That study was heavily flawed (as you note). Just to clarify a bit, it was performed on post-mortem brain samples. The aluminum found in Alzheimer's brains came from the solution they had been preserved in. (The Alzheimer's brains had been previously identified, set aside and preserved, while the non-Alzheimer's brains were sampled, uh, fresh.)
Cue mass panic over soda cans, cooking ware, etc.
But it was an easy flaw to believe in, as aluminum in the blood DOES cause dementia, as was discovered when the early dialysis machines were made with aluminum containers for the water bath. This led to "dialysis dementia syndrome", which limited the time a person with kidney failure could be kept alive on dialysis.
Once this was figured out (early 1980s) the containers were changed, the dialysate treated to remove aluminum (and the use of aluminum-containing antacids as phosphate-binding agents reduced or discontinued.) Then people could be kept alive and reasonably healthy for long enough on dialysis to make it possible to wait for a transplatable kidney donation.
But we have the nations oldest president, who seems to be getting much of its advice not from experts but from TV Political Pund[i]ts,...
There are plenty of experts who give the same advice. Trump (and those who don't self-select against it when browsing) can get it from experts as well.
But the media won't cover it. So the only place YOU hear it are from "pundits" (who also get it from experts and) who get enough air time to be noticed - and then flamed by mainstreamers when the advice runs counter to what THEY're pushing at you.
So when Trump follows this advice, it's easy to think he's "getting... advice not from experts but from TV Political Pund[i]ts". Especially when said mainstreamers push this image at you because they WANT you to believe it.
The ONLY value associated [with "real money" - in this case, fiat currency] is that which is assigned to it by those that can provide the services/good trade, otherwise, they're just meaningless digits.
That's true of ANYTHING, including the goods and services. The value of anything is what someone is willing to trade it for / for it.
The thing that makes money "money" is that it a commodity that is valued by many (at roughly the same value), stable valued (in the short term) and easily divisible, so a barter of X for Y can be split (without substantial loss) into two barters - X for $ and $ for Y - , so you don't have to find somebody with a Y who wants to swap it for your X.
And you still missed that real money isn't real. There is 0 intrinsic value. It's all made up, just like digital coins.
That depends on the kind of money. Some of it is a commodity that has a generally recognized value. For instance, non-debased coinage: Standard sized chunks of known purity metals, stamped to indicate its composition and who certified it. Or debased coinage: Ditto but then the manufacturing-and-certifying authority changes the composition to be less valuable but keeps the designation.
Then there is "backed paper money" - lightweight printed promises to give you something else of value (though less convenient to handle) when you ask. (The value of these is a function of the trader's estimate of the value of the backing commodity and the likelyhood that the promiser will make good on the promise.) The commodity might be anyhing: Gold, Silver, Liquor, pork bellies,...
But you seem to be talking about fiat currency: Paper notes or cheap token coins plus a law that says they must be accepted for payment of debts. The "backing value", to the extent there is one, is the promise of the government accepting these things (for fines, taxes, etc) and using force and/or court non-enforcement of debt collection on private creditors and merchants unless they accept the currency. The perceived value is also modulated by the estimate of how much more the government will print/stamp out, diluting the value of what is already out there.
It makes me wonder if they really needed an RTOS for this.
Running on an RTOS ENORMOUSLY simplifies things when you have multiple, independent (or mostly independent), things you have to manage in real time.
The task or task set managing each of these independent things can be written without regard for any of the other stuff going on, except for those tiny and well-contained places where it must communicate with another task handling something related. Meanwhile the OS handles the resource allocation, scheduling, and inter-task communication.
With a good set of patterns to program to, everything gets broken into simple and tiny pieces, small enough to understand and make reliable. The simplicity letts you avoid gobs of on-the-fly checking program bloat, and get a lot done very quickly with minimal resource.
Why can a child learn a new language easily while older brains can't?
Because several stages of language acquisition (such a going from emitting a broad range of phonemes to just the "correct", and "correctly pronounced" phoneme set of the first language) seem to work by keeping the relevant neurons alive while the irrelevant ones die off.
Before the end of each "critical period" for some particular aspect of the language, a child's brain is a language learning engine. After, learning that aspect of some language is like recovering from a stroke. An exception is that people who learn TWO or more languages before the relevant critical periods end (along with how to keep them sorted out) seem able to acquire more in later life without the difficulties of those who learned (no more than) one.
Or at least that was the theory back in the early 1970s, when I took a "Psych of Language Acquisition" course as a distribution elective - in the same semester as a German class for the degree's language requirement - hoping to get some tips that might help with the language class. Instead I ended up sabotaging myself, having to go straight from the class claiming I couldn't possibly learn a new language (where I had to BELIEVE it to regurgitate what was wanted on tests in a timely fashion), directly to the class where I had to do the thing it was claimed was impossible. B-b
Presuming this model (or something like it) is true: "Bilingual Education" - i.e. teaching immigrant kids in their native language until they're past those critical periods, rather than throwing them into English immersion classes while they're still language-flexible - looks more like a way to make them into members of a lifelong underclass than to help them learn. It curses them with an accent that they can't get rid of and impedes their learning of the language necessary for success in higher education and employment.
My biggest miss was replacement organs - especially teeth. In about 1958 I expected implanted replacement adult tooth buds, far better than drilling-and-filling, to be available by about 1978 (when I might start to want them myself).
Now it's a half century after the prediction. Fillings have drastically improved and I have a couple titanium implants. But serious work on replacement organs is just getting under way.
Heinlein had them in "Space cadet" in the late 40s. Clarke had them in "Imperial Earth" in 1976.
Also: Cheste Gould's Dick Tracy used his two-way wrist radio starting in 1946 (and a similar device showed up in a story arc on the Superman radio show the same year). It was upgraded with video in 1964.
Does a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a social media bot have a right to Free Speech?
IMHO That sort of argument stands a good chance of prevailing at the Supreme Court. Anonymous speech has already been ruled to be protected, even (especially) if in the form of political campaign literature, and the anonymity protected even if the speaker/poster loses a suit due to the speech itself being tortuous.
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
It's not that hard for the founders and early hires.
One of the risks of a startup is that, after you've worked for them a while, they get merged, and the new guys fire the old ones - often before their stock options have all vested. The employee loses the prize he helped create and the value reverts to the company and/or the new owners. There are lots of variations on this (internal shakeups and office politics, companies buying and killing their upstart competition, etc.)
This makes the potential employee leery. To get him to sign, the contract may have clauses to prevent that, such as immediate vesting if the company is acquired, an extra year's vesting if he's laid off or fired before his options vest, etc. If one company offers this and another doesn't, guess which he joins.
But if (as they often used to) the contract DOESN'T hand out the goodies if he's fired "for cause", it gives the employer an incentive to claim misconduct and hold on to the goodies by faking cause. Then the employee is not just out the goodies but also gets an undeserved black mark on his job history. Oops! So again, in the hire-the-good-talent race, contracts have evolved so there is either a no-fault get-the-goodies-when-canned clause, or the bad conduct exception has to be something like a provable major sin against the company.
Thus it's common to have contracts where, if somebody gets dumped because of an external accusation that makes them a bigger liability than their work makes them an asset, it may result in a dismissal with, not just all the benefits earned so far, but triggering a "we fired you early" bonus.
Me too. I live in Canada. My financial state is not something I need to worry about when visiting a hospital.
But the waiting time is. What good is "free" medical care if you can't get a broken bone set for a week, or progress from testing to treatment on a rapid cancer until the cancer has progressed to be beyond treatment?
A substantial amount of the medical service in the northern part of the U.S. is provided to Canadians, paying out-of-pocket in order to get treatment in a timely fashion or to U.S. standards. So even with Canadians the rich get better treatment. (They just don't get it in Canada.)
One group with low rates of cancers are people who work in the nuclear industry or on navy ships.... Another possibility of course is that low level nuclear radiation is good for you.
I wouldn't assume that the level of ongoing, background, exposure to radiation is higher for nuclear workers than the general population. Nuclear workers are in an environment where nuclear exposure is carefully monitored and minimized, while the general population is, or has been, wandering around radiation-blind and unmonitored among various threats. Having said that...
It has been known for decades that small increases in ongoing background ionizing radiation actually reduce cancer rates.
As I recall this came up in studies looking for a higher cancer rate among residents of higher altitude sites, such as Denver, where the background radiation was slightly higher due to things like more secondary cosmics. The studies, surprisingly, showed a lower, rather than a higher, cancer rate.
One theory to explain the effect was that the effects of background radiation was detected by the cellular machinery, which responded by increasing the production of (nutritionally expensive) protective molecules, such as free-radical scavengers, overcorrecting, not just for the mutagenic effects of higher radiation levels, but also increasing protection from the (much larger) exposure to the free radicals produced by metabolism.
This is what you might expect if, for instance, the detector(s) of the free radicals, damage, etc. were more loosely coupled to the nuclear DNA than the protective molecule production/delivery. Like an air conditioned house with the cold air vents at the center and the thermostat near the outer wall, with the center getting colder when the outside temperature gets hotter.
Raise the ongoing background radiation enough, though, and the limits of the inducible enzyme production are hit. Beyond that the cancer rate does go up as you'd expect.
Of course it wouldn't do squat for intermittent pulse exposures such as medical X-rays, or for people in whom the mechanism is defective or already maxed-out.
why does Trump need approval for funding for the wall in the first place if Mexico was going to pay for it?
1. Because even if Mexico DOES pay for it he needs congressional approval to spend the money through normal pathways. 2. Because congressional action is necessary to set up the laws (even trade-agreement implementing laws) that enforce Mexico paying for it.
Virtually all terrorists come in via plane and sea, the remainder drive from inside the US.
And how is it that you (or whomever originally made the claim) KNOW this to be true? It's really hard to check when the people in question are NOT coming in through anywhere they can be checked.
Like election fraud: All the "There's little to no election fraud occurring." claims turn out to really be: "There's little to no PROSECUTION of election fraud." This is as easily explained by the claim that the people in power have no incentive to change the system that PUT them in power: The results would be either:
- Not enough change to make a difference.
- Any change that DOES make a difference kicks some of them OUT of power.
In both the "no terrorists across the effectively open border" and "no significant election fraud", more information is necessary to support (or falsify) the claim. To gather that information, in the case of the first claim, you need to check substantially all the incoming border crossers.
What does the infrastructure needed to perform that check look like? Maybe a wall along the border, so essentially all the border crossers have to do so at ports-of-entry?
if you produce everything in China... of cource they will have the tech to make it and even improve or make similar products.
And they can throw a literal army of engineers at it: Reverse-engineering anything you didn't tell them about your stuff, then fixing bugs, adding bells and whistles, and eventually pushing out the core functionality to advance the bleeding edge.
Individually they may not average as good as US engineers (though many of them are quite competent). But suppose they're only a third as effective. If they can throw ten to a hundred times as many at a product (and organize them effectively) they can still beat you at pushing your own stolen tech out beyond the cutting edge - and beyond your own next-few-gens progucts.
If it can add a kW at steady state to a battery pack, then it'd be a great addition to a mild hybrid vehicle, where all the loads that used to be belt-driven are now electric.
But a hybrid's engine is already hooked up to an even more efficient alternator, and normally running in the most efficient part of the engine's operating range. This particular heat scavenger is horribly inefficient - and it produces a drop in the bucket compared to what the engine/genny combo is putting out.
Get something that can get maybe half of carnot cycle efficiency, rather than a piddly couple percent, and can run with the hot end capable of running at catalytic converter temperatures of 1,200 to 1,600 F, rather than the 300 F limit of this device (losing you another factor of more than four for a car running in warmer than sub-zero weather). Then you might have something that would save enough fuel to pay for itself if it lasts the life of the car.
Package it right and put it on every cpu heatsink and psu in a datacenter.
That's nuts. You're burning power to pump heat to cool those CPUs.
Even if this thing, the air conditioning system, and the electrical system, were a perfect carnot cycle prime mover, refrigerator, and supercondicting wiring with 100% efficient electronics, you'd be burning every watthour generated by the device to cool the cold end of the thermal scavenger to a temperature lower than that of the CPU's heatsink. It would be a wash (except for buying the extra gadgetry and paying for a bigger heat pump).
But they're not perfect. In fact, this thing is a drop in the bucket compared to the carnot cycle. So you'd be buying several times more extra power from the grid than the amount generated by the gadget.
Auto companies, for decades, have been playing around with thermoelectric recovery of power from internal combustion exhaust heat as a replacement or supplement for the alternator. They'd LOVE to replace that pack of moving parts, wearing bearings and slip rings, and fan-belt wear, with a quiet, solid state, black box that pulls the necessary power "for free" from otherwise wasted heat, rather than sucking down a horsepower or two (when the battery needs its starting and pre-start energy consumption replaced) and lasts the life of the car - or at least the muffler or catalytic converter.
But this won't do it. It's less efficient than the peliter cells they've already tried, and its big advantage is that it is thin and can flex, which isn't needed in a car.
The last two improvements in electric generation for cars were the result of semiconductor technology: The replacement of the double-wound, commutator-rectified generator with the diode-rectified alternator, an the relay-and-buzzer electromechanical regulator with a semiconductor regulator (currently built into the alternator).
The main advantage, which got these deployed as soon as the semiconductors were up to it, was that the alternator could generate enough at idle to immediately pick up the operating load and start replacing the battery power used to start the engine. Generators needed the higher RPMs of driving to replace the starting power. This drastically reduced the depth of discharge on the battery, lengthening its life, and also avoided the scenario of running the battery down if you have an in-city driving cycle composed of just short trips. (The other advantage was that commutators and relay-regulators wore out, requiring regulator replacement and generator rebuilds occasionally during the life of the vehicle, while slip rings on an alternator can last until the bearings also fail.)
A waste-heat scavenger doesn't generate substantial power until the exhaust system is up to temperature, or close to it. That would put you back to the lots-of-short-trips-kills-the-battery scenario if you replaced the alternator with a heat scavenger. It would be even worse, because you'd still be powering the running loads off the battery even as you drive away. So you still need the alternator.
By the time the scavenger is putting out, the alternator would typically have replaced the starting power and any pre-starting energy use, and be just running the operating loads. 3/4 horsepower is close enough to a kilowatt as not to bother with the difference, and your typical vehicle's run power is well below that, so (even with its slight inefficiencies) it's not putting enough running load on the engine to make much difference So far, peltier cells (apparently better than this invention) haven't been attractive enough as a fuel-saver to justify their expense.
There are other issues too. (Like increased complexity and opportunity for failure, whether they can stand the heat levels needed to scavenge significant power, and the vibration to last the life of the car without an expensive repair.) But the above lack of improvement on an alternator seems to me to be enough of a killer in itself.
Having "free" energy available doesn't mean the value of the-amount you can collect and put to good use will exceed the direct and reliability risk costs of collecting it.
As any fule kno, it was Al Gore what invented teh interwebs.
Actually, the main thing Al Gore did was support legalization of general access to, and commercial use of, the Internet by the general public, rather than leaving it restricted to a few universities, the military, and their contractors.
Slashdot now depends on Reddit for actual tech news?
No. The user "Etcetera" (14711) found and posted part of a relevant thread (and a link to the rest) that happened to be on Reddit.
Treating "Slashdot" and all its users (except yourself?) as a monolith composed of identical bricks is an example of stereotyping. It clouds your thinking, and leads to silly posts.
My math skills say the Republicans currently have majorities in both the House and Senate. Or are you using some new math no one knows about.
There's a piece of Senate math you don't know about.
It takes 60%, not 50%+, to break a filibuster. (Down from 75%, down from "you can't break it until the other side ALL falls asleep at once".)
There are some issues where a filibuster is not allowed. Appropriation bills are explicitly NOT one of them.
The Republicans could exercise the "Nuclear Option" and change the rules. But they don't want to do that, because it would be used against them the next time THEY are in the minority.
Right now they've got 51 senators plus the Vice president's tie-breaker. So if they could get it to a vote it would pass. But they're nowhere near the 60 they'd need to bring it to a vote. They need 9 Democrats.
They picked up a couple in the midterms, but are still nowhere near 60. Meanwhile the Democrats picked up a bunch in the house and will have a majority there. So waiting for next year is a bad idea.
Trump promised, when signing last year's appropriation, to not do that again this year. He's sticking to that, at least so far. So 17% of the government gets a paid vacation until 6 senate Democrats vote for wall funding, the clock run out on this congress (which is being held in session by another of the presidential powers), or Trump flinches.
Slashdot Mirror
That study was heavily flawed (as you note). Just to clarify a bit, it was performed on post-mortem brain samples. The aluminum found in Alzheimer's brains came from the solution they had been preserved in. (The Alzheimer's brains had been previously identified, set aside and preserved, while the non-Alzheimer's brains were sampled, uh, fresh.)
Cue mass panic over soda cans, cooking ware, etc.
But it was an easy flaw to believe in, as aluminum in the blood DOES cause dementia, as was discovered when the early dialysis machines were made with aluminum containers for the water bath.
This led to "dialysis dementia syndrome", which limited the time a person with kidney failure could be kept alive on dialysis.
Once this was figured out (early 1980s) the containers were changed, the dialysate treated to remove aluminum (and the use of aluminum-containing antacids as phosphate-binding agents reduced or discontinued.) Then people could be kept alive and reasonably healthy for long enough on dialysis to make it possible to wait for a transplatable kidney donation.
But we have the nations oldest president, who seems to be getting much of its advice not from experts but from TV Political Pund[i]ts, ...
There are plenty of experts who give the same advice. Trump (and those who don't self-select against it when browsing) can get it from experts as well.
But the media won't cover it. So the only place YOU hear it are from "pundits" (who also get it from experts and) who get enough air time to be noticed - and then flamed by mainstreamers when the advice runs counter to what THEY're pushing at you.
So when Trump follows this advice, it's easy to think he's "getting ... advice not from experts but from TV Political Pund[i]ts". Especially when said mainstreamers push this image at you because they WANT you to believe it.
The ONLY value associated [with "real money" - in this case, fiat currency] is that which is assigned to it by those that can provide the services/good trade, otherwise, they're just meaningless digits.
That's true of ANYTHING, including the goods and services. The value of anything is what someone is willing to trade it for / for it.
The thing that makes money "money" is that it a commodity that is valued by many (at roughly the same value), stable valued (in the short term) and easily divisible, so a barter of X for Y can be split (without substantial loss) into two barters - X for $ and $ for Y - , so you don't have to find somebody with a Y who wants to swap it for your X.
And you still missed that real money isn't real. There is 0 intrinsic value. It's all made up, just like digital coins.
That depends on the kind of money. Some of it is a commodity that has a generally recognized value. For instance, non-debased coinage: Standard sized chunks of known purity metals, stamped to indicate its composition and who certified it. Or debased coinage: Ditto but then the manufacturing-and-certifying authority changes the composition to be less valuable but keeps the designation.
Then there is "backed paper money" - lightweight printed promises to give you something else of value (though less convenient to handle) when you ask. (The value of these is a function of the trader's estimate of the value of the backing commodity and the likelyhood that the promiser will make good on the promise.) The commodity might be anyhing: Gold, Silver, Liquor, pork bellies, ...
But you seem to be talking about fiat currency: Paper notes or cheap token coins plus a law that says they must be accepted for payment of debts. The "backing value", to the extent there is one, is the promise of the government accepting these things (for fines, taxes, etc) and using force and/or court non-enforcement of debt collection on private creditors and merchants unless they accept the currency. The perceived value is also modulated by the estimate of how much more the government will print/stamp out, diluting the value of what is already out there.
It makes me wonder if they really needed an RTOS for this.
Running on an RTOS ENORMOUSLY simplifies things when you have multiple, independent (or mostly independent), things you have to manage in real time.
The task or task set managing each of these independent things can be written without regard for any of the other stuff going on, except for those tiny and well-contained places where it must communicate with another task handling something related. Meanwhile the OS handles the resource allocation, scheduling, and inter-task communication.
With a good set of patterns to program to, everything gets broken into simple and tiny pieces, small enough to understand and make reliable. The simplicity letts you avoid gobs of on-the-fly checking program bloat, and get a lot done very quickly with minimal resource.
Don't get "NO PLATE" "NO PL8" "NO TAG" or "MISSING". You're likely to get a flood of citations for parked cars with missing plates.
Why can a child learn a new language easily while older brains can't?
Because several stages of language acquisition (such a going from emitting a broad range of phonemes to just the "correct", and "correctly pronounced" phoneme set of the first language) seem to work by keeping the relevant neurons alive while the irrelevant ones die off.
Before the end of each "critical period" for some particular aspect of the language, a child's brain is a language learning engine. After, learning that aspect of some language is like recovering from a stroke. An exception is that people who learn TWO or more languages before the relevant critical periods end (along with how to keep them sorted out) seem able to acquire more in later life without the difficulties of those who learned (no more than) one.
Or at least that was the theory back in the early 1970s, when I took a "Psych of Language Acquisition" course as a distribution elective - in the same semester as a German class for the degree's language requirement - hoping to get some tips that might help with the language class. Instead I ended up sabotaging myself, having to go straight from the class claiming I couldn't possibly learn a new language (where I had to BELIEVE it to regurgitate what was wanted on tests in a timely fashion), directly to the class where I had to do the thing it was claimed was impossible. B-b
Presuming this model (or something like it) is true: "Bilingual Education" - i.e. teaching immigrant kids in their native language until they're past those critical periods, rather than throwing them into English immersion classes while they're still language-flexible - looks more like a way to make them into members of a lifelong underclass than to help them learn. It curses them with an accent that they can't get rid of and impedes their learning of the language necessary for success in higher education and employment.
My biggest miss was replacement organs - especially teeth. In about 1958 I expected implanted replacement adult tooth buds, far better than drilling-and-filling, to be available by about 1978 (when I might start to want them myself).
Now it's a half century after the prediction. Fillings have drastically improved and I have a couple titanium implants. But serious work on replacement organs is just getting under way.
Heinlein had them in "Space cadet" in the late 40s. Clarke had them in "Imperial Earth" in 1976.
Also: Cheste Gould's Dick Tracy used his two-way wrist radio starting in 1946 (and a similar device showed up in a story arc on the Superman radio show the same year). It was upgraded with video in 1964.
Quit being obtuse.
Try being a little deeper:
Do Social Media Bots Have a Right To Free Speech?
Does a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a printing press have a right to Freedom of the Press?
Does a USER of a social media bot have a right to Free Speech?
IMHO That sort of argument stands a good chance of prevailing at the Supreme Court. Anonymous speech has already been ruled to be protected, even (especially) if in the form of political campaign literature, and the anonymity protected even if the speaker/poster loses a suit due to the speech itself being tortuous.
thank you Peter Steiner.
(Thank Leovo's squashed-chicklet laptop keyboard for the typo. B-b Also my eyes: I actually checked before posting and missed it.)
... or a dog.
(Thank you, Peter Seiner.)
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
It's not that hard for the founders and early hires.
One of the risks of a startup is that, after you've worked for them a while, they get merged, and the new guys fire the old ones - often before their stock options have all vested. The employee loses the prize he helped create and the value reverts to the company and/or the new owners. There are lots of variations on this (internal shakeups and office politics, companies buying and killing their upstart competition, etc.)
This makes the potential employee leery. To get him to sign, the contract may have clauses to prevent that, such as immediate vesting if the company is acquired, an extra year's vesting if he's laid off or fired before his options vest, etc. If one company offers this and another doesn't, guess which he joins.
But if (as they often used to) the contract DOESN'T hand out the goodies if he's fired "for cause", it gives the employer an incentive to claim misconduct and hold on to the goodies by faking cause. Then the employee is not just out the goodies but also gets an undeserved black mark on his job history. Oops! So again, in the hire-the-good-talent race, contracts have evolved so there is either a no-fault get-the-goodies-when-canned clause, or the bad conduct exception has to be something like a provable major sin against the company.
Thus it's common to have contracts where, if somebody gets dumped because of an external accusation that makes them a bigger liability than their work makes them an asset, it may result in a dismissal with, not just all the benefits earned so far, but triggering a "we fired you early" bonus.
Me too. I live in Canada. My financial state is not something I need to worry about when visiting a hospital.
But the waiting time is. What good is "free" medical care if you can't get a broken bone set for a week, or progress from testing to treatment on a rapid cancer until the cancer has progressed to be beyond treatment?
A substantial amount of the medical service in the northern part of the U.S. is provided to Canadians, paying out-of-pocket in order to get treatment in a timely fashion or to U.S. standards. So even with Canadians the rich get better treatment. (They just don't get it in Canada.)
One group with low rates of cancers are people who work in the nuclear industry or on navy ships. ... Another possibility of course is that low level nuclear radiation is good for you.
I wouldn't assume that the level of ongoing, background, exposure to radiation is higher for nuclear workers than the general population. Nuclear workers are in an environment where nuclear exposure is carefully monitored and minimized, while the general population is, or has been, wandering around radiation-blind and unmonitored among various threats. Having said that...
It has been known for decades that small increases in ongoing background ionizing radiation actually reduce cancer rates.
As I recall this came up in studies looking for a higher cancer rate among residents of higher altitude sites, such as Denver, where the background radiation was slightly higher due to things like more secondary cosmics. The studies, surprisingly, showed a lower, rather than a higher, cancer rate.
One theory to explain the effect was that the effects of background radiation was detected by the cellular machinery, which responded by increasing the production of (nutritionally expensive) protective molecules, such as free-radical scavengers, overcorrecting, not just for the mutagenic effects of higher radiation levels, but also increasing protection from the (much larger) exposure to the free radicals produced by metabolism.
This is what you might expect if, for instance, the detector(s) of the free radicals, damage, etc. were more loosely coupled to the nuclear DNA than the protective molecule production/delivery. Like an air conditioned house with the cold air vents at the center and the thermostat near the outer wall, with the center getting colder when the outside temperature gets hotter.
Raise the ongoing background radiation enough, though, and the limits of the inducible enzyme production are hit. Beyond that the cancer rate does go up as you'd expect.
Of course it wouldn't do squat for intermittent pulse exposures such as medical X-rays, or for people in whom the mechanism is defective or already maxed-out.
why does Trump need approval for funding for the wall in the first place if Mexico was going to pay for it?
1. Because even if Mexico DOES pay for it he needs congressional approval to spend the money through normal pathways.
2. Because congressional action is necessary to set up the laws (even trade-agreement implementing laws) that enforce Mexico paying for it.
Virtually all terrorists come in via plane and sea, the remainder drive from inside the US.
And how is it that you (or whomever originally made the claim) KNOW this to be true? It's really hard to check when the people in question are NOT coming in through anywhere they can be checked.
Like election fraud: All the "There's little to no election fraud occurring." claims turn out to really be: "There's little to no PROSECUTION of election fraud." This is as easily explained by the claim that the people in power have no incentive to change the system that PUT them in power: The results would be either:
- Not enough change to make a difference.
- Any change that DOES make a difference kicks some of them OUT of power.
In both the "no terrorists across the effectively open border" and "no significant election fraud", more information is necessary to support (or falsify) the claim. To gather that information, in the case of the first claim, you need to check substantially all the incoming border crossers.
What does the infrastructure needed to perform that check look like? Maybe a wall along the border, so essentially all the border crossers have to do so at ports-of-entry?
Intel has Management Engine - a total-control backdoor that's already been broken.
AMD has ASP/PSP. It's claimed to be less of an issue. But as long as it's closed we can't audit it and thus must assume that it IS an issue.
A plague on both their houses.
if you produce everything in China... of cource they will have the tech to make it and even improve or make similar products.
And they can throw a literal army of engineers at it: Reverse-engineering anything you didn't tell them about your stuff, then fixing bugs, adding bells and whistles, and eventually pushing out the core functionality to advance the bleeding edge.
Individually they may not average as good as US engineers (though many of them are quite competent). But suppose they're only a third as effective. If they can throw ten to a hundred times as many at a product (and organize them effectively) they can still beat you at pushing your own stolen tech out beyond the cutting edge - and beyond your own next-few-gens progucts.
If it can add a kW at steady state to a battery pack, then it'd be a great addition to a mild hybrid vehicle, where all the loads that used to be belt-driven are now electric.
But a hybrid's engine is already hooked up to an even more efficient alternator, and normally running in the most efficient part of the engine's operating range. This particular heat scavenger is horribly inefficient - and it produces a drop in the bucket compared to what the engine/genny combo is putting out.
Get something that can get maybe half of carnot cycle efficiency, rather than a piddly couple percent, and can run with the hot end capable of running at catalytic converter temperatures of 1,200 to 1,600 F, rather than the 300 F limit of this device (losing you another factor of more than four for a car running in warmer than sub-zero weather). Then you might have something that would save enough fuel to pay for itself if it lasts the life of the car.
Package it right and put it on every cpu heatsink and psu in a datacenter.
That's nuts. You're burning power to pump heat to cool those CPUs.
Even if this thing, the air conditioning system, and the electrical system, were a perfect carnot cycle prime mover, refrigerator, and supercondicting wiring with 100% efficient electronics, you'd be burning every watthour generated by the device to cool the cold end of the thermal scavenger to a temperature lower than that of the CPU's heatsink. It would be a wash (except for buying the extra gadgetry and paying for a bigger heat pump).
But they're not perfect. In fact, this thing is a drop in the bucket compared to the carnot cycle. So you'd be buying several times more extra power from the grid than the amount generated by the gadget.
Auto companies, for decades, have been playing around with thermoelectric recovery of power from internal combustion exhaust heat as a replacement or supplement for the alternator. They'd LOVE to replace that pack of moving parts, wearing bearings and slip rings, and fan-belt wear, with a quiet, solid state, black box that pulls the necessary power "for free" from otherwise wasted heat, rather than sucking down a horsepower or two (when the battery needs its starting and pre-start energy consumption replaced) and lasts the life of the car - or at least the muffler or catalytic converter.
But this won't do it. It's less efficient than the peliter cells they've already tried, and its big advantage is that it is thin and can flex, which isn't needed in a car.
The last two improvements in electric generation for cars were the result of semiconductor technology: The replacement of the double-wound, commutator-rectified generator with the diode-rectified alternator, an the relay-and-buzzer electromechanical regulator with a semiconductor regulator (currently built into the alternator).
The main advantage, which got these deployed as soon as the semiconductors were up to it, was that the alternator could generate enough at idle to immediately pick up the operating load and start replacing the battery power used to start the engine. Generators needed the higher RPMs of driving to replace the starting power. This drastically reduced the depth of discharge on the battery, lengthening its life, and also avoided the scenario of running the battery down if you have an in-city driving cycle composed of just short trips. (The other advantage was that commutators and relay-regulators wore out, requiring regulator replacement and generator rebuilds occasionally during the life of the vehicle, while slip rings on an alternator can last until the bearings also fail.)
A waste-heat scavenger doesn't generate substantial power until the exhaust system is up to temperature, or close to it. That would put you back to the lots-of-short-trips-kills-the-battery scenario if you replaced the alternator with a heat scavenger. It would be even worse, because you'd still be powering the running loads off the battery even as you drive away. So you still need the alternator.
By the time the scavenger is putting out, the alternator would typically have replaced the starting power and any pre-starting energy use, and be just running the operating loads. 3/4 horsepower is close enough to a kilowatt as not to bother with the difference, and your typical vehicle's run power is well below that, so (even with its slight inefficiencies) it's not putting enough running load on the engine to make much difference So far, peltier cells (apparently better than this invention) haven't been attractive enough as a fuel-saver to justify their expense.
There are other issues too. (Like increased complexity and opportunity for failure, whether they can stand the heat levels needed to scavenge significant power, and the vibration to last the life of the car without an expensive repair.) But the above lack of improvement on an alternator seems to me to be enough of a killer in itself.
Having "free" energy available doesn't mean the value of the-amount you can collect and put to good use will exceed the direct and reliability risk costs of collecting it.
As any fule kno, it was Al Gore what invented teh interwebs.
Actually, the main thing Al Gore did was support legalization of general access to, and commercial use of, the Internet by the general public, rather than leaving it restricted to a few universities, the military, and their contractors.
So what he did was legalize spam.
Slashdot now depends on Reddit for actual tech news?
No. The user "Etcetera" (14711) found and posted part of a relevant thread (and a link to the rest) that happened to be on Reddit.
Treating "Slashdot" and all its users (except yourself?) as a monolith composed of identical bricks is an example of stereotyping. It clouds your thinking, and leads to silly posts.
A Woman on Twitter is Abused Every 30 Seconds
And a Trump voter ever 30 milliseconds. So what else is new?
My math skills say the Republicans currently have majorities in both the House and Senate. Or are you using some new math no one knows about.
There's a piece of Senate math you don't know about.
It takes 60%, not 50%+, to break a filibuster. (Down from 75%, down from "you can't break it until the other side ALL falls asleep at once".)
There are some issues where a filibuster is not allowed. Appropriation bills are explicitly NOT one of them.
The Republicans could exercise the "Nuclear Option" and change the rules. But they don't want to do that, because it would be used against them the next time THEY are in the minority.
Right now they've got 51 senators plus the Vice president's tie-breaker. So if they could get it to a vote it would pass. But they're nowhere near the 60 they'd need to bring it to a vote. They need 9 Democrats.
They picked up a couple in the midterms, but are still nowhere near 60. Meanwhile the Democrats picked up a bunch in the house and will have a majority there. So waiting for next year is a bad idea.
Trump promised, when signing last year's appropriation, to not do that again this year. He's sticking to that, at least so far. So 17% of the government gets a paid vacation until 6 senate Democrats vote for wall funding, the clock run out on this congress (which is being held in session by another of the presidential powers), or Trump flinches.