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  1. Infinity Puzzle & Windup Girl on Ask Slashdot: What Are You Reading This Month? · · Score: 1
    "The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe" (you'll need a bachelor's degree in physics or equivalent to make heads or tails out of this one).

    "The Windup Girl"

  2. Re:IoT stuff only works EARLY in the disease! on Internet of Things Set To Change the Face of Dementia Care (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1
    The promise of the current generation of IoT gadgets...only useful during a pretty short transition period between self-care and a locked memory care assisted living campus.

    This.

    A larger market may be in devices for nondemented with chronic diseases. For instance, someone who has to take medication several times a day. I depend on reminders sent through my Apple Watch for this.

  3. A 1959 tabletop accelerator on Terahertz Radiation To Enable Portable Particle Accelerators (www.desy.de) · · Score: 1
  4. We are hereby amending our longstanding policy on How Many Scientists Does It Take To Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands · · Score: 1

    Am I really the first here to link to this classic from the Journal of Irreproducible Results? http://www.improbable.com/airc...

  5. Re:I can tell you what will happen ... on What Will Happen When Cascadia Subduction Zone Slips · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This. Oregon DOT did a study a few years ago and concluded that in western Oregon (where essentially all the population is), 70 [seventy] road bridges will go down.

    For household prep, top priority is water, which may be the hardest thing. At least one 5 gallon jug per person. We have 10 gallons per person, which is pathetically inadequate. Food for 2 weeks. Camp stove with fuel. Flashlights, radios, batteries. Firewood. Extra prescription meds. Gasoline (I keep a 5 gallon jug and I never let my car get below 1/4 tank).

    I haven't read the article yet (awaiting my magazine to arrive) but the scariest part is that if a strong earthquake hits the CSZ off Oregon in the spring/summer when the reservoirs are full, the Hills Creek Dam (an earthen dam) could fail. This could then cause Dexter Dam below it fail. Then most of the cities of Springfield and Eugene (about 200,000 people) would be scraped off the face of the Earth.

  6. We Are Doomed on Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot · · Score: 1

    A decade or so ago in England a combat robot got out of its cage, found its way out of the facility, and was caught heading down the street. (I have a news link somewhere.)

  7. It's been done...in 1959 on New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's a tabletop particle accelerator in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column in 1959: http://www.sciencemadness.org/... And in the Sept 1953 issue, an account of some high school students in El Cerrito who built a cyclotron.

  8. Re:Brooks's Law on Ask Slashdot: Does Your Work Schedule Make You Unproductive? · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's Brooks. But you and your boss definitely should read Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Edition/dp/0321934113).

  9. Maybe someone at DHS remembered WW2 on DHS Budget Includes No New Airport Body Scanners · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The French built the "Maginot Line" of fortifications along their border with Germany--at enormous expense--between World War I and World War II. The Germans simply went around it through Belgium and defeated France in a few days. The TSA is our Maginot Line.

  10. E-prescribing is no panacea on Study Says E-prescription Systems Would Save At Least 50k Lives a Year · · Score: 1

    A recent study found that 1/12 or 1/8 (can't remember which, so call it 1/10) of electronic prescriptions had an error. Types of errors include: wrong medication, wrong dose, wrong instructions, wrong quantity. I do dozens of electronic orders a day and get several kicked back to me from the pharmacist.

  11. Big Red Bee on Atlantic Crossing By Amateur Radio High Altitude Balloon · · Score: 1

    The APRS tracker used was one from Big Red Bee.

  12. iPad on Ask Slashdot: Ebook Reader for Scientific Papers? · · Score: 1

    I bought an iPad 1 about 9 months ago primarily for reading science PDFs. It's fabulous for this.

  13. American Scientist on How Do You Keep Up With Science Developments? · · Score: 1

    American Scientist is a beefier Scientific American. It has review articles on recent findings written for a scientifically educated audience, as opposed to SciAm, which is written for sixth graders and businessmen. It's what SciAm used to be a few decades ago. Published six times a year.

  14. Re:The originals really are something else on Homebrew Cray-1 · · Score: 1

    In college in the early 1980s I did some work at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. I spent several days wiring up the logic circuits (CAMAC modules) for our detectors. Our data cables were labeled with their lengths in nanoseconds. A 1 nanosecond cable would be about a foot long.

  15. Re:Pay Pri Care Dr's more -or- PERFORMANCE-based P on How Norway Fought Staph Infections · · Score: 1

    Much of my income is based on performance, Anonymous Coward, so get off your high horse. What I mainly resent is specialists with an equal amount of training making 5 times the money I make.

  16. rx abx if it's friday on How Norway Fought Staph Infections · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm a primary care physician in the US. There are a number of logistical issues in the decision whether to prescribe antibiotics. They revolve around the ease of followup. It would be nice to always be able to say "You'll probably be fine. If you get sicker, come back." But if it's a Thursday or Friday, or if the patient lives an hour's drive from the clinic, or if I'm about to go on vacation, or if my schedule is overbooked for the next few days, I'm much more likely to prescribe an antibiotic. We need better access to care. Among the things that would help that would be (1) single payer insurance, so people could get care anywhere, and (2) better compensation for primary care providers (PCPs) which would result in (a) more of them, relative to specialists and (b) less need for existing PCP to overbook their schedules to make ends meet.

  17. Um, what about inflation? on Hollywood Sets $10 Billion Box Office Record · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is it that news stories about movie revenues never take inflation into account?

  18. Jansky's discovery of cosmic radio waves on US Navy Was Ordered To Listen For Martian Broadcast · · Score: 1
  19. The V.A. is ahead of DOD on Worm Attack Prompts DoD To Ban Use of External Media · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The V.A.--at least the healthcare part of it-- banned these months ago to prevent data from wandering away..

  20. "History of AIDS" book on AIDS Virus Now Estimated To Be 100 Years Old · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Grmek's History of AIDS from 1993 is quite good and interesting.

  21. Re:ugh on Source Claims 240K Kindles Sold · · Score: 1
    There are only 145,000 books available. That sounds like a lot, but it's really not.

    Of the 27 books that I've read in 2007-2008, 4 are available on Kindle (this stat as of March 2008). Your mileage may vary.

  22. radio astronomy on Alternative Uses For an Old Satellite Dish? · · Score: 1
  23. bigggest ever? on The Arthur C. Clarke Gamma Ray Burst · · Score: 1

    I'm not impressed with the supposed uniqueness of this event. We've had the ability to detect GRBs for only about 10 years and initially that ability was pretty crude. To make a big deal of this being the biggest one "ever" is quite presumptuous.

    Reminds me of when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. Levy said (during the live TV coverage) that it was a once-in-a-hundred-million-year (I forget the exact number, but it was big) event. What a remarkable coincidence that it happened just a handful of years after we developed the ability to detect it.

  24. radio on Google Sky Now Available Through Your Browser · · Score: 1
    Too bad there's no radio spectrum. Maybe they'll add that later.

    (Please enjoy My Brother Karl Jansky and His Discovery of Radio Waves from Beyond the Earth).

  25. Los Alamos Primer on Wikileaks Releases Early Atomic Bomb Diagram · · Score: 1

    The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build an Atomic Bomb has been around for a long time. It covers the nuclear physics of the atomic bomb. Anyone with a bachelor's degree in physics can understand it completely (anyone else: unlikely). The nuclear part is the easy part. The hard parts of making an atomic bomb are (1) separating isotopes to make fissable material and (2) constructing the chemical explosives to generate enough compression to insure a good nuclear reaction. The item on Wikileaks is a rough sketch in the direction of #2.