It depends on what sort of "criminal" you're dealing with. Sure, there are folks who fit the thug stereotype, but even most dealers have figured out that they're better off just operating in the shadows. They don't want any trouble from the locals or police, and will just scuttle away when challenged. So if you want to know what they were thinking, it's that someone has them on film and is calling the cops. Frankly, trashing robo-cop seems more likely to actually get them arrested, as opposed to loitering, trespassing, prostitution, and low-grade drug use.
As an example: I yelled at one of my neighborhood junkies last week, because he was parked in his usual spot with his cart and sleeping bag, filling up a syringe; and if previous encounters are any indicator, he was going to shoot up, nod off, and leave his needle lying there. When I angrily asked him if he was going to dispose of his needle properly, he said, "Yes, sir." He had packed up his camp and was gone in the time it took me to walk the half-block home and call SFPD.
Thank you! Nice to know that someone else on/. has a basic working knowledge of the laws of physics.
I remember in undergrad, my thermodynamics professor's favorite example of a lucrative career was working as a technology analyst for an investment firm. The premise was that knowing the second law of thermodynamics would give you a god-like leg up on the finance guys.
If we can stare at a blank wall for hours on end and still see the wall, i think we can still see a HUD.
The point is that even when you sit still, your eyeball is still moving. Your eye moves because it scans around; and it also moves due to micromotion from breathing, blood flow, heartbeats. The point that someone is making is that if you hold your eyeball perfectly still, say, by clamping it in place, things disappear.
And that afterimage is not strictly the chemicals decaying. Your photoreceptors have a gain knob, instantiated by genetic regulation. They dynamically adjust to the ambient light level (as do other cells all along the processing chain) by changing how much of certain proteins they produce.
If it was just chemical decay, you'd never be able to track small, fast changes. It's a carefully regulated system.
Those drugs will stop your eye muscles from moving, but they won't stop your eye from moving; vibrations from your blood pulsation will still move your eye enough to get this variation.
The better proof are classical vision experiments, in which a subject (usually a cat or rhesus macaque) is not only paralyzed and immobilized, but also has its eyeball fixed in place with a suction cup. Say what you will about how gruesome this looks, it allows you to record visual signals in the brain, so vision isn't entirely abolished.
If an image moves in perfect sync with your eyeball, isn't your brain likely to stop seeing it after a short time?
I don't think so, otherwise a scotoma would not be an issue, would it?
Not necessarily, because the neural processing that removes DC (i.e. stationary) components is done on the retina. Macular degeneration — one cause of scotoma — will certainly cause the death of the retinal layers that do this processing.
And would be measured in kilopond (kp). But ever heard anyone say that? I mean, outside a physics lab?
In engineering labs? I can't recall the last time I heard a physicist do something in pounds. All snark aside, when talking about building big things out of steel, kips (kilopounds) and mips (megapounds) come in very handy. So handy that one often drops the "pound" right out, so that thousands-of-pounds-per-square-inch become ksi.
When looking for asbestos-remediation contractors recently, I got adword hits like, "Looking for asbestos? Find and buy asbestos in your area at local.com!"
You're missing the really groundbreaking development here, though.
This is a/. article, claiming a scientific discovery, that is traceable to a peer-reviewed journal article. A well-respected journal, no less. This is truly a first.
First off, this is totally useless against mines/IEDs/roadside bombs, which have proven so useful in the current conflict in Iraq that you can guarantee their use by anyone else who wants to take on the US military.
Second, I keep having visions of the "slow penetrator" from Dune: something that moves so slowly that the device will not notice it. Like the opposite of a kinetic-energy penetrator. I'm having visions of an RC car with a bomb.
Fluorocarbons are great — it's what Cray user — but there can be some problems. Besides the cost, that is. I say this as someone who spent six months retrofitting a flow cytometer to run with various fluorocarbons, and I can say from experience that it isn't always straightforward.
Highly inert though they are, fluorocarbon liquids can damage teflon and other fluorocarbon plastics and rubbers, as well as many epoxies. This isn't as dramatic as acetone on acryllic, but teflon will swell and soften dramatically, while rubber will stiffen. Epoxies may become soften and lose grip on some surfaces.
This isn't an insurmountable problem. But given the prevalence of teflon as an electrical insulator, and of epoxy for bonding, potting and encapsulation, it seems a likely one. Add in the fact that you're buying components — motherboard, RAM, graphics card, PSU — from many different vendors, and the fact that the designers of those components weren't planning on having them dumped into a bucket of refrigerant, and it becomes a more uncertain question.
I'm not saying your computer will fall apart. Fluorocarbon liquids are often used to clean circuit boards during manufacturing, so they can't be all bad. But it's simply not guaranteed that pouring refrigerant into your case is safe, and there are reasons that mineral oil or highly refined vegetable oil could be a safer choice.
The second law of thermodynamics says it's not worth bothering.
If you're running a power cycle off the waste heat from the cluster alone, (heat up water to drive a turbine, or some such), the second law dictates that the absolute maximum efficiency you can acchieve is 1-Tcold/Thot. In this case Tcold is ambient, and Thot is the temperature the processor is running at. Under realistic conditions, Tcold = 20 degrees C and Thot = 75 (293K and 348K resp.), that figure is a paltry 16%. So even if you get the maximum efficiency that the laws of nature allow, you still have to get rid of 84% of your waste heat.
Generating power onsite could actually make your problems worse, because then you're powering your 2.5MW shipping crate with a powerplant, and you have to get rid of not just your 2.5MW but also the other 5MW of waste heat generated in producing it.
It's a/. discussion, of a scientific topic, where the vast majority of respondants get it!
Seriously, it's nice to see how many of the posters actually understand that removing fear is severely maladaptive.
Re:Not as "new" or "revolutionary" as advertised
on
Fighting Cancer with Math
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If I've read your post correctly, you've misunderstood the article. They're arguing -- convincingly -- that the Gompertz model should be thrown out in favor of an MBE (Molecular Beam Epitaxy) model.
The MBE model differs from the Gompertz model in that it has most of the growth occurring at the tumor surface, rather than uniformly throughout. It's this phenomenon that they're targeting their therapies at.
You're joking, right? We already have a set of tiny machines that seek out rogue cells -- it's called the immune system. And this is exactly what they've done, given the patient's immune system the tools it needs to identify the cancer.
So, with the rise of grown diamonds, I look forward to many advances in easy to use cooking gear.
Unfortunately, diamond oxidizes at high temperatures. I've got a reference giving the temperature of the core of gas flames at 900-1100C, and one giving the maximum service temperature in air for diamond at 600C. Above this temperature, diamond begins to burn. So this would be cheapo teflon cookware that you can only use on an electric range. It's one thing to make cheap cookware that is easily bent or scratched; it's quite another to make cheap cookware that crumbles to carbon if you use it wrong.
People already make pots out of hard-anodized aluminum; it's not as slippy as teflon, but the surface is near indestructible because it's composed of sapphire. You need diamond, CBN or sapphire to scratch it.
I like the compressed air solution, but have you ever watched a bartender? I'm not really sure what the innards of one of those bar nozzles looks like, but in order to measure out the liquor, you invert the bottle over the glass, and count out time. That's a gravity feed, no doubt about it. Perhaps this explains the great variability in drink quality.
Thank you for posting this! They don't mention what kind of tubing they use -- do you think it's vinyl? It seems to me that it's either going to be vinyl, or aquarium tubing. I hope it's not vinyl, because that would be about as toxic as you could get, to the point that the EU was thinking about banning vinyl a few years ago.
I do biotech instrumentation, where fluids purity is pretty important. Are we the only people here who have ever heard of 'food-grade components' or 'plasticizer leaching'?
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It depends on what sort of "criminal" you're dealing with. Sure, there are folks who fit the thug stereotype, but even most dealers have figured out that they're better off just operating in the shadows. They don't want any trouble from the locals or police, and will just scuttle away when challenged. So if you want to know what they were thinking, it's that someone has them on film and is calling the cops. Frankly, trashing robo-cop seems more likely to actually get them arrested, as opposed to loitering, trespassing, prostitution, and low-grade drug use.
As an example: I yelled at one of my neighborhood junkies last week, because he was parked in his usual spot with his cart and sleeping bag, filling up a syringe; and if previous encounters are any indicator, he was going to shoot up, nod off, and leave his needle lying there. When I angrily asked him if he was going to dispose of his needle properly, he said, "Yes, sir." He had packed up his camp and was gone in the time it took me to walk the half-block home and call SFPD.
Thank you! Nice to know that someone else on /. has a basic working knowledge of the laws of physics.
I remember in undergrad, my thermodynamics professor's favorite example of a lucrative career was working as a technology analyst for an investment firm. The premise was that knowing the second law of thermodynamics would give you a god-like leg up on the finance guys.
If we can stare at a blank wall for hours on end and still see the wall, i think we can still see a HUD.
The point is that even when you sit still, your eyeball is still moving. Your eye moves because it scans around; and it also moves due to micromotion from breathing, blood flow, heartbeats. The point that someone is making is that if you hold your eyeball perfectly still, say, by clamping it in place, things disappear. And that afterimage is not strictly the chemicals decaying. Your photoreceptors have a gain knob, instantiated by genetic regulation. They dynamically adjust to the ambient light level (as do other cells all along the processing chain) by changing how much of certain proteins they produce. If it was just chemical decay, you'd never be able to track small, fast changes. It's a carefully regulated system.
Those drugs will stop your eye muscles from moving, but they won't stop your eye from moving; vibrations from your blood pulsation will still move your eye enough to get this variation. The better proof are classical vision experiments, in which a subject (usually a cat or rhesus macaque) is not only paralyzed and immobilized, but also has its eyeball fixed in place with a suction cup. Say what you will about how gruesome this looks, it allows you to record visual signals in the brain, so vision isn't entirely abolished.
If an image moves in perfect sync with your eyeball, isn't your brain likely to stop seeing it after a short time? I don't think so, otherwise a scotoma would not be an issue, would it? Not necessarily, because the neural processing that removes DC (i.e. stationary) components is done on the retina. Macular degeneration — one cause of scotoma — will certainly cause the death of the retinal layers that do this processing.
And would be measured in kilopond (kp). But ever heard anyone say that? I mean, outside a physics lab?
In engineering labs? I can't recall the last time I heard a physicist do something in pounds. All snark aside, when talking about building big things out of steel, kips (kilopounds) and mips (megapounds) come in very handy. So handy that one often drops the "pound" right out, so that thousands-of-pounds-per-square-inch become ksi.
When looking for asbestos-remediation contractors recently, I got adword hits like, "Looking for asbestos? Find and buy asbestos in your area at local.com!"
You're missing the really groundbreaking development here, though.
/. article, claiming a scientific discovery, that is traceable to a peer-reviewed journal article. A well-respected journal, no less. This is truly a first.
This is a
Do you think Disney has noticed that they stole the Pirates of the Carribean theme music?
First off, this is totally useless against mines/IEDs/roadside bombs, which have proven so useful in the current conflict in Iraq that you can guarantee their use by anyone else who wants to take on the US military.
Second, I keep having visions of the "slow penetrator" from Dune: something that moves so slowly that the device will not notice it. Like the opposite of a kinetic-energy penetrator. I'm having visions of an RC car with a bomb.
Also object weights tended to be too light IMO. I really felt that objects' fall rates and throw trajectories reflected not enough weight.
You realize the fall rates are largely independent of the weight, right Gallileo?
Umm, maybe not? Methanol is pretty bad for you, being readily absorbed through the skin and then metabolized into formaldehyde.
Fluorocarbons are great — it's what Cray user — but there can be some problems. Besides the cost, that is. I say this as someone who spent six months retrofitting a flow cytometer to run with various fluorocarbons, and I can say from experience that it isn't always straightforward.
Highly inert though they are, fluorocarbon liquids can damage teflon and other fluorocarbon plastics and rubbers, as well as many epoxies. This isn't as dramatic as acetone on acryllic, but teflon will swell and soften dramatically, while rubber will stiffen. Epoxies may become soften and lose grip on some surfaces.
This isn't an insurmountable problem. But given the prevalence of teflon as an electrical insulator, and of epoxy for bonding, potting and encapsulation, it seems a likely one. Add in the fact that you're buying components — motherboard, RAM, graphics card, PSU — from many different vendors, and the fact that the designers of those components weren't planning on having them dumped into a bucket of refrigerant, and it becomes a more uncertain question.
I'm not saying your computer will fall apart. Fluorocarbon liquids are often used to clean circuit boards during manufacturing, so they can't be all bad. But it's simply not guaranteed that pouring refrigerant into your case is safe, and there are reasons that mineral oil or highly refined vegetable oil could be a safer choice.
The second law of thermodynamics says it's not worth bothering. If you're running a power cycle off the waste heat from the cluster alone, (heat up water to drive a turbine, or some such), the second law dictates that the absolute maximum efficiency you can acchieve is 1-Tcold/Thot. In this case Tcold is ambient, and Thot is the temperature the processor is running at. Under realistic conditions, Tcold = 20 degrees C and Thot = 75 (293K and 348K resp.), that figure is a paltry 16%. So even if you get the maximum efficiency that the laws of nature allow, you still have to get rid of 84% of your waste heat. Generating power onsite could actually make your problems worse, because then you're powering your 2.5MW shipping crate with a powerplant, and you have to get rid of not just your 2.5MW but also the other 5MW of waste heat generated in producing it.
It's a /. discussion, of a scientific topic, where the vast majority of respondants get it!
Seriously, it's nice to see how many of the posters actually understand that removing fear is severely maladaptive.
If I've read your post correctly, you've misunderstood the article. They're arguing -- convincingly -- that the Gompertz model should be thrown out in favor of an MBE (Molecular Beam Epitaxy) model. The MBE model differs from the Gompertz model in that it has most of the growth occurring at the tumor surface, rather than uniformly throughout. It's this phenomenon that they're targeting their therapies at.
You're joking, right? We already have a set of tiny machines that seek out rogue cells -- it's called the immune system. And this is exactly what they've done, given the patient's immune system the tools it needs to identify the cancer.
Note that this uses electromagnetic induction to move the coolant. Caterpillar drive, anyone? "Are those torpedo doors?"
Liquid sodium is often used for reactor cooling in power plants; personally, I'm going to stay away from that in my video card...
So, with the rise of grown diamonds, I look forward to many advances in easy to use cooking gear. Unfortunately, diamond oxidizes at high temperatures. I've got a reference giving the temperature of the core of gas flames at 900-1100C, and one giving the maximum service temperature in air for diamond at 600C. Above this temperature, diamond begins to burn. So this would be cheapo teflon cookware that you can only use on an electric range. It's one thing to make cheap cookware that is easily bent or scratched; it's quite another to make cheap cookware that crumbles to carbon if you use it wrong. People already make pots out of hard-anodized aluminum; it's not as slippy as teflon, but the surface is near indestructible because it's composed of sapphire. You need diamond, CBN or sapphire to scratch it.
I like the compressed air solution, but have you ever watched a bartender? I'm not really sure what the innards of one of those bar nozzles looks like, but in order to measure out the liquor, you invert the bottle over the glass, and count out time. That's a gravity feed, no doubt about it. Perhaps this explains the great variability in drink quality.
Thank you for posting this! They don't mention what kind of tubing they use -- do you think it's vinyl? It seems to me that it's either going to be vinyl, or aquarium tubing. I hope it's not vinyl, because that would be about as toxic as you could get, to the point that the EU was thinking about banning vinyl a few years ago. I do biotech instrumentation, where fluids purity is pretty important. Are we the only people here who have ever heard of 'food-grade components' or 'plasticizer leaching'?