reconstructing the apparent location of the sound source in stereo and other multi-channel audio systems. So the flatter phase response of the anti-aliasing filters that are possible with higher sampling rates produces a very noticeable improvement in the sound quality.
= = = =
I learned that last from Steve Eberbach, designer of the DCM Time Window loudspeakers. These had a very flat phase response, good enough to allow a listener to track thechanging location of the "veep" sound of a recorded accoustic guitarist's fingers sliding on the wound strings. In addition to not distorting the sound (thus not producing an acoustic image of the enclosure), the speakers also had a hack to cancel the reflection from the wall behind them, resulting in the acoustic effiect of the room's wall going away, becoming a window on the recorded performance. Thus the name: Time (because the response was flat in the time domain (phase) as well as frequency), Window (for the "window on the performance" effect).
CDs began to come out shortly after the introduction of these superb loudspeakers. And Steve had a lot to say about them. The low sampling rate chosen and resulting rotten filter phase response wiped out much of his speakers' advantage over the competition. (The choice of a linear, rather than a floating-point-like compressed, encoding also limited dynamic range, making quantization error audible as noise and intermodulation distortion in quiet passages.) Only listeners playing vinyl disks or dolby tapes could really appreciate the difference between his product and other high-end speakers.
What the researchers should do next is look into the instance for people who have supposedly "woke up" during surgery being paralyzed yet still feeling the intense pain of surgery in progress.
That will be hard to do. They normally give surgical patients a drug that inhibits the transcription of temporary to permanent memory. They might have been awake and suffering horribly - but they won't remember it afterward.
This does two useful things: It reduces post traumatic problems. And it also reduces malpractice suits.
I could really care less about AMD vs Intel. I have no horses in that race - and haven't for over a decade. (The only issue I have with either of them is Intel's inclusion of hardware remote administration backdoors in their chipsets, which they tout as a "feature" - and I haven't looked into whether AMD does the equivalent.)
My only point was that using this particular technology is good for about a generation's worth of density without a process upgrade and a substantial power and heat savings.
If Intel wants to do it, too, the more the merrier. Meanwhile, while AMD has it deployed and Intel doesn't yet, it may put AMD back into the race for one round.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard the expectation was that a magnetic reversal would take something like a century and that during which time the field would not just disappear and then reappear in the other polarity, but instead do something more akin to the poles wandering around and ending up near the opposite spin pole from their former location. While the field strength might vary substantially as well, we wouldn't be completely without a direction-indicating field (though we might have east and west poles for a while and we also might have low enough field to be a cosmic ray/solar flare hazard).
A century or three is a LOT of pigeon generations. The pigeons would not be without a magnetic navigational reference that was usable and essentially stable on a several-season basis.
It is amazing really...how often, how companies will grind their W2's (young ones) into the ground, for nothing, willingly lose them, but pay a major premium for a contractor to come in and do the same thing or fix things, etc.
It isn't just IT, work has changed.
As someone who was consulting back in the '70s and '80s, I can testify that it was like that then, too. The consultants got paid a hefty premium and the W2s got ground down. (I understand it was also that way in what was high tech - electronics - before computers were the norm.)
Consultants got the big bux. (It was fun having the ATMs ask me if I'd typoed when I deposited my paycheck.) But they also were even more disposable than W2.
Then Ross Perot broke it for private consultants (by lobbying for a change to the tax law that put the client at risk if a contractor failed to pay his taxes and was working directly or through a firm he controlled. (That's when I switched from contracting directly to through-a-firm or doing W2.) A couple big auto companies got seriously burned and contracts dried up for consultants who weren't working through somebody else's firm (like Ross Perot's EDS).
I understand that, in modern Silicon Valley at least, some clients are willing to take the risk these days, so people who have hung out their shingle can get contracts again.
And in about two months the corporate workplace will become unbearable, as executives who have read this begin deploying all sorts of intrusive big-brother measures.
With these measures deployed, anyone doing any innovation will show up on their profiles as trying to crack and is likely to be fired or harassed.
Ordinary workers will perceive their management as not trusting them, which will in turn encourage them to become untrustworthy.
Speaking of Einstein, I understand his brain was donated to a research institution.
If some of it is still around it might be interesting to check his genome and find out how it deviates from the Human Genome Project reference.
Granted some of his intelect might be the result of training, nurture, and/or a "birth defect but GOOD mind you". But if there's a genetic basis for improved intelligence (or its potential) that would be a good place to look.
What I have seen, both in my personal and professional lives, that would make far more impact for society is finding the genes for discipline, for rationality, for work ethic, for compassion to others. Solve those, and you'll improve our society far more than trying to create a planet of Einstein's.
IMHO you might get the biggest bang for the work by researching and finding a cure for psychopathy (by the "sociopathic behavior due to brain abnormality rather than training" definition") This is something akin to color-blindness but for conscience. Psychopaths are pretty common (about one in a hundred) and if they don't come up with a compensation that turns them into an acceptable citizen they do harm far in excess to their numbers. (Sociopaths-by-training may be more common but they're also more trainable-out-of-it.) The bulk of legal systems and moral codes is about finding a way to handle these people.
So far the best "treatment" found seems to be teaching them Objectivism. It gives them a logical reason that accepting a particular set of behavioral rules starting with the non-aggression principle is good for THEIR interests. They may become very abrasive good citizens. But they still become people you can interact with and not have to count your fingers and relatives afterward.
(Some religions also succeed a bit at reforming some psychopaths. But other psychopaths are happy to fake a conversion if it gets them benefits and/or sets up suckers for bilking. It's hard to fake being an Objectivist without actually accepting the philosophy and becoming one.)
Sociopathy and Psychopathy (by one set of definitions the former being learned and the latter being innate) aren't necessarily something that is easy to recognize. Nor is it clear that an observer with somewhat raised intelligence (but still working behind the news-media filter) would have any significantly increased success in recognizing them, let alone avoiding supporting them.
Further, a well-compensated psychopath may actually perform better in certain positions where their decisions may drastically affect people's lives and livelihoods: Military officers, business managers, government officials, surgeons, ... The emotional detachment allows them to think more clearly about the big picture of life-affecting decisions rather than getting emotionally hung up on avoiding short-term harm. The important thing here is the "well compensated" adjective: The good of others must not be deleted from the evaluation function.
Unfortunately, psychopathy also drastically improves performance in sales and political campaigning - especially if it's NOT taking into account harm to others. The ability to lie with a straight face is invaluable here. "Sincerity is the key. Once you can fake that, the rest is easy." So political systems select very strongly for Psychopaths.
I've never been able to understand how some people manage to reconcile belief in the Christian God with guns and military.
You mean the guy who went around literally whipping peddlers because they were selling stuff in his temple?
Not to mention telling his disciples to buy swords (the "assault weapons of choice" of the day), selling their clothing if necessary to raise the money.
The grandfather poster is confused because he doesn't understand the theology.
Starting with the commandment commonly mistranslated as "Thou shalt not kill". It used a different word and would be more correctly rendered as "Thou shalt not commit the crime of murder." It explicitly did not cover a lot of things, including the use of deadly force in self-defence, defence of home and family, executions, and war. (Jesus' "turn the other cheek" prescription, and when to apply it, is a separate issue.)
If you want a better understanding, start by looking up the "just war" doctrine. Meanwhile, don't hallucinate nonexistent hypocrisy by projecting the misunderstandings you've been taught onto others' behavior.
Zimmerman's whole case seems to ride on him "feeling threatened" which apparently makes it okay to murder people in Florida.
In most states (I'm not sure of the details for Florida) the standard is not whether HE felt threatened. The standard is whether a REASONABLE AND PRUDENT person IN HIS SITUATION would feel threatened - at risk of the loss of "life or limb".
As to "murder" there's a difference between that and "justifiable homicide". If the prosecutor thinks he has enough evidence to prove the former, expect him to bring it to court to let a judge or jury decide.
Are they going to include how Jobs and Woz raised seed capital by selling "blue boxes" (long distance call billing bypass devices) to organized crime? (As documented by Esquire magazine.)
What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?
I'm not sure which "do not eat" signal they're talking about. But one that I do know a little about is the one that prevents rejection of a placenta and multiple sclerosis.
The immune system apparently recognizes and avoids attacking its own body primarily by:
- Editing the sections of DNA coding for antibodies to produce a bunch of small clones of proto-antibody-producing cells that randomly react to all sorts of stuff.
- Shortly after birth (when most of mommy's random cellular components have been purged from baby's body) letting these clones take a grand tour of baby's body - and anybody who recognizes anything dies off.
- Then the survivors (who don't recognize any tissue in baby) turn themselves on and get ready to do a growth spurt if they recognize a target at the same time they're getting an "I'm being damaged" signal (i.e. histamine).
Result: A no-autoimmune immune system. Well, almost.
A significant problem is that there are a few tissues that aren't deployed yet when the baby is just born. One such tissue is the myelin sheaths of the nerves. Another, of course, is placental tissue from a pregnancy. (Unlike tribbles, humans aren't born pregnant.) If nothing were done about this, the immune system tissues would be a time-bomb, ready to go into attack mode if it happens to see a damage signal near a nerve or a placenta. This would result in multiple sclerosis or spontaneous abortion - both very big negative scores in the evolutionary game. So the immune system has a patch.
The main myelin protein has a short sequence that tells the immune system that this is a late-blooming tissue, so leave it alone. (I'm guessing this may be the "do not eat" signal they're talking about.) Placental tissue has the same sequence. There are lots of opportunities for failure, of course. (Defects in the signal molecules, disease organisms mimicing it, etc.) But when this patch is working right the nerves and a new baby are protected without significantly degrading the immune system's response to diseases.
This, by the way, is the reason nursing on cow's milk is a risk factor for MS. Milk has a protein related to the myelin sheath protein, but with the "do not eat" signal slightly different. As a result a baby may develop an allergy to that component of cow's milk - and thus to the common stretch of the myelin protein. Result: Autoimmune reaction to the myelin sheaths.
The good part is that the members seem to be declaring their conflicts and recusing themselves (sometimes over half of them) rather than participate in decisions when they have a conflict. I wish this were the case with more commissions regulating other industries.
This is characteristic of all government regulation organizations. It's called "regulatory capture". Virtually anyone who has the expertise to regulate an industry developed that expertise by working in the industry - typically in high positions - and being interested in it. So the regulatory boards end up stacked with people with conflicts of interest (even if the boards pay well enough for the members to divest themselves of all current financial ties).
We also saw movies where nuclear tests created giant women with inadequate blood circulation to the brain, inch tall men, ants the size of SUVs, ...
-- but rather than the traditional AIDs payload of "don't attack anything" going into them you alter the HIV virus's DNA to train the T-Cells to kill cancers
You also artificially assemble the engineered virus from components and don't include the code that says "make lots more of me".
Also, the tatroos detect magnetic, not electric, fields. So you might be able to tell if the line was VERY heavily loaded. But just being hot won't affect the tattoo.
And it is one of the benefits of free universal healthcare; when it is necessary with regular checkups, even if expensive, there's no health insurance company there to complain.
The downside, of course, is that you pay for it in higher taxes. And for another one for each member of the out-of-work family down the street.
Then when it gets too expansive for the government to afford, they try to patch it by reducing services. Like with cancer surgery waiting list time longer than the time it takes the cancer to become inoperable. Or decision-making committees deciding who is old and sick enough that it makes financial sense to let them die and use the resources for people still young and productive.
Of course once the healthcare is single-payer there's no alternative to go to. If the "death panel" says you die, you die.
(Yes, the original Obamacare legislation didn't have "death panels". They were in a companion bill passed around the same time.)
Proof that:
1) it works at industrial scale and in particular that
2) the papers claiming the containment fails at practical time scales and thus requires more energy input than it produces are wrong.
They're working on that now. With about 2M in funding from the Navy - which requires that the results not be published until the final report at the end of each segment of the project.
... the apparatus exposed to neutron flux is mostly a hard vacuum, a vacuum chamber, and a lacy electromagnet structure.
Oh, yes. And the collection electrodes. Still very little material subject to the low neutron flux.
One nice thing about polywell: If it DOES work you can get something like 85% of the fusion energy out as DC. And at voltages within about a factor of 2 of the current DC power transmission line running along the western side of the US. From there it's very easy to efficiently transform it to line power.
(In fact, now that semiconductor technology is up to it, it might make sense to upgrade the DC long-haul transmission systems to the predominant-electrode natural output voltage of a polywell reactor system if/when it is developed and deployed. Teala/Westinghouse's AC beat Edison/GE's DC for over a century because efficient and inexpensive voltage conversion was available/better for AC than DC with the tech of the times. But DC is inherently less lossy to transport with a given amount of material, once it's converted, and the technology is now up to the conversion.)
And "aneutronic" reactions, such as p+B11 -> 3 He4, produce very few of those, because they're only produced by low-quantity side reactions involving things like impurities and combustion products of the basic reaction.
As for hard gammas, they're still stopped by adequate shielding, like any other ionizing radiation. And they're also stopped by TURNING OFF THE REACTOR, rather than hanging around for millennia like, say, Co60.
Assuming the reaction can be made to pass break-even, the apparatus exposed to neutron flux is mostly a hard vacuum, a vacuum chamber, and a lacy electromagnet structure. Very little material to require sequestration and disposal after decomissioning.
what kind of a bozo looks at an unexpected result, from an incredibly complex first-one, never-been-done before kind of a machine, and jumps to the conclusion "FASTER THAN LIGHT"!
Not the original authors. They published something that can be summarized as "This is probably experimental error but we haven't found a bug in the setup. We're announcing it just in case there is something real here and also to get more eyes to look at the issue and see what the problem might be."
you do realise that the phase is already smeared by the microphone, the preamplifier and probably a channel EQ? To say nothing of room acoustics in the playback environment.
A good electret condenser microphone had an amazingly flat and phase-accurate response. Preamp equalization was the inverse of preemphasis and canceled in phase as well as frequency. Channel equalization could foul up phase response - but wasn't commonly used on sounds where this would be an issue.
As I pointed out, Time Windows use a hack to deal with room acoustics. The woofer is at the top of the tower, which is an accoustic transmission line driven by the backside wave (ala bass reflex). A pair of ports at the bottom are sized to correctly load it when letting the energy escape near the bottom, preventing the wave from bouncing back up and emerging through the driver. The transmission line is loaded with a fiberglass stuffing that attenuates higher frequencies in a way that models the diffraction of the driver's front wave around the tower on its way to bounce off the wall behind the speaker. When positioned according to the instructions, the unit is just far enough from the wall that the wave from the bottom ports cancels the wave that diffracts around the speaker and bounces from the wall. Thus the wall "disappears". You still have the acoustic effects of the side and back wall, furniture, and third bounce from those off the "disappeared" wall. But that actually helps, by making the rest of the room and its contents remain audible, while the speakers and the wall behind them become a window on the performance.
The majority of vinyl cut since the mid '70s utilised a digital delay. I'm sure the surface noise and scratches really benefitted from these speakers though, especially records cut on lathes using non-oversampling 32kHz 12 bit delays. As for the phase accuracy of consumer grade dolby decoding... HA!
Which is why you should buy your vinyl from Mobile Fidelity Sound or the like. Pressed into virgin vinyl (no ground up labels to make hisses and pops), their disk master cut using analog equipment at a reduced speed, no phase-trashing filtering, etc. You still need a pre-disk master good enough to take advangage of this or you still have issues. But many good masters do exist. And even when the original master isn't ideal the disk master cutting doesn't make it substantially worse, giving you something substantially better than an original commercial release.
I can't make heads or tails whether having my DNA promoter regions methylated or demethylated is good for me or not.
Exercise switches on expression of certain muscle-related genes in muscles. Film at eleven.
Surprise, surprise! What did they expect?
IMHO they're just discovering the details of some signaling pathways in muscles, probably related to rebuilding damage and strengthening muscles as a result of exercise.
... but I wonder just how practical it is to produce these strings on a large scale.
It would be tough with natural spider silk draglines.
But both the chemical and mechanical structure and construction mechanisms of spider silk are now reasonably understood, and arbitrary protein synthesis by genetic engineering of bacteria is well developed.
So now that the concept is proven it should be straightforward to make synthetic dragline violin strings if a market for them develops.
Oversampling (i.e. 192kHz) allows much more room to develop a good anti-aliasing filter. [... filters] designed for the higher sampling rate can have more linear phase.
This is an especially serious issue for percussive sounds, which have both a very broad spectrum and a strong sensitivity to phase errors in reconstruction.
The broad spectrum means there's a lot of energy in the high frequencies that map into the audible range due to sampling aliases. Oversampling lets filters have greater image attenuation.
Percussive sounds are very short and the phase relationship between the harmonics must be maintained to keep them short when reconstructed. So a non-flat phase response in the antialiasing filters lengthens the time of the reconstructed sound. This is VERY audible, making the sounds "muddy" rather than "crisp". Phase distortion also interferes with reconstructing the apparent location of the sound source in stereo and other multi-channel audio systems. So the flatter phase response of the anti-aliasing filters that are possible with higher sampling rates produces a very noticeable improvement in the sound quality.
= = = =
I learned that last from Steve Eberbach, designer of the DCM Time Window loudspeakers. These had a very flat phase response, good enough to allow a listener to track thechanging location of the "veep" sound of a recorded accoustic guitarist's fingers sliding on the wound strings. In addition to not distorting the sound (thus not producing an acoustic image of the enclosure), the speakers also had a hack to cancel the reflection from the wall behind them, resulting in the acoustic effiect of the room's wall going away, becoming a window on the recorded performance. Thus the name: Time (because the response was flat in the time domain (phase) as well as frequency), Window (for the "window on the performance" effect).
CDs began to come out shortly after the introduction of these superb loudspeakers. And Steve had a lot to say about them. The low sampling rate chosen and resulting rotten filter phase response wiped out much of his speakers' advantage over the competition. (The choice of a linear, rather than a floating-point-like compressed, encoding also limited dynamic range, making quantization error audible as noise and intermodulation distortion in quiet passages.) Only listeners playing vinyl disks or dolby tapes could really appreciate the difference between his product and other high-end speakers.
What the researchers should do next is look into the instance for people who have supposedly "woke up" during surgery being paralyzed yet still feeling the intense pain of surgery in progress.
That will be hard to do. They normally give surgical patients a drug that inhibits the transcription of temporary to permanent memory. They might have been awake and suffering horribly - but they won't remember it afterward.
This does two useful things: It reduces post traumatic problems. And it also reduces malpractice suits.
I could really care less about AMD vs Intel. I have no horses in that race - and haven't for over a decade. (The only issue I have with either of them is Intel's inclusion of hardware remote administration backdoors in their chipsets, which they tout as a "feature" - and I haven't looked into whether AMD does the equivalent.)
My only point was that using this particular technology is good for about a generation's worth of density without a process upgrade and a substantial power and heat savings.
If Intel wants to do it, too, the more the merrier. Meanwhile, while AMD has it deployed and Intel doesn't yet, it may put AMD back into the race for one round.