Actually I have a book that had lots of great pictures of vitreous retinal surgery. I thought it was pretty cool the way they stick all those tubes in your eye, suck out the old vitreous, and squirt in the new vitreous. They have a whole toolbox of these tiny tools, like scissors, that they can stick in through the tubes. Those ophthalmologists, they can get anything they want -- lasers, video, operating microscopes, you name it. Anything to save the retina, I always say.
The amazing thing is that they can stick all those things in your eye, even the cornea, and it heals up pretty well. But not the retina. I once dissected a cow's eye, and saw the retina. It's thinner than a cobweb.
You're lucky you're having that surgery now, instead of 20 years ago. The complication rates really went down. They used to have 1% infection, now it's 0.1% or 0.01%.
You really should be careful about vigorous sex right after retinal surgery. Maybe you should try bondage for a while until it heals. And definitely no roller coasters (even without sex).
That IOP is your intraocular pressure, in millimeters of mercury. 30 is pretty high. I think it should be 18 or so (I forget exactly). Make sure you smoke your marijuana regularly to get it down.
Say you're testing a new IOL for cataract surgery. You don't test against a placebo, you test against standard surgery.
That's right. And here's another one: Suppose you want to test standard treatment (medication) against surgery. You have to find doctors -- and patients -- who honestly can't figure out which one is better. If you have a doctor who thinks surgery is better, he can't be in the trial, because he's ethically obligated to perform surgery. (At least in England; that's the way they explain it in The Lancet.)
Talking about IOL, BTW, a few years ago, Brazil used to be the wild west of ophthalmological surgery. They did surgery on humans in Brazil when they were still doing it on rabbits in the U.S.
Although Germany has some "aggressive" surgeons too. They did a trial of (I think) infusing heart muscle stem cells into the heart to treat myocardial infarction.
That said, I have a very hard time sympathising with a Press Secretary who gets fired for mouthing off on controversial issues. The whole point of the "press secretary" job is managing media relations and generally smoothing PR feathers for whoever hired you. Having highly visible and controversial opinions, particularly if they oppose that of the person you are doing media relations for, seems an obvious contradiction.
There are zero blinded tests -- let alone double blind tests -- demonstrating the effectiveness of surgery.
I call bullshit. Here's one: http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00042081
Prevention of Autogenous Vein Graft Failure in Coronary Artery Bypass Procedures
Study Design: Prevention, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo Control, Single Group Assignment, Safety/Efficacy Study
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00042081
in every case where a surgical procedure has been tested against a placebo operation, the surgery has been no more effective than the placebo.
The term surgeons use is not "placebo" but "sham surgery".
They use sham surgery when they can, but they can't use sham surgery that would be unreasonably harmful to the patient. It may be OK to thread a catheter into somebody's coronary arteries and squirt saline, but nobody is going to ask a patient to undergo abdominal or chest surgery, with a mortality of 1% or even 0.1%, just to satisfy somebody's idea of a perfect scientific design.
1-sentence course in medical ethics: A doctor can't do anything to a patient that wouldn't benefit the patient.
The days of using prisoners, negroes, Jews, Chinese and Puerto Ricans as experimental subjects are long gone.
There's been a lot of progress towards evidence-based medicine in the last generation of surgeons. Most surgeons put their patients' welfare first, understand science better than most people on Slashdot, and spend a lot of effort figuring out what the scientific evidence is for alternative procedures. I've seen them in some gloves-off debates at surgery conferences. Of course there are surgeons who are out first to make a buck, but that's the price of a free market.
I don't know where you get your facts from. At least go to Wikipedia.
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost. This relationship between efficiency and cost is exponential due to increased complexity efficiency demands. I put together a simple JavaScript model of this at http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx . Basically, by jiggering the predicted cost of fuel (using gasoline as a baseline), versus, the exponent of increased energy efficiency costs, you can arrive at a number of scenarios where reducing greenhouse gasses actually doesn't pay for itself.
Good, a skeptic who looked at the numbers.
Most of what I know about global warming is what I read in Science magazine, in the news roundups and the editorials. As I recall, they said that some models, on the 5% shoulder of the probability curve, give a 10-meter rise in sea level by 2100. You can't dismiss the unlikely occurrences; you have to account for their likelihood and consequences in your cost/benefit calculations.
In your model, what is the economic cost of a 10-meter rise in sea level?
I think that's called the "prosecutor's fallacy." If there's a 1/10,000 chance of a child dying of cot death, and a woman has two children die of cot death, the prosecutor tells the jury that the chances could only be 1/10,000 * 1/10,000 = 1/100 million that both deaths were a cot death, so she must have murdered them.
This only works if the deaths are statistically independent, which they're not. The parents could have a genetic defect which cause 2 successive infants to die.
If each parent had 1 fatal recessive genetic defect, then 1/4 of their children would die, so the odds are 1/16 that two successive children would die. But actually a lot of fatal birth defects are more complicated than that simple mendelian pattern.
It's even more complicated because some mothers have been captured on video trying to smother their children.
I tried to get the best figures I could for the false positive rate of those employment drug tests. It seemed to be around 1% to 3%.
There were (cheap) screening tests with a false positive rate of about 1%, under ideal circumstances. Positives were supposed to be confirmed with (expensive) gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy. A lot of companies saved money by skipping the confirmation tests, especially for screening job applicants.
Poppy seed bagels actually can give a false positive.
A few employees sued, but it was difficult to fight a false positive.
The U.S. military seemed to have a good program. But when you're regularly screening a million and a half people, a lot of one-in-a-million situations will come up. (And false positives are a lot more than one in a million.)
There was one lab where a GC/MS unit was giving false positives for amphetamine, as I recall. They took apart the machine, examined it, but they never figured out why it was giving false positives. People got fired. Then one supervisor absolutely refused to believe that one of his employees was lying, so they checked it out more carefully. The employee was finally vindicated.
This BBC article fails to distinguish between sensitivity and specificity.
There's a difference between a test that identifies 99% of all terrorists, and a test that identifies people as terrorists, 99% of whom are really terrorists.
Perhaps a good way to teach statistics would be to start by teaching it to BBC reporters.
It's a non-problem. There are math teachers who know how to explain this very clearly. And there's a lot of research on how to communicate the results of medical tests to patients.
You're an up and coming engineer, you have a place of respect and admiration in society, you have a good life, lots of friends and co-workers.
Then all of a sudden you make a mistake (or maybe you're just the victim of a crime), the people you thought were your friends turn on you, accuse you, denounce you, you lose your job. Your whole life falls apart.
A couple of Madoff's victims killed themselves.
People often commit suicide here when they get arrested. That's why they take away shoelaces and belts.
On the other hand, when the team sequenced BAK1 cDNA from healthy aortic tissue obtained from a Quebec transplant service, they found the same three SNPs as in the aortic tissue from the AAA cases. The researchers verified their findings by sequencing both strands of DNA and repeating the sequencing several times.
So far, Schweitzer said it's unclear whether these BAK1 differences in the blood and aortic tissue are the consequence of RNA editing, which changes the messenger RNA but not the gene, or DNA editing, which involves differences in the gene itself.
People sometimes get mosaicism after stem cell transplants or organ transplants.
I saw an interesting example of mosaicism in a medical journal. An infant was born with half male genitals, half female genitals. The most obvious explanation was that he/she was born of two embryos, one male, the other female, that combined at an early stage (but not too early) and formed a mosaic individual, with patches of male and female cells. Mosaicism actually is pretty common in biology. Sometimes you get patches of skin that vary between 2 colors. The later the embryo recombines, the bigger the patches are.
But this raises the possibility that the DNA of the cells in one developmental branch -- the arteries, or the aorta -- goes through some epigenetic doubling, on a routine basis, because it happened in several samples, even healthy tissue. I wonder if it happens in mice.
My understanding of the article was that they sequenced DNA -- both strands -- not the RNA. But for reasons I don't understand, Schweitzer said it might be the consequences of RNA editing, to the messenger RNA.
Actually they got into chimerizaton at the end of TFA:
In an e-mail message to GenomeWeb Daily News, Navigenics Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dietrich Stephan said the team's work is interesting and deserves further investigation.
"Differences between the germ-line genome and somatic cells is well established in cancer. It is also well described that chimeras can result from early DNA changes in early embryonic development that propagate to form regional differences in the genome across the body," Stephan noted.
You misunderstand communism, then, or at least are confusing it with socialism. Communism, at its heart, is a centrally controlled economy where the government determines where you work, how much you earn, etc.
I don't know. It was difficult in the U.S. to get objective information about the USSR. You could go to jail in the U.S. for advocating Communism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States and teachers were fired. So I never knew who to believe.
I once read (actually copy-edited) a business school book on management accounting, and they gave case histories from the Soviet Union. Apparently the Soviet Union had internal markets, and the factories were run by managers who had a lot of autonomy. They bid on projects, and everybody in the factory was rewarded if they met their quotas, and penalized if they missed their quotas. It's quite different from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, where the managers get bonuses even if they miss their quotas. So how much economic freedom did the Soviets have? I don't know. The system was more complicated than I realized.
They were very good at large, centralized projects that benefited from economy of scale, like tractor factories. They had a good education system, particularly in science. They sent the first man into space. They weren't so good at projects that required individual resourcefulness and independence -- they had lots of electronic hobbyists who built home computers, but they were never able to clone an American PC, let alone build a PC industry, as Taiwan did. They sound like General Motors.
Someone ends up owning the farms, making decisions about what to grow, and who can or cannot leave the farm, and it's certainly not the peasants that run them.
I don't know. Farms may need managers. But have there ever been collective farms where the farmers elected their managers? I do know the Soviets educated a lot of peasants, and educated a lot of pretty good chemists and engineers. Some of them emigrated to the U.S. and did well. And they didn't have college loans to pay off.
I know people who lived through the Soviet system, and I'm well aware of its weaknesses. The flourishing of free artistic expression came to an end with Stalin. People were shot for telling jokes about Stalin.
But they did have world-class accomplishments in education, the arts and sciences. It's too simple to say that the arts flourish under capitalism and wilt under Communism.
In particular -- and the point I was raising for Slashdot -- is that under Communism, socialism, whatever, the artists and scientists were paid salaries, they had no patents or copyrights, and if that system were in existence today, their work would have been distributed free on the Internet. It's an interesting model.
We've had dictatorships in the U.S. all the time. Look at the Alien and Sedition Acts, the McCarthy days, or the late Bush Administration. The only thing that stopped the Bush Administration from arresting anyone he pleased for any reason, including law-abiding political rivals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman), was the separation of powers. It had nothing to do with the inherent qualities of capitalism.
Another explanation might be the failure of practicing fully communal societies like the U.S.S.R. Back then it could have been construed as possible for art to flourish with everything in the public domain. After watching the few movies that came out of communist countries, I think it definitely inhibits the production of quality art.
Are you saying that the Soviet Union didn't produce good movies? There are a lot of big-name American and foreign filmmakers who would disagree with you.
When I studied filmmaking, they divided the world into before and after Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein (although by now Eisenstein has become a cliche). Eisenstein was invited to Hollywood (there's a famous picture of Eisenstein shaking hands with Micky Mouse at the Walt Disney studio), and Hollywood filmmakers deliberately set out to learn as much as they could from Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmakers were universally admired. I saw a lot of Soviet movies at the Museum of Modern Art. Don't forget, this is the land of Chekov.
Eisenstein's fortune was that (1) Lenin thought that film was a new and powerful medium that could be used to convince the masses to join in their collective struggle, and the Soviet Union put a lot of resources into it and (2) he was a favorite of Stalin, who also gave him pretty much a free hand. If you found favor with the dictator, you could be pretty creative in the USSR.
The great creative flourishing of Soviet art came to an unfortunate end with Stalin, but the Soviet cinema was still pretty good at least until the end of the war.
Nobody knows how Communism would have turned out if it had a more benevolent dictator than Stalin.
The great thing about the Soviet Union was that they didn't believe in copyrights or patents for most of their existence. They flooded the world with books and phonograph records cheap enough to be affordable in the third world, which an army of translators converted into every language of the world. They had good science books. There were physics courses at Columbia University that used Soviet textbooks.
If the Soviet Union were still around, and continued those patent policies, we would have the entire classical music canon in great performances in the public domain.
But the one thing the Soviets did brilliantly was make good movies.
I'd like to compare the fMRI of a researcher telling a subject the actual purpose of a study, with the fMRI of a researcher deceiving a subject on the purpose of the study.
Slashdot Mirror
You're lucky you're having that surgery now, instead of 20 years ago. The complication rates really went down. They used to have 1% infection, now it's 0.1% or 0.01%.
You really should be careful about vigorous sex right after retinal surgery. Maybe you should try bondage for a while until it heals. And definitely no roller coasters (even without sex).
That IOP is your intraocular pressure, in millimeters of mercury. 30 is pretty high. I think it should be 18 or so (I forget exactly). Make sure you smoke your marijuana regularly to get it down.
Anything you can do with a blackboard and chalk, the Soviets were great at.
But they can't do anything that requires them to actually make something.
Graham said that this was ironic for a movement founded on materialism.
He had an entertaining story about how he went to GUM and asked the saleslady in the electronics department if he could buy a personal computer.
She said, "Theoretically yes."
Well, if I can grow bud for 100 years it might be a good deal all around.
Say you're testing a new IOL for cataract surgery. You don't test against a placebo, you test against standard surgery.
That's right. And here's another one: Suppose you want to test standard treatment (medication) against surgery. You have to find doctors -- and patients -- who honestly can't figure out which one is better. If you have a doctor who thinks surgery is better, he can't be in the trial, because he's ethically obligated to perform surgery. (At least in England; that's the way they explain it in The Lancet.)
Talking about IOL, BTW, a few years ago, Brazil used to be the wild west of ophthalmological surgery. They did surgery on humans in Brazil when they were still doing it on rabbits in the U.S.
Although Germany has some "aggressive" surgeons too. They did a trial of (I think) infusing heart muscle stem cells into the heart to treat myocardial infarction.
That said, I have a very hard time sympathising with a Press Secretary who gets fired for mouthing off on controversial issues. The whole point of the "press secretary" job is managing media relations and generally smoothing PR feathers for whoever hired you. Having highly visible and controversial opinions, particularly if they oppose that of the person you are doing media relations for, seems an obvious contradiction.
Here's one press secretary I can sympathize with http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0727-05.htm
It's a good way to quit your job when you're finally fed up.
There are zero blinded tests -- let alone double blind tests -- demonstrating the effectiveness of surgery.
I call bullshit. Here's one:
http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00042081
Prevention of Autogenous Vein Graft Failure in Coronary Artery Bypass Procedures
Study Design: Prevention, Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo Control, Single Group Assignment, Safety/Efficacy Study
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00042081
Try Googling randomized controlled trial surgery
The term surgeons use is not "placebo" but "sham surgery".
They use sham surgery when they can, but they can't use sham surgery that would be unreasonably harmful to the patient. It may be OK to thread a catheter into somebody's coronary arteries and squirt saline, but nobody is going to ask a patient to undergo abdominal or chest surgery, with a mortality of 1% or even 0.1%, just to satisfy somebody's idea of a perfect scientific design.
1-sentence course in medical ethics: A doctor can't do anything to a patient that wouldn't benefit the patient.
The days of using prisoners, negroes, Jews, Chinese and Puerto Ricans as experimental subjects are long gone.
There's been a lot of progress towards evidence-based medicine in the last generation of surgeons. Most surgeons put their patients' welfare first, understand science better than most people on Slashdot, and spend a lot of effort figuring out what the scientific evidence is for alternative procedures. I've seen them in some gloves-off debates at surgery conferences. Of course there are surgeons who are out first to make a buck, but that's the price of a free market.
I don't know where you get your facts from. At least go to Wikipedia.
2. Wait 100 years
3. Sell beachfront property
4. Profit!
Can somebody please create a Gull Island, Alaska page on Wikipedia?
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost. This relationship between efficiency and cost is exponential due to increased complexity efficiency demands. I put together a simple JavaScript model of this at http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx . Basically, by jiggering the predicted cost of fuel (using gasoline as a baseline), versus, the exponent of increased energy efficiency costs, you can arrive at a number of scenarios where reducing greenhouse gasses actually doesn't pay for itself.
Good, a skeptic who looked at the numbers.
Most of what I know about global warming is what I read in Science magazine, in the news roundups and the editorials. As I recall, they said that some models, on the 5% shoulder of the probability curve, give a 10-meter rise in sea level by 2100. You can't dismiss the unlikely occurrences; you have to account for their likelihood and consequences in your cost/benefit calculations.
In your model, what is the economic cost of a 10-meter rise in sea level?
I think that's called the "prosecutor's fallacy." If there's a 1/10,000 chance of a child dying of cot death, and a woman has two children die of cot death, the prosecutor tells the jury that the chances could only be 1/10,000 * 1/10,000 = 1/100 million that both deaths were a cot death, so she must have murdered them.
This only works if the deaths are statistically independent, which they're not. The parents could have a genetic defect which cause 2 successive infants to die.
If each parent had 1 fatal recessive genetic defect, then 1/4 of their children would die, so the odds are 1/16 that two successive children would die. But actually a lot of fatal birth defects are more complicated than that simple mendelian pattern.
It's even more complicated because some mothers have been captured on video trying to smother their children.
I tried to get the best figures I could for the false positive rate of those employment drug tests. It seemed to be around 1% to 3%.
There were (cheap) screening tests with a false positive rate of about 1%, under ideal circumstances. Positives were supposed to be confirmed with (expensive) gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy. A lot of companies saved money by skipping the confirmation tests, especially for screening job applicants.
Poppy seed bagels actually can give a false positive.
A few employees sued, but it was difficult to fight a false positive.
The U.S. military seemed to have a good program. But when you're regularly screening a million and a half people, a lot of one-in-a-million situations will come up. (And false positives are a lot more than one in a million.)
There was one lab where a GC/MS unit was giving false positives for amphetamine, as I recall. They took apart the machine, examined it, but they never figured out why it was giving false positives. People got fired. Then one supervisor absolutely refused to believe that one of his employees was lying, so they checked it out more carefully. The employee was finally vindicated.
There's a difference between a test that identifies 99% of all terrorists, and a test that identifies people as terrorists, 99% of whom are really terrorists.
Perhaps a good way to teach statistics would be to start by teaching it to BBC reporters.
It's a non-problem. There are math teachers who know how to explain this very clearly. And there's a lot of research on how to communicate the results of medical tests to patients.
Everyone dies. What is so wrong with going out at your own choosing?
Sounds like you've been reading Shakespeare. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/full.html
You're an up and coming engineer, you have a place of respect and admiration in society, you have a good life, lots of friends and co-workers.
Then all of a sudden you make a mistake (or maybe you're just the victim of a crime), the people you thought were your friends turn on you, accuse you, denounce you, you lose your job. Your whole life falls apart.
A couple of Madoff's victims killed themselves.
People often commit suicide here when they get arrested. That's why they take away shoelaces and belts.
You'll note that even in this study they didn't sequence any DNA; they just looked at the expressed mRNA.
I couldn't quite figure that out from TFA. It sounded like they sequenced the DNA and cDNA, but then they talk about mRNA.
http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/snps-non-cancerous-tissue-may-differ-those-blood-study-finds http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:0S55-4qOoysJ:www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/snps-non-cancerous-tissue-may-differ-those-blood-study-finds+SNPs+in+Non-Cancerous+Tissue+May+Differ+From+Those+In+Blood,+Study+Finds&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Sneaky cache to avoid login
On the other hand, when the team sequenced BAK1 cDNA from healthy aortic tissue obtained from a Quebec transplant service, they found the same three SNPs as in the aortic tissue from the AAA cases. The researchers verified their findings by sequencing both strands of DNA and repeating the sequencing several times.
So far, Schweitzer said it's unclear whether these BAK1 differences in the blood and aortic tissue are the consequence of RNA editing, which changes the messenger RNA but not the gene, or DNA editing, which involves differences in the gene itself.
I came away envisioning our genetic programme as a Bach Fugue that develops various voices from an initial set of themes.
More like John Cage.
People sometimes get mosaicism after stem cell transplants or organ transplants.
I saw an interesting example of mosaicism in a medical journal. An infant was born with half male genitals, half female genitals. The most obvious explanation was that he/she was born of two embryos, one male, the other female, that combined at an early stage (but not too early) and formed a mosaic individual, with patches of male and female cells. Mosaicism actually is pretty common in biology. Sometimes you get patches of skin that vary between 2 colors. The later the embryo recombines, the bigger the patches are.
But this raises the possibility that the DNA of the cells in one developmental branch -- the arteries, or the aorta -- goes through some epigenetic doubling, on a routine basis, because it happened in several samples, even healthy tissue. I wonder if it happens in mice.
My understanding of the article was that they sequenced DNA -- both strands -- not the RNA. But for reasons I don't understand, Schweitzer said it might be the consequences of RNA editing, to the messenger RNA.
Actually they got into chimerizaton at the end of TFA:
In an e-mail message to GenomeWeb Daily News, Navigenics Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Dietrich Stephan said the team's work is interesting and deserves further investigation.
"Differences between the germ-line genome and somatic cells is well established in cancer. It is also well described that chimeras can result from early DNA changes in early embryonic development that propagate to form regional differences in the genome across the body," Stephan noted.
You misunderstand communism, then, or at least are confusing it with socialism. Communism, at its heart, is a centrally controlled economy where the government determines where you work, how much you earn, etc.
I don't know. It was difficult in the U.S. to get objective information about the USSR. You could go to jail in the U.S. for advocating Communism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States and teachers were fired. So I never knew who to believe.
I once read (actually copy-edited) a business school book on management accounting, and they gave case histories from the Soviet Union. Apparently the Soviet Union had internal markets, and the factories were run by managers who had a lot of autonomy. They bid on projects, and everybody in the factory was rewarded if they met their quotas, and penalized if they missed their quotas. It's quite different from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, where the managers get bonuses even if they miss their quotas. So how much economic freedom did the Soviets have? I don't know. The system was more complicated than I realized.
They were very good at large, centralized projects that benefited from economy of scale, like tractor factories. They had a good education system, particularly in science. They sent the first man into space. They weren't so good at projects that required individual resourcefulness and independence -- they had lots of electronic hobbyists who built home computers, but they were never able to clone an American PC, let alone build a PC industry, as Taiwan did. They sound like General Motors.
Someone ends up owning the farms, making decisions about what to grow, and who can or cannot leave the farm, and it's certainly not the peasants that run them.
I don't know. Farms may need managers. But have there ever been collective farms where the farmers elected their managers? I do know the Soviets educated a lot of peasants, and educated a lot of pretty good chemists and engineers. Some of them emigrated to the U.S. and did well. And they didn't have college loans to pay off.
I know people who lived through the Soviet system, and I'm well aware of its weaknesses. The flourishing of free artistic expression came to an end with Stalin. People were shot for telling jokes about Stalin.
But they did have world-class accomplishments in education, the arts and sciences. It's too simple to say that the arts flourish under capitalism and wilt under Communism.
In particular -- and the point I was raising for Slashdot -- is that under Communism, socialism, whatever, the artists and scientists were paid salaries, they had no patents or copyrights, and if that system were in existence today, their work would have been distributed free on the Internet. It's an interesting model.
if people do what they want, it's called capitalism.
People in the Scandinavian countries did what they want, and they got mixed capitalism/socialism. (No health insurance premiums, no college loans.)
Capitalism doesn't inherently prevent dictatorships.
Look at Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Haiti.
We've had dictatorships in the U.S. all the time. Look at the Alien and Sedition Acts, the McCarthy days, or the late Bush Administration. The only thing that stopped the Bush Administration from arresting anyone he pleased for any reason, including law-abiding political rivals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman), was the separation of powers. It had nothing to do with the inherent qualities of capitalism.
Another explanation might be the failure of practicing fully communal societies like the U.S.S.R. Back then it could have been construed as possible for art to flourish with everything in the public domain. After watching the few movies that came out of communist countries, I think it definitely inhibits the production of quality art.
Are you saying that the Soviet Union didn't produce good movies? There are a lot of big-name American and foreign filmmakers who would disagree with you.
When I studied filmmaking, they divided the world into before and after Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein (although by now Eisenstein has become a cliche). Eisenstein was invited to Hollywood (there's a famous picture of Eisenstein shaking hands with Micky Mouse at the Walt Disney studio), and Hollywood filmmakers deliberately set out to learn as much as they could from Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmakers were universally admired. I saw a lot of Soviet movies at the Museum of Modern Art. Don't forget, this is the land of Chekov.
Eisenstein's fortune was that (1) Lenin thought that film was a new and powerful medium that could be used to convince the masses to join in their collective struggle, and the Soviet Union put a lot of resources into it and (2) he was a favorite of Stalin, who also gave him pretty much a free hand. If you found favor with the dictator, you could be pretty creative in the USSR.
The Soviets were pretty good in all the visual arts. Do a Google Image search for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism Malevich or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Lissitzky Lissitsky. And of course they were brilliant musicians.
The great creative flourishing of Soviet art came to an unfortunate end with Stalin, but the Soviet cinema was still pretty good at least until the end of the war.
Nobody knows how Communism would have turned out if it had a more benevolent dictator than Stalin.
The great thing about the Soviet Union was that they didn't believe in copyrights or patents for most of their existence. They flooded the world with books and phonograph records cheap enough to be affordable in the third world, which an army of translators converted into every language of the world. They had good science books. There were physics courses at Columbia University that used Soviet textbooks.
If the Soviet Union were still around, and continued those patent policies, we would have the entire classical music canon in great performances in the public domain.
But the one thing the Soviets did brilliantly was make good movies.
I'd like to compare the fMRI of a researcher telling a subject the actual purpose of a study, with the fMRI of a researcher deceiving a subject on the purpose of the study.
And? You clearly KNEW it was an ad, right?
That's because I'm smarter than most people who use the Internet.
You've got to admire the cleverness of the bacteria that cause urinary tract infections too.
That's the same NY Mom who appears as a California Mom, Texas Mom, Florida Mom and %ipaddress% Mom.
It's like the 17th Century, when pickpockets used to work the crowds who came to watch pickpockets being hanged.
Try petting a squirrel.
He bit me.