A physicist may well benefit a great deal from from having gone to English class in high school. Sure they only use make use of the basics, like correct spelling and grammar, every day but the style of critical thinking that is exercised in literary analysis is additional tool that they have.
The classic Fermi problem is, "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?"
Fermi's wife Laura wrote a biography called Atoms in the Kitchen, which described how they used to sit around the dinner table and Enrico would ask questions like, "Tin melts at 232 degrees C, olive oil boils at 300 degrees C, so how come you can boil olive oil in a tin frying pan?"
Answer: It's not the olive oil boiling, it's absorbed water. (Anyway that was his explanation.)
And they couldn't look things up in the Internet back in those days.
I'm not talking about the Stalin era. I'm talking about a case history in an American management book published in 1995 about the management of Soviet factories, for the benefit of American managers who think it's valuable to learn about alternate ways of doing things.
I've had friends who lived and worked in the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody ever told me that managers were sent to prison if they didn't meet their quotas (although managers were fired, sometimes for political reasons). While that may have happened under Stalin, especially during the war, I don't think it happened since Khrushchev. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd like to know what it is.
Comparing life under George W. Bush with life in the Soviet Union, especially under Gorbachev, would be a close call. Bush had the flaws of the worst Soviet leaders.
For example, not being able to deal with predictable disasters like the New Orleans flood, because he replaced competent managers with incompetents for political reasons.
Or ignoring human rights and using in Guantanamo Bay exactly the same tortures used by the Soviets in the Gulags.
And Bush didn't even build a good educational system. We're still suffering from his ass-backwards reforms and privatizations.
I've heard that too, mismanagement and the arms race.
One of the paradoxes is that Soviet Communism was a good economic engine for a long time. My old copy of Samuelson's Economics has a chart on the inside cover showing the GDP of the Soviet Union, US, UK, Germany and India over a century. In 1930. the GDP of the Soviet Union was about equal to that of India. By 1980, the GDP of the Soviet Union was close to that of the UK (half that of the US). The dramatic success of Communism was in education. Every Communist country achieved 99% or 100% literacy. They also improved the infant and maternal mortality rate.
The transition from pre-industrial society to industrial society was easy. When peasant farmers are ploughing with horses, and you give them tractors, their efficiency increases dramatically.
I could never understand why the Soviets could never manage to manufacture personal computers when the rest of the world did. They used computers extensively for top-down industrial planning. They cloned IBM mainframe computers. They had a skilled population, including electronics hobbyists who built computers from parts for fun. They had some of the world's best mathematicians. But they couldn't deliver a PC in the GUM department store. At the same time the Taiwanese developed a huge PC industry. Manufacturing PCs is more complicated and market-responsive than running tractors off an assembly line, but even so.
The free market runs itself, but sometimes it runs itself in ways that most of us don't want. The industries capture the regulators. The health care industry is the best/worst example. The wealthy get unnecessary CAT scans, and the poor can't pay for cancer drugs they need to save their lives. And what's your favorite unemployment statistic, 10%?
It was good to compete with the Soviet Union. In the U.S., scientists got respect. Science students got scholarships, not loans. We probably wouldn't have NASA if we weren't worried that the Soviets would get to the moon first.
Now, instead of fighting the enemy by sending people to school to learn science, we're fighting the enemy by sending people to prison.
you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well.
A common misconception. I once edited a business management book, and one of the case histories they gave was a Soviet factory. The Soviets started off with a 5-year-plan, and assigned quotas to different industries and different factories or farms. Suppose the factory was building window glass. The factory manager would bid on the amount of product that he wanted to manufacture that year. If he produced exactly that amount, he got a bonus (and so did the workers in the factory). If he produced more, they got less of a bonus, and if he produced less, they got no bonus at all. So the Soviet Union had a clever incentive system.
I'm not sure what went wrong in the Soviet Union, but I'm not sure it was Communism. When they converted from Communism to capitalism, things got *worse*. (The health care system collapsed, and life expectancy declined by about 10 years. Journalists get shot in the streets. Ethnic separatists set off bombs.) The Chinese continued with Communism, gave the factories more autonomy, and now they're the world's industrial engine (prosperous in the coastal regions, still impoverished in the rural regions).
The more I read the Wall Street Journal, the more I think this free market/socialist dichotomy is just an ideological battle by people who simply want to cut taxes for the rich. Well-run government agencies work very well. But if George W. Bush appoints one of his campaign contributors to run an agency, it will fail, just as GWB's businesses failed.
He had a head-on collision into a tree. Modern cars are designed to let you survive this exact kind of crash if you wear your seat belts. When the front of the car collapses, it absorbs enough energy to come to a stop in 30 inches at 50g, and if you're wearing the seat belt you usually survive.
Maybe your life isn't important to you. But it shows disrespect for the engineers who worked so hard to design a safer car when you don't wear your seat belt.
It also shows disrespect for the laws of physics. And you know what happens to people who show disrespect for the laws of physics.
You will remember in Dr. Strangelove the Herman Kahn/Werner von Braun character's bionic hand that keeps autonomously making the Hitler salute and tries to strangle its owner.
This was an echo of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (which is on the Wayback Machine).
I can forgive the Atlantic for hyping the story -- it's the only way to get attention!:)
Obviously, Ionnidis' work is well known, since he's published in JAMA and PLOS. It's worth repeating in a popular magazine.
Everybody who keeps up with the medical literature knows about evidence-based medicine and meta-analysis.
They also know that once you apply rigorous standards to conventional wisdom, a lot of the wisdom doesn't hold up. It's humbling.
It's frustrating to look at http://www.cochrane.org/ and see how many of the treatments have a modest effect, or just don't work at all.
But some of it does. It just takes a few good treatments to make a big difference. People live a lot longer now. There's a lot more 80-year-olds. We can control heart disease, high blood pressure and kidney failure, and diabetes a lot better now (good thing, because we've got a lot more of it). Childhood leukemia used to be a death sentence, now the cure rate is up to 95%. I know somebody with chronic myeloid leukemia would would have died young if she didn't have imatinib (Gleevic).
A lot of the research today is directed not at finding new wonder drugs, but on figuring out how to best use the old drugs, like all the drugs for heart disease. A lot of that research is by guys like Ionnidis.
Just remember the next time you see a medical news story: Association isn't causation.
It's worth mentioning that one of the reasons hormone replacement therapy seemed to reduce heart attacks in retrospective studies was that the women who were most concerned about their health were most likely to have good habits like diet and exercise -- and also most likely to take HRT, since they thought it was good. Then the evidence-based medicine guys did a prospective, randomized controlled study, and it did more harm than good. There was actually a measurable, significant increase in breast cancer as a result.
Yes, chimpanzees cooperate like that in the lab, but no one has seen them cooperate like that in the wild.
So you wonder how they managed to evolve this potential without using it.
Chimpanzees cooperate in a general way, by sharing food or hunting together, but only humans cooperate in order to accomplish complex tasks like the ones the researchers thought up, with food too far away to reach.
Thanks for pointing that out. I don't watch much TV right now, but one thing I miss is some pretty good science TV programs.
Interesting about dogs. Oddly enough, chimpanzees won't look (as I recall). You can put a reward under a can, point to it, and they won't realize you're giving them a hint.
There's a reason why humans and dogs get along so well together. Our behavior has co-evolved for 10,000 years.
If they show a movie to babies with geometrical figures, they assume that the geometrical figures are helping or hindering each other because geometrical figures want to.
He said this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because it improves survival if you assume everything around you that moves might be out to get you.
He also says that this is an evolutionary explanation of religion, by finding sentient beings behind all of nature. If you see a storm, there must be a sentient being behind it.
It might be worth investigating if you drove in a high-rabbit-risk environment.
It wouldn't be any heavier than an undercoating.
I'm not saying it would work. It's just a back-of-the envelope concept. I haven't tried it. I'd have to look at a car on a lift to see whether it looks practical.
Weigh that against the inconvenience and cost of having your distributor wires looking like corncobs.
Heroin is a horrific drug, and much worse than beer - instantly and basically permanently addictive and usually destroys the lives of users (much like Meth).
I don't know where you get your facts from, but I get my facts from medical journals.
The Lancet, Adverse health effects of non-medical cannabis use, Wayne Hall and Louisa Diegenhardt, 17 October 2009, said that the dependence risk of different drugs was 9% cannabis, 32% nicotine, 23% heroin, 17% cocaine, 15% alcohol.
So nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and only 23% of heroin users go on to become addicted. This has been well known for decades. Heroin is also safer than tobacco (400,000 deaths a year).
Heroin is not worse than beer (100,000 alcohol deaths a year). If you drink 100 grams of alcohol a day, you have (recalling from memory now, so I could be off) a 16% chance of developing cirrhosis of the liver in 10 years, which leads to fatal liver failure and liver cancer.
Heroin in contrast has almost none of the toxic effects of alcohol and tobacco. If people use clean needles, and get unadulterated heroin, it's pretty safe. In the days before it was illegal, many people, including doctors, were addicted and didn't suffer adverse effects.
I'm not recommending heroin, because in the U.S. its illegality results in a danger of infection and adulteration. And sitting on the couch nodding out is not my idea of a great way to spend a day. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/drugs/mouse.html There are a percentage of heroin addicts that become dysfunctional, but no worse than alcohol.
I know 3 ex heroin addicts (I lived in a house with two - 4 of the 6 people in that house had rehabbed together, but for different things), and saw one (a singer in a band I was in) kicking the habit, which is literal kicking when a heroin addict is going through withdrawal.
So they stopped heroin. How many of them stopped smoking cigarettes?
First, October 9 is not October 12. This "coincidence" reflects what's going on in your mind. I had completely forgotten the Ramalla incident.
Second, that Wikipedia article you linked to is another piece of propaganda by volunteer and paid Likudniks. It doesn't mention that the killings were provoked by the killing the night before of the Palestinian Khalil Bade, and the mob thought that the IDF reservists were members of the IDF group responsible. The killings of the reservists were horrific, like all killings, but so were the IDF killings that started it off. If you don't want a cycle of killings and revenge, don't start.
But the Israelis do start cycles of killings and revenge. The Israeli government has continually been provoking retaliation by the Palestinians to sabotage the peace process (and avoid the problem of having to evacuate the illegal settlements).
Gideon Levy had a piece in Haaretz listing the times that Hamas stopped firing missiles, and the IDF responded by killing Palestinians, which led to Hamas firing missiles again.
Third, I'm talking about what happens in the real world. The Israelis have never cited a case in which IDF soldiers were killed by people throwing stones. It may be theoretically that a huge number of people could kill a soldier even if he was wearing riot gear (baseball players get killed by baseballs), but that's not the way it happens. It's disproportionate force -- a crime -- to shoot and kill someone who is throwing stones at a soldier wearing riot gear, in Kent State, Israel or anyplace else.
Finally, don't wave the bloody flag at me. The deaths of innocent Palestinians outnumber the deaths of innocent Israelis by 10 to 1. I've read too many B'Tselem and Amnesty International reports of the IDF killing innocent Palestinian children (like Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish's daughters and niece, which seems to have been scrubbed from Wikipedia) to be shocked at two more deaths, especially of soldiers.
You're defending the Israelis. I'm defending the rule of law. There are international laws that prohibit disproportionate force and the killing of innocent civilians, and it's equally wrong for the Israelis and Palestinians to violate international laws. The Israelis could save a lot of Jewish lives if they would follow international law and evacuate their illegal settlements.
It’s that type of engagement some school board members referred to when last month they unanimously approved a three-year, $6.2 million lease for new Apple computers to be swapped out for old ones throughout District 186 – the same district that in June adopted a 2011 budget with a $6.2 million budget deficit. The agreement means Springfield schools will receive 5,610 new Apple laptops, all of which will replace computers that are at least three years old. Apple will also upgrade 19 district servers, add 55 more servers and provide at least 450 hours of professional development training to district teachers.
Do you really need to spend $1,100 per student for new laptops to look up a picture of an Iranian woman on a loom? I have a 10-year-old PC which does that. Is that the best use of $1,100? Would they be better off spending it on a school library (or even better, a school librarian)?
I believe that the quality of the teacher overrides all educational technology. The Soviets had one of the best educational systems in the world (Sputnik, Gregory Perelman, Michael and Eugenia Brin), and their main technology was cheap textbooks, chalk and a blackboard. If you're teaching the sciences, you do need equipment, but you can buy most of it in a hardware store or gather it in the field locally. This is sixth grade, right?
If you're talking about science education, the most important lesson I have is the value of randomized controlled trials. It's very easy in educational settings to randomly assign students to one class with computers, and an identical class without them. Then you can get good evidence on what computers do. There were several studies like that (summarized in Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil), and as I recall, they found that kids with computers didn't do better and sometimes did worse.
There could be studies that I don't know about, and I'd like to see the latest result, but my point is that it's stupid to spend huge amounts of money on needless technology (not just laptops but upgrades of completely adequate 3-year-old equipment) without doing these studies to see whether they get the result the advocates and Apple salesmen claim.
I like technology, but lots of times technology doesn't work. You have to evaluate it in small pilot projects and only expand its use when it works.
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation.
Another reason why plants have large genomes is that they tend to duplicate their genomes. One theory is that it makes speciation easier.
Mind you, it's not as if the designer said, "I'll duplicate plant genomes to make it easier for them to separate into species." They just duplicate and it works out well.
Apparently plants can double their genomes without the disasterous consequences that it has in animal cells. Animal cells don't double their entire genome unless they're really messed up, like in cancer, and then they're swiftly disposed of.
Slashdot Mirror
And the toxic* enzyme which causes the cancer cell to die: Croakin.
Good guess.
You may be thinking of reaper. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101020131710.htm
Or caspase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspase which turns the cell into Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Or you could give it a Smac http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071112133819.htm
You can't make this stuff up.
You know which two classes I've used the most in my 20 years of education? AP US History in high school and a literature class in college,
Not surprising. Gerard Piel, the founding editor of the modern Scientific American, was a history major.
A physicist may well benefit a great deal from from having gone to English class in high school. Sure they only use make use of the basics, like correct spelling and grammar, every day but the style of critical thinking that is exercised in literary analysis is additional tool that they have.
True. An engineer may benefit a great deal for having taken an English class that taught him how to organize his ideas and argue, as Roger Boisjoly did when he tried to convince Morton Thiokol management to cancel the Challenger launch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_disaster#Pre-launch_conditions_and_delays
Good scientists are just well-rounded guys who happen to know a lot about science.
Yes, Fermi problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
The classic Fermi problem is, "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?"
Fermi's wife Laura wrote a biography called Atoms in the Kitchen, which described how they used to sit around the dinner table and Enrico would ask questions like, "Tin melts at 232 degrees C, olive oil boils at 300 degrees C, so how come you can boil olive oil in a tin frying pan?"
Answer: It's not the olive oil boiling, it's absorbed water. (Anyway that was his explanation.)
And they couldn't look things up in the Internet back in those days.
I'm not talking about the Stalin era. I'm talking about a case history in an American management book published in 1995 about the management of Soviet factories, for the benefit of American managers who think it's valuable to learn about alternate ways of doing things.
I've had friends who lived and worked in the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody ever told me that managers were sent to prison if they didn't meet their quotas (although managers were fired, sometimes for political reasons). While that may have happened under Stalin, especially during the war, I don't think it happened since Khrushchev. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd like to know what it is.
Comparing life under George W. Bush with life in the Soviet Union, especially under Gorbachev, would be a close call. Bush had the flaws of the worst Soviet leaders.
For example, not being able to deal with predictable disasters like the New Orleans flood, because he replaced competent managers with incompetents for political reasons.
Or ignoring human rights and using in Guantanamo Bay exactly the same tortures used by the Soviets in the Gulags.
And Bush didn't even build a good educational system. We're still suffering from his ass-backwards reforms and privatizations.
I've heard that too, mismanagement and the arms race.
One of the paradoxes is that Soviet Communism was a good economic engine for a long time. My old copy of Samuelson's Economics has a chart on the inside cover showing the GDP of the Soviet Union, US, UK, Germany and India over a century. In 1930. the GDP of the Soviet Union was about equal to that of India. By 1980, the GDP of the Soviet Union was close to that of the UK (half that of the US). The dramatic success of Communism was in education. Every Communist country achieved 99% or 100% literacy. They also improved the infant and maternal mortality rate.
The transition from pre-industrial society to industrial society was easy. When peasant farmers are ploughing with horses, and you give them tractors, their efficiency increases dramatically.
I could never understand why the Soviets could never manage to manufacture personal computers when the rest of the world did. They used computers extensively for top-down industrial planning. They cloned IBM mainframe computers. They had a skilled population, including electronics hobbyists who built computers from parts for fun. They had some of the world's best mathematicians. But they couldn't deliver a PC in the GUM department store. At the same time the Taiwanese developed a huge PC industry. Manufacturing PCs is more complicated and market-responsive than running tractors off an assembly line, but even so.
The free market runs itself, but sometimes it runs itself in ways that most of us don't want. The industries capture the regulators. The health care industry is the best/worst example. The wealthy get unnecessary CAT scans, and the poor can't pay for cancer drugs they need to save their lives. And what's your favorite unemployment statistic, 10%?
It was good to compete with the Soviet Union. In the U.S., scientists got respect. Science students got scholarships, not loans. We probably wouldn't have NASA if we weren't worried that the Soviets would get to the moon first.
Now, instead of fighting the enemy by sending people to school to learn science, we're fighting the enemy by sending people to prison.
How the hell do they get home? Parents are still at work at 3.
They attach a rubber band. In the morning, they stretch it all the way to school. At 3, they release the kids and let them snap back.
you have communism where there's no incentive to do better because you don't get any more, so nothing gets done very well.
A common misconception. I once edited a business management book, and one of the case histories they gave was a Soviet factory. The Soviets started off with a 5-year-plan, and assigned quotas to different industries and different factories or farms. Suppose the factory was building window glass. The factory manager would bid on the amount of product that he wanted to manufacture that year. If he produced exactly that amount, he got a bonus (and so did the workers in the factory). If he produced more, they got less of a bonus, and if he produced less, they got no bonus at all. So the Soviet Union had a clever incentive system.
I'm not sure what went wrong in the Soviet Union, but I'm not sure it was Communism. When they converted from Communism to capitalism, things got *worse*. (The health care system collapsed, and life expectancy declined by about 10 years. Journalists get shot in the streets. Ethnic separatists set off bombs.) The Chinese continued with Communism, gave the factories more autonomy, and now they're the world's industrial engine (prosperous in the coastal regions, still impoverished in the rural regions).
The more I read the Wall Street Journal, the more I think this free market/socialist dichotomy is just an ideological battle by people who simply want to cut taxes for the rich. Well-run government agencies work very well. But if George W. Bush appoints one of his campaign contributors to run an agency, it will fail, just as GWB's businesses failed.
I wonder whether he was wearing his seat belts.
He had a head-on collision into a tree. Modern cars are designed to let you survive this exact kind of crash if you wear your seat belts. When the front of the car collapses, it absorbs enough energy to come to a stop in 30 inches at 50g, and if you're wearing the seat belt you usually survive.
Maybe your life isn't important to you. But it shows disrespect for the engineers who worked so hard to design a safer car when you don't wear your seat belt.
It also shows disrespect for the laws of physics. And you know what happens to people who show disrespect for the laws of physics.
Not so far-fetched.
You will remember in Dr. Strangelove the Herman Kahn/Werner von Braun character's bionic hand that keeps autonomously making the Hitler salute and tries to strangle its owner.
This was an echo of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (which is on the Wayback Machine).
I can forgive the Atlantic for hyping the story -- it's the only way to get attention! :)
Obviously, Ionnidis' work is well known, since he's published in JAMA and PLOS. It's worth repeating in a popular magazine.
Everybody who keeps up with the medical literature knows about evidence-based medicine and meta-analysis.
They also know that once you apply rigorous standards to conventional wisdom, a lot of the wisdom doesn't hold up. It's humbling.
It's frustrating to look at http://www.cochrane.org/ and see how many of the treatments have a modest effect, or just don't work at all.
But some of it does. It just takes a few good treatments to make a big difference. People live a lot longer now. There's a lot more 80-year-olds. We can control heart disease, high blood pressure and kidney failure, and diabetes a lot better now (good thing, because we've got a lot more of it). Childhood leukemia used to be a death sentence, now the cure rate is up to 95%. I know somebody with chronic myeloid leukemia would would have died young if she didn't have imatinib (Gleevic).
A lot of the research today is directed not at finding new wonder drugs, but on figuring out how to best use the old drugs, like all the drugs for heart disease. A lot of that research is by guys like Ionnidis.
Just remember the next time you see a medical news story: Association isn't causation.
It's worth mentioning that one of the reasons hormone replacement therapy seemed to reduce heart attacks in retrospective studies was that the women who were most concerned about their health were most likely to have good habits like diet and exercise -- and also most likely to take HRT, since they thought it was good. Then the evidence-based medicine guys did a prospective, randomized controlled study, and it did more harm than good. There was actually a measurable, significant increase in breast cancer as a result.
Yes, chimpanzees cooperate like that in the lab, but no one has seen them cooperate like that in the wild.
So you wonder how they managed to evolve this potential without using it.
Chimpanzees cooperate in a general way, by sharing food or hunting together, but only humans cooperate in order to accomplish complex tasks like the ones the researchers thought up, with food too far away to reach.
Human sacrifice at 11.
Babies can be so fucking stupid sometimes.
Not as stupid as Republicans. http://online.wsj.com/itp/20101015/us/opinion
Thanks for pointing that out. I don't watch much TV right now, but one thing I miss is some pretty good science TV programs.
Interesting about dogs. Oddly enough, chimpanzees won't look (as I recall). You can put a reward under a can, point to it, and they won't realize you're giving them a hint.
There's a reason why humans and dogs get along so well together. Our behavior has co-evolved for 10,000 years.
According to psychologist Paul Bloom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bloom_(psychologist) , babies think lots of things are sentient.
If they show a movie to babies with geometrical figures, they assume that the geometrical figures are helping or hindering each other because geometrical figures want to.
He said this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because it improves survival if you assume everything around you that moves might be out to get you.
He also says that this is an evolutionary explanation of religion, by finding sentient beings behind all of nature. If you see a storm, there must be a sentient being behind it.
It might be worth investigating if you drove in a high-rabbit-risk environment.
It wouldn't be any heavier than an undercoating.
I'm not saying it would work. It's just a back-of-the envelope concept. I haven't tried it. I'd have to look at a car on a lift to see whether it looks practical.
Weigh that against the inconvenience and cost of having your distributor wires looking like corncobs.
I finally understood what was going on between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny when my cousin planted a vegetable garden and got cleaned out by the rabbits.
Cover the exposed bottom of your car with rabbit wire.
There is such a thing as rabbit wire, right?
the number of references to rabbits as rodents is quite offensive.
Is there something wrong with rodents, you insensitive clod? 8(:o-)E
Heroin is a horrific drug, and much worse than beer - instantly and basically permanently addictive and usually destroys the lives of users (much like Meth).
I don't know where you get your facts from, but I get my facts from medical journals.
The Lancet, Adverse health effects of non-medical cannabis use, Wayne Hall and Louisa Diegenhardt, 17 October 2009, said that the dependence risk of different drugs was 9% cannabis, 32% nicotine, 23% heroin, 17% cocaine, 15% alcohol.
So nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and only 23% of heroin users go on to become addicted. This has been well known for decades. Heroin is also safer than tobacco (400,000 deaths a year).
Heroin is not worse than beer (100,000 alcohol deaths a year). If you drink 100 grams of alcohol a day, you have (recalling from memory now, so I could be off) a 16% chance of developing cirrhosis of the liver in 10 years, which leads to fatal liver failure and liver cancer.
Heroin in contrast has almost none of the toxic effects of alcohol and tobacco. If people use clean needles, and get unadulterated heroin, it's pretty safe. In the days before it was illegal, many people, including doctors, were addicted and didn't suffer adverse effects.
I'm not recommending heroin, because in the U.S. its illegality results in a danger of infection and adulteration. And sitting on the couch nodding out is not my idea of a great way to spend a day. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/drugs/mouse.html There are a percentage of heroin addicts that become dysfunctional, but no worse than alcohol.
I know 3 ex heroin addicts (I lived in a house with two - 4 of the 6 people in that house had rehabbed together, but for different things), and saw one (a singer in a band I was in) kicking the habit, which is literal kicking when a heroin addict is going through withdrawal.
So they stopped heroin. How many of them stopped smoking cigarettes?
That doesn't sound too bad.
First, October 9 is not October 12. This "coincidence" reflects what's going on in your mind. I had completely forgotten the Ramalla incident.
Second, that Wikipedia article you linked to is another piece of propaganda by volunteer and paid Likudniks. It doesn't mention that the killings were provoked by the killing the night before of the Palestinian Khalil Bade, and the mob thought that the IDF reservists were members of the IDF group responsible. The killings of the reservists were horrific, like all killings, but so were the IDF killings that started it off. If you don't want a cycle of killings and revenge, don't start.
But the Israelis do start cycles of killings and revenge. The Israeli government has continually been provoking retaliation by the Palestinians to sabotage the peace process (and avoid the problem of having to evacuate the illegal settlements).
Gideon Levy had a piece in Haaretz listing the times that Hamas stopped firing missiles, and the IDF responded by killing Palestinians, which led to Hamas firing missiles again.
Third, I'm talking about what happens in the real world. The Israelis have never cited a case in which IDF soldiers were killed by people throwing stones. It may be theoretically that a huge number of people could kill a soldier even if he was wearing riot gear (baseball players get killed by baseballs), but that's not the way it happens. It's disproportionate force -- a crime -- to shoot and kill someone who is throwing stones at a soldier wearing riot gear, in Kent State, Israel or anyplace else.
Finally, don't wave the bloody flag at me. The deaths of innocent Palestinians outnumber the deaths of innocent Israelis by 10 to 1. I've read too many B'Tselem and Amnesty International reports of the IDF killing innocent Palestinian children (like Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish's daughters and niece, which seems to have been scrubbed from Wikipedia) to be shocked at two more deaths, especially of soldiers.
You're defending the Israelis. I'm defending the rule of law. There are international laws that prohibit disproportionate force and the killing of innocent civilians, and it's equally wrong for the Israelis and Palestinians to violate international laws. The Israelis could save a lot of Jewish lives if they would follow international law and evacuate their illegal settlements.
Yes, it is interesting, especially this part:
Do you really need to spend $1,100 per student for new laptops to look up a picture of an Iranian woman on a loom? I have a 10-year-old PC which does that. Is that the best use of $1,100? Would they be better off spending it on a school library (or even better, a school librarian)?
I believe that the quality of the teacher overrides all educational technology. The Soviets had one of the best educational systems in the world (Sputnik, Gregory Perelman, Michael and Eugenia Brin), and their main technology was cheap textbooks, chalk and a blackboard. If you're teaching the sciences, you do need equipment, but you can buy most of it in a hardware store or gather it in the field locally. This is sixth grade, right?
If you're talking about science education, the most important lesson I have is the value of randomized controlled trials. It's very easy in educational settings to randomly assign students to one class with computers, and an identical class without them. Then you can get good evidence on what computers do. There were several studies like that (summarized in Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil), and as I recall, they found that kids with computers didn't do better and sometimes did worse.
There could be studies that I don't know about, and I'd like to see the latest result, but my point is that it's stupid to spend huge amounts of money on needless technology (not just laptops but upgrades of completely adequate 3-year-old equipment) without doing these studies to see whether they get the result the advocates and Apple salesmen claim.
I like technology, but lots of times technology doesn't work. You have to evaluate it in small pilot projects and only expand its use when it works.
Well, a large genome generally means lots of redundancy. Lots of redundancy is theorized to mean high resistance to radiation.
Another reason why plants have large genomes is that they tend to duplicate their genomes. One theory is that it makes speciation easier.
Mind you, it's not as if the designer said, "I'll duplicate plant genomes to make it easier for them to separate into species." They just duplicate and it works out well.
Apparently plants can double their genomes without the disasterous consequences that it has in animal cells. Animal cells don't double their entire genome unless they're really messed up, like in cancer, and then they're swiftly disposed of.